[Fic] "Cold and Sweet" -- Angel Sanctuary

[edenfalling]

I have said before and will doubtless say again that of all fantasy tropes, the one I hate most is prophecy. I hate it on moral grounds; prophecy denies free will. I hate it on scientific grounds; prophecy denies chaos and chance. (Look, we cannot predict the weather a week in advance. Don't ask me to believe you can predict human society even six months into the future.) And I hate it on literary grounds; prophecy steals agency and makes characters into helpless, boring puppets -- why should I care about them when all their thoughts and actions are pre-programmed, with no chance for learning, growth, or serendipity?

I also dislike astrology, though I dislike that mostly because people act as if it's true, valid, and scientific, and it is really, really not, but mostly I hate it because all fortune-telling is either fraud or prophecy, and either way it's icky. (I realize that sounds funny coming from someone who occasionally reads Tarot cards and plays clock solitaire as a fortune-telling method, but I do those because the stories I shape out of random patterns illuminate my subconscious mind, not because I think they actually say anything useful about the future.)

Anyway. Have an Angel Sanctuary double drabble about Lucifer and predestination. It's pretty didactic, but I am unreasonable on this subject and do not have the patience to hide my axe-grinding tonight.

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Cold and Sweet
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God knows everything. God plans the universe down to the last, least detail. God sees the shadows in your heart and the ghosts of your thoughts before they form. Rebellion is futile. Resistance is already accounted for, already woven into the pattern.

That is the party line. That is heaven's catechism.

Lucifer denies it. He looks at the chaos of the universe, the dance of quantum particles and the emergent properties of thought and emotion, and denies predestination. The dance can be guided, but never controlled... and even if control were possible, no one worthy of such power would inflict such cruelty on his children.

God wants Lucifer to play the villain, and so he will, but on his own terms. He has a promise to keep, and he refuses to believe God has already planned for that. God thinks him heartless, incapable of love. Lucifer refuses to accept that either.

Eons later, tempered by countless defeats and humiliations, he curls his fingers into the belly of God's infernal machine as Setsuna brings down the killing stroke. The shock on God's false face is like air to a drowning man.

Lucifer picks up his opponent's severed head and smiles. "Surprise."

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Inspired by the 10/19/09 15_minute_fic word #124: forecast

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In random real life news, the street in front of the smoke shop has reopened (well, 3/4 opened) after months of construction. Hi there, sudden business rebound! Our deposits have just jumped back to pre-June levels, and I am out of practice dealing with this kind of customer flow. I feel as though I am always running about two steps behind myself.

...On the bright side, people have stopped asking if the construction has hurt/slowed our business. (Which, okay, after the first week I wanted to scream every time I heard that. Have the noise and dust and lack of easy access hurt us? Of course they have! *sigh* I know people said it mostly to make small talk, but seriously, I wish people would take a second and think before they make blatantly obvious comments, because we have heard them all before, and we are sick to death of the subject. This also holds for stupid lottery jokes, btw.)

Comments

[branchandroot]

*evil grin* I like this drabble. I can totally envision Lucifer doing exactly that.

And, really, a big part of the point of AS seems to be that the only difference between the angels and the devils is the stories they tell themselves about their role in the world.

[edenfalling]

I can't quite make it fit into the canon timeline, but I am convinced that if he'd had even thirty seconds before his vision of Alexiel, Lucifer would totally have done something like this. *grin*

Yeah, Kaori Yuki's heaven and hell are amazingly similar when you get right down to it; I would not want to live in either realm... though at least the demons admit that they're bastards.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

You hate prophecy too? YAY! It strikes me as such a cheap plot device, smacks of "I can't think of any other way to give you the information or make the plot internally consistent". And it undermines any message or theme about choice and free will, or the terrifying nature of the villain. (Seriously, Voldemort's reign of terror and the miracle of Harry's survival was a lot more potent when it seemed that the targeting was random.) Who's going to really be scared of some guy whose coming failure is divine writ?

I like astrology (and tarot and stuff) more for the historical and cultural goldmine in it. Like everybody knows that our days are named after the planets discovered in antiquity, yeah, but how many people know that the order our days are listed in comes from an extremely logical medieval system of naming hours with the same planets in the order of their travel speed? That Tarot cards reflect the Renaissance sociopolitical landscape? Etc.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, if the heroes are destined to win, I am always thinking (in the back of my mind), "Okay, then why should I care?" I usually have to borrow a page from the villain's playbook and ignore or deny the existence of a prophecy, or treat it as unsubstantiated folklore, or something.

The history of fortune-telling methods is fascinating. I just find it depressing how many people still buy into them.

[askerian]

God thinks him heartless, incapable of love. Lucifer refuses to accept that either.
;________________; ♥

I like this drabble. Mmh. *_*

[edenfalling]

Thanks! I am very fond of Lucifer and his weirdly selfless love (or, occasionally, love/hate) for Alexiel. *pets him from a careful distance*

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

I find the best kinds of prophecy for me are the ones that are If-Then or Either-or statements about possible futures. IF the trueborn son of the old kings shall return in the dark hour of need, THEN he shall be crowned king and a new age of power and vision shall invigorate the kingdom and drive back the hated foes to their old borders. EITHER the prophets prepare the chosen one for her duties and her uncertain battle with her nemesis, OR they can let both rot in ignominy, and the world will soldier on unchanging, neither destroyed or saved.

These provide some structure and goals for characters, but not without some uncertainty. What if the sole heir to the kingdom is a bastard? What if the Chosen One's nemesis is trained by a rouge prophet who seeks the end of all? Prophecies should be subvertable, flexible, and baddly worded so that they are opent to multiple interpretations. The above prophecy about trueborn heirs might mean a descendant of the thought-extinct royal line, a true son of his nation, or some outlander prince who simply steps onto the throne in exchange for oaths of fielty to provide the service of his armies. And that's pretty explicit, as far as prophecy goes.

[edenfalling]

Conditional prophecies are much less annoying, though they have problems of their own: namely, the ever-branching, ever-proliferating prophecy tree. Or, if that's too complicated, sometimes you get the 'two competing prophecies, one good, one evil' trope, which is almost more annoying than having a single prophecy. (I am not fond of reductive moral systems either.)

About the only person I have seen consistently handle prophecy in a way that fails to annoy me is Andre Norton, whose prophecies tend to be along the lines of someone looking into a bowl of water and saying, "Well, I see some images that are suggestive of possibilities you may face, but I'm not precisely sure what they mean, and do please recall that some of them may be mutually exclusive. Just, you know, think of this as a heads-up and keep your eyes open." That sort of fortune-telling I can live with, because it's essentially the same thing anyone does when thinking about the future; the only magic involved is a sort of... clairvoyance, I suppose, giving the fortune-teller access to a wider pool of general facts than she or he would otherwise have.

I am also surprisingly unannoyed by the prophecies in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I think that is because Lewis presents them through Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, so they come off as folklore that they believe in and Jadis is wary of, rather than set-in-stone blueprints for destiny. Generally, the more a prophecy is presented as folklore or a codified hope, the less it will irritate me. (And I am totally with you on the importance of vague wording and multiple reasonable interpretations.)