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.)
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Date: 2009-10-20 05:06 am (UTC)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.)