Thread by @FoldableHuman

Actually, let's do a short thread on prophecy as a narrative conceit and how it plays in ASOIF and GOT

https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1126236857736425472

Prophecy is a big deal in ASOIAF, it's everywhere. There's tons of overlapping, reenforcing, and conflicting prophecies and, importantly, they're pretty much all BS.

They're poetic (in multiple senses), vague, and generally self-fulfilling.

Maggie The Frog's prophecy about Cersei is poetic in how every step of the prophecy is created by Cersei taking extreme actions to avert the prophecy, to the point that her attempts to avert it create the circumstances that fulfil it.

Now, there is a supernatural element, prophets aren't all merely cold readers taking broad educated guesses (though many are), there are diegetically real visions and stuff.

However these visions, while real, are themselves suspect. Their sources are difficult to verify and several are created by wizards who have an explicit agenda they are trying to further.

This is a key point to the immediate history of AOIAF. Rheagar was a prophecy obsessed fanatic trying to manufacture the fulfilment of the Azor Ahai Rebirth prophecy, to the point that he was willing to plunge the kingdom into a war that created the status quo the books open on.

So the books spend a lot of time concerned with prophecy, but not because prophecy is actually prophecy. Telling the future isn't interesting in and of itself, the interesting thing is how people react to the possibility that they're being told the future.

The actual narrative purpose of prophecy in ASOIAF is to reveal how it motivates people. Who is skeptical, who uses it, who ignores it, who tries to subvert it, how do they play as political tools, how do they shape individuals.

Game of Thrones, as a narrative, has dug itself a wild hole here because it's pretty clear the showrunners didn't make a firm decision early on how they were going to play this whole subject.

There's enough included that they've definitely opened the can of worms, but not enough to resolve it, so there's just a lot of loose worms all over the story.

However they have, for the most part, played prophecy as prophecy: it just comes true but "in unexpected ways". Cersei's role in her own downfall is just poetic irony that reflects the truth of prophecy rather than casting doubt on it.

Now, with Arya killing the Night King they have, probably by accident, fallen on the side of "actually prophecy is all BS" by ending that particular threat in a way that completely disconnects with a major prophecy.

But.

But.

I've got this dread that they are totally going to "answer" that in the next two episodes and the answer isn't going to be "yeah, prophecy is BS" but will instead be a chain of absolutely tortured logic in order to fit what they wrote into fulfilling the prophecy.