History Main / PropheticFallacy

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' features this in "It's About Time", when future Twilight comes back in time to warn past Twilight about something, but gets cut off before she can explain what she was warning against. Twilight spends the next week freaking out because her future self looked pretty rough. [[spoiler: Turns out that she looked rough because she had spent all week freaking out, and when she finally found the time travel spell, goes back in time in a vain attempt to warn herself not to worry about what is going to happen.]]

** There's also the entirety of the Fortune Teller episode, which SEEMS to be leading this way. Everything she prophesises is either incredibly vague or self-fulfilling ("I'll meet my wife on the day I wear red shoes, so every day I wear red shoes!"). Then she makes a series of predictions that fly in the face of logic concerning the local about-to-erupt volcano, and everyone adopts a very laissez faire approach. It gets so bad that the Gaang has to fly up and literally rearrange the clouds to get her to change her prophecy, which FINALLY gets everyone off their asses, proving that her initial prediction was the wrong one. The subversion, pointed out explicitly by her, is that it ended up that everything turned out literally as she predicted (the village itself was ''not'' destroyed by the volcano).

* ''Film/TheMatrix'' takes this to rather insane extremes as Neo and his friends deal with apparently contradicting prophecies from the Oracle that work themselves out in the end.
** The trick, though, is that the Oracle isn't really telling Neo or the other Zionites what her prophecies actually ''are''. She tells them, "exactly what they need to hear" in order for her prophecies to come true.
** There's also a trick to the wording. She said Neo wasn't The One -- didn't say he couldn't ''become'' The One. In fact, she said the opposite; she compared being The One to being in love and said it seemed like Neo was "waiting for something", which suggest that Oneness isn't something you just get automatically.
*** It's even more detailed than that - Oracle: "You got the gift, but it looks like you're waiting for something." Neo: "What?" Oracle: "Your next life, maybe. Who knows?" [[spoiler:Neo only really unlocks his One-ness after being shot and apparently killed by the Agents, then coming back to life]].
** It is Neo's love for Trinity that allows him to save the day.
*** The Oracle and the Architect could only use their prophecy to guide the One within the Matrix itself. For the Architect, it was to compel the One to fulfill his function. For the Oracle, it was to add an unbalancing element to the One's choice in hopes of ending the war. [[spoiler: That spoiler was Trinity's love (which was real and existed in and out of the Matrix), which compelled Neo to TakeAThirdOption, saving Trinity from death within the Matrix, despite the Architect's fated words, or Neo's own dreams of her death.]]
*** In fact, what seemed to be a [[spoiler: false prophecy that the war would end when the One reached the Source]] became true. The Architect [[spoiler: wasn't the Source, but the Machine City that Neo sought to reach in The Matrix: Revolutions.]]
*** The Architect's words still rung true; in the course of Neo's ultimate choice, [[spoiler: Trinity still dies and he was powerless to stop it]]. ItSucksToBeTheChosenOne.

** As a parody on this, Death's introduction as a character in the very first ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' novel goes like this: Rincewind runs into Death, who comments that they have an appointment soon somewhere else and asks if Rincewind would mind going there. Rincewind declines.

* The actions of Princess Celestia in ''Fanfic/HowILostMyMother'' boil down to this, experiencing a vision of her daughter terrorizing Equestria that she ends up sealing away Cozys' Magic on top of [[UnPerson Erasing all memory of her]] from the public before banishing her from Canterlot. A few years later, Cozy who had been living in the Everfree Forest stumbles across Celestias' personal journal: where she discovers that just less than a day after that happened, Celestia realized that she wound up setting events in motion that would make Cozy Glow ''into'' the very threat the vision warned about, and that due to her own [[HonorBeforeReason pride]] and [[BlueAndOrangeMorality ego]]; she just decided to leave her daughter to her fate thinking she'd just stay away forever. This unfortunately sends Cozy Glow [[RageBreakingPoint careening off the deep-end]] as she finds out her years [[GoMadFromTheIsolation spent in complete solitude]] when she was barely 5-years old [[CouldHaveAvoidedThisPlot were completely baseless and avoidable]].

* The plot of ''VideoGame/MortalKombat9'' is based on this. During [[VideoGame/MortalKombatArmageddon the Battle of Armageddon]], Raiden -- in his dying breaths, just before [[TheBadGuyWins Shao Kahn is about to claim victory over all the realms]] -- sends a cryptic message to [[VideoGame/MortalKombat1992 his past self]]: "He must win." This leads Raiden and the rest of the world into an AlternateTimeline based on the decisions he makes in response to this prompt, and unfortunately, the fact that it's so vague ends up causing certain things to go off the rails and diverge in the name of determining who exactly was meant to "win". [[spoiler:He comes to conclude that it was meant to be Liu Kang. He's wrong; [[YouCantFightFate it turns out it's Shao Kahn all along]].]]