Immune to Fate

“Some rare folk are what’s called fateless, ye see. They wander through their lives doing as they see fit, creating their own destinies. Ye have no fortune to tell, scarred one… none at all. I’ve nothing to tell ye… and so here is yer coin.”

— Fortuneteller returning her fee, Planescape: Torment

You Can't Fight Fate. Everything that happens, has happened, or ever will happen has been pre-ordained from the moment the universe came into being. No one can escape the inexorable tide of destiny, for they will meet it on the path they take to avoid it...

Except for that guy over there. No way for Fate to tell what he's gonna do.

This is a character who has the power to Screw Destiny as a special ability; everyone else in their universe may be bound by fate, but all the prophecies you can conjure up don't mean squat if such a person gets involved. Somehow, this rabble-rouser always seems to be on the path where the inevitable roadblocks of destiny aren't, and his very existence may even pose a threat to whatever cosmic plan is in store for the world, much to the chagrin of the Powers That Be. "Spanner in the Works" is their job title on a cosmic scale, and from the perspective of Seers, they may as well be a Man of Kryptonite.

An interesting side of this trope is that it happens rather often to video game protagonists. Since all but the most linear games can't yet predict player's actions, this provides an opt-out for the writers of the story whenever there is a risk of a player going Off the Rails story-wise, or of fate- or foretelling-related Fridge Logic kicking in. As leading characters rather tend to be uncommon people, this also works to underline their uniqueness. It also tends to apply to characters who come Back from the Dead quite often, possibly implying that their fate is already supposed to be complete at this point.

Often results in Thread of Prophecy, Severed. Compare and contrast with Winds of Destiny, Change!, which is about the ability to change fate rather than ignore it entirely.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• An unusual variation of this exists in Ann Cassandra: Banjou is fated to die on his 20th birthday. Because there was a prediction of him dying on that specific day, he can't die before that day. This means that he can do all sorts of Leeroy Jenkins-style stunts without worrying about dying, as fate warps itself around him to keep him alive. Knowing this, Banjou uses his reality-warping presence to protect the lives of people fated to die, often by using himself as a human shield against whatever is about to kill that person. Given that Ann Cassandra is about teenagers who can see the future and want to stop terrible things from happening, this power is quite relevant most of the time. (The reason this isn't a straight example is because while he is immune to death, he is NOT immune to getting hurt, and he spends almost half of the entire series either in the hospital or with bandages on his body.)
• Berserk: After the events of the Eclipse, Guts has vowed to destroy the God Hand who control and use fate to their advantage. While he didn't die the day he was fated to (thanks to a combination of being improbably badass and the timely intervention of the Skull Knight), he hasn't fully broken from the reins of fate yet, as the Brand of Sacrifice is still trying to correct the mistake fate made by drawing demons to him at night to kill him. It's hinted in Guts's Back Story that his birth was somehow a surprise even to fate itself. Summed up in his Leitmotif "Blood and Guts":
• In Bleach Inoue Orihime's powers are introduced as barrier abilities that cut, heal and shield. As an Actual Pacifist she only heals and shields. Her powers are eventually revealed to Screw Destiny by rejecting events - injuries are rejected as never having occurred rather than being healed.
• In Chivalry of a Failed Knight, this is the Desperados' power. When a Blazer Awakens as a Desperado, they break the chains of fate, gaining power that dwarfs that of anyone still bound by fate. A normal Blazer needs to have strong faith in their own abilities to even defend against a Desperado's aura. Ikki and Stella eventually awaken as Desperados.
• Future Diary: Akise becomes this once he obtains his "detective diary", a meta-diary which renders him immune to having his future changed by other Diary Holders. This immunity doesn't make him untouchable however, as he can be forced to change his own future, and can still make miscalculations due to incomplete information.
• Ginji in Get Backers might be this. One thing for sure, not even Makube X could predict what he would do.
• In Goblin Slayer, the gods are intrigued by Goblin Slayer because he does not let them roll the dice to determine his fate. This is because he works very hard to leave absolutely nothing to chance in his quest to slay goblins. While Goblin Slayer is a Small Steps Hero so this usually doesn't have much of an effect on the world, there are exceptions. The Priestess was supposed to die in the Total Party Kill caused by a god's spectacularly bad roll. She had been written off when Goblin Slayer saved her. Likewise, on his very first job, he saved a village from goblins. One of the girls in that village went on to become the greatest hero in the world with a happy childhood when the gods intended her to be a Broken Bird from a ruined hometown.
• Bellcross of Heroic Age's special power is "existence". He's punched his way out of a black hole he was trapped in, and was in one case attacked by a time traveler in tens of thousands of different timelines at various points. He survived in all of them.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Diavolo, Big Bad of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind can achieve this through his Stand, King Crimson. Through a sub-Stand called Epitaph, Diavolo can peer at most 10 seconds into the future at will, allowing him to be forewarned of any incoming attacks. Activating King Crimson allows him to erase/skip a section of time up to a maximum of 10 seconds, and when combined with his precognition ability, allows him to maneuver himself out of the way of an attack that was fated to happen. Importantly, while Diavolo can outmaneuver fate, everyone else still undertakes their fated actions in those 10 seconds of time, but doesn't remember what happened in the erased time, leaving an enemy heavily disoriented and open to Diavolo's (often fatal) counterattack. Giorno manages to overcome King Crimson's ability through his evolved stand, Gold Experience Requiem, which cancels King Crimson's time erasure and overrides the future that Epitaph saw; Diavolo is in such disbelief that such a thing could be possible that he's left wide open in the face of GER's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
  • Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Jo Jolion: The Stand of the Big Bad, Wonder of U, will send a calamity upon anyone who should try to (or even intend to) pursue it or its master, ranging from such things as raindrops gaining the strength of bullets to being crushed by a plane's panel coming loose. No matter what the target tries, these calamities are absolutely unavoidable once triggered. Josuke manages to overcome Wonder of U's ability by shooting it with a bubble so infinitesimally thin that, technically, it doesn't exist, allowing him to damage both it and its master without triggering a calamity and forcing Wonder of U to actively defend itself. After Josuke hurts Wonder of U for the first time in this manner, Yasuho is saved in the nick of time from being killed by the aforementioned plane panel, which until a few seconds ago kept changing its course to home in towards Yasuho before missing her at the very last second right as Wonder of U's ability is disrupted by Josuke.
• In Medaka Box, Zenkichi gains this power during the Successor arc. What it actually does is negate any form of narrative causality, meaning that no dramatic manga-style plot contrivances like Heroic Second Winds or Eleventh Hour Superpowers will affect either Zenkichi or anyone who fights him, but with the series's heavy lampshading it effectively qualifies as this trope.
• Scrapped Princess: Pacifica Casull, a.k.a. the Providence Breaker. She's genetically engineered to be immune to fate, and she manages to avoid the one fate she wasn't supposed to avoid.
• The Spiral Power in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is, as Viral puts it, the "burning blood that cuts through Fate".
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: After becoming a True Demon Lord, the Dragonnewt, Gabiru eventually obtains the Ultimate Skill [Pierrot Star]. One of the most powerful abilities of this Skill is "Rewrite Fate", allowing him once a day to turn even the worst possible outcome against him into a total victory, ignoring even other causality-manipulating Skills. Crossing over into Winds of Destiny, Change!, he can also actively inflict this on others (friend or enemy) once a day per person as well, which allows him to do something like say, shut down an opponent's Healing Factor to prevent them from surviving a wound they otherwise would be able to.
• In The Vision of Escaflowne, the Big Bad is desperate to capture Escaflowne because it is the one thing his Fate Alteration Engine can't control the future of.
• Saiou from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX is basically fated to win any duel he enters, which automatically gives him the best of all possible outcomes in his very luck based deck. That is, until he met Judai...

Comic Books

• Warlock (1967): Both Thanos of Titan and his good counterpart Adam Warlock have been remarked on as being outside the purview of Order and Chaos, and thus in some sense outside of fate. In Warlock's case this may be because he changed history by killing himself, thus preventing himself from becoming an evil god. He got better, though.
• Challengers of the Unknown: The titular characters have this ability, a result of their living in "borrowed time" (they survived a fatal plane crash). Indeed, the entire "The Lords Of Luck" crisis started in the first place because Destiny of the Endless noted blank spaces in his book, leading to growing corruptions to the timeline he was unable to track. Horrified, he cast it away, hoping the blanked out people would be able to restore the missing bits. While the Challengers were successful in stopping the crisis, when handing back the tome, they noted that as a result of the adventure, their fifth member had been likewise blasted out of the book's scope, giving them hope for her survival.
• In Flashpoint, Professor Zoom/Reverse-Flash boasts to Barry Allen as being able to do this as he's a living Temporal Paradox. Batman (Thomas Wayne) promptly shoves a sword through his chest, though later events would show Zoom was right, as he just comes back to life with all his memories.
• This is one of Superman's many, many, powers. As the one who started it all, he essentially acts as a Cosmic Keystone for The DCU which is emphasized in Doomsday Clock. He's immune to Ret-Gone attempts by Reality Warpers, and can effortlessly travel through spacetime. Although he doesn't take it to the extreme that Reverse-Flash does, as he's still mortal (more or less).
• In Corto Maltese, the eponymous main character's backstory includes an episode from his childhood where a palmreader tries to predict his destiny. She fails because according to her his hand lacks a "fate line", i.e. he completely lacks a predetermined future. His response? He takes a knife and slices his own hand, creating a scar to serves as his fate line. This is his way of declaring that his fate lies in his own hand and only he will decide what his life will be.

Fan Works

• In DC Nation, this is broadly hinted to be something of a superpower for the otherwise Badass Normal Roy Harper. He's flipped off Eldritch Abominations and Jerkass Gods alike. In-universe, he is completely unreadable to Dr. Fate. At one point, Dark Angel is howling for his head, saying he should have died in Crisis on Infinite Earths. He shrugs it off.
  Arsenal: 'All you're telling me is that I've pissed in your Cheerios more than once, and I did it beside Donna. Lemme tell you, those are two things that make me a very happy little camper...And hey, extra bonus for me at the end of it? I pissed you off when I didn't even mean to! Little ol' me. A guy. A dude. A very attractive but semi-normal human fleshbag. Man, I'm good.
• In Shinji and Warhammer40k, there are quite a few powers betting on the outcome of the Evas vs Angels war and trying to manipulate events all according to their interpretation of ancient prophecies. The problem is that Mana Kirishima is not an Eva pilot, so the prophecies don't say anything about her, yet she can still influence events thanks to piloting Magnos Tancred. Kaworu complains that "It's as though canon refuses to accept her existence."
• In the Veronica Mars meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic Martian Manhunter, Veronica is told (by Drusilla, of all people) that she has no fate or destiny that anyone can discern. Dru even explicitly makes the comparison to Sparhawk.
• My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator: Several seers in the pantheons say that the Doom Slayer's fate is unwritten and he can change the fates of those around him. The author said this was inspired by Goblin Slayer.
• Pony POV Series:
  • This comes up in Shining Armor's side story. According to Reznov, due to the very reason the Blank Wolf is after Shining, his future AND past are completely unpredictable, even considering that fate in the Pony POV Series has many roads. Instead of going down a river, he's described as being adrift at sea. However, this also leaves him immune to Makarov's powers, meaning he's the one with the best chance of stopping him. It turns out this is because Shining literally didn't exist prior to the start of his story, and his timeline's been filling itself in both ways ever since.
  • The Finale Arc reveals Flash Sentry is this too. It's because he's really the human version from the Equestria Girls films. Rota Fortuna, the personification of fate herself, briefly appears to him and says his fate is not written in her book. This leaves him immune to the changes in reality caused by Discord's Endgame.
• Ash Ketchum is heavily hinted to be this in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines. At one point, a girl with the ability to see into the past and the future of people admits that she has difficulties reading Ash's past and future for some unexplained reason.

Films — Animated

• Everyone has a destiny written in The Book of Life, their stories penned from the moment they're born. But the pages belonging to Manolo Sanchez are blank. At some point, Manolo broke away from his own fate and is now "writing his own story".

Films — Live-Action

• Zig-zagged in The Adjustment Bureau, where it's a toss-up as to whether the protagonists are defying their chosen fate, getting caught up in an earlier version of the plan for humanity, or everything that happens was as intended all along, with the titular Bureau's agents also being "adjusted" by their godlike boss The Chairman (who might actually be God, possibly). The Bureau believes that if too many people become immune to fate, the consequences are never good, although since it's their entire job to implement The Plan, that could be a self-serving mythology meant to justify their own actions.
• In Terminator Genisys, John Connor comes to believe that he and all his family are subject to this, given that they're all displaced from their proper time anyway.

Literature

• Sir Sparhawk, Champion of the Pandion Knights in David Eddings' The Elenium and The Tamuli series. The gods know him as 'Anakha', literally "without destiny", and most of them were in favor of simply not letting him get born. Because he has no fate, even the gods can't predict what he'll do from one moment to the next, making him able to fight them... in the end, the only reason they even allowed him to exist is that sometimes it's handy to have a godslayer around... providing they're careful where they point him.
  • At the end of the second trilogy, it's revealed that he has this power, and more, due to being created by Bhelliom, the Cosmic Entity that created the world. Because Sparhawk was created by something more powerful than the gods, they lack any direct power over him.
• In the later Dune books by Frank Herbert, the God Emperor Leto II spends three and a half thousand years breeding humans to make a gene as widespread as possible that prevents prescient people from seeing what people with the gene are going to do.
• Discworld:
  • Rincewind, while in general being a Cosmic Plaything who can't fight fate, plays this specific role for Death. Due to Rincewind being favored by Lady Luck — Fate's arch-enemy — not even Death knows when he's going to die. (His lifetimer has an... interesting shape.)
  • Sourcery: More literally, there is Coin the Sourcerer:
    Death: "Sourcerers make their own destiny. They touch the world lightly."
  • Some people such as some witches can tap the power of the story to either bind people to a certain destiny or — where this trope comes in - to change it.
• Dragonlance: The entire Kender race (most notably Tasselhoff Burrfoot). Elves, Humans, and Ogres were created by the gods at the beginning to embody light, balance, and darkness, respectively. Kender, and related races such as dwarves and gnomes, were created by the Graygem, an Artifact of Doom containing the essence of pure Chaos. Needless to say, all three have the potential to massively screw up the timeline, with kender being the most likely because they're naturally adventuresome and impulsive.
• In Diana Wynne Jones' The Magids, part of the job description of the Magids is being disentangled from fate... to a certain extent. While they are separated from human workings, Them Up There are free to meddle in their affairs.
• Meta-example: in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout writes a novel about a man who discovers he is the only free-willed being in the universe, which then causes an aged business magnate to go on a killing spree after believing this applies to him also. It doesn't.
• Firekeeper, titular heroine of the Firekeeper Saga, is a human woman who has been Raised by Wolves. This causes her to have a chaotic nature such that skilled Seers, such as the Wise Jaguar, Truth, cannot accurately predict events she is directly involved in.
• In Stephen King's Insomnia, people are defined by being born to the "Purpose" (important to the Multiverse in some way) and the "Random" (random extra as far as the greater Multiverse is concerned). Trouble brews when the Grim Reaper normally tasked with ending the lives of "Random" people cuts the lifeline of someone who isn't defined as "Purpose" or "Random". Main characters Ralph and Lois are conscripted by the "Purpose" Grim Reapers to prevent this act from screwing over the Multiverse.
• Illium and Olympos by Dan Simmons features as one of its main characters Achilles in an alternate timeline of the Trojan War. In it, Paris dies before he can kill Achilles, as the prophecy dictates. For the rest of the story, Achilles becomes immortal and indestructible, as his fate became impossible to bring about.
• In Terry Pratchett's The Dark Side of the Sun, the Jokers are completely invisible to probability math, which can otherwise predict the future with near certainty.
• In the Sword of Truth books, Richard typically says Screw Destiny, or rather claims he knows best despite wizards having studied them for years telling him otherwise. And somehow, he's always right, possibly because he's the hero. Ye he ends up fulfilling prophecies all the time by ignoring them and finding alternate interpretations, some even give him epiphanies. There are also the "Pillars of Creation" that have no link to magic, so prophecies can't see them. Though, this was never really taken advantage of.
• The Silmarillion: Men are free to make their own choices outside of the Great Music (i.e. Fate) while other races (Ainur, Elves, Dwarves etc.) have their Fates determined by it.
• In With a Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony, the Incarnation of Fate allows several fortune-tellers to attempt to scry her. A charlatan would actually attempt it, while the real deal somehow recognizes her and refuses.
• In the seventh volume of The Wheel of Time, the resident seer, Min, who sees visions around people foretelling their fate, cannot see any around Padan Fain, resident Darkfriend, Humanoid Abomination, and Corrupter who is a Wild Card for both sides and as determined to bring down the Dark One as the hero Rand. This implies he is somehow "outside the Pattern" and therefore this trope, and by Word of God he is something unique that has never happened before; at the very least he is unpredictable.
• In the 1978 Superman novel Superman: The Last Son of Krypton Superman has a vision where God explains to him that as the Big Good of the universe he has a force of destiny so powerful that it trumps all other fates. He then proceeds to come Back from the Dead and defeats a Big Bad who was predestined to rule the galaxy. With a little help from Lex Luthor.
• In the setting of Tale of the Unwithering Realm, there are the rare "foreverborn", whose actions cannot be predicted by astrology, and who thus are considered extremely dangerous by the Dark Tower (whose modus operandi is simply predicting their enemies' moves years in advance) because they tend to be the Spanner in the Works. By extension, anyone who "walks in their shadow" (in their company) has this extended to them, as long as they don't do anything according to their lower nature (i.e. as long as they don't commit selfish evil acts.)
• Aeon Legion: Labyrinth: Most people have a connection with fate. Those with a strong connection are the movers and shakers of history and are called Qadar, but there are those without a connection to fate are called nulls. Sybil cannot see them very well with precognition. A null's influence on events is usually negligible.
• In Void City, Eric has the power to defy fate and break prophecy. Even the Eye of Scrythax, a powerful magical artifact capable of seeing into the future, cannot see what he is going to do.
• In Thalia's Musings, the Fates wonder if Thalia and thus the rest of the Muses are this. The Fates don't like this idea.
• In Worm, a few key beings and entities are specific blind spots for precogs. Which beings a precog is blind to, and the precise nature of the blindness, varies between precogs. Some fail utterly when blind spots get involved in a situation, while others can indirectly predict the consequences of the actions of blind spots.
• In the epilogue of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Ahriman: Unchanged, Ahriman visits the Mad Oracle Menkaura and asks him to read his future. Menkaura tries, only to quickly—- and painfully—- discover that the paths of Ahriman's potential futures are now hidden by thorns and shadows, making it impossible to predict his actions. It's implied that Ahriman gained this ability when Tzeentch, who had previously ordered the Changeling to kill Ahriman, decided to spare his life instead.
• George Zebrowski's "Foundation’s Conscience": The final appearance by Hari Seldon, where he reveals the end of his millennia-long Plan, has him explaining that he hopes that humanity will take advantage of the new galactic civilization to become "a rational intelligence which would be immune to psychohistorical prediction".
• The Stormlight Archive: Renarin Kholin has a version of this, due to his own limited prophetic abilites allowing him to interfere with other major precognitives in the story. By extension, anyone he interacts with also gains a measure of this: as Renarin's unpedictable actions make their own choices unpredictable in turn.

Live-Action TV

• In The Cape, Dice is unable to see Vince in her predictions.
• The Doctor from Doctor Who, Depending on the Writer.
  • "The Waters of Mars" provides a particularly chilling deconstruction of the trope: while the Doctor himself is immune to Fate (with the exception of his death, though he can usually avoid that by regeneration or Faking the Dead), his human allies are not.
  • Other episodes demonstrate that you CAN Screw Destiny but if you screw with it TOO MUCH, as in "The Wedding of River Song", you break the Universe, or in the case of "Father's Day" you have Clock Roaches trying to eat you.
  • Steven Moffat interprets "Day of the Daleks" this way. The Doctor can break the Stable Time Loop creating the alternate future of the Dalek rule as he is not subject to the usual laws of time.
  • The Doctor also has a "Time-Sense" which allows him to see possibilities, disturbances in Time, as well as whether a certain event is set in stone or changeable, which certainly comes in handy for him, as well as explaining why he never been attacked by Clock Roaches until Rose messes it up in "Father's Day".
    • Expanded media has used this on various occasions; for example, a storyline in the Eighth Doctor Adventures focused on the idea of the Doctor as a 'Rogue Element', existing outside the usual rules of cause and effect, with the result that a race capable of predicting the future could never predict what the Doctor was going to do even after collapsing reality down to a single timeline to further their own agenda.
• In Fringe, Peter Bishop proves to be a bit of a temporal wildcard due to some very unusual circumstances. After the main timeline's Peter Bishop dies of illness as a child, his father Walter Bishop interprets some important instructions given by a time-traveler ("The boy is important. He has to live.") to mean that Peter is a Living MacGuffin who must survive in some way, which becomes a sort of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Walter Bishop invents technology that allows him to travel to a parallel universe, where he kidnaps an alternate version of his son who would have died of the same illness in order to cure him. It is later revealed that Walter misinterpreted the time traveler's instructions and almost caused a ClassX-5 in the process, but Peter proves instrumental in saving both timelines because his unexpected survival makes him a sort of Butterfly of Doom that the Big Bads are unable to stop. The title of the series' final episode, "An Enemy of Fate" is a nod to this trope.
• Time Travel on Lost follows, for the most part, the You Already Changed the Past model. The exception is Desmond, thanks to how the Island's electro-magnetism messed up his head. When he sees a vision of Charlie dying, he's able to prevent it, but has to keep on saving Charlie's life as destiny keeps finding new ways to off him. And when Daniel Faraday tells Desmond something in the past, present day Desmond shoots up in bed, suddenly remembering a conversation that, until just then, hadn't actually happened.
• Smallville: Clark Kent is implied to be this in the episode "Hereafter". There was a kid named Jordan Cross who could see the future (specifically, the deaths of whoever he touches, and he can't turn it off) and became The Fatalist because nothing he did could alter his visions. His attitude changes when Clark rescues someone who he predicted would die, even though Clark had no knowledge of the vision and was just doing his regular superheroing since they hadn't even met yet. He also tells Clark that everyone is fated to die, but in Clark's future, all he saw was a cape fluttering in a sea of stars.
  Jordan Cross: "You don't have an end like other people. It's like you live forever."
• In Supernatural the brothers are so entwined in Destiny they seem mostly unaffected when Balthazar stops the Titanic from sinking and changes the timeline in a major way. The closer people and things are to the brothers and their destiny, the less affected are they by the changes.
  • In the fifth season, Sam and Dean are constantly told by the angels that, as the human vessels of Lucifer and Michael, they are fated to give in and that no matter how hard they try to avoid it, it's inevitably going to happen anyway. Sam eventually says yes to Lucifer (as part of their plan to take him back to his Cage), but Dean does not, forcing Michael to adopt their half-brother Adam Milligan as a makeshift vessel so Lucifer and Michael can follow through with their plan. They manage to avert the end of the world anyway.
  • In season six the brothers actually meet one of the Fates who is pissed off at them for stopping the Apocalypse. The boys are apparently not so immune to fate as she seriously threatens to kill them.
  • Naomi and later God himself express this about Castiel. The Broken Angel never followed orders in this timeline and thus helped upend the plans for the apocalypse by helping the Winchesters.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology: It's not so much that King Admetus is immune to fate, it's just that he got fate drunk so it would give him a pass on the day he was supposed to die by getting someone to take his place.
• There is a Jewish legend about a sage meeting Death and asking him about when he's going to die. Death's answer? "Sorry, but sages as righteous as you get delays all the time".

Tabletop Games

• GURPS has the "Temporal Inertia" advantage, basically making a character immune to death by fate (among other things).
• In Mage: The Awakening, mages with high levels of the Fate Arcanum become "Unfettered"; they are automatically able to detect and resist any attempt to magically alter their destiny, such as curses, attempts to bind their fate, mind control, or tampering with their soul. (On the other side of the coin, mages of the Mastigos path are terrified of mages with Fate, because Fate implies free will isn't all it's cracked up to be.)
  • Mages reaching the apex of the Sphinx Legacy take this about a thousand steps further - they can "walk between" the patterns of the world, isolating themselves from it. They are literally immune to any magical attempt to alter, define or predict their destiny. Any attempt to use Sympathetic Magic on them automatically fails unless the caster knows their True Name. They even become extremely hard to pay attention to. However, by the same token, they disable one of their Legacy's other abilities, and are rendered practically unable to alter the destinies of anyone else, either.
  • A sufficiently powerful Time mage can do this retroactively, fulfilling the requirements of fate to satisfy the magical aspects of curse spells and gaesa, then erasing the timeline in which the conditions were fulfilled, allowing them to reap the benefits of screwing destiny without suffering the horrible consequences. Similarly, advanced Prime mages can eventually counter or dispel essentially anything, including destinies laid by non-mage supernatural creatures.
• Exalted has legions of these. The Underworld, the Wyld, Malfeas, and Autochthon are all outside Fate. Of them, Autochthonians are the only ones who would feel at all guilty about disrupting Fate by walking in Creation - one charm submodule lets them become part of Fate just to avoid screwing things up (3e drops their immunity entirely, as Autochthon integrated himself into Fate beforehand and shares this status with his inhabitants). Everyone else considers it a job perk.
  • It's worth noting, however, that Fate doesn't take this lying down. If something from outside Fate spends enough time in Creation or Yu-Shan, where Fate does hold sway, they'll eventually get integrated into Fate by the Pattern Spiders. That, or the Sidereal Exalted will pay them a visit (and in 3e, since the Sidereals are guardians of Fate, they have various powers for use against those outside it, something they didn't have in previous editions).
  • Liminal Exalted are immune by nature, being Exalted by an ancient power of the Underworld, but if they have a lifeline to a living character, that serves as their thread of fate. It should be noted that for Liminals, the downsides of not having a lifeline typically outweigh any advantage immunity to Fate might give them.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • A fourth edition epic destiny for revenants called Free Soul with this as its schtick. You have won freedom from the goddess of fate, be it by arms or charms, and are now immune to the laws of death and destiny. It comes with nifty powers that pretty much let you roll saves as you see fit.
  • According to the Cyrinishad, the holy book of Cyric, the God of Evil Deity of Human Origin in Forgotten Realms, when he was born, the goddesses of good and bad luck, Tymora and Besheba, tossed a coin to decide his fate, as they do with all mortals, but even as an unborn soul, Cyric was able to prevent them seeing the result, meaning he would make his own destiny. This is complete nonsense; there's a reason the book had to be enchanted to make anyone who read it believe it.
• One of the fan-made Pantheons for Scion is Arthurian Legend. Arthurian legend is well known for their You Can't Fight Fate theme. However, the highest level of the Pantheon perks is that you can Screw Destiny. It takes a lot of the equivalent of mana to do so, but you can stop anything fated to happen, including the Apocalypse for a few minutes.

Video Games

• The Fateless One in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Seeing as how s/he starts the game off dead and comes back to life, there's a lot of ways s/he can break the world around him/her. In more detail, Fate in Amalur is an immutable destiny; Fae society hinges on this predeterminism and while individuals of the younger races might scoff at the idea, they're still bound by it. The Fateless One having no destiny completely breaks the system; just being present can make Fate go Off the Rails. To Fateweavers and especially the Fae, it's like there's someone walking around whose very presence makes physics stop working.
  • The Fatesworn DLC for the Re-reckoning remaster deconstructs this aspect. The Fateless One's immunity to fate as well as their defeat of Tirnoch breaks the weave of Fate for everyone. Unfortunately, said Fate helps hold Amalur together, so the Fateless One ends up departing the land at the end of the DLC.
• In the Legacy of Kain series, Raziel is essentially this trope. The only way to escape fate is to cause a paradox and take action right at the paradox, but Raziel is a wraith carrying his own soul from a different time on his arm, so he's a paradox on legs, and everything he does can potentially alter history or, to put it another way, he's the only character who has real free will. However, being immune to the power of destiny does not make him immune to being manipulated in more conventional ways, and he spends a huge amount of the series as an Unwitting Pawn to various factions.
• A book of background fluff in Baldur's Gate references a Forgotten Realms folk tale; when something is born the Goddess of bad luck calls a coin toss by the Goddess of good luck and the victor decides the newborn's fate, but sometimes the coin lands on edge...
  • Both a Hermit in Baldur's Gate and a fortune teller in Baldur's Gate II tell the main character that their coin landed on the edge. The fortune teller also gives them a refund.
• The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment. A fortune teller flat-out tells him as much, before giving him a full refund.
  • Ironically, he's also a case of You Can't Fight Fate. No matter what he does, if he dies he will go to Hell; the eons-long gambit of his first incarnation to avoid it was always in vain. The best you can do is either exist forever as an ever-more-empty shell of a man, or obliterate yourself so completely that it's as if you never existed.
• While he's at the very center of the maelstrom of fate in Chrono Cross, Serge seems to be astoundingly immune to being screwed by it. Crono from Chrono Trigger, not so much...
• In The Legend of Spyro, the Purple Dragon is specifically said to be able to guide the fate of the era he/she is born into. Whenever someone predicts a destiny he doesn't like, Spyro tends to Screw Destiny. The Chronicler tells him that Cynder will turn evil again when Malefor is revived? He pulls a Big Damn Heroes moment and saves her while killing that particular game's Big Bad (though Word of God states that the Chronicler was aware Spyro may not go along with the future he fortold and taught him what he'd need anyway, it still counts). Malefor tells him the fate of the Purple Dragon is to destroy the world? He and Cynder kick Malefor's tail and Spyro restores the world.
• A fortune teller in Trials of Mana is shocked when he tries to tell the main character's future, and all he can see is a faerie. The Faerie then appears and says that, when she inhabits a human, his or her future becomes impossible to determine.
• In Final Fantasy XIII, humans can transcend any kind of limitations, even their own fate. Fal'Cie, on the other hand, cannot: despite being infinitely more powerful than humans, they cannot act outside of very specific roles the Creator Deity assigned to them. Which is why they create l'Cie, in an attempt to control the fate-defying human will.
• Final Fantasy VII Remake: Takes this to a meta level. The "Arbiters of Fate", the weird spectral things encountered at several points in the story, turn out to be literal agents of fate, interfering with events to make sure fate goes on its plotted course, the plot of the original Final Fantasy VII. Eventually, the heroes kill the Arbiters, allowing them the freedom to move in different directions than the original game, but also risking the possibility that Sephiroth might win this time around.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • The series' lore has the concept of "heroes", individuals with a special fate and the ability to rule their own destiny, often being capable of growing far more powerful than other mortals. These heroes are tied to the prophecies of the Elder Scrolls themselves, but are not bound by them. Naturally, the Player Character in each game in the series is considered to be such a "hero", as are many of the Long Dead Badasses mentioned in the lengthy backstory.
  • In Skyrim, the so-called "Book of Fate" is one of the items in Calixto's House of Curiosities. According to Calixto, the book reveals the fate of the reader. When the Dragonborn looks at it, it appears to be completely blank. Calixto speculates that this is because the Dragonborn has no predetermined destiny (as mentioned above) or is about to experience imminent death. (Considering that Calixto is a full blown serial killer, it's also highly likely he's just lying and that it really is just a blank book.)
• The Nephalem (those who have awakened humanity's original power as angel/demon hybrids) in Diablo III are not mentioned in the Scroll of Fate and thus are the only ones capable of averting anything that is written in it such as stopping Diablo, the Prime Evil, from destroying Heaven.
• Runescape: After the quest The Chosen Commander, cave goblin Zanik is forsaken by the gods in retribution for defying and defeating the avatar of Bandos (with your help). It's yet to be seen if this has any explicitly negative consequences, but one odd thing that's happened to her since is visiting the Varrock Fortune Teller, only to be told that her future cannot be seen.
• In Tales of the Abyss, replicas are this. Although they look and sound and act (sometimes) similar to their originals, they are in fact separate entities. As such, they are the only beings in the world whose destinies aren't controlled by the Score - a prophecy that controls every single aspect of every person's life. The Big Bad, recognising this, aims to free the world from the Apocalypse How prophesied by the final part of the Score by replacing everything - the people, the animals, the land, the cities, all of it - with replicas in order to thoroughly Screw Destiny. To that end he created The Hero and used him as an Unwitting Pawn to take the place of his original in regards to his doomed fate. The Hero goes on to screw over both the Big Bad's plans and the Score itself, with the implication he can do this because he's a God in Human Form due to the nature of his creation and other Magic A Is Magic A factors.
• In Exit Fate, this is one of the perks of being possessed by the Hand of Fate. The others include effectively being able to rewrite it on the fly and having a much better chance of things going your way than most people.
• Okage: Shadow King has the main character, Ari who exists outside of the fates and rules of the land's "god". Represented by his Neutral alignment in the elemental trinity.
• Primal has the main character Jen and her boyfriend Lewis as half-breed demons. The laws of the world do not apply to them, and they are theirs to break.
• Persona 5: Joker appears to have this ability if his quest with Chihaya Mifune is anything to go by.
• God of War: It's implied that Kratos is not bound by fate. Even when the Sisters of Fate try to prevent him from killing Zeus in the second game, he simply kills them before going to war with Olympus. And even though he was foretold to be the instrument of Olympus' downfall, said prophecy only comes true because he wanted it to come true — he didn't even try to avoid it. In God of War (PS4) he starts mucking up the prophecy of Ragnarök by killing Baldur centuries before his foretold death, which triggers Fimbulvetr, the winter that precedes Ragnarök ahead of schedule. It is also worth noting that he and Atreus end up killing Magni and Modi, the sons of Thor who in the original myths were destined to survive Ragnarök. Whether this is also the case in the games is not confirmed, though Modi's horrified disbelief at Magni's death implies it is. This is then deconstructed in God of War Ragnarök when Kratos learns he's "immune" to fate because predetermined fate doesn't actually exist in this universe. The most the gods can do is predict the future and then retroactively meddle with the past as the Sisters of Fate did, hence why they ended up having to ultimately fight Kratos rather than just declare "you die" and he drops dead. This also means all of Kratos' screw-ups really do have no one to blame but himself.
• After the Bard of Wandersong spends the whole beginning of the game wondering if he is the one destined to save the world from oblivion, a visit to Calliope the fortune teller during Act Three reveals... that not only is he nowhere near being The Hero to save the world, but also that he is apparently so insignificant that destiny itself didn't bother giving him a fate.
  Calliope: Holy cow... There's...! No prophecy about you whatsoever.
  (Beat)
  Bard: ...None?
  Calliope: None whatsoever.
  Bard: What does that mean?
  Calliope: I don't even know! Usually you at least see something... You're for sure NOT the hero foretold... But I guess you're not NOT a hero? Destiny just has no expectations for you at all.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Zanza and Meyneth, the two gods of the world, are stated to be outside the passage of fate by Alvis. They are able to receive visions of the future, which enable them to change it. In the end, Zanza is defeated because he inadvertently granted Shulk the same power.
• In the SP missions for Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Alex, an AI that is Strangereal’s equivalent to Google’s Alexa, tries to run a simulation to determine who would win in an engagement between Matias Torres and Trigger. The first simulation fails, with one of the reasons being that Torres is a ‘singularity’. When David North, an analyst working for Osea’s Intelligence Agency to hunt for Torres, gives Alex Trigger’s flight data from before he joined the LRSSG, Alex runs the simulation again, and determines that Trigger is also a ‘singularity’, and that an accurate simulation between the two would take months to determine.
• In Destiny, paracausal beings "make their own fate". While this generally amounts to the ability to violate physical laws and do magic, it also means that neither they nor their powers can be accurately simulated by the Vex, whose predictive models of the universe are otherwise so perfect that they're recursive: Vex units running a simulation naturally must include themselves running the simulation in it, which naturally must include themselves etcetera. The Vex are so virulent that their consuming the universe should be a mathematical certainty, but the existence of paracausality means their victory is no longer assured — though it's up in the air whether the final outcome now will be any better.
• Timespinner enforces this with the way its setting's time travel works; Lunais' clan regularly trains Time Messengers who use the titular time machine to go back in time when disasters occur and warn the clan about them. When they use the Timespinner, however, they are erased from history. This means they're allowed to do things that radically alter time, fate, and prophecy as a result, but it also means their original timeline is erased, leaving them stranded in one where they were never born, and their friends and family aren't familiar with them.

Webcomics

• Sluggy Freelance:
  • Oasis is said to be one of small number of beings who aren't part of the Web of Fate and has the potential to severely screw up destiny, possibly leading to The End of the World as We Know It.
  • The Talking Weapon Chaz, the Unholy Evil Death Bringer, AKA the Weeping God, also exists outside the Web of Fate, and can kill gods, demons, and souls. A King Of Gods was also unable to destroy Chaz for the same reason.
• In Digger, wombats are rarely, if ever, mentioned in any prophecy even when things they cause are (such as the hole Digger uses to reach the surface at the story's beginning). This is actually Justified, as one of Digger's distant ancestors demanded a dwarf make him, his children, and his descendants Immune to Fate as payment for his assistance with the binding of a mad god. The only ones who seem able to give wombat-involved prophecies are oracular slugs.
• In Captain SNES: The Game Masta, the Sovereign of Sorrow is capable of seeing everyone's future... except Schrodinger the cat, who has already interfered with several of the Sovereign's prophecies.
• K from Blip is a "cosmic mistake"—God himself somehow never foresaw her existence, so he had no place for her in his predestined plan. Any action of hers has the potential to completely upend God's plans. (K herself is completely unaware of any of this.) Unfortunately, she ends up as a Cosmic Plaything because of the angels constantly screwing up her life, stifling her creativity, and doing whatever they can to prevent her from realizing her true potential, since the less significant she is, the less harm she can do.
• According to characters in Homestuck, this is apparently the the reason Big Bad Lord English is always triumphant. As the Lord of Time, whatever he wishes happen in the alpha timeline will happen in the alpha timeline.
  • John eventually gains similar powers. A powerful Artifact grants him the ability to retcon the Alpha Timeline.
  • Double subverted with Light players. They are more susceptible to psychic attacks, but they manage and manipulate fate and destiny.
• Parson from Erfworld, by virtue of being able to subvert and outright break some of the rules that define Erfworld. Some residents of Erfworld hope that he will be able to break the "game" and bring true peace. Others are terrified of him for the same reason.
  • Also, the Carnymancers, whose specific magical power is the ability to break the rules and counteract Fate. Notable in that this is a major exception to Erfworld's usual You Can't Fight Fate rule.
  • Ironically, Parson is also The Chosen One being Fate's weapon to get rid of Charlie.
  • It is heavily implied that Jillian was given a limited degree of resistance to Fate, though at the price of a Fate Worse than Death since it involved being Mind Raped by Charlie.
• This is hinted at in Tower of God, although not all the details are necessarily clear. Some characters, such as Navigators, are able to see fate — but then they just draw a blank with a rare few other characters.
  • Emily, the computer program who's also a living ignition weapon (which apparently explains this somehow), is totally able to throw off Hwaryun's abilities to see destinies and paths.
  • Probably a trait of Irregulars. Certainly the protagonist Bam.
  • Jahad, the King of the Tower. Maybe it's because he himself is trying to bring fate under his control and is succeeding (though he's also technically an Irregular). He can certainly blindside Khel Hellam, a FUG Elder who thrives in manipulating fates.

Web Video

• The D-Day Knight in THE MONUMENT MYTHOS. Alice Avenue suggests that, because of the Deanverse's destruction, he can fight destiny and save the lives of those who were "fated" to die. Even when it's revealed that Nixon laid out a said path for him, he immediately disregards that by rejecting his fate as a Lunarian prince and upending the entirety of the Lunarians' prophecy through wiping them out.
• T.C. in the Tactical Cupcakes LORE series is explicitly described as this, and has been shown to dodge death or escape things she otherwise should not have.

Western Animation

• This is the reason Mighty Max is chosen to fight Skullmaster: As the Mighty One, his destiny is so strong it overrides anyone else's, making him the only one who could possibly stop Skullmaster.

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