Musings: How to read and understand prophecy and vision in a fantasy story · 11:56pm Feb 16th, 2019
“Three crowns had the First King of the stags. One for the sun, a crown of baleful gold. One for the moon, a crown of mournful silver. And one for the earth, a crown of fateful bronze. Three crowns shall the Last King have, too.”
- Cardinal: Fall of Equestria, chapter 1: Three Crowns, One King
“Melara said that if we never spoke about her prophecies, we would forget them. She said that a forgotten prophecy couldn’t come true.”
- G.R.R. Martin: A Feast For Crows, Cersei IV
Preston Jacobs, a Youtuber dedicated to A Song of Ice and Fire theory videos, uploaded a video today about the role of prophecy and vision in G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire - series that also goes into detail about how prophecy and vision are generally to be understood in fantasy plots. Since we know Cardinal was inspired by G.R.R. Martin to a high extent, I would like to take the opportunity to use Preston’s scheme to try and discuss the prophecies and visions Cardinal gave to us in his one chapter. I’m not sure if anything helpful will come of this, but at least it might help clear up a few things, both regarding prophecy in general and regarding Cardinal’s specific use of it. For those of you who know Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, I also highly recommend watching Preston’s video.
First of all, we have to ask what the point of prophecy is - and we quickly see that this question is actually a paradox. Prophecy shows an inevitable future, but if the future really was set, then prophecy would be pointless. A character who believes this could just as easily lean back and do nothing - but that’s not how stories about prophecies usually work.
Thus, we have to be a bit more specific and ask about the intent of the prophecy, because this will determine how it works. According to Preston, there are three variants here.
The first one is prophecy as a warning. Preston calls this inducing nonconformity. For example, you receive a vision of a Dark Lord taking over the world, you see how he did it and how things were set up, and then you take the necessary steps to set things up differently so this outcome doesn’t happen - and more often than not, it’ll turn out that this is why you were sent that vision to begin with.
The second one is the opposite: Prophecy as inducing conformity. His example is you having a vision of lottery numbers and then use these numbers when you play the next time. Another example would be someone prophesying that the Messiah who will save the world will do so with a weapon tempered in the blood of his wife, so lots of people start killing their wives in order to forge the legendary weapon and save the world. (Yes, this is A Song of Ice and Fire’s Azor Ahai prophecy.)
And the third one is prophecy as inducing conformity via inducing non-conformity. In this case, the prophecy or vision actually intends to make the target conform to the intended behavior, but it is presented as a warning. In these cases, the very attempts to prevent the prophecy make it happen. The Maggy the Frog prophecy from A Song of Ice and Fire is likely one example - so far, Cersei has set up the stage for its final fulfillment precisely by taking the steps she believed would prevent its fulfillment. Preston himself calls this deceptive prophecy, but as we’ve seen above, all prophecies can be deceptive.
This is (one reason) why the question of who sent the visions or made the prophecies is so important. It determines how they are supposed to work within the story.
In case of Cardinal’s story, we get one prophecy and one vision - and with regards to what we just discussed, both are… weird. We aren’t given the origin of either, and both kind of go against what we just said about the point of prophecy. Let’s begin with Twilight’s vision. In her vision, she sees a ship, presumably Dainn’s, with three figures standing on it. The first one (presumably Dainn himself) is described as wearing a black cloak and a bronze crown. The second one (whose identity is unknown, but there are several candidates - Svardagr, Strom, Sindri or even Daen the Daywalker are probably the most likely) is described as an almost demonic figure made of shadow and flame, with a golden crown. And the third one (clearly the White Cow), is described as pale and ghost-like, floating, and adorned with a silver daisy crown. The ships come closer to Twilight, and then she recognizes herself in the Dainn figure’s eyes, who have the same shade of purple as Twilight’s.
Now if this prophecy indeed foreshadows the caribou landing, then it’s narratively pointless. It doesn’t incite conforming action, nor nonconforming action, not does it incite the former through the latter. The caribou landing is something that will happen and is already happening, and nothing Twilight could do can change anything about that. Does it though?
First of all, a few things are strange about the vision. Who is the shadow demon figure? If it’s Svardagr (and the description at least somewhat seems to indicate that), then it is the only figure that doesn’t fit in. Dainn and the White Cow are indeed coming with these ships, but Svardagr is dead. Another unexplainable detail is the fact that Twilight recognizes herself in Dainn’s purple eyes - except that Cardinal describes Dainn as having blue eyes.
So is that vision actually meant to tell or show Twilight something else entirely? If so, what? And what is the intention behind it? What does the vision want Twilight to do, so to speak.
The second prophecy is even weirder - precisely because it’s explicitly be said to be a forgotten prophecy. In fact, this idea alone almost makes it smell like a red herring. A forgotten prophecy… well, simply put, isn’t a prophecy. Cersei’s friend Melara from A Song of Ice and Fire is right on a fundamental level. A forgotten prophecy can’t come true, because a prophecy always has an intent. It’s meant to incite action. If the things foretold by a forgotten prophecy happen, it’s not the prophecy coming true, it’s ultimately just stuff happening for completely unrelated reasons. That is, of course, unless some people didn’t forget about it. In that case, the label “forgotten” would be the red herring - but there is no indication that this is the case or that Cardinal intended that. (It could be true given that Strom, just like his spiritual predecessor Etadys, is set up as a nigh-immortal lich. But once again, there is no evidence for that, neither in the story nor in the prophecy.)
So there we have it. Cardinal left us with two prophecies that, to all appearances, aren’t actually prophecies. They seem to be intended as plot points, but they’re set up in a way that precludes them from actually being plot points. Either that, or we fundamentally don’t understand what Cardinal was even trying to do with them.
Complicating matters is the existence of mystery boxes and faux symbolism.
J.J. Abrams is notorious for the former. Potential plot points are introduced to generate interest and suspense, but they're not hashed out. They get forgotten or dropped. Sometimes, nothing's inside the mystery box at all because the writer hasn't thought of an answer themselves yet.
And closely related, faux symbolism where something looks like it has meaning but it doesn't. Southland Tales, I believe, has seven little people because the writer/director thought one of the actresses looked like Snow White and he wanted to reference it somehow.
Either could be possible with, for example, the quote at the top. Perhaps Cardinal threw something cool-sounding together without having a clear idea what to do with it later. Maybe it's just in there to sound cool. Thing is, the first two images are relatively obvious (Celestia and Luna), but the third has no reference point. It's possible it just means Dainn's death, with earth being the important word and bronze just being a less impressive material symbolising the tarnishing of his and his forebears' legacies.
5015040
Yeah, I know. I wanted to read Cardinal's story benevolently.
Weeeell... Daen Daywalker never wielded Celestia's and Luna's crowns. He left Equestria with his people precisely because he couldn't defeat them, and that conflict wasn't even really about taking their crowns. So is the prophecy lying? It could be, but given that it's also a forgotten prophecy, that lie would also be meaningless.
In the context of the ideas Cardinal took up my stories, you can make sense of the third crown (it's the crown worn by the stag bearing the title Heart of the Forest, since the Everwood, being sapient plants, obviously have a strong connection to the earth). Then again, I somewhat suspect Cardinal took up the idea of three crowns from my Friga and the White Cow story (in the Tales of the Hearth chapter of Freeville Chronicles), where the White Cow at one point is said to have three golden crowns. (Which actually is faux symbolism - it's an external reference to Hebrew Kabbalah with no bearing on the plot that I put in there just because I thought it was cool. Remember that Friga and the White Cow is pretty much the oldest part of the current Freeville Chronicles version, with its original version dating back to the time when I still also used the Elder Scrolls crossover idea.)
5015196
... I just had this image of the White Cow being Aspen's sister. Manipulating the then-king (or perhaps the then not-king, upon second thought), leading to the eventual exile of the rebels who went north and became the Caribou.
5015240
Mmmh... our idea was that Daen led the entire Everfree deer people out of the forest, not just a few rebels.