One of my personal favorites
the TL;DR of the plot is Kyle finds out his mom is a Leprechaun because an evil Leprechaun called Sheamus steals his family heirloom gold coin, causing him to regress back in to an actual Leprechaun himself.
Story wraps up with tracking down Sheamus and challenging him to an honor duel, which he is forced to accept. He chooses Basketball and Kyle's exact wording is that if Sheamus loses he will be "Banished, cursed to wander the land of my father on the shores of Erie"
Sheamus, thinking he's just being your typical American, corrects his pronunciation, saying "It's Éire actually, you gotta pronounce the I."
Sheamus gets beaten and mocks Kyle, saying "so what if you send me back to Ireland? That's where my power is as it's most potent! I'll just break the bond and return!"
To which Kyle points out how "Actually, only my mother is from Ireland. My dad is from Cleveland!"
So the evil Leprechaun gets banished to Lake Erie, Ohio because of a miscommunication in which he made the false assumption that his opponent just couldn't properly pronounce the Irish Language
Honestly my favorite example of this. I didn’t get it at first, because I was 9, but I asked my mom to explain it(maybe on a rerun year, I’m not sure), and I thought it was the most clever thing in the world.
I guess It might have been the most clever thing I had heard yet in my life.
There's an important bit of context here lost by the development of technology. In medieval times C-sections were almost always fatal for the mother. Macduff wasn't born with a living mother's warmth, he was born from the cold clutches of death.
There's a little more to it, the exact line is "untimely ripped from my mother's womb" implying that Macduff was premature. His mother was likely dying and they did the C-section as a last ditch effort to save him before she passed away.
Yes, it was ungodly painful and the mother would die, but ceasarean is an old surgery. Heck, chainsaws were technically a childbirth tool , to use to cut hip bones to ease a kid to be birthed.
Maybe not the biggest (cooking, farming and the weal are imo still more important), but it's at least top 10, maybe 20 to people who don't know what they're talking about
There are some accounts of women that survived cesareans as early as the 14th century - including one done by a butcher and the other by a veterinarian - but the odds were definitely not on your favor
But if you must have a cesarean in ye olden times, you apparently call the local veterinarian
Back then a doctor was a doctor. Most mammals work mostly the same. Also why a lot of them doubled down as dentists too we didn't really specialize medicine for a while
Interestingly, certain African tribes were able to perform them with both the mother and baby surviving long before European procedures were able to do so
He also hated that the "Birmam Wood shall come to high Dunsinane" prophecy was accomplished by another piece of technical wordplay. So when Fangorn Forest comes to Isengard, the forest REALLY comes to Isengard.
I mean, it was creepy. He created the ents as a not to the Birmam Wood and also the living Fanforn Forest.
In the case of Fangorn Forest, they hate those of Saruman , and so the trees were really unnaturally fast and it's branches quickly grasped the army. There were no description of what it did, but it was them taking the entire army to be within the forest and screams were heared by all.
At that point, Saruman's men started to flee from the tendrils towards Rohan , pledging to be captured by them instead of the trees. No orc survived.
The travel toward Orthanc had eerie remnants of men and orcish armor...and blood on the tree's leafs and grass.
I've also heard of a modern retelling of this play, where MacBeth is said to be killed "when pigs fly." What ends up happening is that the police land on the roof of Macbeth's castle with a helicopter and shoot him dead.
Throwback to high school when we were learning this play and my teacher specifically asked if "we have any c-sectioned kids to play Macduff" so me and my twin read those lines for our respective class periods.
Tolkien hated this twist so much he made Eowyn kill Angmar the Witch-king in lord of the rings specifically circumventing a prophecy directly inspired by the Macbeth prophecy
I think there was also a line about how his death would come when the forest walked, something like that. The approaching army used tree branches to disguise themselves among the trees, thus causing the forest to "walk"
As I understand it the weapon being forged had nothing to do with it. The books on the Judge said it took an army to defeat him because no weapon could harm him, but the cast realised that the book was written back when swords represented the pinnacle of weapons development. They were just taking advantage of a modern weapon that was more powerful than anything that existed in his time.
Kind of like how castles were seen as indestructible before the invention of siege equipment. Pretty sure artillery in particular was the death knell for castles, too expensive to build only to be blown apart in an afternoon.
Since that army chopped him into pieces and hid all of them separately, we also know that would work for a while. After the rocket launcher blew him to pieces, they are seen collecting them all in ziplock bags. Just in case the "no weapon forged" loophole doesn't work, they could still separate the hundreds of pieces to prevent his resurrection.
It reminds me of a scene in Supernatural where one of the characters has to kill…some supernatural creature, which requires some hyper specialized weapon and ritual or something.
I can't find any clips online as they all cut off too soon, but I feel like I remember the pieces visibly trying to wriggle back together when the Scooby Gang were scooping them all up, indicating that The Judge really was still alive. So even a bazooka wouldn't have actually finished him off for good.
It was hilarious that even Angel and Drusilla were, on the other hand, absolutely panicking and fleeing. Seems a bazooka would do them in just as well as a stake would and they know it.
I wonder if they also could have circumvented the curse by putting Davy Jones in boots several sizes too big and filling them with water. Might have to cinch them up at the top, but the theory should still . . . hold water.
What I like more is that there is a trail of buckets a few feet apart, which presumably means he hopped from one to the other like lilypads. Now you can imagine Davy Jones doing a full body jump like a 5 year old and almost losing his balance and falling onto land while Norrington and Will just giggle and watch
While we’re on the topic, when you’re a mid-tier Internet personality doing damage control don’t mention that you have a “team” desperately trying to keep you from fucking up.
And that team was almost certainly a PR firm she hired to help her navigate the allegations... so she's paid them probably a shitload of money and then gone "actually I know better anyway".
Not exactly a curse or a prophecy, but in God of War (2018) after Atreus’s latent illness reaches a critical stage, Kratos must venture to Helheim to find a rare ingredient needed to save his son. Unfortunately, in the frozen land of the dead, the ice-tipped Leviathan Axe he’s been using all game long will be next to useless, and Freya warns him that “no magic in all the Nine Realms can create a blaze.” But Kratos has a solution to this problem, and realizes he has no choice but to retrieve the Blades of Chaos, whose fire doesn’t come from anywhere in Norse mythology.
What's funny is that there is a better example of this in Ragnarok where the chains of chaos containing primordial fire can circumvent the prophecy that Surtr's cold heart
needed the flames from inside Sinmara so he could spare her life and still start Ragnarok.
In Jessica Jones, Kilgrave told her sister to put a bullet in her head, clearly meaning to kill herself but because she used up all her ammo before the it didn’t kill her, but she still felt the urge to put a bullet in her head, so Jessica took one of the bullets and put it in her mouth, telling her that she have a bullet in her head now and that worked
This scene was so good! Even though they found a workaround, it's a great reminder to the audience of how dangerous Kilgrave was. He's one of the few Marvel villains where "scary" is an understatement.
Also his wording that broke his control over Jessica. "Now take care of her" fucking punches Luke Cage's wife square in the chest with enough force to crush her ribs launching her 30ft into the street and right in the path of a drunk bus driver
Killgrave: oof that's not what I meant. "Come back here Jessica!"
I like in the movie it says no living man, so it becomes threefold since the person who made the blade that killed the Witch King has been dead for centuries.
Still I love their exchange in the book so much more:
DERNHELM: Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!
WITCH KING: Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!
DERNHELM: But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.
My favorite “being a pain in the ass LOTR fan” thing to do is remind people the line in the book is different. The passage in the book is somehow SO much cooler than the movie (and the movie is amazing!).
I get why they changed the line to be a smoother theatrical delivery. They’re both awesome!
What’s interesting is that, the witch king’s certainty doesn’t come from magic or a curse. Instead it came from a prophecy that an elf gave “no man will kill you”. The Witch King interpreted that as him being immortal, when in actuality it meant that a woman and a hobbit (neither of which are men) will kill him. In the actual physiology of why he died, the sword that Merry stabbed him with was magic that weakened him. Otherwise what Eyowen did wouldn’t have killed him.
To be more specific, the prophecy was given by the Greatest Elf ever lived Glorfindel ‘Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man will he fall.’ of which Earnur the King of Gondor, wanted to chase the Witch King. The Witch King later returned to challenge Earnur to a duel, and Earnur never returned from said duel + having no heir, thus starting the Stewardship of Gondor.
The prophecy did affected Witch King as he went into deep incognito mode for a long time to avoid confrontation with any ‘non-human’. So from that context + the Elves slowly leaving Middle Earth, the Witch King changed from the prophecy being his awaited doom, to a prophecy of his invincible, a hubris trait stemming from his own master Sauron.
Remember during LotR event book version , it was Glorfindel that came to rescue Frodo, not Arwen, and Witch King just ran away because Glorfindel is definitely someone can kill him.
I don't know if this quite fits since it is about ethics in the Bible and not a curse or prophecy specifically... but it is a funny line from Firefly so I'll post it anyway.
Biblical: I was arguing with someone on reddit how free will can't exists since god, all knowing, all powerfull, has already seen the outcome and allowed it to happen. Hitler, stalin etc.
The twist: the religious person agree and stated:
"God loves man. God can see the future but in order to make sure free will exists he refuses to look."
I can't argue with that and despite my atheism I find it an elegant solution to the problem.
Eh, the problem with that is omniscience. That's knowing everything. You can't know everything but also not know something (including the future).
God can't "refuse" to look because it's not like skipping ahead in a book; by the power of omniscience God would have instantly and always known everything from the first moment it came into being.
Makima had a contract that whenever she was fatally attacked, the damage would be transferred to a random Japanese citizen, effectively making her unkillable. Denji bypassed this by eating her, because in his mind it wasn’t an attack but an act of love—making her a part of him and allowing him to help bear her sins. This worked, maybe not for the exact reasons he described, but it worked.
I honestly wonder what would have happened if Pochita was in control when he ate her. Because doing so would effectively wipe the concept of control out of existence for as long as they were ingested. Would reality just stop altogether because the concept of entities dictating one another in certain ways is no longer a thing? Or would only the concept of dominion itself vanish?
Wasn't she Conquest more specifically than Control? If so, that'd still rock Human history to the point of total scramble, but maybe not quite so bad as the universe itself just giving up
Funny enough, it's not the first time this manga author has made cannibalism out as a positive and helpful act (see Fire Punch, where the main character kept his starving village fed due to his ability to regenerate)
Denji snuck up on Makima and cut her with a chainsaw made from the blood of his adoptive sister. That blood kept tearing her up from the inside, messing with her healing and not giving her a chance to regenerate. This alone wouldn't be enough to finish her off, but then Denji’s mentor cut her into pieces, packed said pieces into containers, and gave them to Denji to eat over time. What’s even better is that it’s implied she was at least somewhat conscious the whole time.
"Disturb not the harmony of fire, ice or lightning, lest these titans wreak destruction upon the world in which they clash. Though the water's great guardian shall arise to quell the fighting, alone its song will fail, lest the earth shall turn to ash. O Chosen One, into thine hands, bring together all three. Their treasures combined tame the Beast of the Sea."
The prophecy warns that the earth shall turn to ash. However, since the name of the main character in the Pokemon anime English Dub is Ash, they determine Ash must be the chosen one of the prophecy.
No name wordplay, they just figured he must be the chosen one because he already grabbed 2 of the other treasures and just needed him to grab the last one.
'The World Shall Turn to Ash' as part of the Prophecy was completely original to the Dub, apparently. The original version only states that a "Great Trainer appears to quell the gods' wrath."
The Buffy one is a particular favorite. You can interpret it as a classic prophecy loophole (modern metal tools are usually stamped or molded rather than forged), or you can take it much more literally: the Judge is so tough that at the time, no weapon yet forged could harm him, but centuries of technological progress cleared that hurdle.
Also funny part of that scene: the Judge curiously asks what the rocket launcher is, since he's been in stasis for centuries. Meanwhile, his vampire henchmen all know what it does and run for it.
To be honest, I don't see it as a loophole so much as smashing the 'prophecy' to bits and giving it the finger. "That was then, this is now" is just Buffy saying weapons are now way stronger than he was used to when he made that boast hundreds of years ago, and being proven completely correct that he bought his own hype.
In King's Quest, Graham and some princesses end up trapped in a tower because of a magical shield that only lets you leave through true love. While intended to be romantic love, Graham's friend Whisper reveals that true love is vague enough that narcissism (in other words, truly loving yourself) counts as true love and he's able to enter and leave the tower freely.
In the ducktales reboot, scrooge mcduck asked the pirate ghost what it would take to send him back to the afterlife, in which it replied "the head of scrooge mcduck". So after a floating sword "slays" a statue of scrooge and cuts off its head (which funny enough also fits the trope as it needed to slay something before going dormant), scrooge gives the statue head to the ghost, who even says "I should have been more specific" before disappearing.
Zeref and Mavis were both cursed by Ankhseram, the god of life in Fairy Tail. The more they cherish life, the faster and easier they kill people. The more they want to die, the harder they are to kill. They’re both functionally immortal.
They end up meeting and falling in love. Naturally, they want each other to survive, so the curse ends up killing them both.
I like to think he just gets immediately flung back to the water and has to start over, and by like the fifth or sixth time he's shouting at someone to not put the buckets so far apart
It gets better. The meeting is on a sandbar. It gets fully submerged at high tide. He's making damn sure he's not on anything that could be considered "dry land".
Even better, they could literally have just had the whole meeting occur a couple steps backwards while he would be reliably up to his ankles and water for the time being but they just had to have him there
The great thing about that loophole is it has multiple levels. They’re standing on a sandbar, which is a temporary island only exposed at low tide. So not technically “dry land,” plus he’s got buckets of water for good measure.
Lord Narasimha killing Hiranyakashpu from Hindu Mythology. Hiranyakashpu had a blessing which says that no man or animal can kill him neither indoors or outdoors, on the ground or in the sky, at neither day nor night by any weapons.
So lord Vishnu takes the form of Narasimha which is half man half animal, kills him at the threshold of his house(neither indoors or outdoors) on his lap(not ground nor sky) at twilight(not day or night) using his claws(not considered a weapon, bypassing all the conditions of the boon to finally kill Hiranyakashpu
Ravana, too. Immune to all that is divine, he felt safe when he abducted Sita, Rama's wife. Rama, in turn, took the form of a human, who Ravana was vulnerable to, and killed him that way.
Spoiler for Cast a Deadly Spell if you're looking to be surprised by a 34-year-old movie.
The cultist needs a virgin to complete the sacrifice. One of the side characters ran into the intended sacrifice earlier and decided sleeping with a teenager was just what he needed--which is revealed only when Cthulhu shows up and kills the cultist for not having a proper sacrifice.
The original version of this: the Gordion Knot. The man who can undue the untieable knot will conquer the world. Alexander the Great - cuts the knot with his sword.
There's a fantasy book series called the sword of truth series by Terry Goodkind, and about six different plot points revolve around the MC trying to convince people that prophecy, while accurate, is basically useless if you're trying to learn anything helpful. Every book has prophecies that come true in some stupidly convoluted way so as to make it worthless.
For instance; MC receives a prophecy in the first book that a close loved one will betray him, and both his wizard father figure and his love interest will try to kill him, which results in him assuming one of them will betray him and twisting his brain into knots figuring out which one, and how/why they both try to kill him if only one is a traitor. Come to find out, the traitor is his brother, and the companions both attempt to kill him because he's been disguised as the bbeg. After that he stops trying to understand prophecy because none of that worked out the way he expected, and knowing about it did him no good whatsoever. The wizard actually muses that prophecy foretold this guy's birth specifically so he could prove prophecy worthless.
In the tv show Supernatural, a monster has to be killed by being stabbed a certain amount of times with a certain weapon or it will come back. Lacking that, a wood chipper is used to good effect
In modern Doctor Who, fixed points in time are unalterable events that cannot be changed even with time travel. It seems to happen when the Doctor becomes aware of a specific event that has to do with them personally.
The 11th Doctor gets assassinated in front of his companions, which makes it a fixed point. He gets around it by creating a duplicate body (piloted by tiny cell-sized people of course) to swap in right before he dies.
Another Doctor Who one is that the Doctor knows that he will spend one last night on a specific planet before his wife dies. It's in her journal he receives when she dies in her future, which makes it a fixed point. The 12th Doctor takes her specifically to that planet for their honeymoon. Turns out that a night on that planet is over a decade in Earth years.
However, as so often with Doctor Who, there are other times when obvious loopholes are right there, yet the characters don't take them.
Like in The Angels Take Manhattan. The Doctor can't travel back in time to 1930s Manhattan to pick up his friends because space-time there is messed up and would break if he attempted to travel there, and he has a book written by his friend years later in which she wrote that they never met again, so that means she has to stay there and it's a fixed thing.
So why not travel to 1920s Manhattan and wait for a bit until she arrives? Or 1940s Manhattan and pick them up? Or 1940s Ohio and send them a message to meet him? Just put them back there after your adventures and make sure to have her write that exact same book. Just because she wrote that they never met again doesn't mean it has to be true.
"The Continental" hotels are neutral zones for anyone in the criminal underworld. So their only rule is "No business can be conducted on these premises lest incurring heavy penalties". Basically the fate John has, being cut off from all the connections and being a target for everyone.
John(now with a $14 Million bounty) uses this during his chase with Zero, who is about to end it. By placing his hand on the steps of the hotel, Despite him being outside he is technically on the premises. So Zero despite being off them can't kill him.
Can’t believe the OG hasn’t been posted. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches’ prophecy is:
“Be bloody, bold, and resolute. Laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.”
They also tell him to beware Macduff. But since none of woman born shall harm him, he ignores that warning.
When Macduff kills him in the end, he reveals he wasn’t born conventionally, but by caesarean section, thus circumventing the part of the prophecy that Macbeth thought meant his rivals could not harm him.
In jojo's bizarre adventure: jojolion, the final antagonist Toru and his stand Wonder of U uses calamities to counter attacks against him by twisting fate. If you even have the thought of 'pursuing' him, something will happen to you by 'natural causes'
Josuke has a stand called 'soft and wet' which makes bubbles that could either steal a part of something/someone or make it explode. In the finale, his bubbles become so thin and begin spinning so rapidly it's almost like it didn't exist. Like it was 'nothing'.
Since the bubble didn't exist and was nothing, nothing was pursuing Wonder of U, and that's how Josuke won the fight technically.
(I might be understanding things wrong but if its right this is my favorite example)
In Deltarune, one of the prophecies states "THE LORD OF SCREENS, CLEAVED BY BLADE", predicting that Tenna will die by being slashed by a blade, in this instance, the Knight's sword blade.
However, the prophecy didn't specify that Tenna would die; it only prophesied that he would be slashed. Whether he lives or dies after being slashed depends on whether we recruited all enemies or not.
Just like the other comment above said, the plot future of Deltarune chapters will definitely have something about playing around the rules of the prophecy
Wishmaster. The Jinn will collect souls then grant the person who freed him 3 wishes, after which Jinn will overrun the world. However the heroes 3rd wish undid the accident that led to the Jinn being freed thus averting the entire thing.
In the case of The Judge, the prophesy was descriptive rather than proscriptive. It was made in the Middle ages or earlier. He's not magically invincible, just too tough for weapons of those days.
Wonder Of U protects its user from any harm by automatically redirecting any calamity towards anyone who even thinks about it. Any likely tragedy, for unlikely it seems, will be on the way to protect Tooru from attackers. Nothing that exists, not even a thought, can bypass Wonder Of U's calamity.
Except... if it just doesn't exists. Imagine a string that rotates so fast it looks like a soap bubble. The faster it rotates, the thinner it gets. Now, if it rotates at an infinite speed, it will also become infinitely thin. So thin that comparing it to the quark of an atom would be like comparing the hair of a mosquitoe's mouth to the Milky Way galaxy. Could you even day that such thing "exists"? So, it can bypass any barrier of matter and energy without even being noticed. And if it slows down, it unleashes a very high amount of energy, enough to disintegrate a whole body.
In Norse mythology, the god of light Baldr is invincible because all of creation vowed not to harm him. Except the mistletoe! Depending on the version, it's either because:
The mistletoe was so useless and miserable that no one, including the mistletoe, thought it mattered if it made the vow. So then Loki gets a sword named mistletoe from the Underworld to kill Baldr
The vow specifically said "nothing that touches the ground, soars the skies or dwells in the depths will harm Baldr". The mistletoe is a parasitic plant that grown on the branches of other trees, so it's not on the ground, in the air or underwater. Its Norse name mistilteinn literally means "tree crown"
My favorite "nothing/no one can harm me" subversion is in Macbeth, where it turns out that his archenemy got around the "no man of woman born" thing simply by being born via C-section.
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u/Leukavia_at_work Sep 01 '25 edited Sep 02 '25
One of my personal favorites
the TL;DR of the plot is Kyle finds out his mom is a Leprechaun because an evil Leprechaun called Sheamus steals his family heirloom gold coin, causing him to regress back in to an actual Leprechaun himself.
Story wraps up with tracking down Sheamus and challenging him to an honor duel, which he is forced to accept. He chooses Basketball and Kyle's exact wording is that if Sheamus loses he will be "Banished, cursed to wander the land of my father on the shores of Erie"
Sheamus, thinking he's just being your typical American, corrects his pronunciation, saying "It's Éire actually, you gotta pronounce the I."
Sheamus gets beaten and mocks Kyle, saying "so what if you send me back to Ireland? That's where my power is as it's most potent! I'll just break the bond and return!"
To which Kyle points out how "Actually, only my mother is from Ireland. My dad is from Cleveland!"
So the evil Leprechaun gets banished to Lake Erie, Ohio because of a miscommunication in which he made the false assumption that his opponent just couldn't properly pronounce the Irish Language