The Curse of Foreknowledge

    Let's get the reader foreknowledge out of the way first. For purposes of this essay, the "reader" is whoever is experiencing the story, be it in text, audio, video, interactive game, or whatnot. There's two main ways the reader can know for certain what's coming: spoilers, and the prequel/interquel/side story effect.

    A writer can't really stop spoilers from happening, but spoilers are really just a weaker form of "the reader has read this before." A work that has good re-reading potential is also pretty resistant to spoilers. Depending on a plot twist to be enjoyable is certainly a valid form of storytelling, but it does mean that foreknowledge can hurt the readers' enjoyment.

    More challenging are stories set in an already existing canon, where the new story has to fit into the known plotlines. At the time the new work is released, its events do not take place after the end of the existing canon, which constrains how things can go. Prequels are entirely before the previous start, and if they use the same characters you already know where they'll be by the end. Prequels set far in the past, however, have freer rein because there isn't the "Why aren't the characters around in the original movies?" question. Interquels and side stories are similar and a bit overlapping, but both take place between or alongside scenes from previously released works. An interquel generally involves main characters, while a side story focuses on new characters (although main characters might make appearances). Black Widow is a MCU interquel, while the Mandalorian is a side story.

    Still, all of these are matters of managing reader expectations. The easiest way to tell a compelling story under such constraints of foreknowledge is to focus on characters who have no reason to have shown up in the previous releases, so their fate isn't already known. Or you can go for the higher degree of difficulty and try to tell a story where it's about the journey rather than the destination.

    (Brief aside: computer games can blur the line between reader and character, since the character is at least somewhat controlled by the reader. That's beyond the scope of this essay, though.)

    But then we get back to those pesky characters having read the spoilers....

    The main way that character foreknowledge becomes a problem for the writer is that a story with foreknowledge tends to become a story about the mechanism by which the information is known, rather than about what the characters are doing. Gimmick twist stories are easy to fall into, and there's a minefield of tropes specially prepared to catch the unwary. Granted, there's twists and tropes in any kind of story, but stories where characters think they know the future are subject to some that may be less obvious to the writer going in.

    Most foreknowledge comes in two flavors: prophecy and time travelers. There's certainly some overlap...a time traveler could have gone back and planted a prophecy, for instance.

PROPHECY

    Here's a non-exhaustive list of the flavors of fictional prophecy, and how they can make life hard on the writer who chooses to indulge in them.

• The Fake Prophecy - The prophecy, be it claimed to be magical or technological, was never "real," but it comes from a source the characters have reason to trust. Perhaps it was a scam, but usually the Fake Prophecy was made with good intentions, an attempt to give people hope or motivation or whatnot. The usual way these stories run is that the protagonists discover the prophecy is fake either on the eve of the final conflict or in its wake. If before, it's a cause for a crisis in faith, and the protagonists need to find their own reason to believe they can still succeed. If after, it usually feels like getting the explanation for a stage magician's trick. "You see, the macguffin wasn't really magic after all, but the struggle to obtain it led to the diminishment if not destruction of the ninja in this city anyway, as foretold." The Fake Prophecy doesn't bring quite as many structural issues as true prophecies (especially if revealed before the climax), but does tend to be a bit cliche these days.
  • The characters think they know what the future holds, but have been lied to.

• The Vague Prophecy - This is probably the most common "cheat" around predestination when it comes to having a foretelling of the future. The prophecy is worded in a deliberately vague way that could mean almost anything and only really makes sense in retrospect. Or it was intended to be clear when it was made, but translation issues (ancient language, alien message, buried in math, etc) make it impossible to be sure of what it means until the event has already passed. This is so hoary of a cliche that the companion cliche of characters complaining about the vagueness is also quite old. At least the "lost in translation" issue avoids the "why don't seers just speak clearly?" complaint, and in the epilogue you might have some happy linguists who got more information about the language in question.
  • The characters think they know what the future holds, but perhaps they have lied to themselves.

• The Loophole Prophecy - The prophecy seems quite clear and unambiguous, until one of the characters figures out that it's TOO clear and unambiguous and that there's a loophole in what isn't stated. Hanging an entire story on one of these is not a great idea, because that makes it a gimmick story and those are hard to do well. Making it a side plot can work well, although be prepared to have the side plot taken as a joke. For instance, "I am no man!" in Lord of the Rings is as much a laugh line as it is a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Another danger of the Loophole Prophecy is that it can be seen as cheating, really being vague instead of clear, such as the prophecy about a walking forest in MacBeth.
  • The characters think they know what the future holds, but it's not that, psych!

• The Threat - Sometimes a "prophecy" is really the gods (or an equivalent power) promising that something will happen because you ticked them off or because they think you need to be taken down a few notches or whatever. Since the one making the statement has the power to ensure it comes to pass, this does count as character foreknowledge. It's possible that averting it is accomplished by fighting the god(s), but often it resolves as one of the other sorts of prophecy (the Loophole Prophecy is a common way of weaseling out of a godly doom).
  • The characters know someone has it in for them. Reasonable.

• The Scrooge - This sort of prophecy is deliberately less absolute, and also more plausible as a scientific prediction. But the basic idea of this sort of prophecy is to warn someone that unless things change significantly, there will be a horrible fate in store. What sets the Scrooge apart from mundane predictions is that the characters are given ample reason to accept that it will definitely happen unless they personally do something about it. As a result, much of the story may be spent convincing them that the one making the prediction is a valid source.
  • The characters are offered a chance to mend their ways. Reasonable, if overused.

• The Harbinger - This is one of the more dramatically "safe" types of foreknowledge, because it merely claims that something is going to happen, not what the aftermath will be. The story becomes a race to prepare for the inevitable problem, whether to try to avert it or simply to survive it. Sometimes the core conflict of the story comes from the protagonist being the only one who initially believes the Harbinger, and the hard part of preparation is getting others to act as well. Other times, everyone believes it's coming, but it's hard to see how anything could be done.
  • The characters can prepare for something that will happen, even if they can't stop it. Reasonable.

• The No-Win Scenario - The prophecy is true, it is accepted, and it is bad news for everyone. There is no averting fate, no avoiding it. A lot of prophecy stories start out looking like this, only to turn out to have had a Loophole, or been misinterpreted, or been a Fake Prophecy. But the true No-Win Scenario does have its place in drama. Stories concerning this sort of foreknowledge tend to be more melancholy, focusing on how individual people react to impending doom.
  • The characters know they're hosed, but the reader might hope otherwise.

• The Chosen One - Someone in the story is the focus of a prophecy, either embraces it or denies it, but in the end is but a puppet on the strings of fate. This lack of agency makes for a rather dark story if they're the protagonist. It also makes for a minefield of cliches and tired tropes.
  • The character labors under the weight of expectations.

• The Fatebreaker - This is a subversion of the Chosen One prophecy. The protagonist is someone who is outside of fate, and only they can avert the terrible doom that awaits. They, too, may embrace or deny their role, but at least this isn't quite as overused as the Chosen One prophecies. Somewhat related to Loophole Prophecies, since the Fatebreaker is a sort of universal loophole.
  • The character is free from the obligations of prophecy, but may be under the weight of even greater expectations from those who need saving from the prophecy.

TIME TRAVEL

• Swiss-Cheese Memory - Something about the process of time travel makes it difficult to bring complete and accurate information back to the past, rendering the foreknowledge a sort of Vague Prophecy, with all the problems that entails.
  • The character knows something about the future, but never enough useful information to help. They are lied to by omission.

• Limited Intel - Similar to Swiss-Cheese Memory, but in this case it's because the time travelers simply can't access enough information in the future to generate a useful plan. Maybe the time jumps are of limited duration, and they can only find out a few things before snapping back. Maybe information about the Great Disaster was lost in the Great Disaster (and traveling directly to the Great Disaster is a Bad Idea). Often this leads to some sort of Loophole situation, where the information they couldn't get turns out to be key to averting the foretold events.
  • The character knows just enough to come to a false conclusion, lied to by omission.

• Divergence - The foreknowledge becomes increasingly useless as it is used, because the future it came from was not one in which someone used the future knowledge. This tends to also make dramatic tension difficult, because if bad things happen a time traveler can go back and try to fix them or at least re-roll on the random events table by disrupting things. That's fine in a light or comedic story, less so if the writer wants to be serious. Furthermore, diverenge due to the use of foreknowledge can rapidly make the world too unlike its initial state, losing the interest of readers who don't want to come along for the retcon ride. Kludges like "fixed points" don't really help unless given an adequate explanation (such as "Someone is defending that point in the timeline for comprehensible reasons," as seen in Loki or Legends of Tomorrow).
  • No matter what the character does, if they can change things they find they no longer have useful foreknowledge of the consequences.

• Groundhog Day - The foreknowledge is key to the story, because the protagonist(s) repeats a limited time loop over and over until they learn something important. We have reached the point where just about any series where time travel is possible can be expected to have an episode like this eventually, so it's best to figure out what it's good for, rather than just doing it to be clever...because it's not really clever anymore. Often the loop is used to allow for the personal growth of the character (as in the Groundhog Day movie), or for them to acquire the skills they need to defeat the Big Bad in a sort of video game respawn (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Live Die Repeat, etc). Since the foreknowledge only covers a limited timespan, divergences get reset every time it loops, and this plot is usually not the basis for an entire series, most of the worst dramatic pitfalls can be avoided.
  • 10 The character expects this time they will figure out how to break the loop.
  • 20 GO TO 10.

IN CONCLUSION

    Regardless of the plot conflict the writer thought they were using (Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Author, whatever), the story has also acquired "Man vs. Expectations" as a core conflict. The character has expectations about what the future holds, and the story demands they deal with those expectations in some fashion...rare is the story in which there's a great prophecy and the protagonists don't care about it at all, even if they don't plan to do anything about it. The "Threat" style of prophecy is probably the least at risk here, since those tend to be obvious "Man vs. God(s)" conflicts, but even those can fall prey to unnoticed conflict.

    When a writer isn't acutely aware of the conflict in their own story, and assumes that the character foreknowledge is just a plot motivator or a gimmick, the entire story can be fatally weakened.

    As foretold.