: Re: What are some signs of a chosen one nebulous enough that they can be mistaken? The setup: We have a fantasy world. A while back (like, 30-100 years; not really sure yet) a prophecy was given

@Gonzalez219

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Warning: Spoilers Below
In the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, there is a double misdirection regarding the driving prophesy surrounding the identity of the "Hero of Ages". Some excerpts of the prophesy are as follows:

The Hero of Ages shall be not a man, but a force. No nation may claim him, no woman shall keep him, and no king may slay him. He shall belong to none, not even himself.
He shall defend their ways, yet shall violate them. He will be their savior, yet they shall call him heretic. His name shall be Discord, yet they shall love him for it.
The Hero will have the power to save the world. But he will also have the power to destroy it.

The understanding of this prophesy comes in three stages as the series progresses:

For the first while, the prophesy is interpreted as written, that all the references to "he" and "him" meant that the Hero would be a man.
Later on, a historian realizes that this was an intentional mistranslation, and that the pronouns in the original language were gender-neutral, and as such could mean that the Hero could be either a man or a woman.
And finally, in the end, the historian realizes that maybe the pronouns weren't gender-neutral to indicate that the Hero could be someone of either gender, but instead to indicate that the Hero would in fact be someone who was effectively neither gender (i.e. a eunich).

The more twists that leave the prophesy text unchanged but fundamentally alter the understanding of it are, in my opinion, the most effective uses of a prophesy in fiction. For example, there could be a prophesy that says the chosen one will have "power in their scales". This could be interpreted literally to mean that they physically have scales and are some sort of lizardman, or is a reptile hunter with a bunch of scales collected from their kills. Or perhaps it's a weight scale and the hero is a merchant. Or that it's a reference to the scales of justice and the hero is a judge or member of law enforcement. Or it's a "scale" meaning a range of values, and the hero is a statistician.
Part of the depth and richness of a story comes from the ability to assure that the reader knows the truth before ripping their expectations out from underneath them in an "I can't believe I didn't see that coming" moment, and pushing a prophesy with a "commonly held understanding" that has its true meaning slowly revealed over the course of the plot (sometimes more than once) is a great way to accomplish that.

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