Which reminds me of an occasion about 15 years ago or so, when I was talking to a girl I know about LotR, and she mentioned that the moment she heard them mention that there was a prophecy that no man would ever kill the Witch-King, she instantly knew he was going to get killed by a woman, and mentioned that it was a super-cliche premise in a lot of fantasy. I pointed out that it was only really a common cliche because most of the stories that used the idea stole the idea from Tolkien in the first place. A lot of LotR feels super-cliched, because 50+ years of fantasy writers stole nearly every idea and concept he ever had and used it in their stories, even before D&D got into the mix, and in turn basically passed most of those cliches on into video game RPGs.
That was a terrible twist for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that man colloquially refers to women as well (an aspect which I suppose factored into the deceit). But yes, the fact that it's overused in fantasy -- and I think mythology as well -- certainly contributes to the lameness, although it probably suffer to some extent from the same phenomena as the Twilight Zone.
Of course, the general prophecy was completely underwhelming since it specified "man" in a universe with elves, dwarfs (or dwarves? idk), hobbits, ents, dragons, and all manner of non-human threats. Hell, they could have even forced him to accidentally hit himself with his own weapon since he was a wraith not a man.
ParanoidObsessive posted...
when the original audience was reading the books, it was a lot more culturally unthinkable that a woman could be bad-ass enough to kill an evil ghost monster.
Because geeks were sexist? =p Granted, the LOTR books came out *after* Wonder Woman was a thing so the idea that women can kick ass shouldn't have been wholly alien to his readers. ---
(\/)(\/)|-| There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don't exist.