Twist on the ‘chosen one’ trope that I’ve been super into lately: your hero is the actual Chosen One, selected by gods or destiny or what-have-you, but they themselves think they’re lying about it.
It’s been centuries and nobody’s been able to pull the magic blade that can kill the demon king from the stone, but people keep dying–so the local blacksmith takes a hammer and chisel to the rock in the middle of the night because fuck it, somebody has to do something. Little do they know the sword was specifically placed so as to be un-drawable by everyone until somebody came along with enough practicality to do things the sensible way.
The paladin very definitely never had any prophetic dreams, but if she’d said she was leaving her village to go be a mercenary just because she was so desperate to get out everybody would have cried and scolded and been super-judgy, so she maybe invented a Call a little bit. But now her first aid’s working way better than it should and some weird shit happened the other day with those undead, and she still hasn’t had had any contact from her god but she’s not meant to be this good of a liar.
A trio of con artists take on the persona of an old folk-legend for a job, and gets in over their heads when a little sleight-of-hand gets out of hand and the whole countryside starts believing it. They end up fulfilling half the prophecy just by deliberately trying so the con doesn’t fall apart around them. Meanwhile the other half of the prophecy’s coming true around them at every turn, which they keep chalking up to good fortune, assuming one of their co-conspirators is pulling off on purpose, or just plain not noticing because they’re too distracted with the rest of the con.
Possibly I just need to watch The Road to El Dorado again, but seriously, more of THIS trope please.