“Fate” is a fancy way of saying “hindsight is 20/20”. What happened was the only thing that could ever happen.

I don’t think about either, I work on staying in the moment.

Destiny is what we call the story we tell to explain chance. It is only ever used once someone achieves something and never to enable a person to start their journey.

I’ve seen bad men do good things, good men do bad things. Whether you end up in heaven or hell isn’t god’s plan, it’s yours. You just have to remember what it was.

Clancy Brown, Cowboys and Aliens

Seems like comforting nonsense, or possibly just nonsense. If something goes to hell, you can tell yourself that it was “fated” to happen that way, instead of examining the actual reasons and possibly discovering you were at fault.

Fate/destiny is nothing more than the intersections of the choices that we make that affect each other. It’s what you call it when what happens to you is out of your control and you cannot freely choose your way out of it. For example, you choose to get in my car and I choose to drive you somewhere. My free choice on where to go and how fast becomes your fate. You are fated to exist because two people chose to fuck. Scale that relationship to encompass a society and the complex ways in which we make choices, and it becomes evident that free will and fate/destiny are two sides of the same coin.

The universe is probably deterministic somehow, but seeing it that way is bad for my mental health, and there’s no functional difference between true random and pseudo-random you can’t crack, so I kinda don’t care.

It’s a fun series, but is really allergic to consistency in things like history and rules. They need to abandon all these alternative timelines and give me MORE SHIROU

I don’t quite believe in that stuff, but it’s a fun way to think about all the positive coincidences in your life and maybe let go of anger about negative situations you can’t change.