God Never Said That - TV Tropes

"I really didn't say everything I said."

— Yogi Berra

• Former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada is said to have defended the critically panned One More Day storyline and his own role in it by saying something to the effect of "Fans can't relate to Spider-Man having a hot wife; they can relate to Aunt May walking in on Spider-Man downloading porn," among other statements indicating that he does not have a high opinion of his public. These statements have never been sourced.
• Sonic the Hedgehog comics
  • This image made the rounds on Tumblr, purporting to be a Take That! from Archie Comics's Sonic comic at the new character designs in the Sonic Boom cartoon and games. Actually, it was part of a fan-produced comic distributed at a British Fan Convention dedicated to Sonic the Comic - the animal showing Sonic his Boom design is a fan character created by one of the convention's Kickstarter backers, and Sonic's indifference to the Boom design is consistent with his characterization in that comic.
  • When Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) was officially cancelled in 2016, the most common reason cited was as a direct consequence of Ken Penders lawsuit regarding the characters he created for the comic. While it's likely to have at least played a part, no one from Archie has ever cited it as the definitive reason as to why the comic was cancelled.
  • Even on this Wiki there were quotes that, at a convention, one of the writers said Amy and Tekno from Sonic the Comic were a couple. This quote doesn't exist, and Lewis Stringer, one of the writers in question, has actually stated that he wrote Shortfuse and Tekno as a couple, despite never making it explicit in the pages of the comic itself. This confusion wasn't helped when another writer, Nigel Kitching, would write a story for the fan continuation Sonic the Comic – Online!, which heavily implied that Amy and Tekno really did get together after all.
  • Tangle the Lemur from Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) has never been explicitly confirmed to be a lesbian or in a relationship with Whisper the Wolf. The closest they've come is Evan Stanley saying that her sexuality doesn't matter as fans would love her either way, and Ian Flynn expressing support for the pairing, but noting that Sega prohibited any romantic relationships in the comic, regardless of sexuality.
• Ultimate Spider-Man editor Axel Alonso fell victim to this when, addressing the controversy over the new lead Miles Morales, stated that maybe one day a gay character could even be introduced without it causing an uproar. This caused mass speculation that Miles Morales was going to be both mixed and gay, and that his best friend Ganke was going to be his love interest. This had to be debunked multiple times just because one quote got taken out of context.

• Uncyclopedia's article on Peter Chimaera insisted that he had a fic in the works entitled Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction. When he eventually published a fic by that name, he referenced the article, and clarified that "dontn't know where come but I decide to write anyway".

• Beauty and the Beast (1991): The Beast is never given a name in the film, though many fans will tell you that he's called "Adam", which was first menioned in a 1998 computer trivia game called "The D Show". Paige O'Hara (the voice of Belle) and Dan Stevens (who played the Beast in the 2017 film) later accepted the name as well. However, the animators stated they forgot to give the Beast a name. And Disney continues to make a point of calling him just "the Beast" or "the Prince".
• The voice actress for GoGo Tomago from Big Hero 6, Jamie Chung, stated that she thinks that GoGo's name is "something plain, like Ethel, Marge or Patty". This quickly warped into "GoGo's VA said that her real name is Ethel".
• Finding Dory: Before the movie came out, Ellen DeGeneres joked that it would feature a trans female stingray, who was "about to become a sting-Rhonda". Some people took this claim as serious, before Ellen clarified she was joking.
• Frozen:
  • In 2015, director Chris Buck jokingly claimed that he likes to think King Agnarr and Queen Iduna survived their shipwreck, ended up in the jungle and became Tarzan's parents. Many fans took this as canon, even though it's not really consistent with the two films' details (Tarzan's parents look different from the king and queen, they escaped from a burning ship, not just a sunken one, the time periods don't match up, and they already had baby Tarzan with them, whereas Queen Iduna showed no sign of being pregnant when she and the king left on their voyage). Those who spread this statement as proof of that this theory was true also conveniently left out that Buck went on to say that he imagined that the films also take place in the same continuity as Surf's Up, a film from Sony Animation also directed by Buck, demonstrating that it was meant in jest, since officially making that in the same universe as the two Disney films would otherwise probably result in a legal dispute, given that two different studios are involved.

    In 2019, Buck finally confirmed that his comment was only meant as a joke. This was further supported in Frozen II, where it's revealed that the ship was en route to Ahtohallan, which is in the North Sea and not in Africa, and Agnarr and Iduna were sailing there to find answers to where Elsa got her powers when the ship sank.

  • A persistent belief among some fans, due to an alleged "leak" from an early screening, is that Frozen II originally had a deeply Bittersweet Ending with Elsa Killed Off for Real instead of only suffering a Disney Death, but that the ending was changed after test audiences disapproved. There has been no hint of this whatsoever from either the Walt Disney Company or the movie's creative team.
• Despite claims otherwise, no one at Disney has said that Lady is in heat during Lady and the Tramp and that the strays that attack her were trying to rape her.
• The Lion King:
  • It's been circulated that someone on the The Lion King II: Simba's Pride team clarified on Facebook that Zira adopted Kovu and that Kovu is an orphan, but no quote exists. This confusion probably exists because of a separate, similar quote: The film's director, Darrell Rooney, has noted on Facebook that Kovu isn't Scar's son (something mentioned in the film itself).
  • It's been repeated in the fandom that Kiara's scrapped twin brother Chaka was engaged to a female cub named either "Timira" or "Kirijah". Despite this, there's never been any source on this info and no one involved on the project seems to remember her. The closest source listed is a "Dan T. Guyton" but no one by that name worked on the film.
  • Producer Don Hahn once made an off-hand statement in an interview that was misconstrued and widely spread through clickbait headlines as a claim that Mufasa and Scar weren't actually brothers, causing an uproar over such a blatant Retcon. What he actually said was that in real life, Mufasa and Scar would not be brothers because of how actual lion prides operate (related male lions drive each other out for control of the pride, and will kill each other's cubs to ensure that only their genetics are spread). This context was dropped when reported on, and director Rob Minkoff had to clarify that Mufasa and Scar are indeed brothers, and the later film Mufasa: The Lion King shows how their sibling relationship came to be.
• Being to video games what Roger Rabbit was to classic Western animation, Wreck-It Ralph has a ton of cameos from real video game characters. A number of Nintendo-owned characters and references show up, but Mario himself didn't get a direct cameo, only a verbal reference. A rumor spread like wildfire that Mario didn't get in because Nintendo demanded too much money, and that the director said so. As it turns out, this is patently false. In a video interview (around 15:30) with FirstShowing.net, director Rich Moore debunks the rumor, positing that it grew out of a joke John C. Reilly made at Comic-Con when he said, "Luigi wants more money than Mario." In reality, the creators were able to use Mario; they just didn't know what to do with him. They felt that he was too important a gaming icon for a short gag, but were unable to figure out a bigger role in the narrative that he could have, so they chose to forego him.

• Reportedly Josef Stalin was once asked, at one of his conferences (Tehran or Yalta) with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, how he knew that he would become ruler of the Soviet Union. Stalin says that God came to him in a vision and told him so (let's forget he was a staunch atheist for the purpose of the joke, or say he said so jokingly). FDR turns to Stalin, and says, "Now wait a minute Joe, I never said any such thing!"

• BIONICLE:
  • Writer Greg Farshtey used to actively invoke this in the fanbase, as he's been known to "confirm" or "reject" plausible theories in order to throw fans off the trail of his actual plans; and when called on it would point out the Exact Words in his original statements. Greg also did this in relation to the series' Universe Bible. In response to fan complaints that the franchise diminished its mystical elements (which in itself was true) and supposedly ruined its magical themes by demystifying them, he pointed out that nothing in the franchise's working notes was described as "magic". Greg would also remind fans that one of the series' main themes was characters being wrong, so their beliefs and understanding of their world didn't always reflect the writers' intent.
  • Franchise co-creator Bob Thompson was often quoted saying Bionicle had been planned ahead for twenty years, with a total of seven "books" or grand story arcs. On the brand's 20th anniversary, ten years after its discontinuation, Bob clarified he never meant it literally. He had ideas that might have been enough for twenty years of stories, but apart from a few pre-planned mysteries, the story was mostly made up on the fly, with plans constantly changing. The "seven books" were just a nice-sounding concept that was abandoned after a certain point, not something the writers aimed to achieve. Greg is partially to blame for this misconception, as he mentioned the "seven books" idea in his early correspondence with fans, paraphrasing what he had heard from Bob.
• Unfortunately true for the Nasuverse, due to the large amount of untranslated extra materials leading to certain fans making up plausible theories and passing them off as truths.

• It is Common Knowledge that Don McLean has offered specific interpretations of his classic song "American Pie". However, aside from tacitly acknowledging its homage to Buddy Holly, the singer has always avoided doing this (often answering with "It means I never have to work again"), leaving the interpretation up to the listener.
• A common rumor is that Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails reportedly claimed that Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" is either "the perfect cover" or "better than the original". Neither is true, as he said that listening to Cash's cover was like he had lost his girlfriend because it wasn't his anymore. While this may suggest that he thinks Cash's version is superior, he goes on to clarify that the two versions are "different - but every bit as pure".
• The following hilariously pretentious quote about the true meaning of Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", attributed to frontman Thom Yorke, has been floating around the Internet since at least the early 2000s, despite the fact there's zero evidence he ever actually said it:

  "Street Spirit" is our purest song, but I didn’t write it. It wrote itself. We were just its messengers; its biological catalysts. Its core is a complete mystery to me, and, you know, I wouldn’t ever try to write something that hopeless. All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song. It’s called detachment. Especially me; I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn’t play it. I’d crack. I’d break down on stage. That’s why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning. I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together. That’s what’s meant by ‘all these things you’ll one day swallow whole’. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn’t have it in me to articulate the emotion. I’d crack… Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don’t realise what they’re listening to. They don’t realise that Street Spirit is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he’ll get the last laugh. And it’s real, and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that too long, I’d crack. I can’t believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That’s why I’m convinced that they don’t know what it’s about. It’s why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you’re going to have your dog put down and it’s wagging its tail on the way there. That’s what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn’t picked us as its catalysts, and so I don’t claim it. It asks too much. I didn’t write that song."

• L'Osservatore Romano— a perpetual source. Just because the newspaper of Vatican City pans Avatar does not mean that the Pope condemns it. It's just a newspaper; it's not an official statement of dogma by the Church.

• During the Adventurers' Island Story Arc in Dino Attack RPG, PeabodySam was careful to never confirm OOC which temple was actually the Maelstrom Temple, deliberately invoking this trope to keep his fellow players from guessing his true intentions until The Reveal.
• In anticipation of the release of version 3.0 of NoPixel, rumors began circulating that characters that had been killed off could return in 3.0. However, no public statement about it was ever made by the server administrators, and Koil (the server owner) later stated in a Discord voice chat that dead characters would indeed remain dead in 3.0 (for the time being).
• Within We Are All Pokémon Trainers there have been many instances of claims being made regarding statements about the WAAPTverse that have turned out to have never been said.

• In The Annoying Orange, some viewers thought that Marshmallow's gender was already confirmed to be male due to Marshmallow being referred as he/him in earlier videos despite the Running Gag (both in-universe and out-of-universe) of being asked whether Marshmallow is a boy or a girl without a clear answer multiple times. This was proven wrong in "PRIDE". No, Marshmallow isn't female either!
  • When one of the viewers notified Daneboe and their crew at a live video that Wikipedia stated that Marshmallow is a boy, Daneboe shrugs it off saying that such a thing had not been confirmed.
• RWBY:
  • Volume 5 is already the most disliked season of the show, but some reasons that got touted shortly after release were fans claiming that they were promised the return of fan-favorite character Neopolitan and that we'd meet Pyrrha's parents, neither of which happened. The creators went on to clarify that they only said Neo would return soon; Volume 6 would feature both a dedicated subplot for Neo and a oneshot appearance by someone heavily hinted to be Pyrrha's mother.
  • Samantha Ireland, Nora's voice actress, said during a convention before Volume 7 that Nora would get interesting content in relation with her backstory. This caused people to assume she said that Nora would be getting her backstory in the Volume, leading to blowback when this supposed backstory never surfaced.
  • Opponents of pairings between two or more of the eponymous team's members will quote Monty Oum as saying that he imagined them as being close in platonic, "sisterly" ways, the implication (or outright statement) being that it would go against his vision. This is a misquote of a conversation between Monty and Kerry during the V2 DVD Commentary for Chapter 9: Monty states he likes the specific scene that's playing out because the girls are behaving in an "almost sisterly" way and reassuring each other as "they're sharing all that strife". Kerry agrees, stating that they "sense they're going through the same thing".
• Alan Moore is often said to have liked Saturday Morning Watchmen, even though no one has ever been able to provide any kind of tangible proof of this being true. Dave Gibbons did enjoy the short, and it seems like people have simply conflated this with Moore enjoying it as well.

• Stand Still, Stay Silent had a huge fandom uproar when it turned out that an authorial statement in The Rant had been widely misinterpreted by the fans, leading the fandom to believe that there would be no named character deaths. This turned out to be false. The author released a statement saying that she was sorry for stringing her fans along for so long, but that the only way to debunk the rumor was to spoil the majority of the main Story Arc.

• Charles Darwin gets this a lot. Oftentimes, things that Häckel or Huxley said are attributed to Darwin. Huxley being especially notable, having earned the name "Darwin's Bulldog" vociferously defending evolution, because Darwin was too shy and too afraid to defend his theory himself. The big one is that Darwin didn't use the word "evolution" (a misnomer that has caused problems) to refer to the process he explained, though "evolved" is the last word of his book. He called it "descent with modification". Social Darwinism even has his name tacked on it, even though he was dismayed by his theories being misused in social context, in extremely unscientific ways. Even today people from both sides talk about eugenics like Darwin had anything to do with the practice, which he in fact opposed. When the idea of intentional "improvement" of humanity through selective breeding was first brought up (the term eugenics had yet to be coined), Darwin referred to it as "utopian" (as in impractical or unrealistic). It's also a concept that far predates his time, as it was advocated by Plato in The Republic based on ancient Sparta's practice for instance. Selective breeding of plants and animals is as old as agriculture.
• This caused a stir when Halle Berry's Wikipedia page was edited with a quote from her that said "this new album will show people that [she] can do more than act". A number of news websites then reported that Berry was branching out into music, which caused Berry herself to report that she had no plans to do so.
• With the relaunch of VH1 Classic as MTV Classic, it has been touted as being a return to MTV's musical roots. Neither Viacom, nor the MTV division itself ever made any such claims.
• In a famous incident, Christian fundamentalists started burning Beatles merchandise when John Lennon's statement about the band being more popular than Jesus Christ was misinterpreted as them being bigger than Christ. Lennon's statement was intended as a Take That! to excessive fan worship and he would clarify "I never said we were better than Christ or greater than Christ. I'm just saying we're more popular." To this day, some have yet to be mollified. (Lennon becoming a vocal anti-theist in his later life doesn't help matters here, though he insisted he was a big fan of the man personally.)
• Bill Gates supposedly said in 1981 "640K[B] ought to be enough for anybody.", which when the personal computer took off would eventually proved a very short number (by 2008, a computer had up to 128 GB of memory!). However, the quote seems all but apocryphal, with Gates even stating in a 2001 interview "Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K?" while adding that IBM's RAM had to be pushed up from 512K following much pressure from software developers.
• "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires," only he didn't really. It's telling that this quote, apparently first used by Ronald Wright, is repeated verbatim rather than anything directly from Steinbeck. The quote this is most likely based off of reads "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist," but the context was rather different. He is talking about open socialists from affluent backgrounds and goes onto say: "Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic."
• Ancient writers are often victims to this, since there is a lot of time for people to make up quotes. For example, the ancient Christian writer John Chrysostom is quoted as saying this about women; "What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!" Only problem is that this quote doesn't come from any of Chrysostom's writings, but from the Malleus Maleficarum (Part I, Question VI). He cites Chrysostom's comment on Matthew xix (19), but if you check Chrysostom's comment on it (Homily LXII on Matthew), he says nothing of the sort.
• In the Canadian Armed Forces, an infamous one is the "rule" that "toques must be worn with gloves" that is unanimously enforced on pretty much any base in Canada. So much so that when the dress regulations were amended in 2022, it specifically mentioned that toques may now be worn without gloves. However, there actually never was a rule that demanded the wearing of gloves with toques, and the only mention of toques anywhere in the dress regulations is Chapter 2.17 Winter Dress, which only states that toques may only be worn "when winter dress is in effect". However, almost everyone in the CAF has been yelled at at least once by a superior rank for not having their gloves on with a toque.