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Living Lie - TV Tropes

  • ️Sat Jun 22 2024

People lie for a variety of reasons; to avoid getting in trouble, to make themselves seem more impressive, to cast another person in a bad light, or to create an opportunity for financial gain.

But sometimes, in the realm of fiction, it is possible for someone to meet their lies face to face; be it a menacing monster or a beautiful babe, a character who was made up out of whole cloth may show up in the reality of the story.

A Sub-Trope of Be Careful What You Say, though often unintentionally invoked, as most liars don't expect to be faced with living incarnations of their lies. It can also overlap with Hoist by Their Own Petard. Also a sub-trope of The Power of Language.

It can be Played for Laughs, but it can also have use in drama or horror fiction.

May often be accompanied by An Aesop about not lying in the first place. Indeed, the truth may well be lethal to a Living Lie.

In some works, someone may engage in Gaslighting to make someone believe that their lies have become manifest, often leading into Mind Screw territory.

Another variation is that the lie itself becomes an anthropomorphic personification of lying, rather than a being who matches the details of the lie.

Compare Tulpa and Creating Life Is Unforeseen. Compare Rewriting Reality and Your Mind Makes It Real.

See also Accidental Truth, where someone lies about something that turns out to be true. Sister Trope to I Am One of Those, Too. Compare The Real Remington Steele, where someone invents a fake alias that is later hijacked by someone else.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

  • Paranoia Agent: Li'l Slugger was a lie made up by Tsukiko Sagi, first as a young girl when her puppy was killed in an accident and she blamed it on a boy with a baseball bat, fearing her overly strict father. She revisited the lie to escape the consequences of Writer's Block when being pressured to come up with a new character to follow the success of her popular Maromi. She hits herself in the leg with a steel pipe and blames it once again on Li'l Slugger, who, due to coverage in the media, is made manifest by the public's belief in him.

Comic Books 

  • Daredevil: Matt Murdock once claimed that Daredevil was secretly his twin brother Mike Murdock. Years later, the Inhuman known as Reader accidentally used his powers to bring Mike to life, who in turn used an Asgardian Norn Stone to perform a Cosmic Retcon so that he existed for real.

Comic Strips 

  • The Family Circus: Ida Know, Not Me, and Nobody are gremlins created from the collective lies of children everywhere. How much of the chaos around they actually do and how much the children blame on them is open to interpretation.

Films — Animation 

  • In Shark Tale, Oscar falsely takes the credit for killing the shark Frankie (who was actually crushed under an anchor) as a way to gain fame and fortune. Later in the film, he helps the friendly shark Lenny (Frankie's brother) stage his death so he can live as a dolphin while furthering Oscar's reputation as the "Shark Slayer". Come the end of the film, Oscar is forced to fight a shark for real when Lenny's father, Don Lino, decides to take revenge on Oscar for supposedly killing his two sons.
  • In Winnie the Pooh (2011), the characters mistake Christopher Robin's note that he would be back soon for him being captured by a creature called the Backson. In The Stinger, we learn that the Backson is actually real.

Films — Live-Action 

Literature 

  • Downplayed in Going Postal, where an automatic mail-sorting machine ends up getting mail from different timelines and universes (where the check really was in the mail, the letter really was sent and lost, etc.) due to having a part that uses pi with a value of 3.
  • In the story "The Materialization of Cecil" in the book Further Chronicles of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables series), spinster Charlotte Holmes gets tired of being shunned by the other women because she never had a romance. She decides to invent a former boyfriend named Cecil Fenwick and tells stories of their failed romance. She gets sympathy and more friendships, but then a man comes to town and amazingly his name really is Cecil Fenwick. Furthermore, everything about him fits into the fake background that Charlotte invented, and he's getting confused by everyone talking about his romance with a woman he's never met.
  • Nackles: The abusive, vindictive child-hating Frank invented the story of Nackles, a black-clad tunnel-dweller in a mine cart drawn by goats, who every Christmas takes the naughty away in his sack to be eaten, to scare his children into staying absolutely silent and keeping out of his way. It's implied that their sheer belief in the spectre actually brought him to life, at which point he devoured his own creator.
  • "The Thing About Cassandra" has the narrator, a young man, tell the readers that his mother had just run into his old girlfriend Cassandra, which was impossible because Cassandra was a fiction he'd invented to impress his friends and keep his mother from wondering if he was gay. He arranges to meet this impossible woman, only for a huge reversal. Cassandra invented him for much the same reason, not the other way around. In fact, she'd learned as a young child that she could bring her lies to life, with one caveat. If she made physical contact with them, they would fade away into nothing, never to return. She wondered if anyone who knew the original narrator would remember or miss him, or if the check he wrote to pay for one of her paintings would even still exist the next morning.
  • In the penultimate chapter of Wayside School Is Falling Down, Alison manages to figure out how the school's Missing Floor on the 19th story works due to the fact that subjects that people have been wrong about or made up have appeared on the floor in question. However, she quickly loses her train of thought while explaining her reasoning.
  • X-Wing Series: In the Wraith Squadron trilogy, the Wraiths have an internal Running Gag about recruiting an Ewok pilot named Kettch to their Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, which, due to a prank the squad plays on Wedge Antilles in Iron Fist, leads to him having to fly a sortie with an Ewok doll clipped in front of his flight suit so that it looks like there's an Ewok in his cockpit. Word of the "Hawk-bat Pirates'" Ewok then makes it all the way to Warlord Zsinj, which in turn inspires him to have his pet Mad Scientist Edda Gast create an actual Ewok pilot named Kolot, whom Lara Notsil discovers during the finale of Solo Command.

Live-Action TV 

  • Tales from the Darkside: "Seasons of Belief" has a father tell his bored children about a creature called the Grither, which has ears that grow larger when spoken of, and will come and kill whoever speaks about it for that reason. He then tells his scared children that it was just a story, not real, only for a pair of large arms to smash into the house and kill him and his wife.

Puppet Shows 

  • Sesame Street: In one skit, Ernie finds two slices of chocolate cake and eats one, not knowing that Bert had been saving them for dessert. When Bert enters, he sees that one piece is gone, that Ernie has a fork in one hand and a napkin with some chocolate on it in the other, and that a plate of chocolate crumbs is in front of him. He accuses Ernie of having eaten the piece of cake, but Ernie denies it, lying that a monster came in, shook some of the crumbs onto the plate, and then, after eating the cake, put the fork and napkin in Ernie's hands to frame him. Bert doesn't fall for it. After Bert leaves, though, an actual monster comes in, spies the other piece of cake, and does exactly what the monster in Ernie's lie did.

    Ernie: [tearfully, to camera] Did you... did you see what he just did? He came out here...
    Bert: [walking back in] Hey, Ernie, I... [He stops short, seeing that the other piece of cake is gone and that Ernie is again holding a fork and napkin.]
    Ernie: You won't believe this, Bert, but a monster just...
    Bert: I don't want to talk about it. [walks out]
    [Ernie breaks down in tears.]

Video Games 

  • LiEat: Efina can turn lies into physical entities that she can eat, meaning that people who lie will cause the little critters to manifest. But Efi is young and inexperienced, meaning that she can tell when a person's lying but can't tell which exact statement is a lie, especially if someone says a lot of things at once. This causes multiple critters to appear, but only one of them is actually a lie.
  • The Logomancer: At the end of "Edited For Content", Ardus reveals that the ideal Love Interest he created for his novel looks and acts exactly like Cynthia, even though he wrote the manuscript long before he met her. Everyone is quick to point out how weird this is, but it never comes up again.
  • Planescape: Torment: The Player Character. known only as "the Nameless One", has no name, but can tell others to call him "Adahn" (which is a lie). Tell that to enough NPCs, and a new NPC actually named "Adahn" will spontaneously spawn into existence because the Planescape setting runs on Clap Your Hands If You Believe logic, so once enough people believe there is an Adahn running around, he actually pops up.
  • Puddle Books: The Lie involves a young girl named Susie lying about not having any homework to do over the weekend so that she can spend some time with her parents and her best friend Melanie. When she lies, a strange bluish-green creature known as a Lie magically appears in front of her. The Lie causes havoc for Susie and grows bigger with each new lie she tells. On the day of Melanie's birthday party, a whole pack of Lies arrive at the party, where they do such things as eat all the ice cream and pop the balloons, while the original Lie grows to the size of a house. It takes Susie confessing that she lied about not having any homework to do over the weekend to get the Lies to disappear.

Webcomics 

  • Kill Six Billion Demons: Magic essentially acts as this. The universe is a lie told by The Maker, YISUN, and lesser beings who are skilled enough can lie so convincingly that they temporarily convince the universe to follow their lie instead of YISUN's. So when Cio says with complete conviction that "my paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall", the universe is convinced that this is the case and the paper soldiers grow to match.

Web Videos 

  • Dimension 20: Riz Gukgak claims to have a romance partner named Baron from the Baronies in an attempt to fit in with his friends. The lie eventually creates a mannequin-like Mirror Monster that haunts him throughout sophomore and junior years, both to serve the Nightmare King and to force Riz to make it more real.

    Baron: Riz Gukgak, you don't recognize me? I am your romance partner, Baron.
    Riz: Um... I have a confession to make. Baron's not real.
    Baron: You should be very careful about saying such hurtful things, Riz Gukgak.

Western Animation 

  • Beetlejuice: In one episode, it is revealed that when you tell a lie in the Neitherworld, it puts a skeleton in your closet. Beej has an extra large closet, so he can pile up the lies, but it finally bursts, including a skeleton for Lydia which intends to tell her parents that she's lied to them. She's able to banish it by telling the truth, as is Beetlejuice.
  • The Fairly OddParents!: In "Mr. Right!", Timmy, embarrassed that he constantly gets things wrong, wishes for every little thing he says to become the truth. This results in him causing North and South Dakota to become one united Dakota and making his fairies cease to exist.
  • Fish Hooks: In one episode, Oscar repeatedly lies about having a girlfriend named "Doris Flores". Towards the end of the episode, as Oscar is about to reveal the lie, he is actually greeted by "Doris Flores". Subverted in that it's actually another character, Clamantha, in disguise.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Lyin' Around the House", the Powerpuff Girls repeatedly tell small lies whenever the Professor asks them about mistakes they made. This results in a white, fuzzy beast that is the personification of their lies running through the house, destroying everything in his path. The Powerpuff Girls learn that the only way to get rid of him is to come clean about everything they did wrong (and as it turns out, the Professor's been lying about being busy, as he wanted some time alone to watch TV).
  • Puff the Magic Dragon: "Puff in the Land of Living Lies" has a girl named Sandy who constantly tells lies, only to be brought to the titular land of living lies by Puff, which is inhabited by such famous liars as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Baron Munchausen, and Pinocchio. She is accused of a crime and subsequently blames Puff. Puff tells her the only way to return home is to tell the truth. Sandy then blames herself for the fact that her home is "broken" because she broke it, saying she is responsible for her parents' divorce. Puff uses the reaction from the living lies to show her that it isn't the truth, that she is not responsible for the divorce, and that her parents still love her. Puff suggests that Sandy can direct her imagination in more healthy and creative ways, like writing.
  • VeggieTales: "Larryboy and the Fib from Outer Space" revolves around Junior and his obsession with lying about how a bowling themed plate belonging to his dad got broken. After coming across a monster called a Fib, it encourages Junior to lie, which only makes the Fib grow in size. The climax of the story ends in Junior coming clean about every lie he tells, which causes the Fib to shrink and disintegrate.