Cassandra Truth / Literature

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Cassandra Truths in Literature.

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• A short story started with a boy not being able to sleep because he had a fly in his ear. Then all four siblings got up and had a midnight party, playing make believe games so that when the toddler told the parents the next morning they assumed it was a dream, until he mentioned the fly in his brother's ear.

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• In Acid Row, Jimmy warns Melanie that her intended protest against the paedophile is a bad idea, saying that the youth gangs will hijack it and use it as an excuse to make trouble, and that Melanie and Gaynor won't be able to control them. This is exactly what ends up happening. He's also right about the paedophile in Humbert Street having nothing to do with Amy's disappearance, pointing out the logical fallacy of a supposedly gay paedophile taking a little girl and that there's no proof Amy is in Acid Row besides unsubstantiated rumours. Again, no one listens.
• Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars:
  • Alan tells everyone in school he's from Mars. Half the students believe him, and half the students don't. Then the two halves start fighting and Alan gets suspended. Whether this is true or not is left ambiguous for most of the book, spoiler, but the ending reveals Alan really was from Mars.
  • After telling his psychologist a bunch of lies about his mental state, Leonard tells the psychologist the complete truth about Klugarsh Mind Control. The therapist eats up all of Leonard's lies about having nightmares and Freudian delusions, but ascribes everything Leonard says about Mind Control to delusional thinking.
• The Condor leader in Always Coming Home ignores and even punishes anyone who tries to tell him his armies cannot take on the whole world by themselves. That includes his own son.
• In Angel in the Whirlwind: The Oncoming Storm, the Commonwealth's stated reason for annexing the Cadiz system is so that the Theocracy won't get it. They know however much the Cadizians hate the Commonwealth and want the Occupiers Out of Our Country, the Theocrats will be much worse. After the Theocracy forces the Commonwealth Navy to cede the system, local resistance fighters essentially give a "Dang, you weren't kidding" reaction to some Commonwealth Space Marines who got stuck on-planet with them.
• Animorphs: Understandably, when the protagonists finally break The Masquerade, nobody believes them at first. Morphing in front of them makes this short-lived. At one point the Andalites are sending the majority of their reinforcements to the Anati system instead of Earth, believing the majority of the Yeerk fleet to be there. The kids have inside information that the Anati system situation is an ambush (the asteroid fields are rigged with automated turrets and mines). When they hear this, the Andalite command assumes the kids are lying in an effort to become a priority.
• Area 51: All mainstream scientific ideas of how humans on Earth arose, human civilizations came to exist, many artifacts were created and more are shown as wrong in the books. Fringe theorists who rejected these old models and proposed aliens were behind many things, or that all world civilizations had come from a single source earlier (Atlantis) along with various legends having truth in them are shown to be right. Mainstream scientists didn't believe this until overwhelming evidence came quickly to light, and even then it's a long time until things sink in.
• In the Ascendance Series, Sage repeatedly tells Mott and Connor that he is the prince. They interpret him as expressing willingness/desire to be the one chosen to impersonate the prince. Frequently employed in various situations throughout all three books, often coupled with Sarcastic Confession.
• Atar Gull:
  • When she was a child, Jenny Will often thought there was a snake in her room, so Atar Gull kills her by putting one there. She dies screaming for help, which is brushed off by her father.
  • Even worse in the novel, where her fiancé leaves a dead snake in her room as a prank, with her parents in on it, even holding the door shut, all to teach her to confront her fears. They didn't know Atar Gull had arranged for the snake's mate to follow the trail of blood into her room and attack her.
• Jane Austen:
  • Fanny Price in Mansfield Park tries to warn Edmund that Henry Crawford is constantly flirting with his sister. Who is engaged to someone else. This does not end well.
  • Miss Bates in Emma is also usually right, but her Motor Mouth tendency causes people to tune her out.
  • Charlotte Collins in Pride and Prejudice is also frequently right. Elizabeth assumes she's just jealous.
  • Elizabeth herself, when she tries to warn her father that allowing her sister Lydia to go to Brighton with the regiment will end in disaster. It does. He magnanimously tells her that "I bear you no ill will for being justified in your advice to me."
• Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts: Nobody believes that Akihisa Yoshii knows how to cook because his Perpetual Poverty leaves him with just drinking water or eating small fractions of ramen noodles. Imagine everyone's surprise when he cooks paella.
• The Belgariad: In Demon Lord of Karanda, Polgara pronounces a curse on a Grolim:
  Polgara: You are now invincible. No one can kill you — no man, no demon — not even you yourself. BUT no one will ever again believe a single word that you say. You will be faced with constant ridicule and derision all the days of your life and you will be driven out wherever you go, to wander the world as a rootless vagabond.
  Grolim: Who are you, woman? And what power do you have to pronounce so terrible a curse?
  Polgara: I am Polgara. You may have heard of me.
  Sadi: Do you think it was wise to reveal your identity, my lady?
  Polgara: There's no danger, Sadi. He can shout my name from every rooftop, but no one will believe him.
  • Not strictly a Cassandra, in that the grolim doesn't have perfect vision, but he does know at least one true and potentially valuable thing that he'd probably like to share.
• It's complicated in Below. Brenish can't safely tell Gareth the treasure map is a forgery, yet he repeatedly expresses doubts about it, hoping to get Gareth out of the equation. Since everyone knows Brenish is a Consummate Liar, Gareth interprets this as an attempt to cut him out of the treasure, and lets his own desire to see the ruins push him into accepting the map at face value (at least once the Expert signs off on it). Brenish loves to exploit this trope, but this rare backfire gets him and his friends dragged into a quest he knows the map can't complete.
• Bigfoot and Littlefoot: In the first book, when Boone tells Hugo about how he spotted a Sasquatch in the woods (said Sasquatch was Hugo), Hugo replies that he was that Sasquatch. However, since Boone and Hugo hadn't met in person at that point, having only communicated via notes sent between them, Boone accuses Hugo of playing a joke on him and decides to cut ties with him.
• The Bioshock prequel novel Rapture ends with Elaine and her daughter escaping Rapture as it falls into chaos to head to New York City. As her daughter is checked by a doctor, she gushes on how amazing the surface world is compared to her childhood in a lavish underwater city filled with devices out of science fiction. Elaine can only smile at the doctor chuckling at what an amazing imagination her girl has.
• The Boy Who Cried Wolf: After lying so much the villagers don't believe the little boy anymore, even when there's an actual wolf chasing him. In most tellings, this then gets subverted when the boy admits that there is a wolf and everyone then believes him, but it is too late, as the wolf has ate the boy’s sheep...
• A Brother's Price: Princess Trini warned her sisters not to marry Keifer Porter (who, because of the special kind of polygyny practiced in their culture, would become her husband, too), but was not listened to. He turned out to be evil, but even got away with beating and raping her, claiming that she "provoked him" when confronted by her elder sister, who liked his pretty face.
• Bruce Coville's Book of...: Used in several books.
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens: In Zero Hour, a daughter tells her mother about the upcoming alien invasion and all the promises the Martians made the children in exchange for help. The mother brushes it off as a new game until it's too late.
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares:
    • David in There's Nothing Under the Bed insists there's something weird going on under his bed. His parents refuse to believe him because the nothingness under there disappears when adults are around. By the time they find out the truth, it's too late.
    • The Boy Who Cried Dragon ends with the protagonist being arrested for burglary, and claiming he was chased out of the house by a dragon. Naturally, the police don't believe him, since all they see is the owner's cat... who's actually the dragon in disguise (the human "owner" is actually a wizard who works for him).
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Spine Tinglers: In Campfire, young Danny tells his fellow campers about the devil having a secret name, and he'll come for you when you say it aloud. He shares it with The Bully at the camp, who soon after gets taken away by the devil. Danny laments that his parents didn't believe him about it either.
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares II: In The Gravekeeper, the elderly Dollmaker has always tried to warn people away from the area where the titular monster stalks. Most don't believe him, including Gabriel's mother, who left when she grew up and never visited her father again because she thought he was crazy.
• James Thurber's The Catbird Seat is about a man who plots to get rid of an incredibly obnoxious woman who works at his office; she's driven away most of his colleagues and is about to talk his superior into cutting out the man's department. The man, a clean-living, sober type who wouldn't hurt a fly, visits her apartment one night, at which point he drinks whiskey, smokes a cigar and discusses his plan to kill his boss using very harsh language. The next day, the woman tries to warn their boss of the man's plan... and is fired when the boss thinks she's having a breakdown.
• The Changeover: Laura attempts to inform her muggle mother as to what her brother Jacko's condition truly is, to no avail. Subverted soon after with romantic lead Sorry, who doesn't believe her at first but then drops by and confirms Jacko's condition himself.
• In Charlotte's Web, a spiderweb appears near the pigpen of Mr. Zuckerman's barn with the words 'SOME PIG' written in it. Later, more spiderwebs appear with more words. While everyone is praising the miracle and believe that the pig must be extraordinary, Mrs. Zuckerman is the only character who thinks maybe the spider might be the extraordinary one. Her husband quickly shoots the idea down.
  • The book, the 1971 film adaptation, and the stage adaptation all maintain this plot hole. The only version to explain it is the 2006 film adaptation, where it's explained that Mr. Zuckerman looked for the spider that spun the web, but couldn't find one.
• Dave Pelzer wrote A Child Called It about his experiences as the victim of the third-worst case of child abuse in Californian history. The evidence was clear across his body on a daily basis, up to broken bones (and worse!), and yet the school officials took several years to conclude it was bad enough to intervene. Worse because the couple of times he tried to tell, early on, they'd just call his mother, and send him back to her, and she'd abuse him even worse - so he stopped trying to tell anyone at all.
• Chocoholic Mysteries: In Frog Frame-Up, town crank Hershel Perkins has been claiming that the Root Beer Barrel, an old and historic building which has been closed down for years and was in bad shape, was knocked down illegally. Everyone else says it just fell down in a snowstorm. Hershel, it turns out, is right about the building having been knocked down illegally, though wrong about whom he claims had been responsible (and the actual culprit is also the one who eventually killed him to shut him up).
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Akella warns the others in the third book not to keep sailing on their course, as she can tell a storm is coming. She's ignored, though sure enough their fleet goes right into a huge storm. Joslyn realizes as the ship's captain still fights against Akella's directions she was wrong, relieving him. After this, Akella's skill saves the ship, but many of the rest aren't so lucky.
• No one believes in the dangers of Europe, nor in the story of the voyage of Quetza in Federico Andahazi's El Conquistador.
• Coraline calls the police to tell them that her parents are missing — and she thinks they were taken by the creepy lady with buttons for eyes who lives in the Alternate Universe connected to her house. The police tell her to go back to bed, sweetie.
• Suggested in the Damnatio Memoriae series by Laura Marcelle Giebfried, where Enim and Jack realize that a number of local girls who ran away have actually been murdered by someone on the island. Of course, given that they're constantly up to trouble and Jack has a reputation for thinking up wild conspiracy theories, they know that no one will ever believe them. To make matters worse, after Enim thinks he finds solid proof that they're right, he's diagnosed with schizophrenia, and even the reader can't be sure whose version of events is true.
• Darkest Powers:
  • Liz is in denial over her death until someone besides Chloe (who is a necromancer and thus can see ghosts) confirms it.
  • Rae is the only kid who doesn't believe the facility they're staying at is dangerous and will even kill them under certain circumstances.
• Daughter of the Sun:
  • Orsina laughs and thinks Aelia is joking after she says her age is really fourteen billion.
  • Vissente later tries to tell Orsina who Aelia really is. She doesn't understand and thinks he's lying at first, then comes to a wrong conclusion later about what he meant.
• The Day Santa Stopped Believing In Harold: Santa initially thinks Mrs. Claus and Harold's parents are lying about Harold's existence, but actually they're telling the truth.
• At the end of The Dire Saga, Dire tries to explain her actions to the heroes and they assume she's inventing a story to justify villainy. Although, frankly, it is a little implausible that a low-level street gang is being led by history's most scary villain, long thought dead but revived by a vampire, and is colluding with a group of techno-mercenaries to help a group of artificial intelligences to use Y2K as a smoke screen as an opportunity to kill off an earlier group of AI.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe: It's a Running Gag in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies that Colonel Kortez of UNISYC keeps insisting things are "not what they seem", leading to the other characters dismissing him as a paranoid loon. And he probably is a paranoid loon, but the fact is everything he says that about turns out not, in fact, to be what it seems.
• In DO NOT TAKE THE SHELLS, Harris's friends don't believe him when he tells them about the Eldritch Abomination living below the water, although they do promise not to go back to the beach that day.
• Dragonvarld: Few people believe Marcus at first about Dragonkeep, a hidden kingdom supposedly right on their border, or its army that's coming their way as no one can see either one at first and as he'd been mentally ill as a child, seeing invisible things (which were real, but no one else knew). It's soon shown that he's right though.
• The Dresden Files has a condition called Cassandra's Tears, resulting in a person having somewhat reliable visions of the future, which no one believes. If someone does believe, the condition may be cured — but it's easily faked and a common confidence scam among the magical community. Which probably contributes to the fact that no one believes the predictions. More medically, genuine cases are also easy to mistake for garden-variety seizures, so people not in on The Masquerade, or people in on it but not suspecting the condition, could end up trying to medicate the wrong problem.
• Earth's Children: On her deathbed in The Clan of the Cave Bear, Iza tries to warn Ayla to seek out her own kind, because she realizes now she will never be able to live with the Clan indefinitely as she is too different, and that she should leave soon, otherwise Broud will do something terrible to her once he becomes leader. Ayla doesn't heed her advice and, sadly, Iza is proved to be correct: Broud ends up trying to force her to marry him and to give up custody of her son, then curses her with death when she speaks out against him, permanently separating her from her loved ones.
• The Enchanted Files: In Diary of a Mad Brownie / Cursed, Destiny Carhart freely talks about her friend Herbert the Goblin. Her family and schoolmates chalk it up to an Imaginary Friend (and even Angus thinks she was making him up, since he hasn't found any goblins in the house since he arrived), but he, Destiny's siblings and her teacher Ms. Kincaid all later learn that Herbert was Real After All when they meet him in person during their trip through the Enchanted Realm.
• Played for Laughs in Everworld, with the Trope Namer herself. In the first chapter of the seventh book she burst in and declares a prophecy that, while vague, accurately predicts what's going to happen by the end of the story. The protagonists are fully aware of her story and that they should believe her...but can't. She probably isn't even the real Cassandra, right? In fact, they find her so unbelievable that their minds can't even hold onto what she said for more than a few seconds. Eventually she storms out of the room and is never mentioned again.
• The Famous Five: In Five Go Adventuring Again, George simply hates their tutor Mr Roland. Not only that, but she has a Feeling about him, and suspects that he is up to something, when she sees him poking around in her father's study, and meeting two artists whom he pretended not to know. Because she hates Mr Roland so much, nobody will believe her suspicions about him, which are correct, when he steals her father's papers.
• In the short story collection Far North & Other Dark Tales, by Sara Maitland, the mythological story of Cassandra is retold as being the result of a Apollo severing her corpus callosum as revenge for her withholding the sex she had promised in exchange for the gift of prophesy. She can see the future, but because of her brain damage cannot articulate clearly enough to be understood.
• In Flawed, when Celestine is invited to Logan's party, Juniper warns her against going, stating that Logan isn't even turning 18. Despite this, Celestine just ignores her, goes to the party, and, of course, it turns out poorly.
• Played for Laughs at the end of the Dale Brown novel Flight of the Old Dog, where Patrick McLanahan casually tells his mother that he had just come back from bombing Russia. Mrs. McLanahan doesn't believe him. Also used seriously in Plan of Attack, where no one outside of the Air Battle Force believes that a Russian attack is coming, as well as in Edge of Battle where no one believes just how dangerous Comandante Veracruz's plan really is.
• The Fold invokes this with the 19th-century scientist Koturovic who predicted a) the mathematics to fold three-dimensional space, b) that such folds would become inevitable as human telepathic potential reached critical mass, and c) that when it happened transdimensional monsters would eat everyone. Two are shown to be true.
• In Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, the protagonist guiltily enjoys sadistic fantasies of murdering her romantic rival, despite knowing they are morally wrong. When she confides in Wei about them, he assumes it's just bog-standard jealousy that she shouldn't worry about. (Partly justified by the fact that the primitive society they live in barely understands mental illness, much less "a God of Evil is trying to corrupt people's souls".)
• Full Metal Panic!:
  • When Sōsuke explains to Kaname that he's a soldier from an elite military unit on orders to protect her, Kaname informs him that he's delusional — even as he's fighting off enemy soldiers and escaping with her across a military base. It's not until he climbs into an outdated Humongous Mecha and kicks a world of ass with it that she realizes he's telling the unvarnished truth.
  • Kaname is similarly incredulous when Sousuke tries to explain that the cute teenage girl who just came out of his bathroom in nothing but a towel is his commanding officer, not his girlfriend. It didn't help that Tessa actually quite likes the idea of being mistaken for his girlfriend and deliberately employs Bad "Bad Acting" when confirming the story in order to undermine his case.
• In Galaxy of Fear: Eaten Alive, a ship called the Misanthrope crashes on an uncharted world that the natives call D'vouran. The twenty surviving crew find an abandoned lab that they hole up in, not trusting the natives, and find that one by one anyone who leaves disappears. The scientists got the ground to come to life and eat people other than the natives. The captain, Kevreb Bebo, is able to leave thanks to a trinket that keeps him safe; when other people start landing on D'vouran he frantically tries to warn them, but isn't believed. There's never any evidence; when he takes the last of the crew with him to help convince people, she disappears too. Gradually, a sympathetic Tash Arranda does decide to hear him out, because she too is not believed when she talks about the bad feeling she has about the place.
• Ghost Girl (2021): The kids' attempt to explain Deanna Jameson's murder and Scratch's involvement in it only results in them being laughed off by the police.
• Ghosts of the Titanic: When Kevin dreams he's on the Titanic right after it hit the iceberg, he sees a couple of crewmen nearby playing with a chunk of ice that fell off of the iceberg in the collision. He tries to tell them that the ship is going to sink, but they just laugh off his concerns, pointing out how the ship was billed as being unsinkable.
• In Good Omens, Tadfield's local busy-body R.P. Tyler encounters Crowley driving around in the smoldering remains of Crowley's vintage Bentley. Afterwards Tyler mentally prepares a Strongly Worded Letter to the local newspaper about reckless young people driving around in flaming cars... but is forced to give up when he eventually realizes even he has a hard time believing his own eyes.
  • Agnes Nutter was the only seer in human history to make nothing but 100% accurate predictions, but this has done nothing but make her seem like a madwoman for talking about 'curing illnesses by using a sort of mold, and the importance of washing your hands so that the tiny little animals who caused diseases would be washed away', ending with her being burned at the stake. It's also speculated as the reason why her book of prophecy didn't sell a single copy.
• Most books in the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine, in which the protagonists' supernatural claims are disbelieved by parents and authorities. This is turned around in "The Girl Who Cried Monster"; the girl's parents don't believe that her librarian is a monster, not because they don't think monsters exist, but because she has a habit of making up outlandish stories (in fact, it's her Establishing Character Moment) and because they're monsters, and they thought they'd eliminated all nearby competitors long ago.
• Gravity Falls: Journal 3: while reading his palm at a fair, The Hand Witch tries to convince Ford Pines to not activate The Portal for Bill Cipher, telling him that he’s being deceived. Ford doesn’t listen and the results are disastrous, from driving away his Only Friend to getting sucked into the Multiverse.
• Any number of examples in Harry Potter
  • Professor McGonagall is on the receiving end of this trope multiple times. In the first book alone, she refuses to believe Malfoy's claim about Harry trying to smuggle a dragon through the school and Harry's claim someone is trying to steal the Philosopher's Stone. Both of these claims are met with irritation. In the sixth book, she also expresses disbelief when Harry accuses Malfoy of being involved in Katie Bell nearly being killed by a cursed necklace in Hogsmeade. In this case, she had good reason to, as Malfoy was serving detention with her.
  • Dumbledore invokes this trope in the third book, after the trio claims Sirius Black is innocent, telling them that the ministry would never believe the word of three underage wizards.
  • Sybill (great-granddaughter of famous Seer Cassandra) Trelawney is regarded as a fraud by her colleagues and some of her students, but the mindful reader will notice that almost everything she "predicts" does happen, just not in the way she says it will.
  • So is the sneakoscope Ron gave Harry in Prisoner of Azkaban: when it lights up there's always some foul play going on, but the characters don't realize it's constantly going off in Scabbers' presence because he's actually Peter Pettigrew.
  • In Goblet of Fire, when Moody shows Harry his collections, he specifically mentions he had to disable his Sneakoscope, since it won't stop ringing because he's actually Barty Crouch, Jr. using Polyjuice potion to impersonate Moody.
  • An interesting twist on the classic trope is that anytime Ron makes a snarky comment, half the time he's right:
    • In Philosopher's Stone: "I'll kill Fred, he was going on about wrestling a troll." And they're doing just that a chapter or two later.
    • In Chamber of Secrets, on what Tom Riddle did to get himself a Special Award For Services To The School: "Maybe he murdered Myrtle, that would have done everyone a favor." Technically, that's not what won him the award, but it turns out that was his actual role in the situation. (The award was for supposedly catching the killer, but it turns out to have been a frame job.)
    • Less obvious examples in Prisoner of Azkaban: "She's still acting like Scabbers has gone on vacation, or something." Surprise, surprise, Scabbers wasn't dead after all, just hanging out in Hagrid's hut.
    • "What would [Hermione's Boggart] have been for you? A piece of homework that only got nine out of ten?" Lo and behold, Hermione's boggart is McGonagall telling her she failed everything.
    • In Goblet of Fire, while making stuff up for the Divination homework, one of the suggestions Ron gives to Harry is "being stabbed in the back by someone you thought was a friend". Near the end of the year, Harry is betrayed by someone placed within Hogwarts he believed to be friendly and nearly killed before Dumbledore shows up in time to save him.
  • When Harry tells everyone that Voldemort has returned at the end of Goblet of Fire, Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge not only doesn't believe Harry, he spends almost the entirety of Order of the Phoenix slandering Harry, Albus Dumbledore, and anyone who even dare speak of Voldemort's return.
  • In the last book, Harry finds a letter from his mother to Sirius that mentions she’s gotten to know an older neighbor named Bathilda Bagshot. Lily tells him that Bathilda knew Dumbledore as a teenager and likes to tell stories about him. Lily says she thinks she is exaggerating about one in particular, him being “friends” with Predecessor Villain Grindelwald, because it’s simply too outrageous to be true. However, Bathilda isn’t lying.
  • Bellatrix Lestrange actually becomes this in the second chapter of Half-Blood Prince, openly expressing mistrust of Severus Snape and actually telling her sister, Narcissa, that Voldemort was mistaken in trusting Snape; since she’s fanatically loyal to Voldemort, that says something. She’s actually right to mistrust Snape, but he’s able to outmaneuver her! That said, Snape does indicate in his conversation with her that other Death Eaters also mistrusted him, so she might just be the first one to say so out loud, but she’s still right in her suspicions.
  • Throughout Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry suspects that Draco Malfoy is up to something sinister, and has good evidence, but absolutely everybody dismisses his suspicions at once.
• In Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon tells Haruhi about Itsuki, Yuki, and Mikuru's supernatural powers, but she flat-out doesn't believe him and tells him to stop messing with her. This is despite the fact that she's actively looking for people with supernatural powers, though her more cynical side keeps her from truly recognizing any; she dismisses Kyon's claims because she thinks it's "too easy" that the very people she's looking for are ones she actually knows.
• High School D×D: While fighting Loki, the protagonist Issei accidentally summons a breast god. No one believes him, not even when Ddraig had to explain that yes, he did hear the voice.
• In the Honor Harrington books, the few Solarians that recognise how far behind the times their Navy is are often casually dismissed as alarmists and defeatists.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge plays with this. It's unclear whether the first third of the book is narrative or excerpts from a document that may or may not be contradicted by the rest of the novel.
• In Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer, the fallen angel Lucifer casually tells people exactly who he is, despite being in a mortal body, only to be seen as joking or eccentric. He even continues being himself when in talks to create a movie on his life story.
• Demon pox in The Infernal Devices is considered to be an urban legend, and no one believes the protagonist when he says that it's spreading.
• During the Familia War arc of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, one of the Apollo Familia members (appropriately named Cassandra) warns the others that they are going to lose, even prophesizing several key events, but, as expected, no one believes her. They lose. Horribly. Even after this, no matter how many times her visions come true, everyone dismisses her visions as nonsense. So far, Bell Cranel is the only person who ever believed her, causing her to have a crush on him.
• In Robert Munsch's Jonathan Cleaned Up - Then He Heard a Sound, Jonathan's house is somehow turned into a subway station, and the people getting off cause a huge mess. Jonathan tries to explain this to his mom, but she doesn't believe him, as she's out when this happens—until the third time, where she does witness the train stopping in their home, which finally convinces her that her son was telling the truth all along.
• Kill time or die trying: Brad spends his entire first day at university trying to figure out where to go. The only reliable directions he's given come from a pair of stoners, who he ignores.
• The Kingston Cycle: Claims that the Hundred Houses of Aeland are all witches are known as a common sign that a witch has been driven mad by their power and needs to be locked away... just like the Supernatural Elite who implemented the Ban on Magic planned.
• KonoSuba: Hardly anyone believes that Aqua is really a goddess, not even the members of her own religion, even when she demonstrates her powers. This owes largely to the fact that Aqua is very stupid and clumsy, while everyone expects goddesses to be wise and graceful.
• Laughing Jack: Laughing Jack's tendency to not show himself to adults makes it hard for his kid playmates to convince their parents of his existence.
  • James' mother is incredulous each time James attributes something happening to Laughing Jack, since she's convinced that the clown her son has been describing is an Imaginary Friend, but knows her son is not a liar. She only realises he truly exists when Jack finally reveals himself to her, and by then it's too late.
  • Twice does Isaac tell his mother about Laughing Jack, and she doesn't believe him. The first is when he leads her to his room to see him but earns a slap and no dinner since no one is present. Laughing Jack explains that he must hide himself from his parents so that they could still play together. Ironically, when Isaac fails to convince his mother that Jack killed the neighbor's cat, Isaac is sent away to boarding school soon after.
• In the Left Behind series, the prophecies concerning the coming judgments in Revelation were treated as religious ramblings by the general public during the Tribulation until they actually happen, such as the Wrath of the Lamb earthquake. Even after they happen, though, there are some survivors who stubbornly insist that it isn't God behind it all and persist in continuing to live in their sins.
• In Level Up Just By Eating, nobody ever believes that Laura is a goddess, even when she performs miracles, for pretty much the same reason nobody believes Aqua in KonoSuba.
• A Lion in the Meadow: The mother doesn't believe the boy's claims of the lion in the meadow, but it turns out to be true.
• Lolita. After emptying a couple of pistol magazines into fellow paedophile Claire Quilty, Humbert discovers some Upper Class Twits have turned up for a dinner party at his house. He confesses to killing the man, but they just joke that someone should have done it a long time ago. It doesn't help that a dying Quilty then staggers into the room.
• It would benefit the protagonist of The Longing of Shiina Ryo greatly if he did not suffer from this.
• In fact, MAD kind of summed up how this Trope works in their satire of Gremlins:
  Billy: Why won't you guys believe me?
  Cop: Because the police never believe the hero until it's too late. Haven't you ever seen old '60's sci-fi movies like The Blob?
• Martha Speaks: In Perfectly Martha, Martha tells Dr. Pablum that soup is the reason she can talk. He doesn't believe her, but has to scram to avoid the angry customers and doesn't have time to get further clarification.
• In Roald Dahl's Matilda, Miss Agatha Trunchbull gets away with outrageously abusing students because "no one would believe them" if they reported it.
• In The Maze Runner, Gally repeatedly tells everyone that Thomas is not to be trusted, and that he probably has something to do with them all being stuck in the maze. Obviously, considering that Gally’s proven himself to be a Jerkass with a mean streak, most of the Gladers ignore him. It’s later revealed that Thomas and Teresa were actually the ones in charge of building and designing the Maze project.
• In Midnight's Children, one of the titular children has the power of Time Travel. They warn the other children of impending doom, but nobody believes them, and they eventually leave the Midnight's Children Conference out of frustration.
• Millennium Series: Lisbeth repeatedly told authorities as a child about her father's abuse of her mother, but no one did anything, and she wound up being institutionalised after attempting to take matters into her own hands. There turned out to be a giant Government Conspiracy responsible for covering up her father's crimes, so this isn't entirely a straight example of the trope. It's also largely responsible for turning her into the person she is today.
• Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded: When Chantel, Anna, Bowser, and Franklin need to get back into Lightening Pass, the former three approach a guard to ask him to let them in, stating that they're students at Miss Ellicott's School. He doesn't believe them, stating that if they were students there, they would be at school right now.
• The Misfit of Demon King Academy: Following Emilia Lud(o)well's Forced Transformation from a pure demon to a half-demon, she tries to talk a small group of pureblood demon students out of assaulting her by trying to convince them of what she originally was. Unfortunately, they do not believe her (and likely do not care) because of her new form before they proceed to pummel her and drain mana from her. Fortunately, Anos's parents manage to step in and save her.
• The Mortal Instruments:
  • Maia Robert's parents never believed her when she told them her brother was abusive.
  • In City of Glass, Jace's outright dislike and suspicion of Sebastian raises a lot of eyebrows despite the fact that he was right all along.
• In My One-Hit Kill Sister, the warrior Gloria correctly accuses Asahi Ikusaba of being a fraud but the lie had grown too deep at that point.
• My Sister, the Serial Killer: Korede has a crush on Tade, a handsome doctor who in turn, is infatuated with Ayoola, her sister. Korede tries to warn Tade that her sister has killed four boyfriends already but he accuses her of making up stuff out of jealousy.
• In Pseudonymous Bosch's The Name Of This Book Is Secret, and its sequels, the main character is named after the character from Greek legend and is often not believed by adults. A fairly detailed description of the original Cassandra character is given in the first book.
• Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Joshua Calvert always tells a different story over how his father damaged his spaceship The Lady MacBeth, usually involving some form of selfless heroics. Eventually his girlfriend asks for the real story, and is given one involving terrorists and mysterious alien technology. Naturally she doesn't believe a word of it, much to Calvert's annoyance, but a short story by Peter F. Hamilton in another book reveals that he is in fact telling the complete truth.
• This trope is a major plot point of Gordon Korman's No More Dead Dogs. No one believes Wallace when he says that he isn't sabotaging the play. It doesn't help that he was framed the night before the play when his football jersey was found beneath a pile of shredded scripts. This causes the whole cast to totally turn their backs on him.
• Not Now, Bernard: Bernard tries to alert his mother that there’s a monster outside, but she doesn’t buy it and just ignores him.
• Of Fire and Stars:
  • Mare's father the king and his advisors refuse to believe it when she uncovers facts indicating Zumorda isn't responsible for the attacks, barely listening at all, which infuriates her.
  • Later on, Thandilimon refuses to listen when Dennaleia reveals that Lord Kriantz murdered Nils, kidnapped Mare and is behind magical attacks on his family to get them into a war with Zumorda for his own gain. It doesn't help how her fire magic erupts at that very moment as a result of her high emotions, while it's banned in the country and not surprisingly he thinks that she's really behind those attacks.
• One Fat Summer: When Bobby Marks is asked by his sister what he did the previous night, Michelle thinks he's being cheeky when he answers that he spent the night on Make-Out Island. Of course readers already know he DID get marooned on the island the previous evening and only got home less than an hour before her.
• Yun from Only Sense Online is an unwilling Cross Player in the titular game, as a result of the game system misidentifying his sex. Despite his consistent usage of masculine speech and repeated attempts to deny that he is a girl, nobody other than his real-life acquaintances believe him and assume instead that he is roleplaying as a Bokukko.
• Subverted in "Police Operation" by H. Beam Piper. The Paratime Police are shown to actively take action to make true accounts of Paratime doings seem false. Flying saucers, their existence, and the relevant 'smothering out' technique are particularly discussed.
• In Anne S. Lindbergh's The People In Pineapple Place, August's mother does not believe his stories of Pineapple Place, an alley only he can see, filled with families, all of whom only he can see. However, it turns out that his mother is a Reasonable Authority Figure, and comes to believe him once she sees evidence of August's story (a child she [and August] can see, but no one else can, able to get away with considerable mischief, and a security guard, apparently making a fool out of himself in front of a large crowd of people, none of whom (except August) can see the girl he [truthfully] claims to have caught roller-skating in a museum).
• In The Priory of the Orange Tree, Truyde saw Ead use magic to ward Sabran during a confrontation with an evil dragon (which would result in Burn the Witch!, since magic is forbidden no matter what the reason). Sabran dismisses this report because according to the official religious doctrine of the kingdom, the queen of Inys is shielded from dragonfire by the divine blood of her ancestors.
• In Jill Paton Walsh's A Presumption of Death, retired dentist Mrs. Spright is paranoid and senile so nobody pays attention when she claims that there are Nazi spies in Paggleham. It turns out that she's right.
• The Purple Cloud: Before Adam joins the expedition to the North Pole, he hears a parson named Mackay give a sermon about how man is not meant to visit the Poles and if the expedition is a success, a terrible punishment will be visited upon the entire human race, like when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. The expedition continues anyway. Adam takes Mackay a lot more seriously when he returns from the Pole and finds that most other human and animal life on the planet has been killed by the titular Fog of Doom.
• In the first book of The Raven Cycle, Noah consistently tells the others he's a ghost. His first line in the series is literally "I've been dead for seven years," yet the others ignore him until they find his body in the woods. When this happens, Noah's response is to point out that he did tell them several times.
• In Norma Fox Mazer's Saturday The Twelfth Of October Zan spends a year living with cave dwellers due to accidental time travel. When she returns to the present, nobody she tries to tell believes her.
• Second Apocalypse: Sorweel hates the Anasûrimbor family because they invaded his kingdom and killed his father. The goddess Yatwer puts a glamor over his face so that the Anasûrimbor family cannot use their Dunyain abilities to see his thoughts through his expression. Moënghus, who has no Dunyain blood, tries to convince Serwa that of course he hates the family, but Serwa insists on trusting her perceptions.
• Septimus Heap:
  • In Flyte, only Beetle and Nicko trust Septimus when he tells them that Jenna has been kidnapped by Simon Heap.
  • Jenna tries in vain to warn Septimus of the upcoming Darke Domaine in Darke.
• This is the whole point of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. No one ever believes Baudelaire children, no matter how many times they tell them that their new principal/gym teacher/assistant/captain/chief of medicine/whatever is Count Olaf trying to kill them. Even if the current experience strangely mirrors that of the previous one. The majority of adults are either evil, will become evil, or are morons.
• The Shadow Project: Danny is accused of murder and treason after truthfully claiming that another project official was killed by a strange monster that appeared out of nowhere. However, the surveillance tapes prove he is being honest.
• Slacker:
  • Whenever Cam tries to tell Jennifer or the principal that he doesn't care about the P.A.G. and is fine with their efforts to move against it, they think he is just playing dumb and hoping they'll blame someone else for his actions.
  • When Chuck and Pavel tell String the truth about the P.A.G. just being something Cam made up so his parents would let him play videogames, String thinks that they are just jealous of Cam and tells them to get out of his sight for telling such a mean-spirited lie.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles: In The Field Guide, the first installment, The Field Guide, Jared tries to tell his family that faeries are causing all the mischief that he is being blamed for... but, since he's nine and has been acting mischievously as of late anyway, no one believes him.
• Star Trek:
  • A Running Gag in Peter David's Star Trek novels is how Starfleet Command assumed that Kirk's reports of things like meeting Greek gods or his first office's brain being stolen were just a bored Kirk messing with them.
  • Invoked in The Q Continuum; when Picard asks why Q didn't just tell him about the powerful and dangerous entity known as 0 in the first place to deter him from the experiment to open the galactic barrier, Q asks if Picard would have believed him without sufficient evidence of 0's threat, and Picard privately concedes that he'd be reluctant to take Q's word about the time of day, never mind something this significant.
• The Stormlight Archive features Szeth. He interpreted events to mean there was a coming Desolation. He was banished and made "Truthless", meaning he was honor-bound to follow the orders of his master, resulting in him becoming the infamous Assassin in White. He ends up, of course, being correct in his prediction, but the rest of Shinovar seems to prefer remaining with their heads in the sand. Edgedancer has similar events, as Szeth keeps on telling Nale and his acolytes that the Desolation they've been trying to prevent is already here, but Nale is too keen on Believing Their Own Lies to listen to him, and his acolytes trust him more than they do Szeth.
• Supergifted: In chapter 12, when Chloe concludes from her thinking that Noah couldn't have possibly been the "superkid" who saved the Mercury household from a runaway propane tanker truck, Donovan tells her that he was the real hero who leaped into the truck door and steered the truck clear of the house. He also tells her Noah said he did it so the Taggarts wouldn't find out he was in their neighbourhood, and thus have the grounds to have Brad's dog, Beatrice, put down by Animal Control. However, Chloe notes that the story sounds too fantastical to have actually happened, and concludes that Donovan and Noah made it up, and that what really happened is that the truck hit a curb and changed direction from that. She apologizes to Donovan for assuming he and Noah lied when the truth is revealed.
• Tales from the Year Between, in its first volume, features the story 'Jon Andra's Daughter'. Its protagonist is a girl named Cass (making her full name Cass Andra) who seems to receive prophetic visions from the waters of the Everfall. She isn't often believed, and the vision she receives in the story is one of a terrible year ahead (which makes sense, because the rest of the stories in the volume chronicle that year!). Ultimately, her final vision is a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story, as she dies before she can return to the town to tell anyone what she's seen.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • As noted in the Films page, Gandalf's suspicions that Sauron had indeed returned and was amassing new armies were dismissed by the White Council. However, it's subverted in that Saruman does believe him, and actually knows for a fact Gandalf is correct, he's just delaying acting for as long as possible in hopes of finding the One Ring for himself, and fears driving Sauron out of Dol Guldur too soon will will interfere with his search. He only finally agrees to take action to avoid tipping his hand to the rest of the Council, and because Sauron has grown in strength to the point that he has now begun to endanger Saruman's planning.
  • A double example in The Lord of the Rings: after Gollum's temporary Heel–Face Turn due to Frodo's kindness, Sam refuses to believe Frodo's insistence that Gollum has indeed earned their trust. Meanwhile, Frodo dismisses Sam's warnings that Gollum is still a danger to themselves and the Quest. Ironically, it was Sam's own distrust that delivered the final Heel–Face Door-Slam when Gollum was genuinely considering repenting and abandoning his plan to betray the Hobbits to Shelob.
  • Tom Bombadil is completely unaffected by the powers of the One Ring. Because of this, he cannot be convinced that it is important and dangerous. Gandalf points out that if they asked him to keep it, he wouldn't take it seriously and would likely leave it lying around.
• In the Trylle Trilogy, Wendy's mother stabbed her at the age of 6, claiming that she was a changeling switched at birth with her son. Wendy's family is horrified, and her mother is put into a mental hospital. Wendy eventually finds out that she is a changeling troll and her mother's real son is being raised by Wendy's biological mother Elora.
• Doctor Courtine's testimony in Charles Palliser's The Unburied is brilliant, forensic, mostly true and completely ignored, leading to the hanging of an innocent man.
• In James Thurber's short story "The Unicorn in the Garden", a Henpecked Husband finds a unicorn in the garden, but his wife doesn't believe him, telling him firmly that there's no such thing as unicorns, and calls for him to be taken away to a mental asylum. The tables are turned when the officials from the asylum arrive; when she tells them her husband saw a unicorn in the garden, he meekly says that there's no such thing as unicorns, leaving her looking like the unbalanced one.
• Universal Monsters:
  • In book 1, after their penultimate fight with Dracula, the teens try to warn police detective Turner about Dr. Dunn being Dracula. Naturally, he doesn't believe them and thinks they just hallucinated the vampire stuff.
  • In book 4, after they get attacked by a baboon and jackal, Nina tries to tell Levi Tovar about their battles with the monsters. He thinks she's making it up and angrily storms out. He later apologizes, but still doesn't believe... until later on. It ultimately turns out he was faking — he knew it was real, because he was Imhotep the entire time.
  • In book 5, the teens try to convince Rita Crockett that the Gill Man is an escapee from a movie. She doesn't believe them until the very end.
• Children's book Voyage of the Basset (the movie Voyage of the Unicorn is based on it) has a mythology-loving college professor whose daughter, Cassandra, is specifically named after this character. Cassandra somewhat lives up to her name when her warnings to her father about what not to do and trouble that could be caused are completely brushed aside, resulting in him getting pissed off and acting nasty to her. He later apologizes when she turns out to be right. (In the movie, he has a nicer personality and the "ignored warnings" thing is avoided.)
• A major part of the plot in the Warrior Cats book Dark River: when a crisis on RiverClan territory forces them out of their camp, the other Clans all start preparing for invasion, since they believe that RiverClan will now try to steal territory. Hollypaw is seemingly the only cat on the lake that notices that all these fears are founded on nothing but paranoia, and that by preparing for a battle, everyone is making it that much more likely to happen. Naturally, nobody listens to her when she says they should try to help RiverClan with their problem, or at least get more information about it before jumping to conclusions, because she's just an apprentice and they are all "more experienced".
• Watership Down
  • Part of its premise is a deliberate subversion of the trope with author Richard Adams wondering "What if the Cassandra character was believed?" So in this book, the Waif Prophet, Fiver, is taken seriously by his brother and a select few who escape a doomed warren. There is some doubt when they enter the seemingly idyllic Cowslip's warren that Fiver warns not to enter while the gang ignores him. However, when the place's horrific secret is revealed, the company then accepts Fiver's counsel without question, such as when the group encounters a electricity transmission tower and Fiver firmly tells them that it is of no danger to them. Not all the rabbits who joined Fiver in the first place necessarily believed him (although Hazel did); they were dissatisfied with their life in the warren and thought they'd have it better elsewhere. It's only after he is proven right, both about their home warren and about Cowslip, that that all really start believing him.
  • An El-ahrairah short story in the book relies on El-ahrairah constructing a Cassandra out of a suspected spy so that he would lose his credibility and be ordered to leave the warren.
  • The very first lines in the book are a Cassandra quote from Aeschylus' Agamemnon, lampshading this.
    Chorus: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
    Cassandra: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
    Chorus: 'Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice.
    Cassandra: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.
• The Wheel of Time: When Rand first passes through Cairhien, where political maneuvering is effectively the national sport, all of his attempts to avoid notice instead convince the locals that he's a Chessmaster playing his cards close to his chest. He gets fed up enough to burn a stack of nobles' invitations in an inn common room and loudly announce that he wants nothing to do with their "Great Game"... a claim so preposterous to the Cairhienin that they immediately assume he's up to something big and is very well connected.
• When the Storm Came: When cowboys from out of town warn that the storm is coming, the townsfolk laugh at them, thinking that they're trying to scare them away so they could steal gold from their mines. When the actual thing arrives, they realise that they should have heeded their warnings.
• The Warbrunn-Knight report in World War Z. Features detailed information on the first zombie attacks and forming patterns, and nobody in a position to effect meaningful change even reads it, save for Israel.
• This happens in A Bad Spell for The Worst Witch. At the beginning, Mildred terrifies Ethel's sister with a made-up story about the frog in the school pond being somebody under an enchantment. Later, Mildred finds out that the frog really is an enchanted human, but nobody will believe her, not even her best friends Maud and Enid.

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