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Year after year, science finds explanations, Scientific reasons behind all the legends. They think this proves that history Was not as myth has shown it But in fact it proves That all the myths are true.
Abney Park, "All the Myths Are True"
After all, if they weren't true, why were they even mentioned?
In fantasy settings, the idea that all myths, folk tales and prophecies are either accurate descriptions of past events or accurate predictions of the future is so often used that it deserves to be called a cliché. It's used so often, in fact, that exceptions to the rule are far more notable.
If the hero's got to do something Because Destiny Says So, these are the official mandates that force him or her. Saying "It's just a myth" always marks a jaded skeptic that has lost all faith in the world, regardless of the fact that in the real world, this complaint would make perfect sense.
Not to be confused with Clap Your Hands If You Believe (and its sub-trope Gods Need Prayer Badly), where believing in a myth makes it true.
And Man Grew Proud and Prophecies Are Always Right are SubTropes of this. Crossover Cosmology deals with the theological aspect. Take it to extremes, and you end up with the Fantasy Kitchen Sink. For versions where the myth is based on truth but people got the details wrong, see Cargo Cult, Ancient Astronauts, Physical God, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and A God Am I. For characters who might live in a world where All Myths Are True and despite solid evidence don't believe it, see Flat Earth Atheist.
Examples
Anime/Manga
- Saint Seiya. Full stop. Blatantly obvious in the anime, with the addition of movies and a Filler arc. To the point where greek gods, Norse gods, Buddha, and friggin' Satan fought Seiya and Co.
- Shaman King also does mention about all prophets/chosen people in different cultures as being Shaman Kings from previous tournaments, although they only imply that with the most known ones, Jesus and Buddha. Some spirits used by shamans seem to be portrayed as Gods, too, like Shamash, and the Sphynx.
Comic Books
Film
- A variation shows up in Undercover Brother, when Eddie Griffin learns from "The Brotherhood" that all the supposed conspiracy theories about black people are true:
Conspiracy Brother: What do you think? Things don't just happen by accident! Sometimes people — mostly white people — make things happen!
Undercover Brother: So the conspiracies we've believed for all these years are true? The NBA really did institute the three point shot to give white boys a chance?
Conspiracy Brother: Of course!
Undercover Brother: Then the entertainment industry really *is* out to get Spike Lee?
Conspiracy Brother: Come on man! Even Cher's won an Oscar! Cher!
Undercover Brother: Then O.J. really didn't do it?
everyone looks away and mumbles
Literature
- Stephen Marley's books about Chia the Black Dragon Sorceress, Spirit Mirror and Mortal Mask, take place in 2nd century China, but there also appear Indian Buddhists, ancient Egyptians (in the back story) and a few Christians. It is suggested that the mythologies and afterlives of all four religions (Chinese, Buddhist, Egyptian and Christian) all exist. In addition to the Stephen Marley's own original myths and creatures, of course
- This is the whole point of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, in which every god/spirit/devil/etc. that mankind has ever dreamed up are still around, mostly living like normal folks. (For instance, Thoth and Anubis run a funeral parlor.)
- Well actually it's backwards. People do not believe in Gods, fairys, leprechauns and stuff because they exist, they exist because people were there to invent them and they change with time, depending on the picture that their worshipers have of them, as, among others, described with the example of Mad Sweeney (but also in the following novel, Ananzi Boys)
- In K.A. Applegate's Everworld series, every god from every mythology gets together, and they create a parallel universe where they all rule. This causes some problems when every god has an extensive cult, and they're all militant. Kill the heretic for worshiping Aphrodite and not Quetzalcoatl!
- In Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Greek gods are real: features of Greek myths move around depending on where the center of Western civilization is. Olympus is on top of the Empire State Building; the Underworld is in Los Angeles.
- Robert A Heinlein's later novels, beginning with the novel The Number of the Beast (though he used the concept almost 40 years earlier in his short story "Elsewhen"), deal with the World As Myth, and expand it to the multiverse. In his multiverse, All Stories Are True and Exist, somewhere — and if you've read the stories, it's possible to visit the universe in which the story takes place. He shows this by having his four protagonists visit several universes, albeit unknowing. A side effect of this is that all worlds are part of a story, somewhere... and that anyone who writes a story has become the literal God of the universe the story creates.
- Children's author Robin Jarvis loves this trope. The ending of the Wyrd Museum series features the deaths of the Nornir by the Spear of Antioch, as well as the ice giants being finally defeated by the Eye of Balor on a spinning weathercock.
- True in John Barnes's One For The Morning Glory. It's lampshaded as one of the distinguishing marks of the kingdom, to distinguish it from lands that are merely actual.
- The Harold Shea series of short stories features a multiverse much like that of The Number of The Beast.
- While the Fantasy Kitchen Sink of Kitty Norville makes this trope fairly self-evident, a particularly effective and even insightful example occurs in book two when Ahmed explains that Daniel of the lion's den was really a werelion and Enkidu of Gilgamesh was a werecreature as well.
This was thousands of years ago, remember. Humankind and animalkind were closer then—our years in the Garden together were not so long ago. And our kind, the lycanthropes, were the bridge between the two...It saddens me that the tribes in this country do not tell the old tales to one another. If we gathered to tell stories and drink more, there would not be so much fighting, yes?
- In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next and Nursery Crime series all fictional characters are real and exist in a parallel universe called the Well of Stories.
- The entire basis of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy is that all conspiracy theories are true, including the one's that contradict each other.
Live Action TV
- In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, the humans and Cylons both have their own, conflicting, sets of prophecies regarding their mutual future. Series creator Ron Moore has implied in interviews that both visions will prove to be true.
- This is mostly an Ass Pull on the part of Ron Moore, as apparently, the Cylon God is real and the Lords of Kobol are not. Either that or he had no clue what the hell to think.
- Stargate SG-1 has the Ancient Astronauts version of this, with plenty of snarky comments and Lampshade Hanging to go with in regards to the fact. For example, in a recent episode, before setting off, the characters all made a vow that dragons weren't real. And yet, by the end of the cliffhanger episode...
- The short-lived series Special Unit 2 was about a secret police division that dealt with supernatural creatures, which they call "Links". Lampshaded in the pilot episode, as the head of the division explains all such bugaboos (dwarfs, gargoyles, fairies, goblins, gremlins that hide in the walls) are real "except for vampires—good God! Most ridiculous thing I ever heard!" (a little swipe at Buffy and Angel).
- In Big Wolf On Campus, everything from Cerberus to Hell to Mummy curses to Medusa to Cyclops to even Santa Claus turns out to be real.
- One of the Tales of the Gold Monkey ("Legends Are Forever") had Jack Cutter run into an old flying 'buddy' who had the annoying habit of getting him involved in ill-fated searches for legendary treasure in the constant belief that "All legends are based on fact." He assures Jack that this time he's just on a mercy mission, which has nothing to do with a lost African tribe on an island in the South Pacific...
- In any Doctor Who episode, if an alien or a colonist mentions myths of a monster lurking in the ______, the Doctor and his companion(s) will run into it.
Tabletop Games
- One White Wolf game, Scion, posits that every single pantheon of Gods actually exists and that the players are all children of those gods. Scion: God hints that it's a case of life imitating art, as the Gods were once pieces of the Titans who shaped themselves according to human myth. All Myths Are True... because the Gods made them be true.
- In Glorantha, principal setting of Rune Quest, all the (non-Earthly) myths about a wide variety of gods and spirits are all literally true. Especially the ones that utterly contradict one another.
Video Games
- The Thief games feature vague prophecies which imply that antihero protagonist Garrett is a saviour who will protect the world from several menaces. Though he scoffs at this and finds the prophecies ridiculous, he does end up saving the day as foretold. The trope is especially strong in the third game, in which the main villain is thought by the general public to be just a "bogeyman" and is introduced by quotes from Nursery Rhymes.
- In Kingdom Hearts 2, there are Seven Mysteries of Twilight Town, which invariably turn out to be for real when Roxas investigates, and serve as clues to the nature of the world he's been living in. But when Roxas's friend comes along to do the write-up, he assumes it was just a mundane misunderstanding.
- The Nasuverse. In fact, legendary heroes tend to be even more incredible and terrifying than their legends. Who knew Excalibur could fire giant beams of light?
- Well, they do get stronger after death. Also, Fate route briefly mentions that it actually doesn't matter if the person ever lived or not so long as people venerate them.
- This is really only explored in Fate Stay Night, but since they are all part of the Nasuverse, this would apply to all of them. This, of course, can cause contradictions involving the gods in these myths, the myths contradicting each other as well contradicting things that was already established about the Nasuverse in his previous works.
- Turned evil in the form of the Night of Wallachia. Well, not legends, but rumor. "Did you hear that a werewolf haunts this town on the full moon?" Even if there was never a real werewolf, there is one now. And it wants your blood.
- Bungie's Marathon series contains an interesting example. The second game has a single terminal midway through the game that references a S'pht creation myth where the god Yrro (hmmm... sounds like Jjaro) flings a chaotic being into the star that Lh'owon orbits. This terminal is never mentioned by any character for the remainder of the game, even when the Pfhor destroy this star at the finale. This myth then forms the entire plot of the third game, Marathon Infinity. Sure enough, the Yrro/Jjaro stuck a chaotic being in the system's star.
- All of the "legendary" Pokemon exist and can generally be found easily if you just look in the right place. The actual details given for them in the Pokédex could be myth as far as the game is concerned, but the various adaptations of the world treat them as true.
- The mythological Pokédex entries actually seem to be acknowledged in Platinum, where Cyrus assumes that capturing or defeating Giratina will cause both universes to collapse in on each other, since Giratina and nothing else supports one of them. That gets subverted when the player catches Giratina...which ends up Saving Both Worlds.
- Tomb Raider. So far we've had Atlantis, present-day dinosaurs, giant muscular wingless birds, dragons, aliens, Egyptian gods, harpies, living skeletons, demons, shapeshifters, Arthurian and Norse mythology, undead Thralls and a hellish Underworld. This is because, at the prime of its time, the series was built on the Rule Of Cool.
- It's incredible no one mentioned both Persona2 games yet. After all, that was a big plot point!
- In Cave Story, you're told that a mimiga that eats a red flower dies right away.
Turns out to be false It's an urban legend to keep the Mimigas from being tempted into eating them - what happens in reality is much worse.
Western Animation
- Gargoyles practically named the trope when the Weird Sisters (yes, from MacBeth) said "All things are true." The line has become a favorite answer given by Word Of God to certain kinds of fan questions. In a recent comic book, it was subverted by King Arthur (in reference to Arthurian legends): "All things are true... few things are accurate."
- Early on in Jackie Chan Adventures, the only thing supernatural was the titular magic talismans and a few Chinese myths, but filler-episodes soon gave way to just about everything you can think of and then some.
- Played for laughs in an episode about Stonehenge. Apparently, it has some sort of great magical powers, but nobody really knows what it does. Jackie Chan, upon being told this, sarcastically remarks "Yeah, and some people think it's used to contact aliens." The bad guys figure it must be some kind of weapon, and Jackie Chan goes into action to stop them from activating it. Amazingly, the bad guys actually succeed at pulling off their Evil Plan to activate Stonehenge, revealing to everyone present that Stonehenge does... absolutely nothing. Everyone goes home, and then, in the last scene of the episode, a UFO lands at the now-deserted Stonehenge.
- Despite diverse aliens initially being the main shtick, the sci-fi Ben 10 felt the need to make use of this. By season 2, sorcerers, the Krakken, and mall-attacking zombies are all but commonplace. Then they clumsily ret-conned everything away except for the aliens in Ben 10 Alien Force, to the point where everything is alien-based, including super-powered human children.
- Kim Possible. Mystical Monkey Power, big time.
- This trope led to an ontological debate in a three-episode arc of South Park, wherein it is discovered that there's a place known as Imaginationland where everything imagined by people — myths, religions, and deliberate fiction — is in fact real. Turns out, the place is ruled by the "Council of Nine", a body consisting of Aslan, Gandalf, Glinda the Good Witch, Luke Skywalker, Morpheus, Popeye, Wonder Woman, Zeus, and, of course, Jesus.
- In some episodes of the Growing Up Creepie, there appears to be paranormal things like haunted bagpipes, living dolls, alien crop circles, etc. Though Creepie soon finds out to be the cause of bugs. But by the end of an episode, the paranormal turns out to be real after all (the bagpipe really IS haunted by the ghost of its original owner, the doll really IS alive and possibly evil, aliens are real, etc.).
Subversions and Exceptions
Anime
Fairy Tales
- In Sleeping Beauty, when the prince comes and asks after the castle, he gets a whole slew of false answers; although one old man does know the truth, it's not the popular one.
Everyone answered according as they had heard. Some said that it was a ruinous old castle, haunted by spirits.
Others, That all the sorcerers and witches of the country kept there their sabbath or night's meeting.
The common opinion was: That an ogre lived there, and that he carried thither all the little children he could catch, that he might eat them up at his leisure, without anybody being able to follow him, as having himself only the power to pass through the wood.
Literature
- In the Principia Discordia, the founding document of the Discordian religion, the following conversation transpires between two saints:
GP: "Is Eris true?"
M2: "Everything is true."
GP: "Even false things?"
M2: "Even false things are true."
GP: "How can that be?"
M2: "I don't know man, I didn't do it."
- In the Dune novels, the Bene Gesserit have a whole system of false myths called the Missionaria Protectiva. They purposely spread made-up prophecies that any member of their order can fulfill if needed. Thus, a member stranded on an otherwise hostile world can appear to be The Woman From the Prophecy.
- Which ends up biting them in the ass, hard, when Paul Atreides starts fufilling prophecies left and right and the Bene Gesserit are so used to treating prophecies as fakes and tools that they don't see The Messiah in front of their faces until it's too late to do anything about it. Lampshaded by Herbert in one of the Appendixes, an after-action report by the Bene Gesserit that points out all the clues that a lot of people who should have known better ignored. The report concludes that the only explanation is that the Bene Gesserit were themselves in the grip of a higher plan all along: In other words, yep, All Myths Are True and that's what they get for playing with fire.
- Nothing's ever simple in Dune, though. That report was commissioned by the Lady Jessica, Paul's mother, who has a vested interest in maintaining the mythos that is part of Paul's power base.
- In Brandon Sanderson's The Well of Ascension, the Twist Ending is that the prophecies have been deliberately altered by a powerful being in order to manipulate humanity/the heroes into freeing it.
- The stories in the Magic The Gathering anthology The Myths of Magic are false, either because they contradict existing canon or because they contradict each other.
- Also from Magic, the name Lord of the Wastes originally referred to a Benalish mythological figure, but was later used as a name for Yawgmoth. However, the description of the Lord of the Wastes didn't match Yawgie at all, other than that they were both evil overlords.
- In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, many divining methods are actually just "talking to Dust", the sentient matter forming most of the universe. Averted, however, in that most religions may actually be lies created by the authority to control everything.
Tabletop Games
- Subverted in White Wolf's Mage: the Awakening, where part of being a mage is sorting through which myths are true and which are not. Note that, in this case, "true" probably means "contains a tiny kernel of actual supernatural, historical or cosmic insight which was either implanted or leaked through into the human consciousness", while "not true" probably means "was deliberately fabricated by other mages in order to mislead those who would seek the truth, was deliberately fabricated by other mages in order manipulate the course of human culture, or was just a myth that people came up with".
Live Action TV
- Subverted as a Running Gag throughout BuffyTheVampireSlayer and Angel. Despite living in a world where vampires, werewolves, witches, dragons, demons and zombies are all real and have been encountered by the main cast at one point or another, everyone agrees completely unanimously that leprechauns aren't real.
Video Games
- The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind features an exception, in that the particulars of a certain historical event relevant to the main plot of the game is recounted differently by different parties. This is more a case of deliberate revisionism. The main quest still requires the player to live up to a prophecy's version of the champion against the Big Bad. He turns out to be something of a Well Intentioned Extremist.
- Arguably, an underlying theme throughout the Elder Scrolls series is that different, contradictory mythologies are all simultaneously true. There were some seven different endings for The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall depending upon the final decision of the player; the succeeding games describe all the possible endings having occurred, despite the contradictions involved.
- The Game Boy game Final Fantasy Legend II (SaGa 2 in Japan) avoids this. One world your characters explore has a myth that turns out to be true and another myth that turns out to be false. Also, there are actually 78 "MAGI", not the 77 that you are told about at the beginning of the game.
- In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Professor Frankly encounters conflicting theories on the nature of the treasure he's looking for.
- Eventually one of the theories turns out to be true: the treasure is an ancient demon. But later it is revealed that the 'real' treasure was a Dried Shroom, the weakest healing item in the game.
- In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, the heroes learn that a medallion holds a dark god who will bring The End Of The World As We Know It if freed, and it can be freed by Magic Music or a huge war. The fact that certain people can become mindless berserkers by wielding the relic reinforces this belief. But in the sequel, Radiant Dawn it turns out to be a lie spread by the Dragon Laguz king in vain hopes that it'll prevent war between everyone in Tellius. In truth, endless war will actually awaken the goddess Ashera, who will see the wars as a sign that those living in Tellius are failures, and must be purged away to allow for a perfect world.
- In the Shadow Hearts series all myths are true, though very often in ridiculous, bizarre and over the top ways.
Web Comics
- Myths and superstitions in Tales Of The Questor tend to be problematic after a few too many generations. Some of them end up being accurate, but for each one that actually is, you've got a few dozen that are corrupted from translation issues or pure age, and hundreds that are plain false or started up from illogical premises. It's also a rule for the setting that no one can see the future, so prophecy tends to always be wrong.
- In Thunderstruck
 , the two leads are sisters. One is an atheist (but not a Hollywood Atheist) and the other is a Christian, but not Holier Than Thou. They're both wrong. The series also has a Fantasy Kitchen Sink.
- Subverted in this Abe Kroenen comic. Of course, everyone present takes the fact that Atlantis exists in the first place as unsurprising.
- Subverted in The Order Of The Stick, where the Norse and Sumerian pantheons and 12 Chinese zodiacal gods all exist in the Stickverse, but the Greek pantheon — probably the best-known to most readers — does not. Even the names of Zeus, et al, are considered silly by Oot S characters. Justified in that the Greek pantheon was wiped out en masse by the Snarl before the current world's creation.
Western Animation
- In one episode of The Real Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters must deal with a creature from Irish folklore. According to legend, the creature can only be stopped by a four-leaf clover. All the characters go out searching for one, except Egon, who, playing the role of Agent Scully, insists that the creature can be captured using the same "scientific" methods they always use. In the end, the four-leaf clover fails (it was a fake taken from a parade float), and Egon saves the day by capturing the creature "scientifically", exactly as he said he would.
- Despite this exception, the show generally followed this trope faithfully, as did its sequel Extreme Ghostbusters.
- Another "exception to the rule" episode: Ben 10 devoted an episode to the Navajo legend of the Yenaldooshi, as told by one of Max's former teammates. In the end, the Monster Of The Week turned out to be a mere alien (though one that would prove to be important later), and all of the folklore was a red herring. Even the parts where Ben was "infected".
- The trope is inverted in most Scooby Doo series - the monster is always simply a person in a costume.
- This troper thinks that the characters should have caught on by now and stopped believing that every single ghost they encounter is real. Not very Genre Savvy of them.
- There are a few times where the monster turns out to be real.
Other
- Bionicle has made liberal use of this, though most of the myths have been distorted through the ages, and the rest have other things keeping them from being perfectly straight examples:
- In the first few years of the franchise, each time a new threat appeared, the Turaga elders had a legend ready to explain their presence. Eventually, the Toa got rather annoyed with being kept out of the loop until the last minute, finally getting the Turaga to explain just where they got all their information:
- The original backstory said that the Great Spirit brought the Matoran out of darkness to the island of Mata Nui. We later find out that it was actually the Turaga who rescued them (as Toa Metru) from their ruined city of Metru Nui, they just credited the Spirit with giving them the strength and abilities to do so. (They also treated Metru Nui's existence as a Greatest Story Never Told to keep the Matoran from remembering and getting homesick.)
- One story said that poor workers were sent to the dreaded realm of Karzahni to be punished. In truth, poor workers were sent to Karzahni to be fixed; it's just that Karzahni was a really crappy healer and he never let anyone leave.
- One legend that isn't real is that of the monster Irnakk — that is, it wasn't real, until the Piraka entered an area that brought worst fears to life... (Thankfully, Irnakk only existed briefly before vanishing.)
WebOriginal
- Playfully averted in Tales Of MU, where magic is real, gods are real, but myths are just myths, with conflicting legends from different cultures presented alongside each other being a recurring side feature.
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