A situation where multiple actions (crimes, misdeeds, heroic feats...) committed by different people with a shared trait (job, hobby, hair color, being from Florida...) are attributed to a single fictional (or the original) person with that trait.
Suspect Is Hatless is one way this can happen. A subtrope of Invented Individual.
See also Julius Beethoven da Vinci (multiple historical figures are stated to have been the same person) and Historical Rap Sheet (a single person is behind many of humanity's darker moments). Compare Composite Character, Copycat Killer, Peeve Goblins.
Contrast Collective Identity, where multiple people intentionally portray themselves as the same individual.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Gamma, the Magical Girl Warrior Lily Cure a.k.a. Yuri Kitajishi (her uncostumed persona) is believed to have been the single strongest Super Hero to ever live. Later in the story, it is revealed that Lily Cure was actually a team of two exceptionally strong superheroines who were weaker than some of their peers individually, but unbeatable as a duo. Unfortunately, in the same battle that Yuri had lost her powers, her partner Midori sacrificed not just her life but all records and memories of herself to save Yuri's life, who then went on to be remembered as the ultimate Magical Girl.
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: The Laughing Man turns out to be such a case, with only the first cyber-crime being committed by the original hacker and the others by copy-cats, a case of the titular Stand Alone Complex.
Comedy
- The Hustler, Vanderbilt University's parody newspaper, mocked the description of a criminal as the totally unhelpful "six foot tall black man" by writing an article about the six-foot-tall black man's long reign of terror, ascribing every crime committed in Nashville since the 1970s to the same six-foot-tall black man described in police reports.
Comic Books
- Green Manor: Played for Drama: A police inspector discovers that the extremely prolific Serial Killer John Smith, who kills with a different method every time and leaving a letter reading "I will kill again", is actually a huge number of copycat killers who independently hit on the idea of murdering an Asshole Victim and blaming it on the original killer (something the general public will never accept, especially since he only puts the pieces together after one of them confessed). He then gets himself arrested, putting an end to the murders by taking the blame for them. A fellow inspector is shown to be cutting up an "I will kill again" letter on hearing the news, implying he too was going to murder his overbearing wife.
- The Punisher MAX: The Broad Street Killaz are a small hit squad with a terrifying reputation. It turns out a lot of contract killings committed by them are actually performed (for free) by unaffiliated gang members hoping to join them.
Jokes
- There's an old(ish) joke that goes "Every 30 seconds in the UK, a woman gives birth. Boy, she must be exhausted!" A variant is "Every 30 minutes, a man in New York City is robbed. That poor guy!"
- Inverted in one joke where an Army officer is swamped with work while his coworkers seem to have a One-Hour Work Week. He complains about it to a sympathetic officer at a bar, who tells him "There's a trick I use when that happens: Everything in my in-tray gets stamped with "Send to Major John Smith for approval" and goes straight to the out-tray, there's bound to be someone with that name and rank". Three guesses what the overworked officer's name and rank are...
Literature
- Nineteen Eighty-Four: Heavily implied. It is unknown whether Big Brother, the mastermind behind the Party and its draconian rule over Oceania, is a real person or a construct of all of the major Inner Party members created to instill fear and loyalty.
- The gods of the Discworld are created by belief, and because humans tend to work along similar lines (the Top God is always going to be a Grandpa God with a beard because that's how a five year old sees his father), a single god can be in several different pantheons at once: the Fertility Goddess has a lot of wigs and a padded bra, Blind Io (a combination of Zeus, Odin and Thor) has a dozen different hammers with which to cause thunder and is the only god able to do that (although every god can bring down lightning bolts, 'cause you gotta smite the blasphemers with something).
- In the Lensman series, Kinnison and Worsel create a fictitious Director of Lensmen, Star A Star, as a cover story. Afterwards, various Boskonian leaders attribute various actions of Kinnison, Nadreck, and other lensmen to this Star A Star.
- In the short story "Sam Hall" by Poul Anderson, a secretly rebellious functionary involved in inputting data to a Master Computer covering events throughout a near-future totalitarian USA creates a fictional rebel/terrorist named "Sam Hall", and falsely ascribes various crimes and incidents to him at random. The fictitious Sam Hall ends up being a folk hero and inspiring a revolution.
- Michael Moore points out in his book Stupid White Men that every crime he ever hears about seems to be committed by an unidentified black man. This leads to Moore theorising that every reported crime in America is actually being committed by the same man.
- The Unadulterated Cat:
- It's claimed that all "Travelling Cats" — i.e. the ones that make news headlines after showing up thousands of miles from home, and are frequently named Oscar for some reason — are all actually the same cat, a smallish black and white tom which is trying to get somewhere, but keeps getting lost due to its inability to provide directions a human can understand.
- It goes on to suggest that Oscar is in fact a sort of feline Flying Dutchman who has been cursed to walk the earth ever since the 4th-century Bishop of Smyrna, St. Eric, tripped over it and wished for it to go away and never come back (It also notes that some evidence suggests Oscar may have had a litter of kittens, which does make "a tiny hole" in the theory, but "nothing that a reasonable grant couldn't plug").
- Watership Down has the rabbits recount some of the exploits of El-ahrairah, the first rabbit, and their greatest trickster. El-ahrairah, the "Prince with a Thousand Enemies," is portrayed as an ingenious and innovative rabbit who routinely outsmarts his adversaries. A typical rabbit couldn't live long enough to have so many achievements, so the cunning of the Prince's descendants has been ascribed to him. It not only makes for good storytelling among the rabbits, but also works as a "con man's handbook" of trickery.
- One minor character in a Serge Storms novel thought himself clever to have "UNKNOWN" as his license plate number, until he found himself blamed for every vehicular crime in the state where nobody got the plate of the car responsible.
Live-Action TV
- CSI: New York has an episode ("Dead Recononing") where the twist is based on "The Phantom of Heilbronn", where a spate of crimes involving the same person turns out to be due to a woman in one of the factories where their swabs are produced not wearing gloves.
"Am I in trouble?"
- The Elementary episode "On the Scent" also fictionalises the "Phantom of Heilbronn" affair, with a number of unrelated murders thought to have been committed by a serial murderer due to contamination of forensic kits with a factory worker's DNA.
- One television show animated by the French comedy group Les Nuls included a segment named Régis est un con ("Régis is a dumbass") which consist in a short video of someone doing something funny introduced by the sentence "Today, Régis does [something related to the video]", and the hosts pretend each scene from the segment are footages from the same very dumb person (Régis is a French male give name). The formula has become memetic in France: "Régis does [X]" is a common shorthand for expressing a "What an idiot!" reaction to something.
Mythology and Religion
- Syncretism
is the merging of religious or philosophical concepts into a new whole. For example, it's been theorized that Zeus' legendary libido and pursuit of family members is the result of lumping together every local thunder god's dating history into the same god, so what was an unrelated thunder god and fertility goddess having a child became Zeus fathering Persephone on his sister Demeter.
Theatre
- Cats has Old Deuteronomy be kidnapped by rogue cats. Demeter and Bomburalina sing about a cat named Macavity, a name synonymous with "Napoleon of Feline Crime." Macavity is infamous for many instances of larceny and subterfuge, yet cannot be pinned to any crime because "Macavity's not there." It's left unclear how many crimes in the song are Macavity's doing, engineered by Macavity, or simply accredited to Macavity so that the true culprits evade justice.
Video Games
- In the Dragon Age universe, there's the Friends of Red Jenny, a sprawling collective of individuals who are extremely loosely organized; they perform various underhanded actions, ranging from petty larceny to outright murder, in order to stick it to members of the upper class who are dishonest or cruel to those beneath them. There is no actual Red Jenny (it's speculated there might have once been a person with that moniker, but the loose organization means nobody knows for sure and she'd be long dead by the present anyway), but "she" is frequently blamed for the work of "her" friends.
- Persona 5: Inverted. The Phantom Thieves, a group comprised of eight individuals, are believed to be the perpetrators behind a series of murders caused by mental shutdowns and psychotic breakdowns. The true culprit is actually one person, Akechi.
Webcomics
- Inverted in Ennui GO!, where "Florida Man" actually is a single immortal (maybe) man whose exploits include releasing alligators into urban areas, publicly insulting Castro, robbing banks, trying to detonate a nuke, and rescuing two girls from a sinking car.
- NEXT!!! Sound of the Future: Because of Hatsune Miku androids having the same name and similar appearances, some humans will mistakenly view every Hatsune Miku as being the same person, and attribute every song sung by a Miku as belonging to a vague individual "Hatsune Miku" despite there being over a thousand different ones.
Web Original
- In the Joueur du Grenier universe, the same company is singlehandedly responsible for every mediocre-to-bad video game there is, aptly named Bad Games, Inc.:
- David Goodenough (the name of an actual developer on XPerts) became a recurring character when reimagined as an apathetic project leader with a Meaningful Name, responding to any criticism with a shrug and pointing out a Trivially Obvious positive point about the game (such as "the box closes correctly"). It reached the point where the actual David Goodenough's page is sometimes vandalized by replacing his photo with one of Seb as the character.
- Jean-Michel Bruitage ("Sound Effects"), an inept sound designer whose "work" includes recording his synthesizer's output when wiping it clean, putting no music because he had to sell his synthesizer to make rent that month, repeating the same three or four notes (when he was testing if the keyboard still worked), and using this sound for a dying giant scorpion.
- According to his outfit, wig, and mannierisms, the director of Captain America (1979) television film and the Resident Evil Film Seriesnote is the same person.
- The "Florida Man" meme stems from deliberately interpreting every "Florida Man [Does Something Bizarre]" headline as being the work of the same man from Florida. He is often further interpreted to be a terrible superhero, an underachieving supervillain, and even the Anthropomorphic Personification of Chaotic Stupid and/or Crystal Meth. See also the Florida Man subreddit chronicling his adventures.
- Due to the overuse of Running Over the Plot in many an isekai, "Truck-kun" is interpreted as the same heroic sentient truck prowling the streets of Japan, looking for high-school teenagers or salarymen to run over and send to fantasy realms in need of defeating demon lords.
- The entry titles for the "Jane Complain" entries on Not Always Right imply that every customer who complains just for the sake of complaining is the same person, Jane Complain. Not Always Working does something similar with "Clive", the world's most clueless employee.
Real Life
- Ireland had a serial offender named Prawo Jazdy who was ticketed more than 50 times for speeding and parking offenses but evading police by giving a different home address every time... until it turned out that it's Polish for "Driver's License", not a name. The Gárdaí were simply misreading the driver's licenses of Polish visitors.
- Over the course of sixteen years (1993-2009), investigators in Europe found DNA from the same woman at forty crime scenes in three countries. "The Phantom of Heilbronn'', as she was called managed, to avoid identification for years. Then, it was discovered that the cotton swabs used for testing that DNA all came from the same shipment. The "phantom" turned out to be a worker at the manufacturing plant where the swabs were made who accidentally contaminated them with her DNA.
- In Philology, some works denominated pseudepigrapha had been attributed to "pseudo-[X]", where "X" was the name of an author. They are especially common in Biblical and Classical scholarship. The cause for this runs the gamut from a pupil taking dictation from the purported author, a pupil reminding his master's teachings to outright forgeries.
- There have been a number of cases where a Vanity License Plate reading "NO PLATE", "NO TAG", "NULL", or the like has resulted in the owner receiving large numbers of tickets from all the traffic violators with no license plates.
- An interesting historical case of this happening accidentally: A common nickname for gay men was "Friends of Dorothy", after Judy Garland's character from the 1939 The Wizard of Oz. In the 1970s, the Naval Investigative Service in Chicago was investigating homosexual military personnel (which, at the time, called for dismissal from the military), and became convinced that "Dorothy" was a real person, and so launched a hunt for this mysterious "Dorothy" that so many gay men claimed to be a friend of, in hopes of getting her to reveal homosexual military personnel.
- The infamous Jack the Ripper is speculated to be multiple people assumed as a singular killer bu some historians.
