Basic Trope: If a character appears to have done something bad but they haven't, everyone will assume they did the bad thing despite knowing them better.
- Straight: Alice is a huge Animal Lover and is known among her social circle for being a very amiable, virtuous woman. However, when her nemesis, Bob, takes a photo of her playing basketball and edits it to make it look like she's slam-dunking a cat, everybody who sees it believes she really did slam-dunk the cat, even her boyfriend Charlie, her best friend Diane, and her parents Emily and Franklin.
- Exaggerated: Alice literally wouldn't hurt a fly, she's done many heroic acts up to and including preventing an Apocalypse How, and Bob did a very bad job of editing the photo. However, when everyone sees it, they believe she not only slam-dunked the cat, but that she has an Evil Plan to kill all the cats in the world.
- Downplayed: While Charlie, Diane, Emily, and Franklin don't believe the photo is real and are set on clearing Alice's name, the general populace still believes it's real, despite her having a reputation as a kind animal lover.
- Justified:
- Everyone in the cast is quite dense and gullible, with the exception of Alice and Bob themselves.
- Bob brainwashed everyone.
- Inverted: Alice is a notorious villain known for hurting animals, but when Bob (for whatever reason) edits a photo to make it look like she's petting a cat, everybody assumes she's turned over a new leaf.
- Subverted: When Charlie sees the edited photo of Alice, he looks shocked. Alice says, "Come on, honey, you know me better than that", but then he clarifies that he was just shocked that someone would try to frame his girlfriend.
- Double Subverted: Even though Charlie is on Alice's side, many people still fall for the edited photo, even Diane.
- Parodied: The edit is way too extremely obvious (Alice's head was pasted on a video of Michael Jordan performing a slam dunk, Alice being a Caucasian woman measuring four feet when wearing dominatrix boots who has never owned anything with the logo of the Chicago Bulls and the video has an announcer clearly yelling "another awesome move by Michael Jordan!" and the 'slam-dunked cat' is just adding a meow when the ball goes through the ring) and everyone still buys it.
- Zigzagged: Everybody keeps changing their minds over whether they think Alice really dunked the cat.
- Averted:
- When Bob edits the photo to make Alice look like she's slam-dunking a cat, no one falls for it.
- Bob decides to frame George, who would more plausibly harm a cat, instead of Alice.
- Enforced:
- Lampshaded: "C'mon, guys, I thought you knew me better than that!"
- Invoked:
- Exploited: Bob does this to cause a rift between her and her friends, family, and boyfriend.
- Defied: "There's no way she slam-dunked a cat. We know her better than that. This has to be fake!"
- Discussed: "But what if someone photographs me and edits the picture to make it look like I'm slam-dunking a cat, and everyone thinks the photo is real?!"
- Conversed: "C'mon! Why are all the characters suddenly assuming that Alice — the same Alice who volunteers at the animal shelter and has saved several lives — would harm a cat?! Have they never heard of digital manipulation?"
- Implied: Alice says she's loved by everyone about five seconds before everybody reads a Tweet on their phones, and then we cut to a few hours later with Alice being chased by a horde of citizens armed with Torches and Pitchforks.
- Deconstructed: Alice decides to burn all of her bridges when she sees how little trust everybody else truly seems to have for her, even those who should treasure it the most.
- Reconstructed: What comes around goes around - Alice manufactures fake news of her own and sits back as Bob enters a similar hell, which becomes worse when his true misdeeds are eventually exposed.
- Played for Laughs: Alice grows increasingly more frustrated as everyone gives her Death Glares and calls her a "cat-dunker", and then actual cats start growling and hissing at her.
- Played for Drama: Charlie breaks up with Alice, Emily and Franklin disown her, and Diane cuts ties with her.
- Played for Horror:
- Everyone's scorn of Alice as the result of the edited photo ends up summoning a demon who feeds on hatred.
- Alice snaps and exacts violent retribution against everyone who turned on her.
- A member of an Animal Wrongs Group kills Alice for the alleged cat dunking. It's a violent, tortuous kill as an alleged message to other cat dunkers, and when it's inevitably revealed that it was faked, the group member undergoes Sanity Slippage and quadruples down on the violence, slaying Bob as part of his spree and ascending to the position of the true villain of the tale.
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