Archived Discussion Main / TruthAndLies

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

From Cassandra Confession Discussion

Susan Davis: I'd like to nominate Purloined Letter Confession as a replacement name for this trope. Cassandra, while widely disbelieved, wasn't deceptive... and Poe's "The Purloined Letter" is arguably this trope applied to something other than a Secret Identity.

Seth: I would like to veto that since i have never heard of that story.

Tabby: But the letter was actually disguised as something else — turned inside-out and with someone else's seal on it, if my memory of the Wishbone adaptation is correct — while what's happening in this trope is the unvarnished truth.

Seth: If that's true then it isn't even an example of the trope.

Robert: Cassandra told truths no one believed, which fits this trope well enough. I think there are some cases where a character tells the truth without deceptive intent, but isn't believed because the truth is too outrageous, which would also fall under this trope.

Fast Eddie: Finding myself in a territory where I might be disagreeing with Robert. A scary place, indeed. The intent of the trope is truth presented as a lie. Cassandra is not on. No intent to lie. Purloined Letter is not on. No intent to truth.

We need a kinds-of-lies category. This is one of them: truth as a lie.

Seth: I like this name, its mnemonic and while not spot on i think it works. That and i can't think of a better one (Just please dont use "Purloined Letter", i would never remember that)

If you really fixed on the name change idea how about Sarcastic Confession, its just as mnemonic and it fits the trope to a T. (Since Rob rewrote his entire post - including reference to mine - i moved this before Roberts post for clarification chronological order and all that)

Robert: I'd say if it's true it can't be a lie, but it can be a deception. Which categories we want depends how finely we want to dice them.

If we go by narrative function, natural categories would be

• Outright Lie - knowing falsehood spoken with intent to deceive
• Metaphor - knowing falsehood spoken without intent to deceive
  • Metaphor mistakenly taken literally - standard comic device
• Spin - carefully selected truths, intended to deceive, the hallmark of advertisers and politicians.
• Truth - plain truth, spoken without deceptive intent.
  • Cassandra - Truth that is not believed.

The trope on this page is a sub-type of spin - plain truth, deceptively presented to imply it's false. If they intended to be believed, they'd present things differently.

We could conflate it with with Cassandra - they're both instances of a truth not believed, though for different reasons - but the two concepts serve different narrative purposes, so I'd prefer to split them.

If we do, Sarcastic Confession would be a good name for this page. Cassandra Confession would be the page for examples where someone tries to tell the truth, but isn't believed, and we might also want The Cassandra for the character who does this regularly - the prophet-of-doom-crying-in-the-wilderness type.

Oh, and 'scary'? Disagreeing with me? Since when? I could introduce you to dozens of people who've done that, not all of them dead.

Fast Eddie: Not all of them dead? So reassured. :-)

I think you are on to something meaty, here, with Deceptions as an index. Your breakdown is right on ... frack it. I'll put up Deceptions with your splits, and we shall see what comes.

Seth: So when creating these pages are we going with Roberts description? And if so do we just rename Cassandra Confession to Cassandra Truth?

Fast Eddie: That's my take, on the Cassandra thing. The article will need a few tweaks, to fit. For the rest of your question, we should probably wait for Robert to roll around. My take is that those are good thesis statements.

Robert: I agree. I was thinking as much when I wrote it, but wanted to see other peoples reaction first.

Hopefully we can keep the simple four-fold division — true truths, true lies = metaphor, lying lies, and lying truths=spin — and list the various types of each under those headings. The important questions are is deception intended, and is it true.

It's easier to talk about deception and falsehood, not the same thing, if they're contrasted with truth and honesty.

As sub-pages are created, some of the text can probably be moved off this page.

Seth: The problem is while we can use examples of un-believed truth, misunderstood metaphors and what not we cant create an entry on Lies or Simple Truth because they are such basic concepts that we only notice them when they are absent (Like i said in another discussion, its like an entry on Air: Most characters breath it, rarely subverted). You would need to list every piece of media in existence as examples or list non at all if we were to make a page on it. So what do we do with those entries? Do we create a stub with a little description to avoid the red link or leave them red?

Robert: Either make them both a redirect to this page, which would look more uniform or don't make them links at all.

Another subtype of true lie is dismissive responses like 'And I'm the Queen of Sheba' or 'And then we'll all live happily ever after', said in response to some unbelievable claim. It's obviously false, and not intended to believed; rather the clear implication is that the original claim was equally absurd. While not a metaphor, it's subject to the same kind of literal misinterpretation tropes as metaphors. Name?

Also, there's a reason for the order of paragraphs on this page. The Sarcastic Confession, is a type of deception, more specifically of Spin. Indeed, once Spin gets its own page, Sarcastic Confession would go best on that page, not this one. Similarly, the big lie is a specific type of outright lie, not a coequal category.

Seth: So since its been a while and no one has objected im going to change this page into a redirect and create Truth and Lies as the new index. >> Later: Done

HeartBurn Kid: Ummm... Bush ''did'' say Saddam was an imminent threat, in his 2003 State of the Union address. Personally, I feel that the "Big Lie" here was what Bush said, not that he said it, but perhaps we should just remove the example, in the interest of not turning this page into a political flamewar.

Seth: I know we aren't a NPOV site but i would still say remove it, it is a bit inflammatory.

Looney Toons: My original text — which was altered into what was eventually removed by someone calling himself "norms" — was, I feel, a bit less inflammatory, and I have restored it.

YYZ: My personal opinion is that both sides of that particular debate have given in to the temptation of the Big Lie - accordingly, I added another theory that a similarly large number of people find ludicrous.

Looney Toons: Works for me — and thanks for catching a couple of my smaller errors in that passage.

Eric DVH: Doesn't work for me. The thing about the first two lies (from Hitler and Bush) is that their untruth is NOT a theory, but an exhaustively proven fact. The truth of whoever is ultimately responsible for various "terrorist" attacks is still a poorly answered question, with the open wording (you didn't specifically mention 9/11) certainly not helping any, given the fact that our government has at least previously admitted to almost carrying out such incidents (known as false flag operations in the intelligence community) such as Operation Northwoods. If you want to balance it out, choose a lie that has been conclusively proven as a lie. Since the World Wars and the War On Terror are in there, I thought I'd add one from the Cold War.

Ununnilium: You know what? No. Just no. I'm pulling all the quotes now because the Flame War potential is just too great.