Characters who keep digging themselves deeper while trying to clarify an unintentionally unfortunate remark in Anime and Manga.
- In Angel Densetsu, this happens to a nosebleeding Kuroda who meets Ryoko (his crush) at this time.Kuroda: N... No, it wasn't Kitano-san who did this to me ... and it wasn't from some unfamiliar girl kicking me, it just started flowing as I stood here, thinking of you ... Ah ... no, no they weren't like...those kind of thoughts ... I just, um, really want to eat chocolate when I think about you ... B ... But wait, that doesn't mean I really want to eat you! I just ...
Kuroda's Lackeys: (What the hell is he saying?) - Early in Air, Yukito's explanation about why he was hugging Kano is like this and leads to Hijiri getting angry and charging him with scalpels. Luckily, Misuzu's intervention means that Hijiri's reaction is Played for Laughs.
- Kaorin has this one in Azumanga Daioh: Supplementary Materials:Kaorin: (Sigh) Sakaki is so cool...
Osaka: Kaorin, are you gay?
Kaorin: The correct term is lesbian! Uh, not that I'm a lesbian!! It's just, you know, a teenage thing. That's all. Anyway, that's not what I meant when I said she was cool. Just to prove it, I wouldn't mind if she was a guy!
(Beat)
Osaka: Huh? - A Running Gag with Romio from Boarding School Juliet is his tendency to run into trouble, and his attempts to talk his way out of it only makes it worse for himself. When Juliet told him that she wasn't bothered by Romio having a Porn Stash (which wasn't his to begin with anyway), Romio told her that he wasn't interested in any other girls' breasts but Juliet's. He immediately regretted saying that.
- Played for catharsis in The Creation Alchemist Enjoys Freedom. The plot is kicked off by Duke Bragas Regus having his son kidnapped from the government office/apartment where he works by a contingent of knights, dragged back to the family home, and proceeds to not only berate him himself, but has the entire household staff mock him for daring to have a non-combat class, and then summarily banishes him to what he believes to be certain death in the country known as Demon King Territory, and to make sure the boy utterly hates him, renders him unconscious by punching him in the gut for good measure, after doing his best to try and drive him to suicide for at least six years, starting at age 10. In less than a week, this turns around to bite him, hard, and his knee-jerk responses keep making it worse until he's facing felonies just shy of high treason.
- Mistake 1: When the crown asks for an update on the royal holy sword he volunteered to have repaired, he is so dismissive of the alchemy profession that he doesn't go to the guild himself but instead tasks his head butler to go with the order "Get it fixed, no matter what" since failing a royal commission would shame him and his house.
- Mistake 2: When the butler gets to the alchemy guild and is informed that nobody currently working at the guild can even come close to working on it, let alone fix it, the butler quickly realizes that mocking Thor, rather than standing up for him, and letting the Duke banish him may have been a mistake, but rather than inform the duke while there was any chance of salvaging the situation, instead goes with his orders and orders the guild-master to simply make it look repaired, and when the guildmaster balks, thinks nothing of using the house seal to sign a contract absolving the guild of blame. When the duke gets the sword, he just assumes it's ceremonial anyway, and it doesn't matter, as long as it looks good.
- Mistake 3: When he's at party hosted by the crown, he's bragging for the umpteenth time how he's proud to have banished his "incompetent" son to "appease those savages in Demon King Territory" and is given the cold-shoulder by the crown princess Liana. Confused and feeling slighted, he demands, in public, to know why. She responds by tearing into him for putting her life in danger by delivering a sword that was pieced together out of sub-standard materials which shattered when she took it into battle.
- Mistake 4: He tries to blame the alchemist's guild for the error to save face. Liana responds by presenting the contract signed with his house seal, indicating that he ordered the sword be put together poorly to make it look whole when it wasn't.
- Mistake 5: Desperate to recover his reputation and standing, he goes with a hair-brained scheme to gain accomplishments by stealing silver from a mine at the border with Demon King Territory and bribing General Respalgia with some of the stolen silver, planning to shift the blame to Thor if things go wrong. This enrages the general, who is a man of honor, and has a debt of gratitude to Thor, to the point that he considers Thor his son-in-law. Word of the duke's treachery reaches both Demon King Rukia and the emperor, both of whom condemn him.
- Result: He is stripped of the duke title, demoted to count, and sent to the front lines to "lessen his sins." Being a coward, he's horrified and tries to plead and beg to get out of the sentence, but is denied. But he's not done.
- Mistake 6: When he's ordered to write an apology letter to Thor, he puts forward absolutely no sincerity and makes it glaringly obvious that he's trying to make Thor an imperial mole and betray his friends in Demon King Territory. Thor makes the letter public and gives the imperial messenger a polite "NOT A CHANCE IN HELL!"
- Result 2: With the apology letter's failure, he's informed that he can kiss any hope of amnesty good-bye and it's only because of Thor's existence that he's not summarily executed. He breaks down in despair and has to be carried out of Zagran's mannor and office.
- Played for Drama in The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want a Fourth Time. Heinz, leader of the Five Colored Blades adventuring party, kicks off the plot by taking a hand-delivered note from Baronet Bestero as fact and attacks Darcia, Vandalieu's mother, ultimately condemning her to three days of horrific and public torture and public immolation, for the "crime" of daring to get pregnant and give birth to Van in the first place. He spends the next 10 years desperately fleeing his guilt and giving himself a Redemption Quest in the form of bringing down the very system of oppression that brought the quest about. Problem is, he is devoted to the god Alda who is entirely human supremacist, to the point of genocide. As such, Heinz still takes those types of quests without thinking, and then does little more than preaching in the town square about how persecution is wrong, so he rescues another dhampir, Selen, and lets his party tell him that he's successfully atoned, when he hasn't even come close. Naturally, Van sees this all as deeply insulting, and the goddess Vida, who created the very races Alda's trying to eradicate, actively agrees. Refusing to own up to his actions, Heinz just keeps getting worse and worse until he and Van come as close as possible to "kill on sight" with each other.
- Happens in episode 7 of Durarara!!, when some poor sod attempts to talk down Shizuo with flattery and compares him to a really popular Bishōnen actor, Yuuhei Hanejima. Unfortunately for him, said actor is actually Shizuo's little brother, whom Shizuo is very protective of, and he instinctively interprets the namedrop as an attempt to invade Yuuhei's privacy through him. Of course, since the poor sod doesn't know this, he just thinks Shizuo's suddenly angry because he hates Yuuhei — so he rescinds his previous statement and calls Yuuhei an asshole. The only thing surprising about what happens next is that the poor sod actually survived.
- In FLCL, Mamimi confronts Naota and accuses him of having a crush on Haruko, to which Naota replies, "How can you like someone who's insane?" The problem is that Mamimi is a pyromaniac arsonist, and Naota knows this.
- A dramatic example occurs in Happy Yarou Wedding when a drunken makeout session is suddenly halted by Yuuhi and Todou fears he's made him uncomfortable and lies that he mistook him for his dead wife. Since Yuuhi had stopped because he was shocked to realize he was in love with Todou, this crushes him and he decides to never return. Todou then persistently texts him with messages like "I have no interest in men" and "sorry for making you feel bad" in attempt to get him to come back, but of course, this just makes Yuuhi even more upset.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha INNOCENT has Nanoha attempting to explain away her crush on Fate after the latter rescued her.Arisa: She's been worrying about you aaaaaaaaall day, Fate. And she just couldn't take her eyes off you when she first saw you.
Nanoha: NO- I, uh- I was just thinking about how cool you looked... and how pretty you are... - In Maria no Danzai, after Maria kidnaps him, stuffs him in a Drowning Pit and wordlessly makes clear her intent to kill him, Kowase promptly assumes that this is retribution for bullying and sexually abusing Yashima, and starts running his mouth to downplay his actions. He tries to reason with Maria that what he did to Yashima wasn't that bad, because Yashima didn't put up much resistance at the time and didn't make a big deal out of his actions (never mind the fact that he was blackmailing her). This only serves to make Maria angrier at him, as she recalls how her late son Kiritaka, who was bullied and sent to his death by Kowase and his friends two years ago, kept all his suffering to himself because he didn't want to upset her.
- In One Piece, during the Wano arc, Who's Who attempts to ask Jinbe about the Sun God Nika, having heard the name in passing when he was still in prison and assuming that Jinbe, having captained the Sun Pirates, might know something. That Who's Who bases this assumption on Nika supposedly being a figure revered for liberating slaves and his associating the fishmen with slavery does nothing but piss off Jinbe, who summarily breaks his fingers, his hands and his face while angrily telling Who's Who that they have nothing to discuss.
- Kurando Wada falls victim to an exaggerated case in Popcorn Avatar. Thanks to a previous incident when a bump to the head made him regress to the hyperactive, skirt-flipping personality he had as a 9-year-old, all the girls in his class start treating him like he's a dangerous pervert. He assures them that he has no interest in what's under their clothes, which they automatically take as an insulting comparison to Lisa Vayu. He immediately counters that he doesn't even like big breasts, only for Lisa to put a hand on his shoulder right after he says it. While she's painfully punishing him for that, he tells her she has the best breasts in the world... just when his sister happens to walk in looking for him.
- Rebuild World:
- When Katsuya meets Sheryl, she ends up buying coffee at the Hunter's Office shop because it's the cheapest thing on the menu and she's poor. As an excuse to keep up her guise as a Fake Aristocrat, she claims it's because she's on a diet. Thus Katsuya digs himself deeper saying she has Curves in All the Right Places, inadvertently calling Sheryl fat.
- When Akira, who has grown taller and more muscular gets his measurements taken by Celene for a custom outfit he's ordering, she's too preoccupied Eating the Eye Candy and digs herself deeper, making herself sound more and more like a pervert. Fortunately, it goes over Akira's head, him thinking that she's referring to hunter topics.
- A dramatic example happens in Sazanka. After breaking up with her boyfriend Keita, Tatsuki has her friend Aoi over. After telling Aoi about the breakup and quitting her job, Tatsuki accidentally shows Aoi one of her bruises, resulting in her frantically trying to explain it away so as to not get her ex-boyfriend in trouble.Aoi: What's that bruise?
Tatsuki: Oh, I... hit it against something!
Aoi: The underside of your arm? Yeah, likely story. Don't tell me, when you told your boyfriend that you wanted to break up, he beat you?
Tatsuki: No, it didn't happen then!note
Aoi: ...What? You're saying he beat you up regularly?
Tatsuki: (thinks) Oh... crap... - In Trash Skill Gacha, Duke Bahurst has royally screwed the pooch by unjustly exiling his fifth and youngest son to near-certain death for an imagined slight, and learned the next day that said son, Crest Bahurst, is needed to save the kingdom from a prophesied monster stampede. He and his four other sons, loved to brutalize the boy and blame him for it, by proclaiming that the boy is a murderer who escaped justice because he survived his mother's Death by Childbirth. So now he's got to try to win the boy back before either one of his rival duchies sends wins him over, the king wins him over, or he's monster chow. What does he do? He takes volunteers from his "beloved" sons who only see each other as rivals to eliminate and have good reason to want Crest dead, as the king has stipulated that if Crest returns, the duke title is his. Naturally, he just keeps alienating Crest further and losing more and more of his "good" sons. Thus bordering with Sunk Cost Fallacy.
- In The World God Only Knows, Keima has an accidental pervert moment with Haqua with a predictable result despite him not even really caring. A bit later, he reassures her by saying he has no memory of her naked body anyway. This might help normally, only Haqua is already bothered by the way he never shows attraction to anyone or anything outside of his games. Cue getting hit again.
- In Yona of the Dawn, Jae-Ha wanted to recruit Hak into his pirate gang but did so by holding Hak's hands and declaring that "I want you". Naturally, Hak declined. To convince him further, Jae-Ha then wrapped his arms around Hak's waist, saying he was a handsome man and they should go somewhere private to continue their conversation. Hilarity Ensues.
