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Scratchy: Wow. Poochie is one outrageous dude!
Itchy: He's totally in my face!

Sometimes, we hear about a character who doesn't really line up with the way they've been described, whether it be their abilities or their personality. Sometimes, though, this information all comes from a second character who is simply amazed at this character. They sing their praises, gushing their little hearts out. Okay, that's all well and good, Mister or Miss Fervent Admirer, but why are you praising them so openly?

This is what is known as Character Shilling. Whether it be an attempt to make us like the character, a way of quickly establishing that someone new is a badass a level above anything we've seen before, or whatever the case may be, other people will be extremely impressed with this person and let us the viewers know about it. Whether they actually match up to the hype is optional. Sometimes they really are amazing, and sometimes we have ourselves a case of Informed Ability. Or worse, Creator's Pet.

Remember, it's only really shilling when we don't know why such praise and admiration is being given. If they've already shown they can back it up, it probably doesn't count. The Show, Don't Tell principle is often relevant.

This trope does have some useful functions. Sometimes shilling can be used to build suspense for a character who has yet to appear (or whose abilities have yet to be shown), in order to make a climactic scene where we see the truth behind all those stories all the more powerfully. Generally speaking, this tends to be more effective with villains than with heroes, as having the other characters act completely terrified of them tends to build up the antagonist as a credible threat, especially if the villain is rarely or only briefly seen otherwise. Other times, it can be used to build up a character who never appears at all, either to serve as an inspiration or a foil to the main cast. Sometimes the credentials of The Rival or The Dreaded will be established through shilling, especially when their reputation (and the hero's efforts to compete with it) is more important to the story than their actual abilities. Shilling can also be used to show that the character doing it is a (distressingly) obsessive fan. And what better way to establish that someone is Famed In-Story? Alternately, if the character doesn't live up to the hype, shilling can be used to indicate we're dealing with an Unreliable Narrator or an individual that's Easily Impressed.

When the opposite happens — characters filibuster at length about how awful, hateful, loathsome, and generally unpleasant another is for no apparent reason the audience can understand, or at worst, when the audience agrees with the criticized character — that's the Informed Flaw/Wrongness or Designated Evil/Villain.

Compare Informed Attribute, Informed Ability, and Creator's Pet, the last of which is what happens when this goes wrong and the fans just end up hating the shilled character. Also compare Respected by the Respected. May lead to Stop Worshipping Me if it's to the person's face and they're more modest. A character who shills himself in-universe may be a Fake Ultimate Hero or Miles Gloriosus. If it's a one-off shill of their own secret identity of some kind then it's …But He Sounds Handsome. Overrated and Underleveled is a variation of this trope.

See also Gushing About Guest Stars for when a real live celebrity appears as themselves in a show or movie and the characters shill and/or fan boy/girl all over them.

Not to Be Confused with Character Shill, which is about fictional characters advertising real-life products during their own shows.

The trope name comes from "shill", someone who dishonestly helps a Con Man make his offer look more appealing by praising it in front of the mark. Nothing to do with the coin called a "shilling."


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Downplayed in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, the class of Danganronpa 2 constantly go on and on about how great Chiaki is; for example, when Chiaki brings in videogames for the class to play, everybody gushes about how cute and sweet she is, but nobody even thanks Kazuichi for setting up the giant TV so they could actually play the console, and Junko instantly deduces she's what will drive the entire class into Despair, so she sticks her in the very first Killing Game while using Mitarai's hypnosis technology on them. Thing is, Chiaki does back up these claims by proving to be a genuine Nice Girl; most of the class's bonding is simply during off-screen time skips, so the constant praise seems disproportionate to what she does on-screen.
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, in order to not let early statements about Shinobu being the physically weakest Hashira (which she herself claims at first) diminish her true worth as an elite Demon Slayer, Gotouge starts informing some actual feats of strength on Shinobu's belt later on, such as her being one of the most agile Hashira, and specifically having the best fencing prowess amongst them.
  • This was one of the reasons why Ryo in Digimon Tamers was so disliked outside of Japan. When he enters Tamers, the other characters instantly know him despite that he had never appeared (in that series) before, and there's a notable part wherein Kazu and Kenta fanboy over him and talk about how legendary and amazing he is.
  • Happens In-Universe in Dragon Ball Super: the heroes of Universe 11 endlessly praise Jiren as the greatest, coolest, most powerful hero ever to exist. The Irony is that their shilling is half correct; Jiren really is that outrageously strong (in fact, he’s one of the most powerful beings in the entire Dragon Ball universe), but he's not the All-Loving Hero they think he is. He's really an Anti-Hero who does heroic things, but is also extremely cold and rude towards others when off the clock, and sees his fellow Pride Troopers as little more than tools to help him achieve his goals. Of course, it also happened in the regular sense, as about 20 episodes of the "Universe Survival Saga" have characters repeatedly mention how awesome and powerful Jiren is when he spends much of those 20 episodes doing quite literally nothing or one thing when he feels like it, so until he does something, the shilling is all we have to go on and we need to take their words for it.
  • Played with (and possibly parodied) in the El-Hazard: The Magnificent World OAV. Princess Fatora is highly praised by nearly every character who talks about her. When we finally meet her, though, one wonders why she was really missed at all.
  • A number of powerful wizards in Fairy Tail do live up to their hype. Particularly the ones who are given the title of Wizard Saint, or are the rarely seen allies of the main guild. However, most of the one-off villains are given quick hype to make them seem more threatening, and generally it's only the Arc Villain who manages to match whatever the other characters claim about their power.
  • Nasa Yuzaki, the protagonist of Fly Me to the Moon, often gets this from his family and friends. When Tsukasa visits Nasa's parents, Nasa's father thanks her for saving his son's life, saying that he can hardly imagine how eccentric people like him and his wife raised a "perfect" son like Nasa (disregarding how bragging about your children is a no-no in Japan). At the end of the trip, Nasa and Tsukasa's apartment building burns down, and Nasa's first reaction is to ask whether anyone got hurt, prompting Tsukasa to go into an Inner Monologue about how she loves that Nasa is selfless, that he prepares for situations like this and he accepts others' kindness gratefully without feeling guilty about it.
  • The final chapters of Food Wars! continuously paint Asahi Saiba as the infallible chef who can instantly utilize the styles of different chefs. In his final match, the oddsmakers are on his side, but he ultimately loses to Soma.
  • Gundam:
    • Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam shills former villain-turned-Anti-Hero Deuteragonist, Char Aznable like no tomorrow about what a great, noble guy he is when his past actions in Mobile Suit Gundam shows that he's really not, as do his future ones in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. As well as how he's such an awesome pilot when he's spent most of the series getting hit by The Worf Effect. Even his speech at Dakar, which is supposed to be so good that it captures the attention of every Federation politician there and convinces a Titan pilot to switch sides, boils down to pointing out that even Dakarnote  is undergoing desertification and that humanity needs to stop it.

      To be fair to Char, his stint as Quattro had him masquerading as someone with actual social skills (which he sorely lacks due to devoting 13 or so years to nothing but revenge), and the other characters around him tend to ignore this because, well, he's Char. He's also saddled with the Hyaku-Shiki, a failed prototype Gundam with a transformable frame which, historically in UC means it's saddled with structural issues despite the final product being unable to transform at all. (If anything, it's ONLY because of his piloting skill that he isn't killed in the many skirmishes he goes into in said machine.) Besides that, he's a surprisingly good mentor to Kamille, and he and old rival Amuro actually get along quite well. It's only when said prodigy gets mind-raped does Char snap after realizing just how cruel the world can be and how much people like the leaders of the Federation have royally screwed things up in order to keep their own power.
    • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, Heine Westenfluss is set up as an ace pilot like Athrun, as well as charming and a really nice guy. Unfortunately, he doesn't get a chance to live up to his extreme reputation since he dies too soon. The fact that he spends most of his screentime lecturing Athrun about how he should just ignore his doubts and do his job doesn't help. However, it can be argued he's more of a foil to Athrun given his short role.
  • Inazuma Eleven actually managed to subvert this one. When the team first set out to find and meet Fubuki, several characters start discussing rumors about what an amazingly strong and talented person he is, some of which are so over the top (such as "Fubuki the bear-killer") that they're likely parodying this trope. Everyone is quite surprised when they actually meet him and he's nothing like what they expected.
    Fubuki: Oh, are you disappointed after seeing the real thing?
  • Parodied in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War with Kobachi Osaragi, who is the most popular girl in school, gets a steady stream of boyfriends without trying, and is constantly being shilled by random characters... all while being a Ridiculously Average Girl who is plain-looking, unremarkable in talent, and is just really boring and forgettable in general. And yet everybody loves and obsesses over her, talking like she's the Second Coming. The main cast is just as baffled as the audience probably is. Eventually this makes more sense, as from before the start of the manga Osaragi has been working hard to present herself as a plain and unremarkable background character; the part of her past that gave her the reputation she still can't shake is both so well and publicly known and just a little embarrassing for people to admit is still on their minds that nobody ever directly raises the topic. This remains exaggerated from realistic levels for comedic effect, thus the parody.
  • One of the later episodes of Kemono Friends' second season has Kaban, the main character of the first season, declare that her relationship with Serval "didn't compare" with Serval's relationship with Kyururu, the main character of the second season. Few people to have watched both seasons would agree, as Kyururu had considerably more frequently jerkish moments, including being adamant about not being an animal, and in general they never hit the same emotional highs. Most viewers saw it as a potshot at the director of the first season, who had been fired by the studio and left on bad terms, as well as an attempt to prop up the local Replacement Scrappy as superior.
  • The narrator of Killing Bites would like you to know that because the honey badger is the most badass animal in the world, Hitomi is also the most badass Brute in the world. Sure, the honey badger is an incredibly fearsome animal, but the way the narrator shills it, you would think it could take on God himself and then some.
  • Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: An in-universe example occurs when Dedede makes his own anime. Within said Show Within a Show, a fight scene is suddenly interrupted by Dedede and Escargon greeting each other and having a conversation where they call each other cool and beautiful, including an Art Shift intended to make them look much better than normal.
  • Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force:
    • Thoma, the main character, was fairly bland in the first few chapters, up until it was revealed that he was the not-yet-adopted little brother of Subaru, a far more popular character. While it's shown how they met, it doesn't quite show how they became so close, and the two don't even interact for a long while. It's just to say "Hey, Subaru likes him!" to the reader. It gets more obvious later on when it's shown that other characters like Nanoha know and like him too, which happened entirely off-screen.
    • He's also billed as a character who uses a unique fighting style and he has a lot of potential. Yet of all the times we see him fight, he was just swinging his Divider. There's apparently also something special inside him that the Anti-Magic-using villains take their time in trying to recruit him.
  • Invoked in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Kanna's Daily Life. Kanna often gets favors out of Lucoa by promising to say nice things about her to Shouta.
  • Naruto:
    • Sasuke is hyped up as one of the most promising Leaf Ninja in the Chunin Exam despite having a very slipshod record, even by Rock Lee, who trounced him fairly easily while using his training weights. This is especially the case before the fight with Gaara—nothing in Sasuke's arsenal that he's demonstrated beforehand should be able to even scratch Gaara, and Gaara had nearly crippled a fully-powered Lee in a prior fight, so by all rights the audience should be expecting a Curb-Stomp Battle, and yet the students practically riot when the fight gets postponed. Granted, in the fight proper, Sasuke manages to injure Gaara with a technique learned right beforehand, but nobody in the audience knew about it.
    • Ever since the truth of his actions was made known, many characters have been heaping praise on Itachi. Whether or not he deserves it is heavily debatable (he did horrible things in the name of defending his home and maintaining peace). It usually isn't too bad, but it gets weird when even the freaking First Hokage says that he is a better shinobi than he is, and the Third Hokage says that he had Kage-level wisdom at the age of seven. Even Sasuke and Naruto, whose lives have been made significantly worse by his actions, shill the guy like nobody's business. Ironically, one of the few people who don't shill him is Itachi himself, thanks to being revived as an Edo Tensei Zombie and seeing the consequences of his actions firsthand.
    • During the Ten-Tails arc, many characters went out of their way to express how awesome Sakura became, and how she finally caught up to Sasuke and Naruto. While she got to make a memorable showcase of her powers, it doesn't last long before Naruto and Sasuke both receive a new power-up that puts them ahead of her again.
    • After Kaguya kills Obito, Naruto screams at her that he was "the coolest." Keep in mind that Obito was partially responsible for a vast majority of the mess that happened in the manga — especially Naruto's parents' and Neji's deaths — and only pull a Heel–Face Turn a few moments earlier. Granted, in that time he did save Naruto's life, helped give him a Next Tier Power-Up, and died sacrificing himself to save Naruto and Kakashi, but calling him "the coolest" might have been stretching the truth a little bit.
  • Everyone in New Game! always praises Nene's incredible potential as a programmer, but all she's been seen doing is bug testing and making a Stylistic Suck self-programmed PC game that didn't even work half the time. To the viewer, it just looks like she got hired thanks to knowing people rather than any sort of aptitude or ability to learn on her behalf. Less so in the manga, where it's clear she's been corresponding with her eventual supervisor to ask questions and receive some direction in her attempts to learn programming, said woman doesn't so much praise her potential as profess the belief the company has plenty of basic grunt work she could make herself useful doing while she continues to develop a proper skill set (and precedented by the main character, who was hired as a 3D artist having never used modeling software before), and the game was pretty bug-free by the time she shows it to any others.
  • While One Piece has many legendary figures, the story really lays on thick how awesome Kozuki Oden was. He had many admirers, including the Pirate King and his eventual vassals, despite several outrageous deeds under his belt since childhood. He was hailed as Wano's hero post-mortem despite abandoning it to continue his adventures even when he could tell from a glance that it had changed for the worse, and then letting the issue continue for five years under the promise that the culprit Orochi (who had a track record of swindling) would leave the country. Kaido, the main antagonist of the Wano arc who ultimately killed Oden, holds him in high regard and laments that no samurai will ever match his strength. Most egregiously, Kaido's biological daughter idolized Oden to the point of taking his name and assuming a male identity, to which Luffy initially objected on the basis that Oden "was loved by everyone" rather than Oden being biologically male or dead.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • Despite his immense jerkassery, Paul is praised for being a great Trainer by a number of characters in the Diamond & Pearl series, including Cynthia, Barry, and, at times, even Ash himself. Even Pyramid King Brandon, who plays a vital role in humbling him and calling out his attitude, notes that Paul has done an excellent job raising his Pokémon. Partially justified in that, for all his cruelty, he's one of the most skilled Trainers Ash has ever faced, and as the series goes on, his training style is portrayed far more humanely (if still harsh) than it was in the earlier episodes.
    • Ash received this in the Kanto saga. Despite his status as an Idiot Hero with a case of Small Name, Big Ego, many episodes ended with him getting disproportionally praised for some minor accomplishment. An egregious example was in "The Ultimate Test" when the head instructor praised Ash for fending off the ineffectual Team Rocket trio and declared with confidence that he would pass the League entrance exam if he were to re-take it, ignoring the fact that Ash had just failed it with one of the lowest grades.
    • He again became a recipient of this in the XY series. Gym Leaders and Champions alike all have the utmost respect for him, and he gets Hero Worship from his band of friends, to the point that for Ash's fifth Gym Battle, it was Clemont the Gym Leader who takes a leave of absence from the group so he could train and meet Ash's expectations. He is Always Someone Better to all his region rivals, and even the one who Ash eventually loses to in the League finals unquestionably follows Ash's lead throughout the entire Kalos crisis afterwards, and in the end contemplates that, between the two of them, Ash is the better Trainer. This is all in spite of still being Book Dumb (though now downplayed), and none of his prior achievements actually being mentioned onscreen, with Ash not officially achieving anything in this series beyond his usual Gym quest and League run.
    • Ritchie, Ash's final opponent in the Indigo League, is hyped up as an expert trainer who has managed to get as far as he did in the tournament without a single Pokemon getting knocked out. His skill as a trainer largely proves to be an Informed Attribute as his victory over Ash comes about because Ash's Pokemon are exhausted and his Charizard, which could have easily won Ash the match, refuses to fight.
  • 7 Seeds has several characters comment about Hana. While she is certainly ready to take action in the wilderness or explore more easily than most of the other characters, this is justified by her having been raised in a way to survive in the wilderness. But then there are characters who admire her for her strength, her desire to work hard when she isn't feeling well herself, despite this actually being more of a flaw but not treated as one. This got particularly bad when Ango and Ryo, both of who clashed horribly with her, praise her stubborn behavior, despite this being the reason why the three of them clashed so much.
  • Inami from Wagnaria!! gets this from most of the cast whenever the spotlight is on her (and that's often), with the most coming from Poplar, who won't shut up on how cute Inami is. Though for most people, she's much cuter. Presumably, they're trying to make Takahashi, the guy Inami likes, think better of her, but they still overdo it a little. Even the Romantic False Lead spends more time praising Inami than looking for his Long Lost Sibling.
  • Early The World God Only Knows shills Haqua as being amazing, but it's actually part of an obvious set-up to show that despite how talented she is the only one she's fooling is Elsie. She's been unable to get any results after graduating and is pretty depressed. Eventually, she does end up deserving her reputation.note 
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Pretty much any new character with a new and marketable Deck gets talked up as being a master strategist and a wielder of unstoppable cards, even if their actual strategy is bog-standard and their cards are nothing new. V/Quinton in Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL is a good example; he's built up as the guy who taught main character Kaito everything he knows, a guy who gets a Minor Injury Overreaction to damage because he's normally untouchable, and the narrative treats him as the strongest of the Arclight brothers. Over the course of all three of his duels, his strategy consisted of summoning Dyson Sphere and then sitting on it until the opponent found a way to defeat him. It's mildly impressive that he can bring it out so quickly, and it's a reasonably strong card, but it's nowhere near what his brothers were capable of. The Neo-Spacians in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX also get chatted up for their unique "Contact Fusion" ability by everyone, but Contact Fusion wasn't a new concept (indeed, several characters had used the VWXYZ line, which is functionally the same thing), and the Neo-Spacian application of it was, if anything, one of the worst executions of it.
    • This could also apply to Yugi himself. He's ostensibly a master gamer but frequently loses games in the early manga so that Yami Yugi/Atem can come out and take care of them, plays a few duels by himself in the whole series, and without the benefit of all the practice Jonouchi has had in tournaments, somehow manages to defeat Yami Yugi/Atem by the end of the series. He's also played up as being courageous in the English dub and while his heroism is more prevalent than his duelling, he's still less active as a character than Jonouchi and takes fewer responsibilities on his shoulders than Atem. He's presented as part of an equal team with Atem, moreso in the anime, but frequently vanishes offscreen for whole duels at a time. This is zigzagged in Darkside of Dimensions when he's dueling solo and taking responsibility for rescuing others, but still needs Atem's help to defeat a supernatural threat.

    Comic Books 
  • Captain America:
    • Cap is one of the few characters who can (usually) get away with this without audiences rolling their eyes. His entire character relies on being a pure-hearted inspiration to others; that's why he was chosen to be the first Super-Soldier. He also got famous during World War II by fighting the Nazis and apparently dying in a Heroic Sacrifice, which bolstered his reputation among other heroes. It's only natural that they'd be a little awestruck when the man himself turns up.
    • That said, much of the second lineup of The Avengers consisted of heroes and villains alike heaping praise on his inspiring leadership and all-around awesomeness to a point that could feel excessive since that "leadership" usually consisted of yelling at Hawkeye and Quicksilver to fall in line and grant him endless respect solely based on his past accomplishments. While Hawkeye and Quicksilver were usually being arrogant jerks also, they were meant to come across as arrogant jerks while Cap's attitude was presented as fully justified.
    • He can be most commonly shilled by writers and characters alike as being the Big Good of the superhero community, with everyone singing his praises about how he's the most moral and righteous hero of them all. However, Cap can sometimes act the opposite of what an ideal superhero leader should be with a "punch first, ask questions later" attitude that sometimes manifests with other heroes in certain stories, like when he straight up assaults Wolverine over a disagreement during the Avengers vs. X-Men crossover or when he throws his shield into Deadpool's head during Despicable Deadpool, fights Deadpool, and expects Deadpool to happily come with him quietly when Deadpool was already in a pretty bad mental and emotional place over being fooled by Hydra Cap. Granted, Cap doesn't always act this way because Depending on the Writer, he can also be more diplomatic, reasonable, and willing to hear other people out but there are enough cases in his long publication history where he happily grabs the Conflict Ball, maintains a hard-headed "my way or the highway" attitude, and/or punches another hero in the face with very little or even zero provocation to the point where the shilling over Cap's heroism and righteousness can come off as a case of Informed Kindness.
  • Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics): Carol Danvers, after becoming Captain Marvel (and getting a new Superman-esque costume), was suddenly treated as the Marvel Universe's greatest female superhero. One of the first arcs of her comic involved in-universe fans, Kamala Khan specifically took on the mantle because she idolized Carol, and she was added to a large number of teams, often acting as a leader. This happened despite Carol not really being an A-lister until her rebranding; prior to then, her most prominent contribution to Marvel lore was an on-again-off-again Avengers membership and being the reason why Rogue is a Flying Brick. It wasn't hard to figure that a potential Marvel Cinematic Universe project was a motivating factor since Disney, which owns Marvel, lacked or had to share the film rights to Marvel's actual most powerful female superheroes (like Jean Grey, Storm, or the Invisible Woman, who were wholly held by Fox, and She-Hulk who along with the Hulk was jointly held with Universalnote ). Eventually, Disney bought Fox itself and seems to have acquired all the Hulk-related stuff back in full.
  • Daredevil: Bullseye, a reasonably popular but firmly street-level baddie, was subject to an awkward period when Marvel Comics tried to promote him as their answer to the Joker. In nearly every appearance, characters would shill Bullseye as an unstoppable murderous psychopath — despite the fact that he's not particularly intelligent, nor is he much more dangerous than any guy with a gun. During his time as a member of the Dark Avengers, he's treated as The Dreaded (despite his teammates including a walking nuclear reactor, a cannibalistic alien parasite, and a deranged Physical God). Marvel eventually gave up and turned off the Plot Armor, leaving Bullseye blind, disabled, and Put on a Bus for the next few years.
  • Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom is often shilled as a genius and the savior of mankind, but rarely by the right people — at one point, a Wakandan deity proclaims that the only peaceful future is one with Doom as the dictator, but there's some serious Blue-and-Orange Morality at work. In any event, the character who shills Doom the most is usually Doom himself.
  • The Flash:
    • Writer Geoff Johns did this to Barry Allen in several directions when he came Back from the Dead. Jay Garrick, the original Flash, shilled his replacement Barry by saying that "Barry made him the Flash", despite fighting crime decades before Barry started. The explanation was pretty weird and just raised more questions — he meant that seeing Barry as the Flash convinced him to come out of retirement, but this contradicts the events of the story where that happened, where Jay already wanted to come out of retirement. Barry's successor Wally West also shilled him as an inspiration to him when he was a kid as Barry Allen, which contradicts scenes where young Wally considered the Flash much cooler than Barry Allen and couldn't understand why Iris was dating Barry and not the Flash. Johns defended the shilling by saying it was necessary to avoid Barry being seen as a Replacement Scrappy for Wally, even though he was the Flash before Wally, and even readers who didn't remember that would probably know that since a big part of Wally's character revolves around that.
    • And then Johns had Barry talk up how great a CSI Patty Spivot is (presumably under the logic that if Barry says she's great, she must be really great...which falls a little flat given this occurs at the same time Barry, a trained CSI, makes a basic rookie mistake at a crime scene). What little work we see her doing is nothing spectacular.
    • Flash issue #750 has a lot of people talking about how great the Flash is. In fairness, though, it's a Milestone Celebration, so some shilling is to be expected.
  • Green Lantern:
    • Kyle Rayner was shilled almost by necessity; comic fans were never going to receive him very well, partly because he was replacing Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, and partly because they had seen how Superman's death and Azrael becoming Batman turned out to be temporary — DC needed to make sure that Kyle stuck around. They did this by having a range of superheroes from Martian Manhunter to Superman to Batman say, without solicitation, what a terrific guy he is. This only led to eye-rolling among even the fans who liked him. In the end, Grant Morrison refused to give Kyle the same treatment in Justice League of America, where he was a rookie whom not everyone trusted (particularly The Flash and Batman, the latter of whom took twelve issues to even speak to Kyle) — and exactly why he was a good Green Lantern was actually brought up (that he knows fear, as opposed to the fearless-to-suicidal-degrees Hal Jordan). This was sufficient Character Development that he was considered Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.
    • Then it came full circle when Geoff Johns brought Hal back to be Green Lantern in Green Lantern: Rebirth, and every other hero couldn't stop talking about how brave, selfless, and supportive Hal was and anyone who distrusted him was painted in a terrible light. Characters would also frequently explicitly mention how he was "the greatest Green Lantern" without ever defining why.
    • During the Johns era, Hal and Kyle themselves were very prone to shilling one another. According to Johns, he felt that it was important to establish a brotherly relationship between the two in order to move the franchise past the Hal vs. Kyle debates.
  • Hawkman is a fairly frequent recipient, as a longtime member of two prominent and powerful hero teams while also being in an unfortunate place power-wise in the context of a superhero universe — he's a Flying Brick with the strength of a Badass Normal, resulting in him lacking the brute force of most of the former and the technology and intellect of most of the latter, along with lacking specialized skills that could contrive situations where he can be the only one to save the day. Consequently, he's usually shilled when people wonder why the heck he's on the team to begin with — they call him an excellent leader (who never displays this and is usually a Jerkass) with centuries of battle experience (which he mostly uses to fly straight in and bludgeon people with his mace). The peak is probably Justice League: Cry for Justice, where Prometheus, having taken down half the team and armed with a gun, faces Hawkman and monologues about how Hawkman is the most dangerous opponent he's faced because he's unpredictable and pissed off — and he's also not Immune to Bullets (and not wearing a shirt), but for some reason, Prometheus doesn't connect those dots.
  • The Inhumans, both the main characters and the Inhuman species in general, underwent this from around the end of Infinity, to the end of Inhumans vs. X-Men, getting pushed by Marvel as an effective replacement to the X-Men, who were shunted into a more diminished role. It started when Black Bolt unleashed the Terrigen Mists on the world at the end of Infinity and it was presented as a good thing, despite the fact that it would turn all sorts of people into Inhumans who might not want to be Inhumans, and that it was known to be lethal to mutants. Moreover, Cyclops destroying one of the two Terrigen clouds (which weren't required for Inhumans to live, just to change — and there were other methods) earns him a vaporizing by Black Bolt on Medusa's orders. While it turns out that Scott was already dead and it was an illusion by Emma Frost to make Scott a martyr, the Inhumans sure as hell didn't know that. Death of X was meant to leave the Inhumans as the sympathetic party (this failed miserably, leading to resurrection of the 'Cyclops was Right' catchphrase), along with the whole 'M-Pox' phenomenon where the X-Men literally had to relocate to Hell to survive... and when the trigger of Inhumans vs. X-Men was revealed — the Terrigen was spreading, essentially making Earth uninhabitable for mutants — there were still attempts to present both sides as morally evenly balanced. To say that the fanbase was unhappy would be a colossal Understatement.
  • Ironheart: Riri Williams receives mounds of this in her first proper issue taking over from Tony Stark as Ironheart. Barely a scene will pass without a big-name character praising her intelligence, S.H.I.E.L.D. holds a special meeting to talk about how wonderful she is, and Tony Stark himself even gets in on the act, despite heaping praise on others being very out-of-character for him.
  • JLA: Act of God shills Batman by having all the de-powered superheroes gush about how awesome he is for having always been a Badass Normal (when he's far from the only one in the League). Batman, for his part, is an arrogant jerk who seems only to help the de-powered heroes because they're telling him how awesome he is.
  • Justice League of America has a couple of interesting variants:
    • When Faith was added during the "Age of Obsidian" arc, she was a complete unknown who was immediately and inexplicably shilled by other characters as being an awesome and powerful person. But this rapid acceptance was justified with the revelation that she has the subconscious ability to inspire trust in others.
    • Minor character Aztek jumped to the League when his own series was prematurely cancelled. The other characters shilled him immediately, telling him that he earned his place in the League. The problem is that Aztek doesn't know how he did that; Grant Morrison was just using it as a way to give a Too Good to Last series a Fully Absorbed Finale (the final villain of his run is the God of Evil that Aztek was created to fight, culminating in his Heroic Sacrifice).
  • The first issue of one volume of Justice Society of America kicks off by having Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman tell the founding JSA that they're a massive inspiration to everyone and modern superheroes wouldn't exist without them. This can be a bit of a hard sell, as while the JSA are by no means losers, they also distinctly aren't the foundation upon which The DCU's A-listers built their careers. The truth is that we'd seen the origins of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and none of their origins showed them taking any real inspiration from the JSA, and rarely if ever even acknowledged their existence. Really, the only significant non-JSA heroes to take any inspiration from them are The Flash and Black Canary.note 
  • Robin: Tim's love interest Bernard Dowd got plenty of this after he first got with Tim in Batman Urban Legends issue 6. Damian apparently likes him despite him disliking Tim and never caring about his personal life as well, stories tell us how he makes Tim happy, secure, or have Tim super into him without showing it or actually explaining why. It got so bad to the point that upon meeting him, Stephanie, Tim's long-running love interest for over 20 years, declared it was the "best day ever." This is after Tim dumped her for no reason, ghosted her, reconnected by accident, and introduced her to Bernard without even asking... Understandably, some readers were quick to compare this to the below-mentioned Carlie Cooper.
  • The Sentry's entire character was based on this; supposedly, he was an amazing hero who debuted in the Silver Age and did a lot of really awesome things before being erased by Cosmic Retcon. This was pretty clever in his original miniseries, but his addition to the mainstream comics ended up running the joke so thin it wasn't even a joke anymore. Even when he finally kicked the bucket (to much fan rejoicing), everyone in the Marvel Universe showed up to his funeral to talk about how he'd always been there for them and he was a really great guy, nervously skirting around all the times he was useless, whiny, and homicidal.
  • Spider-Man: Peter's one-time love interest Carlie Cooper was heavily shilled, mostly to get readers to accept her over Peter's more memorable love interests Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. One big problem was that this was after One More Day, in which Peter's marriage to Mary Jane gets magically erased so that Peter could be single again (and that Carlie's named after the writer's daughter). An implausible number of people would go on about not just how perfect she is for Peter, but how perfect she is in general. Mary Jane shilled her. Black Cat shilled her. Gwen, despite being dead, shilled her in flashback, having been retconned into Carlie's best friend. That really didn't endear her to the readers.
  • Superman is another of the few characters whose shilling is deserved. He's the Big Good of The DCU, a Nice Guy, and incredibly powerful, so it's no wonder he's so successful and charismatic. He's also a Humble Hero who frequently seems uncomfortable with being on the receiving end of said shilling and goes to great lengths to ensure that the general populace, who would otherwise be inclined to mistrust someone so powerful, can trust him.
  • Jennika from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW) gets this treatment after becoming the fifth Ninja Turtle. Pre-mutation, she wasn't much of a character outside of being Splinter's student and Casey's new love interest. She also didn't interact much with anyone aside from Splinter and Casey in any significant way. Post mutation, the Turtles act as if she's a close family member and characters who barely know her, if at all, start harping on about how great and strong she is.
  • Trial of the Amazons has Hyppolyta shilling Yara Flor's mother Aella during the opening and Diana shilling Yara Flor herself after the climax. Regardless of just how strongly they believe their own words, it's clear it's being done to make Yara feel welcome, given she's hated by the queen goddess of Diana's pantheon and both tribes have tried to have Yara assasinated in the past.

    Fan Works 
  • The Ariana Black Series:
    • The stories are pretty blatant about how often they praise Ariana for how "powerful" her Empath abilities are, even if they are Blessed with Suck at best, causing Ariana to have fits around emotion-changing spells, have other people's emotions override her own, and Voldemort can apparently use her blood to make himself immortal so he's always trying to capture her. Not to mention that her powers frequently fail to alert her when someone with hostile intentions is sneaking up on her.
    • Ariana is also frequently referred to as "sweet" and "cares so much about others over herself" — she isn't and doesn't. She's more akin to a Spoiled Brat who has her older friends constantly visiting to entertain her even after they've graduated Hogwarts and have full-time jobs, gets adopted by Sirius who lets her do anything she wants and never disciplines her, manages to wriggle out of serious punishment for abusing her "Empath" powers at school by whining and crying about people bullying her (which she instigates), frequently attacks her rival Maria with no repercussions, gets given expensive presents for no reason, gets away with rifling through Snape's memories without asking permission and tells Neville she's jealous that he still has parents when her mother died when she was a baby — you know, Neville's parents who were tortured so badly, they went insane and can't recognise Neville as their own son, so he was raised by his extremely strict grandmother? Yes, those parents.
  • Fantasia Times: Andi, the main OC, gets a lot of this. Her friends, family, and harem praise her as much as possible when she's onscreen, and when she's offscreen expect them to say things like "I wish Andi was here" or "What would Andi do in this situation?", if they're not talking about her wise advice/kindness towards others/amazing battle prowess/super special powers/awesomeness in general.
  • Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail:
    • Chloe in Act 1 (and a little bit of Act 2). The narrative seems to have a dissonance over how nice she's supposed to be; characters will constantly mention how Chloe's a kind soul, someone with a heart "as big as the sea," and generally a unique person who didn't deserve everything that happened to her. While there are many moments where she is kind to Denizens, she's no nicer than an average human being, and when it comes to the Pokémon World, she proves herself just as bitter and spiteful, if not more so, than the people who did hurt her.
    • This trope also applies to Parker: despite being only five, keeping vital information hidden, and generally knowing Chloe better than the other people only by comparison, the characters and story seem to treat this as a reason enough to act like he's better than the rest, despite not only being unhelpful all around but this ego-boosting being the main reason why he doesn't stop his Unown rampage and acts like everybody deserves everything he does to them.
  • The Last Prayer has several characters talk about how great Hinata is, at times to nonsensical levels. Naruto can't believe that "a girl like Hinata" would be interested in him, despite having multiple women of similar or greater status pursuing a relationship with him. Kurenai tries to insist that if it wasn't for Hinata, none of the other women would have fallen in love with Naruto.note  Lastly, Temari declares that if the Hokage insists Naruto can only have one wife from Konoha, it should be Hinata, even though her given reason for marrying Narutonote  sounds more like she's doing him a minor favor, especially compared to Ino's and Kurenai's passionate declarations of love for him.
  • The first few books of The Last Son are infamous for this treatment of Superman and his love interest Alison Blaire, a.k.a. Alia Ka-Lir. Superman, being the single most powerful entity on the planet, deserves people shilling his power — but not his oratory, which is hailed as brilliant despite consisting mostly of preachy moral lectures. His love interest, meanwhile, is given bucketloads of Informed Attributes, and everyone (except the villains and the resident Alpha Bitches) loves her despite not really having a reason to. This treatment is considered a black mark on an otherwise well-conceived story.
  • All of Starfleet in My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic is this. The story repeatedly tells us how much faster, stronger, smarter, and overall superior the Space Ponies are compared to their Equestrian counterparts, which isn't really supported by their actions.
  • Precipice has an In-Universe example with Ahsoka. In Anakin's retellings of his Clone Wars adventures to his daughter, Leia, he likes to embellish and exaggerate Ahsoka's actions to make her seem more awesome or having done more than she actually did. This is mainly because he likes to tell Leia these stories whenever he's really happy and wants to stay that way.
  • In Xantrax-42's Precure Meet The Dream Traveler series:
    • The canon characters heap endless praise on both of his Original Characters. It's most blatant in chapter two of Smile Precure meet the Dream Traveler, where Blaze comes in, saves the Pretty Cure, and defeats three blue-nosed Akanbes without using Rainbow Healing (which is required in canon). The Cures and the narrative insist he's the greatest thing ever to grace Pretty Cure fandom with words like "So cool!" and remarking how he's fighting all by himself when most readers regard him as boring and obnoxious.
    • It gets exaggerated in the sequels, especially with the introduction of Shadow Akechi in the Doki Doki series. No matter what atrocities or abuse Shadow heaps on others, everyone says he's the best thing ever. The worst occurs when, in one of the final chapters, Shadow mercilessly beats up twelve-year-old Regina nearly to death, and Cure Heart smiles and watches while saying Shadow is amazing because he can channel rage and hatred into such awesome power.

    Films — Animation 
  • In The LEGO Batman Movie, the heroes constantly talk up how awesome and heroic Batman is, surrounding him with cheering and admiration even when he's offscreen. But when we actually see Batman for real, he's revealed to be a broken man with a life of loneliness and isolation. He explicitly needs the adulation, and when it stops after the Joker surrenders to Barbara Gordon, Batman's emotional collapse is heart-wrenching to watch. It's also shown that for all his adulation, the Justice League don't particularly like him all that much either.
  • In the Novelization of Turning Red, Miriam talks up Devon saying "he's really cute." In the film proper, Abby talks about how his hair is really soft. When he's actually seen, Mei is initially dismissive of him saying that "he looks like a hobo" to which Abby responds "a hot hobo."

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Bad Black: Played for Laughs. During Ssali's introduction scene, VJ Emmie insists that his actor is "America's Van Damme".
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Spider-Man: Homecoming and its sequel do this with both of Spidey's love interests, Liz and Michelle/MJ, respectively. Peter repeatedly talks about how perfect and amazing Liz is, and gushes about her intelligence, but then we never actually see her demonstrate this intelligence, and their interactions have her mostly be vaguely friendly but unamused by his ditching. Liz is more or less a symbol of how Peter wants to grow up too fast and as such has a crush on the most popular senior girl in school. MJ, likewise, is gushed by Peter for being really smart and funny, but her intelligence is never demonstrated outside of her answering a single science question and figuring out Peter's identity, which itself is less down to her own intellect and more Peter being very bad at hiding it (in fact, that she's the only person to figure this out is more due to the rest of the cast just not being very smart). As for her being funny, this is very much subjective. To some extent, this is partially explainable as Peter is just a kid with a schoolboy crush on the two, so his reasons for liking them are likely actually quite shallow. No Way Home eventually shows more of MJ's kindness, compassion, and loyalty that better justifies Peter's feelings for her (and coincidentally, Liz is shown in a Freeze-Frame Bonus to be bad-mouthing Peter to a tabloid).
    • In these movies, Tony Stark also gets this. While beyond them, Tony definitely earns much of the praise towards him, he's also more readily called out on his failings, so any praise he does get is balanced and he's more clearly a Byronic Hero. In Homecoming, Tony is held up as Peter's inspiration for becoming a hero (a complete invention of the movies), even replacing Uncle Ben as his primary father figure, and Peter's extremely desperate to impress him, to the point that disappointing Tony leads to a Heroic BSoD. In the sequel, Tony's death leads to him being further lionised, with people questioning how the world will move on without him and if Peter is ready and capable of living up to his legacy. The problem with this, though, is that Tony is a hands-off mentor who does very little to actually support Peter, while also being significantly more of a jerkass than usual (in fact, the Big Bads of both films are heavily linked to his actions). Tony's paid a reverence in these films he's otherwise never given (since they follow Peter's POV) and given a pass on behaviour that would have got called out immediately elsewhere. However, Tony himself admits he could be a better mentor and tries to be (Homecoming), and Happy gives Peter a much more realistic idea of who Tony was, and says Peter shouldn't try to live up to either version of Tony (Far From Home).
    • Thanos had been hyped up long before his appearance in Avengers: Infinity War. Thanos is the universe's Greater-Scope Villain, the ultimate evil dreaded across the universe, so when he's mentioned, it's basically to illustrate how the threat that the heroes just struggled to stop is nothing compared to Thanos. For seven years, all we saw of him was a purple guy sitting on his throne talking smack. But when he finally showed up for real, he absolutely lived up to the hype — in the first ten minutes of Infinity War, he beats Hulk so easily, the green guy refuses to come out for the rest of the movie, and of course in the end he wins.
    • It seems oddly coincidental that the character pulling Big Damn Heroes for the final battle in Avengers: Endgame — Captain Marvel, one of the more polarizing characters in the MCU — has Rocket Raccoon taking the time to cheer for her appearance. No other returning character got singled out for fanfare.
  • Mean Girls uses this to establish Regina George as a feared and revered Alpha Bitch before we even meet her:
    Janis Ian: Regina George... how do I begin to explain Regina George?
    Emma Gerber: Regina George is flawless.
    Lea Edwards: She has two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus.
    Tim Pak: I hear her hair's insured for ten thousand dollars.
    Amber D'Alessio: I hear she does car commercials — in Japan.
    Kristen Hadley: Her favorite movie is Varsity Blues.
    Short Girl: One time she met John Stamos on a plane...
    Jessica Lopez: ..and he told her she was pretty.
    Bethany Byrd: One time she punched me in the face... it was awesome!
  • Played for Laughs in Mystery Men when it comes to The Sphinx. Other characters speak of him in hushed and reverent tones when describing him to a skeptical Mr. Furious, lauding him as wise and awe-inspiring and mysterious... and oh, by the way, he can cut guns in half with his mind. When he arrives on the scene, it turns out that he is all these things, but Mr. Furious remains staunchly unimpressed.
  • Mercilessly parodied in Monty Python and the Holy Grail by Sir Robin's minstrel, who keeps gushing in song about "brave Sir Robin" despite Sir Robin's repeated commands to shut up, as he's trying to avoid picking a fight. The minstrel goes on gushing about it even after Sir Robin has fled in abject cowardice:
    Minstrel: Brave Sir Robin ran away, (Sir Robin: No!)
    Bravely ran away, away! (I didn't!)
    When danger reared its ugly head,
    He bravely turned his tail and fled. (No!)
    Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about, (I didn't!)
    And gallantly he chickened out.
    Bravely taking to his feet, (I never did!)
    He beat a very brave retreat. (All lies!)
    Oh, bravest of the braaave, Sir Robin! (I never!)
  • One criticism of Pearl Harbor is the way that many characters gush over Rafe's skill as a pilot. From what we see, Rafe isn't much better than his best friend who sings his praises the whole movie. He's made out to be a noble hero by everyone, including Jimmy Doolittle and an RAF pilot who tells him that if there are others like him where Rafe comes from then, by God, America will kick the world's ass. It makes you wonder why Randall Wallace didn't stretch the movie by another hour so Rafe could join up with the Flying Tigers and the likes of Claire Chennault and Ed Rector could gush over him some more.
  • The Room (2003):
    • Lisa is consistently described as being incredibly beautiful.
    • Protagonist Johnny is extremely successful at his job and is constantly described as a paragon of compassion and selflessness who is entirely undeserving of Lisa's treatment of him. It may not be a coincidence that Johnny is played by the film's writer/producer/director.
  • Star Trek:
    • Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is said to be physically and mentally augmented though it hardly shows. His physical superiority is demonstrated only a couple of times, his superior intelligence is thwarted by his plan and the execution. The Enterprise crew overpower him by hiding in a nebula and shooting torpedoes all over the place. This is because Khan demonstrated most of his physical and mental superiority in the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series where he was a Villain of the Week, in which he and his compatriots repeatedly demonstrated how physically and intellectually dangerous they were to "average" humans.
    • When Khan makes trouble in Star Trek Into Darkness, the Spock from the original universe turns up to shill him there, too.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse goes to great lengths to show how much of a hero Mystique is, particularly how she saved the President and showed the public that mutants aren't evil in the previous film. Schools teach about her, and many other mutants consider her an inspiration — Storm idolizes her, and Quicksilver claims she changed his life (although apparently with a ten-year delay, during which he mooched off his mother like he did before). The main problem with this is that all she really did was be in the right place at the right time — she only saved the President because she was trying to kill one of his advisors, most of the events of the previous film were her fault to some degree, and she's generally not a pleasant or trustworthy person. She herself seems uncomfortable with this and chooses to stay in disguise for most of the run time to avoid being recognised.

    Literature 
  • Cleverly used in The Manchurian Candidate, as all the comrades of main character Raymond Shaw describe him as the "kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life", despite him being shown as a withdrawn and generally unpleasant person to be around. It turns out that he and his entire unit have been brainwashed to portray him as a war hero in order to get him elected to high office.
  • A lot of this in Cassandra Clare's works. Perhaps most egregiously, Queen of Air and Darkness devotes over a hundred pages to a detour in which Julian and Emma visit a parallel dimension where Clary didn't triumph at the end of City of Lost Souls, seemingly just for the purpose of having the characters expound on how important her contributions were and what a hero she was in the previous series.
    "So, this is what our world would be like without Clary," said Emma, remembering all the times she'd heard people- mostly men -say that Clary wasn't a hero, that she hadn't done much that deserved to be praised, that she was selfish, even worthless, just a girl who'd been in the right places at the right times.
    Emma: "That world was the way it was because you weren't in it. You were the crisis point, and you made all the difference. [...] Without you, so many people would be dead, and so much goodness would be gone from the world forever."
  • The Devil is a Part-Timer!: This trope is the reason why Chiho Sasaki is such a divisive character among fans. The story often goes on about how sweet and kind she is, even to the point of blatantly lying about her personality or bending the story around her. For example, she gets jealous of Acies at one point and the story says this is highly unusual for her and only because of how clingy the other girl is being, but anyone who has paid attention up to this point knows that Chiho is extremely jealous of anyone she perceives as a rival, most notably Emi.
  • Parodied in the first two Discworld novels: Rincewind is the most incompetent and cowardly wizard on the Disc, even to the point that he can't spell "wizard" right. His companion Twoflower, however, thinks he's the mightiest magician who ever lived. This really gets on Rincewind's nerves, especially when Twoflower's going on about what a mighty warrior he is, and all he really wants to do is run far, far away.
  • In The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel's description of Augustus Waters, from the very first time she meets him, is pretty glowing, focusing on his good looks, charisma, and the connection they have in conversation, compared to her descriptions of other people (which tend to be affectionate, but don't gloss over flaws). This ends up fading away as she gets to know him, as even though she falls in love with him (and he with her), she gets to see his flaws in greater detail. She actually finds she loves him more as she realizes he's less perfect and more human than he seemed at first.
  • Gate: The story gradually reveals more details about Itami by having other characters talk about his achievements, like going through a Ranger training. Each time, Shino is shocked to hear this about someone as lazy and inconspicuous like him. In the first season of the anime, various characters spend about half of the last episode (which is even titled "What would Itami do?") praising the protagonist by repeatedly saying things like "Yeah, Itami definitely could do this" implying he's the only one who can help the newly introduced dark elf girl and save her people.
  • Harry Potter:
    • Lily Potter gets this from virtually every character who ever knew her, and the only people who don't sing her praises are driven by jealousy (Petunia) or evil (the Malfoys, Voldemort), with everyone talking about how kind, clever, beautiful, talented and overall amazing she was. While James has his virtues and flaws examined in close detail over the course of the series, particularly pertaining to Snape, Lily has no flaws and is shown to be right in every single situation she's involved in during flashbacks or secondhand accounts, such as calling James out for being a showboating bully or Snape's obsession with the Dark Arts and Lack of Empathy towards any Muggleborn who isn't her. She is consistently described as extremely talented, intelligent, attractive, and just overall this amazing, saint-like person. Even J.K Rowling describes her as "a bit of a catch."
    • Once it became clear that Ginny was the other half of the series's Official Couple, the narrative seemingly couldn't stop telling us how clever, skilled, kind, and funny she was. The issue with this is that Ginny remains relatively Out of Focus throughout the series, meaning that most of these things are rarely ever conveyed to the audience or actually come to any real circumstance (for example, her skill as a Quidditch player only started showing up after the sport became The Artifact), and some seem to be cases of outright Informed Ability—to the point that some fans theorize it to be a case of Harry's affections giving him an unusually rose-tinted view of her. The films fix this somewhat by actually showing her in action — such as being the only character to join Harry in a fight when the Death Eaters sneak attack the Burrow.
    • Cedric Diggory receives some shilling in the fourth book, though nothing he does seems particularly amazing and the stuff he does do only seems impressive because he is older than Harry and thus has more experience. Notably, Harry ends up bailing him out of the first and third trials, and he is then unceremoniously killed off by Wormtail. This was somewhat necessary to give his character more impact. He's a very minor character in the third book as the captain of Hufflepuff's Quidditch team, then suddenly becomes much more important and needs some rapid character development in the next book. Making it clear just how great and wonderful he is needed to happen for his role as the Sacrificial Lion.
  • Exaggerated with Zoey Redbird in The House of Night. Nyx chose her because she is supposedly wise beyond her years, is a fount of empathy and compassion, and is well-versed in both the old ways and the modern world. She has an instant fan club of people that serve mainly to ooh and ahh over how wonderful she is, men fall at her feet in droves because of how beautiful and awesome she supposedly is, and she gets new tattoos and praise for her bravery from Nyx anytime she takes care of whatever problem is plaguing her that particular book. Actually reading the book shows us that she's a stupid, shallow, judgmental hypocrite that doesn't do much of anything except bemoaning about her boyfriend problems until the authors decide that something needs to happen so the book can end.
  • In The Hunger Games, Katniss' narration does this to her father and sister, and Peeta to a lesser extent. Her father died years ago and she only remembers him as a saint, forgetting or ignoring his bad qualities. She adores her baby sister, is very protective of her, and can't imagine anyone not loving her. As for Peeta, her opinion of him shows subtle clues that she's falling in love with him, but unlike the other two, other characters shill him as well, with Katniss even outright claiming he saved her in the Games, even though Peeta was largely The Load and Katniss spent much of the second half of the book trying to heal his injuries. Katniss and Haymitch also tend to treat Peeta like he's some kind of saint, with Haymitch telling Katniss that Peeta is a much better person than she is and Katniss agrees with him to the point of being willing to die protecting him in the Quarter Quell despite the fact she has a mother and younger sister who would be devastated by her death. This is even though Peeta outright states he threw Katniss the bread the day they met because he was in love with her, not because saving a girl from starving to death was the right thing to do and willingly chose to kill a defenseless girl in the Hunger Games purely to get the Careers to trust him.
  • Eragon of the Inheritance Cycle gets plenty of this. Several of his accomplishments are frequently praised by the other characters, even though most aren't extraordinary compared to what others have done. This is most evident regarding Eragon's skill with words, despite the fact he supposedly has terrible grammar and no practice at writing or giving speeches. He's also praised as a great and wonderful hero despite doing several selfish or un-heroic acts, including choosing to hang out with his friends and ignoring a man who asked Eragon to heal his dying wife.
  • Left Behind:
    • This is more or less the only way that the two main characters Buck and Rayford ever interact with non-main characters. Scores of unnamed friends and co-workers gush about how awesome they are, and they themselves think about how special they are and what a privilege it is to be around them. The authors failed to Show, Don't Tell — they wanted these characters to be awesome, but they only told us how awesome they were without showing it in action. Buck in particular pairs it with a bad case of an Informed Attribute — he's supposed to be a legendarily incorruptible reporter, but over the course of the series we've seen him bury multiple major stories in exchange for protection from — and a job with — the group he would have exposed. This is pretty much a necessity since, in practical terms, they not only never actually achieve anything but it would actually be impossible by the rules of the story for them to do so.
    • Nicolae Carpathia is constantly described in narration as a "genius" with "complete charm". In particular, he's described as a great orator, when his most famous speech in the series (which is hailed as brilliant and gets a standing ovation) consists basically of naming every country in the United Nations in alphabetical order. He is The Antichrist and might have super persuasion skills, but this is never stated explicitly.
  • Mistborn: The Original Trilogy
    • Kelsier is the leader of La Résistance, a skilled Mistborn, and great at sowing discord among the nobles and hope among the Skaa, but people do tend to turn a blind eye towards his less-than-stellar traits at times. In particular after his death it gets even worse, as he crosses into being legendary figure who's the centeral figure of a major religion in the sequels. Elend lampshades it when he complains in his internal monologue that even Kelsier's handwriting is legendary.
    • Vin gets this a bit as well, although similar to above she's Famed In-Story after killing the Lord Ruler. She's obviously a skilled Mistborn and very dangerous in a fight, but she also gets a lot of praise for how talented/beautiful/smart/capable she is on top of that there even she often feels is undeserved. Most of her significant accomplishments basically boil down to killing someone, often with a good bit of luck. She generally doesn't think she's much use outside of a fight, and generally lets the people around her make the actual decisions.
  • The Name of the Wind has Denna, who receives a lot of Character Shilling because Kvothe is in love with her, and the narrative is told from his perspective. It's even lampshaded and justified by Bast who points out he is not an unbiased source when it comes to her and she's actually merely pretty and not breathtaking the way Kvothe describes her, but the narration still goes out of its way to praise Denna on how beautiful, talented and witty she is, despite her personality mostly being a flirt towards rich men because she depends on their handouts and during her adventure with Kvothe she's The Load as Kvothe has to drop what he's doing to take care of her after she accidentally poisons herself with denner resin — which happened because she just stuck a random substance she found in an abandoned house in her mouth, yet she continuously gets the Women Are Wiser trope associated with her.
  • In the Realm of the Elderlings series, Molly from The Farseer Trilogy gets shilled a lot — Burrich and Nighteyes both approvingly comment she's an excellent mate for Fitz and Lady Patience comes out with some fairly blatant shilling when she claims Molly is "smart and diligent, full of wit and spirit" when actually all Molly does when she's on page is constantly scold and nag Fitz for daring to have a life outside of her and seemingly deliberately fails to grasp he isn't lying when he says he's in a very dangerous position in court and has to keep their relationship a secret, even when two armed men on horseback try to assault her because of her association with Fitz.
  • S.D. Perry's Resident Evil series go to extraordinary lengths to sell readers on how smart, brave, tough, smart, gifted, smart, and really, really smart Rebecca Chambers is, despite her scientific knowledge never rising above that expected from anyone who paid attention in junior high chemistry. Every sympathetic character, even the protagonists from the actual games, gets at least one inner monologue describing how fiercely independent, resourceful, and intelligent she is, and she becomes the star of two original novels where she basically saves the world singlehandedly while riding atop a massive, cresting wave of adulation from the other characters. It's notable that these books were written before the 2002 REmake changed Rebecca's characterization into that of an intelligent and well-grounded but very stressed-out young woman in way over her head, so Perry's only source of inspiration for her hypercompetent super-genius version was the obliviously cheerful dingbat from the 1996 original.
  • Count how many times someone in the Sword of Truth talks about how "there aren't many people like Richard" or "Richard is a very rare person" or "Richard was the most (fill in the blank: compassionate, humble, brilliant, gentle, kind, brave) man (he/she) had ever met." You'll be over a hundred by the time you finish the first book. It's debatable whether Richard actually displays any of those qualities.
  • Miss Pross' brother, Solomon, in A Tale of Two Cities: Through most of the novel, all we "know" about him is that his sister sings his praises at the slightest provocation (or often none at all), and in particular that she considers him the only man on earth worthy of marrying Lucie. When we do finally meet him, he's utterly devoid of redeeming qualities.
  • All of the main cast in The Twilight Saga gets this treatment. We're told how wonderful Edward and the Cullens are, but their actions and behavior throughout the series suggest anything but. Bella herself is constantly described as amazing and special, without really doing anything to deserve it.
  • In Warrior Cats, mostly in material written by Vicky Holmes, Ashfur and Hollyleaf tend to be characterized as good and noble cats in tragic circumstances they couldn't help, playing down their crimes and motivations for committing them.
    • Ashfur is described as a "good mentor" to Lionblaze in the Ultimate Guide, which is debatable since they didn't get along at all — they even fought each other once — and he also possibly taught Lionblaze some moves incorrectly (at least Lionblaze thought so and accused him of it). More than once Ashfur's attempted murders of the father and three kits of the she-cat who rejected him is handwaved as "his only fault was to love too much" (including in a scene where he made it to the cats' equivalent of heaven).
    • Hollyleaf's behavior was whitewashed at least once (in the Ultimate Guide): her murder of Ashfur was described as an accident where she didn't mean to fatally wound him, he fell into the stream himself, her self-imposed exile from the Clan was due to guilt, and her motivations were basically fear and being overwhelmed by the secret. In the book where it actually happened, her brother saw in her memories that she intentionally tried to kill Ashfur, she even stated that she threw his body in the stream to hide it, she ran from the Clan because they wouldn't view the murder as her doing "the right thing", and her motivations were more along the lines of Knight Templar/Black-and-White Insanity.
  • The Zodiac Series is obsessed with giving Rho this treatment, even when she hasn’t actually done anything yet. The best example of this can be seen in Wandering Star, where a string of 4 to 5 new characters are introduced back to back, given a one sentence backstory each, then give multiple paragraphs praising her for her actions in the first book when all that she did was convince the Plenum to send an armada to an uninhabited section of space that ended with a ton of people dying and nothing actually being achieved.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
    • One of the initial reasons comic fans reacted poorly to the show was because of the writers' insistence on constantly comparing Grant Ward, a Canon Foreigner, to Black Widow, an actual Avenger from the comics and movie. It got to the height of absurdity when it was stated that Ward was more adept at trickery and undercover work than Widow, who in the past has managed to outsmart the God of lies and trickery himself. Though it becomes somewhat justified in hindsight since this provided the first clue to the series' outcome: Ward was in fact The Mole and Evil All Along without anyone within S.H.I.E.L.D. being aware of this fact, meaning he really was that good as a double agent, if not within his original role.
    • Skye took a lot of flak, largely because nearly everyone else on the team was head-over-heels in love with her by the second episode, despite knowing she was an anti-S.H.I.E.L.D. hacker who hadn't yet done much to prove her new loyalties. Coulson already saw her as a substitute daughter, Ward and Fitz both had crushes on her, and Simmons had formed a sisterly friendship with her. Only May ever expressed any real doubts about letting her work with them. Even when she betrayed the team for her ex-boyfriend and fellow hacktivist early on, everyone got over it within a couple of episodes. Luckily, the writers managed to reel it back in enough to even give it a bit of a Fandom Nod later in the series, when Skye's legal name at the orphanage where she was raised was "Mary Sue Poots."
    • Ironically, the other three Canon Foreigners in the main cast, all of whom were deliberately set up to possess Living Legend status within S.H.I.E.L.D. — May and Fitz-Simmons — weren't the subjects of much shilling at all, and as such were generally much better received by fans than Ward or Skye, especially to begin with. May in particular is treated well, because she herself doesn't like to talk about why she's The Dreaded and we only know how good she is because her enemies are terrified of her.
  • American Idol has often made a habit of this, with the judges often going on about how awesome some contestants were regardless of public opinion. It was most infamous with Season 11 contender Phillip Phillips; despite having little vocal range and repetitive performances, the judges relentlessly praised the heck out of him and he won the season.
  • America's Got Talent also has a tendency to shill its contestants. 12-year-old Grace Vanderwaal was shilled repeatedly by all four of the judges no matter what, though her voice sounded like she was going through puberty at the time of the season's run and most of her performances were somewhat repetitive. She went on to win the season and is considered to be somewhat of a Creator's Pet. The next season, Angelica Hale got this so much that you could make a Drinking Game out of it.
  • Arrow:
    • Laurel Lance, particularly in early seasons. Oliver, Quentin, and Tommy all gush about how selfless and noble she is, when she's generally selfish, vindictive, butts heads with everyone (especially Oliver), and more than once almost gets him arrested. She spends most of Season 1 getting damselled, most of Season 2 descending into drugs and alcohol, and most of Season 3 hiding her sister's death from her father. She eventually gets set straight and Took a Level in Kindness, but she still gets shilled on occasion.
    • Felicity is similarly shilled, especially after Laurel was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. Not only was she not selfless like everyone said, she became such a Creator's Pet that even the villains were praising her. In particular, everybody feels the need to show how she's "perfect" for Oliver, and even Laurel devotes her death scene to proclaiming Felicity Oliver's true love. The shilling migrated over to The Flash, with everyone there gushing about her no matter how tangentially they know her, and even Thawne gratuitously calling her "a great woman".
    • Tina Boland aka "Dinah Drake" is written to be Laurel Lance's successor as Black Canary, and thus has been shilled upon her introduction. The production team even go out of their way to build her up on social media to make the audiences fall in love with her. However, the coincidences of her skillset and name reek of the writers trying to present the character as "better" than either Laurel or her Alternate Self from Earth-2 (the fan-favorite to succeed the former) and thus perfect for the role has instead made the character both a Replacement Scrappy and a Creator's Pet.
  • Babylon 5: A Lower-Deck Episode in its last season featured a couple of maintenance workers who end up praising new character Captain Lochley and telling her that she was all right in their book. Apparently, both of the two "little guys" were openly Author Avatars.
  • Bones: In the sixth season, Hannah Burley is constantly shilled as beautiful, talented, and intelligent, when she's about as interesting as a raw vegetable. Most awkwardly, the characters insist on calling Hannah and Brennan "friends", when every scene depicting their "friendship" is awkward at best.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In seasons four and five, Buffy's boyfriend Riley Finn got a lot of character shilling (partly because the writers knew they had to distinguish him from her previous boyfriend Angel). One episode in particular had the couple break up, only for Xander to admonish Buffy by telling her how awesome he was, which only made the problem worse.
  • Charmed: The Charmed Ones in later seasons are explicitly shilled by other characters, who often make mention of their selflessness — even though by then, they've forsaken their own destiny so they could focus on their own lives. The only times they're called on it, it's by explicitly evil characters. Coincidentally, this started happening when two of the three leads became executive producers.
  • Criminal Minds did this a couple of times:
    • Jason Gideon was being shilled as early as the pilot (to the obvious annoyance of Morgan and Hotch). He left the show two seasons later, but his replacement David Rossi was similarly talked up, and Alex Blake later had the same thing happen to her. In all cases, we never saw what made them so good at their jobs.
    • Ashley Seaver was talked up as having exceptional academy scores, only to be shown making bad decisions in the field and having a tendency to state the obvious.
  • In Cursed (2020), Nimue is quickly held up by the Fey as being a great leader and fearsome warrior who is responsible for bringing them all together, but until the seventh episode all she's really done is have the Sword of Power in her possession and kill a few Paladins; she doesn't step up as a leader until the final minutes of this episode, though she begins living up to her reputation afterwards. In comparison, Gawain is actively doing more to rally the Fey and resist the Paladins for much longer (leading night raids, getting food, leading refugees to Nemos etc) but doesn't get nearly as much hype.
  • Zig-Zagging Trope in Daredevil (2015) with Wilson Fisk. Before his first appearance, characters like James Wesley would hype him up as a fearsome crime lord, without even mentioning him by name. The first time we actually see Fisk, he's a shy dork fumbling over asking Vanessa out on a date. Then we see that he really does live up to the hype, starting when he kills Anatoly with a car door.
  • Degrassi:
    • This happens quite a bit to Mia during Season 8, much to Holly J's (and many fans') annoyance. The character was seen by many as being unrealistic, but the showrunners kept trying to portray her as amazing. One episode focusing on another character's attempts to woo her was even titled "Uptown Girl" after the Billy Joel songnote  as if to remind the audience how obviously desirable and amazing Mia supposedly was.
    • In "Degrassi Takes Manhattan", Jay shills Emma by telling Spinner that she wouldn't screw him over like Jane did (like Emma never cheated on anybody before). It's especially perplexing that Jay would talk Emma up like this because a few years ago, she prostituted herself to him. For rubber bracelets.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Doctor refers to K-9 as his "best friend", but he never really deserves this, especially considering that the Doctor has known Leela longer and seems to like her more. Fans saw this as a cheap way to introduce a mascot to the show. (They were particularly burned because the first time the Doctor ever had a "best friend", it was a really big deal, and it was in reference to Sarah Jane, who definitely did deserve the title).
    • The Daleks needed some shilling in their first appearance in the new series, as they had undergone some serious Badass Decay over the years, and while "Remembrance of the Daleks" had gone a way to fixing this, it had been roughly twenty years before, at a time when the show's audience had already greatly declined. This was fixed partly by removing their Weaksauce Weaknesses (like their useless plungers) and partly by showing that the Doctor despises them and treats them like one of the most dangerous races in the universe.
      The Doctor: If the Dalek gets out, it'll murder every living thing. That's all it needs.
      Van Statten: But why would it do that?
      The Doctor: Because it honestly believes they should die. Human beings are different, and anything different is wrong. It's the ultimate in racial cleansing, and you, van Statten, you've let it loose!
    • Rose Tyler is often seen this way. The Doctor and Captain Jack would gush about how special she was, while many fans thought there was little evidence of this (and a few considered her a Canon Sue). It got even worse after she left, as the Doctor would hype her up to his next companion Martha, who was left feeling she could never live up to her (and Rose had to come back anyway to help save the universe, despite being specifically told that doing so would put the whole universe together).
    • Clara Oswald is treated like the Doctor's single most important companion. Most of this has to do with where the story thrust her, rather than any exceptional abilities compared to other companions. The show started to treat it like an incredible accomplishment that she wouldn't twist her ankle and turn useless (it had been forever since a companion did that anyway). The Doctor grew extremely protective of her and close to her, even though she didn't deserve this more than some other companions, leading to him becoming a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds after she's Killed Off for Real in a Senseless Sacrifice (which is admittedly something that doesn't happen very often with his companions). Some of this is mitigated by the Doctor's decision to undergo a painful procedure to wipe his memory of her, which at least shows he's learned not to mope about her as he did with Rose.
    • One complaint about the new series is that the Doctor themself is often subjected to character shilling. YouTube critic Hbomberguy observed in one of his videos that the Eleventh Doctor's first appearance involves him scaring off the Monster of the Week by simply telling it how cool he is, and other characters speak of him reverently as if he is a god, whereas in the older series, and even in the earlier revival series, the Doctor was just someone who went on adventures and was only one piece of the puzzle to each episode's plot, rather than the axis around which the entire Universe spins. However Series Six does go on to deconstruct this, by showing how the Doctor's legend has grown out of control with his enemies going to extreme lengths to destroy him, including kidnaping the child of his companions to raise as a weapon against him. This prompts him to fake his death and destroy the records on him so he can fade back into the shadows.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond did this to Debra, as part of a wider trend to make her the clear "winner" in her series-long conflict with her mother-in-law Marienote . Not only was she an absolute saint who was always right, she got Progressively Prettier and could get away with outright physical and emotional abuse of her husband Ray (which the show portrayed as positive female empowerment). This made her a Base-Breaking Character; it clearly worked with some fans, but others saw her as a smug Karma Houdini and Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
  • Friends did this to Rachel. The series seemed to go out of its way to make her a desirable character, and her friends spoke of her accordingly. They make a big deal about how she "made it on her own" (i.e. left her life as a spoiled rich kid to live with her friends who bail her out when she screws up), how she's a "career woman" (with maybe the easiest job in the cast when she can hold one down), how great a mother she is (she's not — the show jokes about it), and how awesome a girlfriend she is (when she's probably the most difficult to please out of anyone in the cast, and not noticeably more attractive than Monica or Phoebe). This is due in no small part to the fact that Rachel is series co-creator and head writer Marta Kaufman’s Author Avatar.
    • Ross and Rachel as a couple got this on the show as well. All through the series, the four other main characters would constantly go on and on and on about Ross and Rachel were such a cute couple, how great they were together, how they were "destined" to be together, and how they were each other's "lobster." A casual viewing of the show reveals quite the opposite. In reality, Ross and Rachel fought all the time (usually dragging the other four characters in the middle, making it even more awkward), they had jealousy issues even when they were not together (which is bad enough for a couple held up to such high standards), but what made it even worse was that they were always blaming everything on the other person, and neither one refused to take any responsibility for their part in the multiple break ups. This is in part due to the fact that both were spoiled rotten as children and weren't used to being blamed for things. The fighting's also lampshaded by Monica at least once.
    Monica: (pretending to be Rachel) "I love Ross! I hate Ross! I love Ross! I hate Ross!"
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Renly Baratheon is described by loads of people as someone who would make an ideal ruler in contrast to his austere older brother Stannis. Even the writers openly said Renly would undoubtedly make a better King than Stannis. But Renly doesn't actually show any statesmanship, in his Small Council meetings just going along with what his oldest brother King Robert says. The idea that he's being supported by so many Lords falls somewhat flat when you remember he and his father-in-law are their Lord Paramount. And despite the idea that he has a caring and kind nature, he shows he was quite willing to start a war and kill his brother to usurp the Iron Throne, even turning down an offer from Stannis to become their heir and be on the Small Council (something that would be likely to land him on the throne for quite a few years). Part of this is explained by the writer really hating Stannis, forcing some Adaptational Heroism on Renly's part compared to the books, and his grandmother-in-law Olenna Tyrell says he knew how to look good and thought that meant he should be King.
    • Daenerys Targaryen gets a lot of this from season four and on. Her liberation of Slaver's Bay is talked up by everyone in her faction (unsurprisingly given most of them are slaves she saved), glossing over the later issues she faces trying to rebuild the economy. That said, she is dismantling a thousand-year-old regime and is the first person in centuries to revive dragons so it's unsurprising she's become a Living Legend.
    • Tyrion Lannister himself gets some shilling in later episodes when people constantly refer to his "brilliant mind", even though after he becomes Dany's Hand, his so-called "brilliance" ends up costing a lot of defeats thanks to his outdated information and positing himself as an excellent tactician and military strategist when he really isn't. He is smart, but not as smart as the show wants us to believe. Peter Dinklage even lampshaded this in an interview for "The Long Night" by pointing out you'd think Tyrion of all people would have realised hiding all the non-combatants in the crypts of Winterfell was a terrible idea considering they're fighting an enemy who can raise the dead.
    • Ramsay gets this from others, especially in season 6 where his enemies talk about how smart he is despite his Stupid Evil tendencies and hasn’t shown any long-term strategic mind.
    • Sansa Stark gets this in the final two seasons, with multiple characters raving about her apparent brilliance without preamble. These include Tyrion talking about what an intelligent survivor she is (despite not having seen her in years and her having not been particularly bright beforehand), and Jon telling her she'll be a great leader (just after she spilled his life-threatening secret for her own ends).
  • Garth Marenghis Darkplace: it'd probably be easier to list times Rick Dagless isn't shilled, at one point a priest implies that he's a better person than God. Considering Dagless is played by the titular Garth Marenghi, who also wrote and directed the series, it's a blatant Marty Stu. Of course, this show is a parody of the eighties horror genre, so it's natural that this trope is getting parodied as well. And just to take it one step further, Dagless shills Marenghi. In one episode he finds one of Marenghi's books, and shamelessly praises the author's skill and powerful writing for the rest of the scene.
  • General Hospital: everyone is singing the praises of Brenda Barrett. Both men and women rave about how beautiful and perfect she is, and almost every heroine on the show is compared to her and told how they will never measure up to her. She's been more or less officially designated the One True Love of two different men. But she's far from a perfect person, and her returns usually result in the ruination of a few relationships.
  • Gilmore Girls: If the entire town of Stars Hollow is to be believed (especially her mother Lorelai and grandparents Richard and Emily), Rory Gilmore walks on water, is a genius, and is the embodiment of all things good and pure. Practically every episode features characters going on and on about what a great young lady Rory is, how she's destined for success, how she has no trouble attracting men, how any drama she has with them is in no way, shape, or form her fault, and how people who don't like her are just jealous. Suffice to say whenever someone bluntly points out Rory's flaws, she cannot handle it.
  • Glee:
    • Increasingly, the show treats Will and Finn this way — particularly, other characters stand around gushing about how talented, good-hearted, and attractive they both are.
    • In the first half of Season 2, this went on a lot with Kurt Hummel, in spite him of sometimes treating his friends rather cruelly. This culminated in "Furt", a whole episode of Kurt-shilling, upstaging even his dad and Finn's mom getting married (Finn's best man speech and even the parents' wedding vows were all about Kurt). Thankfully they let off on it after that, but did so by sending Kurt to Dalton.
    • Other characters constantly talk up Blaine as a talented, attractive dreamboat, especially in Season 3.
    • Rachel Berry swims in an unending sea of this with regard to her singing ability. Every character, even those who are rightfully put off by how incredibly self-centered and rude she is, falls over themselves to talk about how her singing voice is flawless, miraculous, the greatest thing they have ever heard, and how she is destined to be a shining star. It even takes bald-faced Character Shilling from Tina to persuade the dean of Rachel's dream school to give her a second audition... after Rachel completely screwed up her first one.
    • Marley Rose is described as amazing so often, you'd think everyone was being drugged into doing it. She's as thick as two short planks, gets everything with no effort, and has the personality of a wet blanket — and yet nobody (not even the mean characters) has a bad thing to say about her, she has two guys chasing after her, and she seems to be an uber-special member of the Glee club.
  • Gossip Girl does this to Dan Humphrey, especially in the series finale. This is partly because of the revelation that Dan is Gossip Girl, and everyone's suddenly willing to forgive him for basically stalking them, outing their secrets, humiliating them, and generally being a dick for the entirety of the show.
  • H₂O: Just Add Water: Will is set up as the new male lead for the third season, becoming the new character for the girls to go to for help after Lewis's departure. Thing is, Will isn't as nice as he is said to be, given that he felt entitled to the secret the girls shared and forced Bella into mermaid form by cornering her, and got confirmation that Cleo and Rikki are also mermaids by withholding a kidnapped Rikki's location from the others. His romance with Bella is based around the fact that she's a mermaid, with "What else is there?" being his response to why he likes her, something that never gets resolved. To make matters worse, Zane, and to a lesser extent Lewis, Took a Level in Jerkass to make Will look better by comparison.
  • How I Met Your Mother:
    • Don was introduced in Season 5 as "the guy Robin would inevitably marry," but his subsequent appearances paint him as annoying and flawed. As soon as he started showing romantic interest in Robin, Marshall does not stop gushing about him. We don't even see their interactions, but Marshall calls him "smart, handsome, and funny". This is jarring because two episodes ago we were supposed to hate the guy.
    • Once Robin met Don, Barney was flanderized into a supreme womanizer who scored with every girl he hit on... and the rest of the cast inexplicably became his enthusiastic cheerleaders, even though in earlier seasons they'd only kind of put up with it and even expressed occasional disgust at some of Barney's slimier methods. They rooted for Barney every time he hit on a girl, actively helped him out at one point, and celebrated every time he scored (which was often). It was as if the writers were desperately telling their viewers, "See? See how much better Barney is as an exaggerated caricature of himself than when he was paired with Robin?" Then it's deconstructed when Robin reveals that she was actually quite upset when Barney started chasing girls and the others started cheering him on. The others realize what a dick he was, and he eventually settles down and commits to Robin.
  • Passions: In the summer and fall of 2003, many people kept going on and on about what a good mother Theresa was. The problem with this was that not only did she spend much of the first year of her son's life using him to pull in her longtime crush Ethan (even naming the boy after him), but she wasn't even with him — she was vacationing in L.A., where Ethan and his wife happened to be seeking help with her complicated pregnancy.
  • Power Rangers Samurai:
    • Done heavily towards Jayden when Lauren enters the field. Jayden decides to leave the team now that his sister, the rightful heir, has returned and he thinks she'll take his place as the Red Samurai Ranger, only for the team to mostly ignore Lauren's attempts at making friends with them and instead complaining that she's not Jayden. This shilling continues past the time when Jayden returns, even focusing more on him than on Lauren when she failed at the sealing technique, the one thing she has spent her whole life training to do up until that point.
    • Really, the whole series. Jayden's so great, Jayden's so important, Jayden is the best warrior ever, we love him so much, he's so bright and shiny and perfect... and just as surely as the heroes are the Jayden Cheerleading Squad, he's the only enemy the villains feel is important. Jayden's the only one who can seal them away again so he must be brought down, Jayden's the Worthy Opponent who is the only one the Blood Knight swordsman sees as worth fighting... SERIOUSLY, WE GET IT. You'd think it'd all lessen with the Lauren storyline where we find that no, he CAN'T actually seal away the villains; he's been set up as a decoy for the one who can while she perfects the sealing technique, but instead, it simply becomes 2-3 episodes of everyone whinging over how much they miss him and how nothing is the same without him and ONLY JAYDEN is the one "true" Red Ranger and it's so horribly wrong that he isn't here and... you get the picture. While he's actually less annoying than most examples on this list (where all too often, the shilling is repeating the Informed Attributes of characters who actually display none of the positive qualities everyone gushes over), it creates a bit of a problem where your enjoyment level of this season will largely depend on whether or not you can worship Jayden as much as the writers are telling you to.
  • Revolution: Done by Nora on behalf of Charlie, just in case we had forgotten how "special" she is. In fact, Miles can't ever seem to call her out on being an Idiot Hero without being seen as an asshole. It petered out in later episodes, though.
  • Robin Hood: Kate is shilled to an ungodly extreme. Across only eleven episodes, the character is described by allies and enemies alike as amazing, perfect, feisty, pretty, a treasure, a good fighter, brave, compassionate, and beautiful. Hilarity stems from the fact that she often displays the exact opposite qualities to the ones affixed to her. For example, the episode in which she's lauded as "compassionate" involves her repeatedly insisting that the outlaws leave her romantic rival to be raped and murdered by a psychopath, and the "good fighter" compliment makes no sense whatsoever considering she's the team Load who spends most of her time getting kidnapped.
  • Scrubs:
    • Season 3 character Grace Miller, who was supposed to be the female version of Doctor Cox and supposedly a very competent surgeon and treated like she was some kind of mega-hot goddess... She was also really petty, like making Turk do work way beneath his skill level because she wasn't invited to his wedding (and the whole reason Carla didn't want her there was because she's "too pretty"), rude, conceited, constantly treated Turk like dirt and wasn't funny. Yet Turk inexplicably really wanted to impress her, Carla never defends Turk over Dr. Miller's treatment of him as she would have anyone else, Dr. Cox spends quite a bit of the season panting over her even though she's basically Jordan but without any redeeming qualities or history with him, Elliot gushes over how "cool" she is because she bullies her male surgeons team by giving them constant undeserved "The Reason You Suck" Speeches. Thankfully the writers realised the audience hated her and she didn't come back after that season.
    • Molly Clock also gets this a lot, with people (again, Elliot in particular) shilling how nice, smart, and overall great she is, even managing to pull off a Wounded Gazelle Gambit on both Dr. Kelso and Dr. Cox when they find her constantly upbeat demeanour (justifiably) annoying. The only character who actively avoids/dislikes her is Turk, and that's because he thinks of her as a "devil woman" who can read his thoughts because she's that good as a psychiatrist and he claims any man would kill to have sex with her, Elliot acts like a schoolgirl with a crush towards her after some initial hostility, Carla gets jealous because everyone starts taking their problems to Molly over her despite barely knowing her, she's a Love Interest of J.D's for a short time and even manages to heal the Todd (though it doesn't stick). J.D. and Turk even claim she's the second hottest woman in the hospital. This is even though she pulls some really manipulative stunts over her stay on the show, frequently makes stupid mistakes like trusting a drug addict (which is something Dr. Cox busted Elliot's balls over previously), and dating terrible men and she herself even admits that Elliot puts her on a pedestal way too much.
    • Jordan tends to get treated like some kind of indomitable badass who is the only person who can control Dr. Cox, but since she inherited her position from her father and only comes into the hospital seemingly when she feels like it, she comes off more like a lazy Spoiled Brat than anything else and though she complains about Dr. Cox's Jerkass tendencies, she's just as bad (if not worse, since why she's like that is never explored) as he is but never gets called out on it. She's very rarely, if ever, put in a position where she has to stand on her own with the odds against her the way Carla and Elliot are. This may have something to do with the fact that the character is played by the show creator and executive producer’s wife.
  • Sherlock:
    • Played with in the case of Sherlock himself. There are a lot of characters who explicitly don't like him, and with good reason — he's an anti-social, abrasive Insufferable Genius with an unspecified mental disorder (but who occasionally proves himself invaluable to the police). But the people who do like him (particularly John) see him as even more than a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and one of the greatest people they've ever known, even though he struggles mightily to give a shit about anyone else.
    • In Season 3, Charles Magnussen is described by Mycroft as the most dangerous man in Europe. He lasts a single episode against Sherlock, who ends up shooting him just to get rid of him. It doesn't help that the fans were immediately comparing him to Moriarty (whose message "Did you miss me?" could well be poking fun at those fans).
    • Moriarity also gets this—he's described as being Sherlock's Arch-Enemy, a Manipulative Bastard par none. As it turns out, his whole plan was part of a larger Batman Gambit by the Holmes brothers and he ends up succumbing to a Villainous BSoD and committing suicide.
  • In Smallville, Lana Lang spent the first several years of the show's run being the girl everyone was in love with; she was Clark's long-term hopeless crush, the object of every villain's twisted affection (so that Clark could rescue her every week or so), and everyone else's bestest friend. All of the praise heaped upon the character couldn't hide the fact that she really wasn't all that amazing and would often indulge in petty behavior. As the show wore on, her awesomeness caught up with all the shilling when she got a dose of superpowers — but this made her more irritating, and she finally left the show in season eight.
  • Stargate Universe:
    • By the latter half of season 2, Scott's line telling Young, "You are a good commander!" was added to every episode intro, apparently in an attempt to convince the audience of just that. He wasn't.
    • Scott himself is constantly touted as being a great leader who's also awesome because he Really Gets Around; the creators even called him the "Jack O'Neill of ten years ago." Fans countered that the comparison doesn't work because they actually like Jack. (On top of that, O'Neill made a couple guest appearances in SGU, making the difference between the two obvious.)
  • Star Trek: The Original Series had a tendency to shower unwarranted and effusive praise on guest star characters whom Gene Roddenberry had a special interest in plugging. It's most egregious in "Assignment Earth" when Kirk and company take several minutes out of the plot to expound on the physical perfection of Gary Seven (Robert Lansing's a handsome man, but come on) to hide the fact that the episode was a Poorly Disguised Pilot for a half-hour adventure series padded out to fill a full hour time slot.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In one particularly glaring example from a first-season episode, a Sufficiently Advanced Alien known as "The Traveler" stopped in seemingly for the exclusive purpose of telling the crew how wonderful Wesley was. While Wesley hadn't quite become a Creator's Pet by that point, further treatment along these lines cemented him as one of the most definitive examples of Creator's Pet. He is, in fact, the former Trope Namer ("Shilling the Wesley", "The Wesley" being the old name for Creator's Pet).
    • Captain Okona from "The Outrageous Okona" did nothing actually outrageous except taking advantage of his incredibly hyped reputation as a wild maverick man of action to get laid (not exactly difficult in Trek's Free-Love Future). Popular with the ladies, but not with the fans, who largely consider him a joke.
    • In-universe, the Zakdorn rely on their reputation as master strategists, which has ensured that nobody ever dared to fight them. Characters who meet one on TNG are less than impressed with his abilities. Apparently no race had ever attempted to tangle with them just because of their reputation, which annoyed Worf:
      Worf: This Zakdorn does not appear to be a very formidable warrior.
      Data: In the game of military brinkmanship, individual physical prowess is less important than the perception of a species as a whole. For over nine millennia, potential foes have regarded the Zakdorn as having the greatest innately strategic minds in the galaxy.
      Worf: So no one is willing to test that perception in combat?
      Data: Exactly.
      Worf: Then the reputation means nothing.
    • A slightly more modest example was Dr. Pulaski. Characters often stated to each other (and the audience) how comforting her bedside manner was, and how she was a kind, loving physician. This was probably done to soften her character, which had been saddled with one of the only arcs in the whole show, starting out as racist against Data and gradually learning the errors of her ways. The character never lived it down, and most audiences were not convinced by the shilling to warm up to her.
  • Played for Laughs in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The rest of the cast constantly talks up how funny, talented, talkative, charming, handsome, etc., Morn is, none of which the audience ever gets to see.note 
  • A pretty extreme example comes from the last season of That '70s Show. Randy, an infamous Replacement Scrappy, is praised by the other teens for his looks and sweet demeanor. Worst of all, he's praised by Red (father of the character he replaced), despite the fact that it'd be out of character for Red to be complimenting anyone, much less a long-haired, soft-spoken youth.
  • The Wire: A lot of characters in the third season comment on just how bad and cold Marlo Stanfield is, saying that he's "for real" and that no gangster we've yet seen can match up to him. Subverted in that, once he shows up, he lives up to the hype, starting a reign of terror that eclipses that of the Barksdale crew.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • CMLL successfully turned Perro Aguayo Jr, who was seen as a Replacement Scrappy for his father, into a heavily cheered tecnico by having the popular Los Guapos back him up — but interestingly, the only way they could do that was to hang a lampshade on how much everybody hated him to begin with.
  • Adam "Pacman" Jones, a football player who joined TNA, was someone who nobody (be they football fans, wrestling fans, or the NFL itself) was particularly interested in seeing — except TNA's creative, who had Eric Young (whom everyone still liked at this point) blab constantly about how Pacman is his hero.
  • "Bruce LeRoy" Taimak, star of The Last Dragon, was shilled by popular wrestlers like Jimmy Wang Yang in Ring of Honor, former WCW farm league The Heartland Association and Vendetta Pro Wrestling before any live involvement. Though he always returned the favor.
  • Triple H, "The Cerebral Assassin", is considered to have decent to great wrestling psychology by even his harshest critics (and they're pretty harsh). However, announcers would constantly talk about what a great technical wrestler he was, even though he was clearly a brawler with few on the mat moves. This was especially noticeable when he first readded the modified Indian deathlock that he'd used as a finisher during his Terra Ryzing days in WCW to his moveset as a resthold — the rest gave the commentators time to gush over his supposed technical mastery.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Happens to several characters in Legend of the Five Rings, due to the interactive nature of its storyline. Characters referred to as badasses can often be of questionable competence:
    • Hantei Naseru is an odd case, as he was frequently shown to be a Magnificent Bastard and The Chessmaster before he ascended to the throne. But since then, his regime is all but neutered by political rivals, and he's never shown even attempting to oppose them.
    • Scorpion ninja are supposed to be badass normals as opposed to the shapeshifting ninja of the Goju and Ninube, with the Scorpion expressly referred to as "Snake Eyes". In practice, they tend to play Conservation of Ninjutsu straight: A story with a single Scorpion ninja may have the character hold their own, but a group of them tends to grab the Idiot Ball and hold it tight.
    • The Lion Clan are often talked up as the foremost tacticians and soldiers in the Empire. Their leaders have a horrible tendency to die to obvious ploys.
    • The Phoenix, the foremost magicians in the Empire, and they've spent three generations running losing every single battle they're ever in.
  • This is a major mechanic in Spycraft, with several skills (Networking, Impress, and Manipulation) and loads of feats and gear (cover identities, the Patriotism feat, etc.) focused on shifting people's attitude towards you (or another player or faction), even before you make your actual move. And that move doesn't have to be commensurate with your reputation. The Seduction conflict is an entire minigame based on talking a character into thinking that you're allied with them without actually doing anything to prove it.
  • Warhammer 40,000 does this so often, you hardly notice anymore; every faction update portrays its faction as mighty and unstoppable, if only because it's the best way to sell models. But even by these standards, the Space Marines — and particularly the Ultramarines — get a ridiculous amount of shilling. The 5th Edition codex converted the Ultramarines from their old Jack of All Trades characteristic to the epitome of Imperial virtue, and the pinnacle to which all other Space Marine chapters aspire to emulate. The codex being mostly written by a confessed Ultramarine fanboy might have had something to do with it.

    Theatre 
  • Lampshaded in The Merchant of Venice:
    Portia: No more, I pray thee. I am half afeard
    Thou wilt say anon he is some kin to thee,
    Thou spend'st such high-day wit in praising him!

    Video Games 
  • Isabelle in Animal Crossing: New Horizons arrives with a lot of fanfare, as Tom Nook announces that she will be joining the island in Resident Services. So you would think this would open a lot of new things, with Isabelle being one of the most useful characters in the game. Unfortunately, many players found Isabelle's actual role to be rather bothersome to say the least. Her purpose it turns out is to inject herself into every play session to talk about her TV habits instead of anything useful, give vague ideas on how to make your island "look" better, and reset your villagers' clothing.
  • By the time of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Makoto Nanaya has been enjoying quite a bit shilling for someone who's just minding her own business rather than taking part in the plot actively. Hazama considers her a Spanner in the Works, Relius Clover becomes obsessed with her apparent "strong soul", and resident snobby bitch Rachel has only had nice things to say to her. The sequel ends up dropping this completely, instead treating her as a normal character instead of some godly being. Relius doesn't even acknowledge her when they meet up again.
  • Lilith receives a heavy dose of this throughout Borderlands 3. The game even opens with Marcus hailing her as The Paragon that's "saved Pandora over and over", even though half the events of 2 were directly her fault. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! showed that Handsome Jack went off the deep end after she disfigured him, and she pulled a Leeroy Jenkins in 2 that rendered Angel's Heroic Sacrifice pointless, and Pre-Sequel all but spelled out that her obsession with revenge against anyone she feels was even remotely connected to Jack and thus Roland's death was leading her down a dark path, but all of this goes ignored in-universe.
  • Pretty much every other line from a human NPC in Duke Nukem Forever consists of talking Duke Nukem up for being a total badass and a big-time celebrity; male characters think he's the coolest dude ever, and female characters can't go five minutes without propositioning him for sex. The sole exception is the President, who is framed as a whiny, incompetent moron. This stands out, because the game makes the Sequel Gap between Duke Nukem 3D and Forever canon, meaning that some of the people shilling Duke would have been children (or, in the case of a child begging for his autograph, not even born yet) during the bulk of his career.
  • Dusty Raging Fist introduces a new character, Leo the Lion who's a "legendary demolitions expert." The moment he appears onscreen, all the characters exclaim, "It's the Leo!" with Snow asking if Leo would autograph his rifle. But as the game goes on Leo is just another Assist Character with little-to-no development.
  • Dynasty Warriors:
    • Guan Yu is praised as "the God of War"... even well before he's done anything to deserve such a lofty title. Worse, his children are introduced into the series as time goes by (his oldest son Guan Ping is introduced in the fifth game), but generally they don't seem to do much except to talk about how amazing their father is. For people who dislike Shu (and Guan Yu in particular), the worst examples were the introduction of Guan Suo and Zhou Cang... who historically never existed and seemed to be introduced solely because of their connection to Guan Yu.
    • Zhuge Liang also gets hit with this, being praised as a peerless strategist. While in earlier games he seemed to back this up by understanding how enemies will act and react, in later games his 'strategies' seem to boil down to launching his wife's Schizo Tech tiger tanks and other machines at the enemy.
    • Lu Bu is shilled as the mightiest warrior of the land... but he generally backs this up by actually being the strongest character in the game. Even on lower difficulty levels, he's often able to kill a player in one hit. However, despite his physical prowess, many characters note he's such a belligerent Blood Knight that he's rather easy to manipulate.
    • What makes the above Zhou Cang example particularly galling was that he was introduced in a crossover game as Dynasty Warriors' representative alongside series poster boy Zhao Yun. The director defended the decision by claiming Zhou Cang was "wildly popular" and "long requested", a claim that enraged fans by suggesting that fans would be more interested in the interactions between crossover characters and a character who only existed to be Guan Yu's servant rather than, say, a leader character like Liu Bei or Cao Cao. And this is before taking into account people angry that someone who didn't exist was introduced before people who actually did.
  • Fate/Grand Order shills Nero to hell and back in the Septim singularity. Even characters who by all means should despise her and actively want her dead can't stop praising her every other sentence (most prominently Boudica and Spartacus, whose entire historical fame come from brutal rebellions against the Roman regime, but still end up happily on her side). This also happens in Fate/Extella, where she's played up as the perfect ruler and has zero flaws. (The two storylines share a writer.) What makes this particularly bizarre is that her earlier appearances did the exact opposite, making out Nero to be a deluded narcissist and an utter failure as a ruler despite her surface-level charms and good intentions.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Used effectively in Final Fantasy VII, where Cloud, Tifa, President Shinra, and most every NPC you encounter all talk about Sephiroth in frightened tones as being an impossibly brilliant General and unstoppable force of destruction (exemplified by the line, "Sephiroth's strength is unreal. He is far stronger in reality than any story you might have heard about him.") We even get to use him as a party member in a sequence which is explained as being a story that Cloud is telling, where he's so strong the player's survival is dependent on him. Then, when you see what he's capable of, he's so much worse.
    • In Mobius Final Fantasy, Lightning (from Final Fantasy XIII) is a beloved legendary figure and hero in the setting, so even Wol, who is flippant and dismissive towards most of the wonders he's faced with, is in awe of her strength and beauty. Never mind that it's a violation of the established rules of the setting that he even knows who she is — because he's not originally from Palamecia, so he shouldn't know Palamecian legend (and in fact, his ignorance of it is plot-important in many other scenes). The implication is that she's so special, every other world in the Void has her as a goddess figure. This is also noticeably different from the way Cloud is treated in his cameo, where both Wol and Echo treat him with suspicion and snark about him together until his merits become apparent.
    • When Jack Garland of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is introduced in Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia, the hero party is quickly in awe of him. Jack's presence does singlehandedly tip the balance of the world from "dangerous Light" to "dangerous Darkness", but most of his dialogue is insulting the heroes for being weak and dismissing what they have to say. The heroes' response is to become determined to impress Jack and win his approval, even though he only just showed up and he hasn't given them much reason to respect him other than having a strong aura.
  • The eponymous Heroes of Fire Emblem Heroes tend to be humble, or at least hesitant to accept the title of "hero." During several Forging Bonds events, the summoned characters, each legendary in their own right, deny that they are really heroic, instead deferring to the characters native to the game as the true heroes, frequently because the summoned heroes are still burdened by what motivated them in their home games.
  • Genshin Impact: Despite not even appearing in the game yet, Alice is being built up as one of, if not the, strongest mages in the world. Mona claims she's a master of many fields, Albedo describes her as nearly omnipotent in ability, and Diluc even claims she can rival Barbatos in terms of power. This is given some justification given the reveal that she set up the entire Golden Apple Archipelago just so her daughter could have a fun summer, but needless to say, she has a lot of hype surrounding her.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: Packie repeatedly shills Gerald McReary as a violent, dangerous man. However, we never see Gerry's violent side (apart from bitter outbursts, but that's common in the McReary family), and he hasn't even killed anyone (with the possible exception of the Albanian biker in his first mission). Even when he finds out the charges against him are going to stick this time, his reaction is somber rather than aggressive.
  • Metroid: Other M: A common criticism is Samus' shilling of her former commanding officer and mentor Adam Malkovitch, who was The Ghost in Samus' few Inner Monologues in Metroid Fusion and mentioned nowhere else in the series. In Fusion, she called him "the perfect military mind" — which is portrayed in Other M as making such questionable decisions as sending each of his men to different locations (they all die except Anthony); ignoring the increasingly obvious evidence of a traitor among the squadron; forcing Samus not to use any of her gear until he gives his permission; and inexplicably shooting Samus in the back instead of the Metroid she was facing down. Samus nonetheless idolizes him as a father figure, while he's pretty indifferent to her. The one good thing he does is blow up a secret Metroid hatchery to save the universe, and himself with it... but on the other hand, some players felt he was effectively stealing a Tourian-like last level from them, no matter the story's justification for it. Interestingly, this makes a line of questioning about Adam by the A.I. of Samus' gunship in Fusion sound like it's retroactively doing the exact opposite and calling Adam out for his portrayal in Other M. And considering said A.I. is the man in question and has realized this fact by that point in the story, ADAM is possibly having an I Hate Past Me moment.
    "Did this Adam care for you? Would he sit in a safe Command Room and order you to die?"
  • Inverted in the Monkey Island series: Guybrush wants to be recognized by everybody for his "success" in defeating Le Chuck and constantly boasts about how heroic he is for it, but nobody else gives a damn (perhaps because he just won't shut up about it). He eventually gets so accustomed to this that in Tales of Monkey Island, he's stunned that Morgan LeFlay actually has heard of him and his exploits.
  • Monster Hunter: World has the Handler frequently claiming how she and the Hunter do all the work hunting the monsters, with the narrative and other characters agreeing with her and regarding her as providing equal contributions to the hunt. This is in spite of the fact that the player is the one who does the actual hunting (including collecting field samples and tracking down monsters), with the Hunter themselves constantly having to save her due to the Handler's tendency to recklessly run through a path full of dangerous monsters. And back at camp and the hub, she's usually seen eating or sitting around doing nothing. And somehow the game expects players to believe that she does the same amount of work as they do. Granted, the Handler does handle the paperwork and administrative duties as well as being the one who cooks meals for the Hunter while they're out in the wild, and because the Hunter is a Heroic Mime, it often falls to the Handler to move the plot along. The Iceborne expansion did address some complaints about the Handler, toning down her Leeroy Jenkins traits and handing her the Distress Ball far less often.
  • NBA 2K 2016: Vic Van Lier is the main character's best friend and later revealed to be his foster brother. Throughout the game, he is shown to be a toxic influence on the main character, who adamantly defends Vic when he's called out. When Vic is eventually killed in a car chase he was involved in, the game treats it like it's a tragedy, with him being talked about like he was this great guy, despite literally everything beforehand showing him to be anything but. If that wasn't enough, the game ends with Vic's ghost addressing the audience with a nine-minute long monologue about his life, making him out to be this sympathetic character with these deep issues, that ultimately falls flat with everything beforehand.
  • Leon and his Charizard in Pokémon Sword and Shield are often shilled by other characters as an absolutely invincible duo. Even when you are the one to defeat the Big Bad and Eternatus, when Leon admits he could merely soften it, everyone will still root for Leon. He does have a good reason for being shilled, however, as his team is 10 levels higher than that of the previous major Trainer you've faced, which is no more than 10 minutes before you can challenge him, and when you finally defeat Leon, you're the first one ever to do so.
  • In Pokémon Masters, the crossover event that features Ash Ketchum accidentally arriving at Pasio (because he was too busy training to notice being whisked by Hoopa into the region) features no shortage of admiration for him. To explain, Lear - Pasio's ruler with a Small Name, Big Ego who deems trainers he wishes to fight worthy of his time after he does his research on them - rather immediately praises Ash when he shows him his Journeys team without any showcase of skill but just one look at them all; Tina praises his rather reckless tendency of getting in the way of a Pokemon attack and becomes afflicted with feeling inadequate as a trainer next to him when she's generally very perceptive of Pokémon herself; and then there is the other playable characters praising his out-of-the-box strategies as if they never thought those themselves before.
    • The tip of the iceberg is Red outright sensing Ash's battle at Pasio's stadium without seeing him with his own eyes, though they never meet each other.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse plays up Flynn, the protagonist of Shin Megami Tensei IV, to be the messiah of Tokyo and Mikado who's just what humanity needs to liberate them from their crappy situations. It doesn't quite work out that way: that's not Flynn at all, but Shesha in disguise, and he exploits the Tokyo masses' hope and faith in Flynn to easily reap their souls in one place while they're full of emotions.
  • In The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, Watson explains that Holmes's adopted daughter Katelyn Moriarty was the only person who Holmes ever loved, that she single-handedly turned him from a cold-hearted recluse into a doting father, and makes her out to be incredibly virtuous and intelligent. The sequel Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter maintains this stance but actually gives Katelyn a speaking role, which shows her to be saccharine sweet (but actually quite rude to the adults around her), precociously gifted (yet remarkably lacking in even basic common sense), and just generally annoying. She's pretty much hated by most players, unsurprisingly.
  • Karin Kanzuki in Street Fighter V gets shilled quite a lot in the Cinematic Story Mode, A Shadow Falls, where she wins all of her fights and serves the Big Good. Meanwhile, experienced characters like Guile or Chun-Li keep getting hit by The Worf Effect until the plot allows them to win with the latter only getting one win in the entire story mode.
  • Tales Series:
    • Tales of Vesperia has this problem when it comes to Estelle, whom everyone around her (barring maybe Rita and Repede) constantly refer to how selfless and stubborn about saving people she is, even when her insistence on stopping and healing every person she sees and her utter naivety often ends up dragging the group into bad situations and you'd think one person would scold her about this, but they don't and continue indulging her. Even the mildest of calling-outs tend to get Estelle defended by Yuri or Karol.
    • Tales of Xillia: Milla is often lavished with praise by the others, Jude most of all. In many scenes, they remark on her courageousness, her strength, and her beauty. In the latter half of the game, Rowen and the others each remark about how she inspires them and say they feel motivated whenever she's with them. The gamer, however, may not see those qualities, making much of it seem undeserved.
  • Itsuki Aoi, the protagonist of Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE is constantly showered with praise by pretty much everyone throughout the game for not only being a great leader and a Nice Guy but also a talented idol whom his former rival and veteran idol, Yashiro Tsurugi, considers his equal and nobles such as Chrom and Virion considers him worthy to be one as well. The problem is Itsuki has a two-dimensional personality (even by Ordinary High-School Student standards), lacks any Character Development and importance to the plot (until the final act) and has just started being an idol for less than a year. In fact, he actually has no desire to being an idol in the first place and is only supporting his friend Tsubasa as one. Despite the theme of the game, Itsuki at the most acts as an extra or understudy for another actor in one of his friends' show or as a backup singer/dancer in their songs. He will not have his first major acting role until the finale for the Opera of Light but even that is in an Eldritch Location where there is no actual audience. In the post-credits scene, he is even given the position of president of Fortuna Entertainment with everyone claiming he is the most suitable choice despite him still being a high school student and has little knowledge of how the idol business works.
  • Lady Elisabeth Ashbury of Vampyr is constantly shilled by everyone around her (even people she hardly knows, such as in the case of Old Bridget) as being just great in every way, whether they're bragging on how wise, beautiful, moral, or inspiring she is. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but she never really demonstrates any of her supposed positive character traits in action, all the buildup around her and her past falling flat. It's hard not to wonder why any of the historical figures who were supposedly interested in her cared about such a bland person. The fact she's also part of what's largely regarded as a Romantic Plot Tumor, to the point numerous players have found the bad endings, wherein she and Jonathan don't remain in a relationship, to be better than the good endings where they do, only makes it worse.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Garrosh Hellscream is constantly referred to by NPCs as a master tactician and military genius. We rarely see this put to the test, and when it is, he's incompetent at best (in Borean Tundra he sends the player on a Suicide Mission, and in Twilight Highlands his attempt to ambush the Alliance backfires spectacularly). Despite this, you incite an insurrection against the Dragonmaw just by talking about how awesome Garrosh is; in Battle for Azeroth, Garrosh is shilled as "the greatest warchief ever" (and is only explicitly evil in the canon timeline); and in Wrath of the Lich King, a letter from Saurfang describes how Garrosh's "successful" tactics were winning over the Horde, in spite of this coming right after the aforementioned mission in Borean Tundra. At this point, players began to realize that Garrosh was being propped up less by his in-universe merit and more for the narrative sake of the Conflict Ball.
    • Varian Wrynn on the Alliance side is also shilled as a great tactician. It started with the Retcon that he (rather than the players) drove Onyxia out of Stormwind, and in Mists of Pandaria, he's portrayed as a better tactician than Tyrande Whisperwind, who has thousands of years more experience than he does.
    • Sylvana is shilled as a good leader and worthy successor to Vol'jin and Thrall after they're incapacitated. The cutscene where Vol'jin reluctantly acknowledges her talent before dying is seen as a waste of his character.
    • Illidan gets shilled during Xe'ra's retelling of his history, spinning even his worst acts into hard choices he had to make. In the same expansion, the Illdiari shill him (and are implied to have formed a Cult of Personality around him) without being portrayed negatively for supporting him. Ironically, in patch 7.3, Illidan basically rejects Xe'ra's attempts to make him the Chosen One and kills her after she tries to purify him by force.
  • Especially following her death, Mirei Park of Yakuza 5 is constantly raved over (especially by Akiyama) as being such a wonderful, determined businesswoman with a strong character and just an all-around great person, when what was seen of the real Mirei was a manipulative, domineering bitch who couldn't get along with anyone and once literally threatened to defund an orphanage to put pressure on her student. She also seemed perfectly fine with exploiting a needy young girl to fulfill her own dream, which she ruined through her own actions.

    Visual Novels 
  • Played for dark humor during the fifth and sixth chapters of Umineko: When They Cry, where the narration and characters keep going on about Erika Furudo. The problem is that there's so much gushing because it's Lambdadelta's script and she's also callous and an incredible bitch. She does end up satisfying her reputation. But she's still a bitch. It's also acknowledged that she was pissing off the Ushiromiya family and thus they decided to play a prank on her, so apparently being a genius isn't good for being actually likable.

    Webcomics 
  • In Dominic Deegan, Milov spends a few panels telling Nimmel that he makes a better werewolf than most werewolves, meaning he's smart, strong, loyal — all the traits they prize. It's particularly weird because earlier in the arc, Nimmel called the werewolf race "emotion-crazed beast people" and mused to himself that the reason he even came to study in their country was to use their strengthened magic to feel superior and be the "big dog on campus".
  • In El Goonish Shive, many readers got annoyed by how completely flawless and perfect for Elliot Ashley seems to be. Fans even began theorizing that she must be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing or some kind of villainess manipulating him. The author responded with a strip where Pandora notes that Ashley would be the perfect receptacle for being marked with magic powers, but that she is so deeply and sincerely pure and good that Pandora can't use her.
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, by the end of the "The Island And the Idol" arc, Bob himself is complaining about being shilled, saying he's being given credit for what were clearly team efforts and that it's starting to creep him out.
  • Red String's Yosue Makoto is two people: the one that everyone praises and the one that we are actually shown. The Makoto people speak highly about is a persistent, self-sacrificing "flirty goofball". The Makoto that we see, however, is shown time and time again to be opportunistic, jealous, and rather unhealthily obsessed when it comes to his "devotion" to the object of his affection, Miharu.
  • Vegan Artbook: The vegan characters Sterk (except Bunny) are shilled as All-Loving Hero compassionate animal lovers. However, to any reader who doesn't share Yerdian's comics, they come across as the opposite.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold:
    • The show plays this trope for laughs by presenting Batman as a Parody Sue; characters think he's the greatest human who ever lived, and not even the day's guest star can match up to him, even if they're a superhero themselves. It's at its worst in episodes like "Mayhem of the Music Meister!", where every superhero sings about how jealous of Batman they are, or "The Masks of Matches Malone!" where Catwoman, Black Canary, and Huntress all sing Batman's praises while putting down several other heroes (in a rather suggestive manner). The episode with Captain Atom presented the Captain as a Smug Super who looks down on people without superpowers. He's basically a strawman there to make fun of Batman, while the rest of the JLI are shocked and insist that no, Batman is totally the best hero ever and certainly better than all of them.
    • Wonder Woman is the most consistently shilled hero, even more so than Batman. Steve Trevor gushes about she will always save him (and Batman too). She even has her own leitmotif that shouts "WONDER WOMAN!" every time the shot cuts to her.
  • The Ben 10 franchise does this with Ma Vreedle and is completely Played for Laughs. While she is a competent villain in her own right, she’s far from the biggest threat in Ben’s Rogues Gallery in any show, but everyone lives in mortal fear of her and gives her a wide berth. Her presence even makes Vilgax, often known as the most dangerous being in the galaxy, run for his dear life. She does back it up with dastardly plans and berserker charges (on one occasion, the entire Plumber organization found themselves on the wrong end of a rampaging Ma Vreedle and immediately regretted it) but she’s mostly Laughably Evil due to being a hammy Fat Bastard with a funny southern accent.
  • A 1985 Betty Boop cartoon titled "The Romance of Betty Boop" takes this to the extreme, with people gushing about how wonderful Betty is as she walks down the street. And it's every bit as cringe-inducing as it sounds.
  • The Fairly OddParents!: All the characters, with the exception of Timmy, constantly talk about how perfect Chloe is, from Crocker holding up a banner reading 'I LOVE CHLOE', to Timmy's dad wearing a shirt with the same phrase, to even Jorgen being excited about having Timmy share his fairies with her.
  • Hey Arnold!: The beginning of "Arnold Betrays Iggy" does this to Iggy, who prior to this was just a Recurring Extra; Sid and Stinky boast about how cool Iggy is, just to get the plot in motion.
  • Kamp Koral: Characters repeatedly talk about how great Narlene is, with Sandy saying twice that she "never stops amazing me!" Scenarios are also written so that Narlene will save the day, like SpongeBob beating Sandy at karate with her advice, or her trying to fight off a sea urchin infestation. However, it's hard to agree with the shilling because not only does she end up stealing his reward for the karate tournament, the urchin infestation was something she started, and she never faces any punishment for the bad stuff she does (serving kids food without telling them the disgusting way she made it, screwing up Squidward's art lessons, letting baby Pearl endanger herself in the woods).
    SpongeBob: Those narwhals are simply nar-velous!
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Part of the reason why Starlight Glimmer is a major Base-Breaking Character, especially when she first joined the main cast during Season 6, is that the show either has other characters praise her too easily or makes her look good at the expense of others by weakening them or giving them the Jerkass Ball. The premiere of Season 7 "Celestial Advice" particularly felt like just an excuse to praise Starlight as Twilight was not shy about how awesome and amazing she felt Starlight was and claimed she had graduated as her pupil and was "ready to make her own way in the world"... even though Starlight would continue to stay with Twilight as her pupil and continue to make the exact same friendship mistakes she made before graduating.
  • Rocko's Modern Life has an In-Universe example. In "Wacky Delly", all of Mr. Cheese's dialogue is just Filburt praising his own character.
    Mr. Cheese: I am the cheese! I am the best character on this show! I am better than both the salami and the bologna combined!
  • Used In-Universe on The Simpsons: In "The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show", Itchy and Scratchy shill the new character Poochie as early as his very first appearance, and his voice actor Homer suggests even further measures to boost his popularity — such as having other characters, when Poochie is not on screen, ask, "where's Poochie?"
    Scratchy: Wow. Poochie is one outrageous dude.
    Itchy: He's totally in my face.
  • South Park: Parodied with Heidi Turner, whom Cartman repeatedly says is smart and funny, with other characters (including Heidi herself) pointing out that she doesn't really do anything funny. It reads like a play on how shilling so often uses the criteria "smart" and "funny" that it's become almost meaningless to say that now.
  • Total Drama:
    • Owen, particularly during the second season. Most of his accomplishments are either based on dumb luck or somehow related to eating, yet everybody acts like they're incredible talents. In the first episode of Total Drama Action, for example, he manages to avoid being caught by the monster simply because he's too fat to pick up, then eats a bunch of fake food because he wouldn't just stop and listen to Chris tell him it was fake. But by coincidence, he happens to burp out the key they were supposed to find, and immediately several other characters wow his accomplishment. When he's voted off by Courtney in a later episode, everyone acts like she's crossed the Moral Event Horizon, even though he and the other Grips were all The Load in that day's challenge, and she only had the deciding vote because the others all wasted theirs, voting for her despite her having immunity. The tables turn on him in the following seasons: in World Tour, he is openly mocked by several other characters and made into a Butt-Monkey, and he's treated similarly in his cameos in seasons 4 and 5.
    • This is a part of why Zoey became The Scrappy during All-Stars. Other characters kept going out of their way to talk about how amazing she is, but in reality she's one of the blandest characters in the series, she acted Too Dumb to Live with regard to Mal taking over her boyfriend's body, and most of her accomplishments were the result of dumb luck or tampering by the aforementioned.
  • In Season 2 of Voltron: Legendary Defender, Shiro repeatedly talks about how much he wants Keith to take over the Black Lion and lead Voltron if anything were to happen to him. While Keith isn't a bad pilot, he's very Hot-Blooded and hadn't shown many good leadership qualities up to that point. Then in Season 3, despite the Black Lion accepting him, Keith still gets the team in trouble several times, quickly making him a Base-Breaking Character. It's ultimately deconstructed a bit in season four when the other paladins start getting frustrated with him.
  • Winx Club does this in an odd way in the later seasons, propping up both Bloom and whoever she's supporting that particular episode. The basic gist of it is: character is incapable of doing something, Bloom comes along and tells them how amazing they are, character is suddenly happier and manages to succeed because of how amaaazing her pep talk was.

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