Crying Wolf

House: At the end of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", the wolf really does come. And he eats the sheep... and the boy... and his parents.
Chase: The wolf doesn't eat the parents!
House: It does when I tell it.

— House

You know the story. A little shepherd boy cries wolf to get people to come running because he's bored out of his skull (or whatever). They fall for it. He does it again. They fall for it again. Then, an actual wolf comes along, and the little boy screams his little lungs out (crying "You Have to Believe Me!") but this time nobody comes, since they think he's just playing that stupid prank again. The sheep the boy is watching get nommed down, and the boy learns a valuable lesson. Grimmer versions will end with the wolf eating the boy as well. Or everyone.

Some have the variant plot of the hero kid getting caught in a relatively minor lie, or at least they thought they have, and then the kid alone spots something truly serious and no-one believes him. Fortunately, the kid is either able to find witnesses to support him or is able to prove his claim, even if he has to save the day on his own. Eventually, the kid's reputation is restored either by the authorities being impressed by his heroism or the people he helped coming forward to praise his character.

Moral of the story: nobody believes a liar, even when he's telling the truth. This can be taken two ways: "Don't be a liar" or "Don't assume liars are always lying." Less traditional possibilities are "Never tell the same lie twice" and "Don't leave a known liar on watch."

There is also a more innocent variant when a hero, like a detective, makes a conclusion and decides that he has to take immediate action with something, only to find he was mistaken to his embarrassment. This kills his credibility with others, which makes his next move upon learning the real situation all the more difficult.

Older Than Feudalism, the Trope Namer being from Aesop's Fables. Which also makes it one of The Oldest Ones in the Book.

A frequently subverted Undead Horse Trope.

Not to be confused with the Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots boss Crying Wolf.

See also: This Is Not a Drill, Cassandra Truth, Not-So-Imaginary Friend, No Mere Windmill, Mistaken for an Imposter, Not Now, Kiddo. Contrast While Rome Burns, when things are actually going horribly wrong but everyone is in denial of it. In situations like that, if the character crying wolf turns out to be right, and people still refuse to believe him, then he is either an Ignored Expert or The Cassandra. Subtrope of Poor Communication Kills. Not to be confused with a wolf that is crying.

This trope provides examples of the following situations:

• An Aesop: "Lying is bad" is the usual interpretation, but Aesop didn't actually spell this one out and alternatives have been proposed as mentioned in the description.
• The Big Bad Wolf: Without the antagonist, we're left without the tale.
• Cassandra Truth: The villagers don't believe anything the boy says, even when he is serious.
• Crowd Panic: As in another unspoken Aesop of the tale; "don't agitate then laugh at the village — it gets really cranky".
• Honesty Aesop: The moral is not to lie.
• The Gadfly: The boy gets people riled up by screaming about danger that doesn't exist.
• "Just Joking" Justification: How the boy justifies crying wolf, complete with the lesson that "It's just a prank, bro!" will turn out badly in the end.
• Karmic Death: Let's face it, the lad earns this typical fairy tale ending. Depending on the version, either he dies or his sheep die because of his lying.
• Rule of Three: The third time the boy cries "Wolf!" nobody believes him anymore.
• Space Whale Aesop: "Don't lie, or else your sheep, and possibly you, will be eaten by a wolf."
• Urgent Medical Alert: Patient abusing alarms results in this, regardless of the truth.
• You Have to Believe Me!: The boy isn't believed because he's telling an improbable-sounding story with no evidence to back it up.

On a similar note, see Opening a Can of Clones for when this situation extends to an author and their audience, where viewers become unable to take the work at face-value because of certain story decisions made by the writer.

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Examples:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Advertising

• Fittingly, Isuzu featured the Joe Isuzu as the boy (or car salesman, in this case) lying about various problems before showing it was solved easily with his Isuzu Trooper. When he's surrounded, this happens...
  Joe Isuzu: Help, wolf! I'll never lie again, I'll never lie again. Help, wolf! [townspeople ignore him]
  Wolf: BURP!
• A Dutch ad had the host of the Dutch equivalent of Candid Camera falling off his ladder and hanging onto the edge of the roof. His shouting attracted some bystanders, but once they recognised him they laughed and left, not wanting to "fall for it".

Asian Animation

• In episode 7 of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, Mr. Slowy gives the goats whistles and tells them that they may only use them to call for help if Wolffy is nearby. Sparky keeps blowing his whistle, not because Wolffy is attacking him, but just to mess with Weslie and Slowy; when Sparky actually uses the whistle to call for help, Slowy assures Weslie that Sparky is just playing a trick again, and it isn't until later that the other goats notice he's missing and worry about him.

Comic Strips

• Garfield:

• While camping, Jon told Garfield to look out for wild animals. Garfield started playing tricks on him. When Jon refused to believe, a bear caught Garfield.

• Retail: Inverted and invoked. Josh was telling the truth about Val and Cooper being in a forbidden relationship, but because Amber overheard him ratting them out to Stuart, it gave them time to make it look like Josh was crying wolf by getting someone else to pose as Val's boyfriend.

Films — Animation

• In How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup says that "This isn't like the last time! I really did kill a Night Fury!" Though even if he had never lied about killing one before, nobody would believe Hiccup had killed a Night Fury anyway.
• In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Fred initially doesn't believe that the zombies are real, since usually any "monsters" they run into are people in costumes.

Films — Live-Action

• In Bedazzled (1967), George (the Devil) gives poor shlub Stanley seven wishes for his soul, but grants them all in the worst-case ways possible. Having claimed more than enough souls to get back into Heaven as an angel (as per a bet with God), he gives Stanley the deed to his soul back, maybe out of pity, but more to make himself look good. At Heaven's gate, he's turned away for this selfish gesture - he rushes back to Stanley, desperate to give him back his soul in an altruistic way, but Stanley has been tricked too often, burns the deed, and slips away.
• This is the entire plot of Big Fat Liar. The characters' surnames are even Shepherd and Wolf.
• Carry On Matron had Mrs. Tidey, an expecting mother that had a baby three-weeks overdue waiting inside her. She binge-ate while she waited, leading to her calling out that her waters had broken when it would always turn out to be wind or indigestion.

• Chunk has this problem in The Goonies. None of his friends believe him when he starts a story with "I just saw the most amazing thing in my entire life." More importantly, the friendly sheriff doesn't believe him when he says he's in trouble because the last time several times he called it was a prank.
• In Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, Jesse's half-brother Elvis turns out to be a compulsive liar. After several days of them dealing with Elvis' lies, Jesse and Elvis find a whale beached in the aftermath of an oil spill, and Jesse, apparently not thinking about this, sends Elvis to wake up their foster parents and tell them to call for help. Unsurprisingly, it takes Elvis a little while to convince them there's an actual emergency.
• Friday the 13th Part III has Shelly, who's known for playing pranks on the rest of his friends, including one where it looks like he's taken an axe to the head. When Jason proceeds to slit his throat later on, he manages to last long enough to make it back to one of the others, but at this point he's pranked everyone so many times she merely assumes he's playing another joke and ignores him, only realizing that this time he's not joking long after he's bled to death.
• Exploited in How to Steal a Million. Simon Dermott, as a ploy to snatch a counterfeit statue from a museum, uses a boomerang twice to activate the statue's motion-sensing alarm before quickly sneaking back into his janitor's closet hiding place. After the museum security fails to find anything stolen or moved, and after getting an angry call from the French President concerning the loud siren so late at night, the Head of Security decides to just turn off what he believes to be a faulty security system, allowing Simon and Nicole to grab the statue without problem.
• You Know from Keep Off My Grass! spends so much time bragging about his nonexistent sex life that when he gets laid for real, no one believes him.
• In The Lost Boys, a new recruit starts the process of becoming a vampire by drinking the blood of the group's leader. David uses this trope to make sure Michael will drink it. The gang have Chinese food, and David gets Michael to eat some white rice, then asks him how he's enjoying his maggots. Looking down, Michael sees wriggling maggots, but when he drops the box, only plain white rice spills out. David apologizes and offers a box of noodles, but Michael sees writhing worms inside — yet when David takes a big bite, they are clearly only noodles. Needless to say, when reluctant half-vampire Star tries to warn Michael that the wine bottle he is offered contains not wine, but blood, Michael scoffs and takes a good long drink.
  • Interestingly, the viewer has no way of knowing what is real and what is illusion in this scene. Was mortal Michael eating maggots or rice? Was vampire David eating real worms? It's impossible to know whether this is a case of crying wolf falsely or warning of real wolves who are then hidden.
• The reason nobody initially believes that Andy Kaufman really does have cancer in Man on the Moon is because he had done so many fake publicity stunts before. A reflection of the real life incident listed below.
• In Mr. Deeds, tabloid reporter Babe Bennet pretends to be mugged in order to get the titular character to trust her and get dirt on him. He eventually found out her deceit and when later she was in danger of drowning, he has a hard time believing her.
• In Outbreak, Colonel Daniels had previously predicted serious outbreaks of deadly diseases, which failed to happen. This is why General Ford tells him not to worry since the recently discovered (actually reemerged) Motaba virus kills so quickly, it's unlikely to get very far. Cue one Motaba-infected monkey arriving in America...
• Pants On Fire has Jack Parker making up one white lie after another from a nonexistent kid he's tutoring to illness and more, all to slack off his chores and school work. One day he's rocked when suddenly, all the stuff he's been lying about (adoptive Asian parents, a Canadian girlfriend, evil lumberjacks, alien-hunting government agents) starts coming true. In his journey, he runs into his favorite baseball player at a park, who gives him some advice to be honest. Taking it, Jack confessed to the school all his lies. It turns out it was his sister and her acting troupe doing all this to teach Jack a lesson on lying. At the end of the film, Jack takes a break from his grounding and added school work to go to love interest Jennifer, apologizes and promises to not lie again. He then invites her to Fenway Park as that ballplayer has given him box seats for a game and Jennifer rolls her eyes, says "I thought you'd changed" and slams the door in his face. Luckily, Jennifer looks out the window to see Jack entering his waiting limo and quickly joins him.
• Captain Jack Sparrow of Pirates of the Caribbean is an interesting case. It's not that he tells outright lies, but usually half-truths, and it's always for the purpose of manipulating people for his own ends. As a result, nobody actually trusts Jack fully and when it turns out he's been honest about something, it's pretty shocking.
  Norrington: You really were telling the truth.
  Jack: I do that quite a lot. You people are always surprised.
  Will: With good reason.
• Razorback. The eponymous giant razorback is shot with a tracking dart. When a signal is picked up, a posse goes racing off to its location only to find an ordinary boar shot with a similar dart. When the signal goes off a second time to show the giant razorback is close, no-one is interested as they're busy getting drunk in the pub.
• Scary Movie 3: Brenda watches the cursed tape from The Ring and tells her friend Cindy about it. Afterwards, she pranks her by pretending to die three times. When the curse turns out to be real, Cindy thinks it's another prank and doesn't come to help her.
• The Sea Wolves. While sailing to Goa, the lookout sounds the alarm over what he thinks is a U-boat's periscope, only to get derided by everyone when it turns out to be a shark fin. Later he sees a real periscope, but is afraid of making a fool of himself again so thinks It's Probably Nothing. Fortunately the Germans think their tiny rustbucket vessel is not worth wasting a torpedo on.
• In Six Degrees Of Celebration 2, an elderly man who watches over a closed airbase is sure that someday it will be needed again, and his grandson keeps telling him that a plane is coming to distract him from the staff phone and call his girlfriend. Naturally, when the boy notices an actual plane making an emergency landing and raises the alarm, the grandpa calmly sits at his supper. Fortunately, when he sees the boy really running to turn on the runway lights, he believes him, and they ensure the plane lands safely.
• Superhost: The protagonists Teddy and Claire are a pair of travel vloggers with a bad reputation for clickbait. At the end of the film, Claire records and uploads a video saying that Rebecca, the owner of the house they're staying at, is Ax-Crazy and trying to kill her. When Rebecca sees that the video has finished uploading, she initially thinks she's done for... until she reads the comments and sees that everybody thinks that Claire's pulling a dumb prank to boost the channel's subscribers. While Teddy and Claire will likely be reported missing eventually, the fact that nobody believed Claire's initial warning means that Rebecca will probably have enough time to change her identity again and get away with everything.
• Tremors. The boy Melvin Plug repeatedly plays pranks on Earl and Valentine, including wrapping a Graboid tentacle around his head and pretending it's attacking him. Finally he starts yelling and Earl, thinking he's still joking, says he's going to kick Melvin's ass. When they go outside, they see Melvin cowering on top of a metal pole — making them realize that this time he isn't kidding — the Graboids are here. You'd likely expect a jerk like Melvin to be counted among the victims in a film like this, but ironically, he survives.
• 12 Monkeys: Part of what makes Kathryn realize that Cole is telling the truth about being from the future is when they overhear a news report about a kid falling down a well and the ensuing rescue operation. Cole dismissively notes that he remembers hearing about this when he was young, and that the kid was actually just playing a prank and hiding in a nearby barn. Kathryn ignores him... until she later sees a second report on TV showing the kid being found in the exact barn Cole described and confessing to his prank.
• The Window has this as its Central Theme and as An Aesop for the hero kid Tommy. Because of his history of being a notorious Mr. Imagination, Tommy's parents and the police don't believe him when he becomes a witness to a murder. It almost gets him killed afterwards but by the end, the villains get caught and Tommy's reputation is restored.

Music

• Julien Baker's "Crying Wolf" inverts the typical take on the story into a parable on addiction and trying to convince your friends to believe that you're really trying to change even when you fail.
  I'm not crying wolf, I'm out here looking for them
  In the morning when I wake up naked in their den
  I'll swear off all the things I thought that got me here
  In the evening I'll come back again...

Myths & Religion

• The Talmud: The liar’s punishment is that even when he speaks the truth, no one believes him (Sanhedrin 89b).

Puppet Shows

• The Muppet Classic Theater special adapted the classic fable as well, with Gonzo as the titular boy who cried wolf. Unlike most of the other examples, though, Gonzo is not deliberately lying; he's just over-excitable and jumps to conclusions a lot, his imagination well helped along by overreacting sheep who panic over everything (a couple of falling rocks means an earthquake, a few drops of water hitting him is obviously the signs of a tidal wave). He honestly believes it every time he rushes to warn the villagers of impending doom, but since the disasters are always ludicrous and never even remotely true, the result is the same: When the Big Bad Wolf shows up, the villagers don't bother to listen to Gonzo's cries for help. It becomes a bit of a Broken Aesop when the moral weirdly remains "don't lie" and the villagers all chew Gonzo out for lying — except Gonzo never tells a single intentional lie over the course of the story. A better moral for this version of the tale would have been "before making public statements about something, try to make sure you have the basic facts right and haven't misunderstood the whole thing.", which might be interpreted more along the lines of "The Sky Is Falling" than of deliberate pranking.
• Sesame Street:
  • A Muppet sketch adapted the classic fable, with Cookie Monster taking the place of the wolf.
  • In another sketch, Ernie finds a piece of cake and eats it. Bert then informs Ernie that he bought two pieces of cake for them to have for dessert, before seeing that one piece is missing. Rather than admit his mistake, Ernie tells Bert that a monster ate the cake, and when Bert questions why Ernie has a fork in his hand and is wearing a napkin, claims that the monster did it to frame him. Bert doesn't believe him, figures out that Ernie ate the cake, and is only humouring him when he agrees that it could have happened. But when Bert leaves, Beautiful Day Monster shows up, eats the other piece of cake, and for some reason asks Ernie to hold the fork and napkin. Bert comes back and notices the other piece missing, and when Ernie starts telling Bert what happened, Bert immediately doesn't believe him.
  • In episode 555, Big Bird makes plans for his adult friends to see Mr. Snuffleupagus by getting them to agree to show up when Big Bird shouts "Snuffleupagus!" Given Snuffy's habit of leaving early, Big Bird shouts the word multiple times as practice, which annoys the adults. When Snuffy does show up and Big Bird shouts it, nobody comes, as he had "cried Snuffleupagus" too many times.
  • Similarly, in episode 2096, the adults agree to run over when Big Bird shouts a secret word (food), at one point Big Bird does it just as practice, and while Big Bird promises not to do any more practice, the next time Snuffy shows up and Big Bird yells the secret word (and Elmo holds onto Snuffy's snuffle so he does not leave early), the adults (including the few who had started believing Big Bird for the last year) all hesitate. Although they all do decide to see that Snuffy is real, and this time they finally do.
  • In Episode 3430, Maria hears Elmo crying, but soon finds out that he is pretending to cry as part of his new Crying Game. Elmo plays this game throughout the episode, and as a result, Maria thinks he's still playing the game when he really does become sad near the end of the episode after another monster calls both Elmo and his game silly.
• Treasure Attic: In "Happy and Healthy", the big dog's friends tell him the original "boy who cried wolf" story after he pretends to be injured.

Radio

• Attacked in a That Mitchell and Webb Sound sketch depicting the shepherd boy's uncle being cross-examined during a court inquiry into the incident, where the prosecutor questions why the boy was chosen as the one to watch the sheep in the first place and suggests a better moral for the story would be "If you have grounds to believe there is a ferocious predator at large, don't appoint as your sole watchman a twelve-year-old child whom you have resolved to ignore." It then goes on to suggest the shepherd intentionally set the boy up as part of an insurance and inheritance scheme.

Tabletop Games

• The Transhuman Space supplement Cities On The Edge describes an ultra-tech version of the car/shop alarm problem described under Real Life. If criminals can keep fooling an AI security system into making false alarms, then eventually the owners will either start ignoring it or set it to be less vigilant.

Theatre

• Amahl in the Menotti opera Amahl and the Night Visitors has told his mother so many imaginative stories that when he comes to tell her there is a "king with a crown" at the door, she doesn't believe him ... or when he finally ramps it up to, "The kings are three / And one of them is black!" Then she goes to the door herself and finds the Three Kings waiting there.
• Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio is a melodramatic jokester, so when he gets into a mock fight with Tybalt and screamed that he is dying while making witticisms about his injury, all of his friends laugh at him. He is, in fact, dying.

Visual Novels

• In Higurashi: When They Cry the reason why social services do not believe that Satoko is being abused by her uncle is that she used a Wounded Gazelle Gambit one too many times against her innocent stepfather and they were afraid that she was doing the same thing again. This is rather tragic when you read the TIPS and learn that abuse from previous stepfathers has really messed with her head and she can't tell the difference between her current stepfather and the ones before. In other words: There's a good chance she really believed she was being abused. Although the social services actually DID show up at her house when her teacher called them. However, this time Satoko refuses to admit to the abuse, so they can't do anything.

Web Comics

• Cyanide and Happiness shows how the pandas suffer because of this.
• In Doc Rat, Wilbur Fuzz is shaken when after all his jokes about heart attacks, he actually has one. He thinks of this trope. The paramedics — wolves — tell him that they came, and he should Be Careful What You Wish For.
• In Freefall, Sam's release of 2001 crickets has a few effects on Security's responsiveness to alarms...
• In chapter 32 of Gunnerkrigg Court, Annie's attempts to reconcile with Kat by inventing dangerous situations for them to "solve" become so exaggerated that Kat assumes a huge, clearly real kraken to be another of her antics.
• NEXT!! Sound Of The Future: When she was in training, Shine would pretend to sing badly on purpose to make her classmates laugh. Eventually, when she genuinely became unable to sing properly, her teacher and classmates didn’t believe her and assumed she was causing trouble as always.
• Oglaf:
  • The page image has the trope defied. As soon as the boy admits he lied, he is shot to death.
  • Another page has a boy make ridiculous claims to a traveler, who stabs him. The boy seeks help, but is dismissed as another lie.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Parodied in "The Elf Who Cried Raven." Vaarsuvius' party members refuse to believe that V really has a familiar and that it's been with them the whole time, largely because V completely forgot about it until recently. The trope is even referenced in the title.
  • A much more serious (and sad) version of the trope appears in "Getting the Message". Roy doesn't believe Belkar when the latter reveals to them that Durkon is dead, arguing it is another of Belkar's sick jokes. Though in this case, it was mostly out of denial from Roy's part.
  • Referenced again when Blackwing tries to get V's attention via their empathic link. It doesn't work, as he's been doing the same thing whenever the sky pirates so much as glance at his new bauble.
    Blackwing: Ugh, this is all that wolf-crying boy's fault, whoever he is.
• Paranatural: Subverted for laughs. Max often warns his friends about gut feelings he has, and he's pretty much always right. They still find it annoying.
  Isabel: Max, one of these days you're going to cry wolf, and there won't be a wolf, and then you'll be sorry.
  Max: Yes Isabel that's exactly how that fable goes.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: inverted in "Wolf 2" with the story of the wolf who keeps crying "boy", so when there finally really is a boy, the other wolves don't believe him and he gets to eat the boy by himself. The inversion isn't in the roles being reversed (that inverts the trope namer story, not the broader trope), but in that the liar benefits from not being believed, which is against normal expectations (even though it isn't against the trope definition as such).
• In the prologue of Stand Still, Stay Silent, a talk show guest suspecting that an Apocalyptic Gag Order is in place concerning the seriousness of The Virus is discredited due to being somewhat of a Conspiracy Theorist.

Web Original

• On the Discord app, due to how easily the @everyone feature can be abused — allowing one member to notify everyone on the server, regardless of reason — many users mute notifications on all servers they're a part of. This makes them susceptible to missing announcements that would actually be important to them, such as security issues and major updates. Over time, it becomes increasingly obvious to staff members which members have muted the server if they haven't updated their roles along with everyone else...
• The Evil Overlord List:
  • Defied (like many other things that would create The Guards Must Be Crazy): Any kind of alarm is to be treated as true and responded to with full military might always in case heroes are tying to lull security into disregarding them (the List itself doesn't has any rules for compulsive liars, though, but since for the most part they advise the Overlord to severely castigate any act of Stupid Evil done by his subordinates...)
  • Played straight with Rule 109 of cellblock A, which has someone resembling "a plucky lad/lass in strange clothes and with the accent of an outlander" regularly climb a monument in the overlord's capital and denounce him, claim to know the secret of his power, rally masses, etc. The idea is that after a while, said masses will be too jaded to care when the real McCoy comes along.
• In one of the GoAnimate "Grounded" videos, Caillou is wrongly punished at school for going to the bathroom because in the past, he would pretend to go to the bathroom but actually go to Chuck E Cheese's.
• Neopets:
  • Some devious users will lie that they accidentally abandoned their pet in the pound, to try to nab someone else's adopted pet. This makes it hard for users who genuinely did lose a pet in the pound by mistake to be taken seriously.
  • Neopets can't die, but some scammers will pretend their pets are dying so they can get free items or Neopoints. On the other hand, many users claim their pets are dying because they genuinely think so, having gotten confused because "dying" is their lowest level of hunger.
• In "No More Lying", a boy named Goo-Goo lies that he washed his hands (despite them obviously being dirty) and that it was his pet who broke a pot plant instead of him. So when his neighbour, Ya-Ya, tramples the garden, his parents think he did it and don't believe him when he says he didn't.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-2179 is a supernatural fire alarm that likes to play a downplayed version of this prank, where it phrases actual incidents in a way that makes them sound more dangerous or anomalous than they actually are, to the Foundation's expense. Then one day, it declared an animal attack and everyone was too sick of the constant military deployments to care. Until it declared 5+ civilian casualties, at which point a squad was deployed and discovered that it was telling the truth for once. Since then, they HAVE to listen to the alarm, regardless of false positives. Interestingly, the animals turned out to be pathetic but rabid from hunger, yet the squad witnessed mega-beasts mauling the corpses of the civilians.
• The Shortest Story: Discussed in Bring the Wolves Down, with reference to a sexist Double Standard.
• An update on TV Tropes itself resulted in a bug that would sometimes lock random pages but had a couple of workarounds. Attempts to fix the bug brought things to a point where in most cases, "Edit page" buttons will display a lock despite the page not actually being locked, but the page can otherwise be edited like any other page. Because of this, running into a page that actually is either permanently locked, suffering from the more crippling version of the bug, or temporarily locked because another user is currently working on it can come as a surprise.
• Over the course of Twig, the Lambsbridge Gang develops a deserved reputation as devastatingly cunning human-looking experiments that masquerade as children and use their abilities to bait their enemies into disastrous actions. Naturally, when Lillian, who actually is a normal human child, is injured and needs medical help, Sylvester and Jamie run into problems convincing the people they go to for help that it's not a trap.

Web Videos

• In the Fairy Tale edition of 50 Ways to Die in Minecraft, death number 35 shows the shepherd boy from the original story trying and failing to warn everyone about the wolf after crying wolf one too many times. The wolf gloats about being able to eat the sheep...only for the shepherd to yell for help again in a different voice.
  Villager: (gasp) Trustworthy Troy? Is that you?
  (cue the wolf getting run out by an angry mob)
• In various Achievement Hunter videos featuring Trouble in Terrorist Town, Geoff Ramsey will usually shout out "I'M NOT THE KILLER!" or will immediately blame someone else as the killer. A lot of those times, Geoff really isn't the killer, but the rest of the team will usually just kill him because he tends to be loud in his protests that he had to be the killer.
• This trope is partly responsible for pokecapn's infamous LP of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). The OP for the archived version tells the tale of reviews for the game complaining about terrible controls, a terrible camera, a terrible story, and terribly long loading times — but pokecapn had heard the exact same complaints about every other 3D Sonic The Hedgehog game before then, and having enjoyed all of them regardless of those issues, decided to Let's Play the game, initially assuming that the problems wouldn't be nearly as bad as everyone made them out to be this time, either.

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