Decoy Backstory

Korra: Aris [Boch] told you about his wife and son? ... It's a lie. He has none. Never did.
Dr. Daniel Jackson: So why does he do this?
Korra: ... It is true that his race cannot be used as hosts, and most were slaughtered by the Goa'uld. Those that were kept alive were addicted to a substance called roshna. It was given to them in their water.

— Stargate SG-1, "Deadman Switch"

A character is given an apparent backstory. Whether a hero, villain or somewhere in between, we assume this is true. But then in a twist, something happens that makes it impossible for it to be that character's background. In short, the backstory was a decoy and not the real thing.

The reason for this could be framing; the backstory is being told by an Unreliable Expositor, either the character in question lying or a second-hand source being incorrect. Or it could be that it's the origin of a secondary character in the backstory, likely inspired by the assumed character. This can have the risk of being an Ass Pull if done poorly.

Compare Once More, with Clarity, with which it sometimes overlaps; Not His Sled, when this trope is used to twist audience expectations in an adaptation; Multiple-Choice Past, which posits multiple valid origins but the viewer can't deduce or is left to decide which is the real origin, and Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story. See Impersonation-Exclusive Character for when the decoy backstory involves someone claiming to be someone else they're not.

Spoilers ahead.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: In Chapter 30, Rentarou tells Mei about a time when he played a word game with Kusuri, and afterwards was unable to properly say a similar sounding phrase. When Mei laughs at the story, Rentarou reveals that it actually happened to her master Hahari, not him. The resulting Oh, Crap! face is what finally gets her to open those bright eyes, which was Rentarou's objective in telling the aforementioned story.
• Attack on Titan:
  • Reiner and Bertolt claimed that they lost their homes during a Titan attack which explains their reason for enlistment. Turns out it's a lie as Reiner admits to Eren that he and Bertolt are actually the Armored Titan and the Colossal Titan respectively who are responsible for the attack on Shinganshina. As the truth goes further, both men and Annie are Eldians from the Libero Internment Zones in Marley who infiltrated Paradis Island to obtain the Coordinate Titan Power which happens to be in Eren's possession.
  • Yelena claims to be from a nation that's been conquered by Marley. Pieck reveals that she's actually a Marleyan but lied about her origins to approach Zeke and be remembered for saving the world.
• Blood-C: Saya Kisaragi is the daughter of a Shinto priest and wields a katana she inherited from her late mother which she uses to slay the Elder Bairns. Unfortunately, her backstory is a lie that is concocted by Fumito Nanahara as part of his experiment. As revealed in the last two episodes, Saya is not fully human but a half-Elder Bairn, and her father, who is also a half-Elder Bairn, is not related to her biologically but he used to work with the US military post-World War II before working with Fumito.
• Bungo Stray Dogs: Chuuya has no memories from before he was seven, and worries his connection to Arahabaki means he is not a real human. His friends eventually manage to procure intel proving he was a human with a normal life prior to being experimented on, but it's quickly revealed the intel was false and he is actually a modified clone of the real Chuuya made by the military. However, Dazai points out there's no way to be one hundred percent certain Chuuya really is the clone, so it's unknown which backstory is true, but by that point, he decides it does not matter.
• Cowboy Bebop: The first time Faye appears, in "Honky Tonk Woman", she claims to be a Romani. Later episodes will show a very different background for her: she grew up on Earth and was made a Human Popsicle before the Lunar Hypergate exploded and caused Apocalypse How. While Faye was deliberately lying about her backstory the first time and rather transparent about it, she actually suffers from amnesia and doesn't remember anything about her life before being woken up from cryogenic suspension by a shady doctor and his con-artist nephew who wanted to exploit her.
• In The Demon Girl Next Door, Momo thinks she grew up in a normal orphanage before meeting Sakura; in truth, Sakura asked Joshua to seal away her memories of having been the result of a Ukrainian experiment to produce Tyke Bombs and overwrite them with that more consistent of an orphan.
• Inazuma Eleven Orion no Kokuin: Before it was revealed he is actually Hikaru and not Mitsuru, Ichihoshi's excuse for joining the Disciples of Orion was to get treatment for his hospitalized brother. But as stated earlier, the Ichihoshi who plays for Inazuma Japan is actually Hikaru, Mitsuru's alleged sick brother, while the latter died in the same car accident as their father and became the former's split personality.
• Karakuri Circus:
  • Early in the series, Eleonore claims that she accepted Shoji's request to protect Masaru because he saved her family from poverty. During the Interrogation Arc of the manga, it's revealed that Sadayoshi fabricated this backstory when he impersonated her father Shoji.
  • Commander Faceless claims in his dying moments that he hates automata because one of them married his childhood friend against her will and killed her when he tried to help her escape. His backstory is eventually revealed to be a complete fabrication when he comes back alive and exposes himself as the fourth and last identity of Bai Jin, the creator of all automata and the main antagonist of the series, who has survived for two centuries by possessing a young relative of his. Early in his original life, Bai Jin kidnapped Francine a day after his older brother, Bai Yin, married her. When she reunited with her husband, she killed herself because she couldn't live with her nine years of living with another man.
• Lupin III:
  • Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine is the origin story for Fujiko Mine specifically, but the "little girl" she remembers being is actually someone else who tried to overwrite her memories. The careful and tragic backstory that was built up over the series is destroyed by the final episode when Fujiko announces that it doesn't matter what her origin is, only that she exists.
  • Lupin III: Episode 0: First Contact is Jigen telling a reporter the story of how Everyone Meets Everyone, especially Lupin, but the climax has Fujiko and Jigen appearing out of the shadows to complain that the story "Jigen" just told was a bunch of bullshit. But then they steal the MacGuffin from the "bullshit story"...
• Naruto: Played with. The mysterious masked man who had been calling himself "Tobi" approaches Sasuke and reveals himself to be Madara Uchiha, a legendary figure who supposedly died 80 years ago. He then recounts his backstory, including details that were lost to time, and of course that he faked his death and survived to the modern day (although he doesn't explain how). This is Madara's real backstory, and Madara really did survive... but Tobi isn't Madara. He is a member of the Uchiha clan though, and he does know the real Madara, which is why he knows so much about him.
• Played with in One Piece. When Sanji fights Jabra for the possible keys to Robin's handcuffs, Jabra stops and offers his key to Sanji while telling him that he and Robin are siblings who got separated and how he has been searching for her ever since. However, the backstory completely contradicts the backstory Robin was given only a few episodes/chapters prior (which established Robin as an only child on the run from the government), making it blatantly clear that Jabra is lying. Sanji isn't fooled and deliberately pretends to fall for his ruse, only to then kick Jabra into the ceiling when he tries to sneak attack him.
• Princess Tutu: Rue is originally revealed to be Princess Kraehe, the Monster Raven's daughter, who was told from a young age that she was "a crow born as an ugly human girl" who could only ever be loved by her father and the Prince. It's revealed late in the series that Rue is actually an ordinary human girl who was kidnapped as an infant by the Raven and fed his blood, giving her the powers of Princess Kraehe.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena: "The Rose Bride" narrates how Utena decided to be a prince because one helped her cope with the deaths of her parents. "The Rose Signet" reveals that Dios only inspired her by showing her Anthy's eternal agony but she eventually forgot her true motivation as she grew up.
• YuruYuri: Chapter 51, "A Certain Scientific Power Outlet", had science teacher Nana Nishigaki tell a touching story about how, when she was a girl, her only friend was her robot dog. But one day, it stopped moving. So, with tears in her eyes, she dedicated herself to the sciences so she could reunite with her beloved friend ... and then she reveals she just made the whole story up to mess with them.

Comic Books

• Anya's Ghost: After falling down a hole, Anya discovers a skeleton in it and befriends the ghost whose remains it belongs to, a girl named Emily. She claims her fiancé died in World War I and she was murdered by a man who her parents gave room and board to. Her "fiancé" was actually her crush who rejected her for another girl and called her ugly. One night, she stared at them through the window of his house as they embraced, and set the building on fire, killing both of them. She was promptly executed by an angry mob in retribution.
• The Avengers: In Avengers: No Surrender, when she was first introduced, Voyager claims to be an original founding member of The Avengers, having been erased from existence because of Victory the Electromagnetic Man. Thanks to Edwin Jarvis, he exposed the truth that she had never been an Avenger in the first place, implanting fake memories regarding her personal history to make her story more believable. It's eventually revealed that she's the daughter of the Grandmaster and her real name is Va Nee Gast. She was sent to Earth to act as his ace to reclaim his title as the Grandmaster, as Earth was chosen to be the battleground for the contest.
• The Boys: In-Universe example: The Seven and other supers are publicly given origins of the superhero they parody, eg; The Homelander is an alien who crash-landed on Earth and was reared by farmers. In reality, they were almost all reared in labs after they started showing superpowers as children, some with a nuke nearby ready to detonate in case of behavioral issues. It helps to explain why very few supers in this series are normal or well-adjusted.
• Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles: Throughout the comic, Huckleberry Hound is presented as a gay, depressive author, which is considerably different from how he's usually presented in cartoons, where he's usually a plucky everyman who comes out on top. The ending of the series reveals that this is actually the father of the more commonly known Huckleberry Hound, who adopted his dad's name to honor him after he died.
• The Flash: During the New 52, DC Comics race-lifted Wally West from a white ginger to a half-black brunette. In DC Rebirth, they retconned that away. It turns out that the biracial Wally is a relative of the original Wally who shares his name.
• Invincible: In the first issue, Nolan tells his son, Mark, about his homeworld Viltrium which is an advanced and peaceful utopia, and its people, the Viltriumites, went to other planets to help its inhabitants uplift their civilization. Nolan explains that he came to Earth because he wanted to help the humans and became its protector. Then in the third issue, after Mark witnessed his father defeating the Immortal, Nolan tells him the truth: Viltrium is actually an empire where its people adhere to survival of the fittest and the Viltriumites are conquerors who either force the inhabitants to submit or eradicate them if they resist. Nolan's real mission on Earth is to blend into human society and weaken its defenses such as killing the Guardians of the Globe so it would be easier to conquer the planet.
• Kick-Ass: We are initially led to believe that Big Daddy is an ex-cop whose wife was killed, leading to him becoming a vigilante and training his daughter to be the violent superhero Hit-Girl. Eventually, the Awful Truth is revealed: he was merely an accountant whose wife left him. He made up the backstory so he could vicariously live a comic book-style hero fantasy. The movie ends up adapting this out, making his fake backstory in the comic real.
• Nemesis shows the titular villain's supposed origins as Matthew Anderson, son of a disgraced billionaire who was busted by Blake Morrow. When Blake confronts him at the end, Nemesis reveals the real Matthew Anderson died squandering the inheritance. Nemesis has merely been acting the role, and nothing is revealed of his real origins aside from being "rich and bored".
• Preacher: In the "Salvation" story arc, Jesse is aided as Sheriff of Salvation by Gunther Hahn, a German immigrant who tells Jesse he once worked for the Nazi party as a spy. He tricked them into sending him to the US on a mission, then simply never completed it and never went back, preferring to live in peace. It holds up until Jesse finds Gunther's name and backstory in a history book that says he was killed in combat; "Gunther" is actually Siegfried Vechtel, a Nazi policeman who rounded up and murdered civilians and worked in a concentration camp. When Jesse confronts him with the truth, Vechtel is Driven to Suicide.
• Wolverine: In Origin, the reader is introduced to two boys: weak, sickly James, and gruff Dog Logan. We're obviously supposed to believe that Dog grows up to be Wolverine until James develops claws and a healing factor. Dog Logan turns out to be Wolverine's half-brother, and Depending on the Writer hinted to be his Arch-Enemy Sabertooth.
• X-Men: One arc of Uncanny X-Men introduced a supposed new team of X-Men, each with their own backstory (Crux was a French figure skater, Rapture was a nun, Chaos was autistic, etc.) Absolutely none of their backstories were real; they all turned out to be nanotech constructed and created by Cerebro.
• X-Statix:
  • Surrender Monkey was initially presented as a French mutant with the supposed ability to Know When to Fold 'Em. A later issue reveals that he's actually an American secret agent who was sent to France to pose as a stereotypical Frenchman, in order to gin up anti-French sentiment in advance of the The War on Terror.
  • Throughout the series' run, Tike "Anarchist" Alicar was presented as a wild, womanizing bachelor. The X-Statix Special, released years after the series ended, revealed that Tike was actually married and had a son, Mike, who was conveniently old enough to join the new X-Statix alongside Edie Sawyer's now-grown daughter Katie and an Opposite-Sex Clone of Phat.

Fan Works

• In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Wonder Woman was frequently thought to be the daughter of Zeus despite her insistence that she was molded from clay by her mother Hippolyta. The "daughter of Zeus" theory grew so popular that even her protégé Wonder Girl touted it. At some point, it was exposed as part of a conspiracy to get her to commit deicide.
• Petriculture: Pinkie Pie is revealed to have lied about her childhood because her real origin was very strange; she was Twilight Sparkle's imaginary friend.
• In Risk It All, Ren only knows his father as an accountant working in a place like Gotham City. According to his parents, they met while Ren's mom was studying abroad in China before moving back to the U.S. together. But the fact that Ren's father isn't all that concerned about Ren's rapid recovery from his coma and nonchalance to the threat of Black Mask makes Ren realize that his father is hiding something from him. Ren's uncle reveals that Ren descends from a line of powerful qi cultivators. His father left them to marry Ren's mother, burning bridges so badly that he'd be killed if he ever returned to China.

Films — Animated

• NIMONA (2023): When Ballister asks Nimona how she can shapeshift, she gives a fairytale-esque backstory about a wishing well... which ends with a sarcastic claim that she wished to be on a subway with "an uptight knight asking me small-minded questions." Later in the movie we see a more accurate flashback; notably it's less about how she got her powers, but how her first real friend, Gloreth, turned on her and declared her a monster. Effectively using this trope to emphasize what's more important to Nimona's character is who she is as a person, rather than what she is.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: Chelsea tells Ruby that she's Nerissa's daughter, and wants to steal the trident to get revenge on the kraken who killed her. At the climax, it turns out that Nerissa didn't have a daughter, and Chelsea was her in disguise all along.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost: Mystery Inc. is invited by famous horror writer Ben Ravencroft to Oakhaven for Harvest Fest, where Ben's ancestor Sarah is accused of being a witch when really, back then, she was a Wiccan who healed the innocent, and we get an appropriate flashback for such. But it turns out Sarah wasn't a Wiccan at all; she was indeed a witch whom Ben is trying to free from her spell book prison.
• Tokyo Godfathers: Gin's story of how he became homeless as a tragic former racer ends up being total baloney, as the actual explanation he's an estranged alcoholic father with gambling debts is considerably less dignified. It does provide a point of connection with Sachiko's husband, though, and come the climax, he ironically ends up putting in the work racing on a bike for real.

Films — Live-Action

• As per tradition with the Joker, in The Dark Knight Joker brings up how his abusive father scarred him for life as the reasoning behind his scars. Later in the film, he tells a completely different backstory about how he cut the scars into his mouth himself to make his wife happy.
• In The Dark Knight Rises, there are flashbacks of a child escaping from a prison. Because the character Bane is known in the comics for being born and raised in prison, viewers are led to believe that this is his backstory. However, it is later revealed that the child is a young Talia al Ghul and Bane was a guard who protected her and suffered for it.
• Frailty: Fenton Meiks confesses to an incredulous FBI agent about burying his brother Adam, the "God's Hand" Serial Killer the agent was hunting; most of the film is Fenton narrating his childhood as he watches his father become a religious killer and Adam as his acolyte. As Fenton takes the agent to his brother's grave in a rose garden, the agent realizes Adam promised to bury Fenton there, and says the story doesn't make sense. Fenton replies, "Yes it does... if the man standing in front of you is Adam Meiks."
• Godmothered: Mackenzie says "Life isn't always a fairy tale. Sometimes people grow or change or get divorced or fall out of love or run off and join a cult or fall in love with a skinny Pilates instructor." The audience is meant to assume the last item in the list is true, as if she had just made a Suspiciously Specific Denial. Because she doesn't know what "Pilates" is, Eleanor first assumes Mackenzie meant to say that her husband went off to teach skinny pirates. However, Mia reveals to Eleanor that Mackenzie's husband actually died in a car accident four years ago.
• Ambiguously used in High Plains Drifter, with a dose of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. A mysterious drifter comes to a town ostensibly to help (but clearly seeking vengeance), and flashbacks show that the drifter looks like the town's previous Marshall, who was flogged to death by bandits while the townsfolk idly stood by. The original script had it that the drifter is the Marshall's brother, but it is also possible that the drifter is the Marshall's ghost or else an avenging angel (or devil) taking the Marshall's form.
• Lucky Number Slevin revolves around an extremely unlucky young man who lost his job, his girlfriend, his house, and his wallet in one day. When he asks a friend to stay at his flat for a while, it turns out that the friend owes a large sum of money to Mafia dons who kidnap the protagonist, mistaking him for his friend... Eventually it turns out that the protagonist's parents were murdered by the Mafia dons when he was still a kid, and he deliberately crafted his "random unlucky everyman" persona as a part of a plan to get revenge on them.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Captain Marvel (2019): A flashback (specifically Carol's Flashback Nightmare) at the start of the movie shows her surviving a plane crash, then a Skrull moves in to shoot her, but her boss Yon-Rogg shot the Skrull before the latter could attack. Later on, however, after some time on Earth, the same flashback plays... but with her piloting mentor Wendy (a Kree in disguise) being shot by Yon-Rogg. The flashback at the start turns out to be a faked memory.
  • Spider-Man: Far From Home: When Peter first meets Quentin Beck, he tells him how he's from an Alternate Universe and had come to this Earth in pursuit of the elemental creatures that had killed his family. After a number of shared battles, Peter trusts Beck enough to give him the E.D.I.T.H. glasses he'd received from the late Tony Stark, thus giving him access to Stark information and technology. Once he has it, Beck is revealed to in actuality be a disgruntled Stark employee who gathered up others like him to create the illusion of a tragic warrior from another universe in an effort to gain Peter's trust.
• Star Wars:
  • Enforced with Darth Vader in the original trilogy. In A New Hope, Luke Skywalker is told that his father Anakin Skywalker was killed by Darth Vader. However, during their battle in The Empire Strikes Back it's revealed that Vader IS Luke's father. When Luke confronts Obi-Wan about it he admits he was being metaphorical about Vader "killing" Anakin. Obi-Wan was in fact originally meant to be telling the literal truth, but scriptwriting needs during preproduction on Empire led to Anakin and Vader being retconned into the same person.
  • In The Last Jedi, Rey confronts Kylo Ren, who tells her that her missing parents were "nobodies" who sold her as a baby for drinking money. In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey is told — once again by Kylo Ren — that she is actually the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine by a son of his (explained in tie-in material to have been a clone). Needless to say, she does not take it well. Again an enforced example, this time due to multiple writing teams with competing visions: J. J. Abrams reportedly decided to try to one-up the shock that Rian Johnson had given Rey in the second film of the trilogy.
• Wonder Woman (2017): Diana grows up believing she is a clay statue molded into the shape of a child by her mother Queen Hippolyta and given life by the gods (which is her actual backstory in the comics). In truth, she is really the biological daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta, deliberately conceived as a weapon to kill her older half-brother Ares (who slaughtered the rest of the Greek Pantheon thousands of years ago). Diana doesn't find this out until she finally confronts Ares herself at the climax of the film.
• Zombieland: Early in the movie, Tallahassee tells the story of how he lost his dog to zombies. The story is coupled with flashback shots of him with his dog. Later in the movie, though, it is revealed that his 'dog' was actually his son, and the shots are shown again with a little boy in place of the dog.

Literature

• And Then There Were None:
  • Each of the Ten Little Murder Victims on Indian Island is accused of using Loophole Abuse to end someone's life without technically murdering them: for example, Emily Brent, a religious fundamentalist, found out that her unmarried maid had become pregnant and kicked her out of the house with scathing words, driving the poor girl to kill herself. Justice Wargrave's own backstory involves sentencing Edward Seton, a young man accused of murdering an elderly woman, to death; people who remember the trial note that Wargrave essentially bullied the jury into giving a guilty verdict despite a lack of convincing evidence. However, the epilogue reveals that Seton really did commit the crime in question, meaning that Wargrave made the right choice — which is fitting, considering he's the murderer and thus not under the same "rule" as the others.
  • Building on the above, the novel opens with each of the ten victims reading an invitation they received from either Ulrick Norman or Una Nancy Owen, or "unknown," explaining why they're all gathering on Indian Island. Though readers are shown Justice Wargrave studying his own invitation, it's actually a fake he sent to himself to cover his tracks.
• In Facing The Flag by Jules Verne, the mysterious yet very wealthy Earl of Artigas is the infamous Pirate Ker Karraje, who kidnapped Thomas Roch to get an extremely destructive weapon he invented.
• In H. Beam Piper's Four Day Planet, Bish Ware appears to be a drunken remittance man (someone whose living expenses are paid on condition that he goes away and stays away). He's actually an undercover agent for Federation law enforcement investigating a criminal who has assumed a new identity to hide out on the backwater world where the story takes place.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Harry was told by the Dursleys that his parents were killed in a car crash and got his scar from it. Harry vaguely remembers a big green flash and supposes this must be the crash. Then Hagrid came along to tell Harry that his parents were actually killed by Lord Voldemort, who gave the scar on his forehead. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire explains that the green flash he remembers was the Killing Curse.
• Mistborn: The Original Trilogy starts out with a plot about the rebel heroes trying to overthrow The Lord Ruler, and the first novel of the series has each chapter begin with excerpts from the journal of Alendi, the man believed to have become him, who is a parody/pastiche of the stock brooding fantasy novel hero. The heroes, who read the journal, believe that Alendi went bad after absorbing great power, as the journal ends right before he journeyed into the source of the power. There's a few references to a man named Rashek, who was enlisted as Alendi's guide and clearly resented him, and doesn't seem the most pleasant guy. It is later revealed that Rashek killed Alendi and took the power himself, but then realizing he'd accidentally released the God of Evil, became nobler in his goals and tried to fix things (but due to the entities influence, created the hellish dystopia in which the series is set).
• Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles Side B: The fourth chapter begins with Ada retelling her childhood to Leon shortly after meeting him. According to her, she was born in Saigon during the Vietnam War to a wealthy Chinese family. Her family had to flee to the United States when she was three and were cheated out of their fortunes by the man who smuggled them into the country. What she doesn't tell him is that the entire story is a fabrication she told to test how gullible he was. Her true backstory remains unknown.
• The Star Trek: The Fall novel The Crimson Shadow introduces a young working-class Cardassian named Rakhat Blok, who recently arrived on Cardassia Prime from a colony world. He's presented as not fundamentally a bad guy, but the sort of person who's open to recruitment by the True Way traditionalist movement because what have Garak's reforms ever done for him? He's eventually revealed to actually be Glinn Ravel Dygan from Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch, going undercover on Garak's orders to infiltrate the True Way.
• Use of Weapons stars Anti-Hero Cheradenine Zakalwe, and the novel alternates between the present story and Zakalwe's past missions, and both are interspersed with flashbacks to Zakalawe's past. The earliest flashbacks deal with Cheradenine's cousin/adopted brother Elethiomel, showing that Cheradenine was originally a jerk to Elethiomel, but over time, Elethiomel became increasingly evil, and eventually sent armies against the increasingly heroic Cheradenine. At the very end of the novel, it is shown that the real Cheradenine was Driven to Suicide after Elethiomel murdered his sister (and Elethiomel's lover), and sent Cheradenine a chair made of her body. After this, Elethiomel went mad from guilt and convinced himself that he was the heroic Cheradenine.
• The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor purports to be the origin story/Start of Darkness of The Governor, the major villain of the series, who is a cruel, depraved Knight Templar. It tells of two brothers, Philip and Brian Blake, who are trying to survive the Zombie Apocalypse and their fellow man, and Philip increasingly becomes He Who Fights Monsters and the meek, ineffectual Brian is the Only Sane Man. While it seems obvious that Philip will become the Governor, he gets killed off, and it turns out that this is actually Brian's Start of Darkness, as he takes on his brother's identity and becomes The Governor.
• In the Warrior Cats: A Vision of Shadows book Thunder and Shadow's bonus scene, Tree tells Needlepaw that his mother abandoned him when he was very young due to wanting to take his sickly sister to Twolegs and that he can't remember if he ever had a name before Tree. In the novella Trees Roots, we see that actually he was part of a group called the Sisters that kicks out males at six moons of age, and was originally named Earth. He had so much resentment against them that he didn't want to be reminded of them, so he chose a new name and invented a new backstory for himself.

Live-Action TV

• 1899 revolves around a group of passengers on a steamship in 1899, each of whom has their own tragic backstory. In the final twist, it's revealed that they're actually passengers in suspended animation on a spacecraft in 2099, implying that their backstories are illusory.
• Blindspot: Jane spends much of the first season believing she's Taylor Shaw, a childhood friend of Weller's who disappeared. At the end of the season, however, Weller's father confesses that he killed Taylor, leading Weller to find Taylor's body, meaning Jane's not her.
• The Boys (2019): In-Universe example: The Seven and other supers are publicly given origins of the superhero they parody, eg; The Homelander is an alien who crash-landed on Earth and raised by farmers. In reality, they were almost all raised in labs after they started showing superpowers as children, some with a nuke nearby ready to detonate in case of behavioral issues. It helps to explain why very few supers in this series are normal or well-adjusted.
• Castle: Zig-zagged. When asked where his fascination with murder came from, Castle initially tells Beckett that he found the body of a dead boy on the beach when he was a child, before she catches on that he made it up. In Season 7, he tells Beckett the truth — he got lost in Hollander's Woods as a child and witnessed the murder of a woman. So his original "fake" backstory was Metaphorically True with a few details changed. Justified in that he was sworn to secrecy on threat of death by the murderer.
• In The Gifted: Graduation, the villain of the series, Director Supot, explains to Pang after losing his position the origins of the Gifted Program and the anti-superpowered Nyx-88 virus. It makes him seem quite sympathetic: his first Super-Empowering human trial on his girlfriend accidentally created the virus, and the government killed his Muggle researcher friend for revealing that to him. Pang and the others help him by stealing the virus from the government to remove their leverage overpowered people, only for him to betray them and put himself back in power. The idealistic young man of the flashback was actually a muggle brainwashed into thinking he had the Compelling Voice power by the friend, the true Supot. Shortly after the events of that flashback, Supot also disposed of his stand-in by ordering him to kill himself.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Sauron poses as the last remnant of an unknown line of Kings native to the Southlands as a cover up to walk among humans, which works so well for him that he fools even the Elves. In reality he was betrayed by his own followers and had to flee as a result.
• Once Upon a Time: The show intersperses the characters in the present with flashbacks of their fairy tale selves, and one of the characters is Prince Charming (first name James) and his Storybrooke equivalent David Nolan. One episode starts out with a flashback to James acting like a jerkass Royal Brat, very much at odds with his established character, and recklessly enters into a duel. James is killed in that duel, and it turns out that the guy who became Prince Charming was a Farm Boy named David who was a Back Up Twin forced to do an Emergency Impersonation. As shown in a later episode (and chronologically earlier flashback), the "real" James was the Evil Twin.
• Person of Interest: In "Bad Code", Reese and Carter, looking for Root and Finch, are pointed toward a missing girl, Hanna Frey, and the details of the case lead them to believe Hanna became Root. However, Carter eventually confirms that Hanna was abducted and murdered; Root is actually Hanna's friend Samantha, who saw Hanna get abducted but couldn't make anyone believe her.
• The Pretender: Practically Once an Episode due to Jarod making up a new identity for each of his Pretends.
  • In one episode he pretends to be a doctor at a hospital. The HR Director hounds him for paperwork needed for a background check, payroll, an eventual W-2, etc. Jarod (who's Caucasian) holds him off by responding to various emergencies for a while but eventually gives in. Later, the Director angrily confronts him because the name, education and work history he'd given belong to a Black doctor who had died in the 1970s.
  • Downplayed in many examples where the actual background Jarod makes up isn't given, but where he confesses to having lied. In "Flesh & Blood", Jarod pretends to be an ATF agent so he can help rescue Sidney's son and some other teachers from the Appalachian militia group who'd kidnapped them for a million-dollar ransom. When everything is over, Jarod says to the lone surviving militiaman, "Oh by the way, I'm not really an ATF agent. I was just (glances quickly at Sydney and smirks) pretending."
• One of the characters in Smallville is Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen (full name Henry James Olsen). Toward the end of the show, Jimmy is unexpectedly killed off. Then the show introduces his younger brother and replacement at the Daily Planet, the "real" Jimmy (full name James Bartholomew Olsen).
• Spooks: The character Lucas North was initially presented in series 7 as an upstanding British agent who'd spent years rotting in a Russian jail cell, suffering from torture but staying loyal to the Crown. Then, series 9 revealed he was actually just ... some guy named John Bateman who was living like a lout in North Africa when he stole the real Lucas North's documents and somehow got away with masquerading as an intelligence officer for over a decade. This revelation coincided with a plotline in the present day where somebody who knew Bateman's real identity blackmailed him into giving up state secrets. It ended with Bateman guilty of murdering innocents, his old lover dead, and him jumping off a building to kill himself after being cornered. To say this Retcon was not well-received by fans is an understatement.
• Stargate SG-1: In "Deadman Switch", SG-1 are captured by a Bounty Hunter named Aris Boch, who offers to let them go if they help him capture a bounty of greater value while claiming that he's trying to buy his wife and son out of slavery. Said bounty turns out to be a Tok'ra operative named Korra, who explains that Boch lied about having a family: the Goa'uld addicted the survivors of his species to the drug he keeps putting in his water, and he works for them in exchange for resupply.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Garak, the "plain, simple tailor" who's the sole Cardassian on the promenade left after his people pulled out of Bajor, claims to be just a tailor, but all onboard the station suspect him of being a spy. "The Wire" makes a plot point out of this when he starts falling ill, and Dr. Bashir discovers he has an implant in his body that they eventually learn is a device of The Obsidian Order, designed to put him in a state of euphoria if he was ever tortured. Unfortunately, Garak had been abusing it to the point that the withdrawal nearly kills him, and in a maddened state to try and get Bashir to back away from helping him, he gives three contradictory backstories behind his exile. First, he claims he destroyed an entire Cardassian ship to keep Bajoran prisoners from escaping and was exiled because one of the passengers was related to a member of the government. Then he says he refused to torture starving and battered children, and was reprimanded for his failure to duty. Then he claims it's because he tried to betray his best friend in the Order, Elim, but said friend backstabbed him first. All of these stories are only partially true, or as he puts it, "They were all true, especially the lies": he's really the illegitimate son of Enabran Tain, the former commander of the Order, was exiled for betraying him, and "Elim" is Garak's own given name.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: In "Under the Cloak of War", Dak'Rah "the Butcher of J'Gal", a former Klingon general-turned-Federation ambassador, claims to have had a Heel Realization during the bloody battle for the moon of J'Gal during the Great Offscreen War, killing several of his own officers to stop them from massacring everyone who wasn't a Klingon soldier and then defecting. Dr. M'Benga ultimately reveals he knows damn well Rah didn't kill his officers, because M'Benga himself did: Rah gave the order for the massacre and then fled when M'Benga snuck into his base camp to assassinate him.
• Supergirl (2015):
  • When Mon-El first arrived on Earth, he told everyone that he was the bodyguard to the prince of Daxam, who let him take his ride off the doomed planet. It later turned out the story was mostly true, except Mon-El was the prince.
  • When she first appears, M'gann M'orzz claims that she's a Green Martian refugee who escaped from a White Martian prison camp. It's later revealed that she's a White Martian who fled after developing sympathy for the Greens.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate III:
  • Shadowheart, the half-elf cleric of Shar, claims that she was an orphan who was adopted by the Sharran temple. However, if she confronts the Nightsong in Act 2, the Nightsong tells her that this isn't true. Choosing to spare the Nightsong reveals that she was in fact the daughter of a pair of Selune worshipers and all three of them were captured by Shar's clergy on the eve of Shadowheart's initiation into Selune's service. Shadowheart's memories were magically erased in order to try and mold her into being the perfect champion for Shar.
  • Subverted with Astarion. When you first meet him, he claims to be a magistrate at Baldur's Gate, which seems to be an obvious lie considering that his background is Charlatan. Turns out he was a magistrate—two hundred years ago, before he became a vampire.
• BioShock: The protagonist, Jack, has flashes of his past involving his parents and being raised on a farm. When he finally confronts Andrew Ryan, he discovers that his entire past is a hypnotic fabrication; Jack is Ryan's 4-year-old son, genetically enhanced and artificially aged, and manipulated into coming back to Rapture as a living weapon.
• Zig-zagged in Dragalia Lost. Akasha's adventurer story is of her telling Heinwald about how she became the woman she is. By the end though, she admits that it is just one of many backstories she has and that she doesn't remember which one is true.
• In Final Fantasy VII, one of the more well-known twists is that a flashback narrated by Cloud near the beginning actually turns out to have involved his friend Zack. Cloud ended up confusing himself with Zack and absorbed some of his memories of the Nibelheim incident thanks to a combination of trauma and Hojo's experiments. This is why Cloud's narration tends to trail off and get murky throughout the flashback like he has trouble remembering much beyond a few incidental scenes. That is because he really didn't have much to recall besides all of the scenes he shared with Zack as a grunt, the few bits of info that Zack shared with him, and others that he made up in his own head.
• Genshin Impact: In Kaeya's Story Quest, Kaeya claims that his grandfather was a pirate who hid an important legacy treasure in Mondstadt that only his family would know, and the Eyepatch of Power he wears is supposedly inherited from him. In actuality, Kaeya's pirate backstory was just a ruse to bait and capture a greedy eavesdropping Treasure Hoarder who has been wanted by the Knights of Favonius for quite some time, and he decided to get the Traveler in on the fake treasure hunt simply because it amused him. Kaeya is actually a descendant of the Alberich Clan from Khaenri'ah, whose ancestor; Chlothar Alberich, founded the Abyss Order.
• Metal Gear: Big Boss, the Big Bad of the first game and its sequel, is said to have a decorated past as the 20th century's greatest soldier, fighting in various conflicts across the globe. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, an interquel set between the other prequel games centered around him and the original duology, depicts him taking on missions in Afghanistan and Central Africa during the 1980s under the code name Venom Snake, but the Truth Ending reveals that Venom isn't Big Boss at all, but a body double implanted with his memories (and his stand-in as Outer Heaven's commander in Metal Gear); the real Big Boss was in fact the mysterious figure named Ishmael who helped him out during the prologue. Thus, while Venom Snake's exploits make a significant contribution to the legend of Big Boss, they're not a legitimate part of his backstory.
• Psychonauts: In "Black Velvetopia", Razputin and the player are told via an artist dog that Edgar Teglee was a famous painter and husband to Lampita Pasionado. When the bullfighter Dingo Inflagrante commissioned Edgar to paint his picture, Lampita fell in love with him and left Edgar for him. The heartbreak drove Edgar to madness, and now he can't paint anything but bullfights. Except that isn't how it happened. The real story, as revealed by memory vaults, is that Edgar was the captain of his high school's wrestling team, and his talents got them to the state semi-finals... where his then-girlfriend Lana left him for male cheerleader Dean. Edgar was crushed by his heartbreak, and he ended up losing his match; the resulting shame pushed him to insanity and caused him to invent an elaborate justification because it sounded so much more dramatic. The bullfighting connection arose because Edgar's nickname on the wrestling team was "Bull."
• Basara Kubikiri from Samurai Shodown series is a yurei who in the first games he appeared (SSIII and SSIV), he went after Zankuro Minazuki to get revenge for his death and his lover Kagaribi. But in his SSV ending, it's revealed he went mad and killed Kagaribi and then was Driven to Suicide. This is reaffirmed in the next games where, in his endings, he made Time Travel to avoid the deaths and save Kagaribi and they disappeared from this reality (SSVI), and Kagaribi is revealed to be a Vengeful Ghost around him and after killing the Big Bad she's getting closer to forgive him and resting in peace (2019).
• Twisted Metal Black has Jebidiah, otherwise known as Preacher, the driver of the El Camino truck Brimstone. According to himself, he was thrown into Blackfield Asylum because he murdered a church full of people after getting demonically possessed during an exorcism he was doing on a baby. In his ending, Calypso reveals that there was no demon, with the exorcism Jebidiah thought he was doing being just a baptism, and Jebidiah was just insane. Unable to cope with this, Jebidiah ends up jumping off a building and into traffic.
• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End: The fifth chapter, "Hector Alcázar", features a flashback Prison Level recounting how the recently-liberated Sam escaped. Sam was cellmates with the drug lord Hector Alcázar, who was interested in Sam's knowledge of Henry Avery's treasure and organized a Prison Riot in order to escape. After they escape, Alcázar presents Sam with an ultimatum: find Henry Avery's treasure for him, or be killed. Rafe reveals in the third act that he was the one who let Sam out of prison simply by bribing the prison warden and that Hector Alcázar died in a shootout in Argentina six months prior to the game. Furthermore, Sam's release was not recent; he spent two years with Rafe looking for the second Saint Dismas cross before leaving him to find Nate.

Web Animation

• Underverse: When Sans asks Ink where Cross came from, he says that Cross is "from a Genocide timeline with no Reset capabilities", and that he has no idea how his world was erased or how the human who carried it out was sealed in Cross' body. All of this is Blatant Lies; there was no Genocide run, the world's Reset capabilities were fine, and Ink knows exactly what happened to Cross and the human that led to his world's erasure. He lied to Sans to manipulate him on behalf of the guy who planned the whole thing.

Webcomics

• In NIMONA, the first time the shapeshifter Nimona tells Ballister her backstory, she claims she was once an ordinary girl who was gifted magical transforming powers by a witch after she helped the witch. It's pretty obvious that at least some parts of it are false, as it makes no real sense that the witch would have needed her help or could have bestowed shapeshifting abilities as powerful as Nimona's. Ballister even points out some of the holes in the story. Much later it's confirmed that pretty much the entire story was a lie. Nimona's true origin is never fully revealed. What little we know was that she was captured and experimented on after killing dozens of raiders with her powers, and it's theorized she may be some sort of ancient shapeshifting parasite that either killed and replaced or merged with a young girl.
• The Warrior Returns has a retroactive example in Seongjun Lee. From Season 1 of the comic, the reader already knows that he's the Resurrection Warrior who was summoned to the World of Nothingness. However, in the Prequel Season 2, he presents himself as the "Future Warrior" with the power of foresight to Director Kim. His promises to ensure Kim's glory and success convince Kim to enact Operation Fighting Ring, sending South Korea's heroic Warriors to die one by one against Minsu ostensibly for the sake of South Korea's future security. This ensures the Foregone Conclusion that all of Korea's heroic Warriors will be dead or dying by the events of the main story.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Campaign Two
  • Invoked. When asked about his past, Molly likes giving elaborate and entirely fabricated answers, such as telling Fjord he was meant to be a sacrifice for a cult and routinely performing prayer rituals on his swords to back up the story. No one ever believes him, and it's eventually revealed he has no past — he was born two years ago from the remains of the soul of someone called Lucien, having woken up in a grave with ominous eye tattoos, no memories and only able to say the word "empty".
  • Nott the Brave is originally believed to be a very strange goblin who loathes her own clan whom she parted ways with, and desires to be part of society despite their hatred for her. She is actually a halfling called Veth Brenatto who was transformed into a goblin as punishment for killing one when they attacked her family. After escaping the clan, she stuck with Caleb partly in hopes that his magic could undo her curse.
• A Scotsman in Egypt: The Scottish spy James Bunnok, dissatisfied with his perceived lack of promotion, offers to sell out the empire to the Timurids (another spy sent after him is found out and killed, lending strength to his story). But on the eve of battle, the Timurid high command are murdered by Bunnok, who was an assassin named Colison all along (having claimed the real Bunnok's backstory for his own and denouncing him as the spy, Bunnok's ravings only hastening his death). Colison then used his position to feed the Timurids false information regarding the Scots' strength, with the end result that the Timurids invade with an army of 9,000... and find themselves facing 15,000 men (the Scottish empire now covers pretty much all of Europe).

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series: In "Mad Love", a flashback reveals that Dr. Harleen Quinzel grew to sympathize with the Joker after he told her about his traumatic childhood growing up with an abusive, misanthropic father, which helped motivate her decision to join him as Harley Quinn. In the climax of the episode, Batman reveals that this was just one of many fake backstories that the Joker has used to fish for sympathy, leaving Harley devastated.
• Futurama:
  • Early in the series, all Leela knew about her history was that she was an alien abandoned by her parents, with no knowledge of her home planet. In "A Bicyclops Built for Two", Leela meets another cyclops named Alcazar, who tells her the story of their people, the Cyclopians. He tells Leela that Cyclopia was bombed by eyeless mole people, killing everybody except Alcazar, who was working in a pool, and Leela, who was shipped off the planet as an infant before the planet was destroyed. At the end of the episode, Alcazar reveals he's a shapeshifter, not a cyclops, who made the entire story up to marry Leela (and it's implied he did the same to several other girlfriends of other species). Later in the series, Leela learns why she never found her home planet: she's not an alien, but a sewer mutant, and her parents sent her above ground with an alien note so she could live without being subjected to a degrading life in the sewer like every other mutant.
  • In "Luck of the Fryish", Fry goes looking for a lucky seven-leaf clover he had as a kid. Flashbacks show that Fry had an older brother named Yancy who was jealous of his luck, so when Fry discovers a statue for a Phillip J. Fry with his clover, he assumes (as does the audience) that Yancy took the clover, assumed his identity, and lived the life Fry should have had. He goes to his grave with the intent of recovering his clover, but then he discovers that Phillip was actually Yancy's son. One last flashback shows that Yancy named him after Fry, "whom I miss every day", and gave him the clover so that he may continue his legacy.
  • Inverted in Bender's Big Score. After a trip to the time he got frozen, Fry ends up creating a time duplicate of himself that lived for 12 years in the 21st century until Bender killed him. We're led to believe that he was simply a duplicate who died, only for it to eventually be revealed Bender only thought he killed him, and that he's the backstory to an already-seen character: Leela's new boyfriend Lars Fillmore. Lars didn't even know it for himself until his hair burned off and his voice changed.
  • In "Proposition Infinity", Professor Farnsworth is a strong advocate against robosexuality because, in his youth, his human girlfriend Eunice left him for a robot. Then he remembers that her name was not Eunice, but Unit, and she was actually a robot. Farnsworth realizes he too was a robosexual, so he gives up the crusade.
• Harley Quinn:
  • The Joker told Harley a story about how his abusive father murdered his beloved pet when he was a child. As usual, this was a lie on his part, the story was actually something that happened to Poison Ivy, who's annoyed when she finds out that Joker had used a tragedy from her past to score sympathy from Harley.
  • Harley herself has one. For the first few episodes she talks repeatedly about how the Joker was the one who pushed her into the vat of chemicals that transformed her from Harleen Quinzel into Harley Quinn. It's not until she goes inside her own head that she realizes that she's been lying to herself this entire time — Joker didn't push her, she voluntarily jumped, which means that the Joker isn't responsible for her creation, she is.
• In the Justice League episode "Twilight", Hawkgirl initially relates to her teammates a Superhero Origin where she has been pursuing some criminals on her own world when a freak teleportation accident left her stranded on Earth instead, where she continued doing what she's always been doing: fighting crime. "Starcrossed", however, reveals this to be deliberate misinformation, since Hawkgirl is actually a spy for the Thanagarian military sent to Earth to prepare their invasion, and the origin she told earlier was just a clever cover story.
• In The Legend of Korra, Amon, the Big Bad of season one, reveals to his supporters at a rally that he is a non-bender from the Fire Nation whose parents were killed and his own face, horribly disfigured by a power-tripping firebender, setting him on the path to discovering a way to De-power benders. At the end of the season, it is revealed that Amon is actually from the Northern Water Tribe, and his bending-severing technique is an advanced form of bloodbending, which he learned from his father, the ex-crime lord Yakone.
• Littlest Pet Shop: In "So Interesting", Penny Ling tells the others that she grew up in a mystical forest and was reared by "green bean fairies". At the end, she admits that she made it all up so that she'd have an interesting story like everyone else.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Father Knows Beast", Sludge claims to be Spike's Disappeared Dad and gives his backstory; he decided to take Spike's egg on a journey to meet his mother only to get captured by "scale collectors", losing Spike's egg in the process. At the end, he admits that he was lying so he could live in the castle and be as lazy as he wanted.
• The Owl House: The Golden Guard a.k.a. Hunter was raised to believe that he was a powerless witch, raised by his uncle Emperor Belos, after the rest of their family was wiped out by Wild Magic. It turns out that this backstory was a complete lie, and Hunter is really a kind of Artificial Human called a Grimwalker, based on Belos/Philip Whittebane's brother Caleb, and is only the latest in a long line that Belos keeps killing off for betraying him.
• Steven Universe: In "Your Mother and Mine", Garnet reveals Rose Quartz's backstory; she was a soldier from the Prime Kindergarten who came to realize that Earth was bustling with life of its own and that Homeworld's colonization would leave it nothing but an empty shell. She was brought before Pink Diamond after telling other Gems about the life on the planet, and Rose begged her to spare it; Pink Diamond simply laughed in her face, told her to drop these silly ideas, and get back to work. In response, Rose donned her iconic white dress and began telling her fellow Quartzes about a new idea — rebellion. It's later revealed that this story is a complete fabrication by Rose herself, to hide her true origins and to inspire other Gems to join her cause. In reality, Rose was actually Pink Diamond, who had come to love the planet dearly, and donned the guise of a common Quartz soldier to forcefully stop Earth's destruction after the other Diamonds refused to listen to her pleas. In a similar vein, Pearl claimed to be an ownerless, renegade Pearl who ran away from her former owner and met Rose on Earth. In actuality, she was Pink Diamond's Pearl.
• Ultimate Spider-Man: Scarlet Spider claims that he is the "First Spider", created by Doctor Octopus (whom he despises) and held captive for months before escaping. This is ultimately revealed to be a lie; not only was Scarlet Spider created much sooner, but he has been working for Doc Ock from the beginning, and fed Peter a fake sob story so he would be accepted onto the team.

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