I Reject Your Reality

"... and substitute my own."

— Paul Bradford, The Dungeonmaster

Some people just don't get it.

This sort of character is a relative of the Cloudcuckoolander but with much more sinister overtones. They seem to live in a world of their own, they may live by the mantra of Screw the Rules when the "rules" are hard facts. They will stubbornly insist "their" reality is the true reality in the face of evidence to the contrary, much to the frustration of others and sometimes danger to companions, underlings, peers, or themselves, especially when the fact they are rejecting is a consequence of their own actions. If anything manages to pierce their iron-bound conviction, a breakdown, villainous or otherwise, is likely to ensue.

On a broader scale, any person can have moments or periods like these or full-on blind spots when it comes to some hot-button issue, a la Selective Obliviousness. It might be a running gag Played for Laughs, or the disabusing of their delusion may be a dramatic plot point.

The poster child for many other tropes: Belief Makes You Stupid, the Inspector Javert, the Knight Templar, the Lawful Stupid. Not to be confused with The Spark of Genius or the Reality Warper (who literally can reject and replace reality), although it is possible to combine this trope with either of the others; A God Am I is usually the result. Also, if the reality is fake to begin with, rejecting it may be a right and necessary step to awaken.

A Sister Trope to Implausible Deniability. Gets close to Doublethink and may involve it. May overlap with In the Dreaming Stage of Grief if they rationalize this as "That was All Just a Dream". Believing Their Own Lies is the logical conclusion if they continue. When applied to a series, this is Fanon Discontinuity.

Compare Gravity Is Only a Theory, Windmill Political, and Theory Tunnelvision. Contrast Mr. Imagination and the Cloudcuckoolander, who have the more peaceful philosophy that they can "substitute their own reality" without this kind of fighting against everyone else's reality which they have rejected. Also contrast the Reality Warper, who can actually reject your reality and substitute their own.

In Real Life, it is unfortunately so common and politically charged that we won't list any examples.

noreallife

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Briefly happens in episode 9 of Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts. The main characters come to the conclusion that Akihisa is in a secret relationship and follow him to his home to find out more. When they find various feminine items such as underwear and a cotton pad (for makeup), Himeji refuses to accept reality and believes that the underwear belongs to Akihisa and the cotton pad is a fishcake. She only starts to accept reality when she finds a lunch that was obviously made by a woman. They were all wrong in their assumptions; the assorted items belong to Akihisa's sister, who has recently returned to look after her brother.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, the most egregious case in the entire series is certainly Hantengu, the Upper Rank 4 demon of the Twelve Kizuki, who lived his entire human life, and now demon life, leeching of a fabricated reality that no matter what heinous crimes he committed Hantengu believed himself to be innocent; it is so ludicrous that the only memories of his human life that resurface shortly before he is about to be killed by Tanjiro is of the numerous people that correctly judged him as guilty, but Hantengu still saw it as instances where terrible individuals accused him of things he never did.
• Jiren of Dragon Ball Super has this in spades. Having lost his family, village, master, and friends to a mysterious villain, he rejects The Power of Friendship in favor of Might Makes Right. He gladly and smugly espouses this viewpoint as a Hope Crusher, intending on smashing every bit of chance and hope of anything other than pure, unadulterated strength being the worthwhile power. However, when Goku ends up mastering Ultra Instinct and beats Jiren into the ground, he's told that he's gained this through the trust of his True Companions (and Frieza). Jiren cannot wrap his head around this concept at all and tries to disprove it by attempting to kill them. This proves to be a big mistake and ultimately leads to his downfall.
• Phryne Jamil of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is very bad with this. She's a hideous frog-faced woman who thinks of herself as the World's Most Beautiful Woman who has men of all scores head over heels over her. What she refuses to believe is that the men she "tastes" are traumatized to the point of complete impotence rather than so utterly love-struck that they won't be "satisfied" by anyone else. Nothing can change her mind, not her own teammates who are rightfully disgusted to be around her or a damn mirror. Her delusion is so twisted that she thinks herself more beautiful than the story's actual goddess of beauty, and she had the balls to say it to the face of said goddess' Number Two, who promptly kills her both for her stupidity and for bad-mouthing his goddess.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stone Ocean: Pucci's obsession with fate has to do with his desire for something to blame for his decision to go to an outsider (who turned out to be the KKK) to get his sister to break up with Weather Report, who is actually their brother thought to have been dead, but was actually switched at birth.
  • The JoJoLands: Barbara Ann Joestar, when faced with the possibility that her youngest child could be a genuine sociopath, her response is to yell that the psychiatrist's diagnosis is untrustworthy and demand for her money back. Unfortunately for her, Jodio resignedly accepts the news.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Todo ends up inventing a completely fictitious backstory for himself depicting him and Itadori as best friends in middle school where Itadori helped him try to confess to Takada-chan, being there for Toudou when he got rejected and taking him out for ramen with a brotherly pat on the back while he was depressed aftewards, and supposedly winning the baseball middle school nationals together entirely off-screen, which Itadori denies.
• Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! gives us Rikka Takanashi, who for the most part is just a Chuunibyou, but the one part of her fantasy that she absolutely will not let go of is that her old home still exists, and that her father is still alive on the other side of the "invisible boundary line".
• Obito from Naruto refuses to acknowledge a world in which Rin chose to sacrifice herself and Kakashi was unable to protect her, and chooses to believe the current world is fake. His main goal is to use Infinite Tsukuyomi to replace reality with a dream world where he can pretend Rin is still alive.
• Idiot Hero Luffy from the anime and manga One Piece pulls this often.
  Luffy: I refuse!
  Sanji: What do you mean you refuse?
  Luffy: I refuse your refusal!
  • An even more ridiculous example from the same series is Zeo, a bad guy from the Fishman Island arc. This trope is his main personality trait, from rejecting the fact that he was ignored by claiming he was speaking quietly (he was yelling), to rejecting the fact he got stabbed and instead insisting he was trying to break off the offending sword's tip with his own body. One of the best ones is that he even rejected the fact that someone was stepping on his face, insisting that he was headbutting the person's foot. The last and very best one is when Zeo and the rest of the bad guys have been aged into old men due to the Energy Steroids they took, really an age-accelerating substance. Note that absolutely none of them knew this would happen...
    Zeo: I became old on purpose.
• In Pluto, this failing is used as the identifier for the first ever truly perfect artificial intelligence. The ability to lie has never been programmed into any robot, yet the most advanced ones are capable of doing so anyway, in an example of complex emergent behaviour. The first true A.I. is so advanced that it can lie even to itself, ignoring three laws compliance because it believes itself to be human, evidence to the contrary be damned.
• Pokémon 3 focuses on a delusional little girl named Molly Hale whose connection with a bunch of reality-bending Psychic-types allows her to bend reality. But even when confronted with things she can't change, she still insists her version is the correct one. Most likely because she's six or so and because her father disappeared leaving her all alone since her mother left her father some years ago. As Linkara put it, the movie is basically Silent Hill for children.
  Ash: If you come with us, you can have real Pokémon.
  Molly: [conjures up crystal Pokémon] I already have real Pokémon! NOW, GO AWAY!
• Ranma ½: This is the attitude of many of the characters, but the one that showcases this to the highest levels of annoyance to the rest of the cast is Tatewaki Kuno, who believes himself to be a top-notch warrior and God's gift to women (if anything, he's the weakest of the whole cast and is pretty repugnant), and that Ranma Saotome is not only a womanizer that has managed to get Akane Tendo and "the pig-tailed girl" (who is really Ranma's female form) under his grasp, but that he is a "foul sorcerer" that has won every "fight" he's had with Kuno and has enslaved the 'pig-tailed girl' using his magic (and so defeating Ranma will not only release the 'girl' but make her instantly fall head-over-heels for Kuno). There is absolutely nothing, no amount of beat-downs or even changing forms in front of him, that will make him change his mind about Ranma.
• A straight variant and a lighter, less visible variant of this is seen between counterparts Mikage and Utena in Revolutionary Girl Utena. For Mikage, he doggedly draws in young students, during a time when they feel down and out, and manipulates them to duel for him - and it seems that he's been keeping this up for years and years, possibly being Dead All Along, seeking an "eternity" where he and his old lover Tokiko and her brother Mamiya can flourish. When Utena begins to break through it, he breaks down and vanishes. So, what makes Utena his counterpart? She rejects the hardships that her fellow classmates go through, rejects the feelings that she gets for Akio because of the need to become "princely", and consistently rejects the notion that the seemingly pure and doormat-like Anthy is manipulative of everyone else and is afraid to step outside of her boundaries - the outside world - from being the Rose Bride. Whereas the other duelists manage to cope with their problems, Utena remains childish in behavior and ideals, and if the stabs of a million swords at the Rose Gate are anything to go by, doing that bit her in the ass pretty hard.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero:
  • As far as Motoyasu is concerned, he's the archetypical Knight in Shining Armor, the most powerful and virtuous of the Three Heroes, while the titular outcast Shield Hero Naofumi is the Devil incarnate, whose every action is pure, unforgivable evil and who's companions are unfortunate souls brainwashed into servitude, and that Malty is a pure, uncorrupted maiden who's never done anything wrong in her entire life. He'll never stop believing this no matter what the undeniable facts in front of him or even common sense says. Deconstructed, as this not only makes it easy for bad guys like Malty and the corrupt fanatics in the Three Heroes Church to manipulate Motoyasu into doing their dirty work since Naofumi is their chief target, but the latter gets so fed up with dealing with someone so monumentally blind to reality to the point of unwittingly putting the people around him in danger that he was prepared to let him get killed by the Church's ringleader at one point. Finally, when he suffers a Trauma Conga Line that forces him to realize that he's not nearly as great as he thinks he is, culminating with him being betrayed and thrown away by the one person he had deluded himself into seeing in a positive light in the face of so much evidence, he goes completely insane.
  • Itsuki, the Hero of the Bow, is in the same boat as well, but with more of a Never My Fault attitude since his massive ego refuses to let him see himself as anything else but a virtuous Humble Hero that can do no wrong. This leads to him blaming Naofumi for "stealing credit" for assassinating a governor in secret, believing that doing so would improve the lives of the people under him. He refuses to listen when he's told that there's no logical way for him or anyone else to even know about what he did without telling someone directly because he did so in secret, or that things only got better temporarily before the civilians went destitute because of what happened after. This only gets worse when his Curse Series Weapon awakens, and he starts brainwashing people into following him, claiming that he's bringing justice by "making them see his point of view" while ironically accusing Naofumi of the same.
• Sword Art Online:
  • Most of the Aincrad arc is actually an aversion of this. Despite Sword Art Online being a VRMMORPG, the fact it is a death game where dying in the game means dying in real life, means players need to accept the game as their new reality until it gets cleared. Kirito heavily delves into the philosophy of whether the virtual world was 'real' or not, with his belief that the virtual world could be as real as the real world if designed right.
  • Kyouji had given up on the real world and instead turned to the virtual world of a VRMMORPG, Gun Gale Online. When he doesn't succeed at that either, he decides to move onto the next reality after death and tries to take his crush Sinon with him.
  • In the abridged version of the series, Kirito uses this line as a Pre-Mortem One-Liner during the climactic fight against Kayaba, bringing their shared gag of referencing old B-Movies to a nice close.
• In Urusei Yatsura, Mr. Fujinami Wanted a Son Instead so badly that not only has he forcibly raised his daughter Ryunosuke as a boy, but he's even convinced himself that she's actually a boy. To the point he will literally deny blatant evidence to the contrary and insist on Ryunosuke's masculinity no matter what the situation is. As early as their second appearance, he registers Ryunosuke at Tomobiki High School as a boy, and when her home-room teacher protests that he can't put Ryunosuke in the male side of the Physical Education class, Mr. Fujinami insists to the principal that Ryunosuke is actually a boy... even when Onsen-Mark points out he's seen Ryunosuke's bosom, and Ryunosuke herself admits she's a girl.
  • Ataru Moroboshi can approach this trope in his adamancy in hitting on girls. The greatest example can be seen in his interactions with Asuka Mizunokoji; the girl Does Not Like Men. As in, she's literally terrified of men, to the point her reaction to even seeing Ataru is to scream in terror, hit him with a Megaton Punch, and potentially start running. Ataru will not only repeatedly thrust himself into her proximity in his usual aggressive flirtations, but during her brief Arranged Marriage to Shutaro Mendo, repeatedly kept trying to claim that he was Asuka's betrothed, despite everyone around him pointing out he was no relation to the Mendo family at all.
• Seto Kaiba, from Yu-Gi-Oh! vehemently denies the existence of any sort of magic throughout the English dub, despite evidence to the contrary. The dub itself eventually started making fun of this.
  Dartz: Is that Your Answer to Everything, Kaiba? You really need a new catchphrase.
  • Made funnier, is the fact that Kaiba's past self was an actual sorcerer/priest who could cast magic.
  • His absolute refusal to accept that he lost to Yugi and he isn't as good as the Pharaoh really delves into this territory considering the many times he's forced Yugi into a rematch — when the final film ends, we find out in The Stinger that he built a machine to chase the Pharaoh into the afterlife to challenge him yet again.

Comic Books

• Doctor Thirteen in The DCU is a crazy skeptic who doesn't believe in the supernatural despite living in a world where wizards and aliens are public celebrities. Because of his innate, unknown powers, the supernatural literally doesn't exist for him (but does for his beleaguered wife and his witch daughter). This is taken to the extreme in the Vertigo Visions one-shot, where Doctor Thirteen is so stubbornly refusing to believe in anything that might be supernatural or out of the ordinary he considers himself to be the sanest man in the world. He thinks his wife is needlessly exaggerating their problems even though he uses her money to fund his research without getting paid while constantly insulting her, and labels everything unusual he sees as a hoax or a scam. For example, when presented with TV footage of characters from old shows somehow popping up in other programs, everyone but Thirteen consented that there was something wrong. Thirteen just called everyone else crazy and stormed out of the room.
  • Detective Chimp notes how Thirteen kept wondering where "the ventriloquist" was, refusing to accept Chimp was an intelligent talking monkey. Keep in mind, it's well known that in the DCU, there's an entire city of talking apes.
  • It's taken to extremes in a few issues where Thirteen seriously doubts the existence of Superman and even brushing off full-scale alien invasions as just "mass delusion to handle the trauma of a global disaster."
• Brief squib in a Chick Tract, where one character declares, "Well, I'm a Buddhist, so you don't exist!"
• Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom lives in a world in which he is the hero and Reed Richards is responsible for nearly everything bad in his life, starting with his scarred face. It was Doom's own fault that the machine exploded scarring his face, but admitting that would mean admitting that Reed (who tried to warn him about the calculation errors) was able to spot a flaw that he didn't. Doom's ego is too huge to ever allow that, so he came up with the delusion that Reed "sabotaged" his machine. Case in point: in AXIS the bonafide truth smacked him in the face thanks to the truth wave, created by Valeria Richards and Loki to combat the Red Skull's Hate Plague, and he rejected both! Which is either impressive or sad. Maybe both.
• The entire push of Secret Empire is Steve Rogers convinced by Kobik that he lived the life of a long-term Hydra agent. He also believes Hydra was a noble group corrupted by the Nazis and the Axis won World War II but the Allies used the Cosmic Cube to rewrite reality. In the final issue, after the real Cap has returned, he confronts the captured Hydra!Cap and realizes the man still believes in the "history" he knows and won't accept it was all an invention of Kobik.
• Spider-Man: J. Jonah Jameson has an unhealthy tendency to make people who correctly believe that Spider-Man is a hero have second thoughts. Jameson refuses to accept the opinions of others, including his own son, that Spider-Man is a hero, trying to make his confronters second guess themselves. He also refuses to believe that Spider-Man himself is a hero and just sees him as a disruptive force of destruction. In many adaptations, this is one of his Flanderized qualities.

Fan Works

Crossovers:

• Akane in Anything Goes Game Changer struggles to accept that she isn't the best. Not only does she flat out reject that she's lost several spars, but she insists that only freaks can do what the various Sekirei and better martial artists can, especially Roof Hopping. She eventually grows out of this after a battle against a Sekirei leaves her with a broken arm, with Word of God stating not even her delusions could ignore a long-lasting injury like that.
• Suzaku has this problem in Code Prime throughout most of R1. He continuously insists that he can change the system of Britannia, despite the fact that they’re allied with the Decepticons, as well as the numerous atrocities that Britannia commits. He also refuses to acknowledge that the Black Knights and the Autobots have legitimate reasons for opposing Britannia, and continues to buy into the idea that they’re terrorists. It takes the SAZ Massacre, along with Lelouch calling him out on it, as well as asking him if he’s gonna start blaming Euphemia for his mistakes for him to finally snap out of it, and accept that he was deluding himself, and that he never had a chance to change Britannia.
• Plus Five to Charisma: Despite all of the good that the Party is doing, Alma convinces herself that they're sabotaging her family, to the point that she convinces herself that Mirabel must have been replaced by a Fay Trickster.
• A Shadow of the Titans has this happen to Kitten after her Emergency Transformation. Between the trauma of the near-death experience that required said transformation to save her life, and the shock at having lost her humanity, she completely snaps and puts herself into a delusional state where she believes she's still human, reacting violently whenever anyone or anything points out the contrary.
• Shadows over Meridian: Caleb's Irrational Hatred of anyone he even suspects of being connected to Phobos means that he refuses to believe the truth about Jade/Kage (that she's innocent and never served Phobos) and "the Mage" (that she was really a disguised Nerissa manipulating him) regardless of all the evidence and all the holes in the theories he tries to use to defend his beliefs. The authors have explained in the reviews that after spending practically all of his short life fighting a war to bring down a tyrant, accepting that all the losses and sacrifices of his comrades and himself were all part of another villain's masterplan is simply too much for Caleb, so he resorts to Theory Tunnel Vision to hold on to the reality he has always taken for granted.
• Brett in Through His Eyes refuses to accept that Percy Jackson is anything but a dangerous criminal who abuses Annabeth Chase despite all evidence to the contrary. Even when he gives up at the end, it's not a Jerkass Realization that he broke into her apartment to find evidence, but "accepting" that nothing he can do will convince anyone he's right.

Danganronpa:

• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Denial: With the second culprit, it's deliberately unclear how much this applies. Their plan hinged on rigging a trap so that somebody else would be responsible for the victim's death; however, it went off prematurely, leaving them as the blackened. Furthermore, it's implied that they knew the trap went off too soon, but they deny it to the bitter end.
• System Restore: Following the second trial, Kazuichi refuses to accept the culprit's identity, continuing to insist that Gundam must have been the murderer and somehow got away with it without everyone being executed for getting it wrong.

Death Note:

• Lampshaded in All You Need Is Love:
  Naomi: It's like you have this belief that if you say things enough times they suddenly become true.
  Light: I do not.
  Naomi: I'm the god of the new world?
  Light: (confused) But I am the god of the new world.
  Naomi: No you're not. I have good intentions? Raye Penber is wallpaper? I don't get high off the murders of rapists and other murderers? I can keep going, you know, if I really want to.
  Light: All true, I don't say them to make them true I just have to remind everyone else that they're true. If I didn't say anything people would assume that Matsuda's theories are correct, and I just won't stand for that.
  Naomi: Yeah, completely buying that.

Detective Conan:

• Dominoes:
  • Many of the cast have maladapted coping mechanisms in the form of self-delusions and denial; recognizing what sort of issues they're dealing with would require them to face some Awful Truths, so they sidestep full awareness of their situations until they reach their personal limits as to what they can rationalize away.
  • Aoko demonstrates this the most acutely with her Black-and-White Insanity. As the story progresses, all of the 'good' reasons she uses to justify her absolute moral justice are increasingly illegitimated, and the more she learns, the more she denies. By Chapter 10, she's grasping desperately for any reason to continue viewing Shuichi and Kaito as 'the bad guys' in the face of things like Yuusaku openly Mind Controlling his son right in front of her team while giving his son a Breaking Speech about how he doesn't deserve even the thinnest veneer of respect.

Disgaea:

• Tyrantly Ever After: After the events of Disgaea 4, Fuka has amended her delusions. While she now accepts that she died at some point, she firmly believes that she's up in Heaven, with all her escapades in the Netherworld being nothing more than dreams... since after all, there's no way that a 'sweet, innocent girl' like her could have been sent to the Netherworld, right?
• Wolf in the Streets, Sardine in the Sheets: In this Alternate Universe, a tragic accident at Genjuro's lab killed his wife and one of his daughters, with the other two (Fuka and Desco) barely surviving. The girls end up at Valvatorez's rehabilitation home after their father is arrested for the incident; however, Fuka refuses to acknowledge this as anything other than a temporary measure, dismissing the incident at the lab as 'a bad dream' and insisting that their father is just busy at work.

Doug:

• Dear Journal: I'm Crazy: Doug has a horrible time adjusting to the first few days after taking the pills.
  SKEETER ISN'T BLUE! I refuse to believe it! I went to school for the first time today, and everyone was DIFFERENT! Nobody was beautifully colored anymore, NOBODY! Skeeter! He was blue, I swear it, or at least I swore it until I came home. I checked the photo album of pictures I took since we became friends, and even in those pictures, he ISN'T BLUE! They all are so bland and boring now, with very few colors. Mr. Dink isn't purple, Roger isn't green, and Skeeter isn't BLUE! I can't take it anymore. I miss Porkchop doing more than pooping on the carpet and sleeping, I miss everyone's beautiful colors. I don't know what happened. I don't want to believe this is how things really are. I have spent so long enjoying life as it was that now I feel I really am going crazy. Other people say I am more attentive, and I don't space out as much, but I do not even know what they are talking about! I just want things to return to normal, to the way I know they should be. Please!

  —Doug's Journal Entry, Thursday February 10th, 1994

Fire Emblem:

• The Savior King, the Master Tactician and the Queen of Liberation: While Edelgard claims to be more open-minded than any other aristocrats, as the war wears on, they refuse to acknowledge that they aren't winning the conflict, or that others have justifiable grievances against them. Even after Renata Fraldarius delivers a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how they cling to their self-serving narratives, blinding themselves to the truth, they refuse to even consider fleeing, or that they might not be Fódlan's savior after all.

For Better or for Worse:

• In The New Retcons, Elly Patterson's madness begins when she rejects her youngest daughter, April, denying that she was ever her daughter. This swiftly escalates, as she convinces herself that it's still the eighties (in 2008), that her adult children were still little kids, and that Edgar, their dog, was actually his father Farley. Her husband refuses to seek any professional help, letting her condition worsen until the matter is forced due to her kidnapping a child she'd mistaken for Lawrence.

Harry Potter:

• In Oh God, Not Again!, Sirius chooses to pretend he was in Majorca instead of Azkaban for over a decade. Everyone goes with it. Legally speaking, since he was acquitted of all those murders, the reality he rejects "didn't happen".

Hetalia: Axis Powers:

• In the America Is Still a Colony premise of Grey Skies Universe, Arthur rejects the truth that Alfred willingly rebelled against him. He genuinely believes Alfred was kidnapped, and when he shows a negative reaction to George Washington's execution, Arthur thinks it is because Alfred is afraid of his "captor" and not because one of his Founding Fathers and Parental Substitute is being hanged.
  Francis: (on Arthur) As uncouth as he can be, his heart is quite tendered beneath its shields. He becomes easily lost in his passions. They blind him to what is real and, when that reality asserts itself, he will fight to return to his happy dreams.

Love Hina:

• Entering The Love Hina World: Naru is so thoroughly convinced that All Men Are Perverts and always deserve her Unprovoked Pervert Paybacks that she insists that Anthony and Faye are somehow "brainwashing" anyone who thinks otherwise.
• In For His Own Sake, Mutsumi refuses to accept that Keitaro broke up with Naru because their relationship was too toxic, and is dead set on getting them back together. She even believes that Keitaro will thank her for this, despite him repeatedly telling her to back off, stop meddling in his life, and leave him alone. Even Naru agrees that they shouldn't get back together, though naturally she blames Keitaro for everything, and is willing to play along with Mutsumi's delusions for another chance to beat the crap out of him.

Marvel Cinematic Universe:

• Open For All: Flash and Mr. Harrington continue to disbelieve Peter has an internship at Stark Industries despite all the evidence presented to them during the tour of Stark Tower. It took Harley Keener threatening them for reality to set in.
• Peter Parker's Field Trip (Of course it's to Stark Industries): Mr. Harrison and the Principal refuse to accept any evidence that Peter is telling the truth about interning with Tony Stark. Even when his aunt affirms it, they continue to treat him as though he's lying about it, accusing him of forging Stark's signature. It takes Tony Stark visiting the principal's office and telling him off personally for it to sink in.

Miraculous Ladybug:

• Chloé's Lament: Chloé utterly rejects the idea that the reason everybody dislikes her is because she's a Spoiled Brat who abuses her status as the Mayor's Daughter to dodge the consequences of her actions, who completely lacks empathy or concern for anyone aside from herself. She also rejects the idea that Marinette isn't secretly just as bad as her, and makes this literal by using a reality warping Wish to swap places with her, convinced that this will make her the new Ladybug and ensure that everybody loves her while Marinette becomes just as hated and despised as she was.
• Played for Laughs in How to Catch a Ladybug, where Lila, upon discovering that Marinette is Ladybug, convinces herself she's an evil liar with an impressive facade of niceness that comes from a broken house with incredibly strict parents and desperately tries to fit the mounting evidence of the contrary in her view just as she's starting to be drawn in by Marinette's genuine niceness.
• I See What You Do Behind Closed Doors: Adrien ignores all evidence that Ladybug really isn't interested in any of his unwanted advances as Chat Noir. As far as he's concerned, he's God's gift to women, and she's just Playing Hard to Get.
• Juleka vs. the Forces of the Universe: Alya is so hellbent on 'helping' Marinette hook up with Adrien that she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge anything that doesn't suit her plans. When Luka asks Marinette out in front of her, Adrien, and several of their other friends, Alya frantically texts the rest of the Girl Posse complaining about how Adrien now thinks that Marinette has a date for the dance, and starts conspiring to turn it into an Operation: Jealousy.
• The Karma of Lies: Adrien embodies this several times over:
  • He is completely unable to handle the notion that the world doesn't revolve around his whims. As Laser-Guided Karma burns through his crumbling Karma Houdini Warranty, he continuously reassures himself that he's still going to get everything he wants, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
  • He insists that Lila's deception hasn't really hurt anyone. Oh, sure, she's conning their classmates into donating to her fake causes, but surely his classmates aren't giving away anything they can't afford to give up, right? Even when Marinette tells him point-blank how much she's been hurting, he looks her straight in the eyes, smiles and declares she's strong enough to handle it.
  • He refuses to acknowledge the idea that Marinette doesn't like him, much less that she isn't interested in any kind of romantic relationship. She's just confused, deluded, in denial — just needs to "come to her senses". And once he wins her over, he fully believes that she'll agree to do whatever he wants out of sheer single-minded dedication to making him happy.
• LadyBugOut: No matter how many times Ladybug rejects him, Chat Noir continues insisting that she's either in denial or flat out lying about her lack of interest in him. At one point, he attempts to force a kiss on her, then claims that she only rebuffed him because she knew that she wouldn't be able to hide her "true feelings" during a lip-lock. As opposed to simply not wanting to be kissed against her will.
• Marinette Dupain-Cheng's Spite Playlist: Remix: At Adrien's encouragement, Alya starts investigating Lila's claims, but balks when she uncovers evidence that she hasn't been truthful, not wanting to deal with the potential implications. She proceeds to turn entirely against Marinette and Ladybug, accepting Lila's claims that both were Bitches in Sheep's Clothing all along rather than confront the notion that she was wrong to dismiss their warnings about Lila.
• In Of Patience and Pettiness, Alya falls HARD into this after Lila's true nature is exposed to the whole class. She expects everything to go right back to normal, insisting that she's still besties with Marinette despite publicly disowning her and calling Lila her BFF on the Ladyblog. Despite Marinette telling her off several times, making quite clear that she's moving on with her life, Alya clings to her pretty fiction, to the point that she gets akumatized into Fixateur.
  • Fixateur weaponizes this, being a Reality Warper who makes her victims believe what she wants them to believe. However, this power is limited; when she uses it on Marinette, it doesn't work because Alya is too deluded to understand her former friend's mindset. She's convinced herself that Mari is faking her anger, and still considers her to be her bestie. Thus, her attempt to erase her 'fake anger' fails.
• One step backwards and Three forwards: After betraying Ladybug, murdering Viperion, helping Hawkmoth win, and Wishing on the stolen Miraculous, Alya plunges deep into denial as the consequences of her actions come calling.
  • Faced with Chat Noir seemingly following them into the new timeline, she theorizes that his vengefulness is fueled by Sanity Slippage, with his worst traits being amplified somehow. The notion that he has every reason to want revenge upon those who betrayed him and Ladybug is something she dances around, along with the fact that she personally contributed to reality being rewritten with her Wish.
  • Along similar lines, she applies the same theory to Marinette, attributing her occasional testiness and shortness with her to being jealous of Lila hooking up with Adrien. Despite the fact that Marinette is happily dating Felix (who is actually the original Adrien split into a seperate person), and most of her moments of Sugary Malice come out in response to Alya's attempts to meddle in that relationship.
• Scarlet Lady:
  • The whole AU was kicked off by Fu putting the Ladybug Earrings in Marinette's purse and Chloé stealing them, leading to her becoming the titular 'heroine' instead. Despite knowing how she got the earrings — and how Tikki greeted her as Marinette when she first appeared — Chloé has convinced herself that she was chosen from the start. When Tikki points this out in "Lady WiFi", the series' fifth episode, Chloé blithely ignores her.
  • Along similar lines, she acts completely oblivious to just how much Adrien has been put off by her bullying and clinginess. "Reflekta" illustrates this mental disconnect perfectly, as she sabotages the photoshoot so she can stand next to him... and the resulting picture captures him shoving her away. Yet she still sees it as 'her photo with Adrien' and wants to preserve it at any cost, despite how it immortalizes his anger and frustration with her.
  • During "Guitar Villain", Chloé declares that one of the "Rules of the Bourgeois" is that "All guys have to be crazy about you." To this end, she has convinced herself that both Adrien and Luka are interested in her, despite how both boys openly treat her as an Abhorrent Admirer and are instead competing for Marinette.
    • This delusional belief that all the boys around her must be besotted with her also causes the conflict in the earlier episode "Dark Cupid": when she comes across Kim waiting to meet up with his girlfriend Ondine, she assumes he must have been waiting for her and makes a big scene out of rejecting him, misleading Ondine to believe he actually was trying to date the Spoiled Brat.
  • The greatest example of this comes in "Despair Bear". After ignoring all of Adrien's warnings about her bullying and possessive behavior, she's caught completely off-guard when he breaks off their friendship. She then expects him to reward her for pretending to be nice to their classmates, and when he bluntly informs her that's not happening? Convinces herself that he's "obviously just being dramatic", and that the whole thing is just his way of cruelly "teasing" her and that he'll apologize eventually.
  • This attitude persists in "Malediktator", where she tells her half-sister Zoé that Sabrina (who broke ties with her in "Vanisher") will eventually come back crawling to her. By this time, Sabrina's not only made friends with the rest of the class, she's actually become best friends with Lila.
  • In "Queen Wasp", she believes that revealing her Secret Identity will cause everyone to admire her, when in reality she's despised by most of Paris - with everyone present jeering at her when Nino points out that Chloé was all too willing to leave Paris to Hawkmoth's mercy just because her classmates didn't suck up to her. This is also preceded by her claiming that Alya's thorough exposé on her horrible attitude as Scarlet Lady is defamation.
  • Mme. Caline Bustier also falls into this, having convinced herself that the best way to convince Chloé to care about others is by giving her a free pass for all of her bullying while pressuring her victims to Turn the Other Cheek. She stubbornly insists that they're all "friends" despite all evidence to the contrary, and continues thinking that her students adore her after they collectively realize that her pedestal had been shattered ages ago.
    • Perhaps the best illustration of this comes in "Catalyst", wherein she proposes that the whole class should throw a party celebrating everything Chloé "did for them", blithely ignoring just what Chloé did. Note that this comes after Chloé outed herself as Scarlet Lady, whose true nature as The Millstone had already destroyed the Nominal Heroine's reputation before Chloé effectively stomped the rest of her Broken Pedestal into rubble. Yet Caline outright refuses to acknowledge anything that challenges her belief that everybody should coddle Chloé. Not even Zoé pointing out that Chloé doesn't regret a single thing she did fazes her.
• Villain Of Your Own Story:
  • Alya refuses to believe that Marinette was telling the truth about Lila. Even after learning that her False Friend was Caught on Tape threatening a celebrity's daughter after they saw through her lies, she thinks that it's a case of Adaptational Villainy — that the Wish she made rewrote reality so that Lila was the victim of a Karmic Misfire. Why? Because part of Alya's Wish was that she hoped Marinette would be happier, so she convinces herself that the Wish must have twisted her words.
  • Speaking of which, Alya also refuses to believe that the Wish actually made Marinette happier, as said happiness didn't take the form Alya wanted or expected. Even though she can clearly see that Marinette is much more relaxed, enjoying the company of both of her boyfriends, Alya's upset because neither of them are Adrien.
• Weight Off Your Shoulder:
  • Future!Alix takes Shipper on Deck to whole new levels of toxicity by trying to manipulate the timeline so that Marinette and Adrien end up together... despite the fact that this has spawned a number of Bad Futures. Even when the two do get together, it's doomed to failure due to Adrien being All Take and No Give or otherwise taking Marinette for granted. Yet Future!Alix not only refuses to accept that they might not be compatible, but is hellbent on "fixing HER timeline" after Marinette manages to avert disaster, all while claiming that the future is set in stone and all the horrible tragedies her meddling created HAVE to happen Because Destiny Says So.
  • Adrien can be just as bad about denying reality. When it comes to Chloé, for instance, he outright refuses to accept that the kids who have known her since kindergarten — and been constantly bullied by her for years — know more about the Spoiled Brat than he does.
  • Adrien's inability to accept painful truths is also responsible of causing many of the Bad Futures mentioned above. In one where he and Marinette got married, he blithely ignores how miserable his wife is as she struggles to hold their failing relationship together and keep his company afloat. Even when their divorce is being finalized, he refuses to accept that it's over, begging her to remember that she's his "everyday Ladybug" and is meant to do all this work for him. Then there's all the offshoots where he refuses to accept that his father was Hawk/Shadow Moth all along and pulls a Face–Heel Turn...
• In The Wolves in the Woods, Alya is determined to rekindle her friendship with Marinette... after she torched that bridge beyond repair. Though she refuses to acknowledge that she did so, continuing to insist that they're still best friends even after being banned from the Dupain-Cheng bakery and hit with a restraining order.

My Hero Academia:

• Accidental Successor: Mineta's mother insists that her son couldn't possibly be a pervert, as Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal. When he gets expelled for groping Tsuyu during a villain attack, she rejects all evidence of his guilt, wanting to take the matter to court in order to prove his innocence... even though dragging it into the public eye wouldn't work out well. His father proves to be much more reasonable, quickly signing the paperwork to make their son's expulsion official before his wife can destroy their reputations.
• Throughout Cain, Katsuki uses extensive amounts of Doublethink to convince himself that Izuku is simultaneously a useless, incompetent crybaby and a master manipulator who's out to ruin Katsuki's life. The truth is more that Katsuki is completely obsessed with Izuku, Feeling Oppressed By His Existence and intent upon denying his favorite victim any scrap of joy, happiness or accomplishment. When Toshinori sits him down and systematically deconstructs all his reasoning, pointing out the flaws in his twisted logic, Katsuki concludes that Izuku must be tricking All Might and poisoning his mind against him.
  • Katsuki's inability to see reality for what it is also proves to be a Fatal Flaw, as he's so deeply mired in his delusions that he's outright incapable of understanding how anybody else thinks. This renders him incapable of seeing the downsides of his various schemes... for instance, that Toshinori might not appreciate him attempting to put an end to his training sessions with Izuku by convincing Inko that the hero is actually a creepy stalker.
• Conversations with a Cryptid: Bakugo refuses to acknowledge the idea that Izuku could pose any kind of threat to him, or that he did anything wrong by bullying him. Even after Izuku returns his Quirk, he continues to deny how he bullied him.
• Cursed Blood: In Bakugo's mind, he is the next Number One Pro Hero, while his former friend Izuku is the next supervillain that he is fated to fight, just waiting to show his true colors. In reality, Bakugo is The Sociopath who got sent to a mental institution after he almost murdered Izuku and two fellow students just because Izuku defeated him in a training battle, while Izuku is the victim of a Bad Powers, Good People perception, being actually heroic and self-sacrificing to the point that the only reason he's not dead multiple times is thanks to his Healing Factor.
• Dekugate: The toxic 'fans' that belong to the titular community refuse to believe anything the media reports, dismissing it all as "narratives" constructed by the Hero Commission. This includes refusing to believe that Toshinori and Inko are Happily Married, or that Izuku is actually their child. Due to this mentality, they see nothing wrong with casually discussing horrific concepts and scenarios, even actively rooting for tragedies to befall their 'favorite heroes'.
  • One such fan gets offended when called on over their insulting the late Mary Shield, insisting that they have 'proof' that Mary didn't die of cancer, but that her actress simply went to Arizona after her contract was up.
  • Another fan proposes an "ideal solution" for 'Dekugate' wherein Izuku is killed in battle, with his parents splitting up out of grief, clearing the way for Yagi to eventually hook up with David after "realizing things about himself".
• In Karma in Retrograde, Touya's immediate response to learning that he becomes the serial killer Dabi is to vehemently deny it as a horrible nightmare. He reluctantly accepts it when he hears Shouto tapping "real" in Morse code from behind the one-way glass.
  Touya: I-I don’t... How? What happened to make me...? (shakes his head) No, I don't believe it. This isn't real.
• Mastermind: Rise of Anarchy: Bakugou Katsuki embodies this:
  • Despite the fact that Izuku proved dangerous enough to become an S-class villain in Mastermind: Strategist for Hire, Katsuki insists that he's still just a 'useless Deku'. He also refuses to acknowledge that bullying him was wrong — in fact, he believes that Deku 'forgot his place' when he stopped actively tormenting him.
  • As he descends into violent vigilantism as 'King', he gets personally insulted whenever anyone accuses him of acting villainously, refusing to regard his actions as anything other than good. He's beating up crooks, after all; how could anyone see that as bad?!
  • Eventually, this reaches the point that he's legitimately outraged when he's placed under house arrest after murdering a petty crook... because he thinks that he's being personally insulted. To his mind, he's obviously a bigger threat than Deku, so why aren't they sending him to Tartarus?!
• Mean Rabbit: Izuku refuses to believe that Knuckleduster is Quirkless, as the idea that the vigilante could have been a successful hero despite the Fantastic Racism against people without powers is completely alien to him... despite his own ambitions to go Pro. No matter how many times he's told otherwise, he continues to believe it's all some kind of elaborate lie.
• My False Love Academia: Hina is completely convinced that she's in a polyamorous relationship with Miruko, Nagant and Yaritezawa. Despite how both Miruko and Nagant have explicitly stated that their single night together was a one-time thing, while Yaritezawa has a restraining order against her.
• Toga Himiko's Guide to Time Travel: Himiko refuses to believe that any police or Pro Heroes might be genuinely good people, always looking for potential ulterior motives behind their actions.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:

• In Equestria: A History Revealed, the Lemony Narrator seems to be deadset on proving the Celestia-centered conspiracy surrounding Equestria's history, even when history, multiple sources, and reality clearly state otherwise.
• Loved and Lost:
  • Jewelius is able to make Twilight lose all trust in her friends, brother, and mentor by arguing that they refused to see any truth in her suspicions regarding the false Cadance because they lived in this mindset.
    Jewelius: They don't care about the truth. They want to see the world the way they want it to be. The reality of things frightens them so they'd rather ignore it than accept it. And in the end, it was that kind of backwards thinking that sealed their fates.
  • Ironically, Jewelius himself succumbs to this mindset as he becomes so obsessed with capturing and further tormenting Twilight's loved ones (whom Canterlot's citizens are slowly starting to forgive), that he refuses to believe that the escaped Changelings pose any immediate threat, much to the chagrin of Fancy Pants, Twilight, and Canterlot's citizens who all insist otherwise. He pays the price for this in the end when Queen Chrysalis and her Changelings eat a cornered and helpless Jewelius alive for betraying them.
  • Conversely, the dishonored heroes fully own up to their mistakes that contributed to the Changeling invasion and admit some unpleasant truths about their selfish/foolish behavior during the wedding preparations^note such as not postponing the wedding before taking care of the then-unknown threat and disregarding the safety of Canterlot's citizens. This convinces Twilight to give her loved ones the benefit of the doubt, thus restoring her trust in them and providing the heroes with an opportunity to fully reconcile with each other.
• The Negotiations-verse: Many of the ponies who remained loyal to the princesses or joined the Equestrian Freedom Fighters refuse to accept that Celestia abandoned the other races and left them on a dying planet when she transported Equestria to Earth. In Choice, Rainbow Dash believes that the humans forced Twilight to make such claims in order to break the ponies' faith in their leaders.
• This is part of why the titular Villain Protagonist of The Rise of Darth Vulcan is on his deadly course, along with his Moral Myopia.

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!:

• Catarina Claes MUST DIE! has Henrietta Garland. Like Catarina herself, Henrietta was reincarnated into the world of Fortune Lover. In her former life, she was a heavily bullied high schooler who enjoyed playing the game — especially the gruesome fates that Catarina suffered. Unable to accept that this Catarina is a much nicer person than the one in the original game, Henrietta convinces herself that she must be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who's secretly bullying Maria and Keith. No amount of evidence to the contrary can convince her otherwise, and she grows increasingly obsessed with ensuring Catarina meets a terrible end.
  • Her denial of reality is so severe that when others learn that she was attempting to murder Catarina, she admits it, insisting that she was trying to "protect" Maria and Keith. When they protest and refute her accusations, she dismisses this as the pair being Extreme Doormats and letting Catarina walk all over them.
  • Ultimately, it takes Geordo and Mary showing her Catarina's journal for Henrietta to realize that she was mistaken, as said journal is partially written in Japanese. Realizing that Catarina really was a Nice Girl all along, and that she tried to kill the Academy Saintess for nothing, sends Henrietta into a Villainous BSoD.

The Twilight Saga:

• In If Bella Were Sane, Edward doesn't seem to listen when Bella (who is a Deadpan Snarker in this fic) says she doesn't love him, and no matter how many times she tries to tell him she doesn't, he continues to believe she does.
• Luminosity:
  • Chelsea's power works by inducing this. She doesn't directly force any particular sentiment on you; instead, your own mind comes up with whatever rationalizations it needs to defend the people she's made you loyal to and blame the people she's turned you against. Elspeth describes it as "leaving things out".
  • Demetri refuses to accept that Allirea doesn't love him, no matter what she says.
• Tough Love: When Bella threatens to move out if her father doesn't bow to her whims, Charlie calls her bluff, spelling out to her precisely what that entails and informing her that no, she doesn't get to take it back: he's kicking her out of his house. Bella refuses to believe that he's entirely serious about this, ignoring the time limit he sets for her to pack; he ends up having to throw together a duffel bag for her and shove her out the door, and she's shocked upon realizing that he confiscated her house keys.

Film — Live-Action

• Baron Münchhausen sometimes was used as an embodiment of this trope in a comedy variant. The character invokes the trope in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
  The Baron: Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I am delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever!
• Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny becomes more and more obsessed with finding a quart of strawberries that (apparently) went missing from the ship's pantry as he becomes increasingly more unhinged that when the people who took the strawberries finally had enough of his constant hazing of the ship's crew to force the thief to come forth and confess, Queeg refuses their confession and continues to look for the man who copied the cook's key with a wax mold (among other steps needed to pull off the heist imagined through Insane Troll Logic).
• In The Day of the Jackal, Bastien-Thiery, the leader of the OAS' attempt to assassinate Charles DeGaule of the prologue, firmly believes that he won’t be executed for this. In the book, he literally didn't up until the bullets of the firing squad pierced his torso.
  Bastien-Thiery: [to his lawyer after being told he will be shot at dawn] No Frenchman will raise his rifle against me!
  [Cut to him being shot the next morning]
• Denial: Holocaust denier David Irving rejects any information he doesn't want to hear, and uses copious amounts of Insane Troll Logic to justify his extremely bigoted worldview, all the while denying he's a racist in any way.
• In Downfall (2004), Adolf Hitler spends quite a long time refusing to entertain the idea that the war is lost, despite the fact he's currently hiding in a bunker in Berlin, which is rapidly falling to the Soviet Army on one side and the other Allied powers on the other. He even takes the time to go over the plans he has for rebuilding the city with his architect, Speer. Several other extremely fanatical Nazis also keep believing to the bitter end that a miracle will happen to change the tide. Once the Soviets are basically on the bunker's doorstep and capture is undeniably imminent, a lot of suicides occur, including Hitler's.
• The Dungeonmaster is the Trope Namer. It isn't actually an example though; he was responding to an oddly-worded taunt about serving his enemy "in a future reality"; it's a Shut Up, Hannibal! if anything.
• Five: After the apocalypse, Barnstable's mind snaps and he refuses to acknowledge that almost all of humanity has been wiped out. Instead, he believes that he is on vacation and talks about he will soon have to go back to work at the bank, despite there being no work to go back to.
• Cypher in The Matrix rejects reality outside of the Matrix, and his betrayal was motivated by a desire to go back into the Matrix permanently.
• This happens to Myerson the end of Murder on Flight 502. After murdering three people and being badly burned, Myerson—who had already been described as being on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown—has his mind completely snap and he is happily chatting to Larkin as he is led off the plane in handcuffs about how he will probably receive a commendation for his actions, and that he will reccomend Larkin for one as well.
• John Doe, the serial killer in Se7en. He imposes his own private view of the world by first inflicting gruesome punishments on "sinners", and finally goading Mills into killing him, his own punishment for himself for the "sin" of envy.

Literature

• Nineteen Eighty-Four employs reality-rejection as a sociological tool (it is the trope namer for the Orwellian Retcon). The residents of that world will even reject their own reality if it's no longer in accordance with new updates in doctrine.
  Eurasia had always been at war with Eastasia.
• Atlas Shrugged: Among the book's themes is that the governments and the failed businesses are denying reality (in the form of what amounts to Objectivism: reality is objective, morality is not subjective, and all the capitalist and "man qua man" philosophy attached to it) and should be left to suffer the consequences.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • A group of Dwarves in The Last Battle decided that Aslan wasn't real so they couldn't see that they were in Aslan's Country, thinking they were in a small dark shack. When they were given wonderful food they ate it but thought it tasted like shit, because they expected food scavenged out of a dingy stable to taste like shit.
  • In The Magician's Nephew, there is a similar scene where the titular magician sees Aslan as just a lion that goes around growling at people.
• In Codex Alera, Senator Arnos would be a great commander except for two things: he's willing to sacrifice any number of troops to further his own career and he rejects anything that doesn't fit into how he sees the world. There's a new enemy out there, dangerous enough to completely chew up a Marat and an Aleran force and whose sole motivation is killing everything alive that's not it? Just lies. Marat are barbarians and can't be trusted, you know. The Canim have invented crossbows? Nope, Canim are just beasts who couldn't possibly innovate anything, and the sample crossbow that you have isn't enough evidence. The Canim are building ships in order to get away from Alera? Can't be, since Canim only exist to make Alerans miserable. Allowing them to build ships would just result in sea-going Canim raiders. Pretty much everyone else is aware of this and thinks Arnos a fool for it, but he's in a high enough position that he can't be ignored (and is being backed by Lady Aquitaine, who's using him as a pawn).
• In Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, U.S. President Ted Jason absolutely refuses to face the possibility that the Soviet Union is openly attacking the United States. Invasion of Alaska? Eh, the Soviet paratroopers got lost on a training mission. American soldiers being captured in Panama and sent to POW camps in the Ukraine? A friendly attempt to rescue those soldiers. Soviet ships blockading American fleets from escaping? They're just exercising their right to sea travel. Eventually, during an emergency summit in Moscow, the Soviet premier has to flat out state that the Soviet Union is trying to take over the world, which sends Jason into full Heroic BSoD mode.
• Discworld:
  • Lord Rust in Jingo owns this trope, with his mind refusing to accept various conversations, and on one occasion an entire person. This seems to have some effect on reality as well; he is perhaps the worst general in fiction, but events always conspire to keep him from ever being killed (even though he's only ever lost battles, he's always survived them). Arrows will curve in their paths to miss him and hit the man behind him. He believes that just being an Ankh-Morpork aristocrat makes him unbeatable.
  • Reg Shoe in Night Watch is what happens when you cross a Conspiracy Theorist with The Only Believer and face him with his actual impact on the world. Vimes outright explains to him that absolutely no one on either side cares about who he is or what he does, with Reg's reaction being to continue further into its fantasy. He takes Ankh-Morpork's Full-Circle Revolution particularly hard, to the point where this characterization disappears in (chronologically) later appearances. On the other hand, he's so affronted by the betrayal of everything he believed in that when he's offhandedly killed by the forces of the new tyranny his belief in the revolution is so strong that he literally refuses to be dead, fighting on with superhuman strength for several minutes despite the number of crossbow bolts buried in him before finally falling over, only to shortly afterwards rise as an equally revolutionary zombie. On the Discworld, belief is power.
• Edgedancer (a novella of The Stormlight Archive): Nale is convinced that the Desolation is not coming, despite several people telling him that they saw the tell-tale signs of it. In his reality, those are all either unconnected coincidences or remnants of the previous Desolation - at least until he sees the Voidbringers himself.
• Every Breath You Take: Anna absolutely refuses to consider the possibility that Ivan not only didn't kill her mother, but that he sincerely loved her and they were serious about getting married, even when presented with evidence to contrary. In particular, Ivan and Virginia had discussed Anna's lawyer husband drawing up a pre-nup for them to protect the family's assets and had gone ring shopping together; it's also pointed out to her that she can't prove Ivan stole the money he used to start up his gym (he says Virginia gifted it to him) and therefore he had no motive to kill Virginia (even if Ivan was a Gold Digger, it would make no sense for him to kill Virginia as they weren't yet married). Anna just dismisses this while providing no evidence to back-up her beliefs. Even when she realises Carter could've been involved, the next day she's convinced herself this is nonsense (though this is indicated to be because she's horrified at the thought of her own brother killing their mother).
• Harry Potter:
  • Cornelius Fudge in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is in utter denial about the return of Voldemort - by Order Of the Phoenix, the Ministry of Magic is outright denying the comeback until the battle in the Ministry itself forces the issue. On the other hand, Voldemort is specifically lying low to accommodate this, so...
  • This is taken up to eleven in A Very Potter Musical, with Fudge denying Voldemort's return not only after seeing Voldemort's latest Flootube post but even while Voldemort's standing right in front of him. Killing him. "A heart attack! It's got to be!"
• Discussed in British statesman Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son: "Doctor Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, a very worthy, ingenious, and learned man, has written a book, to prove that there is no such thing as matter, and that nothing exists but in idea: that you and I only fancy ourselves eating, drinking, and sleeping; you at Leipsig, and I at London: that we think we have flesh and blood, legs, arms, etc., but that we are only spirit. His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable; but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that MATTER, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good plight as possible." (letter 52)
• The Lord of the Rings: Sauron slowly drives Denethor past the Despair Event Horizon and into madness by manipulating Denethor's Crystal Ball to only show Mordor's greatest victories, convincing him that Sauron is an unstoppable Invincible Villain and that all attempts to fight him are doomed. This madness soon becomes so pronounced that nothing can dissuade Denethor from believing the end is nigh, even direct evidence to the contrary; when Faramir is comatose from injuries sustained in battle, no force on the planet is able to convince Denethor that Faramir is not actually dead and that burning him in a funeral pyre is a really bad idea.
• Lady Granleigh from Mairelon the Magician constantly ignores others in favor of her version of events, but as she has considerable power most people don't call her out on it. Until the end of the book where she actually manages to ignore the entire summation of the plot and accuse the villain of something that they actually haven't done. The villain is the only one to call her out on it: "I congratulate you. I have never before met anyone with so great a talent for seeing the world as she wishes it to be."
• Michael Bingham/Blood Spider in Marvel's Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover has a bad tendency to try to rework the world through his own perspective. Case in point, he doesn't consider Spider-Man worthy of his power and title, hence he himself is the Spider-Man and the hero of New York is an imposter. Also he makes up claims that his mother neglected him despite the fact she was one of the few people in his life to be genuinely kind to him.
• Zeus, King of the gods from the Percy Jackson and The Heroes of Olympus series has a tendency to do this thanks to his pride much to the annoyance and detriment of the heroes and other gods. In the first, he denies the return of the Titans until presented with impossible to refuse evidence and by then it is too late to do anything to stop them before another war. In the second, he knows the giants are rising, but thinks ignoring the problem will cause it to go away and the gods do not need demigod help. This is despite several of the giants already having risen and knowing from past experience that the giants are impossible to kill without a mortal's help. Once again other gods and heroes have to work behind his back to save the world till he comes around and then he gets in a huff at being embarrassed when proven wrong.
• Poster Girl takes place in large parts in a ghetto were the surviving elite of a pervious regime was locked up by the rebels who overthrew them. Several people in there are in complete denial over their situation holding lavish dinner parties as if they were still the high society... while feeding of low quality canned food and wearing handmedown clothing. On a darker note many of them also refuse to accept their regimes crimes.
• Red Dwarf: Rimmer absolutely refuses to admit he went into a brothel one time. It gets so bad that when in an argument with a copy of himself he screams that it wasn't him, because it's so at odds with his image of himself.
• Sword of Truth: The Bandakar are philosophical skeptics who believe there's no reality as our senses are not reliable. When something goes wrong, they start chanting "Nothing is real" (until Richard easily shows this view is absurd).
• Lady Schrapnell of To Say Nothing of the Dog, has as one of her mantras that "rules are meant to be broken". This includes the laws of time travel and physics. Time lag? No such thing, you're trying to shirk work with a lame excuse. Bring artifacts back from the past? Well, they find a loophole in the end but who cares if it can't be done? Too dangerous to send the black grad student back to do the work? Nonsense, it's only an air raid, how bad can it be?
• In The Witchlands, grief-maddened Merik is absolutely convinced that his sister was the one to kill him, even though there's no proof she was and a mountain of evidence against her involvement - evidence he refuses to acknowledge.
• Worlds of Shadow: One character is convinced the events of the story are a dream, and suffers a mental breakdown as a result since it becomes a full-on psychological delusion. Nothing he experiences nor anyone says will change his mind about this.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock: When Avery Jessup is kidnapped by Kim Jong Il, her own mother refuses to acknowledge that she is being held in North Korea against her will and is just away on business. Avery's mother also refuses to acknowledge her dead husband's passing and according to Jack, everyone in the Jessup family prefers to avoid uncomfortable facts of reality.
• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2, "Real S.H.I.E.L.D." does this a lot. They frequently criticize Coulson's actions and try to brush off any (factual) counterarguments they get. This is done most frequently with his decision to go to an ancient city with alien artifacts. Whenever it's pointed out that was done to deny HYDRA powerful weapons, they always try to twist things so that HYDRA doesn't matter. They also blame Fury's tendency towards secrets as the reason S.H.I.E.L.D. fell, once again smoothly ignoring that that was HYDRA.
• Blackadder: In the second series, the Queen on the colour of elephants.
  Queenie: I think you'll find it was orange, Lord Melchett.
  Melchett: Grey is more usual, ma'am.
  Queenie: (Beat) Who's Queen?
  Melchett: (Fearing execution) As I said, there were these magnificent orange elephants...
• Andrew from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was very prone to twist facts, particularly concerning his time as a supervillain, in order to make a more interesting story, and on some level seemed to believe his outrageous claims, even when they contradicted the outrageous claims he made two minutes earlier.
• Cheers: In her worse moments, Diane Chambers gets like this, refusing to listen to anyone telling her she and Sam don't belong together forever, even when that person is Sam himself. One episode in particular has a marriage counselor telling her, at length, that their relationship is toxic and doomed. Diane keeps going back to "prove" he's wrong, dragging an entirely reluctant Sam with her, even as he exasperatedly tells her he's not testing them, and finally has a spectacular breakdown. ^note And since said counselor is played by John Cleese, the breakdown is spectacular indeed. Even worse, in one other episode Sam gets very much fed up with the train wreck of their sexual tension and fires her. She completely and utterly refuses to acknowledge that she has been fired and keeps arriving to the bar to work and bully Sam until he re-hires her (not that she acknowledges that either). In a later episode Sam mentions that he really didn't wanted to push his luck by trying to call the police on her.
• Chernobyl: Dyatlov, the engineer in charge of the fatal test, is absolutely in denial about what just happened, to the point of denying that there was any graphite debris when he saw some himself (graphite is only used in the core- seeing it elsewhere is bad news), attributing the beam of blue light coming from the destroyed reactor to the Cherenkov Effect (which anyone with nuclear training should know only occurs underwater) and insisting he's fine even as he suffers clear symptoms of radiation poisoning. This being Chernobyl, his stubbornness leads several men to their cruel and unusual deaths, when he sends them to do stuff like cool the core that just exploded and was beyond any help, which exposes them to lethal amounts of radiation.
• In the finale of The Dropout, as she walks the halls of the now deserted Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes talks as if her once-billion dollar company is another failed tech venture undone by bad timing and a timid tech community with bad press from ex-employees with a grudge and speaking like she's taking an extended vacation before starting a new venture. Her lawyer openly asks "is there something wrong with you?" as she points out that Theranos failed because it was a massive fraud that falsified testing results (which put several people at serious health risk), is now bankrupt amid a score of lawsuits and investigations and Elizabeth herself is facing twenty years in prison on federal charges. Elizabeth's response is to hug her dog before excitedly talking about a trip she'll be taking with her new boyfriend as the lawyer realizes she's beyond help.
• Chandler from Friends does this in "The One With the Routine" regarding something under his gym bag.
  Chandler: You don’t… like go into the back of my closet, and look under my gym bag or anything?
  Phoebe and Rachel: No, we never do that! [They turn away and laugh]
  Chandler: Because that’s where Joey gave me some stuff to store that I’ve never seen before in my life! Okay, that did not just happen! [He does a weird clicky motion with his fingers]
• Game of Thrones:
  • Sansa Stark hates the world she lives in. In the real world, the truth is either boring or horrible, so she makes up stories in her mind to survive. This is taking a toll on her sanity.
  • In season 6's "Battle of the Bastards", Ramsey Bolton literally cannot accept the fact he's losing even when the charging armies of the Vale are slaughtering his men. When he retreats to his castle, he stuns his aides by telling the castle holders that "the Stark army is broken." When one man points out his army just got routed, Ramsey scoffs that it doesn't matter as the Starks don't have the manpower or the supplies to mount a siege. At which point, a giant smashes the door to the castle down to let Jon lead a charge. Ramsey then avoids taking a shot with an arrow as he thinks he can still weasel out of beating Jon. Even when Jon is beating the hell out of him, Ramsey just laughs as if thinking he's winning. Unfortunately for him, the reality of his situation doesn't dawn on him until he's locked in a cage with his hounds...the same hounds he consistently starves so they will not discriminate between animal or human flesh.
    • Even when tossed into a cell, Ramsey gloats to Sansa that he'll get out of this and they'll bow to the Bolton banner. At which point, Sansa reminds Ramsey that because he killed all his family, there are no more Boltons. She then introduces Ramsey's dogs who he spent days starving as he intended to feed Jon to them. Ramsey honestly believes his hounds will never turn on their master and is almost bored telling them to sit. It's when they keep coming that it breaks into Ramsey that their hunger is outweighing any "loyalty" and it takes their teeth sinking into him for Ramsey to finally accept he's lost in every way that matters.
  • By Season 7, Cersei Lannister. Oh so much. By this point she may be Queen of the Seven Kingdoms but she has effectively killed the Lannister dynasty and alienated literally everyone else on the continent, and Daenarys' superior forces are pouring in to bring her down. Only by Jaime's martial brilliance do the Lannisters manage to win a few battles, but even he realises they're fighting an unwinnable war. She doesn't listen to him. Later she dismisses the threat posed by the Night King despite seeing a zombie with her own eyes, and seems insistent that she can still win the war; just because she correctly guesses that Daenarys' dragons are killable, she believes that she can destroy both Daenarys' and the Night King's forces just by hiring enough mercenaries, this despite her scorpion ballista failed to critically injure Drogon one bit, let alone kill him, and the Night King possesses means to kill Daenarys' dragons very easily. She pretty much doesn't care if Westeros is ravaged and destroyed by the armies of the dead, as long as she still gets to sit on the throne.
    • In season 8, Cersei is completely unable to accept how Daenerys' forces are taking over King's Landing. She insists "the Iron Fleet will hold them" despite how the fleet is currently burning, the walls have fallen and her sellswords are running for their lives and her own troops surrendering rather than stay and fight the Unsullied. Even when she finally meets her end, Cersei seems to not grasp how her actions have led the entire kingdom to ruin. It's remarkable she even acknowledges the Keep (which she had stated was "the safest part of the city") is literally burning around her.
• Done tragically in Homicide: Life on the Street when Lewis goes into denial over his partner and best friend Crosetti's suicide. Lewis actually starts trying to sabotage Bolander's investigation into Crosetti's death to stop him from posthumously slandering him, having convinced himself that Bolander is trying to posthumously frame him for suicide. He eventually comes to accept it after a toxicology report proves it was a suicide beyond a shadow of a doubt, and he promptly bursts into tears on the spot at the realization.
• In Kamen Rider Gaim, DJ Sagara tells Kota that since power can only be used to destroy, if he wants to protect people, he should reject and destroy the rule of reality that hope can only be won with sacrifice.
• Kamen Rider Zi-O takes this trope to another meaning when Another Decade demonstrated the ability to put his victims and trap them in an endless "Groundhog Day" Loop pocket dimension where they were forced to relive their most regretful moments being replaced to suit their intended outcome (eg; Yukihiro reuniting with his deceased lover, Nishimura winning a past race that he actually lost).
• Midsomer Murders: Twice in "The Noble Art". When Iris Holman caught her openly gay employer, Giles Braithwaite, making out with Sebastian Farquaharson, instead of accepting that Giles could never love her the way she wanted, she became convinced that Sebastian had deceived Giles. When Sebastian begged her not to tell anyone about his sexual orientation by offering her money, Iris accepted it, convincing herself that it was not blackmail since she was not the one asking for it. Of course, since she accepted the money, this attempt at Loophole Abuse is so ineffective that is immediately rejected by Tom, who doesn't arrest her on the spot just because he guessed that she is hiding something else, and the nervousness of knowing that he is aware of her crimes will probably lead her to make the mistake that will allow Barnaby to solve the case.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Gavin Millarrrrrrrrrrrrrr's analysis of Neville Shunt's play which uses railway timetables as metaphors for a murder mystery goes on to say that "reality is illusion and the ambiguity is the only truth." Only the truth can't exist because the ambiguity within the play's context has made no room for it.
• In Mystery Science Theater 3000 the bots spin a complicated yarn about the existence of a Carnival Magic Cinematic Universe, comprised of sequels, spin-offs, and a reboot which to their surprise Jonah seems to believe every word of...at least until they take it even further and invent a phony trailer park based production studio. Leading to this exchange.
  Jonah: Were any of those movies real?
  Tom: Of course not, Jonah!
  Crow: I just watched Carnival Magic and I'm not even sure that was real.
  Jonah: That's a good point...did we even watch a movie just now?
• Much of the time MythBusters is devoted to debunking nutty hypotheses - free energy, Moon landing hoax, and so on. Adam may also have been quoting the old '80s film The Dungeonmaster.
  • Adam Savage recently in a video on his Tested channel stated he got the joke from Ralph Miller, a modelmaker whom Adam worked with before Mythbusters came to be. Adam liked the joke and decided to keep it in mind, originally unaware it was from The Dungeonmaster until after he said it on the show and someone told him about it. That said, he does confirm that the joke originally came from the film.
• Orange Is the New Black:
  • Lorna, mostly due to her mental issues. It's revealed that her "fiancee" Christopher is a guy she went on a single date with and then stalked. At her trial for attempted murder of his real girlfriend, Christopher talks about how Lorna forced him to change jobs and homes twice because of her stalking him and Lorna just laughs to her attorney "he's making it sound worse than it is."
  • When Lorna uses a day out to break into Christopher's home, he confronts her at the prison with Lorna honestly thinking he's going to take her "back." When she whispers to him to keep his voice down, Christopher realizes she's been telling the inmates they're together and openly tells everyone present Lorna is a lunatic.
  • Lorna's son Sterling sadly dies after a brief illness. Lorna, however, refuses to accept it, putting up an Instagram page for him with photos found online of other babies. When Lorna talks as if Sterling is home waiting for her, Vinnie realizes how far gone Lorna is and sadly leaves her.
  • Fig explains much of her bitterness by the fact she was in the audience when Bruce Springsteen was filming his "Dancing in the Dark" video. Fig complains that if Springsteen had chosen her from the audience to dance with rather than Courteney Cox, Fig would have become a successful actress. Fig doesn't hear people trying to explain to her that Cox wasn't chosen at random but specifically cast for the video.
• Played for Laughs on the Saturday Night Live "Bill Swerski's Superfans" skit. The group always believes "da Bears" will emerge victorious no matter what the current state of the team is or who their opponent is. Any time the team loses, they either assume Coach Ditka threw the game for a noble cause or flat out ignore it happened.
  Bob Swerski: So far, da Bears are four and eight. And although they are technically mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, do not count them out.
  • A 2020 sketch called "Sportsmax" imagines a sports network that continues to insist the New York Jets (winless at the time) were somehow undefeated, ignoring all evidence of 13 losses.
• Gul Dukat in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a master at remembering any event in his life in a way that makes him feel better — especially if it involves the occupation, in which he was a benevolent father to a planet of ungrateful Bajorans, and certainly not Cardassian Hitler.
  • Kai Winn Adami is very adept at believing that she is favoured by the Prophets (even though they selected a human, Captain Sisko, as their Emissary) and an excellent leader (despite being shown to be reliant on the efforts of others when it comes to complex issues, and nearly starting a civil war over farm equipment). She also believes she is a deeply religious person, but promptly turns her back on her gods when that stops working for her. She does have a final My God, What Have I Done? moment, which leads directly to Redemption Equals Death.
• The short-lived comedy Sunnyside has disgraced city councilman Garrett often in denial on how his drunken arrest caught on video has ruined what was already a pretty rough political career. The opening scene has him living in his office as he's dead broke due to overspending massively, thinking he could never lose his job. When a woman enters to kick him out, he tells her that "this is all going to blow over" and she's amazed he doesn't get he's been fired.
  Diana: The council voted to remove you. Unanimously.
  Garrett: [scoffing] "Unanimously?" What does that even mean?
• WandaVision: Throughout the show, more and more hints are dropped that Wanda is using her Reality Warper powers to reject her Trauma Conga Line reality and live in a safe sitcom instead.
• A key part of You (2018) is Joe refusing to accept any life except being the nice guy in a rom-com seeking love, ignoring he's really a sociopathic and murderous stalker manipulating everyone.

Music

• Doctor Steel is crazy. And a big believer in visualization and subjective reality. He calls himself a "Doctor of Reality Engineering."
• In Deathspell Omega's The Furnaces of Palingenesia, this is a major part of The Order's philosophy
  We shall make you so impervious to the world that should all the Angels descend upon you and prove you wrong, you would simply shut your eyes and stop your ears, for they would not deserve to be either seen or heard. Our teachings shall shield you from the world and turn you into an island in dead waters with high cliffs and no coves

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes can be quoted thus: "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
• For Better or for Worse: When Luke, Candace's mother's boyfriend, tries to molest Candace, Candace's mother declares that "It never happened," establishing herself with this and crossing the Moral Event Horizon. It may not be done out of malice, but a defense mechanism to avoid the pure horror of considering the alternative. Regardless, Candace cuts ties with her mother and it’s implied that she plans to keep her and Luke away from her and Rudy’s child.

Puppet Shows

• The Muppet Show: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew insists he cannot possibly be under attack from a gorilla as it smashes up the lab around him, then proceeds to strangle Honeydew himself, simply because his Gorilla Detector hasn't gone off. It goes off after the gorilla's knocked him out.

Radio

• Dead Ringers:
  • Theresa May, after stepping down as Prime Minister, spends every day calling the repairman to look at her house's phone lines because she's convinced the Tory part are about to ask her back, but the phone isn't working, no matter how often he tells her it's working fine.
  • After England loses the football world cup again, Alan Shearer and Rio Ferdinand refuse to acknowledge it, much to Gary Lineker's bafflement. They even insist goals aren't even that important to football, really.

Tabletop Games

• Genius: The Transgression:
  • The game has the Unmada, Mad Scientists who believe they alone understand the truth. Unmada are low level Reality Warpers who unknowingly prove themselves right and censor contradictory facts. Then there are the Baramins of Lemuria, whole organisations of Unmada sharing similar delusions based around a key point where mankind went off in the wrong direction, and they're going to fix it. Any way they can...
  • The most triumphant example would have to be the Phenomenologists: The Baramin for people who believe mankind made a fundamental mistake when it acknowledged the existence of hard facts or any philosophy more consistent than personal whim. They casually reinvent their entire worldview to justify whatever they're doing and it is almost impossible to realise when one is lying simply because from their point of view they're always telling the truth.
• Mage: The Ascension:
  • The game featured Marauders, mages who had something strange happen during their Awakening that drove them mad. As a direct result of that, they're more powerful than other mages, as Paradox slides off of them and onto others, meaning they can get away with the most blatant of magic without reality grabbing them by the short hairs. However, they're also locked in their own delusions, and if they get powerful enough, reality rejects them.
    • Some of them also literally had the ability to "substitute their own": they would (in a manner totally unconnected to their actual power level as a mage) unconsciously warp the reality around them to conform to their delusion. So a Marauder who believed himself to be a Nature Hero would walk down the street transforming buildings into gigantic old growth trees and cars into elephants or lions... and then they would all change back as soon as he left the area.
  • To a lesser extent, this is how all Awakened magick works: the mage identifies a fact he doesn't like and imposes his will to alter that fact. Of course, if the fact in question is obvious enough, reality tends to impose back, often painfully.
• The Magic: The Gathering card Deny Reality, which lets you send a card back to your opponent's hand, seemingly because you just refuse to believe that much.
• Played for horror/tragedy with Elena Faithhold, Darklord of Nidalia in Ravenloft. Originally The Paladin to Belenus, a goodly sun god, she allowed herself to become The Fundamentalist and from there The Heretic as she began leading a murderous crusade to forcibly convert everyone to worship of Belenus alone, which is how she got drawn into Ravenloft. Thing is, Elena completely refuses to accept that her crimes are her own fault, or even that she has even committed any crimes; she still ardently believes she's The Paladin and fails to notice how she no longer hears from Belenus or that most of her powers are either missing or mutated — most prominently, her Detect Evil power has been replaced by "Detect Strong Emotion Aimed At Me", but she still believes that she's detecting evil, even though nobody else in the demiplane can use that trait. In at least one edition, every so often, the sheer weight of her crimes causes her to have a mental breakdown, causing her to go galloping through her domain on her horse, weeping over her fallen status. Once the fit is over, however, the denial goes back up again and she's back to being a murderous fundamentalist again.
  • This is actually a trait of all darklords in Ravenloft to some extent or another; any one of them could escape the demiplane of dread if they could admit what they had done wrong that got them trapped there in the first place, but each and every one has a strong case of Never My Fault, so all of them reject reality.
• Vampire: The Requiem: Zagreus the Liar is a 3000-year-old vampire with effortless Glamour, a highly mythologized interpretation of his own history, a bad case of Immortal Immaturity, the unique power to Curse an entire region by dictating things that will happen in its future (if not when or how), and a tendency to lash out when he gets bored. It's a bad combination.
• Thanks to the way their unique brand of Psychic Powers works, Warhammer 40,000's Orks can do this and quite literally substitute their own. For all intents and purposes, their shootas should explode in their hands as soon as they pull the trigger, their Gargants should collapse under their own weight, and their spaceships should be unable to hover a few inches off the ground, let alone blast off into space and travail the perils of the Warp. But if enough Orks believe otherwise, their psychic powers will make it a reality.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: C's Evil Plan on acquiring The Dypheus' Breath hinges on the motivation that he can use it to revive his dead lover and using it would not unleash total destruction on the entire world in spite of his associates warning him that will be the outcome if he goes through with it.
• Batman: Arkham Knight: At the end of the game, Batman is unmasked as Bruce Wayne by Scarecrow on live television. The Riddler refuses to believe it, telling Batman he's far too smart to fall for such a trick. To him, an Upper-Class Twit like Bruce Wayne couldn't have the intelligence of Batman or even the average citizen, thus this is an impossibly large ruse with everyone working together to fool him. The fact that literally everyone else sees it as the truth is taken by him as proof of it being a lie, since he's clearly smarter than them anyway.
• At the end of the first season of Batman: The Telltale Series, if Batman chooses to reveal his identity to the Big Bad Vicki Vale, she cannot accept the truth as she's convinced that Bruce is just as bad as his father, Thomas, and claims that he uses his identity as Batman to prey on the innocent.
• BioShock: While Jack works his way through Hephaestus, Ryan starts losing his grip, vocally insisting his city is going to thrive, despite the fact that nearly all of the populace are dead or completely insane, and all surviving children have been transformed into Little Sisters.
  Andrew Ryan: Rapture is coming back to life. Even now, can't you hear the breath returning to her lungs? The shops reopening, the schools humming with the thoughts of young minds?
• Disgaea:
  • Salvatore in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice believes so strongly in her own authority over everyone (including people she is currently battling), that she frequently gives them completely impossible instructions to follow, and is incapable of understanding that her requests are unreasonable, even in the crazy Disgaea universe. This has interesting results in her DLC scenario in Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness when she meets the Lawful Stupid Barbara, who is so conditioned to follow orders that she actually obeys.
    Salvatore: Master Big Star, you will burrow underground and attack me with 5,000,000°C magma! Aim for my heart! The rest of you, transform into a giant invincible robot and blast the area with a -5000°C blizzard!
  • Disgaea 4: The director of Netherworld Communications insists The Battle Didn't Count. Repeatedly. Despite being the only breathing member remaining. Valvatorez counters by threatening to whoop her ass every time she says that.
  • Disgaea 4 also features Fuka, who refuses to accept that she's died and reincarnated in Hades as an 'unprinny'. Instead, she staunchly insists that her experiences are All Just a Dream, long past the point of any deniability.
• Dragon Age:
  • Teyrn Loghain. No matter how much mounting evidence there is that the well-organized darkspawn incursion really is a Blight, and that his forces cannot combat the darkspawn incursion and the rebelling nobles and patrol the Orlesian border alone, Loghain continues to insist that it's not a true Blight and Ferelden can stand alone, even as half the country is swallowed up by the Blight. At the Landsmeet, he changes to admitting that it is a Blight, but claims that they don't need the Grey Wardens to defeat it. It takes being forced into becoming a Gray Warden for him to truly accept that the Blight is a real threat. He's also somehow convinced that Orlais is behind everything.
  • The Qunari are masters of willful ignorance whenever they have to deal with people who don't fit perfectly into the Qun. For example, it's established that only men can be soldiers. The fact that some of those soldiers happen to lack certain male attributes (as in, all of them) is irrelevant. They're soldiers, so they can't be women. Alternatively, they'll be shunted into one of the many combat roles that are not, strictly and technically, "soldiers" (it's a caste thing). Same goes for mages. Under the Qun, mages are dangerous things ("saarebas" literally means dangerous thing) that must be chained and leashed at all times. Anyone who earns the Qunari's respect that is able to use magic is not considered a mage. They are considered non-mages who just happen to be able to launch fireballs from their hands.
  • The Iron Bull of Dragon Age: Inquisition shows this off in greater detail. He considers all warriors men, as long as they're suited up. Thus his Lieutenant Krem, a transgender man, always qualifies as male in his eyes while Bull only classes Cassandra, a cisgender woman, as male when she wears armor. This is because the Qunari can accept transgender individuals as long as that individual still conforms to gender roles. Similarly, while he's terrified of spirits and demons Cole is okay because "you may be a weird squirrely kid, but you're my weird squirrely kid."
  • Sera of Dragon Age: Inquisition takes this to an even more baffling degree than many Qunari. She fights for the "common people" however she strictly defines "common people" as "non-noble, non-mage humans or surface dwarves." The Dalish? They weird common humans out so they must deserve what they get. City elves? Deserve what they get for being too "elfy". Mages? Their power scares other people so they deserve to be locked up in the Circle system. Any amount of oppression faced by any group she does not like is that group's own fault and any part of the world that does not fit her worldview is "stupid". She will use any number of fallacies to argue her points and does not like being disagreed with, even if it's to offer a third option to a seemingly black and white question. She gets a little better in the epilogue DLC Trespasser and undergoes a bit of character development there.
• Captain Cook in Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest is deathly afraid of ghosts and her character arc involves investigating a way to overcome that fear. She does so by coming to the conclusion that ghosts do not actually exist and, therefore, that isn't what she's fighting against despite the fact the player's party faces off against numerous ghost units and one of the playable characters is a ghost herself.
• Fallout 4's DLC has Dara Hubble, leader of the Hubologists, who has brought her followers to the Nuka-World amusement park in search of a spaceship that will take her and her followers to the alien paradise that is the center of their religion. The player character, being considerably smarter than her, can point out that the "spaceship" she's so fixated on is nothing more than a decommissioned Gravitron ride. Dara promptly claims that the player's mind is too "limited by Neurodynes" to see the truth available to her, with her "expanded mental powers". This can come back to bite her; if the player fully charges up the ride, its broken controls means it proceeds to whip her and the rest of her followers around so hard that they are all torn apart by the centrifugal forces.
• In the climax of Halo 2, Tartarus is told in no uncertain terms that the Halo rings are weapons of mass destruction designed to wipe out all life in the galaxy, not religious artifacts as the Covenant religion claims. He refuses to accept it and activates the ring. This is actually exactly why the Prophet of Truth had the Brutes replace the Elites in the Covenant's Fantastic Caste System, the Elites' intelligence and honor would allow them to recognize the truth (evidenced by the fact that the Arbiter does accept it), whereas the Brutes were blindly obedient.
• Insanity: Shigeki spends nearly the whole game insisting he can create a potion to revive the dead. He even thinks he can revive his wife and daughter, who were cremated, and is convinced Kyouko is his daughter despite her plainly stating she's not. Deep down, he knows it isn't possible, but he clings to his delusion because he can't bear to face the reality of what he's done.
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2: Venom is adamant that both Miles and Mary Jane are toxic influences on Peter and absolutely refuses to believe they're anything more than a toxic influence. He's completely blind to the fact that he is the biggest toxic influence, snarling at Miles whenever he brings up how bad the symbiote was for Peter that he made Peter better, and that no one would miss Miles if he were to disappear.
• In OMORI, this turns out to be the basis for the entire plot. Sunny, unable to handle the guilt of accidentally killing his sister in an argument and covering it up, creates Omori and Headspace to pretend that his sister was still alive and his friends never broke apart. Omori also exists to suppress Something, a being that exists that represents the truth of Mari’s death. In the bad endings, Omori flat out erases Sunny and overwrites him to stop Sunny from ever confronting the truth. In the Golden Ending, Sunny relearns the truth, overcomes an otherwise unbeatable Omori by accepting his sister’s death, and confesses the truth to his friends.
• The true villain of Psychonauts 2, Gristol aka Nick Johnsmith, while not mentally ill like many of the other minds Raz has explored, has built his entire worldview upon delusions of grandeur and a childish sense of entitlement that colors everything he does. He equates his own childhood luxury to Grulovia's prosperity, when really it was a People's Republic of Tyranny that was plagued with unrest from the peasantry, and the ruling class responded by using Lucy as a one-woman attack-squad to silence them. He thinks of Maligula as his country's secret weapon and that the Psychonauts were a meddling foreign power jealous of their greatness, when really she was a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who snapped under the stress his family put her through and that the Psychic Six were recruited by the rebel peasantry to prevent her from destroying the world. He believes his family lived homeless and in squalor, when really his family managed to escape their own country with their lives and fortune virtually unscathed, subsisting on caviar in a five-star luxury hotel. His entire end-goal is to find Maligula and revive her, thinking that she will remain loyal to his family, completely overlooking the fact that his own father tried to kill her when she grew out of control, that she might not be happy to see him and that her destructive power is about as discriminating as a nuclear bomb.
• Halfway into Spec Ops: The Line, protagonist Captain Walker already ignored his orders to simply scout out the situation and instead gotten involved in Dubai's conflict, leading to his team making enemies of the American soldiers stationed there. When he uses white phosphorus mortars to clear out an enemy camp and finds the corpses of dozens of civilians in the aftermath, Walker snaps. He blames everything on the renegade Colonel Konrad and declares that he never had a choice in proceeding, and continues to go forward with his "mission" of making the colonel and the 33rd Infantry pay for what "they" did. It's only at the end of the game, when he sees Konrad's corpse, that Walker is forced to confront the truth.
• The Soldier of Team Fortress 2. In his Excuse Plot backstory, it's mentioned that he was rejected from the U.S. military but went to fight World War II anyway. By himself. And he only stopped killing Germans when he heard that the war was over in 1949.
• Umineko: When They Cry:
  • Maria insists on the existence of witches, especially Beatrice; if her reality is chipped away, she can get frightfully unhinged yet more stubbornly assured.
  • Natsuhi dearly clings to the delusion that Kinzo loved and respected her as a daughter-in-law, with no evidence whatsoever. This is especially apparent once it's made clear that all the moments where Kinzo seems to be praising and encouraging Natsuhi were all in Natsuhi's head, as it's later confirmed that Kinzo has been Dead All Along.
• In the Xenosaga series, this is revealed to be how the Gnosis alien race thinks, and in fact, what makes them literally exist: The rejection of reality as it is.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue:
  • Sarge. Nothing will convince him that he isn't a brilliant mechanic, that the Blue Team is not their diabolical and dastardly enemy, or that Grif could ever make Sergeant - to the point where when they reunite and "Sergeant Grif" is introduced, he asks where the invisible officer with the unfortunate name is. Somehow, he still manages to be a more competent leader than the other Reds and is something of a Genius Ditz when it comes to warfare.
  • To a lesser extent, Caboose also fits this, combining it heavily with Cloudcuckoolander. When Church has to jump inside his head, we see just what sort of "reality" Caboose sees: Church (who can't stand Caboose in reality) is his overprotective best friend, Tucker is even more of an idiot than usual, Caboose himself is smart and erudite, Sarge has a pirate accent, Grif wears yellow, Donut (pink armor!) is a girl, and Sister is Church's yellow-wearing identical twin with a personality identical to the real Church instead of Caboose's made-up Church.
• In RWBY, this is Ironwood's problem; No matter how many times it fails, no matter how often it enables the villains' plans, no matter what anyone tells him, Ironwood always assumes that his extremist ideas are the best way forward, and blames whatever failures occurred on other people.

Web Comics

• 8-Bit Theater. If a character is around long enough they will do this at some point. Highlights include Fighter's belief that he's best friends with Black Mage, and everything involving King Steve or Red Mage. Of course, oftentimes the "crazy" person's version of reality will be right, usually because it's funnier that way.
• Dr. Phage in Awful Hospital sees the titular run-down, grimy, dysfunctional hospital as a bright, cartoony, impeccably functional facility with staff who agree with everything he says. Justified in that Reality Is Out to Lunch in the setting, where a person's reality depends on what they're able and willing to perceive; and unknown Eldritch Abominations are sabotaging the very concepts of sickness and health that make the hospital exist.
• Ensign Sue Must Die: Ensign Sue is totally convinced that she's the protagonist of a suefic, and always acts as if everyone else fits into one. She rejects any evidence that reality does not work that way and that her crewmates are trying to get rid of her by any means necessary. For example, when Spock fires a phaser at her (she survives), she thinks that he was trying to give a demonstration to her and the phaser went off accidentally. When she's Brought Down to Normal in the sequel, she is forcibly dragged back into reality.
• Girl Genius: Othar's spunky assistants and student heroes are people who want absolutely nothing to do with him but who can't get that through Othar's skull. He seems to think they're all just wandering off or goofing around when they try to escape him and merrily catches them and drags them back.
• Goblins: The Maze of Many arc had an alternate universe version of Minmax who was a super-intelligent Psion. He decided that since the universe is so flawed, he would remove himself (and hundreds of other people who don't share his goal) from reality. While this is itself not an example of the trope - he recognizes that reality isn't what he wants it to be - he slips into this a few times on the way to fulfilling his goal. For example, he claims upon killing someone, that he didn't ask the universe to make death possible, it just works that way, so he's done no wrong. He even accuses others of deluding themselves into thinking they have an Omniscient Morality License while having that exact delusion.
• An inversion of the trope: A Loonatic's Tale Issue #4: "Talking To Myself," is about Dr. Qubert giving the main characters a mental health interview; Dr. Qubert's own personal philosophy on the treatment of mental disorders is that if he can see reality the way his patient does, he can understand what makes him see it that way and the best way to fix it. So in a very real sense, he works by temporarily rejecting his own reality so that he can see how his patient needs to change their reality to bring it in line with what's medically considered normal.
• The Order of the Stick's Knight Templar, Miko Miyazaki. Once she gets it into her head that someone is evil, nothing on heaven and earth will change her mind, not even if the gods themselves were to smite her. Literally - she loses her alignment and paladin-hood when she kills her mentor, Lord Shojo, thinking he's a traitor. She dies thinking she did the right thing.
• Slightly Damned: Kazai Suizhan has been so thoroughly indoctrinated by Angel-Supremacist dogma that it ends up turning him against his sister, because 'she continues to delude herself' that angels and demons are not so different. This is best shown when he uses the raid on Saint Curtis as an excuse to treat demons as worthless beasts, ignoring the speed at which Saint Curtis has been re-growing thanks to the efforts of all races.

Web Original

• In Eurogamer's Bloodborne Let's Play, after killing Father Gascoigne with the Saw Cleaver, Johnny Chiodini insists that it was actually the Kirhammer, his favourite weapon, and goes so far as to upgrade it as a reward for its performance.
• In the How Did This Get Made? episode on the movie Sleepwalkers, June Diane Raphael flatly refuses to acknowledge that the eponymous Sleepwalker creatures are a mother and son in the midst of Parental Incest. Co-host Jason Mantzoukas wastes no time needling her about it throughout the episode.
• Unfortunately common on Not Always Right, where way too many customers hear "we don't perform this service", "you're not supposed to do that", and "that is literally impossible given the laws of physics" as "Go ahead with whatever you're doing, and we'll take responsibility when it inevitably fails".
  • Not exclusive to customers. In this story, not only the college students but also the professors keep trying to use the one computer that's supposed to be installing a lengthy-but-vital security update, every one ripping off the "DO NOT TOUCH" sign because they all think it can't possibly apply to them. The tech has to stay after their shift so they can finish the update after the office is closed.
• Filbert from Ruby Quest. He's one of the few who knows anything about what happened to the Metal Glen, but it's all mixed up in his madness. He believes that there is an infection ravaging the facility and that its spread can be stopped by emergency amputation, and at the same time, he remembers that what actually happened was that the Metal Glen's doctors administrated a treatment to their patients that cured all the patient's ailments, including conditions present since birth, and even removed the need to eat or drink. The higher-ups then prescribed it to everyone, and Filbert enthusiastically followed their orders. The treatment turned out to be part of an Eldritch Abomination and its use caused the facility to fall into the state it was in at the beginning of the quest. The only thing he is absolutely certain of is that he is the only one that's clean, and no amount of Body Horror will convince him that he is wrong.
• SF Debris: It's a Running Gag in Chuck's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reviews that Dukat regularly re-imagines his interactions with the DS9 crew to better suit his own delusional self-image.
  Gul Dukat: (After Major Kira throws a glass at his head) "Why Major, I would love to have a drink with you, but duty calls."

Western Animation

• In All Grown Up!, Dil is a Cloudcuckoolander who believes the world is triangular, among other ridiculous things, and won't be persuaded otherwise.
• Amphibia: The Olms are frustratingly good at this. For example they claim that the earthquakes caused by the drill are natural, then accuse Sasha and her team of creating a False Flag Operation when the entire (inactive) drill is dropped into their home.
• In the Season Finale of season 4 of Avengers Assemble, Loki has gained the powers of the Sorcerer Supreme, and has used them to usurp Odin and summon a horrible darkness that infects Yggdrassil. When the Eye of Agamotto shows him that, for all his power, this will destroy him too, he insists it's lying and tears it off, shrieking "EVERYONE IS A LIAR EXCEPT ME!" Despite the fact he is now down to his regular power and facing Thor, a repowered Dr Strange, and Jane Foster with Mjolnir, he continues insisting that he's already won until the All-Dark envelops him.
• Bob's Burgers: Despite all evidence to the contrary (replace evidence with blatant facts), Linda Belcher firmly believes that Bob loves her side of the family just as much as she does. Bob, in truth, has nothing nice to say about her family: while her father is a decent but otherwise oblivious guy with numerous illnesses, her mother is emotionally abusive and controlling with no regard for inconveniencing her daughter while her sister is a neurotic mess of a human that Bob cannot stand. She refuses to hear him say things like he hates them, and willfully is in denial about how he wants nothing to do with them.
• Infinity Train: As season 3 goes on, Grace and Simon are confronted with more and more evidence that they completely misunderstood the nature of the Train (Passenger numbers are supposed to go down not up, One-One is the real conductor rather than a fake, etc.). While Grace begins to change her worldview in response to the revelations, Simon just sinks further and further into denial, to the point he almost looks delusional; as Amelia explains the Train's history to him, he can do nothing but repetitively shout that she's wrong like a child, and begins lashing out at Grace for not agreeing with his perception of the Train.
• Invader Zim. The title character is convinced that he's the greatest Irken Invader ever; completely oblivious to the fact that he's an incompetent, insane dolt who's hated by his entire species. Well, he's right from a certain point of view. If his goal was to take over or destroy the Irken Empire, then he would be considered remarkably competent. He has on his resume: killing two Tallests with a monster he created, wiping out the fleet of Operation Impending Doom I, setting most of Irk ablaze in that same incident, destroying an Irken Boot Camp, defeating Irk's most competent soldier, doing so in a dogfight against a superior spacecraft, hijacking the Irken Armada, and the Tallests' attempts to get rid of him tend to backfire horribly, including resulting in Invader Tenn being captured by Meekrobians, Irk's most dangerous enemy.
• This seems to be Peep's attitude toward Heloise on Jimmy Two-Shoes. No matter how angrily or violently she rejects his advances, Peep is convinced she's just teasing, and that Heloise will love him too. Not helping is the fact that Heloise did date him, but only to make Jimmy jealous.
• Thanks to Selective Obliviousness, Helga on The Oblongs believes she's thin and beautiful, has hundreds and hundreds of boyfriends, and she is one of the popular kids.
• The Owl House: Emperor Belos has had literal centuries to see that the Witches and Demons of the Isles aren't the inherently evil monsters he thinks they are, but denies it to further his childish delusions of being a heroic witch hunter "saving humanity from evil", even though there's no real way for the people of the Isles to cross over between worlds these days without his portal. In "Hollow Mind", the initial fake memory portraits shown are all a Self-Serving Memory, and says that "can't reason with crazy" when Luz calls him evil before immediately trying to kill her without realizing how malicious trying to kill a child who can't defend herself without remorse is, something similar happening when Luz calls him out for being a hypocrite in "King's Tide".
• The Simpsons has a minor example in one episode, when Nelson is shown treasuring what seems to be a Disneyland photograph of himself with Snow White.
  Detective: You know, she's just an actress.
  Nelson: Shut up! Some of us prefer illusion to despair!
• This is pretty much the embodiment of Cartman's character on South Park.
  • The episode "Fishsticks" has Jimmy and Cartman (mostly Jimmy) come up with a ridiculously popular joke. Over the course of the episode, we keep seeing Cartman's flashbacks of how they came up with it, each more glorifying Cartman than the last. In the end, Cartman has himself so convinced he SOLELY came up with the joke, that he won't admit otherwise, even when threatened with death, and has himself convinced that Jimmy is the delusional one for remembering accurately.
  • Best evidenced when, after getting completely thrashed by Wendy, he decides that the other boys saying they never thought he was cool meant that they were trying to spare his feelings, thus proving he was cool.
• Steven Universe. Ronaldo Fryman, upon hearing his insane conspiracy theories proven false:
  Ronaldo: Don't get hung up on these minor facts! Truth is about more than that! Truth is a feeling in your gut that you know is true! Truth is searching for anything that proves you're right no matter how small, and holding on to that, no matter what.
  Steven: That kinda sounds like the opposite of truth.

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"What? No MythBusters. What the hell is "Dungeonmaster"?"