Basic Trope: A character who habitually lies is not believed when he tells the truth.
- Straight: Deceitful Danny raises false alarms about thieves in his home. When thieves finally do break in, no one will come help.
- Exaggerated:
- Everyone in town believes that Deceitful Danny is lying, even when the thieves are breaking into his house right in front of them.
- Deceitful Danny lied once about the flavor of a pie (it was cherry, he said apple) and now no one in town believes a word he says.
- Downplayed: The authorities are skeptical about Danny's claims because of his history, but they do send help. However, they send only one or two people when Danny's story indicates a larger response might be justified.
- Justified:
- Danny is in frail health and suffering from the advanced stages of dementia. His alarms warrant one or two investigations but are ignored afterwards.
- Frankly, it would be difficult to trust a person who is known to have lied constantly in the past, so it would make sense that one would refuse to believe Deceitful Danny even when he tells the truth.
- Inverted:
- Truthful Tom tells a blatant lie and gets away with it because he has never been known to say anything untrue.
- Truthful Tom sees thieves threatening other people's homes and alerts the others, but the "thieves" turn out to be his friends trying to prank people with no intention of harm or stealing. When the real thieves show up however, Tom thinks they're just his prankster friends again and does absolutely nothing to stop them.
- Deceitful Danny kept bragging that his house is completely burglar-proof, so when he's robbed, everyone thinks it's a case of insurance fraud.
- Subverted:
- Danny calls and worries no one will come, but then some of his neighbors decide to help.
- Danny only calls when the thieves really are coming. Since he never pranked anyone in the first place, they have no reason to disbelieve him and they all come running.
- Danny is infamous for lying about his house being robbed several times. After his house gets robbed for real, it turns out he was telling the truth every single time and the robbers just left before his neighbors could see it.
- Double Subverted: ...help the robbers, that is.
- Parodied: Danny lies and tells the truth just often enough that people tend to come running when he's lying and leave him to his fate when he's telling the truth. Danny gives up, goes into the mountains, and becomes a Mad Oracle.
- Zig Zagged: New people keep coming, each of them eventually revealing themselves to be there to rob Danny. When Zeke finally comes to help, Danny shoos him away, not believing his story of being there to help.
- Averted:
- A habitual liar's proclamations are treated with skepticism but are generally given the benefit of the doubt.
- No one lies enough for this to happen.
- No one ever discovers that Danny's lying.
- It doesn't matters how many times Danny lies about having an emergency, his mother is always going to come running the moment he hollers, probably dragging everybody else behind.
- Danny may lie about things like where he got the five dollars to buy that cream pie, but saying he saw a murder does seem too awful to be a lie.
- Enforced: It's a story for children to teach An Aesop about lying.
- Lampshaded: "My house is being robbed!" "Yeah, and there's a wolf eating your sheep too, isn't there?"
- Invoked: Deceitful Danny is a Chess Master who wants to jade the townspeople and prevent them from believing certain pieces of information he doesn't want them to act on.
- Exploited: The robbers targeted Danny because they knew he lied in the past and nobody will believe him now.
- Defied:
- "If I lie about that now, they might not believe me if it really happens".
- The town charter has two standing rules: if anybody says that his house is being robbed the response must always be prompt and with full power, and if anybody is ever caught lying (even if it takes a full investigation) they will be punished to the full extent of the law.
- "Danny, you can lie and prank all you want as long as it's harmless — that you didn't pee in the pool, that the sky is yellow instead of blue, that a dog ate your homework, that kind of stuff. If you ever lie about people robbing your home for a lark, you better hope that it's the best damn prank in the history of mankind, because it's damn sure gonna be the your last."
- Danny has told the occasional lie here and there, but he makes a point of always being truthful when it comes to things like whether or not his flock is being attacked by wolves.
- Discussed: "Better stop lying, Danny. What if something bad does happen?!"
- Conversed: "That character better stop lying, or else something bad will happen."
- Deconstructed:
- The townspeople believe Danny's house is being robbed but they allow it to happen because they think he deserves it and they're sick of him.
- Danny suffers a heavy loss from the robbery, and is unable to receive support from the townsfolk because of his bad reputation.
- Danny's attempts to warn someone else about the robbery go ignored, and they get badly hurt from the incident, leaving Danny wracked with guilt.
- A group of thieves hear about Danny's dishonest reputation and decide he'd be a perfect target.
- Reconstructed:
- The townspeople recognize that statements can be true even if liars are saying them, but they give up on Danny as hopelessly untruthful just as he's starting to mend his ways.
- Danny leads a difficult life following the robbery, but nonetheless pulls through and uses his story to convince others not to make his mistake.
- Danny is a sociopath with a Lack of Empathy for anyone that gets hurt from his lying, so he continues it until he's the one that suffers from his own actions.
- Played For Laughs: Danny comes running into town, banged up, fleeing for his life with a wolf hot on his heels. The villagers STILL don't believe him.
- Played For Drama:
- Danny gets a serious injury as a result of this trope.
- Danny dies as a result of this trope. The townspeople flinch because this goes too much past Laser-Guided Karma for them to feel comfortable.
- Played For Horror: Danny's alarm is about how that Serial Killer who escaped two weeks ago is trying to get into his home. The morning after, people find Danny and his entire family disemboweled, and lament how they didn't came to help him after a gratuitous amount of time puking their guts out... not to mention that that means the serial killer is now roaming the neighborhood, and their chance to get him before he hurt someone is now long gone.
- Implied: Danny lied about his house being robbed several times. He's later seen significantly poorer and more honest, implying he may have learned this lesson offscreen.
This really is a link back to Crying Wolf! Honest!
