Basic Trope: Someone claims a person exists when that person doesn't.
- Straight: Alice covers up her involvement in an accident by claiming to have a friend named Bob who was actually responsible. Bob doesn't actually exist.
- Exaggerated: Alice covers up her involvement in an accident by claiming that her nonexistent friend Bob was repsonsible, then goes on to pin the blame for other aspects on twenty more people who don't exist.
- Downplayed: Alice covers up her involvement in an accident by pinning the blame on her friend Bob. Bob exists, but Alice describes him with fictitious characteristics to the point where he might as well be a different person.
- Justified:
- Alice didn't want the blame to fall on a real person.
- Alice genuinely believes that Bob exists.
- Inverted: Alice pretends that her friend Bob doesn't exist when he does.
- Subverted: Alice talks about her friend Bob, but the others don't believe he exists. Then he walks into the room.
- Double Subverted: After the others leave, "Bob" is revealed to be an actor Alice hired.
- Parodied: Alice says that Bob's last name is Izzentreel. ("Isn't real")
- Zig-Zagged: Every time it looks like Bob doesn't exist, proof comes along that he does. Then it seems like that proof was just a coincidence only for something else to prove Bob exists. By the time the work is over, Bob's existence is still ambiguous.
- Averted: Alice never mentions someone who doesn't exist.
- Enforced: The actor hired to play Bob drops out of the production too late to hire a replacement, so the producers take the information created for him and have Alice's actress talk about him like he supposedly exists.
- Lampshaded: "Actually, my friend Bob came by and he did it." "You never mentioned this Bob before. Are you sure he's not just someone you've made up?"
- Invoked: After Alice causes the accident, Charlie asks her if someone unaccounted for was responsible. She immediately claims it was a friend of hers named Bob who she's just made up.
- Exploited: Charlie realizes that Bob doesn't exist and starts pinning the blame for his own misdeeds on him as well.
- Defied: When Charlie asks Alice about the accident, she starts to pin the blame on the nonexistent Bob only for Charlie to tell Alice that he knows no one else was present.
- Discussed: "Alice keeps mentioning this Bob guy, but I've never met him or seen any of these things he's supposedly done. I'm starting to wonder if he actually exists."
- Conversed: "Making up a character is a complicated process. The logical extreme to creating a character would be to make up a person in your real life."
- Deconstructed: After Alice pins the blame for the accident on a nonexistant friend of hers named Bob, Charlie starts to look into finding Bob to discipline him for the accident. After multiple attempts to find him without success, Charlie starts to lose his mind. When Alice finally confesses that Bob isn't real, Charlie is really angry at her and gives her a harsher punishment than normal as a result.
- Reconstructed: Alice decides to be more careful when creating a fictional person to blame things on, thinking about how to keep the evidence of their (non-)existence away from Charlie and others like him. With enough practice, she has more than enough fleshed out people who don't exist.
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