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Self-Made Lie
- 214 statements
- 41 feature instances
- 10 referencing feature instances
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Everyone loves the inspirational story of the Self-Made Man or Woman whose rise to power and wealth from humble beginnings is through their own efforts. However, that isn't always the case. While some people pretend to have come from a privileged background due to shame over their middle or lower-class roots, there are those of a more privileged background who do the opposite. The Self-Made Lie is when someone who is known for having fought their way to the top and earned their wealth, power, and position in society is shown to have had advantages that were unknown to others. At the most innocent, they simply got lucky, had a leg-up that they kept secret, or advantages they didn't even know about (inherited wealth, favors from friends or family); at the most insidious, their success is due to exploiting others or cheating them out of their deserved credit. This can lead to Stolen Credit Backfire once the self-made liar finds themselves in a position where they can’t lie their way out of a situation. This can also result in a Broken Pedestal and is common in stories about a Liar Revealed. Sometimes, the beneficiary of the lie may actually delude themselves into thinking their accomplishments are due solely to their own efforts. This trope is quite common in stories that deconstruct the myth of pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, showing that wealthy people are often born wealthy (or at least upper-middle-class), and their parents were their earliest investors, or at least provided them with connections. This should not be confused with Self-Made Myth, which is about someone making a mythical reputation about themselves to inspire fear or admiration. The Self-Made Lie is about someone presenting themselves as a person who overcomes a disadvantaged background to rise to the top. It is possible for the two tropes to overlap in some way, though. Compare Mock Millionaire, Miles Gloriosus, Phony Veteran, and Fake Ultimate Hero. See Based on a Great Big Lie for cases where a purportedly real event that brings someone fame and fortune turns out to be fictitious. See also Hard Work Fallacy, which is the belief that anyone successful has worked hard for it. Due to the controversial nature behind whether or not successful people became successful on their own merits or not, there will be No Real Life Examples, Please! |
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Self-Made Lie / int_1a8119af | type |
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Dragon Quest VIII: Angelo's half-brother Marcello claims to be self-made, having worked his way up from an orphan in an abbey to the leader of the world's religion. As you watch his rise to power throughout the game, it becomes clear that he only gets there through exploiting others and having anyone he views as a threat to him disposed of, rather than through any earnest effort of his own. Because of this, he loses all his power and privilege pretty quickly. | |
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Hard Times: Josiah Bounderby claims that his mother abandoned him soon after his birth and that he was completely independent by the age of three. It is later revealed that his parents adored him, and scrimped and sacrificed so that he could receive a good education and a promising apprenticeship. He then rose rapidly through the ranks of society and deserted his doting parents in their old age. | |
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F Troop: The tie-in novel The Great Indian Uprising features a swaggering young general who insists that he gained his rank at a young age purely through merit, despite not even being old enough to be a college graduate and his father being the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One stressful setback later, he quickly admits that his father unilaterally decided to promote him before he was ready for his position. | |
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The Big Lebowski: Jeffrey Lebowski, the titular "Big" Lebowski (and definitely not to be confused with Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski) is a rich old man who boasts of having made his fortune through his own diligence and has no love for slackers like the Dude. In reality, the Big Lebowski married into money, the true wielder of the Lebowski fortune is his daughter Maude, and he tried to exploit the chaos of his Trophy Wife Bunny disappearing and someone claiming they kidnapped her to steal some of the fortune and pin it on the Dude. | |
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Castle (2009): In "Sucker Punch", the team meets a man named Johnny Vong who runs a get-rich-quick scheme and claims to have come from East Asia by boat. When the team tries to question him about the Victim of the Week, they discover he is not in fact a foreigner, but a Californian MIT graduate who got rich through his involvement in a drug smuggling ring. | |
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Sullivan's Travels: While lecturing the well-off Sullivan about how little he knows about the masses, the studio bosses describe working hard in lower-class backgrounds to support their families and get through college, only to admit later that they made up or exaggerated a lot of that stuff. One of them got a million-dollar loan from his uncle to get started in business. | |
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Camp Lazlo: In one episode, Edward wears a sash of fake badges to show himself to be the best Bean Scout in Camp Kidney. For this reason, Commander Hoo-Ha decides to send him to Tomato Camp but when Edward sees a video showing how ruthless Tomato Camp is, he tries to find a way to prevent him from going. He can’t reveal the truth because then Hoo-Ha would send him to Skull Crush camp as punishment. Fortunately, Edward is able to avoid Tomato Camp when he cries at the other Bean Scouts’ farewell gift, because according to Hoo-Ha, Tomato Scouts don’t cry. | |
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Strike Up the Band: The play has a Patter Song homaging the one from H.M.S. Pinafore, in which Horace Fletcher explains how he became "A Typical, Self-Made American" by exploiting family connections. | |
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Big Eyes: The film tells the real-life story of how Walter Keane stole the credit for his wife Margaret's paintings, becoming rich and famous for several years until Margaret finally stepped forward and exposed him as a fraud. | |
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Archie Comics: Played for laughs in an old story about the multi-millionaire Hiram Lodge. He tries to impress Archie Andrews (his daughter's boyfriend) by explaining that he started out impoverished, and got ahead in life with hard work and by depending on his wits. He lists some low-paying jobs which he had in his childhood and teenage years, and the effort he placed on them. Then Veronica (Hiram's daughter) innocently reveals that Hiram became wealthy the old-fashioned way: by courting and marrying a wealthy heiress. The previously intimidated Archie mocks Hiram's story of success. | |
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Being A ΔΙΚ: Tybalt brags about raising himself up from the dregs of society to make something of himself. Leaving aside that this is coming from a college student, it's painfully obvious that everything he has is because of his extremely wealthy adoptive parents. Notably, this is Played for Laughs given that the only person who seems to believe this is Tybalt himself. His sister Sage is far more appreciative of her privileges. | |
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Self-Made Lie / int_53a0bd32 | comment |
The Twilight Zone (1959): "Of Late I Think Of Cliffordsville" centers on a Corrupt Corporate Executive who made his money by preying on the unfortunate, yet fancies himself a Self-Made Man. When he makes a Deal with the Devil to relive his youth, he quickly fails at rebuilding his fortune because he can't come up with any actual ideas he hasn’t stolen. The Devil even lectures him on it, pointing out he failed because he always took and never gave. | |
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DuckTales (2017): Mark Beaks, a newly-crowned billionaire in the tech industry, is a downplayed example. While a genuine tech genius with a few inventions under his belt, he also gets by on trickery and plagiarism: He first becomes a billionaire by staging the theft of his hyped-up new product, Project Ta-Da (which turns out to be him hyping up absolutely nothing) and uses Gyro's plans for the self-driving car, leaked onto the internet, and makes them his own, actually making it less safe because he didn't understand that a certain feature he got rid of was meant to stop it from turning evil. One wonders, then, which accomplishments were his own and which were made up or taken from others to get him to where he is. This is further complicated by the later reveal that Beaks's mother is Emma Glamour, an incredibly rich and influential editor and critic. | |
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DuckTales (2017) | hasFeature |
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Persona 5: Famed artist Ichiryusai Madarame is renowned for his expertise in Japanese art. While he was a genuinely talented artist early in his career, a bout of artist's block caused him to gather his pupils' works and pass them off as his own, leading to a years-long plagiarism scam that saw said pupils either exit the art world on a bitter note or more tragically end their lives due to a lack of recognition. Even his purportedly humble living standards are a sham as well, as he forced his pupils to live in a rundown shack while he lived in a mansion under his mistress' name. | |
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Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent: "Minnow and the Shark" features two examples as the main culprits. One is Nadia Betts, the CEO of BestBetts, a grocery store chain. Despite having inherited the company from her grandfather, Nadia insists she earned her position through merit, but one of her employees states that the company is making money in spite of her. The other is Douglas Hill, founder of Hill Breads who started out as just a humble baker before becoming the owner of the largest commercial bakery in Canada and is much closer to being an underdog who rose to the top than Nadia. However, the detectives' investigation reveals that Nadia and Douglas are engaged in a price-fixing scheme — when one increases the prices of their goods, the other gains market share. Zoe Vaughn, the Victim of the Week, discovered this and was trying to expose both of them, hence why they had her killed. | |
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McHale's Navy: In "Birth of a Salesman," Lieutenant Whitworth is a peacetime insurance executive who brags about how he went from office boy to a major executive in a matter of months. It turns out this is because his father was the boss, something he quickly admits as the punch line to a joke. | |
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Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Scrooge McDuck is typically depicted as a Self-Made Man who started with nothing and earned his wealth in the Klondike Gold Rush. He often claims that he got wealthy by being “smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies, and [he] made it square!� (meaning fairly). However, some stories about his past have depicted him in a shadier light, earning part of his wealth as a con artist, a smuggler, a robber baron, etc. As early as Back to the Klondike (1953), Scrooge revealed that he never paid the taxes required for his original gold mine, and several Italian stories featured a number of Scrooge's ex-partners, who he cheated out of their share of the wealth. | |
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The second season's opening trilogy of episodes features the character Li Nalas, whom the Bajoran people view as a war hero who killed a notorious Cardassian officer after a long struggle. The real story is that Nalas had a lucky shot and the corpse happened to fall on him. Nalas didn't even know who the Cardassian was until afterwards. Despite this, he became a legend, and many victories were attributed to him. Eventually he had to run away to exile to get away from the hassles of his fame. | |
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Rebuild World: To an outside viewer, Akira is a gifted prodigy who clawed his way up from being a slum rat to a hunter making massive amounts of cash. In truth, Akira is extremely reliant on Alpha in most situations and knows he's indebted to her for helping him survive one crisis after the other. While he does try to make it on his own merits, his bad luck frequently lands him in situations he can't handle on his own. | |
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The Flash (2014): "Mixed Signals" features a trio of programmers whose claim to fame is an app they created and sold to a tech company, earning them billions. It turns out they stole the idea from their colleague Ramsay Deacon, whom they omitted from their history. When Deacon gets his Technopathy powers, he kills one of the programmers and spends the episode hunting down the other two. The Flash eventually saves both, but not before Deacon forces one of them to admit on live camera that he and his colleagues stole the app. | |
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The Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort presents himself as proof that hard work and ambition can get you the American Dream. However, he leaves out the part about being a white-collar criminal whose accomplishments are almost entirely through illegal means. | |
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Hogan's Heroes: Colonel Klink is an Impoverished Patrician who had an undistinguished peacetime career but now enjoys a level of renown (although not necessarily respect) among his peers for being the commandant of the only POW camp in Germany that has never had a prisoner escape from it. However, unknownst to Klink and his superiors, this is because he has a camp full of Play Along Prisoners who help him maintain his record because they can exploit his incompetent leadership for their spy work. | |
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Glass Onion: All of the Disruptors are guilty of this to some degree, each one claiming to have become filthy rich in their respective fields through their own talent and acumen. In reality, all of them were riding off the coattails of Miles Bron and relying on his wealth to jumpstart their pursuits. While Lionel and Claire seem to have competently maintained their careers, Duke and Birdie have been steadily declining and have stumbled from one controversy to another, and it's clear all of them have become codependent on Miles' wealth to keep going, all while he shamelessly exploits them for his own ventures. Even Miles himself is later revealed to be lying about his self-made background, as Alpha — the tech company that made him a billionaire — wasn't even his idea; he just stole the credit for it. | |
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Behind the Bastards: Virtually any episode about a so-called self-made billionaire will reveal that they were born into wealth and privilege, or sometimes just luck. | |
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Behind the Bastards (Podcast) | hasFeature |
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Gilderoy Lockhart is a wizard celebrity who has written numerous books about his adventures defeating trolls, hags, werewolves, yetis, and such. All of his accomplishments were done by other wizards, whose memories of the events he erased while he took credit for their deeds. | |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The fifth of the Seven Stars Assassins is Abidos the Third, a boy pharaoh who never lost a duel in the past. When he faces off against Judai, it becomes clear that Abidos is a mediocre duelist who only won because his opponents pretended to lose out of fear of retribution. | |
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Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The fifth of the Seven Stars Assassins is Abidos the Third, a boy pharaoh who never lost a duel in the past. When he faces off against Judai, it becomes clear that Abidos is a mediocre duelist who only won because his opponents pretended to lose out of fear of retribution. Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s: Jack Atlas started as a street kid from the impoverished city of Satellite. After escaping with a monster card and D-Wheel, both stolen from his friend Yusei Fudo, Jack became a champion in Turbo Dueling. However, it is later revealed that Goodwin and Jeager paid strong duelists to lose against Jack on purpose when Jack's career began. That said, Jack is still a skilled enough duelist to earn some legitimate victories throughout the series. |
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Out of the Dark: Affie is quite proud of how her adoptive mother Scover built the Byen Guild of shippers out of a bunch of old ships and into a big conglomerate, until she learns that Scover did so by relying on/exploiting indentured workers. | |
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Skinny Dip: Red Hammernut likes to talk as if he's a hardworking hammer who has to put up with unfair government regulations, but he inherited millions of dollars from his daughter to first buy his sugar cane empire and has clearly never spent a day of his life working in the fields. | |
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H.M.S. Pinafore: The lyrics of "When I was a lad," have Sir Joseph Porter, KCB telling the tale of how he social-climbed his way into commanding the Royal Navy, constantly emphasizing how this goal was attained by his diligent work... which involved no nautical experience whatsoever. | |
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John Putnam Thatcher: In Something in the Air, Mitch Scovil loves to talk about how he was a humble young business consultant before a bold business idea and a lucky lottery ticket propelled him to the head of a major airline. While all of that's true, he tends to unconsciously downplay how much work his business partners put into it, and how much more practical their ideas tend to be than his. One of those partners, Clay, is a straighter example of the trope, as he got his start-up money by smuggling drugs rather than raiding his savings account like he implied. | |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s: Jack Atlas started as a street kid from the impoverished city of Satellite. After escaping with a monster card and D-Wheel, both stolen from his friend Yusei Fudo, Jack became a champion in Turbo Dueling. However, it is later revealed that Goodwin and Jeager paid strong duelists to lose against Jack on purpose when Jack's career began. That said, Jack is still a skilled enough duelist to earn some legitimate victories throughout the series. | |
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Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman: Jason Mayzik's dead father is remembered as a former junkman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the richest men in Metropolis. In truth, the elder Mayzik made his fortune by reading Tempus's journal and making investments based on the information on Earth history contained within it. | |
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Shark Tale: The catalyst of the plot is Oscar taking credit for killing a shark (who was actually killed by an anchor while trying to eat Oscar) and being dubbed "The Shark Slayer" by the rest of the city, who shower him in praise and money. Oscar's Character Development is him realizing that lying just to boost his self-image (and endangering the ones he loves when the rest of the sharks come for revenge) isn't worth it in the long run. | |
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Dortmunder: Harry Hochman considers himself a self-made man due to building a hotel empire with just the few million dollars he inherited. | |
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Teen Power Inc.: The Case of Crazy Claude has Oscar Seely, client of Nick's father and struggling inventor whose brilliant inventions have him on the verge of becoming a tycoon before he's thirty. The kids learn that all of those inventions were stolen from one of Oscar's rivals. | |
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Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: Colonel McKinsey unintentionally does this to himself. He leads the Spare Squadron penal unit from a prison disguised as an airbase and hoards all of their accomplishments for himself in the hopes that he’ll be transferred over to a desk job far away from the frontlines. Instead, Osea High Command sends him directly to the frontlines, because they find him to be the right man to lead against Erusea thanks to his "accomplishments". | |
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black•ish: "justakidfromcompton" offers a rare example of the beneficiary of the lie being unaware of the lie themselves. Dre's cousin Kyra gets into a private school on a scholarship. Dre is proud until he reads an article on Kyra's accomplishments which focuses on her "hood roots" rather than her academic accomplishments. Dre is especially offended because the article paints him as a kid from Compton who got a "free handout" rather than someone who made it big solely through his own efforts. When Dre decides to forfeit Kyra's scholarship and pay for her education himself out of pride, his mother Ruby reveals that his private school education was paid for by the owner of the apartment building they lived and she kept this from him because she never wanted him to feel like he was less than anyone else. | |
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Dumb Money: When the main cast is Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee at the end of the film, Gabe Plotkin, the CEO of Melvin Capital, is coached by his assistants to present himself as a self-made man: for example, leaving out the part that his "middle-class" father was a grocery store chain executive who paid for him to go to Northwestern. This is contrasted directly with main protagonist Keith Gill, the personal finance YouTube streamer who accidentally started the run on GameStop stock, whose parents are a trucker and a nurse, and who was the first in his family to go to college. | |
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Succession: Logan Roy is a downplayed example. He is very attracted to the myth of himself as a self-made man who dragged himself up from abject poverty to become a multi-billionaire. The Roy kids are surprised when they visit his hometown and discover that his childhood home is modest but far from the shack he'd described. However, in comparison to the patrician Pierces, Logan is still very much self-made. | |
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Cold Case: Downplayed in "Beautiful Little Fool," where the late Felix Spyczyk was indeed a former servant who built a shipping empire from the proceeds of a clock he sold, like his family proudly states in the present. Still, the clock was stolen property (and the murder weapon used to bludgeon its rightful owner) rather than a severance package from his employer as he claimed. | |
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.
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Cynicism Tropes | |
Big Eyes / int_ed874942 | type |
Self-Made Lie | |
Truth and Lies | processingUnknown |
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Behind the Bastards (Podcast) / int_ed874942 | type |
Self-Made Lie | |
black•ish | processingUnknown |
Self-Made Lie | |
Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent / int_ed874942 | type |
Self-Made Lie | |
H.M.S. Pinafore (Theatre) | processingUnknown |
Self-Made Lie | |
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (Video Game) / int_ed874942 | type |
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Camp Lazlo / int_ed874942 | type |
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Shark Tale / int_ed874942 | type |
Self-Made Lie |
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