He's right there, dude!
"You may believe yourselves rid of your headache now, and maybe you are — but you've only done it by cutting off your own heads."
— Fox Mulder, The X-Files, "The Truth"
Sometimes people just won't believe you.
A common staple of Disney and children's films, where the Kid Hero stumbles upon an evil conspiracy or a criminal ring and their parents and the police refuse to listen, perhaps because they think the kid imagined it. Nothing left to do but save the day yourself.
The trope name comes from the seer Cassandra from Classical Mythology. Apollo granted her the gift of prophecy, but she then stirred his wrath by refusing his advances. (In one version of the story she promised him sex in exchange, but then went back on her word. In another, Apollo was just trying to take advantage.) Apollo couldn't revoke his own gift, so he cursed Cassandra so that her prophecies were always true, but never believed, thus making this Older Than Feudalism (and writers just looove to name precognitive or clairvoyant characters "Cassandra" or some variant thereof). Cassandra then spends the rest of her time, whenever she makes an appearance, warning numerous characters of their doom, none of whom pay her any attention.
Cassandra therefore became a metaphor for someone who vainly tries to warn others of impending disaster but is never believed or simply ignored.
A Cassandra Truth is when a character tries to warn others of some danger, or tell them something incredibly important, but is dismissed out of hand for no good reason due to laziness, prejudice, stubbornness, etc. The reason could also be supernatural, such as the listeners being hypnotized, bewitched, or fooled in some magical manner. In exaggerated Played for Laughs examples, the skeptic may just be extremely stubborn in their doubts, even as legitimate evidence piles up in front of them.
A Cassandra Truth is not a character merely doubting another character, or a character disbelieving another character when there are good reasons to disbelieve them. Nor is it a character simply not immediately believing another character, or an off-hand but true comment being dismissed as a joke. It is also crucial that both the character and the audience know the information is true, while everyone else in-story ignores or dismisses it.
Subtropes are Ignored Expert and The Cassandra, where the character in question is in a position where they really should be believed, due to authority on the subject or a track record of accuracy, but still isn't. Cassandra Did It is when people believe the seer's visions (usually after they come true), but then blame the seer for making it happen. Another subtrope is the Contagious Cassandra Truth, which is when The Cassandra manages to convince one, maybe two other people, including an expert, but the community at large, and the expert's peers, will think that they're delusional liars. See also The Cuckoolander Was Right, The Dissenter Is Always Right, Adults Are Useless, and Police Are Useless. Compare Mistaken for Bluff, for when someone thinks a serious warning or threat is a bluff. Contrast Sarcastic Confession, where the character tells the truth but expects to not be believed. A Cassandra Gambit is when a person or group intentionally releases a piece of information in such a way that people will dismiss it as fiction. See Master of Delusion, when the character has some suspicion about the character who is Clark Kenting but has not figuered it out yet.
Examples Subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Fan Works
- Films — Animation
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Western Animation
Other Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- In "Jake from State Farm", a wife doesn't believe that her husband is talking to a real estate agent, believing him to be having an affair over the phone. Even when all the details are lining up so that it's clear the husband is telling the truth, she still doesn't take the hint.
Wife: "Jake from State Farm," at 3 in the morning?! Who is this?!
Husband: It's Jake... from State Farm.
Wife: What're you wearing, (Air Quotes) "Jake from State Farm?"
Jake: Uh... khakis?
Wife: (nodding) She sounds hideous!
Husband: Well, she's a guy, so...
Asian Animation
- Lamput: At the end of "Orange Street", after Skinny Doc has failed to find Lamput camouflaged in orange things too many times, he points behind Specs Doc to tell him that Lamput is right behind them in plain sight, having just ordered a drink. Specs Doc doesn't believe Skinny Doc the few times he points behind him, threatens to use his ray gun on him the third time, and actually does attempt to shoot him the fourth time.
- King Shakir: In "April Fools", nobody believes Shakir, Necati, and Remzi about the evil suckers planning to prank the neighborhood since they had been pulling April Fools jokes earlier. Sure enough, they don't realize they were 100% not joking until when the suckers go through with their prank.
Comic Books
- Invoked by Neil Gaiman in a 1993 speech at the Diamond Retailers Seminar: "I'm not here to play Cassandra. I do not have the figure and I do not have the legs". In his speech, he predicted that the contemporary speculator boom in comics would result in the market crashing.
- Age of Bronze: The daughter of Priam, Cassandra frequently makes predictions. While some are clear, others are gibberish and only decipherable in hindsight. This tends to get all of her prophecies dismissed -even when she's reminding Priam of a prophecy he believed. The problem is compounded by Priam being insistent on having his own way, to the point of ignoring other, saner prophets.
- Astro City: In the story "The Tarnished Angel", former supervillian Steeljack tries to warn the heroic Honor Guard about the Big Bad's plan to attack the city, but they refuse to believe him. At least at first.
- A Town Called Dragon: Mickey earlier tried to warn everyone about what he discovered to be a terrorist cell up in Devil's Peak, but turns out to be a team of German scientists looking for the dragon egg. When he tried to warn the police about the dragon, he gets disbelieving looks until one of the officers found a huge pile of dragon dung with a severed human hand in it and then seeing the dragon's molted husk.
- Chronos: Tsui Fei-Hong was locked in Arkham Asylum because he insisted he was a time traveller. He was telling the truth
- Daredevil: In the classic issue #181, before Daredevil's Secret Identity became public, even before Kingpin knew who he was, Bullseye figured out that Murdock was Daredevil, and even guessed that the chemical accident had given him his powers. When he tries to tell Kingpin, Fisk dismisses him as insane.
- Deadpool: Deadpool will loudly and repeatedly tell anyone who will listen about how they're all in a comic book, complete with critiques about either the plot or art style, but nobody listens. Granted, it doesn't help that he's genuinely insane otherwise.
- Joker: At one point, Harvey Dent pulls The Joker's new henchman Jonny Frost aside and urges him to quit, saying the Joker is insane and prone to killing the people around him. Frost doesn't believe him, delusionally thinking he is the Joker's friend and partner. Sure enough, at the end of the story, Joker shoots Frost in the face in the middle of a Villainous Breakdown.
- Martian Manhunter/Marvin the Martian Special: From M'arvinn's perspective, he knew the truth about humanity and warned his own kind not to associate with them, but he was ignored. This led to not only humanity destroying the Earth in his home universe, but also killing almost everyone on Mars, leaving M'arvinn as the Last of His Kind.
- Nextwave: The dubiously canon events of the series were eventually explained away as the main antagonists, the Beyond Corporation, abducting the protagonists to a slightly more absurd Alternate Universe for a year — with the added baggage that after they got back, shell-shocked and deeply affected by the Fake Memories and bizarre situations they had to deal with, no one would believe that what they went through actually happened.
- Nova: In volume 5, Carnage, having learned that Sam Alexander is the titular Nova when they briefly teamed up during the AXIS crossover, decides to come after Sam now that his Heel–Face Brainwashing has been undone. He attacks Sam at the entrance to the latter's high school, but when Principal Philbin steps forward to defend Sam, Carnage reveals that Sam is Nova — and Philbin bursts out laughing, because the thought of one of his worst students being a responsible superhero who pals around with the Avengers is too ridiculous for him to take seriously.
- The Red Ten has twisted mass-murdering villain Oxymoron telling long-time nemesis crimefighter Red that her super-team, the Alliance, is made up of monsters with some responsible for crimes even worse than Oxymoron's. This sets Red to find the truth.
- Route 666: The main character is named Cassandra (usually called "Cassie") and suddenly starts seeing a world of ghosts and horrific monsters preying upon humanity. No one else can see this, and so, in her struggles against them, she is also pursued by the police as a psychopathic killer.
- Runaways: The first volume has the superpowered main characters struggling with the fact that no one will believe that their parents are supervillains, resulting in them having to bring them down personally. Conversely, after the Pride are dead, their activities exposed, still few are willing to trust the Runaways, because of who their parents were.
- The Simpsons: In the Treehouse of Horror issue "Sideshow Blob", on seeing the titular villain Lisa tells Bart they have to warn someone. Bart points out that no-one will ever believe them, and sure enough he's right. The only person who believes them is Apu, and then only because Bob is trying to eat him at that very moment. Once Bob is (supposedly) killed, Chief Wiggum also refuses to believe them, despite the massive pile of missing people.
- The Simpsons Futurama Crossover Crisis: Pretending to be a teacher, Fry finally gets a chance to talk to Bart and says "Bart, I'm from the year 3002, trapped in a comic book because evil brains want to destroy the universe, and I need to find my friends, a cyclops, robot, and a talking lobster, or we'll all die!" Naturally, Bart doesn't believe him, but admits it's nice to know he can still drive a teacher crazy. It's only the next day, when Fry shows his Simpsons comic to Bart that the latter believes him.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Extremely minor character Harvey Who was portrayed as this. A member of the Royal Secret Service, he warned King Max Acorn over not trusting certain characters, including the original Robotnik. However, Max ignored those warnings as he had trusted the mystical Source of All for his guidance. Years later, when Max's son Elias had lost the throne, Harvey decided to help him as he realized he was in a better position to be king than his father ever was because he never used the Source.
- Another example is with Sonic himself. Even after hearing that Eggman was planning to use a Wave-Motion Gun that would destroy both the Freedom Fighters' camp and half of the Eggdome in an effort to get rid of him, Sonic brushed off Shadow and Rouge's assertions that Eggman was going crazy until he witnessed Eggman's Villainous Breakdown firsthand.
- Spider-Man:
- In a classic early issue in The Amazing Spider-Man (1963), Spider-Man fights Doctor Octopus, is soundly defeated and unmasked...and no one believes Peter Parker can be Spider-Man. It helps that Peter was suffering from a bad flu and at nowhere near his strength, so folks think this was just him trying to be a hero.
- When he thinks he's lost his powers, Peter confesses the truth to his friends, who don't believe it. It turns out, it was just another flu and Peter brushes off the "confession" as him suffering a high fever.
- Debra Whitman is convinced Peter is Spider-Man, risking her life to prove it. Spider-Man finally comes to her, unmasks...and Debra laughs at how ridiculous this idea was and thanks Peter for putting on that "cheap costume" to shock her out of this.
- When Peter reveals his identity to the world in The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski), Flash Thompson refuses to accept "puny Parker" could be Spider-Man and this is some sort of ruse. He changes his tune when Peter lays him out in a dodgeball game.
- In Spider-Man 2099, Miguel point-blank tells his mother he's Spider-Man, showing the costume and "claws" and she still won't believe it.
- Superman:
- Jor-El in nearly every version of Superman's origin. The classic story is that he tells the Kryptonian High Council (or something like that) that Krypton is doomed and they must evacuate, but nobody believes him, so he's forced to send his infant son to Earth in a small rocket.
- Year of the Comet: Averted in the origin of Superboy-Prime, where the Jor-El of the Prime Universe tells colleagues that Krypton is doomed, and everyone believes him, but bureaucracy gets in the way.
- The Krypton Chronicles: Several millennia before the birth of Superman, Rao's prophet Jaf-El foretold that Kryptonians would have to be ready to leave Krypton eventually because their planet would be destroyed in the distant future. Unfortunately, his warnings would go unheeded.
- In Superman (1939) #62 "Black Magic on Mars!", Orson Welles' transmission about the (real, this time) Martian invasion is dismissed by the public as a joke. Likewise, Clark's after-action report on the incident is thrown in the garbage by Perry White as he thinks he made it all up, despite the fact that Superman could corroborate it if necessary.
- Subverted in The Hunt for Reactron. After stealthily X-Raying Lana Lang, Thara Ak-Var tries to warn Supergirl there is something foul about her surrogate aunt, but Kara dismisses her former friend's words as a nutjob's nonsense (even though Thara clarifies she did not mean Lana was evil or sinful). Later, after they have made up, Kara finally listens to Thara and confronts Lana about her unknown malady.
- In Superman (Volume 2) #2, a computer programmer working for Lex Luthor ran extensive data on both Superman and Clark Kent into the system, in order to find a perceived connection between them. When the computer responds, "Clark Kent Is Superman", Lex promptly fires the programmer, refusing to believe that someone with Superman's powers would be satisfied with a "normal" life.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- Ultimate Galactus Trilogy:
- Played for drama. Xavier agrees that the vision of aliens dying (that he got in a dream, as well as Jean) was not a made-up montage, but thought that it was just a visual metaphor of loneliness and abuse from some new mutant. It turns out that the visions were completely what they appeared to be.
- Nick Fury initially refuses to believe Marh-Vehl's claims he's defected to help save humanity, and nearly shoots him because of it.
- The Ultimates: Thor has a lot of difficulty getting anyone to believe he is the actual Norse god of Thunder. It gets worse when Loki gets involved, but Thor's declarations of You Have to Believe Me! do not help.
- Ultimate Galactus Trilogy:
- X-Force: For many of the first few arcs of Volume 2 of X-Force (2008), X-23 is constantly warning Wolverine that Angel is a liability they can't trust because of his Superpowered Evil Side. However Logan downplays her concerns, and insists Warren is under control. Sure enough, Archangel proves to be an uncontrollable wildcard that derails a couple of their operations. Logan immediately warns her not to even think of saying "I told you so," when she's proven correct.
- The Ultimates (2015): Connor Sims, the Anti-Man, managed to attain a state of hyper-awareness when he gained his powers, and learnt all reality was in a "cage." Unfortunately, his attempts to explain this to people never work, partly because Connor went insane because of what he saw, and also because something is making sure no one hears his explanations. Then, come Civil War II, someone does start listening. It's Thanos.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: In the arcs featuring Rosalyn, Calvin's parents are used to horror stories from Rosalyn when they arrive home. Naturally, the one time Rosalyn says she had an easy time babysitting Calvin, they're skeptical to believe it.
- In Safe Havens, at one point a school photographer snagged a photo of Remora's mermaid transformation, but when he presented it to the school principal she simply denounced it as a manipulated photo, as Samantha had already shown her several manipulated photos in advance. Samantha later apologized to him, telling him she had to do it to protect Remora's secret.
- In a Tempest strip, when Tempest awakes in an interrogation room, he quickly and clearly tells the questioner that Deathfist and his daughter have broken out of prison and are on their way to Times Square to punch a hole in the space-time continuum. When the lie detector says he's telling the complete truth, the interrogator jumps to the conclusion that he's figured out how to fool it.
- Retail: Josh was telling Stuart the truth when he tells Stuart that Val and Cooper were in a relationship, which violated Grumbel's policy, but since Amber overheard him ratting them out, she had time to warn them and they had time to make it look like he was Crying Wolf by having Cooper's friend pose as Val's boyfriend.
- Spider-Man: In one storyline, J. Jonah Jameson interviews Spider-Man (love him or hate him, he sells lots of papers). When he asks where where Spidey got his powers and is told about the radioactive spider bite, he angrily ends the interview, convinced that he's being trolled.
Jokes
- Evoked by a man who cheated on his wife to get away with it.
He goes out to buy cigarettes, but finds the store closed. So he goes to a bar to use a vending machine. While there, he has a few drinks and starts talking to a pretty lady. The next thing he knows, he's at the lady's apartment having quite the pleasurable time, and before he knows it's after 3AM."My wife is going to kill me!" he says, "Quick, give me some talcum powder!"So he rubs the talcum powder all over his hands. When he gets home, his wife is up and she is furious. "Where the hell have you been?!" she yells."Well, to be totally honest, I went to the bar, had some drinks, went home with a blonde, and had sex with her," he says.She grabs his wrists and checks his hands, seeing the white powder. "Damned liar! You were out bowling again!"
Magazines
- MAD kind of summed up how this trope works in their satire of Gremlins (1984):
Billy: Why won't you guys believe me?
Cop: Because the police never believe the hero until it's too late. Haven't you ever seen old '60's sci-fi movies like The Blob?
Music
- This trope is a huge part of the Ayreon legendarium. In The Final Experiment the protagonist, Ayreon, is sent visions from the future about the end of the world and travels to King Arthur's court to warn him. Merlin is jealous, convinces everyone that Ayreon is wrong, and realizes that was a bad idea too late. He predicts that another seer will come: Mr. L in 01011001 has dreams about the end of the world sent to him by cyborg fish aliens; unfortunately, he's in an insane asylum.
- Bear Ghost: Nobody believes the singer of "All at Once" that monsters are real. He's Mistaken for Insane and locked up, making him unable to continue protecting humanity.
- De La Soul: "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa" is about a girl being molested by her father, but the narrator refuses to believe it because her father is a well-respected member of their community. So she decides to take matters into her own hands.
- Emilie Autumn’s Bedlam House chic is heavily based on her belief that psychiatric institutions have not progressed that much with patient care: specifically, she alleges that abuse is rampant but never gets brought up because "[she's] the crazy girl and he's the doctor with a million dollar education."
- Fear Before the March of the Flames have "Taking Cassandra to the End of the World Party," with lyrics referencing someone predicting a catastrophe while being ignored with the chorus, "No one listens to the damned."
- The Lumineers' darkly humorous song "Submarines" tells the story of a town drunk who tries in vain to warn the townspeople about an impending attack.
Myths & Religion
- Classical Mythology:
- Cassandra, as featured in The Iliad, The Odyssey, the lost epics of The Trojan Cycle, The Aeneid, and many others. Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, before they had some sort of falling-out (details vary with different tellings; possibly they were in a romantic relationship and she cheated, Apollo used the gift to court her but was rejected, or she was a priestess of Apollo who broke her vow of celibacy), and since he couldn't take back his gift, he made it useless by cursing her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. She sporadically appears in later stories to inform everyone that whatever they're about to do will lead to disaster, only to be ignored and have the disaster occur anyway. She's eventually taken as a concubine by Agememnon when he returns from Troy and gets killed alongside him by his wife Clytemnestra. Thankfully, outside of her one misstep with Apollo she was considered to be a good and pious person, so she got to go to Elysium.
- Princess Apemosyne was raped by the god Hermes. When she told her brother Althaemenes, he accused her of lying and killed her in anger.
- The Bible:
- Many prophets, like Jeremiah and Elijah, spent much of their lives trying to convince the public in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah that exile was imminent due to the people having strayed from the Ten Commandments, and the monarchy in particular having turned to idolatry. This was often met with hostility, particularly from the monarchy.
- Isaiah 53:1 invokes this: "Who can believe what we have heard?"
Podcasts
- Sick Sad World:
- A teacher went to the police after one of his students said her father was planning to kill her. He was dismissed as stupid.
- In another episode, drug users went to the cops to report a serial killer. They were ignored because they used drugs.
- On the May 22, 2025 episode of his Countdown podcast, Keith Olbermann lampshaded this. Keith's father would travel around the country for pleasure, keeping in touch with his family by telephone. In late 1980 or early '81, Keith's dad told him he'd changed hotels because the one he'd been going to stay in was a "death trap". A gifted architectnote , he had previously predicted the collapse of the Hartford Civic Center stadium
and Keith knew to take him seriously: "You won't believe what they've done here. They've hung a walkway from another walkway on top of another walkway." To do this properly, three points of support were needed and they barely had one. Keith's dad spoke to the hotel's manager and structural engineer, explaining that if one walkway collapsed it would pull down the other two and part of the ceiling along with it and people were going to die. Nobody listened.
My father was Cassandra. My father was the guy who arrived, saying the next person you hear from will be the angel of death.
Radio
- Cabin Pressure: In the final episode, a police officer approaches Arthur, since he's just idling his van outside a bank and has just seen someone run out of it, and to him this looks pretty suspicious. Arthur has absolutely no ability to lie whatsoever, so when asked what he's got in his van replies, utterly truthfully, that he's got a thousand ice lollies and the Princess of Lichtenstein in the back.
- In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a fortune teller insists that inside Jekyll's saintly exterior is a monster. The other characters shrug this off.
- In the BBC radio adaptation of Mary Poppins, in the section adapting Bad Tuesday, Mr. and Mrs. Banks, as you can imagine, don't believe Michael's story about how Mary Poppins took the children around the world and assume he must be lying to them. When Michael tries using a bowl which Mrs. Banks' aunt Caroline gave her to illustrate his narrative and accidentally breaks it, he gets sent to bed as punishment. This forms part of the reason he steals Mary Poppins' Magic Compass, in contrast to the novel, where he plans to run away from home and join a circus using the compass.
Tabletop Games
- Mage: The Awakening features "Proximi", families with a magical heritage, limited magic, and an unbreakable family Curse. Particularly the Primid family, said to be descended from Cassandra with a gift for prophecy, and who originally shared her Curse. They eventually tried to use it to their advantage (deliberately making predictions that they knew people would act against, as a way to manipulate them), so the Curse altered itself accordingly (the point of Proximus Curses being that they are always bad, and change themselves to fit loopholes). Now, the Primid Curse is that they are incapable of accurately conveying their prophecies at all (that is, they will know the future, but will be unable to truthfully tell it to anyone else)
- Warhammer 40,000: Magnus the Red tried to warn the Emperor of his brother Horus's corruption but was ignored. While Magnus was right, he used sorcery to deliver the message, which was not only outlawed but inadvertently allowed daemons to invade the Imperial Palace. By the time the Emperor realized the truth, half of his sons had been corrupted and turned against him. Worst of all Magnus himself was forced to turn to Chaos in order to save his legion, joining the same traitors he tried to warn his father about.
- In the board game They've Invaded Pleasantville, a homage to alien-invasion B-Movies, the townspeople can't react to the alien presence until somebody spots the aliens and spreads the word. Certain people are unable to spread the word, because nobody else in town will believe someone known to be 1) a drunkard or 2) a Democrat.
Theatre
- In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, once Mrs. Lovett's pie shop starts doing business again, the Beggar Woman starts hanging around the shop, trying to warn people that something evil's afoot, pointing out the stench from her chimneys and claiming that Mrs. Lovett is a witch. Naturally, no one believes her because she's a mad beggar woman.
- In Heathers: The Musical, Veronica confesses in a fit of rage that she was responsible for the deaths of Heather, Kurt and Ram after the school points on a patronising and unhelpful anti-suicide rally. When she realises what she's just said, she's horrified... only for everyone to laugh and assume she's just doing it for attention.
- The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya: The Gusli Player sings of impending dark times. Nobody believes him, and when a short while later, the Tatars attack, it's already too late.
- Trope Namer: Within The Oresteia, in the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Cassandra gives a prophecy revealing Clytaemnestra's plan to kill her husband, Agamemnon. Although the chorus does try to listen to Cassandra, they don't understand a thing she says, and eventually ask her to stop talking about such horrible things, because they would never happen.
- Julius Caesar: By the time Caesar learns that he should pay more attention to soothsayers, it's too late.
- Troilus and Cressida features the original Cassandra. In an early scene, she runs onstage and attempts to warn her father and brothers that Troy will be up in flames by the end of the Trojan War. None of them believe her.
Visual Novels
- In the first case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, Phoenix's friend, Doug Swallow, discovers that Dahlia Hawthorne has been stealing some poison from the university. Having been suspecting that she might be the one who has poisoned a defense attorney before, he tries to warn Phoenix about her, but Phoenix doesn't believe in him, insisting that Dahlia truly loves him, and pushes Doug. Dahlia witnesses this and kills him.
- Artificial Nexus: Kieran has picked up that Akemi is a terrible programmer (unbeknownst to him, because Akemi is actually The Mole), but none of his coworkers believe him when he points it out. To be fair, he tries arguing his case in a very blunt and rude manner.
- One of Corpse Party: Blood Covered's Bad Endings has this: Satoshi finds himself sent back to the day they performed the ritual that sent them to Tenjin. Unfortunately, he can't convince anyone not to go along with it, as they all assume he's just too scared and superstitious rather than having good reason to protest. Book of Shadows actually picks up from this ending and deals with the results.
- Danganronpa
- Nobody initially believes Makoto when he says that Sayaka's body was discovered in his bathroom because they'd swapped rooms earlier at Sayaka's own request. Celestia even speculates that this was Sayaka's intent when she proposed the swap; she had planned to murder Leon and proposed the swap to frame Makoto for it, knowing that the students would face a he-said-she-said situation when he tried to explain himself, and nobody would likely believe Makoto over Sayaka. The murder attempt went a bit poorly, but the work she'd done to frame Makoto remained.
- No one listens to Yasuhiro Hagakure when he predicts there will be no more murders halfway through the murder mystery (or any other time, for that matter), but he's right; assuming the Bad Ending doesn't happen, the only deaths from that point on are suicides.
- Kaito isn't believed when he proclaims that neither he nor Maki (who at that point seem to be the only viable suspects) committed the murder on trial based on a hunch, but he is correct; neither of them did. It was Kirumi.
- Nobody listens to Angie's supposed oracles from Atua, but in hindsight 'Atua' is spot-on on all of them: The first killer did escape through the secret passage, the students don't have lives outside the academy, and the flashback lights are dangerous as they implant false memories.
- In Hourglass of Summer the protagonist tries to warn the girls of the future events he's seen from traveling randomly through time against Lee Jane's warnings not to. It fails because nobody believes him and the tragedies happen to them anyway.
- In The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen, the characters all decide that they can't tell anybody that they summoned a demon and then had to kill their possessed friend, since nobody would believe them. The exception is Hannah, who thinks that they should nevertheless go to their parents, but ultimately discovers this trope to be the case when she does so and her parents assume that she's simply stressed.
- In Scarlet Hollow, cryptid YouTuber Stella gets clear video footage of ditchlings, as well as audio recordings of "Tommyknockers" that end up being angry ghosts collapsing a mine. She uploads these to a cryptid forum as proof of the supernatural, but she's banned after being accused of self-promoting an ARG.
Web Animation
- Dayum: Gary’s mom from “Types of Parents Portrayed by Minecraft” warns him that Santa will punish him if he stays up late. Gary thinks she’s lying, but does get beaten up by a Bad Santa.
- SNARLED
- In "Elizabeth", the titular character tries to invoke this. When the protagonist explains to his mother that Elizabeth Wettlaufer tricked them into eating shrimp with peanut oil, Elizabeth gaslights that the boy is delusional from the medication. Averted, as the protagonist's mother ultimately takes his word for it and breaks up with Elizabeth.
- In "Death on 423 Stockholm St", the narrator was often written off by her parents every time she tried to tell them a monster was living on the other side of her bedroom wall. Justified, in the father's case, as he's the cause of the mysterious noises behind her bedroom wall.
- In every sense of the word, "The Little Medium" has AJ tell her babysitter Kim about how a man named Tracy burn her alive. If only she hadn't been written off, it might've saved Kim's life to steer clear of her future boyfriend Tracy.
- In "The Bubak", Lucia's cousin often pranks her to the point where she's skeptical towards anything she says. So when she tries to warn Lucia that the scarecrow she saw earlier was a bubak, she thinks it's just another prank in a long line of pranks she's ever pulled. Her skeptism costs her dearly.
- Captain Oto becomes a victim of this when he tries to warn his rescuers of the Umibōzu, only for them to think he's just a crazy old man losing his mind.
Web Original
- BUTCHY KID VIDEOS: Implied. In "SHOCKING YETI ENCOUNTER CAUGHT ON TAPE," the yeti steals the cameraman's pickup truck. The cameraman complains that his insurance won't cover it, presumably because they'll never believe him.
Cameraman: I just got carjacked by a freaking yeti! My liability insurance ain't gonna cover THIS shit!
- On the Dream SMP, Quackity, despite being one of the resident Cloudcuckoolanders, is much more perceptive than most people would give him credit for.
- On November 16th, he is the first to put two and two together and realize that Wilbur had left the group to blow up L'Manburg and tries to warn everyone, but is ignored amidst the chaos. Ten seconds later, Wilbur presses the button, and everything goes to shit.
- He is also among the first people to realize that Dream was the root of most of the conflicts on the server, while most other people, more often than not, ended up falling for Dream's manipulations. It takes the Doomsday War for several server members to realize that Quackity was being truthful about Dream all along, which he eventually lampshades to Sam.
Quackity: I've been telling everyone that he's bad all fucking along and no one goddamn believed me!
- #109 of the Evil Overlord List: "I will see to it that plucky young lads/lasses in strange clothes and with the accent of an outlander shall regularly climb some monument in the main square of my capital and denounce me, claim to know the secret of my power, rally the masses to rebellion, etc. That way, the citizens will be jaded in case the real thing ever comes along."
- Critical Role: Exandria Unlimited Calamity: When the Ring of Brass arrive at the Hall of Prophecy, the place where all of Avalir's oracles perform their work, they find the building closed and shuttered for the first time ever. After gaining entrance, the guardian of the Hall explains that two weeks prior, the oracles all started going mad, spitting out horrible prophecies about impending doom that couldn't possibly be true. The Calamity starts only a handful of hours later, plunging the world into 300 years of bloodshed and misery, killing 2/3rds of the world population, and sending a thriving mageocratic society back into the iron age.
- Invoked by Jimquisition in "Turning Players Into Players". Given how many predictions they've made about the video game industry that had come true despite people pooh-poohing them, they started referring to themselves as the Cassandra of video games.
- Last Life SMP: While Mumbo and Grian are building the ghast farm platform together on Day 4, Mumbo spots Joel, a Red Name, climbing the ladder up to them. Mumbo immediately alerts Grian to this fact, but Grian thinks he's just joking around and trying to scare him, until Joel shoots him off the platform to his death.
- The Rageaholic/Razorfist stated, on the topic of Rogue One and Star Wars as a whole (at least regarding the Sequel Trilogy), that the franchise was likely to be going downhill in both quality and profitability after seeing the box office results of it (and being put off by what he saw as poor quality), infamously saying 'You will BEG for George Lucas in the end', to much criticism of fans of Rogue One and The Force Awakens (which he also panned). Then the incredibly divisive at best The Last Jedi came out, which suffered a heavy box office drop-off a week after the movie played, despite lavish praise from mainstream critics, and was hammered with criticism by much of the fandom (with some strident defenders).
- Shorts Wars: Riggy, the character that Danno used in his shorts, is unable to tell him about the glitches before it's too late, as he thinks that it's another one of Riggy's pranks.
- In Star Harbor Nights's Toymakers arc, fully half the conflict could have been avoided if everyone had just believed Claire's observations and her resulting conclusions.
- Something walks whistling past my house every night at 3:03.: When the Welcoming Committee visited the narrator's house when the family first moved there, they tried to warn the parents about the Whistler. The narrator's mother didn't believe it at first, thinking they were trying to prank them, even accusing them of trying to drive them out of the neighborhood because her husband is Polynesian. Her husband, however, was the one who convinced her to listen, citing stories he heard as a boy about how the world is full of cryptids. Turns out, the neighbors weren't kidding about the strange entity. After deciding that it was in his family's best interests to stay (as the Whistler's haunting gives their baby daughter a chance at living through childhood), the father joins the Welcoming Committee so he can try and make sure this trope doesn't apply to other new neighbors.
- The Warning combines this with Be Careful What You Say and Resurrective Immortality. As the seer explains to the king, he is far from the first ambitious person to have her dragged before them to predict their future, then have her punished when she failed to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. In fact, the seer herself was once a would-be conqueror, and when she complained to the gods that they hadn't warned her before she was beyond redemption, they punished her by transforming her into a seer who would always be spurned or slain for telling others like her the Awful Truth.
- Tumblr:
- In this reimagining of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the boy is telling the truth from the start, repeatedly warning everyone that there are wolves in the area they're settling in. But nobody wants to listen, and while he's placed in charge of watching for wolves, this is only so they can blame him when the attacks inevitably start.
- Classical Mythology:
- This post has Cassandra play with this as a way to insult Apollo by prophesying that he would sexually satisfy a woman, knowing no one will believe he can if she's the one to proclaim it. Apollo is unamused.
Cassandra: Lord Apollo will sexually satisfy a woman tonight!
Random Trojan 1: Cassandra[,] don't be absurd.
Random Trojan 2: As though Lord Apollo would ever be anything but colossally disappointing in bed. - This other post suggests Loophole Abuse to a) finally get someone to believe Cassandra, and b) allow Odysseus to avoid The Odyssey altogether.
Cassandra: You won't believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.
Odysseus: ...I'm Nobody. Fill me in.
- This post
- In this reimagining
- Vampires SMP: Avid is a Vampire Hunter who is deemed to be crazy for his insistence that vampires are real, even by cryptid enthusiast Shelby, herself considered strange. Of course, Avid is correct about vampires, and there are already two among the group at the start of the series.