Self Made Lie - TV Tropes (2024)

"Everybody thinks that my old man was just some humble junk man who made it big through hard work. But all he ever did was follow this [journal] and invest wisely: plastics in the sixties, oil in the seventies, computers in the eighties."

• 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 because they feared retribution from him.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Dumb Money: When the main cast are 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.
• 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.
• The Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort presents himself as proof 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.

• Agent Z and The Penguin From Mars: Ben's wealthy new neighbor Dennis Sidebottom claims to have gotten rich from betting money in a football pool and boasts about him getting to where he is through intelligence and hard work. However, the climax reveals that the Sidebottoms' money was actually stolen from an Australian casino. Even after being exposed as nothing but a common thief, Dennis still brags about being an hard worker.
• 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.
• Knight Moves has a rare sympathetic example. Doran Faulkner is a man thought to be responsible for mankind's greatest technological breakthroughs - Immortality and Faster-Than-Light Travel. The truth is that he is not the genius of legend, but got information from alien beings. He is also disillusioned by what the innovations he introduced have done to human civilization, which seems to be slowly declining.
• Qualityland: This is the backstory of basically any executive, with some more secretive about the fact that they already started out with inherited wealth. Henryk Ingenieur openly admits in the sequel that anyone with his ideal starting conditions could have made it big.
• 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 situations he can't handle on his own.

• 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.
• 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 New York local who got rich through his involvement in a drug smuggling ring.
• 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.
• : "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.
• : Jason Mayzik's 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.
• 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.
• 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 viwit 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• The Mistholme Museum Of Mystery Morbidity And Mortality: Played With in "FINAL". One of the exhibits at the titular museum is a rundown red Editor Pencil, which the Tour Guide reveals belonged to the deceased major media tycoon and Titan of Industry Yiding Lu, who seemingly rose out of nowhere to become one of the most powerful and successful media moguls in the world. As the Guide reveals, it was only after Lu's death that it was discovered he actually started off as a very shy and timid Newspaper editor in his home town, who whilst doing a therapy exercise recommended to give him more confidence, discovered that if he rewrote events he had been through he had the power to manipulate everyone's memories into believing the more preferable events were what occurred. After much trial and error, Lu seized upon this newfound power, building himself a glorious media empire. However, at the climax the guide points out that whilst this ability certainly gave him a massive advantage, all the evidence suggests that even without it Lu was a legitimately brilliant businessman, leading it to speculate that he might have managed to become successful all on his own and that the real advantage his power gave him was granting him the confidence to try, or maybe that is just something else he wrote down somewhere that they haven't found yet.

• Warhammer Fantasy: Egrimm van Horstmann was one of the most gifted wizards in the history of the Colleges of Magic and was elected Patriarch at a record-setting young age. Three years later, he was exposed as a Chaos cultist who'd been drawing his magical expertise from daemons all along — especially embarrassing given he led the Light Order, the Colleges' most diligent daemon-hunters.

• 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.

  Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip

  That they took me into the partnership

  And that junior partnership, I ween,

  Was the only ship that I had ever seen.

  But that kind of ship so suited me,

  That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

• 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.

• 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".
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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.