Offending a Foreign Country

Dani Alves: Ugh, what is this shirt, checkers? Ugh, gross!
Luka Modric: OK, you just offended all of Croatia.

— The Champions (2018)

When traveling to a foreign country, it is often a good idea to brush up on the culture of said country. What you may see and do as completely normal might be perceived as an insult elsewhere.

In this trope, however, a character does or says something that either offends a foreign country or another character points out is offensive to another foreign country. Whether it's an individual who does it on their own or a foreign ambassador, if a country, real or fictional, ends up offended, it fits the trope. The trope is usually Played for Laughs, though in certain instances it can be Serious Business.

In most cases, the offense is a result of being Innocently Insensitive. Many examples are initiated because of, or by the "Ugly American" Stereotype. Accidental Unfortunate Gesture is a subtrope when it comes to characters making a gesture that to them is innocent but to others is seen as an obscene gesture. My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels if it's an issue with the language barrier. If the offending person is a diplomat, then you have an "Ass" in Ambassador. See also Cross-Cultural Kerfluffle for meta-examples.

No Real Life Examples, Please! Not only is this trope reserved for fictional instances of offending a foreign nation, there would simply be no end to the listing of all the rights and wrongs and do's and don'ts of other countries, and of all the international incidents that have happened as a result.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In One Piece, Saint Charlos of the World Nobles makes the mother of all Fee Fi Faux Pas by openly attempting to enslave princess Shirahoshi of Fishman Island, right in front of her family, in the first day of the Levely, a meeting of the kings, queens and assorted monarchs of the member nations of the World Government that takes place every four years in order for its members to discuss and set the course of worldwide politics. Naturally, Shirahoshi's family does not take it well, and while a few other dignataries protest against it, Charlos simply orders CP0 to kill anyone who tries to stop him. Mind you, attacking a World Noble for lesser slights has been answered with in the past by sending a freaking Admiral against the offending party. Considering that several of the aforementioned dignataries had become friendly both with Shirahoshi and each other solely on the account of being personally acquainted with the Straw Hat Pirates, who had saved their countries in the past, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that their countries would've gone to war against the World Government over the incident, with the Straw Hats (and by extension the Straw Hat Grand Fleet and maybe the Revolutionary Army) getting involved the second they heard about it and possibly escalating the conflict into a worldwide scale. Luckily, the whole incident is defused by Saint Mjosgard, who was influenced by Shirahoshi's mother in the past to become a better person and intends to repay the Neptune Family, by smacking Charlos in the face with a spiked club and ordering his slaves to release Shirahoshi and CP0 to stand down. Good thing too, since King Neptune was about to get himself killed trying to save his daughter.

Fan Works

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Functionally, Dungeon Keepers are rulers of their own dungeon countries, due to having a great amount of physical control over what's in their domain, so those who enter such areas on more peaceful missions are wary about offending the Keeper. Then there's the special case of Keepers who actually legally rule lands... due to having physical control of all of said land, in addition to their dungeons.

Films — Live-Action

• OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies: During a night at an Egyptian hotel, 117 is woken up near dawn by the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Not only does he go and beat the man up, he casually mentions this as though it were an everyday occurrence. Later he meets an Egyptian official, where he demonstrates (via Condescending Compassion) his crass ignorance about anything involving the Middle East, to the point where the official has him literally thrown out of the embassy and saying that if it weren't for their respective countries being allied, 117 would be rotting in a cell. 117 is left confused at what happened and wonders if it was something he said.
• Canadian Bacon: Sheriff Bud Boomer causes a riot at a Canadian hockey game when he criticizes their beer.
• Midsommar: Mark has to go pee, so he chooses a random tree and unzips the fly. It turns out this is the ancestral tree of the Harga, and they angrily berate him for being so disrespectful. Mark is then killed and turned into one of the sacrifices for the festival.

Literature

• Alexis Carew: In HMS Nightingale, two of Alexis's crew members miss ship's movement while docked at Al Jadiq. Another crewman who has been there before recalls them chatting up a local woman and then says that somebody he knew from another ship had been arrested and beheaded on Al Jadiq for doing the same thing. Fortunately for the offending crew members, this works both ways: A Mother to Her Men, Alexis promptly orders a ship's laser cannon loaded onto the shuttle for use in an armed rescue of her crewmen from the prison, and threatens Al Jadiq's planetary governor with being stripped of Royal Navy protection altogether if they pull something like this on the Queen's spacers again.
• In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent's remark "I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" is unwittingly carried through a freak wormhole across the galaxy to the Vl'Hurg civilization, where the words in the local language are the worst insult imaginable. This sparks a massive war with the rival G'Gugvuntts, until both civilizations finally realize it was a mistake and launch an assault on Earth instead, where, due to a gross miscalculation in size, both battle fleets are eaten by a small dog.
• In Two For The lions, Roman private eye Marcus Didius Falco issen on a mission for Emperor Vespasian and - reluctantly - has to take his brother in law, a horse-vet who works for one of the big chariot teams. Falco has to drag his drunken, chauvanistic, Lower-Class Lout relative out of trouble, knowing his sister will be a bit hard to deal with if her husband does anything stupid. Unfortunately for Falco, he does. Famia, buoyed up on drink and a conviction that a Roman abroad can do whatever the Hades he likes with impunity, gets drunk and belittles the local Gods as not a patch on our superior Roman deities. He is arrested by the temple guards and sentenced to death at the paws and teeth of the arena lions.

Live-Action TV

• Big Time Rush: In "Big Time Blogger", the B-Plot is of Gustavo using a Twitter-parody "Scuttlebutter". When he attempts to tweet that he "Hates Brussel Sprouts", he ends up saying he hates "Brussels", as in, the capital of Belgium. As a result, this sparks protests in Belgium and negative publicity from Belgian celebrity. At the end of the episode, he tells the boys that he has a feeling Belgium won't be buying their albums.
• In The Orville episode "Majority Rule", LaMarr offends the entire society by dry-humping a statue of a popular figure.
• A planetary example from the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Vox Sola". A group of aliens is offended when they enter the Enterprise's mess hall. Turns out, in their culture, eating in front of others is considered taboo. Thankfully, they accept a sincere apology for the misunderstanding, later.
• Janeway offends a whole planet in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Macrocosm" because it turns out that in their culture, putting your hands on your hips is the most offensive gesture possible.

Web Animation

• The Champions (2018): While picking out a new outfit for Luka Modric, Dani Alves comes across a Croatia national team shirt. After throwing it away because he didn't like the checker pattern, Modric tells him he just offended all of Croatia. Alves doesn't help the situation by donning a Croatian Polo cap and posting a selfie with it.
• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email sbemail_22, Strong Bad's opinions of England (which we never hear) are apparently so offensive they bring the Royal Family to tears. At a subsequent press conference, when asked about the offending remarks, he casually responds "Screw all of y'all", drawing a round of gasps and an "I can't believe he said that!".

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Guy", Gumball suspects Anais' new friend Josh is up to no good and when the two hang out at a restaurant, he disguises himself as a stereotypical European waiter named "Ferzandelerp" and pretends everything Josh does is offensive to his home country... of New Jersey. He says the name Josh means "toilet paper" in his native language, and after Josh gives him a thumbs up, mentions that the gesture is extremely insulting to his culture.
• Bojack Horseman: Bojack was banned from the Cannes Film Festival after offending the French by criticizing Jean-Paul Sartre and also saying that the French smell.
• The Fairly Oddparents: in "Parent Hoods", Timmy’s dad manages to offend Canada when he accidentally breaks the Sacred Silver Sharpener at the North American Museum of Pencil Pushing. As a result the Turners are arrested and set to be paddled.
• Let's Go Luna!:
  • In "Aren't We a Pair?", Carmen assumes that Cairo, Egypt is "ancient" and "boring", and that all Egyptians live in pyramids, based on what she saw in movies. She eventually learns the opposite.
  • Amazingly enough, another example involving Carmen — in "Hip Life", she travels to Ghana and assumes that there are wild animals roaming everywhere (the only other African nation she had visited was Kenya, which did have wild animals), which offends Akua, a young local rapper.
• The Loud House: Lincoln manages to get banned from Canada for saying that he doesn't want maple syrup on his pancakes.
• In the Pinky and the Brain episode, "Around the World in 80 Narfs", while the duo travel through Italy, Pinky's travel book mentions odd hand gestures that Italians would find offensive; by a stroke of bad luck, Brain ends up doing these gestures in response to being attacked by a swarm of bees, infuriating the locals.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror IX" segment "The Homega Man", Mayor Quimby insults the French by saying they look like frogs. He then doubles down by saying "I stand by my ethnic slur." The French retaliate by launching a neutron bomb at Springfield (and when they laugh their throats expand like a frog's).
  • In "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore", while traveling to India, Homer calls Lisa because he's being stared at in the street by angry people because a cow took his iPod and he punched it. Lisa suggests that he shows the cow he adores it, which, Homer does in a rather... romantic way, but it seems to appease the crowd.
  • The entire plot of "Bart vs. Australia" happens because Bart, trying to find out if toilets drain clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, makes a collect call that gets an Australian man billed for 900 Dollary-Doos. That man complains to his neighbor, a member of Parliament, which starts a diplomatic spat that leads to the Simpsons traveling to Australia so that Bart can apologize. The Simpsons proceed to piss off the Australians even more when they get there.
  • In "The Regina Monologues", the Simpson family travels to the UK, where Homer gets in trouble for accidentally driving into Buckingham Palace and wrecking the Queen's carriage, and is summarily put on trial.

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