Unreliable Narrator

"You just show that your first-person narrator was actually in an insane asylum and then OH MY GOD, did it actually happen? Who can say? Here, I can say. It didn't happen because your narrator was just no good. Listen. Never lend an unreliable narrator money."

— Dinosaur Comics, "Literary techniques comics: Unreliable Narrator" Alt Text

In most narratives, there's an element of trust that the person telling you the story is telling the truth, at least as far as they know it. This trope occurs when that convention is discarded. The narrator's facts contradict each other. If you ask them to go back a bit and retell it, the events come out a little differently. It can be like dealing with a used-car salesman — there's a real story in there somewhere, but you're left to piece it together through all the lies, half-truths, and mistruths.

Reasons for the unreliability vary. Sometimes the narrator is a guilty party and is trying to mislead the audience as well as the other characters. If the narrator is insane, it's Through the Eyes of Madness. A consistent and sincere testimony may prove Unreliable if coming from a perspective of personal bias, or conclusions drawn from incomplete observation. If the narrator has honestly misunderstood what's going on due to naivete, inexperience, or just lack of information, it's Innocent Inaccurate. A variation commonly seen in kids' books is that the narrator is a small child and is actually playing make-believe, but claims their "adventures" are real.

As an author, this is a difficult trick to pull off. It is a lot easier to tell a straight story than it is to deliberately mislead the audience, never mind that it violates the traditional assumption that Viewers Are Morons. And there's always a risk of attracting Misaimed Fandom.

One common technique is to use a Framing Device, so that the narrator is presented as a character in the frame story, to emphasize that they are not actually the author. Another, even trickier method, is the Direct Line to the Author, where the narrator is supposedly relating things that happened in Real Life, or Literary Agent Hypothesis, for when fans speculate that such a thing is occurring. Multiple unreliable narrators results in "Rashomon"-Style. If it's a visual medium and the picture contradicts the narration, it's an Unreliable Voiceover. This can also be used as a trick in commercials, to evade claims of false advertising by having an unreliable character do the talking. Sometimes, the story might be illustrated so that the narrator lies but the illustrations tell the truth.

First-person stories and third-person-limited stories are candidates for two levels of the Unreliable Narrator. First, a well-written story would have the Innocent Inaccurate version, simply because the narrator shouldn't provide any information that the viewpoint character doesn't have, and in a more-difficult version, may not be able to provide information he has because the character hasn't the vocabulary or the necessary background knowledge. Second, the narrator sometimes refuses to tell us what the viewpoint character knows or sees at a critical junction.

In video games and other interactive works, an unreliable narrator can maintain immersion while dismissing the character losing numerous Video-Game Lives as poor memory or wandering thoughts, or even while drawing attention to uncharacteristic actions or exhaustion of options. This does require more effort on the designers to identify potential plot branches and the consequences of all of the player's possible input at every critical moment.

Unreliable Expositor is a variant with less than credible exposition from specific characters, as opposed to narrators of the whole story. Contrast Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane where the evidence is reliable but insufficient, and Infallible Narrator, when the narration of the character is far more accurate than the character's capabilities. A Lemony Narrator is usually reliable as far as the facts go, but probably eccentric or opinionated in other ways.

This can also be a source of humour for the work, too.

Note that this is specifically for narrators within the work. When it's the author that's lying, that's Lying Creator. When the author simply can't make up their mind, that's Flip-Flop of God.

Note: as this is often a particularly subversive Reveal, REALLY BIG spoilers ahead, especially in the Literature section. See also "Rashomon"-Style, Unreliable Voiceover, and Self-Serving Memory. Fanon tropes like Alternative Character Interpretation result from the fandom treating the narrator as unreliable by default. On the other hand, the narrator may end up being seen as unreliable due to breaking the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief, thus leading to tropes like Unintentionally Sympathetic and its converse.

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Example subpages:

• Fan Works
• Film
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Anime and Manga

• Koimonogatari, one of the arcs in Bakemonogatari is narrated by Kaiki Deishu. He starts the story with a winded monologue on how the audience has no way of knowing whether the story he's about to tell is true or false, he ends it telling that he was murdered. Which audience already knows is a blatant lie because he is alive and well in another arc that chronologically happens later.
• The Dangers in My Heart: Ichikawa Kyotaro, the manga's male protagonist, and its narrator by virtue of being the only character in the series who has an internal monologue and being an internally dramatic chuunibyou. Early on, he tells the audience (himself) that he's messed up in the head and harboring hidden murderous intent. Both of which is always contradicted by his actions showing us that he's really just a shy and awkward, yet observant and considerate kid towards the girl he "wants to kill."
• In the Death Note anime, Mikami himself, rather than an omniscient narrator, narrates his flashbacks. He thus has an unfavorable view of his mother's advice to stop fighting against the bullies, whereas the manga's narrator noted that she was motivated by genuine concern for his welfare that was largely lost on him.
• In The Devil is a Part-Timer!, in order to clear up a repeated misunderstanding, Ashiya tries to explain the relationship between himself, his roommate Sadao Maō, and Emi Yusa to some people. However, the people he's talking to don't know that all three hail from a Heroic Fantasy universe where Maō was the Demon King, Ashiya was his top general, and Emi was the fated hero who almost slew them both. So instead Ashiya makes up a story about Maō being the head of an upstart construction company that was driven out of business by a rival, for whom Emi worked as an intern. In this case, the viewer already knows that the story is made up, but it's interesting to note that his cover-up story offers an interesting perspective on the real events he's masking: for example, he sees the armies of humanity not as mortal enemies or insects to be crushed, but simply as rivals competing over limited resources, and he doesn't seem to hate Emi personally for her role in their defeat, instead regarding it as a case of Just Following Orders. In retrospect, this interpretation would explain why a pair of demons who seemed hell-bent on conquering humanity in their world would be able to fit in so comfortably with humans in this world.
• In Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the episode Poker Face entirely takes place in a small shack at the side of some large event, where Cold Sniper Saito and some other police officers play poker during their break. When the other players ask him how he got so good at bluffing, he tells them the story how he met the Major while he was a mercenary sniper who killed most of her patrol during a UN mission in Mexico. Since both the plot and the story within the story are all about bluffing, it's entirely unclear if anything was true at all, and there are lots of small details that are inconsistent with information from other episodes.
• Jose from Gunslinger Girl puts his deceased younger sister on a pedestal and sees her as Purity Personified. Enrica, however, was just like any kid. In fact, she was quite clingy over their other brother Jean.
• As in the light novels, Kyon in the Haruhi Suzumiya Animated Adaptation certainly qualifies. At the end of each episode, in the original 2006 summer broadcast, Haruhi always indicates the number of the next episode by its chronological order, while Kyon corrects her every time with the episode number based on the broadcast order (and for the one episode where the numbers actually match up, he then corrects himself and apologizes). Both are replaced with Nagato delivering a deadpan tie-in to the next episode, in both the DVD release and expanded 2009 broadcast.
  • There is also his stupefying habit of mixing narration with dialogue in language and terms that no high-schooler uses; and tendency not to tell the readers what he has figured out previously until the reveal.
  • His tendency in the novels not to differentiate between narration and things he says aloud which are included in the narration without indication of their being speech is preserved by either not showing his mouth or not showing it moving and having characters respond — or give what could be responses — anyway.
  • A favored theory is that he tries to present himself as an objective and respectful young man. When he's actually in love with all of them. Whenever scenes supporting this come up, his narration says nothing about it, or goes completely off-topic while we watch what happens.
• In several of the first novels of Higurashi: When They Cry, due to the nature of the madness and paranoia-inducing parasite that infects all of the residents of Hinamizawa, it is unclear what actually takes place as the narrator for the arc ends up slaughtering several of their friends and others. There are hints throughout that the events may not be as perceived by the narrator, such as when the police report at the end of the first novel contradicts the narrator's belief of what happened. Keiichi's demise by clawing at his throat at the end of the first arc proves that he succumbed to the town's parasite, creating doubt with regards to his mental state.
• The protagonist to the manga Kami no Kodomo; a sociopathic serial killer who depicts himself as a messiah-like figure.
• In Love Hina, Kitsune starts explaining Naru's past, and says that Naru and Seta were in a Teacher/Student Romance at the time. She then immediately states "If that had happened, it would have been interesting."
• Lupin III: Episode 0: First Contact is the Origin Story to Lupin III, except the narrator Jigen admits to altering some things. Also, he's actually Lupin in disguise. The credits sequence shows that some of it is true, but it's clear, and even stated, that other parts were changed. Why? Why not?
• According to Word of God nearly every installment in the Macross franchise is in fact an in-universe dramatization of the events depicted made several years after the fact. While the Broad Strokes of what happened is usually correct, certain elements are tweaked somewhat due to Rule of Cool, Rule of Drama, or just the in-universe contemporary political climate.
• Jack Rakan of Negima! Magister Negi Magi is kind of like this whenever he relates any sort of Back Story, tending to massively exaggerate his own importance. That said, what he says is usually accurate... he just leaves out enormous chunks of the story because they don't involve him.
• One Piece (the manga, not the anime) doesn't have an actual narrator except for in a few info boxes, and when characters recount their memories, it is usually done in the form of an objective Flashback, even making use of the Third-Person Flashback trope to show all details. There is, however, a first example of an unreliable narrator in the Dressrosa arc: When Rebecca's flashback is shown, it looks like she was raised by only her mother, Scarlet, and didn't meet her father, Kyros, before he appeared as a toy soldier carrying her dead mother in his arms. However, as Kyros' flashback shows, he lived with them and was an important part of Rebecca's early childhood. But then Kyros was turned into a toy, effectively making him an Un-person. This is why Rebecca's flashback was unreliable: She cannot remember a thing about her father, so she genuinely thought that she only lived with her mother. This unreliability makes all the Third Person Flashbacks seem a little weird in hindsight, but it was probably a handy excuse to avoid spoiling that the toy soldier was Rebecca's real father and Kyros, since that wasn't known by the readers back then.
  • In a similar vein, the Tontatta dwarf Leo describes Mansherry, princess of the Tontatta that he's trying to rescue, as "selfish, mean, capricious, and short-tempered". When the manga finally shows her in person, it's shown that she's incredibly sweet and kind-hearted, but acts that way around Leo because she has a giant crush on him and he's too dense to see it.
• Taken to huge levels in PandoraHearts, especially with the case of one...Jack Vessalius and all of the despicable deeds he has done-including twisting his story around numerous times-making it look like GLEN stabbed Gilbert when HE was the one to do so, making it look like Alice liked Jack when in fact she hated him and Alyss liked him, and even rewriting history to make it look like the Baskervilles were the bad guys. Oh, and also-watch for whenever they tell you about the Tragedy of Sablier and Alice's memories. Especially considering those were ALYSS'S memories she was remembering, not her own.... and that hooded figure who speaks to Lacie....It's not Glen, it's Jack.
• Genma Saotome from Ranma ½. Any time he tells a story you just know that isn't how it really happened. This goes double for Happōsai. And Cologne. And the principal. And Sōun (ESPECIALLY Sōun). Heck, point to just about any important adult in Ranma ½, and it'd be easier to list the things they claimed that weren't total BS.
  • Of special note, whenever Happosai talks about his youth, he'll almost always depict himself as this starry-eyed Bishounen, when in fact the young Happosai was virtually identical to the current, save a fuller head of hair.
• School-Live! has a severely unreliable narrator in its heroine Yuki. The story at first largely follows her life as she sees it, living at school for fun and spending her days doing typical light-hearted school-life anime activities with her classmates and a small group of club members. When the perspective switches to one of her club members, however, it's revealed that the four club members are the only survivors left in the city after a Zombie Apocalypse, Yuki spends much of her time interacting with classmates who're long gone, and the beautiful school is in ruins, full of barricades designed to stop attacks.
• Serial Experiments Lain is notoriously hard to follow, as the main character lies to others, herself, and the viewer, and reality may (or may not) change during the series (assuming reality even exists). Fortunately there's an apparently impartial non-character narrator, who explains at the start of each episode what's really going on. However, the oblique and obfuscated exposition frequently does little to help and much to confuse - and to make things worse, the few solid facts he gives often turn out to be flat out lies later in the series...
• In early episodes of Slayers, Lina's narration of the previous episode's events tends to paint herself in the best light possible, to the point of, say... practically ignoring destroying almost a whole village. Lina is no more reliable as the narrator of the novels.
• Played for Laughs in Tenchi Universe. During the series, both Ayeka and Ryoko give different versions of how they met and interacted with each other in the past, which resulted in them becoming enemies. Both girls tell stories that make the other look bad. It's up to the viewing audience to decide if Ayeka or Ryoko is telling the truth. By the end of the series, Washu concludes that they're both telling the truth and both girls were cruel to each other.
• In Episode 8 of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 Yuuki dies. However the viewers don't know this until two episodes later. We see him die however it's treated like a nightmare that his sister had. For the entirety of episode nine and most of episode ten we see Yuuki alive and normal because that's what Mirai thought happened. There are clues that Yuuki isn't "really" there, like shots where he is missing and him constantly disappearing.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters the two sides of Alexander the Great's soul give opposite accounts of what happened when he faced Shadi's challenge. Alexander's good half says he failed the five trials, while his evil half says he completed the five trials, but the doorway refused to open. It's implied the latter is correct, as otherwise the final battle couldn't have happened.
• The titular character of Yuri!!! on Ice, Yuri Katsuki, is this, since he is the main character and often narrates the earlier episodes from his point-of-view. It's not intentional or done out of malice to the viewer, but due to his self-esteem issues and a severe and awful case of Heroic Self-Deprecation, Yuri states that he is a mediocre figure skater at best who is unable to skate good programs, doesn't have much support and that Victor will eventually tire of him and leave. This trope is masterfully used to heartwarming degrees, as later episodes make clear that Yuri is the best male figure skater in Japan (even though he came in last in the Grand Prix Finals, it still makes him the sixth best male figure skater in the world), has the support of his whole country and is looked up to by his fellow Japanese skaters, capable of skating programs that even his Living Legend coach whistles to and Victor is absolutely smitten and in love with him, and has been since the beginning, especially since they are an engaged couple as of Episode 10.
• Ii-chan of Zaregoto forgets important details, frequently. He even neglects to tell the readers how he disguised the second murder in The Kubishime Romanticist as a suicide.

Comic Books

• Comics are the easiest medium to accomplish this in, since you can have the narration saying one thing above the panel and the panel show what's really happening, whereas in Film, Western Animation, and Live TV you might have the narrator's speech conflict with the scene, necessitating a more "flashback" style to show this. It is very common to have a narrator say one thing and the below panel completely contradict it.
• Word of God states that Dilios of 300 is an unreliable narrator; all of the supposed inconsistencies with actual history are actually bare-faced lies, with Delios stretching the truth about who did what and how many there were. This naturally justifies the comic's explicit use of Rule of Cool and Refuge in Audacity.
• Anya's Ghost: Emily's entire backstory about being killed by a maniac is a lie, and she was never engaged, in fact she murdered her supposed fiancé (who was a boy that rejected her advances) together with his sweetheart and her death was actually caused by being chased by a mob that had arisen from said murder.
• Done in-universe with Astro City's Manny Monkton, a comic book publisher who encourages his writers to play fast and loose with the facts to make their stories more exciting.
  "The kids don't want facts. They want drama! THRILLS!"
• Marvel Adventures: The Avengers: In Issue #2, Spider-Man warns the Hulk (too late) about a gigantic man-o-war, telling him to steer clear of its toxic tendrils. Later on, the Hulk tells Spidey of how he would never betray the Avengers because he knows they always try to help him. In the background of that panel we see a flashback to Spidey warning Hulk, but this is how he remembers it: "Get off that creature! BIG danger!"
• Ballad for Sophie has Julien Dubois, a retired star musician, who decides to tell his life story to a persistent intern who sleeps overnight on his doorstep until he lets her interview him. Upfront about how he's going a bit batty and how he always struggled with drug addiction, his otherwise cogent account starting from the 1930s becomes peppered with strange and contrived features. These include his piano teacher and later agent Hubert Triton having the head of a goat, his psychiatrist looking exactly like the long-dead Sigmund Freud, a homeless man who helped him while he was living on the streets of World War 2 Paris greeting him decades later without him or his pet bird not having aged a day, and a memory of his rival François Samson playing on a flying piano during a competition, which he insists can be corroborated by various reviews of that performance but is likely him just making literal a colorful metaphor in his recollections.
• Batman:
  • In Arkham Reborn, Jeremiah Arkham turns out to be just a tad loopy, to the point where it turns out his "beauties", three patients who seem relatively functional but have to be kept apart for their own safety, don't actually exist, and some of the time he's the supervillain Black Mask (another one). When he recovers his memories as to where his marbles actually went — it involves the Joker, Hugo Strange, and a suggestibility-enhancing drug, and even that is left ambiguous regarding how much of it is true — in his reflection, he sees himself as Black Mask.
  • May be the case for the Wrath, a criminal who serves as a literal "anti-Batman" to the extent that his costume was designed to resemble Batman's and his origin even occurred on the same night as Batman's, as his parents were criminals killed right in front of their child. When Batman faces the second Wrath (the first was killed when he fell into his own trap), the villain tells Batman that his mentor's parents were shot, unprovoked, by a Gotham police officer when the original Wrath was a child. However, as the officer who killed the Wrath's parents was his future ally James Gordon, Batman knows for a fact that events didn't play out that way, but it is left up to the reader if the first or second Wrath are just unreliable (was the first lying to make himself seem more sympathetic or did he tell the truth and the second has twisted it to further "justify" his own crimes?) or victims of a Self-Serving Memory.
  • Also applies to Lincoln March, AKA 'Owlman'; an agent of the Court of Owls, he claims to actually be Bruce Wayne's younger brother, Thomas Wayne Junior, born disfigured and left in an orphanage until the Court took him in and gave him various treatments to restore him to health. Bruce doesn't believe that his parents would have hidden the existence of a brother from him, and speculates that the Court twisted the facts he could find out about March's history just to convince him that he was Thomas Wayne Jr., even talking with Dick Grayson about alternative explanations for all of March's supposed evidence, but admits that there's no way to be certain if March is right or wrong without a DNA test.
  • In "The Batman Nobody Knows", a classic comic book that inspired two animated episodes, two of the kids have versions of Batman that are pure speculation, but one got his story from an ex-con intending to Scare 'Em Straight. Unfortunately, said ex-con decided that making Batman seven feet tall and able to bounce back onto the roof from a clothesline rather than using his Batrope would make for a better story.
• Ed Brubaker's Books of Doom miniseries tells the origin story of classic Marvel Comics supervillain Doctor Doom, seemingly narrated by Doom himself. However, at the story's end, it is revealed that the narrator is actually one of the Doom's Doombots, telling the story that Doom has programmed into it, leaving to question how much of it was true.
• In The Boys, The Frenchman (who's known to be insane) decides to tell Hughie his "Origin Story" which is an obvious fabrication that involves his father being murdered during a baguette-jousting tournament. He then jumps out the window, and when Hughie asks if any of it was true Butcher says "only the last line" about his devotion to the team. It's implied that he isn't even French and was an Englishman who somehow lost his mind after joining the French Foreign Legion.
  • However the very next issue has him relate to Hughie The Female's Origin Story, which is implied to be much more truthful.
• Vincent Santini, the narrator from Brooklyn Dreams, tells us in the first page he can't remember much from his past, so he'll tell us the best he can. The whole story is him telling us about his life the way he wants to remember it. He even says "I'll weave you some lies about my life, and who knows they might be true."
• This is the thing that is going on in Captain America: Steve Rogers and the Secret Empire storyline. With Steve's mind altered by the Red Skull and Kobik during Avengers Standoff, our hero is believed to be an agent of HYDRA introduced to the group as a young boy. We know this to be fake as we're shown how this happened. However, as the story keeps going, we go further into the rabbit hole and it even calls our recollections into question as it seems to be revealed that the Nazis were actually going to win World War II and the Allies' use of the Cosmic Cube prevented that at all, turning Cap into the big blue boy scout we all know and love. For the most part, those who are confronted with these revelations have automatically called bullshit on them.
• Happens once in a while in Diabolik, as the characters may gloss over some particulars (for example, when narrating the flashback of "Diabolik, Who Are You?" the title character didn't say numerous important particulars), not know the truth (some of the facts from "Diabolik, Who Are You?" are later shown wrong in "The True Story of King's Island", as King flat-out lied to Diabolik), or flat-out lie (in "Diabolik's Secret" Eva is forced to tell a journalist a story about Diabolik that nobody knew... And lied, before mailing to their competitors evidence that it was a lie).
• In Druid City, no one character in particular serves as a narrator in a traditional sense, but it does become clear that certain details about how some characters are drawn change after the character in question is disassociated with the lead character. For example, once Hunter Hastings (the lead) and Misa Saito (a character in question) end their second relationship and potential lasting friendship, Misa's hair is drawn in a completely different style and certain qualities that she has disappear. All of these changes are not commented upon by any other characters, so the assumption could be that Hunter's opinion was shaping her appearance for the audience to some degree.
• It should be obvious at the beginning of Earth X that Uatu the Watcher is an unreliable narrator: he's an alien from a culture that has very different values from humanity's. It should be further obvious when Uatu does things like object to World War II on the grounds that "humanity was not yet ready for a master race". But most readers were used to Uatu's style of narration and problematic "neutral" moral stance from What If?, so Uatu manages to carry on the illusion that he's a friend of humanity for several more issues.
• Fantastic Four #15 offers this introduction to◊ the Thing.
• The comic continuation of Gargoyles introduces the character Shari, a young woman and high-ranking member of the Illuminati with a penchant for telling stories, usually with a historical or mythological basis but which sometimes contradict each other. During a storyline within which she told a sequence of such tales to Thailog, he attempts to call her out when he notices one such contradiction...to which she simply repeats the first half of the catchphrase she begins all her stories with, emphasizing that they are not necessarily meant to be fully accurate retellings of events.
  Thailog: You said Moses gave the Stone to Gathelus and Scota...before leading the Hebrews out of Egypt!
  Shari: The story is told...
  [beat panel]
  Thailog: "Though who can say if it be true?" Right. Continue.
• Dreadwing, the main antagonist of Gold Digger, has a mymior, a magical journal of sorts for dragons. He lost his original one, but he was able to create a "new and improved" mymior for himself and it's clear that Dreadwing's jaded and evil mindset has heavy influence over his writing, such as putting everyone except him in a negative light, trying to justify his many crimes and giving questionable overviews of his relationships with other characters.
• John Constantine from Hellblazer tends to get unreliable, especially if he's depressed or drunk. If there was a scene where he actually didn't see it (but we readers do), he will tend to second guess everything and can only imagine what could have happened. Although not an accurate description, John's gory imagination makes up one hell of a comic panel.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us deserves a mention as it is narrated by Harley Quinn who grossly exaggerates her involvement with the Insurgency.
  • Issue #7 of Year Two has Sinestro recapping his backstory and how his Green Lantern ring was forcefully taken from him. While his narration paints himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who was "liberating" his home world from a corrupt government, the comic itself shows that he was really a bloodthirsty tyrant who ruled his planet as a murderous dictator with a 0% Approval Rating (even his own wife killed herself to get away from him, but he's in denial, believing her to have been murdered).
• An annual had Iron Man villain The Mandarin telling his life story to a film maker, with the captions showing his version of the events, and the panels showing the complete opposite.
• Done by Vladek in Maus. He tells his story to his son and real-life author of the comic Art Spiegelman, but the sections shown from Spiegelman's creates a clear dissonance between Vladek's past and present self, to the point of where one would wonder how much of what he's saying about himself is true. He often portrays himself as generous to others going through the same struggle as him, but in the modern day he's shown to be extremely selfish and concerned with money. And one point, he even exclaims to Art, "At that time it wasn't anymore families. It was everybody to take care for himself!"
• In The Mighty Thor #356, Hercules and Jarvis are taking a stroll in the park, and a group of kids ask him if he's stronger than Thor or not. Hercules begins to narrate their last encounter. Humbled and ashamed by the vast superiority of Hercules over him, Thor asked him for an arm wrestle, to see if he could regain the will to live. Jarvis laughs at the idea of Thor trying to defeat Hercules, and points out that he doesn't remember any such scene. "Oh, of course, it happened while you were on vacation, dear Jarvis!". So, Thor was defeated in a second, hit Hercules in the head with his hammer, began to destroy the city in a tantrum... Mr. Hercules, that doesn't make sense, aren't you making it up? Oh, this Jarvis may be a prince among butlets, but as a spectator he leaves much to desire. Where were we? Oh, that the fight got into the Empire State Building which was destroyed... but such a thing never made it to the newspapers, because the Avengers repaired it immediately! And he goes on, on, and on... that is, until he realizes that the kid asking isn't his fan but a fan of Thor, who feels sad for his hero. Where were we? Oh, that Thor was about to receive the final blow... and suddenly showed that he was holding his strength, beat the crap out of Hercules, and sent him to another state with a single punch. Yes, it really happened! Would Hercules lie to you?
• This is one of the rules governing the stories in Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard.
  • June states that the stories can be neither "complete truths", nor "complete falsehoods." Exactly how much of any given story is true or false is left as an exercise to the reader, and they vary from the relatively plausible (a story of brief and unlikely companionship between mouse and bat), to the truly outlandish (a mouse king who rode into battle upon a weasel, a Guardmouse who saved a town from a flash flood and drought by swallowing the flood waters then spitting them back out to serve as a reservoir).
  • Amusingly, one of the most plausible stories — a play on "Androcles and the Lion" in which an African mouse manages to befriend a lion that's impressed with its bravery and resourcefulness (pulling the thorn out of the lion's paw is in there, but is outright established to be a secondary factor at best) — is discarded out of hand because the North American mice of the series have never seen or heard of lions or hyenas before, as well as the fact that it's told by a known lunatic who claims to have heard it from a beetle, which aren't talking animals in Mouse Guard.
• In Phonogram, one issue of "The Singles Club" has a back-up strip that tells the story of the previous story, "Rue Britannia", from the perspective of a minor character in the previous work. The minor character is a friend of David Kohl, the protagonist of the previous story, and tagged along for part of it. As the minor character is not part of the world of the 'phonomancers' like Kohl, it's pretty clear from his telling that he really had no clue exactly what was going on, but it's nevertheless a reasonably faithful version of events. Until the end, whereupon the minor character suddenly produces a big gun, shoots what he thinks was the bad guy, saves Kohl's life and then swaggers off to have a threesome with two beautiful women. Kohl, needless to say, is not particularly impressed with this addition to the narrative.
• The Sandman: Invoked with a story that Cluracan tells in a tavern. He talks about when he was sent as an envoy to an impoverished nation, was imprisoned, and managed to escape as well as destroy the corrupt ruler. The other patrons call him on this, and he freely confesses to adding and removing parts of the story to make it more interesting, though the only thing he outright admits to fabricating is a sword fight he had with the palace guards (he added it to spice up the climax, which he felt was otherwise pretty boring). He states they can choose to believe him or not. How much of it actually is true is left up to the audience's interpretation, as is the case with all the stories told in the tavern, though in his tale Cluracan is still an amoral ditz and a drunk who gets himself in trouble, requires Dream to save him, and dethrones the ruler out of revenge rather than duty, none of which is out of character.
• The Scott Pilgrim series. It's revealed in the final book of the series, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, that Scott's memories of his past experiences with his ex-girlfriends were altered by Gideon Graves, meaning some of the events shown in the previous books may/may not be entirely false.
• Done in Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool via thought balloons and dialog from Flynn "Flyin'" Ryan. Although he's secretly the tool's inventor and the mastermind behind Mr. Pilgrim, his thoughts often read like he's unaware of the big picture. Done particularly egregiously when he and a cohort are making plans, and he still refers to Mr. Pilgrim in the third person.
• At the beginning of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Kara tells a tale of abusive parents banishing her to Earth because she requested seasoning. Superman gives her an "Okay, now tell me the real story" stare and she relents.
• The Superior Foes of Spider-Man: This is used as an excuse for any continuity errors- the series is framed as a story Boomerang is telling a stranger at a bar, and anytime he says something that doesn't make sense with other stories, the other ones were right and Boomerang is just lying to the guy.
• In his debut in Supreme Power Emil Burbank shares his story to a military contact, making himself sound a promising and eager scientist. The panels show the truth, which is that Burbank is a murderous sociopath who doesn't care who he steps on to get ahead.
• Teen Titans Go!:
  • In Issue #40, some H.I.V.E. 5 villains recall past run-ins with the Teen Titans. The flashbacks show that, in most cases, escaping the heroes took more luck and less skill than their narrations suggest.
  • When Beast Boy narrates his origin, he messes up several details and keeps forgetting where his parents were and which creature they were dealing with.
• In the first annual for Thunderbolts Citizen V tells new member Jolt how the team formed. As Jolt is unaware they're really villains in disguise, V (aka Baron Zemo) alters details from locations (he says he met Techno in Minneapolis when the Fixer was in Atlanta) to their origins and the true reasons they formed.
• Common in Twisted Tales. Examples include:
  • "Banjo Lessons": A man narrates, in increasingly detailed flashbacks, the circumstances that led him to have a psychotic break and murder his friends. He claims it's due to his suppressed rage over an incident where they killed and ate a dog while on their hunting trip, but a court sees through him and realizes the truth — "Banjo" the dog was actually their (black, while the men were white) hunting guide.
  • "Me An' Ol' Rex": A mentally disabled hick boy is beaten by his abusive father, but finds solace in "Rex", his dinosaur friend. Rex eventually grows bigger and begins eating people who the boy feeds to him. The boy eventually commits suicide because he knows he'll be blamed for the people's disappearance. We then discover that "Rex" is not a dinosaur, but his father, who was driven to cannibalism when locked in the shed for the boy's own protection. The dinosaur story was his delusion or lie.
• In Twisted Toyfare Theatre, the perpetually drunk Iron Man tells Spider-Man about how Bucky died (again).
  Iron Man: I shtood my ground, but it wash too late! The Shweathogs got him...
  Captain America: "Sweathogs"? I thought Pez Dispensers were chasing you!
  Iron Man: Thash the weird part...
• Rorschach in Watchmen is a good example of this, especially when he talks about himself. The artwork actually uses an unreliable framing device (one of many the work contains) to show "Rorschach" in the first person and Walter Kovacs in the 3rd person (walking around in the background of the same chapter), leading to The Reveal. This both misdirects the audience as to who Rorschach is behind the mask, and contributes to the sense of Rorschach's disconnection from "the man in the mirror", so to speak.
• Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons: Going along with Written by the Winners, the opening narration invokes this saying there is no "objective" version of history and that this is simply the Amazons' version of it.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin's six year-old imagination has the tendency to run away with him, resulting in spectacular fantasy sequences featuring characters like Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, and Tracer Bullet. Then, of course, there's Hobbes himself, Calvin's stuffed tiger to whom he attaches a personality. Hobbes is even drawn differently when other characters are in the panel, to reflect how they see him as just a toy. Word of God is deliberately mum on whether or not Hobbes is just a stuffed toy, or really somehow alive. And then there's the storyline where Hobbes ties Calvin to a chair and Calvin's dad finds him and can't for his life figure out how the heck Calvin has managed this...

Music

• Abba's 'The Day Before You Came' recounts a day in the singer's life, presumably from a long time ago, 'before you came'. Who 'you' are is never elaborated on, nor what you did that changed her life so drastically, and even the things she recalls are fuzzy and unclear. Every sentence begins with 'I must have', implying even the narrator isn't quite sure, except that the day was a very average and normal one.
• Evillious Chronicles:
  • Eve Moonlit, the character Vocaloid Hatsune Miku plays in "Moonlit Bear", talked about how she found two apples deep in the wood and got chased by a bear. As it turned out, the apples are two infants and the bear their mother, whom Eve ended up killing.
  • "Tailor Shop on Enbizaka": Kayo Sudou, played by the Vocaloid Luka Megurine, sang about her lover cheating on her with 3 women (one of whom is mentioned to be disturbingly young). It turns out her lover was Dead to Begin With, and the man she thought was her lover was a completely different person, and the three people she murdered to get to him were his wife and kids. It becomes a double case when it's revealed in the novel that Kayo was perfectly aware of who this man was and had totally different motives for killing him and his family. The song recounts the false testimony she gave when caught.
• Most of the Barenaked Ladies song "The Old Apartment" is meant to imply that the narrator has broken into his ex-girlfriend's apartment in a fit of creepy stalkerishness. Toward the end of the song, he reveals that he and the girlfriend are still together, and have just moved to a nicer house; he's broken into their old place in a fit of creepy nostalgia.
• The protagonist of King Diamond's concept album The Graveyard claims that he was thrown into a mental hospital because he threatened to expose a politician as a child molester. Since the entire album is from his point of view, and he's an insane killer, it's not clear if he's telling the truth or just crazy.
• The refrain of Gaelic Storm's "Johnny Tarr" goes: "Even if you saw it yourself you wouldn't believe it/But I wouldn't trust a person like me if I were you/Sure I wasn't there - I swear I have an alibi/I heard it from a man who knows a fella who swears it's true". The story told in the song is borderline fantasy, wherein the title character dies of thirst in the middle of a drinking contest.
• They Might Be Giants do this so much they considered calling one of their albums Unreliable Narrator.
  • "Purple Toupee" from Lincoln is built around the narrator's horribly mangled memories of newsworthy events of the 60s ("I remember the book depository where they crowned the king of Cuba"..."Martin X was mad when they outlawed bell bottoms").
  • "I Should Be Allowed To Think" from John Henry was described as one of these in an interview with John Linnell. It's about a guy who talks like he's some kind of persecuted genius when the truth is he's a pretentious dullard.
• Denton, TX based Slobberbone's "Billy Pritchard" features a father telling his daughter how he doesn't approve of her relationship with a boy in her town, and implies that he killed her brother. Near the end of the song, the daughter gives her response, and we learn that the father shot his own son in the back of the head after mistaking him for Billy, and that most of what he had said was a lie.
• Eminem played with this for the majority of his career. His 'Slim Shady' character was an obvious parody of the excesses of the gangsta rapper archetype, but a lot of the devices Eminem used with Slim Shady were kept on even after he abandoned the character. How much of Eminem's rapping reflected his own attitudes is a very debatable question. Eminem often twists fact and fantasy in his songs, explaining why so many real-life people felt the need to sue him for slander. He lampshades this himself in the song "Criminal" from The Marshall Mathers LP.
  A lot of people ask me.. stupid fucking questions
  A lot of people think that.. what I say on records
  or what I talk about on a record, that I actually do in real life
  or that I believe in it
  Or if I say that, I wanna kill somebody, that..
  I'm actually gonna do it
  or that I believe in it
  Well, shit.. if you believe that
  then I'll kill you
• Rael, the protagonist of the Genesis Concept Album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, is practically made of this trope.
• Iron Maiden's "Dance of Death" implies this: "I'd one drink but no more." Which is something a drunkard might claim, so the narrator's ghastly meeting with the supernatural was just an alcohol-induced nightmare.
• In Joanna Newsom's song "Colleen", the story is told by a young mermaid or sea nymph who lost her memory and was subsequently adopted by humans. It's implied that by the end of the song, she's still unaware that she's not human, although it's obvious from the lyrics.
  I'll tell it as I best know how, and that's the way it was told to me: I must have once been a thief or a whore, then surely was thrown overboard, where, they say, I came this way from the deep blue sea...
• Pink Floyd's The Wall, the movie in particular.
• Ludo's song "Lake Pontchartrain" is told from the perspective of a young man who supposedly witnessed his friends' watery, supernatural deaths. But at the last verse he adds; "That's how it happened/Why would I lie?/There were no bodies/I got none to hide", implying that he's being tried for killing them.
• The Decemberists has "We Both Go Down Together". It is supposedly a tale of Starcrossed Lovers from different social classes who kill themselves to be together, but with lines like "You wept, but your soul was willing", it is possible that the narrator is a deranged rapist believing he and his victim are tragic lovers.
• Gorillaz bassist Murdoc is notorious for this. He may be the only speaking witness to Noodle's disappearance and apparent death, but he changes the story every time he tells it. Sort of justified in that he claims to be withholding information in hopes of a movie deal. Of course, Murdoc's been known for exaggerating stories and flat out lying on important topics, so it's possible that he's just making things up as he goes.
• Regal Pinion's songs has some of this. Sometimes the narrator's don't know if they can even trust themselves.
• Many of Randy Newman's songs feature one of these.
• In Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to take me away HAHA," the main character went mad because his wife divorced him (or his dog ran away, depends on the interpretation). In another song in the series sung from the point of view of the wife\dog, it shows he wasn't really all there beforehand.
• The Nick Cave song "The Curse of Millhaven" from the album Murder Ballads introduces us to Lottie, a young teen girl who recounts the nasty murders that have been plaguing her small town. By the end of the song, it's revealed that Lottie herself is the curse of Millhaven and has been committing all the killings.
• The Silverstein song "A Great Fire" and what follows throughout the album "A Shipwreck in The Sand". The first song talks about how the protagonist/hero saves his wife and daughter from their house that's burning down.though there are some things in the song to hint at something not quite right with how the husband wife treat each other;this was my home/this was my life/it's not always just about you. it doesn't become apparent till a later song what happened to cause the fire. in "I Am The Arsonist" he set the house on fire himself, because in the second song "Vices" he found out his wife was cheating on him, which lead to drinking, trying to hide he knew and knew how disappointed in him his wife was. it culminates in a song just before the last 2, "A Hero Loses Everyday", in which he states; The Protagonist became/The villian they disdain/In every way and ends on a realization that they could never have truly loved each other in the first place, because they were broken people.
• In the Mercedes Lackey / Frank Hayes song The Leslac Version, Leslac the bard tries to tell the story of wandering heroes Tarma and Kethry liberating Viden town, but Tarma keeps interrupting with snarky corrections. In his version they deliberately sought out the tyrant to bring him down; in her version he died accidentally in a drunken bar fight. He plays up their nobility, she plays it down, but the truth is probably closer to Tarma's version:
  Leslac: They searched through all the town to find and bring him to defeat.
  Tarma: Like hell what we were searching for was wine and bread and meat!
  Leslac: They found him in the tavern and they challenged him to fight.
  Tarma: We found him holding up the bar drunk as a pig that night!
  • Lackey went on to write a short story about the events surrounding this song. Tarma's version has a few minor inaccuracies, but Leslac's version is complete nonsense. The amusing thing is that Leslac was present for the events of the song, but ultimately decided that he couldn't write a song about how a belligerent drunk (Who coincidentally happened to be the unpopular local lord) picked a fight with a couple travelers for no intelligent reason, got hit with a broomstick, and accidentally broke his skull against the fireplace and died. So he wrote a song about how the story should have gone. In fact, the author invented Leslac to handwave away mistakes she wrote in some of the Tarma and Kethry stories due to the fact that she wrote some of the songs about them before the stories behind the songs, and forgot a few details. All mistakes in the songs are Leslac's either because he didn't do the research, or changed the story to be more dramatic.
• The Bee Gees: "And somehow in this madness believe she was mine -but...I'm a liar"
• In Tom Waits' "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" from Blue Valentine a woman tells an old acquaintance named Charlie (possibly an ex) that she's cleaned up, got married, has a child on the way (though it isn't her husband's) and is happy for the first time since an unspecified accident. She then admits it's all a lie; in fact she's lonely, in debt and is writing to Charlie to ask for money. She concludes by telling him she'll be "eligible for parole on Valentine's Day."
• The old blues song "Get My Shotgun" by Lightnin' Hopkins is one long rant by a cuckolded man who announces that he's going to shoot his old lady for foolin' around with too many men. At the end, his wife dares him to go through with it, and he admits that his shotgun doesn't even work.
• Nickelback's "Do This Anymore" addresses a failed relationship and the reasons why it failed. However, the lines “She says I'm only tellin' half of it / That's probably 'cause there's only half worth tellin'” definitely throw into question whether the protagonist is being completely honest with us as the audience.
• The Matchbox Twenty song "Unwell" is about a man who is trying to convince people that he isn't crazy, just "unwell". The verses make it clear that he is suffering from delusions and paranoia.
• In Nena's classic "99 luftballoons" ("99 red balloons" in English) a nuclear war starts due to the narrator releasing balloons. How would they know? In the aftermath of a major nuclear exchange would a member of the general public be told how it started? Even if the appropriate people eventually figured it out? The narrator admits to looking for "a souvenir just to prove that we were here." But a balloon hardly proves anything let alone that they started a war. Perhaps she is just trying to explain what happened, to assign a cause she could understand.
• Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" is narrated by a huge fan of the titular band, who gushes about how cool they look and what a great show they put on, but never mentions anything about the songs themselves, with the implication that they're a crappy style-over-substance band as was becoming more and more common in the early '70s.
• The narrator in TISM's "I might be a cunt but I'm not a fucking cunt" claims he'd never have sex with your mum, even though he did with your sister. In the last verse he admits he might not tell the truth all the time, and asks for your mum's phone number.
• The Living Tombstone: 'Drunk' recounts a man's bar crawl becoming increasingly less healthy, revealing his alcoholic and self-destructive tendencies. As the song progresses and he gets drunker he loses track of how many shots he's had, where his friends are, and eventually begins seeing things that aren't there. He convinces himself the crowd at the bar is jealous of him, and when he finally leaves the bar sees the stars as eyes watching him from Heaven.
  My vision is blurry, as long as I'm thirsting, nobody can hurt me, hurt me, hurt me!

Podcasts

• In In Strange Woods, by his own admission, Brett is captivated by Peregrine, Howl, and their stories, leading to bias towards them in his narrating and thoughts.

Radio

• Big Finish Doctor Who audio
  • And The Pirates is told by Evelyn and the Doctor. Evelyn gets many of the facts wrong and is caught making up names on the spot, such as "John Johnson" and "Tom Thompson". She even initially says the Doctor died mere minutes after saying he'll be around to tell more of the story. Parts are told out of order, and all the sailors have the same voice because she can't impersonate them well. The Doctor's version of events is much more accurate but suspiciously full of characters complimenting his unorthodox wardrobe.
  • The Companion Chronicles audio The Memory Cheats is told first person by Zoe to a Company psychologist, as they try to unlock her memories of traveling with the Doctor (wiped by the Time Lords at the end of "The War Games"). At the end, she reveals she made it all up based on information the psychologist gave her, the one time she did meet the Doctor, and her dreams. But she can't explain why there's a photo of her from 1919. Not only are we left not knowing how much of the story is true, so is Zoe herself.
  • Used to a lesser extent in the previous story in the arc, "Echoes of Grey." The parts that Zoe narrates are accurate. The parts narrated by Ali are lies; she was never there.
  • Omega features multiple flashbacks from Omega's perspective, and he's delusional. At least one event definitely didn't happen or, at least, not to him, and he's at the very least interpreting others in the context of this. Since a main theme of the story is how history is constantly rewritten (not in the time travel sense), we never do get a definite version.
• Dickensian parody Bleak Expectations uses this in the framing story for laughs:
  "We swore we would escape the school, or die in the attempt."
  "And what happened?"
  "We died in the attempt."
  "Oh, how awful!"
  "Of course not, you blundering idiot! How would I be talking to you now?"
• Occasionally used for humorous effect in the introductory narration on radio episodes of Our Miss Brooks. Cue a correction from Deadpan Snarker Miss Brooks.
• The Storyteller in John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme is frequently portrayed as a naive fool, on which occasions it's quite clear that what actually happened to him is not what he thinks happened. (For instance a ghost story that is obviously a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, or a love story that is actually the tale of how he was gulled by a conwoman.)

Tabletop Games

• Indie storytelling game The Adventures of Baron Munchausen makes every player into an unreliable narrator, and has specific mechanics governing how players can challenge the veracity of each others' tales.
• Much like the below Warhammer example, all of the material on BattleTech is written from an in-universe perspective, always of some particular person or organization. This goes for everything, even the technical readouts on new 'Mechs and such. ComStar was the original viewpoint group, but it has since branched out to every faction. Some of the earlier books had significant errors (people doing things before their stated date of birth, or 'Mechs being developed before the invention of Battlemechs, etc), and the in-universe perspective allowed them to chalk it up to different perspectives or deliberate propaganda. It also allowed them to Retcon things that they didn't want.
• The Deadlands source books are divided into two to three sections. The Posse Territory sections are for general use, and give about as much information as the world at large knows. No Man's Land is for information only certain people would know, like the existence of Harrowed or how Huckster magic works. Both of these sections are filled with untruths, ranging from simple misinformation to Blatant Lies. The Marshall's Only sections have the lowdown on how things really work. Part of the setting's mystique is having the inner workings of the Reckoning remain a mystery to the players. Then, to make it all even more interesting, several of the Marshalls Only sections are double-bluffs, leadinig metagaming players to think there's something sinister going on when in fact there isn't.
• All of the character stats in the The Dresden Files RPG are treated this way, as extrapolations made by Billy, the RPG's writer and werewolf from Harry's "case files". He admits flatly that this heavily underestimates the power of a lot of important figures (like the White Council's senior members, the Denarians, Cowl, etc.), allowing the GM to make them as powerful as he or she desires. It also means that future books are not constrained to the metaphysics or stats laid out in the RPG.
• Many 2nd edition Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks, and most notably the Planescape ones, are assigned specific narrators. (This also includes the Ravenloft Van Richten's Guides and a bunch of others.) Planescape had more unreliable narrators than others, considering the fact that at least one of them was certifiably insane by human standards...
  • In fact, the Splat book Faces of Evil: The Fiends had several oddball narrators presented as contributors, but by far the most interesting — and likely most unreliable — one was the blue slaad Xanxost who was... Who was a slaad. That was the best way the editor could describe Xanxost. Xanxost seemed to be less chaotic than most of its kind, being able to write complete sentences and follow a single train of thought for nearly an entire paragraph at times, but was distracted easily (mostly by its appetite), repeated itself often, and seemed to have trouble counting. (Xanxost appeared later to narrate the chapter on the Quasielemental Plane of Steam in the later book The Inner Planes, the editor of that book claiming it was recruited to pen the chapter because feedback to its commentary in the former book was overwhelmingly positive.)
  • An especially interesting example of this was the Netheril: Empire of Magic sourcebook that described said lost civilization in the Forgotten Realms. Except one particular archwizard of immense power was never mentioned in the entire book, despite being a prominent figure. That is, until you start to try to figure out who the narrator was...
• Almost all source materials for games set in Greg Stafford's "Glorantha" (RuneQuest, HeroQuest, Dragon Pass, Nomad Gods) along with books (King of Sartar) are written in the style of Unreliable Narrators with no one absolute truth.
• Hoyle's Rules of Dragon Poker starts off with a fictional history of the game, in which the author offers two possible origins of the game, mocks both and ultimately chides the reader for not believing the more fantastic one when it turns out to be (allegedly) true. All this happens within about a page and a half.
• The first and early second edition sourcebooks of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG were all written from the subjective in-universe point of view of the clan or faction that was the primary focus of the book. This was done both for flavor and to give the GM the freedom to decide what was true and what wasn't in his campaign. This approach was eventually abandoned during the second edition because Wizards of the Coast thought it was too confusing for d20 players.
• All of the world background in White Wolf's Old World of Darkness is presented in this way. Each book. This is most notable in the splatbooks: each faction tells a different version of history in which their own faction is somehow older, smarter, and generally more awesome than all the others. Each game line had its own creation myths filtered through the interpretations and prejudices of whatever faction is the focus of the book you're reading and most are mutually exclusive.
  • The largest one: Demon: The Fallen. We never get the other viewpoint, and the viewpoint we do get is filtered through several millennia of resentment.
• Large parts of Shadowrun supplements were written as posts on an online message board, and the authors were ever eager to point out that anything could be wrong, exaggerated, or invented.
• Traveller Sourcebooks are kind of this way too, though far more reliable as it is a more mundane setting. There is enough leeway for a good gamemaster to go every which way.
• Used as a justification for adventure hooks in Unknown Armies, in the form of rumours that may or may not be true as the GM decides. One example: "Bigfoot has a social security number".
• Nearly all of the background material for Warhammer 40,000 is told from possibly inaccurate histories and skewed propaganda pieces, making the exact nature of the setting dubious at best.
  • While all of the material is written from the perspective of some particular group, which naturally wants to make itself the most sympathetic, the Imperium takes a Nineteen Eighty-Four approach to the way it handles information.
  • This trope (along with Future Imperfect) was specifically invoked when the Horus Heresy novels were first released. When fans pointed out that events in the novels contradicted what was in the 40k backstory, GW outright said "the backstory is history filtered through ten thousand years. The novels are what really happened." This trope also applies thanks to the novels, told from different perspectives, contradicting each other even in things like the basic timeline of events.
  • Invoked again with the Tau, who were initially introduced as an Always Lawful Good faction after part of the player base complained that there was too much GRIMDARK in the setting. After another section of the player base complained that the Tau were ruining the GRIMDARK, information popped up about forced sterilizations, concentration camps, and various other traditionally evil acts on the part of the Tau. The kicker? In-Universe, all of said information comes from the Imperium's propaganda machine, putting the right to Alternate Character Interpretation squarely in the players' laps.''
  • Games Workshop once said that while all published material is canon, not all of it is true...
• And like Warhammer 40,000 the regular Warhammer books are also written in an unreliable sort of way.

Visual Novels

• The Ace Attorney series is built on this trope. Quick rule of thumb: witnesses are always lying. Or exaggerating. Or leaving out details. Or straight up forgetting something. Or is Larry Butz and doing all four. It's rarer for a witness's account to be an accurate summary of their observations instead of complete bunk. Half of the game is using the evidence you collect to point out these inconsistencies to create a more factual account of the events and catch the real criminal. The only times a witness is accurately and completely recounting what they saw is when their testimony is harmful for your client. Will Powers in 2-4 is totally truthful and his testimony is useful in uncovering the true killer...when Maya is being held hostage on Phoenix getting said killer a Not Guilty verdict.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Implied with Celestia Ludenberg. Her free time events involve her telling stories of her gambling exploits... that if you do the research happen to line up suspiciously well with various gambling manga, making it unclear whether or not it's out-of-universe shout-outs and in-universe coincidences, or if Celestia just reads a lot of gambling manga and is lying/exaggerating to make herself look cooler- which would be very in-character for her. No one else from her life ever appears in any subsequent media, leaving the ultimate truthfulness of her statements up in the air.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: During the first trial, it eventually becomes clear that Kaede was withholding a few facts from the audience, though she never directly lied. She leaves out that she kept the shot-put ball instead of returning it, never tells us the reason she rearranged books (though she does lie to Shuichi about it), and leaves out that she tossed the shot-put ball down the vent before going down to the library when their camera trap alerted them. All of which would've revealed that she'd created a death trap for the Mastermind that ended up backfiring on her, getting her executed as the first Blackened.
  • Closing Argument puzzles have the player re-construct a manga to give the protagonist's final narration of how the crime occurred a visual representation. Since they only show up at the end of trials when the protagonists are sure what happened, they're generally accurate, but they're still merely illustrations of the protagonist's crime narrative, not a third-person reveal of what really happened. In the second case of the second game, for example, while the general sequence of events is correct, the killer is portrayed as alone with the victim when in fact there was a third person present, because the characters don't learn the sequence of events that led up to the murder, in which Peko intervened in an argument between Fuyuhiko and Mahiru, until after they voted. And in v3, the first Closing Argument is flat-out wrong, because Shuichi came to the wrong conclusion about how Rantaro died, thinking it was Kaede's death trap when the trap had in fact missed. The class votes for the wrong culprit and Monokuma executes the innocent Kaede because the true culprit was the mastermind. The Closing Argument is re-visted in the final chapter, this time showing what really happened.
• Taichi in CROSS†CHANNEL to some extent is an unreliable narrator. The first version of events about something he says or illustrates is rarely entirely correct and leaves out a great deal of necessary context. For example, he initially portrays his earlier relationship with Touko as a mixture of an experiment and mere seduction, but later it turns out he really was trying to have a relationship, but she turned out to be incredibly clingy and obsessed with him nearly to the point of being a yandere.
• Shikanosuke in Kira☆Kira is sufficiently kuudere that he won't admit what he's feeling, even to the reader. Despite him being the narrator it can fall to other characters to explain his emotions.
• No, Thank You!!!: In Maki's route, Haru chastises Maki for not saying anything to Tojo, Maki's last living childhood friend, when he was about to leave and return to the syndicate. Maki later repeats those words to him when Haru was about to leave and return to his organization.
  Haru: What's wrong with saying 'Don't die, it'd make me sad'? Are you too embarrassed or something?
  Maki: I'd be sad if you died.
• One Thousand Lies: Very straight example. Apart from the prologue and the epilogue, the game is written entirely by the protagonist Ciar. He took many liberties with the details of the story, which include creating an imaginary character and leaving out an incident in the past which is critical to the plot. Lampshaded by the title.
• The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983) is the Ur-Example among Visual Novels. The story is told through Second-Person Narration. In the game's twist ending, it is revealed that the narrator was the culprit all along.
• The early parts of A Profile do not have entirely accurate narration because it is all from the point of view of Masayuki, who insists on seeing the best in situations and people, even if they're terrible. After some of his backstory is revealed, the point is largely dropped.
• Raging Loop: Haruaki keeps much of his own past hidden, even from the player. In the late game it's revealed "Haruaki Fusaishi" isn't even his real name, and has outright lied in the narration about what he was doing in a petrol station out in rural Japan in the first place.
• Shiki in Tsukihime would like to let you know that he's only ever had one sibling, despite the fact that he refers to them in the plural.
• When They Cry:
  • You can hardly trust the narration in Higurashi: When They Cry, since a Hate Plague usually causes the point-of-view character to go crazy and start hallucinating.
    • Very well done in the manga-only arc Onisarashi-hen. In the final chapter, it's revealed that the point-of-view character is responsible for every murder in the story.
    • Also, Onikakushi-hen, although we only find out in later chapter. Rena and Mion were completely innocent, and Keiichi was hallucinating the Creepy Monotone, Hellish Pupils, and murder attempts.
    • Tatarigoroshi-hen plays with this, too. Keiichi kills Teppei Houjou in order to protect Satoko. But then his friends tell him he was at the festival at the time, and Satoko insists that her uncle abused her later that night. But wait! Teppei's missing and his body isn't where Keiichi buried it. Subverted by the fact that Keiichi did kill Teppei. Mion just had the body moved and everyone's giving Keiichi a cover story. As for Satoko? Well... Who says the POV character has to be the only crazy character?
  • The narrator in Umineko: When They Cry (or the camera, in the anime) is pretty much the queen of this trope. Anything the main character doesn't see with his own eyes is highly suspect, at best. A chunk of the series mystery is simply whether the series is a genuine mystery or a massive Mind Screw, since Beatrice is narrating most of the third-person sections and writing the TIPS. It's later confirmed that in the first four arcs only Battler's narration is reliable, and in EP5 only Erika's narration is reliable (though the scenes that she narrates are very few).

Webcomics

• Bad Machinery: Narrator unreliability is openly acknowledged in the footnote to this strip:
  It's worth saying at this point that Charlotte is merely describing to Shelley what she thinks the mystery boys might have said and done. There is no guarantee that these events transpired exactly this way. But there's no way of knowing that they didn't.
• In Collar 6, Butterfly and Trina give mutually exclusive versions of how Butterfly got information on Michelle's techniques from Trina, and Word of God has confirmed that this was intentional. Its unusual, in that both of them presented versions that made themselves look worse Butterfly claiming she tortured Trina, and Trina claiming she gave up the information freely.
• One of the characters in Flying Man and Friends, Harbor the loon, is convinced that his belly and the bottle of eggnog he carries with him count as two separate characters. This is never refuted, so it's his word against dead silence. In one strip, he somehow detonates an atomic bomb that is never explained (and is eventually undone). The entire story is unreliable.
• Tailsteak's sci-fi webcomic Forward has a literal narrator in the form of annotations, largely there to inform us about details of the depicted future timeline. Said narrator regularly assures the reader that all the AI in this world fall on the lower end of the Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence and neither deserve nor desire the same rights as humans so it's perfectly okay to own one... despite one of them being one of the two protagonists of the piece. "Its" actions are all just programming designed to mimic human behavior, we are told...
• In Frivolesque, any strip focusing mostly on Flore shouldn't be trusted too much. What's real and what's a figment of her wild imagination isn't always clear.
• Homestuck has a subversion. After the reader goes to Doc Scratch for some god moding help, he gives out a huge amount of exposition and his self-serving memory prompts Andrew Hussie, the creator of the comic, to break through the "fifth wall" and beat him up.
  • There's also the Mindfang Journal, embellished and flowery as it is written. Word of God is that everything Mindfang wrote in it is true, though only as she perceived it putting a few accounts into question.
  • Aranea Serket, Mindfang's pre-Scratch counterpart, is proudly the cast's Exposition Fairy, but the fact that she goes rogue in an attempt to defeat Lord English puts some of her claims into scrutiny.
• The Nightmare Fuel-ish animated short arc "Twist, Twist, Twist" in Jack. "I'm in hell because I love my wife... imagine that."
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Creation itself is a tale told by a Unreliable Narrator. The Central Theme of the setting (if not the comic's main story) is the power of lies and storytelling, and the nature of reality is mutable and often self-contradictory.
  "YISUN said: let there not be a genesis, for beginnings are false and I am a Consummate Liar"
• MegaTokyo has a consistent running theme of different perceptions of reality and what events fit into which character's reality, creating what is, in effect, an entire cast of unreliable narrators -what is perfectly obvious and logical for one character is dismissed out of hand as impossible by another, if it gets noticed at all.
  • Of course, considering how often it comes up, even so far as to be lampshaded by both characters and the author, this is probably more of an Unreliable Author.
  • Also, since all of the examples above are about Pirovision being unable to see Largoland, it's worth pointing out that it works both ways.
  • Additionally, nature and circumstances of Piro and Miho's "relationship" differ greatly depending on who's telling the story.
• The Order of the Stick
  • Early on, Durkon is lost in a dungeon with a female dwarf named Hilgya, and he's starting to fall for her. She tells him the story of how she came to be with the Linear Guild, where she's married against her will to a cruel husband who refuses to understand her needs, so she runs away to make her own life. The panels below her narration show that the "cruel husband" was in fact an extremely pleasant guy who was thrilled to be so lucky as to be married to a dwarf like Hilgya, and whose only need out of the relationship appeared to be meeting hers.
  • Tarquin tells Elan about how he carved out an empire in the Western Continent, but was booted out within a year (which is hardly unexpected in the region). While perfectly accurate, he fails to mention a few key details: He made his debut by conquering eleven nations in eight months, and it took a coalition of twenty-six other countries to finally defeat him.
  • Lampshaded in this comic, where Elan points out that the paladins they're traveling with are experiencing their "first unreliable narrator". Basically, their lord Soon told them that he had no contact with his old teammates after they all went their separate ways to protect each gate, and that Kraagor's gate's defenses were created by Serini with the mentality of the late Kraagor in mind. Serini initially backed this up and implied that she, too, had no contact with her old teammates. Actually, Serini secretly conspired with all of the surviving members of her team (except Soon) to shore up her defenses (but each one only individually), and Soon was only left out due to his own stubbornness; she did approach him.
• Played for Laughs in Penny Blackfeather by Nathaniel, whose recaps blatantly contradict events we've seen. He also trolls the Adventurer a couple of times.
• In Scandinavia and the World, none of the Scandinavian countries are telling the whole unvarnished truth about Norway's butter crisis.
• Sluggy Freelance
  • Done in a complicated way in "bROKEN": There's no narrator as such, but it's revealed at the end that some scenes have been shown through Torg's skewed memories. We keep seeing versions of a scene where he's standing in the background and someone else is sitting on the ground at the foreground. When he goes to see a psychiatrist having realised that perhaps these memories are inaccurate, he figures out that he's remembering things like that because he's suppressing a memory of what really happened in one scene near the end — where someone really was sitting like that, but which was shown differently, edited by his mind to remove evidence of something terrible.
  • Later, we believe we are seeing Torg relating his experiences in the Digbot city to Sasha, when in fact we are seeing Torg telling Kiki a largely embellished story about relating the experiences in the Digbot city to Sasha — a recursive flashback, as it were. While it definitely seemed weird, there was nothing to indicate that what we were seeing was false until Torg got killed by a porcupine on a boomerang — and then resurrected by said porcupine, who is also a necromancer.
  • A few of the Christmas stories, including a "Gift of the Maji" variation in which Torg and Riff sold their shoulders to science to pay for each other's coat/flannel... but they didn't appear shoulderless to the old man Torg told the story in a bar.
  • Torg's story to the storyteller in the original Stormbreaker saga. He gives an account that's at least partially the story of Army of Darkness including telling the storyteller he had a chainsaw for a hand. The majority of the story being accurate after this beginning is never questioned, except for the bits where we see that Torg edits it because the bard says no-one will believe that. Besides, Zoë is present to correct him.
• Sunstone is narrated by Lisa writing about the events some five years in the future; but Lisa is writing for retail, meaning some of the events are embellished. We know this due to the framing device showing Lisa's wife calling bullshit on certain events.
• Played with in a Super-Fun-Pak Comix strip titled "Unreliable Narrator", in which the protagonist is interrupted in his narration of his activities on an ordinary day by a call from an annoyed friend chastising him for not picking her up at the airport as promised.
• Twisted Tropes: Gargamel tries to convince a woman that cooking smurfs is justified becuase they will attack the villagers otherwise and the screams from the pot are just air.
• Unsounded: Duane is a near rabid nationalist and fundamentalist, and does not question many things he really should. This is not evident at the start of the tale but as time goes on it becomes clear that most of those he sees as villains are not only far more decent people than he claims, they're also not guilty of much he had the reader convinced they were responsible for.
• What the Fu is narrated by the main character, who sometimes pads out the blind spots with imaginary scenes, which employ even broader stereotypes than the comic generally does.
• In Yokoka's Quest, Yokoka is an unreliable narrator at the start of chapter 1, opening with "My name is Yokoka. I've lived here all my life!"... though the prologue immediately prior tells the reader that this isn't actually true.

Web Original

• The narrator in Farce of the Three Kingdoms is actually a character. He's mainly unreliable on account of being incredibly biased. The actual narrative makes it pretty clear that Liu Bei is a terrible person.
• Strong Bad in Homestar Runner is often a pathological liar. Sometimes narrating events that just happened as a complete fabrication. Probably most blatantly with how he narrates to us that he successfully popped Pom Pom with a pin. Seen here.
  • Complicating matters, the series' Negative Continuity occasionally reveals that Strong Bad's ridiculous fabrications actually happened, even (perhaps especially) when there's substantial evidence that they didn't. The character of Senor Cardgage is a prime example, originally being a hypothetical "cooler" (in Strong Bad's opinion) version of Strong Bad but later appearing in his own short (with the subtitle "Wait, is Senor Cardgage real!?!")
• The hosts of The Last Podcast on the Left absolutely love when they are able to get their information about a serial killer from the person themselves, such as via an autobiography. However, they are quick to note this trope is in effect and try to differentiate what they think is bullshit and what can be or has been corroborated. For example, Charles Manson's biography is clearly making an effort to make Manson sound like he was not nearly as involved as he was, while Pee-Wee Gaskins overstates his acts, claiming dozens, even hundreds of murders that are impossible to confirm.
• The Magnus Archives: In the first season, Jon often indicates that he thinks the statement-maker either wasn’t entirely truthful or was affected by drugs, a mental health condition or similar. In "Lost Johns' Cave" his assistants' research proves that statement is full of inaccuracies. Later we learn that Jon himself has been an unreliable narrator in his comments.
• Misadventures of Norma is a metafiction that story discusses it, with the characters snarking at the Lemony Narrator because they refuse to describe an entire days' worth of travel, resulting in a literal Plot Hole.
• A hazard when it comes to the stories on Not Always Right and its various sister-sites is that a number of the narrators/submitters telling their stories could very well be this. Since the submissions are published anonymously and they cut out referencing any names, there's no way of telling of whether or not the stories posted to the various websites are true, have been heavily embellished, or are just fake altogether.
• Oktober, a collection of journal entries from each of the main characters. Now, obviously, journal entries aren't going to be entirely accurate, so sometimes minor discrepancies appear. Other times though...
• Most of the only source of information we get about Salad Fingers comes from the titular character telling the audience. However, to say that Salad Fingers is mentally disturbed would be putting it lightly. He changes personalities and moods in about every scene, and his grasp on the world in general isn't very strong. Word of God confirms that he makes Salad Fingers' characterization inconsistent to mess with fans.
• Sam & Mickey's first Valentine's Day Episode has Barbie give three different accounts of how she and Ken met, each one tweaked to match the interests of whichever "little sister" she tells it to. Apparently they are all false. When flashbacks in "Alcoholics Anonymous" provided further contradictions, Sam & Mickey explained them away by admitting that alcohol ruined Barbie's memory.
• SCP Foundation:
  • The website is made up largely of documents. Given the nature of the Foundation, much of it is deliberate misinformation. Also, there tends to be a lot of stuff with black marker over it and a large amount of [DATA EXPUNGED].
  • There was one instance however in which all of the blacked out sections and [DATA EXPUNGED] were removed, allowing the article to be read in its entirety. Let's just say that there is a very, very good reason for those edits.
  • SCP-1867 ("A Gentleman"). Lord Blackwood thinks he's a British gentleman adventurer. He does exaggerate his tales, but there's considerable evidence that they aren't entirely delusional.
• Rather common in The Slender Man Mythos. Examples on the wiki include Damien in no small part thanks to his multiple personalities. A possible example (via Alternative Character Interpretation) would be Zeke Strahm, according to the final entry in the blog.
  • A notable example in the video of Tribe Twelve 'The Envelope', there is a piece of paper torn in half that says "unrel/ narra/". Noah may not be telling us everything.
  • Paranoia Fuel especially comes into play with Dare 2 Die where Ulryc wasn't even narrating for most of the time.
  • Arron of Strange Aeons could possibly be this as well. Very suspicious that he claimed to not be able to see the clips randomly in his videos.
  • The girls of One Hundred Yard Stare manage to subvert this trope and being worse by it. They tell the story as it happened from their point of view. Why they made the series is the true reveal. They are spreading the infection in the hope to divert the monsters attention, how do you feel being Slender bait?
  • Marble Hornets played this somewhat mildly, but it was still clear from fairly early on that, while Jay doesn't necessarily lie to the viewer, his memory isn't perfect due to the Operator's influence. The clearest example would be in Entry #71, where it's revealed that the very action of Alex giving Jay the tapes, the event that kicked off the entire series, went down a lot differently than how Jay remembered.
• Surprisingly enough, used in Survival of the Fittest. In the profile for v4 killer Clio Gabriella, it explains several parts of her personality, yet her actions in the game contradict this. Reason? Clio spent nearly all of her teenage life lying to her parents, her therapist, and nearly everyone she knew so that she could put on a demeanor of a normal, well-adjusted teenage girl, when secretly she was a basket case very close to breaking point.
• During The Third Night of The Tale of the Exile, Gaven Morren (who tells the story from a first person POV) is dosed with a potent hallucinogen. What follows is a trip into Daydream Surprise, dream logic, and Schrödinger's Butterfly, helped along by a character actively lying to him about events to prevent herself from disappearing.
• The merchant from Aladdin is revealed to be this in Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier. In reality, Ja'far is one of the nicest guys around (though hated by all) and Aladdin is a thieving asshole. The merchant himself is really Aladdin many years down the road.
• Unwanted Houseguest: Several episodes of "TRUE Scary Stories" feature narrators in states that could call their experiences into question. Notably, the protagonist of Episode Four had an apparently supernatural encounter while recovering from an appendectomy.
• Even though Update is a work that is simply the retelling of life experiences from the perspective of the protagonist, much of the information given is clearly not fully correct or telling the whole story, with how frequently it's inconsistent or contradictory, and has been proven at some cases to be flat out false. Determining how much of the story is being told, and how much of it is accurate is up to the reader's interpretation.
• Several characters get their own points of view in Void Domain. The POVs are kept tight, you never see, hear, or know anything that the current POV character does not see, hear, or know. This can lead to some incorrect conclusions due to the characters not having all the information.
• Cecil from Welcome to Night Vale is an earnest narrator, but not particularly reliable: he lets his biases color his reporting, has a skewed idea of what is normal, and lives in a police state where, presumably, he needs to be careful what he says. It's unclear exactly how much he believes of what he's told or whether he's using some very VERY dry sarcasm to get around government censorship. Also, the amount of time he's spent in Night Vale has left his knowledge of the outside world very lacking — he doesn't know what state "Mitchigan" is in, and only recently learned what a President is.
  • Kevin, his Desert Bluffs counterpart, is even more of one. His mind has been so warped by the forced cheerfulness of Desert Bluffs that he appears to be physically incapable of perceiving acts of violence; he mistakes Cecil trying to choke him for a hug, and thinks workers having seizures in an internment camp are smiling and dancing. He also blames all economic problems on people being sad and lazy, even when Lauren admits to him that she deliberately crashed the stock market just to see how he would react.
• The Jobe stories of the Whateley Universe. Jobe Wilkins narrates his own stories, explaining how as a handsome, dynamic, brilliant, but misunderstood bio-deviser, he has to put up with all kinds of grief from everyone else. Even within his own stories he seems to be an Unreliable Narrator. Everyone else in all other Whateley stories sees Jobe as an egocentric, inconsiderate, unattractive Heroic Comedic Sociopath who might be a little short on the 'heroic' part. Still, Jobe doesn't seem to lie about events, just put his own personal spin on interpreting them.
  • Anything Phase says about the Goodkinds. Canon (particularly "Ayla and the Late Trevor James Goodkind") has proven that there's a lot Ayla doesn't know about his family, but he keeps insisting that the Goodkinds are almost totally morally blameless, ignoring canon events because he doesn't want to apply them to his family or the anti-mutant organizations they support. This has come back to bite him on almost every occasion, but in this one area he seems utterly blind.
  • Mephisto the Mentalist lays a heavy mix of lies, truths, and half-truths on 'Dustin Redford', an agent of The Dark Avenger who was pretending to be a journalist researching Mephisto's history who had 'coincidentally' interviewed Mephisto's current false identity on the topic. Given that Mephisto is a one-man Deconstructor Fleet for a wide range of pop culture tropes, and a past master of The Power of Acting, he's able to craft a twisty maze for anyone who then tried to extract these claims from 'Redford' later down the line.

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