Basic Trope: A character gets well-known facts wrong In-Universe.
- Straight: Ben's essay on The Black Death starts with a medieval English family celebrating the 4th of July.
- Exaggerated:
- Ben's essay on the Black Death starts with a Japanese Viking family fighting off dinosaurs that interrupted them while they were trying to watch a 4th of July TV special. It's all downhill from there.
- Ben believes that "the Black Death" was a Nazi euthanasia program, so he ends up writing a Completely Off-Topic Report full of blatantly wrong "facts" about the Nazis.
- Downplayed:
- Ben's essay on the Black Death is mostly well-written, but it does have one pretty major flaw: the opening paragraph implies that the plague also ravaged the US.
- The facts in Ben's essay are correct, with the exception of an obvious joke "fact" that he threw in for fun and forgot to edit out.
- Ben is incorrect about a fact that he could understandably be wrong about. While doing a report on the state of Illinois, Ben incorrectly states that its capital city is Chicago, when in actuality it's Springfield.
- Justified:
- Ben is Book Dumb, The Ditz, and/or a Know-Nothing Know-It-All.
- Ben asked his friends to help him find a way to open his Black Death essay. His friends, who are either Know-Nothing Know-It-Alls or intentionally giving him bad information because it amuses them, suggest the 4th of July thing.
- The essay was a Last-Minute Project, so Ben's fact-checking was rushed or nonexistent.
- Ben conflated the (nowadays little known) 4th-of-july event important during the Black Death's time frame with the one celebrated nowadays.
- Inverted: Ben writes an unrealistically brilliant paper for his age.
- Subverted: Ben mentions that he got an F-- on his essay. It turns out to be because it was way too short and spent more time attacking the teacher than trying to be informative.
- Double Subverted: The one "informative" sentence in the essay was "The Black Death was a disease that killed a ton of people in, like, the '90s or something".
- Parodied: Ben's essay is subtitled "I Didn't Research This At All"Teacher: Sigh. At least he's honest, I guess.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Ben's essay is perfect, or only has a few minor mistakes.
- Enforced: The work relies on funding from a group that wanted to criticize the education system.
- Lampshaded: "A medieval English family celebrating the 4th of July. Don't you see the problem, Ben?"
- Invoked: Ben's mischievous friends deliberately give him bad information for his essays.
- Exploited: A time traveler uses Ben's fake facts as inspiration for his recreational remaking of history.
- Defied:
- Ben researches his paper properly.
- Ben gets his parents to look at his paper before he hands it in.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Ben's essay is so bad that his teacher wondered if he was joking.
- Played for Laughs: The "facts" in Ben's essay are Entertainingly Wrong.
- Played for Drama:
- Ben's essays keep getting facts wrong because the problems in his personal life make it difficult for him to focus on his schoolwork.
- Ben has a learning disability that he is bullied for.
- Played for Horror: Ben gets an F on his essay, and is abused by his parents for it.
Back to In-Universe Factoid Failure
