- Ur-Example: In the ancient Egyptian folktale Tale of Two Brothers, the wife of Anpu (that is, Anubis) tried to seduce her brother-in-law Bata (who outside of this story is a local deity in far Upper Egypt). When he refused, she used makeup to cover herself in fake bruises, and accused Bata of trying to seduce her and beating her for refusing his advances. Anpu completely fell for it and tried to kill Bata, who had to run away and get into all kinds of bizarre adventures to prove his innocence. This story was first recorded around the reign of Seti II,note in the 12th century BCE. That makes this trope Older Than Dirt.
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A-J
- A Brother's Price:
- In the backstory, Keifer Porter gets away with torturing and raping one of his younger wives by convincing her eldest sister that she "provoked him". Due to Love Makes You Dumb, he actually succeeds with this.
- A milder example would be Odelia, who is really hurt, but pretends to be unconscious in the hopes that handsome Jerin will enter the room where she lies without chaperone so that she can steal a kiss. She's not even able to sit up, so her plan likely involved asking Jerin for a kiss.
- Accidental Detectives: In The Phantom Outlaw of Wolf Creek, the villain tricked Delilah into taking a lot of the banks money with her while he was handing over the deed to the property he'd stolen from her, in order to frame her as a bank robber and discredit anything she had to say.
- Agatha Christie uses this trope on several occasions. In fact, if someone survives an attempt on their life in one of her books, there is a 90% chance they did it themselves.
- A Murder Is Announced is rife with deception, the most important one being that Miss Blacklock, who had ostensibly been the victim of attempted murder, was in fact the mastermind behind the attack.
- In Peril at End House, Nick makes it look like there have been multiple attempts on her life to fool Poirot into believing that her later murder of her cousin Maggie was just an accidental murder committed by someone else who mistook Maggie for her. She even eats chocolates she poisoned herself to further this deception.
- In Death on the Nile, the murderer gave himself an alibi — he was shot in the leg, and one of the victims therefore couldn't have been shot by him because he couldn't move fast enough to do it. Trick is, the shot everyone saw was fake. Only after doing the kill he "couldn't" have done did he go back and shoot his own leg.
- After the Funeral manages to slightly disguise the pattern of non-fatal attacks being self-inflicted by having two of them; one of them turns out to be a self-poisoning meant to misdirect, but the other (a Tap on the Head) was the real deal.
- The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side sees actress Marina Gregg poisoning her own drink and then offering it to her victim, and by extension painting herself as the intended target. She later poisons her own coffee to keep up the facade.
- In The Accursed Kings (Les Rois Maudits), the last Pope has just died, so the Cardinals have to elect one of them as the next one. Unfortunately, the two favorites for the post have exactly the same numbers of voters on each side, so the election process goes on for several years with no result. The French Royal Family is growing impatient, since their King just died and they can't legally get a new one if a Pope doesn't oversee the coronation — and the country will fall into chaos if there's no new King. They therefore decide to kidnap the Cardinals and lock them up together in a room as prisoners to force their decision process: they'll only release them if they walk out of here with a new Pope. The two candidates and their voters come up with a solution: they're going to vote for a Cardinal whose health is declining and who won't pass the next month anyway. Once that new Pope dies, they'll be free to restart the same incessant voting process.
- ...The final result is even more awesome and qualifies as Xanatos Speed Chess and Magnificent Bastard. The new Pope was actually working with the French Court all along and completely pretended having a deadly illness, because they anticipated how the Cardinals would take advantage of that. As soon as the voting has been confirmed, the ex-Cardinal and now Pope, who originally didn't get a single vote, rises from his deathbed with a triumphant smile. In a Mass "Oh, Crap!" moment, the Cardinals realize they've just jeopardized every single political planning they made for the next thirty years. The king is immediately crowned, and France gets an extremely grateful Pope by their side. So it's a subversion or a double example, depending on your interpretation.
- So you've just been left behind in a non-FTL-capable shuttle with a Hanoverian customs cutter closing in. What do you do? Well, if you're Midshipman Alexis Carew, you pretend to be a terrified sixteen-year-old girl with a drunken crew and board the Hanoverians to steal their ship when they come to rescue you. Notably she's asked afterwards if she had signaled surrender during the ruse (which would violate the Fictional Geneva Conventions), but responds that she never actually struck her colors and that her only response to surrender demands was, "It would appear that I have little choice in the matter."
- Artemis Fowl: Early on in The Arctic Incident, it's mentioned that the crimes committed by the B'wa Kell terrorist group include several attacks on facilities belonging to Opal Koboi. Shortly thereafter, it's revealed that Koboi herself is the group's benefactor, and the attacks on herself are designed to avert suspicion. It works, as the heroes don't realise she's responsible until The Dragon pulls a Just Between You and Me.
- In Bud, Not Buddy, Bud's foster brother Todd Amos is a Spoiled Brat who beats on Bud, then fakes an asthma attack when his mother catches him. His parents are easily convinced by his lies and punish Bud for "attacking" Todd.
- In The Caves of Klydor, Cord sets out to rescue Bren from the clutches of a team of Elite Mooks by feigning an injury. It backfires on him...but it turns out that Bren was pulling one of his own.
- The Chronicles of Dorsa: Tasia is accused of staging attacks on herself to throw off suspicion and gain sympathy when she's tried for supposedly murdering her father. It's all lies however-they were genuine failed attacks by the people behind his murder.
- A male example in Companions of the Night, it's how Ethan gets Kerry to help him at the laundry store. He is hurt, but considering he's a vampire, it's not serious injuries for him.
- A Court of Thorns and Roses: Feyre deliberately provokes Tamlin to the point of lashing out at her in A Court of Wings and Ruin in order to gain Lucien's (and the rest of Spring Court's) sympathy against him.
- In Daemon the eponymous daemon was designed with one of these built in. Sobol purposely introduced a flaw into it because while he could be sure someone would try to stop it, he couldn't be sure who they would be. When the Omniscient Council of Vagueness tried to exploit the flaw, the daemon simply shut down for a few minutes and, now armed with the knowledge of who attacked it, proceeded to destroy their finances and render them powerless.
- In Dragon Bones, Bastilla does this, by injuring her feet by running barefoot through the wilderness which makes that person more convincing as the poor, innocent victim. Ward is easily fooled, as protecting others is an integral part of his personality. Later, he uses the gambit himself, asking an ally to hit him over the head with a chamber pot, to make the villains think he had nothing to do with the escape of their other prisoners and is really on their side.
- Girls Don't Hit: Joss got away with killing a cop after seducing him by hitting herself, making it look like the killer had struck her then cut his throat. His colleagues bought this (helped by the fact she'd slept with several others too), thinking it's because she was not a target and the hitman spared her as a result since they don't kill for free.
- The Great Divorce: Sarah Smith's husband Frank's sin was using other peoples' pity to manipulate them and make them miserable. This trait is represented by the Tragedian, who eventually overtakes and (quite literally) consumes Frank's original personality.
- The entire point of Ann Coulter's book Guilty is to allege that the American Far Left has been pulling this on its right-wing opponents for several decades, with the Right being too dumbfounded by some of the allegations to intelligibly fight back. But this book is doing that for the right-wing people. It makes the right-wing look like the victims of "false victims." But this is a "chicken and egg" situation, so don't bother deciding who is the lion and who is the gazelle.
- Harry Potter:
- In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, it was revealed that Peter Pettigrew faked his death and framed Sirius Black for it.
- In the same book, Draco Malfoy used his injury from a hippogriff to get special treatment, eventually leading up to his dad using political leverage to order the hippogriff's execution.
- In book two of the H.I.V.E. Series, Laura uses this to lure Block and Tackle into a pit in the Maze.
- The Irregular at Magic High School:
- Miyuki deliberately acts weaker than she really is to encourage Tatsuya to stay with her as much as possible.
- Miyuki pretends to be less competent than she is to make absolutely certain that her Bodyguard Crush will never leave her. This is unnecessary, because he loves her just as much as she loves him and is (unbeknownst to her) smart enough to see through the ruse. Miyuki is just really insecure.
- Anti-magician extremists use the difference in power between magicians and ordinary humans as justification for removing the former's rights- as if it's their fault they were born with magic. The magicians victimized are usually able to fight back, but they don't, because they know that doing so would make them and their families a target of Immoral Journalists.
- After the GAU's sneak attack on Japan backfires, its leaders try to claim that Japan was the attacker. They do not explain why 800 Asian soldiers were in Japan in the first place.
- In Jedi Apprentice: The Rising Force, thirteen-year-old Obi-Wan Kenobi's rival Bruck Chun does this in an attempt to discredit Obi-Wan and prevent him from becoming a Jedi. It almost works, too.
- Joe Pickett: In Endangered, Dallas Cates is beaten up by his father and brother — dislocating his shoulder and breaking his ribs — in order to persuade Joe that he could not have committed the crime of which he is accused.
- The Joy Luck Club:
- One of the women tells her back story, in which she goes to live with her mother and her mother's second husband. It turns out that the husband has several wives and the second one frequently employs this trope by sickening herself by eating large amounts of opium and pretending to be dying so she could have her way. It gets to the point that she doesn't even need to eat opium to trick her husband. Ultimately, the narrator's mother goes one step further and actually does commit suicide by opium to ensure that her daughter is best treated and the second wife loses power. Possibly subverted in that the husband was extremely superstitious and feared angering a woman who would potentially come back to haunt him, rather than feeling sorry for her.
- Also used in the back story of another woman, who was forced into an arranged marriage with a boy she only ever loved like a brother. She escapes the marriage and the wrath of her mother in law (who was pissed at the lack of grandchildren) by screaming in fear and claiming that the ghost of a family ancestor had tormented her in the night. She then spins an elaborate tale that boils down to that she and her husband weren't fated to marry, he should have married one of the servant girls (the servant in question was pregnant and the woman knew this) with further claims that her husband spiritually impregnated his "true wife" and that she's scared for her life. It works.
K-Z
- Matilda in The Monk pretends that she is poisoned and dying in order to break Ambrosio's defenses down so he will sleep with her. While it is possible to interpret her as being honest, she gets over her "fatal illness" quickly and easily.
- In Paladin of Souls, Ista threatened the head of her guards with this to make him give in to her demands after they were both rescued from a raiding party. Unusually for this trope Ista is presented as the reasonable one, pulling this option out only after her request for something to eat and a place to lie down was met with gibbering about needing to locate accommodations more suitable for a Dowager Royinanote than the field encampment of the troops that rescued them and nothing else was getting through.
- In Non-Stop when Zilliac, the Greene's guard commander, darts into Roy's cabin while pursuing Marapper, Roy pretends he's been hit by the door. First Zilliac briefly trash-talks him but as soon as he turns his back on him, Roy hits him over the head with a chair.
- In The Quantum Thief—trilogy this is one of Gentleman Thief Jean le Flambeur's favourite strategies. He puts himself in a position where his enemies see him as weak and vulnerable, and weakly trying to bluff them into thinking that he still has some ace in the hole. It inevitably turns out that he does have a secret plan, and almost never the one which he seemed to be bluffing about, and which usually requires the opponent to be suspicious, confident and vengeful to work in the first place.
- In the Raffles story "The Return Match", Raffles knocks himself out with chloroform and a blow to the head to prevent the police from thinking he let a criminal escape willingly.
- The most famous Wounded Gazelle Gambit of Romance of the Three Kingdoms happens in the lead up to the battle of Chi Bi, where Zhou Yu and Huang Gai pretended to have a falling out, after which Zhou Yu has Huang Gai flogged in public to help bolster Huang Gai's Fake Defector claims. (In fact, should TV tropes ever get translated into Chinese, this incident would be the Trope Namer.)
- Sabina Kane: Sabina is a vampire, and not a vegetarian, either. A few times she's mentioned having found prey by going to bad parts of town and waiting for someone to mug her. She even fed on an attempted rapist once.
- In Sideways Stories from Wayside School, a boy has been pulling on his classmate's pigtails. When warned by the teacher to stop or she will send him home early, the boy resolves to stop so as not to get into trouble... and suddenly, the girl screams out again, even though he didn't touch her.
- Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: The book Sweet Revenge reveals that Rosemary Hershey used this to ruin Isabelle Flanders. Too bad for her that Isabelle had help in getting back on her feet and she is now gunning for her....
- A Song of Ice and Fire: As part of Littlefinger's bid to retain control of the Vale after Lysa's death, he bribes one of the lesser lords, who come to visit him and make their dissatisfaction with him known, to draw his sword threateningly in a moment of feigned anger. Such a blatant breach of Sacred Hospitality makes it harder for the other lords to claim the moral high ground, buying Littlefinger more time and bargaining power to solidify his claim.
- Star Trek Expanded Universe:
- In the Star Trek: Millennium novels, the human archaeologist/adventurer Vash appears to have been hit by a toxic dart in an assassination attempt and is rushed to the infirmary, unconscious. The poison is an Andorian neurotoxin, implicating the Andorians Satr and Leen, who are rivals to Vash (and particularly shady characters). It is not in fact fatal to Humans, though, and Vash fully recovers. She later mentions the toxin by name in a throw-away comment, alerting Doctor Bashir that she planned the whole thing — because he never mentioned the name, and there are dozens of neurotoxins it could have been. It turns out Vash injected herself with the dart.
- During the climactic ship battle in Dreadnought!, Kirk tricks the villain and his cronies by having Enterprise appear to lose power and Spock broadcast that the ship is critically damaged and that Kirk has been mortally wounded. The villains take the bait and move in to secure Enterprise and take prisoners, but Enterprise powers back up and launches a counter-attack that badly damages the other ships and starts to swing the battle in Enterprise and Star Empire's favor.
- In Star Wars Legends by one of the good guys: "The Sand Tender" is the tale of Momaw Nadon (better known to fans of the movies as "Hammerhead"), an exiled Ithorian priest who is secretly helping the Rebel Alliance on Tatooine. When word gets out that Nadon might know where the blueprints for the Death Star are hidden (which he does, since he is friends with Obi-Wan Kenobi), the cold-hearted Imperial Lieutenant Alima comes to Nadon's house and warns him that if he does not tell him where R2-D2 is, Alima will sew open Nadon's eyes and force him to watch as the lieutenant incinerates all of the plants in his house (which, being Ithorian plants, are semisentient and can feel pain). Nadon is conflicted: he is repelled by the thought of betraying the Rebels, but he doesn't want to see his plant friends slaughtered either. He decides to kill Alima in desperation, even though as a priest he is supposed to be completely pacifistic. He buys a gun and goes to shoot Alima with it, but the lieutenant tricks him and shoots him first — and then, when the Hammerhead is lying wounded on the ground, kicks him so remorselessly that Nadon is left badly bruised. This gives Nadon another idea: he goes to Alima's superior officer and lies that the lieutenant had tortured him to get information on R2-D2 but then had not done anything with that information, offering his bruises from when Alima kicked him as "proof." Nadon assumes that Alima will now be either demoted or imprisoned, but the superior is so outraged by Alima's supposed incompetence that he has the lieutenant callously executed. Nadon is horrified that he has caused someone to be killed — even if it was unintentional — and decides to do penance by taking DNA from Lieutenant Alima's corpse, planning to use his genetic engineering skills to clone twin sons whom he will raise to be the good sort of person their father never was.
- Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising: In the final battle, admiral Ar'alani orders one of her ships to fake grave avaries in order to beg the neutral Vak to help evacuate the crew. then she briar-patches the Nikardun into opening fire on the Vak rescue shuttles, showing the Vak how little the Nikardun care about their neutrality.
- The Stormlight Archive: Discussed in Edgedancer. The Stump's orphanage often receives children who were abandoned due to illness or injury, and she is quick to accuse them of faking for sympathy and free food. After all, their parents usually come to collect them after a few days, and they walk out perfectly healthy. They're not faking. The Stump doesn't realize that she has healing powers, and she's been subconsciously healing the children.
- Tempest (2011): In Tempest Unleashed, the evil sea witch Tiamat pretends to be a human woman who lost her surfboard and hit her head. When Mark swims over to help her, she abducts him and chains him on the ocean floor with an oxygen tank.
- Subverted in To Kill a Mockingbird. Mayella claims she was raped when, in fact, it was the opposite, in order to get rid of her guilt about kissing a black man.
- One of Tom Holt's near-interchangeable protagonists at one point remembers how, when left to play with a young cousin, the little rodent would at the first hint of boredom burst into tears and run out crying "Mummy, he hit me!" Since most of Tom Holt's protagonists are Butt Monkeys and/or Chew Toys, this is pretty much standard.
- In The Twilight Saga, Bella pulls this off by pulling Crocodile Tears after Leah calls her out for mistreating Jacob, making the others (including Jacob) believe that Leah hurt her feelings.
- In the Warhammer 40,000: Blood Angels novel Deus Encarmine, Inquisitor Stele accuses the astropath Horin of trying to kill him and uses psyker magic to strengthen his case. The Space Marines he deludes promptly shoot the astropath apart.
- Faile threatens romantic rival Berelain with this in The Wheel of Time, threatening to challenge Berelain to a Duel to the Death. Both women know that their respective odds of success in such a duel are around 50/50, but Faile points out that if she (Faile) wins, Berelain is dead and Perrin (the central point of the love triangle) is pissed but will get over it, but if Berelain wins, then she (Berelain) becomes the one who killed Perrin's beloved wife and will never have a chance with him again. The threat works.
