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Dramatically Missing the Point - TV Tropes

You put a woman who was attacked by a cop in a car with a cop?

Nobody wants to get this guy more than we do.

That's not the point.

Sometimes people can miss the point of things, due to being dense, stubborn, or lacking context, but the story treats this as a serious thing. The consequences can vary though, from a misunderstanding, to a tragedy, or even a Happy Ending.

One of the most common forms is someone being sad, seemingly due to a small trigger, and another person thinks it's just that trigger instead of the bigger picture.

Although this can be caused by people being stupid or delusional, as with an Irrational Hatred, often they can simply be naive, like people who don't realize that they are being asked out, or confessed to. This also could apply to when the mentor/Parent/Acquaintance leaves some sort of instructions or advice that is tragically misinterpreted. Likewise, ignoring another person's feelings may come to a head with a declaration of "Did You Think I Can't Feel?"

Also, this can happen in Comedies, it's just not meant to be silly ways of missing the point.

Many of the more moralistic examples of the Inspector Javert trope stem from this. Sometimes, you'll get a Javert who is simply confused or doesn't have all the facts, but the others persecute people they know are good simply because it's the rules. They're loyal to the letter of the law, but not its spirit.

A Sister Trope to Comically Missing the Point.

Compare Advice Backfire, Poor Communication Kills, "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot, Ignored Epiphany, Dramatic Irony, Selective Obliviousness, Stopped Reading Too Soon, Evil Cannot Comprehend Good.

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    Advertising 

• Commercials for the short-lived food Snack 'Ums would feature a kid trying out said product, then getting hurt doing a sports activity, such as high diving or street hockey. When asked by one of his friends if it hurt, he would reply "Yeah, but I think I liked it" and asks for some more, referring to the snack and not the injury.

    Anime & Manga 

• The events of the second chapter (or the second segment of the first episode) of Asteroid in Love is basically caused by Ao, as she freaks out from the profuse stream of text messages Mira sends her on the day they reunited, decides to consult a book on business emails to help her reply the texts. Ao's very formal response to Mira's texts makes Mira mistakenly think Ao doesn't like her anymore.
• Bakuman。:
  • After learning that Nakai said that he'd only draw for Aoki if Aoki becomes Nakai's girlfriend, Fukuda confronts Nakai and punches him, angrily saying that he's forgotten his promise to compete with the other members of "Team Fukuda." Nakai, who's lost sight of his goals, angrily complains about Fukuda meddling in his love life.
  • In the "PCP Copycat arc," someone imitates a "perfect crime" mentioned in PCP- breaking into a bank vault and leaving behind a note, thus causing Moral Guardians to come down even harder on the series. The point that both are missing is that while PCP are pranksters by nature, they only do "perfect crimes" that don't cause harm to others- when the crime was proposed in the manga itself, the characters decided against it, since someone breaking into the vault would cause the security company's reputation to suffer.
• In Blade of the Immortal, Anotsu's lower-classed grandfather lost his bid to advance in his dojo thanks to the master favoring his own son. The master used the excuse that the elder Anotsu was too much of a Combat Pragmatist, causing his grandson to start his crusade of eliminating traditional schools. What he fails to understand is that Japan's social system was specifically designed so that higher-classed people could never lose to their inferiors.
• Bleach:
  • The New Captain Amagai Arc has a villain whose motivation is that Head Captain Yamamoto killed his father. The only other clue he had is that the father's dying words were "Bakkoto," the MacGuffins and Empathetic Weapons featured in the arc. It turns out that the father's last words were actually "Beware the Bakkoto" and that the father had been forcibly bonded to said Bakkoto and had gone berserk, so Yamato killed him in self-defense. This makes the entire arc a Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story as had he not sworn revenge, the original villain's schemes would have still outed him as a villain and Amagai (who committed suicide out of remorse after losing to Ichigo and learning the truth) would still be alive.
  • In Uryu's introductory arc, he starts a "hollow hunting contest," between himself and Ichigo to see whether Soul Reapers or Quincies are superior, since he's bitter about the Soul Reapers abandoning his grandfather. Not only does this endanger many innocent people, but it also misses the point of what his grandfather was trying to accomplish- he wanted Soul Reapers and Quincies to cooperate. It's fairly telling that Ichigo gets the point the first time he's told the story, despite not having paid attention to it.
• Bloom Into You:
  • Many adults sing Touko's praises as being an ideal Student Council President who takes after her late sister, not realizing that Touko was putting up a façade, as was her sister. In Chapter 10, after hearing one of the teachers say something to this effect, Yuu, one of the few who's aware of Touko's insecurities, makes a brief internal monologue noting how much the teacher missed the mark.
  • While in middle school, Sayaka was once in a relationship with her senpai, only for the older girl to break off their relationship, thinking that they're getting too old for the Gay Romantic Phase, leading Sayaka to transfer out and go to Toomi East High School. In a side chapter, Sayaka's ex sees her again, and apologizes for making Sayaka interested in girls in the first place. Sayaka, who has come to terms with her sexuality and fallen in love with Touko, is deeply hurt by her ex's comments, and after reassuring the older girl that she no longer loves her, subtly expresses that she's still a lesbian by leaving arm-in-arm with Touko.
• Code Geass
  • In episode 21 of R2, Lelouch points out that he only wanted to exact vengeance so that good may result for others' sake, whereas his father threw his children's lives away for his own benefit. Lelouch argues that Charles had no right to think it was acceptable just because the things they'd planned to reunite the dead with the living happened to turn out well. But they missed how evil it was that they would've let their children die without even knowing whether their plan would succeed or not. Worse still, Charles continues to blame God when he's been the one responsible for making the world as awful as it is. Lelouch points out that, regardless of the innocent lives that would be lost for Britannia's benefit, even with his children in exile, Charles was still bent on conquering Japan. Even with all of this, Charles doesn't get it, and Lelouch declares that his father is too far gone to save.
  • Suzaku's ethos is that victory obtained through contemptible means is meaningless, which is why he works to be an Internal Reformist. Unfortunately, despite having his enemies and his allies stating so repeatedly, he never recognizes that his own efforts require him to willingly collaborate with a racist empire designed to oppress others, meaning any reform he could enact is doomed to fail from the onset. He finally realizes this after the Geass Lelouch gave him forces Suzaku to nuke Tokyo, forcing him to accept how pointless his actions were.
• This comes up in Teru Mikami's backstory in Death Note. As a child, Teru did what he could to protect his schoolmates from bullies, and while he enjoyed some initial success, in high school, the bullies retaliated against him, prompting his mother to advise him to give up on his crusade. The narration points out that she did so out of concern for his well-being, but Teru decided that his mother had no sense of justice, and actually rejoiced when she was killed along with a few of the bullies in an auto accident.
• Happens very often in Death Parade due to much of the series taking place in a sort of Afterlife Antechamber where recently deceased humans are secretly being judged by arbiters. Most of them don't realize this until it's too late and they've already crossed a line, at which point they will often beg for their lives, not realizing the futility of their actions even after realizing they've died.
  • The black-haired woman is prone to this as well. Most notably, she doesn't realize that the point of the judgment process is to deliberately make the situation as stressful as possible so that the guests will show their "true colors." When she questions Decim about it a few times, it isn't until she witnesses his actions causing his guests to assault one another that the nature of their job finally sinks in.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, this is played with in Rui's backstory. After he turned into a demon and killed a human, his parents were planning to kill him and then themselves as a way of atonement, only for Rui to kill them instead and conclude that they never loved him. Despite that, Rui understood what they were trying to do on some level, and the only way he could live with what he had done was to lie to himself that his parents had never loved him.
• Food Wars!: Much of the drama instigated by the antagonists in the story is due to them falling into this:
  • Both Erina Nakiri and her father Azami admire Joichiro Saiba as the ultimate chef, yet somehow they've made themselves a false image of him being a perfectionist who is obsessed with victory and does not admit failure. This is specially jarring in Erina's case, as flashbacks show that Joichiro outright tells her that the chance of failure is part of the fun of crafting a new dish. In Azami's case, he wants "revenge" on the culinary world who caused Joichiro to hit burnout due to people constantly pressuring him and overlooking the hard work he put into his dishes, not realizing, one, that he himself is acting the same way as the people who ruined his idol, and two, that Joichiro had long moved on and found happiness again in running a humble diner with his wife and son.
  • In the final arc, Asahi Saiba, Joichiro's disciple and surrogate son of sorts, decided to take Joichiro's advice "the secret to becoming a great chef is meeting a woman that makes you want to give all the food you make to her." as meaning he has to marry the ultimate female gourmet, Erina, to cook for. Obviously, Joichiro meant it as finding someone he actually wants to cook with all his heart for, but Asahi doesn't realize this until he faces Joichiro's biological son Soma in the BLUE, who asks him why he wanted to marry Erina in the first place. Worst of all, the girl he was trying to court was his half-sister, which would have had serious consequences had he succeeded.
• Fruits Basket: What drives Kyo and Yuki's Mutual Envy:
  • Yuki resents Kyo a lot because he thinks Kyo has the life with parental love and friends he desperately wants. While it's true Kyo has a good adoptive father in Kazuma, he has been very badly traumatized by his mother committing suicide and his biological father treating him like a disgusting monster. While the peers outside of the Sohma clan can act more natural around Kyo because he doesn't put on a perfect front like Yuki, Kyo is still unable to bond with people and pushes them away because of all the anger he has in him over the unfairness of his treatment from the Sohma clan and no one being able to understand him until he meets Tohru.
  • On the other side, Kyo resents Yuki for being the Rat, the first of the Zodiac animals and the one closest to God, whereas he's been unfairly ostracized and abused for being the Cat his entire life. What Kyo doesn't realize is that being accepted by the Zodiac isn't necessarily a good thing; his greedy mother saw him as nothing but a Meal Ticket and sold him to Akito, who horrifically abused and scarred him in numerous ways, his parents and older brother abandoned him to such a fate, and he couldn't make friends because of his higher status in the Zodiac and curse alienating him from the other kids.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, a downplayed example happens when Ed and Al's alchemy teacher Izumi learns that they violated a central taboo of alchemy by trying to transmute their mother back to life and expels them as their pupils. Ed and Al are so dejected by their teacher casting them out that they miss the subtext — she no longer sees them as students, but as equals. Instead, Ed and Al believe that Izumi has kicked them out for violating the law on human transmutation. Izumi's husband Sig has to point out to Ed and Al was Izumi was trying to say, so they only miss the point for so long.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: In Battle Tendency, when Joseph and Caesar climb the Hell Climb Pillar, Joseph notices that Caesar's hanging on by his fingertips, and assumes he's about to fall off. Joseph forgot something Caesar had told him before, about how Hamon is best concentrated in the fingertips, meaning that Caesar was actually climbing properly. Joseph then remembers Caesar's advice, gets the hint and eventually manages to get the hang of climbing the pillar.
• In Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Shirogane says that Princess Kaguya's beloved was guilty of this in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. The man had destroyed the elixir of immortality Kaguya had given him due to not wanting to live forever in a world without Kaguya. According to Shirogane, the elixir was Kaguya's way of promising to see him again, even if their reunion would take longer than a human's lifetime.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Arf tells Fate that seeing her sad and in pain from her quest for the Jewel Seeds is driving her insane with grief and begs her to stop. Fate's response is that she'll just have to repress her feelings to avoid upsetting Arf and try even harder to finish her mission. Fate eventually gets the point after her mother makes it clear that she never thought of Fate as her daughter, and regrets taking Arf's loyalty for granted and causing her pain by persisting in this painful and hopeless quest.
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Teana, who's quite competent despite not having much magic power or many rare abilities initially assumes that the only appropriate response to any mistake or inability to adequately contribute is to try even harder, which in turn leads to more problems. During the mission to protect the hotel, she and the other Forwards, who are essentially the last line of defense, don't see much action, so Teana tries to let loose with a magical barrage rather than hold out until Vita arrives, nearly injuring Subaru if not for Vita's intervention. After getting a harsh scolding from Vita and a calmer lecture from Nanoha, Teana pushes herself in training for several days, and tries a reckless combination attack against Nanoha during a training exercise, resulting in Nanoha blasting her into unconsciousness (which is implied to be partly the result of exhaustion). When Teana wakes up that night and is temporarily taken off active duty out of concern for her health, Teana protests and states her desire to be useful until Signum punches her in the face. After learning Nanoha's backstory and more of her training plans, Teana gets the point and decides to use what magic she has strategically.
• In My Hero Academia, Endeavor believes that the only thing between him and the title of #1 Hero is that he isn't as strong as All Might, never thinking that it's related to the fact that he is an awful person who scares and is a huge jerk even to his own fans (later chapters reveal he has gathered a large Hatedom in-universe), while All Might is an Ideal Hero whose main interest is to make citizens feel safe and protected and inspires hope to the people. Endeavor becomes painfully aware of what he's lacking when All Might is forced into retirement, and Endeavor becomes the #1 Hero by default, even though he can't be the Symbol of Peace that All Might had been. He's forced to clean up his act as a hero and a father, albeit with mixed results.
• The New Fishman Pirates of One Piece idolize Fisher Tiger, a fishman adventurer who attacked Marijoa, center of the human-run World Government, believing it to be retribution for the Fantastic Racism fishmen suffered, and practice anti-humanism to such a degree that they have no problem enslaving human pirates that sail towards Fishman Island. What they didn't seem to pick up on is that Tiger hated slavery in general, and attacked the city to free as many slaves as he could, regardless of race. It's also later revealed that while Fisher Tiger did hate humans, he was fully aware that this was a character flaw (hence saving human slaves along with fishmen) and hated himself for being unable to overcome it.
  • Arlong and Jimbei's friendship fell apart because Arlong refused to listen to Fisher Tiger's dying wish for peace between humans and Fishmen. Jimbei decided to follow that wish and accepted a position as a Warlord so the remaining Sun Pirates could go home safely to their families. Arlong instead saw Jimbei as a coward for serving the same government that killed their beloved captain and vowed to continue to wage war against humans.
• Pokémon the Series: Team Rocket's Meowth was just a normal member of his race until he developed his ability to talk and walk upright, which was a the result of this. He fell head over heels for a lady Meowth named Meowzie, who wouldn't give him the time of day. She told him she had no use for a common street Meowth when she had a human owner who gave her everything she wanted. Madly in love and desperate for a chance with her, Meowth missed the point that Meowzie's love for humans was mostly based in all the nice things they gave her and the luxurious life they allowed her to lead; he thought it was about the humans themselves and that if he taught himself to become more human-like, she would like him. He discovered his error when he returned to Meowzie, walking and talking like a human, only for her to call him a freak.
• In YuYu Hakusho, Kuwabara gets very angry with Yusuke for not telling him about Genkai's death, after having learned about the event in question in perhaps the worst way possible, but Kurama then tells Kuwabara that Yusuke didn't tell anyone else about it. Yusuke says it's because he was having trouble accepting it, and admitting what had happened would force him to accept reality. Kuwabara, who's often rather dense, replies as follows.

    Comic Books 

• Chick Tracts:
  • A lot of people who refuse to accept Christ don't get what the Christian who's witnessing to them is trying to express. For example, the sheriff in "Gun Slinger," assumes he's too good to go to Hell. In reality, the point of the tract is that it doesn't matter whether you're a good or bad person as long as you accept Jesus and repent of your sins; a notorious outlaw who'd repented of his sins before being executed goes to heaven, while the sheriff goes to hell.
  • Subverted in "Ransom." Bonnie, who's just learned that her sister and brother-in-law have no intention of paying her ransom, initially sounds like she needs a reality check when she says that she's already been ransomed, but then launches into a metaphor about Jesus paying the "ransom" for mankind's sins that ends up converting her kidnappers.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us, when Superman starts going over the edge, Batman points out that Superman is scaring people. Superman justifies himself by saying that the bad guys should be scared, not understanding that Batman meant people in general.
• A good chunk of suffering and death in the Marvel Universe is due to Thanos madly trying to earn Death's favor by killing people. Death apparently reciprocates those feelings, but she sometimes seems wary of Thanos' "offerings". At one point she bluntly told him that more death is the last thing she needs. This hasn't stopped Thanos' killing spree. He isn't called the "Mad" Titan for nothing.
• Revival sees dozens of people come back to life. Jordan Borchardt's mother asks if she saw God during her time dead and is disappointed that Jordan reports only blackness. Off this reaction Jordan slices off her eyelids so that next time she'll keep her eyes open.
• In Superman storyline Way of the World, Supergirl asks Wonder Woman how she can cure cancer because she promised an ill kid that she would save his life. Wonder Woman asks why, and Kara wrongly thinks Diana is asking "Why did you go to me specifically?" instead of "Why did you make such a reckless promise?".

  Supergirl: I promised a kid that I'd cure his cancer, and I'd like your help.
  Wonder Woman: Why?
  Supergirl: "Why?" Well, you've got a lot more experience than me, and I haven't really tried anything like this before...
  Wonder Woman: No. I mean why would you make that promise? To a child.

    Films — Animation 

• Coco: Ernesto de la Cruz missed the point of Héctor's songs. He sings "Remember Me" as a frivolous romance song rather than a tender lullaby. He also understands "The World Is Mi Familia" as an endorsement of career success over settling down and forming a family rather than the other way around.
• Encanto: Alma sees the magical "gifts" as something that her family must prove to be deserving of and never take for granted. Except a gift isn't a reward, it's an unconditional gesture of love. By believing it will preserve the magic to have her children and grandchildren live to benefit others, leading to rampant emotional instability, Alma unwittingly took the true gift, her family's safety and happiness, for granted. This is largely because of unresolved grief over the tragic death of her husband and fear of losing everything she loved.
• The Incredibles: Buddy Pine, also known as Syndrome, failed to become a superhero due to his narrow focus on external powers rather than the intrinsic motivations that drive true heroes to use their abilities for the greater good. Despite his talents as a Gadgeteer Genius and his obsession with superheroes, he neglected the altruistic values that inspire heroes to help others. As a child, Buddy misinterpreted Mr. Incredible's rejection, believing it was due to his lack of superpowers when it was actually because of his reckless behavior as "IncrediBoy". This flawed mentality persisted into adulthood, evident when Mr. Incredible criticizes Syndrome for killing retired superheroes to impersonate one. Syndrome dismisses this, claiming his technology made him legitimate enough to capture the Parr family and execute his plan, revealing his descent into a mass-murdering lunatic driven by a selfish fantasy. In other words, Syndrome was so fixated on the "super" aspect of being a superhero that he completely neglected the "hero" part.
• Khumba: Throughout most of the adventure, Khumba believes he needs the other half of his stripes in order to complete himself when he's actually already complete in spirit because of his courage and determination. Deconstructed earlier on when he believes his mother Lungisa's story about how the zebras got their stripes means he can get his when she really meant to tell the story to warn against conformity ("...but they all looked the same.") She dies knowing that her son misunderstood the point of her story.
• In Kung Fu Panda, the Dragon Scroll is said to impart enormous power upon those who read it and is the ultimate reward for the one chosen to be the Dragon Warrior. However, it would turn out that the power is all spiritual. The scroll itself is just a shiny surface acting as a mirror, showing the reflection of the one looking at it because all the power, skill, and value is within them, not the scroll. It's telling that Tai Lung and Shifu did not understand the meaning behind it and misunderstood what the Dragon Warrior was supposed to be all along. Tai Lung even says when looking at his own reflection that it's nothing.
• Megamind: Hal became a hero to impress Roxanne, not because he actually wanted to be a hero.
• In Mickey's Christmas Carol, in the past, when Isabelle asks if Scrooge made up his mind, she means about whether they will get married while he believes it was about the mortgage on their honeymoon cottage, which he quickly forecloses. Needless to say, Isabelle is heartbroken and walks out on him forever.
• Olaf's Frozen Adventure hinges on Olaf's belief that he can just find someone else's holiday tradition so Anna and Elsa can mimic it. He doesn't realize, either out of innocence or thoughtlessness, that a family tradition is a personal thing by nature.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Jack Horner, combined with Comically Missing the Point due to the Black Comedy nature of his character. Jack blames magical creatures for taking the public's attention away from his own shows in his childhood. Due to magical creatures already being commonplace in this world, and even having suffered Fantastic Racism in some places such as Duloc, it's clear the real reason the public moved on from Jack was that his entertainment "routine" was just repeating his nursery rhyme and nothing else. It's shown that even his parents were starting to get tired of his shtick after a while. By contrast, while being a magical talking puppet definitely helped, Pinocchio's routine involved fancy dance moves, a light show, and confetti, and was therefore simply more entertaining to watch.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: The sad truth about the Spider-Society's enforcement of Canon Events is that it demands that they can't step in to stop the deaths of anyone important to each Spider-Person when the whole mantra of being Spider-Man is to never knowingly allow someone to suffer or die because of inaction, meaning the Spider-Society is going against everything that Spider-Man is supposed to stand for. Miles himself indirectly states this when he says how messed up that is.
• Toy Story 4 builds its ending around this trope throughout most of the film. After having spent weeks not being played with by Bonnie, Woody fears he's lost his purpose, but still maintains loyalty to his owner in spite of the fact. His actions to prove his loyalty to her constantly end up causing him and his friends trouble, even if he never meant to. When he reencounters his old flame Bo Peep, she spends much of the time trying to convince him he needs to move on with his life, but he doesn't quite seem to get it, content with staying as Bonnie's toy. It takes a disastrous rescue mission and Bo walking out on him afterward that Woody realizes that he's been largely unable to move on from being Andy's toy and that Bonnie doesn't appreciate him the same way as Andy did. Thus, he decides to stay with Bo and live life as a lost toy.
• Wish Dragon:
  • When Li Na tells "Dan" that she has met "someone from a respectable family [she] enjoys talking to", Din is more focused on the "respectable family" part. This leads Din to start acting like a stereotypical snobby rich person, rather than rely on being his kind self. It ends as badly as you would expect.
  • Later, Li Na tries to have a heart-to-heart with her father about the absence of meaningful relationships in their lives because of their focus on wealth. She tries to illustrate her point by relating how "Dan" is really Din, and they had a great time together despite his lack of wealth. However, instead of listening to what his daughter is saying, Mr. Wang instead pieces together that Din is the one in possession of the magic teapot he has been looking for. As such, he leaves his daughter in mid-conversation so he can go through with his plan of taking the wish dragon for himself so he can save his business.
  • In his original life as a ruler, Long pushed his subjects to build great monuments to him, forced his daughters to marry for political gain, and sent his son on a crusade that ultimately cost the young man's life. As a consequence, when Long was on his death bed, he was legitimately surprised that everybody in his life (who were pushed away by his actions) never showed up.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Angels in the Outfield (1994): Roger, who is a foster child, asks his estranged father when they'll be a family again. Roger's dad quips "when the Angels win the pennant" in Sarcasm Mode, since at the time, the Angels were in last place in the American League and had a long shot at best to get to the World Series. But Roger thought his dad was being literal, and prayed to God for a miracle. Even though the Angels start winning with divine intervention, Roger's dad doesn't come back. Instead, a scene in the middle of the film shows Roger's father giving up custody of Roger to the state of California, as he feels that it's in Roger's best interest. Roger is thus quite heartbroken when he realizes what his dad was actually saying, and breaks down into tears.
• In The Batman (2022), Big Bad Eddie Nashton, AKA The Riddler, misses the point of what Batman was trying to accomplish. Since both Riddler and Batman are engaging in a war on crime, Riddler assumes that Batman is a kindred spirit in wanting to take down the rich elites of Gotham City. However, Riddler is such a Manchild with a bad case of arrested development that he doesn't get that Batman is doing this to save Gotham, not tear it all down. Riddler genuinely believes that he and Batman are on the same side, and that Batman is willingly helping him to expose corruption in Gotham. So Riddler enters into a Villainous Breakdown when Batman says that they're not on the same side, were never working together, and that Batman considers Riddler to be nothing more than a murdering psychopath. During this breakdown, Riddler ends up Saying Too Much when he says "I had it all planned out! We were gonna be safe here!" to Batman. This clues Batman in that Riddler's plans aren't over yet and that something else is going to happen. As a result, Batman learns too late that Riddler real endgame was to flood Gotham and drown the rich part of the city.
• At the ending of The Final, the parents of the victims dramatically miss the point of the attacks. Instead of the victims being seen as getting their comeuppance for years of bullying, they're portrayed as saint-like who were attacked for no reason. Also, rather than become "a moment in history", as one of the attackers said it would be, it's largely forgotten about after it's over. Though Kelly, realizing just what her behavior has driven people to do, eventually kills herself out of shame.
• Godzilla (2014): When Admiral Stenz plans to blow a nuke in both Godzilla and the MUTOs' faces in the belief that the blast will kill all three of them faster than they can use the radiation to regenerate (despite how a previous atomic bomb failed to do any lasting damage to Godzilla), Serizawa tries to dissuade Stenz by showing him his father's pocket watch, which he explains has been stuck on the 8:15 time since August 6, 1945. Although Stenz gets what event Serizawa is referring to, he still decides to go ahead with deploying the nuke. His next conversation with Serizawa indicates that he believes Serizawa is against nuking the monsters out of personal fear of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings ever happening anywhere again: Serizawa has to spell out to Stenz nearer the movie's end that what he's actually been trying to say is that mankind believing they can subdue and control living, breathing forces of nature like Godzilla and the MUTOs is arrogance.
• The Hunt (2020): The hunters attempt to make their hunt a long-running homage to Animal Farm, complete with a pig and nicknaming them after the animals in them. They seem to utterly miss that it's a story about leftist revolutionaries becoming as bad as the people who they revolted against. Nor does Athena seem to realize that Crystal isn't who she should dub "Snowball" after the Trotsky character in the story. Crystal notes that going by what Athena believes, she should give that to herself as a nickname.
• In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Henry didn't realize the way he was treating his son was driving a wedge between them. Indy states this when Calling the Old Man Out.

  Henry, Sr.: Did I ever tell you to eat up, go to bed, wash your ears, or do your homework? No. I respected your privacy, and I taught you self-reliance.
  Indy: What you taught me is that I was less important to you than people who've been dead for 500 years in another country. And I learned it so well, that we've hardly spoken for 20 years.

• Interview with the Vampire: Louis (the titular vampire) spends the whole of his interview with a reporter named Daniel discussing how he was sired by Lestat and the years he has spent as a vampire. He describes his unlife and the blood lust that came with it as a torturous existence that has been nothing but painful with any supposed benefits being far outweighed by the negatives. Daniel, however, becomes so enamoured with the idea of living forever as a supernatural being that he asks Louis to make him a vampire. Predictably (and understandably), Louis flips out.
• In The King's Speech, Albert criticizes his brother Edward, who is heir to the throne, for acting unbecoming of the King of England. Edward thus accuses his brother of trying to take his place as king, when what Albert was really trying to do was telling Edward to get his act together specifically because Albert didn't want to be king. (Which is especially ironic, because Albert does end up becoming King (as George VI) precisely because of Edward's behavior.)
• Kong: Skull Island: When two of the heroes try to warn the resident General Ripper that Kong needs to stay alive because killing him will enable much more dangerous monsters, the Skullcrawlers, to breed and spread out of control without Kong keeping their population in check and will endanger all life on the island including humans, the General Ripper just assumes that he can kill the Skullcrawlers too, after killing Kong.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: All of Ego's plans and motives with the Expansion are originally rooted in him Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life since the beginning of his existence, having decided to assimilate everything into himself because he couldn't find anything satisfactory in the universe. This spiritually hollow and evil plan was frustrated for eons because every single partner he mated with failed to produce an offspring that inherited his Celestial powers. Ego genuinely fell in love with Peter's mother Meredith on Earth to the point where he was sorely tempted to abandon his plan for the Expansion just to be with her — and it's hinted that this love is the reason why Peter inherited Ego's Celestial powers where all of Ego's other attempts at siring another Celestial with casual breeding partners hadn't — but Ego failed to see this love as the fulfilment of his search for purpose and self-meaning that he'd originally been looking for all along. Instead, Ego, blinded by the Expansion plans he'd formed for eons to compensate for his original loneliness, murdered Meredith with a brain tumor so she wouldn't sway him from that plan.
  • Avengers: Endgame: When 2014!Thanos sees that even five years after managing to complete his grand scheme of "solving" the Overpopulation Crisis by wiping out half the population of the universe, everyone still remembers and are recovering from the event, the Avengers killed his future self for it, and are in the process of trying to undoing it. Instead of realizing that his solution was the wrong one from seeing these things, he decides everyone else are simply ungrateful and decides instead that he will wipe out the entire population of the universe and build a new one where no one will know the atrocities he committed and everyone will be grateful towards him.
• Moulin Rouge!: Christian leaves before the finale of El Tango De Roxanne, depressed at the thought of Satine sleeping with the Duke, in doing so missing the point of the song; the Argentinian was playing the part of The Duke, not Christian, during the song; it was a warning that he (The Duke) was going to do anything, including rape, to be with Satine.
• Over the Edge: After Richie is shot by Doberman for pointing an unloaded gun at him, Jerry calls a PTA meeting, but his discussion is less about how to deal with the problem of delinquency, and more about how to maintain the town's property values. This causes Fred, his own business partner, to angrily call Jerry, himself, and every parent in the meeting out for neglecting their children.
• The Paper Chase: Near the end of the law school year, Bell lords an 800-page course outline over the other members of the study group as the pinnacle of what a great outline should be. However, law school course outlines are supposed to be around 50-80 pages in length, because they're a summary of the year-long class. Given that most textbooks are around 800 pages in length, an 800-page outline isn't "summarizing" anything and would be worthless as a study aid. You might as well just read the textbook itself.
• Planet of the Apes (1968): During Taylor's trial, the orangutan Honorius, who is convinced that humans are incapable of intelligent thought, attempts to convince everyone of this by asking Taylor questions about ape culture which he would have no way of knowing the answers to. When he asks why all apes are created equal, Taylor — who at this point has seen enough of ape society to realize how riddled with Fantastic Racism it is — remarks that "some apes, it seems, are more equal than others". Honorius takes Taylor's self-contradiction as further evidence that humans aren't intelligent enough to actually understand ape language.
• The script for Pretty Woman started out a lot more tragic. One plot point was Edward renting a white fur coat for Vivian to wear during her hired time. When she is sad over their time nearly being up, he thinks it's just because he made her give the fur back.
• Done subtly in The Sandlot. At the end of the movie, Scotty and Benny meet the Cool Old Guy Mr. Mertle, a retired baseball star who supposedly once knew Babe Ruth personally, and always dreamed of beating the Babe's home run record before he was forced to retire when a wayward baseball left him blind. After hearing his life story, Scotty assumes that he never got to beat the record because he lost his eyesight. Of course, an older viewer will probably deduce the real reason: he's a middle-aged Black man in the 1960s, and he would have played long before baseball teams were desegregated. In all likelihood, he was never allowed to achieve his dream because he was never allowed to play against White players.
• Scarface (1983): When Manny puts Gina in the friend zone because he wants her to find a decent guy and stay away from the gangster life, she asks him if he's afraid of Tony and then asks him if he's afraid of her.

  Manny: Hey! I'm not afraid of anybody, ok? That's not the point here!

• Secrets & Lies: Cynthia thinks that Maurice and Monica don't have children because Monica doesn't want any while Maurice does. Going by the way she tries to cut her mother off when she confronts Monica, Roxanne has probably already cottoned on to the real reason.
• Star Trek:
  • In both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek (2009), the Kobayashi Maru test is a major one for Kirk. In both timelines, Kirk is so determined to beat the training simulation that he actually hacks Starfleet Academy's computers and cheats his way to victory by changing the conditions of the starting scenario. He doesn't realize that the entire point of the Kobayashi Maru simulation is that cadets aren't supposed to beat it; the test is designed to be unbeatable to prepare them for the possibility of a no-win scenario, and to test how they react to defeat. Or rather, he rejects the point of the test, adamantly believing that there's no such thing as a no-win scenario. Kirk's refusal to accept this fact provides valuable insight into his pride, which proves to be his Fatal Flaw.
    • In a more straight example, Khan owns Moby-Dick, and even quotes Captain Ahab, but apparently completely missed the entire point of the book about the cost of vengeance.
  • In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Valeris airs her concerns to Spock about this new Federation-Klingon peace. Spock doesn't realize how concerned she is at this moment. He later states neither party was listening to the other.
• Terence Fletcher, the Big Bad of Whiplash, was a Sadist Teacher who psychologically tortured his students in the hopes of producing the next great jazz musician through Misery Builds Character. However, his brutal Control Freak attitude demanding absolute perfection from his students was antithetical to the genre itself, as it was about freedom and the joy of music which he took from them leading one of them to even be Driven to Suicide by his abuse.
• In White Christmas, Betty is upset at what she thinks is Judy's betrayal at leaving the act to get married and Bob's double-dealing by using the show for publicity. Bob, on the other hand, doesn't understand why she won't sing for him and thinks she's just being difficult.

    Literature 

• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Myne describes her previous life mother's attempts to save water and electricity to be this. She would turn water off while brushing her teeth but not while doing dishes and unplug the television while it was not in use only to regularly fall asleep while it was on.
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas depicts the Holocaust from a child's point of view. Their innocence frequently causes them to miss the true horrors of what's going on:
  • Bruno thinks Pavel the Jewish manservant is peeling potatoes because he wasn't "qualified" to be a doctor.
  • At first, Bruno believes the Jewish inmates living on the camp with Shmuel are "farmers" rather than inmates.
  • When Bruno sees the uniforms Shmuel, Pavel and the other Jewish inmates wear for the first time, he thinks they're "pyjamas", and that the tag numbers on them are part of a "game".
  • Shmuel refuses to play football with Bruno not out of rudeness but because it's too dangerous, while Bruno sees no problem with it, oblivious that Shmuel is trying to warn him they could get caught.
  • Bruno sees the propaganda film his father, grandfather, Kotler and other Nazis are watching, and literally believes the camp is like a place for enjoyment, only for him to see the true picture of the camp near the end of the film.
  • Shmuel believes his father is now working mending boots, implying he thinks that's his new job rather than to an extent slavery.
  • The ending, when Bruno and Shmuel are led on the long walk to their demise in the gas chambers and believe they're going for a "shower", although it can be argued that the Jewish soldiers simply made it up so there would be no panic, as well as the implication they had to use a cover story to hide the fact everyone is getting executed.
• The Collector. Clegg stalks and abducts Miranda, a young woman he's grown obsessed with. After numerous escape attempts on her part, Miranda becomes severely ill and dies because Clegg refuses to let her out of captivity to see a doctor. The lesson Clegg learns from all of this? Things went badly because he was too lenient a captor, and the book ends with him stalking another girl, eager to put his new knowledge to use.
• Vlad Tepes in Count and Countess, who doesn't understand why it's bad to conscript children into his army, nor why Elizabeth Bathory is so upset when her daughter dies.
• In the novelization version of the Godzilla vs. Kong movie, this occurs between the Russell family. After Madison almost died to the Kaiju during the events of the preceding movie, her formerly-distant father Mark thinks that he needs to hyper-focus on being around her and giving her a normal, monster-free life without an illusion of safety whether she wants it or not, and he's in firm denial to the point of borderline delusion that Madison's heroism during the previous film might not have just been a stint that they can move on from and forget about; despite him arguing with Madison a lot about her life. Mark only realizes that he's been too controlling and unwilling to listen to his daughter once she's gone behind his back and put herself in giant monster-related danger again.
• The Goose Girl At The Well: A king asks his daughters how much they love him, their answers decide how much of the kingdom they will get. The youngest daughter says that "The best food does not taste good without salt, therefore I love my father as I love salt". So the king divides the kingdom between her older sisters and sends her deep into the forest with a bag of salt bound to her back.
• Harry Potter:
  • Anyone who possesses the three Deathly Hallows is said to become the "Master of Death". Many people theorize that this means giving their owner some sort of immortality. The various people who undertake the search for the Hallows believe as such, including Xenophilius Lovegood, Gellert Grindelwald, and a young Albus Dumbledore. Only later in life did Dumbledore realize that "mastering Death" doesn't mean conquering death and becoming immortal, but accepting that death is inevitable, much like how Ignotus Peverell, creator of the Invisibility Cloak, greeted Death like an old friend. During their meeting in the Afterlife Antechamber at the end of Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore calls Harry a true Master of Death, because he did not use the Hallows as a way to deny his mortality.
  • The point about the Master of Death is actually stressed as the main Aesop of "The Tale of the Three Brothers", included in a children's book that is widely read in the wizarding world. Strange that very few people get it.
• The Perfect Run: The Alchemist received a full information dump on how an alien civilization utilized the higher realms to conquer the universe, only to be cast down by the Ultimate Ones until only one ship escaped to Earth. She proceeded to do basically the exact same thing they did. Ryan dryly notes that maybe if she wasn't stuck in an echo chamber of her own making, someone would have pointed out what an insane idea this was.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: At the climax of volume 1, after seeing Marco the troll speaking to Katie after he refused to talk to her, Vera Miligan kidnaps Katie with the intention of examining her brain to find whatever quality awakened his ability to speak. She completely fails to grasp the fact that Marco never spoke to her because she was conducting painful experiments on him, and Katie simply earned his trust by having his life spared and showing him kindness.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Everyone who treats the conflict over Westeros as a "game of thrones" and covets the Iron Throne, upon which the King of Westeros sits, as the ultimate prize. The entire point of the Iron Throne (an extremely uncomfortable and dangerous chair made of swords welded together by dragonfire) is to be a physical reminder that ruling a realm is a responsibility and a burden, not a prize in a game. So far as we know, only three people in the series really seem to have understood this: Eddard Stark, who had the opportunity to seize the Throne but refused it out of a sense of honor and never regretted it; Robert Baratheon, who never really wanted it in the first place but was forced to claim it; and Aegon the Conqueror, who made the damn thing in the first place. Stannis and Robb get some credit, as neither is motivated by personal gain and dislike what comes with being King. Both of them are still fighting over the throne, Robb in order to avenge his father and Stannis because he's technically next in line to inherit it and he refuses to fail at his duty. Varys does at least claim to be doing what's best for the people, but his true motives are too murky to say for sure. Aegon VI was raised to believe this, but he still seems to have a bit of an entitlement complex about the whole thing.
  • Although in Robb's case, he never actually expresses any intent to claim the Iron Throne. He's crowned King in the North, and as far as land he only ever expressly plans to keep everything North of the Trident as independent Kingdom. His issue is a different way of interpreting this trope, as he's focused on avenging the Northmen who had lost their lives already (including his father), as well as rescuing his sisters (one of who already escaped, but he doesn't know this). He does also want to dethrone the illegitimate Joffrey and eventually bring down the Lannisters in revenge and "justice", which may or may not result in him claiming the Iron Throne, depending on how it plays out. In the War Council at the end of the first book, his mother Catelyn attempts to point out the fact that killing the ones responsible for their dead will not bring her husband or other dead and they should be willing to make concessions for the sake of peace, the security of their realm, and saving the people who still could be saved (like Rob's sisters). Of course none of the other factions are willing to budge, making such negotiations difficult, and thanks to his advisors Robb decides to play the game full-tilt. With dire consequences...
  • Jon Snow is initially disappointed to learn that he's to be the steward of the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, rather than a ranger. His friend Samwell Tarly points out that this is an opportunity to learn how the Lord Commander works, and proof that he's being groomed to be his successor. In the books, Sam points out that his father Randyll used to have Sam observe him at court, until Randyll gave up on Sam in favor of his younger brother.
  • When Roose Bolton tells his bastard son Ramsay that people fear Ramsay, Ramsay's initial response is "Good." Roose then has to lecture Ramsay about how bad it is that people are spreading rumors about Ramsay's sadism, and the importance of discretion when it comes to his less than admirable habits.
• In Their Vicious Games, a thriller about a deadly scholarship competition called the Finnish, Pierce, whose super-rich family runs it, believes that he has "leveled the playing field" simply by inviting a more diverse group of people. But crucially, he failed to change absolutely anything else about the Finish, something Adina, the only middle-class competitor, cannot get through his head means he hasn't changed anything at all. All the challenges still rely on things more available to fellow WASP one-percenters (such as a horseback course that is obviously much easier for the girls whose parents could pay for riding lessons all their lives, fancy parties that require multiple formal dresses worth more than Adina's parents make in a month, etc), so it's just as unfair as it was before—in fact, he's made more unfair, because at least when all the competitors were rich girls, they all had exactly the same advantages.
• The Traveler's Gate: Naraka Travelers are supposed to be completely dedicated to justice. Unfortunately, Naraka defines justice as "punishing the guilty." They don't much care about side effects of their punishments, or even about preventing crimes. A Naraka Traveler can commit a crime, undergo proper penance for it in the form of pain, and then go right back to committing the same crime again.
• One in Warhammer 40,000's backstory is shown in the Horus Heresy novel Betrayer. In the Night of the Wolf, Leman Russ and the Space Wolves confronted Angron about his practice of using forbidden technology to turn the World Eaters into raving berserkers, and the two legions came to blows over it. Angron always said that he won, that he thrashed Leman Russ in close combat until the Wolf had to crawl away. Decades later, Lorgar of the Word Bearers explained that Angron won the duel, but Russ won the battle - Angron's bloodlust led him to be surrounded by Russ' bodyguard while the rest of the World Bearers fought on oblivious, therefore proving Russ' point that Russ' soldiers were greater than Angron's warriors. The only reason Russ spared Angron was in hope that the Primarch learned something.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The Aes Sedai are magically bound by the Three Oaths, to "speak no word that is not true," "make no weapon for one man to kill another," and "Never to use the One Power as a weapon except against Darkfriends or Shadowspawn, or in the last extreme defense of her life, the life of her Warder, or another Aes Sedai". In theory, this was to stop them from taking advantage of people, but in practice, they focus on the first one, and use it primarily to gain people's trust while twisting the truth, so they can more easily manipulate them.
  • Also, their name; "Aes Sedai" means "Servant of All" in the Old Tongue, which, in the the Age of Legends would have been taken largely at face value, being a phrase in the language that everyone spoke. This meaning, while still known to those with knowledge of the Old Tongue, is now completely non-indicative, as modern Aes Sedai seem mostly to want to lead the world (at best), or rule over it with an iron fist/destroy it (at worst).
  • The Aiel prohibition against using swords is a remnant of their previous pacifism (a sword doesn't have use as a tool, like an axe would, so it served as a shorthand). Having forgotten the origins of the rule, they're now perfectly happy to kill people but are arbitrarily restricted from using swords to do it.

    Live-Action TV 

• Black Mirror: In the first episode, "The National Anthem", everyone seems to be way more interested in the sensationalism of the ridiculous demands of the princess' kidnapper to actually think about her well-being. It's enforced with her release at the point of no return, making it clear that the kidnapper's actions were nothing more than a statement.
• The Chosen
  • Judas expresses frustration to Simon the Zealot that Jesus is making them do mundane chores and busy work instead of working on establishing the Kingdom of Heaven. Simon has to point out that these mundane chores and work help them stay humble and relatable to the very people they're trying to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to.
  • When Jesus tells the disciples that in Jerusalem, the gentiles will flog and kill the Son of Man, and that after three days he will rise, the disciples don't understand at all.

    John: What are you talking about?

    Matthew: I thought the Son of Man was you.

• Brenda in The Closer is many times blindingly oblivious to her hypocrisy when she calls out other people for being manipulative, arrogant, ignoring the rules, lying to her, or ignoring her authority even when others specifically try to make her realize this. It eventually comes back to bite her in the final season and she does start to realize that a series of murders the unit has had to deal with, not to mention the professional difficulties they've had that season, are largely her fault.
• The Cleaner (UK): This turns out to be the reason why the Widow finally snapped and killed her husband. She wanted to go to Italy on vacation to visit the Dolamite mountains, something she dreamed of since she was a child. She gave her husband plenty of hints of what she wanted and felt that he owed it to her for all the years of going to modeling conventions for their vacations. Her husband got her hints but decided that instead of a vacation he would build her a large model of the location. This finally broke the woman and she stabbed the husband to death for being so self absorbed and blind to her needs.
• In the Grand Finale Downer Ending of Dinosaurs Earl tries to explain to his boss Richfield that the WESAYSO Corporation's actions have caused The End of the World as We Know It. All Richfield sees is dinosaurs buying company winter gear in droves, making him a ton of money, in response to the ensuing ice age. Earl actually points this out, "I think you're missing the point, sir! The world may be coming to an end!"

  Richfield: That's a fourth-quarter problem. We'll drop a bomb on that bridge when we come to it! Right now, my biggest problem is trying to figure out what to do with all this MONEY!!

• Doctor Who:
  • "Partners in Crime" has an unusual, spoilery example related to the Series 4 Story Arc, one that is disguised by making it look like another character is Comically Missing the Point. It turns out that when Miss Foster's employers told her that their breeding planet was lost, she didn't realize they meant it completely literally: the planet had vanished into thin air. It's clear she assumed the planet to have been "lost" in the metaphorical sense, as a nation might lose territory in a war. The writer was clearly trying to trip the audience up with this one, as the conversation initially seems like the Doctor is misinterpreting what Foster said by assuming the planet to have disappeared, when he's correctly figured out what she misinterpreted.

    Miss Foster: I've been employed by the Adiposian First Family to foster a new generation after their breeding planet was lost.
    The Doctor: What do you mean, "lost"? How’d you lose a planet?
    Miss Foster: Oh, the politics are none of my concern. I'm just here to look after the children on behalf of the parents.

  • "The Pandorica Opens": When the Doctor relays the myth of the Pandorica; any fan can grasp the implication that it's the Doctor the myth is referring to, especially after he trumps up his countless victories over all the alien races present as just a single unarmed man with no plan. Interestingly enough, he does talk indirectly about himself regarding it, namely that it was sealed by a good wizard tricking it.

    The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a... trickster. Or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or... reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.

• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: A central issue with John Walker is his fundamental misunderstanding of Captain America and what it means to take up the mantle. John believes he's worthy of the title because he's physically capable and always follows orders, and that's what makes someone Captain America. But Steve Rogers earned the title because he was a good man before he was a good soldier: he always did what he believed to be the right thing, which in many instances put him in direct oppositions with orders from the higher-ups. This disconnect between the image of being Captain America in Walker's head and the reality is a major contributor to his mental decline and it's only when he finally gets the point in the end does it stop.
• The Flash (2014) After kidnapping Caitlin, Zoom is attempting to get her to fall in love with him again. He fails to recognize that it won't work because she didn't fall in love with Hunter Zolomon, the serial killer from Earth-2, but Jay Garrick, the hero of Earth-2. But "Jay" was never real, and Hunter is nothing like what she fell for.
• In one episode of Flashpoint, an employee becomes infatuated with his boss Marina, constantly sending her emails outside of work and leaving gifts at her door. When Marina gently tried to let him down that she wasn't interested and fired him as a result, he returned to the office with a gun, killing one person, all so he could propose to Marina, believing he now has a better chance to be with her since she fired him. Marina is completely flabbergasted by his train of thought.
• Game of Thrones:
  • In Season 1, Episode 7, Jon Snow is incensed that he was named as Mormont's steward, when he expected to be a ranger because of his fighting abilities. Sam points out that he's essentially being made personal assistant to the Lord Commander, right out of training, which gives him a very rare opportunity to work with and learn from the man, and very likely means that Mormont is grooming him for command.
  • In Season 5, Episode 2, Cersei Lannister and Jaime Lannister learn that their child Myrcella is in danger in Dorne. Cersei loudly and angrily threatens vengeance if "our daughter" is harmed. Jaime tries to quiet her and reminds her that no one can be allowed to hear that Myrcella is their daughter. Cersei reprimands Jaime quite venomously and tells him "then don't call her your daughter," somehow failing to realise that HER previous angry rant is why Jaime spoke up in the first place.
  • Lord Tywin Lannister repeatedly states the importance of family throughout his time on the show, but seems to view the concept as merely a vessel for increased power and status, and repeatedly fails to realize that a family is only as strong as the trust and love each of its members have for each other. As such, while he constantly strives to glorify the Lannister name, and cement its place in history as a powerful family dynasty, he mistreats and abuses all his children, practically ensuring that they'd be too screwed up to maintain power in the long-term. This leads to his death and his family being destroyed while his enemy's families, who generally love each other, rise again and thrive.
• Good Omens (2019): The angels sometimes fail to understand that the point of being good is to be good, not just to oppose the demons.

  Aziraphale: There doesn't have to be a war.
  Gabriel: Of course there does. Otherwise, how would we win it? [gives "duh" look]

• Arthur in Merlin is convinced that he's created a golden age of equality and justice where all men are respected. In many ways he has, as he's married a peasant girl who was worthy to be Queen, knighted the commoners who helped him take back his kingdom, and established the Round Table. However, he has remained oblivious to the people that need equality most: the magic-users, who were shunned and persecuted during his father's reign. This comes back to bite him hard when it is what eventually turns Mordred, until then a loyal knight, on him.
  • He's also claimed his strength is in the support of Camelot, and that he is much wiser for accepting the advice of others. The one person he does not accept the advice of? Merlin, who is the most deserving.
• Happens in episode 61 of Mimpi Metropolitan. When Bambang tells Melani about how insecure he feels from people not believing Melani is his girlfriend, Melani asks him why is he listening to other people. Melani's point is that Bambang should just listen to her then, but Bambang thinks Melani wants him to stop listening to people altogether and angrily tells her it's impossible. Melani storms away out of frustration and only tells Bambang her point after they make up in the ending.
• In one episode of NUMB3RS, an internal affairs officer working with the FBI sends a uniformed LAPD officer — a male officer, no less — to transport a woman who had just been raped by a police officer. Even when she's called on it, she doesn't quite understand the issue. Megan:

  You put a woman who was attacked by a cop in a car with a cop?

  
  IA Officer:

  Nobody wants to get this guy more than we do.

  
  Megan: That's not the point.
• In the seventh season of Psych, Juliet discovers that Shawn has been lying about being a psychic, and this implodes their relationship. He spends the following episode mulling things over and tells her that "If I hadn't given you my jacket, everything would be okay." No, Shawn, it wouldn't, and that's the point.
  • It even seems to be part of his character that he can't stop himself from missing the point. Just before that scene he has a full dream about how to properly handle the situation from completely listening to Juliet's feelings to acknowledging and apologizing for his mistakes...Once he wakes up however and is immediately faced with the same situation he proceeds to do everything in the opposite way leading to the quote above which completely torpedoes the situation.
  • Juliet's own face says it all. Shawn knows her dad was a con artist and thus Juliet absolutely hates liars and the like. And here's Shawn clearly thinking it's how Juliet found out the truth that's upsetting her, not that Shawn has been lying to her all these years like her father did.
• In Skeleton Crew (2024), Jod quotes Jedi wisdom to try and help Wim deal with his grief over his lost father and dead mother, but he either misunderstood initially or has since filtered it through his own worldview, and his interpretation of the Jedi teaching against attachment is you should stop caring about other people when it's inconvenient.
• Soap: Burt's doctor calls him in to tell him that he's got a rare disease.

  Burt: OK, then what's the treatment?
  Doctor: Burt, there is no treatment.
  Burt: So, what, it just goes away by itself, huh?

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Well into the Dominion War, Weyoun notices that Damar has actually started showing up to work sober. He takes it as a good sign that Weyoun has turned the corner on his despair and has renewed confidence in Dominion victory. In fact, Damar's newfound sense of purpose came from his decision to foment a rebellion against the Dominion.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Obsolete Man", Romney Wordsworth is sentenced to death by an authoritarian regime for opposing their censorship of books, and is confronted in his final hours by the regime's figurehead the Chancellor. Wordsworth compares the Chancellor and his government to numerous dictatorships, and points out they've failed to learn anything from the past. The Chancellor's reply show he's totally missed the point Wordsworth was trying to make.
• invoked In HBO's Watchmen Sequel Series, Rorshach had his journal posthumously published by The New Frontiersman in the hopes of it revealing that Adrian Veidt was responsible for the deaths of over 3 million innocent people and traumatizing countless more in 11/2. Unfortunately, it was promptly dismissed as the mad ravings of an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer by general society, and only found a Misaimed Fandom in the white supremacist Seventh Kavalry, who began to use it as a paper-thin justification for their actions as Western Terrorists against minority groups. Now, Rorshach was certainly a Politically Incorrect Hero, but it's still painfully obvious that he would be utterly revolted by his desire to have justice served against a mass-murdering Narcissist instead be misappropriated by The Klan as an excuse for killing countless Innocent Bystanders.
• The X-Files: In "Never Again" Scully complains that she has to share Mulder's desk; this and some Jerkass behaviour from her partner causes her to go off and engage in a number of Out of Character behaviors like getting a tattoo and engaging in a one-night stand. At the end of the episode Mulder says, "I don't understand...all this over a desk?" Scully just replies: "Not everything is about you, Mulder." The truth is Scully had just discovered she had cancer.

    Manhua 

• My Girlfriend Is A Villain: Zhang Nan wanted to cut ties with his yakuza heritage due to a couple of incidents in his early childhood. So he tells his father and grandfather "I want to be a normal school student." They sell off everything of value and drag him out of his normal high-school, where he's being bullied for being yakuza, and shipped off to the yakuza academy "so he'll be the most normal student there." He is naturally not pleased.

    Tabletop Games 

• Warhammer 40,000: The Iron Hands Astartes Chapter believe that the living metal hands of their Primarch were a physical embodiment of his doctrines of efficiency and strength above all things, something that has led to the Chapter's Rite of Severance where a newly initiated battle-brother has their left hand replaced with a mechanical one. Ferrus himself, however, never saw his hands as a sign of strength, for all the great works he accomplished with them he was painfully aware they weren't his real hands and it amazed him that no one else saw it that way too. He saw the hands as a sign of his weakness, a crutch he relied on instead of being strong in his own right. He intended to lead by example by removing the metal from his hands but was slain in his fateful duel with Fulgrim before he had the chance.

    Theatre 

• Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman ends up killing himself, thinking that he will give his family a lot of money. At his funeral, at least one character points out that Willy could have chosen another path and have been happier for it. One of his sons, Happy, declares that he will succeed where Willy failed. He's blatantly ignoring the fact that Willy was no good at being a salesman and Happy has no reason to assume that he's any better, and that if any lessons were to be learned from events it was that it's more important to find something you're good at which makes you happy and look for success there, rather than follow someone else's idea of success.
• In Les Misérables, when Valjean is trying to explain his theft to Javert in the first song.

  Valjean: My sister's child was close to death, we were starving—
  Javert: You'll starve again!

    Video Games 

• ANNO: Mutationem: This comes into play in the bad ending. When Ann chooses to not trust The Consortium, it immediately prompts Ryan to accuse them of wanting to control her instead despite G trying to explain that leaving Ann connected to her Superpowered Evil Side will be dangerous for herself and everyone, it just ends up provoking Ryan to recklessly attack, leading to a disastrous outcome.
• The Big Bad of BioShock Infinite, Comstock, doesn't get that baptism is supposed to metaphorically make you a new person unaffected by the sins you have committed, which gives you a chance to start fresh. Instead, Comstock believes that his baptism justified his past acts, so nothing he ever did or will ever do could be a sin. This is a result of an Alternate Timeline. In one timeline, Comstock came out of the baptism with the aforesaid mindset. In another timeline, he didn't go through with it at all, wanting to remember his past sins and feeling like he could redeem himself another way. This resulted in protagonist Booker DeWitt, who got what the baptism was supposed to do but rejected the chance.
• Peko Pekoyama in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair was raised to think of herself as a tool to the Kuzuryuu clan. So when clan scion Fuyuhiko insists that their relationship is null and void once they arrive at the "class trip", she assumes that he hates her as the clan's tool out of his desire to prove himself independent of the clan. In reality, he sees her as his childhood friend and is distancing himself from her so she can break away from the toxic beliefs his parents installed. As a result of this mindset, Peko kills Mahiru when a tense standoff between Mahiru and Fuyuhiko (who'd planned on killing Mahiru but was starting to get cold feet) breaks down, believing that because she acts on Fuyuhiko's behalf, if she's convicted of the murder, he'll be able to "graduate". In truth, Fuyuhiko didn't want her to do that, so Peko is found guilty and executed, with Fuyuhiko losing an eye in a failed attempt to save her and living with the guilt for the rest of the game. In Island Mode, however, Peko gets over this if you successfully reach her ending.
• The Big Bad of Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar, resented the New California Republic because it tried to restore the old world without learning from its mistakes. As a result, he tried to go the opposite direction and based his Legion on the Roman Empire, believing that its integration of foreign cultures meshed with his The Social Darwinist beliefs. However, the Legion's refusal to use technology, form stable alliances, or position themselves as a lesser threat than their enemies to independent or minor factions meant they acted even less like the actual Romans than the NCR did. To some degree Caesar himself was aware of this, even comparing them to the hordes of Gaul, but believed that winning the war would fix everything instead of his ideas being fundamentally flawed.
  • Caesar is also unaware of how much he personally contradict his philosophy. He's sick with a brain tumor, but stays in charge and tries to treat himself with an autodoc despite his ideology saying that the sick and weak should be culled to avoid burdening the Legion. He also allows favored underlings to use said autodoc as reward for their services, despite relying on pre-war medical tech being explicitly against his teachings. He's constantly undermining his own philosophy with little exceptions and conveniences, which he seems to justify with "it doesn't count if it helps me".
• The Final Fantasy X character Yuna has always believed that the fayth want her to die, and spends quite some time arranging her death and making sure it will happen in a way that benefits Spira. She's correct that the fayth want her to learn about tragedy, but it's not for the purpose she thinks: she's not supposed to join the dead, just to listen to them, and use the knowledge gained to lead Spira into a brighter future. Yuna takes this realization badly for two reasons; one, because her capacity to deal with negative feelings relied solely on the hope that she would someday be able to commit suicide, and two, because it happened during the untimely death of yet another of her loved ones.
• In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Lucina's B support with her sibling^note Either Male Morgan, Cynthia, Kjelle, Brady or Inigo has her realize that the latter may be able to wield Falchion, a weapon that only a handful in Ylisse's bloodline can wield, such as Lucina and her father Chrom, and insists on putting it to the test should it become necessary. The sibling asks if this is in case Lucina is busy, prompting Lucina to clarify that she means that it's in case she dies. It's played with a bit in that the sibling isn't necessarily dense, per se- s/he is understandably disturbed by the idea of his/her older sister dying and how willing Lucina is to discuss the possibility.
• Genshin Impact: The ultimate irony surrounding the Sages of the Akademiya is that, for all they sing the praises and exalt the achievements of their former Archon Rukkhadevata, they really don't share any of her ideals, having become so focused on her being the "God of Wisdom" that they've completely ignored her other virtues. They look down on practictioners of the arts and crafts she admired and championed, they lock away, abuse and shun her reincarnation Kusanali/Nahida simply because she's not how they imagine a God of Wisdom to be, and have taught Sumeru to be so reliant on the Akasha System that they're now plagued by Creative Sterility. This ultimately culminates in the four of the Sages collaborating with Il Dottore to try and turn Scaramouche into a Humungous Mecha machine god to have a God of Wisdom more to their liking, and in doing so sell out the country Rukkhadevata gave her life to protect, endanger the citizens she cherished so much and nearly ruin her own ongoing plan to save the world from the corrupted knowledge she died sealing away. For all their proclaimed devotion, the Sages wind up becoming the biggest blasphemers in Sumeru's history because they've completely misunderstood their own God for centuries.
• God of War has Atreus, the son of Kratos in the Norse saga. He's a young boy/young man in the two Norse games, and naturally misreads the more complex motivations of his elders because he's too young to understand them. Even so, Atreus being reckless and impulsive leads him to dramatically miss the reasons behind the motivations of other characters, which can lead to trouble.
  • God of War (PS4): When Atreus overhears his father claiming that he's cursed, Atreus believes that Kratos is saying that Atreus is weak for not being like him. Kratos considers his son not being like him to be a good thing; he was talking about Atreus having inherited Kratos's own divinity, something that Kratos considers to be a curse because of how all the gods he'd previously met had behaved. But Kratos's stern demeanor and inability to have a straight talk with his son convinced Atreus that his dad was looking down on him.
  • In God of War Ragnarök, once Atreus realizes that Kratos is prophesized to die in Ragnarok, he becomes desperate to stop it, to the point of willingly going to visit Odin despite that being part of the prophecy because Odin might have answers. As the Norns later reveal, Atreus is running on a serious misconception about how fate works. Namely, thinking that it's a force outside people's control that forces them to do things, instead of the logical consequences of their choices and flaws. The correct way to Screw Destiny is to get yourself some Character Development so you don't make the stupid decisions that would lead you to ruin... and Atreus's decision to run off on his own was based on his Fatal Flaw of recklessness, so it only furthered the prophecy. Once Atreus finally realizes that this is what's going on, he finally starts making decisions that allow him to properly Screw Destiny and stop the plans of Big Bad Odin in his own way.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, two merchants- an Oseram and a Carja- decided to merge their businesses as a "symbolic gesture" of racial unity that would attract them more customers. But they didn't stop disagreeing with each other, all the time, about everything, making it impossible for any buyers to get a word in edgewise. The lesson being that no amount of representation will save a business if the people behind it just suck at selling things.
• Happens to Injustice Superman in Injustice: Gods Among Us:
  • When Batman points out that Superman was beginning to have his Face–Heel Turn and are scaring people, Superman justifies himself by saying that the bad guys should be afraid, not understanding that Batman was referring to people in general.
  • He repeatedly justifies that everything he is doing was for Lois's sake, including wanting to bring an alternate Lois to his universe. When the Prime universe's Superman confronts him and says how horrified and disgusted Lois would be of him, he dismisses this completely and only manages a Lame Comeback of "She'll be alive!". All that matters to him is having Lois in his life again, which Prime Superman immediately derides him for as Lois' death doesn't justify anything he's done, from killing everyone who disagreed with him to stealing the planet's freedom.
• In Kindred Spirits on the Roof, Umi values her friendships with Sasa and Nena, so while she accepts Sasa's Love Confession, she insists that their relationship not come at Nena's expense. After noticing that Nena has distanced herself from the other two, Umi becomes concerned and convinces Sasa that they'll have to tell Nena about their relationship and break up if it gets in the way of their friendship with Nena. It turns out that Nena not only knew about Sasa's feelings for Umi before Umi herself did, but approved of the relationship and was trying to give the other two some space, so Nena calls out Umi on being overly concerned about her. Umi gets the point, and while she remains considerate of Nena, she never again contemplates going that far for Nena's sake.
• Late in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, when The Exile returns to Dantooine for the final time to start the endgame, somebody refuses to see the truth. If The Exile is light-sided, the Jedi Masters see them as an abomination, treating The Exile's strange 'anti'-connection to the Force as a wound caused by massive-trauma that the Dark Side latched onto and mutated, and attempt to sever The Exile's connection to the Force again. Kreia is surprised and disgusted at the Masters for their 'arrogance' and ignorance of what is right in front of them: someone who is empowered by the Force without becoming dependent on it. When the Masters accuse Kreia of being a Sith Lord and attempting to corrupt The Exile, Kreia gives each Master a The Reason You Suck Speech; while they were hiding, they had found Places of Dark Force Power. They ignored these as temptations, closed their hearts and minds to the 'corruption' of the worlds they were forced to hide in. Kreia treats these ordeals as journeys, and instead of doing as wise Masters should and learning from their journeys, they covered their eyes and ears when they could have discovered why the Dark Side exists in the first place. To emphasize what they were about to do to The Exile, Kreia then severs their connection to the Force, which kills them instantly from their overdependence on it. If The Exile is dark-sided, they absent-mindedly kill the Jedi Masters they were tasked with saving, even though their whole journey was about restoring the Master Council - which they can't do if they kill the members of the Council. Kreia finally gives up on The Exile, tearing into them because they refused to heed any lessons taught by either her or The Exile's experiences, ignoring any hint of what their strange Force connection implied. In Kreia's eyes, The Exile was content to be a childish bully who spread chaos, misery, and destruction everywhere they went for their own amusement or for short-sighted revenge, hearing every word Kreia said, yet refusing to listen. Kreia decides that the only hope she has of reaching The Exile's heart is with sharp, white-hot pain to the chest - which she then inflicts by stabbing herself with her lightsaber and letting the empathic bond she forged between herself and The Exile transfer the pain, an aspect of The Exile's powers that they failed to realize through all of Kreia's many, many lectures about the binding nature of the Force.
• Metal Gear is built on this. The goals of almost every single major antagonist stem from a misinterpretation of the last wish of The Paragon, The Boss, to "make the world whole again" and create a solidified world kept in balance without restrictions of fate and necessity. Since none of them could agree on what a "whole world" means, they each terrorized the planet in their own ways.
  • Big Boss/Naked Snake was like a son to her and alongside her actual son Revolver Ocelot sought to realize The Boss's Will through liberty from nations, bounds, oppressions, political domination, and forced exploitation of soldiers, thus creating the terrorist organization Outer Heaven with his son Liquid Snake following in his footsteps. Through his desires, these ideas become forced and sacrificed the principles of peace and harmony, to the point that there's little care for soldiers that differ, or disapprove, like his other son Solid Snake.
  • Zero was a close friend to The Boss and loved her more than his immediate family. He sought to realize The Boss' Will through a unified world under a single regime, without reasoning and with status. Thus, The Patriots. Suppressing information and creating peace and harmony by sacrificing the principles of freedom and honor to attain those ideals, and forcing Big Boss' other son Solidus Snake to pull out all the stops trying to prevent this.
  • Skull Face was The Starscream to Zero and was inspired by The Boss' Heroic Sacrifice. After the Nazis destroyed his cultural identity, he sought to hit the Reset Button for human civilization by using the vocal chord parasites to systematically revert different cultures to their own original language, destroy global communications, international alliances, and intermingling cultures, and "make the world whole" by putting everyone on equal terms with Mutually Assured Destruction to enforce it.
  • Senator Armstrong had similar motivations to Zero, except he was The Social Darwinist who sought to socially engineer American evolution through violence rather than manipulation in order to undo the damage the Patriots caused and make America great again.
• In the Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC, the aliens who built the Stranger first came to your solar system after receiving a signal from the Eye of the Universe, and were so dedicated to the journey that they destroyed their home moon to build the ringworld they used for the interstellar voyage. Unfortunately, once they arrived, they received a vision from the Eye that seemingly showed it destroying the universe and reducing their race to grass-covered bone piles. The aliens decided the Eye was Evil All Along and blocked its signal so that no one else could find it and trigger an apocalypse. Only one of them had a different interpretation, that the Eye could be used to create a new universe after the previous one died, as symbolized by the grass growing over the bones of their species. This alien briefly unblocked the Eye's signal, setting into motion the main story's events, but was imprisoned for their efforts.
• Persona:
  • Persona 4:
    • When Mitsuo's Shadow is defeated, and disappears, Mitsuo starts gloating, acting as though he'd defeated it. In reality, this means that he failed to come to terms with the personal flaws that gave rise to it, in stark contrast to the heroes, who'd used those powers to defeat it. His Shadow died because his ego had become so corrupted that it became indistinguishable from one.
    • In Chie's Social Link, one of Chie's old friends, Takeshi, is infatuated with Yukiko. At Rank 8, he complains to her about how Yukiko had a "funky laugh" the last time he saw her, and points out that he thinks she "was better off gloomy." Chie points out that's how Yukiko naturally is, and it's subtly indicated that she gradually gains the confidence to be herself around people other than Chie. Contrasting this earlier was after saving Yukiko and seeing her open more to the others, Yosuke notes he wants to know more of her like this as a person.
    • Kanji says that a great deal of his efforts to be a man at first, such as beating up biker gangs and hiding his interest in handicrafts, were a result of trying to follow his late father's advice to "become strong," out of the belief that his father didn't think he was strong enough (to be fair, he was a kid when he lost his father.) Kanji ultimately realizes that he had the wrong idea of what it means to be strong, and so decides to be true to himself.
  • Persona 5:
    • Early on in the game, if you talk to two girls at Shujin, they will remark about how Ann's best friend Shiho often meets with Kamoshida, her volleyball coach, for one-on-one sessions, and leaves feeling depressed. Rather than realize that Kamoshida is physically abusing Shiho and later rapes her, the girls are offended that Shiho is sad after monopolizing Kamoshida's time.
    • On Christmas Day in the base game (and in Royal if the bonus content hasn't been triggered), Ryuji enthusiastically greets Makoto, Futaba and Sojiro in LeBlanc and wonders why the three of them seem saddened, clearly unable to read the mood. Ryuji did not realize the protagonist had turned himself in to the police.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:
  • During The Teal Mask DLC, Kieran idolizes the ogre that the rest of his village shuns, partly because he views it as strong and independent. He's also awed by and slightly jealous of the player character's battling skills. Therefore, when Ogerpon eventually chooses the player over him, and he loses one last battle with them, Kieran concludes that he simply wasn't strong enough to be Ogerpon's trainer, and he becomes obsessed with beating the player character. In reality, Ogerpon chose the player over him because they spent more time with her than he did, and she's actually very lonely (to the point that she's locked into a Lonely nature).
  • Kieran does this again during The Indigo Disk. He's still bitter over the player character beating him and is obsessed with getting stronger to the point of becoming his school's Champion. Therefore, when the player beats him one more time and he hears about Area Zero and Terapagos, Kieran decides to go along on the trip solely for the chance to catch a Legendary Pokémon to beat the player character with. This shows he hasn't learned why he keeps losing to the player, nor has he started considering the feelings of the Legendary he's currently fixated on. Kieran goes a step further than he did with Ogerpon by actively catching Terapagos as soon as it wakes up, even though he saw it walking towards the player in curiosity.
• Toward the end of Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, a flashback reveals that Kamen had tried to tell her best friend Momoko that Hiro was unfaithful, since Hiro had asked Kamen out while still in a relationship. Momoko, however, refused to believe Kamen, assuming that Kamen wanted Hiro for herself, and threatened to end their friendship if Kamen persisted. In reality, Kamen was a lesbian who had Unrequited Love for Momoko, but she didn't want to break them up; she just didn't want Momoko to get her heart broken. In the end, Momoko read texts from Hiro on Kamen's phone, and, assuming that Hiro was cheating on her with Kamen, proceeded to kill Hiro and herself with the goal of framing Kamen for their deaths.
• In Spirit Hunter: NG, the reason Kubitarou collects heads is because she misinterpreted a children's song that she thought could heal her younger brother. The opening line is "Head to the Great Tarou Kintoki"; because of her sub-standard education, Kubitarou took it to mean "Bring a head to the Great Tarou Kintoki".
• Street Fighter veteran E. Honda claims that his motivation is to show people that Sumo Wrestling is a legitimate martial art, and sumos are the best fighters on Earth. However, no less than Dan Hibiki pointed out a problem with this: Honda modified his wrestling style to compete with other martial artists, including adding various moves that would generally be illegal in sumo (sumo doesn't allow you to kick, for instance). Therefore, his own actions prove the opposite: traditional sumo wrestling has no place in an actual fight, since otherwise, Honda wouldn't need to change anything.
• In World of Warcraft, during the fight with Murozond, leader of the Infinite Dragonflight, the party can use the Hourglass of Time to reverse time, resetting all their health and cooldowns to their state at the start of the battle, and causing Murozond to arrogantly say that the Hourglass does nothing to him. He's right, but fails to notice that his health isn't being reset- by using the Hourglass to repeatedly use your strongest abilities and clear the voidzones left by Distortion Bombs, it's possible to defeat Murozond.

    Webcomics 

• The Order of the Stick:
  • Miko Miyazaki immediately assumes that because her own conclusions led her to kill Lord Shojo, the eponymous band somehow made her do it. She then takes it as far as assuming everyone in the room is working against her, and she can do no wrong because she is the strongest member of the Sapphire Guard.

  Roy Greenhilt: It's like she has that Monk ability that lets you jump as far as you want, only for her, it applies to conclusions.

  • In a discussion between Redcloak and Oona, she uses a metaphor to say that while Redcloak is genuinely trying to do what's best for the goblins, he's also obsessed with proving himself right, and she asks him which one he'd choose if the two goals ever conflicted. Redcloak chooses to deny that the goals are any way distinct and change the subject to criticizing the metaphor she used, essentially proving what she'd already guessed: that he would always choose the latter but convince himself it was the former. Oona notes that she's helping him in hopes of preventing the two goals from ever coming into conflict, because she knows what Redcloak's answer would be.
• Trevor (2020): Dr. Maddison thinks that Colin and Purdy being dumbfounded are them maliciously mocking him by pretending to not know what was happening to Trevor, despite him sending them multiple messages explaining it. Enid explains to Purdy that she had the messages (that they could catch) altered without Dr. Maddison's knowledge, and fed rumors about Dr. Maddison being crazy to the rest of the staff, so they truly do not know what he is ranting and raving about, despite his insistence that he’s already told them.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 

• Arthur: In "Arthur's Big Hit", Arthur gets a lot of flack from his parents and peers for hitting D.W. in retaliation for breaking his model plane. He focuses entirely on the fact that he constantly reminded D.W. not to touch it, failing to realize their point is that hitting his sister is still not an appropriate response. It takes Binky (who was pressured by the Tough Customers) hitting him to finally realize his mistake.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In a flashback scene from "Sozin's Comet, Part 1", Fire Lord Ozai asks Zuko (who spent most of season 2 Walking the Earth) how best to take care of the the remaining pockets of resistance in the Earth Kingdom. Zuko thinks that the resistances are stubborn like rocks and won't give up as long as they have hope. Zuko meant 'you're never going to be able to terrorize them into submission and should seek to pacify them diplomatically', but Azula thinks he means 'the best way to stop them is to terrorize them more until their will is completely broken' and suggests using Sozin's Comet to commit genocide against them. Ozai actually liking Azula's solution finally clues Zuko in that Ozai is a Complete Monster and that the Fire Nation's campaign of world conquest is totally unjustifiable.
• In The Batman (2004), when Harley Quinn's producer Jimmy Herbert calls her out on turning her show into a "circus" with her terrible advice instead of actually helping people, not only does Harley still think she knows what she's doing, but she eagerly agrees about turning the show into a "circus" because that's exactly what she's going for. Harley completely fails to realize her actions are actually hurting her reputation and are far more likely to get her show canceled.
• Bluey. Throughtout "The Sign," Bingo is quite cheerful over the fact that her family is moving. But by the end of the episode, it's revealed that Bingo didn't realize that when you sell your house, it means that you can't live in it anymore. When she finds out the truth, Bingo is devistated and she desperately tries to pull the For Sale sign out before breaking down into tears.
• A Boy Named Charlie Brown has Charlie Brown, who feels he is a complete loser as a spelling bee competitor, fails to realize he not only won the state Spelling Bee championship but he came in second in the National championship. His friends miss the point as well, as the closest thing he gets to support is Linus telling him he didn't need to be worried because everything is okay despite his failure, totally missing the point that both winning the state championship and coming in second at the National championship is actually an incredible level of success.
• Castlevania: Nocturne: Driven by fear that the French Revolution will spell the end of the church, Abbot Emmanuel has thrown in his lot with the vampire queen Erszabet Báthory, who promises a return of the "natural order", which he interprets as the church returned to a position of power. To that end, he prepares his daughter, Maria Renard, as a sacrifice for Erszabet in the season 1 finale "Devourer of Light". When Richter Belmont leads his friends — including Maria's mother, Tera — on a mission to rescue Maria and stop Erszabet's plot, Emmanuel fights back against them, quoting the Binding of Isaac, a story from the Book of Genesis that tells of Abraham, who had been commanded by God to make a sacrifice of his son Isaac, as justification for sacrificing Maria. Tera pointedly fires back that God stopped Abraham from carrying out Isaac's death and offered a ram to sacrifice instead. In the end, with Erszabet too powerful to stop and with no alternative, Tera offers herself in Maria's place as a sacrifice to Erszabet, telling Emmanual "I am the ram!"
• The Daria season 2 premiere "Arts 'N Crass" has Daria and Jane tasked with submitting a painting meant to represent student life. Daria, being The Cynic, gets the idea to submit a painting of a pretty girl with a poem explaining she maintained that beauty through bulimia. Even after having it explained to them, their cheerful English teacher and Dean Bitterman Mr. O'Neill and Ms. Li struggled to understand the negative message and tried to get them to change it despite the entire point being the juxtaposition of beautiful imagery with a darker underlying theme. Although to his credit, Mr. O'Neill attempted to meet them halfway by suggesting a Missed Meal Aesop to lighten the tone but the two refused to compromise.
• Gravity Falls: In "A Tale of Two Stans", during Stan and Ford's final argument before the latter is sent into an alternate universe, the final straw in Stan's argument that Ford is putting his ambitions before his family is that Ford is "selfishly hoarding" his grant money instead of using it to help his family. Stan, a high school dropout and con man, doesn't realize that this is the one instance where Ford really can't do anything, because that isn't how grant money works. The people who gave Ford the grant money would be monitoring Ford's expenses quite closely to make sure that he wasn't embezzling from them by spending the money on anything but the project he said it was for, which unfortunately for both Stans includes using it to help his family.
• Infinity Train:
  • The Conductor. Or, rather, Amelia. Towards the end of Book 1 we learn that, much like every other passenger, she found herself aboard the train after a traumatic event. However, after learning about the purpose of the train and its inner workings, her (admittedly justified) questions about how no one there consented to adventure therapy give way to an insistence that she should be allowed to use the science of the train to bring her husband back to life instead of working through her issues, too enveloped with grief to see any issues with this. The result of reaching for this goal is three decades of suffering and confusion for the train's native denizens and future passengers, both directly and indirectly.
  • The reason for Book 3's conflict is that Grace decided that numbers going up was a good thing (the actual goal is to get your numbers down to 0 via Character Development so you can leave the train) and taught this to her Apex cult, resulting in them venerating bad behavior and refusal to move on from trauma. By the midpoint of Book 3, she's started to learn that she was wrong. Unfortunately for everyone, while her friend Simon gets to learn the same lessons as her, he instead concludes that her number going down was a bad thing purely because it meant they were growing further apart (because she was developing as a person while he remained selfish), so he decided that the only thing for it was to kill Grace if he couldn't make her return to her old self.
• Justice League: In the Unlimited episode "Patriot Act", Shining Knight (a time-displaced Aurthurian knight) faces off against the Knight Templar General Eiling, and tries to get him to come to his senses and realize that following orders isn't always the right option by relating a story of when Arthur gave him a Secret Test of Character by ordering him to destroy a village, which Shining Knight disobeyed because he knew that would be an evil act and not something Arthur would have wanted. Eiling retorts that Shining Knight is clearly not a good soldier, ignoring the point that what Arthur wanted was to make sure that Shining Knight would, of his own accord, make the right choice in a To Be Lawful or Good situation.
• Kaeloo: In Episode 17, Kaeloo forces several kisses on Mr. Cat offscreen and she thinks it's okay because "kissing isn't violent". She tries to explain this to Mr. Cat... who is sitting in Troubled Fetal Position with a disturbed facial expression, clearly feeling violated.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Stormy Weather 2", Nathalie, Gabriel Agreste's assistant, reveals in an Internal Monologue that she admires Gabriel's commitment to his family. Of course, this is ignoring that Gabriel is an emotionally abusive Control Freak whose "commitment" is damaging to everyone involved.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Owl's Well That Ends Well", Twilight lectures Spike about all the trouble he's been causing because he's jealous of Owlowiscious, telling him "This is not the Spike I know and love!" A dejected Spike interprets this as meaning Twilight doesn't love him anymore, and prompts him to run away from home. Twilight telling him more clearly why she is not liking his attitude could have prevented him from running off.
  • In Twilight's Kingdom Part 1, since Twilight's Element of Harmony is Magic, both she and Rarity assume that the lesson Twilight would have learned to get her key involved a difficult magical task, and not The Power of Friendship... even when Twilight acknowledges that the Magic in the Element of Magic is the Magic of Friendship from the beginning of the show.
• The Owl House:
  • In "Convention", Amity blames Luz for embarrassing her during the abomination incident and making her look bad in front of the Emperor's Coven during the witches' duel. However, the latter was caused by Lilith, the Coven leader.
  • Amity thinks Luz is a bully over a misunderstanding with the Blight twins and her diary, having come in right as Luz was trying to stop them from reading it and not giving her the chance to explain herself.
  • In "Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Hooty's Door", she's initially flattered by the Tunnel of Love Hooty set up for her and Luz, but when Luz starts tearing it apart in embarrassment, she assumes it means Luz isn't interested in her. Luz is actually terrified of embarrassing herself in front of her crush and thinks Amity deserves a much better date than a corny tunnel of love. They clear it up by the end of the episode and get a Relationship Upgrade.
• Rocket Power: In "Radical New Equipment", the gang encounters a group of winter sports athletes with different physical impairments, such as blindness and paralysis. Reggie is particularly impressed by Lizzie, a girl with a prosthetic leg, and tries to strike up a friendship, only to treat her like a helpless child. Hoping to help Reggie understand that Lizzie is not helpless because of her disability. Reggie's father, Ray, and honorary uncle Tito tell her a story about their friend Leonard "The Lizard" Brady; he used to be the best surfer around until he lost his eyesight. All his friends felt sorry for him because he could not surf anymore, until one day at night, he was able to surf in the dark with no problem. Tito explains that Brady did not let anything stop him from living his life to the fullest. He even uses his blindness to his advantage. Reggie got that Lizzie is making the best of a bad situation, and left before Ray and Tito explain the real lesson that she should've learned.
• Santa Inc.: Candy wants to be the first female and elf to become the new Santa, and to that end she's fixated on that goal. However, she's also very rude, irritable and uninterested in getting along with others, which hurts in the one area most important. As being Santa means being a Friend to All Children, Candy's guaranteed success was shot down when Santa saw she hated being around kids and scared them away to Devin, whose genuine ability to easily interact with them made Santa decide to give him the position instead. She fails to understand why this is so important until Santa tells her that getting along with kids is the number one aspect he needs in a successor, but Candy's insistence she can learn makes it clear she sees it more like a minor job requirement rather than the key aspect of the job. When Santa instead offers her the role of being the brains of the Santa Inc. while Devin becomes the face as the new Santa, she rejects this and curses him out.
• In the South Park episode "Kenny Dies" (with a semi-parody tone), where the boys are told Kenny is diagnosed with a terminal disease. "But he's gonna get better, right?" inquires Stan. Somber music plays in the background as the adults exchange saddened looks.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Morrie Bench was Mary Jane Watson's ex-boyfriend from high school, whom she broke up with and, after being enlisted in the Navy by his parents, became the supervillain Hydro-Man. He set out to prove to Mary Jane he could give her anything she wanted, thinking she had every right to break up with him because he had nothing so he committed thefts to provide for her. Mary Jane had to spell it out for him that he was an obnoxious and overbearing person who was jealous of everyone around her, and that she didn't love him. Unfortunately, not only does he not see his attitude is a problem, he's convinced he'll have to flood all of New York if it means she'll be his, still not getting that this is the very reason she rejected him.
• Star Wars Rebels: In "Ghosts of Geonosis", the rebels exploring the titular Ghost Planet find a surviving Geonosian. When they ask him what the Empire was doing at the planet, all he does is draw a circle inside of a circle, clearly representative of a certain superweapon. Due to the Language Barrier, however, the rebels can only misinterpret the images, ultimately concluding that Klik-Klak was drawing the poison gas canisters they find at the bottom of a shaft.
• Steven Universe:
  • The Homeworld Gems have performed experiments with fusion as a means to strengthen their forces. Unfortunately, they see it as nothing but a power boost, not realizing that the relationship between two or more Gems is why fusions can be formed in the first place. By forcefully and emotionlessly mashing together Gem shards, all they manage to create are misshapen pitiful horrors. But rather than abandon the project, they doubled down and used the results of their research to make a "fusion" out of millions of shards called the Cluster, which they proceeded to stick in the Earth's core as a ticking time bomb.
  • In "Off Colors", Lars saves the Off Colors from the Shattering Robonoids by blocking their scanners with his body and beating them with a rock. He finishes off the last one by jumping on top of it and jamming a pointed rock in its "eye", causing it to blow up. He gets flung into a wall with a nasty "CRACK" and falls thirty feet to the ground. The Off Colors, who are used to Gems' Super-Toughness, start celebrating and praise his heroism... while Steven starts to panic because he knows that humans can't just walk off those sorts of hits. Sure enough, when he checks Lars's pulse, it isn't there, and he starts sobbing because he knows he's just lost a friend.
  • In "Now We're Only Falling Apart", Sapphire is distraught upon finding out that Rose Quartz was actually Pink Diamond, as she ended up believing that Rose was the cruel, cowardly tyrant the Crystal Gems assumed they were supposed to shatter along with the other Diamonds, and she never looked into Rose or any of her intentions because she trusted Rose that much. Steven and Pearl eventually get her to realize how backwards Sapphire is thinking when Pearl explains why Pink Diamond did what she did to spare the Earth. Pearl's following flashback story reveals that when Pink Diamond told Blue Diamond she wanted to save life on Earth from the damage Pink's colonization was causing, Blue created a People Zoo and put a few humans in, believing that that would appease her.
• Steven Universe: Future:
  • In "Prickly Pair", Steven vents his bottled-up feelings to a sentient cactus, who ends up causing problems when it starts parroting Steven's words. Steven realizes that using the creature as an emotional outlet was a mistake, but what he takes away from the experience is that he shouldn't talk about his problems at all.
  • In "Mr. Universe", Steven is upset upon learning his father ran away from a comparatively mundane life and ended up raising his son with limitless freedom, along with not giving Steven the basic necessities he should have had growing up like schooling. Greg's reasoning is that his parents were emotionally controlling, whereas Steven points out that they might have had their reasons for their actions and how Greg's decision to raise his son in the opposite manner resulted in Steven having no idea what to do with his life and his inability to connect with people anymore. After Steven yells and crashes the van, Greg says he's proud of Steven for speaking up as he himself never had the courage to do that with his own father. If this were any other scenario, this would be heartwarming. However, it's clear Greg doesn't realize Steven isn't acting out or expressing his individuality, he's furious at his father for essentially running away from a normal family and not giving Steven any structure, cementing in his mind that Greg is a Manchild who was not fit to raise him. Saying he's proud of Steven just made it worse.

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