I Am Spartacus: Difference between revisions

* Shannon Hale's ''[[Princess Academy]]'' has a form of this. The girls who were candidates to marry the prince are captured by bandits, who demand to know which is the future princess so they can hold her for ransom. (The prince actually left without making a decision, but the bandits don't believe this.) One girl speaks up and claims the prince secretly proposed to her. When another girl who hadn't even met the prince makes the same claim, the rest catch on and claim he proposed to all of them. This confuses the bandits enough that they don't dare kill anyone until they know which girl is the princess.

* The short story "The Three Lime Trees", by [[Hermann Hesse]], uses this trope. When a young man is wrongfully accused of murder, his older brother claims to be the murderer to save him and he's released. Soon, their eldest brother comes to town to do exactly the same... and the younger brother (who didn't know his siblings were taking up the blame for the "crime") returns to the courtroom and says that ''he'' was the killer, so his siblings must be released. The judge decides to leave it to God's judgement and makes the siblings plant three lime trees by their crowns, thinking that the one that withers sooner will signal who is the true culprit... so when ''none'' of the trees wither and dry, but start growing healthy and normal, the three brothers are released.

** In ''[[Horus Heresy|Legion]]'', all the Alpha Legion are Alpharius, at least to outsiders. Magnificent Bastardry is their [[Planet of Hats|hat]], and having the entire legion appear virtually alike is important to much of their scheming.

*** [[Fridge Logic|Doesn't it make it easier to root them out, since if you've seen even of them, you basically know every one of them in the face?]]

== Tabletop Games ==

* ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' lore has one of these, too. [http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/es/20030108es Such is] the mystery of [[The Casanova|Phlambror]]'s death. "He was murdered by an enraged husband, and no one was ever punished for the crime despite the garthraun arresting a man red-handed (literally bloody-handed, over the body). As it turns out, no less than four hundred men came forward to claim that they'd slain Phlambror."

 

 

[[Category:I Am an Index]]

[[Category:Romanticism Versus Enlightenment]]

[[Category:Loyalty Tropes]]