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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Telemachus took a deep breath and said: You want the truth, and I will give it to you.
Prior to the days of [[Daddy DNA Test|DNA testing]], it was impossible to verify a child's paternity, and the only evidence besides the word of the mother (who might not know herself in the subtrope [[
This can be a source of tension and drama even when the mother is honest, because neither the child nor the father can prove it. The [[Green
Why [[Luke, I Might Be Your Father]] is a trope.
A powerful force behind [[My Girl Is Not a Slut]] and [[Nature Adores a Virgin]] in [[Real Life]], because a man's sexual escapades cannot leave the woman wondering, nine months later, whether she really gave birth to that baby (short of invoking [[Switched At Birth]] or, for in-vitro fertilisation, Switched At Implantation). To what extent there is reason to doubt in real life is not known; numerous urban legends claim a high percentage of babies are attributed to false fathers, but the location of the studies determining this tends to migrate a lot.
A trope for historical settings, as [[Daddy DNA Test]] is the [[Trope Breaker]], unless identical twins, or clones, are the purported father, or for some reason, testing is impossible.
{{examples|Examples}}▼
== Ballads ==
* In the [[Child Ballad]] ''Gil Brenton'', the hero accepts the heroine's story of how he got her pregnant, but the ballad ends with magical writing on the baby's body affirming that he is in fact the father, to doubly avert this trope.
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== [[Fairy Tales]] ==
* In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130603143049/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/facetiousnights/night3_fable1.html Peter the Fool]'', the king goes to investigate how the princess came to be pregnant. The baby recognizes the man
* In the folktale ''[http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type1362.html The Snow Child]'', the husband claims to be taken in by the fantasical story his wife tells about how the child came to be conceived without a father, always involving snow. Then, later, he [[Made a Slave|sells the boy as a slave]] and tells his mother that he melted.
== Film ==
* In ''[[The Count of Monte Cristo (film)|The Count of Monte Cristo]]'', Mercédès, the fiancée of hero Edmond Dantes, inexplicably espouses his rival Fernand Mondego soon after Dantes is imprisoned on a trumped-up charge. The paternity of {{spoiler|her only son}} eventually becomes a plot point in the film (which [[Revised Ending|isn't in the original]] [[Alexandre Dumas]] [[The Count of Monte Cristo (novel)|novel]]).
* ''[http://lonchaney.org/filmography/153.html West of Zanzibar]'': [[Lon Chaney]] plays a man whose wife was going to run away with another man and then [[Death
== Literature ==
* In the ''Odyssey'', Telemachus wonders about
* In ''[[Jane Eyre]]'', Mr. Rochester's ward is the daughter of his one-time mistress, who sent him the baby after he had dismissed her when he learned she was unfaithful to him. She said the child was his; he assures Jane he has his doubts.
* In [[Sharon Shinn]]'s ''Jenna Starborn'', a [[Twice
* In [[Madeleine L
* ''[[
* Becomes an issue for two characters in Larry Niven's ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring''. After one female character is used as a [[Sex Slave]], her husband can't accept her child as his {{spoiler|until learning that the child inherited a respiratory problem from Mom's husband/his true father}}.
* In [[Andre Norton]]'s ''[[Witch World|The Jargoon Pard]]'', Kethan is his uncle's heir because as his sister's son, he is his most reliable kin.
* In [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]'s ''Beyond Thirty'', the British Isles have "retrogressed"
{{quote|
* Inverted in ''[[Wicked (
** Although [[Played Straight]] with her sister Nessarose, who her father suspects is not his. {{spoiler|Turns out it's true about Elphaba, too, with a different father than her sister, though}}.
*** the issue of both claims is resolved by sequel books, where {{spoiler|Liir's daughter turns up green, confirming Liir's parentage at last}} and {{spoiler|the family tree confrims that Nessarose is indeed Frexspar's child}}
* In L. Jagi Lamplighter's ''[[
* In Angie Sage's ''[[
* In the [[Chivalric Romance]] ''Octavian'', the emperor's wicked mother accuses his wife of infidelity and claims her twin children are not his.
* In some forms of the [[Chivalric Romance]] ''The Swan Children'', a woman taunts another woman with infidelity because she had given birth to twins; later, she gives birth to seven children at once, and her mother-in-law taunts her with the same "proof" and exposes the children, although she has not been unfaithful.
* In Marie de France's ''Le Fresne'', a woman taunts another woman with infidelity after she bears twins; then she bears twins herself, and unable to prove her innocence, exposes one daughter.
* In [[
* In Ovid's ''Elegy XIII'', he invokes Isis and Lucina to save his mistress, Corinna, after an attempted abortion; during the course of it, he admits that the child may not be his.
* Jacky invokes this trope in ''[[Bloody Jack|Under The Jolly Roger]]''. She knows she's shortly to be deflowered by Captain Scrogg, so she decides to sleep with Robin. Her reasoning is that if she becomes pregnant, whoever the father is, she'll be able to tell herself it's Robin's baby and be able to love it the way it deserves. {{spoiler|It doesn't work, but neither does Captain Scrogg's [[Attempted Rape]], so it all works out.}}
* From the start there is speculation as to whether the father of Isabelle's children is Charlie or her husband in ''[[
* This is the backstory of one of the characters in [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s ''[[Heralds of Valdemar|Magic's Promise]]''; when the kid was born early and looked like neither his mother nor his father but exactly like his maternal uncle, his father assumed [[Brother
* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''The Song of the Cardinal'', with some [[Fridge Logic]]. The father cardinal suspects an egg was laid by an interloper and the mother knows it for her own. Except, of course, her actual egg ''could'' have been tipped out of the nest by a brood
* This could be said for George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire". {{spoiler|Cersei goes out of her way to not have Robert's children, instead getting pregnant by her brother Jaime and claiming that all three of her children are her husband's.}} This brings about a struggle for succession after Robert's death.
* In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Time Enough for Love]]'', Lazarus Long time-travels to his own childhood, with a story about having been a foundling. The family resemblance, combined with the backstory Lazarus (going under the name "Ted Bronson" at that point) provides, leads his mother Maureen and her father Ira to conclude "Ted" is the illegitimate child of Ira's late brother. Later on, Maureen admits to Lazarus that her father thinks it a good deal more likely that "Ted" is Ira's own son.
== [[Live
* An episode of ''[[Sanford and Son]]'' has an old friend of Fred's claim that he had a one night stand with Elizabeth and that he's actually Lamont's father. Another friend of Fred's actually says the trope name verbatim. In the end {{spoiler|it turns out that the guy actually slept with Aunt Esther, and thought it was Elizabeth in the dark.}}
* On ''[[Two and A Half Men]]'', Alan's ex wife Judith had a daughter with her current husband Herb. Alan, however, suspects he might actually be the father, after he and Judith had a brief tryst while she and Herb were separated.
* On ''[[My Name Is Earl]]'', this comes up more than once. The first time is when Joy is pregnant (for the second time, having been visibly pregnant already the night she met and married Earl), and Earl thinks the baby is his...but she has been sleeping with Darnell, and [[
* An episode of ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'' plays with and lamp-shades the gender double-standard of the trope when the title character tries to do a [[Daddy DNA Test]] on Taub's kids (from simultaneous pregnancies with the two woman he had been seeing). {{spoiler|After a moment of weakness, Taub shreds the results without looking.}}
* The ''[[
** The answer: {{spoiler|it IS her husband Rory's, but because the baby was conceived in the TARDIS, she is also a Time Lord.}}
* In season 9 of ''[[
==
* [[William Shakespeare]]
** In ''[[The
** In ''[[The Tempest]]'', Prospero tweaks the edge of this trope, explaining the past to Miranda:
{{quote|
She said thou wast my daughter;'' }}
** In ''[[Titus Andronicus (
** In ''[[
* In [[Euripides]]'s ''Ion'', Apollo exploits the difficulty in telling: his oracle tells Xuthus that Ion is his son when in fact, he is the son of Xuthus's wife Creusa who was raped by Apollo.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[
** Eventually John Redcorn ''wants'' to reveal the truth to Joseph, but Nancy (the boy's mother) refuses to allow it based on the strong bond Joseph and Dale share. As she puts it "Joseph already has the only father he'll ever need".
*** Indeed, Dale and Joseph even discover that Dale was out of town the night Joseph must have been conceived but convince themselves that she was simply abducted by aliens and impregnated with her husbands genetic seed (for some reason) that night.
** Another episode involved a former lover of John Redcorn's (a single mother with a darker-skinned daughter about Joseph's age) moving into the neighborhood and beginning to date resident loser, Bill. While Joseph and the daughter [[Squick|develop crushes on each other]], Dale discovers via covert DNA testing that they are half-siblings. After convincing himself this means he is the father (via alien abduction and impregnation once again), he reveals the test and results to his wife, who confronts John Redcorn over this infidelity during their affair. Fortunately, Redcorn ends up taking some responsibility [[Discontinuity|and the mother and daughter end up moving in with him]], separating the girl and Joseph (without alerting them to their blood relation) before anything actually incestuous occurs.
* In ''[[
** On multiple occasions throughout the episode, when asked by Francine if he can forgive her infidelity, Stan holds her tenderly in contemplative silence before [[Defiled Forever|calling her a slut]] and then remarking off-handedly in bewilderment on his body language, and the mixed signals it must be giving her.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* The use of DNA testing. In about three-quarters of the cases, the purported father finds he is the real
** Standing these statistics on their head, however, is the tidbit that in general men only have these tests done if they feel there's a strong probability that they're not the father - but even in these cases where someone's really suspicious, three-quarters of the time they're wrong.
*** Of course, a DNA test is no proof of fidelity, either. If a woman has sex with two men (whether consensually or by being raped) within her fertile period and then conceives, it's a tossup which of the men is the child's father, and the DNA test will resolve it.
* Commonplace on [[Talk Show
* Literature/real Life: In Conn Iggulden's epic stories of the Mongol Empire, a recurring plot-theme concerns Genghiz Khan's uncertainty over the paternity of his eldest son Jechi (at the time of conception, his mother Borte was a prisoner of the Tartars and was known to have been raped). Because he half-believes in the "this is a Tartar's bastard" stories, Genghiz repeatedly shuns and blanks his oldest son, or else gives him punitive or seemingly impossible tasks to complete that he would not dream of imposing on the favoured younger sons. This had consequences that stretched down the generations and caused the Mongol empire to collapse prematurely.
* At the Oneida colony, the practice of "complex marriage" caused onlookers to wonder about the children knowing their fathers. The leader retorted that the children knew their fathers the way children outside the colony did: on the word of their mothers.
* Victorian anthropologists hypothesized that matrilineal systems were more primitive than patrilineal systems, stemming from before the organization of marriage, so that only a child's mother could be known. This has not been borne out by subsequent
** The practice in Egypt of the Pharaoh marrying his own sister was taken to be evidence of this, but since the Pharaoh's heir would be his own son even if he was not born to the sister, it appears to be a matter of regarding only his own sister as his social equal and so an appropriate wife.
*** Also a matter of getting the strongest royal blood possible for the
*** This factored into the inheritance snarl around Hatshepsut and the Thutmoses. (Thutmose III was her nephew, and her husband's son, but not her child; her only offspring was a daughter. Thutmose II was her sickly half-brother, to whom she was queen, and who left her regent to his heir when he died young. Thutmose III's reasons for attempting to write her out of history have lately been suspected to be as much about downplaying the fact that he was only royalty on his father's side for his son's benefit as about resentment for the semi-usurpation thing, considering his timing.)
*** Thutmose III was six foot two and has been called the Napoleon of Egypt for his conquests. Hybrid vigor oi!
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Always Male]]
[[Category:Luke, I Am Your Index]]▼
[[Category:Pregnancy Tropes]]
[[Category:Parental Issues]]
▲[[Category:Luke I Am Your Index]]
[[Category:Sublime Rhyme]]
[[Category:
▲[[Category:Trope]]
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