No More Lies
Sometimes, for whatever reason, a mentor, a Quest Giver, or someone in the know has cause to lie to the heroes. It's not necessarily even for its own sake, in fact it may even be with the best of intentions. However, inevitably it comes to a point where instead of helping, continued deception will cause more harm than good.
Most of the time, this is when the characters have to let the truth out, no matter the feelings hurt, the harmful secrets revealed, the comfortable illusions shattered.
The No More Lies moment is that point, where the plan is no longer furthered by lying. Sometimes, in fact, the plan has already been hindered and the mentor has no choice but to part with the information. Sometimes the mentor is a Manipulative Bastard and only gives the information when he knows the Hero will have no choice but to keep going. Sometimes the hero does have the choice to leave, and that choice is precisely why the Manipulative Bastard version was waiting.
Anime and Manga
- In Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Fai knew everything that would happen all along. The rest of the group found out when Ashura showed them Fai's past
Live Action Television
- Often subverted in Seinfeld, where even when the point has obviously come to tell the truth, characters (most often George) will continue to lie on principle.
Film
- Judge Dredd. Chief Judge Fargo told Dredd that his family was killed when he was a child. Just before his death Fargo tells Dredd the truth: Dredd was created in a lab, and so was Rico.
- Return of the Jedi: When Obi-Wan can no longer gain by hiding the truth from Luke, he tells him that Vader is in fact his father and that Leia is his twin sister.
- Galaxy Quest: When the ship is boarded, Jason has no choice but to tell the truth about the show and his life as an actor.
- Shrek, Fiona, at the altar at sunset, chooses Shrek over Farquaad and reveals her nature and her curse.
Literature
- Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone: z'Acatto needs to tell Cazio that his own drunken stupidity led to the death of Cazio's father because if he didn't he knew the young man would chase shadows until he died.
- The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn shows himself to Sauron in the palantir when there can be no more gain by hiding himself and who he is.
- Well, that and it's also part of a larger deception to convince Sauron that he has the ring—to draw his attention away from their real plan to destroy it.
- Harry Potter: When Dumbledore tells Harry what little he hadn't pieced together about Voldemort and the Prophecy, he lampshades this pretty well verbatim.
Video Game
- Dragon Age Origins: The Grey Wardens are made of this. They keep the Joining ritual secret until the last moment, and they keep the Heroic Sacrifice needed by a Warden to slay an Archdemon secret until the end.
- The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time has Zelda, who knows about the Triforce and who has each piece of it, but she waits until she has no choice to tell Link.
- The Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series has several of these, often when Phoenix's clients are innocent of the crimes they're accused of but hold off on explaining the full truth to Phoenix and the court until the climax of the trial. One major example involves Lana from the DS version of the first game.
- When you receive Mordin's loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, he tells Shepard that he wasn't entirely truthful about his previous work in the STG, studying the effects of the genophage -- when they discovered the krogan were adapting, he and his team revised the genophage to keep the krogan subdued.
Web Comic
- Girl Genius has Baron Wulfenbach say the "no more secrets" version of this to his son Gil. Of course, it's also of the "I'll tell you after the big plot event" so Gil still doesn't know anything. And now the Baron may be dead.