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'''Homer''': [[Blatant Lies|It's you.]]|''[[The Simpsons]]'', "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons"}}
A lie or deception that takes on a life of its own, spiraling out of the control of the ones who started it and often mutating in the process. What distinguishes a Snowball Lie from a [[Fawlty Towers Plot]] lie is that it attracts other characters to keep it alive and expand it, either by explicitly furthering the deception for their own purposes or by sincerely buying into it and carrying it on in the honest belief that it is real—or to avoid being embarrassed by their "ignorance" or "inexperience".
Usually a Snowball Lie will eventually grow to a point where it will collapse, either under the weight of its internal contradictions or after some insightful person [[Pull the Thread|Pulls The Thread]] on it. Sometimes, though, a perfect Snowball Lie will show no signs of ever stopping, and its creators will find themselves forced to kill it—with varying degrees of success, and varying degrees of repercussions to themselves. In particularly ironic situations, the Snowball Lie can become an unstoppable juggernaut that displaces the truth and becomes a new "truth" in its own right.
An [[Invented Individual]] is a Snowball Lie based around a fictional person.
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== Fan Fic ==
* ''[[Harry Potter and
* [[Princess Celestia Hates Tea]]: Celestia lied to Luna that she enjoyed the Tea Brewer she gifted her with, in order to spare her feelings. The problem? That was a few thousand years ago, and as an immortal [[Physical God]], Celestia has had millenia to continue drinking all the tea her loving subjects have been giving her, even though she still can't stand the stuff. It's safe to say it causes an avalanche instead of a snowball when she reveals she doesn not, in fact, enjoy tea.
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* In the obscure 2005 [[Robin Williams]] film ''The Big White'', he plays a man in Alaska with a mentally ill wife and they're on the brink of bankruptcy. He finds a corpse in a dumpster and passes it off as his long-lost brother to get an insurance claim. But he's hounded by an investigator who knows something's up, and he has to pile on lie upon lie. And just when he thinks he's gotten away with it, the two men who dumped the corpse want it back, and the real long-lost brother shows up.
* The mystery product "Vip" in ''Lover Come Back''.
* Rather a nasty example in ''Gossip,'' a guy sees a girl pass out at party when alone with her boyfriend. The boyfriend leaves her to sleep. But the guy suggests to his friends that they should spread the rumor that the boyfriend had sex with her while she was unconscious, to see how far the rumor goes. The rumor goes far enough that she has the boyfriend arrested for rape. Viewers might wonder if the girl couldn't tell the difference, turns out she could, and the guy starting the rumor was in fact {{spoiler|covering up his rape. She was also extremely sensitive to the whole plan because she had been date-raped before, by the guy who started the rumor and raped her again.}}
* The [[Al Pacino]] film ''[[S1m0ne]]'' and the [[Whoopi Goldberg]] film ''The Associate'' are both about fake people invented by the protagonists.
* ''Accepted'', about a fake college.
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* A convicted child molester on ''[[Breakout Kings]]'' is revealed to be {{spoiler|a victim of this. Only one victim was actually assaulted, and the guilty party was her own father. She was forced into blaming her teacher. The other "victims" were kids caught up in the hysteria.}}
* This is a regular feature of [[As Time Goes By]], particularly in any episode where Jean is trying to avoid becoming the target of her officious and patronising sister-in-law's pity (or intervene in Judith, Sandy and/or Alistair's love lives...). Lionel invariably protests and tries to avoid participation, but if it's a Penny (sister-in-law) [[Lies Snowball]], he will never quite manage to get free of it.
* Sometimes occurs whenever Sheldon is involved in a lie in ''[[Big Bang Theory]]''; not because maintaining the lie actually requires this, but because Sheldon becomes neurotic and ''thinks'' it does. On one memorable occasion, he even brought in someone to stay in their apartment acting as Leonard's [[Invented Individual]] junkie cousin because he thought his original plot—that they were trying to get him into rehab—was implausible.
* In the ''[[Fraggle Rock]]'' episode "Boober's Quiet Day", [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Boober hopes to have a nice quiet day]]. When his friend Tosh asks him for a favor that would ruin his quiet day, he lies that he is going on a trip. Then he has to ''actually'' go on that trip when Mokey asks him to bring something back for her... The lie keeps growing and growing until eventually Boober is forced to pretend to be an Old Gypsy Lady. When the web of lies finally collapses, and the other Fraggles ask Boober why he lied so much, he says "BECAUSE I WANTED TO HAVE A NICE QUIET DAY!" To which Gobo replies... [[We Could Have Avoided All This|"Why didn't you just ask?"]]
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== Video Games ==
* Thanks to the [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe]] nature of the universe in ''[[Planescape: Torment]],'' a snowball lie can cause quite a lot of unintended consequences, up to and including creating a ''[[Invented Individual|entirely new person]]'' out of an alias the Nameless One uses.
* The ''[[Persona 2]]'' rumor systems can work on the Snowball lie in the same fashion as the ''Planescape'' example.
* In [[Final Fantasy XIII]], {{spoiler|Vanille}} cannot bear to tell the truth to {{spoiler|Fang}} about their Focus, fearing the latter's reaction to {{spoiler|becoming Ragnarok}}. Because of this, {{spoiler|the two of them end up attacking the Bodhum Fal'Cie in an effort to trigger their memories}}, which leads to {{spoiler|Serah and Dajh becoming L'Cie}}. Thus, had {{spoiler|Vanille}} told the truth in the first place, the ''entire plot of the game'' would never have happened.
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* An episode of ''[[Dilbert]]'' had the usual team creating a record of a new employee for the purpose of taking the ownership of a cubicle or some such, even making a picture of his face by amalgamating their own. By the end of the episode, everyone thought he was real.
** Not everyone. Catbert did not believe in Todd.
* The ''[[Pepper Ann]]'' episode "Crush + Burn" is all about this trope. Milo asks Pepper Ann to cover him by making up a lie so he can have an excuse to reject Gwen's romantic interest on him. Every time Gwen discovers an inconsistency in the story, Pepper Ann tries to cover it up with more and more lies until it gets out of control and everyone gets tangled up in it.
{{quote|'''Pepper Ann:''' I wanted to tell Gwen Mezzrow the truth, but you said "cover".
'''Milo:''' I said "cover", not "create an alternative universe"! }}
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== Real Life ==
* [[wikipedia:Cottingley fairies|The "Cottingley fairies" case]].
* The "crop circles" hoax was a Snowball Lie that grew so big that even when its authors (two old men from England) tried to kill it, ufologists and other enthusiasts refused to believe them. Of course, they were also imitated by dozens of copycats, hence the excuse that "Well, you might have done ''some'' of them, but what about ''these'' ones?"
** The same goes for things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Just like the crop circles, when people came forward to announce that they were involved in the hoaxing, believers accused them of lying to cover up the ''real'' creatures.
* There's also H.L. Mencken's "bathtub hoax", where his bogus history of the bathtub, "A Neglected Anniversary", was believed as truth for decades after it was published in 1917.
* ''The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion'', a fraudulent anti-Semitic manifesto about [[Conspiracy Theory|a worldwide Jewish conspiracy]]. It was first used to scapegoat Jews for the monarchists' defeat in the Russo-Japanese war and the Russian Revolution, was infamously used by [[Adolf Hitler]] according to some historians as his justification for his campaign of genocide during [[World War II]], and is still believed to be real by many people even today.
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* Perhaps one of the most tragic and best-known cases of this were the Salem witch trials in colonial America. The witch hunt was started by three girls who claimed to be possessed by demons, and who went into "fits" because of it. When they later confessed to lying about it, however, the trend was so huge and so many people were caught up in such a panicky situation that the people simply refused to believe them, choosing instead to believe that it was the demons within them who were making them "confess" their lies.
** In a similar fashion, the so called "Gävle Boy", Johan Johansson Grijs, who was one of the most infamous children involved in the Swedish witch trials. After he had accused his own mother of witchcraft and gotten her executed in his hometown Gävle, he was sent to relatives in Stockholm, where he continued to accuse people and got other children to do the same. This went on for quite some time, until someone realised that he knew a bit too much about witchcraft for being a victim, and he himself was sentenced to death. He panicked and confessed to lying, but was executed for that instead.
* The claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Doubleday, a military hero, never claimed to have invented baseball, and there's no evidence he'd ever even visited Cooperstown. In fact, the first printed reference to baseball in America [[Older Than They Think|was in 1791]]. In 1908, 15 years after Doubleday died, a commission whose open aim was to prove that baseball was strictly American in origin announced their findings that Doubleday was the inventor. This claim was based the testimony of just one person, an elderly mentally ill man, who would have have been a young boy in 1839. The report was forgotten until the 1930s. Then Major League Baseball kicked of a massive campaign to celebrate the supposed centennial of baseball in 1939, culminating in the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
* Various child abuse scandals, especially those with supposed Satanic cult connections and multiple alleged perpetrators, result from this: one suspicious parent, teacher, or social worker questions a child (who may or may not be an actual abuse victim) and soon worried parents are questioning their kids and the number of "victims" and "abusers" starts expanding dramatically.
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[[Category:Narrative Devices]]
[[Category:Truth and Lies]]
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