Framed for Heroism

A hero tries a desperate, futile attack against the enemy, charging in against an armored killing machine armed with, say, a pointed stick.

The enemy falls down dead. The hero looks at his weapon in baffled amazement. Then we see that the villain was actually shot by another hero who'd sneaked up behind him.

This is sometimes a variant of Bait and Switch Gunshot. It could overlap with Big Damn Heroes, Big Damn Villains, or Changed My Mind, Kid.

Sometimes, the second hero is disappointed when no one will give him the proper credit and praise he deserves. See Dude, Where's My Reward? and Dude, Where's My Respect?

Examples of Framed for Heroism include:

Anime and Manga

• In the second Sakura Taisen OVA series, there is a point where Li Kohran, in costume as a character she plays on the radio, faces down a mecha with a prop gun; her teammate Maria is actually the one who makes the shot.
• In Berserk, Farnese has her knights fighting Guts and getting slaughtered. Guts plows through them and charges Farnese who timidly holds out her sword in a feeble attempt to defend herself. Just as Guts reaches the point of her sword, the combined exertion from fighting an giant monster and then facing her knights causes him to collapse from exhaustion. The knights then cheer Farnese for single-handedly defeating the black swordsman.
• Trigun: During Meryl and Millie's Day in The Limelight, Vash takes care of a couple of baddies for them as payback for their help in a previous episode. Then there's an Iris Out on him as he complains about not having a bigger role in this story.
• in Dragonball Z, Mr. Satan tried to shoot Buu with a pistol, and it seemed like it had cut Buu in half, but it was actually Goku that did it

Comic Books

• In the Tintin album The Crab With The Golden Claws, Captain Haddock charges a whole band of desert raiders alone. They flee, and he believes for a moment that they did because they were scared of him. In fact, reinforcements were arriving behind him.
• Spider-Man: Norman Osborn killing the Skrull Queen Veranke in Secret Invasion. While the others have been battling for days, doing most of the dirty work, his team of maniacs, criminals, and lunatics comes in and steals the show. What really makes the it a Downer Ending is that he kills the Skrull queen seconds before Wolverine was able to. Naturally, he was placed in charge of every registered superhero, the Avengers Initiative was renamed the Thunderbolts Initiative, and SHIELD was disbanded and replaced with HAMMER, which is also run by Osborn.
• Played with in Snarfquest, where an evil wizard whom Snarf is facing off with suddenly goes "Urk!" and dies. The humanoid characters assume that Snarf actually scared him to death, but the readers learn that their gaggaleech companion (actually a highly venomous death leech) had secretly dropped onto the wizard's back and bitten him.

Film

• Happens in the John Ford movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Jimmy Stewart's character is a pacifist lawyer in a bad town in the old west. Throughout the film the outlaw and murderer Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) constantly assaults and belittles him, only stopping from outright murdering the whole town due to the presence of the badass but uncaring John Wayne. After Valance beats the town's eccentric newspaper man, Stewart grabs a pistol and attempts to kill Valance on the town's main street. He misses the first five shots and is horribly wounded by the outlaw. John Wayne, witnessing the scene from a secluded spot, fires from an alley at the same time Stewart does and kills Valance. The town only sees Stewart who gets the girl and the glory, and later on becomes a Senator. John Wayne dies bitter and alone after drunkenly burning down his own house. When Stewart tries to set the record straight, the reporter replies "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact... print the legend."
• In Saving Private Ryan Tom Hanks' character starts shooting at a tank with a pistol, and the tank suddenly blows up. He then watches the American P-51 Mustangs who really blew the tank fly overhead.
• The Brazilian movie Lisbela e o Prisioneiro does this twice in the same scene, using a Bait and Switch Gunshot to boot. Frederico is about to shoot Leleu, the camera cuts and a shot is heard. It's revealed that Lisbela shot Frederico. Later on, it's revealed that Lisbela's gun was in fact empty and Frederico's wife was the one who shot him.
• Variant occurs in The Lion King. Simba is trying to roar to scare off the Hyenas from the elephant graveyard. On his third try he suddenly lets loose with a loud, echoing roar.... Except it's his father coming to save him.
• In the second Ghostbusters movie, Rick Moranis's character, who has spent the film bumbling about, gets to the Battle Royale, and clumsily fires up his proton pack just as the other guys take down the Big Bad. The crowd doesn't see them, and cheers and starts parading him around instead.
• The movie Sahara has a minor subversion at the climax. After Dirk Pitt and friends shoot down the local warlord's helicopter with lucky shot from a Civil War era cannon, the enemy army surrenders while the heroes marvel that their plan actually worked. Realizing something's not quite right, they turn and see an entire (friendly) Toureg army positioned on the top of the cliffs behind them. The subversion is that while the army surrenders because of the Touregs, the heroes really did shoot down the helicopter with a 150-year-old Confederate cannon.

Literature

• The Illuminatus Trilogy combines this with a Gambit Pileup for its depiction of the JFK assassination.
• In a Star Wars Expanded Universe novel, four fighter pilots are vastly outnumbered, so despite their superior skills, they are being worn down. After one's ship is damaged, he ejects. That particular pilot is also known as something of a gunslinger with a blaster (rivaling Han Solo for skills with a blaster pistol)...so in desperation, he draws his sidearm and fires at a fighter about to make a run on him. The fighter explodes. His commander makes a mental note to ask what kind of pistol he carries, when he sees that one of the other pilots was the one who took it down.
• In Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, the character of Shadwell points an admonishing finger at a character who promptly vanishes in an explosion of blue light. This happens so often to him that he becomes convinced that his finger is the deadliest weapon known to mankind. In all cases, the explosions are due to there literally being an Angel nearby who is causing it.
• Discworld
  • The same thing happens to Rincewind in Interesting Times and Eric.
  • The Last Continent: The actual source of Rincewind's powerful curse turns out to be a particularly venomous spider that was hiding in his hat.
• In one of the Left Behind books, Rayford attempts to fulfill the part in Revelation about The Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, getting killed. After accidentally firing his gun and actually wishing he hadn't, it turns out that Chaim Rosensweig had actually stuck a blade through his back.
• The battleship USS Missouri, in the second book of the Posleen War Series, fires a full salvo from one of its main turrets at a Posleen warship in a desperate attempt at destroying the vessel. The craft is destroyed, but it wasn't the battleship's rounds that did it: a nearby Planetary Defense Center armed with a gun designed to defend against those kinds of ships actually made the killing shot. However, from the perspective of the battleship's crew, their rounds were the fatal shot, as the PDC was completely destroyed by orbital bombardment from another Posleen warship immediately after firing. The notion of the battleship's rounds making the kill was ultimately responsible for the creation of the SheVa mobile artillery pieces featured in the third and fourth books.

Live-Action TV

• The reimagined Battlestar Galactica:
  • "Fragged".
  • First happens when Crashdown threatens to shoot Cally on the count of three if she doesn't follow orders. Crashdown hits three, and a shot rings out. Crashdown falls forward, shot dead by Gaius Baltar.
  • Then Chief Tyrol starts shooting at a squad of Centurions, who become engulfed in a fireball and are destroyed. Tyrol looks at his gun in amazement, then realizes Lee Adama just pulled a Gunship Rescue.
• In Chuck, our eponymous hero is on a 'Red test', where he must kill someone to graduate as a fully-fledged CIA agent. Since Chuck has never killed anyone, preferring to carry a tranq-pistol, he faces a moral dilemma until Casey shoots the target from a hidden position nearby
• In the first season of Deep Space 9, a famed Bajoran war hero reveals to Sisko that the "heroic deed" that started him on his path of glory was accidentally shooting an enemy officer who had been taking a bath, and the Heroic Legend grew out of control after that. But in the end he dies heroically.
• Gemini Man (and probably other Invisibility series) do this a lot, with the invisible hero backing up someone less assuming in a Bar Brawl.
• Andromeda did an interesting variation on this: in the series premier, "Under The Night", Dylan survives a fight which Rhade clearly dominates. We are led to believe that it's his strength of character and force of will that bought his victory. But the Flash Back episode "The Unconquerable Man" reveals the truth seasons later: Rhade threw the fight, having witnessed the dire consequences for the universe should he take the role of leading man.
• In the Stargate SG-1 episode Prototype, an Anubis clone with telekinetic powers is shot at repeatedly by Mitchell. He makes the hand movement to stop the bullets and for a second the audience believes he blocked them, then blood starts pouring from his wounds. The camera pans from Mitchell who is still holding his gun, to Daniel, who sneaked up and shot him while the clone's focus was on Mitchell.
  • That was planned. The prototype could only deflect bullets it knew were coming, so Mitchell distracted the clone so Daniel could get the drop on him.
• In the Torchwood episode "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang", Ianto is forced to do a double-take at his unfired gun when a fish-alien drops dead seconds after insisting he wouldn't have the nerve to shoot. Then we pan over to Captain Jack, who's returned just in time.
• In the Mortified episode "The Talk", Taylor attempts to scare off some bullies using her (non-existant) karate skills. They flee and Taylor is convinced that they are terrified of her martial arts prowess, unaware that they actually left because of the two police officers slowly approaching behind her.
• In one episode of Gunsmoke, Matt is facing off against a tyrannical marshal (and former best friend) who has beaten him at every friendly Quick Draw they've ever had, and has used his skills to take over a town. The two (naturally) agree to a final showdown, take the usual positions...and then the marshal's lover sneaks down a side street and shoots him the very instant they draw.

Video Games

• In a sidequest in Tales of Symphonia, Genis and Mithos are going out by themselves to try to find a cure for Raine's sickness, but Lloyd follows them secretly. At one point the two are assaulted by a monster. Genis tries to attack it. He clearly misses, but Lloyd dashes out behind the monster and kills it. Mithos gives Genis the credit for beating the monster. Later on, after everyone has yelled at Lloyd for being useless during the crisis, Genis tells Lloyd that he knows what Lloyd did.
• In the videogame Snatcher, there is a scene where "junker" Gillian Seed is being choked to death from behind by Freddie Nielsen, the Snatcher who killed your co-agent Jean Jack Gibson. In order to pass this action scene, you have to use the mirror to aim behind you and make a shot. When you do, the Snatcher's head explodes, and it is revealed that it is not your shot that killed the Snatcher, but that of ace bounty hunter Random Hajile, who just happened to wander in.

Web Original

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has the Doctor's frantic "stop"-button pressing to save Penny from a van while Captain Hammer is prepared to stop the van with hands outstretched. Dr. Horrible's stop button works just before Captain Hammer grabs the van, but Penny just sees the Captain stop a moving van. Dr. Horrible remains the universe's Butt Monkey.
• I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC: This appears during the finale of the second season of After Hours. The Joker holds Harley Quinn hostage, and eggs Batman and Spider-Man, the only two heroes left in the room, to shoot him with a gun he threw earlier at Batman. As the morals of the two prevent them from murdering anyone, the Joker prepares to leave; however, a gunshot is heard, and the Joker drops to the floor, seemingly dead (though he isn't). Both Batman and Spider-Man are baffled, until they see The Punisher, who had been imprisoned earlier on, holding the gun.

The Punisher: See, you have to take the safety cap off.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series has an excellent episode, titled "The Man Who Killed Batman". It's told from the perspective of a nobody mob underling voiced by Matt Frewer, "Sid the Squid", who was the lookout on a job in which Batman is apparently killed. From Sid's perspective, Bats fell into a gas explosion, but everyone else thought Sid pushed him. He has to deal with a jealous Joker, an obsessed Commissioner Gordon, and a few rival mob bosses who can't believe his story. In the end, of course, Bats turns out to have survived unharmed. In prison, a fulfilled Sid becomes, "The Man Who Almost Killed Batman, and who also made a fool of the Joker".
• The Boondocks has a rather strange subversion. In The Story of Catcher Freeman, each of The Rashomon tellings of the story give Catcher credit for killing the slavemaster, when every possible witness saw first-hand that Thelma did it. Since she's dead, we can't know for sure if this is a Dude, Where's My Reward?.
• In The Simpsons, Homer is confronted by a mob the Mob in front of his house. After they're about to shoot him, each of them fall over, hit with an incapacitating gunshot. After Chief Wiggum arrives on the scene, Homer and Marge assume it was him. After he denies credit, the camera pans up to one of the windows in the house, revealing Maggie holding an old rifle, barrel still smoking.
• In the Bugs Bunny cartoon Windblown Hare, Bugs gets involved in the story of the Three Little Pigs, when the pigs con him into buying their straw and stick houses before the Big Bad Wolf comes along. When he realizes that the pigs had conned him, Bugs has the Wolf try and blow down their brick house, which then blows up.

Wolf: I did it!
Pigs (in unison): He did it!
Bugs (standing next to dynamite plunger): Eh, we did it!

• Cow and Chicken: In the episode "Karate Chick", Chicken thinks his flying kick does the Red Guy in. It is actually Super Cow, doing an udder attack just microseconds before Chicken's foot connects.

Real Life

• The downfall of The Red Baron may be this. It is credited to a Canadian Arthur Roy Brown, but an Australian flak battery also claims it.