History Main / CultureBlind

** It could be Fridge Brilliance in that he used it to make people underestimate him and it became habitual.
*** My dad has been in this country for thirty-five years and his English still pretty much sucks.
*** Anyone who has worked in retail can tell stories about immigrant couples who are totally reliant on their children as translators for any kind of commercial transaction.

*** Meh. My dad has been in this country for thirty-five years and his English still pretty much sucks.

*** Anyone who has worked in retail can tell stories about immigrant couples who are totally reliant on their children as translators for any kind of commercial transaction. I don't mean this to sound like a bad thing, but a lot of them don't even try.

** The thing that makes Teal'c a fish out of water is that he's spent those 8 years on a military base, filled with military personnel. As such, he's never had the chance to adapt to civilian life before (and things like normal Earthling relationships), and the main source of conflict is his inability to just let things happen. He feels compelled to intervene when he sees a robbery, or an abusive boyfriend, even though in most cases normal people would just ignore it. By that season, he has absolutely no trouble interacting with anyone at the SGC. It's just the ''civilian'' aspect that throws him off, something that any long time soldier has trouble with (and Teal'c is over ''100 years old'' by this point, and spent most of it as a soldier; on entirely different planets, no less).

* Another example, although less blatant, is Brennan from ''{{Bones}}''. Although she's focused primarily on her work, she displays a remarkable ignorance of current culture, which is odd given that she clearly wasn't always like that (she's a ''WonderWoman'' fan, likes classic rock, but still has no idea what's in any movie or TV show released in the last 20 years). Brennan's "I don't know what that is" gets annoying, especially when she's the author of a successful and popular series of novels and so should have some grasp of current culture if through nothing else than PopculturalOsmosis since she's part of current culture (in the show).

*** It's frankly unbelievable that someone with such low empathy and poor understanding of other people could be a successful anthropologist of any sort. The writers really should have picked some other scientific discipline for their StrawVulcan.

* To some extent, various characters in Disney's {{Aladdin}}, such as when anyone acts shocked or complains about women being treated in a way that was perfectly normal in Arabia of that time. (Yes, the original tale takes place in an Arabia-like version of China, but especially in the Disney version, it's pretty clear it's somewhere in the Middle-East) I.e. Aladdin acting shocked when Jasmine tells him "My father's forcing me to get married" (although that may have been because he has a crush on her, not because he was surprised), Jasmine complaining that she's never been outside the palace walls, and especially her saying "If I do marry, I want it to be for love". It seems to this troper that such a demand would be pretty huge, especially the part of the sentence that makes marriage optional. And then of course her very feminist-sounding speech "How dare you? Standing around deciding ''my'' future? I am not a price to be won!"

** To be fair, one of these countries is one where the average man on the street can tell you more about {{Superman}} than about the [[GeorgeWashington Father of His Country]]. Religious ignorance among the general population doesn't come as that much of a surprise.

** Also, when we see Anya in a flashback from before she became a demon, it's clear that she was pretty much ''always'' like that. It's less "Anya is weird because she spent the last 1000 years as a demon" and more "Anya is weird because Anya is weird". Maybe Anya prefers to have everyone think the former rather than the latter.

** To be fair, one of these countries is one where the average man on the street can tell you more about {{Superman}} than about the [[UsefulNotes/GeorgeWashington Father of His Country]]. Religious ignorance among the general population doesn't come as that much of a surprise.

** Jeremy Watt, however, is just [[weird CloudCuckooLander]]

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* Ash Ketchum from ''{{Pokemon}}'' knows surprisingly little about Pokémon, considering that the entire world is obsessed about them, and he's more obsessed about them than anybody else.

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* A rather fatal example comes from the series TheTamuli by DavidEddings. The church of Elenia continuously sends missionaries to the Rendors in order to try to convert them to their beliefs. Mind you, the Rendors aren't bad people, but they take their religion VERY seriously, and while they usually don't go around slaughtering nonbelievers, they are very easily angered, especially when it comes to religion. And unfortunately, the missionaries that the Elenes send tend to be the screaming zealot type, and go around ripping the veils off of women, and screaming that they're all heretics and damned to burn in hell. The end result is a small riot, and a lynched missionary, for very obvious reasons.
** One knight, who had been assigned to be the bodyguard of a missionary that ended up this way, was asked why he didn't stop the crowd from lynching his charge. His reply is that he was supposed to protect the man from UNPROVOKED attacks, and when a man runs through the streets of a foreign city, ripping the veils off of women, and screaming out that they're all heretics, he's not only provoked them, but is obviously too stupid to risk himself and his men trying to save him.

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** Worf as well, should act as human as Riker. He's raised among humans, knows human values and ethics, but acts as if he's fresh off the boat from Quonos most of the time.
*** While it doesn't excuse outright ignorance, a lot of his failing to fit in is implied to be overcompensation for just that. He is described as having spent much of his time growing up embracing his heritage and trying to be as Klingon as possible in Human society. That combined with his formantive years being among Klingons, makes it pretty reasonable. Guinan [[LampshadeHanging hangs a lampshade]] on this in one episode, telling him outright that most Klingons [[BoisterousBruiser do not]] act as [[TheStoic stiff and stoic]] as he does.

* Regarding Anya from ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', it's often been noted how odd it is that she knows so little about human interaction given that she's been interacting with humanity for hundreds of years, and she [[RetCon eventually]] used to be human herself.

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* Averted in ''AlleyOop.'' The titular caveman has been time traveling between his prehistoric world and the present day for years, and by now he is completely fluent in modern culture. This gets lampshaded whenever one of his caveman friends ends up time traveling ''with'' him and sees the modern world for the first time.

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[[AC:{{Other}}]]
* Characters in [[JackChick Chick tracts]] never know anything about Christianity (usually even being ignorant of Jesus or the religion itself), even if they're from countries that are overwhelmingly Christian.

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