Arbitrary Skepticism / Literature

Arbitrary Skepticism in literature.

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• The Belgariad: Silk initially has difficulty believing in Vordai's powers as a witch. Vordai points out that this doesn't make much sense, given that he's travelling with two powerful sorcerers.
• The BFG: Even after meeting the eponymous giant, Sophie doesn't believe him when he says that aliens exist, that he has super hearing, or that various crazy-sounding animals exist.
• "Bigfoot Dreams": Clinton has a hard time believing that ghosts exist, even after surviving a bigfoot attack and running into a werewolf and vampire.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew believes that he can perform magic and travel to different worlds, yet he's utterly incapable of accepting talking animals in one of them! He's a parody of scientists who have no problem with bizarre stuff in science (i.e. quantum physics) but are skeptical about the supernatural.
  • Prince Caspian: The titular Prince, who was given fairy tales about dwarfs and talking animals, and Aslan, meets a dwarf who doesn't believe that Aslan exists. Prince Caspian immediately points out that most humans believe both Aslan and dwarfs are creatures of fantasy.
  • The Horse and His Boy has Bree (the titular horse) believe in Aslan, but not that he's a literal lion, until Aslan shows up and gently mocks him about it. In this case it's probably a bit closer to Fantastic Racism (Bree is afraid of lions, so obviously the great Aslan can't be one), but in the context of the series' Christianity it parodies those who deny the Incarnation.
• In Curse of the Wolfgirl when 'Vex claims she can talk to cats she is disbelieved by Daniel, Moonglow, and Kalix. For the record Kalix is a werewolf, 'Vex is a fire demon, and whilst only human, Daniel and Moonglow have witnessed and been a part of more magical events than mundane ones.
• Discworld:
  • Things like gods, wizards, trolls and dragons are perfectly acceptable, but things like Death and talking dogs are so impossible that people just ignore them. Arguably explained in Hogfather, where it's stated there's an upper limit on things people can believe in.
  • Talking trees. Notice that Rincewind here uses a perfectly fine logical analysis, but it fails because the premises aren't true:
    Rincewind: I can't be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I'd be mad, and I'm not mad, so trees can't talk.
  • Witches and wizards on the Discworld can see Death (and hear talking dogs). They also interact with gods and demons on a regular basis, but don't believe in them, as this only encourages them.
  • Carrot and a few other characters can hear Gaspode, as could anybody he makes an effort in talking to. Plus, at several points in the series, there are statements to the effect of "there's no point believing in what already exists" — such as the space turtle on which the world rests. It's like believing in the postman.
  • In Feet of Clay:
    A Priest: But the gods plainly do exist.
    Dorfl: It Is Not Evident.
    [a bolt of lightning hits Dorfl on the helmet; however, being a golem, he is unharmed]
    Dorfl: I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument.
  • Granny Weatherwax has been known to criticize people for not being Arbitrarily Skeptical. She gets mad at Weaver for assuming she used magic to detect his presence while not noticing the fact that her cottage overlooks the path, and she tells off a bunch of opera people for assuming she used magic to block a sword, claiming she might well have had a bit of metal in her palm. The fact that she did use magic for these things is irrelevant in Granny's book.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry had always assumed that "The Outer Gates" were a metaphor, a limit to keep wizards from delving too deep into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, and the wizard with the title of Gatekeeper just held a secretive position of policing matters of that secret knowledge. He finds out during the events of Cold Days that the Outer Gates are an actual set of gates of a titanic scale separating reality from the Outside and the Gatekeeper is responsible for helping guard them.
  • Sanya is a Knight of the Cross, wielding a sword that glows with holy power with a nail from the Crucifixion in its hilt, given to him directly by the Archangel Michael himself, and uses said sword to fight Fallen Angels — and was at one point possessed by a Fallen Angel — and he's a self-professed atheist, later amended to agnostic. His justification is that he may just be hallucinating, or that the archangel could be an alien or similar being and thus does not actually prove the existence of God. Harry thinks this is hilarious and dubs him the "Knight of Maybe".
  • Also the mortar that holds the Extra-Strength Masquerade together. Roughly around the time of the Enlightenment, the supernaturals started to hide from humanity as we started to grow in relative power, and humanity would rather not think there are things higher in the food chain walking amongst us. The unspoken arrangement works out both ways: the supernaturals hide, but don't have to try too hard so long as they keep their collective heads down; humanity assigns some specialist groups to give humanity the dross necessary and a voice of authority to rationalize away the things that they can't outright ignore. This comes to a head in Battle Ground, where Enthiu, the Last Titan, come back from mythology with a vengeance. She took her father's place as the head of the Fomor and has his deadly Eye, and attacks Chicago. After a full-on battle between a number of supernatural nations, Chicago is left devastated, with tens, even possibly a few hundreds of thousands dead. The magical EMP Ethniu let out caused a major blackout which allowed the US government to control the information out of Chicago, but the Masquerade is irrepairably broken within Chicago, and it's accepted to be a matter of time before humanity as a whole becomes aware of the supernaturals.
• Eddie LaCrosse: In Burn Me Deadly, Eddie has seen stranger things than dragons, but is adamant that dragons can't possibly exist, and that Father Tempcott's cult therefore consists of gullible morons. This is probably more about Eddie's stubbornness and self-image than it is about the evidence in question.
• The Elenium: The child goddess Aphrael arranges for herself to be born as Sparhawk and Ehlana's daughter, Danae. Sparhawk is extremely insistent that Ehlana never finds out the true nature of her daughter, as the revelation will drive her insane. Meanwhile they live in a world where magic is real, gods exist as people rather than theological concepts, and there are demons and trolls (who also have their own gods, all of which are horrible) and her husband sometimes carry around a sapient jewel, which claims to have created the world. Also, she knows Aphrael personally and knows that the girl has a very lax attitude about the term 'impossible', and she's perfectly sane and sensible about just about everything else. But no, this one, specific, drama-generating topic is where the line is drawn, apparently.
  • His specific argument is that she'd end up realizing she's biologically barren (as a consequence of having been poisoned; needing a miracle to produce an heir anyway inspired Aphrael to bundle in a couple of her personal goals by making herself that heir), and that's the part she couldn't accept and get over. But despite Ehlana having surprising areas of emotional vulnerability, this one is never explored in any detail and the distinction rarely comes up. As a lot of the cast likes to joke about the supposed sanity-warping revelations they've endured, it's easy to think this is another example.
• Every Other Day: Unmasqued World of dangerous monsters or not, nothing will get Elliot to accept that his sister Skylar is psychic.* Subverted in Father Brown. The titular priest will almost never believe in the apparently supernatural explanation for a mystery, precisely because as a priest he does deal with God and the Devil, and has a good working knowledge of what it looks like when either of them intervenes in the mortal world and what kind of person will catch the attention of the latter.
• In The Goblin Reservation, Oop mentions a rumor about contact having been made with the Devil. When Carol is surprised the others are considering it might be real, Maxwell states that a few centuries ago, people were just as skeptical about the titular goblins, as well as other creatures now known to be real.
• Staggeringly so in The Great Divorce. One character continues to deny that "Heaven" and "God" are literal things that exist, and insists they're just metaphors. This is while he actually has died, is in the afterlife, and is talking to a resident of Heaven, who offers to take him to see God this very minute.
• Harry Potter:
  • Mostly subverted: Hermione's refusal to believe in Crumple-Horned Snorkacks might appear to be this at first, but there's documented evidence for vampires and thestrals, but none for the Snorkack. It's rather like saying if apes exist, Bigfoot must exist, too.
  • Her disbelief in Divination is a bit more complicated: most of the "Divination" in the books is like real-life fortune-telling (bogusness included). While several of the methods that Trelawney teaches actually work, they only seem to work for her, so Hermione is right to reject them. The catch is that real magic predictions do occasionally happen in the Potter universe — Harry witnesses one in the 3rd book — but Hermione never sees one, so she doesn't think they exist. After using a magic time machine for a year, you'd think magic prediction would seem plausible to her... though Trelawney is a terrible teacher.
  • Hermione, and sometimes Ron, are pretty quick to shoot down Harry's theories about Voldemort's latest schemes. They are pretty far-fetched by wizard standards, but this whole thing started with Harry surviving an unblockable curse that causes instant death as an infant. Harry's wild claims also invariably turn out to be correct or at least partially so, at least once per book. Despite this, they remain skeptical even by the sixth book, when you'd think they'd have learned to start giving him the benefit of the doubt long before now?
  • Her disbelief in the Deathly Hallows is a straight-up example, though. It takes Ron pointing out that they've been using one of them since they were in First Year to make her even consider the possibility they might exist. This is despite her discovering any number of other "impossible" magical artifacts were real (such as the Philosopher's Stone).
  • Harry mostly averts this. Since he was neither brought up in an all-magic environment like Ron, nor refuses to believe anything not written in a book like Hermione, he's at least willing to listen to Luna's bizarre theories, since he's witnessed far stranger things in the course of his life.
  • Happens with the teachers at Hogwarts too. Harry's theories about what's happening in each book always turn out to be at least partially right (usually they're reasonable conclusions with the information he's got, and if he's wrong it's due to missing some crucial bit of knowledge), but he's always disregarded by teachers and authority figures who insist on keeping him Locked Out of the Loop.
• In Heralds of Valdemar, the eponymous country's inhabitants trust in the Heralds' Incorruptible Pure Pureness so much that they'll let a strange Herald rule the country, sleep in their houses, and identify criminals...but not, apparently, enough to protect the Heralds from being framed. A Herald accused of a crime must stand trial and provide evidence just like they'd have to in a setting where Detect Evil and Zone of Truth spells were not commonplace. Even though their judges in such trials are also Heralds...
• Spoofed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the eponymous guide's entry about the Babel Fish: The scientists who discovered and analyzed the Babel Fish and its property as an universal language translator started to wonder if it would be a proof that God exists. Then God appears to tell them that proving something is the opposite of faith and God is nothing without faith. Their logical conclusion: God doesn't exist.
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, Ward's companion Axiel is known to claim to be the son of the dwarf-king when he's very, very drunk. Ward lampshades this trope by mentioning that he doesn't doubt the dwarf thing so much (after all, there's a dragon skeleton in the basement of his castle, he has seen some weird stuff), but the king part is a bit unbelievable, as Axiel worked as valet for Ward's father. Turns out it was the truth. He was there as valet because he wanted to keep an eye on the family, due to a prophecy.
• In Death series: Eve Dallas, being just a pragmatic soul, could be considered this. She has a hard time believing in the existence of vampires in Eternity in Death, ghosts in Haunted in Death, sensitives in Visions in Death, and supernatural things like in Ceremony in Death and Ritual in Death. Some supernatural things did occur in some of the books, but Dallas automatically goes with "I don't believe in this!"
• One of the protagonists in the sci-fi novel John Dies at the End has a healthy amount of skepticism before his mundane life is derailed by a torrent of supernatural horrors, but even after he's accepted the existence of demonic beings that can erase people from history, and hunting ghosts has become a routine freelance job for him, he's still quick to dismiss things that are merely unlikely, such as a claim his friend John makes about birds' feet getting frozen to power lines during particularly cold weather.
  Without breaking my gaze with the TV, I said, "To John, something being funny is more important than being true."

The narrator actually notices birds whose feet have apparently frozen to power lines, and describes it in just enough detail for the audience to realize what happened even if the narrator's oblivious to it.

• In later books, Dave initially doesn't believe there's anything to a case because it involves a toy. He explains that it might seem a little rich for him to be skeptical, but actually the team gets tons of cases that turn out to be nothing (he just doesn't write about them because they're not interesting). For some reason, it's particularly common with "haunted" dolls, to the point Dave now refuses doll- or toy-related jobs on principle. Not that this ever stops John.

• Kate Daniels: In Magic Rises, Kate inquires why a beast from myth doesn't look like it is depicted in ancient statues, and is told, "He says it's a, what's the word... allegory. There are no animals with human heads, that's ridiculous." She thinks, Look who's talking. An eighteen-inch-tall magic man in riding boots, werejackals, and sea dragons are all fine, but animals with human faces are ridiculous. Okay, then. Glad we cleared that up.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle
  • Kvothe can do magic with his brain, fights demons, visits fairy realms, and other supernatural stuff; and yet he remains extremely skeptical of the world's religions.
  • It happens the other way around, too. Most people (especially outside of the University) believe in some kind of fairytale creatures, depending on their origin, but Kvothe risks ridicule from everyone for even considering the possibility that the Chandrian exist, although he has seen them first hand.
  • A lampshaded inversion comes in the second book - Kvothe is surprised when Wil readily accepts the existence of Felurian without coercion, even though he spends a large amount of time early in the book shooting down other things such as the Amyr.
• The Last Dragon Chronicles: David doubting the dragons at first is completely logical, but by the second book, one wonders why his Weirdness Censor is so hardy.
• The Laundry Files:
  • Despite the Laundry existing to prevent Eldritch Abominations from eating humanity and where Sufficiently Analyzed Magic can be imagined and turned horribly wrong, everyone agrees that vampires don't exist. Period. And that's exactly what the vampires have mind-controlled them to think.
  • Later, when the Senior Auditor mentions werewolves, he attempts to say they obviously don't exist, then pauses and corrects himself, saying that he sincerely hopes they do not exist and has no evidence to the contrary.
• The Magic Tree House: In a relatively early book, Annie is afraid to go into a "ghost town" in the Old West. Jack says "There's no such thing as ghosts." to reassure her, to which Annie replies "Yes, there are, we saw one in Ancient Egypt.", which did indeed happen in an earlier adventure. Jack's reply? "Yeah, but that was Ancient Egypt." What makes it even funnier is that they had way more interaction with the Ancient Egyptian ghost in the previous book (talking to her and finding objects to help her reach the afterlife) than they do with the cowboy ghost when he finally shows up.
• In Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Magnus remains an atheist both before and after he dies, become an einheri and learns that his father is a Norse god. In particular, learning that the Greco-Roman gods also exist leads him to believe that there's no "greater plan". Meanwhile, Sam(ira), a Muslim, goes in the opposite direction by believing in God but seeing the other gods as something akin to Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: Despite the constant fanatical happenings around Macondo, everyone looks at José Arcadio Buendía as a crank for believing he can make the Gypsies' inventions work and for his fantastical plans, and they turn out to be right about this skepticism.
• Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson novels. Werewolves have recently gone public; the fae have been officially out for a decade or so, but the protagonist has to spend some time explaining to people that vampires are also real, her ability to see ghosts is frequently disbelieved, and by the sixth book, someone who has relatives who shapeshift doesn't believe that Mercy can do so too. There is much Lampshade Hanging.
• Used for humor in Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series. During a war, the main character, a wizard in training, recruits a bunch of different helpers from different dimensions to prevent it. One of them is a blue Gremlin. The main character's mentor, a demon, insists that there's no such thing as gremlins, and the little monster in question always remains just out of sight. Until the very end...
• In My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister, Satori initially expresses doubt when he hears about a dark elf, thinking that they only exist in fantasy fiction. Not only does he have the titular vampire older sister and zombie younger sister, but this is after he's encountered several other supernatural beings like mermaids and fairies.
• Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime novels feature a reasonable amount of this. This world features aliens, talking bears, giant superhuman gingerbread men and the like. Yet when Jack tells his staff, whose job it is to investigate things like the murder of Humpty Dumpty and Rumpelstiltskin's illegal straw-into-gold operation, that his car heals itself, they think he's gone mad. As does his boss when he reports on exploding cucumbers. And so on.
• In One Foot In The Grave, the protagonist quickly learns that vampires are real (and that he's becoming one), along with werewolves, house fairies, satyrs and more but is adamant that ghosts can't be real when his deceased wife starts haunting him. He spends his time trying to rationalize her away as some sort of psychosis (as supposedly ALL vampires develop some degree of insanity) even when she helps save his life. Interesting while he's told by another supernatural creature (no description of what he is is given, but is likely some kind of doppelganger) that ghosts don't exist, Dracula (yes THAT Dracula) has no problems accepting that she's real.
• Devi, protagonist of the Paradox Trilogy, has this to an extent. She fully believes that the Sacred King of Paradox is capable of performing miracles, but doesn't believe in curses or psychic powers. She's surprised when the psychic energy plasmex, which she'd dismissed as mere ignorant superstition, turns out to be a well-known and well-documented phenomenon on worlds other than Paradox.
• Quarters: Bannon scoffs that the dead can't walk once he's first heard the idea. Vree reminds him the two are currently Sharing a Body, but he insists that it's different.
• Septimus Heap
  • In Queste, Sarah does not believe in her son's Time Travel.
  • In Syren, Septimus has a hard time of convincing Jenna and Beetle of the Syren's existence.
• Contrary to the popular belief this was not a trait of Sherlock Holmes.
  • For example, in The Hound of the Baskervilles he does not outright eliminate the possibility that said hound is supernatural — he merely states that all other options have to be investigated first and if it proves to be so, he is powerless to do anything about it.
  • Though he outright scoffs at the very idea of a vampire in The Sussex Vampire. Mostly because he immediately finds bucketloads of clues pointing to a more lively culprit.
  • Unsurprising, given that Holmes was written by an author who believed in fairies (he supported the girls who concocted the Cottingley Fairy Hoax later). Though the whole Holmes canon except for The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes were written before he became a Spiritualist.
• In Slaves of Spiegel by Daniel Pinkwater, Steve Nickelson submits a detailed account of his abduction by Space Pirates to the Flying Saucer Club of Hudson County, New Jersey. They reject his application for membership on the grounds that "everyone knows that extraterrestrials are little green men with big heads, or shapeless pink things with eyes on stalks," and that no previous report of Alien Abduction has mentioned "being wrapped in aluminum foil and reduced to a tiny size." They further insinuate Steve is perpetrating Some Nutty Publicity Stunt to promote his restaurant (which was shrunken and seized along with him).
• Somewhither: When Ilya tells Abby that on his world God took on human form and was killed but forgave his tormentors, Abby is incredulous that any god could possibly forgive such a crime. Ilya then responds...
  Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, little sister! You are in an evil magic tower filled with evil magic Astrologers who can predict the future, headquarters of an evil magic interdimensional empire ruling thirty-three parallel aeons of time, and in each of those aeons there is some sort of dark magic or another, including blind guys who eat souls and hairless wolfy things who climb walls, and you are looking for a man who can walk through the clouds, and you rescued a kid who cannot die with your magic shape-changing prehensile sickle of plus-one heat-metal, which enables you to scare the magic cage bars into magically retracting, and you look like a monkey, but you are telling me it is impossible for a divine being big enough to create the whole supercalifragilisticexpialidocious universe to be big-hearted enough to forgive his own murderers?
• Nicely justified in the A Song of Ice and Fire series: When people are warned of dragons or giants, they say that such things don't exist anymore, they all died out years ago! This is actually false in the case of the giants, and while the dragons did die out, they're back.
• In Soon I Will Be Invincible, a Deconstruction/Reconstruction of superhero tropes set in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, the Cyborg Fatale believes that her teammate Mr. Mystic is a real sorcerer, but is convinced that teammate Elphin (who claims to be the last of The Fair Folk) must actually be some sort of alien or mutant. Villain Protagonist Dr. Impossible, meanwhile, flatly disbelieves in all things magical, despite the fact that he battles magicians and fairies, he's worked with magically-empowered villains in the past, and part of his plan depends on exploiting a magic artifact.
  • A number of events suggest that Fatale has it backward. Elphin is definitely a real fairy and when Dr. Impossible faces Mr. Mystic it appears that his magic might be little more than complex illusions.
• The Tamuli has most of the heroes who indulge in this learn to knock it off as steadily more things that "don't exist" turn out to be pretty damn real. Although it still has people professing agnosticism to the face of a Physical God.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, the people of Alres and Galle dismiss the stories of Nova Terra's Wild creatures as obvious fairy tales, despite living in a world where magic is a fact of life and the nearby country's being decimated by armies of the not-dead. The most notable example is probably the Gallish archbishop of Alba, who proclaims that the Wild doesn't exist while living in the country which has fought a great battle against it not even two year earlier.
• In The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant, the titular vampire and his zombie assistant are driving to Vegas with his (the vampire's) Love Interest, who works for an organization that polices supernatural beings. She explains that all of Vegas is pretty much run by descendants of dragons. When Fred expresses his doubt that a single family is capable of secretly running all the casinos of Vegas, she points out that, being a vampire, who has a zombie assistant, he shouldn't be quick to dismiss anything. To be fair, though Fred hasn't had any exposure to the supernatural until relatively recently and has only been a vampire for a year. Given his quiet and boring lifestyle, he hasn't had an opportunity to encounter anything out of the ordinary.
• In Vampire Academy, when Rose starts seeing ghosts, she questions her sanity. Because as she puts it: "while I believed in vampires and magic and psychic powers, I most certainly did not believe in ghosts."
• In The Vampire Files, Charles Escott is uncomfortable with the idea that ghosts could exist. This despite the fact that his partner is a genuine Undead vampire. Played for Laughs when Shoe Coldfield learns the truth about Jack, as he's far less taken aback by the existence of vampires than by the thought that Jack could be one of them.
• Videssos: Despite the situation he and his men are in and personally witnessing magic being performed, Marcus initially doesn't take the native Videssian religion very seriously and expresses skepticism about the existence of their gods, Photos and Skotos. Then in the finale, he gets a front-row seat to the Big Bad being literally Dragged Off to Hell by Skotos. Needless to say, he changes his tune on skepticism pretty quick.
• The War Against the Chtorr. The first novel "A Matter For Men" begins with a news report on three volunteers searching for a missing girl being dismissed for claiming they saw the giant Chtorran worms. Most people don't believe in their existence until the worms start moving into towns and eating people. Even then the Fourth World Alliance insists on downplaying the invasion (because they're more concerned about the US re-arming, a danger they are all too familiar with) until a captive Chtorran escapes and starts chomping its way through their delegates.
• In Watersong, even after learning that the sirens from Classical Mythology are real, Harper doesn't believe in ghosts or spirits when Marci suggests performing a séance.
• The Wheel of Time
  • Tuon refuses outright to believe in certain vaguely fantastical things the reader has seen to be true through the other characters and scoffs at what she sees as absurd beliefs, the next second reading signs and portents from a flight of birds as total fact. This is more a case of the Seanchan in general being unspeakably arrogant even within the standard of the setting, exceeded only by the Aes Sedai (and by contrast the Seanchan are at least usually competent).
  • That arrogance goes both ways, as Westlanders who believe in stuff like probability twisting ta'veren don't consider even for a split second the possibility that the Wheel's weaving could manifest itself in seemingly random omens, although they turn out to be true suspiciously often. Like a battle-hardened Seanchan banner general seeing an omen she considers "the worst she had ever seen" only to have her troops torn to pieces a few hours later by hundreds of Trollocs they considered to be absurd fairy tales up to that point.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko and Nick Perumov's Wrong Time for Dragons, the Middle World is, for the most part, your typical Medieval European Fantasy setting, There are elves, dwarves, mages, dragons, undead, shapeshifters, etc. But when Victor asks about Hobbits, all he gets are blank looks, and the concept is brushed off as something obviously made up.
• Xanth: In Faun and Games, Forrest Faun encounters Nimby the Dragon-Ass and his lover Chlorine (both protagonists of an earlier title, Yon Ill Wind), traversing the Gap Chasm by walking along the cliffside in complete disregard of gravity. Chlorine helpfully mentions that Nimby's special talent is "allowing his companions to be whatever they wish to be". Forrest concludes that Chlorine is absolutely, completely insane, because everyone knows that you can only ever have one singular talent, and Nimby's is obviously the ability to walk on walls. This despite the fact that Xanth is overflowing with strange and often useful magic plants, creatures and other things, and anyone living there can learn to make use of them; something that lets you change your personal gravity is certainly not out of the realm of possibility. And of course Forrest has no way of knowing that Nimby is actually the cover identity of the Senior Demon X(A/N)th, who as such doesn't have to abide by the laws of the land, magic, or physics itself unless he wants to.

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