Those who have been Conditioned to Accept Horror in Literature.
By Author:
- Stephen King:
- The Big Bad in Desperation tries to scare Johnny Marinville by showing him his blood-dripping penis, but it doesn't work because he saw far more disturbing things in Vietnam.
- Many of the Calla from The Dark Tower have come to accept how the Wolves take away one twin from each pair and return them in a mentally and physically damaged condition. Granted, this is more likely to be true among those Calla whose own children are too young or old to be taken.
By Title:
- Nineteen Eighty-Four: The whole world has fallen below the Despair Event Horizon, yet the people have been conditioned to accept the fact and just live their drab lives worshiping Big Brother or not giving a shit about politics despite trying to survive in such a suicide-encouraging hellhole plagued by constant and immutable war, poverty and paranoia, with the Party members getting the worst of it thanks to the corrupt Big Brother Is Watching regime. Naturally, if a Party member even thinks of going against the will of Big Brother, they are extensively and brutally tortured (including a trip to Room 101) until they are nothing but an Empty Shell of a human being. O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, even openly admits that only pure power is what keeps the Dystopia alive and that the future is "a boot stamping on a human face forever". As yet another example, before Winston is caught and tortured, he recalls once walking through a district that had just been hit by a bomb, and casually kicking a severed human arm into the gutter as though it were a stone or a piece of debris.
- In the Frozen spinoff novel A Frozen Heart, we delve into Hans' backstory, and we see that he has become so used to his family's mistreatment, that he doesn't do anything to fight back.
- Subverted in Ancillary Justice. The protagonist is an artificial intelligence, built to serve in the military, and obey every command without question. On several occasions, she is told to kill innocent people. She does so, seemingly without emotion, but the reader learns that she feels regret, and the novel is about her quest for revenge on her "owner".
- Brave New World has an entire society of people who don't engage in any meaningful intellectual thought, or for that matter, much of anything. A part of this conditioning is taking small children to the hospital of dying and giving them cookies every time someone dies. Aside from the few characters intelligent enough to realize how blithe all this is, everyone seems to enjoy it. And those few characters are shipped off to remote islands or made World Controllers to keep them from spoiling everyone else's fun.
- In A Brother's Price, when they find the body of a man who was raped, and then killed by having his tongue cut off, Ren is shocked at the lack of reaction from the soldiers who accompany her. It's not unreasonable to assume that they have seen worse, it comes with the job, and there seems to have been a bandit problem for a long time. And her lieutenant points out that unlike Ren, who knew and loved her father, most soldiers are conceived from drugged prisoners in military brothels.
- In a more short-term manner, Basini in The Confusions of Young Törless regards what his classmates do to him with a childish acceptance. It isn't clear whether this is due to real innocence, because he is genuinely complicit in it, because the way in which they frame their advances and "experiments" has eased him into accepting them as okay... or because he has been abused before.
- "Death, Dust, and Other Inconveniences": While an agent of death stalking the halls certainly raises some alarms, it's treated more like a squatter than something to truly dread. Nessy even considers leaving it alone because death is typically something one has to tolerate. Considering all of the strange things wander Margle's castles on a daily basis, this is a given.
- In the Delirium Series, youth are conditioned to believe that love is a deadly disease, and that the only cure is brain surgery to remove the part of the brain that causes love. After the surgery, most people have a Lack of Empathy, and in extreme cases hate or kill their children because they can't feel love.
- In Dragon Bones, Oreg has been a slave for so long that what would constitute horror to others is his baseline normal. When talking to his master about things that may annoy him, he casually moves to keep a piece of furniture between them at all times. Ward (who inherited him at the start of the novel) notices this and concludes that Oreg must be used to people whose reaction to things that annoy them is violence. It takes him a long time to shake these habits around Ward, and he slips back into them on occasion if he's stressed or if Ward is in a bad mood.
- Ward has some experience with this, as his father (Oreg's most recent owner) was abusive. Ward, however, refuses to acknowledge this as normal. His brother Tosten, on the other hand, is a bit more sensitive, and when Ward seeks him out for a family reunion, he assumes that Ward has come to kill him in order to get him out of the way as potential heir. He accepts this and only asks Ward to make it quick and painless. Ward is horrified when he finally understands what Tosten is talking about.
- In The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, humans are mostly forced to accept their eventual fate of ending up being eaten by the dragon, with the humans even trying to rationalize why being eaten by the dragon is a good thing. This is an allegory to our relationship with death, and why we should end it.
- Book II of The Faerie Queene ends with the realization that one of Acrasia's victims actually prefers living life as a filthy pig rather than being a man. Guyon and the palmer feel a mix of pity and disgust for a man so deceived and denigrated that he can't even imagine the joys of human life.
- The Giver:
- People who work with the very young or the old are conditioned to accept euthanasia as a fact of life, starting from their early adolescence. This includes Jonas's father, who nonchalantly euthanizes a baby.
- Like most people in his community, Jonas takes things that would be downright horrifying to many people as normal — although once he receives memories of better times, he realizes how horrible the Community is to make its residents live this way.
- The Hunger Games:
- An entire subculture exists of people who select, groom, and train the "tributes" for the eponymous games. In the first book, the main character's team is nothing but friendly professionalism. In the second, they start to break down...
- Katniss takes a lot of horror in stride in the first book, but over the rest of the trilogy it finally becomes too much for her to deal with.
- One of the functions of the hero's gifts in Isekai ni Otosareta... Jouka wa Kihon! is to condition the summoned heroes to accept horror, so that they are able to function in their role as heroes. When the gifts wear off, the former heroes often go crazy as a result of the accumulated trauma.
- Bethan, the sacrificial maiden from The Light Fantastic, although it really depends on your definition of "horror" — her belief that she would get to drink tea with the moon goddess after being sacrificed might have been correct, considering that there are real goddesses in this universe.
- The main conflict in the Ray Bradbury short story "Long After Midnight" involves a rookie cop who doesn't exhibit this trope in regards to someone who was Driven to Suicide and two veteran officers who do. The New Meat actually does manage to get the two to see his way, by arguing that whoever drove the victim to suicide must have been one hell of a heartless bastard.
- Discussed in The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbits wonder why the horses of the Ringwraiths don't exhibit the nerve-racking dread that all other living things that encounter them do. The answer is that the horses were raised in Mordor, and quite simply are used to it. The movies give them Red Eyes, Take Warning, implying a more supernatural explanation there.
- In "The Lottery", the Town with a Dark Secret operates on this trope. This is a unique example in that there's not really a conscious effort by anyone to groom the citizens or harden their hearts to the horror — in this case, the trope is self-perpetuating. Everyone grows up witnessing a Human Sacrifice ritual every year, and as they get used to this ritual, they continue it without any second thoughts. The tradition gets passed down from generation to generation in a vicious cycle, and if anyone has doubts, they can rationalize those doubts away by saying "Culture Justifies Anything" or "Nobody Ever Complained Before".
- Never Let Me Go has this as the central tragic plot point. As terrifying as the fate of the Hailsham students is when it's finally revealed to the reader, it's not particularly remarkable to Kathy, who mentions it casually while talking about something else. It genuinely doesn't even occur to anyone that they could do something else with their lives.
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe features food that's been bred to want to be eaten. Arthur Dent, being a normal human from Earth rather unused to this, is a little disturbed.
- The Scholomance: Students get so resigned to the titular Wizarding School's inescapable dangers that it doesn't disrupt the lunch hour to have a mortally wounded senior bleed out at a cafeteria table. Most show no interest in the lives of people outside their own clique, but they'll quickly turn on anyone who actively preys on the others through Black Magic or other means.
- The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has the darklings, who are desensitized to trauma by constant exposure. The highest echelons of them, like the protagonist, are made this way through cycles of brutal reincarnation.
- Played every way, but especially memorably when straight in A Song of Ice and Fire. The nature of the Crapsack World is such that wide sections of the populations on two continents are culturally inured to such things as widespread rape, bigotry of many kinds from classism to sexism via racism and worse, indentured servitude of various descriptions and hellacious training, working or living conditions. To the point that, when a relatively reasonable Death-Cult springs up in the form of those who worship the Many-Faced God, it makes sense that offering either assassination (of those who have wronged you) or euthanasia (for when you hurt too much either physically or mentally to recover) as part of the regular (and regulated) service gets participants and, unlike many others, it lasts. Its cultural impact spreads widely as a weirdly gruesome form of checks-and-balances, thanks to their strict code of ethics making them... acceptable, if feared. Valar morghulis; valar dohaeris — "all men must die; all men must serve".
- Speaking of serving, we get the Unsullied, the Essossi, eunuch warrior-slaves whose Training from Hell in Astapor puts Sparta, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire to shame. They go so far as to have had both fear and self-preservation trained out of them by horrific means. As it turns out, the "Good Masters" didn't manage to train a sense of self-worth out of them, as, given a chance to fight for their own reasons as free men, they almost all jumped at the chance. They're all still as hard as nails, but... Subverted. They couldn't be trained to be completely inhumanly submissive, however hard the Astorpuri slave-masters tried.
- The Cleganes pretty much decided to turn their own sons into Westerosi Unsullied to get ahead. Minus gelding them, of course — or technically turning them into slaves, first (although, being a minor House sworn to lords who treat you like dirt isn't as great a step up as it looks on paper). It led to much dysfunction on both sides by producing a Straw Nihilist as one and a trigger-happy Serial Killer as the other, as well as contributed to derailing many of their liege-lord's plans and the probable end of their own family lineage. So, not a great success, then.
- In The Sparrow, the Runa are conditioned to serve the Jana'ata. In every sense of the word. Including the Twilight Zone sense of the word.
- After some jarring injustices, one of the humans teaches the Runa the old Earth adage of "We are many, they are few". The Jana'ata that are there to hear this being chanted, understandably, flip out and try to pull a Total Party Kill — their entire civilization hinged on the Runa never making that connection (the Runa outnumber the Jana'ata population something like 10:1 at least, even if they are pacifist herbivores).
- In the sequel, Children of God, the Jana'ata's fears are proven exactly right, and they are almost hunted to extinction by the Runa.
- Tofu and Olson from Super Minion. Both spent time as test subjects for horrific experiments, and in Tofu's case those were his first experience in life, so even horrifying things rarely faze either of them.
- Touch (2017):
- Caspar, who is The Empath, senses someone having sex with someone who seems simply bored. After a moment, he realizes that the latter is actually a child who has endured this enough that they're no longer horrified by it. Possibly played with, however, since Father's More than Mind Control is involved.
- Caleb never fully accepted his position as an enslaved Child Soldier, but he shrugs off Hideyoshi's attempts to intimidate him, with the narration commenting "He almost wished the threat of harm still meant something to him."
- Vorkosigan Saga: In Mirror Dance, the clone Lily Jr. knows and agrees with the notion of being killed to give "my lady" a full-body transplant.
- Cowslip's warren in Watership Down is managed by a human. In return for a daily delivery of garden scraps and the shooting of predators, the rabbits all pretend not to know that the area is full of snares and have convinced themselves that rabbits must await death with dignity and stoicism. The protagonists escape, taking a Defector from Decadence along with them.
- The Wheel of Time treats horses enough like minor characters that it's important if they've been trained to not panic in fights against Trollocs and Myrddraal.
- To a lesser extent, recruits and even soldiers occasionally break before those horrors.
- The main characters themselves. In their first encounter with an enemy, Perrin and Egwene hid in a hole. By the end of the series, they were known to charge Eldritch Abominations and armies on their own. Rand panics the first time he ever sees Trollocs, and by the end of the series he's annihilated armies of them on his lonesome, killed Forsaken, and fought the Dark One himself. Mat hates fighting throughout, but he secretly enjoys commanding some of the largest battles at the end of the series.
- The Borderlanders and the Aiel-lifetimes of wars do that to you.
- Aes Sedai have this as a professional requirement and a product of their membership tests. Some of them do it much better than others. Egwene Sedai and Cadsuane Sedai are known for having absurd control of themselves. Others such as Nynaeve Sedai are known to have poor emotional control even though they're highly capable.
- In World War Z, dogs that were alive at the time the Zombie Apocalypse kicked off are terrified and enraged by the scent of the undead and freak out in the presence of zombies or the infected. Those dogs born after it started are "born smelling the dead" and are sufficiently acclimated to this aroma that they can be trained to work with humans and each other to lure zombies into kill zones and traps.
