Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"I don't know, and I have no opinion."
"The great thing about your species, Dib, is that most of them don't notice." — Tak, Invader Zim
Does somebody need a million dollars to pay off a loan shark? Is he bleeding to death on the street? Will a nuclear war start if he doesn't get the launch codes? Are young girls vanishing into a house where the windows are coated with human blood? He begs people for help — and as far as they're concerned, it's Somebody Else's Problem. They've got more important things to worry about, like their back pains.
The exact opposite of this is Chronic Hero Syndrome. Compare With This Herring. See also Dying Like Animals. Scarily a Truth in Television, alternately used to demonstrate anviliciously that Humans Are Bastards. Note that the trope namer, the Somebody Else's Problem field from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, does not fit this trope (although it uses it), but rather is a short range Weirdness Censor created by Applied Phlebotinum.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- In Code Geass: "My mother is dead!" "Old news, what of it?" This dialogue took place between a boy and his father. Just days after it happened.
- To be fair, his father knew more about the situation and was also more upset about it than he let on.
- Ichigo Kurosaki attempts this in Bleach but Cant Stay Normal and Chronic Hero Syndrome get the better of him and eventually he's stabbing bad guys with the best of shonen heroes.
- What's odd is he's been able to see ghosts (called Pluses in Bleach) and cares for them, but when The Call finds him, he takes his new powers, saves his family, and then tries to hand it right back. Sorry, Ichibutt, it doesn't work that way!
- Kanako Oora in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei has this as her defining character trait. To her, everything else is somebody else's problem. Like, say, a huge pile of corpses in the classroom after one of Chiri's rampages.
- If it doesn't involve his little brother Mokuba, his company Kaiba Corp, his position as a duelist, or owning the most powerful cards, this defines Seto Kaiba of the original Yu-Gi-Oh to a T.
- Invoked by Fate in Mahou Sensei Negima, when he tries to convince Negi not to interfere with his plans to destroy the Magic World. His argument was basically "This isn't your world, it's just a fantasy, and you really shouldn't interfere in it's affairs." This is before Negi discovers who his mother is.
Film
- In Airplane!, fully a third of the gags are set up by contrasting the terrible things happening and the passengers' complete indifference to them. Examples include the unconscious bodies of the pilots being dragged through the aisle, a little girl nearly dying after her IV gets knocked out, and the Offscreen Crash near the end.
- The passengers in Airplane II: The Sequel react with utter stoicism to being told that the lunar shuttle they're on is off course and being hit by asteroids. Being told they are out of coffee induces a full scale riot.
Literature
- Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lampshades this with the Somebody Else's Problem Field which amplifies this into a full blown Weirdness Censor.
- Bonus points because the SEP field was developed as a cheaper and more reliable alternative to a full blown Invisibility Cloak. And it runs over a hundred years on a single torch battery.
- Well, the spaceship that it hides looks like an Italian restaurant, so it's already hard to notice.
- It also allows people to breathe happily on an airless asteroid. The mechanics just become somebody else's.
- In JK Rowling's Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, the Knight Bus seems to work the same way as Hitchhiker's Guide's Somebody Else's Problem Field.
- Richard Mayhew's refusal to yield to this trope, when he found Door bleeding on the sidewalk, led him into London Below in Neverwhere. His fiancee declared it Somebody Else's Problem, and so remained in London Above.
- Residents of London Below tend not to be noticed by the Above folks in the first place. Later in the book, his fiance recognzies him for a brief moment, then is unable to even -see- him.
Live Action TV
- The entire Four Man Band of Seinfeld is incarcerated in the finale for the many, many times they do this (as well as just being horrible). The breaking point is the four watching a man get mugged and laughing about it.
- In one episode of The Young Ones, the characters have stumbled across a time warp and now have a horde of medieval peasants out to kill them. They are terrified, and wonder aloud how they are going to get out of this predicament, when Vyvyan says "Who cares?", and the housemates instantly lose interest in their own mortal peril. End of episode.
- An SEP field is why no-one thinks a blue Police Box is an odd thing to see anywhere other than 1960s England. Move along, nothing to see here...
Music
Video Games
- This is the general attitude of most townspeople in video games. It will be The End Of The World As We Know It, and they'll just be continuing on with their normal townspeople things, charging the heroes for supplies to save the world.
- And asking you to deliver trinkets to some dude and generally just standing around doing nothing.
- This happens in every single RPG in existence, even when there's a giant meteor hanging in the sky or the last boss is hanging over the earth in a huge purple blob and you're the world's only hope. Chalk it down to how confident they are in the hero's skills.
- A notable subversion is Wizardry 7, in which competing parties are not only attempting to reach the same goal as your party, they can actually find and take important main-quest items before you, making the game more difficult to finish.
- In the Baldur's Gate games, the lazy, lazy members of the world may well claim to be amazing warriors, but they'll still stand around waiting for you to reach them before they go to rescue their friend/kill rats/buy a book/retrieve something that was stolen.
- In regards to characters the developers intended to be recruitable to your party, that's really more a case of Take Your Time mixed with Always Close. They are going to go do that in just a little bit, but you “happen” to show up before then.
- Final Fantasy X lampshades this with Rin charging the party. Even though he acknowledges that he might die soon, he has confidence in the party.
- In Zelda games, the world's gonna be destroyed if the princess isn't rescued, whether she's been kidnapped, turned to stone, or vanished off the face of Hyrule. Of course, since you, Link, are already dealing with it, nobody's worried. It's YOUR problem now. They even charge you for equipment vital to your quest.
- Averted in Majora's Mask - everybody knows that something horrible is about to happen. By nightfall of the last day, almost all of them have fled town - of the few who you are able to locate at this point, they acknowledge their flight probably won't make a difference. Only those in serious denial of the imminent catastrophe (and you, the player) remain behind.
- Senel Coolidge from Tales Of Legendia has this mindset at first. He acts as if the world revolve around Shirley, and if something unrelated to her is presented to him, he ignores them or at least tell him not to bugger him with it, pissing off many people, especially Chloe, though eventually he stopped obsessing about her completely. This one is so bad that in the Tales Of The World, he gets a What The Hell Hero yell that he'd rather let the world be destroyed than just halting his search for Shirley, then he takes the hint (after all, if the world is destroyed, he can't even reunite with Shirley at all).
- This trope is why nobody helps Aeka with the horrible bullying she deals with in Yume Miru Kusuri. People realize she is suffering, but don't help her for fear that they will become targets. If the player picks her route, Kohei and her get so fed up with this that they leave school entirely.
Web Original
- The attitude of the general population towards demons in Demonic Symphony, and oh boy does it backfire
Western Animation
- Nearly every character in Drawn Together (considering the prevalent Jerkass-ness) has done this at one point or another, but Captain Hero, a superhero whose Catch Phrase is "SAVE YOURSELVES!", is probably the worst offender. His response to Bambi wailing to him about his dead mother (that he shot no less) is:
Captain Hero: "Sucks to be you!"
- Every character in Futurama has decided, at least once, that the current crisis is Somebody Else's Problem.
- Scruffy the Janitor may be the most blatant offender here: when asked why he didn't fix the boiler, his reply was "schedule conflict" and another flip of his porn magazine. When said boiler was getting ready to go critical ten feet away.
Scruffy: "Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived." (licks finger, turns page)
- In Invader Zim, a fair bit of the humour comes from the fact that nobody ever notices all the alien spaceships and Humongous Mecha that routinely appear, or even the time that Earth was nearly thrown into a dying sun.
- Well, the last one was disguised by a giant screen set to display a normal Earth sky. After that went away, people noticed.
- Gaz is the only other person besides Dib who knows Zim is an alien but this tropes basically keeps her from doing anything. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Zim is Too Dumb To Live and Failure Is The Only Option when it comes to any of his plots, something she points out when Dib questions why she doesn't care more.
- The only two times she got involved was when she needed to rescue Dib from Zim or else her dad wouldn't take them out for Pizza, and when Tak proved a little more competent with the whole 'destroying the Earth' thing.
- The Simpsons. When Lenny and Carl walk past a tank containing radioactive gas that's bursting at the seams, Carl remarks nonchalantly about the tank's imminent failure, to which Lenny quips "Who cares? It's Homer's problem." Considering how over-the-top the dialogue was given the situation, this could even be considered Lampshade Hanging.
- The Williams Street cartoons for Adult Swim specialize in this.
- In Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Master Shake has a different (and often bizarrely random) reason every episode for not caring about what's going on - even in "Revenge of the Trees," where the Monster Of The Week was looking for revenge on Shake.
- Sealab 2021 does this a lot. In the pilot episode, "I, Robot," Quinn is trying to save Sealab from exploding — but everyone else is too busy with a Seinfeldian Conversation to help. In "Green Fever," zombies attack the station, but Debbie is too busy preparing her birthday party, Stormy and Sparks are busy chatting about steel pipes, etc. Exactly who is uncaring varies; in "No Waterworld," Quinn is too busy with his monster truck to help Debbie find out why all the water around the station has disappeared.
- In Space Ghost Coast To Coast, Zorak and Moltar frequently get bored with Space Ghost's show, and decide their jobs on it are Somebody Else's Problem. Sometimes Space Ghost gets bored with his own show, and does the same thing.
- On an episode of The Fairly Oddparents, every anti-fairy escapes from prison, and Jorgen prepares to round them up. Then his shift ends, to which he responds "Your problem."
- This trope very, very prevalent in The Fairly Oddparents. The world gets taken over and heavily modified in just about every movie (twice in one of them) and the people act accordingly. Timmy usually makes an extravagant wish and somehow either everyone doesn't notice or is too stupid to understand what is happening.
Real Life
- Aside from the way you're using your wealth to read about entertainment tricks when one person in six lacks safe drinking water, the bystander effect
 and the diffusion of responsibility mean that people in crowds are less likely to act in an emergency. It's suggested that the thing to do is to point out a particular bystander and order him to do something specific.
- The full scale of the existence in real life is far beyond what most people realize. On this list of charities, the best one is rated at $3 per DALY. In plain English, that means that you can add a year onto someone's life for three dollars.
- This is why "You, go call an ambulance" works better than "Somebody call an ambulance" in emergencies, even if 'you' is just a random passer-by.
- Some suspect this is why the Kitty Genovese case turned out like it did.
- Some? Suspect? As in, ignoring the witness statements to the effect of "I figured someone else would have done something"?
- Yeah, the Kitty Genovese case is tragically straight example. She could have been easily saved if at least one of the many witnesses attempted to help.
- If it's any comfort, most of the 'facts' of the Genovese case are wrong. Witnesses did call for help, and not much of the murder happened in plain sight anyway. The story was out of proportion some weeks later to make a point. It's not like everyone was just standing around watching her get murdered.
- This trope is the reason many municipalities/states/countries around the world have laws to prosecute people who stand by and do not help during an emergency situation.
|
|
