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Elephant In The Living Room
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alt title(s): Elephant In The Corner  
Peter: Let's just ignore it and hope it goes away. Just like we do with the squid. (giant squid knocks the plates off table) Lois: Uh, earthquake. Peter: Truck passing by.
Also rendered "the elephant in the corner", the Elephant In The Living Room is a large topic or issue which should be obvious to everyone but which is deliberately or conspicuously avoided. In most cases this is used to create comedic tension, for example when a character has a Big Secret he must struggle to divert conversation away from. In stark contrast, some cases of the trope creates a tragic vibe, with an Elephant so awful that nobody can bring themselves to raise the topic.
For cases where a subject within the series that simply cannot be questioned, or else the whole premise will fall apart, it's a case of why they don't Just Eat Gilligan. If a subject is addressed with some form of implausible explanation, that is most often a Hand Wave or Scotch Tape; when the subject is simply verboten, it is the Elephant in the Living Room.
In Anime, this trope is known as a Pregnant Ranma Problem, based on the following anecdotal discussion between the artist of Ranma 1/2 and a random fan at a convention:
Which just about sums up 90% of these examples. Cheers!
See also Unusually Uninteresting Sight.
Examples:
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Advertising
- One public awareness commercial that this editor remembers seeing once (possibly during a Superbowl?) has a man walking into an office accompanied by an elephant, with the nametag of "AIDS." Certainly a very effective message.
- Ads for AXA Equities invoke this trope by having as a spokesperson the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, reminding people to invest for retirement.
- Which is a bizarrely mixed metaphor. The proverbial 800-pound gorilla represents the ability to do whatever you want because nobody dares to stop you...
- Where do you invest your money when there's an 800-pound gorilla in the room? Anywhere he tells you to.
Anime and Manga
- In Mahou Sensei Negima Negi often uses the excuse that he's considering one of his students to become his magical partner in order to prevent other mages from using Laser Guided Amnesia on them to maintain the Masquerade. The Elephant is that this excuse won't protect the Muggles in his class forever.
- At the rate things are going, will there be any Muggles left in said class by the time they graduate? They're down to somewhere around 7/31 at this point...
- Were there many in the first place?
- Out of the starting 31 students? In the manga, 12. Plus, another 4 that have dealt with magic but are kept in the dark by relatives/close friends, and another 4 that are aware of some weirdness, but not about magic until their dealings with Negi, so there's no Elephant there.
- He only used this excuse in Negima!?, the second anime. In the manga, it seems that as long as his magic doesn't go public, it's okay for people to know.
- One of Kousaka's major character traits in Genshiken is that he has absolutely no awareness that the elephant in the room is supposed to be hiding. As a result, he says what everyone's thinking without hesitation. A key example is when the rest of the club is unsure of whether Ohno and Tanaka are dating; as everyone else vacillates, he just yells, "Hey! Are you two going out?"
- The big one from Ah My Goddess, eventually brought up in a recent Light Novel for the series: what will happen to Keiichi and Belldandy's relationship as Keiichi grows old? Interestingly, Keiichi and Peorth did have a rather evasive conversation about it. Keiichi's biggest concern, to Peorth's surprise, was how it would hurt Belldandy.
- Precisely the same in Kanokon. The female lead is some 25+ times older than the male. That means, by the time he dies of old age, she'll only just have got out of adolescence. Yet no-one mentions it, ever.
- In Cromartie High School, no one but Kamiyama and Hayashida seem to realize that Mechazawa is a robot, and even they never directly say it.
- This an the general weirdness is lampshaded in the last scene of the anime: Hayashida and Maeda ask Kamiyama what they're going to with their lives. Kamiyama then points out the window to Mechazawa, Freddie, his horse, and Gorilla, stating that's whatever the three of them might do doesn't interest him nearly as much as what those other guys might do.
- In Detective Conan, Conan's increasingly noticeable failure to act as a normal little boy arouses suspicions from just about everyone in the cast not privy to his secret, yet nobody really thinks of just sitting the kid down and asking him just how on earth does he know so much, rather preferring to harbor vague suspicions relatively forever.
- Considering a lot of the information Conan spouts is related to weapons, death and chemicals, they just might be scared that he'll kill them if they point something out. After all, there are plenty of people who've seen him shoot that soccer ball with all the force and accuracy of a heat-seeking missile.
Comic Books
- In Fables, the protagonists rarely talk about much of their pasts, even if it was full of abominable deeds. Which, considering they're all old-school Grimm storybook fables, can be extensive indeed. The in-story explanation is they were all given amnesty when they entered the mundane world. This doesn't keep them from being wary of each other, nor from falling back on old habits.
- Despite the fact that Marvel Comics's version of New York City has been the site of multiple alien invasions, a demonic infestation, has suffered through every kind of cockamamie plot imaginable, and is routinely targeted by supervillains of every stripe, there has never been any sort of mass exodus or serious damage to the economy in spite of all the upheavals.
- Probably because Damage Control repairs everything so efficiently.
- Similarly, Gotham City never suffers from any long-term economic damage or loss of population, despite the fact that a number of psychopathic supervillains routinely use the city as a stage for their grisly "performances" (the Joker), a giant petri dish for their scientific experiments (the Scarecrow and his attempting to use the people of Gotham as test subjects in his experiments in fear), or a base for their environmental crusades (Poison Ivy). And even ignoring them, the city has long been a Wretched Hive of endemic police and civic corruption and mob activity, making it curious that anyone would willingly choose to live there.
- Things did eventually get so bad that, after an earthquake damaged the city, the government isolated Gotham from the rest of the USA (in the "No Man's Land" story arc) on the excuse that it was too expensive to rebuild it. People who refused to leave were left inside to their own devices, and even outside help was forbidden! This is of course completely absurd (and illegal).
- Illegal except for biological epidemics. The only difference between that and the U.S. government's plan in case of a smallpox epidemic (a few vials from the Soviet Union disappeared and remain unaccounted for) is to tear up all roads leading out of an infected city are to be destroyed and anyone from that city that tries to leave is to be shot on sight. Of course since smallpox has a period of dormancy that last months after infection, and people travel around the travel great distances, and the U.S. has only about 300,000 vaccines in a population of multi-millions, make this unlikely to stop the spread so...
- On the other hand, it would take almost no time at all to create enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate everyone on earth. It's easier to create than penicillin and a lot cheaper: simply infect cows with cowpox and three days later you have vaccine - enough to vaccinate 300 people from one cow. Seriously: the needles would cost more and take more time to produce.
- What most people forget is that prior to the quake (literally almost happening a month or two earlier) is that Gotham was struck with two plagues: one was, of all things, the Ebola Virus and the other was a super plague that was released by Ra's al-Ghul. So by the time of the quake, the government said "Fuck it" and sealed Gotham up.
- Biological epidemics, eh? They probably could have used Man-Bat, Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, fear gas, said plagues, etc. as loopholes to justify it then.
- Most cities in superhero comics suffer from at least one Elephant In The Living Room. Why don't the super-powered villains move out of the city where Superman lives? Why don't all the unpowered white-collar supervillains (or at least the two or three of them that don't have a major case of Foe Yay for Batman) move out of the city where the World's Greatest Detective lives? Why don't Marvel villains move out of the one city where almost every single non-comedic superhero lives?
- This was lampshaded and subverted a bit in the Flash comics back in more innocent days. The Central City and Keystone City crooks were generally harmless and some even had codes against killing, so they were more seen as nuisances then anything. Geoff Johns added another reason: most of the people in Keystone work in Heavy Industry, and it's unlikely that their jobs would exist anywhere else.
- Also explored in a short story by Kim Newman: A Commissioner Gordon-like character has questions nagging at the edge of his consciousness about the way Coastal City is always being trashed by supervillains but it's always rebuilt in no time, and his war-hero backstory is periodically updated to a newer war.
- I always imagined that Gotham/Metropolis/etc… being plagued by supervillain crime, rampaging kaiju and the wrath of eldritch entities on a regular basis was perfectly normal in the typical comic book setting, and that there were other superheroes fighting other supervillains in every corner of the world every week too. Just that this particular superhero was the one being followed by the story I'm reading.
- In Mini Marvels, this trope is parodied by Elephant Steve. He really hates this expression, by the way.
Film
Literature
- In the Discworld novels, one of the Canting Crew is a beggar named Duck Man, for the very simple reason that he has a duck on his head. Most people don't mention the duck out of politeness, and those who do bring it up will be met with the response "What duck?" It's mentioned that he used to quite normal "before everyone else started seeing ducks".
- Another member of the Canting Crew is Altogether Andrews, who has several split personalities, none of which is named Andrews. This is never brought up.
- To a lesser extent, Shawn Ogg's parentage is this. His father is publicly accepted to be Sobriety Ogg. The only problem with this idea is that Sobriety Ogg died some ten years before Shawn was born. Most people avoid the issue(probably out of fear of Nanny) and are quick to silence outsiders who try to mention it.
- Death himself is visible to all inhabitants of the Discworld, but he is so frightening in his appearance that most people desperately attempt to not notice anything strange about him to preserve their sanity, even when having a conversation with him.
- Kim Newman's novel The Quorum follows on from his short story "Organ Donors", and references it a few times, including the characters of private investigator Sally Rhodes (and her child, conceived in "Organ Donors") and Derek Leech, satanic media magnate who uses black magic to advance his cause. Sally discovers Leech's nature in "Organ Donors" but has forgotten by The Quorum: Newman admitted there's no reason for this beyond it breaking the story.
- The Douglas Adams novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency features a man at a university with a very long nose. He never speaks, and is never spoken to because people are too startled by the sight of his nose, and don't want to bring it up. He also constantly taps his fingers and makes other odd gestures, and nobody asks why due to their reluctance to speak to him. Finally one character ends up addressing him after accidentally knocking on his door. The man stops twitching and calmly announces that nobody has spoken to him in almost two decades (quoting the exact time to the second). Apparently all the gestures were him counting the seconds.
- A more serious example can be found in Invisible Man, in which characters do their very best not to bring up the subject of race relations.
Live Action TV
Newspaper Comics
- Parodied by Pearls Before Swine in one strip:
Rat: You know, every time someone discusses these issues, they always like to conveniently avoid the elephant in the room.
Goat: You mean Social Security?
Rat: I mean the elephant in the room.
Tiny (the elephant): I like to discuss issues, too.
- In Alley Oop, the character Oscar Boom went straight so many decades ago that many current readers weren't aware that he started out as a crook, and that he had never gone to trial or served jail time for his crimes. Recent storylines have finally addressed this.
- F Minus illustrated a literal example.
Webcomics
- In Abe&Kroenen, almost nobody mentions the fact that Kroenen was and is a Nazi assassin. For some reason his presumed Nazi beliefs never actually make an appearance, probably because that would be a good way to lose a lot of viewers.
- His Nazi affiliations are addressed in small ways, like claiming that V is so cool it almost makes him want him give up Nazism, or giving Abe a speech about staying strong, or else the sub-humans will over-run the earth, and no glory will be brought to the Fatherla—and then he wisely shuts up.
- This Sinfest comic is not exactly an example of the trope, but still terribly appropriate.
- Another direct reference to the phrase is found here.
- Jonny Crossbones is either an undead creature or wears a skeleton suit all the time. No one has noticed so far.
- This strip of Penny And Aggie
- In Sluggy Freelance no one ever seems surprised when Bun-Bun (a rabbit) and Kiki (a ferret) start speaking English, despite several instances suggesting that Talking Animals are not considered normal in the Sluggyverse. How this works is never addressed.
Western Animation
- The basis of a long-running introduction to an episode of The Far Side animated series. Probably.
- It was a Running Gag in The Oblongs that everyone avoided directly referencing the fact that Bob doesn't have arms or legs.
- Although, in the episode "Bucketheads", Tommy Vinegar does call him a Weeble.
- And in another episode (the one where Helga gets her parents back, I think) Bob goes to play the piano, which leaves Milo embarrassed and the people shocked. I wonder what they could be alluding to...
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