Mundane Fantastic

Just your friendly neighborhood witch. Nothing to see here.

Steve Blance: The only evil deed here is to my house. Who are you two?
Thunderbolt: Pow! I'm Thunderbolt!
Lightning: Zap! And I'm Lightning! We come from the comic book pages!
Steve Blance: Oh, out-of-towners.

— GLOW

The complete mesh of fantastic and realistic elements where the impossible is treated as unremarkable. The fantastic is seen as mundane not just in the sense of being a natural part of the world, but also mundane in the sense of being dull. This separates it from general fantasy where magic is real but still attracts attention. The impossible elements don't rely on consistency to maintain Willing Suspension of Disbelief; their presentation as unexceptional helps keep the audience from demanding a plausible explanation. In short, unlike normal fantasy story, a Mundane Fantastic one doesn't indulge in their own fantastic elements, because they're there only as flavor. This is more often seen in Urban Fantasy because they are set in a setting that's close to our real world, just with added fantastic elements.

This attitude can often be justified as more realistic in a story where the impossible has always been possible. In our world, hackers may be uncommon, but they're perfectly plausible, so there's no reason to constantly point them out all the time or give detailed explanations of their place in reality. So the people who know that their world has only two or three wizards in every town would consider this normal too. Not that everyone knows the difference between hacking and wizardry anyway. But while hackers attract attention and interest, Mundane Fantastic wizards are unremarkable even while being uncommon, much like county clerks.

For a purely artistic standpoint, the Mundane Fantastic is a major reason why a show might be animated instead of done live. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the idea that if a cartoon is to be taken seriously it has to be serious and played straight. A Mundane Fantastic show may Jump the Shark if a new writer comes on board and decides that all the fantastic elements have to be explained to death.

Anime uses this very frequently, which probably contributes to the perception of "inherent strangeness" for that visual medium.

If the story is in a realistic setting that is recognizable as our past or present world, it's Magic Realism. Isolated fantastic elements are typically considered Unusually Uninteresting Sights.

See also Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems, Fantastically Indifferent, Fantastic Comedy and World of Weirdness. Compare Mundane Made Awesome for the rational/scientific equivalent.

Not related to Mundane Dogmatic, a science fiction movement/genre which is explicitly against fantastic, speculative settings.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Burger King commercial features a winged pig driving a truck. He explains that yes, he usually flies where he needs to go, but he's in the process of moving out of his mom's basement and needs the truck to carry his stuff.
• In Digimon Project 2021, Digimon are shown to be a natural part of life in the setting, with nobody so much as batting an eye until a lot of hostile ones show up all over the city.
• No one ever shows surprise at talking Duke the Dog, who's forever trying to sell the secret recipes for Bush's Baked Beans. It was surprising at first; initially, Duke couldn't talk.
• No one in the Geico commercials are ever surprised by the various talking animals. Notably in one ad, the talking pig assumes he was pulled over because he's a pig driving a convertible, only to be informed he has a taillight out.

Anime & Manga

• ARIA: A drama about some girls' life as a gondola worker on a Venice replica... In a far future where Mars becomes a water planet after an excavation mentioned in the backstory.
• Played with in Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld: magic is treated as a lost lore in the world where science's been accepted, but Nobita wants to experience the former, so he uses Doraemon's "what if" telephone booth to turns his world into a magician's world. His wish is granted: everybody except him and Doraemon can now cast magic, fly on bloomsticks and do other fantastic stuff while science is treated as a complete ridicule. Nobody accepts Doraemon's scientific gadgets as something not magic due to how powerful they are even by their standards.
• There are a few instances in the Dragon Ball series when it's shown that the general public isn't as desensitized to superhuman powers as our heroes. Krillin doesn't understand why bystanders freak out when he falls out of the sky during the Androids Saga.
• Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas has it in full. Alchemy has a strong presence in the universe, but the lives of the people of the town it's set in take precedence over it in the story.
• Hakobune Hakusho: A young girl who enrolls in a school full of youkai and makes friendships with the students there. The entire rest of the series deals with everything you'd find in a normal school, to the point where the ninja club asks its recruits to gather information and spy on others.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Despite all of the things which are spoiled by just being on this page, the narrative focuses mostly on the S.O.S. members' normal lives.
• Hyper Police is about a Cat Girl and her kitsune partner (previously werewolf). They solve crimes in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink city while competing with a MegaCorp for bounties... and it's a situation comedy.
• Kamichu!'s main character is most definitely a goddess. She is worshipped and given full honors wherever she goes and even visits the realm of the gods for official god-functions. However, she has a relatively normal school life for most of the series (even a romance!) and her transition to divinity has remarkably little impact on the rest of the townspeople.
• Karin: She's a vampire! And it's a... love story?
• In Kiki's Delivery Service, people in the town that Kiki arrives in know that witches exist, as does everyone else in that setting. However, it's commented that it has been a long time since a witch has been seen in that town, leading to a lot of double-takes and finger pointing at Kiki, though it's gotten over quickly. When Kiki is confronted with a policeman due to her nearly causing a traffic accident, he merely equates her reckless low flying with jaywalking.
• Love Hina is an Unwanted Harem Romantic Comedy series about a manager of a girl's dorm studying to get into Tokyo University. This doesn't stop flying turtles, Ki Manipulation, Humongous Mecha, and Magical Girls from showing up.
• In Loveless all virgins have cat ears and a tail until they lose said virginity. No one considers this weird, and it doesn't really have much to do with the main story, which is about a secret world of True Name spell battles.
• My Lovely Ghost Kana is about a young man moving in a haunted house, which is haunted by the ghost of a young girl. Within a few pages, they're a couple. The reader is then presented with such exquisite scenes as the girl touching beer to cool it, entering a wall when they have a fight, entering a UFO catcher to assist her boyfriend with the catch and so forth.
• Nichijou: Aside from a teenage robot, the 8-year-old professor who built her, and their talking cat, the series is all about the ordinary lives of normal high-school freshmen. It's even in the name: nichijou means "everyday, ordinary"; hence, the lesser-used English title My Ordinary Life.
• Patlabor: It's a cop show with giant robots.
• Pokémon: The Series: There's plenty of technology and modern conveniences like cars in the world of Pokémon, but technology exists right alongside psychic powers, ghosts, walking plants, and other such powers and creatures. All of these are a completely normal part of the world that aren't out of the ordinary at all.
• Tentai Senshi Sunred. The world is straight out of sentai shows — evil organizations, monsters running loose, masked heroes of justice. Except all of them are just going about their daily lives with people not caring about whether someone has more arms than they ought to.
• Urusei Yatsura: Going with the manga's nature as a gag-humour series, there are aliens, cryptids, spirits, interdimensional time-travelling higher beings and more strange things. Yet people just go about their normal lives like they're just typical quirky occurrences.

Arts

• Marie de' Medici Cycle: At the time of the painting's creation, monarchies were justified by having the Christian god's blessing. As a result, royalty and, more specifically, Marie is seen mingling with gods, anthropomorphic personifications of concepts, and other preternatural beings. None of the subjects bats an eye at the sight.

Comic Books

• Horndog, set on a World of Funny Animals, the comic has both Fantastic elements like zombies and aliens, but also more serious subject matter, particularly in the main storyline's deconstruction of open relationships, racism and interracial relationships, to start; as a result of this combination of storylines, Mundane Fantastic applies.
• Scott Pilgrim. The setting is a Video Game version of Toronto, and is the trope is in full swing. Examples Include;
  • Subspace portals are common occurrences and save Scott at one point.
  • Scott gets into a duel with a Big Bad who can summon Demonic Hipster Chicks.
  • In multiple cases change has appeared from defeated enemies.
  • Scott ditches a Mithril skateboard after mentioning that he didn't take skateboard proficiency in 5th grade.
  • Ramona Flowers, Action Girlfriend and Magical Girlfriend, uses a Subspace purse that holds a hammer.
  • A vegan that Scott fights has Psychic Powers, because he is vegan.
  • One of the enemies drops a 1-Up (featuring Scott's face).
  • When washing dishes Scott gets 500 Experience Points. And again when Scott professes his love for Ramona Flowers, gains 9999 Exp. and gains a sword called "The Power of Love".
• In Seconds, nobody but Katie seems to be at all bothered or perplexed by the presence of walking, talking skeletons being under the employ of the restaurant. According to them, hiring these skeletons was all Katie's idea.
• Most superhero comics are like this to some degree or another. Sure, if a new alien race or magic being shows up, people will pay attention, but Skrulls (ANAL Skrulls) and the like are treated as just a part of life (though they did give Earth quite the shock there).
  • One Superman comic lampshaded this hilariously when a cabbie yells at someone in front of him about traffic. The person says Supes is fighting a monster. The cabbie retorts that that happens every day.
  • Garth Ennis tends to touch on this with his DC stuff. Mainly it's "Yes, that monster crossing the street is weird but at least he isn't eating people like popcorn. Count your blessings."
• Top 10 is a Police Procedural in a city where everyone from bums to schoolkids, tycoons to hookers has a superpower, or is an alien, a god, a cyborg, an enhanced animal or some other kind of superhero/villain, and they're all just getting on with their lives.
• Cherry Comics: Alien abduction, vampires, post-apocalyptic societies... no biggie.
• Black Magick opens with a Wiccan ceremony — which we later learn has real and direct magical importance — being interrupted by a cell phone call. The leaders of the circle in turn grumble about how much of a hassle it will be to redo all of the rituals and set-up before Rowan is called away for duty.
• No-one in the Condorito universe seems to react wiry to the fact that Condorito is an anthropomorphic talking condor. Even more, several of his relatives appear in the comics showing the same characteristic (most notably his nephew Coné) so there's an entire race of anthropomorphic birds walking around.

Comic Strips

• Most comic strips exhibit this to a small degree, considering that many of them are basically stuck in some kind of time warp where the characters never age.
• Peanuts:
  • Both the comic and animated versions incorporate fantastic elements which don't really seem to faze the characters, such as the never-seen but apparently TARDIS-like interior of Snoopy's doghouse — or Snoopy's sapience, for that matter. In an ironic twist, everyone found it less bizarre that Snoopy was playing on Charlie Brown's baseball team than that Peppermint Patty thought he was just a weird kid with a big nose. (At one point in the comic strip, Marcie finally spells out that Snoopy is a dog, and Patty suffers a Heroic BSoD, spending the next strip repeating "A beagle?!" over and over again.)
  • There's also the kite eating tree.
  • One story arc involved Charlie Brown's baseball-related... uh, hallucinations leading to his short-lived triumph as "Mr. Sack".
• Get Fuzzy is set in a world where dogs, cats, and various other pets are not quite as intelligent as humans. Occasionally the strip actually addresses this.
  • In the same vein as the above, dogs can converse with humans in Pooch Café, and it's no big deal.
• Dilbert is the King of Mundane Fantastic newspaper comic worlds. Talking animals that run corporations (sadistically, of course), or even the U.N. for a short time, various semi-human personifications of office inhabitant types (from a moth-man attracted by meetings to a parasitic consultant that burrowed through the Pointy-Haired Boss to get to his wallet to an evil Youthful Executive who was killed and possessed), a garbage man who invents time travel and species-changing rays because he hates to see it done wrong, and dinosaurs hiding behind couches instead of going extinct. And nobody bats an eye while the world remains roughly the same as ours, for a given value of "same". According to Adams himself, people keep writing to him to tell him how realistic the strip is. He figures it's because it's impossible to exaggerate selfishness so much it's unrealistic.

Fan Works

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

• All Because of Uncle Gary: The story has exactly the same mundane real-life setting as the books, except that there are also magic rituals capable of changing people's biological sexes and/or making them sexually irresistible. This is not common knowledge, but is treated as fairly mundane when it comes up.
• For Love of Magic: Harry Potter is noticeably offended by the Wizarding World's complete lack of awe at magic. They can rewrite facets of reality on a whim but they treat it as completely mundane. Incidentally, it's this very attitude that causes them to be in awe of Harry's seemingly impossible feats, such as wandless casting, creating new spells, and changing components of spells. Anyone can do them but their attitude towards magic keeps them from exploring it.
  Harry: You have the power to alter reality and you use it on something as trivial as cleaning a plate.
• Fur And Photography: It's never stated if the world was unmasqued or if it ever was masqued to begin with, but supernatural beings like werewolves, vampires, demons, elementals and witches are public knowledge.
• The Infinite Loops: Many events become this, simply because the loopers are so old that they have Seen It All. Surprises usually come from variant loops.
• Irreversible Damage: The setting is fundamentally the same average, unremarkable suburbia as in canon, except that Magic Potions and Black Magic also exist. Greg is able to order magic potions over mail, their effects are never treated as especially unusual or remarkable outside of a brief discussion as to whether selling them like that is legal, and Greg barely registers his mother's casual discussion of necromancy as worth paying attention to.
• This Is the Life: A Tale of a Human in Equestria: Poking fun at this trope is more or less the entire point of the story. The titular character is constantly freaked out by everything around him which some ponies make fun of because of how he overreacts.
  Self-Insert: Just today I went to the library to return a book. I spent an hour there, hanging out with a baby dragon who is the assistant to a unicorn who is the protégé of a princess who is thousands of years old, who receives letters from that protégé through the baby dragon's magical breath.
  Lyra: Okay, and I had fried oats for breakfast. What's your point?

Films — Animation

• Hayao Miyazaki, and Studio Ghibli in general do this a lot.
  • In Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Lisa's only reaction to discovering a young girl out at sea and her son swearing this girl is the goldfish he had earlier is saying "The world is a mysterious place". For that matter, when Ponyo was a "goldfish" she more or less resembled a toddler head on a dress, not a fish, but nobody took notice of that either.
  • In Howl's Moving Castle, nobody is at all surprised at all the magic and wizardry going around. In fact, the warring nations enlist their magical inhabitants to fight for them.
  • Does anyone in Kiki's Delivery Service ever wonder what was up with real-life witches? No, they mainly expressed wonder and amazement, not shock.
  • The humans in Princess Mononoke do not fear nature and spirits with dumbfound awe, in fact they are trying their best to actively destroy both.
  • Nobody seems to find it odd that Porco Rosso's main character was turned into a pig. That one could be because maybe he didn't really, and it's just a reflection of his own self-loathing.
• Roxanne Ritchi has been kidnapped by Megamind and rescued by Metro Man so many times that the whole thing bores her to death. Then Titan kidnaps her and there's no Metro Man to save her. Now she's scared.
• In Turning Red, Mei's panda transformations are treated as unusual by those who are initially unaware of it, but more in the sense of finding out that someone else has an extra digit, or Abnormal Limb Rotation Range like Ming's double-jointed elbow, rather than something completely earthshattering in its implications in how the world works.

Films — Live Action

• In Santa Claus Conquers the Martians Santa is acknowledged as a real person rather than a myth adults stop believing in, and is even interviewed on television.
• Ted is a sapient, talking stuffed teddy bear. He was national news and a celebrity when young John Bennett's wish magically bestowed sentience upon his toy, but the movie takes place nearly thirty years later, after the novelty has worn off, so he hardly attracts any attention when he goes out in public.
• The reported inspiration for Jurassic World was a piece of artwork, depicting a teenage boy standing in front of a giant aquarium with a mosasaur swimming past... and completely ignoring it because he's too busy texting and InGen's prehistoric animals have become old news.
• Pretty much the entire point of The Troll Hunter, done in a way that borders on The Magic Goes Away. In the modern day, troll hunting has become a mundane, thankless and often downright boring animal control service, complete with constant paperwork (like filling out after-action forms in triplicate) and wiping out incredible animals for reasons as stupid as assisting with civic construction projects. All of this — the inane bureaucracy, the high amounts of danger, the lonesome secrecy — turns a mythic endeavor into a Soul-Crushing Desk Job.
• Last Action Hero: Part of why Danny has so much trouble convincing Jack Slater that he's a character in an action movie is that the movie world Jack inhabits is this. Jack doesn't find anything weird about every phone number starting with 555 or the total lack of unattractive people or the talking cartoon animals because his world is a movie and it's always been like that, so he sees nothing unusual about them.

Literature

• In Animal Farm, the idea that animals taking over a human's farm is frightening to farmers at first, but by the end of the story, Animal (now renamed Manor) Farm's neighbors have gotten used to the idea, and enjoy a nice card game with the pigs. It is a more sinister example of this trope, because it reflects how much the pigs have abandoned the ideals of Animalism that they cavort with humanity and adopt its worst aspects, to the point where the other animals can't tell pig from man when the two sides argue over the outcome of a card game.
• Zig-Zagged in Strange Practice: as a doctor to London's supernatural population, Greta thinks nothing of treating vampires' Seasonal Affective Disorder, examining fretful ghoul babies, or having her clinic door warded with a Perception Filter to protect the Masquerade. On the other hand, hearing stories about the Devil from an old friend of his does throw her — and everyone else in the room — off a bit.
• In The Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia, the existence of Actives (magic wielding mutants) is well known and many of them have jobs appropriate to their powers. For instance, Heavies (Actives who control gravity) often work anywhere that requires heavy lifting.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Magical Weapons imbedded in stone awaiting their chosen wielder are so common, the National Questing Bureau started giving tours in a warehouse they're kept in.
  Neil Waechter: Once you've seen one ax or spear or halberd stuck in something, you've seen them all. But people still try because... well... you never know.
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: Charles may have a laser gun and a time machine, but he's ultimately essentially a traffic cop. The universe itself may be an artificial narrative construct, but it still took zoning permits and investors and developers to build it. And so on. Even the doomsday clock ticking down to the end of the universe gets nary more than a passing mention.
• Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality universe is a blending of magic elements and modern science, to the point at which people aren't fazed by the Incarnation of Death materializing to take their loved ones to the great beyond — unless he turns his attention to them. At one point, Chronos (the Incarnation of Time) causes the entire world to run backwards for several hours - the general public are aware that this is happening, but they treat it as more of a temporary inconvenience than anything out of the ordinary. Except for the guy who had just gotten out of the bathroom when the reverse began.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell features a magician who is able to raise the dead and trick the entire French navy into hiding at port yet turns any conversation about magic into an extremely dull history lesson. Government and military officials complain that magic is just as full of setbacks and disappointments as any other field. At times it reaches Magic Realism focusing on the two title magicians' daily life rather than on their magical powers.
• Journey to Chaos: When Eric first arrives on Tariatla and enters a city, he is surprised by two things. 1.) The many fantastical creatures living among the humans, who are performing magic. 2.) The fact that he is the only person surprised by #1. Tariatla has had magic for ages and humans learned to coexist with the goblins and dwarves etc. by now. Later, after he has become a mage (which he learned from a mass produced book) he has to get creative when he's hired as a stage performer, because his entire audience can do basic magic.
• The Krim Pyramid books have ordinary people snatched from their early 21st century lives into the worlds of Greek and Egyptian myth.
• Lonely Werewolf Girl ducks into these plot threads half the time. In between politicking between the high clans of werewolves and the plotting of the queen of the fire elementals, you've got college students trying to get cable, a businesswoman trying to get her layabout musician cousins to actually do something, and an overworked sorceress and fashion designer trying to come up with suitable styles for said queen of the fire elementals.
• In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. He and his family treat this event as bothersome and disgusting, but not as unnatural. Gregor himself is not at all surprised by it, and never thinks about why it happened.
• In Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio nobody seems to make a big deal about the title protagonist being a walking, talking marionette, but in all fairness it's a story set in a world with talking animals, anthropomorphic animals, fairies, sea monsters and with some Literal Metaphor figures.
• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries play with this. The existence of vampires is known but other magical creatures like shapeshifters are still in hiding.
• Pagham-on-Sea, the main setting for the Pagham-on-Sea series (see The Crows) plays with this - there are many entities within the town, some living openly and others more discretely, but they vary from werewolves and the undead to unnamed entities and an inbred, Lovecraft Lite, Eldritch Abomination family that the first three novels of the series focus on. The town also has a Sapient House as a main setting/character, and denizens from the town sometimes appear as guests on the Eldritch Girl podcast bonus episodes where the novels are serialised.
• Qualia the Purple is a science-fiction series that uses the Multiverse and Copenhagen theories as a focal point on how the protagonist can traverse these multiverses and try to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Using the multiverse theory and its infinite possibility, she realizes that it's not impossible to think that there is a parallel universe where magic exists. Indeed there is one and she can now use it, no questions asked.
• All books by the Strugatsky Brothers. You want to travel somewhere very quickly? Find the nearest phone booth... er, Null-T cabin, enter the destination phone number... er, cabin address, press "Go" — that's all you need to know. Mostly because they deeply despised Expospeak (see the quote). Roadside Picnic has rather "humans can get used to anything, even really weird crap" point, but the end result is exactly the same.
• Robin McKinley's Sunshine has a lot of this. Sunshine lives on an alternate-reality Earth where vampires, were-animals of all sorts, demons, sorcerers, etc. are simply a fact of life, and in some cases, valued members of society.
• Temeraire: The series is pretty much historical fiction in the Napoleonic era... except there are dragons.
  • In most of the world, they are mostly bred by the military for use as flying war vessels. Civilians tend to panic at the sight of dragons and generally regard them as dangerous warbeasts barely kept in check by their handlers.
  • In China, dragons serve as everything from shopkeepers and public transport to high ranking civil servants, and no humans react to one sleeping by the road save to wake it when traffic is being blocked.
• Inverted in The Monster Baru Cormorant, a low fantasy novel in which an unremarkable metal called uranium is held by the superstitious Oriati to be a source of mysterious magic. The Oriati view it as something both sacred and fearful, and insist that exposure to it causes cancer and makes pregnant women give birth to monsters.
• The Wayside School books have a lot of weird things going on, like dead rats that show up in raincoats posed as school children. Amusingly enough, the final chapter of the first book features the characters learning about an ordinary school and they find that to be strange.
• While Toad is the only animal in The Wind in the Willows who has extensive contact with humans, none of them seem surprised at his being a bipedal, talking, clothes-wearing toad.
• Joshua Gaylord's When We Were Animals takes place in a small podunk town, where every resident that hits puberty turns into a primal, rage-filled, human monster during the full moon for one year. No one in the town seems to bat an eye at the naked teenagers fighting, howling, snarling, and having sex in the streets at night, every month, and treat it as if it's something completely normal.

Live-Action TV

• Family Matters began to swing towards this as Steve Urkel's inventions became more outlandish and fantastical in what was otherwise a fairly realistic Dom Com. By the end of the series, Steve had created a machine that can splice DNA with the DNA of others, a matter transporter, a time machine, and a gravity-device (the last of which gets the attention of NASA). However, the sci-fi elements were only present in Urkel-related plots.
• An Irish children's show called ROY and the film it is based on are about the life of Roy O'Brien, a two-dimensional cartoon boy with all the powers of a cartoon, living in the real world of Ballyfermot, Dublin.
• The Adventures of Pete & Pete happens to take place in an average suburb which hosts a superhero, ecstasy-inducing slushies, hand dryers that can suck people up, an International Adult Conspiracy, and football-obsessed aliens. Oh, and all those weird things you suspected were true, took too seriously, thought were unfair or confused the heck out of you as a kid? Totally Serious Business. No one bats an eye at any of it.
• Sesame Street. Humans interacting with monsters on a regular basis, as well as an eight-foot talking bird, whose best friend is a talking woolly mammoth. Hell, Grouches have their own culture based on an Opposite Day mentality. And apparently, Oscar's trashcan is Bigger on the Inside.
• The series finale of Angel has the Senior Partners send Los Angeles to hell. In After The Fall, the people become used to it and even after the Reset Button they still remember and are not surprised by seeing anything supernatural.
• Mr. Young: Dang can move around at super speed, defy gravity, and be in multiple places at once, Mrs. Byrne is older than the Sun, Adam has created a sentient robot, a machine that can slow down time and discovered the Fountain of Youth, and the characters have encountered various monsters ranging from human-sized chickens, rats, and cockroaches to a corporation of Cyclopses. Despite this, it still mostly appears to be set in a crapsack version of reality.

Music

• This is Jonathan Coulton's shtick.

Pro Wrestling

• The Argentina based Titanes en el ring which ran from 1962 to 1988 was famous for giving "regular" wrestlers the chance to test themselves against Tarzán, teams of androids, a yeti, Frankenstein's Monster, Voltron and most importantly, mummies. There were also historical domain wrestlers such as El Gran Mongol Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar. The 2001 revival saw additions such as Caín. How all these got into its locker room? Who cares?
• Lucha Libre Internacional caused a flood of this into the sport with their highly successful Los Misioneros de la Muerte angle where El Signo, El Texano and Negro Navarro were revealed to be fallen angels who came to Earth to rid it of El Santo. The general public reaction was simply that towards assholes who tried to kill the best thing in Lucha Libre. Their influence can be seen in latter enterprises such as AAA's Muerte Cibernetica turned El Mesías from the depths of hell, Chikara's time travel created FLOOD and Lucha Underground's mythic conspiracies.
• Kevin Sullivan starting a cult and performing elaborate summoning rituals like that which brought him the The Purple Haze wasn't seen as particularly shocking in Championship Wrestling From Florida, the announcers simply stating that there were better ways to deal with life's problems than to turn to the occult like Sullivan had.
• Pretty much all of GLOW's wrestlers were treated rather mundanely, even when Big Bad Mamma used outright "Hoodoo" magic to win matches she didn't get so much as a disqualification.
• New Japan Pro-Wrestling and later All Japan crossed into this with the debut of Jushin Liger, who "powered up" in conjunction with the television show character. While he was far from the first fictional wrestler made real, prior to him those had been cases of actual wrestlers like Mil Mascaras or Tiger Mask, not a Henshin Hero.
• If Lucha Libre Internacional Misioneros de la Muerte is the standard for successful application of this trope, WCW's Capital Combat, where RoboCop saved Sting from The Four Horsemen is the exact opposite. The event did initially garner interest but the sight of a RoboCop live was too much for most viewers to take seriously.
• This was the most immediately visible distinction between Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling and its upstart rival W*ING, the latter having such expies as Nightmare Freddy, Super Leather, Jason The Terrible, Super Raton, Tasmaniac(Tazz), as well gimmicks like the Iceman, Fishman, The Crypt Keeper and Goliath El Gigante. These more elaborate gimmicks would resurface in IWA Japan and then in FMW itself after it absorbed most of the W*ING roster.
• Downplayed in Ohio Valley Wrestling, which did run a send up to Kevin Sullivan's Army Of Darkness in The Disciples Of Synn, right down to them summoning "The Demon Of The Deep". However, most of the time they will (sometimes futilely) grasp for explanations when wrestlers such as Kane or The Undertaker did something particularly outlandish.
• If you're watching Fighting Opera HUSTLE, don't hold your breath waiting for an explanation to exactly what a being as powerful as Generalissimo Takada would find interesting about pro wrestling or mixed martial arts, much less any words on how his powers work or any protests to his flying vampire mooks being allowed in the ring.

Puppet Shows

• Everything having to do with The Muppets. In all of the films (and all the TV shows and TV specials), the fact that the main characters are all a bunch of sentient puppets rarely plays into the reactions of the human cast members (and if it does, it's usually treated as "a little odd" at the most, never "oh my god these 3-foot-tall felt monstrosities are all walking around and singing"). It became extra ridiculous when they hosted an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Played with in Muppets from Space, where Gonzo is captured by a secret government agency because they think he's an alien (he is). This is done by a guy whose assistant is a talking bear.

Tabletop Games

• Tales from the Loop deals with life as a child, growing up in The '80s in a small, suburban Company Town... except the "company" is a shady lab which may or may not be conducting experiments on the locals, there are feral robots prowling the wilderness outside the town and huge anti-gravity freighters share the skies with more conventional aircraft. The game even states that while any Kid Hero may think a 50,000 ton freighter flying overhead is the most amazing thing ever, it's no more exceptional in their world than a smartphone is in ours.

Theater

• Avenue Q operates by the same principle as The Muppets. There's nothing in the slightest weird about puppets walking around with apparently invisible operators, and interacting with humans, though the spin-off show, Avenue Jew, took it a bit further. "Monster" (as in "cookie monster") is considered a race in the Avenue Q universe.

Video Games

• Harvest Moon is mostly a normal farm sim except for the Harvest Goddess and her sprites, and Witches.
• The Sims: Between the four games and all their expansions, there's genies, Plant-Sim hybrids, werewolves, various assorted undead, android-things, Bigfoot, levitation, teleportation, Sim-eating plants, alien abductions, half-alien Sims, magic powers, meteors falling from space, time machines, those bloody splines reticulating all over the place, and so on. And, of course, there is you.
• SimCity is a pretty regular world by our standards... except for UFOs, metallic monsters, buildings can be "plopped" into existence, and then it probably has everything that The Sims has in it as well.
• In the original Zoo Tycoon, use of the right Easter Egg can let you purchase and display unicorns, mermaids, Loch Ness monsters, bigfeet and yeti alongside your mundane animals.
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents have some pretty far-out situations alongside the awesomely mundane ones. A werewolf trying to score a date! A salaryman trying to save his daughter from a giant mouse by growing 50 feet tall! A Renaissance artist who's not-quite Leonardo da Vinci romancing a look-alike of the Mona Lisa! A washed-up baseball player who makes his comeback after fighting a lava golem at an amusement park! And nobody finds any problem with an elderly Momotaro turning Oni Island into an amusement park.
• YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG has monsters in the field, mind dungeons, supernatural powers, and yet the only things the main party finds weird are the Soul Survivors and Entities. This is subverted in the end when Alex acknowledges that none of what’s happening is supposed to happen.
• While the battles and monsters in Chroma Squad are all part of the Show Within a Show you're producing, your actors can include things like a sapient robot, a talking beaver, and a space alien.
• Lampshaded in A Valley Without Wind. The description for the Office Tower camp improvement notes that while such a thing is mundane to modern-era humans, to those from earlier time periods, the giant shining column of concrete and glass is awe-inspiring.
• Yes, Your Grace: The pests peasants complain about are frequently smaller magical creatures. When refusing to help with them, King Eryk will frequently treat them as run-of-the-mill hazards people should be able to deal with themselves.
• The world of Ace Combat is a relatively grounded setting not so different from modern day Earth. The fact that airships, giant railguns, and laser weapons, have been used in several wars starting from the Belkan War in 1995, doesn’t seem to phase anyone.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: The Master Detectives having Forensic Fortes, a supernatural disposition aiding detectives in their investigations that allows them to break the laws of physics, while seen as a natural and impressive skill, is not really questioned upon. The Forensic Fortes just exist as a normal achievement in this game's universe, with nothing being concerning about how the supernatural is possible. In a similar fashion, the residents of Kanai Ward are clueless to the presence of homunculi created by Amaterasu Corporation head researcher Dr. Huesca roaming around the city, because they are those homunculi and think they are their original human selves, though that's because Makoto covered up that truth from them. By contrast, the Shinigami (called Shinigami) that accompanies the protagonist the entire time is seen as an oddity.
• Rogue State Revolution: The game's universe is fairly grounded and seemingly set in the modern day. It's also one where bipedal mechs and time travel can be researched, while the neighboring country of Chickenistan is ruled by sentient chickens.

Visual Novels

• Da Capo II, unlike its predecessor, has robots being openly acknowledged, but no one is really that surprised at their existence or interested. There is, however, a degree of racism against them because the story doesn't take place that far into our future.
• In Dra+Koi dragons capable of destroying cities show up about once a year. The populace doesn't really care.
• The Ace Attorney series primarily focuses on courtroom drama and antics. It also heavily features a family of spirit channelers. The fact that Phoenix's assistant is regularly possessed by the spirit of her older sister, causing her to grow at least a foot and gain a spontaneous boob job also never seems to faze anyone. One person mentions it in passing as if it were no more interesting than the character's voice changing. This isn't a case where it's just for the benefit of the audience, either, as several incidents hinge on the fact that channeling actually does change the person's body.

Web Comics

• City of Blank takes place in a world that has been invaded by identity-stealing shades for decades, and has grown accustomed to dealing with them; anti-shade mask-wearing is a societal standard, bounty hunters with wacky weapons capture shades to prevent them from stealing identities and/or spilling state secrets, and most Humanity Ensues shades are discriminated as the lowest caste instead of feared as supernatural predators. That is, until one of them discovers how to activate their latent superpowers.
• Copper has a very large tendency to tell all its stories like this, though mostly it seems to be an excuse to draw fantastic settings.
• Daisy Owl has anthropomorphic bears and owls (among others) living in normal society, wizards that need to listen to death metal to cast spells, baby factories and professional uncooperative service at the DMV. Everyone seems fine with this.
• In El Goonish Shive, this is how Elliot and Ellen's parents react to all the weirdness happening around them. They express only a few practical concerns.
  • In general, the Government Conspiracy has been fostering this trope to dull humans from pursuing immoral research and/or using their powers to become cult leaders and dictators. They're not afraid to prove that magic is real on live television, they're afraid that everyone will realize how easy magic is to learn and abuse.
• The Fan aims for this setting. So far, it had a rampaging robot, a witch teaching chemistry and brewing a highly potent healing elixir in a cauldron, a shape shifting Imp, and casual talks of magic and telepathy, all part of everyday life. When the Bobby and his crew all develop magical powers, the most surprising part isn't the magic itself, but the fact that they apparently came out of nowhere.
• In Flying Man And Friends, cookies grow on trees, Camembert cheese can be crafted from scratch in mere seconds, stuffed toys come equipped with airplane wings and rockets — and no one seems to notice that these things aren't ordinary.
• Friendly Hostility had this in spades: The Fridge Demon? Worked as a nurse. The Crawling Chaos? Picked up floozies in bars. Satanists? Just your wacky, sex-crazed uncle.
• Fruit Incest contains several of these. Among the things that nobody is ever surprised by include giant robots, talking dolls and animals, Santa Claus and Christmas magic, and even a parallel world made entirely out of food that's just treated like any other foreign country.
• Girl Genius is what happens when mad scientists getting extradimensional knowledge beamed into their heads and using it to war against each other with their creations has been the norm for centuries.
  • Agatha once was rightfully chastised for being surprised at something as relatively normal as a talking cat.
  • One line, which illustrates a lot:
    Professor Mezzasalma: Amazing! [...] These are no ordinary subterranean mecha-narwhals!
• Groovy, Kinda: Eleanor invented the Discombobulationotron, which can open up a (literal) doorway into another universe. Larry and Phyl Sampson investigated the Plateau that Time Misplaced (with dinosaurs), The Underwater Aliens, and helped build The Great Saharan Monorail. There's a maybe-Venusian Cat Girl running loose, and regular humans date Neanderthals. Edison Lighthouse shares her apartment with a small, six-legged creature that she named Robespierre. All without as much as a raised eyebrow.
• The announcement of superheroes moves the world of Grrl Power more towards this: There's a "Twilight Council" of supernatural races, with a veil to help cover up some of their features and abilities, but now they can cover up the 'edge' cases with "Oh, that? Ummm. I'm a superhero?" And alien visitors worry about learning the local language and how to pay for things, just like regular tourists.
• Housepets! has the standard talking animals that no one bats an eyelash at, but it's also well-known that dolphins are telepathic and it doesn't take much for people to believe that individual dogs and cats have more powerful abilities.
• MegaTokyo has perfect AIs used as dating sim accessories, and a not-so-secret organization that deals with rogue magical girls and Godzilla... Nobody really notices that as strange. Though it seems most people don't notice weird stuff like giant robots and zombie hordes, so it might be part of the Weirdness Censor.
• Pessimistic Sense Of Inadequacy has magic as normal, but normally weak, with magic users registered, people crossing over from other worlds, strange characters, characters who know they're characters, ancient artifacts, etc., all in a world with malls, shopping, just an "ordinary day" (name of a story arc), etc.
• Puck is all about the daily lives and dramas of an oddball bunch of friends, first in college ad then in the real world after leaving college. Except that three of those friends are a 600-year-old Irish fae (who is actually the Puck, from Shakespeare), the Half-Human Hybrid daughter of Satan (whose mom got eternal youth as part of her Satanic prenuptial agreement), and a girl who is randomly half human and half dog. Nobody bats an eye at any of this.
• PvP is another good example, with Skull the Troll being treated as any other character in what is supposedly an office drama about a gaming magazine. His super-intelligent cat may or may not also count.
• Questionable Content is a good example: they have sentient robots, minor superheroes, a main character was raised on a space station and at one point The Singularity happens and yet it's brushed off by nearly everyone.
  • One should also remember Law of Conservation of Normality, though this only seems to crop up when the webcomic starts up being mundane, and then takes a turn for the weird. Lampshaded after Faye gets Bubbles the combat droid's backstory explained to her:
    Faye: It's weird how there's all this crazy AI shit going on and nobody is really paying any attention to it.
• Real Life Comics, though it can be pretty tame, deals with this in the form of the character Tony. He's an evil genius who's conquered the world (and, subsequently, gave it back); he built a WarMech, a time machine, and a portal generator (mostly out of gum and old computer parts); and he spends some time as the Black Pants Samurai. How do Greg and the other characters handle this? "Meh. Business as usual."
• Scary Go Round featured a pleasant town somewhere in England that happened to be home to (or drew in) devil-worshippers, Mad Scientists, ghosts, zombies, sentient robots and the like, while the characters included an inventor who made a time machine from a teapot, a sexy spy and a sometime-journalist prone to temporary bouts of gruesome death. Its successor Bad Machinery continues in the same vein (and the same location). No-one seems to bat an eyelid at having a robot in the school.
• Sequential Art documents the everyday lives of a group of housemates. Said housemates include a normal guy, a cat girl, a squirrel girl, and an anthropomorphic penguin. We see in a flashback that said cat girl and a bunny girl attended school with normal kids, and both girls have regular jobs that involve a lot of interaction with the public. Another cat girl is a published author. No-one finds any of that the least bit strange.
  • Note that the comic has a lot of 'regular' fantastic as well, but it's so extreme that anthropomorphic animals and insane corporations are fully accepted as normal in comparison.
• Shortpacked! still has the Alien Invasion backstory from It's Walky! firmly intact, but most of the time it's just semi-real tales out of retail with the weirdness just out of frame. Except for the talking car working in the stockroom. He doesn't fit out of the frame.
  • It's specifically mentioned that most of the Shortpacked employees have no idea about the alien invasion a few years back; Robin doesn't want to spoil their little mundane fantasy world and Mike isn't talking for some reason. Again, Ultra-Car gets a free pass.
    • What they have "no idea" about is their co-workers' participation. Amber, at least, is perfectly aware of the invasion.
  • An infamous senator working at a toy store (Robin) tends to raise a few eyebrows.
    • The one thing in all this madness that doesn't apply to this trope is Reagan, resurrected and working at the titular toy store. Everyone is very aware of how mad it is, and occasionally they have to work at keeping it a secret.
• Skin Deep is like this half the time with its plot of "mythical creatures living in secret among humanity". The characters that grew up in mythical society act as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about a town populated by mythical creatures, while humans understandably have trouble getting past that fact.
• Skin Horse is about what happens when this trope is subverted, as the formerly fantastically mundane is suddenly covered by a Masquerade Weirdness Censor as a totalitarian Government Conspiracy seeks to rule the world by monopolizing mad science through mass-genocide. Everything that was formerly slice-of-life for the titular Black-Ops Supernatural Welfare Agency Skin Horse is forced to take a side or flee for their lives.
• The Snail Factory has an entire cast of bizarre creatures and even inanimate objects, but these are usually more or less treated as normal employees.
• So Damn Bright is a comedy about a group of cynical college drop outs. So far, so normal. The catch is, one of the characters is a fairy. As in, she has visible fairy wings growing out of her back. Fairies are entrenched enough in the culture that there are Red Scare-era educational films about their biology, and a dating service asks right after sexual preference whether someone would be comfortable with a fae/"anthro" partner. Several other fairies have also been spotted in the background doing a number of mundane activities such as drinking in a bar.
• Terrifying Monsters is mostly about extraordinary beings doing mundane things.
• In Voodoo Walrus this is a common theme. Cars regularly enter a setting by falling right out of the sky, explosions are often comprised of cats, and a talking cactus was once responsible for driving a Hummer/pirate ship hybrid vehicle.
  • Said cactus also went by the name Captain Thud and was single-handedly responsible for blowing up the entirety of Wichita.
• Woo Hoo contains a large number of absurd, magical elements (atomic burgers, cave-dwelling mutant creatures, fictional creatures, superheroes, etc.), but is rooted in realistic problems of friendship and relationships in the big city.
• The Dragon Doctors is entirely based around this, as it's about four magical doctors who treat bizarre ailments. A lot of the things we might consider odd are commonplace (such as voluntary transformation services) but everything's still presented as logically and internally consistent as possible.
• Homestuck is a great example. It is perfectly normal that everyone stores their things in a Hyperspace Arsenal that can only be accessed in weird ways, item cards have captcha codes that serve strange purposes, and everyone can only use one particular kind of weapon unless they obtain additional equipment slots. The proper response when encountering your loved one is to engage in a brutal but bloodless battle, and a program that can remodel your room over an Internet connection is met with no surprise at all. Rose is also rather unfazed by gaining actual magic powers. And Dave takes everything in stride.
• Meadowhawk, aside from the main characters being dragons in a modern world that they share peacefully with humans. The second comic has Tater talking about this wondrous forest glen he just found filled with pixies and unicorns, and Drizzle just pulls up its Facebook page.
• The world of Stubble Trouble features both furries and humans, as well as the occasional dinosaur, superhero or villain, magic user, demon, and cryptozoological creature. No one seems to mind.
• Amanda Green, Superhuman Insurance Agent. She deals with the damage claims from superhero battles.
• Undying Happiness would be an ordinary Japanese Slice of Life comedy, except the main character's boyfriend has the power to regenerate any injury, no matter how ridiculously gruesome.
• Established within the prologue of The Sanity Circus, with a teenager on the street casually asking his friend if he's had any chance to do any spells lately. And then when Posey saves Attley from being attacked by a homicidal demon shortly after, her only comment is "Oh Attley, you should know better than to upset demons!".
• Ozy and Millie: Despite the occasional reference to the fact that many don't believe in dragons, most people don't seem to think of Llewellyn as much more than an eccentric old man.
• Daughter of the Lilies: Orrig and his crew are a typical fantasy RPG party, except they work in a mercenary guild with a printed news circular and employee paperwork to report various specialties and magic proficiencies. Meanwhile, Thistle's magic show in the street is treated like busking, and Drath summoning is taught in an academy.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Heaven is real and filled with the titanic, ancient corpses of the gods. Heaven is also a Wretched Hive taken over by mortals, pretender gods who wield terrific but fully explicable powers and criminal empires who occupy hollowed-out divine bodies like skyscrapers, mining their veins for fossilized, opiate blood and using their bones to make healing soup. Dead angels are reanimated and used as city buses.
• Crystal Heroes takes place in a stock JRPG fantasy setting, but with modern-day technology and society. Thus, all the fantasy elements are treated as totally normal parts of the world, given that they've been there all along and have been analyzed scientifically.

Web Original

• The people on Channel Awesome normally live in mundane settings. There are still things like satanic teddy bears, magic guns, and appearances by characters from the things in which they review.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd: Technically, he's just a grouchy guy who plays awful videogames and reviews them, but also: all his light guns happen to function like real weapons, his consoles and game cartridges had been possessed on more than one occasion by evil forces, he knows the reason the game graphics glitch is a little gremlin that fears Q-tips, characters from his videogames appear in his home, there's a musician living behind his couch for no apparent reason, he's able to summon a robotic version of Jesus, and the list goes on and on...
• Many characters in Jon Buck's Paradise setting go on with their normal lives as though nothing had happened after changing into funny animals with minor alterations to their routines to compensate for animal parts; subverted in that they do this simply because of the Weirdness Censor in place that would out them as "Changed" IF they reacted too much to their transformation.
• Satellite City follows a group of bestial creatures older than the universe and their efforts to rebuild their destroyed dimension... while they're living in a perfectly normal house in the English suburbia with their human host, who's more concerned about them getting blood on the freshly mopped floors or their recently shed teeth clogging up his vacuum cleaner than he is about where they came from or what they're doing on Earth.
• The Notting Cove series is about a One-Gender Race of fairies that can use magic. Their lives are perfectly mundane. The only one who seems surprised is the foreigner.
• The titular town of Welcome to Night Vale is just a typical, small sleepy city. Well, it would be, if it wasn't controlled by a totalitarian government, inhabited by creatures such as five-headed dragons and Hooded Spectres, or if the fatality rate wasn't through the roof. The inhabitants treat this all as perfectly normal since, for them, it is.
• The Cracked article "If Every Urban Legend Was True" is based on this: Chupacabras are a registered AKC breed, signs warn not to pick up hitchhikers in "Vengeful Ghost Areas", and the Supreme Court recently ruled that human/mermaid marriages are legal.
• This is the central thesis of Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: an impossible organism, alien to all other life on Earth, so vast it’s most easily described in terms of geography, is discovered in the southern United States... and is converted into a tourist trap and corporate cash grab. Even the author explores it primarily from the lens of it being a defunct national park, with its most disturbing aspects left to Cryptic Background Reference and Nothing Is Scarier. There are few other settings where the near-awakening of an Eldritch Abomination and the ensuing massive devastation can be presented as a dry, clinical industrial disaster report that places the blame on human negligence.

Western Animation

• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy no one seems to think twice about Billy and Mandy having The Grim Reaper as their constant companion, Irwin's mother being a literal mummy, etc. On very rare occasions, some new weirdness will be brought to attention... by Billy, who will instantly have his question be shot down by other characters.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: It's a world where imaginary friends are real. As in, any creature that children can imagine springs into existence if they dwell on the thought hard enough. Despite this, the world is largely the same as our own, and most of the plots are quite mundane, if odd.
• Total Drama:
  • It's supposed to be a parody of reality shows, but there are things that wouldn't exist in the real world: animals that are clearly too intelligent/have superpowers, a living Sasquatch-like monster, and just lots of challenges which only cartoon characters could possibly survive. Chris has also demonstrated having some weird technology to run the show, such as a remote-controlled hail cloud and possibly some method of controlling the weather.
  • The Area 51 episode was particularly weird about this — yeah, they've seen some weird stuff before, but at no point does anyone seem the least bit surprised that this challenge involves finding alien artifacts or act surprised when real, living aliens show up and attack them.
• The world of Kim Possible has a subculture of Easily Forgiven supervillains with Mad Scientists knocking out robot armies or gene-mashed creatures in a day and trying to take over or destroy the world, superheroes, monsters, kids launching spacecraft in the backyard and juvenile crimefighters skipping school to Save the World as a hobby, but seems to take it all in stride.
  • The various crossovers that Lilo & Stitch: The Series had with this show, American Dragon: Jake Long, Recess, and The Proud Family. Granted, all these shows being within the same universe would go a long way at explaining the more... out-there events in the latter two cartoons.
• This appears to be the entire purpose of Ugly Americans, where demons, zombies and much weirder creatures live in New York as if they were just typical minorities.
• The Venture Bros. goes beyond "mundane" to the point of being vaguely bleak. While Dr. Venture's life is filled with murderers dressed like butterflies, dog-Hitler-clones, and exotic death traps, it's all treated by the cast as standard and tiresome. In spite of all the enormous scientific leaps apparently made in the show's universe, the world at large doesn't seem any more futuristic then our own save for the occasional bad guy in a flying car. This might be the point — the creators say that the Central Theme of the show is failure, and single out the fact that in The '60s, science was going to usher in a utopia that still has yet to arrive. Several arcs involve the 'Guild', who keep the mad scientists and the regular adventurers from being too much of a bother to everyday society. Their main weapon is murder and they're damn good at it.
• My Gym Partner's a Monkey: The protagonist is a human who attends a school for Talking Zoo Animals due to a clerical error. No one seems to find this strange.
• This is the defining characteristic of Regular Show. 100 ties in rock paper scissors summons an Eldritch Abomination? Microwaving clocks sends you to an Alternate Dimension? Getting prank-called transports you to the 1980s? Distressing obstacles for sure, but once they'd dealt with, just forget about it and get back to work.
• Rocko's Modern Life, where the things you see on an acid trip are normal.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic does this well and has a lot of fun with it. Two ridiculously overpowered wizards are dueling? Cool, let's go watch! Did that pony just use Toon Physics to pass through a solid wall? Yeah, she's just being Pinkie Pie. A minotaur is giving a self-help seminar? Is it Tuesday already? Yet things like a bunny stampede, a zebra (initially), and running out of cider terrify the ponies. They also see manually clearing out winter and changing it to spring to be a normal and fun yearly tradition, yet the Everfree Forest scares the life out of them because clouds move on their own and nature operates without the help of the ponies. "Slice of Life" shows that monsters attack Ponyville so often that it's treated as a mild inconvenience at best, like road construction holding up traffic. This even extends to non-ponies: since they'd spent many years living underwater while hiding from the Storm King, hippogriffs like Silverstream are fascinated by mundane things like stairs, since they have no need for them underwater or on land, since they have wings.
• Goof Troop, which aside from the staunchly denied purely aesthetic species of the characters, is a perfectly ordinary sitcom about families and friends... until it starts bringing in the fantastic elements such as sapient horns, an evil magic hat that is capable of hexing people, ghosts, a real imaginary friend from outer space, fire-breathing dinosaurs, trucks and bullets with faces, two Muck Monsters, multiple Bigfoots, Frankenstein's Monster, a zombie, and a character turning into a fly. None of this is ever explained and the characters just roll with it. It's to the point where the episode with the evil magic hat was primarily an Acquired Situational Narcissism Feud Episode, the horns were about dealing with a traumatic experience the antagonist went through, the fire-breathing dinosaur could have as easily been a real wild animal, the zombie was just a Funny Background Event, etc.
• Thomas & Friends is set in a world where, somehow, vehicles are alive. That this is strange has been commented on exactly once, in the Canon Discontinuity movie Thomas and the Magic Railroad.
• The Amazing World of Gumball is about a talking, bipedal blue cat and his adopted brother, a goldfish who grew legs and can breathe air. His father and sister are talking, bipedal pink rabbits. He goes to a school where his teacher is a primate whose actual species seems to vary and has been around since the Stone Age. His girlfriend is a yellow shape-shifting fairy who used to hide in a peanut shell with limbs and eyes and mouth that somehow also had expressions. The school bully is a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the 2010's. Other students include a girl who was born a ghost (no one knows how exactly that works), a spider who was originally a video game character, and a purple-furred giant whose mother is a witch. Nearly everyone in Elmore is a Funny Animal or Cartoon Creature of some form or another, with the exception of Santa Claus and the Richwood High students. If Richard gets a job, the Universe will be destroyed. Every single thing in Elmore is sentient and can come to life at any moment. Nobody finds any of this particularly strange.
  • However, the show dabbles into Urban Fantasy in the third season, hinting at aspects of Elmore considered bizarre even by the people who live there. "The Void" has the main characters making a discovery (the universe sends things and people it believes are mistakes to another dimension and erases all traces of their existence) which they point out would have changed the world if they hadn't had their memory of it erased.
• Spliced is set on an island full of mutant Mix-and-Match Critters made by a Mad Scientist, where the only non-mutant is a talking human-sized platypus. That's weird enough to qualify on its own, but it just gets weirder and weirder, but is still all treated as unsettling at worst, never actually weird or fantastic. Lying down in one spot makes you turn into a tree? Cool! The growth on your back is actually a sentient entity tasked with defending the Universe from evil? Who knew? Stomping your feet while shouting can create or destroy black holes, alter the laws of gravity, cause hurricanes and natural disasters, and create living beings out of nowhere? Well what else would it do? Each of your udders is conscious and possesses their own superpower? You mean you didn't know? In fact, pretty much the only things they do find strange are human technologies like bowling balls and walkie-talkies.
• Celebrity Deathmatch is generally Like Reality, Unless Noted, but this doesn't stop Medusa, Bigfoot, Nessie, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, etc. from fighting alongside Real Life celebrities. Even the real celebrities are still often given genuine supernatural attributes, for instance Michael Jackson is a shapeshifter, Melissa Joan Hart and Alyssa Milano are genuine witches, Beyoncé is a Cyborg, and so forth, to say nothing of the various celebrities brought back to life via time travel. Even fights between non-paranormal characters can still sometimes take place in fantastical settings, like John Cusack and John Malkovich fighting shrunken down in someone else's brain, or Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves fighting inside The Matrix.
• Futurama:
  • In the 31st Century, aliens and robots walking the streets is no big deal, and interplanetary travel is as casual as a Sunday drive. The only one to find any of this unusual is Fry, a Fish out of Temporal Water (and not a particularly bright one, at that), and even he gets used to it all after a while. When he sees a Flying Saucer hanging over his head... he advises them that they can't park there, and treats his abduction with annoyance.
  • You can buy a cheap fully-functioning Teleport Gun from the back of a comic book, which is framed like a typical scam featuring a hyped-up toy that's useless in reality as Farnsworth marketed it as a Death Ray and teleporters are extremely common elsewhere. This becomes an important plot point in "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" where Fry seemingly dies after being shot by a raygun, which happens to be the same type of teleporting cheap junk Farnsworth admitted to selling earlier at the beginning, and Fry turns up at the Planet Express Building unharmed.
• Steven Universe: The citizens of Beach City aren't too perturbed by the fact that a group of Magical Girl Humanoid Aliens have taken residence in a Bigger on the Inside temple on the beach. The occasional monster attack and local magical boy manifesting a new power are inconveniences at most. Justified in that the Gems have been there for thousands of years, before there even was a Beach City.
• Hilda: The city of Trollberg has a wall around it to keep out trolls, the hardware store stocks troll repellent, there's a homeless house spirit problem, the main character has a pet deerfox, and nobody bats an eye when a man made out of wood comes in.
• The Simpsons: In the "Treehouse Of Horror V" story "Time And Punishment", while altering the space-time continuum, Homer ends up in what seems to be the perfect universe: he lives in a luxurious home with his family, his children are well-behaved, he has a luxury car, and Patty and Selma are dead. However, when he asks Marge to pass him a donut, she says "Donut? What's a donut?", he freaks out and travels through time again. Sadly, seconds after he leaves, it starts to rain donuts, to which Marge says "Hmm, it's raining again...".
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The world of Avatar has superhumans who can shoot fire and manipulate water, magical spirits, and tons of Mix-and-Match Critters. The Aang Gang are weirded out by the existence of a bear that's...just a bear.

Real Life

• For many tribal, indigenous and animist peoples the existence of spirits, demons, ghosts, witches and magic is an absolute reality as undeniable as the existence of animals and plants.
  • Really, any religion involves this, if not viewed as purely metaphorical. Fire and Brimstone Hell? Gods, singular or not? Reincarnation? And more besides.
• A road project in Iceland was stopped because it could destroy the habitat of elves. In a survey conducted by the University of Iceland in 2007, 5% of Icelanders claim to have seen these beings and 55% say they are either convinced of their existence or consider them very likely.
• Even science has elements of this. Most everyone today accepts it as a given that the planet is round and constantly spinning, that matter is made up of particles that are mostly electrical charge and empty space, that a (so far inexplicable) force called gravity draws matter together into balls that spin around each other, and that the universe is billions upon trillions of times larger than us, despite that each of these things, viewed purely from an individual human's experience, seem completely absurd. And this isn't even getting into special relativity or quantum physics.
• You are currently reading something written by people who span the globe, on a box that also allows you to talk with someone on the other side of the world, watch events that happened in the past on YouTube, translate any language (with mixed results) and allow you to play a game where you shoot Hitler with guns. All of this can be also be done using a simple phone that you carry in your pocket. Our every day use of fantastical technology would definitely appear as Mundane Fantastic to anyone from the past — or many people currently in third world countries.
• Humans are pretty weird in general. Mostly hairless mammals that form societies as hierarchical and complex as any eusocial insect, but pair-bond like birds, share their young with each other (rather than say, eating them), heavily modify their environments to suit their needs, form extremely complicated and abstract symbolic systems which are then used for everything from communication to dictating each other's behavior, can on an individual basis violate nearly every survival instinct (from self-preservation to the sex drive), and walk on two legs. Because Most Humans Are Human, though, no one pays these things much mind.

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