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Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here
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Gee, it sure is boring around here.
"We live on the most boring street in the United States of America, where nothing even remotely dangerous will ever happen—period."
Where is the most dangerous place on the planet to live? Not the city where something exciting is always happening. Not Mordor. Not a Haunted Headquarters. Not the crime-ridden big city. Not even Tokyo. The most dangerous place to live is the small, quiet, unknown town where "nothing exciting ever happens."
New serial killer on the loose? Bodies are piling up in a small town where nothing like this has ever happened before. Portal to a Magical Land opening? It's in the big house in the country where you were preparing to spend the most boring summer of your life. Aliens landing? Their UFOs are parked in the middle of a deserted cornfield in a rural town where cattle outnumber people. Emo Teen moving with their divorced mother out of the Big Applesauce into the sleepy suburbs? They'll be hiding Batman In My Basement or starting a mission to Save Both Worlds by the end of the first episode.
How can I turn my own boring, mundane neighborhood into a Weirdness Magnet, you ask? Just say the magic words " Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here," and let Tempting Fate do its work. Be careful what you wish for (after all, you don't know what genre you're in) and don't say we didn't warn you!
Examples
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- FLCL: Naota remarks in the first episode, "Nothing amazing happens here. Everything is ordinary." Then he gets run over by a Vespa-riding self-proclaimed Space Police officer and smacked in the head by her gas-powered
guitar bass. Next thing he knows, giant robots are climbing out of a portal in his head and he's embroiled in a farcical space opera/coming-of-age story.
- Curiously enough, none of these events seem to change his mind about his life and hometown being boring and ordinary.
- This troper doesn't blame him. I don't think I'd want to live in a town where the newest industrial center looks like it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wrong.
- Of course, the point of what Naota says is that, after all of the insane events that happen, everyone acts exactly the same as before. Very big Downer Ending in this troper's opinion.
- Tenchi Muyo, a rural area of Japan attracts alien women from lightyears around.
- In the original OAVs, every alien woman who arrives does so as a direct or indirect consequence of Tenchi's grandfather being a lost Juraian prince; they don't just turn up randomly. Adaptation Decay and Plot Tumor, however, make it more random in later series.
- Hinamizawa in Higurashi no naku koro ni looks like a boring/peaceful Japanese village where kids idle around playing 'punishment games' and acting MoeMoe, until it turns out that uncanny murders are committed there every year, that it might be under an ancestral curse and that it used to be named Onigafuchi, "the demon abyss."
- Renton spends approximately half of the first episode of Eureka Seven saying this. Of, course, this is right before the Super Robot crashes into his garage.
- Karakura town in Bleach looks like a perfectly ordinary city, but it's actually so filled with people who are high in spirit energy that a Big Bad wants to destroy it in order to forge an interdimensional key so he can basically kill God and assume his throne.
- In Code Geass, right before the Battle of Narita, two soldiers monitoring the area are actually in the middle of complaining about how boring their station is when Zero walks in and Geasses them to ignore any unusual activity. So from their point of view, they're right.
- Jeremy from Zits has complained on a number of occasions how dull his town is. In one case, he and his friend Hector play a game in which they spin a globe around and radomly point at different cities or towns that are more exciting than their own.
- This is the basic concept behind the Rear Window remake Disturbia.
- Related note: In The Iron Giant, Special Agent Kent Mansley misguidedly believes that "big things happen in big places", and he's all too keen to get back to those places when he arrives in the sleepy Maine village where the action takes place. And then the action takes place.
- Deconstructed in Hot Fuzz, where the reason nothing ever happens in Sandford is that the Neighborhood Watch Association kills anyone who threatens their village's perfect image and covers it up.
- The Happening - the massive group of people running from the unexplained mass suicide that may or may not be linked to natural causes or very intricately orchestrated terrorism (it's a long story) find themselves dumped in an isolated town in the middle of the Northwest. Mark Wahlberg says to his best friend's daughter, "Don't worry, nothing's going to happen to us here." Oh boy, is he wrong.
- In Star Wars, Luke complains of Tatooine that, "Well, if there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from."
- Of course, in the Expanded Universe, -everything- happens on Tatooine.
- In the films, everything happens on Tatooine. Episode 5 is the only film without a major plot point on the planet, which just might be why everybody likes it most.
- This, of course, has lead to Dark and his Star Wars fan friends to proclaim Tatooine the most significant planet in the entire galaxy - everyone who is anyone has been there. This trope could just as easily be called "The Tatooine Effect".
- The 1932 film Grand Hotel famously opens and closes with a character stating that "nothing ever happens" at the title locale. This is, of course, in ironic counterpoint to the many dramatic episodes which take place over the course of the film.
- At the very end of Can't Hardly Wait, the two "X-Philes" complain that nothing ever happens in their town. A suspicious shadow falls over them with an unworldly sound, and they look up and grin as a blue light shines on them.
- Lampshaded in Suddenly, where a policeman and a traveller discuss the idea that the town's name should be changed to Gradually. The plot of the movie: A man takes hostages in the town when it is realised that a family's window is just the right place for a sniper rifle pointed at the president.
- Subverted slightly in the home-spun play of Blaine (from Waiting For Guffman), in which an alien's musical number is "Nothing Ever Happens On Mars".
- Lahan in Xenogears.
- Nibelheim in Final Fantasy VII until a defective Makou reactor triggers out a catastrophic and unlikely chain of events.
- In the intro movie for Psychonauts, Lili tries to reassure a nervous Dogen by telling him "I've been coming here for years, and nothing ever happens." Shortly thereafter, Raz shows up...
- The town featured in Persona 4 is portrayed as a lazy country burg whose most exciting conflict is the new Wal-Mart-stand-in Junes putting the mom & pop stores out of business. Of course, the first thing that happens once the main character gets into town is a serial murder, and, by the end, teenagers are fighting a god (or two, who's counting?) with the fate of the soul of humanity at stake.
- The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob is set in "the pleasantly innocuous hamlet of Generictown," where nothing much ever happened until one of their residents, Mr. Bob Smithson, suddenly became the biggest Weirdness Magnet on Earth.
- Tandy Gardens, setting of The Wotch, is said to be this sort of place in the first strip. By now, everyone in the city's probably been turned into something at least once.
- At least once. Two words: Myth Virus.
- RPG World had Cameotown, which was the place where people who weren't doing anything lived until they had something to do again.
- A Running Gag on Danny Phantom was displaying various billboards and signs all over the City Of Adventure that read things like, "Amity Park: A Safe Place To Live" or "Amity Park: It's Quiet Here." Wishful thinking by the Genre Blind.
- Avatar The Last Airbender: Mai laments, "This place [Omashu] is unbearably bleak. Nothing ever happens." Cue La Resistance trying to assassinate her and her mother.
- The first post-opening-credits scene of Yellow Submarine (at least, the first that isn't set to music) features a man who looks suspiciously like Ringo Starr moping around Liverpool, complaining that nothing ever happens to him — until he realizes that he's somehow being tailed through the streets by a yellow submarine.
- In the Heathcliff And The Catillac Cats episode "Cat Balloon", Cleo says this exact phrase about Westfinster. Twist #1: At the moment Cleo says this, exciting things are happening all around her, but she's too busy complaining to notice them. Twist #2: When Cleo and the Catillac Cats use a balloon to go to a neighboring town, it's hijacked by a similar gang of cats who want to leave their hometown because—you guessed it—Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here.
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