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Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here
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" We live on the most boring street in the United States of America, where nothing remotely dangerous will ever happen."
Buzz, Home Alone
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, and don't say we didn't warn you!
Examples
Anime
- 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. 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.
- Nothing ever changes permanantly. The new, exciting, and infuriating people (Haruka, Minami, Naota's brother, the Agents, the robots) eventually leave town while the old, relatively boring and familiar people (the adults and the classmates) stick around, leaving the staus quo intact. Or maybe everyone just has a Weirdness Censor.
- Or maybe he's just being Genre Savvy.
- That Other Wiki
 states that Naota's nonchalance is a front, given that even after the exciting events of the story occur, he still lives in a town with a giant monolithic alien factory...thing.
- 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.
Film
- 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."
Literature
- The Dark Side of Nowhere centers on the protagonist discovering that everyone in his Norman Rockwell-esque town, including himself, is really an alien. The frequent booster shots they've received all their lives have been chemicals to suppress their Adonis-level good looks and blend in with humanity. And the message has just come through that the time has come to gear up for the invasion...
- Actually, not everyone in the town is an alien, probably just about a hundred, extrapolating from information in the book.
Live Action TV
- Eerie Indiana, which was selected by the protagonist father as their new home because it was the most "normal" town in the country, statistically speaking, and whose many of its inhabitants complains about the bleakness of their lives (unaware of what's really going on). The thing was parodied in the second series, where its protagonists complained about how boring their lives are, while living in a world whose quotidian is truly outrageous.
- Eureka; the town looks painfully normal. Except, in a subversion of the trope, for the experimental laboratory complex where almost the entire town works, and which, for lack of a better term, leaks weirdness into the town. So it is a normal and unexciting town... strictly by their standards.
- Sunnydale, the hometown of Buffy in Buffy The Vampire Slayer is built right over a Hellmouth. But most citizens studiously ignore the vampires, demons, monsters and strange occurences or explain them away as "gang violence".
Video Games
- Lahan in Xenogears. 'nuff said.
- 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...
Web Comics
- 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.
Western Animation
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