"And I don't want to hear anything about "I don't believe in vampires" because I don't believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what I saw is fucking vampires!"
Bob is a dyed-in-the-wool
Agent Scully. No matter what Alice tells him, he cannot accept that the truth is anything other than what his own common sense and experience tells him. Usually Alice, the hero, gets about as fed up as she can get with Bob, because Alice knows the truth and Bob. Will. Not. Listen. But then Bob runs into the monster, and suddenly finds that he can no longer pass it off as
swamp gas from a weather balloon that was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. This shocks Bob into dropping the
Idiot Ball very quickly, and very heavily.
In the blink of an eye, he goes from being
Agent Scully to being
Agent Mulder.
Often
Played For Laughs, since the former skeptic is almost always the most rational denier up to this point. Bonus points are given if the skeptic is also an
Obstructive Bureaucrat who suddenly comes to his senses. This sort of occurrence also helps to kick the action along since now they can treat it as
Serious Business.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Kyon from Suzumiya Haruhi initially thinks he's the Only Sane Man after Nagato, Mikuru and Itsuki tell him the truth about their nature as well as Haruhi's. Then, Ryoko tries to stab him, traps him in a sealed dimension, turns her arms into energy tentacles, then Nagato arrives, survives getting impaled by twenty spears, chants a couple of spells, and Ryoko dissolves. Needless to say, he's afterwards quick to believe in whatever he sees or hears from these three.
- Chisame in Mahou Sensei Negima goes from the only sane man into... the only sane man aware that the universe she lives in doesn't make sense at all but whatever. She gets cool age changing pills and magic hacking powers if she plays along, right?
Film
Literature
- Paksenarrion, from Elizabeth Moon's The Deed Of Paksenarrion, gradually changes from a skeptic to a believer to a full-blown Paladin of St. Gird; the Girdish medallion Canna left to Paks when Canna died gives the first signs when it starts warning Paks of dangers.
- At the end of Victory of Eagles, General Wellesy declares himself a convert to the idea that the Dragons of the Aerial Corps are in fact fully sentient... then declares that he "will be damned if they will become political" and manages to get convicted traitor William Laurence's sentence of death commuted to Transportation to Australia on the condition that he take the most obvious prospective rabble-rouser (Temeraire himself) with him.
Live Action TV
- In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Matchmaker" Marshall and Lily (both a bit superstitious) are convinced their apartment is infested by a mutant combination of a cockroach and a mouse (which they dub a cockamouse). Robin plays the role of skeptic until the end when she finally sees the cockamouse herself (though we never do), and it's revealed that somehow the cockamouse can fly too.
- In The X Files, Dana Scully herself became the believer (with her new partner, Agent Doggett, as the skeptic) when Fox Mulder was Put On A Bus.
