Skeptic No Longer

"And I don't want to hear anything about "I don't believe in vampires" because I don't fucking believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what I saw is fucking vampires!"

— Seth Gecko, From Dusk Till Dawn

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 (and it's not for lack of trying). 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. If they're unlucky, they might have caught a Contagious Cassandra Truth. Compare Skepticism Failure and Horror Struck.

Skeptics would argue that this is exactly as it should be. The point of skepticism is not to refuse to believe in something, it is about demanding sufficient evidence to accept the claim being made, and the more fantastical or unlikely the claim, the greater the evidence required. Once enough evidence is provided to demonstrate something is true/exists, a skeptic would not have a problem believing in it. Skeptics would even probably say that the trope is somewhat misnamed, as you do not stop being a skeptic just because one fantastic thing has been proved. After all, just because Leprechauns have been proven to exist does not mean that dragons have been proven to exist as well.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Kyon from Haruhi Suzumiya 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. He's afterwards quick to believe in whatever he sees or hears from these three.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Chisame 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?
• In earlier parts of One Piece, Zoro says that he doesn't believe in dragons. Later on in Punk Hazard, when he and the crew meets an actual dragon, he's visibly surprised.
• In the English dub, Seto Kaiba spends much of Yu-Gi-Oh! ranting against "Egyptian fairy tales" and "hocus-pocus magic" whenever weird things happen, especially involving Yugi and Yami/Atem fighting to save the world from various supernatural threats. By the end of the series, though, he finally accepts that there is some truth to the magical forces they’ve been talking about, including the nature of Yugi and Atem's relationship. The Japanese version has him acknowledge the existence of the magic, but he isn’t interested in dealing with it at all (beyond the original manga having his Solid Vision hologram technology be inspired by the first penalty game he faced). The Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions movie, which follows after the manga’s story but is treated as a continuation of the anime in the English dub, has him actively involving himself in the supernatural forces in order to accomplish his goal of resurrecting the Pharaoh, albeit via Magic Versus Science.

Comic Books

• Blake and Mortimer: In "The Curse of the Thirty Denarii", Mortimer brushes off anything supernatural about the eponymous Thirty Denarii, although he does admit that science can't always explain everything. However, the more he investigates, the more he starts to believe that divine powers are at work:
  • Mortimer uncovers Judas' corpse and it's still intact after 19 centuries.
  • Judas' corpse animates on its own and denounces (in perfect English) Reiner von Stahl for taking the cursed coins.
  • Reiner von Stahl is smitten by God's lightning.
  • A heavenly light takes Judas' soul to heavens.
  • An earthquake kills many remaining Nazi.
• Post-Crisis Supergirl didn't believe in the Kryptonian god Rao, and she thought her friend Thara Ak-Var, who claimed to be the incarnation of Rao's child Flamebird, was a nutjob who believed in fairy tales. Though Kara quickly became a believer in The Hunt for Reactron when Thara transformed into Flamebird right in front of her to save her life.
• Thorn from BONE doesn't believe in the existence of dragons until she's saved from giant rat monsters by one big red dragon.

Comic Strips

• The Phantom: Whenever the titular hero starts fighting crimes in the City, there will always be a black mook that starts pull one and one together and then says a variation of "The Phantom! Grandfathers stories were True", this giving him a chance to inform the White Crime Leader what's up only for it to be dismissed as "Silly Jungle Stories".

Fan Works

• In Redaction of the Golden Witch, the adults of the Ushiromiya family decide that Kinzo's rantings about magic and witches might not be so far-fetched after all. In fact, they're willing to try working Black Magic themselves in order to solve their problems, and bring Kinzo back via Human Sacrifice.
• Sansa in the A Song of Ice and Fire/Iron Man crossover A Man of Iron initially blows off the stories about Iron Man, since the scarcity of magic in Westeros makes a flying knight with magic beam weapons all but impossible. It's only when Ned confirms that the stories are fact that she becomes a big fan of the guy.
• Dueling Trigger Finger: At first dismissive of things like "friendship", "belief", and "The Heart of the Cards", Byakuya has come around to accept and use the last after losing three times in a row, and is slowly coming around to the first two.
• Infinity Crisis has Chloe Decker. After half the world's population vanished into dust and reappared, she's much more inclined to believe Lucifer's claims to demonhood.
• Point Me at the Skyrim: Victoria Dallon never believed in fantasy creatures like dragons or elves until she was thrown in Skyrim. Victoria tries to rationalize away the existence of dragons, elves and magic, but she has to give up in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Films — Animated

• In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, the gang has spent so much time busting fake monsters and other weirdos that when strange things start happening, they don't immediately accept that it really is supernatural this time. Fred, in particular, seems determined to play Agent Scully when they run into the zombies—until he pulls one of their heads off. And the zombie reattaches it. The denial vanishes very quickly. From that point in the franchise, Velma is the only one to retain having skepticism about the supernatural as a character trait, with one movie making her need to never become this trope a part of her backstory.
• From Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost onwards, Velma showcases a character flaw of being a Flat-Earth Atheist who cannot believe at all that there's anything supernatural. She still reaches the midpoint of the film (in which she encounters several honest-to-anything-you-believe-in evil spirits) mumbling a Madness Mantra that there's got to be a logical explanation for all of this.

Films — Live-Action

• Mike Enslin in 1408 is a professional skeptic who makes it his life's work to go around reviewing supposedly haunted locations. When he checks into the Dolphin Hotel's titular room 1408, against the urging of virtually every single member of the hotel staff, he learns very quickly how much he screwed up.
• The marines in Aliens are pretty much uniformly contemptuous of Ripley's description of the xenomorphs at first, refusing to believe that they could be as effectively lethal as she was saying. Ripley might have been the Sole Survivor of the last time anyone encountered those things, but she and her shipmates were civilian freighter crew who had a couple of pistols and some kitbashed flamethrowers, whereas the Colonial Marines are trained and experienced soldiers equipped with fully automatic weapons. Suffice to say that everyone who survives the first combat engagement with them starts taking her much more seriously afterwards.
• Captain Lorenzo in Die Hard 2 believes John McClane that Colonel Stuart and Major Grant are working together only after McClane empties a submachine gun (the same kind used by the soldiers in their attack against the terrorists) full of blanks at him. Lorenzo then calls in the cavalry.
• From Dusk Till Dawn: The fact that vampires are real comes as a shock to everyone... but they get over it quickly.
• In The Sixth Sense, Doctor Malcolm Crowe believes that Cole Sear's problems stem from some sort of schizoaffective disorder... until he encounters something that turns his skepticism on its head.
• Split Second (1992): Detective Dick Durkin refuses to believe that the Serial Killer he and Harley Stone (his partner) are tracking isn't actually a human being at all, but rather some kind of monster. And then he runs face-to-face with the thing.

  Stone: Did you see him?
  Durkin: That wasnae a him, that was a fucking it!

  • Seeing the monster also leads to Durbin's line, "We need to get bigger guns!", which under the circumstances was a very rational reaction.
• Terminator:
  • Sarah Connor starts the first film only knowing that there is a Serial Killer hunting down women with her name all over Los Angeles, and is completely unable to believe Reese's story (she even tries to run away a couple of times while he's saying it, even after he saved her life when the Terminator tried to kill her. The fact that Dr. Silberman labels Reese as a complete nut job and the cops theorize that the Terminator is wearing body armor and may be on PCP also keeps her on the skeptical side for a little while longer. A wrong explanation is still an explanation). By the time the Terminator finds her again and slaughters its way through a police station single-handedly, she is a total believer and by the time of Terminator 2, she has taken all the measures she could to prepare herself and John for the Robot War ahead and tried to do some damage to prevent Skynet from becoming a threat... which, quite understandably, landed her in an insane asylum.
    • In deleted scenes, Lt. Traxler, while skeptical of Kyle's statements, was slightly open to the possibility that they're true, and as he's dying, he tells Kyle he was right and he gives him his gun, telling him to see to it that Sarah stays alive.
  • The arcs of both John Connor himself and Miles Dyson on Terminator 2: Judgment Day are to consider Sarah a complete loon and what she spouts as mad ravings (and John, who grew up around her, is pretty bitter about it) but they immediately come around when they encounter the Terminators.
  • Doctor Peter Silberman encountered proof that Sarah Connor wasn't crazy in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. By Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, he's living in isolation, away from major cities, raising dogs and keeping a healthy sense of paranoia about killer robots disguised as human beings. He even apologizes for not believing in Terminators, not that it does him much good.
  • However, this isn't the case in movie continuity. He appears in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, as Scully as ever, and ascribes his experience with Terminators to psychological trauma (before recoiling in fear at the sight of the Terminator showing up again).
• Oh, come on, Indiana Jones. In Raiders of the Lost Ark he remarked that despite being an expert on the occult he doesn't believe in magic, superstition, (and in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, aliens), yet in Raiders and Skull he believes it enough to get the hell out of there and or not look at the item that would have killed him.
• In The Woman in Black, Sam Daily finally acknowledges the supernatural nature of the house and the existence of the ghost in the last act, and helps Kipps lay the ghosts to rest. Well, he tries...
• In The Haunting (1963), Luke Sanderson is flippantly skeptical that anything supernatural is going on at Hill House, no matter how creeped out the rest of the cast (and the audience) is getting. But by the end of the movie, even he has given in, declaring that the house ought to be burned down and sown with salt.
• In Cat People, Oliver doesn't believe in the story of cat people Irena tell him about. At the end of the movie, when he finds her body shapeshifted into a panther, he realizes how wrong he was.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Miss "Turner" (actually Miss Swan) tells Captain Barbossa she doesn't believe in ghost stories. She then sees the crew by the moonlight and discovers that the ship she's on (The Black Pearl) is crewed by the undead.
  "You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner... you're in one!"
  • In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales Carina Smythe, being a stalwart woman of science, finds the concept of curses and ghosts absurd. It takes coming face to face with a crew of cursed undead to change her mind. Which is ironic given that she's the daughter of the aforementioned Captain Barbossa, and in fact was born after he was brought back to life by Tia Dalma at the end of Dead Man's Chest, so she wouldn't even be alive if not for voodoo.
• Star Wars:
  • Contrast Han Solo in A New Hope and again over thirty years later in The Force Awakens:
    Han (younger, ANH): Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side. [...] Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
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    Han (older, TFA): I used to wonder about [the Jedi] myself. I thought it was a bunch of mumbo jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil, the Dark Side and the Light? The crazy thing is... it's true. The Force. The Jedi. All of it. It's all true.
  • Rogue One:
    • Baze Malbus lost his faith in the Force thanks to The Empire and seems amused by Chirrut Imwe's faith. During the climactic battle, however, after Chirrut is killed, Baze recites Chirrut's mantra as he continues the fight.
    • In the novelization, Director Krennic doesn't think much of Darth Vader and his "dead Sith cult" — until Vader puts the Force-choke on him.
      Mad cultist or not, the Sith Lord's sorcery was real.
• Fright Night (1985). Peter Vincent did not have faith in God, so when he tried to use a cross against the vampire Jerry Dandrige it didn't work. Let's just say that the next time Peter puts a crucifix in Dandrige's face, after Peter has killed a vampirized Evil Ed, it turns out very differently for Dandrige.
• In Doctor Strange (2016), Strange quickly comes around to the "magic is real" camp after The Ancient One shows him a thing or two. (Such as punching his astral form right out of his body.)
  Strange: Teach me...
• In The Reaping: Katherine is the Agent Scully, convinced these "plagues" have a scientific explanation. When Loren summons a horde of locusts (out of nowhere) to kill men about to attack her, Katherine is forced to admit there is absolutely no scientific explanation for that and admits something paranormal/supernatural is occurring.

Jokes

• A skeptical atheist walks around near Loch Ness. Suddenly, the Loch Ness monster erupts from the water and grabs him. In panic, he shouts "Oh Lord, save me!" God answers: "You dare to ask me for help, when you didn't believe in Me one minute ago?" The atheist says: "Have mercy, Lord - one minute ago I didn't believe in the Loch Ness monster either!"

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 Wellesley 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 I will let you make them 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.
• In Man from Mundania, Grey Murphy refuses to believe in magic after being brought into Xanth, until he encounters a river flowing up a cliff and simply can't come up with a scientific explanation for it. It helped that his magic talent was Anti-Magic, so he kept unconsciously nullifying magic near himself, such that some of the things Ivy tried to show him didn't work.
• Professor Summerlee in The Lost World (1912).
• Word of God stated that Cloudtail and Mothwing of Warrior Cats stopped being atheists after an army of dead cats invaded the Clan territories and a second army of dead cats helped the Clans in The Last Hope. In later books (that were not planned at the time of the statement) it is shown that Mothwing actually still doesn't believe in StarClan. She eventually does come to believe, but she doesn't think she can trust their motives.
• Dr. Claymore from the Percy Jackson and the Olympians short story "Son of Magic." Then again, being attacked by Lamia and befriending a son of Hecate will do that to you. Not to mention dying, meeting a goddess, then coming back to the mortal world as a familiar.
• In the original Dragon Lance trilogy this applies to pretty much the whole world. The gods stopped responding to prayers and providing clerics with powers after the Cataclysm. Centuries later at the time of the books, the gods have been largely forgotten and even those who remember their names consider them to be myths. The same applies to dragons which haven't been seen for even longer. Events quickly convince everyone that both the gods and dragons are very real.
• Dracula provides two examples of this:
  • Harker at first thinks the village is just being superstitious despite being an outsider to Transylvania (though they don't really tell what the danger is, just that it's a really bad idea to go to Dracula's castle). But after meeting the count, finding how strange he and his dwelling are and ultimately nearly being bitten by his vampire brides, it doesn't take long for him to become a believer.
  • Later after Lucy dies from Dracula succeeding in draining her blood, Van Helsing tries to convince Seward, Arthur and Quincy that she will become a vampire and be a danger to all. Naturally they think he's coo coo, So Van Helsing decides he needs to show them first. He starts with Seward, his trusted student, as they watch Lucy's coffin and indeed find it initially empty then after waiting a bit, find it filled again with her body, only to discover she hasn't decayed since she was interred and in fact much more beautiful then ever. The following night, Van Helsing gathers the rest of the men and confront Lucy directly as she prowling the night. Indeed, seeing her bearing fangs with bits of blood on her lips, acting not at all like the Lucy they know (feral and seductive instead of kind and caring), acting fearful of a cross and using her powers to flee back to her coffin is more then enough proof to the men that vampires and the threat they pose are real.
• Carmilla: Laura's father comes to believe in vampires once he sees with his own eyes the truth about Carmilla. Before, he had outright laughed at the idea that his young guest was a vampire.
• Being an ordinary muggle (albeit a Retired Badass), Frank Bryce from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire probably never took the idea of magic seriously — at least, not until Voldemort kills him early on. His spirit then appears alongside several others in the climax to help Harry during his Wizard Duel with the Dark Lord.
  "He was a real wizard, then? Killed me, that one did....You fight him, boy...."
• The Cat Who... Series: Qwill's always been skeptical of the idea of UFOs, but the climax of book #21 (The Cat Who Saw Stars) sees him becoming a believer, not that he'll ever admit it to anyone else. Namely, when he sees an alien craft land and the creatures that come out of it, which Koko goes to greet, are... little green cats.
• Star Wars Legends: Han Solo admits to Dr. Qui Xux in the Jedi Academy Trilogy novel "Jedi Search" that he used to think the Force was a hokey religion but later came to accept it as real, having seen his wife, brother-in-law, and father-in-law all use the Force.
• Universal Monsters: After not believing the kids about what happened in the first two books, book 3 and his encounter with Herr Frankenstein sees Detective Mike Turner finally believing them about the monsters escaping from the films.

Live Action TV

• Boris Scherbina starts out as yet another soviet bureaucrat toeing the party line, but once he sees for himself how bad things really are at Chernobyl, he about-faces and becomes one of the most dedicated about cleaning it up.
• Game of Thrones: Growing up in the Crapsack World of Westeros, and especially his family, made Tyrion a cynical man and so he never had any faith in anything even himself. However after meeting Daenerys and seeing the wonders she can do Tyrion admits to her that he now believes in her and her vision for the future. When he meets Jon Snow again in Season 7 he even admits that he now believes his tale of White Walkers when the Tyrion of the first season sarcastically referred to the things beyond the Wall as "Grumkins" and "Snarks".
• 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, originally the hard core skeptic of the dynamic duo, became the believer (with her new partner, Agent Doggett, who took the role of the skeptic) when Fox Mulder was Put on a Bus. Well, as much of a believer as she is capable of, she never truly becomes the Agent Mulder; after having to shoot a shapeshifter who took the form of a young boy, she admits to Doggett that she just guessed at what Mulder would do, and that she doesn't have the same kind of unshakeable belief in the existence of any and all possibilities. But unlike Doggett, she's at least willing to entertain the idea unexplained things exist.
• Lost's Jack after he returned to the Island. Previously he denied everything supernatural or odd, even if it happened right in front of him and other people saw it. Once he became a believer, he went to the opposite extreme-believing everything. Such as lighting dynamite right next to him on a slight chance that he can't die...
• On Supernatural Agent Henriksen spent most of his time ruthlessly pursuing Sam and Dean, whom he believed to be serial killers with psychotic delusions. Seeing a mass outbreak of demonic possession up close changed his opinion on a lot of things, and he chose to help them. Sadly he was killed in the same episode.
• Emma Swan of Once Upon a Time initially did not believe that the Evil Queen from Snow White had cursed a bunch of fairy tale characters to be trapped in our world. Seeing Henry fall unconscious with no medical cause and subsequently fighting Dragon Maleficent disabused Emma of her skepticism.
• Zak Bagans, the leader of the Ghost Adventures crew, is the one who has the best time relating to skeptics they encounter during investigations because he himself used to be a total skeptic when it came to the ghosts and the supernatural. In the original opening for the show, Zak explains that he never believed in ghosts until he came face-to-face with one—in Zak's case, it was the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide in an apartment complex that he once lived in while residing in Michigan. Ever since then, Zak's become investigator of the paranormal.
• Throughout the first two seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise, T'Pol refuses to even entertain the possibility of time travel, simply because the Vulcan Science Directorate has declared it impossible. Then in season 3, she and Archer are sent back to 21st century Detroit; from then on, she's far more accepting of time travel.

Tabletop Games

• A Discussed Trope on the gamemaster section of the D20 version of Call of Cthulhu as a regular character arc for a beginning Investigator, with Sarah Connor's arc in Terminator above provided as a comparison.

Video Games

• Alan Wake:
  • Sheriff Breaker spends most of the time thinking that Wake is having a mental breakdown, and doesn't believe his stories of shadowy attackers and monsters. And then Agent Nightingale is stolen by the darkness right in front of her. One of the first things she says after she witnesses Nightingale's death is "Tell me how we can stop these things" with no hesitation at all.
  • Similarly, Alan's agent, Barry Wheeler, initially thinks that Alan is losing his mind, what with all his stories of living shadows and possessed people. Once he meets The Taken face-to-face, he still thinks Alan is crazy, but is forced to concede that "weird shit is going down" in Bright Falls.
• Clive Barker's Undying: Patrick started his career as an Occult Detective trying to "debunk folklore and mysticism." Presumably he stopped trying to disprove the supernatural at the latest by some point between obtaining the clearly magical Gel'ziabar stone and gaining a German wizard as an archrival.
• Doom Eternal: Dr. Elena Richardson's research logs detail her subject analysis of the Doom Slayer. Initially she believed him to be just a man (a spectacularly angry, violent, utterly relentless man, but still just a man), but even as a scientist she could not deny that the timing of his arrival in the face of a worldwide demonic invasion had shaken her scientific resolve. Further logs detail how she developed some deep fascination at how unstoppable the Slayer was while the best of humanity was utterly powerless in comparison and how he was even more brutal than the demons themselves, no longer believing him to be a mere human. The final log details how, after her hope and her will to live were restored in the face of his relentless crusade against the forces of Hell, Dr. Richardson has essentially become a devout believer in the Slayer, whom she has absolute faith will deliver salvation to humanity.
  "This is Dr. Elena Richardson, log entry 007. March 3rd, 2163. And with him lies our salvation. For as he gains in strength, so do they fall in numbers. The Priests command the armies to the North and South, but he controls the fight. The inner circle of death is where he resides — hunting them at the far reaches of the Earth and beyond. I am a believer now - I feel it is in DOOM that I have faith. The Slayer is the spear that stabs at the heart of our attackers, and those that would seek to harm us should feel warned. For there is only one dominant life form in this universe and it carries a steel barreled sword of vengeance. All hail the coming of the Destroyer — the Slayer's time is now."

Visual Novels

• In Heart of the Woods, Madison "Maddie" Raines doesn't really believe in the supernatural. She, getting sick of pursuing leads of supernatural activity for her best friend Tara's Vlog Series Taranormal, decides to call it quits after one last trip to the remote town of Eysenfeld. While there, Madison sees a forest spirit that looks like a massive tree, meets a ghost named Abigail, dies and becomes a ghost herself and meets fairies of the wood. By the time Madison temporarily becomes fairy queen and uses her magical powers to defeat an evil fairy, it's safe to say she's abandoned her skepticism entirely.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius: Carson Von Mekhan, the former seneschal of Castle Heterodyne and secret ruler of Mechanicsburg during his masters' long disappearance, was of course initially dubious of Agatha's claim of being the real Heterodyne heir. Seeing Agatha in action wore down his doubts, and they were banished completely when she made the kill-happy Castle Heterodyne back down from killing Herr Diamant for doubting that there even was an heir.
  • Vanamonde, his grandson and successor, was dispensed from skepticism even earlier, once he had a sip of Agatha's special coffee brew and had a coffee connoisseur nirvana moment. And then he wouldn't shut up about the "perfect coffee".
• Homestuck: We see in some flashbacks that the Kids have been getting contacted by the trolls periodically throughout their lives, but they've never believed that the trolls were anything other than... well, Internet trolls. When the Sburb session starts up and they get transported into the Medium, and all the other weirdness that happens, they are suddenly much more inclined to believe what the trolls have to say.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: One of the storylines is the Odd Friendship between Flat-Earth Atheist Emil and mage Lalli. At the end of Chapter 16, Lalli ends up needing to use magic right under Emil's nose, which shows Emil that not only does magic exist, but the "mage" on Lalli's resume was not just some kind of fancy non-literal title.

Western Animation

• Captain Black of Jackie Chan Adventures gets this in the Season One Finale. He becomes so convinced in fact that in later seasons he is often seen as mentally unstable by his superiors for constantly mentioning magic and demons.
• Happens to Eduardo in the first episode of Extreme Ghostbusters. His very first line is "Ghosts. Yeah, right." Then Slimer shows up, and by the end of the episode, Eduardo is a Ghostbuster.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Feeling Pinkie Keen," Twilight Sparkle is dismissively skeptical of Pinkie Pie's "Pinkie Sense," even though Applejack (who has lived in Ponyville a lot longer that Twilight) confirms that it's real. At first she insists that Pinkie's ability to predict certain events just before they happen is nothing but coincidence. Then she tries to analyze how the Pinkie sense works, because (as Pinkie points out) Twilight can't believe something she doesn't understand. After being repeatedly smacked in the face by compelling evidence, Twilight accepts that the Pinkie sense exists, even though she can't explain it.
• Marsha from the Looney Tunes short, Punch Trunk, after Teeny the Elephant appears right before her very eyes.

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