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alt title(s): Sunnydale Syndrome "Humans have an amazing capacity for self-deception."
"Picnic on the head of the Sphinx, hang out with the minute hand on Big Ben as if you were Mary Poppins... and, here's the thing: Nobody notices."
Also known as Sunnydale Syndrome .
In some universes, ignoring the antics of the main characters goes beyond somebody else's problem. It seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. Literally, they can't see anything too strange.
A subset of Invisible To Normals. Compare Bavarian Fire Drill, which exploits similar psychological tendencies.
One of many things that enables the Masquerade and allows Muggle characters to act like real people despite the extraordinary things that go on in their universe every day. When it's an actual power, becomes subject to You Can See Me? And they, in fact, can be seen By The Eyes Of The Blind.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Ah My Goddess: No matter how pyrotechnic the magic, the antics of the goddesses and demons never draw the police (or possibly the Army). Not even humongous monsters like Garm.
- Unbelievably enough, the fire brigade actually turned up in one of the latest manga chapters. They ended up thinking it was a false alarm though, as all the damage had already been fixed with supernatural means.
- I think this was explained in the manga as the townspeople being desensitized to weirdness due to the neighborhood kids pulling off epic level pranks on a regular basis, or some similar Hand Wave
- Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan lampshades this in the first episode. She introduces herself to the class as an angel (after turning a classmate into a monkey and making another one completely vanish) despite Sakura's insistence that she keep it a secret, but they just nod and accept it fully. In fact, Sakura is the only one who seems the slightest bit weirded out by the situation. "This should really bother you! Say 'Ahh! Angels exist?!' or something!"
- In Sailor Moon SuperS, a gigantic evil circus tent appears right in the middle of Tokyo, in obvious plain view. Among the other random massive evil fortresses and demonic whatnots that show up in the middle of that same city in other seasons. Part of what makes the odd-numbered seasons of the show is a lack of this problem in most cases: the evil base in the first season is in Arctica, the base in the third season is a covert underground lab, and in the fifth it appears to be located in another dimension. The circus thing was actually lampshaded by the lemures immediately after its appearance — they mocked the citizens for not noticing it.
- In Ikki Tousen nobody seems to care that students attack each other's high schools and commit openly visible acts of extreme violence. You'd at least expect that the police would try to intervene - or that the army would be called in to do something about the genocide that's taking place.
- In Windy Tales, almost nobody notices the huge amounts of cats that fly around on air streams, not even when they're cluttered together in a huge ball consisting of dozens of them during a typhoon.
- In Princess Tutu, the typical townsperson (and even the majority of the main cast in the beginning) doesn't question any of the "odder" stuff that goes on in Kinkan, including ballerina-dancing Anteaters (and other anthropomorphic animals). Even visitors to the town are affected—one women wonders if her troupe leader used to be an electric eel before arriving to the town, then quickly brushes it off. Later on in the series, it's revealed that it's because of the story magically controlling the town and the people inside of it. The only people that ever seem to realize something's off with the town are either important to the story, or actively go looking for something odd in the town.
- Nobody seems to notice their friends strange behavior and obvious paranoia,or atleast do anything about it,in the answer arcs of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni
- This trope is subverted in Tatarigoroshi-hen,or actually any arc where they try to save Satoko. In Tataragiroshi-hen in particular,Rena and Mion notice Keiichi's paranoia,unlike Onikakushi-hen,and try to cover his actions up.
- Mahou Sensei Negima has this is spades early on when it seems like the even with Unusually Uninteresting Sights abound within the Academy, no one with the exception of Chisame could care to notice the blatantly odd things surrounding them. It was later revealed that mages keep their Masquerade protected by spells put in place to highten people's ability to dis-believe information they intake (they also rely on people's inherent ability to doubt). This naturally makes for interesting situations whenever the very odd is shown.
Muggle 1: I see, if its a robot, it all makes sense -nod nod-.
Muggle 2: A-a-ah, I see, sure -nod-.
Chisame: Wait a second! You punks! Doesn't that seem weird to you!?
- In Twin Spica, nobody wonders about the weird stuff that sometimes happens involving Lion-san, for example when Asumi gets twirled around at the playground by some unseen force.
- In Kyouran Kazoku Nikki it's seemingly perfectly normal to see a flying jellyfish—or that a lion visits another lion at the zoo.
Comic Books
- The plot of the comic Black Hole centers around a sexually transmitted disease that horribly mutates high school students, yet none of their parents, teachers or, indeed, any adults in the town seem to realize or do anything about it.
- In The Invisibles, it is revealed that babies are capable of seeing all kinds of strange beings and concepts but lose the ability once they learn language, which makes it impossible for them to express these concepts and thus impossible for them to register them in their heads.
- A running joke in the Invincible comic book is that people without powers never look up, so heroes can change in back alleys and fly away and no one will see. (It's also a play on "Look! Up in the sky!", a phrase associated with Superman.)
- This particular iteration is alluded to in Megatokyo as well, where Tohya tells Yuki that the civilians are "just as afraid to look up as you are to look down".
- Truth in... comics? It's a well proven fact that if you ever need to hide, climb a tree. People don't look up much.
- As pointed out in the commentary for Portal. One the biggest challenges the developers mention having is getting people to look up, leading to them designing entire sections of the map just to get people to glance up.
- And outstandingly well done as an overall trope, in said webcomic, as certain people (like, say, Junko), once crossing the realization event horizon, suddenly have it hit them all at once, and can never go back, ever.
- Up until the "Gang War" storyline several years ago, the writers of DC retconned Batman so that he was still an urban myth not believed in by everyone in Gotham. Even given the average intellect of comic book civilians, this doesn't make an ounce of sense. It's hard to explain away the thousands of criminals Batman has taken down, along with the Bat Signal shining up every night, the dozens of super villains committing crimes just to get his attention, as well as numerous public appearances with the Justice League. And apparently, a guy like Superman is perfectly normal, but a guy dressed as a bat is ridiculous. As Monkey Joe says, "A hero operating as an urban myth only works in his first year. Tops."
- Not to mention the fact that he had previously been described in an excellent graphic novel as so world famous that a Japanese journalistic film crew brushed up on his rogues gallery before flying direct, Tokyo to Gotham City, to try...and technically, at least in the case of their token Hot Reporter, eventually succeed in...interviewing him about why he does what he does. Nevermind said reporter's rich elder relative turning out to have a fixation on him bordering on pathological psychosis, and staging over half of everything that happens in the story as an attempt to replace his idol as 'the new Batman'.
- Aztek, for DC Comics, is about a technologically enhanced superhero working in the town of Vanity. Aztek's support group, believing his existence will help save the earth, employ active weirdness censors to help him out. Literally shouting out his secrets in the halls of his workplace does nothing.
- For a while, Professor X of the X-Men would use his telepathic powers to erase the memories of local citizenry. Yes, he has done this to save lives, which is fine, but he used to do this just to simply act as a Weirdness Censor and keep the X-Men secretive. Um...
- Also in X-Men. Issue 75 of the adjectiveless X-Men series. Set before the X-Men became known to the world, two cops how the local wind produces weird audio effects occasionally. What they don't realize is the wind is actually giant robots attacking the mansion, demon attacks, the Juggernaut plowing through half the ground floor...things of that nature. To futher drive home the point, an X-Man who falsely thought he was out of his gourd is whisked away from confessing to the very same cops, causing confusion.
- One appearance of The Abomination had him walking through a crowded street in the rain without being noticed. The Abomination is an eight-foot-tall musclebound reptilian monster. Everyone else was staring at their feet for fear of making eye-contact with a stranger.
- The Marvel crossover storyline Inferno had Manhattan Island being overrun by demonic forces for what seems like a period of several weeks. Once things return to normal, a very weak Masquerade blaming hallucinations is accepted by the public. How hallucinations can explain the sheer amount of infrastructure damage, not to mention the many people who died during the event or the amount of time lost during those "hallucinated" days, is one question. Why a public that's already accepted the reality of superbeings, aliens and gods would have any trouble believing that New York was attacked by demons is another.
- In Proposition Player, the dispossessed gods Anubis and Moloch try to track down the protagonist in Las Vegas. Moloch suggests they conceal their appearances, but the jackal-headed Anubis doesn't bother since hey, it's Las Vegas.
Film
- In They Live, grotesque aliens walk freely disguised as humans due to a thingy at the local TV station that makes them appear normal.
- In Men In Black, nobody even knows there are aliens in New York, thanks to a combination of clever disguises and the agents' neuralizers. And just in case a giant alien starts causing mayhem in New York, the organization can use "The Big One", a giant neuralizer that can erase the memories from everyone in the city.
- Occurs quite often in Spider-Man (film): Peter Parker jumps around, climbs up walls, shoots webs and even acknowledges himself as Spider-Man when getting money off a man who runs the wrestling. He also beats the snot out of another student, and nobody makes the connection.
- Transformers in any number of incarnations sometimes pushes this pretty far. How can people not see the GIANT ALIEN ROBOTS?
- In one early (possibly the earliest) incarnation, a few episodes after the Decepticons became active on Earth it seems the entire planet is put on a war footing, factories pumping out weapons intended to be used in the war against them, complete with old-fashioned propaganda posters.
- Moviemistakes.com, correcting a submission for the live-action film: "This isn't a movie mistake; the passengers [of a car turned into a Transformer - its steering wheel, at least -] ARE oblivious to the fact that giant robots are destroying their city."
- ...And that's AUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC ORGANISMS FROM THE PLANET CYBERTRON, thank you.
- Mentioned in the background material for the The Matrix films. Apparently (it's not well conveyed on-screen) as well as the titular system's ability to revert an area and people's memories to remove an incident from history, the leads are supposed to have a "bubble effect" which prevents passers-by (NPCs, if you will) from noticing them or interacting with them unless they do something dramatic (like stealing their phone).
- The Ghostbusters franchise sometimes takes this trope to extreme levels. Despite the Ghostbusters very public defeat of Gozer in the first movie, a judge in the second movie still referred to them as conmen, making one wonder "did he NOT see the 50 feet tall marshmallow man?" Perhaps the most egregious example is in the first episode of Extreme Ghostbusters, where the mayor accuses Egon of the Ghostbusters scamming the city, even though at that point the city had been completely overrun with monsters several times.
- The spinoff cartoon The Real Ghostbusters had averted this trope by portraying the world as largely accepting the existence of the supernatural and the legitimacy of the ghostbusters after the first movie. This made things awkward when the cartoon writers tried to work Ghostbusters 2's story, in which the public had initially gone back to treating the ghostbusters like frauds, into the cartoon timeline. The results were so awkward, in fact, that the effort was quietly dropped after one season.
- Extreme Ghostbusters will use weirdness sensors or have people recognising the supernatural depending on what's convenient. The one exception is the Mayor, which is played for humourous effect.
- In Stephen King's IT, despite the fact that Derry has had far, far more child deaths, arsons, psychotic breaks, and industrial accidents than is healthy for a small town, no one notices it's out of the ordinary because It does something to the townspeople. It gets to the point where the characters wonder if It has become part of Derry, or if Derry's just always been an extension of It.
- Given that, in the book at least, It's destruction is immediately followed by Derry falling apart (literally!), the latter seems more likely.
- In Shaun Of The Dead, Shaun goes a whole day (actually, a whole morning) without noticing the countless zombies wandering London.
- This is actually a big huge lampshade hanging and Affectionate Parody of z-movies that give hints to the viewer (but not the characters) about the oncoming Zombie Apocalypse. The "hints" here are made comedically obvious to the viewer, yet the character manages to stay unaware of them through a variety of often genre savvy yet always unintentional means.
- Beetlejuice. Lydia is the only one who normally sees the dead couple; everyone else completely filters them out.
- Averted in The Truman Show - there is a reason nobody seems to notice Truman's eccentric behaviour.
- In the first Blade, no one even glances at the dude driving the suped-up muscle car, with the funny hair and tats, dressed in a black leather duster with a sword handle sticking out of it. He beats up a uniformed cop on a populated street in broad daylight and no one cares.
- The Sixth Sense is a weird case—the ghosts themselves "see what they want to see," protecting themselves from the Tomato In The Mirror.
- It made sense before the prequel trilogy came out, but when the Jedi are so well known, even by backwater slaves, and so important to running the Republic in the past, that Han Solo's line about "hokey religions" becomes actually rather dumb.
- The EU has tried to explain this, several times. None have been all that successful.
Literature
Live Action TV
- "Sunnydale Syndrome" is ascribed to the residents of Sunnydale, California in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a town in which people live in a comical denial of the vampires, werewolves and other supernatural forces that roam its streets. This does see occasional Lampshade Hanging; people on the sly mentioning all the "mysterious" deaths, or musician Aimee Mann claiming that she hates playing vampire towns. A particularly large lampshade is hung at the end of season three, where the graduating class of Sunnydale High give Buffy an award as "Class Protector", while admitting they don't usually acknowledge there's anything to be protected from. Similarly, in season 6 a typical Sunnydale Times headline is revealed to be "Mayhem Ensues: Monsters Definitely Not Involved".
- This continues in Angel, most notably in S1's "victim of the week" stories. Unfortunately, starting from those same eps, we see half of the LA underworld, a major law firm, numerous small businesses, churches, every street gang etc all know about the supernatural; that'd be narrative convinience for you. It gets really silly when S4 sees bizarre manifestations, a rain of fire, the sun being blotted out for days, vampires swarming the city, and finally the whole city (and soon surrounding county) being brainwashed & ruled by a supernatural entity, and seemingly thousands of deaths - a number of those deaths being very public massacres. Nobody seems to remember in S5, or notice outside of LA (the government and army know about demons, where are they?)
- Taken to extremes in the surrealist BBC Three Sketch Show The Wrong Door when no-one seems to fit a woman dating an Albertasaur odd at all, merely commenting on his age. Even when he eats one of their friends in front of them no one flackers.
- On Doctor Who, the Weirdness Censor is used to cover the fact that the Doctor's adventures frequently take him to large, populated areas that would probably notice an alien invasion, for example. Lampshaded on a couple of occasions:
- "Boom Town": The Doctor tells Mickey that people don't notice the TARDIS parked in the middle of 2006 Cardiff, despite the anachronistic look of a 1960s police box, because of this. Torchwood has the spot the TARDIS was in retain its effect permanently. "The Sound of Drums" later Ret Cons this (or adjusts the explanation) to say that the TARDIS has plot-specific Applied Phlebotinum that causes people to quite intentionally not notice, "like when you fancy someone, but they don't know even you're there."
- Subverted in "Aliens of London" and "World War Three": a boy spray paints Bad Wolf on the side of the TARDIS.
- Not so much a subversion as an early clue to the nature of "Bad Wolf"
- "The Sontaran Strategem": This time, regarding a Sontaran teleporter in the office of the headmaster of a "genius school."
- Justified in that everyone would assume it was just another weird device invented by the genius kid. Unless, like the Doctor, they'd seen one before.
- The first page quote comes from when Ace was saying that she would know if there had been an alien invasion in her recent history. The Seventh Doctor informs her that there have been several alien invasions in her recent history that she hadn't know about.
- Due to more lax continuity in the 60s and 70s, there were several stories with attacks in public - The War Machines, The Invasion, Spearhead From Space, The Ambassadors of Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs etc - in which everybody notices. The show just never mentioned it at all in later episodes or made a big deal of the Sudden Revelation (as New Who tends to do), and just carried on as if nobody had noticed without drawing attention.
- Mid-90s Who book "Who Killed Kennedy" (ho ho), following a journalist during the Third Doctor days, had it that people did notice (some of) the weirdness - which was viewed as brutal terrorist attacks and disastrous failures by the government, leading to the (real life) collapse of the Harold Wilson government. This did involve casually retconning away stuff like the War Machines being a public, reported threat, but oh well...
- Inverted in Quantum Leap, in that small children, crazy people, the dying, and animals (all of whom lack a weirdness censor) can see the hologram Al, who is invisible and inaudible to everyone else but Sam. Children and crazy people can also see Sam for who he really is; Sam leaped once as the mother of a little girl, who could tell he wasn't her mother, but Sam turned the difficulty by asking her to play a "pretend game".
- The TV series Special Unit 2 claimed that most people just naturally "tune out" Links, and only the few who notice them can join the Unit. This is Handwaved, not as a special power of Links, but just that people don't like to acknowledge the unusual. Given some of the events of the series, they should have gone with the first explanation, as you'd have to be Too Dumb To Live to ignore swarms of ravaging monsters.
- Occurs in virtually every series of Power Rangers where no one seems quite able to make the connection between those 3 (or 5 or sometimes 6) extremely fit martial arts obsessed kids who all dress in a single colour and are always running off, and the equally mono-coloured Power Rangers who show up moments later.
- Lampshaded in the Dino Thunder series when Tommy gains the Black Ranger powers he tells his students he has to go shopping as there is a distinct lack of black in his wardrobe. True to form, he spends the rest of the season wearing lots of black.
- And in Jungle Fury, mentor RJ wears various clothing until he becomes the purple-colored fourth ranger, at which point all he wears besides his chef-related clothing is an outfit with a purple shirt.
- Lightspeed Rescue also had one episode where a receptionist told a little girl "now dear, there's no such thing as monsters". In a series where a giant monster rampages across the city at least once a week. Yeeeeeahhh.
- Well, the monsters of the week that season were called DEMONS, not monsters. Not that it excuses the receptionist's calm and patronizing statement...
- On The Wire, one season 4 episode opened on four young Baltimore boys sitting in an alley. While they are talking they hear gunfire less than a block away, but casually discuss what caliber the gun was. However, when a drunk shambles through the darkness they run away in panic, thinking he is a zombie.
- In Young Dracula most of the breathers fail to notice the oddity that seems to surround the Dracula family.
- Subverted when Vlad finally says the word "vampire" to Mr. Branaugh he realizes immediately what's been in front of his face the entire time.
- Played up in The Young Ones episode "Boring" for comedic effect, and most people suffer from this most of the time.
Tabletop Games
- One of the character classes of the Palladium RPG Beyond the Supernatural is the "Nega-Psychic"—a person whose disbelief in the supernatural is so strong that it provides him with enhanced saving rolls versus supernatural phenomena and allows cancellation of supernatural effects. (This means that the nega-psychic character spends the entire game loudly wondering why everyone else in the party is getting so excited by "swamp gas"—something which appeals to certain types of role-players, but drives others up the wall.)
- The third edition of the roleplaying game GURPS included an advantageous character trait called "Mundane", which at its most expensive and intense level would actively turn anything odd and unusual into the normal and boring while the character was around it. (See Muggles.)
- Practically a part of everyday human existence in the tabletop roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension. Humanity has been so convinced to accept a paradigm of what is and what isn't possible that anything too blatantly "magical" usually results in reality itself backlashing against mages in the form of "Paradox." The presence of normal humans actively disrupts magic. The mere act of observing a mage's supernatural abilities can cause their spells to decay into nothingness.
- A similar effect occurs in the Second Sight splatbook, where almost all humans are latent psychics, but since they don't believe in psychics, end up using their abilities to suppress the unbelievable psychic acts of others. Conversely, it's possible for characters to gain an advantage in the form of a totally believing hanger-on who actually makes their psychic abilities perform better.
- And similarly in the Starkweather/Shadowgirls continuity; enough templars in an area can shut down magic users entirely. Which, of course, leads to Starkweather circumventing said limitation by somehow tapping into an older magic.
- Also used in other parts of World Of Darkness. Vampires have Obfuscate, a power which causes others to not notice them. Werewolves have the Delirium, which means that (most) mortals, upon seeing a werewolf in true form, freak out hysterically, and forget about what happened later. Changelings are prone to Banality (the death of imagination), which not only shuts down their magic, but is potentially lethal to them. In New WOD, Banality is nixed and all Changeling magic (as well as the Changeling's inhuman appearance) is covered by "the Mask". Demons are simply unable to use their powers when seen by (too many) unbelievers.
- The Swedish horror RPG Kult makes this the central premise of the world's mythology: Humanity has been imprisoned in an illusory world by the Demiurge and blinded to the real world around them. When supernatural events transpire around them, the illusion-spell in people's minds makes them rationalize it away as normal accidents.
- In two of the four main variants of the Tabletop Games d20 Modern, monsters roam the modern world. However, most humans can't believe that they exist, so they just see humans where player characters see monsters.
- Dungeons And Dragons' core rule books advise the DM and the players to avoid this; if you're playing in a setting where you can buy and sale magic items fairly easily, it kind of behooves the NP Cs to notice magic, and not knock it as "superstition."
- Except in Ravenloft, where noticing what's spooky and magical can get you killed. Natives of domains such as Richemulot or Zherisia, where the populace is infiltrated by monsters, find it a lot safer not to admit they've seen anything suspicious, even to themselves.
Video Games
- In the upcoming Diablo III, pre-release information says that the majority of the world has shrugged off the events that happened 20 years ago, and are unaware that demons were responsible for the havoc caused. This is rather odd, because in the second game, the minions of the Prime Evils seemed to rampage across most of the known world, and most of the NP Cs you talk to seemed aware of the cause of the problem.
- Even in one of the novels, a necromancer comments that their seers suspect that Baal is responsible for the destruction of Mount Arreat in the Lord of Destruction expansion pack. Not only do the necromancers usually seem more aware of what's going on than the rest of the world, but Baal was anything but subtle during his assault.
- In The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Hyrule Castle Townsfolk do not notice, or at least have nothing to say about, their castle being taken over by an evil warlard and his moblin army, which is then encased in a crystalline force field, and especially not right after said force field is broken by a giant glowing spider demon. They do however react when the player's wolf form runs around town.
- Hilariously done in Fate Stay Night, when Rin gets so angry at the protagonist that she breaks her (entirely fake) "perfect student/school idol" image in front of their classmates to shout at him. The entire area goes quiet... everybody stops and stares... and suddenly go back to what they were doing, oblivious of what happened, having subconsciously repressed those memories to maintain their "perfect" image of her. This happens on two separate occasions.
Web Comics
- Narbonic partially subverts this by showing that, while Dave Davenport's brother Bill is unable to see such things as talking gerbils or dancing androids, Dave proves equally blind to Bill's flaws as compared to himself, determined to see Bill as having a better life than he does. Also, when the clone-Dave is under the effect of the Mad Science cure, he too is affected by the Weirdness Censor, even while in the midst of a running battle.
- In Megatokyo, nobody even seems to notice when someone or something starts breaking stuff in Tokyo, no matter if it's Ping the overpowered Robot Girl, a giant drunken turtle, or a Rent-a-Zilla. This is justified to some degree, because not only does Tokyo get destroyed so often that nobody really cares, but also because the destruction rampages are scheduled and supervised by the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division. There is also some suggestion that many of the more outrageous aspects of Tokyo life are in fact literally Invisible To Normals, but the actual extent of this effect remains unclear.
- Most of the populace of Generictown in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob appears to have this trait to one degree or another (especially Mr. Bystander). Even Bob himself often refuses to acknowledge just how bizarre the situations are that he finds himself in. The only castmember completely free of this trope is Jean, leading her to exclaim at one point, "Ye gods! I'm the only sane person in town!"
- Played up to the point of parody in this Sluggy Freelance strip.
Western Animation
- American Dragon Jake Long: "I'm glad everyone bought the You've-been-Punked story we feed them."
- Became a running joke in Transformers: Robots in Disguise, in which one woman is constantly harassed by Sideburn—who is basically trying to get jiggy with her car. By narrative convenience, she starts being in range of the giant robot battles nearly every episode.
- In contrast, Transformers Armada has maybe five people actually see the constant robot battles. This is partially justified as apparently all but a few of the Mini-Con panels appear in unpopulated areas, but still.
- In Danny Phantom, Danny feels perfectly secure transforming into a ghost if he ducks inside a locker or even stands behind another person to do so. Apparently nobody makes the connection that a kid moving to a just-concealed area, disappearing, and being replaced by a ghost might mean something. Also, people can be attacked by giant ghost wasps and such like at school and will run screaming as expected... but the next day, everyone's fine; law enforcement is never called and nobody seems to remember being terrorized by supernatural entities.
- Also possibly subverted, in that Danny's sister witnesses him transform and fly off into the sky early in the series, and asks his two friends (who are in on the secret) "Did you see that?"... and then manages to convince them, very easily, that she is affected by the weirdness censor and thinks she was imagining it. In fact, she quickly accepts Danny's secret and later helps and supports him without his knowledge.
- In later episodes, more people seem to remember ghost attacks, and Danny in ghost form ends up being famous.
- Pretty much the entire staff (with the possible exception of the janitor) of Flying Rhino Junior High, especially Mrs. Snodgrass and Principal Mulligan.
- Lilo and Stitch has all types of aliens running around and yet hardly anyone ever give it any mind. Heck when Lilo give a few aliens away to help with a specific job, the owners are more then happy to take them in.
- Invader Zim uses this trope; though it is completely obvious that Zim is an alien (he has green skin and no ears or nose), Dib is the only one who ever notices (aside from his sister Gaz, who simply doesn't care). Likewise any time something bizarre happens most people either ignore it, or notice it but never question how or why it happened in the first place. (Or if they do, Dib usually somehow gets unfairly blamed).
Real Life
- People in Israel are so used to death, explosions and violence, that when a man got ran over by a car in a crowded highway, nobody even bothered to leave their cars and help him until 2-3 minutes later. This editor was chatting with an Israeli during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, when the Israeli signed off with "brb, rockets over my house".
- Similarly, this troper was once drinking with an American friend in Westminster (the centre of government in London) when a policeman came to the pub door to order the patrons out due to a bomb scare. The American girl was somewhat surprised that everybody present calmly finished their drinks before walking out.
- Subverted in just plain stupidity? This troper has read scads of real-life stories where authorities say 'There is a danger' and people just dilly-dally, even if the danger is visible.
- This is London, bombs don't mean a thing. Snow, on the other hand, will bring the city to a halt.
- Sounds like what this troper's seen during tornado warnings in the U.S. Midwest. People born in non-tornado regions freak out, while those native to Tornado Alley just glance outside to see if the sky looks bad enough to maybe whip up a snack they can take down to the cellar if the walls start vibrating.
- In many college towns, if one sees, say, a guy walking around in a gorilla suit accompanied by a walking banana, it's just assumed that it's part of some fraternity prank. God help us if we really were to be invaded by gorillas and giant bananas.
- Who -would- want to pay attention to gorillas and giant bananas? Just don't make eye-contact and hope the weirdos go away.
- This troper, while walking through his campus, was passed by a Ninja. Nobody else batted an eye. Likewise, nobody at a McDonald's glanced twice when two separate groups of people dressed in togas came in to get burgers.
- Especially true on Halloween, but the Halloween of 2008, right after the Dark Knight came out saw such an abundant amount of students dressed up as Jokers, Two-Faces, and (for the ladies) Harley Quinns that no one seemed cared after about the third death threat. This Troper put on a button down shirt and left enough buttons undone to leave the top half of a red and yellow S symbol on a blue shirt.. No one noticed. so that's how he does it!
- When this troper went to university in the late 80s, one Halloween he was with a friend who was dressed in a trenchcoat carrying a real Uzi.(He was supposed to be the Terminator.) We greeted the campus police in my dorm, who complimented the friend on his costume. The campus police then went up to "have a chat" with the two stoners in our dorm who were running around shooting people with brightly colored water pistols.
- One October, this troper's university had an odd-looking guy walking around campus dressed in all black with a George W. Bush mask. No one paid any attention to him; it turned out we should have when we found out he'd brought a loaded gun to campus
- Both the Japanese and New Yorkers - hell, any Urban dweller of a major city - are used to odd crazies. Especially the Japanese and Germans.
- True. While living in Stockholm this tropers has seen A) Four italian men dressed as Superman B) Darth Vader in a bondage outfit. Neither of which caused comment or even a glance.
- This troper knows a related saying that "If you parked a tank/airplane/giant robot in the middle of Times Square, nobody would notice it after a week".
- This Troper's mother has encountered so many celebrities in NYC (she literally ran into one once) but she treats each encounter as if nothing special happened. In particular, Mom felt no need to tell This Troper and her family that we were walking right next to Brooke Shields until we had stopped into a nearby store to get some shopping done.
- The 2004 Republican Convention in New York produced a lot of weird protests in response, including a "Naked Protest" next to Madison Square Garden. Mayor Bloomberg laughed it off: "This is New York. Of course we had seven naked people on Eighth Ave. What's the question?"
- A Real Life example of an active Weirdness Censor would be when you dream. Fantastical, illogical and downright wrong events, places and people play out ignoring causality and the laws of nature yet while dreaming you'll rarely realise just how bizarre things are and deduce you're dreaming.
- And if you figure out that you're dreaming, you can control the dream... making it even weirder, such as when monkeys jump out of their own eyeballs in an attempt to drive your (dreamed) enemies insane.
- Example of levels of weirdness: a submarine surfacing in the Serpentine (a landlocked ornamental lake in the middle of a London park)would be very strange, but might not seem impossible (even though it is). A submarine's periscope poking up through the grass nearby, then moving off, creating a trench in the gound; another level of impossible. A rubber submarine constructed of tyres on a concrete walkway fifty feet off the ground as an art installation? It gets burnt because no-one can accept it.
- Banksy and many other subversive artists have noticed that working in broad daylight while wearing official-looking garb will let you implant half of a telephone book in the pavement or put up your own "ads" on billboards without passersby questioning — or even consciously noticing — you.
- This troper has set up art installations in urban environments, and can attest that it's true. Also, people never look up.
- This really should be placed in Troper Tales: Bavarian Fire Drill
- One geocacher often wears a hard hat, safety orange vest with reflective stripes, and carries a clipboard while searching for hidden containers. Highly visible, yet what he's doing escapes notice.
- There's an psychological phenomenon called change blindness, where people don't notice things that changed quite obviously while they weren't paying attention.
- The game of Geocaching relies pretty heavily on this. Geocache containers can be hidden in highly unusual places, quite often by virtue of small size, camouflage coloring, or by being disguised as something so commonplace it is easily dismissed and overlooked. Searching for geocaches often calls for stealth; some cachers have reported that the easiest way to conceal their search is by acting mildly nuts or wandering at complete random, and thus they can find their objective without anyone taking much notice. I've used this approach myself on many occasions.
- Inverted in real life when Air Force One recently buzzed lower Manhattan. Normally unflappable New Yorkers had a good old fashioned freak out thinking it was a replay of the events of September 11, 2001.
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