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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."
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. Contrast the Fisher Kingdom, where the world itself is the censor.
One of many things that enables the Masquerade, especially its extra strength variant, 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.
- Actually, Usagi did notice it, immediately after the eclipse.
- 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.
- It is perfectly normal, given their world is known to contain monsters to the extent that a city was built just for monsters to live in.
- In Chapter 12 of the Hellsing manga, a group of tourists witness Alucard and Anderson preparing to fight to the death, and dismiss them as performance artists.
- In Bleach, any fighting done in the mortal realm is invisible to most of the human population, but despite that there are a few things that still should stick out. Whenever a human who can see spirits addresses one of them it looks like they're talking talking to thin air to a normal bystander. When a human turns into a Soul Reaper their spirit leaves their body, while most Soul Reapers compensate and have a temporary soul inhabit their body, Ichigo tends to just leave his body lying around out in the open. Nobody at all ever seems to notice either of these events until the first movie, which is roughly 100 episodes into the continuity, and it's hardly mentioned again, if ever at all.
- Detective Conan. In order for The Masquerade to be sustained, there are a number of details that the cast is forcibly required to ignore, otherwise the whole charade would fall apart rather quickly. With time, most of these have been either lampshaded to death or even seriously acknowledged by the cast. This Troper will rather not copy the long explanations at that page.
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'.
- It may be absurd to keep Batman's very existence an urban legend, but an air of mystery around him is totally believable. People might accept that he exists while still being unclear on whether he's a vampire, alien or something else entirely, and given the existence of aliens and stuff, the idea that Batman is a Badass Normal actually does become more implausible.
- 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.
- Fabletown in Fables has a magical protection to keep mundies from noticing their magical society in the middle of New York City. At one point they have to rely on rain to act instead, and in another point their filter (and the magic holding the buildings together) fails, forcing them to leave as New York discovers one of it's neighborhoods is now suddenly in ruins for no discernible reason.
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.
- The only time they could clearly see Peter Parker doing any of that stuff was the fight he got into. Other than that, you had some guy jumping on roofs once that someone might have seen at a distance or not, and Spider-Man in a worse costume doing wrestling. Maybe it would have been possible to get a hint of his identity by tracking clues through the wrestling establishment, but it wasn't evident from any other character's perspective these isolated incidents were tied together.
- 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."
- This gets even worse in the second film, where the government supposedly covered up the existence of the giant robots—you know, the ones whose battle tore up an entire city. This being the same government who has trouble covering up Watergate.
- Hey, you only find out about the things they fail to cover up.
- ...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.
- Justified in that she can see them because she read the book they left behind on the attic table.
- 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.
- I beg to differ: The Han Solo Trilogy—Han has a hand in taking down a large, organized fake religion used to create the perfect slaves and sell them for ridiculous profit (after working them nearly to death). After that, he just hated religions in general, mainly because his girlfriend at the time was one of those slaves, and partly because he got screwed over royally during the operation that finally put an end to it.
- In prose, at least early, the police denied that the Shadow existed, claiming he just represented a contemporary rumor. In the 1994 Alec Baldwin film, a woman scoffs at the Shadow as just a rumor to get people to listen to the radio and read newspapers. (Earlier, the Shadow, while as Lamont Cranston at the Cobalt Club, used his powers of suggestion to dissuade Commissioner Wainright Barth from assigning his officers to investigate the rumors of the Shadow.)
Literature
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, this tendency has been harnessed and distilled into a device called the Somebody Else's Problem field. An example is given of a man who lost a bet about making a mountain disappear when people noticed a suspicious extra moon - it would have been much simpler to just paint the mountain pink and put an SEP field on it.
- In Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone the entrance to Diagon Alley, a street filled with shops for wizards, is hidden behind a pub called The Leaky Cauldron which muggles never notice because they don't pay attention to their surroundings and don't expect it to be there.
"Bless them, they'll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if it's staring them in the face..."
- To be fair, you have later in the series where the wizards are renting out a farmer's field, and when he starts to notice inconsistencies, they blast him with so many memory charms he can barely talk straight.
- This is a big part of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos; the premise being that if the vast majority of human beings didn't do this, they'd go insane from the knowledge of cosmic horrors.
- Perhaps in the later stories by other authors; Lovecraft's own stories involved people being traumatized and unable to forget the weirdness that they encounter, even if it was just a photograph, a shadowy image, or a cloaked figure.
- In Lovecraft's stories, the terrible truth is normally so out of sight people don't need to censor it... except perhaps in the form of not acknowledging how vast the cosmos is and how little they know. Of course, the stories tend to be about when it does come into view.
- In The Magician's Nephew, Uncle Andrew is incapable of believing animals can talk. When he encounters some that subvert that assumption, the narrator takes glee in describing how Andrew's own Weirdness Censor engages at that moment, rendering him incapable of understanding them.
- This is one time Lewis falls on his face. How are we supposed to believe a man who has spent his entire long life desperately trying to discover real magic has that kind of weirdness censor?!
- Reading the text, Uncle Andrew didn't turn on his "weirdness censor" because he's incapable of believing in talking animals. Aslan's Song of Creation made him think and feel things that left him so deeply ashamed and uncomfortable, things he'd rather not think or feel at all. So he used his considerable powers of self deception (keep in mind, he convinced himself he was in love with Jadis in an earlier chapter!) and told himself that Aslan was not singing, merely roaring. Having sealed himself off from that, he was left incapable of hearing either Aslan or the Talking Beasts speak. Admitting they could talk would mean admitting the things the song made him feel were real too!
- Also, while Uncle Andrew did study magic, his studies seemed to be limited to the box of powder and experiments were kept at arms length. Instead of getting into the thick of things himself, he used guinea pigs and Digory and Polly. When he found himself fully involved for the first time, in what he thought was a dangerous situation, he began trying his hardest to believe everything was normal as a coping mechanism.
- Better yet, Uncle Andrew repeatedly convinced himself that Jadis was smitten with him, each time losing his self-deception when she treated him like so much annoying trash, but immediately regaining it when she was ought of sight for a while. Talk about ego and compensation...
- The Last Battle has another instance set after Narnia's end, where the dwarves eat delicious food in a beautiful meadow but perceive it as stale bread in a muckhole due to their cynical incapability to accept the paradise.
- Narnia is an unusual setting in that most Dwarves elsewhere seem to love eating stale bread in a dark hole in the ground. As one of the Boatmurdered administrators put it, "So these are some dainty fancypants dwarves who don't want to sit in the dark and gnaw cold mushrooms? That sounds un-dwarfy to me."
- In The Voyage of Dawn Treader, after entering Narnia Eustace Scrubb seems completely certain he is still in Britain despite the fact that he was pulled through a picture in the wall.
Eustace: I suppose you haven't even found out about the British Consul. Of course not.
"[Eustace] said that at the first port he would 'lodge a disposition' against them all with the British Council"
- The wizards in the Young Wizards series depend on this to get away with doing some forms of magic out in the open. The bullies can't hit you because your spell is deflecting their blows? They convince themselves that they didn't want to hit you, because invisible force fields are impossible. Vanish off a subway platform via teleporting? Whoever saw you thinks you simply moved deeper into the crowd while they weren't looking.
- The Dresden Files uses this to explain why you never hear stories about trolls, vampires and magic. Everyone just writes it off as something mundane that, at the time, they thought was impossible. If they're attacked by a troll, for example and they're asked about it in a few months or so, they'll just claim that it was a large drug addict or something (the first few months will just have them staying quiet, afraid of people thinking they're crazy or for thinking that they 'themselves' have gone off the deep end).
- It helps that the people who do outright report what they have seen tend to be dismissed at best, or tossed into the loony bin, or in certain cases attacked by the very things they witnessed. A good example of this is the coroner, Butters, who reports that several bodies he examined were clearly not human, and was thus suspended for three months and put into a psych ward for observation as a result.
- In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the narrator explains that most humans have formed a very strong idea of what is "normal", and anything that doesn't fit into that idea is Invisible To Normals. This includes Death and other Anthropomorphic Personifications, and Talking Animal Gaspode the Wonder Dog (since "everyone knows dogs can't talk"). There are some exceptions, including witches and wizards, by training, and small children, because they haven't learnt what "normal" is yet.
- This is one of the central themes of his lesser known work, the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, where the title character specifically lacked those kind of mental filters, so he's usually the first (and sometimes only) one to notice the weird things around him. Ironically, that same lack of mental agility makes him best equipped to actually deal with said weirdness, as his friends tend to try to deal according to the way things "should" go.
- Employed more subtly in the Discworld novel Interesting Times. Rincewind, on yet another foreign jaunt, figures out nobody really notices men on horseback because doing so tends to get people stabbed.
- A trope of the real world; asking a member of a fox hunt to stop trampling your garden/crops/children can get you horsewhipped/arrested. In the past, it could get you killed.
- An unusual example is in Mort, where the titular character changes history by saving the life of a princess doomed to die, and everyone in the kingdom except a wizard find themselves unconsciously acting as though she had died, and feeling upset and nauseous when confronted with the fact that she still lives.
- Inverted in Maskerade, wherein the cast of the Opera House can't come up with the most obvious solutions because those just aren't theatrical enough.
- Subverted in Wyrd Sisters: Death was visible because the audience expected he was an actor. He fit in quite well, since he forgot the lines just like the other actors.
- The Weirdness Censor appears to have been (mostly) left out of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. When said rodents decide to have a talk with the townspeople, it takes a few minutes for most of the humans to accept the existence of talking rats.
- So basically, like the rest of the Discworld, Weirdness Censors run or do not run based on whether it's narratively convenient.
- Actually, narratively convenient becomes canon in the The Science of Discworld when narrativium is declared an element inherrent in the discworld universe. Everything that happens, happens for the sake of the narrative. The wizards are, of course, stunned to discover that Roundworld (our universe) has no narrativium. All the narrativium seems to be a state of mind for us, rather than an actual element like on discworld.
- Narrativium doesn't quite excuse whatever's convenient happening whenever the author feels like it. It has its own rules, sort of. The Discworld reality makes a lot more sense than, say, the one in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, where things can really just happen because.
- The effect on the Discworld varies and sometimes oscillates between a specific supernatural power and applications of this trope. For example, Death can make people see him as he is just by willing it. Conversely, Susan Sto-Helit, his "granddaughter," can make herself psychologically imperceptible at will, though she's usually normally perceptible. Then there's the mention that in one case, being a woman dressed in a Death outfit and walking a horse inside in a men-only club, on the second floor, she doesn't have to use that power, because the context affords her a full-blown Weirdness Censor cover by itself.
- In the Percy Jackson And The Olympians books, a magical force called Mist acts as an active Weirdness Censor to cover up whenever a mortal sees gods or monsters. A few mortals are known to be immune to its effects.
- In the Clan Of The Cave Bear series, the Clan are unable to see someone who has been sentenced to death. The person sentenced isn't killed, mind you; the medicine man says "you are dead" and everyone else assumes that to be true. Even if they do "see" the person they assume it's an evil spirit pretending to be that person. Ayla (the main character) even tells her BF in a later book that if she were to tell some Clan people they've just met that she had been sentenced to death they would instantly be unable to see her.
Live Action TV
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 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.
- Practically a part of everyday human existence in the Worldof Darkness 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 game 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. (These settings are called Urban Arcana and Shadow Chasers, if you're wondering.) The average joe walks around in a state of autopilot, it's explained, so while they do see monsters as monsters while they're around, their mind subconciously edits it out later, remembering a troll as a massive brute of a man, the dragon's fireball as a gas leak, the gnoll in the corner a shady guy wearing a trenchcoat. They also don't notice things that the more alert player characters and "aware" NP Cs do, such as aforementioned shady man having slightly protruding ears...
- 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.
- Nobilis averts this. Muggles may go mad from encountering what they could not possibly understand and Nobles must take pains to ensure that this will not happen.
- However, their bosses, the Imperators, are powerful enough that reality itself will censor their actions. If an Imperator blots out the sun, not only will everyone believe it's a solar eclipse, but scientists will have retroactively predicted it several weeks ago.
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 warlord 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.
- At the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, a gigantic superweapon crashes into New York City. From the wreckage emerge a white haired pretty boy wielding a sword and the former president wielding two swords and wearing a suit of tentacled power armor. They proceed to fight a battle on the roof of Federal Hall, culminating in the villain being stabbed and falling from the roof. You'd think the cops or someone would take interest, but it just shows everyone going about their daily business like it was Japan and they were used to that.
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.
- In Slightly Damned, for most mortals the sight of a Demon and an Angel walking around together instead of fighting each other is so unthinkable everyone assumes that's just some people in costumes.
- Played with in Shortpacked. For some reason, everybody who works at the titular store (or, at least, the ones who weren't involved in SEMME-related adventures), don't remember any alien-related stuff that happened over the past few years. Everybody else, on the other hand, usually does.
- Present in Thunderstruck, where supernatural entities of all descriptions operate right under the nose of the general populace — partly through passive Weirdness Censoring among the general populace, and partly through active Masquerading. Children lack Weirdness Censors, though — in fact, they're actually drawn to the supernatural.
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".
- As a soldier who fought in said war (on the Israeli side), I can promise that the previous paragraph was over-dramatised. On the other hand, I did have more rocket-attack drills than either fire drills or earthquake drills in the last five years...
- 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.
- You miss the point: this is England, where finishing your beer is infinitely more important than death or serious injury.
- 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.
- Californians behave similarly when faced with earth quakes, with the generally accepted response to a mild tremor being glance around the room to verify that nothing has fallen off of any shelves, and then go back to whatever they were doing before.
- As opposed to what? A mild earthquake lasts a few seconds. By the time you've connected "Oh hey, that's not a truck going by" the quake is over.
- There's a particular reaction to hurricanes in this troper's hometown in the Golden Isles of Georgia. People in Savannah nail down everything, while Florida cities like Jacksonville and St. Augustine turn into ghost towns. Brunswick residents sit on the porch to enjoy the breeze, move inside when it starts to rain, and rake the lawn the next day.
- Must be a regional peculiarity in Florida. In this Florida native's experience, the only time people react to imminent hurricanes is if they're Category 4 or 5. On days when school has been canceled due to hurricanes, this troper's seen kids spending their day off school by playing in the local park.
- This resident of Tornado Alley agrees - at the start of spring the past two years, the local newscasts are all about how 'bad' and 'horrible' this or that storm system will be while I'm like 'YAWN. Put my shows back on and get back to me when 18-wheelers are flying through the air.'
- This troper grew up about 300m from the border seperating West and East Germany during the cold war, where it consited only of a small river maybe 10m across, without any fences or such things. There was even a small pub where the kids could get ice cream. The only rule was not to swim to the other side, because of the mine field. People can get used to about everything.
- This resident of Fort Worth, Texas agrees with the original statement. When there are severe thunderstorms in the area, many people (including myself) react quite calmly; I'm actually the kind to run outside with a camera when a tornado warning is issued. On the other hand, this whole region grinds to a halt whenever there is any kind of wintry weather.
- This troper hails from Seattle, and once came across a man wandering down the street, singing loudly and drunkenly, with a feather boa round his neck and a real boa constrictor covering up his unmentionables, in broad daylight and no pride parade in sight. Meanwhile, directly across the street, two policemen were harassing this troper for truancy on a school holiday.
- 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 lived on campus for 6 months before realizing every day before a big game, a man ran around in a gorilla costume for about two hours. I had to be told by my parents to notice anything was up since I had stopped noticing weird things after a week there.
- 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?"
- While visiting San Francisco, this troper saw (1) a man wearing all gold with gold paint all over his skin, (2) a man wearing all silver and again with silver paint all over his skin, and (3) a man painted silver with a funnel on his head a la Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz. All three were performing on sidewalks to sell C Ds. All three were mainly ignored.
- This isnt really uncommon enough to be weird. Statue People are a dime a dozen in major cities. They also tend to be quite annoying.
- 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
- Actually in the general public's defence, most of the time such artwork won't be recognisable until it's (nearly) finished - so there's no obvious sign for most of the time that it's not authorised work.
- 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.
- The same technique was used by Anthony Bourdain on the Washington, D.C. episode No Reservations when a spy guest demonstrated how spies in the Cold War hid things in drop-off points. In one particular instance, Bourdain feigned public urination to keep eyes off of him as he hid a "tip" in a discreet spot.
- 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.
- This troper remembers hearing about an article that actually spoke of an experiment of the Weirdness Censor in NYC. Two guys locked a bike up, and then proceeded to try to steal it in various ways. Nobody noticed or did anything about it, even when they took a CUTTING TORCH to the lock, which involved OPENING A NEARBY STREET LAMP to power it.
- This is likely due to the audience inhibition effect
- This troper once lost the keys to his bike lock at night. Being Genre Savvy, he waited until the next day to buy a bolt cutter and retrieve it by force, knowing that when the street was full of shoppers and the police were present, he was most likely to go unnoticed. He did.
- The human mind has strong a very strong resistance to anything that would challange any accepted facts. Once a person believes another person to be of a certain gender, they will ignore almost any hints and details that would reveal them as Transsexuals or crossdressers.
- When there's some kind of convention in town in which people dress up in fantastical costumes, the number of people who stare openly is only matched by the number of people who refuse to acknowledge this is going on.
- Otakon seems to avert this, having a scale tipped much more to the "openly staring" side in recent years; the Baltimore Convention Center is smack on the middle of the city's tourist center, so a vast number of people in the area are not residents and think the cosplay weirdness is at least semi-normal for the place at first, and marvel at it as much as anything else. Workers at restaurants and tourist shops around the convention will usually be visibly weirded out, even the ones that have been at their jobs for more than a year and thus would've presumably seen a previous con.
- At the Edinburgh Festival every summer, particularly on the Royal Mile, there are so many street performers and people advertising for shows wandering about that it would probably be entirely possible to sprint from the Castle to St Giles' Cathedral dressed as a flag-waving unicorn without attracting any attention beyond a "hey, watch where you're going". Note that this doesn't work so well for the rest of the year.
- Word of warning: It can happen to you. Watch This Video for proof.
- If you live in a college town and use the college facilities, you will probably be desensitized to fire alarms. If anyone does more than saunter out at a cool stroll, it's because they actually saw flame.
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