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"Strange and bizarre things happen to you with alarming frequency. You are the one with whom demons will stop and chat. Magic items with disturbing properties will find their way to you. The only talking dog on 20th-century Earth will come to you with his problems. Dimensional gates sealed for centuries will crack open just so that you can be bathed in the energies released... or perhaps the entities on the other side will invite you to tea. Nothing lethal will happen to you, at least not immediately, and occasionally some weirdness will be beneficial. But most of the time it will be terribly, terribly inconvenient."
— "Weirdness Magnet" disadvantage from GURPS
"Great! Now go away! I'm tired of the horrible things that happen while you're around!"
For some reason, the character is always standing at the intersection of Strange Street and Bizarre Boulevard. They run into situations or creatures that most people don't even believe in, much less have to deal with on a regular basis. Through no fault of their own, they constantly suffer through the effects of the paranormal and supernatural. Alternatively, the character may not think of the weirdness about them as particularly strange; after all, this sort of thing happens to them all the time. However, if something starts getting surreal on the show, chances are, they're at the center of it.
Often seen in comedy, especially when the writers get lazy and don't even bother to Hand Wave their plots anymore. Also used egregiously in Sci Fi and fantasy series, with the chain of weirdness catalyzing in the pilot, and each specific occurrence resolved at the end of the episode. Bonus points if, at some point, one of the characters brings it up and questions, "Why does this kind of stuff keep happening to me/us," or notes that that "Ever since [the events of the pilot happened], you've been a magnet for the freaky."
If the events surrounding the character are possible, just staggeringly unlikely, then they're a Coincidence Magnet. The title of Weirdness Magnet is reserved for those who draw the outright impossible — involving monsters, aliens, magic, psychic powers, Time Travel, etc. Weirdness Magnets are also more likely to be explicitly noted by characters. If a Weirdness Magnet is the focus of external forces that causes things to happen around them, then they're a Cosmic Plaything. If there's something literally about the person that makes them attractive to the Supernatural, they're Supernaturally Delicious And Nutritious. If the Weirdness Magnet is a location rather than a person, it is either a City Of Adventure or a town where nothing exciting ever happens. In anime, Tokyo is particularly vulnerable. In the US, New York is the place to go for excitement. In general, Earth tends to get more than its fair share of craziness. In any case, it may be justified by a Magnetic Plot Device.
What You See Is What You Get is a specific, character-based version of this trope, where the character draws the weirdness in because they are capable of sensing the weirdness in the first place. Or perhaps the weirdness came first and they merely became alert to it out of self-preservation.
Some characters tend to be more prone to this than others: like the Arthur Dent, Cosmic Plaything, Mac Guffin Girl, Strange Girl, and Yuppie Couple. The Only Sane Man is often one of these as well. Often, it's because they have a Clingy Mac Guffin, in which case these people consider themselves to be Blessed With Suck. If it goes on long enough, expect the character to start getting chummy with some very diverse "people". This trope is one of the causes of the Superhero Paradox.
The original Trope Namer was the Blue Devil comic books published by DC in the 1980's, where the main character's status as a Weirdness Magnet is noticed (and explicitly named) within the series. It was later adopted and popularized by the GURPS RPG.
Not to be confused with Strange Attractor .
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Osaka Naru from Sailor Moon was notorious for attracting almost every kind of supernatural creature in existence as the most frequent Victim Of The Week, earning the Fan Nickname "youma bait". However, her role in later seasons was downplayed until she was finally Put On A Bus.
- The entire cast of Urusei Yatsura, but especially the lead character, Ataru Moroboshi.
- As a cultural note, the very first story has Ataru's mother reminiscing about all the bad omens that took place on the day that Ataru was born. It reads like a beginner's guide to superstitions with particular references to Japanese beliefs, starting with the fact that he was born on the anniversary of the Buddha's death. Also, his name can be translated to mean "Many stars will hit him on the head". And finally, the name of the series itself can be translated as "Those Annoying Aliens", suggesting that the galaxy and series' version of Earth is teeming with sentient species who are all irritating in their own ways. Ataru is therefore simply unlucky enough to catch the attention of all of them.
- Played with in xxxHoLic, as Watanuki is fully aware that he is a weirdness magnet, and starts the story by making a Deal With The Devil (Yuuko, actually, but Watanuki seems to consider them one and the same) to get rid of his unwanted ability.
- The cause of his weirdness magnetism is actually explained later on — suicidal thoughts and desires that have been magically amnesia'd away. He may not remember that he wants to die, but he still smells like it to spirits and stuff.
- A second reason, seemingly taken directly from Futurama, is that as a time travel duplicate, he's doomed, as reality itself tries to excise him. He just manages to hang on regardless.
- Ranma from Ranma 1/2, to the point that most fans suspect that Ranma's curse isn't gender bending so much that it's his almost supernatural ability to attract weirdness wherever he goes.
- Others have theorized that it might actually be Akane Tendo who's the real weirdness magnet; Ranma, and the trouble associated with him, could be considered the weirdness that she attracts. Or perhaps they're both weirdness magnets, and their mutual presence is strengthening the effect, hence why more and more whacked out stuff happens as the anime/manga goes on.
- Though it's never outright stated that any character in Ranma 1/2 is a weirdness magnet, it is a fairly easy conclusion to leap to. While the world itself clearly is full of weirdness — the existence of the various Martial Arts And Crafts practitioners proves it — it does seem that Ranma, Akane and the other characters do have a particular knack for getting involved with the more bizarre parts of life. Kuno manages to be the 1 millionth customer to a "Pull the Wish-Granting Sword from the Stone" contest, which means he gets the three wishes. Shampoo brings back a supposedly haunted set of bells as a present for Ranma, and sure enough, out pops a ghost. In the first Non Serial Movie, a young woman who is the third generation of her family to have possession of a relic that will supposedly bring a prince or princess to marry the one who holds it has gone her entire life waiting to be swept off her feet. When she tracks down Old Master Happosai to express her disgruntlement at its failure to work, guess who shows up the second the relic falls into Akane Tendo's hands? Ryoga just happens to stumble upon a creepy merchant selling toy fishing rods that make the person you "catch" fall head-over-heels in love with you. And these are just a few examples.
- More or less the entire premise of Suzumiya Haruhi. It's not that weirdness gravitates toward Haruhi, though, so much as that she generates it. Relating to the Monk example below, at one point two characters in the series have a conversation to the effect that fictional detectives cause bad things to happen by virtue of their very presence, and that Haruhi, at that point on a "detective" kick, might subconsciously will such a disaster into being. Completely subverted when the expected murder actually happens — Kyon immediately knows it's a hoax precisely because he trusts that Haruhi wouldn't really wish for someone to die just so she could play detective.
- The series doesn't portray this very well, but Kyon himself has some pretty weird acquaintances from middle school. There's Nakagawa, who falls in love with Nagato at first sight because he just happens to be a semi-esper who can see her link to the Integrated Thought Entity, and Sasaki, a very strange girl who's also the center of attention for a collection of aliens, time travelers and espers who are rivals to the SOS Brigade's members' factions.
- Yu-Gi-Oh GX: In Season 4, Judai almost drops out of the Academy under the assumption that, as The Chosen One, he is the Weirdness Magnet attracting all the evil, psychotic villains to the place. Two former said psychos clarify that it's Duel Academia that is the Magnetic Plot Device (Sameshima actually revealed it was built for that specific purpose), and Judai can best protect it by staying, not leaving.
- In the early chapters of Bleach, characters with spiritual affinity were weirdness magnets. Ghosts appeared to such characters, and hollows hunted them. Ichigo's spiritual attunement spilled over to his classmates making them weirdness magnets as well.
- Due to its new status as a spiritually enriched area, the entirety of Karakura Town, the hometown of the human protagonists, can be considered as one giant Weirdness Magnet.
- Akari of ARIA tends to stumble into all sorts of supernatural phenomena — many of them involving the king of cats, Cait Sith. These include, but are not limited to: traveling back in time, visiting The Little Shop That Wasnt There Yesterday, nearly taking a ride on the soul train, and an attempted abduction by a ghost.
- Guts and Casca have this literally carved into their bodies (Guts on the back of his neck, Casca over her left breast) in Berserk; they're called the Brands of Sacrifice. Though it's less "weirdness" and more "ravenous demons".
- Mizuki in Mokke has the talent to get haunted by lots of different kinds of ghosts. Her older sister Shizuru can see them, but is lucky not to be influenced by them directly.
- As the Mai-HiME quote above attests, Mai (and possibly the rest of Fuuka Academy) appears to be a magnet for the surreal. Nagi specifically mentions in one episode that the Orphans are drawn to girls like her. However, it later turns out there are more sinister forces at work...
- Lina seems to be this in the first third of Slayers Next, as she inexplicably keeps tripping on one Mazoku plot after the other. As it turns out there's nothing accidental about this, as Xellos was leading her into these situations by order of the Hellmaster.
- Being a magnet for mushi, the Meta Origin for weirdness in Mushi Shi is apparently a common affliction for members of the title profession, including main character Ginko.
- The titular character of Natsume Yujin Cho has spirits (Youkai) coming at him from every direction. It's a genetic thing.
- Sousuke from Full Metal Panic. Not that he isn't weird himself, but... good lord, even the "normal" people he interacts with are later revealed to be oddball psychos. Sure, he causes things to become weird, but a lot of situations that occurred were outlandish before he made it even weirder.
- In Shakugan No Shana, it seems that almost all of the main characters in high school get pulled into something related to the Crimson Realm.
- In Haunted Junction, Saito High School was built at the center of a triangle formed by a Shinto shrine, a Buddhist temple, and a Christian church. The resultant flow of energy makes it a weird place that seems to attract more weird.
- This is not helped by the Chairman's habit of actively bringing more weird items and creatures onto school grounds. He's a deliberate weirdness magnet, to the chagrin of inadvertent magnet Haruto Houjo.
Comic Books
- John Constantine has spent most of his life as a weirdness magnet, as have many of his ancestors. It seems to run in the blood...
- Shade, the Changing Man lived in Hotel Shade, which the Angels told him would "draw madness to it like a magnet." John Constantine visited there, as a matter of fact.
- The main character of the comic Major Bummer is a Weirdness Magnet by design — the implants that give him and various other characters in the series powers are programmed to attract one another as well as other weirdness, like demons.
- Peter David played with the concept of a 'chaos river' for his Supergirl series. This partly explained why a superhero fought so much oddness while living in a small town.
- For 'chaos river', read 'Hellmouth'. The series was basically an expy of Buffy. (But still very good.)
- And Buffy (for the first couple of seasons anyway) was basically an expy of Sailor Moon... how far back shall we go?
- The protagonist of Blue Devil, as noted above.
- Aardvarks in Cerebus act as magical amplifiers; one consequence of this is that strange things tend to happen around them without their conscious control.
- Ivy Town from The All-New Atom was described as a Weirdness Magnet by one of the series antagonists. I blame the writer.
- Astro City. It's mentioned that there are superheroes in other cities and countries, but most other places with heroes seem to only have one major one (Silversmith in Boston, Iron Cross in Stuttgart, etc), whereas Astro City seems to have ridiculous amounts. One character compares the city's abundance as the equivalent to LA's earthquakes.
Literature
- The namesake character in Candide makes this trope Older Than Radio.
- Arthur Dent, in all incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, is perhaps the quintessential Weirdness Magnet.
- From the same author, Dirk Gently — in two and a fragment books, he encountered a ghost, a time machine, Thor, God of Thunder, had an eagle turn into a jet and fly out the front of his house, and narrowly avoided employment to track down the rear half of a cat named Gusty Winds. This isn't counting the minor difficulties with probability during his education.
- Rincewind in the Discworld books was one of these, and it bothered him; he didn't just want to be normal, he wanted to be actively boring. It's no coincidence that one of the books with him is titled Interesting Times.
- He's a favorite of Lady Luck, and Fate hates him personally. Death actually gave up on trying to collect him, as he can no longer tell when Rincewind's due to die (due to massive deformation of his life hourglass — that Death now keeps on his desk as a curio), and treats him rather like an amusing show he drops in on occasionally to see what's happening this episode.
- Tiffany Aching could also be said to be one, though that seems to go with the territory for a Discworld witch, even one still in training.
- Considering that even before Agnes Nitt was an official witch she could sing harmony with herself and had hair that would occasionally eat combs, I'd say it comes with the package.
- In Blood Debt, the last of Tanya Huff's Blood books, Henry Fitzroy wants to know why he is being haunted by ghosts that he does not know, and his lover/regular snack, Tony Foster, points out that "like attracts like", and as a vampire, Henry should expect ghosts and things like that to show up on his doorstep.
- In the second book, Henry swears that he used to live a quiet life; while this is not entirely true, his attraction to the supernatural does seem to have gotten much stronger once Vicki and Tony came along. Maybe it's their fault.
- The Armitage children from the various Armitage stories in Joan Aiken's collections have this peculiarity, but it has its genesis in a wish their mother made with a genuine wishing stone, that she would have two children and they would have interesting magical things happen to them one day a week, usually but not always on the same day. She got her wish...
- What an oddly specific wish.
- The whole premise of A Series Of Unfortunate Events.
- The protagonist of Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, described as a "shit magnet", is never more than a few pages away from coincidentally bumping into something extraordinarily weird or disturbing.
- The title character of Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell Trilogy; though that seems to be more Johnny being the only one who notices the weirdness (due to his chronic lack of imagination, he lacks the mental filters "normal" people have that tell them "This can't be real").
- Callahan's Place in the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series at least begins as a magnificent but otherwise ordinary bar that just happens to draw alien observers, talking animals and darts masters who cheat with telekinesis.
- Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez:
"That happen a lot?"
"More often that it should. When you cross over into the weird stuff, there's no going back. Hector has a theory on it. Calls it the law of 'Anomalous Phenomena Attraction.' He explained it to me once. Didn't really pay attention, but it boils down to 'weird shit pulls in more weird shit.' Figure it's gotta be true. Ever since I killed that guy, I keep runnin' across cults and monsters and fallen gods."
- There a series of young adult books about a place called Eerie, Indiana. It involved these two kids called Marshall and Simon who were in a small town in Indiana where lots of weird and crazy stuff happened (like running into kids from the future, or a TV cable salesman ripping holes in reality). It turns out the town literally was a weirdness magnet, for two reasons. One, a meteorite filled with a material called "eerieum" had landed, and it soaked into the local landscape. This material causes weirdness. Two, the Roswell aliens are being stored there, attracting even more weirdness. Guess you could call them space oddities.
- Kitty Norville. Arguably justified in that most of her problems are the result of being a werewolf and public celebrity. Some, though, really have no possible explanation other than the bad luck and/or destiny of being a Weirdness Magnet.
- Tom Holt's character Paul Carpenter. He gets a job with a major firm of unknown purpose, despite confusing Anton Chekhov with Pavel Chekov. The building seems to reshape itself more or less at random, the stapler will disappear across the building if you put it down for two seconds (even if you're the only one in the room and the door is locked), new employees are left to sort graph printouts that have been scrambled and draw circles around anything on an aerial photograph that looks like a bauxite deposit, and claw marks and sinister glowing eyes appear to pop up occasionally. Paul's misadventures last for three books, all of them introducing new elements of the Fantasy Kitchen Sink any of Holt's characters find themselves stuck in...and all of them seem to need Paul for some purpose in their great (ten-sided) game of Xanatos Speed Chess. It turns out he's been pretty much developed as a living weapon by a couple of blood relatives, one of whom is a) God and b) his real father, and as an additional bonus he's the reincarnation of a Norse warlord.
- Jasper Fforde's character Thursday Next.
- In L. J. Smith's Vampire Diaries, the town of Fell's Church was a weirdness magnet, because of all the souls buried there.
- One of the (many) drawbacks to being a demi-god in the Percy Jackson And The Olympians series is this; monsters are literally drawn to their presence.
- As the quote (from the Half-Blood Prince movie) shows, the Power Trio from the Harry Potter series suffers from this constantly.
- Justified with Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files, since he's the only openly practicing wizard in the country. Name's in the phonebook. Conjure by it at your own risk.
- Most detective books make it seem that whenever the main character shows up, someone's gonna die. And it's probably going to be pulled off in the most arbitrarily complicated fashion possible. Whenever there's a Live Action TV adaptation of a series of detective books, this trope usually becomes much more noticeable.
- Even after Sparrowhawk loses his magic in the third book, he retains his ability to turn up precisely where and when he's needed. Tenar comments on this pointedly.
- Bella Swan of Twilight fame. Her first love and boyfriend turns out to be a vampire, her best friend turns out to be a werewolf.
Live Action TV
Newspaper Comics
- Samantha in Safe Havens, while not so strange herself, keeps meeting and befriending bizarre characters.
Tabletop Games
- As mentioned above, GURPS has a disadvantage that turns you into this.
- Illuminated also tends to cause this.
- Depending on the setting, the weirdness can reach absolutely batshit levels of bizarre. Illuminati University, for example, is weird on its own. Taking Weirdness Magnet there means that you stand a good chance of having Shub-Niggurath invite you to tea, and then reveal that it (she?) is your character's great aunt.
- In Scion, every single character has a "Fateful Aura" that basically turns them into this. No matter where they go or what they do, their own Legend draws things to them, forcing them to respond and thus increase their Legend. It is possible to tone down this aura and shed Legend dots, but characters can never be entirely free of it, and since Legend determines how powerful a character's Boons and Epic Attributes can get, shedding Legend may leave them ill-equipped to deal with the weirdness when (not if) it arrives.
- White Wolf's Promethean: the Created has a similar effect. Prometheans' own Azoth (part of the divine fire of creation which sustains their existence) can be felt by other Prometheans as a call, and will also awaken any Pandorans they go near.
- The Anchors of the Nobles in Nobilis suffer from this. However, they also have immunity from the Reality Warping magical powers of Nobles themselves.
- The Gifted in Witch Craft have an innate tendency to be drawn into supernatural events. Since the setting is unabashed Fantasy Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy this technically makes them Coincidence Magnets, but it looks more like this trope. And they're also Supernaturally Delicious And Nutritious.
Video Games
- Lampshaded by Adell in Disgaea 2, quoted on the quote page.
- Noted in Tsukihime to affect Shiki quite drastically. His Mystic Eyes of Death Perception are a bizarre anomaly and tend to attract others. So far, he's run across the last remaining True Ancestor, the most powerful seat of the Burial Squad in the Church, his sister is a super powerful half demon, Nero Chaos incident, Roa, SHIKI, Sion, Walachia, (who showed up precisely because Shiki has these kinds of incidents) Len and the Kagetsu Tohya events. All above females are also in love with him for some reason. Aozaki Aoko is not, but she showed up simply because his eyes are so weird without even knowing that herself. This is clearly the real reason that Shiki will not live long, not the eyes themselves.
- Vayne from Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Alrevis. He has "attracted" a ghost and an alien invader to be members of his workshop. And then there are the quirks of the rest of his friends (a boy-crazy catgirl, a superhero-turned-Evil Overlord, to name a few). In the end, though, they will always remain his friends (yes, even The Rival), regardless of what happens to him in the game.
- Gaia Online's Johnny K. Gambino. Seriously. No matter what's going on in the world of Gaia, he's got his foot in it somewhere. Vampires? He pissed them off twenty years ago. Zombies? Oh, yeah, they're part of his science corporation's latest failed experiment. Aliens? He is inexplicibly on a first-name basis with their leader. The Animated? Powered by a Negative Space Wedgie created when he came back to life, facilitated by a disillusioned clone... of him, natch.
- Possibly the only competition he has in this department is his son, Gino, whose accomplishments include (but are in no way limited to) a Fusion Dance with dear old dad, creating a Negative Space Wedgie by exploding, and getting possessed by a demigod in the form of a large clam, who does this by eating his head. Gaia Online is weird.
Web Comics
Web Original
- Adam Dodd of Survival Of The Fittest. Doesn't only get put into the act, but after he wins, he gets put in one of the sequels too. Not to mention at one point in V1 he was attacked by various lunatics, including a sex-crazed schizophrenic and a sadistic (and gay) serial killer.
- Charlie of "Charlie the Unicorn" fame. Enough Freaking Said.
Western Animation
- Courage The Cowardly Dog might be the king of this trope, with something strange happening each episode despite the show literally being set in the middle of Nowhere.
- This kind of makes sense. If nothing weird happens here (somewhere), what's the only place left?
- Another contender for the king of this trope would be the flash animated series O'Grady, which aired on The N network. This series, featuring quite a few of the same crew and cast members as the UPN/Adult Swim series Home Movies, was centered on the lives of four teenagers living in the town of O'Grady which was constantly plagued by "The Weirdness." The Weirdness was literally weird, unexplained occurrences that affected the entire citizenry in every single episode. The show was compared to the Twilight Zone for this aspect of its premise. Examples of the Weirdness include the "Old Cold," a disease which caused sneezing-induced age shifts (the young turned old, the old turned young, and main character Abby went from about 15, to 30, to 60 something) and a a bizarre force-cord which caused two people to be inseparable for the duration of the Weirdness.
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were often subject to this, with Michelangelo usually providing the Lampshade Hanging.
- Ben10; be it the Big Apple or the Grand Canyon, no matter where Ben goes on his four-season summer vacation road trip, he seems to have a knack for attracting weirdness in the form of various aliens and monsters. This is lampshaded early on by Gwen. If the weirdness isn't immediately obvious, expect Ben to go looking for it. He'll find it within two minutes.
- Sokka, The Smart Guy on Aang's team in Avatar The Last Airbender, known to occasionally acknowledge tropes, is the first to point out that "weird stuff happens to us" — somewhat justified given that Aang is The Chosen One.
- All the main characters of Kappa Mikey appear to be dogged by random events, though considering the stuff that goes on in a typical episode, they might just live in a world where that sort of mayhem is an everyday thing.
- The Simpsons hung a lampshade on it when Smithers told Mr Burns: "That's Homer Simpson. All the recent events of your life have revolved around him."
- The fundamental premise of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Indeed, in the series' infancy the network execs made the creators of the show turn the characters into detectives, because they couldn't conceive of a show where every single episode consists of something completely crazy happening to the protagonists, apropos of nothing.
- Lampshaded in South Park "Pandemic 2 — The Startling":
Craig: That's a shock. I decided to follow you guys, and now I'm in the land of the giant lost world.
Stan: Craig, it isn't our fault! You make it sound like we always wanna be in situations like this but we don't have any choice!
Kyle: Yeah. Stuff just happens.
Craig: Stuff just happens.
Kyle: That's right!
Craig: You just wind up being sent by the government to take down the city of Lima only to wind up in the land of the giant lost world.
Cartman: That's right.
Craig: You know what stuff happens to most kids? They fall off their bikes. They get in fights with their parents. They get swindled out of their birthday money.
- Egon from The Real Ghostbusters seems to attract more than his fair share of strangeness, even though he's already in a profession known for running into weird things.
- L Ife with Loopy has this pretty much as its main premise
Real Life
- There appears to be something about the state of Florida that attracts a whole lot of weird stories (the Elian Gonzalez affair, the 2000 electoral recount, hurricane after hurricane, Jack Thompson, etc.) Eventually, so many out-of-the-ordinary stories kept coming in from that state that Fark.com had to devise its own tag just for that state.
- The News show Countdown With Keith Olbermann has a regular segment of odd stories, called "Oddball." So many of them occur in Florida that Florida has its own wing in the "Oddball Hall of Fame".
- Could it be the fault of our state motto? 'Florida; The Rules Are Different Here'. Not exactly 'Live Free or Die' is it?
- Dave Barry lives in the Miami area, and his columns are frequently full of stories about the state's ingrained oddness. He has jokingly recommended that the US expel it from the union, simply to save the rest of the country some headaches. In fact, he has literally referred to it as the Giant Underground Weirdness Magnet, and in a 2007 column he claimed it lay under the Golden Glades Interchange, making the only logical action the interchange's violent demolition.
- Before around 2000 or so, California was usually thought of as being The State Where Strange Things Happen, and it is still considered to be a weird place by most people. This was less due to strange occurrences as because of the large number of eccentric people who seemed drawn there, pulled by the twin Weirdness Magnets of Hollywood and San Francisco. The saying used to be that when they tipped the country, everything loose rolled into California.
- New Jersey also has more than its fair share of weird stuff. Pick up one of the Weird NJ books (yes, there are multiple) or the semi-yearly magazine that spawned them, and you'll see what I mean.
- While there's a high chance of most (or all) instances being faked or psychological, when you hear about people who seem to have close encounters with ghosts, shadow beings and otherworldly horrors almost every other week you almost start wondering whether some people are real life weirdness magnets...
- Digipen Institute of Technology is bascially what you would expect to see if you culled your entire student base from the member lists of various video game forums. You know when you read some comment online you can't help but shake your head in disbelief at? The person who wrote that either goes to Digipen, is planning to apply, or (most likely) has dropped out after discovering it's not a big Nintendo tournament.
- Wizard lookalike and comedian Bill Bailey mentioned being 'A Mecca for those with no agenda'.
- Portland, OR seems to be one of these, and its citizens seem to embrace and even promote this. Ever seen a marathon race featuring people crossdressing as Mario and Peach, Pac Man, billiard balls, a sand worm, and so much more? I can now say that at least I have.
- There is even a popular slogan/campaign in the Portland area to "Keep Portland Weird." An evening wandering around Downtown will reveal, among other things, their success.
- Of course, as a state with an easy-going culture, Oregon itself seems to attract its fair share of weirdness, particuarly Portland and Eugene (The Oregon Country Fair, held near Eugene, is basically a family-friendly version of Burning Man and must be seen to be believed).
- The Vancouver Art Gallery. If there's any kind of organised strangeness (including protests) going on in the city, its participants will, without fail, pick the Art Gallery as the place to do it. Or to meet up, or start or wind up there if it's mobile.
- It helps that The VAG used to be a courthouse, and so has these impressive steps flanked by huge granite lions to make speeches from. Next to that, a soapbox is pretty weak.
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