Elephants in the Living Room in Video Games.
- Played disturbingly in Dishonored. The city of Dunwall is in the grips of a terrible plague, with the body count rising terrifyingly fast and the rest of the Isles Empire seriously considering blockading the city to prevent the plague from spreading.What are the city's Beautiful Elite doing during this dire crisis? Throwing parties and hedonistically flaunting their wealth as if nothing is going on. Even as it becomes obvious that the plague is going to spread well past the city's lower class, the rich citizens are in complete denial about the situation.
- The Mage-Templar War in the Dragon Age series is the result of the setting's primary religious institution, the Chantry, having one of these. Due to the Chant of Light saying that "Magic is meant to serve man and never to rule over him," the mages of the setting are kept isolated in colossal facilities called "Circles," which are essentially a combination of a college and a prison, all while kept under close scrutiny and guard of the magic-nullifying but lyrium-addicted Templar Order. While this does have a point (mages are normally victims of Demonic Possession or can go power-mad without demonic intervention) from the Chantry's point of view, shockingly most mages don't appreciate being locked up in a tower with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, and that, again, shockingly, guarding them with super-soldiers addled with and addicted to consuming a substance known to drive people absolutely apeshit if not completely catatonic just from touching it and then treating said supersoldiers as disposable guard dogs might make things a bit tense between the two factions. The Chantry, of course, fails to adequately address any of these problems, instead choosing to continue handing out placations and (somewhat hollow) warnings and refusing to take a clear side on the growing issue. This comes to a head at the end of Dragon Age II, which proves to be the catalyst of the war when the Templar order in the city (which has begun ruling it with an iron fist by making mages Tranquil for the slightest of reasons or no reason at all or other such things despite it being illegal under Chantry law) fails to prevent an uprising and their Knight Templar (pun intended) commander declares a Right of Annulment (basically "kill every mage in the place") over the actions of one apostate mage who was never even a part of Kirkwall's Circle, which the commander knew anyways and enforcing this trope two-fold. The Player Character can decide whether to support the mages or the templars, but the damage to the rest of the world is done.
- Ensemble Stars! heavily encourages shipping, with its Taste the Rainbow approach to the cast extending just as much to potential ships - the player character is surrounded on all sides by cute younger brother types, flirty sempais and even a Forgotten Childhood Friend, while the boys themselves take every trope from Designated Parents to Vitriolic Best Buds to Foe Romance Subtext, all perfectly willing to flirt and joke about how married they are. However, any attempt to take any of these obvious ships beyond the realm of subtext pretty quickly stumbles upon the problem that all of these students are idols in training who will be expected to remain single so the audience can project their fantasies onto them, as happens with real-life Japanese idols. The elephant is finally addressed in canon in Love Comedy when Kaoru admits that despite his feelings for the player character they can't actually be in a relationship, but the fandom at large generally prefers to ignore these issues and let the characters be happy together in the present without bringing in their careers.
- Final Fantasy X beautifully displayed the tragic variant in that nobody can bring themselves to say out loud that Yuna will die as part of the final summon until Tidus finds out himself and calls the rest of the group out for not telling him.
- Played for Laughs in the radio news broadcasts in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where a government official being interviewed about certain mysterious black helicopters responds with just "Helicopters? What helicopters?", with the spinning helicopter rotors clearly audible in the background.
- Kingdom Hearts: Much is made in the series of the "World Order" that prevents Sora, Donald, and Goofy from revealing the existence of other worlds, going as far as using magic to transform themselves into other species to blend in. But in worlds without transformations, nobody seems to notice that two of the three are talking anthropomorphic animals.
- In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Battle of Aces, after the second to last stage of Hayate's story mode, the Wolkenritter note that Reinforce, despite having survived the end of the series in this continuity, will fade away relatively soon. They then note that Hayate and Reinforce both know this but don't admit it to each other.
- Mass Effect:
- The quarians and their robotic creations, the geth, fought a brutal war which resulted in the quarians being kicked off their homeworld and forced to travel the stars in a massive migrant fleet. The geth also attempted to destroy the Citadel with the aid of an Eldritch Abomination, and generally kill any living creatures they encounter. They aren't well liked. In Mass Effect 2, you can freely bring a geth to the quarian migrant fleet and the Citadel; the quarians will initially resist, but with a bit of charm or intimidation, let it on, while the entire Citadel will simply fail a spot check.
- The player can get into a completely optional little argument with an official on the way in; it's pretty clearly lampshaded when Legion says that the "geth do not infiltrate", the customs clerk (whose job currently includes making sure no geth gets onto the station) tells you to keep your "personal attendant android" off the shuttle, as they're not allowed on anymore.Legion: (Beat) ... Geth do not intentionally infiltrate.
- Anderson calls Legion a "trophy bot", so it's possible people just think Shepard's got a cool toy.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda: Since the plot revolves around an entire organization settling another galaxy, a trip that takes six hundred years, it is brought up that at least some of the people in the Andromeda Initiative have loved ones in the Milky Way who lived out their lives. It's also brought up that this was anticipated. The mayor of the first colony calmly and repeatedly informs Ryder that the colony's policy on this is "we stay out of each other's grief". Another, slightly bigger elephant is that, barring an early mention that can be easily missed, no-one back home seems to be picking up the phone... no-one seems as concerned about that one.
- Pandora's Tower: As if Mavda wasn't nearly enough of a paragon of creepiness already, she constantly carries around on her back what appears to be the skeleton of an old man, bigger than she is, for the entire game. Nobody appears to find this weird, even though he is sentient and can talk (albeit unintelligibly, though Mavda can apparently understand him just fine). You can ask her about it, but she answers you in a "you should know this already" tone of voice. Apparently, she's her business partner, or something along those lines.
- In Persona 4, Team Pet Teddie spends the entirety of his arc agonizing over his identity, after realizing that he's a non-human living in a dimension filled with nothing but very diverse creatures made from human emotion. Logic dictates that Teddie himself would probably be one such creature as well, but due to a bad case of denial by repression the possibility doesn't even seem to occur to him for most of the game, and when it finally does, his friends pretty much admit to him straight out that it was pretty obvious to them all along anyway, they just never had the heart to tell him straight to the face. Teddie's own Enemy Without hints that even Teddie himself, in fact, was aware of this in the back of his mind, he merely ignored it, hoping to find a better answer to his identity crisis.
- Pokémon has long made implications that Pokémon can pose physical harm to humans (hence why you aren't allowed to run outside of town without one of your own to fight back), but very rarely makes it explicit. The closest any games get are in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire and Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, where the protagonist gets their starter because someone gets attacked and the they have to take one of the resident Professor's Pokémon for defense. The anime also touches on it in the first episode,note but afterward makes Pokémon incapable of doing lasting damage). The Donphan does get into the open in both Pokémon Adventures (humans getting attacked by Pokémon, including during Trainer battles, is a regular occurrence) and the Orre based games (the Darker and Edgier Gamecube titles), but is still absent in the rest of the franchise.
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus finally broke the trend; it's a prequel when humanity knows much less about Pokemon, so characters explicitly say Pokémon may kill people, to fans' shock. And amusement. Aggressive Pokémon have hospitalized people, may have killed people, will attack the player directly, and some can easily knock you out. They'll never kill you however; likely since getting brutally murdered by an Usaring or an Octillery would likely push the game out of its (tenuous) E-rating. Not that it stops a certain character from trying by siccing a Legendary Pokemon on you.
- In Tales of Destiny 2, the fact that Reala will be erased from time if Fortuna is is treated as a very serious plot development, but no one mentions that Judas will also cease to exist until he is about to die! He'd realized it long before, but just didn't want to bring it up.
- In VVVVVV, there is a literal giant neon elephant that takes up four rooms that will make Captain Viridian sad if he stays with it for a while.
