Just Ignore It

Murdock: Lieutenant... How would you handle this?
Lieutenant: We could try ignoring it, sir.
Murdock: I see... Pretend nothing has happened and hope everything's all right in the morning?
Lieutenant: Just a thought, sir.
Murdock: I've considered that. There's got to be a better angle.

— Airplane II: The Sequel

In a World… where innocent people are dying left and right, some people take it on themselves to be willfully ignorant. These folks tend to believe that all you have to do is ignore the problem and it will solve itself.

Sometimes, they're right. Specifically, ignoring the situation just happens to be preferable to any other solution.

How is this possible?

• Whoever is responsible for the situation is attention-hungry. Don't give him what he wants, and he'll stop.
• Maybe the responsible party is powered by belief, and depriving it of the same will ultimately destroy it.
• Maybe the protagonist's state of mind has some connection to the situation, and cooler heads prevail.
• Or, more recently, an awful truth about the protagonist came out, but the protagonist is Genre Savvy and knows damn well that the more you hate it, the stronger it becomes, so he "fights back" by ignoring it and pretending it's not a big deal.

When this strategy fails, it fails hard. Sometimes played for comic relief, as when the ignoring character thinks it's just an attention ploy, and they're in for a nasty surprise.

Compare Sheathe Your Sword, where the only way to defeat a foe is to not attack it. Also see Head-in-the-Sand Management.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In Where's the Beef? ads, this seems to be the management strategy of the Home of the Big Bun, as they're almost never on call when Clara or the others ask for help, and in one ad the manager is seen lounging on a cruise ship.

Comic Books

• The first time the Fantastic Four fought the Impossible Man, they stopped him by not paying attention to his antics. Eventually he called Earth boring and went home.
• The final issue of Paperinik New Adventures, significantly titled "If...", at one point had Paperinik and the US Army face an army of Evronian Super Soldiers with immense strength (enough to tear through tank armor bare-handed) that, having been created with Angus Fangus' DNA, have an uncanny ability to find and feed on negative emotions, with them being defeated this way the moment Paperinik realizes their immense strength requires their opponents to have hostile thoughts.

Comic Strips

• In a FoxTrot storyline, expert video gamer Jason spends a long time struggling to defeat the "Red Orb Guardian", but when he finally puts the controller down his eternally clueless sister Paige gets past it in moments — she just walks right by, and the monster doesn't attack because she didn't attack it. When she explains what she did, Jason is flabbergasted at the thought of an incredibly powerful enemy you're not supposed to fight. It gets a lampshade when Jason calls this counter-intuitive, and Paige points out that he still harasses her despite the fact that her response is always to pound the snot out of him.

Fan Works

• In After Many Dates: Danny and Kim, this is Danny's reaction to the Masters' Blasters. He decides to simply let them save people. As Kim predicts, eventually the hype wears out and people begin to refuse to pay, the Blasters refuse to help people, and Danny saves them, winning his popularity back and making the Blasters look bad.
• In the essay-fic Equestria: A History Revealed, the Lemony Narrator takes this approach when citing sources that clearly contradict her own theories. At her worst, she demeans the opposing author's intelligence, and crosses out the offending text with a strikethrough.
• The Parselmouth of Gryffindor: Sometimes on purpose, sometimes unwittingly, this is how Hermione approaches most problems that stumped the characters in canon. Thoroughly ignoring Draco's taunts over and over throughout first year gets them mostly rid of him by Second Year, and Hermione and Ron aren't involved at all in First Year's Troll shenanigans, which end up being easily solved by Peeves.
• In The Vinyl Scratch Tapes season 2 part 1, the mane characters at one point react to Prince Blueblood's phone call threatening to bring down their radio station by discussing where they want to have lunch, paying no attention whatsoever to Blueblood's rant. Of course, this was after hanging up on him repeatedly, then threatening to punch out his remaining teeth.

Films — Animation

• In The King and I (the animated film), the heroes' tactic against a giant sea monster that is about to eat the ship is to Whistle a Happy Tune. It works — the monster is just an illusion produced by the bad guy.

Films — Live-Action

• The movie 15 Minutes is about a pair of foreign terrorists who seek to videotape their murders, give the footage to the news, and become infamous that way. The ad campaign used the line "the only way to stop them... is not to watch."
• Airplane II: The Sequel: Captain Buck Murdock of Alpha Beta Base is debating with a junior officer whether they should do anything about the impending crash landing of the lunar shuttle.
• Carry On Up the Khyber: Used to great comic effect where the senior officers and ambassador have a dinner party and steadfastly ignore the pitched battle just outside, even when explosions blow in the windows and make plaster fall over the meal.
• Freddy vs. Jason has a local Government Conspiracy involving a massive cover-up of everything Freddy Krueger had done, down to interring all the surviving kids in an asylum and medicating them so they can't have dreams, because Freddy gets his power from kids being afraid of him. Freddy averts this trope by setting lose another serial killer, causing the kids to hear about Freddy when the Revealing Cover-Up begins to unravel due to the adults wondering if Freddy is back.
• High Spirits: a group of guests and staff in a haunted castle decide to deal with the haunting by ignoring them. They all steadfastly ignore the props of the theater's oceanic performance coming to life...until the giant wooden octopus grabs one of the kids. For the next few minutes everyone is desperately trying to free him whilst avoiding tentacles and getting drenched with water. They finally succeed, at which point one of them yells: "It's a bloody good thing we ignored it!"

• Lawrence of Arabia. When Damascus dissolves into chaos late in the film:
  Brighton: Look, sir, we can't just do nothing.
  General Allenby: Why not? It's usually best.
• Used in the first A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): the Final Girl actually turns her back on Freddy Krueger just as he is about to stab her, and he promptly ceases to exist. At least, until the sequel. (Or just the Revised Ending, at that.)
• In Star Trek: First Contact Commander Riker notices a red light come on the instrument panel of the Phoenix (Earth's first warp-capable ship, which was a rattletrap built on an old nuclear ICBM frame). Zephram Cochrane slaps the side of the panel with his hand, then tells Riker and Commander LaForge to "ignore it".
• Untraceable's plot revolves around a website with streaming video of murders. The more hits on the website, the faster the victim dies.

Literature

• In Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Adrian ignores his mounting debts, recklessly uses credit cards, refuses to open letters, until it spirals out of control.
  I think, but I'm not sure, that I'm now hopelessly in debt.
• This is the approach that the developers of New World Online have taken to Maple in Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense., due to her breaking the game so much and so often that they have even yelled at someone on the team pointing out she did it again.
• Shows up in a few Discworld books:
  • Hogfather: Teatime's plan to assassinate the eponymous Santa Claus pastiche is to control the children's thoughts so that they no longer believe in him.
  • Additionally, it's well-known on the Disc that putting a blanket over your head repels the bogeyman. This is all fine and good, but as seen in Feet of Clay and Hogfather, if you put the blanket over the bogeyman's head he'll be briefly overcome with doubt as to his own existence.
• Hober Mallow's strategy for the war against Korell in Foundation consists of not making any major offences. The Foundation defends its territory, but that's basically all. How does this work to win the Foundation the war? Korell is economically dependent on the Foundation — thanks to Hober Mallow, as it happens — and so Korell finds itself without any population-unifying bombardments, just a steadily worsening economy and quality of life as more and more things shut down without spare parts from the Foundation.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is so stupid that it assumes that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. The best way to escape is to place a towel over your head. It will then get confused and wander away.
• While the events of the first two books in the Knight and Rogue Series were personal, the third book has them just happening across a series of crimes. The Michael insists on helping, Fisk believes the best way to handle the situation is to go about their daily lives.
• The Last Unicorn: "You mustn't run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention."
• At the end of Sphere, in order to get rid of the destructive abilities the namesake Sphere had given them, the protagonists agree to use their power to make themselves forget about the Sphere and all of their activities involving it. This works because the Sphere, by its own admission, didn't grant them these abilities — they already had them, but it took the Sphere to make them aware of it so they could use them. Yeah, it's kind of a weird book.
• Dean Ing's Soft Targets, a group of TV executives enact a plan to weaken terrorists by either ignoring their activities or covering them in a way that makes them into laughingstocks. When this starts to impair terrorist recruiting and funding, several of the executives are kidnapped in an attempt to lift the informal interdiction of terrorism news.
• Star Wars Legends: Hundreds of years before Galaxy of Fear: Spore, the Actual Pacifist Ithorians managed to seal Spore up and bury it in an asteroid behind a Door of Doom with some warnings. In the present day foreign Asteroid Miners are poking around those asteroids looking for minerals with the Ithorians' permission, and they don't do a thing to prevent the miners from digging too far into that one. They have one Ithorian watching, who does nothing to stop them even though she and most other Ithorians know about and dread the thought of Spore's escape. She only acts after it gets out. In part we see that keeping quiet would have been a good idea, since that Ithorian had told someone from The Empire, which promptly sends someone who's clueless about how Evil Is Not a Toy, and the Imperials wouldn't be the only ones who'd want to break it out to use it. But not telling the miners meant they thought there might be treasure in there. This all could have been avoided if they'd picked a more remote asteroid.
• Sword of Truth has a variation in a monster called a Screeling. It will chase down and disembowel anything that runs away from it, but calmly walking away as if it isn't there will confuse it for a while, giving you time to escape, or at least put some distance between you and it and come up with a plan.
• In Warrior Cats, In the novel Midnight, Firestar was informed of a badger at Snakerocks. Since Badgers are formidable foes to even trained warriors, he simply said to keep an eye on it, have the cats stay away from Snakerocks, and hope it moves away before leaf-bare (Autumn).
• In The Wheel of Time, this is how Semirhage is finally broken. That or her being simply humiliated by being spanked.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: Inverted in "Blink": the monsters for that episode are "quantum locked" meaning that they only exist when not being observed. If you look at them (or if they look at each other) they turn to stone. But if you look away (or blink), you're dead.
  The Doctor: Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink. Good luck.
• House of the Dragon: Early in Season 1, King Viserys is well aware his brother Daemon is throwing a tantrum for attention. As such, he thinks that the proper response is to not give it to him. This may be an appropriate way to deal with your bratty little brother, but a king has to be concerned with how he is perceived. Letting his brother defy him with impunity makes Viserys look weak and indecisive, which could encourage others to challenge him, and Lord Corlys specifically notes this while warning about the threat from the Triarchy.

Viserys: My brother wishes to provoke me. To answer is to give him what he wants.

• Merlin: Queen Mab is defeated using this method. When people stop believing in her and refuse to acknowledge that she is important anymore, she fades away.
• Scrubs: J.D. found out that the best thing he could do for the patient who was turfed to every department in the hospital is to do nothing and let things heal themselves, since the patient was not actually suffering from any disease at all, but rather had a high fever that resulted from the rapidly increasing medications he was being given as he was moved from department to department, each department unable to find a problem and giving him generic medication in the hopes of fixing whatever was wrong with him. Since there was no disease, nobody could find a disease, and kept transferring him to a new department in the hopes that they could fix him, and he eventually ended up with J.D., who actually forgot about the patient entirely, and was told after the fact that his "treatment" was brilliant since the fever broke when he stopped being stuffed with drugs. Apparently this happens in real life.
• Star Trek:
  • There are a couple Star Trek: The Original Series episodes where this stratagem is used to weaken the Monster of the Week before taking further measures to finally defeat it:
    • In "Wolf in the Fold", an entity that feeds on fear is neutralized by tranquilizing the crew, after which it is beamed into space with the transporter set on wide dispersion.
    • In "Day of the Dove": an entity that feeds on hatred is weakened when a truce is made between Federation and Klingon combatants, then driven off when the two sides start laughing at it.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • A two part episode of uses a similar weapon: a device that can kill anyone with a single thought. However, being a Vulcan invention, it only works on the aggressive. It is rendered useless when the protagonists stop (conventionally) fighting and empty their minds of aggressive thoughts.
    • Something similar was done in another episode involving a group of soldiers that had been genetically engineered and mentally programmed as perfect killing machines: but are not programmed to kill people who don't fight back. If you don't fight then, they can't/won't do anything. The episode ends with them forced in to a stalemate with the government that created them (and wasn't nice enough to UNprogram them afterward) leaving them with the option of "cooperate or everything stays screwed."
  • Star Trek: Voyager: At the end of "Twisted," with an incredibly powerful entity twisting and altering the ship, their ultimate solution is the decidedly odd, but logical (Tuvok said it, so it must be!) "solution" of not doing anything. That said, nothing else the crew had tried worked and all they could do was to repeat already ineffective moves. So, the best option remaining would be to wait and see if things change.
• Scott from Teen Wolf has the ever-frustrating habit of doing this to anything that even remotely interferes with his ability to spend time with Allison. Anytime someone besides Allison tries to contact him via cell phone, there is a 95% chance Scott will either ignore it; look at it and not bother to respond to its urgency; and/or even hang up on the person on the other line. Even if it's Stiles trying to warn him about something important like someone dying in the near future if Scott doesn't do something critically important soon.

Pro Wrestling

• This was Allison Danger's advice for Leva Bates when Regeneration X discovered MsChif was sneaking through the SHIMMER locker room on volume 44 and ended up breathing down their backs. This proved pretty hard to do as they discovered MsChif had No Sense of Personal Space but luckily for them, "Chif" had no malicious intentions.

Podcasts

• A strategy that works more often than one might think in The Magnus Archives, such as ignoring the Distortion's doors, since if you ignore a problem well enough, the monster/avatar/book/evil butter knife can't feed on your fear. Markedly a bad idea in situations where a specific monster is actively hunting you, though.
  • Joshua Gellespie deserves special mention for having received a coffin marked with "Do not open" containing... something. He proceeded to use it as a coffeetable for over a year, ignoring the sound of something scratching on the inside of it whenever he touched it. When whatever was inside got desperate and attempted to control him in his sleep, he took the key and froze it into a block of ice so he couldn't reach it even if he wanted to.

Roleplay

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Jacob attempts to ignore the strange ticking in the classroom and instead get on with his final exam. His effort only lasts so long before one of the other kids drags him into taking care of it.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • One of the best ways to handle something extremely durable but either not very devastating or that has a very small threat range is to do just this. In fact, the most powerful units in the game aren't those with the best statlines or stuff (these tend to be Cool, but Inefficient), but those with either the mobility to get their alright statlines to where they are most effective, or some other unusual ability, or some evident lack of a Weaksauce Weakness in the current metagame.
  • The Emperor's plan to get rid of Chaos involved all of humanity doing this to the Chaos gods. This... didn't really work.

Video Games

• Three cartoon shorts were created for Bendy and the Ink Machine Chapter 3, one of which, "Tombstone Picnic," featured in the chapter's reveal trailer. In this short, when Bendy is poking Boris to demand his lunch back, Boris decides to just ignore him. Bendy responds by shaking up a soda and spraying Boris with it, but Boris is still successful in keeping Bendy's lunch.
• Five Nights at Freddy's, this can occasionally save your bacon.
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's, there's a rare chance that the Freddy poster in Cam 2B will change to show Golden Freddy, who will then appear in your office. He'll crash your game if you don't immediately ignore him and put up the camera again, which will de-summon him.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 3, this is the way you deal with Phantom Balloon Boy and Phantom Freddy. Phantom BB will occasionally appear on your monitor, and if you put it down, he will (non-lethally) jumpscare you. Clicking to another camera will avert the scare. Phantom Freddy will occasionally appear to limp past your office window. If you look at him, he'll soon duck under it and then jumpscare you, but if you have a camera or the repair panel up he'll just walk past and do nothing.
• The attack of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) video game can be stalled, if not actually defeated, by the same means listed above under Literature. Though this bit of information is relevant, but not enough in and of itself; to get the Beast to stop chasing you, you need to first say your name when he asks, then, with the towel over your head, carve your name into the list of his previous victims. He'll conclude that he ate you in a fit of absent-mindedness (as his mind is very frequently absent), and go to sleep. If you don't do all this, the Beast will eventually realize his mistake and eat you.
• Played With in Just Ignore Them. The title suggests that not acknowledging them will help, Mark's mother suggests to ignore them to make them go away and actually talking about them increases the risk of them harming you or those around you. But they are manufactured beings that aim at specific people for specific reasons, so ignoring them is not an option, if you are their target or in their way. This shows quite well when the pilot and all business class passengers around Mark got killed, yet Neason from economy and Brea who had been on the toilet didn't even notice anything happening.
• At the end of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, the Prince confronts his dark side in his mind. However, as the Dark Side is made out of the Prince's desire to fight, (and other negative/destructive emotions), fighting him only causes him to multiply. The solution is to walk past him.
• In Sea of Stars, the main characters find a tavern in the Town of Lucent literally called "the First Stage of Grief," as both the patrons and staff are so upset by the constant torment of losing their friends and family to the Dweller of Woe, they choose to completely deny that such tragedy is happening, to the point where they hardly believe anything the heroes say when they tell them they're going to defeat the Dweller and bring the town peace.
• The entire point of slender is to collect the 8 pages/clues. If you pay attention to slenderman or look for him, you lose. Alternatively, if you get lost in the bathroom, you lose (mostly due to slendy finding you).
• Seems to be the solution to Pandora's Box in Street Fighter X Tekken. Those who seek to destroy it, such as Ryu, end up consumed by it. Those who seek something out of it get a Jackass Genie result, such as Hwaorang fighting an army of Akumas or it making Rufus and Zangief handsome and slender. Those who really, truly do not care about it (such as Poison) cause it to disappear in a Puff of Logic.
• In Undertale, this is one way to defeat the Greater Dog miniboss without killing it. Repeatedly selecting the "Ignore" Act will eventually cause it to get bored and go away.
• In Uru: Path of the Shell, the penultimate puzzle comprised a room with a large, rollable ball on a large,-rollable-ball-sized track. The understood goal was to get past the ball to the end of the track. The solution, which had to be deduced from a series of abstruse clues littered throughout a five-volume set of prophetical books, was to stand right next to the track and do absolutely nothing for fifteen minutes.
• The beginning of Wario Land II has the Black Sugar Gang causing a ruckus in Wario's Castle as they steal his treasure. The level is normally played by waking up and investigating. However, if you instead decide to ignore the commotion and continue sleeping, you unlock an alternate story path where the sleeping Wario is carried out of the castle and must barge back in to reclaim it.

Web Comics

• Webcomic Elf Only Inn, being set in a chat room, makes this strategy extremely sensible in reality, but very odd in roleplay.
  • Check here (actually, read the entire arc, starting from here, and especially this strip) for an example of its use.
    King Herman: I have a very hard time listening to your speech about ignoring the long-term dangers of deforestation... WHILE A BIG RED DEVIL IS WASHING THE WALLS OF YOUR INN WITH BLOOD IN A VILE ORGY OF CARNAGE!!!!
    Lord Elf: No-one is roleplaying with the Lord of Dorkness. (...) All he wants to do is make himself the center of attention by killing everyone and eating their soul. Just pretend he's not there.
  • And an earlier strip:
    Lord of Dorkness: (eats Lord Elf's soul)
    (Lord Elf ignores him and goes on talking)
    Lord of Dorkness: HELLO? I'm eating your SOUL, here!
  • This is pretty much standard practice in chat and online game role playing, too.
• Mieruko-chan: Miko's policy for dealing with the bizarre and terrifying ghosts and spirits she sees is to ignore them and hope she doesn't draw their attention. This isn't easy when her best friend Hana seems to be a magnet for the supernatural and her self-proclaimed rival Yuria keeps trying to goad her into revealing the truth.
• In a Penny Arcade strip guest-authored by Scott Kurtz, Gabe uses Time Travel to get goods from the 1980s, then says this trope's title when Tycho expresses concern over the ominous hole in space/time hovering just behind them.
• In Weak Hero, this is Ben's response to the Gilshin bullies in middle school, choosing to ignore their taunting so long as they aren't physically hurting people. It's also his reaction to the Union in high school, preferring to live as peacefully as he can at Eunjang rather than confronting them. This changes when Alex and Gray are both hurt deeply by the Union, firing up his resolve to take the Union down.

Web Original

• James Rolfe wisely did this after he released his "no review" of Ghostbusters (2016), wherein he basically explained he was not going to watch the movie at all and why. Being such a controversial subject at the time, some people naturally went on the attack and began Flame Baiting and throwing accusations of sexism and racism — and he basically just ignored all of it and moved on with his reviews like nothing happened. Because he didn't care his fans didn't care, so the controversy remained among the Vocal Minority who tried to stir it up and it quickly died down since it wasn't getting any kind of reaction.
• Whateley Universe: From Ayla and the Late Trevor James Goodkind:
  David was really excited about his birthday party, and about moving up so he was "only one year younger than Shrimpy".
  "David!" Mother didn't allow that sort of language in public, much less at the dinner table. "Apologize to your brother at once!"
  "Mother, it's all right. I am a shrimp," I calmly admitted. It wasn't that I was trying to protect David. No, I was going to be quite happy to see him get in trouble in a few seconds. For several weeks, I had been trying a new strategy: if none of his insults appeared to bother me, he might eventually give up.

Western Animation

• In Ben 10: Omniverse, a group of lesser villains forms a superhero team of their own to steal Ben's thunder. Rather than fight or even expose them, Ben just puts himself on the sidelines, even going as far as to watch paint dry. Sure enough, without Ben to unite against, the villains' clashing egos cause the team to fall apart, which was what Ben was gambling on.
• Danger Mouse: When DM's car turns schizoid and malevolent (episode "What a Three-Point Turn-Up for the Book"), he pretends to ignore it in hopes it will become complacent, then he can jump into the driver's seat. It doesn't work.
• One episode of Family Guy had the family using this approach to deal with a giant squid.
• The Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes episode "Impossible" had the Four resort to this to deal with an annoying cosmically powered alien when nothing else would work. Counts as a Mythology Gag as said brat was the Impossible Man mentioned above.
• On Gravity Falls, Ford and Dipper are exploring an alien ship when they accidentally activate its security droids. Since they react to adrenaline, the most effective method is to control your fear and ignore them, but Dipper can't. Dipper eventually faces one down, but since he no longer fears it, it simply shuts off.
• In the Justice League episode "Hawk and Dove", the more passive of the brothers stops Ares's war machine in the end by refusing to fight it. To clarify, the machine was powered by aggression.
• The final episode of The Legend of Zelda (1989) played this trope smoothly. Ganon's minions overthrew Ganon and attempted to attack North Palace by themselves, which for them ended in hilarious disaster.
  Zelda: Wait a minute, Link. We might not need to fight this one... ...in fact, we might not even need you.
• In an episode of The Mask, the city unveiled a new policy for dealing with The Mask: "Just Ignore Him, Maybe He'll Go Away." It was starting to work, too, but the episode's plot intervened.
• Phineas and Ferb: At a steamroller convention, the Wilkins Brothers showed up to state trolleys were better. The tactic worked. Then again, it's stated the Brothers were already known for doing that kind of thing during steamroller conventions so that wasn't necessarily the first time the plan worked.
• Rick and Morty: In "The Old Man and the Seat" Rick (a big fan of this philosophy) hires an alien personal assistant who he knows is part of a species of Planet Looters planning to distract everyone on Earth with a dating app and steal all their water. He knows he'd need a human to help him to develop the app so he simply tattoo's "Don't develop his app" on his forehead and leaves it be. Unfortunately (kinda) he leaves the planet and gets caught up in a feud with someone who used his private toilet, leaving his assistant alone with Jerry.
• The Simpsons:
  • A Halloween episode included the story "Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores," about giant advertising mascots that come to life and destroy Springfield. As discovered by Lisa and Paul Anka (!), the key to survival is "just don't look." Because any ad that doesn't get attention, quickly vanishes.
  Lisa: [to the one holdout being distracted by a donut ad] Don't make us poke your eyes out, Dad!
  • In "Homer's Enemy", Lenny and Carl recommend this, word for word, to Logical Latecomer Frank Grimes regarding getting him upset about Homer Simpson's immense (and as Grimes dares point out, potentially lethal) stupidity, which he'd never gotten any severe comeuppance for. Grimes disregards this, to his eventual peril.
• In the South Park episodes "Cartoon Wars" (Part I and Part II), the people of South Park decide to literally bury their heads in the sand, so as to show Islamists that they have no part in the insult to Muhammad.
  • In another episode, everyone decides they've had enough with Cartman's horrible attitude and behavior and decide to ignore him knowing that he craves attention. The act causes Cartman to believe he is dead and is a wandering spirit.
• Superman: The Animated Series: In "Mxyzpixilated", Superman puts on a show of indifference when Mxy transforms the rest of the Daily Planet staff into animals and threatens to expose his Secret Identity. This provokes the imp into accepting a higher-stakes challenge, where he will have to go away forever (instead of just for ninety days) if he loses.
• In one episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), the heroes use the technique of "wu wei" (basically, "do nothing") to stop the Technodrome. Understandably, this technique was never used again. This itself is a rather... unusual interpretation of the idea of wu wei, which is more along the lines of "don't waste time thinking, just act, guided by intuition." Basically, the opposite of doing nothing. In this case, as many, the Rule of Funny wins out.
• Wander over Yonder: In "The Troll", Wander and Sylvia are called to aid the warriors of Baaa-hala to protect their food sack from a troll that attacks them once a year. The troll starts out puny, but is obnoxious, and gets bigger and stronger the more the warriors get tweaked by his insults. By the time he reaches Wander, the troll is the size of a building. But when Wander doesn't react, the troll starts shrinking. This inspires the others to do likewise, and the troll shrinks back to its original harmless size.
• We Bare Bears had Chloe do this to defeat a Reality-Warping internet troll.
• What's New, Scooby-Doo?: an egotistical computerized house appears as the villain. The only way to make it stop was to completely ignore it, causing it to overheat in its efforts to get attention.

Real Life

• Many minor diseases, most notably the common cold, are best treated with relaxation and time. The same goes for aches and pains. Some doctors, naturally, will suggest additional methods that have a placebo effect... It's where we get the saying, "If you get a cold and stay at home, you'll be sick for a week. If you get a cold and go to the doctor, you'll be sick for seven days."
• On many websites, "Don't Feed the Troll!" is listed as common advice. The idea is that your average troll is trying to be an Attention Whore. Getting them kicked out/banned/etc. without otherwise acknowledging their presence will make them give up with time since they're not getting the attention they want or otherwise having their bad behavior rewarded.
• "Wei wu wei," in Taoist belief, is often translated as "creative letting be."
• This is the only known way to get an excitable terrier to calm down. This also applies to Genki Girls and Keets.
• Zits and scabs. Picking at them only makes it worse.
  • This is actually inverted in larger wounds, where it is best to be left open (though bandaged and cleaned to avoid infections) rather than letting it scab over. This results in faster healing and less scar tissue forming. Can be recommended by doctors in cases where stitches should have been received but doctor was not seen until after healing has begun, meaning stitches are no longer an option.
  • Diseases like Chickenpox. Picking at them too much can cause infection, making it much worse.
• It has been argued that the best way to fix an economic problem is for everybody to pretend that there isn't one, since stock prices - and through them, the health of the economy - are determined by the confidence that the marketplace has in the companies who issue them.
• Toddlers and tantrums. Provided that there's nothing they need (not hungry, not tired, not in pain, not frightened, etc), ignoring a toddler's tantrum is usually enough to make them stop. Of course, if said toddler is throwing a tantrum due to not receiving enough attention...
  • This gets more complicated when the child (or adult) is having a genuine meltdown (commonly seen in people on the autism spectrum and having sensory processing issues) out of overwhelm rather than throwing a tantrum because of attention. Some meltdowns/anxiety attacks are indeed best dealt with if they're ignored by others - talking to the person as if they're not having a meltdown may even help the panicking person focus on the talker and calm down. However, some meltdowns just get worse if they're ignored (and forced to stay in the same surrounding that's causing them distress). For example, an autistic child crying because their system is overloaded by loud sounds, bright lights, the presence of strangers, etc. at a supermarket while their parent is doing the shopping. The parent should ideally be able to swiftly take the child outside and go through their personal methods to calm the child. Autistic adults leaving a space that's stressing them (a loud party, perhaps) follows the same principle.
• Similarly, when dogs or cats are spooked by things like storms, fireworks, and the like, it's best to just pretend like nothing's wrong. Comforting or "protecting" the animal only reinforces to it that there is something to be afraid of. Also, if the animal decides it likes the attention it receives from being comforted, it will actually play up its reaction to such things in order to get more attention.
• There's a social phenomena called the Bystander Effect where people will ignore someone who needs help. Reasons why this happens include people not wanting to take the responsibility, fearing backlash if said person who needs help gets worse in their care, or the person who needs help has some dangerous element to it and the person would rather not put him/herself in danger.
• This happened with the landing computer of Apollo 11's Lunar Excursion Module during its descent. It continued to go off with an error that basically meant that it was overwhelmed with data and couldn't process it in the time available. Mission control's solution: reset the computer, and assume that there was nothing dangerous in the data it wasn't able to process. The rest is history.
• The best course of action to anything you don't want people seeing. Trying to stop people from seeing it will likely just attract more attention to it. See Streisand Effect, No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, and Revealing Cover-Up. Compare, for example, Disney ignoring Escape from Tomorrow rather than filing legal action, resulting in it barely making a splash, to North Korea's response to The Interview, which got it a lot of attention.
• Jurgen Ohlsen, the young star of a very famous Hitler Youth propaganda film, was later discovered to be gay. The Nazis not only ordered him to report to a concentration camp, but ordered his execution. How did Jurgen escape his fate? Did he flee the country, or seek refuge in the forests of Germany with the Edelweiss Pirates? Nope, he just didn't report to the concentration camp. As a member of the Hitler Youth and something of a national hero, the Nazis just assumed he'd turn himself in and never followed up on it. This happened in 1940, Jurgen died of natural causes in 1994.

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