"After nukes in MW1 and fun with massacres in MW2, we've come to expect a shocking moment in Modern Warfare games; although since we are expecting it, it would be more shocking if there wasn't one. But sadly, no six-year-olds were around to explain this to the developers, and so the shocking moment is hollow, token, and manipulative: a child dies. Whoop de fucking do. Children die all the time, especially if you tie them to the rear bumper of a car; it's not even difficult."
When a form of entertainment relies too much on shocking its audience, they may eventually become desensitized to it. In some cases, an audience may become so desensitized to shocking content that it no longer has any effect on them, leading to a feeling of being bored or even jaded by material that would have previously been found offensive or shocking.
Shock fatigue often occurs when a form of entertainment is trying to be deliberately provocative. While this can be effective in the short term, it can often backfire if the audience becomes too weary of the constant shocks.
However, when the more shocking thing of this kind of fatigue manages to step out, it's usually because the work in question has outgrown its immature humor or shock schlock and is providing more wholesome or nuanced content.
Compare Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, where the bleak tone can make people feel apathetic towards the work, and "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny, in which a once-revolutionary aspect of a work is lost on later audiences after being constantly imitated and/or built upon by the works it influenced.
It could also crossover with Franchise Original Sin when the shocking twist is done to death by being repeatedly used.
In-Universe examples would go on Conditioned to Accept Horror, Immune to Jump Scares, or Failed Attempt at Scaring. Compare Nightmare Retardant and Narm for other articles about works failing to scare viewers.
This trope is also why Shock Jocks have to constantly escalate.
Given that shock can come from surprises, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- A problem with Akame ga Kill!: while fans appreciated a shonen manga that was not afraid to kill off established characters, the sudden deaths and the brutality of the story became so prevalent that many people "got used" to them and it stopped being a novelty.
- Naruto:
- The reveal of Tobi's true identity as Obito Uchiha was not well-received by a large portion of fans who felt that the reveal felt too on-the-nose thanks to "Tobi" being an anagram for "Obito" after years of fandom speculation regarding said identity and the reveal cheapening out Obito's supposed death scene which was generally seen as heartrending. Obito's motivations for his turn to villainy also caught criticism as it's yet another example of Love Makes You Evil, Cynicism Catalyst, Straw Nihilist, and War Is Hell that was already done with past villains like Orochimaru, Nagato, Itachi, and Sasuke, hence fans were less inclined to care about his fall to evil.
- The reveal of Black Zetsu being the mastermind of the Moon's Eye Plan and the final overarching villain being Kaguya Utsutsuki was immediately criticized by fans and critics who not only saw the reveal as weak and barely foreshadowed but also because this was yet another example of a new main villain overtaking the previous one, which had already been done with Obito and Madara just a couple of chapters prior. Fans were less shocked and more disgruntled at Madara being offed and replaced anticlimactically as they felt that he would have been a fitting final villain to the series due to several chapters of Madara being built up, and Kaguya's sudden reveal ended up being less shocking and instead raising even more questions.
Comic Books
- As the Crossed comics progress, each new arc tries to top the last one in terms of shock value, and it becomes increasingly difficult to be that fazed by all the blood, guts and absurdly over-the-top violence. For instance, the scene in the original Volume One where the Crossed simultaneously gang-rape and mutilate a family was considered unbelievably horrific when it was released. Such a scene wouldn't even raise an eyebrow anymore. On top of that, it's hard to care about the characters when you know the vast majority of them will either die or become Crossed. The Crossed series puts The Walking Dead to shame with its willingness to kill off characters.
- Injustice opens up with Lois Lane being pregnant, but then she's kidnapped by the Joker. Superman tries to save her, only to inhale Scarecrow's fear gas and hallucinate Doomsday coming after him. He shoves "Doomsday" into obit, only for the hallucinogens to wear off, revealing that he'd just killed his pregnant wife. While Superman is left in shock, the Joker nukes all of Metropolis and rubs salt into Superman's wound. Superman responds by ramming his whole arm through the Joker's torso, an act that pushes him over the slippery slope into murderous tyrant territory. And this is just the start of the series. The next few issues just maintain the shock value without much of an end goal in mind.
- Spider-Man: The Night Gwen Stacy Died was a landmark moment in comic book history, for better or for worse. On the 'better' side, it encouraged comics to take more risks and have more real stakes; on the 'worse' side, writers keep forgetting that the reason Gwen Stacy's death hit so hard was because it was the Silver Age, and major characters like Gwen didn't die in the Silver Age. Yes, other characters close to Peter can die, and those stories can be well-written in their own right, but they'll never have the same surprise factor because now everyone knows that permanent death of major characters is on the table. Some adaptations have even decided to leave Gwen Stacy out entirely because they know everyone will be expecting the shocking death, which totally removes the point of having it- and since Gwen Stacy is mostly remembered from that one storyline, they have very little to go on otherwise.
Films — Animated
- Discussed in-universe in Monsters, Inc.: children today are becoming more desensitized to fear and violence every day, so the window to scare and collect screams for power is very small, leading to a growing energy crisis bad enough that Waternoose tries to kidnap and torture children to get more screams out of them.
- Sausage Party: Owing to this movie's Broken Base, people either love it for the swearing, violence, and sexual humor because it's an Affectionate Parody of animated movies, or they find the vulgarity (such as the scene where everyone has a massive orgy) too over-the-top to the point where it gets old. There is no in-between.
Films — Live-Action
- The American Pie franchise is a series of teen sex comedies which started with the 1999 film. The first two films in the franchise were well-received by audiences and critics alike, but:
- American Pie 3: American Wedding was met with more mixed reviews thanks to putting gross-out and shock humor more into the foreground.
- The franchise then fell into decline, with the direct-to-video spin-offs American Pie Presents: Band Camp, American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, American Pie Presents: Beta House and American Pie Presents: The Book of Love all being panned by critics and fans for their tiresome overuse of shock value as well as other problems. However, the franchise was given new life with American Reunion, which was released to generally positive reviews and was a box office success.
- Although Paranormal Activity was considered scary in its own right, it popularized Jump Scares. The first Film has been well received to this day, even though the jump scares are considered the weaker aspect of it. However, the other follow-ups overused jump scares to the point where people would simply be shocked whenever the noise happens. This also spawned an unpopular trend of jump scares for other horror movies that would additionally shock fatigue the genre for both new and old-school horror movie fans around the 2010s.
- Saw: The first film was praised for its gruesome Death Traps and the genuinely unexpected Twist Ending, helping to bring the Torture Porn genre to popularity alongside the next two installments. As the series wore on (and on, and on), audiences became turned off by the repetitive traps which almost always ended in the victims' gory deaths, despite that they're supposed to be escapable, bringing Too Bleak, Stopped Caring into play (which got even worse in later films thanks to the introduction of multiple Jigsaw successors who, unlike their mentor, don't believe in giving their victims a fighting chance). The video games tone this down considerably by having a number of people (obligatory and optional alike) for the player to save from traps.
- Wild Things had a particularly lurid plot twist about halfway through its runtime, which was then followed by several more plot twists that add up to a scheme so complicated it made the main characters laughably insignificant in hindsight. The sequels followed the exact same formula.
The Editing Room: The PLOT TWIST GENERATOR EXPLODES, killing the few characters who weren’t DEAD YET.
Music
- Eminem's lyrics and music videos of the 2010s have been criticized for their lack of shocks and surprises. In the past, Eminem was known for his controversial and provocative lyrics and music videos. However, in the 2010s, his output, while still successful in its own right, has been more tame and has failed to generate the same level of controversy. This has led to many fans feeling 'shock fatigue' from his material.
- The success of Marilyn Manson suffered during the mid-2000s due to this trope, making his work less impactful and less influential.
Professional Wrestling
- This trope was the reason that Ole Anderson gave for releasing Cactus Jack, aka Mick Foley, during his first WCW run in 1990. Ole claimed that the crowd would grow desensitized by Foley's daredevil, brawling style.
- Vince Russo ended up becoming one of the most controversial bookers/writers in the medium in large part due to overindulging in what he codified as "shocking swerves". Russo had already received much criticism for making twists that were either way too esoteric or just plain nonsensical, but compounding this is how frequently he would try to pull his twists, and with the final years in TNA being denoted by commentator Tony Schiavone declaring "This is the most shocking swerve ever!" every week, it's no surprise that "Fi-re Ru-sso! (clap clap clapclapclap)" became such a common Crowd Chant.
Toys
- Transformers: The death of Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Movie was a watershed moment as far as Hasbro is concerned, with the negative reaction surprising Hasbro enough to walk back Duke's death in the G.I. Joe animated movie. It's often cited as the moment Hasbro realised that rather than just "product" that could be replaced with new items at any time, people were developing emotional attachments to characters.note However, since then an Optimus Prime (or Optimus-like character) dying has become a Running Gag, with the Transformers Wiki sometimes poking fun at things like Animated Optimus Prime's death being undone in seconds ("A new record!").note
Video Games
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare shocked players by having the United States side of the story end in disaster. The US Army's zeal to capture a terrorist leader leads to a nuclear bomb being detonated, killing everyone present, and the player is treated to a drawn-out sequence of Controllable Helplessness as their character succumbs to his wounds in the destroyed city. It quickly became a tradition that the Modern Warfare titles would have at least one heavily-publicized scene designed to shock the audience, but compared to "Aftermath" from CoD4 they gradually began to suffer from diminishing returns. Modern Warfare 2 had "No Russian", where the player as an undercover agent joins a terrorist attack on an airport that involves slaughtering crowds of innocent civilians using machine guns before being killed by the terrorist mastermind to implicate America in the massacre; this for the most part garnered the intended reaction, since while being an obvious attempt at shocking players, it still at least had a reason to exist in the context of the story. Then Modern Warfare 3 had "Davis Family Vacation", a scene that comes out of nowhere to focus on a young girl and her family on vacation in the middle of London for a minute before a truck suddenly explodes and kills them, which attracted criticism for being a blatant effort to drive sales through moral outcry.
- Fate/Grand Order started to suffer this in the latter portion of its second story arc, Cosmos in the Lostbelt, due to the sheer number of absurd boss enemies faced (which would all probably count as Superbosses if their defeats weren't mandatory for progression). Numerous players started to express annoyance with just how many of them showed up in the later chapters, especially Lostbelt 6, which has six such bosses. That being said, fans were willing to bear with it, and were very appreciative of the Climax Boss of Lostbelt 7 despite it being another such crazy boss, because said boss fight is the long-awaited debut of ORT, the Ultimate One of the Oort Cloud, who had been hyped up as an absurdly difficult, borderline Hopeless Boss Fight for twenty-two years before it was finally fought, and it did not disappoint.
- When it was first released, Mortal Kombat's biggest claim to fame (or rather, infamy) was the Fatality system, where at the end of a match a player could input commands to finish off their stunned opponent in a gory fashion. Despite the outcry from Moral Guardians, the game was a hit, especially because it was very different from the more stylised Street Fighter series thanks to using digital recreations of actual people. However, this popularity led to many competitors trying to "out-gore" Mortal Kombat with things like in-battle dismemberment, and Mortal Kombat itself fell victim to a bit of an Audience-Alienating Era thanks to adding additional "-alities" such as Brutalities (where the player character beats the victim until they explode), Animalities (where the player transforms into an animal to finish off their foe) and Babalities (reducing an opponent into a baby form) in an attempt to recapture the old excitement.
- The Walking Dead (Telltale) has been criticized for how often it kills off characters for cheap shock value. Multiple named characters die in most episodes, and while you can often decide to choose one character to save, that character will usually end up dying shortly afterwards anyway. When you're so regularly reminded that Anyone Can Die, the deaths can stop being sad or shocking, and instead just make it hard to get attached to anyone. The final season addresses this criticism by lowering the rate at which characters die and making the "choose one to save" segments more meaningful by making it possible to keep the characters you save alive until the end.
Visual Novels
- In-universe instance in America's Most Eligible, regarding the titular Show Within a Show, which is noted to be suffering a ratings decline going into its tenth season, and where every challenge is presented with some sort of twist, leading one of the contestants to point out, "You know, twists are less shocking if there's a million of them".
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends: The show's over-reliance on the formula of cute, cuddly animals dying in increasingly horrifying ways, while revolutionary for its origin year of 1999, has come across as gimmicky and repetitive to the fanbase later on, which, alongside general lack of funding and an ill-fated attempt to branch out to TV, contributed to it being Quietly Cancelled after 2016.
Western Animation
- A primary reason Allen Gregory is so hated is this. In fact, the creators knew from the start the show would not last because of this. The show goes out of its way to make everyone as horrendous as possible (with the exception of Julie). Every time it seems like they'll have Allen Gregory learn a lesson? They swerve back and double down on what a little shit he is. That isn't even going into the endless jokes about him wanting to have sex with his elderly principal. It quickly becomes tedious and loses the ability to even disgust within its short seven-episode run.
- Brickleberry perfectly fits the description of an overuse of shocking content leading to a desensitization of audiences. The show's brand of humor relied heavily on shock value with an excess of crude jokes and outlandish storylines. The show failed to evolve its humor or present any new content, which caused viewers to become desensitized to the shock factor. The problems are further compounded by the fact that some of the jokes and plotlines simply didn't work well, resulting in the show becoming repetitive and predictable. The shock factor of the jokes were too tiresome for most viewers after a while, leading to a sense of fatigue with the show. This has contributed to a lack of sustained viewership and audiences losing interest in the show which is what got it canceled eventually.
- Paradise PD didn't make much of an effort to deviate from the formula, featuring plenty of shock-comedy cliches such as potty-mouthed animals, sexually depraved old people, woman-on-man sexual assault, mutilated genitals and mean-spirited jabs at real-life figures. Occaisonally there'd be a plot connecting all of this together.
- The third season of Drawn Together saw a decline in ratings and critical reception due to this. The show had become increasingly reliant on its offensive and outrageous nature, to the point where it lost the ability to be funny. This led to a decrease in viewers, as well as a more negative reception from those who did watch.
- One of the primary issues that viewers had with the later seasons of Family Guy is that the offensive jokes and moments were no longer as shocking or effective as in earlier seasons. This is likely because in later seasons, the story of each episode had taken a backseat to the offensive content, and as such, many viewers have seen through that transparency and became desensitized to the offensive material.
- Hoops had a protagonist with untreated anger problems and a warped sense of ethics, but the supporting cast had little characterization and the plots were overly simplistic. It was cancelled after a single season.
- King Star King: A common criticism of the show is that it tries way too hard to be disgusting with its Deranged Animation, general surreal content, and graphic depictions of bodily fluids.
- Mr. Pickles: The show has a lot of gross-out and sexual humor such as Tommy (who is a child) having breast implants, as well as Mr. Pickles murdering people quite graphically. While several people consider the show an addictive horror comedy because of this, its detractors tend to hate it for the exact same reasons.
- Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" flatlined almost entirely because of this. The majority of the jokes try to be as outrageous, disgusting, and without restraint as possible, in addition to drawing themselves out longer than they need to. Tellingly the majority of episodes were recycled from the cutting room floor, episodes John Kricfalusi had planned for The Ren & Stimpy Show that were rejected. Among the notable examples is "Fire Dogs 2" which John K. admits suffers from very bad timing and pacing, suggesting the episode should be watched at double the speed.
- The Simpsons: Matt Groening has stated this is one of two reasons why The Itchy & Scratchy Show, will never get a spinoff. At one point, Groening put together a compilation of all the segments of Itchy and Scratchy together for some college students and the students were bored less than a minute in. The other reason for Itchy and Scratchy not being able to hold a show is that there's really only one joke, the Subverted Kids' Show aspect of Villain Protagonist, Itchy killing Innocent Bystander, Scratchy For the Evulz. After a while, the only joke just gets boring, hence why the Show Within a Show is only ever shown in extremely small segments.
