"In fact, mostly they just swerved and looked irritated, as if they had to deal with a lot of ratty teenagers carrying old hippie women across the freeway."
— Percy Jackson, The Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune
Something that is blatantly unusual, yet nobody seems to take notice of it. It could be an odd costume, Unusual Ears, an external monologue, a visible weapon, or an animal that only vaguely resembles a normal one (such as a blue wolf wearing armor). For some reason, none of the bystanders take notice or comment on it.
In some cases this is justified with not being seen by mortals or for some reason, if it's a kid's show/book/comic/other, it's often stated that the weirdness cannot be seen by adults or doubters.
Possibly an extension of the Bystander Syndrome, contrast with Mundane Made Awesome and Faux Horrific. Occasionally justified with a Weirdness Censor. Common in Magic Realism and Mundane Fantastic. See also Elephant in the Living Room, Fantastically Indifferent, Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!, Metallicar Syndrome, My God, You Are Serious!, Not Distracted by the Sexy, Unfazed Everyman, and Shut Up, Scary Thing!.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Film
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
- Real Life
Other examples:
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Art
- Sistine Chapel: In one of its many paintings, there are two people chatting away with their backs turned to the Son of God freely giving the truths of the universe away.
Asian Animation
- Lamput: Lamput encounters a monster hiding in a coffin in "Haunted House". He's scared of it, but the docs are too busy searching for him to even notice and be scared as well.
Comedy
- Josh Wolf has a bit where he discusses the first time his daughter met his wife Beth. The previous night, Beth had been too tired to drive home, but Josh didn't want her first time meeting the kids to be in his bed, so she asked to sleep in the closet instead. The next morning, Josh's daughter Kaitlynn couldn't find her shoes, and when Josh told her to keep looking, she checked Josh's closet and found Beth, then returned to him saying "I still can't find my shoes and there's a stranger sleeping in your closet". Josh notes that if this was how she reacted to a stranger sleeping in his closet, she would never snitch on him for anything.
Josh: Just out of curiosity, Kait, there's a stranger sleeping in my closet. That's the reaction I get?
Kaitlynn: It's your closet, daddy, I don't know what happens in your closet.
Comic Strips
- Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Invoked with the magical Shield of Boringness.
- Peanuts: Nobody in this otherwise carefully realistic neighborhood seems to find it at all odd that a beagle should be riding atop his doghouse dressed as a WWI Flying Ace, among many other things. Occasionally lampshaded when they do find his behaviour odd - just in passing - then continue on their merry way.
Eastern European Animation
- The Frog Princess: No one seems at all surprised that animals can talk, or that wizards and witches exist.
Fairy Tales
- In "Mother Holle", the main character barely raises a eyebrow when she runs into talking loaves and sentient trees; and nobody thinks anything of the rooster speaking.
- "Little Otik": Most of peasants seem to take the presence of a big wooden creature who can walk and talk in stride.
- Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "The Enchanted Quill": One man falls asleep while riding his horse. Suddenly, a crow wakes up him and speaks that the man was falling into an eternal sleep, and it wants to marry one of his sisters in reward for saving him from such a fate. And the man takes everything in stride.
- "Follow Me, Jodel!": Jodel thinks nothing of a toad being able to speak. He does not even wonder why it wants to help him, or in the first place, how it knows he needs help. He never questions why it owns a house in the woods and a mouse servant who can also speak. In fact, Jodel shows a bigger reaction to its ugliness than to everybody else.
Jokes
- There is a joke which both subverts and lampshades this trope: One day the first grade teacher was reading the story of The Three Little Pigs to her class. She came to the part of the story where the first pig was trying to accumulate the building materials for his home. She read, "...and so the pig went up to the man with the wheel barrow full of straw and said, 'Pardon me sir, but may I have some of that straw to build my house?'" The teacher paused then asked the class, "And what do you think that man said?" One little boy raised his hand and said, "I think he said 'Holy shit! A talking pig!'" The teacher was unable to teach for the next 10 minutes.
Music
- Several Inugami Circus Dan videos depict the members working in offices, sitting in cafes, meeting old friends and generally going about their business like ordinary people whilst wearing their trademark white and black face paint. None of the extras notice, let alone comment on it. Particularly noticeable example from about 1:34 in this video
- Parodied in a Mariah Carey video (Boy - I Need You). It takes place in Tokyo with several giant monsters and mechs running amok, and the locals just go about their business.
- Likewise, in the video of "Heroes" which The Wallflowers recorded for Godzilla (1998), the band keeps right on playing even after Godzilla's tail knocks a hole in the wall of the apartment where they're performing, and the singer just glances at the hovering military helicopter that stops to check out the damage. Meanwhile, a girl in a hoodie disinterestedly walks past crowds of panicked, fleeing people, picks up a six-pack from the bodega across the street, leaves some money on the counter when she can't find the cashier, and walks back again, never even glancing at the huge footprint which Godzilla left in the pavement while she was in there.
- In the video for Lisa Stanfield's cover of Barry White's "Never, Never Gonna Give You Up", she goes out onto the streets, nude, after taking a bath. No one gives her anything more than a passing glance. Granted, she does eventually find a coat to put on as she heads to her boyfriend's house.
- The video for Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart": Ninjas! Kids with Glowing Eyes! A kid with Wings! In a boarding school! It isn't until near the end when the one kids with glowing eyes sings the hook "Turn around bright eyes" that she gets the sense that there is something wrong.
- Played for Laughs in the music video for Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla from metalcore band A Crowd of Rebellion. The band stops for a quick rest while a parkouring gorilla comes out of nowhere and starts beating the shit out of the lead singer. Only for him to appear just fine and the gorilla hands him a pair of drum sticks and a guitar pick. The rest of the band casually looks at the beatdown bored out of their minds.
- The Ramones' video for "I Wanna Be Sedated" entirely consists of the members sitting around a dinner table while a party featuring nuns, acrobats, ballerinas, monsters, cheerleaders, clowns, doctors, fetish nurses, and smoking schoolgirls goes on behind them. They never take notice of any of this.
- "Rocket Man" by Elton John takes the usually interesting job of an astronaut and makes it as boring as a 9-to-5 job.
- Collapsing New People by Fad Gadget has Frank, who's covered in Tar and Feathers for unknown reasons start grabbing at the people playing the other instruments. Said people just ignore him and keep playing, even after their faces get covered in tar as well.
Podcasts
- Binary Break: After landing in the Digital World, Sophie very much takes the weirdness of the situation in stride. It helps that she was already a bit of a cloudcuckoolander and treats the situation like being in a fairy-tale adventure (which she'd been hoping to end up in one day anyway).
- In the first world of Interstitial: Actual Play, the students of East High don't bat an eye at a strange man in a cloak playing card games in their gym while asking them who's the most hateful among them. Even the main characters take a while to notice, since Marche is distracted by the game and Roxanne thinks his aesthetic is normal.
Professional Wrestling
- Professional Wrestling lives and breathes this trope, due to a combination of Kayfabe, Rule of Cool, Rule of Funny, World of Badass and World of Ham. While all of these may have been surprising when they were first introduced, fans came to accept them as utterly normal.
- The Undertaker, a grave-digging zombie with the ability to make the lights go on and off, come Back from the Dead and Teleport at will? Check.
- Sabu, a maniac who celebrated winning matches by moonsaulting himself through a table? Check.
- A Tag Team called Incoherence (Delirious, Hallowicked and Frightmare) who got plenty of mic time even though their promos were largely unintelligible gibberish? Check.
- La Parka, a Mexican guy in a skeleton costume who dances and does Air Guitar with a chair during his entrance? Check.
- The CHIKARA-affiliated Wrestling Is Fun! promotion had as its main title the WiF! Banana Title, that is, a title that was represented by an actual banana. Jaka actually ate the banana after winning it, which his manager Sidney Bakabella found shocking.
Puppet Shows
- In Fraggle Rock's postcards from Uncle Travelling Matt about his adventures in Outer Space, the "Silly Creatures" are generally portrayed as amused or confused by his misunderstanding of human customs, but not so much "Oh, my God! What even is that thing?" as you might expect, given that the existence of Fraggles is mostly unknown beyond the Rock.
Tabletop Games
- A spell in Pathfinder, aura of the unremarkable, works as a sort of enforced version of this. It allows the target to perform any number of strange actions - perfectly in view of the public - and not have anyone view it as abnormal. They see and remember the actions normally, but unless it directly threatens them or their allies, they are magically compelled to think that there's nothing unusual about the team attempting to blow the hinges off the vault door or cutting the supports for the chandeliers. Once it turns into a "hostile action", the spell won't work, though... handy for preparing your assassination, but not after you fire the ballista at the parade.
- Invoked by the narrator in GURPS Black Ops who took the subway after a mission with a gaping hole in his chest. Even though he left a large pool of blood underneath his feet, not a single other soul on the train looked up or said anything. The narrator says that half the reason why their shadow war has remained a secret is that the world cannot and will not accept the existence of paranormal creatures, and therefore will remain willfully ignorant, writing off any unusual thing they see.
- One of the Pachimon cards have a kaiju rampaging across London and trampling over vehicles, and civilians simply wandering about oblivious to the monster walking around in the open. Like, really◊.
Visual Novels
- In Area X, this is one of the reasons that Elcia is able to tell that Rexus is the leader of Project Recovery and knows who she really is, as he don't react to the fact a girl in a school uniform wants to negotiate with ORZ Corporate, since a normal student wouldn't want or need to negotiate with a major corporation.
- Nobody in Love at First Sight appears to care about the fact that Sachi is a Cyclops. For example, the resident bully goes after her due to her being an Extreme Doormat.
Web Animation
- The seven minute animatic Babushka: the Movie is an adaption of a round of Among Us played by a famous group of streamers and Lets Players. Like the video game, a pair of impostors try to wipe out the crew of a space ship. Unlike the normal video game, the impostors get splashed and even covered with blood as they slaughter the crew one by one. Somehow nobody else seems to notice that or think it's worth noting.
