Mundane Fantastic: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

For a purely artistic standpoint, the [[Mundane Fantastic]] is a major reason why a show might be [[Rule of Animation Conservation|animated instead of done live]]. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the idea that if a cartoon is to be taken seriously it has to ''be'' serious and played straight. A [[Mundane Fantastic]] show may [[Jumping the Shark|Jump the Shark]] if a new writer comes on board and decides that all the fantastic elements have to be explained to death.

** [[Sarcasm Mode|You could say]] that ''Twilight'' is the [[Gender Flip]] version of this...

* ''Hakobune Hakusho'': A young girl who enrolls in a school full of youkai [[Rosario to Vampire|(ahem)]] and makes friendships with the students there. The ''entire'' rest of the series deals with everything you'd find in a normal school, to the point where the ninja club asks its recruits to ''gather information and spy on others''.

* Another manga example: ''Neko Kissa''. Omigod it has a werewolf and a vampire and a cat-demon and a skeleton and a dragoness and a giant and they're the main cast and [http://www.mangafox.com/manga/neko_kissa/v01/c001/7.html here's a picture of them].

* ''[[Spice and Wolf]]'': He is a travelling merchant, she is a Wolf harvest goddess, together they ... trade goods with other people.

* ''[[Itoshi no Kana]]'' is about a young man moving in a haunted house, which is haunted by the ghost of a young girl. Within a few pages, they're a couple. The reader is then presented with such exquisite scenes as the girl touching beer to cool it, entering a wall when they have a fight, entering a [http://everyday.3yen.com/2005-12-14/ufo-catchers/ UFO catcher] to assist her boyfriend with the catch and so forth.

* ''[[Patlabor]]'': It's a cop show with [[Instant Awesome, Just Add Mecha|giant robots]].

* ''[[Love Hina]]'' is an [[Unwanted Harem]] [[Romantic Comedy]] series about a manager of a girl's dorm studying to get into Tokyo University. This doesn't stop flying turtles, [[Ki Attacks]], [[Humongous Mecha]], and [[Magical Girl|Magical Girls]] from showing up.

 

== Comic Books ==

* Everything having to do with [[The Muppet Movie|the Muppets]]. In all of the films (and all the TV Shows and TV specials), the fact that the main characters are all a bunch of sentient puppets rarely plays into the reactions of the human cast members (and if it does, it's usually treated as "a little odd" at the most, never "oh my god these 3 feet tall felt monstrosities are all walking around and singing").

** It became extra ridiculous when they hosted an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

* Roxanne Ritchi has been kidnapped by [[Megamind]] and rescued by Metro Man so many times that the whole thing bores her to death. Then {{spoiler|Tighten kidnaps her and there's no Metro Man to save her}}. Now she's scared.

 

* The world of ''[[The Dresden Files]]'' is like this for a lot of people. There's a [[Masquerade]], but for those in the know, daily life is daily life. Harry advertises in the Yellow Pages under "wizard", writes pamphlets for dabblers in magic, and although we don't see this during the books most of his business seems to come from finding lost items and exorcising frightening-but-not-really-dangerous ghosts.

** To be fair, a lot of people still doubt Harry's sanity, if only at first.

* More of the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' magic is of this flavor than not. Most apparent from the day-to-day [[Boarding School]] goings-on; elixirs, spells, and werewolves become a good bit more mundane when you have to write three essays on them by Monday.

* ''[[Lonely Werewolf Girl]]'' ducks into these plot threads half the time. In between politicking between the high clans of werewolves and the plotting of the queen of the fire elementals, you've got college students trying to get cable, a businesswoman trying to get her layabout musician cousins to actually do something, and an overworked sorceress and fashion designer trying to come up with suitable styles for said queen of the fire elementals.

* [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s "Magic Inc".

* Laurell K. Hamilton's [[Anita Blake]] series.

 

* Most comic strips exhibit this to a small degree when you realize how many of them are basically stuck in she kind of time warp where the characters never age.

** There's also the kite eating tree.

** One story arc involved Charlie Brown's baseball-related... uh, hallucinations leading to his short-lived triumph as "Mr. Sack"

* ''[[Get Fuzzy]]'' is set in a world where dogs, cats, and various other pets are ''not quite'' as intelligent as humans. Occasionally the strip actually addresses this.

** Don't even get me started on [[Pearls Before Swine]].

* ''[[Dilbert]]'' is the King of [[Mundane Fantastic]] newspaper comic worlds. Talking animals ''that run corporations'' ([[Corrupt Corporate Executive|sadistically, of course]]), or even the U.N. for a short time, various semi-human personifications of office inhabitant types (from a moth-man attracted by meetings to a parasitic consultant that burrowed through the [[Pointy-Haired Boss]] to get to his wallet to an evil Youthful Executive who was killed and [[Demonic Possession|possessed]]), a garbage man who invents time travel and species-changing rays because he hates to see it done wrong, and dinosaurs hiding behind couches instead of going extinct. And [[Unusually Uninteresting Sight|nobody bats an eye]] while the world remains roughly the same as ours, [[Mundane Fantastic|for a given value of "same"]]. According to Adams himself, people keep writing to him to tell him how realistic the strip is. He figures it's because it's impossible to exaggerate selfishness so much it's unrealistic.

** "So where's the house made of broccoli?"

* In the original ''[[Zoo Tycoon]]'', use of the right [[Easter Egg]] can let you purchase and display unicorns, mermaids, Loch Ness monsters, bigfeet and yeti alongside your mundane animals.

* ''[[Da Capo II]]'', unlike its predecessor, has robots being openly acknowledged, but no one is really that surprised at their existence or interested. There is, however, a degree of racism against them because the story doesn't take place ''that'' far into our future.

 

* ''[[PvP]]'' is another good example, with Skull the Troll being treated as any other character in what is supposedly an office drama about a gaming magazine. His super-intelligent cat may or may not also count.

* ''[[So Damn Bright]]'' is a comedy about a group of cynical college drop outs. So far, so normal. The catch is, one of the characters is a fairy. As in, she has visible fairy wings growing out of her back. Fairies are entrenched enough in the culture that there are [[Red Scare]]-era educational films about their biology, and a dating service asks right after sexual preference whether someone would be comfortable with a fae/"anthro" partner. Several other fairies have also been spotted in the background doing a number of mundane activities such as drinking in a bar.

** It's specifically mentioned that most of the Shortpacked employees have ''no idea'' about the alien invasion a few years back; Robin doesn't want to spoil their little mundane fantasy world and Mike isn't talking for some reason. Again, Ultra-Car gets a free pass.

*** What they have "no idea" about is their co-workers' participation. Amber, at least, is [http://www.shortpacked.com/2009/comic/book-10/01-this-man-this-manhattan/posthumous/ perfectly aware of the invasion].

** ''[[Scary Go Round]]'''s successor ''[[Bad Machinery]]'' continues in the same vein (and the same location). No-one seems to bat an eyelid at having [http://www.scarygoround.com/index.php?date=20100811 a robot in the school].

* ''[[Skin Deep]]'' is like this half the time with it's plot of "mythical creatures [[The Masquerade|living secret from humanity]]." The characters that grew up in mythical society act as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about a town populated by mythical creatures, while humans understandably have troubles getting past that fact.

* ''[[Copper]]'' has a very large tendency to tell all its stories like this, though mostly it seems to be an excuse to draw [[Scenery Porn|fantastic settings]].

* In ''[[Voodoo Walrus]]'' this is a common theme. Cars regularly enter a setting by [http://voodoowalrus.com/?p=1729 falling right out of the sky], [http://voodoowalrus.com/?p=699 explosions are often comprised of cats], and a talking cactus was once responsible for driving a Hummer/pirate ship hybrid vehicle.

** Said cactus also went by the name Captain Thud and was single-handedly responsible for blowing up the entirety of Wichita.

 

 

== Web Original ==

* Many characters in Jon Buck's Paradise setting go on with their normal lives as though nothing had happened after changing into funny animals with minor alterations to their routines to compensate animal parts, subverted in that they do this simply because of the Weirdness Censor in place that would out them as "Changed" IF they reacted too much to their transformation.

* The Notting Cove series is about a [[One-Gender Race]] of fairies that can use magic. Their lives are perfectly mundane. The only one who seems surprised is the foreigner

 

== Western Animation ==

* Possibly ''[[Total Drama Island]]'': it's supposed to be a parody of reality shows, but there are things that wouldn't exist in the real world: animals that are clearly too intelligent/have superpowers, a living Sasquatch-like monster, and just lots of challenges which only cartoon characters could possibly survive. Chris has also demonstrated having some weird technology to run the show, such as a remote-controlled hail cloud and possibly some method of controlling the weather.

** The Area 51 episode was particularly weird about this--yeah, they've seen some weird stuff before, but at no point does ''anyone'' seem the least bit surprised that this challenge involves finding alien artifacts or act surprised when real, living aliens show up and attack them.

* ''[[The Venture Brothers]]'' does beyond "mundane" to the point of being vaguely bleak. While Dr. Venture's life is filled with murders dressed like butterflies, dog-Hitler-clones, and exotic death traps, it's all treated by the cast as standard and tiresome. In spite of all the enormous scientific leaps apparently made in the show's universe, [[Reed Richards Is Useless|the world at large doesn't seem any more futuristic then our own save for the occasional bad guy in a flying car.]] This might be the point- the creators say that the theme of the show is failure, single out the fact that in the 60s, science was going to usher in a utopia that still has yet to arrive.

** Several arcs involve the 'Guild', which keep the mad scientists and the regular adventurers from being too much of a bother on every day society. Their main weapon is murder and they're damn good at it.

* ''[[Rocko's Modern Life]]'', where the things you see on an acid trip are normal.