Weirdness Censor: Difference between revisions

** And in [[Umineko no Naku Koro ni]] Battler uses it to deny that the Beato/Virgilia battle happened {{spoiler|even better example in ep 5, after being defeated by Battler on the gameboard Erika suddenly stands up in her chair during the meal and starts talking in blue truth and exclaims to her master [[Complete Monster|Bernkastel]] that she has won and has to be acknowledged. Then she suddenly sits down in her chair eating. The family collectively thinks they were hallucinating}}

* ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' has this is spades early on when it seems like the even with [[Unusually Uninteresting Sight|Unusually Uninteresting Sights]] abound within the [[Elaborate University High|Academy]], no one with the exception of Chisame could care to notice the blatantly odd things surrounding them. It was later revealed that mages keep their [[Masquerade]] protected by spells put in place to heighten people's ability to dis-believe information they intake (they also rely on people's inherent ability to doubt). This naturally makes for interesting situations whenever the very odd is shown.

''[[Meta Guy|Chisame]]: Wait a second! You punks! Doesn't that seem weird to you!?'' }}

** In volumes 1 and 9, a spell version (like a [[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy|Somebody Else's Problem Field]]) is mentioned to be used by mages when they do or discuss magic publicly, and don't want to be found out. In vol. 9. Asakura runs head first into it when she and Sayo try to follow Negi, and describes it as a sudden desire ''not'' to go into the area protected by it (Sayo, as a Ghost, is unaffected). Once she's noticed the effect, she can resist it, but is physically straining to do so the further in she goes.

* In ''[[Harry Potter]]'' the entrance to Diagon Alley, a street filled with shops for wizards, is hidden behind a pub called The Leaky Cauldron which muggles never notice because they don't pay attention to their surroundings and don't expect it to be there. Though with memory charms, "Muggle repelling wards" and the charms that make Hogwarts [[Invisible to Normals|look like a pile of rubble]], it's not so much that Muggles wilfully ignore magic as that any interaction with magic tends to involve them getting parts of their cortex melted.

** Arthur Weasley also notes that [[Muggles]] who are the victims of such magical prankings as shrinking keys will always insist that they simply lost them.

* This is a big part of [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s [[Cthulhu Mythos]]; the premise being that if the vast majority of human beings didn't do this, they'd go insane from the knowledge of [[Cosmic Horror|cosmic horrors]].

** Perhaps in the later stories by other authors; Lovecraft's own stories involved people being traumatized and unable to ''forget'' the weirdness that they encounter, even if it was just a photograph, a shadowy image, or a cloaked figure.

* ''The Last Battle'' has another instance set after Narnia's end, where the dwarves eat delicious food in a beautiful meadow but perceive it as stale bread in a muckhole due to their cynical incapability to accept the paradise.

* In ''The Voyage of Dawn Treader'', after entering Narnia Eustace Scrubb seems completely certain he is still in Britain despite the fact that he was ''pulled through a picture in the wall''.

"[Eustace] said that at the first port he would 'lodge a disposition' against them all with the British Council" }}

* The wizards in the ''[[Young Wizards]]'' series depend on this to get away with doing some forms of magic out in the open. The bullies can't hit you because your spell is deflecting their blows? They convince themselves that they didn't ''want'' to hit you, because invisible force fields are impossible. Vanish off a subway platform via teleporting? Whoever saw you thinks you simply moved deeper into the crowd while they weren't looking.

** Moreover, it is described in both ''[[Discworld/Moving Pictures|Moving Pictures]]'' and ''[[Discworld/Guards Guards|Guards! Guards!]]'' as a kind of permanent level of intoxication generated by the brain to be able to ignore things that could drive it to madness. Some people are naturally "super-sober" or it can be achieved by, say drinking extra-strong klatchian coffee, and they are aware of everything normal people are not, sometimes leading to madness.

** There's also ''[[Discworld/Thief of Time|Thief of Time]]'', where an actual horse (Binky) walks into a library to pick up Susan. Except that everybody knows that that doesn't happen, so it's obviously not real and therefore nothing to be concerned about.

* This is one of the central themes of Pratchett's lesser known works, the ''[[Johnny Maxwell Trilogy]]'', where the title character explicitly lacks those kind of mental filters, so he's usually the first (and sometimes only) one to notice the weird things around him. Ironically, that same lack of mental agility makes him best equipped to actually ''deal'' with said weirdness, as his friends tend to try to deal according to the way things are "supposed to" go.

* In the ''[[Percy Jackson and The Olympians]]'' books, a magical force called Mist acts as an active [[Weirdness Censor]] to cover up whenever a mortal sees gods or monsters. A few mortals are known to be immune to its effects.

* Verge Foray's novella ''Practice'' has an incident of this. A school for "disturbed children" is actually for psychic children. A private institute, it's subject to surprise accreditation inspections and the children conspire in [[The Masquerade]] with the non-psychic adults. When one of the kids does make a minor slip, another kid checks the inspectors' minds and finds that one of them "saw it, but he didn't believe it, so he didn't ''see'' it."

* Frank Herbert played with this more than once, e.g. in ''The Featherbedders'':

* Vadim Panov:

** ''Secret City'': While a general [[Masquerade]] is in effect, most humans will easily believe claims that data were forged, witnesses drunk or drugged and people claiming to use magic used clever technology or hypnotism. The eponymous Secret City dwellers also actively support skepticism in the population.

 

* "Sunnydale Syndrome" (this trope's alternate name) is ascribed to the residents of Sunnydale, California in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', a town where people live in [[Somebody Else's Problem|comical denial]] of the vampires, werewolves and other supernatural forces that roam its streets. This does see occasional [[Lampshade Hanging]]: people on the sly mention all the "mysterious" deaths, and musician Aimee Mann says she hates playing vampire towns. A particularly large lampshade is hung at the end of season three, where the graduating class of Sunnydale High gives Buffy an award as "Class Protector", while admitting they don't usually acknowledge there's anything to be protected from. This indicates that they probably know that something's going on with their town, and something odd as well, but they don't suspect supernatural forces to be involved. In season 6, a typical ''Sunnydale Times'' headline reads "Mayhem Ensues: Monsters Definitely Not Involved". Then again, Snyder mentions lying about vampires attacking the high school in season 2, telling journalists it was a gang on PCP -- which the chief of police says is the usual story.

** Towards the end of season 7, the residents finally start to clue up that the town isn't safe, leaving en masse. The weirdness censor is broken ''globally'' in season 8, when Harmony is photographed biting Andy Dick and vampires, demons, Slayers, and magic are brought to light.

* This continues in ''[[Angel]]'', most notably in S1's "victim of the week" stories. Unfortunately, starting from those same eps, we see half of the LA underworld, a major law firm, numerous small businesses, churches, every street gang etc all know about the supernatural; that'd be narrative convenience for you. It gets ''really'' silly when S4 sees bizarre manifestations, a rain of fire, the ''sun being blotted out for days'', vampires swarming the city, and finally the whole city (and soon surrounding county) being brainwashed & ruled by a supernatural entity, and seemingly ''thousands'' of deaths - a number of those deaths being very public massacres. Nobody seems to remember in S5, or ''notice'' outside of LA (the government and army know about demons, where ''are'' they?)

* Played up in ''[[The Young Ones]]'' episode "Boring" for comedic effect, and most people suffer from this most of the time.

* The ''[[Father Ted]]'' episode "Speed 3": Father Dougal McGuire averts this when he moonlights as a temporary short-notice milkman. He sits in bed thinking about the day he's just had when a look of horror comes across his face. Considering his day involved his milk-float having a bomb planted on it by his predecessor, he has every right to look back with horror. However it was his weirdness censor finally failing with regard to his temporary patrons:

** "Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse": From his previous experience, Dougal gave Ted an idea on [[It Makes Sense in Context|how to kick their boss up the arse and get away with it]]. The plan relied on the Bishop's weirdness censor kicking in: Kick him up the arse and act like nothing had happened, because such a thing couldn't possibly happen. Like Dougal, the weirdness censor failed within twenty-four hours after the event. Although Ted still managed to convince him that he'd imagined the whole thing - until he saw the 10 foot high photograph of Ted kicking him that Ted had commissioned the last night after his celebratory drinking.

* ''[[The Lost Room]]'' had a subculture of collectors, hobbyists, organizations and criminals looking for some [[Artifact of Doom|conspicuously destructive objects]] that shunned the laws of physics, thermodynamics and entropy while [[Artifact of Attraction|consuming / destroying the lives of most people who came across them.]] Despite having been tracked, coveted and recklessly experimented with for 40 years, the Police (including [[Papa Wolf|our hero]]) seem to have no way of anticipating or dealing with them. Moreover, these quirky little atom-age [[MacGuffin|MacGuffins]] subtly influenced the laws of probability to get closer to one another, making them even easier to track. Either some unseen government power tries to keep all those pesky cases of spontaneous combustion out of the news with a hypnotic roll of toilet paper, or [[Agent Mulder|organizations like "The Order" and "The Legion" are just too damn nerdy for most people to take seriously.]]

== Theater ==

* [[Discussed]] in ''[[Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]]'':

 

 

** In the fifth collection of Megatokyo, Gallagher FINALLY detailed [[Word of God|his explanation for this phenomenon]]: "[http://wikitokyo.mt-talk.net/wiki/What_is_Megatokyo_all_about%3F ...the main theme of Megatokyo is how everyone has different perceptions of the world around them...]" Everyone sees the world slightly differently. Piro and Largo are on the extreme ends of the scale--Piro only sees "mundane" things (and dismisses the fantastic things as mundane things) and Largo only sees "fantastic" things, and comes up with fantastic explanations for the mundane things he sees. Everyone else is somewhere else on this scale, nearly always between those two extremes.

** It seems as though [[Dark Magical Girl|Miho]] has the power to ''turn off'' other people's [[Weirdness Censor|Weirdness Censors]]. In [http://www.megatokyo.com/strip/1000 this comic], she tells Kimiko to open her eyes, which leads her to notice that the restaurant is under attack by killer robots.

* Most of the populace of Generictown in ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]]'' appears to have this trait to one degree or another (especially Mr. Bystander). Even Bob himself often refuses to acknowledge just ''how'' bizarre the situations are that he finds himself in. The only castmember completely free of this trope is Jean, leading her to exclaim at one point, [http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20071006.html "Ye gods! I'm the only sane person in town!"]

* Played up to the point of parody in [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=070304 this] ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' strip.

== Western Animation ==

* ''[[The Simpsons]]'', full stop. The entire theme of ''Homer's Enemy'' was to plop a regular person (in the form of Frank Grimes) into the Springfield universe and have them react to just how ''bizarre'' that world really was. Frank was thunderstruck how a moron like Homer could have two cars, win a Grammy, tour with rock stars, be friends with Gerald Ford and been to space on the space shuttle.

* ''[[American Dragon Jake Long]]'': [[Is This a Joke?|"I'm glad everyone bought the You've-been-Punked story we feed them."]]

* Became a running joke in ''Transformers: Robots in Disguise'', in which one woman is constantly harassed by Sideburn--who is trying to get jiggy with her car. By narrative convenience, she starts being in range of the giant robot battles nearly every episode.

* Officer Barbrady does this a lot in the early episodes of ''[[South Park]]'', whether it's political corruption or alien plots.

* Played straight and subverted in the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bETCusT5kNM Cat Came Back cartoon] when the old man takes the cat for a ride into the mountains on a train trolley. Along the way, he runs over or passes several women tied to the train tracks, unfazed. But when he spots a ''cow'' tied to the tracks...

* Citizens in ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' who notice the larger stuff the boys do never seem to find it worthy enough for the newspaper. Candace was pretty unlucky no one ever wanted to talk to her parents about what the boys had done, especially in [[The Movie]], where ''the entire town witnesses a robot takeover and never discusses it again''.

** And it's not just in the boys' hometown. In one episode, [[Humongous Mecha|giant robots of a dragon and Queen Elizabeth I]] were duking it out in downtown London. While this does make it to the news, the only thing that caught people's attention was the second story of a new version of ''Jane Eyre'' being made.