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[[File:weirdness-censor_buffy_145.png|link=Buffy the Vampire Slayer|right|<small> "This is our year. If we can focus, keep discipline, and [[Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick|not have quite as many mysterious deaths,]] Sunnydale is gonna rule!" </small> ]]
 
 
{{quote|''"Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity [[In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves|when trying to destroy itself]]."''|'''The Seventh Doctor''', ''[[Doctor Who (TV)|Doctor Who]]''}}
 
In some universes, ignoring the antics of the main characters goes beyond [[Somebody ElsesElse's Problem|somebody else's problem]]. It seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. They simply ''refuse'' to see anything too strange.
 
Sometimes invoked for seriousness, such as an explanation in which exploits go on ignored by most people... but often, this is just ''one'' part of the [[Rule of Funny]]. Magic battles, alien invasions, and all other sorts of supernatural happenings often happen ''right'' in front of people's faces... and yet they merely glance out the window, and go back to their morning coffee, sometimes either not noticing it or just saying some excuse.
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Also see [[City of Weirdos]].
{{examples|Examples:}}
 
== Anime and Manga ==
 
* ''[[Ah! My Goddess (Manga)|Ah My Goddess]]'': No matter how pyrotechnic the magic, the antics of the goddesses and demons never draw the police (or possibly the Army). Not even [[Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever|humongous monsters]] like Garm. This was explained in the manga as the townspeople being desensitized to weirdness due to the neighborhood kids pulling off epic level pranks on a regular basis, or some similar [[Hand Wave]].
** They ''do'' live in the same town as a technical engineering college. If those people get bored enough, they can disassemble your car and then reassemble it. Inside your living room.
** Amazingly enough, the fire brigade actually turned up in one of the latest manga chapters. They ended up thinking it was a false alarm though, as all the damage had already been fixed with supernatural means.
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* In [[Doctor Strange]], Magic is frequently explained away by "they must be shooting a movie." People still get out of Dr Strange's way, but they don't understand why. (see Strange Tales vI#120 (May, 1964))
** Amusingly, sometimes Doc and his associates have to chase down misbehaving magic, since the dragon/ogre/giant rabbit is something "even Greenwich Village would notice."
* In the first arc of the ''[[Zatanna]]'' solo series, detective Dale Colton explains to Zatanna that people have a lot of trouble accepting the truth about magic, even though Zatanna herself is a world-famous [[Stage Magician]] with [[M AgiciansMagicians Are Wizards|actual magical powers]] who is a member of the [[Justice League of America]]. No matter how often there is verifiable documentation of legitimate supernatural affairs people prefer to look the other way and hum really loudly, which explains why magic is still a "secret" in the [[DC Universe]]. This is particularly frustrating, even to Zatanna herself, because here there is no [[Masquerade]], the supernatural world ''wants'' to be recognized, but the people are not listening.
 
 
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== Literature ==
 
* In ''[[The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]'', this tendency has been harnessed and distilled into a device called the [[Somebody Elses Problem|Somebody Else's Problem]] field. An example is given of a man who lost a bet about making a mountain disappear when people noticed a suspicious extra [[That's No Moon|moon]] - it would have been much simpler to just paint the mountain pink and put an SEP field on it.
** In the final book in the series, Arthur ends up on a planet that has a race of birds that ignore everything out of the ordinary that happens around them. For example, they fail to notice a giant crashing spaceship. On the flip side, everything normal comes as a huge shock to them. In the author's own words: "...and the sunrise always took them completely by surprise."
* 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.
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* In Christopher Fowler's novel ''Roofworld''. Why has no one noticed a shadow community living on the rooftops of London, rappelling along telegraph lines? They just don't look up much, and dismiss a glimpse of anyone they see up there if do.
* ''[[The Lost Thing]]'' ends with the main character noting that he might have stopped noticing the lost things, implying that the people of the dull place he lives in are too mundane to notice something out of the ordinary like that. Earlier on, his parents don't notice that there's a giant thing in their living room until he draws their attention to it.
* In [[Sergey Lukyanenko]]'s ''[[Night Watch]]'' and its sequels, the [[Differently -Powered Individual|Others]] use pretty basic spells to keep [[Muggles|humans]] from noticing anything out-of-the-ordinary. This is done in order to prevent world-wide witch hunts. For example, the headquarters of the Moscow Night Watch are located on several floors of an office building, but these floors are invisible to humans (i.e. they think the building is smaller). It is common for crowds to simply pass by an Other hiding himself from humans without knowing why they are leaving a small area open. Also, no Other has to worry about burglars, as other spells make humans instinctively want to avoid certain places. This is mentioned by Anton when he has to pretend to be a human for several days and is not allowed to use any magic. He suddenly realizes his car could be stolen without any active wards.
* 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'':
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== Live Action TV ==
 
* "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 ElsesElse'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.
{{quote| '''Giles''': People rationalize what they can and forget what they can't.}}
** 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.
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** In the new series, there's often several large events in modern day person season that no government can, and therefore doesn't, try to cover up. It's a running joke that London evacuates at Christmas now because they're expecting trouble. And in the fourth series it was a running joke that Donna missed all these events and didn't believe they actually happened. Of course, her eyes were opened when she travelled with the Doctor... ("Except that thing about the ''Titanic'' flying over London, I mean, that had to be a hoax.")
** The 11th Doctor episode "Vampires in Venice" has a very weird example of this. The titular vampires are actually piscine aliens using a perception filter to disguise themselves as humans. The vampire part is that, when the machine is working, they look like humans with fangs and no reflections. According to the Doctor, this is because the disguise doesn't change their image in a mirror, and so, when a person sees the reflection of a scary fish monster for the first time, they don't know what to make of it, so their gets rid of the image. At the same time, it claims that we can see their fangs because our survival instincts are powerful enough to override the disguise, which is actually sort of reverse weirdness censor.
* The [[Laser -Guided Amnesia|amnesia pill]] invented by Captain Jack Harkness in ''[[Torchwood (TV)|Torchwood]]'' allows the titular [[Oddly Small Organization]] to erase recent memories, although it is not always permanent (certain clues can re-awaken the memories). On the other hand, they don't even bother a cover-up when lives are at stake. The people either seem to think it was all some sort of mass hypnosis or just accept it and move on, as shown by an old lady calmly pointing Torchwood towards a fish-person that was running away before muttering "bloody Torchwood."
** Ianto also has mad [[Hollywood Hacking|hacking]] skills, allowing him to see what other people are typing on their computers and shut them down remotely. This is only done in the premiere, though, to stop Gwen from writing down all she knows before the pill takes effect.
* Inverted in ''[[Quantum Leap]]'', in that small children, crazy people, the dying, and animals (all of whom lack a weirdness censor) can see the hologram Al, who is invisible and inaudible to everyone else but Sam. Children and crazy people can also see Sam for who he really is; Sam leaped once as the mother of a little girl, who could tell he wasn't her mother, but Sam turned the difficulty by asking her to play a "pretend game".
** There was also a psychic who saw the real Sam (but not Al).
** Plus the time where the "future" part of [[Yet Another Christmas Carol]] is made possible by the Scrooge stand-in having a remarkably similar brain chemisty to Sam (as the hologram was set up to be visible specifically to him).
* The TV series ''[[Special Unit 2 (TV)|Special Unit 2]]'' claimed that most people just naturally "tune out" [[Our Monsters Are Different|Links]], and only the few who notice them can join the Unit. This is [[Hand Wave|Handwaved]], not as a [[Invisible to Normals|special power]] of Links, but just that people don't like to [[Somebody ElsesElse's Problem|acknowledge the unusual]]. Given some of the events of the series, they should have gone with the first explanation, as you'd have to be [[Too Dumb to Live]] to ignore swarms of ravaging monsters.
* Occurs in virtually every series of ''[[Power Rangers]]'' where no one seems quite able to make the connection between those 3 (or 5 or sometimes 6) extremely fit martial arts obsessed kids who all dress in a single colour and are always running off, and the equally mono-coloured Power Rangers who show up moments later.
** [[Lampshaded]] in the ''Dino Thunder'' series when Tommy gains the Black Ranger powers, he tells his students he has to go shopping as there is a distinct lack of black in his wardrobe. True to form, he spends the rest of the season wearing lots of black. And in ''Jungle Fury'', mentor RJ wears various clothing until he becomes the purple-colored fourth ranger, at which point all he wears besides his chef-related clothing is an outfit with a purple shirt. This happens with every [[Sixth Ranger]] arrival, and you'd think it'd get ''really'' conspicuous when a person who wore a variety of colors ''suddenly'' starts wearing one color - the same color as that new Ranger - when he begins hanging with that group of colorcoded teens.
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** It seems more like they just ''really'' don't care. For instance, at one point Amber goes to New York, and mentions "huh, you would never be able to tell this place was destroyed a few years ago."
* Present in ''[[Thunderstruck]]'', where supernatural entities of all descriptions operate right under the nose of the general populace -- partly through passive Weirdness Censoring among the general populace, and partly through active [[Masquerade|Masquerading]]. Children lack Weirdness Censors, though -- in fact, they're actually ''drawn'' to the supernatural.
* In ''[[Everyday Heroes]]'', it seems at first that Uma and her father are just using the standard [[Paper -Thin Disguise]] of wearing glasses to pass as human. Later, they mention using an [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/H2G2/ptitlex7dt39fg "Adams Field"], implying that the glasses have some sort of [[Weirdness Censor]] built into them.
* In the ''[[Shadowgirls]]'' universe; enough templars in an area disbelieving hard enough can shut down magic users entirely. Which leads to {{spoiler|Starkweather circumventing said limitation by somehow tapping into an older magic.}}
* In ''[[Emergency Exit]]'' it is revealed that the Apartment has one of these only after it temporarily takes it down, allowing police attention to come to the large hole in the wall, because "It thinks it's funny" to do so.
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[[Category:Urban Fantasy Tropes]]
[[Category:Weirdness Censor]]
[[Category:Trope]][[Category:Pages with comment tags]]
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