History Main / WeirdnessCensor

--> '''Giles''': People rationalize what they can and forget what they can't.

** There is also the fact that the citizens on Earth are happy to go back to their everyday lives after only briefly wondering if they were killed by Majin Buu and their cities destroyed. Then again, since this is Dragon Ball, maybe mass revivals became so common that not even the muggles care anymore.

* "[[Series/{{Bewitched}} Abner! Abner! Come quickly!]]"

* The plot of the comic ''BlackHole'' centers around a sexually transmitted disease that horribly mutates high school students, yet none of their parents, teachers or, indeed, any adults in the town seem to realize or do anything about it.
* In ''TheInvisibles'', it is revealed that babies are capable of seeing all kinds of strange beings and concepts but lose the ability once they learn [[{{Newspeak}} language]], which makes it impossible for them to express these concepts and thus impossible for them to register them in their heads.

* In ''{{Octodad}}'', the great majority of people don't seem to think strange a "man" walks in bizarre patterns, talks in blurbs, has tentacles instead of arms and legs or causes great ammounts of property damage doing even the most mundane of tasks.

* In {{Octodad}}, the great majority of people don't seem to think strange a "man" walks in bizarre patterns, talks in blurbs or has tentacles instead of arms and legs.

** In ''The Voyage of the 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:''' I suppose you haven't even found out about the British Consul. Of course not.\\
"[Eustace] said that at the first port he would 'lodge a disposition' against them all with the British Council"
*** Eustace doesn't believe that he is still in Britain. A Consul, like an Embassy, is the office of a foreign government, established in a different country. He wants to lodge a deposition with the British Embassy in Narnia. This isn't quite as deluded as implied by the original troper, but still reveals that Eustace can not tell he is in a fantastical universe, unlikely to have a Britain, let alone a Consul.

* This is one of the central themes of Pratchett's lesser known works, the ''JohnnyMaxwellTrilogy'', 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.

** Lampshaded by the main characters in the Season 9 premiere when the world explains [[spoilers: every angel being banished from heaven and falling to earth]] as an enormous, world-wide meteor shower.

** There is a deleted scene where a TV news reporter states that all the robots was actually "A weather balloon"

** There is a deleted scene where a TV news reporter states that all the robots were in truth "A weather balloon"

* In the first film version of the Mack Bolan imitator ''Film/ThePunisher'', the public did not at first feel sure that the Punisher amounted to more than a rumor. In the Lundgren film, as stated in dialogue several times, Castle had apparently died in the car explosion that slew his family five years previous to the main events of the film. In the main action of the film, people still think of Castle as dead, with only his former partner thinking of him as the true identity of the Punisher. Several newspaper headlines suggest that the public did not accept that the Punisher actually operated until he started leaving knives with his skull symbol on the handle behind. (When we see the Punisher in action before the police officially identify him as the hitherto though dead Castle, though, he does not seem to have made any effort to disguise himself. Somehow, no security cameras managed to get a recording of him, it seems Before anyone says "Maybe he looked different before the explosion, maybe he had plastic surgery", sorry, when we see him in flashback, he looks the same.)

This can sometimes lead to ArtificialAtmosphericActions where [=NPCs=] merely treat all sorts of odd stuff as an everyday occurrence.

* In ''{{Berserk}}'', this explains why normal people literally [[InvisibleToNormals cannot see supernatural creatures]] of the less-antagonizing variety, as people only bother to remember what they can explain (or what's not trying to rape and eat them).

** The title character, despite seeking anything weird or unusual in the world, manages to remain oblivious to the weird things that happen around her, aiding the other characters in keeping her out of the loop.

* The {{PPC}} use actual SEP fields taken from ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' continuum to protect themselves from being seen by the characters in the fanfics they're sporking. Unfortunately, MarySue characters ''can'' see them, so they have to actively hide from the targets of their wrath. It's also possible for them to break the SEP field by attracting too much attention to themselves.

** Kuyou Suou / Suou Kuyou is a HumanoidAbomination who is just so...''off'' that normal people don't even react to their presence. When some people (like Kyon) are forced to acknowledge her, they're creeped out by just how obviously yet subtly ''[[UncannyValley wrong]]'' everything about her is.

* ''MahouSenseiNegima'' has this in spades early on when it seems like the even with [[UnusuallyUninterestingSight Unusually Uninteresting Sights]] abound within the [[ElaborateUniversityHigh 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.
-->''{{Muggle}} 1: I see, if it''s a robot, it all makes sense [nod nod].''
-->''{{Muggle}} 2: A-a-ah, I see, sure [nod].''
-->''{{Muggle}} 3: [nod] yep yep''
-->''[[MetaGuy Chisame]]: Wait a second! You punks! Doesn't that seem weird to you!?''

* In ''HaruhiSuzumiya'', the title character, despite seeking anything weird or unusual in the world, manages to remain oblivious to the weird things that happen around her, aiding the other characters in keeping her out of the loop.

--> '''Marco:''' "It's got to be kids. Adults are too reality-bound. It's too hard for them to suspend disbelief for all this weirdness, even when it hits them square in the face."

* In ''Literature/HarryPotter'' 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 [[InvisibleToNormals look like a pile of rubble]], it's not so much that Muggles willfully ignore magic as that any interaction with magic tends to involve them getting parts of their cortex melted.

--->"Bless them, they'll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if it's staring them in the face..."

* In the ''{{Narnia}}'' book ''The Magician's Nephew'', Uncle Andrew is incapable of believing animals can talk. When he encounters animals talking, the narrator takes glee in describing how Andrew's own WeirdnessCensor engages at that moment, rendering him incapable of understanding them. Ironic in that Uncle Andrew spent his ''whole life'' looking for magic, and when he was finally confronted with real power, he just couldn't handle it.
* ''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: I suppose you haven't even found out about the British Consul. Of course not.''
--> "[Eustace] said that at the first port he would 'lodge a disposition' against them all with the British Council"
** Eustace doesn't believe that he is still in Britain. A Consul, like an Embassy, is the office of a foreign government, established in a different country. He wants to lodge a deposition with the British Embassy in Narnia. This isn't quite as deluded as implied by the original troper, but still reveals that Eustace can not tell he is in a fantastical universe, unlikely to have a Britain, let alone a Consul.
* The wizards in the ''YoungWizards'' 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.
* ''TheDresdenFiles'' uses this to explain why you never hear stories about trolls, vampires and magic. Everyone just writes it off as something mundane that, at the time, they thought was impossible. If they're attacked by a troll, for example and they're asked about it in a few months or so, they'll just claim that it was a large drug addict or something (the first few months will just have them staying quiet, afraid of people thinking they're crazy or for thinking that they 'themselves' have gone off the deep end). It also helps that supernatural happenings tend to [[WalkingTechbane screw up any kind of recording equipment]], making efforts to actually record evidence of the supernatural turn out to be grainy, filled with static, and generally seeming like badly distorted or faked content.

* Weird things happened in ''{{Smallville}}'' OncePerEpisode. It took at least several years for [[IntrepidReporter Chloe]] to [[CassandraTruth convince people]] that [[GreenRocks meteor rocks]] cause mutations. These two lines sum it up nicely.
-->'''Officer''': (sees forcefield) What the hell is this, Sheriff?
-->'''Sheriff''': (sighs) Just another day in Smallville.

--> '''Arthur''': You just coughed You're putting me off. *during a dice game, after he throws a bad roll*
--> '''Merlin''': There is just no fooling you, is there? *proceeds to use magic to weigh the dice and win*

-->Brutus: "But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves."

* In ''Webcomic/MegaTokyo'', nobody even seems to notice when someone or something starts breaking stuff in Tokyo, no matter if it's Ping the overpowered RobotGirl, a giant drunken turtle, or a Rent-a-Zilla. This is [[JustifiedTrope justified]] to some degree, because not only does Tokyo get destroyed so often that nobody really cares, but also because the destruction rampages are scheduled and supervised by the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division. There is also some suggestion that many of the more outrageous aspects of Tokyo life are in fact literally InvisibleToNormals, but the actual extent of this effect remains unclear. Also, the people don't look up particular iteration is alluded to in ''Webcomic/MegaTokyo'' as well, where Tohya tells Yuki that the civilians are "just as afraid to look up as you are to look down".
** In the fifth collection of Megatokyo, Gallagher [=FINALLY=] detailed [[WordOfGod 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.

-->'''Miho:''' Now close them. [[ExtraStrengthMasquerade Close them real tight]].

* ''TheSimpsons''. 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.

-->Old Man: [[CurseCutShort "What the ffff-"]]