Bystander Syndrome / Western Animation

Examples of Bystander Syndrome depicted in Western Animation.

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• Adventure Time has Princess Bubblegum (in stark contrast to Finn and his Samaritan Syndrome), who just doesn't care about anything that doesn't affect the Candy Kingdom and its people. This is most apparent in her treatment of her mentally unwell creation Lemongrab, as she is perfectly fine with sticking him in an empty castle far away from her, and it's not until he starts sneaking into her castle and watching the candy people sleeping that she decides to help him.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Master Shake has a different (and often bizarrely random) reason every episode for not caring about what's going on — even in "Revenge of the Trees," where the Monster of the Week was looking for revenge on Shake.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Pizza", since Donut Cop isn't getting his paycheck (Larry was the department accountant), he decides to participate in the looting instead of doing anything about it.
• In Batman Beyond, Dana and Howard don't care much when Terry hears somebody scream in "Speak No Evil". It's to be expected when you live in a city as crime-ridden as Gotham.
• Played for Laughs in The Boondocks when Huey is narrating about African-American stigma against snitching. He tells a story about a young man getting shot and killed during a basketball tournament with 300 witnesses and not a single person called the cops or even tried to help, instead just going home and leaving a note with his fresh corpse telling the police they saw nothing.
• Castlevania (2017): Alucard attempts to persuade his father not to commit genocide against mankind when it was just a single priest who burned his wife at the stake. Dracula argues back that there are no innocents left, because any one of the hundreds of people gathered to watch the execution could have stood up and attempted to stop it, yet no one did. Notably, even Trevor Belmont agrees with this, and unintentionally quotes Dracula on it later, showing that the Villain Has a Point.
• Dave the Barbarian: Udrogoth could be the world capital for this.
  Candy: Happy? They're going to destroy half a continent!
  Fang: Yeah, but not the part we live on.
• Drawn Together: Most characters (considering the prevalent Jerkass-ness) have done this at one point or another, but Captain Hero, a superhero whose Catchphrase is "SAVE YOURSELVES!", is by far the worst offender. His response to Bambi wailing to him about his dead mother (that he shot, no less) is:
  Captain Hero: Sucks to be you!
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • In "That Old Black Magic", every anti-fairy escapes from prison, and Jorgen prepares to round them up. Then his shift ends, to which he responds "Your problem."
  • In every movie, the world gets taken over and heavily modified (twice in one of them), and the people act accordingly. Timmy usually makes an extravagant wish, and suddenly everyone either doesn't notice, is too stupid to understand what is happening, or has had their memories rewritten to think that the changed world was always that way.
• Family Guy:
  • In "Screams of Silence", despite their apparent concern for Brenda's well-being, none of the main characters actually do anything to help her as they witness her getting assaulted by Jeff. Special mention goes to Joe, who refuses to intervene simply because Brenda hasn't reported Jeff (even though that's not how it actually works), even saying the police cannot do anything until it's "too late".
  • Speaking of Joe, oftentimes Peter and Quagmire will openly commit felonies in front of him, with Joe doing nothing about it, sometimes even partaking in it.
  • Whenever Meg is in a near-death situation, don't expect anyone (even her own family) to do anything about it. This is lampshaded in "Breaking Out Is Hard to Do" — Lois tries to save Joe from falling in the sewer, and Joe chants "Not Meg! Not Meg!" to motivate Lois to pull harder, making it clear that Lois would not help Meg if she was in that predicament herself.
• Every character in Futurama has decided, at least once, that the current crisis is somebody else's problem.
  • Scruffy the Janitor may be the most blatant offender here: when asked why he didn't fix the boiler, his reply was "schedule conflict" and another flip of his porn magazine. When said boiler was getting ready to go critical ten feet away.
    Scruffy: Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived. (licks finger, turns page)
  • It was also sort of used when the characters decide they don't care that Earth will be threatened by a giant garbage ball in about a thousand years. Mostly because launching said garbage ball was their method of averting the very same crisis during the present day.
• In one US Acres/Orson's Farm segment of Garfield and Friends a new rooster replaces Roy and is tasked with rescuing the chickens from a weasel. When he prefers to take cover and hide, Orson actually spends the rest of the episode trying to drag him out and make him take on the weasel, never coming to the (likely much quicker and easier) realization to do it himself.
• Invader Zim:
  • A fair bit of the humour comes from the fact that nobody ever notices all the alien spaceships and Humongous Mecha that routinely appear.
  • While Gaz is the only human other than Dib to be fully aware that Zim's an alien, but unlike him, she couldn't care less. As she points out on a few occasions, Zim's own incompetence and huge ego means that no matter how terrifyingly close he may get to actually conquering the world, he'll inevitably screw himself over anyway. Why waste her time getting involved when she can keep playing video games and eating pizza instead? She does help on rare occasions, though it's usually because she was somehow directly dragged into the center of the mess regardless.
    Dib: Don't you care that Zim is trying to destroy all mankind? Huh?
    Gaz: But he's so bad at it.
• Justice League: In "Fury", a woman who parked her car on the side of the road gets in and tries to drive off, but a parked truck is blocking her way. She asks the driver, who is reading a newspaper, to please move because she has a doctor's appointment, but the man says he is on his break and goes back to reading. Wonder Woman then steps in and lifts the truck into the air, allowing the woman to leave.
• In Marvel's Spider-Man, Peter ignores a burglar he could have stopped because he's too caught up in getting into a wrestling match for five minutes of fame. We all know how that works out for him.
• Megas XLR: Coop is the king of this trope. In one instance, he makes a horde of rampaging monsters someone else's problem by chucking them into Philadelphia. In another, he blows up part of the moon, causing worldwide climatic change, and his only concern is buying bubblegum ice cream. He's destroyed several planets with (usually) no remorse, and is arguably more of a danger to the universe than the race trying to conquer it. A race that he created.
• In the Mickey Mouse (2013) short "Bronco Busted", Donald Duck abandons Mickey and Goofy after a millionaire mistaking him for a real horse offers to give Mickey and Goofy the money they need to repair their car in exchange for treating Donald like a king. Once Donald leaves, Goofy asks Mickey if they should tell Daisy about this, and Mickey replies that they shouldn't.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Princess Celestia seems to suffer from this often enough for the fans to take notice and poke fun at her for it. A grand total of five Big Bads have popped up so far, and she's only tried to help directly once. When the villain was right in front of her. And she got stomped to the curb for her effort. Word of God is that Nightmare Moon incapacitated Celestia off-screen. As for Discord's attack, it's implied she couldn't help if she wanted to (she did). She has no excuse for ignoring Sombra's attack, however. Somewhat in her defense, she couldn't have won even if she did try. She needed Luna's help and/or the Elements of Harmony to defeat three of them in the past and only managed to seal them away rather than completely defeat them.
  • The Mane Six suffer a bout of this during "Daring Don't" when they just stand back and watch as Daring Do and a bunch of thugs fight over a giant gold ring. Fluttershy even lampshades it.
    Fluttershy: Um, should we go in and help her maybe?
  • "Slice of Life" parodies this. Not only does the populace not seem all that interested in fighting or running from the Bugbear that is currently being engaged by the Mane Six, but they act as if monsters tearing their city apart is a totally normal and common occurrence (it happens about 30% of the time, while the other 70% is calm and peaceful, so it's not overly common). During their otherwise ship-tastic scene, Bon Bon/Sweetie Drops and Lyra have this to say:
    Bon Bon: (after hearing the monster growl) What was that?
    Lyra: (with complete disinterest) There's some monster attacking Ponyville or something.
    Bon Bon: (rolls eyes) What is it this time? Some creature from the Everfree Forest or something?
• Given a pretty strong lampshade in a series of short Robot Chicken sketches where "Little Hitler" gradually takes over the desks and such of all his classmates. In the final of the three sketches Little America, sitting off to the side, scoffs at Little Hitler taking over most of the classroom and says "It's not my problem." Then Little Japan comes over and messes with Little America's desk. Cue Little America calmly but angrily taking a deep breath and saying "Now it's my problem."
• Sealab 2021 does this a lot. In the pilot episode, "I, Robot," Quinn is trying to save Sealab from exploding — but everyone else is too busy with a Seinfeldian Conversation to help. In "Green Fever," zombies attack the station, but Debbie is too busy preparing her birthday party, Stormy and Sparks are busy chatting about steel pipes, etc. Exactly who is uncaring varies; in "No Waterworld," Quinn is too busy with his monster truck to help Debbie find out why all the water around the station has disappeared.
• The Simpsons:
  • When Lenny and Carl walk past a tank containing radioactive gas that's bursting at the seams, Carl remarks nonchalantly about the tank's imminent failure, to which Lenny quips "Who cares? It's Homer's problem."
  • Once Homer's job as Sanitation Commissioner predictably starts falling apart, he decides the best way to get funding is for other cities to pay him to bury their garbage. When questioned he almost responds with this trope. Later on this backfires horribly, to the point Springfield ends up becoming a huge dump and the city's buildings have to be relocated five miles away.
  • One episode has Santa's Little Helper become a star, then during one of his promos, Homer fakes drowning in the beach (in an effort to get him back). When Santa's Little Helper chickens out of swimming, the crowd furiously shame a dog for not saving the man, none of them even trying to go in themselves.
  • When Marge exposes Snake's Three-Card Monte con in front of a crowd, Snake runs away and Marge yells for somebody to stop him. Everyone just stands there, so Marge goes after him herself.
  • The Frank Grimes episode. Grimes snaps and starts acting like Homer, pointing out all his worst traits. Homer, Mr. Burns, Smithers and several employees see that he's about to touch high-voltage wires without safety gloves. Nobody bothers to stop him from grabbing the wires, and Grimes is fatally electrocuted.
  • Anytime Homer throttles Bart, expect Marge and Lisa doing nothing to stop it (with Lisa joining in sometimes)
• In Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Zorak and Moltar frequently get bored with Space Ghost's show, and decide their jobs on it are for someone else to do. Sometimes Space Ghost gets bored with his own show, and does the same thing.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Wet Painters", SpongeBob is in danger of having his butt removed by his boss and is abandoned in a moment of crisis by his own reflection.
  • In "SpongeBob Meets the Strangler", the police refuse to help SpongeBob when the latter is getting menaced by the Strangler, saying it's not their job (even though it actually is) and leaving him to his fate. They even go as far as teasing him over it:
    Officer Slugfish: Give us a call if you see him again, tattletale!
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In the first season Episode "Hostage Crisis" a senator is held at gun point by a bounty hunter. An armed senate guard passes by and does... nothing! He does not even ask where he is going. More surprisingly he is a member of the Senate Commandos, which are considered as the best of the Senate Guard, an elite security force of the Galactic Republic. But why help a Senator if there are Jedi who can deal with it?

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