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Elephant In The Living Room
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Peter: Let's just ignore it and hope it goes away. Just like we do with the squid.
(giant squid knocks the plates off table)
Lois: Uh, earthquake.
Peter: Truck passing by.
Also rendered "the elephant in the corner", the Elephant In The Living Room is a large topic or issue which should be obvious to everyone but which is deliberately or conspicuously avoided. In most cases this is used to create comedic tension, for example when a character has a Big Secret he must struggle to divert conversation away from. In stark contrast, some cases of the trope creates a tragic vibe, with an Elephant so awful that nobody can bring themselves to raise the topic.
For cases where a subject within the series that simply cannot be questioned, or else the whole premise will fall apart, it's a case of why they don't Just Eat Gilligan. If a subject is addressed with some form of implausible explanation, that is most often a Hand Wave or Scotch Tape; when the subject is simply verboten, it is the Elephant in the Living Room.
In Anime, this trope is known as a Pregnant Ranma Problem, based on the following anecdotal discussion between the artist of Ranma 1/2 and a random fan at a convention:
Which just about sums up 90% of these examples. Cheers!
See also Unusually Uninteresting Sight.
Examples:
- In Dead Like Me there are grim reapers, in public. The living interact with them like normal people, but when on the job they aren't noticed as extraordinary even when arguing with ghosts.
- Popular theory among viewers is that when Reapers are...er...reaping, they turn invisible to normal people. Which then raises the question of what people think when the Reaper suddenly disappears.
- I think that, at some point during the first season, it's mentioned that people just sort of ignore Reapers while they're on the job. They don't disappear so much as stop being interesting.
- In the comicbook Fables, the protagonists rarely talk about much of their pasts, even if it was full of abominable deeds. Which, considering they're all old-school Grimm storybook fables, can be extensive indeed. The in story explanation is they were all given amnesty when they entered the mundane world. This doesn't keep them from being wary of each other, nor from falling back on old habits.
- Not subverted, but occasionally addressed in Battlestar Galactica. While the remains of humanity are on the run after the destruction of their homes, and shower vitriol on the Cylons for it, no one talks about the reasons for the Cylon's hate of humanity. Only commander Adama points out that "We deserved what we got for enslaving our creations; we were terrible parents, do we deserve to survive?" (Paraphrased) The question is occasionally brought up to reinforce that humanity is not blameless in the show's Back Story, and needs to atone.
- Adama actually directly asks Boomer why the Cylons hate humanity so much in one episode. She replies that during Galactica's decommissioning speech during the pilot episode, Adama asked whether humanity deserved to survive. Then she adds "Maybe you don't."
- In a Sci Fi Stargate SG-1 special, a letter had one viewer asking why all the aliens speak English. The reader, David Hewlett, simply laughed and playfully stated that he couldn't believe they caught onto that.
- In Abe&Kroenen, almost nobody mentions the fact that Kroenen was and is a Nazi assassin. For some reason his presumed Nazi beliefs never actually make an appearance, probably because that would be a good way to lose a lot of viewers.
- In Mahou Sensei Negima Negi often uses the excuse that he's considering one of his students to become his magical partner in order to prevent other mages from using Laser Guided Amnesia on them to maintain the Masquerade. The Elephant is that this excuse won't protect the Muggles in his class forever.
- At the rate things are going, will there be any Muggles left in said class by the time they graduate? They're down to somewhere around 7/31 at this point...
- Were there many in the first place?
- Out of the starting 31 students? In the manga, 12. Plus, another 4 that have dealt with magic but are kept in the dark by relatives/close friends, and another 4 that are aware of some weirdness, but not about magic until their dealings with Negi, so there's no Elephant there.
- He only used this excuse in Negima!?, the second anime. In the manga, it seems that as long as his magic doesn't go public, it's okay for people to know.
- This Sinfest comic is not exactly an example of the trope, but still terribly appropriate
 .
- The movie Elephant by Gus van Sant was named exactly for this reason (it's about a High School shooting).
- One public awareness commercial that this editor remembers seeing once(possibly during a Superbowl?) has a man walking into an office accompanied by an elephant, with the nametag of "AIDS." Certainly a very effective message.
- One of Kousaka's major character traits in Genshiken is that he has absolutely no awareness of the elephant in the room. As a result, he says what everyone's thinking without hesitation. A key example is when the rest of the club is unsure of whether Ohno and Tanaka are dating; as everyone else vacillates, he just yells, "Hey! Are you two going out?"
- In the Discworld novels, one of the Irregulars is a beggar named Duck Man, for the very simple reason that he has a duck on his head. Most people don't mention the duck out of politeness, and those who do bring it up will be met with the response "What duck?" It's mentioned that he used to quite normal "before everyone else started seeing ducks".
- Kim Newman's novel The Quorum follows on from his short story "Organ Donors", and references it a few times, including the characters of private investigator Sally Rhodes (and her child, conceived in "Organ Donors") and Derek Leech, satanic media magnate who uses black magic to advance his cause. Sally discovers Leech's nature in "Organ Donors" but has forgotten by The Quorum: Newman admitted there's no reason for this beyond it breaking the story.
- The big one from Ah My Goddess: what will happen to Keiichi and Belldandy's relationship as Keiichi grows old? A Light Novel was recently released that pondered just that.
- Keiichi and Peorth had a brief conversation about that in the Manga. Keiichi's biggest concern, to Peorth's surprise, was how it would hurt Belldandy.
- This troper has a preferred solution.
- Ads for AXA Equities invoke this trope by having as a spokesperson the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, reminding people to invest for retirement.
- Which is a bizarrely mixed metaphor. The proverbial 800-pound gorilla represents the ability to do whatever you want because nobody dares to stop you...
- Where do you invest your money when there's an 800-pound gorilla in the room? Anywhere he tells you to.
- The basis of a long-running introduction to an episode of The Far Side animated series. Probably.
- There's a subplot in the movie Freaks in which Roscoe the clown, who is engaged to Daisy Hilton, is introduced to the fiance of Daisy's sister, Violet, and the line "You must come over and visit us some time," is used. At no point does anyone explicitly mention the fact that Daisy and Violet are joined at the hip. The whole thing is going to be very awkward.
- It was a Running Gag in The Oblongs that everyone avoided directly referencing the fact that Bob doesn't have arms or legs.
- Although, in the episode "Bucketheads", Tommy Vinegar does call him a Weeble.
- In the Doctor Who episode The Unicorn and the Wasp:
Doctor: She’d just discovered her husband was having an affair.
Donna: You'd never think to look at her. Smiling away.
Doctor: Well, she’s British and moneyed. That’s what they do. They carry on.
- In Cromartie High School, no one but Kamiyama and Hayashida seem to realize that Mechazawa is a robot, and even they never directly say it.
- This an the general weirdness is lampshaded in the last scene of the anime: Hayashida and Maeda ask Kamiyama what they're going to with their lives. Kamiyama then points out the window to Mechazawa, Freddie, his horse, and Gorilla, stating that's whatever the three of them might do doesn't interest him nearly as much as what those other guys might do.
- Sunnydale's vampire problem could be thought of this way, as several episodes make it obvious that the Muggles know what's going on (especially after season three), they just try to ignore it and get on with their lives.
- A literal and classic example appears in the play (and later film) Billy Rose's Jumbo. Jimmy Durante's character is attempting to "sneak" an elephant out of his failing circus as the creditors close in. He and the elephant are of course promptly confronted by the sheriff and the repo squad:
Sheriff: Hey! Where are you going with that elephant?
Durante: (Pauses with the elephant looming directly behind him, looks left, looks right) Elephant? What elephant?
- Nobody in Degrassi talks about the unusually high rate of horrible things that happen to its students. Despite the school shooting, stabbing, rape, attempted rape, STD outbreak, and umpteen teen pregnancies, which in the real world would make Degrassi the most infamous school in all of Canada, everyone still thinks that it's a fabulous school and nobody moves away to find a safer one.
- Despite the fact that Marvel Comics's version of New York City has been the site of multiple alien invasions, a demonic infestation, has suffered through every kind of cockamamie plot imaginable, and is routinely targeted by supervillains of every stripe, there has never been any sort of mass exodus or serious damage to the economy in spite of all the upheavals.
- Similarly, Gotham City never suffers from any long-term economic damage or loss of population, despite the fact that a number of psychopathic supervillains routinely use the city as a stage for their grisly "performances" (the Joker), a giant petri dish for their scientific experiments (the Scarecrow and his attempting to use the people of Gotham as test subjects in his experiments in fear), or a base for their environnmental crusades (Poison Ivy). And even ignoring them, the city has long been a Wretched Hive of endemic police and civic corruption and mob activity, making it curious that anyone would willingly choose to live there.
- Things DID eventually get so bad that, after an earthquake damaged the city, the government isolated Gotham from the rest of the USA (in the "No Man's Land" story arc) on the excuse that it was too expensive to rebuild it. People who refused to leave were left inside to their own devices, and even outside help was forbidden! This is of course completely absurd (and illegal.)
- Most cities in superhero comics suffer from at least one Elephant In The Living Room. Why don't the super-powered villains move out of the city where Superman lives? Why don't all the unpowered white-collar supervillains (or at least the two or three of them that don't have a major case of Foe Yay for Batman) move out of the city where the World's Greatest Detective lives? Why don't Marvel villains move out of the one city where almost every single non-comedic superhero lives?]
- This was lampshaded and subverted a bit in the Flash comics back in more innocent days. The Central City and Keystone City crooks were generally harmless and some even had codes against killing, so they were more seen as nuisances then anything. Geoff Johns added another reason: most of the people in Keystone work in Heavy Industry, and it's unlikely that their jobs would exist anywhere else.
- In Detective Conan, Conan's increasingly noticeable failure to act as a normal little boy arises suspicions from just about everyone in the cast not privy to his secret, yet nobody really thinks of just sitting the kid down and asking him just how on earth does he knows so much, rather prefering to harbor vague suspicions relatively forever.
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