No matter how exotic or spectacular the setting, whatever magic or superscience is involved, if relatable and compelling characters live there, it has to be habitable. Often, that takes a group effort. Streets must be swept, crops must be irrigated, Power Crystals must be charged and distributed. An Academy of Adventure needs adventuresome teachers. Mystical Plagues call for magical healthcare. A Portal Network will fail if not for the network technicians, especially if Hyperspace Is a Scary Place. Sometimes, there are even therapists.
Focusing on the people responsible for this level of social and technical maintenance draws attention to the contrast inherent in Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems. The way an imaginary society deals with familiar problems can ground the setting or deconstruct genre elements that are normally taken for granted. At the same time, work which would be quotidian on Earth can attract interest through the very unfamiliar causes of those problems... for the audience, at least. In-universe, most people will be Fantastically Indifferent, and the protagonists may regularly struggle to get enough respect, attention, or funding compared to more glamourous jobs like Police Psychics or Space Marines. The Jaded Professional is not uncommon.
Exactly who the protagonists work for may vary; whether they are a government, corporation, church, or some other NGO depending on the setting, they are likely an Impartial Purpose-Driven Faction. Or at least they tried to present themselves that way before plot started happening.
Sub-Trope of Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems, alongside (and potentially overlapping with) Extranormal Institute, Magical Society, Monsters Anonymous, and especially Weird Trade Union. Fantastic Legal Weirdness, Fantastic Religious Weirdness, and Fantastically Challenging Patient have similar appeal and sometimes may be directly involved. Compare Benevolent Conspiracy and Who You Gonna Call?. May involve Notary Nonsense for fantastic notarization situations. Contrast Super Civil Services, the James Bond to this trope's George Smiley, where the setting is Like Reality, Unless Noted and the speculative elements mainly serve to make public service look flashy and exciting.
Super-Trope for Creature-Hunter Organization and Adventure Guild, as well as the many variants on fantastic police and paramilitary departments (Androids and Detectives, Cape Busters, The Men in Black, Mutant Draft Board, Police Psychic, Space Police, Time Police, Vampire Detective Series) — the most common public service job to be portrayed in fiction, speculative or otherwise, and frequently exempt from the typical tone (by virtue of crime-fighting and monster-hunting having more obvious sources of danger and conflict than sanitation engineering). Therefore, please sort examples into a relevant subtrope if possible.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Concrete Revolutio: Choujin Gensou is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink with superhumans ranging from organic mecha to aliens to youkai. The protagonists in this story are the Superhuman Bureau, tasked with the mission of ensuring all these fantastical beings have their documents up to date to ensure they will receive the social services necessary to live comfortably in society.
- Delicious in Dungeon: The Dungeon has attracted an entire adventuring economy, including government-subsidized "corpse retriever" squads who resurrect the dead for a cut of their treasure. The most unethical ones deliberately sabotage adventurers to keep the mortality rate high.
- Interviews with Monster Girls: The titular "monster" girls are referred to in-universe as "Demi-humans", essentially Mutants, with several groups designed to assist them in society.
- Vampires, like Hikari, are provided rations of blood to help keep them healthy.
- Succubi like Sakie are provided with remote housing if they need, to prevent Power Incontinence.
- Succubi also are the subject of a special investigative branch that looks into incidents of sexual harassment involving succubi, whose job is to determine if the incident was caused by Power Incontinence, a deliberate use of their powers to test their limits, or if someone was targeting succubi with the hopes of claiming that the succubus caused it.
- Kaiju No. 8: Kaiju Cleanup Crew comes in to remove the Kaiju carcasses by manually stripping them down with power tools, which makes basically somewhat unusual and sometimes endangered garbage collectors. They are the first step in rebuilding the affected area after an attack and gathering samples for the companies that study Kaiju. The protagonist Kafka Hibino has a comprehensive knowledge of Kaiju anatomy as a result of working the job for years.
- In Mission: Yozakura Family, the Spy Foundation runs an orphanage for the children left behind when their spy parents are killed as well as orphans taken in by spies on missions. In addition to being an Orphanage of Love, many of the orphans are taught the skills necessary to become spies themselves so they'll find employment once they come of age.
- In Monster Musume, the government is running a foreign exchange program to gradually introduce monsters into human society and promote coexistence. The story begins when a clerical error causes Miia to bunk at Kimihito's house. Her affection for Kimihito soon makes him a poster boy for the program, resulting in him housing several additional monster girls.
- In My Hero Academia, nearly Everyone Is a Super with strict laws in place to prevent unsanctioned use of Quirks to mitigate potential havoc. Since most people gain their Quirks by the age of four, parents can take their children to Quirk counselors to help them acclimate to their abilities and use them responsibly. However, the tight restrictions on the use of superpowers mean that advice for handling more esoteric and dangerous abilities may simply come down to "Don't use them and pretend you don't have them". This is problematic because most people have an innate urge to use their Quirks in some capacity, given that Quirks are an inherent part of one's biology. In the case of Himiko Toga, this led her to snap and become a Yandere Serial Killer because she had no outlet to use her blood-based shapeshifting powers.
- Planetes focuses on the Debris Section of the Technora corporation, which is legally required to contribute to clearing Earth orbit of abandoned booster rockets, obsolete satellites, dropped screws, and other dangerous, high-velocity trash. Despite the risks and training required of them, Debris Section astronauts are regarded as orbital garbage collectors and generally respected comparably.
- Ryuu to Yuusha to Haitatsunin follows Yoshida, an ordinary half-elf courier for the local mail service. In a world of dungeons, magic, heroes, and dragons, Yoshida has to scale mountains to deliver eviction orders to crotchety old wizards, pass threatening letters between a couple of young storeowners with Belligerent Sexual Tension, and flee mice covered in aphrodisiac-coated spines while delivering packages from another city.
Comic Books
- The point of the governmental agency Damage Control is to handle the cleanup and reconstruction efforts following the inevitably destructive battles between superheroes and supervillains. In a particularly tragic turn of events, the plot of Civil War (2006) happened (at least partially) because Damage Control got a new boss who decided the company was not getting enough contracts to repair superhero battle damages and peddled power-boosting drugs to villains knowing the inevitable destruction that it would lead to (he just did not expected a school full of children to get blown up. He, quite karmically, gets a visit from Wolverine as a result).
- PS238 is about a public elementary school (the titular 238) that's dedicated to teaching metahuman students. In addition to basic classes like reading and arithmetic, there are classes about how to control their powers, maintaining a Secret Identity, and other superhero-related stuff. It's also shown that there are job fairs for metahumans to help them get jobs that match their powers.
Fan Works
- This trope is commonly used by fans of certain franchises either for better world-building (expanding on pre-existing lore from a franchise to help it make more sense) or as a Take That! to explain how a system in a work is flawed and would not/should not work. This is often seen in fanfics of the Harry Potter franchise and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
- If Wishes Were Ponies does both. The fic occasionally shows the slightly more mundane side to the government in Equestria (even briefly going into adoption laws in Equestria note ). At the same time, the sheer absurdity behind some laws and practices in the wizarding world (such as the blood purity system and slipshod way Hogwarts is run) gets ridiculed by the children and pretty much every Equestrian in the work.
Films — Live-Action
- The premise of The Troll Hunter is that what used to be a heroic job worthy of commemoration in fairy tales has become a routine and thankless kind of animal control, involving filling out after-action forms in triplicate and wiping out mythical creatures for the sake of civic construction projects. This is the basis of Hans' motivation to whistleblow the existence of the TST.
Literature
- The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump is set in an alternate history where Magitek is common and depicts the work of the setting's version of the Environmental Protection Agency. There's a big fantastical threat that underpins the plot, but much of their work (confiscating illegally imported magical creatures, assisting deities endangered by habitat loss, etc.) is treated as day-to-day routine.
- Later Discworld books see Ankh-Morpork industrialising, largely under the direction of Moist von Lipwig, a con artist secretly pardoned by the Patrician on the condition that he figure out how to modernise the post office. His success is rewarded with repeating his performance for the Royal Mint and Bank, and then establishing a public railway system.
- Grimoire's Soul: The Dysfunctional Magic Unit, or DMU, of the Atrium is effectively a boarding house/therapy center for those who either cannot use magic at all or only with great effort, which is treated as a disability in a society where everyone is otherwise capable of using magic.
- The Happy Bureaucracy book series follows the misadventures of one of the agents of the sole surviving part of the Government of the United States of America following a nuclear apocalypse, which happens to be the Internal Revenue Service. The fact that the world has completely gone to hell and people are more likely to shoot him than say "hello" does not matters to his employers — they desire a thorough census of the surviving settlements so they can calculate how much to tax them come the end of the fiscal year. Lots and lots of darkly comedic Mad Max-style warfare waged on tax dodgers ensue.
- In Monster Girl Doctor, Glenn is a doctor who runs a clinic specializing in treating non-human patients. The narrative goes to great lengths to describe the difficulties their physiology because that necessitate specialists like him to treat their ills.
- Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: Nightmare painters are essentially a state-run extermination service. The pests just happen to be living nightmares that creep into the city from the eldritch darkness beyond, and the extermination involves painting them into harmless forms before they can eat enough fear to assume a much more dangerous physical form.
Tabletop Games
- Typical player characters in Paranoia are simple Troubleshooters, whose job is ostensibly tech support. However, since the tech they are meant to support is Friend Computer and by extension the entirety of Alpha Complex, there's a lot more actual shooting of troubles involved... followed by convincing Friend Computer that they didn't shoot anything above their security clearance.
- The Universal Brotherhood in Shadowrun presents itself this way, providing social services to homeless people. It turns out that they are a front for insect shamans looking for hosts for demonic possession.
- The Series Mascot class of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is the humble rat-catcher (and their small, but vicious, dog). They keep the cities of the Empire clean of vermin, but their work in the sewers inevitably leads them to run into the skaven, a technologically sophisticated race of evil Rat Men who dwell Beneath the Earth. Officially, the skaven do not exist, and anyone who attempts to blow the whistle is either ridiculed as a madman or assassinated. Rat-catchers who live long enough simply keep the truth to themselves, shouldering the thankless burden of being a de facto first line of defence against the menace of the Under-Empire.
Video Games
- Black & White: You might be the patron god of a Physical Religion, but you still need to assign day jobs to your mortal followers. These range from the mundane, like farmers and builders, to the supernatural, like full-time worshipers to fuel your Miracles.
- Death Stranding follows Sam's job as a mercenary postal agent in an apocalyptic United States whose deliveries are impeded by invisible abominations and time-accelerating rain and assisted by technology exploiting the properties of an objectively real Afterlife Antechamber.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- The Arcanist class questline follows the Warrior of Light learning the art of arcanima while assisting the Arcanists' Guild in their day-to-day duties as customs officers for the pirate-run nation of Limsa Lominsa, using Formulaic Magic for bookkeeping and their carbuncle Familiars for tracking contraband.
- Communication between the city-states of Eorzea is maintained with the aid of flying postmoogles, who are Invisible to Normals. The Postmoogle questline has the Player Character take up this role themselves at the Deputy Postmoogle's behest.
- Due to the precarious nature of teleportation, all aetherytes are kept under 24/8 surveillance by armed guards and tended to by trained aetherologists to ensure they remain in working order. If anything were to happen to the aetheryte while it's in use, the people using them could suffer a Teleporter Accident and be lost in the Lifestream forever. This is also why all users are charged a toll fee to pay for these services.
- The Ishgard Restoration questline follows one of House Haillenarte's charitable endeavors in rebuilding the Firmament, a residential district torched to the ground by dragon attacks during the Dragonsong War. Several quests involve handling material logistics, promoting affordable housing and employment opportunities for the poor, and delivering missives to request investments into the project. The Custom Deliveries run by Charlemend de Durendaire in the same area involve helping a newly constructed hospital stock up on essential supplies.
- Emet-Selch reveals that in the unsundered past, everyone was gifted with magical access to The Power of Creation. Ideas and concepts were handled by the Bureau of the Architect, which kept an archive of submitted concepts for future reference, to be withdrawn with permission to use in artistic or practical projects. Later on, the Warrior of Light travels to Elpis, a research facility dedicated to reviewing Bureau submissions for usefulness and danger. Especially dangerous specimens that are still valuable for research purposes are taken down to Lahabrea's personal facility, Pandaemonium, for interment and experimentation.
- Due to being situated in the freezing tundra of the Northern Wastes, magitek engineers developed a means of delivering ceruleum to every home in Garlemald to keep them warm. Following Garlemald's destruction in a bloody civil war, the entire system is taken offline, and the heroes work to restore it to keep the surviving refugees alive in the wake of the Empire's collapse.
- The Crystalline Mean is the central workshop and storehouse providing all the essential goods and services the Crystarium needs in the wake of the apocalyptic Flood of Light. The Facet of Nourishing, for instance, consists of physicians, cooks, and alchemists, and is led by Bethric, who also serves as the Tenemos Rookery's veterinarian for livestock, chocobo, and amaro.
- Menphina's Arms is founded by Zhloe Aliapoh to provide an Orphanage of Love to children left behind when their parents get eaten by sun bears or petrified by cockatrices in the wilderness of Dravania. By the time the Warrior meets Zhloe, she's out of money and needs the Warrior's help to get items to sell and get the orphanage out of the red.
- In Endwalker, the Khalzahl Foundation is founded as an Orphanage of Love to help children orphaned by the Final Days. It's funded by the treasure of Alzadaal's Legacy, the Dragon Hoard of Vrtra, the founder and secret ruler of Radz-at-Han and a member of Midgardsormr's First Brood.
- In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Carm Mercantile is a clan focused on charitable causes, paying special attention to the conservation of endangered monsters from overhunting and poaching. Luso and Clan Gully can regularly donate to Carm Mercantile to help its cause. Unbeknownst to most of its day-to-day members, Carm Mercantile is actually one of Khamja's many fronts. Portions of the funds raised by these charity drives bankroll Khamja's criminal empire, including the poaching that Carm Mercantile tries to prevent.
- Far out into Sunless Sea is Nuncio, an Island of Mystery with a mystical attraction for lost letters and packages, and obsessive postal workers to finally deliver them to their destinations. It's nominally a British colony, but the Dead Letter Office believes it is older than London, and based on the number of packages they have to deal with it will likely outlast it as well. Beneath the Office's back rooms is an unlit hollow shaft that makes the entire island resonate like an infrasonic drum with every wave on the beach; at the bottom is a burning engraving in the Correspondence ordaining that all things arrive at their destined place, that every secret must be preserved until it is revealed, that an unheard message is a tragedy, that a ray of light can traverse any darkness — NO WORD LOST.
DO NOT RETURN, SENDER
- Transistor is set in the city of Cloudbank, a post-scarcity direct democracy that might also be Inside a Computer System. Cloudbank is run by the Central Administration, which polls citizens daily through the OVC news terminals to determine policy down to the scale of the shapes of buildings and the colour of the sky; its members include people like Farrah Yon-Dale, a professional sky painter who spited popular vote one day to use her suitor's favourite colours instead, and Bailey Gilande, an archivist of Cloudbank's nebulous history. Among the Administrators is a faction called the Camerata, who are disillusioned with the fickleness of Cloudbank's constant changes and wish they could leave a mark on the city a little more permanently.
- Viscera Cleanup Detail gives the player the job of a janitor for Aerospace Sanitation Inc, because every time there's a massacre caused by alien monsters, escaped experiments, and artifacts of doom, someone has to clean it up and the heroes who made the mess are busy. It even had a free spin-off expansion based on Shadow Warrior (2013) where you had to clean up the first level of the game after Lo Wang was done there.
Webcomics
- Schlock Mercenary: The portal network that enables interstellar travel at the beginning of the comic is run by the Gatekeepers, who closely guard their secret to wormhole generation in the name of galactic security. Successive Plot Twists reveal that they're less sufficiently advanced than they let on and their wormholes only look impossibly large and efficient, they've secretly murdered the entire population of the galaxy, several times over, by duplicating disposable copies of everyone who uses a portal and secretly interrogating them to protect their monopoly, and finally this plan was part of a secret armistice with the Pa'anuri, who threatened galactic annihilation if baryonic species continued to use widespread teraport technology which physically harms their dark-matter biology... while secretly plotting galactic annihilation anyway.
- Skin Horse:
- The title organization is an underfunded, black-ops (sort of) federal agency providing government assistance for the roughly 30,000 nonhuman sapients who inhabit the United States, most of whom are products of mad science. A conspiracy group called Anasigma has heavily compromised Skin Horse's mission, using them as unwitting surveillance of everyone they intend to erase via Weirdness Censor.
- One arc also features the ancient, monastic order of Notaries Public, who carry out paperwork filing as a sacred ritual. Unity's induction involves learning the importance of bureaucracy by transfusing the black goo that acts as her brain into a series of animals that live in the wilderness nearby... all of whom have their own independent regulatory structures.
Western Animation
- Hilda: Every home in the Trolberg area has its own Nisse, all named Tontu, who collects all the socks and keys and other lost objects that fall through the cracks into Nowhere Space (generously returning them if the homeowner is friendly). Nisse are all avaricious hoarders who don't get along, and in Strange Frequencies this escalates into a war of thieving from each others' houses, which Frida attempts to resolve by hosting a town hall meeting to negotiate grievances. After Hilda inadvertently ruins the meeting, her plan to make up for it is to organise a Nisse Lending Library to act as a stockpile that they can all share.
- The Owl House: The Healing Coven (those who specialize in Healing magic) exists to provide doctors who can come on call whenever a witch needs medical assistance (as shown when Eda first learned of her curse and when her Owl Beast form accidentally takes out her father's eye).
- The entire premise of Ugly Americans is a social service office integrating all the fantastical, paranormal citizens of New York into coexisting. The main protagonist is Mark Lilly, an idealistic human who heads a support group to counsel non-humans living in the city. One of his peers who butts heads with him is a man in charge of policing any disputes between these various groups, and has the Fantastic Racism to show for it.
- Winx Club: The comics expand on the more mundane side of the Enchanted Dimension, most relevantly including the members of the Council of Rocalucce; i.e., the almost clean-from-corruption entity overseeing Magix's three magical schools.
