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Fantastically Indifferent

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Becoming a Super Gender-Bender doesn't faze Justin.

Robo: Overall, I gotta say, you're taking this rather well.
Carl Sagan: Astronomy is a long and relentless lesson that the universe is under no obligation to match up with your expectations. Also, the alcohol helps.
Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time

Take a person. Something fantastic happens to or around them. They acknowledge that something as supernatural or as something that should be impossible, but, when people expect them to freak out, they don't. It turns out that the person in question utterly fails to react with the sense of wonder that something fantastic, unnatural or supposedly impossible would entail. This usually happens for one of two reasons:

  1. The person is just that calm or collected; or
  2. The person who has Seen It All, maybe from the same source, that — though they recognize it is fantastic — they got used to it enough to view it as "normal" — for them, at least.

In the first case, the person is more likely to berate others for their overreaction, though not always. In the second case, the person already reacted strongly to this kind of thing a few times, if only off-screen, so they won't really mind when others do. Mind that the person does know the event is impressive or surprising — they're just too calm or too used to it to really mind. Superheroes that work in teams depend on this trope not to stare wide-eyed in the middle of a battle whenever a teammate does something.

This trope can often be used for comedic purposes, especially when paired with another character who is anything but indifferent and more than ready to point out how strange or fantastic the situation is, and react with incredulity at the calmness of the other person/people.

Compare Stiff Upper Lip, Weirdness Censor, Conditioned to Accept Horror, Unusually Uninteresting Sight, Dull Surprise, and Shut Up, Scary Thing!.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • In the case of Lil' Sweet, most of the time people shrug when this magenta-haired, three-foot tall man magically appears in an explosion of glitter and gives them Diet Dr. Pepper. The only time anyone is shocked or afraid is in the "Playhouse" commercial, where he spooks a girl by magically appearing in her playhouse, the girl screaming and running away.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Assassination Classroom: Justified. The students in class E are trying to assassinate their super-fast, almost-impossible-to-kill octopus-monster sensei before he destroys the world in March. Compared with Koro-sensei, normal weirdness just doesn't measure up.
  • The Demon Girl Next Door: Sakura set a series of Perception Filter across the city of Tama to prevent Magical Girls from interacting with demons. This means in Tama, they co-exist with muggles, and since muggles are not affected by the said barriers, they have been interacting with the demons so frequently that they see nothing unusual in the protagonist gaining horns and tail overnight, or a talking statue claiming itself to be Lilith.
  • The titular character of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid has seen the destruction caused by dragons on a regular basis to the point she doesn't even flinch when Elma is introduced by smashing through the wall of her apartment and trashing her living room.
  • Subverted in Mission: Yozakura Family. Despite all his training desensitizing him to many dangers, Taiyo continues to be the Only Sane Man and reacts with alarm and surprise when encountering something truly weird, like buying bullets at a bubble tea shop or Nanao shrinking down to an unrecognizably small state.

    Comic Books 
  • Alias: In #15, Jessica Jones is on her first date with Scott Lang after Carol Danvers set them up, when suddenly Human Torch and Spider-Man go by chasing Doc Ock down the street. They just sorta look at each other and go, "You wanna go help?" "Nah, they got it."
  • In Atomic Robo, both Carl Sagan and Charles Fort react rather calmly to the reality-warping machinations of an extradimensional Eldritch Abomination — although Sagan does take a moment (and some booze) to reach this point.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes: In the titular team's first story, upon arriving at the 30th century, the Legion shows Superboy one class where one professor is using a Superboy Robot to explain how his Kryptonians powers worked. Unfortunately, the robot malfunctions, but Cosmic Boy steps forward and says they have brought the real Superboy from the past, who is eager to help him. The professor takes the appearance of a long-gone legend in his classroom completely in stride, expressing nothing other than delight at being able to continue his lesson.

    Fan Works 
  • In All Mixed Up!, Olive and Otto ride the tubes to Mariana Mag's aquarium and end up landing in the middle of a tank. Otto begins to panic because he has trouble breathing in the tubes and him being in the water means that he can't regain his breath. Olive, on the other hand, just looks mildly surprised as she pulls out the Snorkel-inator from her Hammerspace pocket and fires it at herself and Otto, granting them snorkeling gear that allows them to breathe. She quickly changes her tune, however, when she sees that it's a shark tank, with the sole finned occupant hurtling right towards Otto and attacking him.
  • In And I Saw the Beast upon a Cold World, Anna's sole reaction to Elsa accidentally freezing the table and everything on it is to pick up her plate then set it back down once the frost passes.
  • Escape from the Moon: In the sequel The Mare From the Moon, Zecora is completely unfazed at the sight of a new alicorn outside her home (she doesn't even comment on Spliced's species), and reacts with total calmness when she recognizes Spliced as being from another dimension. Apparently, zebras in general are used to travelers from other worlds dropping in or passing through.
  • Child of the Storm has the Avengers, and increasingly, Harry and his friends, being unfazed by the weirdness that tends to follow them (or rather, follow Harry) around like a bad smell. Unusually, they're contrasted with those outside their circle who find it very weird. In particular, those who deal with Doctor Strange on a regular basis become more or less inured to his Success Through Insanity Beyond the Impossible antics, and just pigeon-hole it as "Strange being Strange, in every possible sense of the phrase."
  • Development: While Lydia is more consciously aware of regular society than the Addams family, her history with the supernatural makes her less easily spooked by the Addams' deadly hobbies than most other people, more put off by Wednesday's frivolous spending than the poisoned food and electric chairs.
  • If Wishes Were Ponies: Harry's time spent in Equestria (and general dislike of human adults) means that he doesn't find half of the wizarding world's magic as impressive as his professors would think. The same goes for every Equestrian who visits the wizarding world. If anything, they're more impressed by Muggle technology (and how they can use their magic to improve it) than what the wizarding world has to offer (something that angers Dolores Umbridge).
  • Subverted in Imaginary Seas. Having saved the world time and time again, Percy thinks he's Seen It All until he learns that the Greek gods were Humongous Mecha. Then he starts getting regular doses of nanomachines to upgrade himself and learns about how the gods combined into a super mecha to fight off an Alien Invasion.
  • Though they initially freak out, Harry/Hari's friends in Itachi, Is That a Baby? quickly stop reacting to Harry doing the impossible regularly. For example, when Harry visits Tracey over Christmas in third year, she reacts to the explosion of fire he arrives in right behind her and the gunshot from her mother that barely misses her with a calm "Morning Hari." Even Hermione, who initially reacted with outrage and fury over Hari violating the laws of magic and insisting the books claiming his actions to be impossible are wrong, mellows out. It helps that Hari teaches her to use wandless magic, by stealing her wand and forcing her to attend classes without it.
  • Peter Parker Needs A Hug: When Spider-Man makes his Gotham debut, the only one concerned about there being a spider-themed meta is Jason (who's worried that he's some form of Man-Bat, except with spiders). Everyone else is only concerned with whether or not he's a threat that they should keep on their radar. When it becomes clear he's not, then their biggest concern is making sure Batman doesn't adopt another teen vigilante (they fail).
  • Stories in the Pony Earth Verse vary in regard to this. Usually, "later" stories have the people transformed into ponies reacting very dryly to their situation, in comparison with "earlier" stories focusing on shocked initial reactions.
  • Scarlet Lady: As Akumas become more common, Parisians get more or less used to them and their goings on.
    • In "The Mime", Ultimutt asks how the heroes are going to catch Scarlet Lady's attention (as she never pays enough attention to the rest of the world to know there's an Akuma). Chat Noir brings down the Eiffel Tower. When Chloé (Scarlet Lady's Secret Identity) sees this:
      Chloé: Ugh, this again? Tikkiiiii!
    • Chloé's long-absent and neglectful mother Audrey doesn't bat a lash at her husband being akumatized into Malediktator, telling him that his outfit looks absolutely ridiculous. She's also unfazed by the revelation that her daughter has become a superheroine.
  • In Sixes and Sevens, Pat Mason puts up a strong front as he realizes more and more of the team in Shadow of the Eagle (by the end, everyone but himself and Robert) aren't quite human.
  • Naruto's status as a jinchuriki is never made a secret in Son of the Sannin, so none of the members of the Konoha 15 treat it or the existence of other jinchuriki as a big deal. This is best seen when Fu loses control and outs herself during the Chunin Exam finals and Shino (who has a mutual crush on her) doesn't think anything beyond it being "an interesting turn of events". Kakashi even mentions during the Hidan and Kakazu arc that it's most likely the reason why Fu had a much easier time making friends in Konoha rather than her home village.
  • The Spectacular Spider-Man: Lost in Gotham: After countless years as the butler to Bruce Wayne/Batman and the Bat children, Alfred Pennyworth has Seen It All. So, when Bruce adopted a teenage boy with spider powers, Alfred's only reaction was to ask Peter not to leave footprints on the ceiling or webs around the house.
  • The Supermen: Most ordinary citizens in the DC universe would count, but special mention goes to the unnamed woman at the newsstand who Wesker speaks to right after arriving in the DC universe. Wesker has just fallen out of the sky, and she just attempts to make small talk with him as he buys a newspaper. She also accepts the events described by the newspaper (articles about Superman and The Joker, for instance) as everyday and uneventful. Wesker's narration lampshades this, as he'd expected people to be more surprised.
    "You all right?" the woman at the stand asked. "Looked like you fell pretty far."
    That was not a normal person's reaction.
  • In Touched, after the two seemingly become magnetically attracted to each other, Xander stays calm while Cordelia is freaking out over being physically incapable of not touching him.
  • While it would have been amazing to him early in his journey, by the time Ash meets a talking Slowking in Traveler, he's already encountered half a dozen Legendaries so he's not even fazed by the idea.
  • Venomous Xander has a trio of teens see Xander in full Venom form and their sole reaction is asking if he knows Spider-Man. Of course, it helps they're all seriously stoned.

    Films — Animation 
  • During Frozen (2013), aside from a brief freak-out upon first meeting the living Olaf, Anna shows complete indifference to learning that Elsa can make magic ice. Possibly justified by the fact that Anna is probably a good compartmentalizer and is pushing that aside to deal with what's important (bringing Elsa back to Arendelle). Though it also extends to when Kristoff takes her to the trolls, and Anna is a lot less freaked out to the point that Olaf is trying to tell her to run.
  • In Legends of Valhalla: Thor, everyone knows and accepts that Thor is Odin's son, though it doesn't seem to afford him special treatment from anybody.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Galaxy Quest, when the characters are all transported onto the Protector, everyone freaks out, except Fred, who smiles vaguely and says "That was a hell of a thing." Likewise while they are on a shuttle heading down to an alien world, Guy freaks out at the realization that he's a Red Shirt, and the others try to calm him down, while Fred placidly munches on a Handi-Snak. Possibly justified by a deleted scene which implies that he's high the entire time.
  • Almost everyone in Hop except the lead is not overly surprised by a talking bunny.

    Literature 
  • Candy Quackenbush from Abarat is like this. She accepts one bizarre thing after another, just as they come because, she reasons, what else can she do? Word of God has said that he intentionally invoked this to spare readers from having to read pages and pages of freak-out scenes.
  • Animorphs: In "The Extreme", while wandering in the Arctic, the kids run into an Inuit boy named Derek who is bizarrely unfazed by shapeshifting teenagers, a telepathic four-eyed blue centaur, or human-Controllers blasting wildlife with "Star Trek guns".
  • Ronnie in Anita Blake has no psychic or magic abilities and, despite her job as a P.I., not a lot of contact with such things outside of her association with Anita. When the weird crap happens, though, she takes it pretty well; at least until her Character Derailment later in the series.
    • Also Edward from the same series. Yeah, he's an assassin who kills monsters for a living, but turning into some kind of human vampire who feeds off of sex is still pretty outside his experiences, so when Anita reveals this has happened to her, it should still be a shock, but he's more or less like "Well, that's unusual." And finding out that the vampires who are so scary that other vampires are afraid of them are after Anita should give one pause as well. His response is basically to shrug and say "Okay, so how do we kill them?"
  • Battle Royale:
    • Kazuo Kiriyama is fairly calm for someone who learns that he's expected to kill or be killed by his classmates. Justified in the novel and manga, where a car accident in utero/childhood (respectively) gave him brain damage that left him unable to feel emotions.
    • Shogo Kawada is also pretty calm about the whole ordeal, with the exceptions being anger rather than shock. This leads up to The Reveal that by coincidence, he was part of "the Program" the previous year, and therefore knows exactly how it works.
  • Blanche, The Blue-Nosed Witch, impresses the kids she runs into trick-or-treating with her blue glowing nose and witch talents. (They initially think the nose is a dime-store gag.) However, they don't make a big deal of it; they fold her into the group to go trick-or-treating without any worries, suggest she show it off at the Smith house, and when she gets on her broom and blows smoke down Child Hater Skinner's chimney in retaliation for his nasty prank, their only reaction to her being on a Flying Broomstick is that flying is much better than walking and clearly she uses the same "concentration" she used for her nose to fly.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In the The Deathless (set in mid-season 3), Beta Bitch Harmony Kendall and most of her classmates are kidnapped by the villain and lose their memories of the event after being rescued. When Harmony goes home, her relieved mother tells her that she was missing all day. Harmony correctly suspects she just experienced "one of those weird things Buffy and her friends were always involved in" (and that Cordelia will insist on recapping it at school). However, she deduces that if she is back home safely and her mother (and, by extension, the rest of the town) didn't come to any harm while she was gone, things must have turned out fine and aren't "worth thinking about".
  • In Dinoverse, Janine doesn't take suddenly ending up in the body of a Quetzalcoatlus with total calm, but she adjusts much faster than the others, to the point where Mike asks her about it.
    Janine: I don't want to think about this, I don't want to talk about this. It doesn't do us any good. We know what's at stake. What we have to figure out is what's our first move.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Pikka birds in Mostly Harmless embody this trope. They're not surprised by unusual, million-to-one, you'll-never-see-that-again events, because, well, they're unusual, million-to-one, and you'll never see them again in your life, so why bother noticing? And yet, every morning, the sunrise takes them completely by surprise.
  • In Mother of Learning, Haslush finds Zorian's calmness in the face of hearing of unusual and horrifying events noteworthy and unnerving. Zorian claims to just be naturally calm, but he just has Seen It All, and is just a poor actor.
  • The agents of the Red Room series tend to behave as if zombie plagues in their headquarters, invisible mercenaries, Oni assassins, and Rakshasas in shopping malls are all in a day's work — which they are. Subverted, ironically, by Agent O'Reilly when she goes nuts over a Committee member having his own panda.
  • Pebbles from Super Minion is not impressed or surprised at all when a squid in a restaurant mutates, grows to enormous size, smashes through a wall and attacks them. He is annoyed though, because the chef should have known better than to keep live ingredients during Odd Summer.
  • The Zombie Survival Guide describes the Roman Legions dealing with zombie outbreaks about the same as they would any armed uprising - with normalized, well-trained discipline, allowing 480 men in 121 AD to be well-prepared against over 9000 zombies and defeat them all at the cost of 150 of them. Hadrian had an anti-zombie manual of their own disseminated after this. It even got to the point where overwhelming numbers were advised in response to an outbreak just to deal with the general populace's panic rather than the zombies themselves, and outbreaks largely weren't even worth mentioning in detail thereafter. Some thirty years later, a riot occurred over the Roman troops putting down a zombified holy man (and nine other zombies) in Germania - the Romans' casualties were caused only by the riot.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 7, May wakes up in a healing pod and meets someone who claims they have yet to meet in that timeline, who asks her what she remembers. She explains she remembers fighting her way through an alternate dimension and killing the Big Bad of the previous season, and then waking up where she is now. She's told she briefly died, was saved by futuristic technology, and that she's currently in the year 1931. After six seasons of and change of what she does for a living, her response is hilariously flippant:
    May: (Beat) I'm hungry.
  • Happens in Angel, after Angel gives Connor the lowdown on demons and whatnot in "Origin":
    Connor: So... demons, vampires, doctors with claws... and I'm some sort of super-hero. (Beat) Okay.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Sets in with Xander by Episode 10: after the latest fantastic occurrence in class, he says he's gotten used to living on the Hellmouth and that if there's something serious going on, Buffy will slay it.
    • The first time Oz is caught up in a fight with vampires, Willow hesitantly begins to explain the whole situation, prefacing it with "Now don't freak out..." Oz doesn't, because not only is he really that calm, but because the fact that vampires are real suddenly makes a lot of things about Sunnydale make sense. In the comics, he tops himself when his ex drops by outside the monastery he's meditating at, in a submarine, that she teleported to Tibet. His reaction: a nonchalant "Huh".
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Doctor and anyone who travels with them is probably going to become at least a little Fantastically Indifferent. After all, when you're traveling through time and space with a millennia-old alien who switches bodies, in a sentient Police Call Box that's bigger on the inside, while defeating monsters and aliens of all types, fantastic is an everyday occurrence. And even then, just meeting them is enough to cause some change in a person's mindset.
      Harriet Jones: If we only knew what the Slitheen wanted. Listen to me. I'm saying Slitheen as if it's normal.
    • In "Tooth and Claw", this attitude is part of what convinces Queen Victoria the Doctor can't be trusted/relied on. He and Rose's delight at the chance to encounter "real werewolves" appalls her in light of the very real danger and very high body count of the "adventure". She calls them out on it at the end of the episode, going as far as to knight "Sir Doctor" and "Dame Rose" for saving her life, and then banishing them for posing a greater danger than the werewolves. Then she founds the Torchwood Institute on the spot, to combat menaces like him.
    • In "The Vampires of Venice", when Rory first walks into the TARDIS, both the audience and the Doctor expect him to look around in wonder, saying "It's Bigger on the Inside." He doesn't, and calmly explains that it's dimensionally transcendental before the Doctor can, to his annoyance.
    • In "Village of the Angels", Professor Jericho doesn't so much as blink at the possibility of the Weeping Angels, which is attributed to his experiences liberating Belsen Concentration Camp in World War II:
      The Doctor: Eustacius Jericho, proper scientist. Under siege from the impossible, doesn't even stop to be scared. Just wants to understand what's beyond his comprehension.
      Professor Jericho: Oh, I've seen many things beyond my comprehension, Doctor. I was one of the first British soldiers into Belsen at the end of the war. If you think a few stone statues will destroy my equilibrium you are mistaken.
  • In Fargo's second season, when a UFO shows up during the Sioux Falls Massacre, nearly everyone stops to stare at it. Lou uses this distraction as an opportunity to shoot Bear Gerhardt through the head (Bear trying to strangle him to death), while Peggy is like:
    Peggy: It's just a flying saucer, Ed! We gotta go.
  • Lampshaded in "For Those Of You Just Joining Us", an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys which takes place in the modern day. "Excuse me, but doesn't it worry anyone that the god of war is real?"
  • Extraordinary (2023) takes place in a universe where, following a Mass Empowering Event a little over a decade earlier, every human has superpowers and more people get them around the time they turn 18. As a result, superpowers are such a mundane part of everyday life that people openly use them for daily labor.
  • In a second-season episode of The Flash (2014), King Shark attacks the West house while hunting the title character and rips a huge hole in the roof in the process. Wally, who's new to Central City and the superhero-supervillain battles that happen every weeks, is visibly weirded out by the whole situation, but his father and sister? Iris is calmly sweeping up the dust while Joe grumbles about how his insurance is probably not going to cover the damage.
    Wally: I — I don't understand you people. Jaws busts through your house like the Kool-Aid man, the Flash shows up, and y'all just act like it's no big deal.
    Iris: Yeah, well, we've had a lot of weird things happen in Central City over the past two years.
    Wally: Weirder than a talking shark wearing pants?
  • Weird example in I Dream of Jeannie — while Nelson is used to magic (so he doesn't react with wonder to it per se), he does get caught flat-footed by what Jeannie does with said magic. Not because he thought it was impossible, but because of the situations it gets him in.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "In Throes of Increasing Wonder...", Louis de Pointe du Lac is curious about Lestat de Lioncourt's Telepathy and Time Stands Still abilities, but he's otherwise unfazed by these impossible feats, believing them to be mere parlor tricks that Lestat had picked up in France. These supernatural skills should've been a dead giveaway to Louis that his new friend isn't human, yet this thought doesn't cross his mind.
  • The Librarians: In "...And Some Dude Named Jeff'', the eponymous dude named Jeff pulls a Grand Theft Me on Jenkins using a dangerous artefact. To gain access to the library and reverse the process, Jenkins must enlist the help of Jeff's D&D group... whose reaction when he explains the situation is "Okay, makes sense. We figured something like that was going on."
  • In Orphan Black's first scene, Identical Strangers Sarah and Beth see each other at a train station. Sarah is freaked out by Beth, while Beth has absolutely no reaction. It's the first such meeting for Sarah, but not Beth, who's also about to step in front of a train so she has bigger things on her mind.
  • The Sandman, "Dream a Little Dream of Me": Exorcist Johanna Constantine is called in by a vicar friend to a wedding where one of the happy couple is suspected of being possessed by a demon. When Johanna's exorcism takes effect and the demon exits his victim — by clawing his way out through the victim's mouth — Johanna and the vicar respond with the casualness of people who've seen this kind of thing before, while the victim's fiancée is understandably freaked out.
  • Star Trek: Voyager. At the end of "Emanations", Captain Janeway orders Ensign Newbie Harry Kim to take some time off to ponder what just happened to him.
    "It's so easy to become jaded, to treat the extraordinary like just another day at the office, but sometimes there are experiences which transcend all that."
  • Supernatural.
    • Sam time travels back to 1861 to get help from Samuel Colt, who barely grunts when handed a mobile phone as proof of Sam's story. Sam is bemused at this underreaction.
      "When you've done this job as long as I have, a giant from the future with some magic brick doesn't exactly give you the vapors."
    • In an episode of Season 10, adults are being abducted and de-aged into children. Dean becomes a victim, as well as a woman he was chatting with at a bar. Dean's reaction to being kidnapped and suddenly fourteen years old is essentially irritation, while the woman is understandably freaked and demands to know how he can be so calm about things.
  • The Wellington Paranormal division of the Wellington police department never react to any of the supernatural entities they run into with surprise or shock or fear unless they are being threatened. Their behavior is best described as "awkward professionalism". The ordinary Wellington citizens who encounter them likewise rarely seem more than mildly concerned by the presence of supernatural phenomena.

    Manhwa 
  • Played for Laughs in I Wish. Since Lyu-Jin has started working for K, she's seen weird things like a race of flower-people that you can eat to obtain eternal life, a thumb-sized sprite that had a son with a regular human and a man whose memories need to be erased in order to prevent being killed by them, so that when a "normal" 150 year old vampire reveals himself to her it lost all its shock potential.

    Roleplays 

    Theatre 
  • In Jasper in Deadland, Gretchen is totally uninterested in Jasper's ability to restore memories. Dozens of other Deadland residents clamber over each other for a chance to remember their lives, while asking what he intends to do with these powers, but Gretchen never even tries to get him to restore more of her memories.

    Video Games 
  • In Disco Elysium, the amnesiac Player Character can range from a disturbed recovering alcoholic struggling to act normal, to a complete loon preaching apocalyptic destruction while addled out of his mind on hallucinogenics. But no matter how crazy he acts, pretty much nothing fazes Joyce, the Wild Pines company representative. She takes it all in stride, and sometimes even shows signs of understanding more than she lets on about the bizarre and esoteric. She's spent far too much time in the Pale; the Detective's eccentricities are nothing in comparison.
  • Dragon Age: The Warden is this by the end of the vanilla game. Flemeth? Check. A poet tree? Check. A dwarven Paragon made golem from a millennia ago? Check. The Lady of the Forest? Check. By the time of Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening not even seeing a sapient, talking darkspawn surprised them anymore.
  • In Fairune 2, the Ancient Codex reports that monsters have overrun the world, and then drops voice to remark that it's a kind of a custom, repeating every few hundred years.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: For most of the game, it's a plot point that only two colonists know of the Gardeners, the Artificial Intelligence network left behind by the planet's long-gone sentient species with orders to restore and maintain its ecosystem. If the Player Character tries telling anyone else about the Gardeners too often, it's possible for them to get Wrongfully Committed. It's also possible for their actions to result in the Wetware Body of a Gardener named Nocticulent showing up near the end of the game and talking directly to the colony's human-supremacist Governor who is among the people who had no idea the Gardeners exist up to that point. The Governor's response? Simply telling Nocticulent to leave because the planet now belongs to humans.
  • Mass Effect 3: Ashley William's reaction to the discovery of a species that's been hiding for billions of years, can possess people across light years and, oh yeah, created the Reapers? Aggressive indifference. As she explains to Shepard, she doesn't care who made the Reapers, she just wants them dead.
  • Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider games takes extraordinary encounters perfectly in stride. In the first game alone, she is hinted to have hunted and killed Bigfoot, and she doesn't remark when encountering dinosaurs in an underground jungle. Chronicles reveals that her first supernatural encounters were on a haunted isle off the coast of Ireland; again she reacts little, though she is wisely apprehensive of the Hanging Demon.

    Visual Novels 
  • Masayuki in A Profile tends to react this way about almost everything. "Ah, Dissociative Identity Disorder? Neat. Can I meet your other personality some time?"
  • While most characters in Ace Attorney have Weirdness Censor towards Maya channeling the spirit of her sister Mia, the hyper-logical Miles Edgeworth ends up working with Phoenix on a case that directly involves spirit channeling (Bridge to the Turnabout)... and he barely comments on it. It's implied that, seeing it irrefutably performed, he simply treats it like he would another fact of the case.
  • The protagonist's classmates in Dra+Koi react to a dragon entering their school and firing mouth beams by trying to ignore her and continue with class while casualties begin to pile up.
  • Hatoful Boyfriend takes place in a school for birds. Supposedly everyone there but the Token Human is male. In the manga Okosan mentions laying an egg, and only one character finds this at all noteworthy — the same character who was confused and taken aback to hear that the School Idol gets a lot of presents on their analogue to Valentine's Day. Poor, sheltered Sakuya.

    Web Animation 
  • In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, Kitten seems to have gotten this attitude after all the millennia in the Palace. When making tea for the Emperor, he cheerfully hums to himself even as a grand battle to open a can of alien beans rages behind him, and even the sudden arrival of Fab Custodes falling from the sky doesn't move him in the slightest.
  • Minilife TV: In "Spirit in the Sky", when everyone in the mall panics from the mannequins coming to life, Chris and Ian try to continue their meeting with Vince and Zach and only decide to evacuate when a mall announcement tells them to.

    Webcomics 
  • Awful Hospital: Unlike almost every human, Cheryl has enough experience with the infinite weirdness and mutability of The Multiverse that she's waiting for an apocalyptic crisis either to get fixed or Cosmic Retcon itself into the status quo.
    Fern: [...] what if this is one of the times it doesn't "sort out?"
    Cheryl: ...Then it's the new normal, hon. You roll with it. Either mom takes the dog home to her kids after all this or a flesh pillar takes her jelly ball home to her red slugs.
  • In Axe Cop, this is the reaction of just about every character to a bizarre situation. For example, when Axe Cop's partner, Flute Cop, is turned into Dinosaur Soldier by dinosaur blood, and subsequently into Avocado Soldier after eating an avocado, there's not even a hint of Body Horror. Instead, he just accepts his new identity calmly and without comment.
  • Batman: Wayne Family Adventures: While fighting Copperhead (who's gotten his hands on a magic wand) turns Nightwing into a bunny. He simply shrugs it off and continues to fight while Zatanna tries to come up with a plan. The images of an adorable bunny kicking the crud out of Copperhead are as funny as you'd think.
  • In Cans of Beans, Dude's reaction to learning that his roommate is a werewolf is to pop open a beer and ask how long he's been transforming. It helps that he had spent the night drinking with the wolf alter-ego under the mistaken impression that the giant hulking Wolf Man was his roommate's fursona.
  • In Free Spirit (2014), the other witches and warlocks of Magical Nanny Winnie's homeworld apparently feel less impressed with her abilities than the mortal Harper kids do.
  • El Goonish Shive:
    • Elliot's parents are completely unconcerned that they now have a daughter with all of their son's memories, and are more interested in the fact that Elliot lied to them about sleeping over at a friend's house.
      Mr. Dunkel: And finally, if you're going to be out late fighting evil, you need to call home first!
      Mrs. Dunkel: That's right. It affects our ability to plan supper and alibis.
    • Even more with Liz who is Highly Skilled at Not Giving a Crap.
    • Sarah's reaction to Pandora showing up in her bedroom in the middle of the night.
      Sarah: You could have warned me before making light.
      Pandora: An ancient being of tremendous power appears floating in your room, and you chastise her for turning on the lights too fast?
      Sarah: I react to paranormal stuff in one of two ways: Curiosity, or sass. You hurt my eyes. You get sass.
      Pandora: (grinning) Oh yes. I made the right decision with you.
    • The EGS:NP stories often take this far.
      Tensaided: [seeing Susan has turned into a buxom blonde bimbo and is dashing around the store with a cart] SUSAN! Take it slow with that cart, okay? Speeding through the store is dangerous.
      Susan: Oh. Okay. But... what about...
      Tensaided: What, your transformation? Does your uniform still have a name tag?
      Susan: Um... yes.
      Tensaided: Then it's none of my bees-wax.
    • Justin gets turned into a Super Gender-Bender in this sketchbook strip. His reaction? "Feh. You want enthusiasm? Get back to me with a clone form of Elliot."
  • The kids in Homestuck react surprisingly well to the discovery that they have amazing powers and that the Earth is going to be destroyed.
  • The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: While everyone around him is properly freaking out, Bob's standard reaction to almost anything is a brief moment of Dull Surprise, and then he takes it in stride.
  • In Jet Dream, the T-Birds of the Thunderbird Squadron barely lose a step after involuntarily becoming T-Girls. Turning into a woman has its complications and differences, but they're seldom treated as all that big a deal.
  • Mario & Luigi: Cleanup Crew: Not only is Luigi completely unconcerned with Mario's battle with the Toilet Piranha, he objects to the idea that Toad's concerns should interrupt.
  • From Questionable Content, Faye once mentions that it feels strange being so jaded that Pintsize's antics no longer surprise her.
  • Stand Still, Stay Silent: Pastor A is perfectly aware that her physical body turned into a troll. However, both the reader and the main characters find out about the situation after it has lasted for ninety years, so she had plenty of time to get used to it.
  • In UC, when Naim opens his locker into what appears to be a lava filled room, he just keeps opening and closing it until it opens back up to his school books.

    Web Video 
  • TomSka spends the entirety of "The Hole" being bizarrely calm about the bottomless pit that suddenly appeared in his house.

    Western Animation 
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
    • The eponymous Aqua Teens consist of a talking milkshake, a levitating box of fries, and a sentient meatball. How the humans react to them largely varies; for the most part, the humans treat the Aqua Teens casual indifference, but there are some moments where they display signs of unconformity around them (at least not when Shake or Meatwad are causing trouble). Then there's specifically the Aqua Teens' neighbor Carl, who hates them but moreso because they constantly annoy him rather than the fact that they're anthropomorphic fast food products.
    • Generally speaking, the characters in the show tend to be unfazed by many of the bizarre and outright crazy events they find themselves in. Carl and Shake are the best examples, as they'll react to certain things like a robot claiming to be the ghost of Christmas past or aliens from the moon with shock at most and mild annoyance at least.
  • One of Zuko's funniest lines in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is really saying something, is his completely matter-of-fact and casually accepting response to Sokka's lament that his girlfriend turned into the moon in "The Boiling Rock, Part 1":
  • Owen Burnett, the loyal right-hand man to Xanatos from Gargoyles, reacts to all the magic and monster related madness unfurling around him with barely anything more than a raised eyebrow. Which makes sense, since he himself is secretly a fairy.
  • Jade Armor: The citizens of Ban Tang got used to the weird rather quickly. As long as it doesn't impact them, they treat it as a mundane occurrence such as when Lan Jun was shrunk by a shard and no one raised an eyebrow at it.
  • Played for Laughs in the Justice League Unlimited episode "Kid Stuff", when a battle between the league and some villains is interrupted by them all spontaneously being sent to another dimension. Copperhead freaks right out thinking he's died and been sent to hell, and...
    Green Lantern: Calm down. We're probably just in another dimension.
    Copperhead: Oh, is THAT all?
  • Most Phineas and Ferb characters treat the boys' inventions as creative and interesting, but never seem too surprised by them. Even Candace eventually grows used to them.
    Alien Lizard Phineas: Outer-space alien super-crooks from a planet of frogs and reptiles have taken over our bodies!
    Candace: Okay. What do you want me to do?
    Alien Lizard Phineas: Really? You believe that weird story just like that?
    Candace: Yeah. It's been a long summer, kid. What do you need?
  • The Simpsons: Parodied in the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "The Shinning", which spoofs The Shining. As Mr. Burns guides the Simpsons through the winter lodge, they stop at the elevator when the river of blood spills out of it, and while the Simpsons are horrified, Burns is hilariously blasé.
    Burns: Hmm, that's odd... usually the blood gets off at the second floor.
  • In Solar Opposites, the humans tend to treat the aliens quite well at best and with casual indifference at worst, being completely unfazed that aliens are real and that a family of them are their neighbors and students. At least, until the aliens inevitably do something evil or immoral and the humans react accordingly... and the aliens accuse them of being racist against aliens.
  • In part two of the South Park two-parter Pandemic, Craig is this. Oh so hilariously much. He never breaks his Deadpan Snark no matter what ludicrous things they experience, from being sent to Peru by the US Government, finding massive underground ruins, battling a Guinea Pirate (A gigantic photorealistic guinea pig in a pirate costume), or him literally being The Chosen One destined to defeat the Guinea Creatures and save the world. Instead he takes every opportunity to chastise the others for constantly getting themselves involved in such ridiculous events with the same level of interest you'd explain to someone why chewing with their mouth open was rude. In the end he learns two very mundane Aesops while narrating about the events of the day with complete disinterest:
    "The Guinea Pirate lived, but was taken to prison to live out the rest of his days, and people all over the world learned to support their local Peruvian flute bands, and buy their CDs. For they protect us from the Guinea Creatures. As for me, I was returned home by Homeland Security. My parents were sooo happy. I realized that we don't always have control over what happens to us. We are but players on the stage of life. And I also learned to never listen when people come asking you for money."
  • In The Spectacular Spider-Man both the silent Mrs. Osborn and the family butler walk in to see Norman and Harry (who had just been missing for a week) talking to Spider-Man and the most surprise we get is a raised eyebrow from the former.
    Houseman: (nodding in greeting) Master Osborn, Master Harry. (Beat) Spider-Man.
  • Most of the humans in Star vs. the Forces of Evil don't seem particularly shocked by the Magical Girl "exchange student", but they certainly find Star and her powers interesting, and as a result she is very popular at her and Marco's school.
  • Steven Universe:
    • Everyone in Beach City seems either completely uninterested in the fact that Magical Girl aliens are living in their midst, or don't know what the Gems are and don't really care. Ronaldo is the ultimate example: he has a Character Blog (In-Universe and in Real Life) where he often chronicles supernatural things from the show. When he realizes that most of his discoveries are related to the Crystal Gems, he's devastated, because apparently, chronicling their paranormal activities never occurs to him.
      • The unstated reason for much of this seems to be that the Crystal Gems have been living in the vicinity of Beach City since before it was actually settled — they actually rescued the city founder when he was lost at sea — and while they have mostly kept to themselves over the millennia, they've made no real attempt at hiding what they are.
    • In "Political Power", Mayor Dewey suggests that his job has largely involved keeping the Beach City residents happy and calm despite all the supernatural events around them. Its more likely that they are that indifferent, but Dewey seems to think otherwise. His approach utterly falls apart once a supernatural event (a series of Alien Abductions) starts upsetting people enough that they stop being indifferent.
    • On a few occasions were people not from Beach City witness the gems and their supernatural powers, those people find them unusual — but only about as much as a weird haircut, not a worldview shattering revelation.
      • In "Fusion Cuisine", Connie's parents are introduced to the Crystal Gems, at the time fused together into a multi-story giant with six arms. They seem slightly nervous, but continue an awkward dinner and don't even comment when she breaks apart into three different people; they're more upset Connie lied to them about Steven coming from a nuclear family.
      • When informed the gems are aliens in "Gem Harvest", Greg's cousin Andy takes it as another reason to dislike them because that makes them illegal immigrants. And to be clear, given his comments that follow shortly afterward, Andy didn't misunderstand the word "alien".
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): Angel takes her introduction really did take well on seeing the four titular Turtles really well during her debut episode:
    Angel: Okay, I knew Casey hung out with pretty weird dudes, but you guys are off the charts.
  • A number of characters in The Venture Bros. easily qualify, but none more so than Rusty. In one episode, after a number of shenanigans lead him to believe an extremely farfetched story, the following commentary is made on the matter:
    Dermott: How does he even believe this?!
    Hank: (scoffs) Last year, right where you're standing, David Bowielooking like David Bowie from the '70s — slapped a guy with invisible arms and legs. Right over there, Brock killed a guy from 'Dimension C' — that may or may not have been an alternate earth. (Beat) Dude, totally see you there.
    Gary: That's impossible! Stealth mode!
    Hank: And that's an ex-henchman for my dad's arch-enemy. ...Pretty sure he lives in my yard now.
    Dermott: No, nah, I get it. I get it.
  • One episode of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner has Roadrunner standing on a rock that floats in midair, to which the Coyote responds "I wouldn't mind, except that he defies the law of gravity!". (Road Runner: Sure, but I never studied law.)

 
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Most of the time people shrug when this magenta-haired, three-foot tall man magically appears in an explosion of glitter and gives them Diet Dr. Pepper.

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