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"This is our year. If we can focus, keep discipline, and not have quite as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule!"

"People have a tendency to rationalize what they can, and forget what they can't."

In some universes, ignoring the antics of the story goes beyond the Bystander Syndrome. It seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. They simply refuse to see anything too strange.

Sometimes invoked for seriousness, such as an explanation in which exploits go on ignored by most people... but often, this is just one part of the Rule of Funny. Magic battles, an Alien Invasion, and all other sorts of supernatural happenings often happen right in front of people's faces... and yet they merely glance out the window, and go back to their morning coffee, sometimes either not noticing it or just saying some excuse.

If it's ignored because they're incapable of seeing it, it's Invisible to Normals. Compare Bavarian Fire Drill, which exploits similar psychological tendencies. Contrast the Fisher Kingdom, where the world itself is the censor. Frequently Pink Elephants are invoked when the only evidence of the character's having drunk anything is what he claims to have seen that is being dismissed as a hallucination.

One of many things that enables the Masquerade, especially its extra strength variant, and allows Muggle characters to act like real people despite the extraordinary things that go on in their universe every day. When it's an actual power, becomes subject to You Can See Me? And they, in fact, can be seen By the Eyes of the Blind.

This can sometimes lead to Artificial Atmospheric Actions where NPCs merely treat all sorts of odd stuff as an everyday occurrence. Can also lead to the protagonists, especially if they're a small group or completely isolated from others that can see through the effect, seriously wondering if they're the ones who are seeing things wrong, or just insane.

Possibly overlaps with Supernatural-Proof Father.

Compare and overlap Unusually Uninteresting Sight, where something blatantly looks out of place to the viewer, but nobody notices (or cares to notice), and also Fantastically Indifferent, where the Muggles do acknowledge the weirdness, but are unfazed by it. Compare with Seen It All, where someone has simply experienced too many weird things to be fazed by them anymore. Also see Apathy Killed the Cat, where certain aspects of the strange thing in question raise no deeper questions in anyone, even if they acknowledge it.

Compare Perception Filter, which causes people to overlook something regardless of whether or not it's "weird".


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Became a running joke in Transformers: Robots in Disguise, in which one woman is constantly harassed by Sideburn — who is trying to get jiggy with her car. By narrative convenience, she starts being in range of the giant robot battles nearly every episode.
  • In contrast, Transformers: Armada has maybe five people actually see the constant robot battles. This is partially justified as apparently all but a few of the Mini-Con panels appear in unpopulated areas, but still.
  • Ah! My Goddess: No matter how pyrotechnic the magic, the antics of the goddesses and demons never draw the police (or possibly the Army). Not even humongous monsters like Garm. This was explained in the manga as the townspeople being desensitized to weirdness due to the neighborhood kids pulling off epic level pranks on a regular basis, or some similar Hand Wave.
    • They do live in the same town as a technical engineering college. If those people get bored enough, they can disassemble your car and then reassemble it. Inside your living room.
      • Shown in action in one occasion: when Marller transformed the college in a castle due a wish from Sayoko, even the students who weren't in when she did it decided it was a prank, and left to not get involved with the mess.
    • Amazingly enough, the fire brigade actually turned up in one of the latest manga chapters. They ended up thinking it was a false alarm though, as all the damage had already been fixed with supernatural means.
  • Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan lampshades this in the first episode. She introduces herself to the class as an angel (after turning a classmate into a monkey and making another one completely vanish) despite Sakura's insistence that she keep it a secret, but they just nod and accept it fully. In fact, Sakura is the only one who seems the slightest bit weirded out by the situation. "This should really bother you! Say 'Ahh! Angels exist?!' or something!"
  • The citizens of the Dragon Ball Z universe seem to quickly get over the fact that several towns and cities suddenly explode when a Monster of the Week comes by.
    • King Piccolo nuked a city live on television and everyone knew he was more than capable of destroying West City when he made his announcement. There was also his son who destroyed the island where the Martial Arts Tournament is held, canceling the event for a number of years.
    • Nappa destroys several cities before military forces finally are sent out to stop him, to no avail. For whatever reason, the fact that he can blow up huge urban areas and shoot energy from his hand doesn't factor into their attempt at fighting back.
    • Perhaps the most blatant example of this was how the entire world became convinced that Cell was just a monster and chi attacks were just special effects. This despite the fact that not two decades earlier one of those special effects blew up the moon on global television.
    • The military also goes up against Majin Buu, before sending in Mr. Satan. Despite everything that has happened on a global scale for close to two decades, he initially refuses to believe in flight, chi attacks, nigh-indestructible super beings, or robots from the future. But doesn't seem to have much trouble accepting aliens.
    • There is also the fact that the citizens on Earth are happy to go back to their everyday lives after only briefly wondering if they were killed by Majin Buu and their cities destroyed. Then again, since this is Dragon Ball, maybe mass revivals became so common that not even the muggles care anymore.
  • In Digimon Ghost Game, the series takes place 20 Minutes into the Future with holograms being commonplace, and as a result the protagonists are able to take their mons out in public with bystanders assuming this to be the case. However it's Zig-Zagged with hostile Digimon, as the public clearly recognizes them as abnormal but don't have another frame of reference, giving them the nickname "hologram ghosts". In previous series, the protagonists would get by through having them pretend to be stuffed animals or cosplaying kids in public with the exception of Digimon Data Squad where they could simply be stored in their Digivices.
  • In Sailor Moon SuperS, a gigantic evil circus tent appears right in the middle of Tokyo, in obvious plain view. Among the other random massive evil fortresses and demonic whatnots that show up in the middle of that same city in other seasons. Part of what makes this one stand out in the show is a lack of this problem in most cases: the evil base in the first season was underground in Antarctica, the base in the second season was on a distant planet in the far future, the base in the third season is a covert underground lab, and in the fifth it appears to be located in another dimension. The circus thing was actually lampshaded by the Lemures immediately after its appearance - they mocked the citizens for not noticing it.
  • In Ikki Tousen nobody seems to care that students attack each other's high schools and commit openly visible acts of extreme violence. You'd at least expect that the police would try to intervene - or that the army would be called in to do something about the genocide that's taking place.
    • In the manga a doctor commented in it being more or less a bunch of delinquents beating each-other to death. He seems to be the only one that has noticed.
  • In Windy Tales, almost nobody notices the huge amounts of cats that fly around on air streams, not even when they're cluttered together in a huge ball consisting of dozens of them during a typhoon.
  • In Princess Tutu, the typical townsperson (and the majority of the main cast in the beginning) doesn't question any of the "odder" stuff that goes on in Kinkan, including ballerina-dancing Anteaters (and other anthropomorphic animals). Even visitors to the town are affected—one women wonders if her troupe leader used to be an electric eel before arriving to the town, then quickly brushes it off. Later on in the series, it's revealed that it's because of the story magically controlling the town and the people inside of it. The only people that ever seem to realize something's off with the town are either important to the story, or actively go looking for something odd in the town.
  • Nobody seems to notice their friends strange behavior and obvious paranoia, or at least do anything about it, in the answer arcs of Higurashi: When They Cry.
    • This trope is subverted in Tatarigoroshi-hen, or actually any arc where they try to save Satoko. In Tataragiroshi-hen in particular, Rena and Mion notice Keiichi's paranoia, unlike Onikakushi-hen, and try to cover his actions up.
    • And in Umineko: When They Cry Battler uses it to deny that the Beato/Virgilia battle happened even better example in ep 5, after being defeated by Battler on the game board, Erika suddenly stands up in her chair during the meal and starts talking in blue truth and exclaims to her master Bernkastel that she has won and has to be acknowledged. Then she suddenly sits down in her chair eating. The family collectively thinks they were hallucinating.
  • In Twin Spica, nobody wonders about the weird stuff that sometimes happens involving Lion-san, for example when Asumi gets twirled around at the playground by some unseen force.
    • Usually this is the case, including people it's happening to, like Kasane on the merry-go-round. There is one little girl that comments on sake flying through the air, which gets her grandfather scolded for giving alcohol to the kids.
  • In Chapter 12 of the Hellsing manga, a group of tourists witness Alucard and Anderson preparing to fight to the death, and dismiss them as performance artists. You could say it was lampshaded, since they were inside a museum when that happened.
  • In Bleach, any fighting done in the mortal realm is invisible to most of the human population, but despite that there are a few things that still should stick out. Whenever a human who can see spirits addresses one of them it looks like they're talking to thin air to a normal bystander. When a human turns into a Shinigami their spirit leaves their body, while most Shinigami compensate and have a temporary soul inhabit their body, Ichigo tends to just leave his body lying around out in the open. Nobody at all ever seems to notice either of these events until the first movie, which is roughly 100 episodes into the continuity, and it's hardly mentioned again, if ever at all.
    • Somewhat explained with all the level of Brainwashing the Shinigami pull off. Also, there's another "substitute soul-reaper" there, as well as is reasonable to think the Technological Department, considering Karakura-town (or whatever) is the set of many, MANY altercations, may have devised something to make the townspeople unaware to what's going on under their noses. Even Ichigo was close to having his memories removed, Orihime had the process applied on her, Ichigo's sisters etc. At this level, It's surprising more of the characters don't die of brain cancer...
    • Averted when they handle Ichigo leaving his body lying around in one of the movies. Exactly as Rukia said would happen, someone found his body and some paramedics were trying to restart his heart.
    • Although, there are occasions where the fights actually caused damage to nearby structures, which is hardly ever mentioned. The only times it's mentioned is in the first episode, where a Hollow breaks the glass on a nearby building, (only Ichigo can see what did it). Also when Shinji fights Grimmjow, he mentions that their fight is breaking the roofs of houses and asks him to be more careful.
    • It's implied by Yumichika that Soul Society actually factors in this sort of damage into their missions- when the battle against Grimmjow's Fraccion seems to be getting more heated than expected, he calls up Mission Control telling them to set a 'spatial freeze' around the battling shinigami and add repairs to the mission budget.
  • Case Closed. In order for the Masquerade to be sustained, there are a number of details that the cast is forcibly required to ignore, otherwise the whole charade would fall apart rather quickly. With time, most of these have been either lampshaded to death or even seriously acknowledged by the cast.
  • Used maybe as irony in Code Geass: "You will disregard any strange events." The geassed people usually reply if they're asked why they're not doing anything about a crisis situation, or even reassure themselves, or warn the watcher that they are geassed with the line "I see nothing out of the ordinary."
  • In Uta∽Kata nobody wonders about the tsunami that threatens Kamakura out of the blue, or about the fact that it is deflected by a flying, screaming young girl.
  • In the anime version of Prétear, Shin's spell Beyondios creates a dimensional zone wherein the Leafe Knights can fight Demon Larvae without destroying nearby real estate. Obviously this is impossible to do when Shin isn't around, or when the monsters can't be placed under the shield for whatever reasons — but they still manage to stay unnoticed even by the protagonist's family, who only become aware that something is going on when the Big Bad invades their Big Fancy House. And then, it takes awhile for them to notice. There are at least a few episodes in which they go on a "ghost hunt".
  • In Venus Versus Virus, only a few people can see a Virus. Not only that, the Virus likes to attack people who are able to see it.
  • Played with in Love Is in the Bag, where everyone except the London transfer students know about Kate turning into a bag.
  • In Mononoke almost no one takes notice of the Medicine Seller's Facial Markings, Cute Little Fangs and Pointed Ears. Only once does anyone remark upon his unusual clothing. Usually, the most anyone notices about him is that he's very attractive.
    • This is especially obvious in the Zashiki-Warashi arc, which features a blonde, blue-eyed woman in Feudal Japan, something the other characters are astonished by when she first removes the cloth over her hair. These same characters have just met and interacted with the Medicine Seller, who has almost white hair and blue eyes, without comment.
  • A Certain Scientific Railgun has a girl whose special ability is Dummy Check. It makes her invisible to the naked eye but not to cameras. Apparently she can also use it as a Weirdness Censor in order to avoid drawing attention to herself (mainly due to her massive eyebrows).
  • This is often played for laughs in the typically bizarre world of One Piece. Particularly because the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates, who is literally made of rubber, and who has recruited a large cast of truly freaky characters into his crew, finds extremely random things to be weird. For example, he has a talking reindeer as his ship's doctor, but is shocked and baffled to meet a talking bear on another crew.
  • Lampshaded in the yaoi manga Sex Pistols: any "Madararui talk" overheard by the "normal" humans is automatically and subconsciously discarded. The art plays it literal for laughs: inside the normal people thought-clouds, a paper with "Madararui talk" written on it is crushed into a ball and then thrown into a garbage bin.
  • In Berserk, this explains why normal people literally cannot see supernatural creatures of the less-antagonizing variety, as people only bother to remember what they can explain (or what's not trying to rape and eat them).
  • Haruhi Suzumiya:
    • The title character, despite seeking anything weird or unusual in the world, manages to remain oblivious to the weird things that happen around her, aiding the other characters in keeping her Locked Out of the Loop.
    • Kuyou Suou / Suou Kuyou is a Humanoid Abomination who is just so...off that normal people don't even react to her presence. When some people (like Kyon) are forced to acknowledge her, they're creeped out by just how obviously yet subtly wrong everything about her is.
  • In Kamichu! a middle school girl becomes a goddess. It's just another after school job as far as most of the townsfolk are concerned.
  • In Is This A Zombie?, the heroes normally erase the memories of the normal people to keep the Masquerade. In the first episode of season 2, Ayumu is forced to fight a tentacled monster in broad daylight, yet everybody seems to only give it a passing glance and concentrate on the fact that Ayumu is in a dress. After defeating the monster, the device Ayumu uses to erase memories breaks down, leaving him a laughingstock as everyone brings up the crossdressing for a long, long time. At the very least, Taeko noticed the monster and thanked him for saving her life.
  • Weaponized and enforced by the villains in Kill la Kill, who by the end of the series are roaming the streets eating everyone they see - and deleting memories of anything being out of the ordinary from everyone who hasn't built up resistance to their power, ensuring that nobody but the heroes notice enough to avoid getting eaten or even panic.
  • In Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!, the characters do try to keep the Muggles from realizing that there are Cthulhu Mythos monsters in their town (with the title character erecting a "convenient barrier" to block out her battles) — but they don't bother hiding much else. Nyarko introduces herself at school as Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos and Mahiro's wife and nobody bats an eyelash. Cuko introduces herself as Nyarko's wife with nary a remark (except for Nyarko's friend remarking "You're pretty lucky!"). Nyarko's pet shantak-bird (which looks like a mix of hippopotamus, bird, and bat) does draw some brief commentary, but they just shrug it off.
  • Most bystanders in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid seem to be utterly oblivious to the actions that any of the dragons take; like when Tohru used inhuman strength and speed to stop a purse snatcher, or when she fired a massive Wave-Motion Gun in broad daylight that blew away storm clouds while in full dragon form. They do notice the horns, but everyone just passes that off as cosplaying. It's later explained as being caused by "cognitive inhibition" magic on part of the dragons.
    • During the Dodgeball chapter where Tohru and friend ended fighting each other and destroyed the park they're on, Lucoa stated that she'll restore the park and manipulate bystander memory to keep their identity secret.
    • In chapter 38, Tohru also shows that she also capable to manipulate memories as she erase Clemene memories.
    • In chapter 6 of Lucoa is my xx, Lucoa admits to Shouta that she cast a "Fuzzy Spell" on his entire class that makes them oblivious to what she does while still being aware that she's there. She proceeds to demonstrate its effects by parting the pool a la Moses to save a drowning student without anyone making a comment.
  • Exaggerated in Cromartie High School, where the majority of the school doesn't bat an eye that among the student body is a Tin-Can Robot, a gorilla and a man who may or may not be Freddie Mercury. Mechazawa (the aforementioned Tin-Can Robot) in particular is especially odd in that not only do most people not even realize that he's a robot, but Mechazawa himself doesn't seem to realize it, either.
  • In the manga Nagasarete Airantou Ikuto has a spell placed on him to cause him to disregard any supernatural events he witnesses and if forced to witness an event to handwave it with a scientific explanation even if his explanation makes no sense. (And double down if he's called out) This was done to prevent him from noticing that his sister is a Youkai because she was worried he'd be scared of her if he knew she wasn't human.
  • Most modern humans in Ayakashi Triangle cannot notice and tend to forget supernatural phenomena. This makes ayakashi Invisible to Normals unless they appear as someone or something mundane; even then, they tend to be forgotten afterward. Sosuke made quite a stir when he showed up at Hokusai High School as a student, but by the next day no one but Suzu and Matsuri remembered him. Oddly, people in the past did the opposite, attributing natural phenomena they didn't understand to ayakashi, and their belief created more of them.
    Seigen: It’s difficult for people who don’t believe in ayakashi to remember one that disappeared. That’s how vague of an existence ayakashi have in the modern world.
  • In Transformers: Super-God Masterforce, at one point the humans completely forget about what Autobots AND Decepticons are despite the series having already established the existence of both factions and the early episodes showing there's a few people who know about them.
  • Re:CREATORS is supposedly set in the "real world" but employs this to such a high degree that it borders on parody. Fictional characters including mages, fantasy swordswomen and mecha pilots pop up in real life Japan, but nobody ever seems to care. One time the aftermath of one of their battles was pointed out, but every other time since then there always was a Conveniently Empty Building. The Obviously Evil character couldn't be more blatant if she tried and yet everybody falls for her tricks. Another character blows herself up generating what amounts to a Fantastic Nuke, yet nobody ever comments on it afterwards, not even the Japanese government.

    Comic Books 
  • The plot of Black Hole centers around a sexually transmitted disease that horribly mutates high school students, yet none of their parents, teachers or, indeed, any adults in the town seem to realize or do anything about it.
  • In The Invisibles, it is revealed that babies are capable of seeing all kinds of strange beings and concepts but lose the ability once they learn language, which makes it impossible for them to express these concepts and thus impossible for them to register them in their heads. The same is used in Mary Poppins with the twins.
  • A running joke in the Invincible comic book is that people without powers never look up, so heroes can change in back alleys and fly away and no one will see. (It's also a play on "Look! Up in the sky!", a phrase associated with Superman.)
  • Up until the "Gang War" storyline several years ago, the writers of DC retconned Batman so that he was still an urban myth not believed in by everyone in Gotham. An air of mystery around him is believable, or even confusion over what he is, but it was often taken too far. It's hard to explain away the thousands of criminals Batman has taken down, along with the Bat Signal shining up every night, the dozens of supervillains committing crimes just to get his attention, as well as numerous public appearances with the Justice League of America. And apparently, a guy like Superman is perfectly normal, but a guy dressed as a bat is ridiculous. As Monkey Joe says, "A hero operating as an urban myth only works in his first year. Tops."
  • Aztek, for DC Comics, is about a technologically enhanced superhero working in the town of Vanity. Aztek's support group, believing his existence will help save the earth, employ active weirdness censors to help him out. Shouting out his secrets in the halls of his secret identity's workplace does nothing.
  • X-Men:
    • For a while, Professor X would use his telepathic powers to erase the memories of local citizenry. Yes, he has done this to save lives, which is fine, but he used to do this just to simply act as a Weirdness Censor and keep the X-Men secretive. Professor Xavier is a jerk.
    • Issue 75 of the adjectiveless X-Men series, set before the X-Men's headquarters became known to the world, has two cops talk about how the local wind produces weird audio effects occasionally. What they don't realize is the wind is actually giant robots attacking the mansion, demon attacks, the Juggernaut plowing through half the ground floor... things of that nature. To further drive home the point, an X-Man who falsely thought he was out of his gourd is whisked away from confessing to the very same cops, causing confusion.
  • One appearance of The Abomination had him walking through a crowded street in the rain without being noticed. The Abomination is an eight-foot-tall musclebound reptilian monster. Everyone else was staring at their feet for fear of making eye-contact with a stranger. Even worse, there was a six-month period of time with him as a teacher of dramatic writing or something, and no one of his students or anyone else for that matter has anything to say of the 8-foot gravely voiced covered from head to feet guy except that "he looks sad" or something. Seriously, if The Incredible Hulk used a semi-decent suit he wouldn't attract any attention at all.
    • There was a period when the Gray Hulk worked in Vegas as an enforcer named "Mr. Fixit." People regarded him as just a huge guy. "Either he's part black and part Native American, or else he tans real weird." (It helped that everyone thought of the Hulk as green.)
      • It's kind of fair since by this point, the Marvel Universe had an entire Pro Wrestling organization with super strong people.
  • The Marvel crossover storyline Inferno (1988) had Manhattan Island being overrun by demonic forces for what seems like a period of several weeks. Once things return to normal, a very weak Masquerade blaming hallucinations is accepted by the public. How hallucinations can explain the sheer amount of infrastructure damage or the many deaths during the event or the amount of time lost during those "hallucinated" days, is one question. Why a public that's already accepted the reality of superbeings, aliens and gods would have any trouble believing that New York was attacked by demons is another.
  • In Proposition Player, the dispossessed gods Anubis and Moloch try to track down the protagonist in Las Vegas. Moloch suggests they conceal their appearances, but the jackal-headed Anubis doesn't bother since hey, it's Las Vegas.
  • Fabletown in Fables has a magical protection to keep mundies from noticing their magical society in the middle of New York City. At one point they have to rely on rain to act instead, and at another their filter (and the magic holding the buildings together) fails, forcing them to leave as New York discovers one of its neighborhoods is now suddenly in ruins for no discernible reason.
  • In Doctor Strange, magic is frequently explained away by "they must be shooting a movie." People still get out of Dr Strange's way, but they don't understand why (see Strange Tales vol. 1 #120 [May, 1964]). Amusingly, sometimes Doc and his associates have to chase down misbehaving magic, since the dragon/ogre/giant rabbit is something "even Greenwich Village would notice."
  • Zatanna: In the first arc of Zatanna (2010), detective Dale Colton explains to Zatanna that people have a lot of trouble accepting the truth about magic, even though Zatanna herself is a world-famous Stage Magician with actual magical powers who is a member of the Justice League of America. No matter how often there is verifiable documentation of legitimate supernatural affairs people prefer to look the other way and hum really loudly, which explains why magic is still a "secret" in The DCU. This is particularly frustrating, even to Zatanna herself, because here there is no Masquerade, the supernatural world wants to be recognized, but the people are not listening. The alternate argument would be that in a world populated by aliens who can fly and shoot lasers out their eyes and gets invaded once a month, most people probably don't really see much difference between natural and supernatural as one could easily be used to mimic the other.
  • Sam's low level psychic powers in the Phil Foglio Angel and the Ape miniseries keep people from noticing he's a gorilla. Most of the time.
  • A running gag of the Italian Disney Comics of old was that Goofy was a massive skeptic, steadfastly refusing to believe in magic and the supernatural, no matter how many times Witch Hazel tried to impress him. Of course, this didn't stop him from taking part in various sci-fi and fantasy adventures by various artists.
  • Very few people ever seem to notice or remark on Vampirella's Stripperiffic outfit and when they do it's quickly handwaved.

    Comic Strips 
  • In Phoebe and Her Unicorn, the class doesn't react much when Phoebe shows a real live unicorn during show and tell. As the unicorn tells Phoebe, this is because of the "Shield of Boringness," a bit of magic that lets unicorns live undisturbed.

    Eastern Animation 
  • In His Wife Is a Hen, the husband is completely unaware his wife is a hen, despite the fact that she makes no effort whatsoever to hide it.

    Fan Works 
  • Inverted in The Detective and the Diplomat. While most people in Ankh-Morpork don't even blink at a lot of stuff in the city, Sherlock Holmes has trained himself to pay attention to his senses and unusual clues and thus his Weirdness Censor doesn't work. This becomes a considerable problem when he is trapped there.
  • The Infinite Loops: Mercilessly exploited by Applejack on a visit to Middle-earth, as a horse. Every time she gives away to non-Loopers that she's obviously talking (to saying nothing of earthbending), she actually says normal horse noises ("whinny, contented ear-flick"), and their natural weirdness censor reassures them that everything is alright. After all, horses can't talk.
  • The premise of Harry is a Dragon and that's okay. Harry Potter turned into a dragon as a young child but dragons have an inborn magic that keeps muggles from noticing them, meaning they think Harry's an ordinary boy even though he has wings and a tail and goes around naked. It's not until Hagrid's arrival that anyone comments on Harry being a dragon. Notably, when Harry flies in front of Hermione's parents, from their persepective it's described as Harry "jumping into the air then immediately becoming completely unremarkable".
  • The villain uses an actual device to keep up the Masquerade at his hideout in The Man with No Name, similar to what the TARDIS has.
  • Penny Saves Paldea: Several people around Paldea have observed the odd phenomena taking place, which include things like inexplicably slow movements, people and Pokemon phasing through objects, and invisible stuff that should be visible. However, the majority of the population either think the occurrences are the results of Pokemon being themselves or just ignore them altogether. Oddly enough, all the people who properly notice the phenomena are important to the plot of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet; namely Penny, Arven, various members of Team Star, Director Clavell, and Juliana.
  • Pony POV Series: The Interviewers are a mysterious trio who go around interviewing various characters and giving cryptic advice. Except for rare occasions like when they handed Twilight Sparkle Razzaroo's Apocalyptic Log, none of the characters ever question their presence and their habit of appearing and disappearing at will.
  • This turns out to be part of Pinkie's Wrong Context Magic in the Triptych Continuum. Her powers include a subtle compulsion that causes anyone who sees her do something that shouldn't be possible to write it off as "Pinkie being Pinkie" and not think any further on it.
  • Sons and Daughters of Sineya: Narnia is shown to have it's own separate censor from what keeps people from noticing the supernatural. Xander went alone there for years because no one was interested. Even after he brings Buffy and Willow there multiple times, shows others evidence, and they express interest in going there, they always are suddenly busy when invited and say they have no time. Buffy lampshades that Joyce and Giles somehow don't have time to visit a place where time doesn't pass at all. Eventually they work around it by bringing Harmony there blindfolded, which allows her to visit.
  • There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton:
    • Adrien notes at one point in To Rule Alone, to Build Together that the rest of the world doesn't even seem to notice that Paris is attacked by supervillains on a regular basis. Chloe later almost name-drops the trope when talking to Lady Noire and Mister Bug about how people outside of Paris know that they exist (though not to nearly the extent that they should, with even Spider-Man being more popular than the oddly obscure Parisian hero duo), the former of which notes that she and Tikki think that there's basically a magical bubble over the city preventing anything inside from affecting the outside and vice versa, like a giant version of the Glamour that protects the identities of the Miraculous holders.
    • The Mist used to enforce this on the world, shrouding the senses of ordinary humans regarding the exploits of demigods and monsters, but of late it's becoming less and less effective at doing so. One theory is that this is at least partially because, with the superheroes and all the other craziness that's been showing up relatively lately, the idea of mythical creatures existing is a lot less farfetched, so the Mist can't exploit their disbelief like it used to. Hecate, who is in charge of the Mist, hasn't been answering Zeus' calls about it either. The Olympians are seriously considering revealing their existence to the world at large so they can at least do this on their own terms.
    • Like Paris, it's noted in Thanatos Scowled that the exploits of Danny Phantom never making national, or even state news, was likely because of the Mist. That said, Nico notes the people of Amity Park seem to be able to see through the Mist more than normal, likely because they see ghosts regularly, and although Danny himself hasn't been seen in six years at that point, there's still a museum and a statue of him, among other things.
    • According to Word of God, the reason that no one's come across ancient Gem ruins or battlegrounds around the world is because Rose Quartz put up wards that act similarly to the Mist; as long as no one's actively looking for these sites, they can't find them. Although people who can see through the Mist like Rachel Elizabeth Dare can still find the sites regardless, even demigods and other magical humans are affected by it. The one place not so warded is the moon base, as Rose didn't expect humans to develop space flight, much to her surprise when a S.W.O.R.D. expedition stumbled onto it.
  • In What if the Yeerks Were the Good Guys?, Iniss wonders if no-one found the cavern underneath an abandoned building because it was protected by a psychic perception filter.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Overlaps with Failed a Spot Check in Knight and Day. After June exits the bathroom on the plane, she fails to notice that everyone on board except for herself and Roy is dead. She continues to block it out when Roy points this out to her. It's not until Roy takes control of the aircraft and June sees the bodies fall out of their seats that she's finally convinced.
  • Spider-Man Trilogy:
    • Occurs quite often in Spider-Man: Peter Parker jumps around, climbs up walls, shoots webs and acknowledges himself as Spider-Man when getting money off a man who runs the wrestling. He also beats the snot out of another student, and nobody makes the connection.
    • The only time they could clearly see Peter Parker doing any of that stuff was the fight he got into. Other than that, you had some guy jumping on roofs once that someone might have seen at a distance or not, and Spider-Man in a worse costume doing wrestling. Maybe it would have been possible to get a hint of his identity by tracking clues through the wrestling establishment, but it wasn't evident from any other character's perspective these isolated incidents were tied together.
    • He does get unmasked on the L train in Spider-Man 2. But no one knows a name to go with the face, and they promise not to reveal his identity anyway since he saved their lives.
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter shatters a basketball goal when dunking the ball and later throws a football so hard that it slams into and bends a goal post. Each of these events had multiple witnesses who knew Peter, but nothing seems to come of them.
  • Mentioned in the background material for The Matrix films. Apparently (it's not well conveyed on-screen) as well as The Matrix's ability to revert an area and people's memories to remove an incident from history, the leads are supposed to have a "bubble effect" which prevents passers-by (NPCs, if you will) from noticing them or interacting with them unless they do something dramatic (like stealing their phone).
  • The Ghostbusters franchise has a long history with this trope:
    • Ghostbusters II picks up five years after the end of the original, and excuses the public perception caused by a litany of ghosts/50-foot tall marshmallow man rampaging across New York City for one day by having the populace write the titular heroes off as having created a series of projections. By the time the sequel's plot begins, the characters have been sued by the city, lost most of the income they generated through the business, and have been forced to seek other employment, with only Stantz and Zeddemore still doing birthday parties in-costume (and one kid dismissing them as heroes). It takes another public incident (the reveal of the Scoleri Brothers after the Ghostbusters have had their gear impounded and a trial launched to find them guilty of illegally accessing city property) for the public to start trusting them again.
    • The 2015 Sony Pictures email hack references this trope as the rationale for why Paul Feig wanted to have a Continuity Reboot of the franchise. In an email to then-Chairman Amy Pascal, Feig reasoned that having a franchise where the public is aware of ghosts would create too many problems for future plots, necessitating a fresh start in a world where there have never been mass ghost sightings.
    • Subverted by the marketing for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which counts both of the first two film's events as canon, then clarifies (via a schoolteacher who is aware of the Ghostbusters) that there hasn't been a ghost sighting in 30 years. As such, the original team's exploits have passed into legend.
  • In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun goes a whole day and into the next morning without noticing the Zombie Apocalypse that has already started. This is part of his characterization that he's trudging through his life like a zombie.
  • In The Truman Show, this explains why Truman takes so long realizing that his world is fake. "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented." It also explains why all the people around him studiously ignore Truman when he starts to act out. They ignore Truman's antics because that's what they are paid to do.
  • Mary Poppins: Admiral Boom fires a cannon twice a day so regularly you can set your clock by it, which results in tremors akin to an earthquake for any nearby houses, including the Banks residence. However, they're so used to it at the time of the film that it barely fazes them; they just take their posts to make sure that no valuables are broken, then go back to whatever they were doing before.
    • A minor example with the eponymous character; Mary doesn't generally let people see her magic (with the exceptions of Jane, Michael, and those who are already aware of it like Bert and Uncle Albert), but near the start of the film, Ellen sees her and the children sliding down the banister and exiting the door to head for the park (the door opening and closing on its own). And how does she react? She simply smiles and waves, happy that she doesn't have to take on the responsibility of looking after Jane and Michael now that they have a good nanny.
    • Winifred comes home to find a crowd of sooty chimney sweeps dancing around the living room, and she looks mildly surprised at best. Then she casually says to Ellen that they need to talk when Ellen has a moment.
  • In Blade (1998), no one even glances at the dude driving the souped-up muscle car, with the funny hair and tats, dressed in a black leather duster with a sword handle sticking out of it. He beats up a uniformed cop on a populated street in broad daylight and no one cares.
  • The Sixth Sense is a weird case — the ghosts themselves "see what they want to see", protecting themselves from the Tomato in the Mirror.
  • In prose, at least in early incarnations, the police denied that The Shadow existed, claiming he just represented a contemporary rumor. In the 1994 Alec Baldwin film, a woman scoffs at the Shadow as just a rumor to get people to listen to the radio and read newspapers. (Earlier, the Shadow, while as Lamont Cranston at the Cobalt Club, used his powers of suggestion to dissuade Commissioner Wainright Barth from assigning his officers to investigate the rumors of the Shadow.)
  • This happens often in film adaptations, which tend to focus on either the origin or early years, instead of going for a more en media res approach. In 1996's The Phantom, someone scoffs at reports of the Phantom as "just a rumor" and in Daredevil in 2003 the police deny Daredevil as nothing more than a rumor until, in an early scene, reporter Ben Urich lights a drawing of flammable chemicals that Daredevil left behind as a Zorro Mark to spell out DD.
  • In the first film version of the Mack Bolan imitator The Punisher, the public did not at first feel sure that the Punisher amounted to more than a rumor. In the Lundgren film, as stated in dialogue several times, Castle had apparently died in the car explosion that slew his family five years previous to the main events of the film. In the main action of the film, people still think of Castle as dead, with only his former partner thinking of him as the true identity of the Punisher. Several newspaper headlines suggest that the public did not accept that the Punisher actually operated until he started leaving knives with his skull symbol on the handle behind. (When we see the Punisher in action before the police officially identify him as the hitherto though dead Castle, though, he does not seem to have made any effort to disguise himself. Somehow, no security cameras managed to get a recording of him, it seems Before anyone says "Maybe he looked different before the explosion, maybe he had plastic surgery", sorry, when we see him in flashback, he looks the same.)
  • In Guyver: Dark Hero, a newspaper headline reads "Verdict Still Out on Armored Vigilante" perhaps indicating that much of the public has not accepted him more than a rumor.
  • In one of the Darkman sequels, a newspaper headline refers to Darkman as "an urban Bigfoot", suggesting that the public thinks of him as a rumor.
  • In Beetlejuice the dead are Invisible to Normals - which Lydia Deetz is proudly not.
    Lydia: Well, I've read through that handbook for the recently deceased. It says: "Live people ignore the strange and unusual." I, myself, am strange and unusual.
  • The X-Men Film Series play fast and loose with this trope. The world knows mutants exist to the point where governments are trying to pass laws against them, there are entire studies done on them, the issue is being discussed in the media, and people are actively protesting for/against them. Despite this, people are usually shocked when they see mutants displaying their powers with only a few exceptions. This even includes Wolverine who finds the concept of the X-Men bizarre despite the fact that he is a mutant himself.
  • In High Anxiety fugitive Richard Thorndyke invokes this trope when he tells Brisbane that people tend to ignore strange things. In order to pass customs without incident, they behave like an outrageously obnoxious bickering old Jewish couple.
  • In the Indiana Jones franchise, the weirdness censor is Dr. Jones himself. This serves also as a disclaimer that the movies are not what real archaeology is about.
  • One of the primary responsibilities of the Men in Black (the other being handling lawful extraterrestrial alien visitor traffic) is policing illicit alien activity on Earth. Part of that duty is ensuring that the humans on Earth outside the agency are completely oblivious to the aliens among them, be they legal or otherwise.
  • In The Howling, there is a live werewolf transformation on the evening news. Many of the locals pass it off as special effects.
  • Played with in R.I.P.D. Nick/old Chinese guy gets crushed by a car and a group of bystanders rush to help him. The Dead-o's actions do not go unnoticed by the media.
  • Let Me In shows Owen. He quickly notices that Abby is acting strange. He never sees her in daylight, she obviously can't eat sweets, and she walks barefoot through the snow because she can't feel the cold. In addition, she does not know very famous pop culture objects such as the Rubix cube. In addition, one night she climbs through his window into his bedroom, although an ordinary human would not be able to climb up there at all. But eventually Owen confronts Abby about whether she is a vampire. That implies that he suspected it before, but was willing to overlook it as long as she's going to be his girlfriend.

    Literature 
  • Animorphs: The reason that, when discussing who to recruit for the Auxiliary Animorphs, the kids decide that Adults Are Useless.
    Marco: It's got to be kids. Adults are too reality-bound. It's too hard for them to suspend disbelief for all this weirdness, even when it hits them square in the face.
  • The kids don't care that Blanche The Blue-Nosed Witch is a witch and can fly on a broomstick. However, when she darts off on her broom after visiting an evening party (because it's nearly midnight and she's about to be late to her scurry's meetup), one of the ladies at the party sees her fly off through the door slot and when she tells the others at the party, they just laugh her off.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia:
    • In The Magician's Nephew, Uncle Andrew is incapable of believing animals can talk. When he encounters animals talking, the narrator takes glee in describing how Andrew's own Weirdness Censor engages at that moment, rendering him incapable of understanding them. Ironic in that Uncle Andrew spent his whole life looking for magic, and when he was finally confronted with real power, he just couldn't handle it.
    • The Last Battle has another instance set after Narnia's end, where the dwarves eat delicious food in a beautiful meadow but perceive it as stale bread in a muckhole due to their cynical incapability to accept the paradise.
    • In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, after entering Narnia, Eustace Scrubb seems completely certain he is just somewhere else on Earth and not the magical place his cousins claim he's in, despite the fact that he was pulled through a picture on the wall.
  • This is a big part of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos; the premise being that if the vast majority of human beings actually inquired into the weirdness and vastness around them, they'd go insane from the knowledge of "gods" and monsters. From The Call of Cthulhu:
    The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
  • The City & the City are a pair of politically and culturally distinct city-states that physically overlap. Residents of both cities are trained from childhood to ignore people, vehicles, buildings, and even disasters in the other city at all times. Visitors from other countries receive training to avoid "breaching" the division.
  • In the Clan of the Cave Bear series, the Clan are unable to see someone who has been sentenced to death. The person sentenced isn't killed; the medicine man says "you are dead" and everyone else assumes that to be true. Even if they do "see" the person they assume it's an evil spirit pretending to be that person. Ayla (the main character) even tells her BF in a later book that if she were to tell some Clan people they've just met that she had been sentenced to death they would instantly be unable to see her. The explanation in the books regarding this is quite fuzzy. The Clan don't appear to physically lose the ability to see the person; they just believe the person is a spirit, and that if the spirit is ignored for long enough, they will disappear.
  • Lynn Mims uses this in a story in a Darkover anthology—Caleb Hargrave’s Weirdness Censor is so strong that it cancels out psi powers. He’s a walking telepathic damper... but it only works when he’s nearby.
  • In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the narrator explains that most humans have formed a very strong idea of what is "normal", and anything that doesn't fit into that idea is Invisible to Normals. This includes Death and other Anthropomorphic Personifications, and Talking Animal Gaspode the Wonder Dog (since "everyone knows dogs can't talk"). There are some exceptions, including witches and wizards, by training, and small children, because they haven't learnt what "normal" is yet.
    • Employed more subtly in the Discworld novel Interesting Times. Rincewind, on yet another foreign jaunt, figures out nobody really notices men on horseback because doing so tends to get people stabbed.
    • An unusual example is in Mort, where the title character changes history by saving the life of a princess doomed to die, and everyone in the kingdom except a wizard find themselves unconsciously acting as though she had died, and feeling upset and nauseous when confronted with the fact that she still lives, then revert back to believing her dead once away from her.
    • Inverted in Maskerade, wherein the cast of the Opera House can't come up with the most obvious solutions because those just aren't theatrical enough.
    • Subverted in Wyrd Sisters: Death was visible on stage during a play, because the audience were expecting to see Death appear and assumed he was an actor. He fit in quite well, since he forgot the lines just like the other actors.
    • The Weirdness Censor appears to have been (mostly) left out of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. When said rodents decide to have a talk with the townspeople, it takes a few minutes for most of the humans to accept the existence of talking rats.
    • Lord Rust in Jingo confirms that it's not just the supernatural that falls subject to this trope on Discworld: his personal Weirdness Censor is so strict that it even blots out his perception of rudeness, on the grounds that a lowborn churl like Sam Vimes wouldn't possibly dare snark off to an aristocrat like him. Snuff would later expand this into a superpower; his absolute certainty that he was invincible caused arrows to curve in flight and hit the man behind him instead.
    • Moreover, it is described in both Moving Pictures and Guards! Guards!! as a kind of permanent level of intoxication generated by the brain to be able to ignore things that could drive it to madness, which can happen if one were to ever become "knurd" (a state of sobriety so stark that the Weirdness Censor is shut off). Some people are born "knurd", or it can be achieved by, say drinking extra-strong Klatchian Coffee.
    • There's also Thief of Time, where an actual horse (Binky) walks into a library to pick up Susan. But since everybody knows that that doesn't happen, it's obviously not real and therefore nothing to be concerned about.
      "The historians paid him no attention. Horses did not walk into libraries."
    • Lack of this is actually given a specific name (First Sight) in the Tiffany Aching books. Having First Sight is a much better indication that a young girl could make a formidable witch than mere Second Sight, because it's better to be grounded than mystical.
  • The Dresden Files:
    • The Masquerade is held up by the vanilla humans as much by the supernatural community, largely because people just don't want to believe that the world is saturated with murderous monsters and inexplicable magic. The safe, mundane world that most vanillas live in is a much safer and happier place if they didn't have to worry about vampires, demons, or warlocks, which explain why you never hear stories about trolls and magic. Everyone just writes it off as something mundane that, at the time, they thought was impossible. If they're attacked by a troll, for example and they're asked about it in a few months or so, they'll just claim that it was a large drug addict or something (the first few months will just have them staying quiet, afraid of people thinking they're crazy or for thinking that they 'themselves' have gone off the deep end). It also helps that human magic users tend to screw up any kind of recording equipment, making efforts to actually record evidence of the supernatural turn out to be grainy, filled with static, and generally seeming like badly distorted or faked content.
    • It helps that the people who do outright report what they have seen tend to be dismissed at best, or tossed into the loony bin, or in certain cases attacked by the very things they witnessed. A good example of this is the medical examiner, Butters, who reports that several bodies he examined were clearly not human, and was thus suspended for three months and put into a psych ward for observation as a result.
    • The author makes a point of justifying this every now and then, and gives at least one long speech about it. It actually makes sense, so you accept the blatant use of this trope.
    • It also helps that the various supernatural powers in play have a pretty big stake in making sure humanity does not find out about them, given that for all the contempt most of these creatures have for humans, the last thing they want to do is get humanity riled up. While in the past a mob with torches and pitchforks could be considered a tangible threat to most supernatural creatures, humanity has since upgraded to assault rifles and attack helicopters. And now number in the billions. Harry has, in fact, used this as a threat once or twice, mentioning to the latest Big Bad that if they go ahead the way they are, they'll end up involving the human authorities, or Harry might call them in. Human involvement has been likened to nuclear brinkmanship - you're unlikely to actually use it, but your opponent can't always be certain that you won't get that desperate.
    • It really helps that most humans really don't want to believe that the Things That Go "Bump" in the Night are real. Selective Obliviousness at its finest. To the point that they will accept any alternate "rational" explanation no matter how farfetched.
    • One individual, Anna Valmont, a normal human and master thief, was very suddenly pulled into the supernatural side when demons killed her partners and she finds that they were being used as a playing piece between the forces of Heaven and Hell. When she gets out, she continues with her craft, taking on clients and targets in the supernatural community, though she mentioned how easy it was to find information on the players of the supernatural world, and this trope gets mentioned again as the reason why the supernatural nations don't need to try too hard to keep concealed.
  • Edgedancer (a novella of The Stormlight Archive): The people of Yeddaw outright ignore a miracle happening in the middle of their town (specifically a tree growing ten feet in seconds), despite being exceptionally good at spotting street urchins and lawbreakers. Lift snarks that they must be doing so on purpose.
  • Frank Herbert played with this more than once, e.g. in "The Featherbedders":
    ...he was well within the seventy-five percent accuracy limit the Slorin set for themselves. It was a universal fact that the untrained sentience saw what it thought it saw. The mind tended to supply the missing elements.
  • The Golem and the Jinni: The title characters look like humans to Muggles, but they and other supernaturally-aware entities can see each other as figures formed of stone and primordial fire, respectively.
  • Harry Potter:
    • The entrance to Diagon Alley, a street filled with shops for wizards, is hidden behind a pub called The Leaky Cauldron which muggles never notice because they don't pay attention to their surroundings and don't expect it to be there. Though with memory charms, "Muggle repelling wards" and the charms that make Hogwarts look like a pile of rubble, it's not so much that Muggles willfully ignore magic as that any interaction with magic tends to involve them getting parts of their cortex melted.
    • Arthur Weasley also notes that Muggles who are the victims of such magical pranks as shrinking keys will always insist that they simply lost them.
      Arthur: Bless them, they'll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if it's staring them in the face...
    • The whole world of Harry Potter relies on Muggles' inherent ignorance towards anything magical. There's an in-universe book devoted to why muggles tend to subconsciously suppress all the memories of supernatural experiences.
    • In Order of the Phoenix the majority of wizarding Britain was putting one on themselves with the Minster's smear campaign against Harry, and willful denial of Voldemort's return.
  • In The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School, students from a Superhero School and Academy of Evil get into a fight in the middle of a London street, and a crowd gathers. The combatants don't worry about it, because they know that within a few hours at most the Ordinaries will have convinced themselves that they imagined the whole thing, or turned the memory into something more mundane. Before the fight's even over, there are people in the crowd telling each other that they saw better last time they went to see a conjurer at the theatre.
  • Heretical Edge has the Bystander Effect, which functions similarity to The Mist from the Percy Jackson example up above by erasing or censoring memories of anything magical or otherwise supernatural from the minds of mundane humans. It can be overcome by becoming a Heretic or by being born half or part human. It's essentially a giant memory spell cast by a race called the Seosten to stunt humanity's growth and isolate it from other races. Individual Seosten can selectively free humans from its effects.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
    • Life, the Universe and Everything introduces the SEP, or "Somebody Else's Problem" field, a device which renders things effectively invisible by suggesting to an onlooker's subconscious that it's somebody else's problem and can therefore be safely ignored.
    • In Mostly Harmless, Arthur ends up on a planet that has a race of birds that ignore everything out of the ordinary that happens around them. For example, they fail to notice a giant crashing spaceship. On the flip side, everything normal comes as a huge shock to them. In the author's own words: "...and the sunrise always took them completely by surprise."
  • In the Hitman novels of the 1970's, featuring Mike Ross, private investigator who operated in the guise of the hockey masked figure the Hitman, the Hitman stood as legendary figure only hinted at by the media. Possibly some cover occurred.
  • This is one of the central themes of Pratchett's lesser known works, the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, where the title character explicitly lacks those kind of mental filters, so he's usually the first (and sometimes only) one to notice the weird things around him. Ironically, that same lack of mental agility makes him best equipped to actually deal with said weirdness, as his friends tend to try to deal according to the way things are "supposed to" go.
  • In Steven Gould's novel "Jumper" and the sequel "Reflex", the protagonist discovers he has the ability to teleport at will. At first he's afraid of revealing his secret if he ever "lands" somewhere within sight of anyone, but when this occurs a few times by accident, he discovers it's not a problem. Even when he instantly appears right in front of someone, the startled person just brushes it off with "oh excuse me, I didn't see you there" and dismisses it as a failure of their own attention rather than spending even a moment considering the ridiculous notion that he had just popped in.
  • The Lost Thing ends with the main character noting that he might have stopped noticing the lost things, implying that the people of the dull place he lives in are too mundane to notice something out of the ordinary like that. Earlier on, his parents don't notice that there's a giant thing in their living room until he draws their attention to it.
  • In The Mortal Instruments, mundanes cannot see the Shadow World or most individuals belonging to it as they really are. The Shadowhunters, being mostly human, would normally be visible to them, but a simple bit of magic renders them unnoticeable as well. Locations, including an entire country are hidden from human perception this way.
  • In Sergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch and its sequels, the Others use pretty basic spells to keep humans from noticing anything out-of-the-ordinary. This is done in order to prevent world-wide witch hunts. For example, the headquarters of the Moscow Night Watch are located on several floors of an office building, but these floors are invisible to humans (i.e. they think the building is smaller). It is common for crowds to simply pass by an Other hiding himself from humans without knowing why they are leaving a small area open. Also, no Other has to worry about burglars, as other spells make humans instinctively want to avoid certain places. This is mentioned by Anton when he has to pretend to be a human for several days and is not allowed to use any magic. He suddenly realizes his car could be stolen without any active wards.
  • In the ONSET series, it's theorized that one of the effects of the Seal of Solomon which has kept most of the really powerful supernatural entities away from Earth for a few millennia is that it increases the probability that people will avoid consciously noticing the rare supernatural events that take place (unless they're made aware of the Masquerade). However, as the Seal weakens not only does it increase the odds of something powerful getting through, people are more likely to notice odd things.
  • Vadim Panov:
    • Secret City: While a general Masquerade is in effect, most humans will easily believe claims that data were forged, witnesses drunk or drugged and people claiming to use magic used clever technology or hypnotism. The eponymous Secret City dwellers also actively support skepticism in the population.
    • Enclaves: In an otherwise cyberpunk setting, several ancient traditions survived and some changed, generally working by Religion is Magic. People will yet actively ignore obvious supernatural events, e.g. a person outrunning a projectile, and cite secret research or evidence failure to that end.
  • In the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books, a magical force called Mist acts as an active version to cover up whenever a mortal sees gods or monsters. A few mortals are known to be immune to its effects.
  • Plato reasoned that the people living in his allegorical Platonic Cave cannot comprehend the world outside the cave, and merely dismiss experiencing the surface world as a delusion.
  • Verge Foray's novella "Practice" has an incident of this. A school for "disturbed children" is actually for psychic children. A private institute, it's subject to surprise accreditation inspections and the children conspire in the Masquerade with the non-psychic adults. When one of the kids does make a minor slip, another kid checks the inspectors' minds and finds that one of them "saw it, but he didn't believe it, so he didn't see it."
  • In Christopher Fowler's novel Roofworld. Why has no one noticed a shadow community living on the rooftops of London, rappelling along telegraph lines? They just don't look up much, and dismiss a glimpse of anyone they see up there if do.
  • Near the beginning of Something More Than Night, a car is pulled out of the bay with a very dead body in the driver's seat and, unexpectedly, a very much alive woman in the trunk. The cops investigating the scene are baffled by her survival, since the car was submerged for several hours and the trunk had visible holes in it and was full of water, but quickly persuade themselves, despite the evidence of their own senses, that it must have been watertight and preserved her in an air pocket. The protagonist, observing all this, reflects that in his experience most people, when confronted with the impossible, find ways to rationalize it or remember it as something more mundane.
  • The Masquerade in The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is maintained thanks to this. In the setting, summoners and supernatural beings have a specific form of Invisible to Normals: whenever they leave a normal person's field of vision, that person will lose all of their memories of the supernatural. The explanation given is that an uninitiated person's mind is unable to properly comprehend the supernatural.
  • In Michael Kurland's The Unicorn Girl, the characters visit a Victorian-like world where most of the people literally cannot see a naked person—a fact which some thieves are very happy to take advantage of.
  • In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat mentions that this tendency is "a lesson about mortal piece of mind I never forgot."
    Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing tin pans all over, pouring water on pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortals will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.
  • In the children's novel Whispering in the Wind by Alan Marshall, the Kid Hero meets a witch who flies him to the Moon where they're seen by an astronaut, who reacts by following the advice of Mission Control to increase his oxygen flow and take a couple of pills which will stop him having any more hallucinations.
  • The wizards in the Young Wizards series depend on this to get away with doing some forms of magic out in the open. The bullies can't hit you because your spell is deflecting their blows? They convince themselves that they didn't want to hit you, because invisible force fields are impossible. Vanish off a subway platform via teleporting? Whoever saw you thinks you simply moved deeper into the crowd while they weren't looking.

    Mythology and Religion 

    Radio 
  • Played with in a few of Bob & Ray's Wally Ballou skits, wherein the newsman, searching eagerly for a story, ends up interviewing the most boring man alive (in the most memorable version, a cranberry grower) while resolutely ignoring the obvious disaster — gunshots, sirens, screams, crackling flames etc — happening all around them.
  • During a Halloween Special on That Gosh Darn Hippie Show, the host got numerous (fake) phone calls from listeners who were obviously not human, and although she was slightly bewildered she completely failed to realize what was going on. She cottoned on by the end of the show, though, and was surprised when the last caller didn't make any bizarre threats against her life.

    Tabletop Games 
  • An amusing variation in Warhammer, with the level of it Depending on the Writer. The Empire refuse to believe in the existence of the Skaven (a race of technologically advanced rat-people, living just under the surface), despite the fact that half-human Beastmen, Elves, Dwarves (who exist in a constant state of war with the Skaven), magic and freaking Dragons are just a fact of life in the Empire . This has been explained back and forth by either the Empire keeping it quiet to keep everyone from panicking, the Skaven keeping it quiet in their own best interest, people just assuming they're a Beastmen variant or some innate magic of the Skaven making everyone forget.
  • One of the character classes of the Palladium RPG Beyond the Supernatural is the "Nega-Psychic": a person whose disbelief in the supernatural is so strong that it provides him with enhanced saving rolls versus supernatural phenomena and allows cancellation of supernatural effects. (This means that the nega-psychic character spends the entire game loudly wondering why everyone else in the party is getting so excited by "swamp gas," something which appeals to certain types of role-players, but drives others up the wall.)
  • The Third Edition of GURPS, specifically in the IOU setting, included an advantageous character trait called "Mundanity". The advantage comes in a variety of levels. At its most expensive and intense level, any character with that trait has a chance of turning anything he / she sees that isn't considered "normal" into something normal. For example: demons turn into men in demon suits, ray guns turn into squirt guns, etc. It's sort of like a weaponized version of Sunnydale Syndrome.
  • Practically a part of everyday human existence in the various The World of Darkness games.
    • Vampires in both settings can learn Obfuscate, a power which causes others to not notice them. Essentially every other type of supernatural creature has at least one (usually several) specialty or subtype with the same ability (such as mages using telepathy or probability manipulation or changelings using illusions).
    • Old World of Darkness-only examples:
      • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, werewolves (and other shapeshifters, except werefoxes), have the Delirium. This means that (most) mortals, upon seeing a werewolf in true form, freak out hysterically, and forget about what happened later. However, relying on this to maintain the Masquerade is pointedly a stupid idea and usually outlawed in shapeshifter societies, as the various enemies who know about them can simply follow incidences of such hysteria to track down the protagonists.
      • In Changeling: The Dreaming, changelings are prone to Banality (the death of imagination), which not only shuts down their magic, but is potentially lethal to them, and if they manage to use their magic in front of mortals, the Mists will erase the knowledge of it.
      • Wraith: The Oblivion has a similar censorship mechanic called the Fog, where mortals who see wraiths and experience their powers will react with mortal terror, then write it all off as a nightmare or trick of the light.
      • In Mage: The Ascension, humanity has been so convinced to accept a paradigm of what is and what isn't possible that anything too blatantly "magical" usually results in reality itself backlashing against mages in the form of "Paradox". The presence of normal humans actively disrupts magic. The mere act of observing a mage's supernatural abilities can cause their spells to decay into nothingness. The Arcane advantage doubles down on this by making the mage himself tend to slip out of both physical records and human memory, meaning that the censor extends even to people actively trying to figure it out.
    • New World of Darkness-only examples:
      • Mage: The Awakening keeps Paradox, but in this case, it's coded into the very laws of the universe. Human observation will cause magic to decay (due to the Lie), but the very act of performing something explicitly magical runs the risk of the universe (or... something worse) pantsing you. Related to this is Quiescence, the tendency of humans to rationalize and forget anything obviously magical that they witnessed. Certain people (known as Sleepwalkers) are, while unable to work magic, able to see past the Lie and truly witness magic; this same ability also means they cannot trigger Paradox, making them invaluable as assistants to mages.
      • Werewolf: The Forsaken has Lunacy, which is equivalent to Delirium. Instead of being the ancestral memories of werewolves culling humans, however, it's a gift by their patron goddess Luna that keeps humanity from easily finding the beasts in their midst.
      • A similar effect occurs in the Second Sight splatbook, where almost all humans are latent psychics, but since they don't believe in psychics, end up using their abilities to suppress the unbelievable psychic acts of others. Conversely, it's possible for characters to gain an advantage in the form of a believing hanger-on who actually makes their psychic abilities perform better.
      • In Changeling: The Lost, all changeling magic (as well as the changeling's inhuman appearance) is covered by "the Mask". A seven-foot-tall cyclops with fey armour sculpted from living, rune-etched wood looks like a banged-up old bouncer with an eye patch and hockey pads, and so on.
      • Averted in the fan-game Genius: The Transgression: the rules explicitly state that nothing about Mad Science clouds men's minds. Causes insanity yes, but if you resist that (and it doesn't kill you before you can tell anyone) there's no censor. The only groups that appear to be unable to perceive something are both intrinsically supernatural - the Lemurians and the Seers to the Throne, the bad-guy conspiracies for Geniuses and Mages respectively, are seemingly unable to detect each other, and no-one knows why.
      • Other fan-game Princess: The Hopeful has an optional rule allowing to apply the trope to Princesses' outfits; according to this rule, the Nobles' magic combined with mortals' natural tendency to ignore the supernatural means a Princess dressed in a futuristic sci-fi outfit can go around in public completely unnoticed, aside from people noticing she looks a bit "nerdy".
  • The Swedish horror game KULT makes this the central premise of the world's mythology: Humanity has been imprisoned in an illusory world by the Demiurge and blinded to the real world around them. When supernatural events transpire around them, the illusion-spell in people's minds makes them rationalize it away as normal accidents.
  • In two of the four main variants of d20 Modern, monsters roam the modern world. However, most humans can't believe that they exist, so they just see humans where player characters see monsters. (These settings are called Urban Arcana and Shadow Chasers, if you're wondering.) The average joe walks around in a state of autopilot, it's explained, so while they do see monsters as monsters while they're around, their mind subconsciously edits it out later, remembering a troll as a massive brute of a man, the dragon's fireball as a gas leak, the gnoll in the corner a shady guy wearing a trenchcoat. They also don't notice things that the more alert player characters and "aware" NPCs do, such as aforementioned shady man having slightly protruding ears...
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • The core rule books advise the DM and the players to avoid this; if you're playing in a setting where you can buy and sell magic items fairly easily, it kind of behooves the NPCs to notice magic, and not knock it as "superstition."
    • Except in Ravenloft, where noticing what's spooky and magical can get you killed. Natives of domains such as Richemulot or Zherisia, where the populace is infiltrated by monsters, find it a lot safer not to admit they've seen anything suspicious, even to themselves.
    • Outsiders embodying the multiverse's Lawful alignments can have trouble with this, becoming so used to following rules that they assume that everyone else is too. So that group of mortals moving through the Nine Hells of Baator must be mercenaries or cultists on official business, and not, say, an adventuring party raiding the Lower Planes.
    • Successfully making your Will saving throw against the demon queen Pale Night means that you've managed to activate a Weirdness Censor as a defensive mechanism, since You Cannot Grasp the True Form of such a primordial horror. It's implied that her standard appearance, that of a hovering feminine figure wrapped in a billowing white sheet, is some sort of cosmic censor. Fail the saving throw? You understand exactly what you're seeing - something so unspeakably monstrous that just seeing it burns your brain out and kills you. If someone resurrects you, mercifully, your brain deletes what you saw and all you remember is a feeling of sheer terror.
  • In The Dark Eye German Pen&Paper, its fairly normal for elves and dwarfs roam the cities. The bigger cities have their mage academies. Goblins and orcs are fairly well known in the wilderness. Yet muggles are particularity shocked whenever something magical happens around them, and are fast to shrug it off as something mundane instead of magic. This is played Up to Eleven with the kobolds, which in this setting are supernatural beings of near infinite power... and only use it for mischief or if enlisted by an deity for a particular job to guard an area. Like in Real Life if some mishap is going on, they are going to handwave it towards the kobolds as fairy tale, but maybe more true as they want it to be.
  • Nobilis averts this. Muggles may go mad from encountering what they could not possibly understand and Nobles must take pains to ensure that this will not happen. However, their bosses, the Imperators, are powerful enough that reality itself will censor their actions. If an Imperator blots out the sun, not only will everyone believe it's a solar eclipse, but scientists will have retroactively predicted it several weeks ago. Third edition tones this down a bit, with most miracles having a degree of muggle-safety, but pulling off stuff that's too blatant will still cause dementia animus.
  • Rogue Trader mentions this as a Required Secondary Power for Navigators- their Warp eye allows them to gaze into the Warp, but also edits the input into an appropriate metaphor- the examples in the book are finding a path through a storm-racked wood or navigating a roiling sea. It's actually a good thing, as Going Mad From The Revelation can be harmful to your health.
  • In addition, the Unremarkable trait from Dark Heresy can work like this. The Moritat assassin who is anti-social and obsessed with murder? All I see is a businessman with a bit of red on him...
  • Meanwhile Black Crusade has the mutation "Aura of Normalcy", which makes the character appear completely mundane. Even if said character is a 8 foot tall Chaos Space Marine in Powered Armor carrying a missile launcher and has wings, is phasing in and out of reality and has a flaming skull straight out of Ghost Rider.
  • In Call of Cthulhu, one possible form of insanity is Panzaism, the pathological inability to perceive extraordinary things as such. A Deep One, for example, will be seen as a normal man, or perhaps a man in a wetsuit, or at the very most, man wearing a deeply unconvincing monster suit.
  • In Don't Rest Your Head, "Sleepers" (aka Muggles who regularly sleep and live in the "normal" world) are incapable of perceiving the Mad City, its inhabitants, and their actions. Once, the Nightmares stole an entire district; Sleepers thought that it was destroyed in a fire. The manual implies that sleep is some sort of natural defence that makes Sleepers mostly immune to the Mad City.
  • The Yellow King has the This is Normal Now setting, which is our modern day reality... being slowly invaded by Carcosa, to the point that supernatural causes are responsible of 15 out of 100,000 deaths per year. People notice, but they don't care as much as they should, due to a psychic effect called the Reintegration Complex. While people joke about "threatening my integration" the same way some people might joke about trigger warnings, thinking too hard about the monsters and other strange phenomena stalking the world can cause mental breakdowns and death in some people.

    Theatre 
  • From Julius Caesar:
    Brutus: But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
  • Discussed in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:
    "A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until—"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer."

    Video Games 
  • Ashina: The Red Witch: Ash's sister Tena doesn't seem to realise she's in the spirit world after her boss Yoko invites her to the bathhouse, not thinking much about the fact that the other guests don't look human, and later thinking that the Red Witch's transformation during the confrontation with Yoko in the theatre is just really good special effects.
  • Averted in the Assassin's Creed games, when bystanders will basically go "WTF?!" when they see Altair, Ezio, and other characters climbing up a wall, and so on.
  • Bloodborne: This is actually a stat in this game; increasing your Insight represents your weirdness filter being slowly removed, so you notice things like arcane beam attacks, the Witch of Hemwick summoning Mad Ones, the Plain Doll being alive, [[spoiler;and the Lesser Amygdalas hanging around everywhere]]. Rom is also implied to be a living Weirdness Censor; as long as she's around, the truth of the Mensis Ritual being performed and the Blood Moon will never reach Yharnam proper.
  • In The Darkside Detective, most of the population of Twin Lakes seems to just ignore the supernatural events going on around them. At one point a computer operator comments that she can't figure out why the computer's on the fritz when there's a gremlin standing right next to her loudly nomming on the wiring. In the finale chapter, an incipient Zombie Apocalypse is treated as non-supernatural rioting by everybody except the Occult Detective protagonist and a priest he joins forces with.
  • In Diablo III, pre-release information says that the majority of the world has shrugged off the events that happened 20 years ago, and are unaware that demons were responsible for the havoc caused. This is rather odd, because in the second game, the minions of the Prime Evils seemed to rampage across most of the known world, and most of the NPCs you talk to seemed aware of the cause of the problem.
    • Even in one of the novels, a necromancer comments that their seers suspect that Baal is responsible for the destruction of Mount Arreat in the Lord of Destruction expansion pack. Not only do the necromancers usually seem more aware of what's going on than the rest of the world, but Baal was anything but subtle during his assault. Baal wasn't exactly skipping merrily to the summit, though. He killed cities and possibly kingdoms that were in his way. Who's left to say what really went on besides some reclusive, not terribly credible barbarians?
      • In the absence of forensics science, evidence of the Prime Evils rests entirely on eye witnesses. The demons weren't exactly leaving a lot of those... and most of them would likely be thought insane by anyone who hadn't been involved in the previous conflicts. Marius is a clear example of this, narrating his misadventures with the wanderer from inside an asylum cell.
    • This was present to an extent in Diablo II as well. One of the first things that Warriv says to you is "Some say that Diablo, the Lord of Terror, walks the world again. I don't know if I believe that..."
  • Played for Drama in Doki Doki Literature Club!. After Sayori commits suicide and the game resets, characters begin acting more and more intense (culminating in Yuri becoming an obsessive Yandere towards the player) and the game starts glitching due to the Medium Aware Monika's influence over the game. The player character (who, being the Audience Surrogate, has the least character out of anyone in the cast) doesn't comment on any of this, even when Natsuki notices the changes in Yuri and tries to go to the player for help, only for her face to suddenly disappear as she tells the player to forget about her and Yuri once Monika gets to her. Eventually it gets so bad that even when Yuri catches the player character alone, confesses her love in an extremely creepy way, and then stabs herself to death in front of the player no matter whether the player accepts her confession or not, the PC has zero reaction to any of it and ends up just staring blankly at her dead body for an entire in-game weekend as he functionally ceases to be a character.
  • In The Elder Scrolls series, Tamriel has one, partly thanks to Artificial Atmospheric Actions. NPCs will suffer odd pathing issues and will get stuck trying to walk through each other. Guards will ignore people attacking you, but if you attack someone, they'll immediately try to arrest you for committing a crime. You can murder someone in cold blood in the street, pay your fine, and then otherwise walk away scot-free. You can fire an arrow into a person's head from stealth, and that person will dismiss it as the wind. Odd circumstances crop up where two guards will suddenly try to kill each other because one accidentally struck a friendly NPC while fighting a legitimate enemy and the other considered it a crime. You may help a village defend against an attack but then immediately find yourself under arrest because you accidentally killed a chicken in the fighting. You'll wake up to find yourself being attacked by an assassin or a zombie but your bunkmate won't lift a finger to help you. Many fans actually enjoy this aspect of the series because the weirdness is just that entertaining sometimes.
  • Hilariously done in Fate/stay night, when Rin gets so angry at the protagonist that she breaks her (entirely fake) "perfect student/school idol" image in front of their classmates to shout at him. The entire area goes quiet... everybody stops and stares... and suddenly go back to what they were doing, oblivious of what happened, having subconsciously repressed those memories to maintain their "perfect" image of her. This happens on two separate occasions.
  • In Golden Sun and both sequels, Psynergy itself is Invisible to Normals... but people still should be able to see the objects that move without being touched, fires starting and stopping, sprouts growing into giant vines in a matter of seconds, puddles freezing into giant ice pillars, and that group of Anime Haired teenagers that always seems to be around when strange things happen. The number of situations where anybody notices Psynergy in use or the effects thereof, in all three games, can be counted on one hand.
    • Subverted in Dark Dawn when Briggs recognizes Matthew & Co. because he saw them handwaving crates around on the other side of the dock... but it's implied that he knew what to look for since he's dealt with Adepts before (and lives with a few), making him more of an exception that proves the rule.
  • Most of the stages in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle have onlookers, most of whom watch the fight, with some commenting on hazards. However, the background characters for the Cairo stage simply do not care about the insanity occurring right next to them. Granted, Stands are Invisible to Normals, but they should still see such things as a man teleporting around and dropping steamrollers, a woman unraveling herself into string, a man's bullets being redirected in a zigzag pattern, or a long-dead president of the United States (though to be fair, not one from this present timeline) disappearing into an American Flag, or any one of the crazy things from the first two parts, but no one bats an eye. They don't even react when a car speeds right past their table.
  • Discussed in Katawa Shoujo. After a couple of weeks of studying at a school for the physically disabled, the main character notices that he's been developing a Weirdness Censor of sorts for his classmates' various disabilities.
  • Kingdom Hearts II: When investigating the Seven Wonders of Twilight Town during the prologue, Pence comes up with "sensible" conclusions that totally ignore some of the seemingly impossible events that Roxas witnesses. Justified since he's a simulation created by DiZ, who's trying to cover up the fact that Roxas is in a computer.
  • For some reason in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, nobody seems to notice how many monsters are in Twilight Town. For that matter; it almost seems to be a ghost town whenever you have to be in there. Bonus points go to when you consider that Xion's final form is floating in the air in front of the train station. And she's practically an Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever. How on earth did people not notice that or even come to investigate?!
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Hyrule Castle townsfolk do not notice, or at least have nothing to say about, their castle being taken over by an evil warlord and his moblin army, which is then encased in a crystalline force field, and especially not right after said force field is broken by a giant glowing spider demon. They do however react when the player's wolf form runs around town. The ignoring (or being completely blind to) the barrier is lampshaded by one character.
    • Zigzagged in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask where at first it appears to be an aversion with people ignoring the moon, until you walk in on the meeting with the Mayor and Captain Viscen declares that the city is usually overrun with people this time of year, making it clear you're only seeing the very small portion of people who actually are ignoring it. As time goes on however, more and more people flee until the only few who are left are those who have utterly resigned themselves to the annihilation. Mutoh is the only person left who actually still refuses to believe the moon will fall.
  • At the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, a gigantic superweapon crashes into New York City. From the wreckage emerge a white haired pretty boy wielding a sword and the former president wielding two swords and wearing a suit of tentacled power armor. They proceed to fight a battle on the roof of Federal Hall, culminating in the villain being stabbed and falling from the roof. You'd think the cops or someone would take interest, but it just shows everyone going about their daily business because it's New York and they're used to that.
    • Not that the rest of the ending was any more rational.
    • This is actually intentional. The patriots wanted to put their all-controlling super-AI to one final test: suppose that one day, the mind-control nanomachines and the ID-controlled guns go completely haywire. Can the A.I.s come up with a plan to prevent would-be rebels reacting poorly to the newly-revealed broken Masquerade, even if they see it in all of its full glory? The fact that the patriot A.I.s were able to micromanage New York so that a giant submarine crashing into the city was considered "normal" means that the test was an extremely productive success.
  • In Octodad, the great majority of people don't seem to think strange a "man" walks in bizarre patterns, talks in blurbs, has tentacles instead of arms and legs or causes great amounts of property damage doing even the most mundane of tasks. The only person who knows his secret is a psychotic chef and his daughter, who assumed that everyone already knew.
  • In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Finnean the Talking Weapon continues to believe himself to be a flesh and blood human as opposed to a spectral Morph Weapon, and when confronted with the time discrepancy, his inability to move under his own power, and any other extremely obvious evidence of his current state, will dismiss it as a joke or rationalize it away. Only seeing his own skull lets him remember what happened.
  • Played for Drama in Persona 5, when politician Masayoshi Shido confessing to multiple crimes and murders during his election victory speech is quickly buried and written off as him "falling ill due to overexertion" by The Conspiracy backing him with help from the God of Evil Yaldabaoth, and the populace of Japan just goes with it.
  • Pokémon: Huh. That ten-year-old is running around with a giant, super-rare, legendary creature following their every whim. Nah, that's probably just a transformed Ditto.
  • Only partly averted in [PROTOTYPE]. Pedestrians will freak out and the military will open fire if the PC Alex Mercer reveals some of his Lovecraftian Superpowers, but running along a wall upwards, leaping across a street or gliding? Nah, that's fine. There's a small chance that a pedestrian or marine will look at you, look away, and say "fucking New York." Apparently, that sort of thing happens all the time here.
  • Psychonauts plays this quite literally. Every mind has actual censors whose job is to roam around and stamp out anything that doesn't belong. (Such as visiting Psychonauts...)
  • This is the point of a camouflage barrier in Senran Kagura. While it gives away a Shinobi's position to other Shinobi, it makes them completely Invisible to Normals, to the point where they can trash their surroundings fighting in a busy food court and still go completely unnoticed.
  • Touhou Project's Koishi Komeiji has the ability to manipulate the subconscious, the most common application of which seems to be to trigger peoples' Weirdness Censors, thereby making herself invisible to them.
  • The iOS game Plague Inc. (similar in many respects to Pandemic) has several types of plagues that can be unleashed. The "parasite" type has additional abilities that can be evolved that hide it from notice by people. In game terms, this decreases the "severity" stat to below zero. What this means is that the symptoms can include nausea, coughing + vomiting (which enables projectile vomiting) and still not think anything is wrong. You can have the entire world have these symptoms with no one the wiser. It's not until you "evolve" deadly symptoms and people start dying by the millions that anybody starts to consider that something strange is going on. The same can be done with the special Neurax Worm plague type, but that is implied to be a semi-sentient Puppeteer Parasite.
  • The Mat Dickie game The You Testament has this with its citizens. It's not uncommon to watch citizens greet others, turn around and attack them, steal items, run around with missing limbs, hug a person, then turn around and attack them... you try to do any of this stuff, you're gonna get caught.

    Web Animation 
  • Helluva Boss: The main characters are demons who go around assassinating humans. It seems that most humans are too stupid to recognize demons when they see them. Undisguised demons spotted in the living world have been mistaken for people in costumes, and in one case for a possum. In season 2 episode 2, Blitzo dons a poor disguise to pass as a human, gets mistaken for a comedian obviously based on his real-life voice actor just because his wig looks like his hair, and continues to play the role of that character even after losing the part of his disguise hiding his huge horns, in a studio in front of loads of people none of whom notices anything. Well, maybe his voice is right.

    Webcomics 
  • In El Goonish Shive, the aliens, when walking among humans, use a system of disguise that involves wearing shirts bearing the label 'human'. Despite their natural forms looking like Little Green Men, this method somehow successfully convinces anyone who has not been explicitly informed of their existence.
    • Averted later on when a monster attack happens in public, all the bystanders record the incident and release the information, the local news station immediately shows up and interviews the man who fought the monster, and that very same day the head of The Men in Black openly confirms magic and monsters are real.
    • The trope actually ends up being subtly deconstructed as The Unmasqued World really isn't any different from before. People still go about their lives as usual, The Men in Black still do their job as before, and most denizens of the magical world still stay out of sight. Even while the Masquerade was in place a lot of people knew about magic. It seems like people just don't let all the weirdness going on around them get in the way of living their lives, yet aren't in the least bit of denial about how strange things are. They just treat the fantastic the same way as they treat the mundane.
    • The above gets lampshaded when a security guard in EGS:NP calls someone's sleeves shrinking a "neat trick". The Rant says "Oh my god. We found him! We found the one character in EGS who makes excuses when he sees obvious magic and doesn't just accept it as a thing!"
  • Narbonic partially subverts this by showing that, while Dave Davenport's brother Bill is unable to see such things as talking gerbils or dancing androids, Dave proves equally blind to Bill's flaws as compared to himself, determined to see Bill as having a better life than he does. Also, when the clone-Dave is under the effect of the Mad Science cure, he too is affected, even while in the midst of a running battle.
    • Elaborated on in the sequel, Skin Horse. Although censors don't appear to be universal even among the regular population (the filename story suggests about 20% of the population), those who have one make for good employees or middle-men in secret projects: one is guaranteed not to spill the beans when one is not aware there are any beans to be spilled.
      • There's one point where Sweetheart sings Gilbert & Sullivan in front of two Reality Blind people to make a point.
      • As of the end of "Sure As You're Born", the proportion of the population who are reality blind has gone from 20% to "nearly everyone", which subsequently turns out to be the work of A-Sig, who have the aforementioned Cure.
  • MegaTokyo:
    • Nobody even seems to notice when someone or something starts breaking stuff in Tokyo, no matter if it's Ping the overpowered Robot Girl, a giant drunken turtle, or a Rent-a-Zilla. This is justified to some degree, because not only does Tokyo get destroyed so often that nobody really cares, but also because the destruction rampages are scheduled and supervised by the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division. There is also some suggestion that many of the more outrageous aspects of Tokyo life are in fact literally Invisible to Normals, but the actual extent of this effect remains unclear. Also, the people don't look up particular iteration is alluded to in MegaTokyo as well, where Tohya tells Yuki that the civilians are "just as afraid to look up as you are to look down". In the fifth collection of Megatokyo, Gallagher FINALLY detailed his explanation for this phenomenon: "...the main theme of Megatokyo is how everyone has different perceptions of the world around them..." Everyone sees the world slightly differently. Piro and Largo are on the extreme ends of the scale—Piro only sees "mundane" things (and dismisses the fantastic things as mundane things) and Largo only sees "fantastic" things, and comes up with fantastic explanations for the mundane things he sees. Everyone else is somewhere else on this scale, nearly always between those two extremes.
    • It seems as though Miho has the power to turn off other people's Weirdness Censors. In this comic, she tells Kimiko to open her eyes, which leads her to notice that the restaurant is under attack by killer robots.
      Miho: Now close them. Close them real tight.
  • Most of the populace of Generictown in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! appears to have this trait to one degree or another (especially Mr. Bystander). Even Bob himself often refuses to acknowledge just how bizarre the situations are that he finds himself in. The only castmember completely free of this trope is Jean, leading her to exclaim at one point, "Ye gods! I'm the only sane person in town!"
  • Played up to the point of parody in this Sluggy Freelance strip.
  • In Slightly Damned, for most mortals the sight of a Demon and an Angel walking around together instead of fighting each other is so unthinkable everyone assumes that's just some people in costumes. The fact that most mortals have never seen angels and demons also helps.
  • Played with in Shortpacked!. For some reason, everybody who works at the titular store (or, at least, the ones who weren't involved in SEMME-related adventures), don't remember any alien-related stuff that happened over the past few years. Everybody else, on the other hand, usually does.
    • It seems more like they just really don't care. For instance, at one point Amber goes to New York, and mentions "huh, you would never be able to tell this place was destroyed a few years ago."
  • Present in Thunderstruck, where supernatural entities of all descriptions operate right under the nose of the general populace — partly through passive Weirdness Censoring among the general populace, and partly through active Masquerading. Children lack Weirdness Censors, though — in fact, they're actually drawn to the supernatural.
  • In Everyday Heroes, it seems at first that Uma and her father are just using the standard Paper-Thin Disguise of wearing glasses to pass as human. Later, they mention using an "Adams Field", implying that the glasses have some sort of Weirdness Censor built into them. On its highest setting, the glasses can interfere with all electronic recording devices nearby.
  • In the Shadowgirls universe; enough templars in an area disbelieving hard enough can shut down magic users entirely. Which leads to Starkweather circumventing said limitation by somehow tapping into an older magic.
  • In Emergency Exit it is revealed that the Apartment has one of these only after it temporarily takes it down, allowing police attention to come to the large hole in the wall, because "It thinks it's funny" to do so.
  • This seems to happen occasionally in Rhapsodies most notably after Dielle hitches a ride
  • In Zebra Girl, the lagomorphic Sam explains that he can stroll into any bar to have a drink without worrying about his appearance because most people will actively dismiss him out of hand even if he's sitting right there.
  • In Chasing the Sunset, humans purposefully ignore Myhrad.
  • This is how people miss magical events in Errant Story. When they see something impossible (like the talking cat with wings) they think that there's no way they just saw that and then promptly forget it even existed.
  • This is the explanation for how the angels and demons of Elijah and Azuu are able to integrate into society... humans still physically see their horns and haloes, but simply don't process them. Though if someone is too weird looking they're simply Invisible to Normals.
  • Kat from Gunnerkrigg Court:
    • We are first introduced to the Realm of The Dead from Kat's perspective where the organization and its facilities seems to take the form of some kind of children's haunted house with her companions Annie and Mort completely mystified by her ability to treat it as such. When we finally get a look at what they see it's hard not to sympathize. Whether it is this, Invisible to Normals, or something else is not clear, but the way she uses the Realm's devices while her friends can begin to comprehend them, and the "smoke and mirrors" speech suggest that her rational(ish) view of the world helps her see through the Realm's illusions.
    • It's later revealed that her this applies to her own eldritch appearance in the Ether. She and everything she sees look normal to her, while in the ether she looks like some steel/bug Eldritch Abomination.
  • Purposefully enforced in Escape from Terra by the researchers at a Martian polar base; the first one to mention hallucinations lost their job, so all his successors kept their mouths shut. And then one went nuts and went outside for a bit of fresh "air"...
    Guzman: Okay, I get it. Back in the day, commercial and military pilots saw lots of strange things in the sky. Those that honestly reported what they saw, were taken off flight duty. Their bosses didn’t want "crazy" pilots in control over heavy armaments or the lives of hundreds of passengers. Of course, the law of unintended consequences made sure any pilot - crazy or not - who saw something out of the ordinary "kept mouth shut" too.
  • Played for Drama and lampshaded in Chapter 60 of Joe vs. Elan School. Joe's narration notes that Elan School's maintenance men, nurse, gym teacher, schoolteachers, and head cook are all completely oblivious to the school's abuses:
    Joe: [narrating] Realizing how far some people will go to ignore the strangeness going on around them was a lesson that I've never forgotten.
  • Adults not in the know cannot figure out that the title character of Selkie isn't human. The official story is that she's a human with a rare genetic condition. Sure, she has periwinkle skin, a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, and webbed fingers and toes. She's also an obligate carnivore, is cold-blooded, and her nose is blatantly non-human. However, her gills are typically covered by her clothing, and she wears her hair down to hide the fact that her ears are entirely internal. Notably, every child who has spent meaningful time around her knows the truth. Amanda says it best:
    Amanda: Ms. Flower WATCHED Selkie huff water, and just told me it was "medicine". Frankly, most of the adults that learn about Selkie are just really STUPID about it.

    Web Original 
  • The Protectors of the Plot Continuum use actual SEP fields taken from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy continuum to protect themselves from being seen by the characters in the fanfics they're sporking. Unfortunately, Sueish characters can see them, so they have to actively hide from the targets of their wrath. It's also possible for them to break the SEP field by attracting too much attention to themselves.
  • New York Magician: Lampshaded repeatedly; most New Yorkers people won't notice unless something really incredible is happening. In fact, Michel muses that it's easier for him to get away with using magic in public than it is to get away with waving a gun around; people rationalize magic, but they call the cops for guns.
  • In the Paradise setting, humans are randomly, permanently transformed into Funny Animals (and occasionally gender-changed) by causes unknown. A powerful "Reality Distortion Field", otherwise known as "the Veil", renders these changes Invisible to Normals, who will continue to see the Changed as their original human selves (and genders). It is only able to cover their bodies, however; they will still leave animal footprints, and any fur, horns, claw trimmings, etc. they shed will be visible to others. It begins breaking down as the series goes on and finally starts failing completely in 2009, leading to The Unmasqued World as the Changed finally make themselves fully known.
  • This is exploited in WarpZone Project to cover up the fact that Comic Books Are Real. A character sums up the idea behind it as "Imagine you run into Spider-Man. The next moment, you'll think you're just remembering a scene from a movie, a comic book or a video game.".
  • The subject of parody in this video.
    Guy: Yeah, hi. Welcome to Earth.
  • Petscop: In episode 6, a four hour long cutscene occurs, involving the windmill and a randomly generating environment, which includes ominous text. Paul's only comment is that it was neat that the windmill reversed directions.
  • SCP Foundation: There are several anomalies that prevent people from properly perceiving them or erase memories about themselves, but most anomalies do not and so when civilians encounter them they have to be subjected to Laser-Guided Amnesia to uphold the masquerade. However, a small but significant proportion of the population is affected by what is called Filbuson Syndrome. People with this condition will refuse to believe in the existence of anything "unscientific" no matter what they see, and if they are forced to acknowledge anomalies they may come up with scientific or pseudoscientific rationalizations for them. People with severe cases of this condition will try to force their denial of the supernatural on to other people, turning them into militant atheists. Surprisingly, it also is possible for people who do believe in the supernatural to suffer from it, resulting in people who believe in magic as part of their religion but are unable to believe it if they witnessed real magic.

    Western Animation 
  • American Dragon: Jake Long: "I'm glad everyone bought the You've-been-Punked story we feed them."
  • The titular character of Archie's Weird Mysteries, given all the odd things that happen in that God-forsaken town, is pretty quick to accept the existence of anything from aliens to a giant blob monster made of tapioca pudding. Subverted (and lampshaded) when Santa Claus comes to town and Archie can't believe it's really him:
    Santa Claus: Archie. You believe in ghosts, werewolves, aliens, and monsters. Why's it so hard to believe the real Santa Claus would come to Riverdale?
  • One episode of Batman: The Animated Series pits the Dark Knight against the Condiment King: a hammy pun-dropping Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who uses ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce as weapons. Good old Bats is so used to villains with outlandish costumes and motives that he doesn't even think twice about it; he simply assumes the guy is new at it and even offers to go easy on him. He does mutter, "It's gonna be one of those nights" when he hears the initial police radio report, suggesting that the situation is weird even by his standards.
  • Played straight and subverted in the Cat Came Back cartoon when the old man takes the cat for a ride into the mountains on a train trolley. Along the way, he runs over or passes several women tied to the train tracks, unfazed. But when he spots a cow tied to the tracks...
    Old Man: What the ffff--
  • In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation T.U.R.N.I.P.", the farmer is completely oblivious to the fact that his giant turnip is sending smaller ones through its roots all over the place and attacking the Sector V kids. The only thing that causes him to freak out is when it falls over and rolls into the sea.
    • This seems to be in effect for almost all the non-evil adults in the show; they seem to never notice the absolute insanity going on from the battles between the KND and the villains. The fact that the KND wipe the memories of their members once they turn 13 may be a contributing factor.
  • Cartoons and movies that take place in a Mouse World, such as An American Tail, The Rescuers, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers and others, rely on this trope. Humans never notice they're surrounded by clothed, talking mice with their own human-like civilization.
  • In Danny Phantom, Danny feels perfectly secure transforming into a ghost if he ducks inside a locker or even stands behind another person to do so. Apparently nobody makes the connection that a kid moving to a just-concealed area, disappearing, and being replaced by a ghost might mean something. Though this is probably justified to an extent since even the resident ghost experts don't know human/ghost hybrids are possible. After all, ghosts are supposed to be dead. Why would anyone assume a ghost superhero has a secret identity, much less a human one?
    • Subverted with Danny's sister, Jazz, early in the first season. Jazz has been incredibly concerned about his recent behavior since the start of the series, culminating in her discovering his ghost form after chasing him down to have a serious talk. She becomes a Secret Secret-Keeper until halfway through Season 2.
    • Paulina lampshades this in one episode, where she invites Fenton to her birthday party because he always seems be there whenever his alter ego shows up to save the day, meaning Phantom would come if Fenton did. She never puts two and two together, though.
  • Dorg Van Dango: Though RD (a blobby alien who spends most of his time in a humanoid form) and Patronella (a witch) arguably pass well for humans when disguised, bystanders don't seem to notice that Jet and Yooki are a bipedal unicorn and a Bedsheet Ghost respectively.
  • Family Guy:
    • Parodied hilariously when the Griffins ignore the giant squid that destroys their home, choosing to blame it on earthquakes or a truck driving by.
    • Also, in the episode where they get a poltergeist, Lois pushes in some chairs around the dinner table and then turns around. When she turns back, they're all stacked in a pyramid on the table, and she says "Oh, I must have just stacked them wrong and not realized it. Yeah, that's it...."
    • Peter's fights with the giant chicken are treated this way. In one extreme example, Peter and Lois were interrupted mid-conversation by the chicken attacking Peter. The fight sequence (with a break for a fancy dinner) doesn't finish until hours have passed. When Peter finally returns home, battered and bleeding, Lois is still sitting there waiting for him, and they finish the conversation as if nothing happened.
  • The staff (with the possible exception of the janitor) of Flying Rhino Junior High, especially Mrs. Snodgrass and Principal Mulligan.
    • in a way, the rest of the cast to the fact that there principal is an anthropomorphic Rhinoceros and there janitor is an anthropomorphic pig
    • The janitor even fooled the intro, which points out that the Principle is a Rhino, but notes that the Janitor's a spy.
  • Futurama has an episode in which the crew go back in time, first to visit the American Revolution and then to help America win because their last visit caused Britain to win. Not one colonial notices that Bender is a robot — Paul Revere believes he's a cannon, Benjamin Franklin mistakes him for an oven, and so on. Much to Bender's surprise, he proves capable of shooting cannonballs out his ass and baking a turkey in his compartment.
  • Gravity Falls: Grunkle Stan either doesn't see or doesn't seem bothered by the supernatural events in the town. When he sees preserved dinosaurs, he only thinks of how much money he can make by using them as attractions. Though by the end of season 1 it's revealed that he knows a lot more than that as he's been gathering the secrets of the books to unlock something. When Dipper presents evidence in the form of his book, Stan makes a few jokes about it, reads it, and gives it back, thinking them funny stories when in reality he used the books for his machines and photo copied the contents. When Dipper unleashes zombies in season 2 Stan fights them off, and reveals he's known all along about the supernatural, having lived in the town for years. He pretended not to notice because messing with that stuff is dangerous and could get the kids killed.
    • The rest of the town, however, barely reacts to any of the strange things going on. While a lot of the weirdness is occurring in the woods and may not be perfectly in sight, things like a giant rampaging gnome made of smaller gnomes or a two-dimensional, pixelated video game character destroying things throughout the town would be pretty hard to miss. All it takes for Mermando to hide his identity as a mermaid is a conveniently-placed pool raft, and the teenagers seem to go more or less back to normal after their encounter with the convenience store ghosts and never mention it again.
      • Possibly justified because even without the supernatural elements, the town is pretty strange by itself: for example, one episode has Pool Check the pool manager lock a kid up in the drain for unknown reasons and an indeterminate amount of time.
    • There turns out to be a good reason for this in the season 2 episode "Society of the Blind Eye": the eponymous Society has been kidnapping people who do see the supernatural and erasing their memories.
    • Then, in the final episode after said Society was no longer active, the mayor declares the "Never Mind All That" act, wherein the whole town agrees to not talk about Weirdmageddon with outsiders. Though there is a shot of a farmer shooing "eye-bats" out of his barn, so they are acknowledging some of the weirdness, at least.
  • Invader Zim uses this trope; though it is completely obvious that Zim is an alien (he has green skin and no ears or nose), Dib is the only one who ever notices (aside from his sister Gaz, who simply doesn't care). Likewise any time something bizarre happens most people either ignore it, or notice it but never question how or why it happened in the first place. (Or if they do, Dib usually somehow gets unfairly blamed).
  • Kaeloo: Lavanade has supernatural powers, and ghosts are naturally attracted to her. This means that wherever she goes, a horde of ghosts pops up behind her. The ghosts are visible to Kaeloo, Stumpy, Quack-Quack, Mr. Cat, all of Lavanade's sisters, and Lavanade's teacher, but Lavanade's mother is unable to see them and insists that it's all in Stumpy's head whenever he tries to point it out to her.
  • Played for laughs in King of the Hill; Hank Hill's unique form of eccentricity makes him literally incapable of understanding things that strongly contradict his strongly conservative Good Ol' Boy values. Most notably, in one episode when he meets his wife Peggy's friend, "Carolyn", a Drag Queen, Hank genuinely believes that "she's" a woman because he refuses to believe that men would dress as women even after being told the truth.note 
  • Lilo & Stitch: The Series has all types of aliens running around and yet hardly anyone ever give it any mind. When Lilo gives a few aliens away to help with a specific job, the owners are more then happy to take them in.
  • Played for Laughs in the Littlest Pet Shop (2012) episode "Littlest Pet Shop of Horrors": The shop receives a guest, a vampire bat named Vlad. Vlad openly does stereotypical vampire-like things, like attempting to bite the other characters' necks, lacking a reflection, repulsion by crosses and garlic, sleeping in a coffin, and getting burned by sunlight. Only Russell catches on that he's a vampire, but everyone else refuses to believe him (under the idea that Vlad never said he was a vampire), forcing Russell to fight Vlad on his own while being hindered by his friends.
  • Pet Alien: Tommy, being the Only Sane Man of the show, is the only person in DeSpray Bay who knows his friends are aliens, even though they don't wear disguises. Anyone not in the know just calls them his friends or his "things".
  • Citizens in Phineas and Ferb who notice the larger stuff the boys do never seem to find it worthy enough for the newspaper. Candace was pretty unlucky no one ever wanted to talk to her parents about what the boys had done, especially in The Movie, where the entire town witnesses a robot invasion and never discusses it again.
    • There is a deleted scene where a TV news reporter states that all the robots were actually "A weather balloon".
    • And it's not just in the boys' hometown. In one episode, giant robots of a dragon and Queen Elizabeth I were duking it out in downtown London (the boys weren't involved in any way). While this does make it to the news, the only thing that caught people's attention was the second story of a new version of Jane Eyre being made.
    • After a while it's pretty clear that their mom Linda is the only person in town who doesn't know what's going on. Even their dad participates in many of their projects; increasingly ludicrous misunderstandings keep him from realizing that she isn't aware of them. Both sets of grandparents are frequently involved as well.
  • In Ready Jet Go!, nobody in Boxwood Terrace (save for Mitchell), acknowledges the alien behaviors of the Propulsions, or notice their minivan turning into a flying saucer.
  • Shaun the Sheep: The Farmer will willingly ignore all the evidences that the sheep and other farm animals are clearly sentient and acting like humans.
  • The military in Sheep in the Big City try to enforce this, not even bothering to hide their giant top secret military bases and helicopters, but instead just putting up signs telling people to ignore them.
  • The Simpsons. The entire theme of "Homer's Enemy" was to plop a regular person (in the form of Frank Grimes) into the Springfield universe and have them react to just how bizarre that world really was. Frank was thunderstruck how a moron like Homer could have two cars, win a Grammy, tour with rock stars, be friends with Gerald Ford and been to space on the space shuttle.
    Frank Grimes: I'm saying you're what's wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life, you do as little as possible, and you leech off of decent, hardworking people like me. Heh, if you lived in any other country in the world, you'd have starved to death long ago.
  • In The Smurfs episode "Romeo And Smurfette", when the Smurfs capture Papa Smurf posing as Gargamel after a "Freaky Friday" Flip and stake him down, they refuse to believe that he is actually Papa Smurf despite the fact that he is clearly speaking to them in Papa Smurf's voice. Since this scene was actually adapted from the comic book story "Smurf Vs. Smurf", it's obvious that the attempt to translate this mistake in knowing who's actually in the appearance of Gargamel did not work as well as it did in the comic book, where even Hefty without his tattoo mark in the comic book version of "King Smurf" had trouble convincing his fellow Smurfs who he actually is.
  • Officer Barbrady does this a lot in the early episodes of South Park, whether it's political corruption or alien plots.
    • This applies to absolutely everyone in regards to Kenny's tendency to die horribly and return absolutely fine the very next day. No matter how many times Kenny reminds the others about it, or even prefaces them to remember before he does so, no one ever seems to recall when Kenny was last killed unless it JUST happened a few minutes ago.
  • Anyone who's not Stanley or part of his circle of friends and such on Stanley seems to use this when confronted by things such as talking/singing pets, or wild animals popping up in places they shouldn't be, such as the roof of Stanley's house.
  • The Transformers:
    • A few episodes after the Decepticons became active on Earth it seems the entire planet is put on a war footing, factories pumping out weapons intended to be used in the war against them, complete with old-fashioned propaganda posters.
    • There's a sort of Masquerade for the first few episodes, but after a bit the Transformers don't bother with hiding from humans as a whole (though many people still seem unaware of their existence, considering all the episodes where a human mistakes a Transformer for a normal vehicle and react with shock/fear/awe when the Transformer reveals himself). Following a twenty-year timeskip between the second season and The Movie, the Transformers are living openly on Earth.
  • The Galactic Grand Inquisitor from The Venture Bros. tries to enforce this, following the characters around everywhere and yelling "IGNORE ME!" whenever anyone looks at him.
  • At the end of the second season of W.I.T.C.H. the five girls have ascended to their zenith forms (pure whatever element they are—air, earth, fire, water and quintessence) and are fighting a giant snake monster who ate Phobos and gained his power. No one in the city notices this fight because the regent for the heart of Earth makes it look like it was a cartoon on a big billboard downtown. Also, during the first season no one seems to notice or question the frequent appearance of portals or girls with wings and magical powers closing those portals.

    Real Life 
  • One classic demonstration of a real-life version of this trope, which psychologists refer to as the "Selective Attention" phenomenon can be seen here. When your attention is even mildly focused on something else, you simply don't notice bizarre things happening.
  • Another related form of weirdness censor is called change blindness. This video demonstrates how far the brain will go to avoid acknowledging even a blatant Mind Screw.
  • A third type is known as a "memory bias"; a tendency to rationalize, dismiss, or otherwise distort memories that are unpleasant, unusual, or inconvenient enough. Your brain, in effect, decides that an unsettling event was just a dream or that something that has changed was always that way, and you simply never noticed. This is the reason why people idealize the The Good Old Days, for instance. They literally only recall the good parts.
  • In a study about ball lightning, a very poorly understood electromagnetic meteorological phenomenon, it was found that about 5% people in the United States had seen ball lightning but never told anyone. The reason was simple, ball lightning has no presence in modern day pop culture (unlike cryptids) and is visually simple enough (a ball of light) that the ones that do can simply convince themselves it was simply an optical illusion.
  • The game of Geocaching relies pretty heavily on this. Geocache containers can be hidden in highly unusual places, quite often by virtue of small size, camouflage coloring, or by being disguised as something so commonplace it is easily dismissed and overlooked. Searching for geocaches often calls for stealth, some cachers have reported that the easiest way to conceal their search is by acting mildly nuts or wandering at complete random, and thus they can find their objective without anyone taking much notice.
  • Invoked by various conspiracy theories, New Age mythology and fringe cults- that the human race is instinctively in denial of the true nature of reality.
  • The Internet and its denizens have it full-stop. Compared to what's acceptable and/or normal in real life, websites with a dedicated enough userbase to have a community, fan bases, and the like do some pretty freaking weird stuff that happens without so much as attracting a second glance. In fact, pointing out the weirdness of this online will likely have you branded as a NORP/newfag/noob and lambasted until you retreat.
  • Roger Penrose's Cosmic censorship hypothesis. Or a way to hide a naked singularity of the rest of the Universe.
  • When you dream, your frontal lobe is suppressed. Among other things, the frontal lobe serves as the "fact checker" part of the brain. This is why you don't think anything is weird if you're dreaming and, for example, your dog can suddenly talk or you're naked in school. If the frontal part of the brain activates while you're dreaming, you can generally recognize that this is all bizarre and start lucid dreaming by controlling what happens.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Sunnydale Syndrome

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Shaun Of The Dead

Shaun not noticing the zombie apocalypse taking place all around him.

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