Basic Trope: Civilians that don't seem to care too much about what's going on around them or the world at large.
- Straight: Several citizens of Redville have gone mysteriously missing. When Dirk goes around asking for help, few are willing to offer anything more than a few scraps of information.
- Exaggerated: Monsters are swarming outside Redville, the evil Emperor Evulz has been expanding his territory left and right, people keep disappearing... and Dirk's hard pressed to find anyone who even has a clue what's going on.
- Downplayed: Citizens help every once in a while, but only because whatever is going on is really starting to bore them.
- Justified:
- Redville is a province of The Empire, and its residents don't want to draw unwanted attention to themselves.
- Why bother treating the monsters roaming their town any differently from normal citizens, when those monsters, like the citizens, generally aren't malicious?
- The citizens are confident in Dirk's ability to save them, and don't seem to feel they need to do much to help.
- Inverted:
- The average citizens are aware of the problem and desperately trying to alert the heroes, but the heroes ignore them.
- The citizens care a lot about the disappearances, leading them to incite an angry mob against potential suspects. The hero tries to get them to calm down.
- Subverted: The citizens appear to go about business as usual while the crisis worsens, but it turns out they're secretly working to fix it without the heroes' knowledge.
- Double Subverted: On the surface the citizens don't appear to care about the problem, but it turns out they're working in secret against it... but we learn they have absolutely no understanding of the real problem and are instead working to solve a completely unrelated matter.
- Parodied: The citizens don't care even in the middle of being devoured by a monster. Possibly even actively in denial: "oh no no, it's just... a big dog. It is... licking me, yeah."
- Zig Zagged:
- On the surface the citizens don't appear to care about the problem, but it turns out they're working in secret against it... but we learn they have absolutely no understanding of the real problem and are instead working to solve a completely unrelated matter... That turns out to be the Big Bad's back up plan, ruining his escape.
- The people start out knowing nothing about the crisis but soon figure it out and start asking the heroes for help, but then it turns out they didn't actually know anything at all.
- Averted: The civilians form citizen militias to protect themselves. They hire the hero to go for the source, but prepare him a cover, make a distraction and/or deal with roaming monsters.
- Enforced: "Programming appropriate reactions for all these non playable characters for every chapter of the game would be too time consuming and expensive. Let's just give them all one completely generic thing to say for the entire game."
- Lampshaded: "Why is it every time monsters attack, the average citizens don't seem to care?"
- Invoked: The townspeople know about the threat but pretend they don't, instead sending people out to taverns to whisper "rumors" to each other, knowing that a Hero will inevitably overhear them and show up to deal with the problem.
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz knows that the citizens of Redville don't cause a fuss when bad things happen, so he uses Redville as a testing and demonstration site for his superweapons.
- Defied: "I don't know why no one else will help, Dirk. But I'll tell you everything I know and get my friends too!"
- Discussed: Do any of these citizens care that Emperor Evulz is destroying their home!?"
- Conversed: "Bob, why don't any of these people in this show care what's going on? It's so unrealistic!" "I don't care!"
- Deconstructed:
- Without any support from the uncaring populace, the heroes' attempts to save the world wind up failing.
- Alternatively: Things had been so bad for so long that the citizens don't care anymore, and when the heroes find the city, the citizens are already used to the problems, and believe that the heroes are too naive to understand that they can't change anything.
- Alternatively: A great war that had finally stopped, but at an extremely great cost, traumatized the population to the point that when the next problem arrives, they deny that those problems are on their doorsteps, because they have yet to cope with the last ones.
- Reconstructed: The populace realised heroes are practically the only ones able to solve the problem. They appear as if they didn't care, because they concluded any reaction other than stoicism would result in Stupid Sacrifice during the crisis or long-term collapse of order afterward.
- Played For Laughs: "Ah reckon some bad folks been kidnappin' people 'round here." "Yep." "What else is on?"
- Played For Drama: It's implied that the villagers know much more than they're letting on, but they're avoiding the topic for some reason, averting their eyes and giving Dirk and his buddies a wide berth. Clearly something bad is going down in Redville, but nobody's willing to let the heroes in on it. They'll have to investigate further and discover the truth on their own...
Oh, we can go back to Apathetic Citizens? Hm, whatever... *walks away*
