http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeirdnessCensor

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

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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, alien invasions, 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.

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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.

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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

Comic Books

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

Films  Animation

In the 2008 Horton Hears a Who!, the only one to make the connection is the Mayor. Other than that, Whoville makes Sunnydale look like a highly alert town. Though, the members of the city council help to actively enforce the Weirdness Censor, which helps a little to justify this. Not by much, but still...

Films  Live-Action

Literature

Mythology and Religion

In John 12 of The Bible, while Jesus is speaking, a voice speaks from heaven, and many people in the crowd think it's just thunder.

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

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

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life