"After nukes in MW1 and fun with massacres in MW2, we've come to expect a shocking moment in Modern Warfare games; although since we are expecting it, it would be more shocking if there wasn't one. But sadly, no six-year-olds were around to explain this to the developers, and so the shocking moment is hollow, token, and manipulative: a child dies. Whoop de fucking do. Children die all the time, especially if you tie them to the rear bumper of a car; it's not even difficult."
When a form of entertainment relies too much on shocking its audience, that audience will eventually become desensitized to it. In some cases, an audience may become so desensitized to shocking content that it no longer has any effect on them — what was once conjuring feelings of shock or offense that kept them glued to the material is now leaving them bored or even jaded.
Shock Fatigue often occurs when a form of entertainment is trying to be deliberately provocative but failing because of prolonged exposure. While shocking moments can be effective in the short term, it can backfire if the audience becomes too weary of the constant shocks. This trope is also why Shock Jocks, Trolls, and others who rely on shocking material have to constantly escalate — what used to be shocking or offensive becomes the baseline, the mundane, or the expected. So something that Crosses the Line Twice has to keep chasing that line in order to cross it in the first place.
However, when the shocking work manages to step out of this, it's usually because the work in question has outgrown its immature humor or shock schlock. It's providing more wholesome or nuanced content, which can itself produce a shocking moment when what used to hopscotch over the line of good taste decides it's actually getting comfy on one side of it.
Compare Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, where the bleak tone can make people feel apathetic towards the work, and "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny, in which a once-revolutionary aspect of a work is lost on later audiences after being constantly imitated and/or built upon by the works it influenced.
It could also crossover with Franchise Original Sin when the shocking twist is done to death by being repeatedly used.
In-Universe examples would go on Conditioned to Accept Horror, Immune to Jump Scares, or Failed Attempt at Scaring. Compare Nightmare Retardant and Narm for other articles about works failing to scare viewers.
Given that shock can come from surprises, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- A problem with Akame ga Kill!: while fans appreciated a shonen manga that was not afraid to kill off established characters, the sudden deaths and the brutality of the story became so prevalent that many people "got used" to them and it stopped being a novelty.
- Juujika no Rokunin relies a lot on extreme violence and shock value. However, after a certain point, many readers became desensitized to the manga's shocking content. A particular point of criticism is the frequent use of sexual violence, with many critics arguing that it loses any kind of emotional impact after the first couple of instances.
- Naruto:
- The reveal of Tobi's true identity as Obito Uchiha was not well-received by a large portion of fans who felt that the reveal felt too on-the-nose thanks to "Tobi" being an anagram for "Obito" after years of fandom speculation regarding said identity and the reveal cheapening out Obito's supposed death scene which was generally seen as heartrending. Obito's motivations for his turn to villainy also caught criticism as it's yet another example of Love Makes You Evil, Cynicism Catalyst, Straw Nihilist, and War Is Hell that was already done with past villains like Orochimaru, Nagato, Itachi, and Sasuke, hence fans were less inclined to care about his fall to evil.
- The reveal of Black Zetsu being the mastermind of the Moon's Eye Plan and the final overarching villain being Kaguya Utsutsuki was immediately criticized by fans and critics who not only saw the reveal as weak and barely foreshadowed but also because this was yet another example of a new main villain overtaking the previous one, which had already been done with Obito and Madara just a couple of chapters prior. Fans were less shocked and more disgruntled at Madara being offed and replaced anticlimactically as they felt that he would have been a fitting final villain to the series due to several chapters of Madara being built up, and Kaguya's sudden reveal ended up being less shocking and instead raising even more questions.
- Valvrave the Liberator has an unusual case of this trope: the first season was regarded by many as So Bad, It's Good due to the sheer volume of shocking swerves, with at least one per episode and almost always topping the moment that came before. However, after a preplanned six-month hiatus between halves, referred to as the "split cour" format, the show came back with a more focused narrative that was substantially lighter on shocking moments, while also still not being good, and opinions on the show thus quickly soured. Sunrise has notably avoided returning to the split cour format after trying it with Valvrave and Mobile Suit Gundam 00, which is similarly regarded as having a worse second half than its first due to the format allowing for too much Executive Meddling.
Comic Books
- As the Crossed comics progress, each new arc tries to top the last one in terms of shock value, and it becomes increasingly difficult to be that fazed by all the blood, guts and absurdly over-the-top violence. For instance, the scene in the original Volume One where the Crossed simultaneously gang-rape and mutilate a family was considered unbelievably horrific when it was released. Such a scene wouldn't even raise an eyebrow anymore. On top of that, it's hard to care about the characters when you know the vast majority of them will either die or become Crossed. The Crossed series puts The Walking Dead to shame with its willingness to kill off characters.
- Injustice: Gods Among Us opens up with Lois Lane being pregnant, but then she's kidnapped by the Joker. Superman tries to save her, only to inhale Scarecrow's fear gas and hallucinate Doomsday coming after him. He shoves "Doomsday" into orbit, only for the hallucinogens to wear off, revealing that he'd just killed his pregnant wife. While Superman is left in shock, the Joker nukes all of Metropolis and rubs salt into Superman's wound. Superman responds by ramming his whole arm through the Joker's torso, an act that pushes him over the slippery slope into murderous tyrant territory. And this is just the start of the series. The next few issues just maintain the shock value without much of an end goal in mind.
- Spider-Man: The Night Gwen Stacy Died was a landmark moment in comic book history, for better or for worse. On the 'better' side, it encouraged comics to take more risks and have more real stakes; on the 'worse' side, writers keep forgetting that the reason Gwen Stacy's death hit so hard was because it was the Silver Age, and major characters like Gwen didn't die in the Silver Age. Yes, other characters close to Peter can die, and those stories can be well-written in their own right, but they'll never have the same surprise factor because now everyone knows that permanent death of major characters is on the table. Some adaptations have even decided to leave Gwen Stacy out entirely because they know everyone will be expecting the shocking death, which totally removes the point of having it- and since Gwen Stacy is mostly remembered from that one storyline, they have very little to go on otherwise.
Films — Animation
- Discussed in-universe in Monsters, Inc.: children today are becoming more desensitized to fear and violence every day, so the window to scare and collect screams for power is very small, leading to a growing energy crisis bad enough that Waternoose tries to kidnap and torture children to get more screams out of them in a desperate attempt to solve the shortage.
- Sausage Party: Owing to this movie's Broken Base, people either love it for the swearing, violence, and sexual humor because it's an Affectionate Parody of animated movies, or they find the vulgarity (such as the scene where everyone has a massive orgy) too over-the-top to the point where it gets old. There is no in-between.
Films — Live-Action
- The American Pie franchise is a series of teen sex comedies which started with the 1999 film. The first two films in the franchise were well-received by audiences and critics alike, but:
- American Wedding was met with more mixed reviews thanks to putting gross-out and shock humor more into the foreground.
- The franchise then fell into decline, with the direct-to-video spin-offs American Pie Presents: Band Camp, American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, American Pie Presents: Beta House and American Pie Presents: The Book of Love all being panned by critics and fans for their tiresome overuse of shock value as well as other problems. However, the franchise was given new life with American Reunion, which was released to generally positive reviews and was a box office success.
- A common criticism of Bloodsucking Freaks is that the film tries too hard to offend with its extreme gore, over-the-top misogyny, and outlandish premise, and as a result quickly desensitizes the viewer to its brand of horror unless they were already a fan of it.
- Although Paranormal Activity was considered scary in its own right, it popularized Jump Scares. The first Film has been well received to this day, even though the jump scares are considered the weaker aspect of it. However, the other follow-ups overused jump scares to the point where people would simply be shocked whenever the noise happens. This also spawned an unpopular trend of jump scares for other horror movies that would additionally shock fatigue the genre for both new and old-school horror movie fans around the 2010s.
- RoboCop 2 has been widely criticized for this. It attempts to one-up a film already known for its over-the-top violence, vulgarity, and melodrama to such an extent that it ultimately falls flat and instead becomes either downright depressing or unintentionally silly in its attempts to shock the viewer, featuring such elements as frequent explicit use of narcotics and one of the main villains being a Sir Swears-a-Lot Enfant Terrible on top of the already present grimdark setting and atmosphere. It was for precisely this reason and because the title character's costume was uncomfortable to wear that Peter Weller chose not to reprise the role in the third film.
- Saw: The first film was praised for its gruesome Death Traps and the genuinely unexpected Twist Ending, helping to bring the Torture Porn genre to popularity alongside the next two installments. As the series wore on (and on, and on), audiences became turned off by the repetitive traps which almost always ended in the victims' gory deaths, despite that they're supposed to be escapable, bringing Too Bleak, Stopped Caring into play (which got even worse in later films thanks to the introduction of multiple Jigsaw successors who, unlike their mentor, don't believe in giving their victims a fighting chance). The video games tone this down considerably by having a number of people (obligatory and optional alike) for the player to save from traps.
- Wild Things had a particularly lurid plot twist about halfway through its runtime, which was then followed by several more plot twists that add up to a scheme so complicated it made the main characters laughably insignificant in hindsight. The sequels followed the exact same formula.
The Editing Room: The PLOT TWIST GENERATOR EXPLODES, killing the few characters who weren’t DEAD YET.
Music
- The success of Marilyn Manson suffered during the mid-2000s due to this trope, making his work less impactful and less influential, to the point the Onion famously mocked it with the story "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door to Door Trying to Shock People".
- Believe it or not, there was a time when KISS was considered shocking. Their costumes horrified a lot of parents in the 1970s, while Gene Simmons' firebreathing and fake blood spitting pushing the limits of what was socially acceptable. They had constant accusations of Satanism thrown at them by conservative Christians. However, the shock factor died off quick, and even by the late 1970s, the band had become increasingly more merchandise-driven and popular with children. By the time they put the makeup back on in 1996 after over a decade of not having worn it, they were essentially seen as a for-all-ages nostalgia act playing fairly mild hard rock.
Professional Wrestling
- This trope was the reason that Ole Anderson gave for releasing Cactus Jack, aka Mick Foley, during his first WCW run in 1990. Ole claimed that the crowd would grow desensitized by Foley's daredevil, brawling style.
- This is why the Brock Lesnar burials have become increasingly lowly regarded; his defeats of The Undertaker at WrestleMania XXX and John Cena at Summerslam in 2014 were seen as genuinely shocking, with the end of 'Taker's winning streak and Cena getting brutalized for 16 minutes when a fairer fight was expected actually being novel back in the day. Once Lesnar was then booked into squash matches against less-prominent talent such as Kofi Kingston and Mustafa Ali, that was when fans regarded them as failed attempts to recapture lightning in a bottle, and got tired of Lesnar's performances.
- This is one of the reasons why the New World Order stable gradually fell out of favor with audiences. When Hulk Hogan pulled a Face–Heel Turn at WCW's Bash at the Beach pay-per-view in 1996, it was genuinely a shock, because Hogan was the quintessential All-American Face, and had been for over a decade. Over the next few years, the sheer number of people joining the stable watered down the surprise of new wrestlers coming into the group. Plus, for however cool the nWo might have been, they were still the bad guys, which meant their constant victories made them come off as Invincible Villains who were never going to lose. The numerous attempts to catch lightning in a bottle by having other wrestlers turn heel had diminishing returns because the audience had come to expect it, and because they simply couldn't replicate the sheer magnitude of Hogan's heel turn. As a result, the repeated attempts just turned off the audience.
- Vince Russo ended up becoming one of the most controversial bookers/writers in the medium in large part due to overindulging in what he codified as "shocking swerves". Russo had already received much criticism for making twists that were either way too esoteric or just plain nonsensical, but compounding this is how frequently he would try to pull his twists, and with the final years in WCW being denoted by commentator Tony Schiavone declaring "This is the most shocking swerve ever!" every week, it's no surprise that "Fi-re Ru-sso! (clap clap clapclapclap)" became such a common Crowd Chant when he was still pulling the same nonsense in TNA.
Tabletop Games
- A common complaint about Cards Against Humanity is that much of the Black Comedy relies on the shock factor of seeing cards like "A bigger, blacker dick", "An Oedipus complex" and "Auschwitz", which only lasts so long. This goes doubly if you play a lot without buying expansions (a shocking card is less shocking the tenth time you see it), or your opponents have a habit of just playing the most shocking card in their hand instead of trying to pick something that works well with the current black card.
Toys
- Transformers: The death of Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie was a watershed moment as far as Hasbro is concerned, with the negative reaction surprising Hasbro enough to walk back Duke's death in the G.I. Joe animated movie. It's often cited as the moment Hasbro realised that rather than just "product" that could be replaced with new items at any time, people were developing emotional attachments to characters.note However, since then an Optimus Prime (or Optimus-like character) dying has become a Running Gag, with the Transformers Wiki sometimes poking fun at things like Animated Optimus Prime's death being undone in seconds ("A new record!").note
Video Games
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare shocked players by having the United States side of the story end in disaster. The US Army's zeal to capture a terrorist leader leads to a nuclear bomb being detonated, killing everyone present, and the player is treated to a drawn-out sequence of Controllable Helplessness as their character succumbs to his wounds in the destroyed city. It quickly became a tradition that the Modern Warfare titles would have at least one heavily-publicized scene designed to shock the audience, but compared to "Aftermath" from CoD4 they gradually began to suffer from diminishing returns. Modern Warfare 2 had "No Russian", where the player as an undercover agent joins a terrorist attack on an airport that involves slaughtering crowds of innocent civilians using machine guns before being killed by the terrorist mastermind to implicate America in the massacre; this for the most part garnered the intended reaction, since while being an obvious attempt at shocking players, it still at least had a reason to exist in the context of the story. Then Modern Warfare 3 had "Davis Family Vacation", a scene that comes out of nowhere to focus on a young girl and her family on vacation in the middle of London for a minute before a truck suddenly explodes and kills them, which attracted criticism for being a blatant effort to drive sales through moral outcry.
- Fate/Grand Order started to suffer this in the latter portion of its second story arc, Cosmos in the Lostbelt, due to the sheer number of absurd boss enemies faced (which would all probably count as Superbosses if their defeats weren't mandatory for progression). Numerous players started to express annoyance with just how many of them showed up in the later chapters, especially Lostbelt 6, which has six such bosses. That being said, fans were willing to bear with it, and were very appreciative of the Climax Boss of Lostbelt 7 despite it being another such crazy boss, because said boss fight is the long-awaited debut of ORT, the Ultimate One of the Oort Cloud, who had been hyped up as an absurdly difficult, borderline Hopeless Boss Fight for twenty-two years before it was finally fought, and it did not disappoint.
- Hatred was the subject of much moral hullabaloo, with most arguments surrounding the game being largely based around its sincere yet near-cartoonishly edgy embrace of nihilistic violence, but one particular angle of criticism (largely by critics questioning whether the actual gameplay was good or not) found that beyond its controversial visage, it really has nothing much else up its sleeve. Aside from just shooting random civilians, the complete absence of any irony, humor, or anything beyond the high concept becomes obvious pretty quickly, with many finding out after all the overshadowing controversy that the game ends up becoming surprisingly boring. Even the premise - of being a random spree killer - falls out the window after about five minutes, as once you've killed a small number of civilians, the police and military respond and become your only targets, taking the game into territory that stopped being edgy after the original Grand Theft Auto.
- When it was first released, Mortal Kombat's biggest claim to fame (or rather, infamy) was the Fatality system, where at the end of a match a player could input commands to finish off their stunned opponent in a gory fashion. Despite the outcry from Moral Guardians, the game was a hit, especially because it was very different from the more stylised Street Fighter series thanks to using digital recreations of actual people. However, this popularity led to many competitors trying to "out-gore" Mortal Kombat with things like in-battle dismemberment, and Mortal Kombat itself fell victim to a bit of an Audience-Alienating Era thanks to adding additional "-alities" such as Brutalities (where the player character beats the victim until they explode), Animalities (where the player transforms into an animal to finish off their foe) and Babalities (reducing an opponent into a baby form) in an attempt to recapture the old excitement.
- Outlast II is criticized for being inferior to the original game partly for this reason. It tries to amp up the violence, gore, and bleakness far greater than the already very violent, gory, and bleak story and visuals of the first game, but does so to such a degree that it quickly tires and gets repetitive after the first few hours, and starts getting unintentionally silly due to how hard the game is trying to disturb the player, with a ton of dead children and graphic rape (including things like literal piles of rotting baby corpses you have to wade through, a sex slave chained up and covered in feces, two first-person scenes of being sexually violated by a hallucination demon, and the main character's backstory involving a child killer/rapist Karma Houdini that has practically no connection to the main story). By the time the protagonist's wife dies, rendering the whole game All for Nothing, players will probably be apathetic to her fate, or angered they wasted their time on this misery, rather than saddened by the loss, because at this point absolutely nothing has gone even remotely well and the hallucinations have started to make the story hard to even understand, so a depressing outcome was incredibly predictable.
- The Walking Dead (Telltale) has been criticized for how often it kills off characters for cheap shock value. Multiple named characters die in most episodes, and while you can often decide to choose one character to save, that character will usually end up dying shortly afterwards anyway. When you're so regularly reminded that Anyone Can Die, the deaths can stop being sad or shocking, and instead just make it hard to get attached to anyone. The final season addresses this criticism by lowering the rate at which characters die and making the "choose one to save" segments more meaningful by making it possible to keep the characters you save alive until the end.
- Shock fatigue has been noted by a few to be one of the many reasons for Yandere Simulator's Audience-Alienating Era starting from 2017 — the basic concept of a satire of the Harem Genre starring a Yandere willing to Murder the Hypotenuse more or less demanded violent and sexual content. However, the game's development then not only started ratcheting up said content with more elimination methods and backstories, but also implemented more taboo topics such as organized crime, animal abuse and political extremism, with the large amount of characters being involved in said topics becoming increasingly criticized as excessive.
Visual Novels
- In-universe instance in America's Most Eligible, regarding the titular Show Within a Show, which is noted to be suffering a ratings decline going into its tenth season, and where every challenge is presented with some sort of twist, leading one of the contestants to point out, "You know, twists are less shocking if there's a million of them".
- How To Date A Magical Girl! falls victim to this trope by the end of its story. It first uses gory imagery sporadically to show that the setting isn't as saccharine as it initially appears, but as the game progresses such moments happen with increasing frequency as the protagonist undergoes a progressing Sanity Slippage. When it starts killing off the main cast one by one in back-to-back drawn-out scenes, what's meant to be shocking has become dull and predictable.
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends has an over-reliance on being a Subverted Kids' Show. It features a cast full of Ridiculously Cute Critters that you'd typically see in a show meant for little kids, but every episode is little more than these cute critters dying in horrific ways. While revolutionary for its origin year of 1999, it gradually started being seen as gimmicky and repetitive when Happy Tree Friends kept relying on these horrific displays as the only string to its bow. Alongside a lack of funding and an ill-fated attempt to branch out to TV, this fatigue with the material has contributed to frequent and lengthy Series Hiatuses.
Web Original
- Many have blamed shock fatigue as a key reason in the decline of Creepypastas midway through The New '10s — imitators of stories such as Jeff the Killer, Laughing Jack, Sonic.exe and Squidward's Suicide all tried to one-up each other on how much Gorn and disturbing content they would contain, eventually causing readers to grow bored of almost every story containing at least one over-the-top Cruel and Unusual Death.
- The Painter is a series about a pair of serial killers who make paintings symbolizing their victims and how they died. This is a solid premise, but the series rapidly descends into describing, with almost masturbatory levels of detail, the horrific ways in which the killer's victims (many of whom are children) were killed and mutilated. By the third episode, it becomes clear story advancement and verisimilitude have taken a distant backseat to lists of ways the human body can be destroyed.
Western Animation
- The third season of Drawn Together saw a decline in ratings and critical reception due to this. The show had become increasingly reliant on its offensive and outrageous nature, to the point where it lost the ability to be funny. This led to a decrease in viewers, as well as a more negative reception from those who did watch. The direct-to-DVD movie takes it so far as to include featuring necrophilia and a lengthy, Fan Disservice-laden sex scene, leaving the viewers feeling like the writers were desperately trying to up the ante.
- One of the primary issues that viewers had with the later seasons of Family Guy is that the offensive jokes and moments were no longer as shocking or effective as in earlier seasons. This is likely because in later seasons, the story of each episode had taken a backseat to the offensive content, and as such, many viewers have seen through that transparency and became desensitized to the offensive material.
- Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" flatlined almost entirely because of this. The majority of the jokes try to be as outrageous, disgusting, and without restraint as possible, in addition to drawing themselves out longer than they need to. Tellingly the majority of episodes were recycled from the cutting room floor, episodes John Kricfalusi had planned for The Ren & Stimpy Show that were rejected. Among the notable examples is "Fire Dogs 2" which John K. admits suffers from very bad timing and pacing, suggesting the episode should be watched at double the speed.
- The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has stated this is one of two reasons why The Itchy & Scratchy Show (an in-universe hyper-violent cartoon that Bart and Lisa like) will never get a spinoff. At one point, Groening put together a compilation of all the segments of Itchy and Scratchy together for some college students — the students were bored less than a minute into the footage. The other reason for Itchy and Scratchy not being able to hold a show is that there's really only one joke: the Subverted Kids' Show aspect of Itchy killing Scratchy For the Evulz. After a while, the only joke just gets boring, hence why the Show Within a Show is only ever shown in extremely small segments. In fact, the real joke of the show is that the Simpson children are so easily entertained by such a boring and repetitive show.
- An in-universe case occurs in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Ghost Host". The Flying Dutchman loses the ability to scare people due to this trope, and after six months of staying with the titular character until he gets his mojo back, even he isn't fazed by the Dutchman's attempts at scaring anymore.
