Disturbed by Not Being Disturbed

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• Kakegurui: When Maede asks Yumeko if she ever feels guilty about the people whose lives she’s ruined with her gambling, she tells him that she does feel guilty about not feeling guilty.

• Doom Patrol (2009): In the first issue, Nudge gets killed off, and as the team counselor makes the rounds to make sure the Patrol is coping with the loss of their young teammate, Rita confesses that she feels terrible about the fact that instead of mourning the poor girl, she envies her.
• The Walking Dead: In Miles Behind Us, Tyreese tells Rick about an old man who nearly raped Julia before he was able to intervene and killed the man with his bare hands. While Rick assures him that he did his duty as a father, Tyreese mentions that he feels bad because he didn't feel bad about the act, and worries about how the end of the world is changing him.
• X-Men: In the aftermath of Thunderbird's death in action, Cyclops is horrified when he realizes that his first few thoughts revolve around how Thunderbird dying was an acceptable loss instead of feeling guilt or grief. He even has a mild freakout, blasting his surroundings with his optic blasts as he fears something is wrong with him.

• FoxTrot:
  • In one arc, Paige is dreading having to dissect a frog in her biology class, considering faking illness to stay home from school. When the moment arrives, she covers her eyes, makes her incision, then peeks through her fingers...and hunches wide-eyed over the frog with an awestruck, "Coooool..." When she gets home from school, she is even more freaked out by how much she enjoyed the experience. Peter is similarly freaked out and edges away from her, while her mother Andy tries to bring her down to Earth by encouraging her to consider that she has the makings of a surgeon (Truth in Television, as there are plenty of doctors who graduate from medical school but don't undergo the extra training needed to become surgeons because they hate the sight of blood). Then Jason needles her by calling her a "frog killer", which Paige easily disputes because the frog was already dead when she dissected it.
  • Another arc had Peter refusing to eat the dinner Andy cooked. She makes him stay at his seat until the food is eaten. Peter lasts until late at night when he begrudgingly tries a bit of her cooking. To his horror, he enjoys it.

• Danganronpa 4: Next Generation Killing!: After going through three Class Trials and witnessing the deaths of a few of her friends, Kiki admits to Shuichi that she's afraid of being numb to death, though Shuichi reassures her that she's too kind and empathetic a person for that to ever happen to her.
• Don't Be: In chapter 18, Buffy is disappointed at herself because her reactions to Omega shooting Jack and almost shooting the Doctor are snarky "Were the walls in here always red?" and "You shouldn't have asked for it" instead of proper horror.
• The Dragon and the Butterfly: Hiccup notes after being stranded on a mountain top that he's become far more accustomed to the heat of the Colombian jungle and is now uncomfortable in the cold. This surprises him, as he grew up in the Nordic archipelago and thus is used to chilly weather. Downplayed in that it doesn't so much concern him as it does surprise him.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: From "Moving On": Ami had an Evil Overlord at her mercy and killed him out of hate because he's been evil for centuries, instead of a more noble reason like justice.
  "I- that's just it. I can't feel bad about killing him! I would do it again in the same situation! I just murdered someone and I feel nothing! What is this world doing to me? I'm turning into a monster just like him!" Ami wheezed out those last words with great difficulty, as if pained to speak them.
  "So you are feeling guilty for not feeling guilty?" Jered asked.
  "No, that's rubbish!" Snyder slammed both palms down on the wooden surface of the table as he stood up. "Already the fact that you are worried about this means that you aren't in any danger of becoming like him! You have a conscience, he did not! He might have looked human, but he hasn't been for a long time!" the young acolyte shouted, more passionately than Ami had ever heard him before.
• The Emancipators: Izuku Midoriya (who has a hefty dose of Adaptational Jerkass from being angry after all of the bullying he endured in canon) becomes concerned about how much Drunk on the Dark Side he may have become when he feels nothing but joy after he successfully pulls a Batman Gambit on Monoma during their fight in the Sports Festival and Monoma's subsequent attempt to absorb One For All led to the Quirk rejecting him and making his arm explode.
• Lionheart: Hermione worries that she's a terrible person because she's doing okay and not having an awful time adjusting to Viktor's death. Draco technically tells her You Are Better Than You Think You Are, though being Draco, he's much snarkier about it; nonetheless, he does assure her that she's only worrying about it because her stress levels are off the charts.
• A Loud Among Demons: After spending a lot of time as the human foster child of the demons of I.M.P., Lincoln grows concerned that he's become so desensitized to the horrors of Hell, as he believes it's a sign he's losing his humanity.
• Madison Clements has an Unusual Power (And she's going to be a Hero!): from "18.3", after Madison has finished scattering a group of Nazis around the city, she has a small crisis of conscience about her lack of feeling about threatening people:
  Either way she was grimly satisfied with what she'd accomplished, even as part of her couldn't help but wonder if she'd gone too far and another part of her felt guilty for not feeling guilty about her actions at all.
• In The Price of Victory, after Draco is killed, it is mentioned that his oldest son, Perseus, wonders if it's bad he isn't upset about it. To give you an idea of what Draco was like, Perseus, despite being only a child, fought him to protect both Ginny (his mom) and Harry.
• In Singled Out (a fanfic of The Loud House), Lori goes missing and her little sister Lola is disturbed by the fact that she's not worried about it and fears that she's evil. Lisa suggests that Lola is a sociopath, but tells her to accept it.
• With This Ring (2013): Sunset Shimmer has something of a breakdown after the Renegade gives her and her friends an object lesson in practical morality. He assigns them the task of stopping a genocidal civil war, with no time limit except that casualties are rapidly mounting. After talking it over at length, they plan and carry out a series of carefully targeted assassinations of key leaders, followed by disarming the rest. Sunset is very disturbed to find that she killed people and can't identify anything she did wrong. The Renegade introduces her to the idea of "reflective equilibrium", dealing with an apparent contradiction between your beliefs and your behavior by determining which one is incorrect and adjusting it until they match up.
  Sunset: I.. act as if I don't think killing is bad. And I know that's wrong.
  Renegade: If you actually thought that then you wouldn't have stuttered. Miss Amane has no problem with killing. You do. You think it's bad. Your problem is that you want to think 'bad' means that it's something only evil people do, while in fact you merely assign it a heavy utility value. In this situation you believe that it was necessary and you're feeling bad because that clashes with a belief you have about yourself and the beliefs you have about people who believe what you now know that you believe.
• The Victors Project: Justinian Trinket, a Capitol sponsor for District 6, gets high at a post-Games reception right before approaching District 6's most recent Victor, Maeve. The next morning he wakes up not remembering exactly what happened, but he fears he raped Maeve. He then surprises himself by realizing he doesn't care if he did.

• Hollow Point (1996): Garrett Lawton (Donald Sutherland), a Hitman with a Heart, carries out his latest job with his usual professionalism, but afterwards admits to his latest victim's body that he feels completely "numb" inside — no thrill, no fear, no guilt, no nothing — and it's really starting to bother him.

Examples by Creator

• Thomas Harris:
  • Red Dragon: Will Graham made his career in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit by tracking down Serial Killer Garrett Jacob Hobbs, and killing him in a firefight, but he needed therapy for months afterward. His nemesis, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, sends him a mocking letter pointing out what has never occurred to anyone else: he didn't need therapy because killing Hobbs felt wrong, he needed it because it felt so good. Lecter likewise needles Graham that he doesn't feel guilty for causing Freddy Lounds's death, he feels guilty because he actually doesn't feel guilty at all.
  • The Silence of the Lambs: Investigating the effects of Hannibal Lecter's last victim, Clarice Starling finds a severed head in a specimen jar, arranged in a tableau inside a storage unit:
    Starling, in this moment, examined herself. She was pleased. She was exhilarated. She wondered for a second if those were worthy feelings. Now, at this moment, sitting in this old car with a head and some mice, she could think clearly, and she was proud of that.

• A frequent recurring theme of Carl Hiaasen:
  • In Tourist Season, former news reporter and private investigator Brian Keyes is a confirmed Non-Action Guy, but he is forced to shoot and kill anti-Castro terrorist Jesus Bernal to stop Bernal from killing Keyes's friend, Detective Al Garcia. In conversation with his girlfriend afterwards, Keyes admits that the only thing he feels guilty about is not feeling guilty about killing Bernal, who was a nasty piece of work. Even his girlfriend is shaken by those words.
    Keyes: Maybe I should say a prayer. Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you kill someone?
    Kara Lynn: Only in spaghetti westerns.
  • Double Whammy: Private investigator R.J. Decker quit his job as a staff photographer for a Miami newspaper after he was called to a crime scene that turned out to be the murder of one of his co-workers, whose new husband strangled her with a coat hanger and left her in the trunk of a car. What really freaked Decker out was not the horrible sight of seeing his friend's dead body, but the fact that he photographed the scene as dispassionately as if she were a complete stranger. He threw up after he was done, but in his mind any decent person should have thrown up at the scene.
  • Fever Beach: Viva Morales has a nice, safe job working for a nonprofit charity, and accompanies her new boyfriend, eco-terrorist Twilly Spree, to a construction site and assists him in blowing up an excavator. Afterwards she "jumps" him twice at his apartment and sleeps like a baby afterwards. When she wakes up in the morning, she feels guilty at her lack of guilt.
    Viva wondered if she had sociopathic tendencies. She was now a criminal, after all—a bomber!

Examples by Work Title

• Dungeon Core Chat Room: In Chapter 92, Innearth begins to question What Measure Is a Mook? in regards to his ascended monsters:
  Innearth was beginning to have difficulty giving all his ascended monsters enough attention. He let them do what they wanted while making a note to figure out a better solution.
  He didn’t see them as disposable but they started to blend together and when one of them attacked and was killed by an adventurer... he found it hard to muster up any real feelings for them. They had been ascended for too short of a time... all that ended up happening was Innearth felt bad about not feeling bad.
• A Feast for Crows: At his father Tywin's funeral, Jaime Lannister is disturbed by the fact that he does not feel sad or angry about it. In fairness to him, Tywin was a terrible parent who viewed his children as little more than pawns to carry on the family name.
  It was queer, but he felt no grief. Where are my tears? Where is my rage? Jaime Lannister had never lacked for rage. "Father," he told the corpse, "it was you who told me that tears were a mark of weakness in a man, so you cannot expect that I should cry for you."
• Monstrous Regiment: Polly cuts off her hair to join the army disguised as a man. She doesn't feel guilty about it, but does feel guilty that she doesn't feel guilty about it.
• My Status As an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's: Akira murders Guildmaster Gram in his bed in a case of justifiable homicide. It takes a lot of effort to make the kill, but he's disturbed afterwards to find that he feels nothing in hindsight about his first kill of a humanoid: he simply feels empty.
• Whateley Universe: This story has an unusual variation: Jade has the power to become two different people with their own experiences who later fuse back together, but there's only one physical body so the other one is a kind of ghost. This leads to her ghost half being absolutely horrified by whatever's under the sewers, while her physical half gets increasingly reckless due to a strange, unexplained sense of safety, which just freaks her ghost half out even more. After they leave and fuse back together, Jade has the kind of breakdown you would expect a 14-year-old girl to have after close proximity to the prison of a Brown Note Being (or perhaps multiple).

• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Jake and Rosa are investigating a murder in which the crime scene is an apartment whose walls are drenched in blood. When Rosa and Jake bring a suspect into the apartment, he sees the copious amounts of blood and freaks out. His reaction leaves Jake and Rosa with the uncomfortable realization that they had been Conditioned to Accept Horror.
• Cadfael: Brother Cadfael served as a soldier in the First Crusade before becoming a Benedictine, and recalls once, with a look of rather complex emotions on his face, that he's stood on a battlefield in the aftermath, knee deep in blood, and felt absolutely nothing.
• Cheers: In "The Executive's Executioner", Norm is recruited as his bosses' new "corporate killer", meaning the man whose job it is to lower the boom on terminated employees. During his first job, he bursts into tears and the guy being fired feels like he has to comfort Norm. But It Gets Easier with each job, and by the end his latest "victim" is insulted by Norm's lack of reaction, even trying to fake tears. Midway through the episode, Norm confides that he is having a recurring nightmare that he is an angel in Heaven, throwing a line of people down an elevator shaft to fall screaming into Hell. Then he pulls off the mask of the next person in line to reveal... himself! Diane, always the amateur psychologist, opines that Norm's subconscious is trying to tell him how guilty he feels for growing numb to the pain he's inflicting.
• The Crown: In "Aberfan", Elizabeth attends the site of the Aberfan disaster (a catastrophic mudslide that killed 116 children and 28 adults). She is advised that, this being Wales, not England, a display of emotion is expected, and duly feigns a tear. Later she is worried that she is broken, as she is unable to feel sadness as easily as many members of her family do due to her stoic upbringing.
• CSI: NY: In "The Real McCoy", Adam tells Mac that he feels guilty for not feeling any emotion towards his father, who now has Alzheimer's, because the older man was abusive towards his whole family while Adam was growing up.
• In Plain Sight: Mary lifts the lid on a soup pot and sees what looks like a dog's corpse being simmered. She isn't sure what freaks her out more - the sight of the dog, or the fact that the soup smells delicious.^note It's actually a goat.
• Law & Order: SVU: In the season 1 episode Wanderlust, the murderer turns out to be a teenage girl, which Stabler refuses to consider because of his own family. When it's proven she did it, Stabler apologizes to his superior Cragen for letting his feelings cloud his judgement. Cragen doesn't reprimand him for this, instead telling him "don't worry when you feel something, worry when you don't" which alludes to this trope.
• M*A*S*H: The characters of the 4077, at differing times, grow concerned when they start to lose the guilt, fear, or horror they have when treating injured soldiers.
• Mom: A year after his first stroke left him bed-ridden, Marjorie's husband died. Marjorie felt guilty that she felt nothing except relief. Wendy assures her that this is common among people whose loved ones die slowly.
• NCIS: In "Bounce", the Victim of the Week has been broken in half and stuffed into a gym bag. Ziva (a Mossad-trained assassin who has seen, and inflicted, plenty of violent death), shakes her head at the tragedy of it, but McGee is more disturbed by the fact that the bag's seams have split, since he ordered that same bag and didn't pay enough attention to the online reviews that said the seams were a problem...
  Ziva: McGee, the man is folded in half!
  McGee: I know. No, that... that is a shame, too.
  [Beat]
  McGee: [disturbed] Maybe I've been doing this for too long.
  [Ziva makes a "Gee, ya think?" face.]
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "In the Pale Moonlight", Sisko is mildly perturbed that, after accepting Garak's help to frame the Dominion for the murder of a diplomat to bring the Romulans into the war, violating his own and Starfleet's deepest-held principles, while he does his best to justify it, he's obviously very uncomfortable about his lack of conflict about the outcome.
    Sisko: ...So I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all... I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would. Garak was right about one thing: A guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant, so I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it... I can live with it. Computer, erase that entire personal log.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Extreme Risk", B'Elanna is disappointed in herself that her response to hearing that the Maquis are all either dead or imprisoned is not to be sad but instead to become emotionally numb. As such, she begins self-harming via extreme sport just so that she can feel something even if it's pain.
• Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye: In "Bad Hair Day", Tara kills an armed criminal to keep him from opening fire in the salon she was visiting. Everyone is expecting her to be upset about going through such a traumatic incident, but she brushes it off as having "a bad hair day" that she can handle. She's more disturbed by the fact that she doesn't feel guilty, causing her to fear that she's losing her compassion. After everything is over, though, she has a breakdown as the emotions of the event catch up to her, much to her relief
• S.W.A.T. (2017): After Street donated his liver to his mother, she died of a drug overdose. He continues working as if nothing happened. Hondo thinks Street is repressing his emotions, but Street confides in Chris that he felt relieved. Street feels guilty about feeling relieved over his mother's death, but Chris reassures him that after everything he did for her and everything she put him through, he had every reason to feel this way.
• Invoked in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979): In conversation with George Smiley, Control's gopher Mendel says he's concerned about Peter Guillam, who reminds Mendel too much of the overly stoic types who crack when they turn forty. Smiley says he's not concerned because he knows Peter's history, including a brutal stint in North Africa when he was outmatched by the opposition and his agents were exposed and executed.
  Smiley: No one recovers completely from that sort of thing. At least I wouldn't trust anyone who did.

• A Chorus Line: Implied and double subverted in "Nothing"; when Diana heard that her Sadist Teacher from high school passed away soon after she transferred away from him, she cried...because she felt "nothing".
• Heathers: The Musical: Veronica's aside after she accidentally contributes to Heather Chandler's death:
  Veronica: I didn't technically kill Heather, and I know that, but I still feel bad. But... not as bad as I should? And that makes me feel even worse.
• Little Shop of Horrors: When her abusive boyfriend goes missing, Audrey feels bad because of how happy she is, especially because she believes she doesn't deserve better than him due to her past. Somewhat played for Black Comedy.
  Seymour: You miss him, don't you?
  Audrey: Miss him? I never felt so relieved as when they told me he'd vanished. It was like a miracle. [Beat] Not to mention all the money I'd save on Epsom salts and Ace bandages.
  Seymour: Then what's the matter?
  Audrey: I feel guilty, I guess. I mean, if he met with foul play or some terrible accident of some kind... then it's partly my fault, you see. Because secretly... I wished it.

• The Coffin of Andy and Leyley: In a dream/vision in Episode 2, Andrew sees an image of his ex-girlfriend, Julia. Andrew thinks to himself that he'll probably never see her again, being in the run with his sister. That fact doesn't bother him, but the fact that it doesn't bother him, does.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: An early quest in the game revolves around the two protagonists, Estelle and Joshua Bright, being asked to fend off some monsters menacing a farm. When they defeat the monsters, though, the farmer asks the pair not to kill them, which Joshua disagrees with. He later explains to Estelle that his lack of sympathy in similar situations makes him feel heartless. This is one of many moments foreshadowing that he's a deprogrammed former assassin.
• Tomb Raider (2013): After killing Vladimir and several of his fellow cultists while escaping the Solarii, Lara confides in Roth over the radio that she's scared by how easy it was.
• Warcraft III: After becoming a Death Knight, murdering his own father, and leading the destruction of his kingdom of Lordaeron, Prince Arthas admits that he's surprised that he feels no remorse for having betrayed everyone and everything he once cared about. Tichondrius, the Dreadlord supervising the Scourge, tells him that it's because Frostmourne took away his soul and ability to feel guilt.
• Yandere Simulator: In the video "Yandere-chan's Childhood", Ayano explains that she was totally unable to feel any kind of emotion growing up. She wanted to be able to feel happy, sad, or angry like other children. She became so desperate to feel anything at all that, at one point, she killed a stray kitten with her bare hands, but she still could not feel sorrow or guilt about it, even though she wanted to. She was upset (as much as she was able to feel) that she couldn't feel upset, as much as that sounds like a Logic Bomb—the video shows her hanging her head after she kills the kitten.

• Yet Another Killing Game: Inspecting the bloodstained tools in the basement causes the protagonist to remark, "I don't like the way I'm not flinching to blood anymore..."

• Discussed during Raycevick's analysis of Spec Ops: The Line, where, while discussing the game's infamous white phosphorus scene, he talks about how the most disturbing thing about it was how casually he participated in it, due to having been conditioned by previous military games.
  Speaking from personal experience, what hit me so hard about the white phosphorus scene wasn't that it's brutal, destructive, and horrifying — lots of games are all three. What unnerved me to the core is just how casually I did it. How routine it was to fire up a laptop screen and play polka dots with missiles, exterminating white blips that might as well have been zombies, only to be forced to walk through your actions and see the effects.

• Arthur: The Very Special Episode "April 9th," centers around the kids' reaction to Lakewood Elementary School burning down. When Buster, who stayed home that day from school due to having overslept the previous night, tries to impress the kids at Mighty Mountain Elementary School, where his class transferred temporarily during the reconstruction, over how he bravely survived the fire, Arthur calls him out because his dad had to be rescued when the school's kitchen caught fire, while Buster wasn't even there. When Buster talks to his mom, he wonders if it's wrong not to feel bad about the school burning down just because he wasn't present during such a traumatic event.
• Dexter's Laboratory: In more than one episode, it's shown that Dexter is so used to Dee Dee causing havoc in his laboratory that he can't work without the risk of her interrupting him. In one episode, he ends up having to hire a "spastic sister" to take her place.
• Daria: Discussed in "The Misery Chick"; Jerk Jock Tommy Sherman, a former student of Lawndale High, visits the school and insults, mocks, and belittles almost everyone he meets, and even propositions Brittany, after she'd already told him she had a boyfriend. Then he's killed in a freak accident by the very goal post that was being erected in his honor. Brittany tells Daria that she feels bad about Sherman dying, but that she doesn't feel that bad because of how he treated her, and not feeling as bad as she thinks she should makes her feel even worse about it.
  Daria: So, you are upset about what happened?
  Brittany: That's just it. I feel terrible. Why did that jerk make me hate him? Now he's dead and I feel bad but I don't feel that bad so I feel terrible!
  ...
  Daria: You're sorry that he died, but you don't think that you feel sorry enough... and you're worried that you're not as nice a person as you thought.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • In "Daddycop", Sabrina's guilt over her past actions is compounded by the fact that no matter how much remorse she feels for hurting her classmates, it's still not enough to stop her from mourning her incredibly toxic relationship with Chloe and how it ended, even as she recognizes that Chloe was just using her. Marinette, who has more justification than almost anyone for resenting Sabrina, points out that Chloe abused and manipulated Sabrina for a long time, to an extent that Sabrina is still realizing, and it's natural that Sabrina is having trouble thinking about the victims of her behavior when she hasn't thought about herself in years.
    Marinette: You were a victim of Chloe, too.
  • In "Mister Agreste", Adrien has to deal with a Loony Fan who wants to erect a ten-meter memorial statue to his abusive father. The statue brings to the forefront a lot of Adrien's conflicting feelings — on the one hand, he loved his dad and misses him, and wants to honor his father's supposed Heroic Sacrifice, but on the other hand, he can't just forget how controlling his father was or ignore the fact that in a lot of respects, his life is better now that his father is gone. He gets a small measure of catharsis after events allow him to shout all the things he wanted to say to his dad to a walking ten-meter replica, but at the end of the episode, he still feels guilty about not feeling sadder for his father.
    Adrien: Even though I loved him too, I can't just forget the harm he caused us! And now, hearing the way everyone talks about him, I feel like they're talking about someone else. I refuse to see him the way everyone else does! Does that make me a bad son?
• Steven Universe: In “Reformed”, after Amethyst gets herself poofed for the third time in one episode, Steven wonders aloud if it’s weird that he’s starting to get numb to it.
• Young Justice (2010): At the end of "Disordered", Conner admits that the reason he is upset is not because what happens in the previous episode traumatizes him like it does to his friends, but because it makes him happy (as he gets to know how it feels to be Superman for once) and that feeling disturbs him.

• Soldiers, first responders, and others whose jobs frequently involve disturbing tasks and sights, are expected to perform those jobs without distraction or hesitation, and so they are trained to temper their reactions. Many involved, including friends and family, eventually become bothered by how the job no longer bothers them. In an interview for ABC News, Vietnam veteran Albert "Peewee" Dobbs put it succinctly.
  Dobbs: You're 18 years old and you're wearing somebody's brains on your shirt because they got their head blown off right next to you. And that's not supposed to affect you. I can never understand that. What would scare me is if we were to send a group of 18-year-olds 12,000 miles away and subject them to a year of that obscenity, and have them not be affected. That's what would frighten me.