They Walk Among Us

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Nope, nothing weird going on here.

A sci-fi / fantasy trope.

Let's say, for instance, that you are a perfectly normal human being living in a perfectly normal house in a perfectly normal urban community. Every day you wake up, you go to work or to school, you come home and have dinner. You have perfectly normal friends and family you enjoy doing perfectly normal things with. Also, your neighbor is, say, a robot. And your robot neighbor lives in the perfectly normal house right next to yours. He also gets up every morning and goes on with his robot affairs. And as the both of you walk down the street, side by side, you meet other humans just like yourself, sure, but the robot community is there as well, minding their own business just like you do. And nobody thinks it's weird because, you see, they walk among you.

That's the main gist of this trope: in an otherwise normal world not too different from our own, humans share the world with something distinctly nonhuman, or at least abnormal or fantastic; another sentient species, or a different kind of being altogether. Their presence in the world is not regarded differently in any way from how we look at all the different races and ethnic groups here. Needless to say, Fantastic Racism tends to ensue, but though this is a common staple, it's not a necessity.

Related tropes include:

For beings who Walk Among Us without our knowledge, see The Masquerade.

No real life examples, please; as mentioned above, this trope is about humans knowingly sharing the Earth with nonhuman intelligent beings, and (as of 2019) those don't exist.

Examples of They Walk Among Us include:

Advertising

  • Modern-day cavemen in the famous GEICO commercials.

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • Mutants in X-Men. Even Nightcrawler can walk around undisguised and few people seem to care. (One issue has him and Wolverine walking around in public and 'Crawler worried about it... only for a pretty girl to slip him her phone number.)
    • In fact, superhumans from both Marvel Comics and DC Comics often walk among normal humans with little fanfare.
  • The Bone Cousins in Bone. People remark that they're funny looking a few times but it seems to be more of a case of them being from another part of the world.
  • All manner of bizarre creatures in Hellboy.
  • Superheroes Costumed Heroes in Watchmen.
  • Funny animals in Midnite, the Rebel Skunk
  • The titular characters in Elephantmen-- Half-Human Hybrids of hippos, elephants, and various other African megafauna.

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Vampires in True Blood.
  • Humanoid Cylons in Battlestar Galactica.
  • Pretty much everything walked among us at some point in The X-Files.
  • Any of Jim Hensons' works involving the Muppets, but the effect was not handled the same way in every case. In Sesame Street, for example, humans and "monsters" recognized each other as different, but in The Muppets Show there were instances where ordinary humans and the Muppets were in perfectly equal standing. (As in, a humanoid muppet and a real human were both "human")
  • The world of Special Unit 2: All sorts of supernatural creatures still live among the humans. There is no organized Masquerade; most people don't realize they're there but the Chicago Police Department has established SU 2 to deal with them.
  • The Newcomers, a.k.a. Tenctonese, in Alien Nation.
  • Puppets in Greg the Bunny.
  • Power Rangers SPD has aliens and humans living side by side in 2025. However, humans with powers are discriminated against, at least at the grade school level. By the year 3000 of Power Rangers Time Force, It Got Worse, with aliens still around, but humans' treatment of the mutants that are born when humanity's Designer Babies habit doesn't yield such good results revolting, traveling to the present, and becoming the villains of the series.

Video Games

  • Sonic the Hedgehog, especially in the newer games.
  • The Gurhal System in Phantasy Star Universe really doesn't care if you're human, newman, beast, or CAST, because they're all on equal standing. Though the four races have planets (or a space station) to themselves, other races can and do live there with equality (excepting those bigots that no amount of time will erase).
  • You could probably count the human characters in Touhou on your fingers.
  • Vortigaunts in Half Life 2 have reached this status. No one bats an eyelid at them (except the Combine who harass them just as much as humans).
  • The Supernatural pack for the third game in The Sims series gives players can option to create a witch, ghost, vampire, and werewolf. Apart from having extra features, they often act like normal Sims.

Web Original

  • The Orion's Arm worldbuilding project includes every possible kind of being in a science fiction setting (genetically modified humans, uplifted animals, robots, cyborgs, sentient vehicles, etc.) co-existing in the same interstellar civilization.

Western Animation

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