The Nondescript

"Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And no matter what you do, for the love of God don't, under any circumstances--"

—Robert "Rusty" Ryan (shortly before being called away), Ocean's Eleven

Basically, this trope is when a character is described as being "utterly unmemorable." They have a boring face, boring brown eyes, boring brown hair, they're not too tall or too short, they're not too fat or too thin, and their voice is often a monotone (but not so creepy that it's memorable). They might even drive a Volvo. In short, the only reason they're interesting at all is because of how uninteresting they appear.

However, beneath that yawn-worthy exterior lurks something very interesting indeed. The Nondescript is often a spy, or Con Man, or criminal, whose looks make it easy for him to get away with what he's doing because people either can't remember what he looks like or can't describe him well when they do. Other times, The Nondescript is just a Played for Laughs attribute of a character.

Certain characters take this to superpower levels: they aren't merely average looking, they are so nondescript that even the narrator seems unable to pin down any of their features - or, in fact, to tell us anything about them. One gets the impression that these characters are deliberately doing something to make themselves invisible in plain sight.

Usually occurs only in literary fiction, because unmemorable and nondescript actors are hard to find and not particularly rewarding to film. When it does appear in a visual medium, the nondescriptness will often be an Informed Ability for just that reason.

This can be used to help the reader/viewer/player to imagine the character as themselves, resulting in a Featureless Protagonist. Related to He Who Must Not Be Seen. Compare The Generic Guy, The Spook, Suspect Is Hatless, and Ridiculously Average Guy. Occasionally The Men in Black achieve this.

Examples of The Nondescript include:

Anime and Manga

  • Ishimaru from Eyeshield 21 is frequently described as incredibly plain, often going unnoticed by teammates and even opposing players while on the field. The Devil Bats sometimes use this to their advantage by including him in crucial plays.
  • This trope is a trait carried by several of the Black Rose Duelists of Revolutionary Girl Utena; with Kozue, Wakaba, and Keiko being the most affected. Kozue was this when she was younger due to being overshadowed by her twin brother Miki's genius piano skills, whereas she was both mediocre in skill and an anxious performer. Wakaba is a heartbreaking case of I Just Want to Be Special - the only way she can feel good is by helping others because she feels that she doesn't stand out in any other way. And Keiko is part of a Girl Posse that serves Nanami; when she breaks away from them briefly for a chance meeting with local casanova and crush Touga (who is also Nanami's older brother), both Nanami and the two other girls ostracize her severely. After her duel with Utena, it comes to a head when we find out that Utena doesn't know Keiko's name.
    • There's also Wakaba's childhood friend Tatsuya, a Dogged Nice Guy to such proportions that Wakaba doesn't even notice his feelings. To make matters worse, Tatsuya's nickname is onion prince (referring to something as an onion, in Japan, means that it's shoddy or third-rate), and despite having his unrequited feelings and inferiority cause him emotional turmoil, Mikage deems him sound enough to be rejected from the Black Rose duels.
    • This trope is played with such as by having Ishimaru run in the invisible man costume at the school athletics festival or by making his box in the manga incredibly small.
  • Gouda of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex started out as one of these, a staid bureaucrat who was unnoticed by his co-workers, and when the protagonists look into his past, they find out that his colleagues only remember him for being totally unmemorable. This all changed one day when his face was badly disfigured in an accident, an event which he believes changed his "ghost" (his soul) and transformed him into a Machiavellian schemer.
    • Major Kusanagi herself, whose body is apparently designed to resemble a generic model of cyborg or android.
  • Shinpachi from Gintama is described as this. During a "how to draw Shinpachi" segment, Gin instructs viewers to imagine the most boring and uninteresting face you can, then draw it. Tada! You've drawn Shinpachi! Also, at one point, Shinpachi is training to be a Highly-Visible Ninja, and manages to completely escape the notice of everyone in a crowded bookstore because, apparently, he is just that plain and unnoticeable. Even though he was he was wearing a itycow costume at the time.
  • Momoko from the Mahjong anime Saki takes this to supernatural level. When you're in a game where everyone is watching everyone else for a chance of quick victory, it's a tremendous advantage.
  • What's-her-name-again[1] from Yuru-Yuri, played for Comedic Sociopathy-gold.
  • The main character of Kuroko no Basuke has this attribute and weaponizes it to relay passes while playing basketball.
  • Kagerou Usui of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei is this dialed up to 11. He fades into the background to the point of being at risk of getting run over by cars on the street. His name even derives from a japanese phrase for "overshadowed". He is very annoyed at his lack of presence, but it also has advantages for him since he's a Covert Pervert.

Comic Books

  • Zandar, Zartan's brother from the G.I. Joe comics was this kind of guy. He is so unnoticeable that in one instance, Zandar was literally sat upon, as it was thought the chair was empty. Admittedly, he is a master of camouflage and can easily hide in plain sight. So, it's like sitting on a chameleon, it's not really your fault for not noticing him when he's trying not to be noticed.
  • In The DCU, there's John Doe, the Generic Man, who takes this to the logical extreme (that other extreme examples somehow manage to avoid) by being so generic and drab in appearance that he stands out spectacularly. He's literally featureless, except for a label on his chest that says "(person)". He can, by touching them, make other objects as undefined as he is.
    • And then there's Agent !, who dresses and acts with the intention to shock, but nobody notices him, and his power is, explicitly, the ability to go unnoticed. He's a subversion in the fact that he has many very distinguishing features; For one, his chest is a birdcage with a toy biplane inside of it. (If you guessed this character was created by Grant Morrison, give yourself a gold star.)
  • The title character of the indie comic Mister Blank, a totally ordinary office-worker turned Badass Normal fighting an Ancient Conspiracy. He's so normal-looking the artist just drew the minimal facial features of eyes and a mouth.
  • Believe it or not, Superman! At least during the Silver Age of comics. There were SO many people that just happened to look like him, from his father to a random thug, that he could often take a day off by having someone else replace him in either of his identities! (knowing that makes the whole Clark Kenting aspect more believable.)
  • Jeremy Feeple of Ninja High School is absolutely average in every way, at least as of the start of the comic.

Fan Works

  • In The Art of Hidden Personas by "whitedwarf" (a Harry Potter For Want of a Nail Alternate Universe) main character Hadrian Walker, basically Harry born and grown under different circumstances, assumes such a disguise. It is made possible via copious use of advanced glamours and also unremarkable behavior. When attention is brought upon him most of the Hogwarts staff have trouble putting a face to his name and even Chessmaster Dumbledore is affected.
  • Forward is a Firefly fanfic with multiple types of psychics, including one known as "Inducers." Inducers can manipulate emotions in others, including apathy and interest, and one uses this to remain completely unnoticeable. She can go as far a making herself and a mind-controlled River walk right past the rest of the crew while they're distracted by an injured Mal without anyone noticing.
  • The early installments of Undocumented Features take this attribute of Jeremy Feeple of Ninja High School and turn it up to eleven, making it an actual super power.

Films -- Animation

  • The protagonist of The LEGO Movie has a face is so generic that when the villain tries to find him using surveillance and facial recognition software, the entire population registers as a match. The protagonist also has no friends because nobody ever remembers him.

Films -- Live-Action

Stoner Guy: Preston? I dunno, his hair's kinda, I dunno, brown?
Matt, Watermelon Guy: No, it's not really brown. Oh, he's tall.
Stoner Guy: Yeah, he's kinda kinda tall. Sorta tall. And he's like always wearing like t-shirts.
Amanda Becket: So, he's sort of tall?
Stoner Guy: Kind of.
Amanda Becket: With... hair?
Stoner Guy: Yeah.
Amanda Becket: And he wears t-shirts sometimes?
Stoner Guy: Yeah.

  • Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from Perfume possesses a superhuman sense of smell and eventually becomes a mass murderer. However, he has no scent of his own, causing people to instinctively treat him as a cipher beneath their notice. Even a watchdog ignores him. This is part of his motivation to create the perfect scent.
  • The assassin Vincent in Collateral consciously invokes this trope, making himself nondescript by coupling his gray hair with clothing entirely of gray. Supposedly, as training, the director even had Tom Cruise deliver a package in a public place with nobody recognizing him.
  • There's a creepy, possibly alien guy in horror movie The Forgotten with rather short brown hair, brown eyes, a blank, ordinary face... and he's Immune to Bullets.

Literature

  • Moist von Lipwig from Discworld. Unusual because in two books he is the main protagonist. He is a Con Man, and in the books it says he likes to wear fake nose or ear hair, because that is invariably the only feature of his they remember after being conned, and it's easy for him to discard.
    • Several other Discworld characters also exhibit the ability to become The Nondescript simply by dressing and standing inconspicuously (preferably in the shadows). Granny Weatherwax did it in Maskerade, and young Vetinari did it in Night Watch. Justified in that she's a witch and he's a self-taught expert in camouflage.
    • Stratford from Snuff is pretty nondescript, that is until he gets mad. That's when he starts to really look like Stratford.
  • Pops up in the form of Malden, a "colourless" young psyker from the third Ciaphas Cain book.
  • A ghoul assassin like this shows up in The Dresden Files book 4. And also Susan Rodriquez's associate Martin, the epitome of this trope, shows up in Death Masks. He deliberately cultivates this in every aspect, as a way of suppressing his infection. This is also very handy in the battlefield, as the enemy fighters, wizards, and snipers do not consider him a threat at all.
    • In "Fool Moon," Dresden whips up a potion that can turn him into this, temporarily, and he uses it to fairly good effect to avoid being killed by a giant Loup Garou.
  • A minor character in a Tom Swift/Hardy Boys crossover book is like this. He is a thief who steals rare documents by simply walking out with them, confident no-one could remember enough about him to track him down.
    • The 80s restart called The Hardy Boys Casefiles features a character called The Gray Man who is recruited as a secret agent because he is so nondescript.
  • Judder Page from the Star Wars Expanded Universe is described as one of these.
  • Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary had one in the Big Bad.
  • The unnamed man in the dark suit in Neil Gaiman's American Gods, who appears in several scenes and is so elusive and indistinct that even his lines in the dialogue are obscured: we are merely told that he "said something" or "nodded in reply and made a comment". Each time Shadow asks his employer (possibly the single character who remembers anything about the unnamed god, including his name) who the man in the dark suit is, he finds his mind momentarily wandering so that he misses hearing the response.
    • This may be because the man is a god of luck; when we're introduced to him, he passes several people who don't even remember seeing him but have strokes of good luck seconds later.
    • It's never stated what kind of god he is; however, Pluto, the Roman god of the dead and wealth was supposed to be at that meeting.
  • Also a Gaiman example, Nobody Owens (it's in the name) from The Graveyard Book has this as an ability he learns from living among ghosts. He's so average-looking that nobody even remembers he's there unless he wants them to.
  • The Grey Men, assassins for the Big Bad of the Wheel of Time series, have this going on at the level of a Perception Filter, and use their nondescriptness to slip through crowds and get up close to their target. It is said that a Grey Man coming at you with a knife is less noticeable then the leg of a chair. Whenever they attempt to assassinate someone, their actions are mentioned in the text a while before anyone notices them.
  • The book version of The Bourne Identity specifically notes that this is one of Jason's defining traits, an utterly average face that allows him to easily disguise himself.
  • Mercedes Lackey loves to have characters like this in her novels. They're usually thieves or assassins. At least one Herald of Valdemar been picked out for "special training" specifically because he was so nondescript.
  • The Big Bad in Christa Faust's novel Money Shot is like this.
  • The book The Schwa Was Here is about a character who's so nondescript that not only do people not remember him, nobody notices him in the first place.
  • Two characters from the Dragaera books, both assassins, have this trait: Kragar, famous for his Stealth Hi Bye, and the assassin Mario Greymist. Vlad shows himself Dangerously Genre Savvy when he meets Mario in Dzur, as his immediate reaction when seeing a plain, pleasant looking man coming up to him is to assume he's a dangerous assassin.
  • Ian Fleming originally designed James Bond to be this sort of character. His name was even chosen because it was boring.
    • But only partially. James Bond was also the name of an ornithologist known by Ian Fleming with a peculiar background – he wasn't from any institution, and didn't come from any sort of personal wealth via family or business. How could James Bond be funding his "bird-watching?" Well, he could be a Naughty Birdwatching …
  • In His Dark Materials, this is the "magic" witches use to become invisible: since actual invisibility is impossible, they just make themselves very, very nondescript, causing everyone to simply ignore them.
    • Will Parry also does a version of this; he is introduced as someone who, because of his mother's mental illness and the responsibilities it puts upon him, has learned to escape the notice of others in order to avoid being taken by social services. He later demonstrates this talent by shaking the attention he's gathered from a crowd by pretending to be dull and stupid.
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Tickler is a Torture Technician in a company of particularly loathesome men-at-arms, but is in all other respects totally nondescript and ordinary. Also, Roose Bolton is an utterly amoral lord from a family that likes to skin their enemies alive. He looks ordinary except for his creepy "pale eyes."
  • Grey Murphy in the Xanth series. His driver's license lists his hair as "hair-colored" and his eyes as "neutral".
  • Mr. Hopkins in The Bartimaeus Trilogy who turns out to be The Man Behind the Man (or possibly the man behind the man behind the man).
    • He's still not the man at the back. The third book goes absolutely nuts with that. Farquarl is at the back, then Makepeace, then Hopkins, then Pennyfather and the mercenary and that guy from book one who died and it just goes on and on and on.
  • The ancient Roman mystery Terra Incognita has an agent-with-special-powers, an aide to a senior military officer, named Metellus who is like this. He doesn't do any undercover work, but his lack of distinguishing features adds to his blandly amoral creepiness.
  • In King David's Spaceship, Malcolm Dougal, head of the Haven Secret Police, is described this way.
  • Repairman Jack is described as a generic "Pale Male", a natural image he also carefully cultivates to prevent himself from being IDed.
  • In the shared anthology Temps, about people with superhuman powers being called in to work for the British government, one story tells of a young Pakistani man who is constantly ignored, people don't listen to him, they talk over his head, etc. When called in to do his Temps duty in a hostage crisis the people in charge ignore him, but he goes in, more or less accidentally "talks down" the hostage taker (who thinks he was already in the building) and leaves unthanked and unnoticed. He never shows any signs of the power of a "Temp" until the last line in the story, where we learn his codename is... The Invisible Boy.
  • Wren Valere from Laura Gilman's Retrievers series often appears this way as a side affect of her magical talent. It helps her in her career as a professional thief/retriever, but also hinders her when she wants people to listen to her.
  • The assassin Magdalena Crouch is like this in J.V. Jones's A Cavern of Black Ice. No two people who have seen her can agree on her real age, her hair or eye color, or any other feature of her appearance. Her only distinctive feature is her beautiful voice.
  • The protagonist of the Ghallager Girls series, who is a Teen Superspy.
  • Sue Grafton had a character like this who used his non-descript forgettableness to get into crime, specifically embezzling.
  • Jesus, in The Bible, was this. Despite being a well-known Rabbi and an inflammatory political activist, Judas needed to greet him with a hug and kiss for the Roman authorities to recognize and thus arrest him.
    • It was the middle of the night and everyone was wearing nondescript clothing. (And the Romans probably thought the Jews all looked alike anyway.)
    • And it's not like they had photos of him. Back in those days, even if you were famous, strangers didn't have a chance recognize you at all, unless you had an EXTREMELY outstanding appearance.
    • That was also part of the deal that Judas had made. The authorities wanted to make sure they had the right guy after all.
    • If something puts Jesus in this category, it's the fact that no-one seems to recognise him post-Resurrection. Yes, you would have to look twice to realize that the man who is supposed to be dead is standing right there, but something is weird when even his own mother fails to see who he is. Especially since these are all people who wholeheartedly believe him to have supernatural powers.
  • Dimitrios, the arch villain of A Coffin for Dimitrios manages to escape capture despite all of his crimes and betrayals, because he's quite ordinary looking apart from his terrifying eyes. The descriptions of him from a co-worker, an ex-lover, and a former employer are so general that they could fit thousands of people. At one point an older, well-dressed Dimitrios is described as looking like a diplomat at a state dinner, but a fairly unimportant guest who no one would pay attention to and would fade into the background.
  • In The Fountainhead, when Gail Wynand is starting up his newspaper, the Banner, he brings a man who looks just like this into the newspaper offices and tells his journalistic team that this is their target audience.
  • Wheezer in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle novel Hammers of Ulric uses this ability to his advantage to pick pockets and live like an Artful Dodger in the city of Middenheim.
  • In the novel Watership Down and its animated adaptation, Hazel is a very nondescript rabbit, compared to his co-stars' distinguishing features (Bigwig's head-tuft, Blackberry's tipped ears, Fiver's and Pipkin's small size). Rabbits meeting his band for the first time invariably assume somebody else is the leader until told otherwise.
  • The demon in Running With the Demon is a bland looking man with smooth features, light blond hair, and pale blue eyes. He can sit down next to you, join your conversation, and everyone there will be convinced they know him; his name is just on the tip of their tongue, but they can't quite remember it. When he leaves, they forget all about him. Being a soulless Chaotic Evil Bitch in Sheep's Clothing helps in this regard.
  • Dead Souls has an unusual example where this backfires, because people are somewhat Genre Savvy (or at least Wrong Genre Savvy). The protagonist Chichikov is fairly nondescript, having a blandly polite and charming personality and being neither handsome nor ugly. However, the oddity of his behavior- buying the records of dead peasants from landowners- is such that people start to think up odd theories about him, such as that he's the ghost of a mistreated war hero returned for revenge, or that he's Napoleon in disguise. It also doesn't help that because of the "buying souls" metaphor, he seems a lot like Satan in a The Devil Is a Loser depiction.
  • Sheftu, the male lead of Eloise McGraw's Mara, Daughter of the Nile, exploits this in his role as double agent for the king. He's even complimented on it by two of the other characters. However, when he's in his day job, he's perfectly capable of appearing glitteringly resplendent, and women—including the title character—tend to find him very attractive, despite not being conventionally handsome.
  • In the novel The Kouga Ninja Scrolls, the Master of Disguise Saemon is described as having a face that is instantly forgettable. While as noted in the page description, this is a hard trope to do visually, it does seem likely that the manga/anime adaptation Basilisk aimed at depicting this, since while he has Eyes Always Shut that hide rather shifty eyes, his features are otherwise pretty bland.
  • The villain of Aaron Elkins's The Worst Thing went so far as to have surgery to make his ears and nose look more average. He's often stopped in the street and told that he looks just like some actor who had a bit part in a single episode of a TV show—but it's never the same actor.
  • Alias from the Evil Genius Trilogy is described as having a "strangely unmemorable voice" and says he can pull off so many disguises because he's "on the average side".
  • Granta Omega of Jedi Quest is a Force Blank. He has no connection to the Force whatsoever, and as such, is almost immediately forgotten by people after he leaves them, and is undetectable via the force.
  • In Life of Pi, Pi's spiritual adviser Mr. Kumar (not the atheist one) is described as being so average looking that at one point he worries about being unable to pick him out of a crowd when they're set to meet at his family's zoo.
  • Travis McGee takes full advantage of his own generally unremarkable appearance in his investigations; his height — 6'5" — is literally the only thing most people remember about him. He occasionally puts lifts in his shoes to make it even harder for them to remember anything else.
  • Magdelena Crouch, aka the Crouching Maiden, a Dark Action Girl assassin from the Sword of Shadows series, is like this- she's so unremarkable that people tend to fill in details about what she looks like from their own imagination- though she's memorable owing to being a strong personality, two people who met her could describe her to each other and never know they were talking about the same person. The effect is implied to be mildly supernatural.
  • Both main characters in the Knight and Rogue Series are perfectly average looking. Michael does have a scar on his face, but this is only used to identify him if he's already made himself stand out. Otherwise, it's been stated that it's easier to find the two by asking if anyone has seen their horses.
  • Greystroke in Michael Flynn's The January Dancer.

Live-Action TV

  • In one episode of The Persuaders, an assassin is set on the heroes' tail. He is just an aging, thin, unattractive man who is normally a repairman when he's not taking jobs like this. He attributes his success to the fact that he is always The Everyman who no-one ever notices or suspects.
  • Firefly has this with Lawrence Dobson who looks to be nothing special, and loses anything interesting about him whatsoever when you see Simon wearing the most Villainous getup you can imagine.
  • The Mayor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is just an average smiling politician, right? Wrong.
  • Alex, Paul and Jess of The Real Hustle don't usually use disguises except for fake names, but are never recognised by their marks. Then again, the magic of editing means it probably happens, but we just never see it ("Hey, aren't you that guy off TV?")
  • On The Drew Carey Show, Lewis and Oswald once boasted to Drew that their greatest edge in trying to meet women was being completely forgettable, thus any woman who turns them down would always give them a second chance a few years later by means of having forgotten them already. They go on to try to pick up a pair of girls who turn them down immediately, but they merely smirk and say "See you in ten years!"
  • The unsub in one Criminal Minds episode started killing because he was one of these and was angry that no-one noticed him.
  • An assassin sent to kill Michael Westen certainly qualifies. He's shortish, chubby, with thinning brown hair and glasses. He's just another bureaucrat sent to review Michael's file. Until he asks for a drink and whips out a garrote. Spies show contempt for bureaucrats, meaning they're the perfect cover.
  • It's fairly common for the protagonist or, occasionally, villain to be this in The Twilight Zone. Usually, to show that even an average Joe could have something happen to him or that the problem/villain/moral of the episode could happen to anyone.
  • Her?[context?]

Newspaper Comics

  • One of Max Allan Collins's last storylines in Dick Tracy before leaving the title in the 80's, involved a criminal of this type. His face is never shown on-panel, and—highly unusually for a Dick Tracy story—he successfully escapes at the end, even though his evil plan was thwarted. When Tracy is asked for a description of the guy so the police can search, he has no choice but to shrug and admit he can't remember what he looked like.

Tabletop Games

  • In the Champions adventure "Red Doom", the character Disinformer has this quality, which is why he's one of the KGB's top spies.
  • The advantage "Bland" makes you this in the Legend of the Five Rings tabletop game 3rd edition. Too bad it also makes you less likely to be recognised when glory is to be had for great deeds.
  • One of the Dungeons and Dragons splatbooks describe a nondescript box you can hide items in. It's not invisible, but anyone looking for it must pass a search check or they will ignore it. "It's just another plain box."
  • Unknown Armies offers this as a skill.
  • Likewise, there is a magical ability called "Incognito" in Deadlands that does nothing to alter its user's appearance, but instead makes him or her really, really, supernaturally... uninteresting. No surprise that it's under the purview of the Hucksters, arcane practitioners often described as "shifty".
  • Having a nondescript appearance is a perk in GURPS that causes people to just naturally assume you're not involved in things.
  • This is the focus of both a Merit (Occultation) and a Legacy (The Blank Badges) in Mage: The Awakening.
  • The Sidereal Exalted may be nondescript or attention-grabbing, as their individual natures dictate, but the Arcane Fate ensures that any non-Sidereal who meets them will find them very hard to remember...even more so when all traces of their existence, from footprints to pictures to bureaucratic records, get lost, are accidentally destroyed or defaced, or mysteriously vanish. Unfortunately for their social lives, they can't turn it off.
  • Dark Heresy has the talent "Unremarkable", usually taken as a starting ability. Mind you, in this game you can also take chemical castration, nanite blood, and replacing half your brain with a computer as talents.
  • In Scion, this is one of the weaker powers of the Darkness purview.
  • In the Vorkosigan Saga, Simon Illyan, who first appears as a junior ImpSec officer, is described as being this.

Video Games

  • Hitman: Agent 47 was deliberately engineered to be multiracial so he could fit in anywhere without drawing attention. Then they tattooed a barcode on the back of his shaved head. Not to mention that he doesn't look nondescript at all, and that being a mix of all races should make you stand out pretty much anywhere. And then topped it off with a $3000 suit and custom handguns.
    • Was he engineered to look like a combination of all races, or was he engineered to have physical features common to several races?
  • In Knights of the Old Republic, HK-47 gives a short lecture about assassination. He mentions how being a droid makes his job easy since most people tend to treat droids like furniture.
  • The Stone Mask in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has the ability to make the wearer to appear as unnoticeable as a stone. This has a drawback: you get it by using the Lens of Truth to find a soldier who put it on, then suffered an injury. He laid there, hurt and forgotten, for days until you found him.
  • Your U.L. Paper contact in Grand Theft Auto IV. "To me? Who am I? There's a hundred guys in this building alone who fit my description. Middle aged men, paunchy, glasses... you bring them here? What's this? Empty office, leased to a man who died in the last days of Vietnam... Call me up. My number never existed."—also goes for The Men in Black.
  • To the Big Bad in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, everyone is like this due to his prosopagnosia. This allows Zero to trick him into killing one of his former accomplices.

Web Original

  • Jolie La Belle from Star Harbor Nights has "indescribable beauty" as a superpower, with an emphasis on the "indescribable" part.
    • There was at least one fanfiction Author Avatar who had a similar power. Occasionally someone tries, and it comes across as "his eyes were kinda blueish-greenish-brownish... or maybe they were more reddish..."
  • Billy from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
    • Not with that actor, he's not.
      • However, he does manage to pull off Clark Kenting remarkably well, and goes unnoticed following Captain Hammer and Penny around on their dates.
  • SCP Foundation: Huh? SCP-055? That number isn't in use, is it?
  • Pirate Lady Corazon Rivadeneira from Open Blue is so nondescript that even the paintings she modeled for can't agree on how she looks like. It's implied to be a supernatural power.

Western Animation

  • Samson the gerbil of Camp Lazlo, a case of Ascended Extra that isn't quite that. He once snuck into a guarded vault of candy just by waltzing in. When the owner of it found him, he actively stepped over Samson and blamed a fly for it.

Real Life

  • Come on, you know you've Seen It a Million Times. You just can't remember who or where...
    • To some Aspies, most people are this.
  • Dan freaking Cooper (whose alias was most certainly not D.B.). It's possible that he didn't survive landing, but looking at his composite sketch it seems much more likely that they didn't catch him because he could be any living (and Caucasian, male, and adult) human being.
    • Who tended to wear shades, don't forget that.
  • The President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy (not, technically, the "President of Europe" as is often incorrectly assumed) approaches the ideal. The Telegraph newspaper wrote after his appointment to the position in 2009 that "those who have met him [...] and can still recall the experience describe him as 'modest', 'introverted' and 'self-effacing'". Nigel Farage accused him of having the "charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk". Mr. Van Rompuy also comes from Belgium, which is about as nondescript as countries get.
  • One of the things that allowed Ted Bundy to go on killing for so long was the fact he was so ordinary looking; he was pretty much a natural master of disguise.
    • He was also helped by the fact that he could look reasonably handsome (though not memorably so), which helped him to persuade his female victims to get into vulnerable situations.
  • Former Seattle Mariners catcher Dan Wilson fits this well enough that many people, after meeting him have stated that they would never recognize him if they saw him walking down the street. This includes someone who had looked up to him as a hero for most of her life!
  • Most spies will probably use this to their advantage.
  • Most DJs, no matter how much they produce Crowning Music of Awesome generally seem to be nondescript white guys dressed in generic clothing wearing sunglasses and hats. DJ Shadow, James Lavelle, 3D and RJD2 all look really quite similar. It's unlikely that any DJ out there gets recognised in the street.
    • This is seemingly part of the reason artists like Daft Punk are so noticeable.
  • Gerald Ford had very few distinguishing features that political cartoonists of the time couldn't figure out how to caricature him properly.
    • Early on Barack Obama suffered the same fate in caricatures out of fear any exaggerated features would be labeled racist. The problem seems to have disappeared as artist decided to emphasize his ears, which the president noted his daughters and black peers have mocked the size of.
  • Surprisingly, being too beautiful can result in this trope. Human facial beauty is often judged by how closely a face matches a person's internal "blueprint" of what a human face looks like. As that blueprint is created from a mental average of every face the person has ever seen, the more you look like that blueprint, the more average you are, despite the fact that you are more attractive for your averageness.
  1. ↑ Akaza Akari
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