The concept of this is related to the theoretical Dunbar's Number, which says at some point, it is simply impossible for a person to truly care about so many people.

Strong reactions by main characters can also help. Since Men Are the Expendable Gender, this sort of A Death in the Limelight is more often female or Children Are Innocent (especially orphans) or, if male, injured. Writers who want to avert this effect must deploy such tricks as the Empathy Doll Shot, The Dead Have Names, or personalizing some victims, to suggest the faces of the faceless victims. Often ties into Offstage Villainy, since the larger atrocities can't be displayed onscreen in full magnitude. Psychologically, proximity is more important than magnitude. Part of this is that the major deaths occur on stage or on camera, in detail and taking long enough to be dramatic. As long as the victims are sufficiently faceless, even a Final Solution can be considered not worth making any fuzz about. The death of a single plot-important character is a tragic and often pivotal point the deaths of thousands of faceless Mooks, even if by torture, are simply background noise, so to speak. However, the Redshirt Army can be sacrificed with reckless abandon, and no one will so much as bat an eyelash. In other words, when some sort of Tragedy befalls a character such as The Hero (or even the Big Bad), the audience is expected to sympathize with him or perhaps even cry for him. Far more important is the degree to which the audience knows the character(s) affected. The amount of sympathy that death, cruelty or suffering is expected to evoke from the audience is often inversely proportional to the magnitude of its effects. Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk attributed to Josef Stalin

Dead space aftermath tv tropes