Where I Was Born and Razed

""Hah! That's rich. I'm the last Czarnian." [Aside] "I fragged the rest of the planet for my high school science project. Gave myself an A.""

- Lobo, Superman: The Animated Series

"Takadox: He was exiled from his home island after he broke something. Mantax: What did he break? Takadox: The island."

- Bionicle

Hometown isn't doomed? Doom it yourself! Whether it's an accident, revenge or just plain anger, heroes sometimes display disturbing tendencies toward destroying their own hometowns, countries, planets or even universes. Bonus point if they simultaneously kill their parents.

It doesn't count if only the house is destroyed, in attempts to kill the hero or just to spite him. It also doesn't count if a broader war is involved, unless the character's actions directly created that war.

This is more frequent with villains. Sometimes it's to demonstrate how disturbed he is, other times it's a Start of Darkness event for him. Or maybe he just really liked the sound of being the Last of His Kind.

See also Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds, The End of the World as We Know It and Comes Great Responsibility.

Anime and Manga

 * In Akira, a mutated Tetsuo destroys most of his home city of Neo-Tokyo.
 * This was the beginning of Sara's Disproportionate Retribution in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch. At least her own home was an accident. Others were not.
 * Mostly inverted in Saikano, as Chise protects her and Shuji's home town from complete destruction until the very end of the story, when
 * in King of Thorn burnt her house down when she was a child after her family had died of the Medusa virus, along with the creature that the virus had spawned from her in the process.
 * In Chrono Crusade, Joshua goes insane when Aion gives him Chrono's horns, which allows him to hear the thoughts of everyone around him. He "stops the noise" by freezing everyone in the orphanage he lives in to stone. Also doubles as a Doomed Hometown for Chrono and Rosette—their goal is both to save Joshua, and unfreeze the children in the orphanage.
 * Also, in the manga Aion's plans are reveal to be
 * In Pokémon, a flashback shows Saffron City Gym Leader Sabrina destroying her house with her psychic powers as a child.
 * Eneru from One Piece destroyed his home island of Birka.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam's Amuro Ray accidentally blows a hole in the wall of Side 7 shortly after he gets on the Gundam.
 * The same effect (technically) happens to Kamille. The same also, being something of a remake, happens to Kira (again being a remake, having done the same thing as Amuro among other things to damage his colony beyond repair) and Shinn.
 * In Fullmetal Alchemist, Ed and Al burn down their house to symbolize how they'd never look back during their quest to regain their bodies. However, in the manga, their father guesses that the true reason was to.
 * Speaking of Hohenheim, in the manga and Brotherhood,
 * Eva Heinemann in Monster does this to the Heinemann family mansion after realizing.
 * You mention Eva and not Johan? She only did it once.
 * No one mentioned Diva yet? She drank everyone's blood and set the whole mansion on fire. Granted, they
 * Uchiha Itachi massacred his entire family and clan in their private section of the village of Konoha..
 * Currently, this is Uchiha Sasuke's plan.
 * In Macross Frontier
 * Later on
 * And
 * Trigun features a couple of these. Most notably Knives blowing up the ship where he was born and brought up as part of his first attempt to kill off the human race; in the anime he manipulates and kills off the entire crew beforehand.
 * Manga Legato Bluesummers seems to have almost gotten himself killed as a child out of his determination to do this, instead of using his nascent mind-control powers to get the fuck away and run like hell. That Knives appears to have turned up and killed the whole town for kicks at the last moment is icing on the cake of rape-stopping and life-saving and electing-not-to-murder and tacit-acceptance-of-lifelong-fealty.
 * In Yu Yu Hakusho, Hiei was a male fire demon that was born among a female race of ice demons. Males can only be born to ice demons if they were birthed by an outside male. According to the ice demons beliefs, males bring destruction, so the elders had him thrown off a cliff. This is what caused him to want to destroy the ice demons, but it was subverted in the end. Why? Because when he finally found them, he realized that the ice demons had very pitiful lives, so decided that leaving them alive was a worse punishment. No wonder Hiei has a lot of social problems.

Comics
""By sixteen, Lobo had murdered half the population of his home planet. By seventeen, he stopped screwing around.""
 * It's Lobo's own fault he's the Last of His Kind in both The DCU (where he killed all the other Czarnians on a lark) and The DCAU (where he fragged the rest of the planet for his high school science project).


 * Liz Sherman in Hellboy.
 * Cletus Kasady, better known as Carnage of Spider-Man fame got his start along the path of villainy by burning down the Orphanage of Fear he was raised in.
 * Nocturn, the warlord Ehlek's lieutenant in Bionicle got sent to The Pit for "breaking" his island in a fit of rage. When the author Greg Farshtey got asked why he did this, he answered: "People break things when they get angry. Nocturn happened to break his island." Apparently he hit a weak spot For Massive Damage.
 * Bizarro did this as well in the classic story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, destroying the Bizarro world due to him thinking he needed to do so to become a better duplicate of Superman. He then
 * Correction: he wanted to become a "perfect opposite". Coming to Earth as an adult instead of a child, destroying his homeworld on purpose instead of it being a natural catastrophe, and as a perfect finisher,

Fan Fiction

 * In Arestis' Childhood,, angry at the High Priestess of the village for , takes it out on the village by . Her parents die in the attack. She doesn't seem to much care.
 * In the Death Note Fanfic Low Light

Film

 * In a relatively mild version, Carrie killed everyone at her prom, the two kids who had humiliated her, and after prom night went horribly, horribly wrong for her.
 * The novel and the remake play it much more straight. It's shown pretty explicitly that the damage she did was enormous (setting fires, pulling down power lines, blowing open fire hydrants so that the firefighters couldn't do anything, etc). In the novel, the town never really recovers and essentially becomes a ghost town within a few months.
 * They wanted to have her destroy the town in the film but didn't have the budget.
 * At the end of Addams Family Values,  The Addams, naturally, are quite understanding.
 * The prequel comics and novel to 2007's Transformers movie all reveal, despite otherwise being separate continuities, that it was Optimus Prime, of all people, who launched the All Spark into space to keep it from Megatron's hands, dooming Cybertron to a slow, lingering death. In the movie itself, Optimus states that he's willing to sacrifice his own life to destroy the All Spark, if need be. Some characters think it's noble. Others think it's disturbing...
 * In Monsters vs. Aliens, Gallaxhar reveals that he destroyed his home planet, although his reasons for doing so are constantly interrupted. Maybe he should have waited until he was out of his cloning machine to give his Backstory...
 * A variant occurs in Pokémon the First Movie, when Mewtwo destroys the laboratory he was created in.
 * In Thor when Loki found out that he was in fact a

Literature

 * Elric of Melnibone destroyed his own empire after his cousin carried out a coup while Elric was traveling overseas.
 * He then destroyed the entire world, eventually, although it was pretty terminally afflicted by Chaos already.
 * Carrie. The casualties number over 400 by the time she's stopped.
 * The White Witch from the Narnia series is revealed, in the prequel The Magician's Nephew, to have originally been Jadis, Queen of the world of Charn. When her sister rebelled against her, and came a bit too close to succeeding, Jadis used the ultimate magic spell, 'The Deplorable Word', to extinguish all other life on the planet. ALL of it. Then she petrified herself, awaiting a time when visitors from another world would intrude on her crumbling sanctuary...
 * The Pyromaniac and her girlfriend in Monstrous Regiment go back to the orphanage that abused them in order to Kill It with Fire. And watch.
 * Clandish Consto in Stationery Voyagers sought revenge on a girl who got him expelled from grade school YEARS ago, murdered every teacher that ever verbally abused him that was still living, poisoned his own landlord, murdered his landlord's wife, joined an invading enemy army, and hijacked an entire space center. And all in his own hometown! He then proceeds to threaten the world of that army he initially joined, and eventually becomes such a threat to the universe, that the Angel of Death traps him in the Haragad Cavity until the end of time so he can't learn sorcery. So much for the "I'm back" celebration.
 * In the short story "Basilisk" in the collection Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison, a former POW returns home with damage to his eyes and is condemned by almost the entire populace for having cracked under torture. Then the god Ares decides to heal his injuries. Penance ensues.
 * In the Annals of the Black Company, the man known as "Erin NoFather, an unlanded priest of the god Vancer from Slinger, in the kingdom of Vye" eventually became the Dominator. Of course, by that time he'd made sure to wipe the town of Slinger off the face of the earth, and kill everyone who had lived there while he was growing up, to prevent any of his enemies learning his true name. Later he laid waste to all of Vye.

Music
"Gonna leave, get a job with the help and the grace from above. Save some money, get rich and old, bring it back to Tobacco Road. But it's home, the only life I ever known. Only you know how I loathe Tobacco Road. Bring that dynamite and a crane, blow it up, start all over again. Build a town, be proud to show. Give it the name Tobacco Road"
 * Tobacco Road, written by John Loudermilk, and first performed by The Nashville Teens. It has been covered by The Animals, Jefferson Airplane, The Lovin' Spoonful, the Blues Magoos, and David Lee Roth, among others.

"In my little town I never meant nothing, I was just my father's son Saving my money, dreaming of glory Twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun Leaving nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town..."
 * My Little Town by Simon and Garfunkel is a poignant memoir, but if you squint and look sideways at the final verse, it can take on some unintended meaning:

"And the fire of '91 that razed the Bella Vista slum That was the biggest shit-fight this country's ever seen Insurance companies ruined, land lords getting sued All cause of wee little girl with a can of gasoline Those flames really roared when the wind started blowing La la la la La la la lie Well the rich man, and the poor man, they all got to die"
 * The Curse Of Millhaven by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - admittedly, she only razes part of it, but in the other verses the protagonist kills enough people to populate a small town.

"Burn, honey burn, let the fire eat away I never liked the look of this town Burn it down now I'll run, they'll know what I've done I'll fetch my gear and take my leave from this mountain"
 * Wildfire by Sonata Arctica, a power metal band from Finland, is about a young man who does this.

"You said, I'm gonna buy this place and burn it down I'm gonna put it six feet underground You said, I'm gonna buy this place and watch it fall Stand here beside my baby and the crumbling walls Oh I'm gonna buy this place and start a fire Stand here until I fill all your heart's desires Because I'm gonna buy this place and see it burn And do back the things it did to you in return"
 * In the Voltaire song "Bomb New Jersey", the singer is trying to arrange the nuclear destruction of his home state.
 * The song "A Rush Of Blood To The Head" by Coldplay:

Radio

 * In the Big Finish Doctor Who adventure "Orbis",

Role Playing Games

 * In the Mutants and Masterminds Meta-4 universe, Neutronik's cloning of himself eventually caused a world war and a nuclear apocalypse.

Tabletop Games

 * Warhammer 40000 has Night Haunter, the Primarch of the Night Lords, spend his youth as a bloody-handed vigilante cleaning up the streets of his adopted home planet by fear. On his eventual return, and seeing how the populace has slipped back into depravity, he uses his fleet to annihilate the entire planet.

Television

 * In Red Dwarf, the titular ship suffers its accident because Rimmer hasn't fixed the drive-plate properly.
 * Or at least he believed he did. According to "Justice" Rimmer never worked on the drive-plate at all, and simply took the blame for the incident because he honestly believed that he was important enough to take responsibility. Whether this is really the case is up for debate, largely because even though the ship blew thanks to an ill repaired drive plate, chicken soup machine repairman Rimmer should never have been involved in the repair process whatsoever.
 * This doesn't answer why in season one we see security camera footage of Captain Hollister tearing Rimmer a new one for doing "sloppy work on the drive plate"; interestingly Rimmer does say in a panicked voice that he is sorry and takes full responsibility, just as the drive plate blows and disintegrates the entire crew.
 * In the novels Rimmer has nothing to do with the disaster that kills the crew, he just takes some characteristically bad decisions on the day of the accident that result in his own death, rather than his being safely in stasis at the time.
 * When Kryten is constructing Rimmer's defence in Justice, it sounds a lot like he is lying in order to get Rimmer off the hook. The Justice AI after all has no actual evidence, just Rimmer's guilt over the event. Not a very good judicial system, really.
 * This troper took it to mean that while Rimmer was tasked to fix the drive plate, he had absolutely no idea how to do it right, and was never properly trained. Rimmer thought that, because he's such an arrogant egotistical moron, that he should be able to do a good job regardless. In this instance, it would be Captain Hollister's fault for relying on an incompetent crewman to do work that could (and did) kill the entire crew.
 * Hollister's own records stated that if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing well, and if it wasn't worth doing, give it to Rimmer. So clearly, it would be the fault of anyone moronic enough to have assigned a job with potentially lethal consequences, say, repairing a drive plate that could leak fatal doses of radiation, to Arnold Judas Rimmer in the first place.
 * Doctor Who: The Doctor was only able to destroy the threat of the Daleks during the "last great Time War" by also destroying the other Time Lords and his home planet Gallifrey.
 * He also destroyed Gallifrey in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Ancestor Cell, and, to be fair, it was for a good reason and they were being assholes anyway. He developed Trauma-Induced Amnesia as a result. Then You'd almost think he doesn't like Gallifrey or something, huh?
 * It isn't that he doesn't like Gallifrey, or even Gallifreyans. It's that he doesn't trust the Time Lords (not all Gallifreyans were necessarily Time Lords). He misses Gallifrey and the people, but he knows that if the Time Lords returned, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for humans and other species in the universe. We find out how true that is in The End Of Time.
 * Captain Hero in Drawn Together tossed his home planet Zebulon into its sun in the episode "Little Orphan Hero," which was basically a parody of Superman's backstory.
 * Ben Linus from Lost told the main characters that he had lived on the island his entire life.
 * The first Volume of Heroes was about a Petrelli family plot to have Peter nuke New York City, their home. In an alternate future, Sylar nukes Costa Verde, his new town, in a rage after his son is killed.
 * In Power Rangers RPM,
 * Angel, soon after becoming a vampire, killed everyone in his village, including his parents and sister.
 * In a heroic example, Buffy, over the years, has destroyed her high school gym, her next high school, and finally, her home town of Sunnydale.
 * Does it count if with, AT LEAST the last one, the entire world would have been destroyed if she hadn't intervened? (For those not in the know, her town is built on top of the portal to Hell.)
 * In a minor example, Parker from Leverage blew up her foster parents' house after they hit her and took away her favorite toy. No word yet on whether they were in it at the time.
 * In a minor example, Parker from Leverage blew up her foster parents' house after they hit her and took away her favorite toy. No word yet on whether they were in it at the time.

Video Games

 * The player character of the PlayStation game Summoner. Arguably, twice. Before the game, when he was still a young boy, the player character used his summoning powers to defend his hometown, which was swiftly destroyed when the demon he summoned broke free of his control. The second time involves the "tutorial" level of the game, where the character's new hometown is destroyed by the invading forces of the enemy nation, in a war touched off because the emperor of said enemy nation received a prophecy that the Summoner would come and slay him, so the emperor decided to kill the Summoner first.
 * In Final Fantasy IV, after Cecil and Kain are tricked into burning down the village of Mist, young Rydia summons Titan in an attempt at a Roaring Rampage of Revenge but mainly succeeds only in finishing the job.
 * It doesn't end there, interestingly—at least in the DS version..
 * At least in the SNES version(not the Bowlderized "FFII", though maybe even there), Mist wasn't actually destroyed: you can return via airship.
 * You can return to Mist in every single version of FFIV. Problem is, the only version that shows any damage to the town after the traumatic event is the DS version, where you can see the damage to some of the houses.
 * If you talk with the inhabitants there, they will reference the horrible disaster that killed all of the summoners. Maybe Mist had two significant populations: the world's only summoners, and the world's best carpenters.
 * Final Fantasy VII has a creative variant in the Nibelheim burning. Sephiroth was born (and experimented on by his very own Father) in the Village of Nibelheim (which coincidentally happens to be the Protagonist's Doomed Hometown), but later taken to and raised at the resident Mega Corp's HQ. When he returns to his birthplace many years later, he has no idea about his connection to Nibelheim, but once he finds it out, he doesn't take the news too well...
 * In Final Fantasy XIII  do this to their hometown of
 * Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid destroyed his home village during what can only be described as a psychic temper tantrum.
 * In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Laughing Octopus
 * From the backstory of The King of Fighters, Leona went loopy and murdered her entire village when The Dragon awakened her Orochi powers.
 * In the original Secret of Mana, the hero is ostracized by his fellow villagers after his retrieval of the magical sword causes their town to become vulnerable to monster attacks. Oops.
 * In Xenogears,  is responsible for the destruction of.
 * Bishop from Neverwinter Nights 2 will admit to burning down his hometown if the player's influence score with him is high enough.
 * from Tales of the Abyss. Granted, he didn't mean to.
 * The town of Nordberg from Overlord 2 and the hometown of the titular Overlord is the first town you conquer, and depending on your (obtuse) karma meter, you'll either wind up enslaving them all or leaving it a smoking pile of ash.
 * Fallout 3:
 * Fallout: New Vegas.
 * The Lonesome Road DLC reveals
 * Breath of Fire I: Cerl, one of the Dark Dragon Generals, uses the Time Key to freeze her old hometown. When she was younger, they kicked her out due to Fantastic Racism; the only person she spares is her childhood friend Alan, who never agreed to the exile but was powerless to stop it.
 * Dawn of War in the back story Gabriel ordered the Exterminatus on his own homeworld Cyrene when he discovered corruption on the recruits.
 * Dawn of War in the back story Gabriel ordered the Exterminatus on his own homeworld Cyrene when he discovered corruption on the recruits.

Web Original

 * In Fine Structure (Power of Two being the first in the arc) the Powers gain their power when they're hit by a very painful lightning bolt that makes them go berserk for about fifteen seconds. One of their superpowers is speed, so a lot of people can die. Also, that website started as a howto on destroying the Earth.
 * Bionicle gives us Nocturn, who smashed his entire home island by hitting in "just the right spot."

Webcomics

 * One (and a half) villain in The Wotch was ostracized by his village of reindeer because he was a were. No, not a werewolf, a harmless were-girl. When he/they came back from a quest for an artifact allowing him/them to control the change, the townsfolk reacted even more violently, leading to an inevitable, but deserved, massacre.
 * Belkar Bitterleaf plans on doing this to his Halfling village at some point.
 * Maybe, maybe not. Who can tell with Belkar? He was trying to earn roleplaying XP by spinning a tale, so we're not really sure...
 * Knowing Belkar he's already done it.
 * Also might do it too, by accident, given a prophecy that he knows nothing about.

Western Animation

 * In Superman: The Animated Series, Superman's old foe Brainiac got a new origin: instead of a mad scientist from the planet Colu, he was an intelligent supercomputer from Krypton. When Jor-El shared his fears that the planet was going to explode, Brainiac probably could have done something about it—but he lied and said Jor-El was wrong, while secretly plotting his own escape. Being the last holder of knowledge about a whole world appealed to him. In fact, he liked the idea so much he started doing it to other worlds too.
 * In Invader Zim, Zim was banished to Foodcourtia for single-handedly (almost) destroying the entire Irken civilization