Absurdly Cool City
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In fictional settings, authors often decide to make great cites for their work. In "classic" sci-fi the city served as a common trope to be used to represent whatever society that existed. Then, when animated, drawn or otherwise shown, a Design Student's Orgasm usually occurs.
This comes in two flavors, although "shiny and awesome" is prevalent unless the work is a set in a Crapsack World. This sort of city is often the capital of The Federation, The Alliance, The Empire, or The Republic. It's usually a City of Adventure.
Examples of Absurdly Cool City include:
Shiny and Awesome
Anime and Manga
- New Domino City from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's.
- Mitakihara City from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
- Sternbild City, a three-leveled city decorated with several Statue-of-Liberty-sized monuments from Tiger and Bunny is also a nice example.
Comic Books
- Themyscra of Wonder Woman. Just take a look.
- Metropolis from Superman.
- The Mighty Thor's version of Asgard.
Film
- Vampire New York as seen in Daybreakers. While it's the exact opposite of "shiny", the sheer infrastructure of adapting the biggest city in the United States to Vampires gets it put in this category. Besides, Dark is shiny for vampires.
- Star Wars:
- Coruscant is a planet. It's so large they needed an entire subsidiary guide just to explain how it worked.
- Cloud City, which was allegedly inspired by Star Trek's Stratos City.
- Theed, which could have been inspired by Dinotopia's Waterfall City.
Literature
- Trantor from the Foundation series. It covers all the planet, it's the capital of the galactic empire, and continues many kilometers underground.
- Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. So absurdly cool, it has its own Wikipedia page.
Live-Action TV
- Stargate: The Ancients, Atlantis from Stargate Atlantis and other Great City Ships. Crystal Spires on hyperdrives.
- Star Trek:
- Stratos City: Crystal Spires and Togas for everyone! (Except Troglodytes.)
- The Federation's own capitol, San Francisco.
Video Games
- Any city level from Ratchet & Clank. You'd think those guys were architects.
- Dentech City from Rockman EXE. The fact that Everything Is Online compounds this. And its virtual counterpart Navi City which is online.
- The Citadel from Mass Effect. It's a a giant space station. Just check out its page. It. Is. Awesome. Of course, it was made by crazy Robo-Cthulhu death farmers. But that's beside the point.
- "Ubiquitos", also known as 'The City' from Mirror's Edge. See also Ascetic Aesthetic and Scenery Porn.
Web Comics
- The titular Megatokyo.
Western Animation
- Cloudsdale from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a hovering (and possibly mobile) city made almost entirely from clouds and rainbows and featuring a weather factory.
Dark and Gritty
Comic Books
- Gotham City from Batman, especially post-earthquake when the city looks like a mash up of the 1930s, Gothic London and a Modern city.
Film
- The eponymous Dark City is a Scenery Porn-tastic, German Expressionism-inspired, Always Night City in a Bottle.
- The city in Blade Runner, as depicted in fanart here.
- In RoboCop, OCP portrays Delta City as Shiny and Awesome, but, like every other product OCP makes...
- Star Wars:
Literature
- Ankh-Morpork from Discworld, though most of its dark has turned into grime and might occasionally become part of something served in a bun.
Both Shiny and Gritty
Film
- The titular Metropolis. It borrows from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and has a shiny Art Deco city on top and a gritty worker's city under the earth.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000 has quite a lot. Eldar cities and the Dark Eldar capital of Commorgah are both very impressive (the former are Crystal Spires and Togas style cites housed inside Craftworlds, spacecrafts the size of small moons, the latter is a Dark Towers and Spikes style city located inside the Webway). Humans have numerous heavily populated worlds with impressive looking cities, but the grand price goes to Holy Terra, seat of the Imperium. The Imperial Palace alone covers most of what used to be Eurasia.
Web Comics
- Drowtales: Chel'el'sussoloth, literally means "City of light in the darkness". For Lonely Rich Kid Ariel, it's a fantasy world beyond her wildest dreams, to Genre Savvy Cloudcuckoolander Lirel, it's a Wretched Hive that also has Crystal Spires and Togas... perfect for having A Hell of a Time.
Western Animation
- In Futurama, New New York actually finds itself suffering from a garbage shortage, while they dump their radioactive sewage directly into Old New York and the sewers below, the later of which now look like this because of a civilisation of mutants (who are required to live there by law).
Real Life
- Dubai.
- New York City.
- Hong Kong.
- Mont-Saint-Michel, France, the inspiration for Peter Jackson's version of Minas Tirith in his movie version of The Lord of the Rings.
UNSORTED
Shiny, Gritty, or both?
- The major cities of World of Warcraft: Silver Moon, Undercity, the Exodar, Dalaran and Shattrah.
- The titular City of Ember.
- New Mombasa from Halo 3.
- The Human City from The Matrix. It's a virtual merger of several real-world cities.
- Dinotopia's Waterfall City.
- In James and the Giant Peach, James tends to think of New York City this way.