No Endor Holocaust: Difference between revisions

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Pell of ''[[One Piece]]'' saved Alubarna by flying the giant bomb (designed to annihilate the whole city and its inhabitants) straight up for a few seconds. {{spoiler|And he also survived the blast, even though clutching onto the bomb. Hey, [[Disney Death|unless it's a flashback, nobody dies]] in ''[[One Piece]]''.}}

* Played straight in ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]] A's'', which is a [[Magical Girl]] show with lots of [[Stuff Blowing Up]]. Each battle take place in a [[Phantom Zone]] that removes non-magicians, but static structures remain. At one point, the title character is sent crashing down into a building. At another point, a character forcefully enters the [[Phantom Zone]] and, upon landing, makes a crater on a building's rooftop. Some dialogue implies that the [[The Federation|The Bureau]] has to fix the damaged areas before they can drop the [[Phantom Zone]] effect.

** Somewhat related to the above. Probably due to some internal [[Lampshade Hanging]] within the production company, the majority of fights in the third season averts this by having the fights taking place in the abandoned part of a city the protagonists are stationed in. That way, they can blow up as much stuff as possible and nobody would care, since the infrastructure was abandoned anyway.

*** The series ending is ''really'' upbeat, considering that {{spoiler|Lelouch}} is hated by ''everyone''. How does he exceed the {{spoiler|nuking}} of Tokyo and Pendragon? How does he exceed Charles' rampant warmongering on the entire planet? He'd have to either kill an enormous number of people to do it, or otherwise enact some sort of extreme tyranny that somehow ruins fun for everybody. But it's never mentioned, and no one who knows about {{spoiler|Lelouch}} seems to care. And for the record, between the epilogue and a post-series DVD bonus feature, that's the entire (surviving) main cast.

* Parodied in ''[[Dirty Pair]] Flash'': After one of their little "accidents" involving a space station Kei and Yuri are ordered to send a hand-written letter of apology to each one of the 300,000 survivors.

* The series finale of ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]'' has the entire cast fighting for the universe... in a robot large enough to use galaxies as weapons, which they do quite often. It's implied that the universe they fought in may have been created by their own warping power, and so nobody was actually in trouble.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* As mentioned in one of the page quotes, The [[Incredible Hulk]] can go a long way without killing anyone during his rampages. Hulk's buddy, Amadeus Cho, tries to explain this by suggesting that the Hulk is amazingly gifted, doing math to know exactly where every chunk of debris he creates will fall.

* Lampooned by Scott McCloud's ''Destroy!!'', in which two quarreling superheroes demolish most, and finally '''all''', of Manhattan. The punchline: {{spoiler|"Well, at least no one was hurt."}}

* ''[[The Punisher]]'', in his 30-odd years of punishing (racking up something in the order of 2000+ bodies, it's estimated) has never killed an innocent. It's reasoned that Frank's whole schtick is that he's a phenomenally well trained, extremely diligent US Marine, who makes damn sure everything's in place before he starts his "work".

** Two others have the end of a dog leash coming out from under him, implying he crushed a dog, and a squashed shopping bag with a woman lamenting, "Well, there go my tomatoes."

* Unlike most traditional superhero comics, ''[[Invincible]]'' averts this hard: whenever there's a big, city-levelling battle between superheroes and supervillains, a large number of innocent civilians die.

 

== [[Fan Works]] ==

 

== [[Film]] ==

** There's also ''X2: X-Men United'', as pointed out in this [http://www.the-editing-room.com/x2.html abridged script], when Stryker first makes Xavier use the other Cerebro to try to kill all mutants in the world (of which there are hundreds of millions). We are shown the X-Men writhing in pain. Then Magneto comes and rewires Cerebro to kill humans instead. All 6 billion of them. While Xavier is stopped a few minutes later, this means that for several minutes, every human in the world (including pilots, surgeons, high-rise construction workers, etc.) were immobilized with pain. Guess what, no collateral damage is mentioned. However, given that the president seems about to do something drastic with regards to mutants before Xavier stops him, there may, in fact, have been tremendous damage.

* ''[[Independence Day]]'' initially looks like it's going to [[Averted Trope|avert]] the trope with the considerable concern about the collateral damage which would be caused by staging a nuclear attack on one of the alien ships, but then plays it straight anyway in the climax:

** Given that {{spoiler|most of these turn out to be people who are known to be dead}}, it's possible that there really wasn't anyone near the building.

* After test audiences left ''[[WALL-E]]'' thinking that the ending of the movie left [[Inferred Holocaust|humanity doomed]], the credits sequence was specifically designed to let people know they survived quite handily.

* In the ''[[Ocean's Eleven]]'' remake, Danny's crew uses an electromagnetic device to shut off all electricity in Las Vegas for 30 seconds. Realistically, we should be looking at pacemakers going haywire, car crashes in the thousands, hospital equipment failing, and god help them if any planes were flying low over the city when it happened. Yet the sequels still only refer to them as thieves, not as the most successful and high-tech terrorists of all time.

* Turned [[Up to Eleven]] in the ''[[Cutie Honey]]'' movie: Panther Claw have this giant drill-like tower underneath ''Tokyo Tower''. Meaning: If you work in the area, don't bother coming in. Then, Scarlet Claw blows up three buildings. They all remain largely intact, save for a giant hole in the middle. One of them, hilariously, is Cutie Honey's former office, and the only reaction this gets is a dazed "what the...?" from the boss. And finally, the tower ''explodes''. If you're in Tokyo when this kind of thing is happening, ''get out of the city''. The only things we see? A traffic jam and other people not caring.

* ''[[Transformers (film)|Transformers]]''

** The first movie. Very strange logic on the part of the army to take the Allspark into the middle of downtown Los Angeles when a horde or psychotic giant alien robots plus the good guys' jet fighter air support, was destined to converge on its location. The ensuing battle destroys a huge number of buildings and who knows how many innocent bystanders. But the situation was so desperate that it [[Godzilla Threshold|was the only option.]]

* In ''[[Battlefield Earth]]'', most of the aliens live inside a large artificial dome that was constructed over the city of Denver, along with thousands of human slaves and lots of old human buildings that have been repurposed for Psychlo rule. The heroes plan to shatter the dome to suffocate most of the Psychlos since many of them will not be wearing their protective masks; very little time is given to the incredible collateral damage of shattering foot-thick glass all over the tops of everyone, humans included.

* ''[[Blue Thunder]]'' pulls an interesting one in having the big aerial battle sequences occur over a major city (presumably Los Angeles). In the course of the battle, [[Misguided Missile]]s hit a Japanese barbecue shop and a skyscraper, and a jet aircraft is shot down. While the people in charge do express dismay over these events, nowhere is it implied that anyone got killed, and the news voiceover that closes the film seems more concerned with the fate of the helicopter than with the flaming debris raining down over the city.

* ...and [[King Kong]] didn't land on anyone when he fell off that skyscraper. In fairness, surely the first thing any sane person would do if they say a giant ape climbing the Empire State Building being attacked by fighters would be to get out of Dodge.

* In the ''[[Star Trek (film)|Star Trek]]'' film, the [[Big Bad]] is stopped from destroying Earth, while he was drilling a big hole into Earth's crust to reach the core in the San Francisco Bay. Everybody is happy, but there is still a big hole in the bay, which can lead to all sorts of bad things for San Francisco and Starfleet (whose HQ and academy are in the city). Additionally, the film fails to mention that Starfleet is now in a bad shape, thanks to the loss of the majority of the graduating class and 6 top-of-the-line starships. There is also the loss of one of the founding member worlds of the Federation. There is also the threat of another war with the Romulans. Good luck convincing people that Nero was not associated with the Empire.

* Halfway through ''[[Kung Fu Panda 2]]'', [[Big Bad|Lord Shen]] fires cannons at his ancestral palace in order to kill Po and the Furious Five. The tall palace collapses on the side, while Po and the others manage to run up its side and survive. Thing is, Gongmen City is a bustling metropolis (for fictional Ancient China). How many cute rabbits were crushed by the falling building?

* ''[[Iron Man (film)|Iron Man]] 2'' features more collateral damage than you can shake an explosion at, including a swarm of combat drones going amok among a crowd of people, and not a single bystander is shown with so much as a scratch. Even the test pilot being shown having his ''spine'' snapped ([[Bloodless Carnage|bloodlessly]]) is pointed out to have survived.

* ''[[Hulk (film)|Hulk]]'' went out of its way to show that no-one died during the Hulk's rampages.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

** While there ''are'' commanders who will make at least a token effort to avoid it, the novels nonetheless show plenty of instances of combat in an urban setting. The presumably resulting civilian casualties are rarely even mentioned in passing unless it's explicitly a plot point (like the Smoke Jaguars' orbital bombardment and resulting total destruction of Edo, which was in fact considered over the top by even their allies and a genuine war crime by most everybody else).

*** The Jade Falcons repeat the orbital bombardment in the animated series, but it's explicitly stated that the city's population was evacuated prior to the bombardment. A sourcebook for the series goes into further detail, comparing the two incidents, and bringing up the question of what the Falcons did with the people afterwards.

* Deconstructed and averted in ''[[Night Watch (novel)|Final Watch]]''. As explained there is a fundamental difference between Mass Sleep spells used by the Light Ones and the Dark Ones. The Light version allows the victim a few moments of consciousness to put whatever he's doing to a halt and make himself comfortable. The Dark one simply knocks everybody out. After the Dark spell is used the characters enter the area of effect and register numerous crashed cars, starting fires and other unpleasantries.

* Averted in ''[[Honor Harrington|Mission of Honor]]''. {{spoiler|The destruction of space stations orbiting the Manticoran system worlds}} causes a great deal of collateral damage from debris striking the planets below, including the complete destruction of a city, and {{spoiler|a treecat clan being wiped out}}.

** In fairness, those "heavily populated areas" were next door to the military bases and spaceports the Moonies were trying to bomb in the first place, not the actual targets themselves. And only one or two are mentioned as having been knocked off course in such a manner. (They specifically avoided targeting the headquarters of the government they were revolting against, since it happened to be dangerously close to the Taj Mahal. Quite apart from the PR implications of destroying the Taj Mahal, it was the favorite building of the revolutionary prime minister.)

* In the [[Star Trek]] novel ''[[Star Trek Enterprise Relaunch|Beneath the Raptor’s Wing]]'', several starships carrying antimatter explode in orbit over Andoria. The planet is fine, but characters do note that had the explosions been a certain degree more powerful, the atmosphere ''could'' have been stripped away.

* Partly averted in [[Vladimir Vasilyev]] and [[Alexander Gromov]]'s novel ''Antarctic-online'', in which the titular continent inexplicably finds itself in Central Pacific, while the islands that used to occupy the area find themselves near the South Pole. While the novel largely focuses on the political consequences of a continent that nobody wants suddenly becoming prime real estate, there is plenty of talk about the ecological consequences, such as many coastal cities being flooded in the near future as the result of the melting Antarctic ice cap (this is handled, more or less, realistically - it's stated that the process will last for millennia given the sheer amount of ice). There are immediate effects, though, such as tidal waves hitting the coasts from the sudden shift, and the numerous Polynesian islands, stuck in the Antarctic Circle, to evacuate. The world's nations wish to blame somebody, and the blame falls on the newly-declared sovereign Antarctic nation. Many nations demand reparations from Antarctic representatives, even though the continental "jump" was not their fault.

 

* In the season 4 finale of ''[[24]]'', a military-grade nuclear missile is intercepted and destroyed just above downtown LA seconds before it was to detonate. While this should have spread several kilos of plutonium across the city in a "dirty bomb" effect, nobody seems to be concerned about this aside from a [[Hand Wave]] about NEST cleaning up the scene. Although the plutonium would only be particularly dangerous if inhaled or eaten, as the alpha radiation it emits wouldn't penetrate your skin. There was some handwave about prevailing winds blowing it away from the city.

* In ''[[Power Rangers]]'', the [[Monster of the Week]]'s energy blasts regularly hit the Zords and they fall back and ''through'' a building. Nobody ever talks about the implications of that... The later [[Hand Wave|dodge]] of many fights happening in an abandoned warehouse district is an [[Voodoo Shark|inelegant solution]] to say the least.

* ''Leverage'': In the season finale, Nate rigs a component of a nuclear {{spoiler|to explode when terrorists try to use it. In a show that meticulously avoids killing people off indiscriminately it's a bit jarring [[Values Dissonance|to see the smoking wreckage of the plant that went boom.]] But . . . it's okay since it's terrorists? Sheesh.}}

* An EMP problem ensued in an episode of the short-lived alien invasion drama ''[[Threshold]]'', where an EMP is unleashed in Miami to keep an alien signal from spreading. The team leader is told no one was killed. You're telling me not one pacemaker shorted out in a city located in the Retiree Capital of Earth? Riiiiight.

* ''[[FlashForward]]'' averts it brutally in the pilot. When {{spoiler|almost}} everybody on Earth falls asleep for two minutes, there aren't exactly exemptions for drivers, pilots, or train conductors.

** In one episode the theory is advanced that the Chinese did it, because most people in China were asleep at the time, and so went unharmed.

* In ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'', huge sections of Atlantis are regularly demolished by alien invaders, natural disasters and our heroes - yet this seems to have very little overall impact on the city as a whole and the population, which appears to stay remarkably steady in numbers. Although the latter could be explained after contact is re-established with Earth as new personnel arriving to fill the gaps. Still, all in all, Atlantis must be one of those alien cities which is capable of almost instantly rebuilding itself when damaged.

** It is mentioned that Atlantis is ''gigantic''... it is a city after all. Over 90% of it is uninhabited; the expedition (numbering a couple thousand at most) stays almost exclusively in the central tower, while the Athosians live in colonies on the mainland.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* Occurs in ''[[Saints Row]] 3'' when the military brings in a giant {{spoiler|flying aircraft carrier}} to bomb Steelport. It eventually gets blown up, but the city miraculously does not get flattened by the falling debris.

* The last act of ''[[Xenoblade]]'' has players witness no less than {{spoiler|The Bionis and Mechonis, the [[Humongous Mecha]]/continents the game's characters live on, '''coming to life and engaging in mortal combat.''' ''No one'' on either continent is concerned about this happening (besides the High Entia, who have [[Body Horror|other problems]] to deal with), and no one is shown dying or being injured, even though the simple act of the Bionis moving its leg should have ended at least 3 civilizations.}}

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' has averted and played straight. In a direct parody of the trope namer, a giant bone space-station is defeat above the ruins of Valhalla, reducing it to even more ruins. However, the update message reminds the players that a thousand years is as a day in Valhalla, so it'll be just fine when you get there.

* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' doesn't play up collateral damage, but doesn't make it disappear either. If anything goes boom, it knocks something over and has appropriate minimum safe distance (if this was a [[Star-Killing|star]], this can be [//www.schlockmercenary.com/2002-07-04 five hundred light years]). Even [//www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-05-22 when] people take time to minimize it--

== [[Web Original]] ==

* Apparently ''[[The Mercury Men]]'' universe never heard of the Roche Limit; the Moon gets so close to the Earth that it's affecting the cloud cover. Possibly justified however, as we don't really know how the Gravity Engine works.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* In ''[[The Spectacular Spider-Man]]'', Sandman tries to help the mob jack crude from a tanker. Spidey shows up, and they do what superheroes and villains have done for ages...only now they do it on an oil tanker. In New York harbor. At least the ''Valdez'' wasn't anywhere near a human port of millions of people, though I'm sure that was cold comfort to the wildlife.

* Yet another blunder from Redakai. "Kairu", the [[Star Wars|Life-energy of the universe]], is regularly made off with by the heroes. However, the presence of the energy generates prosperity with the surrounding wildlife. The heroes realize this in one episode when they find some of the energy on a farm where one of them grew up. They decide to leave the energy where it was in this case, ''but what happened to the places that they have taken the energy from before and since?!''

 

== [[Real Life]] ==