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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|
'''Gargravarr:''' Have you ''seen'' the local scenery?
'''A blast door grinds open, wind howls mournfully'''
'''Zaphod:''' Ah. Okay. Well, I'll just slouch about then...
|''
Picture this: you are making your dream [[After the End]] film, comic, manga, or book, and you need a way to really ''knock it into'' your audience that this is, indeed, a [[Crapsack World]]. What do you do? Cue slow pan over abandoned, bleak, ruined cityscape or radiation-scorched wilderness. Preferably both. If you're doing a [[Cyberpunk]] work, be sure to have [[City Noir|gloomy, twilit skyscrapers towering over]] [[Wretched Hive|masses of stinking poverty]]
If it's post-apocalyptic, it's a look of abandonment rather that slums/sprawl or recent destruction. Buildings are crumbling, collapsed, torn open, leaning. There are rubble piles at the base of walls, peeling paint. Familiar objects are weathered, rusted, rotted, sun-bleached, and may be encrusted in dirt and dust which has been wetted by rain at some point and dried. Buildings, vehicles, etc may be half-buried in sediment as if a flood had come through, basically they're melted into the ground. Cracked desert soil is common, though not required, the next likely option is jungle-like overgrowth as the Earth retakes the city. Many of these elements are directly based on what has already happened in real abandoned locations.
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High Dynamic Range (HDR) renderings seem to go hand-in-hand with Scenery Gorn, as everybody taking pics of real-life examples (below) seems to be addicted to HDR. Seems to be uniquely useful here since interiors lit only with sunbeams through windows or holes can't be accurately depicted with normal photographic technology when lit as they actually occur, and that natural lighting is essential to remaining authentic to the scene.
Keep in mind that the line between
[[Crapsack World]] pretty much always involves
Closely related (possibly sub-tropes) are [[Saharan Shipwreck]] and [[Ribcage Ridge]], and often includes an [[Empathy Doll Shot]].
{{examples}}▼
Not to be confused with decorative [[Star Trek: The Original Series|lizard men]].
▲{{examples}}
== [[Art]] ==
* [[
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[
* ''[[Barefoot Gen]]'' depicts Hiroshima during and after the atomic bombing.
* ''[[Battle Angel Alita]]''. Countless detailed scenes of the Scrapyard and the surrounding desert wastes. So relentless is the decay (and fastidious detail) of ''Alita'' that familiarity eventually blurs the line between Scenery Gorn and [[Scenery Porn]].
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* ''[[Fist of the North Star]]'' may qualify. The animation was low enough budget that the backgrounds were never exactly detailed, but you still had plenty of crumbling buildings and of course lots and lots of wasteland. The movie had a larger budget, and had several scenes of destruction and desolation, including an oil tanker impaling a skyscraper. That one appeared twice.
* [[Trigun|Gunsmoke/No Man's Land]], being a [[Single Biome Planet]], already has long stretches of desert as far as the eye can see, but once flashbacks to the city of July start happening, this comes into play in an even worse way.
* ''[[Ghost in
* ''[[Laputa]]'', featuring the decay of an ancient fantasy city
* ''[[
* ''[[Texhnolyze]]'', despite actually being [[Scenery Porn|masterfully detailed]], features one of the more extreme examples of the [[Cyberpunk]]
** ''[[Blame]]'' and Tsutomu Nihei's works (''Biomega'', and ''Abara'') could be the manga counterpart for this. There's enough vast, ruined cityscapes to.. well, cover the [[Crapsack World|planet]]. Definitely an [[Author Appeal]].
* The Manga version of ''[[Berserk]]'' is known for being lavishly detailed, featuring battlefields littered with corpses mangled in different ways. It's a [[Crapsack World]] full of misery and death, and the art does not flinch from depicting it.
* In the ''[[Naruto]]'' manga, we are informed that the lab of Orochimaru that Snake is headed to was for researching the Cursed Seal and this is accompanied by a lovely [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511183309/http://read.mangashare.com/Naruto/chapter-349/page010.html page-and-a-half layout] of one of the escaped subject killing a dozen researchers with their blood all over the walls (including one whose head he just crushed into a wall). In the anime, [[Bowdlerised|we only see half of the bodies]] and [[Bloodless Carnage|there isn't any blood]].
* ''[[Tokyo Magnitude 80]]'' has this in abundance, including the opening and ending themes.
* ''[[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]]'' does this in [https://web.archive.org/web/20090215113420/http://www.onemanga.com/Tsubasa_Reservoir_Chronicles/107/08-09/ Acid] [https://web.archive.org/web/20090215072328/http://www.onemanga.com/Tsubasa_Reservoir_Chronicles/107/15/ Tokyo].
* In ''[[Ergo Proxy]]'' there are frequent shots of scenery gorn related to humans abandoning their cities and moving into massive domes.
* The first minute of ''[[Rebuild of Evangelion]] 1.0'' is nothing but this. Not to mention that in the entire series (both ''Neon Genesis Evangelion'' and ''Rebuild of Evangelion'') almost every time an Angel has been defeated, we get a nice shot full of this, to show all the massive damage in its detail.
** After Rei attempts to [[Taking You
* ''Survival'' by [[Golgo 13|Takao Saitou]] is set in Japan after a devastating earthquake and features lavishly detailed sceneries of destruction and decay on almost every page.
* ''[[Violence Jack]]'' is [[Gorn]] on every level, including this one.
* ''[[Madoka Magica]]'': This is the result of Walpurgisnacht. And, depending on how you feel about industrial district, many other locations could qualify. We see the end result in episode 10. This one hits particularly hard because mere hours after the episode aired, [
* ''[[
* ''[[Macross Frontier]]'' combined this with [[Scenery Porn]] with respect to the Frontier fleet quite effectively over the run of the series. The first half of the series has the title Frontier fleet as a beautiful, clean, shiny, and lively city on a bay and quite an impressive [[Wagon Train to
* In [[Zeta Gundam]], Kamille and Quattro enter a space colony that was gassed. The colony has low gravity, so building wreckage and lifeless bodies, including children, float around. Its both disturbing to the audience and Kamille.
* [[Casshern Sins]] is yet another example of
* ''[[Weathering with You]]''{{'}}s [[Distant Finale]] shows {{spoiler| a Tokyo that has large areas underwater.}} That the people seem to have gotten used to it doesn't make the sight any less disturbing or haunting.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* ''[[Watchmen]]''. The aftermath of {{spoiler|the psychic explosion from the post-teleport death of the creature Ozymandias beams into New York. Not much damage to buildings but TRUCKLOADS OF DEAD BODIES.}}
** Inverted in [[Watchmen (
* Pick an issue of either ''[[Irredeemable]]'' or ''[[Incorruptible]]''.
* One comic in the ''[[Marvelman]]'' series, featuring [[Psycho for Hire|Kid]] [[Complete Monster|Marvelman]], has London becoming just about the closest definition of
** [[Alan Moore|Guess who wrote both these comics.]]
** It's the page image now. Pleasant dreams, [[This Is for Emphasis, Bitch|bitch.]]
* ''[[The Invisibles]]'' has the blasted, holocaust-slum lands of the Outer Church, devastated cityscapes filled with impaled corpses and stalked by the nightmare figures of the Archons and their servants.
* ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath:_Population_Zero Aftermath: Population Zero]'' and ''[[Life After People]]'' are both [[Speculative Documentary|Speculative Documentaries]] that focus largely on envisioning the world as it would look if humanity suddenly disappeared. Civilization collapses into Scenery Gorn, but over longer periods of time it blossoms into [[Scenery Porn]], as plants and wilderness reclaim everything.▼
== [[
* ''[[
* ''[[Land Before Time]]'' fan fics with
** ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2360239/1/Land_Before_Time_The_Mysterious_World The Mysterious World]'' starts out normal. Later, it shifts to an outright scenery gorntastic depiction of post-apocalyptic London.
** ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4965556/2/Time_Gate_LBT Time Gate LBT]'' has some scenery gorn depicting <s>Pittsburgh</s> the entire US in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
** ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2550278/1/Out_of_the_Shadows Out of the Shadows]'' is an ''extremely'' dark and ''very'' bloody fan fiction. It starts out normal but dark. However, dark becomes pitch black, when the scenery gorntastic descriptions of a war ravaged Great Valley come in.
* ''[[Poke Wars]]'' shows the raw power of undampened Pokémon by describing the ravaged landscapes that the battles leave behind.
== [[Film]] ==
* James Cameron's ''[[Avatar (
* ''[[Armageddon]]'' (The post-meteor shower shots of New York City)
* ''[[Black Hawk Down]]''.
* ''[[Blade Runner]]''. Almost the de-facto example of
** [[Your Mileage May Vary]] - some would call it [[Scenery Porn]] [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|instead.]]
* Terry Gilliam's ''[[Brazil (
* ''[[Cloverfield]]''.
* The battlefield scene at the beginning of ''[[Patton]]''.
* ''[[The Day After Tomorrow]]'' does this to the entire ''world''.
* ''[[Doomsday]]'' has many scenes of a decayed and abandoned Glasgow in the aftermath of a plague.
* ''[[I Am Legend]]''.
* ''[[Independence Day]]'''s multiple shots of ruined New York and Los Angeles after the alien attack. (Also other cities around the world, as much of an afterthought as this parenthesis.) The strongest of these was probably when Jasmine first emerges from the rubble and sees the ruins of Los Angeles, complete with poignant background music.
* Peter Jackson's ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' had this in ''spades''.
** LOTR is made of [[Scenery Porn]] during the "good times" parts, and
** The best example is probably the view of the ruination of the Shire in the Mirror of Galadriel (the actual canon Scouring of the Shire was cut from the films, so this was Jackson's way of wedging it in). As Sam and Frodo say in the books, seeing your own home devastated when you remember it being pleasant is far more horrifying than some anonymous landscape that you never knew before it was ruined.
** Mordor itself ''is''
* While the ''[[Mad Max]]'' films are mostly set in regions that were pretty desolate to begin with, some urban ruins viewed from the air at the end of ''Beyond Thunderdome'' do invoke this trope.
* ''[[
* ''[[Terminator]]'' managed
** The larger budget of ''Terminator 2'' allowed for this combined with [[Desolation Shot]] in the opening scenes, complete with the classic "sea" of human skulls covering the ground, and the title sequence of a children's playground burning in the nuclear fires.
* Parodied in ''[[Scary Movie]] 4'' where Detroit is shown this way both before and after the alien invasion, the only difference being the latter having TriPods.
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* ''[[No Country for Old Men]]'' has plenty of this - from the barren, desolate Texas scenery to the long shots of dead bodies in the early stages of decay. Lesser directors might have actually shown the firefight between the dealers that Llewellyn stumbles upon. This would have been a mistake, as [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing|the audience likely would have found it to be exciting]]. Instead, all we see is the horrifying aftermath, and it is incredibly disturbing and effective.
* To show the raging chaos Los Angeles is in at the start of ''[[Demolition Man]]'', the Hollywood sign is on fire.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* [[The Remake]] of ''[[Dawn of the Dead (2004
* ''[[Koyaanisqatsi]]'''s "Pruitt-Igoe" sequence.
* ''[[Wristcutters:
* ''[[
* The city in ''[[Se7en]]'', where urban decay is exaggerated to emphasize that this is a [[Crapsack World]]. Also [[Real Is Brown]], and heavy doses of [[Film Noir]].
* Take your pick among every war movie ever made.
* The ''[[Dollars Trilogy]]'' was famous for this. While the environments were very beautiful, they were almost always parched, dusty and deadly-looking. Even the farm at the beginning of ''[[The Good, the Bad
* [[Played for Laughs]] in ''[[Mars Attacks
* ''[[The Element of Crime]]'': In the grim darkness of post-World War II Germany, there are only ruins and flooded buildings.
* ''[[Star Trek III:
* Tarkovsky's ''[[STALKER]]'' spends nearly three hours alternating between this and plain old [[Scenery Porn]]. It goes from a nearly-abandoned and falling apart city to beautiful grasslands and then to a half dozen destroyed tanks in about ten minutes. That is lightning quick for a Tarkovsky movie.
* ''[[The Road]]'' is pretty much composed of this trope, along with [[After the End]].
* [[Dagon]]'s Imboca has seen better days, to put it mildly.
* ''[[Dances
* ''[[Transformers (
* ''[[Battle: Los Angeles]]'' has numerous wide shots of the titular city, with burning buildings, heavy palls of smoke, and countless strewn bodies. Pretty much any wide shot in the first two minutes and after the first twenty minutes involves this.
* In ''[[Toy Story 3]]'', the dump, the conveyor belt, and the incinerator. Dear '''GOD''', the incin[[Tear Jerker|erator]].
* The original cut ending of ''[[Alien]]: Resurrection'', restored in the special edition, has Ripley and Call sitting in a desert-like area of Earth filled with all kinds of debris. The final shot reveals that they're overlooking a thoroughly destroyed Paris, complete with the Eiffel Tower missing the top half and an orange-tinted cloudy sky (apocalypticly confirming an earlier throw-away line, "Earth... what a shithole.").
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== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[The Dark Tower]]'' contains numerous, detailed descriptions of the post-apocalyptic land of Mid-World. Some of King's descriptions are quite creative, especially when it comes to mutated animals and "thinnies."
* The page-quote is from the original radio broadcast of ''[[The
* In the later ''[[Harry Potter]]'' books, as Voldemort has risen to power, Diagon Alley (the reader's original introduction to the fantastical magic world) is depicted with abandoned storefronts and dark figures. Evidence that the magical world is truly turning into a dark and unhappy place. The only exception is the Weasley twins' store, which stands out as a colorful and delightful shop... the reader knows it would have been just another store in the first or second books.
* ''[[Swan Song (
* ''[[
* [[H. G. Wells]]' works ''[[The Time Machine]]'' and ''[[The War of the Worlds (novel)|The War of the Worlds]]'' do this. The first does this with Earth at the end of the planet, and the second does this with a barren, Red Weed-stricken London.
* In the short story "Ananke" from [[Stanislaw Lem
* The Zone from ''[[
▲* ''[
== [[Live
* ''[[Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)|Battlestar Galactica]]'' has this when the humans reach {{spoiler|the ''first'' Earth}}.
** Although it did not happen in the ''Miniseries'', ''The Plan'' had shots of (almost) every Colony during the Cylon Holocaust, with [[Nightmare Fuel
* [[Stephen King]]'s ''[[The Stand]]''.
* Taken somewhat literally in one episode of ''[[Sanctuary]]'', with the shredded bodies of hundreds of mermaids floating in the ocean. (Humorously enough, the mermaids are shown in graphic, almost clinical
* The first 17 minutes of the first episode of ''[[
* ''[[Life After People]]'' doesn't just show us scenery gorn, it gives us a depressing play-by-play of just how well the stuff we made would last without constant maintenance.
* ''[[
* ''[[Threads]]''. From the moment when the bomb hits Sheffield, there's nothing but scenery gorn - collapsed, burning buildings, piles of corpses, feral dogs. And when the action moves into the countryside, nuclear winter has taken care of all plant and animal life. [[Crapsack World]] doesn't even begin to cover it.
* ''[[
* ''[[Warehouse 13]]'': At the end of Season 3, we get a rather graphic depiction of {{spoiler|the Warehouse being completely destroyed in an explosion}}. It's quite impressive.
* Shows up occasionally in ''[[Power Rangers]]''/''[[Super Sentai]]''. Usually in Zord fights only a few buildings, if any, are damaged. But on special occasions the city can get quite smashed up. One of the best known is of course the rampage of the Dragonzord towards the end of the Evil Green Ranger saga from ''[[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]]''.
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== [[Music]] ==
* The cover of Midnight Oil's 1984 album ''[
* Like H.G. Wells' original, ''[[Jeff
* Radiohead's ''Kid A'' album came with a crapload of haunting, [http://sharpinsandiego.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/radioheadkida.jpg eerie]{{Dead link}} and [https://web.archive.org/web/20130701203341/http://www.inradiobows.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/radioheadsaturday.jpg apocalyptic] landscapes, featuring [http://img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/00f07c4aa0a4a19e91fcfcef4f6227f9c1fd98a7_m.jpg blood-filled swimming pools]{{Dead link}}, razor-teethed modified bears, [http://www.popmatters.com/images/features_art/k/kida51.jpg giant sperm monsters] and snowy mountains smeared with blood and grime. This carried on in their next album Amnesiac.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Though some places are less [[Grimdark]] than others, official art of Imperial cities in ''[[Warhammer
** The ''Planetstrike'' expansion allows Scenery Gorn of the do-it-yourself variety. Scenarios consists of a defender setting up a fortress, and the attacker blowing it to hell with orbital bombardments and drop troops. One battle report displayed before-and-after pics of the battlefield - the "before" image was a standard-issue Imperial desert fortress encrusted with fortifications, and the "after" image was mainly craters, still-bubbling laser beam scars, and similar wreckage.
* ''[[Rifts]]'' wallows in this, between the post-apocalyptic ruins, the [[Cyberpunk]] aesthetic of the cities, and the [[Eldritch Abomination|Alien Intelligences]] and their magical creations and experiments. External and internal artwork is full of
* ''[[Wraith: The Oblivion]]'' and the later books of ''[[Orpheus]]'' go into great detail describing the Shadowlands, the realm of the dead. Places and things with strong emotional attachments that are destroyed in the world of the living still exist in there, but greatly damaged and decayed and crammed in together with other things from different eras. Necropoli, or reflections of still living cities, are particularly prone to this, as are places strongly associated with death; several places associated with the Holocaust are so horrific they get their own very disturbing yet surprisingly respectful [http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Charnel_Houses_of_Europe%3A_The_Shoah volume]. As it takes place [[After the End|after a huge Underworld cataclysm]], ''Orpheus'' makes the Shadowlands an even nastier place to be.
* The blasted landscape of Dominaria in [[
** The imagery and flavor text on "[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=108799 Burning Blade Askari]" drove the point home rather poignantly.
{{quote|
* [[Shadowrun]] gives us such appalling sights as the Shattergraves, Bug City, the hellhole that is much of West Africa, and assorted toxic waste zones.
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* The Plaguelands in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', as well as most of the other undead areas. The Eastern Plaguelands are particularly decrepit. The sky is a sickly rusty orange, the trees have tumorous growths sticking out of them, there are mutant creatures everywhere, and that's all before you reach [[It Got Worse|the Plaguewood]]. It all gives a definite impression that the land itself is being poisoned.
** After the ''[[Earthshattering Kaboom|Cataclysm]]'' expansion, a good percentage of Azeroth's geography now counts as this. Ironically, even as the Barrens have been split in two by a molten fissure and the Badlands scarred by dragonfire, the Western Plaguelands have made a nearly full recovery from the plague of undeath.
* In ''[[Battlefield
* The introduction to ''[[
** ''[[
** ''[[Fallout
* ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' begins with this trope: a wretched cyberpunk metropolis of Midgar in birds-eye view... and then you fall into the shoes of terrorists blowing up a scary mad science installation.
** Another scene not that long afterwards (well, relatively; this is an [[Role
* Emblematic of the ''[[Silent Hill]]'' series, which ''at best'' features abandoned, fog-shrouded streets and buildings in varying states of disuse and decay, and often switches to a [[Dark World|twisted mirror]] characterised by blood, metal gratings, rust, blood, and more blood. Oh, and monsters. Lots of monsters.
* ''[[Resident Evil]]''. The old school Playstation series resorted to using static images for scenarios due to their much higher detail, which happened to be good enough to stick for the Gamecube releases.
** ''[[Resident Evil 3: Nemesis]]'' deserves special mention for its many cutscenes depicting Raccoon City's descent into chaos, culminating in a nuclear strike that obliterates the entire town. It was very impressive CGI at the time, and even today the destruction is [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_F0XgBrcYY glorious to behold].
* ''[[
** During the first underwater section of the sequel, Subject Delta can see the Rapture skyline, complete with decaying, flooded buildings.
* ''[[STALKER]]'' actually manages to do a good job of this. You don't expect to see abject ruination on the scale of an all-out nuclear post-apocalypse, but the empty, decaying land and the ugly concrete convey the idea of an eerily unlivable zone picked over by the desperate. Of course, then you find the mutants, zombies, and deadly
** In the early betas, STALKER featured even more desolation and destruction; eg. the Dead City with collapsed Soviet-era flats, an old research center in the Dark Valley and more.
** Most of the scenery is directly based on the photos taken by the game designers in the real area surrounding the infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant. Which, in turn, may not be
** The [[Unexpected Genre Change|ghillie sniper missions]] from ''[[Call of Duty]] 4'' evoke a similar atmosphere, albeit without anything more fantastic than arms-trading terrorists and wild hounds.
* Speaking of ''[[Call of Duty]] 4''... {{spoiler|When Jackson, one of the player characters, [[Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped|staggers out of the crashed helicopter into the hellscape created by the detonation of Al-Asad's nuclear bomb, allowing the player to soak in the devastation before dying of radiation poisoning2]]}}.
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* ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin]]'' goes out of its way to show you just how horribly devastated post-explosion Fairport is. One of the most powerful moments is when you reach the epicenter of the explosion... or rather, the ''edge'' of the epicenter. Throughout the game, you've been seeing this ''titanic'' rising dust cloud spreading over the sky in the distance, but it isn't until the last hour or so of the game that you actually reach the crater itself, which is so vastly immense that standing at the edge simply boggles the mind.
* ''[[Halo|Halo 3: ODST]]'' plays this especially strongly during the nighttime segments of prowling the Covenant-occupied New Mombasa. Abandoned cars, destroyed vehicles, and burning buildings are common.
** [[Halo: Reach]] takes this [[Up to Eleven]], particularly in the level "New Alexandria".
* ''[[Resistance Fall of Man|Resistance 2]]'' shows a shot of San Francisco in flames, being destroyed by Chimera ships, a destroyed Chicago, flooded and filled with corpses as the Chimeran Citadel looms over the city and the abandoned suburban towns of Orick and Twin Falls, made worse by the fact that each town is filled with cocoons, especially the child-sized ones that fill the playgrounds and backyards.
* According to the [[Word of God|developers' commentary]], this is used together with [[Scenery Porn]] to reward the player for surviving certain sections of ''[[Half Life|Half-Life 2]]'' and ''[[Left 4 Dead]]''. Some notable scenes include:
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** The railroad bridge in Episode 2.
** The gas station, the view from the top of Mercy Hospital and the airplane crash in ''Left 4 Dead''.
* Being set in ''[[Warhammer
** ''Dawn of War II: Retribution'' may take the cake. One mission has you deploy to a world only for an Imperial fleet to warp in moments later and prepare the world for [[Earthshattering Kaboom|Exterminatus]]. Your objective changes from "Get the [[Big Bad]]" to "Run like hell to the teleporter beacon." The world has been transformed from a verdant jungle to a burning hellscape, and you race your heroes along the molten rims of craters extending miles into the planet's crust as the ground heaves and screams beneath you. Meanwhile Chaos forces, Tyranids, and Orks are in a frenzy, alternating between running madly and attacking each other in a blind panic. It's both [[Apocalypse Wow|spectacular]] and [[That One Level|screamingly difficult]].
* In ''[[World in Conflict]]'', most of the campaign and multiplayer battles tend to end with the map you've been fighting in reduced to nothing more than blackened ground, craters, and ruins. The sky even darkens a little from all the smoke if a battle drags out.
** [[Euphemism|"Tend to end" is an euphemism]] for a game where artillery is cheap, napalm is fair game and more than one tactical nuke can be deployed per game. [[Awesome]].
* In ''[[
** The city of New Marais in the sequel has its own example in Flood Town - a ruined parish, still flooded and in ruin, with scrawled messages all over the buildings as the people who live there try to hold on.
* In ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'', [[After the End]] [[The End of the World
** And then the ending cinematic indulges in [[Scenery Porn]] to show how despite all of the devastation, life (and hope) goes on.
* The Oblivion dimension in ''[[The Elder Scrolls|The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion]]''.
* The tutorial of ''[[Guild Wars]] Prophecies'' ends with the Searing, magical fire raining down on your [[Doomed Hometown]]. The next few missions take place in the ruins, which are now a burned-out wastleland; this is particularly effective if you remember how beautiful it was during the tutorial. Other uses of
* The Butcher's room in ''[[Diablo]]'', red with blood and full of human bodies mutilated, impaled and/or hung up on hooks.
* In ''[[
* ''[[Prototype (
* ''[[Metro 2033]]'' has this when you get out onto the surface, coupled with snow, howling wind, and ruined buildings.
* In ''[[Splinter Cell]] Conviction'', {{spoiler|Downtown Washington, D.C. after the EMP bombs go off}} with wrecked buildings or vehicles, fires in the streets and various casualties (you even get to see {{spoiler|someone succumb to his wounds before your eyes, with his companion weeping over his body}}) does more to drive in the evil of {{spoiler|Tom Reed's}} plan than any amount of [[And That's Terrible|ranting]] could. Similarly, the inside of {{spoiler|the White House}} is also disturbing.
* The ''[[Nightmare Ned]]'' video game features some really scary scenes, as per the name.
* Planet Helghan from ''[[Killzone]] 2''.
* ''[[American McGee's Alice]]'' has this in spades. It's hard to single out just one screenshot for comparison, but [http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_g9A4qUX6pZ0/S9CIIt7pD2I/AAAAAAAAAhc/p1kq_m3rGoI/s1600/American_McGee%27s_Alice.jpg this]{{Dead link}} pretty much sums up the mood of the new "Wonderland" created by Alice's unbalanced mind.
** Its sequel, ''[[Alice: Madness Returns]]'' wavers between gorgeous scenery porn (Oriental area) and horrific scenery gorn (the Hatter's Domain) until {{spoiler|Queensland}}. Then gorn rules the day.
* Certain areas of ''[[
* Most areas of ''[[Odium]]'', especially the docks in the beginning.
* The [[Abandoned Laboratory|Enrichment Center]] in the beginning areas of ''[[
* The ruined areas of Haven City in ''[[Jak and Daxter]] 3''. Like the above example, it's unnerving when you can make out areas you've visited in the previous game now in a state of severe ruin.
* ''[[Manhunt]]'' is made of this trope, as the story takes place in a crappy, run-down stand-in for New York City. From the abandoned projects to the empty mall, it's everywhere.
* ''[[
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time]]'' When Link emerges from the Temple of Time for the first time as an adult and sees the devastation that Ganondorf's seven-year reign has wrought: The bright, colorful Market with its happy music has been turned to ruins, the carefree villagers replaced by Redead zombies. Likewise, beautiful and majestic Hyrule Castle has been replaced by the onyx coloured Ganon's
* The [[Bad Future|bad futures]] in ''[[Sonic CD]]'' are dystopian worlds corrupted by Dr. Eggman. Sonic can make these futures better if he fixes what Eggman has done wrong in the past.
** [[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006
*** Also returning in Generations is the ruined Station Square that Perfect Chaos flooded and wrecked in ''[[
* One of the first few things to realize in ''[[Inazuma Eleven]] 2'' is that the whole Raimon academy is totally destroyed by aliens. The scene specially pans on the soccer club, which is the heroes' important stronghold in the first game. The school gets better, and more fabulous than ever.
* Some games in ''[[Castlevania]]'' series feature this as backgrounds, which include destroyed buildings, flame, and hanged/impaled corpses.
* Many "City" stages in ''[[Contra]]'' series are this, usually since you're required to jump from a destroyed building to another while dodging alien rushes and bullets.
* ''[[Togainu no Chi]]'' takes place in the ruins of Toshima; the gritty artwork for the backgrounds is very much this.
* ''[[
* Dowerton Station, unpleasant enough in ''Dark Fall: The Journal'', has graduated to full-on
* In ''[[Final Fantasy V]]'' there's a place called Gorn Town that is essentially the abandoned ruin of an ancient town, complete with broken pillars, ruined buildings and plants that have overgrown everything. It was renamed to Gohn in the GBA release, which somewhat ruins the joke.
** The Ship Graveyard much earlier in the game also qualifies - an entire dungeon made up of nothing but wrecked and ruined ships, many of which are submerged.
* ''Afterfall: [[In Sanity]]'' has some awesome scenery gorn, particularly in the City of Light.
* ''[[Super Metroid]]'' has Old Tourian, the wreckage of the first game's Tourian, as well as the wrecked ship.
** In ''Fusion'', after you destroy Nettori, {{spoiler|Nightmare lays waste to Sector 5, flooding most of the area.}}
* In ''[[
** ''[[
* Because of the post-apocalyptic setting for ''[[Fragile Dreams Farewell
* ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'': pick a world attacked by Reapers, any world. There's Earth, where you're gunning down Husks not a hundred feet from [[Humongous Mecha|Reaper Destroyers]] and their [[Hell Is That Noise|foghorns from hell]]; Palaven, where you can watch from orbit as cities are consumed by enormous firestorms; Tuchanka,
* ''[[Company of Heroes]]'' featured this, but in a twist, instead of immediately starting off this, you are the one doing the [[What the Hell, Hero?|destruction]]. Its a sight when you first start off, some french villas, beautiful market squares, and walls. But once the battle actually starts, artillery starts falling, blowing up houses, grenades and mortars start scarring the landscape, and tanks break apart the walls. By the end a battle, the landscape is completely changed, with only an inkling of the past beauty.
* This trope is almost the entire point of ''[[Space Funeral]]''.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[
* ''[[Lovecraft Is Missing]]'' has some [https://web.archive.org/web/20140213202700/http://lovecraftismissing.com/?p=486 great slums].
* The Plaguelands in ''[[Uncreation]]'' are full of [https://web.archive.org/web/20130906214451/http://uncreation.comicdish.com/?pageID=2 bizarre ruins]. What we've seen of [https://web.archive.org/web/20130906214958/http://uncreation.comicdish.com/?pageID=76 civilization] also seems pretty run-down.
== [[Web Original]] ==
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[
* ''[[Thundarr the Barbarian]]'' took this one step further: forget the trashed cities, is that the MOON in pieces up there?
* Who-Ville in Horton Hears a Who, after Vlad drops the clover from what would be unspeakable hights; to the Whos at least.
* In [[Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker]], the [[Kill Sat]] race between Terry in the Batmobile and Joker with the Halcyon-class laser weapons platform. It's an awesome action scene until you pause to reflect on the fact that Terry just overflew a local ''shopping mall''. The casualties probably outdo those in the first [[Batman]] movie's gas attack by an order of magnitude, at least. Then consider the plan to burn a smiley-face into the city from orbit [[For the Evulz]], then add in the typical cyberpunk themes of urban decay and corporate-owned megastructures...
* The opening sequence of ''[[
== [[Real Life]] ==
* Pictures of abandoned [[Motor City|Detroit]] buildings are even labeled [https://web.archive.org/web/20120114171611/http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2281/leary_1_15_11/ "ruin porn".]
* Abandoned resorts around the Salton Sea. Salton Sea was created by accident in 1905, and saw massive development starting in the 1920's, resorts and marinas popped up all over. But having no outlet (all water which comes in ultimately evaporates) and fed primarily with agricultural runoff and prone to flooding, the water turned toxic by the 60's and mass fish kills turned the place into a stinking cesspit and guests and owners alike packed up and abandoned everything rapidly. It's not only known for the gorn of decaying buildings but the alien landscape of cracked salt-encrusted, dead earth and isolated pools of unnatural green-colored water.
* Abandoned nuclear missile silos, often full of vintage equipment, and partially flooded.
* [
* Centralia, PA, abandoned after an invasive coal mine fire undermined much of the small town and flooded it with high levels of carbon monoxide. Inspiration for ''[[Silent Hill]]''. In reality, the town was never a big settlement and today most of the abandoned buildings have been demolished and disposed of in an orderly fashion, but there's still all the city block roads, some huge, cracked, smoking upheavals in the ruined Route 61 highway, and various black, smoking cracks in the ground surrounded by death, as the trees and foliage killed by the heat and gas drop all around and into them. A few longterm holdout residents defied the evacuation and continue to live in the town, which lacks any functioning stores or businesses.
* Most examples are very large, very durable purpose-built buildings which could not effectively be retasked once they outlived their initial purpose, and have been too expensive to tear down. e.g. asylums (mental health isn't conducted this way anymore), sanatoriums (which were for long-treatment of tuberculosis), hospitals (based on obsolete technology), boarding schools (which are rare nowadays), factories based on obsolete products or manufacturing methods, and workhouses/poorhouses (good riddance).
* Sometimes gorn is reversed. [https://web.archive.org/web/20131101060037/http://www.adam-hats-lofts.com/AdamHatsLofts/
* [http://vimeo.com/31744773 Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans]. Hurricane Katrina left it under
* Many pictures of the Dust Bowl show tremendous gorn, the most amazing being cars and farm equipment more than half-buried in deposited dust; they appear to be melting into the earth itself.
* Post nuclear-meltdown Chernobyl was one of the best real-life examples of this trope.
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* Post-[[WW 2]] Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably take the title in that category.
* Major disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides and volcanic eruptions. See the photo galleries [[The Other Wiki]] has for Hurricane Katrina, the Great Haitian Earthquake, Armero, and Pompeii.
* The endless footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers in the days and weeks after September
* Post-[[WW 2]] Warsaw. It's so damn impressive that they managed to rebuild it almost completely, even expanding it.
** All firebombed European cities after WWII.
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* Any place there has been a recent forest fire.
* Many places in Japan are starting to look like this after the 2011 earthquake.
* Heck, many places in Japan looked like this before the 2011 earthquake. [
* The great Soviet Union, when it was still great, had a tendency to build massive structures in a unique function-over-form styling (or lack thereof). Then it wasn't great anymore, money ran out, and they stopped building stuff that looked like it came out straight from [[Command
* [
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUVYAft9OSs Dixie Square Mall] in Harvey, Illinois, which rotted away for over three decades before finally being demolished in 2012 and is most notable for being the mall from ''[[The Blues Brothers]]'' (it was ''already'' abandoned even then, hence why they had no qualms of trashing the place).
* [
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Spectacle]]
▲[[Category:Scenery Gorn]]
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