Unnecessarily Large Interior: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

A tendency of [[Speculative Fiction]] pictures and art direction to have interiors much larger than would be needed in reality. As in what could be a large room becomes huge and cavernous. Sometimes the story tries to justify this, claiming the [[Phlebotinum]] needs this much empty space to work, but usually it's just because [[Bigger Is Better]] (or because the higher the ceiling, the more stuff there is to drop down on the escaping heroes when the [[Collapsing Lair|building collapses]]).

 

 

 

 

Compare [[Absurdly Spacious Sewer]].

 

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

* ''[[Blame]]'' is a manga ''set'' in a never-ending series of ridiculously large superstructures. This is more-or-less [[Justified Trope|justified]] in-universe, as the machines responsible for constructing [[The City]] have been doing so unguided for countless millennia. [[media:whoa.png|This]] conversation is held in a "room" that encompasses roughly the ''entire diameter of Jupiter''. {{spoiler|Because that's where Jupiter used to be before it was ''swallowed up'' by [[The City]], only to be consumed for building material.}}

* Las Noches in ''[[Bleach]]'' is large enough to <s> practically</s> have its own sky, and extremely large towers.

* Gendo's office in [[Rebuild of Evangelion]] is enormous, and the only thing in it is his desk. There's no possible reason for it to be this big, other than what appears to be a large diagram on the ceilings or walls. You'd think space would be at a premium in Tokyo-3, but...

 

== [[Film]] ==

* Some leftovers of the Krell civilization in ''[[Forbidden Planet]]''.

* Parts of the Black Fortress in ''[[Krull]]''.

* [[Absurdly Spacious Sewer|The sewers]] in ''[[The Matrix]]''.

* Occurs throughout the ''[[Star Wars]]'' series:

** Huge, tall shafts in the Death Star in ''A New Hope''. They're practically [[Bottomless Pits]].

** The cavernous core of Cloud City in ''The Empire Strikes Back''. Note that if you wanted to have an actual "Cloud City" in a gas giants (or rather Venus-like) atmosphere, this would be the way to go - basically, you would have the whole city as one huge airship floating far above the surface with little work needed to maintain it (and without explosive decompression/implosive? compression if you get a rupture in the hull, not to mention not having to use such strong materials in the first place). Obviously though, Cloud City from SW wasn't built like this (open views and active propulsion to maintain altitude)...

** The hangar bay next to the Senate building (Where Anakin and Obi-Wan land after rescuing Palpatine) in ''Revenge of the Sith''.

** A justified example is the monster holding facility in [[Area 51|Area 52]]. It was meant to house thousands of monsters of various sizes. The "unnecessarily" part comes from the fact that it never seems to house more than a handful at any given time.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* [[Seen It a Million Times]] on book covers.

* From Douglas Adams:

** To be fair, in the Golden Age of planet building, they probably had a lot of orders... It takes a while to make a planet and they probably used the extra space to build more planets at the same time and some of them were probably bigger than Earth... And hey, when you have such a display of your industrial might, who'd try to steal your business?

** ''Life, the Universe, and Everything'' has Agrajag's shrine to Arthur Dent, which looks just like it was carved out of the inside of a mountain. Because it was.

* Paul's throne room on Arrakis in Frank Herbert's ''[[Dune]] Messiah'' is unnecessarily large for the sole purpose of intimidating his visitors. The author also describes how the room gradually gets smaller as you approach the throne to create the illusion that Paul is larger than he is.

* In GRR Martin's ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'', the Alchemists' Guild has a grand hall filled with green wildfire torches. Tyrion notes that the hall is only used to impress visitors and all the torches will be extinguished as soon as he leaves.

* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld|Interesting Times]]'', the throne room of the Agatean emperor is described as indicating to all viewers "look at me, I can afford to waste all this space". This is [[Lampshaded]] in descriptions of Death's residence, which the [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] forgot to make the same size on the inside and the outside. Death made the rooms in his house into mile-long cubes (from the outside it's quite a normal size for a house), but because this is such a mind-boggling size for a room, humans like Albert (Death's housekeeper) mentally blot out the excess space, arranging the necessary furnishings on little patches of floor the size of normal rooms. As Death's residence isn't a part of the real world, this mental block works so well that Albert can step through the door of Death's office and ''instantly'' appear on the patch of carpet in the vast chamber's center, never actually setting foot on the intervening half-mile of floor.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

** Just the fancy parts where all the important people like captains and navigators work. The rest of the crew is stuck with tiny dirty cabins under the engine room, if they're lucky, or sharing a room like that with 20 other people.

*** So not unlike a modern-day warship or submarine then. Only, y'know, we in the modern day Navies don't have to deal with Hrud monsters under the floorboards.

** On Holy Terra there is the Eternity Gate, a colossal chamber leading to the Sanctum Imperialis, where the Emperor Himself sits atop the Golden Throne. The Gate lies at the end of a mile-long aisle, the gargoyle-covered roof hangs half a mile overhead past clouds of incense and swarms of fluttering Cherubim, and the thousand steps leading to the portal take pilgrims through a forest of banners and standards from warriors over the past ten millennia. The Eternity Gate itself is large enough to accommodate [[Humongous Mecha]], while the Imperial Palace it stands in covers most of Europe.

** Holy Terra as a whole is made of this trope, mostly. The Ecclesiarchal Palace, for example (contextually equivalent to the St Peter's Basilica example above) covers an entire continent (Australasia, to be precise) with a single contiguous structure. It's avoided by a number of other structures, such as the Hall of the Astronomican, which is what you get when you hollow out and structurally reinforce Mt Everest, then fill it with cells and living quarters for the most powerful telepaths humanity can provide. The actual Hall itself takes most of the available volume inside the mountain, and is a single room stuffed, from top to bottom, with psykers, life-support systems and psychic amplifiers.

* In general, tabletop games where combat is played out on a grid tend to feature buildings, furniture, and animals that are bigger than you'd expect, either to enable more different tactical movement options or to round up to the nearest number of units on the grid. This leads to phenomena such as chairs that are always spaced at least 5 feet apart from each other, horses that are 10 foot cubes, and simple peasant shacks that are 100 by 100 feet.

** In ''Half Life: Blue Shift'' the training level for the security guards (apparently one must get used to the body armor) is half a mile long, easy.

*** For as large as Black Mesa is, if you [http://www.nextdimension.org/bmrf/Black_Mesa_Research_Facility_HL_Map.jpg map out the facility] (warning: HUGE image), you'll notice some interesting things; for instance, the big sludge pit in "Blast Pit" is mere ''feet'' away, on the other side of a wall, from the test chamber where everything goes wrong.

* Everything the forerunners ever built in the ''[[Halo]]'' series.

* The underground lab the "Hollow Bastion" area of ''[[Kingdom Hearts]] II''.

* ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' occasionally will have indoor missions, with fortresses or space stations that have room enough for whole squads of [[Humongous Mecha]] to all ''fly'' in. A particularly egregious example is in ''[[Super Robot Wars Destiny]]'', where the final mission takes place inside, and the game lets you choose as your battleship for the mission the Battle 7 from ''[[Macross 7]]'': A [[Transforming Mecha|transforming]] [[Cool Starship]] that stands 1400 meters tall (about 200 meters short of a mile), and it ''still'' has room to either fly or walk.

* The browser-based MMO ''Travians'' allows players to buy and furnish houses of ever-increasing size ([[Allegedly Free Game|sometimes at considerable real-money expense]]). Since the only items of furniture that have a practical effect are beds, Roman baths and seating, most of the available houses are impractically large.

* Ship and station interiors in [[Star Trek Online]] are several times larger than what appeared on any of the shows. The developers claim it's necessary for proper camera control to work.

* Many tombs and dungeons in the ''[[Tomb Raider]]'' series.

* In ''[[Dragon Age]]'', the ruins of ancient civilizations like the Tevinter Imperium and pre-Blight dwarves are enormous, with towering spires or soaring vaulted ceilings ([http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Fort_Drakon Fort Drakon], a former Tevinter outpost, is easily 10 times taller than anything else in Denerim). Fereldan and Orzimmar architecture of places people currently live tends to be much smaller, to the point of claustrophobic. It does reinforce the theme of Thedas' past being much more magical and [[High Fantasy]] than the present.

** Most of the old Tevinter buildings in [[Dragon Age 2]] are also quite massive.

* Tristram Cathedral was dark and claustrophobic in ''[[Diablo]]''. In ''Diablo 3'', it looks like one giant cavern, with the player running around on rooftops.

* Played for laughs in ''[[Fancy Pants Adventures|The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 3]]'', where the king's bathtub is ridiculously enormous (king-sized, of course), being tall as the entire stage you're in.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* The [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1455.html Hall of Dworin] from ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]''

* ''[[DM of the Rings]]'' : [[Gonna Need More Trope|I'm going to need]] [http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=712 a lot more graph paper ]

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

** The Seville Cathedral; built as a monument to Seville's wealth (read: for no other purpose other than showing off), its central nave is somewhere around the 115 meters x 76 meters x ''42 meters tall!''

** St. Peter's Basilica in Rome has a dome that's 42 meters in diameter. The rest of the church is... larger. It is the largest Christian church in the world and it's said that if its roof were to be removed, the second-largest church could be lowered inside, and the roof put back in place.

* Italian dictator [[Benito Mussolini]] had his visitors cross an excessively-large room to meet him as a psychological intimidation tactic ala [[Neon Genesis Evangelion|Gendo's office]].

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Bigger Is Better]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]