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CCC City, The City of Opportunities
No need for Adventure Towns; all the weirdness necessary for the protagonists to do their thing just happens to be right in their own city. Unlike Tokyo and New York, this city is usually fictional.
The place to go to get easy Hero Insurance, judging by the massive collateral damage they can sustain.
Taken to the logical extreme, you get Xanadu.
There may be a Magnetic Plot Device hidden somewhere around here. Try to find one.
See also Geographic Flexibility and New Neighbours As The Plot Demands. Contrast Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here.
Examples:
Comic Books
- It is extremely common in solo Super Hero series for the hero to have a specific city that they are known to patrol as "their territory":
- Gotham (Batman)
- Metropolis (Superman)
- Central City/Keystone City (The Flash)
- Opal City (Starman)
- Fawcett City/Fairfield (Captain Marvel)
- Ivy Town (The Atom)
- Blüdhaven (Nightwing)
- Coast City (Hal Jordan's Green Lantern)
- Gateway City (Mr. Terrific / Spectre/ Wonder Woman for a time)
- Boston (Wonder Woman)
- Hub City (The Question)
- Midway City/St. Roch (Hawkman/Doom Patrol)
- Sub Diego (Aquaman/Aquagirl)
- Star City/Seattle (Green Arrow)
- Viceroy, South Carolina (Resurrection Man)
- The Teen Titans' Titans Tower is generally accepted to be in the San Francisco Bay.
- Middleton/Denver (Martian Manhunter)
- Park City/Seattle (Black Canary)
- El Paso (Jaime Reyes's Blue Beetle)
- Chicago (Ted Kord's Blue Beetle)
- New York City (Iron Man/Fantastic Four/The Avengers/Spider-Man... specifically the fictional Empire State University)
- Salem Center, Westchester County, just north of NYC (Home of the X-Men's Mansion)
- Hell's Kitchen, NYC (Daredevil)
- Dakota (the city, not the state) - Static Shock, Icon, Hardware, Blood Syndicate and other Dakotaverse characters.
- Citrusville, FL (Man-Thing)
- Parodied in The Tick with "The City".
- Used straight in Runaways with Los Angeles, with a justification: after the kids take out the Pride, there's a power vacuum and supervillains try to make their niche. But also deconstructed somewhat with regards to New York City, the City Of Adventure for the rest of the Marvel Universe - superpowers are seen as something that mostly happens far away from our heroes; then they visit NYC and are awed at seeing superheroes in the streets, and one character comments "here, we're not so special".
- This troper will never understand why Washington, D.C., was not this for Captain America.
- Judge Dredd's Mega-City-One from the British comic 2000AD.
- Neopolis, the Science Hero ghetto that the police of Top Ten patrol.
- How has Kurt Busiek's Astro City not made the list? Much of the plot hinges on subverting and lampshadehanging this very trope.
- The City in Transmetropolitan, home to Spider Jerusalem and every vice there is.
- Bugtown, in Matt Howarth's various comics, including Those Annoying Post Brothers and Savage Henry. Notable for being infinite in size, and having such screwed-up laws of physics that entropy works in reverse—dead people inevitably come back to life after some time.
Western Animation
- The TV series Teen Titans has the Titans Tower in "Jump City," and "Steel City" as the location of Titans East.
- The City... of Townsville in Powerpuff Girls.
- and the Town... of Citysville.
- It's an actual city, but it's in Australia, so...
- Saint Canard in Darkwing Duck.
- In Duck Tales and the comics it's based on, many of Uncle Scrooge's adventures take place in Duckburg.
- Heatherfield in W.I.T.C.H. (it's where all the portals are, and it's where all the Guardians live.)
- Not exactly a city, but the Middle of Nowhere in Courage The Cowardly Dog seems to be some sort of nexus for "creepy stuff", to the point where it takes obvious danger to get anyone but Courage to take notice. Talking animals, aliens, deities, and supernatural entities (not to mention Courage's own sapience and abilities) are all treated as normal until the big pointy teeth come out.
- What are you talking about? Of course it's a city. Nowhere, Kansas.
- Springfield in The Simpsons is a deliberate parody of this (at one point Our Favorite Family suddenly notices that they live across the street from an expensive mansion that wasn't there before and was created for that episode so that George Bush could move in). See Separate Simpsons Geography Thing.
- Danny Phantom has Amity Park, a town with ghost/occult-related names for obvious reasons.
- Megakat City, of Swat Kats.
- Porkbelly in Johnny Test.
- Cape Suzette in Tale Spin.
- Single Town in Monster Buster Club.
- The Life And Times Of Juniper Lee is set entirely in Orchid Bay, an expy of San Francisco. This is a Justified Trope because Juniper is magically prevented from leaving the city as long as she's the Te Xuan Ze.
- EarthwormJim's town of Terlawk. Lampshaded in Upholstered Peril.
- The unnamed yet strangely familiar hometown of the Rescue Rangers.
- The "city-planet" of Acmetropolis in ''Loonatics Unleashed'.
Live Action TV
- The town of Smallville in Smallville. The explanation for the large number of unusual occurrences is the presence of a significant amount of Kryptonite in the area, which in this case causes humans in its presence to gain powers varying from individual to individual.
- Eerie, Indiana in Eerie, Indiana.
- Monk's San Francisco
- CSI's Las Vegas
- And obviously CSI:NY's New York and CSI: Miami's Miami.
- Played with in one episode when a Vegas-based rapper claimed it was "the new New York". A certain New York rapper took offense, and a "beef" started.
- Forever Knight's Toronto, with a serial killer for every day of the year.
- Cabot Cove in Murder She Wrote. They do get Jessica out and about regularly, but there are still an awful lot of murders in her small hometown — it's a wonder there's anyone left. After Sheriff Tupper left, his replacement in Cabot Cove (an ex-New Yorker) [[Lampshading lampshaded]] this.
- Aliens in Doctor Who like to invade from the Home Counties.
- In Torchwood, Cardiff is located on an interdimensional rift, which results in plenty of weird things ending up there.
- The town of Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, being set upon a "Hellmouth," is very much a town of this sort. The Hellmouth is described as a portal which leaks mystical energy, both drawing demons towards it and affecting things in supernatural ways: e.g., a girl becomes invisible because she feels invisible, and later we see various kinds of Mad Science that might not work elsewhere. Thus, there is an automatic answer for so many supernatural things all occurring in this one town. The town transformed at need so that in one episode it was small enough to be taken over by a dozen bikers and in others it became a major University town with international sea and air hubs.
- In 24, Genre Blind terrorists always make a point of attacking Los Angeles, despite the fact that it is the one city in America that has the indestructible Jack Bauer in it.
- In the seventh season, they finally wise up and attack Washington, D.C. But their timing really sucks...
- Power Rangers usually follows this trope, with the occasional side trip. To date: Angel Grove, Terra Venture, Mariner Bay, Silver Hills, Turtle Cove, Blue Bay Harbor, Reefside, Newtech City, Briarwood, Ocean Bluff, and Corinth. Subverted in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, where the characters are based in San Angeles, but travel all over the world. Justified in Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, as Terra Venture is actually a traveling space colony and there's nothing outside the city but the empty expanse of space. (But Mike could still breathe out there, so...)
- Also Justified in Power Rangers RPM, where Corinth is the only city left on earth, the rest of the planet being a bombed-out wasteland.
- Super Sentai and Kamen Rider work on the same principle, but the events of both series apparently happen in the exact same (unnamed) city every single year. An avid fan will quickly be able to spot reused locations, and come to pity the people who live there.
- The city of Cascade in The Sentinel. Ebola virus threats? Uranium smuggling? Yakuza gang wars? Paramilitary terrorists taking whole buildings hostage? Just another day in Cascade.
- "Seacouver" in Highlander the Series.
- Lampshaded in the In The Heat of the Night TV series, set in the fictional Missisippi town of Sparta. "I should join the Marines...I'd see less dead bodies."
- In Big Wolf On Campus, Pleasantville is beset by an astonishing number of bizarre supernatural occurrences; a few of them are connected to the heroes, but mainly it's just a place where weird things happen.
Literature
- Literary example: St Mary Mead, where Agatha Christie's little old lady/amateur detective Miss Marple lives. Given her advanced age, the events described in the books starring her must take place over the space of a few years, so it seems that mysterious murders occur in her village with alarming frequency.
- Trantor in several Isaac Asimov stories, which is in fact a city covering the entire surface of a planet. (Timothy Zahn would later adapt this idea to the planet Coruscant in the Star Wars Expanded Universe; it would later appear in the prequels.) A 47th century New York City is used to the same effect in his novel "The Caves of Steel". Such a world city is known as an Ecumenopolis.
- Popular in fantasy settings. Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar from his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories is probably the archetype, but its parody Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld novels is now much better known.
- Hogboro in several stories by Daniel Pinkwater. In Alan Mendelssohn, Boy from Mars, Alan and Leonard remark on their luck finding that one of the dozen places in the world listed as suitable for interplanar contact is right in Hogboro (though tracking down the exact spot proves troublesome). The next closest spot on the list is in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, Canada.
- Chicago in Dresden Files
- The fictional English town of Blackbury in Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell Trilogy. It's also the location of The Store in Truckers.
- "The Sprawl" in William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction. Officially known as Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA), it is essentially one huge megapolis covering most of the east coast of the USA.
- Thousands of British juvenile adventure novels were published by the pulp presses, and an overwhelming number - somewhere in the hundreds - were set in Calgary. This troper suspects the writers wanted to show exciting things like cowboys and Indians, ranches, mountain climbers, and hunting (popular subjects of American juvenile literature) but in an Empire setting, and Calgary fit the bill. Many of these books were also translated into German; this troper knew an elderly man who immigrated to Canada specifically because as a child he'd immured himself in these novels and thought Calgary was Tombstone with Union Jacks.
Video Games
- Paragon City, Rhode Island in City Of Heroes.
- Sigil of Planescape fame, being the foremost crossroads of the Dungeons And Dragons multiverse.
- Port Island in Persona 3.
- Dungeons And Dragons Online in Stormreach.
- The Grand Theft Auto series consistently gives us three of this kind of city since the first game: Liberty City (an expy of New York City), San Andreas (an expy of California and Nevada), and Vice City (an expy of Miami). GTA 2 also gives us "Anywhere, USA", though it's almost forgotten''.
- Befitting that its borrows a lot from Grand Theft Auto (as listed directly above), Crackdown takes place in 'Pacific City', and seems to be either inspired by, or borrows the idea of a multi-island approach, for geography.
- Urban Chaos takes place in Union City.
Anime & Manga
- The beach town in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, although it's because the protagonists live there that things keep happening.
- The importance of Karakura Town, a fictional district of Tokyo, to various spiritual entities in the anime Bleach is explained by an area of "high spiritual density" (a phenomenon which occurs more or less randomly across the world) coinciding with an area of high population. A notably high population of former Shinigami and other spiritually-attuned beings doesn't hurt, either. Plus, Tokyo Is The Center Of The Universe.
- Would the Soul Society count?
- Ryukendo's city of Akebono is a hot spot for the Power Spot located conveniently beneath the city.
- All the weirdness in Elfen Lied takes place in Kamakura, a small city 50 km away from Tokyo.
- Uminari City in the first two seasons of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. This trait was passed to Mid-Childa when the heroes officially joined The Federation, but then again, it is the Capital World of The Multiverse.
Tabletop Games
- Sigil of Planescape fame, being the foremost crossroads of the Dungeons And Dragons multiverse.
- Any tabletopg RPG supplement devoted to filling out the details of a single city in a setting counts, though this is relatively rare. For example, Sharn, City of Towers
- Someone hasn't played their World Of Darkness. Half the Vampire supplements are "Boston by Night," or "Mexaco City by Night."
- The island city of Al-Amarja is the setting for all the weirdness in Over The Edge.
- Ravinca, of the Magic: The Gathering multi-verse. Ravnica covers that entire world.
- In Monte Cook's Ptolus, a setting revolving entirely around the titular city (and, incidentally, one of the fattest roleplaying books ever published, at 672 pages).
- The city is built around Sealed Evil In A Can and on top of multiple layers of Sealed Evil In A Can, and (mostly unrelatedly) is home to several men who are, or can at least get away with claiming to be, emperor. The evil is leaking, the cans have become something of a tourist industry, and the political tensions are on the rise. Yes, there are some explanations.
- Warhammer has Mordheim, a warband setting that takes place in the titular City of Adventure and puts its own unique perspective on it. The city was levelled by a meteorite of Warpstone, a substance that has tremendous value for magical experiments and is a vital ingredient in the Philosopher's Stone- that is, an alchemical concoction that can change "base" metals into pure gold. So, naturally, the city is swarming with violent, opportunistic mercenaries and treasure hunters. Of course, Warpstone is also Toxic Phlebotinum, or perhaps Psycho Serum would be a better descriptor, as it causes physical, mental and spiritual corruption. So, naturally, the city is also teeming with all manner of horrific monsters...
Web Comics
- Gunnerkrigg Court's eponymous boarding school.
- Templar Arizona the comic is about this kind of city.
- 'Last Resort has its reality show in its very own space station built expressly for this purpose; it houses the show, the arena, and everything else you need for a world-class tourist resort to house and host all the spectators coming to watch.
- The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob has the "pleasantly innocuous hamlet" of Generictown, which has become a City Of Adventure purely because Bob the Weirdness Magnet lives there. Presumably, it would quiet down again if he moved, but he shows no signs of doing so.
Web Animation
- Picture on top: CCC City
 , the 'City of Opportunities' in the popular flash video series, in which literally every day in and around the city (so large it renders maps pointless) involves countless adventures of many different levels.
Web Original
Real Life
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