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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. Contrast Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here.
Examples:
- 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, though the TV series has it as "Jump City" and "Steel City" as the location of Titans East.
- 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/Spiderman... 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)
- The City... of Townsville in Powerpuff Girls.
- Saint Canard in Darkwing Duck.
- Likewise, most of Uncle Scrooge's adventures take place in Duckburg.
- 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.
- 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 them, and then they visit the city and are awed at seeing superheroes in the streets, and one character comments "here, we're not so special".
- 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.
- Heatherfield in W.I.T.C.H. (it's where all the portals are, and it's where all the Guardians live.)
- 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.
- Similarly, Cabot Cove in Murder She Wrote (though they do get Jessica out and about regularly, there are still an awful lot of murders in her small hometown — it's a wonder there's anyone left.)
- 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 sentience and abilities) are all treated as normal until the big pointy teeth come out.
- Aliens in Doctor Who like to invade from the Home Counties.
- 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.
- 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.
- MMORPG Example: Paragon City in City Of Heroes.
- 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.
- The beach town in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, although it's because the protagonists live there that things keep happening.
- In Torchwood, Cardiff is located on an interdimensional rift, which results in plenty of weird things ending up there.
- 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.
- Sigil of Planescape fame, being the foremost crossroads of the Dungeons And Dragons multiverse.
- Port Island in Persona 3.
- 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?
- Gunnerkrigg Court's eponymous boarding school.
- Ryukendo's city of Akebono is a hot spot for the Power Spot located conveniently beneath the city.
- 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, and now Ocean Bluff. Subverted in Operation Overdrive, where the characters are based in San Angeles, but travel all over the world. Justified in 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...)
- 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.
- All the weirdness in Elfen Lied takes place in Kamakura, a small city 50 km away from Tokyo.
- 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.
- According to Dave Barry, South Florida is a Real Life example.
- 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.
- Porkbelly in Johnny Test
- The Town
- How has Kurt Busiek's "Astro City" not made the list? Much of the plot hinges on subverting and lampshadehanging this very trope.
- Danny Phantom has Amity Park, a town with ghost/occult-related names for obvious reasons.
- 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.
- Chicago in Dresden Files
- "Seacouver" in Highlander
- Certain MMORP Gs take place in a single city: Dungeons And Dragons Online in Stormreach, City Of Heroes in Paragon City, Rhode Island; and City Of Villains in the Rogue Isles.
- The fictional English town of Blackbury in Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy. It's also the location of The Store in Truckers.
- 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."
- Any tabletopg RPG supplement devoted to filling out the details of a single city in a setting counts, though this is relatively rare. i.e. 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 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.
- Judge Dredd's Mega-City-One from the British comic 2000AD.
- Ylelon, the city-state setting of The Lonely Winds. No set explanation has yet been given, but the place comes off as a cross between Hong Kong and a Hellmouth.
- Neopolis, the Science Hero ghetto that the police of Top Ten patrol.
- Ravinca, of the Magic: The Gathering multi-verse. Ravnica covers that entire world.
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