Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
|
One does not simply walk into Mordor. The Black Gates are guarded by more than just Orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep, and the Great Eye is ever watchful. And if by some miracle you slip past the Morannon, what then? There is nowhere to hide on the plain of Gorgoroth. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, dust; the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. - Boromir at the Council of Elrond, Fellowship of the Ring (movie version)
Ahh, look! How lovely! The black clouds of twilight are so fetching today... - Midna, The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The environmental opposite of Ghibli Hills. Mordor is black, bleak, and the sun is always hidden behind endless dark storm clouds. There is no vegetation unless it's dead or mutated into an "evil" variety that's liable to eat people. Expect frequent volcanoes and/or ice storms.
In a Fantasy Setting, Mordor is often this way because the evil of the Big Bad who rules the place radiates throughout the land. Often, this land was once a beautiful place before the Big Bad got hold of it, and it's presented as a stark example of what could happen to the hero's world should he or she fail in stopping the Big Bad. Should the Big Bad be defeated and the good king restored, often the skies will clear up and the birds and bees and flowers will return at warp speed.
In more realistic or Sci-Fi settings, Mordor is an Aesop against abusing resources. Its inhabitants stripped the land of everything good, and polluted the air. Defeat of the Big Bad won't necessarily return the land to its pristine state. Quite often, this also involves big sprawling cities that somehow became something worse than the run-down ghettos of São Paulo, or big sprawling industrial zones that breathe smoke 24/7.
It's not clear how anything can actually survive in Mordor for any extended period in time. Perhaps everyone lives Beneath The Earth and eats mushrooms (or people who wander into their land), or else all their resources come from conquering others. Expect its inhabitants and plants to be part-monster as a result of adapting to survive the conditions there.
Series that take place After The End will often be set in a version of Mordor (though usually not quite as harsh). Sometimes Mordor is Where It All Began.
Not to be confused with the Glaswegian pronunciation of "murder".
Mordor is one form of Shadowland.
Examples:
- Both Fantasy and Sci Fi versions of this trope are seen in the second season of Magic Knight Rayearth: Cephiro is this way because it lost the mystical ruler who had sustained the land, and one of the invading countries was a mechanical world that had used up all of their natural resources.
- The island nation of Argentum in Simoun is a SF anime example.
- The fukai from Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind is depicted as Mordor at first, and is later revealed to be the Ghibli Hills.
- In Inuyasha, Naraku has a mobile Mordor; a magically-generated cloud of poisonous gas that follows him to wherever he chooses to abide.
- Michel in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch wants to turn the world into a rather odd-looking Mordor: rocks jutting above the clouds, giant neon DNA strands shooting out of the sky, and wings on every animal. Seeing his hideout, which already looks like this, disgusts Lucia and makes her wonder what would possess anyone to like that. Of course, it all has symbolic ties to his own origin.
- The planet Apokolips in The DCU, ruled by Darkseid.
- The real world of The Matrix is depicted this way, and is the result of the war between the Humans and the Machines.
- Outworld is depicted much like this in the Mortal Kombat movie. As Kitana tells us, it was once a beautiful land before its best warriors lost ten Mortal Kombats and the realm was taken over by Shao Kahn. She tells Liu Kang that the same thing will happen to his world if he fails to win this Mortal Kombat. Johnny Cage has perhaps the best line about what this land is like:
Johnny Cage: Liu, I hate this place. I'm telling you, I hate it. I'm in a hostile environment, I'm completely unprepared, and I'm surrounded by people who probably want to kick my ass. It's like being back in high school!
- The trope's title comes from the Dark Land of Mordor from Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Mordor combined both the "radiated evil" version of this trope (already seen in Mirkwood) and the "don't abuse resources" version (already seen in Isengard). Ironically, Sam and Frodo never find out quite a bit of Mordor has great amounts of farmland much farther away to keep itself running, kept fertile by ash from the evil volcano. Impossible ecosystems are a thing of the post-Tolkien hangover.
- The Yeerk homeworld is portrayed this way in Animorphs.
- Gorgossium, the Midnight Island in Abarat.
- In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Korriban, the homeworld of the Sith, is a Single Biome Planet version of Mordor; in fact, the Sith relocated to another world early in its history and turned the planet into a vast necropolis.
- In some versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the blasted and ruined Frogstar is the home of the Total Perspective Vortex:
Zaphod Beeblebrox: This place is the dismalest. Looks like a bomb's hit it, you know.
Gargravarr: Several have; it’s a very unpopular place.
- Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series features the Blight, a festering wasteland where any bit of plant life is malevolent and the animals are even more so.
- According to The Areas Of My Expertise, Oregon is "where the shadows lie."
- In John Barnes's One For The Morning Glory, Overhill has been reduced to a wasteland under the reign of the usurper Waldo. Queen Calliope, returning, is told that it has even become better since the usurper left to continue his conquests.
- In Firefly, Earth has become uninhabitable and is now called "Earth-That-Was". In addition, much the same thing happened to Mal's homeworld, Shadow, at the hands of the Alliance during the Unification War.
- Subversion: In the movie Serenity, the brutal Reavers originate from a planet that is as pristine and high-tech as any Core World.
- The mining colony Androzani Minor in the Doctor Who serial "The Caves of Androzani." Absolutely everyone on it was trying to kill everyone else, and a fatally poisoned Doctor had to regenerate just to get his companion away in one piece.
- Also, the planet Skaro, as depicted in "Genesis of the Daleks" and several Expanded Universe media, thanks to a centuries-long war of attrition involving nuclear and chemical weapons. And that was before the Daleks came into the picture.
- The Shadow homeworld Z'ha'dum in Babylon 5 is another science-fiction Mordor.
- In Magic The Gathering, the Tempest cycle has Rath, wherein Mordor becomes an entire plane of existence where a perpetual storm rages in the sky. Phyrexia is another example, of the techno-industrial kind.
- Another recent example from Magic is the plane of Shadowmoor, which was once the idyllic sunny world of Lorwyn. After undergoing the cyclic process of the Aurora, the Ghibli Hills-esque Lorwyn becomes Shadowmoor, a world of perpetual night, filled with sickly vegetation and corrupted life.
- And a third example comes from Shards of Alara: the plane of Grixis, a world completely devoid of white and green magic, ruled by demons and hordes of the undead.
- Exalted has the shadowlands, which are an example of "Make Your Own Mordor": any massive act of slaughter over a large enough area will effectively open a door to the Underworld, something the Deathlords are quick to capitalize on. Zombies are created more easily in a shadowland, ghosts wander when night falls, and the flow of Essence is impeded.
- The Lone Wolf Gamebooks give us a few, including the Darklands, home of the Darklords, Ixia, home of the (not to be confused) Deathlord, and the Doomlands of Naaros.
- The realm of Karzahni in Bionicle definitely fits. The ground screams with every step you take, waterfalls flow with dust, volcanoes erupt with burning ice, and any lazy Matoran would be turned to stone. When the ruler left, the Toa Nuva liberated the mentally and physically broken Matoran and Toa Gali proceeded to destroy the place in a massive flood.
- Red Mountain in The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, a volcano inhabited by the game's Big Bad and perpetually shrouded in "ash-blight". The Powers That Be in the game world have gone so far as to erect a magical fence around the mountain to keep the monsters trapped therein, with limited effectiveness.
- Mehrunes Dagon's planes of Oblivion from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a Mordor with lots of fire. The gates to Mehrunes' Oblivion in the "real world" radiate scorched land and ominous clouds. The other planes of Oblivion are ruled by other entities have appearances reflecting their personalities and powers, and as such have different appearances. Or at least in theory.
- Northrend in the Warcraft series is an example of an icy Mordor, though it should be noted that the land was barren and forbidding before it became the seat of the Lich King's army. World Of Warcraft provides many other examples, but the most prominent ones are probably the Searing Gorge and the Burning Steppes.
- If we're using Tolkien terminology, Northrend is much more like Utumno and its environs.
- The Dark World of A Link To the Past was really the Sacred Realm of the Gods after Ganon got through with it. Zelda does this a lot, but the original Dark World is the most prominent example.
- Edutainment Game Zoombinis Island Odyssey features this as the resource aspect; the titular Zoombinis arrive at their abandoned homeland and realise that the invaders have removed all the butterflies and destroyed the environment(?). By returning caterpillars, the place gradually returns to its former glory. So, basically, you play through rebuilding an area.
- To some degree, Planet Leeds in Freelancer. Even though the "great evil" is pretty much absent, imagine a planet capable of blowing out entire nebulae of smog! Accordingly, the government is depicted as unable to deal with the pollution and industrial accidents.
- Done in the realistic approach in all the Oddworld series of games (and possible future movies), where the bad guys are the ones who pollute the land and drive species to extinction in their thirst for profits. This makes all bad guy areas disgusting industrial wastelands with gloomy smog as the clouds of doom, immense factories as the tall, dark towers, and cruel CE Os as the Big Bads. The player is bashed over the head with the "Save the environment, Big corporations are bad" philosophy, which is ironic considering the last two games in this franchise were made for a Microsoft platform.
- The hyper-industrial Strogg from the Quake series of games turn every place and thing they can find into Mordor, as long as it can be used in a production facility somehow. Blood and gristle are fine lubricants, and they'll be damned if they can't find a way to install a human torso in a machine one way or another.
- Bowser's Castle in the Super Mario Bros games almost always exists in Mordor. It rarely has a set name, though Dark Land/World and Valley of Bowser are some that have been used. Such lands are filled with barren rocks, volcanoes, rivers and lakes of lava, and if it's lucky enough to have vegetation, fetid swampland. Especially noteworthy in Super Mario Bros 3, where part of Dark World was so dark that you could only see your current location on the map screen, not the whole map.
- Guild Wars begins with the characters' kingdom becoming Mordor when the Charr (the game's stand-in for orcs) unleash a massive sorcerous assault of flame and crystalline meteors, rendering the entire kingdom into a broken desert, featuring rivers of tar and a blood-red sky. This whole trope is later subverted when you visit the Charr homelands in the Eye of the North expansion, and, well... it's actually a pretty pleasant place.
- Mhaldor in Achaea is Mordor on an island. The streets are littered with corpses, piranha fish swim in every pond and even the plants are carnivorous - that is, the ones that aren't withered by the toxic red mist. The city patrons are Apollyon and Shaitan, also known as the Twin Gods of Oppression and Suffering. It's a nice place for a picnic.
- Taros, from Total Annihilation Kingdoms, is a textbook Mordor clone. Like most Tolkien ripoffs it lacks any ecological explanation for how the barren volcanic steppes can support a population, unlike the original.
- Meridian in W.I.T.C.H. was Mordor until its evil ruler was dethroned. It's explained that Phobos was draining the magical energy of the land.
- Rainbow Land was Mordor before Rainbow Brite came from "somewhere else", freed its Light and defeated The Evil One.
- In most incarnations of the Transformers franchise, Cybertron hs been reduced to the sci-fi version of this, albeit due to a history made up almost entirely of brutal warfare rather than by abuse of resources.
- In The Lion King the Pridelands become a Mordor of sorts after Scar and the hyenas take over. The sky turns grey, all the plants die and all the animals are gone. As expected, when Simba defeats Scar and takes his rightful place as king, the land recovers perfectly (and apparently fast enough that the Pride doesn't starve in the meantime).
- Simba's mother did advise Scar to temporarily leave the Pridelands during this period, and follow the herds. Scar refused for some unknown reason, but Simba would've been more practical.
- Ommadon's Red Realm in the animated film The Flight of Dragons.
- When an Apple employee visits the city-sized FoxConn factory where iPods are made, he is said to have been "sent to Mordor."
- The Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah. The whole area is basically a plain of salt. There is a highway with a couple of gasoline stations, a statue of a tree made by a Mad Artist, and that's about it. No plants, no animals, and the whole thing is surrounded by some barren-looking mountains (though these do actually have a working ecosystem).
|
|
