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Mordor, surprisingly gentle on your allergies.
One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its 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. Not with 10,000 men could you do this; it is folly. — Boromir, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 film)
The environmental opposite of Ghibli Hills. Mordor is black, bleak, and cold, or possibly black, bleak, and hot. The sun is always hidden behind endless dark storm clouds. What little vegetation there is (if any) will be withered and rotting or mutated into an "evil" variety that's covered in sharp thorns and/or liable to eat people. Poisonous marshes and swampland are also quite common. Expect frequent volcanoes and/or ice storms. May contain the ruins that show that once people had lived here. It may even be an Eldritch Location, defying the laws of nature, (and most Eldritch Locations are Mordor).
In a Fantasy Setting, Mordor is often this way because the evil of the Big Bad who rules the place radiates throughout the land, or because his Black Magic acts as a Curse on it. 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 — though Hope Springs Eternal is quite common. 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 vegetation to be part-monster as a result of adapting to survive the conditions there, or being twisted by whatever evil resulted in Mordor's creation.
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.
As noted above, One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor (but it is usually the best way to get there.)
Not to be confused with the Glaswegian pronunciation of "murder".
Compare Forbidden Zone, I Dont Like The Sound Of That Place.
Mordor is one form of Shadowland.
Examples
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- 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.
- As a subversion, the whole world at first appears like Mordor in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and becomes more and more hospitable as the heroes approach the Big Bad's fortress. It's also why Kamina City is erected near the ruins of Teppelin.
- Subverted in Princess Mononoke; Iron Town looks a bit like Mordor, with its destruction of the countryside and smoke rising from the furnaces, but instead of plain evil, Ashitaka finds a combination of good and ordinary human fraility. And in the end, the Forest Spirit lays waste to the forest in a flood of death and destruction while searching for his missing head.
- After that, Iron town's iron shield becomes covered with vegetation when Lady Eboshi swears to do better. Miyazaki loves this; it also happens to Laputa in Castle In The Sky and the titular castle in Howls Moving Castle.
Comic Books
- The real world of The Matrix is depicted this way, and is the result of the war between the Humans and the Machines.
- Ditto, the future world as depicted in The Terminator films.
- 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!
- 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.
- This troper likes to think Scar is too proud to admit she was right, and probably didn't want to leave the kingdom he'd spent years coveting.
- Ommadon's Red Realm in the animated film The Flight of Dragons.
- Earth as seen by WALL-E. Thanks a lot, Buy 'N' Large...
- The castle of the Skeksis and the land surrounding it in The Dark Crystal are dark, barren, and forbiding. That is until the Skeksis are no more.
- The Lone Wolf series 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.
Live Action TV
- 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.
- Because it WAS a pristine, high-tech world. Then the chemicals turned the survivors into Reavers, and they went and left after causing a bit of damage on their way out.
- 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. Complete with a Great Eye that is ever watchful.
- Though in name and pronunciation is sounds suspiciously reminiscent of Khazad-dum...
- In Dead Ringers a run-down house was memorably described as looking like "a cross between Afghanistan and Mordor".
- Netu in Stargate SG-1 is a good example of science fiction Mordor. The devil himself bombarded it to resemble hell.
Tabletop Games
- 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.
- Legend of the Five Rings has the Shadowlands. Thoroughly tainted by dark spirits and the touch of the Dark God, the place rots and corrupts everything within. The overwhelming presence of dark spirits makes magic much more difficult and dangerous to cast, and it teems with mutants and horrible creatures, many of which are outright immune to anything short of jade (which is pure and thus dangerous to them) or magic. Carrying jade protects the bearer from the taint, but jade is rare and valuable, and the protection causes it to slowly rot.
- The Mournland in Eberron, which was once the kingdom of Cyre before the dark magical cataclysm known as the Day of Mourning that ended the Last War, is actually even less convivial to Mordor; Mordor itself actually had living things (blighted, twisted ones, but still living). In the Mournland, healing doesn't work, the ground is littered with corpses, and there are even undead warforged.
- Also, the Demon Reaches, who are closer to the "classic" Mordor (ie: Volcanic, ash covered land blasted by evil). Humanoids native to the area tend to have various signs of demonic corruptions.
- The "industrial" trade classification in Traveller describes a planet with billions of inhabitants and an unbreathable or barely breathable atmosphere, that's implied to be a global factory and (because of the way the Traveller random world generation system works) also very likely to have a repressive government.
- The Deadlands in the eponymous RPG. The twist is that any place can become like that if the inhabitants are driven into despair and fear. In the original Deadlands: The Weird West, there's only one major Deadland, in war-devastated Kentucky, and one area close to becoming a Deadland, the City of Lost Angels. But in the sequel, Deadlands: Hell on Earth, most of the former USA is kinda like that, and the Eastern Seaboard is one big Mordor.
- Warhammer40000's planet Krieg. It was once a habitable planet until its ruler declared independence from the Imperium. Five hundred years of atomic bombing later, Krieg became a futuristic Mordor.
- 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.
Video Games
- 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.
- Sheogorath's realm, the Shivering Isles, is split into Mania and Dementia. The latter area is a mild slice of Mordor somewhat darker than Morrowind's swamps, but some locations there are more like the Heart of Mordor.
- In World Of Warcraft, you have Searing Gorge, Burning Steppes, Felwood, Hellfire Peninsula, Shadowmoon Valley, and Icecrown. The Western and Eastern Plaguelands, Silithus, Tirisfal Glades and Zul'drak may arguably also count. (Many if not all of these zones double as Scrappy Levels.)
- Don't forget Desolace, whose name speaks for itself.
- There's also Netherstorm, a place completely destroyed because of the blood elves draining the power out of everything. It was previously a green field.
- For those who haven't seen it, Icecrown is Mordor down to a T; complete with big black gates guarded by fearsome, disfigured creatures, an evil, necromantic lord bent on destroying the world as we know it and even a large magical eye atop a tower. Only difference is it's covered in snow instead of ash.
- Intentional on Blizzard's part: the entire area is separated by huge ramparts with Gates to block passage. The one directly in front of the Citadel (which already looks like Barad-Dur) is called "Mord'rethar." Also, one does not walk into Icecrown. A flying mount is needed to get around the place.
- The Blasted Lands, as evidenced by the name: a blasted, lifeless desert desert with a perpetually black, stormy sky. Also the Bone Waste, literally an enormous bomb crater littered with bones tossed from their previous resting place inside a now-exploded necropolis.
- EverQuest and EverQuest 2 both have two realms of volcanic mountains; Lavastorm and the Skyfire Mountains. In EQ1, the Muramites are doing their best to turn the entire continent of Taelosia into Mordor. Perhaps surprisingly, the Muramites home realm isn't too harsh for the most part, although being an upper level area it suffers from a severe case of Everything Trying To Kill You.
- EQ1 has a few areas that are slightly less conventional Mordors. The Grey is an area that got exposed to the vacuum of space through some powerful magic. Now it's a desert where the only things that can survive are those that don't need to breathe air.
- 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.
- As suggested by the page qoute, the Twilight Realm is perpetually covered in bleak light and dark clouds. Besides that and the creepy architecture, though, it's actually a pretty nice place.
- The last stretch before the final palace in Zelda II is very much this.
- 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.
- The Death Faith's lands in the Sierra game Lords Of Magic is basically
a teh marshlands of evilness, dominated by a omnious, towering cliff with a skull carved into it... Oh, and the people who lives in the land are all since childhood trained murderers and, as such, the life expectancy within their borders isn't especially long. A merchant in the Death capital's marketplace even points out that his "lifetime guarantee" labeled wares are "good up to 30 days".
- 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 CEOs 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.
- To be fair, half the first campaign takes place in a series of Mordors. First your kingdom is razed to ash, then after a brief interlude in the series of hells with an excursion to the Ice Caves and a brief pass through the lush jungle crawling with with The Undead and Knight Templars, you're thrown into a scorching endless desert hell. Then you go to a more standard hell-esque Mordor that makes even Sauron's Mordor look like a pleasant vacation spot.
- Later played straight with the Realm of Torment in the third game, which is the home of the fallen god Abaddon. Caves made of flesh? Check. Teeth sticking out of the ground? Check. It's even got some fetid swampland of its own. And every part of it has its own delightful status effect to offer.
- 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.
- By the time it gets like that it has no human population, it's all undead and demons.
- The various worlds named Filgaia in the Wild ARMs series are virtually always like this, but usually long after the event that caused it. Sometimes this was caused by a Fisher King scenario (another of which might also be arriving in the same story), but the original cause has long since departed, leaving the planet's ecosystem to try to slowly clean up after itself. Compare Tatooine from Star Wars or the World of Ruin from Final Fantasy VI.
- The planet Fargett in Star Ocean: First Departure is a desolate wasteland, in contrast to the lush, Earth-like environment of Roak, the home planet of the game's main character, Roddick Farrence. The planet Fargett is run by an Evil Overlord named Jie Revorse, who essentially turned the planet into The Empire.
- Char from Starcraft is your standard Planet Mordor, all lava and volcanoes and blasted dead black plains.
- As is Barathrum from Total Annihilation.
- Barathrum is a subversion, actually. It's a world in the process of being born, hence the higher than average metal content of the surface. The overall effect is about the same, though.
- Eversion's world turns more and more into this as you progress through the game. The environment takes on a definite Mordor feel with the sixth "everted" world: the vegetation is covered in thorns (which are Spikes Of Doom for all intents and purposes), the Goomba-like enemies start to show their teeth, everything turns into a spray of Ludicrous Gibs when killed, and the music sounds horribly distorted.
- American McGee's Alice pulls this off: as soon as you defeat the Big Bad, the entire world loses its sickly nightmarish quality and reverts to a much nicer place, complete with blooming flowers and chirping birds. Justified by the fact that it's all happening in Alice's head.
- The Island of Evil in Phantom Brave, due to Sulphur's influence.
- Legacy Of Kain has two examples. One is Dark Eden, the lands surrounding a tower which spews forth an ever-expanding dome of magic. The dome is the result of three Pillar Guardians pooling their powers and it warps everything it touches. The inside of the dome is standard fare with roiling lakes of lava and warped mutants with poisonous blood. The second example is Nosgoth itself, as it turns out that Kain's decision at the Pillars was fixed to result in destruction either way. As it is, Kain chose to live and rule, which causes the world's balance to waver, resulting in the world as it is seen in Soul Reaver.
- California, Nevada, and Washington DC in the various Fallout games, though this is a result of Global Thermonuclear War.
- The Rogue Isles is known as the City Of Villains for a reason. Places that aren't a Vice City or Supervillain Lair are a dilipidated mess of decripit slums, or ruined and abandoned buildings. The first zone players enter, Mercy Island, fits this trope to a tee.
- Wherever the Combine come from, it seems to look like this from the glimpse we get through one of their portals. They seem intent on redecorating Earth to match.
- Boatmurdered becomes one of these, about the time when a stream of lava is unleashed to dry up a freak flood. It Got Worse.
- Planets colonized by the Zuul in Sword Of The Stars start taking on a very Mordor-ish bent.
- In Fable, the landscape that is near places of great evil, such as Darkwood or Wraithmarsh, are very creepy and ruined.
- In Jak II and Jak 3, the Metal Heads' territory, as well as Haven City itself, is very desolate, polluted, and dangerous.
- Crocodile Island from Donkey Kong Country 2 (and Donkey Kong Land 2), until it sinks into the ocean. It has/had Gangplank Galleon, an Amusement Park Of Doom called Krazy Kremland, a forboding Evil Tower Of Ominousness, is filled with dead trees, Zingers (killer bees), Brambles and danger, and the whole place and ocean around it is dark murky green.
Western Animation
- 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.
- On The Fairly Oddparents, Dimmsdale became one of these after Crocker took over.
- In Reboot, Mainframe turns into this after Bob is launched into the Web, Enzo, AndrAIa and Frisket are stranded on the Net after a game goes awry, and Megabyte takes over the city.
Real Life
- The battlefields of the First World War is the very image of Mordor, particularly the the battle of Passchendaele. Blasted hellscapes of twisted trees where nothing lived and men drowned in the mud. The battlefields were most likely Tolkien's inspiration for Mordor, as he served in the war as a young officer.
- 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, an 87-foot-high 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).
- The place is also so flat that it's been used as a racetrack where many a speed record in a land vehicle was set.
- Until the 1960s, Pittsburgh, thanks to industrial pollution, was known for its Mordor-y combination of fire-belching furnaces and smokestacks; air so black with soot that the sky could not be seen in mid-day in photographs, and all the lights had to be on all the time; and water quality capable of petrifying wooden boats into iridescent chunks of iron oxide. It's since gotten much better, though, to the point where it's recently been ranked as one of the cleanest and most livable cities in America.
- Many of Britain's industrial cities were the same way. Even in the Victoria Era, Blake referred "the dark Satanic mills". The region around Birmingham was (and still is) literally known as "the Black Country", although the area is much cleaner today. Incidentally, Tolkien grew up in this area; many scholars think Mordor at least in part inspired by the polluted industrial desolation (which leads to a long-time Wild Mass Guess that the Ring saga is an allegorical Green Aesop or an anti-technology rant). And Ridley Scott claimed that the smoke-belching urban hellscape of Twenty Minutes Into The Future Los Angeles in BladeRunner was based on his hometown of Middlesbrough.
- Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for over 40 years and will continue to be on fire for at least another 250. It has a population of
twelve nine. Nine serious Bad Asses.
- Ethiopia's Danakil Depression is an, um, interesting place with 130-degree temperatures, sulphuric acid volcanoes and lava lakes. Google 'Erta Ale' some time and you'll see exactly what we mean.
- Death Valley, despite its name, is NOT an example. You still don't want to go there without water, though.
- Wyoming. Also, parts of the Deep South.
- The Deep South?? There isn't a single inch of land here that isn't lush with wildlife and flora. There's plenty of swamps, granted, but Your Mileage May Vary on whether they are Mordor-ish.
- This editor's home town of Saugus, Massachusetts is very much this. Desolate, decaying, and filled with human orcs.
- 250 million years ago, a huge, continuing volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia(which today could qualify as this) reduced pretty much the entire planet to this. Fortunately, this didn't last.
- Speaking of Siberia, the city of Norilsk definitely qualifies. According to the Blacksmith Institute, it's one of the top 10 most polluted cities on earth due to a huge concentration of nickel mines and smelters nearby. According to our friends at The Other Wiki, there's not a single tree within 48 kilometers of one smelter. Here's a picture and more info.
 Perhaps fittingly, it was founded as a Soviet Gulag labor camp. And to top it off, it's one of the largest cities north of the Arctic Circle, at about 70 degrees North (it apparently has the northernmost mosque in the world).
- The Dasht-e Lut, the largest desert basin in Iran and confirmed by NASA to be the hottest place on Earth, with a recorded maximum of 71 degrees Celsius (159 degrees Fahrenheit). Most notably the area called Gandom Beriyan, an area of hardend black volcanic lava whos temperature differential with the surrounding terrain causes constant winds. No life is said to exist here.
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