You're an Ace Operative, tasked with infiltrating and then
destroying the base of operations of the Nefarious Nine Eye Army. You get in, you get out, and you set enough explosives to make the
Great Tokyo Fireball look like a firecracker. You're tempted to
just walk away, the flash will blind you and people a mile away, but ... you've got
shades, and who doesn't want to look at their handy work?
Effectively, this trope is when a character brings destruction to a rather large structure and escapes, typically by the skin of their teeth, in time to manage to get a good view from above of the destruction taking place.
Scenery Gorn tends to ensue.
Expect a sillhouetted shot of the hero and/or
Damsel in Distress as they engage in an
After Action, Villain Analysis. For the inverse situation, where the hero has to watch a place he cares about go down in flames, see
Watching Troy Burn.
While both tend to involve looking down from a height at scenery, this is not to be confused with
The World Is Just Awesome.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- An interesting variation in Fullmetal Alchemist, where Ed and Al invoke this trope by burning their home down so they won't be tempted to give up their quest to get their bodies back. Their father also offers an alternate explanation in the manga/Brotherhood version: it's the equivalent of a kid hiding their sheets after wetting the bed. They're not burning the house to sever their ties to home; they're burning it to destroy all traces of their failed experiment.
Film
- Patlabor The Movie's ending is on the ruins of a megastructure the protagonists tore down on a clear morning after the storm. A very pure use of this trope.
- The page quote refers to a scene at the end of Battlefield Earth where we are treated to a scene of essentially shell-shocked cavemen staring at the ruins of the (not dome shaped) dome that had been the base of the bad guys.
Video Games
- Zelda and Link watch Ganon's castle collapse into a heap at the end of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, relieved that it's finally over. Or so they think.
- Fallout:
- The end of Fallout shows the Big Bad's Supervillain Lair getting nuked into oblivion from a (hopefully) safe distance.
- In Fallout 3, if you choose to nuke the Enclave Mobile Base in Broken Steel your getaway pilot lands a safe distance away to let you watch the bombs drop.
- Donkey Kong Country 2's ending has Diddy, Dixie and DK watching Crocodile Isle collapse into the ocean as the sun sets.
- Half-Life 2: Episode 2 begins with Gordon and Alyx overlooking the destruction of the Citadel they caused during Episode 1 and the end of Half-Life 2.
- The Human campaign of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness ends with an unnamed mage (who is later revealed to be Khadgar) and a human army standing in a cliff above the pit which is home to the nefarious Dark Portal. His eyes go glowy, and a massive pillar of energy breaks through the surface of the ground and envelops the portal. Cue the "standing above the destruction, arms raised in triumph, while cool music plays" scene. The portal got better... then made babies.
- The ending of Iji plays with this. Iji is reunited with her brother on a cliff overlooking the blasted earth unless the player fails to save him, which leaves Iji kneeling on the cliff by herself, but then the camera angle reverses to show the Komato invasion fleet leaving orbit.
- The ending sequences for several characters in Street Fighter IV, feature Guile, Chun Li and Abel overlooking the still smoldering ruins of S.I.N. labs from a nearby cliff, after narrowly escaping alive.
- The NES Ninja Gaiden games were fond of this trope. In Ninja Gaiden II, the Evil Overlord's lair collapses bit by enormous bit.
- Inverted in The Lost Vikings. If you get a game over, the scene shows the surviving viking(s) on a random shore, taking a glace on a burning boat drifting away. Push the continue button, and the dead vikings will be revived then you can continue the game.
- The endings of many, many Castlevania games. Except more often than not, the castle is still crumbling as the Belmont-of-the-Day looks on from a distant cliff.
Web Original
- In an episode of the web fiction serial Legion Of Nothing, the Grand Lake Heroes League visits the old lair located under the mansion of Red Lightning where the original Heroes League (the parents and grandparents of the current team) had to fight Red Lightning (a former good guy turned super-villain) in an all-out battle that burned down everything inside the cave. The characters comment that all these years later the burn and scorch marks look brand new.
- In a slight twist to the trope, the first part of the season finale of the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes shows the Big Bad and his henchmen watching the destruction of the city they helped bring about with smug satisfaction.
Western Animation
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, Aang gets a moment of this atop a stack rock formation after defeating Ozai. He uses it to pull the ocean inland to put out the fire in the forest below.
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, and Priam and his people shall be slain. -
Scipio Aemilianus Africanus,
while invoking this trope.
