|
|
They don't hate watching this.
Did you notice the sunset for the first time in ages?
— Alan Jackson, "Where Were You when the World Stopped Turning"
Characters just watching a sunset. It's often for their own pleasure, based on the romantic connotations, or for a symbolic purpose. They may even be waiting for something that's supposed to happen after the sun sets.
Whenever you have people in anime Sitting on the Roof, this is bound to turn up from time to time.
A Super Trope to Against the Setting Sun.
Compare Cue the Sun, Riding into the Sunset, That Cloud Looks Like, Meditating Under a Waterfall.
Contrast Melancholy Moon.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In Now and Then, Here and There, Shu and Lalaru watch the sunset as on three occasion, the first time when they first met, the second time when they escaped Hamdo's fortress and the third time Lalaru disappears from existence.
- Also, Lalaru said that she likes watching the sunset.
- In a Bleach filler episode, Toushirou likes to hang out in a place that has the best view of the sunset because it reminds him of his childhood days spent with Momo, where they eat watermelons while watching the sky.
- Ouran High School Host Club's Tamaki has an Imagine Spot of him and Haruhi walking along the beach together and watching the sunset.
- Macross Frontier has a sunset watching scene with Sheryl in Alto's arms in flight. They watch the sun set. And also fly. Yes, that basically sums it up. Done for romantic connotations as one of the many Ship Tease moments in the series.
- Future War 198X: Wataru and Laura are on the balcony on New Year's Eve, watching the sunset and talking all about their future plans right before finding out that war has broken out in Europe due to A Nuclear Error.
Film
- Luke Skywalker watches the twin setting suns
 of Tatooine in A New Hope while the Skywalker Leitmotif plays in the score, establishing Luke's longing to leave and do great things but being tied down by a sense of duty to his uncle.
- And deliberately mirrored as the very last scene of Revenge of the Sith with the younger version of said uncle and his wife holding baby Luke and staring at those same setting suns as Darkness falls over the whole galaxy...
- Also appears in Attack of the Clones, as Yoda, Palpatine and the rest watch the Clone Army's ships lift off against an ominous sunset — basically a visual shorthand for "It's all downhill from here".
- Aladdin
- In The Little Mermaid, when Ariel sees the sun is near setting, and her contract to be human will have failed, she decides to take some action.
- Kind of the entire point of Rohmer's La rayon vert (the "green flash", which is semi-seriously considered to confer a heightened spiritual state to the one who manages to spot it in the sunset).
- A recurring motif in The Proposition, mostly associated with the film's deeply-human villain, Arthur Burns. After being shot by his heroic brother Charlie at the end of the movie, he stumbles outside to die as he watches the sunset, and Charlie goes out to join him.
Literature
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy 1 spoofed this (big surprise).
Arthur Dent: Night's falling. Look robot, the stars are coming out.
Marvin: I know. Wretched isn't it?
Arthur Dent: But that sunset, I've never seen anything like it in my wildest dreams! The two suns... It was like mountains of fire boiling into space..!
Marvin: I've seen it, it's rubbish.
- In The Outsiders, Cherry comes to believe Ponyboy is more than just a greaser because he enjoys watching sunsets.
Live-Action TV
- In Angel, the eponymous hero had a ring that made the wearer invincible. He destroyed it, but not before wearing it for a full day, finally crushing it after the sun set.
- In Babylon 5, the episode Sleeping in Light shows Sheridan making a point of Watching the Sunset after he's confirmed his time to die has come. Delenn continues the tradition started by Sheridan after he disappears when his time comes.
Newspaper Comics
- Calvin And Hobbes were watching a beautiful sunset, but only because the dad took them camping, and Calvin complained about the shows he was missing.
- Happens in a few Garfield strips. The usually cynical Garfield actually gets sentimental watching them. One time he thought he was watching the sunrise, not realizing that he had overslept. Creator Jim Davis has said he spent many evenings watching the sunset with his family as he grew up.
Video Games
Visual Novels
Webcomics
Western Animation
|
|
