Scenery Gorn / Anime & Manga

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• 7 Seeds repeatedly shows the characters, and reader, the ruins of their old homes or monuments. At least, what's left of them, as most of them are either submerged, crumbling apart or so corroded due to prolonged contact to seawater that it has the consistency of seaweed upon touch.
• Accel World can run into this sometimes. The stages in the Accelerated World are selected at random and essentially apply a skin to a digital version of the local surroundings. The End of Century and Weathered stages are made of Scenery Gorn and get worse as the combatants fight and frequently damage the scenery even more. Especially when one of them is Niko.
• AKIRA is mostly one long metaphor for the fragility of cities, so...
• Barefoot Gen depicts Hiroshima during and after the atomic bombing.
• Battle Angel Alita. Countless detailed scenes of the Scrapyard and the surrounding desert wastes. So relentless is the decay (and fastidious detail) of Alita that familiarity eventually blurs the line between Scenery Gorn and Scenery Porn.
• The manga Berserk is known for being lavishly detailed, featuring battlefields littered with corpses mangled in different ways. It's a Crapsack World full of misery and death, and the art does not flinch from depicting it.
• Tsutomu Nihei's works Blame!, Biomega, and Abara have enough vast, ruined cityscapes to... well, cover the planet. Definitely an Author Appeal.
• Casshern Sins is yet another example of Scenery Gorn meeting Scenery Porn. The whole world is a desolate hellscape full of sand, rust and ruined buildings, where almost every living thing is dead, and even robots are struggling to survive. But it's all so gorgeously rendered that it manages to make the apocalypse look beautiful.
• Dorohedoro shows quite a lot of details for its cities. Being mostly a Crapsack World, it is no surprise that there are quite a lot of corpses (and often less pleasant things) decorating it, and sometimes corpses walking in it.
• Dragon Ball, as soon as the cast learns how to blow things up.
  • Oh, Dragon Ball Z IN SPADES. To point where the cast would flat out abuse this trope on a regular basis. Seriously, nearly every fight in that show had a gratuitous amount of Scenery Gorn. Quite possibly one of the best examples of Scenery Gorn you'll ever see in anime was when Super Saiyan Goku took on Freiza on Namek as it was on the verge of imploding. My God. The amount of Scenery Gorn that there was in that fight was astonishing.
• In Ergo Proxy there are frequent shots of scenery gorn related to humans abandoning their cities and moving into massive domes.
• Fist of the North Star may qualify. The animation was low enough budget that the backgrounds were never exactly detailed, but you still had plenty of crumbling buildings and of course lots and lots of wastelands. The movie had a larger budget and had several scenes of destruction and desolation, including an oil tanker impaling a skyscraper. That one appeared twice.
• Ghost in the Shell has lots of urban decay but for the most part the cities are still inhabited by lots of normal people, as it was based on the absurdly uncontrolled dense overgrowth of Kowloon Walled City. The first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex even spends a great deal of time in the clean, bright, and wealthy parts of Japan, but in the second season, there are a couple of trips to Tokyo, or rather what's left of it.
• K, in Mikoto's nightmares in episode 6. When the aftermath of the Kagutsu Crater Incident is shown in a flashback in season 2, it's the same, and probably what Mikoto was thinking of, considering his situation. The rest of the series' Scenery Porn is pretty bright, though.
• Macross Frontier combined this with Scenery Porn with respect to the Frontier fleet quite effectively over the run of the series. The first half of the series has the title Frontier fleet as a beautiful, clean, shiny, and lively city on a bay and quite an impressive Wagon Train to the Stars. There's a whole episode devoted to Sheryl gawking in amazement at every aspect of the fleet's ecosystem and cities. Then war happens, and by the last few episodes half the locations Sheryl visited no longer exist and the main island is a ruin of its former self of apocalyptic proportions. No exaggeration. By that time, the government had concluded that the fleet's ecosystem had been irreparably damaged, and within a few months, it would no longer be able to sustain its population. Cue Grand Finale.
• Magic Knight Rayearth II has a lot of focus on the now-ruined and crumbling landscape of Cephiro, which has been reduced from a sprawling and vibrant world to a small circle of barren and twisted rock.
• In Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Kamille and Quattro enter a space colony that was gassed. The colony has low gravity, so building wreckage and lifeless bodies, including children, float around. Its both disturbing to the audience and Kamille.
• Naruto:
  • We are informed that the lab of Orochimaru that Snake is headed to was for researching the Cursed Seal and this is accompanied by a lovely page-and-a-half layout of one of the escaped subject killing a dozen researchers with their blood all over the walls (including one whose head he just crushed into a wall). In the anime, we only see half of the bodies and there isn't any blood.
  • Kishimoto is rather good at this. We get to see the after-effects of Madara's Colony Drop, shinobi crushed and laid scattered over the landscape as the smoke clears. Oh, not only that, what happened to the Kages that Madara did... well... and that's not even going into Obito's flashback!
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion takes the time to do this at the end with Shinji and Asuka sitting on the shore, watching the red sea with GNR's giant, unmoving head in the distance.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: This is the result of Walpurgisnacht. And, depending on how you feel about industrial districts, many other locations could qualify. We see the end result in episode 10. This one hits particularly hard because mere hours after the episode aired, well... it caused the two remaining episodes to be declared to have poor timing.
• The first minute of Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0 is nothing but this. Not to mention that in the entire series (both Neon Genesis Evangelion and Rebuild of Evangelion) almost every time an Angel has been defeated, we get a nice shot full of this, to show all the massive damage in its detail.
  • After Rei attempts to takedown Zeruel with an N2 mine in 2.0, we're treated to a lengthy shot of a ruined Geofront that includes fallen buildings, burnt trees, and a few charred corpses.
  • What, no mention of the Fourth Impact in 3.0?
• Survival by Takao Saitou (of Golgo 13 fame) is set in Japan after a devastating earthquake and features lavishly detailed sceneries of destruction and decay on almost every page.
• Texhnolyze, despite actually being masterfully detailed, features one of the more extreme examples of the Cyberpunk Scenery Gorn setting.
• Tokyo Ghoul shows more and more of this as its collected works progress into more epic and fantastical territory, such as an abandoned mall that houses a ghoul army, an illicit lab with walls of flesh, and a sprawling underground city ruined by a truly monumental kagune.
• Gunsmoke/No Man's Land of Trigun, being a Single-Biome Planet, already has long stretches of desert as far as the eye can see, but once flashbacks to the city of July start happening, this comes into play in an even worse way.
• Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 has this in abundance, including the opening and ending themes.
• Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- does this in Acid◊ Tokyo.
• Uzumaki features detailed depictions of the twisted scenery surrounding Kurozu-Cho in its later chapters culminating in a panoramic, full-page spread of the Spiral City under the town, where piles of human bodies form the groundwork for twisted ruins.
• Violence Jack is Gorn on every level, including this one.
• Wolf's Rain has quite a few examples, particularly the ruined city in "Scars in the Wilderness".

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