This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Harmless Destruction: From YKTTW
Vampire Buddha: Cut out a bit of natter
** From what
This Troper remembers, Soul Society had been evacuated because of the intruders (Evacuated to where?
Don't think about this one), and the buildings are made up of soul energy. Or something.
*** Besides, no one ever dies in
Bleach anyway.
***Maybe because a good part of the cast is ALREADY DEAD?
arromdee: Cut:
- Actually, breaking the debris up into smaller pieces would make them much more likely to burn up in the atmosphere, instead of having big piecwes slamming into the ground with the force of nuclear bombs.
If a piece of debris would hit the ground with the force of a nuclear bomb, breaking it into a cloud will produce a cloud that hits with the force of a nuclear bomb. The fact that the cloud hits the atmosphere instead of the ground won't save you; you'll just get a nuclear bomb sized explosion in the atmosphere. It will help if the cloud occupies a larger area than the single piece, but that isn't any good if you have a hail of pieces that already covers a large area and whose area won't be significantly increased by breaking the pieces up.
Peteman: Cut out some of the natter.
- The trope is named after a theory that argues the destruction of the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi turned the Ewok homeworld into a smoking wasteland. Canonically, the Endor Holocaust did not happen.
- Similarly, this editor shudders to think about what happened in the Battle of Coruscant. Having huge spaceships half a mile long or more shooting each other in the upper atmosphere can't be good for anyone under the losers.
- Timothy Zahn actually makes this a major plot point in his Expanded Universe Thrawn Trilogy. the Noghri homeworld is severely polluted when debris from a space battle overhead leaks into their soil. Darth Vader buys their slavery by offering to help 'clean' the soil—from the genetically enginereed plants that are further polluting it.
- "The explosion of the second death star never reached Endor - because Katarn said so. Even shock waves and radiation know not to *** with Katarn."
- Lampshaded a little in a Star Wars Tales Comic book that talks of a Stormtrooper with post traumatic stress disorder due to the horror that were the Ewoks. He is telling the story to men at the pub and his final remark is that he is happy that at least the debris of the Death Star would destroy Endor. The man he is talking to replies that the Alliance shot the debris out of the Sky.
- Shooting debris out of the sky gets you a cloud of bits that's as massive as, and dumps as much energy into the atmosphere as, the original debris; it wouldn't help at all. The only reason it even sounds plausible is Rule of Perception—the cloud of dust and gas is harder to see than the big piece, so we think of it as doing less damage. The only way it's even half-way plausible is to suggest that it deflects the debris in such a way as to escape the gravity of Endor, and to assume that the Alliance isn't already busy with the huge Imperial fleet it's fighting.
- Except that maybe half the dust goes into orbit, and the rest burns up on reentry. Surface area counts.
- The Imperial fleet ran away after the Death Star was destroyed. Remember, their entire upper leadership, both military and political, had just been wiped out in a single stroke, as had their most powerful weapons. Even though the Imperial fleet at Endor was still numerically superior, it degenerated into a disorganized rabble and many of the lesser commanders ran off the carve up their own little mini-Empires from the the soon-to-disintegrate Galactic Empire. Also, it was eventually retconned that most of the Death Star's mass was hurled into hyperspace when the exploding reactor overloaded its hyperdrive. Canonically, the Endor Holocaust concept is considered propaganda produced by the remnants of the Empire.
Bob: Good job.
Z: Lots of natter here, plus a fair bit of Complaining About Shows You Dont Like. I'm editing it down.
- Alien Resurrection ends with the good guys destroying the aliens on the research ship by crashing it into Earth's surface. We get a view from space as it crashes into what appears to be the east coast of either Africa or India, producing an enormous explosion that realistically would undoubtedly have killed millions. Nobody comments on the fact that this explosion undoubtedly killed many more people than the aliens would probably ever have.
- In all fairness, one of the main conceits of the Aliens series (at least pre-Alien vs. Predator) was that if the aliens got to Earth they could easily wipe out every human on the planet. A few million probably seems like a fair trade off next to that.
- There was, in fact, an entire book series based on that very event occurring. Something like half a dozen aliens are spread across the planet, and within a year there are massive hives with thousands of aliens each, often located in sewers and such. The hives are shown to be growing exponentially, and as time goes on the intelligence of the queens continues to develop, until a captured queen has demonstrated an IQ equal to a human with Down's Syndrome (this when ALL the aliens in ALL the movies were dumber than rats, and couldn't use any real tactics). This gets even worse in a later book, when somebody has the bright idea to teach them how to use weapons.
- Dumber than rats? Then how did they cut the power...
- Same way rats do? "Hey something to chew on!" *bite* *Zap*.
- The alternative ending shows Ripley and Call sitting in the ruins of Paris, so presumably
the crashing spaceship destroyed civilisation Earth has already been destroyed or used up.
This has become...
- Alien Resurrection ends with the good guys destroying the aliens on the research ship by crashing it into Earth's surface. We get a view from space as it crashes into what appears to be the east coast of either Africa or India, producing an enormous explosion that realistically would undoubtedly have killed millions... maybe more than a xenomorph infestation.
This could do with a little more humour and probably better phrasing.
Vampire Buddha: Since this had become one of those pages where there are more aversions than proper examples, I took my hatchet to it ( 16:27GMT, 3/5/2009)
open/close all folders
What I removed
- Timothy Zahn actually makes this a major plot point in his Expanded Universe Thrawn Trilogy. the Noghri homeworld is severely polluted when debris from a space battle overhead leaks into their soil. Darth Vader buys their slavery by offering to help 'clean' the soil - from the genetically enginereed plants that are further polluting it.
- "The explosion of the second death star never reached Endor - because Katarn said so. Even shock waves and radiation know not to *** with Katarn."
- Lampshaded a little in a Star Wars Tales Comic book that talks of a Stormtrooper with post traumatic stress disorder due to the horror that were the Ewoks. He is telling the story to men at the pub and his final remark is that he is happy that at least the debris of the Death Star would destroy Endor. The man he is talking to replies that the Alliance shot the debris out of the sky.
- Realistically, this would probably cause more problems than it would solve, but some sources retconned it so that much of the debris was sucked into Hyperspace. As it stands, Endor is alive and well, with the Endor Holocaust existing only as Imperial propaganda.
- As for the Imperial fleet the Alliance would have had to deal with... between the loss of its political leadership and large swaths of its military leadership and the loss of their Dark Side Battle Meditation provided by one of the Imperial Admirals on the station, much of the fleet descended into disarray and eventually had to withdraw.
- Another EU argument is that the climate of Endor is not controlled by science, but by magic, with each season being controlled by a deity. Seriously.
- In one of Michael Stackpole's X-Wing books, a Super Star Destroyer buried under the surface of Coruscant blasts off, demolishing a large chunk of cityscape. Not only that, but it also destroys a skyhook in orbit, and the falling debris destoys even more chunks of cityscape. This has several effects in the subsequent book, such as when Rogue Squadron is unable to obtain a skyhook because they had all been grounded to accomodate people rendered homeless by the disaster.
- Averted in King of Braves Gao Gai Gar; the first fight causes significant damage to the city, though no casualties are mentioned, and later a villainous plot revolves around making the titular Humongous Mecha fight in a crowded area with lots of potential for property damage and innocent deaths. Of course, that's when they conveniently introduce the Dividing Driver, a gigantic screwdriver that creates a Phantom Zone fighting ring in the middle of wherever with no damage to the buildings and people moved out of the way.
- When the Dividing Driver is not available, the series uses property damage with glee. In FINAL, the heroes had an entire replica Earth to fight in, and nothing survived even before the whole thing went up in light. The end of the main series lampshades it a little with the revelation that the GGG has built an army of little Carpenter robots to fix up any property damage sustained waiting for GaoGaiGar to show up.
- Dirty Pair lampshades this constantly, but you still never see the kind of aftermath you would expect from unleashing that sort of devastation.
- Heavy-handedly averted in Neon Genesis Evangelion: as the series progresses, the battles against the Monster Of The Week does increasing amounts of damage to Tokyo until by the last few episode, the city is little more than a smouldering crater. Additionally, the reason Toji initially hated Shinji is because his sister was injured by the battle against Sachiel.
- "The Second and Third Lake Ashino. I hope I won't have to see any more." (Kouzou Fuyutsuki)
- The original Tokyo was actually destroyed before the first episode, and replaced by not one, but two cities. The latter of these, Tokyo-3, is specifically designed to withstand angel attacks, with buildings that fold away for convenient (underground) storage, turning it into one huge bunker network. Impressive, but not quite enough to save it.
- Painfully subverted in one episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, where an Anti-Spiral Mugann's destruction causes a massive amount of damage to the surroundings, eventually leading to the hero's arrest and imprisonment. Of course, he and the other heroes quickly figure out ways to contain the destruction in future engagements, as it wouldn't be Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann without explosive Humongous Mecha fights.
- Subverted in the second Project A Ko movie. The first one featured rather little property damage after the super fights and so on. The second ... trashed Graviton City, causing a military chief to lament the repairs cost.
- Subverted in Excel Saga, when a ship from an alien invasion land in F-City and turns it into barren wasteland. Granted, something that huge should have turned every person and thing into vapor, but then how would they do a Fist Of The North Star parody? The same reason goes for how an old man survived even though he was the first thing the ship hit.
- In the Soul Society Arc of Bleach, during Ichigo & Co.'s fights with the various shinigami, about a hundred buildings are destroyed. Kenpachi Zaraki goes as far as to slice a building in half just to prove a point, and Renji's bankai destroys several structures around him. The question here is, why is no one dead in the damage yet? Why have the characters not been prosecuted for property damage? And why the hell are those buildings even there if they're seemingly empty all the time?
- Well, being dead, they may have stopped caring.
- Too bad they can still die (they are reborn on Earth) and the writer "forgot" about it
- Averted in Bokurano, where the battles of the half-kilometre tall robots in major urban areas usually cause casualties in the thousands, both from their movements, attacks, and from the result of the loser falling over.
- Of course, the losers have bigger things to worry about, like their whole universe getting "uninstalled". Inter-universe mecha tournaments are very serious business.
- This troper notes that most shounen anime loves shoving the protagonist/antagonists through buildings/pillars. Nothing was ever said about the building, nor the building that the pillars support ever collapse, save for rare instances.
- A notable aversion is in Saint Seiya, where the various collapsing columns eventually cause large sections of the Zodiac Houses to collapse.
- And a deliberate aversion in the Poseidon Arc, where destroying the Great Pillars supporting the seven seas is kind of the point. When the Main Pillar behind Poseidon's temple is brought down, the ocean (which hung above them like a canopy) floods the god's sanctuary and washes everyone away.
- In Fist Of The North Star, the buildings were abandoned After the End anyway, so it's not like there will be collateral casualities.
- Aversion in Macross Frontier, where a shot from a Vajra mothership rips through the armor of Island 1 itself, causing immense devastation and loss of both civilian lives and material that is sucked through the breach and into deep space. The next episode shows concerns about all the millions of liters of air, water, and other necessities lost in the attack.
- And then there's the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross itself. A fleet of millions of ships, including one the same size as the Japanese Archipelago, surrounds the Earth. Thousands of those ships are destroyed, meaning that there should be gigatons of debris falling to Earth. On the other hand, Earth was pretty much fucked by that point anyway...
- As a continuation from the Macross Frontier example: by the end, after a particularly nasty invasion, the loss of resources is so catastrophic that the government realizes the colony only has a few weeks left of deep-space sustainability, and must find a planet to settle on IMMEDIATELY or else everyone on board will die. This leads directly to the Frontier's near-suicidal assault on the Vajra homeworld.
- Averted in Shin Mazinger's first mecha battle. What seems like a typical Hot-Blooded Super Robot fight at first suddenly takes a turn for the worse when Kouji realises he just accidentally crushed a bunch of civillains.
- Comics generally hold up this trope, but there have been times when it's gotten averted. One of the most infamous was Civil War; the New Warriors manage to corral Nitro, but then he blows himself up... and takes out a good chunk of a small town in Connecticut. The fact that Marvel had basically been acting on a "no civilian casualties" philosophy for the past few decades was deftly ignored. This was also regarded as a Wall Banger by many fans, especially when the reason Nitro could suddenly explode so powerfully comes out.
- Marvel has an entire series, Damage Control, about how they deal with, insure, and repair the aftermaths of so many super battles in the Big Applesauce. (For the record, when The Thing bats a villain through a row of parked cars, insurance counts it as "collision damage".)
- Chaos Theory would like to have a word with Amadeus Cho.
- Averted in the DC Elseworld miniseries Kingdom Come, when a team of "super heroes" attacks Parasite, who splits Captain Atom open. The resulting blast irradiates most of the American mid-west and kills millions of civilians.
- Doubly averted as at the end of the story the UN decides to drop a uber-nuke on the grand
finally finale super hero fight in part to avoid the massive collateral damage the fight would inevitably cause across the world.
- Averted in the French comic series The Adventures of Tanguy and Laverdure. The protagonists, members of Armée de l'Air (French Air Force), are always told to avoid engagement above cities or otherwise populated civilian places. More often than not, this brings a dilemma and in many cases, a plot point. One volume deals with a enemy pilot that uses that directive to his advantage, purposefully flying low above densely populated cities to avoid getting shot down.
- Averted in the Big Guy And Rusty The Boy Robot comic - as Big Guy dodges the monster's nuclear breath, he comments that he needs to finish the job quickly as each blast "wastes millions of taxpayer dollars!" and he takes care to use nonlethal methods against the mutated citizens. However, a Japanese official describes casualties as "astonishingly light," despite the number of buildings trashed and the ridiculously high population density of Tokyo.
- Averted massively in Invincible, where a fight between Invincible and Omni-Man (Invincible's father, BTW) wrecked a city and killed hundreds. Tragically Lampshaded, where the brother of one of the dead swears vengeance on Invincible, and in the process winds up accidentally killing his wife and son.
- This troper recalls a part of the city battle scene where a grappling Megatron and Optimus actually fly through a crowded building. There is no way that people were walking away from that.
- It was a brilliant idea. Staying out in the desert meant getting bounced by alien combat-robots with air superiority until dead. They opted for Stalingrad on the Colorado instead.
- Not only that, they tried to convince us that the government managed to "hush it up". Ri-i-i-ight.
- Would anyone really have cared of Wilmington, Delaware got destroyed anyway?
- The book averts this by incorporating collateral damage into the plan. In the book, the plan was to make the tallest building in the world topple over and destroy the history museum next door.
- Averted in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which the titular beast's incredibly pathogenic blood is given as a reason for the military not being able to deploy artillery against the creature, and the creature's death throes start a fire that utterly destroys most of Coney Island. Noteworthy in that The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms helped start the 1950s Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever craze.
- I'm willing to chalk that up to Rule of Funny or Rule of Three, as that is the third time we see the kid and given his line. However, It's kind of odd that the falling wreckage zeroed directly into the Parr house.
- Averted in Cloverfield, where it looks as if the production team studied news footage from 9/11/01 in order to realistically portray what would happen if a giant mutant hellbeast (or whatever it was) rampaged through Manhattan, knocking buildings down.
- In Ocean's Eleven, the team uses a device to generate an electromagnetic pulse that affects much of Las Vegas. The lights go out, then 30 seconds later they come back on again without any problems. In reality, an electromagnetic pulse like that would permanently disable all electronics within a large radius, causing millions of dollars of damage. If a hospital was within that radius, it would disable all of the life support machines, killing dozens of people. Quite a lot to go through just to rob three casinos.
- If we substitute "power-outage generator" for "EMP generator", we probably get what the movie intended. It helps that non-nuclear EMP generators that could bring down entire cities don't exist (yet?), and if they did they would be quite a bit harder to steal.
- They exist. They were used in the Iraq war. Popular Mechanics did a special on it. Turns out with a few hundred bucks of parts from Radio Shack and you can build one. It's actually suspected to be one of the easiest WMD to make...
- To be fair, that's how things (usually) work in Marvel comics. Titanic battles right in the middle of Manhattan, dozens (sometimes hundreds) of buildings damaged, yet nobody dies, and the next day everyone in New York is back to work as though nothing happened. In this respect, the movie did remain absolutely true to it's original source material.
- That particular series has a get-out-of-jail-free card for such questions: He's The Goddamned Batman.
- Averted in Batman Begins though, where Batman's chase scene nets himself a What the Hell Hero from Alfred, who specifically notes how dangerous and irresponsible it was.
- Lampshaded and subverted in The Simpsons Movie when the bomb destroys the glass dome. The town is in ruins, they have to rebuild it, and are still in the middle of rebuilding during the opening of the next season of the show.
- Played straight with the glass pieces falling from the sky, which should have wounded everyone terribly.
- And recurring character Dr. Nick Riviera is killed by one of the larger pieces of falling glass.
- Bye, Dr. Nick. :(
- He's Oh-Kay. My money is on "Clone". Although self experimenting to make himself immortal is still on the table.
- Subverted hard in Team America World Police, with a running gag that the heroes always cause massive collateral damage, probably more than the terrorist attacks they were trying to prevent, and usually to world-famous structures.
- Also subverted in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, when Godzilla and Hedorah's first scuffle leaves 35 dead with hundreds more injured...yet when Hedorah returns a second time, no less than 13,000 people are reported dead from the smog monster's sulfurous poisons.
- Exception: The City Who Fought by Anne McCaffrey and S.M. Stirling. An out of control starship on a collision course with the space station explodes, and a major part of the rest of the story involves dealing with the enormous cloud of debris that is generated as a result.
- Averted in the Tom Clancy novel "The Bear and the Dragon". After a Chinese nuclear missile is destroyed over Washington DC, the President makes arrangments to clean up any radioactive material.
- Averted in the science fiction novel Red Lightning by John Varley, when a large object that is unidentified for most of the novel crashes into the Atlantic Ocean and floods land within a hundred miles of the Atlantic coast in the United States. Other places near the Gulf also suffer similar effects, but as the main character has family in Florida, the novel focuses less on them.
- Averted in Finder's Stone. When already great and enlarged further ancient dragon crashlands into city, it's less than catastrophe, but enough to cause serious damage and trigger "state of emergency" procedures: gates are closed, guards are mobilized, etc.
- Very averted in the Star Trek Expanded Universe Destiny trilogy, in which a massive Borg attack takes out, among a lot of other things, just about all of Starfleet's ships, huge chunks of the Betazoid, Andorian, and Klingon homeworlds, the Vulcan city of Shi-Kahr, and several recurring characters from the EU. And that's just what we've seen so far.
- Averted in Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth universe, where the primary method of interstellar propulsion is a gravity drive that is said to have catastrophic effects if it is brought too close to a planetary mass. In a flashback in Orphan Star, a half-constructed drive is activated by a Mind Controlled engineer and annihilates an entire mountain before destroying itself. For this reason, spacecraft must use conventional thrusters and shuttlecraft near a planet. One of the things that makes Flinx's Cool Starship so special is that it can land on KK drive without causing any side-effects.
- This actually wouldn't likely be a problem; as it turns out, it takes a fair amount of radiation to kill a human being. When you look at the numbers involved, there's effectively no chance that the dispersal of a warhead's worth of radiological material (particularly over a wide area) would be dangerous enough to kill or seriously harm anyone, at least not for several weeks - more than enough time to evacuate the area. The threat posed by radiological "dirty bombs" in general has been greatly exaggerated by the media.
- In fact, weapon-grade (i. e. highly purified) fission material isn't very radioactive at all. The real danger comes from the products of fission (needless to say, without actual explosion their quantity is negligible).
- Depends if it is Uranium or Plutonium. Plutonium is definitely radioactive, emits a moderate amount of radiation, and a significant long term hazard if it gets into the body. A dirty bomb of any kind probably wouldn't kill many people straight away, but would YOU want to live on a radioactive street?
- To their credit, they tried to correct their error in season 6, when an unexploded nuke crashed into a San Francisco wharf; the local fire department arrives before NEST can, and over a dozen firefighters receive a lethal dose of radiation. Unfortunately nuclear weapons are made from uranium and plutonium, which are only weak emitters of alpha particles, the most easily shielded-against form of radiation. The most dire effect that the firefighters would have had to suffer through would have been decon.
- Ironically the later seasons were less realistic than Season 2 (Man, nuclear weapons go missing like pencils). The military notes that detonating a rogue nuclear device in the ocean would cause massive damage and essentially eliminate ocean life off the west coast of the US, which is why they have it go off in the desert.
- And don't forget how many Angel Grovians have no doubt survived the carnage, avoided being blasted, stepped on or fallen on...and then get incinerated by the inexplicably exploding monster.
- There have even been instances of the Power Rangers' Megazord blasting a giant monster through a nearby skyscraper, demolishing the building and probably killing an awful lot of people in the process.
- This troper remembers hearing that at least one monster makes the comment " I hate empty buildings don't you?" Before smashing them. So all the skyscrapers we see are not supposed to be occupied. Angel Grove probably has an evacuate alarm for giant monsters or something.
- Sentai was mixed about this. One ep of Dai Sentai Goggle V had a kaiju inverting gravity in a building with people visibly inside.
- Averted in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Deja Q", where a moon is inexplicably falling toward a planet. They're quite clear on the concept that blowing up the moon would make matters worse, and in fact at one point Q complains that, if they miscalculate, their proposed solution will make the moon crumble, which will essentially destroy the planet.
- Averted in the 2008 Christmas special, where the Doctor realises that a giant falling steampunk cyberman thing can do a lot of damage, and uses a Chekhov'sGun from earlier in the episode to teleport it away into "the void" before it hits the ground.
- Video games are a terrible offender on this - things crashing or exploding surprisingly rarely damage the environs or buildings, and sometimes friendly or neutral targets are magically immune, as well - both in the story and gameplay. It's actually easier to list the exceptions here.
- Loudly subverted in Half-Life 2, when the Big Bad tries to talk you out of destroying his fortress' reactor by arguing the resulting explosion will take out most of the city. You do it anyway. Later, at the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 1, it explodes and takes out most of the city. Doofus.
- Considering the state of the city, you were most likely doing it a favor. Also, the people inside were either sheep or evil- the good guys already got the hell out of dodge, as the episodic sequels indicate.
- In Supreme Commander, crashing aircraft will damage any unit or building they collide with, and when a commander's mech is destroyed, its reactor goes critical, generating a massive explosion that destroys nearly any units or buildings in a wide area, friendly or enemy.
- Happened in the original game too, but without warning, leading to the ever popular Commander Kamikaze.
- In fact, a flying experimental unit (Like the CZAR or Soul Ripper) who crashes can kill a fully healed Commander if they land on him.
- In the game DEFCON: Everybody Dies, if you shoot down a plane over one of your structures, there's a chance it will collide with it as it goes down and destroy it.
- The Super Robot game Robot Alchemic Drive subverts this heavily. Not only do falling robots crush buildings and people, but stray laser blasts and special abilities likewise can take down buildings very quickly. Since the Player is rewarded for reducing the amount of damage done, this can be a problem. Even better, as Kid With The Remote Control, the Player can even crush, blast, stomp, or Rocket Punch himself to death whether intentionally or accidentally.
- Similarly, Zone Of The Enders penalizes you for damage caused to the surrounding structures and especially for civilian casualties, whether caused by the enemy or a missed shot from the player's Humongous Mecha.
- On the opposite end of things, the Godzilla games have minigames involved in smashing the cities to bits. Even for the GOOD monsters! (And hilariously enough, the human-controlled MOGUERA). You also need to smash open buildings to find the Godzilla DNA capsules, and can also pick up and heave buildings at the opposition. Ghidora, Jet Jaguar, and Orga can even lift monstrous skyscrapers and throw them! Orga with ONE HAND! Jet Jaguar is so huge that knocking him over causes a concussion shockwave that will even damage the attacker! All in all, ridiculously insane and keeping with the random destructiveness of the original.
- And in the SNES game Super Godzilla as well, you could knock over skyscrapers to create shortcuts. Though you took some damage for it.
- In Rise Of Nations, falling aeroplanes can damage below buildings.
- Ditto for Soviet Kirov Zeppelins in Red Alert 2.
- Any aircraft crashing into a building in Red Alert 2 will cause damage, although Kirovs are especially bad.
- The Battle Tech tabletop game and subsequent Mech Warrior PC games have various handlings of a rule that sometimes has a destroyed mech's fusion reactor lose containment and explode with the power of a tactical nuke, which is even featured on the intro cinematic to one of the games. This contributor fondly remembers the final mission of the Mech Warrior 3 expansion, when I loaded my mech up with high-powered energy weapons (which also raised a target's heat in this game), and fully unloaded on a target from maximum range. It died not from the damage, but from the crazy spike in overheating, setting off its reactor and blasting everything off my own mech except for the central chassis, and some remnants of an arm and leg. Good thing it was the last enemy...
- Taken to a ridiculous extreme in Earth Defense Force: 2017, wherein any explosive weapon (even a single hand grenade) is capable of demolishing any structure, the Radio Chatter implies that every single military power on the face of the Earth has been wiped out by the last mission (except for the players character, of course). Presumably some civilian militia as well. Oh, and the many aliens are about the size of a modestly large building, one is as large as an entire city block, and one is a spaceship the size of a freakin' city. Odds are that the rubble from their corpses would have done a lot more damage then the aliens themselves.
- Significantly subverted in Xenogears, to the degree of creating a minor plot arc. After defeating a flying enemy battleship over the city of Nortune, the heroes try to steer the remains of the ship away from the city, risking their own lives. They give up, though, and only Elly keeps trying to push the ship away from the city. She is saved at the last second by Grahf.
- Completely subverted in, of all things, Sim City 2000. When a disaster hits your town (including, yes, the ones you cause), a newspaper pops up telling you what happened, including randomly generated numbers of injuries and deaths. The numbers don't seem to scale very much, nor do they actually effect your real population total, but it does give the impression that there are real people down there.
- An easter egg in Sim City 2000 involves clicking on the helicopter that circles the city. The pilot yells "I'm hit!" and spirals in for a fiery crash, taking out any buildings that happened to be under it at the time. If you're playing on hard, it'll start a fire that'll burn down half the city if you don't put it out fast.
- You can also cause plane crashes, by, for instance, placing tall buildings directly in front of runways. I once placed a dense commercial district around an airport, then wondered where those periodic explosions where coming from. The Sims were apparently not smart enough to stop launching planes. However, neither the news ticker nor the population marker were affected by this.
- An aversion occurs in a mission of Grand Theft Auto IV: you're tasked with following and destroying a helicopter being piloted by a terrorist in another helicopter. However, your partner (the one carrying the RPG to take it down) will not fire until both choppers are far out into the river due to being ordered to do so to avoid civilian casualties.
- In the storyline that began the Empyrean Age expansion of Eve Online, a major battle was fought over the planet Mekhios. Subsequent news reports spoke of the devastating effects on the planet.
- At the end of Legend of Lufia II the giant flying island falls from the sky and lands in the sea. Estimates of deaths from ensuing the tidal waves this caused have not been tallied...
- In the MMO "City Of Heroes" during the Alien Invasion before the playable storyline, Statesman was guilty of this for the first one or two ships he destroyed, but mildly adverted when he realizes the damage that the falling ships are doing and pushes them out to sea before destroying them.
- In Katamari Damacy, you roll up people to make new stars. They scream in horror. Obviously, this is fine - it's even quite fun - but it's extremely bizarre when you roll over a whale. It thrashes in agony and makes horrible moaning noises. I suppose it's a Japanese game, but...
- Four words: Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division.
- A previous episode of Justice League Unlimited actually had the devastation caused by a superhero fight to be a major point of the plot.
- In the Direct to Video movie, Superman/Doomsday, the titular monster's rampage is limited to ground level and only affects his immediate vicinity. When Superman gets to him, the collateral damage escalates to the entire city, demolishing buildings and leaving giant craters all over the place. And that's nothing compared to Superman's fight with his Knight Templar clone.
- The first episode of The Batman has the titular character getting rid of the Joker's poison by dumping it into Lake Gotham. This later gets something of a Lampshade Hanging later when we see what Joker's mind is like and there's a huge swarm of flying fish with Joker faces (which is also a Shout-Out to several different stories about the Joker).
- Averted in one Powerpuff Girls episode, "Uh Oh Dynamo". While the "Dy.Na.Mo" Humongous Mecha the Professor made for the girls did destroy the Monster of the Week, it also obliterated a good portion of Townsville.
- Also averted in a Dexters Laboratory episode - when a enormous meteor is headed towards the Earth, Dexter flies his Humongous Mecha out and shatters it with one punch. The resulting fragments destroy his robot and the planet.
- Also subverted when a battle destroys a huge chunk of the dark side of the moon. Coop says since no one can see it, it doesn't matter, but the loss in mass ends up causing all kinds of natural disasters, and he has to push the pieces back on it.
- They take it a step further, particularly in some of the earlier episodes. Although much of New Jersey is destroyed quite casually, specific buildings are often labelled with big signs saying things like "Conveniently Empty Building" and "This Building Was Going to be Demolished Anyway".
- Contrast the "Museum Of Irreplaceable Art".
- Transformers Animated is surprisingly good at avoiding this, including one of the few crashing spaceships that does explicitly try to avoid hitting a populated area by heading for a lake and a crew of Autobots helping to rebuild wrecked buildings in Detroit after their battle with Starscream. When one episode ended with a large battle in the city, the next started with the Autobots helping to rebuild. Still, there's only so far you can push the envelope on Saturday morning, so no casualties were reported, even after Starscream flies through an office building.
- Also subverted in a later episode where Bulkhead intercepts an incoming missile in the middle of a city by throwing a car at it, but it did massive damage to the surrounding area. It was played mostly for laughs, and the only one to get damaged was an annoying robotic reporter that got smashed under a car.
- Also averted in, of all places, the original Transformers cartoon. The three-part episode "The Ultimate Doom" has Megatron bring Cybertron into Earth's orbit in order to destroy Earth and harvest the energy. For the next two episodes, Earth is still devastated, and there are several shots of the Autobots helping repair the damage.
- Subverted in The Simpsons episode "Viva Ned Flanders" with the demolition of Mr. Burns' casino. The one who set the explosives wasn't aware that you're suppose to make the buildings implode into themselves and not blow them up, which causes a gigantic dust cloud to sweep across several blocks.
- Averted in the French film "Les Chevaliers du Ciel," in which a hijacked Mirage jet is deliberately shot down over a large park in Paris.
- To be fair, it didn't actually spray any people in between escaping the hall and spraying the executives.
BritBllt: Removed a whole bunch of argumentative
Justifying Edits that, apart from being
Justifying Edits, relied on speculation and seemed half-intended as
Flame Bait. Also cut out a rather a odd line in Dragonball: "also hate to be that guy but the earth has two moons. The moon and corithne (or something like that.)" Sounds like a
Justifying Edit, the odd self-referential phrasing makes it unsuitable anyway, and as far as I can tell, it's not true at all in Dragonball. The entry might be referring to Cruithne, a Near-Earth Asteroid discovered in the '90s that shares Earth's orbit, but it's
not a moon (and not relevant to Dragonball anyway).
MattyDienhoff: Since this is not a proper example, but I really got a kick out of it, I'll mention this here: this trope was averted in the extreme in
this hilarious animated music video, in which the Earth is being invaded by aliens, and
John Wayne infiltrates the alien mothership and cripples it, only for it to crash into the Earth, blowing the entire planet to bits.
