History Main / SceneryGorn

[[caption-width-right:350:[[BlatantLies What a beautiful vacation spot!]]]]

* /Wiki/{{Taerel Setting}}: The Zu'aan Empire's cities and buildings during The Age of Awakening and the Age of Shattering. The buildings are ruins of their former glory, but oddly enough seem still quite strong as shown in a page mentioning a hydroponic farm and a Zu'aan group that lives in skyscrapers.. The descriptions are text-based though.

[[folder:Film]]

* The entirety of ''WesternAnimation/{{Nine}}'', and it really is ''gorgeous''.

* Who-Ville in ''WesternAnimation/HortonHearsAWho'', after Vlad drops the clover from what would be unspeakable heights (to the Whos at least).

* The playfield for ''[[Pinball/{{Fire}} Fire!]]'' is dominated by a city skyline awash in flames. For extra pizazz, the game uses a rotating color cylinder inside the cabinet to make the table and model buildings appear to be on fire.

[[quoteright:350:[[VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_screen41b_7414.jpg]]]]

* In ''Aftershock!'', the destruction of Cascade Gully by the earthquake at the end of ''Literature/{{Shatterbelt}}'' is described in harrowing detail, beginning with the Great Hall at St. Bernard's Park, which Tracy had just narrowly managed to evacuate in time.
-->The tall pillars in the portico of the Great Hall began to break and buckle, the concrete lintel cracked, and suddenly the whole building -- walls, roof and rafters -- crushed in a tangle of shattered stone and splintered timber. A plume of dust swirled up above the wreck, and masses of debris -- bits of brick, torn wood, and slivers of stained glass -- rained down through it in an evil shower. The school crest and motto, moulded in heavy concrete, crashed onto the shattered pillars and lay face upwards, open to the sky.\\
Out in the world beyond St. Bernard's Park there were much more horrifying scenes. The earthquake was shaking the city to pieces. Walls were toppling, houses collapsing, towers buckling. Concrete supports in the older buildings were giving way, and whole floors were tilting drunkenly or falling on those below, like layers of pancake. People were being trapped, flung down, crushed. Cracks as wide as a hand-span were opening up in roads and footpaths. Above Cascade Gully the whole hillside broke away and slid down the steep slope, crushing the old mine-shaft there and bombarding the valley below with an avalanche of boulders and rubble.
* Creator/ChuckPalahniuk's ''Literature/{{Damned}}'' combines this with {{Squick}}. [[FireAndBrimstoneHell Hell]] boasts such attractions as the Dandruff Desert, [[GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion the Swamp of Partial Birth Abortions]], and [[ADateWithRosiePalms the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm]].
* ''Franchise/TheDarkTower'' contains numerous, detailed descriptions of the post-apocalyptic land of Mid-World. Some of King's descriptions are quite creative, especially when it comes to mutated animals and "thinnies."
** A lot of things King has done have some of this. Some examples being Cell and [[spoiler:the future with JFK]] in /11/22/63.
* The ''Literature/DeltoraQuest'' series has [[{{Mordor}} the Shadowlands]], a completely desolate, flat, empty grey wasteland, where the sky is always covered with clouds and the only inhabitants are feral monsters and the occasional heaps of imperfectly made [[ArtificialHuman Grey Guards]]. It's so gorntastic that just being there is fills you with magically induced soul crushing despair. ''The 3 Doors'' adds the Saltings, which is basically the proto-Shadowlands, only completely filled with carnivorous Snails. The Scour and the Harbour aren't much prettier, either.
* The first few pages of ''Literature/{{Gormenghast}}'' in particular are so full of rotting corridors and oppressive kitchens that readers may find themselves suffering from an abstract kind of seasonal affective disorder until the lens of narrative rises above the tower and surveys the sunset over a wooded mountain. Even then, it's a bleak and thorny world Mervyn Peake paints in this foreshortened masterpiece.

* ''Webcomic/LovecraftIsMissing'' has some [[http://lovecraftismissing.com/?p=486 great slums]].

* In C. S. Lewis's ''The Magician's Nephew'' (the sixth book in ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' series, but the first in internal story history), two children, Polly and Digory, accidentally stumble into the wrong world in the Wood Between the Worlds (by jumping into the wrong pool with their magic rings on their fingers). Instead of arriving back in Earth, they find themselves in an ancient, totally lonely, lifeless world seemingly covered entirely by a devastated, crumbling city -- the sun has gone red and hovers forever on the western horizon, in a dark sky. It is here that Digory foolishly obeys a verse posted by a bell and hammer tempting one to strike the bell with the hammer, and does so, and brings to life once more Queen Jadis, who later becomes the White Witch in the first book, ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'' - and of course desperately wishes he could undo his action, but cannot. Jadis reveals that it was she who, aeons ago, destroyed the world whose ruins the three are now in, known as Charn, by uttering the Deplorable Word, which totally destroyed her enemies, and, in the process, their entire world.

* ''Series/RaisedByWolves2020: The flashbacks to the time on Earth are ''not'' pleasant, with cities utterly destroyed from the war, and the camera emphasizing the swaths of urban decay.
* ''Series/{{Revolution}}'': Many shots of overgrown modern stuff, such as a city being overgrown with plants in the [[Recap/RevolutionS1E1Pilot pilot episode]].

[[folder:Fanfiction]]

* ''Series/StarTrekDerpSpaceNine'': the Cardassian homeworld following the Dominion genocide, in the series finale.

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* ''Series/FlashForward2009'': The first 17 minutes of the first episode is dedicated to showing the destruction that occured in downtown LA when the entire world's population simultaneously blacked out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. There are more images from around the world throughout the rest of the episode.

* ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'''s [[GrandFinale final two episodes]] has Sozin's Comet giving firebenders a ''massive'' boost to their power. The result is some of the most simultaneously horrifying, destructive and beautiful visuals the show ever offered. The final duel between [[CainAndAbel Azula and Zuko]] in particular, with Azula's enhanced blue flames blasting against Zuko's enhanced orange flames, is an incredible spectacle.

* Who-Ville in ''WesternAnimation/HortonHearsAWho'', after Vlad drops the clover from what would be unspeakable hights; to the Whos at least.

[[/folder]]

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* ''Comicbook/{{Watchmen}}''. The aftermath of [[spoiler:the psychic explosion from the post-teleport death of the creature Ozymandias beams into New York. Not much damage to buildings but TRUCKLOADS OF DEAD BODIES.]]
** Inverted in [[Film/{{Watchmen}} the movie]] - [[spoiler:buildings crashed by the hundreds in a perfectly spherical crater, but nearly all the dead are completely disintegrated.]]
* One comic in the ''[[ComicBook/{{Miracleman}} Marvelman]]'' series, featuring [[PsychoForHire Kid Marvelman]], has London becoming just about the closest definition of Scenery Gorn after he goes on a murderous rampage through the city and gruesomely murders nearly every inhabitant in a highly disturbing manner. Some of the things shown include people running from a rain of severed hands and feet, skins hung up on clothes lines, corpses impaled on the hands of Big Ben, the Tower Bridge in ruin, mounds of severed heads, heads on pikes, cars full of people plummeting to earth, mutilated children wandering screaming through the streets, and countless dead bodies. [[Creator/AlanMoore Guess who wrote both these comics.]]
* Pick an issue of either ''ComicBook/{{Irredeemable}}'' or ''[[ComicBook/{{Irredeemable}} Incorruptible]]''.
* ''ComicBook/{{Invincible}}'' has this in any fight involving a Viltrumite or when it's shown that the [[spoiler:''planetary ring'' around Viltrum is made of all the Viltrumites that died by the plague.]]
* ''ComicBook/TheInvisibles'' has the blasted, holocaust-slum lands of the Outer Church, devastated cityscapes filled with impaled corpses and stalked by the nightmare figures of the Archons and their servants.

* Most ''Druuna'' albums, aside from the erotic content, are filled with beautiful scenery of the post-apocalyptic world that future humanity resides in.

* The first few pages of ''Literature/{{Gormenghast}}'' in particular are so full of rotting corridors and oppressive kitchens that readers may find themselves suffering from an abstract kind of seasonal affective disorder until the lens of narrative rises above the tower and surveys the sunset over a wooded mountain. Even then, it's a bleak and thorny world Mervyn Peake paints in this foreshortened masterpiece.
* ''Literature/ASeriesOfUnfortunateEvents'' has the ruins of the Baudelaire mansion, and Olaf's house in TheFilmOfTheBook.

* In the book and radio versions of ''Literature/TheRestaurantAtTheEndOfTheUniverse'', Zaphod Breeblebrox visits a bombed-out wasteland of a planet, littered with the crashed hulks of numerous buildings.

* ''Literature/SwanSong'' by Robert R. [=McCammon=], which is hardly surprising as it deals with the aftermath of a nuclear war.

* In the short story "Ananke" from Creator/StanislawLem's ''Literature/TalesOfPirxThePilot'', [[spoiler: a long time is spent describing the wreck of a huge (as in, 100000 tons heavy) crashed rocket.]]
* The Zone from ''Literature/RoadsidePicnic'' is a town that got turned into a disaster area by an alien visitation. It's described as looking completely normal, if deserted, at first glance, yet having many subtle unsettling details - non-decaying trucks, shadows that point in the wrong direction. It's riddled with invisible death traps and physics-defying artifacts.
* The ''Literature/DeltoraQuest'' series has [[{{Mordor}} the Shadowlands]], a completely desolate, flat, empty grey wasteland, where the sky is always covered with clouds and the only inhabitants are feral monsters and the occasional heaps of imperfectly made [[ArtificialHuman Grey Guards]]. It's so gorntastic that just being there is fills you with magically induced soul crushing despair. ''The 3 Doors'' adds the Saltings, which is basically the proto-Shadowlands, only completely filled with carnivorous Snails. The Scour and the Harbour aren't much prettier, either.
* Creator/HPLovecraft generally preferred describing attractive scenery, but when ugly scenery did show up, he certainly didn't skimp on descriptions of that, either. The "blasted heath" from ''Literature/TheColourOutOfSpace'' is particularly notable (though in that case, it's relevant to the plot).
* In C. S. Lewis's ''The Magician's Nephew'' (the sixth book in ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' series, but the first in internal story history), two children, Polly and Digory, accidentally stumble into the wrong world in the Wood Between the Worlds (by jumping into the wrong pool with their magic rings on their fingers). Instead of arriving back in Earth, they find themselves in an ancient, totally lonely, lifeless world seemingly covered entirely by a devastated, crumbling city - the sun has gone red and hovers forever on the western horizon, in a dark sky. It is here that Digory foolishly obeys a verse posted by a bell and hammer tempting one to strike the bell with the hammer, and does so, and brings to life once more Queen Jadis, who later becomes the White Witch in the first book, ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'' - and of course desperately wishes he could undo his action, but cannot. Jadis reveals that it was she who, aeons ago, destroyed the world whose ruins the three are now in, known as Charn, by uttering the Deplorable Word, which totally destroyed her enemies, and, in the process, their entire world.
* ''Literature/TheKillingStar'' details the aftermath of the [[KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter relativistic bombing]] of the Solar System quite thoroughly, particularly on Earth.
* In ''Aftershock!'', the destruction of Cascade Gully by the earthquake at the end of ''Literature/{{Shatterbelt}}'' is described in harrowing detail, beginning with the Great Hall at St. Bernard's Park, which Tracy had just narrowly managed to evacuate in time.
-->The tall pillars in the portico of the Great Hall began to break and buckle, the concrete lintel cracked, and suddenly the whole building -- walls, roof and rafters -- crushed in a tangle of shattered stone and splintered timber. A plume of dust swirled up above the wreck, and masses of debris -- bits of brick, torn wood, and slivers of stained glass -- rained down through it in an evil shower. The school crest and motto, moulded in heavy concrete, crashed onto the shattered pillars and lay face upwards, open to the sky.\\
Out in the world beyond St. Bernard's Park there were much more horrifying scenes. The earthquake was shaking the city to pieces. Walls were toppling, houses collapsing, towers buckling. Concrete supports in the older buildings were giving way, and whole floors were tilting drunkenly or falling on those below, like layers of pancake. People were being trapped, flung down, crushed. Cracks as wide as a hand-span were opening up in roads and footpaths. Above Cascade Gully the whole hillside broke away and slid down the steep slope, crushing the old mine-shaft there and bombarding the valley below with an avalanche of boulders and rubble.

* Though some places are less {{grimdark}} than others, official art of Imperial cities in ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' counts as this ''before'' the conflicts that blast them into ruins. [[NothingButSkulls Mountains of skulls]], the [[KillItWithFire charred remains]] of witches or mutants hanging from gibbets lining the streets, [[ChurchMilitant gothic cathedrals]] towering over throngs of hollow-eyed citizens, ominous [[WretchedHive hive cities]] dotting industrial wastelands covering entire planets...
** The ''Planetstrike'' expansion allows Scenery Gorn of the do-it-yourself variety. Scenarios consists of a defender setting up a fortress, and the attacker blowing it to hell with orbital bombardments and drop troops. One battle report displayed before-and-after pics of the battlefield - the "before" image was a standard-issue Imperial desert fortress encrusted with fortifications, and the "after" image was mainly craters, still-bubbling laser beam scars, and similar wreckage.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}'' wallows in this, between the post-apocalyptic ruins, the CyberPunk aesthetic of the cities, and the [[EldritchAbomination Alien Intelligences]] and their magical creations and experiments. External and internal artwork is full of Scenery Gorn; check out the cover of [[https://palladium-store.com/1001/product/869-Rifts-WB-29-Madhaven.html Madhaven]], for example.
* ''TabletopGame/WraithTheOblivion'' and the later books of ''TabletopGame/{{Orpheus}}'' go into great detail describing the Shadowlands, the realm of the dead. Places and things with strong emotional attachments that are destroyed in the world of the living still exist in there, but greatly damaged and decayed and crammed in together with other things from different eras. Necropoli, or reflections of still living cities, are particularly prone to this, as are places strongly associated with death; several places associated with the Holocaust are so horrific they get their own very disturbing yet surprisingly respectful [[http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Charnel_Houses_of_Europe%3A_The_Shoah volume]]. As it takes place [[AfterTheEnd after a huge Underworld cataclysm]], ''Orpheus'' makes the Shadowlands an even nastier place to be.

* Every description of the surface world in ''TabletopGame/DragonMech'' emphasises the mid-apocalyptic setting. Natural beauty is so rare following the coming of the lunar rain that kings will pay a fortune for a bunch of daffodils.
* ''TabletopGame/DeadReign'' has tons of this due to the ZombieApocalypse setting. You really have to admire the detail the artists put into the ruined buildings and piles of corpses...

* ''TabletopGame/ChangelingTheDreaming'' has a weird twist on this trope. A changeling experiences the wonder and power of creation and imagination, so the art has an occasional motif where the ''TabletopGame/WorldOfDarkness'' is depicted as this trope to changelings because they can see what the world is like when seen through eyes that still Dream.

* ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'':
** The Exiles meet in a post-apocalyptic desert hellhole that used to be Jade Harley's tropical island home. Plenty of other locations are blasted to rubble, struck by meteors, shredded by [[spoiler:[[HeroKiller Jack Noir]]]], or otherwise hideously mauled, but this is the one that gets the most post-Reckoning screentime.
** The aftermath seen in Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4. [[spoiler: All of the kids' planets have been shattered, and are floating in pieces in the B2 universe.]]
* ''Webcomic/AwfulHospital'' has the titular Hospital, where every surface is so filthy that you can literally see the germs crawling around on them.
* ''Webcomic/StandStillStaySilent'' gives us... the abandoned, post-apocalyptic [[IDontLikeTheSoundOfThatPlace Silent World]]. With the vast majority of the land abandoned due to the [[ThePlague Great]] [[ZombieApocalypse Sickness]], you get hauntingly beautiful, overgrown vistas of abandoned military complexes, road infrastructure, towns and cities that approach the rest of the standard for SceneryPorn in the webcomic. Beautiful, but very creepy.

* ''WesternAnimation/ThundarrTheBarbarian'' took this one step further: forget the trashed cities, is that the MOON in pieces up there?
* Who-Ville in ''WesternAnimation/HortonHearsAWho'', after Vlad drops the clover from what would be unspeakable hights; to the Whos at least.

* The opening sequence of ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'' has this right at the beginning. You see a wasteland with some nukes and broken televisions lying around, followed by a zombie-like arm waving out from a tree stump. Also, in "Ocean of Fear", you can see the remains of a city when Finn and Jake go underwater. That's not all, though. In "Mortal Folly", the entrance to the Lich's lair bears resemblance to a subway that's been attacked by the black plague. Oh, you can also see a huge crater in the Earth in "The Real You" if you pause fast enough when Finn puts the glasses on and when they're taken off. Whenever there's an episode about [[spoiler: Marceline's]] past, there will be plenty of this.
* Galaluna becomes this after it has been invaded by Modula and the Mutraddi in ''WesternAnimation/SymBionicTitan''.
* To break Rainbow Dash in ''[[WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic The Return of Harmony Part 1]]'', Discord whips up an image of [[SceneryPorn Cloudsdale]] literally falling apart, and the townsponies unable to do anything but gape in horror. This is an illusion meant to gore Dashie on MortonsFork.

* ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'''s [[GrandFinale final two episodes]] has Sozin's Comet giving firebenders a ''massive'' boost to their power. The result is some of the most simultaneously horrifying, destructive and beautiful visuals the show ever offered. The final duel between [[CainAndAbel Azula and Zuko]] in particular, with Azula's enhanced blue flames blasting against Zuko's enhanced orange flames, is an incredible spectacle.

Picture this: you are making your dream AfterTheEnd film, comic, manga, or book, and you need a way to really ''knock it into'' your audience that this world is, indeed, a CrapsackWorld. What do you do? Cue slow pan over abandoned, bleak, ruined cityscape or radiation-scorched wilderness. Preferably both. If you're doing a {{cyberpunk}} work, be sure to have [[CityNoir gloomy, twilit, ominous skyscrapers towering over]] [[WretchedHive masses of stinking poverty]] — [[IndustrialGhetto lots of smokestacks, toxic waste and pollution by the slums]], and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking decadent advertisements choking the more economically robust areas.]] If you're making a DisasterMovie, be sure to have tons of destroyed skyscrapers, overturned cars, general burning chaos, or in the aftermath, mute, smoky desolation.

* ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'''s [[GrandFinale final two episodes]] has Sozin's Comet giving firebenders a ''massive'' boost to their power. The result is some of the most simultaneously horrifying and beautiful visuals the show ever offered. The final duel between [[CainAndAbel Azula and Zuko]] in particular, with Azula's enhanced blue flames blasting against Zuko's enhanced orange flames, is an incredible spectacle.

* The final two episodes of the four-part GrandFinale for ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'' has Sozin's Comet giving firebenders a ''massive'' boost to their power. The result is some of the most simultaneously horrifying and beautiful visuals the show ever offered. The final duel between [[CainAndAbel Azula and Zuko]] in particular, with Azula's enhanced blue flames blasting against Zuko's enhanced orange flames, is an incredible spectacle.

* ''Series/{{Cosmos}}' 2014 series usually has SceneryPorn... until UsefulNotes/NeilDeGrasseTyson starts talking about the Permian-Triassic Extinction, also known as "The Great Dying". The camera pans over the volcanic hellscape of the Siberian Traps or a beach strewn with corpses choked by hydrogen sulfide.

-->-- '''John Vachon''', on [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII Warsaw, 1946.]] Quoted in ''Savage Continent'' by Keith Lowe.

Picture this: you are making your dream AfterTheEnd film, comic, manga, or book, and you need a way to really ''knock it into'' your audience that this world is, indeed, a CrapsackWorld. What do you do? Cue slow pan over abandoned, bleak, ruined cityscape or radiation-scorched wilderness. Preferably both. If you're doing a CyberPunk work, be sure to have [[CityNoir gloomy, twilit, ominous skyscrapers towering over]] [[WretchedHive masses of stinking poverty]] -- [[IndustrialGhetto lots of smokestacks, toxic waste and pollution by the slums]], and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking decadent advertisements choking the more economically robust areas.]] If you're making a DisasterMovie, be sure to have tons of destroyed skyscrapers, overturned cars, general burning chaos, or in the aftermath, mute, smoky desolation.

If it's post-apocalyptic, it's a look of abandonment rather than slums/sprawl or recent destruction. Buildings are crumbling, collapsed, torn open, leaning. There are rubble piles at the base of walls, peeling paint. Familiar objects are weathered, rusted, rotted, sun-bleached, and may be encrusted in dirt and dust which has been wetted by rain at some point and dried. Buildings, vehicles, etc may be half-buried in sediment as if a flood had come through--basically they're melted into the ground. Cracked desert soil is common, though not required. The next likely option is jungle-like overgrowth as the Earth retakes the city. Many of these elements are directly based on what has already happened in real abandoned locations.

Keep in mind that telling whether a work is using Scenery Gorn and SceneryPorn can sometimes be confusing - especially in settings where the abandoned ruins have long since been reclaimed by the forces of nature.

[[folder:Fanfic]]

** "1980, Sarah, if you want to get off..." The quote comes from "Pyramids of Mars," the scene where the Doctor takes her to an alternate 1980--a barren, stormy wasteland, shredded in the wake of Sutekh's wrath. Other ''Doctor Who'' stories to feature this include just about ANY Dalek story, "The Brain of Morbius," "Survival," and countless others.
** The opening scene of "The End of Time, Part 2" definitely qualifies. Remember [[SceneryPorn that beautiful CGI Gallifrey]] from "The Sound of Drums"? We get to see it at the height of the Time War - the city dome broken, the ground littered with destroyed Dalek saucers, the Time Lord Citadel in ruins.

* ''Series/LowWinterSun'' is set in Detroit and uses many of the city's more clapped out locations to emphasise the show's CrapsackWorld setting. Even the police station is shown to be crumbling into disrepair.

* In the ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' episode [[Recap/SupernaturalS02E21AllHellBreaksLoosePartOne "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part One" (S02, Ep21)]], the Roadhouse is burnt to the ground and as Bobby and Dean search through the debris we get close ups of familiar items in the debris as well as at least 3 badly burnt bodies.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* The town of [[WesternAnimation/GravityFalls Gravity Falls]] after [[spoiler: Weirdmageddon starts]].

* ''TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}'' wallows in this, between the post-apocalyptic ruins, the CyberPunk aesthetic of the cities, and the [[EldritchAbomination Alien Intelligences]] and their magical creations and experiments. External and internal artwork is full of Scenery Gorn; check out the cover of [[http://www.palladiumbooks.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=1001&Product_Code=869 Madhaven]], for example.