History Main / ThrowAwayCountry

* In JacquesBrel 's song "Mon Père Disait" he sings how his father told him that London is just a piece of the town Bruges, Belgium that long ago floated away on sea and then got stuck on England.

* ''FireEmblem'' loves this trope. A lot of its games have started out with one (if not many) of the main character's nations being invaded.

* ''ShadowHearts'' has its cake and eats it when Shanghai is destroyed in a huge explosion halfway through the first game. Despite this, every single named character in the city survives, even the ones standing at ground zero at the time; oddly enough, one of them reappears only to die near instantly afterwards. Later on, several cut scenes actually reuse the Shanghai sets without any sign of damage, giving rise to the feeling that the huge nuclear explosion [[Main/CosyCatastrophe knocked over a couple of trees and mussed up the main character's hair]].

* ''StarCraft'': Several Terran worlds are literally sterilized by the Protoss to prevent the Zerg from spreading further. A futile effort. (Mar Sara was an exception to the trope, as you started there and and needed to escape it before it was sterilized. )

* Heavily downplayed in ''KingdomHearts'', but TheHeartless are [[InferredHolocaust said to have eradicated]] entire planets full of sentient life before they went after [[DoomedHometown the Destiny Islands]] and begin the game proper. [[spoiler: However, they recover.]]

** In the Classic serial "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", a London-based resistance member casually mentions that the entire populations of Asia, Africa and South America has been completely wiped out by a plague induced by the Daleks. The UnfortunateImplications of only North America, Australasia and Europe surviving an apocalypse is very obvious.

* In [[TransformersGeneration2 Transformers G2]], Jhiaxus destroys San Francisco to show Optimus Prime that he can and will.
** And in IDW's ''[[Franchise/{{Transformers}} Transformers: Regeneration One]]'', Megatron blasts the Earth into a barren wasteland (off-screen!) on a whim to get Optimus Prime's attention.

** Consciously averted with the Markab, who were wiped out as a species by a plague in Season Two. They were built up as a significant allied species for several episodes, so that their extinction would be more hard-hitting.

* In ''[[Anime/MobileSuitGundamSeedDestiny Gundam SEED Destiny]]'', the Eurasian Federation got the worse out of the war, and they did nothing but sit there and get blasted.

* At the beginning of ''CallOfDuty 4: ModernWarfare'', [[{{Qurac}} an unspecified Arab country]] falls to a coup by Khaled al-Assad, and you get to watch the former president's execution from first person.

* In the beginning of ''SecretWarsII'', the Beyonder destroys an entire ''galaxy''. Molecule Man later restores the stars, but it seems unlikely that he could have resurrected all the aliens presumably killed when their planets got blown up.

** There have been several Clans have been annihilated or absorbed by the other Clans for one reason or another. The Clans that have been annihilated so far were Clans Widowmaker, Wolverine, Smoke Jaguar, Fire Mandrill, Steel Viper and Blood Spirit.

* ''Series/{{Jericho}}'' Iran and North Korea are mentioned as being destroyed in the exchange of Nuclear Weapons.

* Before World War 2, Superpowers, and the UnitedNations, one country "annexing" all or part of another was considered a legitimate part of international relations. Only "Powers" were assured of territorial integrity and all others had to either had to rely on a Power to protect them or be wily enough to remain independent. This practice was at its most rampant during the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa Scramble for Africa]] and later after World War 1 when all the previous maps were re-drawn to reflect the outcome of the conflict.

* An ComicBook/{{Aquaman}} story arc involved half of San Diego, CA being sunk into the sea, but it got better.

* Of course, [[Main/TheDCU the DC Universe]] has in the past ten years destroyed [[GreenLantern Coast City]] (''TheDeathOfSuperman / Emerald Twilight''), Montevideo (''DCOneMillion''), Vladivostok (Terror Incognita arc, ''JLA''), and Bludhaven (''InfiniteCrisis''). ''Permanently'' destroyed, with nuclear fire.
** Also San Diego, CA being sunk into the sea.

* ''Anime/MartianSuccessorNadesico'': The cheerful Christmas episode concerns the funerals of millions who died in the previous episode. And the entire destruction of a colony is downplayed because a certain character plans to fix it later.

* In the episode "Juggernaut" from the original 1984 series ''Series/{{V}}'', Diana has the [[WaveMotionGun Particle Beam Triax]] destroy [[TheMoonsOfJupiter Io]] as a warmup exercise prior to taking station over Earth. Fortunately, before [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill it can destroy Los Angeles]] a Resistance member [[HeroicSacrifice crashes the captured mothership into it]].

* In Marvel's AgeOfApocalypse, the entire north of South America (where in our space-time lies the Amazon Forest) is a radioactive sea, marked in the map with several radiation symbols.
* A few locales have gotten this treatment in the Archie ''ComicBook/SonicTheHedgehog'' comics, though the most egregious has to be the Floating Island, which had recently had its entire population quite literally decimated in a semi-offpanel war against Eggman and the Dingoes in an apparent bid to shift the action away from the [[SpotlightStealingSquad spotlight stealing]] Echidnas and back onto the main heroes. It worked; Knuckles' and the Dark Legions' stories were shifted off the island, and the last we heard of its population, it was quietly rebuilding, given little reference in later comics.

* Before World War 2, Superpowers and the UnitedNations one country "annexing" all or part of another was considered a legitimate part of international relations. Only "Powers" were assured of territorial integrity and all others had to either had to rely on a Power to protect them or be wily enough to remain independent. This practice was at its most rampant during the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa Scramble for Africa]] and later after World War 1 when all the previous maps were re-drawn to reflect the outcome of the conflict.

* In the episode "Juggernaut" from the original 1984 series {{V}}, Diana has the [[WaveMotionGun Particle Beam Triax]] destroy [[TheMoonsOfJupiter Io]] as a warmup exercise prior to taking station over Earth; fortunately, before [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill it can destroy Los Angeles]] a Resistance member [[HeroicSacrifice crashes one of the motherships into it]].

* In ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', [[spoiler:the country of Amestris was created by the BigBad controlling wars for over 400 years, with the sole purpose of sacrificing the entire population in order to gain the energy to [[AGodAmI become God]]]].

* Karolina's homeworld Majesdane is bombed to dust off panel in ''{{Runaways}}'' to give their last survivors a reason to come to earth and attack her.

* In ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' the world is covered in flood water that has drowned most major coastal cities and killed more than half of the global population (the first episode does show this, and Fuyutsuki's BackStory scene from the director's cut suggests this) but the series itself never strays outside of Japan or the Pacific (and Antarctica) to show us how ''bad'' it really is. In an unrelated situation, Nerv has 108 worldwide satellite organizations and an American and a German branch. [[spoiler:The 108 companies are all fake,]] the German branch produces Asuka and Unit 02, but the American branch is [[spoiler:destroyed and]] never spoken of again.

** During the InfinityGauntlet arc, the entire island of Japan sinks to the ocean. Of course, like most of the disasters during the story, it got a ResetButton at the end. (And, oh yeah, Thanos kills literally ''exactly half'' of the population of the ''entire universe'' in an instant.)

* Any planet except Earth in ''Manga/DragonBall Z''. Namek at least gets a few more mentions after being blown up (though not the extent you would expect, since [[KingOfAllCosmos ''God'']] grew up there), but all the other ones we see villains destroying just to prove that they can aren't dwelled on by the marvelous heroes who only care about the safety of Earth.