Scenery Gorn

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"Wherever you walk here it is hunks of buildings standing up without roofs or sides, and people living in them. Except the Ghetto, where it is just a great plain of bricks, with twisted beds, and bath tubs and sofas, pictures in frames, trunks, millions of things sticking out among the bricks. I can't understand how it could have been done...It is something so vicious I can't believe it."

— John Vachon, on Warsaw, 1946. Quoted in Savage Continent by Keith Lowe.

Picture this: you are making your dream After the End film, comic, manga, or book, and you need a way to really knock it into your audience that this world is, indeed, a Crapsack World. What do you do? Cue slow pan over abandoned, bleak, ruined cityscape or radiation-scorched wilderness. Preferably both. If you're doing a dystopian or cyberpunk work, be sure to have gloomy, twilit, ominous, monolithic skyscrapers towering over masses of stinking poverty — lots of smokestacks, toxic waste and pollution by the slums, and decadent advertisements choking the more economically robust areas. If you're making a Disaster Movie, 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.

Scenery Porn refers to lavish attention to background details, made in order to suck the viewers into a beautiful, gloriously detailed otherworld. Scenery Gorn, on the other hand, means to bludgeon viewers with a lavishly detailed depiction of absolute hell on earth, or scenes of complete and utter destruction and deprivation.

This is also popular with apocalyptic and disaster films. Compare Desolation Shot. Ruins of the Modern Age is a subtrope. Contrast Apocalypse Wow, which has a broader variety of uses. If the apocalypse involved a plague or virus instead of bombs, expect Ghost City.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) renderings seem to go hand-in-hand with Scenery Gorn, as everybody taking pics of real-life examples (below) seems to be addicted to HDR. Seems to be uniquely useful here since interiors lit only with sunbeams through windows or holes can't be accurately depicted with normal photographic technology when lit as they actually occur, and that natural lighting is essential to remaining authentic to the scene.

Keep in mind that telling whether a work is using Scenery Gorn and Scenery Porn can sometimes be confusing — especially in settings where the abandoned ruins have long since been reclaimed by the forces of nature. Indeed, today's bleak ruins may look beautiful after a millennia of lush jungle overgrowth.

Crapsack World pretty much always involves Scenery Gorn, but the principle difference is that Scenery Gorn is just the scenery aspect. Crapsack World is the overall dynamics of the entire world.

Closely related (possibly sub-) tropes are Saharan Shipwreck and Ribcage Ridge, and often includes an Empathy Doll Shot. Not to be confused with Gorn Scenery.

Examples:

• Anime & Manga
• Film
• Video Games
• Real Life

Art

• H. R. Giger's landscape paintings. Full stop. Freudian techno-organic hellscapes.
• The German painter and World War I veteran Otto Dix's hellish landscapes from the trenches of the western front.
• The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
• The "Master of the Aftermath" Zdzislaw Beksinski.

Comic Books

• Bio Apocalypse has the entire planet covered by a hideously mutated, constantly evolving organism where lesser organisms are being perpetually consumed, defecated, tortured, impaled, and digested out of other constantly evolving and rotting orifices. It has to be seen to be believed.
• Most Druuna albums, aside from the erotic content, are filled with beautiful scenery of the post-apocalyptic world that future humanity resides in.
• At least once per issue of Heavy Metal Magazine is a story set After the End or in a still-functioning Dystopia that begins with an Establishing Shot displaying all of its wretched beauty.
• Invincible has this in any fight involving a Viltrumite or when it's shown that the planetary ring around Viltrum is made of all the Viltrumites that died by the plague.
• The Invisibles 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.
• Pick an issue of either Irredeemable or Incorruptible.
• Towards the end of the 1980s Miracleman series, Kid Miracleman breaks free from his human form and transforms London into 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.
• The Ten-Seconders: There are many panels showing the destruction that the "Gods" wrought on the planet, especially London and New York City.
• Watchmen. The aftermath of 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 the movie - buildings crashed by the hundreds in a perfectly spherical crater, but nearly all the dead are completely disintegrated.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Following Hera's destruction of the Pocket Dimension Themyscira resided in, causing the islands to crash into the Atlantic off the eastern seaboard the destroyed remnants of the Amazon's once architecturally awe inspiring city are shown in detail for the rest of the locale's appearances in the book.

Documentary

• Aftermath: Population Zero and Life After People are both Speculative Documentaries that focus largely on envisioning the world as it would look if humanity suddenly disappeared. Civilization collapses into Scenery Gorn, but over longer periods of time it blossoms into Scenery Porn, as plants and wilderness reclaim everything.
• Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which chronicles the Troubled Production of Apocalypse Now, shows some of the movie sets that had been destroyed by a typhoon.
• Koyaanisqatsi's "Pruitt-Igoe" sequence, in which an abandoned housing project is demolished. Overlaps with real life, obviously, since it's an impressionistic documentary.
• Lessons of Darkness by Werner Herzog is an impressionistic documentary about the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, with particular reference to the burning oil fields that the retreating Iraqis left behind them.

Fan Works

• In the Avantasia Protag AU series, there are some stories where the main characters go to the Ayreon world and the description of Planet Alpha hours before it completely blows up and the city is in chaotic disarray is major Scenery Gorn.
  "Across the dark city, there were odd metal structures at various points, so tall that the tops vanished into the smog in the sky. Their shape was abstract, like bent and burnt metal twisting to a point, the structures almost appearing like great metallic alien monsters in the distance."
• Tiberium Wars. The descriptions of ruined environments, destroyed cities, and the active annihilation of the landscape is done with almost worrying relish.
• The Land Before Time fan fics with Scenery Gorn? Yes!
  • The Mysterious World starts out normal. Later, it shifts to an outright scenery gorntastic depiction of post-apocalyptic London.
  • Time Gate LBT has some scenery gorn depicting the entire US in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
  • Out of the Shadows is an extremely dark and very bloody fan fiction. It starts out normal but dark. However, dark becomes pitch black, when the scenery gorntastic descriptions of a war ravaged Great Valley come in.
• Child of the Storm goes into almost loving detail when describing the Battle of London in the finale, particularly the horrors that an all-out superhuman war, with the power of Chthon warping reality in the background, wrought upon what is - to the author, who's a Londoner - a familiar landscape. Similar levels of detail appear in the sequel, in the World Gone Mad of the Red Room base in the Nevernever, the depiction of Muspelheim, and the Hogwarts grounds after the Elder Wyrm unleashes its fury upon them.
• Poké Wars shows the raw power of undampened Pokémon by describing the ravaged landscapes that the battles leave behind.
• Fallout: Equestria is full of very poignant visions of post apocalyptic Equestria: Ponyville a destroyed ruin used as a raider outpost, Cloudsdale vaporized by a balefire bomb leaving nothing but a vast necropolis of pegasus skeletons, Canterlot inundated with Pink Cloud and inhabited by nigh-unkillable feral ghouls, and the Everfree Forest a radioactive wasteland overgrown with Killing Joke plants.
• Sonic X: Dark Chaos vividly describes a galaxy torn apart. Sonic and his friends find many worlds devastated by the Metarex conflict and Shroud pandemics, and some changed beyond recognition from losing their Planet Eggs. Others have been turned into glassed hellholes by the Demon Empire or transformed into living conduits of Dark Chaos Energy.
• The Last Great Time War has many examples of this, including one of Gallifrey in ruins.
• Several examples in With Strings Attached:
  • The Plains of Death, carpeted with skeletons with rusty swords, cold as death, windless, under a sky full of thick clouds that haven't rained in years.
  • The dead, abandoned city of Ehndris, filled with rampant weeds, crumbling ruins, and monsters magically made out of inorganic trash.

Film — Animated

• The entirety of 9, and it really is gorgeous.
• Who-Ville in Horton Hears a Who! (2008), after Vlad drops the clover from what would be unspeakable heights (to the Whos at least).

Literature

• Aftershock: The destruction of Cascade Gully by the earthquake at the end of 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.
• Damned combines this with Squick. Hell boasts such attractions as the Dandruff Desert, the Swamp of Partial Birth Abortions, and the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm.
• The Dark Tower 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 the future with JFK in /11/22/63.
• Deltora Quest has 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 Grey Guards. It's so gorntastic that just being there is fills you with magically induced soul crushing despair. The Three 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.
• Evolution: After many vivid descriptions of the world of the dinosaurs, both in the late Jurassic and the late Cretaceous, the destruction of that world is described just as vividly — the narration gives extensive attention to the systematic demolition of the landscapes, species and individual creatures described in the earlier Cretaceous chapter, as they're annihilated in the initial blast waves, drowned and crushed in the tsunamis, slaughtered in the rain of fragments falling back to earth, incinerated in global firestorms, or slowly frozen to death in the ensuing impact winter.
• Gormenghast: The first few pages 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.
• In the later Harry Potter books, as Voldemort has risen to power, Diagon Alley (the reader's original introduction to the fantastical magic world) is depicted with abandoned storefronts and dark figures. Evidence that the magical world is truly turning into a dark and unhappy place. The only exception is the Weasley twins' store, which stands out as a colorful and delightful shop... the reader knows it would have been just another store in the first or second books.
• H. P. Lovecraft 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 The Colour Out of Space is particularly notable (though in that case, it's relevant to the plot).
• The Killing Star details the aftermath of the relativistic bombing of the Solar System quite thoroughly, particularly on Earth.
• Lucifer's Hammer by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven is full of this.
• 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.
• In the book and radio versions of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod Breeblebrox visits a bombed-out wasteland of a planet, littered with the crashed hulks of numerous buildings.
• The Zone from Roadside Picnic 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.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events has the ruins of the Baudelaire mansion, and Olaf's house in The Film of the Book.
• Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon, which is hardly surprising as it deals with the aftermath of a nuclear war.
• In the short story "Ananke" from Stanisław Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot, a long time is spent describing the wreck of a huge (as in, 100000 tons heavy) crashed rocket.
• H. G. Wells' works The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (1898) do this. The first does this with Earth at the end of the planet, and the second does this with a barren, Red Weed-stricken London.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica (2003):
  • Has this when the humans reach the first Earth.
  • Although it did not happen in the Miniseries, The Plan had shots of (almost) every Colony during the Cylon Holocaust, with Nightmare Fuellerrific images of burning cities and fleeing (or dying) people in a 10 minutes sequence.
• Chernobyl focuses a great deal on the devastated scenery after the accident upends everything in the area. The stricken reactor building itself is deeply unsettling, particularly the roof strewn with debris so radioactive that men in full protection gear can only spend a maximum of ninety seconds there because that will give them a lifetime's worth of radiation (do not look at the core). Then there are the towns and villages in the Exclusion Zone once it's established, posted with radiation warning signs and with almost everything left behind—including all the pets and livestock that now have to be killed to prevent them spreading contamination.
• Community: Parodied in all three of their episodes about paintball. Jeff wakes up after a nap in his car to find the entirety of Greendale empty, with every square inch covered in dots of paint. Shutters are closed, everything's flipped over to form cover and there's things strewn all around. What's most impressive about this is that the first paintball episode wasn't the season finale, so somebody had to clean up the entire set ready to begin filming the last few episodes.
• Cosmos' 2014 series usually has Scenery Porn... until Neil deGrasse Tyson 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.
• Doctor Who:
  • "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 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.
  • "The Time of Angels" has the spectacular shot of the Byzantium crashed into an old temple.
  • "Spyfall": You thought "The End of Time" had the Citadel of the Time Lords in ruins? This story does it one better, with the Citadel completely destroyed. The Master claims responsibility.
• FlashForward (2009): The first 17 minutes of the first episode is dedicated to showing the destruction that occurred 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.
• Game of Thrones: The Riverlands, especially after the Red Wedding when the Freys take over the Riverlands. Arya and Sandor Clegane trudge through the countryside on their way to the Vale and the landscape is a desiccated wasteland.
• Katla: Pretty much every outdoor shot shows the sub-arctic landscape of Iceland with an added layer of gritty grey volcanic ash. It’s set in a town which has been mostly evacuated following the eruption, and then the paranormal weirdness starts, aggravating the various characters’ assorted forms of depression.
• Life After People: Doesn't just show us scenery gorn, it gives us a depressing play-by-play of just how well the stuff we made would last without constant maintenance.
• Low Winter Sun is set in Detroit and uses many of the city's more clapped out locations to emphasise the show's Crapsack World setting. Even the police station is shown to be crumbling into disrepair.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power:
  • In the prologue, the after-match of the War of Wrath is shown, with an entire forest being turned into a wasteland filled with the dead bodies of the elves. Galadriel mentions that Middle-earth was left in complete ruins.
  • The Southlands is nothing but a desolated wasteland after Orodruin's eruption.
• Power Rangers/Super Sentai: Shows up occasionally. Usually in Zord fights only a few buildings, if any, are damaged. But on special occasions the city can get quite smashed up. One of the best known is of course the rampage of the Dragonzord towards the end of the Evil Green Ranger saga from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
• Raised by Wolves (2020): 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.
• Revolution: There are many shots of overgrown modern stuff, such as a city being overgrown with plants in the pilot episode.
• Sanctuary: Taken somewhat literally in one episode, with the shredded bodies of hundreds of mermaids floating in the ocean. (Humorously enough, the mermaids are shown in graphic, almost clinical detail—except for Barbie Doll Anatomy.)

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: the Cardassian homeworld following the Dominion genocide, in the series finale.
• Storm Chasers: Has this on occasion when tornadoes the teams are pursuing strike a populated area; Yazoo City, Mississippi and the numerous tornado outbreaks in 2011 being among the biggest examples.
• In the Supernatural episode "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.
• Warehouse 13: At the end of Season 3, we get a rather graphic depiction of the Warehouse being completely destroyed in an explosion. It's quite impressive.
• The Walking Dead practically every episode has this- some towns and suburbs are just deserted and crumbling, while others show the effects of the battles against the zombies.
• In The Wire, the neglect of West Baltimore is captured in all its glory. One beat cop even jokes that if some terrorists were to "fuck up" the Western district, nobody could even tell.

Multiple Media

• The 2005 Toa Hordika saga of BIONICLE featured this heavily in promos◊, comics◊ and a Direct-to-DVD film◊, when Metru Nui was half-destroyed in the aftermath of the Great Cataclysm, and then overrun by Giant Spiders.

Music

• The cover of Midnight Oil's 1984 album Red Sails in the Sunset features a spectacular image of Sydney Harbour, with famous Opera House and Bridge, as a water-free, crater-strewn, post-nuclear-holocaust wasteland.
• Like H.G. Wells' original, Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds evokes a barren, rarefied London stricken with Red Weed, its buildings devastated by Martian weaponry - the music, especially, evokes a kind of sickness.
• Radiohead's Kid A album came with a crapload of haunting, eerie◊ and apocalyptic◊ landscapes, featuring blood-filled swimming pools◊, razor-teethed modified bears, giant sperm monsters◊ and snowy mountains smeared with blood and grime. This carried on in their next album Amnesiac.
• This line from Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "The Dead Flag Blues:"
  "The skyline was beautiful on fire. All twisted metal, stretching upwards. Everything washed in a thin orange haze."
• Autopsy's Mutant Village has this, combined with irradiated zombies.
  "Desert screams on plains of doom, your mind will snap beyond the dunes. A village ahead, the stench of disease, nauseating wasteland, distorted dead trees"
• The music of Pink Floyd evokes this, particularly Richard Wright's keyboard work on Animals. The movie of The Wall has the "alienated landscape" within Pink's mind: a barren, war-torn wasteland ringed around with barbed wires and crossed hammers, and, in the middle of it all, Pink sits and obliviously watches TV.

Pinball

• The playfield for Fire! (1987) 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.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Dreaming 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 World of Darkness is depicted as this trope to changelings because they can see what the world is like when seen through eyes that still Dream.
• Dead Reign has tons of this due to the Zombie Apocalypse setting. You really have to admire the detail the artists put into the ruined buildings and piles of corpses...
• Every description of the surface world in 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.
• The blasted landscape of Dominaria in Magic: The Gathering's Time Spiral block is as much a star as the characters going through the block's storyline.
  • The imagery and flavor text on "Burning Blade Askari" drove the point home rather poignantly: "This can't be Jamuraa. We could not have failed her this badly..."
  • The Scars of Mirrodin block has different art on its basic lands for each of its three sets. Setting them side-by-side shows just how badly the war with New Phyrexia is ruining the once-shining land. And then the end result when Phyrexia wins.
• Rifts wallows in this, between the post-apocalyptic ruins, the Cyberpunk aesthetic of the cities, and the Alien Intelligences and their magical creations and experiments. External and internal artwork is full of Scenery Gorn; check out the cover of Madhaven, for example.
• Shadowrun gives us such appalling sights as the Shattergraves, Bug City, the hellhole that is much of West Africa, and assorted toxic waste zones.
• Unhallowed Metropolis goes for this with its view of ruined London. It goes for ruined zombie apocalypse hellhole by way of poison gas and gasmask fetishism - when the art isn't instead just vaguely photoshopped goth models.
• Though some places are less grimdark than others, official art of Imperial cities in Warhammer 40,000 counts as this before the conflicts that blast them into ruins. Mountains of skulls, the charred remains of witches or mutants hanging from gibbets lining the streets, gothic cathedrals towering over throngs of hollow-eyed citizens, ominous 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.
• Wraith: The Oblivion and the later books of 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 volume. As it takes place after a huge Underworld cataclysm, Orpheus makes the Shadowlands an even nastier place to be.

Visual Novels

• In Saya no Uta, the main character sees the world in a literal version of this, i.e. like a Womb Level. Later other characters suffer the same, causing a lot of Sanity Slippage.
• Togainu no Chi takes place in the ruins of Toshima; the gritty artwork for the backgrounds is very much this.

Webcomics

• Awful Hospital has the titular Hospital, where every surface is so filthy that you can literally see the germs crawling around on them.
• 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 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. All of the kids' planets have been shattered, and are floating in pieces in the B2 universe.
• Romantically Apocalyptic has some in almost every single panel. And it◊ is◊ glorious◊.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent gives us... the abandoned, post-apocalyptic Silent World. With the vast majority of the land abandoned due to the Great Sickness, you get hauntingly beautiful, overgrown vistas of abandoned military complexes, road infrastructure, towns and cities that approach the rest of the standard for Scenery Porn in the webcomic. Beautiful, but very creepy.
• The Plaguelands in Uncreation are full of bizarre ruins. What we've seen of civilization also seems pretty run-down.

Web Original

• Marble Hornets: The strange industrial basement that Alex and later Jay searches has strange blood marks smeared over the walls. Alex's house is in a similar state on the second story before the blood mysteriously disappears later.
• The short video RUIN could be summed up as "scenery gorn with a motorcycle chase thrown in for good measure".
• Stampy's Lovely World: In the Show Within a Show "Block of the Dead", a Zombie Apocalypse film set After the End, there is infamously a shot which pans out to the Lovely World in ruins and on fire, complete with the clock part of the Clock Tower being completely blown off, just before the film title appears onscreen.
• 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.

Western Animation

• The opening sequence of Adventure Time 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 Marceline's past, there will be plenty of this.
• The world of Amphibia after King Andrias takes over.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender's 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 Azula and Zuko in particular, with Azula's enhanced blue flames blasting against Zuko's enhanced orange flames, is an incredible spectacle.
• The town of Gravity Falls after Weirdmageddon starts.
• I ♡ Arlo: Arlo's old swamp home, after the Bog Lady curses it.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: To break Rainbow Dash in "The Return of Harmony, Part 1", Discord whips up an image of Cloudsdale literally falling apart, and the townsponies unable to do anything but gape in horror. This is an illusion meant to gore Dashie on Morton's Fork.
• Galaluna becomes this after it has been invaded by Modula and the Mutraddi in Sym-Bionic Titan.
• Thundarr the Barbarian took this one step further: forget the trashed cities, is that the MOON in pieces up there?
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Dying for Pie", Bikini Bottom and its surroundings are positively TOASTED after the bomb goes off.

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