Pictured above: only a handful of the Marvel superheroes living in Manhattan (and Stan Lee).
Marinette: Hey, what's that guy doing?
Alya: Oh, it's just Captain Redlight organizing the traffic. There's a superhero for everything here now.
Alya: Oh, it's just Captain Redlight organizing the traffic. There's a superhero for everything here now.
While Metropolis has Superman and Gotham has Batman, some cities have many heroes, some in teams, others freelance. With Superheroes so popular, more and more come out the woodwork and see how popular wearing a costume and punching bank robbers becomes. As time goes on however, there are so many heroes in one place that it can really become an issue.
When The City has a surplus of superpowered weirdos fighting crime in their free time, this usually leads to many upsides and downsides. With so many heroes, it can act as an impressive deterrent to keep criminals off of the streets and drive villains out of their territory. Hero Insurance becomes a lucrative enterprise. It can also leave proper law enforcement out of a job since Cops Need the Vigilante, that is if the entire police force hasn't already been replaced by cop-themed heroes. When heroes have a bad habit of creating their villains, then only the worst of the worst would ever dare stir up trouble. Half the time, the fact that there are so many heroes can leave some of them with nothing to do because all of the city's bases have been covered; because when Everyone Is a Super, no one is.
Since some powers are better fit certain situations than others, this is usually ideal when certain heroes suffer from Crippling Overspecialization. A fire just broke out in an apartment building and it would be a serious downer if Plant Person was the only hero in town, but thankfully Water Woman lives right next to him. A bomb needs disarming and Water Woman doesn't know how to disarm it, but Anti-Bomber does and she lives just down the street. Anti-Bomber's rooftop garden isn't doing well, so this looks like a job for Plant Person!
If the city is not fictional, than it will often be a national capital or a landmark city, a city big enough to justify having so many people fighting each other to rescue somebody. While not mutually exclusive, most examples of the trope coincide with the Big Applesauce and Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe, as most examples tend to fall either in New York City, Tokyo or a fictional place based on either or both. These typically exist when a Standard Super-Hero Setting is undergoing its Later Stages of Superhero Prevalence.
Creator Provincialism and Write What You Know are commonly at play, the creators setting the events at their place of residence.
Sub-Trope to City of Adventure. Compare Superhero School. Contrast Superman Stays Out of Gotham and West Coast Team. Can happen in works where Everyone Is a Super. See also City of Spies.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In My Hero Academia, Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe. While it's acknowledged that the United States is considered the birthplace of the Pro Hero profession, Tokyo, Japan has all the focus. Hero agencies number in the hundreds, the Japanese school U.A.'s sports festival is more popular as a spectator sport than the Olympics, and all the world is watching Tokyo because it's the home of the Symbol of Peace, All Might.
Comic Books
- In the Astro City universe, while every major city has its own superheroes, Astro City itself attracts an unusually large number of them. Sometimes lampshaded by characters who find the heavy concentration of super-activity to be part of the city's appeal.
"They all think it's an ordinary city... More super-heroes than most, a little more exotic — but a regular city for all that. They always think that, at first."
- In Idolized, New York City is explicitly called the "superhero capital of the world", and as such, is the site of the Show Within a Show, "Superhero Idol".
- The Ur-Example of the trope can be attributed to New York City in the Marvel Universe. New York is the most common location for superheroes and Super Teams in the setting. Examples include: The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Heroes for Hire, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, X-Mennote , etc. Granted, some of them often leave New York to go on foreign missions, but overall most Marvel heroes live in and are active in New York. The reason for this? Marvel Comics' seminal figures of the time, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and original publisher Martin Goodman were all native New Yorkers. Further, Marvel (first known as Timely Comics) was headquartered in NYC. In sum, Creator Provincialism and Write What You Know.
- Just Imagine... Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe is a direct play off Stan Lee's habit mentioned above, as for his alternate take on The DCU, he chooses Los Angeles (a city on the opposite side of the country) as its superhero capitol.
- Rubicon City in Thomas Valiant has a bunch of heroes in there.
- Parodied in the original comic of The Tick. Because the first heroes to make it big did so in New York, so many heroes have gone there hoping to make it big themselves that they need to schedule who protects what block on what day to give everyone a fair chance, and any sight of actual supervillainry results in a feeding frenzy of heroes hoping to get a piece of the glory.
- In Top 10, Neopolis was constructed as a home for every science-powered individual in the United States, in the hopes of keeping all the insanity that comes with superheroes (time travel, giant monsters, doomsday plots, etc.) from infecting other cities.
- Welcome to Tranquility has a variation - Tranquility is the Superhero Retirement Capital of the WildStorm Universe, because many of the old World War II heroes visited there after the war in order to stop a Robot War, and they liked the town enough that they all decided that it would be a nice place to retire. The fact that is has a Fountain of Youth hidden nearby didn't hurt.
- Mark Millar discussed the trope when talking about Supercrooks saying he didn't understand why villains stayed in superhero patrolled cities like Gotham and Metropolis instead of just committing crimes in Europe.
Films - Live-Action
- Champion City in Mystery Men has one dominant superhero, Captain Amazing, but is also hip-deep in minor superheroes, a small handful of whom ultimately rise to the occasion and defeat supervillain Casanova Frankenstein.
- Just as it is in the comics, New York City ends up being a hub for a vast amount of superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This ends up becoming a plot point during Avengers: Endgame as the heroes stake a "Time Heist" to retrieve the six Infinity Stones from alternate timelines, and they realize that back in 2012, three of them were in NYC all at once — the Tesseract and Mind Stone were directly involved in the plot of The Avengers (2012), while the Time Stone was held by The Ancient One, who was protecting the New York Sanctum at the time.
Literature
- Nowhere Stars: Magical Girl varient; the main city of New Claris, where the plot takes place, is stated by Liadain to be almost crowded with Keepers compared to other cities in the setting. This is good for the average citizen, as it means Harbinger attacks are dealt with almost immediately after they begin, but bad for Liadain herself, because it makes finding Harbingers to kill a lot harder.
- While not so much hosting heroes per se, the Wild Cards setting keeps New York City as the center for the majority of its action. Because the virus was released over Manhattan in 1946, the boroughs had the vast majority of initial fatalities — and survivors. Over time, most of the jokers went into the section of Manhattan known as the Bowery, making it into their own: Jokertown. Some aces are attracted to the glamour of the city, while others feel that they'll at least be among their own kind. And when you're the (hopefully) walking result of a medical experiment, close proximity to the premiere hospital for Xenovirus Takis-A victims on the planet doesn't exactly hurt. Additionally, as the virus writes itself into the host's DNA as a recessive chromosome, having that many wild carders in the same area leads to more next-generation births and manifestations — and so the population stays centered on the city.
- And when The Committee is formed, it operates out of the United Nations. The virus just can't quit Manhattan.
- Notably, Wild Cards has several volumes that are treated as a Formula-Breaking Episode where the main hook is to explore the setting outside of New York City. They indirectly cement New York's centrality in the setting.
- Wearing the Cape has Chicago, as its where the first recorded superhero, Superman Substitute Atlas, first appeared and where his team and the world's most famous super-hero group, The Sentinels, are based. It is mentioned that many heroes and villains attempt to make a name for themselves by moving to and/or making their debut in Chicago.
- Whateley Universe: While Superhero School Whateley Academy itself has a fair claim to this (with some 650 students in all grades for the 2006-07 school year, many of whom do aspire to be superheroes), when it comes to permanent residency, New York City is far and away the biggest. While most major (or even mid-sized) cities have at least a few local heroes (and villains), and many have one or even two super-teams (Los Angeles being a stand-out with three), NYC has no less than four permanent super-teams, and a variety of 'street heroes' of every description.
Live-Action TV
- Misfits: Though very few would probably qualify as "heroes", Wertham, a fictional borough of London, comes to host most of the world's superpowered people after a strange storm grants powers to many of the people caught in it.
Tabletop Games
- In the Freedom City setting for Mutants & Masterminds the eponymous Freedom City was originally the centre of super activity. This is lampshaded in Atlas of Earth-Prime, which notes that America has more supers than the rest of the world, and Freedom has more supers than comprable cities in America, and offers Watsonian and Doylist explanations. The latter is that superheroes began as an American phenomenon, and the Freedom setting was originally just the city, so of course that's where all the characters were based. The former is that when the Centurion arrived from an alternate reality, the accompanying wave of quantum weirdness essentially turned the whole city into a Weirdness Magnet. Origin events are more common, and superhumans are more likely to settle there. In third edition, the Mass Empowering Event in Emerald City has resulted in superhumans being as common there as in Freedom, but Emerald supers are more likely to move away than in Freedom.
- Millennium City from the Champions game is one of the most prominent cities with superheroes in the United States in the Champions universe. Once the city of Detroit, it was razed in the horrific Battle for Detroit when Dr. Destroyer sought to take over America and unleashed a suicide device as he was close to being defeated. It was rebuilt as the City of the Future with the help of James Harmon IV, who protects the city as Defender with the rest of the superteam known as the Champions. Superheroes also gather in other cities, such as Vibora Bay in Florida, New York City and various other places.
Video Games
- This is the entire point of MMORPG City of Heroes, as stated by the title. Paragon City, Rhode Island, USA is the single city in the world with the largest superhero population, and naturally the one most often under attack by villains. Also inverted in sister game City of Villains, with the Rogue Isles, a rogue nation ruled by supervillain Lord Recluse and with the largest population of villains in the world.
Web Comics
- Gatorstan, Florida is where most of the super-beings on Earth live in Captus Cinematic Universe.
- Shitropolis in League of Super Redundant Heroes has the highest population of vigilantes in America, to the point of which every hardware store apparently sells grappling hook guns.
- Supermegatopia was pretty much built on this premise, with plenty of heroes and villains anywhere the reader looked.
Western Animation
- Mertz from the Darkwing Duck episode "Planet of the Capers" is a planet populated entirely by superheroes, the only exception to this being its lone Un-Sorcerer Ordinary Guy. Being superheroes, they possess an innate ability to rescue Innocent Bystanders with their Flying Brick powers. With no supervillains and only one Muggle on the planet, they either fly to other planets (as Comic Book Guy did when he went to Earth) or they stay on Mertz and rush to "rescue" Ordinary Guy from mundane hazards, usually just making the problem worse.
- While the main setting of Miraculous Ladybug — Paris, France — averts the trope with Ladybug and Cat Noir as its only permanent heroes (usually lending other miraculous to civilians temporarily) and Hawk Moth and Mayura as its only villains (every other villain being on-off products of their powers), it is revealed that New York is a much different story. In "Miraculous World: New York -- United HeroeZ", we are introduced to HeroeZ United, a Justice League/Avengers Expy that populates New York, with implications that the hero group is so big, that many of its heroes usually take on other duties when their abilities do not call for it; Hot Dog Dan works a hot-dog stand, Captain Redlight directs traffic, Doorman is a tour guide at a History Museum and Victory is the President of the United States.
- The City from The Tick is so full of superheroes, the Mayor has a Bat Signal for each and every one of them and has since run out of room on his window sill to house them all. Since all sorts of shenanigans of epic proportions — from aliens to terrorists, Kaiju and too many supervillains to count — happen in The City and only a handful of them are any good at being superheroes (either due to Crippling Overspecialization or just plain incompetence), The City needs all the help it can get.
- Seasons 6 and 7 of The Venture Bros. moves the cast to New York City and it's just brimming with Affectionate Parodies of superheroes. This being Venture Bros., it's lampshaded when the Monarch, finding that his trust fund has run dry, tries to rob a bank but is immediately thwarted by the Brown Widow, a Spider-Man expy, and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch tells him that his regular supervillainy just won't work in New York because there are so many superheroes there.
