The Whole World Is Watching

Something occurs in some part of the world, something that, due to its nature or the scope of its effects or simply that people find it interesting, begins to circle the globe, garnering attention wherever it goes. Before long, it has seemingly reached every corner of the world, such that wherever you go, it's the topic of conversation.

Simply put, this is where all or a good majority of the world watch an incident that the main characters are involved in. This can be through television, magic TV or any other device that allows others to watch something that is taking place somewhere else. In rare cases this could even involve watching something through time.

There are a few reasons that this may occur:

• As a form of entertainment.
• To publicly announce their plan a villain may do this. See Do Not Adjust Your Set.
• To show an important event or crisis that is of interest to the entire world.

Will on occasion be accompanied by a "Nations of the World" Montage.

Compare "Truman Show" Plot. Contrast What You Are in the Dark when no one is watching.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• At the end of Code Geass R2, Lelouch makes a worldwide announcement of his victory over his brother Schneizel and consequent domination of the entire world. In the epilogue, his public assassination is likewise broadcast to the entire world live.
• Dragon Ball Z: The Cell Games got a worldwide audience courtesy of Hercules Satan as he tried ramp up his reputation by defeating Cell. The broadcast didn't stop even after Hercule was defeated thanks to the cameramen and announcers sticking around, as well as presumably Cell's own vanity. Amazingly, despite video evidence of such things as ki attacks and flying blondes, the world manages to let itself be duped into thinking it was all trickery in time for the Buu saga. Earlier, Cell actually commandeered an official newscast in order to announce his Cell Games and what losing would entail for the world. It was presumably this that got Mr. Satan's attention.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean: After Enrico Pucci's Stand undergoes its final transformation into Made in Heaven, it activates its ability of Time Acceleration, which gradually speeds up time to its logical maximum, and affects every non-living object in the entire universe, with the effects mainly being seen on Earth. The entire population notices the sun flashing across the sky in an instant, clocks keep up with the acceleration of time, infrastructures dilapidate and food rots in an instant, news stations are unable to properly identify the time of day and temperature, and so on.^*Rohan Kishibe is somehow able to keep up with his deadlines for his manga even in the accelerated time. This eventually culminates in the universe ending, and all living creatures being transferred to a new universe where a planet almost identical to Earth is created in its stead.
• Little Witch Academia (2017) features this in the final episode. Akko and Diana reach low Earth orbit to fight against a magically-powered ICBM that could destroy the world, and the Academy with their powers makes sure that the whole world follows their struggle (not only on TV and radio but on social networks too), to get everyone on Earth to believe in magic once again, in order to give the two girls the power-up they need to stop the menace.
• Mega Man Megamix: Invoked by Terra, who uses the powers of Dark Moon to ensure that everyone on Earth gets to see him deprive humanity of their symbol of hope by killing Mega Man.
• My Hero Academia: Thanks to news crews, the fight between All Might and All For One during the Hideout Raid arc is televised to the entire world. While this means everyone gets to see All Might defeat one of the world's most evil villains, it also lets everybody learn about All Might's Power Incontinence and ultimately witness his final loss of his powers. It marks the definitive point in the series where his successor Deku must take up the mantle of the Symbol of Peace.
• One Piece:
  • The public execution of Portgas D Ace is intended to be broadcast to as many places as possible with reporters ready to relay everything that happens as it happens to show the world the end of the bloodline of the King of the Pirates, Gold Roger, with the death of his son, Ace. Things do not go as planned due to, among other things, the arrival of Ace's sworn brother Luffy. One of Luffy's allies steals one of the cameras and has it on so he can mug for it when the cameras were supposed to be turned off during the battle to stop the execution. This does cause Ace's death to be broadcast, but also sees sent to the world the death of Ace's captain, Whitebeard, the chaos wrought by traitorous Warlord of the Sea Blackbeard, and Whitebeard's dying words, which proclaim Roger's legendary treasure the One Piece, does exist.
  • In the aftermath of the Dressrosa arc, Marine Admiral Fujitora orders a broadcast set up to reach as far as they can get. This extends to the three islands nearest Dressrosa itself. As part of that broadcast he announces the defeat of the arc's Big Bad and how he was defeated by Luffy and his allies. He goes on to say that because said big bad, Donquixote Doflamingo, was ruling Dressrosa and was able to cause the damage he did because of the legal immunity granted him as one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea, the ultimate fault for the whole incident lies with none other than the World Government that gave Doflamingo his power. He goes on to enter a Pose of Supplication with his men and apologize to Dressrosa's true king for all that had happened. Word and recordings of this broadcast soon spread and Fujitora's superiors are livid, not least because it makes the Marines and World Government look bad due a pirate saving the day instead of them. Fujitora later shows he did this precisely to avoid the Government from changing the story of what happened as, in a previous arc, the Government gave the credit for saving the desert kingdom of Alabasta to the Marines rather than admit a pirate, again Luffy, showed them up.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Seto Kaiba loves giving all his tournaments as much of an audience as possible, even using his satellites to hijack the airwaves so that everyone in Domino City can watch his mastery of Duel Monsters. Of course this is more about his ego than anything else.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: Since many major duels happen in widely broadcasted tournaments, this happens a LOT.
  • The first most notable incident was in the Maiami Championship during Kurosaki and Sora's duel, where Sora revealed that he was Evil All Along - and quite psychotic at that - while Kurosaki decided to deal with him via literally carpet bombing the field, all the while the two were throwing reveal after reveal. To say the audience was shocked would be a major understatement.
  • LDS, the organizers of the Maiami Championship, went to great lengths to cover the latter part of the tournament by having it take place outside of the stadium while the crowd was inside, and cutting off the feed. And then they used the footage and showed it to everyone anyway as a propaganda piece.
  • Yugo's duel with the Security as he and Yuzu attempt to escape capture is broadcasted live to the whole City (yes, that's really what it's called) in a manner more befitting of an athletic event than the police chase it actually was. This backfires for both of them, as one of the people watching was the Chief of Security, who was able to gather vital information about the two of them from the TV footage.
  • The Friendship Cup is similarly broadcasted to the entire City, and just like the Maiami Championship, several important matches are shown to everyone. This includes Kurosaki exposing Denis (this time via Kill Sat which was seen from space). Notably, many participants use it for propaganda, such as Yuya advocating against the City's slavery-based system, Shinji Weber using it to rally the Commons for the revolution, Roget's failed attempt to crush public resistance by using Sergei as a stand-in, Yuzu and later Sora's hijacking of the same broadcasting system to communicate with their allies, and most importantly, Yuya and Jack's finals duel to unite the City.
  • The last major duel, ZARC vs everyone, is seen by all four dimensions due to the various portals appearing all over the place.

Comic Books

• Spider-Man 2099: Tyler Stone decides to broadcast Spider-Man's fight with the Specialist to every channel - a fight which resulted in Miguel accidentally killing the Specialist. This had an avalanche of consequences, such as his brother figuring out his Secret Identity, the Thorites starting a new cult, Vulture taking an interest, and more.
• Wonder Woman (1987):
  • In the climax of "The Witch and The Warrior", Diana and Circe's battle is broadcast to the entire world under orders from Diana to Oracle to usurp all stations. Circe intends to make Diana execute her on t.v. in hopes that it will cause people to lose faith in Diana. Diana instead spares Circe's life.
  • Diana has another televised battle in Greg Rucka's first run. This time, her opponent is the gorgon Medusa whose sisters, with the aid of Circe, plan to use Medusa's gaze to turn everyone watching the fight to stone. Diana blinds herself with one of Medusa's snakes and kills the gorgon.

Fan Works

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Big fights between what are effectively world superpowers are watched by many through scrying magic, such as Crystal Ball and scrying pool.

Films — Animated

• Near the conclusion of The LEGO Movie, Wyldstyle is able to broadcast her Rousing Speech to the entire world by hijacking the recording of Where Are My Pants?.
• At the start of Steven Universe: The Movie, Steven uses the Diamonds' technology to inform the entire universe that peace has been established, and galactic conquest has been abolished. Unfortunately, this universal broadcast allows Spinel to find out what happened to Pink Diamond, track down Steven, and attempt to exact her revenge.

Films — Live-Action

• In Airplane!, we see news reports about the distressed plane being broadcast around the world, in all different languages, including Japanese (with a woodcut of a burning plane in the background) and African drums.
• Apollo 13 plays with this trope twice, before and after the oxygen tank explosion as a contrast about the world's reaction to what is now the third mission to the Moon:
  • Only a couple hours before the accident, the astronauts are scheduled to do a live broadcast from the Odyssey to be relayed back to Earth. A brief scene at the Lovell's home shows wife Marilyn arguing with daughter Barbara about going to Mission Control for it, with Marilyn insisting that the whole world is going to be watching Jim do the broadcast. This gets rather cruelly Subverted once they do arrive at Mission Control's public gallery and they find out from NASA's PR officer Henry Hurt that none of the television networks are broadcasting it live, Henry mentioning that by now the program's become so routine they've made going to the moon as exciting as a trip to Pittsburgh. Other aides in the room keep changing the television's channel to no avail — apparently watching a gorilla in a zoo throwing around baggage was more interesting.
  • Afterwards it's played straight as the spacecraft circles around and approaches the Earth. News reports are shown of reactions from the nations of the world. Many offer help, but there's really nothing anyone outside of NASA can do except pray. Archive footage is shown of Pope Paul VI leading fifty thousand people in prayer at St. Peter's and prayers offered at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Marilyn herself is rather bitter about the media's about-face of attitude when the networks wanted to set up broadcasting equipment on her lawn.
    "If landing on the moon wasn't interesting enough, why should not landing be?"
• Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey: The villain De Nomolos causes all the world's channels to watch his New Era Speech, but Bill and Ted are able to defeat him and then their future selves play their music for all the world to see, which makes them internationally famous. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain
• In The Dish, there's an extended montage of people watching the moon landing, ranging from schoolchildren and residents of Parkes, Australia (where the satellite dish receiving the Apollo 11 signal is located) to people in several cities around the world to a group of American soldiers in Vietnam.
• Gamer: The online shooting game Slayers (where gamers control convicts who slaughter each other for real) is shown to have become a worldwide phenomenon, with games being broadcast to all points of the globe as huge crowds cheer on their favorite Slayer, Kable.
• The Martian: As the Hermes prepares to rendezvous with Watney after he was stranded on Mars for nearly four years, crowds are shown gathering in Times Square in New York, Trafalgar Square in London and in Beijing to follow updates on the mission. And the entire world cheers when word comes that Watney has been safely recovered.
• In The Replacements, the disastrous Sugar Bowl performance that effectively ended quarterback Shane Falco's pro career before it began is heavily implied to have been such an event, as numerous characters bring up the game upon meeting him. After one such conversation, he even quips, "Didn't anybody have anything better to do that day?"
• Serenity: At the end, armed with knowledge that the Alliance is responsible for the existence of the Reavers, Mal decides that everyone needs to know about this and for that, he intends to take it to Mr. Universe, who has the equipment to put it on every screen in the system.
• In Spice World, the Spice Girls are about to give their first ever live performance, due to be broadcast all over the world, but the Spice Girls might be late, because they are waiting for their friend Nicola to give birth.
  Geri: The world can wait! This is more important! It's about friendship and commitment, but you wouldn't know about that!
• Thirteen Days: While the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba is kept on the downlow at first, after the Kennedy administration goes public with the information they have, the entire crisis takes center stage in the world theatre, best demonstrated by the confrontation between US Ambassador Stevenson and Soviet Ambassador Zorin at the United Nations.

  Stevenson: You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer "yes" or "no" (about whether the offical Soviet position is that there are no missiles in Cuba).

• The Truman Show bases its whole plot on an audience of people watching everything the titular character does, but Truman's ultimately successful escape attempt in particular is considered absolutely must-see TV, and we see frequent shows of the huge crowds and wide variety of people on the edge of their seat watching it.
• In Wonder Woman 1984, Maxwell Lord's plan to grant the wish of every person in the world (thereby causing society to fall into complete chaos and bringing about the end of the world as we know it) involves taking over a top-secret experimental satellite network being developed by the U.S. Government and simultaneously broadcasting himself on every television and radio across the planet. Though fortunately, this plan is foiled when Wonder Woman uses the same system and the Lasso of Truth to communicate to the world, convincing everyone to renounce their wishes and restoring everything to normal.

Literature

• In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, it's explicitly said that the whole world is glued to their TVs, watching the glass elevator's flight, listening to Mr. Wonka, and then watching the subsequent confrontation with the Vermicious Knids.
• In The Day of the Triffids, the majority of the world's population is blinded through observing a strange green meteor shower that lasted long enough to be see all over the world. The protagonist Bill Masen speculates that the "meteor shower" may have been orbiting satellite weapons, triggered accidentally.
• The Hunger Games is about the eponymous Deadly Game that is broadcast all over Panem annually and is treated like a major sporting event.
• The major events in Chicago that form the climax of Geoph Essex's Jackrabbit Messiah are televised on the news, up to and including a real-time play-by-play of a pivotal chase scene. Even more, this trope is invoked by name in direct reference to the real life example of the 1968 Democratic Convention (which the Princess of Chicago does deliberately to mock Lieutenant Springer, who was actually one of the protestors as a teen back in 1968).
• In the final confrontation between Sergey and Nes in Lukyanenko's Space Opera trilogy A Lord from Planet Earth Nes releases a camera automaton and states that not only the entirety of his fellow Fangs but also the entire Human civilization will be watching them duel for the sake of deciding the war between the two civilizations.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who "Day of the Moon": The Doctor takes advantage of the record-setting Apollo 11 broadcast to embed a subliminal message against the Monster of the Week.
• Chernobyl: The ever image-conscious Soviet Union is desperately trying to avert this in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, not allowing the town to be evacuated and putting a moratorium on all information coming in and out in an effort to keep it quiet. After radiation is detected in Sweden, the United States makes a satellite sweep of the area. Moscow drops pretenses after that, allowing the evacuation to proceed, but with the eyes of the world now on them, they try harder than ever to downplay the incident to make it seem the Soviet government has it all under control. As Comrade Gorbachev puts it, their power comes from the perception of their power.
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: The fourth episode is flat-out called "The Whole World Is Watching" reflecting the pressure John Walker is feeling in his new role as Captain America. And at the end, as he ruthlessly kills one of the Flag-Smashers, people with cell phones are shown not far away recording it and then him standing with his blood-stained shield. The implication is clear: the entire world is going to see this.
• The Orville: The landing party in the episode "Majority Rule" has LeMarr unwittingly earn the displeasure of a world similar to the 21st century, with ubiquitous cell-phone devices, and legal judgments rendered by social media voting. A video of him dry-humping a statue of an important historical figure goes viral, and seemingly the entire world starts giving him downvotes, which in this society leads to him being arrested. After the trial, his fate is once again up to the whims of the social media public, though the Orville crew start fabricating stories to make him more sympathetic and swing the vote in his favor. They manage to get him off, just barely.
• In The People v. O. J. Simpson, Simpson's flight from the cops in a white Bronco is watched by millions of people. This is what inspires Johnny Cochrane to become his defense attorney when Simpson is accused of murder; Cochrane rightly assumes that the murder trial will get similarly large viewership numbers, and intends to use that publicity to present evidence of the LAPD's racism to an audience that might not have seen it otherwise.
• In the Black Mirror episode "The National Anthem", the much-beloved Princess Susannah (an Expy of the Princesses Diana and Kate Middleton) is kidnapped, and her captors demand an odd ransom: U.K. Prime Minister Michael Callow must have sex with a pig on live television for her safe return. The episode follows Callow and his cabinet trying to come up with ways to avoid this fate, while more and more people across the United Kingdom tune in to watch the buildup. When the deadline hits and all attempts to rescue Princess Susannah have failed, Callow is forced to go through with the horrible act, while nearly every person on the planet watches in Bile Fascination. It turns out that this was the whole point—the kidnapper is a Mad Artist who engineered the whole scheme as a commentary on people's inherent cruelty and obsession with shock value. To drive the point home, the artist frees Susannah fifteen minutes before the deadline and leaves her wandering alone and disoriented in London, correctly assuming that everyone in the city (and indeed the entire world) will be too busy watching their screens to realize she's been released.

Video Games

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: In the final mission of the Allied campaign of Yuri's Revenge, Eva gives a word of encouragement to the Commander about how the entire world is waiting for you to put an end to Yuri's plans for world domination once and for all.
  Eva: We're rooting for you, Commander. The whole world is watching and waiting. Battle control online.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc reveals in the final chapter that the Mastermind has been broadcasting the entire killing game to the survivors of the ruined world. This also explains what those strange noises heard at times near the front entrance are: they're the sound of would-be rescuers getting gunned down by the school's automated defenses.
• Friday Night Funkin': Corruption: The video for "Dusk" ends with a text box stating "Everyone is watching us". In the following video for "Deathmatch", there's a giant hole in the wall showing hordes of corrupted people watching Daddy Dearest fight Boyfriend. The end of the video sees the entire world corrupted after Daddy Dearest succumbs.
• Sonic Adventure 2: Eggman enforces this trope via the Space Colony ARK, which has the ability to transfer messages to every communications device on the planet. Even countries that don't have communications devices are Forced to Watch, given that Eggman blows up half of the moon with the Eclipse Cannon, and the entire world's attention is fully taken once all seven Chaos Emeralds are inserted into the Eclipse Cannon, and a pre-recorded message from Professor Gerald Robotnik informs the entire world that the ARK is on a crash course with the planet, and nothing can be done to prevent the death of everyone.

Web Animation

• RWBY:
  • The Vytal Festival celebrates the cultures of the world and pits the students of the elite Huntsman Academies against each other in competitive matches for their kingdom's honour. A montage is shown of people all around the world from different walks of life all watching the tournament at the same time. As part of her plan to destroy the world, the Big Bad uses the event's global reach to frame the Beacon students and headmaster as dishonourable, and enable The Heavy to control the broadcast to discredit all Huntsman Academies and every kingdom's leadership. This causes massive global spikes in Grimm activity, destroys Beacon, frames Atlas for the attack, and leaves humanity wallowing in fear, mistrust and confusion.
  • Following the communications system between Kingdom's going down, General James Ironwood attempts to restore communications by converting Amity Colosseum into Amity Communications Tower by the time the heroes reach the Kingdom of Atlas. However, the reason for the supplies needed to get it running are kept a secret and cause tension between the people of Mantle as a result. Ironwood planned to tell the world about the existence of Salem when Amity was up and running. When he learned that Salem herself was on her way to Atlas however, Ironwood abandoned his original plan and decided to only save Atlas while leaving Mantle to die. Because of this, Ruby Rose decides to finish the original plan and manages to briefly restore worldwide communications and send a message revealing everything they had learned about the situation up to that point. While the majority of the message is shown all across Remnant to characters from previous Volumes, the ending is cut off after Penny succumbs to a virus and let's go of the communications tower.The very last scene of Volume 9 showing Vacuo reveals that Ruby's message wasn't in vain as ships from all over Remnant were shown guarding the capital.

Web Videos

• Joueur du Grenier: Played for Laughs whenever sports anime comes up, the stadiums always seem full to bursting over unimportant matches of minor leagues.
  • The Let's Play of Captain Tsubasa goes the Serial Escalation route, with junior soccer matches being broadcast to 145 countries, then 3 galaxies, then 4 parallel universes.
  • The Beyblade special points out that the stadiums are filled to capacity despite no one being able to see the spinning tops.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In "Tearjerker", the titular villain (Roger) plans to make the world cry themselves to death with his film Oscar Gold, about a mentally-retarded Jewish boy hiding from the Nazis with his cancer-riddled puppy. Indeed, once it premiered simultaneously around the world, people around the world are sobbing (except those in Iran, who are laughing their asses off). Fortunately, Agent Stan Smith and Sexpun T'Come (Francine) save the world by unleashing something more alluring than a Holocaust movie: photos of celebrity babies!
• Pinky and the Brain: At the end of the "Brainwashed" trilogy, an event called "The Schmeerskahoven-a-thon for World Peace" is set up, complete with jumbo-trons meant to broadcast BAAB singing it across the globe. Precious, the Big Bad of the trilogy, intended to use it to make all of humanity think that they're cats, but Brain uses Bobby-Bob to undo the damage to humanity's collective intelligence caused by the Schmeerskahoven.
• The last episodes of Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline feature both instances of this:
  • First, Pyrna announces, across the galaxies, that death penalty has been reestablished for subversives and that Valerian will suffer a Public Execution which he survives, thanks to have moved Pyrna to High-Heel–Face Turn after learning her who really murdered her parents, and that it was the Vlagos who did it.
  • Second, Tancarville announces across Earth he will marry Laureline.

Real Life

• A real-life example would be World War II, but as most people worldwide didn't have TV at the time, it was more like a case of "The Whole World Is Listening Via Radio".
• Adolf Hitler went out of his way to invoke this for the 1936 Olympics being hosted in Berlin as a way to showcase the supposed superiority of the Ubermensch. This did not turn out at all the way he wanted, especially when Jesse Owens beat out Germany's runners in front of the whole world.
  • General Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked this trope in his telegram addressing the Allied forces marshalling for Overlord, the massive invasion operation to establish a western ground front in mainland Europe and begin the process of liberating France, stating, "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you!"
• The FIFA World Cup has attracted an average of 3.2 billion viewers in 2010 and 2014, making it the most-watched overall live event by average on television worldwide in the 21st century.
• Invoked during the protests outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; one of the crowd chants was "The whole world is watching!", in reference to the fact that the "big three" networks had aired footage of protesters clashing with police as part of their nightly news, and had questioned why the Police felt the need to respond with the level of violence that they did.
• An estimated audience of 650 million people, the largest ever at the time, watched the Apollo 11 moon landings on July 20, 1969.
• It is estimated that between 1.5 and 2 billion people tuned in to watch Live Aid, two concerts held in London and Philadelphia on July 13, 1985 to raise donations for the famine in Ethiopia. Considering that this was about 40% of the world's population back then, this would easily make Live Aid the biggest musical event of The '80s and of all time.
• U.S. presidential elections. That the major American news networks have all night specials covering voting results and tallying electoral votes as each state is called is to be expected, but similar wall-to-wall coverage also occurs on The BBC in England, CBC in Canada and the ABC in Australia, and most other countries will have similar presentations of it as well. A lot of them even have the same wall-sized maps of the U.S. that the American networks use with states that get colored in red or blue as they're called. Here's a selection of a few from around the world. Given the influence the President of the United States can have on world events, when a new president is chosen the world pays attention.

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