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The Great Cities

225 statements
43 feature instances
2 referencing feature instances

The Great Cities	type	TVTItem
The Great Cities	label	The Great Cities
The Great Cities	page	TheGreatCities
The Great Cities	comment	The Urban Fantasy duology Great Cities, by N. K. Jemisin, consists of "The City Born Great" (2016) was a short story mostly reworked into the first chapter of The City We Became The City We Became (2020) The World We Make (2022)It takes place in a world where great cities acquire sentience through human avatars. In New York City, a group of avatars of New York, each representing their respective five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten Island) as well as of the whole city New York City as a whole emerges to face a supernatural threat.
The Great Cities	fetched	2024-02-04T08:30:38Z
The Great Cities	parsed	2024-02-04T08:30:38Z
The Great Cities	processingComment	Dropped link to DiscussedTrope: Not a Feature - ITEM
The Great Cities	processingComment	Dropped link to KingKong1933: Not a Feature - ITEM
The Great Cities	isPartOf	DBTropes
The Great Cities / int_1888979e	type	Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist
The Great Cities / int_1888979e	comment	Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Enemy initially says she wants to stop cities from becoming alive and destroying multiple inhabited universes each time. If she has to exploit human bigotries and cause smaller massacres in the process, and cripple humanity's social development, so be it. By the endgame, she makes it clear that she simply considers humans and their cities to be abominations, and she intends to destroy not just the universe where the story is taking place, but every universe connected to it.
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The Great Cities / int_2207b002	type	Ambiguously Brown
The Great Cities / int_2207b002	comment	Ambiguously Brown: Manny does have a specific ethnicity (Black American), but looks Ambiguously Brown and appears to be used to fielding questions about his heritage. A notable aspect of his appearance that Bronca picks up on is that he's perceived to be whatever race other people he's talking to are, which is implied to be an expression of Manhattan itself: not only very multi-cultural, but its more predatory elements can win you to their side by making you think, "he's okay. He's one of us". Hell, when he goes to visit the avatar of Tokyo in the second book, she immediately perceives him to be half-Japanese.
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The Great Cities / int_234073a4	type	Your Mind Makes It Real
The Great Cities / int_234073a4	comment	Your Mind Makes It Real: People have the power to create new universes with their thoughts, either from cultural constructs or even just one person's imagination being strong enough.
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The Great Cities / int_23ff95fb	type	Brutal Honesty
The Great Cities / int_23ff95fb	comment	Brutal Honesty: The Woman In White makes no secret of the fact that she considers humans, and especially cities, to be abominations; that she intends to destroy the city and use it as a stepping stone to destroy the universe; and that the only reward for allying with her is to die last and more peacefully. Staten Island hates the rest of the City too much to care.
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The Great Cities / int_2a35374f	type	Villainous Gentrification
The Great Cities / int_2a35374f	comment	Villainous Gentrification: A tool of the Woman in White. By putting up generic chain stores and pricing out the population and their original culture, she saps the "character" from cities and weakens their power. Becomes very literal near the climax when a race to Staten Island must go through a gauntlet of Starbucks franchises-turned-Eldritch Abominations.
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The Great Cities / int_3fe6a857	type	Public Domain Character
The Great Cities / int_3fe6a857	comment	Public Domain Character: At the climax, Manhattan briefly takes the form of King Kong.
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The Great Cities	hasFeature	The Great Cities / int_3fe6a857
The Great Cities / int_49fb5ccb	type	Combat Pragmatist
The Great Cities / int_49fb5ccb	comment	Combat Pragmatist: The Enemy never kept to the rules of engagement it had supposedly agreed to with the cities, and even set up a multinational corporation whose purpose is to destroy cities' individuality so they might never be born, or to weaken and sabotage them if they are. The older cities come to suspect that this is how it arranged the assassination of the avatar of New Orleans.
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The Great Cities / int_4a879f41	type	Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?
The Great Cities / int_4a879f41	comment	Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Aislyn thinks of The Woman in White as a friend. She's even a fan of tea.
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The Great Cities / int_4bf3d8d7	type	Personality Powers
The Great Cities / int_4bf3d8d7	comment	Personality Powers: The avatars battle using "constructs"—abstract ideas that have real existence in cityspace. Each avatar's preferred constructs influence their fighting style. Brooklyn is a former MC who defeats monsters with literal rap battles. Bronca has fought all her life by running up to bigger, stronger opponents and kicking them before they expect anything. As an avatar, she's always wearing her "boots." Aislyn is so timid that she commands a Perception Filter. Padmini is a graduate student that uses mental mathematical equations to shape reality. Manny is able to hold off the eldritch abominations by literally buying the land they're standing on. He's also able to summon a subway train construct more than once to make an escape (most people who live or work in Manhattan famously don't drive), and when facing down the monster sent to destroy Neek, transforms into none other than King Kong, renowned for his rampage through the borough that, of course, ended at Manhattan's most famous landmark, the Empire State Building.
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The Great Cities / int_4eb66c8d	type	White Male Lead
The Great Cities / int_4eb66c8d	comment	White Male Lead: Averted with the main cast. In fact, being a straight white male is a good sign of being on the side of evil. Lampshaded when Hong addresses Manny upon first meeting the avatars, assuming that the only man among them must be the leader.
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The Great Cities / int_51c70be6	type	Obliviously Evil
The Great Cities / int_51c70be6	comment	Obliviously Evil: The birth of a city collapses thousands of realities into non-existence, killing trillions of people or even rendering them Deader than Dead. But there is no way for the avatars of the city to know this until after the city is born.
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The Great Cities / int_51d8f2e3	type	Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering
The Great Cities / int_51d8f2e3	comment	Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: There is a Summit composed of all the cities on Earth that survived their awakenings. Disagreements among their ranks prevented them from mounting an effective resistance to the Enemy's changing tactics.
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The Great Cities / int_586624e5	type	Genius Loci
The Great Cities / int_586624e5	comment	Genius Loci: The main characters are this to New York and its boroughs. In fact, all the major cities in this world get one or several: Sao Paolo and Hong Kong are secondary characters in the first book, and the second book introduces a whole host of these, notably London, Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul, Faiyum and even Atlantis. The Woman in White is also one - namely, R'lyeh.
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The Great Cities / int_61459062	type	Perception Filter
The Great Cities / int_61459062	comment	Aislyn is so timid that she commands a Perception Filter.
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The Great Cities / int_643dbca5	type	Cast of Personifications
The Great Cities / int_643dbca5	comment	Cast of Personifications: The main characters embody social and historical aspects of New York and its boroughs: Bronca is an older boisterous Lenape artist, embodying the first inhabitants of New York and the scrappy, artsy side of the Bronx. Brooklyn is a black middle-aged lawyer and city councilwoman who was once a rapper. She embodies both the bohemian past of Brooklyn and its current gentrification. Padmini is a 25-year-old Tamil immigrant graduate student, reflecting the multiculturalism of Queens. She's implied to be Dalit (of the lowest caste), so she also embodies the desires of immigrants to start over in a place with more opportunity. Manny is smartly dressed and ruthless, embodying the business-focused mentality of Manhattan. Much like Manhattan itself, he's just ambiguous enough to reflect whatever the person looking at him expects to see. Aislyn is a timid and mousy white woman afraid of the other, bigger, boroughs, reflecting the whiter and more conservative lean of Staten Island. Veneza hangs around the other avatars for most of the book despite not being one of them. At the climax, she becomes the personification of Jersey City, small and scrappy but daring the rest of New York to say it doesn't belong.
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The Great Cities / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
The Great Cities / int_6bda9a30	comment	Meaningful Name: Several of the avatars have names that sound like their borough's name—or, in Brooklyn's case, just have exactly the same name.
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The Great Cities / int_729c69f3	type	Politically Incorrect Villain
The Great Cities / int_729c69f3	comment	Politically Incorrect Villain: While the Woman in White is too inhuman to properly feel mortal prejudices (she's good at Fantastic Racism, though), bigots are easier for her to influence than most, so she cheerfully plays to any and all kinds of -isms to get what she wants.
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The Great Cities / int_7b7f0141	type	Tentacled Terror
The Great Cities / int_7b7f0141	comment	Tentacled Terror: The soldiers of the Enemy frequently sport the classic writhing tentacles. It's hinted that they intentionally took on the Lovecraft look to distract the Cities from the Enemy's newer, subtler tactics.
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The Great Cities / int_851dda8f	type	Humanoid Abomination
The Great Cities / int_851dda8f	comment	Humanoid Abomination: The Woman in White appears to be a white (Caucasian) woman with white hair and all-white clothing, but she doesn't even bother hiding that she's something utterly inhuman and alien. Her other features vary considerably between appearances, and is once described as having unnatural and unsettling beauty. She is an avatar of the Enemy, and R'lyeh contains many Women in White.
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The Great Cities / int_8774fb47	type	Eldritch Abomination
The Great Cities / int_8774fb47	comment	Eldritch Abomination: The Enemy is explicitly and repeatedly called one, word for word. It is an immense, ancient horror from an incomprehensible universe, and it has nothing but ill will for cities and humanity in general. It manifests on Earth in a variety of forms, including feathery white tendrils of various sizes, two-dimensional spider monsters, and - most prominently - the Woman in White. Fittingly, the Enemy turns out to be the avatar of the city of R'lyeh.
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The Great Cities / int_87b8f581	type	Refusal of the Call
The Great Cities / int_87b8f581	comment	Refusal of the Call: Bronca and Aislyn are both reluctant to join the rest of the city despite their powers calling to them to do so.
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The Great Cities / int_8cb844c6	type	Mr. Exposition
The Great Cities / int_8cb844c6	comment	Ms. Exposition: Because Bronca's the oldest, New York decides she's the one who can handle knowing all the background information, so she has to tell the others how stuff works.
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The Great Cities / int_91e894b4	type	Apocalypse How
The Great Cities / int_91e894b4	comment	Apocalypse How: The Woman in White intends to create a class X-5 with her city imposing on New York destroying this universe and several others connecting to it. A class X-5 also happens every time a city is born, "tearing through" universes and destroying thousands of them.
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The Great Cities / int_92cca75b	type	Ret-Gone
The Great Cities / int_92cca75b	comment	Ret-Gone: One of the possible fates for New York if the avatars lose—the Woman in White destroyed Atlantis so completely that it never existed in the first place.
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The Great Cities / int_9a1d239e	type	Been There, Shaped History
The Great Cities / int_9a1d239e	comment	Been There, Shaped History: Hurricane Katrina and the botching of the government response were influenced, if not caused by, the Woman in White, as a way to make it easier to kill New Orleans. The same goes for the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the birth of Port-au-Prince.
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The Great Cities / int_9b06e314	type	Greater-Scope Villain
The Great Cities / int_9b06e314	comment	Greater-Scope Villain: The Woman in White has a "board" she must answer to.
The Great Cities / int_9b06e314	featureApplicability	1.0
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The Great Cities / int_a7aef9ff	type	Obfuscating Stupidity
The Great Cities / int_a7aef9ff	comment	Obfuscating Stupidity: The Enemy has spent millennia pretending to be a rampaging beast so the cities don't recognize its ability to plan ahead and weaken cities before they're born.
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The Great Cities / int_a7aef9ff	featureConfidence	1.0
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The Great Cities / int_b3bdf232	type	Alien Geometries
The Great Cities / int_b3bdf232	comment	Alien Geometries: As befitting a story where R'lyeh shows up. A mere glimpse is frightening enough to break down the normally unshakeable Veneza. Discussed on a Tumblr post that Padmini reads, which jokes about how Lovecraft portrayed non-Euclidean geometry as scary when to people familiar with math it's actually completely harmless.
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The Great Cities / int_b4a6ae4c	type	Everyone Has Standards
The Great Cities / int_b4a6ae4c	comment	Everyone Has Standards: It's strongly implied that even the NYPD find Aislyn's father's behavior unacceptable, which is why he has no friends at work and hasn't made detective despite thirty years of trying. We also learn that at least a few NYPD officers (notably, the women) are on the side of the City.
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The Great Cities / int_b7e74b77	type	Five-Token Band
The Great Cities / int_b7e74b77	comment	Five-Token Band: Befitting the ethnic and cultural diversity of New York City. Also played with as the main cast has no White Male Lead like the usual iterations of this trope.
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The Great Cities / int_b7e74b77	featureConfidence	1.0
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The Great Cities / int_beb932ca	type	Big Applesauce
The Great Cities / int_beb932ca	comment	Big Applesauce: The story is set in New York.
The Great Cities / int_beb932ca	featureApplicability	1.0
The Great Cities / int_beb932ca	featureConfidence	1.0
The Great Cities	hasFeature	The Great Cities / int_beb932ca
The Great Cities / int_cad57f30	type	The Nameless
The Great Cities / int_cad57f30	comment	The Nameless: Manhattan. He does actually learn his true name, but refuses to acknowledge it throughout the books (so far), and the reader never learns what it is.
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The Great Cities / int_cc4d190a	type	Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?
The Great Cities / int_cc4d190a	comment	Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Subverted. The heroes beat the abominations with physical violence several times, but being city avatars, they're halfway to being eldritch abominations themselves.
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The Great Cities / int_d32cd9f5	type	Cast Full of Gay
The Great Cities / int_d32cd9f5	comment	Cast Full of Gay: Most characters are LGBTQI.
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The Great Cities / int_d3f67567	type	Personal Hate Before Common Goals
The Great Cities / int_d3f67567	comment	Personal Hate Before Common Goals: The Enemy openly declares that she's there to destroy the universe. Staten Island wants to see the other boroughs go to Hell so badly that she's okay with this.
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The Great Cities / int_d57ead25	type	Alike and Antithetical Adversaries
The Great Cities / int_d57ead25	comment	Alike and Antithetical Adversaries: The diverse main cast, representing New York, is contrasted with the uniformity of the Enemy which tries to make cities more uniform, and the Woman in White always appears as a white woman as well as being the Anthropomorphic Personification of a scarily uniform city herself.
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The Great Cities / int_e543a655	type	Light Is Not Good
The Great Cities / int_e543a655	comment	Light Is Not Good: Everything associated with the Enemy is a stark, stale white.
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The Great Cities / int_e8a56ee7	type	Steven Ulysses Perhero
The Great Cities / int_e8a56ee7	comment	Steven Ulysses Perhero: Brooklyn, Bronca and Aislyn all have names that sound like the borough they will later end up represented, although Manny's name is a Line-of-Sight Name he created for himself due to his amnesia and not the name he was born with.
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The Great Cities / int_eb251937	type	Dirty Cop
The Great Cities / int_eb251937	comment	Dirty Cop: Aislyn's father arrests someone and charges them with assault for no other reason than they were the wrong color and in his wrong neighborhood.
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The Great Cities / int_f31926c2	type	Expendable Alternate Universe
The Great Cities / int_f31926c2	comment	Expendable Alternate Universe: Thousands of alternate universes are destroyed when a city is born. While the main characters had no way of preventing this from happening with the birth of New York, they still decide pretty quickly that it's worth it and make no attempt to prevent it from happening again.
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The Great Cities / int_f76b8969	type	Anthropomorphic Personification
The Great Cities / int_f76b8969	comment	Anthropomorphic Personification: The five boroughs of New York and New York city as a whole are incarnated into six avatars that represent their social essence.
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The Great Cities / int_fed93e1b	type	Dark and Troubled Past
The Great Cities / int_fed93e1b	comment	Dark and Troubled Past: Manny is very, very strongly implied to have one of these, although his amnesia makes it difficult to say just how much. Even meeting his mother in the second book doesn't shed any light on this.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

	The Great Cities	hasFeature	The Chosen Many / int_c0f33a52
	The Great Cities	hasFeature	Villainous Gentrification / int_c0f33a52

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