Just look at the world around you
Right here on the ocean floor
Such wonderful things surround you
What more is you lookin' for?
Right here on the ocean floor
Such wonderful things surround you
What more is you lookin' for?
— Sebastian, "Under the Sea", The Little Mermaid (1989)
Most people would not think much about what's going on underwater, despite the oceans making up three quarters of the Earth. For many, the oceans are just water and fish. Given how humanity cannot survive underwater without special equipment that was only developed recently, it does make a fair bit of sense.
Yet once we were finally able to go underwater, we've discovered the oceans have as much variety of biomes as dry land as we saw a world full of life held beneath the waves — kelp forests, seagrass meadows and colorful coral reefs, all full of fish and invertebrates swimming in the water. Even in the otherwise desert deep sea, there are oases of life in places such as seamounts, shipwrecks, whale falls and hydrothermal vents — we cannot help but feel awe at how life can thrive even in otherwise inhospitable environments.
Then there are the centuries of lore and mythology associated with the ocean since humanity first set out to sea. Besides the classic romance of sailors and explorers with the sea, humanity has always maintained fascination with what magical or monstrous beings could have lived underwater, a new world where — for most of history — humanity could not tread. This has been reflected in various folktales and stories in all sorts of human mythologies. Combine this with the potential discovery for Underwater Ruins of ancient or modern human creations, and you have an ocean of awe.
Now in the modern era, when we know much more about the seas than we've ever did (thanks to the growing advancements in technology and science for underwater exploration), we may wonder how it'd be like to be able to breathe underwater and move in three dimensions in our day-to-day — to fly through liquid with the same ease as walking or running. SCUBA diving may provide an approximation, but a water-breathing character would have an even richer sensory experience, being able to taste and sense every smell suspended in the water and hear every sound unmuffled. From here we get gorgeous Underwater Cities (usually Atlantis) with buildings of monumental stonemasonry and hanging gardens, inhabited by Water-Breathing Humans, mythological creatures such as mermaids or Sea Monsters, or extra- or Ultraterrestrials such as Fish People or aquatic Starfish Aliens.
For wildlife, you will find aquatic animals of any kind, no matter how deep — often fish and dolphinsnote , both playful and heroic (however, beware the devious sort). The occasional Shipshape Shipwreck may provide housing for any of the above.
For a version that couples can see next-door without any special diving equipment or powers, see Aquarium Date. For related underwater tropes, see Under the Sea, Water Is Air, and Flying Seafood Special. Sub-Trope of Scenery Porn. Compare Ocean of Adventure. Contrast Eldritch Ocean Abyss.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea has an extensive underwater village and a significant portion of the plot going on there. There's plenty of wonder down there, and they usually don't forget about the additional dimension.
- One Piece with Fishman Island. It's visually impressive, being several massive bubbles, partially filled with water, coral reefs, and regular buildings within the branches of a massive phosphorescent underwater tree. It's constantly visited by string of pirates (being the only way across the Red Line without going through the marines and or the Calm Belt), slaver raids (fishmen are superhumanly strong, and mermaids are seen as incredibly beautiful), and a long running battle over human relations (join humans or screw humans).
Comic Books
- Aquaman has had this as a general trait since his inception, with many stories focusing on the wonder of undersea life and how beautiful it is. More specific examples include:
- In The Atlantis Chronicles, when Orin takes the serum allowing him to breathe underwater, he happily dances among the sea creatures, and the art takes pain to show how beautiful it is.
- In Aquaman (1994), when Aquaman descends to the Devil's Deep trench midway through the run, he finds comfort and fascination in the deep-sea life encountered there and marvels at how life can thrive anywhere.
- Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis sports a fantasy setting full of underwater communities bustling with life, and worldbuilding details such as taverns with jelly capsules (implied to be carrageen) and drinks served in swimbladders.
- Shazam!: In The Marvel Family #62 "Sivana's Undersea Kingdom", Dr. Sivana decides to create his own sunken kingdom by teleporting entire towns to the bottom of the ocean. As the Marvels get to thwart Sivana's scheme, they find the depths are filled of thick jungles and fearsome monsters.
- Sub-Mariner's Atlantis features plenty of underwater machines and strange sea life. While the political elements often repeat themselves (Namor keeps being elected king, abdicating for various reasons, doing superhero stuff on the surface, returning to Atlantis or a remnant made of his most loyal followers, rinse and repeat), it's still a classic part of Marvel's mythos and keeps being revisited. He is one of Marvel's oldest superheroes, and his Byronic Hero elements maintain him a cult following. As of recently, he has also quarreled with other superstates (such as Black Panther and Wakanda, as well as Doctor Doom and Latveria.)
- Superman: In Superboy meets Supergirl!, Clark and Linda visit a faraway world wich is completely water-covered. As swimming across the endless ocean, Superboy and Supergirl are grabbed by giant crab-like pincers of an underwater fishing vehicle operated by green-skinned humanoids. Unwilling to be some mermen's dinner, both cousins pry the pincers open and fly off.
- Wonder Woman (1942): For a while in the Silver Age, there was a fascinating merpeople town in the waters right off Paradise Island. The town itself was hidden under a bit of false seafloor by a giant clam entrance making it underwater and underground, was the site of near constant dances, home to oversized sea creatures, and frequently attacked by underwater centaurs. They also had "Chlorofleur Vines" that produced a knockout drug.
Fan Works
- A focus in Aquaman: Monster is how wonderful life under the sea is even with villains attacking, as fish sing a dawn chorus just like birds and create beautiful nests, and for the most part creatures live in harmony with one another.
- The Urthblood Saga: There is a scene in The Crimson Badger in which Winokur, a river otter, gets to swim in the ocean for the first time. The author does a wonderful job making the underwater world interesting and colourful.
Films — Animation
- In Barbie Fairytopia, the ocean kingdom of Mermaidia is filled with beautiful landscapes, quirky characters both human and anthropomorphic, and magical plants unlike any growing on land.
- Deep Sea (2023) takes place in a submarine that houses a restaurant and the colorful aquatic world is highlighted during the scene where it travels to the eye of the Deep Sea and features vibrant scenery and wildlife during it.
- Finding Nemo does a good job of creating a diverse underwater environment with plenty of exciting action scenes. In fact, during the production of the film, Pixar required plenty of people to go scuba-diving so they could fully capture life underwater. Needless to say, they succeeded beautifully.
- The Little Mermaid is able to maintain a fairly interesting underwater setting; it's even stated in-universe as such with Sebastian's song "Under the Sea" in the first movie, when he tries to convince Ariel to forget about her interest in the human world. Ironically, the first movie takes place on land a lot (kind of a given, since the story it adapts is about a mermaid becoming human), whereas The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning, and The Little Mermaid (1992) are far more focused on the underwater adventures.
- The Sword in the Stone: During the lesson spent as a fish, Merlin comments that there are all different types of underwater environments, each with their own challenges. Though we never see any of them, knowing Merlin, it's probably true.
- The start of Trolls World Tour introduces us to Techno Reef, a super cool, rave-aesthetic reef home to the Techno Trolls, ruled by King Trollex.
Films — Live-Action
- Aquaman (2018) is the best-grossing film in the DC Extended Universe on the international market, with a significant chunk of the movie taking place underwater in the kingdom of Atlantis.
Literature
- Adventure Series: "Diving Adventure" (part of a Values Dissonance-rife series about teenage animal trappers) takes place in an undersea town/experimental community and does make full use of its setting.
- Amphibian Man by Russian science fiction author Alexander Beliaev gives a poetic account of undersea beauty as experienced by a young man with gills, which naturally force him to spend most of his life in the ocean. A lot of Scenery Porn is provided about the young man's underwater environment — such as a cavern that he furnishes with seashells, pearls, and various plant life.
He placed the table in the middle of the grotto, the vases on the table, poured the earth into the vases, and planted the aquatic flowers. The earth, washed by the water, clouded for some time above the vases like smoke, but then the water cleared. Only the flowers, stirred by light ripples, swayed quietly, as if in a breeze.
- Animorphs has several books centered around deep-sea action, most notably when the characters travel to the mostly aquatic planet Leera — there, the scattered islands and lone continent are mostly dull, barren rock, while the sea is filled with bizarre, colorful lifeforms everywhere you look.
Cassie: My mom has a friend who's a marine biologist. She would cut off her arm to spend an hour here.
- Atlan boasts both a bizarre sea-girt jungle kingdom and a strange, colorful undersea path to said Lost World.
- One scene in The Chronicles of Amber sees the characters going into a Castlevania-style inverse version of their own castle, which goes even further than most inverse castles by being underwater. They initially go with Walk, Don't Swim (and they can breathe, for some reason), but eventually one of the characters gets sick of a particularly long spiral stair and swims down the bottom. Subverted as Rebma usually is on the placid side, and deliberately so as its ruler favors stability and usually is too busy trying to cope with the reflections of changes in Amber (which Rebma is both a literal and figurative reflection of) to do much that's noticeable on her own.
- The Chronicles of Narnia: In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy observes some mermen on the sea floor and reflects that human concepts do not apply directly to the sea and some are inverted — for example, the safe, homely places are on the tops of 'mountains', nearest the surface, while heroes go to fight monsters in the dark, dangerous 'valleys' where the sea is deepest.
- The Dark Life series takes place entirely undersea 20 Minutes into the Future. Downplayed since most of it takes place in pressurized domes filled with air.
- The Dirk Pitt Adventures: Many heart pounding action sequences happen below water as well as above — a given as the characters work for the National Underwater Marine Agency and are the nations foremost civilian underwater experts.
- Humanx Commonwealth: Cachalot is set on an ocean planet named Cachalot, which is inhabited by both its own unique set of lifeforms and a large population of whales and dolphins transplanted from Earth. Most of the novel takes place on and under the waters of Cachalot, several parts of which are described in loving detail.
- Magic Hour: During their undersea adventure in "Mermaid Fair," Calista and Jermaine take time to admire coral reefs and kelp forests.
- Rifters Trilogy: Starfish has deep-sea vent setting is stunning, with every excursion by its genetically modified protagonists a brush with death, darkness-induced telepathy, undersea robots, and giant versions of "regular" vent creatures... which aren't nearly as dangerous as their land-based counterparts. Its sequel, while still having an interesting, land-based setting, isn't nearly as astounding. Of course, Starfish can't help but include this trope, what with the author Peter Watts being a marine biologist and all.
- The Sea Fairies deals with a young girl and her crusty sea captain friend being temporarily transformed into the titular mermaids/mermen. They tour the queen's kingdom, meet all kinds of magical sea creatures, and end up captured by an evil sorcerer. This is actually the dominant plot of the book, so despite its scientific inaccuracy, there's a lot of interesting things that happen.
- The Shadow over Innsmouth: The main character is absolutely delighted to learn that he will be able to live forever in an Underwater City at the end of the story.
- Uplift: Startide Rising takes place primarily in an alien ocean — it helps that the protagonists' ship is one primarily manned by Smart Cetaceans.
Live Action TV
- Sea Hunt, which was quite popular in the '60s. Lloyd Bridges played sea diver Mike Nelson, and he took on a new dangerous assignment of one sort or another each week, encountering seafaring crooks, Soviet spies, a sunken ship carrying nerve gas, sharks, alligators, and even a fake sea monster.
- Stingray (1964) has lots of interesting underwater environments and varieties of aquatic races, many of whom want to give the heroes a hard time.
Mythology
- Several cultures envision the underworld as being underwater. Examples include the Celts, the Maya, and Aboriginal Australian cultures in the Worrorra complex.
- Classical Mythology: In one version of a Greek creation myth where Zeus, Hades and Poseidon decide who gets dominion over what, Zeus goes first and chooses the sky, being so high and majestic, but Poseidon (knowing Zeus would take the empty sky) chooses the sea, which is full of life. Hades took what was left, the Underworld (that is filled with precious stones and metals and there is always room for one more).
- Japanese Mythology: Being an island nation, stories of the sea are common in Japan, but most famous all revolve around Ryūgū-jō, the underwater palace and home to Ryūjin, the dragon god king of the seas. In fact, this was the source of inspiration for Fishman Island from One Piece and Dragon Palace from Okami.
Tabletop Games
- Blue Planet focuses on a mostly water-covered planet named Poseidon that was discovered on the other side of a stable wormhole. Part of what makes the setting exciting is all the strange alien things lurking beneath the waves, but there's plenty of loving detail beyond that, and the setting makes extensive use of real oceanography.
- Planescape takes an unusual approach in making the Elemental Plane of Water one of the more hospitable planes (at least compared to most of the Inner Planes, or the Lower Planes), recommended as a setting for low-level adventurers.
- Rifts tries to assure this with a number of Sourcebooks, notably Rifts' Underseas and Coalition Navy. Lemuria continues this with mobile underwater cities, living armor, rideable sea serpents, sea dragons, biomancy, and giant vampire crabs literally from Davy Jones' Locker.
- In Scion, there are two major aquatic environments listed: Atlantis and the Drowned Road. The former is the ruins of a Titan-worshipping civilization (worshippers still present) buried under Antarctica, and requires immense effort just to get there. The latter is the Titan of Water, and if you're in there, it should be entertaining by sheer virtue of taking the fight to the enemy.
- Transhuman Space with the sourcebook Under Pressure, which details the oceans of Earth and of terraformed Mars, as well as the subsurface ocean of Europa.
Video Games
- ABZÛ is a beautiful example of this. You play an anonymous individual going through beautiful and varies areas of the ocean, seeing various underwater fauna (including supposedly extinct ones) and even the ruins of a lost civilization. Furthermore, this is the Spiritual Successor to Journey (while not made by the same company, Abzu was conceived and created by that game's art director, Matt Nava, and scored by its composer, Austin Wintory.) You just take in the beautiful sights with no fears of drowning and trying to figure out the mystery of what you are exploring.
- Aquaria shows extreme variety in its environments, coupled with a diverse array of wildlife, both natural and fictitious.
- Archimedean Dynasty includes this by taking a heaping handful of the nautical tropes common in the space shooter genre (stealth by silence, minefields, escort missions, Ramming Always Works) and leveraging them for all their worth in their native Under the Sea environment.
- BioShock 2: There are segments where you can leave the city and travel the ocean floor to reach another part of Rapture, in order to give players some time to catch their breath between bouts of action. Big Daddies have self-contained air supplies; Splicers don't. These levels are spectacularly beautiful too.
- Champions Online. One of the higher level zones is "Lemuria", set in an ocean trench. The waterbreathing Lemurians have suffered a political schism, and the 'bad guy' Lemurians have taken to worshipping Eldritch Abomination types called the Bleak Ones, and transformed into humanoid reptile/fish things, who use both freaky sci-fi subs and shark-shaped subs for travel faster than they can swim. Meanwhile the humanoid sharks of Doctor Destroyer have also set up shop, there's the radioactive undead crew of a Russian sub that sank, a ghost ship with ghost pirates (and a few robot pirates down there, too), lots of sea life both hostile and not really THAT hostile, myriad forms of plant life, et cetera. A power that summons wolves on dry land summons sharks, instead, and many other pet summons are similarly altered — robot drones have artificial fins, for example.
- Civilization: Beyond Earth: The Rising Tide expansion pack. Most factions can traverse in water, and RT expands its role by making certain resources obtainable underwater, and colonies and other structures can be built on water. It also adds newer aquatic alien lifeforms.
- Civilization: Call to Power and its successor include this trope in the science fiction phase of the game. Once players can build submarines the ocean is revealed to have a huge variety of features such as volcanoes, rifts and giant squid; sea colonies have access to many more resources than land-based ones, and in addition to the variety of undersea units, players can engineer underwater tunnels to move land units quickly around on the sea bed.
- The entirety of Debris is set under the Arctic Seas, where all the marine life, from fishes to corals and underwater caverns, are bioluminescent and glowing with assorted colours owing to an asteroid filled with space energy landing in there years ago.
- The Ecco the Dolphin series plays its setting and protagonist's species for all they're worth — lots of Scenery Porn and levels that require thinking in two or three dimensions.
- The Endless Ocean games do a fantastic job of conveying the diversity of the sea's life and environments.
- E.V.O.: Search for Eden; despite being the first area, and thus the smallest, the water level feels more 'alive' and populated than the amphibian level. It does a good job in selling the feeling of being the first step into a true epic, and has numerous tutorial NPCs.
- Final Fantasy X has an added feature of three of your party being able to breathe underwater and there are several underwater places to go, complete with water-based fiends and boss battles.
- Grounded: Played with, in that the "ocean" is a small fish pond ventured into by ant-sized teenagers. The novelty of this trope being played out with tiny freshwater organisms rather than sea life, together with how many secrets the pond's depths conceal, make it a fascinating place to investigate.
- Guild Wars 2: Though underwater areas are not as common as terrestrial ones, they're just as beautifully crafted as the rest of the game. Combat also changes appropriately when underwater; you use a different weapon while swimming, which has a different set of skills than what you're used to. There are Renown Heart quests and dynamic events that take place entirely underwater, and resources, scenic views and skill points can be collected just like anywhere else. You're also equipped with a breathing device right from the beginning, so you don't need to worry about the annoyance of drowning.
- The first few Kingdom Hearts games include an Atlantica level based on The Little Mermaid. Fans are pretty divided on the first one and its swimming mechanic, but most prefer it to the musical mini game in II. Chain of Memories simply had the characters walk around on the ocean floor unimpeded, which sort-of made sense as they were in a memory world rather than physically there.
- Kingdom of Loathing: The Sea is one of the post-story environments that can be explored and its recent expansions have made it one of the best. A brutal challenge with penalties regarding obtaining wealth and items along with maintaining oxygen, you end up exploring the various areas while helping out the Sea Monkees. Then they updated it where you finally visit the mysterious city of the Mer-Kin and things quickly go Lovecraftian from there, resulting in fighting two Eldritch Abominations depending on which path and each dropping a piece of gear depending on your class. This means to get the full set, you'd need to fight each of the two six times, as each class before combining the pieces of gear with their counterpart to form a new uniform which unlocks one last boss to get the last piece of equipment to one of the strongest set. One of the best post-story areas to explore and without requiring special items or equipment that involve cash donations.
- Knights of the Old Republic has the water planet of Manaan, inhabited by the Fish People race known as Selkath. The entire surface of the planet is covered in water, with the only surface settlement, Ahto City, serving as the planet's capital. It also serves as a Paradise Planet as the architecture is stunningly beautiful as a result of the Selkath's environmentalism and savvy negotiations.
- Koral uses this as a selling point. You're a plankton, and spends the whole game exploring the depths of the ocean through various coral reefs, anemone beds and ocean floors.
- Mobfish Hunter: A diving game where the player chases strange fish underwater. The ocean world is very colorful and interesting, and some of the levels have strange colored water and unusual rock formations on the seafloor.
- Monster Hunter 3 (Tri): The ocean is full of beautiful marine life that wants to kill you. There are also underwater ruins in the game that you get to visit; they serve as the backdrop, armaments included, for the battle with the Final Boss, the Ceadeus. That monster is what brought said ruins underwater in the first place, and threatens to repeat this with Moga Village unless you stop it.
- New Pokémon Snap has a reef level and a underwater level, and both have some pretty gorgeous graphics and an array of water-types. There are things like the massive Wailord, swimming Mantine, singing Primarina and Lapras and bullying Sharpedo, and the predators like Frillish actually drag away Magikarp and others for a meal. The underwater level also has a cave alternate path where you can find Lugia.
- Subnautica basically runs on this trope. The player is stranded in the middle of a shallow reef on a planet mostly covered in ocean, and spends 90% of the game underwater. To survive and find a way home, the player must explore deeper and deeper in beautiful — and increasingly deadly — underwater environments.
- Warframe has maps where the player can travel through the coral reefs of Uranus (no, we don't know how they got there) using their Archwing, a personal jetpack normally used for space travel. The underwater segments are strikingly detailed.
- World of Warcraft: Vashj'ir, the first fully underwater zone introduced in Cataclysm, is one of the most colorful zones in the game thanks to abundant use of coral reefs. It is divided in three subzones, roughly correlating to kelp forest, tropical reef and deep-sea. The zone is varied, has interesting races, a story that doesn't seem like it belonged above the water and was definitely created with swimming in mind (the very first spell you get takes care of the breathing issues). It helps that one of the lead designers for the game was a former marine biologist.
Webcomics
Web Original
- In Hector's World, Silicon Deep is a generally-happy underwater town with lots of computers and an arcade.
- Unwanted Houseguest: The music video for "Until My Toes Turn Blue"
features the Houseguest in an underwater environment, which is actually a restaurant aquarium.
Western Animation
- Big Blue follows the adventures of the crew of the Calypso, who explore and protect a colorful and diverse ocean full of sights and life... as well as the dangers that threaten it.
- The Deep (2015) is about the Nekton family, who live on a submarine and devote their lives to exploring wonders of the deep.
- In Flipper and Lopaka, the sunken city of Quetzo is portrayed as intriguing and empowering in comparison to the hero's mundane life on the surface.
- Samurai Jack: In "Jack Under the Sea", the underwater realm is lushly portrayed as beautiful and full of strange life (there's a sequence during Jack's trip devoted to showing just how much weird stuff there is down there), and there's plenty going on to keep Jack busy in Oceanus itself.
- Parodied on The Simpsons: In "Homer Badman", Homer fantasizes living under the sea, spoofing The Little Mermaid (1989). Homer sings about great life is while eating every underwater creature he comes across.
- Sweet Sea takes place in the "underwater wonderland" of the Coral Kingdom, where mermaid princess Sweet Sea and her family live happily. The kingdom includes shops, a ballet studio, and an underwater windmill, and is kept safe from Sheeba the Sea Serpent by the Royal Necklace.
Real Life
- Any marine biologist or oceanographer would tell you that Real Life oceans are far from boring.
- Vibrant and colorful coral reefs filling the tropics, kelp forests with fruit-like airbladders and columnar fronds that grow tall in temperate zones, seagrass meadows with lily-like flowers that bloom every spring — all swarmed by colorful fish singing like birds and crustaceans cackling like crickets.note
- In the otherwise empty abyssal plains that make two thirds of the oceans and more than 50% of the Earth — endless sandy deserts to get lost in, full of dunes and scraggy abyssal hills — there are various isolated communities of peculiar-looking extremophiles in cold seeps, hydrothermal vents, brine pools, whale falls, cold-water coral and sponge reefs, rock reefs and shipwrecks found in all depths.
- Even in the otherwise inhospitable hadal zone where most forms of sea life cannot thrive, we find animals such as the Mariana snailfish, and other adorable little creatures that seem to be made of slime (due to their adaptations against the bone-crushing pressure of the hadopelagic).