Where Realms Twist: A Dance with the Unfathomable
Examples of Eldritch Location in anime and manga.- Heaven and Hell in Ah! My Goddess both use and avert this concept. On the one hand, both are realms that exist in twelve-dimensions, far more than the normal humans of Earth can ever hope to perceive. However, due to their complete inability to perceive more than three dimensions, the sheer alien quality of the two realms is completely lost on humans.
- Whenever the God Hand show up in Berserk they either pull people into their world (which is either a creepy landscape or something from an Escher painting) or start distorting our world until it resembles theirs.
- In Cells at Work!, for the characters, the "Outside World" is this. It is where all the viruses and bacteria are coming in from and it serves as a Death World for the cells as if they fall out into there, they can never return home.
- Hell's Gate in Darker than Black is full of Not of This Earth weirdness, the geography constantly shifts, Reality Is Out to Lunch, and, generally, there are very good reasons the scientists studying it have mostly abandoned manned missions in favor of sending in robots. As an added bonus, its appearance in the middle of Tokyo was accompanied by an Alien Sky covering the entire Earth and people suddenly becoming superpowered sociopaths. Said "sending in robots" consists of sending in a robot with a camera and having a full room of people watch the video stream and write down everything they see, because even through the video, everyone sees something different.
- Day Break Illusion has the Astralux, where the magical girls fight the Daemonia. It's a twisted approximation of the real world, distorted by the Daemonia's negative emotions, and while Daemonia are Invisible to Normals, what happens to the Astralux can wreck havoc on the real world.
- The titular dungeon of Delicious in Dungeon. Really, just dungeons in general. They drip with magic, swarm with monsters and death itself is forbidden there.
- In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, there is The Infinity Castle. The headquarters for Muzan and his demons. If you think the drum house is confusing with the ever-changing layout then imagine that times infinity. An extra-dimensional space taking the form of a castle stretching on for eternity with infinite rooms. It’s all controlled by Muzan’s minion Nakime through her blood demon art and can change the layout at the drop of a hat. Good luck even knowing which way is up in this place.
- The Digimon World of Digimon V-Tamer 01 and the monsters in it are all computer code but automatically appear to humans in familiar forms, so that they will easily be able to tell what is rock, water, a living being, etc.
- Digimon Adventure 02:
- The Dark Ocean, a place populated by the Deep Ones. They serve and worship Dagomon, a Digimon whose designs are heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos. It was stated that The Dark Ocean is a separate dimension from the other two established dimensions.
- Wherever the Hell it is Etemon ends up after his first defeat in Digimon Adventure.
- The world where the kids get sent to because Oikawa screwed up the card order
- What happens to the Digital World after the Dark Masters are defeated
- Digimon Tamers:
- The inside of the D-Reaper's mass bubble when it invades Earth. It goes from a giant bunch of melted buildings and electronics and a few sidewalks to a liquid-like gooey landscape of pure pink and red evil all around. Not only that, but the digital world certainly qualifies when the D-Reaper has taken over and turned everything into a rather disturbing, apocalyptic-looking war zone.
- And the world created by Mephistomon in Battle of Adventurers. It was ruined city with random vehicles suspended in the sky, everything was a shade of red, you could float around, and while it appeared submerged in liquid you breathe and talk normally.
- Dream Eater Merry: The Border between the dream and waking worlds is even stranger than the dreamscapes, looking like a mashup of all the different dreamscapes together in one place and a lingering sense of being watched despite there being no one around. It's also the place that gives all dreams their form and existence and the reason why dreams even exist in the first place.
- The eponymous geographical feature fromThe Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito. There are holes shaped like people in the rock surface. The holes bewitch people into climbing in, then they change shape as the people go through, somehow keeping them alive even as their bodies are stretched and twisted into horrific abominations.
- Fullmetal Alchemist:
- There's the inside of the Gate of Truth ("It's awful!"). Also, the inside of Gluttony's stomach, which is an infinite void created because Father tried and failed to make a pathway to the Gate of Truth.
- The entire country of Amestris is a subtle version of this. The Xingese characters notice that alchemy in Amestris has something distinctly off about it, and a creepy vibe seems to ooze from the ground and tickle their chi-sense. This is because Amestrian alchemy, which draws tectonic energy from the earth, is being suppressed by a massive system of pipes and underground tunnels. Amestrian alchemy can be completely disabled by Father at will, making him theoretically invincible. The whole system is derailed by a countermeasure based on Xingese alkahestry devised by Scar's brother before the series even started. Once Scar puts the plan into effect, Amestrian alchemy becomes much more powerful than before.
- The so called 'closed spaces' in Haruhi Suzumiya can be considered a form of this.
- Hell and the Afterlife Antechamber leading up to it in Hell Girl are this, and they're deliberately designed for personalized Mind Rape.
- Holoearth Chronicles Side:E ~Yamato Phantasia~: Stigma is capable of affecting buildings (and possibly other kinds of locations), giving them all kinds of weird properties such as being Bigger on the Inside. A perfect example is the haunted house Fubuki and Mio are led to by their search.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run:
- The Devil's Palm is a moving supernatural landscape that appears at seemingly random in various parts of America which has a tendency to ensnare people that wander near it until they die. If they survive, they are changed forever, being granted the power of a Stand. Despite the name the phenomenon is actually linked to Jesus Christ, who, in this alternate universe, died in America and his corpse was broken up into nine pieces. The Devil's Palm stores its pieces and, rarely, grants them to people who survive it.
- In Jujutsu Kaisen, when either jujutsu sorcerers or cursed spirits accumulate cursed power, it will be used to construct a domain, which is a location that can be used to boost their own powers. When a domain is expanded, a more polished sorcery will control the space itself. An example of a sorcerer's Domain Expansion is Gojo's Unlimited Void, which is nothing but an endless void.
- M3: The Dark Metal has the Lightless Realm, areas consumed by the Necrometal.
- The titular Abyss of Made in Abyss is a ridiculously deep vertically stratified cave that's Bigger on the Inside and populated by alien-looking plants and animals, many of which are extremely dangerous. Time seems to slow down as you delve deeper, and a mysterious power known as the "Curse of the Abyss" causes strain on ascent, ranging from dizziness and mild nausea in the upper levels to hallucinations, loss of senses, and even death in the deeper ones. Prolonged exposure to the cave's force field also has odd effects on people, even ones living near it on the surface.
- In Naruto, Kakashi's and Obito's Mangekyou Sharingan powers can send people into one of these. Also, Kaguya can create as many as five different eldritch dimensions and teleport people into any of them.
- The whole point of the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind movie is that the Sea of Decay / Toxic Jungle is not this, unlike most characters think, and that it actually functions as a natural "cleanup" facility that filters all toxins from the world and creates a pure, healthy environment underneath that even supports regular vegetation.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- The original series has the Sea of LCL, "a place with no AT-Field, where individual forms do not exist; an ambiguous world where you cannot tell where you end and others begin; a world where you exist everywhere and yet you exist nowhere, all at once". Its freaky nature is perfectly illustrated by the scene where Rei pulls out her hands out of Shinji's chest with absolutely no signs of injury on him.
- Rebuild of Evangelion has its equivalent, the Anti-Universe, "where reality and fiction blend together", where reality takes its form based on the imaginations and memories of those within it. For extra Mind Screw meta-points, scenes in the Anti-Universe even begin to incorporate footage from the original series or scenes falling apart like sets in a film studio.
- The Manor in Noir: Said to be be "between France and Spain" (Protip: It's not Andorra), but Kirika gets there by walking from Paris. Its entirely normal (for rural areas in western European countries) landscape (it has fields of grapes and is covered with Roman ruins) manages to come across as profoundly unsettling even in bright sunlight. The main building seems to be bigger on the inside and is set over an active volcano.
- Ojamajo Doremi:
- The Witch World is this in addition to being a Magical Land. It has strange skies, floating islands, bizarre geography, and unique creatures, all of which would definitely be out of place on a standard world.
- The Cursed Forest is a much darker take and is used as the Big Bad's lair.
- One Piece:
- The whole Grand Line might count, as the weather there does not conform to standard laws of meteorology; the only pirate known to have explored the entire place to the point of claiming expertise in the area was Gold Roger himself. It's not only violent and volatile, but can change in an instant, from a storm, to a blizzard, to a waterspout and calm for an hour before changing again. Islands are somewhat stable, but each is the same climate all year round (and are thus grouped into Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn to describe them) and each of those has four seasons of its own, giving the Grand Line 16 seasons. Cyclones appear randomly, and there are even stranger places, like Enies Lobby, which has Endless Daytime. Navigation in the Grand Line can't be done with a normal compass due to the bizarre nature of its magnetic fields; a special compass called a Log Pose can be "set" to up to seven roues if you first visit them, and is a reliable way to navigate to them for a limited amount of time depending on what islands are in each route; an Eternal Pose is a superior version, which can be set to a specific island permanently.
- The New World is even more bizarre; there are islands with perpetual lightning storms, giant elephants with long legs touching the ocean floor as islands, massive man-eating planets with forests of cooked food to lure in victims, a place where you can inexplicably run on air, and apparently a black hole just sucking up stuff in the sky above the ocean. The weather is even worse as it's just as random but the raindrops and hailstones can be bigger than ships and the ocean can just open up under you into a chasm and swallow everything.
- Overlord (2012) has the Great Tomb of Nazarick, headquarters of the series' Villain Protagonist and his minions. The whole place is guarded by legions of unholy creatures of which every single one could wipe anything from a city to a whole country off the surface of the map, a mess of portals and traps makes navigation incredibly confusing and prone to dumping intruders basically anywhere except where they want to go, trying your own teleportation spells gets you redirected into a sealed chamber where a Miko sics an army of monstrously powerful Yōkai on you, and past the very first floors, the "Tomb" completely and utterly stops even looking like a tomb. Nazarick was a habitat designed in a game that didn't have to make too many concessions to reality and it shows now that it's in reality. One floor is inexplicably a Slippy-Slidey Ice World, another is a Fire and Brimstone Hell, meanwhile the sixth floor looks like a totally convincing simulation of being outside, complete with a vast forest and an open sky. Arche from Foresight finds out the hard way that she's underground when she tries to fly away to safety only to encounter an invisible wall in the "sky".
- The Abyss from PandoraHearts is a time-warping dimension that appears as a cross between a broken toy box and hell. Apparently, it used to be a paradise of golden light.
- Pokémon:
- The Distortion World in Pokémon Adventures is this to the core, due to not having the limitations that the video game version has. Most notable is the random gravity for different areas, and, of course, Giratina.
- The Distortion World also appears in Pokémon Generations when Giratina pulls Cyrus into it. It looks quite a bit different from its appearances in the games and manga, taking the form of a series of largely barren landmasses tilted in random directions and connected by waterfalls under the effects of their respective Gravity Screws.
- Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior presents the main anime's counterpart to the Distortion World, the Reverse World, as Giratina's home dimension. Instead of floating landmasses, the Reverse World's traversable areas are made of landmasses, buildings, and even particularly large trees that mirror themselves seemingly endlessly into twisted structures that extend out of view both above and below. The sky is replaced with what appears to be oceans above and below this bizarre landscape, so day/night cycles are represented by the angle and color of the ambient light. Gravity varies in direction and intensity depending on location, with zero-gravity areas giving off a Sickly Green Glow. Finally, the normal world and Reverse World affect each other in strange ways. Dialga and Palkia's fighting in the normal world creates distortions in the reverse World that spew horribly toxic gas. The Reverse World also has effects on the normal world. Namely, popping a bubble in the Reverse World causes an explosion at the counterpart location and damaging an object causes its counterpart to break violently. If the object is particularly large like, say, an entire glacier, this has the potential to cause a lot of destruction in the Pokémon world.
- The titular Psyren is Earth in the future with a membrane that disables all electronics, filters out sunlight, and saturates the atmosphere with psychic energy, awakening latent powers in the inhabitants and Drifters. The membrane is a fragment of an Eldritch Abomination named Quat Nevas, who devours the life force and PSI from planets after cultivating it this way.
- The Witch Barrier in Puella Magi Madoka Magica are chaotic dimensions isolated from reality where Witches manifest and reside. It's a crossover between this trope and Mental World, since the barrier itself represents the (near-mindless) psyche of Witches. Entering it is a death sentence for humans since the familiars of the Witch are usually running around. They are also full Rule of Symbolism, as it turns out that the Witch Barrier represents subversions and mockeries of the wishes of the Witch who created it.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena:
- Ohtori Academy is totally just a normal, elite private school. Those gigantic school buildings with their odd window placement? Surely just Rule of Cool. That (invisible) sword fighting arena high above the Forbidden Forest? Don't worry about it. How about the animated pictures and the transforming statues? Or Literal Metaphors appearing out of nowhere in places they couldn't possibly be without notice or comment? Or the resident Living Memory? Or the implications that Miki and Kozue have lived at the school their entire lives? What about how almost no one leaves or graduates? Or how those who do are forgotten?
- The film's version shows the full potential of a Big Budget Beef-Up—while the original Ohtori looked like a real building until you started paying attention, the film Ohtori looks like a surrealist painting of a building which people somehow live in. Individual structures are constantly shifting within it, staircases don't seem to go anywhere, and there is absolutely no sense of where this place even is; every shot where the background is visible shows nothing but endless blue sky.
- Summer Time Rendering: Haine's home world exists in an alternate dimension outside of time where only shadows can safely reside, whereas humans who step foot here will slowly break down and turn into dust. The space is presided over by a red sky and a permanent black sun, and the contents of the dimension are determined by Haine's memories and current mental state.
- Tokimi's realm in Tenchi Muyo!. It's a floating temple-like thing in the middle of nowhere in the universe. outside it's got a twisted planet thing with a Space Whale. Her presence fills the room, but she is not there. And that's only in the third dimension. Each dimension up is so much more complex that a being from a lower dimension cannot comprehend, and there is a lot of them.
- Again Junji Ito, the town of Kurôzu-cho in Uzumaki becomes this over the course of the story as the curse of the spiral takes over. Roads leading out of town take travellers back in again, roads and houses begin to line up into a spiral shape, and beneath the lake lies a twisted underworld that's even stranger.
- YuYu Hakusho has the Demon World and the inside of the creature Itsuki summoned up to eat Kuwabara, Kurama, and Hiei. Come to think of it, almost anywhere other than Earth or the Spirit World count as this.
