Eldritch Location / Western Animation

• Adventures of the Gummi Bears: Drekmore, a land where nothing of any use grows, plants are deadly and may purposely try to kill you, and the even the mountainsides want to kill you. Castle Drekmore, perched high on a cliff over the sea, pushes the boundary of what's possible to build. Duke Igthorn is literally the only human being who lives there. Although the dukedom legitimately belongs to the Igthorn family, the castle had been abandoned for many years before Igthorn took up residence. In "Light Makes Right", Igthorn reveals that he grew up in a house in Dunwyn (before he turned traitor to King Gregor).
• Adventure Time:
  • The Nightosphere, home loads of creepy demons and is essentially Hell.
  • The rest of the land of Ooo is pretty weird too. There's a kingdom made of candy that is populated by candy.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Elmore definitely counts, considering the entire plot of an episode involves a black void where the town dumps all its mistakes. In fact, the aforementioned black void counts, what with its alien geometry, and how the current Big Bad was permanently scarred upon exit.
  • The Awesome Store is a red van managed by a Living Shadow that sells a plethora of items, most of which are some variety of Artifact of Doom, such as a game console that turns the city into a JRPG, a reality-warping remote control, Darwin, a fish that can grow legs and lungs, among others. The van is also much larger on the inside, and the owner said that it has a map on the fifth floor.
• The Spirit World in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Shown in more detail in The Legend of Korra, as we see such things as the terrain and inhabitants being affected by the emotions of humans inside of it, gravity not going in any particular direction, and conventional concepts of location and distance being violated.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: Nowhere, Kansas. It's a sleepy desert town that, for unexplained reasons, doesn't comply with the laws of physics or reality itself. Strange monsters and phenomena better suited for a Cosmic Horror Story are drawn to it like moths to a flame. And the main cast lives in the middle of it.
• The Ghost Zone in Danny Phantom which serves as an "opposite" dimension to Earth. Home to ghosts, it's a massive world where its sky is a swirl of eerie green and black. Surrounding the majority of the GZ are (usually small) floating lands — it's rare to find giant land masses since ghosts don't really need to walk — and multiple floating doors that lead to various ghostly realms, all unique, surreal, and different based on how it fits the ghostly inhabitants. Those large landmasses include a giant prison, an island that's the home base of an Egomaniac Hunter, and the temple of Pandora.
• A Family Guy skit shows Peter going into the 'beyond' section of 'Bed, Bath, and Beyond' which is a black void filled with various floating formulas and the like...and the coffee mugs he was looking for.
• Final Space is a Place Beyond Time that can only be accessed through extraordinary means. It's a plane of existence where every possible timeline ultimately leads to, and also where a legion of enormous, terrifyingly powerful beings called the Titans are imprisoned, along with their malevolent master Invictus who yearns to escape Final Space in order to conquer existence itself.
• Gravity Falls:
  • The town itself of Gravity Falls is a magnet for all sorts of bizarre people, creatures and entities, including a clan of macho minotaurs, a bear with more than a dozen heads, and a walking mass of rejected Halloween candy. There's also a Lost World in the caves beneath the town, complete with still-living dinosaurs encased in tree-sap. The official Journal 3 reveals that the town itself is a literal magnet of weirdness, drawing "weird" things towards itself by some invisible force. An example of this was shown to Dipper, where jellybeans were rolled down a hill at the edge of the town, and odd-shaped ones were pulled back up by said force.
  • There's also the Nightmare Realm. A decaying dimension that is the home of several interdimensional criminals and nightmares, all of which are leaked into the titular town in Weirdmagedon by Bill Cipher.
• Infinity Train has the titular vehicle, which is an apparently endless train in the middle of a bizarre desert. The train has seemingly infinite cars, is inhabited by creatures which defy logic, and the cars themselves have properties which don't fit their external design. It can somehow appear in the "normal" world in different forms depending on who is about to board it. It has an engine and conductor, but the engine doesn’t resemble any kind on Earth and the conductor is a small, spherical Starfish Robot that plugs itself into the engine to control the train. While we learn a bit of how it works over the course of several seasons, we never learn its origin or where this wasteland actually is: it just exists and apparently has for centuries. Its function is to be a sort of Stealth Mentor, accepting passengers in order to physically force them to face and move on from personal trauma.
• Invader Zim has The Room With A Moose. It's an entire dimension consisting entirely of a room with a moose eating walnuts in it. There's also a dimension of pure dookie.
• Jackie Chan Adventures has the Netherworld, a dimension that the Demon Sorcerers were banished to by the Eight Immortals. The Netherworld is a seemingly infinite void filled with floating rocks, which condemns the Demons to an eternity of boredom.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • It plays with this via the Everfree Forest. While home to an assortment of beastly critters — like manticores, sea serpents and cockatrices — the main reason ponies regard it as horrific and unnatural is because everything there takes care of itself. The plants grow on their own, the animals don't need to be looked after, the weather runs without help... it's surreal! (From their point of view, anyway.)
  • Played straight in the Season 2 premiere with Discord's hedge maze, which could be best described as Escherian shrubbery. Not really a surprise when the architect is a Reality Warping spirit of chaos. In the second episode he turns all of Ponyville into this, and drives its inhabitants insane for good measure.
  • We get to follow Discord home in Season 5. It's a Pocket Dimension that does not disappoint in terms of World Gone Mad. As such... the mail is sometimes delivered *slightly* late.
  • There's also the Changeling Hive. Just like its occupants can change their form at will, the hive constantly changes its layout, and as a result is impossible to navigate without a changeling's assistance.
• In an episode of The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show the show gets consumed by a black hole. Mr. Peabody keeps hosting from inside, a bizarre space where the rules of physics do not apply and anyone can become anything.
• The Real Ghostbusters/Extreme Ghostbusters made regular use of these. From the Bogeyman's home dimension to a sneak peek at the end of the world to a ghostly pirate TV station, the series enjoyed dropping the Ghostbusters in places where physics didn't work right and the architect expected the residents to be capable of phasing through walls. Some examples:
  • New York in general seems to be this in their universe, as it is constantly attacked by all sorts of spirits, monsters, demons, Legions of Hell and interdimensional creatures.
  • The Containment Unit evolved into this after a while. How exactly it became Bigger on the Inside is never explained, but it seems to be its own immense Pocket Dimension, very similar in look to the Netherworld.
  • The Netherworld, which is basically Another Dimension from where ghosts originate. Winston describes it as a place full of spirits, demons and souls of people that couldn’t reach other realms. The look of it varies from episode to episode (justified, as it's said by Ray that it is the size of our universe), but it's mostly shown as a huge wasteland with floating boulders and mist.
  • The cabinet dimension: a dimension connected to our world from a magician's cabinet is a hell dimension with boiling lava and snakes raining from the sky.
• The Web in ReBoot. A dark and organic-looking space-like realm where gravity appears to be only a suggestion, where bizarre creatures roam that will feast on your very code, and where sprites will degrade over time into hideous-looking monsters just by being there. It's a far cry from the bright and technological look of The Net, the standard Guardian protocol for dealing with the presence of a web creature in a small system is wipe out the entire system to ensure it is dead, the mere mention of this dimension's name is enough to instill fear in binomes and sprites alike, and not even Megabyte could survive this realm without being turned into something much, much worse.
• Regular Show: The park is constantly swarming with weird people, bizarre creatures, and Eldritch Abominations that appear by ripping of the very fabric of reality.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Beast Island is an island the First Ones used as a dumping ground for their tech. It mutated the biological life there into monstrous, violent creatures, and the people that are there are slowly overwhelmed by a loud signal that makes them give up on life and be absorbed into the plant life of the island.
• The Simpsons:
  • Springfield could very well count at this point. One look at the Separate Simpsons Geography Thing page should tell you all you need to know.
  • Even locations within Springfield have signs of oddness. The neighborhood around Moe's Tavern, for instance, never seems to have the same buildings.
  • The occasionally mentioned "Springfield Mystery Spot". It's unclear if Ozzy Smith was ever seen again.
• South Park:
  • The evil half of Imaginationland. They never allow anyone or anything good to cross into their territory or else they'll be killed. Otherwise, they have no interest in war, until the terrorists attacked both halves of Imaginationland and pinned attacks on the Evil territory on the Good Imaginary Characters.
  • The Dark Oblivion, also known as the Sunken City of R'lyeh in the Coon and Friends Trilogy literally personifies this trope, as it is supposed to be Cthulhu's home plane.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • "The Fly of Despair" from "Shangheid", a dimension that only the Flying Dutchman and Squidward know about which is nothing but a dark tunnel of surreal, demonic imagery.
  • Rock Bottom also comes off as this, a region in the deep sea housing bizarre creatures. The busses also seem to run on a strange schedule there for whatever reason, arriving and taking off right after.
  • RandomLand too. Almost no one has ever managed to return from there, and Mr. Krabs even describes it (with good reason) as a "preposterous location where the laws of nature change randomly".
• Star Wars Rebels introduces the world between worlds, which is even weirder than any of The Clone Wars' examples. How? It's a Place Beyond Time, only reachable by a few people in rare portals scattered across the galaxy on planets like Lothal and Malachor, that allows for actual Time Travel. It looks like white-bordered paths hanging in the middle of space. It was introduced by stealth in Season 1 episode "Path of the Jedi", but it isn't until late in Season 4 that we actually find out what it is.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • Mortis is a weird Force dimension constantly alternating between World-Healing and World-Wrecking Waves, inhabited by a trio of physical gods. Obi-Wan speculates that it's actually in a completely different galaxy or universe than the rest of the setting. It's reached via a giant octahedron that appears in the middle of space that only Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka can see, and when they're sent back, they've only been gone for a second at most with none of the crew of the Jedi Cruiser they're rendezvousing with aware of what happened.
  • The Wellspring of Life that Yoda visits in the last episodes of Season 6 is said to be where the midi-chlorians that serve as a conduit between the Living and Cosmic Force originate. It's heavily implied that, like Mortis, only Force-users can go there. Inside, it's full of floating islands and inhabited only by the Five Priestesses, indicated to be incredibly ancient Force ghosts. On one of the islands, Yoda is forced to face a manifestation of his own dark side in order to pass a test.
  • The planet known in the modern day as Moraband is not nearly so eldritch as either of the two above, but it makes up for that by being absolutely steeped in the Dark Side of the Force. Fans of the franchise will know it better as Korriban, homeworld of the Sith, and the ancient chamber where Jedi used to be sacrificed is the worst of all. There, Darth Sidious long-distance ensnares Yoda in a Force illusion in an attempt to break his will, but fails.
• The Dimension of Magic, in Star vs. the Forces of Evil, a splendid, very luminous place made of pure magic, with waterfalls that run upwards beyond the sky, it is also inhabited only by unicorns. But this place is the nexus between multiple dimensions, and if you stay a few minutes you will lose all your memories.
• Invoked in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Counter-Clock Incident". Both the TV episode and the novelization produced from it mention several incongruities:
  • The character of the week "Karla Five" comes from a universe where time naturally flows backwards. To us in our universe, she speaks and acts in reverse.
  • The vastness of space in the reverse universe is also inverted in color: black stars shine against a white nothingness. (Karla Five even mentions in the novelization that she finds our universe's inverted space maddening to look at.)
  • Stars coalesce from nebulae in a violent accumulation of hot matter (a reverse supernova), and die in a dispersal of that matter (the reversal of a star's birth by gravity that collects dust and gas)
  • Individuals are born from old age (which begs the question as to where a body comes from) and die in infancy. (Karla Five's father is mentioned in the novel as entering "senile infancy".) Your descendants (future children) die before you, and your ancestors (grandfather, grandmother, great-grandparents, etc.) are born after you.
  • The Enterprise and its functions, including propulsion, run backwards. (At least, relative to how the crew perceives it; for all probable intents and purposes, their brains are working in reverse, and the ship is actually working how it should.)
  • In the reverse universe, even the name of the planet (implied to be Earth/Terra in this universe) that the Enterprise travels to, Arret, is reversed.
  • In the novel, when the away team attempts to beam down to Arret, the transporter does not work. Spock realizes the conundrum and asks Scotty to beam them "up" to the planet.
    • To explain: The sequence of events are happening in reverse, so if one inverts the sequence, then starting from the end of their visit, the away team beamed down, "lost" (instead of received) their information for returning home (as proverbially, Karla Five pulled all of the information back by speaking backwards), started to form a plan, met Karla Five's father, beamed back up, and reversed out of orbit. (Again, if one starts from here and reverses the order and direction of events, it makes more sense.)
  • In the novel, though, it's explained that this was an alien fabrication.
• Many locations in Steven Universe are peculiar or exceptional (such as the pyramid from "Serious Steven" or the Lunar Sea Spire in "Cheeseburger Backpack"), but the inside of the Gem Temple easily takes the cake as one of the weirder and more frequently seen locations. The main door opens up to different locations depending on who operates it, it has multiple organs including a colossal pulsating heart, and there are corridors that twist on themselves while still maintaining a nebulous sense of gravity... to say nothing of the personalized rooms each of the Gems have:
  • Pearl's room is a series of freestanding waterfalls which she stands atop and keeps objects inside the water. It also features what looks to be a starry sky overhead, completely ignoring the fact that this is supposed to be indoors. Further down, the waterfalls flow sideways and even upwards.
  • Amethyst's room is a section of shallow purple coastline below Pearl's, littered with an assortment of objects including a palm tree and piles of gold coins. Huge crystals grow out of the walls and floor. Said coast is littered with puddles where, if you submerge yourself on one side, you emerge from the ceiling or floor of a different room.
  • The Burning Room is a low, circular area floored in stone. Unlike the Gems' personal rooms it actually seems like it could feasibly be inside, but the veins of the temple feed into the walls on all sides and the ceiling is filled with bubbled gems. There's also a pit of exposed lava in the center which sees occasional use.
  • Rose's room is a huge expanse of sparkling pink clouds that has this little thing of recreating anything its occupants ask for out of said clouds. It also operates like a computer simulation and crashes if asked to create anything too grandiose.
    • There's also the inside of Lion's mane, a Pocket Dimension that could be best described as an airless, Pink version of The Moon from Majora's Mask. It contains several things that were important to Rose, such as one of Greg's t-shirts, her sword, a video for Steven, and, formerly, a bubble containing Bismuth's gem.
  • Sardonyx's room, a black expanse that looks similar to a talk show room complete with an unseen audience, which Sardonyx can manipulate however she wants. It also only exists when Pearl and Garnet are fused as Sardonyx.
• Superjail! is full of these, especially within Superjail itself, but the Time Court and Time Jail in "Time Police" take the cake. Considering it's a place where all living beings from all corners of the universe and time work or are tried and imprisoned, this is to be expected.
• Although it's much more light-hearted than most, Wackyland in Tiny Toon Adventures probably qualifies. The original Wackyland, however, featured in the Porky Pig short "Porky in Wackyland" and its color remake "Dough for the Do-Do", varies from merely inexplicable to subtly menacing in its bizarreness.
• Transformers: Cyberverse:
  • The Crystal City is reimagined as an eldritch place in this adaptation. It's a seemingly living city of crystals that trap people inside of it and bring their reflections to life. It's ambiguous as to whether or not the place is even sentient.
  • The Dweller in the Depths is revealed to be a Titan, massive Transformers that become cities for other Cybertronians. The Dweller is an empty city and wants to capture Cybertronians to populate it. The audience never gets a good look at the creature but its many halls can spawn tentacles and mind-controlling gas. The Dweller was created as a Shout-Out to The Call of Cthulhu with the Dweller designed after Cthulhu and the city based on the sunken city of R'lyeh.
• Possibly the emperor's palace in Xiaolin Showdown as it is one of the only places where, if a Showdown is declared, the participant's clothing does not change. While this could be written off as for sake of plot (Kimiko's formal but awkward kimono made it more of a challenge for her to overcome) it makes sense if you consider the societal rules of etiquette of such a place; the palace emits a spiritual counter spell to prevent other sources of magic to break such taboos.

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