Awesome Underwater World

Just look at the world around you
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 consider much what was going on underwater, despite it making up 70% of the world. Given how humanity cannot survive underwater without special equipment that was only developed recently, it does make a fair bit of sense.

Yet, when people were finally able to go underwater, they discovered how breath-taking it all is^note and not just because you can't breathe there.

Thanks to the endless potential of fiction along with the growing advancements in technology and science for underwater exploration, many creators have been awed at the abundance of life and mystery held beneath the waves. Beyond the strange and exotic-looking creatures is the fact that it remains unexplored, maintaining this sense of mystery under the waves.

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 lived underwater, a new world where 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 ruins of ancient or modern human creations, and you have an underwater world of awe. Awe-derwater, if you will.

Probably contains an Underwater City (usually Atlantis) inhabited by mermaids, Apparently Human Merfolk and or Fish People. For wildlife, you will find Sea Monsters, fish and dolphins, both playful and heroic (however, beware the devious sort).

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.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• 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). Indeed, it was a long-awaited journey there since the timeskip in One Piece and it did not disappoint.
• Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea has an extensive underwater village and a significant portion of the plot going on there. While there's some Artistic License – Physics to make it more relatable for the viewers, there's plenty of wonder down there, and they usually don't forget about the additional dimension.

Comic Books

• Aquaman:
  • Peter David's Aquaman (1994) run is often lauded as an example, in which Aquaman became a badass with an extensive supporting cast, complicated cosmology, and lengthy story arc.
  • Aquaman as literally 'King of the Seas' makes for a potentially fascinating badass backstory character, too. Imagine if he has access to enough military power to limit or stop oceanic cargo transport or interdict the movement of national navies.
  • Rick Veitch's Aquaman (2003) run on Aquaman was pretty good, too. This was partially due to the work Peter David did over the previous decade and partially Veitch's addition of a sword-and-sorcery undertone (c'mon, he's a king named Arthur). Kurt Busiek amped up the fantasy elements in his Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis book.
• 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.)
• 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 Fiction

• 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.

Film — Animated

• 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.
• 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. While The Little Mermaid (1989) takes place on land a lot (kind of a given, since the story it adapts is about a mermaid becoming human), 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.
• During the lesson spent as a fish in The Sword in the Stone, 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.

Film — 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

• Animorphs has several books centered around deep-sea action. Exaggerated 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.
• The Humanx Commonwealth novel 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, and it is indeed awesome.
• Inverted in Rupert Brooke's Heaven, which imagines Christianity from a fish's point of view, ending with "And in that Heaven of all they wish / There shall be no more land say fish."
• H. P. Lovecraft was terrified of (among other things) the ocean and ended up creating the Cthulhu Mythos, a mysterious, terrifying world where the seas hold ancient secrets and monsters, providing inspiration for non-boring ocean-related stuff for years to come — thus, awesome in the Biblical sense of the word (meaning terrifying). That said, the main character of The Shadow Over Innsmouth is absolutely delighted to learn that he will be able to live forever in an Underwater City at the end of the story.
• Willard Price's Adventure Series novel "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.
• The Uplift novel Startide Rising is a fast-paced, exciting book which takes place primarily in an alien ocean (it helps that the protagonists' ship is one primarily manned by Sapient Cetaceans). Of course, the other half of the book is about a space battle, but it still works.
• Slightly before Lovecraft, Jules Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is (this being Jules Verne) hardly boring.
• The Rifters Trilogy novel Starfish has this spectacularly: its 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.
• Amphibian Man by Russian science fiction author Alexander Beliaev gives a breathtaking 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. Beliaev, who was paralyzed and ill for much of his life, had nothing but his imagination to take him to incredible places, and he clearly put a lot of thought into a picture of the young man's underwater environment, 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.
• 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 under water. 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, However, 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 trope is analyzed to some extent in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when 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 underwater 20 Minutes into the Future.
• The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke. You'd never expect a novel about underwater whale herding to be exciting, but then again, Clarke specializes in putting mundane ideas into interesting settings and making them awesome.
• Atlan boasts both a bizarre sea-girt jungle kingdom and a strange, colorful undersea path to said Lost World.
• The Dirk Pitt Adventures: Many heart pounding action sequences happen below water as well as above. Justified in that the characters work for the National Underwater Marine Agency and are the nations foremost civilian underwater experts.
• Everworld: The mayor of Atlantis is also a refugee from Earth, and spends his time fending off attempts by both Neptune and Poseidon (and presumably other sea gods of all religions) to conquer his city (it helps that gods of different pantheons hate each other).

Live Action TV

• Gerry Anderson's Stingray (1964) has lots of interesting underwater environments and varieties of aquatic races, many of whom want to give our heroes a hard time.
• Sea Hunt, which was quite popular in the '60's. 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.
• Stargate Atlantis. The city of Atlantis is meant to be on the surface of the planet (which is mostly water) but can be submerged if necessary. The shields on the city keep it from flooding; should they fail, the city gets flooded, and everyone dies. Played straight with the ocean of the planet as it is mostly empty and boring (this is repeatedly noted by the expedition members.)

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.

Podcasts

• Just Roll With It Show has the Undersea, a nation of aquatic races.

Tabletop Games

• Rifts tries to assure this with a number of Sourcebooks, notably "Rifts' Underseas" and "Coalition Navy". Of course, how well that is done is up to the players...
  • "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.
• 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.
• 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.

Video Games

• The Forever Blue / Endless Ocean games, while not exactly brimming with excitement, do a fantastic job of conveying the diversity of the sea's life and environments.
  • However, there are a few levels that take place in sunken ruins implied to be similar to Atlantis, which are more boring than regular levels because you spend a lot of time swimming down long featureless corridors.
• The Ecco the Dolphin series plays its setting and protagonist's species for all they're worth. The result? Lots of Scenery Porn and levels that require thinking in two or three dimensions.
• Aquaria shows extreme variety in its environments, coupled with a diverse array of wildlife, both natural and fictitious.
• 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.
• 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.
• X-COM: Terror from the Deep plays with the trope:
  • It's underwater, there are various ruins on the sea bottom, but underwater physics are nonexistent, and weapons not so different from land weapons. The denizens of the sea bottom are Gillmen, the first or second "alien" species you will encounter in TFTD. More precisely, they are an Earthly species and have prostrated themselves before the Aliens in exchange for their miserable hides (and a slice of the surface world, once it's conquered).
  • TFTD was a cheap repainted version of X-COM: UFO Defense with the difficulty amped up. You would think that underwater, you would't be restricted to stumbling around the ocean floor ... but until you get the ultimate suit (equivalent to the original game's Flying Suit), your characters are stuck in two dimensions ... alien elevators and all. Apparently they cannot swim.
• BioShock: the city of Rapture is underwater but rife with crime, murder, crazy people... Of course, its urban art deco appearance sometimes makes you forget you're under the ocean.
• In BioShock 2, there are segments where you can leave the city and travel the ocean floor to reach another part of Rapture. Big Daddies have self-contained air supplies; Splicers don't. These segments are deliberately boring in order to give players some time to catch their breath between bouts of action. These levels are spectacularly beautiful too.
• Ocean class planets in the Master of Orion series work exactly like planets not entirely submerged in water. Subverted in Master of Orion II, a race with Aquatic ability gain more benefit from ocean planets or those with "wet" environments other than Gaia (Tundra, Swamp, Terran). At no time do they ever exceed the food productivity or maximum population of Gaia worlds at similar levels of development.
• PC game 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. (O'Neil's proposed habitats never did make practical sense.)
• Civilization: Beyond Earth: The Rising Tide expansion pack. Most factions can traverse in water, but it has little to offer, 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.
• 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.
• Pokémon: Teflecting real life wildlife, there are more Water-types than any other type. They are also extremely diverse, as the Water-type has been paired with every other type in the game. 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’s 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.
• 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.
• 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. Allegedly the game's designer got the idea during a scuba-diving trip in Southeast Asia, and the studio where it's developed is located on a boat.
• Spyro 2 has a level half-set in an underwater cavern, half in a huge ocean city, and entirely underwater. While Spyro can stay underwater indefinitely, swimming instead of running or gliding can be disorienting.
• The SeaQuest DSV GAME of all things. Now, if only the entire 2D portion wasn't That One Level after That One Level filled with mindbending button/mending puzzles. But until you're forced to do these mini-missions the game is quite fun. If only mode 7 had been implemented at the time... Then rather than deal with these you could have different 'scales' so when you use a different vehicle the scale zooms in. But anyway, the top-down 'overworld' is pretty good, and the first few non-Nintendo Hard 2D levels.
• 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. Possibly due to the feeling of being the first step into a true epic, and the numerous tutorial NPCs.
• 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. The end result was surprisingly awesome.
• 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. However, this is weakened considerably by the unfortunate lag suffered in that zone, which leads many to avoid it. Sad, really, there's plenty of action down there.
• 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.
• In Dominions, while 2D Water is in effect, the oceans have special considerations and challenges; one of the bigger hurdles in the game for land-based species is developing the ability to operate in the water, and vice versa (except for Atlantis, which is truly amphibious, and a guide for the race refers to it as "a submarine" when it's fully geared up).
• 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. And yet, it still ended up one of the least liked zones of Cataclysm, not because it was boring, but because 3D movement underwater was disorienting and too different from the rest of the game.
• 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.
• Ever17 is about a trip to an underwater amusement park, which by the way is named after Lemuria, gone wrong.
• In Jurassic Park: The Game, the marine exhibit is where a lot of the drama unfolds, and it includes an attempt to sneak past the fearsome Mosasaur.
• The Legendary Starfy completely, taking place almost entirely underwater despite the title character being from the sky.
• The Legend of Zelda actually makes very good use of underwater settings. The first 3D outing, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time introduced diving and later walking and breathing underwater. Every 3D game after except The Wind Waker would use it (the ocean is an in-universe symbol of death, and the land of Hyrule trapped beneath the waves is suspended in an air bubble), and even The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages has essentially an entire other overworld under the ocean because you can transform into a merman.
• 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, and the players haven't leveled any complaints about the mode that Archwing combat didn't already have.
• 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.
• Poseidon: Master of Atlantis naturally seeks to use this (one of the main differences with the Greek civilization from Zeus: Master of Olympus is that athletics, philosophy and theater are replaced by science and learning), though of course it all takes place before Atlantis goes under (there exists a species of Fish Men with Underwater Cities, but these are never seen or visited, though they can be conquered with land troops... somehow). The campaigns are an Alternate History in which Atlanteans conquer most of the Mediterranean before finally being destroyed.
• Ōkami loves showing off its beautiful art style of the game and does so masterfully in the Dragon Palace, inspired by the Japanese mythos as noted above. It includes many emotional moments and the boss fight leading up from the events is against a malicious doppelganger.
• 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.
• Star Wars:
  • 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.

Webcomics

• Exemplified in xkcd here

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

• In Onyx Equinox the underworld is envisioned as looking like an undersea realm, filled with dreadful coral-like structures and jellyfish-like spirits. This is based on Mayan associations of water with the underworld.
• Sharky And George were the crime busters of the sea, and they were great. This being a cartoon, they had underwater equivalents of most overland things and even an aeroplane (a whale that everyone sat inside).
• Oddly enough, Jabberjaw has one of the best-developed "colonized ocean floor" settings you'll ever see. The show still gets no respect! No Respect!
• 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.
• 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.
• Although we never actually see it, Rick and Morty went to Atlantis in one episode. They had so much fun with "mermaid puss", they wanna go there again!
• The Deep (2015) is about the Nekton family, who live on a submarine and devote their lives to exploring wonders of the deep.
• 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.
• 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.

Real Life

• Any oceanographer would tell you that Real Life oceans are far from boring.

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