Blank White Void

"This cage is vast, it has no walls. While I stand still all I see is a white plain stretching across an equally blank sky. There is no life in this place."

— SCP-000, SCP-000, SCP Foundation

A dimension of eternal whiteness. A blank slate. It might represent eternity, nothingness itself, or it might be a Void Between the Worlds. Can also be a realm which exists only in the mind or a Pocket Dimension. Could even be black, depending on the creator's preference. If this is used as a prison, expect it to be Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere.

A room which appears to be a Blank White Void but actually has white walls, a floor and ceiling is a White Void Room. Compare Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue, where this is a stylistic choice. Compare and contrast In the Doldrums, an often-overlapping trope where the space is maddeningly empty and calm.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • The Hyberbolic Time Chamber, a.k.a. the Room of Space and Time, from Dragon Ball Z looks like a small but ornate building with two huge hourglasses flanking it, all of which is located in a white void.
  • In Dragon Ball Super, when Zen'o destroys the multiverse in the Future Trunks timeline, all that's remains is a blank void of sparkly glitter that Zen'o is left drifting in.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, any alchemist who opens the Gate of Truth is transported to a white void.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the 12th Angel Leliel's body is comprised of a black Void Between the Worlds known as a Dirac sea, which Ritsuko hypothesizes is connected another universe to theirs.

Comic Books

• Black Moon Chronicles: Lucifer is banished to a featureless white dimension after he invades the second Earth. He's later joined by Beelzebub.
• Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics): When Genis-Vell went mad and helped the cosmic villain Entropy destroy the universe, the result was Genis, Entropy, Rick Jones, and a couple of other characters standing around in a Blank White Void, astonished that it had actually happened. Entropy realizes that he never actually expected to succeed and doesn't know what to do now, so they do some timey-wimey jiggery pokery and the universe comes back.
• In one of Warren Ellis' issues of DV8, Copycat steps on a booby trap that apparently teleports her into one of these. The white void later turns out to be a simulation, a result of being teleported to another room in the facility and hooked up to a virtual reality machine. She grows to like the isolation, because her Split Personality starts integrating, until her teammates pull an Unwanted Rescue.
• The Great Power of Chninkel: G'wel and J'on are both thrown into the Non-World by the Immortals, a white space between the worlds. It turns out to be the prison for king N'om, who defied O'ne by declaring himself a god in his place.
• In Lucifer, the titular character mercy kills Michael Demiurgos in one of these and proceeds to create his own Totality of creation in it with the released energy. At the end of the series, he ventures out into this same Void again, where he either "imposes himself upon it, or becomes it".
• The last issue of Marvel: The End takes place in an empty void that used to be the Marvel universe where Thanos and Adam Warlock have their final conversation before bringing everything back to normal.
• Near the end of the first volume of The Sandman (1989), dream controlling super villain John Dee tries to battle with Dream over control of the Dream Land. Dee stands a chance in this battle largely thanks to his use of the Ruby, an Artifact of Power/Artifact of Doom that Dream created long ago. In the middle of the fight Dee realizes that Dream had to put a portion of his life and power into the Ruby to create it, and furthermore the Ruby sucked more out of Dream when he attempted to reclaim it, so Dee decides to smash the Ruby, thinking that doing so would kill Dream, similar to how destroying the One Ring effectively killed Sauron. When Dee finishes breaking the Ruby, Dream is gone and Dee stands alone in a white void, with nobody else around and nothing there as far as the eye can see... until suddenly Dream speaks, and we realize that the endless white void is simply the palm of Dream's hand. Turns out that rather than killing him, smashing the Ruby that held a big chunk of his power simply returned all that power and life force to him. Dee's panicked reaction to this development is both very natural and understandable.
• Secret Wars (2015): What remains of the Marvel multiverse outside of the world egg containing Battleworld after the last Incursion hits starts is a blank white void identified as "The Place of Couldn't-Be, Shouldn't-Be". As the Marvel Universe tends to run on metaphor at that cosmic level, thinking of it as a blank sheet of paper (or a new document file) is probably not far off.
• Shakara: The armory that contains the lost superweapons of the Shakara is inside a featureless white pocket dimension that is very reminiscent of the construct program in The Matrix.
• The Unbelievable Gwenpool: Gwenpool learns how to leave the comic book panel and go into the page gutter (although for her, she can also the other pages in this "Gutter Space"), even using that to push villains into the featureless void.◊
• X-Men has the White Hot Room, which is sort of outside the universe and mostly seems to exist so that various wielders of the Phoenix Force (past and present) can talk to each other.
• The universe itself is turned into a very large one in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! after Hal Jordan as Parallax has finished erasing it with his entropy rifts, in which only a few surviving heroes get to witness him recreating the universe.

Fan Works

• Break it down, Butterfly: When Nino reaches out to Ms. Bustier to akumatize her for the first time, her perception changes to that of a white void where Nino (powered-up) speaks with her.
• Empath: The Luckiest Smurf has The Nothing, which is what Traveler ends up finding at the end of one of the alternate timelines he travels down — particularly the one where Empath grows up without powers as Wild Smurf instead and the Smurfs wind up traveling through time.
• Fates Collide: Ruby Rose's Silver Eyes give her a Reality Marble that is one of these. In addition, it holds an apparition of her mother Summer Rose, who attacks her enemies with a scythe and is almost invisible because of her white cloak.

Films — Animated

• The opening shot of Blindscape is the man waking up against a white void background, as he is blind, and has not seen or felt anything. Images only appear as he hears them or touches them.
• In Destination: Imagination, Frankie is held prisoner by an Imaginary Friend who controls a pretend world in a toy box. (Actually, she's more like the first person he's seen in a very long time and so he gets very excited. She genuinely enjoys the experience, but she's not allowed to leave his world.) When Mr. Herriman tries to take her back to Foster's, the friend in control of the world gets very angry. As he chases them, he destroys the world and it becomes one of these, albeit with debris and landmarks still around.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
  • In the "Mirror Magic" short, the Humane Seven end up trapped in one of these thanks to Big Bad Juniper Montage using a mirror with Equestrian magic. The room inside the mirror starts to break apart as the mirror takes more damage in the outside world.
  • Again in the Rollercoaster of Friendship special, when the Humane Seven (barring Applejack and Rarity) ended up in one after being zapped by Vignette Valencia's magic-infused phone. Unlike the above example, it's later revealed that they were just teleported to an empty White Void Room within the amusement park, much to Sunset Shimmer's chagrin.

Films — Live-Action

• In π, the protagonist finds himself in one of these. It's implied that he's standing on the border of life and death, as he calmly starts to recite the universal number, which has previously been noted to possibly be God's true name. He wakes up from this state, only to realize that he was probably hallucinating.
• In Bruce Almighty, the Supreme Being invites the protagonist into a white loft.
• Nothing is mostly set in a white void.
• The shower at the beginning of Nowhere is a white void room. The movie starts off with credits over a white screen and pans down, down, down to show the main character, named Dark, in a white void with gray steam. A shower head seemingly floating in space. The scene is shot from far away so that Dark looks dwarfed by the infinite whiteness on the screen. When his mother knocks on the bathroom door, the shower is seen for the cramped, normal utility that it is.
• In the automated dystopia of THX 1138, criminals and non-conformists are contained in a bivouac that seems to be the only thing in the midst of an endless empty whiteness. This is an illusion caused by narcotics in the inmates' food that limits their depth of vision.

Literature

• A Certain Magical Index: A black version of this is made by Othinus for her final battle with Touma when she destroys the world.
• Dr. Franklin's Island: Semi, the main character, and Miranda, her friend, are able to communicate through radio when they are animals, but in a white-void-like space where they both appear in their human forms, where Miranda has a strange black bracelet on her leg, the same as the one she is wearing to stop her flying away as a bird. Semi dislikes the white space, saying that it feels like being dead.
• Once Harry Dresden figures out who killed him in Ghost Story, he is taken out of the Battle in the Center of the Mind between Molly and Corpsetaker and ends up in one of these while he talks to Archangel Uriel.
• Such a scene is included in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows involving Harry meeting and speaking briefly with Dumbledore. It stops being a blank white room and becomes King's Cross Station fairly quickly, though. The film version goes both ways, being a blank white version of King's Cross.
• The setting of House of Stairs is just a big white void criss-crossed with stairs, plus one toilet and a pellet dispenser. Somewhere, presumably very far off, is an elevator that gets you out. That toilet is their only water supply (so they wash up in it too), and the only non-stairs element besides the machine. It constantly flushes, but still.
• The Red Tower is surrounded by an empty grey landscape, to which the Tower's redness is an intolerable impurity that must be worn down and erased.
• Inverted in The Time Ships. The Time Traveler is imprisoned by Morlocks by means of a single shaft of light in a seemingly-infinite black room. He's psychologically unable to walk out of sight of the beam.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: D'Hoffryn's place of business is a featureless black void.
• Doctor Who:
  • Apparently, these were a fixture of Terry Nation's early scripts.
  • "The Mind Robber" features an early example, as the Doctor and his companions find themselves trapped in the land of Fiction. This being classic series Doctor Who, you actually can see the edges of the walls, but the cast never do...
  • "Warrior's Gate" is set almost entirely in one of these, to eerie effect.
  • In "It Takes You Away", when the Solitract drops the Norwegian cottage guise when the Doctor is the only visitor left, it takes the form of one of these, with beams resembling the cottage attic, and itself in the form of a talking frog sitting on a chair.
• The Good Place:
  • The "Janet warehouse" housing all of the Janets of the Good Place is a seemingly boundless void (excepting the door), with one Janet standing in the middle. When the Janet is removed from the warehouse, a new one replaces them.
  • Every Janet has a "boundless void", that exists everywhere. This void is where they exist when not interacting with anyone, and is used for holding/retrieving objects.
    • All Good Janets have a standard blank white void.
    • Downplayed with Bad Janets, who have a similar blank white void, but littered with rubbish.
    • Neutral Janets have a blank beige void.
    • Downplayed with Disco Janets, who have a blank disco void, containing nothing but coloured floor tiles, and a single disco ball.
• Legion (2017): In "Chapter 27", the astral plane is white and featureless when Charles Xavier initially confronts Present Amahl Farouk, then negotiates a truce with him, and later convinces David Haller to accept the peace agreement.
• Many early animated inserts in Sesame Street take place in white voids, or at least in minimalist environments.
• Used a few times in Star Trek, as boundless white voids:
  • At the beginning of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry", Picard apparently dies on Dr Crusher's operating table after being shot through the heart. He wakes up in a bright white void in which he can make out a white-robed figure who reaches out to him... only for it to turn out to be Q, who informs Jean-Luc that he's dead, Q is God, and they're going to spend eternity together. Picard is not convinced.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In "The Visitor", a white void is used to represent the "subspace vacuole" that Captain Sisko is trapped in.
    • The realm of the Prophets looks like a white void before images of places and people start appearing.
  • In Star Trek: Enterprise, T'Pol is shown meditating in a mental version of this to avoid distractions. Unfortunately, she discovers her brief "intimate relationship" with Trip Tucker has led to a somewhat more permanent connection when he appears in there as well.
    T'Pol: Why are you here?
    Tucker: I was about to ask you the same thing. Is this a daydream?
    T'Pol: I'm meditating. This is where I go in my mind.
    Tucker: Well, I would've thought you'd pick a more interesting place. Like the beach, or one of those Fire Plains you showed me.
    T'Pol: Please leave.
    Tucker: Exactly where am I supposed to go?
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "A Matter of Minutes", Michael and Maureen Wright attempt to use their neighbor Cliff Turner's phone but when they enter his home, they find nothing but a featureless white void. The same thing happens later when they run down an alley. The supervisor explains to them that he and his workers did not bother to construct the family home or the alley when building the minute 11:37am on April 27, 1986, as no one is supposed to see either during that time.
• Yo Gabba Gabba! is set in a white void filled with miniature playsets, where toys come to life.

Music Videos

• The music video for the a-ha song "Take on Me" features the protagonist being sucked into her own drawing, a blank white sheet of paper as the background.

Video Games

• Asura's Wrath: In the final phase of the Chakratarvin the Creator boss fight, the boss itself turns an entire plane of existence into this just by his raw power alone.
• In Kingdom Hearts III, this turns out to be the ultimate endgame of Master Xehanort: to use the power of Kingdom Hearts to destroy the current universe and reduce it to a blank slate where he can rebuild it from scratch. It's more apparent in the Japanese script, where he calls it a "pure white world", whereas he calls it "an empty world, pure and bright" in English.
• Ganondorf's ultimate fate at the end of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is to be sealed away in Another Dimension which is depicted as a white, formless void where he can do nothing but spew vile invectives at the heroes.
• Line Rider takes place in an empty white area. The only objects are Bosh and the lines you draw.
• OMORI spends his downtime in a relatively featureless void called 'White Space' when he's not interacting with his neighbor friends. The only things of consequence in it are his laptop, his sketchbook (which also has many blank pages), a cat, tissues for wiping away his tears and a black bulb suspended overhead.
• The Expanse, the Void Between the Worlds, in Shin Megami Tensei IV, due to the influence of the White. More creepily, the Monochrome Forest is this trope applied to a small plane of reality. Despite being a forest instead of a room, it manages to achieve the same effect. Played straight when the White talk to you when the Expanse is first opened.
• Sonic Generations uses one as its Hub Level, with small previews of each of the nine levels being used as their entrances. Used properly in the game's epilogue, where both Dr. Eggman and his past self from 20 years ago are both stuck in a true white void.
• In The Stanley Parable, you can go through a window and outside the map into one of these. No, this isn't a glitch; there's even a secret ending there.
• Star Wars: In Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Rakata use mind traps as prisons, which are represented by the prisoner in an empty white void.
• In Super Paper Mario, when Sammer's Kingdom is destroyed, the door that led there now leads to a vast, empty landscape.

Web Animation

• Animated Inanimate Battle is — for the most part — set in a similar yellow-and-white void referred to as "the Blank Slate". Outside the characters themselves, the only notable things in said void are some poker cards, a pile of trash that Oodle flinged to kingdom come, a bush, an ocean with some ice floating in it, a mountain, and some claw machines as of the third episode.
• Da Amazin OT Advenchr takes place in a white landscape. Subverted in Appisote 18, in which the series gains a background until Lite kills himself at the end of the Appisote to stop the "evolving".
• Dreamscape: The Possessor Ghosts Dimsnion. It also serves as a Void Between the Worlds to get to the Mirror Universe.
• RWBY: In Volume 6, Jinn reveals that there is a place between realms that is an endless white void, and uses this place a blank canvas on which to illustrate the story she tells of Remnant's secret history. It is in this place that the God of Light originally gave Ozpin his mission to save humanity and which Ozpin subsequently uses to protect the four Relics from Salem. By creating a Pocket Dimension within the void that is accessible through a Vault underneath each Huntsman Academy, Ozpin can protect the Relics by ensuring only a Headmaster can grant access to the Vaults, and only a Maiden can then grant access to the dimensional chambers where each Relic is stored.
• Alphabet Lore: Where the series takes place. F's lair appears to be the only distinguishable landmark. It's not actually that much of a void, it turns out; the end of the series reveals everything takes place upon the planet-sized Z, who happens to be a marble-white and house a white atmosphere that progressively turns cyan as more of space becomes visible.

Webcomics

• 1/0 is set in one of these. Then the characters create land from the corpse of a dead giant and eventually build a town there. The introduction of all the characters and other objects, one by one, to this realm forms the backbone of the comic's storyline.
• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe is set within a pocket dimension in the shape of a complex of increasingly lavish apartments (going from a basic bachelor pad to a full-blown mansion) floating in an immense white void broken only by a seemingly endless railway and an ominous, pulsing black star. It's all that is left of the universe after it underwent heat death and collapsed into a singularity, that being the black star. The reason there's anything at all besides empty void is because the Everyman — the Anthropomorphic Personification of humanity's collective unconscious — willed a number of pocket existences and the railway connecting them, in order to preserve existence in some form. In the sequel, Chairman Jack: Emerge, the civilization that was built clinging to the railway ends up making extensive use of flying vehicles as the only meaningful way of moving through the void.
• Blank It takes place in one of these. It quickly turns into a surreal, Alice in Wonderland-style adventure.
• In Collar 6, a character in the subspace trance sees this. Several characters can enter the same 'space' if they are also in subspace and have a strong bond. The last stage of the World Revolutionizer puts Laura and Michael Kappel into a similar place — where Sixx joins them, just in time to save the day.
• In El Goonish Shive, Ellen floats in a featureless black void at the end of the memories inserted into her dreams.
• In Homestuck, Roxy describes the Power of the Void as an endless expanse of white which she can draw out anything from.
• In Honkai Impact 3rd: Second Eruption, we learn that the Will of Honkai, the gestalt mind driving every Honkai Beast, resides in a parallel dimension devoid of anything but a white emptiness, with the only furniture being dependent on whoever interacts with it. In Sirin's case, it sits comfortably on a rock throne; in Otto's case, it's seen praying before a blue crucifix.
• The "Cone" story arc in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! sees our heroes abducted to a realm like this for much of the story, trying to find a way out.
• Richard of Looking for Group was banished into a featureless white void while battling the sisters. He dubbed it the "Plane of Suck".
• There have been several cases in L's Empire when the characters are in a featureless white void: when they're in a brand-new dimension, one of the authors left pocket, and the Void Between the Worlds. They comment on this.
  Void: So this is the new dimension huh? Where's the color?
  Mr. L: Uh, Void. I think you mean, where's the EVERYTHING?
• A number of early Nedroid strips have little in the way of background, to the point where the characters eventually begin to lampshade it, such as when Reginald gets tired of the featureless white void in which he inhabits and takes a trip to the featureless black void for a change of scenery.
• Unsounded has an interesting meta-example: throughout the comic, the web page's background and decorations change to match the comic image, so when Sette falls into a bizarre parallel dimension, the page goes totally black (to the extent that Sette tries to fiddle with the page forward/back buttons because nothing else is visible) and a bit later, completely white.
• White Void starts out in one, but it grows a horizon in the third strip and hasn't been really blank since.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-000, despite being only a problematic file to the Foundation and the outside world, actually contains an entity known as a Pattern Screamer, which is trapped within a system error forever. The entity perceives it's condition as being stuck in a featureless white void occasionally broken by flashes of light and sounds.
  • SCP-3001 is an endless black Void Between the Worlds described as a pocket "non-dimension" located between realities that Scranton (the narrator, who got there holding a recording device) entered when going through a wormhole. He describes it as "falling off the bridge" of the wormhole instead of reaching his destination, and reached a zone that literally REFUTES the concept of existence itself, since the place technically shouldn't even exist. Scranton was trapped in it for almost six years, unable to die and his physical body slowly decaying as the void tried to close back down, after a Freak Lab Accident.
  • Inverted by SCP-3930. It's a Void Between the Worlds underpinning the very foundation of reality that theoretically does not exist, as it's comprised of complete nothingness. It can't even be called a black or white void, as that attributes some kind of quality to it; it has no possible descriptor as it lacks shape, dimension, anything that could potentially be used to quantify it. Because the human mind isn't equipped to process complete nothingness, people who directly observe its entry point just see an extension of the forest surrounding it.
• In Void Domain, Zoe's teleportation magic creates an instantaneous shortcut through an infinite, frigid, dead-white void. Everyone but her finds it extremely unsettling, to such an extent that Eva prefers a teleport spell that catapults her through Hell and inflicts major temporary Body Horror along the way.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Bond Beyond Time Abridged, the ending of the film has Jaden telling Yami Yugi a future event. This causes a paradox and has all of Yugi, Jaden, and Yusei stuck in subspace which is a literal white void.

Western Animation

• This is what ChalkZone is without any chalk in it. Minus the floor, it's literally a bottomless abyss.
• Ben 10: Omniverse: In "A New Dawn", Ben and Rook chase Maltruant back in time to before the creation of the universe. They end up in a blank white void with nothing but a Contumelia ship, and realize that the Annihilargh doesn't just destroy universes - if it is activated in a dimension without one, it will instead create a universe.
• Family Guy:
  • A cutaway in "The Thin White Line" shows the Griffins visiting Purgatory. It's a white space that doesn't even have a floor; you're just suspended in the void.
  • In "Road to the Multiverse", Brian and Stewie visit an alternate universe that is this, with just them and "Compliment Guy", who stands so far away that he's almost a dot. He is the only inhabitant of his universe and his sole purpose is to yell compliments from a distance. Brian and Stewie then leave that universe and back to their own universe, in front of their house. However, it turns out that they are only standing in front of a large picture of their house, and two workers come along and carry the picture away, revealing that they are simply in yet another White Void Room. Stewie tells Brian that they are in the Universe of Misleading Portraiture. It has no true specific locations, only portraits that represent the locations. But then they see Compliment Guy in the distance of the void... but then it turns out that he and the void are simply yet another Misleading Portraiture, which gets carried away by two workers, revealing another white void room, but with a horizon where a gray wall meets a white floor.
  • In "The Big Pang Theory", Stewie and Brian end up in a white, floorless nothingness when they go back in time before the big bang. They demonstrate the versatility of the nothingness when Stewie snaps his fingers to alter the physics, and creates a musical staff with their two heads taking place of the musical notes, where the two heads sing the Carmichael/Loesser song "Heart and Soul".
• The Futurama What If? episode "Anthology of Interest" ends with Fry destroying the universe, yet he and a few others survive, suspended in a white featureless void.
  Stephen Hawking: Great. The entire universe was destroyed.
  Fry: Destroyed? Then where are we now?
  Al Gore: I don't know. But I can darn well tell you where we're not: the universe.
  Nichelle Nichols: [groaning] Eternity with nerds. It's the Pasadena Star Trek convention all over again.
  Gary Gygax: Anyone wanna play Dungeons & Dragons for the next quadrillion years?
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the Sorcerous Overlord King Sombra created a Pocket Dimension version of this as part of his complex security system, as seen in "The Crystal Empire - Part 2". The only way out is by climbing a vast, Evil Tower of Ominousness-sized staircase.
• Rock and Paper end up here as one of the locations in the Rock, Paper, Scissors episode, "Hide and Seek" while trying to search for Scissors, via traveling through a time machine Paper borrows from Pencil 20 years later. Paper utters that they went too far back after arriving.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "SB-129", Squidward is on a Time Machine that goes haywire and ends up in one of these.
  • Patrick's dreamscape turns out to be one of these, with just him on a coin-operated kiddie ride and a sewer grate that his last quarter fell into.
• Uncle Grandpa features one of these in between episodes. Uncle Grandpa and his group seem to walk around it just fine, but one who comes in unprepared, say, the Crystal Gems, can easily get lost.
• The aptly named "White Dimension" in Wakfu. It's a dimension in between the World of Twelve and Emrub. At the same time it is used as a prison to trap one of the villains, Qilby, who views it as a Fate Worse than Death. After all, as a Straw Nihilist obsessed with staving off the monotony of an immortal eternal existence by seeking out new and unknown things, the unending nothingness is his Ironic Hell.
• The Wander over Yonder episode "The Void" is about Another Dimension, accessed through a Lonely Door floating around in space, that starts out as pure white and changes according to your desires.

---