Sugar Bowl

Mmm, topography.

"They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles!"

— Sean Penn, Team America: World Police, describing Iraq under Saddam Hussein

A Sugar Bowl is a setting in a story that is lively and happy and where bad events rarely, if ever, happen. Any place with friendly locals (human or not), idyllic landscapes, rustic yet hygienic towns, and No Poverty is likely a Sugar Bowl.

There is either No Antagonist or the villains here are harmless. Sometimes you can have a sweet setting with unexpectedly creepy and/or evil bad guys who may or may not be allergic to anything saccharine, but even in that case, the kind of permanent damage they can do is likely minor. Expect a Heel–Face Turn via Care-Bear Stare and/or Defeat Means Friendship. There might be a character who finds the place Sickeningly Sweet.

They're often intended to be a Utopia, so don't worry about the details.

Be advised that proximity to, prolonged stays within, or merely entering such places may "naturalize" you into a local in body and/or mind.

Compare with: Level Ate, which covers settings that are literally made out of sugar. Contrast with Crapsack World, the Mirror Universe of this trope. Crapsaccharine World appears to be this, but turns out to be Crapsack World. If a Sugar Bowl used to be a Wretched Hive, see Heel–Face Town. Also, Sugar Apocalypse, where bad things happen to good universes. Not to be confused with Sweetness Aversion, which is a reaction. If sufficiently analyzed and contrasted with a more "realistic" world, it can be a tame variant of Eldritch Location.

Not to be confused with the elusive Macguffin of A Series of Unfortunate Events... whatever it is. Also not to be confused with the American Football game known as the Sugar Bowl; for that, see Collegiate American Football.

We have one of these. See the Self-Demonstrating Article for Sugar Bowl for an in-character description made by a visitor.

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Examples

Advertising

• "Kids and grownups love it so in the happy world of Haribo!"◊
• "Hello Kitty, Hello Kitty/ we all think you're, very pretty/We all love to, hug and kiss you/ You make boys and girls so happy when they're with you/ Little Twin Stars, are so charming/ And My Melody, is such a darling/ We all love to, come and see you/ In the happy little world of Sanrio!"

Anime and Manga

• ARIA takes place in the city of New Venice, in a futuristic terraformed Mars.
• Flognarde in Dog Days, mostly trusting Kemonomimis, war is a sporting event important for the country's inner workings and overall is a fluffy fantasy world. However, it was KEPT that way, and not without effort by the inhabitants themselves when The Corruption strikes occasionally. (Said war is used as a Level Grinding method).
• This is Freeza's personal Ironic Hell in Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' - cocooned and hanging from a tree in a beautiful field, while fairies and magic stuffed animals frolic around him.
  Freeza: Instead of ruling the universe with an iron fist, I was SERENADED BY TEDDY BEARS!
• The world of Hamtaro is a delightful Sugar Bowl in which talking hamsters, Hamtaro and his Ham-Ham Gang, go on suspenseful adventures in which the Ham-Hams overcome fears, misunderstandings and endangered expectations.
• Hayao Miyazaki uses such settings for some of his films like My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. In one way or another, the world is almost absurdly nice to nice people. This trope is averted with his more 'serious' films like Princess Mononoke and The Wind Rises, with both the natural and human worlds shown as being hostile and dangerous.
• Jewel Land from Jewelpet is very much a sugar bowl. The most evil thing imaginable in the series, Dark Magic, tends to be locked away somewhere, or be extremely weak in the face of Jewel Magic. Provided it's kept at bay, virtually nothing bad happens.
• The Perks of Working in the Black Magic Industry features a setting that is actually a very nice place to live. The people are mostly friendly. The air and water is clean. There are serious subjects mentioned and shown, such as suicide and worker oppression, but their occurrence is rare.
• Many of the later Pretty Cure movies involve the heroes having adventures in various Sugar Bowls. In addition to that, the alternate worlds that the girls have to save in each season are inhabited by ridiculously cute critters.
• Wherever Witzy lives in Suzy's Zoo: Daisuki! Witzy, it appears that the place is gentle and happy throughout.
• The Wonder Planet in Twin Princess of Wonder Planet. About the worst thing that can happen is hurting someone's feelings.

Comic Books

• The French comic series Les Womoks, a sci-fi parody series about a bunch of sub-par space troopers, features the Albon, an alien Sugar Bowl civilization of Ridiculously Cute Critters. They seldom come out of encounters with the Womoks without getting the business end of an explosion, yet somehow never lose their ludicrously optimistic view of life, even after their world gets invaded by the setting's Proud Warrior Race bad guys. And after their homeworld gets blown to pieces in the following liberation? They happily live on the resulting Floating Continent Islands, happily enjoying the view.
• In the Belgian comic Olivier Rameau, the Dream Land setting of Rêverose ("Pink Dream") is very much this; a happy and fantastic place "strictly forbidden to boring people". It isn't entirely devoid of a dark side, though, as some places are governed by nightmares. Nor it is entirely childish, as evidenced by Colombe Tiredaile, the hero's Love Interest, who has since become quite the sex symbol, thanks to the cartoonist Dany not being shy about drawing her rather au natural.
• The Smurf Village in The Smurfs started off as Mordor in the Johan and Peewit comic book story The Flute with Six Holes (later renamed The Smurfs and the Magic Flute), located in what was called The Cursed Land. When the Smurfs got their own series, the village was relocated to a flourishing animal-filled forest until eventually it became a Sugar Bowl. When a prequel story called "The Flute Smurfers" was published in 2008, the forest of the Smurf Village kept the Sugar Bowl look of the comic book series instead of reverting back to its original Mordor appearance. However, this trope is downplayed, as there's still quite a lot of danger, with the forest being destroyed by a fire in one comic book.
• Widgey Q Butterfluff is a Deconstructive Parody of shows like this, where the attempts by Widgey and her friends to deal with Very Special Episode fodder like adolescence and G-rated drug addiction tend to end in surreal disaster.
• The Fairie Land in Mélusine. The sun is always shining and has a cartoon face on it. Giant lollipops grow up instead of trees. Houses are shaped like cakes. In contrast to Mélusine's witch world, there's no monsters or any dangers.
• In modern The Mighty Thor books, Alfheim, home of the Light Elves is depicted as one of these in its natural state. It's described as a peaceful and colorful land filled with cute and friendly gnomes, fairies, and unicorns in addition to the Light Elves. Candy is a crop there too, so the "Sugar" part is literal. However, Malekith seeks to put an end to its Sugar Bowl status by tossing it into the bloodiest war in history.

Fan Works

• Izuku the Reincarnated Chef: This is probably the best way to describe the Magical Girl World given how ridiculously saccharine everyone and everything there is, and that's putting it mildly. Adelia explains the current state of that world being the result of the Heart of Light trying to forcibly convert that world into being 'pure good'. It got so unbearable for Adelia that she had a Rage Breaking Point and incinerated her former coworkers with a huge fireball.
• Nine Days Down: Modern-day Equestria is an incredibly safe and welcoming place, where those threats that do occur can mostly be solved through diplomacy and understanding and without anybody truly getting permanently hurt. As a result, modern ponies have only a limited and theoretical understanding of what a war entails and no concept of rape, and Twilight does not even recognize swear words when she hears them. In the ancient past, it was instead a Death World, where small bands of ponies were tyrannized and preyed on by endless monsters and villains. The reason this is no longer the case is because Celestia, Luna and their followers worked very, very hard to make it so. A lot of the story's drama comes from Twilight, who has spent all her life in the sugar bowl of the upper world, becoming trapped in Tartarus, where all the old monsters were banished to and which very much remains a death world.
• Turnabout Storm: As far as Phoenix is concerned, he is stuck in one; the colorful equine filled Equestria. It is so cutesy and peaceful that not only is the defendant innocent but everyone else is too; the "murder" really was an accident. As far as Equestria's concerned however, the real one is overseas; a land where ponies and humans coexist.
• A Wild Badfic Appeared! Commentaries: According to various bits of information from the Smashers, the Smash Mansion, the Fanon mansion where the fighters (and in AWBfA! itself, the Assist Trophies and extra characters as well) reside while they aren't fighting, is portrayed as one. It is a big house populated mostly by the multiverse's nicest, kindest, most heroic, well, heroes, resulting in a Close-Knit Community where most of the characters are friends or at least care about each other, also comfortably housing hundreds upon hundreds of Pokémon and other creatures, birthday or holiday parties are thrown seemingly every other week at the very least, some of them by the face of gaming himself, the residents can fight with all manner of lethal weapons and not get hurt whatsoever as long as they are in a designated stage because of magic, nobody ever ages also due to magic, everything is managed by the giant, benevolent, floating hand of a god (and his Cloud Cuckoolander brother) that cast the spells in the first place and can fix and create anything to their whims, and there is no school. While there are the villains to worry about, they are vastly outnumbered by heroic characters (with only two at most being serious threats anyway) and constantly kept under check. It is deliberately implied to be an impossibly awesome place to live (especially to the characters from medieval settings like Fire Emblem, who are still adjusting over a year into their arrival), with businesses to serve the fighters implied to be bustling around it and even TV from our world somehow able to air in it, providing a haven for all manner of broken soldiers, children who have lost sight of their childhoods, heroes who have been alone for a great deal of their lives, and tired adventurers among their ever-increasing ranks. And don't worry about matters back home; time flows much faster within it, so they are only actually away for a very short amount of time. Granted, since it is once again populated mostly by some of the purest heroes in the multiverse, described by Erika herself as "The video game equivalent of the Justice League or The Avengers" and "the nicest guys in the multiverse", this is pretty justified.
• You Got HaruhiRolled!: Chapter 59 deliberately makes the setting of Haruhi Suzumiya into this trope, as a parody of how 4Kids Entertainment would have treated the show had it gotten its hands on it. Haruhi's powers are reimagined as the power of imagination, and everyone else in the SOS Brigade is only there to learn about the true meaning of friendship from her. Taniguchi is chaste and Sickeningly Sweethearts with Ryouko, and even the Anti-SOS Brigade is nice.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie has Cloud Cuckooland, a utopian society which literally is a complete Cloud Cuckooland.
  Uni-Kitty: Here in Cloud Cuckooland, there are no rules! There's no government, no babysitters, no bedtimes, no frowny faces, no bushy moustaches, and no negativity of any kind!
  Wyldstyle: You just said the word "no" like, a thousand times.
  Uni-Kitty: And there's also no consistency.
• Babes in Toyland has Toyland, where everything is supposed to appeal to children.
• The Happy Cricket is set in a happy-go-lucky fantasy world, where everyone is either absurdly cheerful or absurdly naive.
• Barbie and the Secret Door has the world Zinnia. It's a magical land full of fairies, unicorns, and mermaids, and its entire color palette is very bright and almost like candy. This is subverted when Malucia drains the entire land of its magic, though.
• Doogal at the beginning of the film alongside Doogal's love of sugary treats.
• Yellow Submarine has Pepperland, which is described as an 'unearthly paradise' and is portrayed as a never-ending Victorian-era garden party. The plot kicks off when the Blue Meanies lay waste to the place, and Old Fred is forced to take the Yellow Submarine and go somewhere - ANYWHERE - to get help.

Films — Live-Action

• In Maleficent, the Moors were this when Maleficent was young. Bright colours, flowers everywhere, everyone greets each other happily, and there is no monarchy because the inhabitants are peaceful and don't need a ruler.
• Disneyland Dream, amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow's sophisticated home movie of his family's visit to Disneyland in 1956, shows Disneyland as this.
  Robbins Barstow: For our particular family at that particular time, we agreed with Walt Disney that this was the happiest place on earth.

Literature

• Ivan Yefremov's Andromeda Nebula is an attempt to imagine what a realistic utopia might look like, based on the scientific knowledge of the time (1950s). Technological advances have led to advanced machinery and near-perfect healthcare, and society has progressed to the point where there is no poverty or class distinction. Humanity is guided by governing councils and academies of experts, but is otherwise anarchic.
• 'The Culture' in Iain M Banks' The Culture is shown as a space-faring equivalent of humanity in Andromeda Nebula. One big difference is that this civiisation is guided by Benevolent A.I. called Minds, reflecting the Information Revolution that occurred between the writings of Andromeda Nebula and the Culture novels. Culture citizens enjoy almost absolute freedom and luxury. They also try to help other civilisations develop to their standard of living, with varying degrees of success.
• Happy Birthday to You! is a Dr. Seuss story with no conflict whatsoever. It's just about a special Birthday Bird who takes a boy on an exhilarating excursion on his birthday.
• Even H. P. Lovecraft has a bit of this in his Dreamlands. Sona-Nyl, Celephais and Aira are all described in these terms. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph Carter, having just endured innumerable horrors after his ascent of Mt. Ngranek, gets a break as he heads for Thran to catch a ship to Celephais:
  Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dingle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.
• The philosophical novel Ishmael has a bit where the eponymous gorilla attempts to illustrate his main point by making the case for how a world in which people eat other people could be one of these.
• Life, the Universe and Everything: The planet Krikket, one of the most horrific and dreaded places in the galaxy, is a lovely, scenic, beautiful planet whose inhabitants cheerfully spend their days singing mind-bogglingly nice (if, perhaps, a tad too whimsical) songs about peace, justice, morality, sports, and puppies. Just don't look at the sky. It's completely pitch black, because their solar system is surrounded by a thick dust cloud that blocks out the light of every other star. Once the Krikketers learn about the rest of the universe, they come to a conclusion: "It'll have to go."
• The Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe starts off this way - a post-scarcity society with no war and advanced healthcare a la Andromeda Nebula. This is gradually subverted as the series progresses, with the local Secret Police banning whatever they consider to be 'dangerous experiments', and human diplomats often doing more harm than good in their attempts to 'help' less developed aliens.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events parodies these quite beautifully with a fictitious novel called The Littlest Elf. The reader is told constantly that it would be a better idea to read The Littlest Elf seeing as the book you are reading is unhappy and therefore should not be read by anyone. The Littlest Elf is a running gag that even comes up in Lemony Snicket's "Biography".
• In Daniel Pinkwater's book Spaceburger, two boys take a long walk on a pleasant day to be the first to eat at the eponymous fast food restaurant on its opening day. One of the boys has eaten at a location in another city and assures the other that it is far better than any of the other hamburger joints they pass along the way, and it more than lives up to its reputation in atmosphere and food. After their meal and playing in the "weightless room" (a foam pit) the boys head back home singing happily.
• In Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, the Runa culture could look like this. Conflicts are resolved through endless discussion. Strongly felt anger and unhappiness are believed to cause destructive storms. Equality and fairness are important so that people don't become porai, or heartsick. City-dwelling Runa don't take these values as seriously as rural villagers, and anyway the whole thing gets demolished when the revolution happens.
• A particularly dark version of this comes about in the book Villains by Necessity, about a fantasy world in which the forces of light have decisively won against the forces of darkness, and tipped the Balance Between Good and Evil way, way too far in their favor. Without darkness, the world becomes more and more of a Sugar Bowl, and will eventually be "consumed by light" (a nice way of saying "wiped out"). While at the start of the book the world has just become uncommonly pleasant and peaceful, it becomes more and more like this toward the end, such as nighttime lasting for shorter and shorter periods each cycle. By the end of the book, when the world is on the cusp of destruction, it's bright and sunny at eleven at night, flowers and blossoming over every countryside (even barren cliffsides), there are no shadows anywhere (even on the inside of peoples' mouths) and even dark colors stop existing. The Main Characters who are predominantly dressed in black spontaneously find themselves in bright, cheery colors (their sorcerer's raven familiar having even turned bright blue).

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5's third season saw the Earth Alliance sliding into fascism since Clark came to office. They've begun a heavy propaganda campaign to portray Earth as "one happy planet" where poverty, homelessness, disease, or conflict don't exist. And anyone who dares say otherwise is charged with sedition and called un-patriotic
• The Good Place plays with this. The setting was clearly intended to be a Sugar Bowl, but it starts to fall apart almost immediately because of the unplanned presence of a person who isn't as perfect as the rest of the setting's inhabitants and causes chaos with their selfish actions and the hidden truth that the entire setting is a Hell disguised as Heaven.
• LazyTown: While too much sugar in LazyTown is obviously a bad thing, the town overall is very sweet with fairly harmless conflict.
• Star Trek plays with this. On the one hand, we're assured that civilization has outgrown savagery, war, poverty and discrimination. However, the longer the franchise goes on, the more we see examples of these qualities come up, largely due to the need for conflict. For instance, the friendly bickering between the human McCoy and Vulcan Spock in the original series becomes more explicitly Fantastic Racism later on.

Music

• Official video from Katy Perry's song Chained to the Rythm depicts her as she enters and interacts with a colorful theme park where there's plenty of cotton candy, social-media rollcoasters and at least one 3D cinema, and where every visitor seems overhyped and colorfully dressed. The word "utopia" is mentioned in the lyrics, although that status probably is being put into question between lines.
• The work of Adam And The Couch Potatoes is full of life and happiness, and very uplifting.
• Aqua's 'Lollipop' has music and lyrics fit because its genre is a super sugary brand of Eurodance.
• Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's stage persona is very sugary sweet, though with a side of the excessively strange.
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a hobo song from The Great Depression era, describes a more adult-oriented Sugar Bowl with geographical features like a whiskey lake, fauna like chickens that lay hard-boiled eggs, flora like cigarette trees, and blind policemen.
  • You can also find Bowdlerized versions of the song oriented towards kids.
• The main setting for the Jamster character Schnuffel is mainly set in a beautiful looking meadow with a castle. It's mostly populated by cute animals including a mouse,pig, and a bee.

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible has the Garden of Eden. Plenty of food, all animals are vegetarians (yes, even lions, female mosquitoes, and fleas), no disease, no guilt, and you never die. Also, everyone is perfectly formed and naked. The next world to come will be identical, after this one's inevitable destruction. Many Christian offshoots emphasizing the end of the world have a tailor-made second Earth; fundamentalist sects ignore the nudity, while indigenous versions, such as the Ghost Dance, tend to ignore the vegetarianism.

Tabletop Games

• In the Dungeons & Dragons setting Planescape, the Outer Plane of Elysium isn't quite this goody-goody, but it's still filled with magical Good-aligned humanimals, brims with bounteous natural beauty, and has an inconvenient habit of turning anyone who stays for more than a week or two (and repeatedly fails their will save) into a blissed-out hippie zombie who has completely forgotten why he came there and has no desire ever to leave. This trait is only shared by the plane's evil counterpart, the Gray Wastes of Hades, an endless plain of gray dust. Except that it doesn't make you happy at all. The only reason people don't just lay down and die is that it's futile, as most of them are already Dead to Begin With.

Theater

• Camelot has Arthur serenading Guenevere with a real-estate pitch, basically, to persuade her to marry him.
  The rain may never fall till after sundown
  By 8:00, the morning fog must disappear
  In short, there's simply not
  A more congenial spot
  For happily-ever-aftering than here in Camelot

Theme Parks

• "it's a small world" at the Disney Theme Parks is set in a bright and colorful earth where everyone is together and united in peace, as well as always smiling and singing.

Video Games

• BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea: Episode 2 starts with a leisure stroll down a vibrant and gorgeous esplanade over Seine, Paris, filled with nice, friendly people (and a little birdie). The game being what it is, it quickly descends into Nightmare Fuel.
• Melodia of HarmoKnight is this, but in a more musical way. Everything is in the shape of notes and instruments, but it just looks so happy! You could even think that this could basically be a musical Pop Star with more human characters. This place is a musician's dream come true.
• Hello Kitty Online, as it extends the Sanrio franchise into the world of MMORPGs. However, to some players, the fact that ever time you step outside of a town you're surrounded by hordes of dangerous, aggressive (but still painfully cute) animals makes it seem more like a Crapsaccharine World. One of the buildings in the first town after the starting town is a giant sugar bowl (another building is a giant teacup).
• Kirby:
  • Dream Land, the main setting of the franchise. Its geography is even named after different types of kid's food. And yet there's enough Eldritch Abominations around that it gets darn near a Cosmic Horror Story world. Luckily they have Kirby around to keep everything from being destroyed.
  • Then they went and made a world out of fabric in Kirby's Epic Yarn. Which also had a Level Ate in case you were wondering.
  • Ripple Star from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is even more of a Sugar Bowl than Dream Land. It's a smiling heart shaped planet inhabited by fairies, and then Dark Matter shows up.
• Ollo in The Sunny Valley Fair, a children's game, surprisingly averts this for the most part. While the backgrounds are colorful, some settings are toned-down and somewhat realistic.
• Pokémon, where they think nothing of sending preteens/young teenagers out into the world with no supervision and only a small (if destructive) animal for company.
  • Hearthome City in Sinnoh is one of the best examples of this trope, having babies everywhere and a park allowing entry only to cute Pokemon.
  • In Kalos ironically the only characters that are evil, want to reset civilization (In a Biblical flood sense) because they think the world has gotten too corrupt despite Kalos is not only the most beautiful region, filled with gorgeous scenery, lots and lots of atmospheric cafes filled with friendly people, but also has tons of random people giving the player (A complete stranger) helpful items and advice for no reason other than to be friendly, even the street punks are generally well mannered.
• Pony Island: At one point, you have to replay a reskinned version of the game with obnoxiously-cutesy graphics and a lengthy Forced Tutorial explaining things the player has already learned from earlier playthroughs. It actually gets a little ominous when the player pulls out the pony wings before Louie explains how to use them.
• In the Puyo Puyo series, Primp Town is very bright and colorful, and according to Fever 2 lore, is said to have pleasing climate and good harvest in spite of being secluded by terrain. If any sort of conflict happened, it was resolved quickly with no effect on the town.
• Rakuen: In contrast to the dull, gray confines of the hospital, Morizora's Forest is a beautiful, colorful world full of welcoming creatures and little danger. The most the inhabitants usually have to worry about is a grouchy bear ruining their vegetable gardens, the Envoy causing mischief around the village, and a mysterious culprit eating all the food from the sky mansion's fridge.
• Raze's Hell is set on one such world inhabited by Cute Is Evil creatures who decide to slaughter everyone who is ugly. The protagonist is a survivor of said attacks who is then forced to cause a Sugar Apocalypse.
• Style Savvy. You're an up-and-coming designer in the cutthroat fashion industry, struggling to succeed amidst the pettiness, politics, and backstabbing of— wait, no. Everyone is utterly sweet, polite, and encouraging. You could create the most horrific outfit on the face of the planet, and the worst someone might say to you is that it's not really their style, but thanks so much for your time! The worst possible criticism you can get during a fashion contest is along the lines of "Your outfit didn't fit the theme, but you have potential — keep trying and your skills will shine through!" No matter how badly you fail a contest, your model will do her best to cheer you up and express her faith that you'll win next time.
• Troy from Struggling goes through one of these during a Mushroom Samba. It's full of bright colors, happily singing mushrooms, and ...one rainbow-farting unicorn. It's still as dangerous as the rest of the game.
• The entire Super Mario Bros. series could probably qualify. The Mushroom Kingdom is an idyllic land where Toad people romp happily and the only real problem the kingdom ever seems to have is Bowser's penchant for kidnapping the Princess. This is a problem Mario consistently resolves in short order. Then they all go go-karting or play sports together.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Apparently this is how The Pyro sees the world. Melee weapons are lollipops, the other team is cherubs, and fire is rainbows. Ammo crates are presents and Health packs are cakes/cupcakes too. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a Crapsaccharine World as well- Mayor Balloonicorn^note Mayor? Don't be ridiculous. We're talking about an inflatable unicorn here. He's the Municipal Ombudsman. is an alcoholic with a hair-trigger temper, appears to be in debt, has a bit of a nicotine addiction, and his wife's cheating on him. But isn't he the cutest thing ever?◊
  • With special googles, provided by the same company that also made Pyro's mask, every class can experience it.
• Subverted with the hardmode biome Hallow in Terraria. It has a paster-colored fairytale look, Rainbows and Unicorns, and is also one of the more dangerous biomes. It also spreads, just like Corruption and Crimson, the evil biomes.
• Played for laughs with Toonstruck's Cutopia, ruled by a giant smiley face.
• Touhou Project: Once you get past the customary greeting, Gensokyo could very well qualify. Nobody ever dies (except that one bat), all the notable locals are cute girls, and whenever something goes horribly wrong, inevitably the Miko and the Cute Witch save the day and befriend whatever was causing the problem.
• Vigilante 8 on the N64 has a bonus map called Super Dreamland 64, a ludicrously cartoony fantasy kingdom that would feel right at home in Super Mario 64 (and which intentionally feels out of place compared to the realistic settings from the rest of the game). Even the music is wacky and upbeat.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the final major DLC is Blood and Wine set in a duchy called Toussaint, reminiscent of the vineyards of southern France. Compared to the grim-dark setting of the rest of the game, Toussaint comes across as this.

Web Comics

• Blindsprings has Tamaura live in one of those at first; a nice green forest with beautiful flowers, where Tamaura is friends with all animals.
• Hello Cthulhu is about Lovecraftian horrors trapped in Sanrio's Sugar Bowl. Dagon, for example, runs a fish-and-chips shop.
• The cute art-style and bright color palette of Heroes of Thantopolis certainly lends itself to this trope, but the city is actually a pretty cheerful (and clean) place considering that everyone is dead.
• The below quote from The Order of the Stick is some kind of inversion of this trope: the place Belkar is calling "Happy Fun Sunshine Land" is actually a city where it is not odd to walk down the street carrying a corpse with your dagger still in it. He calls it that because he's feverish and delusional from the Mark of Justice curse, and has no idea what's actually going on. The magical fairy part is the only accurate part.
  Belkar: Be very quiet, Mr. Scruffy! If we make any noise, the magical Cart Fairy might not take us on the enchanted trip to Happy Fun Sunshine Land!
• Sluggy Freelance
  • During the "Dimension of Pain" Saturday story arc, the Dimension of Pain was taken over by a sneaky angel who managed to briefly turn the Dimension of Pain into the Dimension of Fun. The demonic hordes became Care Bear parodies of themselves and the Demon King was turning into Mister Rogers. Fortunately, Lord Horribus returned from his exile and managed to make the angel Fall and become demonic, allowing the Dimension of Pain to be restored to its original evil. Yay!
  • The "Dimension of Lame" is naturally like this, even if it looks more like our world.
  Torg: Why the ^BLEEPYes, the dimension has naturally occurring censor bleeps. does it smell like flowers down here?
  Alternate Zoë: It's a sewer, silly!

Web Original

• UniCreatures is set in one, right down to their being no carnivores (that big scary lion on fire? He eats fruit.) to avoid the violence and pain of creatures hunting each other.
• "He's Barack Obama!" portrays the newly-elected President as a superhero who transforms Iraq from a gun-bristling wasteland to one of these, including rainbows, bunnies, ice cream, flowers, and a ruined mosque restored and turned into a Whole Foods.

Western Animation

• Adventures of the Gummi Bears: True, they live in a pretty happy Medieval world standard to the trope, but they are the last remnants of their once great race/civilization on Earth (the European part of it anyway) with a certain amount of sadness and Zeerust thrown in as well.
• Danny Phantom has "Gothapalooza" turned into this briefly by one of the Reality Gems. The protagonists were understandably shocked.
• The Dreamstone has the Land Of Dreams, in contrast to the desolate Land Of Nightmares, the former is colorful utopian Medieval World. The majority of it's civilians are perpetually cheerful and sparse on jerkish or cynical traits, usually their only wrathful actions are towards Zordrak and the Urpneys which even then are rather leniant cartoony punishments.
• Futurama: Saturday Morning Fun Pit's Purpleberry Pond, the Strawberry Shortcake meets Smurfs spoof.
• In an episode of Project Gee Ke R: Geeker, Noah, and Lady MacBeth are chased into a run-down amusement park. They encounter interactive holograms that adapt to the visitor's "play setting" — with adorably goofy, brightly-colored cartoon bunnies being the default mode. (That is, until Lady MacBeth's short temper triggers their "battle mode".)
• The Happy Tree Friends appear to inhabit one of these until you keep watching.
• Lalaloopsy (the TV series) is one of these. The characters are all very friendly and helpful with each other (despite a few times where they don't always help right away), the worst problem seems to be running out of ingredients for each characters' favorite food(s) or a Little (Sister) getting lost. Everyone leads happy lives in a low-tech setting (they use can-and-string as phones!) with no need for paying back another character's helpful deed or even asking for favors in return for doing the deed. There's no villain and no monsters (except the various Pet animals each character has, but they are always as nice as their owner).
• My Little Pony has a reputation for this given entries like the cartoons for the G3/G3.5 toyline, but the pilot specials, The Movie, and the original My Little Pony and Friends show had the ponies frequently dealing with supernatural threats to their peaceful lives, ranging from rampaging monsters to wicked witches to Evil Overlords.
  • In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic the world is largely forced to run along sugar bowl lines if it is to remain habitable and safe. If ponies hate each other, they'll attract windigos which will cause an unending blizzard. Fighting brings about the Mad God Discord or at least hinders the ability to fight him off. Even jealousy or resentment can power dark magics that will corrupt even the most powerful alicorns into monsters like Nightmare Moon. There are some interpersonal conflicts, but they're simply not allowed to grow any larger than that.
• Parodied by Meap's home planet on Phineas and Ferb. The Meaps' society is explicitly based on cuteness, and the harshest legal punishment they have is a fifteen minute time out. This does not stop them from having an effective military force.
• PB&J Otter, to those who don't have fond memories of watching the show. The show's cheeriness and overload of songs create cavities to the ninth degree.
• The Powerpuff Girls: Him tricks Bubbles with one of these in "All Chalked Up". Clever — who would suspect a place like this of secretly being the creation of an evil, manipulative demon?
• In the world of Rabbids Invasion, humanity has put an end to war and world hunger, crime exists but is rare and rarer still is anyone actually injured by it, and even the world's greatest supervillain isn't much more than an annoyance to most people. The only problem is that humanity has to share it with the Rabbids.
• The Simpsons
  • In "Flaming Moe's", Homer, bitter over Moe stealing his mixed drink recipe and getting rich off of it, sarcastically invokes this trope.
  Homer: Oh, look at me! I'm making people happy! I'm the Magical Man from Happy-Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!
  • The Happy Little Elves, a Show Within a Show seen in some early episodes, seemed to be an example of this trope.
• The Smurfs. While Gargamel's motive to eat the Smurfs is horrifyingly gruesome if one thinks about it, and many other occurrences in the show are much more terrifying than you'd expect from a show fitting this trope, there is never any permanent harm to the Smurf Village and everyone ends up fine at the end of each episode.
• Strawberry Shortcake and its Strawberryland, a happy, sunny, sweet place inhabited by all sorts of cute creatures.
• Imaginationland from South Park is most definitely this, until the terrorists broke down the wall that was keeping evil imaginary characters in. It's up to Butters to save the realm from being destroyed.
• Super Wish: The show is set in the Happy Land of Birthdays, which appears to be the world birthday magic comes from. It's a whole world made up of party favours and birthday treats, populated by living birthday treats and living party objects. The main evil comes from Balloonicus, who wants to ruin birthdays for everyone. Jesse and his friends Sadie and Xander, and his cousin Winnie, end up there after Jesse tries to use his super wish to get rid of his less-than-expected birthday party. Now they have to travel through the land to find the super wish and use it to get back home.
• In the Teen Titans episode "Nevermore", Beastboy and Cyborg stumble upon a bright and cheery area complete with floating strawberries. Beast Boy quips, "This must be where air fresheners come from." It's a Justified Trope because it's the realm of Happy!Raven.
• ThunderCats
  • The Ro-Bear Berbils seems to be space-colonists from the Sugar Bowl and true to their nature, they've set up a little piece of Sugar Bowl right in the middle of the mutant-infested swampland of Third Earth. A place filled with houses shaped like giant, pink mushrooms, where candy-canes grow in orchards. They also talk like Smurfs, and all have names starting with a B. Isn't that right, Ro-Bear Bill? Berbil-fruit, anyone?
  • In the ThunderCats UK comic we saw that Sugar Bowl was a deliberate choice. They used to be cyborg-Bears rather than cyborg-Teddy-Bears, but they are trying to be Space Amish while still having the Superweapon Surprise technology in their underground facilities. They intented to rebuild themselves in their spacefaring warlike image. At one point they showed a ThunderCat a hologram of what they used to look like, and he instantly agreed to help them restore their façade of cute harmlessness.
• Unikitty! has the Unikingdom, which is as sweet and saccharine as it gets. Averted with the other side of the world, Frowntown, which is dark and dreary.
• Word Party is set in a location where conflicts are generally petty if nonexistent.
• League of Super Evil: Doomageddon, the team's pet/mascot; a pan-dimensional Doomhound (Originally Hell Hound before the censors noticed) once lost a tooth, causing the hole left behind to suck everything into another dimension. Doktor Frogg saw the other dimension briefly, but the viewers couldn't, except that it was mentioned as a "Land of endless nightmares" Later on when everyone does end up within, the "Land of endless nightmares" is a world of rainbows, singing mountains, candy, and Unicorns. To an evil mad scientist like Doktor Frogg, this is Hell.
• Adventure Time: Parodied by the Candy Kingdom, which as the name implies is populated by people made of actual candy. Despite the saccharine imagery, the Candy Kingdom is threatened by at least two zombie outbreaks, a magical plague accidentally caused by the Ice King, being eaten by mutant "hyoo-mans", the Lich, and more weirdness found in the Land of Ooo. Also, later episodes reveal that Princess Bubblegum is a (mostly-benevolent) tyrant who spies on her citizens.
• In the Gravity Falls episode "Weirdmageddon 2: Escape from Reality", Bill Cipher traps Mabel in a Lotus-Eater Machine that creates a "perfect world" for Mabel. This manifests in the bizarre, cutesy, and wildly-colorful "Mabeland", which is populated by talking animals, living plushies, and Anthropomorphic Food, and features rainbows that include "colors only bees and art students can see".
• Freaktown: The kingdom of Sweetlandia, which happens to also be the area surrounding the titular town. A bit of a subversion though as to the monsters of Freaktown, it's the worst place imaginable.
• Care Bears live in a cloudy heaven with rainbows as streets and cars made of clouds.
• Rainbow Brite as the name implies it's about a world of bright colors and rainbows. The villains are quite the opposite; black and white and hate colors. In an odd inversion, the Origins Episode shows it wasn’t always this way- the world was a total Crapsack World before Rainbow came along to fix everything.
• Star Street: The Adventures of the Star Kids is a Dutch cartoon about the anthropomorphization of the Western Zodiac signs. They live in a star-shaped planet with star-shaped houses, cloudy streets and bright colors.
• Dragon Land on Dragon Tales seems to be a Sugar Bowl because the worst problem that's appeared in an episode is Max's tendency to hit someone when frustrated. Quetzal reminds him that the "first rule" in Dragon Land is "Use your words, not your fists." Besides that the dragons that are native to the land are shown to always live in peace and harmony with any problems being of a social nature, and resolved very quickly.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sleepy Time", Pearl's dream takes place in a candy-colored Fluffy Cloud Heaven.
• Happy Ness: The Secret of the Loch features a land of friendly Loch Ness Monsters, the leader of them representing happiness. It's like a mix of My Little Pony and Care Bears.
• The Treeborhood in Work It Out Wombats! is a bright and happy place, filled with friendly technicolor animals who have nonstop fun. They're not perfect and they do get into arguments occasionally, but they're always resolved by the end of the episode. The worst things that can happen are losing a favorite toy or ice cream melting.

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