History Main / WeirdMoon

* In ''Literature/TheRimeOfTheAncientMariner'', Samuel Taylor Coleridge refers to "the hornèd moon with one bright star within the nether tip." It's considered not a mistake by the author but a way to show a physical manifestation of the unnaturalness that results from the slaying of an innocent bird. Isaac Asimov comments on such as well in one of his essays (found in ''Gold'', one of his collections).
* ''Literature/UnderThePendulumSun'': In addition to the eponymous [[WeirdSun "pendulum sun"]], the Faelands also have a "fish moon" -- an AlluringAnglerfish swimming in the sky.
* In Literature/{{Nos4a2}}, in Christmas Land, the inscape of Charlie Manx, the moon actually looks like his face. It's quite disturbing.

* ''ComicBook/TheLegendOfZeldaALinkToThePast'': A full moon hovers over Hyrule, counting down the nights until Agahnim's ritual. In the Dark World, the moon sports a skull face.

* ''LightNovel/{{Durarara}}'': In the episodes ''Storm and Stress'' and ''Yin and Yang'', the moon appears eerily red for no explained reason. In the finale, the sky also turns completely black, resulting in no moon.

** In ''WesternAnimation/{{Cars}}'', the maria on the Moon are shaped like a car's headlights and grille, and its craters are shaped like tires.

* The Creator/DreamWorks logo features a boy fishing while sitting in a crescent moon.

* In the ''Animation/PleasantGoatAndBigBigWolf'' movie ''Moon Castle: The Space Adventure'', the moon is depicted as a world filled with candy and sweets.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': Remnant has a moon that is [[DetonationMoon partially shattered]]. While it does appear to rotate relative to Remnant, it doesn't show any sign of the lunar phases associated with Earth's real life moon. Remnant's moon is always depicted in full glow, but the degree of shattering that's visible depends on the moon's rotation. There is a phase which displays the unbroken face; during that stage, there's no sign the moon is damaged at all, and no sign of any of the blasted chunks. As it rotates, more and more of the shattering appears. When the shattered face is fully in view, the blasted fragments seem to extend out towards Remnant slightly; the full view of the shattered side of the moon has only been seen during a period the characters described as 'the night of the full moon'. The reason for the shattered moon is given two sepparate explanations InUniverse:

* The Animusic video [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCiZSN62M5Q Resonant Chamber]] features four moons in the sky, each a different phase. Given that the video also features a self-playing conglomeration of different string instruments that may make arachnophobes uncomfortable, this can be safely filed under RuleOfCool.

* The crescent moon in Creator/VincentVanGogh's ''Art/TheStarryNight'' is highly stylized, larger, and brighter than it ever has been in real life, and the crescent extends too far around the moon's surface. This adds to the beauty and wonder of the scene.

*** Notably, [[CatFolk the Khajiit]], for whom the moons hold great religious significance, have a similar, yet somewhat different view; namely that Masser and Secunda are not Lorkhan, but was around long before he ever entered the picture in the first place, and that Masser and Secunda have just been expressed as moons when Mundus was formed by him.

* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII'', monsters originate from the moon via a process known as the "Lunar Cry." In addition, the moon is enormous, occupying a significant portion of the sky.

* The titular entity of the ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'' series is a massive, heart-shaped moon that serves as the heart of all worlds, usually seen in the skies of wherever a game's finale takes place.
** An artificial Kingdom Hearts, created by Organization XIII using millions of stolen hearts, hangs in the starless sky of The World That Never Was in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII''. The game's prequel, ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts358DaysOver2'', actually shows the creation of this Kingdom Hearts, showing it as a tiny speck in the sky that slowly grows larger and larger as Roxas collects more hearts.

[[folder:Other]]
* There's a BBC ident (the short clip or animation that's playing while a voice announces what's coming up now or later) with people driving their boats over a lake, each one carrying a piece of the moon. Then they put it together and we see a big (ridiculously big) moon hovering over the lake as it turn into the BBC logo.
* The Animusic video [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCiZSN62M5Q Resonant Chamber]] features four moons in the sky, each a different phase. Given that the video also features a self-playing conglomeration of different string instruments that may make arachnophobes uncomfortable, this can be safely filed under RuleOfCool.
* On a similar note, because UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} has two asteroid satellites, Phobos and Deimos, in fiction such as ''Film/TotalRecall1990'', ''Film/{{Watchmen}}'', ''Film/JohnCarter'' and the TV series ''Away'' they're usually depicted as twin moons large enough to be seen by the naked eye in the sky like the Earth's moon.

* It's no longer ''quite'' so impossible for a point of light to appear within the crescent moon's horns, as orbiting satellites ''can'' pass in front of the moon at any stage of its cycle, and reflect sunlight independently of how much of the moon's surface is illuminated.
* A particularly common goof, in scenes with a full Moon that have been retouched for one reason or another by adding it, is to use [[http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/images/as11_44_6667.jpg this image]] instead of something like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FullMoon2010.jpg this other.]] The latter is a typical full Moon seen from Earth... but the former was taken by the astronauts of Apollo XI -- and the Moon is ''never'' seen that way from the planet's surface. The Apollo picture is centered on the Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises), a lunar basin that is normally only visible near the Moon's eastern edge. The area to its right, captured in this photo from space, is part of the Moon's far side impossible to view from Earth.

* The crescent moon in Vincent van Gogh's ''Art/TheStarryNight'' is highly stylized, larger and brighter than it ever has been in real life, and the crescent extending too far around the moon's surface. This adds to the beauty and wonder of the scene.
* Early on during its history, the Moon is thought to have been covered in a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_magma_ocean magma ocean]], and some hundreds of millions of years later lava emerged from its interior covering part of its surface. Were humans around by then, they'd have seen when it was in crescent phase its unilluminated side and parts of it respectively glowing red (and the same just after a large impactor had hit somewhere on its surface forming a very large crater) because of all that molten rock.

* Back in the 90's, in one of the comic relief soap operas played by Globo, there was a mystic event day in which there would be two giant moons in the sky.

* ''Franchise/TouhouProject'' offers a subversion: a Lunar civilization of long-lived Earth humans living completely unknown to humans on the Earth (supposedly; the backstory is fuzzy around the time of the Apollo moon landings). To conceal themselves, the Lunarians erected a great (dimensional) Border around the moon, much like the Border surrounding Gensokyo. The internal region hidden by this Border provides oxygen, plant life, and oceans for what is dubbed the Lunar Capital; to us: the moon we see at night.

* Mira in ''VideoGame/XenobladeChroniclesX'' has 5 moons, all but one of which are absolutely massive with the largest dominating the eastern night sky. They're each different colours, don't have phases, don't move in the sky and '''stars can be seen through them'''.

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* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation:'' [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1812 SCP-1812]] is what seems to be a small, yet tremendously dense asteroid orbiting Earth at just about 180 kilometers away, essentially acting as a second moon. The problem being, you won't perceive it, and it ''cannot'' affect you in any way or form, unless someone points it out to you, in which case you will be aware of how much the tides have risen, flooding so many coasts, and its light will let you see better at night. Or, going by the fact different individuals can perceive it at different places at once, it's some anomalous ''thing'' that doesn't actually exist, and when someone points it out to you it causes such severe delusions people drown on dry land, under tides that aren't real. The Foundation is completely uncertain if it exists or not, how the original finder managed to discover it when the only way to see it is for someone else to point it out, and why it is that the exact same measurements, with the exact same equipment, will give results backing the moon's existence when used by someone aware of it, and give entirely contradictory (AKA normal) results when used by anyone else. And one final phenomenon that backs neither possibility, and only serves to make the whole matter even stranger: The delusions are curable, in a GoneHorriblyRight way. Show an infected individual the extra illumination isn't real because the moon isn't real, and they will stop perceiving starlight wholesale, including sunlight. Convince an affected individual the supposed tides aren't real due to the same, and ''they'll start thinking water doesn't exist'', leading to death through dehydration. The Foundation's containment procedures amount to making sure no one finds out about this moon, and possibly attempt to nuke the dubiously-existent rock into oblivion if more than 10% of the world learns of it.

* Matt Parker from ''WebVideo/{{Numberphile}}'' points out in [[https://youtu.be/6JwEYamjXpA?t=619 a talk]] how there is a hole in the moon on a ''[[Series/TheMuppets Muppets]]'' book cover where the stars shine through.

* In ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing: Wild World'' for the DS, the moon looks normal enough, but unlike the real thing, it rises and sets at the exact same time each day (with moonrise being early in the evening and moonset being after midnight (this is related to the confusion of moonrise and sunset mentioned near the top of the page)). Solar and lunar eclipses are unheard of in the game (the former because the sun is never visible on the game). This does not apply to the original ''Animal Crossing'', because the sky wasn't visible in that game (it featured a top-down view like that of a [=2D=] {{R|olePlayingGame}}PG). This does, however, apply to ''Animal Crossing: City Folk'' for the Wii.

** The moon of the Space Zone in ''{{Videogame/Super Mario Land 2|SixGoldenCoins}}''. Not only is it very much huge in the sky, and a pretty exaggerated crescent moon, it's apparently floating just above the ocean on the world map, and changes facial expression when a star smashes into its face.

** Travel to and from the moon only works consistently on nights of the full moon, which allows for a perfect connection. In ''Imperishable Night'', the Lunar refugees in Eientei have interrupted the full moon with the image of a gibbous moon to make it impossible for emissaries from the moon to come to Earth after them.

--> I've got my eye on you, Moon.

-->Dammit Moon, I knew you were up to no good.

* The moon in ''Anime/LittleWitchAcademia'' is shaped normally, but has a large crater (or possibly ''mare'') shaped like a four-pointed-star. [[spoiler:This was caused by Shiny Chariot in her last performance, when she defeated a monster through NoKillLikeOverkill. Croix wiped the witnesses' memories, but Chariot retired in shame]].

* ''Manga/AssassinationClassroom'': In the very beginning, seventy percent of the moon is destroyed by Korosensei, a super-powered, tentacle monster who threatens to do the same in one year to the earth unless the class of kids he teaches can kill him. Later, it is [[spoiler:revealed that it was actually a rat that had been experimented on with antimatter that exploded that caused the damage]]. In the end, the moon begins collapsing in on itself thanks to its own gravity and due to the implosion was sent closer to the earth, resulting in a very normal-looking moon.

* During the Celestial Event in ''VideoGame/{{Terraria}}'', the moon will be bigger and change color depending on which tower you're near.

* ''WesternAnimation/ATaleDarkAndGrimm'' The moon and the [[WeirdSun]] are alive and can be reached by climbing a tall tree. The moon asks how the protagonists the protagonist if they know how they taste before the protagonists leave the company of the moon.