Shipwreck Start

Captain Krabs: Status report, Mr. SquarePants?
SpongeBob: The whole ship is underwater, Captain.
Captain Krabs: Arrgh... We're marooned, then! Our treasure hunt will have to continue on foot.

— SpongeBob SquarePants, "Arrgh!"

Shipwrecking the protagonist to start their adventure is an effective way to justify multiple conditions:

1. They have lost all their stuff, usually. Otherwise it's downplayed.
2. They're alone.
3. They're not at fault for any of that.
4. They have to show off their (survival) skills in order to get out of the situation.
5. The story can focus on the protagonist and introduce more characters when they get back to civilization.
6. Ship technology is a good way to show which of the Technology Levels are being used, possibly even changing the medium of travel from water to Space Is an Ocean, but Tropes Are Flexible. It could be an airplane, if, for some reason, a modern-ish setting and its possibly-Trope Breaking technology is wanted. Or even a car, so long as the story starts with them sufficiently isolated and out of resources.

Depending on where the shipwreck happens, it can also be used to generate a Closed Circle situation, locking the protagonist into an area, such as a Deserted Island, and if the latter, also possibly leading to a Robinsonade plot. The protagonist likely wakes up on a beach to give the author an even easier starting point for his story.

Unlike other ways of achieving the first two conditions, usually You All Meet in a Cell, the prisoner protagonist trope, there's no societal stigma associated with being a shipwreck survivor.

A Downer Beginning subtrope since it's a disaster that happens to the protagonist at the beginning of the story. If there's no one at fault for the shipwreck, then it's a Plot-Driven Breakdown, a malfunction with no apparent cause or foreshadowing. Derelict Graveyard is a place with many shipwrecks, not a plot event. There might be a segment before the story really starts dealing with a Sinking Ship Scenario and/or Abandon Ship events.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Hello! Sandybell: Pushing the shipwreck from the story start into Backstory: as Sandybell's father Leslie succumbs to his illness, he tells her she's adopted. He goes on to explain that when he was young, he and his best friend Kern Longwood found an abandoned baby in a shipwreck accident, that baby being Sandybell. There was no mother in sight, and her father's corpse was on the ship as well. Thus Leslie took home Sandybell and raised her as if she was his own.
• Nagasarete Airantou: The basic premise of this harem series is that the main character, Ikuto, gets shipwrecked and ends up stranded on an island with only women.
• Ranma ½ the Movie 2: Nihao, My Concubine starts with Kuno showing off his new yacht. Cut to the yacht already destroyed and the cast stranded on an island.

Film — Animated

• Barbie as the Island Princess: The movie starts with the 6-year-old Ro washed ashore on the island where Sagi, Azul, and Tika reside, having lost her memory from being shipwrecked during a storm the night before.
• Tarzan opens with Lord and Lady Greystoke abandoning a burning ship, and taking a lifeboat to the shore of Darkest Africa. They took their infant son with them, and only what provisions they could take in a hurry at the time. That lifeboat would end up as the roof of a treehouse where the couple would live as castaways as best they could.

Film — Live-Action

• The Flight of the Phoenix (2004) begins with a crew of oil rig workers flying in a C-111 twin-engine aircraft. They fly into a sandstorm that brings the craft down in the Gobi Desert. There's almost no resources, and no way to summon help, so the survivors' only hope is to rebuild their damaged aircraft into a single-engine Franken-vehicle.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: The film begins with 10-year-old Elizabeth Swann, sailing with her father, Norrington, and Gibbs, coming across a burning shipwreck caused by pirates, spotting one of its victims, young Will Turner, in the water.
• Discussed and inverted in Shakespeare in Love, which ends with Shakespeare's lover and muse Viola de Lesseps, about to travel on a boat to the New World with her husband, suggesting he start his next play — Twelfth Night — with a shipwreck. Once parted, he writes the beginning of Twelfth Night and imagines the shipwreck, naming his lead after Viola.
  Will: [voiceover] My story starts at sea. A perilous voyage to an unknown land. A shipwreck. The wild waters roar and heave. The brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned. All save one: a lady whose soul is greater than the ocean, and her spirit, stronger than the sea’s embrace. Not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story, for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name will be Viola.
• Dracula (1979) begins with the S.S Demeter washing ashore in England and the unconscious title character being discovered by Mina.

Literature

• The Cay: The story is kicked off when the ship that Philip and his mother are onboard is torpedoed, stranding him on an island in the Caribbean with Timothy and Stew Cat.
• Dinotopia: Arthur Denison and his son Will are introduced traveling on the schooner Venturer, which meets an unfortunate fate during a round-the-world voyage. The pair are rescued by dolphins who bring them to the shore of an island they discover is a Lost World, when they eventually find it to be inhabited by dinosaurs...and humans as well.
• Gulliver's Travels begins with Gulliver being shipwrecked, which is how he ends up in the land of Lilliput.
• James Clavell's Shogun starts with the wreck of a Dutch ship on the coast of largely unknown Japan. Its navigator, the Englishman Robert Blackthorne, is then faced with adapting to a completely foreign country very quickly or dying in the attempt.
• This is a staple of the Robinsonade genre; going all the way back to Robinson Crusoe, where Crusoe spends a large part of the book salvaging from the wreckage of the ship he was the only survivor from.
• The Swiss Family Robinson, as well as the 1960 film, begins with a family of six (originally) being stranded on an island probably in the East Indies after their ship founders in a storm. In the film, they tried to use the storm to evade pirates, but the original book just seems to be a case of bad luck. Thankfully for the latter, their ship survives basically intact with all their supplies, so it's a downplayed example.
• The Mysterious Island: The protagonists are a group of Union POWs of The American Civil War who flee from Confederate captivity on a stolen reconnaissance balloon, only to get swept up by a sudden storm and to crash near an uninhabited island in the Pacific. This being a Jules Verne novel, the five of them prove way too industrious for a regular Robinsonade and immediately get to reinventing most of modern civilization on the island.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: Downplayed in the Pilot, where billionaire playboy Oliver Queen is found by a fishing boat on the remote Mandarin Pacific island of Lian Yu, having been shipwrecked for five years. The sinking of the Queen's Gambit itself is shown in flashback later in the episode and is the Inciting Incident of the series.
• Yellowjackets: The 1990s plot starts with the survivors being marooned in the remote Canadian wilderness (though the crash itself happens in the second episode rather than the first) due to a plane crash. There's another plane there, but that also crashes after Laura Lee tries to fly it away.
• Carnival Row: "Some Dark God Wakes" gets Vignette to the Burgue by means of her escaping the Pact-occupied Tirnanoc among a shipload of refugees, only for the ship to founder in a storm with Vignette the Sole Survivor. This leads Ezra Spurnrose, an investor in the lost ship, to force her into Indentured Servitude as a maid to recoup a bit of his investment.
• Gilligan's Island: The show's Expository Theme Tune tells how the crew of the SS Minnow took some passengers out for "a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour," ran into a storm and got wrecked on an uninhabited island, setting up the premise of them having to find a way off the island, but ultimately never succeeding.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: In episode 2, Galadriel finds a bunch of shipwrecked people on a raft. On the raft, she meets the mysterious Halbrand and they both become the sole survivors after a Sea Monster attacks the raft they were on. Luckily for them, they are saved by the Numenorian ships.
• Lost: The first episode begins with survivors of the Oceanic Flight 815 wandering around the beach on the island where they are now stranded amidst the wreckage of their plane.
• The Tomorrow People (1973): Invoked in the 90s reboot, which begins with Adam washing up on the shore of a tropical island like he's the survivor of a shipwreck. As he explores the island he discovers an alien ship buried under the sand. It soon after becomes apparent there was no shipwreck, he's the first of the Tomorrow People and he got there by instinctively using his Teleportation ability.

Theatre

• The Tempest starts with Prospero's storm that wrecks the ship containing Alonso, Ferdinand, and everyone else on the island.
• Twelfth Night starts with Viola getting shipwrecked and believing her twin brother, Sebastian, to have died.

Video Games

• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura: The Player Character emerges as the sole survivor of a crashed passenger airship, the IFS Zephyr, after it gets shot out of the sky by ogres piloting some mysterious heavier-than-air flying machines. Shortly afterwards, they find an Almost Dead Guy who entrusts them with returning a ring to its rightful owner, a monk of the Panarii religion who proclaims them the reincarnation of a prophecied hero, and they begin to find evidence of a conspiracy of assassins out to murder them...
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag opens with the game's main claim to fame - a quick tutorial on the basics of naval combat, only for the ship you used to be destroyed, effectively forcing main protagonist Edward Kenway to swim to shore. From there, he tries to haggle another survivor - Duncan Walpole - for some change, only for Walpole to brandish a flintlock pistol and try to kill him (to no avail; lucky for Edward). Kenway then chases after Walpole and the game kicks off with a tutorial on the usual Assassin's Creed fare (e.g., freerunning, viewpoints, etc.)
• Baldur's Gate III opens with the player character breaking out of imprisonment on a mind flayer Eldritch Starship, not a sea ship. On your way out, you meet two of your potential party members, Lae'zel and Shadowheart, then you scuttle the "ship" because you don't want to reach your destination.
• Beacon (2018): Interstellar mercenary Freja Akiyama, or rather, her clones, have to deal with having crash landed onto a planet with near-constantly violent factions, and has to fight her way through them to her distress beacon so she can make it call for an extraction.
• Bioshock 1: Jack becomes controllable by the player when he makes it to the surface of the water, right after a plane crash, and his first action is to swim to the only place of shelter, a lighthouse on an island.
• Bravely Default II: Seth begins the game as a sailor who was washed over the side of his ship and drowned during a storm, but the Wind Crystal identified him as a Hero of Light and brought him Back from the Dead. He washes ashore on the coast of Excillant, a continent he's never visited before, and befriends a princess called Gloria who agrees to recruit him as a bodyguard.
• The Case Of The Golden Idol: The DLC story The Lemurian Vampire begins with the protagonists shipwrecked on Monkey Paw Island. Much of the story involves how they integrate into the small but self-sufficient village there, and how the arrival of the ship's survivors changes the lives of the villagers.
• The ClueFinders 5th Grade Adventures: The Secret of the Living Volcano starts off with the titular Kid Detectives getting shipwrecked on a tiny volcanic island in the South Pacific. The opening Cutscenes conclude with them waking up on the beach of the island.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: The prologue takes place aboard a prison ship, transporting several Sourcerors (including the Player Character) to the prison colony Fort Joy. The ship is attacked by a kraken and ripped apart, and chapter one begins with the player character washing up on a beach not far from the colony.
• Each session of Don't Starve: Shipwrecked starts with your chosen character being woken up on a beach by a talking parrot after their ship wrecks in it. You can salvage what remains of it for some useful materials.
• Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: The Lost Mangroves, the first world, are loosely based on the Bermuda Triangle and as a result feature a ridiculous number of shipwrecks (mostly of more modern, World War II-looking battleships rather than the piratey masted ships of previous games), crashed planes and abandoned submarines. The Kongs end up in this world as a result of the Snowmads blowing them off DK Island at the beginning of the game.
• Dragon Quest Builders 2 begins with the player being held prisoner on a ship and getting swept out to sea when it sinks in a storm. They end up washing ashore on the Isle of Awakening shortly afterwards.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online: New player characters start out shipwrecked on the island of Korthos off the coast of Xen'drik. The ship turns out to have been wrecked because of a dragon that is being controlled by cultists of the Devourer, and the quests on the island involve fighting the cult, protecting the villagers that live on the island, and eventually dealing with those controlling the dragon.
• The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, your character suffered a shipwreck and found him/herself washed up in a cave that connected to a dungeon.
• Elona: The player character was shipwrecked and then rescued by two characters that hold good loot but are more to provide tutorial information and the starter house.
• Factorio begins with the player having crash-landed on an alien world. From this humble beginning, the player must locate and exploit resources to develop food, water, machinery, robots, fuel, and other assets. The ultimate goal is to build an all-new spaceship in which to return home.
• The Forest has the plane-crash version, with the only survivors being the player character and his son, who is promptly kidnapped.
• Immortals Fenyx Rising begins with a trireme carrying a squad of greek soldiers crashing on the shore of the Golden Isle after a storm, with the protagonist, a young shield-bearer called Fenyx, as the only survivor.
• King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow begins with Prince Alexander sailing to the Land of the Green Isles after falling in love with the heir to the Isles' throne, Princess Cassima, following the events of the previous game. His ship wrecks on the Isle of the Crown.
• Legend of Grimrock 2 starts with the player's party as prisoners being transported by ship. The ship goes down in a storm, and the cage containing the party washes up on the Island of Nex.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: During a sailing expedition, Link's boat is struck by a lightning bolt during a storm at sea and his unconscious body washes up on the beach of a strange island called Koholint. He's rescued by an islander girl called Marin and wakes up in her house in Mabe village.
• Minecraft: Beta versions of the game had the player character spawn on sand after creating a new world, possibly implying that you washed up on shore after a shipwreck.
• Forgotten Realms Neverwinter games:
  • Neverwinter Nights 2: The Storm of Zehir expansion begins with the player's adventuring party on a merchant ship, which wrecks off the coast of Chult during a storm. Waking up in the wreck to find the site being surveyed by hostile goblins, they send the travelling scribe Volo to parley and buy time while they scavenge supplies and build improvised weapons to fend off the imminent goblin attack.
  • Neverwinter: After creating your character, the game's opening act is set on the shoreline of Protector's Enclave in the midst of an attack by antagonist Valindra Shadowmantle, your ship in particular being wrecked by her Dracolich.
• Path of Exile opens with a group of convicts being taken to the remote continent of Wraeclast aboard a Prison Ship. Naturally, there is a storm, and the ship hits some rocks and sinks, with your character (characters in co-op) being the only survivor(s). From there, your first objective is to fight your way up the undead-infested beach to the nearest settlement.
• In Pikmin (2001), Captain Olimar's rocket ship, the S.S. Dolphin, crashes on a distant planet, and he must recover the ship's 30 missing parts before his life support systems fail in 30 days.
• Risen starts off with the nameless protagonist getting stranded on the island of Faranga after surviving a shipwreck.
• The Settlers 2: The opening cutscene depicts a Roman ship captain named Octavius as his ship, the Tortius, is wrecked while crossing the Sea of Storms and he and his crew wash up on an uncharted island. The single-player campaign then picks up from there.
• Subnautica begins with the destruction and crash landing of the Starship Aurora, with the rest of the plot spent trying to escape the planet you've been stranded on.
• Tomb Raider (2013) begins with Lara Croft and the crew of the Endurance being involved in a shipwreck while searching for the island of Yamatai in the Dragon's Triangle. Lara and the survivors wash up on the shores of Yamatai and the plot of the game is them attempting to escape from the island.
• Unreal begins with the player's character regaining consciousness after the Prison Ship they were in, crashes on the planet Na Pali via magnetic fields messing with the ship's systems, killing (almost) every other passenger and conveniently enabling the player's escape.
• The first and eighth games in the Ys series start with Adol's ship being sunk (by a storm in I, by a sea monster in VIII), and the sixth game opens with him falling overboard (with the ship eventually making it to land without him).

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Campaign Two: The animated intro opens on Fjord's backstory, getting thrown overboard by an explosion which destroyed the ship he was working on. To avoid drowning, he subconsciously agrees to a warlock pact with the leviathan demigod Uk'otoa and wakes up onshore with his new falchion.

Western Animation

• Skull Island (2023): The premiere sees the main cast — the crew of the Once Upon a Maritime, and also the Private Military Contractors offscreen — get stranded on the titular Skull Island thanks to the Kraken attacking their boats.

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