Pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses) have a reputation for being very inactive. Sure, you might see them performing at SeaWorld or in circuses, but when left to their own devices, it seems like most pinnipeds prefer to just lay around all the time. The image of hundreds of pinnipeds of the same species resting on a beach or iceberg is a common one in nature documentaries.
To be fair to seals, the main reason they don't move around much on land is because they simply can't. Their anatomy gives them very limited mobility on land, so they can't do much other than bounce while pulling themselves forward with their flippers, or in some cases, even roll down hills
. Needless to say, they are much better adapted to moving around underwater.
Another reason for this stereotype may be their blubber. All pinnipeds have a thick layer of blubber under their skin that keeps them warm in the cold climates in which they live. As a result, they are very chunky. This gives them the appearance of being Fat Slobs.
This often leads to seal, walrus, or sea lion characters in fiction being portrayed as couch potatoes (beach potatoes? Iceberg potatoes?) who are slow and slothful. They may be sleeping most of the time, and even when they're not, they'll rarely move unless they have to. Their attitudes are often apathetic and neutral.
If they aren't always lazy creatures, this can overlap with Mighty Glacier when their sheer body mass provides more weight in dealing offenses.
Subtrope of Animal Stereotype and Lazy Bum. This can overlap with Sweet Seal or Warm-Hearted Walrus if the character is passive and gentle about their laziness, or Monstrous Seal or Wily Walrus if they're more malicious about it. For other lazy creatures, see Cats Are Lazy, Lazy Dragon, and Laid-Back Koala. For other slow creatures, see Sturdy and Steady Turtles and Sluggish Sloths.
Examples:
- A GEICO commercial depicts an Ice Hockey game where one team has a walrus as its goalie. The point is that saving with GEICO is "walrus in a goal" easy, since there's no way for a puck to get by the walrus. (Well, the commercial ends with the walrus, named Duncan, falling asleep and the coach telling him "No sleepies.")
- Alice in Wonderland: The Walrus in the "Walrus and the Carpenter" song panics when the Carpenter suggests sweeping the beach clean, because he doesn't want to do the work. He also manipulates the Carpenter into building a restaurant and preparing a sauce, under the impression that he and the Walrus are going to eat oysters together. However, while the Carpenter is busy, the Walrus eats all the oysters himself.
- Finding Dory: Fluke and Rudder are two sea lions who spend all their time sitting on a rock. Fluke and Rudder are acknowledged to be fish-eating predators, but they are too lazy to attack Marlin and Nemo. Fluke and Rudder only move when they want to get fellow sea-lion Gerald off their rock.
- Parry Gripp's song "Lazy Harp Seal Has No Job" is about an adorable baby harp seal who just sits around being cute, getting all the attention, frustrating the singer who is ignored by women despite his expensive camera and yellow jacket.
- A Hat in Time: The main workers on the SS Literally Can't Sink are talking seals, though they're quite lazy and the captain (a larger walrus) is the only ever seen actually working. The one working in the laundry room even admits to spending most of his time sleeping on the warm towels when talked to.
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: A lazy walrus blocks the way to Yarna Desert. You will have to get Marin to sing a ballad in front of the walrus to get it to dance and fall back into the water.
- In The Manhole, one character encountered in the canals of the castle is a walrus sea captain who is almost always sleeping on the job, despite claiming that "a sailor's work is never done." If you wish, he'll show you to an elevator that can take you from the canals to his sunken ship on the bottom of the ocean... and as soon as the two of you arrive, he immediately seeks out the nearest available corner and goes to sleep.
- Pokémon:
- Pokémon Red and Blue has Seel and Dewgong, which have Speed tied for last in their stat pool. Their entries mention their fondness for sleeping on ice (contrasted with their love of swimming in freezing-cold water).
- Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire has Spheal, Sealeo, and Walrein, which are statistically veeery slow (Spheal has a Speed stat of only 25!). All three are also much more rotund than Seel or Dewgong.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon has Popplio, Brionne, and Primarina. Even with their more slender appearance, their Speed stats are still the lowest in their stat pool.
- Rocket: Robot on Wheels: Whoopie the walrus is the game's Dude in Distress, and he acts very neutral. He doesn't do anything helpful besides flop on top of the villain, Jojo, trapping him, which he didn't even mean to do.
- Pretty Fishy makes short animations about seals and other animals. Most of the seals in their videos idly lay around while things happen around them.
- Shallowskin: One of the main characters, Merril, is seen spending most of the time masquerading as a normal seal, lazing around while conversing with Browne, until she revealed herself to be a selkie.
- Twistwood Tales has the King of Seals, a minor recurring character. He's an enormously fat seal with a crown who never moves from his rock. However, he is very jovial and kind to anyone who visits his rock.
- In the Oxventure D&D game, Egbert's Animal Companion is a seal called Seal Gaiman. He is constantly disappearing to eat massive amounts of foods, especially Scotch Eggs. Notably, despite being a human subject to Forced Transformation, he's much happier as a seal, noting that he no longer needs to worry about looking a bit round in the belly.
- Robbaz's pet Horker (a walrus-like creature), Walrus, in his Skyrim videos is depicted as a Lovable Sex Maniac who is constantly depressed and rarely does anything useful. In Return of the Virtual Walrus, Robbaz tries to get Walrus to climb into the back of a carriage before realizing that Walrus is too fat, so he has to shove Walrus into the back.
- Disenchantment: In a flashback a younger King Zog finds a seal caught in a net on the beach and cuts him free. But the seal stays on the beach so Zog carries him into the water, where a mermaid explains that her seal friend is just lazy.
- Housebroken: In "Who's Afraid of Boomsday?", Chief meets a pod of lazy sea lions and becomes God for a Day after he learns that they like to doze around just like him. However, they think he can swim underwater too even though he can't, which leads him to almost drowning while trying.
