There's only one fish in the sea.
The majority of Earth's species live in the ocean. In fiction, however, it seems that most organisms live on land. If a work has Loads and Loads of Races, there'll be a variety of races for each terrestrial biome, but chances are that only one will live underwater.
Why is this? Because Most Writers Are Human. While land animals are only a fraction of life on Earth, they're also the most familiar to us, and thus easier to relate to and write about, and it's easy for us to understand the difference between (say) a desert and a forest. Meanwhile, to the average person, the sea is just a place where fish live.
Such races may be amphibious to allow them to interact with the other characters. If they aren't, they might still be able to interact with land-dwellers via a Mobile Fishbowl. If they have Elemental Powers, their element is usually water. See also Captain Fishman.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Land of the Lustrous has the Admirabilis, a race of slugs and snails that can also transform into merfolk underwater. They are one of three major humanoid races that exist on and around Earth, with the other two being Silicon-Based Life and Lunarians. Unlike the other two, the Admirabilis have much shorter lifespans and are subjected to all the banalties of mortal life, such as hunger, generational turnover, and eventually their population nearly going extinct had it not been for protagonist Phosphophyllite.
- One Piece has the Fishmen and Merfolk races, who primarily live on Fishman Island, an underwater island 10,000 meters below sea level in the Grand Line. Fishmen are also victims of much racism and discrimination due to being different from the humans of the setting, so much so that many fishmen and especially mermaids end up being captured/kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Comic Books
- The DCU: Atlanteans are an advanced underwater humanoid race living in the sunken city of Atlantis with the ability to swim fast and breathe underwater. Their appearance varies from Apparently Human Merfolk to humanoids with fish- or crustacean-like features. They coexist with humans, metahumans, gods and Human Aliens. They can cross-breed with humans; the most famous half-human half-Atlantean is Arthur Curry, better known as Aquaman.
Films — Animation
- The Techno Trolls, originally introduced in Trolls World Tour, are the only major underwater species in the Trolls franchise thus far.
Films — Live Action
- Averted in the Star Wars universe, which has multiple aquatic or amphibious humanoid races, including the Mon Calamari, the Quarrennote , and the Gungans.
Literature
- Animorphs: Among the many alien species in the series, only the Leerans and the Nartec are aquatic, and the Nartec are a Human Subspecies that only appear in one book.
- The Edge Chronicles: There's a sizable number of races of goblins, trolls, elves, trogs, and waifs, plus the token human race known as the fourthlings and the humanoid bird-like shrykes. Out of all these races, the only aquatic race are the amphibious webfoot goblins — notably, the Edge itself also features a very limited amount of either rivers or standing water.
- Harry Potter: The only sapient aquatic creatures are the mermaids, and they refused being classified as Beings, since it would have involved being also classified alongside creatures such as hags and vampires.
- In Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, the Aquamorphs are humans modified with gills and looking vaguely froglike, but are unable to reproduce, and go extinct after they have served their purpose. Genetic engineers later create the Aquatics, which are able to reproduce, and evolve on their own after the collapse of civilization. The oceans overall get much less focus than the land in this book.
- Wings of Fire: The SeaWings are the only fully aquatic dragons; they have gills as well as lungs, are one of the few tribes to not have a Breath Weapon, and their kingdom covers a chain of islands and the sea around it. The MudWings are also amphibious and live in a swamp, but they can't stay underwater indefinitely.
Live-Action TV
- Power Rangers: The Aquitians are the only alien race in the entirety of the franchise that live in a planet completely submerged in water. They also need to feed on pure water to survive, which frequently became an issue for them when they were stranded on Earth during Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: The Xindi are a collective of five (formerly six) intelligent species, all native to the same planet. All but one of them are land-dwelling, the sole exception being the Xindi-Aquatics, who live exclusively in water and have to attend meetings of the Xindi council in a tank.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: Downplayed in 5e, which has a small number of playable aquatic races in addition to the large number of land-dwelling ones:
- Tritons are a race of humanoids who were once natives of the Elemental Plane of Water, but some have migrated to the Prime Material Plane where they dwell on the ocean floor. They often come across as arrogant but well-meaning when interacting with surface-dwellers, as they see themselves as protectors of the land as well as the ocean, often fighting against monsters that surface dwellers have no knowledge of. According to the Mystic Odysseys of Theros rulebook, those who live in that setting exclusively worship the sea goddess Thassa, even though all of the terrestrial races worship multiple gods each.
- Sea elves, an aquatic subrace of regular elves.
- Water Genasi have waterbreathing and a swimming speed as one of the perks of being the Elemental Embodiment of water.
- Simic hybrids from the Ravnica setting, as described under Magic: The Gathering below.
- The Locathah are a Joke Race of fish-people who inhabit the seacoasts and can breath air for a limited time (four hours) before needing to be submerged in water at least once every four hours to avoid suffocating.
- Savage Worlds has many playable races and an explanation of how to best generate your own races for play, but only comes with one aquatic race: Atlantean. In sci-fi games, Atlanteans are generally seen as coming from water-dominated planets.
- In general Magic: The Gathering moved away from this due to a design belief that water is boring. But it still happens occasionally:
- The Simic hybrids of Ravnica are Artificial Hybrids who undergo Bio-Augmentation at the hands of the Simic Combine, which often involves having the body-parts of sea creatures spliced into them.
- Merfolk (though in more recent sets they tend to be more terrestrial, culminating in Ixalan's Green-aligned ones that preffer to live on land).
- Ulgrotha has sea trolls.
Video Games
- Dragalia Lost features the Abyssians, a race of Zora-like underwater-dwelling people. The event “Toll of the Deep” is about Mym and Alex ending up in an Abyssian city, where they meet Tianna, the Abyssian princess. The event ends with New Alberia forming an alliance with the Abyssians. Sadly, since the game was Cut Short, there are still many unanswered questions regarding them, and none of them, not even Tianna, ever became playable adventurers.
- The Elder Scrolls: The Argonians are marsh-dwelling Lizard Folk and the only playable race in the games to naturally have the Waterbreathing trait, granting them Super Not-Drowning Skills.
- Genshin Impact: The Oceanids are a race of pure Hydro lifeforms that originate from Fontaine; the domain of the Hydro Archon. According to lore, they operate as spies and use vast water networks across all seven nations in order to relay information back the Hydro Archon, and the World Boss, Rhodeia of Loch (which is required for Hydro user ascension materials), used to be one of their spies before she fled to Liyue in exile. You could also get a travelling Oceanid companion named Endora if you participated in the temporary "Wishful Drops" event back in Version 1.4.
- Legacy of Kain: Most vampires are unable to touch water, as it burns their flesh like acid. The Rahabim clan are a notable exception who have specifically evolved to dwell in aquatic environments, at the expense of being even more vulnerable to sunlight than their kin.
- The Legend of Zelda: The only recurring aquatic race are the Zoras. They come in two varieties — a more monstrous, green kind called River Zoras, and a more humanoid, usually blue kind called Sea Zoras — but the only game where both appear is The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, where the Sea Zoras mention how Hylians frequently come by to complain about having been attacked by a River Zora. Similarly, the only aquatic race in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword are the jellyfish-like Parella, which were designed to look like primitive Zoras. Mermaids also exist, but have never played a role outside of a single one in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
- Mass Effect: The hanar are a prominent species of sapient jellyfish who have learned to move onto land (or rather, into the atmosphere) and into space by encasing their invertebrate bodies in protective mass effect fields. The only other named sapient aquatic species does not appear until Mass Effect 3 and then only in DLC (the leviathans from the eponymous expansion).
- Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: The Nereids are this, which is considerably egregious seeing there are Loads and Loads of Races above land (and even some in the skies) but only one that live under the water. They also happen to be a One-Gender Race who need to mate with men of other races (primarily humans, but also potentially Sepp), and while most of them are Apparently Human Merfolk, their queen is your classic fish-tailed Seashell Bra mermaid. This discrepancy is never explained.
- Subverse: The Mawsus are the only sentient aquatic species of the Prodigium Galaxy mentioned in the game. The Codex justifies it by claiming that aquatic species' adaptation to a narrow range of environments generally makes them very poor at spaceflight, so they interact very little with the rest of the galaxy. In fact, the only Mawsus we actually meet in-game is the Huntress, an infamous eccentric even among her own species.
- Tales of Maj'Eyal: The only known aquatic race are the Nalore, an offshoot of the elves who lived on the coasts, and who were apparently wiped out by the Spellblaze.
- X: The major races of the setting are humans, the Rubber-Forehead Alien Split, the avian Paranids, the reptilian Teladi, and the Boron, an aquatic species who resemble squids and rely on Mobile Fishbowl suits to interact with the other races.
Web Original
- Hamster's Paradise: In the original draft of the story, the third sapient species to evolve on the planet was a marine dolphin-like creature known as the roddolphs that developed intelligence thanks to their sophisticated language skills and ability to teach information like seasonal change over the generations. However, they were limited by their anatomy which lacked grasping appendages and their aquatic home which prevented the use of fire. They spent about two million years as nomadic hunter-gatherers before going extinct in an asteroid strike.
- Serina: The world develops multiple sapient canary lineages over the years, with the only fully sapient aquatic lineage being a type of dolfinch (aquatic pliosaur-like birds) called the daydreamers, which in turn split into two lineages: the piscivorous fishers and the macropedatory pastoralists. However, another lineage of dolfinch, the herbivorous porplets, evolve into semi-sapience, with one lineage called the luddies befriending the fishers, and another lineage called the nops being domesticated and farmed by the pastoralists for meat, having lost all sapience. It eventually ends up getting subverted when the semi-sapient luddies ultimately end up evolving into the fully sapient greenskeeper by the late Ocean Age.
Webcomics
- Homestuck: Trolls have twelve variants that can be told apart by blood color, with at least one mutant variant. Only two of these thirteen known types of trolls are aquatic, or sea dwellers, the violet and fuchsia-blooded trolls. Even amongst them, the violet-blooded trolls are generally Out of Focus even in side material and the fuchsia-blooded trolls are so rare that there's usually only two alive at a given moment in time. Most of the focus is on the land dweller trolls as a result.
Western Animation
- The Dragon Prince has a subspecies of elf and dragon for each of the Primal Sources, one of which is Ocean. The Ocean elves are called Tidebound Elves.
- Futurama: The only major underwater society note is the city of Atlanta, a community of merpeople living in sunken Georgia. They only appeared in one episode, "The Deep South".
- My Little Pony: The only recurring aquatic species are the seaponies. In Friendship is Magic, they're not even a species in their own right — just a form that hippogriffs (and occasionally ponies) can take. A trio of Sirens also appear who appear as a hippocampus-type sea horse creature, and while they can fly and "swim" through the air no problem they apparently come from the sea as their appearances in their backstory depict them attacking coastal villages.
- Ninjago: The only multi-member sapient sea species are the Merlopians from Seabound, though there are two distinct types, one resembling black Snake People and the other resembling humanoid squids.
- Inverted in SpongeBob SquarePants where Sandy is the only land creature within a group of sea creatures.
