Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Sandbox / Beneath The Earth Wick Check 2024

Go To

Overall, the trope seems to want to be about underground settings as a general category, and specifically about underground areas with their own self-contained societies and ecosystems. The laconic is simply "Colossal underground spaces with their own ecosystem", while the body of the description talks about the various permutations of the setting, conditions encountered there, and things that live in it.

The most obvious feature here is a soft split between "Urban" and "Caverns" versions. The former is concerned with some sort of society living in the sewers, buried buildings and assorted underground spaces of a surface-oriented city, or in the ruins of an old city buried under a new one; emphasis here is placed on living hidden from the surface and mooching resources and energy from up top. The latter is concerned with extensive cavern systems running beneath the world and containing their own underground ecosystems and civilizations; the description lists off natives (mole people, morlocks, dwarves, dark elves, etc.), fauna (dinosaurs, giant insects), and environment features (lava, giant mushrooms, tropical lost worlds). The earliest version I could find on the Wayback Machine is this one, from 2006; it's much more bare-bones but shows the same general trend and a lot of text is carried over to the present version.

I went in with the suspicion that these two concepts are too distinct to be called variants of a single trope, and did this wick check to test that out. I checked fifty examples from each section and a hundred inbounds. I opted to skip the Real Life sections and Sandbox/ pages.

    Sewers 

  • Society living in sewers/subway/basements of surface city: 24/50 = 48%
  • Underground City with no surface counterpart: 6/50 = 12%
  • Giant cavern network or hollow world: 2/50 = 4%
  • Other: 12/50 = 24%
  • ZCE: 6/50 = 12%

    Caverns 

  • Global/setting-wide "underdark" with underground cultures, monsters, strange sights and such: 14/50 = 28%
  • Smaller or of undescribed size but otherwise as above: 7/50 = 14%
(Combined = 42%)
  • People head underground to escape catastrophe (not mutually exclusive with others): 4/50 = 8%
  • Society living in sewers/subway/basements of surface city: 3/50 = 6%
  • Mole Men: 4/50 = 8%
  • ZCE: 2/50 = 4%
  • Other caves: 19/50 = 38%

(Note that both sections contain examples that should properly go in the other.)

In both cases, each section is a little under half made up of a single concept, with the rest made up of various other cases and tropes.

Wick check:

Note: many of these examples do not specify if the underground areas discussed are underground structures (e.g. sewers), tunnels in soil, tunnels in rock, or natural caverns.

    Large cavernous underworlds 
  • Creepy Cave: Narnia Book 4, The Silver Chair: In search of the missing prince, the protagonists end up falling into "Underland," a civilization of Mole Men housed Beneath the Earth in massive natural cave systems. The whole area is decidedly Played for Horror, with the initial journey to the central city making use of all the frightening elements of a real-life caving expedition such as crossing dark waters and crawling through small, tight tunnels. There is a sense of claustrophobia and encroaching darkness throughout the Underland chapters, and to make matters worse, the whole place starts flooding after the climactic confrontation.
  • Double-Meaning Title: Fraggle Rock: The Fraggles live in an elaborate world of rocky caverns. Almost every episode has at least one song. They cover a wide range of musical genres, including Rock!
  • Elemental Embodiment: Dwarf Fortress: A number of fire elementals such as fire men, magma men and fire imps live in the magma ocean at the bottom of the underworld. In addition, the shallower cavern layers Beneath the Earth are home to beings such as iron men, which become statues upon death, and amethyst men.
  • Mushroom House: Magi-Nation: The Underneath, a vast region of caverns Beneath the Earth, is almost entirely covered by vast forest-like growths of gigantic mushrooms with purple stalks and orange, spotted caps. For lack of other building materials, the locals often hollow these mushrooms out, fit them with doors and windows and use them as their primary source of housing.
  • Subterranean Sanity Failure: Out of the Abyss: The player characters are stuck in the subterranean Death World of the Underdark at the same time as a demonic incursion spreads madness and (even more) monsters into its caverns. The module makes extensive use of a Sanity Meter — PCs could suffer short- or long-term madness from eerie encounters, pervasive magic, the stress of deprivation, or more, and will meet many insane NPCs along the way.
  • Tunnel Network: Since fortresses in Dwarf Fortress tend to be mainly underground anyway, they usually incorporate some degree of this. Dwarven and goblin civilisations also create large tunnels linking settlements created during worldgen, and beneath those there are three levels of naturally-formed cavern system that blur the line somewhat between this trope and Beneath the Earth.
  • Characters.Pathfinder The Darklands: They particularly draw inspiration from pulp fiction of the early 1900s, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar. They're divided into three layers:
    • The uppermost layer, Nar-Voth, consists of extremely deep and extensive but otherwise fairly normal caverns (which are often isolated and do not form a continuous network), and is the most familiar layer to the surface-dwellers. While most of it is sparsely populated stony wilderness, it is also home to fairly normal humanoids like goblins, troglodytes and duergar.
    • Sekamina, the middle layer, consists of much larger and more thoroughly interconnected caverns and tunnels, extending beneath most of the world’s surface. It is home to more reclusive and dangerous races like the drow and ghouls, who rule true underground empires, alongside monsters such as driders, morlocks and gugs. It has more exotic terrain than Nar-Voth, including fungal forests, volcanic caves and a true subterranean sea.
    • Finally, the deepest level — the Vaults of Orv — is as much a subject of fear and mystery for the people of Nar-Voth and Sekamina as the Darklands as a whole are for surface-dwellers. It consists of massive caverns the size of nations, some dark and others lit by artificial suns or glowing crystals, containing environments such as deserts, rainforests, ruined cities, mountain ranges and a vast subterranean ocean. The Vaults are inhabited by a great variety of monsters, ranging from dinosaurs, dragons, monstrous arthropods and the undead to a variety of unspeakable horrors. They did not form naturally, but were excavated by a powerful earth elemental Precursor race called the Xiomorn to host their evolutionary experiments.
  • Characters.Skylanders Life: A former member of the royal guard for the Drilla King, who ruled over the subterranean Drilla Empire.
  • Characters.The Misfit Of Demon King Academy Hero Academy Underground World: The Underground World, as it name implied, is a domain located beneath the surface of the earth, as it was a place that didn't exist originally during the Mythical Age, being created after Anos' reincarnation.
  • EldenRing.Tropes A To E: The Lands Between is full of hidden catacombs, caves, and crystal mines the Tarnished can stumble upon, most of them even having a Boss at the bottom of it. Furthermore, some places are their own little world beneath the earth, such as Nokron, the Eternal City, which has a sky full of stars (actually glowing glintstone ores) despite being underground.
  • Fanfic.The Palaververse: An extensive underworld of caverns exists beneath Theia’s surface, permeating its entire volume supposedly going all the way to a sea of lava at the planet’s core. The Diamond Dogs live in the uppermost layers, while the deeps are home to a great variety of horrors.
  • Franchise.Dragon Age: Beneath the Earth, in the meantime, the dwarves built a great empire of the underground cavern cities, or "thaigs", connected by a vast tunnel network known as the Deep Roads.
  • Literature.Rihannsu: The Ysailsu resistance — which includes most of the planetary population of an established Rihannsu colony — has retreated into the vast Saijja Caverns, a network of caves so deep that they cannot be accurately scanned from space, and which have never been completely mapped, even by them.
  • Literature.The Underland Chronicles: The series is all about this trope. More than 90 percent of the books take place in an underground world beneath New York called the Underland.
  • Series.Cosmic Disclosure: There's all sorts of cool stuff there, like self-contained ecosystems, remnants of the Advanced Ancient Humans' expeditions, and the Agarthan cities.
  • Skyrim.Tropes U To Z: There are regular caves and mines (often serving as dens for bandits, Falmer, vampires, etc.), ancient Nordic burial tombs, and subterranean fortresses guarded by machines that were built by their long-since-vanished Dwemer masters. There's even a wide-open cavern deep underground connecting three Dwemer fortresses, once the location of the Dwemer city of Blackreach.
  • TabletopGame.Middle Earth Role Playing: Moria is given an extensive description, showing it as a layered, complex labyrinth of mines and underground ruins home to tribes of orcs and trolls, flocks of flesh-eating bats, restless undead, and serpentine dragons that shun the light of day, although its depths also hide the treasures of the ancient Dwarves and natural wonders in the deeper caves. The deepest levels of Moria are connected to the Under-Deeps, a lightless realm that has never been explored but which is believed to extend beneath the span of the Misty Mountains and where terrible monsters lurk.
  • TheLordOfTheRings.Tropes A To C: The dwarven realm of Khazad-dûm is technically a vast, glorified mine under the mountains, connecting with ancient caves where orcs and monsters hide out of sight of the surface world. Erebor (or the Lonely Mountain, as it's called in The Hobbit), a smaller-scale version of the same, is also mentioned.
  • VideoGame.Dont Starve: The extensive cave systems accessible through sinkholes are home to two types of bioluminescent plants, the mushtrees — tree-sized mushrooms that shine with faint blue, red or green glows, depending on which color variation they come in — and Light Flowers — true plants that sprout either one, two or three glowing white spheres named Light Bulbs at the end of tall stalks. Since the caves are otherwise completely lightless, and since in Don't Starve walking into the darkness is an excellent way of dying a horrible death, the occasional groves of mushtrees and light flowers provide invaluable oases of relative safety. The bulbs of light flowers can also be used to craft lanterns, although doing so also means shrinking the size of the permanent illuminated areas.
  • VideoGame.Knight Bewitched 2: Deepforge I is buried deep underground, and there's an entire world map underground known as the Ambrose Underworld, just like the Underworld of Final Fantasy IV. This takes place before the dungeon, Heaven's Door, raised the lava sea level, so more locations are available than in Finding Light.
  • Webcomic.A Beginners Guide To The End Of The Universe: After reaching the Dark Star, the Everyman enters a vast system of lightless caverns that wind on for miles. He encounters nothing there besides a single Giant Spider and, eventually, the Singularity's hidden lair.

    Hidden under-city 
  • Sewer Tropes: Beneath the Earth (the urban type)
  • TabletopGame.Dont Rest Your Head: Underneath the Mad City is a system of caves, caverns, and twisting tunnels known as the Warrens. While many known and unknown things live down below, the Warrens are most famous for the Kingdom of Wax, the domain of the Wax King.
  • TabletopGame.Vampire The Masquerade:
    • Nosferatu usually congregate in sewers, abandoned tunnels and the like.
    • Beneath New York, once lay a horror more terrifying than any Nosferatu. It was thought by the Nosferatu to be a Nictuku, a childe of Absimilard, the Nosferatu Antediluvian. Only Lambach Ruthven knew the truth. It was the Tzimisce Antediluvian. He tried to tell people what was in there, but no one believed him... Then it pulled itself together... and left to meet with its "siblings".
  • VideoGame.The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion: The Imperial city is so vast, its sewers are used by several vampires as an alternative to living on the surface.
  • WebAnimation.Ollie And Scoops: In the third episode, Scoops introduces Ollie to Catlifornia, a secret city-esque society for cats that can be accessed via a garbage can with a chute that leads to the place located underground.

    A singe wholly underground city 

    People flee underground to escape a catastrophe 
  • Anime.Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Most of humanity had been forced underground by forces unknown a long time ago. The first part of the series revolves around liberating the repressed humans.

    Monsters live underground, either no further context or normal caves/tunnels 

    Other 

     Low context/ZCE 

General analysis of the wicks:

  • Large cavernous underworlds: 21/109 = 19.3%
  • Hidden under-city: 5/109 = 4.6%
  • Wholly underground city: 6/109 = 5.5%
  • People flee underground to escape a catastrophe: 1/109 = 0.9%
  • Monsters live underground, either no further context or normal caves/tunnels: 8/109 = %
  • Other/unspecific: 30/109 = 7.3%
  • ZCE/no-context pothole: 38/109 = 34.9%

(It was supposed to be a batch of 100, but I miscounted.)

The wick check shows the "huge cavern system with wierd stuff in it" variant to be the most common. The "hidden society under another city" is drastically underrepresented, despite being nominally half of the trope's identity. ZCEs and pattern-less examples make up the majorty of the entries. As it currently stands, the trope's use on the site at large doesn't show much identity beyond "underground spaces exist".

As a general analysis, the main concepts identifiable within the confusion are:

  1. "A society of mole people, mutants, vagrants, or similar things that lives in the underground spaces of a human city, usually in secret."
  2. "A large, sprawling network of caverns and tunnels, home to subterranean civilizations, lost worlds, strange creatures and dramatic natural phenomena."
  3. "People escape a catastrophe or other great threat by retreating in natural or artificial underground spaces."
  4. "An Underground City."

As to what to do with this, these are my main takeaways:

  • The fourth concept is already a trope and can handily take in any relevant examples.
  • Many examples in the first category discuss cities that used to be aboveground and were buried, forgotten, and built over. These are covered by another existing trope, Under City.
  • Outside of that, the other three concepts, I think, all have good potential to be split off into their own tropes. My suggestion to deal with the identity issues here is to just... do that.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top