Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Difference between revisions
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Real life spacious sewers do exist. See [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dctho/iama_a_drainer_i_explore_sewers_storm_drains_and/ IAMA Drainer]; note also that storm drainage systems, which are quite spacious, are sometimes [[You Keep Using That Word|called "sewers"]], thus explaining at least some versions of this trope.
For whole levels set in sewers, see [[Down the Drain]]. Compare [[Unnecessarily Large Interior]].
{{examples|suf=s}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Digimon Adventure]]'' managed to fit this trope. Despite, you know, a lack of any reason for sewers to exist in the digital world. But then, that's the digital world for you.
** Considering that the digital world includes such gems of architecture as an upside-down, physics-defying pyramid, an improbably large sewer is the least of their engineering problems.
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* In one episode of ''[[Kimba the White Lion]]'', Kimba accidentally gets himself lost in the sewer system in Paris and then has to fight an elderly leopard that has been thought as a monster living in the sewers.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* As mentioned above, the New York (and London, and Chicago) sewers are home to the Morlocks in ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]''.
** The original Morlock Tunnels in New York were not sewers or storm drains at all, but a long-abandoned Army construction project originally intended to serve as a mass fallout shelter and then abandoned partway through construction due to cancellation of funding.
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* In ''[[The Beano]]'' the Ratz appear to live in a sewer large enough for a number of things and the sewer enables them to easily get into the houses of humans. However the sewers have never been shown to be large enough to fit humans down them.
==
* In ''[[Flushed Away]]'' we see the sewers only from the rats' perspective, but for their purposes, at least, the sewer is large enough for an entire sprawling city.
* ''[[Shrek]] the Third''. This is justified because it was a secret escape route connected to the palace in case of attack.
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* The secret hideout of the cat gang in ''[[An American Tail]]''. Justified for being in New York City in 1885 (they were that big back then) and that from the viewpoints of cats and mice everything is bigger.
* The Gypsies in Disney's ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney film)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]'' all live inside a giant sewer system located underneath the streets of medieval Paris. Unfortunately, [[Complete Monster|Frollo]] actually knows where that location is...
* In ''[[Aliens vs. Predator]]: Requiem'', the town of Gunnison's sewer system is big enough for two grown men to walk through easily, has ducts big enough for chestbursters to hide in, is easy to access by both humans and xenomorphs, and is the setting of a major fight scene between a Predator and two xenomorphs.
** ''"Is that a couch?...Its better than ours!"''
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* Averted in ''[[The Shawshank Redemption]],'' which has {{spoiler|Dufresne escape from prison by tunneling a hole in his cell wall and breaking into a sewer pipe that happened to be right next to it. It's big enough for him to crawl through, but not stand up in; and the film [[Vomit Indiscretion Shot|doesn't exactly portray crawling through raw sewage as healthy either]].}}
==
* The ''[[Lone Wolf]]'' gamebook series contains a few Absurdly Spacious Sewers, most notably the Baga-darooz in Barrakeesh, capital of [[Arabian Nights Days|Vassagonia]]. This sewer is vast enough to house giant lizards and other nasty monsters, and criminals can be condemned to be locked within. Unlike some other fantasy examples, however, it is described as extremely filthy, smelly and insalubrious—just getting an open wound in contact with the water can give you a horrible disease.
** As in, "[[Race Against the Clock]] to get the next [[Plot Coupon]] before you have to hack off the infected arm and/or die screaming."
== [[Literature]] ==
* Clare Clark's historical novel ''The Great Stink'' is all about building an improved London sewer system.
* ''Three Hands in the Fountain'' by [[Lindsey Davis]] (a historical mystery set in [[Ancient Rome]] in A.D. 73) is about the hunt for a [[Serial Killer]] who dumps the bodies of his victims into Rome's formidable aqueduct system.
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* In [[Garth Nix]]'s ''[[Shade's Children]]'', which takes place [[After the End]], the sewer system is the primary path of transportation for [[La Résistance]]. Averted very slightly by the fact that the difficulties of walking in a curved pipe and the danger of sudden floods are addressed.
* In Eric Nylund's ''A Game of Universe'', some action happens in a sewer, but since there are no walkways they have to do a lot of wading/swimming.
* ''[[Discworld]]'':
** In the
{{quote|'''Detritus:''' In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself. Truly, this a land of opportunity.}}
** The entirety of Ankh-Morpork is built on the slowly sinking ruins of its past, making it extremely easy for the native/non-native dwarves to tunnel under the city. Morpork doesn't build out from urban sprawl, it builds UP, and then sinks farther and farther.
*** In ''[[
* ''[[
* [[Neal Shusterman]]'s young adult novel ''[[Downsiders]]'' is about a secret community of people who live underneath New York City and are forbidden to go "topside."
* In the early Neal Stephenson book ''The Big U'', devoted role-playing gamers would enter the sewers to game, with the help of a mainframe computer and a form of [[Mission Control]] acting as DM. (See the ''Mazes & Monsters'' entry below.)
* In ''The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids'', a spacious sewer inhabited by the Bookworms (smart kids and teacher's pets) is the last refuge of the [[Kid Hero]].
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* In ''[[The Saga of Darren Shan]]'' absurdly large sewers feature largely in a number of the books {{spoiler|most notably an arena of sorts is built in one part of the sewer and the sewers are used as a base of sorts for the mad vampaneze Murlough.}}
* In the book ''Reliquary'', the sequel to ''The Relic'', much of the action takes place in massive underground sewers, storm drains, maintenance tunnels, abandoned pneumatic train systems (!) beneath New York City. As noted in the [[Real Life]] section below, justified as [[Truth in Television]]: New York City is said to stand on seven storeys of underground tunnels, and the authors add a postscript backing the veracity of much of their claims about the extensive tunnelwork below the city.
* In the ''[[Tortall Universe
* An Absurdly Spacious Rubbish Chute {{spoiler|serves as the escape path for Jenna and the Heaps}} in ''[[Septimus Heap|Magyk]]''.
* In ''The Magician'', the second book of ''[[The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel]]'' series, Machiavelli and Dee take Josh into the spacious sewers and then the catacombs in Paris to be {{spoiler|Awakened by Mars Ultor}}. This is [[Justified Trope|justified]] because Paris does have an incredibly large sewer system that connects to the catacombs. There is even a special branch of the police force that patrols the sewers.
== [[Live
* The pilot episode of ''[[Monk]]''.
* ''[[Pushing Daisies]]'' has the most cheerful and attractive looking sewers I've ever seen. At least one character lives in them.
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* ''[[The Legend of Dick and Dom]]'' has a sewer under the [[Big Bad]]'s castle large enough for the good guys to escape through. They do come out the other side covered in, well, [[Toilet Humor|what you would expect]]. Oddly, this has the opposite of [[Nobody Poops]]; there are very few people in the castle, but [[Covered in Gunge|lots of sewage]] in the sewer.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* ''[[Paranoia]]'' once had an section simply named "Sewerworld!" in the ''Send in the Clones'' adventure. The author observes something to the effect that sewers are remarkably consistent over time. "You could put a Roman sewer-slave in modern Tokyo's ultra-sanitary system... sure it'd be cruel. But he wouldn't wonder where he was..."
* Any sewer in ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' is spacious and comes complete with whole thieves guilds, secret wizard labs, and lots and lots of specially adapted monsters (like the Otyugh and the Cesspit Ooze).
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** In the later expansion Shards of Alara, the plane of Esper has a sewer system known as the Tidehollow, where the plane's more unsavory elements salvage Etherium scrap. Predictably, most of the shard's black mana comes from this region.
== [[Theater]] ==
* In ''[[Guys and Dolls]]'', the New York sewers have enough room for a full dance number!
* The sewers in ''[[Urinetown]]'' are large enough to hold the rebel "base". And one song with a full dance section.
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* We never actually see the sewers per se in ''[[Les Misérables (theatre)|Les Misérables]]'', as they're in most productions just represented by shafts of light that Valjean walks through, but everything is covered in Literature and Real Life.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* A ''lot'' of videogames have this kind of level. For a more comprehensive list, look [http://www.giantbomb.com/sewer/95-348/ here].
* ''[[Airforce Delta|Air Force Delta Strike]]'' had you flying through Absurdly Spacious Subway tunnels.
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* ''[[Yoshi's Story]]'' features two levels set inside giant sewer pipes. The first level, Jelly Pipe, is loaded up with mysterious gunk that clings to the sides. The second, Torrential Maze, is full of rushing water to sweep you away.
* When the heroes from ''[[Shining the Holy Ark]]'' get kidnapped they use a secret passage and escape into the sewers. It appear to be one massive space under a vaulted ceiling, with multiple levels, that is actually bigger than the castle above it. Maybe justified as there were more than one secret entrance to the castle and it's implied that soon of the royalty is entombed there...in the sewers.
* ''[[Global Agenda]]'' gets in on the action with a mission in the subterranean waterways in North Sonara (Recursive Colony Update). It's the sort of spacious that some of the shorter-range turrets can't cover its width.
* There's a huge sewer underneath the village in ''[[Stardew Valley]]'', which is home to the merchant, Krobus, as well as a fishing spot.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Subverted in ''[[Antihero for Hire]]'', where Shadehawk escapes capture through the [
* In the ''[[Narbonic]]'' Director's Commentary, Shaennon Garrity openly admits that the design of Helen's sewer-based underground lab comes entirely from the old ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' cartoon.
* In ''[[Girl Genius]]'', the sewers of Sturmhalten are not only large enough to walk around in, they're large enough to support a [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20060501 deeply alarming ecosystem].
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'''Vinicius''': You'd be surprised at how much they hide from us. }}
== [[Web Original]] ==
* [[The Spoony Experiment|Spoony]] has expressed a hatred of sewer levels in videogames. He was especially disgusted by the game [[Sewer Shark|that's all sewer levels]].
* A sanitary sewer like this appears on the island used for version two of ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'', spanning the entire island ''underground'', but from the vague descriptions it's implied that people can only just barely move across the walkways on the sides, and that otherwise it's fairly cramped.
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# it was originally intended to be a supersized alchemical apparatus to extract the fundamentum profundus. }}
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[Futurama]]'' really played with this one in a few episodes. New New York's sewers are actually the city of New York, and home to a community of mutants, who mention off-hand that they have a sub-sewer system (home to a community of sub-mutants, according to sub-urban legend). It helps that New New York's sewers connect with the subterranean ruins of old New York. Reality intrudes, however, when the Planet Express crew gets lost down there and Fry says that the only way out is through... a tube that's at most only a few inches wide ("Don't worry, it gets wider after about a mile").
* ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]''. In all incarnations, their sewer lair is larger than any house you've been in ([[Big Fancy House|possibly]]) and the tunnels are wide enough to accommodate vehicles like the tank-sized Battle Shell. It is ''very'' seldom that the Turtles must come into contact with anything you've flushed. In the 1990s cartoon, their original lair was invaded and they later got ''another, even more palatial'' one.
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{{reflist}}
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[[Category:This Index Is Highly Improbable]]
[[Category:Architecture Tropes]]
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[[Category:Video Game Settings]]
[[Category:Truth in Television]]
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