Weird Moon

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
(Redirected from Artsy Moon)
All right, this is just getting ridiculous. Is the Moon just larger in Japan?
—Unskippable, on Onimusha 3
We could live here by the shore of the tranquilibrious sea, in a timeshare. And I would pluck the Moon from the sky, just to see you smile. Almost got it. It seems to be sort of, stuck!
—Kif Kroker, Futurama "Kif Gets Knocked Up A Notch"

The Moon. Our planet's only natural companion, the brightest object in the night sky; worshipped as a god(dess) by countless cultures; inspiration of poets, lovers, lunatics, and werewolves.

Depictions of the moon in fiction vary, and it can behave rather ... oddly.

Size and shape

  • The moon is shown much, much larger than it appears to the naked eye in Real Life—often filling half the sky, with such detail where you can identify individual craters and canyons. In Real Life the moon is about the size or your little fingernail at arm's length (even when it appears larger at the horizon); while it can be argued that certain Science Fiction or Fantasy settings may indeed have larger moons than Earth's, "huge moon" shots are usually the result of special effects, such as using a high-powered telephoto lens to shoot the scene from a large distance, making the moon appear comparatively larger to the subject due to perspective distortion.
  • The crescent moon is often depicted in a stylized, unrealistic manner with the horns of the crescent extending an average of three-quarters of a circle. (In Real Life, they always end at opposite ends of a diameter). Likewise, the inner (dark) part of the crescent is often circular in shape (which in Real Life only occurs if something eclipses the moon).
    • The crescent can sometimes point incorrectly for the hemisphere it's observed from, i.e. contrary to the position of the sun.
  • There can be objects (such as stars) visible inside the crescent; in Real Life this can only occur if there's something on the moon's surface emitting light, or if something else is between the moon and viewer.
    • If the characters actually realize this, it usually becomes an important plot point.

Lunar phases

  • The moon's lunar phases always seem to coincide with important plot moments. For example, when The Hero and heroine have won the day, expect a full moon that night so they can sit back and enjoy the romantic mood lighting it casts upon them. The same goes for the Melancholy Moon upon which characters sit and wistfully ruminate upon.
  • The moon is never shown during its "gibbous" (more than half-full) phase, and rarely shown in its "half" phase—it's always either a crescent moon or full moon. The only times these other phases are shown is if the lunar cycle plays an actual role in the setting (e.g. a gameplay mechanic in Video Games), and even then these other phases are little more than lead-up to the next full moon. In video games, it's also possible for new moon can go to a quarter moon with one night.
  • A "full moon" can last for three or four nights on the trot—extra time for that Wolf Man to go rampaging! (Perhaps the "mostly full" nights are full enough?)
  • Moonrise and moonset always coincide with sunset and sunrise, where in Real Life, moonrise and moonset vary by phase: a "first quarter" moon is easily visible when it rises at midday, while the "new moon" isn't visible because it rises at roughly the same time as the sun. Even a full moon is often visible entering the horizon even as the sun is still leaving it.

Eclipses and phenomena

  • Solar eclipses can occur during any phase of the moon and are always total eclipses, never partial. In Real Life a solar eclipse can only occur during a new moon, when the moon and sun are in relatively close proximity in the sky. During the actual eclipse, the moon will slowly move to obscure the sun, then slow its orbit and block out the sun for however long the plot requires (sometimes entire days) before moving on.
    • Its opposite, the lunar eclipse, either does not exist or is an explicit sign of evil forces at work.
  • The lunar phase affects people's moods way more than is really likely.
  • In space, you will sometimes see a full moon and the sun simultaneously in the background. Since the sun would have to be behind the moon to get both in shot, the side you see should be dark.
    • Relatedly, the full moon and Venus can never be near each other in the sky.
  • Presuming the moon and the atmosphere are even vaguely like Earth's, no part of the moon can be darker than the surrounding sky. (The sky is light-blue-in-front-of-black-space; therefore even the blackest parts of the moon will be light-blue-in-front-of-black-moon.)

For more on eclipses, see Total Eclipse of the Plot.

When the moon is weird or behaves oddly in-universe, usually to signify something evil going on, it's a case of Bad Moon Rising (or possibly That's No Moon). If the moon has actually been physically altered to change its appearance, it's Deface of the Moon. See also Weird Sun. This is related to The Man in the Moon.

There used to be a subtrope of Weird Moon, titled Artsy Moon. That trope was quite similar to this one, except it specifies that the moon must be depicted in an artistic way. However, Weird Moon is also quite "artsy". Our community agreed there isn't much of a difference between the tropes, so the Artsy Moon examples were moved here.

Examples of Weird Moon include:


Anime and Manga

  • The Moon from Soul Eater is huge, bright yellow, a perpetual crescent, wears a Slasher Smile and drools blood. Not to mention some clouds are behind it. It turns out the moon isn't just drawn that way, that's literally how it's shaped. It's not even an object orbiting the planet outside the atmosphere, it's just floating above the Earth in the clouds. It also has an weirdSun.
    • And one can apparently walk about on it without being affected by gravity changes or the need for any protective/breathing gear whatsoever.
  • In Rebuild of Evangelion, the moon has a visible splatter of blood on it (perhaps a Shout-Out to the fate of the moon during End of Evangelion), as well as giant coffins in which the Angels sleep until they descend to earth in order to make their attack. SEELE also has a base on it.
    • The moon is huge in the original Neon Genesis Evangelion show too. In Episode 6, for example, it is shown much bigger than Rei's body.
    • In End of Evangelion it also seems to be unnaturally close to Earth in the scenes where giant Rei looms over the planet with the Moon right above her. Though considering the measurements given slightly earlier, it seems that the animators overestimated Earth's relative size as far larger than it actually is, rather than the distance between the two bodies.
  • In Bleach, Kubo Tite seems to like drawing crescent moons by the tried and true method of drawing a dark circle touching a bigger white circle from the inside. And it is always crescent moons in Bleach.
    • Also, in Hueco Mundo, the moon seems to be flipped. See for yourself. It's always night there, and the moon is always a crescent.
  • The moon in ef: A Tale Of Memories is huge. It also has the points of the crescent meet at one end, which is impossible—and then there are the scenes where it seems to be a two-dimensional object glued to the night sky.
    • You could get a similar view (points of the crescent meeting) by viewing the earth from the moon during a solar eclipse, though...
  • In Gankutsuou, the surface of the moon resembles a huge and ominous skull. Strangely enough, no-one ever wonders about it (though seeing the wealth and weird tastes of the upper classes, it's entirely possible that the moon was deliberately modified to look like this from the Earth). Somewhat justified by the fact that it is colonized, thus having its surface altered.
    • More curiously, it looks the same no matter what angle it's being viewed from; the same skull appears in scenes that feature Earth and the moon together, even though what we see ought to be the dark side.
  • Inuyasha is really bad with this. Essentially, the moon is always full, except when the plot calls for a new moon (which causes the title character to lose his demonic powers).
  • In Kurau Phantom Memory, the full moon looks awfully huge behind the flying silhouettes of Kurau and later Christmas, although it makes for lovely E.T.-like scenery, emphasizing the lonely mood. Of course, the moon looks weird anyway since it has been terraformed.
  • The last scene of Madlax has two moons, one red and one blue, overlapping each other; this is symbolic of either Margaret and Madlax, Madlax and Limelda, or Limelda and Vanessa (the finale is...complicated).
    • Throughout the series, the moon is either red or blue, and in one case two characters simultaneously see it as different colours. In the Sanctuary, there are always two moons (one red, one blue).
  • The Moon was full throughout the entire season of My-HiME. Granted that there was probably sometime between, but this may have been just so that it could be used as a comparison for the approaching HiME Star.
  • For examples of the over-extended crescent, look no further than Sailor Moon.
  • The god Hades in Saint Seiya summons the Final Eclipse, which magically aligns all planets and all moons to cover Earth in perpetual darkness. If he had had his way, it would have lasted all eternity.
  • In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, there's a three-week period when the moon is about to crash into the Earth. For the entire time, the moon was always visible and full in the sky. Justified in that it turns out that the moon is a huge battleship/mecha called "Cathedral Terra". The real moon was apparently hidden away in another dimension, and was pulled out of said dimension by the protagonists after the Colony Drop had been averted.
    • Also, most of the population of the world (and thus the view point) is in a relatively small area.
  • In Wolf's Rain the moon turns blood-red, portending the end of the world. And its rebirth.
  • In the anime version of Vision of Escaflowne the Moon and the Earth, cast in the role of the "Mystic Moon," display this trope, despite technically not being true moons. There's even a total solar eclipse in one episode, with the Earth conveniently having the same apparent diameter as the sun when seen from Gaea. The Moon is perfectly centered on the Earth during the event...yet can still be seen in complete shadow.
  • In Miyazaki's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the moon comes so close to earth it appears huge.
    • In Spirited Away the moon changes a lot faster than normal which makes sense when it's revealed a lot of time has passed since Chihiro's family got trapped in the other world.
  • The Hellsing OVAs show a moon that, in one scene, is so big that the bottom 15% or so half fills a row of windows about ten meters across. To get that kind of size with a real camera, you'd need a lens with a focal length measured in meters, and you'd have to photograph the (indoor) scene from a couple kilometers away. Not only that, there is almost always a blood moon when there is a plot point, such as the night Seras Victoria was transformed into a vampire or when Walter informed Alucard that he would be heading to Brazil. Also, it is always a full moon; it appears to have no other phases.
  • Animation studio Bee Train has a particular affinity for weird moons. As mentioned above in Madlax they have used the moon many more times in different series.
    • .hack//Sign: Acceptable giving the series takes place majorly in a virtual world.
    • Avenger: The abnormally large red Moon that can be seen from Mars is actually the same Moon that once normally existed exclusively as planet Earth's only natural satellite. After the natural catastrophe that took place on Earth, the Moon's orbital trajectory was deeply affected due too an excessive approximation between Earth and Mars. Consequently, the Moon now plays an important role in the gravitational field between both planets. The drastic approximation between the Moon and planet Mars often originates Lunar Storms, a phenomenon created by a large fluctuation affecting the surface of Mars, which is one of the main reasons why life outside Dome Cities is considered very harsh to a normal human being. The Moon is especially red in color probably due to the excessive proximity to Mars' atmosphere, therefore reflecting the dominant tonality on the planet's surface.
    • Continuing with the red weirdness trend their anime adaptation of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle the moon turns red during the Ashura Country Arc which is where an other clan's base is also stationed. Taking place in an alternate universe also acceptable break from reality
    • Murder Princess also features a red moon in the opening titles. The moon is also lush and full a great majority of the time.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, Hohenheim tries to counter Father's Nationwide Transmutation Circle by drawing his own transmutation circle on the shadow of the moon. In real life, however, the moon during an eclipse doesn't leave such a nice defined shadow, such as seen here.
  • In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, both Meakashi and Tsumihoroboshi climax on 25 June 1983, and the full moon shown is actually correct for that date. The flashbacks in Meakashi also get the moon's phase right just often enough that you wonder whether it's deliberate. But in the second season they stopped caring: the moon is full whenever it's shown, over a period of two weeks.
  • A recent chapter of Naruto, in what's probably an art error rather than deliberate liberty, had a moon that appeared to have part of a cloud behind it.
    • It was also said in legend that the Rikudo Sage created the Moon by catching the Juubi's corpse inside an astronomically large Chibaku Tensei before tossing the earthen ball to the sky.
  • In Cowboy Bebop a third of the Moon has blown up into a giant Asteroid Thicket ring around the Earth, essentially leaving it as physically crescent.
  • In Shuna's Journey, the moon is flat, looking more like an alien spaceship than a moon. It sets to the west, where instead of going beneath the horizon, it lands and deposits resources in an ominous Eldritch Abomination.
  • In The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, The "artsy" part of "Artsy Moon" comes from size. In some shots of the film, notably the last one before the credits, the Moon takes up over half of the screen. The shot is made more weird by the lack of saturation when compared to the rest of the film, and the moon feels more "artsy" due to the film's rough and simplistic art style.

Comic Books

  • The '70s Marvel comic Werewolf By Night explicitly stated that its protagonist transformed "on the three nights of the full moon". "Looks full to me" is good enough for a werewolf curse—why would such a thing rely on some kind of mathematical/astronomical precision?
  • Earth inexplicably picked up an extra moon during the cataclysm in Xenozoic Tales.
  • Comes up, in a way, in Darklighter, the four-issue series about Biggs Darklighter. When Biggs graduates from the Imperial pilot's academy, his class gets a speech from Grand Moff Tarkin. Tarkin drops intensely unsubtle hints about the Empire being close to possessing great power - world-shattering power, you could say! "Never again will a citizen of this galaxy watch a moonrise in quite the same way. He will stare at that moon - if such it is - and remember that the Empire is truly in control."
    • The new pilots lounge around trying to make sense of that, and one of them tells a story about a man who had tunnels mined out on his world's moon, and they formed a drawing of his face. Then Biggs speculates that "world-shattering" was literal, but something that could do that would have to be moon-sized itself... Then Hobbie Klivian walks in, subtexts with Biggs a bit, and says that they're calling it the Death Star.
  • Elf Quest takes place on the World of Two Moons, aka Abode. Creator-artist Wendy Pini always draws the moons in their correct relative phases (being married to an amateur astronomer probably helps). When other artists attempt it they sometimes get it wrong, for instance drawing the two moons in different phases even when they are right next to each other in the sky. In another particularly egregious example both moons were seen to the left of a cave in one panel, and to the right of the same cave on the next page. And no, they hadn't had time to move that far between panels.
  • The moon is full rather more often than not in Batman comics.
  • During DC Comics' Final Night event, the sun temporarily went out. Many artists working on the event put a visible moon in the sky. The moon doesn't glow on its own, it reflects sunlight.
  • In Zot, "Ring in the New", issue 27, the characters go outside just before midnight on New Year's Eve to see the "Big Clock". "Up there." "Oh, I see it ... Hey! That's the Moon!!" "Yeah. Zot say it's all done with lasers here on Earth." It is a couple of days past new (a thin crescent) and has a lit clockface. This Is Wrong on So Many Levels. A moon so close to new would set an hour or two after sunset, so it wouldn't be visible near local midnight. On a spherical Earth, the clock's time would be correct for only one out of the 12 or so time zones that could see it. It would take very powerful lasers to have a display that could compete with the sunlight of the crescent.


Film

  • For the "huge" thing, see the bit in 300 where we first see the Oracle's Temple. Some say it's a visual metaphor, others say it just looks cool.
  • Subverted in the film Bruce Almighty, where Bruce "pulls" the moon with a divine "snare" to provide just the right setting for his romantic night. Later, we find that the sudden change in the gravitational pull of the moon caused floods in Japan.
  • From Dusk till Dawn 2 has a particularly egregious "plot-timed" eclipse, where the moon literally races across the sun and then stops dead, allowing the vampire villains to come out from under cover for an extended period.
  • ET the Extraterrestrial, in the scene where ET makes Elliot's bike fly. The image of the bike silhouetted against the moon became the logo of Steven Spielberg's production company Amblin Entertainment.
  • The Evil Dead movies often feature an unnaturally large image of the full moon during their shots of the cabin in the woods. The second movie in particularly has a moon so huge that it looks like Ash should be worrying less about demons and more about the impending collision.
  • In the Beethoven's Sixth Symphony portion of Fantasia, the crescent moon is used as a bow to fire off a star that lights the other stars in the sky.
    • Justified in that the setting is mythological.
    • The final section of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring segment is sandwiched between the formation of a total solar eclipse.
  • The ending of Hancock. Hancock somehow paints a huge heart on the moon. No, it's not explained just how the hell he did that. Of course, he is a superhero.
  • Joe Versus the Volcano featured a large moon framing Joe as he was floating out at sea on his luggage. Justified Trope in that Joe has spent several days without water and is hallucinating. The constellations are also starting to do funny things (move around, appear with actual lines, etc.).
  • Ladyhawke, in which we have a night scene with a full moon and then, a few days later, a total eclipse of the sun. (A solar eclipse can only happen during a new moon; a lunar eclipse can only happen during a full moon.)
    • Apocalypto did the same thing: first showing a solar eclipse and that same night a full moon.
  • In Moonstruck Raymond relates a story of when Cosmo was in love, there was a giant moon outside his house, keeping him awake, as if Cosmo had brought it there. He called it "Cosmo's moon" later in the story when he sees it again, obstensibly because it's now there for Cher and Nicholas Cage.
  • The moon is always full in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
  • In Pitch Black the characters are on a moon of a large gas giant planet, and the planet eclipses the star as seen from its moon, instead of the other way around. The planet rapidly goes from "just touching the sun" to "completely covering the sun" in a matter of moments. As soon as the planet covers the sun, the rest of the film is spent in the titular condition, and dialogue in the film says the eclipse will last a month. Given that the planet is much larger in the sky than the sun is at that distance, a long eclipse is reasonable, although a month is pushing it. A moon with such a long orbital period around the planet would be so far away from it that the planet would be much smaller in its sky.
    • It's never explicitly stated in Pitch Black how long the eclipse will last. None of the characters have any idea, but agree that it will probably last too long to try and wait it out.
  • The 2002 remake of The Time Machine features a sub-plot about colonizing the moon in the 2030's which goes horribly wrong and ends up with the moon being blown to pieces. When the time traveller later emerges in 802701, the smaller chunks of the moon have been pulled apart and stretched into a mini asteroid belt.
  • Lampshaded in Disney's Treasure Planet, where the crescent "moon" hanging in the sky turns out to be, on closer examination, an actual crescent-shaped celestial body, covered in stardocks and buildings.
  • Justified in The Truman Show because the moon is fake.
  • Van Helsing uses "full for several nights", along with "the stroke of midnight" lasting well over two minutes. It's probably a tribute to the kind of films Lon Chaney made, though.
  • Watchmen has far more full moons than expected.
  • Werewolf uses "full for several nights"—and, of course, is lampshaded and mocked repeatedly in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version: "The full moon doggedly refuses to wane." "The most stubborn full moon in the history of the world." "So are we supposed to assume a month passes every few minutes here in Flagstaff?" "The third straight week of the full moon."
  • For the "full for several nights" thing, watch Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man or one of its sequels.
  • The moon in the end of Despicable Me is large enough to occupy good part of the screen.Justified since after getting stolen by Vector, it didn't have the time to reach its former orbit before going back to its original size.
  • The DreamWorks logo features a boy fishing while sitting in a crescent moon.
  • In Titan A.E., the protagonists visit a planet whose moon is split in half. Almost completely in half. And it has neither crumbled nor been pulled back together by gravity. Oh, and it's a plot point. It is cool, though.
  • The Secret of Moonacre has a continuously-full moon that gets larger and larger as the movie goes on. It's an actual plot point, as the moon will destroy the earth unless Maria gives back the moon jewels.
  • In Coraline, the Other World moon is slowly being covered by the shadow of a button. When all of it is covered, everything outside the house disappears.
  • In Daredevil the moon appears full every single night throughout the movie.
  • The moon appearing in the "A Whole New World" number from Aladdin for some reason actually changes from a full moon to a crescent moon all in the same night!
    • And at the end of the film, it's actually revealed to be the Genie in disguise!
  • In Kull The Conqueror, the awakening of the dark forces of Acheron turns the moon into a gruesome red demonic face.
  • In The Return of Hanuman, the moon is not shaped like a ball, but rather a crescent. Hanuman even pulls one of its edges, using it as a flashlight due to the moon's brightness.
  • Alice in Wonderland: The moon becomes the Cheshire Cat's grin.
  • Near the end of Finding Nemo, during the scene where the whale drops off Marlin and Dory at Sydney, Australia, when we see the whale swimming away, if you look very closely, you can easily tell that the Moon is "right-side up." (Tycho, the large crater on the Moon's southern hemisphere, is facing down). In real life, the Moon should appear "upside down" when viewed from the Earth's southern hemisphere (Tycho would be facing up) since the Moon is always right-side up no matter what.
    • In another Pixar movie, Cars, the maria on the Moon are shaped like a car's headlights and grille, and its craters are shaped like tires.
  • The 1902 film A Trip to the Moon (original French title Le Voyage dans la Lune) depicts a moon that is not only a sentient being with a face,[1] but is also covered in giant mushrooms, apparently has enough oxygen for the humans to breathe, and is inhabited by savage Rubber Forehead Aliens called Selenites.


Literature

  • Justified in Nancy Farmer's Land of the Silver Apples, as the elves pretty much make the moon whatever phase they want it to be, and they always want it to be full.
  • The "Affecting Lunatics" thing is prominent in the Ian Fleming's James Bond novel From Russia with Love. The assassin Red Grant is a serial killer driven to murder at the full moon.
  • In Simon Green's Nightside novels, the moon over London's Nightside always appears unnaturally large (or maybe unnaturally close). Then again, this is a place where it's always three o'clock in the morning.
  • Played straight in Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf, in which the chapters cover successive months of a year in the life of a town in which one man has become a werewolf. King deliberately set the time of the full moon to match major holidays rather than realistically. Justified in that according to the Other Wiki, the project originally began as a set of short stories to accompany a calendar.
  • Subverted in the Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, where whenever anyone wants a symbolic moon it turns out to be gibbous.(One character, a witch, reflects that normally she doesn't have much time for this nonsense about phases of the moon being connected to witchcraft - but there may be something in a half-moon, poised right on the balance between one thing and another, that she's able to relate to.) In fact, the fact it's almost never full or a crescent begins to seem unlikely. But then, the Disc's moon has a very complicated and rather strange orbit (one of the elephants occasionally has to lift its leg to let the moon past). Plus the phases are somewhat different considering half the moon is covered by glowing silver plants and the other is scorched.
    • "Stars" within the dark half are also justified; they're the light of Moon Dragons jetting about.
    • In Soul Music there's a half moon and the text describes this as "the most magical phase" even if it doesn't appear in romantic or occult pictures.
    • The werewolf police officer Angua also mentions that werewolves only have to change during the (one) night of the full moon, while it's reasonably controllable at any other time.
  • In N. K. Stouffer's The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, the Moon shines through a cloud of nuclear fallout that's impenetrable to sunlight.
  • The habit of the moon's phases appearing in the wrong order is neatly averted in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and other JRR Tolkien works: Tolkien actually spent hours working out a table of phases and making sure they were consistent with the time of each scene. In several places in The Lord of the Rings when a character looks at the moon, that passage was redrafted three or four times to change the phase after Tolkien inserted extra days into their journey as the map grew larger.
    • It's a minor plot point at least once - they remember spending a week or two in Lothlorien, but so much time has gone by outside, the moon passed through an entire phase-cycle. (Tolkien was paying homage to long-standing legends of mortals visiting the realms of The Fair Folk.)
    • It's been suggested that we can actually calculate the exact historical dates on which Tolkien set his tales from the moon's phases. http://www.angelfire.com/rings/three/chrono.htm eg. The Lord of the Rings takes place in 3105-3104 BC.
    • One glaring exception, though, is in The Hobbit, when Bilbo and the dwarves find the secret door on Thror's map at sunset with a thin crescent moon in the sky. A very few days later, Bard shoots Smaug by the light of the rising moon. Astronomically, those two events would have to be separated by about two weeks.
  • The Dragonlance universe has three moons, Solinari, Lunitari, and Nuitari, which are white, red, and black, corresponding with the colors of good, neutral, and evil magic in the world. Nuitari is a particularly weird moon because only evil mages can see it, except when Nuitari passes in front of one or both of the other moons; also, Nuitari's position can be inferred when it blocks any of the stars.
  • In Perdido Street Station and its sequels, the moon is described as having two smaller moons orbiting it.
  • In The Book of the New Sun, the moon is green, probably as a result of terraforming.
  • In Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon the moon is shining unusually brightly. Most people who notice think that it's quite beautiful. The hero realizes that it means that the sun has gone nova, and this is going to be his last night on Earth. It turns out he's not quite right. The sun has just thrown off an unusually bright flare, which has killed off just about everyone on the other side of the Earth, but it's subsided by sunrise over California.
  • In the world of Goblin Moon, the moon's highly-elliptical orbit brings it alarmingly close to the planet when it's full, causing monthly cycles of ground tremors and extreme tides. The novel's title is a reference to an old myth which personified the moon as a shapechanging female deity, who became harsh and ugly when full.
  • The Wheel of Time uses a (roughly) consistent lunar phase similar to Tolkien's, except that references of weeks in the early books can confuse the reader as for how much time passed, since Jordan couldn't initially make up his mind for a 7-day or a 10-day week.
  • The Gor series takes place on a Counter-Earth which has three moons instead of only one like we have; but whenever they're mentioned, all three are always full. the latest book reveals that at least one of the moons is artificial and is used as a Prison Planet by the Priest-Kings.
  • In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge refers to "the hornèd moon with one bright star within the nether tip."


Live Action TV

  • On the Playhouse Disney children's series Bear in the Big Blue House, the moon was named Luna and was a good friend of Bear. He would tell her about the events of the day at the end of each episode.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer did the "full for several nights" thing, but clarified it by saying "the night before and the night after" - in other words, they admitted the moon wasn't really full, but the full moon had that big an effect on werewolves.
    • The episode "What's My Line" features a vampiric ritual that needs to be performed on the night of a new moon. Spike gets ready to start the ritual when "the moon is rising"—which really ought to be around dawn.
      • The script writer goofed and forgot what they'd said earlier. Spike and Dru say that the ritual has to take place during the full moon.
  • During one episode of Chef!, a wedding is set to occur on a full moon. Savannah predicts that the romantic atmosphere will clean up all the romantic loose ends. Ironically, everyone but her gets their wish.
  • The Doctor Who episode Smith and Jones showed a lovely, round full Earth from the Moon's surface, and on the very same day, a full moon from Earth's surface, creating the implication that the sun is somehow between the two, or that the moon can somehow produce its own luminescence.
  • A recent episode of Heroes had an eclipse lasting for most of the episode (probably a few hours in-story) and it still wasn't over by the end of the episode, when sunlight moves across and revives Claire after the moon's shadow is seen leaving the edge of the sun's disc.
    • Additionally, this is the second total solar eclipse visible in (all of) North America in how many years?
    • Not to mention how the last eclipse was seen around the entire world.
    • And let's not forget how the moon was visible in the sky next to the sun just before the eclipse.
  • The Mighty Boosh features the Moon as a character who provides monologues to break up the segments of the show. It's fond of astronomical jokes; it's implied there that there are several moons, with him being the full one.
    • Of course, whether or not that's true is debatable, given that the Moon is the biggest Cloudcuckoolander in the series (in more ways than just size).

"When you are the moon, the best form you can be is a full moon. And then the half moon... he's all right. But the full moon is the famous moon. And then three-quarters, eh, no one gives a shit about him. When does he come? two days in to the calendar month? He's useless..."

  • American Gothic: It's always a full moon in Trinity.
  • The 2007 premiere of Smallville showed a half moon with the lit part on the top in the nighttime, as well as having the moon be seen by people in Kansas and China at the same time in the same position in the sky, thus getting it wrong in two ways at once.
  • Supernatural did the "full for several nights" thing. Many werewolf stories do this, if for no other reason than ease of storytelling—it's boring for the hero to hear about a killing last night and have to wait for the next full moon to do anything.
    • Supernatural is also guilty of presenting the "unbelievably enormous" version of the moon; in real life, the moon looks about the size of a pea held at an arm's length... not a baseball.
  • In the 90's The Tonight Show With Jay Leno had skits with Jay playing characters like Beyondo, Iron Jay, Billy Tuttle and Mr Brain- one of the characters was Evil Jay- Jay's evil twin who appeared at every full moon.
  • Back in the 90's, the comic relief soap operas played by Globo had a Running Gag in which the moon would always be at it's full phase and be several times bigger than normal. In one, there was even a mystic event day in which there would be two giant moons in the sky!
  • Gilligan's Island episode "Ship Ahoax". When Ginger tells Gilligan's fortune, she says to look for a ship when "the moon is blue". Sure enough, that night the moon is colored blue and a ship passes by the island.
  • In Terra Nova, the moon is shown to be huge. It's 85 million years in the past, which, as they explain, means the moon is closer and looks bigger; but this doesn't quite work. The moon would have been about 3,000 kilometers closer...that's less than one percent of its current average distance, around 380,000 kilometers. The moon's distance varies by nearly 40,000 km every month due to its eccentric orbit. To a normal person, the moon 85 million years ago would have looked exactly the same.
  • Sesame Street: In "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon", Ernie is shown sitting on a small crescent-shaped moon.

Music

The moon is red and bleeding
The sky is burned and black!


Tabletop Games

  • The Magic: The Gathering plane of Mirrodin has four moons, one for each color of magic except green. During the Convergence, each one hangs right over the appropriate section of the plane, too. During the day. It helps that Mirrodin has no sun, either. Oh, and then there's the Fifth Dawn, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • On Mirrodin, the terms "Moon" and "Sun" are used pretty much interchangeably, and with good reason. Though they orbit around the planet like moons, they are made of flaming balls of magic and supply the primary light source like suns. Oh, and the "stars" in Mirrodin's sky are actually insects. That make rain. Mirrodin is not so much an example of a Weird Moon and more a Weird Cosmos that happens to contain moons.
    • The game itself also includes the cards Blood Moon, Pale Moon, Chaos Moon, and Bad Moon.
    • Dominaria, the primary setting, used to have two moons: the Mist Moon, which has an atmosphere (hence the mist) and Griffins (among other things) living on it, and the Null Moon, also known as the Glimmer Moon, which is a space station and was destroyed in the Apocalypse.
  • The Eberron campaign setting for D&D has twelve moons—and a missing thirteenth moon, as well (one of the setting motifs being baker's dozens missing the thirteenth element). One starts to wonder what kind of influence all those moons had on Eberron's lycanthropes and if they're the cause of the violent frenzies that led the Church of the Silver Flame to hunt the lycanthropes into near-extinction.
    • On the plus side, this made life easier for DMs whose players try and seek out were-creatures to get infected. One Will save a month to avoid the alignment change is easy. One every two days is a much better deterrent.
    • Also, in the Elder Evils expansion for Dungeons & Dragons, the Blood Moon is a "symptom", so to speak, of the imminent awakening of the Hulks of Zoretha. The moon turns a creepy red colour and creatures go Ax Crazy with bloodlust and try to murder each other.
  • Some domains in the Ravenloft setting provide examples of this trope, such as Sithicus, where a moon similar to Krynn's Nuitari (see above, under Literature) is the only one in the sky. Nova Vaasa was once stated to have five moons, a detail that fans have argued about.
  • Forgotten Realms has Selûne[2], the moon of the planet Toril, trailed by a Trojan cluster of small asteroids commonly called Selûne's Tears. Also, it looks like a dusty stone much like Earth's Moon, but it's a permanent false image created by Leira[3]. Spelljamming community knows Selûne is an inhabited and even civilized world, the only problem is that the locals are paranoid about their "enemies" from Toril. The latter quirk may or may not have something to do with Selûne's Tears being fragments blasted out of the moon's surface long ago by a glancing hit from magical superweapon on Toril's surface (some dragons built it to destroy the comet that triggers magic periodically driving them insane, but miscalculated something).
  • In the fantasy Warhammer Fantasy Battle world, there are multiple moons. One of these is made up of warpstone, this setting's form of glowy green rock. Warpstone is solidified magic from the Realm of Chaos and can mutate anything it touches, generally in a bad way. This moon affects the flows of magic, occasionally sends down warpstone meteorites, and has a (seemingly) randomly changing orbital period (and hence the length of each month as judge by that moon varies massively). On one night each year,[4] both this moon and Mannslieb (the largest, normal moon) are full. On this night the dead are restless, and demons find it easier to break out of the Realm of Chaos.
  • The moon in Exalted is actually dedicated to making things less weird; it's a gigantic reality engine controlled by Luna, Incarna of the Moon, and dedicated to keeping the chaotic influence of the Wyld out of Creation.

Video Games

  • In the Marathon 'verse, Mars has been inhabited by humanity. The title of the game is the name of the ship the first game takes place on, which is a hollowed out Deimos. The Player also lands on Lh'owon's moon, which has... Well... Really freakin' weird terrain.
  • In Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, the moon looks normal enough, but unlike the real thing, it rises and sets at the exact same time each day (with moonrise being early in the evening and moonset being after midnight (this is related to the confusion of moonrise and sunset mentioned near the top of the page)). Solar and lunar eclipses are unheard of in the game (the former because the sun is never visible on the game). This does not apply to the original Animal Crossing, because the sky wasn't visible in that game (it featured a top-down view like that of a 2D RPG). This does, however, apply to Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii.
  • The Moon seen in the background of Blinx the Time Sweeper is missing a huge chunk, making it a literal crescent shape.
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum has an absolutely massive full moon hovering over Arkham Island. It doesn't actually do anything, it's just for atmosphere.
    • It's also backwards.
  • Most Castlevania games content themselves with an inexplicably gigantic moon, but Symphony of the Night takes the cake. SotN's moon appears crescent when viewed from the clock tower, full when viewed from the outer wall and Olrox's quarters, and full with a blood red tint when viewed from the castle keep. In all but Olrox's quarters, the moon is also terrifyingly HUGE. And yet, all of these locations are a short walk from each other, with the outer wall, clock tower, and castle keep all being right next door.
  • The moon in 11eyes is pitch black in color, which stands out against the blood red sky. It's also ominously huge, staring down on the city like some sort of eye.
  • In Fable II, the moon is always full. No wonder Westcliff has a Balverine problem.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, monsters originate from the moon via a process known as the "Lunar Cry." In addition, the moon is enormous, occupying a significant portion of the sky.
    • The moon in Final Fantasy XI changes color depending on the day of the week. It does go through the full set of phases, though - despite always being in opposition to the sun.
    • There are two moons in Final Fantasy IV. The smaller one, the Red Moon, is the interstellar vehicle of the Lunarians, who travel the cosmos seeking for a new home. The larger one is completely lifeless. And then there's True Moon, which appears in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and houses the Creator, who seeded the worlds with Crystals to make life flourish.
  • Grand Theft Auto plays with this: there's an Easter egg where, if you shoot the moon with a sniper rifle, it grows larger and larger until, after 5-6 shots, it reverts to its normal size.
  • In I Wanna Be the Guy, the moon falls on you multiple times.
    • And signals the arrival of a witch about to crash into you, and is one of Dracula's attacks. The moon is never a good sign in this game.
  • Kingdom Hearts has a heart-shaped moon on its cover, though this was originally just a stylistic effect; it didn't appear in the actual game until the final level of Kingdom Hearts II.
  • The world of Klonoa: Empire of Dreams has a crescent moon with a smaller full moon inside it.
  • The main plot of The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask revolves around the moon and the fact that it is going to crash into the landscape in three days. It also grew a face, and cries rocks. Not to mention that at the end of the game, you travel inside the moon and find that it contains a field with the Tree in the middle. It also hovers directly overhead for three days straight, and when it finally crashes, it's not all that big to be a moon. Whether it moved across the sky before the events in the game is unclear.
  • The moon in The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker, for some reason, has an influence on the whereabouts of the Ghost Ship. There is even a map illustrating the islands the ship visits according to the lunar phase. It also changes its lunar phase more quickly, showing seven in one week.
  • The Moon that Never Sets in the Legend of Dragoon is the body of the 108th species. When the moon glows red, the incarnation of its soul and The End of the World as We Know It is at hand.
  • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, there are moons that are literally chained to the planet Bryyo's surface. With actual chains. Granted, the moons may actually be pieces of the planet that is starting to break apart. In Bryyo's defense, the Reptilicus are/were capable of using magic, which would explain a number of oddities seen on the planet... Also, Metroid in general seems to have magic. Go figure.
  • In Okami, the Day of Darkness consists of a solar eclipse. Considering that the main character and whom the player controls is an avatar of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, this is a problem. The full eclipse itself starts with the rise of the Emperor of Eternal Darkness, Yami, and ends when Ammy redraws the Sun in the sky, so it can be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, but the initial phase of umbra lasts for several hours. When the characters go through a Portal to the Past several days after a full-moon festival in another town, the first clue that something is wrong is that the moon is full again.
  • The moon in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a strange one. While it looks pretty normal from Earth, there's a canyon running along the length of it and it revolves in about a minute.
  • The moon of the Space Zone in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. Not only is it very much huge in the sky, and a pretty exaggerated crescent moon, it's apparently floating just above the ocean on the world map, and changes facial expression when a star smashes into its face.
  • In Super Mario Galaxy, the Sand Spiral Galaxy has a moon as part of the level (with the end star on it), and in a rather blatant failing of physics, generates LIGHT. Though, seeing as you get burnt when touching it, it might actually be a star (albeit a very small one).
    • In Super Mario Galaxy 2, there is the Boo Moon Galaxy. Mario lands on the (rather nearby and small) crescent moon, where it tilts left and right due to his weight.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei, the Lunar Phases effect your ability to communicate with demons. The moon shuffles through each of the sixteen different stages of the cycle in the matter of a few seconds.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, the "moon" is called Kagutsuchi, and it functions as the Sun of the Vortex World, but it still has waxing and waning phases and can send demons berserk when full.
    • In Persona 3, the Moon is transmogrifies during the Dark Hour into the physical shell of Nyx, personification of Death and the Bringer of The Fall. Upon Nyx's departure, Tartarus is sucked back into it, the Dark Hour ends, and the Moon sleeps once more. Its phases also have a stronger effect on the world (and gameplay) of Persona 3 than in other Megaten games: during a Full Moon, Nyx's influence is so great it causes greater Shadows to manifest outside Tartarus, leading to special "extermination" missions (read: plot bosses) once every month. Full and New Moons also have an effect on the protagonist's psyche by affecting the Persona fusion processes.
    • Strange Journey lets you hook up a Sub App called "Lunatic", making it possible to communicate with demons during a Full Moon (otherwise impossible). The catch? They're still drunk on moonlight, so talking to them is kind of a crapshoot.
  • Skies of Arcadia has six moons, each in a geostationary orbit over a different part of the planet. They're pretty evenly spread, despite the fact that a geostationary orbit requires the object to be directly above the planet's equator. (Though it's debatable whether Arcadia even has an equator, being doughnut-shaped...)
    • As an added bonus, the moons supply Arcadia with Moon Stones, which are the foundation of pretty much all magic and technology on the planet - each moon provides magic governing a different Elemental Powers, so of course they're Color Coded for Your Convenience.
    • There are even hints of a 7th moon. The evidence is inside the Dark Rift: a large number of black moonstones.
  • The moon in Wario Land 4's Crescent Moon Village. Absolutely huge in the sky (about a bit bigger than many background buildings, or double the size of Wario and the pirate ghost), perpetually in crescent phase likely all year around, and well, the actual level name should probably imply the somewhat oddness of the moon. You could also probably say the moon is always full when seen in Wario Land Shake It!, although it's probably just standard Big Boo's Haunt background decor.
  • In Wiz 'n Liz, the moon has a face. Usually it just looks like it's asleep, but every now and then it will yawn, and even come out with an incredibly creepy grimace.
  • Sonic Adventure 2: Eggman elects to show the world (well, America the United Federation) how badass his new Kill Sat is by aiming it at the moon. It blows off part of the moon, revealing a molten core and apparently having no influence on the planet's oceans. The following game, it's been repaired.
  • The Dig: The planet Cocytus has 2 moons (actually the smaller one is a satellite of the larger). In one puzzle, the protagonist discovers a planetarium-orrery with models of the planet and its moons, and by moving the models he makes the real moons move to create an eclipse. This is never explained but then again, we are talking about Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
  • Zork Zero's Feelies include a calendar which shows moon phases. In addition to the usual Full Moon and New Moon are rather more unusual phases such as Empty Moon, Old Moon, Small Moon, Large Moon, Grue Moon, Rad Moon, Bull Moon (as in bulls-eye archery-target moon) and, yes, Weird Moon. The calendar also shows the days for Full Sun, New Sun, and Half-Boz Sun.
  • During the Halloween event in Guild Wars, the moon appears as huge with a creepy face in certain cities.
  • The Elder Scrolls makes this a point in the back story. The moons are not sub-planetoids but in fact the decaying remains of a long dead god. This decay is why you can see the stars through the dark side, it has quite literally rotted away. Admittedly though, this is one of the easier astronomical concepts to explain.
  • Touhou Project offers a subversion: a Lunar civilization of long-lived Earth humans living completely unknown to humans on the Earth (supposedly; the backstory is fuzzy around the time of the Apollo moon landings). To conceal themselves, the Lunarians erected a great (dimensional) Border around the moon, much like the Border surrounding Gensokyo. The internal region hidden by this Border provides oxygen, plant life, and oceans for what is dubbed the Lunar Capital; to us: the moon we see at night.
    • Travel to and from the moon only works consistently on nights of the full moon, which allows for a perfect connection. In Imperishable Night, the Lunar refugees in Eientei have interrupted the full moon with the image of a gibbous moon to make it impossible for emissaries from the moon to come to Earth after them.
  • The map Doublecross on Team Fortress 2 inexplicably had 5 moons in the skybox until an update removed them.
  • The Blue Moon in Dark Cloud 2 is, in reality, the Star of Destruction created by the Ancients so that it would fall upon the world and destroy everything in case anyone ever collected all three Atlamillia and assumed godlike power. In fact, in the American release of the game, that's the Star doing its thing in the logo.
  • In Luigi's Mansion, there's a section where Luigi visits an observatory. As he explores, the wall of the room is destroyed, revealing the night sky with a spherical moon. Until Luigi has to fire a shooting star at it and walk along a path of light to the resulting hemisphere.
  • In Adventure Quest, there are two weird moons; one has a face and leads to the Void, where the strongest monsters of the game are held. The second also has a face and is an interpretation of the Big Bad.
  • In World of Warcraft, the real-world time of day on the Realm's server drives whether it's day or night in the game. At night, the moon is always full, and it's huuuuuge.
    • There used to be a second, smaller (and blue) moon, but it vanished from the sky when the first expansion came out. It still appears in fiction, but not in-game.
  • In Loco Roco, the Moon is very much alive.
  • In Mabinogi there is the white moon Ladeca, but there's also a smaller pink one called Eweca, which radiates all of Erinn's mana.
  • Sengoku Basara 3 has several instances of this. Firstly, if the Moon appears at all it is always full. In the Winter Osaka Siege it is absolutely enormous, taking up about half the sky (it's probably symbolic, as Mitsunari is represented by the Moon and more than a little insane). When Kanbe takes the castle it turns yellow but doesn't decrease in size. At the Kanegasaki Siege it's much smaller, but still unrealistic, and coloured blood red with a strange aura, impending Nobunaga's resurrection.
  • The Moon in Minecraft always comes up when the Sun goes down. It's also square-shaped and rather large.
    • It now has phases, which show round sections of shadow moving across it. The one exception is the new moon, where only the outermost edge is visible - and about half as bright as on a full moon. It was round for a short time (during a pre-release update), but then the people who asked for it decided they liked the square one better. Despite having phases, it still is always at the opposite side of the Sun.
  • The moon in The Lost Crown: A Ghosthunting Adventure is perpetually full, and unnaturally large. It can even be seen to grow at one point, looming larger behind bare tree branches.
  • The moon in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is big enough to block out a huge percentage of the sky, as seen in the battle against the appropriately named Margaret Moonlight.
  • Lycanthropic horror game Bloodborne has a moon that sits in front of the clouds in the night sky.
  • In Earth Eternal, Earth's moon has had chunks blown out if it, with a Sickly Green Glow coming from between the pieces.

Web Comic

  • From Order of the Stick, we get this. Rich Burlew responds to rampant speculation that this is an eclipse with "I love how it never crosses anyone's mind that the author may know less about astronomy than they do. I WENT TO ART SCHOOL, OK?"
    • And stick figures is what he does? Art School doesn't seem like such a good deal anymore....
      • Rich has appeared in the comic at one point and proven that he can draw very well. He probably chose to make his comic using stick figures simply because they're simpler to draw, and thus put out a semi-weekly comic strip
    • You don't learn just drawing at art school. You can major in graphic design, screen writing, interior design, exterior design, basically anything that is 'artistic'. Which is a lot more than drawing/painting.
  • Soul Symphony: The moon in Olivia's Soul World, where it is always night time, is the source of all energy and life. Supplies strange powers and mutations for Olivia's sidekick. Not only that, but it appears to be permanently crescent because a majority of it actually exploded.
  • Irregular Webcomic discussed suspicious parameters of certain Endor's moon in Star Wars.
  • Our Little Adventure: The moon has a face. Justified by the fact that it's actually a moon goddess.

Web Original

I've got my eye on you, Moon.

Dammit Moon, I knew you were up to no good.

  • A few variations in Homestuck: Prospit and Derse have moons chained to their surfaces, and the trolls' homeworld Alternia has two moons, a huge green one and a smaller pink one with a tiny moon of its own. Its eventually revealed that the green one isn't natural, and is only there because of Doc Scratch.
  • In Homestar Runner, the Moon is shaped like an octagon.
  • The moon in the sky of Remnant in RWBY is shattered into a dozen or more pieces. In volume 6 we learn that it was broken by one of the two gods who had created Remnant while making a Dramatic Exit after nuking the entire planet in response to Salem raising a human rebellion against them.

Western Animation

  • Many cartoons show visible stars within a crescent moon.
    • One classic modification is in George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Often, the moon would be not just shown as a crescent, but as a slice of itself—with curvature, implying that most of the moon had been hacked away. Since Krazy Kat ended its run in the 1940s, this trope is Older Than Television.
      • The landscape in Krazy Kat is so surreal anyway that this just blends in.
    • On a more serious note, this may be excused if circumstances have caused a huge chunk to have been taken out of the moon anyway. The problems this would cause for tides or the integrity of the remaining bits of the moon seem to rarely be addressed.
  • Bruce Timm commented how whenever the moon is shown in any DCAU show that it is full. He tried to get it shown as a crescent to indicate change in time, but it never quite came to pass.
  • There was not a Gargoyles episode where the moon was anything but full... ever.
    • There's a brief shot of a crescent moon in "Eye of the Storm", and several in "Hunter's Moon".
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, when the Moon Spirit is threatened, the moon turns red, and when the Moon Spirit dies, it is no longer visible.
    • Played straight in season 3 as well, where the moon was shown to be full for about four episodes running, despite the in-show dialogue suggesting that some time passed between episodes. (and no, it couldn't have been a month per episode as the characters were on a very specific time-limit)
    • Also shown to be full and crescent in the same night in the episode "The Painted Lady."
    • Well, the moon is a living, thinking entity in the Avatar-verse. It's quite possible Yue can be in whatever phase she wants to be. Particularly if it's dramatically appropriate.
      • And, of course, there's no reason to assume that Avatar takes place on planet Earth. The "moon" in the Avatar world's sky is some other celestial object, associated with that planet.
    • However, the moon's behavior in the solar eclipse was actually fairly realistic—a real eclipse lasts around a couple of hours, give or take, from beginning to end, and is only a total eclipse for a very short time. In the show, the total eclipse lasted eight minutes, as mentioned by one of the characters.
  • Beast Wars: There were two moons revolving around the planet. Only, by the end of season 1, we discover that one of the moons wasn't really a moon, but was in fact an artificial satellite (and Phlebotinum Bomb) planted there by an alien race in their research on the planet.
    • It's how they figure out that something on this planet is seriously messed up, as the second moon has far too little mass for a satellite of its size.
    • It also hid the fact that the planet they were on was Earth. When season 2 starts and only the actual moon remains, Dinobot is the first to realize that Megatron had led them to the correct planet after all.
    • Um, no, Waspinator is the first to figure it out, Dinobot suspects it, but Waspinator confirms it.
  • In the Ni Hao, Kai-Lan episode "Kai-lan's Moon Festival", a cloud conveniently (to the plot) blocks the moon and only the moon. The stars can still be seen in the sky.
  • Parodied in The Simpsons. In the episode "Dude, Where's My Ranch?", Lisa and guest character Luke are looking at the night sky and comment on how big the moon seems. The camera then pans back to show the landscape they're on - with the moon taking up half the screen.
    • "You should see it when it's full!"
  • In Thundarr the Barbarian, a runaway planet passes between the Earth and the Moon, and its gravitational field cracks the latter in half, like a walnut. This doesn't affect its orbit in the slightest, but it does end human civilization.
  • The Tick (animation) had a normal moon..then had CHA lasered into it...then explosives filled the C in...then it got a bite taken out of it.
  • Lampshaded in Futurama "Kif gets Knocked Up a Notch", when Kif Kroker constructs a romantic HoloShed night scene for Amy complete with impossibly large moon. "And I would pluck the moon from the sky, just to see you smile," and then he does. Later it even saves them during the Holodeck Malfunction when it plugs a hole in the hull.
  • Fanboy and Chum Chum. For the most blatant example, in "Fanboy in the Plastic Bubble" the titular bubble is popped by the crescent moon.
  • The moon from Ruby Gloom appears to be alive. It has eyes, a mouth, and is even seen reacting to what the characters are doing sometimes. Oh, and it sings the theme song.
  • Ren and Stimpy are stranded on a remote planet in one of the space episodes. Ren goes to bed but Stimpy implores him to go outside and look at the moon. Ren goes back outside grumbling about what's so special about it and cracks his head on it. It's about two yards above the surface and things just get weirder from there.
  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has two princesses, one who raises the sun in the day and one who raises the moon at night. This means that Equestria is some strange place where the moon only comes out at night. This means the sun and moon must always be on opposite sides of the planet.
    • The moon also used to have visible craters forming the shape of a unicorn's head: the "Mare in the Moon". This disappeared when Nightmare Moon was freed from her exile there.
  • Tiny Toons did a parody with the Amblin Logo having Elliot crashing into the moon and falling off his bike.
  • One Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon has Casper decide to visit the Man in the Moon. Being a ghost, he has no trouble flying to the Moon, but as he gets closer, the smiling cartoon face on the moon slowly fades into just being a bleak pattern of craters, and he arrives bitterly disappointed. Fortunately, the place turns out to be inhabited by little Lilliputian guys, so he makes some friends after all.

Other

  • There's a BBC ident (the short clip or animation that's playing while a voice announces what's coming up now or later) with people driving their boats over a lake, each one carrying a piece of the moon. Then they put it together and we see a big (ridiculously big) moon hovering over the lake as it turn into the BBC logo.
  • The Animusic video "Resonant Chamber" features four moons in the sky, each a different phase. Given that the video also features a self-playing conglomeration of different string instruments, this can be safely filed under Rule of Cool.
  • Lots of science fiction shows like to illustrate that a planet is alien by having multiple moons and really big moons, even if they seem too close to exist without tearing the planet apart from tidal forces, or indeed (in the case of Vulcan from Star Trek) when the planet has previously been stated to have no moons...
    • Similarly, fantasy often invokes the Many Moons trope, albeit with less attention to details like tidal effects since A Wizard Did It.
  • A crescent with a star inside its horns is a famous symbol of Islam and appears on the flags of many majority-Muslim countries. In most cases, the horns are over-long, as well. All this impossibility is justified, inasmuch as the symbol alludes to the possibility of miracles (a key point for any self-respecting Abrahamic religion).
  • The recapper for Hell's Kitchen at Television Without Pity has noted that the series repeatedly features shots of a full moon when it cannot possibly be a full moon the entire time throughout the series run. Sometimes, a crescent moon is thrown in, apparently just for kicks.
  • Yes it's surreal, but Van Gogh's "Starry Night" has the crescent extending too far around the moon's surface.


Real Life

  • The Moon illusion was probably the inspiration for so many artists and film makers drawing the moon abnormally large, they have seen it that way.
  • The moon is actually moving away from the Earth at a very slow rate—it can be measured in inches per year—so it would have appeared slightly larger three thousand years ago, but probably not noticeably to the naked eye. Now, if you went back to the time of the dinosaurs...
    • "We can see that a hundred million years ago, the moon was twelve meters above the earth. This might have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs - the tallest ones, anyway."
    • The moon's rate of recession has been measured at 38 mm per year. That places it only a few thousand kilometers closer to the Earth during the Mesozoic Era, which would still not be noticable to the naked eye.
    • Some astronomers have suggested that 5 billion years in the future, before the Earth gets swallowed by the red giant Sun, the drag caused by the Sun's extended atmosphere will cause the Moon to spiral in until the moment it's at a distance to the Earth of 18,500 kilometers, when Earth's gravity will torn apart the Moon turning it into a ring system. Debris forming these rings will also decay and impact the Earth.
  • By sheer astronomical fluke, Earth's Moon appears to be virtually the same size as the Sun, when viewed from the planet's surface. This makes solar eclipses extra-spectacular here, as a corona of light rims the Moon's shadow: something which could make the Earth a popular tourist attraction during eclipse years, should sightseeing aliens ever learn about this weird coincidence.
    • Every year is an eclipse year. See here. - there are between 2 and 5 solar eclipses each year, however at most two total (partial ones are not very impressive).
      • And any (opaque) object near a source of light casts a shadow all the time. Spacefaring aliens could just set up shop within the shadow of any celestial body and have their very own "eclipse". The attractive of the Earth would be that it happens naturally; it would only be a touristic attraction when there's an eclipse going through a populated center, to provide basic touristic services.
  • A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon's orbit carries it into the Earth's shadow. This results in the moon turning red.
  • Blue-tinted moons are possible as well (it involves lots of atmospheric dust), but the phrase usually refers to 'additional' moons due to the difference between the 30-or-so day calendar month and the 28-or-so day lunar month.
  • Theoretically, a satellite could pass between the Earth and the moon at a time when the latter appears as a crescent, creating a "star between the horns" configuration. The satellite would have to be exceptionally reflective to be distinguishable in contrast to the moon's reflected brightness, however.
    • Also, if it were far enough and large and/or reflective enough to be visible from the surface, it wouldn't even appear to move.
    • Flares from Iridium satellites (up to magnitude -8; many times brighter than Venus and visible in broad daylight) are plenty bright enough to create this effect. Satellites move plenty fast enough to be distinguished from stars, however.
  • Recently, scientists have discovered water underneath the moon's surface, which raises a lot of questions...
  • Small as it appears, seeing something framed in the moon as in the trope image is easily possible: they just need to be far enough away that they appear smaller than the moon. Presumably, the image of Elliot and ET was taken from some miles distant with a telephoto lens.
  • Many accurate maps of the Moon that were created more than 50 years ago depict it upside-down and flipped left to right, as early techniques to capture its image inverted the Moon's light as it passed through a telescope. More recent maps use digital image-reversal to flip the image again, so it once again matches what's visible to the naked eye from Earth.
  • At various times of the year, it is actually possible to see the sun and the full moon at the same time. This becomes important in The Hobbit, in which these times are called Durin's Days.
  • If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, go to the Southern Hemisphere (residents of the Southern, reverse these instructions) and look up. The Moon is now upside-down!
  • For a proof that the Earth is round, look at the shape of its shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse (it's always a circular arc, so the Earth's 3D shape has to be a sphere); this was one of the first indications that the Earth is not flat.
  • According to some simulations of the great impact that it's believed formed the Moon, two moons (not just one) were formed at a distance of 20,000 kilometers. However, the innermost one ended crashing with the Earth or the other moon just 1,000 years after its formation.
  1. ↑ Whose eye they crash their spaceship into, no less
  2. ↑ shares its name with the Faerûnian goddess of moon, navigation and some other things
  3. ↑ the goddess of illusion and deception in general
  4. ↑ the date varies, obviously, but it's presumably usually within a couple of months of the Summer Solstice, as the occurrence is known as Geheimnisnacht/Geheimnistag (the Night/Day of Mysteries), and the two months after the solstice are Vorgeheim (Before Mystery) and Nachgeheim (After Mystery)
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