World in the Sky: Difference between revisions

== Anime & Manga ==

* Edolas from the Anima arc of [[Fairy Tail]] was an Earthlike land with an assortment of floating islands, including the one carrying the Eksheeds' homeland of Exteria, and another that the King used to store the Magnolia [[Power Crystal|La'cryma]].

 

 

== Films -- Animation ==

* ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVmKhNG6S3o Skywhales!]''

* ''[[Dragon Hunters]]'' [[The Movie]]

== Films -- Live Action ==

<!-- %% The Hallelujah mountains in Avatar are not an example - they are a Floating Continent. Please stop adding it. -->

 

 

* Arianus, from the first book of ''[[The Death Gate Cycle]]'' by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, is a series of continental islands floating at different levels. Apparently, they're made of a sort of coral filled with floaty gas.

* ''[[The Edge Chronicles]]'' features a small city built on a floating rock, which in turn was anchored to a city built upon a far larger floating rock. Which had "gardens" of stones similar to it, that occasionally grew large enough to become less dense than air and float away into the sky. The floating city was kept from floating away via a combination of many huge anchors and a lump of impossibly dense material that was deposited by special lightning bolts and exploded extremely violently if broken in anything other than twilight and as such grains of it were incredibly valuable.

** Or rather, it's caused and maintained by the Ellimist's people - the surface is too inhospitable to live on, so they live on chunks of crystal held aloft by their flying residents. Their names are more like addresses, they have strictly scheduled free-fly and rest time, and not much else about their culture (such as where they actually get food) is given much detail.

* In ''[[The Culture/The Player of Games|The Culture]]'', one of the character wants to '''build''' one of those, because it would cooler than the artificial worlds usually made by the Culture (which just show how blasé the Culture citizens can be: [[Ringworld Planet|Ring Worlds]] and sapient spaceships with hundreds of millions of people living inside can be deemed ''boring''). The Culture's technology would allow it to build such a world, except that it would be a lot of energy and matter lost on a whim.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* Multiple floating islands provide the name of the [[Tabletop Games]] ''[[Skyrealms of Jorune]]''.

* The ''[[Ravenloft]]'' game setting consists of chunks of landscape -- the Core, Clusters, and Islands -- adrift in a directionless zone of supernatural Mists. Each piece of landscape has its own gravity and own climate, and ''appears'' to have its own sky and horizons, but travel too far, dig too deep, or fly too high and you'll still wind up at the Misty Border.

** Sufficient numbers of floating continents turn up in the [[Mystara]] setting to suggest this trope, both in outer-world Floating Ar ([[A Wizard Did It]]) and orbiting the inner sun of the Hollow World (The Immortals Did It). Subverted in the former case, as the people of Ar still depend on resources from the land or sea beneath them.

* ''[[Prose Descriptive Qualities|Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies]]'' takes place within a dome thousands of miles across, filled with floating islands ranging from near-continents with their own seas to tiny islets. There's also a region called the Sky of Stones filled with floating boulders.

 

 

== Video Games ==

** There are no hints that the world has ever been different, the world was the same way in ancient times. The planet and surface act somewhat like a gas giant with thinner atmosphere layers above and crushing pressure on the surface. Though why the planet appears blue from space is anyone's guess.

** Metafalss isn't even a continent. The people are living on the mechanism that was supposed to build the Tower for temporary use. During the course of the game, they {{spoiler|create an entirely new floating continent separate from the Tower because Metafalss was quite literally falling apart.}} The only tower that was actually designed from the start to live on was the First Tower, Sol Ciel.

* Outland in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' consists of the blasted shards of Draenor, home of the orcs and ogres, which now hang suspended in an interdimensional void. The Skywall and Firelands sections of the Elemental Plane, as seen in some dungeons, raids, and daily zones, give this idea as well.

* The "border world" of Xen in the ''[[Half-Life]]'' series consists of strange islands floating through a nebulous void.

* The ''Ray's Maze'' series of [[World Builder]] graphical adventure games includes a setting known as "The Void", which is made up of hunks of dirt and rock varying in size between a pebble and a large island floating in a breathable atmosphere. Presumably infinite in size, it appears as though it even rains there, and falling off whatever you're standing on is a common way to die. While flying between islands is pretty much unknown (the "jump doors" of the series are the primary means of transport), two prominent features of the setting are the [[Lost Technology]] left behind by the [[Precursors]] and the giant [[Fantastic Voyage|voidbeast]].

* The Shadow Shard of ''[[City of Heroes]]'', a world shattered by a mad godlike being (it's implied that this world is an alternate version of Earth).

** It's also implied that the entire Shadow Shard is really inside the ''mind'' of said "god" and that the non-human inhabitants are all fractions of his shattered psyche.

* The freeware game ''[[Skyrates]]'', set in the land of Skytopia is entirely made of these.

* The ''[[Myst|Age of Spire]]'' consists of giant floating mountains in orbit around what looks like a neutron star. The physics are sufficiently well-described to trigger ''massive'' fan speculation on exactly how it works.

* Septerra from ''[[Septerra Core]]''. Its shape (and purpose) plays a part in the storyline.

* The game ''Netstorm: Islands At War'' is set on Nimbus, a world of flying islands that the inhabitants maneuver to fight the occupants of other islands. Note that the islands themselves never move relative to each other during the actual game, they are just land on which you can build. They also can't be destroyed (but the things you build on them certainly can). Making scientific sense was not high on the agenda.

* Both the ''[[Rage Of Mages]]'' and ''[[Spellforce]]'' series use the "long ago there was a cataclysm that shattered the world into floating islands, but some great mage or other managed to prevent it from falling apart completely." Oddly enough, in both series this property of the world is more backstory than anything, as the locations look pretty much like you'd expect a typical fantasy world to look (forests, deserts, snow wastes, ''active volcanoes'') and the characters are almost never confronted with "world's edge."

** In ''[[Spellforce]]'', at least, it's little more than a [[Hand Wave]] for why the game world is composed of a number of completely disparate maps that can only be reached via portals -- the technical reason being that it uses [[Real Time Strategy]] style maps coupled with [[Role Playing Game]] style backtracking, and this is what it ends up looking like.

* Apparently ''[[Tetris Worlds|Hotline Tetris]]'' leads to such a world.

* ''[[The Granstream Saga]]'' takes place on 4 floating islands (and a huge flying battleship), one for each element: Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth in that order.

** That is, there are blue skies and clouds, and sometimes faint multitudes of stars, in all directions. In these regions of the universe, space itself resembles a surreal version of Earth's daytime sky, with planets, moons, asteroids, and sometimes even stars floating around in it. It is possibly the most literal image of this trope.

* ''[[Baten Kaitos]]'' takes place on several islands floating above the Earth, which was tainted during the War of the Gods to the point where it became uninhabitable.

* ''[[Wizard 101]]'' is a mixture of this and [[Shattered World]]. It use to be a single world but fighting between the Titans broke it apart and the islands are currently held in orbit by magic.

* ''[[Minecraft]]'''s The End seems to qualify. It's a floating continent made of a type of white stone, with obsidian towers and is the home dimension of the Endermen.