http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WaterIsAir



My barracuda was in the shop

So I was in a rented stingray

and it was overheating — Kip Addotta, "Wet Dream" I was driving in downtown AtlantisMy barracuda was in the shopSo I was in a rented stingrayand it was overheating

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Living underwater sounds like it would be so cool, doesn't it? Actually, in fiction, it isn't that big a deal because life at the bottom of the ocean is conducted impossibly similarly to life on land. Whether your characters are mermaids, Fish People, or talking, sentient fish and other sea creatures, you'll find their underwater lifestyles have a lot in common with humans' above-land lifestyle. Most Writers Are Human, and they give the viewers or readers a portrayal they are familiar with.

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Examples of this type of Creator Provincialism include:

The problems with viewers being able to understand the characters can sometimes be handwaved with Direct Line to the Author.

In addition, the setting for underwater fantasy is almost always "under the sea," not "under Lake Michigan" or "under the Amazon River" presumably because it sounds more romantic, even though salt water would introduce yet a few more challenges, such as 'things would rust at really fast rates' and 'having a salty taste constantly in your mouth would probably get annoying faster than permanently wrinkled skin and burning eyes'.

In short, replacing air with water requires far more changes to the human anatomy than simply replacing legs with a fishtail and far more research about the laws of physics and biology than most writers bother to do. Fortunately, as mentioned above, the concept is saved by the Rule of Cool and by Acceptable Breaks from Reality. Nobody is going to watch an ocean movie, only to strain their eyes and ears to see or hear anything taking place.

Compare Water Is Dry, Space Is an Ocean, Sand Is Water, Atlantis Is Boring, and Walk, Don't Swim.

Contrast The Sky Is an Ocean.

Not to be confused with Super Not-Drowning Skills, when characters are given an unexplained ability to survive underwater for an infinite time.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch: Will someone please explain the existence of working hot tubs and fountains?

Digimon Tamers did this in "Shibumi Speaks". As long as they believe they won't drown/get wet/etc, it won't happen to them. Justified in that the Digital World functions under vastly different rules than the real one, with the water being mere data.

Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea has this trope full-scale. Underwater is exactly like above water, except for fishes (who looks more like hovering than swimming) and the occasionnal swimming (which looks rather more like a long jump). There is no buoyancy, no water resistance, no distorted sounds, no light dampening and you can even cook and drink without a problem.

In Neon Genesis Evangelion, LCL has the consistency (and, presumably, composition) of amniotic fluid, and characters breathe it while sitting in the Entry Plugs. Fair enough, but they also speak and yell without any sort of difficulty or distortion. Sweat, blood, and tears also behave as though LCL had air-like density and solvency. There have been attempts to explain away the unimpeded-speech issue, but the tears that fall freely on a character's lap remain inexplicable.

A very odd example in Saint Seiya. The Seven Pillars of Poseidon's Sanctuary are connected to, and hold up, the Seven Seas, so the temple itself —at the bottom of the ocean, mind— is a dry land above which the seas hang like a canopy. As a show of force, Seiya was once punched upwards so hard by Seahorse Baian that he crashed into the "ceiling" (namely, the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean,) was pushed up all the way to the surface by the strength of the blow, and then sank all the way back down, unimpeded, and fell right back into the Sanctuary. But despite the entire depth of the ocean hanging above the temple, sunlight is as abundant there as though they were fighting in an above-water plaza.

Marine Boy is all over the place with this trope. The Ocean Patrol craft certainly move in 3D, and require engines to do so. While underwater, the characters never walk, and the resident mermaid has, at times, to cope with not having legs, though we never really see her much away from the humans. On the other hand, the Non-Human Sidekick (a dolphin) never need to breathe (and it's doubtful that he could chew the "oxygen gum" that the eponymous hero used); the hero's uniform has no visor or goggles, yet he has no difficulties seeing or talking underwater — which is generally crystal-clear; and in the most outrageous use of this trope, his sole weapon is a folding boomerang, which he throw at everything from bad guys to sea monsters to full-sized submarines! Being an "electro-boomerang", it zaps them all (and frequently more than one in a single "flight"), often causing mechanical enemies to blow up.

Subverted in an episode of My Bride is a Mermaid when Sun decides to take Nagasumi underwater to look at a coral reef. However she's unaware of how sensitive humans are to water pressure, and it ends up taking a toll on Nagasumi when they get around 45 meters deep.

In an episode of Pokémon, they have a battle underwater. Misty scolds Ash for forgetting that you can treat underwater like the sky when Ash gets confused after their opponent takes advantage of the surroundings to attack in 3 dimensions. Also happens in the third movie when the film's antagonist Molly challenges Misty. Since it takes place in a dreamworld created by the Unown, it's expected.

In the Fairy Tail seaside training episode, Natsu practices his Fire Dragon Roar by using it deep underwater.

Inverted in an episode of Doraemon where the gadget-of-the-week permitted the protagonists to treat air as water, for recreational purposes.

Comic Books

Comic Strips

This happens all the time in the U.S. newspaper comic strip Sherman's Lagoon.

Films — Animation

Films — Live-Action

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow includes a scene where airplanes fly underwater. The airplane's control surfaces allow it to function almost identically to how it would fly through the air.

Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, during the animated sequence after the bed and its passengers crash in the Island of Naboombu's lagoon and sink to the bottom.

In GI Joe The Rise Of Cobra, while not obvious, the effects of particles in the underwater fight scene moved very much like they were in air, not accounting for the difference in density, especially in cold water. In fact, the speed at which it moved was comparable to that in air.

In The City of Lost Children one of the main characters, the Mad Scientist lost his mind (Identity Amnesia), and as a deep sea diver permanently lived on the bottom of the sea, collecting marine debris.

In "The Magic Voyage of Sinbad" the title character throws himself into the sea to appease Neptune. On MST3K they even ask "Why isn't it wet underwater?" and when a pigeon with a message reaches him in Neptune's kingdom they ask "How does that work?"

Literature

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader addresses this briefly when Lucy sees mermaids through the preternaturally clear sea-water. Among other things, C. S. Lewis compares the deep water to dangerous mountains, and the shallows to sunny, habitable valleys. In addition, even though mermaids are usually depicted in media as being able to poke their heads above water and converse and breathe in air, Drinian explains that these merpeople cannot come up and examine the Dawn Treader or talk with them because... they cannot breathe air! When Lucy sees them, she expects them to be able to surface, because her coronation apparently featured singing mermaids that could breathe air. Drinian explains that those mermaids must have been a different sort.

An interesting aversion in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—when Harry goes to "blast" the Grindylows during the second task, a jet of hot water comes out of his wand.

James Blish's novella Surface Tension averts this trope very nicely. Blish's microscopic water-dwellers live in a "universe" with three "surfaces": the bottom, where the water ends; the "sky", the top of the water, which (as the title suggests) they cannot penetrate; and between these, the thermocline, the division between the sunwarmed upper layers and the cold deeps.

In The Chronicles of Amber, the water in the undersea city of Rebma works like this, but the trope is justified as it's explicitly a magical effect, and people are able to breathe the water within the city as well. In fact, if you fall off the underwater stairway leading to the city, you re-enter 'normal' deep sea conditions and are crushed to death. "Why are the waters in Rebma so different from the waters elsewhere?" I asked. Because that is the way it is ," replied Dierdre, which irritated me.

Averted in Hal Clement's books, since they are hard SF. In "Ocean on Top", a colony of humans is established on the ocean floor, using geothermal power to provide light and a specially-made oxygen-carrying dive fluid in place of air. But since the dive fluid is denser than water, the humans have to wear weights if they want to stay on the bottom or even have neutral buoyancy (their bones were denser than the fluid and their lungs were filled with it, but the rest of their bodies were less dense and the net effect was a slight positive buoyancy). They sleep tied to the ceilings of their buildings. Played with in Close to Critical. The planet Tenebra has atmospheric conditions close to the critical point of water. This leads to some truly bizarre effects like large blobs of water hovering in the air, and people lighting fires to drive water away at night.

In the children's fantasy novel Lundon's Bridge and the Three Keys, common examples of this trope appear (some, such as humans and insects breathing underwater and having no problems with pressure, are handwaved as the result of magic) — and then there's the crisis that kicks things off. The world's oceans are gradually being overtaken by "The Decayed Sea", polluted waters that mutate plants into carnivorous monsters. Decayed Sea areas are the aquatic equivalent of "forbidden forests" in land-based fantasy works; one can enter (more often, be pulled into) and exit them, and the monsters cannot survive in the clean water beyond them. This shows a gross misunderstanding of how water and contaminants work, but correcting it would require a thorough rewrite of the plot.

Mostly averted in Redwall: since the main characters are all mammals, there are very few underwater sequences, and even those involve otters.

Averted in Animorphs, since most underwater sequences have the characters morphed as appropriate sea life. There is one book where they go underwater in a stolen space fighter, but Ax explains that most such ships are capable of limited underwater travel.

Live-Action TV

seaQuest DSV takes place on a hyper-advanced submarine in the near future. They almost always treat water as air (they even have mini-subs that behave as jet fighters).

Tabletop Games

The Basic D&D supplement The Sea Peoples averts this trope, mentioning such issues as light levels, water clarity, and triton architects' channeling water currents through homes so that oxygen-depleted water is carried away efficiently. (The last chamber that such disposal-currents pass through is even designated as a latrine.) Later editions of Dungeons & Dragons have pages of rules detailing precisely how life underwater is not like life on land (and spells to remove some of these differences). In AD&D1E, this trope could be invoked by means of the Airy Water spell, which caused an area of water to be simultaneously treated as air for air-breathing creatures and as water for aquatic creatures.

In Exalted, a few bits of artifact equipment and the anima power of the Water Aspect Dragon-Blooded allow them to treat water according to this trope.

Video Games

Web Animation

DSBT InsaniT: Lampshaded by Cody in the underwater game he and Lisa are playing in 'VRcade'. Cody: Oh... right... the games underwater, but at the same time its NOT... Its like we're on freaking Oh... right... the games underwater, but at the same time its NOT... Its like we're on freaking SPONGEBOB or something!

Web Comics

Certain trolls in Homestuck are amphibious, but you wouldn't noticed when they were underwater save for the fish suspended in "midair" . But then things get subverted when physics strike .

Western Animation

Real Life