Kraken and Leviathan

For scale, that turtle is carrying a city on its back.

On a scale of one to ten, there is no number large enough.

—Flavor text for Cawh, pictured, Magi Nation

These are the big ones. These are the sea monsters whose size not only matches ships but dwarfs them. When these are introduced, all you'll see is an overhead shot of a small boat on top of a much larger shadow in the water and "small boat" ranges from fishing ship to aircraft carrier. These beasts aren't just big, they're leviathan.

They'll live in the deepest depths and their appearances are saved for the end of days when the world is to be shattered by their movements. If they're not Eldritch Abominations, they're the next best thing. There will be little shyness about their inspirations, they'll be unabashedly named after the Norse legend of Kraken or the biblical Leviathan. The Kraken tends to take the form of a tentacle laced giant squid or octopus, while the Leviathan is more variable, ranging from a colossal whale to a massive sea serpent. However, since Our Monsters Are Different, the title of kraken or leviathan may be given to all kinds of terrors of the deep.

The leviathan in the bible is often taken to be a view of a whale and is sometimes translated directly as whale (intriguingly the "big fish" that swallowed Jonah was often interpreted as a whale or leviathan but nowadays people are having a lot of fun with it as a Megalodon). Indeed, the modern Hebrew word for whale is לויתן, or leviathan. Strangely, the actual biblical description of a leviathan, suggests that it has legs and is able to move on land, and seems to refer to armour plates or scales (in fact, if one accepts that all traits might be considerably exaggerated, and we ignore the vast size typically associated with leviathans, it sounds quite like a crocodile.)

Kraken on the other hand are believed to be inspired by giant squid, and when most people think of a kraken, they tend to imagine a a squid-like creature that is simply many times bigger than a real one. However, since actual Nautical Folklore says that the Kraken could be mistaken for an entire chain of islands, one can reasonably infer that it was imagined to be much bigger than most film depictions.

Interestingly a common theme in sea monster stories is that of two contrasting sea beasts that are each other's mortal enemy and in real life sperm whale, the largest predatory whale and deepest diver, are believed to hunt giant squid.

In video games, Kraken often have Cognizant Limbs, with their tentacles being considered separate from the body as enemies.

If you were looking for the book by China Mieville, see Kraken.

Examples of Kraken and Leviathan include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Digimon Xros Wars Taiki unleashes Leviamon upon a Bagura Digimon.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, the mythological Leviathan of Atlantis seems to be a cross between a dragon and a sea serpent.
  • In the most recent[when?] manga chapter of One Piece the Straw Hat Crew discovers a gigantic kraken that feeds on ships that pass. Luffy, of course, seems to have intentions of making it the Team Pet. If he manages to get control of it, the Marines are really gonna freak.


Fan Works

  • In The Games We Play by Ryuugi, a RWBY/The Gamer Crossover Fic, once Jaune starts coming into his full power, he (and some friends) start leaving the Vale area to hunt truly monstrous Grimm. One variety they eventually face are Kaiju-sized sea-going Grimm explicitly called "Leviathans"; there are several others.


Film

  • In Star Wars Episode One, the Naboo ocean seems to be filled with monsters each getting bigger and bigger as you go deeper and considering the fact that the planet is meant to be hollow and full of ocean that gets you some pretty big fish. Also the oceans of Kamino. Ah hell, any planet with an ocean in the Galaxy Far Far Away is bound to have sea monsters in it.
  • The creature from Cloverfield, possibly.
    • Word of God states that the creature is a sea monster and not an alien like some believe (the 'falling object' was a satellite that awoke the creature, not the creature itself).
      • Though said creator seems to have taken on the anger of the co-Gods by saying as such, since the others went with the alien explanation, or at the very least wanted viewers to make up their own truths.
  • The Kraken from the Pirates of the Caribbean series gets bonus obfuscation points for being called "Davy Jones' Leviathan" once. Maybe they just meant leviathan as in "really big thing".
    • The PotC visual dictionary actually contains a picture of the entire Kraken rather than just it's tentacles, and it seems to combine both monsters. Imagine either a whale with tentacles where it's head should be, or a squid with a head long enough to act as a tail.
  • According to Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the Biblical Leviathan is actually a giant mechanical lobster that guards the entrance to Atlantis and looks nothing like the Biblical Leviathan.
    • The Kraken was actually featured in the first act of the film's sequel.
  • Most people know of the Kraken thanks to Clash of the Titans. Never mind what a Scandinavian creature was doing in Ancient Greece.
    • Not to mention that it is... you know... nothing resembling a squid that pretends to be an island. According to the director's commentary, they didn't even know about the Kraken's mythological origins and attributed its creation to the poem by Tennyson that most people these days have never heard of.
      • In Ray Harryhausen's book, The Art of Ray Harryhausen, he claims that the writer, at least, did know enough about the Kraken to know that it wasn't from Greek mythology, but put it in anyway because the name sounded so cool.
      • Not to mention, just because the Kraken is from Scandinavia doesn't mean it has to stay there. It could just swim wherever the hell it wants!
    • The thing from Clash was supposed to be Cetus/Ketos, the sea monster that Princess Andromeda was supposed to be sacrificed to, but they changed its name for no clear reason.
      • Probably because it's a fairly weak name. Try saying "Unleash the Ketos!" in a way that is in any way badass.
      • They could have used Typhon, but Zeus would never authorize his release, what with the thing being able to oust Zeus himself from Olympus.
  • Deep Rising.
  • Ursula's One-Winged Angel form in The Little Mermaid.

Comic Books

Literature

  • The "Leviathan" mentioned above is described in the Book of Job (Ch. 41, all of it), in the Old Testament of The Bible, and referenced elsewhere. Unlike most sea creatures, the Leviathan has an affinity for fire or something reasonably similar. Job 41:8 ("Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.") seems to indicate a reasonably high encounter survival rate, considering that this creature is essentially a seagoing dragon.
    • Leviathan represents the sin of Envy. "Envy lurks in the hearts of men, as Leviathan lurks beneath calm waters."
    • Job also makes reference to something called a Behemoth, which has similarly entered the lexicon as a catch-all term for "crazy-great-big-thing". It's thought to be a hippo. Or a titanosaur of some sort, what with the tail like a cedar and all.
    • Also, the great fish that ate Jonah.
      • In the Midrash there's a legend or myth that states that the giant fish which swallowed Jonah narrowly avoids being eaten by Leviathan.
  • Cthulhu from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos may count, as is imprisoned in the ocean on Earth, but it originally came from space...
  • The sixth Artemis Fowl book features a kraken. It's actually a peaceful bivalve creature that lives off of microorganisms and krill filtered out of seawater (just like a blue whale in fact). You still don't want to be on top of it when it sheds its skin, though...
  • The Codex Alera has its own leviathans, something like enormous turtles with no shells. Word of God is they're descended from plesiosaurs, and the smallest ones are forty feet long. The larger ones... well, they're probably the single greatest threat to oceangoing ships. Alerans have to use watercrafting to get around them, and the Canim maintain elaborate maps of their territories to avoid making them angry by sailing in too close.
  • In the Scott Westerfeld Leviathan trilogy, the eponymous beast is actually a airship, that looks sort like the biggest whale you'll ever see. In the next book the Behemoth (who is supposed to be a land creature) actually live in the sea, the picture of it puts it up with Lovecraft's beasties. Also their are the normal British navies' Kraken, which are massive squid/octopus monsters that can pull a weakened ironclad under given time.
  • Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series has World War II warships fall into an Alternate Universe where the Cretaceous extinction event didn't happen. Among the sea creatures in this world is the "mountain fish" (apparently actually air-breathing; there's mention of them spouting like whales), so big that one can wreck a steamship — by biting it. At one point, it's stated that the locals' massive city-ships known as "Homes" are almost as big as mountain fish — and a Home is the size of an Essex-class aircraft carrier.
  • The final book of the Illuminatus Trilogy, Leviathan, has the main characters coming face-to-um...something with the eponymous sea-monster, a titanic single-celled organism that's survived and grown since the Paleozoic Era.
  • The Enterprise fish from The War Against the Chtorr, part of the ecological Alien Invasion. These massive fish roam the oceans eating everything natural or man-made to fuel their constant hunger and enormous growth. Immune to Bullets thanks to their massive layers of blubber, the only way to destroy them is with a low-yield atomic torpedo.
  • Steve Alten writes a lot of books with these; his novel Meg was about a Megalodon (sixty foot prehistoric shark) that makes it to the surface after surviving down in the Marinara Trench. Hilarity Ensues. It suffered from some Sequelitis though. His more recent novel The Loch deals with, of course, the Loch Ness Monster. In a twist however, Nessie isn't a peaceful plesiosaur but a giant eel with a taste for tourists.
  • The Leviathan makes an appearance during The End of the World as We Know It in Good Omens. Since this particular apocalypse has all the Biblical imagery being filtered through a boy who has recently overdosed on Green Aesops, its immediate action is to attack a Japanese whaling ship.

The Kraken stirred. And ten million sushi dinners cried out for vengeance.

  • Among the whales are Moby Dick and the giant shark from Pinocchio Disneyfied into a giant whale (and thus, the 'big fish' from the Bible that inspired it).
  • Drowned Wednesday from the Keys to the Kingdom series was cursed to turn into a massive, omniphagic whale.
  • Father from The Ellimist Chronicles, a sponge-like creature big enough to cover an entire planet.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien's Fastitokalon; the Watcher in the Water may also qualify.
  • Shimmer, the dragon protagonist from Laurence Yep's Dragon Series gets into a fight with a raiding party of krakens.
  • Although we haven't seen any big sea monsters on the Discworld itself, there are mentions of the Midgard Serpent from Norse Mythology circling other flat worlds in The Colour of Magic and Equal Rites.
  • In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the eponymous ship is attacked by a large sea serpent, which almost manages to crush it in its coils.
  • In Sennar's Mission a gargantuan sea monster similar to a kraken is met on the way to the Submerged World. Its hunting method consist in wait for ships and then make them slither on his body to the gaping mouth in the middle, using tentacles if necessary. However, the beast is never named.
  • One of Larry Niven's "Svetz the time traveler" stories is Leviathan!, in which he is sent back in time to catch a whale, but the first "whale" he latches onto with his tractor beam is just too big to bring back—as it's the Biblical Leviathan, not a whale at all. After realizing that actual whales would have to exist to feed a predator that massive—so much of the knowledge of the past is lost in his world that they only have vague descriptions of animals that may once have existed—he brings one back: Moby Dick, just after he sank the Pequod.
  • In Wild Mage, during the attack on Pirate's Swoop, Daine tries to convince a pod of whales to attack the Carthaki backed pirate fleet. When they refuse and leave, Daine sends her awareness far out after them, and wakes the Kraken. He's more than happy to destroy any fleet she wants. She knows full well it's a deal with a demon, but she's desperate and agrees to his offer. He's described as an octopus with too many arms that are a mile long each, with a body that's a mile and a half. He's also fast: Daine found him out past the Copper Isles, a four day sail. He made it to Pirate's Swoop in the space of a morning.

Live-Action TV

  • One episode of Jurassic Fight Club featured a battle between a Megalodon shark (see above) and its more recently-discovered contemporary, the "biting sperm whale".
  • Beast Legends did an episode featuring a digitally animated kraken incorporating the nastiest features of the Giant Octopus, Giant Squid and Colossal Squid, scaled up to 200 ft long from the tip of its head to outstretch tentacles, which take up half the body length them selves.
  • If we go with the view that Space Is an Ocean, Moya's species of giant living ships called "Leviathans" count as examples of this trope.
  • The Leviathans on Supernatural are not giant sea creatures, but rather are perfectly capable of living on land and while they are seldom seen in their true form, there's no sign that this true form is any bigger than the human disguises they use. But there are good mythological reasons for calling them by the name "Leviathan": Their backstory is related to biblical mythology; they are Eldritch Abomination s that are all about having a predatory appetite; and when their true form is shown, the view isn't very clear, but it definitely has More Teeth Than the Osmond Family.

Mythology

  • Jormungandr the World Serpent of Norse myth is also under the sea, long enough to wrap around the world, some legends say twice.
  • Greek mythology has several large marine creatures. They were typically sent by the sea-nymphs to ravage land-dwelling kings or queens who offended them, and the royals tried to appease the monsters by sacrificing their beautiful daughters, which the heroes then had to rescue. One particularly worthy of mention being Ketos, the monster who was slain by Perseus. It is very obvious that Ketos was what the Kraken was meant to be in Clash of the Titans, but they opted for the creature of the Norse myths instead.
    • There's also Scylla (or is it Charybdis?),from The Odyssey.
      • Scylla was a six headed, snake necked creature that sat atop a cliff and snatched sailors from passing ships. The reason they didn't just sail around was because of the creature opposite the cliff, Charbydis. Basically she was a giant mouth under water. Every time she opened her mouth, a whirlpool formed to suck everything down. The original rock and hard place.
    • Another example was the sea serpent Heracles fought when he promised to rescue King Laomedon's daughter Hesione in exchange for a pair of magic horses. Heracles eventually killed the monster by letting it swallow him and then cutting his way out from the inside with his sword, but Laomedon tried to cheat him. Pissing off the Hot-Blooded Heracles was never a bright idea, and in this case Heracles exacted his vengeance by invading and looting Troy, killing the king and all his sons.
    • Another example would be the unspecified sea monster sent by Posiedon to help the Greeks in the Trojan War, too bad for Odessius he forgot to give Posiedon props for that when it was over.
    • Of course the best example to be found in this mythology would probably be Echidna the literal mother of them all, and a whole bunch of others who don't share her watery lair as well.
  • And then, of course, there's the Kraken and the Leviathan. The former emerged in medieval Scandinavian, especially Norwegian Nautical Folklore,[1] while the latter is the Christian edition of the Canaanite Lotan, an aspect/friend/ally/whatever of the sea god Yam.
  • Apep might also count. He was a colossal serpent that stalked the ancient Egyptian underworld, hoping to devour the sun god. According to The Other Wiki one of his nicknames was "World Encircler", making him similar to Jormungandr above.

Music

  • "Belly of the Whale" by Burning Sensations. The video shows the band and others partying in a set that's loosely modeled on a giant whale's mouth, complete with a water-slide entrance.
  • Mastodon's second album, Leviathan, particularly the song "Megalodon".
  • Alestorm, a Scottish Pirate Metal band, has a song called (and glorifying) "The Leviathan" on their album Black Sails At Midnight.
  • Revocation has "Leviathan Awaits"; here, the eponymous creature seems to be a borderline Eldritch Abomination with thousands of eyes, enormous barbed tentacles, and a gigantic, fanged maw. It also devours the research sub that decided to go poking around its domain with insulting ease.
  • Steampunk band The Cog is Dead has a song titled To the Depths Below on their album, Steam-Powered Stories. It describes a large, mechanical beast referred to as a leviathan.
  • Metallica's "The Thing That Should Not Be" is about a massive Eldritch Abomination living below the sea.
    • The Lovecraft misquote in the lyrics("not dead which eternal lie / stranger eons death may die") makes it pretty clear this is in fact Cthulhu.
  • Technical Death Metal band Fleshgod Apocalypse makes an interesting take in their EP Mafia. They play a cover of a song by At the Gates, "Blinded By Fear", which is about an unnamed terror that "unleaashes purgatory and burns the face of the earth"; however, in the cover, after the song is over a sound of waves and ocean is heard, implying the terror is a sea creature. The fact that the cover for the EP features a huge octopus-like creature rising from the sea helps.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

Tabletop Games

  • Many blue creatures from Magic: The Gathering, which includes Leviathans, Krakens, and other deep sea monsters.
  • In Rifts, the biggest Sea Monster is the Lord of the Deep, also referred to as both Kraken and Leviathan, a massive Cosmic Horror resting at the bottom of the Marianas Trench with tentacles that can reach for thousands of miles.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • The splatbook Elder Evils has the Leviathan, an immense world-spanning sea monster made out of pure chaos which was a side-effect of the creation of the world. It sleeps at the bottom of the ocean and will eventually fade away into nothingness, provided nobody wakes it up. Unfortunately, since this is Elder Evils we're talking about...
    • Kraken and another Leviathan also appear in the various Monster Manuals, the former being a particularly Giant Squid with magical powers, the latter being a really, really big whale. Supposedly.
    • Forgotten Realms got Leviathan—the superpowered whale working as Earthmother's divine minion for sea missions. She did never spawn avatars (until merging with Chauntea), such improved natural beasts were enough to deal with her problems.
    • While it never appeared in the original novels, the Dragonlance modules based on the Chronicles trilogy give us the King of the Deep. The King of the Deep is a nightmarish sea monster with the body of a huge fish covered in silver hairs, the head of a giant squid, and a pair of long, deadly lobster claws, created when ten (or twelve in the updated 3rd Edition version) of the corrupted priests of Istar offered themselves to the Queen of Darkness, who turned them into this monster.
  • In Chaosium's Stormbringer supplement Demon Magic, the adventure "Sorcerer's Isle" had a Megalodon that could sink ships by biting through their hulls and a giant whale-like demon named Lvthn.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has a few, though they're rather obscure.
    • The Space Wolf homeworld has a massive kraken (said to be a Tyranid offshoot) and sea serpents straight out of Norse myth, appropriate given the Space Wolves' Viking theme.
    • A sea monster is said to live on the planet Armageddon, where it attacked Ork ships. Given the nature of the setting, it's a safe bet that most world with any oceans have at least one.
    • Though a couple references that aren't obscure by any stretch of the imagination are the Tyranids of the hive fleets named, you guessed it, Kraken and Leviathan. The third canonic hive fleet (ignoring Naga, Jormungadr, and Gorgon) is Behemoth, the first fleet to appear in the chronology.
    • Rogue Trader has Void Krakens. They are spaceship-sized and slow enough that even most transport ships can outrun them in a straight line, and cannot attack at range. But they consist of stone-like substances, misshapen, have a habit of lurking in asteroid fields and neither have active sensors nor vent hot plasma out of their rear ends, so usually they are very hard to detect one until it's very close, especially if you don't specifically look for it. Also, they are tough, more maneuverable than human ships normally can be, and if one grapples a ship, it's hard to shake off, while shooting at it (whether from the grappled ship or others) damages the ship too. It can swat smaller objects with lesser tentacles, so not even Point Defenseless. Also, spacefarers traditionally make nice knives (that are also considered good luck charms) out of their "teeth", that is smaller claws from tentacles, though those are far more likely to be found stuck in a heavily damaged derelict than cut out of a slain kraken.
  • The New World of Darkness has the Leviathan as the Kerberos of the Ocean of Fragments. It dwarfs nearly everything else on this list, and pretty much qualifies for Eldritch Abomination status on size alone, even disregarding that it's an unstoppable force of nature that literally the entire human race has nightmares about. To give some idea of the scale, no-one has any idea what it actually looks like or what it is—it's so massive that the most anyone's ever seen of it is a vast, seemingly-infinite wall of flesh that gives no hints to its form. The best guess anyone has is that it's some sort of impossibly gigantic cephalopod, but that's just because it has tentacles.
    • There's also a fan-brew game on RPG.net, Leviathan: The Tempest, which is all about playing the Fish People in human form descended from primordial gods of the ocean. They have the ability to assume ungodly large forms, but don't do it except for dire circumstances as it tends to rend the Masquerade in two and drives humans into a state of holy terror.
      • And humans would utterly crush any Leviathan who tried it.
  • Exalted name drops the latter with Leviathan, a Lunar from the First Age who's spent the past few millennia stuck in his spirit shape as an orca, dwelling on his failure to protect his Solar mate, and serving as a god to/tormenting the inhabitants of a sunken city. Appropriately enough, he has a custom shapeshifting Knack that not only makes him gigantic, it allows him to serve as his own military force in mass combat.
    • It also has a kraken, although said kraken is made of magma.

Theater

Video Games

  • City of Heroes features Lusca, one of the biggest Giant Monster class enemies in the form of a colossal octopus that menaces Independence Port, and takes over a dozen players to systematically defeat. Oddly, the Kraken in that game is less aquatic, but you don't want to know about the Leviathan...
    • The thing called Kraken is a giant alien from another dimension. During a mission in Cimerora you must fight off tentacles of the actual Kraken.
    • Cap'n Krak'n Jumbo Seafood sign in Independence Port and Talos Island. Complete with octopus holding a spoon and fork and wearing a bib.
  • EarthBound has the Kraken, who in this game is less squid and more sea serpent.
  • Resistance 2 features the Kraken. It's actually kind of puny compared to some of these, but it's enormous and tentacley. It also features a creature called a Leviathan, but that one's more Kaiju than Giant Swimmer, despite living in the mostly-flooded Chicago.
  • Sin is an unusual example in that it shows it can fly toward the middle of the game, but otherwise fits this trope. It appears in Ansem Retort as "World-killing God-whale," and it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • Leviathan and Kraken are recurring characters in the Final Fantasy series, with the former often serving as a Summoned Monster, and the latter as a villain.
    • Final Fantasy III has the Nepto sea dragon, who roams the oceans of the Floating Continent. It functions as a Beef Gate preventing you from sailing out of the Bay of Nepto, and its rage can only be appeased by placing the gemstone Eye of Nepto in the Nepto Statue in the Nepto Temple. If the party tries to sail away regardless, the ensuing battle is unwinnable, and the party must run (if they can.)
    • In Final Fantasy IV, Leviathan is a feared monster that swallows ships whole. When Cecil and his companions set sail from Fabul, Leviathan does just that, scattering the party and taking Rydia to his kingdom, the Land of Summoned Monsters, where the party can later fight him and his Queen, Asura, to earn the right to summon them.
    • Final Fantasy V has an additional sea monster, the plesiosaur-like Syldra. She is Faris' pet sea dragon, who can carry the pirate ship on her back even when the destruction of the Wind Crystal keeps all other ships from sailing. Unfortunately, the boss monster Karlabos/Karl Boss drags her under, and Syldra is further weakened by saving the party from the sinking Walse Tower. In a Tear Jerking scene, Faris experiences a Heroic BSOD upon Syldra's death, but the latter's spirit would reappear in the third world and offer her help as a Summoned Beast.
    • The Updated Rerelease of Final Fantasy VI added Leviathan to the Esper roster, by having the sea serpent preying upon ships sailing between South Figaro and Nikeah. Defeating the creature will reduce it to Magicite, which the player can equip.
    • Final Fantasy IX has Lord Gizamaluke, who functions as an early That One Boss. He is revered as a god/king by the Burmecians, but the capacity to which is never touched upon in the game.
      • Additionally, there is a boss called Kraken, who is, unsurprisingly, water-themed, and has a knack for blinding your team with ink.
        • One of the summons is also Leviathan, who simply crashes a ginormous amount of water onto your enemy team.
      • You can also run into Zombie Whales, which can shrink their victims with sonic screams or turn them into zombies by spitting toxic dust on them.
    • Like the above example, the Wutai people worship Leviathan as a god. This serves no plot relevance except for some flavor text in a Bonus Dungeon and some brief banter when you talk to Yuffie in Crisis Core.
    • Leviathan functions as a Fantastic Voyage level in Final Fantasy II.
  • The third chapter in Tales of Monkey Island is called "Lair of the Leviathan". The chapter starts with Guybrush and his ship being eaten by a giant Manatee, but the title Leviathan turns out to be an even bigger female Manatee, which the first one has to conquer without being eaten.
  • In World of Warcraft, The Lurker Below, a boss in Serpentshrine Cavern raid whose ingame model and is actually called "kraken". Its brethren are called kraken as well.
    • In Cataclysm, however, there is the more traditional (i.e. giant squid) kraken Ozumat. And that's not even mentioning Nespirah... who is a giant... underwater... something.
      • Also from the same expansion, the Whale Shark. nearly ten million hit points, quarter million damage bites and an achievement for killing this beast just because you CAN.
  • Um, Kyogre anyone? It's an obvious Expy of the Biblical Leviathan.
    • The entire Weather Trio was meant to be one big Expy. Groudon is meant to represent the Behemoth, which according to some sources is mortal enemies with the Leviathan. Rayquaza is meant to represent the Ziz, whose job is apparently to calm Behemoth and Leviathan down when they get going.
  • Dragon Quest IX: at Port Llaffan, you meet Jona, a girl with the ability to call Leviathan... a gift the other townsfolk abuse by making the great whale provide the whole town with fish, completely giving up their own fishing efforts.
  • Age of Mythology has creatures called Leviathan and Jormund, but they're no bigger than most of the other Myth Units. The Kraken is also a present myth unit.
    • The Jormund is supposed to be the offspring of the real World Serpent though. The snakey fellow himself couldn't show, what with blocking out the entire screen...
  • One of the monster types available in Crush Crumble and Chomp, particularly The Kraken.
  • A humongous Zerg monster from Star Craft 2 is called a Leviathan. It can fly, shoot a wide variety of things (even other zerg air units), and has tentacles. Kerrigan's base in Heart of the Swarm is going to be one. Concept art indicates that it was originally going to be a whale-like creature larger than a protoss Mothership that could swarm planets with clouds of some kind of creature. There is also a zerg creature from the novels called a Behemoth, which is a docile manta ray-like creature of similar size (it is hard to tell how big the Leviathan is supposed to be) used for transport.
  • You can create both of these in Scribblenauts. The Kraken is a giant squid-like creature, the Leviathan manifests as a long sea serpent.
  • In Tomb Raider: Legend, Lara fights a creature called "The Leviathan".
  • The first and second boss in the arcade shooter, The Ocean Hunter. Leviathan is a giant shark in this game.
  • Razing Storm has a squid-like Humongous Mecha named the Kraken, complete with Combat Tentacles.
  • Mousehunt has the Squeaken Mouse and the Leviathan Mouse, which are pretty much a giant octopus and a sea serpent crossed with mice.
  • Wonder Boy in Monster Land has a Kraken boss, although not particularly large.
  • Wing Commander: Prophecy: The Terrans assign Reporting Names to the ships used by the new alien race attacking through the new wormhole in the Kilrah System. These names are pretty much all names for aquatic creatures from Earth, given that the alien ships all look like they would be at home under the ocean. The capital ships are named for mythological sea monsters, including the Kraken and Leviathan.
  • The second Endless Ocean game has both of these. There, the Leviathan is a large albino sperm whale with a back story lifted from Moby Dick. The Kraken appears in the form of Kraken Jr., a young giant squid.
  • In Kid Icarus: Uprising, you fight a Giant Space Kraken at the end of Chapter 8.
  • In the Boreas seabed mission of Guild Wars, players have to fight a giant kraken like creature as the final boss. In addition, "Leviathans" are large sea serpent like enemies that the players fight at points in the mission "the deep", as well as being frozen in jade at other locations.
  • In Subnautica, monstrous predators (explicitly identified as"leviathans") dwell in the deeper parts of the volcanic caldera where you've crashlanded.

Web Comics

  • The Dreamland Chronicles: they venture to the cave of the kraken.
  • Wapsi Square features a creature bearing some resemblance to the kraken. It is ancient and large enough to drop a U-boat on a beach. At one point in the past, Bud made a pet out of it and named it Stinky.
  • In Scary Go Round, the Kraken is caught by Ernest Cromerty, Gibbous Moon and Desmond Fishman (who was previously suspected by some readers to be himself the Kraken, because he was designated with this term in a prophecy).
  • Girl Genius has large whales and cephalopods peacefully present in England.
    • And then there are Great Cetaceans. They are immense and quite sapient, so as far as the ocean dwellers (other than Brits) are concerned, they are living gods (though whether they have powers comparable to abilities of Ancient God-Queens remains to be seen). They have an obvious problem communicating with other sapient beings, but can use trained Deepdwellers for that. Naturally, anything this big is a whole ecosystem unto itself, and in this case a mobile city as well. They also grow "small" chambers where even humans can breathe and survive. Occasionally actually called "Leviathans" by both Deepdwellers and humans.
    • There was a bit of Kraken vs. Leviathan fighting not so long ago, but not much is known about it… except exactly whom to blame for this.
    • Wild squids are (or at least were) also used as a variant of capital punishment.

Web Originals

  • SCP-169. It's probably bigger than Europe.
    • The SCP Foundation has plans of varying effectiveness to contain and/or prevent everything from multiple zombie apocalypses to holes in reality that periodically spew monsters. Their plan for this? When you cut through the formal scientific sounding terminology, it amounts to "Hope to hell it doesn't wake up, and if it does, hope it's friendly. The thing is just too damn big to do anything about."
  • "Wurser Fings 'ave 'appened @t Sea", matey. Jus' not dat much of 'em.
  • Magical Trevor 4 featured a Kraken with the face of a haddock.
  • This Cracked.com article discusses various unsolved mysterious and possible explanations for them. One of the mysterious is the Bloop (an extremely loud sound from underwater), and the possible explanation is that it's Cthulhu.
  • Three members of The League of STEAM recount their encounters with a Kraken in "Tall Tails."

Western Animation

  • In an episode of Martin Mystery, a Leviathan was guarding a treasure and attacked anyone who tried to steal it.
  • On Catscratch, Gordon goes hunting for the Kraken, who will supposedly grant a wish to whomever would defeat it in battle. In a later episode, the Kraken is revealed to be from another dimension.
  • Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas features a leviathan which the crew mistake for an island, complete with vegetation. It isn't actually aggressive, and is actually quite useful, as they can use it to tow the ship where they need to go. This leviathan gets points for being one of the comparatively few depictions that actually is big enough to be reasonably mistaken for an island.

Other

Real Life

  • Whales, obviously.
    • There's a fossil whale species named Livyatan melvillei (from the Hebrew spelling of "Leviathan" and the author of Moby Dick). And it is pretty scary-looking.
  • For a while researchers theorized that the stories of the Kraken were exaggerations of Giant Squid sightings, but more recent discoveries might prove that the tales were not so exaggerated; specimens as large as eight meters (26 feet) have been caught, and it's theorized they can grow to 10 to 13 meters in total. They've also been shown to display aggressive hunting behaviors, in contrast to the hypothesis that they are slothful drifters.
    • Then there's the Colossal Squid. A live specimen was caught in 2007, and initial estimates put its total length at 10 meters (33 feet) long before the tentacles shrank post-mortem. It's theorized that there may be even larger examples of the species in the wild, as the beak of the live specimen was smaller than what they'd found in the stomachs of sperm whales.
      • Another evidence is scars. Giant cephalopods, naturally, fight back unless completely stunned by an attack. This leaves recognizable marks on the sperm whale's hide. The size of some scars is quite impressive, and it can be hard to tell whether one was left when the whale was much younger and stretched with the skin, or it's fairly recent.
  • There have always been unpleasantly large cephalopods throughout the history of the world:
    • One was Cameroceras, an Ordovician (about 440 million years ago) genus of primitive shelled cephalopods which had long, conical shells ranging from 3 to 11 feet in length.
    • An ammonite from the Cretaceous of Germany was Parapuzosia, it had a coiled shell with a 6 foot diameter. It had numerous cousins in the US that were slightly smaller, about 3 to 5 feet in diameter.
    • From the Niobraran Sea, of Cretaceous Kansas, we have Tusoteuthis, a 20 to 35 foot long (with tentacles outstretched) relative of the modern-day vampire squid. Of course, it was not even close to being the worst of the worst of the denizens of the Niobraran: a fossil of a predatory salmon, Cimolichthys, showed that the beast choked to death while trying to swallow a Tusoteuthis, tailfirst.
  • Much is made about how the bus-sized, 20-foot placoderm fish Dunkleosteus was the world's first vertebrate superpredator. It's often mentioned that Dunkleosteus ' bite was among the strongest of any vertebrate living or extinct, and that it was a voracious cannibal. What isn't mentioned is how Big D had several, equally voracious relatives, including the evocatively named Dinichthys and Gorgonichthys, who were only slightly smaller (by about a few feet, or so). And then there was the 30 foot long Titanichthys, the largest placoderm ever, though, it was a basking shark-like plankton eater with "ineffectual mouthplates."
  • Then there's the Liopleurodon. It stalked the seas of the mid to late Jurassic. Its maximum size is controversial, but modern estimates are in the 20–30 foot range, about the size of a killer whale. Some other estimates, though, put it at over 50 feet long, which would make it the largest known predator in Earth's history.
  • Also, the Mosasaurs of the Cretaceous, which were about as close to the mythical sea-serpents as you can get.
  1. ↑ It is not yet found in Norse Mythology.
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