Floating Islands Should Be Weird

Floating islands are a staple of fantasy fiction. It's easy to see why: floating islands are cool. Take an island and push it into the sky and it goes from mundane to extraordinary in moments. It is a shame then that most sky islands are kind of boring. It is strange that the underground (a thing that exists in real life) gets treated with a sense of wonder and mystery and uniqueness while sky islands (a thing that does not exist in real life) gets treated as "an island but sky".

Let's start with an example. There's this game called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), perhaps you've heard of it. TotK happens to have both deep dark caverns and sky islands and the difference between them is obvious and apparent. The underground is weird. It's dark and ominous and plays differently to much of the game. The things you find down there are alien; strange rock formations and trees long since petrified into rock. It's cool. The sky islands are just islands in the sky. They're autumnal, which is cool, but otherwise just some islands and some ruins. They're cool, but they're not interesting.

This is a common occurrence. All too often I have seen a setting that boils down to "sky islands!" as the beginning and end of its pitch. Sky islands are cool but why do we accept sky islands as the end of the concept? Sky islands would be weird. Like extremely weird.

Let's start with the obvious. Sky islands are in the sky. This, at the very minimum, means they're going to be colder and have less oxygen than most places on the surface. They're also an incredibly isolated environment, so whatever evolves on them is near guaranteed to be weird and hyper-specialized. Even beneath the island, where its presence creates a permanent dark spot on the surface will have a strange environment. A lack of sun will lead to a lack of plants. Perhaps a mushroom forest will grow there, or something weirder.

There's a reason that the Shattered Continent of Neurim (known as Zatrom), is a weird alien environment that lacks plant life, primarily being inhabited by living rocks and stone dissolving fungus. To me, part of the fun of fantasy is seeing a new weird world, and that's part of why it bothers me that sky islands are often treated as "an island but sky" rather than "what are the ramifications of having an island in the sky?"