ESB Underwater (series)

ESB Underwater, commonly abbreviated as ESBU, was the second ESB series to be created on | Encyclopedia SpongeBobia. It's known for being the series that jumpstarted the ESB series trend, and as of right now, it is the longest running series on Encyclopedia SpongeBobia with releasing its first episode on July 15, 2020. It is also the longest ESB series at two seasons and thirty-seven episodes and counting.

Overview
ESB Underwater, like most ESB series, is in reality television format. Multiple contestants compete against each other in various challenges to win some sort of grand prize. In this series' case, it's $500,000 in | United States Dollars, which changes into $1,000,000 in USD in the second season. The game show contestants must last the longest in the game without being eliminated or voted off to win the grand prize. To achieve this goal, they try to hide some sort of game play under their sleeve, or simply stay under the radar and avoid all conflict. The contestants are divided into two teams to face off against each other in order to win invincibility from being voted off. The losing team will have to vote off a player they feel isn't beneficial to either the team or themselves. This cycle continues until Mavnol333, the host of the series, decides to dissolve the teams and merge the contestants into one, meaning that only one contestant can win a challenge for themselves and every other contestant is at risk of being voted off. This cycle continues until there is only one contestant standing, and that contestant will be the one to take home the grand prize.

Production
This series was inspired by the now discontinued Total Drama ESB, which is the first ESB series to be created on ESB. The creator of ESB Underwater wanted to take that show's concept and turn it into something more than it already was. Total Drama ESB was rather focused on giving some of the wiki's users a shot at simply being included in something and didn't focus on telling a complex storyline. ESB Underwater, as well as many succeeding ESB series, focuses on giving some users a chance to be included in scripts while also having a goal to tell a thickening story. ESB Underwater is the show that started this, and the contestants' had more to their character than the previous ESB series. Many of the contestants went through their own story arcs and some of theirs are still progressing.

However, it wasn't always this way. Once ESB Underwater first started, the creator of the series was very eager to keep the show afloat, so the beginning eight episodes were written released in a mere four days. These episodes were rather rushed to be completed, so there wasn't much time to give most of the contestants' a solid personality, which led to afew characters with early eliminations not have many notable interactions with other characters or not much to their personality. Luckily, the creator realized that the series was releasing its episodes way too rapidly, and took more time than before to write out episodes. The ninth episode of the season, Tars, is what fans consider to be where ESB Underwater's episode quality began to rise. The characters received much more depth than they had in the first eight episodes, the episodes were longer, and according to fans, the comedy grew stronger. After the eighth episode released, episodes released every other day rather than every single day. Episodes started to release on ESB every three to four days, until after Gobble Up, Goobers!, the eighteenth episode, released. After that episode made its debut on the wiki, the creator of the series started his next school year, which meant a lot of his time to work on the show has vanished. Instead of releasing an episode every three to four days, one episode usually released every week. All of episodes 22 to 30 released 6-8 days apart from each other. The creator took a break after the first season's finale to pursue in other things. Once the break ended, the second season premiere released on the wiki, and the second episode of the season released a week afterward.

After Morning Rush's debut, episodes started to take longer than ever before to release. Thanks to the new season having many more characters to work with, the episodes grew even longer in length, which took the episodes longer to write. This combined with the creator being busy with other things such as schoolwork caused one episode to release every two weeks. The second season first released on November 22, 2020 and is over four months old as of now. Only seven episodes of the season have been completed and released, and it is still being worked on today.

Cast of characters

 * Mavnol333
 * Rick Astley
 * Weightnol383
 * 9/17
 * Albert's Country
 * Alex
 * BSponge
 * CartoonGuy
 * Chase McFly
 * Chickenkrispies
 * Cmcgrath26
 * Dededeletethis
 * Doctor Parick
 * ExcitedGreenPig6
 * FireMatch
 * Gamer
 * GoldenSpongebob
 * Gustav
 * GuyBesideYou3
 * Jfro8461
 * JoJo
 * Koolkitty108
 * Louis219
 * MagicSponge123
 * Peterbilt
 * PlanKrab
 * Robski
 * Ruggie
 * Scrooge200
 * Sharko
 * Shut Up
 * SirBenelux
 * SpongeKrab
 * SpongeTron D
 * SpungiBub
 * Suprem
 * TheKorraFanatic
 * Tortellini
 * Vemsa
 * Violetta
 * XsamM
 * YOIMKYLE

Trivia

 * This series' concept, sign-up blog post, and first two episodes were released on the same day.
 * Although, The Retrieval of the Spatula released on July 16, 2020 in | UTC, the timezone that ESB goes by.
 * This series was originally set to be one season long, but the creator decided to keep it going.
 * As of now, this is the only ESB series to have an entirely completed season.
 * It is also the only ESB series that has all of its first season's episodes released within the same year.
 * This series has the most ESB users involved to date at a whopping thirty-nine users. Including the host, Mavnol333, there are forty users involved.
 * A few ESB users who are not involved with the competition in any form have also made cameos in episodes, including EmilyHReturns and Anthony2306.