Mundane Afterlife

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Calvin: I wonder where we go after we die.
Hobbes: Pittsburgh?

Calvin: If you're good or bad?
—Calvin and Hobbes

Welcome... To Hell! I'm Old Scratch, and I'll be your waiter tonight. The only table we have is by the bathrooms, the specials menu only has food you're allergic to, there's a massive markup on the wine, and I'm afraid we're a bit busy at the moment, so the wait is... All Eternity!

This is a popular portrayal of the afterlife in comedies and Urban Fantasy: Heaven and Hell are much like our own universe, only Flanderized to be either perfect (but often not totally perfect) or unbearable. For some reason, restaurants seem to be a popular depiction.

It may be A Form You Are Comfortable With for souls who are still living who see or visit it.

Can overlap with Place Worse Than Death, A Hell of a Time or Ironic Hell. Compare Cool and Unusual Punishment.

Examples of Mundane Afterlife include:

Anime and Manga

  • Inverted in Amakusa 1637. At one point, the locals ask the time-traveling protagonists to describe the "Heaven" they believe they come from. When the protagonists comply, they are themselves shocked and moved when they realize the modern society they describe - one of electric light and heating, religious tolerance, rule of law, and ample food - is, in fact, Heaven for the medieval peasants. A paradise that they'd been taking for granted.
  • Bleach. Not only is the afterlife medieval Japan complete with social classes, but people are still born and die in it. Die in it in any manner that doesn't destroy your soul, and you reincarnate back in the living world. Note that Hell is separate from this setup, and we don't quite know how it works. Especially since we've only seen it maybe once, waaaay back around Episode 5.
  • In 5 Centimeters Per Second, Takaki has a recurring dream almost exactly like Heaven in The Great Divorce (see Literature below). The most salient feature is that he's with Akari. This may be something else, though.
  • Haibane Renmei takes place in a mundane version of purgatory, where children and teenagers are purified from their sins before going to heaven.
  • Japan's afterlife in Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru is strikingly similar to everyday life. The Egyptian afterlife is the classical one, though.


Comic Books

  • Johnny the Homicidal Maniac depicts hell as the real world without the decent folk mixed in with everyone else. In heaven everyone is omnipotent, but content to sit on a chair doing nothing for eternity. Until Johnny pisses someone off.
  • In Poodles from Hell, a dead cartoonist communicates with a living one to explain aspects of the afterlife through illustrations. The first place you go when you die is a quite ordinary coffee break room. You can sit there and sip on a coffee or soda and think things over before proceeding.


Film

  • The depiction of Hell in Highway to Hell. It included a diner and a strip club.
  • Monty Pythons Meaning of Life: Heaven is the cheesiest Vegas-style cabaret you could possibly imagine, complete with sub-Tony Bennett crooner and terrible dancers. And to make matters worse, it's always Christmas there.
  • The film Wristcutters: A Love Story featured an afterlife for suicides where everything was exactly like the real world only depressingly drab, broken, and devoid of color or warmth. Also, you weren't allowed to smile. In other words, pretty much what depressives think life is like anyway.
  • In the Albert Brooks comedy Defending Your Life, the "in-between" plane is an idealized resort setting where the dead dine in fine restaurants and generally enjoy themselves until it's time to be judged, after which time they will either be sent on to Heaven if they're deemed ready or reincarnated if the powers that be decide they still have more to learn on Earth. Their Judgment takes place in a courtroom setting, complete with lawyers and counselors. When it's time for the souls to go to wherever the powers have deemed they are to go, they travel there on trams like you'd see in Disney World.
  • The Bothersome Man invokes this trope flawlessly, depicting afterlife as a consumerism urban life so normal it's devoid of all deep emotions and feelings (even the consumerist ones, including smell, taste and alcohol highs), complete with absolute contentment and indifference of all the people around (even if you've just cut off your finger on an office cutter). Needless to say it's vague about the city being Heaven, Hell or Purgatory.
  • Heaven, or at least part of it in Beetlejuice is depicted as a large and rather mundane office environment.
    • And if you kill yourself, you become a civil servant and must work there.
    • They do briefly mention a possible next life, after a term served as ghosts is up.


Literature

  • In some ways, the afterlife featured in the J.W.Wells books by Tom Holt is not at all mundane, being an empty white expanse. However, considering the only activities that take place there are classes in basket weaving and intermediate Spanish, it probably counts.
  • In Briar's Book, Briar follows Rosethorn into the afterlife and finds her facing a huge, badly overgrown and disorganized garden... the sort of challenging project both of them could happily work on forever, being plant mages.
  • Discussed in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: Svidrigailov speculates that maybe the afterlife is just a small, dark room with spiders in the corners.
  • The Discworld book Faust Eric involves a discussion of how, since most of the damned become numb to the physical torments of Hell, the demons have devised ways to inflict mental torments—namely, incredible mind-destroying boredom. There's a lengthy discussion of how such a Hell would be like a cheap hotel room with nothing to read and only one TV channel (in Welsh) and the ice machines not working and the bars not open for several more hours. Although the actual Hell is a distilled version of that boredom, it's the same kind of idea. For instance the Sisyphus analog doesn't even get to try to push his rock up a hill. Instead he has to spend eternity memorising the endless and everchanging instructions on how to move objects safely.
  • The Nac mac Feegle from the Discworld series believe that they're in the afterlife, and refer to dying as "going back to the Last World".
  • Elsewhere is a novel centering on afterlife speculation. It has freshly-dead people go on a sort of boat together. Whatever killed them heals, and then they arrive in Elsewhere, where they are greeted by recently-dead relatives and friends. They age backwards then, and as newborns are taken back on the boat to be reincarnated. There's a society not unlike what the living have, and people tend to go for different jobs - Marilyn Monroe became a psychiatrist, for example. It's possible to pay to look at the world of the living and communicate through water, but that's generally frowned upon.
  • In Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven, before you can truly get to heaven, you have to meet five people to learn the meaning of your life. Afterward, you choose your heaven. Usually it is some place you liked or missed out on in life. It may even have people you loved in it. For example, Eddie's wife Marguerite's heaven is a constant stream of happy weddings, because she loves the magic of them.
  • In CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, Hell is a very drab city right after everything has closed for the evening. And your neighbors are jerks. (You are, too, but you're less likely to notice.) And it's raining all the time and there's nothing to do except bicker with the neighbors and make houses that don't even keep the rain out. All the interesting people are millions of miles away...and really aren't that interesting when you meet them.
Heaven—at least the part closest to Hell—is a beautiful vibrant natural setting, with everything bigger than life and more real than reality. And that's before sunrise. The very natives glow with light. Unfortunately, if you're a visitor from Hell, it's hard to enjoy, even after you get past being a jerk—walking is painful, and lifting anything heavenly is almost impossible. If you stop being a jerk, though, you become more solid.
    • Though at the very end, the narrator is carefully cautioned that he is only dreaming it and he must make it clear that it is a dream, with the implication that it was A Form You Are Comfortable With.
  • In one of Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms books the protagonist visits a local afterlife which is basically total apathy. People freshly arrived will work out of habit, making nets and cleaning clothes, or they will wander seeking answers, but the work never goes anywhere - nets never get bigger, the clothes aren't cleaner - and bit by bit they forget everything, until they lie down and sleep. They can be roused, but not into interest, and if reminded that they are dead they will attack.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Harry sacrifices himself, Dumbledore is amused to learn that the in-between-life-and-death place he finds himself in resembles King's Cross Station.
  • In The Lovely Bones, each person has their own heaven, but they overlap if they meld together well. The narrator (a junior-high-age girl who was murdered) has a high school like the one in her hometown, but with swingsets, and she never has to go to any class except art. The other residents include teenage boys who play basketball on the blacktop and adult female athletes who use the sports fields for practice. She has a roommate and an intake counselor. They can get whatever they want in heaven (as soon as they specifically figure out that they want it), but this seems to apply only to mundane things, like dogs for the narrator or speaking English without a Vietnamese accent for her roommate.
  • The afterlife in The Brief History of the Dead is basically the same as the world of the living, except nobody ever ages and people spontaneously vanish when there's nobody left alive who remembers them.


Live-Action TV

  • In Scrubs, one of JD's fantasies has him going to Heaven and finding it's really a diner that doesn't serve flapjacks, making him briefly wonder if flapjacks are actually evil.
  • The Ancients' form of Limbo in Stargate SG-1 consists of a diner. Apparently, the food's quite excellent. It's heavily implied that the Ascended Plane looked like a diner because Jackson Cannot Grasp The True Form of it, so his mind substituted a diner instead.
  • There was an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a food critic gave a bad review of a Chinese restaurant. When he came back on request to give them another chance, he was inexplicably ravenous, to the point of ordering everything on the menu and still not being satisfied. When he got his fortune cookie, it said "you are in Hell".
    • It was the '80s revival of The Twilight Zone; the episode was titled "The Misfortune Cookie," the critic viciously panned the restaurant before he ever ate there, and the fortune cookie he gets (over and over and over) reads "You're dead." It's based on a 1970 short story of the same name by Charles Fritch.
  • Voyager:
    • An honorable mention goes to the Q Continuum. It's not heaven or hell, of course, but as home to a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, it's certainly on par. To show why he wants to commit suicide, a Q philosopher shows the Continuum to Janeway as a tiny town on a dusty backwater road where nothing new ever happens.
    • When Janeway gets to visit, it's when two factions have gone to war. As such, it resembles the American Civil War.
    • B'elanna goes to the Klingon hell, and finds it to be an eternity on Voyager, but with no mission for the ship and no respect from her crewmates. Neither Klingon afterlife is quite analogous to Heaven and Hell. It's more like the Greek Hades (eternal boredom) for the dishonored dead and (of course) Norse Valhalla for the honorable. This may have something to do with the fact that Klingon legend states they killed the gods for being more trouble than they were worth.
  • Supernatural: Crowley the Demon, when he becomes King of Hell changes Hell from fire and brimstone, to an eternal waiting room.


Music

  • A rare musical one, from Billy Joel's "Blonde Over Blue": "In Hell there's a big hotel/ Where the bar just closed and the windows never open/ No phone so you can't call home and the TV works but the clicker is broken"
  • The Eagles' "Hotel California" could be seen as a metaphor for addiction or for Hell.
  • In "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Everything You Know Is Wrong," the singer ends up in Heaven, where St. Peter gives him "the room next to the noisy ice machine - for all eternity."
  • The Rock Opera A Passion Play by Jethro Tull describes a Heaven so mundanely good that the dead main character is bored of it, wishes to live in Hell, than finds Hell equally mundanely evil. He decides neither are his cup of tea, and that he is better off on Earth, neither aspiring to be entirely good nor evil.
  • "The Afterlife" by Paul Simon, encapsulated the refrain, "you've got to fill out a form first, and then you wait in the line"... until the last verse, when the narrator finally meets God.
  • The video for "Run On" by Moby has the main character die and go to Heaven, where Angels help employees over telephones and have "Employee of the month" awards. The main difference is that ,unlike on earth, things work as They should (The coffee is actually nice and the copier works), the coworkers are friendly and the main character quite enjoys it.


Music Videos


Mythology

  • A number of mythologies have a rather blah, dreary afterlife. The Mesopotamian version with vulture heads and all the dust comes to mind. And in Greek mythology, if you're not heroic enough to be in Elysium or bad enough to be in Tartarus, you wander the mists as a shade.
  • In Church Of The Sub Genius mythology (such as it is), there's a section of Hell called "West Heck", that's just like the living world, only more dreary and depressing. The implication being that you could be there right now and not even realize it; you just think that your life sucks.
  • According to the Principia Discordia, bad people (but not jackasses) end up in the Region of Thud. Christians call it "Paradise".
  • One of the traditional Chinese view of the afterlife can be summed up as "exactly like the your previous life, but with worse lighting". The dead has the exactly same needs as they did in their mortal life, and so must be provided offerings of (fake/paper-mache) food, cash, houses, servants, etc.


Newspaper Comics

  • In Dilbert the afterlife is shown to be... an eternity in a cubicle. Next to Wally.
  • There's a Gahan Wilson cartoon where Heaven is a slum and all the angels are alkies with cardboard wings and burlap robes. One of them happens to remark, "I always thought this place would be a whole lot classier."


Theater

  • Sartre's No Exit features the afterlife being three people locked in a room together for all eternity. The room is designed so that you just barely don't like it, and the people in the room are chosen so that no one can stand being in the others' presence. This is the play that gives us the quote "Hell is other people", after all.


Video Games

  • In Sam And Max: What's New, Beelzebub?, Hell is a rather dull office where it's always 4:59 p.m., every day is Monday, the coffee is cold, and the refrigerator is room temperature.
  • Afterlife Heaven And Hell has an impressive selection of really quite creatively unpleasant punishments in Hell, yet the flavour text for many of the various heavenly rewards make it sound like spending eternity in an upmarket retirement home next-door to a highly sophisticated yet slightly tacky theme park. It actually sounds like it would get really, really boring after a while. Oddly enough, this trope actually forms the basis for a game mechanic; you have to build structures to siphon "Ad Infinitum" from the various rocks scattered about the map, which the rocks are a source of because they're infinitely heavy, and thus can keep all of Heaven's rewards and Hell's punishments perpetually novel.
  • The various Netherworld's depicted in the Disgaea series are far from mundane, but the fate of sinners possibly is; you are stuffed in a penguin suit and forced to do manual labor for low pay. Eventually you will earn enough to be reincarnated. About the only time this fate is truly hellish is if you wind up working for Etna.


Webcomics

  • In Achewood, Hell consists of a dreary town with a KFC and a small eatery with toilets that lead back to Earth. Everyone drives a 1982 Subaru Brat, and there are telephones that allow you to call home, but change your side of the call into a telemarketing pitch.
  • In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Purgatory is a restaurant with poor service—it takes literally centuries to be served, since there's only one waiter. And the only things on the menu are your sins in life ("roast baby potatoes sprinkled with lied to your mother about brushing your teeth").
  • In DDG if you are not good enough for heaven, or evil enough for hell, you end up in Off World, which contains diners, cinemas, and television shows where you can pay off your karmic debt doing deeds for other souls. Our Heroine Zip is doing just that as the the co-host of a gameshow.
  • In Pictures for Sad Children, Hell is a hotel somewhere in Central America. There's nothing preventing you from leaving, and the punishments are poorly-implemented attempts at ironic punishments. For example, for an internet addict, the only punishment is that the wi-fi is slow and costs money. Also, Wikipedia is replaced with a message that whatever trivia you were looking up is stupid, but the rest of the internet works fine. Furthermore, it seems to be that you can escape into the bodies of the dead by climbing through the ceiling tiles. Somehow.
  • The Ring of the Slightly Damned—where people who have no place in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory go—is an afterlife filled with pretty much only piles of brown rock.
  • Heaven in Minus is depicted as being just like real life—except everyone's immortal, has ghost tails instead of legs, can fly, and everyone feels too good to be mean to each other. It's briefly handwaved that the afterlife is mundane because the mundane is what people like to do.


Western Animation

  • The Simpsons: In the Bible Stories episode, Hell consists of a barbecue, except that they're out of hotdogs, the coleslaw has pineapple in it and they have German potato salad.
  • South Park portrays Purgatory as an airplane on the runway waiting for its turn to take off, with the Fasten Seatbelt and No Smoking signs active and no indication of how long the wait will be. Some depictions of Hell also makes it look quite mundane.
  • In the Dilbert series, the title character becomes disillusioned when he finds out (temporarily) that the afterlife is an office, much like the one he works in. Also, the people who worship Wally believe the dead spend eternity with him. When Dilbert returns to the afterlife later in the episode, it's the same as before, but Wally's standing in the cubicle.


Other

  • There's a silly animated video on the Web, about a man who farts in his cubicle, gets sealed inside, and lights a match to read the pink slip he's been given (and farts again). When he goes to Heaven, he winds up in a cubicle.
  • In Kevin Guilfoile's web mystery series, Madalyn Murray O’Hair in Hell, the part of Hell Madalyn lives in (the City of Dis) resembles a dingy city where movies are dubbed into languages no one can understand and the only thing on television are shows from 1978. Originally it was part of a Fire and Brimstone Hell, but the residents made some tentative improvements and, when no one punished them for doing this, they began renovating Hell so that it eventually resembled a somewhat tolerable Crapsack World.
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