Mundane Afterlife: Difference between revisions
Replaced redirects
m (remove image pickin/quotes page inline comments) |
(Replaced redirects) |
||
| (7 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|'''Calvin''': I wonder where we go after we die.
'''Hobbes''': [[Pittsburgh]]?
'''Calvin''': [[Place Worse Than Death|If you're good or bad?]]|'''''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'''''}}
Line 12:
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}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== 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 [[Crapsack World|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 [[Deader Than Dead|destroy your soul]], and you [[Reincarnation|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 ''[[
* ''[[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.
Line 33:
* 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:
* 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 ''[[
** 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.
Line 44:
* 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 ''[[Circle of Magic|Briar's Book]]'', {{spoiler|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 ''[[
* The [[Discworld]] book ''<s>Faust</s> 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
* 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 [[Merlin Sickness|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 [[
: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
* 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
* 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 [[You Cannot Grasp the True Form|Jackson Cannot Grasp The True Form]] of it, so his mind substituted a diner instead.
Line 72 ⟶ 73:
* 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 [[Blue and Orange Morality|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]].
Line 99 ⟶ 100:
== [[Video Games]] ==
* In ''[[Sam and Max|Sam And Max: What's New, Beelzebub?]]'', Hell is a rather dull office where it's always 4:59
* ''[[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, [[It Runs On Nonsenseulum|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 [[Fate Worse Than Death|working for]] [[Bad Boss|Etna]].
Line 106 ⟶ 107:
== 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
* In ''[[DDG]]'' if you are not good enough for heaven, or evil enough for hell, you end up in [https://web.archive.org/web/20131106020929/http://www.sincomics.com/ddg.php Off World], which contains diners, cinemas, and television shows where you can pay off your karmic debt doing deeds for other souls. Our [[Gender Bender|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]]''
* Heaven in ''[[Minus]]'' is depicted as being just like real
Line 128 ⟶ 129:
[[Category:Afterlife Tropes]]
[[Category:Mundane Afterlife]]
| |||