Our Souls Are Different



"This soul thing. . . can I get one by eating someone else's?"

- Schlock Mercenary

One of the "big questions" everyone poses to themselves at one time: what happens to your consciousness when you die? What we call thinking goes on in our brains, and when your brain dies it seems you can't think or feel anything anymore, but this idea seems difficult to comprehend - not to mention unattractive - to us who are the ones in the pilot seat, since the loss of your mind is an event comparable to the end of the entire universe from a personal point of view. Hence the idea of souls - a part of you that is independent from your physical body but still serves a useful function in your existence. Before we learned the answers to most questions about our own biology a soul was an essential explanation to why life seems so different and far removed from non-life, or, where comes the intelligence that seems to separate us from the rest of life on the planet. However, as something that is by definition outside our normal perception (most of the time - realistically speaking anything that has the ability to affect our lives is measurable) there hasn't been much agreement on what it is that a soul actually does. Is it essential for life, or can a person live on without it? What exactly does it give you, life, or wisdom, or will, or morality? Does it have weight? What happens if it's stolen or sold? Is it an Energy Being? Does it taste like strawberries or chocolate?

Note that despite popular culture associating it with the "soul", the above definition actually describes "spirit" better, which refers to in this case Life Energy (it can also refer to an invisible force such as an angel). The correct definition of a "soul" is the person itself, including the physical body and mind rather than separate from it. Many often confuse them as being the same thing.

Authors of fiction explore some possibilities on how the nature of a soul, and its absence, affects a person.


 * You die.
 * You go into a coma.
 * You become evil.
 * You become emotionless and uncreative, maybe even sterile.
 * You become one of The Heartless.
 * You become one of The Soulless.
 * You act lobotomized.
 * You can be easily mind controlled.
 * You become an easy target for Demonic Possession.
 * You become a Stepford Smiler.
 * You become an Empty Shell.
 * You lose your reflection.
 * Any of the above, with the additional addendum: your consciousness goes wherever your soul is. (and whether that's a ghost or glowing ball of light is a whole different story.) Meanwhile your body/shell may show the previous symptoms.
 * Nothing happens immediately, but you go to Hell when you die.
 * Nothing happens immediately, but you go "nowhere" when you die, or worse, cease to exist entirely.


 * Whether or not souls can be destroyed.
 * Whether the mind and the soul are separate, and whether they can be willingly or forcibly separated, divided, or transplanted.
 * More generally, whether a soul has distinct component parts.
 * Whether robots and such have souls, or can earn them.
 * Whether a ghost of a person is their soul or some other aspect of them.
 * Whether more than one soul can inhabit a body (and which controls it).
 * Whether a soul can eat another one (common with various soul eating demons and villains). Usually this is done to gain more Life Energy or to gain a (very evil) powerup.
 * Whether a soul can be "sold" for power, and who would benefit from this.
 * What happens to the soul of characters who are resurrected? Frequently, it Came Back Wrong.
 * Other times, the possibility of resurrection is dependent on the ability and willingness of the soul to come back at all. If it's unable or unwilling, you can just forget about revival.

See also Heart Trauma, where one's literal heart is synonymous with one's soul. If there's more than a one-piece soul inside of a person, it is likely that a whole Soul Anatomy is in there. Sometimes, a soul is a Piece Of God. See also Brain In a Jar, which presents a more scientific variation in which the brain either is the self (with no spiritual aspect) or somehow contains the soul.

Compare Our Spirits Are Different.

The trope name is entirely self-explanatory. What? What are you laughing at?

NOT to be confused with the kind of music known as Soul.

Anime and Manga

 * Serial Experiments Lain: Soul, mind, data, it's all the same. We Are All Connected...
 * The central premise of Ghost in the Shell, and its sequels, is the exploration of the true nature of souls and minds. People believe that even when almost the entire body and brain is replaced by implants, cybernetics do not eat your soul and that some unique part of a person always remains. It's even hinted that highly advanced machines could possibly create rudimentary ghosts.
 * Bleach has a lot of this; die in the real world, your spirit goes to Soul Society, or you become a Hollow. Get killed after you go to Soul Society or the Hollow world, you're reincarnated back in the real world. Screw up way too badly in life, and you leave the loop - you go to Hell.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion has significant plot points that revolve around the nature of the human soul, which is apparently a required component to make some of the important technology work.
 * It is apparently possible for a human mind and body to function with just a fragment of a soul - but not very well and not without drawbacks: the first and only time Rei III externalized her AT-field, her body started falling apart on the very next day.
 * Conversely, it is possible to transplant a human soul into another biological body - even into an Evangelion which results in the soul's co-existence with the Evangelion's Ax Crazy inner consciousness for eternity.
 * Forcibly removing a human soul from its body causes the body to instantly liquefy, collapsing into a puddle of primordial ooze; this is apparently a reversible process as a disembodied soul can reconstruct its physical form if sufficient raw materials (read: primordial ooze) are available and the soul's desire to be isolated from others is strong enough to manifest an AT-field.
 * Disembodied souls clumped together form a Hive Mind where everyone has full access to everyone else's memories, personality and just about everything imaginable. Like a large, metaphysical group hug.
 * It is unclear just what exactly the dummy plugs are: artificial souls, soul-copies or just an AI emulating one? Who knows?
 * Shaman King: Souls, at first sight, appear to be destroyable, but then
 * In one arc of Yu Yu Hakusho the protagonists encountered a character who had the power to capture a person's soul if the person spoke a certain taboo word. Characters whose souls were taken were frozen in place and glowed with something resembling electricity until the only character who didn't break the taboo won their souls back.
 * The Virus in Venus Versus Virus preys on civilians, eating their souls.
 * While not literally showing souls, drills in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are apparently supposed to represent them.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh is terrible with this. Souls can jump/be sucked in and out bodies, millennium items, the Shadow Realm, Virtual Reality games, cards and other lifeless objects; they can float in mid-air, possess other bodies (both with and without the original owner still present, and with or without his permission/knowledge), or even split up into different parts, which can be diametral opposites or identical copies, depending on the situation. The only rule that stands is " 'you' go where your soul is", but (because of the split-ups) some can be in several places at the same time. Bodies without a soul usually go into a coma, unless some other soul comes along for a ride.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh GX: After death, his soul often gets consumed by
 * Soul Eater, obviously enough. Weapons are designed to eat souls, but there's a moral code that only the souls of those about to become kishin are allowed. Eating human souls is a very bad thing. Also, if weapons and meisters have their souls in sync—Soul Resonance—massive fighting power can be unlocked. The size of one's soul wavelength reflects their potential strength (physical and otherwise), and the leader of the good guys has a soul large enough to contain an entire city. Potentially, the souls of gods can cover the entire planet (which, if one in-universe god is Death, is actually quite appropriate).
 * In the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, In the manga,
 * It is also established that
 * This carries into the manga as well. Barry the Chopper's original body is revealed to actually still be around. However, an animal's soul is inside it, causing it to decay, though 'his' current body is okay. Seems that souls are indeed paired up with one body and one mind in this series.
 * A story in Mushishi features a Mushishi who had his soul replaced with a Mushi (essentially making him "the can") because he couldn't see mushi, which would have made him useless in protecting another "can". Most of the time he's merely The Stoic, but occasionally the Mushi-soul leaves and he becomes The Spock.
 * The rule in Mahou Sensei Negima is apparently that if you think you have a soul, you do. Details on this are fuzzy, but it appears to only be necessary for certain aspects of magic such as forming pactios and dark magic. Plus the whole 'Am I a real person and not just a robot?' thing. Chachamaru's sisters presumably do not have one while she herself does.
 * This is likely because Chachamaru is part robot part magic puppet. Note that Chachazero also has her own distinct personality.
 * In One Piece, Brook's devil fruit power is that after he died, his soul returned to his body (though not until after it had rotted to a skeleton). Later on, during the Time Skip, he figures out how to force his soul out of his body have it fly around.
 * In Sailor Moon, souls are represented by starseeds, which can be readily stolen by Sailor Galaxia and her minions. When a normal human loses their starseed, they become a phage, when a Sailor Soldier loses hers, she dies.
 * In Karakuridouji Ultimo, Dr. Dunstan said that he successfully broke down human souls and put them in robots known as the karakuri doji. The only way a doji truly dies is if you crush their soul sphere.
 * In Puella Magi Madoka Magica  In addition,.
 * In the Nasuverse, souls are eternal, but require a physical body to tether them to the world. The soul is linked to the body, and when the body dies, it returns to Akasha, to await reincarnation. Ordinarily when a soul is reincarnated, it retains no memories from any of it's previous lives, but there are ways around this, as seen with Roa. If a person does manage to preserve their soul beyond the death of their original body, usually by transferring it directly into a new body or by becoming a vampire, then the soul will decay. The Third True Magic, as explained in Fate Stay Night, can overcome this problem. Also,
 * Souls in the Nasuverse are normally indestructible, but someone with the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception can kill the soul itself.
 * Windaria: When people die they turn into red light shaped like birds and fly to this airship in the sky over the ocean. What this ship is never gets explained, at least not in the movie.

Comic Books

 * Hector Hall in Infinity, Inc., later used in The Sandman, is a weird case. He was born without a soul. The major effect of this was that it let him be taken over by Hath-Set later, and was eventually reincarnated as a version of Doctor Fate. The idea of someone without a soul being reincarnated, when reincarnation by definition involves a soul, was never explained.
 * Spawn had soul-negating demons, who could cause angels and demons to become Deader Than Dead. It was later revealed that the title character had several thousand souls in his body.
 * In Lucifer, demons don't have souls. Lucifer demonstrates his power by creating a soul for one just so he can sentence it to eternal suffering.
 * That may refer only to some demons, since many are angels who originally fell with him, and presumably retain the souls that they had. The demons that came from elsewhere may be soulless.
 * It's also explained that souls are absolutely indestructible, but can be "unravelled" into a broken state that takes millennia to come back together into a conscious entity.
 * Sebastian Faust, the son of Evil Sorcerer Felix Faust from The DCU, doesn't have a soul. He doesn't have one because his father sold his infant son's soul to a demon in exchange for power (as his Meaningful Name would suggest, Faust has a penchant for making Faustian bargains). The silver lining in this whole mess was that the demon screwed over Faust for the hell of it and gave Sebastian the power instead. Unusually, lacking a soul hasn't had any obvious negative effect on Sebastian; he more or less makes do without one.
 * The idea of body and souls was tackled in the resurrection of Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow. When he returns from the dead, it's discovered that he only remembers about as far as The Bronze Age of Comic Books (thus having no knowledge of Parallax, Arsenal, ect.), and has none of the character development he experienced since. After some digging around, Ollie finds out that when he was resurrected his soul didn't come back, so he's really just an empty shell (his "quiver"). It appears the soulless body still possesses free will but can't grow or change emotionally and is stuck in whatever period he remembers, like a projection, and it's alluded that when it dies, the consciousness inside will just cease existing. As for Ollie's soul, it decided to stay in heaven even when being offered outright a chance to come back to life by reuniting with his body, deciding it preferred heavenly bliss and using it as an excuse to duck his lingering problems back on Earth.
 * In X-Factor, Layla Miller's true power is revealed as the ability to resurrect dead people, albeit without souls. Trevor Fitzroy's role as a longstanding Bishop villain is thus explaining as Layla restoring the once good Trevor, but without a soul.
 * Sometime later, she does the same thing to . While   apparently doesn't feel anything wrong about himself, he's shown acting more erratically and less restrained than usual, with Layla utterly distraught at his condition.

Fan Works

 * The Mad Scientist Wars explores this a bit. Souls are basically a imprint or image of a person that is tied to the body, and constantly updates. Upon death, they go to either heaven or hell depending on their deeds. The mind of a person is something else entirely, and can be copied, moved or altered, but the soul will still be the same. Intelligent creations that were not physically born need to pass a test to see if they should exist and have had existence (i.e If they fail it, they will have never existed at all).
 * The Heart Containers in The Blue Blur of Termina are the metaphysical manifestation of a person's soul. The more powerful a person is, the larger (and more crystallized) their Heart Container will appear. Heart Containers of particularly powerful entities can even take on their own separate forms, should they be separated from their "bodies". Beings of godlike caliber harbor Heart Containers of truly limitless power.
 * Douglas Sangnoir of Drunkard's Walk can see souls with his "mage sight" (suggesting that other mages from his homeworld can as well); they appear as golden glows of differing intensities. He makes it clear that even the most primitive multicelled animals have some kind of rudimentary soul which appears as little more than a golden spark, while on the other hand gods have such powerful souls that he can make out their  component parts in the form of a multicolored triple helix within the gold.  Supplemental material by the author indicates that he uses a variation on the In Nomine mechanics for souls.
 * During the events of the Ranma ½ fic Girl's School by "Miko2", Ranma is killed and a magically-empowered Nabiki has to bring him back from the Land of the Dead. In what is likely a unique case, Ranma's soul looks more or less like his physical body but to his consternation combines elements from both his male and female forms.

Film

 * Short Circuit. Number Five gets struck by lightning, there is a glitch in the programming and he gains a soul. In the Sequelitis, he foils the bad guys, is legally recognized as a person and swears the oath of citizenship.
 * An interesting variation occurs in Ghost Rider, where Johnny Blaze seems to lose his free will as a consequence of selling his soul to Mephisto, as he is unable to refuse to become the Ghost Rider, or even to get off his bike when Mephisto doesn't want him to. Once his big mission is complete and his soul restored, though, Blaze has no trouble refusing the Devil's offer to free him of the Rider or in using the powers of the Rider against Mephisto's plans on Earth.
 * In the world of Cold Souls, extracting your soul is as common as, say, wiping away bad memories. Creative Sterility happens to Paul Giamatti (as himself) when his "chickpea-sized" soul is removed to prevent anxiety, and he later gets involved in Russian soul-smuggling.
 * In 9, souls essentially act as a life source, and their forcible removal can be...nasty. It would also appear that.
 * In The Serpent and the Rainbow, a movie that deals with Haitian voodoo, shows rainbow-colored souls being stored away in ceramic pots.
 * In the 1967 version of Bedazzled it is said that the soul is a lot like the appendix and is of no real use. Of course, given the source and what they were selling at the time, it's probably not that accurate...
 * In the 2000 remake, a person the protagonist meets in a jail cell tells him that while humans do have souls, they are not able to sell them as the owner is God, a universal spirit that animates and binds all things in existence.

Literature

 * In the Nasuverse, the soul is an indestructible "concept" that is tied down to the material world via the body. Souls of the dead are returned to "The Root" (that is, the origin of everything - past, present, and future) and recycled to create new souls.
 * Other concepts in The Verse, such as Magic Circuits and Origins, are also attached to the soul. It is also quite touchy, and easily damaged if messed with.
 * Harry Potter: Losing your soul robs you of all willpower and memory, you simply "exist" as an empty shell, conscious but unable to make choices or act, while breaking it apart makes you less human (and immortal). It appears that the mind is a semi-separate entity that remains with the largest piece of a split soul.
 * In addition, . Hermione implies that repentance can potentially put a torn soul back together, but it hurts a lot.
 * Peter F. Hamilton loves the subject so much that he wrote a whole SF trilogy about possession in the 2600s. The soul is basically sentience (that is, YOU), but in a form that retains cohesion after death, without physical support (like the brain). This is linked to a theory of strata-less computing, which says (correct me if I'm wrong) that computation (read 'thought') can be accomplished without energy consumption and support if there is no input or output. A dead guy loses his 'input' (senses), and, so Hamilton says, the Universe is wired so that sentience survives and is either transported to the 'beyond' (an input-less hell where souls pass the time by raping each other for memories), or is transported to the end of time, to contribute with its memories to the creation of a new universe. Also, for some reason, if a soul is given the chance to take over a living human body (after suppressing the occupant), its remaining part which is still in the beyond dimension can serve as a massive source of energy for all sorts of evil powers.
 * In The Toxic Spell Dump children with apsychia are born without a soul and apparently simply stop existing after death—no afterlife, no nothing. It is seen as horrendously tragic.
 * The Bear at the Gate: Short story about a teddy bear who earns a soul through a good deed and gaining emotions, which results in it getting into heaven.
 * In Hans Christian Andersen's original version of The Little Mermaid, gaining a soul gives you access to the Christian afterlife; without one, you "dissolve like the sea foam".
 * Piers Anthony's Xanth: Characters without souls are less introspective and less capable of empathy than those with souls, but can earn souls through self-exploration and consciously trying to think of others more. Souls can be taken apart, and regenerate; babies' souls are grown from bits of the soul of their mother and father.
 * In Incarnations of Immortality, souls are described as essentially being two-dimensional; and they only gain substance in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Souls in these frameworks are virtually indistinguishable from when the individual was alive and become the defacto body. In special cases, the incarnation Death may be needed to physically pull the soul from the body so that they may die.
 * In Steven Brust's Dragaera novels, a person's soul can only be destroyed by a Morganti weapon. If they're killed any other way, they can reincarnate. It's implied that wizards keep their souls separate from their bodies, but otherwise they're treated inextricably linked.
 * In Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files, Bob describes "the soul" as equivalent to "life force" or "chi": "the part of you that is more than merely physical." He also notes (to Harry's dismay) that you can lose a significant chunk of it and still remain "you," since it grows back in about a week. In Small Favor,
 * Using it does, however,.
 * And in Ghost Story, the concept of a soul is finally settled by one line

"-Foxx Travis: Can you prove that was a lie? Let's see yours. Draw-SOUL! Inspection-SOUL!"
 * In Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, the soul is an artificial construct implanted by Applied Phlebotinum, recording one's life, memories, and existence to allow people to reincarnate on the eponymous Riverworld, eons later, and work their way to some kind of Redemption/Ascension/Crystal Dragon Nirvana. One striking scene shows a holding vat holding thousands of souls: this is metaphysics meeting brutally mass manufacture. Imagine: machinery handling souls like a billion ghostly coke bottles on a production line. In a supreme irony there is no proof for the final afterlife: the spirit engineers are profoundly religious.
 * In C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, it is implied that the souls of those in Hell are devoured by demons, and this is in fact the fate of all the damned, including the demons themselves minus whoever's last. (Theologically, this can be seen as a parody/inversion of the Christian belief in Heaven as eternal communion with God, where the Devil's version of that communion is an eternal domination and violation of all lesser souls.)
 * In Lewis' The Great Divorce, on the other hand, souls in Hell (which looks like ), isolate themselves there out of refusal to give up some single vital facet of their self, becoming a twisted, damaged version of their former personality. Divorce plays with the idea that souls can leave Hell of their own will (in which case it will merely have been Purgatory), if they have not placed themselves beyond redemption—it can be difficult to tell if a person has crossed the line. (A "Solid Person" who has made it to heaven questions whether a woman whose fate is up for grabs is still a grumbler, or merely a grumble going on and on mechanically.)
 * Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (crazy spoilers ahead). The whole trilogy has quite a lot to say about the nature of the soul, and may be considered a long meditation on the subject. In a child, losing the soul causes schizophrenia-like symptoms: catatonia, delusions that your soul is still there, etc. -- presuming, of course, that the subject survived the process in the first place. One character who goes through this dies of apathy. Another gradually wastes away. Some characters, especially adults, who manage to survive that part are Stepford Smilers, the "nothing underneath" variation. On top of this, much of the series takes place in a world where the soul resides outside the body as a sentient, autonomous entity with its own (highly symbolic) physical form.
 * Of course, those are only the effects if your soul is cut away. If your soul is eaten away by a Specter, it leaves you a completely hollow body that does not react to any stimulus whatsoever, which is why there are apparently no adults in Cittàgazze.
 * The first book also has soldiers dying outright when their daemons are killed, which might explain the taboo against touching another's daemon.
 * His Dark Materials also holds that the mind and the soul are separate, though intrinsically connected, and that a person's mind (ghost) retains its composition upon death, while a soul (Dæmon) dissolves upon death. The mind feels incomplete however. On the bright side, a dead-but-still-intact ghost is the perfect fighter against the aforementioned soul-eating Specters.
 * Iorek Byrnison mentions that his armor his is soul - bears make their own soul.
 * Furthermore, if your Dæmon is injured or separated from you by a certain distance, it causes the both of you intense physical pain. Physical contact with another person's Dæmon is all but forbidden (except for certain circumstances, If You Know What I Mean). And the final chapters of the third novel explain some of the ways around all of these handicaps.
 * Dæmons are also described as being made from Dust, as are angels, and in fact the product of the interference of the fallen angels (the result of the fruit of knowledge, or the wheel oil). While the panserbjørne's existence seems to prove this is not necessary for intelligent life, their attachment to armor and a stricter culture could be seen as a suggestion that it helps, and lacking it a surrogate needs to be found. Then again, we only have the one example to go on.
 * Dante played with the idea of separating the soul from the body before death in the Inferno, where in Hell, he ran into one of the more notorious historical figures of his time who was in fact still alive while he was writing, the idea being his sin had been so bad he had fallen to Hell immediately, while a demon had come up to Earth to mind his body until it died.
 * Handled interestingly in Oscar Wilde's The Fisherman And His Soul, where the titular Fisherman gives up his soul in order to be with the mermaid he loves. His soul is shown as being intellectually completely different from himself. In fact, his life only changes for the worse once his soul returns.
 * Note that the spell the Fisherman performs to separate himself from his soul involves cutting his shadow free from his body, and that the soul, left on its own, is apparently Heartless.
 * Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel Trilogy: when you die, your soul ascends to the sky ("deep heaven"). Once there, it is possible for it to return to earth temporarily to speak to living people, though this happens rarely. However, the soul can be removed from the body and stored in a vial. When this happens, the soul's owner become a wraith which retains the power of speech but very little memory. Souls can also be consumed by demons like darkangels and lorelei, in which case the owner's consciousness is completely obliterated. Soulless beings are always hideous to look at.
 * In "The Boy Who Couldn't Die", removing the soul from a living thing's body makes them immortal. The soul can only be retrieved from the recently deceased or dying; it requires some voodoo crap to pull out, and the proper container to keep it in. Damaging the soul is instant death.
 * In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, a person's soul is what casts a shadow (in many respects it IS the shadow) and thus someone whose soul is missing doesn't cast one. Members of the Kencyr races can give their soul to another who has the ability to accept it; this makes the giver very hard to kill, and makes it so that dishonorable acts that must be done do not stain the soul, since it isn't there. Souls may also be stolen or consumed, and heroine Jame and her mother are able to reap souls, drawing them from the body and taking them.
 * H. Beam Piper flip-flopped about souls. While one of his Paratime novels featured reincarnation as a scientific fact, which makes no sense without some kind of soul...there was also a story in Federation which revolved around the attempt to settle down a planet's main religion, who were convinced The Last Hot Time was coming and were going a bit psychotic with fire-frenzies. To pacify them, a Terran who was very friendly with their culture explained not only that Armageddon wasn't coming, but also that humans needed the main local product (biocrystals) to build themselves souls, following a curse (It Makes Sense in Context). When another member of the cast objects to this, a military man comes up with this gem:


 * Considering Piper committed suicide apparently as a result of a bad time and a belief in reincarnation...
 * Souls in The Hollows novels are a nebulous thing that is referenced often but ill-defined. The souls of living vampires are destroyed when the die and reanimate and they seem to lose their conscience and the ability to feel emotion. Souls of living beings can be temporarily removed by demon magic without appreciable harm to the person though what change this makes in the person is never explored. Black Magic creates 'smut' on the soul that is visible to magical creatures. This is considered a bad thing though the negative consequences of having this smut is never explained. This smut can be transferred to another person's soul. Finally the existence of souls is an established fact and its loss and destruction can be detected by an unexplained process.
 * To add more confusion a person's aura is linked yet separate from their soul in an unexplained manner.
 * In The Salvation War, people's souls become tangible (with all attendant sensation) as corporeal bodies in another dimension, immortal, and gain a Healing Factor upon the person's death. Unfortunately, that's the better to let demons abuse you forever, since everyone goes to Fire and Brimstone Hell when they die. Despite the fact that in this series, human race invades and occupies, where souls come from is still a Riddle for the Ages by the end.
 * In JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth mythos, the precise nature of the soul (fëa, in Quenya), and its fate after death, varies depending on race: the souls of Elves are bound to this universe, and when they die they go to hang out in the Halls of Mandos, eventually to be reincarnated (unless they've committed acts of irredeemable evil in life) in a body identical to the old one. The souls of Men, on the other hand, are only meant to stay in this world for a limited time; after death they make a brief stop in the Halls of Mandos and then depart from the universe for an unknown destination. Disembodied Elvish souls are capable of refusing the summons to the Halls of Mandos, in which case they will drift around wherever they like—but such souls are then susceptible to being captured and controlled by black magic (remember how Sauron was sometimes called the "Necromancer"? Yeah...).
 * It's uncertain what happens to dwarves, not being part of the original divine plan for the world, but they believe that Aule their maker (who they call Mahal) has prepared some sort of afterlife for them. Tolkien speculates in The Silmarillion that Aule made some sort of arrangement with Mandos to get his creatures a space in his Halls. Hobbits, as a kind of sub-species of Men, are probably subject to the same fate as them.
 * Wayne Barlowe book series that takes place in Hell has a rather terrifying prospect for all human souls who go there. Apparently, the underworld does have a food chain, but humans are at the bottom of it. And that's not counting the fact that humans are the main building materials for demons, their livestock, vehicles, and war machines all made out of souls.
 * In Warbreaker, everyone has a single Breath, which is the equivalent of the soul, but can be transferred willingly to others and used to animate objects. Those who lose their Breath can function normally, but they and their clothes appear drained of color, and they are more irritable and angry.
 * In a young adult novel, an adopted girl was contacted by the astral projection of her long lost twin sister who encouraged her to also astrally project. This evidently meant vacating your soul from your body as when she was back from flying among the stars her twin sister had snaffled her body. When her siblings threw an 'anti-bad-spirit' charm that touched the body, the twin sister was momentarily displaced and the original sister got snapped back into her body. Because the original sister did not seek out her twins' now-spare body but stayed with her family her sister was assumed to be dead and cremated. Her soul would continue to exist, gradually getting fainter and fainter. As long as she didn't astrally project again she was fine.
 * Michael Swanick wrote a short story in which dead souls fall up to the heavens to be absorbed into creation. However, power lines and cold iron would stop this (if for example you died in a building with reinforced concrete ceilings) so ghosts could avoid that undiscovered country and stay themselves while they navigated an upside down otherwise intangible world constantly holding on to iron or powerlines. There was also a soul eating monster.
 * In the Jedi Academy Trilogy, Luke loses his soul. He's comatose, but he can now possess his nephew Jacen.
 * In The Wheel of Time souls are reincarnated countless times throughout history, what happens between incarnations isn't discussed. The souls of Heroes get a slightly different treatment, they spend their time between lives in Tel'aranh'rhiod, but lose their memories between the time they are reborn and their next death.  proves a soul can be forced into the real world before its time, but the full effects are far from certain.
 * The Dark One can also reincarnate his followers at the instant of their death. Balefire can be used to retroactively kill someone before the Dark One knows what's happening, denying it the ability to reincarnate its servant into a new body, instead forcing the soul back into the normal cycle of reincarnation.
 * Machin'Shin (The Black Wind) is an entity of the Ways, an encounter with it may be fatal, or it could destroy the soul, leaving the victim alive but an Empty Shell.
 * Interestingly, ghosts aren't generally a thing that happens in this 'verse, and are only seen during "bubbles of evil" from the Dark One.
 * In Lord Dunsany's short story "The Kith of the Elf-Folk", a little Wild Thing from the marshes longs to have a soul so it can worship God and know the meaning of music. It has none, but the other Wild Things make a soul for it out of what is around them, although the Oldest of the Wild Things warns that "if you got a soul, one day you would have to die, and if you knew the meaning of music you would learn the meaning of sorrow, and it is better to be a Wild Thing and not to die".
 * In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, it is taken for granted that the humans that Professor Maxon creates have no souls. At one point, Number 13 goes to murder him, and stops because it would be the act of a soulless creature. von Horn becomes quite envious of him because a soulless creature acts better than he does.
 * Charles Stross's Laundry Files is couched in mathematical and scientific language, based as it is off the Cthulhu Mythos. The word "soul" refers to the electrical impulses that make up a human being's brain: thinking, feeling, calculating; some of that information remains as "echoes" when a person dies, but there are ways—and creatures—capable of erasing those echoes entirely. Certain beings feed by increasing entropy, and erasing information generates a lot of it.
 * The World Gates Trilogy by Holly Lisle involves several artifacts (necklaces and such, usually) that bring someone back if they die while they're wearing them. At one point a character who was so revived is told that she has no soul. Her sister ends up going to the afterlife, where it is revealed that losing a soul is not all that uncommon, and that someone who has no soul can essentially grow a new one by good deeds and so on. There's no indication that soullessness has any particular effect on a person's life, although those who get revived by these artifacts more than a few times tend to become cruel.

Live Action TV
"Phillipa: We've all been dancing around the basic issue... Does Data have a soul?"
 * Vampires in the Buffyverse are typically soulless and Exclusively Evil, since the essence of one of the first demons comes in and parks in the vacated spot. Their vampiric personalities are generally twisted parodies of the original person, and never get any closer to goodness than a Noble Demon (and even Noble Demon vampires are very rare). A vampire can, through magic, actually regain a soul, and with it a completely human identity, morality, and guilt over their former crimes. Non-human demons may or may not have their own versions of souls, and they can range all the way from Omnicidal Maniacs to Knight in Sour Armor heroes. There are also Half Human Hybrids, and the dialogue suggests that, whatever other metaphysics apply, they do have human souls. Having a soul, however, is no guarantee of morality: as a demon points out, the worst serial killers and tyrants in human history also had souls. It could be considered that having a soul gives you a conscience so that you'll feel guilty about doing bad things, but that conscience can be misguided or suppressed. Lack of soul removes the guilt, and the demon essence gives you the evil.
 * There are also ghosts in the Buffyverse, and they seem to be disembodied human souls that haven't moved on to the afterlife (more than one episode's dealt with either helping a ghost pass on, or at least come to terms with their current status as a ghost). The recently ensouled vampire Spike also became something like a ghost for a while, but the story made it clear that, despite his intangibility, he wasn't really a ghost, and his condition was the result of magic designed to mimic the effect. Another vampire who indirectly gained a soul before she died, Darla, later appeared as a ghost although, since she was sent as a messenger for the Powers That Be, this was likely the human Darla's soul. For more speculation on the metaphysics of the Buffyverse, see here.
 * In Dead Like Me, a soul is attached to a body, even after death, and can only be removed by a reaper who usually does so right before their death to spare them the pain. A person without a soul will continue to act as they are programmed to, typically walking right in to whatever death fate had in store for them.
 * This show also includes an unusual case, where if a person's fated death is avoided, their soul is imprisoned in their body and unable to affect anything. According to Rube, this causes the soul to "rot."
 * George also screws up and decides to skip one of her appointments. She later finds the soul was trapped inside the body since she wasn't there—and had to sit through its own autopsy, unable to do anything.
 * Souls, as far as Engine Sentai Go-onger is concerned, are highly marketable. The team's mecha sidekicks need to have them placed into their bodies to return to their normal size, but only for ten minutes, as a side effect of being in the Human World. Even the human souls in the series work like this, as proven when Sousuke shoots his soul at his own body to reverse a Freaky Friday situation.
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation. When the android Data has to stand in court to prove himself a sentient being (with the right to refuse to be dismantled by a less then entirely competent scientist) the judge's final verdict deals with something to this effect.


 * The TNG novel Ghostship deals with the idea of whether Data has a soul. Your Mileage May Vary on it's success.
 * In Deep Space 9: Once more unto the breech Kor is sent on a suicide mission and promises to convey Worf's greetings to Jadzia in Sto'Vo'Kor. While Ezri is back at Deep Space 9 chatting in Quark's Bar. Which makes one wonder. What does happen to the soul's of a Trill's previous hosts?
 * Jadzia even (re)introduced herself to some old friends of a previous host with the phrase "Don't mistake a new face with a new soul…" clouding the issue a bit. The symbiant which carries the memories to new hosts might be counted as having it's own soul, mingled with but distinct from the soul of the individual host.
 * The Tales from the Crypt episode "Doctor of Horror" featured a scientist who theorized that the human soul could be physically found, in the form of a pinprick of light, at the base of one's spine.
 * In Supernatural, it is possible to sell your soul, typically via the traditional Faustian Deal with the Devil. However, in later seasons, it was revealed that
 * Supernatural souls can also be eaten (by Famine,) turned into demons via torture in Hell and used as an incredibly potent power source by various beings. Interestingly, while humans, monsters and demons all have souls or are souls, angels apparently don't have them (or else they're waiting to tackle that in Season 7.)
 * According to Death, souls can be twisted, corrupted, and outright destroyed but never broken. It is impossible, even for a cosmic entity such as Death, to split apart a soul.

Tabletop Games

 * Dead Inside is based almost entirely around the loss, gain, and expenditure of souls and soul energies. In most games, new characters start off as someone who's had his/her innate spiritual "shell" cracked open, and their soul scooped out, leaving nothing but the last few dregs of soul power to them. The overarching objective for anyone in such a position is to either grow (through doing good deeds or engaging in character building) or steal a new soul. Soul energy powers magic, is the basis of trade, and is the basis of self-improvement: you perform rituals at various stages to "lock" your soul energy into a fully-developed soul. Once you have your soul back, you become known as a Sensitive, and if you cull another soul's worth of energy and perform the proper ritual, you become a Mage. The more developed your soul, the easier magic is to perform, and what happens to you when you die is different depending on whether you're Dead Inside, Sensitive, or Mage.
 * Dungeons & Dragons has a pretty simple notion of a soul that seems to represent one's mind and sentience but is also a metaphysical-magical entity that can leave the body. Soul-trapping spells leave the body comatose, and the soul is what departs to various afterlives after death.
 * Exalted has a complex but fairly well defined soul-ecology. Normal people have two souls, the lower and higher, whereas celestial Exalts have a third soul that grants them their powers. On death, each faces a separate fate. The lower ghost becomes a bestial grave guardian until the body rots away; it then is simply a mindless beast that hunts in the underworld. The higher usually has its memories destroyed and then goes on to be reincarnated, but "lucky" souls that cling to life can become ghosts, and very unlucky ones can be consumed by oblivion. Solar shards first go back to Lytek, the God of Exaltations, who prunes some of their memories, and then sends them to a almost always adult person who is somehow worthy in the eyes of the Unconquered Sun, thereby exalting them. Lunar shards face much the same process, although Luna's standards are different then the Unconquered Sun's. Abyssal shards have to slink back to the underworld and their deathlord, carefully, because sunlight hurts the shards. Infernal shards are pulled back inside a brutally tortured little girl until the Yozi feel like making another Infernal. Sidereal shards are fated to Exalt someone at a specific time, shortly after a specific Sidereal dies. Fate itself thus prepares them for their life as a Exalt as they grow up. The problem is that both Sidereals and Sidereals-to-be can be killed ahead of schedule by beings capable of defying fate, in which case the Sidereal shard Exalts someone completely unexpected and unprepared, which throws the whole system out of whack. Thing is, there are a lot of creatures that exist outside of fate running around Creation these days...
 * Also note that all the Shards have their memories pruned - except the Infernals. While the Ebon Dragon has the necessary tools, he sees no particular reason to use them.
 * Autochthon himself fell afoul of this soul ecology; since he left Creation before too much was known about the underworld, and he requires a supply of lower ghosts to nourish himself, he now has a massive pressurised vat of confused accumulated higher ghosts. Similarly, because Creation can produce new souls as necessary but Autochthon can't, there is now a massive soul shortage and an epidemic of stillbirths among the Autochthonians. And then we throw in the whole 'soulgem' thing and stuff gets complicated. Alchemicals have just their own souls, but those souls are soulgems that have gone back into the cycle multiple times and demonstrated unparalleled heroism in each life, around which the Alchemical is built.
 * The Primordials' own souls are pretty unusual, too - essentially, each Primordial has multiple souls, each of which is a separate, sapient being. These each have seven souls of their own, which are also separate, sapient beings. Most of these have humanoid forms, but some manifest as geographical features, or weather, or even odder things instead (or even use multiple forms simultaneously). The Yozis' souls also pull double duty as Our Demons Are Different.
 * In In Nomine souls are made up of three "Forces" -- Corporeal, Ethereal and Celestial -- in varying numbers and combinations. In very broad terms, Corporeal Forces control your strength within the physical world; Ethereal Forces define your intellect and related abilities; and Celestial Forces define your connection to the Divine (or Infernal).  Sufficiently powerful beings -- like Demon Princes or Angelic Superiors -- can add or remove Forces to/from lesser creatures.  It's also possible to lose Forces from combat damage.  This is a bad idea on all fronts, but you can effectively lose lose your soul by having all your Celestial Forces destroyed; on top of various mental disadvantages you cease to exist when you die. Undead in the same setting are not strictly soulless, but the trade off for physical Immortality means that they too cease to exist when or if they die.
 * Sorcerer leaves it up to the individual gaming group to decide what a sorcerer's Humanity attribute (which can be damaged by too much consorting with demons) represents in concrete terms; one possible option is that Humanity measures how much of the sorcerer's soul still remains intact.
 * In the New World of Darkness, the soul is a concrete spiritual presence, capable of being affected by powerful magic. Should it be separated from the body, the person thus deprived slowly undergoes a horrific spiritual withering, eventually becoming a shriveled mockery of their original self that can be easily possessed by ghosts and spirits. The soul is completely separate from the mind, and apparently interchangeable with all others; attaching any soul to a victim of soul-theft will restore them to normal in due time. Each supplement deals with souls in various ways:
 * Mages must have their souls to work magic. Some Mages, more properly known as Tremere Liches, learn to prolong their existence by consuming the souls of others. These mages are sometimes known by an apt description: "sociopaths".
 * Werewolves are not entirely human, and their "souls" are likewise not entirely like human souls. It's implied they are half spirit, which is borne out since as they go down the Karma Meter they act more spirit like with strange behaviours, weaknesses, and bans.
 * It's believed that Changelings have their souls ripped to shreds on the Thorns when the True Fae first abduct them, and manage to gather and knit back (most) of the pieces unconsciously when they escape. However, this is only conjecture, and if it's true, whatever's left isn't affected by soul-targeting magic (and they worry a great deal about the connotations).
 * Prometheans seek To Become Human so that they can earn one.
 * Vampires seem to keep their souls after being Embraced, but now the soul is trapped in an animated dead body with a hungry demon-thing (The "Beast") that occasionally takes control. As if that weren't bad enough, the soul can now be eaten by other vampires in an act called Diablerie; doing so risks damaging the eater's soul, addicting them to devouring souls, and stains their aura with black veins for decades, but in the process they absorb a measure of their victim's own power.
 * The process of becoming a Sin-Eater bonds a geist, an archetypal embodiment of death, to the prospective Sin-Eater's soul. To all intents and purposes, the geist becomes part of the Sin-Eater's soul, and removing it will have devastating consequences.
 * Whether or not there is an afterlife is unknown, so what happens to souls after death is an open question.
 * Ghosts don't seem to be a person's soul, but a few Mage and Thaumaturge powers can create ghosts by removing a person's soul and anchoring it to an object in a means similar to the above mentioned soul-theft which is similarly reversible.
 * In Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000, the soul is the core of sentience and emotions and also the foundation of magic and psychic ability; this also makes it the primary fare of the universe's Eldritch Abominations. Losing one's soul while still alive essentially renders one an inert lump of meat.
 * Pariahs are literally soulless, and have no existence in the spiritual reality called "the Warp". This is hugely disconcerting to all around them, although those so offended rarely know why. This is especially dangerous to those with powers drawn from that realm, but is no protection from their powers. Those ultra-rare individuals who passively block or diminish supernatural powers are referred to as 'blanks' or 'untouchables', and with the exception of Warp users reacting badly to them there is no indication that they are anything but fully souled. This confusion is not helped by Games Workshop being extremely vague on the subject, often using the terms interchangeably between different media. The current consensus on their differences and exact capabilities, and if they indeed are the same thing, appears highly diffuse.
 * The Liber Chaotica and Liber Necris sourcebooks go into deep detail on Warhammer Fantasy Battle souls, eventually concluding that they must comprise at least seven divisible parts.
 * Both Necrons and Tau also lack a Warp presence, meaning they probably lack souls. In the case of the Necrons this is because their Eldritch Abomination masters stole theirs and they are mostly mindless and entirely emotionless killing machines. The Tau never seem to have had any, which is odd, given that they are a vibrant, emotional and (given the state of the universe) relatively compassionate species.
 * The Tau do have souls, they're just very small and weak compared to the souls of other races.
 * Some years before they came up with a certain little card game, Wizards of the Coast published a set of books called The Primal Order, which provided a universal system for sensibly handling gods in a role-playing campaign. Within that system, the primary purpose of the souls of mortals was to provide a god with divine power, even more so after death than during life; gods even have the option to incorporate the souls of their deceased worshipers within their very being for use as a kind of internal battery -- or to devour them outright.

Video Games

 * In The Elder Scrolls, a Daedric soul, or "Essence", is referred to as The Animus. Unlike a mortal soul, which can theoretically be permanently destroyed, a Daedric Animus is both everlasting and protean. As a result, "killing" a Daedra's mortal shell is possible, but it's soul will just take a metaphysical swim through the cosmic sewers and be spat back out again... Eventually.
 * Animal and Daedra souls can be trapped in Soul Gems and used to power magical items. The more powerful the soul, the greater the effect, and the larger the Soul Gem needs to be in order to hold it. Intelligent beings like humans, elves and orcs can have their souls bound into Black Soul Gems, but even owning Black Soul Gems is illegal, as they identify the owner as a Necromancer.
 * In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the souls of the Falmer, unlike the other Mer races, can be trapped in normal Soul Gems. This shows just how far the race has fallen.
 * Kingdom Hearts: All beings have a separate heart and soul. If the heart separates from the body it becomes one of The Heartless, while the body and soul either die or become Nobodies. You read that right, "The Heartless" are in fact made from hearts (or at least the Emblem ones) and the Nobodies are actually "heartless". Here, the heart contains all your emotions and memories, while the soul is merely the spark that animates the body.
 * The soul also seems to be what possesses intellect and reason, as evidenced by the fact that Nobodies can still think rationally, whereas heartless act solely on instinct. Its possible that this is a function of the body's brain as well, its not clear. Furthermore, the body/soul combination does seem able to hold memories as well, as the Organization XIII members are stated to occasionally act like they have emotions because they remember having had them, and long for a return to that state. The heart is more related to one's emotions and ability to connect emotionally to other people. In other words, its responsible for the Power of Friendship. Messing with the heart does seem to have an effect on memory, however, so the topic is somewhat muddled—its possible that only "people" nobodies, like the Organization members, retain memories, through raw strength of will.
 * And events in Birth By Sleep seem to indicate that their is a third element to the a person's soul.
 * The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has Jovani, who lost his soul (and his mobility) to greed. To restore it, you must collect sixty Poe Souls. Sixty. Poe. Souls. The exchange rate is... interesting, to say the least. Also, Poe Souls are dark purple pseudo-spheres.
 * It wasn't the Poe's souls that were being collected, as the item name would have you believe; Jovani's soul was split into sixty pieces and each of the Poes carried one piece—the idea was that you were reclaiming Jovani's soul from the Poes to restore him.
 * Majora's Mask features the ability to extract the last regrets and thoughts of a dying soul into a mask... which you can promptly don and gain whatever wicked cool abilities the deceased may have possessed.
 * It is also implied that the masks allow the soul to possess the wearer - and according to certain Epileptic Trees, even preserve the soul for resurrection at the end of the game.
 * Continuing the above trend is The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, where the Big Bad removes Zelda's soul so he can use her body for his own purposes. Her soul then possesses a suit of armor. Yes, really.
 * The Legacy of Kain series largely revolves around the various effects of souls and the corruption thereof. Losing your soul will kill you, while returning a soul into it's dead body will apparently create a vampire. A corruption of the soul leads to a creeping physical corruption - Kain's vampire lieutenants grew into increasingly inhuman monsters instead of just stronger. Also very importantly, souls are food for various beings, almost all them tied into the biggest soul-devourer of them all, . There's a lot more, but these are the most noteworthy points.
 * Souls are an important part of Mortal Kombat, as the battle for them throughout the tournaments makes up the premise of the series. Several characters (such as Shang Tsung, Quan Chi, and Shao Kahn) have the ability to take other people's souls as their own, and this primarily results in the demise of the victim and the granting of more strength to the victor. The only way to live without a soul in the Mortal Kombat universe, other than having it return to your body or being reanimated as a zombie by a sorcerer, is to get turned into a cyborg by the Lin Kuei.
 * In Final Fantasy X, when a person dies, their soul must be sent on to the Farplane by a summoner's Sending. If not one of two things will happen: Either the soul will form with other souls and become a Fiend, which is the major source of monsters all game, or a strong willed soul will give itself a physical form by pulling together supernatural creatures called pyreflies, becoming an Unsent. Several major characters are Unsent (including ). An Unsent can voluntarily leave for the Farplane (as happens to in X and  in X-2) or be Sent against their will.
 * Every episode of The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police Season 2 involves souls in some way, and it appears that the "You are your soul" theory seems to be in use here. Your soul has two forms: a gloopy blob and a transparent version of your body. Zombies are created by Jurgen with his Soul Sucker, which separates the soul from the body and causes both soul and body to retain personality, effectively causing two copies of the same person, soul and zombie. Not the same personality though; Sam and Max's souls are fed up with Sam and Max's mindless violence and poor moral compass, and refuse to go back to their bodies. Jurgen then sends the souls off to  to be crushed by depressed Moai heads, and then finally the grim reaper takes them to the Soul Train on the River Styx which sends them to Hell.
 * It turns out that if you're in Baldur's Gate 2. And it has some other interesting effects.
 * Darwinians in Darwinia have digital souls. When a Darwinian dies, its soul floats off to soul repository in the middle of Darwinia. Soon it'll float back and its intelligence is processed after being sent to spawning grounds to be reborn again. However, soul destroyers and in Multiwinia, dark forest can destroy their souls.
 * In Chzo Mythos the soul is one of a person's three aspects, the other two is the body and the mind. The soul is described as the entity that dreams and hopes, and is therefore regarded as a symbol of the future. A soul can feel pain if someone or something very dear to the person it belongs to is killed and/or destroyed, but since this permanently cripples the soul, it can only be done once. A soul can be completely destroyed if it is bound to an object and that object is destroyed. Furthermore: A mind separated from it's soul will go insane and lose it's perception of reality, an effect that increases the futher away the soul is.
 * In SaGa Frontier 2, the ability to use magic, or 'Anima', is considered the physical manifestation of one's soul. The stronger your Anima, the stronger your soul. Occasionally, someone is born without the ability to use Anima; these few are scorned and looked down upon, and even rumored to be 'soulless'. Naturally, one of the main characters, Gustave XIII, can't use Anima and has to cope with this prejudice and hatred on top of all his other problems.
 * Played with in Afterlife and its SOULs (Stuff Of Unending Life).
 * Albion has two different versions. 'Soul' in a tradition sense is an abstract concept used by Terrans to make a distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings. The closest thing the game has to actual souls is called Ens, which is defined as life-force.
 * In The World Ends With You, "Soul" is a form of matter that comprises everything in the UG.
 * Borrowing from Eastern religions and mythologies, Touhou has interesting characters when it comes to the souls:
 * Most people's souls—or at least the human ones—are made of 3 "high" "kon" and 7 "lower" "paku". Part of Youmu Konpaku's souls is outside her body and is visible to everyone. Because of this macabre soul-arrangement, Youmu resists anything that specifically target only the living or only the dead. Meanwhile, Yuyuko (Youmu's ghostly mistress) has some ghost lights orbiting around her, each of them are themselves souls.
 * Hourai elixir renders one immortal: the soul gain the ability to materialize physical body, which is no longer tightly coupled to the soul. A Hourai immortal can be blown to bits and the soul will regenerate the body; this is a painful process that strain the soul. (This gory dismemberment has happened to Mokou multiple times.)
 * Other kind of immortals simply become immortals because they kick the arses of every Grim Reaper who come to claim their soul (much to Komachi Onozuka's grievance). Apparently you can be immortal if both your soul and your body are badass enough.

Web Comics

 * In Last Res0rt, souls are a form of 'creative energy' that naturally occurs in living beings, often in a set amount known as a 'Sterling'. Being born with more or less energy (or having it altered later on, in the case of the Dead Inside) leads to remarkable powers.
 * At the end of Zebra Girl's "The Magi-Net" arc, after the wizards lose their souls, most of them die, and the few that are left lose their magical talents and become permanently insane.
 * In Dominic Deegan, destroying a soul causes a huge explosion. Now that's metaphysics!
 * You knew we had to get in an El Goonish Shive example, right? According to Nioi, people created by the Dewitchery Diamond have completely new souls, rather than being reincarnations. Because.
 * If you are a host for The Sins in Sins then your soul is destroyed, no matter what you do or have done. Just picking up their Soul Jar is enough. This doesn't seem to impact daily life, but Word of God states that when you die, it is nought but oblivion for you. Which sucks.
 * Misfile doesn't say where your soul goes when you die, but wherever it is, you go there naked.
 * Richard from Looking for Group has partially settled the final question of the first paragraph of this entry. Monk souls taste like chocolate, other souls apparently do not.
 * In MSF High all that is known is that souls are immutable. No magic can influence a soul. Period, end of story.
 * Gilbert of A Modest Destiny had his soul stolen as an infant. He says that he can't feel emotions and that when he dies he will cease to exist because of this.
 * Also, it makes it so that after Deo Deo temporarily inhabits his body, he can't get it back. Ironically, Gilbert was only working for Deo Deo so he'd be immortal and wouldn't have to cease to exist. Deo Deo "forgot" to tell him the problem.
 * In Sluggy Freelance a person's consciousness and personality go where their soul goes. If their soul is sold or stolen, their body is left in a coma. It is apparently possible to "kill" a soul/spirit, but whether this leaves them Deader Than Dead or just sends them somewhere else is unknown. Souls also take on the same appearance as the body they used to inhabit (with a few ghostly attributes added); the exception being Aylee, who, due to being a shapeshifter, has a far more amorphous soul.
 * Soul "bodies" are also material if they enter a spirit world. Ghosts seem to be souls left behind in the normal material dimension, where their bodies are incorporeal. (Yes, incorporeal bodies. This kind of thing is why notions of a soul can be so confusing.)
 * The principle characters of DDG are all disembodied souls, this leads to a certain amount of both Voluntary Shapeshifting and involuntary shapeshifting
 * Souls play an important part of the plot of Archipelago. The Big Bad seeks to free himself with the souls of the descendants of the six heroes who imprisoned him. The Dragon collects the souls by tearing them out of bodies with his magic mechanical arm. When a soul is removed, the body remains alive, although it loses its personality and becomes an Empty Shell that obeys simple orders but mostly sits around. The souls themselves remain in the physical world, wrapped in a layer of protective magic. They are small, weightless, retain the individual's magic capabilities, and are extremely cute.
 * Off White: All spirits are shades of gray, except that each species has a single White Spirit and Black Spirit to keep the balance between the other spirits. The White and Black Spirits at least can be reincarnated, and even the bugs have spirits.
 * In L's Empire, souls apparently develop along with the mind while the body is still a fetus. The only difference is that the soul develops backwards in comparison to the mind (the mind develops selfishness then compassion, and the soul develops compassion then selfishness.)
 * In Sinfest, the Devil can add some soul to his recipe.

Web Original

 * Shadowhunter Peril focuses on souls quite a bit. There exists a creature called an Ushubaen, which boils down to a human imbibed with demonic energy. Normally this would kill the human, but if the human is also imbibed with enough souls to counteract the corrosive demonic energy, then they become a perfect mix of the two (in contrast to faeries, which are half angel half demon, but aren't perfect mixtures). Unfortunately, because they have multiple souls in them, and demonic energy taints the mind as well as bestowing powers, all Ushubaen are insane, genocidal Complete Monsters who want to destroy everything they can. They can even kill angels.
 * All demons don't have souls, instead they have Pure Energy. This grants them life, but not a place in the afterlife. Umbra's desire for a soul is pretty tear jerking. No matter how hard he fights against his own kind and tries to protect innocent humans from the wrath of other demons, if his physical body is destroyed he will be sent straight to Hell and have to force himself back to the surface to fight for the humans all over again. This later gets rectified, as he gains a soul and turns into an angel.

Western Animation

 * The Simpsons: Bart loses his soul (or just thinks he does, depending) and loses his sense of humor, his breath can't fog glass, and animals fear him (not to mention that he doesn't activate automatic door openers). He and Milhouse seem to believe that a soul is essentially a get-into-the-afterlife-free ticket. In a dream, Bart imagines the soul as a duplicate individual to interact with; since he sold his, the other Bart joins the two Milhouses.
 * And just in case you forgot the robot souls thing, Transformers offers sparks. Note that only transformers have sparks. Humans do not. And at least in  it is possible for a Transformer to still live and function without their personal spark.
 * In Transformers Animated they even seem to have an afterlife, the Well of All Sparks. While it's existence has been proven, virtually no properties have been established for it.
 * A similar concept in the Beast Wars series called the Matrix seems to exist, it being the place where the sparks of the departed commune. All these sparks being there is what makes the Matrix what it is, though, rather than it being an otherworldy place that may or may not exist and you'd have to die to find out. This concept is also called the Allspark until the movieverse made its Allspark a MacGuffin - since then, it's been called the Well of All Sparks.
 * Apropos of nothing, in the "Shattered Glass" Mirror Universe, Sparks have an opposite charge and are called "Embers," which was sorta cool.
 * Only Transformers have sparks, meaning their souls can be transferred into a different functional body, by dint of being manifest. But by the same token, they can also be directly attacked, while a human's spirit cannot by dint of being an intangible force. See, a Transformer's Spark is a combination of soul and heart. If a Transformer's spark is extinguished, then without divine or MacGuffin intervention they're doomed.
 * In Avatar: The Last Airbender souls exist, but it is not discussed what happens if you lose one (or even if it is possible). It is possible for a soul to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, such as the case of the human Yue becoming the moon spirit. The most interesting example is that of the titular Avatar: the World Spirit which is reincarnated whenever it dies, meaning thousands of Avatars have existed with the same soul, but different minds and identities.
 * In Ugly Americans souls are physical objects resting in the stomach, and are enlarged by good deeds and shrunk by bad ones. Mark's soul is dangerously engorged, to the point that it's pushing on his other organs. They can be removed and sold to demons, although this can cause feelings of emptiness, which can be counteracted by medication.
 * In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic multiparter "Bright Lights", several ponies and other beings have had their shadows stolen. They start becoming sick and tired, with no explanation or cure. The long-term victims are half-alive and zombie-like. Galaxy, The Empath, even states that it's not just the patch of obstructed light that's missing.