A Hell of a Time



""Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.""

- Mark Twain

The Anti Hero (Or the Villain) has finally perished and gone to the afterlife. Of course, his track record denies him entry to Heaven, so he finds himself tumbling to that Other Place. But the strange thing is, it doesn't seem to be that horrible. Sure, there's fire everywhere, the paintwork's flaking, and the occasional moans of the damned ruin the ambience a tad, but overall, it's a place you could get used to.

Often combined with the Ironic Hell (if a particularly Jerkass character dies, then Hell for them may well involve being showered with love and pretty pink ponies), or Lord Satan just not wanting the badass hero to screw things up for them. Sometimes, it can be that Hell is only a nice place to the evil - the merely "not quite good" still suffer for all eternity. Of course, if Satan Is Good, all bets are off - Hell may even be a nicer place than Heaven.

Also often combined with Rock Me Asmodeus and The Dead Can Dance. Joining the fun may be the motivation for the Hell Seeker. Contrast Hell of a Heaven for when Heaven isn't all it's cracked up to be. Usually a form of Mundane Afterlife.

Anime and Manga

 * Magical Pokaan has Yuuma going to Hell after being involved in a romance with a ghost. However, after finding out she'll be doing stuff like stacking stones for eternity, she thinks she might as well get used to it and enjoy herself. As a result, she gets kicked from Hell into Heaven. She finds Heaven boring, though, so she's sent back to Japan.
 * Rurouni Kenshin: No madman in his right mind is going to mistake for a holiday resort but he doesn't seem to mind terribly. In fact, if his words are anything to go by, he plans to have the trope name by overthrowing the Devil...
 * Hell in Kenshin also seems to lack any sort of torments, demons, or much of anything; it's just a big mountain of skulls and bones, with Satan/Enma's castle off in the distance. seem to be free to do as they please. Also it seems to be a located inside a pocketwatch....
 * Hell in Dragonball Z is... Different. Namely it's guarded by ogres instead of demons, and everyone's soul (that isn't special - i.e. plot relevant) is just a little fluff cloud, but it's mostly a pretty decent place and you see things like a couple of souls having a romantic boat ride (in Blood Lake), a group of souls organizing a field trip (up Spikey Mountain) and just generally a kind of do-as-you-please attitude. Well except that one time Janenba broke reality...

Comedy

 * A Russian (Soviet Union era) joke goes something along the lines of: A Russian and an American are sentenced to Hell. The Devil summons them and says: "Guys, you have 2 options: an American or Russian hell. In the American one you can do what you want, but you'll have to eat a bucket of shit every morning. The Russian one is the same, but it's 2 buckets." The Yankee quickly makes up his mind and goes to American Hell, while the Russian eventually chooses the Russian one. In a week or so they meet. The Russian asks: "So, what's it like out there?"/ "Exactly what the devil said, the Hell itself is OK, but eating a bucket of shit is killing me. And you?" / "Ah, it feels like home - either the shit was not delivered or there aren't enough buckets for everyone!"
 * There's a similar Brazilian joke, except change any Russian with Brazilian and it's a shallow plate in the American and a bucket for the Brazilian, also, the Brazilian chooses his hell right away. When they meet a week after and the American asks, the Brazilian answers: "It's a great place. The demons are always lazing off the torture, the bureaucrats make it impossible for the buckets to be delivered, other sections of hell just ignore it exists so the administration just don't care and the damned party all the time."
 * The exact same joke is heard in Italy, too - and with reason.
 * There is a Daily Breeze review of the Sex Pistols' 1997 "Filthy Lucre" tour stop in Los Angeles, written in the voice of Sid Vicious. Vicious mentions how he's glad to be in Hell, where they get all the good music.
 * Comedian Bill Hicks made a similar joke in which he said that if rock music came from the Devil, at least we'd have great music to listen to for all eternity, as opposed to lame Christian rock music.
 * A man goes to Hell and finds it to be an immense night-club where everybody have great time for all eternity. While exploring around he stumbles upon an inconspicuous door with the more "conventional" hellscape behind it: fire, brimstone and horrible tortures. He asks a passing-by demon about it. The demon says: "Oh, it's for the religious folk - they prefer it that way for some reason."
 * A man goes to Heaven and finds it nice but not exactly amusing. So he enquires for a trip to Hell and sees a place of neverending free-and-easy pleasures. So he volunteers to move to Hell for good and is thrown into a pit of boiling tar. "What the fuck! Last time it was all different!!" - screams the man. "Last time you were a tourist, and now you're an immigrant," - responds the demon.
 * There are countless variations of the punchline: "Last time we were recruiting you, now you are staff."; "What you first saw was the demo, this is the actual product", etc.
 * A man goes to heaven where his every wish is fulfilled. He gets everything he ever wanted, wins at all games, and everyone likes him. After a few months he starts to get completely bored and in his despair he finally asks an angel if he couldn't take a look at hell, just for one day. To which the angels replies "Where do you think you are?"
 * This is exactly what happens in the Twilight Zone example below.
 * A virtuous man dies of old age after a life of avoiding the temptations of the flesh. The angel of death takes him and says "For your life of virtue, you will now get to spend eternity in Heaven. Before we go there, though, here's a peek at the other option:". Both go to Hell, and find out that it's a huge, never ending party with music, drugs, sex, whatever. After spending a few minutes there they leave for Heaven, only to find out that it's a bleak, white plane devoid of life. The man, angry, asks the angel why. "Well, what did you expect? We're not going to invite a DJ to play for three guys."
 * Fred the Crab and Sam the Clam, who are friends, both die. Fred, who was virtuous, gets sent to Heaven; Sam gets sent to Hell. Fred gets issued a harp, which he's very good at playing with all his little legs. But eventually he gets lonely and wants to see Sam again, so he asks God if he can go visit Hell. God says yes, but he has to be back by midnight. Fred goes to Hell and finds out that Sam has a swinging nightclub. Fred plays the harp with them and they have such a good time that he almost loses track of time, and when he looks at the clock it's a quarter to midnight. He rushes back to Heaven and gets there right at midnight. "Wow, you just barely made it," says God. But then Fred says, "I have to go back! I left my harp in Sam Clam's disco!"

Comics

 * Résurrection, the Hell of Franco-Belgian comic Requiem Chevalier Vampire, is a bizarre inversion of the Earth where the oceans and continents exchange place, time flows backwards and people are resurrected as various fantasy monsters like vampires, werewolves, ghouls etc. Most importantly however, the world is completely unjust; the more evil you were in life the better you are rewarded in hell, so the people who commited the worst evils are resurrected as vampires and form the top clique in the world's demonic society, while petty criminals are resurrected as zombies that languish at the bottom as either slaves to the vampires or scavengers out in the vast plains where people first enter hell.
 * The worst off, though, are the Lemures (or as the English translation somewhat inexplicably labels them, Lamias) -- the setting's ghosts, these are good people who died as victims of someone who qualified for this world, and have to live in Résurrection as eternal victims, only able to escape if the person responsible for their being condemned to Résurrection is "expirated." The one perk is that they get to torment their killers in their sleep.
 * In Secret Six,

Film

 * The One, When he finds it's not so bad, as he receives what he wanted anyway --.
 * Little Nicky, in the end, two pseudo-Satanists die in a plane crash and are shown in Hell, partying. "They have never been happier."
 * Bedazzled, the remake, where Hell seems to be a non-stop nightclub. Slightly subverted in that it's implied that eventually it gets really, really boring.
 * Although Bill and Teds Bogus Journey mostly features Ironic Hells tailored to the characters, a deleted scene would have added some aspects of this; before catching Satan's attention, the duo would have been forced by a demon to break rocks with hammers. Bill discovers he actually really enjoys doing so.

Literature

 * William Blake's The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell is probably the Ur Example.
 * In the Eoin Colfer book The Wish List, more evil people get luxury apartments, complete with lava hottubs.
 * Used in Good Omens, where an angel and a demon discuss who gets the better entertainment (Hell wins, as all Heaven has is Elgar and The Sound Of Music for all eternity). Overall, however, Hell is said to be extremely unpleasant. The real point of the argument is that the Earth, possessing the best of both worlds, should be saved.
 * In Paradise Lost, the capital of Hell (Pandemonium) is portrayed as a somewhat glorious place - far more beautiful than anywhere on earth, but rather small for countless of millions of gigantic fallen angels. Thankfully they can change their size at will.
 * In Robert A. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice, God created Hell to be a bad place, but then Satan took over and turned it relatively nice. It's notable that the story features a God Is Evil plot that is itself subverted by revealing that God and Satan "take turns" playing the Good and Evil deity role and they're merely junior members of a vast Celestial Bureaucracy.
 * The Discworld book Eric features the Disc's version of Hell and the description of how it used to be before the book's Big Bad took charge doesn't sound that bad - people did get tortured, but since they didn't have physical bodies this wasn't a problem and the demons were quite friendly. But the new management has switched to psychological torture by boring the souls of the damned out of their minds.
 * In the novel Waiting On The Galactic Bus by Parke Godwin, Heaven and Hell (or "Topside" and "Downstairs" as the characters refer to it) are pretty much the same, shaped only by the minds of the souls ("post-life energy") who inhabit it. Also, people tend to end up in the version they expect to. In the sequel, The Snake Oil Wars Topside is run by one of the two immortal alien brothers accidentally responsible for human evolution, and Downstairs is turned over to Jesus (Yeshua) and Judas (Yes, that Judas).
 * The Hell in the novels of Edward Lee is one of the "only a nice place to the evil" sorts. The Mephistopolis, as they call it, is a big Dystopian city with a government and economic classes. A Satanist, Nazi, mass murderer, fallen angel, tyrant, serial rapist, etc. has a much better chance of getting into Hell's privileged upper class than a suicide or a drug dealer.
 * In Ted Chiang's short story "Hell is the Absence of God" Hell is exactly like Earth except God is absent. His absence is immediately noticable because God's angels frequently make random appearances on Earth that are accompanied by destructive weather patterns. The only people this bothers are the really religious, who fear eternal separation from their Lord if they fail to love him enough.
 * The Afro-American folktale character Stagger Lee aka Stag O' Lee, you get the idea is a living Memetic Badass God Mode Sue that makes Chuck Norris seem ho-hum even on his best day as he simply decides as a child not to be a slave in Pre-Civil War America and walks the earth, carrying only a deck of cards (to win money,) a guitar (to seduce WHITE women) and a gun (to kill men, especially White men) as he literally gets away with murder, marries his victim's wife, can't be killed by hanging and shoots at the Grim Reaper to live into the 20th Century, forcing God to step in and smite him with a bolt of lightning. Stag's response: go up to Fluffy Cloud Heaven, break up God's card game, declares the place sucks (only White people and Uncle Toms) and deliberately goes to Hell where he turns it into a nightclub while the Devil is too scared/sad to do anything about it.
 * The entire Heroes In Hell shared universe book series. Everybody who was anybody ends up in hell. Each person is dealing with their own personal level of torment or contentment. Julius Caesar is in hell, but his attitude is 'It's just afterlife, and not a bad one".
 * In the Incarnations of Immortality series, Hell is definitely a bad place, but the current Satan has instituted various "reforms" to make it more efficient, and has also visited Heaven and found it to be dreadfully dull. More literally, he's set up a special annex of Hell for the souls that properly belong in Heaven but were misclassified. This annex is really nice, the way Heaven is supposed to be, and Hilarity Ensues when he does finally manage to get an exchange program set up, as most of the souls don't want to leave.
 * In the novel Jitterbug Perfume, the afterlife is briefly explored by one character. Most people seem to just get shuttled off on some boats to have their souls reincarnated/"return to the source" or something. But those who pass the test (heart lighter than a feather) are sent to the eternal party boat full of philosophers, artists, interesting people, etc. One side of the boat has the word "Heaven" painted on it, the otherside says "Hell"; it's all a matter of perspective I guess (some people would see lingering around forever instead of "moving on" as a punishment I guess?)
 * In the French play Aucassin and Nicolette (said to date back to the 1200s!), Aucassin basically says that he'd rather to go to Hell (with Nicolette) than to Heaven, because in Hell reside "the fine churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen".

Live Action TV

 * Toyed with in the first series of Black Adder. After being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund is charged with ensuring a nobleman leaves his lands to the crown instead of the church. He does this by explaining that Heaven is for people who like praising God and watering pot plants, while Hell is for pillage, adultery, and so on. Judging from the man's reaction just before dying, this is probably not true.
 * In the infamous Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit", this trope is actually used as a punishment.

Music
""In Hell there's a big hotel
 * From Billy Joel's "Blonde Over Blue":

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""

""They say there's a heaven for those who will wait/ Some say it's better but I say it ain't/ I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints/ The sinners are much more fun.""
 * From his "Only the Good Die Young" (although it doesn't actually mention the word hell):

""And when I die, I want to go to hell!""
 * The Irving Berlin song "Pack Up Your Sins And Go To The Devil."
 * Iron Maiden would like to remind you that "Hell ain't a bad place; Hell is From Here To Eternity". But they also told us of "the evil face that twists my mind and brings me to despair". Maybe it's only not a bad place for girls like Charlotte.
 * ACDC would also like to remind you that "Hell Ain't A Bad Place to Be"
 * The Venom song "To Hell and Back" depicts a rollicking party full of breeding mutants, dancing zombies, Satanic queens and so forth. By metalhead standards, it sounds pretty cool. (A similar song by the same band begs "Leave Me in Hell"; granted, that narrator's daddy "rules hell's domain," so it's a good bet he's got a privileged perspective on the place.)
 * A fairly common theme in Morrissey's solo work.

"When I die I don't want no part of heaven
 * U2's "The Fly" features a narrator who calls his lover from hell. The twist is he kind of likes it there.
 * Apparently, Satan likes gothic musicians, and invites the damned to enjoy the buffet. He also has a wife.
 * Played as a Tear Jerker in Bruce Springsteen's "Youngstown", where an unemployed iron worker sums up his life:

I would not do heaven's work well

I pray the devil comes and takes me

To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell"


 * Played with in "Death Death (Devil, Devil, Devil, Devil, Evil, Evil, Evil, Evil Song)" by Voltaire. After dying and going to hell, Voltaire finds that Satan and his wife are his biggest fans...and then Satan jabs him in the junk with a pitchfork. But then he says he was just kidding, welcomes Voltaire to hell, and tells him to "enjoy the buffet".

Newspaper Comics

 * One of Dan Piraro's Bizarro strips depicts a festive setting with everyone wearing Hawaiian shirts and holding drinks. An overhead banner reads, "Welcome to Hell. Get-acquainted luau 7:00 p.m." One newcomer asks another, "Surprised?"
 * German newspaper comic Touche by ©Tom has reoccuring strip of the Devil welcomming new residents to Hell. The devil is a fat and bald naked man with glasses who is usually much more interested in his notepad than talking to the new arrivals, which makes most people a little confused about what place they've ended up. But he soon informs them about the particularly cruel punishment they prepared just for them. (This one is about a department store cashier who died during christmas season.
 * Translation:
 * You know, we're just not reaching that guy.

Radio

 * Old Harrys Game is set in Hell - and while the descriptions of individual punishments sound unpleasant (The Devil's Bumbling Sidekick is ordered to literally eat himself for instance) they don't seem to actually bother the protagonists much, or last long. The unhapiest person actually appears to be Satan himself, a miserable, self loathing prison warden who can never escape his job and only painfully remember his days as an angel.

Theater
"Don Juan: Hell, Señora, is a place for the wicked. The wicked are quite comfortable."
 * In Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orphee aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), the gods hold a massive party in Hell. (Though its not the same thing as the Christian hell, in ancient Greek Mythology, hell is practically a portmanteau synonym of afterlife.)
 * In the third act of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, referred to as Don Juan in Hell when performed separately, Dona finds Don Juan and the Devil discussing philosophy, and is horrified that her guardian, the Commendatore killed by Don Juan, is present as well. He has quit heaven due to boredom and moved downstairs.

Video Games

 * The video game Atlantis 2 (also known as Beyond Atlantis) portrayed the Chinese Hell as not scary at all, and the only "hellish" thing about it was the Obstructive Bureaucrat running the place. People could also freely enter and leave it, at least living ones. It also portrayed the Mayan underworld, Xibalba, as a tropical paradise overseen by a slightly insane bat-god.
 * In the Interactive fiction game Perdition's Flames, ever since the afterlife industry was deregulated, Hell had to compete, and now it's tough to tell the difference between the two.
 * In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Daedra seem to be the resident equivalent of demons, therefore making the realms of Oblivion the equivalent of Hell. Sure, Dagon's plane isn't all that great, but, say, hanging around Sheogorath's realm of Oblivion is quite fun, making this a straight example. Somewhat.
 * In Overlord: Raising Hell, the Heaven's Peak Abyss is this for the women, as part of its being an Ironic Hell for Sir William and the men. As well, although the Mellow Hills Abyss is intended to be torture for the human peasants, since it's only an Ironic Hell for Melvin and his Halfings some of them see being chained to a wall forever in a Fire and Brimstone Hell as an improvement over toiling as your slaves for the rest of their lives -- as one puts it, "In the warm, a bit of a stretch, giant exploding halfling to watch. What more could a man want?"
 * UmJammer Lammy's penultimate level takes place in a hell where there are frequent rock concerts. In the North American release, this was changed to an island, but that doesn't really explain the frequent electrocution of the audience.
 * Guitar Hero 3's final stage has you He drags you to hell... Where you rock out a ridiculous concert with demon dancing girls on stage and in cages. You're doing so well he thinks you'll be able to get out of his arrangement, so he challenges you. To a heavy-metal version of Devil Went Down To Georgia. And it, is, awesome.
 * The interior decor of the Afterlife in Mass Effect 2 invokes this, being based entirely on flames and steel while being simultaneously the Coolest Club Ever.
 * In the True Cheater Ending of Catherine,

Web Comics

 * In Happy But Dead, Colin, Gear and Tito all die, and Colin and Gear go to Hell (Tito goes to Heaven because "Dumb Is Good"). However, Gear and Colin soon discover that Hell isn't so bad. It's actually just like their home on Earth, except they now have healthcare and there are free hotubs (technically lava pits) everywhere.
 * In Achewood, everyone drives a 1982 Subaru Brat, there's a KFC, a Best Western where Robert Johnson performs (and the wallpaper mocks you), and a Friendly's that contains the secret to escaping. If you try calling your still-living loved ones on a payphone, your side of the conversation is secretly replaced with a random telemarketer's pitch. The Alt Text sums it up nicely: "Hell is kind of a weird place".
 * The MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing has what is, given the humor, probably a Shout Out in the form of Hey Deze (There is a typical "arcane" gate which is its own area, and a "Waffle Haus" which leads Bad Moon adventurers there.)
 * In Something Positive, Hell is an eternal ferret rave. The chains and fire and brimstone for wicked souls are there too, but still... ferret rave!
 * Additionally, Hell turns out to be where Pepito and Avogadro are reunited. True hell for Pepito, although Avogadro apparently is a thorn in the side of the local administration by complaining that there isn't enough torture.
 * Eight Bit Theater: Black Mage dies and goes to Ironic Hell but then takes over and starts enjoying his power, at least until he's kicked out (brought back to life) for being too evil.
 * One Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip featured a man being presented with a banana split by a giant demon. When the man comments that it doesn't have enough whipped topping, the demon shouts, "That's because you're in Hell!" The comment notes that because demons are mostly fallen angels, they're not very good at torturing people. And then, as SMBC does, it goes one step further.
 * In Slightly Damned, punishment in Hell ranges from "tortured to death on a daily basis" to "absolutely nothing at all". As the title implies, we don't see much of the former, though the latter could be considered a punishment by boredom that comes close to sensory deprivation as The Ring of Slightly Damned features: small brown rocks, big brown rocks, huge brown boulders, brown plains, brown mountains and brown cliffs as far as an eye can see. Understandably, the number of inhabitants is one-digit.
 * "Don't believe everything you hear."
 * The Parking Lot Is Full of the only good for bad people variety.
 * Inverted in Jack Chick comics. Apparently, hell is presented this way in the media and/or among roleplaying gamers, satanists and other sinful people. One comic had someone arriving in hell and expressing disappointment that it is not a huge party and another one had a sign at the gates of hell reading "Welcome to Hell. All parties cancelled due to fire".

Web Original

 * This is a major part of the premise of Bartleby Tales--God went completely nuts, and almost everyone goes to Hell, so the Devil decided not to punish people who aren't really that bad. The part of Hell that most directly fits the trope is the second level, where people deprogram themselves from all the silly taboos they were taught in life. (We never see the first level, and the third and lower are for people who genuinely need to atone for something.)
 * Sailor Moon Abridged: Mars dies at in the penultimate episode with the rest of the cast and winds up in hell. She is ecstatic, though knowing her, that's probably not a good sign.

Western Animation

 * A episode of The Simpsons has Bart experiencing a vision of Hell after being hit by a car. This version is directly inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, but Satan seems like a fairly affable guy who takes an immediate liking to Bart, though he reminds him to "lie, cheat and steal" as he sends him back to Earth.
 * In another episode, a church carnival has a mirror that shows what you'd look like in Hell. When Lisa looks into it, she sees herself and ragged clothes being eaten at by flames. When Mr. Burns looks into it, he sees himself dressed as a king and eating a human head. "Excellent!"
 * Treehouse of Horror IV features Ned Flanders as Satan (explaining "Always the one you least suspect") who manages to get Homer to sell him his soul for a doughnut. Though Homer is able to wrangle out of this before an infernal court trial he still is consigned to hell for a day. Hell is played dead straight as a place of suffering and torment, but an attempt at Ironic Hell backfires as Homer is fed all the doughnuts in the world in an attempt to drive him mad; it fails and Homer just keeps asking for more.
 * Hell is completely inconsistent in South Park. Sometimes it'll be a place of suffering and torment, and sometimes we'll drop in on Satan throwing a luau of the damned and people having a decent time. What is somewhat consistent (or at least given the occasional Continuity Nod), though, is that it contains everyone who isn't a Mormon. From what they've shown, Heaven seems like a pretty boring and annoying place filled with stereotypical Mormons.
 * Fridge Brilliance: Satan in this show is a flippant and fickle Man Child, so the Hell is probably oscillating between this and a "regular" Hell, depending on his whim.
 * This was lampshaded in the show itself. When Saddam Hussein proves to be too much of a hassle for Satan himself, what does he do? Gets God to send him to Heaven.
 * On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Miseryville is heavily implied to be Hell. It was even more blatant in the original pitch. Despite this, even though it's run by a man determined to make everyone miserable, it looks pretty tolerable. Probably because said man is incredibly incompetent.
 * It's also helped by the fact that the one character who is both genuinely interested in making people miserable and actually competent is at least as interested in making said incompetent man miserable as anyone else -- and the best way to do that is to make things enjoyable for everyone else. Such as the time she convinced him that he actually lived in Smilesville, where everyone was constantly happy... or tricked him into running a carnival by Accentuating The Negative to make it sound like something people would hate instead of enjoy.
 * The Baskervilles takes place in 'Underworld: The Theme Park' and is run by a man who thinks he's the Devil. Both shows also are named after and star a character(s) who are too upbeat to let Hell bring them down.