Death's Hourglass: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:Birthday countdown 8681.jpg|link=The Perry Bible Fellowship|
{{quote|''I told her I knew when I was going to die because my birth certificate had an expiration date on it.''
|'''[[Steven Wright]]'''}}
It's one of mankind's oldest and most useless musings... "which will be the day I die, how much time do I still have?" In real life no one knows until it's too late. In fiction, some characters only need to check their clock.
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There are clocks, watches, withering flowers and other things that fill this function, but the most popular and oldest design is a running hourglass, which is so poetically symbolic. May overlap with [[When the Clock Strikes Twelve]] if the hourglass or bell is also counting down to midnight. Compare with [[Doomsday Clock]], which is the fatalistic version of this on a global scale.
{{deathtrope}}
{{examples}}
== Fatalistic ==
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** The Discworld's "lifetimers" aren't just clocks. If a person's hourglass is broken, they immediately die or go catatonic, and Death doesn't normally control the flow of timers. He is merely supposed to help a timer's owner pass on when the sand runs out. (Fiddling with timers is usually a bad idea, as several characters discover the hard way.) Even Death has an hourglass, but it has no sand and cannot be damaged.
** Rincewind's hourglass is a particularly interesting one. It has a very odd shape and the sand within sometimes flows slower or even in ''reverse''. Even Death himself doesn't know when Rincewind's life is going to end.
** Death doesn't know when a lot of Discworld characters are going to die. It has to do with 'quantum' or something. In ''[[
** As the [[
{{quote|{{smallcaps|"The Hogfather gives presents. There's no greater present than a future." }}}}
** He does the same thing for the title character in ''[[
** It is explicitly stated that this is a ''mortal'' ability - many do it all the time, without even realizing. Death, under normal circumstances, cannot truly extend someone's life.
** In fact he doesn't add sand to anyone's life timers. In Reaper Man, it doesn't count because he wasn't Death at the time and could act as a human would to save lives. In [[Hogfather]] he isn't Death either, he's filling in for the Hogfather, who's job isn't to let people die, see above quote. In Mort, he doesn't give Mort more time, he turns the hourglass over. He doubles his lifespan, at the cost that now Mort knows exactly how long he has to live.
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* [[Older Than Feudalism]]: From Greek myth, there are the Moirai, the Fate sisters, who measure out people's lifespans on their threads.
* There's a Greek myth about Meleager, who was prophesied to live only until a log in the fire had burned down. His mother promptly snatched it out and extinguished it, and he kept on living until years later... when he murdered his two uncles in a fight, and his mother threw that log back in the fire. (Nobody does dysfunctional families like Greek mythology.)
=== Tabletop Games ===
* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]''; according to giantish legend, the god Annam lives in the Hidden Realm, where hourglasses measure the lives of every living being in existence.
=== Video Games ===
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** There's also the fact that interfering with the natural progression of his life in such a manner gets him banned from returning to Heaven when he finally dies. He sees what happens
* ''[[Hercules (1997 film)||Hercules]]'' had the Fate sisters, and their strings of fate.
* ''[[The Grim Adventures of Billy
** Even the Grim Reaper himself has one, albeit much larger and filled with black sand, but we get to see him as a kid in some episodes so it makes more sense than one would think.
*** Also, possibly due to [[Achievements in Ignorance]], complete idiot Billy manages to flip over Grim's giant hourglass, quickly de-aging him into oblivion.
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=== Real Life ===
* Execution, if you don't escape a prison by the time it's scheduled, then you're dead.
* The website
== Or else... ==
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=== Literature ===
* Discworld again: in ''[[
* In Piers Anthony's ''[[On a Pale Horse]]'', the Incarnation of Death carries an hourglass that shows how long he has to collect his next client's soul. Subverted in that Death can actually postpone a given death briefly if his schedule demands it, although Fate will intercede if he delays things too long.
** Make that a snazzy black watch; even an [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] has to keep up with the times.
** Time, [[Captain Obvious|naturally]], is the one to [[Title Drop|bear an hourglass]], but among its many powers ''is'' the ability to freeze time and thus prevent death. It never actually measures out lifespans, though book seven in the series states that each grain of sand within it does correspond to a human life.
** In [[For The Love Of Evil]], Lucifer torments Parry by telling him the exact time of his death.
* In the ''[[Left Behind]]'' book ''Kingdom Come'': While lacking the actual timepiece, citizens of the Millennial Kingdom know that "naturals" who stay unbelievers by the time they reach 100 will instantly die and go to Hell. The only way for "naturals" to avoid this fate is to [[Religion Is Right|accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.]] [[La Résistance|The Other Light faction]] sees [[God Is Evil]] because of this and has prepared for that contingency by having their teachings passed down to the next generation of its converts so that the generation that [[Final Battle|gets to confront God and Jesus by the end of the Millennium]] will be "assured victory" when [[Sealed Evil in a Can|Satan is released]]. [[Curb Stomp Battle|Unfortunately for them,]] [[You Can't Fight Fate|it didn't go as they hoped.]]
=== Live-Action TV ===
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* The flower in the glass with its dropping petals of from Disney's ''[[Beauty and the Beast]]'' showed how long the Beast had before the curse was unbreakable, ending at his 21st birthday.
* In ''[[Aladdin (Disney film)|Aladdin]]'', Jafar uses the "Sands of Time" to discover the one person (Aladdin) who can retrieve the lamp from the Cave of Wonders. Later, he imprisons Jasmine in the lower half of a giant hourglass, where she is in danger of suffocation due to the sand falling on her.
* ''[[Hazbin Hotel]]''; the series starts right after one of the annual purges, and a clock in the center of the city starts counting down to the next one. While not outright stated, it is implied that Charlie has until then to prove her hotel is a success.
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[[Category:Death Tropes]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
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