Fluffy Cloud Heaven/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Heaven is a cheery place built in the clouds, typically with chubby cherubs and harp-strumming angels.

  • Straight: Alice arrives in heaven, which is built on cloud banks, and is promptly given a harp, a pair of wings, and a robe.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is in a painfully saccharine place where angels and cherubs dispense painful amounts of Glurge
  • Justified: It's impossible to see heaven as it truly is, so it takes on a simpler form for visitors like Alice.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted:
  • Double Subverted:
    • Inner heaven is actually a shiny Utopian city... built on clouds.
    • In spite of its bizarre shapes, heaven is still a happy place.
  • Parodied: Heaven is literally in the clouds; as a result, jet engines are a very real threat.
  • Deconstructed: Heaven is so abjectly boring, with nothing to do but chat with angels (who are either self-righteous or profoundly alien), listen to ethereal music (that rapidly grows dull), and reminisce about past lives (which only makes the souls more nostalgic), that Hell becomes more popular.
  • Reconstructed:
    • The fluffy cloud heaven is a sort of "waiting room" for those unprepared to take the next step into the mysterious "true" heaven, which is implied to be beyond human comprehension.
    • The fluffy clouds might be part of the deal, but humans have carved out a niche for themselves in heaven, complete with all the amenities and pleasures of Earth (even sexual ones), but none of the cruelty or want.
  • Zig Zagged: Every time Alice goes to heaven, it comes out looking different, sometimes with an explanation, other times without.
  • Averted: Heaven, if shown, simply isn't built in cloudbanks.
  • Enforced: After trying to figure out how to best envision heaven, the work starts to draw near a deadline and the creators decide to just go with fluffy clouds and be done with it.
  • Lampshaded: "Fluffy clouds, pearly gates... let me guess, I got the thumbs up from the big guy?
  • Invoked: Alice was expecting and hoping for fluffy clouds, and heaven is happy to oblige.
  • Exploited: As the Legions of Hell find out to their pleasure, clouds, gold and pearls are not very good wall-building material.
  • Defied: When a decent but rough Anti-Hero finds out from an angel he's going to heaven, his only request is "no cutesy clouds." The angel promptly sends him to the ultimate Good Guy Bar/Warrior Heaven.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

Grab your harp and head back to Fluffy Cloud Heaven

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