Mundane Afterlife: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|'''Calvin''': I wonder where we go after we die.

It may be [[A Form You Are Comfortable With]] for souls who are still living who see or visit it.

 

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''Inverted'' in ''[[Amakusa 1637]]''. At one point, the locals ask the time-traveling protagonists to describe the "Heaven" they believe they come from. When the protagonists comply, they are themselves shocked and moved when they realize the modern society they describe - one of electric light and heating, religious tolerance, rule of law, and ample food - ''is'', in fact, Heaven for the [[Crapsack World|medieval peasants]]. A paradise that they'd been taking for granted.

* In Mitch Albom's ''The Five People You Meet In Heaven'', before you can truly get to heaven, you have to meet five people to learn the meaning of your life. Afterward, you choose your heaven. Usually it is some place you liked or missed out on in life. It may even have people you loved in it. For example, Eddie's wife Marguerite's heaven is a constant stream of happy weddings, because she loves the magic of them.

* In [[C. S. Lewis|CS Lewis]]' ''The Great Divorce'', Hell is a very drab city right after everything has closed for the evening. And your neighbors are jerks. (You are, too, but you're less likely to notice.) And it's raining all the time and there's nothing to do except bicker with the neighbors and make houses that don't even keep the rain out. All the interesting people are millions of miles away...and really aren't that interesting when you meet them.

** Though at the very end, the narrator is carefully cautioned that he is only dreaming it and he must make it clear that it is a dream, with the implication that it was [[A Form You Are Comfortable With]].

* In one of [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s ''Five Hundred Kingdoms'' books the protagonist visits a local afterlife which is basically total apathy. People freshly arrived will work out of habit, making nets and cleaning clothes, or they will wander seeking answers, but the work never goes anywhere - nets never get bigger, the clothes aren't cleaner - and bit by bit they forget everything, until they lie down and sleep. They can be roused, but not into interest, and if reminded that they are dead they will attack.

* In ''[[The Lovely Bones]]'', each person has their own heaven, but they overlap if they meld together well. The narrator (a junior-high-age girl who was murdered) has a high school like the one in her hometown, but with swingsets, and she never has to go to any class except art. The other residents include teenage boys who play basketball on the blacktop and adult female athletes who use the sports fields for practice. She has a roommate and an intake counselor. They can get whatever they want in heaven (as soon as they specifically figure out that they want it), but this seems to apply only to mundane things, like dogs for the narrator or speaking English without a Vietnamese accent for her roommate.

* The afterlife in ''The Brief History of the Dead'' is basically the same as the world of the living, except nobody ever ages and people spontaneously vanish when there's nobody left alive who remembers them.

 

 

* In ''[[Scrubs]]'', one of JD's fantasies has him going to Heaven and finding it's really a diner that doesn't serve flapjacks, making him briefly wonder if flapjacks are actually evil.

* The Ancients' form of Limbo in ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' consists of a diner. Apparently, the food's quite excellent. It's heavily implied that the Ascended Plane looked like a diner because [[You Cannot Grasp the True Form|Jackson Cannot Grasp The True Form]] of it, so his mind substituted a diner instead.

* In ''[[Achewood]]'', Hell consists of a dreary town with a KFC and a small eatery with toilets that lead back to Earth. Everyone drives a 1982 Subaru Brat, and there are telephones that allow you to call home, but change your side of the call into a telemarketing pitch.

* In ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]'', Purgatory is a restaurant with poor service—it takes literally centuries to be served, since there's only [[Grim Reaper|one waiter]]. And the only things on the menu are your sins in life ("roast baby potatoes sprinkled with lied to your mother about brushing your teeth").

* In ''[[Pictures for Sad Children]]'', Hell is a hotel somewhere in Central America. There's nothing preventing you from leaving, and the punishments are poorly-implemented attempts at ironic punishments. For example, for an internet addict, the only punishment is that the wi-fi is slow and costs money. Also, Wikipedia is replaced with a message that whatever trivia you were looking up is stupid, but the rest of the internet works fine. Furthermore, it seems to be that you can escape into the bodies of the dead by climbing through the ceiling tiles. Somehow.

* The Ring of the ''[[Slightly Damned]]''—where people who have no place in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory go—is an afterlife filled with pretty much only piles of brown rock.