Mundane Afterlife: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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{{quote|'''Calvin''': I wonder where we go after we die.
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* In ''[[Circle of Magic|Briar's Book]]'', {{spoiler|Briar follows Rosethorn into the afterlife and finds her facing a huge, badly overgrown and disorganized garden... the sort of challenging project both of them could happily work on forever, being plant mages.}}
* Discussed in Dostoevsky's ''[[Crime and Punishment]]'': Svidrigailov speculates that maybe the afterlife is just a small, dark room with spiders in the corners.
* The [[Discworld]] book ''<s>Faust</s> Eric'' involves a discussion of how, since most of the damned become numb to the physical torments of Hell, the demons have devised ways to inflict mental
* The Nac mac Feegle from the ''[[Discworld]]'' series believe that they're ''in'' the afterlife, and refer to dying as "going back to the Last World".
* ''Elsewhere'' is a novel centering on afterlife speculation. It has freshly-dead people go on a sort of boat together. Whatever killed them heals, and then they arrive in Elsewhere, where they are greeted by recently-dead relatives and friends. They [[Merlin Sickness|age backwards]] then, and as newborns are taken back on the boat to be reincarnated. There's a society not unlike what the living have, and people tend to go for different jobs - Marilyn Monroe became a psychiatrist, for example. It's possible to pay to look at the world of the living and communicate through water, but that's generally frowned upon.
* 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
Heaven—at least the part closest to Hell—is a beautiful vibrant natural setting, with everything bigger than life and more real than reality. And that's before sunrise. The very natives glow with light. Unfortunately, if you're a visitor from Hell, it's hard to enjoy, even after you get past being a jerk—walking is painful, and lifting anything heavenly is ''almost'' impossible. If you stop being a jerk, though, you become more solid.
** 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.
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* In ''[[Sam and Max|Sam And Max: What's New, Beelzebub?]]'', Hell is a rather dull office where it's always 4:59
* ''[[Afterlife Heaven And Hell]]'' has an impressive selection of really quite creatively unpleasant punishments in Hell, yet the flavour text for many of the various heavenly rewards make it sound like spending eternity in an upmarket retirement home next-door to a highly sophisticated yet slightly tacky theme park. It actually sounds like it would get really, really boring after a while. Oddly enough, this trope actually forms the basis for a game mechanic; you have to build structures to siphon "Ad Infinitum" from the various rocks scattered about the map, [[It Runs On Nonsenseulum|which the rocks are a source of because they're infinitely heavy,]] and thus can keep all of Heaven's rewards and Hell's punishments perpetually novel.
* The various Netherworld's depicted in the [[Disgaea]] series are far from ''mundane'', but the fate of sinners possibly is; you are stuffed in a penguin suit and forced to do manual labor for low pay. Eventually you will earn enough to be reincarnated. About the only time this fate is truly hellish is if you wind up [[Fate Worse Than Death|working for]] [[Bad Boss|Etna]].
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== Webcomics ==
* 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
* In ''[[DDG]]'' if you are not good enough for heaven, or evil enough for hell, you end up in [http://www.sincomics.com/ddg.php Off World], which contains diners, cinemas, and television shows where you can pay off your karmic debt doing deeds for other souls. Our [[Gender Bender|Heroine]] Zip is doing just that as the the co-host of a gameshow.
* 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]]''
* Heaven in ''[[Minus]]'' is depicted as being just like real
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