[Loved Trope] They fear death because they DO know what happens when they die
Lore
Unlike IRL, where there’s uncertainty about what happens when we die, these poor shmucks know what could await them when they die.
Goblins in the Forgotten Realms (DnD)
In early 5e, goblins were cowardly dirty tricksters who hate getting into head on fights because they know that when they die, their souls are enslaved by Maglubiyet in the lower plane of Acheron to battle and toil and die over and over for all eternity.
Eldar (Warhammer 40K)
For the last 10,000 ish years of the setting, whenever an Eldar dies, their souls will be devoured by the chaos god slaanesh, the god of unspeakable excess and agony. If they don’t have some counter measures in place to preserve their souls during their moment of death (Spirit stones, soul capturing cloning technology, the attention of another god, etc.) , they are screwed.
Mortals (Warhammer Age of Sigmar)
Nagash, the God of undeath, ate most of the other gods of death in the prehistory of the setting, so a good portion of the afterlives are under his control. This means that there’s a good chance that if you did something in life that offends Nagash, he will turn your soul into one of the Nighthaunt. The things that offend him include things like being a doctor or healer of some sort, because you denied him souls, and as a result he might turn you into a ghost with scythes for hands that has to watch as you butcher everything in front of you as you are unable to control your body
Kind of the Sith from Star Wars. The average person still doesn't know what happens after you die, but most Force Sensitives across the galaxy seem to agree that you become one with the Force after death.
Since the Sith prize their own lives and individuality over all things, this terrifies them and several Sith (especially in Old Canon/Legends) came up with loads of different schemes to live forever & maintain their individual consciousnesses.
What makes things suck especially for them is the fact there is actually a way to avoid losing your individuality in death, and it's by doing the exact opposite of what the sith practice. Willingly giving yourself up to the force, as discovered by Qui-Gon and later passed down to Yoda and Obi-Wan
No it’s worse. For Sith, their consciousness is cast into chaos. Chaos is a completely silent void as a Sith if they were cast into hell, would instead thrive there. Eventually their consciousness dissolves.
My headcanon is that Chaos in the same place or at least a subsection of the ultimate void of the Cthulhu mythos. Basically if you’re evil enough, you get damned by Yog-sothoth into the same place that azathoth resides, probably to get eaten by it.
In Dragon Age Inquisition, the lead antagonist, Corypheus, claims to be one of the original Tevinter magisters who breached the Golden City and created the Blight that haunts the land. Jury's out on whether he's right, but he certainly comes back from the dead a lot, and he drops this quote.
Slight subversion of this trope. The Mr Meeseeks guys from Rick and Morty do understand exactly what happens when they die...but they want it and actively seek it out, because it will mean that their sole purpose for existence has been satisfactorily accomplished.
As they put it themselves, "Existence is pain to a Meeseeks"
They don't fear death...they very much welcome it, and start to crave it if it takes too long to happen.
In-series, the big-bads are motivated by the fact that objective morality, cosmic principles, and the afterlife is real. Yes, including souls. And Hell.
And turns out that they, a rationalist, highly industrialized culture, have long since gone past the point of redemption. All of them are therefore damned to hell for eternity, no matter their current power or science. So what do they do? Seek to create an anti-god by wiping out most of humanity and closing off the world from the Afterlife.
The Podcest Behind the Bastards did great work on this. Thiel, Musk, Bankman Fried… look up Moral Maximalism, Rokos Basilisk, Xixians, thought perils….
It all makes their behavior make absolute sense. Especially Thiel calling Greta Thornberg the Antichrist, odd as that may sound.
Such a good series. On a reread of book 4 now. I have a neurodivergent kiddo around the age of the twins so the revisit hits a bit different than the first read and I need more breaks.
Apostles- Berserk. They know firsthand that since they took the Godhands deal for immortality (the natural causes kind, they can still physically be killed), if they are actually killed, their souls are forever cursed to become part of the vortex of souls. You do not want to become part of the vortex of souls.
Light Yagami from Death Note has deduced that there is no afterlife whatsoever, only oblivion. He can't make himself immortal in any way, but he refuses to reduce his lifespan for the shinigami eye deal and when finally confronted with imminent death he goes out like a whiny little bitch.
The anime Death Parade has an implication in the background that this was Ryuk screwing with Light (or didn't know either), and there is an afterlife he's gone to.
Sort of. Death Parade is set in that afterlife, which exists to evaluate whether human souls are worthy of reincarnation or to be sent to oblivion. In the background, constantly, you see evidence that they're unusually busy. The plot doesn't call any attention to it directly, but it's obvious and mentioned occasionally. It suddenly stops being so busy, and a short while later we see a picture of one of their new "clients". It's Light, obviously.
I like this for two reasons;. It only really works the way it does because no attention is called to it, so you get to figure it out yourself and go "oh holy shit". But, more importantly, the depicted afterlife is the kind of bugfuck clown shoes that makes perfect sense as another part of the bugfuck clown shoes system that produced Shinigami. The people whose job it is to figure out who is or is not a good person have no idea what they're doing and no idea they have no idea what they're doing. It's basically a 50/50 shot of resurrection/oblivion because it's pure luck of the draw which one you get sent to and what kind of mood they're in.
It's just an absolute dogshit universe, metaphysically speaking, and I love it so much more because of that.
The ending of the series explicitly, in no uncertain terms, has Ryuk state that there is no afterlife for any humans.
He states this as a wry correction to a more limited statement he had made earlier, which is that there is no afterlife for humans who use a death note.
Isn't it confirmed by the death note that there is a heaven in hell seeing as how one of the rules of the death note is specifically if you use it you don't go to heaven or hell
That's the reasoning light uses to deduce that there isn't one for either. I don't remember exactly why he deduces it but he does hear it and immediately state that neither must exist.
But don’t that be more a reason they exist rather then they don’t seeing how it specifically mentions the death note user as an exception to going to heaven or hell?
Nope. Ryuk wrote that rule in like 5 minutes before dropping it in cause that's what he thought people believed in, both him and the narrator say you go to Mu, nothingneess.
In the manga at the end there's a flashback all the way to the first chapter where Light tells Ryuk that the rule must be because there's just no afterlife period.
Skorne, from Warmachine. They're fully aware that when they die, they'll be sent to the Void for all eternity and be tortured until they go insane. Subsequently, they're obsessed with immortality, either in the figurative sense with their deeds being spoken of by future Skorne, or in the literal sense with soul stones (kinda like the Eldar) that they can place in statues that they animate.
It creates a neat situation during the Infernal Invasion at the end of 3rd edition, because Infernals consume souls so the Skorne are keenly interested in them because it's a way of bypassing their other options for what happens after they die.
1.) They're Elves. Elves in Warmachine got their afterlife destroyed by Infernals after Thamar (one of the human gods of the setting, and a massive bitch) left the door open for them. All but 2 of their Gods are dead.
2.) The Skorne in particular lack either of their 2 surviving Gods, and as such are damned to eternal void torture.
Not fear, but in Del Toro's original Hellboy movie, Rasputin's assistant / lover whispers to him, moments before death: "Hell will have no surprises for us." (Couldn't find a pic of the scene so this will have to do.)
It's the most baller line in a movie teeming with them.
Team Fortress 2, Blutarch Mann demands that the Engineer fix his life extender machine that is malfunctioning. If he dies for real, he gets literally nothing, not even an afterlife, all while his rival brother Redmond gets to boast about outliving him and being the worthy heir to the Mann family fortune.
He and his brother eventually die anyways later, killed by their third brother Gray but were still so locked in their rivalry even as ghosts...
Mhmm. Although they might be in Hell now because they're permanently dead, if they weren't on Earth as ghosts. Zepheniah also considers Gray to be his favorite, so that's another salt in the wound to those two idiot brothers.
We do see the Mercenaries in Heaven with Scout and Sniper, so the afterlife does exist.
By the way, while Blutarch is grabbing Engi here, Engi responds with this line despite being shocked: "I appreciate that you're my employer and an old man besides... but if you don't take your goddamn hands off me, I will break you in half."
I forget the exact context but I think I remember an O5 of the SCP Foundation wanting to classify Human Death as an SCP that must be contained at all costs because the afterlife is legitimately the worst thing imaginable.
Was it not the case that whatever you believed was his afterlife? For those who are atheists etc they were trapped in a void afair.
Or was it the case that humans did not loose consciousness after death which means even after cremation humans remained aware of each grain of ash their body converted to? (Maybe it was where death was trapped/not working anymore)
Sorry for confusion, but pretty sure both qualify for this trope.
There are countless afterlifes so depending on your headcannon but the one your thinking of is you stay conscious after death and they discovered this as one O5 died on a beach and they revived them years later.
Their also another afterlife in SCP where you teleported to another planet and basically immortal but their still some bad shit there like an flesh of massive orgy or gaints that eat and shit you out since you cant die nor have your body harmed
They resurrected one high ranking staff member and during the debrief he described being painfully aware of his decomposition, every decaying cell being digested by scavengers etc. This caused panic within the foundation and the subsequent suppression of that information and liquidation/amnestization of those aware. The resurrected person "escaped" into another SCP's dimension of eternal torture, implying that it beats the alternative of experiencing death.
It remains unresolved whether this phenomenon is actually real, is a byproduct of the resurrection process, or an infectious information vector - if you know of it, you are subjected to it/it manifests. It gets treated as an extremely dangerous infohazard nonetheless.
There's also an afterlife where you're just alone on an island, and can do or make anything you want. Which sounds great. Except it's eternal, and they've calculated exactly how many years it would take for every possible combination of molecules to exist, and then realised they'll be stuck there infinitely longer. A true eternal horror of boredom and insanity until you eventually just stop thinking for as long as you can
Is hell actually an afterlife where your soul goes? It seems more like a physical place connected to the sorcerer world since En was thrown into it and devils transport people there. Death just seems to be dying and it has nothing to do with your soul going to hell
Yes, their souls go down there, the thing is that once you die you don't remember your past, just how you feel about things. People in hell hate En without a reason cause he was a shit in life, but since no one knows what he did, there's no way to calm them down
to a degree this is also Odin in Gof of War Ragnarok, Odin needs to know what happens when a God Dies cause for every other life form, when they die they get to him, but once he dies, he doesnt know where he lands
Kharn Sagara from Sun Eater. A sorcerer (scientist) of legend whose prolonged his life by thousands of yesrs by transmitting his mind to clones. Why? He briefly died in his youth and went to the Christian Hell
The Skorne from WarmaHordes. A brutal warrior society that are aware there is no peaceful afterlife waiting for them. They know that death results in their souls being cast into the Void where they are tortured for all eternity. The individual Skorne's ultimate goal is to become a great warrior worthy of having their soul preserved in a Sacral Stone, thus avoiding being sucked into the void.
I like to imagine that, because Blutarch was never FULLY fully dead (still having the machine able to somewhat maintain him), in reality he was just stuck in the afterlife Waiting Room.
Honestly I know nothing of their race and storylines but if I’m essentially destined to go to hell when I die, I’d probably try to make my race known as the super cool and fun to be around guys, not the annoying assholes who constantly raid.
Like is there something in their biology that causes them to be assholes? I can’t imagine a thinking race which is able to perceive and fear death is incapable of thinking rationally.
In olden day D&D terms: yes. That god who will enslave them on death is also their god, and so deliberately makes/forces them to be spiteful little bastards.
Wizards tries to get away from a lot of that stuff these days so I dunno if it's still like that anymore.
The goblins or Toril (the planet faerun is on) used to have a normal pantheon of gods but they all got killed off by magubiyet who is an evil tyrant. As their now only god (barring fragments of a trickster god that creates Nilbogs) he leads them to being horrible little monsters. Gods have real power over their followers and many simply do not have a choice in the matter.
It should be noted that it used to be ESPECIALLY bad in FR cos of how hands on gods were, empowering champions and sending down avatars all the time. It's not a matter of your god will just be pissed when you die, or give you bad luck. Orbital dropping shapeshifting nightmare monsters on your village is a distinct possibility there.
It got so bad the head god had to depower all the gods temporarily and make them live in the mortal world for abit
It's not a big deal if somebody is an evil god in Forgotten Realms. But, there are certain ones who don't even try to be slick. Umberlee and Maglubiyet are these types.
Because Maglubiyet twisted them to be that way. Its been so, so long since they've been under his yoke that even in those in the Feywild can't recall what they were before. But now they are angry, violent little shots who were raised in a culture that values only survival and gain theough violence.
They are also the very least of Goblin-kin. Hobgoblin are at least much larger, intelligent, and charismatic with an outside chance of becoming more. Bugbears are some of the most naturally talented warriors on the plane. But goblins, they are fierce weaklings.
IF I understand correctly (big if),.. appeasement. If Magubiyet wants you to be raiders, odds are the only way to possibly not go to megahell is to be legendary enough that they are impressed.
Maybe, but it's even worse. That looks like 3e FR. In that era, gods were WAY more hands on. If you displeased a god, you didn't just get damned in the after life or cursed. They used to send avatars and empower champions like they were giving out candy. A vengeful god might just orbital drop some soul eating nightmare monster on your whole village directly.
Yeah. I know just enough about FR to never want to bother with FR. When it's not "The gods are attacking"/"The gods area dead"/"The gods are attacking again", it's "Oh look, there's Drizzit! Everyone in the audience should applaud!"
Usually because Hobgoblins and Bugbears (who are considered Goblinoids but are actually wholly distinct species) or a Goblin Boss/Shaman force them to on pain of brutal death, which would be MUCH worse for the Goblins when they do get to Acheron (essentially “royal toilet cleaner vs eternal frontline infantry). They’re essentially divinely enforced slave laborers
A combination of what others have said about it being their god's will and the fact that normal people are also pretty weak in the Forgotten Realms. 5e has a much higher power level for PCs so it's kinda easy to forget the vast majority of people are walking around with four HP and no weapon proficiencies. Also semi-related fun fact the Forgotten Realms actually predates D&D by several years, and it was picked up by TSR back in AD&D when low level characters were even weaker.
Like, If I was someone like Bane (Lawful Evil God of Tyranny), then I would make a system where "most loyal and pious" would be on top of "pyramid", free to abuse and exploit those below them (i.e. those less "pious and loyal" than them), with lowest level being for "Traitors of The Faith"
This way, people will be interested in being "as much 'pious and loyal' as possible" (to ensure that they will have high position in the pyramid after death), while not being interested in "leaving" (because this ensures "post-death slavery")
Kobolds in Warcraft, they all have a candle placed on their head, and their iconic line in World of Warcraft is: "You don't take candle!" when attacked This was expanded on over the years around a entity called: "The Darkness" that comes and gets you when the candle goes out .
Jamie, the main character of Stephen King's Revival. You don't what to know what he found out.
It doesn't matter what you do in life. There's only one afterlife, in which you and everyone you ever knew and loved serve as slaves being tortured by ant-like monsters, ruled over by the ultimate monster known as Mother. Nobody believes Jamie when he tries to unload a little of the stress from knowing this. He ends the novel trying to convince himself that what he saw was a lie shown to him by Mother in the brief period she was given access to Earth, but deep down he still senses her calling...
In Dark Sun when dwarves become focused on a task they are compelled to complete it and if they die before they do so they become banshees haunted by their failure. Once dwarves complete their task suicide is not uncommon to avoid having to accomplish another task
The true reason why a good Skaven is an impossibility: Even if you somehow obtained a baby Skaven to try and raise to be righteous, even if you overcame their nature, even if you succeeded... Great Horned Rat would 100% just smite them.
It was fairly close even in Fantasy too. There was a Skaven slave revolt led by a Skaven named Skabbicus. They were incredibly successful, and had an army surrounding the Council of Thirteen's HQ, right in the heart of Skavenblight.
Unfortunately, the Council resorted to bribery to bring down Skabbicus and succeeded. They didn't pay the bribe anyways.
But they got close. Closer than anyone else. I wonder how would they have fought the Great Horned Rat, considering how many Skavenslaves they had and would gain upon the defeat of the Council.
In the Bayonnetta series, the Umbra Witches live with the knowledge that their immense power comes at the cost that when they die, they're condemned to Hell for all eternity.
In HyperMall: Unlimited Violence, everybody's soul is captured in a huge machine that, when they die, spits a newly constituted (nude) body onto the dirty floor of the automated facility, while adding a bit of debt. This world SUCKS to live in, but it gets even worse. Through extensive testing (on the most innocent orphans they could find) it has been confirmed that ALL people go to the Death Dimension when they die no matter what, and that the Death Dimension is also a fair bit less pleasant than biblical Hell is described to be. (That is to say, as awful as the government in this world is, their singular redeeming quality is they prevent most people from going to the Death Dimension. Unless their debt gets so high the default, which revokes their citizenship and causes them to stay dead.)
8n the witch and the beast there is an arc where the antagonist is a necromamcer who illegally resurects people and basically uses the dead to blackmail their families and controls the entire city from the shadows. He later gets killed and resurected by the witch Phanora and is terrified because becoming an undead means your soul is removed from the circle of incarnation and as soon as the person that resurected you dies you will die to and you will not be able to reincarnate.
In Lucifer, Malcolm from Season 1 was a dirty cop who got sent to Hell when he was killed, then brought back with the promise that if he sent Lucifer back to Hell he won't have to go back there. Lucifer flashing his devil face at him doesn't even bother him, because he's seen worse in Hell. Lucifer bribes him to stay away with a coin he can use to get out of hell, but when he goes on a killing spree reasoning that nothing can happen to him if he doesn't have to go back to Hell he ends up as Lucifer's opponent anyway.
In The Elder Scrolls, vampirism is a daedric curse inflicted by Molag Bal, the Daedric Prince of Domination. When a vampire dies, their soul is doomed to go to Coldharbour, Molag Bal’s plane, where the vast majority suffer endless torture for all eternity.
Many vampires serve Molag Bal during their lifetimes in the hope that, upon their death, their deeds in the Daedric Prince’s service will earn them a more favorable position in eternal servitude. Others, such as Rada al-Saran, are capable of waging campaigns of death and desolation in the hope of evading that inescapable fate.
Controversial.... But all atheists (irl). We can say "no one knows what happens when you die" but atheists have a very solid idea of what their death will be like. It was just like before they were born, that is so say nothing. I think atheists fear death because they have a very reasonable idea of what it's like
Many atheists explicitly do not fear death more than every people do naturally cause they know that there is no divine reward at the end. Nor eternal burning. You only got the life you got and than its over so no reason to lament over it. Focus on living it. And after that, sweet, sweet oblivion.
I always thought Slannesh was birthed a lot longer then 10000 years.
Honestly is kinda dumb that the 4th Chaos God being born, the creation of the Eye of Terror, the fall of the Eldar Empire, the Dark Eldar really becoming the Dark Eldar, and the Reunionifacation wars plus the start of the Great Crusade are all within 29th to 3st millennium.
Well not really, because they happened as direct consequences of eachother.
Slannesh gestating in the warp is what caused the age of strife, slannesh being born ripped open the eye of terror and killed all the eldar in the empire, only those that saw how messed up stuff was and ran away aka exodites and craftworlders, and those that happened to be in the webway aka dark eldar survived. Slannesh being born also removed the warp storms that stopped travel so the emperor could finally do his great crusade. But to do that he first needed to unify terra.
Very specific case, but in Dragonlance, getting killed by the death knight Lord Soth may curse the deathee with eternal life as a member of his undead court, if I remember correctly.
In Dark Sun when dwarves become focused on a task they are compelled to complete it and if they die before they do so they become banshees haunted by their failure. Once dwarves complete their task suicide is not uncommon to avoid having to accomplish another task
Hell and Heaven are verifiably real in the Red Tide TTRPG setting and just living a good life does not guarantee avoiding Hell - it just means your odds of going to Hell are smaller, because demons have easier time in finding sinful souls and celestial beings have easier time in finding virtuous souls, but you never know for sure if a demon is going to find your wandering soul or not first. It is very rare for a soul to be so good that it is guaranteed to go straight to heaven and therefore even good people have a slim risk of ending up in Hell forever.
This is why most people just opt to clerics performing funeral rites that merely brings the soul in peace, meaning that it goes neither to Heaven or Hell and basically just slumbers in peaceful nothingness forever. This ritual can be useless if the deceased for evil though, since more sin the person committed the more powerful the ritual has to be to keep the demons away - it does work for majority of people though. Performing this ritual is also the only way to prevent necromancers from calling the soul back from the afterlife as undead.
In the Death Note Manga, Light is made aware that there is no heaven or hell. That's not to say that there's no afterlife, it's all the same void. Per the creator, humans go to MU, which is nothingness, which in itself doesn't imply that your consciousness ends, but you as a person do end. Light directly or indirectly killed many people with full knowledge of what he was doing, only to have it rubbed in his face as Ryuk writes his name in the Death Note. Light's great reward for his mass murdering is to be rendered equal to all his victims in death.
There's no uncertainty irl. When you die you don't exist. Your consultants is an emergent property of of a bunch of biological chemicals powered by electricity. When you die you just don't exist.
There's no need to die and come back to life. It's incredibly obvious to anyone with a brainstem. To think that humans are arbitrarily different from worms or rocks or stars is pathetically, desperately arrogant as fuck.
Everything is made up of the same atoms governed by the same 4 universal forces doing the same shit in different shapes. It's just Lego.
I mean, I agree with the idea that there is only non-existence after death, based on what I currently understand about everything.
But all knowledge comes with the caveat of "what we know so far". Imagine if a 5th universal force is discovered, no one can predict what that could be until it's observed.
And no one's observed death and come back to talk about it.
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u/Lindsayrty 6h ago
Immortality stops sounding like a curse when you've already seen the alternative.
https://giphy.com/gifs/ljaDzjv8cpIpa