The Mythcreant Podcast 508 – Portraying the Afterlife
What if everyone in this episode was… A GHOST? We’re not, but we could be, and then choices would have to be made about how to portray our audio afterlife. That’s our topic this week: all the different ways writers can depict what happens on the other side. From fun and cartoony town builders to the most serious spookums, we’ll discuss the options authors have at their disposal, plus the pros and cons of each.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Savannah Bard. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Chris] You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]
[Bunny] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
[Chris] Chris!
[Bunny] And…
[Oren] Oren!
[Bunny] And I am speaking to you from beyond the grave because the podcast died in episode 505, very disappointingly. It’s pretty misty where I’m at.
[Oren] Ooh!
[Bunny] I can see some shapes, but the special effects budget isn’t that large, guys. Don’t expect much.
[Oren] Wait, hang on. So, the podcast died in episode 505. This is 508. Does that mean for the last two podcasts we’ve been dead and didn’t know it? Is that the kind of afterlife story we’re doing?
[Chris] Yeah, we just had a dramatic twist where we realized we’re dead.
[Bunny] The twist happened between episodes, but it did happen. Rest assured.
[Chris] That’s why we haven’t been getting any comments. I’m like, why can’t anybody hear us?
[Bunny] Oh, oh, oh, okay. That’s why. But now, we’ve breached the barrier between the land of the living and the land of the podcast dead. So, we can upload 506 and 507 just fine now. Don’t worry. I’m going to be super cryptic about whether I’m a ghost, but you know, I am dead and piloting a really cool boat with orchards and fishing off the back, and it’s been a great time.
[Chris] Yeah, but even though we’re already dead, we can still die somehow?
[Oren] Yeah.
[Chris] There’s still an oblivion that we can go to, maybe through a door or something. That’s very disappointing.
[Bunny]There’s extra super death.
[Oren] Yeah. Look, it turns out that the possibility of death underpins a lot of storytelling, and when you take that away, stories get weird. So, most stories will introduce double death because they don’t know how else to do it.
[Bunny] Extra-super-maxi-extreme-ultra death.
[Oren] And to be clear, I am most stories in this situation, right? I’m doing that too. I’m currently working on a story that sort of takes place in an afterlife, and I’ve introduced double death because I did not know how to tell this story without it.
[Chris] You have to do something for stakes.
[Bunny] And you can approach double death in different ways depending on the type of story you’re telling. Certainly if you’re like a ghost who’s restless because of a murder or whatever. The double death is moving on to peace.
[Chris] You could have a low-stakes, happiness-based story, like a cozy, that’s in the afterlife where we lose our afterlife coffee shop.
[Bunny] Oh, we’re going to get the afterlife mob boss to sponsor the rebuilding of our afterlife coffee shop.
[Chris] We could just say that the afterlife is kind of miserable and everybody in there’s miserable. But if we create this coffee shop, suddenly it’ll make the afterlife less miserable, and that’s a thing that we are invested in.
[Bunny] Right.
[Oren] Is the afterlife my neighborhood now? Because a coffee shop would make us all a lot less miserable.
[Bunny] Oh no, the afterlife is being gentrified. The afterlife has a light rail now.
[Chris] Oh, no, no, no. Too real. Too real.
[Bunny] I mean a very cozy afterlife, which I was just referencing because I’ve played 10 hours of it in the past week, is again, a spirit farer where the extra-double death is like, the character has resolved their daddy issues and now they can move on peacefully, and that’s a video game.
[Chris] Move on to where?
[Bunny] It’s just through the door, Chris. Don’t worry.
[Oren] It’s probably fine.
[Chris] Death can’t tell you.
[Bunny] Gwen’s happy.
[Chris] They still can’t tell you what’s on the other side.
[Bunny] In that game I guess you’re technically, you’re the spirit farer, so you’re ferrying people through a liminal space, and it’s kind of the afterlife, but also kind of not. But I think it counts because definitely the mysterious slash liminal afterlife is one of several different kinds of afterlife that writers tend to use. One is this one. One is the scary, the spooky, frightening kind. And one is the pedestrian kind, where it’s just basically normal life, but with maybe one or two things different. And one is the spunky kind, where everything’s funky and weird, but in a spooky Halloween-y kind of way.
[Chris] I have to admit that every time you say the word “liminal”, something inside me recoils, but I know that you’re actually using it appropriately, that this is an appropriate use of the word “liminal”. It’s just−
[Bunny] Wait, how do people use it?
[Chris] It’s become a buzzword where people use it to show off their vocabulary or make something seem mysterious and profound.
[Bunny] Oh no!
[Chris] Yeah.
[Bunny] Don’t take my liminal from me!
[Oren] We get it in angry reactions to our articles sometimes where we’ll criticize something and say, “This didn’t make sense,” or “This character didn’t act according to the way they’ve been previously established to act.” Things like that. And someone will be like, “Oh, well, you see that character or that plot point exists in the liminal space between being good and being bad, presumably.”
[Bunny] No! Oh my gosh.
[Chris] Yeah.
[Bunny] That’s too bad. I am justified here, though.
[Chris] No, it is fair to call limbo liminal.
[Bunny] Limbo. Maybe we can just go with limbo and sidestep this whole issue because that is definitely one of the types. It’s the one where it’s probably misty and hard to make out, and everyone tends to have unfinished business. It’s the place between life and double death.
[Chris] I think that’s particularly useful for stories where the protagonists are still alive, because then we can bring in the afterlife without making it too much like when people die, they’re not really dead, because we could just… go to the next neighborhood over and talk to them like in Crescent City, apparently.
[Oren] In Crescent City, the fact that there’s just a place where ghosts hang out, and one of the ghosts there knows the answer to the mystery, and we just don’t go talk to them. Ick.
[Bunny] Who killed you? I don’t know. Just go ask.
[Oren] We could find out, if only Danika could tell us what happened, and then at the end of the book it’s, “Oh yeah, we could have gone and asked her like any time, and we just didn’t.”
[Chris] But having that temporary space where ghosts go sometimes and then they leave again, allows for some contact with people who are dead without it being plot-breaking or world-breaking in some way. It’s a very different world if every time somebody dies, all I have to do is make a seance phone call and talk to them.
[Bunny] And you can make the rules more flexible, right? If it’s a mysterious limbo and we don’t know a ton about it, then you have more wiggle room for the connection and the seance being unclear rather than a telephone call.
[Oren] And that kind of afterlife world is also particularly useful if your story is going to focus heavily on the fact that the characters are dead or are maybe dying or are going to die or whatever. Right? That’s a big part of your story because it lends itself pretty well to it because you have to make peace with whatever your issues are or be okay with the way you died or solve your own murder or something in this space as opposed to a story set in Asgard with some Einherjar who did technically die. This is technically the afterlife for them, but we don’t really care how they died that much. Right? It’s probably not that big a deal.
[Bunny] No, don’t worry about it. One book that does the mysterious afterlife is a book called Liesl & Po [pronounced with a long “i” sound], which might be Liesl & Po [pronounced with a long “e” sound]. I think it is actually Liesl & Po [long “e”], because recently I met someone named Liesel, and it wasn’t Liesl [long “i”], and I embarrassed myself.
[Oren] We’ll split the difference and call it Liesl & Po [long “a”].
[Bunny] Liesl & Po [long “a”].
[Oren] That way we know we’re wrong.
[Bunny] Yeah, you can annoy both sets of people.
But Poe is a ghost who has been in the liminal space, which is called the Other Side in this book, long enough that he’s pretty much lost all of his memories, including his body and his gender for most of the book. So, for most of the book, Po is it. And ghosts are able to pass beyond the other side when whatever unfinished business they have is completed− so, Poe remembering who he was. And for Liesl, bringing her father’s ashes to a significant place for him to be buried and also resolving his murder. But she kind of does that on accident. She didn’t know he was murdered.
[Oren] You solve a murder sometimes. It just happens.
[Bunny] Yeah, oops!
[Oren] My favorite is, and I’m not just talking about Hazbin Hotel here, but I am talking about Hazbin Hotel, a lot of new stories tend to not really know what to do with hell. It tends to get thematically confused. Is it a place you get sent for actual bad things? Or is it a place you get sent for being cool and rad?
[Bunny] Yeah.
[Oren] Sometimes it wants them to be both.
[Chris] I’ve seen the movies that seem to embrace hell being a bad place and are building off of Christianity in some way. The thing that they often do is have the one character who dies by suicide because then they can say, oh, see, that’s a sin, so now they go to hell. But it’s also very sympathetic. Nobody actually wants to believe that people who die that way go to hell. Now there’s somebody that they can go rescue from hell.
[Oren] The problem with that kind of story is that if you think about it for even five seconds, you realize that basically nobody deserves the things that happen to you in most versions of hell−of the Christian hell anyway. Like maybe some of history’s greatest monsters. That’s its philosophical point. But most people, even most bad people, clearly don’t deserve that.
It came up in The Sandman show where they were able to rescue one of the bullies, the most sympathetic of the bullies. The other bullies all live in hell forever. But I don’t think that what those bullies did was bad enough to be in hell forever. Just seems bad, man.
[Bunny] Definitely, hell is the most common place that I’ve seen the scary afterlife type of trope. Outside of classical mythology or works drawing on classical mythology, I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of stories with the afterlife as a prominent part where the afterlife is definitely horrible and frightening.
[Oren] It would be depressing, right? It would be hard to have a real story just set in the classical Christian hell, right? You’d have to do something to change that up.
[Chris] It’s like you need the uncertainty. So just as you need the after-afterlife so that we have stakes, something could go wrong if characters were in hell, they would also need some hope of escape to create tension at that point. We can’t just have everything bad forever. That also is tensionless.
[Bunny] And I think that goes to what, how stories interact with the afterlife and what they use it for. Three of the main ones I could think of are the character is dead and navigating the afterlife, so our main character is figuring out what this thing is all about. There’s a book called Elsewhere where the character is dead, and basically it turns out the afterlife is an island where everyone ages backwards until they’re ready to be reborn as little babies.
[Chris] Honestly, that’s probably one of the better uses of the aging backwards trope that I’ve heard of. I’ve seen other stories where people age backwards, but that actually gives it a reason to happen.
[Bunny] Yeah. It’s like, you grow old and then you die, and then you go to this place and you grow young, and then you’re born again. It makes a sort of sense, right? In this case, the tension and the story is about she really wants to get back to earth, and now she’s trying to make peace with the fact that she’s dead and whether she wants to speed up the process and do an early release or something, whatever it’s called, where instead of living out a full afterlife, they’ll age you down really quick and send you back. And it’s about her being like, maybe I don’t want that. Maybe I want to experience this afterlife thing. And I think that’s what she ultimately does, but she makes her peace with it. And then the book ends with her in the future, having aged back down to a little baby and being sent back to earth.
[Oren] The advantage of making your own kind of abstract afterlife that isn’t obviously modeled off of the one that we’re familiar with, makes it easier to have a wider number of people there. Because if it’s a Christian afterlife, you have to start asking some questions.
[Bunny] It’s good for a joke. Good Omens jokes about what composers ended up in hell.
[Oren] It’ll be like, okay, I guess the story either can’t have any Jews in it, or we have some uncomfortable questions to answer. That’s a little weird. Whereas if you make up your own afterlife, it’s less of a problem because it could just be everyone ends up here on the weird town-building boat. This is a non-denominational place. Don’t worry about it.
[Bunny] And they all happen to be connected to me in some way.
[Oren] Yeah.
[Chris] I think that’s the other convenience about the limbo, right? If you say, oh, it’s a temporary space, then you don’t really have to define what happens or ask any of the questions.
[Oren] Or you could be like The Good Place and say you’ve made up your own, but it’s definitely just heaven and hell. Every religion got it about 5% correct. Mm-hmm..
[Chris] Uh-huh.
[Bunny] The Good Place is definitely the−at least from what I understand, having not seen it−the pedestrian afterlife where it’s pretty much real life, but there’s… a couple things changed. They’re dead, but it’s just a normal neighborhood, right?
[Chris] Uh, kind of.
[Oren] It’s kind of complicated. There’s a whole in-universe reason why they’re in what looks like a normal neighborhood. The plot is hard to explain, but suffice to say, the actual afterlife is separated into the good place and the bad place. And the good place is heaven. The bad place is clearly hell, even though they claim otherwise. And I love The Good Place. It’s a fantastic show. But I did notice that as they were starting and they were claiming that this was not just Christianity, it is like… I’m not saying there aren’t any other religions that this matches, but I can name several that it clearly does not.
[Bunny] I think that would count as pretty much earth. More or less, at least in how it looks. That and Elsewhere, except Elsewhere also apparently has talking animals, which I learned from its Wikipedia; I don’t remember that. But it does have the same thing for animals, so you got that fun thing where the character can meet up with their childhood pet or whatever.
[Oren] The Good Place sometimes does the whole, oh yeah, this place is actually a mind-bending alternate reality, but we’re not, we don’t have the budget for that. So, your brain is interpreting it as an office.
[Bunny] Sure. We’ll go with that.
[Oren] The Good Place is fond of that premise, because it saves on the budget.
[Chris] That is the issue with world building in any TV shows, right?
[Bunny] It’s the plot equivalent of the misty space because we don’t have special effects.
[Chris] Honestly, that’s one of the reasons why CHAOS, the show, it has problems as a show, but it’s basically like an alternate world urban fantasy, but where the Greek gods are an active presence in people’s lives, and we do have the whole Greek underworld thing.
[Oren] The premise is what if Zeus was real, and it’s just as terrible as you think.
[Bunny] That’d be pretty terrible.
[Chris] And we have, when they go into the underworld, there’s another hole that’s like the terrible place that you don’t want to go when you’re in the underworld. Apparently, people can still leave it. So maybe if we went in there, there would be another after-afterlife. After-after-afterlife.
[Bunny] There’s another classic way that stories engage with the afterlife, with the prime example being Orpheus and Euridice, is trying to rescue someone, right? Bring them back. Don’t look at them. Don’t look over your shoulder. Don’t you dare!
[Oren] I love Greek mythology for starting the weird type of confusion of, yeah, I’m in the realm of the dead, but I’m not dead, right? I don’t have the ghost type, so I take different damage types as I’m down here.
[Bunny] I do love that trope, though, unabashedly. Just a living person going to the land of the dead or the spirit world or whatever. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes those are different. I guess that’s another thing is whether the spirit world is the same thing as the land of the dead, which makes me think of Avatar, and I’m not sure if they ever answered that.
[Oren] Sort of. In Korra, we do meet some just ghosts hanging out in the spirit world, and that’s a whole thing. It’s unclear if that’s where all of the dead go or if Iroh was just there because he’s particularly cool. Although, man, Avatar, the spirit world is a huge problem if you try to run an Avatar RPG, because canonically, bending doesn’t work there, and players do not want to spend an entire session without their bending. They get ornery.
[Bunny] This is where your Kyoshi warrior shines.
[Oren] You have to think of a reason for them to still be able to get their bending.
[Chris] The fantasy audience does not like it when their magic is taken away.
[Bunny] No.
[Chris] And, of course, RPG players do not like it when their most powerful abilities are taken away.
[Oren] Right. With Avatar, with the show, it’s like, okay, whatever. The audience can tolerate it for a while, right? Don’t get me wrong, it would be sad to have an entire season in the spirit world and no bending. That’s not what I’m here for. But one episode? Sure. But with a session of an RPG, they’re crawling the walls by the end of it.
[Bunny] Funny enough, I had this problem with a story I had once intended to write where the first book of it was set in an alternate fantasy world, and then it− the twist would be that it’s a portal fantasy, and I think they’re going to a spirit world when they go through the portal, but it’s actually earth. And then I was like, wait but then the second book is set on earth, and nobody wants that.
[Chris] Yep.
[Oren] I had a slightly different problem. The first time I envisioned a story within an afterlife premise, I realized that this is a problem because it just raises the expectation that there’s going to be a plot about how each character died because they’re in the afterlife, and I realized I didn’t want to do that. That wasn’t what was interesting to me. So, I changed it a bit to have one character who is a dead human. Everyone else is just a magical creature who lives there. So I can have one plot about the human and how they died, and I don’t have to do it for everybody else.
[Bunny] As a treat.
[Chris] You do want to make it feel like the afterlife somehow, which is a trick. So, it doesn’t seem like we’re just in another world. It would be a little strange if your character dies and then it seems like they just go through a portal into a fantasy dimension.
[Oren] That is kind of what I want.
[Bunny] But what if I did do that?
[Oren] I want an excuse for a modern character to be in a fantasy world, which I know that’s called portal fantasy.
[Chris] Well, we just need some kind of theme that accurately reflects that this is an afterlife in some way.
[Bunny] Oh, stop that, Chris. Don’t be applying your logic and critical thinking to this.
So, I think the last kind of afterlife that− well, there’re lots of different kinds of afterlives. I don’t want to be discriminating here, but the last major genre of afterlife that I could think of was the spunky afterlife, where it’s weird and wild, but in a spooky way. And usually darkly comedic. I feel like this is entirely Tim Burton.
[Chris] Oh, like Beetlejuice?
[Bunny] Yeah, exactly.
[Chris] One of my favorite things about the afterlife and Beetlejuice, again, it’s supposed to be very comedic was−and I have not seen the new Beetlejuice, by the way. I probably should, and it is just the fact that they become ghosts who are haunting their house, which was really cool; we’ve had more of those types of stories since then, but you know, at the time being from the perspective of the ghosts haunting the house had a lot of novelty−was the fact that they when they try to go outside their house, there’s just sand and sandworms that want to eat them.
[Bunny] They just appear on Dune.
[Chris] It’s like Dune, but way wackier because they are black- and white-striped and much goofier. But yeah, that’s definitely the dark and wacky and goofy. It’s like, nope, you can’t leave your house. Sandworms will eat you. It’s like, okay, that was a little random, but the overall world is just colorful enough−because it’s comedic, especially−that it can handle the low realism, and I think it’s a little bit more disparate.
[Bunny] Everything’s bizarre. The afterlife is a bureaucracy, too.
[Chris] I have to go and get a number and wait in line, and the number is−
[Bunny] −it’s got caseworkers, and everyone’s wearing funky prostheses.
[Oren] Yeah, the idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy is very popular. We can’t just send people magically to where they need to be. There needs to be infrastructure for that.
[Chris] It’s a great contrast between the things that we experience in the real world and the afterlife, which is supposed to be mystical and magical, and so there’s novelty in mixing those two things together.
[Bunny] Probably the most obvious one in terms of the contrast is Corpse Bride, because the real world is mostly grayscale. And then you get to the afterlife, and it’s bright and it’s colorful and there are big bouncy musical numbers. And there’s literally a bar with a band singing.
[Chris] Yeah.
[Oren] Which is the opposite of how a lot of purgatory stories are shown because if you have a story that takes place in purgatory, you can basically just shoot anywhere and then put a gray filter over it, and now you’re in purgatory.
[Bunny] It’s like the blue filter for night. Don’t worry about it.
[Oren] I was just wondering if you’d seen Hazbin Hotel. I was curious where you thought it fell on the spectrum.
[Bunny] I have not seen it. I haven’t seen most TV. I’m just bad at TV shows.
[Oren] That’s why you’re so normal.
[Bunny] Oh, I don’t know.
[Oren] That’s why you’re so well-adjusted.
[Bunny] That means I can’t do the banter. It’s a trade-off.
[Chris] That one takes place in hell, but it’s definitely a very wacky hell. A lot of very colorful character designs.
[Oren] Yeah. When you die, you become a fun, animated character, and you might get some animalistic traits if you’re feeling like a furry, or you might just be a weird-looking guy, a weird little guy. So, it allows for a lot of creative freedom.
[Bunny] Well, this begs the question, do you think you are a furry, a weird little guy, or just having some animalistic characteristics?
[Oren] I’ll never tell. I liked that show. It is fun, but it does show some of the thematic clashes with the way that it’s trying to portray hell because it−on the one hand, it wants to do the whole “hell is an actual punishment that you get sent for doing real bad things” but also, hell is the cool place where you go for wearing leather jackets and having a healthy sex life.
[Bunny] Is Satan not the ultimate bad boy?
[Oren] I mean, they make that joke, but at the same time, the whole story is weird because the protagonist is theoretically trying to help people improve so they can get into heaven. But by the end of the first season−mild spoilers, I guess; the show’s been out for a while now, but still−by the end of the first season, they’ve also basically declared war on heaven and fought off an attempt by heaven to kill them all, and so it’s unclear why they would even want to go to heaven at that point. It seems like the only problem is that hell is an exploited population that hasn’t been able to have a proper representative democracy.
[Chris] Once too many angels are jerks, then heaven’s just the jerky place for privileged people.
[Oren] And maybe that’s on purpose, I don’t know. Maybe season two is going to start with them being like, actually, trying to go to heaven makes you a class traitor. Let’s try to clean up here in hell, because the only problem with hell is that it’s ruled by a bunch of jerk-ass demon lords. So, we’ll overthrow them, and everything will be great.
[Bunny] So, Satan’s a bad boy who is also Marx.
[Oren] In this story, Satan or Lucifer is a disaffected emo kid. The idea is that he tried to do something cool and it failed. So now, he hangs out in his room and is sad most of the time, which is not an uncommon portrayal of Satan.
[Chris] But also in hell in the show, they have their mercenary hoard of cannibals that they use.
[Oren] People who did actual bad things, right?
[Chris] It’s kind of ambiguous.
[Bunny] In addition to the double death, we also have the hell and then the real double hell where the actual bad people are. Is that the shtick?
[Oren] Well, it’s all the same place. It’s just like how they feel in portraying it in different episodes, right?.
[Chris] There’s double death, I think. In Hazbin Hotel, the angels can permanently kill people that are in hell, I think. And then what? Do they just go to oblivion or something?
[Oren] Unclear. Question mark.
[Bunny] I feel like we see hell a whole lot more than we see heaven in stories just because most depictions of heaven seem boring and tensionless just because everything’s pretty good. That’s the selling point of heaven. Right? I don’t- I can’t think of a story set in heaven.
[Chris] So, What Dreams May Come, again, it uses the kind of surreal approach where we try to make the environment colorful and creative. And they do, again, they have−it’s basically about a family, and so they do have the one person who dies by suicide, who they have to rescue from hell, right? And that’s how they end up escalating the tension in that movie. But in the beginning− this is starring Robin Williams−we have when he first enters, his landscape is a painting literally with paint. So they use a lot of creativity there and build this wondrous atmosphere.
In that case, the novelty−and just obviously death has some tension to it−works okay, but then when they want to actually escalate things, they still end up including hell.
[Bunny] Definitely going with a more…. Taking the spunky afterlife, or just going that more creative route to heaven rather than just your typical Christian heaven or something like it, makes things a lot more interesting.
[Chris] Utopias are always difficult to write in. You can do kind of personal stories, but if you’re having a utopia, you’re eliminating any world-level source problems, and that just makes it much harder to plot.
[Oren] Oh, I do feel like I should just give a shout out to Hades, one of my favorite games of all time.
[Bunny] Yes! How did we not talk about Hades?
[Oren] The reason why we didn’t talk about Hades that much is that it’s only technically the afterlife.
[Bunny] Oh, okay.
[Oren] Our protagonist is like a god who was born there, right? He didn’t die, and we try not to think too hard about all the minions he’s smashing his way through on his way up to visit Mom.
[Bunny] Don’t worry about it.
[Oren] That’s a great game, but it’s only kind of an afterlife. With that, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.
[Bunny] We’ll kill this episode, if you will.
[Oren] Let the episode die. Kill it if you have to.
[Chris] If you would like to resurrect this episode as another episode later…
[Bunny] Ooh!
[Chris] …consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
[Oren] That’s very good. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro music]