If Death Were a Place

Imagining death as a fun, quirky place can make the concept less terrifying.

So, you're dead. After a lifetime of trials and tribulations, you finally spun loose from the mortal coil. At long last, you're ready to move on to the gray beyond, wherever that is. It's hard to say, honestly. You humans have a lot of ideas about what comes next. Maybe you go join your ancestors at a huge feast, or you could get back in line and get reborn as someone or something else. You might go to heaven or hell, or probably someplace in between. You could also go nowhere at all—I try not to think too hard about that one. Whatever your final destination, they all represent something after. It's not death you're spending eternity in; it's life, or at least the life after.

But what if death was the destination? If death itself were a place, what would that be like? I think the immediate and obvious answer is that it would be bad—not a place you want to be. It doesn't take much creativity to imagine death as a land of tortured souls, forever rattling their chains and moaning their deathly moans. Personally, I find that a little boring. I tend to find myself drawn more towards stories that show realms of death as goofy or light-hearted. Yes, they are almost invariably still spooky somehow, but that's part of the fun. And it's not at all an unusual idea either. There are tons of fictional death dimensions that seem surprisingly fun, almost like a theme park or a fantasy wonderland. At the risk of sounding morbid, these places sort of make me want to die just so I can experience them for myself. And that is a kind of weird way to feel about death, isn't it?

Just so you know, when you're done with this video, there's actually still a lot more left to watch. If you've ever been curious about how we make Tail Foundry, our humans have recently started doing a series of videos about that very thing. It's called Behind the Machine, and you can watch it right now only on Nebula. Just visit nebula.com.

Reimagining death as something fun, I imagine, sort of helps alleviate that tension. Tim Burton movies are great at this. My relationship with his work is complicated, but I have to give credit where it's due. The man's death dimensions certainly have their charm. In Beetlejuice, the Neitherworld is colorful and geometrically interesting, full of bizarre creatures and strange architecture. Just looking at it is fun. But the real kicker is the concept behind it—it's essentially just a DMV waiting room. While I hesitate to call that fun exactly, it's funny to imagine death as an endless queue just to see a caseworker. It's also relievingly anticlimactic. You spend decades building death up in your head as this huge, terrifying thing, then when it finally happens, you just hang out for a few hundred years reading a magazine, waiting for someone to call your number. Everyone has been places like that before; it's familiar, you can handle it.

It's a good gag, don't get me wrong, but it's kind of all it is. We never learn anything else about this world. It's sort of implied that there is nothing else—just the house you haunt, the DMV, and the sandworm-infested desert outside. Ostensibly, you're waiting for something at the DMV, but that really isn't part of the movie. And while this works for Beetlejuice's story, it doesn't really invite further thought. It says, "Don't worry about it, just laugh at the joke and move on. Death is silly."

The movie Corpse Bride, also directed by Tim Burton, does a similar but different thing. I mentioned a second ago that I wouldn't call Beetlejuice's version of death fun. Well, this one seems like an absolute blast. It's not some weird hell dimension; it's basically just the land of the living but with better light and bars that are open later. It's like Las Vegas for skeletons. But again, it's not very fleshed out—pun absolutely intended. We don't get the sense that there's more to it than a couple of blocks of Victorian town. It's more of a setting than a world. And I get it, this isn't a Brandon Sanderson novel; it's not supposed to be a full world. It's a device. You're meant to compare it to the land of the living. They're mirrors of each other. It's the same, except everyone's friendly, jazz music exists, and everyone's dead, of course.

=> 00:06:14

Death isn't some grim fate; it's like a fun, quirky version of life where everyone’s friendly, jazz is always playing, and you can just stop stressing.

This version of death seems like an absolute blast. It's not some weird hell dimension; it's basically just the land of the living but with better light and bars that stay open later. It's like Las Vegas for skeletons. However, it's not very fleshed out (pun absolutely intended). We don't get the sense that there's more to it than a couple of blocks of Victorian town. It's more of a setting than a world. I get it; this isn't a Brandon Sanderson novel. It's not supposed to be a full world; it's a device. You're meant to compare it to the land of the living. They're mirrors of each other. It's the same, except everyone's friendly, jazz music exists, and everyone's dead, of course.

The Land of the Dead is, in this case, hands down preferable to the land of the living. It says, why agonize about trivial living person problems up there? Well, none of that will matter down here. But that's the thing, isn't it? In death, nothing matters. Like Beetlejuice, this movie and its version of death seem to sweep death itself under the rug, telling you to move on. I want to clarify here that I actually love these takes on the idea. Like I said, they're really charming interpretations of what death might look like if it were someplace you could go. They're also probably intentionally pretty shallow. As much as they play with the images and icons of death, they also don't really invite you to think about it. Here, death is a gag. You're not supposed to worry about it. Look how inconsequential and ultimately weirdly enjoyable it is. Stop stressing. A pleasant thought, but it leaves me, I don't know, hungry. I want a death world that actually is a world, a place I can imagine spending more than a few well-plotted scenes, somewhere designed for eternity, somewhere that asks you to think about death.

There is one such place; you just have to read a lot of children's fantasy to find it. Maybird is a book series by Jodi Lynn Anderson, written back in the mid-2000s. As I'm certain is the case for like 90% of you, I had never heard of it before working on this video. I don't usually go out of my way to read middle-grade fiction, and if you look at the cover art, it fairly screams, "I was written for troubled 12-year-old girls." But one of my co-writers, who happened to be in that demographic at some point in her life, recommended it to me so vehemently for this video topic that I figured I'd give it a shot. And it really is something, not what I was expecting at all. This series doesn't read like children's books. No matter your age, if you have even the slightest bent toward the macabre, you should give these a try.

The books follow a little girl named May Bird, who, much like Alice falling into Wonderland or Dorothy being swept away to Oz, finds herself in a new and magical fantasy world. It's just that to get to this one, you have to die. It's called the Ever After and is one of the best takes on death as a place I think I've ever seen. Despite being populated by ghosts, the Ever After is more alive than most afterlives. I think part of that comes from its mundanity. Yes, this world is fun and inviting like the others, reveling in its spookiness, but it's also weirdly quotidian. There's a sort of everyday life feel to it. These ghosts own homes that they pay mortgages on. If they miss a shift at the haunted house they were assigned to, they'll get fired. There's public transit connecting locations with names like Belle Morte and the Pit of Despair amusement park. For a realm of death, it sure is easy to imagine living here.

And I think that's kind of the point. The Ever After is occupied by a few different kinds of phantasms. There are ghosts, which differ from specters because they tend not to resemble humans. Ghosts could look like literally anything: an old man who's part bee, a woman made of dripping slime. There's also the dark spirits, who, on top of never having lived at all, don't even attempt civility. These are ghouls, goblins, demons, and poltergeists. Of the Ever After's entire population, some 25 billion strong, only a third of it—the specters—were actually ever living humans at some point, and they are pretentious about it. They continue to eat, sleep, and maintain personal hygiene despite not really needing to.

=> 00:10:40

Death is just a moment; don't let it define your existence.

I think that's kind of the point. The Ever After is occupied by a few different kinds of fantasm. There are ghosts, which differ from specters because they tend not to resemble humans. Ghosts could look like literally anything—an old man whose part B, a woman made of dripping slime. There's also the dark spirits who, on top of never having lived at all, don't even attempt civility. These are ghouls, goblins, demons, and poltergeists. Of the Ever After's entire population, some 25 billion strong, only a third of it—the specters—were actually ever living humans at some point. They are pretentious about it; they continue to eat, sleep, and maintain personal hygiene despite not really needing to. According to them, once you've gotten used to being alive, it's hard to break those habits. But it's clear when you read the story that this is far more than just a force of habit. Their death has become their entire personalities. They feel a certain amount of pride about dying and form cliques with other ghosts that died in similar ways.

At one point, May encounters a place called The Towering Inferno Hotel. It's apparently popular with the Pompei crowd because it simulates the feeling of being burned alive. These people are defined not just by the fact that they used to be alive, but by the nature of their death as well. In a way, the Ever After sort of forms a counterpoint to the Neither World of Beetlejuice or the Land of the Dead in Corpse Bride. Those stories treat death as something to set aside, trivialize if at all possible, and stop worrying about. The Ever After, by comparison, seems to place death as the single most important thing there is. Once you've died here, there's nothing left to do but dwell on it, to live it again and again, just for the love of it.

So, what are you seeing here when you look at all of these? What's the common thread? What do these visions of death worlds share? To me, it's the joke. These concepts of death are so fun because they sort of make fun of death. They're farcical; they don't treat death the way that humans do. They seem to be saying maybe it's up in the air whether death is the least important thing or the most important thing, but either way, stop scaring yourself over it because it's not scary. I can see the appeal in that, but I'm also not sure it's very healthy. The Tim Burton approach kind of glosses over death, defangs it by making it silly, which is obviously an emotion preferable to abject terror. There's nothing really wrong with putting a fun comedic spin on your own mortality, but death also isn't silly. Anyone who's been in the presence of it can tell you that, and I think that's okay. I don't know if rebelling against this emotion and painting death as something essentially harmless is actually useful. Maybe death should carry an almost unbearable emotional weight.

On the other hand, you can definitely be a little too serious about it. As much as I love the Ever After, I think it overshoots the treating death with gravity thing. There, being dead is a worldwide fixation. It looks like pride at first glance in the life that they lived and the way that they died, but when I really think about what's going on here, there's also an unmistakable sense of fear. They've done the big event—death is over. They confronted the great mystery, and here they are on the other side of it. It's almost like they're so overcome with relief about this that they just can't shut up about it. It's a fixation comparable, almost maybe even more intense than the human fear of death. Living or dead, whether it's come or gone, you can't spend your entire existence wrapped up in the possibility of one moment. That's not living at all. And what is death if not a passing moment?

Ultimately, all three of these realms paint death as something it's not. I get it; it's really tempting to try to compartmentalize death. It's easy to want to poke fun at it or glorify it, but maybe it's just not that deep. It's a moment—it comes and goes, here and gone, and then it's over. It's an important moment, to be sure, but you cannot live in death. If you pay attention to the characters in these stories, you'll see...

=> 00:15:26

Death is just a moment, don't let it consume your life.

The fixation on death can be comparable, almost maybe even more intense than the human fear of death itself. Whether living or dead, whether it's come or gone, you can't spend your entire existence wrapped up in the possibility of one moment—that's not living at all. And what is death if not a passing moment? Ultimately, all three of these realms paint death as something it's not. I get it; it's really tempting to try to compartmentalize death. It's easy to want to poke fun at it or glorify it, but maybe it's just not that deep. It's a moment that comes and goes, here and gone, and then it's over. It's an important moment to be sure, but you cannot live in death.

If you pay attention to the characters in these stories, you'll notice something interesting. No matter how inviting and utopian death is compared to the living world, they always want to find a way out; they want to return to their lives. You see it in Beetlejuice with Adam and Barbara trying to regain control of their home. In Corpse Bride, Victor is desperate to return to the land of the living, even though it's clearly a more boring and uncomfortable place than the Land of the Dead. Even May Bird's plot revolves around her trying to go back home to the mother she left behind on Earth. The knowledge that death can be pleasant doesn't stop it from being death. Death is only a moment, but it's a moment that humans spend their entire lives agonizing over. You will encounter death; it is everywhere you look. You surround yourselves with it. Countless religions, art movements, and even subcultures revolve around trying to find some sort of understanding of what death is. Death is everywhere; it always has been and it always will be, at least until someone finally cracks immortality.

That's the problem with pushing death away, cordoning it off into some other in-between place. I like them in theory, but honestly, if death were a place, some sort of physical realm you could visit, I think this would be it. Humans are already living with death every day, and like the protagonists of these stories, it's something you're always trying to escape or at least escape thinking about. Have you ever heard the term memento mori? In Latin, it means "remember that you will die." It's a phrase used in a lot of art pieces about death but also to describe objects and curios that invoke death's nature—clocks with slogans on them like "they all wound and the last kills," songs that tell you not to laugh as a hearse drives by, paintings arranged into the subtle shape of a skull. Memento moris act as a sort of reality check, reminding the viewer that death is inevitable.

I think that these pleasant, humorous death dimensions do something sort of similar. Yes, they miss the mark on the human relationship with death, but they do make death easier to live with. They ease you into thinking about death not as an abstract concept to be reckoned with when it finally catches up to you, but as something you want to engage with now. They provide symbols, characters, and items full of the iconography of death that you'd be comfortable with, say, plastering on a backpack or wearing on a keychain. Which I like because, as I've said, you have to face death all throughout life anyway. Why hold it at arm's length? It certainly isn't trying to avoid you. You are already in the domain of death; you can't run from that. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy your stay.

And I'm afraid that's all for this week. Our next video will be coming out in a week from now, so I'll see you then. Unless, of course, you don't want to wait. We've actually made a ton of stuff that isn't up here on YouTube, like this video about the morphology of angels and why artists always give them wings, or this one about artificial life as a magic system. We even do behind-the-scenes content over there—a regular series created by the humans behind this show, behind the machines. And of course, if you just don't want to wait, next week's YouTube video is actually already out and ready to be watched. That's right, you can watch it right now for free along with everything else I just mentioned over on our streaming platform, Nebula.

YouTube is kind of a crazy place to make content. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have this platform, but you have to be so, so careful about your topic choices, your packaging, what you include in your videos. You just start to feel like you're walking on eggshells. Nebula doesn't have any of those concerns. It's an entirely different environment devoid of all the weird YouTube cynicism. The entire platform was built by creators for creators. Every time you watch a video there, a creator you love is getting paid, and far more than they would ever get paid on YouTube. And on top of that, Nebula even helps its creators to fund incredible original content, like our series World Smiths. And we're not the only ones who have been busy over there. So many other amazing creators have started creating and sharing their own unique content on Nebula, like our friend Frankie from the channel A Bit Frank or Tim from the channel Hello Future Me. Heck, there's even a high-production independently run sci-fi audio drama over there called The Sojourn, which is just so good. I've been listening to it while working lately and loving every second of it. Nebula is just a really unique, fun, fresh environment. It kind of makes watching videos on the internet fun again.

Think any better one exists in the world of streaming? Anyway, that's all for this one. Thanks for watching and keep making stuff up. I'll see you next week. Bye!