Deep Space and Dragons
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Deep Space and Dragons
The Afterlife Across Fiction: From Bureaucratic Lines to Digital Ghosts
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Karl and Richard explore the fascinating world of fictional afterlives across anime, games, and popular media, examining everything from bureaucratic waiting rooms to digital consciousness uploads.
• Karl shares his experiences diving into Korean manhwa on Webtoon, discovering popular genres like isekai and regression stories
• Richard explains his frustration with the formulaic nature of many modern isekai stories compared to their more nuanced predecessors
• We examine various afterlife systems in fiction, starting with the common "waiting in line" bureaucracy seen in Dragon Ball Z and Beetlejuice
• Bleach is nominated for having the worst fictional afterlife, where even "heaven" is a feudal slum with rigid class hierarchies
• The Good Place offers a thoughtful examination of afterlife ethics, suggesting people need opportunities to grow even after death
• Digital afterlives raise philosophical questions about whether uploading consciousness creates a continuation or merely a copy
• We debate whether isekai stories qualify as afterlife narratives, given that many begin with the protagonist's death
• Dragon Ball Z's tournament-based afterlife rewards martial prowess, fitting its universe's values
What fictional afterlife would you choose? Let us know by reaching out on social media or joining our Patreon community!
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It's Carl time. It's Carl time. Carl is the star of the show. Also, Richard, I'm Richard.
Speaker 2:And I am Carl of Carl and Richard present Deep Space and Dragons.
Speaker 1:You know, the funniest part is the only thing that, like we have the technology, I could actually switch the graphic on all the episodes in the podcast name and just do that one of these days, like they're allowed to. It wouldn't even cost you much, like I don't even think it'd be things that would cost you. I think it'd be like concepts. It would cost you, like you would have to bribe me, but it wouldn't really need to be like a physical bribe. It could be something like a hey if you change it to Carl and Richard present. It's like well bribe. It could be something like a hey if you change it to Carl and Richard present. I am going to change my name on the receipt tab to Captain Eisen and I'd be like, wow, that's such not even a bribe.
Speaker 2:but yeah, you got me sold. That would be pretty funny. Well, it's not actually something I care about, it's just a funny bit.
Speaker 1:It's true, if you cared, you would have did something about it. You know, I think the funniest way to solve this is to put a strikethrough for the R-I on Richard oh, because then it's charted.
Speaker 2:Carl.
Speaker 1:Presents. And then I win alphabetically, Because it's not with a C, not a K.
Speaker 2:Because if it was a c you would still win. But uh, enough pre-rambling about nothing. Uh, what's new with you there, richard?
Speaker 1:mild distinction. What do you mean? Enough pre-rambling about nothing. That's the show, that is the entire show.
Speaker 2:No, we ramble about some things like I I have. I have things we ramble about, some things I have things to ramble about. But the names on the title card, well, a fascinating topic. I don't think that's something our listeners are. I mean, that's for us.
Speaker 1:but Obviously they take a shot whenever we complain about the names, like it's hard to think of whatever our drinking game would be. So new with me is I got my new email set up for my new school. I got my orientation date in the calendar. I applied to a couple of freelance things. I finished the rough draft of my ghostwriting job, so now I have two months of editing. But if I were to drop off the face of the earth, they have a book they could like make it exist.
Speaker 1:I'm considering taking the extra thing to format it and send them like a couple proof copies just so they can like hold it in their hands. I mean, I always wonder, like buying a gift for someone who pays you seems odd. Like the idea that you'd bring in, like I can't imagine a situation back when. Like the idea that you'd bring in, like I can't imagine a situation back when you're my manager, that I'd bring you in a thank you present to work for being my manager. But I think it'd be a little different if, like, you hired me on a contract type thing and we're a really good client. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I think that's a that's a normal response for uh, for that kind of that relationship I think so, so I think I'm gonna go ahead and do that.
Speaker 1:Um, it's been raining so I haven't went out for my daily walkies today, so I've just been a cave dweller playing wild man c6 all day. I mean, I also did some like timeets and stamps and looking and inserting locations to embed images and files. You know, I'm the fun one.
Speaker 2:Oh, so this week you actually had a super boring week then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because last week was like my romantic date. We made it to the hand-holding stage.
Speaker 1:That's literally all the information I'm going to give. So I've been doing a running bit where my mom wants to know the name of anyone I'm ever seeing, regardless if it's one day, two day, three, day, right, and I refuse to ever give her that information. I know she's not tech savvy, I know she's not listening to this right now because she can't find the podcast, so there's no version of reality where this name would give her any information. Right but right. The denial of the information gives me great joy because everyone in my life is in on this bit. So I say no, you don't haven't earned the name yet. Ask me again in a year.
Speaker 1:My brother was like why would I ever ask that information of him? And then my aunt's like I have no idea. And like my mom's, the assumption that everyone knows but hers, his name, when just no one actually cares, and like it's a pointless bit. But it gives me joy because it's like, no, you can't have this information because I believe in conventionality, although it's one of those things where, like, I'm a harlot in theory but in practice not.
Speaker 2:So it's like I like to preserve the mystique.
Speaker 1:Like I'm a person who goes on more than one date a month.
Speaker 2:You and that mystery friend have been taking it slow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a good plan because I, as mentioned, busy. I technically work three jobs, fair enough, and then I'm heading into full-time classes, which makes me happy, because that means I can only put like six hours a day into gaming, which is probably good for me, probably. So that's my updates. What's new in the Carll verse?
Speaker 2:uh well, first off obligatory mini movie review.
Speaker 1:Uh we, uh, we watched the new naked gun movie oh, I'm actually like my fiance, I know this has nothing to do with our feature topic, but I actually want to know this, so I'm going to give you a disclaimer that I should probably have talked to you about off screen. Your flash movie reviews are much more interesting than me if it's a movie I haven't seen or we haven't already discussed so it's like, if you go see something spicy and new, I'm like, oh, I would never see that, I'm deeply interested.
Speaker 1:But if you're like, oh yeah, the drive action dracula is different than the movie one, I'm like, wow, wow, I should be discussing this with you. I should not just be sitting here taking this. I should have done the research to make this a conversation.
Speaker 2:Well, so there are, at least that I noticed there were surprisingly few references to the original material. I mean the Liam Neeson's character, frank Drebin Jr, at least that I noticed there were surprisingly few references to the original material, I mean.
Speaker 1:Liam Neeson's character.
Speaker 2:Frank Drebin Jr Pardon, that's probably smart, yeah. So Liam Neeson's character Frank Drebin Jr is Leslie Nielsen's character, frank Drebin Sr, his son in the universe and the plot. I'm going to spoil one of the first jokes in the movie. The villain steals the literal plot device, plot being an acronym for Primal Law of Toughness device, ha being an acronym for Primal Law of Toughness device, and this device is essentially the plot device from Kingsman Secret Service.
Speaker 1:I liked Kingsman More than it deserves. I also liked Kingsman.
Speaker 2:I also liked that movie. I thought it was pretty interesting. But if you're looking for a movie that does that plot, well, kingsman Secret Service is just the better version of the movie. But not that it does the plot poorly, it's just, you know, it's a gag movie, so it's not actually on the not as serious as Kingsman's king's been secret service, um.
Speaker 2:But overall, uh, you know all the movie reviews uh from uh, both political spectrums have basically said that it's super funny, uh, and I, so I kind of went into it expecting to be like a non-stop, non-stop laugh train, um, and there were definitely some lulls, but there were definitely some extremely funny parts. In particular, I laughed pretty hard. This is like within the first five, ten minutes of the movie that they steal this plot device, but I laughed pretty hard when I saw that. I thought that was quite funny and overall I think they did a really good job of maintaining the spirit of the original Naked Gun while making something fresh and new. I do think, because it's Seth MacFarlane, I do think there's more shock humor than the original.
Speaker 2:So I don't know. It's not the kind of movie that I would recommend. I wouldn't say you could watch it over and over again. You'd have to have some downtime between viewings because sometimes the jokes won't land as well. If you've seen it recently, I thought it was pretty funny. Ah, but obligatory movie review aside. On a slightly nerdier topic, a while back I decided that I wanted to try and read more Korean manhwa, because the majority of my international literature is manga from Japan. So I downloaded an app called Webtoon, which I'm sure a lot of our listeners are familiar with.
Speaker 1:Hopefully I don't know I can imagine a Webtoon censorship. That'd be great. I don't know how corrupt, good or evil they are, but I do like money.
Speaker 2:Well, so I'm reading Webtoon and at first I was kind of disappointed because they didn't have the two series that I actually wanted to read on there. Actually, I didn't know there were three series I wanted to read that aren't on there yet, but eventually I was just like you know what? I'm just going to start like checking just random things out, right, yeah, and I've discovered that there are. Right now there seems to be maybe it's just my feed in particular, right now there seems to be two rather popular genres, and they are the isekai, most often the person being reincarnated into a book that they've read. So they know what's going to happen, but they're reincarnated as the villain, or as not a villain, but like a loser side character or someone who has a terrible fate, and so then they use their meta knowledge to try and avoid the fate of their character.
Speaker 1:So to kind of play on that one a bit is that for a while I was tinkering on how I would run a Dragon Ball Z tabletop RPG right, played a round of different engines, looked at their official rules, threw that in the garbage. Looked at some fan rulebooks rules threw that in the garbage. Looked at some fan rule books, threw those in the garbage. Made some mechanics myself. Realized it would probably work with the fate core. But fate core rules are barely even a game at that point. But one thing I was like is how do you deal with players metagaming a series like that? That's super linear and characters have numbers on them, right. So my solution would have been oh, player, characters are from the time patrol, from the future, and the meta knowledge you, your person, knows your character would also know. Because it's easier to give fanboys, give it a canon power that they metagame, rather than expecting them to play the honor system because the kind of dude that wants to play a dragon ball.
Speaker 1:Z ttrpg is the kind of dude who metagames those. Venn diagram is the circle right, right. So it's like I understand the idea of we put you in a novel and you have novel cheating powers for, like an escapism, fantasy, right, because everyone's played that hypothetical. If I was in hypothetical, if I was in this horror movie, I wouldn't die because I don't have anxiety and have never dropped a screwdriver.
Speaker 2:But then the other genre that's super popular right now, on Webtoon, it seems, is almost the same. On Webtoon, it seems, is almost the same, except instead of being an isekai, they call it regression, where someone gets sent back in time to their previous body and then they know the future and can avoid a terrible fate.
Speaker 1:I mean I gave a character that power in one of my books and then had them get checkmated so bad they just kept dying in a loop until they killed themselves. But I did it as a bit kind of as shade to that entire genre.
Speaker 2:And I mean, I've read a couple chapters of ones that were duds. I've read a couple chapters numerous chapters of ones that were really quite good. But I'm getting kind of tired of those two genres. And then I guess the third genre that they have is the awakened dungeon crawler genre, Eh, when people awaken powers and then they go into dungeons to clear them before the dungeon break happens and monsters come piling out of the dungeon. I wonder, why?
Speaker 1:Hmm, it's like we, as a society gave a bunch of rewards to. People will fight me about how good this series is, and I think it's a heralder of an apocalypse of blandness.
Speaker 2:because we as a society agreed that solo leveling was better than free rins, so people were writing more solo levelings instead of more free rins but so I've been inundated with these genres of Korean manhwa, and it's kind of like when I read something else, even if it's not particularly fresh or exciting, uh, it actually is fresh and exciting because it's something else. Yeah, um, and so a genre that's kind of fallen out of popularity, uh, is the what I'm calling the mirim genre. I'm probably not saying the word, right? Uh, but miram is basically a secret society of super powered martial artists.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, yeah, in the shadows I think that's also the name of the camera.
Speaker 2:Ant king, not related. And so then the, the hero of the series uh, either realizes they have powers or they acquire powers and they become part of the society, and their pure hearted nature wins over the hearts of their enemies and allies alike.
Speaker 1:So that genre cause that could easily be a full episode that we've already done. But, like I love, I'm always torn, cause I conceptually love Kenichi. And then they filled it full of underage women with clothes exploding because anime, and I'm like but but can we fix it though? But the problem is, most things I've read that try to fix it swing too hard in the other direction, being like, yeah, it's only 12 chapters long because I fight my brother in an MMA fight and then we beat him up.
Speaker 1:And then it ends because it turns out you can just fight a person and there really isn't that many tears to go. Or it goes to baki row, where it just goes so absurd that, like I don't know how, kanichi so kanichi slow rolled it enough that a character clapping their hands together to blow up a tank didn't break my suspension of disbelief. But right, baki baki exists to break my suspension of disbelief. There's, baki Baki exists to break my suspension of disbelief. There's a part where a character goes, he grabs his enemy and swings them around so fast. It's like he's wearing a wedding dress because they're in a blurring motion. They're being thrown around so fast.
Speaker 1:I'm like this is just or in Kangan Ashura, where a character gets themselves kicked in the head to make their brain wobbly, to get back their sea legs so they can use their boat fighting martial arts, which I love these things, don't get me wrong, I love them, but it's like it like skill point caps them right, like the Kengen Ashura Baki things, which I've watched both of to completion, are like actually watching professional wrestling. You gotta go into it and know what to get stupid.
Speaker 2:That's the secret but so one such series that I read. That was a Murom style series and I really enjoyed it. I've mentioned it on either this podcast or our plays day or heart podcast. It's called Elisede. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right either.
Speaker 1:Uh, but e, l, e, c, e, e d you know, I'm almost surprised you didn't make a monk for a dagger heart campaign, so you could be. Go through this exact story of someone gives you a drug to give you super martial arts and then you try and find your sensei who disappears after killing a bunch of people, and then someone, someone drops ten tons of weight directly on your fist.
Speaker 2:So I really enjoyed LSE, mostly because the way it stood out was that the main character's entire motivation for the first hundred chapters was the fact that he loves cats.
Speaker 1:I can respect that, I can get behind that. That's me, I live that life.
Speaker 2:Even his mentor actually is a cat through magical, weird circumstances. But regardless, I read all the way through it. There's like over 300 chapters. I get to the point on the Webtoon app where they say hey, you know, there's 10 episodes, we're going to send a wellness check because we're worried about your physical and mental health.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, they're like there's, there's 10 episodes, uh, and you can either uh pay coins to unlock them early, or there's five of these episodes, you can watch a little short ad to unlock the other. Okay, I'm like, okay, cool.
Speaker 1:I'll watch a little ad. I'll watch some wins.
Speaker 2:I watch the ad. I watch five ads and then the actual release date for the first episode I unlocked comes out and I'm expecting the next episode in sequence to become free with ads. It does not Oof. The next episode comes out and again the ads. They don't seem to roll forward. Now I have to pay coins if I want to unlock episodes past this last ad episode that I've watched, which effectively means that it was useless to watch the ads because I have to wait like 35 days before I can actually watch the actual new episode that I want to watch, that I want to wait like 35 days before I can actually watch the actual new episode that I want to watch.
Speaker 1:But I want to read. I mean.
Speaker 2:So now I'm like I need something else to read. So I look on their recommendations and they're like the greatest estate developer, like Elisade. Okay, well, that's an interesting title. I don't really see how that could be. You piqued my interest. You say this is like Elisid, but as a title like that, it doesn't really match up. Yeah, no, it doesn't match up at all. It's an isekai.
Speaker 1:Oh, I was really hoping for the plot twist to be the secret martial artist who just keeps trying to beat up dojos and then flips them as real as do it's an isekai, where the guy gets reincarnated into a book.
Speaker 2:He's from Seoul, korea, seoul. I'm not gonna get it right, he's from Korea and I'm not going to get it right. He's from Korea, and the reason he's the greatest estate developer is when he gets reincarnated into this book. He reincarnates as the drunken son of a noble who is deeply deeply in debt.
Speaker 2:Like you do, and all that our main character wants to do is to make lots of money and then just live the life of a lazy bum off of residual income from all the money he's made. So I can't remember what the word was. Uh, but there's a traditional method for heated flooring in korea, uh, which doesn't exist in this fantasy land, uh. And so he starts making money by building people heated flooring and then when they need fuel for their heated flooring, he sells them coal that he also like he built it. He gets people to build a path to like the mine, and then they start mining coal and it's just like he, just basically. He literally creates like a real estate empire in this for a second.
Speaker 1:Imagine you will. In the 90s, things were about being the best in the world, following your dreams friendship, imagination, joy. Job insecurity has hit so hard that people are daydreaming about being shot in the head so they can wake up and get a flooring job. What? Because putting in heating flooring in modern society is so unobtainable it's now a fictional aspiration. People are like I can't get a real estate ticket and then go out and do this in 2025 in this economy. I need to die first to be able to install heated flooring. Oof, I'm not even saying the manga's bad, that's just a rough state of mind for that to be your escape.
Speaker 2:The series is very bizarre. I really, really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:It's super funny because the character just goes around blackmailing people into signing ridiculous contracts, or you know, at the end of the day he improves the lives of everyone around him for the most part, but he does basically trick people into signing ridiculous contracts so that he has a workforce to actually expand his real estate empire well, it's like um, so what's kind of funny is, uh, the reincarnated as a slime, ikasai went through this weird plot arc where the first season was I die, become a slime, use my superpower, clear a dungeon, but then it becomes like a city building simulator by by season three, because it's like the original concept just didn't have anywhere to go. So it's like early enough in the genre that I'm reincarnated in the world to play a city builder is a recurring trope. I've seen a few things do that.
Speaker 2:Well see, what I really like about it and this is something that we've talked about before is that there's no point in it being an isekai if your real-world knowledge doesn't do something for you.
Speaker 1:That's fair.
Speaker 2:And so, firstly, he is a civil engineer in Korea, and so he uses his civil engineering knowledge and abilities to build, to engineer products, like he builds like a suspension bridge so it doesn't get washed away by floods. He builds like a cold storage house in the traditional Korean style. He builds the traditional heated flooring. Or he gets into a fight with someone and he's served in the traditional korean style. He builds the traditional heated flooring. Uh, or he gets into a fight with someone and he served in the korean army, and so he uses his korean bayonet army training to kick this person's ass with the style of martial arts that no one has seen in this, in this universe, because they just don't use bayonets in this universe.
Speaker 2:And so I, like that was my number one thing is that it's like man. Firstly, the fact that he's from the real world is like a core to the way this story flows and functions, like it literally uses real world knowledge to improve the lives of people in this fantasy setting. But then they meet the dragon king real world knowledge to improve the lives of people in this fantasy setting. But then they meet the Dragon King and the Dragon King's like oh yeah, you're looking for this MacGuffin, it's in Korea, in Seoul, seoul, korea, and so then they go through a portal into Korea. So like I don't know if he's actually like dead or like just like actual career and this book that he's in, that he knows the story to exist simultaneously.
Speaker 1:Oh no, I'm going to have to use some of adult language for this it managed to get its head stuck up its own ass. There's no other way to put that.
Speaker 2:It Ouroos itself yeah, I mean I'm. I don't know if he's ever going to want to go back to korea, but or maybe he'll be forced to go back to korea, I don't know, uh. But in any event I've I've been really enjoying it. It has been quite an interesting read. I'm glad that it recommended me this series, but so far the recommendations of the webtoon have been spotty at best well for a topic about fictional afterlives like Ika Sai is like a good natural start of this cuz.
Speaker 1:Like so recently I've been going through all the Final Fantasy games and sequence and I've been blessed because I've been going through all the final fantasy games in sequence and I've been blessed because I've been going into final fantasy 6 blind it is such a treat and such a delight to go into that game blind, because it's like my friends, like I don't want to say the franchise peaked, but it peaked and I'm like it did, like there's some bits that feel a little dated but not really Like.
Speaker 1:Gameplay-wise it all looked fine but like the narrative way it handles characters and character arcs is like, oh, everyone has a story to tell here and even though it's Fate of the World, there's a lot of like personal storytelling going on. Like you wake up after an apocalypse and a year has passed and your grandfather coughs himself to death after starving on fish and you decide to jump off a cliff to kill yourself, but in the last minute you see a reminder of a friend, so you build a rapid escape. I'm like what? Why is this here? Why is this legitimately good writing in this final fantasy game? I wasn't expecting this to get real. What do you mean?
Speaker 1:it's getting real with me like, especially when you play them in sequence right, because you just got past like, and then I use the song in the desert to make the ship to fly and that's it. So it's like wow, this is like blowing my socks off. But on the topic of, like the egasi, so this might just because I'm a pretentious literary type. Now I spent a fair amount of money to do begin this pretentiousness. My, my problems of egosci are threefold. So first, as you mentioned, if your real world knowledge doesn't matter, then you just can do a fantasy setting. There's no reason to egosign, right. Second and this is going a layer deeper is you want a character with a want and a need, right, and the want and the need need to be different to create a character, to tell a story.
Speaker 2:Okay, just one quick second here. Lloyd Frontera, the main character of the greatest estate developer. Uh, his want is the money so he can retire, uh, but his need is uh to protect those people around him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he sorry, you see, that's the problem with the genre, though. That want and need is like there's no personality there. So when you talk about a character's want and need, you have to have it tied into their origin, background, story or personality in some way, because if you say, like, well, what's richard's want? To get money, but what's his need for people to read his book? It's missing, like it's bite to it. It's what's his need for people to read his book? It's missing, like bite to it. It's missing humanity, like an ai could come up with that I, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 2:I don't. I don't know um, because I'm gonna give several better ekasi examples for character writing.
Speaker 1:But okay, okay, go ahead. So you might just be oversaturated, right, because I'm not saying the series is bad. I've watched a fair number of Ecosize in my day, thus my hate like of it. Like one I recently went through was a human pretending to be a demon who was in the Demon Army's general conquering places so he could set them up working infrastructure and political setup and his big argument to his superiors was working infrastructure is more profitable for their demon empire, okay, and he's like.
Speaker 1:He's like I hate humanity, but I'm setting up commerce for us. And he's like constantly lying to himself. Or he's like why are you helping a people? I hate people. They're just more useful when they're happy and productive. But, like when we look at some of earlier examples of proto-ecosize, before it became xeroxed infinitely, let's go to vision of escaflowne oh yeah, okay so escaflowne was fundamentally about a teenage girl trying to build up the courage to ask someone out that they thought they would never see again.
Speaker 1:So the whole thing was they had a crush on a guy and were working up the courage to ask them out, but instead decide to like do a dramatic gesture, running a race, and ended up in a fancy kingdom love triangle, medieval feudalism society that ran on zero video game logic. But the thing about the characters in escaflone is the main character, hitomi. The Ikasai adventure directly paralleled their ability to like, see the future, accept outcomes, and then what they learned was their want was to do what they could, despite knowing things were inevitable. But their need was to realize that things were not in fact inevitable. So the entire series was effectively a metaphor for their believing that because they can predict things accurately, there is no sense in trying to change them and trying to make the best of things. And then the other main character, vaughn, who is trying to build on nobility, responsibility, destiny.
Speaker 1:He had to go through his character arc to learn that if everyone's wishes come true at once, then nobody's wishes come true except an old man getting a sandwich and that he had to learn that everyone's dreams were as valid as each other, because you can't do things perfectly, so it's like there was more to it, like the world itself effectively existed. To contrast, the character setting like to go like to full metal alchemist for a quick going. The setting of full metal alchemist is required because the story needs that setting. The story simply doesn't work without that setting. Everything is built around for something to be obtained. Something of equal value must be lost. When we get into the ecocide where you're just borrowing not even a particularly good dragon age, like they're not even going to take the well thought out final fantasy 6 world, they're going to take out the completely not thought out Final Fantasy 1 world that just has airships, cuz, and it's like, yeah, you want money, but learn that the people are important.
Speaker 1:It's just you can do better. Like Inuyasha was an interesting one, where it was like, yeah, he had someone come through to teach him that humanity isn't worth killing, but really he was just trying to get over his abusive ex.
Speaker 2:Okay, but so to our topic of fictional afterlife. Indeed, you started this, I know, I know, I actually I was going to ask you. I mean, obviously not all Ikasais are an afterlife, but given the large number of people who do in fact, die to be reincarnated, would you say that Isekai, ikasais are a version of the afterlife?
Speaker 1:absolutely so when we go out, when I was having that distinction between a proto ecossi and a modern ecossi, right, so proto ecossi is being monster rancher, escaflone, inuyasha and a few others along those lines they're typically well, let's go with the first one. The wine lich in the wardrobe is you find a portal to a magical world, you're alice in wonderlands. Then, right they, when you find a portal, it gives you a narrative expectation to then return at the end a changed person, right, like there's a plot point in monster rancher was like was it all a dream? No, I still have the shoes. I got there, it was real.
Speaker 1:Then the ekosai thing that changed it weirdly because of sword art, of all things right is that, hey, you're stuck in this new place and sometimes you died and you have a karma reincarnation system like slime and a lot of them are literally how you lived. Your human life directly sets up your ekosai life. So it's absolutely an afterlife, but they don't really go with what happens when you die there. Do you then get a status screen and go back to human and like an infinite, like Ouroboros, because I've seen the reverse egosize happen, where someone like dies in their fantasy world, like there was one. That was the first episode was like I'm a general in the legend of the galactic heroes and then I died and I got egosized. I'm like, ugh, you got kicked. Legend of the galactic heroes and then I died and I got ecocide. I'm like, oh, you got kicked out of the interesting setting into the boring one or one where the red power ranger gets ecocide.
Speaker 1:It was amusing follow 10 episodes, but yeah, it is absolutely an afterlife and it's a high tier one. If I were to die and be ecocide, amazing, yeah, okay, okay, like, think about it. It's a high tier one. If I were to die in Meek, it's amazing. Yeah, okay, okay, like, think about it. It's reincarnation. But you get to be a god. You get directly rewarded for bonus points for like you were creepy and never held the hand of a loved one. Get plus 100 defense stat Like it is a great one. It's like you managed to go 30 years unemployed. Get the billionaire ability.
Speaker 2:Like, oh, they're just shenanigans um, so then the, the next version of the afterlife, that I'm a little bit curious. How, how many examples you would have with this uh is the uh long lineup?
Speaker 1:oh man. So I'm doing some research for this episode. I got a few examples because you're immediately thinking king emma's desk, dragon ball yeah, dragon ball, uh, beetlejuice yuyu mako show pixar soul producer, had a really big lineup in the afterlife.
Speaker 2:Um, or another. Actually, an isekai uh character dies, uh, spends like a thousand years in line to meet the goddess of reincarnation, uh, and then, uh, she gets attacked by a monster when she's about to reincarnate him and so he like, just like, dives off her platform and it winds up in a random world and shenanigans ensue. But, um, I just uh, this long lineup, uh, afterlife seems to be a cross-cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 1:I was curious how many examples you could you would have of that so, like the immediate dragon ball z one, the not explicit in good omens, but good omens has a lot of the bureaucracy going on. Definitely the file or requisition and like the beetlejuice one. The yuyu haka show did something similar. Hades the game does something similar, where you just see him at his front desk as the souls are coming through okay and like it, being a cultural bit, makes sense, like the only things are life, death and taxes right, so it's like the idea that you take the myth of I have an all-knowing judge and then you look at the logistics of humanity.
Speaker 1:You just got to stand there and wait. Heaven, hell, heaven, hell. Back to life, exception. So right, I honestly like I hate to say it that's probably the most plausible afterlife, like in my brain, like it's easy to imagine. I die now I have to wait for my turn in purgatory while they do the math while they do the math.
Speaker 2:Do you have enough good karma? Okay.
Speaker 1:The Good Place was an interesting take on that one where they literally gave you good points and bad points.
Speaker 2:Okay, I was actually going to. That was going to be a question. I asked one of my coworkers what they're, what they think the best afterlife is, and they said the final result of the Good Place, which unfortunately I haven't read. I did read a synopsis on wikipedia um well, it's a show, but, right, sorry, I haven't watched it it's funny because he watched a lot of manga earlier and then tried to read the show.
Speaker 1:Your synesthesis powers are quite impressive.
Speaker 2:That has a lot of this bureaucratic theme to it as well, you think.
Speaker 1:So the core concept was it's a bad place. It's trying to come up with a method to torture humans, right, and they're trying a new, experimental one of making them think they went to heaven and then just tormenting each other for all eternity in fake heaven, okay, and then as the show kind of progresses, it goes from the demons like these guys aren't that bad, what is the point? System like, and they're like oh, it's actually impossible to have a good enough score to get into heaven now because life got too complex. You went to hell because you drank almond milk, because that burned the fields down, because it came from an apartheid region, so therefore you supported slavery by buying almond milk. So you're a bad person.
Speaker 1:So they end up going with this idea that, like you keep putting people through learning little bits of it and then to get their score up after the fact. And then once they like go through life enough and eventually become a good person, they move on. And it's they like, go through life enough and eventually become a good person, they move on. And it's amusing Because it's like, yeah, we are literally marking it by points, pointing out like, oh, there's flaws in the system bureaucracy. They get to the very end and realize heaven's kind of lame, because everyone gets everything they want all the time. So they had to add like a suicide button to heaven that has like quantum instability and just does something to you and it's impossible to know what.
Speaker 1:So that way, you can end your internal happiness, if you choose to, which made heaven better. Okay, like the ending thing was we made heaven better by letting you opt out of heaven. So it's like big on time loops. But really the show was just going through and working out a lot of philosophical thought exercises, as practical things, like I had a lot of philosophy. Like they literally had someone tortured someone through trolley problems for a while. I put them actually in the trolley like that's your friend steve, are you gonna turn to swerve to miss him and kill these eight orphans? So as far as afterlifes are concerned, that one's actually kind of a terrible one, weirdly. Huh, because the idea is that everyone, you're not going to have a good point to go into heaven. You're just not. So you go into hell with a buddy to slowly teach you to be a better person, to then, once you're a better person, go to heaven, to then be there as long as you want to chill out, then leave.
Speaker 1:But it's like if omnipotent beings create and control you with their omnipotence then it's like oh yeah, you're inherently flawed and the point is to go through until you're good. That's terrible. That is a terrible thing to do to someone to be like. You're fundamentally broken, based on your very nature, so we're going to make you keep going through trust fall exercises until you become a good person, to no longer get punished. I almost prefer the D and D five E method of based on your alignment, you get sent to an appropriate afterlife Cause. It's like, yeah, some people would probably prefer to be in Valhalla when they die. Some people like the good place, like you go through the store and it's literally whatever you want. I'm like I do think some people would want to go strobical for their next life.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is what pivots me into the worst afterlife in fiction Bleach.
Speaker 2:Bleach is the worst and most. I think it's the most nonsensical because, like do you, you age in the afterlife. So the deeper.
Speaker 1:you dig into it and try and find pieces of it, which the big advice is don't put more thought into it than the original author did. Right? So we know the basics for our viewers. I I'll recap. When you die in Bleach, you have four outcomes Outcome. The first A person in a robe hits you with the butt of a sword and sends you to the beautiful place Soul Society. We'll get to it. Option the second you can't move on from the afterlife because someone didn't come to hit you with the butt of a sword or whatever reason, so you just turn into a monster and start torturing your loved ones. The third option you're just chilling, living your life as a ghost and one of the monsters drags you in and turns you into a monster anyway. And the last one your soul is disintegrated and you're turned to a pile of sand with no consciousness for all eternity. That is one of the options. And the fifth option is you return back to Yohabaha.
Speaker 2:And also just cease to exist forever because you made a contract.
Speaker 1:So the good afterlife puts you in a futile Japanese slum where you still get bullied, people spit on you, they steal your food and your candy, and there's a case system when basically the only thing that matters in your afterlife Is your blatant fighting potential, to then become a militia. The good ending is you get to join the militia, like I'd rather turn into the monster, because at least I don't have to deal with nobility and clans and I can just murder my way up the chain. But also you can just murder my way up the chain, but also you can just get shot by the glowy arrow and just turn to dust and that's it which might be the best way out.
Speaker 1:The idea that Heaven has a slum and Hell doesn't is really funny, is there?
Speaker 2:Hell wasn't actually in your list of possible items for death.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, if you're turned into a monster and killed, you then get sent to hell, which isn't the monster place. It's a slightly worse than the monster place. Monster place which I have seen no evidence to see is actually worse than the good one.
Speaker 2:Fair enough, fair enough. People are bombing hell. Bleach does have one of the worst afterlifes possible, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:To the point where, like fan theories among my household, are that no, no, there's actually a heaven, but the Soul Reapers intercept you and militia-ize you where you normally would go to heaven. But they intercept you and militia you instead. It makes more sense if they're evil.
Speaker 2:It kind of does it?
Speaker 1:kind of does. And then Yu Yu Hakusho has a similar thing where, like King Emma, decided if you go good or bad, but spirits get lost, misplaced, judged, unfairly, eaten by demons Like drink of all these narwhals are ridiculous ones. I made it to the good afterlife, oh a monster. Teleport here and start bombing heaven, like I want a heaven that isn't bombable that's true.
Speaker 2:That version of heaven is just that version of the afterlife in general is just way too close to the actual main universe.
Speaker 1:It's like I feel like you can just fly there well, at one point they literally take a higher plane and fry a plane from one place to another.
Speaker 1:But in its defense though, the vast majority of time in the good afterlifes in Dragon Ball Z, which does get bonus points if you punch good, but whatever I guess most afterlifes have to. Now, if you're in a fight and you're in a martial arts based economy, of course you need a martial arts based afterlife. That just makes sense. But like Right right, a lot of the time they're just chilling, like King Kai At least. At least they have cable. In Dragon Ball Z's afterlife, bleach doesn't have Gaming consoles in their heaven.
Speaker 2:I don't think they have electricity.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure they have electricity. Oh also, I don't think they have electricity.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure they have electricity. Oh, also have running water one of their soul captains.
Speaker 1:The alleged good guys turn troopers into suicide bombers to capture and torture people. I'm like how are you the good place? This is insane. Do you not check cvs here?
Speaker 2:okay, okay. So the next category of afterlife. It might be too broad Because it applies to a lot of things, but I call it the Other Side. Which is a series where there are ghosts who couldn't move on to the afterlife. But the afterlife is only ever described as the other side and the purpose of people Is to ensure that these ghosts ever described as the other side.
Speaker 1:And the purpose of people of ghosts is, of people is to ensure that these ghosts go on to said other side oh, like that one dude who scammed people by taking advantage of bereaved ones live action, crossing over with whatever his name was uh, well, I mean, I was thinking uh of things like, uh, ghostbusters.
Speaker 2:Where there are ghosts, there must be an afterlife, but they never bother to explore it.
Speaker 1:That is coward's atheism. That is like I want to make it a movie theater to not offend any religion. So we have ghosts, but we're going to remove all spirituality from it completely. That is coward's or Danny Phantom Pardon.
Speaker 2:Or Danny Phantom Pardon or Danny Phantom, danny Phantom, danny Phantom was another good example. Like I said, it might be a little bit too broad, because you could apply that to pretty much any.
Speaker 1:I think it's a fair category, though, because it's like, like I said, the coward's ghost system of it's Bleach, but you don't actually bother. After I hit them with the sword, we don't know where they go. Yeah, they just go to the other side.
Speaker 1:And the thing about I just read about how shitty Bleach's afterlife is. That makes a good storytelling. I want to be clear, because it's worth discussing, right. Well, like Dragon Ball Z's, afterlife is worth discussing. There's some logistics going on, like if we get to something like did you ever do Death Parade? I don't think so.
Speaker 1:So when you die, you play carnival games to decide whether winners reincarnate and losers are cast into the void Okay. And souls are tested at their worst moments instead of their bests. So it'd be like you die and then Yugi Moto's waiting for you and then you're playing magic with them and it's like, yeah, if you win, you go to heaven. So you're like well, I need to make sure I win. So you sneak a peek at the top deck of your card and you're like ha, caught you cheating. You go to hell forever because you're a cheater. Well, no, you go to the void.
Speaker 1:I Dogami from Death. No, cameo in it, yeah. So it's like let's play a game where you throw a dart on a board and when you hit it, a matching part on the board will hit your fiancé. But you need to win the game to go to heaven. Haha, you're a bad person. You go to hell. Ew, it's very Like that one. It's like kind of goes into a good o omen, one of the carnival game afterlife, where you have to like literally do a thing like how wolverine has to fight death to come back so how do you feel about that?
Speaker 1:you die and you have to play a game oddly enough, uh, that's.
Speaker 2:That's not really. Um. Most of the things that I've seen or watched are people playing sick and twisted games for their actual life, not for their afterlife.
Speaker 1:Ironically, though, the end of Yu-Gi-Oh is absolutely him playing card games to move on to his afterlife.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:To go political for a second. So the timeline of Yu-Gi-ioh is wild, because seto kaiba invested billions. He took an arms company and took all of that funding to make a trading card game economy. He put his entire net wealth into making trading cards the new currency, the new sport, the new technology, and you see all the yugioh sequels where he's done this. Could you imagine?
Speaker 1:if elon musk was cool and switched us over to a card game-based economy. He had the resources, he was in the government, but no, he'll never be as cool as Seto Kaiba. He had the chance.
Speaker 2:He bit it I don't know, he could bail Hasbro and.
Speaker 1:No, no, it'd have to be a new card game because Hasbro is bad at card games. Fair enough Because like to make your card game-based economy, you have to have a lot of people who are in it just for the love of the game. Right or else it doesn't work Because the moment you can pre-order a collector's box set that has guaranteed Blue Eyes, White Dragons in it, your card game economy implodes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. So, here's a fun one for Afterlife.
Speaker 1:Disgaea, where there's heaven, there's hell. It's bureaucratic. You literally have voting things and if you're a bad person you can come back as a pretty. That was pretty close, I think. I feel like the Disgaea one was inspired by the Dragon Ball Z Yu Yu Hakusho Afterlives. They're like I'm going to make a game just about this part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Disgaea was definitely. Disgaea basically takes place entirely in the afterlife.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And it's definitely like monsters and demons and angels and seraphims. But I like that in the afterlife because it has a lot of lore and it has a ton of really interesting conceptual ideas that aren't really explored very well in other media oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, it's like it was a line in disenchantment where they ended up in hell, which disenchantment's funny, because they're like there's heaven and hell, but there isn't magic. It's just literally the angel of river of angel tears hits the hell geyser and it creates a weird chemical reaction. But okay, this is yeah, it's amazing, but there's a line where someone's in hell and they're about to fall in a liver of lava and they're like no, if I die, I'm gonna go to super hell. And that's a question that all of these bring up, that no one's ever been prepared to answer.
Speaker 1:What happens when you die when you're dead because, like you wouldn't think that would ever come up. But you get to bleach and you're like when a soul reaper dies, they're like, oh yeah, captain class ones go to hell. I'm like what happens to the rest of them? Do they go back? Do they reincarnate as humans?
Speaker 2:because that would make sense or you know, I feel like they must, um like refill the, the hourglass that the quincy's destroy with their arrows right.
Speaker 1:So like soul reapers die and then they go back and get reincarnated and become people, and then those ones are the ones that get like it. It almost bleach, is a tapestry of almost works, if you don't think about it too hard.
Speaker 1:Almost works, yeah just just don't, don't think about it too much I love the joke though that, like in Yu-Gi-Oh, that duel spirits are real and when you die your soul might get dragged into the card game dimension where you spend eternity as a monster trading hands between duelists, like there's a, if you look at, like the full lore of Yu-Gi-Oh. So you die heroically, right, my good friend, in a shadow game, and then I use your soul to create pot of greed and then you just travel with pot of greed and then in a hundred and a thousand no, two thousand years, a 12-year-old pulls apart a greed and it contains your jewel spirit in it and you get to watch him play card games.
Speaker 2:That would be a pretty awful afterlife.
Speaker 1:Because that's actually the canon. That would be a pretty awful afterlife, because that's actually the candidate. It's like, yeah, a guy becomes dark magician, who becomes a stone tablet, whose spirit then transfers into the dark magician trading card, who then uses his existence as a sentient being to make sure that card's on the top of Yugi's deck when he plays. This is beautiful. I'm not sure if this counts as an aftergraph, but the Matrix afterlife if you die and you wake up from the robot doom.
Speaker 2:You know, I was actually going to ask that question but in reverse Nice. Do you think that digital afterlife is a real form of afterlife, or do you think that's just us being God complexes, I guess?
Speaker 1:Well, what's wild about this one? So I've made the quip before that I'm never going to use your teleporter because I enjoy being alive and it just kills you.
Speaker 1:It's just a mass murder machine, because it breaks you down and brings you back together, which means you are, in fact, dead. So the thing that would always get me is I put the neurons in my brain right and do the consciousness upload, but much like a rom cartridge containing I'm gonna go fire emblem, sacred stones. If you take your game boy advanced cartridge or fire emblem, sacred stones, right, you put it in the reader and you move the file from that cartridge to the computer. That's not what happens. It's you scan what's on there and copy it onto the computer, and we don't have a way to like ever take the you and put it in the computer. So you're making a digital clone of yourself, right, and if your stream of alertness ends during this process, you definitely died right.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 1:So it's like, unless I've created some sort of like organic thing that like, like your brain is pulled out of your skull and like woven into the web of brains to be kept alive Hmm, then maybe blow of your skull and like woven into the web of brains to be kept alive hmm then maybe. But like, if you're doing the upload thing, going from analog to digital, nah, you're just creating cyber ghosts yeah, yeah, okay, cyber ghosts that think they're real people or feel like they're real people I mean for the ghost it wouldn't matter at all.
Speaker 1:So I'd probably still do it, because then ghost me is gonna have a great time. I just acknowledge that's not me, that's digital ghost me right, right, and I mean in theory.
Speaker 1:Uh, provided the process doesn't kill you, uh, you could interact with your own self yep, although weirdly enough I think you want the process to kill people, like even if it doesn't have to. So what you kind of want you see this in sci-fi a lot that the high power brain scan kills the person hooked up to the brain scanner, right, right, that's a feature, not a flaw, because if you're digitally up making a carl ghost, right like, let's say, take the game boy example of, I'm gonna take fire him with the sacred stones put in this reader, put on my computer, but also runs a magnet across it and just blanks the cartridge, when it does it, it defeats the nintendo claim, kind of sort of of like you made a copy, I'm like no, there's only one, I just moved where it is and if you just move where it is because you fried the human being you cooked to the skynet.
Speaker 1:They can't have crisis of consciousness. The digital ghost isn't going to think it's a ghost. You're not going to have multiple but one person making many copies of themselves, which is a huge problem. You're not going to have infinite copies. You're not going to have the twice from my hero not knowing who the original was and having an existential crisis If he gets hit once he poofs cause he doesn't know what the original is anymore. It's just easier to let there only be one copy of a person at a time going.
Speaker 2:I mean, I totally agree, even if, in the case of an analog clone assuming the technology is able to clone me at my current state I would definitely have to kill my clone. If it cloned me as a child or as a baby, I might consider raising my own clone as my own child. But then it's a Boba Django situation Attorney detests that is my child.
Speaker 1:Well, the thing is, we look at Altered Carbon, where you got the chip on the back of your neck. So when you die, it uploads the chip to the cloud and then just prints you in a new body, that one where it's like, yeah, yeah, your body is just whatever happened to be lying around and they just re-sleeve you in it, but your consciousness is the usb chip that's on the back of your neck. That's fine, because there's still one of you and you're at least non-fungible, right, right, but you need your people to be non-fungible, or else we'll just have a million Elons and none of them will be particularly good at the new Kirby Air Ride when it comes out.
Speaker 2:Hashtag fake gamer.
Speaker 1:It only requires one button, the new one, they had put in a second bunch and much to sakurai's displeasure. Oh so the kirby direct was great because it was mostly just him playing the game. I'm just gonna tell you spoiled the kirby direct in the middle of this episode because that was gonna be what was new with me, but I forgot at the time.
Speaker 1:Okay, so he's like demoing this game and he's like, first off, our podcast made it happen because we said make a new one, and then we had one download in Japan and now we have a new one, yeah, which was just Sakurai personally.
Speaker 2:That would be amazing.
Speaker 1:They added a second button and the button is for your super attack and for switching cards. Their big update is they added more racers to the game. So it's like we have all the old modes Well, we have the city trial and we have the race mode. It gets the race modes like this is race mobile fans. The games know we don't care about that, here's the city trial, but they're like we have it. So they added in a bunch of racers so you get to pick your racer and your cart and each racer has an ability okay.
Speaker 1:So like, for example, if you're the mushroom head guy, you can take a few free hits. If you met a knight, you stab people. Different colors of curb. Each color of curvy has its own super attack, which is a different ultra nice. And they're like city child with a bigger city, up to 16 players. At the of the run you get a vote on what your arena thing is, but sometimes they'll just be random because screw you. So it's like I'm watching it. I'm like this is exactly what I wanted, which means I don't care enough to buy a Switch 2 to play it. It's like if I already had one, absolutely. But it's like they haven't shown it being better, just that. Look, we made the game again nicer with more characters, more cards and more things on a console that's not 20 years old, I'm like, technically, that's all you had to do, sir. But my mini-game trailer review aside, oh man, the worst afterlife is just being absorbed by Kirby and wandering the void To never truly die to never truly die.
Speaker 1:I love the Mario theory that every Mario life is a parallel timeline and Bowser's actually killed him hundreds of thousands of times in different timelines. There's also the Hades afterlife, the one where the roguelike afterlife, where literally you just die and come back, but you don't get to actually die the Deadpool, that would be.
Speaker 2:That would be a form of afterlife, I suppose the Eternal Loop.
Speaker 1:Yep, I'm not a fan of being stuck in the. Actually, I think I'd be fine with the Eternal Loop. I'd be evil but I'd be fine with it.
Speaker 2:You think you'd be evil Eventually I mean I guess it's an eternal loop You'd probably go insane.
Speaker 1:Well, no, I'm just kind of a little evil now, like if I'm truly immortal and I've hit 2,000 years. And I'm just listening to the news right now Like spoilers for the new Superman movie. I've haven't seen it. I think, I would just go walk up to the line, the like starvation zone right now, and just start stabbing, like I think I'm just walking right up to redacted person's fortress where he pushing the genocide button, walking through the front door full of bullets, just walking right up and then slapping him repeatedly.
Speaker 2:I was like you think, if you live for every being evil person.
Speaker 1:I'm like I think I'm kind of evil now, so I definitely would be if given infinite life.
Speaker 2:Hmm, did you say you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain?
Speaker 1:Actually, I might go through the reverse. I might pull a Strauss and start the villain and live long enough to become the hero, begrudgingly. Which is leads me to my next category of afterlife, the worst one Spite reincarnation. Spite reincarnation, fight reincarnation. So we had it in record of the angsty vampire where his daughter's soul was grafted to a human to murder him and keeps coming dying after every 21 years and coming back to murder him again. We have seven deadly sins.
Speaker 2:Where?
Speaker 1:meliodas comes back angstier every time, and whenever him and his true love fall in love, she dies three days later. You know you're stuck in a reincarnation and it sucks, but you also, when paired with you, don't actually know if there's an afterlife, which means you end your reincarnation, you might just cease to exist forever. Seventily, sins of All Things, kind of avoided the super hell problem. Yeah, so they had heaven, they had hell. It was like humans can go to heaven or hell.
Speaker 1:Fairies, just kind of reincarnate giants, just kind of reincarnate demons, just go back to hell. Right, angels go back to heaven, and it was. Or if you kill an angel, they could get stuck in reincarnation and the guy will just wake up being the goat. But it's like when you died in purgatory you just kind of reassembled, more broken and monstrous, so you just became more and more demon each time you died in hell. Yeah, okay, which is still a terrible afterlife. Anything with an endless hell you can't get out of is a flawed system, like just a bad system. Same with anything where you're in heaven and can't leave heaven. It's a flawed system like. I really enjoyed this guy one where the angel's like no, no, I hope it's more interesting because I can help more people here and they just become a fallen angel who looks identical but got a different color wings and a hat.
Speaker 2:I have always kind of wondered, like in actual Christian heaven, when you know you go to heaven and they say it's this wonderful, amazing place, but it's like, do you just do whatever you want? Do you even want to do anything there? Are you just like part of the scenery or like, what do these people do? Because you don't turn into an angel. Angels and humans are very clearly distinct.
Speaker 1:So it makes me think of the squirrel heaven, dog hell paradox. So, as we're well aware, all dogs go to heaven, right, and in heaven they have infinite squirrels to chase. And you think, oh, that's good for the dogs. And then you think about it. I'm like, but that sucks for the squirrels.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah because squirrel hell is dog heaven.
Speaker 1:And it's like, well, why are all these squirrels going to hell? And you're like, because they know the bird feeder wasn't for them. So like a lot of it's subjective where it's like, yeah, for your afterlife to work. There's a lot of loop-de-loops going on Like. I personally subscribe to the. If everyone's right and just everyone goes to their appropriate afterlife and you can kind of shift between them, just simply. That's the only way any of this actually works, because mathematically, every religion has an equal chance of being true, then mathematically speaking, they're all more likely to be wrong than right. That's just numbers. No amount of King's James saying that I can divorce my fat wife is going to convince me that that has equal odds of being true, has better odds of being true Because we know that happened. For one thing Anytime you staple another testament on a book, I'm just like that's the one ultimate truth. Huh.
Speaker 2:Why is the guy's name on?
Speaker 1:it. Who's this guy doesn't say god. Shouldn't that be the only name on this book? Written by god yeah, though, like actually shouldn't it? If you're omnipotent, they're pretty sure you get the copyright. So I'm not saying spirituality is some nonsense, I'm just saying that people need to have a little more flexibility.
Speaker 2:Is all I'm saying, or else you'll end up in the feudal Japanese society after like fighting over a scrap of rock candy oh man, I don't know if it's exactly an afterlife, uh, but I know you said that you didn't really like chojin x uh, because, uh it I don't think it did anything wrong, I think it's just like I read.
Speaker 1:I'm like sure is tokyo ghoul in here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just didn't feel distinct enough from Tokyo Ghoul and I can get that vibe. He basically just rewrote Tokyo Ghoul for the first portion, but in the latest chapters spoiler alerts the pharmacist manages to get basically the most powerful Chojin X. The pharmacist manages to steal Chojin X's power and uses it to basically destroy the universe so that he can see his wife again, so he can rebuild it. Destroy the universe so that he can see his wife again, so he can, like, rebuild it, uh. But then, uh, unwittingly, he traps himself in like a 400 square, uh kilometer space, uh, reliving the same day over and over again, going home to his wife, and you know, he can live there for like 10 000 years, just like convincing himself that he's happy when he's not. Um, I, I thought that was really interesting, because then one of the other characters will actually also inadvertently got sucked into the same purgatory type place. Uh, basically slaps him and says, hey, give me your power so I can go and fix this, and then escapes from his afterlife.
Speaker 1:See, that's another. One is like the. It's not really an afterlife so much as the I'm trapped from an afterlife. See, that's another. One is like the. It's not really an afterlife so much as the I'm trapped from an afterlife syndrome, like in kaiju number eight. We had the soldiers who fought were fighting against kaijus becoming kaijus becoming the kaiju. But we get a lot of that where it's like no, you just have to exist, like the Hellsing, or it completely is actually pivot. The full metal alchemist afterlife of a math equation calls you a chump when a cosmic entity doesn't forgive mistakes. Eternity is here and endlessly aware of your own transgression. But it's not really an afterlife. It's like it's not that you go to the truth when you die. You go to the truth when you walk up and knock on the door of the truth. Although they kind of implied in the first Cut of Full Metal Alchemist, when you die, your souls flow to Nazi Germany and back to power, their alchemy, which is a choice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first Cut of Full Metal Alchemist definitely has a far worse ending, although I didn't mind.
Speaker 1:The Conquerors of Shambhala movie like it's like the worst version, so it's kind of like I'm gonna go with. It's the birthday cake blizzard. The birthday cake blizzard is the worst blizzard. Pieces of soggy cake do nothing however, okay if full metal okamist.
Speaker 1:The original cut is the birthday cake blizzard version, it's still a blizzard. It's still 90 ice cream. It just is the worst flavor of it. So it's like like, yeah, it's good. It's hard to call it bad, it's just attached to something that's ridiculously good. But I mean the only one true afterlife is your heart is weighed against a feather and a crocodile eats you. That's, that's going to be the correct one one, right? Or? I do love the circles of hell. I really enjoy when you give hell architecture in your fiction and there's always like, uh, it's kind of a recurring one where, like, they don't really show the afterlife, but the grim reaper, greg the grim reaper, just a dude who comes up it's like time to go, and then walks you to somewhere you're like can I know where?
Speaker 2:he's like nah, um, just as a interesting um. So the the greatest estate developer, the guy gets quote-unquote reincarnated, um, but but the guy that he reincarnates as doesn't actually die, his soul gets forced out of his body but he doesn't die. And then the Grim Reaper comes to, like, collect the soul. And he's like, oh wait, I mean, I see you're a soul, but your body's not dead. So I don't really know what to do here. And so he takes this guy's soul down to hell, um, and then later on in the series, uh, the main character uh has reason to go to hell to talk to the king of hell. Uh, he comes across the soul that originally owned his body and then, uh, basically convinces the king of hell to allow him, allow the former soul to reincarnate. Um, I don't know the series. The series is, uh I don't know if I did justice describing it like I say, it's super funny uh, and has a very interesting, well, a little kind of a bizarre afterlife. I don't know okay.
Speaker 1:Well, it's kind of funny because it's like I was thinking about mechs and magic, where it's like I'm a gumball clan reincarnated who knows how to build mechs. In this fantasy setting I just can't get over the fact how much better it would have been if it was just the fantasy setting and a person had cool mech ideas and that's like I don't know. Afterlife is such an interesting talk because it's like so much of things are scaffolded off of earlier pieces of fiction, because I'd say about half this list are a take on Dante's Inferno in some way, like even the bureaucratic standing in line, and then like I really wonder who did it first, the standing in line to check into heaven thing, or if that's just an obvious bit.
Speaker 2:I mean it must be a somewhat obvious bit because, as mentioned at the start of the episode here, that is a cross-cultural joke I don't even have anything against that joke.
Speaker 1:It's like it's a cross-cultural joke, but it's good. Like if I found myself in a situation where I was writing a comedy and needed to have an afterlife the bureaucratic afterlife is my go-to. Like I'm like, yeah, that's, that's pretty funny already. Like I don't have to do like that, there's a lot you can do with that. I also really enjoy that. You're not qualified to die, but here's your reward points.
Speaker 1:Like not everyone can do a biscuit hammer, where a character sees himself dying in a dream and tells another character and then the character catches up to the part where they died in the dream that that is true.
Speaker 1:Lucifer and the biscuit hammer was pretty interesting in that way and can't be worse than his current life, like if the big twist to chainsaw man is denji's just in. Hell. Yeah tracks, oh man, clearly, clearly he's in. You know. I think denji's right about his statement in the recent chapter. By the way, I think he is an inappropriate location for that. If you think about it, it is a perfectly sanitary location.
Speaker 2:Like In the nurse's office.
Speaker 1:I mean of all the places. I'm like you know, I don't think he's wrong, really, oh, chainsaw man, so it's just so unique. That is the most absurd superpower I've ever heard and I'm like that's so good, that's so weird and fucked up.
Speaker 2:But I digress. Shall we head into our random question of the day?
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, I mean, we've definitely covered all the versions of the afterlife that I was thinking of. I mean, I wasn't going to come bust down actual afterlives and talk. Start talking about the Sephiroth and the places of divine hierarchy.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, Keep, keep it.
Speaker 1:uh, fictional media, which I mean, some people might argue, but I've actually seen like the divine hierarchy Sephiroth used in a couple of animes before. But usually like wrong, I'd have to assume Okay.
Speaker 2:So here's a random question.
Speaker 1:You are a Hollywood director. You are doing a reshoot of lord of the rings. However, you marvel has recently bought your studio and you are forced to replace gandalf with an mcu cameo. What character is replacing gandalf?
Speaker 2:uh well, I mean, the obvious answer is Doctor Strange if you want a boring movie, sure yeah, you're right, doctor Strange would just solve all the problems well, not just that, but like.
Speaker 1:So Doctor Strange is actually probably weaker than Gandalf, because it's like Doctor Strange. Part of the point of Lord of the Rings is the wizards in Lord of the Rings are basically angels, like they have like Archangel. The point of lord of the rings is the wizards in lord of the rings are basically angels, right, like they have, like archangel, gabriel, powers going on, and the reason gandalf can't do shit is the main villain is one of these angels. Long story short, don't come at me.
Speaker 1:Stephen colbert and one of the one of his generals is also one of these angels so it's like dr strange with being like I'm the sorcerer supreme and it's like cool, we got dormammu's boss over there and his lieutenant, alternate reality dr. Strange, but good, good, go at it, fair. So I'm making a great movie. I don't know if it'll be good movie, but great movie. I'm replacing g Gandalf with Spider-Man Huh, he is just quipping the entire way through this movie and I enjoy the part where the evil, where Doctor Strange knocks Spider-Man off the tower and then he, like, jumps off a cliff and Falcon, punches a Balrog and comes back as Spider-Man in the Venom symbiote suit.
Speaker 2:You know what else would be?
Speaker 1:a fairly interesting movie replacing gandalf with, uh, daredevil yes, I love the worst the superhero, the better this works out.
Speaker 2:It turns out well, yeah, because then you know he goes, goes off to deal with whatever and comes back and it's like he's just some dude that went out and beat up all these crazy powerful monsters with his bare hands.
Speaker 1:Hawkeye would be lame, because he's just the worst Legolas.
Speaker 2:He is just the worst Legolas.
Speaker 1:Nick Fury would be pretty great. Like Nick Fury, pulling a Glock on the Balrog is a pretty great visual. You shall not pass. And then just surviving somehow is pretty in character, honestly.
Speaker 2:Oh Well, no, I don't know if you can have a black character play Gandalf the Grey, because they come back as Gandalf the White.
Speaker 1:The only way this works is it's called that, but it's just a theory with a different color eye patch. That's the only way you can do that right, fair enough, and that's the joke. It writes itself, because everyone just calls him Nick Fury the White and he just has a white eye patch.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Thank you for everyone tuning in to this week's episode of Deep Space Dragons. I don't know. Send us random questions. I'll send you stuff, probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, if you sign up for Patreon, you could get one of our Deep Space Dragons mugs. I think that's the only merch we have right now.
Speaker 1:Our Patreon. It has made an indeterminate amount of funds over the years. Really, though, like I want them just to raise a check so I can justify just trying to send someone your spleen in the jar.
Speaker 2:I just think that would be really funny oh, I still haven't asked whether or not I get to keep it afterwards because it's just in a jar and it's just labeled carl's spleen, like that's the worst.
Speaker 1:I don't even know if we can legally give that away as merch, like that might like break some laws. I think we have to like give away a mug and it just comes with the mug uh, can you ship organs in canada?
Speaker 2:you would think no. You can only ship medical or biological materials if they're not infectious, poisonous or otherwise prohibited under any applicable legislation or law. All right, so we're getting close to being. You can only ship medical or biological materials if they're not infectious, poisonous or otherwise prohibited under any applicable legislation or law.
Speaker 1:Alright, so we're getting close to being allowed to do this. That wasn't as strong of a no as it should have been.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, that's what Canada Post says, anyway.
Speaker 1:You know, shipping it through Canada Post is the best part of this bit. Like the version where, like our like top, top tier donator like comes to a dinner with us and you give it to them in person like feels feasible, but they're just opening it in a crate and their loved ones staring at the being like we can't afford rent this month. Bye, bye. Oh man, ecosize are actually like the best afterlife, like it's actually ridiculous to just be like. You died. Oh, I got hit by a truck in my 30s. What will happen now? Well, do you want to shoot lightning from your hands? Even the one where you're a cute spider still lets you shoot lightning. Somehow. It's like, oh, what's this? I died and went to a world where I can afford a property by working a 9-to-5 job. This is amazing. What do you mean? There's healing magic and I can just fix my sore back.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, this looks like the. Okay, okay, this looks like the Canadian Border Service Agency.
