Ah, the concept of afterlife. That attempt of ours to battle the uncertainty of death and handle the fact we all, eventually, end. A marvellous concept, really.
I wish, though, to talk about very specific presentations of the afterlife. What came to mind originally was the similarities and differences between His Dark Materials and the Good Place in handling those topics. Spoilers for the HDM books and tGP TV series ahead, then - massive spoilers, as both works pretty much end with what I intend to talk about. Since I plan on writing long, I'll even be gracious enough to put it under the cut.
So, similarities and differences. My interest mostly piqued because of one particular trope both works have in common - the Door at the end of the afterlife that returns your particles to the universe as the solution to the afterlife. I suppose this idea isn't necessarily unique to those works, but I don't really know of any other work that does that. Except maybe Kaos, where it's the lie the Greek Pantheon has been telling people is true.
It would be interesting to remark that this same solution is applied to two wildly different problems: the HDM's afterlife is a bleak wasteland ruled over by lie-sniffing harpies, and is actually a prison - a threat held over mortals by the Authority. Only all mortals go there because the Authority is too lazy to actually reward his followers. Seriously, 90% of the premise isn't "if G-d is real and acts as Christians say He does than He's the villain", it's "if G-d isn't actually G-d and both Heaven and Hell are actually Purgatory/the Fields of Asphodel then the world is crap". I'm sure someone somewhere can correct me on how it still works as a criticism of organized religion - like, "with how these Fire and Brimstone preachers speak, practically everyone goes to Purgatory forever anyway, plus religion does try to restrict your enjoyment of worldly pleasures" or something like that. Or a way more educated version that mentions Paradise Lost and William Blake a lot or something.
I would say that I digress, but this isn't the only criticism with which I wish to inflict HDM today. Because,speaking of the freaking afterlife, this world's version of the ultimate judgement is very much not morality based. Which, hey, I suppose is fine. It just means extremely boring people are the ones damned to spend an eternity continuing to exist in boring conditions, while every interesting person, be they unfathomably evil or perfectly good or anything in between get to reunite with the universe. The additional people who'll have problems include compulsive liars and possibly amnesiacs and anyone with a memory problem. The deal only covered babies being free, after all - everyone else has to tell true stories about themselves. Sure, Gracious Wings and co. can choose if a given true story will get you through and they can choose who to punish, but we have no frame for their morality outside of truth and lies. So sure, go ahead and argue the afterlife judgement shouldn't be morality based and your morals should be based on other things. You still damned some particularly weak groups for eternity just because they can't tell stories. I'm exaggerating a bit. But we do know that fanciful tales are out of the question - would a work of outright fiction be fine if it's not technically lies? And I'm digressing again. This system is immoral - or, more accurately, morally neutral. It has no mortality to it. The exact opposite of the Good Place's system.
The Good Place uses the Objective Point System: the moral system to end all moral systems which, for some incomprehensible reason, is point based. And it's fine, right? Everything's fine... Oh, no, nevermind, consequentialist purity culture dictates that everyone goes to hell ever since the start of the Modern Era. Well, that and not receiving love and support from your surroundings? But Chidi, who stressed about the former and actually had the latter also failed because of his infinite attempt to find moral clarity? Clearly, my knowledge of moral philosophy is just as flawed as my understanding of classic English literature about Genesis. But that's not really the point.
After the entire system was reformed - not by getting rid of the Infallible Point System, but by adding another stage to the testing with as many repeats as you like - the Soul Squad find that heaven has a problem: they kind of turned into the Pullman version of the afterlife, only for the opposite reason: an abundance of pleasure had turned them numb and now they're bored for eternity. The solution, though, is the same as HDM only different: a final Door is added, but its point is to have an end in sight to the eternal paradise. It functions similarly, but not the same - as the Good Place has some time in heaven before reuniting with the cosmos. Which is more fun than being flown over a bottomless pit, I think.
A couple more notes, since we're at it: out of the Soul Squad, Jason will have the easiest time passing through Gracious Wings' test. Tahani will come as a close second. Chodi and Eleanor will have the most trouble - Chidi because of his indecisiveness, if the Harpies will tell him he doesn't need to stress out over complete accuracy of details he can be fine, and Eleanor because she can be a compulsive liar sometimes - I'm sure she and Lyra could bond over that and having crappy parents. She'll deal eventually, anyway - the Dress Bench story alone should be enough if recounted with honesty.
On the opposite side of the veil, I don't really know enough about how the new System of the Good Place works to judge how long will it take any given HDM character to go through it. I think Lyra's major flaws are her arrogance and self-assuredness, Will's is probably his ruthlessness, Lord Asriel's is his hubris and also ruthlessness (thank goodness he and Will never met), and Mrs Coulter's is probably her manipulativeness. But I'm not really the best judge of character. Putting the four of them in the same neighborhood is probably a terrible idea but it's fun to consider and I might try writing this fic at some point. Maybe.
I feel like this kind of lost its thread in the middle. I'll keep the title, because it still is about the afterlife in some ways even though half of it is random rambles. Maybe one day I'll delve into more afterlife systems. Until then - thank you for reading!
I'm not really great at spotting bad special effects - like, I come out of a lot of Doctor Who episodes thinking that those visuals were pretty cool, but as far as anyone else cares to comment on them it's to say they're shit, so I guess I just don't have the eye for what's corny or not.
So, like, I don't know if I'm being too easily impressed when they let the camera focus on Iorek's face, and Gracious Wing's face, and you can see them being all emotive. I love Iorek's scoffs and spits when he's getting in Asriel's face, and the Harpy's twitchy sneering. It looks so good to me.
