Where there are demons, there are usually their opposing numbers, assuming the world isn't completely crapsack, and occasionally they will have a physical base on Earth. Much rarer than its malevolent counterpart, as heaven doesn't usually come up as often as hell in stories, due to not being quite as obvious a target for those pesky adventurers. (Though considering how much fun heaven can be to fight, this is a shame.)
Many mythological settings had physical heavens, the top of Mount Olympus being the supposed Home of the Gods. So physical heavens are more common in mythological settings.
Unless humans have found a way of shifting planes, this is a requirement for a Rage Against the Heavens plot.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- One Piece: The World Nobles, rulers of the World Government's, consider themselves gods, and by extension consider their home heaven. It's even called "Sacred Marijoa" and on the world's highest continental landform.
Literature
- Cori Celesti, the mountain at the centre of the Discworld, is the site of Dunmanifestin, the home of the gods. It's entirely reachable by mortals with the right skills or technology — The Last Hero revolves around a gang of old Barbarian Heroes on a quest to blow it up.
- In The Divine Comedy, the first 7 "circles" of Heaven consist of the Moon, Sun, and the five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), while the 8th consists of the "fixed stars" (as most astronomers and astrologers at the time thought the stars didn't move, unlike the planets.) This eventually gets subverted in the 10th heaven (The Empyrean), where God actually "lives", and is described as being beyond matter and space.
- Earthsea: In The Other Wind, the Heaven in the West is... in... the West.
- The Gaea Trilogy is mostly set in a space habitat that is, itself, alive. The hub is where the station's avatar hangs out, and it's set up as a kind of Hollywood Heaven... Gaea understands the value of theatrics.
- Tolkien's Legendarium has the continent Aman in the West with the land Valinor, which is the realm of the Valar (divine spirits made by the creator god; think angels or minor gods) — or at least it did until the end of the Second Age, when Ilúvatar reshaped the world into a sphere and Valinor became accessible only by elven ships capable of sailing the Straight Road off-world. Interestingly, the trope is also averted with respect to Ilúvatar Himself and His domain (where the Valar originally come from), which is completely outside the universe and is hinted to be where humans go after death.
- The Whoniverse short story "The Ruins of Heaven" has the Sixth Doctor and Perri arrive on the city of Heaven on the planet Sheol. It turns out to be a tourist trap with the angels being actors. A Fallen angel tells Perri that the planet used to be the real Heaven, but God and the angels left to found a new one after tourists discovered it.
Live-Action TV
- In-Universe example in The 100: The people living in space practice a religion where Earth is Heaven. It's where they send the bodies of the dead, and the time when they're able to return to Earth is treated like the coming of the Messianic Age
.
- Charmed (1998) features a physical 'up there' that mortals can enter, although it's both difficult and only permitted in emergencies. It's never really made clear whether this 'heaven' is where the dead reside or purely the home of White Lighters.
- Dead people in Lexx reincarnate on the Counter-Earth planet, Water. The twin planet Fire is a Physical Hell.
- The lands of Valinor from Aman are shown in the prologue of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as a place of great beauty and very idyllic.
Mythology & Religion
- Book of Genesis: The Garden of Eden is said to have once been a real place on Earth, presumably before being destroyed by the Biblical Flood. Two of the four rivers that are said to have originated from it are very much real rivers in the Middle East: Hiddekel is the Tigris while Perat is the Euphrates. Nobody can agree on where its original location is though; candidates have included the Armenian Highlands, Kurdistan, and the Lower Mesopotamia.
- Classical Mythology: As mentioned above, Mount Olympus was considered to be the abode of the Greek pantheon.
Video Games
- In The Aether, you can enter the Aether "dimension" through a portal. Doesn't seem like it fits this trope, right? If you fall from it, you end up in the overworld. Even if it is technically another dimension in the game engine, it's right above your head. Except it isn't when you actually build up there. For clarification, due to the world being locked at a set number of blocks high The Aether had to become a new dimension in order to build around that block limit. It is heavily implied that it is actually just above the top of that height limit because when you fall from it you drop into the top of the main dimension at the same distance from the entrance as where you fell.
- Age of Mythology has Arkantos' son wrecking Heaven. Well, the Greek equivalent.
- Diablo:
- In Diablo II you're sent to Hell in order to kill Diablo. And you find out that the forces of Heaven have a fortress set up there and in fact have a few Angels patrolling the place trying to keep things under control. Care to guess how that turned out?
- Diablo III's fourth act has you battling demons in the High Heavens themselves to stop them from destroying everything.
- Doom Eternal: Urdak seems to be this, although it's kept somewhat ambiguous if it's really Heaven, as while it's quite pretty, and seem to be in the "sky", the Makyrs are anything but benevolent, although it's implied that they weren't always so evil, and the current Khan Makyr made them this way.
- In the third Heroes of Might and Magic, the Medieval European-inspired Castle faction has as its ultimate base upgrade the Portal of Glory, a gold-and-ivory, banner-draped gate to Fluffy Cloud Heaven literally built atop the clouds over the city. Despite the practical difficulties of attacking such a structure, Gameplay and Story Segregation means that successfully besieging the human castle far below puts invaders in control of the Portal as well.
- One iteration of the Nexus Clash universe allowed angelic player characters to pour energy into the land of the mortal plane and transform buildings and terrain into the idealized landscape of Elysium. Demons could do the opposite and try to turn it into Physical Hell instead.
- Princess Maker 2 has a physical heaven to match its Physical Hell, but it's guarded by the War God. Considering that he can potentially be beaten by a thirteen-year-old, forcing the Gods to raise the drawbridge (or rather, make it disappear), he's probably not very good at his job.
- Risk of Rain 2 mentions a religion called the High Court, which believes that Heaven is a physical location somewhere in the universe and dedicates itself to deep-space exploration in the hopes of finding it.
- Scribblenauts: Just as how you can summon schools and museums you can actually summon Heaven. Interacting with it produces a God. Physical Hell also exists.
- Touhou Project has Hakugyokuro (the Netherworld), the Hell of Blazing Fires, the shores of the Sanzu, and the heavenly realm of Bhava-agra as locales.
Web Original
- One intro page for Homestar Runner is a Fluffy Cloud Heaven. Hovering over one of the site links has a squadron of fighter jets fly through.
- The Salvation War has, of course, this and it is invaded in the second book.
