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alt title(s): Legions Of Hell Demons. Monsters. Fallen Angels. There is a place where they go to, and a place from which they spring. Simply calling it Another Dimension doesn't do it justice.
Their numbers are legion and their powers are diverse.
Sometimes ruled by Satan, sometimes by a God Of Evil, who depending on the setting and author worldview may or may not be the same person/thing, and residing in Fire And Brimstone Hell in Televisionland (or the real deal). There may or may not be heavenly equivalents, and either one can be treated in a Crystal Dragon Jesus manner. Heck, they may even have Naughty Tentacles.
The Shinto version of the afterlife is markedly different from the Christian version; thus, in anime not influenced by western notions of Hell and demons, Hell acts more Chaotic Neutral than evil regardless of how it looks, especially the classic Buddhist and Chinese versions. Demons will be more like administrators than tormentors, often taken to the extreme.
See also: Bonus Level Of Hell, for guys slightly higher on the infernal totem-pole see Demon Lords And Archdevils. For the non-demonic version: Alien Invasion.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Angel Sanctuary tells the story of war between angels and demons. Among other things, the demons are the good guys....
- Not so much the good guys as the less evil guys. God himself is mostly absent.
- The forces of Hell and Heaven seem more like rival sports teams than vicious enemies in Ah My Goddess, but even so the demons can be nasty.
- The American dub of Sailor Moon lumped all of the show's villains and monsters into a single evil force called the "Negaverse".
- In Bleach, Hell is not among the villains. In one episode, the Soul Reapers defeat a fallen ghost who was also a serial killer during his life. A Soul Reaper cannot purify sins made by the living, so the Gate of Hell opens up and a demon reaches out and grabs the damned soul.
- Much better in the manga where the giant demon impales him on an equally giant sword.
- On the other hand, Hueco Mundo ("Hollow World") is a poster child of this trope. The Hollows themselves were the early antagonists, and the series's Big Bad eventually sets up shop there.
- Most everything that isn't human in Legend Of The Overfiend and La Blue Girl.
- The dead villains from Dragonball were shown in hell from time to time. Due to censorship issues at the time, any time in the dub the word "HELL" was on a uniform or on the wall, it was edited to "HFIL" or "Home For Infinite Losers." This is the subject of amusement and/or eyerolling among fans.
- Goku in the dub lampshades this. He foils an escape attempt, which only gets all of the former villains impaled and back in their cells, unamused. Cell farts, asks "who farted", and immediately has everyone staring at him, which only re-affirms the "Losers" bit.
- The demons of Berserk are quite powerful, diverse and horrific. Every one of them were once humans who got hold of a Behelit and sold their souls and sacrificed those closest to them to the demonic gods of the Godhand in exchange for being reborn as demons. The Godhand themselves are servants of the Idea of Evil, a quite evil God that governs the Berserk universe and manipulates events so that behelits get passed down to those destined to use them so that more demons and members of the Godhand get created. Needless to say, Berserk's world is every bit of a crappy place to live as the 40K universe.
- No two Orphans from Mai-HiME are alike, and their presence is made even more eerie once the characters (and the viewers) realize where (and who) they're coming from.
- The Hundred Demon Clan of Getter Robo G. Had one subordinate that looked like Hitler with demon horns.
- The Guze no Tomogarra (Denizens of the Crimson Realm in the dub) and their Rinne servants from Shakugan No Shana.
- Ronin Warriors had Talpa's Dynasty Soldiers, a seemingly endless supply of Faceless Goons.
- Pulled off in the 10th episode of Kanokon, when a hoard of them attack the school. When he reaches his Five-Tailed Form, Kouta lets loose an expanding energy wave that completely obliterates the hoard of baddies (save their leader, who flees).
- The Lucifer Hawke/Lucifer Folk from Silent Moebius.
- The enemy forces of the Demon Wars from Sakura Taisen.
- The Invaders from Gatekeepers and Gatekeepers 21.
- The Arigami from Blue Seed.
- Thoroughly subverted by Bakuen Campus Guardress.
- Even more thoroughly subverted by Hyper Police, in which the invasion is long over and the demons are a normal part of the landscape (to the point where humans are a rare and protected species).
- Mahou Sensei Negima: Negi's hometown was doomed by one of those. Is not clear if they do come from Hell, but they are called demons anyway.
- The Dark Liege Army in Nora. Subverted in the fact that they're actually the good guys.
Comic Books
- Shows up from time to time in The DCU. Teen Titans has had to deal with Trigon, Superman has traded blows with Karkull, and even Batman has fought both alongside and against Etrigan the Rhyming Demon. The Sandman makes quite a few visits there as well.
- Mephisto and his son Blackheart serve as the rulers of a Hell-like dimension in the Marvel Universe. They are responsible for the creation of any number of heroes and villains, such as Ghost Rider (who sold his soul) and Dr. Doom (who tried to access Mephisto's dimension to save his mother's soul, but wound up scarring his own face). The upcoming Ghost Rider movie has indicated that Blackheart will be the primary villain.
- Marvel has been largely inconsistent in its portrayal of hell (largely due, it seems, to an unwillingness to flatly confirm or deny the existence of God in the comics, quite unlike DC). The current Ghost Rider series had Satan himself (not Mephisto, Satannish or any other almost-Satan Marvel has used in the past). For the most part, Marvel seems to go with the idea that there are many different hells, with many different devils.
- Originally Johnny Blaze had made a deal with the same Satan that was the father of Daimon Hellstrom (Son Of Satan natch) and Satanna, who definitely was NOT Mephisto.
- Note that part of the inconsistency has been explained by the fact that demons lie all the time.
- What about the Neyaphem, a race of exiled denomic muatants led by Azazel, who is also the father of Abyss, Kiwi Black, and Nightcrawler.
- Spawn got his superpowers under the conditions of leading the Legions of Hell. He ended up not, but he still kept the powers.
Literature
- In Clive Barker's short story "Hellbound Heart," and the Hellraiser films and graphic novels based on it, the Legions of Hell are the Cenobites (a word originally meaning simply monks in monastic orders, as distinct from "eremites" or hermit monks). Hell is not a place for punishment of sins as such — souls are lured there simply by the temptation of solving puzzles.
- In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, the characters end up storming Hell and facing down the legions to recover their daughter.
- In Robert A Heinlein's "Magic, Incorporated", the characters demand of the king of Hell, according to Hell's customs, that he let them inspect his legions looking for their enemy.
- Discworld has the Dungeon Dimensions as the home of its Legions Of Hell.
- Technically the Dungeon Dimensions are a home for the Eldritch Abominations, while the Legions Of Hell are more amiable and bureaucratic, and reside in various Hells produced by the human imagination.
- The "feeders" from Terry Brooks' The Knight of the Word novels almost fit the trope. Though they're dark and oozy and scary, they aren't very dangerous; they're more harbingers of evil than evil itself.
- Demons swarmed out of the Darkwood in Simon R Green's Blue Moon Rising. In Beyond The Blue Moon, it turned out that the demons were really humans transformed into murderous monsters, subverting this trope.
- Paradise Lost features the legions named in a device called an "epic catalogue". Usually used to name the various heroes on the quest (see The Iliad for a classic example), this version instead mentions the various gods of other religions who form the forces of Satan.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- In the old World of Darkness RPG Demon: the Fallen, demons that escaped from Hell are the player characters; the angels have long since vanished. Whether the demons are antiheroes or atoners is up to the player.
- Similarly, the Spectres fulfill this role in Wraith: The Oblivion, with the Malfeans being the overlords waiting til they get to eat reality. The various servants of the Wyrm in Werewolf: The Apocolypse might also count.
- The New World of Darkness has, as of Inferno, introduced Hell into the setting. Hell plays host to a number of demons that are born of the first fleeting moments of human wickedness, who occasionally come to humans and offer them great power for a little price...
- One of the main factions in Warhammer 40000 is Chaos, spewing forth from the Eye of Terror which is essentially an alternate reality made up of the emotions and thoughts of the entirety of sapient life in the galaxy. 40K being so crapsacky its hardly suprising that it is a literal Hell, with the four most powerful entities being the evil deities of Violence, Lust, Despair, and Hope. (Yes, Hope. There is a god of Hope, and the god of friggin' Hope is evil.)
- The Hope one should probably be termed Lies. But then, the lust one is also pleasure and 'love'. Probably best to consider them Outward (Violence), Inward (Indulgence), Entropy and Change.
- Oh man, there's an evil god of Hope and Change?! Ah geez...
- Don't blame me. I voted for McKhorne.
- Well played.
- The older Warhammer Fantasy Battle game also includes Chaos as a faction, with the same lineup of evil gods. In addition to Demonic Invaders, the Chaos army also includes tainted mortal warriors and twisted beastmen, all sweeping down from the Grim Up North.
- And out of the corrupted forests, Sylvania, etc.
- Dungeons And Dragons draws a distinction between Devils, who are Lawful Evil and Demons, who are Chaotic Evil. The former are a race of Chessmasters who seek to conquer the universe, where as the later are out to destroy all of creation. Each has their own home plane: The Nine Hells of Baator for the devils, and The infinite Layers of the Abyss for the demons.
- Devils actually include "Legion Devils"...the literal Legions of Hell.
- Don't forget the Neutral Evil Daemons, although the developers of the new edition seem to have done so.
- 4th edition altered the alignment axis and changed the definition of "demon" from "Always Chaotic Evil" to "monstrous in appearance and "devil" from "Lawful Evil" to "humanoid in appearance." Daemons (Yugoloths in 3rd Edition) no longer have a place.
- Like the WoD example above, another Tabletop Game, In Nomine, gave players a chance to enact this trope as demons operating on Earth. Unlike the above example, however, it gave an equal chance to fight for the other side, too.
- Well, not so equal, because Angels have higher stats, and a military organization to support them. Demons have to work undercover and are more weak. The reason? All of this is a Game, and God is a cheater...
- Exalted has a really bizarre hell. It's ruled over by the Yozis (who created the world and ruled over it until the Exalted deposed them), and the Can keeping them Sealed Evil In A Can is the inside-out body of the mightiest of their number. Each Yozi has a large number of souls, which are the immensely powerful Third Circle Demons. Those have souls which are the Second Circle Demons, and all of the above created the hordes of Mooks that are First Circle Demons.
- Exalted also has the Underworld, the inverted shadow of Creation created when the Exalted armies killed the some of the Primordials, the beings that created the universe. Killing beings who could not die caused so much chaos that the Exalted decided to seal the rest of the Primordials away instead of killing them. Because the Primordials were outside the limits of death and time, however, they didn't actually die but instead became creatures now known as the Neverborn, intent on ending their existence by sending their own legions to take the rest of Creation down with them.
- Infernum is a third-party setting that uses the 3.5 rules for Dungeons And Dragons and, as the name suggests, this trope is all over it. In fact, the default assumption is that the party members are demons. Has heavy roots in Christian beliefs, mainly Dante's Inferno, but is twisted and changed into its own unique setting. For a start, the demons are the result of vile crossbreeding experiments conducted between rebellious angels and "spawn" (prototypes of earthly lifeforms) in an effort to breed warrior-slaves... only for the demons to decide they didn't like the idea of being cannon fodder and promptly devoure every last one of their "fathers" that didn't run for their life clean out of reality. Many demons at least profess not to believe in Heaven, and almost none believe that it's anything like the humans think it is (the Fallen Angels can't comment, having forgotten everything down to the reason why they Fell in the first place). There's also vague hints of even stranger forces in the multiverse; Benandanti are humans "touched" by nature spirits, whose souls travel to Hell in the guise of werewolves to steal souls to restow the vitality of nature, while Brokenlanders are the ghostly remnants of Quilipoth, another universe so ancient there's nothing left but a single ringworld orbiting the last dying cinder of a star.
Video Games
- The video game Doom and its sequels involve an invasion from Hell. While many many video games (eg Quake, Half-Life) are based around monsters pouring forth from another realm, Doom is the only one to go the whole hog and use Hell itself. (Both the contemporary novelization and the later movie avoided this, by using aliens and genetic engineering respectively.)
- The Diablo video games are about the Legions of Hell attempting the world's destruction. In both games of the series, the last act is in Hell. The Expansion is about the attempt to graft Hell and the mortal world together, and there are portals to hell that you can go and loot stuff.
- Oblivion and the Daedra from The Elder Scrolls games.
- Mehrunes Dagon's Daedra & The Dremora (his favorite servants) are much like this, but since Daedras are not all evil, many avoid the trope entirely.
- The Burning Legion in World Of Warcraft is an army of demons whose goal is to unmake the universe. They scour all life from the planets they conquer, and the only beings they spare are those whom their leaders deem fit to be "recruited", corrupted and pressed into their crusade.
- Most enemies in Ghosts 'n Goblins can be described thus.
- The Strategy Game Disciples 2 has a playable faction called the Legions of the Damned, which is a literal use of this trope.
- Just like in Disciples 1.
- Painkiller is about the legions of Hell invading another world, although it's another afterlife instead of a physical world.
- Purgatory, to be specific.
- In Hellgate London, demons have decided to start off their invasion of the world in London, and it's the players' task to stop them.
- Final Fantasy II outright stated at the beginning that the Emperor of Palamecia summons these to launch his campaign for world conquest.
- Members of The Legions Of Hell feature in several Shin Megami Tensei games. Most notably so in Nocturne, in which the protagonist becomes half-demon, half-human that can survive The Conception thanks to the involvement of an oddly creepy child and an old man in a wheelchair. And in the game's 'worst'/awesomest ending, said protagonist becomes the general of Lucifer's armies and leads said Legions to the final battle in the war against Heaven.
- Dante foils demonic puppets, demonic sand creatures, demonic clowns, demonic businessmen, demonic cultists, etc.
- The Heartless of Kingdom Hearts are, as that trope describes, The Virus made from the 'darkness' in human hearts. The sequel adds gray-bodied Nobodies.
Webcomics
Western Animation
Web Original
- Somewhat subverted in The Salvation War, where the demons are apparently genetic offshoots from human ancestors — and are completely mortal. Superhuman strength, speed (on foot at least), some with wings, and not a few with powers, but all killable (AND HOW!). Heck, a human kills Asmodeus with multiple sniper rifle bullets to the head, and there's nothing showing that Satan isn't mortal too. In fact, he really only survives a recent attempt by the humans to assassinate him by bombing his palace by sheer luck; he just happened to be out of the city at the time. The angels appear to be slightly tougher, and much faster, but by no means immortal themselves.
- Satan was killed when he took two antishipping missiles to the face, although he would have actually survived and possibly recovered from the first.
- They may be killable, but they seem to live pretty much forever if they avoid a violent death.
Film
- Army Of Darkness, anyone? Essentially, a bunch of dead bodies are possessed by demons released by the Necromonicon Ex Mortis. They attack a medieval castle, and it's up to Ash, his chainsaw, and his boomstick to defeat them.
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