Basic Trope: Hell turns out to be a fun place to be.
- Straight: Bob goes to Hell. He doesn't suffer the torments, uses the pit of eternal fire to keep his feet warm, and has a party with the seven deadly sins.
- Exaggerated: Every character that goes to Hell indulges in every sin, turns Hell into a World of Badass, and has parties also known as orgies with the Succubi and Incubi.
- Downplayed:
- While most of Hell is just as horrific as advertised, if you can get into management, you get to live in the decadent luxury suites and party.
- Hell is a Mundane Afterlife that looks and functions much like Earth, just slightly worse due to the company and the byzantine labyrinth that is the Celestial Bureaucracy.
- Justified:
- Satan is basically a god of disorder and hedonism, like Dionysus, who got Hijacked by Jesus into a God of Evil.
- God created Hell to scare people into acting morally, but is so loving that He doesn't actually want to torture anyone. He still sends people to Hell since He won't break his word, but it's made to be almost as good as Heaven.
- Hell is eternal separation from God's laws, which means more freedom, making Hell a Wide-Open Sandbox compared to the monotonous totalitarianism of Heaven.
- Satan has to live in hell too, and he isn't particularly inclined to punish people on behalf of God; this is exactly his kind of people!
- The damned have gotten used to any torture Hell can throw.
- The people sent to Hell were good people, they just didn't believe in God. Satan thinks they shouldn't suffer for that.
- The ruler of Hell, Satan is a God of Evil. Of course, he's going to make evil men have a Karma Houdini to spite morality!
- Satan is doing it to spite God. He's no longer associated with the Almighty, so why should he do God's job for Him?
- Satan's job is first and foremost to be a warden and keep them contained. It is far easier to keep them trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine than it is to have to deal with legions of the damned using an eternity to scheme their escapes, allowing even one to escape would have dire consequences, thus its inhabitants becoming Karma Houdinis is a small price to pay to protect innocents.
- Bob is a Sadist but was too kind-hearted in life to act on their fantasies. God sends them to Hell as a reward so they can act out on the irredeemably evil. After all, every prison needs wardens.
- This is the parole layer of Hell. If you succeed in not succumbing to its darker parts, then you are allowed a new chance at life (or better).
- Sent to Hell, Bob and the others realize the error of their ways and opt to make their new home a better place.
- Inverted: Bob goes to Heaven and he finds it awful and boring.
- Subverted:
- Bob goes to Hell and is shown rooms with various affairs that are actually quite nice. However, he is reminded that these are for the people Satan likes and then he gets shoved into a torture chamber.
- Heaven takes the form of whatever paradise your heart desires. A Dark Is Not Evil metalhead's Heaven, therefore, seems to be an enjoyable form of Hell until God clarifies. The real Hell sucks.
- It's an Ironic Hell that looks great at first but then it multiplies by an eternity.
- Double Subverted:
- However, as everyone in Hell does not have a body anymore, Bob does not feel any pain at all. As Satan is Affably Evil, Bob's even served hot chocolate during torture breaks and has a party every weekend.
- ...only because these are for the really, really, bad people like terrorists, school shooters, and vice presidents. The others get to have fun partying all the time without getting bored.
- Parodied: Hell is A Party, Also Known as an Orgy and Satan is a really prissy, preening host in a cocktail dress who is overly concerned with your well-being whenever he's not getting gangbanged by like 50 others.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Hell turns out to be a huge party, but the food causes extreme pain. Satan admits he had made a mistake and cures everyone's pain, but accidentally takes out some of their organs. Eventually, people regrow them, and the party continues...
- Hell is a place for the impure. Some suffer the classic Hell. However, those who are only mildly sinful have a good time. Those who have properly atoned and suffered enough even get to join the good parts of it as well.
- Averted: Hell is the fiery torture chamber it is usually known as.
- Enforced: The executives want a Darker and Edgier work with some demon characters and the trip to Hell is just an excuse to get them to join the band of protagonists.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, it's like Satan made a version of Hell designed to just disagree with the Bible."
- Invoked: Satan is trying to win his war against Heaven, and needs all the followers he can corrupt, so he stops torturing people and starts giving them a reason to follow him while corrupting them in the process.
- Exploited: Striking down Emperor Evulz, Bob tells him, "I hope you rot in Hell." Evulz just chuckles at this and dies with a spiteful laugh. He has seen Hell, and he knows he will love it there.
- Defied: "You are in Hell and by the Lightbringer, you are going to hate it here!"
- Discussed: "Those "screams of the damned" you hear? Yeah, they're the fans of a local rock concert."
- Conversed: "Eventually, someone would rather choose the wretched hive instead of spending an eternity of boredom with those Fundamentalists.''
- Implied: Bob is rescued from Hell, but doesn't seem especially relieved.
- Deconstructed:
- The torments are far more subtle than a Lake of Fire, but over time prove at least as effective.
- Imagine being at a party where every rapist, cannibal, spree killer, mass murderer, and all the most heinous criminals to have ever walked the face of the earth were invited. Now imagine you can never leave.
- The lawless party becomes a groundwork for widespread anarchy and the creation of a Wretched Hive, causing the people to lose all inhibitions and become more corrupt and shameless and less peaceful, eventually making them maltreat and rape each other, torment the weaker inhabitants and generally becoming mutual jerkasses in an orgy of social Darwinism. It's revealed that the eternal punishment is not the Lake of Fire and that the real Hell is the other people who live there.
- Mindless Hedonism actually gets boring after a few hundred years. The people in Heaven, however, having long detached themselves from any hedonistic acts, are actually content with their afterlife.
- Reconstructed:
- The complexities of the ironies of torments and chaos make the underworld as complex as mortal life and ultimately becomes just as under your control over how it turns out. Everybody ends up making an underworld, not unlike the overworld including its good times.
- No matter how much of a Wretched Hive it is, Hell's conflicts and complexities will still allow for all varieties of creativity, ideas, and tropes to flow in, be played, and interact in interesting ways, especially when compared to the monotony of Heaven.
- That is until Satan introduces a new fun game no one has ever seen before. Everything is fun again.
- Played for Horror: The mindless party causes everyone in Hell to turn into mindless rats.
We hope you have A Hell of a Time at the Styx Riverwalk and the Bottomless Bar-B-Q Pit!
