Basic Trope: A vehicle, usually a train, takes dead souls to the afterlife.
- Straight: The Afterlife Express takes Bob to the afterlife.
- Exaggerated: The Express can also come as a limousine, a bus, or an airplane.
- Downplayed: The Express appears only to those scared of Psychopomps.
- Justified:
- The psychopomps sent the train because they were too busy in one part of the world to take the dead souls everywhere else to the afterlife.
- Or they wanted to appear in A Form You Are Comfortable With.
- Inverted: The Beforelife Express takes unborn fetuses to the world of the living.
- Subverted: Bob dies, and a train passes by. That's not the Express.
- Double Subverted: ...the Express arrives soon anyway.
- Parodied: The Express's schedule includes scheduled funerals, complete with The Grim Reaper as the conductor and other Psychopomps as staff.
- Zig Zagged: Whether a psychopomp or the Express takes a dead soul to the afterlife depends on the soul's expectations.
- Averted:
- There are no vehicles to the afterlife.
- There is no afterlife in the first place.
- Enforced: "All the psychopomps are Put on a Bus for this episode! How can we have the dead souls arrive at the afterlife?" "Let's just create a train and have the souls arrive on there."
- Lampshaded: "I thought the Reaper would take me there!"
- Invoked:
- The psychopomps are in another part of the world, and send for the train for everywhere else.
- A shrewd Railroad Baron manages to escape his place in hell by bribing psychopomps with making their job easier, knowing they find it difficult to keep up with the increasing population and thus death rate.
- Exploited: The psychopomps use a train to make people less scared of death, since after all, riding a train is a fairly mundane experience for many.
- Defied: The psychopomps take Bob to the afterlife themselves.
- Discussed: "I wonder how we go to the afterlife when we die."
- Conversed: "So we go to the afterlife on a train? I've seen this happen before!"
- Implied: The story starts out with Bob already in the afterlife, but whenever new characters show up, "The Express" is always mentioned off-handedly.
- Deconstructed: People stop believing in deities because after all, a train takes dead people to the afterlife.
- Reconstructed: Deities are seen around the train so people don't stop believing in them.
- Played For Laughs: The Grim Reaper meets Bob and takes him to a nearby train station to board the Afterlife Express... only to be informed that the train is running late, and has to ask Bob if he's got any ideas to kill time while they wait.
- Played For Horror: A Native American war chief is gruesomely killed resisting being forced off his land for the sake of gold and railroad building. He is horrified to find himself on the train. Even the afterlife isn't safe from their incursion. Said incursion is gruesome. After the incursion, the afterlife is basically a pool of blood, even scarier during the night.
Hop back on the Afterlife Express trains at the main page!
