Basic Trope: Doing one small bad deed will condemn a character to Hell.
- Straight: Bob curses out Alice. He is deemed worthy of damnation.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob thinks of lustful thoughts. God sends him to Hell within a span of one second.
- Just doing anything can condemn you to Hell.
- There is no Heaven. Everyone, without exception, goes to Hell when they die.
- Only an elite group of worshippers are allowed access to Heaven. If you aren't in the cult or ranked high enough in it, you go straight to the hellfire.
- Entry to Heaven requires the dead to be perfect in every way. Every single flaw from mistakes to disabilities earn you Hell. Even having a papercut or making a minor spelling mistake is damnnation worthy.
- A baby is born and is immediately teleported to Hell for existinal sin.
- Downplayed:
- Bob steals a car and knows he's going to Hell for it. Before he could even ask God for forgiveness, God sends him to Hell anyways.
- Everyone who sins goes to Purgatory. Purgatory is used to correct their mistakes until they are good enough for Heaven.
- Justified:
- God Is Evil, and this system was designed For the Evulz.
- Humans Are Bastards, and very few people are good enough for heaven.
- God is a Knight Templar who sees that every sin is equal to His eyes.
- God is a eldritch supercomputer, YHWH-1000, that judges souls based on an algorithm of their virtues and good deeds in life vs. their sins. Unfortunately a certain someone has hacked in and reprogrammed God to send everyone to Hell.
- The rules for getting into Heaven and Hell are outdated. The complexity of the modern world means that the best-intentioned people still contribute to sins worthy of hell.
- Heaven has very little space in it and God is not powerful enough to make more. When Heaven is full, God has no choice but to damn all other souls.
- Inverted:
- Bob says one nice thing about Alice. He is deemed worthy of heaven.
- Bob kills thousands of innocents. God is pleased with him and sends him to heaven.
- All except for the most wicked and evil people go to heaven.
- There is no hell; everyone goes to heaven when they die.
- Subverted:
- Bob did a bad deed and is expecting his eternal doom, but finds out that God was only testing him.
- Most people go to "Hell", but there are actually several afterlives and "Hell" is just the catch-all name for any afterlife except the very best.
- Double Subverted:
- ...only to send him to Hell because he lacked faith during his test.
- All of the other afterlives than the very best are pretty terrible.
- Parodied:
- Bob goes to Hell because he removed the Do Not Remove tag from a mattress. When in Hell, even the demons are scared of him due to the heinousness of his sin.
- Bob dies and meets an angry God who is threatening to send him to Hell for minor misdeeds. However, God's movements are awful jerky and he seems to getting a lot of His facts about Bob's life wrong. Bob yanks off God's robe to find that it was actually the Devil trying to take over Heaven again while God was out having lunch with Jesus.
- The Celestial Bureaucracy is run by a bunch of slacker gods who toss everybody into Hell because they're too lazy to judge anybody.
- God sends Bob to Hell for minor things that God would do himself. And God would do these things just as much if not more and hates it for it.
- God throws the entire Earth into hell after seeing a spider on it.
- Zig Zagged: Going to hell is fairly easy for minor sins - but the level of punishment is light to non-existent for the lightest levels. Most don't even stay there that long. However many of what are considered severe amount to Disproportionate Retribution. However spirit uprisings over the injustice of disproportionate sins can occur and the more karmically out of whack they are the empowered and far more likely to succeed. Extreme unfairness would allow a single weak soul to defeat God and Satan allied for their cosmic overreach. Being successful is enough to bring your category high into heaven if successful, but failing results in the whole class being brought deeper into hell even if you took no part in or weren't dead at the time.
- Averted:
- Doing small bad deeds doesn't easily condemn people to Hell.
- Only seriously heinous crimes condemns people to Hell.
- Hell doesn't exist.
- The afterlife doesn't exist.
- Enforced:
- The writer, who is The Fundamentalist wants to use Hell in his series as a way to scare the audience into good behavior or believe in his religious values.
- The writer, who is a misotheist, wants to use this idea to demonstrate how terribly cruel God can be.
- The author is a Nay-Theist, who wants their works to rally humanity against the malevolent Eldritch Abominations that rule the universe.
- Lampshaded: "Come on! Sending me to Hell is too much!"
- Invoked: God thought about keeping humanity in line, so He sends out warnings that any major or minor sin will lead them to Hell.
- Exploited: After finding out this trope is in full effect, a fundamentalist tries to convert non-believers by telling them they will immediately go to Hell if they don't accept God's standards.
- Defied: Satan outright refuses to take insufficiently evil people.
- Discussed: Bob did a bad deed and is expecting his eternal doom, only to have God tell him He's nothing like that, and to not be so quick to believe what those nasty comic books say about Him.
- Conversed: "So just calling someone a name sends you to Hell in these comics? What's next, you go to Hell for sneezing the wrong way?"
- Implied: Several characters never seen committing any but the most minor of misdeeds are seen in Hell later.
- Deconstructed:
- Because trivial things can lead to one's damnation, this becomes a demotivator for heaven seeking.
- The human souls eventually vastly outnumber the demons and realising this, take over Hell.
- The Devil takes pity on the humans because he thinks they deserved Heaven and makes sure they have A Hell of a Time after death. In the end, people prefer to go to Hell instead of Heaven.
- Due to the many, many, many souls that go to Hell for even the most trivial things. The Devil isn't having a good time managing Hell's "mortal overcrowded" issue.
- Reconstructed:
- The road is easy but not inevitable.
- Since Humans Are Bastards, Hell's still a terrible place after their souls take over.
- The Devil has no idea what humans actually like, and Hell is still awful despite his best efforts.
- Played For Drama: Because of believing that God will send anyone to hell anyway, and sees every human on earth as sinners. people begin sinning and even pledging loyalty to Satan himself as they invade heaven.
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