What would a world without death look like?
There are many answers, though, and as always, chasing through implications and ramifications and unintended consequences can make for some very interesting thoughts. Story hooks abound, and fictional universes can be built around tweaking death, like nudging the cosmological constant or the boiling point of water and seeing how (or if) life evolves in parallel universes.
A few links to start with, though:
Merely Magical – An old article of mine digging a bit into magic and what sort of effects it has on storytelling.
Ravnica – Magic the Gathering’s city-plane where some of the spirits of the dead are stuck and cannot pass on, so naturally, many become politicians, er, gangsters, while another group embraces undeath as a way of life.
Valkyrie Profile – Where Japanese writers plumb Norse myths for RPG fodder, winding up with a game where most characters are introduced at their death, and only then does the adventure start.
Gameplay and Story Segregation – In a world with FullLife materia, why again did Aeris die and stay dead? Because Story is inviolate, and CRPGs tend to be noninteractive movies gated by grindy gameplay. Speaking of which…
Final Fantasy X’s Farplane – People who die in Spira leave their bodies and move on as spirits that eventually turn into pyreflies. They populate this odd place, occasionally taking spirit form when loved ones come to call. They aren’t gone, exactly, but they aren’t what we might call alive or undead either. Oh, and if someone actually dies without accepting death, their stubborn spirits will likely become fiends, or monsters. Interesting origin story for monsters, that.
Death is a significant component of our mortal life, so it’s understandable that fiction would experiment with it. Even something like necromancy, a fantasy staple, has Sabriel (a fantastic book) standing in the wings, toying with expectations. And then there’s the zombies. Oh, the zombies and their amazing culture. And let’s not speak of vampires and their form of undeath/immortality/inexplicable popularity.
And yes, there’s the concept of immortality. What if there really is no death at all, instead of a multitude of mulligan mechanics? Forget the Life spells, what if nobody could ever die in the first place? Would there be population problems? How in the world would assassins make a living?
…speaking of which, in a fictional setting where death is cheaply and easily overcome, it strikes me that skullduggery of all sorts, from political to passionate, could prove a tricky thing indeed. Of course we don’t think of that instinctively, but really, there are implications that would change a lot of behavior, religion, customs and even art.
If you found yourself in a world where wars were literally unwinnable by human asset attrition, how would one actually get anywhere? Would peace be more likely, or would truly determined fighters just find new fronts to fight on?
How would thrillseekers get their rush? Would skydivers even bother with parachutes? Would they have crater competitions?
Would ancestor worship change if one could simply talk to them instead of praying to them? How would the ancestors feel about being worshipped?
Would people even have children or would the population be static? Is age a component of immortality of this sort? Would aged people wind up with dementia for millennia?
Would they want to die?
I’ll admit, death is a pretty big thing to change, but even just changing that single thing can have significant repercussions for a fictional universe. Interconnections abound in any sufficiently complex world, and it can be difficult to track down all the tangents. Life is complex. So is death. Perhaps that’s why they are so fascinating.
Pretty deep for a Monday morning, but I’ll bite.
I think death holds such fascintion for us because it is one of the things we can never change, never ignore. We can never know what it truly feels like in the moment when you cease you inhabit your corporeal form until the very moment of time when it comes to pass.
We cannot fully comprehend death because it would require us to fully comprehend ceasing to exist and the human mind rebels against it. Exploring the possibilites after death and instead of death in fiction allows us to flesh out ideas and concepts completely alien to our minds.
What happens when the physical body is destroyed? I can only conclude that as a person is physically destroyed more and more, there must be some other force to compensate, an undeath force, which must be used in greater and greater quantities to maintain the animation/life/undeath of the damaged physical being.
So bringing back a recently dead person: nearly effortless. Say the right prayers and there it is. Decay? Harder, but still doable. Skeletons are going to test even the best (after all, you need enough magic to compensate for the total lack of muscles).
This is my typical flaw: I’m always trying to make magic scientific. I suppose it would be good if I was a writer since it would help with making a consistent universe, but as a reader, it causes problems.
Whoa…that’s some deep stuff there.
I think fiction has a fascination with death because people have a fascination with death.
We spend all of our lives figuring out ways to prolong life and keep the inevitable as postponed as possible. Death is just one of the things we cannot control (eventually).
So fiction can play around with death, have characters cheat it. Not only can it get us thinking about what death is, but really how through death we see LIFE.
A key distinction in fiction would be if we talk about death of mind, death of body or both. Would it be considered death if the memories were still intact, but in another ones mind, or in the same mind, but the personality or soul is lost? Or if it was the other way around, memories are lost, but a personality or soul is still there – which raises the question how to define a soul or personality.
Death of body implies either a transfer to some other state, or that bodies can be replaced or repaired. The former case is a kind of permanent transfer, which would have a very different effect than if it was just a matter of a replacement (even if it were cumbersome to do).
A different aspect also is if we were looking at a hive mind society. Also potentially a death of body, but also very different where instead larger groups formed the unit of mind.
There is plenty to speculate about what a society would be like; something MMOs and other games could do a bit more perhaps.
Thanks, all. I’m not really offering much in the way of answers here, but that’s sort of the point. I think fiction and the quirky storytelling potential of games really can do a lot with this sort of concept. I think there are some interesting games out there (I hear Prey had an interesting “spiritwalk” mechanic) that toy with death, but I’d actually like to see more.
Note, I’m not talking about wanting to see more gore, violence or gratuitous killing… I’m talking about a more nuanced and thoughtful treatment of death itself and how it affects the human condition in otherworldly settings. I think there’s a lot there that we can only really explore with fiction. (And arguably, that’s what storytellers and mythshapers did ages before we came around anyway.)
Quick! Somebody make a crater-competition skydiving game!
I think there’s potential there. But I’m weird. I’m pretty sure that there are weirder implications for truly immortal adrenaline junkies, though. Extreme sports alone would be very crazy to see. That’s why I called this “Death Unhinged” instead of just “Death Undone”. Sanity as we know it could be blown apart by tinkering with death.
Morbid nugget quoth, ‘Even if death is impossible, dismemberment and other forms of disablement are not.’
…now look at being immortal, loook at that statement, and think again, if immortality is really all it’s cut out to be.
😄
[…] Death Unhinged […]
[…] most important mark of our passage in this mortal coil? …is it important at all? What if death were unhinged, what then? What can those who have gone before teach us today? Do we care, or do we keep […]
[…] musing. I’m in that sort of mood again, where I contemplate narrative, endings, entropy and death. Not because I’m depressed, no, but because I think endings are important to life, and […]
[…] To which I might add: What would the horror genre look like if death itself became unhinged in any of a variety of curious ways? […]
[…] work leads to story hooks, like trying to figure out what happens when death breaks, as I did in my Death Unhinged article. I’m firmly in the camp of “magic should have […]