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7 Trips to the Anime Underworld

by Lynzee Loveridge,

Cultures have pondered about life after death about as long as humanity has been capable of doing so. This includes differentiating between "good" humans and "bad" ones and sometimes further into "good," "mediocre," "bad," and "really, really bad." Some souls are denied reincarnation, others tasked with performing seemingly impossible tasks for all eternity, and still more getting to downright Dark Ages torture levels.


7. Jigoku Shōjo Somewhere on the other side of the river where Enma Ai ferries sinners to meet their fates is a small, traditional Japanese home. It rests on top of a hill surrounded by red spider lilies in perpetual sunset. The flower itself, according to folklore, is said to grow in Hell and is regarded as a funeral flower. Ai resides in the house with her three yokai assistants, Wanyūdō, Ren Ichimoku, Hone Onna, a "magical spider," and a ghostly grandmother. The souls of her victims must reside elsewhere, but what their circumstances are after arriving in Hell is left up to the imagination. Hell here is quiet, and pretty eerie, but doesn't seem awful.




6. Yū Yū Hakusho The process to determine where a soul goes after death is complicated. The dead first arrive in the Spirit World, a sort of weigh station for the deceased. King Enma Jr. resides there and handles the necessary paperwork needed to judge each soul. The worst of the worst are sent off to Hell (called "Limbo" in the dub) where they are cut off from feelings and emotions with the exception of pain for 10,000 years. The result is sounds similar to the experience of depression and could be compared to the modern interpretation of Limbo. This Hell isn't teeming with demons like some of others. Instead, the resident ogres and demons live in their own separate world.




5.Hozuki's Coolheadedness Hōzuki is the top advisor to the larger-than-life King of Hell and is tasked with managing an underworld not so unlike the mundane world of humans. This hell is filled with residents from Japanese folklore, but they have very normal problems and Hōzuki's job is to manage the bureaucratic needs of some 200 plus territories of various suffering. He sends Momotaro to tend to the peach trees in Shangri-la and assigns his animal companions to take part in terrorizing sinners in the Hell of Animal Cruelty. Hōzuki's hell isn't so bad, if you're one of the regular working-demon types.




4. Dragon Ball Z Hell, or "Home For Infinite Losers" as it was renamed in the original dub, borrows most of its imagery from traditional Eastern sources. The series' villains, like the Ginyu Force and Cell, end up here after their battles with Goku. Other than being occasionally tossed into the Bloody Pond, the villains don't undergo much in the way of suffering. The place operates more like a slightly sinister tourist spot with its own "board" for that specific purpose. One sector even has a roller coaster.




3. Bleach Bleach's hell is reserved for souls of awful humans. The place is populated by "sinners" whose crimes during their lives were so bad they cannot rightfully enter Soul Society and are instead monitored by Kushanāda and tormented for eternity. The skeletal gates show up to drag defeated Hollows inside after Ichigo and Co. battle them. The location's layout is made up of a series of levels. They seem nonsensical; one is comprised of floating cubes, another of a pond filled with stone water lilies, the third of plateaus oozing yellow lava, the fourth houses an impossibly large skeleton among a wasteland of ash and lava, and the last one is...more lava.




2. Hells Rinne had plans to make 100 friends at her new school, until she was hit by a semi-truck and sent spiraling into a academy of demon delinquents in Hell. The school is run by headmaster Helvis, and like his name implies, is a demon version of Elvis. The rest of "Destinyland" looks like a world out of the mind of Tim Burton with character design cues from Hellraiser. The place is full of impossibly thin architecture, weird monstrous clocks and gates, and enough off-beat humor to keep it unsettling but not truly horrific. The delinquents prove themselves likable despite the front they put up and Rinne is even able to form something resembling friendships with them.




1. Saint Seiya Hades' domain in the Greek mythology-inspired series also borrows heavily from Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy. The parts that are distinctly Greek are the place's many rivers and "Inferno" which is modeled after Tartarus. Punishment was originally dolled out in Tartarus and The Fields of Punishment, while the rest of traditional Hades was made up of ordinary souls mucking about or those granted entry to Elysium. Saint Seiya's version is all about the suffering. The world is broken up into a series of prisons, each holding perpetrators of specific moral crimes and guarded by Specters. The further visitors go, the colder it gets until finally reaching the frozen wasteland of Cocytus.






The new poll: What anime series needs to be rescued?

The old poll: Last week we had some server trouble. Unfortunately some votes were lost but I hope most were able to come back and cast their vote again. Here are your favorite kinds of chocolate:

  1. Milk Chocolate 45.8%
  2. Dark Chocolate 36.0%
  3. White Chocolate 16.5%
  4. Dislike Chocolate 1.6%

When she isn't compiling lists of tropes, topics, and characters, Lynzee works as Associate Editor for Anime News Network and posts pictures of her son on Twitter @ANN_Lynzee.

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