Worldbuilding 201: Introducing Death
Greetings and salu- ARGH! MY THREE HEARTS! I’M DYING! 💀
Why is there a skull? We limaces don’t have skeletons… Mystery for another day, but psyche! I am very much alive! But today we will be talking about death in worldbuilding! But first!
Disclaimer: Death can be a sensitive subject to people but is an inevitable component of life. I am under no circumstances minimising the emotions or trauma people experience due to deaths but will remain factual in order to inform and joke to keep up with my general style. What you feel is valid.
This blogpost is an overview and I will inevitably come back and go deeper into things in later posts.
What is Death?
Everyone knows it, everyone has or will experience it while living, everyone will die eventually, but what is it exactly? Purely biologically, it can be summarised:
The termination of biochemical pathways to the point where they cannot be resumed through external stimuli.
Biology in normal life is all chemistry, and it is a continuous repetition of biochemical reactions in endless circles to maintain themselves. All cells continue their own processes to help other cells maintain themselves in endless cycles of consumption and cycles, and then it breaks somehow, and life is no more. There are ways that these cycles can be put on hiatus and even be stopped only to be restarted again, but unless the pausing of biochemical pathways has evolved to occur naturally, it is a stroke of luck to survive it. People have survived this though, thus it was included.
If you use magic, souls, or whatnot, the definition may be different, overlap or coexist; maybe you have different types of death? You can be creative even here.
Mourning
One important personal aspect when it comes to death is mourning. This is, in modern times in the West, a highly personal affair. How it is done is up to you. When I lost my dad, I had a good cry once the shock wore off, then continued on with life like nothing happened. To me, being autistic, maintaining that structure was an important aspect for me to keep myself afloat and come to terms with what had happened. For others, it is completely different, and it is all fine if it helps you mourn.
But it has not always been so, and to this day isn’t everywhere. Mourning can be a public display to show one's own feelings and devotion to the person. This can vary vastly between the people who actually have died and their relationships. Some cultures have that, for example, when your father dies, there is a 5 year mourning time where you are expected to do certain things. Mother and siblings? Not so much. One example from the old days was that women were meant to wear black and be highly withdrawn when they became a widow in the West. For widowers, it was not the same. So the rituals around mourning after death (not related to the funeral) can show a lot about culture and how it differs by relationship.
Funeral
The body lies there, what once had been a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child, they look so much the same, but there is something fundamentally different. We know why and what is different, but to ancient people, it was a great mystery, yet they knew it was death. So naturally, rituals and beliefs evolved surrounding death itself and how to handle the body of someone who had once been. This is another highly cultural thing. One thing to remember for all Westerners is this: funerals do not need to be a sad time. Some cultures make it a happier occasion for many reasons. What emotion it is meant to evoke can depend on cultural beliefs. Some view it as a loss, like the West. Others view it as a relief, thus happy emotions. One can also view it as a time of celebration, not because they lost someone, but because the person enjoyed a good life that is worth celebrating.
Of course, depending on how they view death and religious beliefs, what surrounds death changes. Think about what associations and emotions exist in your culture. Black in the West is often viewed as very negative and sad, and funerals are therefore littered with lots of black. But if you want to evoke happiness, you’d use brighter colours. What if fear is the emotion and yellow (yeah I know, not creative but you get it) is the colour of choice then? Rituals around will also differ depending on how extravagant is considered normal and what is considered required to put the dead to rest.
For mourning and funerals I will do a blogpost later, a practicum on my own cultures.
Politics of Death
I am not talking about laws surrounding funerals, graves, and similar. Those are important on their own, but here we are talking about the bigger choices and politics. Politics have a fundamental impact on who lives and who dies. It may be as direct as Gulags and concentration camps or as indirect and subtle as who gets easy healthcare and help.
I hear you ask now
How is that possible?
Well, my astutely curious reader! It does not matter how kind and benevolent you wish to be, there are always groups and subgroups of people with various properties and abilities that are entirely beyond their control. For example, consider rural people living in Nowheretown or even alone in the countryside. It is a peaceful existence with lots of delight, but when it comes to police, firefighters, and, most importantly, hospitals, it takes a lot of resources to operate. These cannot be kept at every possible location where they are needed. It is economically infeasible. So when the inevitable happens and the people of Nowheretown need help, it will be delayed due to distances. This means mortality rates go up, and thus by not investing money in those things (a political decision), they are condemned to die more easily.
You might think they shouldn’t live a rural life then, but they are needed for farmers and many professions that cannot be in the lively city. But even in cities, politics affect death. Where do you put, for example, industrial sectors that will be spewing things into the atmosphere and pouring toxins into the local water? Who and what has to live as close as they must to these? The people forced to live nearby will have a much higher rate of health problems due to these sectors. Another thing, also: how is policing done? That is a political decision. If the police are encouraged to be aggressive, that will reduce expected life time for all those in areas they are drawn to.
How much is society helping out the poor, the handicapped, the sick, and so on? Poor people will starve, handicapped people will be unable to do what they must to live and, well... they all die in the end. But no one wants to die, so crimes are likely to rise to fill the gap and… the aforementioned police can come in then. A quote I once heard that relates to this is:
Poverty, Illness, everything preventable, are incredibly expensive to the point where fixing them costs less.
It refers to the cost of having to prevent crimes that emerge due to people wanting to live but not getting the help they need.
Now, of course, you do not need to make a world perfect, you can be like Anne and have it utter shite, but here you have ways to think about targeting groups and what it causes. (Anne: When you do have dystopias, you want to design them carefully. Basing them on real political decisions, both current and historical and from around the world, will make your dystopias more convincing and more frightening).
Death Penalty
I will state this before I continue: I strongly oppose the death penalty and consider it highly barbaric and find supporters of it immoral. Now, I will still be as objective as I can.
That out of the way, it is a very old form of punishment that predates civilisation itself. Back in the days of the Stone Age, being expelled from the group was, for all intents and purposes, a death sentence. Now, why has this one been so popular? Humans are a vengeful kind. Throughout history, “justice” has been thought of as a way to make the culprit suffer as much as the victim has. In some cases, it has also been about getting rid of troublemakers, and in rare cases with very powerful people, it has been a way to demonstrate power or get rid of political opponents. Most have heard of the Great Purge by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Today, we have little Putinski doing his own purges! Some fabricated charges and tada, you can execute your rivals!
There have been a whole slew of different forms of execution styles ranging from outright torture to “at least I can pretend it isn’t barbaric”. Beheading has been quite popular, but that got tiresome, so we needed something faster: Anne’s favourite, a guillotine! Poison gas and chemical executions are used these days. The chemical one has at least the “benefit” of it appearing like they are just falling asleep, even if some of the cocktails fail, and the person is being tortured as they die. You’ll just never know about it because they cannot move!
The myriad of ways are very rarely for the benefit of the one being executed; it is for the benefit of the poor sod that has to be the executioner. It is well known that for the vast majority of people, killing another human being and knowing it was you that snuffed out that spark and seeing it drain from the face causes immense psychological damage. That is why you have things like firing squads that the victim many times faces away (don’t see the face), and it is a squad so that no one can tell who had the killing shot. All these are to reduce the psychological burden of the executioner. Even the Nazis had to stop many of their early attempts of mass killings because the toll taken on people was too great, and the executioners started actively revolting against orders. The gas chambers were once again a method to make it so whoever actually kills them does not have to see what is happening and thus be able to keep going.
Morality
All of this just so the executioner does not feel the toll; it is almost like you humans have some innate unwillingness to kill your own fellow men that you try to work around constantly! For some cultures, killing is justified and worth it, but a general trend is that as societies have progressed, the abandonment of capital punishment has followed. The most common last vestige of it that eventually dies is for the crime of high treason.
You are of course by no means obligated to make your society moral and not have capital punishment, but it is a thing to think about if you live in a place that practises this to this day. Death penalties can be abused by politicians and judicial systems. Which may be what you want in your society, so go for it! (Anne: If you are going dystopian, just make sure that there aren’t random killings unless there’s a strategy of pure chaos, and even then, the victims are usually carefully chosen. Whether targeting an individual or a group, there needs to be a reason). A good addition; purgers and such are not random as that may cause revolutions. But if you want to portray your society as highly moral and still do executions, a question to consider is “how many guilty must be executed to justify the one innocent that everyone in society murdered together?”
Death with Intention
Death can be intentional for other reasons than capital punishment, I’ll go through a few here!
Suicide
This one is highly sensitive but is one important one. Suicide is when a person ends their own life actively through their own volition. The great misfortune here is that in a lot of cases, the person doing it is not of sound mind and is suffering from something that warps their perceptions and reasoning. I am not going to discuss this as that relates to mental health which is outside of this post's purpose.
With that out of the way, suicide can and has been used for good causes. Suicide missions are an example. It is known that the person who does it is going to die no matter what, but it is something that has to be done. It can be to save other people, it can be to prevent something from going from bad to catastrophic. There are countless examples of this throughout history, and the one I remember the most is the demon core. During nuclear experimentation to make the first nuclear bomb, an accident happened, and suddenly the entire thing had gone critical; a nuclear disaster was imminent. One of the men ran toward it, throwing themselves on top of the core and pulling the top away. He stopped it just in time for nothing to happen beyond increased radiation; it unfortunately ended up killing him less than a month later.
An example of where it is used for evil is suicide bombers, where it is used to terrorise people and kill them. We have all heard these stories and we know all the bad stereotypes. But there exist good versions of this as well: one of the murder attempts on Hitler. This of course makes it a suicide mission as well. One had a bomb on him and was going to blow himself up along with Hitler, but he got cold feet with innocent people around, and Hitler ran off to do something suddenly, so the suicide bomber could not detonate it unless it was only two men, Hitler and the suicide bomber, if I remember correctly. My point is that while they are often used as distinctly different things, they technically have some overlap. To most people however, suicide bombers do it for evil, while suicide missions are for good; your freedom fighters are my terrorists, and all that.
When it comes to cultures, it can get complicated. Some cultures have very strict views on whether it is always bad, others have very complicated systems. Factors may include, but not be limited to, the health status, honour, reason, social status, method, location, relations, witnesses, and ceremony. So in your society you can have that a certain class of people are allowed suicide for health reasons, another class is not, except if they do this highly specific ritual at the temple of Anne. In fantasy, magic can even be a factor that determines how it is viewed.
Euthenasia
Euthenasia is assisting another being to die. Imagine them being sick and miserable from the pain and agony they experience. It can be anything that exists in your world, but they lie there unable to end it for themselves; death is certain but will be prolonged and nothing but utmost agony and pain. What do you do when every fibre of your being wants to help, but you know that there is nothing you can do, there is nothing that can be done? Euthenasia is what you can do: mercy killing.
It is not about saving, it is not about hate, vengeance, or anything; it is a humane thing to do in the worst possible of times. In the worst of cases, the person or being is unable to ask for it, and it has to be a judgement call on the person that has to do it. This can do a lot of damage to a person because they will never be certain, especially with another sapient being, if they truly wanted out of their misery.
Similar to suicide, culturally this can be complicated. Some cultures have a total ban for any number of reasons. Morality here is more interesting because it is a balancing between the damage it risks doing to the person committing it vs the relief it will give to the one needing it. In some cultures, it has been allowed, and some have had very restricted reasons for when it is permitted.
Murder
This one is easy. Every society agrees it is wrong because it is by definition an illegal, intentional, planned death of someone. There are of course degrees of murder, as many know, but here we talk primarily about the first kind, which are those planned deaths as opposed to accidental deaths or crimes of passion. The big question is, of course, what is considered an illegal killing? That is the big question for a culture! And this concept of “illegal” is partially a lie; the thing about it is that all societies agree murder is wrong, but a lot of societies, well at least subsets of them, can think of a form of murder that is fine even if the law says “Don’t do it”. We all can think of the groups that people wish death on where murder might be excused even if illegal.
When this happens can vary a lot depending on views of the society. Of course, if people think a murder is justified, they will remain quiet and let the police not solve it. An example of where this can happen is honour murders. In some cultures, those are acceptable if a family member disgraces the honour of the family; in the West, it is considered an abhorrent injustice and barbaric. So this can be a way to make distinctions in subgroups of your society: different groups consider different kinds of acts of murder (and reasons) acceptable but others do not. This is a good way to follow my rule, Rule #13: Monoliths are the arch-enemy of good worldbuilding.
Postmortem
For this, I am encompassing everything that happens AFTER you’re dead, except funerals and mourning of course. There are a lot of things that can happen, and it all depends on so many factors.
Soul
Does your world have souls in it? The essence of personhood that transcends the physical body in some way? If so, what happens to it? There are so many options! You can go a Buddhist-like route where the soul is reincarnated. Maybe you want to go the egg route? Or maybe you want to do afterlives where things still happen? Speaking of afterlives!
Afterlife
The soul is relinquished from its chains to the mortal world and is now free to roam whatever awaits it. But what is it? Historically, there have been myriads of afterlives. In old Norse, it is thought that they believed souls go to Valhalla if they were shown to be great warriors that could help Odin and the gods at Ragnarök. Yes, I will use the Swedish spelling! 🙂. Those that died an ignoble death went to Hel’s domain, a cold frozen region. And those between went to Freya’s plentiful plains to exist until Ragnarök. If my memory serves me right!
My personal favourite that I generally default too is that souls have a place to go, but it is not eternal. It is a place where souls go to find peace with themselves, life and all, before leaving the realm of existence and ceasing to be.
In Christianity, there is usually Hell and Heaven, where you go depending on how God, or Yahweh, judges your life. Some denominations have the Hell punishment be temporary until the soul has redeemed itself, others have it be eternal.
In Judaism, if I recall correctly, feel free to correct me below, their idea of the afterlife lacks those ideas. I will not say what they have as I cannot recall what.
In ancient Egypt, your soul was consumed by an alligator monster if you were deemed unworthy. But if your soul was good enough, there was a place beyond, the Field of Reeds, where one would live on. This of course leads to…
Judgement
How are the souls judged? In ancient Egypt, it was weighing the heart against a feather; in many Christian depictions, it is by Saint Peter before the gates to Heaven. One can be very creative in how judgement is done, either by conscious entities, or by animals, items, and more to make the judgement of where you go in the afterlife. Wouldn’t it be funny if where you go is based on a roulette wheel of options?
The Body
And lastly, the body. How is it treated? A funeral is nigh universal, but there are so many more things that can be done. In Western societies, an autopsy is almost always done, especially if foul play is suspected. There is digging inside the body to see what has happened. This of course requires advanced medical knowledge, but maybe your people know it? After that, there are many options for things. For example, you can cremate the body, bury it whole, or, as in some rare instances, preserve it as fresh as possible. Think of like Lenin, who was preserved and is to this day. Sure, it is highly toxic stuff to anyone alive, but his body has barely aged a day since his death almost a century ago.
Inheritance
I will be brief, but this is important. People own things in life; all cultures have inheritance. It differs in how ownership is perceived, but all have it. Dead people do not need everything they once had, but maybe some? Who knows what the afterlife needs! But what they no longer need, who gets it, and why? Inheritance is not like many Americans think where the formerly dead can decide everything. In Sweden, you can only decide 50% of everything you have as you please; the rest is divided equally between all that the law says should inherit it. Everyone living still deserves part of your estate, no matter your relation, or something. I don’t know. My editor Anne thinks not knowing is too weak of an ending so, 900 Tonnes ending!
Summa Summarum
Death is an integral part of life; it is the inevitable thing because life is the deviation from the norm of the universe. Beliefs, systems, structures, and all have been made to deal with this. It is a tragic thing that we all have to deal with, but it is important in cultures. It is often at death that the strongest values of a culture become visible. What they believe happens after also speaks volumes about worldviews. It is a ripe subject to show everything your culture stands for, believes, and thinks.
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