De-aged in Death

"I be back, and in me prime no less!"

Souls. Nobody knows anything about them, or if they're even real. Most religions and even non-religious spiritual groups have a concept for it. Heck, the fact that they're even called "spiritual" means dealing with the idea of a living essence within humans that carries on after the human dies. But either way, no one truly knows anything about souls, and that means writers are free to write the rules of souls and spirits however they darn well please.

However, one common thread among many souls is that they usually manifest identically to how the person looked when they died. For example, if they died as a child, they stay a child. This is especially the case in live-action and animated productions. In live-action, this allows the same actor to continue playing the role of the dead character. In animation, it saves on having to create another character model.

But sometimes, this doesn't happen. Sometimes, a character as a soul doesn't look like they did when they died. They look younger, maybe even to their childhood. Why is that? Many times, there is no explanation for this, at least a Watsonian one. However, there is a perfectly reasonable Doylist reason for this: recognition.

When characters are seen at different parts of their lives, there usually is one age considered the "default" appearance of the character. This is usually the appearance they have for most of the story, and it usually is them as a young adult or an older teenager, both of which can be played by actors in their 20s to 30s. Stories will usually flash around their lives, usually with childhood flashbacks and perhaps a Distant Epilogue where they're now elderly. This leaves a little bit of a conundrum for when the writers decide to have the elderly character die but wish for the character to come back as a spiritual entity. By most stories' logic, they'd have to use the elderly form of the character since that was how the character looked in death. But even though the elder version is the same character, it's not the same familiar character the audience grew to know and love. So instead of manifesting as an elderly soul, they instead manifest as they did when the audience really got to know them. The writers choose to give the audience the familiar younger form of the character.

Sub-Trope of Healthy in Heaven. Not to be confused with Death by De-aging, where de-aging is what causes death, not the after-effect. Overlaps with Residual Self-Image, since if this happens, the soul looks different than the body they had in life. This trope can also be used as a shorthand to indicate Dying as Yourself.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Daki, the Upper Moon 6, is a demon more than a hundred years old, with the appearance of an adult woman. After being killed, she appears in the afterlife as a 13-year-old girl, which is the age at which she became a demon.
• Hell Teacher Nube: Hiroshi goes into a coma after falling down and hitting his head against concrete, and finds himself stuck in the spirit world between life and afterlife. He meets and befriends a beautiful young girl, and helps protect her from the guards who would otherwise force them to the next world. After Nube helps to revive them, Hiroshi is appalled to discover that the beautiful girl is in fact a 63-year-old crone. A bemused Nube explains that this is because spirits don't age.
• Naruto: After Obito is killed by Kaguya, he reverts to his child appearance in the afterlife as he reunites with Rin.
• Record of Ragnarok: Inverted for Sasaki Kojiro who, despite dying as a young adult, has the appearance of Cool Old Guy when fighting in Ragnarok. This is because the souls of the combatants take the form they had at their golden age, and since Kojiro is always improving himself, his peak should have happened years after his death.

Fan Works

• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse):
  • Despite having died of old age, Leon Belmont looks like he's in his early 20s, which is when he experienced his most life-changing event.
  • In the reboot A Game of Cat and Cat, the appearance of ghosts reflects their mental state. The above-mentioned Leon once again died of old age and appears to be in his 20s, but when talking about his family his appearance shifts to that of an old man.
• Pony POV Series: In the Dark World timeline, Fluttercruel is Born as an Adult and is more than a thousand years old. When she dies, her spirit appears as a filly to reflect that she is and always has been a Psychopathic Manchild who was never mentally an adult and only looked like one, due to being Discorded and brainwashed her whole life.
• The Simpsons fanfic "Love Thy Neighbour" is a Dark Fic which starts with Homer's death from cancer obtained from an explosion at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. In spite of this, Bart and Lisa end up having a Dead Person Conversation with him at separate points, where he appears to be in his early 20s in the afterlife in spite of dying around his 40s. Apparently, Heaven allows him to appear at his healthiest, which was apparently just before Bart was born.
• The Saga of the Last Two Saiyans: Chi-Chi and Bulma, who both died of old age, are young again when Goku and Vegeta visit them in Heaven.

Films—Animated

• The Loud House Movie: The Louds' ancestors are implied to have died of old age centuries ago. However, when they come back as ghosts, they appear as they did in the painting, with the eldest five being teens, the boy being a preteen, and the youngest five being little kids with the youngest even being a baby.

Films—Live-Action

• Field of Dreams:
  • The White Sox players appear on the Field of Dreams at the age they would have been in 1919 when they were banned from baseball in the Black Sox Scandal, while many of the players died decades later (i.e. the real Shoeless Joe Jackson died at age 64, while his ghost was played by 35-year-old Ray Liotta). Other Field of Dreams players appear as they did at the height of their careers.
  • Zigzagged with Dr. Archie "Moonlight" Graham, who died an old man, but appears as a ghost as both a young man (when his baseball career almost took off, getting the chance at bat he never had in life) and an old man (when he gives up being a ballplayer and becomes a doctor again to save Karin from choking).
  • Discussed when the Field of Dreams catcher is revealed to be Ray's father John as a young man. Ray, shocked at his appearance, mentions how, "I only saw him later, when he was worn down by life."
• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: After the ghost of Captain Gregg moves on and erases Lucy's memory of him, she lives into old age, long enough to see her granddaughter engaged. When she dies and is reunited with Captain Gregg, her spirit appears as it did in her 20s when she first met him.
• Somewhere in Time: When Richard dies he is met by an Elise played by Jane Seymour, not the 80-year old woman he met as a student (who recognized him, gave him a watch, and started the whole shebang).
• The Star Wars series usually averts this, with the Force ghosts of various characters (Obi-wan, Yoda, Luke, and Leia, for example) looking the same age they were when they died. However Return of the Jedi had an example of Healthy in Heaven in Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader specifically—which was then turned into a completely straight example of De-aged in Death via Orwellian Retcon. In the 1983 cut of the film, Anakin's Force ghost looks the same age as the unmasked Darth Vader (both were played by Sebastian Shaw) but his spirit lacks the extensive burns and scars of his physical body (from injuries he'd received decades ago). For the 2004 DVD cut of the film (and all subsequent releases), Anakin's Force ghost instead looks like he did just before his fall to the Dark Side, 20 years prior (and he's portrayed by Hayden Christensen, Anakin's actor from the prequel films).
• Titanic (1997): The ending leaves it ambiguous as to whether Old Rose is just dreaming of returning to join Titanic's passengers, or if she died and her soul is actually doing so. If you subscribe to the latter, then this trope is in full play, as despite dying as a centenarian, she appears to the passengers as she did while she was on the ship: as a 17-year-old Fiery Redhead.
• Tower of Terror: After elderly Abby Gregory reconciles with the ghost of her sister Sally, who died as a child 60 years before, this allows Abby to rejoin her sister as a child, as she was in 1939, in the afterlife of the Tip-Top Club party they never reached when they were alive. Whether the reconciliation allowed Abby to pass on or she was Dead All Along remains an Ambiguous Situation.

Literature

• Zig-zagged in Mark Twain's short story Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. The titular Captain mentions to his angelic companion that he expected everyone in Heaven to be young and spry. Said companion explains that people in Heaven can be any age they want to be, and they usually opt to restore their youth at first, but they almost never do so for long, as they're no longer comfortable in a younger body. Most settle at the age they're most used to; either the age they were when they died, or if they were particularly sickly or senile in their final years, the last age where they were most sound. Even those who die young tend to opt into a more mature age as they continue to learn and develop.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: When King Caspian, who died of old age, is resurrected in Aslan's country, his hair and beard rapidly regain their colour, his wrinkles fade, and his overall appearance quickly shifts younger and younger, until he's in his prime, much like Eustace remembers him from the previous visit to Narnia. Eustace wonders if he's a ghost, but Caspian indicates that that would only be the case if he were to return to Narnia.
• Discworld: Spirits look like how the person sees themselves, which is normally how they appeared in life, but there are exceptions. In Mort, Death's apprentice Mort is sent to reap the soul of a very old Witch, who knows he's coming. He meets a hunched-up old lady in her 90s who can barely walk unaided. After he frees her soul from her body, he watches as she spins the years away until she appears as she did in her late teens; before crossing over, she points out that not having a body anymore, she can present herself as of any age she chooses.
• The Dresden Files: In Ghost Story, the first spirit Dresden encounters is Ron Carmichael, who died about a decade before during the events of Fool Moon. Dresden doesn't even recognize him until he uses his Character Catchphrase, because his spirit self is about 20 years younger, 40 pounds lighter, and lacking the receding hairline and poor hygiene of his living self. It's implied this is pretty standard and most spirits have a degree of control over how their appearance manifests.
• In Elsewhere, people age backwards in the afterlife; upon reaching infancy they are reincarnated. The protagonist Liz — who dies when she's 15 — meets her grandmother in the afterlife, who died before she was born and now looks young enough to pass as Liz's mother.
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven: The fourth person Eddie meets is his late wife Marguerite, who died in middle age, but appears to him how she did on her wedding day decades earlier. When he asks why she looks so young, she reveals that she opted to look that way because she thought she wasn't beautiful at the end and he'd like to see her more like this. He tells her that he disagrees, and she shifts into her real age as they share a last dance.
• The Kingston Cycle: When Sir Christopher is hanged for his crimes at the end of Soulstar, his spirit reverts from old age to the prime of life in seconds, apparently eager to take revenge.
• In The Wish List, Saint Peter is introduced judging an Italian man who died in his eighties and looks it. When the man is let into heaven, he finds his youth regenerating with every step he takes.
• My Posthumous Adventures: Everyone in Heaven looks like people in their 30s, including those who died at an older age. The critics actually disliked the notion, stating that the author overly emphasises the physical aspect of age while talking of spirits.
• Warrior Cats: It's mentioned that cats appear in StarClan (the main afterlife for clan cats) at the age they were happiest in life, not necessarily the age that they died.

Live-Action TV

• Ahsoka has the same example as Return of the Jedi, mentioned above, with Anakin's ghost resembling Hayden Christensen rather than Sebastian Shaw. When Ahsoka first sees him like this, she even lampshades it.
  Ahsoka: "Anakin. You look the same."
  Anakin: "You look old."
  Ahsoka: "Well, that happens."
• Cold Case: In a few cases where one of the suspects/people involved in the case died before the cold case was reopened, they will appear in the episode's ending montage as they appeared in the flashbacks, not at the age they actually died. This was particularly true of "Torn", where the murder took place in 1919 and all but one of the people involved had long since passed away. Downplayed, since those who appear are not necessarily literal ghosts.
• Doctor Who: In "The Time of the Doctor", the Eleventh Doctor defends Trenzalore in a war so long that he eventually dies of old age. As this was his thirteenth and final life^note despite being the eleventh incarnation in the official numbering system, he spent two additional regenerations: one to become the War Doctor, who didn't consider himself "the Doctor" until the very end of his life, and another after being shot by a Dalek in "The Stolen Earth", diverting the regenerative energy into his severed hand to avoid changing his appearance, he would've been Killed Off for Real, but the Time Lords grant him a new regenerative cycle that allows him to keep going on. After spending the first half of his regeneration taking out a Dalek fleet, he reverts back to his initial youthful appearance before completing the process, which is treated in-universe as the death of one incarnation and the birth of the next.
• When General Hospital's Edward dreamt of his late wife Lila, it was of her younger self. This was necessary as her actress had passed away too.
• The Season 3 episode of Ghost Whisperer "First Do No Harm" featured this phenomenon happening. While most ghosts manifest as the age they were in death, Peter Harrison manifested to her as a younger man and an elderly man, leading her to originally mistake them for two different people.
• The Good Place:
  • Michael has a picture of Doug Forcett in his office. Doug was a human who got high and figured out how the afterlife really worked. When Michael visited Doug on Earth he was an old man. After Doug died he was seen in the afterlife, looking the way he did in the picture.
  • The finale reveals in the Good Place, humans can look different from how they died, with Doug choosing to appear as he did in his 20s despite dying an elderly man. Chidi notes that, given his new Big Eater habits, this was probably a good choice.
• The Haunting of Hill House (2018): Some of the ghosts in the titular Hill House do this. Child and young adult ghosts remain the same age, but two elderly characters revert to their younger selves as ghosts. Mrs. Dudley is one of them, as she reverts to the age she was when she lost her daughter Abigail, and it's implied her husband will follow suit when his time comes. Hugh Crane does the same thing, reverting to the age he was when his wife Olivia succumbed to the influence of the House and died.
• Lucifer (2016): The final episode shows Chloe dying as an old woman. She then appears in hell, the same age she was the last time Lucifer saw her.
• Once Upon a Time: Elsa and Anna's aunt, Ingrid the Snow Queen, serves as the Arc Villain of the first half of Season 4. The discovery of her powers by her and her sisters Gerda^note Elsa and Anna's mother and Helga occurs when they're playing as little girls on a hill with Ingrid catching up to them. They promise to stay as loving sisters. Circumstances align and cause the sisters to divide, with Helga dying accidentally by Ingrid's hand, Gerda sealing her in an urn, and then Gerda herself dying at sea, resulting in Ingrid believing she had no sisters and her villainous turn is her trying to find new ones. Once Ingrid realizes that Gerda profoundly regretted her actions, Ingrid sacrifices herself to stop her own villainous plan, proclaiming that she'd be Together in Death with the sisters who she now knows truly loved her. This is visualized with the same scene of them running over that same hill with Ingrid catching up to her sisters.
• Played to the letter in the finale of Supernatural - Although Sam is shown dying as an old man after a long life in the Deadly Distant Finale, he appears in heaven as the age he was the last time Dean saw him (obviously the actor's age).

Myths & Religion

• In Christian art and iconography, a soul at the moment of death or just afterwards is usually depicted in roughly the form of a child or a teenager, even if the person is old. The Righteous Souls on Abraham's bosom in the Orthodox icon of the Last Judgment are also given a very youthful appearance.

Video Games

• At the end of the main questline in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Dragonborn pursues Alduin into Sovngarde, the Nordic Warrior Heaven. There, the Dragonborn can encounter the spirits of many great figures from Nordic history. Even those who lived to old age, such as Ysgramor, appear in their physical primes.
• Fate Series: Heroic spirits, famous figures from history and legend, can be summoned as familiars called Servants. They almost always take the form they had during their "prime", generally whenever their most famous accomplishments occurred. For instance, if someone had some epic adventure in their 20s and then settled down 'till they died in their 80s, they'd be summoned in their 20s.
• Hades: Eurydice mentions that dead souls can choose whatever age they want to be when they pass into the Underworld, and lampshades that it was probably lobbied by everyone who died of old age. Sisyphus appears middle-aged, even though some versions of his myth state that he died of old age.
• Kingdom Hearts III: After the spirit of Master Eraqus convinces Master Xehanort to surrender and accept defeat, the two Keyblade Masters reconcile their friendship as their spirits take on the appearance of their childhood selves before passing on to the afterlife.
• Mr. Hopp's Playhouse 3: Esther died as an elderly woman due to Mr. Hopp causing her mental state to deteriorate. It is revealed that Esther was eternally damned in the underworld, and has gone back to her youthful 12 year old self that was seen in the second game.

Web Videos

• This Encanto continuation TikTok features Dolores and Mariano's possible future kids. Andrés is the oldest at 18, and Sophia^note Which should be spelled as Sofia or Sofía since it's the Colombian variant is the youngest at 6, and she is a medium. A commenter noticed the Fridge Horror that Abuela Alma might be dead by this point and this being the reason for her powers. The TikToker responded to the commented with a follow-up revealing that Abuela passed away at age 94 before Sophia received her Gift, and Sophia wished to ease everyone's pain. Her gift ceremony with Mirabel leading ends with Sophia seeing Alma and Pedro, with Alma adopting the younger appearance she had when she was last with Pedro.

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick: Zig-zagged in the Lawful Goodinvoked Heaven, where spirits appear as their ideal version of themselves. Roy's mother looks like the 19-year-old looker she was in her youth, and his grandfather a proud warrior in his prime, but his father is the same Grumpy Old Man he always was at heart.
  Roy: Um, no. My mother has a grey bun hairdo and osteoporosis, not pigtails and a rack.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: When an individual passes on to the land of the dead, their disembodied spirit is able to take on as young of a form as they want or one they were transformed into when they were alive. And in cases like Finn and Jake, their past incarnations.
• Zig-Zagged in The Legend of Korra. Aang's spirit appears to Korra as a grown man, likely in his mid to late 30s or early 40s. However, later in the series, when Aang's spirit appears to Tenzin, he is much older, looking as though he is in his late middle ages, right around the age he would have been when he died.
• Bromwell High: When Iqbal is giving a speech about a near-death experience he had in one episode, he describes seeing his mom. He says that when he saw her, she was young again, and "is not have moustache anymore".
• Samurai Jack: In season 5, the Scotsman is now an old man leading an army consisting of his own daughters. He is killed by Aku after he orders them to retreat, but the use of Celtic magic brings him back as a ghost in the form of his youth.
  Scotsman: I be back, and in me prime no less!
• The Simpsons: The episode "The Boys of Bummer" has a Distant Epilogue taking place 60 years after the events of the episode in which Bart and Milhouse are 70-year-old men in the Springfield Retirement Castle. Homer and Marge's ghosts appear to comment on the scene, looking no older than they do in the show's main timeline.

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