Fluffy Cloud Heaven

Today's weather will be partly cloudy with a chance of salvation.

Fluffy Cloud Heaven is taking millennia of belief and art on "Heaven", and boiling it down to a Hallmark card.

Heaven takes place in the clouds, which are solid enough to walk on, and expect much Heavenly Blue. Besides the clouds, the landscape consists chiefly of white, fluted columns in a generic Greco-Roman style. Humans become angels after they die. They are given wings, a long white robe, a lyre/harp and a Holy Halo that is literally a golden glowing ring that floats over their heads. Smaller Super-Deformed cherubs à la Cupid may float around too.^note These guys are really called putti and may represent (among other things) innocence and fun, or guardian spirits keeping an eye on things. Other than that, it's not exactly clear what people do. If God exists in Fluffy Cloud Heaven at all, he's a giant white-haired, bearded man wandering around or sitting on a huge white marble throne. There is often a line in front of the "Pearly Gates" of people wanting to get in (because Heaven itself can't find an efficient way to deal with a line of people), with St. Peter who stands in front of them and acts as a bouncer. He'll read his book about all the naughty and nice things someone has done, and then either let them in or send them to Hell via a trapdoor. Often he has a desk right in front of the gates. Sometimes there's even a computer on it.

Depending on the version, animals may be frolicking about, ready to meet their owners from when they were alive, or they might be waiting down at Rainbow Bridge.

Note that you probably won't find an Ophanim or Seraphim among the inhabitants; not that they're any less angelic than any of the other residents here, but more the fact that they don't quite fit the scenery. - Be not afraid, indeed!

In a Rage Against the Heavens setting, Fluffy Cloud Heaven will have its tackiness emphasized: Halos are fake and hung up via a metal strip at the back of the neck, like in a child's School Play. Elements of Fluffy Cloud Heaven may be used as a disguise for "the truth". In other, more beneficent settings, heaven is whatever is pleasant to its inhabitants; if they want Fluffy Cloud Heaven, they get Fluffy Cloud Heaven, however silly. Or it might be an Afterlife Antechamber to the real Heaven, which nobody talks about.

Fluffy Cloud Heaven may be the home of Hollywood angels, who are less like something out of any established religion and more like fairy godmothers and godfathers. Some only offer banal homilies to their clients; others provide supernatural aid, but none of them smite the unrighteous, Old Testament style.

Don't expect to find this description in any religious text. Nowadays the use of this depiction is usually meant either as satire or for very young children. The exceptions almost invariably treat the depiction as a simple visual short-hand.

This is the most popular sub-trope of Heaven Above, which covers any association of the divine and the sky. See also the Hallmark version of Hell, Fire and Brimstone Hell. Not to be mistaken for Level in the Clouds, which may be fluffy but is still very terrestrial. Characters who die in a story often Died Happily Ever After before coming here. The destination when Winged Soul Flies Off at Death. We may also get to see some Celebrities Hang Out in Heaven.

As a side note, the actual origin of this depiction comes from Early Christians, many of whom were formerly of the Greek religion, conflating Heaven with Mount Olympus and angels with Apollo, god of light and music (hence why angels are often shown playing harps).

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Nespresso ad shows George Clooney being killed by a falling piano and arrives at the Pearly Gates, with John Malkovich as either St. Peter or God.
  • The Nespresso commercial was accused of plagiarizing a commercial from Lavazza, an Italian company, which also showed characters in a fluffy heaven which has seemingly nothing better to offer than coffee. The commercial received some negative attention due to a series of interviews to elementary school children who claimed in a worrying number that heaven was "a place where you drank coffee".
  • Inverted with the commercials of Segafredo, a competitor of Lavazza's, that (in what is most certainly a Take That!) are set in a Fire and Brimstone Hell complete with sexy she-devils, and their coffee is shown as being the only thing that can free sinners from their eternal torment, albeit temporarily.
• Subverted in this Got Milk? ad, where a man dies and enters a perfectly white realm filled with light and giant cookies. The twist is that all the milk cartons are empty, leading him to realize he's actually in Hell.
• Commercials for Hebrew National hot dogs take place here, to prove the point that they "answer to a higher authority".
• A commercial for the Tamagotchi Angel takes place here with two girl angels.^note Although one of them might be a girl devil...
• Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese has a series of commercials depicting angels in heaven full of clouds.

Anime & Manga

• Magical Pokaan sends Yuuma to the Fluffy Cloud Heaven, to the extent that she even says "Ahhhh, it's so fluffy and comfy!". She ends up getting bored, though, so she's simply sent back to Earth.
• In Dragon Ball Z, there is a variation on this. Fluffy clouds abound, and when a character dies they get a halo over their head. Heaven itself is run in a modern fashion. Everyone who works there wears white collar clothing typical of an office setting, and everyone seems extremely stressed. From the check-in point (where one awaits judgment) good beings are flown on a plane to a paradise, while bad beings are dropped through the clouds and into the Home for Infinite Losers (or Hell in the uncut version). The true warriors are allowed to visit Gods for training and an eternity of exercise.
• Queen's Blade: A standard Fluffy Cloud Heaven appears as the home of Nanael, complete with Greco-Roman architecture lying about.
• The Lyrical Nanoha Tribute Comics included in the pamphlets for The Movie adaptations typically ends with a scene showing all the named characters who have died in so far in the movie continuity watching over the characters from this type of heaven. Even Precia and Reinforce.
• While Heaven itself is never shown proper in Jojos Bizarre Adventure, depictions of it, both symbolic and literal, are usually shown with golden clouds:
  • In Stardust Crusaders, after Iggy and Avdol die, Polnareff sees their souls taking the forms of gold clouds looking at him from the sky.
  • Again in Stardust Crusaders, when Joseph temporarily dies, his soul has a cloud-like appearance.
  • In Diamond is Unbreakable, Shigechi's soul is shown ascending to the sky after their death. Similiarly the resident ghost girl Reimi ascends to Heaven at the end of the Part.
  • In Golden Wind, Bruno (who was technically undead at this point)'s soul was finally able to ascend to the sky after the effects of Chariot Requiem was undone. Similiarly, Abbachio's soul was shown alongside his former partner in the clouds after the Gang learns about his corpse and his final actions.

Arts

• The Apotheosis of Washington: Washington's holy abode has few distinguishable features besides being covered in clouds and having some large source of light being covered by them.
• Psyche and Cupid (Bouguereau): In "Cupid and Psyche as Children", "Psyche and Love", and "The Rapture of Psyche", the title characters are in the Heavens together and all we can see is a relaxing landscape of white clouds.
• Disputation Of The Holy Sacrament by Raphael Sanzio shows Christ and the saints sitting on clouds floating above a Eucharistic celebration. Interestingly, the painting tries to make this a Justified Trope by showing that the clouds are filled with little angels that support everything that lies above the clouds.

Comic Books

• Cattivik: In Cattivik in Paradiso, Cattivik reaches the Pearly Gates by means of a hot air balloon to find a cloudy paradise populated by robed and haloed blessed souls. After a few misadventures, including trying to steal the halos of the blessed after mistaking them for gold and a brief stint leading the Heavenly choir, he steals St. Peter's robe and uses it to parachute back down to Earth.
• The Chronicles of Wormwood by Garth Ennis. The Antichrist visits Fluffy Cloud Heaven with the permission of Jesus (who is a brain damaged black man, no really). It's the typical sort, with a few inversions. It acts as the de facto hell for terrorists, who are the nannies for babies' souls in Heaven. Each terrorist gets seventy babies to take care of. Think about it.
• The DCU has sometimes featured Fluffy Cloud Heaven, often with the justification that Heaven doesn't really look like this, but it's something mortals can comprehend. In the Crisis Crossover Day of Judgement a side-door in Fluffy Cloud Heaven leads to Grey Cloud Purgatory. It's also established in the DC Universe that the afterlife tends to be what the deceased wants, or what they think they deserve, so if a good person expects Fluffy Cloud Heaven and desires it, that is what they will get.
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: When Scrooge has a near-death experience and briefly ends up among the deceased McDucks, the afterlife manifests as a field of scattered clouds where the souls of the dead, looking exactly as they did in life, amuse themselves by playing an endless game of golf.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Subverted. The entrance to Fluffy Cloud Heaven is covered in filth and grime. Heaven itself is fairly standard.
• Mr Natural has him getting hit by a car and waking up in Fluffy Cloud Heaven. He's amazed at the angels singing hymns, "the whole shtick!" God greets him and asks how he likes it, and Mr. Natural chuckles that it's a little corny and outdated. God is insulted and has him booted back to Earth.
• Poodles From Hell: After spending some time in an ordinary-looking break room (pop machine, coffee, napkins, trash can) you enter Fluffy Cloud Heaven, where you get all the stuff back that you ever lost. You ride around in a limo — you hit all the green lights...

Comic Strips

• Private Eye: One arc in the Celeb strip has the protagonist apparently dead and wandering about in a Heaven of this type. It's eventually revealed that he's in a coma and hallucinating it.
• The Far Side: Parodied to... well, death. Whenever Heaven features in some capacity, it always does so as a scattering of clouds peopled by souls in white robes and with halos and small wings, with Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates to decide who does and doesn't get in. When the other place shows up, of course, it's always a Fire and Brimstone Hell.
  • "Welcome to Heaven. Here's your harp." "Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion."
  • Two dead people standing on a cloud. One has a shotgun and is bringing down live birds. "Are you sure you're supposed to be doin' that?"
  • Someone gets sent to "hog heaven" by mistake. It's Fluffy Cloud Heaven with pigs.
  • "... wish I'd brought a magazine..."
  • Life on Cloud Eight.
  • Colonel Sanders has an unpleasant surprise, upon finding statues of chickens outside the Pearly Gates.
• Cartoonist Gahan Wilson is also fond of this trope. One of his cartoons shows some angels (and by "angels" we mean "guys in cheap robes with wire halos and cardboard wings") standing around in a small grubby room labeled "Heaven", with one of them commenting "I expected the place to be a lot more classy!"
• There's a famous cartoon by Benita Epstein showing St. Peter leaning over from his desk addressing a little black cat sitting on a cloud in front of the half-open Pearly Gates. Pete's line, of course, is: "Well, in or out?"

Fan Works

• In I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC, Superman arrives here, only to meet Captain America and told it is not his time yet.
• How Can It This Be, Spice Girls are brought here, becoming angels and meeting supernatural fans. It even comes with a concert stage.
• In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, Elysium, the Smurfs' version of Heaven, combines this with a golden Shining City version of the Smurf Village... or at least it did in the version Empath visited in "Smurfing In Heaven" before he realized that it was a supernatural illusion created by Ares the god of war.
• The Bolt Chronicles: Played with in "The Gift." Mittens is reunited in the afterlife with Bolt and Rhino, who predecease her. There are checkout counter style lines for admission. It's also an ideal place where one can call up all knowledge, art, or culture for enjoyment, and its residents mingle and talk in cocktail party fashion. However, it's based on Eastern karmic principles (even referred to as Nirvana instead of Heaven) and beings can't enter until they have learned all their required life lessons.
• In A Lion and His Cub this is where Harry shows up after being (temporarily) killed by Voldemort. While there's plenty of clouds, it's also full of plants and animals, and its denizens are robed but lack wings or halos.

Films — Animation

• In Ice Age: The Meltdown, Scrat dies and goes to fluffy cloud squirrel heaven where he encounters an enormous golden acorn. Unfortunately, that acorn proves just as frustratingly elusive to him as all the rest, as Sid performs CPR on him and brings him back to life just as he is reaching out to touch it.
• All Dogs Go to Heaven has this in spades. The sequel makes no attempt to hide how boring it could be to spend an eternity in a heaven like this, complete with a song called "It's Too Heavenly Here".
• In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Kenny is about to be welcomed into Fluffy Cloud Heaven complete with topless angels before he falls into Hell. He gains re-entry at the end with his Heroic Sacrifice.

Films — Live-Action

• Heaven in The Frighteners is half this, half bright-white-light. Hell, on the other hand, is half fire 'n' brimstone, half gigantic Lovecraftian worms that gobble souls up and then dive back into the abyss.
• In Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey Bill and Ted go to a perfectly white realm filled with ornate towers and light to talk God into helping them find someone smart enough to defeat their Evil Robot doubles. This Fluffy Cloud Heaven is a tribute to that in the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, in which David Niven's character shuttles between our world and Heaven as a result of a bureaucratic mix-up.
• The ending to Casino Royale (1967) sums up the tone of the movie - a huge explosion turns all the principal characters into angels playing harps on puffy, white clouds. All except Jimmy Bond, who instead goes to "a place that is terribly hot."
• In Stardust Memories, Woody Allen's filmmaker character is incensed when behind-his-back Executive Meddling slaps a happy ending in Fluffy Cloud "Jazz Heaven" to his deliberately somber movie.
• In the historical film Black Robe, Christian missionaries in the year 1634 have a lot of difficulty converting Native Americans because this is how they describe heaven to them. The Native Americans find the concept immensely unappealing.
• Heaven is depicted in This Is the End as a kingdom on top of a plane of puffy clouds and untainted cities where people only wear white with giant, golden Holy Haloes. People can also get anything they want here, including weed and a Backstreet Boys reunion.
• In Jesus, Bro!, Rick meets Santa Christ in this sort of heaven, though it looks rather sparse due to being a cheap soundstage. That is to say, Rick is actually on a cheap soundstage In-Universe; Santa Christ notes that faking heaven in this way is a better alternative than taking him to the actual clouds because one moment's lapse in concentration will send Rick falling to his death.

Literature

• This is an Unbuilt Trope in The Divine Comedy, which helped codify much of Western thought about the afterlife. Sure, Dante's Heaven is above the Earth, but he doesn't describe it as with bunch of farts playing harps in the cloud, but as a realm where spirits use their Mind Meld powers to form into giant sentient eagles and crosses everywhere from the Moon to the farthest stars of the universe all while having joy more intense than the heat of a lightning bolt.
• Christian apologist C. S. Lewis subverts this trope in The Great Divorce where instead of an ethereal and possibly boring fluffy cloud heaven, heaven is a beautiful country that is much more real than Earth (which is described as merely a shadow of heaven). When spirits from Earth or Hell try to walk on the grass in Heaven, it stabs through their feet, because everything there is more real than them. In this book, it is Hell that is described as insubstantial and dreadfully dull. This is more or less how he describes "Aslan's Country" in The Chronicles of Narnia as well.
• Paradiso, one of the Seven Heavens in the Astral Dawn series, is modeled after this modern Flanderization of Heaven.
• Subverted in Robert A. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice. Protagonist Alex dies and goes to Fluffy Cloud Heaven, only to learn that it's deadly dull and overrun with Celestial Bureaucracy. The scene is taken directly from Heinlein's favorite book, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell. Except that it's run by the hero's grandmother, who lambasted the god-above-God into making it this way.
• In For Love of Evil, Satan is trying to take over partly because he's seen that heaven is a fluffy totalitarian police state and wants to free the souls there. One of his reforms in Hell is the creation of a Mock-Heaven annex for souls that have ended up in Hell by bureaucratic error or because of Heaven's excessively rigid standards; it is also a Fluffy Cloud Heaven because that's what people expect.
• In Mark Twain's "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven", Heaven at first is like this - but it is later revealed that this is because that's what most people expect, and Heaven tries to make people happy by giving them anything they want. Most people eventually wise up and develop more interesting lives in Heaven later.
  • Mark Twain also lampoons Fluffy Cloud Heaven in Letters from the Earth, written from Satan's perspective while visiting Earth.
  • He does it again in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck is presented with this vision as a motivator for being good. It doesn't work very well, because he finds the whole idea incredibly boring.
    Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so.
• In the Anne of Green Gables stories young Davy has been studying this concept of heaven. He remarks that he doesn't want to go there until he's really, really old, and wonders if they'll let him play a harmonica instead of a harp.
• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Rowley draws a cartoon where the character goes to Fluffy Cloud Heaven. The character foolishly reminds St. Peter of the time he stole candy as a child and gets tossed off a cloud, shouting the comic's catchphrase "ZOO-WEE-MAMAAAAAA!"
• A short story collection by Anthony Horowitz includes Howard's End; a story about a bully who dies and cheats his way into Heaven, which is depicted as a clean place above the clouds. He swiftly gets bored of the endlessly peaceful and uneventful world, feeling himself begin to lose it, and shouts that he lied to get in, shouldn't be there and deserves to be in Hell, which he imagines to be more eventful. "St. Peter" simply turns around and tells him that he already is.
• In The Fault in Our Stars, Gus says he doesn't believe in Heaven by dismissing it as a cartoon-ish realm of clouds and rainbows, but does say he believes in "something" after death.
• In Love Anthony, this is Beth's idea of heaven, as she's vaguely Christian but was never actively religious. After her mother died, she wished she had something more solid to believe in - it's hard for her to picture her mother sitting on a cloud, surrounded by naked winged babies.
• Heaven in Der Münchner im Himmel consists of Solid Clouds that are even strong enough to carry harps while still being white and fluffy.

Live-Action TV

• The concept is mentioned in Black Adder;
  Edmund: You see, the thing about heaven is that heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in heaven. Like, well, singing, talking to God, watering pot(ted) plants.
• Stephen Colbert, as a right-wing satire created by a devout Catholic, naturally has a very stereotypical (and more than slightly mangled) view of religion, and of Heaven:
  Colbert: I'll get a harp, I'll have a mint julep and I'll ask Ronald Reagan questions.
  Bishop N.T. Wright: And you'll be sitting there like that guy in The Far Side cartoon, saying "Gee, I wish I'd brought a magazine".
• Burnistoun: DJ Jesus lives in a land in the sky surrounded by clouds, where his white-bearded father, God also lives.
• Lenny Henry imagined the 'House Band in Heaven' on his show - Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, Karen Carpenter, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain... and George Formby on ukelele; "'Ey up Mr Hendrix can I 'ave a go? (sings) 'Ey Joe... where you goin' with that gun in yer 'and?'
• In Mahou Sentai Magiranger, the Heavenly Saints live in Magitopia, a Fluffy Cloud Heaven-like Alternate Universe. There are buildings here, actually: expect the inside to be endless with no signs of walls or doors, and stark white all around (including the pillars and any furniture.) However, this being sentai, the Saints themselves are People in Rubber Suits instead of Winged Humanoids. Some of them command Humongous Mecha while others just become giant sized on their own.
• Notably averted in the HBO adaptation of Angels in America; whether or not it is played this way on-stage can vary by production.
• In an animated skit on Monty Python's Flying Circus, the gentlemen end up on a fluffy cloud in heaven... While women on a cloud below beg them not to jump. They are eventually rescued by firemen. Arriving on a fire-fluffy-cloud.
• An entire season (all ten episodes) of the Norwegian comedy show Fleksnes Fataliteter revolved around the main character dying and ending up in front of the Pearly Gates. But St. Peter doesn't allow him entrance, and instead makes him watch various scenes from his life (which partly includes footage from earlier seasons).
• In Charmed, the whitelighters' domain ("Up There") looks like this, with clouds, white pillars, and a white-robed dress code (that Leo ignores because jeans are more comfortable).
• Referenced in the Scrubs episode, "My Way Home," where J.D. and Turk discuss their plans to meet up "by the milkshake pool on the lesbian cloud" in Heaven after they both die.
• Saturday Night Live heartwarmingly played it straight in a tribute to Rodney Dangerfield. In the sketch, St. Peter reads a list of questions to the late comedian, then simply says, "Okay, you can get in." RD is amazed at this, and St. Peter admits, "I just wanted to hear those jokes one last time." RD is nearly reduced to tears upon realizing that he has finally gotten some respect.
• In one episode of Happy Days, a nun visits a sick Fonzie in the hospital and he asks her about Heaven, worried that he might "end up on a cloud with a bunch of nerds." The nun assures him that there will be separate "cool clouds" and "nerd clouds."
• SCTV did a tv show parody "Quincy, Cartoon Coroner" where the title character (Joe Flaherty) investigates the deaths of Looney Tunes cartoon characters. Appropriately, the show ends with him getting blown up by a Cartoon Bomb and ending up here.
• The Brittas Empire: Gordon Brittas showed up here after his death in "The Last Day", complete with Pearly Gates, and a white colour scheme. He even gets white clothes once he gets in proper. He doesn't last there long though, since St.Peter and the other angels couldn't stand him.

Music

• Invoked and rejected by Rammstein's song "Engel". The chorus, translated:
  Only when the clouds have gone to sleep
  you can see us in the sky
  we are afraid and alone
  God knows I don't want to be an angel
• Played with by Talking Heads:
  Heaven / Heaven is a place / A place where nothing / Nothing ever happens...
• Played with by Radiohead:
  When I'm at the Pearly Gates / This'll be on my videotape...
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's song Everything You Know Is Wrong has him dying as a result of an infected paper cut and winding up in Heaven where he get the room next to the noisy ice machine for all eternity.
• Flight of the Conchords informs us, "There are angels in the clouds.... doin' it."
• Sparks' video for "The Number One Song in Heaven" uses a white background and fog machine to invoke this image.
• "Clouds" by Before You Exit is one of the few examples not to play this trope ironically... at all.
• Despite Christian parody band Apologetix’s belief in the inverse, they refute this trope in “Heaven Isn’t Like That”, to the tune of Collective Soul’s “Shine”.
• Referenced in "Help Pour Out the Rain (Lacey's Song)" by Buddy Jewell:
  The moment was custom-made to order
  I was ridin' with my daughter on our way back from Monroe
  An' like children do, she started playin' twenty questions
  But I never could've guessed one would touch me to my soul
  She said: "Daddy, when we get to Heaven, can I taste the Milky Way?
  Are we goin' there to visit, or are we goin' there to stay?
  Am I gonna see my Grandpa? Can I have a pair of wings?
  An' do you think that God could use another Angel
  To help pour out the rain?"

Myths & Religion

• Inverted: Niflhel of Norse Mythology is more or less Fluffy Cloud Hell.
• Pure Lands in Buddhism are often depicted as Fluffy Cloud places. Pure Lands are paradise-like realms where practicioners can live confortably and easily attain enlightenment. Pure Land Buddhism as the name implies centers around rebirth in there.

Print Media

• It has been noticed that whenever a famous person (naturally, only people who were famous for doing good things) dies, there will be an editorial cartoon showing that person in Fluffy Cloud Heaven, either making some wisecrack to the angels/other dead people about what they're famous for or discovering that the angels/other dead people are fans of theirs.
  • Randall Mario Poffo, a.k.a. "Macho Man Randy Savage," may not have had an official editorial cartoon, but he did die just before a certain religious cult's predicted Rapture was supposed to happen. Internet fan art depicts him in Heaven, in costume, delivering a flying elbow slam to an unsuspecting Jesus before he can rapture the people of Earth. Macho Man died so that we may live.
  • One that turned up in USA Today had late comedian George Carlin arriving here with the implication he was in trouble for having deconstructed religion so often in his act, which seems like a cruel Take That!.
  • Also, when Richard Nixon died, he went here but apparently had to listen to the Watergate tapes for all eternity.
  • Another shows Rosa Parks being invited to sit in the front of a heaven-bound bus.
  • James Doohan had a great one in the British Daily Mirror, where St. Peter phones God to tell him "I've just beamed up Scotty".
  • One cartoon after Johnny Carson's death showed him standing at the Pearly Gates where St. Peter assures him that "Every cartoonist who draws me saying 'Heeeere's Johnny!' will be going straight to Hell."
  • When radio cricket commentator Brian Johnston died, a Private Eye cartoon paid homage to his usual nicknaming habit by showing him entering the Pearly Gates and cheerily saying "Morning, Godders!" to the Almighty.
  • When Billy Mays died, Ctrl+Alt+Del made a comic about it.
  • Shortpacked! has one about Christopher Hitchens, complete with Lampshade Hanging.
  • There were so many doing this to Steve Jobs that one depicted him complaining about how inappropriate they were for a Buddhist◊.^note This ignores how most real Buddhist traditions do believe people can be reborn in heaven-like realms of being, such as the Deva realms or the aforementioned Pure Land, with one controversial Thai Buddhist leader claiming he actually did wind up in the former.
  • The death of Christopher Reeve inspired hundreds of cartoons. One has him in the standard white robe, St. Peter handing him a pair of wings, and he laughs and says "No thanks, I'd prefer to walk!" When Dana Reeve died, many cartoons showed her husband in his Superman suit flying with her to Fluffy Cloud Heaven.
  • A famous one shows a cat sitting before the half-open Pearly Gates making up his mind... St. Peter says "Well, in or out?"

Toys

• Angel Bunny: The decals on the toys often depict this, with Angel Bunny and her friends playing among the clouds.

Video Games

• MapleStory has Orbis. It has clouds, heavenly music and angels. However, there are monsters that can quickly kill you if you're not at a high enough level.
• In the video game Cave Story, the final enemies are demons who disguise themselves as Cupid-esque cherubs; the truth is revealed after they are killed.
• At the end of Blue's Story in SaGa Frontier for the original PlayStation, Hell resembles Fluffy Cloud Heaven...until Hell's Lord shifts from his humanoid form to his monstrous one. Even before then, touching one of the "angels" leads to a fight. According to Essence, this was the result of a noblewoman wishing on the Nine Rings (the ones Riki collects in his story) for a paradise. The Nine Rings are evil, so they created a Hell that looks like Heaven.
• Celestia in Disgaea resembles this. As does the heaven visible in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters.
• Super Paper Mario has the "Overthere", a land of clouds and Nimbis for Good Players who got their Game Over. Not to be confused with other more mortal cloud lands in the Super Mario Bros. universe, of which there are quite a few.
• In Afterlife (1996), you build a Fluffy Cloud Heaven, though the angels are the working force instead of the residents (and some souls can become angels through training). The angels can also be residents as well (if you don't want them commuting from some other universe's Heaven), though they're segregated away from regular souls into their own special residential complexes. Got to be a trope in that somewhere...
• The Simpsons Game plays this concept fairly straight. Cloud hopping and angelic versions of enemies from previous levels run rampant.
• The Disc-One Final Dungeon of Persona 4 is a variation of this with a somewhat melancholy ballad as the theme music, and the party remarks that it's like "a storybook version of heaven." Like other dungeons, it's made from the thoughts of the person who "created" it, when they were thrown into the TV, namely a combination of Nanako (the victim)'s desire to see her dead mother again (one of her Social Link events has her happy to hear you say that you think dead people go to heaven), and Namatame (the kidnapper)'s belief that the TV world was a safe haven (and to a lesser extent, his messiah complex).
• While it's probably not actually supposed to be heaven, Skyworld in Kid Icarus certainly looks the part.
• Romancia: Dragon Slayer Jr. has this as one of its areas.
• One death of Space Ace had Ace and Kimmy in heaven on the motorcycle, with Ace smiling at the camera. This walkthrough calls it Motorcycle Heaven. The SNES version only had Ace in it, since Kimmy is not rescued until the end of the level.
• In the intro of Messiah Heaven is shown as basically a fluffy mass of clouds, with God's and Bob's disembodied voices talking over it.
• Goetterdaemmerung RPG has a Game Over scene where the player characters have become little angels.
• Played straight in a sense in Touhou Project where Bhava-agra, the home of the celestials, while not being a Christian realm of fluffy clouds and angels, is this trope's Buddhistic counterpart; a realm of Floating Continents and lush greenery. Also deconstructed in a way with Hinanawi Tenshi who, rather than becoming a Celestial by her own virtue, simply trancended along with her parents after they made a Bargain with Heaven, and as such has none of the self-dicipline and maturity that typically makes a mortal ascend to Bhava-agra... So how does a being with the mind of an unenlightened mortal turn out if it grows up in a world of instant gratifications? Why, it turns into a Spoiled Brat who's willing to majorly fuck up stuff down on Earth just to relieve its own ginormous boredom, that's how... According to Word of God, Tenshi is not malicious, though; she's just a case of Children Are Innocent enforced by the lack of Character Development a place like Fluffy Cloud Heaven would invoke.
• Ultra Heaven, the last World in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz.
• If Tiki dies under certain conditions in The Newzealand Story he will find himself in a Heaven of this kind, where however he still has to defeat enemies and avoid spikes. The prize for completing it is eternal sleep in the arms of the Goddess. There is a way out, and finding it will make Tiki restart with one life in the level after the one he died in.
• The second stage of early PlayStation game Kyuiin, a Cute 'em Up, is this. Since the players are gunning down rows of cherubs, angels and archangels, it may also count as Rage Against the Heavens, if it wasn't all inspired by fairy tales.
• The land of Magicant in EarthBound Beginnings is a kingdom in the fluffy clouds created by the imagination of Maria.
• In EarthBound (1994) one of the eight sanctuaries is the Pink Cloud, a puffy pink cloud in the sky. The cloud is located in the land of Dalaam, a kingdom in the sky.
• This was the setting of Kanye West's cancelled iOS game Only One, which was based on his late mother Donda West "travelling through the gates of heaven".
• Recent Team Fortress 2 comics portray various characters temporarily ending up here, assuming they're not just the result of near-death hallucinations (Medic appears to bring something back from his visit to The Other Place, so it being real is plausible). It's executed with about the same level of deliberate, cultivated stupidity that you would expect from a setting where Abraham Lincoln died in a freak rocket-jumping accident. Most notably, the clouds are confirmed to house three foosball tables and a steam room, and the cherubs have surprising skill at delivering a Neck Snap.
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Heavenly Garden, the arena for the fight against Jun Kazama, the Final Boss, is inspired by the Buddhist Pure Land: an idyllic water garden with lotus flowers and flying pretty birds. The sky is brightly lit, featuring colorful clouds and rainbows. When Jun is defeated and undergoes One-Winged Angel, however, it abruptly turns into Fallen Garden: the water is dark blue goo, the flowers are wilted, the sky is dark, and there are visible fires in the background.
• Soulcalibur V: Utopia of the Blessed, a realm inside Soul Calibur, is depicted as this trope, complete with Greek columns, tiled floors, and a Stairway to Heaven.
• Rengoku: Paradisus in the second game, desgined after Heaven, has disconnected stone platforms overgrown with plants, floating in the sky surrounded by clouds.
• Heavenly is set in one of these, which contains landmarks like the Wall of Good Deeds and the Hall of Adorable Niceness.

Web Animation

• This main page from Homestar Runner, which portrays Homestar as an angel in Heaven.
• Tabor Robak's "Heaven", an Internet art piece which combines old, animated GIFs and MIDI music into an oddly touching sort of fluffy pixel heaven.
• The Saga of Biorn is about an aging Viking warrior seeking an honorable death in battle so he can go to Valhalla, rather than spending eternity in the very boring Helheim. After many failed attempts, he gets his wish when saving a church of nuns from a giant monster. As he climbs the steps to Valhalla, the nuns give his body a Christian burial, causing Biorn to end up in Fluffy Cloud Heaven instead. It looks exactly like Helheim, except it's full of nuns.

Webcomics

• Blip. The clouds won't support anyone who isn't sufficiently holy.
• Dresden Codak employs a variation of this, known as Secular Heaven, an afterlife specifically reserved for people who don't believe in an afterlife. With dragons.
• In El Goonish Shive, the Boar seems to have gone to this when it died if this comic is any indication as the ground its standing on in heaven is mostly featureless except for some lumps.
• Subverted partially in Narbonic, when a bunch of monstrous creatures turn out to be cherubim: they, unlike the traditional babies with wings, more closely resemble the Ezekiel description. (Imagine a ball of eyes with six wings and insectoid jaws, and you'll have a pretty good idea.)
  • This depiction of cherubim owes a lot to the character Progo from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, who is similarly depicted — and who identifies himself as a "cherubim" rather than a "cherub", insisting that on some level he is in fact a plural entity.
• Used in The Order of the Stick, when Roy Greenhilt dies. This is just a sort of proto-heaven adventurers go to so that they can get sorted out in the great bureaucracy of the Afterlife; if you're approved, you get to go hang out in the first level of real Heaven until being raised or the desire for more spiritual fare sends you elsewhere. If not, you have to stay in Fluffy Cloud Heaven until that assessment changes.
  • It's implied that the Lawful Good heaven ascends to spiritual heights that mortals would only achieve after a long period there, but at least the entry has all the trappings of this trope. There's fluffy clouds, pearly gates, spirits peering down on the lives of the living. No St. Peter, but there's a morality-auditing angel with desk and computer.
  • And when Gary Gygax died, there was a special homage cartoon where he showed up and had a chat with Roy. Also, an archon warned him not to go near the Hall of Characters Who Died without a Saving Throw...
  • Subverted when Durkon and Minrah die and end up in a place that looks like they're walking on clouds, which Durkon thinks matches Roy's description. Turns out they're walking on the fluffy lining on the edge of Thor's boot.
• The Rooster Teeth webcomic showed this in one comic, where some recently dead celebrities were moping about being forgotten since MJ just died.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal likes to use this trope, often just as a place for God and angels to hang out in or as a backdrop for afterlife jokes, sometimes making more specific jokes about it.
  • In the strip for 2006-03-07, the artist's retrospectively added "votey" Alt Text makes fun of his depiction of Heaven by calling it the anus of a giant albino elephant.
  • In "Dear Science", Fluffy Cloud Heaven is described as an Ironic Hell for those who failed to believe in science (or rather, question things as the scientific approach requires) in this life.
  • Fluffy Cloud Heaven is also robot Hell. All that moisture...
  • Subverted in "Conscious 3": It's actually nothing but a backdrop for the soul recycler.

Web Original

• Heaven in Dantes Infanzia is never seen directly, nothing but a silhouette of it from over the walls of Eden visible. From there however, Dante describes it as "the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Disney World, and the Emerald City of Oz all rolled up into one and multiplied times infinity" and that "no human language has been able to accurately describe Its grandeur".

Western Animation

• Nearly any North American cartoon, especially The Gary Coleman Show.
• The Simpsons:
  • Spoofed. One chapter of the former shows the difference between the "Protestant Heaven", a gathering of snobby British and American WASPs dressed in polo shirts and playing crocket and badminton, and the "Catholic Heaven", with Latinos dancing to the tunes "Jarabe Tapatío", Italians drinking wine passionately making out at the dinner table, Irish drunkely brawling and then all of them gathering to break a piñata and dance like Michael Flatley.
  • Spoofed further in another episode where Marge forces the family to watch a Christian sitcom "about the everyday lives of angels" called Good Heavens. It depicts a middle-aged angel couple sitting on clouds reading, their dull routine only broken up by the wife telling the husband that Jesus called that afternoon ("He DID?!!?")
  • In "Homer's Triple Bypass," Lisa imagines what would happen if Homer were to die during his coronary bypass surgery. She pictures him as an angel, messing with a cloud in the same way he messed with his hospital bed earlier: "Cloud goes up; cloud goes down; cloud goes up; cloud goes down..."
  • Principal Skinner mentions that his vision of heaven "wasn't clouds and angels playing harps, like at the end of so many Three Stooges shorts".
• Family Guy: Seen in many spot gags, with the Abrahamic, Western world version of God often featured. "God" was frequently seen with a prostitute (as part of the show's satrical look at religion).
• South Park:
  • In the aptly named episode "A Ladder to Heaven", the boys try to build a physical ladder to Fluffy Cloud Heaven to contact the deceased Kenny so he can tell them where he hid a raffle ticket. They do succeed in reaching the clouds, but find no one there. The actual Heaven turns out to really be a Fluffy Cloud Heaven.
  • Also shown in the episode "Best Friends Forever", where Kenny controls Heaven's army by PSP.
  • Saddam Hussein, who has been stalking his ex-lover Satan and simply ends up back in Hell every time Satan kills him is given the ultimate punishment of sent to this Mormon Fluffy Cloud Heaven, and is borne away screaming by cheerful Mormons who want him to "join our play about why it's wrong to lie."
• Futurama:
  • In The Beast with a Billion Backs, it's revealed that this version of Heaven takes place on a planet-sized, tentacled alien from another universe, who indicates that Earth's depictions of Heaven were influenced by an image of his dimension that he transmitted telepathically to the minds of their artists. Among other things, the "clouds" are a vapor the alien exudes, and stereotypical humanoid "angels" with wings and halos are present, but they're not even sapient; they're just birdlike creatures who eat the parasites on his surface. The idea is played with when Leela says it's boring because everything is so wholesome, and we then see that people indeed have regular orgies.
  • This shows up again in "Ghost in the Machines" with "Robot Heaven", a be-walled cloudscapes where robot ghosts with Fog Feet go after they die. Robot God also lives there.
• Care Bears: It isn't an afterlife, but Care-a-Lot, where the Bears live, is the same idea. They even have cars made of clouds and rainbows. One commercial for the toys had kids visiting the place in a hot air balloon.
• The Boondocks: In "The Passion of Reverend Ruckus", the racist Uncle Ruckus dreams of briefly visiting "White Heaven". He's met by Ronald Reagan, who explains that there are many "separate but equal" heavens for the various races, but strongly hinting that White Heaven is better.
• Robot Chicken mocked this heavily as one skit featured a Fluffy Cloud Heaven that had people being regularly sucked into airplane jet engines.
• In Beavis And Butthead, Beavis is (temporarily) dead after running head-on into a wall. He rises through the clouds hearing angelic choirs ("This music sucks!") and encounters St. Peter, who reads all Beavis's bad deeds recorded in his life journal...this ends up going on a long time with no sign of ending.
  Beavis: Uhh, this is beginning to suck. Do I get into Heaven or not?
  St. Peter: ...umm, no.
• This was a very common trope during The Golden Age of Animation, showing up a lot in Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and others.
• Angel Wars: Heaven is typically depicted either as blue skies with white puffy clouds or as full of bright golden clouds. This helps contrast the grittier human world.

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Of course we couldn't have gone for the
all-inclusive luxury pack at the other place,
being stuck in this one room, all clouds, no AC,
with grandma figurines playing instruments for the rest of eternity,
now that sounds much more fun.