Basic Trope: Dying in a way such that you get no afterlife, no reincarnation - nothing.
- Straight: Most characters' souls can be raised Back from the Dead, but getting hit by a Wave-Motion Gun causes one's soul to be utterly destroyed and their consciousness to come to an end.
- Exaggerated:
- Downplayed:
- One can survive as long as they have either their brain or their soul. Having both destroyed results in this.
- Souls can never be destroyed, but they can be rendered permanently unconscious.
- Justified:
- Consciousness and overall "existence" is tied to the soul, so if one loses their soul, they revert to a state of nothingness.
- There is no soul and everything is in your brain. When the brain dies, you just disappear.
- Inverted: Death Is Cheap and/or Death Is a Slap on the Wrist.
- Subverted: If one is rejected from both reincarnation and ascension, they are drawn into their body from another timeline.
- Double Subverted: ...but it's eventually figured out that a Negative Space Wedgie can deny you the ability to transcend to another timeline, so dying from it with no access to reincarnation or an afterlife causes you to stop existing.
- Parodied: Being killed by a Groin Attack is so humiliating that your soul will no longer be accepted into the afterlife.
- Zig Zagged: There is always a mathematical "afterlife" of sorts that is so bizarre that it is debatable if it even counts. Because it describes everyone as a number, and is older than all universes. And this includes all possible states including ones that are outright unreachable. So Good News, Bad News - it is impossible to be barred from the afterlife because it existed even before you were born and regardless if you ever existed.
- Averted:
- Resurrections never happen, and no-one knows where characters are while they're dead.
- Souls are indestructible and cannot be stopped from assuming a new body or otherwise passing on to the afterlife.
- Enforced: "If we can't let characters stay dead, we'll be Opening a Can of Clones. Or, worse, we could succumb to The Chris Carter Effect, what with the Big Bad's reincarnations. We need some way for characters to be Killed Off for Real."
- Deconstructed:
- A character takes extreme measures and kills many, to remove all Wave Motion Guns from the world because everyone else who dies to stop Cessation of Existence will be able to exist eternally in the afterlife.
- A character becomes so frightened of death that they spiral into a depressive breakdown and end up losing sight of what makes life worth living.
- Lampshaded: "She's really dead this time? Not merely dead, but... dead dead?"
- Invoked: A character passes out. Beyond just the narration calling it a "dead faint", it (or the character themself, after waking up) explicitly describes the faint as being a period of total, dreamless oblivion during which they are literally temporarily dead: knowing and feeling nothing, unaware of their own existence and unable to sense even the passage of time. Nonetheless, no outright confirmation of whether or not the writer (or the character) believes that this also applies to actual death.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: A character Time Travels to save their Deader than Dead friend.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Back to Cessation of Existence.
