- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
Could be a good way to end a season (or the show), have either Charlie or whoever is most sympathetic left out of this mess realizing that the gates are locked from the inside, maybe have a quiet moment, look back at hell, and just leave, quietly exiting hell with no fanfare to it, just a realization that there was nothing keeping anyone there except for their own sins and the fact that most of them don't actually care enough to change.This would actually be an interesting approach towards people in Hell repenting, with the gates ultimately being locked from the inside. But Vivzie has a progressive metropolitan worldview that doesn't even want to acknowledge a conception of good and evil beyond vague niceness versus meanness.
Also, in line with Wormwood and Screwtape representing the banality of evil, in The Great Divorce, hell is simply a rainy city that stretches unfathomable miles out from the center, because everyone in hell is so wrapped up in their own mess that they keep moving further and further from each other. Though to be fair, it is implied heavily that things will get worse after the last judgement, and when the sun finally sets on the dreary Hell, "they will come out".
There are two lines I think of with how the book really portrays Heaven and Hell as a choice. Because even though quite a lot of the damned souls we meet are obviously imperfect, the fundamental difference was which of them were willing to change, and to leave their sin behind, and those who stubbornly clung to it, until they had no choice but to go back to Hell.
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
“I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?"
"For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...”