this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Why is it in popular imagining, that ghosts are {MOSTLY} depicted as miserable lonely sad folks that are stuck to the places they've died in? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Can't they discover the world beyond? Weren't they humans; don't they have the mind to move on and focus on something else, since trauma and grief will run its course, sooner or later, and not just haunt the living?

If I were a ghost, I'd be tired of acting like one... even if I was murdered or otherwise died untimely

With the exception of Casper the Ghost, I don't think I've seen the alternative take on it

This presupposes ghosts do exist, though I believe ye skeptics would tell me no, which, alright, you win the argument

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Sour grapes.

There is nothing popular fiction hates more than somebody doing something everyone wants to do but can’t. Impossibility, when possible, becomes cast as immorality or immaturity or otherwise something arbitrarily undesirable.

To be a ghost is depressing and/or monstrous because when we die in real life we don’t stick around. Time travel overwrites reality with a worse version of the present because in real life we can’t change the past. Resurrection brings people back as monsters because in real life we can’t have our lost loved ones back. Immortality is sad and lonely and often requires you to do evil things to sustain it because in real life we can’t live forever. Traveling to alternate lifetimes where you’re more successful is emotionally hollow because you had the most important emotional stuff in your life all along and you wouldn’t trade that for the world.

These and other speculative crises always have to be fixed by making the fictional world abide be the limitations of the real one. Aren’t we so lucky that our world is randomly already like this?