the good place

The Bad Place (1/4)

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This is a The Good Place fanfiction I’ve been working on for about a year now. I started thinking about it after the finale aired last year, and it went from there.

It features very few of the characters from the actual show, has a far less comedic tone and perhaps only counts as a fanfiction in the loosest sense really…but it is my sort-of answer to the one question the show never tackled, “What happens to children and babies in the afterlife?”

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An Ode to “The Good Place” — Writer’s Block Magazine

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It’s not often that a sitcom makes you both laugh out loud and ponder on moral philosophy, but NBC’s The Good Place (2016) does it with such ease and delight. Created by Michael Schur (same dude who created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, so you can trust he knows what he’s doing), The Good […]

An Ode to “The Good Place” — Writer’s Block Magazine

This is a really good rundown of what made The Good Place so damn special.

The Good Place Babies

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Not a proposal for a spinoff, but rather:

That one question season four of the show never answered. What happens to babies and children in the afterlife? I do remember the showrunners saying it was a question too unsettling to tackle, but…

(This is by its nature a very triggering subject, sorry.)

Let’s talk pre-Eleanor and co changing the system. Babies and very young children, I think we can assume from what we know of things, wouldn’t have had enough time to accrue or lose any afterlife points. They obviously weren’t in the Good Place because no-one could get in anymore. So… where did they go?

Some theories:

  1. Babies technically go to the Bad Place, but they’re put in a sort of separate, neutral area of their own. Janets tend to their needs, and it just stays like that, no-one else really getting involved.
  2. Babies and children go to the Bad Place and are used against people. (Those who hated babies in life would be put in a room with ten of them, that sort of thing.)
  3. Leading on to – children in the Bad Place only suffer the sort of “torment” that would suit the level of a child. Think having to do homework every night and never being allowed a third scoop of ice cream, that sort of thing.
  4. Babies and children (where the cutoff age is I don’t know) immediately rejoin the universe the same way Eleanor eventually did, no hanging around, they just go.
  5. Babies and children are reincarnated?
  6. Babies and children are automatically “aged up” based on their projected point score and judged accordingly (this is the worst and most unfair one, so I suspect it’s the most likely option)

So there you go, some stuff to ponder. The lack of answer to that big question is one of The Good Place’s only real flaws, I think.

(But I also like to think the eventual, better Good Place reunited all parents with their children one way or another.)

I saw the end of The Good Place and I am not okay

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Oh man. Oh… man. What a show. Binge-watching the entirety of the last season all in one day probably wasn’t a good idea. Damn. A masterpiece. Here’s Kristen Bell explaining it all. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.) God I’m internally sobbing so much.

I think everybody’s particles sprinkle down. The way they reevaluated how to get into the Good Place with these manufactured tests that once you got to the Good Place, you were allowed to celebrate being there as long as you want. Then you are allowed to end it. Then you become these tiny, sparkly particles that rain down on the people on Earth to give them an extra boost. Those are the tiny voices inside your head that say, “Don’t throw that person’s mail away. Just walk to their door. It takes two seconds and it probably will make their day.” I would love to believe that that’s what happens. That’s such a beautiful way of thinking about it. Because we are all one, right? We’re all part of each other. Whether we want to believe it or not. There’s something that connects us all. I would love to believe that people who die become sparkly particles that make the voices inside our head give us good guidance.

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