doing drafts and ruminating on johnson's nebulous mission of "stop the apocalypse" and how that ultimately translates into him being an angelic first responder to living hell-conducive events/people.
i have said (and in a reply i'm working on atm, will continue to say) hell is a climate. i mean that metaphorically. but also literally. a lot of lee's narrative (the world johnson inhabits) is very surreal magical realism. where things have very physical orders and conditions but still exist very abstractly/wonderfully.
hell is a literal place, yes. the devil lived there. but it's no different than saying pompeii is a place. the events and history of a place are what makes that location hell. the geography/biome is dress setting. pompeii, you think volanic eruption. ohio, you think astronauts and corn. both are bigger than their lands and while we might discuss the physical events of the volcanic eruption, the only reason we do is because of how devastating an affliction it was on/to people.
if you want to understand better, hell is hail and each icy blob is a soul. when alive, your corporeal vessel insulates your soul well enough that it can't quite solidify into something so hardened and destructive. but it isn't impossible. the spiritual and physical conditions rarely arise (like how the northern lights are rare or rainbow clouds are, etc). once deceased, the soul parts from the body. it's a much more flowy state of existing and certain dispositions and lived-histories-when-alive will make a soul more susceptible to intensifying into something denser and volatile in "the afterlife". like how hurricanes form by oppositional temperatures stewing on the ocean, hellish-inclined souls are much the same. they create this atmosphere. and that atmosphere typically originates in a similar place like how hurricanes typically are made in similar spots in the ocean and usually disseminate/decimate to similar places. this is hell. souls aren't sent there, they're naturally compelled there. the devil oversaw this atmosphere/area.
this can happen in living beings. it's much much rarer and difficult to manifest. johnson assures it doesn't. he also generally tries to prevent people from acts that will make them more susceptible to hell-soul conditions once dead (e.g. all the reprehensible vileness of life given impure motives).
