If physical anydeathrelics are about touch and decay, digital anydeathrelics are about persistence and surveillance.
Consider your own smartphone. It contains:
By the strictest definition, these are anydeathrelics—they are artifacts of a specific, individual mortality. Yet we rarely call them that. Why? Because digital objects feel impermanent. We mistake “infinite storage” for “immortality.” But servers fail. Hard drives corrupt. Social media profiles become haunted museums.
The most profound example in recent years is the phenomenon of bereavement accounts on gaming platforms. In MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), when a guild member dies, other players will often preserve the character’s avatar, gear, or final in-game chat log. These are not relics in the religious sense, but they function identically: they grant continued presence. anydeathrelics
Search for anydeathrelics on Reddit or Discord, and you will find threads like:
“My best friend died mid-raid in Destiny 2. His last message was ‘BRB, doorbell.’ I never deleted his character. Is that weird?”
No. That is an anydeathrelic. The relic is not just the pixel data; it is the gap—the expectation of return that death forecloses. If physical anydeathrelics are about touch and decay,
Psychologists who have studied the anydeathrelics community identify several recurring motivations:
Dr. Elena Voss, a sociologist at the University of Oslo who has studied dark tourism and memorial practices, notes: "The anydeathrelics movement is fascinating because it rejects the hierarchy of grief. In mainstream society, a celebrity's death is a global event; a homeless person's death is a statistic. This subculture says: No. All deaths produce relics. All relics matter."
| Criteria | Score | Notes | |----------|-------|-------| | Physical danger to living | [ ] | | | Psychological influence | [ ] | | | Resurrection / reanimation risk | [ ] | | | Difficulty of neutralization | [ ] | | | Potential for mass casualty event | [ ] | | “My best friend died mid-raid in Destiny 2
AnyDeathRelics come in various forms, each with its own set of attributes and benefits. Some common types include:
Due to mainstream platform restrictions, the anydeathrelics market operates in a decentralized ecosystem. Dedicated websites use cryptocurrency for transactions, and shipping is often done through private couriers to avoid postal inspection. Prices vary wildly:
Authenticity is a constant concern. Because anydeathrelics prioritizes "any" death, forgers have flooded the market with fake relics—animal bones sold as human, resin casts passed off as cremains, or modern dirt sold as "historic grave soil." As a result, serious collectors now rely on forensic testing and carbon dating, creating a bizarre intersection of hobbyist enthusiasm and hard science.
From a philosophical standpoint, "anydeathrelics" evokes Memento Mori ("remember you must die"). It suggests an artistic project or philosophical stance that seeks to find the universal in the particular. If any death leaves a relic, then every life is validated by the trace it leaves behind. This interpretation positions the term as a poetic descriptor for the debris of human existence.