Pearly Gates
| Pearly Gates | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Collection | Redacted Remilio Babies |
| Category | Background |
| References | "RIP Heaven" meme format; internet death collage tradition |
| Count | 18 |
| Rarity | 0.18% |
Pearly Gates is a background trait in the Redacted Remilio Babies NFT collection, based on the "RIP Heaven" internet meme format — a recurring image type in which the faces of deceased (and sometimes still-living) celebrities are photoshopped around a kitsch stock-photo depiction of a heavenly staircase ascending through clouds, flanked by white doves. With 18 occurrences, it is the rarest background in the collection.
Background
The underlying image draws on a widely circulated meme template that emerged and recirculated across social media throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, typically in the aftermath of a notable death or cluster of deaths. The format uses a commercially produced stock illustration of a glowing staircase rising into a blue sky of layered clouds — a visual shorthand for the Christian concept of heaven — as a base onto which cutout portraits of recently deceased public figures are arranged. The tone is typically tragicomic: grief processed through the logic of internet humour, where the irreverent act of populating a kitsch paradise with dead celebrities becomes a collective ritual of acknowledgement.
The specific version referenced in the Pearly Gates trait includes a dense collage of figures drawn from across internet culture and public life, among them Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Harambe, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michael Jackson, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, and Stan Lee, alongside several figures who were living at the time of the meme's circulation — including Drake, Kanye West, and Joe Biden — reflecting the format's loose relationship with factual accuracy and its tendency to incorporate the culturally "dead" alongside the literally dead.
The meme sits within a broader tradition of internet death iconography that treats celebrity mortality as shared cultural material — something to be processed collectively, remixed, and returned to circulation. Within the Redacted Remilio Babies collection, the Pearly Gates background carries this sensibility into a PFP context, placing the Remilio figure inside a scene that is simultaneously sincere in its heaven imagery and openly parodic in its execution.