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  • 3×3 Eyes: Having characters with Complete Immortality (the Wu such as Yakumo, the hero) does offer several examples:
    • Xun Gui is a demoness whose Breath Weapon can turn people to stone and only her death can undo the curse. Yakumo almost risks being trapped into stone for the rest of his life when he fights her.
    • Triclops who undergo the Humanization Ritual suffers this, as their third eye and Sanzhiyan identity are absorbed into Kaiyanwang.
    • After the Moon Arc, Benares coerces Yakumo into looking for the third Sanzhiyan lost in the Subspace by connecting a Spell Line to his brain which will drag him into Subspace (which, for all intent and purpose, is like outer space but between dimensions) where he'll continuously suffer and regenerate alone. The same Spell Line, however, can also be used by Benares to fish him out of there should he find the third Sanzhiyan. Defied by Pai, who swears to commit suicide so that Yakumo dies as well should he be left stranded into the Subspace.
    • Near the end of the series, Kaiyanwang releases the Spell of Destruction all over the world: people exposed to it turn into grotesque soulless husks which by medical analysis are still perfectly fine and alive, but completely devoid of soul or will.
  • Angel Beats!: Starvation/dehydration is seen as a Fate Worse Than Death, since they can't really die. More so is becoming an NPC since they have no soul.
  • Assassination Classroom: Shiro/Yanagisawa was blown into a barrier of Anti-Sensei lasers while his cells were infused with tentacle cells. He doesn't die, but the damage cripples his body permanently, leaving him a vegetable unable to even move without someone else's help. Not only that, but his lifelong research on antimatter was canned by the government under the reasoning that it's "impractical".
  • Attack on Titan: being "Sent to Utopia" is a sweet-sounding euphemism for the worst possible punishment. It involves being transformed into a mindless Titan. The only person known to have eventually escaped this fate describes it as being trapped in a nightmare that never ends. Ymir estimates she was trapped in this state for roughly 60 years. Her gratitude towards Reiner and Bertolt for inadvertently saving her is so great that she willingly sacrifices herself to save them.
  • Baccano!: Immortality can be this under the right circumstances. As a rule, immortals cannot die and will quickly regenerate any lost body part. They can, however, feel pain. This is taken full advantage of by the writers, who seem to have no problem subjecting these poor souls to some rather... unfortunate experiments, including poking out eyes with a hot poker, daily mutilation, tossing people through grinders, and giving someone Cement Shoes and leaving them at the bottom of a river to perpetually drown. For a year. And, quite possibly worst of all, drinking the Elixir of Life while mortally injured. One character actually drinks the Elixir as he was stabbed in the throat. And since he was stabbed before he drank it, he can't heal. Ever. So, unless he finds someone who can perform a Mercy Kill, he'll spend eternity with a gaping hole in his throat. Fun times. Makes you think twice about wanting immortality.
  • Black Butler: In the non-canon Black Butler II anime, Hannah turns Ciel into a demon so Sebastian can no longer eat his soul. The catch is that because of an order he gave in an earlier episode, Sebastian can't stop being his butler until he eats him, making him Ciel's servant for all eternity.
  • Bleach: during As Nodt's Villainous Breakdown, he threatens to throw Byakuya into "an ocean of pain and fear", unable to lose consciousness or even his sanity, begging for a death that will never come. However, Rukia kills As Nodt before he can even attempt to do this.
    • A variant on this trope is Mayuri's victory over Szayelaporro Granz - while it does kill him, it does so in such a manner that the death at the end comes as a considerable relief. After making the mistake of reviving himself through Nemu's body, Mayuri reveals that he had laced her whole body with a potent drug, which Szayelaporro starts to feel the effects of, making everything seem like they're moving slow around him including himself. So slow, that one second now feels like one hundred years to him. Mayuri slowly thrusts his sword forward, and Szayelaporro only has enough reaction time to put his hand up, and Mayuri plunges through his hand into his chest, and then breaks it off, leaving Szayelaporro to experience his slow and agonizing death over the course of a very long time. By the time the blade's tip touches Szayelaporro's heart (very shortly afterwards, from the perspective of everyone else), he is begging Mayuri to hurry up and kill him.
    • This also is Shaz's fate in the 13 Blades fanbook. Due to his powers with The Stigma, the way Kira has to defeat him is by continually striking him with Wabisuke, leaving him sinking further and further into the ground, unable to reconstitute himself or to die.
    • Being made into the Soul King is largely viewed as this, even by villains such as Aizen and Yhwach.
  • Chainsaw Man: This is part of the Cosmic Horror Reveal, as it's revealed that there were ways life could end other than death, but the Chainsaw Devil used its Ret-Gone power to erase them from existence, leaving nothing more than a Cryptic Background Reference from Makima.
  • City Hunter: Ryo once claimed that impotence is this, and that he would have never taken the antidote to the killer bees poison had he known of the side-effect. He then declared that if he couldn't recover his Gag Penis he'd go in Morocco to have his gender switched. Of course, at the end of the story arc Ryo's Gag Penis had been restored by a perfected antidote, and the villains had been made impotent in the same way without having access to the perfected antidote.
  • Code Geass:
  • Cyborg 009: This is what happens to Princess Ixquic. She can't die since she's a Robot Girl with a huge healing factor. She can't interact with the outer world unless some conditions are met. And after said conditions are broken in such a way that they won't ever be met again, she's stranded in time and space... forever.
  • Death Parade: "The Void" (also called Hell) is described like this - it feels like falling through an endless darkness where all that remains of you are your worst fears, deepest insecurities, and most negative traits.
  • Delicious in Dungeon: The reason that Only Mostly Dead works is because when in a dungeon, one's soul doesn't leave the body right away. The trade-off is that if a resurrect spell isn't used, the person will become undead; their body into a zombie; their soul into a ghost.
  • Digimon:
    • Happens to Piedmon in Digimon Adventure. Most Digimon villains are Killed Off for Real (though Digimon are normally reborn, so it's possible, but some lose their memories in the process), he's not so lucky. Piedmon is thrown into MagnaAngemon's Gate of Destiny. While the series doesn't explain what this does to him, its said elsewhere that the Gate of Destiny leads to subspace, a dimension from which there is no escape. Digimon are effectively immortal barring being killed outright, so this means he'll spend eternity there. Naturally, as a remorseless maniac who relishes in turning his victims into keychains and slowly torturing them, he's one of the few Digimon villains deserving of such a fate.
    • The Chamblemon in Digimon Ghost Game end up being abducted by a herd of predatory Geremon to be used as mushroom farms. Given they were effectively growing mushrooms on human women and graphically torturing them for food before, they deserved it.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone: The now immortal Garlic Jr. gets trapped and escapes the eponymous Dead Zone only to be trapped there again FOREVER in the anime's Garlic Jr saga.
    • Dragon Ball Z: In the Frieza Saga, rather than being killed like the rest of the Ginyu Force, Captain Ginyu's Grand Theft Me backfires, switching him into the body of a frog. As he needs a vocal command to activate his abilities, and gets wished back to Earth with everyone but Goku/Frieza later, he's trapped in that body for the rest of his life (which is the main reason Vegeta lets him live) When he finally gets out of it by switching with Tagoma, he compares his ordeal to Frieza's torment in Hell. He dies soon after, condemning Tagoma to that fate.
  • Fairy Tail has the Curse of Ankhseram, an ancient deity governing life and death. Whoever has his curse is immortal. However, they are also bestowed with an "Instant Death" Radius that kills everything around them, with the probability of it activating increasing in proportion to how much they value life of those around them. Thus, anyone and anything they could possibly care for would die, leaving them perpetually alone. The Big Bad Zeref was cursed with this long ago for researching taboo magics to resurrect his dead brother, and the Big Good Mavis received her own curse when she used an incomplete Law. Though the latter died to the former's curse when they fell in love with each other.
  • Fate/Zero: Rin and Sakura's mother, Aoi, is strangled by her former friend, Kariya, after she is set up to believe he killed her husband. While he didn't manage to kill her, he did cut off her oxygen supply long enough for her to suffer considerable brain damage, leaving her in a mental state similar to that of a young child, and forcing Rin to care for her until her death. One fan-theory is that Aoi would have died naturally at the hands of Kariya, but she was "saved" by the sadistic Kirei, who also chose not to use his healing magic to try to repair her mind, as he felt leaving her in such a state was more painful for her family than just letting her die.
  • Franken Fran: This happens a lot, because (as Y: Ruler of Time put it) to Franken Fran, there is no fate worse than death. Needless to say, many of us would beg to differ after seeing what she does to people she "operates" on...
    • In one chapter, Fran catches several people attempting to break into her lab and steal her medical research. At the same time, she had been pondering a question proposed to her by a friend, and so decides to test it by surgically altering the men into dog beasts, grotesque mockeries of canines which look rather like the Egyptian Ammet. She then uses them to point out the lady who hired them, and then drags her off screaming and surgically alters her into another dog beast. It is unknown what their final fate is, but it is certainly worse than death.
    • In a later chapter, Fran's "little sister" blows up a nearby family gathering, thinking they are going to attack the lab. The only way Fran could "save" them is to merge all of their bodies together into a living human latticework. This prompts Fran's little sister, a living arsenal and an assassin with no remorse, to remark "shouldn't you just let them die?".
    • Fran saves a wealthy young businesswoman after her entire body is burned by using artificial skin made of cockroach shells. Guess which insect the OCD businesswoman utterly loathes? Ironically, she looks perfectly normal, but the concept of being skinned with cockroaches completely breaks her mind and it's implied that she started tearing off the skin on her face. A short omake in volume 2 showed that she takes the operation again, gets over the creepy feeling, and admits to Fran that she overreacted. Then, when she removes the bandages, it turned out that the genes fused weirdly during this operation and cockroach legs are now growing out of her face, breaking her mind again.
    • Possibly the worst of them is the woman who wanted immortality (and wanted it all to herself, so she had the scientists who helped her towards it murdered); she steals Fran's research and has Fran's throat cut, but that's not enough to kill Fran, who manages to sew her own head back on. But the murderous woman gets the immortality she wanted — in the form of a gigantic conscious but immobile tumorous mass.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
    • The true nature of creating Philosopher's Stones is this. The main ingredient to create them is living souls. Souls trapped in a container to be used as an energy source, screaming in pure agony for eternity. Winry describes it as "being trapped, imprisoned in a vortex of anguish".
    • The ultimate fate of Father is heavily implied to be this. Having been defeated and The Truth freed, he is dragged into the Gate of Truth, begging that he not be sent back in there. He is last seen screaming in terror.
    • Shou Tucker, a State Alchemist desperate to retain his license and cling to the science he lived by, used alchemy to transmute his preschool daughter with her dog, resulting in a monstrosity that leads Scar to kill her in sympathy... right after he kills her father for doing it to her.
    • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Tucker ends up in a situation that isn't that much better; he is not only transformed into a monstrous chimera himself, one even more disgusting than the one he turned his daughter into, but he also completely lost his mind. He's so far gone that he has no idea that his daughter is basically a lifeless doll that can't move or speak.
    • The Gold-Toothed Doctor suffers this after being forced into assistance in the human transmutation by being turned into a disgusting ball of moaning flesh that barely resembles him. But after everything he did, he certainly deserved it.
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star: Michiru and Kaoru Kiryuu are condemned to this by Lord Akudaikhan, who paralyzes them and places their still-sentient bodies at the bottom of a lake. They get better after half a season.
  • Ghost in the Shell:
    • Ghost Dubbing involves copying people's ghosts. The problem is that it leads to the original suffering and eventually dying from brain damage. Understandably, ghost dubbing is highly illegal.
    • The reveal at the ending Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a terrifying one. Imagine you are a little girl that gets kidnapped by the Yakuza and sold to an Evil, Inc.. Then you wake up with an old creepy Japanese man groping your new mechanical body dressed as a hooker, as your consciousness was replicated to the body of a gynoid in order to make it more human-like. Congrats! You are now a Sexbot! And it happened with A LOT of other girls.
  • Gundam:
    • Katejina Loos, in Victory Gundam, ends the series as a blind, amnesiac cripple who has nothing to do in life but be an empty shell of a person. However, since Katejina crossed the Moral Event Horizon more than once, that can be considered her just punishment. Word of God, however, has said that this is also her best chance at salvation, so this trope won't necessarily hold for long.
    • Gundam 00: A Wakening of the Trailblazer gives us assimilation. Your body is slowly converted into an alien crystalline substance starting with your limbs and ending with your still-alive head... which you can feel happening around you as your nerve receptors are still registering your muscles and tissue changing form. Worse still this happens from the inside out, as you can see the blood-covered crystals making their way through the skin. In the end, it turns out that this was only because the ELS had no real idea how to properly assimilate a human body. By the end of the movie they've got it right, and even the victims from earlier are shown to be fine.
    • The end of ∀ Gundam has Gym Ghingnham trapped inside the Moonlight Butterfly cocoon created by the Turn units. What makes it worse is that since the nanobots in said cocoon can maintain and regenerate anything and anyone, Gym's going to be alive for a VERY long time.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya: In the short story "Endless Eight", Yuki Nagato remembers everything, so more or less she's been going through everything for about 596 years. So she gains emotions, and proceeds to Retcon reality so that Kyon can decide whether a world without Haruhi is better. Her boss isn't happy, and starts deciding whether to kill her. They decide not to kill her. Instead, they elect her to be the ambassador to the Sky Canopy Domain; exposing her existence and sanity to something which is as alien to her as the Data Overmind is to humans. A lesser being would Go Mad from the Revelation.
  • Jigoku No Gouka De Yakare Tsuzuketa Shounen: The flames of Hell will burn away everything about a person, even their very soul. Because of this, a soul confined in Hell is trapped in neverending agony as the flames continue to burn it even after their body is nothing but dust. The pain is so immense that Flare wonders why he hasn't died yet as what's left of him curls up into a ball and wishes for the pain to end. Despite this, Flare's soul somehow remains intact and the pain becomes more of an annoyance after a thousand years of the same sensation.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    Narrator: Kars was never able to go back to Earth. Becoming a life-form between organic and mineral, he wandered for eternity into the endless void known as Space. Being unable to die even though he wished for it, Kars eventually stopped thinking.
  • Junji Ito generally seems to love this trope.
    • The short story The Enigma of Amigara Fault is about people who after walking through a hole in a wall, slide through the mountain for 3 months while their limbs are stretched into ribbons, eventually to become a formless mass. And they are alive during the entire punishment. Drr...Drr...Drr...
    • Another one-shot, "A Doll's Hellish Burial", has arguably the worst example, however. In six pages, a little girl freezes into a doll while apparently still alive, then continues changing. By the end, you just kind of have to hope that she's dead already.
    • Uzumaki: This happens to many of the Spiral's victims. It seems that not even death allows an escape from its effects after the events of an early chapter display the souls of victims being trapped in the clay of Dragonfly Pond. By the end, it's obvious that the Spiral doesn't care about killing people. Instead, it wants their attention. Forever.
  • Kamen no Maid Guy: Done humorously — anyone who uses a camera to spy on Naeka will get frozen in place for half an hour, unable to close their eyes, and their video feed is replaced by a video of the fish salesman taking a bath.
  • The second Macross Frontier movie does this to Grace, a cyborg, who is reduced to a sentient torso and interrogated for a long time.
  • The Misfit of Demon King Academy: As a proud pureblooded royal, Anos reincarnating Emilia Ludowell as a hybrid horrifies her into trying to commit suicide, only stopping after Anos states that killing herself to escape her fate is pointless as he cursed her source to forever reincarnate as a hybrid.
  • MPD Psycho: Many of the serial killers specialize in this. A couple of examples include a lunatic who cuts off his victims' arms and legs, while raping her during the process, before stuffing her in an ice chest and mailing what's left of her to her boyfriend, the series' protagonist. Then there is the killer who cuts open their victims skulls to plant flowers that take root in their brains. Both of these killers go through their entire process while keeping their victims alive.
  • My Hero Academia: Shigaraki inflicts one of these onto Overhaul as part of his revenge for what he did to the League of Villains. After Overhaul was captured by the heroes, Shigaraki intercepted the convoy transporting him to the hospital. As revenge for killing Magne earlier on in the story, he steals the Quirk neutralizing bullets that Overhaul had been working on, but not before he has Mr. Compress sever one of Overhaul's arms while he decayed and amputated his other arm, thus ensuring he would never be able to use his Quirk again. He leaves Overhaul with the final words that now he won't be able to lift a finger to stop the League as they use his own tools to be the heads of the criminal underworld, all while Overhaul is left screaming in defeat due to completely losing everything he worked so hard for and not being able to fix his boss who he left in a coma for the purposes of eventually getting him to see the value of his plan.
  • Naruto:
    • Shikamaru faces off against Hidan, an immortal ninja. He easily defeats Hidan, and in vengeance, cuts off Hidan's (still living) head and buries it in a hole where nobody would ever find him. Deprived of his ability to kill, he'll eventually die for real, but it'll take a long time.
    • The fate of the first four Hokage, all of whom are stuck in the stomach of the Shinigami where they will suffer for all eternity. Or so we're told; how anybody can actually know the final results of that technique is unexplained. Until Orochimaru comes back yet again and cuts open the Reaper's stomach.
    • Throughout most of the series, Itachi's Tsukiyomi illusion. When first revealed, it was used on Kakashi to trap him in a dreamworld where he was stabbed repeatedly for 72 hours. and apparently all in his head.
    • It was later revealed that Itachi had an ever worse Fate Worse Than Death-rendering equipment. His totsuka sword supposedly put Orochimaru in a world of dreams for eternity.
    • What happened to Anko Mitarashi. Imagine if you have something in your body that Kabuto Yakushi wants and can't take from you if you die (the remains of Orochimaru's chakra). What will he do to you? Beating the shit outta you, then keeping you alive and carrying you around with one of his snakes wrapped around you, slowly draining said chakra from your almost lifeless body to absorb it better. Not even MADARA liked that!. Thankfully, she got better.
    • Poor Samui and Atsui are sealed inside a tool which happens to be eaten by the Gedo Mazo, and then absorbed by Obito. Fortunately they are eventually released looking fine.
    • Humans caught in the Infinite Tsukuyomi and assimilated to the God Tree will eventually transform into White Zetsu, effectively stripping them of their personalities and defining features.
    • The final fates of Kaguya Otsutsuki and Black Zetsu. They are both trapped in a moon in another dimension, unable to move and unable to die due to their immortality.
    • In Boruto, those who have a Kama implanted on them slowly transform into the Otsutsuki who implanted it on them.
  • Ninja Scroll: The greedy, thoroughly evil and immortal Gemma gets encased in gold and sunk to the bottom of the pacific ocean — where he'll presumably remain, conscious and immobile forever. It's stated earlier in the movie that his ability to survive death is a method of concentrated willpower, so all he'd have to do to escape this fate is simply choose to die and be done with it.
  • One Piece:
    • Invoked by Luffy himself; Luffy may be nice to friends, but he's a complete ass to enemies. With villains, he doesn't kill them, but leaves them alive to watch their hopes and dreams crumble around them (though how they manage to keep breathing after Luffy's thrashing is absurd). This is a terrible punishment, because this series is all about being able to live your dream. When he's not around, half the crew just does things the quick and easy old-fashioned way (though if the character has a name, odds are he or she will still Never Say "Die").
    • Brook suffered through this, before Luffy came along. His crew was decimated by enemies who used poisoned weapons. Brook died along with the rest of them, but his Revive-Revive Fruit allowed him to return to life. However, his ship was damaged, which made sailing impossible and force Brook to spend 45 years drifting through the sea — 45 years all alone, unable to die from starvation or dehydration, surrounded by his friends' corpses. And, when he finally stumbles upon an island and manages to fix the ship, the island's master steals his shadow and uses it to animate a powerful zombie. Since shadowless people can't step into direct sunlight without being disintegrated, he had to spend the next five years training so he could reclaim his shadow. And of course, he couldn't end his suffering via suicide, because he made a promise to come back. At least this one has a happy ending in the form of him joining the Straw Hats.
    • Doflamingo loves this trope. In his Kingdom, undesirable people are usually either forced into gladiatorial combat, with a promise to be set free once they win a thousand matches (pretty much everyone, including Doflamingo, thinks that it's impossible) or turned into toys and forced into slavery. On top of that, when a human gets turned into a toy, everyone forgets that they ever existed — so toys are forced to live among their loved ones, unable to tell them who they are.
  • Overlord (2012): This happens all over the place. One notable example is an entire floor to the Great Tomb of Nazarick, where the victims are tortured, maimed, disemboweled, become wombs for ghastly creatures, forced to feast upon each other and/or have other horrible acts committed to them only to be healed with the same acts repeated upon them again. The victims are simply not allowed to die until the resident Torture Technician had enough fun, or is told to allow the victims to pass on.
  • Pita-Ten: In the anime adaptation, failure to pass the angel exam or devil exam (for people from Heaven or Hell respectively) results in the otherwise immortal person to be deleted from existence and all memories of their existence expunged.
  • Pokémon: The Series: At the end of the Team Galactic arc, Cyrus creates a new universe... and walks into it. The portal closes behind him and is then destroyed. Fans argue if he can survive, but the nature of the series and some past canon indicate that he can. However, this means that he's going to drift in empty space for the rest of his life, unable to do anything but watch his creation, and unable to stop himself from aging. Bear in mind that he's not even thirty. He could live for another century in what amounts to a void, all alone and powerless. A world with no emotion is what he wanted, so it could be paradise for him.
  • Princess Tutu: Rue almost gets trapped in one of these fates. The Raven locks Rue into a Lotus-Eater Machine inside of his body, where she's put in a trance and forced to dance non-stop until she falls dead as he saps her out of her life energy. She gets better once Mytho comes for her, though.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Becoming a magical girl is a Deal with the Devil. Every time a magical girl uses magic or suffers negative emotions, her Soul Gem becomes more corrupted. The only way to keep the corruption at bay is by killing witches, horrible Eldritch Abominations that can and will kill you horribly if you make even the slightest mistake, and using their Grief Seeds to cleanse the corruption from the gem. But this is a stopgap measure at best, because inevitably the gem will darken completely and become a Grief Seed itself, and she will become the very thing that she is fighting.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena: As the Rose Bride, Anthy Himemiya's role is to be the trophy wife of whoever wins her hand, slavishly obeying her masters' whims no matter how cruel or abusive they are, while forbidden from defending herself or having any form of agency in her life. That alone is bad enough. It's later revealed that part of being the Rose Bride is to be her brother's Silent Scapegoat, letting herself be stabbed for eternity by the Swords of Hate that were originally intended for Prince Dios. Even worse, she is plagued with the knowledge that sacrificing herself to protect Dios from some rather ungrateful townsfolk turned her brother into the monstrously abusive Akio, rendering her pain utterly pointless. But she chooses to continue the cycle anyway partially out of loyalty to Dios/Akio, and partially out of self-punishment.
  • The Rising of the Shield Hero: Naofumi stops the public execution of Princess Malty and King Aultcray, the people who ruined his life, claiming that "death is instant release" and they deserve worse. He instead has their names legally changed to "Bitch" and "Trash" and forces them to live the rest of their existence in shame.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • The anime version of Jadeite was frozen to death in crystal for his many failures to get energy for Queen Beryl.
    • In the S Season, Mimete uses a machine to turn her into energy and transmitted herself on giant televisions. Then Tellu came along and pulled the plug. If said machine is unplugged while the user is still transmuted, they're trapped inside forever. Mimete was turned into energy, and energy can't be destroyed. So, she's trapped in an empty black void forever, alone and unable to die.
  • In the Shadow Star manga, Komori is killed and his Shadow Dragon Push Dagger attempts to absorb him into its body to turn the guy into an Otohime so they can reach their most powerful evolution. However, they're found by government agents... and the next time they're seen is when Sudo shows Akira that their still half-merged bodies are hooked up to a machine that slows down the process, effectively keeping Komori from either fully dying or being "reborn". Urgh.
  • Slayers: The Raugnut Rushavna curse is a VERY horrible curse, as it makes the victim immortal until the one who cast the curse is killed.
    Lina: I was staring at an enormous lump of flesh. It was writhing — the arrangement of its internal organs and the pulsing of its veins fully visible. As we watched, a snake sprang forth from the top of the lump. The snake, borne of the hideous meatball, grew into an arch half the size of the clump. It swallowed the mound of flesh, essentially consuming itself, and then sunk back into its fleshy mass. Those that fall victim to this ritual are cursed to die over and over until the demon that cast the curse is destroyed.
  • Sword Art Online: In the climax of the Alicization arc, PoH fully expects Kirito to just kill him in-game, remarking that he'll just keep coming after Kirito and Asuna again and again until he finally slits their throats and rips their hearts out in real life. This is the final nail in his coffin; rather than kill him, Kirito declares that PoH will never log out of the Soul Translator, instead trapping him in a tree and leaving him to rot in Underworld forever. It's made even worse by the fact that time in Underworld runs on Year Inside, Hour Outside; years can pass in-game while mere days pass in the real world.
  • Tokyo Ghoul: The manga provides a few examples, all thanks to one individual.
    • Rize Kamishiro is revealed to be alive, but being held captive as part of an experiment. The procedures and extensive starvation have driven them insane.
    • Likewise, the finale reveals that Yoshimura has taken Rize's place as the new donor and will likely suffer just like she did.
    • In the sequel, Seidou Takizawa is revealed to be Not Quite Dead. Unfortunately, it's because he was captured by Aogiri for use in their experiments. His significantly altered appearance indicates extensive torture over the last two years, transforming the Plucky Comic Relief into an Ax-Crazy Half-Human Hybrid.
  • Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-: This happens to Yuui and Fai. Being imprisoned without food, water or any means of sheltering themselves, being separated from each other (and thereby from the only person who ever loved them) but still having to witness their twin suffering. And on top of this being utterly unable to die because their magic keeps them alive. And then it gets even worse for Yuui. After a visit from the Big Bad, Fai commits suicide in order to save Yuui. However then Yuui's memories are warped so he's led to believe he murdered his twin. So Yuui is left facing the same hell he'd done so before, but now he's entirely alone and he believes himself to have killed the one person he loved.
  • When They Cry:
    • Higurashi: When They Cry: Rika Furude has been stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop for somewhere between a century and a millennium. In most iterations, one of her friends will go insane and kill a bunch of people. In every iteration, Rika is murdered, usually disemboweled while she's still alive, and most or all of her friends die within a few days. Then she's resurrected in the past, and goes through it all over again, and she's the only one who remembers what's happening, but enough important details keep changing that she can't manage to stop it.
    • Umineko: When They Cry: Battler suffers a similar but even worse fate, since the loop is much shorter and between "games" Beato spends her time having the Stakes reduce him to a pulp over and over. ...Which is nothing compared to EP6, where he gets trapped in a closed room/horrific logic error and spends years trying to escape. A lot worse than it sounds.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!': The Shadow Realm induces this. In the Shadow Realm, your worst fears (Examples: Kaiba and defeat, Mai and isolation) play out over and over in front of your eyes for eternity. This became more prominent in the 4Kids dub, when being sent to the Shadow Realm was the substitute for death. Because it's much less frightening to be tormented eternally than to be killed!
    • If you know Egyptian lore, Pharaoh Atem's fate qualifies. He was sealed into the Puzzle in order to contain the magic of the Millennium Items and Zorc. This not only killed him, but sealed his soul into the Puzzle. He also lost his memories and any idea of who or what he was, and forgot about the country he died saving and was all alone in the Puzzle with no one to talk to for 3,000 years. If Yugi hadn't solved it, he would never have been freed. The lore kicks in with the loss of his name — Egyptians believe the name is part of the soul, so he essentially lost part of himself.
  • Yuki Yuna is a Hero: The girls offer up either a body part or one of their senses in exchange for the power of Mankai. Sonoko is practically a living vegetable having lost the use of all of her limbs, one of her eyes and ears, and her senses of smell, taste, and touch. Karin arguably gets it even worse, losing both her eyesight and her hearing after using Mankai just four times. On top of all this, they cannot even kill themselves if they decide they've had enough of being a living vegetable. Needless to say, some among the team do not take to this news with verve.
  • YuYu Hakusho:
    • Toguro the Elder suffers such a fate. It's dealt by Kurama, who plants a parasitic tree on him that uses hallucinations to catch and trap prey until it has drained all of their life energy and killed them, at which point it discards the corpse. Since technically Toguro the Elder can't die, he is doomed to eternal frustration in the form of trying to kill an illusory Kurama, who not only won't die no matter what Toguro does to him, but doesn't fight back, or even show signs of feeling pain, and tops it off by smiling when injured. Kurama lampshades the trope by saying afterward that death was too good for him anyway.
    • What King Yomi did to the demon who blinded him? Yomi nailed the guy to a wall for five hundred years, then finally killed him in one hit by stomping on his face so hard that his head exploded.
    • Being a koorime (ice demon) and living on their floating ice mountain. Hiei was thrown off the mountain the day he was born for the crime of being male and a fire demonnote . Having found the mountain again, he doesn't carry out the plan to slaughter them all that has become one of his life goals... because he considers their pathetic lives a crueler punishment for their crimes.
    • Hiei's "birthday gift" to a depressed Mukuro near the end of the manga also counts as this. He finds the evil slave dealer who owned and brutalized her as a child, and has Kurama put him into a parasitic plant similar to the one he gave Toguro above. It will keep him alive and heal all injuries unless his brain is destroyed.

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