Fate Worse Than Death - Television Tropes & Idioms

Another ironic punishment: the greedy, thoroughly evil and immortal Gemma from Ninja Scroll gets encased in gold and sunk to the bottom of the pacific ocean — where he'll presumably remain, conscious and immobile forever.
- They did this to Morgana in the The Little Mermaid sequel; where she was imprisoned in ice and sunk to the bottom of the ocean—completely aware of her fate. Dude, at least her sister Ursula got a merciful death!
In Yu Yu 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.
- We can't forget what King Yomi did to the demon who blinded him, can we? 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. No, seriously. Hiei was thrown off the mountain the day he was born for the crime of being male. 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 crueller punishment for their crimes.
- Of course, in the first episode/manga, Yuusuke says he doesn't want to be resurrected; he doesn't believe anyone will miss him so he doesn't have anything worth living for. So, Life.
Baccano! tells the tale of a group of immortals that 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. Makes you think twice about wanting immortality.
Mad Scientist Mayuri Kurotsuchi in Bleach defeats espada and fellow Mad Scientist Szayel Aporro Granz by stabbing his heart with his zanpakutō and breaking off the blade after Szayel devoured his lieutenant and daughter Nemu, causing him to ingest a poison that increases his senses to the point that a second seems like a century.
- Also, according to Gotei 13 Captains turned Vizards, namely Shinji and Love, getting on the bad side of Unohana is actually a fate worse than getting crisped by Yamamoto's Bankai. You've seen how destructive his Shikai is. If Unohana's treatment is even worse than his Bankai...
In Naruto, Shikamaru faces off against Hidan, an immortal ninja who had killed Shikamaru's teacher, Asuma. 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.
- Databook 3 partially negates this by stating that the "secret Jashinist experiment" that grants Hidan his immortality only makes him immortal as long as he continues to kill people. So Hidan's head will eventually die, though it's not certain how long it takes for his immortality to wear off.
  - Earlier in the series the Third Hokage removes Orochimaru's ability to perform jutsus; in the Narutoverse local magic (considering Orochimaru's goal to use, this leaves Orochimaru's arms paralyzed for normal use as well... for about three months. Even then he never fully recovers, and has momentary moments of complete agony.
  - Even worse than all this is 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.
In Shakugan No Shana demons known as Tomogara have to eat the existences of human beings. Flame Hazes such as Shana then "fill" these empty space with "Torches" which act and feel like real people, but are in fact just empty shells of the people who died (not that all torches are willing to believe this, and the responses to discovering they're just shells which will soon fade away range from denial to suicide). These torches will eventually burn out and the person will cease to have ever existed. And don't expect any sympathy from Shana, either. After all, Torches are merely "shells" and not real people.
- This is worse than it sounds as, once the torch dies, the entire world forgets the person ever existed.
In the Narutaru 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.
In 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.
Rue almost gets trapped in one of these fates by her "father", the Raven in Princess Tutu. After her Heroic Sacrifice for Mytho, 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.
In Cowboy Bebop, a group of crazy eco-terrorists are trapped when the authorities close the hyperspace gates with them inside. Their fate is to drift around the universe in a half-phased state, unable to interact with the physical world.
- Let's not forget that they will be painfully turned into apes, by their own virus.
Katejina Loos, in Victory Gundam, ends the series as a blind, half-insane cripple who has nothing to look forward to other than a life of constant torment. However, since Katejina was a Complete Monster and crossed the Moral Event Horizon more than once, that can be considered her just punishment. Karma Houdini, my right foot...
The short story The Enigma Of Amigara Fault is about people that 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...
- Made even worse by the fact that the punishment is for being a Schmuck Bait.
Subverted in Code Geass. After Mao gives a Hannibal Lecture to Suzaku, Lelouch activates his Geass and tells him to "never speak again." The result? Mao tries to speak, but chokes on his own saliva and makes all manner of groans and gurgles and other disgusting noises. Scared shitless, he runs out of the church he and Lelouch are in, and finds C.C. waiting for him, who comforts him...and then shoots him in the head with a silenced pistol.
- Arguably, Suzaku Kururugi's final fate. While his tombstone praises him as a loyal defender of Emperor Lelouch, given that Lelouch will (by his own design) be remembered as the worst tyrant ever, it is likely that Suzaku will go down in history as The Quisling where Japanese people (except for Kallen, and maybe Todou and Kaguya) are concerned, and as The Dragon to a deeply evil ruler for everyone else. Also, throughtout the series, he always argues for change within the system rather than through revolution- while he gets to change the system from within, it is through becoming Zero who will be celebrated as a hero for working outside of the system. And to make matters worse, he will never be able to be anything but Zero for the rest of his life, as only a small handful of people know who's under the mask, and they aren't stupid enough to spill the beans and ruin the plan.
  - Adding even more irony to it Zero was the one thing he hated and fought against all this time, and he had just become it.
  - Suzaku is now now known to the world as the man who killed the woman Suzaku loved.
Diavolo gets this punishment in Jojos Bizarre Adventure after being killed by Giorno's Golden Experience Requiem. He is killed repeatedly in various ways for eternity, each time not knowing how he's going to die. The last time we see him, he's screaming at a little girl to get away from him, having grown insanely paranoid.
- This fate also befalls Cars in Part 2. Having turned himself into a boulder to avoid the effects of a volcanic blast, he's launched into space, unable to change his trajectory. The solitude eventually causes him to stop thinking completely.
A more humerous example would be Russia's kolkolkol chant in AxisPowersHetalia which he uses to threaten his fellow nations, most notably Lithuania.
- "Eventually everyone will become one with mother Russia, da?"
This happens a lot in the manga Franken Fran, because she places great value "life" but the concept of "quality of life" is completely foreign. 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 (who happened to be her friend's secretary), and then drags her off and surgically alters her. It is unknown what their final fate is, but it is certainly worse than death.
- Actually... She's turned into another dog beast. Note how on the page where Fran is claiming she didn't kill her, we see the image of a dog beast that, unlike the three previous ones, has noticable breasts.
- And it happens again in a later chapter, when 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 the response from Fran's little sister "shouldn't you just let them die?" It should also be mentioned that Fran's little sister was built to be a living arsenal and an assassin with no remorse, and this gives her squick.
  - Another one: 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 tht 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.
This much anime — and we forget about the anime version of Jadeite from Sailor Moon who was frozen in crystal for his many failures to get energy for Queen Beryl.
Being a mystic loser.
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni: Rika Furude has been stuck in a Groundhog Day Loop for about a hundred or so years. She is always killed and rezzed everytime.
- In the same vein, Suzumiya Haruhi: In Endless Eight, Yuki Nagato rememebers everything, so more or less she's been going through everything for about 596 years.
- Higurashi's sequel inflicts a similar fate Battler.
A certain Alternate Character Interpretation of Sebastian from Kuroshitsuji has this as the ultimate fate for Ciel — making him a fledgling demon and granting him eternal life. Which will ultimately make Ciel watch all those he cares about pass away. Given that Sebastian is Affably Evil and has quite a bit of affection for his young master (not that way...maybe), we might indeed get this instead of Sebastian's eating his soul, especially given the Gecko Ending of the anime.
Done humerously in Kamen No Maid Guy. 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.

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The Sandman by Neil Gaiman: After the first Despair was killed (in a vain attempt to remove despair and suffering from the world), the man responsible was put into a state of perpetual suffering from which he could not die — he would suffer for all eternity until time ended. In the first issue, Dream of the Endless punishes the son of the magician who sealed him away for seventy years (the magician having already died by that time) by trapping him in an endless Dream Within A Dream — while he might eventually die, he will suffer for an eternity in his head first. (Although after Morpheus' death on the hands of the three "Kindly Ones", his successor, the new Dream, shows mercy and lifts the curse. So, the man only had to spend six years or so in a coma, hallucinating the most torturous horrors his mind could devise.)
- In a later arc, Morpheus a.k.a. Dream and his "younger" sister Delirium have a run in with a Traffic Cop after she's driven erratically; and Delirium (in a "normal" fit of randomness) curses the officer to forever feel bugs crawling all over his body. Dream points out this is a rather harsh punishment for a very minor inconvenience, but Delirium tellingly counters that it's still better than many of the things Dream has inflicted on others.
- ...such as Morpheus condemning Nada, a former African queen, to Hell in a fit of anger after she refused to stay with him and become his queen in the Dreaming, because, as she said, "It is not for mortals to love the Endless". It took the Dream King several thousand years to forgive her and seek her forgiveness after he finally freed her from her torment.
- Of course, Delirium inflicts the most Mind Screwing one of these ever when she is briefly detained by a semi-recurring deformed demoness with a crush on Lucifer, and proclaims "If you don't let me in, I will turn you into a demon half-face waitress night-club lady with a crush on her boss, and I'll make it so you've been that from the beginning of time to now and you'll never ever know if you were anything else and it will itch inside your head worse than little bugses!" Debate still rages about whether Delirium could have actually done that, or just knew the demon's nature and mocked it.
  - Or whether she already did. Welcome to the mouth of madness, folks.
  - Thats an easy one, if Mazakeen only loved Lucifer because she was cursed, he would not have loved her back, he would have found a way to break the curse. As Lucifer loved her back, we must assume that Delirium merely knew what madness would occur in the future.
Thanos of Titan was, for a very long time (as comic books go), transformed into immobile stone, unable either to die or to truly live. As Thanos was in love with the personification of Death, he found this an especially horrible fate, since he expected never to see her. He got better.
During yet another of his bids for total control of the entire DCU, Darkseid travelled to the Wall at the edge of the universe, behind which is The Source (presumably that which allows the superheroes to make balloon animals out of the laws of physics). Various carvings on the Wall are described as being the imprisoned forms of gods, would-be conquerors, and others who wished to control the Source. Naturally, Darkseid's face becomes the newest addition to the collection, but presumably this story was either a one-shot story or he managed to escape.
The Hellraiser graphic novels (based on the films, in turn based on Clive Barker's short story "Hellbound Heart") is based on the premise that Hell exists, as a place of unending torment, through much more creative abuses and distortions of the flesh than mere burning. The Cenobites (a word originally meaning simply a monk in a monastic order, as distinct from an eremite or hermit monk) seek to lure unwary souls into Hell by scattering puzzles throughout the world for them to solve. Many, but by no means all, of the damned are evil or unsympathetic people; but this is not the Christian Hell — you are not damned for sins in the Christian sense, but generally for an obsessiveness that allows to you be so caught. In the films, Leviathan, the Lord of Hell, is "the God of Hunger, Flesh and Desire," which is more in the spirit of the short story; but in the graphic novels, Leviathan and the Cenobites are devoted to Order, a concept that at first seems rather dissonant, in some ways, with the bizarre and grotesque goings-on in Hell. However, Cenobites seek to destroy emotion, which their god Leviathan believes is the ultimate cause of the chaos humanity reeks. As a result, they seek to overload the sensory perception of their victims, by exposing them to the most extreme forms of pain and pleasure imaginable, while destroying their minds with chaos. The result: a being that has grown numb to feeling, and therefore emotion, who craves, as a release, the order that Leviathan seeks.
In the Judge Dredd story Judgement Day, the zombie-controlling villain Sabbat was rendered immortal (even to the point of being able to survive a bullet in the head) by a large magical crystal. Dredd punished him for causing the deaths of millions of people by decapitating him and sticking his head on top of the crystal, remarking that the sentence was "life - no remission."
Wally West, also known as The Flash, returned from hiatus in an alternate dimension to find that the supervillain Inertia had murdered his former sidekick Bart Allen, who had been serving as the Flash in Wally's absence. This, naturally, made Wally mad as hell: his response was to hunt Inertia down and use his powers to rob the villain of all his speed, rendering him an immobile (but fully conscious and completely aware) statue...which he then placed in the Flash Museum, to stare at a statue of the man he killed for all eternity (his situation has since been reversed). Which leads one to wonder: why do so many superheroes with Thou Shalt Not Kill policies have no problem giving their enemies fates worse than death?
- Some of them have the Thou Shalt Not Kill policies mostly to stay in line with other heroes. Batman and Black Canary have both threatened other heroes who have killed, though both of them are double standardizing. Wally thought several times about killing Inertia, including contemplating leaving him to burn in the Flash museum.
Speaking of comic worse-than-death fates, a rather bizarre one happened between Spider Man's villain Carnage and the Silver Surfer several years ago. After trying to possess the latter, the Carnage Symbiote is tossed back onto the original host and is then encased in an unbreakable shell of energy much like the Surfer's own shell of silver. It's stated he's stuck like that for all eternity, but he apparently got better just in time for Venom to devour the Carnage symbiote. He got better from that too. Then later was ripped in half by The Sentry.
The Silver Surfer also encountered, at one point, a hideous mutation run rampant on Earth. It began to absorb all the living matter it could find (including people), growing larger and more repulsive at a constant rate until the Surfer flew it to a desolate moon where it could be properly destroyed. Unfortunately, at the last instant before he would have disintegrated the abomination, a coherent facet emerged and explained that at its core it was a thinking human being who had become the victim of an experiment gone awry. Though he begged him to end his suffering, the Surfer refused, since to kill a sentient being was anathema to his moral code. Thus, the Surfer regretfully left the creature to its interminable fate, isolated and alone. Bet the poor guy wishes he had just kept his mouth shut.
In the Star Wars series Dark Empire, Darth Sidious and Jedi Empatojayos Brand end up bound to each other for all eternity. But it was a Heroic Sacrifice of Brand's part.
In other sources from the Expanded Universe, Palpatine has Bevel Lemelisk (who designed the Death Star with that airshaft) killed by flesh-eating beetles. Then he clones the body and brings Lemelisk back to get killed again in an even worse way. This goes on over and over and over until the New Republic finally executes him for good.
Lemelisk: Just make sure you do it right this time.
The final fate of Batman in Final Crisis as Darkseid's Omega Sanction didn't kill him; it left him stranded lost in time and cursed with multiple lives, each one worse than the previous one. (But it still left a corpse for some reason)
- It left a corpse because it was his soul that was put into the loop, the body was accidentally burnt in the ruins of Command-D when Superman all but vaporized it.
In Fables, where a character's Popularity Power determined how difficult they are to kill, Goldilocks gets one of these. She's attempting to murder two of the other characters when she gets an axe buried in the side of her head, takes a tumble down a cliff-face, gets hit full-on by a speeding semi-truck and then hurled into a river. And because her injuries were so severe she couldn't reach the surface or the shore, she describes it as "always drowning, never dying" after getting pulled out weeks later.
In Catwoman, the villain Black Mask decided to "improve himself" not by killing Catwoman, but by torturing and killing everyone close to her, leaving her alive to suffer through it. Catwoman, obviously not a fan of this trope, shot him in the head.
In one of the recent Doctor Who comics in Panini's Doctor Who Magazine, "Hotel Historia", an otherwise light-hearted and frothy tale is ended with the Tenth Doctor sealing the race of marauding aliens into a nebulous state where they can neither touch nor interact in any way with anything. Ever.
Evil Alien: Have mercy!
Doctor: This is mercy. Don't make me regret it.
Narrowly averted in book 3 of Empowered, where the squad of ninja that decided to claim the bounty on returning one Kaburagi Kozue (AKA Ninjette) to her clan in New Jersey (or rather the two that were not dead or mortally wounded in the fight to bring her down) decide to facilitate her return and prevent future escapes by amputating her arms and legs. It is not as if she would need them to bear heirs for the Kaburagi Clan, right?

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The Sarlaac Pit, though it is somewhat nullified given that you'd die of starvation or thirst within a few days or even of suffocation in a few minutes. Not to mention the fact that Boba Fett fell in and he got better.
- You wouldn't die due to starvation or thirst. Apparently the Sarlaac's digestive juices keep you alive while it's digesting you. Somehow.
Budd from Kill Bill decided that only a Fate Worse Than Death was a fitting punishment for the Bride after she broke his brother Bill's heart. So he shoots her with rock salt, ties her up, puts her in a coffin, and buries her alive. She still escapes.
In Beetlejuice, Limbo is described as "Death for the dead." It happens to ghosts who are exorcised by the living. And considering how messed-up regular dead people looked already...
One of the few good lines from the Aladdin sequel is the Genie Jafar's response to being reminded of his inability to kill: "You'd be surprised what you can live through."
- It's one of those lines that would be good...if it wasn't repeated at least five more times.
  - The times it's used optimistically (following a revival, for example) just makes Jafar's use of it as a threat that much creepier
Parodied in the kung-fu movie segment of Kentucky Fried Movie, where the Fate Worse Than Death turns out to be... Detroit.
- NO, NO NOT DETROIT!! NO, NO PLEASE ANYTHING BUT *THAT*!! NOOOOO!!
  - Similarly, was Wisconsin really that bad?
- That's a parody? Have you ever seen Detroit?
Jeepers Creepers, the guy Derry found still alive in the basement
I've done far worse than kill you. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you, as you left me ... as you left her. Marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet - Buried alive! Okay, so it doesn't work out that way, but still.
Paranormal Activity, a haunted house story about a young couple, ends with Katie becoming fully possessed by a demon and killing her boyfriend. The police found Micah's body, but Katie's whereabouts are unknown.
Contact. Jodie Foster's character is given a Cyanide Pill before entering the Faster Than Light Travel machine, not only in case she's marooned light years from home, but also in case a fate that they can't possibly predict.
"There are a thousand reasons we can think of why you should have this thing with you, but mostly it's for the reasons we can't think of."

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Can be used almost comically in Thou Shalt Not Kill situations, such as Animorphs. Instead of killing the traitor, David, the Animorphs trap him permanently in rat form and abandon him on a rock island. (In this case, the "almost" is key - his screaming pleas for mercy gave them nightmares for years.)
- Being taken by the Yeerks and having one of them controlling your body was also suggested to be worse than death.
Dementors in Harry Potter have the power to steal a person's soul (via a sort-of Kiss Of Death) without killing them, turning them into an empty shell forever. Word Of God has it that they're an allegorical monster representing clinical depression.
- Aside from agonizing pain, overuse of the Cruciatus curse can lead to severe psychological trauma. The Aurors Frank and Alice Longbottom, Neville's parents, were driven permanently and irretrievably insane by prolonged exposure to Cruciatus.
- Though he doesn't experience this trope directly, it's eventually learned that Voldemort's greatest weakness is that he cannot conceive of a worse fate than death, meaning his obsession with becoming immortal renders him vulnerable to other, equally or more unpleasant fates; see the "afterlife train station" chapter of Deathly Hallows for one of these.
  - At the end of the fifth book, Dumbledore fires a very powerful spell. It is blocked, and we never see what it does, but when Voldemort mocks Dumbledore for not seeking to kill him, Dumbledore merely responds, "We both know there are other ways of destroying a man, Tom."
  - This is lampshaded by Harry Potter himself... in the first book. "If you're going to be cursed forever, death's better, isn't it?"
A Song Of Ice And Fire: "We have oubliettes under Casterly Rock that fit a man tighter than a suit of armour..."
- What Theon Grejoy is being subjected to by the end of the third book. *shudders*
The Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which gives anyone who has to go into it a momentary view of the entire universe, and themselves in relation to it, resulting in insanity through loss of all sense of self-worth. When Zaphod Beeblebrox goes into it, it doesn't work, because the universe he's in is actually a simulated universe, created specifically for Zaphod. This makes him the most important thing in the universe - as he always thought to be - so he is immune to the Vortex's effects.
- Also:
  Ford: If we're lucky, it's just the Vogons come to throw us in to space.
  Arthur: And if we're unlucky?
  Ford: If we're unlucky, the captain might be serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his poetry first...
Room 101 in 1984, where prisoners are tortured with their greatest fear and psychologically broken.
In Dearly Devoted Dexter, the main villain does things so disgusting to his victims that I don't even want to type them. "yodeling potato".
- In the same vein as Dexter, Serial Killer Patrick Bateman from American Psycho commits some of the most sadistic and gruesome tortures ever conceived by the imagination. In fact, Bateman actually keeps his victims alive intentionally longer, just so they can experience more agony.
- The worst part of the Dexter example is it's partly real. Don't read this next part. The sequence of removing the arms and legs a piece at a time was really done by the Japanese on prisoners at Unit 731, after which the limbless torso was used for chemical and biological weapon experiments.
So do some characters in Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné saga and the Dorian Hawkmoon saga.
- Prince Gaynor the Damned is subjected to a horrible eternal punishment after he, the former Champion of the Balance, falls from grace and is forced to serve the Lords of Chaos.
In KA Applegate's Remnants series, 80 people are put into hibernation on a space ship in order to escape the destruction of the Earth by an asteroid. For one of those people, the hibernation technology malfunctions, and does not stop his brain. So Billy Weir remains totally paralyzed yet fully conscious. For 500 years.
Similar to the above is Larry Niven's short story "Wait it Out", in which an astronaut stranded on Pluto tries to survive by using the planet's frigid environment to put him in cryostasis - only to discover that by a quirk of physics he remains fully conscious and aware of the excruciating cold.
- Of course, neither of the previous two would actually work, since thought requires electrical impulses, which means energy expenditure, and therefore all the stuff the bloodstream brings (like food and air). Without a working circulatory system, if the brain didn't stop functioning, the cells would starve in a matter of minutes and die of (essentially) suffocation.
  - Niven handwaves this by claiming that in such extreme cold the brain and nervous system become superconductors through which electric currents (and therefore consciousness and sensations) continue to flow, but very sluggishly so that days seem like minutes. It works if you don't think too hard about it.
  - The Remnants example at least has the indication that the hibernation process doesn't completely stop cellular respiration, only slow it down a great deal (the hibernators are given feeding tubes to provide for their "minimal nutrition requirements" during the voyage). It's still a stretch, though.
In I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, the computer AM develops an intense hatred of humanity, starts a nuclear war that kills almost the entire human race, then tries to inflict a Fate Worse Than Death on the five survivors. It halts their aging process, then puts them through numerous horrific situations. After about a hundred years, one of the survivors manages to euthanize the other four. AM responds by turning him into an immortal, immobile, gelatinous blob. Thankfully, the video game adaptation offers a good ending, in which the lone survivor manages to defeat AM through the use of special items and remains alive long enough to see the cryogenically frozen population of the moon thaw out and repopulate Earth.
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Death and Life-in-Death gamble for the Mariner. Life-in-Death wins, to the Mariner's sorrow.
In the Stephen King short story The Jaunt, the titular teleportation process is instantaneous in physical terms, but anyone making the trip while conscious experiences Something Horrible for endless eons of time.
- And then there's that wife whose murderous husband scattered her to the metaphorical winds, being Jaunted forever and ever and ever infinity. "Longer than you think!"
Another Stephen King short story (turned movie) is 1408. The protagonist is tortured by a "fucking evil [hotel] room" (think the hotel from The Shining but concentrated) before setting himself on fire, escaping, and possibly destroying the room to boot. However, no one escapes 1408, not even survivors: he's still haunted by his experiences - he feels uneasy in his own house, he has to find something else to write about now that he can't handle "haunted houses", and he has to cover the windows during sunset, which reminds him of the fire - and it's fairly certain he's going to be like this for the rest of his life.
- In The Movie, here's how the room works: Nobody has survived more than one hour in the room. During that hour, the room will physically and emotionally torture you. And if you somehow manage to survive and not commit suicide, it will begin all over again until you decide to do it. "You can choose to repeat this hour over and over again, or you can take advantage of our express checkout system".
The novelette A Colder War (Go now! Don't read the spoilers, read the story! It's free!) by Charles Stross details an alternate-history Cold War where the Soviets have retrieved the sleeping Cthulhu and entombed in it in a silo as the ultimate weapon of Mutually Assured Destruction. Things get out of hand. Cthulhu is deployed and the United States' entire XK-PLUTO arsenal fails to stop it. The protagonist, a few politicians and a small military force are all who manage to escape, through an eldritch stargate, to a dead, frozen world. The story ends with the tiny shellshocked population, going through the motions in a domed compound under an alien sky, unable to do anything. The protagonist is unable to bring himself to commit suicide. And it is implied that he may never have escaped at all.
Obviously, the book A Fate Totally Worse Than Death (which was later filmed as Bad Girls from Valley High), in which three murderous teenage girls known as "the Huns of Cliffside High" begin to to age rapidly, and believe themselves to be cursed by the ghost of the girl whose death they caused the year before.
Lester Del Rey wrote a story in 1940 or 1941, before the US joined WWII, detailing Hitler's fate. A scientist (implied to be Jewish in the story) invents a time machine that, instead of moving a person through time, brought future versions of himself to the present and gives him full control over the "clones." The scientist uses his machine to summon hundreds upon hundreds of Hitler "clones." Nearly a day after the machine is first used, the oldest of the Hitler "clones" confronts Hitler and the scientist and spouts off nonsensical gibberish about things like trying to run away only to be brought back again. Hitler shoots him dead. The scientist then reveals that, as was his intention all along, Hitler is now condemned to relive the same 24-hour period over and over again from a different point of view until he finally finds himself staring down the barrel of his own gun in his final moments.
In the book Ice Hunt, researchers find a giant iceberg where somebody had been doing suspended animation experiments decades ago. The research says that he had to put the subjects to sleep before suspending them. One explorer finds out why when he uses some of the suspended animation serum when he gets trapped in a pod as the whole place collapses - while suspended, the subject cannot sense anything, but is completely conscious — the guy realizes this as his pod lands at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
This troper remembers a short story in one of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction anthologies of the 1980s about a protagonist (and everyone around him) being trapped in a Groundhog Day Loop that got steadily shorter, from hours to minutes and then mere seconds, until he couldn't even get to the end of a thought. The sequence always started over exactly the same, with him being trapped on a traffic island, and the drivers of the cars around him likewise going in circles forever and ever... the protagonist speculates that Earth may have fallen into a travelling singularity or that Time has actually ended because the universe was imploding, but essentially they are trapped in hell, going insane, and no hope even for death to deliver them.
Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Called Shayol" centers around a prison planet where people are infected with a healing symbiont that works so well that not only does it make infectees immortal, but it also causes them to grow extra organs and limbs, which are subsequently harvested for transplants.
In the Wheel Of Time losing the ability to channel is considered a fate worse than death, as channeling is shown to be quite pleasurable and addictive. One character who temporarily loses the ability to channel compares it to losing the sun. The general rule is that the person will lose the will to live, and die. One character was famed, as having brought an entire country to his knees, and the next book has him basically guarded by one girl, whose job is to prevent him from committing suicide. Lady Colavaere hangs herself rather than live the rest of her life on a farm, powerless. Tuon, after returning from being kidnapped and marrying her kidnapper, sentences Suroth, who tried to order her death, to become a Da'Covale (a slave that wears see through fabric), Suroth's only thought is of the knife in her bedroom that she now can't use to cut herself. Semirhage specialized in this, getting sexual pleasure out of torture, some captives where known to use their teeth to open the veins in their wrist to escape Semirhage's tortures since she would occasionally keep them alive.
In Alan Campbell's Deepgate Codex series, part of the backstory is the fate of the Soft Men. These were three scientists who discovered how to make Angelwine, a distillation of human souls that (among other effects) makes those who drink it immortal. When the Church caught up with them, it discovered that they weren't kidding about the immortality bit: the scientists could survive any injury, and couldn't be poisoned, suffocated, etc. Eventually the Church found a way to keep them out of circulation for good: by ripping all their bones out of their bodies (rendering their still-functioning muscles useless), and burying the still-living bodies separately from the bones. Although, inevitably, eventually someone hears the story and becomes curious enough to dig them up.
The newest novel of the Inheritance cycle has two examples of this:
- On the one hand, Eragon's punishment for Sloan is to be consigned almost to a Flying Dutchman curse: forced "To Walk the Land Alone", driven by a constant compulsion to seek out the land of the elves, there to remain 'even unto your dying day', living with the knowledge that he can never see, touch, or talk to his daughter Katrina ever again, and that she is with Roran and happy, without him—even though Eragon explicitly says he knows Katrina is more important to Sloan than anything else. Granted, Sloan did turn against Carvahall which caused death for one of it's citizens, and Eragon has promised that if Sloan truly repents of his misdeeds and becomes a better person, the elves will restore his sight. Even so...
  - The irony here is that Eragon explicitly states this fate to be "the most terrible I could invent short of death." The key words here being "short of death." Our hero thinks there is nothing worse he could grant to his enemy than death, yet I'm sure we can all agree that that fate is ''much'' worse than death.
  - Considering what the elves taught Eragon about their views on death, (Specifically, that there is nothing; the soul is destroyed forever with death) he probably thinks that death would be worse. If he still believed in an afterlife, it might be different.
- The fate of the dragons belonging to the Forsworn is even worse: in the Banishing of the Names, they were stripped of any means of identifying themselves—given names, nicknames, true names, titles, until they could not even make 'I' statements since these named themselves. Nor could they be called dragons. Reduced to little more than animals, the spell obliterated everything that defined them as thinking creatures, until they descended into complete ignorance. No one can remember their names, utter them, or even read them anymore. As Arya herself says, "The experience was so disturbing, at least five of the thirteen, and several of the Forsworn, went mad as a result."
In The Dresden Files, Winter Knight Lloyd Slate suffers a particularly gruesome example of this at the hands of Mab- he's entombed in ice, crucified on a tree of the same, until he's almost dead from frostbite and exhaustion... at which point Mab takes him out, feeds him, heals him, and takes him to bed with her, only to return him to his torture when we wakes up. Mab has stated that the only way from him to be freed, and subsequently die, is to have Harry take over his position as Winter Knight.
- Well... Lea did mention the possibility that if Dresden continues to refuse the title long enough, Mab might kill Slate when he's completely and utterly broken... that is, when he's gone so completely insane that he starts to look forward to his crucifixion with joy because of the kindness Mab shows him after she takes him down.
- And Mab wonders why Harry doesn't want the job.
In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novels, Soric is handed over to the Black Ships. Hark finds him several books later, cries (which all the deaths have not drawn from him), and at his request, kills him.
David Eddings. The fates of Zedar, sealed in rock forever in the Belgariad and Zalasta and Baron Parok, burning in frozen time forever in the Tamuli definitely qualify.
Star Trek novelizations have quite a few:
- In Peter David's Vendetta, a throwaway character achieves Warp 10 (the Star Trek term for infinite speed, meaning you occupy all all points in the universe at once). She ends up trapped into thinking she's almost at Warp 10 forever.
- In "The Brave and the Bold", the villain Malkus was trapped for 10,000 years in the instruments of his handiwork. After the events in the novels, he's trapped for considerably longer.
In Jeffrey Sackett's Mark of the Werewolf, Janos Kaldy becomes the titular werewolf every full moon, whose only purpose is to dismember and eat people, and turn self-serving priests into werewolves themselves. He spends three thousand years attempting suicide, which is hampered by being immortal and Nigh Invulnerable no matter which form he's in. He and Claudia get better. Neville doesn't.
The Boy Who Couldn't Die. The main character gets one of these for not doing enough research.
In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the titular character of Tess suffers an example of rape being worse than death. She is sent to live and work for some not relatives of her family. There she meets a guy named Alec, who is attracted to her and eventually rapes her. Tess's life goes downhill from there.
In The Edge Chronicles, anyone who wanders into the Twilight Woods is immortal as long as they stay there. However, the woods also make any unsuspecting travelers go insane, and despite the immortality, you can be very much hurt, more or less rotting away while unable to die or even go comatose,and also completely insane and lost. In the series, this fate is indeed actually inflicted on some characters, with no evidence as to if they ever escape, except Tem Barkwater, who makes it out.
Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Raises Hell deals out such fates to three of the villains (which for two of them is deliciously karmic): the ifrit, the vampire priestess, and Nick, the smug weretiger, are tricked (in the case of the first two) and outright thrown into Grant's magical cabinet. The priestess, at the time, is on fire...and all of them are presumably doomed to be trapped in this world's version of Chthuluverse, imprisoned, tortured, or otherwise driven mad, forever.
Kage Baker's Company series has a ton of this. There's an entire research facility, the "Bureau of Punitive Medicine", where Immortals are continually tortured until a way can be found to kill them off for good. Even aside from that, Immortals come up with all sorts of nasty ways of getting rid of each other; specific fates include being imprisoned in a submarine buried in silt at the bottom of the ocean, being buried under a slab of concrete and having a building built on top of them, being reduced to ooze by nanomachines that tear them apart molecule by molecule just as quickly as they regenerate...
In one of Simon R. Green's Nightside novels, John and Suzie confront some demons. In an attempt to intimidate them, the demons show them their lunch: a young woman, half consumed, yet still conscious and suffering. Recognizing this trope when she sees it, Suzie immediately shoots the woman in the head, then proclaims there are some things she won't stand for.
In Gav Thorpe's Warhammer 40000 novel Angels of Darkness, one of the Fallen, captured by the Dark Angels, tells his torturer his full story (as he claims to be true). He is told that he will not be killed. He will be carefully tended and kept alive and prisoner and able to listen the scream of Luther, who is also alive and prisoner forever. By the end of the novel, his torturer is convinced that he is right, and when sending off his final message, asks that someone tell the prisoner that he was not wrong — but he also knows that they will not deliver such a message.
H.P. Lovecraft's Through the Gates of Silver Key Randolph Carter end's up trapped inside the doby of monstrous creature, that lives on the planet full of creatures like it, and even worse. He tries to take control and get free, but a seconds before sucess moster takes control completly, and ruins everything.
Being separated from your daemon in His Dark Materials.
Samson, enslaved and blinded by the Philistines, prays to die in the ruins of their temple to escape.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, when John Carter saved Dejah Thoris from Attempted Rape, and they try to escape, she tells him
"If we make it, my chieftain, the debt of Helium will be a mighty one; greater than she can ever pay you; and should we not make it," she continued, "the debt is no less, though Helium will never know, for you have saved the last of our line from worse than death."
The fate of children caught by the Other Mother in Coraline seem to be this, given they thank Coraline after she rescues them even though they are still dead.

Close Literature

A particularly ironic Fate Worse Than Death befalls an escaped Nazi war criminal in an episode of Night Gallery. He discovers that he has the power to wish himself into paintings (or at least, into one particular painting at a local art gallery, which features a lone figure in a serene fishing scene). Near the end of the story, when he's on the run from the authorities, he escapes to the museum and tries to wish himself back into the painting — only to discover that it has been replaced with a scene of the crucifixion of Jesus. He then gets to spend the rest of eternity trapped in the painting, undergoing perpetual torture as the figure of Jesus.
The season finale of ALIAS. See Heroes below.
Angel goes for the Karmic Death in "Hell Bound": the spirit Pavayne remains in the real world long after death by sending others to hell in his place, so they imprison him for eternity instead... a fate, Angel notes, that is rather hellish itself. Another example from the same show occurs when Angel's son decides that death is too good for his father. He seals Angel in a metal box and sinks him to the bottom of a bay, knowing that hunger can't kill vampires, but it can torment them until they go insane. Angel stays there for a whole summer.
On Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Catherine Madison was trapped in a cheerleading trophy by a spell that rebounded on her. Mercifully, she was probably killed three years later when the high school exploded.
- Fans speculate, though, that this somehow released Catherine to possess her daughter Amy again, explaining Amy's otherwise inexplicable Face Heel Turn.
On the Joss Whedon trend, the Reavers from Firefly are probably something like this.
Zoe: If they catch us, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skin on to their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order.
- Yikes.
  - In some cases, they take one victim and let them live while forcing them to watch. In the end, after they've witnessed such evil, they have no choice but to become it. That's how new Reavers are made.
In Blackadder Goes Forth, Blackadder is captured by the Germans, and is visited in his cell by a German commander who threatens him with a fate worse than death... unless he attempts to escape, in which case he'll suffer a fate worse than a fate worse than death. Although Blackadder immediately thinks of the term's origin, the fate worse than death turns out to be teaching home economics at a girls school in Heidelberg. Designed to strike at the very soul of a man of honour, it doesn't have the expected effect on Blackadder.
In the Doctor Who episode "The Family of Blood", the Family are hunting the Doctor to steal his remaining lives and become immortal. Unfortunately for the Family, after they really piss him off by murdering several innocents, bombarding the village he was living in and forcing him to give up his adopted human form, life and the woman he'd fallen in love with in order to stop them, he decides to grant their wish — and since this involves making them immortal whilst at the same time imprisoning them in various unpleasant and eternal prisons, they realize a bit too late that, originally, he was being nice.
In the Torchwood series 2 finale, Jack Harkness is taken back to the first century and buried alive. He proceeds to spend 18 centuries painfully dying and reviving over and over again. It's a good thing he suffers absolutely no long-term consequences (psychological or otherwise) from this.
- In Children of Earth, Jack got trapped in cement until his boy toy came to the rescue. Then the show proceeds to painfully remind us why being immortal sucks. Like watching your love die in his arms, knowing he himself can never die permanently. Really, this show has been working hard lately to assure viewers that Jack's brand of immortality would be utterly agonizing.
  - Let us not forget that before his entombment, Jack underwent the prolonged and (judging from the screams) extremely painful process of regrowing his body after being blown up by a bomb implanted in his lower torso. Lampshaded when a witness to this resurrection comments that he’d have been better off staying dead.
  - Also from Children of Earth, the 456's reason for needing the children - they use them to get high, bonding with them for decades.
In an episode of Farscape, Crichton had found a doctor able to remove the Neural Chip implanted in his brain by Scorpius. But it's tangled with the speech center of his brain, so removing the chip meant removing his ability to speak coherently (though the doc had some 'spares' she could use for parts to replace that portion of Crichton's brain). Midway through the operation, Scorpius waltzes in, incapacitates the surgeon, take the chip, and... leaves John strapped to the operating table, completely unable to speak.
- I condemn you John Crichton... to live. So that your thirst for unfulfilled revenge will consume you! Goodbye.
Ascertained and subsequently often subverted in Highlander: The Series. Many Immortals suffer from a Fate Worse Than Death. Others (like Duncan) want to be mortal so they can die, but continue to fight to keep their heads.
- A particularly notable case was a flashback to when Duncan was serving on a 18th century sailing ship. The captain was a cruel and sadistic immortal, and eventually the crew mutinied. Rather than have them find out about immortals by watching him come back to life after they kill him, Duncan instead has them maroon the captain on an island with no food or water, where he waits for years until another ship passes by.
- Likewise the Nazi who (before he was a Nazi) was chained up and dumped into the Seine and lay on the bottom for over 14 years.
Heroes', uh, Hiro, proves he can be as vengeful as any villain when he leaves Adam Monroe, the murderer of his father, Buried Alive in a grave at the same cemetery his father was interred in, knowing that Adam cannot die due to his regenerative abilities, and will forever be entombed alive. According to the online comics, Adam spends this time suffocating and reviving over and over again. Do NOT piss off Hiro.
- Luckily for Adam, he only spends a few weeks at the most down there until Angela Petrelli forces Hiro to dig him up for information. Unfortunately he only lasts a few episodes before he suffers fate that is exactly as worse as death.
One ancient Goa'uld in Stargate SG 1 was, after a revolt by his people, locked in his sarcophagus (which can heal anything up to and including death) with a carnivorous beast. The sarcophagus kept both him and the beast alive for decades, with the beast eating him alive the whole time until the body finally died (as even the sarcophagus has its limits), with the symbiote jumping into the beast.
- The system lord Ba'al once had the captured Jack O'Neill tortured to death repeatedly and then revived in the sarcophagus, only to start again the next day.
- Apophis was tortured the same way (possibly worse, since it was not to draw information) by Sokar. Also, it is arguable if Anubis' ending is possibly worse than death.
- It's said that the experience of being used as a host by a Goa'uld for thousands of years will drive humans insane.
  - Despite this, Ba'al's host seems to be okay after being separated from the symbiote. Technically both the host and the symbiote were clones of the original Ba'al and his host, and only a couple of years old. But the clone host would still (due to the genetic nature of Goa'uld memory and the fact that freed hosts retain their symbiotes' memories) remember being a host for thousands of years.
- Stargate Atlantis' Wraith are capable of sending people to the very brink of dying by old age... then return them to normal... then take them back to the brink... again, and again, and again.
- Anubis ends up locked in an eternal battle with Oma Desala, leaving him no ability to do anything except fight to survive. And his egotistical nature would never allow him to just give up and let Oma kill him. The same probably applies to Adria in her struggle with Ganos Lal (aka Morgan Le Fey).
One episode of The Twilight Zone had a Nazi war criminal be tortured by the angry spirit of a Holocaust victim by experiencing the pain his victims felt before they died. He was eventually driven insane before being found by authorities, and the spirit warned that it would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.
"You will lower your shields and surrender your vessel. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
- In the original series, there was the ending of "The Alternative Factor", which left the matter and anti-matter Lazaruses trapped between universes, at each other's throats for eternity. It's compounded by Fridge Logic when you realize they really just had to imprison the insane Lazarus and destroy his ship to protect the two universes.
Vic Mackey... Oh, dear, Vic Mackey. Specifically: He cuts a deal with the feds - specifically, I.C.E. - that he helps bring in a major drug lord in exchange for immunity for past crimes (And Vic has A LOT of them) just as Claudette and the LAPD were about to close in on him. Looks like he's pulled a Karma Houdini and is about to start his dream job with Homeland Security. But then, best-friend turned fugitive Shane kills himself and his family, and leaves a suicide note blaming everything on Vic. Claudette reads the letter to the dumb-struck Vic. Then, while he's still reeling from that, arrests the last remaining Strike Team member, Ronnie, for all the stuff Vic had already copped to. Vic had lied to him about including him in the deal with the Feds. Ronnie proceeds to let the entire Barn know exactly what kind of bastard Vic was. Did I mention he screwed over Ronnie for nothing? Part of the deal was protection for Vic's estranged wife, Corrine. But she'd cut a deal with Claudette to try and snare Vic. So she was never in danger. AND she's put an order of protection out against Vic and took the kids into Witness Protection. With his reputation in shreds, Vic goes back to ICE headquarters to settle into his new life... only to be informed that he'll be spending the entirety of his ICE tenure as a paper pusher, assigned to fill out daily ten-page reports and if he quits or doesn't live up to expectation, his deal is voided and all the stuff he confessed to - up to and including murdering a fellow cop - comes into play. Worse than prison for a Cowboy Cop like Vic. Family gone, friends dead or betrayed, and career in tatters, the last scene of the show shows Vic seriously contemplating eating his gun, but deciding to soldier on.
- YMMV on this one. Show creator Shawn Ryan doesn't see it as a Fate Worse Than Death. I interpret the smirk on Vic's face during the final scene in which he decides to "soldier on" as a reversal. He was hit with a lot of unpleasant surprises in a short span of time, the combined shock of which nearly broke him (maybe), but in the end he realizes that he got off light. (After all, imagine trying to sell Claudette, Ronnie, Shane or Olivia on the proposition that Vic's fate is worse than death.) He'll compartmentalize the guilt and rationalize his actions, and try to salvage the situation to survive and adapt, because that's what Vic Mackey does.
Kings: Silas decides to spare his gay son Jack because he's already found a better punishment for him. As Thomasina explains when she brings Jack's wife to his room: "Your father wants for you a living death. To brick you into a wall with someone who loves you, who you can't stand the sight of... until you produce an heir whom Silas will take and raise right this time." When Jack begs her for mercy, she twists the knife: it's not so bad, all he has to do is close his eyes and think of his dead lover.

Close Live Action TV

The song One by Metallica details the life of a soldier, after he loses all his limbs, his sight, his speech, and his hearing due to a landmine. He has machines that breathe for him, and so he's unable to die. His mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body.
Darkness, imprisoning me! All I see, absolute horror! I can not live, I can not die! Trapped in myself, body my holding cell!

Close Music

This is Older Than Dirt: Prometheus was chained to a rock to forever have his liver eaten by an eagle. Since he was a Titan, he could not die. Fortunately, he was later freed by Heracles, who took pity on his plight.
- Norse Mythology has a similar fate for Loki (chained to a rock with the entrails of his slaughtered sons, and tormented by a snake perpetually dripping poisonous saliva into his eyes) although, being a Trickster, he gets out of it after a while... just in time to take part in The End Of The World As We Know It.
  - And all because the other gods claimed Loki had tricked Hödur into fatally shooting a mistletoe dart at the neigh-invulnerable Baldur, and then prevented Baldur's return from the afterlife in Hel, which was never actually proven. Well, he had to wait for his chains to be broken until Ragnarök, as was prophesied. He didn't actually manage to fast-talk his way out of this punishment.
- Greek mythology is actually full of these, Prometheus is simply the most famous. Tantalus, for example, killed his son Pelops and tried to feed him to the gods when they came over for dinner. In response, the gods killed Tantalus and sentenced him to forever be cursed in the underworld. He was placed in a pool with water up to his chin and delicious fruit dangling above his head, but whenever he tried to bend down and drink the water or reach up and grab the fruit, the water would drain away and the fruit would be blown just out of reach by a gust of wind. Sisyphus, punished for cheating death, was forced to roll an incredibly heavy boulder up a steep slope. When he was just about to reach the top, the rock would slip out of his hands (or he would run out of energy and the boulder would roll overtop of him) and tumble back down the slope, forcing him to start over. The Danaeids were also punished with a fate worse than death for murdering their husbands, as they were forced to try and fill a water trough using jars with no bottoms.
  - The only relief that the three mentioned above got was when Orpheus arrived. The song that he played asking for Eurydice's soul back not only melted Hades' heart, but quenched Tantalus' thirst, halted Sisyphus' boulder, and kept the water inside the jars... until he left.
  - And then there's Atlas, who has to hold the Earth (or the sky, according to The Other Wiki...) on his shoulders for all eternity.
  - Well, not for all eternity. Hercules passed by on his way to the Garden of the Hesperides and procured Atlas' help in the task of getting the apples in exchange for holding the sky up for a while. He later had to trick Atlas into re-assuming his burden after the task was done, because Atlas was going to leave him there.
- In Kevin O'Donnell Jr's short story "Gift of Prometheus" the protagonist is shot while attempting to use a time bracelet, and the ricocheting bullet causes serious damage to both the bracelet and himself. The damaged bracelet malfunctions and sends him to a kind of limbo outside space and time, and freezes him in time so he can't ever move or die or escape the pain.
- In Greek mythology, the personification of Dawn asked Zeus for eternal life for her lover Tithonus... and forget to ask for eternal youth for him. Consequently, he got so old and feeble that eventually he turned into a grasshopper.
In the Fourth Branch of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (Middle Welsh tale, prob. 11th century), Gwydion (the Anti Hero) tells Blodeuedd (a Femme Fatale) "I won't kill you, I'll do that which is worse to you" before turning her into an owl (note that he was serially turned into animals as a punishment earlier in the tale, so presumably knows what he's talking about).
- This gets references in The Owl Service by Alan Garner, which provides an Alternative Character Interpretation for Blodeuedd. It should be noted that Blodeuedd was a woman who was made of flowers by Gwydion so his nephew could have a wife, and she was turned into an owl because of a certain trope being heavily averted. This actually is a plot point, and to break the curse afflicting the main characters Blodeuedd must be freed of this curse.

Close Mythology

Warhammer has almost everyone who serves Chaos, eventually mutating into a mindless beast. But a particularly notable instance is Count Mordrek the Damned. As he's a chaos warrior, "the Damned" would usually be redundant. He constantly and violently mutates within his unremovable armor suit, and every time he dies the chaos gods bring him back to life. And unlike most people they do things like this to, he still appears to be sane and thinking, and remorseful over what they make him do.
Warhammer 40000. "It is better to die in vain than serve the demonic" just about qualifies.
- For the Eldar, this is pretty much true; if they die and their soulstones are destroyed, their souls are immediately consumed and tormented for the remainder of eternity by the Chaos God Slaanesh.
- Also happens a lot to non-Eldar, especially those that enter the Eye of Terror.
  - Unless, of course, you're an ork, in which case it's the best afterlife ever.
  - And the less said about those captured by the Dark Eldar, the better. One novel describes the victim of a Homunculus' attentions as a collection of skin and organs hanging individually from the ceiling on metal hooks... and the poor guy was still alive.
- What's worse is that one of the few surviving Eldar gods has been spared from death by Slaanesh because she was taken as Nurgle's slave. Nurgle keeps her in a cage and loves to give her "presents". However, since this is Nurgle, all of his "presents" are horrible mutations and diseases. Nurgle's servants don't count because they enjoy this sort of thing.
- One of the novels has a variation on this. A Chaos Marine, feeling remorseful about abandoning his loyalty to the Emperor, decides to kill the leader of the warband he is in. However, the attempted assassination is botched and the traitor is knocked unconscious and captured. He awakes in total darkness, unable to move or speak. He awaits his coming torture and interrogation, but it never arrives. The story ends as he realises he has been placed inside a Dreadnaught coffin, effectively granting him immortality but sealing him off from the world forever.
- Getting captured by Necrons. One Battlefleet Gothic entry describes guardsmen finding a single boy from a colony, the other inhabitants having been taken by Necrons. The boy died several hours after they found him. The Necrons had very carefully cut out no less than 30 of the boy's glands and left him there. The fate of the other colonists is best left unsaid...
Several spells and abilities in Dungeons And Dragons. For example, one spell in the Sandstorm book can turn a victim into a voiceless gust of wind or trap them as sand in the desert until released. An Epic spell, Damnation, teleports the target to Hell, and screws with their thoughts to the point where they believe they deserve the punishment.
- The Imprisonment spell traps its victim in a small magical sphere deep beneath the planet's crust. It also keeps it alive and conscious, forever.
- Another spell traps the target in a gem, and psychically tortures them until their alignment changes; at which point they actually thank you for "opening their eyes". The kicker? The spell is called Sanctify The Wicked, and it is an Exalted (IE: Good enough to make Paladins look like Rogues) spell, which changes them to Lawful Good.
  - It actually changes them to the alignment of the caster, which can be CG or NG as well. In addition, in D&D 3.5 all souls originate from the good-aligned Positive Energy Plane - Sanctify is just reverting them to their natural state. (The spell does not function on soulless enemies, such as constructs.)
  - Still pretty creepy though; it's pretty much on par with the Mind Rape spell.
  - In the beginning, this was considered to be the case for Drow transformed into Driders (basically a dark elf centaur, only replace "horse" with "giant spider"), and the transformation was a punishment by Lloth. Driders, it should be noted, are much stronger and tougher then ordinary dark elves, have more spell-like abilities, and these abilities are more potent then the ones that ordinary drow have. Additionally, Lolth has had various drider-like forms (when she was first introduced to the game, she basically resembled a huge spider whose head had been replaced with that of a female drow). If you're thinking this doesn't make sense, you aren't the only one; since 4th edition, becoming a Drider is now a blessing from Lolth, and they are respected and admired by Drow instead of being chased out of the city.
  - there is a sword in one of the 3.5 books (book if vile darkness i think) that on a critical hit or killing blow rips the soul from the victims body and tortures it until it is released
  - There is a spell used against vampires called Sunfire Tomb. It makes them feel as if constantly being burned by the light of the sun. The worst part is they don't die from it.

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Final Fantasy VIII has Ultimecia, who is trapped in a self-created time-loop where she will endlessly repeat the same events leading to her defeat by See D within an unfinished Time Compression, get thrown into the past, and then desperately transfer her powers to Edea in a futile hope that she will emerge victorious in the next cycle. Since Squall also travels back in time, he will give the idea for See D to Edea and condemn every Sorceress after Edea for hundreds of years and effectively prevent her from ever achieving perfect Time Compression. She is fully aware each and every time that she is going to be defeated but tries anyway, unable to escape her own fate. Then she has to repeat this failure again, and again, for the rest of eternity, and the ultimate irony is she was only hunted and mistreated in the future because of her actions in the past.
In the Infocom game Sorcerer, dallying in the prologue area will result in a Non Standard Game Over where the game's villain condemns the protagonist to an eternity in the Chamber of Living Death, wherein victims are perpetually (and painfully) eaten alive by plagues of parasites.
- Also, dallying too long in the final room without acting will get the protagonist sent to the Hall of Eternal Pain, where they will spend eternity as a powerless disembodied mentality, being tormented telepathically.
- And in the next-to-last room, there are three doors. Two of them lead to the Chamber of Living Death and the Hall of Eternal Pain. Try to find which one is the third one. Try hard.
- And failure to obtain (or, for that matter, use) the correct spell before the final confrontation results in a demon possessing the protagonist and using this new body to enslave the entire world. (In the demon's own words, "Now begins an epoch of evil transcending even your worst nightmares; a reign of terror that will last a thousand thousand years!") The kicker? He keeps the protagonist's mind alive and aware, so the protagonist is forced to watch as his controlled body sacrifices babies, forces slaves to build massive idols - with his face - and generally creates a literal Hell on Earth.
Infocom was at it again in The Lurking Horror. Don't kill the final Cosmic Horror fast enough and one of its formerly human slaves grabs you and throws you into it, which by this point you know is how it makes humans into former humans. Instead of the standard 'You have died' message, you see the far more chilling 'You have changed', followed by 'Sometimes, during your future existence, you remember your old life. At these times, you wish you had died instead.'
In Drakengard, the Anti Hero defeats the Creepy Child Big Bad. She begs him to kill her, but he decides that instead he's going to drag her around the world, forcing her to see the devastation she has caused. This doesn't sound too bad until you consider the Big Bad had the world balanced on the edge of ruin. Killing her would be too easy, no; he's going to make her take responsibility for everything, a child's nightmare.
- This turns out to have been an effective punishment, or at least truly a Fate Worse Than Death. The Big Bad of the first game is a playable character in the second, and she has repressed all the memories of her being the Big Bad and the punishment the protagonist of the first game inflicted on her. This becomes obvious when the Anti Hero of the first game shows up as an Anti Villain in the second, and the mere sight of him makes her go crazy.
  - She gets better.
Played for laughs in Persona 3: the boys "accidentally" spend too long in the hot spring, until after it switches from boys-only to girls-only. When Mitsuru and the rest of the girls enter, Akihiko freaks out and with good reason: if Mitsuru detects the boys in the ensuing minigame, she "executes" them; a fate not seen but referred to as "hell on earth".
- The manga adaptation indicates that she freezes them alive. If that's not horrific enough, I suggest that you read Dante's Divine Comedy about the very last circle of Hell, and imagine experiencing that, while ALIVE.
  - Another theory asks you to look at what Mitsuru does to enemies when she scores a critical hit in battle. And with high heels.
- A more serious example in the underlying implications of The Fall: with the coming of Nyx, the incarnation of Death itself, every single living thing will be consumed from the inside out by its own desire for destruction. Thus everything, everywhere, will lose all sense of self and become a mindless, soulless shell that can only moan and whimper, completely unaware of its own death. Should the protagonists choose to challenge this fate, the Appraiser/Nyx Avatar warns them that they will suffer more than they could possibly imagine, then die.
In Planescape Torment, when you explain to the Mercykiller Vhailor how your immortality works, he moves to punish you as each time you die and regenerate, someone else dies in your place...but you can get him to back off by explaining the downside. Vhailor, thought of even by other Mercykillers as a fanatic who'll scrag someone without evidence, decides that you are suffering punishment enough.
In the add-on to Dungeon Siege II called Broken World, anyone caught by the Familiar Surgeons is horribly mutilated, fused with parts of other bodies or weapons, and transformed into an insane "bound creature". Fortunately, this cannot happen to player characters.
In the backstory of Utawarerumono, Witsarnemitea reduced the scientists who studied him to immortal slimes not unlike the I Have No Mouth example above.
Lost Kingdoms has the Runestones. In the first gave, they weren't alluded to much, but when the second game came around, you find out that a Runestone is a soul that one of the three gods sucked out of a living person and turned into one.
In War Craft 3, one of the Scourge's Xanatos Gambit is to spread the plagued grains in Stratholme, so people who ate from that will turn into zombies, and their souls will be taken by Mal'Ganis and transferred to the Lich King. Arthas, having learned this, makes a drastic decision to purge the entire city, thinking that such fates are something worse than death. Poor chap didn't know (at the time) that it's not the Stratholme citizens the Lich King is after. It's his soul.
Upon completing the original Half-Life, Gordon Freeman is made to choose between being frozen in time or "A battle you have no chance of winning." Either option ends the game, both seem to suck.
- However, the first option was just putting Gordon into stasis until G Man needed his services again. So Yeah.
Reaching the end of the Fourth Kalpa in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne reveals that Hijiri has been condemned to an eternity of life, death and rebirth without hope of reincarnation. He will be forced to witness the Conception and the creation of the new world over and over again until the end of time, but will never be allowed to influence its outcome himself. He received this punishment from God for committing "the ultimate sin" in a previous life; because of this, many suspect that he is a reincarnation of Aleph from Shin Megami Tensei II, who committed deicide at the end of the game by killing God. That's right, God.
Plundered Hearts, another Infocom title, uses this to get around having to state upfront that people want to rape or have raped the main character. This makes more sense when you realize that the game is basically an interactive version of a cheesy romance novel.
In Zork Grand Inquisitor, pretty much all crimes under the rule of Inquisitor Yannick are punishable by being "totemized", having your body painfully transfigured into an immobile totem for all eternity. Justified in that this is part of Yannick's plot to eliminate magic from the land of Zork: if a person is totemized instead of killed, their body's natural supplies of magical energy aren't released and the overall level of magic in the world drops slightly.
In Baldurs Gate (and the source world) has the Imprisonment Spell, in which the victim is instantly trapped deep within the earth, and magically kept alive forever, unable to escape until someone casts "Freedom" at where the Imprisonment is held. In Shadows of Amn, the main character is threatened with this by a particularily hard-lined Harper, and could optionally fight against a high-powered wizard that was driven insane by the experience.
Both Tal Rasha and the player-character from the first Diablo game make the unwise decision to insert a soulstone with a demon into their bodies. The results for both of them are not pretty.
I would argue that the Heartless-izing in the Kingdom Hearts series is worse than death. Either your heart gets sucked out and your body and soul cease to exist, or your body and soul get transformed into an unfeeling body bag with magic powers, which ceases to exist entirely after a while...and your heart gets sucked out anyway.
In certain installments of the Quake series, there is a cybernetic alien race called the Strogg, who build their ranks by capturing their enemies and putting them through a horrific process, referred to by the human soldiers in the forth game as "Stroggification". This process not only involves having several body parts sliced off and crudely replaced with cybernetic parts (without any anasthetic whatsoever), but also involves having a chip implanted into the brain of the unfortunate victim, which is then activated by a machine, so that the victim can be controlled by the Nexus, a giant brain that has control over all other Strogg soldiers (it is unknown if there are any original, pureblood Strogg who possess free will). Watch it here! Worst of all, is that the victims still retain their humanity for a short while after the chip activation but they are unable to control their actions. This is seen in the forth game, when Scott Voss is transformed into a huge, hulking cyborg, and yells at Matthew Kane to run away and that "I can't control it!", shortly before going beserk and attacking Kane. Sometimes, the process fails, resulting in the victims becoming shambling, zombie-like creatures who are then transported to a dumping ground.
Since nearly every major character in Grim Fandango is already dead by virtue of the setting, these are the only things that are real threats. Examples include being made into a dam by demon beavers, and being "sprouted" — having plants grow from your body until you become a patch of flowery meadow.
The good end to Fallout 3's "Tranquility Lane" quest has you condemning Braun to spend the rest of eternity trapped in his vault with no possible way to leave or interact with the outside world. Yes, he was a bastard who deserved punishment, but damn.
- From the same game, there's Harold. When you find him, he's been turned into a tree and cannot grow or die. He, naturally, begs you to kill him.
Chrono Cross gives us the Abyss Beyond Time. Basically, whenever a world's timeline is changed, the world, and everyone in it, are instantly transported to a dark, empty void to make room for the new, altered world. Let me repeat that: Time Travel causes billions of innocent people to become trapped in an endless void for all eternity everytime its used. Kinda gives a darker light to the events of the last game.
Being turned into a Nobody could pretty much qualify. Firstly, your heart is either stolen or corrupted, turning you into a mindless heart-collecting creature. Then what's left behind of you starts to move around on it's own will and - if you're lucky - it'll still look human. If you're not so lucky, you'll look like some vaguely-human twisted-like thing. It gets worse because not only will you technically not exist, you'll also have no emotions, and when you eventually get done in with a giant key, you'll leave nothing behind to show that you ever existed. Thanks Disney!
- A couple very impacting examples include:
Demyx: "Noooo wayyyy!" With a nice sob thrown in to bring it on home.
Larxene: "No... Nooooo!! I refuse to lose to a bunch of losers! I... I'm fading?! NO...this isn't...the way I... I won't...ALLOW..."*fades away*
- There is also a few times when they talk about being turned into a Dusk as a punishment. Only once is death ever threatened, and that was more implying that it hurt the talker more than the victim.
From Devil Survivor, Naoya AKA Cain, as in the biblical Cain And Abel, has been cursed to remember every single memory from all of his previous reincarnations, including the first one where he murdered his brother, resulting in him living non-stop for thousands of years constantly tormented by far too much information for one brain, never being allowed to forget his greatest sin. He can still die, but since he then reincarnates almost immediately with all memories intact, this just makes things worse. What makes it so sad is that he could get out of this; God didn't 'curse' him, this was a genuine attempt to give him time to reflect on his sin and repent. All he has to do to be forgiven is to admit he was wrong and sincerely apologize for the fratricide... but by this point, he's far too bitter to even consider that.
Lezard from Valkyrie Profile Silmeria threathens your party with this if you die against him (the only way you can actually get a Game Over in the game):
I will not slay you. From now and forever, no matter how much you entreat me, how pitifully you lament, you shall not die!
I grant you the rights accorded to an enemy of the gods: You will live from now and forever, in an endless cycle of rebirth, condemned in each life to be hated, feared, scorned, punished and obliterated!
Live always with the screech of insects buzzing within your skull, ants gnawing at your eyeballs for ever and ever!

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Spoofed in Irregular Webcomic strip #671, where Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs is demoted into the Fate department, as A Fate Worse Than Death. He has no idea on how to go about it.
- Also, in strip #1954, "a pirate curse can be a thousand times worse than death".
Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire: Karnak falls into Hell and becomes a demon lord, even though he was just trying to save the world. Later, he decides to pull Siegfried down with him, after the latter's death. Celesto Morgan and the Infernomancer suffer a different Fate Worse Than Death: exile to an alternate plane of pure horror. Although they've recently escaped...
In Erfworld, if the ruler of a faction dies while having no heir, all of their cites go "neutral". It is not pleasant at all: neutrals are frozen in time until someone attacks the city, and if they repel the attack, they presumably get frozen again until they are attacked again. It has not been specified whether or not the neutral units are conscious during the time they are frozen or not.
Order Of The Stick Big Bad Xykon does this in Start Of Darkness to Dorukan and Lirian by binding their souls into a black gem he still carries with him, keeping them from the Afterlife. But it sort of backfires, since though they're not in the afterlife, they are together.
- This was actually intended, as Xykon remarks that he is not a sore loser.
- It's worth noting that the spell Xykon uses (appropriately called Soul Bind, by the way) is an actual Dungeons And Dragons spell, so you can pull this one off yourself if you're feeling particularly evil.
- The Snarl also falls into this trope, as it obliterates the souls of its victims, also erasing their chances of an afterlife. Even gods.
Riane (Alien Dice) considers being a captured Dice to be a Fate Worse Than Death. In this case, though, it's used in the same way it originally meant, as the dialogue implies she was raped during captivity. In Legacy, she actually confirms this, though she uses politer, albeit sarcastic, terminology. No wonder she gleefully encouraged Lexx to kill her.
Being possessed by a slaver wasp in Girl Genius. At least, according to Mr. Rovainen.
Characters that get to live in dream world in One Over Zero says that it's this trope.

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Oran's High Octane Nightmare Fuel speech to the defeated scumbag Mars in Chapter 19 Act 3: "I have seen you scum—staked to the ground at night—belly and manhood split wide, wailing as jagged beaks tear and peck—as a million insect jaws carve the pulp. And when morning comes, I am standing over your seeping husk. You cannot turn from the horror. You cannot stop the rising sun that burns you into blindness. You cannot close your eyes... for I am feasting on their lids.
- The best part is that Raimi immediately chimes in afterward, saying that would be too kind. What does he have to say to Mars? See the Broken Saints entry in Prison Rape.
In the web-novel Fragile, Severin's insanity is portrayed as such. During the course of the story, Page even says that he would have rather seen him die than experience it.

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Subverted in the very first episode of Earthworm Jim:
Psycrow: If Earthworm Jim doesn't cough up his Super Suit in the next 20 minutes, you will face a fate worse than death!
Princess What's-Her-Name: Uh-huh. Such as?
Psycrow: (not expecting the question) Huh? Oh, I don't... you know... something really awful, with pointy... and it'll chafe and stuff.
Princess What's-Her-Name: Fate worse than death. Uh, big talker.
Parodied in Futurama; when the characters are being rapidly de-aged, Farnsworth explains that if this keeps up, "we'll keep getting younger until we suffer a fate worse than death: pre-life! Then death."
Megabyte plays with this to Bob in Reboot, when Bob announces his plan to reprogram the virus rather than delete him saying that he doesn't believe in deletion and that it isn't Megabyte's fault as he was just programmed to be this way. Megabyte's response?:
Megabyte: So I won't be a virus?
Bob: That's the plan.
Megabyte: Ah, a fate worse than deletion and they call me a monster.
From Avatar: The Last Airbender:
Prince Zuko: If the Earth Kingdom catches us, we'll be killed.
General Iroh: But if the Fire Nation catches us, we'll be turned over to Azula.
(pause)
Prince Zuko: Earth Kingdom it is.
In Batman The Brave And The Bold, Gentleman Ghost almost gives Batman one of these, conjuring the spirits of criminals and making them drag him down to, presumably, Hell. Deadman saves him, though.
- It's later revealed that Gentleman Ghost was doing this as revenge for his own fate worse than death. Even though Batman actually tried to save him from his own self-destructive actions which truly caused it. Due to Time Travel, Batman knew exactly how the whole thing would turn out, but the soon-to-be Ghost refused to listen to him.
Dark Danny of Danny Phantom may have survived outside of his now non-existant time period, but he is forever trapped in that Fenton Thermos. The last shots are of him struggling to get out. He would have, too, if not for Executive Meddling, but he's stuck there for the rest of his afterlife.

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Real Life: All the research-institutions during WWII. All of them. May it be the German, Japanese or American ones. They all did horrible things to people beyond imagination. Don't read on if you have a weak stomach: The experiments included vivisection — cutting people open like an autopsy while they were conscious; cutting arms off and sewing them back on reversed. Sewing two children together to make siamese twins. Cuting fetuses from their mothers' wombs and vivisecting them while the mothers were watching. Infecting people with multiple terminal illnesses. Extracting sensory organs (ears, eyes, etc.). Transferring dog fetuses into human wombs to see if they would grow. Transferring sexual organs between men and women. Shortly said, they cut off and sewed together everything in every combination. Dear Gods, let this never happen again!
- Wait...American? I know this isn't That Other Wiki, but I'd sure like to see a source on that. I'm pretty sure that, while the Western Allies did some nasty things, there was nothing even close to that bad.
  - The only thing that I can think of that comes close is the Tuskegee Study, which is pretty bad but not on the order of Unit 731.
Some writers of stories for The Holders series have a little too much fun with this; making the wrong move at any point of a Holder's ordeal will earn some specific form of fate worse than death. It's an attempt at High Octane Nightmare Fuel, but the effectiveness diminishes when all 500+ existing stories play the trope straight, usually several times per story.
The story of Dax Cowart easily fits. The Other Wiki doesn't do it justice; it appears in at least one medical ethics textbook. It was so horrific to go through that Cowart maintains to this day that he should have been permitted to choose death rather than endure it. As part of his treatment, when his deliberate choice to end his own treatment was outright ignored as soon as it looked like he was in danger of finding the death he was after all along, he was placed into a large vat of chlorinated chemicals to fight infected burns; upon his removal, so many nerves would register pain that he'd scream at the top of his lungs until passing out from exhaustion.
Locked-in syndrome.
- Other Wiki Page if you're curious.
- Also a real life subversion. In a survey of 13 French patients who had suffered from Locked-in Syndrome for more than a year 7 had never even considered euthanasia, 6 said they had thought about it in the past and only 1 admitted to wanting to die at the time the survey was conducted. The same survey also found 48% rated their mood as good versus just 5% who rated their mood as bad and only 13% considered themselves depressed. If Locked-In sydrome is worse than death, someone must have forgot to tell them.

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