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Don't worry, Brainiac's warranty is still good.
"You insensitive prick! Do you have any idea how much that stings?"
"As far as I can tell, Wolverine's secret weakness is that he heals so quickly that he forgets not to be injured in the first place."
The Healing Factor is an amazing super power, capable of feats from quick healing to re-growing whole limbs or even one's entire body in seconds. Sadly, it's more passive and less visually impressive than Eye Beams or even Super Strength, both of which you can show off regularly with Mundane Utility to clue in new readers or viewers that the characters have powers.
There's only one way to show off immortality, after all.
So for writers who don't want to go the route of " Luckily My Powers Will Protect Me" every issue, they have to find new and inventive ways for the hero to show off their regeneration, whether by their own clumsiness, being an accident magnet, or the target of lethal attacks. Accidents usually include: deep cuts, lost limbs, third degree burns, and otherwise flirting with sure death. The problem is that while redundant exposition is avoided, the character in question gets a reputation as clumsy to the point that should they lose their regeneration they'd die or be seriously crippled, prompting onlookers to go " Good Thing You Can Heal".
Another side effect of the trope is that normally non-fatal accidents suddenly become almost certainly fatal ones just so the character has a death to avoid: If someone with regeneration so much as trips, you can expect them to end up a mangled heap of broken bones, many of them sticking out of their skin. And don't ask what happens when they get a paper cut.
This can even become canon, as regenerating brawlers come to depend on their regeneration to the point they just use painful and suicidal tactics because they can heal from it.
It also tends to escalate into a rather gorier version of The Worf Barrage. Since the regenerator can take damage that would otherwise kill any other team member, it becomes their "job" to be the target of a " No One Could Survive That" at the hands of the Monster Of The Week or recurring baddy because Immortal Life Is Cheap. It shows that the bad guy is ready and willing to kill, without actually having somebody die. At its worst, it can break Willing Suspension Of Disbelief by having the regenerator come back from being completely incinerated ( Shape Shifter Baggage is usually involved when that much mass is lost), or a character with clones casually killing them.
It's not even limited to characters who can heal; any character who can come back from a normally crippling injury for any reason is subject to this trope.
A subtrope of Could Have Been Messy, with "messy" as in "fatal". They tend to coincide if the one getting mauled is bloodless (robots, golems, etc.)
Related tropes include: Pulling Themselves Together, Appendage Assimilation and Losing Your Head. Despite occasional griping, these characters tend to agree Living Forever Is Awesome. When a character deliberately injures themselves to prove their Healing Factor, it's Self Mutilation Demonstration.
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Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In the Pokemon Special manga, Koga's Arbok has the unique ability to regenerate any severed portion of its body as long as its head is intact. Unsurprisingly, attacks that would inflict only minor injuries on other Pokemon (being bitten by another Arbok, being tail-whipped) literally slice this Arbok in half.
- This was a Ret Con added much later to try to tone down the level of the violence in the manga to be more in-line with the games in anime. Before the Retcon, we were lead to believe that one of the heroes totally sliced that Arbok in two and left it for dead.
- In Trigun, both Vash and his brother Knives have a very impressive regeneration capability. However, Vash appears to have less so, as his body looks like it was sewn back together very, VERY poorly. In the manga, it's shown that Plants in general have the capability to regenerate; however, it has a limit. Plants can only regenerate so much before it kills them. The way one can tell is by watching the color of their hair, as regeneration will cause their hair to slowly turn from its normal color to black. Once every strand is black, the Plant dies. Problem is, Vash is almost completely raven-haired by this point.
- Proven: at the end of the manga, both Vash and Knives' hair have gone completely black, indicating they're both a VERY short way from death. Knives' went as such due to reconstructing his body from almost nothing; he later uses his power to create an apple tree, and it's heavily implied that this finally killed him.
- In Gankutsuou, it's really a good thing the Count is Gankutsuou's host. Thanks to that, he can survive being shot, being stabbed several times, having Gankutsuou's eyes pierce through his skull, and even being deliberately stabbed by Fernand's Humongous Mecha in an awesomely impressive scene. That doesn't prevent him from hurting like crazy though, as attested by his agonizing screams and his frequently passing out.
- In Blade Of The Immortal, the main character, Manji, can regenerate from any injury. He is an excellent swordsman and notes himself that he used to be better but, due to his immortality, has gotten sloppy. In one fight, he's glad to have an arm lopped off by an opponent, because the loss of the weight made him just a tad faster, just enough so that he can now best his foe.
- Mermaid Saga. Yuta and Mana appear to find themselves in situations inexplicably designed to make them bleed as much as possible. Sure, there's some bloodshed to be had when dealing with immortal crazies, but did Masato really need to bind Mana's arms and legs with barbed wire?
- Mai-chan's Daily Life, a horrifically Nightmare Fuel Unleaded guro h-doujin, deals with special humans that, short of complete and total disintegration into ash, can regenerate from pretty much any injury, no matter how fatal. The occupations for most of these people: hired sex slaves for the cruel and sadistic. Not surprisingly, they wouldn't survive even a fraction of the stuff they engage in if they didn't have their healing factor.
- Rin in Mnemosyne seems very prone to being captured and tortured quite gruesomely and having things happen like her arm being shot off by a sniper rifle, being blown up with a massive charge of explosives, and even getting sucked through a running jet engine. Being immortal, she manages to walk them off, though not without quite a lot of pain in the process of regrowing/reattaching lost parts.
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, Ed's metal limbs get chopped off pretty often, but his real limbs barely get hurt. Similarly, the only place Al has never been hurt is the blood seal at the base of his neck, which is also the only part that Ed cannot repair.
- That's mostly because Ed often uses his automail arm to protect his fleshy parts because he knows they can be repaired, and Al takes special care to avoid taking damage to his bloodseal because any damage to it would kill him.
- In his first meeting with Al in the manga, Greed invokes this deliberately, having a henchman literally smash his face off with a big hammer to demonstrate the Homunculi's healing factor. In general, all the homunculi have a tendency to get sliced, diced, and shot to pieces throughout the series.
- In Baccano!, Czeslaw Meyer seems to be the only main character to repeatedly suffer being shot, having limbs ripped off, and other rather gruesome events as the show tries hard to Break The Cutie.
- Really? I'd say this trope applies to most immortals. In the first episode alone Firo would have been killed and had several fingers sliced off on separate occasions. Somewhat justified, as the main cast were mobsters and criminals who are already rather prone to being shot at. And after they become immortals, they still get shot plenty.
- The trope is also invoked in one episode, when Szilard drinks the Elixir of Life given to him and the others by a demon Maiza had just summoned. After drinking it, he suspects he's been cheated and demands the demon to prove that the elixir was real. He obliges by immediately slicing off the top of his head.
- The Guyver can regrow from the tiniest piece of material left on the control metal. And that's not theoretical: this actually happens to Sho in one of his very first adventures, and results in him being a clone of himself. He has to fight a monster that generated from his severed arm. The only thing that can destroy a Guyver is the destruction of the control metal which is what happened to Guyver II.
- Shows up a lot in Jojos Bizarre Adventure Part 4, since The Hero Josuke's Stand Crazy Diamond can heal damn near anything. The twist is that Josuke can't heal himself with this ability.
- It's explicitly stated that being or becoming a Stand user makes you tougher and lets you heal faster, thus allowing most of the cast (protagonists and antagonists alike) to suffer grievous bloody wounds, severed body parts, shattered bones and ruptured organs, and sometimes losing parts of their head, without a single "ow". In part 6 they go without a dedicated healer for a long time (Jolyne makes do by stitching up injuries with her thread) and the wounds are no less horrid.
- Dio's vampiric abilities lets him survive just about anything except sunlight and hamon. In part 1, he gets his head split vertically which only prompts him to push them together again, and later fights on effectively after his head's been severed completely.
- Similarily, "The Men in the Pillar" are walking body horrors and can do all sorts of squicky stuff without permanent damage.
- Exemplified in the humor manga Hannah Of The Z, where the titular character's power is absurdly powerful regeneration — but her body is also comically weak in every other way, to the point where simply attempting to poke through the cap of a milk bottle or pick up a heavy object can cause her bones to break.
- Yakumo in 3x3 Eyes has been turned into a "wu", an immortal guardian of the last known Sanjiyan (Triclops) who regenerates even if he has been turned into paste. At the start of the series, he regularly gets beaten, chopped up, and blown up (it started when he was hit by a truck). At one point, he deliberately grabs a lighter and jumps into a fountain full of gasoline in order to kill a monster.
- While everyone received injuries in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the really serious ones, such as impalement and losing huge chunks of flesh, went to the Wolkenritter and the Combat Cyborgs, who can be repaired and/or have Healing Factors. Good thing too. As one Flashback showed, even with Healing Hands, a normal human who gets critically wounded would require almost a year to recover, and that's if they're lucky.
- Alucard from Hellsing is so much of an asshole, that almost every single fight sequence starts with him purposely letting the enemy blow him off into tiny little bits pieces if only so he can shape-shift back into his human form and open a can of whoop-ass. Not sure if it really falls into this trope though, seeing how it's established pretty early that he is both invincible and a giant prick about it.
- Kenji Murasame in his appearance in Giant Robo is so known for this it earned him the nickname 'Murasame the Immortal' and is instrumental to the finale.
- This trope defines Claymore. Offensive-type Claymores can lose an arm or leg, and simply hold the severed limb to their stump and have it heal. They can even regrow lost limbs, though the limb becomes regular, human strength. Defensive-types are nigh immortal, capable of regrowing lost limbs in minutes and routinely surviving distractions like being nearly cut in half. Odds are if you like a character who's a Defensive-type, you're going to see her get fucked up routinely.
- Bleach, anyone? Some characters exhibit truly instant healing, while Ichigo, the protagonist, simply gets cut up so regularly he ought to be 100% walking scar tissue by now.
- In Ghost In The Shell, cyborgs can recover from (or rather, be repaired from) pretty much any injury that doesn't affect the brain. The Major, in particular, has a tendency to get limbs (and in one case, her head) blown off, but other characters are not exempt from this.
- Twice, if you're counting both the TV series and the first movie.
- Naruto's Healing Factor thanks to the demon fox has lead him to having some of the most extreme injuries in the series, including having an electrified hand shoved through his chest and all of his skin burnt off. Tsunade also qualifies, being stabbed and slashed repeatedly by Orochimaru during their fight and shrugging it off with her Genesis Rebirth technique.
- However, Naruto and Tsunade sort of avert it later on, as the attacks get more powerful due to Sorting Algorithm Of Evil but unlike others on this list their healing powers haven't. Said injuries happened quite a while ago and they have yet to be matched.
- It has, however, been noted that their ability to rapidly heal has a drawback. Healing a major injury can actually takes years off their lifespan.
- What about Orochimaru HIMSELF? His regenerative powers have let him survive getting set on fire while bombarded with shuriken, having his face ripped open, getting his neck broken, having one arm torn off, his whole body getting ripped into two pieces, getting pounded into the ground head first by a giant Breath Weapon, and having sword repeatedly cut the pieces of him apart; it's always been sealing techniques that had any permanent effect. It doesn't even seem like he's even TRYING to avoid half this stuff.
- Jugo and Suigetsu also seem prone to rather insane injuries to demonstrate their Nigh Invulnerability, like getting hit with a blast that destroyed a mountain or getting impaled through the chest, smashed into a wall, and crushed under rubble all in a row.
- dear has Kisara who is immortal. In one practice match, he impales one of his hand onto the opponent's blade in order to disarm and win.
- In Basilisk, Tenzen is the big bad of the Iga clan and his unique special ability is immortality including full regeneration. Because of this, he is killed by at least five different ninjas of the rival Kouga clan (and several times elsewhere), making him appear the least competent of the ten ninjas.
- Creed from Black Cat is defeated a number of times, fatally if not for his immortality.
- The Evangelions can take a heck of a lot of punishment (e.g. dismemberment, impalement, decapitation) while still being possible to repair right back to normal (though the process of doing so is shown to be lengthy and extremely expensive) - and that's not even counting the MP Evas, which are all reactivated after being severely mauled by Asuka. That said, over the course of the series at least three Evas are mangled for good.
- Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita. Not a direct application of this trope, since neither Gally nor her gigantic cyborg foes regenerate per se. However, since the in-universe rule of thumb is that as long as the brain is intact, it can be grafted into any kind of body overnight, it amounts to the same thing. Coincidentally, every fight she's in features lots and lots of dismemberments, slashfests and Ludicrous Gibs - on both sides. Good thing she can bolt those legs back on.
- In D Gray Man, Allen Walker has a healing factor that only applies to his left eye and left arm. Guess what happens? And Kanda Yuu would have been dead a while ago if he didn't have regenerative capabilities.
Comic Books
- Wolverine from the X-Men combines his regeneration with Made Of Iron to be pretty damn careless. In one instance, his entire body, save his adamantium skeleton, was incinerated by a Wave Motion Gun, and he regenerated from a handful of brain cells left in his cranial cavity.
- The movie version went with "painful and suicidal because he can", including an instance where he punctured his own lungs to get out of restraints (and another, less fatal, of putting out his cigar on his palm, complete with wince).
- Wolverine encountered this trope in the third film when, for the first time in the trilogy, he sliced someone's limbs off. Naturally, the mook is revealed to just so happen to be a regenerator and easily regrows his arms over and over again. After some consideration, Logan proves to be able to defeat the goon with a good kick to the groin. "Grow those back."
- Also in the third film, near the end, he's the one that stays behind to face Dark Phoenix for this very reason.
- On one occasion in Ultimate X-Men, he had another mutant blast him with fire in order to break him out of his restraints, which burned off much of his skin and hair (but not his Magic Pants). This was-of course-done since he could (and would) regenerate from the damage.
- The comparatively minor character Shatterstar from the spinoff X-Force has correspondingly less extreme healing abilities... but he needs them, because his signature attack is stabbing himself through the gut to impale somebody standing behind him.
- This is also how Marvel lampshades Logan's near-constant cigar smoking: the Healing Factor 'makes it okay'.
- In depth explanation: Wolverine cannot get cancer. If one of his cells turns cancerous, the surrounding cells will immediately team up and beat the cancer out of it. He's THAT violent.
- Averted in the the Origin's movie. Wolverine only takes serious damage during intense battles. Even when he's a lumberjack with spinning buzzsaws, cliffs, axes, and giant cords of wood all over the place he doesn't so much as get a knock on the head.
- And let's not forget one of the Animated X-Men's memories of his past is a secret mission during World War II along Captain America. Their superior tells them they have to storm an enemy base from an helicopter and it must be done really fast. "How fast?" "You aren't going to use a parachute". Cap'n knows he can do it, but he looks worried at Logan (didn't have the adamantium bones yet), who reassures him he'll be ok. They then jump, Cap'n stands like nothing happened, and sees the poor soldier in the ground, with his legs terribly broken. He's going to go for help, but Logan tells him it's ok, then he regenerates, stands and tells Cap'n they have a mission to do.
- Robotman in the All-Star Squadron comics was a non-healer example; he'd constantly get his arms and legs sliced off, since he has a robot body and they can be fixed. The Doom Patrol Legacy Character version underwent similar travails.
- Similarly, Red Tornado of the Justice League tends to be the official team sacrificial lamb since he can be rebuilt rather easily.
- Minor Marvel character Wolfsbane has a 'healing factor', which means she has been knocked unconscious (with a rifle butt!) and recovered with a short headache ('the lord didn't make me pretty, but he gave me a thick skull'); it was implied that she survived being slashed with a Katana by the Silver Samurai, and her friend Dani Moonstar's defence of her while down gained the Samurai's respect, so he left them alive.
- This trope also applies to invulnerability. In the theatrically released version of the film Superman II, Clark Kent manages to convince Lois Lane that's he's not Superman, then immediately trips, stumbles and puts his hand into a gas fireplace, revealing his invulnerability and with it his secret identity. We're asked to believe that a man with superhuman speed and agility, who's guarded his true identity for his entire lifetime, suddenly has an attack of clumsiness that just happens to show off his powers.
- Well, the original version of the scene had Lois shoot some blanks at him, making him think she already knew for sure. So it all comes down to, would you rather have a sudden cluminess attack, or be asked to believe that Clark couldn't tell that no bullets were actually bouncing off him?
- Blanks do actually fire a projectile, and can actually injure or even kill people if they're fired from a close enough range. They just don't pack the wallop that bullets do.
- He reflexively did the Superman dodge, and was too busy being shocked that LOIS LANE SHOT HIM!
- In Preacher 'V-word' Cassidy can regenerate back from anything given enough time; blood merely speeds up the process. At one point, he's captured by the villains after pretending to be Jesse, and after they realize he's practically invulnerable, trap him in a pit and shoot him over and over with a rifle. By the time Jesse rescues him, he's got one leg, one arm, and no genitals, at least for a while. When describing past events he mentions overdosing on heroin and being buried, eventually waking up in his coffin, forced to vomit up the embalming fluid and feed off insects until his organs regenerating enough to dig out of his own grave, the whole process taking over a month.
- He also recovered from being shot by the Saint of Killers, which is possibly even more remarkable considering that the Saint's guns, forged from the Angel of Death's sword, are supposed to be able to kill anyone, even immortals.
- Makes sense, since he's already dead.
- Though, considering how the Saint subsequently goes on to kill the Devil and God, who were never 'alive' in a sense to begin with, this troper would chalk it down to Power Creep Power Seep or Strong As They Need To Be on account of the Saint.
- Deadpool, the Merc with a Mouth. His regeneration ability is actually in part derived from Wolverine's own. A high tolerance of pain and insanity allow him to frankly not care about any damage he receives and keep fighting regardless. Only problem is, his brain is constantly in flux as a result, which is why he's... unstable.
- Deadpool is... thrilled to meet up with Alex Hayden (Agent X), who can also regenerate. Deadpool shows his affection by spelling out messages with Alex's entrails, and also stealing his pancreas just because he can.
- Deadpool has jumped face first into concrete from a 10 story building to try to "fix" looking like Tom Cruise.
- Deadpool has also jumped into a malfunctioning nuclear reactor to stop it from going nuclear.
- In his defense he didn't know if he would come back from that one. It was actually a bit touching.
- Lest we forget, in Cable & Deadpool, Cable's preferred method of getting Deadpool to leave him alone, at least at first, is to telekinetically blow up his brain, resulting in a nasty looking headwound and Deadpool being down for about an hour.
- Pretty much the entire reason for being for Mr. Immortal, who can come back from any fatal injury... and has no other powers.
- The first creatures to get hurt in Wormy (except for some wronged dwarves) are a pair of Trolls.
- Lampshaded by Cyborg in Titans #5, after his latest self-repair: "There. I am walking, with my new feet on the floor. Let's see if I can go the weekend without getting them blown off."
- Bill Willingham's supernatural superheroes The Elementals got mangled fairly regularly. Being that they were dead already, it was only a temporary inconvenience.
- Jack in Jack of Fables. It is explained that this is partially the result of some karmic payback the universe owes him for making himself nearly invincible. The universe hates to see invincibility exist without a purpose, so it punishes him at every opportunity.
- All of the Fable-folk have this ability which is directly proportional to the popularity of the Fable in question. Snow White recovered from a sniper bullet through the brain in a matter of months. Goldilocks healed up nicely from an axe to the head, a fall off a cliff, getting hit by a truck then falling off ANOTHER cliff into a river where she proceeded to drown repeatedly and get eaten by the local aquatic fauna after she was found by Mr Revise in Jack of Fables. Jack, since he's THE Jack of Tales (even though he's the antecedent to Wicked John) can heal from most things almost instantaneously. Most other fables can be killed but if they're just injured you can expect a fairly speedy recovery. Fables that die are given a burial in the Witching Well.
- Not sure if this counts, but even when a Fable does die, as long as the concept of that Fable lives on, a Replacement Goldfish will appear. This is why Revise keeps captured Fables locked up in a prison camp until their stories fade out of public consciousness instead of trying to kill them off directly.
- The DCU's Lobo, who was originally created as a parody of Wolverine and character types like him. He is able to regenerate from even one remaining drop of blood. In one issue of his book, he resorts to blowing himself up just to take out all the enemies surrounding him.
- Find a Doom Patrol story where Robotman doesn't lose at least one limb. Go ahead, I'll wait.
- In an early solo story, Robotman tracks an escaped killer through a booby trapped island, and rips off all his limbs to use them as various tools. He tears off his own leg and warps it into a giant key to open a door that he could have obviously just broken down, since he was strong enough to TEAR OFF HIS OWN LEG AND WARP IT INTO A GIANT KEY.
Film
- Wolverine in all the X Men movies. Sabertooth and Deadpool in Origins.
- Used multiple times in The Faculty. However its subverted in the case of Jon Stewart's character, who after being turned back human isn't able to regenerate and is subjected to an eyepatch and four missing fingers at the movie's closing.
- The T-1000 from Terminator 2 showed off the movie's control of newfangled CGI technology, getting blown around and smashed apart, yet always flowing back together (Though he eventually got enough damage to make his disguise power less than effective).
- Same thing happens to the T-X as she gets holes shot into her constantly.
- In fact, all the terminators have a variation of this trope, as they all have metal skeletons. They contantly get riddled with bullet holes, and by the end of each movie they are all rendered to metallic skeletons.
- Jeebs in Men In Black can easily regrow his head after it gets shot off. So Agent K frequently blows it off to get information, and sometimes for fun.
- Though K does threaten to shoot him "where it won't grow back" if he catches him dealing in alien guns again.
- B.O.B. the gelatinous goo blob/jello thingy from Monsters Vs Aliens gets crushed all the time as a result of his ability to reform himself.
Literature
Live Action TV
- Claire Bennett from Heroes. The only reason she is not the Trope Namer is because it isn't a direct quote, but several characters have mentioned that she would be a lot less pretty if she didn't have her regeneration. She's chopped off her own toe just to see if it would grow back. In less deliberate instances, she's also gotten her neck snapped and had a sharp branch put through her skull, accidentally grabbed hot cookware, and wedged her hand in a running garbage disposal (all in the first four episodes!)
- There was a bit where her mom dropped her wedding ring into a pot of boiling water and Claire reached in to get it back, whereupon Mom chides her for being "flashy", noting that "we do have a strainer".
- Especially glaring is the fact that she gets these injuries much more easily than anyone else just so we can watch her heal. You know how her neck got snapped? A football player accidentally ran into her. This somehow knocked her head around 180° degrees, and she had to twist it back. It was like something out of Looney Tunes.
- Fans have wondered if she has the secondary "ability" to have incredibly bad luck or to have ridiculously violent things happen to her.
- Then when Sylar gets her abilities, he basically stops trying to avoid getting hurt. Snap his neck? He knocks it right back on. Go ahead, shoot him, he'll get right back up. And when Elle blasts him full of all the electricity she can muster, all that gets destroyed are his clothes. This got especially glaring since up until he had her power he was a very good fighter and deflected bullets with ease so he never got hit in the first place. Jamming a shard of glass into the back of skull would've never happened to pre-regeneration Sylar. Now he treats his body like a meat shield.
- The same qualifies to a lesser extent anyone else with rapid cellular regeneration. Adam, for example, walked on up to an enemy mook, got stabbed, then just smiled and disposed of said mook. Later, he jumps off a building to take Kaito Nakamura with him, then walks away.
- Parodied and deconstructed in How to Debate an Exploding Candidate
 .
Nathan Petrelli: Claire has an amazing power. No matter what injury she suffers or what disease she's exposed to, her body automatically heals almost instantly. What's more, she seems to attract these injuries. Whenever she's around, things happen that could kill or maim somebody, and they always happen to her.
Mohinder Suresh: I've noticed that too; it's a truly bizarre phenomenon. Good thing she can heal.
Nathan: What I propose to do is extend Claire's coverage to the whole nation. Anything bad that would normally happen to you will happen to her instead. She'll just heal from it, and everything will be fine.
- Painkiller Jane. Every episode of the TV series was designed to show off her powers at least once. Sometimes she intentionally used them, sometimes she just had bad luck. The 2007 comic begins with a story where she runs across a terrorist with nerve gas on a train by pure coincidence and would have died if it wasn't for her powers.
- Two words: Jack Harkness. To be fair, he was only super-accident-prone in Torchwood, and after reappearing in the third season of Doctor Who, he instead exploited his ability for the team's benefit.
- Or the villains exploited it for him...
- It gets worse, however, when you consider the offscreen should-be-fatal injuries he referred to. One must wonder how he survived before becoming immortal.
- The Children of Earth miniseries seems to be taking this to new and interesting levels: A government mole implants a bomb in Jack so that he can take out all of Torchwood when it goes off. Gwen and Ianto get away, but Jack still gets blown to bits. Then, when the government agents find his remains and realize this trope is in effect, they dump his remains in quick-setting concrete.
- During the five days of 'Children of Earth' in Season 3, Jack dies six times
- The Doctor can can survive stuff that should be fatal and can quickly recover from much worse injuries than a human can, even without recasting the part. He's regrown a hand, for one thing, and has been tortured enough times to give anyone else wicked PTSD. The spin-offs novels and audios, which don't have to worry about scaring kids or upsetting parents, take this even further.
- The Alzarians, a humanoid race featured in Doctor Who in the early Eighties, are also able to recover from injury more rapidly than humans, a relic of their highly adaptable Marshmen ancestors. However, the Doctor's Alzarian companion, Adric, indicates that the speed of recovery decreases with age. ("Old people take a bit longer, of course. Sometimes a whole day.")
- Torchwood also inverts the trope; After he becomes Only Mostly Dead, Owen can't die, but he can't heal his wounds at all. Cuts don't heal, broken bones don't mend, and a single punch could potentially cripple him.
- Teal'c of Stargate SG 1 never has to regenerate any limbs, but his symbiote (and later Tretonin) let him get away with things most people would need body armor and a radiation suit to attempt, and months of physical therapy to recover from.
- Bob Wire from King is made out of barbed wire and can therefore just spring back into place. As such, he seems to take an obscene amount of punishment every episode.
- Kai from Lexx is an undead assassin who can reattach lost body parts - so he's constantly getting decapitated, vertically bisected, vaporized, etc.
- In Angel, Angel is usually the one who gets shot, stabbed, etc, because as a vampire he's pretty hard to kill.
Angel: Do you know how much it hurts to get an iron rod through your chest?
Cordelia (sprightly): Yep! Benefits of a Sunnydale education!
- In Star Trek DS 9 Odo is a shapeshifter and, if injured, simply shifts back to undamaged form. Thus he uses methods for stopping criminals like letting them run through him so they lose momentum, or jumping from heights on them. This bites him in the ass when he is Modelocked into human - during a very short time he sustains multiple injuries and nearly dies! Laas, another changeling, manages to be stabbed in his stomach within days on station.
- On a similar note, changelings are immune to all regular infections, including ST Ds, so they have no qualms sharing Body Fluids with each other. This also proves nearly fatal when Section 31 develops a ... something that can infect Changelings.
- Most of the reapers on Dead Like Me. The fact there's a spring sticking out of your mattress is no reason to get stabbed almost every time you go to bed, George. Sometimes they intentionally abuse their Healing Factor, though, or each other's; Roxy seems to think running Mason over is a perfectly appropriate punishment.
- Sikozu of Farscape has the ability to reattach lost extremities. Thus, she's had her limbs lopped off on several occasions (and one of her fingers, in the episode Coup By Clam) - the most severe being Twice Shy, in which she has both an arm and a leg ripped off by the true form of Talika.
Video Games
- The character Yoshimitsu, who has appeared in every single Tekken game, has healing abilities beginning in Tekken 3. He can heal through meditating, or through draining lifeforce from an enemy. Like Shatterstar, he has an attack where he stabs himself, inflicting damage but is able to hit an enemy for even more damage with it. He is also able to spin while in this state to further damage someone hit with this attack, with his sword still in him. Yoshimitsu can also spin away from his opponent at an incredibly rapid speed, an attack that requires expending his own life to do, and which causes him to lose his balance and faint temporarily if done excessively.
- Yoshimitsu from the Soul Calibur series has similar techniques including flying into the air, lighting his sword on fire, then stabbing it through his own chest and dropping out of the air onto your opponent for massive damage to both you and your opponent. You can regain your health in identical ways to Tekken.
- Played straight in Xenosaga. Albedo has a powerful healing factor (he can regrow his own head!), but is driven to madness upon the knowledge that he cannot be killed while his brothers can.
- Not to mention that unlike most Healing Factors, Albedo can continue to lecture an innocent loli while decapitated.
- Also, he's not remotely accident-prone. He is, however, completely batshit crazy; his frequent demonstrations of his immortality are largely self-inflicted.
- Semi-invoked in God of War, with Kratos being killed once per game, but then just climbing out of hell again because he's Kratos, damnit! So less "Good Thing You Ca Heal" and more "Good thing you're a tough enough bastard to just walk out of hell"
- The player can do this in Planescape Torment. Since the main character can't die, and has a Healing Factor as part of the parcel, they can willingly allow themselves to be mangled in all sorts of ways. You can allow a woman to pay for the privilage of fatally stabbing you, snap your own neck to prove a point not once but twice, allow a hag to claw out your eye to give you power, remove a magical ring from the dead finger it's stuck on by biting your finger off and sticking the dead finger onto the stump, allow a mortician to sew up your wounds, have a crazy dissectionist cut your various body parts open (including pulling out your own intestines and cracking open your skull), gouge out your eye to put a preserved one in its place, and gain spells from a Pyro Maniac wizard by allowing him to burn your finger, hand, eyeball and intestines to charred cinders.
- Hilariously, although you can't die, you can kill people in a number of increasingly ridiculous ways. The most well-known and memorable is when you convince a man that he doesn't exist, and he simply poofs out of existence when he realizes that he believes your logic. And it doesn't count as murder, because...he never existed!
- Dark Samus. It took the destruction of one and a half planets to finally kill her.
- Robots and Reploids from the Mega Man franchise can be rebuilt after pretty much any damage, except when they need to die for real. In one game, Proto Man is cut in half twice. Zero has been blown up, reduced to a head and torso, lasered through the chest, split into three parts that get passed around like trading cards...
- In Fate Stay Night, Shirou takes frequent and painful abuse from enemy Servants no matter what you do — but he takes noticeably less of it in routes where his contract with Saber gets broken. This is because Shirou has unknowingly been imbued with Saber's lost Noble Phantasm, Avalon, which will heal him from any damage as long as he's connected to her. Without her, it's just there.
- An odd example comes from FEAR,the Point man can regenerate up to 25 health points but no higher.
- Dante in the Devil May Cry series: he gets stabbed and impaled so many times and then shrugs it off that it's just funny...but only in the cut scenes...that don't involve his fights with Vergil in DMC 3 where he actually DOES get hurt...but then gets better by going Devil Time.
- Many Characters in the Final Fantasy series, particularly Dissidia, know that they can come back to life, & use it to their fullest advantage. Sephiroth, Emperor Mattias Palamecia, & Garland although, he uses time travel are notable examples.
- In World Of Warcraft, there are sometimes very high places that would take a long time to climb back down from. Of course the solution is obvious, and several classes have abilities to make it a perfectly survivable tactic, including the Priest's Levitate, Rogue's / Druid Cat-Form's reduced falling damage, or the Paladin's Divine Shield. Warlocks and Shamans don't have these... but they do have the ability to occasionally self-ressurect, leading to a lot of Warlocks and Shammys going 'splat'.
Mythology
- Prometheus was chained to a rock and an eagle tore out his liver every day until he was rescued. Boy Prometheus, it's a Good Thing You Can Heal now isn't it?
- Ares would be injured a bit in greek mythology...thank you Diomedes for stabbing him.
- Norse mythology has several instances of this. Odin hangs himself (for three days), stabs an eye out, and stabs himself with a spear to get knowledge. Loki gets chained down and has a snake drip poison/acid on him.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- The page picture from Legion Of Superheroes is actually less graphic than how the show presented it. While Superboy ignored a distress call thinking it was frivolous, Brainiac got blasted with a surprise shot. In slow motion, with the hand itself going flying off and the still sparking stump shown as Brainiac falls into a Pieta Plagiarism in Lighting Lad's arms. Thankfully, he's a Do Anything Robot with telescoping extensions, so he could heal right quick. Didn't make the let down any easier to take though.
- Kim Possible has an interesting example about this trope. The only times Shego has used her sharp claws to slice Kim's clothes is the times Kim was wearing clothes that can regenerate themself. But what's strange is during the second time, Shego sliced through the battle suit and scared Kim's skin enough that it resulted in blood. After the battle suit regenerated itself, Kim's wounds were never seen ever again, thus apparently the battle suit did not only heal itself but also the wounds of it's host. Weird...
- Swampfire in Ben 10 Alien Force. Those Lasers go right through him... then the holes immediately close. This has become part of Ben's basic fighting style with him.
- No, it also tickles him so at least he gets some sort of side-effect.
- In an episode of Spongebob Squarepants Spongebob had Patrick shave him down so he would be rounded instead of square. Of course, Patrick being an idiot, he shaves Spongebob down to his brain scaring everyone including the Flying Dutchman, at the end Spongebob tells a frightened Patrick "Don't worry it'll grow back". He can also regenerate his limbs if they get ripped or burned off.
- Notably, he has ripped off his arms 40 times in one episode, recovered from being completely liquified, taken a thousand punches in the face, got dragged through a field of giant clams, cheese graters and educational television, and has been ripped in half. Ironically, the latter event occured in an episode that revolved around Spongebob never leaving his house for fear of hurting himself.
- In at least one other episode, he ripped himself in half (as part of a victory dance).
- Transformers wobbles back and forth on this. You have Optimus Prime being dismembered in Transformers Generation One and being okay, but a few shots to the torso kill him one movie later. Beast Wars Waspinator explodes so much that Rattrap has a collection of his parts, but Dinobot dies just with minimal injuries. In one episode of Transformers Animated people live with just their heads, in another a stab to the gut nearly kills you dead.
- These can be justified by Transformers having different anatomy: Dinobot died because he was low on energon but continued to fight anyway. In Animated most of their important parts appear to be inside their heads and body, so a stab to the gut could be fatal while being decapitated would be the equivalent of cutting/disconnecting the cord connecting a computer and the monitor (debilitating, but reversable).
- After Starscream gains immortality from an AllSpark shards he become a complete magnet for injury. Right after this happens Megatron proceeds to kill him five times in one episode.
- When Slade came back, one of the first things that happened was Robin unleashing a series of vicious kicks to the head that he would probably have not got hit with earlier. From his reaction and the cracking noises when he straightened his head, it seems they broke his neck.
- However, it's latter shown that while he was brought back to life his flesh wasn't, so it's probably a lot easier to break his bones.
Web Original
- The Shadow of LessThanThree Comics quasi-fame. Puts himself in obvious danger to save time, and to intimidate his enemies. Once leapt through the windshield of an oncoming car, to force the driver to crash, sending the two of them flying thirty-feet, breaking several bones, just to find out who the guy worked for.
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