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alt title(s): Regeneration
A character is hard to kill, not because he doesn't get hurt, but because he has the ability to recover from serious damage quickly. While it depends on how fast he can heal and how much of a beating his body can take, a character with healing factor will generally recover from severe injuries that other beings can't, often with no scars or medical treatment of any kind.
Slightly more plausible than the Made of Diamond type of Nigh Invulnerability, as it's a souped-up version of a power certain real life forms possess. Rarely will a character need to worry about infection, as a super immune system is most often packaged in, but they may need to worry about setting broken bones.
Really powerful characters will be able to regenerate lost body parts. Ridiculously powerful regenerators may be able to recover From A Single Cell in a stain on the floor. Most often, loss of the head or brain injury is the only permanent damage, and even then they may come back just missing some memories or with an altered personality. Sometimes they appear to be dead for brief periods, but that's just the regeneration taking a while to deal with unusually severe damage.
On the down side, extreme regeneration often leads to the character getting targeted by The Worf Barrage so often, people go " Good Thing You Can Heal" because their Immortal Life Is Cheap. Also, regenerators are often more Made Of Plasticine than the rest of the show's cast.
Note that if any real-world life form were able to recover this fast, they'd need a reserve of raw organic material to work from, and afterwards would be very hungry. The only way to justify always repairing the exact amount of flesh damaged is if it uses the actual damaged flesh to do it. Writers who acknowledge this often at least have their regenerator out of commission for some time, resting and feeding. The effect may be compared to the rapid cell growth, differentiation and self-organization of human embryonic development if the writer is interested in any degree of scientific plausibility, but most don't bother with even that much Hand Wave; they just have the wounds close up and new tissues and organs appear.
Reptilian characters, taking a cue from real-world lizards that can shed and re-grow their tails, are likely to possess at least a minor form of this. (Although this is just because they suppress their immune system to allow their stem cells to respecialize, which would be very, very bad in a human and is why we can't do it.) Dragons, werewolves, and vampires almost always have it as well ( your mileage may vary). Other Shape Shifting characters almost always have this packaged in with their powers, though it's often described as returning to their "default" form rather than regenerating. Nanomachines are a common justification for an acquired power by otherwise human characters in a technological setting.
If regenerators have an Achilles Heel, it's most often a nasty one: either suffocation, decapitation, poison, gas, fire, ice, or acid.
An in-universe, as opposed to plot-based, version of Hollywood Healing. Doing this to others is Healing Hands or using a Healing Potion.
If a character can be blow to bits and reform you could be looking at Pulling Themselves Together
Examples:
Anime
- The eponymous warriors of Claymore. Many can even regenerate limbs if necessary, while others have to make do with reattaching them before the stumps heal.
- Most of the major characters of Hellsing, and even the Nazi vampire mooks that show up later in the manga, have impressive regeneration abilities; Alexander Anderson, for example, can take several headshots in rapid succession and keep fighting. Every single one of them is put to shame by Alucard, though, who allows himself to be near-liquified at the beginning of several fights just to completely demoralize his opponents before brutally killing them.
- Several Pokemon abilities and moves do this, such as Recover or Rain Dish (when it's raining). The "Leftovers" item gives a Regen-like effect, while the Poison Heal ability grants it when the Pokemon is "suffering" from poison.
- Deoxys in the seventh movie is depicted regenerating a vaporized limb. In fact it can regenerate its entire body as long its crystal core is intact.
- An early Pokedex entry states that Staryu (and it's evolved form, presumably) can even regenerate from decapitation as long as their gem-like core remains intact. This is actually justified - as noted below under Truth In Television, some real-life starfish do possess this ability.
- The Wu from the manga and anime 3x3 Eyes are people who have had their souls extracted by an immortal Sanjiyan Unkara and kept within the Sanjiyan. As long as the Sanjiyan lives, the Wu cannot be killed or destroyed- by anything. Their healing factor is so great that main character Yakumo once regenerated from being chewed into tiny scraps by a giant demon in a matter of minutes, although they can't regrow limbs if they're separated from them.
- It's not sure if they're actually unable to re-grow them, it might be a bit more complicated. The one time where an Wu was dismembered without re-attaching it instantly after the fight, the arm was kept in an sealed container. However, that might have been just to keep the arm from moving, after all, Wus can still move their body parts even if they're cut off.
- Abel from Trinity Blood has been shown regenerating a lost arm (from the leftover pool of blood) after it was blown off.
- In the third episode of Haré+Guu, Guu regenerated her arm. After chopping it up and eating it.
- C.C. from Code Geass, who can recover from fatal injuries (such as a bullet to the brain or heart) in a matter of minutes. A few episodes imply that she might be near Wolverine in terms of regeneration: Her former ally Mao intended to cut her into pieces so he could ship her to Australia in luggage, and fully expected her to survive. In the season finale, her current partner Lelouch witnesses her tormented memories, including being burned at the stake and apparently being guillotined. And for all this, the only mark she bears is a very deliberate-looking scar under her left breast.
- It's been stated by Word Of God that code bearers have to die once for the code to activate. Before that they have no healing factor so a scar could be made and then the code bearer could be killed later.
- The guro h-doujin Mai-chan's Daily Life involves sex slaves with the ability to regenerate from virtually any injury, no matter how debilitating, mutilating, or fatal. Furthermore, unlike most of the above examples, some of them also have the ability to convert pain into pleasure, thus literally "getting off" on the sick, sadistic things their clients do to them almost as much as said clients do. Fortunately, they are almost always unable to bear children. If one of them does have a child, that kid won't be born with the trait, needing to develop it as it matures (though it's hinted that the powers kick in at a fairly young age).
- This is Rin Asougi's only power in Mnemosyne. Unfortunately for her, this means she loses fights quite regularly, with fatal results. Of course, seeing as how she can only permanently die from being devoured alive by a specific monster or having her 'time spore' pulled out by a specific person, this isn't quite Blessed With Suck.
- Chirico Cuvie from Armored Trooper VOTOMS is called an "abnormal survivor," and has the capability to not only survive normally fatal physical injuries and illnesses, but to resist damage from certain types of injury, such as being burned alive by mecha fuel. However, as a negative side effect of this, he suffers extreme mental stress from all of the fatal injuries he has taken, to the point of being more or less outwardly emotionless. His early memories include being burned alive and shot through the heart.
- Manji from Blade Of The Immortal
- Partially subverted in Naruto: Tsunade and Naruto can regenerate from grievous injuries very quickly, but they do so via rapid cellular growth, which ages their bodies prematurely and shortens their lifespans (which actually happens
 ). Also, Naruto tends to pass out and become famished regenerating anything more than minor injuries.
- The primary effect of the "Cure virus" in Ever17 is to give the infected party a healing factor that makes it impossible for them to be killed.
- In Slayers, trolls have such fast regeneration abilities that they are nearly impossible to kill. The main character, Lina Inverse, solves this issue by casting a magic-reversal spell on all the trolls so that even the tiniest scratch results in nearly instant death-by-implosion.
- The Wolkenritter of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. They may have lost the Rejuvenation Program, but they still have a Healing Factor that lets them recover a lot faster than a normal human. However, this has been getting weaker as time goes by, though thankfully for Vita, not so much that her getting impaled in the chest could take her out permanently.
- In Dragon Ball, Nameks like Piccolo regenerate as long as their vital organs are intact. Most later villains had this ability, but most have it in even greater strengths, including Cell, Boo, and Metal Cooler (who can revive from a single piece of themselves), in addition to some of the evil dragons.
- Maajn buu is the living embodyment of this. No matter how badly he is destroyes he can always regenerate as long as any part of him still exists.
- Kanda in D.Gray-Man has accelerated healing, but at the cost of some of his life.
- Also Road, who can't be killed unless you know her "true form".
- And Krory, who can heal himself by drinking Akuma's blood.
- Yuki Nagato from Suzumiya Haruhi is able to regenerate using her Magic From Technology, apart from being seemingly unaffected by physical injuries. The limits are unknown, but it does happen in an instant.
- The Homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist all have this power. The Shapeshifter Baggage is spomewhat justified, at least in the manga, by having the Homunculi powered by a Philosopher's Stone, which converts energy into matter. When their stone runs out of juice, the Homunculi lose their powers & have to get it recharged (or run the risk of becoming Deader Than Dead).
- Ranma from Ranma 1/2 recovers from injuries so fast some fans have theorized he has a Healing Factor. Witness him shatter every bone in his body and recover to full fighting capacity only a few moments later, in the middle of a fight.
- "Full fighting capacity"? Later in the fight, he was buried under several tons of ice, punched through said ice, leapt around like a flea on acid, and was still able to run from a vengeful Amazon that very night without ever stopping to rest, and all that in his "weaker" female form. In the manga, anyway (where Shampoo's arrival took place immediately after the Ice Skating duel.)
- Lampshaded early on: his agreement with Shampoo to "half-kill (girl) Ranma" (long story) didn't work because he instantly recovered after the massive beatdown.
- The final enemy of the series, the Phoenix King Saffron, can generate limitless amounts of heat... which he uses to rejuvenate himself at will. He has had half of his body (head included) frozen solid, and the arm on that side broken off; as soon as the freezing influence was removed, he merely melted the ice with no damage to his brain and sprouted a whole new arm. He's not above tearing off his own wings and flinging them as deadly flaming projectiles, and having his entire body frozen and shattered only inconveniences him as far as making him regenerate a brand new infant body.
- Hell, just about all of the characters (or at least Ryoga Hibiki and Mousse) have displayed something like this at least once in the series, if never quite in as impressive a fashion as Ranma.
- The Immortals from the Mermaid Saga can regenerate from any wound, naturally, except burning to ash or having their heads completely severed.
- The Guyvers from Biobooster Armour Guyver can regenerate their entire bodies if destroyed, so long as the control medal on their foreheads is not damaged. At one point, lead character Sho contemplates being a clone since his original body was killed.
- In addition, Aptom develops a massively potent regeneration ability, still limited to avaliable biomatter unlike the Guyvers, which he uses to great effect by splitting up in to clones and using one as a distraction.
- Finally, any of the monsters created by Chronos could have damage regenerated by spending some time in a giant test tube.
- Shikabane Hime in the show of the same name normally heal faster than humans, and can regenerate limbs given enough time. They can also have most wounds healed instantaneously by their contracted monk.
- Besides pretty much every major fight in One Piece involving the good guy/girl to get hurt to the point where he/she should be dead, only to get back up and finish the fight, both Luffy and Zoro show examples of this trope. When a Big Bad tries to unnerve Luffy by pointing out how Luffy got stabbed by him earlier, Luffy replies (at least in the Manga): "Oh, that? I ate meat, and it healed up." Luffy gets hungry for meat after every fight. Meanwhile, Zoro's solution to most wounds (before the crew gets their doctor, at least) is to sleep it off.
- Immortals in Baccano! get this standard with their immortality. They also avert the Regenerative Baggage issue by using the damaged or spilled flesh and blood to patch up the wounds. Yes, even if their remains are splattered across the room.
- Ulquiorra Schiffer of Bleach reveals that this is his special ability during the final stage of his fight with Ichigo. It doesn't help.
- Kotaro of Mahou Sensei Negima has a Healing Factor as part of his ultimate demon form, and it's pretty freaking good, considering he survived getting impaled in the chest by a bunch of Rakan's giants swords.
- Negi can reform severed limbs in his lightning mode. This is because he turns his body into lightning, and therefore can't be permanently injured by physical attacks. Naturally, he promptly runs into an opponent who can bypass that protection...
- One of the "signature" abilities of the Deadman soldiers in Gungrave is the ability to regenerate/near-instantly revive from almost all injuries sustained. Beyond the Grave, the heroic Deadman of the series, has this ability because of the technology used to reanimate him and other Deadmen.
- Franken Fran has a story of a girl with a Healing Factor that reached Body Horror levels. See, not only does it replace lost arms and legs, but it keeps on creating new body parts even when she's perfectly healthy. The end result is a body with multiple faces, organs, limbs, and even torsos growing out of it at once.
- In Love Hina, Keitaro's immortality is expressed as being able to completely heal from the worst Megaton Punches and landings from said punches within a few panels. This is averted only once, when he gets his leg broken; that takes several chapters to completely heal, and the Hinata girls are amazed that it actually happened.
Comic Books
- Wolverine of the X-Men is the iconic Super Hero example. This has been subject to extreme Power Creep Power Seep; he went from "very tough, but can be killed by a single lucky shot from a Humongous Mecha" to "survive being at ground zero of a nuke".
- He was also once regrown from a single droplet of blood spilled by his killer, albeit with the aid of a powerful Ancient Artifact. No mention seems to have been made of what happened to the other body, which this troper recalls seeing in the killer's hands just about the time Wolverine finished his 'new' regrowth.
- A recent arc in his main book was written SPECIFICALLY to tone this down (by the same writer who had written one of the more ridiculous examples, ironically enough).
- There's Wolverine's Opposite Sex Clone X-23, who has all of Wolverine's powers. Though the exact nature of her healing factor outside of Limbo has yet to be determined.
- Officially it is a notch above Wolverine's, mainly due to not having her bones laced with exotic alloys.
- Wolverine's arch-enemy Sabretooth had virtually the same power-set, including the healing factor but all that was cut to an abrupt end. Literally, thanks to Wolvie's anti-healing katana forged from the dark area of his soul.
- Lobo from DC Comics has an absurdly over-the-top Healing Factor, as he is partly a Wolverine parody. Plus, neither afterlife wants him.
- Painkiller Jane.
- The Incredible Hulk has been at various times shown to have a healing factor. (Including having all his skin ripped off and regrown in seconds— partly justified in that drawing mass and energy from another dimension is explicitly part of his powers.)
- More specifically, the Hulk's healing factor is much like his strength level in that it's tied into his emotional state. The Hulk not only gets stronger as he gets angrier, he also heals faster.
- Courier of Marvel Comics has the ability to regrow body parts, but can't create matter so when he had to regrow a finger he shrank by one inch.
- Deadpool from Marvel Comics has this (he even got it from the same place as Wolverine got his adamantium skeleton), but since he had cancer before his Healing Factor caused the tumors to grow out of control and made him horribly scarred and insane (he thinks he's a character in a comic book)
- He has also noted that his couldn't bring him back from the silly lengths that Wolverine's has managed - although he can regrow fast enough that his friend Cable would psychically make his head explode for a joke.
- Well, Deadpool's been shown to recover from being liquefied. When he melted into a puddle, and Cable swallowed him (TO SAVE THEIR LIVES) and then regurgitated him, and Deadpool returned to his solid state almost instantly.
- That last one is because the cosmic entity of death is in love with him. Not kidding. I can't make shit like that up.
- Mr Immortal from Marvel's mutant universe has a unique version: he always recovers from fatal injury. It's not shown how he'd cope with just normal grievous bodily harm, although this is rarely an issue—typically, he's facing villains who are more than happy to kill him. And if he was just really wounded, all he'd need to do is commit suicide ...
- Paul Kirk, one of The DCU's numerous Manhunters, was given his healing factor by a particularly nasty group of Well Intentioned Extremists, as (apparently) was one of the clones they made of him, also known as Manhunter.
- In fact, the revival of Manhunter predates the introduction of Wolverine by a year.
- The vampiric Cassidy from Preacher could do this, but he had to actually open up someone's vein before he could heal.
- The 1990s comic book hero Darkhawk doesn't exactly have a healing factor, but he can instantly repair all the damage to his android form by shifting back to his human form, which sends his armor back to the spaceship where it can be almost instantly repaired with nanotechnology, allowing him to summon it back at full strength. Injuries to Darkhawk's human body couldn't be healed this way, however.
- Even Spider-Man is shown to have a limited version of this ability, although it seems more that he can just heal faster from injuries that any normal human can recover from, with bruises and sprains often disappearing only a day or two after Spidey is hurt. He certainly isn't Made of Iron to the extent that Wolverine and the Hulk are, however.
- The Lizardman in the 1990's Spiderman tv episodes—adapted from Curt Connors/the Lizard in the comics—tried to use lizard DNA to regrow his arm, which succesfully gained him this power but also made him the unwilling villain of episode one.
- Venom and Carnage are also close to immortal, where they can heal from anything but continual and ongoing exposure to high-pitched sounds.
- The Savage Dragon can regrow lost limbs, albeit slowly. One villain actually used this against Dragon by breaking every bone in his body, then stuffing him down a smokestack so he healed all wrong. To fix him, another hero had to break his bones again to let him heal correctly.
- 90s hero Xombi has a Nano Machine based healing factor. It's treated more realistically in that the title character does explicitly need raw organic material to properly heal. In the first issue, his lab assistant is partially devoured when she rests her body against his own while he's healing.
- Green Arrow II, Connor Hawke, has recently been granted healing powers by the machinations of Dr Sivana in an issue of Green Arrow and Black Canary.
- Sivana gave him that healing factor using bits of Plastic Man, a character that has survived being turned to stone, shattered, and having the pieces scattered around the ocean floor for over 1,000 years. Yeah, Plastic Man takes this trope to the extreme.
- In Immortal Iron Fist, this is one of the explicit abilities of the Cobra Warrior of Peng Lai. Old Cobra once reversed his aging to become a young man again, One Armed Cobra regenerated his long-missing arm, and Fat Cobra managed to grow back both of his legs and repair his severed spinal cord after a fateful encounter with the multi-headed dragon Xiang Yao.
Film
- Immortals from Highlander have fast healing, recovering from non-fatal injuries just as fast as deadly ones. The only injuries they do not heal from are ones to the neck - this is why they can only be killed by cutting their heads off (or, according to Highlander The Raven, severing their spine by any other means).
- They also can not regenerate limbs as seen when a fine young cannibal gets his hand cut off and in future episodes has no hand.
- In Godzilla 2000: Millennium, the genetic origin of this (dubbed "Organizer G-1") is explicitly described as the ultimate source (in combination with its sheer mass) of Godzilla's apparent immunity to attacks.
- Jeebs from Men In Black has an incredibly effective healing factor as his alien ability. Every scene with Jeebs involves him getting his head shot off, only to have it grow back in the space of seconds.
- The RPG specified that he had a limited number of several vital organs, including his head.
- The animated series said his species didn't need to breathe oxygen, but needed it to regenerate.
- Also, the healing factor didn't apply to all his physiology. After shooting him, K threatens to shoot him again in a place "where it don't grow back." *cringe*
- The T-1000 from Terminator 2 anyone?
- It's too bad that a lot of scenes from the end were cut, and are thus not canon. The protagonists did enough damage over the course of the movie, specifically highlighting the freeze-and-shoot moment, that the T-1000 isn't able to completely maintain his form. Moments include grabbing a handrail, and having his fingers stick and assume the color of the warning paint, and while he walks his feet tends to melt.
- But then again, all the T-1000's 'glitching' in the special edition leads up to a point where John distinguishes between his real mother and the T-1000 copy based on the copy's warped and melted feet. In this troper's opinion, that particular sequence worked much better in the original, by using John's knowledge of Sarah's character as the distinguishing factor. Think "Help! John? Help! I'm hurt." versus "Get out of the way, John."
- The T-1000 is probably a utility fog swarm (it's a very plausible explanation for the properties of "liquid metal"), and extreme resilience would be pretty plausible for such a construct. Localized damage would only result in a decrease in mass.
- In the third X-Men film, Wolverine fights a mutant who can regrow limbs instantly— but is not immune to a Groin Attack.
- The Hellboy films:
- Sammael from Hellboy can heal from any non-fatal injury almost instantly.
- The Clock Punk robots of Hellboy II: The Golden Army can repair themselves after being ripped to pieces.
- When The Iron Giant gets his arms knocked off by a train, the parts return to him and reattach themselves.
- The title character of the Tomie series of J-horror films has this ability to the extent that every single individual piece of her that is cut off will eventually become a new Tomie. This is justified, at least in the manga it was based on, by Tomie being radiotrophic, feeding on background radiation in the air & somehow converting it into mass.
- Brandon Lee's character in The Crow seemed to possess this ability. Right to the point of making a very bad religious joke in between successive on-target shotgun blasts. Too bad the actor wasn't so endowed.
- The Neo-Vipers from GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra have one thanks to the nanomites.
Literature
- Billy "Carnifex" Ray from the Wild Cards series of novels is a slight subversion; he has a Healing Factor that acts as the biological equivalent of "meatball surgery" — it will save his life and restore practical functionality, but repeated injuries have left him somewhat misshapen (e.g. a broken nose healing while still bent out of place).
- Jordan the Barbarian from the Xanth books has regeneration as his magical talent, allowing him to recover from anything (anything) up to and including death... so long as his body parts are fairly close to each other. However, after being reunited with himself at the end of a 400-year period of being sliced up and scattered, he did need a lot of food to fully recover.
- In Diana Wynne Jones's Chronicles of Chrestomanci series, the titular nine-lived enchanters can recover from mortal injuries such as broken neck or 100% burns, but only eight times, and it does indeed make them very hungry.
- Cormac limbs from the Saga of Darren Shan has the ability to regain lost body parts, when you cut off his head, two smaller heads appear. The guy who decapitated him was suitably freaked out.
- Wizards in The Dresden Files have a slight healing factor that allows them to live for centuries. Harry notes at one point that, given the abuse he's faced over the years, he'd be facing the kind of constant aches and pains a retired football player does if not for his healing factor. It's not Wolverine-strength, of course; in one book, Harry has most of the muscle and flesh burned off of his left hand when a vampiric sorceress realizes his shields don't block heat, and while he's regained use of the hand four books later, it still looks damn ugly.
- The Specials in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series have Nanomachines in their blood that allow them to heal quickly.
- Mistwraiths and some Allomancers in the Mistborn books both have rapid healing. Mistwraiths because they can simply alter their body mass into muscle or other kinds of tissue (though they can't create or repair bone), while any Allomancer that can "burn" pewter will gain super-human healing (though we're talking a week or two to recover from a should-be-fatal cut, not regrowing arms in minutes) in addition to the other benefits it provides.
- The Inquisitors and especially the Lord Ruler have this even moreso. Inquisitors can regenerate from almost any injury, though it takes up a lot of their energy, while the Lord Ruler has been at various points in his Backstory shot, stabbed, decapitated, burned alive, and flayed. He shrugged off all of them in minutes, with no significant harm done.
- In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles Of The Kencyrath series, the Kencyr peoples have impressive healing abilities, although much of it requires dwar sleep, a hibernation-like mode of deep, restorative sleep which can, for severe injuries, last for weeks. Jame, the protagonist, sleeps for thirteen days after she arrives in Tai-tastigon with severely infected haunt bites (haunts being essentially zombies); her healing astonishes the human healer who tends to her. Kencyr can also regenerate lost teeth, and through dwar sleep can recuperate from punishing speeds on foot, allowing their armies to cover ground at a sustained rate much faster than human armies can attain.
- Averted, and possibly inverted, in The Belgariad, where the gods have no healing ability whatsoever because they're normally invincible and have no need of it. Meaning that when the Big Bad Torak is badly maimed, his injuries, consisting of horrible burns and a destroyed eye, remain exactly the same as when Torak received them, pain and all, even after thousands of years.
- The Father of Titans from the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novel Dark Adeptus has one that allows for real-time regeneration of fairly severe damage, though not direct, explosive core sabotage. The Grey Knights themselves, as Super Soldiers, have a better-than-human regeneration, though they still need an apothecary for severe stuff.
- In Octavia Butler's Fledgling, the protagonist recovers from being caught in a burning building—it's implied that she had severe head injuries and was blind at the start. At the end of the process, she's fine except for the amnesia, but she needs fresh meat as soon as possible, and is too hungry to notice where it comes from. It's one of her brother's human friends, who was there trying to find and rescue her.
Live Action TV
- The X Files played with the healing factor's similarity to the rapid cell growth of cancers; a man who could regrow his whole body almost at will showed up in lab reports as having a wide variety of cancers, and he needed to eat tumors to survive.
- Appears to be the only sort of power ascribed to grim reapers in Dead Like Me, beyond the ability to yoink souls out of bodies. An example George acidently rus her hand through a paper shredder, losing a finger in the process. she picks it up out of the basket, holds it back in plce for a few seconds , then goes and washes the blood off her hands.
- Claire Bennet from Heroes. Wile E. Coyote has nothing on her. Nothing. Also, Adam Monroe/Kensei. Peter Petrelli has the same power via absorbing it from Claire, and as of the beginning of Season 3, so has Sylar, albeit in a less family-friendly fashion than Peter.
- The Season 3 episode, "I Am Become Death", shows Claire surviving a nuclear explosion at point blank range. As does Peter. And presumably Sylar, even though he was the one exploding; Peter did the same thing at the end of Season 2.
- Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood comes Back From The Dead whenever he encounters lethal damage. When he does, the damage is healed, regardless of whether it was mundanely or supernaturally inflicted.
- Taken to a disturbing extreme in the season two finale, where he is trapped in a continual death-resurrection cycle for almost 1900 years after being buried alive.
- Taken to yet another disturbing extreme in the Children of Earth miniseries, where he has a bomb implanted in his stomach. He regenerates from a few limbs and part of a head to a skeleton to his normal self over the course of the day. The room he's locked up in is promptly filled with concrete, and he's rescued when the team breaks the concrete block by dropping it into a quarry.
- Buffy has a lesser healing factor as part of her Slayer powers. She can't regenerate injuries in front of our eyes, but she does recover from serious injury much faster than a normal human (at least if she also gets medical assistance).
- Vampires also have this healing factor, though it may not be as strong as Buffy's. Spike was stuck in a wheelchair for several episodes, and Drusilla was heavily weakened by an attack which required a ritual to heal. In some ways it can be stronger than Buffy's, as vampires are clinically dead, they don't have to worry about things like blood loss.
- To be fair, Spike recovered at some point before he actually got out of the wheelchair; in one scene he reveals he'd been faking it for an unspecified amount of time.
- Let's not forget about the fact that Angel has been gutted and run through an unspecified number of times, particularly in his spinoff show
Myth And Legend
- The Lernaean Hydra, of Heracles/Hercules fame, was so difficult to kill because for each head the hero would cut off, two would grow in its place. (The fact that its blood was also a deadly poison didn't help either.) Only when his nephew Iolaos started to cauterize the stumps with his torch could Heracles finally kill the monster; this may be the (or at least one) source for the idea that fire is bad for regenerators.
Tabletop RPG
- In Dungeons And Dragons, the Regeneration ability changes normal damage into subdual damage and the ability to recover so many Hit Points' worth of subdual damage per round. Thus, if you don't use the attack form that does cause normal damage to the foe, they literally cannot be killed, merely knocked out for a while. There is also Fast Healing, which merely causes the character to heal a certain amount of normal damage per round and thus allows real death to occur much more easily, shutting off the power just as normal healing would be.
- The ultimate example of this ability, of course, is the Tarrasque. Its renegeration ability has no damage type exception, meaning that no matter what you do to the monster it'll come back eventually unless you use a magical Wish to wish it stayed dead.
- Of coarse there are methods to make it KO'd more or less permanently (teleporting it to the middle of the ocean so it takes infinite drowning damage.)
- And even then, it will regenerate all that damage, and once it gets on dry land, it will be very angry.
- One way of keeping the Tarrasque dormant, without access to Wishes, is to form an entire community centered on constantly attacking the unconscious Tarrasque once it has been downed. Entire generations would send their best warriors in shifts to persistently Coup de Grace the corpse, for even a few seconds of lapse will ensure their ruin, when the Tarrasque stirs from its slumber.
- Also, Literally causing the Tarrasque to not exist works (IE, making sure it has no remains whatsoever or having a god help you warp reality).
- In previous editions, there were particular forms of regeneration that varied from monster to monster. The D&D troll, arguably the most famous example, can quickly regenerate wounds from swords and axes, and by themselves these weapons can't kill them, although they can knock them out temporarily by reducing their hit points to zero. The only thing that can kill them are fire and acid, which also cause damage that can't be regenerated. Whether you blow them up with a fireball, or knock them out with a weapon and then set them on fire or douse them with acid, you basically need to burn trolls to kill them if you're using standard tactics.
- Healing Factor is the name of a feat in the Eberron campaign setting. It allows shifters to regain health whenever they return to their normal form.
- In the recent fourth edition, regeneration works more like the previous fast healing ability and does not function at 0 Hit Points or less. On the other hand, 'special' attacks (fire vs. trolls, silver against lycanthropes) generally only suppress it for one turn before it kicks back in.
- Werewolves in both versions of The World Of Darkness have an accelerated healing factor. The later game, Werewolf: the Forsaken, actually plays up the cancer element; if a werewolf's wounded with silver, there's a chance they could develop a malignant growth not entirely unlike cancer.
- This is the Hat of the Necrons of Warhammer 40000.
- Well one of them, their primary Hat is that they are hyper-advanced robots.
- To a lesser degree this applies to the Orks, who are capable of healing from any non-fatal wound quite quickly, and when you consider how "tuff" they are, a fatal blow is difficult. In fact, standard Imperial procedure is, after a battle with Orks, to go around and cut the heads off their bodies with entrenching shovels to make sure they stay dead. About the only non-fatal thing that they can't regenerate on their own is severed limbs and even then they are capable of stitching the lost limb, or even someone else's limb, back onto the stump and have it heal together pretty quickly.
- Forget limb amptuation, they can reattach severed heads and walk off like nothing happened!
- With a bit of help from mutation, Tellos of the Soul Drinkers picks up this ability. It gets to the point where he can run into battle naked from the waist up without suffering meaningful damage. It doesn't help with injuries from before he gained this ability - so he can't regrow his hands - but that's not much of a problem when you have chainsaws attached to your wrists. It takes Exterminatus to kill him in the end.
- Magic: the Gathering has various spells and abilities that allow creatures to regenerate instead of going to the graveyard, wiping out all damage they may have suffered in the process (as well as tapping them and taking them out of combat). Of course, these usually require some cost to be paid (usually in mana) and there are forms of destruction that explicitly cannot be regenerated from... — Creatures also recover from damage that fails to kill them pretty quickly by default, as 'remove all leftover damage from stuff still in play' is one of the automatic events of the last step of each turn. (Players aren't so lucky, of course.)
- Lunar Exalts in Exalted are stated as being able to recover from terrible injuries at an astounding rate whilst in their warform, if not in battle (they must use seperate healing powers for that purpose. They can regenerate lost limbs and internal organs (assuming they aren't dead) at a rate of one such organ or limb per hour, good as new and fully functional.
- Regeneration in GURPS ranges from slow enough that people would have to hang out with you for a while to notice it all the way to so fast that you heal twice your total HP every second.
Video Games
- The Nameless One in Planescape Torment. In gameplay terms, this results in speedy regeneration of lost hit points. Also, some tasks take full advantage of this ability, requiring that you cut out various body parts and use them for some purpose probably not in the human body's user manual.
- The healing factor is such that The Nameless One can spontaneously come back from the dead, too - there are a few quests in which 'killing' yourself is a valid solution.
- In City Of Heroes, the "Regeneration" powerset emulates this.
- With a bit of creative tinkering, it was possible to create a Regen Scrapper that was essentially Nigh Invulnerable to attack from enemies ten levels higher and more... in a game where a four level gap was considered impossible for anything less than a full team. Suffice to say, the developers nerfed this ability no less than four times in a row...
- This is also why, in a game where numerous characters are disproportionately powerful in battles of attrition, and hit-run-and-repeat tactics are intentionally left viable, there are still things which take a group to bring down - their intrinsic combat regeneration is just too strong to overcome by anybody who can indefinitely survive their assault.
- White Mages in Final Fantasy XI have a version of this, when at level 25, they get Auto-Regen, which constantly restores 1 HP every 3 seconds. If they don't get hit after getting hurt and stand still for(At most) an hour, they can go from near-dead to full HP, so this trope does count.
- Most of the Final Fantasy games have a similar Regen spell, most of which restore a set percentage of HP each turn, while the one in Final Fantasy VII restored HP constantly. If combined with a Haste effect, attacks that hit for less than 500 or so HP wouldn't even register on the status bar.
- The potent-or-not Healing Factors of Dante and Vergil from Devil May Cry constitute one of the series' more annoying Cutscene Power To The Max moments.
- Kyouya from Diabolo, despite his terminal illness, claims to heal in his sleep (and considering after a night's rest some scratches on his face disappeared, this may not have been a bluff).
- Mega Man X gets it in the third game when he gets either the enhanced helmet or the Golden Armor.
- Team Fortress 2 has the medic class. Although a class designed to heal others, the medic can also heal from any damage back to full health. If the medic goes a certain amount of time without getting hurt again, he regenerates faster.
- Trolls in the Warcraft universe have a healing factor known as Troll Regeneration. In-game, this translates to regaining lost HP points without the aid of healers or potions. (of course, in World of Warcraft everyone regains HP in this manner, but Trolls do it faster)
- It's also very, very weak and the butt of several jokes about its insignificance. In a game where characters have tens of thousands of Hit Points: "I'm regenerating 5 health per second and there's nothing you can do about it!"
- The final boss in Serious Sam: The First Encounter, Ugh-Zan the Third, is a towering behemoth who is nearly impossible to kill thanks to his regeneration abilities. To kill him, a player will have to wear him down first with his own weaponry before activating an enormous death ray to finish him off before he can trigger his healing ability.
- Albedo, one of the antagonists of Xenosaga, has this ability to the level that makes him immortal. This is in fact why he is so Ax Crazy in the first place. His fear of losing Rubedo, and all those close to him, to death while not being able to die himself, drove him insane. Now he seeks just that, ending his own life.
- The main characte in Shadow Of The Colossus doesn't have much in his favor, but it helps that he can take a crushing blow from a Godzilla-sized hulking monstrosity, get pounded into the dust, and as long as he's still alive he'll shake it off in a minute or two.
- In Mass Effect, this rapid healing is one of the abilities of the Soldier class, as well as the Krogan Battlemaster class.
- From the Touhou series, we have Kaguya Houraisan and Fujiwara no Mokou, whose Healing Factors stem from the Hourai Elixer, the Elixir of Immortality. A TYPE IV immortality, they can resurrect from total bodily destruction, feeling every little thing along the way. Mokou, as an Extra stage boss, has become so used to the (not technically)dying and reviving that the only way the protagonists can even fight her in an otherwise safe duel is by repeatedly killing her until she's tired (though she'll resurrect even if she didn't want to because she literally can't die).
- A recent First Person Shooter (as well as other shooters) trend has been to apply this trope to the main character. It doesn't matter how many bullets have pierced your body in total over the course of the adventure: As long as you can find some cover to hide behind for a few seconds before this particular batch of bullets kill you, you're fit for fight again.
- Nathan Drake from Uncharted Drakes Fortune is thus able to run around punching gun-wielding mercenaries to death, as long as he can dart in and out of cover.
- Similarly, Marcus Fenix of Gears Of War runs around without a helmet because this trope allows him to.
- In Dragon Warrior III, several of the bosses have healing factors, sometimes as much as 100 HP per round. It's especially nasty because this happens behind the scenes, and the player is given no indication of it.
- Shirou has this in Fate Stay Night, spurring his famous "people (should) die when they're killed" line when he chooses to abandon it.
- One of the player character's augmentations in Deus Ex is Regeneration.
- In Prototype, Mercer can heal over time when not under attack. It's faster to eat people though.
Web Comics
- Schlock, from Schlock Mercenary, as an amorphous life form, can regenerate from any amount of mass remaining, but as his memories are distributed throughout his body, he literally loses his mind if he takes enough damage. His eyes are actually separate lifeforms, that grow on trees on his homeworld.
- Averted, however, in that he needs to regenerate from what's left of his own mass. If enough of that is lost, he explicitly needs a large outside source of organic material.
- In Sluggy Freelance, Oasis has a healing factor according to this strip. Whether this is the cause of her numerous Back From The Dead moments is unclear.
- One of the Super Soldier implants in SSDD has this effect [1]
Web Original
- This is so common in the Whateley Universe that there is a Regen scale describing how fast any mutant recovers from injury. Carmilla once was decapitated: her head grew back while the assailant stared in shock. Tennyo had her entire arm blasted off by a supervillain: she spun around and had completely regrown her arm by the time she got to him, intent on massive retaliation. Other characters have this to a lesser degree, including Generator and Peril.
Western Animation
- Starscream gets this in Transformers Animated from an Allspark fragment in his head.
- Which is based on how G1 Starscream was Ret Conned into having one to explain how he came Back From The Dead.
- But that was only his spark (soul) which was immortal, he didn't have a body, regenerating or otherwise. Which lead to him floating around like a ghost for quite some time until he could scam himself a new shell (or steal someone else's).
- Transmetal 2s in Transformers: Beast Wars have the ability to heal mild to moderate damage near-instantaneously using energy from their spark. Rampage also has one, as he was created by an expirement to duplicate Starscream's spark.
- Godmasters in Transformers Super God Masterforce have this as one of their defining features.
- A common fanon in Kim Possible is that Shego has this as well. Probably inspired by the fact that her hands can generate a plasma-like fire hot enough to melt steel and never she seems to have as much as a scratch after being kicked around by Kim.
Truth In Television
- The hydra (not the mythological creature, but the polyp) can regrow nearly any damage. It can be sliced in several pieces and each of the pieces can grow into a functioning polyp. Being a very simple animal with two layers of cells and no nervous system or complex organs helps.
- Salamanders are perhaps the most complex animals capable of regenerating limbs in adulthood.
- There are some species of starfish that not only grow new limbs, but the detached limb can grow a new starfish!
- Sponges can be put through a fine strainer and they will eventually recoalesce, also flatworms can regenerate bits, including heads, although it's possible to mess with this in ways that result in two-headed flatworms.
- Some round and segmented worms also can do that, but with the two-tailed and two-headed mistakes as well. It generally depends on the location and extent of the injury.
- Most leafy plants are able to regenerate from practically any damage, as long as they can still acquire nutrients and the materials needed to synthesise sugars (in other words, their roots and leaves still need to be at least partially functional).
- Not even necessarily the roots — many plants can be propagated from cuttings.
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