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"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop! Ever! Until you are dead!"
This is the bad guy that has the creepy habit of implacably, unrelentingly coming after you, even after you try relatively ordinary measures. Bullets? Shrug. Swords? Get real. Rocket launchers?! Barely slow him down, and that's if you're lucky. If he really wants to make you fear him - or just mock your inability to scratch him like the Jerkass he is - he will deliberately take his own sweet time to stroll over.
Oh, and don't even try hiding, he'll always find you; and he'll just use Super Strength to pull you through the wall!
It is going to take some serious Applied Phlebotinum to bring this one down. The highly sought-after Mac Guffin might do the trick... maybe. If this guy's the Big Bad, you probably won't be able to either way; the most you can hope for is to fend him off until he resurfaces again. The big brother to someone "merely" Made Of Iron. Taken further, usually "levels" into The Juggernaut. Of course, comical Implacable Men are still just as prone to mundangers as anyone else.
See also Determinator, Hero Killer, and MK Walker. Almost always a certifiable Badass.
Examples
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Anime
- Mad Pierrot from Cowboy Bebop.
- Petopeto-San has a character named Nuriko, who is a Nurikabe — Essentially, a wall monster. She is made of concrete. She only gets mad once, but the only way to stop her forward progress was to shove her off of the stage she was on at the time.
- The Espada, from Bleach. One of them takes the hero's ultra-powerful, last-ditch attack which has defeated his previous opponents with ease... and gets off with a slight burn. He's not even the most powerful.
- Their leader, Captain Aizen, also does this: he effortlessly blocked the hero's best attack using one finger. The finger didn't even bleed.
- Zaraki Kenpachi, who just grins after being impaled multiple times, and lets someone stab him just so he can get close enough to stab back.
- Roberta from Black Lagoon, who in the space of two episodes hunts the protagonists through half of Roanapur, implacably getting through, in order, one shoot-out against twenty people all intent on killing her, the building said shoot-out was taking place in being detonated (by her, while she was inside, no less!), the ensuing inferno, a car chase that ends with her car flying from a rooftop and crashing into the side of a building, hanging onto the protagonists' car with a knife as they try to shake her off at top speed, being flung from said car into the side of a cargo container, a shootout with the Heroic Sociopath heroine and finally a several-hour long fistfight. Which she stands up and walks away from after drawing with a Cross Counter. Oh yeah, and she's a maid by profession.
- Lampshaded when the Lagoon Company directly compare her to The Terminator.
- The El Baile de La Muerte manga arc shows her more awesomeness. After her master death, as her first move, she methodically tortures everyone that she suspects to be linked to her master's death. After finding the culprit, she hunts him down in Roanapur, while beginning to lose her sanity. Then she wages a one-woman war against anyone who tries to capture him, including a whole platoon of FARC guerillas. With a 50" ASSAULT RIFLE, GRENADE LAUNCHER ATTACHED. IN A STYLE that will make DANTE ENVIOUS. And killing a FARC leader stupid enough to try to seduce her with a HIDDEN GUN IN HER BELTHEAD. Not enough? She even tries to shoot Garcia to prove that "he can't be here," then stops Sawyer the Cleaner and promptly disarms her using her gun barrel, no less. Then catches Shenhua's throwing blade, and SNAPS IT WITH HER TEETH (while wearing a Slasher Smile from hell), and makes little Fabiola cringe in fear simply by talking to her about their master. Eat your gun out,
John Rambo River Tam.
- Roberto and Inspector Runge from Monster. One can wonder what sort of chaos would ensue should they ever have to face each other. They do. It's awesome
- Sabrac from Shakugan No Shana. His physical humanoid form is only a small part of his actual body, so he's able to recover and regenerate from any attack.
- Guts from Berserk, an understandably rare protagonist example, who will not stop until Griffith is dead, demon army after him be damned. Also, quite a number of the series' demons either are these or The Juggernaut.
- The personified Book of Darkness in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. Her implacablity was best displayed when Nanoha activated Raising Heart's brand new Deadly Upgrade, pierced the Book of Darkness' Deflector Shields, blasted her in the face with an Excelion Buster at point blank range... and didn't even leave a scratch on her.
- Almost all of Hellsing's non-humans, including the mooks, and at least one empowered human count as Implacable Men. Hails of normal rounds barely faze them and they heal almost instantly. One extreme case is Church Militant Father Alexander Anderson, who takes two headshots from explosive .454 bullets in rapid succession and gets back up almost immediately. Another is Designated Hero and somewhat Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Alucard, who gets shot to pieces on three separate occasions only to rise, heal and mop the floor with his assailants. Admittedly, both of the above are anti-heroes instead of villains, but the bad guys do get their own Implacable Men, including aforementioned army of vampire mooks.
- The Big Bad has on his side a Werewolf who's practically Made Of Iron and a Catboy by the name of Schrödinger. He got his head shot off in England. He showed up in Brazil in the time it took the Big Bad to walk down the hall. Oh yeah, that "dead" thing? It got better. Oh yeah, and there's The good guy's former Battle Butler Walter, as a vampire
- Inspector Zenigata from Lupin The 3rd fits this bill. If he so much as lays an eye on Lupin, he'll start chasing him to the ends of the earth!
- Sloth from the manga version of Fullmetal Alchemist. Takes countless gunshots, numerous mortars, and a few exploding vehicles and keeps on truckin'. He barely even needs to use his regeneration; the military doesn't even kill him once. The only thing that manages to stop him is getting doused with gasoline and lured out into subzero weather. And that still doesn't kill him, just makes him stop for a while.
- In the Pokemon movie Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, the Regis fit this trope to a T. No matter how many Aura Spheres Lucario chucks at them, and no matter how many passageways are knocked down, they just keep walking slowly, inevitably, towards the heroes. Especially interesting is the fact that they manage to be implacable even while being constantly pegged by their mutual weakness to Fighting types.
- Vash and Knives from Trigun, seeing as, in addition to just not dying, even when pushed to the very limit of their powers, they never relent in their ideals either. A potent example is when Vash fires an entire clip of bullets at Knives. Knives turns the parts of his body where the bullets hit into guns and fires back. They both get better.
- Mahou Sensei Negima has a variation that can only be described as...odd. Due to an unfortunate incident involving the Power Incontinence of The World Tree and a request for a kiss, Negi gets turned into an Implacable Man with the stated goal of french kissing somebody, and the best efforts of several mages and fighters are powerless to stop him. He gets turned back to normal when he succeeds in kissing Asuna, nearly killing her by suffocation in the process.
- Jack Rakan is the comedic version of this. The man will not go down, no matter how hard you hit him. One of his many titles is "That Damn Guy You Can Stab With Swords All You Like And It Won't Do A Thing Damnit", and for good reason.
- Rikiya Gaoh and Jo Tetsuma from Eyeshield 21. Tetsuma runs with the speed of a freight train and hits about as hard, all while remaining perfectly emotionless and calm, while Gaoh's just a psycho who literally can't be stopped...
- Except by Donald Oberman, himself an example.
- Goku becomes an Implacable Man to the Red Ribbon army. He takes out their entire force in their biggest stronghold, and nothing they can throw at him works, not even a big ass mecha.
- Cell from Dragonball Z can regenerate all wounds and come back if there is even a ''single cell'' left of him.
- Fuse from Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade has a touch of this towards the end. Clad in his standard issue bullet-proof armor, he ignores bullets and rifle grenades as he implacably advance through the Tokyo sewers, gunning down any who oppose him.
- Oddly, this is a trait more associated with the protagonists than the villains in Naruto.
- One Piece gets Magellan, the prison warden of Impel Down. During Luffy's escape from prison, Magellan chases them the entire time, and it gets to the point that anybody that's caught by him is considered already dead as the prisoners run away from him, so what starts out as a riot of 5 floors and thousands of prisoners leads to less than 300 making it out alive. It's not that he's just unreasonably tough: his power is producing large amounts of poison, so that even touching him is suicide.
- Almost every Awakened Being in Claymore. They do eventually die from Lowered Monster Difficulty, but boy do they take a lot of punishment. Some Claymores can as well.
- Berserker from Fate/Stay night had 12 lives and took any damage dished out to him. In the end it took some Phlebotinum to kill him.
- Dennou Coil has the anti-virus program Satchii. A Killer Rabbit who relentlessly hunts down Illegal programs and illegal program users. Satchii and the little mechanical balls, Kyuu-chans, that come from him, are the general bane of the main characters of Dennou Coil.
- Luna's father in Seto No Hanayome. The guy takes a Kill Sat to the face without even flinching.
Comic Books
- A heroic example: Superman.
- The Juggernaut
- The Saint of Killers from Preacher is a 24-carat-pure example. Despite appearing to be just a grim-faced middle-aged man in a beat-up duster, bullets bounce off him by the hundreds, speeding trucks crumple around him, a direct hit from a nuke doesn't even give him pause ("Not enough gun." as the Saint himself puts it). The only thing to give to briefly impede him was being literally trapped by a wall of the corpses of Mooks sent in to stop him.
- In the first appearance of Judge Death in Judge Dredd, Dredd and a squad of Judges encounter Death committing a massacre. They open fire with standard ammunition to take him down, but the Dark Judge barely reacts to being hit multiple times while gloating "You cannot kill what does not live." However, the trope is then subverted by Dredd ordering him shot with incendiary ammunition which does bring down Death's body, even if the spirit escapes for the moment.
- Jei-san from Usagi Yojimbo was supposed to be a creepy one-shot character who
dies disappears after being struck by lightning. He mysteriously shows up again with the goal of killing Usagi and gets stabbed by his own spear and tossed off a cliff into a raging river. He gets better. He is Killed Off For Real when he gets stabbed by a mystical sword, but soon possesses the swordswoman Inazuma, then possesses another person after Inazuma's death... He gets better.
- After Usagi's first Single Stroke Battle with him, they both freeze in shock - Usagi because he thought his blow was fatal, Jei because he thought he was invulnerable. So Yeah.
- Spider-Man's enemy Morlun fits. Spidey hits him with a car and it doesn't slow him down.
- In Special Forces, autistic manchild Zone is incredibly implacable. As the Desert Wolf, the enemy he was tasked to capture, finds with horror, "He is a demon! He has no fear!"
Film
- Perhaps the most potent distillation: the Terminator is literally a killing machine, as discussed in the page quote. The key example occurs near the end of the original film where Kyle Reese manages to explode the fuel tanker truck that the Terminator is driving to try to destroy it. Immediately afterward, Kyle and Sarah Connor embrace with romantic music playing as they feel the crisis is over. However, the music abruptly changes back to ominous as the Terminator, now stripped to his endoskeleton frame, arises from the flames to shock both the heroes and the audience that the killer robot is still coming. Hell, even after Kyle blows its legs off the damn thing keeps crawling after Sarah with murderous intent and claws at her with its metallic skeletal hand to the very last even as it's being crushed in a press.
- Taken to further extremes in Terminator 2, where the T-1000 gets frozen by liquid nitrogen and breaks into a million pieces...and still survives, albeit with some damage to its shapeshifting ability; he also manages to continue running at the same speed as a reversing car while being shot repeatedly with a pistol. Moreso with Sarah Connor's attack on Dyson's home, where she all but becomes a Terminator herself and is halfway to shooting a defenceless, wounded man dead in front of his wife and family.
- Terminator 3 takes the trope even further with the T-X, which treats giant electromagnets, rocket launchers and a beating from Arnold Schwarzenegger with nothing more than mild annoyance. The thing that is finally required to take down this Super-Terminator? A silly exploding plot device that the other Terminator is apparently powered by. In all fairness, it was a nuclear silly exploding plot device, preceeded by a Bond One Liner.
- Terminator Salvation has the original T-800 chasing relentlessly after John Connor through the very factory that is building more of them. It is totally impervious to any kind of damage Connor throws at it even after having molten steel poured onto it, with said steel cooling off and being broken out of to continue the chase. The Harvester also counts.
- Jaws from the James Bond franchise lives through two movies by sheer force of not stopping ever.
- For that matter, Bond himself. Especially in the reboot he gets some truly epic chase scenes.
- Probably the least potent film distillation: Ro-Man, the title character of B Movie Robot Monster. All of our weapons have failed to kill it, and it's wiped out all of humanity, save about seven people. Under some circumstances, such feats would be really scary. However, since Ro-Man is a gorilla in a space helmet, this isn't one of those circumstances.
- Agent Smith (and the other Agents) in The Matrix. Not only are Agents ridiculously powerful and ridiculously hard to kill, but if you do manage to kill one, all the Agent needs to do is find another human to possess in order to continue trying to take you down. There's a reason that standard Resistance procedure before Neo came along was to "run your ass off" when an Agent showed up.
- Played for laughs with the random assassin in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: she survived a knife in the back, a dozen bullets shot in the back, a shot from a bazooka in the face, and a fall with Austin landing on top of her. A spot of Lampshade Hanging occurs when Austin cries "Why won't you die?!" A deleted scene shows that he keeps her in the trunk of his car to deflect gunfire.
- The Beast from the film Kung Fu Hustle. Takes being punched through walls and flattened into the ground and still keeps going.
- Realistically played by the main character from Brick. Takes a few beat-downs, but stands up again regardless (though his attempts to be truly implacable fail spectacularly when he swallows too much of his own blood and makes himself sick.)
- The film The Punisher as well as the game, features The Russian who seems to be almost completely impervious to any kind of pain imaginable (in the game he is even immune to bullet even though he doesn't have any super powers). He is based on the Russian character from the original comics, who is a lot more talkative, but just as supremely strong and relentless; he was only defeated when the Punisher suffocated him under his obese neighbour and then cut off his head, but he still came back after having his head reattached and his skeleton augmented with powerful metal alloys (he also received a pair of breasts due to hormone injections, which he took in stride by actually dressing up like a woman on occasions).
- Another bulletproof Russian (Uzbekistani) appears in the movie Snatch, and hilarity ensues.
Bullet-Tooth Tony: (interrogating a mook): Boris the Blade? As in...Boris the Bullet-Dodger?"
Avi:: Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?"
- Drug usage seems able to confer apparent-Implacability. A lesser kind of Implacable Man appears in Scarface: Tony Montana snorts cocaine and then takes on an army of assailants. Despite being shot numerous times with automatic weapons, he doesn't flinch and manages to kill just about every one of his would-be assassins. Only a double-barrel shotgun blast delivered from behind at point-blank range is enough to finally take Tony down.
- Similarly, in a Scarface-themed mission in a Hitman game, the target can, if not assassinated stealthily, snort a pile of cocaine and become very hard to kill.
- Truth In Television, at least for PCP users. Just ask a cop who's had to deal with one.
- Truth In Television for plain old adrenalin high. Many a police officer and crook have been killed by the person they shot and thought to be taken out of action in movie style, when actually a person who doesn't immediately succumb to a shock can act for several minutes after receiving a lethal shot, assuming it didn't hit the brain or spinal column. Dead men can shoot back at you, if you're not careful.
- Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies is nearly impossible to stop, and it's always temporary.
- Jason X adds a more heroic Implacable Man to the mix with Sgt. Brodski, who seems to repeatedly survive all sorts of damage on sheer force of will alone.
- In fact, most of the killers in slasher movies tend to fall under this trope until the Final Girl gets ahold of them (at least, depending on how many sequels there are).
- Imhotep from the 1999 film The Mummy. Literally immortal, the only way to actually stop him is to magic him back to mortality and then kill him.
- Well, or use a cat. Until he's complete, anyway.
- Arguably, Marv from Sin City. He's so tough he taunted his own executioners after they gave him his first round on the electric chair. He defeated the psychopathic Kevin by handcuffing them together and taking everything Kevin could dish out until he could get one good punch in. Throughout the film, he takes an almost superhuman amount of punishment without flinching.
- Kazuo Kiriyama in Battle Royale. Even after brutal hand-to-hand combat with a highly skilled martial artists, a leap out of a speeding car, a spearhead to the eye, and several gunshot wounds, including one to the face, he's still on his feet and dangerous.
- Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men definitely counts, although the film handles it more realistically than most. The next-to-final scene proves Anton is definitely killable. He's just more singleminded than most.
- Robert Mitchum's character in The Night Of The Hunter. "Don't he never sleep?"
- Hancock.
- Hellboy, as well as Kroenen (captured only due to Xanatos Roulette), Rasputin (historically tough, and made a deal with Eldritch Abominations), and Elsa (granted immortality by Rasputin).
- The titular Golden Army of Hellboy 2. Even after getting torn apart, they rebuild themselves.
- Godzilla, King Kong, and other similar giant animal monsters. Guns? Tanks? Fighter jets? Nuclear weapons? Shrug. You need a seriously plot-specific item to take out one of these guys.
- Well, Kong was killed pretty easily, by
airplanes beauty.
- The Repo Men in Repo! The Genetic Opera are hired on the basis of their having this trait, though usually it's displayed in more... subtle ways before they get the job (for example, Nathan's relentless search for Marni's cure.)
- Dorian Gray, as portrayed in the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen probably also counts. In an early scene in the movie, he's seen getting riddled with bullets, which only succeeds in destroying his suit and making him mildly annoyed.
- Subverted in V For Vendetta: title character V takes a massive barrage of bullets with a comparatively very minimal reaction, has a teensy bit o' trouble breathing just afterward (after all the bad guys are completely out of bullets)...... and then proceeds to completely annihilate everyone and everything, until he gets the Big Bad alone and hoists him up in the air and snaps his neck with one hand. The subversion part comes when he opens his cloak to reveal the medieval breastplate that only "sort of" protected him. Cue long-winded Heroic Sacrifice.
- The elite marshall squad in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. Butch eventually comments, "Don't they ever get tired? Don't they ever get hungry?...I wish they'd even speed up, at least it'd be different."
- For a non-superpowered or supernatural slasher the titular villain from The Stepfather films commonly survives things no normal man possibly could - in the first movie alone he gets shot several times and knifed in the chest, getting only a small scar from the encounter. It takes being chewed up and liquefied in a woodchipper in the third film to finally kill him.
- Michael Myers of the Halloween series; in the seventh film, after getting an axe in the chest, he nonchalantly rips the weapon out and keeps going.
- Though apparently you can convince him to go away by dressing up like him, but once the costume comes off, you're just another target.
- The Gunslinger in Westworld, though to be fair he is a robot.
- The Neo-Vipers from GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra are first shown walking calmly through massed assault rifle fire with all the rounds bouncing harmlessly off. While they are later shown to be susceptible to explosives or a Moe Greene Special, it does make them look intimidating.
- Kharis the mummy from The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Ghost, and The Mummy's Curse, a series of mummy films Universal made in the 1940s that were vaguely Inspired By the original 1932 The Mummy. He's immortal, Immune To Bullets, and generally unstoppable, unless he's expose to flames. He'd be a terrifying villain if he was capable of moving at any pace other than a slow walk.
- The Ringwraiths from The Lord Of The Rings (see also Literature).
Aragorn: They are the Nazgûl, Ringwraiths, neither living nor dead. At all times they feel the presence of the Ring, drawn to the power of the One. They will never stop hunting you.
Literature
- Vain, the magically constructed being in the Second Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, is an Implacable Man but not a villain. Instead, he spends most of the time doing very little and being vaguely ominous while he follows the heroes around and shrugs off all attacks.
- The Nazgul in Lord Of The Rings.
- "Dead? No, you cannot kill them, no, no!"
- In the Chronicles of Prydain, the Cauldron-Born are perhaps the most literal embodiment of the Implacable Man; they are actually invulnerable, and all strategies for dealing with them revolve around drawing them away from Annuvin (because they grow weaker when outside it) or delaying them. At the end, however, it is revealed that they can be killed by Dyrnwyn, the black sword. In The Movie, The Black Cauldron, that Implacable Army can only be defeated by someone jumping into the titular cauldron — to their death.
- Shrike from Mortal Engines, last of the Lazarus Brigade, survives being shot and stabbed (a lot), being blown up, being run over by a mobile city, and ten thousand years of entropy.
- A definite candidate for this trope is Verroq, the 'bearded mercenary' from The Bartimaeus Trilogy who, though a prominent baddie, is only named in the last book. He survives... well, anything and everything, really. Bartimaeus himself puts it best:
Bartimaeus: "Whether I squished him under a statue, blew him up with a Detonation or (as in our last encounter) simply set him on fire and hurled him down a mountainside, he never seemed to suffer the slightest injury."
- In the Discworld book Going Postal, having one of these sent after him (in the form of Mr. Pump, a golem) is what convinces Moist von Lipwig to give in and serve as postmaster. Golems do have a weakness, though: they can handle fire, and they can handle water, but being living clay, they can't handle both at the same time.
- Not to mention the Luggage. Even if you go to the ends of the earth, the Luggage will be heading there with its hundreds of tiny feet. It's also rather vicious.
- Ends of the Earth? It will follow you to the beginning of time or its end, into another dimension, or through the gates of Hell itself, utterly destroying whoever and whatever gets in its way.
- In book V of Edmund Spenser's 1596 poem, The Faerie Queene, Talus, the iron sidekick with a penchant for incredibly violent justice, proves unstoppable to any of his enemies, placing the trope firmly in the Older Than Steam category.
- In Glen Cook's Black Company books, all magic users tend to be hard to kill, but the worst by far is the Limper. For starters he gets stabbed a few hundred times, hacked apart, mutilated, knocked out of the sky, then decapitated. It doesn't stop him. Eventually he is shredded to tiny pieces and boiled in a giant pressure cooker, and the gooey, Nightmare Fuel mass of flesh and gore still breaks out and tries to keep going.
- Vago, the golem from Storm Thief. Not only is the guy next to impossible to harm with conventional weaponry, Revenants, which instantly kill everything else by brushing up against them die the instant they touch him, and give him energy. Granted, he was designed to kill them, so that bit is justified.
- Croup and Vandemar in Neverwhere, who cannot be killed and doggedly pursue the heroes until the end.
- The Bible, in the Book of Job, mentions a "leviathan" and "behemoth" that apparently shrug off all human attempts to subdue them, at least if the quite literal Word Of God is to be trusted.
- Rare hero example: Roland of Gilead, protagonist of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, especially in the first book.
- The gods of the Everworld series are, not surprisingly, rather hard to kill. You know, being gods and all. However, what is required to actually kill them varies according to book. At first, they can be killed only by another god or the weapon of a god. Period. Later on, it is said that Hel could've been vanquished by an enchanted sword, and one character says that a fall into a crater the group is at would kill even an immortal. Nonetheless, gods are stabbed with swords, cut with blades, and shot full of arrows with little effect over the course of the books. It is possible that the books' Coo-Hatch steel could kill an immortal, however.
- The Warrior Bugs from Starship Troopers (novel), at least according to Johnnie. It takes losing all four limbs on one side to topple one, and even then it's not out of commission till the nerve case is damaged. If it hasn't been toppled by then, it can still charge forward until it bumps into something like a wall.
- The Steel Inquisitors of Mistborn can only be killed by decapitation or pulling out the metal spike embedded in their back- they'll recover almost instantly from anything else. Their boss, the Lord Ruler, is even tougher- prior to the beginning of the book he had been stabbed, shot, decapitated, burned and even flayed alive and shrugged it all off like nothing.
- Hyde from The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde is a chilling deconstruction of this. Although we don't see him shrug off lots of damage, the point is made clearly - if absolutely, positively nothing is going to stop you, then surely that must include even the innocent little girl who just got in your way. Which is indeed what happens when Hyde callously walks onto her. Literally. In the face of this monstrous behaviour the observers are disgusted.
- Several characters from The Dresden Files, but most notably Cowl, whom a fallen angel-powered Harry flipped a car onto and it did nothing. And keep in mind wizards are the wimpiest of the creatures of the Dresdenverse. Also Nicodemus. He gets shot full of a full clip of bullets without even flincing. After the second bullet he actually started making the quintessential "can we hurry it up" gesture.
- The Vampire Lord Haputmann Constanza from the novel sereis/2000 A.D. comic Feinds of the Eastern Front can reconstitute himself from the smallest grain of ash. Getting shot with silver-plated anti-armor shells doesn't stop him, and getting decapitated by a propeller only slows him down.
- The Princess Bride has a Badass Normal example. Sure, the Man in Black is technically just an ordinary human without any superpowers or invulnerability, but... When following Buttercup's kidnappers, he outraces the fastest ship in the land, climbs the original Cliffs Of Insanity, even after they cut the rope, beats Inigo Montoya in a duel, wrestles Fezzik unconscious, and finally deliberately drinks poison without suffering any effects to beat Vizzini in cunning.
Live Action TV
- The Super Soldiers of Anubis and The Replicators from Stargate SG-1. Anubis himself is a border-line example: he has the survive-anything-you-can-throw-at-him part, but since he is a Galactic Conqueror he doesn't just show up trying to gut the heroes but sends armies after them instead. Sadly, they have this trait.
- The Mayor from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
- The Beast from Angel season 4 couldn't walk very fast due to huge posture and massive, cloven feet. It pursued its intended targets without haste but relentlessly. Bullets bounced off of it, swords and axes broke on its skin, even a pair of hand grenades blowing up in his face failed to slow it down.
- Many of Doctor Who's aliens chose to invade Earth during the late 20th century, and inevitably the army would find that bullets/bombs/missiles/tanks barely scratched the surface.
- In the 25th-season serial "Battlefield", the Brigadier shows the Doctor gold bullets for dealing with Cybermen, Teflon non-stick bullets that "go right through a Dalek" and muses that, just once, it would be nice to encounter an alien menace that wasn't Immune To Bullets.
- The Doctor himself would seem to be a good candidate for this title. He may not be physically invulnerable, but Regeneration combined with his legendary stubbornness means that he Will. Not. Stop. The basic arithmetic of Doctor Who is this: Five million Cybermen < Four Daleks < One Doctor.
- The Huntsman of The Tenth Kingdom. Not only does he get caught in one of his own traps, in a world where presumably medicine is at a medieval level and even magic may not be able to combat infections, he gets hit over the head (twice!), once by an extremely heavy iron torch swung with incredible force which should have smashed his skull or at least given him a concussion. And yet he still keeps waking up and coming after the heroes. His analysis? "I move slowly...but I always get what I want. Nothing escapes...the Huntsman." It finally takes a Hoist By His Own Petard moment to bring him to his Karmic Death.
- The Borg, from Star Trek The Next Generation. You defeat one or two of them, and the rest are able to adapt to whatever you used against the first ones. The exception to this being non-direct energy weapons, as this ability's mostly down to their energy shields.
- The Gorn from the Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Arena" is pretty implacable for most of the episode, even shrugging off a small avalanche caused by Kirk. Kirk is unable to harm the Gorn or stop its attempts to kill him (sluggish as they are) until he improvises a primitive cannon.
- The T-888 Terminator called "Cromartie" in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In the first episode he was shot multiple times, run over by a car, had a live wire shoved into his neck, is blown up as the same car that ran him over exploded and ripped in half by a terminator-destroying gun. He reactivates himself eight years later, dresses up like a post-apocalypse survivor (complete with gas mask), gets its head back, steals medical supplies, gets a scientist to help him regrow his skin, then takes the guise of an FBI agent, working to find Sarah Connor from the inside. The first season finale has him take out an entire SWAT team raiding his apartment(!), but spares the life of an FBI agent who is also tracking the Connor family.
- In a Season 2 episode, a Terminator is sent back to kill the governor of California during a specific time. He is accidentally sent back to the 1920s and kills the architect who designed the building that the speech was held in. The terminator proceeds to start his own architecture firm, go to great lengths to acquire the land, and construct the building himself just so he can pull off the termination as he was ordered to do.
- Also, in the second season opening, Cameron goes berserk and becomes an Implacable Woman as she pursues Connors, trying to kill them.
- Claire from Heroes has become this. Her Healing Factor is a big help.
- Rook from Kamen Rider Kiva is a truly frightening Mighty Glacier whose incredible toughness and intimidating appearance and reputation allow him to play the role of Implacable Man for about a third of the series. His reputation was such that when an Alternate Universe version was defeated handily by Kamen Rider Decade, fans cried foul.
- One episode of Hustle had an implacable bounty hunter (or "tracer") named Pinky Byrne.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 has an entire race of Implacable Men: the robotic Necrons, who can stand back up after basically anything - which in the Warhammer 40000 universe starts at being riddled with lasers capable of blowing limbs off, crushed by artillery rounds the size of houses and having your head bitten off by daemonically possessed super-soldiers. They even have a special rule for it: We'll Be Back. Space Marines and Daemons are effectively of this sort to "normals" too.
- Well, to be fair, Necrons don't get We'll Be Back against the artillery shells without a resurrection orb — Chunky Salsa Rule and all that. It is worth pointing out that even in such situations, the Necrons aren't destroyed. They've simply been damaged to the extent that they'll need to teleport to a proper repair facility before being in fighting shape. But they will be repaired.
- The general character of the Imperial Guard also fits this trope; the entire organization combines a willingness to spend human lives like ammunition with a fundamental religious devotion to utterly, completely crushing their enemies in the name of the God-Emperor of Man in spite of any losses to create this titanic, unstoppable juggernaut of raw manpower and machinery that absorbs casualties and hammers its opponents with sheer, overwhelming force until they break.
- Comissar Yarrik is a Badass Normal example of this. He lost his arm fighting againt an Ork warboss, but still managed to kill him, tear off his power claw and hold it triuphantly in front of the Ork army, causing them to flee in panic. Only then did he pass out. Later he also got his eye shot out and replaced with a bionic implant and had his command tank explode. He's dedicated his life to hunting down the Ork warlord Ghazkull Thraka and seems to have no intention of stopping despite being an old man by now. He even has a special rule similar to the Necrons "Well Be Back", where on 3+ he simply refuses to die and stands back up with one wound.
- GURPS has an Advantage called "Supernatural Durability" which makes you immune to all shock, stun, & knockout. As long as you have positive health you are immune to crippling injuries and have full move. With negative HP you have half move and can be crippled. You can only be killed in two ways: by an attack which does 10 * your maximum HP, or by using an item you're weak against and reducing you below -5*HP.
- For comparison A normal human has half move and dodge below 1/3 of their health. Below 0 HP they must make a roll each turn or fall unconscious, and must make rolls to not die at -1*HP, -2*HP, -3*HP, -4*HP. At -5*HP you die immediately, no save.
- For that matter, the Dungeons And Dragons game has this built right in—sort of. In earlier editions, characters simply had hit points and died only when they reached 0. Characters could be hurt, but they generally weren't bothered by it unless an effect also had a condition attached to it. Later editions made it slightly more believable, as once you reached 0 or lower, you simply dropped unconscious, and if you were at below 0, you bled out until you reached -10, at which point death ensued, but included abilities that allowed a person to be a true implacable man, able to take full actions while at negative points, until they reached -10 and keeled over.
- One particular class, the Frenzied Berserker, takes it a step further. They are capable of completely ignoring negative hit points, even below -10, while they are frenzying. They can easily hit double- or triple-digit negatives, and if a skilled (or lucky) healer manages to get enough spells off to return them to positive hit points before the end of the frenzy, they come out none the worse for wear. The only effects that can kill them in this state are the ones that don't deal hit point damage, like suffocation or instant-death spells. The cost for this ability, of course, is that they are required to continually attack, and if they run out of enemies they start chewing through allies...
- And, of course, no conversation about Implacable Monsters is complete without the Tarrasque: regeneration 40, magic-reflecting carapace, 840 hit points (this in a game where even the luckiest—as in, win the lottery several times—non-epic tank will have no more than 600, and then only for short bursts at a time), and immunities to everything under the sun. Not only that, but to kill it, you have to reduce it anywhere from negative 10 to negative 40 (depending on edition) hitpoints and subsequently cast wish or miracle—generally the most powerful non-epic spells in the game—to make him stay that way...for awhile.
- To top that, the Tarrasque can flat out not be killed in 4th edition Dn D. Instead he can only be driven back to the center of the earth to slumber.
- From the Elder Evils sourcebook is Zargon The Returner, an Eldritch Abomination that sucks up damage almost as well as the Tarrasque. Unlike the Tarrasque, though, even if you actually kill him he'll just grow back around his indestructible horn within a few days. The only way to keep him down for good is to destroy his horn, and good luck with that.
- In 7th Sea, there is the "Man of Will" advantage, rendering one immune to any mind-altering magic, immune to fear, immune to the effects of the Repartee system (ie, no one can Charm, Taunt or Intimidate you), and immune to the effects of being Crippled. Likewise, while you can't get a Hubris with it, it does give you a discount if you wish to purchase a Virtue. Needless to say, for a point based system, it is a very expensive advantage if a starting character wants it.
- In Deadlands: Reloaded and Deadlands: The Classic Collection, there is actually no known way to stop the Reckoners (though a later game, a side story to Hell On Earth allowed you to fight them) and most of their servitors can only be killed in one, very specific way (eg: Jasper Stone, servitor of Death).
- The "Slasher" supplement for the new World Of Darkness brings us the Mask. Built for murder and only murder, these mindless killing machines can take an entire pistol clip to put down, and never need to sleep or eat.
- "Ogre" from Steve Jackson Games. One player would set up the board with a layered defense of tanks, powered army infantry, and artillery. The other would have an Ogre (a large robotic tank in the style of Keith Laumer's "Bolo.") His only job was to advance.
Video Games
- Many games, especially Survival Horror titles, include one of these as a Recurring Boss (which will frequently turn out to be the final boss). Examples include:
- Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. It is perhaps worth noting that Pyramid Head also LITERALLY cannot be killed. Usually the only way to survive an encounter with him is to run your damn fool ass off and hope he doesn't catch you.
- Walter Sullivan from Silent Hill 4, at least until the boss battle. And even then he comes out the victor, depending on the ending. The Ghost Victims of the game also apply, since they will keep chasing Henry unless pinned down by a (very rare) sword.
- The Ultimate Being's final form from Parasite Eve.
- The Nemesis from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. In easy mode it takes at least 14 shotgun shells to kill him. On top of that, he's the only enemy in the game that can follow you from room to room and outrun you.
- Oh, you don't "kill" it with fourteen shells on easy. You knock it out. Nemmy'll show up later. Throughout the course of the game, he gets repeatedly shot, blasted out of a train with a grenade, passes out into burning helicopter wreckage, soaked with acid, and by the end, he's been decapitated, falls into a pit of acid designed to break down BOWs, and still doesn't stop.
- Lisa Trevor. Eventually she commits suicide by throwing herself off the platform you're on, after you expose her mother's corpse. And she somehow shows up again, none the worse for wear, to attack Wesker several times in Umbrella Chronicles.
- Resident Evil 4 actually gives a kind of subversion with the Regenerators. From the first meeting it seems that nothing can stop them... Unless you're really lucky with blind firing or high-end explosives, as we later find out that they simply have hidden weak points that can be revealed later. Bad guys like Mendez and Saddler, however, still play the trope straight, with Saddler ejecting the bullets from his body through his hands. And then there's El Verdugo. Luckily, it is possible to finish the game without killing this guy, which is probably what most players do, their first few times around.
- The Verdugo is so hard to kill, that some players are left with the impression that he's a Hopeless Boss Fight and that he simply can't be killed, only escaped.
- Debilitas from Haunting Ground. The three other stalkers in the game count as well.
- The Dahaka from Prince Of Persia: The Warrior Within. Subverted in that you can rather easily Kill It With Water.
- Officer Carmelita Fox from Sly Cooper
- Scissorman from the Clock Tower series, and the Subordinates from Clock Tower 3.
- The stalkers from Ghost Head/The Struggle Within as well, zombies excluded.
- Fox Face and the Four Masks from Shadow Hearts.
- The Welder (John DeFoe) in the Chzo Mythos series.
- The quite literally invincible Tall Man. Depending on his mood, he'll just walk towards you, or teleport Dragonball Z style and butcher you effortlessly.
- Demonophobia has the butcher-like Lucifer. Since this is THAT kind of game, there's no way to deal with him other than avoiding him. Your only warning he's anywhere nearby is the fact that a room that had mooks is suddenly devoid of them. And don't even try to fight, if he touches the heroine while he's after her, it triggers a cutscene where he brutally kills her.
- The SA-X in Metroid Fusion. Somewhat more complicated in that it's a copy of the heroine, with all the Metroid-killing equipment she wielded at the end of the last adventure. The real heroine starts off pitifully unpowered by comparison, and is now part Metroid to boot. Talk about stacking the odds against you. At first you can't do anything against it and just have to run away, but later on you can freeze it to slow it down.
- Samus herself is also an example. Especially in the 3d games where you can read Space Pirate logs that talk about her as an unstoppable killer cabable of obliterating their armies singlehandedly.
- The Metroids themselves, unless you're packing a cold based weapon.
- Let's not forget Big Bad Albert Wesker himself. He survived being slashed/impaled by Tyrant, and having a load of girders dropped on him, and can dodge bullets and even catch rockets Matrix style. Until he is involuntarily mutated into One Winged Angel form at the end of RE 5.
- After it is released in the third section of the PC game Vivisector: Beast Inside, the Overbrute Panther becomes an Implacable Man; while you can blast whole chunks out of it, it won't be slowed one iota by it, and will instantly regenerate, and unless you find some way of locking it out temporarily, it will always catch up with you and kill you with a casually-placed detonator to the chest. Oh, and it can turn invisible at will, as well, to both sight and radar, making it even harder to avoid the monster. Games designers are sadists, clearly.
- Fatal Frame II had the Kusabi, a guy who was unphotographable at least until the penultimate boss fight.
- Dead Space has The Hunter, aka the Regenerator Necromorph, an artificial Necromorph created by the ship's resident Mad Scientist who regenerates from all damage and steadily pursues you through the ship.
- Alma from F.E.A.R.. You actually do face her head-on at the end of the game... but even then, you don't so much defeat her, or hurt her, as vaguely annoy her into leaving you alone.
- Man in the blue suit in Goonies (NES).
- Death's Hand from Jade Empire, who is also The Dragon.
- Darth Sion from KOTOR 2, who you can only kill by convincing him that his life isn't worth living. I've heard of Talking The Monster To Death but this is ridiculous. According to the KOTOR Campaign Guide, Sion was once a living man, filled with so much hatred that when he finally was killed, his hatred and strength in the dark side allowed him to keep living, AND kill his assailant RIGHT THERE ON THE SPOT. He is bound together purely by his hatred. Oh, also, according to the medical records aboard the Harbinger, his flesh has been cut into a bunch of rotting chunks that now make up his body, and and each of his bones has been absolutely splintered and pieced back together. Isn't biology/necrology fun?
And/or necrophilia?
- The G-man from Half Life is a variant: You don't have to fight him, but he does follow Gordon Freeman all over the place, finding routes through places that Gordon must fight through and getting to spots before Gordon can.
- However, if you do feel like popping off a few rounds at him before he disappears round whatever corner, they simply bounce off with the bullets-on-metal sparks effect and sound (at least in the original; in HL2, like all important or allied NP Cs, he simply cannot be hit by weapons).
- Gordon Freeman himself. By Half-Life 2 he is feared as a One Man Army by the Combine, and worshipped as a hero by the humans in equal amounts.
- Enemies in the Devil May Cry series have a Devil Trigger power that they can use, making them nearly immune to flinching and much harder to kill. Vergil in the third title represents the Implacable Man ideal more accurately. When he uses his Devil Trigger, he doesn't flinch from attacks, takes them without being scratched at all and regenerates health. While he can be knocked out of it, showing the state to be merely a brief flirtation, it is hard enough to do so. When he assumes the Super/Desperation Devil Trigger in the final fight, he can't be knocked out of it, but he does halt after some time, though not before regenerating at a higher rate than in his normal Devil Trigger.
- Luca Blight from Suikoden II. Just look at what it takes to finally kill him.
- What the hell is wrong with you people? You list almost every example ever...Except the original,''Evil Otto''.
- An enemy/creature from Pikmin, the Waterwraith, is invincible unless you have purple Pikmin at your disposal. Unfortunately for you, you don't have any purple Pikmin when you enter the cave he dwells, and won't get access until you've reached the final floor.
- Liquid Snake from Metal Gear Solid survives a helicopter crash, an arseload of missiles that only succeed in blowing up his Humongous Mecha, a forty foot fall from the top of said Humongous Mecha after being punched off it during a fistfight, and then a barrage of gunfire to the face followed by a jeep crash. He is finally killed by a tailored supervirus-induced heart attack. And then he comes back in the sequel as a talking arm. But not really.
- Vamp from Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4. Survives being shot in the head and heart, filled with lead and dumped in a vat of no-resistance fluid, shot in the head again, stabbed multiple times (with he himself pulling a blade stuck in his chest out through his back), and shot a few more times before the Applied Phlebotinum keeping him alive is finally deactivated.
- The Reaper from Persona 3. Even if you do managed to kill him once you're strong enough, he still comes back for more.
- Speaking of Scarface
- In the pseudo-sequel The World Is Yours, Tony can enter a Blind Rage, where he exhibits true Implacability. He becomes immune to attacks, doesn't flinch, gains auto-aiming and the quasi-vampiric ability to heal by attacking enemies. Although it lasts for only brief periods, it can be reused and the meter needed to fuel it can be filled up fairly quickly. For that matter, Tony in general; he's gonna take Miami back and kill Sosa, and heaven help the chazzers stupid enough to get in his way.
- Also in The World Is Yours, Big Bad Alejandro Sosa exhibits apparent-Implacability the way Tony did at the end of the film, taking whole clips to the chest without flinching. Even from the mighty Desert Eagle that instant-kills everyone else. A good few headshots are needed to end him.
- In addition to what has been mentioned about Warhammer 40000, the Dark Crusade expansion to Dawn Of War gives Eldar Fire Dragons the effective mass of super-heavy tanks without compromising their agility. Although they do not have the durability of most other examples on this page, the not-too-shabby health they possess results in a bunch of base-wreckers that can sprint through air strikes, artillery, orbital bombardment and God-Emperor knows what else without being tossed around like most other infantry. Yes, that list of infantry includes Da Ork Warboss. They form a point of contention regarding Eldar imbalance.
- Solus from Breakdown is indestructible to the point where all you can do is run, dodging laser traps only to see him just walking through them - bear in mind these laser traps would kill you the second you touch them, and yet he just walks straight through them without even a burn mark to show for it.
- In Command and Conquer, Kane has survived being shot at by a giant space laser, and also being run through by a piece of debris. He comes back for yet another sequel.
- A little bit of Fridge Logic allows one to realise that almost all action game protagonists must appear this way to the hapless Mooks of the enemy - a lone man - or sometimes more - who just keeps killing and killing his (or her) way through whatever dregs of society and scum of the universe are thrown at him, no matter how big, large in number, high-ranking or well-armed the opposition is, on his way to the idiot who pissed him off. Admittedly, most of them are not Nigh Invulnerable, but spirit of the law and all that...
- Then again some do legitimately end up with so much HP they can outright ignore frightening levels of damage. Imagine what the human Mooks think of the human looking protagonists of most RPGs. Samus or Link with all of their health upgrades are another example. Beam of radioactive plasma? Sword wider than I am tall disemboweling me? Not a scratch.
- This is lampshaded in Pratchett's novel Only You Can Save Mankind where the Screewee Empire are genuinely fearful of the protagonist's ability to keep coming back every time they kill him, since they're a videogame antagonist race who are somehow real. When he points out it must surely be the same for them being as he's played one level many times and there's always three ships, they simply answer "different ships."
- Also lampshaded in the Metal Slug series. When one of your One Hit Point Wonder characters comes back from the dead — either through using an extra life or using a continue — all enemy soldiers on-screen briefly freak out over their inexplicable resurrection.
- Asgard in Wild ARMs 3. Guns and spells? Barely fazes him. An entire structure collapses on him? Minor inconvenience. Sending him to the distant past? Ha ha, yeah right. The only reason you even manage to kill him was because he allowed you to kill him so he can follow his masters to hell.
- The Lobstermen of X-COM: Terror from the Deep, like their predecessors the Chrysalids, will give this impression when you first encounter one. You fill it with harpoons, your squad opens fire with Gauss pistols, you launch torpedoes at it... and you watch in horror as it somehow survives it all and proceeds to mow down your troops.
- Humorously done by Allen O'Neille in Metal Slug. In the second game he gets eaten by a killer whale upon defeat and still comes back for the sequels. When asked about his immortality, the game staff responded that the reason he never dies is because he both "has a body of steel and guts", and he has a wife and son to return to at the end of the day (a strange inversion of Fatal Family Photo there).
- Max Payne can get plugged with hundreds of bullets in the course of the game, but doesn't seems any worse off, as long as he has a supply of painkillers to dull the pain. Lampshaded by the Big Bad of Max Payne and again by the Big Bad of Max Payne 2:
Nicole Horne: (Max Payne) What do you mean he's unstoppable? You are superior to him in every way that counts. You are better trained, better equipped, you outnumber him at least 20 to 1. Do... your... job!
- The Cyberdemon in Doom can mow through masses of lesser Mooks and One Hit Kills the Doomguy unless he's at 200% health and/or 200% armor. It also takes at least 400 bullets (the maximum amount you can carry after finding the backpack) or an equivalent amount of damage from other weapons (except the rocket launcher, which needs more than the equivalent amount) to put it down. Even the almighty BFG, which can even down a Baron of Hell in one hit, takes four or so big blasts in order to take it down.
- In Disaster: Day of Crisis, Ray is practically this - he survives several natural disasters while fighting an elite former special forces unit, and he just still keeps coming after them on his own out of sheer willpower to save Lisa. Major Evans also has this trait, taking an ungodly amount of bullets to the face (and even calls their first fight a draw after he takes so many bullets!), mans a Metal Gear expy while still taking even more bullets (or rockets) to the face, and even is capable of giving Ray one hell of a hand-to-hand battle before Colonel Haynes finally shoots him square in the forehead. That guy must have a really special gun.
- Rune Scape had a couple of these guys that you saw that is implacable in general:
- First one is Lucien in While Guthix Rests, an evil version of the Mahjarrat during a cutscene where a series of heroes go and try fight the guy, needless to say most of them bit the dust for good and they DON'T come back.
- Second Nomination will be the Corpreal beast, a minor result of Nice Job Breaking It Hero. He comes to the copreal realm to deliver a can of whoop ass for anyone willing to take a one way trip back to lumbridge.
- The final nomination will be Vampyres and Vyrewatch, monsters that can't be beaten with even a Godsword, instead until you have a silver weapon, good luck fighting these guys.
- Tsukihime has a few of these as well. From Arcueid being cut into 17 pieces and coming back to life the next day, Roa being taken down to nothing but his ankles and immediately regenerating, and Nero having his body ripped in two only to make fun of the person who did it, I think they have this trope covered.
- The Ballistikraft robots from Rise Of The Triad. Invincible, hulking robots that roll towards you very slowly, shrugging off anything and everything you fire at it and spewing rockets at you. The only thing you can do is run.
- Definitely fitting the description on later difficulties is the Tank from Left 4 Dead, surviving clips upon clips of high-powered rifle and shotgun rounds and surviving complete immolation for upwards of a minute. Combined with how hard he swings, his implacability entered my nightmares.
- The amount of his HP varies from 4500 to over 6000, depending on difficulty, with a wee bit over five goddamn thousand in the Versus mode. When in doubt, Kill It With Fire.
- Common infected could occasionally become absolutely immortal thanks to a bug. Using a cheat engine that displays infected health doesn't even give comforting high numbers (like 999,999), it reveals that they simply do not exist as far as the computer is concerned. A Is will simply give up and let the Implacable Zombie kill them, and the only way to survive is to shove it into a room, close the door, and rush through the rest of the level.
- The Phantoms from The Legend Of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, which cannot even be stunned until you get the bow about halfway through the game, and cannot be defeated until you get the necessary legendary sword shortly before the end of the game.
- The Nameless One from Planescape Torment, unless he wishes himself out of existence or screws up when meeting the Big Bad.
- Zouken Matou. He actually gets 'killed' so often and eventually so effectively by Kotomine that he moves his soul into the Crest Worm that was in Sakura's heart, at which points she rips it out. Then crushes it. And he's still not dead. Also Kotomine, who had his heart ripped out and was still around two days later to kick Shirou's ass despite the latter's body currently turning into swords.
- Jedi Academy has four levels that involve different variations of the theme of an enemy (or several) chasing you that can't simply be killed, and three of the enemies fit this trope.
- From Supreme Commander, is the Galactic Colossus, which without appropriate countermeasures is exactly this as it marches through your base. So is a Monkeylord if you're unprepared.
- You as Rubi in Wet, you will regularly tear through rooms stacked to the brim with Mooks and survive. A more pure example is the ending, where Pelham sicks his pet Albino Tarrantula on you. After you kill her, you come after Pelham and he tries shooting you, it doesn't work and you behead him.
- Auron, a veteran Guardian and Badass Longcoat who died years before. He didn't like that, so he willed himself back into existence.
- The Wizard of Yendor. He's certainly killable, but that doesn't stop him from coming back to torment you all the way through the Elemental Planes, steal the Amulet of Yendor and create copies of himself to help with this.
- Bryan Wilks from Fallout 3. He will chase you across miles of post-apocalyptic wasteland, swim through mirelurk-infested waters, absorb unlimited amounts of gunfire courtesy of his Infant Immortality, all just to tell you that "things" are out to get him. And that his town has been overrun by giant, fire-breathing ants.
- You as Aldo Trapani in The Godfather game, despite his not-so-invulnerability in-game. Hundreds of enemy mobster corpses? Those Legitimate Businessmens Social Clubs converted to the Corleone cause? All stepping stones on the Roaring Rampage Of Revenge leading to Don Emilio Barzini, the man who ordered your father's death.
- Llednar from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance recieves no damage at all if you try to attack him with anything. It was actually because of the "Fortune" law, so Ezel created an antilaw card, making Llednar vulnerable to any attacks.
- Similar to the Metroid Prime example above, the eponymous heroine of Iji winds up viewed this way by the enemy troops, according to their logs - whether or not you're playing a pacifist run.
- In the MMO Ragnarok Online, the Monk character class gets access to the skill "Steel Body", or "Mental Strength" in one translation, that cuts all damage, magical or physical, to 1/10 if you have no vitality or intelligence, and if those two stats are high, any attack will do ONE damage! Another class (the Tank furthermore) has a skill that does big damage in an area, but returns some to its caster. But a glitch can be exploited to make it HEAL you instead, thus doing huge damage to your foes while filling your own life gauge back up. In either case you get a nearly unstoppable character.
Webcomics
- O-chul from Order Of The Stick ''nearly'' does this in #542
 , in which he, in order, throws one of his hobgoblin captors into an acid-tolerant shark's cage without using his hands, stabs himself using the spikes at bottom of said cage (filled with acid) to free himself from a rope bond, gets caught by the shark but pushes himself out, then tricks the shark into grabbing him so its momentum can throw him out of the tank, and still has enough "oomph" left in him to rush at Big Bad Xykon while drawing back a fist... at which point Xykon uses the weakest of the spells in his Functional Magic arsenal to push O-chul into negative hit point territory, which causes him to finally faint. He's still pretty good though, given that by the look of the scars on him, O-chul has probably gone through similar Death Traps multiple times, and Xykon's parting comment seems to suggest that each time he's gotten as far as rearing back for the punch. Justified, despite O-chul being a Badass Normal, in that the comic holds to the Dungeons And Dragons game's use of Critical Existence Failure.
- O-Chul took a hit from a Disintegrate spell while running directly at an enemy...and didn't miss a step. Earlier in the series, a single Disintegrate was enough to stagger a freaking dragon. (Two reduced it to dust.)
- The dialogue from the earlier strips also implies that Xykon is also implacable - being a lich (and thus a skeleton), he is invulnerable or resistant to most physical attacks, and even if he were to die, his phylactery allows him to generate a new body. Subverted in that the only time he is destroyed is when Roy attacks him with his bare hands (though the Phlebotinum in the room did the actual destroying).
- O-Chul, having taken so much damage that he's knocked into negative hit points, gets healed by V. First thing he does? Grabs Xykon's amulet and runs to the Snarl. The man is *driven*
- O-Chul does this stuff so much that there was at one point a thread on the comic's forum for "O-Chul facts." In the Order of the Stick fandom, he's a Memetic Badass to rival Chuck Norris.
- From Girl Genius, perhaps only three things must be said: THE UNSTOPPABLE HIGGS!
- All the Elite Vampires from Charby the Vampirate fit this trope as they are virtually invincible shrugging off even the most grevious damage at speeds even Wolverine would envy. To top it off they have super powers even by vampire standards & no despite all that they are still not a horde of Mary Sues.
- The Mecha Easter Bunny from Sluggy Freelance. Basically a rabbit Terminator with a built-in arsenal of guns. Survived a bazooka blast to the face from Bun-bun with only a lost nose. Was, however, distracted by having to hide Easter Eggs.
- Bun-bun himself, though not invulnerable, fits this trope through the sheer power of Bad Ass.
- Captain Blacksoul from Oceans Unmoving. Followed Bun-bun so implacably he was said to be the only thing the rabbit feared. Of course, it turned out there were very good reasons for this...
- Oasis. She can take a lot of damage before dying, and when she does, it only slows her down for a moment. Has specifically stalked Torg and Zoë as a major plot point that has lasted for years. Kusari would be the same if she were sent after you.
- Kore from Goblins.
Western Animation
- Parodied on The Simpsons, "The Boy Who Knew Too Much": Bart, on the run from Principal Skinner for truancy, cuts a rope bridge across a raging river. Skinner, without reacting, walks down, into the river, and surfaces on the other side. Bart exclaims, "He's like some sort of... non-giving-up... school guy!" The scene is a direct parody of Westworld.
- Vilgax from Ben10 is an extreme example of this.
- In a flashback sequence, it's shown that Grandpa Max stuck him to a nuclear missile, shot the missile into his spaceship, and presumed that was the end of it... until the season finale, where Vilgax emerges from his regeneration tank. At the end of the episode, he winds up, again, getting blown up with his ship.
- He resurfaces at the end of season two, at the end of which he's left trapped in the Null Void, an alternate dimension.
- Season three's premiere episode has Ben time-travel to the future, meeting a future version of himself who had literally torn Vilgax to bits. However, he then gets brought back to life by another recurring villain, who winds up taking a back seat to Vilgax for the rest of the episode.
- Ben lured Vilgax to the sewers where his dad (Who had recently learned Ben's secret) lit a flammable substance and, after Ben turned into XLR 8 and got him and his dad out, Vilgax was left to be caught in the fiery explosion. He's yet to appear in the Alien Force sequel series, but since he's survived countless "No One Could Survive That" explosions, he's probably still alive. Actually that was one of their "what if" episodes, so it may have well been his demise. His reappearance in the main continuity has already been confirmed, although not without a time skip and a story arc as a cooling off period.
- In Jonny Quest:
- There is a famous implacable machine, Dr. Zin's robot spy. Dr. Zin brags to Dr. Quest and Race Bannon all about his new machine since they won't be able to stop it leaving. The heroes immediately learned that Zin is not bluffing as they desperately try to bring down the spidery robot with everything on the army base from rifles to tanks, but nothing does more than barely slow it before Dr. Quest shoots it out of the sky with his Para-Power Raygun.
- The Real Adventures Of Johnny Quest had Ezekiel Rage, an apocalyptic preacher who's supposedly been killed after each of his attempts to end humanity, only to return good as new. It took sending him back to prehistoric times with a nuke before he was finally considered dead.
- Rampage from Transformers: Beast Wars, who is only held in check by Megatron because Megatron has the power to torture his soul if he steps out of line. Without this it's quite possible he'd simply torture and murder everyone on the planet. Frequently subject, of course, to The Worf Barrage. It's pretty much the same with Lugnut in Transformers Animated. Especially if it involves GLORIOUS MEGATRON.
- Brock Samson from The Venture Brothers.
- The fifth season of Teen Titans features an Implacable Woman: Madame Rouge. Like the T-1000 in the Terminator films, it takes her only a few moments to reconstitute after being frozen and shattered into pieces.
- Slade in the Teen Titans fourth season after having become The Dragon to Trigon. He shrugs of all attacks (except for Raven's magic) like they're nothing, even snapping his neck back into place after Robin breaks it. Of course, he was undead at the time.
- Avatar The Last Airbender has the Combustion Man, who won't stop his assassination attempts even when the person who hired him tries to call the hit off. On his first appearance he just blew up everthing that was thrown at him. He also seems to be pretty damn Made Of Iron as he shrugged off a barrage of ice-shards and both a rock and a boomerang hitting him in the head (however, said head injuries did make his power backfire and lead to him blowing himself up).
- The Beast Planet from War Planets is an Implacable Planet Eater. Nightmare Fuel if you ask me, especially once you've seen it in action...
- As seen in old-school Looney Tunes, the little man from the Draft Board will not be deterred under any circumstances.
- The Sharptooth from the original Land Before Time still goes after Littlefoot even after he is tail whipped several times into a mountain by a full grown Apatosaurus with enough force to shatter rock, falling several hundred feet into a chasm and being hit in the eye with a spiny vine. What finally does kill him is being lured into a lake then having a boulder dropped on his head.
- In Swat Kats, the Metallicats constantly shrug off most attacks on them. In their debut episode, they were particularly formidable, walking through gunfire and even ignoring the Swat Kats' best attacks.
- In the Tom And Jerry short Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse, Jerry is turned into one of these by a concoction that Tom has force-fed him in an attempt to poison him; Tom tries slamming down on him with a phone book, hitting him repeatedly with a fire poker, shutting a door on him, and even locking himself in a safe, all to no avail.
Web Original
- You can break his knee with a crowbar. You can have him impaled through the chest with a trap that is explicitly stated to be lethal. You can blow him up with a bomb that collapses several rooms. No matter what you do, Ace won't stop coming to get you...
Real Life
- While not exactly the same thing, Toshiba sold a VCR that once you set the time to record a show, and it started recording, absolutely nothing would stop its completion. The stop button is ignored. The remote control is ignored. Even if you unplugged the VCR for some time and plugged it back in as soon as it was reconnected to power, it would resume recording. The only way you could stop a timed recording before the time ran out was to unplug the machine and plug it back in while holding down the stop button. It was more tenacious than the Postal Service: neither rain, nor snow, nor disconnection of electricity would prevent this courier (of video tape) from the swift (or at least as long as the time period was) completion of its appointed rounds (and rounds, and rounds...).
- Debatably; Grigori Rasputin, whose death is something of a legend. See the film Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny if you want to see James Frain take about five minutes to kill Alan Rickman. Even better, see Nicholas and Alexandra where Rasputin is played by Tom Doctor Who Baker.
- Life itself. We've found anaerobic microbes inside volcanoes and sulfer springs and plants that live in the arctic. There will probably be rats and cockroaches after we blow ourselves up. Life finds a way.
- Of particular note is the Tardigrade, more commonly known as the water bear. It's a microscopic animal that can survive the pressures at the depths of the ocean, boiling water, being frozen to within a few degrees of absolute zero, radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill a human, or being exposed for days to the vacuum of space.
- Robert Henry Cain, During the battle of Arnhem he took to destroying tanks with gusto, hip firing a 2 man Piat gun destroying several tanks until on charge blew in the barrel, he was severely wounded but refused Morphine and returned to the tank killing, when he ran out ammo for his Piat he began using a 2inch mortar instead. His earsdrums burst from the constant explosions yet he continued attacking tanks with a mortar at point blank range. He was awarded a Victoria Cross for his actions.
- Simo Hayha. Famous enough for having over 500 confirmed sniper kills, and another 200 kills with a machine gun, he was completely unstoppable. Soldiers couldn't kill him. Snipers couldn't kill him. Specially trained counter sniper units couldn't kill him. When the Russians started shelling the areas he was known to be in, he was still fine. Entire operations were launched with the sole target of taking this one Finnish farmer out, all of which failed miserably. Eventually, on March 2, 1940, a little less than 100 days after his spree started, he was shot in the face. With an explosive bullet. He awoke from the coma a mere 11 days later, one the same day as the Winter War ended. The Russians probably heard that he'd woken up.
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