Basic Trope: A slain enemy is resurrected and cloned each time they are killed.
- Straight: Bob decapitates the Hydra, but then two more heads grow in its place.
- Exaggerated:
- The Hydra is decapitated and a million heads grow in its place!
- The Monster of the Week is frozen and shattered into countless pieces. Each fragment becomes a new full grown monster.
- Downplayed: The monster regenerates, but the regeneration takes a long time or the severed body part grows back weaker and/or smaller.
- Justified:
- The hydra can regrow From a Single Cell, and has no limiters stopping it from regrowing multiples of lost parts.
- The hydra only uses one head to control the body. The rest serve as distractions that can easily grow back, and the challenge is to find the real head to actually kill the best for good.
- Inverted:
- Two injured monsters merge into one.
- Bob severs the monster's head. The body stays dead...but then the severed head grows two new bodies.
- Subverted: The decapitated monster writhes for a bit, and regrows two more...halves of a head, which fuse into only one head.
- Double Subverted: Trying to burn the stump backfires and makes it regrow two heads, as it's Fed Via Fire.
- Parodied:
- Bob keeps cutting at the heads long after it's become apparent that this is worse than useless, to the point where the hydra asks him to stop humiliating himself.
- The hydra's new heads grow in smaller, until the hydra has thousands of heads but they're all only as big as strands of spaghetti at this point and can no longer even harm the hero.
- Zig Zagged: The hydra can regrow multiple heads, but only when it feels like it. Sometimes, the severed heads slither off and become new hydras, instead.
- Averted:
- The Monster of the Week stays dead.
- The Monster of the Week revives without multiplying.
- Enforced: "We want a Surprisingly Happy Ending for this episode. Let's have the monster regenerate, and make Bob have a Heroic BSoD over this. Then Alice The Unchosen One will kill the monster."
- Lampshaded:Bob: "I cut the hydra's head off and now it has two!"
Alice: "Well, yeah, Bob! Didn't you study mythology in school? That's what hydras do!" - Invoked: The wizard casts a spell on himself that creates two perfect duplicates of him whevener he (or any of his copies) dies.
- Exploited:
- A villain captures one of the infamous self-replicating monsters, locks it inside an inescapable prison and starts slaying it repeatedly until he generates a massive army of them, ready to be unleashed upon his enemies!
- The hydra tears its own heads off in order to get a few extra bites.
- Bob is a Blood Knight and keeps a hydra near his home due to it being a monster that he can fight and mutilate as many times as he wants without killing it.
- Bob cuts off hydra heads and necks to feed to a nearby starving village, using the monster as an endless food supply.
- Defied: The Monster of the Week's heads start to grow back, but Bob takes a torch and cauterizes the wounds to prevent it.
- The heroes note that the legends only ever talk of hydras regrowing lost heads, and so instead opt to just disembowel the thing.
- The heroes kill the hydra in a way that does not involve decapitation. (They could crush the heads, they could poison the hydra, and so on.)
- Discussed: "So, whenever the beast is killed it returns with a friend?"
- Conversed: "How are they going to defeat a monster that keeps regenerating like that?"
- Implied: Bob attacks the monster. It is never shown what exactly he does to it, but it is later shown with multiple heads.
- Deconstructed:
- The Monster of the Week is decapitated and regrows several heads. The multiple heads cannot agree on what actions to take; e.g., where to go, which head gets to eat someone, etc. They also have trouble coordinating who controls the shared body.
- The hydra growing new heads corresponds with the Law of Conservation of Mass: eventually the hydra runs out of body mass and then dies.
- Alternatively, the hydra grows so many heads that it's crushed by its own weight.
- The creature's heads each have their own identity and personality, leading to an existential crisis.
- The creature regenerates multiple of a limb when one is cut off, but his brain isn't used to having the extra limbs and can't control them.
- Too many heads and a circulatory system that can't supply enough oxygen to all of the brains at once means all the heads lose consciousness, making it easy for Bob to slay by other means.
- Eventually the creature grows too many heads to fit on one neck stump, so they all get crushed together and gibbed... which results in still more head giblets, which the world slowly gets flooded in.
- Reconstructed:
- Even if it's not in full control of itself, the hydra's wild flailings make it dangerous still, with the added bonus of being so unpredictable even the hydra doesn't know what it's doing next.
- The hydra collapses from heart failure... then grows two additional hearts and gets back into the action.
- Played For Laughs:
- Bob cuts off the arm of his enemy and two more grow in its place. He does this several times until the Monster is now too top-heavy to stand.
- The hydra sprouts several new heads, which start fighting with each other.
- Played For Horror: Because the hydra always grows more limbs than it loses, it eventually grows into an enormous mass of random body parts that crushes everything in its path, unable to control itself.
Back to Hyd-*slash* Ha ha ha ha ha! Pathetic fool, you have only created two extra links to the main pa--
SILENCE! *slash*
YOU FELL FOR IT, FOOL! NOW YOU HAVE THREE LINKS TO THE MAIN PAGE!
I'LL KILL YOU!! *KABOOM*
What?
Didn't I mention that with each kill you attempt on me, I make more links to the main page?
