Who Wants To Live Forever / Western Animation

• In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, one episode involves Robotnik traveling to Mobius's equivalent of ancient Egypt to retrieve the Chaos Emerald of immortality, which turns out to be in his ancestor's pyramid. Said ancestor's animated mummy actually thanks Robotnik for taking the emerald from him, as he couldn't bear to spend an eternity with Sonic's ancestor who was also in the tomb.
• Mr. Freeze from Batman: The Animated Series has an extended lifespan (not immortal, but a good few thousand years) due to his condition, and he might have been fine with that if not for the fact that he can't survive outside of a sub-zero environment, meaning that whenever he's not in his Tailor-Made Prison cell, he has to wear that big clunky suit of armor all the time. His inability to fully enjoy the world around him causes him so much grief that in "Deep Freeze", when an elderly man comes to him asking to be made like him in order to live longer, he thinks the man is crazy.
  Freeze: You want to live like this? Abandoned and alone? A prisoner in a world you can see but never touch? Old and infirm as you are, I'd trade a thousand of my frozen years for your worst day.
  • It gets a lot worse for him later on when his condition destroys his entire body, leaving only his head. He spends almost fifty years like this before the Batman Beyond episode "Meltdown". When he finally has a chance at a normal life, it doesn't last long, with his body changing back into his prior condition.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold had K'rull the Eternal, a Genius Bruiser caveman who was cursed with immortality and became an Evil Overlord. Unfortunately, the problem with being an Immortal Ruler was that he always outlived the civilizations he conquered, and his Evil Plan to remedy this in the present day is to turn all of mankind into immortal Ultimate Life Forms like himself so he could Take Over the World and not watch his subjects die for once. After his plan is foiled by Batman and Booster Gold, by the 25th century he's become a Retired Monster.
• The Ben 10 episode "Don't Drink the Water'' features the Fountain of Youth and the Conquistador who has been tasked with guarding it for over 400 years. When the heroes learn of the fountain, Grandpa Max (temporarily de-aged) finds the prospect of Eternal Youth a dream come true, while the Conquistador explains that it's actually the opposite; he hates his immortality because it forbids from having a normal life, such as starting a family. The Conquistador is noticeably relieved when Ben is able to destroy the Fountain as it allows him to live out his dream of a regular life (since you only remain immortal if you continue drinking the water).
  Conquistador: I've been unable to fall in love, to have a family like [Max's], knowing that they would grow older while I did not. Time is your friend, not your enemy. Appreciate what you have.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation FOUNTAIN", neither Sector V nor The Delightful Children are interested in drinking from the Fountain of Youth unlike Leona. In fact, the Delightful Children want to destroy the Fountain claiming it to be a violation to every adult's wish that a child should grow up. They do have a point in this.
• Gargoyles:
  • Has Demona and Macbeth, who become immortal at the same time, with the only way to break the spell that granted it being for one to slay the other, at which point both will die. Demona has no problems with immortality because she is too busy trying to eliminate the human race, whereas Macbeth, forced to leave his loved ones and homeland behind and face the fact he'll outlive anyone he truly cares for, has little worth living for. Demona thinks he wants to kill her out of vengeance for her betrayal years ago, but he's really just... tired. Eventually he finds other things to keep himself occupied. For instance, he tried to replace Arthur Pendragon as the One True King and wasn't too disappointed when he failed. Macbeth never really starts thinking that Living Forever Is Awesome, but he's no longer a Death Seeker either.
  • The 1100-year-old Hudson gives the immortality-seeking Xanatos a lecture on the downfalls of living for so long.
    "Most of my clan is dead and dust, and I am a stranger in a strange land. Demona and Macbeth are immortal. Has it brought them happiness?"
• The Halloween Episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is a parody - of sorts - of the legend of Jack o'Lantern. On Halloween, Grim tells his two friends how the prankster Jack tricked him into making him immortal; however, Grim also cut off his head after doing so to teach him a lesson. Jack replaced his head with a pumpkin as he continued to "live in a world that doesn't understand him", only coming out on Halloween. Of course, in the present day, he gets ahold of Grim's scythe and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, sending an army of demonic pumpkins out to destroy Endsville with the intent to cut Grim's head off. In the end, Jack no longer has to suffer this fate, but it's replaced by a worse one: Grim decides that he's overstayed his welcome and cancels the bargain, causing Jack to be Dragged Off to Hell.
• Somewhat mentioned on a much less emotional and spiritual scale in Jackie Chan Adventures - currently made immortal due to holding a magic object, Finn of the show's Quirky Miniboss Squad, hits a low-hanging bridge from being on top of a train as it goes under it. Indenting the bridge, he notes "Immortality... hurts."
• In the Justice League episode "Hereafter", Superman is sent into a barren future, seemingly devoid of humanity... save for the lonely, less insane, immortal Vandal Savage. The fact that the reason why the Earth is barren and ruined is because he destroyed it probably had something to do with it as well. Savage does acknowledge that if he didn't keep busy, he would go (more) insane with the boredom and loneliness. He occupies himself with many projects, from farming to restoring the ruins of Metropolis to dabbling in time travel (which he explicitly can't use to fix things, as he cannot coexist with his past self... good thing Superman came along). The only thing that really seems to bother him is his guilt of destroying the planet, to the point where he has constructed a fully operational spaceship but doesn't use it because he feels that his isolation is a suitable punishment for his crimes.
• Skips of Regular Show is a subversion. Mona, his One True Love and the one reason he had for turning down immortality passed on before he gained it.
• Samurai Jack:
  • The Lava Monster was explicitly cursed with immortality. Originally a great viking warrior, his people were slaughtered by Aku, and, as a final act of cruelty, Aku decided not to kill the viking, but instead trapped him inside an unbreakable crystal, to prevent him from ever rejoining his people in Valhalla. Over the millennia, the Viking learned to shape the rock and magma around him into a new body, and constructed a maze of traps and hazards for the sole purpose of drawing in a warrior powerful enough to defeat and kill him in battle.
  • Season 5 picks up after a 50 year Time Skip, and one of the first things that happens is the revelation that, as a consequence of Jack being pulled from his own time in the pilot, he hasn't aged at all in that time. His consistent failure to defeat Aku in all that time, and the prospect of spending an eternity in this Bad Future, has by now long since driven him to the edge of the Despair Event Horizon.
• Played With on South Park with Kenny. In his case, he keeps dying, yet somehow spontaneously resurrects, without anyone around him even remembering afterwards. It's not so much the immortality that bothers him—it's having to die over and over again.
• In the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Lorelei Signal", the women of the second planet of the Taurean system neither age nor die. However, any men on the planet die quickly. They must lure humanoid males to their planet once every 27 years and drain them of their Life Energy in order to survive. They can't escape their planet and they can't even have children.
• Superman: The Animated Series: In the episode "The Way of All Flesh," John Corben is turned into Metallo, and although Corben enjoyed not feeling pain and being able to go toe-to-toe with the Man of Steel himself, he eventually realized he couldn't feel anything at all. Both the scientists at Lex Corp. and Luthor himself tell Corben that he should be happy at the fact that he can't get sick or tired, and is basically immortal, only for Corben to angrily reply that he's going crazy not feeling pleasure, and demands that his mind/brain be implanted into another body.
• The Transformers don't seem to have a problem with their extremely long lifespans, although a race of sapient robots who can theoretically replace any body parts that become broken or worn out are obviously going to have different perspectives on life than humanity.
  • As most transformers primarily have friends and loved-ones who are also transformers and will live as long as they do, lots of the problems individuals have outliving their social circle don't really apply.
  • Quite a few of them don't reach whatever a Cybertronian's maximum life expectancy is anyway, since they have been fighting in a brutal civil war for millions of years. IDW's run on the comics has taken some time to look at the kinds of effects that can have on an individual's mental health.
• Wakfu: Qilby the Eliatrope is the only one of his kind apart from his dragon sister Shinonome who retains his memories every time he dies and is reborn, making him feel the full effects of a life that will never end. He'll die and be reborn, but life never feels new to him. Qilby sees the individual lives of others as meaningless because they're not significantly different than those before, so he'll readily sacrifice their lives so he can wander space for new sights and lifeforms to hold his interests.
• In X-Men: The Animated Series, the immortal villain Apocalypse realizes in "Beyond Good and Evil" that he has been trying to exterminate mutants and humans alike for the thousands of years he has walked the earth and still hasn't won. He laments that he might be stuck for all eternity and instead sets out to annihilate the multiverse to remake it in his own image.

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