History Main / TheFogOfAges

* The Nameless one in ''[[PlanescapeTorment Planescape: Torment]]'' suffers from a variation: [[NighInvulnerable He is a resurrective immortal]], but the repeated trauma of death eventually causes his mind to break, resulting in complete amnesia and loss of previous personality. This has happened several times by the point the game starts.

* The Nameless one in ''[[PlanescapeTorment Planescape: Torment]]'' suffers from a variation: [[NighInvulnerable He is a resurrective immortal]], but every time he dies and resurrects [[TheChazz he forgets his life up until that point and his personality gets randomly re-rolled]].

* An issue that explores all the backstories of the minor characters in ''{{Invincible}}'' reveals that The Immortal has forgotten some of his past experiences. Including being ''[[JuliusBeethovenDaVinci Abraham Lincoln]]''.

* The titular character of ''The Vampire Tapestry'' loses his memory each time he passes into hibernation, and speculates that this is a defense-mechanism against this trope. [[spoiler: At the end of the book, he realizes it's more likely to be a defense against his becoming emtionally attached to the humans he has to prey upon.]]

* Methos from ''HighlanderTheSeries''. When he tells [=MacLeod=] that he's over 5000 years old, he explains that's when he took his first head and "before that, it all starts to blur". Methos therefore has no idea ''how much'' over 5000 years old he is; for all he knows he could've gone for thousands of years before meeting another Immortal for the first time and killing him.

* Immortals in ''ElGoonishShive'' have this as inherent to their nature, with a slight variation. Every couple of centuries, they "die" and [[LossOfIdentity lose the vast majority of their memory]] and power. They can apparently choose the time of their death, or even postphone it indefinitely, but this has [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity exactly the result you'd expect]].

* The earliest known example of this in a videogame is ''[[GloryOfHeracles Glory of Heracles III]]'', for the [[SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem Super Famicom]], where the protagonist of the game is an immortal who suffers from amnesia. This plot element is used again in one of the sequels, ''GloryOfHeracles'' for the NintendoDS, where the protagonist is also an amnesiac immortal.

** Fairies in general, and Cirno specifically fall into this category - as {{AnthropomorphicPersonification}}s of nature, they are immortal to FromASingleCell levels for as long as their aspect of nature is powerful enough to support them. Individual fairies may well be TimeAbyss material, but because they are also permanently childish and simple-minded, they often forget everything that happened yesterday, much less a thousand years ago. Cirno, for example, can only vaguely remember the previous occurance of the flower's odd growth from ''Phantasmagoria Of Flower View'', only after being reminded a few times, and can't remember any of the details, but is fine with it, since she doesn't care, anyway. She simply wants to do what she always does - play, fly around, and pick fights to see if she'll win.

* In the ''{{Lunar}}'' series, Nall is an immortal white dragon. He appears as a young dragon in ''[[LunarSilverStarStoryComplete Lunar: Silver Star Story]]'' and then appears a thousand years later (in a more human-looking form) in ''[[Lunar2EternalBlueComplete Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete]]'', where he expresses his sadness at the loneliness of being immortal and misses his friends from the original game.

* In the ''[[Lunar]]'' series, Nall is an immortal white dragon. He appears as a young dragon in ''[[LunarSilverStarStoryComplete Lunar: Silver Star Story]]'' and then appears a thousand years later (in a more human-looking form) in ''[[Lunar2EternalBlueComplete Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete]]'', where he expresses his sadness at the loneliness of being immortal and misses his friends from the original game.

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* The Nameless one in ''[[PlanescapeTorment Planescape: Torment]]'' suffers from a variation: [[NighInvulnerable He is a resurrective immortal]], but every time he dies and resurrects [[TheChazz he forgets his life up until that point and his personality gets randomly re-rolled]].

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* Used in part in ''Lost Odyssey''. The main character is an amnesiac immortal who's lived for a thousand years; most of his memories are recalled through dreams as the game progresses. It's not a natural side effect of the immortality, though, but rather a case of LaserGuidedAmnesia that makes him more easy to manipulate.

* The Nameless one in ''[[PlanescapeTorment Planescape: Torment]]'' suffers from a variation: [[NighInvulnerable He is a resurrective immortal]], but every time he dies and resurrects he forgets his life up until that point.

* The Nameless one in ''Planescape: Torment'' suffers from a variation: He is immortal, but every time he dies he forgets his life up until that point.

* Elly from ''TouhouProject'' is an immortal witch who loses her memories blocks at a time, and so she acts as childish as she looks.

Well, hold on a second... see, one could argue that there's only so much space the brain can hold, like a video cassette. Which means that, if you live long enough, your brain's going to start recording over itself. You might forget where you were born, what your parents looked like, hell, maybe even what your real name is. And it'll be lost forever to the sands of time.

* Elly from TouhouProject is an immortal witch who loses her memories blocks at a time, and so she acts as childish as she looks.

* This trope seems to apply to Hazel-rah in the epilogue to ''WatershipDown'', in which the venerable Chief Rabbit can't recall if the adventures attributed to him in his youth were real or not. On the one hand, said adventures couldn't have happened so long ago by human standards; on the other, Hazel is implied to have vastly outlived what's normal for wild rabbits, suggesting that his lapine brain's memory capacity has indeed reached its limit.

* In Classic D&D, the oldest of Immortals don't recall having ever lived as mortal beings. It's implied that they simply can't ''remember'' their mortal lives; Korotiku, for example, speculates that he might have been a planar spider. Note that one of the Immortals who clearly recalls his mortality is a ''dinosaur'', so the ones who've forgotten must be considerably older than that.

* According to the background info for ''{{DMFA}}'', the oldest living demon is tens of thousands of years old (a normal demon life span is 1500 years) but a side-effect of whatever forgotten process that granted her such longevity is that she cannot remember back further than 100 years before the current day.

* Immortals in ''ElGoonishShive'' have this as inherent to their nature. They consistently "forget and relearn in order to avoid a mundane existence."