People like their homes, and if you will permit us a bit of profiling, so do you. It's your sanctuary, a place of respite and relaxation. It doesn't matter if it is small or grandiose — unless it is in need of a major overhaul, you're likely to have some connection to it that is almost indescribable. Likely because, unless you are the seriously extroverted sort, or The Insomniac who likes going for long nightly walks, you'll likely spend more time in your home than you do anywhere else.
Is it any wonder, then, that a home is of importance for fantastical settings the same way a True Name is?
Whether by magic, by the nature of their being, by the simple reason of spending most of their life there, or some other metaphysical reason, for some beingsnote the home address/dimension/timeline/planet/lair or place of origin/birth/creation truly is an anchor beyond the mundane. It is where they start, and it is, apparently, the only point where they can truly end, as if something In-Universe is demanding that their story is Book Ended.
If this doesn't grant Complete Immortality outside whatever counts as 'home', the home will act as a bonafide Respawn Point, ensuring that no lethal harm can come to them outside it — at most there'll be a time delay between their death in a non-home place and their respawning. In these cases, it might be used by time travelers/dimension hoppers who have gotten stuck for the purpose of Resurrection Teleportation — sure, dying no doubt hurts, but it beats being stuck wherever they ended up or taking The Slow Path.
Of course, this also means that if you want to end the threat of the Returning Big Bad or Recurring Boss for good, you're forced to invade their home, giving them the Home Field Advantage with all the trouble that implies — because killing them elsewhere will just mean they'll be Staying Alive and be back for as many more rounds as they like. Alternatively, if invading their home isn't an option, nothing inherent in this trope prevents you from finding means of containment — either by sealing off their home and preventing them from leaving or trapping them in yours while they are still alive, the latter of which is usually one of the reasons why you find so many evils sealed in cans; they couldn't be gotten rid of permanently by other means. If you're of the morally dubious sort, you could also inflict a Fate Worse than Death on them.
Compare the Soul Jar, which not only requires the soul to be sealed within a container but is also usually actively created rather than innate. Also compare Fighting a Shadow, where the reason you cannot kill them is that they were never really there — but if you found their actual self, it wouldn't matter where they were (In particular, watch out for something being described as an 'avatar' of whatever is being fought; if the being uses avatars, you're probably not looking at this trope). Might be justified by the character being a Domain Holder.
As this tends to be used as a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Examples
- Transformers: Unicron and Primus were once multiversal singularities, meaning that in all the Multiverse there was only one. In some universes, Unicron succeeds in destroying Primus and consuming all life, while in others Primus' creations the Transformers succeed in defeating him. However, in one miniseries from Fun Publications, Unicron managed to create an Anti-Matrix that could be used to simultaneously slay all iterations of Primus at once, killing him once and for all. The catch was the Anti-Matrix would only work if used in the Vector Sigma chamber in the very core of Cybertron (i.e. Primus' alternate mode).
- My Immortal: When Ebony gets shot while back in time, it doesn't kill her because she can apparently only die in her own time.
- Inverted in Wreck-It Ralph. Video game characters cannot die in their home game (where, being part of that game, they will simply respawn). If they die in any other game, on the other hand, they're Killed Off for Real.
- Inverted in The Heroes of Olympus. One of the second book's Big Bad Duumvirate can't be killed on Alaskan soil, which is where he was born. The heroes solve this by luring him across the border from Alaska to Canada.
- The Lord of the Rings downplays this: the fact that The One Ring can only be destroyed by dropping it into the volcano where it was forged is central to the story, as said volcano is in the middle of Mordor. However, it is also technically destructible by a power greater than the forger, Sauron — but such power no longer exists in Middle-earth, leaving this caveat moot.
- Skulduggery Pleasant reverses this trope: Cadaverous Gant can only be killed outside his home, for he is invulnerable inside it, has superhuman strength and speed, and can warp reality inside the place. This ability is transferable should Gant claim a new place as his home.
- The Strain: The Master topples all other breeds of vampire by destroying their "black sites", the geographical location where each came into being (all original vampires being pieces of a fallen angel scattered over the earth). He also guards the secret of his own black site, knowing that he and his strain will vanish if the heroes find it. The heroes, in turn, search for the black site in the last novel, planning to obliterate it with a suitcase nuke.
- "Shia LaBeouf" Live tells the story of a couple of fights between the aforementioned Shia LaBeouf and you, but you only manage to kill him once he retreats to his cottage.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Outsiders have a home plane; if killed anywhere else, they'll reincorporate there. If they're killed on their home plane, they stay dead and even resurrecting them is tricky because they don't have a soul as much as they are simply composed of their home plane's essence.
- This is true in Planescape for Devils and Yugoloths, but for demons the reverse is true: they can only be permanently slain when they aren't in the Abyss.
- In 3.5 Edition, Outsiders native to the material plane (mainly Half-Mortal Hybrids of many different sorts) avert this trope as they do have souls, and this soul prevents their entrance to the plane they are otherwise associated with. As such, once killed, they remain dead, and the normal rules of resurrection apply.
- Vampires slain outside their coffin will turn to mist and return to it to regenerate. Only inside their coffins can they be slain (barring rare and extreme measures such as a Sphere of Annihilation). Though if their coffin has already been destroyed or they're prevented from reaching it, they die after a time anyway.
- Outsiders have a home plane; if killed anywhere else, they'll reincorporate there. If they're killed on their home plane, they stay dead and even resurrecting them is tricky because they don't have a soul as much as they are simply composed of their home plane's essence.
- Geist: The Sin-Eaters: Mortals have shades of this in the core game; any living creature who dies in The Underworld reappears outside the nearest Avernian Gate, mentally exhausted and worse for wear on the Sanity Meter but alive. This doesn't hold true for the greater Chronicles of Darkness cosmology, as there are plenty of lethal otherworlds.
- Pathfinder: Inverted for the fey, who will die permanently if slain anywhere except their plane of origin, the First World. The First World, as a prototype of creation that was abandoned by the gods, exists outside of the normal cycles of existence, including those of life and death. While in the First World, fey — and non-native beings who become acclimated to it — will gradually reform if killed, although not without some loss of power. This is one of the primary reasons behind the fey's bizarre behavior — they genuinely aren't used to thinking of death, whether their own or others', as anything more than a temporary inconvenience, and its permanency in other worlds tends to catch them somewhat flat-footed.
- Destiny: The Ascendant Hive are Hive who have accumulated enough power to develop a personal pocket dimension called a throne world, described as a result of their mind expanding beyond their body until it becomes a universe of its own. Killing an Ascendant Hive simply banishes them to their throne world, from which they can return at will. The only way to kill an Ascendant Hive Deader than Dead is to kill them, pursue them into their throne, and then kill them in there, where they'll be at the center and the height of their power. It's also possible to kill them in someone else's throne world, but this doesn't seem to cause a "true" death — two known cases were banished into their thrones but trapped inside, and could only be resurrected by the actions of a third Ascendant, but all three were the Hive's top gods and running on slightly different rules, and it's not clear if the same applies to 'regular' Ascendant Hive.
- Inverted in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with the realm of the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon. Nothing in the Deadlands, his personal Plane of Oblivion, can be killed permanently — any Daedra or Dremora that are slain there automatically resurrect after a certain period of time. It's actually something of an And I Must Scream situation for Mehrunes: he's the Daedric Prince of Destruction, but as long as he's in Oblivion, he can't actually destroy anything. This is his whole motivation for invading Nirn, the physical plane; once he's there, he can start causing lasting damage.
- Eternal Darkness: In Edward Roivas' chapter, the first enemy to appear is the Vampire, who kills one of his maids, and proceeds to go around the mansion attacking other servants. Each time Edward drives it off, the Vampire returns to the basement to replenish its health from an obelisk with a rune on it. To permanently kill it, Edward needs to first destroy the obelisk in the basement.
- Inverted in Final Fantasy XIV with the voidsent. Outside of the void, they can be struck down as they're most frequently inhabiting mortal vessels, but in the void, they will simply regenerate over time since the Thirteenth is so astrally charged that life can't return to The Lifestream. As a result, the only ways to permanently kill a voidsent in the void are to either absorb their essence into oneself or to be a Memoriate capable of sealing them in inert crystals.
- Hollow Knight: The Radiance can only be fought if The Knight has the Voidheart and uses an Awoken Dream Nail on the Hollow Knight once Hornet pins it down, the former of whom is where the Radiance is sealed and can be defeated inside of.
- Lost Odyssey: The Big Bad Gongora can only be destroyed in his native dimension (as he's mortal there), which is why he wants to use the Grand Staff to destroy the Tower of Mirrors and seal off said dimension from the Mortal Realm.
- Played with in Planescape: Torment: the Final Boss' home is only place The Nameless One and the Final Boss can permanently die, meaning going there to face them is equally potentially fatal to your both. The Transcendent One is The Nameless One's mortality, and since The Nameless One can't die, his mortality can't die either. The only loophole to this (barring getting a Non-Standard Game Over by pissing off a deity or soul-imprisoning necromancer) is for The Nameless One to specifically kill himself inside the Fortress of Regrets and end them both.
- Quake:
- The only way to finish off the outer menace in Quake is by putting Shub-Niggurath, the game's Final Boss, to a permanent end. And that is done in her home location.
- The Strogg arc spans three games, in canonical order: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Quake II and Quake IV. After being on the receiving end of a Strogg invasion in the former game, humanity begins the counterattack in II, with a lone marine (Bitterman) managing to disable the interplanetary defense system as well as getting the entirety of the Strogg in disarray after killing the Makron, its leader. The entirety of Quake IV is about humanity finishing up Bitterman's job, entering Stroggos, getting to its depths, and putting the Strogg menace to a permanent end. Then, Kane receives new orders...
- In The Sims 2, a Sim can't die in a "community lot" (public place), only in a private home.
- The Xel'Naga of StarCraft are multiversal travellers, seeding one universe with life and then resting in the Void between universes until the seeded universe, by means of evolution, produces two species who will provide viable Fusion Dance material to birth a new Xel'Naga, then repeating the process in a Time Abyss analogue to reproduction. Should they be rendered without form outside the Void (which they are perfectly capable of doing by themselves), they will return to the Void and reform there, but if slain in the Void, they will remain dead.
- World of Warcraft is home to many different planes of existence aside from the normal one. Beings either closely attuned to such a plane, or born from it/bound to it, are — aside a few exceptions that prove the rule — Barred from the Shadowlands, with their home plane pulling their soul back to it (or the Kyrian guiding it to it if it somehow doesn't get pulled) whereafter the body is reconstituted. If slain in their home plane, the plane simply absorbs the soul, making the being suffer Cessation of Existence. The Legion expansion reveals that the demons of The Burning Legion, who normally reside in the Twisting Nether, have managed to redirect a Titan's power to ensure that the 'Demons can be permanently killed in the Twisting Nether' rule is nulled, meaning that as long as the Titan exists, the demons cannot be permanently killed anywhere.
- Hotis from Critical Role is a fiend who is reborn in Hell whenever he is killed and slowly grows back to his original strength. After the heroes assassinate him on the mortal plane once, he becomes a recurring villain seeking vengeance against them, forcing them to go to Hell if they want peace. This is all in keeping with lore for fiends like Hotis (called rakshasas) in Dungeons & Dragons.
- Argai: The Prophecy works on this principle in regards to Time Travel: you can go back and forth in time by multiple means, whether magical or technological, but if you die in a timeline that's not your own, you get transported back to your own timeline to the point where you left it — though, if you used a Time Machine to get to wherever you died, that Time Machine isn't coming with you.
