Resurrection Sickness

Cavil: She said, "I hope it hurts you for a long, long time before you go to download city." Then they just left me there. They left me in the hot sun with a bullet in my guts.
Boomer: How long were you there before you died?
Cavil: Hours. Eventually, I managed to drag myself over to some spent shell casings. I used one of those to scratch open my carotid artery. Skin is a lot tougher than you think. Now that's... three for me. Three downloads. The first one, I just got a headache. But I could handle it. Now it's worse and worse. This time it was like a frakkin' white hot poker through my skull. Not worth it. None of this is worth it.

— Battlestar Galactica (2003), "Exodus, Part 1"

Susan has recently come Back from the Dead. It may be thanks to cloning, an Emergency Transformation, a holy miracle, or the foulest of The Dark Arts. Whatever the means, she's taken the trans-celestial concorde back to the land of the living. But man, does she have a bad case of karmic jet-lag!

It's not that Susan Came Back Wrong (her Soul was in her carry-on luggage and she bought traveler's Body Horror insurance), but that the after-effects of being resurrected are making her feel less than her pre-mortem self. Susan may experience physical ailments like tremors, sweating, nausea, and other symptoms of real life jet lag. Of course, being that her resurrection was likely at least skirting the wrong side of the Scale of Scientific Sins, she'll probably also experience Hallucinations, vivid flashbacks, and phobias related to however she died.

Where this can get really freaky is if Susan was resurrected with Easy Amnesia of her past life, as is often the case with clones. Even if she's resurrected from infancy and lived an entirely new life, she may experience Resurrection Sickness when the Genetic Memory of her past life is awakened. In both cases, a Split Personality may develop as the past life tries to assert control.

Compare Cryo Sickness. If someone was so deeply asleep that they were practically dead, then finally waking up may bring some of these same negative after-effects.

If Susan is in a video game, this will be represented as a drop in her stats and various penalties that go away over time.

See also Damaged Soul, where bouts of depression post-resurrection affect the resurrected. Contrast Came Back Strong.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Blame!: Seu, Mensab's Knight in Shining Armor-like bodyguard, has been brought back to life so many times that his personality is suffering a major case of software rot.
• Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection: After C.C. resurrects Lelouch, his soul is left behind in the collective unconsciousness, rendering him as an Empty Shell who needs to be taken care of like a baby. Because of this, C.C. has to use the portal to C's world to fully restore him.
• D.Gray-Man: This is the fate of every second exorcist. The artificial apostles are all raised from childhood to become exorcists but at some point the memory of their past life and especially their own death cause them to undergo hallucination and go crazy. As a consequence they have to be "put back to sleep". The only one who managed to keep his sanity is Yu Kanda because his desire to see his loved one was so strong.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: Zest Grangaitz was brought back via cloning but suffers an Incurable Cough of Death as a result.
• Suki Da Yo: This happens with Mina, a childhood friend of the protagonist, who left with her father after being hit by a car and suffering serious injuries, but comes back into his life as a young woman. Turns out she wasn't just injured in the accident, but killed — and the girl who returns is actually a clone who ages three times as fast. Not exactly sickness, but a condition that may lead to an early death... Though the story ends with the protagonist entering college to learn how to stop her rapid aging. So it ends on a hopeful note.

Audio Plays

• On Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk, the Elf is resurrected after a lengthy and costly ritual. She is, however, left very weak from the experience, and shivering in cold. She gets better after a good night of sleep.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • In the comics and cartoons, Ra's al Ghul usually has bouts of madness directly after using the Lazarus Pit. The same happens to anyone else who uses a Lazarus Pit, but not everyone's mind can withstand it like Ra's can.
  • The exact opposite happens to the Joker in The Demon Laughs arc. Slain by Ra's, Batman grabs him and tosses him into the Pit so he can give critical info on his plan to unleash a bioweapon. For a few hours after being fished out of the Pit, he is perfectly sane and has a working conscience... which fades away in the same manner the madness of the Pit usually does.

Fan Works

• Astral Journey: It's Complicated:
  • Emma was legally dead for a few minutes upon arriving to the A&E, finds herself in a coma, and suffers the side-effects of returning to life.
  • Melanie complains about being too cold from her "treatment" for her eating disorder.
• Forewarned is Forearmed: In "Foreshadowed", Akira hasn't been 100% since he came back to life: his stamina is lacking just in the real world, let alone the Metaverse. Fortunately, Lavenza realizes the reason in Chapter 2: they revived him using his twenty Arcana links, but one of them, the Devil, was incomplete, as the aunt who he had it with was only present in spirit. So reforging that bond should fix him. Now, if only his aunt wasn't Kuon Ichinose, the main antagonist of Persona 5 Strikers...
• In Heir to the Empire , Sailor Uranus stabs Akane when she attempts to ambush Ranma with a bucket of water to wake him up. Panicking, Uranus and Neptune convince Saturn to resurrect her. At breakfast, Nabiki gets nervous when she sees the utterly enervated Akane sitting listlessly at the table. When Ranma asks what happened, Hotaru merely replies "Rez Sickness is a bitch."
• In How the Light Gets In, Laurel is suddenly resurrected in her coffin, forcing her dig herself out in a physically and mentally traumatizing experience. She spends some time with Trauma-Induced Amnesia, is dehydrated and starving (given that she hasn't had anything to eat or drink in 7 months) but can't keep anything down, has a seizure when her memories come rushing back all at once, and and has a brand new Sonic Scream superpower she can't control.
• In the Fullmetal Alchemist fanfic Mistakes, when Roy manages to successfully bring Edward back from the dead, he experiences severe sickness as his body expels embalming fluid and decay.
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): When Dracula came back to life in the 90s, he was paralyzed from the waist down, in horrible pain and couldn't use magic. On top of that, kidnapping virgins to drink their blood would've attracted the Belmont's attention, which meant he had to heal the slow way. Death had to introduce Dracula to gaming to help him pass the time, unintentionally making Dracula a hardcore gamer.
• you can only use your own: When Chara is narrowly saved from committing suicide for the third time in we light ourselves up from the deepest of pits (which somewhat counts, because their soul was absent from their body and their plan was to refuse to return long enough for their body to shut down), they wake up weak, white-haired, and overcome with emotion.

Films — Live-Action

• In The 6th Day, the villain's lackeys die and are resurrected through Brain Uploading into new clones. One started to experience flashes of how he'd died (including physical effects). He's repeatedly told this is purely psychological on his part. (They scan brain content when making clones, and one character said it could be done post-mortem, which is how their memories can include the death of their last body.)
• DC Extended Universe: In both Justice League (2017) and Zack Snyder's Justice League, the newly resurrected Superman is at first confused and amnesiac, which isn't helped when Cyborg's self-defense programs automatically turn themselves on and attack him. He's especially not happy to see Batman after the events of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Fortunately, Lois Lane appears and gets him to calm down and help him regain his bearings.
• Played for Drama in Happy Death Day. The Protagonist is caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop where she dies and is inexplicably brought back over and over again. Part of the tension is, because her deaths are so varied and numerous, she gets weaker each time, and becomes worried the cycle will end when she does.
• In The Princess Bride, when Westley is brought back from being "mostly dead", he can't move his body or even hold his own head up (though for some reason, he can work his jaw muscles and speak just fine). His strength slowly returns, but he's pretty much a rag doll for the rest of the film.
• In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, everyone's favorite Vulcan is resurrected after his Heroic Sacrifice in the previous movie. The next movie, however, shows that he's needed several months to get his mind re-trained, and he's still not quite at 100%. He does seem to complete his recovery by the end of the film.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: During the Final Battle, the T-1000 gets frozen with liquid nitrogen and shattered into pieces. Once the pieces melt and re-form, it seems to be back to its old implacable self... but has trouble maintaining its form, merging with almost everything it touches, and refreshing its entire body repeatedly.

Literature

• Circle of Magic: In Briar's Book, Rosethorn's resurrection from death after a seizure causes her to have slurred speech, poor night vision and difficulty breathing for years afterwards. Truth in Television as another character mentions that she's suffered brain damage, which is not uncommon among stroke patients.
• Dragaera: After being "revivified". people need a few days of rest before they have the energy to go out and about again.
• The Duncan Idaho gholas in Dune lose their memories. They only regain it when they experience some serious mental stress, for example having to kill their master.
• Resurrections are commonplace in The Fallen World but they will leave a person weakened for some time. This can last for months and can require the person to use crutches. More expensive forms of resurrections can reduce or eliminate the side effects but they are rarely used as it often isn't considered worth the cost outside of wealthy VIPs.
• A sci-fi book called Good News from Outer Space has this as a side effect of resurrection treatment.
• The Hour of the Dragon opens with Conan the Barbarian's adversaries resurrecting the long-dead wizard-king Xaltotun. He's a little confused and seems to have some memory loss at first, but in a few hours he's fine.
• Neverwhere: After being brought back to life by the local Homeless Pigeon Person following a successful Resurrection Gambit, the Marquis de Carabas struggles with serious weakness and difficulty moving, as well as the slowly-healing injuries from the torture he went through before death (including the slashed throat which finally killed him). On revival, the first thing he does is throw up, although that's mostly due to the fact that his body was dumped in a sewer and his stomach and lungs are filled with sewerage.
• In Overlord (2012), lower-level Resurrection magic has this as a tradeoff. The effect is so severe that it cannot be used on people who are too weak — the resurrection sickness itself would immediately kill them. Even strong Adventurers (who are pretty much superhuman compared to ordinary people though they are still nothing compared to Nazarick's forces) need to spend days recovering after being resurrected with low level Resurrection magic. When Ainz uses a high-level resurrection spell to bring back a Lizard Folk, the subject comes back only slightly weaker than before and temporarily suffers a mild speech impediment.
• An interesting version in The Reckoners Trilogy, Megan comes back with a form of Resurrection Sickness, in that the memories of what happened before death are scrambled, but she is also no longer as strongly affected by the madness that comes with using her Epic powers.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Beric Dondarrion is resurrected multiple times by Thoros of Myr, but with each resurrection his body keeps the wound that killed him and he loses more and more of his memory.
• Vorkosigan Saga: In Mirror Dance, Miles is cryonically frozen after a fatal injury and successfully revived, but suffers from temporary amnesia (which is stated to be a common aftereffect of cryofreezing). In later books, there are more long-term medical consequences, including the seizure disorder that permanently ends his military career.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: After his death during The Avengers (2012), Phil Coulson was resurrected using the regenerative drug GH.325; upon his initial revival, Coulson was in terrible pain and begged to be killed again, forcing the scientists to implant Fake Memories of him going through a peaceful rehabilitation in Tahiti. It's implied that Coulson was feeling the effects all throughout the first season, as May was slipped in by Fury to keep an eye on him in case there were any side effects. Fortunately for everyone, there were no serious issues.
• Arrow: When Thea and Sara are resurrected by the Lazarus Pit, they both awaken in a fit of animalistic, murderous rage. Thea wasn't actually dead yet, so it didn't took her that long to recover, but Sara had been dead for a year, so she needed the services of an exorcist to fully come back.
• The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica (2003). Successive resurrections get progressively more unpleasant as seen by Cavil's page quote. This also applies to the non-humanoid Raiders. One known as "Scar" became more tactical from repeated deaths, but also went Ax-Crazy from coming back so many times.
• Big Wolf on Campus: When Merton is resurrected after being turned to stone, he comes back blind and sans motor skills. Being The Movie Buff, he cites Han Solo's weakness after being unfrozen and assumes he'll get better. He doesn't; within three days, he's feverish, plagued with headaches and losing teeth. The "de-stoning" serum is also a poison, allowing the guy who sold it to further extort them.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • When Angel returns from a hell dimension in season three, the torture has left him borderline feral. It takes a while for him to recover.
  • Buffy wasn't all there for a bit after resurrection, not speaking at first and barely able to see properly, and had no will to live for most of the season. Of course, that was mainly due to a) waking up in her own coffin and b) being yanked out of a heavenly afterlife and back into the harsh, mortal world.
  • Angel: Darla is resurrected by Wolfram & Hart, but as a human, not as a vampire. This has the consequence that she comes back with the same terminal case of syphilis that she was going to die from before the Master sired her.
• Several of the Doctor's regenerations in Doctor Who have left them loopy, sick, or otherwise out of sorts when bringing themself back to life. Only the War Doctor and the Ninth Doctor (at least by implication) were the only incarnations to hit the ground running. For example:
  • Two is in pain and somewhat confused for a while right after regenerating, briefly acting as if his previous incarnation was a whole other person entirely.
  • Three starts his first episode in an unconscious state, causing his admittance to a hospital, where he is a semi-delirious state for a bit, but he is soon fit and aware enough to stage his escape from said hospital.
  • Four spends an episode trying to convince everyone that he doesn't need to go to the hospital because he's fit as a fiddle, but instead convinces them that he's not particularly sane. At one point he runs off and accidentally sends a whole other planet into chaos in his delirium, the consequences of which he'd have to face much later.
  • Five has a rough regeneration^note due to it happening in the middle of a struggle with The Master and worries it might actually fail. He removes random articles of clothing, forgets and remembers everything about himself at random intervals, temporarily reverts back to previous personalities, passes out multiple times, goes crazy, rides around in circles on a motorized wheelchair, floats in the air, spends an episode in a cabinet-coffin thing that his two female companions have to carry him around in, and loads more ridiculous things. Needless to say, he had the most known problems thus far. This was true to the extent that the TARDIS thought it appropriate to drop medical supplies on his head at one point.
  • Six becomes dangerously psychotic and suffers from violent mood swings, first convincing himself that his companion is a spy and trying to strangle her, then declaring that he needs to become a hermit for everyone's safety when he realizes what he almost did.
  • Seven and Eight both lose their memories for a while (although for Seven that was more because he'd been drugged by the Rani). Eight had it particularly bad due to the regeneration taking longer than normal to kick in (he died in surgery and the anesthetic kept him dead "too long".)
  • Ten has about as difficult a go at it as Five had. He starts having seizures and briefly becomes extremely erratic and irrational, before collapsing into a dramatic coma which lasts for most of the episode. At one point, thanks to being woken up too early, his brain almost collapses.
  • Eleven has random fits of hitting himself, spasms painfully, has erratic and odd cravings for food (going through several minutes of announcing he loves a certain food item, only to spit it out in disgust once he actually takes a bite), has trouble focusing and walks face-first into a tree. He lampshades this by saying he's "not finished cooking yet".
  • Twelve's first action is to complain about the colour of his kidneys. From there on out he forgets how to fly the TARDIS, discovers to his horror and confusion that he has obtained some kind of face blindness, and struggles with episodes of delirium and amnesia. It takes him a good chunk of the following episode to get his bearings.
  • Thirteen cannot remember her own name, nor the names for different body parts and emotions she's experiencing (she forgets the word for "tongue" and confuses "worried" for "excited"). She also passes out at one point, and spends a long time under the impression that she's looking for someone called the Doctor.
  • The Master's botched resurrection left him an undead horror with an insatiable hunger and weird electrical powers.
  • When the Eleventh Doctor's ganger is born, he attacks his real self and then cycles through several of his past incarnations, speaking in Four and Ten's voices and botching catchphrases used by the Doctor's previous incarnations.
    Doctor Ganger: Reverse the jelly baby of the neutron flow!
• In the Firefly episode "Ariel", Simon and River are given a drug which simulates death. Waking up from this state causes nausea and vomiting.
  Jayne: You OK?
  Simon: [coughing heavily] Fine. Just th-the after... effects of-of the medicine. J-just give me a... minute.
  Jayne: Your sister seems alright.
  [River then throws up]
• The resurrected characters in Glitch all have some degree of amnesia, though they are regaining their memories over the course of the series.
• In Misfits, after discovering his immortality, Nathan spends some time in the bathroom:
  Nathan: Awww, I'm tellin' ya, it's all hot cross buns and easter eggs when Jesus gets resurrected.
  • The fact that nobody knew about this particular superpower until after they'd buried him probably didn't help either.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "New Lease", Oscar Reynolds, whose body was denoted to medical science, is resurrected by Doctors James Houghton and Charles McCamber using a Scanning Molecular Reorganizer (SMR) module. His body was frozen after death to prevent tissue damage. Very soon after being resurrected, Reynolds' body begins to deteriorate, a very painful process, and he dies for a second time within less than 24 hours. After Anthony Szigetti kills Houghton while robbing him, McCamber brings him back to life. Houghton, whose bodily functions begin to fail in the same manner, plans to use the time that he has left to make up for neglecting his wife Page and daughter Katrine but he cannot resist the temptation to have his revenge. He shoots Szigetti dead in full view of three witnesses. Soon after he does so, McCamber tells him that his condition is stabilizing and his resurrection is permanent. He has determined that Reynolds died because his body had been frozen after his first death. The next morning, Houghton is arrested for Szigetti's murder and is told by Detective Broder that it is likely that he will receive a life sentence if he is convicted, which seems probable because his fatal wound has now completely healed, casting doubt on his revenge excuse.
• In the suddenly Darker and Edgier third season of Smallville, Lionel Luthor uses a serum made from Clark's Kryptonian blood to reanimate people who have recently died of a certain liver disease. But the serum must be administered repeatedly to keep them alive, and withdrawal causes such disgusting symptoms as bleeding from the eyes.

Music

• "Comfortably Numb" from Pink Floyd's The Wall uses this, especially in the movie. When the Physician "resurrects" Pink from his reveries with an injection of...something, the resulting jolt causes him to adopt the persona of Dark Lord Pink. He gets better, though, when Old Pink reasserts himself in "Waiting For The Worms."
• The Rufus Rex song "Body in Revolt" is about this topic. It's not pretty.
  My eyes, they burn!
  My flesh, it bleeds!
  My stomach, it turns,
  Then the darkness proceeds!
  The end is near!
  The uprising is here!
  Now my body's committing mutiny!

Myths & Religion

• Some stories from Celtic Mythology claim that those brought back from the dead lose their voices, so that they may not speak to the living of what lies beyond.

Tabletop Games

• In 7th Sea some Master Glamour Mages can return from the dead, but doing so permanently reduces their Resolve by 2 (out of a possible 5, or 6 with a specific Advantage). If the drop would lower the mage's resolve to 0 or less, the resurrection fails. Since Seventh Sea uses a freeform Point Buy System, the stat can be bought back up, but it's expensive and takes awhile.
• In 13th Age, the cleric's Resurrection spell will work at most a handful of times ever for any given cleric (because the fifth time automatically and irrevocably kills them — and if the target has been resurrected often enough before, it may well happen sooner), and each casting takes more time and effort and leaves both the cleric and the recipient in progressively worse shape.
• Anima: Beyond Fantasy: Dying characters (losing consciousness, etc) brought back^note Resurrection is very hard to get there will have a sizable penalty to all of their actions for a couple of days.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In 1st and 2nd Edition, being brought back to life with a raise dead spell left the recipient weak and helpless and needing 1 day of bed rest for each day they were dead.
  • In 3.5, the character being brought back would lose a level (or some stats if they were level 1, which can't be reversed even by the most powerful magic... meaning that if your level 1 character dies you're probably better off just rolling up a new one), and the lowest-tier resurrection spell would leave them with only 1 hit point. The third-tier version, True Resurrection, averts this trope, bringing them back without the level loss and at full HP, but quintuples the financial cost in comparison to its first-tier variant.
  • Fourth edition has a temporary resurrection penalty that goes away after 3 milestones (a milestone being two encounters on the same day).
  • Fifth edition gives the revived character a -4 penalty to all attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks. Every time the character finishes a long rest, the penalty is reduced by one until it disappears. As with 3.5, the True Resurrection spell averts this trope. There's also the Revivify spell, which brings a character back to life with one hit point and avoids any other penalties, but it has to be cast within one minute of the character dying to work.
  • Players who are resurrected in Curse of Strahd scream when awakening, and if they have been dead for more than 24 hours, they suffer madness due to the revelation that their souls cannot leave for the afterlife.
• Eclipse Phase has multiple tables to determine how much sanity damage resleeving inflicts based on whether they were downloaded from a cortical stack or external backup, how violent their death was, how long they’ve been dead, how different their new sleeve is from the new...
• Hunter: The Vigil: The Malleus Maleficarum's Boon of Lazarus is a very rare aversion to All Deaths Final in the setting — no Balancing Death's Books, no Emergency Transformation, but the person comes back to life with a major Derangement from their glimpse beyond the veil.
• Pathfinder: All but the most powerful resurrection magic inflicts some Level Drain (or Constitution drain if the target has no levels to lose), which lasts indefinitely unless cured with healing magic.
• Relife Sickness in the Runequest setting, Glorantha. Being brought back to life from the brink of death can have odd consequences. Sometimes one becomes listless, emotionally numb and yearning for death (among the Orlanthi, those often can find some measure of satisfaction by joining the cult of Humakt, the grim god of Death). In other cases, however, the opposite might happen; a person is filled with more vigour and love for life than before. Sometimes they even become Chalana Arroy healers (incidentally, resurrection is a signature of the Chalana Arroy cult).
• In Warhammer 40,000, Roboute Guilliman is left with a dull gnawing ache after being restored by a combination of the Armor of Fate designed by Belisarius Cawl and Ynnead's magic. He believes the pain will never leave him.

Video Games

• MMORPGs tend to have this in general, to ensure that players may not infinitely resurrect in a too-difficult quest and still expect to function at 100%. Just for two:
  • Guild Wars has a death penalty that reduces maximum HP and energy by 15% per death. There are items in the game to subvert this and remove the stat penalty, however.
  • Dungeons & Dragons Online afflicts the recently-resurrected with a negative level — up to five if the character dies and resurrects repeatedly within a short time.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, characters who are resurrected with a revival ability or item suffer from the "Weakness" debuff, which reduces Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom stats by 25% for 100 seconds. If the player is KO'd and revived again while suffering from "Weakness", they will be afflicted with "Brink of Death", which increases your stat penalty to 50%. Conversely, if revived with a healer's level-3 Limit Break, revived players will not suffer from "Weakness" (or if they already had "Weakness", they will not suffer from "Brink of Death").

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• Another Bioware game, Baldur's Gate II, gives the druid Jaheira a spell that brings the subject back to life like a Raise Dead spell (which is normally banned to druids) but tacks on some stiff stat penalties that go away over time. The character is all but useless until that time.
• In BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth has the ability to open Tears to different alternate universes. But if someone dies in one universe, and then you travel to another universe where they're alive, the individual's mind[s] get merged, and they remember their deaths, which leaves their minds shattered and confused, as well as causing them to bleed randomly.
• Breath of Fire IV revives downed character after battle while reducing their max HP by 1/10 and the effect is cumulative. Only resting in an inn can removed the affliction, the camp won't do it. As such, it's always recommendable to revive the fallen characters in battle as to avoid dealing with this penalty.
• Dark Souls: The Undead will always revive after being killed, but each time it happens, they lose a bit of their memories and humanity, becoming progressively more mindless. This process can be slowed by gathering large numbers of souls from other creatures, or by having a strong sense of purpose, but it is near-impossible to keep this up forever. Eventually, all Undead become Hollows, mindless creatures who try to kill anything around them in a desperate, fruitless attempt to ease their suffering. Only two characters are known to have resisted Hollowing from the first appearance of the Undead Curse in Dark Souls all the way to The End of the World as We Know It in Dark Souls III's DLC: Andre, who has a strong sense of purpose in being a blacksmith; and Patches, who has a strong sense of purpose in being a Jerkass who kicks people off cliffs and loots their bodies for things to sell. However, Patches did have a bit of a Hollowing problem by the very end, but you can help fix that for him... and get repaid for your kindness by getting kicked off a cliff, naturally.
• In Darkest Dungeon, if your hero dies, there's no getting them back except through a rare town event that only triggers if you have enough dead heroes. You get a choice out of three random ones so there's no guarantee you'll reclaim a prized hero, and even then, their equipment and skills are reset to level 1 so you have to spend more money to bring them back to speed.
• Death Stranding: After Sam is resurrected, he wakes up groggy and confused, and frequently throws up whatever Seam water he swallowed before he came back. While in gameplay he seems to wake up immediately after he comes back, in the story segments where repatriates he seems to be out cold for up to two days.
• Doom: Done very subtly as a game mechanic. Normally, enemies have a reaction time of 8 tics (frames) between seeing you and firing, and on Nightmare Difficulty their reaction time is 0 tics. In Doom II, when revived by an Arch-Vile or by respawning monsters, their reaction time is set to 16 tics even on Nightmare Difficulty, which makes them considerably more sluggish than monsters on their first "life".
• In Dragon Age: Origins, although combat only has Non-Lethal K.O.-type deaths, each time your character is "killed", they come back with an injury (stacking penalty on the stats).
• Eye of the Beholder: As the games are based on AD&D, the "Raise Dead" spell can revive characters, but with only 1 hit point, requiring further healing magic to bring them to full health. Also, their food bar is automatically emptied, meaning they start starving if they don't eat immediately after resurrection.
• Final Fantasy XI: Resurrection Sickness is applied any time a resurrection spell is used^note Raise can be cast at any time, even in combat, giving a 25% reduction in all primary statistics for 5 minutes. Being resurrected again while debuffed brought with it the chance of double sickness which carried a far greater penalty to all primary and secondary statistics.
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: This condition is suffered by Yune, a God of Chaos and direct opposite of God of Order Ashera. Both gods are revived after the influx of recent war across the continent, but while Ashera had no problem coming back as a Physical God capable of threatening the entire world, Yune's imprisonment within the Fire Emblem left her a weakened spirit with no physical body of her own. Thus, she is forced to watch events unfurl from the body of a tiny bird, or trying to communicate through others using the body of her friend Micaiah.
• During the events of Kingdom Hearts II, Oogie Boogie was revived by Maleficent. Weakened and unable to remember what happened in the previous game, Oogie ignored Maleficent's orders and went on his own to recreate the storyline of his movie and to meet his end again at the hands of Jack Skellington as well as Sora, Donald and Goofy.
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: When the bad guys successfully use Zelda's body to free Malladus from his seal, Malladus becomes ill and is unable to use his full strength, forcing the bad guys to go into hiding and giving the heroes a little more time to stop them.
• Mega Man X6: Software rot hit Sigma particularly hard during this game. After going maverick, Gate tried to revive Sigma but thanks to the events of the previous entry, Sigma's programing was damaged beyond what could be repaired and he came back as a hunched, half-conscious and barely-functioning wreck of his former self. Sigma could now only remember little more than his undying hatred of X and Zero and spoke in garbled Engrish.
• Within Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, this is a major limiting factor for characters. Every death saps some amount of attributes, and every death increases the chance of a bad resurrection, where the character ages a few decades and gains the associated stat losses.
• Pillars of Eternity has two seperate but related health bars that both take damage from attacks: Health and Endurance. If a character runs out of Endurance they are rendered unconscious until either they are revived or the current combat encounter ends, and they receive a wound - a persistent debuff that lasts until they next rest. If a character runs out of Health, they die. Both wounds and death can be disabled in the settings, but are enabled by default.
• In Planescape: Torment, the lead character, the Nameless One, is immortal (although this doesn't mean he can't die, he just doesn't stay that way). The reason why he is called the Nameless One is because when he dies, he loses all his memories (although in-game he dies several times without this happening, which is a plot point). He has lived an almost countless number of lives with varying degrees of Resurrection Sickness: some incarnations were raving mad, while others were monsters. It is alluded to in the game that if he dies enough times, he'll eventually become nothing but a catatonic husk. It's also stated that every time he would die, someone else dies instead, meaning that the Nameless One passes a lethal Resurrection Sickness... to strangers. This also has an in-game consequence: the more times the Nameless One dies during the course of the game, the more Shadow enemies you'll find prowling the halls of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
• Rimworld: Resurrector Mech Serum has its share of possible side effects. There is always Resurrection Sickness as the body's various processes restart themselves, which causes people to move slowly and clumsily as they reacquaint themselves with being alive. But errors in the process, especially likely if the body has been decaying, can lead to the nanites causing ocular damage, leading to complete blindness, or increasing brain damage as they glitch out and refuse to be flushed, leading to rising psychosis and inevitable death unless Healer Mech Serum is applied to restart them.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: resurrection makes other people sick. While those who have been given immortality by the Dragon's Heritage won't die, the process requires sucking the lifeforce out of other sources, turning their blood stagnant and giving them a respiratory illness called Dragonrot. Gameplay-wise, it reduces the chance of receiving Unseen Aid (which prevents the loss of skill XP and money on death) and makes other NPCs too sick to progress their questline if they have any. Emma is able to devise a cure for this, by having the immortal return the lifeforce back with a ritual.
• Zasalamel in the Soul Series initially wanted to use Soul Edge and Soul Calibur to remove his Resurrective Immortality because each death and rebirth is coupled with soul-rending agony. In the fourth game Zasalamel saw a vision of humanity's future during the ritual that would make him mortal. He was so awestruck that he stopped the ritual. Seeing what humanity could be, and thinking of how he could contribute to it with his immortality, gave Zasalamel the urge to live again.
• Tak and the Power of Juju featured the horrible condition of "Resurrection's Revenge", which gives the recently revived a horrible case of diarrhea for entire hours on end.
• Touhou Project: Being immortal after drinking the Hourai Elixir, both Kaguya and Mokou return from the dead when killed (usually at each other's hands), but it's not a particularly pleasant experience.
• Valheim: Dying for any reason lowers all your skills which must be slowly regained. There is a grace period after a death where skills won't drop if you die again for ten minutes, but it's surprising how long it takes to get back to your body and the vicious cycle continue. Amusingly, people giving up and not coming back after death is even stated to happen in-universe.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Killed characters have two choices: run across the landscape as a ghost to the place you died and revive without penalty, or choose to have the Spirit Healer resurrect you at the Graveyard. Those that choose the latter option get 10 minutes of Resurrection Sickness (less for low level characters, and as of later changes none until after they have several levels), a debuff that causes 75% reduction in stats, damage, and armor. It also damages all your equipment, requiring you to pay for repairs (and, unlike death itself, applies even to equipment you weren't wearing when you died). But some time and some gold will make your character right as rain again.
  • Downplayed in Warcraft III, where reviving a hero starts him out at less than full mana bur otherwise perfectly fine. Reviving from a Tavern is instantaneous, but the hero has no mana and only half his health. And completely averted with the Tauren Chieftain, whose Reincarnation ability lets him come back with full health and mana every few minutes (but if he dies while it's still on cooldown, it's back to the Altar/Tavern).
  • The Mantid Paragons have a variation. They are each a Sealed Badass in a Can and when let out are ravenously hungry and incredibly weak. Their Wakener is supposed to provide a supply of nourishing Kypari sap to let the Paragon gorge on and return to full strength. As Mantids are The Social Darwinist, it is a sign of their respect for the Paragons that the Wakeners will pretend to not notice this and just so happened to bring the sap along.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: This is an unfortunate side effect of Aionios' cycle of life and death, with soldiers that die occasionally developing disabilities relating to their past deaths. Cammuravi, who tore his own eye out shortly before dying, comes back either partly or completely blind in the same eye, and party member Eunie suffers PTSD as a result of being slain by Moebius D after meeting him an unknown time later, not helped by finding the remains of her past life. The worst example is Ashera, who was decapitated over a thousand years ago yet every incarnation since has slowly developed a scar around her neck, along with memories of her death returning and the feeling of her head being cut off growing, deteriorating her mental stability and making her explicitly suicidal until she dies and gets reincarnated again, at which point it starts all over for her.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: "Resetting" costs fairies the bulk of their magical power. Worse, if they reset improperly, as Demetrius and Helen did, they end up with near-total amnesia.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Angels lose around 90% of their memories and identity whenever they resurrect. Some angels with high resurrection numbers, like 82 White Chain, have basically nothing left of whomever they were in their first incarnations.
• The Order of the Stick: Standard for D&D, being raised from the dead costs a level, as mentioned by the Oracle. Roy also experiences some trouble walking right after his own resurrection, his first attempt resulting in a faceplant, since he'd lost the habit of using his legs to move on the Material Plane.
• Rusty and Co.: Following her death and resurrection at the end of Level 7, Madeline the Paladin is suffering some after-effects. She's always been The Ditz, but since then has acted uncharacteristically clumsy, not to mention abnormally passive (or rather, frozen in shock) while Mimic is in danger, while she would have jumped into the fight without second thoughts before.

Web Original

• On the Dream SMP, after being revived, Tommy didn't appear to have suffered any ill effects physically, but mentally he was a complete wreck. He suffered the worst panic attack we've seen from him yet, bordering on complete hysteria, and his inital reaction to waking up was to scramble to get away from Dream in such a blind panic that he almost ran into the lava. He also appeared to suffer from Sensory Overload after being stuck in a dark, soundless void for what felt like months, screaming in agony when Dream so much as pinched him, completely amazed at the fact that he felt hungry, and startling hard every time the Elder Guardian made a noise, saying that the sounds were more "pure" — this was also reflected on a meta-level, as Tommy turned up his game volume to max after being revived.

Western Animation

• In Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, being revived from the Psychocrypt leaves the victim with ill effects. Zachary reports that his head hurts and he feels "uncoordinated" after his revival. The other three have to practically carry him into the evacuation vessel.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Ra's al Ghul suffers bouts of psychosis and dementia whenever he visits a Lazarus Pit. Taken further in Superman: The Animated Series, showing that centuries of use had diminishing returns.

Real Life

• If you kill a fly by drowning it, you can resurrect it by burying it in salt. However, it will be unable to fly and will stagger around as if drunk.
• Any medical procedure that could plausibly count as resurrecting someone (although the patient is really Not Quite Dead) will have serious side effects. CPR commonly leads to broken ribs. Someone who is dying of an opiate overdose can be immediately revived with a shot of naloxone, but naloxone can cause sweating, tremors, vomiting, and in some cases seizures, and due to having a much shorter half-life than opiates will likely wear off while the opiate is still in the system and can result in someone overdosing again even without taking any more of the opiate. Anaphylaxis is reversed by high doses of epinephrine (adrenaline), which causes tachycardia and massively elevated blood pressure. But all of those beat being dead.
• There is an experimental procedure that involves killing dogs by draining their blood and replacing it with freezing saline, then bringing them back to life by putting the blood back in, warming them up, and administering an electric shock to the brain. This process has a high rate of permanent damage.

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