Resurrective Immortality

The Doctor: When did you realise?
Jack Harkness: Earth. 1892. Got in a fight on Ellis Island. A man shot me through the heart. Then I woke up. Thought it was kinda strange... but then it never stopped. Fell off a cliff, trampled by horses, World War I, World War II, poison, starvation... a stray javelin... in the end, I got the message. I'm the man who can never die!

— Doctor Who, "Utopia"

Okay, what Captain Jack just said is a bit of a misnomer: characters like him with Resurrective Immortality can die just like anyone else. The thing is, they will not stay dead.

When killed, they will always return to life and look none the worse for wear. This is not necessarily due to a regenerative capability, though this sometimes also applies. Characters with resurrective immortality can be injured like anyone else, and can also suffer, survive or die from an illness.

On the plus side, this means that Death Is Cheap. Any enemies they have will never be able to kill them. For The Cape, this means they will never fall in the line of duty. For the Thrill Seeker, this means they can get a higher adrenaline fix than any of their mortal fellows and can try things no regular person would ever dream of — what's the risk of dying from trying to do something awesome if you'll just come back good as new? If they fall for someone whose species also lives forever, then they have a shot at Eternal Love.

On the negative side, this could be a Fate Worse than Death. Someone could torture them indefinitely without worrying about accidentally killing them. In any case they will feel the full pain of dying each and every time. Less maliciously but equally unpleasantly, this can lead to characters who normally have a no-killing rule not feeling any need to pull their punches. And work creators who go by Rule of Cool often can't resist showing this off as frequently and gruesomely as possible.

This is the signature ability of The Phoenix. It can also be a perk of being undead, particularly for vampires and liches. May overlap with other Immortality tropes, such as The Ageless, Immortality Inducer and Fighting a Shadow.

If they always come back in a certain spot, it's Respawn Point. If their mind is being transferred to a new body, it's Body Backup Drive, instead. If they respawn or are reborn as an infant, it's Born-Again Immortality. If they're a secondary-character who dies for comedic effect, that's They Killed Kenny Again.

See Joker Immunity for when a character isn't allowed to die because of Plot Armor. See Unexplained Recovery if no real reason is given for the resurrection. A Mistaken Death Confirmation may happen if someone checks their body for life signs before they revive.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The main characters of Angel Beats! often suffer horribly ignominious (and often hilarious) deaths, only to return to life a few minutes later whole, hale, and cracking wise.
• From Ao no Fuuin, Takao seems to have this, reappearing unharmed when injured or presumed dead. It turns out that he doesn't have this, he's merely a projection that his head can recreate as often as necessary due to a Fate Worse than Death.
• Hakamada from Aphorism. Got thrown off the roof to die by his friends such that he could recover from his not quite fatal injuries.
• Tenzen Yakushiji from Basilisk. As long as his inner parasite twin is fine he can abuse this power as much as he wants.
• Lord Death Man pretends to have this ability in Batman. However, his apparent "deaths" are faked by using an extreme yoga technique to slow his metabolism down to an undetectable level.
• Bleach:
  • This is the basis of Szayelaporro Granz's Gabriel technique. By "impregnating" his target with a portion of his body, he can use it if he's injured beyond repair to absorb all the fluids and chemicals of the victim's body to redevelop his own, killing the victim and reforming in a matter of seconds from a liquid-like casing coming from the victim's mouth. He actually lampshades the process by comparing it to the phoenix of legend. The scene is NOT Played for Laughs and could even be considered a Moral Event Horizon if he hadn't already had several beforehand. That being said, if his target happens to include some form of drugs that are Blessed with Suck by design among said fluids, Szayelaporro will absorb those, too.
  • Yhwach's Schrift, The Almighty, allows him to see all possible futures and counter anything his opponents may use against him by forcibly altering the future into any one timeline he chooses. This includes rewriting timelines in which he's been killed: all Yhwach has to do is change the future to one in which he's still alive. This makes him functionally immortal, unless someone can de-power him and kill him while he can't use The Almighty.
• Philly the Kid from Cannon Busters has this ability. Every time he dies, a new number appears somewhere on his body. When we first meet him, he's at 22 deaths and the numbers just climb as the episodes go on.
• In Chainsaw Man, Denji and the other half-devils have the ability to recover from any form of injury or brutal death if they're fed enough blood.
• Code Bearers in Code Geass might fall under this. Unless their Code is taken from them, they are capable of surviving a lot. V.V. took a knife to the head, fell down, then got back up and took the knife out while C.C. has been shot multiple times, including a bullet to the head in Episode 1, burnt at the stake and crushed by water pressure yet still lives.
• Digimon:
  • Digimon as a species have this with the exception of Digimon Tamers where it's absent. While the overall mechanics differ, the base version is this: when a Digimon dies, they will reform as a Digiegg and hatch. For most, this resets their power level to In-Training form or even Baby and forces them to take the long way back to full strength (as naturally Digivolving is explicitly a long process), but partner Digimon typically have this accelerated by their partner. Whether or not they remember their old life or not varies from series to series. Exceptions to this vary by series: in Adventure, if a Digimon dies in the real world, they're dead as their data can't get back to the Digital World, though they may persist as a ghost, and the evil Digimon never seem to be reborn. In Data Squad, that doesn't apply but Big Bad Kurata creates a way to corrupt their data and kill them permanently. In Fusion, they can potentially stay dead, but as their physical data remains in the digital world they can be resurrected through use of the Code Crown.
  • Myotismon from Adventure has a unique version: not only can he still resurrect in the real world (if he absorbs enough data/power to make a new body), he assumes a more powerful form in the process. This continued until his soul was obliterated in 02's Final Battle. As a trade off, this version seems comparably slower than normal and he needs an outside power source to pull it off.
• The Tartaros guild in Fairy Tail has the ability to restore any demon of theirs that has died using their Magitek in "Hell's Core". They can also adjust the appearances of the demons with each rebirth. Fairy Tail being a guild of technical pacifists who prefer not killing unless absolutely necessary, this ability of the Tartaros guild has been demonstrated as a result of the demons having a much lower standard for when to use their last resort suicide attacks. Mirajane destroys the lab when they capture and attempt to turn her into a loyal demon warrior, thus nullifying this edge. Not that it stops several demons from attempting suicide attacks or putting themselves in fatal situations anyways to achieve their mission.
• Four Knights of the Apocalypse: Percival's magic gives him a powerful Healing Factor, but even in the event that he does die, he will return to life as long as his allies believe in him enough.
• Kenji Murasame from Giant Robo has this type of immortality. He's also got a bit of Made of Iron going on, since non-fatal wounds barely slow him down, but he'll always come back from anything that would definitely kill anyone else, including complete bodily disintegration. He's quick about it, too. Getting shot in the head doesn't even put him down for more than half a minute or so.
• Seine from Hekikai no AiON. She's a The Ageless that can be killed, but as long as her body isn't thrown to the sea, she can resurrect, and when hurt, her wounds heal quickly (even her fatal wounds heal). Her predecessor Simon Magus was the same as her but he met his end being eaten by mermaids.
• In Hunter × Hunter, Camilla has The Cat with a Million Lives, in which if she's killed by someone, the life force of the killer is transferred over to her and allows her to resurrect herself, healing any wounds she received. That the killer dies in the process avoids many of the downsides to this power as it doesn't allow the same person to kill her over and over. However, she has little to no fighting skill other than decent aim with a gun. Her older brother Benjamin, having learned of this power and instantly realizing how dangerous it is, neutralizes it by simply imprisoning her, and unlike cases like Mr. Immortal, she cannot simply kill herself to activate it—someone must murder her. Camilla is also not immortal in the traditional sense, as she still ages normally.
• In Immortal Hounds this is the normal condition of every human being (though people still die of "old age" at exactly 60). Blowing up your own head with a gun and wait a few seconds to be revived as good as new is a common method to cure a disease or heal a wound, to the point reluctance to do it is considered suspicious. Vectors and those they infect are unable to do this.
• The Lyrical Nanoha franchise has the Book of Darkness and the Wolkenritter. Thanks to the Book of Darkness' Rejuvenation Program, they will always come back to life no matter how thoroughly you kill them. They lose this at the end of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, due to Reinforce performing a Heroic Sacrifice to delete the Rejuvenation Program and ensure that the Darkness of the Book of Darkness stays dead.
• Immortals in Mnemosyne can be killed if they are damaged enough (though they also have a normal healing ability, so it takes a lot to get them to this stage,) but they always revive later. Two examples of this that were extraordinary even for them were Rin being disintegrated by a jet turbine and eventually being washed ashore (though it took decades for her to coalesce, and she lost her memories in the process), and Rin having her time spore (the thing that grants immortality) removed from her body, which caused her to turn to dust, but the time spore was able to regrow the rest of her body when it was brought close to Yggdrasil.
• Naruto:
  • It's implied that a Tailed Beast can be temporarily killed, but as they are the embodiment of all Chakra, they will not stay dead. And they will resurrect extremely pissed off. The only semi-permanent way of dealing with one is to seal them inside a human being. The only problem is, this makes the person the walking equivalent of a nuclear bomb, with most people trying to use, capture or kill them, and the host's darker emotions will inevitably transfer over to the Tailed Beast, making it even more ticked off than before. Rinse and repeat each time a host dies and the new one suffers abuse anew. On the other hand...if one of those people overcomes their hate and fear and passes THAT on to the Beast...
  • Although Hashirama killed Madara at the conclusion of their duel at the Valley of the End, Madara secretly cast Izanagi with his right eye and set it to activate some time after his death in order to rewrite reality so that he was still alive. This effectively allowed him to cheat death at the cost of his right eye, after which he left a shadow clone to take his place inside the coffin he was buried in so that no one would notice and went into hiding for the better part of a century until he found a half-dead Obito Uchiha at the entrance to his hideout.
• One-Punch Man:
  • This is what's earned Zombieman a spot among the S-class heroes, who usually get there through sheer destructive power. In terms of offense, he's merely really well trained, but completely normal. But he cannot die, period. He's been atomized before, and it only made him take a bit longer to return. And he makes full use of this while fighting.
  • On the monster's side, Phoenix Man has these powers as a result of his phoenix costume, which comes with the bonus of increasing his power and giving him new abilities with each subsequent revive. However, because they're tied to his costume, losing the suit removes said resurrection powers. Also, depending on how he dies, the suit may bring him back in a form that actually isn't that powerful.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Garterbelt can't stay dead until his mission on Earth is complete; his death animation just plays backwards some time after he dies. However, he doesn't seem to be much stronger than a properly trained human, given how easily Corset tore a hole in his heart.
• The blood warriors from Princess Resurrection, most noticeably the protagonist Hiro. When a person dies, one of the royal siblings can bring them back to life with their blood. This makes the blood warriors semi-immortal. When killed they will come back to life and when just hurt, their wounds will heal quick. However, there is a price to pay: the blood warriors have to drink royal blood every few days or they will die for real. So they have to follow and fight for one of the royal siblings in order to survive. And of course, they have to die, before they can become semi-immortal to begin with.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Kyubey can reappear almost instantly in a new body after being killed, upon which the new body devours the corpse of the old one. This is probably by necessity, given how quick Magical Girls are to kill him once they figure out his plans. Played With, however, as Word of God implies that this may be more of a Hive Mind than an actual resurrection.
• To Your Eternity: Fushi can die, and takes on the form of things in the state they were in when they died mortal wounds and all, but will heal. It is implied he heals faster after each death of the same type.
• UQ Holder!: Kirie Sakurame's immortality is a variant of this: if she dies, time is rewound back to her last "save point", a small shrine that she can set up. Kirie keeps her memories, but everyone else's are reset, though she can alter the save point's properties to bring people back with her if she chooses. If her save point is destroyed or otherwise rendered ineffective, her death will cause time to be rewound back to the point where she first became immortal... some fifteen years ago.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman's enemy Ra's al Ghul can be brought back via the Lazarus Pit if necessary, but it is less and less effective as he naturally ages.
  • Green Lantern (1941): Solomon Grundy can be put down by strong enough opponents, but he'll just rise again from Slaughter Swamp on the following Monday. In this case Grundy never comes fully back to life and is instead a zombie who retains different elements of the man he was in life every time his undead form is resurrected.
  • Resurrection Man and Immortal Man both have this power, coming back to life each time they're killed. It becomes a plot point in the 2008 storyline Way of the World when Supergirl thinks Resurrection Man's power might be used to save a boy who's dying from cancer.
  • Superman's foe Doomsday will come back to life immune to whatever killed him before.
  • In an attempt to reverse a curse on Wildcat that played on his superhero name, Zatanna thought she was giving him nine lives. However, those lives ended up being fairly unlimited in number, as that "nine" gets reset continuously, so he'd have to die a bunch in very quick succession to actually run out.
• Invincible:
  • Atom Eve's powers become more potent right when she dies, allowing her to save herself and others by directly transmuting them (her powers normally can't transmute organic matter). The final issue reveals that this also applies to a natural death via aging — when she dies of old age, she immediately comes back young and re-vitalized.
  • The Immortal is a combination of this and The Ageless, as he has lived for over 3000 years and has the ability revive good as new if his body's in one piece.
• Marvel Universe:
  • All demons have this as a power, or at least all those who rule or co-rule a dimension, though this may apply even to lesser fiends. Dormammu, Mephisto, Set, Chthon, Shuma-Gorath and the rest can all be killed (with extreme difficulty), but they will come back as their evil energies will reform in their own dimensions — how long this takes depends on the nature of the fatality, with total destruction taking millennia to recover from naturally, but it will not keep them down. These energies retain the sentience of the demon in question and thus they can speed up the process by manipulating other magical forces, or even make themselves reappear in somewhere other than their own dimension — once or twice, this has meant Earth. It is also possible, of course, for outside forces (sorcerers, servants, etc.) to help them return as well. In the case of Shuma-Gorath, he can even be reborn within the soul of the person who killed him last.
  • Dazzler of the X-Men has a limited ability to revive herself. She can come back from getting shot or stabbed, but getting blown to pieces is too much.
  • Eleanor Camacho, the daughter of Deadpool, has a Healing Factor like her father. Unlike her dad's version, hers is only activated upon death. It also de-ages her back to the age when her X-gene was first triggered.
  • Great Lakes Avengers: Mr. Immortal's only superpower is the ability to resurrect in perfect health immediately after dying, regardless of the method of death. It is implied that he is homo s. supreme, having evolved beyond death, and will survive to see the end of the universe (becoming something akin to Galactus in the next universe as a result). He can take advantage of it by killing himself to heal any persistent injuries, so it's not entirely a bad thing.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy: As long as Thanos is alive, Drax the Destroyer will be there to try to kill him, no matter how many times Drax dies before Thanos does. Interestingly, the one time Drax died while Thanos was also dead, he stayed that way; but as soon as Thanos was resurrected, Drax was as well. Played for Drama more than anything else, as Drax's resurrections are described as "being torn from his well-earned paradise"; while Thanos has, at various points, been completely rejected by Death.
  • As revealed in Avengers: No Surrender, The Incredible Hulk, and by extension Bruce Banner, has this power. This is even more telling as, at this point, Banner had been depowered by Amadeus Cho, shot in the head and killed by Hawkeye, resurrected by the Hand and killed by the Unity Squad, resurrected again by HYDRA and left for dead in the destruction of the Resistance's base.
    • It's further implied in the spinoff Immortal Hulk that this power extends to all people who've been affected by the Hulk's specific variety of gamma radiation, not just himself, including his girlfriend Betty Ross and his cousin Jennifer Walters.
    • A standalone issue of She-Hulk delves into this deeper. There is a... layer of hell, for lack of better terms, where Gamma beings gather energy before they return. She-Hulk is trying to cope with the idea she's become immortal, and fragments of not-quite-memories keep haunting her. She's met the Leader there, and worse, Bruce's father, her uncle.
  • In Ultimate Spider-Man, all recipients of the Oz drug turn out to have this, including Norman Osborn, Peter Parker, and presumably Miles Morales and Jessica Drew. Peter never has to worry about Mary Jane again, since she was injected during the Ultimate Clone Saga.
  • Wolverine was one time explained to have a version of this. Each time he suffered injuries great enough to kill him he would fight the angel of death, win and return to his body with his body fully healed. It's debatable if this still works for him.
  • X-Men: The Krakoan Age gives the mutants this via a combination of four mutant powers and Mr. Sinister's cloning technology.
• Isstvan in Phil Foglio's adaptation of Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures. Note that it's an involuntary curse, and the whole plot is launched by his latest scheme to get himself permanently killed.
• The pygmy tribe of Pocket God have a Gem of Life that resurrects them by it when they die, which happens often. They later meet a female tribe with their own Jewel of Life.
• In Valérian, this is the fate of the fallen archangels who lose at the divine game of economics on planet Hypsis, most notably Mr. L.C.F. Sat. Having lost his immortality, but not his eternity, he dies repeatedly for no reason, evaporating into the air, only to poof back none worse for wear.

Fan Works

• Better Bones AU:
  • Every time One-eye is killed, he comes back many years later in the form of a different animal.
  • Dark Forest cats regenerate after they die to do being already dead, unless they are killed by a living cat in which case they die permanently.
• Child of the Storm has an example in Harry, who was stabbed in the heart by Daken and was promptly resurrected by the Phoenix, who is also revealed to be both the source of his protection, meaning that he's got embers of Phoenix Fire inside him, and having merged with Lily as a result of that, his mother. So really, it's very unlikely that she's going to let him stay dead if he dies again in the future. However, as the sequel reveals, a side-effect of the burst of power generated by the Phoenix, particularly from a death and resurrection (which unlike other bursts of power, can't be controlled or prevented since it happens more or less automatically) is that it'll unleash an Eldritch Abomination par excellence: Surtur, the original Dark Phoenix.
• As it turns out in Part 2 Clash of the Elements, Cackletta, on top of being a high-powered magic user, is capable of coming back to life an indiscernible amount of times thanks to a spell she used that restores her to a prime state every time she is killed or dies from old age, giving her all the knowledge and power she had gained in her previous life without any consequence. However, the weakness of this is that her cells stay the same as they did when she died, and Alpha is able to abuse this flaw in her spell in order to send her into a loop of death and rebirth until her spell runs dry.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: How vampires recover from fatal injuries, respawning in their coffins.
• Enlightenments: Wander breaks his neck falling off a cliff in the first chapter, and it has the effect of knocking him out for an unspecified length of time before all his injuries heal and he gets back up again. It's because he has a chunk of Dormin's soul still inside him that they can't reclaim, which is why he's also The Ageless.
• Escape from the Moon: Doa was given this to ensure she would live out her thousand-year sentence in jail, reviving in her bed in the station every time she dies. In the sequel, when she's in an alternate universe, she just revives on the spot where she died.
• In Everqueen, it is stated that after his battle with the Void Dragon, the Emperor was reduced to near-normal human level of power except for being reborn after death. Some reincarnations did have a bit of his power, but nowhere his definitely-not-godhood.
• Fallout: Equestria:
  • In Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons, Rampage has this as her main trait - in addition to being a muscle-bound, armored psychopath with multiple personalities and a cartload of other mental issues. She's also one of the protagonists. She can come back from severe injuries, decapitation, crushing, forced through a wood chipper, being eaten by a band of insane cannibals and being disintegrated into a fine pink dust with no problems - in fact, main protagonist Blackjack finds that a good dose of grievous killing is the best way to calm Rampage down when she has a psychotic episode that is, when her serial foal killer persona takes over. She just heals the wounds and regenerates any missing parts, although disintegration causes her to regenerate as a small filly, and she has to eat a lot to grow back to normal size.
  • Similarly, in Fallout Equestria: Pink Eyes, the protagonist Puppysmiles unknowingly possesses necromantic magic that allow her body to recover from any injury. Due to her innocence, she usually doesn't notice, and her habit of getting up from even missile strikes and being eaten by a Manticore has earned her a rank as The Dreaded among the Big 52 and the nickname of The Pink Ghost.
• A Game of Cat and Cat: In an omake, Nanashi takes advantage of the fact that Dagda brings him Back from the Dead to fake a ghost haunting as part of a malicious prank against Mikado.
• In a more general example, this is how Happy Tree Friends fanfics tend to portray the rampant dying integral to the show, since they don't have Negative Continuity to fall back on like the show. Of course, considering what the show is like, Immortality Hurts follows close behind.
• In The Many Deaths of Rainbow Dash Rainbow Dash gets cursed with immortality. Every time she dies (and she dies a lot), she always reappears in perfect health somewhere next to her corpse. Her dead bodies don't vanish though, which makes things rather awkward several times throughout the story—which, yes, is a Black Comedy.
• Mr and Mrs Gold: Until she is resuscitated by Hades, Belle was dead for three days.
• The Night Unfurls:
  • Just like in Bloodborne canon, the Good Hunter cannot be permanently killed. This revelation shocks Perdita, the one who "succeeded" in assassinating him, and Celestine, a witness.
  • In the original version, Kyril internally remarks how nothing would be able to kill the Plain Doll when he's pondering if his allies are well-prepared against Mandeville's preemptive strikes, implying that she retains her canonical ability to resurrect after being struck down.
• This is basically Izuku's quirk in the My Hero Academia fanfic Nutricula. Every time he dies, whether accidentally or on purpose, he'll be clinically dead for a couple of seconds and then wake up as if nothing bad ever happened. And as a bonus, every time he dies, he gets a new power.
• Ho-oh from Cornova's Poké Wars series has so far been able to come back in peak condition from being pulverized, thrown into a mountain, and having all of his limbs and head torn off, all thanks to the removal of his dampener at the start of the series. Uxie notes at one point that Ho-oh is able to come back that way because he's a legendary pokemon - if a normal pokemon ended up with this ability, they'd fall under Born-Again Immortality.
• Every time Bell dies in Rabbit of the Moon, he's sent to the Hunter's Dream instead. While he loses some of his accumulated Blood Echoes, he's effectively unkillable because of this. That said, he still remembers how he dies each and every time and the experience clearly shakes him to his core, not to mention that he has to finish the latest hunt to go home to Orario.
• Sam's Revelation has Sam constantly killing himself only for Lucifer to bring him back to life completely fine.
• In The Tears of Gaia, the dragon Tharos had a spell placed on him that granted him Resurrective Immortality. He can't die, but sees this as a curse, as he's forced to live with the shame of all the times he's been defeated.

Film — Animation

• Rise of the Guardians: Pitch Black implies that even if he dies, he can return if there is enough fear. Whether he is actually destroyed at the end of the film is ambiguous, but the Guardians will have to fight fear to ensure that he does not return.
• Wreck-It Ralph: Being video game characters, they can respawn upon death — but as the PSA in Game Central Station notes, this only applies inside their own games. Death is permanent if it happens in another game.
• In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Puss has nine lives, eight of which he's carelessly used up already. A near-death experience with a vicious lupine bounty hunter (who in fact is none other than The Grim Reaper himself taking on a physical form) causes him to seek the Wishing Star to have his lives restored.

Film — Live-Action

• Chucky from Child's Play is easily resurrected from his deaths at the end of most of the films through various means.
• Hammer Horror: Count Dracula is resurrected at the beginning of each sequel when blood gets on his remains.
• Thackery Binx from the Disney film Hocus Pocus was cursed to live forever as a cat. In one scene, he is run over by a car and is clearly dead. Then as the other characters are screaming and crying in horror, he re-inflates, stands up, and says, "I hate it when that happens." He finally dies for good, much to his spirit's relief, when the witches who cursed him are Killed Off for Real.
• Little Nicky: Nicky dies a bunch of times during his time on Earth, but since he's the son of Satan, he just ends up in Hell each time and can immediately go right back. The only time he's delayed by this is because he ends up in Heaven instead.
• While never explicitly stated, it's strongly implied to be a power of the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In both The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Thor: Ragnarok, Bruce Banner jumps from a great height with the intent of unleashing the Hulk, hits the ground, and seemingly dies from the impact, only for the Hulk to emerge moments later. In The Avengers (2012), he discloses that he once attempted suicide by gunshot, but the Hulk spat the bullet out; Hulk transformations never happen fast enough to stop a bullet except during the aforementioned falling incidents, suggesting the suicide succeeded only for the Hulk to undo it.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger is killed several times by the heroes, but he returns each time. The dream demons who are the source of his powers promised him that he would indefinitely resurrect no matter what anyone does to him. He even boasts about it.
  Freddy: I. AM. ETERNAL! (from The Dream Master)
  Freddy: In dreams. I. Am. FOREVER! (from Freddy's Dead)
• The Tall Man of Phantasm who simply can't be stopped. Destroy him completely and another identical one will step out of the portal and finish where he left off.
• The protagonists possess extra lives in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Jumanji: The Next Level, due to the jungle realm following some form of video game logic. However, considering that everything in the game is lethally dangerous and some of the avatars have rather ridiculous weaknesses, things just sort of balance out in the end.
• Zardoz: Any Eternal who dies in any manner gets brought back to life through the Tabernacle. Friend says he's committed suicide on several different occasions before resurrected, much to his chagrin.

Literature

• 12 Miles Below: Deathless resurrect at a nearby shrine within a few hours of their deaths. The machine "Feathers" are their Evil Counterparts, and are the only machines that can learn past death.
• Acacia: People from the "Other Lands" have access to magical machines that can suck out a victim's soul and put it in them. This increases the person's life by the remainder of the victim's lifespan and if the person is killed, the soul they harvested is used bring them back to life instantly. Since a person can store many souls inside themselves and harvest more in the future, that person can potentially stay young forever and be killed an ungodly number of times until they run out of souls. One such immortal was killed permanently via beheading, with his stored souls constantly leaking out of him as he dies multiple times per second.
• American Gods: Gods don't age or get sick, and it takes a lot of effort to kill them. And if someone manages to kill them but they have enough prayers/belief/sacrifices something like them will materialize eventually. However, The Old Gods are running short on belief. Mr. Wednesday's plan to start a war between the Old Gods and the New involves letting a sniper kill him, rallying the Old Gods to have this big battle with the New Gods that his partner-in-crime Loki would turn into a massive sacrifice to him. Granting him enough power to resurrect and then some.
• Area 51: Someone who's partaken from the Grail gains immortality that works this way partly. Though they briefly will die like anyone else if, say, they're shot in the heart, within a couple minutes they'll revive and be healed.
• The Beyonders:
  • The Amar Kabal possess this. When an Amar Kabal dies, their mind and memories are stored in their "seed", a small cyst-like growth on the back of the neck that detaches after death. Planting the seed in the ground will cause the Amar Kabal within to regrow their body within a few months. Destroying a seed kills the Amar Kabal inside it, and will cause every other Amar Kabal to declare war on you. One quirk of this is that the "template" for the regrowth is locked by the Amar Kabal's First Death, so most seed(wo)men deliberately kill themselves around twenty-five or so to ensure the best quality of body in future rebirths.
  • In the second book, a seed man is bitten by a zombie and his seed is excised before the infection kills him, the excision killing him instantly. Later, after the group discovers that some zombies retain their sentience and memories of their old life, they run into him, which results in there being two of him once they plant his seed.
• Borderlands: It's revealed that the people of one world are The Ageless. But they die every week, like clockwork, only to come back to life several minutes later. It usually takes a few hours for all their memories to come back after death. It's not uncommon for people to date those with the same death day (to the point where personal ads might say "Blonde, fit, pretty, Saturday", with the latter indicating the person's death day), as it's convenient to die and resurrect on the same day, especially since it's usually followed by furious sex. Violent death "doesn't count". People always come back after it, only to die again on their designated death day. Trying to kill yourself on your death day usually results in two deaths — terribly inconvenient. It's pointed out that the resurrected person isn't exactly the same as the one who died. There are subtle personality differences that build up over time.
• Buffyverse: In Immortal, unlike most vampires, Veronique's spirit survives whenever her body is dusted, and her consciousness enters the body of the next human her henchmen turn into a vampire. She spends 120 years trapped without a body due to the machinations of a Slayer and ultimately loses her powers after failing her demonic masters.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: Monsters can show up again and again thanks to this. When they are killed, they go back to Tartarus to regenerate their bodies, and eventually come back to fight them again. Percy Jackson points out how horrifying this is in The House of Hades, as it effectively means his fellow half-bloods will be fighting the same monsters over and over again — he even notices some of the monsters he foung before waiting in line at the Doors of Death. As a side note, weapons made of Stygian Iron can bypass this and kill them for good, but Stygian Iron is both rare and hard to make.
• Campione!: Godou can come back to life fully healed with the power of The Ram, but he can only do this once a day.
• Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: This is how Kasreyn's immortality works in the second series. He has no noticeable fighting abilities, and in one scene a Giant manages to rip the chain that's binding him out of the wall and hit Kasreyn with it, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. Kasreyn is dead for about thirty seconds, then gets back up none the worse for the wear, assuring the Giant that his death will pass description. It's unclear if this power is Kasreyn's own or a side effect of the Deal with the Devil he made with a croyel, but when the croyel is killed, Kasreyn dies for real.
• Corpies: Jeremiah's ability, apparently, involves "locking down" his body into a particular state (typically, when he is fit and healthy). Then, for as long as the ability is active, any damage to the body (including fatal damage) is reversed mere seconds later, which tends to freak everyone out, since no known Healing Factor can bring someone back from death. This ability also means that Jeremiah doesn't age and (possibly) doesn't require sleep.
• Cradle Series: Especially powerful entities (mostly those who have ascended from the worlds of their birth) are so powerful that they are a fact of reality. If killed, they will reform moments later. It comes off as a limited form of Complete Immortality; if killed enough, eventually the Origin of their existence will become damaged and they will be killed for real, but that takes quite a few deaths. If they retreat and rest, their Origin will eventually recover. The four Dreadgods of Cradle are immortal in this way, in addition to the fact that they are nearly impossible to kill anyway (just like most entities with this property). In Reaper Elder Whisper tells the team how to find their Origin in the Labyrinth and render them mortal, but warns that this will not make them any weaker. Of course, with them mortal, maybe the Monarchs will be willing to spend the effort to band together and finally kill them for good.
• The Dawnhounds: Weavers made a deal with one of the gods that means they get thrown back into the world every time they die. Each resurrection makes them more powerful, but also chips away at their humanity—old weavers start to come apart at the seams.
• The Death Gate Cycle: The Serpents can be killed (albeit with great difficulty), but, because they feed on negative emotions and chaos, the violence of their deaths gives them the energy to return to life before long, twice as powerful as before. Both the Royal One (the Serpent king) and Sang-Drax (the most heavily featured Serpent) die and return at various points although its unclear if Sang-Drax's final death — being crushed by the collapsing Seventh Gate, a Cosmic Keystone — was sufficient to destroy him for good.
• Discworld: Vampires can be killed in a number of different ways, but they are always reduced to ashes and will always regenerate when they eventually come into contact with blood. Careful slayers can keep them locked up for hundreds or thousands of years, but sooner or later they'll be back. The only recorded time one has been rendered (possibly) Deader than Dead was when a cat ate him while he was in bat form. Another vampire was threatened with being thrown off of the Disc into space, which would probably have done the job as well.
• The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi: Almost any person, who is killed vanishes in a puff of air and materializes naked in his or her home, with no injuries from several hours before death. This applies only to murder, though, and there is a 1 in 1000 chance it won't work and the person will be dead for good. A special job has been created to allow trained people to kill those they deem about to die, thus ensuring their survival (remember, only murder triggers the resurrection). These people, called Dispatchers, are typically present in operating rooms during critical surgeries. If the surgeons fail to save the patient, the Dispatcher in the room demands that the surgeon in charge declare the patient lost. Then the Dispatcher uses a special tool to inject the patient with a tiny explosive charge straight into the brain. The charge then detonates, killing (and saving) the patient. No one knows why people are coming back, but it has become a fact of life for the past 10 years. This leads to some people doing reckless things, privately hiring Dispatchers to ensure there's someone on hand to kill them if necessary.
• Downward to the Earth: The cermony of rebirth allows the nildoror and sulidoror to be transformed into youthful specimens of the other species, stripping away age and injury, and allowing them to effectively live forever.
• The Executioner and Her Way of Life:
  • Whenever Akari is killed, her Pure Concept of "Time" automatically activates and rewinds her body to the state it was in before she died. Because even her memories are rewound, she herself is unaware of this.
  • Whenever Pandaemonium dies, her Pure Concept automatically activates and spawns a new, undamaged copy of her body.
• In Fengshen Yanyi, a secondary character by the name of Hu Lei has apparently this power, as he's captured and executed by the enemy... only to show up again at the camp gate, looking for another fight. Downplayed as Princess Longji recognize the magic trick as some form of "escape" and uses her Universal Needle to stab Hu Lei in the neck and prevent him from using his technique, so that he dies for real.
• Implied in The Girl from the Miracles District, when it turns out that Robin has died and then returned among the living five times before the events of the book.
• The Great God's War: Prince Bifalt in Seventh Decimate finds himself afflicted with this for no reason he can understand. Every time he gets mortally wounded, he just wakes up a while later with no serious injuries, even if the mortal wound was in the form of having a bolt of lightning melting the flesh from his bones.
• In Harry Potter, Voldemort's Horcruxes grant him a form of this type of immortality as they contain pieces of his soul preventing him from passing on. As his soul doesn't leave the mortal world can later reform his body if it is destroyed being resurrected as a result. However, unlike other examples, the spells and rituals involved require the assistance of another wizard meaning it can take decades to return as was the case after his failed attempt to kill Harry as a baby. Once all of Voldemort's Horcruxes are destroyed — including the one he inadvertently created in Harry — he becomes mortal again.
• The Perpetuals in Horus Heresy, more specifically, Oll Parsson, Vulkan and John Grammaticus. They don't age and they can rebuild From a Single Cell. Unfortunately, every death brings them closer to the brink of insanity. Oll and John deal with it by not dying, but Vulkan goes crazy before he even realizes what's going on.
• In the Hyperion Cantos, a person bearing a cruciform will be resurrected as long as enough of the body and the cruciform remain and adequate materials are available to restore the body (even the cruciform can't violate the law of conservation of mass). For the first few resurrections, the subject will seemingly be resurrected as though they had never been killed. However, on its own, the cruciform cannot resurrect a human being perfectly; after enough resurrections, the subject turns into a sexless, featureless idiot. Only with the "sarcophagi" introduced after the Fall of the Farcasters does the cruciform allow indefinite resurrection without loss of memory or human capacity—though at a frightful cost.
• Never Dead Ned from In the Company of Ogres isn't so much "immortal" as he's being looked after by a witch with resurrection magic at her disposal, routinely appearing to resurrect him after Ned's bad luck does him in.
• In Is This A Zombie?, Kyoko has the ability to gain an "extra life" every time she kills somebody, so she became a Serial Killer. Every time she is killed, she uses up a life and immediately gets up fully healed. She is defeated when Ayumu manages to reduce her to her last life, at which point she begs for mercy, pleading that she doesn't want to die.
• The protagonist of Katabasis, Phoebe, is immortal, and a core plotline of the series centers around her exploration of this ability.
• If the legends in The Kingkiller Chronicle can be believed, this is the curse of Haliax, leader of the bogeyman-like Chandrian. In one Start of Darkness story, whatever power he found while trying to return his wife to life made him incapable of staying dead, no matter how desperately he wants to. Whatever he is, he's been active for millennia.
• Vanir from KonoSuba manages to come back after being killed. The heroes only find this out when they have to break the news to Wiz that they killed him, only to find him working in her shop. It seems that as long as he has a supply of the masks he uses, he can just transfer from one to another.
• The deceased believers in Christ in the Left Behind book series gain this ability once they and their still-living counterparts are Caught Up in the Rapture and Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. This also applies to those who became believers during the Tribulation and were martyred for their faith.
• This is one of the signature powers of the Venerate in The Licanius Trilogy. Not only are the Venerate unaging and unable to be killed except by a specific method unique to each of them, but if they do die they will reincarnate in a random body somewhere. Only the eponymous Licanius can permanently kill them.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's Line of Delirium trilogy, the aTan Corporation has this as their primary service. It goes like this: when a new client signs up for aTan, he or she undergoes a molecular scan (extremely painful), and the matrix of his or her body is stored in the aTan database. At the same time, a neural net is implanted into the client's brain, capable of FTL transmissions. At the point of the client's death, the neural net transmits the client's memories to the nearest aTan facility. If the client has paid for his or her resurrection (always in advance and never more than one at a time), a new body is replicated from the stored matrix, and the memories are downloaded into the new brain. At that point, the resurrected client can pay for another resurrection (usually, a small fortune). The part about the neural net instantly uploading all memories is a lie. Actually, the net constantly transmits the memories to aTan. The moment of death is signified by the end of the transmission. However, should the original still be alive at that point (e.g. the transmission is shielded), the newly-resurrected body will not be fully sapient. It will breathe, eat, drink, and answer questions, but not have a will of its own. If the original then dies, the new body will immediately become that person. The aTan Corporation decided to keep that a secret from the general public. They did tell the Church, though, and the Patriarch has given his full blessing to a device that has provided the first proof of the existence of the human soul.
• Little Mushroom: An Zhe is resurrected after his Heroic Sacrifice when his mushroom spore grows into a replica of his body with his memories transferred over. We only see this happen once in the main story, but Lu Feng theorizes that An Zhe might be able to become functionally immortal by continually growing spores and regenerating from them.
• In the fifth Malazan Book of the Fallen book, Midnight Tides, Rhulad Sengar returns from the dead after being killed, thanks to the cursed sword in his hand at the time. This begins a path of dying and being resurrected again and again. Since the whole dying thing is agonizing and mind-warping, and the process of returning is even worse, this ends up being a case of being Blessed with Suck. This also gains him the title of the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths.
• The Misfit of Demon King Academy: Following her hybrid transformation, Emilia Lud(o)well finds that if she kills herself, she will resurrect as a hybrid every time she dies.
• In The Night Angel Trilogy, the holder of the black ka'kari has this. They come back to life if killed at the cost of having someone they care about die soon after.
• Ryn, the main character of The One Who Eats Monsters, looks like a slightly underfed five-foot tall, sixteen-year-old girl who weighs "one hundred and three pounds." She's actually the oldest monster in the world, from the Before Time and the Long Ago. She's "too old to die," and can heal from literally anything. If someone does enough damage fast enough to "kill" her, her body will simply reform itself from nothingness in a few years.
• In Pact, a Familiar will gain this trait, as their practitioner must spend power to keep their mortal form alive in order to fulfill the familiar oaths which bind them together.
• Unsurprisingly, an Epic in The Reckoners Trilogy has this power. Megan's invincibility manifests in being reborn with the next sunrise after their death. (Unless she's killed by her Kryptonite Factor, fire.) They hates this aspect of their powers because, while it gives them a power-boost, it also comes with overpoweringly evil instincts, being Naked on Revival, and you know, the trauma of the whole "dying" part. It's also causes a bit of an existential crisis later when it turns out that their powers are actually a form of reality warping, and that her reincarnations involve bringing an alternate version of her from another dimension somehow, leading her to wonder about which version of her is herself.
• Re:Zero's Subaru has this ability, but instead of simply coming back time resets to a certain important point in his past. Although two big drawbacks to using this ability is that he can't go further than the last checkpoint, and he still feels the pain of every death making it an ability he hates to rely on.
• In the Secret Histories Urban Fantasy series, Coffin Jobe is a "necroleptic": like a narcoleptic, except he spontaneously drops dead and then revives, rather than falls asleep and then awakens. He's gotten used to it.
• The Eternal Emperor of the Sten series. He can die, and indeed has been assassinated more than once, but he always returns a few years later to reclaim his throne. It should be noted this is what it looks on the outside. In reality, the Emperor has a secret ship that holds cloning technology. When he dies, his body blows up, and a new clone is sent in with his memories up until he dies.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • The Heralds have a very slow and terrible version of this. Under the terms of the Oathpact when they die or a Desolation ends they are returned to Damnation (Hell), where they are captured and tortured until one of them snaps. This triggers another Desolation that they return to fight, and when the Desolation is over any of them that survived have to go back again. The book begins with them breaking this cycle, refusing to return after all but one of them survived the latest Desolation. More than four thousand years later, the enemies of the Heralds find another way to return to fight.
  • Also the Fused, the spirits of ancient dead parsh, who are resurrected by possessing living parsh. They are the reason the Heralds went to Damnation, as the Oathpact allowed the Heralds to trap them there, resurrecting once a new Desolation starts. As of Oathbringer the pact is broken, and they can resurrect with each passage of the Everstorm every few days, although they seem to imply that not all the Fused have returned, and the Storm doesn't instantly bring all the Fused back.
• Olson's power from Super Minion. He instantly vanishes and reappears uninjured any time he dies. Because of this power he was horrifically experimented upon before he either escaped or was rescued and joined Hellion's Henchmen.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Demons as spiritual lifeforms cannot be permanently killed unless their souls are somehow permanently damaged, as they will regenerate within the underworld, which applies even if they obtain a physical vessel. However, repeated deaths over a short enough period of time without recovery will start to weaken the demon with each resurrection, and it's possible for a demon to devolve in the worst case scenario. It's implied that something similar applies to other spiritual lifeforms like angels and spirits.
  • Certain magic-born can survive death and even destruction of their bodies as long as their souls are safe and resurrect. Undead in particular can pull this off, with the ability to "anchor" their souls until they can rebuild their bodies. There are limits to what they can recover from, however, and it can cost more energy to rebuild their bodies than they actually possess. Demon Lord Kazaream, for example, spent centuries as a formless spirit unable to reform, and had to resort to summoning a compatible Otherworlder body in order to commit Grand Theft Me and save himself. They ended up Sharing a Body when the Otherworlder stopped him but was sympathetic to his plight, and even helped him gain a new (female) body.
    • Much like their master Kazaream, Deathmen are also able to do this in the eventuality that their physical body is killed by anchoring their astral body to the ley lines. Laplace was able to resurrect himself without much issue after being disintegrated, but when Clayman threatened to do the same Rimuru put a stop to that by consuming his soul, killing him permanently.
  • The True Dragons have the most impressive version, as almost nothing can permanently kill them save very specific circumstances because they are literally considered by reality to be closer to "forces of nature" than "living beings". At worst, they just lose some memories and get a "reboot" and that no longer applies to Veldora and Velgrynd after Rimuru established a soul corridor with them and obtained Skills related to them that ensure as long as their connection remains and he's alive, they'll keep their memories if they die. That's why Veldanava's apparent permanent death was so earthshaking. Rimuru himself gets in on this when he becomes a True Dragon.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: This is the side effect of Elves being eternally bound to Arda. On top of being immortal, if they die by any means, they will get sent to the Halls of Mandos, where they wait until they are given permission to be reembodied back in Arda, in the same body and the same spirit. Therefore, Elves don't really have the same fear of death as Men do, because they can just come back, whereas Men are fated to leave Arda as soon as they die. That said, the Elves can remain stuck in the Halls and not be reembodied, whether by choice (e.g., Aegnor, who does not want to return to a world without his mortal lover, Andreth) or if they are deemed too sinful (e.g., Fëanor, whose rebellion against the Valar is seen as unforgivable). It is strongly implied in certain writings that the original orcs were the result of Elves being tortured to death multiple times, though Tolkien contradicted himself multiple times on this one.
• This is possessed by Sacred Eclipse in Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle. Overlaps with Came Back Strong, as it gains new powers each time it resurrects, ensuring that it will eventually become impossible to defeat.
• Zigzagged in Warrior Cats. Clan leaders are granted nine lives from StarClan, the spirits of their ancestors. If they die, they are brought back from the dead, fully healed. However, since they only get nine lives, they can only come back eight times, and the ninth death is permanent. As well, they can still die permanently from old age no matter how many lives they have, only their cause of death is healed (Brokenstar is repeatedly injured and killed in Fire and Ice and Forest of Secrets, and comes back with injuries), and some things are able to kill a leader multiple times, such as Scourge's organ shredding blow against Tigerstar in The Darkest Hour, Leopardstar's diabetes in Fading Echoes, and Rowanstar's yellowcough in Thunder and Shadow.
• The Zodiac Series: Ophiuchus's Talisman grants this ability to whoever has it. As he himself explains, it's impossible to keep yourself alive and unaging forever, so the Talisman instead creates a new body whenever the one you're inhabiting dies. Him being killed when he didn't have the Talisman had some...interesting side-effects, and at the end of the series, Aquarius destroys it to kill himself.
• The protagonist of the Web Serial Novel The Zombie Knight has this as his primary power, thanks entirely to the Grim Reaper who revived him. This is used to both gruesome and comical effect. He also boasts Super-Strength and the ability to temporarily Feel No Pain. And growing Extra-ore-dinary powers.

Live-Action TV

• American Horror Story: 1984: Richard Ramirez is granted this by Satan. Every time he's killed, after a short period his wounds will heal and he'll come back to life. This leads to his Fate Worse than Death, as the ghosts of Camp Redwood decide to keep watch over his body, and kill him immediately whenever he comes back.
• Trance Gemini in Andromeda is shot dead in the pilot but comes back to life on her own; Dylan later remarks when someone attempts to take her hostage that she's done that twice that he knows of. Later, she gets taken over by a sapient spore that animates dead hosts, causing Dylan to question whether she's actually alive to begin with.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica (2003) do this when they die. So long as they're in the operational range of a Resurrection Ship (and since Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, that range is quite far) and the resurrection network is online, then when they die, they merely Body Surf into a dormant identical body and continue their existence. However, this also means they get to carry the psychological and emotional trauma of dying with them into their new body and some Cylons are so traumatized by the experience that their consciousnesses are "boxed" rather than having them become a Broken Bird and be a drain on Cylon society.
  • In Caprica, Zoe and Tamara possess this ability in New Cap City in a particularly fast variant. The environment is programmed in such a way to permanently ban anyone who is killed from ever entering again. For Z&T this is just a minor nuisance because they are programs with no real body to return to, so getting killed will cause a glitch and remodel them immediately.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Dracula does this in the one episode in which he appears. Buffy stakes him and he dusts, but then he reforms, only for Buffy to stake him again.
    I've seen your movies. You always come back.
  • Angel once faced a demon who, no matter how many times he cut it up, would always piece itself back together and come after him again.
    Angel: Come on! I'm holding your head!
• In Charmed (1998), the Lazarus Demon always comes back to life fully healed, even if he is reduced to ashes. The only way to neutralize him is to bury his remains in a cemetary, and he'll come back if he is dug up.
• Chas Chandler from Constantine (2014) has this type of immortality. There is a reason why he's John Constantine's oldest friend — nobody else survives the dangers around him for long.
• Dead Like Me: The Psychopomps are already dead and have a flawless Healing Factor, so even fatal damage only puts them down for a little while. In The Film of the Series, the team disposes of their Bad Boss via Rasputinian Death, cremation, and launching the ashes into space — just in case.
• Defiance: Sukar. It's mostly nanomachines, but he's convinced that his gods won't let him die while he and the other chosen ones have a duty to fulfill.
• Doctor Who and Torchwood:
  • Time Lords such as the Doctor are able to regenerate when their body dies or is otherwise too severely damaged to keep alive (be it through old age, severe injury, etc.), retaining all their memories but gaining a new appearance and personality. This ability isn't inherent to Gallifreyans, but instead is granted to those that become Time Lords. The 1976 serial "The Deadly Assassin" would establish a 12-regeneration limit for Time Lords, after which they permanently die, but it also indicates that they can either be granted new regeneration cycles or take the remaining lives of another Time Lord, both of which the Master attempts more than once in the Classic Series after exhausting all his regenerations.
  • Captain Jack Harkness can technically die, but only for a short while due to a mixture of this and From a Single Cell. In Torchwood: Miracle Day, Jack became mortal again. He returns to being immortal at the end of Miracle Day, with Rex also gaining this kind of immortality. ^note  Word of God speculated in the episode commentary that the Blessing may have only removed Jack's Healing Factor, and that were he to die during the Miracle, he would have simply revived as normal.
  • The character of Ashildr, introduced in the Series 9 episode "The Girl Who Died", is rendered "functionally immortal" due to the Doctor installing alien tech in her head to keep her alive, but at the cost of her now losing the ability to die. This is modified in the later episode "The Woman Who Lived", where we learn she can be killed, but will usually quickly recover from otherwise fatal injury. In "Hell Bent" we learn that she ultimately lives until the last moments of the universe, and even beyond thanks to being rescued by the Doctor and Clara.
  • Clara Oswald, as of the end of "Hell Bent", is said to be immortal and, in fact, lives in an almost-dead state, without breathing or having a pulse. It is strongly implied that the universe will not allow her to die until she returns to the originally designated time and place of her death; as long as she still intends to return to die properly, she can delay actually getting there.
• Dr. Henry Morgan of Forever can be injured like anyone else, and normally heals no faster than anyone else, but if killed his body will disappear and he will wake up in the nearest large body of water completely healed. He is also The Ageless and has been since his first death in 1814. His Evil Counterpart "Adam" has been alive for over 2000 years and has grown to no longer care about the lives of everyone else, killing without remorse. The one exception to this is anyone who has survived the German concentration camps, since "Adam" himself was experimented on by Dr. Mengele, in an attempt to find a way to make Adolph Hitler immortal. What caused Henry and "Adam" to become immortal is unknown, but both of them did die trying to save the life of another.
• Haven: In "Friend or Faux", Cornell Stamoran inadvertently spawns a murderous clone of himself. Each time the clone is killed, he reappears next to his corpse in a new body. At one point, he exploits this and kills himself to escape being handcuffed to a pipe. Eventually, the clone redeems himself by shooting the original Cornell when he was about to shoot Audrey. As soon as Cornell dies, the clone vanishes into thin air.
• In the Highlander series, immortals could die just like anyone else, but they revive shortly afterward (unless the injury was a beheading, which is fatal for good). ^note This is different from the movie portion of the Highlander franchise, in which immortals simply can't die except by beheading. It can turn into a cycle if they're trapped in lethal circumstances, which can lead to an insane immortal when they're finally set free.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Phoenix of Kamen Rider Wizard: Like his namesake, his special ability is that he can't be killed for good and will simply revive stronger than before. In the end, the only way Haruto can permanently stop him is by throwing him into the sun and trapping him there.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost doesn't have this power initially, but later revives from the destruction of his Soul Jar in the series and the destruction of his physical body in The Movie seemingly without explanation in either case. In the final episode he meets a god who explains that his extended time as a ghost and extensive spirit channeling have caused him to ascend into another deity, making him immortal. Ghost's archenemies, the Gammaizers, have this power as well, with the entire series being the Big Good trying to find a way to kill them that will stick.
  • Kamen Rider Genm from the video game-themed series Kamen Rider Ex-Aid eventually gains the power of a Zombie Apocalypse-themed video game, which grants him a zombie's resistance to damage and the ability to shrug off fatal injuries; this is represented by the Life Meter on his chestplate being empty. He actually had to die in order to gain the power in the first place, meaning he's like this whether or not he's in his Rider form. Eventually, Ex-Aid finds a way to strip him of this power... until he later gets his hands on a second (though lesser) immortality trick, using the alpha version of Mighty Action X to give himself 99 extra lives.
  • In Kamen Rider Zi-O, every Monster of the Week has this power, simply reappearing as if they hadn't been hit by a Finishing Move. Each one can only be permanently killed by the Kamen Rider they're an Evil Knockoff of, or someone Power Copying them.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One: This is a trait shared by most HumaGears owing to being Ridiculously Human Robots; their memories and personalities are backed up in cloud storage and can simply be installed into a new shell. Only Jin makes significant use of this ability, however, and appropriately comes back with a new phoenix motif to his powers.
• LEXX:
  • Prince, an expy of Satan and the Big Bad of the last two seasons, could return after being killed, once a certain time period had elapsed. Worse, he could choose where he would reappear, and what his appearance would be, making him a de facto shapeshifter. His weaker enemy Duke could resurrect but not change his appearance.
  • Kai plays with this too. Although he's technically dead and only animated by protoblood, he would routinely get "killed" (decapitated, cut apart, etc.) which sometimes incapacitated him for a while until he was put back together properly. Other times, he's move around regardless of injuries.
• Implied to be the case with Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Adar, an Orc, managed to "kill" him after growing tired of Sauron's bad treatment of his kin. How he did that, nobody knows, but it did not last. Sauron resurrects himself at some point before the start of the show, and takes the identity of a roguish lost prince and pretends to be human for a while.
• On Lucifer, Pierce/Cain seems to have this ability. When Lucifer figures out who Pierce is, he stabs him in the chest. Pierce falls to the ground and appears to die, only to get up a few minutes later and pull the knife out of his chest.
• In Merlin, Merlin himself, who is still alive in the present day. He's taken fireballs to the chest, swords, and huge slash wounds, and yet has gotten up again. It was confirmed in a Distant Finale that he really is immortal like his mythological roots. Very heavily implied as early as 4x02 with the Dorocha. Gaius outright says that no mortal can survive their touch, yet Merlin does.
• Misfits: After Nathan dies from impalement, it is revealed that he has this type of immortality. He can be hurt or injured in the normal way, but will heal all injuries once he dies and comes back to life. Best demonstrated when in an alternate timeline, after their powers had become public knowledge, he demonstrated his ability by shooting himself in the head and resurrecting on live television. And then a villain leaves him a brain dead vegetable instead of killing him.
• In Mystery Science Theater 3000, Dr. Forrester repeatedly kills his assistant, TV's Frank, who always comes back. That is, until he is Killed Off for Real at the end of Season 6 by being taken into Second Banana Heaven.
• John Amsterdam in New Amsterdam (2008). In addition to being The Ageless, Amsterdam also possesses this form of immortality. He dies in the pilot, but he is resurrected a few hours later in the morgue.
• Power Rangers Dino Fury: Whenever a Sporix dies, after enough time passes, it will resurrect more powerful than it was before. The Morphin Masters say no force in the universe that they can think of can kill a Sporix permanently. The only way to neutralize them is to put them in cold storage, encase them in crystal, or some other form of containment.
• On Preacher (2016), the angels have this with an interesting twist: Their bodies stay where they were and they re-spawn in a different body. This led to a fight scene in which the angels end up in a room full of their own bodies.
• A specific variation in Smallville. When Chloe heals fatal injuries, it kills her, but she could resurrect herself. However, when she saves Lois Lane, she is dead for 3 hours. When she saves Lex Luthor, she remains dead for 18 hours. Clark thinks if she tries it again, she might stay dead. Permanently.
• The Trill in Star Trek are a race of almost human-looking aliens that share their home planet with a species of highly intelligent slug-like worms, known as the Symbionts. The symbionts are able to live inside the body of a Trill and connect themselves to their nervous system, effectively becoming a second brain that is mostly passive but retains all the memories of the Trill it is bonded with and has been bonded to before. While the lifetime of an individual Trill is about the same as that of a human, the Symbionts can live for many centuries and go through over a dozen of host bodies. These bonded Trill make up less than a percent of their species and form the political, scientific, and cultural elite of their society, so only the most gifted and outstanding individuals are selected for bonding after a very long and hard selection process. While the selection process is primarily supposed to prevent any symbionts to be bonded to mentally unstable host bodies that would permanently damage the mind, it also serves to hide the fact that almost half the Trill population is capable of bonding to symbionts and gaining a kind of immortality. Since there aren't nearly enough Symbionts to make this possible, the consequences would be devastating. The most important quality looked for in candidates after high intelligence and skills, seems to be an outstanding personalty that has a good chance to create a remarkable scientist, artist, or politician. And as a result, they all tend to be highly eccentric, which only gets more intense once they gain access to the memories of several remarkable lifetimes. While a bonded symbiont can live outside a host body for only a few hours outside of their specially maintained pools, and the host dies after the symbiont is removed, the symbionts are very durable and very often survive accidents and injuries that kill the host, as long as they can be transferred into a new one in time.
• Dean Winchester of Supernatural has died at last count five times. He's been brought back every time, almost all of them against his will. His brother Sam and best friend Cas count as well but Dean holds the record as it's been explicitly stated that at this point, nothing short of God himself will be able kill him, especially since as of season 10 he killed Death and is linked to God's sister who promised him she'd always protect him and keep him safe. whether he wants that or not.
• Most prominent villains from the Ultra Series have the ability to come back after their demise after a certain period of time, notably Yapool from Ultraman Ace (whose Power Of Hate is so strong, it can revive him from scratch!) and Ultraman Belial from Ultraman Zero, who keeps (or rather, kept coming back one way or another due to his resurrection powers).
• Gandalf is parodied as this in Dead Ringers, coming back as Gandalf the Tartan and claiming to have "a whole Dulux colour chart" at his disposal.

Music

• The song "The Spirit of the Outlaw" by The Jolly Rogers is about a criminal who apparently comes Back from the Dead every time he's executed, so he can continue committing crimes in a new era. In order, he's been: a Pirate, a Highwayman, a Gunslinger, a Chicago Mobster, and a Ruthless Modern Pirate. At the end, he acknowledges it's only a matter of time before he's caught and executed again, but...
  I hunt the waves until my match is met
  And when that match is found, they'll put me down once more
  And I'll rise up just as I did a thousand times before!

Myths & Religion

• In Greek Mythology, the Phoenix is said to have this power. When it dies, its body bursts into flame and turns to ash. However, a new Phoenix will always rise again from the ashes of its corpse.^note In older versions of the myth, the bird simply dies and spawns a worm-like creature that feeds itself on its parent's corpse and eventualy grows into an adult Phoenix, then brings the remains onto an altar to be burnt.
• Irish Mythology: The Dagda, the chief of the Irish gods, owns two pigs with this ability, with the additional power of perpetually growing in size and girth. This allows him to alternate roasting one while fattening the other day in and day out. The pigs of Assail are a herd of magical pigs that also have the same ability, and were part of the quest undertaken by the sons of Tuireann.
• Egyptian Mythology:
  • Born-Again Immortality seems to be the standard for Egyptian gods, who can age and die but are always reborn. However, with some of them it isn't clear if they actually have to pass through childhood when returning.
  • There's a reason why Apep/Apophis earned the title of "Serpent of Rebirth": No matter how many times Ra destroys him, Apep returns from The Underworld good as new, allowing him to continue his omnicidal ambitions over and over again.
• The Einherjar from Norse Mythology reside in the halls of Valhalla. Every day they fight with real swords and axes, and every night the dead ones get resurrected by Odin and Freyja. They're not going to come back when Ragnarök arrives, however, just like everyone else.
  • There is also the anomalous entity called Gullveig / Heidr, born from the group of nature deities called Vanir. She is a beautiful woman who the Vanirs' enemies (the Aesir) capture, spear and burn in fire several times; but each time is reborn just as she was before. Her capture and torture is implied to be what caused the Aesir-Vanir war and united the two groups into one pantheon. She is also implied to have, in vengeance, spread the knowledge of magic and seduction to mortal women; becoming the first witch.
• Coyote has this trait in some Southwestern Native American traditions. No matter what happens to him, he'll always come back in time for the next story (occasionally he'll even die and come back to life multiple times in a single tale).
• Jesus is the Trope Codifier for western examples, with the narrative of his resurrection describing him as having risen from the dead, returning to his original body, essentially good as new.

Roleplay

• Bay 12 Monster Girls: All Youkai and demons have Resurrective Immortality. Cheru, a Domovoi, also has the same ability, but takes several years to regenerate, as opposed to days/weeks for the former two.
• In Campus Life, the Ferenic Crafts, when killed, reanimate after 24 hours.
• If Nadine from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues dies, then she just comes back to life in a new body. Her power is described as 'multiple lives', so whether there's a point where her immortality can 'run out' remains to be seen. She's none too pleased when she dies for the first time and is resurrected in a body with different genitalia.
• In Effulgence, anyone with the ability to torch will simply reset to a healthy state when they would otherwise die (accompanied by being momentarily engulfed in illusionary fire, hence the term "torching") Also, their physical age sticks around twentysomething.
• Players in Roll To Dodge: Savral have this ability. While players can die, the fact they can respawn, with all their memories intact, makes them effectively immortal. This is justified in-universe since the players are disembodied souls that Cathy cannot completely destroy.
• Ye Gods plays with this. A god might revive in a weakened state if they made plans prior to their death. This method won't work if the god was permakilled and gods don't automatically come with Resurrective Immortality. If a god had no plans in place and was permakilled, nothing can bring them back beyond very uncommon events.
  • By default, angels will revive on their own unless their soul was stolen or destroyed.

Tabletop Games

• In the Old World of Darkness and New World of Darkness:
  • Mummies from Mummy: The Resurrection can only be put down permanently by point-blank annihilation, like ground zero of a nuclear explosion; or long-term sustained damage, like immersion in a volcano, so they die frequently and rapidly enough to exhaust the energy that resurrects them.
  • Arisen from Mummy: The Curse are created by a Rite of Return that restores them to life every 1460 years and/or under special circumstances (like being summoned by a cult, or having their tombs robbed), then maintains their lives for around 8-9 months until they run out of energy and fall into death again. To annihilate one thoroughly enough to prevent its future resurrection requires that you destroy every piece of its remains (so it can't come back on its own), kill its entire cult (so they can't find it a new body), and erase every mention of its name from every record (so no necromancer or cult in the future can learn about it and then try to raise it).
  • In Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Sin Eaters' symbiosis with powerful ghosts lets them come back from the dead at the next dawn or dusk — but their Geist pulls a Grand Theft Me if they die too many times, and it's the Geist who makes the call on whether to resurrect them.
  • Shadow spirits are only banished from the physical world and forced into brief dormancy if "killed", unless their bodies are destroyed while they have no essence reserve.
  • Some humans learn to transform their souls into Shadow spirits possessing their body. These "Purified" can only reliably be killed as spirits are; putting the body somewhere it would die as soon as it regenerates can work in the short term, but they can learn to abandon unsuitable bodies and form entirely new ones.
• In the various editions of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, this is what the Reincarnation attribute does. The various levels determine how long it takes for the character with the attribute to come back after being killed, and how easy or hard this is to stop.
• The Ultimate Powers Book for Marvel Super Heroes has the Serial Immortality and Self-Revival powers, which allow a character to come back from death. Serial Immortality in particular has several ways this can come about, some of which embody other tropes than Resurrective Immortality, such as creation of a new body, reanimating a dead body, taking over another person's body, and others. This is primarily a way for villains to come back.
• The Inevitable Comeback creature power from Feng Shui allows a supernatural creature to resurrect after being killed.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Necrons are an entire RACE of this. Even if reduced to liquid metal, any Necron is teleported away and rebuilt to be redeployed. Whether this has any drawbacks varies; some fluff suggests that constant resurrecting is the reason most necrons are Empty Shells, while other stories such as The Infinite and the Divine suggest that it has no drawbacks to the point that it's used as Resurrection Teleportation and that killing someone is seen as roughly equivelant to punching them in the face.
  • Hive Tyrants of the Tyranids have this built into them. Being the commander of an entire Redshirt Army of Zerg Rush troops means that commanders seldom survive long, so each Hive Tyrant can and will reform in a new body with their mind and memories intact (but only until the current campaign is over). The only exception to this is the Swarmlord, who transcends the various hive fleets and always reforms with his memories. His body is also unique, possessing materials not native to the galaxy, implying that the hive mind will go through the trouble of transmuting the materials for his specially crafted Bonesabres just for the Swarmlord.
  • Then there is Lucius The Eternal, the personal champion of the deity of excess, Slaanesh. Lucius' quirk is that should he be bested in battle and the one who defeated him feels even the tiniest amount of pride about it, said person will slowly and painfully morph into Lucius and the only thing left of them will be a new screaming face on Lucius' Power Armor. Considering the amount of faces already on it, this happened quite often.
    • Terrifyingly, he can possess you in this manner without you even being aware you killed him. In one story, a worker in a munitions factory turned into Lucius when the Chaos Lord stepped on a landmine he made on a distant battlefield on another world. He was proud to work on munitions that destroyed the Imperium's enemies, and that was enough.
  • Also, Perpetuals. Even completely vaporized, they can pull their subatomic particles back together. The most famous of whom is the God-Emperor of Mankind, which suggests that Horus must have hurt him badly if he's been on life-support for the past ten millennia. Another is his son Vulkan, who was once tortured to death thousands of times by the Night Lord but kept on resurrecting. And in a lighter example, the shamans of prehistoric Earth could reincarnate themselves after death, but when they began to lose their souls to the emerging Chaos Gods they made a suicide pact and merged to form the future Emperor.
  • The Dark Eldar can bring dead bodies back, both themselves and slaves who hoped to escape their torturers by dying. However, doing it too often causes little mutations to show up on their bodies (not to mention what it does to their minds). Urien Rakarth, the undisputed master of the procedure, is so far gone he actually looks forward to dying so he can catalog the changes made to his body.
  • The Phoenix Lords, who are sort of like the Eldar equivalent of Primarchs, are ancient Aeldari warriors from the time of the Fall of the Eldar, and the founders of the various Aspect Warrior shrines. Their souls are bound to their suits of armor; when one of them dies, their consciousness will subsume that of whoever puts the armor on next (which can usually be assumed to be an Exarch of their respective shrine anyway) allowing them to be "reborn" after a fashion into a new body. This happening to an Incubus who claimed Drazhar's armor after the latter was slain by Jain Zar, leading to Drazhar's resurrection, lends further credence to the theory that Drazhar is actually the fallen Phoenix Lord Arhra.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Deva race (angels who incarnate as mortals on the Material plane) have this, but when/where they reincarnate is up to the GM, so just choosing that race is not necessarily a way to keep the same character.
  • Many 4th Edition Epic Destinies allow the player self-resurrection — usually prefaced with the amusingly unlikely phrase "Once per day, when you die, [...]". Flavorful variations on the ability include:
    • Having one of your followers take on your identity.
    • Having yourself from another point in time show up to carry on.
    • Literally walking out of Hell.
  • In 5E, aboleths cannot truly die — if one is slain, its spirit flees to the Elemental Plane of Water, where it slowly grows a new body.
  • Demons, devils, and yugoloths only die permanently if they are killed on their home planes of existence (the Abyss, the Nine Hells, and Gehenna, respectively). Kill them anywhere else, and they reform instantly on their home plane.
  • Eberron: The majority of immortals — angels, demons, and so on — simply respawn when they're killed, even on their home plane, and even those that do die have a similar creature come into existence shortly afterwards. Permanently killing an immortal is almost impossible, although changes in state (such as the couatl becoming the Silver Flame) can take place. In particular, this is why the Overlords are Sealed Evil in a Can; there's no way to destroy them, so the Heroic Sacrifice of the couatl bound them so they couldn't wildly ravage the world any more.
  • In Fifth Edition, when a shadar-kai dies, their soul is whisked away to the Fortress of Memories in the Shadowfell, which is ruled by the Raven Queen, a God of the Dead. Should this shadar-kai be one of the Raven Queen's servants, a new body is crafted for them, and they're allowed to come back to life. There is no limit as to how many times this can happen, effectively making the shadar-kai immortal, since Death Is a Slap on the Wrist at worst. It helps to explain why this is a race that is Not Afraid to Die.
• This (along with being The Ageless) is basically how the immortality of the gods of Exalted works. You can destroy the body of a god, but as long as they have a sanctum, they'll just reincarnate there (note that all Celestial Gods count the Heavenly City as a sanctum). Some of them even reincarnate without a sanctum, if they're heavily invested in their domain, although this is less reliable (and often takes longer). The only exception to this is if they're finished off with a spirit destroying Charm, which essentially ignores their immortality. All Exalted possess spirit killing Charms.
  • Third Edition adds a second exception: Exalting an Exigent requires that the god empowering the Exigent sacrifice some of their power. In the case of weaker gods, this can mean permanent death, sacrificing themselves to empower an Exalted champion.
  • Abyssals take this up to eleven (Which frankly, if you're familiar with Exalted, you should have seen coming), they can kill a Spirit, and then reform it as a devoted slave. They can also "Kill" a spirit with a Necromatic ritual that sends the spirit into the Underworld, where it's assigned duties by the Underworld. Sidereals get a variation of this, wherein they can punch a spirit so hard, they're forced to fill out a specific task. It Makes Sense in Context
  • Any Abyssal who learns the Charm Immortal Malevolence Enslavement gains this at the cost of losing a point of Essence when they die, as they forge a connection directly with the Neverborn.
    • Although this does means they can never redeem themselves.
• In GURPS, this is called Unkillable, and comes in various flavors.
• In Magic: The Gathering, some creatures have the ability to immediately return from the graveyard to your library, like the first iteration of the three Eldrazi Titans from Rise of the Eldrazi, or hand, like the three corrupted gods from Hour of Devastation.
  • Squee the Goblin also could not stay dead. This turned out to be not such a good thing when he was captured and delivered to Crovax, Evincar of Rath. Crovax considered Squee to be Yawgmoth's reward to him and would proceed to kill Squee a hundred times a day.
  • From the older sets there are also the Nether Shadow and Ashen Ghoul, both of which could return to life if there are three or more creatures above them in the discard pile (Nether Shadow for free, Ashen Ghoul for a piddling one black mana). They make a very effective combo with the sorcery Buried Alive, which lets you move three creature cards of your choice from your deck to the discard pile.
• In the second edition of Pathfinder, this can be gained through multiple high-level classes and specific magical traditions. For instance, the Phoenix bloodline sorcerer can be predictably reborn from the ashes. Perhaps most unique is the 20th-level Psychic ability that allows one to become a manifestation of thought itself and combine this with Immortality Through Memory: as long as someone remembers you, once per year you can come back.
• Ponyfinder: Earth-bound ponies get a racial feat that allows them to reincarnate into a new earth-bound body one week after dying, so long as their body is on the Material Plane when they die, or is brought back to it at some point afterwards.
• In 7th Sea, Glamour mages can gain this ability. They return to life the following dawn, unharmed. However, each use of this ability permanently decreased their Resolve trait by 2. It maxes out at 5 (6 with a specific Advantage), and it can be re-bought by spending (a lot of) XP.
• Warhammer Fantasy:
  • The High Elf Flamespyre Phoenix has, if it's killed, a chance to restore itself to life from its ashes at the end of each turn.
  • Tomb Kings are described in the lore as being impossible to kill permanently on the battlefield; if their physical bodies are destroyed they turn into a flock of scarabs and reform in their burial caskets, and are back again (and usually severely peeved off) a few decades later.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Stormcast Eternals have this as one of their greatest strengths and biggest weaknesses: whenever one of them dies, their soul returns to Azyr, to be reforged on the Anvil of Apotheosis by Sigmar himself, allowing them to be sent back to fight again in short order (sometimes to the very same fight, if it's important enough). Unfortunately, it's an imperfect process, and causes the Stormcast to Come Back Wrong; each death and resurrection causes them to lose a little more of their memories and humanity, until they're nothing but an automaton in golden armor. This is regarded as a Fate Worse than Death, so most will still try as hard as any mortal to stay alive, and many of their wizards spend their existences questing for a cure.

Video Games

• The Daevas of Aion are seemingly immortal, being able to reform with a type of resurrection stone if killed. One of the main quests involves the player investigating a malfunctioning stone, which turns anyone under its influence into zombies rather than reform them.
• Atelier Series: The homunculi of the Dusk trilogy are immortal, coming back to life shortly after dying. All three games in the trilogy feature an event where the lead character is invited to a homunculus funeral, unaware that the funeral ends with the deceased coming back from the dead. In a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, Atelier Shallie's Homura, a homunculus party member, has a perpetual Auto-Revive effect applied to him by a passive skill.
• Apparently this applies to all vampires in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, though it's only actually seen with OD.
• Lance Galahad of Brain Dead 13 has this from the very start, up to the very end of the game, even in a Kaizo Trap. And since the player has unlimited lives in this game, he always comes back, no matter how many times he gets decapitated, mutilated, doused in acid, eaten up, drained of blood, et cetera.
• In the Castlevania series, Dracula is resurrected in most of the games, the better for the player to have someone to fight. The exact methods vary. The second game involves you going to great lengths to resurrect Dracula yourself, just for the purpose of beating his ass again.
• The main character of The Cat Lady is granted this type of immortality. Unfortunately, every time she's revived, it costs the life of another person.
• Code Vein: Revenants are dead humans brought back to life by implanting a parasite into their bodies. When killed, their bodies merely dissolve and reform elsewhere, though they lose some of their memories every time; this process is called "dispersal". Destroying a Revenant's heart (where the parasite is located) will turn them to ash, killing them permanently, though this is harder than it sounds. The vast majority of the time, there is no reason to fear death other than the eventual loss of all your memories. The much larger danger is the threat of frenzying and becoming Lost. Revenants don't need to eat food and sustain themselves by drinking human blood or "blood beads" which can function as a substitute. If a Revenant doesn't get enough blood, or is exposed to too much Miasma, they lose their minds and attack in a berserk rage as the parasite takes over them completely. Soon after, their bodies will horrifically mutate into impossible and powerful forms. The Lost can never regain their minds again, but retain the Revenant ability to disperse and reform, and since the parasite has now completely merged with their bodies on the cellular level, not even destroying their heart can permanently kill them. The Gaol of the Mists is overwhelmed by the Lost, as the countless Revenant soldiers inevitably run out of blood or get exposed to Miasma and join their ranks.
• Sam Bridges, the protagonist of Death Stranding, is a repatriate capable of coming back from the dead regardless of what kills him, up to and including "voidouts", which are explosions caused by human-BT contact that are capable of disintegrating atoms.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: Major demons eventually revive. While it justifies Repeatable Quests, Liam appearing for the second time within the story shocks everyone due to it being way too early. Greed also feels reminding Gun about it after seemingly been defeated.
• Demonophobia: The only reason Sakuri can make it through Hell is because Ritz blesses her with this sort of immortality — he'll revive her as many times as she sees fit within 72 hours. He's not doing this out of altruism.
• Dept. Heaven: This is the kind of immortality that Nessiah from Yggdra Union, Yggdra Unison and Blaze Union has been cursed with. Reincarnating is supposed to be hellishly painful and leaves him weak, but he will inevitably reincarnate no matter what. It overlaps with Immortality Inducer (and to some extent The Ageless, as he no longer ages), and by the time of Yggdra Union, he's spent over a thousand years trying to destroy what forces him to stay alive.
• Destiny is a prime example of this trope, as it features multiple versions of this. In the game, the player character is a "Guardian", someone who had long since died in an apocalyptic event of the Civilization Destroyer variety, but was brought back to life by a manifestation of the cosmic entity of Light, a floating ball called "the Traveler" which created little sentient drones called "Ghosts" that grant both regular and resurrective immortality. Another way of acquiring resurrective immortality is via a "Throne World", a pocket dimension formed from a small chunk of the "Ascendant Plane". One is created when a being follows the "Sword Logic" and kills other strong beings, thus asserting their right to live over others. Someone who owns a Throne World cannot be permanently killed in our dimension, only in their Throne World, as their soul returns to it where they can regenerate their bodies until they're able to step back out again.
• Nebiros has this skill in Devil Survivor 2. Destroy his undead, he'll just spawn more. Destroy him? He Body Surfs to one of his flunkies, and transforms him into the next Nebiros.
• In the Diablo series, part of the reason why the Eternal Conflict between Heaven and Hell has been eternal is that both the Angiris Council and the Prime Evils have this. Even if their bodies are completely destroyed, they will eventually return.
• Bishop Alexandar in Divinity: Original Sin II has this, as it's revealed that every time he's killed, he's brought back to life by the god of humanity Rhalic. As such, it's possible for the player to kill him four times over the course of a single playthrough.
• Dysmantle: The One-Armed King and by extension the King of Island State and the Survivor cannot be permanently killed as he will simply just resurrect. The island natives discovered this when the One-Armed king was sentenced to death for allegedly starting a Zombie Apocalypse on the island and thrown into the deepest pit on the island. Eventually, after the failed execution, the natives gouge out his eyes, cut off his tongue and bury him alive under a massive pyramid.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Umaril the Unfeathered, the Ayleid sorcerer-king who ruled the Ayleid Empire at the time of the Alessian Revolt, had been granted this by the Daedric Prince Meridia. Alessia's divine champion, Pelinal Whitestrake, was able to defeat but not kill Umaril during the Revolt. Come Oblivion's Knights of the Nine expansion, Umaril has returned, serving as the expansion's Big Bad.
  • The series' Dragons are divine, ageless beings with this sort of immortality. While anyone of sufficient ability can slay the physical form of a dragon, that dragon can be resurrected later by another dragon. The only way to permanently kill a dragon is for another dragon (or Dragonborn) to absorb its soul. In Skyrim, Alduin is bringing slain dragons back to life to serve him once again.
  • In Online, the player characters have had their souls ripped from their bodies, but the ritual meant to process their souls had a major side-effect: with their souls mostly disconnected from their bodies, they can come back to life indefinitely.
• In Evolve, the monsters have this. "Killing" them just severs their connection to their corporeal form and forces them back to their dimension, where they can easily reform and return.
• E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy: The player has a limited number of self-resurrections. When the player dies, an implant injects a cocktail of drugs which jump-starts the body again, allowing the player to continue to fight after a few seconds of inaction. However, the implant doesn't get rid of extreme damage such as mutilations, and will deplete after a couple uses.
• Fallen London:
  • Due to the game being located 'downstream of Hell', its inhabitants all have this, although they can't come back from disease, nor old age, nor are they exempt from the Chunky Salsa Rule.
  • Then there's Feducci who consistently manages to get back up after being chopped to bits.
  • Hesperidean Cider seems to grant a true version of this.
• Yes Man in Fallout: New Vegas has this capability. Killing his Securitron body just causes him to upload to another one. While theoretically you could kill him by tracking down and destroying every Securitron in New Vegas, they all constantly respawn so there's no practical end to them. Yes Man just comes right back, and cheerful and friendly as ever. The same thing applies to the Securitron Victor. It works due to both being Artificial Intelligences.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, as long as Sephiroth holds on to his hatred of Cloud, his spirit cannot dissolve into the Lifestream. Then as long as Jenova cells exist in some form, he can eventually use them to create a new body. So far, he has been killed three times.
  • The Ascians are effectively this in Final Fantasy XIV. They can die, but their soul hangs between the planes of life and death to avoid being absorbed by The Lifestream, thus they can hang around until they can find a new body to inhabit. The only way they can die and stay dead is either trapping their souls in a container where they can't escape and then blasting it with a huge amount of aether or getting their soul absorbed by a stronger being.
• FromSoftware is fond of this trope, and usually tries to provide an in-game explanation for it:
  • The Chosen One in Demon's Souls dies at the very beginning of their quest, only to be brought back to life thanks to the gatekeeper of the Nexus. From that point on, death is a regularly scheduled occurrence.
  • The Undead in Dark Souls are cursed/blessed with this. They cannot stay dead, but each "death" robs them of humanity until they eventually become Hollowed insane monsters. Humanity (represented by small black flames) can restore an Undead's appearance, but it's still only delaying the inevitable.
  • The Hunters in Bloodborne instantly heal from all wounds thanks to their Eldritch-powered blood, but once that blood runs out, they die from blood loss, only to 'wake up' at a lantern connecting Yharnam to The Hunter's Dream. So long as they are connected to the dream, the hunters will have blood transfused back into their corpses and rise again.
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: Sekiro has been blessed by his lord, the Divine Heir, with the Dragon's Heritage, which allows him to revive himself after being killed. However, if he runs out of his own life force (which takes only one or two resurrections) he will unconsciously begin drawing on the life force of other people, infecting them with a sickness called Dragonrot. In addition, some enemies in the game are infested with giant centipedes that prevent their bodies from dying, no matter the harm done to them. If killed, they just get back up a short while later.
  • Elden Ring: The theft of the Gods' Rune of Death has broken the laws of nature, which means most mortals resurrect after they die. Unfortunately, they have been driven insane from endless starvation and war. Interestingly, most of the gods have lost their divine resurrective immortality as a result of their sacrilegious war. The Tarnished has achieved this divine connection with the Grace of the Erdtree, and resurrects indefinitely and without consequence. Other Tarnished (who have lost the grace of the Erdtree) are not so lucky, though.
• Furi: The Stranger naturally revives after any death, hence why the Guardians have to keep him locked up rather than simply killed.
• Ghost of Tsushima: Legends; the Ghosts are already dead, so they'll always be resurrected about a minute after they've gone down. However, on Gold difficulty or higher, resurrection (or on all difficulties, Total Party Kill) means you lose.
• Hades: All the main named characters are demi-gods or outright gods, and are already in the Underworld. Should any of them die (especially Player Character Zagreus, who will die battling his way out, a lot), they simply reappear in the House of Hades at the bottom of Tartarus, no worse for wear save for a blow to their pride.
• The Gravemind of the Flood in Halo is the closest thing to an immortal this setting has. Even if the Flood is reduced to a non-sentient level, all the knowledge and memory of the Gravemind will be transferred to any new one that reforms no matter how long the time in between is. This means that the Gravemind encountered in-game by the Master Chief, Cortana and the Arbiter is the very same Gravemind that fought the Forerunners. That's over 100,000 years. Even before then, it was once the Primordial, a Precursor/prototype Gravemind that telepathically transferred its entire consciousness into the main Gravemind after the IsoDidact destroyed its original body.
• Infinity Blade features the deathless, whose defining characteristic is this ability.
• The Mother in La-Mulana immediately revives if her body is killed. The plot of the game involves the player finding a means to give her soul a physical form since killing it will kill The Mother for good.
• The reason for The Legend of Zelda constantly being Hijacked by Ganon is due to the Triforce of Power granting him this. Every time he's killed by Link, he just comes back to life some generations later, with nearly every appearance being the same Ganon, unlike Zelda and Link, who are usually reincarnations. The only exceptions to this are the Ganons seen in The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, who are also reincarnations due to Demise's curse bringing him back after the original was Killed Off for Real in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
• Lie of Caelum: Mareige is a member of the Underground Bandit who leads "Suicide Trains," where she and other terrorists hijack a train and blow it up, even while they're onboard. However, she survives each one because her Flow ability allows her to revive.
• The immortals of Lost Odyssey have this type of immortality in gameplay: they take damage normally in combat, but only stay KO'ed for a couple turns before reviving. In cutscenes, meanwhile, they're basically indestructible.
• Meat Boy is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, but reforms within one or two seconds, much to the frustration of Dr. Fetus — and not just during gameplay, during cutscenes too!
• The player characters of Minecraft can only be actually killed on Hardcore Mode. Any other difficulty and they just resurrect, minus all their gear and experience but otherwise no worse for wear, back at the last bed they slept in or at coordinates 0,0. What makes it this and not just a game mechanic is gear exists In-Universe that acknowledges the player's ability to do this like the Recovery Compass, which guides you back to your last place of death to try and recover your gear, and the Respawn Anchor which, when charged, allows you to respawn in The Nether or The End where beds don't work.
• LeChuck, perennial Big Bad of Monkey Island, starts out undead and is killed at the end of each game only to come back in the next, with varying explanations. In the second game, he had to be brought back by a Witch Doctor, but in other incarnations he returns on his own, thanks to the power of Big Whoop, a portal into hell. Tales of Monkey Island gives a different explanation for his eternal self-recycling: a resurrection spell he keeps hidden at the Crossroads, the pirate afterlife, which he got from the Voodoo Lady.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Fujin states this is true of his fellow Physical God Raiden; however, for the latter, this means being resurrected as a blank slate devoid of any memories should he be killed. This never happens due to the fact that the only time we ever see Raiden die canonically are when he goes kamikaze on Onaga in Deception and Onaga's corruption helps him retain his memory, and when Shao Kahn kills him in MK9, but only after Raiden sends a message to his past self to prevent it all from happening anyway.
  • Geras from Mortal Kombat 11 has this due to being a fixed point in time. Decapitation, being blown to bits, shot, nothing keeps him down permanently. Raiden eventually wraps him in chains connected to a massive anchor and drops him into the bottomless Sea of Blood to get rid of him.
• There are a few important late-game enemies in NetHack that possess this ability.
  • The Wizard of Yendor will resurrect every time he is killed, and can even clone himself on occasion. He will also "haunt" you and cause trouble throughout the rest of the game after being killed for the first time.
  • The final level contains three Riders of the Apocalypse, who will always resurrect a set number of turns after being killed. This being Nethack, almost all possibilities for killing them permanently have been thought of and plugged, but there are still a couple of obscure ways the Riders can be put down for good.
• Omen of Paladins is an Abyssal demon, powered by his unholy patron Nyx. His physical form is his what's left of his skeleton after he threw himself into a volcano and while this form can be "killed" with enough gunfire, magic, and/or physical trauma damaging it, his body can be easily reconstructed with time, and Omen will be back to wreak havoc on Nyx's enemies for potentially all of eternity.
• The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment. He had achieved immortality some time in his early thirties, and each time he dies, he'll heal up and get back up again shortly afterwards. Every once in a great while (as in "not during the course of the game"), this wipes his memories and gives him a different personality. Dying is even a way to solve some of the puzzles, and learning why he won't die is his goal in the series. He could be killed permanently by being killed by a particularly powerful being, by having his body wholly destroyed by cremation or being eaten and digested, and by one very specific weapon.
• PlanetSide: When a soldier travels through a warp gate, they are matrixed into the planet's core. When they die, their body is deconstructed and then rebuilt at a spawn room. In the backstory, a Terran commander executed a pilot via firing squad for flying through a warp gate without orders — and the pilot kept showing up sitting under trees on continents. This has of course fueled the state of Forever War that the planet currently finds itself in.
• Pokémon:
  • The Olympus Mons Xerneas and Yveltal have limited lifespans, and at the end of theirs, they affect all life in the surrounding area (Xerneas by releasing its entire life into the area, Yveltal by draining all life nearby into itself), then assume the form of a tree/cocoon to sleep for a thousand years, after which they can reawaken (and they inevitably are during the events of Pokémon X and Y).
  • Melmetal also invokes a variant where it disperses into Meltan when it dies. Afterwards, the Meltan continuously search for metal to consume to gain the energy needed to become Melmetal again.
• The main character of Prey (2006) acquires this power after he dies by falling off a bridge in an organic alien Dyson Sphere. After dying for the first time, he finds himself in another dimension called "the Land of the Ancients", where his grandfather's spirit teaches him how to spirit walk (intentionally separating his body and spirit for a certain time) and death walk (return to his body when his spirit is separated by it after a death).
• Radiant Arc: The elemental spirits disperse into magic energy when they die, but they can eventually reassemble their bodies. The shards of the Grand Crystal can speed up this process, which is how Seperus brought them back in the final dungeon. After Zardon is defeated, the party uses the shards to revive the spirits again, this time free of Morian control.
• Rengoku: The ADAM units are made of Nanomachines, so when they are killed, they liquify, return to the base and resume the fight.
• Likely (it's also possible that they're regenerating) the case for Ascended in Rift. They've already died once and been brought back; now, death is a temporary, if traumatic, inconvenience for them.
• The Rimworld expansion Biotech adds the "Deathless" gene, which implants nanomachines into a chosen pawn that maintains their biological processes even if they fall victim to a mortal injury or deadly illness, having them fall into a short coma rather than die. The only way for them to actually die is Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain.
• Rise of the Tomb Raider: The army of Kitezh gained this ability along with eternal youth through a powerful ancient relic called the Divine Source, which removed their souls from their bodies. Whenever a soldier was fatally wounded, they would disintegrate in a flash of blue fire only to return later in the same spot. Becoming known as the Deathless Ones, they dedicated their eternal lives to guarding the relic.
• Those cursed by the thorns in A Rose in the Twilight, like the main character Rose, cannot die. No matter how gruesome their death is, they will simply reappear in another area as if nothing happened. In fact, part of the game requires Rose to be placed in death traps to advance.
• Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins: The Executioner from the Palace dungeon revives every time he's killed. To get rid of him, the player has to either throw him outside of the dungeon or kill Emperor Titus XVI, who is the source of the Executioner's power.
• RuneScape:
  • In earlier versions of the game, this type of immortality was taken for granted, so quests, lore, and jokes from that era include many references to characters, player or otherwise, respawning in Lumbridge. Since the game's storyline has progressively become more serious, resurrection is nowadays treated as the exception rather than the rule.
  • This is the in-universe justification for the player's ability to respawn. Initially, this is because Death will not claim the player's soul citing that it is not their time yet. After a certain quest, the player becomes the "World Guardian" and is granted immortality by the god Guthix.
  • The King Black Dragon, like the player character, is able to return from the dead because he has a special destiny that has not yet been fulfilled.
  • The TokHaar are living constructs made of stone and magma. As long as they are able to melt back into the "sacred lava" from which they came, they will always reform as good as new. Consequently, they love combat-based sports and don't know why other races are so averse to dying, since to them, it just means coming back better than you were.
• The Secret World: Player characters have merged with a special bee that has drank "anima honey" made from the world tree itself. As such, they can respawn at special sites where the world tree intersects with the real world, called "anima wells", or just use their own anima from their own bodies to respawn.
• In Shadowverse, a flashback reveals that Nicola Adel has died and revived several times, with his body feeling increasingly alien each time.
• Peter the phoenix and Lemon the vampire from Shining Force II can automatically resurrect after each battle for free if defeated.
• Nanashi, The Hero of Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse made a Deal with the Devil shortly after his death at the start of the game: in exchange for returning to life, he would have to serve the demon/god who resurrected him. This isn't just a one-time deal; his benefactor can resurrect him as many times as he needs. The antagonists set up the penultimate dungeon so that he cannot revive inside, however.
• The world of Aelion in Skyforge is watched over by the immortals. If an immortal's body sustains too much damage they simply dematerialize into the ether and then reassemble themselves elsewhere, good as new. There is no known way to actually kill them and building a prison that could hold one eternally becomes a plot point.
• In Sonic and the Secret Rings, this is the case for Erazer Djinn.
• Every runewarrior from Spellforce. Your avatar (main character) dies? He automatically respawns at the nearest soulstone. Any of your heroes or minions dies? Simply summon them again.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: Thanks to their ability to bind the dead, the Sith Inquisitor will always be resurrected whenever they die by the ghosts, so long as at least one is bound, no worse for wear. This is actually a plot point, as Darth Thanaton "kills" them halfway through the story, and the next chapter is spent quietly increasing their power to strike back and take him by surprise.
• In Street Fighter III, Gill, the game's final boss, has this as one of his Super Arts. Unless he uses another Super Art beforehand, this happens automatically upon defeat. It can only be used once per match, and hitting him will cancel his healing process, however. Still, this contributes to his SNK Boss status, since there's also a force field used while he's resurrecting, making it harder to hit him.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The game has this in the form of Redmond and Blutarch, CEOs for RED and BLU, respectively. In an attempt to try to outlive the other brother, both have a machine built for them to prevent them from dying. It does not grant immortality in the normal sense, but it does resurrect them within seconds of dying, which does grant the user immortality in the sense that they don't stay dead for long. The third brother, Gray, also has an immortality machine embedded in his spine, but it seems to work differently in that, being fueled by refined Australium, it slows down his natural aging process, and requires a steady supply of the stuff to continue working. The Administrator is later shown using a version of Gray's machine embedded on her forearm that seems to combine both versions so that it consumes less Australium, which is all but depleted across the world by now. In a related vein, respawning in-game appears to be part of canon and not just a gameplay mechanic, given that some classes, particularly Sniper, comment on it.
    Sniper: How many times have you died? I'm actually getting impressed.
    Sniper: Kill ya again soon, mate.
    Sniper: See you in five minutes.
  • Touched upon again in Poker Night at the Inventory, in which the Heavy says that has "dreams" where he dies but then "wakes up" and continues fighting.
    Heavy: Do you get the nightmares? [...] I am talking about visions of endless suffering. Dead doctors everywhere. Spy cannot be found.
  • A couple of the supplementary comics give two possible explanations for the game's respawn mechanic:
    • At least for how the Soldier can't die — he ate an entire bottle of magical "Kill Me, Come Back Stronger" pills owned by his (former) magician roommate. Apparently, this is enough for Merasmus to not even try killing him (in the comic, at least; he'll rip your head off in-game regardless of class). The rest of his team might have taken such pills too... and the other team, too, seeing as how the Administrator wants a perpetual stalemate between RED and BLU. (Well, right up until the robots show up, and she would be delighted to make use of such a thing...)
    • It's revealed late that the Medic somehow collected the entire team's souls, including his own, and wound them together in order to cheat a Deal with the Devil. This gives all of the mercenaries the ability to come back from death unscathed, though they can be Killed Off for Real by old age.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Talion is "banished from death" because of his psychic bond with the world's only elven wraith, allowing him to respawn at special towers after a short period of time. He's not happy about it because (1) his family is dead and (2) dying hurts / damages memories.
  • In Middle-earth: Shadow of War, anyone who wears one of the Rings will get this form of immortality, including the Nazgul. Talion is abandoned by Celebrimbor near the end of the game and has to wear a Nazgul ring to retain his immortality.
• Touhou Project:
  • The fairies work like this: they have very short lifespans, but are reborn in their default, healthy shape as soon as they die, even if they're blown to pieces, as long as the thing they embody still exists, essentially making them immortal. As a sort of deconstruction, this also gives them a rather messed-up view of life; since they have no concept of death, they may consider setting someone aflame and pushing them off a cliff a lighthearted prank.
  • The characters Kaguya Houraisan and Fujiwara no Mokou functionally have this, but on an even more extreme level. They appear to die and resurrect, but they actually exist outside of life and death. Consuming the Hourai Elixir permanently removed the very concept of death from them, meaning that they'll come back from absolutely anything, up to and including complete annihilation of their bodies. Their main pastime is killing each other repeatedly, so their ability gets a lot of mileage. In Mokou's case the player gets to see it firsthand, as in her boss battle she dies and resurrects after each of her spell cards.
  • Side character Hieda no Akyuu has a variant: she has the bloodline of the Child of Miare, which means she carries the memories of all the Children of Miare before her. When she dies, instead of losing the memories and incarnating as something else, she'll spend a certain time in the Netherworld and then arise as the next Child.
• Undertale combines this with Mental Time Travel to justify player respawning after dying. Every time the player character dies, their memories are sent back in time to the previously used savepoint, giving an effect very similar to this trope. Flowey used to also have this ability, and it's strongly implied that so did all of the Fallen Children. It's unknown how they lost it (though a common theory is that they simply lost hope and gave up), and Flowey lost it when the player stole it from him by accident.
• In Unreal Tournament and sequels, respawning is not just a game mechanic, as game lore suggests that repeated death and resurrection can cause a person's mind to collapse.
• Virgo Versus the Zodiac: Scorpio gets her title "The Phoenix" from her ability to resurrect herself every time she's defeated in combat. No matter how many times you reduce her HP to zero, she'll get right back up to continue fighting.
• In XCOM 2 expansion War of the Chosen, the Chosen each have a device called a sarcophagus that dedicates a massive amount of Psionic energy to resurrecting the chosen it's tied to every time they die.

Visual Novels

• In Code:Realize, the immortality of people like Finis and the Apostles of Idea is of this type - they can be killed, it just won't stick. The Apostles' ability to resurrect is not infinite, however, and can run out if they're killed enough times.
• In Fate/stay night, Berserker has this ability. He can come back to life up to eleven times, and he becomes immune to whatever killed him in the first place. He can also regain a life once a day. However, extremely strong attacks can take away multiple lives at once.
• In Slay the Princess, in the Adversary route, the Voice of the Stubborn, one of the voices in the Player's head can command the player to "GET UP" after the Narrator declares the player's death after the Adversary pummels the player and splatters his face across the basement wall. This horrifies the Adversary who is terrified to see the player get back up and speak even with no face.

Web Animation

• Connor, the protagonist of Confinement, is a human SCP who has this power. Everytime he dies, a new copy of him spawns right next to wherever his previous body was killed. This is a very useful anomalous ability to have, as the Foundation treats him like a D-class test subject who is regularly exposed to dangerous anomalies, often leading to Connor going through a regular routine of painfully dying and reviving multiple times in each episode. It's later revealed that the source of Connor's immortality comes from a mysterious demonic entity that is inhabiting his body.
• Dreamscape: Mastery of death and rebirth is one thing Melissa has an edge over Melinda, but it turns out Melinda is truly immortal, so she had no reason to master it.
• Emesis Blue serves to deconstruct this trope in gruesome fashion. A Psychological Horror film set in the Team Fortress 2 world, unlike the source material where Death Is a Slap on the Wrist and the merc characters reappear out of nowhere, in this universe, the Respawn Machine is the source of their pseudo-immortality; it recreates a person's body by resequencing their genomes, rebuilding their skeleton, and even threading new muscles before sticking their soul into their new body. It sounds great, right? Hell no. Like most machines, the Respawn Machine only works well 99 percent of the time, but what about that little 1 percent where it doesn't? In Scout's (Jeremy's) case, BLU found him going through an unconscious seizure; during his post-recovery, he was left with lowered motor functions, intelligence, schizophrenia, and diagnosed with brain atrophy. In the case of the Slaughterhouse Mercs, their bodies are malformed with horrible defects ranging from elongated fingers, pale skin, and rictus grins. Don't even get us started on what happened to the Tenth Class. If that isn't bad enough, the Arc Words "It's eternity in there" and "It's longer than you think" imply that the deceased have to wait for what seems like forever in the Respawn Machine until it actually revives them, so by the time they do get brought back, they're driven insane by the wait. Mercs like Jeremy and Ludwig were lucky enough to not remember it or have repressed the memories entirely, but the Slaughterhouse Mercs didn't, which explains why most of them (except maybe Cyclops, who seems okay) went homicidal. So not only does someone risk coming back in a severely debilitated body or worse, turning into a ghoulish monstrosity, they might also go insane from having to wait for God-knows-how-long until the Respawn Machine actually puts their soul in their new body.
• HFIL has the villains in the titular Home for Infinite Losers, a division of Hell meant to reform them since their absurd levels of ki break the Soul Scrubber. Despite their souls being indestructible by normal means, Cell gets his neck snapped — or at least fractured — by Freeza during his first day. Despite this, he wakes up around an hour later with the injury gone. He's already in Hell, after all.
• In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, Vulkan is, as in canon, a Perpetual, meaning he can resurrect shortly after any death. In this series, it seems to have left him without much survival instinct to speak of. He's died four times onscreen and has one death referenced, and each time bounces back just as peppy as before.
• Plan 3: In Somewhat Squidgame, the backstory for Hart, Hosuh, and Stephen’s characters is that they were scientists that had been right near an immortality device they were experimenting with when it exploded, and as a result, their deaths in Squidgame don’t stick, and they get back up shortly after each death, physically no worse for wear.
• RWBY: Although Professor Ozpin can age and die just like any normal human, he always comes back from death. He has been walking the earth for thousands of years locked in a Forever War with Salem, who is also immortal. After Salem turns humanity against the gods for cursing her with Complete Immortality, the God of Light resurrects her deceased lover, Ozma, to give humanity one chance at redemption. His soul shares a body with a living host, transfering to a new host each time the physical body dies. Each host develops all of Ozma's memories, abilities, magic and muscle memory at inhuman speed, but they risk Loss of Identity as the two souls merge. Ozma has little control over the reincarnation, learning over time how to share life with his hosts instead of overwriting them. After Volume 3, Ozma transfers from Ozpin to a fourteen-year-old farmhand called Oscar. Most characters flit between calling Ozma "Oz" or "Ozpin", but Salem reverts to calling him "Ozma" in Volume 8; upon meeting Oscar, she realises the soul-merge hasn't finished and accordingly addresses them as separate individuals.
• You can't kill Suction Cup Man! He shrugs off being shot, hit by a car, and blown up by a North Korean missile no worse for wear. Naturally it's all Played for Laughs, especially when "One Hell of a Climb" shows that he does it simply by climbing out of Hell. Since the only thing stopping anyone from doing it is "You're not supposed to", apparently everyone has this power, but Suction Cup Man is the only one brash enough to actually try it.
• Zsdav Adventures: Played for Laughs with Herobrine. Final episodes of some arcs end with him dying but comes back to life in later arcs.

Webcomics

• Ethan in the Ctrl+Alt+Del V2 storyline, based on Analog and D-Pad, has infinite respawns. Since that's his only power, he uses gadgets in a similar vein as Batman. Ethan can use this power strategically in battle, such as when he gets grappled by an opponent and decides to jump out of the window to then respawn back in the building. He also uses it for dramatic effect, one time swinging through a window, getting killed by the glass shrapnel, and dying for shock value only to respawn a second later. Unfortunately, the room was completely empty.
• Type A Phoenixes in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures respawn in a random location when they die, and then walk to whichever of their temples is the furthest away, learning stuff as they go. They can also choose to "die" whenever they want, making them impossible to capture.
• Homestuck:
  • Any Sburb player who reaches God Tier cannot be Killed Off for Real unless their death is deemed just or heroic, instead coming back to life a few minutes later, any damage done to themselves or their clothes completely healed.
  • Caliborn, a.k.a. Big Bad Lord English, gains unconditional immortality without the moral restrictions on God Tier players' resurrections, which is supposed to be flatly impossible for Sburb to offer. It's revealed later, however, that Caliborn received the clock that controlled his God-Tier immortality as a reward for completing his Dead Session game. He then destroyed it with a crowbar. This presumably made it impossible for his death to stick, since the clock was in a neutral position when he broke it.
• Irrelevator has the characters die sometimes, but not for long.
• This is part of the deal with the angels of Kill Six Billion Demons; if slain (which can sometimes require killing their souls separate from destroying their bodies), they crystallize in the void outside of reality into the flame of their soul is stoked back to life again, meaning that they can persist through eternity (although they will lose a certain section of their memories, which is why only one angel remembers the ancient gods despite them all having existed back then). It differs from most in that the time taken for resurrection can vary, and can even take a phenomenally long time; the most powerful angels were killed thousands of years before the time of the story, but only one has resurrected since.
• In Kubera, this is the difference between the gods and the Nastika. Nastika are more powerful than gods, but gods can resurrect themselves infinitely (though it does take a few decades), while Nastika only live once. Some of the Nastika's lesser servants do have a form of this trope, however; Hura, from the Asura Clan, has a unique transcendental that lets him resurrect twelve times a day, in addition to his already ridiculous Healing Factor.
• The eponymous Sidekick Girl has this as her only power, only healing slightly faster than a normal human. A villain manages to gain her power by use of her cerebral fluid, whereby she learns that total disintegration will kill her... hopefully.
• Oasis from Sluggy Freelance is theorized to be one of these. It has yet to be made clear how she keeps showing up again after being shot, impaled, and blown up so many times. It's possible that this is just the result of her Healing Factor, but fans are definitely lead to think otherwise. In actuality, she isn't immortal at all. The bodies that were killed were Remote Bodies created at a place called the Rebirth Facility and controlled by an AI.
• In Templars of the Shifting Verse, the Templars can die and be injured, but they always return three days later in the Hall.
• In Undying Happiness, Keisuke and his family members have a Healing Factor so strong they can recover from otherwise-fatal injuries. The first chapter alone has Keisuke slowly regenerating from nothing but his skeleton in the space of a couple hours.

Web Originals

• Members of the Serious Foundation in Ask Serious Rainbow are fitted with technology that's able to resurrect them about five seconds after they die. Serious has flat out exploited it to get an advantage in battle.
• Vigilante from the Curveball series can come back to life from absolutely anything. His teammates keep a body bag around so they have an easy way to transport him while he's "recovering" from a fight.
• Looming Gaia: When the Spirit of Gaia grants someone divinity, that person stops aging, but can still be killed. They resurrect a year later after Gaia has made a new body for them. Unless they were killed with the Divine Executioner, of course.
• Phelous dies in all kinds of comical ways, but always comes back to life. In a crossover with The Angry Joe Show, he gets killed and resurrected multiple times in a few minutes. In a few episodes, his death scenes parody the Time Lord the Doctor's regenerations from Doctor Who. He outright exploits this during To Boldly Flee, wearing a red polo in order to ensure that he will never stay dead upon being killed. This is because a Red Shirt is immediately replaced by another Red Shirt after death, and the only actual Red Shirt among the heroes is Phelous himself.
• SCP Foundation:
  • If SCP-076-2 is killed (which is really hard to do, by the way), his corpse will disintegrate, 076-1 (a giant stone box with a coffin inside it) will slam shut, and he'll be respawned as it were. He's basically a video game character.
  • Dr. Bright combines this trope with possession. You can kill his host body, and it'll stay dead just fine, but give SCP-963 to another host and he can keep walking around like nothing happened.
  • SCP-1922 is doomed to keep dying of natural causes, only to reanimated hours after doing so.
  • SCP-2416 is Joe Grunderson-Pike, an otherwise ordinary man who repeatedly gets himself killed in some ridiculous fashion, only to inexplicably resurrect himself.
  • SCP-7795 is a 12-year-old child doomed to die on their 13th birthday each year, only to then reappear in their bed, resurrected and de-aged by a year. They retain all their memories from the prior year, including those of their own death, and the manners of their deaths keep getting more and more traumatic over time, with a highly-detrimental effect on their mental health.
• In Worm, Gray Boy has this thanks to his time manipulation abilities, which automatically rewinds his body to a point before he was injured, completely negating even lethal wounds.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • Any time the Vreedle Brothers are killed, their memories are just transferred into identical clones. This is quite useful for them due to being notoriously bad cases of Too Dumb to Live.
  • It's hinted at a few times over the franchise, but by the end of Omniverse, Ben confirms that the Omnitrix has a failsafe that gives him this power. If Ben were to ever die, the Omnitrix will automatically transform him into whatever alien he needs to survive, which it does in the Grand Finale to protect him from the Big Bang. The original Omnitrix had previously done so in the Alien Force episode "Vengeance of Vilgax", in which it reforms Ben's Chromastone form (who has been shattered into pieces) into Diamondhead.
• Parodied in an episode of Robot Chicken, ending with Jesus showing this while being repeatedly killed by a cyclops with a club. A brief segment after this shows him dying seven times in fourteen seconds.
• South Park:
  • "Mysterion Rises" confirms that Kenny has this power, as he explains that he dies but wakes up in his bed the next day, and no one else has any memories of his death. This had been hinted at several times before, notably after the episode in which he's replaced by Butters, and later Tweek. He recovers from that, and when he comes back, the other characters ask where he's been. In another episode, Stan is upset that Kyle is seriously ill and will soon die, making Kenny annoyed that he's so upset about that but no one ever cared about all the times he died, but Stan doesn't hear him. Apart from that, he dies on a regular basis since the very first season but comes back anyway because Status Quo Is God, without any explanation. He dies in the first episode but comes back anyway in the next one.^note Some episodes imply that characters do remember; they just don't care anymore. Immediately after complaining to Stan, Kenny is killed again, but Stan barely notices. In another, Timmy tries to kill Jimmy by giving him an orange parka just like Kenny's, causing disasters to follow Jimmy wherever he goes. Finally, there have been variations of their catchphrase ("Oh my God, he/she/they/we killed Kenny! You/We're bastards!") that make it obvious that they don't really care and are just saying it out of habit.
    • In "Mysterion Rises", it's shown that Kenny's mother becomes magically pregnant with a new Kenny every time he dies and gives birth within a few minutes, making this a combination of Born-Again Immortality and Rapid Aging to get him back up to eight years old before morning, because Cthulhu.
    • In one two-part episode, Kenny is killed as normal during the first part, then simply appears out of thin air during the second (getting the non-reaction "Oh, hi Kenny." from Stan), only to die again later in that episode.
  • In one episode, Jesus escapes from a jail cell (in the Vatican) by having Kyle kill him and resurrecting on the other side of the door. He can only do this at Easter.
• Steven Universe: As long as Gems keep their gemstone intact, they can retreat into it upon being fatally wounded, heal, and then respawn with a new body. Even destroying their gemstone can't kill them permanently, because Yellow Diamond can put the gemstone back together, and then completely fix it (including restoring any pieces she can't find) using her specific Diamond powers.
• Because of an AllSpark shard embedded in his forehead, Starscream in Transformers: Animated is repeatedly revived on death. Discovering his immortality, he proceeds to try to kill Megatron, leading to the famous Death Montage. Unlike his G1 counterpart, whose spark survived his body's destruction, this Starscream's spark actually was extinguished, and he's entirely reliant on that AllSpark shard to continue living. So, come the Grand Finale, Prowl gives up his life to reunite the shards of the AllSpark, which includes Starscream's shard, resulting in Starscream being Killed Off for Real.

Real Life

• Turritopsis dohrnii, the aptly-named immortal jellyfish, can disintegrate itself once it reaches its age of death, or it senses imminent danger, and be reborn as a newborn-like larva. However, this does not protect it from complete destruction, such as through predation or disease. At least two other species of jellyfish can do this too, though it's not as well understood, and hydras (as in the cnidarians) are also suspected to have this trait.

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