Basic Trope: A character rapidly becomes younger and decreases in age until they die.
- Straight: Alice casts a spell on Bob to make him younger, but it goes out of control and he de-ages and regresses into a teenager, child, toddler, infant, and finally, nothing.
- Exaggerated: Multiple people are affected by this spell.
- Downplayed:
- Bob regresses into an infant and permanently stays that way.
- Bob goes Back to the Womb, leaving him still alive but effectively beyond reach until he can be born again.
- Justified: The spell was not performed properly or poorly thought out.
- Inverted: Alice casts a spell that causes Bob to age rapidly until he dies.
- Subverted: The spell regresses Bob all the way down to a fetus and looks like it's going to kill him... only for a safety feature to abruptly reverse the transformation at the very last second, leaving Bob slowly returning to a much safer age.
- Double Subverted: ...only for the safety feature to bug out, resulting in Bob fatally regressing anyway.
- Parodied:
- Zig-Zagged: The spell causes Bob to fluctuate in age, rapidly de-aging and then aging, and the resulting bodily stress ends up killing him.
- Averted: The spell de-ages Bob by a fixed amount of time without issue.
- Lampshaded: "If we don't find a way to stop this, Bob will de-age out of existence!"
- Invoked: The spell was deliberately manufactured with this in mind in order to give the victim a Cruel and Unusual Death.
- Defied: Alice doesn't try to use this spell until it's perfected and the kink that would have resulted in this trope has been ironed out.
- Exploited: Alice uses the spell as a means of assassinating people and Bob is her newest target.
- Discussed:
- Conversed:
- Played For Drama: It's a race against time to find an antidote to the spell before Bob de-ages out of existence.
- Played For Horror: Body Horror, Cruel and Unusual Death
Back to Death by De-aging
