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Playing With / Exposition of Immortality

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Basic Trope: He's an immortal / extremely long-lived supernatural. Look at his immortality.

  • Straight: The immortal character remembers, dreams of, or otherwise shows things that demonstrate his longevity.
  • Exaggerated: The immortal has a huge collection of things collected through the ages and remembers a similar thing he did 500 years ago every time he possibly can.
  • Downplayed: The immortal makes choices that seem old fashioned, but can be otherwise attributed to eccentricity.
  • Justified: The immortal is a show off and wants people to know just how long he has lived.
  • Inverted: The immortal goes to great lengths to keep up with current trends and fashions.
  • Subverted:
    • The immortal doesn't have any of the things that might demonstrate his unusual age.
    • Alice assumes Bob is Really 700 Years Old because he seems to remember things that happened hundreds of years ago. It turns out he's actually a time traveler.
  • Double Subverted:
  • Parodied:
    • The immortal maintains a huge and obvious collection of artifacts that actually aren't proof of his long life.
    • The trope in the form of a Visual Pun.
    • The immortal character tends to drone off into long, winding speeches about how much better things were during the Hellenic Era. The characters listening to him are obviously bored, and have probably heard the same speech a dozen times before.
  • Zig Zagged:
    • The amount of exposition varies from immortal to immortal. The main protagonist is rather hesitant to reveal his long and sordid history, while the Big Bad won't shut up about it.
    • Due to the presence of the masquerade, how much immortals talk about their past depends on who's listening.
  • Averted: No one is immortal or long-lived enough to warrant this trope.
  • Enforced: "Well, then how will they know he's immortal?
  • Lampshaded:
    • The immortal may say something like "What, did you think I'd keep something proving I'm a thousand years old lying around where anyone can find it?"
    • "Oh here we go again. 'Back in my day, we didn't have this fancy electricity or metallurgy..."
  • Invoked: The immortal keeps a dated souvenir from every decade of his life as evidence of his eternal lifespan.
  • Exploited: A cunning thief keeps the immortal busy talking about his incessantly long lifespan while he steals the ancient artifacts to sell them as a huge profit.
  • Defied: The immortal values his privacy: He works to destroy as much evidence of his existence as possible, and refuses to talk about it.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: "Apparently part of the conditions for his immortality involve blabbing about it to whoever listens.
  • Implied: We see the immortal look wistfully as an ancient Egyptian relic, almost with nostalgia...
  • Played For Laughs: Declarations of immortality are met with flat disbelief or a character who is depicted as very old, but never directly referred to as immortal, does something that suggests they are. Like claiming your place of birth is a prehistoric continent.

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