Basic Trope: A fight to the death has multiple rounds, despite the fact that one of the people should be dead.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are fighting in a tournament. Alice kills Bob, then they start the next round.
- Exaggerated: After Alice kills Bob again, he asks for Best Out of Infinity.
- Downplayed: Alice only renders Bob comatose, or clinically dead at the end of the round. With medical intervention he recovers just well enough to fight Round 2.
- Justified:
- The people holding the tournament have the power to bring people Back from the Dead.
- The match is won long before the opponent dies (i.e., he's down for ten seconds), and are given enough time to recover before starting the next round.
- The contestants in this tournament have been cloned an indefinite number of times, or are remote-controlling robot duplicates of themselves.
- All the fighters have Complete Immortality; no matter how badly wounded they are they will always survive.
- All the fighters have de facto Resurrective Immortality or an extreme Healing Factor that can regenerate them if they're Only Mostly Dead, but doesn't make them invulnerable to decapitation, incineration, their bodies being completely destroyed etc. So they get up from the normal damage inflicted upon them during a fight (which would kill normal people) but the winner of the bout executes the loser with a Finishing Move they cannot recover from.
- Inverted: A fight that stops after one round, even though the players are perfectly capable of doing another.
- Subverted: Alice wins by default after Bob dies.
- Double Subverted: It's part of a double-elimination tournament
, and Bob joins the loser's bracket. - Parodied: This applies to every cause of death. Alice ends up jumping over and stabbing the truck that ran her over to death twice when it rolls down the road again despite the lack of malice of the driver.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice kills Bob by stabbing him in the chest and then fights him again the next round and beats him there again. She goes for Off with His Head! in her next fight against Carl and doesn't fight him again. Finally she faces Steve McEvil and tries the same thing again. Steve McEvil is back next round to her surprise.
- Alice and Bob are in a fight to the death; Alice beats Bob on points but hasn't killed him by the end of the last round, so she's made to execute him. But Bob has an Unexplained Recovery and is set to fight Alice again later.
- Averted:
- The players are eliminated after death.
- Or, they don't fight to the death.
- Enforced: "We have to give the players some leeway, but we still want it to be gory."
- Lampshaded: "Shouldn't you be dead?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Bob writes in his will that he wants to forfeit any match he's in the middle of at his time of death.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Played for Laughs: Alice and Bob both have Healing Factor. After Bob really gets on Alice's nerves, she challenges him to three duels.
- Played for Drama:
- After Bob is nearly killed, he tracks down his would-be killer and says "Best two out of three".
- The Hero and the Big Bad face off. Both of them have an item that will heal them exactly once.
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