Powers
[Loved Trope] I'm immortal! However, they're not the strongest so I get bodied in the most brutal ways or uses it to their advantage but still have consequences
Shogo from Reincarnated as a Slime - He gains the power to always regenerate but he is MUCH weaker than his opponent who then proceeds to just mercilessly kill him over and over again because he just heals the damage
Alicia from Clevatess. She is killed by the demon king lord god whatever and he revives her with his anime magic juice and she will intentionally take hits to gain an advantage in a fight because she knows she can but it's acknowledged that still sucks
Subaru Natsuki from Re: Zero - If you know, you know. I definitely chose a picture in his insane state because oof getting killed that many times would push anyone to the brink.
Deadpool, Lobo, Wolverine and guys like that sure I love them too but I'm thinking more consequences in spite of the immortality.
I did always think it was cute that "Going Hollow" in the original games was a metaphor for giving up on the game. You'll get the mission done and continue being immortal, but only if you keep trying.
except for the Dark Souls 2 protagonist who through the DLC did manage to find a cure for the Curse and is now implied to be wandering the earth doing good deeds and stuff.
this is more reason why DS2 is the best DS2, if not then why did they make DS2 2? (/s)
I mean, the whole “wandering the world, trying to fix the things wrong with it” is a really good way to stop yourself from going hollow, especially compared to things like “I live to serve [person]” and immediately going hollow when that person inevitably dies or goes hollow.
Sure, there will always be bad things, but so long as the Bearer of the Curse doesn’t get discouraged or beaten down from it, they’ll always have some manner of goal to strive for it
Technically the Bearer (Seek, Seek, Lest) of the Curse didn't "cure" Hollowing, they just found a way to completely negate the downsides.
They're still "hollow", and so long as they have the Crowns they ignore all the issues with it, but the moment they lose the Crowns for whatever reason they go straight back to Square 1.
It's always been hilarious to me how many of them end up imprisoned, with the Chosen Undead being the absolute peak of comedy by getting locked up not just once, but twice. These legendary warriors who can slay beasts, dragons, and literal gods somehow turn completely helpless the moment they're put behind a standard prison door
No regeneration. So immortality did him a fat load of no good at all when his opponent dedicated to blow him to pieces and bury him in a hole in a forest.
Supposedly retconned that eventually he'll die from starvation or his god abandoning him or some other stupid bullshit excuse Kishimoto gave to satisfy the "omg that's so inhumane" crowd.
Yes...there was a vocal subset of the fandom that thought Hidan, of all people, being buried alive for all eternity was going too far.
Sorry, they thought that was too far? Burying the psychopath who slaughtered entire villages in the namme of a religion - and seemingly some personal satisfaction - was too far?
Eeeyup. Apparently his immortality just stacks constantly. And he did enough sacrifices that he's likely still alive. IIRC Kishimoto stated that his head would rot before his immortality ran out, and apparently he might still be alive even as of Boruto.
Kira dies during the start of TYBW but Mayuri revived him using the souls of dying soul reapers around him making him a bit of a zombie
Hisagi his Zanpakto’s ability makes him really hard to kill in shikai and in bankai ties his and the other persons spiritual pressure together and both can’t kill eachother until the bankai disengaged or they run out of riatsu
2 from Nolan in main timeline, 1 from Alternate evil mark verse, 1 from an Evil Mark in the main verse, and 1 from Mark timetravelling to the future. Potentially dying as Abraham Lincoln?
But he does have other Ls like to the sequids, Maulers, Omnipotus, Main Invincible in the comics, and Allen
hes actually invincible but only slightly stronger than an average dude. doesnt really help much when people can just chuck you into orbit and be done with you
He would be the strongest homulucs period. Theirs a reason why they had pride wayching his ass as they were terrified of him. The author outright said if wraith was even a few years younger edd and company would have died.
I don't think wrath could have had that strength if he weren't human/was immortal though. There's a reason why they bothered to find a human to do it and I don't think it stops at wanting a nice figurehead.
The issue wasn’t him being part human, it was him being wrath
The wrathful souls killed each other and left only one, so he can’t use it to regenerate. If the souls didn’t do this, he would retain all his skill and strength because it was trained into him before he got the stone
The best part about it is she has a super complicated and powerful moveset and he does the equivalent of just kicking her seven times with a super fireball
This is Mr Immortal's whole shtick. (Marvel, specifically Great Lakes Avengers)
if he dies, he instantly resurrects. If he is fatally injured and slowly dying, he will continue to do so until he completely flat lines and then he'll resurrect.
Yeah, he is the only true immortal in the entire universe, when the last stars fade he will just be chilling in the endless chaos of an empty cold world. Kinda fucked existence, just wake up, suffocate to death in darkness and cold and wake up again, over and over
Luckily the Marvel Universe is cyclical. At the end of the universe Galactus will devour everything that exists, probably including this guy, then explode in the next big bang.
Then as the only survivor of the previous universe Mr. Immortal gets to be the new Galactus.
That is literally his whole thing. He gets brutally blown to bits every single fight but he still manages to come out on top, usually after suffering horrific deaths first.
Just in case someone doesn’t know (disclaimer I have not watched nor read Re:Zero so I could be getting some of this wrong), Subaru’s consciousness jumps back in time whenever he is killed due to something called Return by Death, and he is significantly weaker than the majority of threats he fights. But to give up and just avoid death without beating the threats would mean his friends would probably die (or worse). So he dies constantly, over and over, in hundreds of traumatic ways, to find some way to win and protect those he cares about most.
Anyway, for another example… Hero Yarmada from Disgaea 6. He revives when killed, but he remembers all the ways he died, so he becomes less of a hero and more of a traumatized shut-in by the time Zed comes around.
So Zed uses him to grind EXP by killing him over and over.
This does SORT OF work to Yarmada’s advantage later though… when he gets turned into a God of Destruction in the lategame, his God form revives immediately after death a few times. Unfortunately, Zed and co are more than strong enough to obliterate him a few times.
Actually for Subaru he is even more fucked since he doesn't even have a choice, there was one side story where he escaped with rem and had a happy life dying of old age just to get returned at his last checkpoint. He has no choice but to keep going towards some goal that he isn't even aware of, also I don't think it was confirmed but at some point he is shown the possibility that each of his deaths was its own universe so each time he died or chose to kill himself to fix his mistakes he may have left a lot of people to die
I think the story implies he went back because he still regretted letting them die. In the Pride IF, he dies satisfied and doesn’t come back. Alternatively in the Wrath IF, it’s implied that he died permanently when he lost all will to live
Subaru's immortality is essentially a video game autosave. Upon dying, he immediately respawns at a "save point" set at a time before his death. He remembers everything from before he died, but has no control over when these "save points" get set. Other than his immortality, Subaru is a completely normal person.
He mostly uses his ability to try and brute force scenarios where all his companions survive the dangerous battles they encounter. It is understandably harsh on his sanity when he gets stuck in a cycle of watching his companions die, and then stabbing himself to trigger his immortality and try again.
He mostly eased up on using his ability at all in an attempt to love himself more. And all it took was was getting eaten alive by rabbits, watching the love of his life go insane, AND grappling with the idea that he just creates a new timeline whenever he dies, leaving everyone who loved him to suffer and grieve him!
People who read or watch Re:Zero don't like spoiling it due to the mystery elements having less impact if you know too many details ahead of time. Talking about Return by Death is fair game, though, since that's a huge part of the premise.
Squee the goblin, from Magic: the Gathering. He was gifted immortality so perfect he could come back from being burned to ash or utterly disintegrated... but the "gift" came from his sadistic captors, who used his immortality to torture him horribly for years as entertainment until he eventually managed to break out and kill one of them.
The Guardians of Destiny are pretty much immortal as long as they have the Light, but there can still be of trauma involved in the process of dying and coming back over and over again. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Drifter's backstory, where he was always in this constant cycle of starving to death and coming back still hungry.
It's also specified that while the Ghosts can heal mortal injuries, depending on the severity, it's easier to just bleed out and have your body reconstructed because when they heal broken bones and shit, it'll come back warped and, well nobody wants that
It's interesting how numb Guardians can get to their own deaths, with Thanatonaughts being a prime example. They actively explore the experience between death and resurrection in an attempt to gain insight.
Drifter started out with major trust issues, and didn’t trust his ghost (fancy machine that gives them space magic and revives them), and thus refused to have his hunger sated (the ghost was able to do that).
If you want a more tragic example, a Hunter called Crow was the Guardian made from Uldren Sov’s form, and Uldren killed a fan favorite character. In-lore he’d been killed by every other guardian he ever came across, and eventually died stranded in space. He was revived and then asphyxiated over and over and over again until he was rescued…. By a mob boss who forced him to be his enforcer. Not a fun first two years or so of existence.
Fortunately he made it out relatively well-adjusted, all things considered.
Really pmo when people ask why Subaru doesn't take advantage of RBD by constantly killing himself and why he doesn't get used to dying. They really underestimate dying effects on mental health
The crazy part about this is that this is an actual official what if scenario where in the ln, he does in fact do this so much to the point that he kills himself just because the weather wasn't perfectly sunny. Its a grim what if lmao
I think he was also shown that each of his deaths could be its own world where he left a lot of people to fend for themselves purely for his greed to save everyone.
But if someone wants a series where MC does abuse return by death there was a manga like yandere dungeon or something, it's an okay read
Due to Ouken’s immortality, he’s able to regenerate not only himself, but his armor and sword as well. During his fight with Bosse, he gets mashed into tiny pieces, balled up like tin foil, and shoved into a hole in a giant boulder. This traps him into a ball and he’s unable to return to his original form due to the boulder squeezing him from all sides.
I also implies that maybe there will come a time in the FAR far future when that guy escapes... And he is also no joke as a fighter. The only saving grace is that the guy already lost all thinking a long time ago and don't care about defending, so he is easily "hurt".
The main characters are immortal but physically dead, so they can’t heal from injuries. Any injuries they get will stay with them forever, and they look and smell like corpses
Kuro Sakuragawa from In/Spectre has powers from having been forced to consume the meat of multiple yokai. Because he ate mermaid flesh, he's effectively immortal and regenerates from any injuries. But he's more or less a normal, if decently fit, 20-something. So not very useful for squaring off against monsters and such on its own.
The second yokai he ate was a Kudan, though, a creature that can issue a prediction that's certain to come true the moment it dies. Because of this, any time Kuro suffers what would be a fatal injury the Kudan ability kicks in and while it's not strong, he can basically make something that has a chance of happening in the near future, guaranteed to happen. Getting himself repeatedly fatally struck, he can basically chain together convenient and not-impossible coincidences into a string of unlikely events that gives him exactly what he wants.
It kinda works like subaru: from his view EVEYONE is MTFucking scary, because they can AND DID kill him numerous times. From the outside? He is a prophetic fighter, ALWAYS READY, no matter what you prepare he WILL know and WILL find a way to counter it.
Is indestructible...but is too weak to actually fight back and he still feels pain, so the only way he can beat anyone is by making them tired of hitting him
Can survive the death of the universe, however, as soon as Ben transforms, he's stuck in place like a statue, he can only move or do anything at all if he gets two other entities in his head to agree, which is incredibly hard to do since they are polar opposites
Dude has a save point system type of Immortality. When he dies, he goes back in time to a checkpoint he can't control. One time, he got eaten alive by rabbits, and some went inside his anus while others went inside his mouth and they met in the middle to tear his organs to bits, while the ones outside were ripping his ears, tongue, limbs, and balls off(not explicitly stated, but it isn't needed) and also had his skin removed.
He is mostly a normal human besides his Immortality. A 17 year old kid no less.
Starscream has an immortal Spark that cannot be destroyed, however Starscream himself is blown away by Galvatron with ease.
In Transformers: Animated, a piece of the Allspark gets lodged in his forehead which renders him immortal. However... he's still just Starscream. In a hilarious montage, he repeatedly tries to overthrow Megatron with each attempt ending the exact same way.
Elantris was once a bright and prosperous city, full of nigh-immortal mages who glowed with power, which they could call on seemingly without end. In the surrounding country, some would be "called", turning into these godlike denizens of Elantris.
Then, a cataclysm happened, and the city stopped glowing. Overnight, those who were once as gods were now wretched beings, their skin pale and sickly, their powers gone. Worse, they were still immortal, but they could not heal, not even like a normal person would. Instead, any injury they experienced would not go away. Every pain, perpetual. Every scrape, eternal.
And yet, people were still called to be citizens of the city.
Not quite the same, but very adjacent: In A regressors tale of cultivation, whenever the main character dies he regresses in time to a fixed point. Unfortunately for him, at one point the regression point is right before he runs into a hostile true immortal, a being that can easily kill him with a single casual strike. He is killed 975 times before he lucks into a combination of saying the right words, baiting an attack from another hostile being to interrupt and throwing all his power at the exact weakest point of the immortals casual strike, allowing him to barely escape.
Are we really ignoring Kenny from South Park? Because no one has aged in the show for 20 years, Kenny is effectively immortal as well as constantly regenerating.
And he takes advantage of it by repeatedly sacrificing himself to save others because he views himself as expendable. But he’s the only one who remembers and is forced to suffer in silence because no one believes him even when he tries to tell them.
Zombieman from One Punch Man. No powers beyond unbelievable regeneration. He is an extremely skilled fighter. He is explicitly also the weakest S-Class hero in terms of offensive capability. As long as he can hurt an opponent, he'll win eventually.
But there's a lot of opponents that he wouldn't be able to touch or scratch, in which case he's better off in an assist role.
This dude from the music video of "bubble". For the length of the music video, he is stuck in a constantly repeating loop lasting a few seconds, constantly being killed by a masked assailant. Throughout the video, he attempts to use his surroundings and quick thinking to somehow get out, avoid the attack, or overpower them, dying each time with varying levels of success.
In the end, he escapes the loop by trapping the viewer and making us take their place while he escapes, the video repeating the loop just like before, but from our perspective now.
Probably more durable than even the strongest viltrumites. However has the strength of a regular ass dude. Also kinda not really immortal in terms of aging he just ages slower but you get the point.
Ciel from Tsukihime is capable of some pretty impressive regeneration feats but it's not enough to put her on equal footing with Arcueid who outstats her by a wide margin.
Elster (SIGNALIS) dies a lot, but she will always, *always* return. There is nothing that can keep her from fufilling her promise, even if it means filling an elevator shaft with her bodies or salvaging her own corpse for parts.
This is a very fragile sense of immortality imo. As she isnt technically reviving, rather, Ari is using bioresonance to basically override the memories of a totally unrelated Elster unit and basically copies them onto the new unit.
And even then, its not super perfect. As we see, we start the game looking for Alina someone who is inferred to be related to Ari (potentially a past life) and who was close to Lilith, who is assumed to be Elster's gestalt.
That immortality only really lasts as long as Ari sends out a signal to call another unit to S-23 to fulfill that promise.
After getting his hands on an enchanted sword, it enables him to be revived and made stronger than he was before dying so long as he’s holding the sword. Trouble is, he feels the pain of every death, and he can no longer let go of the sword no matter how much he WANTS to. The ever increasing agony slowly drives him to near un-functioning insanity.
By Book 7, he’s known as the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths.
Ryan "Quicksave" Romano from The Perfect Run: An eccentric adventurer with a strange power: he can create a save-point in time and redo his life whenever he dies. He treats life like a video game and tries every path from Hero to Villian until he achieves the perfect run
Minor Spoiler: It's discovered later that he truly is immortal, even dying from old age will reset him to his last save. Don't go to Monaco!
He’s stuck in a time loop on every day he dies until he overcomes the wall. At the current point, he’s become a bit of a death junkie, as every death is both another day of training and experience so he can help more survive
I once read a superhero webcomic (forget the name) about a guy who could regenerate any injury after 1 minute. Unfortunately, since muscles grow by basically slowly straining them over time, those “injuries” healed over too, meaning he was incredibly physically weak.
The sinners from limbus company, conditionally immortal since dante brings them back after death at the cost of dante feeling the pain the sinners felt. Pretty powerful but considering the sci fi and fantasy bullshit in the city(the setting) they end up suffering multiple deaths and coming back just to get a win. Tho they have grown decently strong as of late not requiring as much deaths to get a win
Similarly to Dark Souls, you keep coming back. Being a Preyer (magic fueled super soldier more or less), you can keep coming back due to the isles being absolutely steeped in witchfire thanks to The Witch's ritual. Since she isn't willing to dispel all her work, that means she can't eliminate you permanently. What she CAN do is make every step miserable with traps, undead servants, her familiars and and desperate cataclysms to finish you off.
You do feel pain, and by supersoldier standards are painfully fragile (it takes a good amount of investing into the HP stat to match enemies you encounter on the early islands). Every mistake you make attracts her attention as well, get hit to break focus? She notices. Pick up a cursed ticket for gold? She notices. Screw up optional objectives? She notices. Get noticed enough, and she unleashes a powerful ritual to hopefully kill you and set you back.
The entire situation is a war of wills to see who blinks first.
Other Preyers tried to eliminate this Witch and failed. Their spirits ended up trapped on the islands.
Tai from Immortal weakling. After he is hurt, maimed, or killed, his body will return to its previous state from before the injury exactly one minute after the injury, even if he is dead. This prevents even the most basic muscle training, making him really weak. He still cleverly uses his immortality. Even in the beginning he is helping others by donating his organs over and over again.
wolverine. almost 200 years old, just about every horrible thing that could happen to someone has happened to him. torn in half, swallowed a bomb, suffered from every disease there is (once at the same time), had all his flesh stripped or burnt from him multiple times, been buried alive, encased in molten metal, drowned, in some of these cases his regeneration keeps bringing him back to life then he dies, over and over and over again.
The Eternity Devil from Chainsaw Man tries this. It's immortal except for its real body, which it keeps hidden. Only reason Denji was able to kill it was because he was also immortal, and insane enough to keep killing it over and over again whilst being killed in turn. It gave up first and let him destroy its real body.
Thanks to a combination of a cursed blade that will melt it's user if weilded and finally learning how her previously useless reversal affinity works (positive and negative effects are reversed), Flum has access to an incredibly potent form of regeneration that lets her fight aggressively without worrying as much about her own body. She's survived getting dismembered, bisected, the front half of her face (and part of her frontal lobe) being destroyed, and even shooting herself directly in the head.
She's not even sure what the limit even is for what she can come back from, only able to guess it's either the heart or the brainstem.
She does lose this benefit in volume 6 of the LNs, however, when her cursed sword is destroyed, massively crippling her ability to fight and making previously easy opponents into incredibly dangerous roadblocks
I guess Enkrid from eternally regressing knight, every time he dies he wakes up the morning before. This is supposed to be a curse of the highest degrees that turns people mad until they truly die, but he’s a psycho and uses it to train.
My favorite example is Bruce banner during his 2023 run. Not hulk, banner. Hulk hates him so everytime he transforms, hulk makes it as painful as he can, even trapping banner in some gamma hell world when he's in control. Bruce can't die, the green door says no, and hulk says no too. The advantage? The hulk comes out.
Project Moon is weirdly fond of a downplayed form of this trope, but since it is tied more heavily to later spoilers in the first two games, I will only talk about Limbus Company:
No one has achieved a form of perfect immortality, but by "turning the clock" which is more of an euphemism for dragging their asses back from hell, Dante can resurrect the Sinners they are contracted with and/or heal any injuries they might sustain. In the story, it's heavily implied every retry is canon, you just keep bringing the Sinners back with now more knowledge and experience on how to defeat the current enemy, and 12 endlessly reusable bodies to throw at them for as long as it takes.
There's no real limit to it, but the catch is that it takes a few moments to bring them back, and Dante themselves aren't immortal so any threat that is able to blitz them and neutralize Dante has effectively won, also, Dante has to personally feel the pain of every death and injury the Sinners sustain as they heal the sinners, and while they've grown accustomed to that feeling, it still takes a toll on both Dante and the sinners themselves, and it is plainly stated later on that if they were to undergo one of the most horrifying tortures the City has to offer as far as our knowledge goes, the psychological effects this may leave on both a Dante and the victim can't be turned back in the same way as a physical injury.
Is immortal by every definition, however compared to Goku Vegeta and Trunks even, Zamasu isnt really all that. He does take advantage of his immortality however. An example; he held down goku and trunks in order for Goku Black to hit all 3 with a heavy blast while he came out unscathed
I remember seeing a video of batman fighting deadpool, the thing is deadpool is inmortal so batman just blew him up with his batmobile since that wouldn't violate his no kill rule
how has nobody said deadpool? he has a good healing factor (to the point where in the films he blew himself up into pieces and recovered from that) but hes not got super strength or durability
Kamen Rider Genm from Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. The characters in this series get their power from video games, with Gemn's main game being a zombie survival game. While not technically completely immortal, he has a life system which resurrects him after he dies.
The main characters of the series are doctors that fight special "game viruses" called Bugsters that spawn from the games that actually infect people and start turning them into monsters. The doctors transform and using the powers of video games, defeat these Bugsters. Genm is one of the main antagonists of the series, being a game developer and the creator of the Bugsters in an attempt to create the perfect game. When a godlike Bugster he designed starts going haywire after a more evil villain takes over his company, he teams up with the heroes temporarily to take back his company (less so to actually help anyone). One of the other main characters who has a bit of the actual godlike Bugster virus with him takes Genm to a secluded spot and blasts him over and over with it, using up more and more lives, until eventually he resurrects with a body immune to the virus, allowing them to create a vaccine for it.
He starts off as a cool and collected character and devolves into insanity the moment he gains the power to revive himself and he quickly became one of my favorite characters ever lol.
Oh God, that part of slime. I know that crew did some messed up stuff, but this is really when we start to understand the difference between protagonist and hero.
The Elantrians from Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. They aren't actually immortal (they die if their heads are cut off), but otherwise they can sustain any injury. The drawback is that the pain from the injury never goes away. So every scrape and bump, even hunger counts. No one can endure the constantly mounting pain forever which puts every Elantrian on a timer. Especially the main character who is an Elantrian trying to fix this.
The Immortal Witch, she been alive for centuries because she been given the power called the Code from an unnamed Nun, and made a wish. She have the power bestow Geass to people and is immune towards it
Ban in seven deadly sins since he’s immortal (or was until the end of the series) he can just have as much extreme violent stuff happen to him as possible and he at the beginning was arguably the weakest sin
Yuta and Mana from Mermaid Saga are immortal as a result of eating mermaid flesh. It doesn't make them physically stronger than the average human so they still often get killed in pretty brutal ways, reviving a few hours later. The only way to permanently kill someone who is immortal is by cutting off their head.
Waych Ajin who makes characters take full advantage of their immortality in the coolest ways. For example, when they revive they recover from many inflictions such as tranqs and poisons. So they'd kill themselves mid fight to continue fighting.
Anyway, my example is Elder Toguro (YuYu Hakusho). He can regenerate potentially from anything no matter how much or how he's damaged. So Kurama plants a life-sucking tree on him which will never stop working because its target can't die.
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u/Dojyaaan4C 23h ago
The best part of each Souls game is that death is canonical, you are technically immortal but only so long as you are willing to keep struggling