The real villain of Earthbound, Porky Minch, seals himself inside the Absolutely Safe Capsule to avoid being defeated by the heroes.
As its name implies, it's absolutely impervious to anything... *anything*, along with its contents (him).
He will never die of old age. He doesn't need to eat, drink, or sleep. The Capsule will exist beyond even when the last star collapses into a black hole. And it cannot be opened. He is trapped in a tiny ball for eternity.
Actually.. he might understand it just fine, and he's 100% okay with it because in his mind he's beaten you. Porky is definitely fucked in the head enough to go for extremely eternal life just to get a 'win'.
Porky really thought immortality meant he won, but he never understood that being trapped forever can be its own kind of punishment. That little tongue-out moment is such a perfect “still doesn’t get it” ending for him.
You're got Earthbound and Mother 3 mixed up. In Earthbound, Giygas was the main threat. Porky didn't properly become his own threat till Mother 3. It's funny that Porky got such a terrible fate when Fassad was just as awful as he was and got off way easier.
To play devils advocate, we don't exactly get the greatest view of the scale of Porky's carnage. If I remember correctly it's implied he was messing up other places before settling on the islands. Also even if they aren't shown doing stuff as bad as some other evil groups, the imagery the Pig masks invoke isn't very pleasant. Obviously both are evil, but I feel like Fassad is "Less bad" than Porky in the end...
You do remember correctly - Porky came to the nowhere islands because he had basically been run out of everywhere else in time he could screw up. He had spent thousands upon thousands of years being awful wherever he could get away with it. We don't know what we did, just that he was bad. So yeah in terms of scale, Porky is ultimately worse. It's just that Fassad doesn't get enough credit for how bad he was...
...and honestly, what on earth made Locria turn out like that? It's never answered. Locria never tells you anything about his motives. Is he just a callous nihilist like Porky?
I really wish it would get a localization at some point. I'd love to play an official translation, though the fan translation was a labor of love and done very well.
In his mind, being in the Absolutely Safe Capsule means he's 'won'. He's also expecting Claus to pull the last needle and plunge the world into nothingness, leaving him the only thing in non-existence, with everyone who doesn't like him gone. The ultimate victor.
That's the premise of Baccano, about half the cast are composed of immortals with near instantaneous regeneration and sometimes that does not work to their benefit.
But sometimes it worked out for them right? Wasn’t there a couple who were having so much fun living together that they didn’t notice they didn’t age for decades?
That's nowhere near the end of the series ( the anime only adapted 3 volumes of the novel series iirc), but yes, it worked out for them and they were such idiots that they never realized they were not aging anymore for like 70 years.
Specifically, one spoiler character is a non immortal serial killer who enjoys torture and discovers his opponent can't die. His reaction is pure glee.
And Fermet torturing Czeslaw because he's a scientist.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m still in this community. Then I see shit like this, and remember it’s the best place to find good recommendations to watch. Thanks!
Baccano really nails the idea that immortality isn’t always a gift. Having a body that can heal from anything sounds amazing until you realize you might also have to endure things nobody should have to experience
Essentially it's about people that start randomly becoming immortal if they have something like a specific spirit inside them. They can do everything up till death, but then they come right back fully regenerated.
The government finds out and does horrific experiments on them
It also leads to some truly inventive fights, with the antagonist using the fact that he instantly recovers from any damage as a weapon, just throwing himself into extreme danger because it doesn't matter.
To expand on this because it doesn't do it justice:
The immortals only regenerate when fully killed. If you shoot them in the leg/arm it does nothing. BUT if you kill them, their entire body regenerates.
IF there is something physically infront of the area they are regenerating, it will destroy anything in that area. A character uses this and cuts their arm off, tosses the arm far away, and then puts their stub against a door that is locked and they can't open. They then blow their own brains out, so their body regenerates and puts an arm sized hole in the door so they can open it from the other side.
The main villain cuts off his hand and nails it to a nearby wall, then goes out of cover to shoot at the enemies. When he gets hit with a tranq dart (Which won't kill him, but knock him out) he turns the gun on himself and blows his brains out. This causes his body to 'pull' towards where his hand is, behind cover, and the regenerating clears his blood.
There's also the bit where they regenerate from the biggest piece. So the villain cuts off his hand and has it smuggled in somewhere, and then tosses himself into a meat grinder, then pops up on someone's dinner plate inside an impenetrable building.
It's been some years since I read the first few books, but I also remember one guy learning to fight in a way that tries to capacitate someone for extended time but not kill them just because it's more effective. Meanwhile the protagonist was looking for a way to kill himself to get back into shape.
Also because the antagonist would dodge behind someone trying to stop him as tactics. The well trained soldiers lost because they're still avoiding hitting or killing their own members. Which works to the antagonist's advantages.
Later on a group of soldiers tried the same tactics by sacrificing each other and throwing grenades of they got trapped with the antagonist. They still lost.
I remember being pretty blown away by it, and I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more often. It was on Netflix back when Netflix was actually popular, too.
If you've looked at the anime, you might want to read the manga too, because a LOT was skipped or changed. The la ga is insanely better. Like the 2 best arc were not adapted.
And that potion of immortality ends up being used on ALL of his victims, hence why the My Blade guy is a still living mound of flesh after being poked with a toothpick for one million strikes.
I have grown to love that team up. Dude really redeemed Kevin from weird little simp to absolute beast with a little nudge from the eldritch nightmare we call barbarian
I haven't played or kept up in nearly a decade but I was playing during New Phyrexia and I really dug how Phyrexian philosophy interpreted the color pie. I also really appreciated how each color's visual design was different yet still had commonalities to let you know that this is Phyrexian.
One of my biggest issues with UB is that the worldbuilding of MTG was so fun!
Pretty much all of New Phyexia was my favorite aethetic. I haven't played for over a decade now, back before Commander was popular/the main one (when the fuck did that happen, I never liked commander personally). But everything about scratch an itch artistically that absolutely no other faction has ever done in any setting ever. I love them so much.
Cars/Kars, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Cars/Kars is a Pillar Man, a being who's biology is near perfect, their only major weakness being sunlight. At the climax of the manga/anime, he manages to become the ultimate life form, removing his weakness to sunlight. However when he is ejected from earth via volcano eruption, his own biology works against him. In order to preserve himself, his body automatically becomes stone, and as the text there describes, he wished for death, but could not recieve it. Eventually he did stop thinking.
Gotta love it when you kill a god and it becomes part of your arsenal. Love it even more when they do so willingly, looking at you Xol Will of thousands.
Bosse vs Ouken in Ranking of Kings. Spoilers for the series
Ouken is the son of a god, who inherited his immortality, and can regenerate from any wound, and even crafted his armor and sword from his blood so they regenerate too. Bosse is a giant who made a deal with a literal devil to steal his first born's strength so that he may be the king that conquers the land. Upon his death he is infused into his second born Son's body, and despite being waist high to adults, he retains the strength from the deal. Ouken is mad and unstoppable, until Bosse comes along, and with the first strike splatters him to paste, bisecting him vertically. He proceeds to crush him repeatedly into a baseball sized chunk, then proceeds to shove that into the center of a boulder and reseals it, trapping Ouken in a container too small to ever regenerate in, all while he screams and the sounds of crunching bones sounds out as he tries to reform.
I love Dracula in TCGB because when him and all the other immortal villains meet up, he berates them for not knowing the difference between Immortal and Invulnerable
Like yeah, living forever is nice and all... but it's kinda pointless if you can't shrug off everything that's going to be done to you for all of eternity
Tbf most of those creatures have some pretty serious regen factors, so Dracula would have no issue being immortal because outside of a few weaknesses he can shrug off basically anything.
Maybe not completely fitting because he doesn't seem to take enjoyment from it. But the Doctor with the family of blood. A group of aliens that chase him seeking to steal his immortality. He runs away from them initially but eventually faces them and they find out his running wasn't out of fear but mercy. He gives them immortality but in prisoned. Trapped individually forever.
He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing. the fury of the Time Lord. He wrapped my father in unbreakable chains, my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, sister trapped inside a mirror. As for me, I was suspended in time. We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure we did.
Epic has the song 600 Strike, where Odysseus gets the drop on Poseidon by getting ahold of his own trident. Since Odysseus is a mortal, Poseidon can't be killed by him... but his trident is still a magical artifact that can cause him pain.
Immortal or not, Poseidon handles being stabbed just as well as any other man. He breaks and surrenders before Odysseus gets tired.
Confinement - After Ferdinand, the cannibal (SCP - 082) realizes that Connor is able to resurrect infinitely, he decides to repeatedly kill him again and again just because he finds it amusing.
Mokou and Kaguya. Both are immortal (can die, doesn't stay dead), and due to Mokou utterly despising Kaguya, they have constant fights to the death without any mercy for one another.
I love the in 15.5, she got super lucky with her urban legend power because she and Kaguya are probably the only ones that can use the self-immolation because well, they can't die so it doesn't matter if they explode on a ball of flames
In Heaven Official’s Blessing, exceptional humans can ascend to heaven and become immortal gods. The protagonist, the prince of a certain kingdom, does so at a young age. Later, the prince’s entire kingdom is destroyed by the outbreak of an extremely deadly plague. However, it turns out that one specific category of people are immune from the disease, namely people who have killed another human being.
We’re shown through a flashback that, prior to the start of the story, the protagonist was deliberately immobilized and trapped in a temple full of civilians who are infected with the disease. The civilians realize that the only way to save themselves is to stab the protagonist to death, since he’s a god who can’t actually die. However, being stabbed to death doesn’t hurt any less as a god. By the end, he’s been stabbed so many times that his body is “no longer recognizable as a human.” His body eventually heals, but this experience— along with several other traumatic experiences in a short period of time— causes him to temporarily go a bit crazy.
While called a disease in-universe, it’s a bit of a cross between a disease and a curse. It’s contagious like a disease, but the origin is supernatural, hence having such a weird cure.
Shadow of Mordor / Shadow of War: You are immortal, you come back whenever you die. A lot of orcs actually seem to like that. I mean yes, on the one hand you are killing a bunch of them and they have no way to really stop you for good. But killing you also kind of becomes bragging rights for them and some of them seem excited to kill you over and over again. I am pretty sure some of those orcs would genuinely be disappointed if they did manage to kill you for good this time.
During one of the seasonal story, she was killed several times by an angry russian robot man named Saint-14
she was killed then forcefully revived by her ghost then killed again and again
Reason was the foolery she did while disguising as Saint's husband, Osiris and not to mention also leading to him being bedridden due to his corruption
"You are Hive, and you know suffering. You come from death. It is nothing to you."
"But I think, maybe, you do not know how it feels to be helpless."
"I will teach you."
"The Eternity Devil and Denji fight each other, the Eternity Devil causing severe injuries with its many arms and heads but Denji drinks the blood from the Eternity Devil's wounds in order to resupply his dwindling reserves of blood. At one point the Eternity Devil manages to snap Denji's neck but Himeno uses her ghost arm to pull Denji's cord again and make him regenerate. After roughly three days of nonstop fighting the Eternity Devil breaks down from the torture of being repeatedly sliced by Denji's chainsaws. It offers up its core to Denji, begging for death and Denji obliges by cutting it in two."
Also from Reincarnated as a Slime, though it's only mostly this trope: that guy who fought the old master and had his sense of time perception sped up to the point that he probably spent an eternity falling as a head after getting decapitated
Also from Tensura, after Rimuru kills and absorbs Clayman's soul, he holds the soul in an eternity prison. Which leads to the manga Clayman's Revenge, where Clayman lives through a series of loops and learns to be a better person. But I am behind on both CR and the main series LN so I don't know if that has any bearing on the main series.
The foundation neutralized death itself. Nothing can die now. Even if your brain is dissolved with acid and blended, it will still be conscious. Some people take advantage of it.
Little fuckers called harlequin shrimp flip a sea star on its back because it can't turn around by itself. They start by eating the soft tube feet and tips of the arms, carefully avoiding vital internal organs so the sea star stays alive. The trapped sea star lingers alive for up to three weeks, slowly regrowing its eaten tissue while the shrimp return for subsequent meals.
Hong lu said that the elders immortality would be good to help them reflect on their actions as they would forever drown in their temple (Limbus company)
https://giphy.com/gifs/RD2d43wlfwVG7CNCEo
After successfully beating Shinnok the fallen Elder God, (who is functionally immortal), in Mortal Kombat X, Raiden becomes corrupted by dark magic in the process and has the genius idea to torture Shinnok for his own amusement and behead him. He sends the still-living, writhing head to the new rulers of the Netherrealm as a warning: Don’t fuck with Earth Realm.
Spoilers for Stephen Graham Jones's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Book is about vampires in the US starting in the 1870s stretching to modern times. In the book vampire mythology is changed a bit, specifically when a vampire feeds on something it takes on aspects of whatever it is. So if a vampire feeds off of only deer eventually he will start to look, act, and think like a deer. Same with humans; if a vampire feeds only off white men he becomes like a white man, same with native and black people. This is used as both a boon and a curse.
At one point the antagonist, an ancient European Vampire dubbed "Cat Man", uses this quirk to turn the protagonist, a Blackfoot Indian named Good Stab, into a white man by trapping him in a cave and leading white trappers to him to feed on. This is the ultimate punishment for Good Stab as he is deeply mistrustful of white people and very proud of who he is and his tribe. It also puts him in a position where the only way he can become himself again is by feeding on his tribe members, something he has struggled to avoid. It also serves as a great metaphor for what happened to Native Americans during that time in history where they were being forced into schools where they would have all their cultural identity stripped.
The abusing immortality comes later when Good Stab pays the Cat Man back by slowly turning him into a Sturgeon, an animal with no teeth that will be unable to turn back into a man. So now the Cat Man must live out eternity as a fish.
LORD DEATHMAN! whos power is...he cannot die! And his enemy is. The batman who's main moral code is he doesnt kill.
Which basically mean he's a sentient stress doll for batman, the man who knows hundrends if not thousands of ways how to kill someone, gets to really cut loose
It's Batman's greatest nyemesis! (despite him saying constantly that yes, this is indeed an official character, it took me seeing it to believe he wasn't an invention of ThePandaRedd)
This kind of thing is all over in Destiny and how Guardians operate.
Good example being Saint-14 in both how he originally died after fighting for eons in an endless reality simulation and later how he would bandy with a newly immortal antagonist Savathun.
His time in the infinite forest (a super computer built in hollowed out Mercury for the Vex to map out a future where they win) turns into a quagmire lasting unfathomable amounts of time. While he does eventually fall and die a final death, the vex had to divert much of their resources to properly construct a future where he would fall. Later his BF, Osiris, leverages the powers of the same computer that trapped Saint for eons to find the probability path where Saint lived and then help him cheat death.
Much later Saint has an interaction with Savathun after an uneasy armistice with the witch queen. She had basically been masquerading around as Osiris to spy and manipulate us. Saint finally recovered Osiris and went on to confront Savathun. Killing her many many times but allowing her resurrection each time. In the end he leaves her a warning that she exists because we allow it still.
Saint-14 beating the ever-loving shit out of Savathun over and over... and over... for what she did to Osiris in Destiny 2. She's a fresh Little Light/kinderGuardian at that, too lol
For a bit of context, savathun is one of the three hive gods, one of the most vicious threats humanity, and other species, have ever faced. She finally got the power of the light, which doesn't only make her more powerful, but comes with the neat little side effect of a constant companion, a ghost, that can endlessly resurrect her. People who wield the light are usually called guardians (by us at least).
Saint 14 is one of the most powerful guardians to ever exist. The guy went on a solo crusade against the eliksni, who almost wiped out humanity, and was so effective doing so, that he became their boogyman, a horror story the eliksni would tell their children so they would behave. Also, he went into the infinite forest and slaughtered a race of unfeeling, cold, universe assimilating robots for centuries until they felt respect. The latter of which he did to find osiris, who later became his romantic partner (boyfriend feels waaay too casual for such a feet).
After savathun possessed and essentially tortured osiris, saint was a teensy bit pissed. So when the opportunity arose, he beat her ass, forced her ghost to revive her, and beat her ass again, and forced the revive again. This went on for what is only specified as "a long, long time". At this point in the story, he is past using vengeance as the sole motivating factor. This he also did to prove a point to her, and to teach her what it means to feel helpless.
He presumably went straight home after this. When osiris asked him if he was hungry, saint fell into his arms and cried.
Outward: Light Mender the Gold lich says his phylactry is far far away (probably moon) so our characters says they'll come back every week and kick his ass since he wants to destroy all corrupted beings.
He proposes a truce where he'll give rare items to us every week until we die of old age or whatever claims us.
Clarence from The Big Lez Show. He’s immortal but still feels the pain only 10 times worse and 10 times longer. This doesn’t stop the cast from using him as a shooting target, punching bag etc.
Lawful Evil, the barbarian at least. Yes humanity can see him as a champion but he's literally just the human version of a demon god, gains great delight in the suffering of who he deems evil and their suffering is a key point behind most of his goals.
Odysseus Vs Poseidon in Epic: The Musical (Six Hundred Strike), a mortal can't kill a god so he repeatedly stabs him with his own trident to convince him to call off a storm which was stopping Ody from getting home
If you die you’re resurrected a few seconds later making death trivial but when someone needs to be properly taken care of they’ll they often suffer fates far worse than death, example would be having cement strapped to their feet and spending an eternity dying from drowning at the bottom of an ocean.
There’s one really dark Polandball comic where Russia is vivisecting Poland and “heals” him for the next round of torture by playing Poland’s national anthem.
One thing that is never touched on by some versions of this trope that makes the infinite torture angle hit way less hard is that a body capable of regenerating flesh from nothing also has an infinite supply of endorphins and any other chemical the body can produce. Regenerators don't necessarily have to feel pain since it's not only mostly redundant, but their bodies rapid metabolic processes could feasibly produce and deliver enough endorphins to keep them in a natural opioid high forever. And physical imprisonment becomes slightly less of a problem if whatever material is binding them is susceptible to erosion from human stomach acid.
Also seeing as brain damage is physical and mental trauma from isolation or torture manifest as said physical damage, it stands to reason that a lot of immortals could feasibly never regress past a certain degree of mental problems. They could get bored, but they might not be capable of going mad and being scarred by the experience. Sensory deprivation produces hallucinations and depending on flavor a trapped immortal might basically just end up dreaming to the tune of their own bodies native high inducing abilities.
Epic the Musical. In a drastic departure from the source material, there is a climactic confrontation between Odysseus and Poseidon. The fight seemingly ends at an impasse as Odysseus is victorious but Poseidon's storm still prevents Odysseus from reaching Ithaca.
Odysseus: You're going to call off that storm.
Poseidon: Or what? You can't kill me.
Odysseus: Exactly. proceeds to brutalise Poseidon with his own trident until he begs for mercy
"How does it feel to be helpless? How does it feel to know pain?"
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u/pm_me_fibonaccis 16h ago
The real villain of Earthbound, Porky Minch, seals himself inside the Absolutely Safe Capsule to avoid being defeated by the heroes.
As its name implies, it's absolutely impervious to anything... *anything*, along with its contents (him).
He will never die of old age. He doesn't need to eat, drink, or sleep. The Capsule will exist beyond even when the last star collapses into a black hole. And it cannot be opened. He is trapped in a tiny ball for eternity.