"Live. Die. Repeat."
— Tagline of Edge of Tomorrow
Any form of immortality is usually seen as either a blessing or as a strength, at most a Cursed with Awesome situation, but not with these characters: these characters, due to fate, a curse, or just plain old bad luck, are destined to die and come back to life — only to die again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
The form of resurrection itself may vary. They may simply be brought Back from the Dead, or be sent back in time before their death, though not without experiencing it first; a "Groundhog Day" Loop may be involved. If the character's lucky, the loop may end at some point, or it may continue indefinitely.
This process will, more often than not, damage the character's psyche, as they're forced to experience the sensation of death potentially forever.
See also: Immortality Hurts, Who Wants to Live Forever?, The Many Deaths of You, and Fate Worse than Death.
Compare with Resurrective Immortality, where someone can be killed but will come back to life anyway (minus the guaranteed loop of suffering). Contrast with Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, and They Killed Kenny Again. A Death Montage may be used to demonstrate the immortality aspect.
Beware of unmarked spoilers.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Chainsaw Man: The Devils are born in Hell. When they are killed in Hell, they spawn on Earth, and when they're killed there, they return to Hell with no memory of their time on Earth. The Primal Fear Devils are the only Devils to not be part of this cycle, simply because they are far too powerful to be killed by any Devil or human. There is only one way to truly kill a Devil, and that is to be consumed by Pochita, the Chainsaw Devil, in which case the Devil — and the concept they embody — are retroactively erased from existence.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: Diavolo is struck by this in the final fight. After receiving a thorough Curb-Stomp Battle by Giorno's newly awakened Gold Experience Requiem he begins to endlessly be affected by GER's "return to zero" effect, which in his case means he constantly dies over and over, always in a different way. He's fully aware of it, and he can't ever escape from it, making it both this and a nasty case of And I Must Scream. Needless to say, it doesn't take long for him to go insane from fear and paranoia and the last we see of him, he's screaming at a harmless little girl to get away from him.
- The Seven Deadly Sins A goddess was cursed to spend eternity being repeatedly resurrected as a human. Every time she regains her memories, she dies within three days and is reborn immediately as a new infant. Elizabeth is her 107th reincarnation.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yami's battle against the Egyptian God Card Slifer the Sky Dragon sees his opponent exploit this via a weak slime monster that keeps resurrecting itself when it dies, a card that lets him draw three cards for every resurrected monster, and another that removes the limit for cards in his hand. The Purposefully Overpowered Slifer's effect lets it instakill all weaker monsters and gain attack and defense points for every card in the player's hand. Yami gets around the Cycle of Hurting by using a mind-control card that puts the slime monster on his side, creating an infinite loop where the slime is killed and reborn constantly, meaning Slifer's player is forced to keep drawing cards until he runs out, which is an automatic loss despite having a monster of quasi-infinite attack and defense power.
Audio Dramas
- Big Finish Doctor Who: In "Protect and Survive", the Doctor is revealed to have trapped two Elder Gods in the form of an elderly married couple and imprisoned them in a "Groundhog Day" Loop Prison Dimension based on the Bad Future they hoped to create: a global thermonuclear war. On every single iteration, the prisoners will have to endure the same fear and pain the real couple would have experienced in the days following the nuclear bombardment, before dying of radiation sickness; they then restart the loop on the day before the war, set to do it all over again until they learn their lesson. By the start of the story, the punishment has been going on for over a century. Unfortunately, things go a bit awry when Ace and Hex end up landing the TARDIS there by mistake - allowing the prisoners to subject them to the same torture.
Comic Books
- Darkseid: His most dreaded ability is the Omega Beams that he fires from his eyes. Aside from being nigh-undodgeable even for a speedster and able to disintegrate anything they hit should Darkseid will it, he can also will his Omega Beams to teleport his victims to Apokolips. The worst thing that Darkseid can will his Omega Beams to do however, is send anyone hit by them to the Omega Sanction, the "Death That Is Life" where they will be forced into an endless series of lives, each life more insufferable and each death more painful and humiliating than the last. Most people subjected to the Omega Sanction aren't aware of the hell they've been trapped in, and it usually takes a few hundred life cycles before their deaths become horrifying painful, gruesome, and torturous.
- Emperor Joker: The Joker acquires the reality warping powers of Mr. Mxyzptlk and uses them so that very time Joker ends Batman's life, he brings the Dark Knight back to life just so he can kill him in a different way.
- Future Foundation: It's revealed that Rikki Barnes is resurrected into a near-identical life on a parallel earth every time she dies. This is by the design of her creator, Franklin Richards, who wants her to be The Constant of each reality he creates, and thus was originally limited to his Counter-Earth creations before the 2015 Secret Wars. Since he recreated the entire multiverse, Rikki now has lives that will span them all.
- Great Lakes Avengers: Mr. Immortal is Blessed with Suck. A mutant with the power to come back to life after getting killed, he gets killed on a near-daily basis; plus, he's fully aware of the pain it causes every time.
- Wonder Girl: One attempt to explain the Continuity Snarl that is Donna Troy's backstory is that she was cursed by Dark Angel to live out multiple traumatic lives, with her coming back for more suffering after dying in each of them.
Fan Works
- All The World's a Toybox: Bill Cipher celebrates his victory in conquering Earth by making the heroes participants in his planet-wide "games." In the case of Soos, he ends up being dumped on a seemingly endless road and told that his friends are imprisoned at the other end of it, forcing him to run along the road until something ends up killing him; then he's brought back to life and made to do it all over again. Suffice to say, Soos is left decidedly freaked out by this, and is eventually reduced to virtual automaton status in a desperate attempt to ignore the succession of former bodies he keeps tripping over.
- Fate of the Clans: Alaya's Counter Force (Heroic Spirits and Counter Guardians) are just agents who preserve the human race for as long as possible. Only copies get sent out while the original gets kept as a record. This means that even if a copy gets killed, a new one can be sent out. This process will keep repeating until humanity's wiped out. This same thing applies to them during a Holy Grail War. Even if the Servant makes it to the end it'll fade, die in essence, after claiming its prize. Then it can be summoned again in a subsequent War.
- Played for Horror in Sisyphus
. Harry keeps getting killed in different ways, no matter what he tries to do, but he always reincarnates into his eleven-year-old body, in a hut on a rock where Hagrid is about to deliver his Hogwarts letter. At first, he's excited about the chance to do things better — until he gets killed in his second year by the basilisk. Then in his first Quidditch game. Then by a Dementor. Over and over, Harry tries to fix things and beat Voldemort, but all he manages to do is rack up dozens and dozens of ways he has failed, descending further and further into insanity. Until his 101st try, where he has given up and just goes through the motions, resulting in events playing out like canon, killing Voldemort, marrying Ginny, raising a family, and living to the ripe old age of 98 — and then starting over again.
By his ninety-ninth life, he's forgotten the point behind it all. By that time he's lived through the same years so many times that his first life, though he knows the motions by heart, seems like a distant dream if even that. And he cannot recall why he'd set out to try and change things, or why it was so horrible if they remained exactly the same. - To You, My Love, Forever Ago: Asuka has been stuck for the last one million years in a time-loop wherein she gets killed and then is brought back to life at the start of the War.
Films — Live-Action
- Doctor Strange (2016): In order to defeat the Eldritch Abomination Dormammu, Strange inverts this trope to create a Time Loop Trap in which Dormammu repeatedly kills him in various ways, only for him to rewind time and come back immediately. However, the purpose of this is to make Dormammu suffer, stuck trying to kill his enemy and becoming so frustrated he agrees to Strange's demands.
- Edge of Tomorrow: When William Cage kills a unique Mimic, its blood sprays all over him and dissolves him, and he awakens the day before the battle. From that point on, no matter when he dies, he starts at the same point again, accumulating the necessary skills and strategies he's learned from each "life" in an attempt to completely destroy the Mimics. However, why this trope is enforced is that any time he gets injured and doesn't die, he risks losing this ability. Which is exactly what happens before the climax, and how Rita lost it sometime before the film's events began. Even worse, the Omega also has it, and is implied to have used it countless times before to ensure every victory the Mimics ever had against humanity.
- Happy Death Day: Tree is repeatedly murdered by a masked killer on her birthday and must prevent her own death in order to end the time loop. She goes through a similar ordeal in the sequel so she can return to her proper universe.
Literature
- Chrysalis (RinoZ): Originally, "The Immortals" was a mocking nickname given to the Death Seeker ants who never managed to adapt to the Colony's new mindset, where Heroic Sacrifice is only a last resort. Despite their desire to gloriously give their lives for the Colony, throwing themselves into combat so doggedly that their leader is named Leeroy, they were carefully managed and protected, to the point where only one of them actually died. However, their single-minded pursuit of this objective ultimately leads them to the Fallen Zombie Soldier evolution, allowing them to die and then be revived by their symbiotic fungus, over and over. At first they hate it, but upon accepting the idea that they are dying each time, they embrace it as a way to sacrifice their lives for the Colony every day.
Leeroy: LIVE! DIE! LIVE AGAIN!
- The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August: The main character and his fellow kalachakra experience Born-Again Immortality via "Groundhog Day" Loop: whenever they die, they find themselves repeating their lives from the very beginning, but with all the intelligence and memories of their previous life. First-time immortals often Freak Out as a result of this, and even veteran kalachakra are often reborn with the trauma of their previous deaths still haunting them; as such, it's the duty of the Cronus Club to provide vital psychological support to newly-reincarnated members. More disturbingly, the Club's punishment of Victor Hoeness involved inflicting this on purpose, torturing him over multiple lifetimes until he was born virtually brain-dead in his next life - whereupon the Club erased him from existence as a Mercy Kill.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy: There's a character called Agrajag who is repeatedly reincarnated all over time and space, but gets killed by Arthur Dent each time. He isn't happy about it.
- In/Spectre: Kurou Sakuragawa possesses the prophetic power of a Kudan, which allows him to see the ebb and flow of the future whenever he is near death. He can then latch onto a specific path of the future from his vision, creating an odd version of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy where that path becomes the one true future. He also possesses the nigh immortality of a mermaid, meaning that whenever he is killed, he will just get right back up and live in the future he just created. In the Nanase story, he and the main character Kotoko make the most use out of this to find a way to defeat the Steel Girder Nanase phantom, by having Kurou fight the phantom bare-handed and using each of his deaths to create a future where the phantom is finally destroyed. Unfortunately for them, the phantom itself was created by Rikka Sakuragawa, Kurou's cousin who possesses the same prophetic powers as he does, and who goes so far as to kill herself multiple times to create a future where the Nanase phantom lives.
- Re:Zero: The main concept is all based around this. The main character, Subaru, is cursed with going back in time whenever he dies, keeping his memories. Being a completely mundane human with no special talents in fighting or magic, he dies quite often. While this does take its toll on him and wears his sanity down, he does put it to good use in order to overcome the problems, trying again and again and trying till he does succeed in his intentions, badly mentally scarred as it leaves him.
- Well World: In Midnight at the Well of Souls, villain Elkinos Skander ends up being placed into the body of a deer-like animal on the home planet of a species of humanoid which hunts said animal in packs and eats it alive. Wanting to avoid such a grisly fate, he hurls himself off a cliff... only to wake up in the body of another such creature. What Skander doesn't know is that he's been sentenced to experience death repeatedly, once for every person he killed — and he has a fair body count to his credit.
- Wings of Fire: Queen Diamond punishes Foeslayer by killing her over and over with an enchanted spear that will freeze her when she dies and then revive her whenever the user wants.She ends up tying her there for thousands of years so new dragons can come to kill her during their Diamond Trials.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "Heaven Sent", the Doctor eventually realizes that all the skulls he's been finding around the castle have belonged to him, courtesy of a Cloning Gambit he's been using in an attempt to escape without having to confess to the Veil. Being a clone, he doesn't remember any of it... up until the final realization hits home, and he remembers everything. The discovery almost breaks him, but with a little encouragement from his (currently) Imaginary Friend, he willingly subjects himself to fatal injuries at the hands of the Veil for his one chance to make a little bit more progress opening an escape route. Then, mortally wounded and in great pain, he laboriously drags himself back to the teleporter he arrived in, and uses himself as a fuel source to create a fresh copy of himself from the hard drive. And he has to do all of this — the fear, the confusion, the grief, the awful realization and the agonizing injuries — for every iteration until he can finally open his escape route.
The Doctor: How long can I keep doing this, Clara? Burning the old me... to make a new one...
- Doom Patrol: In the penultimate episode of season one, Mr. Nobody traps the Doom Patrol in a loop where they keep fighting (and losing) the same battle over and over, getting killed every time.
- The Good Place: This becomes the plot in season two. Michael keeps resetting the experiment every time Eleanor discovers they were in The Bad Place the whole time. This comes in handy in season three when Eleanor finds that she fell in love with Chidi during one of the reboots.
- Highlander: The Series: One episode had an immortal who went through this as he repeatedly starved to death on a desert island. Another was trapped beneath a riverbed and continuously revived and died over the course of fifty years.
- Legends of Tomorrow: The episode "Here We Go Again" has Zari getting put in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, so that each time the ship explodes, time resets itself. Zari uses each of these resets to find the source of the explosion and to investigate each of her teammates to discover who the culprit is. They finally discover that Time Agent Gary used a device to trigger the Time Loop, while the bomb was revealed to be a souvenir planted by Damien Darhk. However Gary's device gets destroyed, leaving no more resets, so Zari performs a Heroic Sacrifice to shield everyone else from the bomb with her powers. It's all revealed to be a virtual reality Secret Test of Character by the ship's Benevolent A.I. to allow Zari to bond with the Legends.
- The Outer Limits (1995): The episode "Deja Vu" ends with the General Ripper responsible for the "Groundhog Day" Loop being trapped in a second-long time loop of his own: standing in front of an exploding nuclear bomb for all eternity.
- The crux of Russian Doll. Essentially, main character Nadia has been trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop that can only be reset by her death. Worse still, her merest presence seems to turn even the most innocuous scenario into a guaranteed fatality, to the point that Nadia starts avoiding the apartment staircase after tripping and breaking her neck four times in a row. Needless to say, she ends up suffering from some seriously traumatizing experiences, like dying of exposure on the streets or drowning - not helped by the fact that she begins the next loop puking up river water. After spending a large chunk of time worrying that she's suffering from a mental illness, she meets someone else trapped in the same loop, and he's been so worn down by all the deaths that he can barely react to his next fatal accident.
- Supernatural: The Winchester brothers find a man who is cursed to die every single day. It is later revealed that he is Prometheus, his curse being the punishment ordained by Zeus.
- Torchwood: In the Season Two finale, Jack Harkness is buried alive by his evil brother and spends almost 1900 years repeatedly suffocating to death and resurrecting before being exhumed. It has surprisingly little mental effect on him in the long run.
- The Twilight Zone (2002): The episode "The Pool Guy" is about a man who is murdered by a mysterious stranger at the end of each day before he wakes up in his apartment again. It's all a Mind Prison meant to serve as an Ironic Hell, as he's really a murderer.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000: Tuska was an ork warboss who led his Waaagh! into the Eye of Terror in search of a good fight. He met his end on a planet owned by a Daemon Prince of the War God Khorne, but his final act of defiance (attacking the daemon standing triumphantly over him with his power klaw in the groin) so impressed Khorne that he ressurects them to fight every day, a rare Win-Win Ending for all involved.
Video Games
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim: The Facility was meant to raise fifteen cloned humans on terraformed planets. A jilted project member ends up sabotaging the process so the clones will be killed a few years before reaching adulthood, the Facility will make a new line, and this repeats ad infinitum until the system breaks.
- AdventureQuest Worlds: The "4D Pyramid" event has The Hero being put through one that overlaps with a Stable Time Loop. Due to the strange nature of the Eldritch Location, it is possible for people to encounter versions of themselves from the recent future or past. "Future You" acts as the Quest Giver for the present Hero based on what they were told by the previous future version of themselves. This allows them to slowly progress through the Eldritch Location to collect an item called "Eye of the Gods", one million times. However going through each cycle, it results in you getting exposed to a deadly plague which kills you. Fortunately, the sarcophagus you woke up in at the start of the event conveniently revives anything put into it. So the Hero of the past, under the instruction of their future self, will put continue putting their future remains in the sarcophagus that will bring them back to life and allow them to continue the cycle again.
- Dark Souls: The Undead are cursed to forever wander the world until they die enough times that they become Hollows, and lose their self completely. However, this is more or less a Gameplay and Story Segregation. While you, the player character, can't permanently die and are relocated back to a bonfire, all NPCs and bosses don't spawn back when they die. It's also left vague if dying after becoming a Hollow results in permanent death or not.
- DEATHLOOP: The premise is about an assassin caught in a time loop. Every day, one of eight administrators flips the switch to test the giant 'time windmill', which malfunctions completely, causing the world to rewind back to the day before and wiping the memories of almost everyone. The assassin's goal is to find a way to kill all eight in a single iteration, by manipulating remembered events to get them all together for one big family shootout. The catch is, there's another assassin aware of the endless loops, and she doesn't want to leave.
- EverQuest: Dozekar the Cursed's fate in the Temple of Veeshan. Draconic law states that a dragon must never mate with another dragon of a directly opposing element, because the resulting offspring will be both extremely powerful and completely mentally unstable. Dozekar, a fire element dragon, mated with an Ice element dragon, and their resulting offspring was the prismatic dragon Kerafyrm. Kerafyrm would eventually try to wage war against the dragons and needed divine intervention from the dragons' goddess, Veeshan herself just to put him to sleep. Being Kerafyrm's father, Dozekar was cursed to spend the rest of existence being killed and then resurrected by draconic priests over and over again. Adding Insult to Injury, he is cursed to die to lesser mortal beings and adventurers, which Dragons consider to be pretty degrading.
- Fallout 3: In the mission "Tranquility Lane," it's discovered that the inhabitants of Vault 112 have been imprisoned in a virtual reality simulation run by sadistic Overseer Stanislaus Braun. For the last two hundred years, Braun has been regularly torturing his playthings to death, then resetting the scenario to bring them back to life - and also erasing their memories for good measure. The one exception to this is one Mrs Dithers: thanks to a malfunctioning tranquility lounger, she can no longer be mind-wiped, effectively leaving her trapped in a hellish lucid dream with no hope of rescue. The only way to spare the residents from any further torment is to use an incompatible "Chinese Invasion" program to override the safeties and put them down permanently, leaving Braun trapped in his virtual dominion with no more playthings. On the other hand, if you're playing on bad karma, you can play along with Braun's sick games and put them through a round of torture that ends with them being killed and resurrected all over again.
- Katana ZERO: Chronos users are essentially immortal as long as they have enough of the drug in their system, as the drug grants users omnipotent levels of precognition that allows them to ostensibly rewind time. However, a side effect of withdrawal from the Chronos drug is that time effectively "stops" for its user, and dying without a redose makes the user eternally relive their moment of death.
- Mortal Kombat 11: Kronika's Fatality— She telekinetically rips you apart, rewinds your corpse a few seconds, and rips you apart again in a different way. This continues forever until you choose to try again or quit.
- Outer Wilds: The Hearthean player character is trapped in a 22-minute time loop, and each loop ends with the Sun going supernova and killing them, sending them back in time before the disaster. The process repeats every loop, and it can also be triggered prematurely at any point if they die earlier than expected. This is the result of the Ash Twin Project, which was built by the Nomai to find the fabled Eye of the Universe. The project works by capturing and storing the memories of the individual via the Nomai statues (which the Hearthean becomes exposed to at the beginning of the game), and when the Sun goes supernova, it provides enough power to activate the Advanced Warp Core inside the Ash Twin, sending the Hearthean's memories back in time 22 minutes.
- Planescape: Torment: This is actually a gameplay mechanic in which the Nameless One can die as much as the player needs or wants; by the start of the game, he's Covered in Scars and the trauma of the many deaths he's suffered has left his mind in a rather fragile state.
- Portal 2: The AI Chell killed in the first game, GLaDOS, comes back to life and talks about her "black box quick save feature", which forced her to relive the last two minutes before her destruction. The time between the first game and the second game is never specified exactly but it is made clear that it is a very long time, so GLaDOS could have been forced to relive her death from anywhere between decades to centuries.
- Returnal: The planet Atropos harbors an effect that leaves it in a "Groundhog Day" Loop. Selene at first seems to be unaware of it, but after several deaths, she begins to realize the nature of the loop.
- The Secret World:
- It's eventually revealed that this has been the unfortunate fate of Lorraine Maillard. Following the events of The Park, Lorraine is forcibly implanted with one of the Bees, and unlike the player characters, the experience is anything but pleasant: quite apart from the Mind Rape of having an unwilling Bee bonded to her, the process of being killed and resurrected "chips away at you," until Lorraine believes that the process is taking something vital from her. Worse still, given that she's in the same line of work as the players, she is doomed to spend most of her time dying horribly. Already having hit the Despair Event Horizon post-The Park, the resurrections leave her even worse off - to the point that she embarks on a thirty-year quest to disable her Bee and stay dead. Then, of course, you screw the whole thing up and reactivate her Bee, bringing her back to life against her will... and given that this is a repeatable mission.
- Another Bee-implanted character ends up being captured by the Orochi Group for use in Project Odyssey: Gaia's Chosen are the only characters who can access Agartha, so the Group need samples of his tissue in order to allow their cyborgs to infiltrate the Hollow Earth... and the more cyborgs they make use of, the more tissue they take. And the anesthetic they use on him doesn't work. Eventually, the captive agent dies and returns to life, whereupon the cyborgs' implanted tissue disintegrates, forcing the project's scientists to take the samples all over again. Lather, rinse, and repeat. In the end, the Orochi Group scrap Project Odyssey in favor of just employing Bees of their own, but by now, the poor test subject has been completely broken by all the trauma... and then the cyborgs go rogue and get right back to keeping the guy on life-support while they rip more tissue off him.
- Strangeland: Every time the stranger dies, he just wakes up in front of the Strangeland carnival again.
- Undertale: In the neutral path, Omega Flowey's determination outweighs the Human Child's, meaning he now controls your save file and plans to kill them over and over forever. To add insult to injury, he closes or resets the game each time he kills you, and skips the title screen when you open the game back up so he can kill them again, not even giving you the chance to erase your data and start over. The only way to escape is to survive long enough for the human souls he's absorbed to rebel against him. And while it is possible to do this without dying at all in gameplay, he closes the game once before you even fight him and he'll kill the Human Child in rapid succession in the cutscene following his defeat, so either way, you get to see the loop in action. The Pacifist True Final Boss Asriel attempts the same trick, planning to wear the Human Child (who Asriel believes is their adopted sibling) down and turn the whole game into a "Groundhog Day" Loop. This can't work because their determination becomes so strong, they won't only come back as many times as the player wants, they come back just a turn before even without a save point.
- Valheim:
- The game's setting is a Norse purgatory, into which warriors deemed worthy of service (but not yet good enough for Valhalla) are lifted after their deaths in Midgard. Death is a normal part of life, the main issue is that dying lowers your skills, returns you to a naked and hungry state, and leaves your gear in a monster-infested location that can be half the world away from your last spawn point.
- If raiding monsters manage to break through your base's defenses (or if you had none to begin with), you're likely to end up in one of these. You die, respawn in your bed nearby still surrounded by monsters, and die again while trying to recover your gear. Repeat until you manage to get an upper hand or run away, or the monsters get bored and leave, or your bed gets destroyed and you're sent to the game's starting point instead.
Visual Novels
- When They Cry:
- In Higurashi: When They Cry, Rika is forced to repeatedly experience the two weeks before the festival, which always ends with her being tortured to death and waking up in the past like nothing happened, all part of Hanyuu's desire to defeat Miyo Takano. Fortunately, she doesn't remember her final moments, and she is usually put under anesthesia before being killed. Unfortunately, this means that she does not know who kills her. And she still keeps all the memories from before her death, meaning she has experienced over a century from her perspective. Her "mental lifespan" is about to run out, and she will soon stop thinking unless she successfully breaks the loop.
- Umineko: When They Cry's Witches love this trope:
- Episode 2's Tea Party, where Rosa's relatives are repeatedly killed, have specific parts of their body harvested and made into food, and are then brought back to life so more ingredients can be taken.
- In Episode 3, EVA-Beatrice forces Rosa (and Maria) to experience all of her childhood fantasies, which are all deadly: having mountains of cake and jelly (each Giant Food crushes them to death), flying as butterflies (and being eaten by a spider), and flying as humans (they fall onto a spiked fence).
- In Episode 4, Maria repeatedly kills and revives Rosa as revenge.
Web Animation
- Battle for Dream Island: Since Anyone Can Die in an Object Show and can be recovered over and over again without repercussions, Blocky has a pranking company called "Blocky's Funny Doings International" (BFDI for short) dedicated to exploiting the trope for laughs with the season one contestants. A total of four of such pranks were made which are essentially rigging a contestant's personal recovery center in such a way that they're repeatedly and continuously killed the moment they are revived.
- Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: In "Wario Tries To Stop Himself From Dying", Wario finds himself living the same day over and over again. Not only that, but every time involves him dying in some way. After dying so many times, he makes it a goal to go the whole day without dying. The reason he suffers this is because he bought the last of an ice cream that Death wanted, so Death cursed him to die endlessly.
Web Comics
- Awful Hospital: Fern is resurrected in a new body whenever she dies within the Hospital, and sometimes actually needs to get killed to achieve a goal, like when she bribes a monster with a sloppy joe made from one of her bodies. Later, she realizes how jaded she's become to it:
Narration: You can't believe literally dying has become nothing more than obnoxious for you lately.
- Crushed: The Doomed Kitty Adventures: A subset of Supermegatopia by the Burke brothers (before their Creative Differences), Crushed is a cute, young Cat Girl who goes about her Crapsack World seeking relics and treasures. However, Crushed seems to be in over her head, even with teammates coming along, and she routinely perishes in a noble but doomed effort. However, Crushed is an acolyte at the Temple of Infinite Lives, where she's remade after each demise.
Web Original
- 3D Workers Island: Amber's Worker Degeneration can be interpreted as such. Over time, her model will gradually turn red, and eventually morph into a red sphere which emits muffled screams. This transformation is linked to injury, neglect, and bad health. Eventually, the screams coming from the sphere will stop, and a new Amber will pop out of the house, though the sphere itself remains where it is, meaning that Amber is now existing alongside her dead body. Eventually, this Amber will suffer degeneration and die again, and when too many orbs build up, she'll dispose of them by putting them in a wheelbarrow and dumping them into the ocean.
- SCP Foundation: The fate of SCP-1922. He's somehow gained the power of Resurrective Immortality... but because he's an old man in very poor health, deaths are constantly guaranteed no matter how hard he tries to stay out of trouble. Worse still, because of his medical condition, 1922's had to have parts of his legs amputated. As such, the poor old man is openly suicidal and spends the last couple of interviews pleading for the Foundation scientists to just cremate him this time, hoping that this will be enough to put him down for good. Unfortunately, they don't oblige him.
Web Videos
- Phelous: Earlier videos featured this as a Once an Episode gag, where something from the movie he'd review would kill him. This was completely Played for Laughs until the review of Jacob's Ladder, in which his repeated deaths turned out to be the result of the real Phelan dying in his first review and being unable to move on, turning his death into a gag to deny reality. This episode ends with him finally dying for real. He got better.
Western Animation
- Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The episode "Emperor Joker!" is loosely based on the comic of the same name, except Joker acquires the powers of Bat-Mite instead of Mr. Mxyzptlk and uses them to kill Batman in various ways, bringing him back only to torture him again.
- Hilda: ''The Eternal Warriors'' involves around 2 rival clans of Vikings trapped in a loop for centuries without realizing it. Every night, one clan of Vikings kill another to claim a medallion that will remove their fear. By the next day, the medallion's original owner has resurrected the first clan, who no longer remember dying or having the medallion, and repeat the process. Hilda and friends finally break the loop by the end of the episode.
- The Simpsons: In "Treehouse of Horror XXVI", Sideshow Bob finally kills Bart, and becomes a university professor afterwards. However, he soon finds killing Bart was the only thing that ever gave him satisfaction and finds a way to bring him back. Sideshow Bob then uses it to continuously revive and kill the boy over and over again to relive the happiest moment of his life.
- South Park: Kenny's ability to constantly die was revealed to be this via a Cerebus Retcon: Due to his parents attending cult meetings while he was in the womb, he was Touched by Vorlons and thus anytime he dies his mother simply births out another Kenny that quickly ages to 10 years old overnight. Since Kenny is the only one able to consistently remember his deaths while his friends never remember, it's left him deeply bitter.