| rdfs:comment
| - Death is permanent, as we all know. In Real Life. In fictional works, however, this need not necessarily apply. In fiction, people regularly do come Back From the Dead. This is fine if they're on the side of the heroes, but once a villain has pulled this a couple of times it gets really old. The solution? Death is not enough, time to kill them Deader Than Dead. Characters who come back from the dead while staying dead (i.e., the Undead) are a special case, but of course, being "dead" also has a very special meaning in this case. Ow! Ouch! Stop kicking me! Examples of Deader Than Dead include:
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| abstract
| - Death is permanent, as we all know. In Real Life. In fictional works, however, this need not necessarily apply. In fiction, people regularly do come Back From the Dead. This is fine if they're on the side of the heroes, but once a villain has pulled this a couple of times it gets really old. The solution? Death is not enough, time to kill them Deader Than Dead. The actual implementation of a Deader Than Dead varies: Sometimes it's needed to kill more than one component of the target (often its soul and its body at the same time). Sometimes it requires following the dead to the afterlife and killing them there. Sometimes it involves tons and tons of Maximum Overkill that reduces the villain to a fine paste. And sometimes some alternative to death (sometimes a "Fate Worse Than Death") has to be found. For demons and the like, the latter often means "sealing" them somewhere, though more often than not, this is just a surefire way to end up with Sealed Evil in a Can. Your Soul Is Mine is an uncommon way of ensuring total death as well--pulling someone's literal life force out of their body and eating or smashing it is a good way to ensure that they're never coming back. Characters who come back from the dead while staying dead (i.e., the Undead) are a special case, but of course, being "dead" also has a very special meaning in this case. If you have to rely on this trope often, it tells you that you have cheapened the meaning of "death" to the point of uselessness. Relying on it after you have already pulled it for the same character tells you that maybe you're lacking in imagination to come up with good characters. Or it might be that the character is too popular or iconic (to the fans or the writer) to stay permanently dead. So, it's not really that surprising when they pull something out of left field and let someone use Time Travel to... Ow! Ouch! Stop kicking me! Common for important bosses in video games (see Non-Lethal KO), but not rare outside them either. Compare with Final Death and Rasputinian Death. Common ingredient in a Death By Origin Story. Older Than They Think -- a Fairy Tale may outline the villain's death in graphic detail to ensure that, unlike the hero, they cannot come Back From the Dead. (Often, the Family-Unfriendly Death is proposed by the villain as a suitable punishment for his crimes, as a general principle.) Examples of Deader Than Dead include:
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)