| abstract
| - Face it, some Big Bads stay popular enough it might be a bad idea to kill them for real. So they may stick around or keep coming back, but too much of this can start to undermine a (super)hero's perceived effectiveness. While a work focusing on a single hero or group can Hand Wave this as perhaps what's necessary to end the villain for good being beyond their moral code, it can get more egregious if the fictional universe starts to get larger and more interconnected, and the villain keeps pissing off more and more people. This leads to the question of why some of those other folks with a lot fewer qualms against killing haven't put a bullet in them yet. This ends up being a question of whether the villain is just that good, or the writers are delaying things and stretching the patience of the audience. (Or maybe it's just that A Wizard Did It.) Aside from rationalizations given in the story itself, most reasons for trope are outside the story in the form of Contractual Immortality:
* The villain is very popular and lucrative, so franchises with indefinite continuity are hesitant to get rid of them. Particularly the Trope Namer: every would-be Batman writer dreams of writing a good Joker story and to get rid of him with any sense of finality would seemingly rob future writers of such a coveted opportunity. Ironically, a villain could be ostensibly lame, and killing them off is seen as too 'serious' a treatment rather than just putting them on a bus.
* The story exists in a particular continuity or on a sliding timescale; the actual time the villain has been around for a particular story may be smaller than we suppose. Again regarding the Trope Namer, it may seem like the Joker's been mass-murdering people for however-many-decades in Real Time, but in the comic book universe it's only been a handful of years at most.
* The villain, especially those in a Rogues Gallery, are so heavily identified with a particular hero their exploits are specific to him out of a kind of authorial respect (e.g. Marvel's Carnage is heavily identified with Spider-Man, but is both monstrous-looking and much less popular lately, and thus can be killed).
* The struggle against a single major villain is the Series Goal and if that villain is defeated, the series would be over. If this is the case, then the Grand Finale will occasionally revoke Joker Immunity.
* The series is being shown in Anachronic Order, and their death has already been shown. This can apply to any character, not just villains. Note that in all cases this immunity can and will be revoked if the character is waning in popularity; victims of Villain Decay can become outright C-List Fodder for any author wanting to show off. Also, when the next step in the Sorting Algorithm of Evil appears, the dethroned villain is liable to lose his Joker Immunity (often at the hands of the new villain, showing how badass he is). Compare: Villain Exit Stage Left; Moral Dissonance; Cardboard Prison; Tailor-Made Prison; and occasionally Villain Sue. For the heroic equivalent, see Invincible Hero. Also see Just Eat Gilligan when it's not a direct villain that's the problem. See also Villain Based Franchise for one of the products of this kind of thing. See also Popularity Power, where a character will get things his way because of his popularity, and Karma Houdini, where the villain escapes temporal as well as cosmic punishment. Examples of Joker Immunity include:
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