Good Thing You Can Heal

Jeebs: You insensitive pricks! Do you have any idea how much that stings?
Kay: Show us the merchandise or you'll lose another head, Jeebs.

— Men in Black

The Healing Factor is an amazing super power, capable of feats from quick healing to re-growing whole limbs or even one's entire body in seconds. Sadly, it's more passive and less visually impressive than Eye Beams or even Super-Strength, both of which you can show off regularly with Mundane Utility to clue in new readers or viewers that the characters have powers.

There's only one way to show off immortality, after all.

So for writers who don't want to go the route of "Luckily, My Powers Will Protect Me" every issue, they have to find new and inventive ways for the hero to show off their regeneration, whether by their own clumsiness, being an accident magnet, or the target of lethal attacks. Accidents usually include: deep cuts, lost limbs, third-degree burns, and otherwise flirting with certain death. The problem is that while redundant exposition is avoided, the character in question gets a reputation as clumsy to the point that should they lose their regeneration they'd die or be seriously crippled, prompting onlookers to go "Good Thing You Can Heal".

Another side effect of the trope is that normally non-fatal accidents suddenly become almost certainly fatal ones just so the character has a death to avoid: If someone with regeneration so much as trips, you can expect them to end up a mangled heap of broken bones, many of them sticking out of their skin. And don't ask what happens when they get a paper cut.

This can even become Canon, as regenerating brawlers come to depend on their regeneration to the point they just use painful and suicidal tactics because they can heal from it. Can also be justified as a healing character might be the first one to leap into harm's way when needed because they'll live.

It also tends to escalate into a rather gorier version of The Worf Barrage. Since the regenerator can take damage that would otherwise kill any other team member, it becomes their "job" to be the target of a "No One Could Survive That!" at the hands of the Monster of the Week or recurring baddy because writers will always expend the expendable. It shows that the bad guy is ready and willing to kill, without actually having somebody die. At its worst, it can break Willing Suspension of Disbelief by having the regenerator come back from being completely incinerated (Shapeshifter Baggage is usually involved when that much mass is lost), or a character with clones casually killing them.

It's not even limited to characters who can heal; any character who can come back from a normally crippling injury for any reason is subject to this trope. Most noticeable with Cyborgs, who tend to take damage primarily to their repairable or replaceable parts despite a reasonable expectation that their remaining flesh would be more vulnerable.

It's generally a safe assumption that a character who uses this trope a lot has the Required Secondary Powers of Feel No Pain, although only reduced pain is more common as a form of Slapstick - the character will comment that while accelerated healing sounds cool, getting decapitated or shot in the head still hurts like hell. And as anyone who has recovered from an injury can assert, the process of healing doesn't exactly feel great all the time either. Or, there could be a Necessary Drawback — yes, he can heal supernaturally fast, but he feels all the pain at once.

A subtrope of Could Have Been Messy, with "messy" as in "fatal". They tend to coincide if the one getting mauled is bloodless (robots, golems, etc.) and has a Heart Drive or other means of near-immortality.

Related tropes include: Pulling Themselves Together, Appendage Assimilation, Fake Arm Disarm, and Losing Your Head. Despite occasional griping, these characters tend to agree Living Forever Is Awesome. When a character deliberately injures themselves to prove their Healing Factor, it's Self-Mutilation Demonstration.

Contrast Immortal Life Is Cheap, where someone who can't die permanently gets killed repeatedly not out of chance, but because those around them know they won't die. Also contrast Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration, which can go from this to no healing at all. The comedic version of this is They Killed Kenny Again, where a character who isn't established as immortal is repeatedly killed (usually for laughs), and always brought back without any reason. Sister trope to Expendable Clone.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Since Death Is Cheap in Angel Beats! (due to being set in the afterlife or purgatory), nearly every cast member has died at least once, and it's almost always played for Black Comedy.
• In Attack on Titan, the title creatures are regularly maimed and mangled in every fashion imaginable. Unlike the unfortunate humans they prey upon, nothing short of cutting out their nape will kill them. Likewise, the Titan Shifters suffer injuries that would leave a human crippled for life, if not outright dead. The stronger ones easily shrug off severed limbs and Slashed Throats and one soldier states that decapitation is probably the only certain way to kill them. And one Titan Shifter survives even that, though the method he used to do so is noted to be extremely dangerous and likely to result in brain damage, so it's not exactly something one would ever want to attempt except as a last resort.
• Baccano!:
  • Czeslaw Meyer seems to be the only main character to repeatedly suffer being shot, having limbs ripped off, and other rather gruesome events as the show tries hard to Break the Cutie.
  • The trope is also invoked in one episode when Szilard drinks the Elixir of Life given to him and the others by a demon Maiza had just summoned. After drinking it, he suspects he's been cheated and demands the demon to prove that the elixir was real. He obliges by immediately slicing off the top of his head.
• Koyomi Araragi, the main character of Bakemonogatari has a Healing Factor along with Super-Senses as remnants of his previous vampirism. This is fortunate since having his arm torn off is on the low end of the sort of things that happen to him.
• Battle Angel Alita: Not a direct application of this trope, since neither Alita nor her gigantic cyborg foes regenerate per se. However, since the in-universe rule of thumb is that as long as the brain is intact, it can be grafted into any kind of body overnight, it amounts to the same thing. Coincidentally, every fight she's in features lots and lots of dismemberments, slashfests and Ludicrous Gibs — on both sides. Good thing she can bolt those legs back on.
• In Basilisk, Tenzen is the big bad of the Iga clan and his unique special ability is immortality including full regeneration. Because of this, he is killed by at least five different ninjas of the rival Kouga clan (and several times elsewhere). Oboro later unlocks the key to kill him... by using her Piercing Eyes right when he's reviving himself. Enjoy your messy and painful death, buddy.
• Creed from Black Cat is defeated a number of times, fatally if not for his immortality.
• In Blade of the Immortal, the main character, Manji, can regenerate from any injury. He is an excellent swordsman and notes himself that he used to be better but, due to his immortality, has gotten sloppy. In one fight, he's glad to have an arm lopped off by an opponent, because the loss of the weight made him just a tad faster, just enough so that he can now keep up with his foe.
• In Blue Exorcist, Rin's regenerative powers are used as an excuse by Arthur Auguste Angel to justify cutting his foot off with Angel's BFS during a trial. Before that, Rin had been impaled by a zombie hand from his own teacher and stabbed in the shoulder with a sword.
• Atsushi of Bungo Stray Dogs can transform into a were-tiger, and possesses a powerful Healing Factor while in that form. Naturally, he's the one who suffers the most gruesome wounds.
• Common amongst all Devils in Chainsaw Man, which possess the ability to heal wounds as a result of a limited blood-consumption based regeneration. This is unless they fatally wounded, in which case they are reincarnated in Hell. This is taken even further with the Hybrids, who are capable of regenerating from fatal wounds such as decapitation and vertical bisection, provided they are given a sufficient level of blood and can reactivate their ‘starting mechanism’, ie. Denji’s ripcord. Makima, as the Control Devil, can force other humans and devils into receiving any damage inflicted upon her as a result of a contract that they cannot refuse. This means any wounds she receives in a battle instantaneously heal and appear on one of her subordinates instead.
• This trope defines Claymore. Offensive-type Claymores can lose an arm or leg, and simply hold the severed limb to their stump and have it heal. They can even regrow lost limbs, though the limb becomes regular, human strength. Defensive-types are nigh immortal, capable of regrowing lost limbs in minutes and routinely surviving distractions like being nearly cut in half. Odds are if you like a character who's a Defensive-type, you're going to see her get fucked up routinely.
  
  More specifically, high-level Defensive-types are able to regenerate quickly. The lower-ranked ones may take over a day to regenerate a lost limb, and even longer to recover from near-bisection. Only one character has been shown to regenerate her lost limb(s) in mere minutes, and that's due to special circumstances. Normally, it takes an extreme outpouring of power and effort to regenerate limbs or heal from extensive damage, along with recovery time afterwards. For Offensive-types, even reattaching limbs takes long minutes of uninterrupted concentration. Which can be problematic when enemies refuse to show Mook Chivalry during fights and consider a lost limb a good opportunity to finish their opponent off.
• In Cyborg 009, we only find out that Princess Ixquic is a Robot Girl when she pulls a Diving Save for Joe a.k.a. 009 and she suffers a huge injury in her arm, which heals itself almost immediately and reveals the robotic limbs hidden behind her synthetic skin.
• In D.Gray-Man, Allen Walker has a healing factor that only applies to his left eye and left arm. Guess what happens? And Kanda Yu would have been dead a while ago if he didn't have regenerative capabilities.
• dear has Kisara who is immortal. In one practice match, he impales one of his hand onto the opponent's blade in order to disarm and win.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, demons as a species have infinite regenerative capabilities, so demons that actually put up a fight usually get their body parts severed or are otherwise maimed, only for them to heal later. Powerful demons like the Upper Moons can even regenerate instantly.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Piccolo, and all Namekians, are established as having regenerative capabilities. He first demonstrates this During the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai. Unless his head is destroyed, he can use these powers to regenerate himself.
  • In the sanitized Saban/Ocean dub of Dragon Ball Z, Tenshinhan says his arm will grow back when Napa cuts it off. He's sent to the next dimension "before it can happen". Tenshinhan is human and does not have this ability in the manga or the original Japanese. The dub producers likely took advantage of the aforementioned Namekian capabilities. When Funimation went back and redubbed the Saiyan/Vegeta saga, they removed this tidbit.
  • Majin Buu can regenerate even if he's broken up into his constituent atoms, and when Goku and Vegeta escape from Earth as he blows it up he flies from planet to planet, blowing it (and himself) up and simply regenerating each time. Furthermore, unlike Cell below, all forms of Buu show less base durability than the Z-fighters do, equalizing for power. Goku and Kid Buu trading Kamehamehas leads to Buu getting torn to pieces and Goku simply adding to his collection of bruises.
  • Cell, the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier of From a Single Cell, loses a tail, an arm, and his entire upper body at various points before self-destructing and coming back from almost nothing.
• Freezing, Pandoras regularly experience absolutely brutal maiming even in training exercises, never mind real battles. They have the ability to regenerate and specialized infirmaries exist to actively restore them to full health. Even so, it comes with a price — regenerating fatal wounds or lost limbs shortens their (potential) lifespan in the process.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Ed's metal limbs get chopped off pretty often, but his real limbs barely get hurt. Similarly, the only place Al has never been hurt is the blood seal at the base of his neck, which is also the only part that Ed cannot repair. This is mostly because Ed often uses his automail arm to protect his fleshy parts because he knows they can be repaired, and Al takes special care to avoid taking damage to his bloodseal because any damage to it would kill him.
  • In his first meeting with Al, Greed invokes this deliberately, having a henchman literally smash his face off with a big hammer to demonstrate the Homunculi's healing factor. In general, all the homunculi have a tendency to get sliced, diced, and shot to pieces throughout the series.
• In Gankutsuou, it's really a good thing the Count is Gankutsuou's host. Thanks to that, he can survive being shot, being stabbed several times, having Gankutsuou's eyes pierce through his skull, and even being deliberately stabbed by Fernand's Humongous Mecha in an awesomely impressive scene. That doesn't prevent him from hurting like crazy though, as attested by his agonizing screams and his frequently passing out.
• In Ghost in the Shell, cyborgs can recover from (or rather, be repaired from) pretty much any injury that doesn't affect the brain. The Major, in particular, has a tendency to get limbs (and in one case, her head) blown off, but other characters are not exempt from this. Twice, if you're counting both the TV series and the first movie.
• Kenji Murasame in his appearance in Giant Robo is so known for this it earned him the nickname 'Murasame the Immortal' and is instrumental to the finale.
• Go, Go, Loser Ranger!: D's main power as a Duster is that he can't be killed, only turned into smoke to reform his body later. Yumeko has a habit of cutting off D's head when he annoys her, or even just as a greeting. D gets used to it.
• Guyver:
  • The Guyver can regrow from the tiniest piece of material left on the control metal. And that's not theoretical: this actually happens to Sho in one of his very first adventures, and results in him being a clone of himself. He has to fight a monster that generated from his severed arm. The only thing that can destroy a Guyver is the destruction of the control metal which is what happened to Guyver II.
  • Another cast member, Aptom, can not only grow back completely, including memories, from the smallest smattering of his body, but he can even clone himself this way. However, he does require biomass to do so, which he gets from absorbing opponents — gaining their abilities and appearance in the process. Shades of The Thing here.
• Exemplified in the humor manga Hannah of the Z, where the titular character's power is absurdly powerful regeneration — but her body is also comically weak in every other way, to the point where simply attempting to poke through the cap of a milk bottle or pick up a heavy object can cause her bones to break.
• Alucard's first fight in Hellsing has him purposely letting the enemy blow him into tiny little pieces so that they run out of ammo; immediately after, he heals and opens a can of whoop-ass. He has also survived having his head cut off. Integra actually mocks Anderson for thinking that decapitation can kill him. Seras has recovered between scenes from being shot in the chest with a 13mm round and being stabbed by several large bayonets at once. Father Alexander Anderson is a regenerator, specifically engineered to fight vampires and has survived both Alucard and several assassination attempts. Pretty much everyone else in the series, though, averts this trope. In fact, Alucard does this quite often when faced with non-magic weapons. It's practically a combat tactic for him. The Abridged Series, of course, takes this to Troll levels.
• Inuyasha:
  • Inu-Yasha is so good at healing or withstanding even terrible injuries that the manga tends to lampshade just how bad his wounds are when he struggles to recover from injuries as a way of indicating just how dangerous the fight he's been in was (such as when he's injured by his brother). This is particularly notable when he's in trapped in human form or when his injuries are so bad it takes his Superpowered Evil Side to heal them.
  • Sesshoumaru takes this even further. When he's finally so badly injured in a fight that he needs to be rescued, his anger at Inuyasha's sympathy for his plight results in him healing the damage to his only arm with pure fighting spirit alone. That doesn't end the fight, however, as his enemy then stabs him through the heart causing everyone to think he's dead. He comes back strong instead... and very, very angry.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Dio's vampiric abilities let him survive just about anything except sunlight and Hamon. In Part 1, he gets his head split vertically which only prompts him to push them together again and later fights on effectively after his head's been severed completely.
  • Hamon is also capable of harnessing the body's energy to rapidly heal itself or others.
  • Shows up a lot in Part 4, since The Hero Josuke's Stand Crazy Diamond can heal damn near anything. The twist is that Josuke can't heal himself with this ability.
  • Giorno, the hero of Part 5, has a Stand that can turn inanimate objects into living tissue, allowing him to heal wounds and even replace lost body parts. Naturally, he usually sustains some pretty horrible injuries whenever he gets in a fight. Its Achilles' Heel is that it requires direct contact with his hands, which becomes a plot point in an episode "The Notorious B.I.G.".
  • It's explicitly stated that being or becoming a Stand user makes you tougher and lets you heal faster, thus allowing most of the cast, protagonists and antagonists alike, to suffer grievous bloody wounds, severed body parts, shattered bones and ruptured organs, and sometimes losing parts of their head, without a single "ow". In Part 6, they go without a dedicated healer for a long time; Jolyne makes do by stitching up injuries with her thread, and the wounds are no less horrid.
  • Hot Pants, an ally from Part 7, has a Stand that can spray flesh allowing the user to reattach body parts and heal external wounds instantly.
• The Silver King in K - he's completely immortal and he exploits this, constantly coming up with plans that would get himself killed. He goes missing for a year, causing his Clansmen to almost wonder if he's actually dead.
• The second half of Kill la Kill gives us Ragyo Kiryuin, who possesses powerful regenerative abilities thanks to being fused with Life Fibers. As a result, her first battle with the protagonists features her getting stabbed in the back and crucified without much inconvenience on her part. We also learn Ryuko has that same regenerative ability, and actually invokes this trope in the penultimate episode, taking an otherwise fatal injury to get past Ragyo.
• While everyone received injuries in Lyrical Nanoha, the really serious ones, such as impalement and losing huge chunks of flesh, went to the Wolkenritter and the Combat Cyborgs, who can be repaired and/or have Healing Factors. Good thing too. As one Flashback showed, even with Healing Hands, a normal human who gets critically wounded would require almost a year to recover, and that's if they're lucky.
• Mermaid Saga. Yuta and Mana appear to find themselves in situations inexplicably designed to make them bleed as much as possible. Sure, there's some bloodshed to be had when dealing with immortal crazies, and they can't die unless they're killed in very specific manners... but did Masato really need to bind Mana's arms and legs with barbed wire?
• Rin in Mnemosyne seems very prone to being captured and tortured quite gruesomely and having things happen like her arm being shot off by a sniper rifle, being blown up with a massive charge of explosives, and even getting sucked through a running jet engine. Being immortal, she manages to walk them off, though not without quite a lot of pain in the process of regrowing/reattaching lost parts (understandably, the Turbine Blender took a while). Her personal best is regenerating from her own disembodied time fruit after the Big Bad removed it from her (normally the only way to actually kill an immortal) and then took it near the base of Yggdrasill.
• Monster Musume has Zombina, who, being a zombie, can always be stitched back together, no matter how much she's shot, crushed or sliced apart. Unsurprisingly, her tendency to get injured has reached Running Gag status.
• My Hero Academia: Variant. Every time Midoriya uses One For All, he breaks at least one bone, which Recovery Girl can easily fix. During the sports festival, he goes completely beyond, breaking every bone in his hands and then shattering his arm. Aizawa notes that the only reason he's going so far is because he knows he can be healed. After, Recovery Girl points out that even with her healing, he's caused permanent damage, and flatly tells him she will not be healing any more of his self-inflicted injuries. It's the only way she can think of to force him to stop hurting himself.
  • After obtaining the All For One quirk Tomura Shigaraki has made the most use of the hyper regeneration quirk, allowing him to survive being nearly incinerated, having his hands shot off, and hit directly by a Missile.
• Naruto:
  • The title character's Healing Factor provided to him thanks to the demon fox has led him to having some of the most extreme injuries in the series, including having an electrified hand shoved through his chest twice and all of his skin burnt off.
  • Tsunade also qualifies, being stabbed and slashed repeatedly by Orochimaru during their fight and shrugging it off with her Genesis Rebirth technique. She can heal from even the most grievous of injuries, but with the trade-off that it accelerates her natural aging and reduces her lifespan.
  • Orochimaru himself. His regenerative powers have let him survive getting set on fire while bombarded with shuriken, having his face ripped open, getting his neck broken, having one arm torn off, his whole body getting ripped into two pieces, getting pounded into the ground head first by a giant Breath Weapon, and having sword repeatedly cut the pieces of him apart; it's always been sealing techniques that had any permanent effect. It doesn't even seem like he's even TRYING to avoid half this stuff.
  • Jugo and Suigetsu also seem prone to rather insane injuries to demonstrate their Nigh-Invulnerability, like getting hit with a blast that destroyed a mountain or getting impaled through the chest, smashed into a wall, and crushed under rubble all in a row.
  • Kisame averts this though: he is able to heal himself by fusing with Samehada but he avoids getting injured enough to use it until a very long time after he is introduced.
  • Karin has finally surpassed Tsunade as a medic with Heal Thyself powers. Sakura is at least on par with Tsunade by the finale of the Fourth Ninja War.
  • Obito has lost four right arms over the course of the manga. The first was his actual arm, with the subsequent ones being cloned Zetsu tissue. He can regenerate the entire arm to combat readiness within minutes.
  • Madara, after having stolen Hashirama's power, is capable of healing himself within seconds, even after getting a thorough pounding by the tailed beasts and having half his torso blown out by the Night Guy.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Subverted and lampshaded, when they use Cassiopeia to jump back seven days to fix everything and they appeared in the sky instead of the ground.
    Chisame: You can't heal us if we went down with a splat, right?
    Konoka: Th-th-th-th-this one's probably impossible~
  • Negima's Stealth Sequel, UQ Holder!, plays it painfully (no pun intended) straight. Touta take a lot of damage, much of it fatal had it not been for his powers. In one fight, he even lets himself get decapitated just to get inside an enemy's guard.^note he had an arm already moving into position to put it back on his neck.
• One Piece:
  • Buggy the Clown is the only person who has been literally cut to shreds by Zoro and Mihawk, despite both being capable of doing so to anybody — naturally, he can survive that injury quite easily because of his ability to separate his body parts at will, as he simply pieces himself back together.
  • The users of Logia Devil Fruits display a sort of pseudo-regenerative ability. If their bodies are cut or otherwise injured while in their elemental state, they can simply reform themselves using their element. However, this regenerative ability only applies when their elemental bodies are harmed. If their true bodies are harmed, through Haki or other means, they receive damage and feel pain as a normal human would, and cannot heal from it with their powers.
  • Healing is the primary aspect of Marco's Devil Fruit, which allows him to transform into a phoenix of blue flames. Like how the phoenix is said to rise from its own ashes, Marco is able to regenerate from any injuries using his blue phoenix flames. Unlike Logia Devil Fruits whose pseudo-healing is simply reforming their elemental bodies or using their fluid-like states to avoid the blow in the first place, Marco's ability actually heals his injuries, placing his regenerative capabilities a step higher than Logia fruits.
• Pokémon:
  • In the episode "Abra and the Psychic Showdown" of Pokémon: The Series, Pikachu scores a major hit against Sabrina's Kadabra. Ash's Oh, Crap! face when Kadabra uses Recover is quite entertaining.
  • The Pokémon Adventures manga:
    • Koga's Arbok has the unique ability to regenerate any severed portion of its body as long as its head is intact. Unsurprisingly, attacks that would inflict only minor injuries on other Pokémon (being bitten by another Arbok, being tail-whipped) literally slice this Arbok in half. (This was a Retcon added much later to try to tone down the level of the violence in the manga to be more in-line with the games and anime. Before the Retcon, we were lead to believe that one of the heroes totally sliced that Arbok in two and left it for dead.)
    • Moon is a pharmacist who can make medicines that border on miraculous on how well they treat injuries and illnesses. Sure enough, as soon as she steps into Alola, it seems like human and Pokemon alike constantly get injured around her so that she can heal them. Fans have noticed that Sun gets beaten up often and severely to a degree not seen in past main characters.
• Moka's mother in Rosario + Vampire, Akasha. She survives being cut in half at one point, and it's implied by the method used to seal Alucard that her regeneration might be at From a Single Cell levels. Since he's nearly died from Taking the Bullet multiple times, Tsukune might count as well, albeit only by injection of Moka's blood. However, he's implied to be more compatible with the process than most humans.
• Yakumo in 3×3 Eyes has been turned into a "wu", an immortal guardian of the last known Sanjiyan (Triclops) who regenerates even if he has been turned into paste. He cannot die until either the Sanjiyan, Pai, is killed, or she manages to find a way to release him from said condition. At the start of the series, he regularly gets beaten, chopped up, and blown up (it started when he was hit by a bus). At one point, he deliberately grabs a lighter and jumps into a fountain full of gasoline in order to kill a monster. Some of his deaths are simple random bad luck, like the aforementioned car accident; one wonders if he had that kind of bad luck before he was immortal.
• Ban from The Seven Deadly Sins has Complete Immortality after drinking from the Fountain of Youth, meaning that he can shrug off basically anything anyone can do to him. Unfortunately for him, this also means that he's inevitably the one getting hurt, and even his allies don't feel the need to hold back when giving him a smack.
• So I'm a Spider, So What?:
  • The protagonist has a special Skill which acts as a Level-Up Fill-Up, which also restores any injuries she might have sustained. This allows Kumoko to suffer what would otherwise be crippling injuries in most major fights, such as the loss of multiple legs, eyes, and even large parts of her body, as they'll all be restored so long as she wins.
    • Kumoko later gains Immortality and the ability to naturally regenerate which is an excuse for her to survive being literally splattered by Ariel.
  • Wrath has the same ability as Kumoko which comes in handy when part of his head is blasted off by a mage. He only survives because his dying action was to make an attack which killed an enemy and granted a life-saving level up.
  • Sophia's fight with Wrath involved her being literally decapitated, only for her body to grab her head out of the air and reattach it. She was losing a massive amount of HP while the head was detached but managed to heal before she hit 0.
• Soul Eater:
  • Free is of the clumsy/accident magnet variety. Amongst other things, he accidentally freezes himself. Part of it is his own fault, though. He knows he's completely immortal, so he doesn't really even bother with trying to protect himself.
  • Kim's magic turns out to be based on healing, so as you might expect she gets impaled rather abruptly just before showing this.
• Sword Art Online:
  • The avatars in the VMMORPGs can easily regenerate lost limbs after a few minutes, so long as the user still has HP left.
  • Leafa's Terraria avatar in Alicization has infinite auto-regeneration of damage as one of its default skills. However, the lack of pain absorber means that she can still feel any wound inflicted on her.
• Trigun:
  • Both Vash and his brother Knives have a very impressive regeneration capability. However, Vash appears to have less so, as his body looks like it was sewn back together very, very poorly. In the manga, it's shown that Plants in general have the capability to regenerate; however, it has a limit. They can only regenerate so much before it kills them. The way one can tell is by watching the color of their hair, as regeneration will cause their hair to slowly turn from its normal color to black. Once every strand is black, the individual dies. Problem is, Vash is almost completely raven-haired by this point. At the end of the manga, both Vash and Knives' hair have gone completely black, indicating they're both a very short way from death. Knives' went as such due to reconstructing his body from almost nothing; he later uses his power to create an apple tree, and it's heavily implied that this finally killed him.
  • The reason for Vash's lesser regenerative ability is that Knives replenished his own power by absorbing other Plants and taking their own power into himself. Vash, the Friend to All Living Things, would never have done this.
• Andy from Undead Unluck has the power to negate his own death, giving him complete immortality and rapid regeneration. Fuuko, the other deuteragonist, has the power to inflict fatal bad luck on anyone she touches. A long series of creative deaths for Andy naturally ensues.

Comic Books

• Robotman in the All-Star Squadron comics was a non-healer example; he'd constantly get his arms and legs sliced off since he has a robot body and they can be fixed. The Doom Patrol Legacy Character version underwent similar travails. Similarly, Red Tornado of the Justice League tends to be the official team sacrificial lamb since he can be rebuilt rather easily. And rounding it out, the Metal Men seemingly can't go ten issues without at least one member being reduced to scrap, even in the Silver Age. Tin, as ever, got the worst of it.
• Beast Wars: Uprising: Rampage, who has the ability to survive wounds that would kill any other Cybertronian. Although, as a Death Seeker, he's a little bit pissed every time he tries to die, and wakes up to find himself back in good condition. In the final story, he turns out to have Complete Immortality.
• Captain America on several occasions ends up getting an arm broken or whatnot, with the most recent incident happening in the Uncanny Avengers (2023), and typically there'll be a scene where someone will mention in amazement that his broken bone will heal completely within 2 weeks or even less!
• Deadpool: Deadpool, the Merc with a Mouth. His regeneration ability is actually in part derived from Wolverine's own. A high tolerance of pain and insanity allow him to frankly not care about any damage he receives and keep fighting regardless. The only problem is, his brain is constantly in flux as a result, which is why he's... unstable.
  • Deadpool is... thrilled to meet up with Alex Hayden (Agent X), who can also regenerate. Deadpool shows his affection by spelling out messages with Alex's entrails, and also stealing his pancreas just because he can.
  • Deadpool has jumped face first into concrete from a 10 story building to try to "fix" looking like "Thom Cruz".
  • Deadpool has also jumped into a malfunctioning nuclear reactor to stop it from going nuclear.
  • In Cable & Deadpool, Cable's preferred method of getting Deadpool to leave him alone, at least at first, is to telekinetically blow up his brain, resulting in a nasty-looking head wound and Deadpool being down for about an hour.
• The titular heroes of Bill Willingham's supernatural superhero comics Elementals got mangled fairly regularly. Being that they were dead already, it was only a temporary inconvenience.
• Jack in Jack of Fables. It is explained that this is partially the result of some karmic payback the universe owes him for making himself nearly invincible. The universe hates to see invincibility exist without a purpose, so it punishes him at every opportunity.
  • All of the Fable-folk have this ability which is directly proportional to the popularity of the Fable in question. Snow White recovered from a sniper bullet through the brain in a matter of months. Goldilocks healed up nicely from an axe to the head, a fall off a cliff, getting hit by a truck then falling off ANOTHER cliff into a river where she proceeded to drown repeatedly and get eaten by the local aquatic fauna after she was found by Mr. Revise in Jack of Fables. Jack, since he's THE Jack of Tales (even though he's the antecedent to Wicked John) can heal from most things almost instantaneously. Most other fables can be killed but if they're just injured you can expect a fairly speedy recovery. Fables that die are given a burial in the Witching Well.
• Find a Doom Patrol story where Robotman doesn't lose at least one limb. In an early solo story, Robotman tracks an escaped killer through a booby-trapped island and rips off all his limbs to use them as various tools. He tears off his own leg and warps it into a giant key to open a door that he could have obviously just broken down, since he was strong enough to TEAR OFF HIS OWN LEG AND WARP IT INTO A GIANT KEY.
• The Marvel character Darkhawk can heal by transforming into his human form and then changing back again. He discovered this after having his heart/amulet ripped out by a villain named Tombstone.
• Pretty much the entire reason for being for Great Lakes Avengers' Mr. Immortal, who can come back from any fatal injury... and has no other powers.
• Guardians of the Galaxy:
  • Gamora has a healing factor which allows her to survive being set on fire (even if it does take several issues, due to the severity of her burns).
  • Groot can regrow missing limbs in a matter of minutes or seconds, survive gaping chest wounds (since he lacks anything resembling internal organs), and, if destroyed, can regrow from a single splinter. Since this is very badass, expect him to do that very often.
• A variant shows up in one of the Heroes comics. During the Vietnam War, Daniel Linderman is forced to use his ability by his fellow soldier so that the latter can continuously torture and revive a Vietcong soldier for information.
• Invincible: This trope is highly common in this particular comic series. The Viltrumites and other character with a Healing Factor have sooner or later bounced back from loss of teeth and being disemboweled.
• Iron Man: Iron Man has a variant of this, in that his power comes from his armor and he can build a new one basically whenever he wants. Because of this, despite the fact that his armor is supposed to be really powerful, it tends to get torn apart really easily.
• Marvel Comics 2: Played hilariously straight in the Last Hero Standing story set in the Marvel Comics possible-future MC2 universe. The Hulk, under Loki's influence, goes on a killing rampage against the Avengers Next and various other future heroes. Despite his massive strength, insane rage, and lack of holding back, he does no permanent damage to anyone. What he does do is pound Wolverine into the dirt (who, of course, can regenerate), tear off Spider-Man's prosthetic leg and The Thing's robot arm, shatter the Big Brain (a robot) into pieces, and break the arms and head off The Vision (an android). So every injury is repairable. He hits a bunch of regular heroes too, but they just get knocked flying.
• Lobo: Lobo was originally created as a parody of Wolverine and character types like him. He is able to regenerate from even one remaining drop of blood. In one issue of his book, he resorts to blowing himself up just to take out all the enemies surrounding him.
• In the pages of New Avengers, The Sentry ripped the Carnage symbiote in half and threw it into the sun. Of course, Carnage came back about five years later. How? It turns out that because the Carnage symbiote is part of Cletus Kasady's bloodstream, it was able to put Cletus in a coma and keep it alive, nearly dying to do so. Considering the random stuff Carnage, Venom and other symbiotes have done, this is completely believable compared to some other resurrections.
• Minor Marvel character in New Mutants Wolfsbane has a 'healing factor', which means she has been knocked unconscious (with a rifle butt!) and recovered with a short headache ('the lord didn't make me pretty, but he gave me a thick skull'); it was implied that she survived being slashed with a katana by the Silver Samurai, and her friend Dani Moonstar's defence of her while down gained the Samurai's respect, so he left them alive.
• In Preacher 'V-word' Cassidy can regenerate back from anything given enough time; blood merely speeds up the process. At one point, he's captured by the villains after pretending to be Jesse, and after they realize he's practically invulnerable, trap him in a pit and shoot him over and over with a rifle. By the time Jesse rescues him, he's got one leg, one arm, and no genitals, at least for a while. When describing past events he mentions overdosing on heroin and being buried, eventually waking up in his coffin, forced to vomit up the embalming fluid and feed off insects until his organs regenerating enough to dig out of his own grave, the whole process taking over a month. He also recovered from being shot by the Saint of Killers, which is possibly even more remarkable considering that the Saint's guns, forged from the Angel of Death's sword, are supposed to be able to kill anyone, even immortals.
• Robin (1993): Johnny Warlock gets quite mangled in his fights with Robin and Spoiler once he ends up playing host to a cruel magical entity that can heal him from just about anything. At one point Tim spends days freaking out thinking he'd killed Johnny, but Johnny had just gotten up and calmly walked out of the morgue. His hand that got blown off before being possessed stays gone though.
• Savage Dragon can regrow lost limbs, continue talking after getting holes blasted through his chest, and has fought without skin on at least two occasions all due to his healing powers.
• The comparatively minor character Shatterstar from the spinoff X-Force has correspondingly less extreme healing abilities... but he needs them because his signature attack is stabbing himself through the gut to impale somebody standing behind him.
• Simon Dark: While Simon also has regenerative powers it's Tom Kirk who keeps getting horribly wounded, probably because Simon has other flashy powers to show off. Tom gets shot, his neck broken, impaled through the head and chest, and at one point has his hand hanging by a thread all of which he finds rather annoying.
• Superman and other Kryptonians actually have a Healing Factor. Once Superman was mind-controlled into beating himself up early in his Post-Crisis career, Pa Kent mentions to himself that his son has super healing and it'd only be a few minutes before all the bruises disappear. In another incident, General Zodd had been captured by the Suicide Squad and was forcibly recruited by having a kryptonite bomb implanted in his brain. But soon after he had the opportunity to open up his own skull and remove the bomb by hand, and he was already quickly recovering despite a good chunk of his skull gone.
• Lampshaded by Cyborg in Titans #5, after his latest self-repair: "There. I am walking, with my new feet on the floor. Let's see if I can go the weekend without getting them blown off."
• Wolverine:
  • Wolverine combines his regeneration with Made of Iron to be pretty damn careless. In one instance, his entire body, save his adamantium skeleton, is incinerated by a Wave-Motion Gun, and he regenerates from a handful of brain cells left in his cranial cavity. Said skeleton is actually an example. Should he ever lose his healing factor, the metal in his skeleton will kill him.
  • On one occasion in Ultimate X Men, he had another mutant blast him with fire in order to break him out of his restraints, which burned off much of his skin and hair (but not his Magic Pants). This was — of course — done since he could (and would) regenerate from the damage.
  • They're really going all-out in the Ultimate universe. When Ultimate Wolverine was possessed by Proteus he got hit by a truck. The aftermath is never explicitly shown but implied to be so gruesome that the X-Men have to wait a few minutes for Wolverine to regenerate his mouth and vocal cords before they can talk to him again. When his mind got swapped with Peter Parker's, Peter accidentally cuts off one of Wolvie's fingers so the writers can show it growing back. When Wolvie gets ambushed by some mercenaries with an unexplained grudge against him the leader spends a long time shooting him in the forehead just to torture him. He also gets shot a lot. So much so that he often doesn't even notice until after the battle when he realizes he still has bullets lodged under his skin. Apparently, the guards at the Weapon X program used to entertain themselves by shooting Wolverine over and over so they could watch him regenerate.
  • When Ultimate Wolverine went after the Hulk in the Ultimate universe. Hulk at the time was at peace (literally sitting on a throne, surrounded by riches, fine food and drink, and half-naked servant girls). He was a little upset at Wolverine for disturbing him... And ended their fight by tearing him in half at the waist and throwing his legs on top of the mountain. This is resolved in flashback: the introduction would be Wolverine dragging his torso up the mountain to find his lower half, not before he bleeds to death, but before his body heals in such a way that he would have to cut himself apart to again put himself back together.
  • This is also how Marvel lampshades Logan's near-constant cigar smoking: the Healing Factor "makes it okay". In-depth explanation: Wolverine cannot get cancer. If one of his cells turns cancerous, the surrounding cells will immediately team up and beat the cancer out of it. He's THAT violent.
  • In one comic he drives several Nazi death camp commandants crazy by just letting them execute him over and over again and turning up again later as if nothing's happened. At one point he just stands in a gas chamber and refuses to die.
  • This trope is also later subverted by Ultimate Wolverine. He loses his healing factor and becomes Cable. As Cable he has to rely more on planning and wits now that he can die from massive damage.
  • Marvel Anime: Wolverine shows seems to have this in spades. While he does occasionally dodge, he spends quite a bit of time losing huge chunks of skin and flesh. At one point, he's knocked to the floor and loses a chunk of forehead big enough to show his skull.
  • During the period where he lost his healing factor, he picked a fight with Black Panther. Panther easily overpowered him while noting that Logan's entire fighting style hinges on his body's ability to absorb damage, a style that was useless in his current state.
  • It's been noted in-universe that Wolverine's healing ability has made him careless. Since he's able to recover from nearly any damage and has long since gotten accustomed to extreme pain, he tends to let himself take normally-lethal injuries just to keep the fight going or escape a bad situation just because it was faster than a more measured approach.
  • X-23 and Daken are beginning to give Wolverine a run for his money. X-23, at least, is a better healer than Wolverine because she isn't constantly fighting massive adamantium poisoning. However, this is somewhat subverted in her case, in that her lack of a full adamantium skeleton means she's much less durable than Wolverine and more vulnerable to injuries that can disable or outright kill her. Laura will at times take advantage of her ability to heal if necessary, but she generally relies more on Waif-Fu to avoid getting hit in the first place, or her assassin skills to avoid a direct confrontation altogether. Laura finally averts this in All-New Wolverine #19 where she starts wearing a new costume with body armor.
• While some writers, especially since the '90s, will insist on writing Wonder Woman as a female Superman without the eye powers she's usually much less durable than him, but can heal fast enough that it doesn't really matter:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Diana recovers from being knocked out via brute force and/or poison much faster than her regular human allies like Steve Trevor or Etta Candy and her Holliday Girls, which has allowed Di to save their lives and the day on several occasions. Especially since Diana can come to even when the oxygen is far too low for humans to stay conscious in.
  • Wonder Woman (1987):
    • In issue 4 she's able to defeat Decay by strengthening this power using her lasso, going from withered to on her feet and perfectly healthy in about three panels.
    • When an evil galactic empire was attempting to enslave Wondy and she started fighting back as the drugs wore off much sooner than they anticipated they shot her in the temple at point blank range with an energy gun. She woke up several hours later with serious bruising, burns and her eye swollen shut but was back to normal by the end of the day.
  • Wonder Woman (2011): Lennox discovered his powers when a German bomb blew up the house he was in and killed everyone else during the Blitz. He subsequently used his healing abilities to charge through hails of German gunfire getting shot all along the way while fighting in WWII.
  • Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Maru puts several sniper rounds through Diana, which the Amazon shrugs off and heals from even as she uses the injuries to pinpoint Maru's location.
  • Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman: In "Generations" she yanks a spear out of her shoulder/chest and throws it at Cheetah (who dodges, but Di was aiming behind her anyway) and the gory hole left behind is almost entirely closed by the time the spear hits its target.
• Everyone in the X-Men suddenly started getting injured more in battles shortly after they were joined by Elixir, a mutant whose power is to heal himself and others. It's almost like they were deliberately being more careless just so the new guy could feel more useful. It gets even worse in House of X, when the ability to resurrect a mutant in a new body every time they die gets developed. Some characters become downright careless about getting themselves killed.

Comic Strips

• The first creatures to get hurt in Wormy (except for some wronged dwarves) are a pair of Trolls.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Monster X has a truly alien Healing Factor, somewhat similar to Ghidorah. Over the course of the story, Monster X suffers and regenerates from damage that in all probability would permanently debilitate if not outright kill most other Titans like Godzilla and Rodan in the event those Titans' enemies got past their natural armor and defences enough to inflict it — namely, Monster X's lungs get liquified by chlorine gas at one point, and at another point more than half their body is torn apart and blown away.
• All For Luz: During the Battle of Gravesfield, Luz remarks to herself that if it wasn't for her "Super Regeneration", she would have died a long time ago and has become more and more reliant on that Quirk ever since she stole it. Her injuries that she survived the past 4 hours alone include: Fingore, Eye Scream, Jawbreaker, Facial Horror, Tear Off Your Face, multiple cases of An Arm and a Leg, Torso with a View twice, Impaled with Extreme Prejudice several times, Gutted Like a Fish, Half the Man He Used to Be and even being reduced to Ludicrous Gibs!
• Eleutherophobia:
  • The series starts with Tom being Spared by the Adaptation because his skull was smashed open. From there, he's broken a wing and plummeted to the ground as an owl, been bitten in half as a snake, and shattered his pelvis after jumping out of a second-storey window. Good thing that Shapeshifting Heals Wounds.
  • Discussed and Played for Drama in How I Live Now. Tom reluctantly explains to the Animorphs that before the Yeerks could set up a cleaner way to keep morph-capable hosts not named Alloran contained, they used to shoot them, break their bones, or dismember them so they could be neutralised long enough for their Yeerks to feed.
• In Oh God, Not Again!, Harry encounters a Sphinx in a maze and well,
  Sphinx: Right. Do not worry, though, as I am not permitted to kill you. That said, healers can work all sorts of miracles these days.
• In the Doctor Who fanfic 3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Clara gets injured in increasingly horrific ways. If it weren't for her personal cloud of Nanomachines, she would be dead many times over. Her healing allows her to survive breaking her arm in four places, being impaled on a branch, and even having to rip a crossbow bolt out of her own face.
• George in With Strings Attached can shapeshift from “himself hurt” to “himself not hurt.” He recovers from a broken ankle, various cuts and scrapes, and finally multiple fractures after he falls through a roof. He has to be conscious to do this, so if he were killed he wouldn't get better. (Then they'd have to tote him off to the resurrectionist.)
• In Amazing Fantasy, the Nomu's Super Regeneration Quirk allows him to shrug off nearly anything the Heroes throw at him. Because of this, Bakugou and Todoroki resort to lethal force to keep Nomu at bay, resulting in graphic descriptions of the monster being forced to regenerate from having his brain scorced and limbs frozen off.
• In Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, Jack has an auto-repair system that functions like this, thanks to living with Dr. Brainstorm. A villainous example occurs with Shadow.
• While it's never been shown in the anime canon, this is a common piece of Hetalia: Axis Powers Fanon, supported by the fact that in the manga, Russia survives his heart falling out on a regular basis, and China has a scar directly over his spine from when Japan stabbed him. It's so prevalent that "consensual guro" is quite popular among certain sections of the fanbase, with characters treating killing each other like a form of S&M.
• In Rabbit of the Moon, Bell takes a lot of hurt thanks to his Resurrective Immortality and the healing effects of the Old Blood. To date, he's been decapitated, pumped full of quicksilver bullets, stabbed, eaten, crushed into a bloody smear, impaled by his own Wrecked Weapon, among other gruesome fates.
• Forgive Us Our Trespasses, a Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) fanfic, invokes, exploits, deconstructs and plays this trope straight with Vengeance, whose power is basically turning herself into a living bomb.
• In the Pony POV Series Dark World, the mane six have been given Complete Immortality by Discord to serve as his Co-Dragons. Once members begin to break free, they make good use of the fact they can regenerate From a Single Cell so long as their Element of Chaos is intact, both being willing to take more damage due to it and actually harm themselves if it'll give them an advantage. In fact, Rarity's Healing Hands ability from her Element of Desire lets her take injuries from others into herself, which her Healing Factor quickly deals with. On another occasion the Valeyard's trap in case Twilight tries the Memory Spell on him implants a copy of his personality that tries to pull a Grand Theft Me. Twilight has the others smash her head to kill it, then regenerates a new one free of it.
• Navarone doesn't deliberately set out to get himself injured, but he does end up taking far more damage after gaining his Healing Factor in Diaries of a Madman.
• Rampage in Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons can regenerate from anything thanks to the Phoenix Talisman inside her. She's been shot, drowned, fed through a wood chipper, disintegrated, and at one point chained up as a self-replenishing buffet for psychotic cannibals. Her own allies have been known to blow her head off from time to time because it's a reliable way of snapping her out of a psychotic episode.
• In Raindancer, Izuku has suffered a broken jaw, numerous broken ribs, injured his heel, and took multiple concussions from being bludgeoned over the head on separate occasions. He is able to heal all of these away simply by becoming water and transforming back into his perfectly healthy flesh-and-blood state.
• In My Huntsman Academia, Izuku's Aura is the only thing keeping him from suffering deformities and scarring from his bone-breaking usage use of One For All. He abuses this to make use of more Glenn Smashes in dangerous situations by giving himself a short rest to fix his fingers between fights. He takes it up a notch when he begins using a technique he calls "Go Beyond", fracturing his bones, stressing his blood vessels, and tearing his muscles from bone to temporarily utilize double his normal safe limit while using his Aura to keep himself taped together.
• Used for a quick gag in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines. After Ash's Muk accidentally gets one of his hands severed while training, he nonchalantly reabsorbs it into his body and regrows it.
• Ryuko's fighting style in Natural Selection heavily involves this when she's not flat-out overpowering anyone unfortunate enough to face her. Thanks to her Life Fiber biology, she's willing to take what should be crippling damage to figure out an opponent's strategies, their capabilities or just to intimidate them and show them how meaningless their efforts are.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man: Lost in Gotham: Spider-Man manages to stop a monorail before it falls off a destroyed bridge. However, the effort required left him exhausted with a severely strained back. The Bats are worried about him and take him to the Bat Cave for treatment... only to learn that Spider-Man has a healing factor. For him, a strained back is cured with a couple hours of bed rest.
• In Resonance Days, everyone can recover from any injury regardless of how severe. This results in events like Mami and Charlotte both getting their heads blown off by the former, the villainous void walker quartet being dropped from an airplane with no way of slowing their fall (one having just gotten a bullet throuogh her head), and Kyoko at one point having to remove her own eyes to counter a poison. All of these recover within two chapters at most. There is also a Running Gag that Ticky Nikki wants to turn the mermaid Oktavia into sushi, which is only treated as an annoyance at best.
• Chapter 5 of the Bleach fic To Undo it All shows Ichigo in his Shikai and Unohona in her Bankai casually ignoring severed arms so they can enjoy a good spar thanks to this trope.
• When Leviathan arrives in Manehattan's Lone Guardian's eponymous city, it's with all the damage she sustained from getting curbstomped by Omega at the start of Mega Man Zero 3, including a very nasty rent in her side that exposes her endoskeleton and wiring. Her auto-repair systems are capable of restoring her to full health without assistance, though it's a slow process. In addition, she notes that while the systems can repair, they can't replace: if she loses a limb completely, it's gone for good without outside help.
• Vow of the King: How much damage people take in a fight notably increases after healing kido and Orihime's healing powers are introduced. Unohana can't go a single fight without getting all of her limbs hacked off.

Films — Animation

• B.O.B. the gelatinous goo blob/jello thingy from Monsters vs. Aliens gets crushed all the time as a result of his ability to reform himself.
• Wreck-It Ralph:
  • In order to save themselves from quicksand, Felix and Calhoun need to keep the taffy laughing so that it stretches down towards them and they can get out. Felix's solution is to get Calhoun to punch him in the face repeatedly. She's hesitant to continuously abuse him for no particular reason, but he reassures her by showing that, using his magic hammer, he can even fix himself.
  • Earlier in the same movie, Ralph accidentally breaks off a piece of the ceiling, which falls on Felix and kills him. Fortunately, he immediately gets better, as he has extra lives in his own video game.
• Scamper from Igor demonstrates his Healing Factor in practically every scene he's in, mostly because he hadn't actually wanted to be re-animated via Mad Science and keeps trying different ways of killing himself.
• Hulk Vs. Wolverine: Logan cuts off Deadpool's arm. In several pieces. Deadpool, as usual, is completely unfazed by this (although he is upset about losing his favorite gun) and has to get the parts aligned just right for it to re-attach properly.
• Transformers: The Movie: The Junkions are Made of Plasticine and fall to pieces without much effort, but they can instantly reattach any severed body parts just by pressing them into the right spot and keep going.

Films — Live-Action

• The Amazing Spider-Man Series:
  • The Amazing Spider-Man: The Lizard gets attacked by a dozen SWAT officers who proceed to fill him full of bullets, all to demonstrate his Healing Factor.
  • Spider-Man is said to have this in the The Amazing Spider-Man 2. This is what makes his blood so invaluable to Harry Osborn, who's dying of a rare genetic disease and explains how Peter can get pounded on so much and then wake up the next day feeling 100%.
• Used multiple times in The Faculty. However, it's subverted in the case of Jon Stewart's character, who after being turned back human isn't able to regenerate and is subjected to an eyepatch and four missing fingers at the movie's closing.
• As in the manga, it happens in The Guyver. The Guyver is killed halfway through, but the villains keep the control metal in order to study and duplicate it. Of course, they completely ignore the growing organic mass stuck to the thing until it's accidentally swallowed by a monster during a fight with some of The Guyver's allies, at which point he completes his regeneration at the speed of plot and cuts his way out of the creature's stomach.
• The Last Starfighter: Centauri is shot in the chest partway through the film and seemingly dies, with Grig closing his eyes for him and consoling Alex. He comes Back for the Finale and explains that he didn't die, he was just dormant while his body healed itself.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Dorian Gray is immortal as long as he never looks at the painting of himself, and Mina Harker is a vampire who can only be killed by a stab through the heart, so both of them will regenerate from just about anything. They get into a sword fight during the climax of the film, injure each other repeatedly, and Dorian whines "We're going to be at this all day!" After he suffers a particularly nasty injury:
  Dorian: If that had been permanent, I'd have been very upset!
• In Paul, Paul's healing powers can revive the dead and heal the wounded, while Paul's body absorbs and processes the injuries. Paul appears to die from his last attempt at healing, but he does come back to life.
• Snow White & the Huntsman: During Snow White's climactic fight with Queen Ravenna, the latter demonstrates how impervious she is by stepping right into a fire while boasting about her immortality, letting her skin burn and healing it at the same time.
• Starship Troopers: The Federation's advanced medical technology allows characters to undergo a lot of punishment, and allows the Drill Sergeant Nasty to get away with a lot of casual brutality. Zim breaks a recruits arm with a compound fracture and sticks a knife through Ace's hand; Zim's arm appears in a blue futuristic liquid cast in the next scene and appears fine in the next scene after, and Ace's hand injury is shown briefly covered in a bandage. Rico gets a Bug mandible through his thigh during the Clusterf-, uh, Battle of Klendathu but spends a few weeks in an Auto Doc tank and is soon back into fighting shape (in real life a wound like that would take months of healing and rehabilitation, at best; most likely he would have been disabled for life).
• Terminator:
  • The T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day showed off the movie's control of newfangled CGI technology, getting blown around and smashed apart, yet always flowing back together (Though he eventually got enough damage to make his disguise power less than effective).
  • Along the same logic as this trope, the Arnold Schwarzenegger terminators go through a lot of punishment to show off how implacable they are.
  • The T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines gets it just as bad, as she gets holes shot into her constantly.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Wolverine in all the movies. The movie version went with "painful and suicidal because he can", including an instance where he punctured his own lungs to get out of restraints (and another, less fatal, of putting out his cigar on his palm, complete with wince). As usual, he takes a lot of punishment throughout The Wolverine, but his survival of an atomic bomb really stands out.
  • Sabretooth and Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and again for the latter in Deadpool, who cuts off his own hand to escape custody, and breaks both of his arms ineffectually punching Colossus.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Magneto deals with humans and mutants other than Wolverine by shooting them, threatening to shoot them, or restraining them with metal. Magneto deals with Wolverine by weaving steel rebar through his body and throwing him about a mile away. Into the river. In-Universe, this is the reason why Wolverine is sent back in time instead of Professor Xavier, whose mind would not survive the trip.
  • Used again for Wolverine and X-24 in Logan. They both take numerous beatings from each other, including when the latter takes a shotgun blast without wincing. What ends up killing both is a tree through the heart for Logan (and the fact that his healing factor is slowing down), and an adamantium bullet in the head for X-24. Not even Laura is immune, as she is run through several times.

Gamebooks

• The Sage character of Blood Sword can attempt to heal himself or others by a random amount. Also in the first book Battlepits of Krarth, there's a magical golden snuffbox that can do a weaker version of the Sage's healing (it's big advantage is that anyone can use it). No Sage in your party...good luck, healing is otherwise weak and rare. As well, later enemies can do massive damage and many of them are skilled enough to never miss an attack. In the final book of the series, the Enchanter can find an enchanted armour made of electrum. This armour will recover a random amount of health after each battle.
• The Demon Spawn (a.k.a Saga of Fire*Wolf) series by J.H. Brennan of GrailQuest fame, in the first book if you save a captured slave girl from being raped, her grandmother gives you a healing stone that will allow you to recover 1 Endurance every story section where there's no fighting.
• In Lone Wolf, if you choose the Kai discipline of healing, you recover 1 Endurance in each story section where there's no combat. This is an extremely popular discipline, as healing items are rare and don't recover much.

Literature

• Aeon 14: Medical nano and Bio-Augmentation gives humans the ability to bounce back from grievous wounds. In Destiny Lost, Tanis Richards takes an antipersonnel railgun round through the chest and bounces back from it. Taught by Experience, she later gets an auxiliary heart installed that can keep her going if her main heart is damaged; this gets put to use in Orion Rising when she's stabbed in the chest during an Assassination Attempt.
• This trope is ruthlessly exploited by the instructors of Aveum Academy in Aeon Legion: Labyrinth. The recruits all have a device called a shieldwatch that can restore most injuries by rolling back time to when they were uninjured. As a result, the instructors can make their training regimen extremely brutal. Lycus explains that the training is designed to encourage this. Since the recruits can survive most injuries and be instantly restored, the main limitation becomes a recruit's ability to endure pain.
• Animorphs: Morphing resets the body from injuries — so an injured animal just has to morph into something else. The books deal with this in alarmingly visceral ways. Most noticeable is Tobias, who has no morphing ability for the first few books and remains almost totally unharmed (he rarely entered combat as a hawk, preferring to do espionage for the rest of the characters), but once he gets his morphing ability back, he's suddenly prone to horrific injury in his hawk form. Just one highlight: Being swallowed by a Kronosaurus. He gets out with a broken wing that somehow stays whenever he morphs, for reasons that were never quite explained in that book. Either way, the injuries the Animorphs have taken include being shot, dismembered, disemboweled, fourth degree burns, fourth-degree frostbite, partially vaporized, partially digested, and even swatted while in insect morph.
• The Behemoth: Roger suffers a number of injuries after developing his healing factor, including mangling his hand punching a television, having several things stabbed through his hand, breaking a number of bones, several dramatic dislocations, and losing both his liver and his heart at different points.
• Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords series has a magic sword named Woundhealer which cannot be used to kill living creatures because it heals whatever it's stabbed into. Woundhealer's abilities are so potent that one use on an amputee's arm causes the arm to grow back over a period of time. Slicing it through a broken limb will instantly restore the limb. It's also possible to impale one's self on the blade and benefit from constant healing. In an extreme example, a character escaped pursuit by impaling himself and jumping off a cliff. He survived and suffered no lasting physical injury, but it did hurt and he had some psychological trauma after that.
• Largely averted in Casca: The Eternal Mercenary where Casca feels the full and complete pain both of the wound and of the rapid healing, so he takes great pains to avoid getting injured wherever he can. Generally, he only suffers a fatal injury once per book, and only receives that in situations of overwhelming odds.
• Most of the characters in Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber belong to a family of immortals who can regenerate from any injury that doesn't kill them. When the villainous brother takes his sister hostage and threatens to maim her if he doesn't get his way, for some reason he's surprised when one of the good brothers points out that "She can regenerate just as well as the rest of us" and calls his bluff. A more dramatic example: one of the brothers claims to have been relying on the possibility of the main character being able to regenerate from having his eyes burned out.
• Sven Tveskoeg has people wondering what he has floating in his DNA in David Gunn's Death's Head series. While he can't regrow his lost arm which has been replaced with a bionic one, Sven once got up after stuffing his intestines back inside himself after he was disembowelled. He also occasionally hides knives inside his organic arm, which requires him to cut out and pull a large chunk of meat.
• Mages in The Demonata series can use magic to reattach their limbs and repair severe damage in battle, often fixing their arms and legs back on as they continue to fight. Unfortunately, it still hurts just as much as it would to a normal human.
• This is a plot point in Damon Knight's novella Dio (or The Dying Man), which takes place in The Future where humans have genetically engineered themselves to be glamorous immortals who can levitate and regenerate injured body parts. Practically the first thing that happens is a mid-air wrestling match in which the protagonist loses his ability to fly and he and his opponent crash to the ground. The opponent's injuries heal in a few minutes, but Dio's not... that's how he finds out what's going to happen to him. Later on his friend Claire is underwater with her friend Ross, who drowns; his lungs exude a jelly that protects him until the responders get there. It looks gross, but he is safe.
• Discworld:
  • Happens in some of the City Watch novels thanks to the werewolf and golem who join the force. Angua the werewolf has only been seriously wounded by silver while Dorfl the golem is Nigh Invulnerable and when he is mostly destroyed:
    "We can rebuild him. We have the pottery."
  • Another Watchman, Reg Shoe, is a zombie. He can't really heal per se, but his limbs get chopped off disproportionately often since he can just sew them back on.
  • Discworld vampires also have this ability, as demonstrated by Otto von Chriek in The Truth — getting decapitated is merely an inconvenience while everyone else tries to find where his head rolled under. Reattaching it only takes a few seconds, though it's slightly embarrassing ("Like zer passing of ze vater."). Going well beyond this, as a vampire with a vulnerability to sunlight, he's chosen a profession in photography. Using flashbulbs. If he's the slightest bit careless in taking a picture he goes up in smoke, but it's not a problem since he keeps a vial of blood in his pocket which breaks and revives him instantly.
• This is evidently the case in Dante's The Divine Comedy. One soul is burned to ash and then reforms. Although healing in Hell may not be such a good thing after all.
• The hero of Chuck Wending's novel Double Dead can heal anything as long as he has enough blood in his system (he is a vampire, after all). Then he actually burns to death in the sun, is carved up by cannibals, and only regenerates once his decapitated head bites off the cannibal leader's tongue. It's not quite From a Single Cell, but it's close.
• In Dragon Bones, Oreg is an immortal being with a traumatic past. However, due to his powerful magic, he doesn't just experience normal, run-of-the-mill flashbacks, which would be horrible enough, but things actually repeat themselves, to the point that Ward can see how Oreg's shirt falls apart under the strikes of an invisible whip, and a wound gashes open on his face, with the bone visible. Oreg's body recovers quickly once he's snapped out of the flashback.
• Played with in a novel of the Drenai saga. One of Waylander's enemies has magically-endowed regenerative capabilities that make him effectively unkillable. All well and good against Waylander's knives and crossbow bolts, but when his plan to use Waylander as a human sacrifice backfires and a demon arrives to claim HIM..."Ah. I see you have learned the secrets of regeneration. You will wish that you had not. For now it may take you twenty centuries to die."
• The Dresden Files:
  • Wizards have a slight Healing Factor. Wizards' bodies heal at the normal human rate, but will fully heal damage eventually, provided they don't die in the short term. Harry commented he has taken more hits than a linebacker and he should have countless long term ailments and injures as a result, but he's generally fine outside of any recent injuries. This is what allows his burned, maimed hand to eventually heal back into full use.
  • We find in Changes when Harry breaks his back, wizard bodies can heal from extensive damage, but some can take many, many years to heal.
  • Also played straight by Goodman Grey in Skin Game, thanks to being an accomplished shapeshifter and half-Naagloshii. Among other things, he goes down from a literal shot to the heart at one point, only to get up again moments later.
  • Thomas suffers the most abuse among the main characters, repeatedly getting knocked out or blasted across the room. Among the things he recovered from thanks to his Incubus-based vampiric healing were being skinned alive and getting his neck snapped. His sister Lara once survived a point-blank explosion, though she wasn't a pretty picture afterwards, and healed by raping the bomber to death. It was even less of a pretty picture.
• Eden Green: Eden and friends become infected with an alien needle symbiote that keeps them alive no matter how badly they are hurt or killed. This is a very good thing because their city is being invaded by monsters that like to chomp, impale, and/or crush anything that moves.
• A less injurious variation occurs in The Fellowship of the Ring: Frodo is given a shirt of mithril mail that makes him nigh-invulnerable. Thereafter, on several occasions, the Fellowship is ambushed by orcs who take potshots at them. Frodo is always the only person to get hit (with one exception of Gandalf's hat), but because of his armor is perfectly fine.
• In Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles, Angel laughs off the notion of going to a doctor for a cut, until Freckles urges that it could scar on her.
• In Game Slaves, no matter how brutal a death the NPCs receive, the ReSims heal the team completely.
• Wizards and witches in the Harry Potter books are frequently shown to be more resilient than a normal human, surviving accidents that would kill a muggle, or only sustaining minor injuries. Wizards and witches also have much longer lifespans than their muggle counterparts. Add to that magical medicine, with potions such as a Skelegrow, which regrows bones.
• In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno and its sequel Escape From Hell, the damned souls in Hell can and do heal from injuries up to and including being exploded into a cloud of vapor. Of course, they're really Blessed with Suck (after all, they are in Hell), since healing is often a slow painful process during which one is fully conscious but incapacitated, and one can never die. For example, the protagonist tries to comfort Vlad the Impaler, who has a wooden stake partially inserted somewhere humorously painful, with the knowledge that he will heal. Vlad protests that he has almost healed, just before a demon pushes the stake all the way back up.
• Handled consistently in Needle by Hal Clement. A symbiotic intelligent virus can heal many minor injuries and consistently defeat disease. Cue the protagonist getting careless about handling sharp objects, and nearly dying from an infection when the symbiote leaves.
• Nona the Ninth: Played for Horror with Nona, a Kindhearted Simpleton with an unstoppable Healing Factor, a habit of swimming near deadly jellyfish, and a rare few Berserk Buttons. When she has a tantrum, she tears her body out of its restraints, bashes herself through a reinforced door, and throws herself at the people shooting at her, all while screaming fit to liquefy her throat.
• While this never really happens as extreme as others in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, in the final book, Dionysus is seen as splitting his consciousness to speak to Percy...while he was thrown into a ditch and was recovering. He even says that it's quite painful. Also related to mythology because of Kronos...
• Prolecto: Succubi can heal from just about anything. While they don't get cut in half often, they DO get beat up a LOT. They can, however, still feel pain, especially Vivian.
• No-one knows why Lieutenant Kerensky of Redshirts heals so fast and completely, but he's always healed up from one horrifying injury just in time to sustain another, generally on an away mission. Justified, as it turns out: all the characters are, in fact, characters on a bad Star Trek-esque TV show, and Kerensky is the one the writers use to prove that even the leads can be injured. Every time.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Mages are borderline impossible to kill as long as their heads and hearts are intact, though they can still be incapacitated by severe wounds. Bokuto Uno uses this to repeatedly inflict crippling injuries on them and bring them back for more later: at one point in volume 1, main character Oliver Horn is disemboweled by a monster's claw, but is able to retreat to cover and sort himself out with a healing spell.
• The Rifter: After John finds out that no ordinary wound can kill him, he begins to charge straight into armies, shaking off innumerable bullet, pike, etc. wounds. The first time he deliberately let someone shoot him, he had to steel himself against the anticipation of pain, because he does feel it in full; but he found that pain awakened his Rifter powers, and he soon becomes able to go into a divine version of a berserk state where he ignores pain, feels only rage, and draws on his power to heal instantly.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen can regenerate from just about anything shy of decapitation, and Lyrah is very aware of this. Daylen later invokes this trope on Ahrek to subdue him.
• Every human has great recovery because they all have medical nanites in them soon after birth in K.C Alexander's SI Nless series. With a badly contaminated atmosphere and insane levels of global warming, humanity needs those medical nanites to repair cellular damage and snip out the inevitable cancers. They also greatly speed a person's ability to get back to normal after having broken bones or various other injuries. These nanites have their limits and aren't going to regrow a lost limb and contemporary drugs are designed to override the nanite protection so the drug trade is still a constant.
• Visconde de Sabugosa from Sítio do Picapau Amarelo is, much to his frustration, frequently chosen to do the most dangerous and arduous parts of the adventures by the other characters, because since he is a doll made from a corn cob, he can be rebuilt later in case he gets damaged.
• Stone Burners: Olivia has been shot, pummeled, thrown through a wall and suffered through broken bones. She got better.
• In The Stormlight Archive, people with Surgebinding abilities can regenerate almost any injury as long as they have a reserve of Stormlight, which leaves them pretty cavalier about getting creatively hurt. Shallan even weirds out a trusted subordinate by (muzzily) giving him orders while she has a crossbow bolt sticking through her head.
• Veldron of Super Stories regenerates when fatally injured. Unfortunately, others seem to take this as an invitation to hurt him or put him in danger, assuming he'll just heal and not realising that he has to be just about dead for the power to kick in.
• In one of the Thieves' World novels regenerating character was subdued and sold as a slave to local vivisector. This was supposed to 'solve' two problems at once: both his regular wanton murder of poor little mobsters and vivisector cutting up slaves again and again counted as 'a bit too much' even by local standards. Well, one problem — but hey, it's still better than nothing.
• Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen:
  • Title character Elisabeth Le Fanu can regenerate from just about any injury that isn't immediately fatal. During the first battle with one of the fourteen ranked demons, the Knight, she takes a sword through the abdomen in a surprise attack that leaves her intestines trailing on the ground. Her response is to laugh maniacally, rip the remnants of her guts free, and inflict a Curb-Stomp Battle on the Knight.
  • Viewpoint character Kaito Sena, being a golem crafted by Elisabeth using her own blood, is almost as durable: as long as he doesn't lose too much blood, he can recover. Just during the first volume he shrugs off limb loss and disembowelment.
• Trinity Blood:
  • The Crusniks, to an almost absurd level. When main character Abel Nightroad gets into a fight, especially in his Crusnik form, he's almost guaranteed to get mangled in some way. If someone pulls a gun, he usually takes at least one bullet. In one instance, he survives having the left half of his torso, including an arm, a wing, and (presumably) his heart obliterated by a tank. He regrows them in a matter of moments by having the nanomachines in his blood actually eat the charred hunks of flesh before returning to his body, much to his enemy's horror. Father Tres, being an android, has a similar propensity to take damage (a flame-wielding vampire once hit him point-blank in the face), though not to the same extent.
  • In an even more extreme example, Big Bad Cain Nightroad survives being thrown out of a space station, burning to ash upon entering the atmosphere, and subsequently hitting the ground. Granted, regenerating from that took him about 900 years, but the fact that he survived it at all (not to mention the fact that he can live for 900 years) is a little over-the-top.
• The Twilight Saga: The werewolves heal very quickly, and normally this is a good thing (like when Jacob slices his hand open at Bella's house, but the cut is already healed before Bella can get a towel to stop the bleeding). However, this is subverted when Jacob has the right side of his body broken during the battle against the newborns: in wolf form, he heals too quickly and Carlisle has to re-break his bones to fix them.
• Ukiah Oregon: Ukiah and Atticus, once aware that they heal from anything and come Back from the Dead, constantly go around Taking the Bullet and generally more risks than their human partners. Atticus and Ru's boss have noticed that Atticus is constantly getting injured and Ru isn't and assumes Ru is a coward.
• In Vamp!, the vampires can heal from almost anything, and the characters tend to make use of this by beating each other bloody with their super-strength.
• The Vampire Files: In homage to the frequency with which private detectives (like Philip Marlowe) get beaten up by corrupt cops or gangsters, P.N. Elrod's vampire detective Jack Flemming sustains brutal torture and beating in just about every novel.
• In Villains Inc. (sequel to Wearing the Cape), Max Fisher turns out to have the ability to recover from pretty much anything, by virtue of being the self-sustaining projection of a fictional character.
• Wax and Wayne:
  • Wayne has the ability to store health in order to heal quickly later, so of course he gets hurt a lot more then his partner Wax, including once catching the brunt of an explosion and getting his entire back badly burned, being shot multiple times, being poisoned, etc. He makes more of an issue of it early in the series ("It's like taking someone's beer because he can always order more.") but by the end, someone genuinely mistakes him for a Combat Sadomasochist due to how much punishment he takes.
  • Also Miles from The Alloy of Law has a truly ridiculous Healing Factor and probably gets shot almost as many times as everybody else in the book combined, including the mooks. Even his execution after taking away the Metalminds he needs to heal requires multiple volleys from a firing squad to actually kill him.
  • Kandra have Voluntary Shapeshifting and as a result can take a pretty severe amount of punishment. Breaking their bones is just about the only conventional injury that they can't just ignore, and even then it's only inconvenient because they can't make their own bones and will have to find new ones to get back to normal. Acid and a few other things can actually do meaningful damage, but everything from bullets to knives are generally ignored. MeLaan even mentions shutting off her nerve endings to prevent traps from hurting when she intentionally sets them off.
• Tennyo in the Whateley Universe has such a phenomenal regeneration ability that literally nothing seems to stop her. She once had her leg blown off by cyborgs with vulcan cannons, and she regrew the leg by the time it took her to fly over and grab the cyborgs. If you think that's good, Carmilla had her head chopped off and just grew a new one, but she's an Eldritch Abomination. This is only her base-line healing factor. When she gets mad, she has regrown entire limbs and parts of her face in time to continue up an attack she was already doing, before she even realized the body parts were missing. Other characters have theorized that she isn't being healed so much as restored from a master copy woven into the very fabric of the universe.
• The Wild Cards series has Billy Ray aka Carnifex. In this case, there's a little twist: his regenerative ability is somewhat inaccurate, so his face looks rather deformed from all the times it has needed to recover from massive damage.
• Aeduen of The Witchlands is the only POV character gifted with the Healing Factor, so it follows that he gets shot, stabbed, cut, maimed and otherwise damaged several times more than all other POV characters combined.
• In Worm, this is Taylor's justification for how she deals with Lung, the regenerating gang leader who transforms to a stronger form the longer he fights. Unfortunately, the first time she fought him he was given a specially made tranquilizer that would shut off his regeneration for safe transport, so the cocktail of spider and insect venom she hit him with very nearly killed him anyway, and did necrotize his genitals, before he was brought to a superpowered healer.
• The Zombie Knight is practically built on this. Given how destructive servants tend to be when fighting, it's not uncommon for hector to end fights with several parts of himself missing, his skull showing, or cut in half. Regeneration is so prevalent in this world decapitating someone and encasing the head is considered standard procedure for taking prisoners.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse:
  • In The Flash (2014)/Arrow crossover episode "Flash vs. Arrow", Oliver teaches Barry to pay more attention to his surroundings by firing multiple hidden arrows at Barry. When Barry objects, Oliver says "I heard you heal fast" and rips the arrows out.
  • In Constantine (2014), Chas Chandler has Resurrective Immortality due to a spell John cast on him, which caused him to absorb the souls of 47 people who died in an accident. He dies repeatedly just in the single season the show ran for.
• Buffyverse:
  • Angel is usually the one who gets shot, stabbed, etc., because as a vampire he's pretty hard to kill. In fairness, though, it's not just him.
    Angel: Do you know how hard it is to think straight with a piece of rebar through your torso?
    Cordelia: Actually, I do — benefits of a Sunnydale education!
  • This is also something of an Actor Allusion, as Charisma Carpenter, who plays Cordelia, had received that injury herself earlier in her life. In fact, the manner of Cordelia's injury was written so that Carpenter's real-life scar could have an accurate in-universe explanation.
  • The phrase also shows up in "The Ring", after Angel gets a sufficiently serious beating to leave Wesley and Cordelia basically carrying him home.
    Cordelia: Angel, you don't look so... well it's a good thing you heal fast!
  • Angel sustaining (and quickly recovering from) an injury that would kill a normal human is pretty much a Once per Episode thing. Probably the most blatant example is "Apocalypse, Nowish": Angel is staked in the neck and thrown off a building, and in less than a minute, we see him looking fine. Even within the show, only a few minutes could have passed.
  • Buffy, Faith and Kendra (Slayers, basically) also heal faster than regular humans, which can lead to awkward questions posed by those who are not in the loop. For example, in the season 2 episode "Ted", the police wouldn't believe Buffy hit her stepfather in self-defence, because she had no bruise where he had hit her.
• The Collector: Morgan's Healing Factor is shown A LOT, which also shows the hellfire filling him.
• Most of the reapers on Dead Like Me. The fact there's a spring sticking out of your mattress is no reason to get stabbed almost every time you go to bed, George. Sometimes they intentionally abuse their Healing Factor, though, or each other's; Roxy seems to think running Mason over is a perfectly appropriate punishment.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Doctor can survive stuff that should be fatal and can quickly recover from much worse injuries than a human can, even without recasting the part. He's regrown a hand, for one thing, and has been tortured enough times to give anyone else wicked PTSD. The spin-offs novels and audios, which don't have to worry about scaring kids or upsetting parents, take this even further. It is taken to absurd extremes in "The End of Time" when he jumps from a spaceship and falls several hundred feet, crashes through a glass dome, and impacts a marble floor at terminal velocity, and receives nothing more than a few scratches to his face.
  • The Alzarians, a humanoid race featured in the early Eighties, are also able to recover from injury more rapidly than humans, a relic of their highly adaptable Marshmen ancestors. However, the Doctor's Alzarian companion, Adric, indicates that the speed of recovery decreases with age. ("Old people take a bit longer, of course. Sometimes a whole day.")
  • When he resurfaced in the third series of Torchwood, Jack Harkness exploited his ability for the team's benefit. However, it's seriously downplayed, and he can often go entire episodes without his power coming up. In "Last of the Time Lords", Jack has obviously spent an entire year being killed in whatever gruesome ways the Master could come up with, all for his own personal amusement.
  • It's a good job the Timeless Child can regenerate, because they go through multiple lives before reaching adulthood, and before their adopted parent dies of old age. The first regeneration, at least, was an accident; it's unclear whether the subsequent ones were deliberate experimentation or just the result of extreme bad luck and clumsiness.
• Farscape:
  • Sikozu has the ability to reattach lost extremities. Thus, she's had her limbs lopped off on several occasions (and one of her fingers, in the episode "Coup By Clam") - the most severe being "Twice Shy", in which she has both an arm and a leg ripped off by the true form of Talika.
  • Pilot once had this trope forced upon him by the rest of the crew, because a Mad Scientist had demanded one of his limbs in exchange for assistance. So they cut his arm off, which, since the limb grows back, only made him tremendously pissed off at them for the remainder of the episode.
  • They once found another Leviathan that's overrun by some very unpleasant people. They too are abusing their Pilot's regeneration, but not just out of sadism. The first words the traumatized being can say "in simple enough fashion" for the Translator Microbes to be able to let the others understand are, "They... are... EATING! ME!!!"
• Forever: After two hundred years Henry is rather blasé about his personal safety, routinely walking out into traffic or climbing onto a precarious ledge looking for clues. Then there's the stuff like injecting himself with a poison as the quickest way to find out which poison it is.
• Forever Knight:
  • Given how often Nick Knight gets shot in the line of duty, his quest To Become Human could easily get him killed unless he changes his habits.
  • It showed up with other characters too. Vachon lost a hand in the plane crash in "Black Buddha", and LaCroix survived being impaled by a flaming torch in the pilot, though we only find that out in season 2.
• Heroes:
  • Claire Bennett can regenerate. Besides her intentional experiments on her powers, she's constantly having lethal accidents and getting mortally injured during the course of her regular adventures, something none of the non-regenerating characters seem to have trouble with. Not even the super-powered adventures involving other powered people; she would have died multiple times just living her life as a teenage girl.
  • Other characters with regeneration, including Sylar and Adam simply stop trying to defend themselves, so in combat they're constantly taking mortal wounds and just smiling. They aren't as accident-prone as Claire, however.
• Highlander used this to no end.
  • Duncan was always getting hurt in some way during fights and having to heal, and "watch me shoot/stab/whatever myself and die, then revive" was a popular way to show immortality to a mortal.
  • Averted, though, with Xavier St. Cloud's hand. Word of God is that chopped off body parts that aren’t the head can regrow, but it’s a very slow process, taking years or longer. Neck and facial wounds also tend to leave scars.
  • In the 1920s, Duncan slashes Kalas across the throat. 70 years later, Kalas' vocal cords still haven't healed, leaving his voice a throaty rasp. As his fantastic opera singing was the one thing he truly loved, Kalas is quite upset with Duncan over this.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Double: The Claydoll Dopant can reassemble herself from any damage, which is good because she's also literally Made of Plasticine.
  • Kuroto Dan in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid comes back to life as a living computer virus with 99 Video-Game Lives; naturally, he starts getting killed left and right, including one episode where he works himself to death several times pulling an all-nighter to give The Hero a new power-up. This gets exploited near the end of the series by Kiriya Kujo, who repeatedly infects Kuroto with the Gamedeus virus until he finally develops an antibody for it.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One features a movie villain, Kamen Rider Eden, who's made of nanomachines and thus can heal from just about anything. Zero-One proceeds to do a number of things to him that he would never do to less durable villains, such as using his Pest Controller ability to have a swarm of locusts eat Eden alive from the inside out.
  • Kamen Rider Revice: Olteca and the Gifftarians have healing factors that seemingly only exist to let them be repeatedly brutalized in combat. The Gifftarians in particular are just enough of an Elite Mook to appear threatening, and just capable enough of regenerating that any new Rider or form debut can use them as a punching bag.
• Bob Wire from King is made out of barbed wire and can therefore just spring back into place. As such, he seems to take an obscene amount of punishment every episode.
• Kai from Lexx is an undead assassin who can reattach lost body parts - so he's constantly getting decapitated, vertically bisected, vaporized, etc. The fact that he never bothers blocking or avoiding danger isn't so much because he knows he can't be permanently hurt (short of running out of protoblood) but rather because he was brainwashed and reprogrammed with literally NO self-preservation instinct beyond "get the mission done and get back home."
• Nathan from Misfits has been showing this ever since his power was revealed to be immortality. Kind of justified though, since the kid makes such a habit of acting like an unbelievable ass that pretty much everyone who spends more than five seconds in his company could be forgiven for wanting to inflict harm on him (lampshaded by the fact that even his best friends aren't remotely surprised when someone tries to murder him). This, coupled with the fact that he is prone to occasionally jaw-dropping stupidity and recklessness, means that the only real mystery is how the hell he managed to survive prior to getting his power.
• Painkiller Jane. Every episode of the TV series was designed to show off her powers at least once. Sometimes she intentionally used them, sometimes she just had bad luck. The 2007 comic begins with a story where she runs across a terrorist with nerve gas on a train by pure coincidence and would have died if it wasn't for her powers.
• While Teal'c of Stargate SG-1 never has to regenerate any limbs, his symbiote (and later Tretonin) let him get away with things most people would need body armor and a radiation suit to attempt, and months of physical therapy to recover from.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • Odo is a shapeshifter and, if injured, simply shifts back to undamaged form. Thus he uses methods for stopping criminals like letting them run through him so they lose momentum, or jumping from heights on them. This bites him in the ass when he is Modelocked into human — during a very short time, he sustains multiple injuries and nearly dies! Laas, another changeling, manages to be stabbed in his stomach within days on station.
  • On a similar note, changelings are immune to all regular infections, including STDs, so they have no qualms sharing Body Fluids with each other. This also proves nearly fatal when Section 31 develops a ... something that can infect Changelings.
  • The Vorta have backup clones in case they die. Consequently he gets killed outright several times later in the series, which reaches the point of They Killed Kenny Again when Worf breaks Weyoun 7's neck to the bemusement of Damar; when Weyoun 8 arrives back at headquarters, he's rather miffed to find Damar drunkenly laughing his ass off about it. Subverted late in the series, after the good guys mount a successful operation to destroy the Dominion's cloning facility. Weyoun dies, and the Changeling Leader comments, in a tone of mild disappointment, "That was Weyoun's last clone". As he's been a thorn in the heroes' side for quite some time, they are delighted to hear that he's finally gone for good.
• Any of the angels in Supernatural, particularly in Castiel's case. He's been beaten, impaled, carved up, shot, thrown through walls, hung on a meat hook, and always ends up perfectly fine until he's human. Then he realizes just how much it sucks not to have awesome angelic healing powers. Averted by demons, who don't actually heal the bodies they possess. Their unwilling hosts will die once the demon leaves them if the body sustained lethal damage at any point.
• Both played straight and occasionally lampshaded with Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
  John: You're healing fast.
  Cameron: Faster than you.
  • This is the day after Cameron has been blown up, run over, pulled a metal spike out of her head, pressed between two trucks and staple-gunned the wounds on her face closed. John, by contrast, has "only" been in a car accident, and already she's looking much less injured than him.
  • Worth pointing out that as Terminators are living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, any injuries they receive are literally just a flesh wound.
• Torchwood Jack Harkness's abilities are an example in this show as well.
  • Children of Earth takes Jack's abilities to new and interesting levels. A government mole implants a bomb in Jack so that he can take out all of Torchwood when it goes off. Gwen and Ianto get away, but Jack still gets blown to bits. Then, when the government agents find his remains and realize this trope is in effect, they dump his remains in quick-setting concrete.
  • During the five days of Children of Earth in series 3, Jack dies six times. To put this into perspective, this was in the space of five episodes. In the first twenty-five episodes (episode 26 is a special case, due to him being trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth for 2000 years), he died seven times, nine including flashbacks.
  • Rex Matheson, and for a brief period of time, the whole Earth. In Miracle Day, Death Takes a Holiday, and while this does not have good effects, it sure helps Rex when he's impaled. He later has a transfusion with Jack's blood to protect it. Because of it, he survives his Heroic Sacrifice. Then he gets shot. And revives.
• Vampires in The Vampire Diaries heal much faster than humans, including healing from injuries that would kill a human and in some cases, even regrowing missing organs. Whenever a vampire needs to temporarily incapacitate another vampire, it's most often accomplished via a broken neck.
  • While nothing as extreme as regrowing a severed arm or leg has occurred, Damon's eyes were gouged out once only to be regenerated in time for the next scene, though he did constantly rub his eyes and complain about how sore they were for the rest of the episode.
  • Humans who drink vampire blood will also gain a temporary healing factor, though it's still not as powerful as a vampire's healing factor. Drinking vampire blood doesn't allow a human to survive instantly fatal injuries such as a broken neck or drowning, at least not while staying human. They will recover, but they will become a vampire themselves in the process.
• The X-Files: Leonard Betts in the episode named after him, "Leonard Betts". The plot kicks off when Leonard breaks out of a hospital morgue with his head missing so that he can go home and regrow it. Later on, he escapes handcuffs by ripping his own thumb off, because he knows he can get a new one. Unfortunately, his Healing Factor is neither easy nor pleasant.

Myths & Religion

• There is actually some basis for everyone in Hell being healed so they can go on being tortured there in The Bible, although it's not very descriptive. (Jesus simply says that "the flame never goes out and the worm never dies" there).
• Classical Mythology:
  • Prometheus was chained to a rock and an eagle tore out his liver every day until he was rescued. Boy Prometheus, it's a good thing you can heal, now isn't it? Of course, the regeneration was part of his punishment for giving humans fire-so that his liver could be torn out every day for the rest of eternity and not just once.
  • Ares would be injured a bit in Greek Mythology...thank you Diomedes for stabbing him.
• Norse Mythology has several instances of this. Odin hangs himself (for three days), stabs an eye out, and stabs himself with a spear to get knowledge. Loki gets chained down and has a snake drip poison/acid on him.
• The Qur'an gives a very explicit description that the damned regularly have their skins burnt off, and then are provided new ones so that the burning can continue forever. Either way, pity for them that they can heal.

Podcasts

• In the Cool Kids Table game Homeward Bound 4, the dinosaurs are genetically engineered to heal quicker. And it is a good thing, because everyone keeps failing their rolls and getting wounded by humans.

Puppet Shows

• The eponymous hero of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons gets killed off/badly injured pretty much every episode. In fact, it's almost the basis for the series.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • "Fast Healing" and "Regeneration". The difference: Fast Healing heals any damage, but cannot restore limbs and doesn't work past death; Regeneration can regrow anything, including the head, but has something that bypasses the regeneration (usually fire.)
  • Some players opt to treat their hit points as a kind of "alternative armor", being fine with taking near-lethal damage as long as they can take down the enemy first. This tactic depends heavily on them having either the aforementioned regeneration/fast healing or a very dedicated healer. Said healer might not be too happy about having to expend their limited magic on patching up a suicidal fighter all the time.
• Mutants & Masterminds includes a "Regrowth" feature that can be bought on Regeneration and Healing that allows one to regenerate lost limbs and other bits of the body. Handy, except that there's no way in the rules for one to lose limbs or bits of the body, so the only time this comes up is when the GM wants to make the Regrowth seem useful.

Toys

• In BIONICLE, the Toa Mata could regenerate their decayed flesh and organs after awakening from a millennia-long coma. Presumably, other characters can do this too, provided that their organic parts weren't removed by force, and their metal pieces are still intact. Nocturn is a character who could even regrow an arm after Pridak had torn it off, but he wasn't able to grow a new tentacle (this is why he uses a launcher in that hand instead).

Video Games

• Dante in the Devil May Cry series: he gets stabbed and impaled so many times and then shrugs it off that it's just funny...but only in the cut scenes...that don't involve his fights with Vergil in DMC 3 where he actually DOES get hurt...but then gets better by going Devil Time.
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: At one point, Yukiko is found having been beheaded by the upstart villain Michael, her headless body slumped against the back of her shop. Luckily for her, her vampiric healing makes her right as rain once the dramatic shock is over.
• Both Vorcha and Krogans in the Mass Effect universe can heal: Vorcha heal very quickly as a natural ability, which gives them a somewhat horrifying appearance from the mass of scars they receive, and Krogans are so naturally tough and resilient that their anatomy allows them to continue functioning even when they shouldn't be capable, while their body heals the injuries. Both can have their regeneration shut down (temporarily, but permanently in the games based on how combat works) through inflicting incredible amounts of simultaneous, wide-spread damage (the Warp biotic effect) or burning them. Wrex forgets that most species don't have this ability. This leads to an amusing conversation in the second game, where he initially seems to be under the impression that Shepard survived being spaced because of this.
  Wrex: Ah, the benefits of a redundant nervous system!
  Shepard: Yeah, humans don't have that.
  Wrex: Oh... it must've been painful, then.
• Mega Man:
  • Robots and Reploids can be rebuilt after pretty much any damage, except when they need to die for real. In one game, Proto Man is cut in half twice. Zero has been blown up, reduced to a head and torso, lasered through the chest, split into three parts that get passed around like trading cards...
  • Sigma exists as a sentient computer virus allowing him to come back even if his body is completely destroyed. Which of course means it has to happen in every game in the Mega Man X series. Hell, Mega Man X5 begins with Sigma allowing himself to be killed just so he can spread the virus around.
• Dark Samus from the Metroid Prime Trilogy. It took the destruction of one and a half planets to finally kill her.
• Nasuverse:
  • In Fate/stay night, Shirou takes frequent and painful abuse from enemy Servants no matter what you do — but he takes noticeably less of it in routes where his contract with Saber gets broken. This is because Shirou has unknowingly been imbued with Saber's lost Noble Phantasm, Avalon, which will heal him from any damage as long as he's connected to her. Without her, it's just there.
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • Brynhildr is compelled to murder whomever she's attracted to, but especially her true love Sigurd. During the chapter where he becomes playable, Sigurd reassures her that one of his skills grants him auto-revive, so he won't die when she kills him.
    • Yu Mei-ren can reconstitute herself whenever she dies thanks to being a Fairy Elemental. In the Servant Summer Camp event, she ends up being the Designated Victim of horror movie tropes six different times but comes out no worse for wear (although the event later reveals that the entire Singularity was an attempt to find a way to permanently kill her, and if she'd died a seventh time it would have stuck). Her Lancer form even makes this a gameplay mechanic, combining taunt and guts skills to make sure she takes a lethal attack instead of someone else who can't revive from it.
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: If Wolverine falls to one heart, he loses his body and runs around as just his Adamantium skeleton. He's also equipped with passive regeneration, so the skeleton regrows its "flesh" when he moves up to two hearts.
• The Konami title Never Dead turns this into a game mechanic. The protagonist, Bryce, is an immortal who can survive violent dismemberment by picking himself up piece by piece.
• Persona 3: Chidori is a messed-up girl with a bad habit of cutting herself, but her wounds heal rapidly.
• Planescape: Torment: Since the Player Character can't die and has a Healing Factor as part of the parcel, they can willingly allow themselves to be mangled in all sorts of ways. You can allow a woman to pay for the privilege of fatally stabbing you, snap your own neck to prove a point not once but twice, allow a hag to claw out your eye to give you power, remove a magical ring from the dead finger it's stuck on by biting your finger off and sticking the dead finger onto the stump, allow a mortician to sew up your wounds, have a crazy dissectionist cut your various body parts open (including pulling out your own intestines and cracking open your skull), gouge out your eye to put a preserved one in its place, and gain spells from a Pyromaniac wizard by allowing him to burn your finger, hand, eyeball, and intestines to charred cinders.
• Albert Wesker in the Resident Evil series has a virus that allows him to basically survive anything, such as getting a hundred tons of metal to fall on him with barely any effect. Rocket Launchers only stun him while they're able to take down a Tyrant in one hit. It took two rockets, lava, and a hundred attacks to finally obliterate him. Even after all that, some fans suggest he somehow managed to survive. On a lesser scale, the Regenerators in Resident Evil 4 can regenerate any body part, including their head, unless their hidden Plagas are taken out.
• Player characters experience this throughout The Secret World. Because of the Bee they've been symbiotically bonded with, players are effectively immortal and able to return from the dead a matter of seconds after being killed. As such, quest-givers have few qualms about sending their newfound rescuers into deadly situations - to the point that some quests actually require players to kill themselves just so they can see what's going on in the spirit world; taken to ridiculous extremes in earlier versions of the game, where players were able to exploit the game's anima well network to teleport across the map by committing suicide!
• The character Yoshimitsu, who has appeared in every single Tekken game, has healing abilities beginning in Tekken 3. He can heal through meditating, or through draining lifeforce from an enemy. Like Shatterstar, he has an attack where he stabs himself, inflicting damage but is able to hit an enemy for even more damage with it. He is also able to spin while in this state to further damage someone hit with this attack, with his sword still in him. Yoshimitsu can also spin away from his opponent at an incredibly rapid speed, an attack that requires expending his own life to do, and which causes him to lose his balance and faint temporarily if done excessively. Yoshimitsu from the Soul Calibur series has similar techniques including flying into the air, lighting his sword on fire, then stabbing it through his own chest and dropping out of the air onto your opponent for massive damage to both you and your opponent. You can regain your health in identical ways to Tekken.
• Fujiwara no Mokou from the Touhou Project series is completely immortal and will recover from even fatal injuries in moments, which lets her completely disregard personal safety when fighting. It's explicitly stated that the only way to really beat her is to kill her over and over again until the pain simply prevents her from being able to counter-attack. In Urban Legend in Limbo, her gimmick that she has fast and powerful attacks, but any attack that involves fire will damage herself as well. She can incinerate herself in a pillar of fire, which will undo all the self-damage she's sustained up to that point but leaves her vulnerable to counter-attacks while she regenerates, making playing as her a careful balance between pressing the offense and recovering HP.
• World of Warcraft:
  • There are sometimes very high places that would take a long time to climb back down from. Of course, the solution is obvious, and several classes have abilities to make it a perfectly survivable tactic, including the Priest's Levitate, Rogue's / Druid Cat-Form's reduced falling damage, etc. Warlocks and Shamans don't have these... but they do have the ability to occasionally self-resurrect, leading to a lot of Warlocks and Shammys going 'splat'.
  • Divine Intervention is a Paladin skill that kills the Paladin but makes the target invulnerable when things go badly. The saved ally can then resurrect the Paladin and the others. Sadly, Divine Intervention was removed from the game in patch 4.0, back in 2010. At least for players. NPC paladins can still use it in cut scenes though!
• There's been a ton of video games that make use of Wolverine's ability to regenerate, but X-Men Origins: Wolverine, is the first to show grievous bodily harm actually occurring to him, up to and including parts of his face and torso being completely torn off, only for them to slowly come back. For game balancing issues, he has two health meters; his "internal vitals" meter regenerates more slowly, so you're in trouble if you get that far gone. His shirt rarely survives this punishment, though his pants never suffer quite so much. The Magic Pants are sort of justified since he is attacking military soldiers who are trained to target the chest area, where all the vital organs are, not the legs, though his pants should be at least torn up from all the shit he went through.
• Played straight in Xenosaga. Albedo has a powerful healing factor (he can regrow his own head!), but is driven to madness upon the knowledge that he cannot be killed while his brothers can.

Webcomics

• Lexx in Alien Dice takes a lot of punishment during duels, losing and regenerating limbs on a couple of occasions. Though both times he was out of commission for at least a day and needed nutritional supplements to prevent his nanites from cannibalizing the rest of his body.
• Bob and George: See the Mega Man entry above. The robot cast is regularly taken out by the villains and are just rebuilt by Doctor Light (who the villains never take out before being stopped). The title characters are also human but either their shielding makes attacks ineffective or involuntary time travel happens.
• Chiasmata:
  • Bonnie Hallet has Healing Factor that has been put to the test several times so far during the adventure since the "puzzles" she has to do to move on in the Location have all involved deliberately chopping off body parts. Unfortunately for her, the stuff she regrows tend to be mutated in some way. The first time she regrows something (her hand) it has an extra thumb, the second time (her entire arm) it barely resembles a human limb at all.
    Bonnie: This healing thing is awful. I want a refund.
  • Outside of the main adventure we also have Augment, a high ranking superhero from the Benefactors League with regeneration so powerful that she is the only person ever to have survived a 564 attack and is the only one capable of being in the same room as Misanthrope for any amount of time. She is frequently sent into high-risk situations due to her ability to take high amounts of damage, while also apparently being skilled enough to kill dinosaurs when the need arises. It's worth noting that this is one of the many reasons that Augment is speculated to be Bonnie's mother/sister/future self/time displaced clone etc.
• Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire: Gregory once proposed selling his organs to make money, since he could get them back with healing magic. Which doesn't make a lot of sense considering he could use his magic to heal other people just as well.
• Dragon Ball Multiverse: Cell and Majin Buu. Piccolo and the other Namekians also seem to get dismembered a lot. Sadly, the same can't be said for Dabura.
• The Cyborg version shows up in Dresden Codak during Kim's battle with the master of Dark Science. Kim, already a triple amputee from a previous encounter with time-travelling Luddites, takes all serious damage to her prosthetics except for a few small artfully arranged cuts to her face.
• El Goonish Shive has a villainous example: Damien never needed fighting skill because he could regenerate (as well as having burning skin and supposed Super-Strength).
• Kid Charisma in Everyday Heroes is tough enough that Summer can use a Hyperspace Mallet on him (she's normally not allowed because of her Super-Strength). A page or two later, Kid Charisma is back on his feet and unscathed.
• Girl Genius:
  • "The Unstoppable Higgs" is able to recover from a broken leg and arm plus a concussion in just a few days, at the end of which he is able to succeed remarkably in a Jäger bar fight. That can be explained away given that their world has odd yet strangely advanced medical devices that are able to heal very quickly, but this is justified when he is later thrown into walls by a clank with no apparent setbacks, not to mention his encounters with Zola, when he gets punched by a highly drugged and dangerous woman, plus shot and run through with a sword.
  • The Jäger themselves regularly endure enormous amounts of punishment, the one time one was shown to be in any real danger of death was from a venom that liquified flesh. Luckily his friend was around and able to chop off the arm before it was too late. A scared onlooker resolved never to tell the Jägers if he got a headache.
• The eponymous protagonist of Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy. She seems to be getting used to it, too - in this strip she's merely frowning after getting half her skull bashed in. Which is nothing compared to a later part of the same story arc, when she has to regrow her entire body!
• Grrl Power:
  • Lampshaded here. Sydney suspects that if she had regeneration, which she doesn't (as far as she knows), she'd get hurt with alarming frequency. Maxima counters that it's mainly because the only way comic writers can show off the power is by having the person be hurt to begin with.
  • Their team's invulnerable guy, Achilles, goes through things that would cripple anyone else with alarming frequency... in part because he's reckless and because he enjoys showing off. (He once blocked a sword thrust with his eye just to unnerve the assailant.) Good Thing You Don't Need To Heal?
• Head Trip points out that the case of Claire Bennett from Heroes (see above) could be worse.
• The nations of Hetalia: Axis Powers have a powerful Healing Factor that lets them regenerate near-instantly from wounds that would be fatal to humans: For example, France at one point is shot in the head by the rifle-wielding Switzerland, only to be fine moments later. Russia breaks all of his bones after jumping from a plane with no parachute^note He thought the snow on the ground would cushion his fall and is fine with no recovery time that we can see. China is stabbed in the back by the katana-wielding Japan, and except for a scar remaining there, shows no ill effects afterwards, and a young Lithuania continues holding a conversation as normal with an arrow sticking straight through his head.
• Homestuck: More like Good Thing You're Immortal, but going God-Tier and being a God-Tier player means you can go through massive physical trauma and still be okay, as long as certain conditions aren't met. The best example of this would have to be Dave and Rose, who had to travel through a sun that was double the mass of the universe. Not to mention that the thing that allowed them to reach God Tier was being at the source of the explosion which created said sun.
• Gog-Agog in Kill Six Billion Demons can always pull herself together because she's really made of maggots or something. She's also pretty annoying. This combination leads her to repeatedly have her head blown off in the meetings with the other Demiurges.
• Richard of Looking for Group, regularly gets impaled by arrows or loses limbs. He's a lich so it doesn't matter. His village is the same.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things showed the downside of this trope: when Wolverine sparred with Kratos, they end up having to call Commander Badass for help because Wolverine's body healed around Kratos's blades, trapping them in. The Commander's later seen basically constantly injuring Wolverine so he could remove the blades.
• All the MAQ numbers from MAQ #041 have regeneration capabilities, but the one that has the most capacity is #13. So far, she's been plastered against a brick wall by a car and been gunned down accidentally as part of a demonstration.
• Ed of MegaTokyo dies frequently and often thoroughly (to the point of being completely vaporized except for a few individual cells), but his doctor is always able to bring him back...though not necessarily in a body that matches his old one. It's implied that his head has been blown off a lot more times than we know about.
• My Roommate Is an Elf:
  • Griswold is attacked as a joke by people who know elves have a Healing Factor. He doesn't find it funny.
  • Jacinda's grandmother died of old age and jumped out a plane without a parachute. She has lives to spare.
• The Order of the Stick: Subverted with the hydra. The Order of the Stick keeps chopping its regenerating heads off, and eventually its heart can't keep up anymore and it passes out. Then played for laughs when Goblin Dan finds the unconscious hydra and becomes a millionaire by selling roast hydra-head burgers as goblinoid fast food.
• In Peter Is the Wolf Town sheriff (and former alpha of the local Werewolf Pack) Con Nero stops a rampaging Sarah in full 11-foot-tall UberWolf form by Shooting her in the Heart! He wasn't using silver bullets though so she wasn't permanently harmed.
• Spiders in Princess Chroma can heal from anything, which comes in handy since he's a frequent victim of slapstick violence.
• The title character of Princess Pi has physical invulnerability to help her survive all the chaos that ensues in her nonsensical kingdom of Piscataway, including attempts by others to end her life and/or steal her throne.
• In Sluggy Freelance, whenever Oasis appears to "die," she inevitably turns up alive later (exactly how she does this is unknown, even to her). So, shock of shocks, she ends up dying in just about every storyline she appears in. This is especially notable in the "Dangerous Days" arc, where Oasis is the only one of the good guys who takes lethal damage and is the only one left behind when the building they were in explodes.
• In Undying Happiness, a girl named Naomi leaves behind her dysfunctional family to live with her Internet boyfriend Keisuke. Keisuke is a kind, friendly, but profoundly clumsy guy who happens to have uncanny powers of regeneration... which Naomi discovers in the first chapter after Keisuke accidentally burns his house down and emerges from the ashes as a walking skeleton.
• Unsounded: Minnow gets her arms torn off and apart and her face sliced open, but since she's in the water it doesn't actually hurt and her biggest reaction is to sigh as she pulls her pieces together to heal.
• The Wotch has Tie'l, an alien who can heal. Slower than usual though, an arm-tentacle takes a week to regrow. Much like the quote at the start of this page Tie'l also points this out.
  Tie'l: She cut my Arm-Tentacle off!!
  Glock: So? It'll grow back in, like, a week.
  Tie'l: That doesn't make it pleasant!
• Zomgan: Mirae On possesses a powerful Healing Factor that can heal any and all injuries, including being sliced into numerous pieces by a Zomgan and decapitation.

Web Original

• Bartleby Tales directly addresses the Power Perversion Potential in this — as early as the first chapter, a character not only survives after swallowing a live grenade but actually gets off on being blown to pieces and reassembling himself.
• Call Me Kevin: In his The Sims 4 series, he attempts to have Jim Pickens murder Identical Stranger Dennis Racket through a Game Mod, only for the mod to be faulty and cause Dennis to reappear shortly after his demise. He later exploits this when he decides to have Jim steal Christmas, dragging Dennis along and killing him, so his demise distracts the homeowners while Jim swipes the presents, pulling off this scheme multiple times in a row, and yes, Dennis is alive by the end.
• The Shadow of Less Than Three Comics quasi-fame. Puts himself in obvious danger to save time, and to intimidate his enemies. Once leapt through the windshield of an oncoming car, to force the driver to crash, sending the two of them flying thirty-feet, breaking several bones, just to find out who the guy worked for.
• Khalid Shamoun of Survival of the Fittest: Evolution has the ability to regenerate himself from things that would normally kill him. It's even invoked by the scientists, when it's revealed that he was the kid from the prologue who got shot for mouthing off, to demonstrate that rebelling would result in death. It becomes a Deconstructed Trope, however, in that it's shown that his ability to regenerate is failing more than usual in recent history.

Western Animation

• Swampfire in Ben 10: Alien Force. Those Lasers go right through him... then the holes immediately close. This has become part of Ben's basic fighting style with him. Also Goop, the green, goo alien. Because he has no skin or any other form of protection it is reasonable that he gets obliterated and then reforms.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: XR stands somewhere between this, They Killed Kenny Again, and Iron Butt-Monkey. Thanks to easily repairable parts, the "X" no longer stands for "eXperimental," but "eXpendable." (It helps that he often deserves it.)
• Gargoyles: Goliath frequently mentions that their stone sleep during the day allows them to recover from nearly any injury. They get beat half to death just before dawn very frequently, much more often than the human characters are beat half to death at any time of day.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The Horse Talisman gives whoever holds it the ability to immediately recover from any injury. This includes even being turned completely to stone. Played with after the introduction of the Dog Talisman, which gives the user Complete Immortality. However, it by itself comes with the drawback of not instantly curing all injuries, nor the pain that comes with them.
  Finn: [having both the Horse and Dog Talismans] Immortality and Healing? That's redundant.
  [swaps the Horse Talisman with Ratso for Pig, which bestows Eye Beams] I'll swap ya'!
  [...]
  [slams into the underside of a bridge on a truck going 60 mph] Ugh... Immortality hurts...
• Kim Possible has an interesting example about this trope. Shego has only ever used her claws to slice Kim's clothing when Kim was wearing clothes that were self-repairing. The second time, Shego sliced through the battle suit and cut Kim enough that it resulted in blood. After the battle suit regenerated itself, Kim's wounds were never seen ever again. Apparently, the battle suit healed not only itself but also the wounds of its wearer. Weird...
• In Legion of Super Heroes (2006): while Superboy ignored a distress call thinking it was frivolous, Brainiac 5 got blasted with a surprise shot. In slow motion, with the hand itself going flying off and the still sparking stump shown as Brainiac falls into a Pietà Plagiarism in Lighting Lad's arms. Thankfully, he's a Do-Anything Robot with telescoping extensions, so he could heal right quick. Didn't make the let down any easier to take though.
• Not realized, but according to Noelle Stevenson, there were plans for an episode of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power where Adora discovers Healing Hands are part of the She-Ra power suite, which would then lead Glimmer and Bow to use increasingly reckless maneuvers in battle because they could just get patched up. "We did not do this because it is... terrifying."
• In the "Coon & Friends" trilogy of South Park, it's revealed that Kenny coming Back from the Dead isn't just a gag, but an actual superpower. That he's had to use his power hundreds of times by the time he's turned ten is apparently a coincidence.
• SpongeBob SquarePants, like an actual sponge, is often shown with regenerative abilities that border on Nigh-Invulnerability, and really gets to show them off in some instances:
  • One Halloween Episode had Patrick shave SpongeBob down so he would be rounded instead of square to fit in a Bed Sheet Ghost costume. Of course, Patrick being an idiot, he shaves SpongeBob down to his brain, scaring everyone (including the Flying Dutchman). Afterward, SpongeBob tells a frightened Patrick "Don't worry! It'll grow back!"
  • He has ripped off his arms 40 times in one episode, recovered from being completely liquified, taken a thousand punches in the face, gotten dragged through a field of giant clams, cheese graters and educational television, and has been ripped in half. Ironically, the latter event occurred in an episode that revolved around SpongeBob never leaving his house for fear of hurting himself after smashing his hip. Once, he ripped himself in half as part of a victory dance.
• In Steven Universe, gems have Resurrective Immortality. If they "die", they'll just regenerate after a while.
  Pearl: (after getting stabbed in the back) Whoopsy-daisy! Steven, it's okay! I'm gonna be just f—
• Teen Titans:
  • When Slade came Back from the Dead, one of the first things that happened was Robin unleashing a series of vicious kicks to the head that he would probably have not got hit with earlier. From his reaction and the cracking noises when he straightened his head, it seems they broke his neck. However, it's later shown that while he was brought back to life his flesh wasn't, so it's probably a lot easier to break his bones.
  • Cyborg often loses arms and legs, thanks to his mechanical nature. In the third-season finale, he is almost completely dismembered during a battle with the also-cybernetic Brother Blood. Naturally, he gets better.
• Transformers wobbles back and forth on this. You have Optimus Prime being dismembered in Transformers: Generation 1 and being okay, but a few shots to the torso kill him one movie later. Beast Wars Waspinator explodes so much that Rattrap has a collection of his parts, but Dinobot dies just with minimal injuries. In one episode of Transformers: Animated, people live with just their heads; in another, a stab to the gut nearly kills you dead.
  • These can be justified by Transformers having different anatomy: Dinobot died because he was low on energon but continued to fight anyway. In Animated most of their important parts appear to be inside their heads and body, so a stab to the gut could be fatal while being decapitated would be the equivalent of cutting/disconnecting the cord connecting a computer and the monitor (debilitating, but reversible).
  • After Starscream gains immortality from an AllSpark shard, he becomes a complete magnet for injury. Right after this happens Megatron proceeds to kill him five times, back to back.
• Wolverine in X-Men: The Animated Series. One memory of his past is a secret mission during World War II with Captain America. Their superior tells them they have to storm an enemy base from a helicopter and it must be done really fast. "How fast?" "You aren't going to use a parachute". Cap'n knows he can do it, but he looks worried at Logan (didn't have the adamantium bones yet), who reassures him he'll be ok. They then jump, Cap'n stands like nothing happened, and sees the poor soldier in the ground, with his legs terribly broken. He's going to go for help, but Logan tells him it's ok, then he regenerates, stands and tells Cap'n they have a mission to do.
• In Young Justice: Outsiders, we have a character with a Healing Factor—and since the show airs on a streaming service, well, suffice to say there's no limit to the horrible things she is subjected to as a result. "Oh my God, they killed Halo!" has become a minor meme among Young Justice fans. Fortunately, her ever-increasing list of powers eventually comes to include a force field.

Real Life

• Most amphibians can regenerate lost and damaged limbs to a degree that reptiles, birds, and mammals could only dream of. The African hairy frog takes advantage of this by using its own intentionally broken toe bones as DIY claws. Males grow structures of dermal papillae during the breeding season that look uncannily like sideburns. This huge coincidence has earned the species some fame on the Internet as "the Wolverine frog".

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