Mortality Grey Area

"Look! The moonlight shows us for what we really are. We are not among the living, and so we cannot die, but neither are we dead."

— Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

It's generally accepted that a character is one of two things: alive, or dead. Some dead beings can act like a living being; however, they are still considered technically dead. But some beings fit in a grey area, or no area at all; they aren't alive or dead, or simultaneously both like a Schrödinger's Cat. Perhaps they used to be one, but have transformed into a being that can't be classified as either. Or they're such a Paradox Person or Eldritch Abomination that labels like "dead" and "alive" can't be used with them.

While inanimate objects qualify by default, animate beings are more notable. Depending on who you ask, robots are usually considered "alive", but occasionally this gets brought up of them technically not being living or dead beings. Cosmic Entities who exist above life are considered this by default. Someone who's Barred from the Afterlife is liable to become this if they aren't a form of the undead.

Not to be confused with The Undead, as they are considered dead, but are animated like a living being. That said, sometimes undead are categorized as neither living or dead. These beings can't be considered living or dead, or are equally both. This may also be the case with Dhampyrs. May overlap with Child of Two Worlds. Sub-Trope of Liminal Being. This trope is not to be confused with Uncertain Doom, which is when it's unclear whether or not a character has survived a seemingly lethal event. See also Life/Death Juxtaposition.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Death Note, all mortals have a universally destined time of death, and it is a shinigami's job to carry out those deaths. One particular shinigami named Gelus developed affections towards Misa Amane, going far enough to overlook his job and protect her from her time of death by directly killing the man who was destined to stab Misa. Misa is aware that her life was spared. She's still biologically alive, but the universal rules no longer dictate when she is going to die. She wonders if this means she is going to live forever or if her life can still be claimed by a mortal injury.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Anything that's bonded to the Source Wall is as good as dead, however more accurately a case of conscious Taken for Granite. This middle ground between life and death allowed Black Hand to reanimate them, only to backfire when they revive no longer bonded to the Source Wall. One "Future's End" scenario has Hal exploit this arrest of living by being placed in it when mortally wounded.
  • All-Star Superman: Atlas and Samson steal the Ultrasphinx's jewels and present them to Lois Lane. In retaliation, the monster traps the woman in a state of quantum uncertainty, in which she is neither alive nor dead. It then poses an enigma to Superman, telling him that, if his answer is satisfactory, the conundrum will be undone and Lois will return to life. However, if he fails to answer, her death will be permanent.
  • Blackest Night: Black Lanterns see through looking at people's emotions, usually getting something from living, ignore those who suppress their emotions or see their fellow undead as simple grays. However they have a hard time figuring what to do with beings without a heart like Etrigan. The Phantom Stranger, who's a mysterious and enigmatic yet powerful entity, isn't considered either living or dead by their forces. One Black Lantern who tries to take his heart only gets horribly burned.
  • Justice League (2011): In issue #11, the League travels to Mount Sumeru, where an entrance to the valley of souls exists. Cyborg is the only member of the League who is able to see the entrance, something that is only possible for those walking the line between life and death according to a book written by the villain David Graves.
  • Tales from the Dark Multiverse: The What If? for the above-mentioned Blackest Night sees Sinestro botching things due to his pride and turning his white ring on himself. However this didn't work and he becomes a Limbo or Twilight Lantern, that being a hybrid of a White and Black Lantern. In his case he's literally half-alive, half-undead.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Wonder Woman (1942): "Ideaforms", such things and characters from mythology and fairytales, are not included in the Amazon's no killing rule, since their status as alive is questionable. They exist and have their own thoughts but are formed and influenced by human stories, interpretation and desires and they can come back after thousands of years of death/nonexistence if their stories become more popular and are tied to enough modern human desires.
    • Wonder Woman (1987): Olympians that are stuck in Hades are treated as dead by those outside of it but they need to be heavily restrained to keep them there unlike the truly dead, or they'll just walk right out like nothing is wrong.
  • Young Justice: Greta was killed by her brother, but she is not a ghost and when she tries to get a straight answer as to whether or not she is dead or alive from the Specter she's told there is none.
• Hellboy: Roger the homunculus is inert if he doesn't have a power source to activate him, but not dead. His friends come visit his soul and find out he's happy where he is, apparently in a relationship with the Roman goddess of sewers, and asks not to be brought back.
• The Thanos Imperative: The Cancerverse is a universe where life has been infested and corrupted, due to the Many-Angled Ones. The only exceptions to those not turned to their cause are Mechanical Lifeforms like the Vision, who are forming a resistance. As robots aren't truly alive, the Many-Angled Ones can't affect them at all.

Films — Animation

• Coco: After stealing Ernesto de la Cruz's guitar from his tomb on Día de los Muertos, Miguel ends up cursed, unable to interact with other humans, but able to travel to the Land of the Dead and interact with its deceased inhabitants. However, he still resembles a human boy as opposed to a skeleton, though he slowly morphs into a skeleton the longer he stays in the Land of the Dead. When his deceased relatives first find him, his Tía Victoria notes that he's not entirely dead, but his Tía Rosita says he's not quite alive either.

Films — Live-Action

• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl features Barbossa and his crew, as the result of plundering the cursed treasure chest of Hernán Cortés. None of their desires can be satisfied; their hunger cannot be sated, their thirst cannot be quenched, their lust cannot be slaked. Under direct moonlight, they transform into rotting skeletons. On top of all of this, they cannot die, no matter the state they are in,^note this includes a group of pirates impaled through the chest and then blown to bits by a hand-bomb, and a pirate tied to a cannon and then dropped into the ocean not until each piece of Aztec gold is returned to the chest it came from, along with a blood price from the one who took it.

Literature

• Bone Street Rumba: Carlos Delacruz is referred to as a "halfie" because he's only half-dead: he and a few other characters were killed, but then brought partially back to life by another character, hence the first book's title Half-Resurrection Blues. He impregnates Sasha in the first book, and their twins are born fully alive.
• Discworld:
  • Golems are only animated as long as they have a chem (a paper with magic words) in their heads. Remove the chem and they're just very big humanoid statues with empty heads that creep everyone out (as Angua puts it, the living hate the undead and the undead loathe the unalive). It doesn't mean they don't have wants, however, and after the events of Feet of Clay, it turns out that putting a golem's bill of sale to itself along with its chem frees it from its need to have a master, and the golems start working to free themselves. Dorfl argues with a bunch of priests that if they want to prove he's not alive, they can grind him down to the finest powder to find a single spark of life, but to make sure the test is fair, the same must be done to a fellow priest. The priests see the difficulty in the proposal, because the golem can just be remolded and baked to be restored. One golem in Going Postal is shown to have a soul after it dies, but Death isn't sure what to do with it. The golem answers that not doing anything is the greatest freedom a golem can have, and so it stays where it is.
  • Granny Weatherwax considers elves (and presumably all immortals) as this, because it gives them Immortal Immaturity:
    What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you.
  • A Hat Full of Sky: The parasitic entities known as Hivers were formed in the first few seconds of Creation, and are stated to not be alive, but to merely have "the shape of life". They exist as formless, mindless essences driven purely by instinct and base emotion, and possess neither thought nor intelligence... unless they can hijack that of a living being.
  • Mort: Princess Keli was scheduled to die, but The Grim Reaper's apprentice Mort, due to having a crush on her, makes it so that the guy who was destined to kill her doesn't. This results in her being somehow dead but alive at the same time. It takes people a while to realize she's there; her skin is cold to the touch, the other people at the castle make preparations for a funeral before belatedly realizing they don't need to, and dogs howl, but then immediately wonder why.
  • The Auditors of Reality are sentient but specifically not alive, and in fact despise life for being imaginative and disorderly, which gets in the way of their bookkeeping. When they take on human forms in Thief of Time, the irrationality and stimulus of being alive actually ends up killing some of them, but even then they have no souls for The Grim Reaper to take when they die. With one exception: Myria LeJean, who had been human longer than any of them, experienced Humanity Ensues and is surprised to find she's gained a soul after committing suicide.
• The Graveyard Book: Silas, Bod's guardian, is an outcast in the graveyard as he's neither alive nor dead. Notably it also means he can't take part in the Macabray, a surreal ritual when the ghosts get to dance with the living. It's never confirmed but strongly implied that he is a vampire.
• Harry Potter: Amortal beings are a distinct category from immortal beings, despite functionally being the same. Their immortality comes from the virtue of never being alive in the first place, and thus technically can't die. "Non-beings" like poltergeists, boggarts, and the Dementors fall under this category of not being recognized as living or dead.
• His Dark Materials: The Breathless Ones were half-killed warriors who were unable to die doe to their lungs having been harmed by their captors to the point their daemons have to pump them:
  Being alive is one thing, and being dead's another, but being half-killed is worse than either. They just can't die, and living is altogether beyond 'em.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Nazgûl/Ringwraiths. As they are eternally bound to Sauron's will as his top enforcers, they can never truly die as long as the One Ring, and by extension Sauron himself, still exists. But neither are they truly alive, as they are also powerful ghost-like entities with no physical bodies of their own whose primary weapon and purpose (when not pursuing the Fellowship) is to sow terror and discord among their master's enemies, and without fire or a Numenorean blade, it's impossible to so much as even scratch them.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
  • In The Dark Artifices, after Livia Blackthorn is killed, her twin brother Tiberius decides to resurrect her, but the spell only brings her as a pseudo-being who is invisible to everyone but Ty and Kit. Judging by Magnus' horrified reaction to it, it seems that the spell can genuinely bring people back from the dead, but something happened and now Livvy is stuck in a limbo.
  • In The Last Hours, it is revealed that Jesse Blackthorn didn't actually die during his marking ritual. He was sent to a limbo (possibly the same one that Livvy is currently stuck in) because his mother did not put proper protective charms on him as a child, causing his soul to separate from his body during the ritual. Lucie can feel and touch him like a living person, but he is invisible to most people and hasn't aged for years. At the end of the second book, Lucie concentrates her powers to do a spell that fully brings Jesse back to life, something that is evidently not a necromancy.

Live-Action TV

• Andromeda has Trance Gemini. The first hint that there's something strange about her occurs in the second part of the pilot, when she's shot and seemingly killed, only to recover shortly afterward without apparent explanation. In a later episode, a sentient colony of microorganisms known as the Bokor, which kills people and then takes control of their corpses, is able to control and even speak through Trance without killing her first, which causes Dylan Hunt to suspect that Trance was never really alive in the first place. It's eventually revealed she's actually the avatar of a sun.
• In the Charmed (1998) episode "Styx Feet Under", Paige casts a protection spell on an innocent bystander when the demon Sirk attempts to murder him. However rather than keeping the man from harm, the spell merely bound his soul to his body so he was unable to pass on. The Grim Reaper then shows up and reveals that although the man was dead, he was unable to claim his soul. Said man continued roaming around being unable to properly die despite his fatal injuries due to the spell.
• Doctor Who:
  • One of the Doctor's companions ends her tenure in this state, thanks in part to the Doctor himself. She allows herself to take the place of an innocent who was doomed to die at a set time. The Doctor is unable to prevent it at the time it happened, but the moment an opportunity arises, he goes back and manages to pluck her out of harm's way the instant before she would have been killed. However, her death wasn't a case of Never Found the Body, and her body is literally stuck in time in the exact moment before her death, with no heartbeat or anything of the sort. She is neither alive, nor dead, and will remain so until she goes back to the time of her death and events play out as they are supposed to. She and the Doctor argue about how to proceed, as her staying out of time could cause great harm to the universe and the Doctor is prepared to let it happen. Fortunately, so long as she plans to go to her death ''eventually' there's no requirement she do so right away, so Clara Oswald leaves the Doctor, stealing her own TARDIS and going out among time and space with her own companion.
  • In "The Woman who fell to Earth", the villainous Tzim-Sha is a member of a race called the Stenza, who use ritualised hunts of other sentient races to decide their leaders. He claims that the quarry of these hunts must be captured alive and delivered to the Stenza homeworld, where they are sealed within stasis pods that preserve them in a state "something between life and death" to serve as trophies for the rest of time. When he returns as the villain of the series finale, Graham and Ryan decide to seal him in one of his own stasis pods, as both Cruel Mercy and a Taste Of His Own Medicine.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The three Mystics from Rhun seem to be of same nature as the ringwraiths. They appear at first as living women, only for their true wraith forms to be revealed by the Stranger. They were possibly humans once, but gave up their humanity in exchange for the dark magic they wield.

Music

• Apollo 440: "Liquid Cool" describes cryonic preservation this way:
  Certainly someone who is frozen is not alive, but neither are they dead.
  
  They are in a third state. A biostasis what I would use to describe... liquid cool.

Roleplay

• In We Are All Pokémon Trainers, Hitodama is a Chandelure born of Satine, a regular Chandelure, and Lifealope, a Sawsbuck-shaped Nature Spirit closely related to Xerneas and considered their "brother". As a result of the unique circumstances of her birth, she's an odd existence living between life and death due to being half Ghost-type and half nature spirit. As a Litwick and Lampent this manifests in her leaving a wilted trail of flowers wherever she goes, but upon fully evolving she also gains a unique dark green color akin to a dying leaf.

Sciences

• The Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment uses the Mind Screw of this trope to lambaste the apparent absurdity of quantum superposition. In short, a cat is put in a box with a vial of cyanide gas, a striking mechanism, a Geiger counter connected to the striker, and a small amount of a radioactive substance with a 50/50 chance of decaying in one hour. After an hour goes by, there's a 50/50 chance of the Geiger counter pinging and tripping the mechanism, and thus a 50/50 chance of breaking the vial and releasing the gas, so there's a 50/50 chance of the cat being alive or dead once the box is opened. According to the logic of quantum superposition, before the results are observed the cat is simultaneously alive and dead.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Magi succumb to Final Twilight when they build up enough residual magic to glitch them out of reality forever. Necromancy doesn't register them as dead, but they either vanish or transform into something else, and no one knows what that means for the mage's soul.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Constructs and The Undead count as neither living nor dead. Depending on the edition and the specific creature, they're immune to some effects that the living can suffer (like Critical Hits and fatigue in 3.5 Edition), but are unaffected (or harmed) by Healing Hands and can't be brought Back from the Dead. The line is further blurred by Eberron's playable Warforged, which are a special "Living Construct" with more of the strengths and weaknesses of true life.
  • Eberron also has the Undying, beings very much like undead except that the energy that reanimates them is positive energy, the energy of life (instead of negative energy, the energy of death, like undead). Similarly, The Book of Exalted Deeds has rules for the Deathless, good-aligned beings who have come Back from the Dead in a form powered by positive energy. It includes the wrinkle that they react to Turn Undead and Rebuke Undead in the opposite manner, being rebuked or bolstered by turning and turned or destroyed by rebuking.
  • Dragon #313 introduces four half-undead templates: Fetch (half-ghost), Gheden (half-zombie), Ghul (half-ghoul) and Katane (half-vampire). Half-undead are living beings, but they have many of the traits, powers and vulnerabilities of their undead progenitors, although in a lesser form. They register as undead to undead-detecting magic, have some resistance to critical hits, energy drain and negative energy damage (but not the full immunity of undead), and are vulnerable to Turn Undead (and holy water), but are only weakened rather than panicked or controlled. Half-undead still age, but at a much slower rate than the base creature, and upon death they have a good chance of rising as full undead.
  • The 3.5 spells shroud of undeath or kiss of the vampire surround the caster in negative energy, making undead confuse her for one of their own. Any spell specifically affecting undead creatures (including Revive Kills Zombie effects) treat the subject as undead. She stays a living being throughout, however, and can still be targeted by spells affecting living subjects. The more powerful undead mask goes one step further by, temporarily, fully giving the subject the Undead creature type, including all of their immunities and weaknesses. The weaker living undeath doesn't grant such drastic changes but makes the subject immune to precision damage and critical hits like an undead.
  • The 3.5 spell spark of life, on the other hand, has the opposite effect: an undead targeted by it loses almost all of the immunities granted by its creature type. For its short duration, it must breathes like a living being and is no longer subject to Revive Kills Zombie — but it is still otherwise considered undead (and is still healed by negative energy).
  • The dolghast from Magic of Eberron is an Aberration with a body that's constantly healing and rotting, giving it the "Half-Dead" special quality. In addition to gaining some of the immunities of undead (including a 50% chance of negating critical hits), it has a unique interaction with positive and negative energy — both are harmful to it, but if it succeeds on its saving throw against such an effect (which would normally negate or reduce damage) it's converted to healing instead.
• Exalted:
  • The ghost-blooded are the children of unions between living mortals and ghosts, a rare occurrence only possible in shadowlands, and are metaphysically neither truly alive nor actually dead, hence their common moniker of the Half-Dead. Their nature means that they're metaphysical mistakes that shouldn't exist; there aren't even supposed to be an Underworld and lingering dead in Creation, let alone people who aren't strictly alive or dead. As a result, they don't have a true place among either the living, as they're too connected to the dead and unable to recover Essence in the sunlit world, or the dead, as they're still flesh-and-blood creatures who can't thrive in Underworld societies.
  • The Abyssal Exalted exist in a state somewhere between life and The Undead. They're closer to alive than not but still something less than alive.
  • The Neverborn are essentially what happens when you kill something that literally cannot die. Unable by their nature as Primordials to truly die, the Neverborn are trapped in an agonizing half-life, and seek to unmake Creation in order that their torment might finally end.
• Pathfinder: There are a few races that, for a variety of reasons, are functionally very close to the undead (typically, they're animated by negative energy and hurt by positive energy, whereas all living creatures by definition work the other way around) but are still flesh-and-blood beings with active metabolisms and the needs of living creatures. Dhampyrs, the children of vampires and living humanoids, are once such race. Similarly, there are mortics, former mortals who were exposed to immense amounts of negative energy and survived... technically.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Emperor of Man is interred in the Golden Throne, a gigantic mechanism that anchors his soul in his withered carcass to keep him from completely dying so that his soul can power the Warp beacon known as the Astronomican. It's unclear if he can really be considered alive at this point or something akin to a cyborg lich.
  • The Necrons are an entire species who are undying robots that can be remade in their Tomb World whenever they die... but they cannot reproduce, and their personality engrams (their souls, essentially) are degraded a little more whenever they reconstitute. And that's the ones that still have those engrams: the vast majority are little more than zombies/servitors who exist only to follow orders. The "nobility" of the species are very much aware that their minds may be "alive", but their bodies are cold and dead and incapable of perpetuating their species. Unless they find some way to reverse the biotransference process and restore their minds to mortal, biological forms, ultimately the Necrons are a doomed, incrementally dying race at worst and a stagnant one at best.

Theatre

• In The Addams Family musical, Gomez says that he will invite every family member to his reunion: living, dead (via necromancy) and "undecided".

Video Games

• The Binding of Isaac's Lazarus is capable of reviving from death perfectly fine. Tainted Lazarus, on the other hand, is stuck between life and death, constantly flipping between his living form and a walking corpse, dying and resurrecting incessantly for each room you complete and each item you collect.
• Dark Souls:
  • The Dark Sign cursed Undead are stuck "in-between" life and death. Non-Hollow Undead still possess souls and are thus technically "alive", but they're quite literally incapable of dying and will get back up so long as the Undead in question still has Heroic Willpower to not go Hollow. Hollows, which act more like typical zombies, are also hit with this, as it's left ambiguous if Hollowed Undead are Deader than Dead once killed as Hollows, or if they too eventually get back up. Contrasted with the animated skeletons of the Catacombs, which are explicitly just bones given souls and animated by necromancers, the Undead cursed by the Dark Sign are a very explicit anomaly in the world, and a sign of things going very wrong.
  • Dragonslayer Ornstein is stuck with a very bizarre case of this: In the first game, he's fought as a Dual Boss with Smough the Executioner and killed by the player in order to progress through the game. Then came along Dark Souls II with a boss called the Old Dragonslayer... who was all but named to be Ornstein, despite the game being a Distant Sequel of the first game. Then came along Dark Souls III, in which his armor can be found and described the fact that he left "the ruined cathedral" (the place where he's fought in the first game) in search of the Nameless King, and thus it's technically impossible for him to have been fought in the first game at all! To say that this created a lot of Epileptic Trees is an understatement.
  • Smough himself gets in on this as well. Despite being fought as a Dual Boss with Dragonslayer Ornstein and killed by the player character, his armor description in Dark Souls III states that he made the Last Stand in Anor Londo as it was conquered by Pontyff Sullyvan's forces, an event implied to have happened millenias after the events of the first game.
• Elden Ring: When the demigod Godwyn the Golden was assassinated by the Black Knives, they somehow botched it and killed only his soul while leaving his body alive. As such, when Godwyn was interred in the roots of the Erdtree, traditionally considered the source and final destination of all life in the Lands Between, his mindless, still-living corpse could not be properly absorbed and became Alien Kudzu propagating through the Erdtree's roots called Deathroot, which reanimates the dead wherever it spreads. By the time you see it yourself, Godwyn's corpse has bloated into a gigantic, bizarrely mermaid-like figure embedded in the Erdtree's roots, still neither really alive nor dead.
• Ghost Trick: Yomiel's body is stuck at the moment of his death. He's both dead and alive at the same time. This hasn't been good for his mental health.
• In Quest for Glory IV, the oft-mentioned-never-seen Archmage Erana is revealed to have been stuck between life and death for about 80 years before present. While her physical body is unequivocally dead, killed by the Dark One Avoozl during her semi-successful attempt to banish it, her spirit is not, as after killing her, Avoozl latched onto it, so that both it and Erana's soul are stuck between the material world and the Chaos Realm together. Because of this capture, Erana has not become a ghost, unlike Paladin Piotyr, Anna, and Nikolai, and so is not fully conscious and cannot interact with the living. She can, however, still dream (and share her nightmares with the Hero if he sleeps near her staff or in her garden), and at the end of the game, the Hero manages to break Avoozl's grasp on her, giving her just enough time to finish her banishing ritual and save Mordavia, before her soul is pulled into the afterlife.
• Touhou Project
  • Though it's not clear that Yakumo Yukari herself properly fills this trope, her final boss music directly references it. Quoth Renko from Magical Astronomy:
    Immortality doesn't mean absence of death; it means the boundary between life and death disappears, and you are in a state neither alive nor dead. Just as if you were in the living world and the Netherworld at the same time, a Necrophantasia."
  • Youmu Konpaku is a half-human, half-ghost who lives in the Netherworld where dead souls await reincarnation, and is often described as half-alive and half-dead. Her higher soul exists outside her body as wispy blob, while her lower soul remains in her body to animate it, and both halves of her person are described as having a temperature in-between that of living creatures and ghosts. Youmu's unusual status also means she's half human, half youkai, which has had both story and gameplay implications. In Imperishable Night, the Netherworld team^note Consisting of Youmu and her ghost employer has a lopsided Human/Youkai gauge, while solo Youmu is the only solo character with an evenly-balanced one. In Ten Desires, Miko is unable to read Youmu's personality correctly because she has neither an urge to live nor a death drive.
  • The Lunarians. In Touhou lore, kegare (commonly translated as "impurity"), is the source of life, but also death because they are two sides of the same coin. By living on the pure moon and removing impurities from their body, the Lunarians achieved effective immortality as they are technically not alive. However, a frequent theme of their appearances is that this also causes them to miss out on the joys of life, and potentially damages their sense of empathy.

Visual Novels

• Ciel from Tsukihime is stuck in a weird limbo between life and death, having inexplicably come back to life after having been killed by Arcueid. This is due to a combination of possessing extraordinary magic potential and having suffered a Demonic Possession by the Big Bad, so as long as he exists, so does she — in fact, since coming back to life, she has enjoyed a Complete Immortality due to the paradox she represents (being both dead and alive and neither of the two at the same time).

Webcomics

• Gunnerkrigg Court: Jones doesn't believe that she's a living being. She has Complete Immortality, hasn't changed in billions of years and is The Needless. She thinks she lacks the necessary needs and changing to be a living being, though it's not outright stated she isn't human.
• Homestuck: As part of his Duality Motif, when Sollux sacrifices himself, he doesn't become a ghost like the rest of the cast would; he becomes a "half-ghost", separate from his dead body with the powers of a ghost and a blank white eye in addition to an empty black eye from being struck blind shortly before his death. When Gamzee chucks his corpse into a Kernelsprite, Sollux's ghost parts are stripped, rendering him fully alive again.
• Snippy in Romantically Apocalyptic is revived by the Biomatrix shortly after being killed, turning him into a Humanoid Abomination Unstuck in Time, neither living nor dead. He's understandably freaked out; learning that it fused his mask and clothes to his skin does not help.

Websites

• SCP Foundation: Due to regenerating to everything they throw at it, the Foundation has come to believe that SCP-682 can't be considering alive. While functionally a reptilian monstrosity with a Healing Factor and Adaptive Ability, the Hard-to-Destroy Reptile can adapt to the laws of physics being altered around it and survive things that are outright impossible to do so. It has even easily adapted against assaults (including SCP objects) that explicitly target living matter, somehow growing protections and even limbs that are unaffected. As such, it's seen as too much of an Eldritch Abomination to be truly considered a living being.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: The beings known as "hollow ones". They don't age past their moment of death, and they have an uncanny knack for resisting death as they cling to life. Two of them have been introduced on the show thus far:
  • Campaign 2 NPC Jamedi Cosko, a former hired hand of Captain Avantika. His nature is first glimpsed by Caduceus as jungle insects ignore him, due to his faint aura of undeath.
  • 30+ years prior to Campaign 3, Laudna was killed as a young woman in her 20s, but upon being hit by a necromantic force she came back to life, believing that she exists somewhere in-between life and death. Although she registers as undead to magical detection, healing magic works as though she's alive, and her heart beats... three times per minute.

Real Life

• There's some debate over whether viruses should be considered living organisms or not. They have many traits of living beings like being able to replicate themselves and spread to other organisms, but also lack important traits such as being able to reproduce on their own.

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