Rasputinian Death

"He didn't die of old age, either. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, drawn and quartered. [...] There was a prophecy. Just before his head died, his last words were 'Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back.'"

— Ray Stantz (about Vigo the Carpathian), Ghostbusters II

In Which multiple things happen to a character, any of which ought to be fatal. Eventually, one of them is.

There can be several reasons for this:

1. The character is just that tough, and their killers want to make absolutely sure that they go down and stay down.
2. The character has the backing of the Powers That Be, made a Deal with the Devil or is blessed or affected by some other supernatural thing.
3. The initial attempts at killing them are ineffective, unbeknownst to any observers, whether by a mistake on behalf of the killer or sheer dumb luck. Only the last attempt actually does the job.
4. The first fatal thing that happens is relatively slow-acting, and knowledge of it leads them to do something drastic.
5. The first fatal thing that happens is relatively slow-acting, and other people try to kill them before it kicks in.
6. Someone really hates them and wants them to suffer.
7. It's funny.

If someone is supernaturally relentless, unstoppable, or Made of Iron, then this is the most reliable way to kill them. Related to a Self-Destructive Charge and to There Is No Kill Like Overkill (in this case, there is no kill except overkill). Might be done because someone wants to Make Sure He's Dead. Sometimes the person actually does want to die, but screws it up, so it becomes a Bungled Suicide. Related to (though not to be confused with) Why Won't You Die?.

In video games, this is often a Recurring Boss.

The trope takes its name from a myth spread by Prince Felix Yusupov about the assassination of Grigori Rasputin in 1916 (which many scholars had analyzed and found semi-plausible explanations for how Rasputin could have survived the abuse he was allegedly put through). Ironically, Rasputin's Real Life death wasn't very Rasputinian; the 1916 autopsy report (as discovered after the Cold War and reviewed by American and Russian doctors in 2002) shows that Rasputin was shot twice in the back, with a final bullet to the head, which killed him instantly; the chef who was supposed to have put poison in his meal also admitted he'd chickened out.

However, his killers wanted to portray him as a near-indestructible son of Satan, so they made up an elaborate story about how he survived poison, beating, and bullet wounds only to drown in the Neva after being wrapped up in a blanket and tossed into the river. Later embellishments by Yusupov (he thought up a new one every time he was short on money) even had Rasputin dying of hypothermia, having partially succeeded in attempting to claw through the blanket and ice that covered him, and to top it off, another version said that when they cremated him, his body was trying to get up again as it burned.^note Surprisingly enough, that last part actually isn't that improbable. As a corpse's liquids evaporate and the muscles contract in the heat of a fire, the body can indeed shift and curl in on itself, which could indeed have made Rasputin's corpse look like it was trying to rise!

Even with the legend having been debunked, it remains much more popular than the truth because the true story of Rasputin's death is boring, whereas the fake story is much cooler. His death is also disputed, as without Rasputin, who would be Alan Moore? Finally, the myth of Rasputin's death fulfills five of the possible reasons listed above.

Polar opposite of One-Hit Kill.

This is a Death Trope, so EXPECT SPOILERS!

noreallife

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• YuYu Hakusho: Minor villain Byakko is impaled, explodes, falls off a tower, falls into a pit of lava, and is finally frozen and shattered by his teammate, ironically enough. His severed, iced head then complains for several minutes.
• The berserked self-defense program of the Book of Darkness in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's was sliced in half by a BFS, petrified, frozen in ice, blasted to bits by three Wave Motion Guns, jettisoned to space, and shot by a weapon that distorts time and space over an area before it was finally killed... temporarily. Reinforce had to delete herself together with its regeneration program to keep it dead.
• Kazuo Kiriyama of Battle Royale got shot in the stomach with a shotgun (which does nothing to him due to a very sturdy bulletproof vest), stood near an exploding car, took a spearhead to the eye, was shot in the face, and finally died with a shot to the neck/chin.
  • Shinji Mimura gets swiped with multiple bullets, one slashing his stomach that causes his intestines to begin to fall out that he puts back in with help of duct tape, gets the top half of his foot shot off, takes some more bullets to the body and gets one more into his chin and then dies sometime later, still having the strength to carve a final message.
• Hagire Rinichiro of Deadman Wonderland is shot point-blank in the chest by Ganta's Ganbare gun (an evolved branch of sin capable of destroying buildings and one-shotting anyone unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of its projectile) with the blast sending him straight into Senji's blade, losing half of his limbs before falling from a great height and possibly being crushed under debris. Despite the punishment, Hagire survives long enough to patch himself up and reappear for one last round against multiple deadmen until his defense is broken and he's flung into the air, stabbed and incinerated before finally being put out of his misery with a headshot from Ganta.
• Gauron in Full Metal Panic! survives being shot in the head, and having his Arm Slave blown up twice. The second time, what's left of his AS falls into the ocean (Where he is attacked by sharks), but in spite of that and a case of terminal cancer he turns back up again in The Second Raid, now only alive enough to have one final conversation with Sousuke. He finally dies for real after Sousuke unloads a gun into him and the entire building he's in blows up.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, this happens with the homunculi. Their Philosopher's Stone powers enable them to survive being killed repeatedly, but they have a finite number of "lives" based on the number of souls trapped in their Stone, so a sufficient number of brutal fatalities can take them down for good.
  • In the case of Lust it takes half a dozen bullets, a bomb blast, entirely destroying her body by ripping out her Stone, two dozen more bullets, and being set on fire over and over to finally kill her. Which, of course, set up Roy Mustang's Moment of Awesome line, "I'll just keep killing you until you die."
  • Bradley/Wrath got one, what with him still going strong after being on a train that exploded, getting run through, having an eye clawed out, getting shot, nearly drowning, nearly being set on fire and having his hands blasted off. He has now finally died of blood loss but had enough time to give a dying speech first. It should be noted that Wrath/Bradley is the only Homunculus without any healing powers, he's just that badass. In fact, the man who blew his arms off admitted that if it wasn't for A: relatively old age slowing him down, B: all the other wounds, and C: the sun flashing in his one good eye at the right moment to temporarily blind him, Wrath probably would have won, and after receiving his final wound, managed to inflict a few more injuries on his killer with a blade held in his teeth before blood loss caught up with him.
  • And Envy got his Philosopher's Stone destroyed, reducing him to a little fetus... fish... thing, ate a bunch of Cyclops soldiers to grow back to his full size, then got Colonel Mustang angry, which resulted in him getting his tongue burned out, having the water in his eyes boiled several times, and being lit on fire over and over and over. And Riza shot him about a dozen times, too. After Roy burninated him back to Fetus!Envy, he gets lectured by Ed and finally rips what's left of his Stone out, committing suicide. Sheesh.
  • Sloth got filled full of bullets, shot a couple of times by a tank, frozen solid, and defrosted none the worse for wear; the next encounter with him saw him being filled with even more bullets, stabbed and pummeled by Alex and Olivier Armstrong, tossed around like a ragdoll by Izumi and Sieg, and eventually dying with a smile on his face from charging into a bunch of giant spikes Armstrong had made grow out of the floor. Which he had done several times already before it took.
  • Father took a Kamehame Hadoken, a few minutes of sustained fire from an entire army (including tanks, mortars, and other explosives), several full-power fire blasts, stab wounds, a savage beating, serial impalements, and having his body transmuted into charcoal and shattered before it stuck.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003):
    • Scar suffers one, surviving after losing both of his arms (and as a result, a great deal of blood), and takes two hails of bullets before dying.
    • Pride is paralyzed and then incinerated repeatedly by Mustang until his body runs out of red stones (although, this was enabled by Mustang getting a hold of Pride's Achilles' Heel, something the homunculi didn't have in the manga/Brotherhood). Notably, this happened in the anime's Gecko Ending long before Mustang fought Lust (and killed her in the same manner) in the manga.
• Szilard Quates of Baccano!. Number of things he survives over the course of one night (most in rapid succession) before Firo finally "consumes" him: being shot dozens of times by gangsters; getting run over by his own car; being literally stabbed in the back by his disgruntled Battle Butler; getting set on fire; and having his arm sliced in two - the long way - by Firo. Okay, so he's immortal, but props anyway for taking everything up until the fire in stride.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam 00, there are two deaths in Season 1 that might qualify. The first is Lockon's death, the second it Alejandro's.
  • Lockon first goes out in the GN-ARMS Type-D. When that is destroyed, he ejects the Gundam Dynames just before the explosion, losing the GN-Full Shield in the process. Then the Dynames gets severely damaged by Ali Al-Zaachez's Gundam Throne Zwei and its GN Fangs, leaving the Dynames without both arms, legs, and head, and the pilot visibly injured (and his helmet cracked). He then takes the targeting system from Dynames, connects it to the remains of the GN-ARMS and fires, but at the same moment, Throne Zwei fires back, causing the cannon Lockon was standing on to explode, killing Lockon. According to Word of God, Lockon would have died even without being caught in the explosion.
  • Alejandro's death is a more downtoned example. Up until that point, GN-drive powered MS could be destroyed in a few direct hits from other GN-drive powered MS. Alejandro's Alvaroon is stabbed with 6 separate swords before the final blow. From a SEVENTH sword.
• In One Piece, it takes 267 slashes and stabs, getting shot more than 562 times with bullets and 46 times with cannonballs, pierced by a laser, a mid-battle freezing, and having half of his face melted off ON TOP of having previously refused medical attention prior to kill Whitebeard. And nothing of that would have happened had Whitebeard not been stabbed by one of his children the moment he decided he'd get in the fight.
  • He didn't go down without a fight, either. He was truly Defiant to the End, telling the entire world with his last breath that One Piece does exist (thumbing his nose at the World Government in the process by kickstarting a new age of piracy and cementing his place alongside such legends as Gold Roger, the former Pirate King). And on top of that, his Bad Ass Longcoat falls off immediately after, revealing that despite having hundreds of scars and wounds from knives, swords, and bullets, his back didn't have so much as one^note Minus a few that were the result of getting IMPALED FROM THE FRONT. Including the three swords which are still in his chest when he dies.; having never been wounded there in his entire life, because he never retreated from an enemy and was never caught off guard. Not. Even. Once. Honestly, given the man he was, he would have wanted it this way.
  • Not to mention, it's heavily implied that the only reason that was enough to kill him is that he was already terminally ill; he was usually seen hooked up to medical equipment and iv-drips while being attended to by several nurses. In his younger, healthier days, all of those insane wounds combined still wouldn't have taken him down.
    • Sengoku, the man in charge of the Marine forces, outright says that Whitebeard is well past his prime and is just a shadow of his former self. While this does mean that Whitebeard was a monster Sengoku also says that he's just the man who came second to Gold Roger in the effort to be the pirate king.
• In Naruto:
  • Zabuza Momochi is bitten by a half-dozen dogs, his arms rendered useless, and stabbed with an armory's worth of weapons during his run on Gato before giving a tender goodbye to his loyal companion Haku. Having accomplished his goals he died apparently because he didn't have anything else to be badass at doing.
  • Orochimaru has his arms devoured by the Shinigami, his transfer form torn to shreds by Sasuke, and finally gets stabbed by a sword that forces him into a permanent illusion when he reappears later. This doesn't even kill all of him, as he is still alive and trying to take over Kabuto. Now he's back to more-or-less human form again, as Sasuke revived him. The guy just won't stay dead.
  • Kakuzu was stabbed through the heart twice and blown up with a jutsu that essentially killed him on a cellular level. And then Kakashi had to kill him again just to make sure.
  • Jiraiya gets an arm taken off by a surprise attack, is stabbed in the shoulder of his remaining arm, then gets his throat crushed and get stabbed by a half-dozen metallic bars, and dies... before willing himself back to life so he can send a message before finally drowning in a lake.
  • Kushina gave birth, got a bijuu released from her (which is supposed to kill her), chained down Kyuubi with her chakra, got her torso pierced by a giant claw, and after that, she talked and talked and talked some more. Then she gets sealed in her son, where she lies dormant for several years.
  • But Obito Uchiha clearly takes the cake. First, back before the story-line even began, he had half his body crushed by a boulder. He got better, albeit with some help. Decades later, in a period of a few days, he lost an arm, lost an arm (the same one that he had since replaced) again while being blown up by 600 billion explosive tags, and technically dying, surviving only with the help a forbidden technique. Later got stabbed through the heart on purpose, was mind-raped by an ancient quasi-deity, half-disintegrated himself, was cut nearly in half, had the nine Tailed Beasts torn out of him, was body jacked, was forced to perform a suicide-resurrection technique, had the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path that he was using as life-support also ripped out of him (by this point, he really would have keeled over had Naruto not used his newly-acquired Healing Hands to put him back into some level of shape), stressed himself to the point of chakra exhaustion multiple times, got killed by a bone-spear that literally rotted him to ash, flipped off the afterlife with his eyes to return and empower his old friend Kakashi, before finally deciding he'd done enough and letting himself pass on.
• In Rurouni Kenshin, Shishio survived being shot in the head, doused in oil and burned. And that was just his back story. In the final battle against him, he defeats Aoshi, Sanosuke, and Saito, and almost kills Kenshin, though Kenshin recovers and continues to fight. In the end, Kenshin doesn't even defeat him. Technically, Shishio defeats himself by fighting for too long, overheating due to his sweat glands being destroyed when he was burned, and then finally bursting into flames.
• In Guyver, Guyot used up all of his energy, had his arm and the right side of his torso nearly severed, had his zoacrystal pulled out of his brain, got a quantum black hole blast through his heart, and fell over half a mile into an erupting volcano. And then it turns out he's still alive.
• Implacable Man Roberto from Monster is shot in the shoulder and left for dead in a burning library. He drags himself out only after everyone else leaves, with his good arm paralyzed. When he next appears he's gotten into much better shape, and eventually gets into a fight with fellow Implacable Man Inspector Runge, where he's shot in the gut but still manages to get the better of the Inspector. Runge turns the tables by jamming his thumb into Roberto's bullet wound, causing him to pass out, but only briefly as he manages to stagger to where the final confrontation between Tenma and Johan is taking place before dying.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Rudol von Stroheim in Part 2 managed to survive after having his leg hacked off, being possessed by a Pillar Man, and blowing himself up before being turned into a cyborg. Since then, he was cut in half, impaled by a squirrel, and jumped out of a plane (losing only his bionic legs) before somehow finally dying at the Battle of Stalingrad.
  • Later on, in Part 5, there's Cioccolata. Giorno shoots him in the head, turns the bullet into a beetle to eat his brain, pummels him over the course of seven pages/thirty seconds, and launches him off what looks like a three-story building into a dump truck headed for an incinerator. The anime has the dump truck crush him for good measure. All of this was after he cut himself in half from the waste down and remained an active threat, so it made sense for Girono to go out of his way to make certain he stayed down.
• Light Yagami of Death Note is shot several times by Matsuda and runs into a warehouse where Ryuk puts his name in the eponymous Artifact of Doom, dying of a heart attack in the middle of the stairs. This symbolizes he doesn't go to Heaven nor Hell, just nothingness after death.
• Cowboy Bebop: Subverted with Spike. He gets stabbed in the shoulder, shot in the chest and thrown out of a stained glass window, yet he survives. He does take a long time to recover, though.
• Happens to most of the villains of Bleach but Ulquiorra stands out thanks to his Healing Factor. He has his arm and lower half of his body torn off and most of his organs are damaged beyond repair before simply coming apart in the wind.
  • Nnoitra Gilga, being Made of Iron shrugs of most things but deserves mention for his death match with Kenpachi Zaraki. He survives a Kendo blow from Zaraki and gets back up.
  • Filler Villain Maki Ichinose got sliced in half, had his sword broken, thus rendering him powerless, and yet he shows up to fight Ichigo alongside Kariya. He then gets stabbed with his own broken sword and then gets struck by lightning, by Kariya no less.
• Yuuto Kigai goes through this in the X/1999 movie. First, he's impaled by Fuuma through the stomach with the Shinken, but that doesn't kill him. Then, he has his right arm blown off but that still doesn't kill him and he can even speak to his soon-to-be killer. Then, he's telekinetically tossed against the Super Computer known as The Beast, which causes him to be subjected to massive Electric Torture and also causes Beast's owner, Satsuki, to be electrocuted to death. Only then, he dies.
• Samurai Deeper Kyo shows us Hishigi. He's got an Incurable Cough of Death and supernatural parasitic eyes eating him alive before we even get into the fight that actually puts him down. In the final battle in question, he exhausts measures that have been keeping his death at bay for decades, which leaves him bleeding everywhere and barely mobile, not to mention the blood he's now coughing up. He then somehow comes up with the strength to form a barrier to protect Fubuki and several others before attempting to take Kyo with him in a massive explosion. This still does not kill him, and he manages to drag his disintegrating body across a battlefield, rip out his own heart, and implant it into Fubuki's chest to save him because Fubuki's Dangerous Forbidden Technique has destroyed his own. Then, and only then, does Hishigi collapse into Fubuki's arms, apologize for leaving him alone, and dissolve into dust that floats away on the wind.
• Wyald in Berserk. Ignoring the attacks that he was able to No-Sell (a gunpowder explosion, a rockslide, an oil fire), after he assumes his demonic form, he gets hit with a volley of crossbow bolts, has his terrifying penis/tongue sliced off, gets slashed multiple times with a BFS on his mouth, limbs, and crotch, loses one of the eyes on his chest, and is finally knocked out of the fight when Guts rams the broken remains of his sword through Wyald's neck and follows up by shoving a massive hunting knife into his human eye. He manages to regain consciousness a few hours later and attempts to menace the Band of the Hawk a final time, at which the far more powerful Apostle Zodd arrives on the scene, impales him on his horns, lifts him over his head, and bends him so hard that his lower body splits open.
• Pitou in Hunter × Hunter gets their skull smashed in, then is punched in the head so many times their head is completely reduced to mush. Their decapitated body is kept going by their puppet ability until Gon impales them with his severed arm and finally obliterates them with a point blank power blast.

Board Games

• Just for completeness sake, there is a fairy chess piece king named "Rasputin". The rules are that it takes one double-check to immobilize it, and another to kill (checkmate) it.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • The death of the fifth Robin, Damian Wayne. He had his back broken, was riddled with arrows, thrown through a wall and remained Defiant to the End, only succumbing after being stabbed through the heart. Kid's got guts.
  • In the story of how Jason Todd came back to life and became the Red Hood, the police believe that Jason had gone through this - beaten, blown up, buried alive and dug himself back out. One officer mentions Rasputin but another mentions Lazarus since he was alive.
• The Boys: Black Noir. After killing Homelander he drags himself out of the White House with half of his head missing, his limbs burned to the bone, and his guts hanging out behind him. Then, he was continuously shot at by a full platoon of marines (including some tanks), leaving him with no hands, no feet, no ab muscles, one arm missing, and his entire body pierced with more holes than SpongeBob, and he still managed to stand up. Then, Butcher came at him, cracked open his skull with a crowbar, and ripped out a large chunk of his brain, and it wasn't enough to take him down. And then, Butcher crushed the brain chunk in his hand in front of Black Noir's eyes, and only then he finally died.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Anti-Monitor. Jiminy Christmas, but he was a doozy to take down, and then to make him stay down: First, he was assaulted by pretty much every last surviving hero from several universes (which did dick-all); the first one to get to him was Doctor Light, who hit him with the energy of a star after he had his power drained by Alex Luthor. Then, he was poisoned by Earth's wizards, who had magically altered his minions, the shadow demons, which he absorbed to replenish his power. Then, Superman hit him with a bunch of asteroids and a moon. When he came back for more, frickin' Darkseid blasted him using Alex as a conduit, which caused the Anti-Monitor to fall into a star. When he flew out again as a ball of plasma, still screaming bloody murder, Superman finally shattered him into smithereens. He still came back, years later, in Green Lantern Comics... it seems he's simply an integral part of his evil universe and will be reborn even when killed for real.
• Final Crisis: Darkseid. First Batman shoots him with a god-killing weapon. Then Barry Allen and Wally West trick him into hitting himself with The Omega Beam. Then Black Racer destroys his body, Wonder Woman binds his essence, and it still takes Superman shouting the musical equivalent of the Multiverse and the Miracle Machine to take down what's left of him. And all of this was after he was mortally wounded by his son Orion, which is what made all this necessary in the first place.
• Hellboy: Rasputin pulls this yet again in the first volume, when he is harpooned through the chest and then incinerated and still doesn't go down completely until the eponymous big red guy crushes his still-ranting and raving skull with his Right Hand of Doom. And even then his ghost comes back a few time to plot revenge against H.B. and friends.
• Judge Dredd: He ultimately survives, but it's almost comical how much misfortune Chief Judge Sinfield endures after PJ Maybe schemes to assassinate him. First, he secretly infected Sinfield with a fungus that nearly killed him, but he began to recover so Maybe was forced to infect him again with a virus that still didn't do the job. Then he survives a suicide attack organized by a group of angry mutants independent from Maybe, who finally uses his robot servant to simply assassinate Sinfield in the open, an attempt that is foiled by Dredd.
• Justice League of America: From That Other Wiki, the circumstances of Amos Fortune's death: "Professor Amos Fortune had half of his face blown off in Villains United #6, surviving only to be thrown from a moving helicopter in Villains United: Infinite Crisis Special before absorbing energy and exploding in JSA Classified #16."
• The Punisher: The Russian in both mainstream Marvel continuity and Punisher Noir. The Noir version especially, surviving explosions, knife wounds, dozens of bullets, and more. He eventually dies after having his arm bitten off by an alligator and catching a slug right between the eyes, but before he goes he not only kills the offending beast, he brags to the Punisher about being invincible.
• The Punisher MAX:
  • "In the Beginning" has Frank Castle fighting a mobster's insane muscular lackey Pittsy. After trading punches (and shivs) with him, Frank tosses him out of a window, where he lands several stories down onto a spiked wrought iron fence, impaling him through the torso. Frank then jumps from the window and lands on the thug. Later, the thug (fence still jutting through him), stumbles towards Frank; who blasts him in the face with a shotgun. Even then, Frank has to mentally reassure himself that the next steps the guy takes are just reflexive.
    
    When Frank later "meets" the lackey's sister, after gunning her down he makes a point of emptying the clip into her, just to make sure.
  • Even more ridiculous is Barracuda. Over the course of several fights, Frank stabs him, gouges his eye out, knocks out his teeth four times, cuts off the fingertips of his left hand, strangles him with barbed wire, shoots him point blank in the groin, chest, and face with a shotgun, tosses him into shark-infested waters, blows him up with a claymore, fractures his skull with a wrench, bites off another one of his fingers, breaks his arm, bites a chunk out of his face, stabs him again, hooks up a car battery to his testicles for an hour and a half, shoots him with an M-60, breaks his nose, tears off said nose with pliers, cuts off his arm with an axe, cuts the remaining hand off with the next swing, shoots him in the throat and finally shoots his head to bits with an AK-47, then lights the bits on fire just to be sure.
  • Punisher himself spends about the entire "Homeless" arc dying. Still wounded from the Bullseye fight, he fights Elektra, getting stabbed and beaten. Then he is ambushed at his former home by the Kingpin and despite getting shot about a dozen times he manages to kill the thugs and then fights the Kingpin, who flees into the city where Punisher follows him and executes him, then goes all the way back to his home and dies there. Keep in mind that he is also 65 years old and has been a vigilante for about 36 years, probably having been shot and wounded probably hundreds of times during that.
  Nick Fury: Autopsy's taking forever. I asked the coroner for a cause of death and he just laughed. He's up to eight pages of injuries with no end in sight.
• Sin City:
  • The Big Fat Kill - Manute had previously survived everything from being knocked out of a window, getting shot multiple times, stabbed by Miho, and getting an eye torn out by Marv. Even right before his death, he survives a close-range grenade with what appears to be minor burns. He eventually dies when Dwight and the Old Town girls unload on him and his minions to the point where they are nothing but "wet chunks of meat".
  • Marv survives jumping out of several story windows, fights against multiple lackeys, being tortured for a bit by the women of Old Town, being beaten by the serial killer in the barn, being run over at high speeds twice, and has several rounds of bullets fired into him, and he still doesn't die after that. He also does all of this without eating, drinking, or getting any sleep for literally days. It finally takes the electric chair itself to kill him, and even then they have to shock him twice.
    • Further proved by Marv's last words (before being shocked again): "Is that the best you can do, you pansies?"
  • His target Kevin survives after having his arms and legs cut off and most of his organs eaten by a wolf yet still calmly breathes till Marv saws his head off.
  • In That Yellow Bastard, Junior Roarke is stabbed, gets his genitals ripped out, and has his head pounded into the floor so savagely that when John Hartigan is done, his head is pretty much gone. He was probably going to die from the stabbing alone but Hartigan had had more than enough of all of his shit.
• Spider-Man: Spider-Man's clone, Ben Reilly takes a bad pumpkin bomb blast for Flash, is impaled by a Goblin Glider, then falls off a multi-story building, onto a car, and still has it in him to give his Final Speech before degenerating.
• Star Wars: Legacy: Darth Krayt is fried by Force lightning, stabbed in the back of the neck with a lightsaber, tossed off a cliff, and finally fried by Force lightning again. Then comes back, and Cade stabs him through the chest, then FLIES HIS BODY INTO A SUN.
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • Among the many, many, many many character deaths in Marvel's Ultimatum is Wolverine's, first having almost all his soft tissue blasted away, then having his skeleton torn apart, then having the individual cells of his last remaining bones destroyed. Then, finally, his corpse sinks to the bottom of the Ocean, rendered unrecoverable.
  • Ultimate Vision: Vision damaged the Gah Lak Tus module, so it hides into a military base and attempted to dig into earth's core. When attacked again, Dima exploded and greatly damaged it. And yet, it was still alive; but Vision took advantage that its core was exposed to finish it for good.
  • The Ultimates: Herr Kleiser is impaled by a plane, sent to an explosion among the fuel tanks, cut in Half by Captain America, reduced to a pulp by Hulk and finally eaten by him.
• X-Men: The trope is referenced after Colossus (who was thought to be dead after his Heroic Sacrifice) came back in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men;
  Beast: Boy's named Rasputin. Should have known he wouldn't be easy to kill.

Fairy Tales

• The Death of Koschei the Deathless: During the final battle between Prince Ivan and the titular villain, the former's horse kicks Koschei with enough force to crack his skull. Then Koschei gets clubbed to death by Ivan. Then he gets burned on a pyre, and his ashes scattered to the wind.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): At the climax, both MaNi/Elder Brother and the resurrected Ghidorah respectively receive demises of this magnitude from the heroic Titans (with a little help from the Russian military in the latter case), and it is glorious.
• The Age of Dusk explains that Dictator of Valhalla and General Ripper Chenkov died this way, peacefully passing on in his sleep after "several dozen disgruntled soldiers, fourteen rounds of a heavy stubber, an overdose of tranq, a vial of neurotoxin, a hatchet, and three bayonets" were done congratulating him on his victory. In a Historical In-Joke, it's noted that the story was probably exaggerated in the retelling, but he definitely did get shot a whole bunch.
• In Amazing Fantasy, Mysterio puts Sir Nighteye through the wringer before killing him. After fatally stabbing him, he flies into a rage and beats Nighteye senseless. He then proceeds to fling him off a building while scorching his body with lightning.
• Anna's death in By the Hands of the People is this. The firing squad killed her sister Elsa quickly but somehow they managed to just severely injure Anna. The soldiers take pity on her and try to kill her with knives instead of letting her slowly bleed out, but even that fails because they don't stab her deeply enough. They succeed the third time by stabbing her in the heart.
• Cool Cat and the Beauty of War and Destruction:
  Since in Hollywood, rapping is sacred, Daddy Derek was sentenced to death via electric chair for losing the rap battle. However, the chair took 3 or 4 tries to kill him, with the man laughing manically as if he didn't give a fuck the entire time. It is said that a man as vile as Derek couldn't be killed with mortal instruments like that; this was proven true when Patrick just gave up and had to call in Pinkie Pie to have him hacked to pieces.
• Danganronpa: Paradise Lost: The final execution of the mastermind, Momiji Akamatsu, is a succession of all of the previous executions, alongside an altered version of the first execution of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. The victim manages to initially survive all of them and makes it back to the courtroom before finally collapsing in a pool of their own blood.
• A Discworld fic fills in a version of the backstory of the Discworld's Russia. Granted, it is presented as a History essay by a twelve-year-old student at the Assassins' Guild School. But this student is the daughter of Wizard Ponder Stibbons, and she knows to take bananas to the Librarian at Unseen University. The Librarian then finds her a rare privately-produced book which, among other things, details the death of the Imperial Court Wizard Gaz Putin, a man very popular with the Court Ladies but rather less so with their husbands, who thoroughly and inventively kill him. ^note Before he dies, he speaks the Romanoff Prophecy, relating how Rodinia will look after he dies, and it will not be pretty. The country will sink into ruin and obscurity and only the Romanoff Yet To Come will save it. She will apparently pull it all back together again when she descends from the skies in command of vast destructive power. Captain Olga Romanoff, commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Air Watch, is hinted to be in the frame here. She is not overjoyed to discover a copy of the Prophecy still exists, despite the best efforts of her family to obliterate it from the records.
• Bellatrix Lestrange suffers this in an escape attempt in Fate’s Gambit II, when a panicking boat pilot fires a magnesium flare at her.
  The autopsy couldn’t decide whether she died from burning, drowning after having fallen overboard, or Jack Todd caving in what was left of her head with a boat hook as he ‘attempted’ to bring her body back on board. The only thing they were sure of was that she was most definitely dead.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: After hearing a new and far more dangerous prophecy, Voldemort isn't taking any chances. "This is the order in which the next acts shall be done. First Harry Potter shall be stunned, then his limbs severed and the wounds cauterized. Mr. Friendly and Mr. Honor will examine him for any trace of unusual magics. One of you shall shoot the boy many times with my Muggle weapon, and then as many of you as can shall strike him with the Killing Curse. Only then will Mr. Grim crush his skull and brains with the mundane substance of a tombstone. I shall verify his corpse, then his corpse shall be burned with Fiendfyre, then we will exorcise the surrounding area in case he has left a ghost. I myself will guard this place until six hours have passed, for I do not fully trust the wards I have set against Time's looping; and four of you shall search the surroundings for signs of anything noteworthy. Even after that, we must remain vigilant for any sign of his renewed presence, in case Dumbledore has left some unimagined trick in play. If you can think of any trick that I have missed in being sure that his threat is ended, speak now and I shall reward you handsomely... speak now, in Merlin's name!"
• The Haunted Mansion's backstory is famously a Multiple-Choice Past, especially as far as the Beating Heart Bride (often dubbed Emily) is concerned. The two main theories in the fandom are that she was either pushed out the attic window or locked up in a chest to suffocate. In an attempt to please everyone, one version of the backstory combined both. What follows is a direct quote:
  "Emily was heading up to the mansion's attic for something that could be used when suddenly Madame Leota locked her in a chest, dragged her to the attic, and pushed her out of the window."
• Kano gets the treatment in In with the Old, Out with the New during his final confrontation with Sonya. He's shot in the ankle by Johnny, and gets the living shit beaten out of him by Sonya, as she breaks his knee and shatters his ankle. Then, as payback for Kano kidnapping, torturing and raping her daughter Cassie, she shoots him in the groin, his shoulder and through the eye. Then she empties the rest of her pistol's mag into him and pistol whips his corpse for good measure.
• Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger:
  • The terentatek that attacks Jaune in "Fear" is shot with hundreds of high-caliber bullets, blown up by several high-yield missiles, and hit by the combined firepower of JNPR and RWBY. Somehow, the beast survives all this and only dies after being impaled by a giant stone javelin formed by the combined telekinesis of Glynda and Jaune. And even then, the students still shoot its corpse into a bloody pulp just to be sure.
  • Darth Nihilus has thousands of tons of molten metal dropped on him and gets hit by an energy beam as strong as a turbolaser. He is then nuked with the energy stored in Ozpin's cane, has his left arm blown off, and is so badly injured that he can barely use the Force. From there, he gets beaten up by Pyrrha, nearly killed by a psychic backlash caused by a broken Force Bond, and is hit with a fully-powered blast from Ruby's Silver Eyes enhanced with the Fall Maiden's magic. He's still standing after all this and it takes being stabbed through the stomach with a sword to finally finish him off.
• In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, the Noumu dies after getting his head sliced off by Yamashiro, having his lower body frozen off by Todoroki, being pummeled into the ground by Izuku's full strength, and getting his arms torn off and his skull crushed into powder by All Might.
• Queen of Blood (SirWill) has Crawler suffer this when he is taken into space by Dragon and reduced to a shard of bone. He manages to heal from that... into a form that can't do anything except float through space. Years later, he crash-lands on Jupiter where his shard does its level best to keep him alive for a century under the extreme heat, gravity, and pressure of its surface. He only dies because the shard cuts the connection, having learned everything it can from him.
• Madara Uchiha in Son of the Sannin. The guy survives Maito Gai's final attack with the Eighth Gate, which blows off one of his arms, his lower torso and legs, only by virtue of having a Healing Factor from Hashirama's cells and Zetsu taking him away to speed up the process. He comes back for another go against Naruto and Hinata, and then takes his own giant meteor's explosion at point-blank range, somehow falling back to Earth in one piece (though clearly weakened). It takes the combined efforts of the Konoha 15, Naruto beheading him and Sasuke incinerating his corpse with Amaterasu to finally ensure he stays dead.
• Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K:
  • Brother Hastus (the Space Marine that Anakin and the Bad Batch fight in episode 8) has half his mouth burnt by Anakin's lightsaber, gets pelted by heavy blaster fire, has a frag grenade go off in his hand, takes a point-blank shot in the face from the blaster equivalent of a sniper rifle (reducing his face to a skull), and is finally decapitated.
  • The Space Marine Librarian Saphran gets a heart and two of his three lungs punctured by a lightsaber, then has a massive hole blown clean through his torso with an ancient Jedi weapon. He still lives long enough to hold a dying conversation by using his telekinetic powers to propel air through his vocal chords.
• Superwomen of Eva: Treacherous Web: Unlike other fanfics in the series, Gendo Ikari is the story's Disc-One Final Boss. When Ritsuko Akagi, newly empowered as Spider-Woman, encountered him in his home, she really went to town on him:

  Taking in a deep breath, Kaji answered, "Well, according to the medics, Gendo could have died in several ways. His skull was crushed, his neck shattered, his skin had been ripped apart by some kind of cutting tools, he had been stabbed repeatedly, his lungs were punctured, his right forearm has been torn apart and shattered, and..." Once again, Kaji sucked in a deep breath as his gaze once again went to Shinji. "And there was some king of neuro-toxin present in his system. In large enough quantities to cause complete paralysis of the muscles, including the heart."

• Thousand Shinji: Shinji again arrived late to the battle against Zeruel, and the alien monster had hurt and almost killed Asuka and Rei. So Shinji wasn't going to settle for simply killing Zeruel or letting his EVA go berserk and eat it alive. Not at all:
  "You telekinetically threw the Angel back to the surface, through the armour, and not the part it had already shot. You elbowed it in the face and collapsed its skull with a single blow. You snapped its back over your knee. You threw it through a building and then crucified its corpse on the wreckage. You strangled it with its own intestines. Then you ripped out its core and punted it into low earth orbit, where it detonated."
• Where Talent Goes to Die: Much like in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, the mastermind, Sousuke Kagami, is subjected to all of the previous executions, only being killed by the final one in the sequence.
• Yu Yu Hakusho Abridged ironise about Byakko's death, as mentioned above.
  Kuwabara: Oh give me a break. How many times do I have to kill that guy?
  Yusuke: Once would suffice.
  Kuwabara: Shut up.

Films — Animation

• The animated version of The Lord of the Rings plays Boromir's death like in the book, except we can see it happen. Four arrows land in his chest and he just pulls them out and hacks away until the exact same thing happens again; by the end, he is bleeding all over and pinned to the tree by the arrows.
• Averted in Don Bluth's Anastasia by Rasputin. They leave out nearly everything that was done to him. He just drowns after falling through the ice. Since he sold his soul for the power to kill Anya in the first place, he gets trapped in Limbo after the curse fails to kill her, which makes him a living corpse that is prone to falling apart, although undead and indestructible. But he dies if you break his reliquery, which is made of glass and is quite easily breakable.
  • However, when said reliquary is broken this trope is played straight. Aside from the general screaming and writhing in agony, Rasputin is struck by a huge green fireball, then his skin dissolves and evaporates, then his still-living skeleton crumbles into a fine dust.
• The Secret Life of Pets: The Viper gets crushed by some falling ceiling debris but emerges unscathed... and then is crushed by a larger pile of debris. And then a huge chunk of brick wall. Which then spontaneously catches fire.
• Mrs. Tweedy from Chicken Run. She seems at first to get the Disney Villain Death treatment but ends up landing head-first into the pie machine's gravy valve while boiling hot gravy rises up towards her. Somehow, she even manages to survive the pie machine's explosion, only for Mr. Tweedy to literally slam the door on her. Even then, her fate is left ambiguous until Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget reveals she survived all of that. And that film shows her being thrown into a nugget processor head first with an ax through in for good measure, and she still survived long enough to be targeted by exploding ducks and her evil lair self-destructing. In short, it would be a miracle for anything to kill Mrs. Tweedy by this point.

Films — Live-Action

• Mustafa from Austin Powers. He gets burned, shot, and then a second time. Its a Running Gag for the series how he loudly proclaims that he's not quite dead before being finished off. Also, Robin Swallows who is asked 'why won't you die?' by Austin himself after she is: stabbed, shot with a machine gun, shot with a bazooka, and then falls off a building (though if she really dies is uncertain). A deleted scene shows that Austin keeps her in his car trunk as a handy human shield.
• Avatar: Quaritch survives his shoulder catching fire, his airship crashing, the loss of his mech's air supply, and is finally done in by not one but two Na'vi arrows the size of Olympic javelins to the chest.
• Avengers: Age of Ultron: Ultron Prime's Ultimate form takes a lot of punishment from the Avengers before he's finally terminated. First, the right side of his face is partly melted by a concentrated attack from Iron Man, Thor, and Vision (using lasers from Tony and Vision, and Thor's lightning). Then he gets punched over the horizon by the Hulk. As he tries to flee in the Avengers' Quinjet, Hulk leaps aboard the aircraft, overpowers him, and throws him out the rear hatch. He plummets several hundred feet into Novi Grad and crash-lands in an abandoned streetcar. Then Scarlet Witch comes along and finishes him off by ripping out his core. He still has one last Ultron Sentry left to transfer his consciousness to, which meets its end when Vision vaporizes him.
• In Battle: Los Angeles, the first alien actually killed on-screen is given one of these. First, it gets shot up by Lenihan, and falls into a pool. Then when Nantz and two other Marines arrive, the alien leaps back out of the pool, and gets drilled by all four Marines at point-blank range with about a hundred bullets before it drops back down into the pool. One of the Marines drops a grenade in the pool for good measure.
• Kim Sun-Woo, the main character of A Bittersweet Life, is beaten by three men with clubs, gets hanged and punched in the stomach, has his hand broken by a wrench, gets buried alive, gets stabbed in the gut at least six consecutive times, has his ear shot off, and takes three rounds of machine gun fire to the chest. This subdues him, to be sure. But he doesn't die until a merciful gunman shoots him in the head.
• Black Mask: The villain, Jimmy, during the hospital assault. Shot by dozens of rounds, smashed through a wall, set on fire, and flung off the hospital's balcony while having a Time Bomb attached to him, blowing him to bits in mid-air. All that's left of him is a severed hand.
• Quinn in Blade (1998) only dies after being decapitated by the title hero. Before that, he is impaled, burned, beaten, etc.
• Blood Simple: Marty suffers through one of these; he's shot point-blank in the chest by Visser, but isn't killed, reviving just as Ray is about to dispose of his "corpse". Being Buried Alive seems to finish him off for good.
• Amilyn the Vampire in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, played by Paul Reubens, begins to grunt and flail in an over the top mocking "death" scene when staked. Continues to grunt and flail for a minute, realises that the Slayer and his master are watching him, with disapproving looks. At the end of the film, now that his master is apparently dead and the Slayer is long gone, he opens his eyes again and starts doing his fake "death" scene again. "Death" groans continue throughout the credits.
• In Bullet Train, the White Death gets slashed across the abdomen with a katana, then has the sword cleaved so deeply into his shoulder that it becomes firmly lodged in his torso, and then gets violently thrown around as the titular train derails. He survives all this with enough strength to try and kill one of his remaining enemies, only to finally be done in when he pulls the trigger of a boobytrapped handgun and blows half his own head off.
• After going insane, Bell from the Trey Parker/Matt Stone film Cannibal! The Musical suffers a top-notch Rasputinian Death, starting with getting a butcher's ax in the face, (including through one eye) getting shot in the head, a sharpened stick through his other eye, and finally a pickax through the heart. Each time he appears to die like a Slasher Movie monster, only to come back again, including at the main character's hanging, which occurs years later.
• Chucky from the Child's Play series gets this type of over-the-top demise often, but especially in the original trilogy: in the first film after he survives being burned alive, he gets his head, An Arm and a Leg shot off before dying for good after getting shot into his heart; in the second he gets horribly mangled during the climax inside a Nightmarish Factory before being covered in scorching molten plastic and getting his head inflated until it explodes, and finally in the third he gets half of his face painfully sliced off before losing his left arm and his other hand letting him fall into a large industrial fan that shreds him into bloody pieces.
• Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom, the Big Bad of Con Air, gets a truly spectacular send-off, first getting stabbed in the foot with a broken spear, then getting savagely beaten to within an inch of his life, then cuffed to the ladder of a firetruck and raised high into the air. He then goes through a pedestrian flyover and falls into some power cables before finally coming to a rest on a conveyor belt. He only finally dies after meeting the rock crusher at the end of it, which turns his head into a pulp.
• This is the premise of Crank. The entire movie's essentially his one-day Rasputinian Death, compressed into about an hour and a half. Even after falling from an airplane, he lives, making Crank: High Voltage possible. And then, he burns alive after recharging himself on a high voltage power line, gets his normal heart back inside him, which stops, and then starts again, ending the credits with him opening his eyes... again!
• In The Movie of Dead Like Me, Cameron gets this treatment. As a reaper with powerful regenerative abilities, the group has to restrain him, dismember him, burn the body parts, and load the ashes into a capsule that is subsequently launched into space.
• In French movie Delicatessen, one of the secondary characters is trying to commit suicide. She rigs about four or five different things to happen (pills, hanging, a stove rigged to explode, a gun triggered to a door, etc.) but they cancel each other out through a fluke accident when her husband bursts into the room. She decides after seeing her husband that she wants to live again, only for the last of her traps to actually go off.
• In the Evil Dead (2013) remake, Eric's death draws out across about 45 minutes of screen time, beginning when he is stabbed underneath the eye with the needle of a syringe full of tranquilizer, continuing through his being shot repeatedly with a nail gun and beaten over the head with a crowbar and culminating when he finally succumbs to his wounds and drowns in the basement. His corpse is then incinerated with the cabin.
• What happens to the teacher in Final Destination is a textbook example. An exploding computer monitor drives shards of glass into her throat, a trail of fire starts heading towards her down the trail of dripped vodka from her mug, and her attempt to pull down a towel drops a butcher-block full on knives into her chest. When the protagonist comes in to try to save her, to add insult to injury, a bookcase falls and drives the knife deeper into her chest. And then her house explodes. The actress who played the teacher was the wife of one of the writers, so he wrote this scene just for her.
• Although he eventually becomes a superpowered zombie, Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees is a mortal man up until Part VI of his franchise (although he wasn't the killer in parts one and five). He gets a machete slammed into his shoulder, takes an axe to the skull, and finally gets his head entirely impaled with a machete. And even then he twitches, causing Tommy Jarvis to stab him about a dozen more times. He suffers the most damage in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood where he gets electrocuted, hanged, has a roof fall on him, hit by nails, doused in gasoline and set on fire. That still doesn't beat him as he's finally drowned.
• Ghostbusters II: Possibly referencing Rasputin, Vigo the Carpathian (a.k.a. Vigo the Cruel/Despised/Torturer/Unholy/Butch) was over 100 years old when he was... well, see below. And his disembodied head still could give his Dying Words.
  Egon: Vigo the Carpathian. Born 1505, died 1610.
  Peter: 105 years old, he hung in there, didn't he?
  Ray: He didn't die of old age, either. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, drawn and quartered.
  Peter: Ouch.
• The creators of The Godfather film decided that Sonny had acquired a "Rasputin-like mystique." His assassins decide that There Is No Kill Like Overkill, and filled his car with machine gun fire, then took him down in a hail of bullets as he staggers from it.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): In the battle of Boston alone, where he finally meets his end, King Ghidorah is mauled half a dozen times by Godzilla, blasted again and again by a super-charged atomic breath, thrown into buildings, and the foundation of the city. What finally does Ghidorah in is when Godzilla's Fire form vents nuclear heat with enough force to level Boston, twice, resulting in Ghidorah's side heads and most of his body being incinerated by the blasts. And after that, Godzilla still has to stomp on Ghidorah's still alive body and point-blank him with another blast of nuclear heat, and finally Godzilla roasts the remaining head with an atomic blast which goes up the head's neck from the cut while it's held in Godzilla's jaws. Justified, as Ghidorah's Healing Factor practically requires his death to be this.
  • Godzilla Minus One: The master plan to kill Godzilla works in this way. First, canisters are tied to Godzilla which release bubbles that will quickly sink him to the bottom of an ocean trench, attempting to kill him via the immense sudden pressure change. If that doesn't work, the canisters release giant inflatable cushions that buoy him back to the surface just as quickly, causing massive decompression. While it certainly hurts Godzilla a lot, it still isn't enough to kill him, and he prepares to retaliate with his atomic breath. Shikishima then enacts a third step of the plan that the others did not sanction, ramming his bomb-laden fighter plane into Godzilla's mouth, blowing up Godzilla's head. This results in the built-up atomic energy ripping Godzilla's body apart from the inside, now that it has no way for it to be released, putting him down for good (at least, for now).
• In GoldenEye, James Bond throws Trevelyan hundreds of feet off of a huge platform. Then an antenna cradle falls on top of him and explodes. (Bonus: Trevelyan was played by Boromir.)
• Like the movie it's based on, The Good, The Bad, The Weird ends with a three-way Mexican Standoff. Unlike the original, in which the Mexican Standoff is resolved with one shot, all three main characters shoot one another over and over, slowly fall to the ground, then shoot each other another sixteen times or so for good measure, while lying down. Whether or not this is an "Everybody Dies" Ending depends on which of the six endings you're watching.
• GoodFellas: Billy Batts is beaten to within an inch of his life by Tommy (and Jimmy), stomped, pistol-whipped, stabbed multiple times, thrown into the trunk of a car to bleed for several hours, stabbed again, and then finally riddled with bullets. As Batts was a Made Man, this results in Tommy being murdered later.
• Halloween Ends:
  • This happens to Michael Myers. On top of the countless injuries he sustained in the previous three films in this timeline, he is stabbed through both hands and into the table, stabbed in the chest, has a refrigerator toppled on his legs, stabbed in the side, and finally, has his throat slit. As he begins to bleed out, he pulls his hand through the knife pinning it and attempts to pull a Taking You with Me on Laurie by strangling her before Allyson comes in to save her by breaking his arm, then Laurie finishes him off by slitting his wrist. Not convinced Michael is "dead enough," Laurie and Allyson dump his corpse into an industrial shredder.
  • Earlier, this happens to the other killer, Corey Cunningham. Laurie shoots him twice in the chest and knocks him down a flight of stairs. He immediately gets up before deciding to stab himself in the throat to frame her for his murder. Though he seems to bleed out, he revives when Michael arrives. He finally dies when Michael breaks his neck.
• Rasputin gets one in Hellboy, when he's stabbed through the abdomen with Hellboy's horn then a dark god tears its way of him, grows to an enormous size then flattens him and his girlfriend with its tentacle. Poor Rasputin's having a very eventful afterlife.
  • Even Rasputin's initial death qualifies. According to Professor Bruttenholm, he was poisoned, shot, stabbed, clubbed, castrated and finally drowned.
• In the Filipino historical epic Heneral Luna, the eponymous General Antonio Luna's death is absolutely this. The man survives several gunshots at point-blank range from over half a dozen assassins - at least two to the chest, and one to the right eye, in addition to a truly impressive number of machete slashes - while still blindly attempting to counterattack, before being shot in the side of the head. He moves a few seconds later, just enough to scare the killers into delivering another headshot. This is an ordinary human-fueled by pure dogged stubbornness.^note This scene is actually based on (possibly embellished, but at this point, almost no one cares because of how badass it is) historical accounts stating that the real-life General was found with over thirty wounds on his corpse.
• The Highwaymen showcases the real-life deaths of the original Outlaw Couple, Bonnie and Clyde, after a whole film following the lawmen that set it up. In the space of one minute, ten very pissed-off lawmen unload their long-guns, then their sidearms, into the couple. All in all, Bonnie and Clyde were hit fifty times with pistol, rifle and shotgun ammo.
• Hades, the mutant leader from the 2007 film The Hills Have Eyes 2 is shot, impaled, brutally beaten, has chunks of his brain ripped out and only dies after getting a bayonet through the mouth (after another beatdown).
• The Battle of the Five Armies: Bolg is stabbed through the head by Legolas (and in the extended cut, Legolas twists the blade for good measure), falls hundreds of feet to valley floor below, and then a large piece of rubble falls on and crushes his head.
• In Hollow Man, the title character gets hit with a flamethrower, electrocuted and dropped down an elevator shaft into an enormous explosion ... which he climbs out of briefly before falling back in.
• Slim from House II: The Second Story. The primary villain of the film, he is obsessed with gaining the Crystal Skull... so obsessed that no amount of gunfire will seem to down him. He withstands being blasted by a revolver AND a shotgun and even continues to shoot after his entire head is blasted off! Slim is presumably destroyed at the end of the film by the mass firepower of the local police and the mansion burning down.
• While the Indominus rex in Jurassic World takes a lot of pummeling throughout the course of the film (such as taking several point-blank headshots from a combat shotgun, and getting hit in the face by an Ankylosaurus tail club), in the last act she endures a truly absurd amount of punishment before she's killed. First, she takes dozens of bullets from a barrage of assault rifles, shotguns, and machine guns, and tanks a shot from a rocket launcher before fleeing. In the final battle, she successively gets mauled by a pack of Velociraptor while being shot at by a semi-automatic rifle designed for large game, gets her throat ripped at by a Tyrannosaurus, and then facing off against a Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor tag-team fight, during which she has her face smashed into buildings and several pieces of metal rebar speared into her. What finally finishes her off is the Moasasaurus jumping out of her lagoon and dragging the I. rex to a watery grave.
• The second Kamen Rider Decade movie (well, third if you count the Den-O crossover) gives us Doras, a Kamen Rider ZO monster resurrected by the villains, apparently for the simple purpose of finally killing this guy. He's brought down by TWELVE different Kamen Riders, ten of whom were in their Super Modes, hitting him with finishers, the last being Complete Form Decade's Rider Kick.
• King Kong's death is a variation, combined with Disney Villain Death: after being pock-marked by several dozen rounds of machine gun fire, Kong succumbs to his wounds and plummets from the Empire State Building.
• In Legend, the Lord of Darkness is stabbed through the heart with the horn of a unicorn, hit by concentrated rays of sunlight which is anathema to him, loses his arm and is sucked through a portal into oblivion. The end of the film implies that he has somehow survived.
• The Lone Ranger: Latham Cole. He falls several hundred feet, is crushed under several tons of silver, and presumably drowned if all that didn't kill him.
• The Lord of the Rings live-action movies: The Fellowship of the Ring: Almost immediately after mortally wounding Boromir, the Uruk-hai captain Lurtz gets a knife stabbed in his leg. Then he gets his arm cut off and is even stabbed through the chest by Aragorn! It takes a decapitation shortly after that impalement to finish Lurtz off for good.
• Lust, Caution: The idealistic students gang up on a traitor who was threatening to blackmail them. They stab him repeatedly, but he still manages to walk out, so they have to snap his neck. The heroine is so shaken up she splits on the spot.
• In MacGruber the Big Bad Dieter von Cunth is left handcuffed inside his own hideout that is set off to explode, but he survives at the cost of being horribly burnt and losing his penis and the arm he axed off in order to escape. In the ending he smashes into the wedding of the main leads to have his revenge, but instead he gets shoved down a cliff and is riddled with bullets all the way down before smashing into the ground, then he's blown up with a grenade and gets his burnt remains peed on.
• In the Mad Max movies:
  • Wez, The Dragon from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, takes serious damage many times, including falling from a truck in high velocity, but only dies close to the end of the movie, as he lies on the hood of a car that crashes straight into another.
  • Auntie's Plucky Comic Relief in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Ironbar, played by Angry Anderson) also takes very long to die, and there's an almost totemic aspect to his survival. He's one of an apparently elite group who have a mask on a pole that rises from the back armor. He survives everything (including having the car he's in rammed by the train and explode, leaving him blackened and screaming on the cowcatcher)... until his mask is finally knocked off him when he uses his dying strength to give Max the finger.
• In a hilarious Big-Lipped Alligator Moment from Me, Myself & Irene, Charlie and Irene come across a cow that's been hit by a car. Charlie shoots it multiple times to put it out of its misery, but the cow keeps raising its head and mooing. He pistol-whips, strangles and smothers the poor animal before it stops moving. The cow is shown alive during the credits.
• The wuxia The Mighty One has the death of its main villain, Abbot Lung, which drags forever. After getting impaled through the ears, he gets pummeled by the hero Water Knight's chi until his lower body goes through the floor, but somehow that doesn't kill him. Water Knight then hurls his sword through Abbot Lung's torso, but that still doesn't kill him. It was quickly followed by a dagger hurled through Lung's palm. Nope, still alive. The Water Knight had to use his chi to lift and drop a rock formation, some fifteen tons heavy, on Abbot Lung's head, crushing him to the ground until Lung pounded into nothing. The death scene drags for oh-so-excessively long to the point that its almost a chore to sit through.
• Annie Wilkes in Misery takes a bit to go down. First she gets bashed on the head with a very heavy typewriter, still alive, she has burning paper rammed down her throat, still alive, is tripped and falls head-first onto the aforementioned typewriter, look who's still in town and finally dies when she's bashed over over the head with a cast iron doorstopper. So now we know, if we're ever attacked by a seemingly indestructible force of evil, just keep a doorstopper nearby.
• In The Naked Gun, it appears that this happens to OJ Simpson at the beginning, but it turns out he lived. Later, Ricardo Montalban plummets to his doom after being shot with a sedative dart, then is run over by a steamroller and trampled by a marching band. Earlier, the mind-controlled doctor gets one. While attempting to flee, he swerves his car into a truck transporting gas, escapes the explosion with half his car only to roll into a truck carrying huge missiles, escapes that explosion as well, ending up on the last missile that rolls into a nearby fireworks factory. Cue third explosion.
• Nicholas and Alexandra plays the trope namer or more less straight (although with some of the more lurid details omitted), but with a twist: it shows the scene largely from Rasputin's point of view, making it clear to the audience how gruesome and horrifying it would be to actually die in such a protracted manner.
• Slattern, the final Kaiju fought in Pacific Rim, gets a death that's drawn-out even among its (already insanely tough) brethren. Final count is: getting slashed repeatedly by Striker's wrist-mounted blades, including a few to the neck and so many to the shoulders the arms are barely hanging on, getting tricked into charging Striker just as it sets its nuke off, eating several megatons of nuclear power, getting stabbed many, many, many times by Gypsy, and finally killed by getting his chest cavity fried by Gypsy's nuclear turbine running at full power, to the point it starts coming out the other side.
• Pain & Gain: Minus the victim actually dying, this is what the gang tries to do to Victor. Not intentionally, however; their stupid preparation results in the victim surviving each time. They try to get him drunk and crash him in his car, but leave his seat belt on and his airbag in place. They try to burn him alive, only for him to get out of the car in time. Even driving their own car over his head ends up failing.
• The Party opens with Indian actor Hrundi V. Bakshi's character dying during a shoot out scene. He takes so long to get through his death throes that the other actors end up ignoring each other and shooting at him instead. Hilarity Ensues.
• Planet Terror: The Rapist (played by Quentin Tarantino) is smashed over the head with a table leg, impaled in the eye by the leg's broken end, has his privates melt off from the infection taking over him, has a syringe launched into his other eye, melts into an inhuman monster, pukes up his guts, then finally is shot in the crotch with a grenade launcher. Good grief.
• Valentine from Poseidon (2006) immediately comes to mind. After dropping an already lethal distance from an elevator shaft, he falls into large impaling spikes. The elevator itself follows soon afterwards, crushing him and also somehow resulting in a very large Hollywood style explosion. Plus, the ship sinks into the ocean at the end. The scene can be seen here.
• Public Enemies does this to gangster/bank robber Baby Face Nelson, who is hit several times with a shotgun and a Tommy gun and manages to take several FBI agents with him before Melvin Purvis finally kills him with a whole clip of pistol rounds at close range. More or less Truth in Television although the details vary; Nelson, despite being wounded nineteen times in a shootout with the FBI, managed to mortally wound the two agents who shot him, escape the scene and survive for several hours afterwards.
• In The Quick and the Dead, Spotted Horse, who constantly brags that he "cannot be killed by a bullet," is proved right: he gets shot clean through the heart, gets back up, fires off several shots while his opponent reloads, takes a second shot to the forehead, then starts to get back up again before finally dying for real.
• The giant killer boar from Razorback endures multiple rifle shots, impalement through the neck, and electrocution before finally being cut to pieces by a Deadly Rotary Fan.
• In The Return of the Living Dead, the medical cadaver zombie. The characters are Genre Savvy so they immediately brain it with a pickaxe...which doesn't kill it. Then they saw off its head with a hack saw...which doesn't kill it...Then they slice it up into small individual pieces...which doesn't kill it. They finally have to cremate it just to get rid of it.
• Scarface (1983): Tony takes an improbable number of bullets to the torso and isn't even fazed, but this might be explained by the fact that he had his face buried in a mountain of coke just before. It takes a shotgun blast at close range and a fall off a balcony to finally kill him.
• Memnon in The Scorpion King also dies like this. He is pierced by an arrow, thrown from the top of a building and set on fire during the fall.
• Buddy in Six String Samurai goes through about three separate sword fights in rapid succession, taking wounds that really ought to be fatal in each of them, before finally succumbing to Death.
• Snatch.:
  • Boris the Blade/The Bullet Dodger has the reputation of being simply impossible to kill. Here's what happens to him: first, he gets ambushed by three gangsters, beaten viciously, and thrown into the trunk of their car. Next, Boris is still in there while the vehicle is in a car accident. Then Boris crawls out and gets hit by a van at high speed. And after that Boris surprises everyone by showing up to a major shootout with an AK-74M, only to have Bullet-Tooth Tony finally shoot him with the entire magazine (plus one bullet from an earlier mag) from a .50AE Desert Eagle (it's amazing he never had a stoppage—Desert Eagles have a well-deserved reputation for being jam-o-matics). At that point, Boris has finally had enough. (Also, note these events are not spread out, they happen one after another in a very short amount of time).
  • Tony himself is a subversion. His tough-guy credentials come from the fact that he survived getting shot six times in one sitting, and he was still strong enough to kill his attacker with a sword. As a result you'd think that if he was going to die, he'd need some kind of over the top death like Boris. He winds up getting killed by a single stray bullet when his boss Avi grabs a gun and starts recklessly shooting at a dog who ate an enormous diamond and then started running away. Tony's death is so random that Avi doesn't even realize what happened at first, and calls out for Tony several times before realizing that Tony isn't answering or joining him in chasing the dog. Partially justified in that Avi was blasting away with Tony's Hand Cannon and the film doesn't show where was Tony hit — it may have been a headshot, for all we know.
• Claudia Hoffman from Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Lilliana stabs Claudia's mirror which is the source of her power, causing the Vain Sorceress to rapidly age, before the mirror explodes, its shards lacerating the screaming Claudia who then catches fire and is finally crushed by falling debris.
• In the film version of Sweeney Todd The Demon Barberof Fleet Street, Judge Turpin not only gets his throat cut, but also has it stabbed numerous times- which causes him to look pissed off at Sweeney but otherwise not too fussed. Then he is dropped down the chute to the cellar, where he still has the energy to cling to Mrs Lovett's skirts until she she kicks him off.
• The older brother in the Korean war epic Taegukgi ends up taking on what seems like the entire North Korean army by himself. This is after he is viciously beaten to a pulp by his own brother. His opponents take no chances and literally drown him in gunfire.
• All the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminators (T-800\T-850) are robots that take forever to stop.
  • The first is burned to a crisp, bisected, but only dies crushed.
  • The second loses its arm and temporarily dies impaled, but manages to return and ask someone to destroy him.
  • The third is almost decapitated, burned as he does a Dynamic Entry with a helicopter, and then blown in a self-caused explosion.
  • The fourth is burned, frozen, and only ends a long fight once decapitated.
  • A close one in the fifth movie: Guardian was partially showered with acid, impaled through the shoulder, fell from a flying helicopter into another flying helicopter, had its arm ripped off and finally had its exposed metal parts affected by the devastating time displacement field and its explosion. It got deactivated (technically fulfilling the trope) but unprogrammed polymimetic alloy reactivated its systems and repaired all damage.
  • The sixth, "Carl", had an entire arm stripped of flesh and fell from a crashing plane and into the oceans where its hand was torn off. It was temporarily disabled from an exploding hydroelectric turbine which cost it an ankle as well, and then finally dragging its overloading opponent into a pit where they both melt to slag, and even then Carl still survives for a brief moment longer.
• In Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth, the title character takes at least 20 arrows to the chest and still tries to walk and fight, finally falling to an over-dramatic arrow through the neck.
• The villain from Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain takes a good long while to go down, including spending most of the climactic fight with a butcher knife sticking out of his chest. Hitchcock's main goal with the film was to show how hard it could really be to kill someone.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • Brawl from the first movie gets one of his missile pods ripped off by Jazz, blasted several times by Jazz and Ironhide, pumped full sabots rounds (which is an anti-tank round for some context) by Lennox's team, has one of his arms cut off by Ratchet before getting knocked down. He gets up later and take several more sabot rounds and blasts by Bumblebee before finally dying.
    Lennox: That tank is definitely dead now.
• This is the best way to describe the death of Shockwave in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. He takes concentrated fire from NEST and all the Autobots, badly damaging him and leaving his eye hanging out. He still has the power to fight, even when Optimus then punches half of his side off. It takes Optimus ripping his head apart and tearing out his eye to finally kill him.
  • Tragically, Ratchet has the same fate in Transformers: Age of Extinction He gets blasted with plastic explosives, shot with multiple missiles, gets his leg blasted off, blasted by Lockdown's Face-Gun so badly his torso barely recognizable, and gets his Spark ripped out of his chest
• Troy:
  • Ajax takes two spears to the gut, keeps fighting, and isn't brought down until Hector stabs him with a sword. And he still gets another brutal blow in before falling.
  • Achilles dies after becoming a Human Pincushion full of Paris' arrows (the first of which hit him on his famed heel. The film had applied Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane on whether or not how famed invincibility was actually a gift from the gods... he still goes down trying to run Paris through with a sword).
• In True Romance, after Alabama is beaten enough by Virgil, she stabs him in the foot with a corkscrew, blinds him with nail polish, smashes his head with both a toilet lid and a bust of Elvis, sets him on fire with an Aerosol Flamethrower, stabs him with the corkscrew again (in the back this time), and then blasts him with a shotgun six times to finish him off. And even after Virgil's dead, Alabama beats on the corpse with the unloaded weapon for good measure!
• Undercover Brother. Mr. Feather is dropped out of a helicopter over the ocean. Just before he hits the water (after falling hundreds of feet, the impact alone of which would've killed him instantly) a great white shark leaps out of the water and eats him.
• Urban Legends: Bloody Mary features a pretty disgusting version of the trope, with a character named Heather popping a pimple on her face, releasing the spiders inside it, which start swarming over her. Trying to get the things off Heather accidentally smashes her face through a mirror, leaving a big shard of glass embedded in her forehead. Somehow still alive Heather actually starts ripping her own face off, finally dying about halfway through removing it. Also, as all this is going on the spiders just keep coming, eventually covering most of the room.
• In the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, the eponymous character is shot repeatedly at close range by half a dozen gunmen and an old man with a revolver. After staggering briefly, he then goes on to deliver a short speech on ideals, kill every single gunman with short swords before they can reload, lift the old man off his feet and strangle him to death and then pass on his legacy to his apprentice before finally expiring without anyone ever knowing who he was.
• In What Lies Beneath, it takes nearly ten minutes for Claire to drown Norman. Every previous attempt she made to kill him failed.
• The heroes of The Wild Bunch are shot at least a half-dozen times each during the final battle before finally succumbing to their wounds. At one point, Dutch manages to shrug off several pistol rounds at point-blank range; he's briefly knocked off his feet before he jumps back into the fight, apparently little worse for the wear. And it takes at least a dozen Mexican soldiers with rifles shooting Pike repeatedly to finally kill him while manning the machine gun.
• In Willow, General Kael. Madmartigan smashes his skull-mask, and Kael chases Madmartigan up a flight of stairs. Madmartigan stabs him in the chest; Kael responds by punching Madmartigan in the face and trying to strangle him. Madmartigan slashes Kael's belly, then twists the blade still in his chest. Kael does not appear to notice. Madmartigan impales him on his own sword. Kael is still on his feet when Madmartigan finally shoves him off the walkway. Even then he is still moving so Madmartigan throws a dagger into him just for good measure.
• Xmen Film Series:
  • In The Wolverine, Ichirō Yashida’s head is impaled by an adamantium blade, his throat is impaled by another one, his armor (which kept him alive) is shredded to pieces, his chest is sliced by Wolverine's claws and he falls down a cliff.
  • The titular character of X-Men: Apocalypse has his mind/astral form 'injured' by Professor X and then completely shattered by Jean Grey in a telepathic battle, while simultaneously being impaled and bludgeoned by hundreds of pieces of metal debris thrown by Magneto, getting blasted by Cyclops' eye beams at full strength, and getting electrocuted by Storm. Even after all that, his body is still shown to be regenerating, and it takes Jean Grey disintegrating him on a molecular level with the Phoenix Force to finally kill him for good.
  • X-24 in Logan: Clawed repeatedly. Pinned onto a tractor with a car. Entire shotgun unloaded into him. Truck dropped on him. And has half his skull blown off with an Adamantium bullet, finally killing him.
• Zeiram:
  • In its debut film, the title character demonstrates its notorious "immortality", first by having its chest blown out with a rocket launcher, only for its skeletal system to rip out of its ruined body and continue to move on its own. It continues to scuttle after the protagonists, even through several point-blank grenade blasts, only so much as losing an arm when one is strapped directly to its ribcage. It continues to press on until it takes a point-blank shot from a BFG, obliterating the skeleton... and leaving the head to fly around and grow an entirely new body minutes later. Finally, its primary head is shot to bits, and it dies... at least until the sequel.
  • In the sequel, Zeiram gets a sword through the forehead and its arm cut off and heals up just fine. It then has a grenade stuffed under one of its breastplates, semi-crippling it. The heroine then shoots at it repeatedly until its limbs are severed and its mechanical head is obliterated. Its central head pops out and gets shot off as well... just in time for the remaining portion to try and reform itself.

Jokes

• Among the Stierlitz jokes, there is a Black Comedy one referencing the canon death of Professor Pleischner who takes a Cyanide Pill and then jumps through the window.
  Professor Pleischner was falling out of the window for the fifth time. The poison still wasn't working.

Literature

• The movie version of The Lord of the Rings was Boromir's less bad-ass last dance. In the book, Aragorn never arrived to help him but got there only after Boromir had defeated dozens of Uruk-hai on his own before going down, with many of them shooting at him instead of just one. And there are none left standing by the time Aragorn and the others reach him. Of course, the actual scene isn't written; we just see the aftermath. Fits the trope even more in that Boromir's shield and sword were broken to pieces by the time the fight ended, indicating truly brutal melee combat amidst being shot full of arrows.
• Arhys in Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls is actually dead when the book starts but doesn't realize it (he's being sustained by magic being done by his young wife). The climax involves him riding out on a suicidal mission sustained by an amped-up version of the same spell, over the course of which he suffers several more fatal wounds and is eventually chopped to pieces.
• One standard version of vampire lore (dating back at least to Dracula) says that to kill a vampire, you need to stake him through the heart and chop his head off (not to mention filling his mouth with garlic/holy wafers). And sometimes burn the body to ashes and toss said ashes into a fast-flowing river. And in at least one version of the lore, even when all the steps are taken it wasn't really dead. A drop of blood on the ashes would reform it — stopped only by the fact that the ashes are scattered too widely.
• Discworld:
  • Pratchett's vampires seem to follow the rules listed above, although to different degrees depending on the vampire. This is because on the Disc every single vampire cliché is true, but any single cliché does not necessarily apply to any one vampire, so anyone trying to kill them has to try several different ways to make sure they actually die. Vampires eventually start carrying easily broken vials of blood so they'll smash and bring them back if they're dusted, which for the ones sensitive to light as well is fairly often (especially if they work as photographers).
    
    He has serious fun with this in Carpe Jugulum, where various subtypes of vampire have increasingly silly requirements for true death, starting at the weirdest end of the real-life myths and going from there, including mention of a vampire who wouldn't die until carrots got hammered in its ears! The protagonists muse about just how much trial and error it must have taken to get it right.
  • As well as vampires, Discworld has King Murune of Lancre; according to Wyrd Sisters, his death involved a red hot poker, ten pounds of live eels, a three-mile stretch of frozen river, a butt of wine, a couple of tulip bulbs, a number of poisoned eardrops, an oyster and a large man with a mallet. The footnote detailing this also notes that he didn't make friends easily.
  • The Assassins' Guild Diary cites the case of Duke Harold of Pseudopolis, whose assassin resorted to a cudgel, length of chain, pistol crossbow, dagger, poison, and ultimately to attaching the man to an anchor, chopping a hole in a frozen river's ice, and pushing him in. The Duke did die but three months later of a chill he caught from the frigid dunking.
  • Reg Shoe's (awesome) arrow-riddled death in Night Watch. And then he got back up and kept going. Since we generally know him as a zombie, it's a Foregone Conclusion that death didn't stop him.
• In The Robber Bride, it takes cancer, a heroin overdose, and falling six stories to finally kill Zenia. Even then it's debatable — Zenia's defining trait is her ability to convince people of things that aren't remotely true, and she'd already faked her own death once by the beginning of the book.
• Sven Hassel's WW2 novels. Whenever Porta and his gang from the 27th Penal Regiment decide to murder someone, there inevitably follows an entire chapter of bungled attempts which end in the victim either dying by accident or just going insane.
• In Angela's Ashes, Frank is reading about saints and decides that his favourite is St. Christina the Astonishing because she "takes ages to die".
• Older Than Feudalism: Patroclus, in The Iliad, is slapped and unarmed by the god Apollo, stabbed in the chest by Eupharlus, finally finished off by Hector, and still lives long enough to hear Hector's "The Reason You Suck" Speech and respond with his own Final Speech.
• Word of God has it that historical Necromancer Big Bad Kemmler suffered one of these in the backstory of The Dresden Files: In addition to magical swords, there were "guns, axes, shovels, ropes, a flamethrower, and a number of other extremes." This is after a fight with every combat-competent wizard in the world. After they killed him once, decades earlier, and it didn't stick.
  • New information indicates that the White Council had to kill him seven times before he finally died for good.
• Jim Butcher gives us Nihilus Invidia's death in Codex Alera: She was shot with a ballast bolt, one of which can go through two heavily armored legionaries. The ballast bolt was poisoned with two different kinds of poison: One that kills immediately and one that causes a nearly-incurable long-term infection in the wound. She was declared dead by a doctor, but her body disappeared; she'd watercrafted herself to the point where she could move despite being mortally wounded. She mentions, later, that the crows had come for her. She was found by the Vord Queen, who stuck a great big Vord parasite on her as life support. She acted as The Dragon for a while, then came up against her (ex-)husband Attis; she sliced him in half, but he burned most of her face and a good bit of her body off^note The "ex" bit was made official when he served her the divorce papers DURING this fight. A bit later, she gets into a fight with a bunch of the High Lords... and dies from being literally stabbed in the back by Amara.
• In Oleg Divov's Night Watcher, the Big Bad ends up being delimbed, partly encased in cement, hit in the face with a shovel several times and finally injected with (lethal, to him and his kind) silver. The main character actually sort of pities him.
• First Mate Cox in Nation takes an axe to the chest (blood loss, probable major organ damage), falls into a lagoon (drowning) and ultimately gets eaten by sharks.
• I'm Not A Regression: Ohjin, even being beaten to the brink of death, is bleeding liters of blood and most of his organs in his body are already completely destroyed, he will simply ignore the pain and keep fighting until he defeats his opponent.
• Take your pick of any of the sorcerers in The Black Company novels by Glen Cook. The Limper had a building collapsed on him, shot several times by a ballista, shot full of magical arrows, beheaded, burned, and cooked in a giant pot. To make sure he never came back (again), his enemies pushed his remains into another dimension. The Dominator was buried alive, shot with magic arrows, stabbed countless times, then burned. Shadowspinner was also shot with ballista bolts then impaled on a spear and took around a day to die (and that spear was poisoned). Another case in these books was a magical wereleopard called the "forvalvaka". One fought in a battle survived that and was crucified and took days to die with some magical help. Another one of the forvalvaka took 30 or so people shooting it with poisoned crossbow bolts, and magical fireballs, plus being stabbed with a magical spear before it died.
• In Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple's contribution to the anthology The Dragon Book, The Tsar's Dragons, this happens to Rasputin, naturally. It is his Real Life death, with the only exceptions being: 1) he was pushed under the ice by dragons and 2) he had a magic charm that stopped the other attempts from killing him. Presumably because that man was stupidly hard to kill.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gives us: "You barbarians! I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn, and quartered! And whipped! And boiled...until...until...until you've had enough! And then I will do it again! And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will JUMP on them! And I will carry on jumping on them until I get blisters, or I can think of anything even more unpleasant to do..."
  • Fortunately the construction workers and bureaucrats in question are simply vaporized by the Vogon constructor fleet a couple of minutes later.
• Hollow Places features the death of Benjamin. Before he goes down, Benjamin endures through being stabbed in the neck, heart, and genitals. He even manages to slit one of the protagonist's throats before finally going down on account of a final stab through the brain stem.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: In The Horse and His Boy, Lasaraleen attempts to keep a secret by threatening something like this to her servants, though considering her airhead personality it may be mostly a matter of not bothering to think before opening her mouth:
  And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.
• In the Warhammer 40,000 novel Legion of the Damned, Scout Omar survives being mauled by a mob of cultists, being stabbed in the chest with Lightning Claws, and getting his legs eaten by a daemon. After having an I Can Still Fight! moment, he's finally done in by his own suicide grenade after getting swarmed by more flying daemons.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: Mordak is killed or exorcised three times in this book: the first time Kalak and Zarracka beat him up in the mindscape, then Kalak kissed the evil out of Zarracka (his back-up body) then Kthonia scattered his physical remains into a thousand pieces with a hurricane gust. The two from the previous book brings the grand total up to five. Justified by a combination of You Kill It, You Bought It and Body Surf.
• Lolita. Humbert Humbert ends up emptying a couple of magazines from his .32 automatic into Quilty, who wanders around the house mildly protesting at each bullet impact. When he finally collapses, Humbert then goes to confess the deed to some people who'd turned up for a party, but they don't believe him, especially after Quilty staggers into the room and collapses a second time, this time for good.
• In Allegiant, the bureau fails to catch Tris and kill her before she starts her plan, the death serum doesn't work despite her not being inoculated against it - it takes an undignified cheap shot to kill her for good.
• In Hero in the Shadows, a magician with a powerful healing factor is first pushed off a balcony by the hero, falling several floors into a rose border. After regaining consciousness and healing the incurred injuries enough to get to his feet, he is confronted by an angry mob and impaled by a thrown iron spear, which is then struck by lightning. Even then it takes a slit throat to finish him off.
• The Knife of Never Letting Go has the appropriately mad priest Aaron, who survives being mauled by a crocodile with part of his face completely torn away, only dying after being repeatedly bludgeoned, stabbed through the throat and pushed off a waterfall. Even then they Never Found the Body.
• Magical Girl Raising Project: Pukin in Limited brainwashes herself with her own magic rapier to keep fighting as long as her will is strong, making her nearly impossible to stop. She's stabbed by Kuru-Kuru Hime's ribbons, has a smoke grenade detonate in her eye, is beaten by magical-sterioded-up-Mana, is cut in half by an anti-magic barrier, and only finally dies when Tepsekemei solidifies herself in Pukin's head, causing it to explode.
• One account of the state-ordered suicide of Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca the Younger following his implication in an assassination attempt on Nero has Seneca slit his own wrists, take poison, and ultimately immerse himself in a scalding-hot steam bath before finally expiring. Like Rasputin's death, Seneca's was likely exaggerated for political reasons by later generations.
• In Anthony Reynolds’ Warhammer 40,000 Word Bearers novel Dark Apostle, the titular Dark Apostle Jarulek gets a fist-sized hole burned through his abdomen, gets his hand chewed up by the teeth of a chainsword, and gets cut in half at the waist. He’s still alive after this and manages to drag his limbless torso after his First Acolyte Marduk before finally getting stabbed in the head and thrown into a bottomless abyss.
• In Ravenor Rogue, the villainous Bounty Hunter Lucius Worna takes a lot of punishment before finally dying. In order: his face is shredded by an exploding grenade, he gets stabbed in the eye and chest, gets strangled with telekinesis, gets struck by lightning eleven times, catches fire as a result, and is finally hurled out a window and off the side of a mountain. He still had enough strength after the third lightning strike to taunt his killer, Patience Kys:
  Patience: End of story?
  Worna: You… wish…
• Our Dumb Century has the article "Russians Continuing to Kill Rasputin", in which the mad monk is not only poisoned, shot, stabbed, and drowned, but also (among other things) run over by a freight train, Buried Alive, impaled on a spear, struck by a car repeatedly, dissolved in acid, set on fire, electrocuted, beheaded twice, and chopped into small pieces with swords, and still refused to die.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: When she was betrayed by her comrades, Chloe Halford was subjected to 128 kinds of torture starting with disembowelment, fought to escape and was given just enough rope to give her hope, then was Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by Esmeralda, who ripped her soul out as she died. Her son Oliver Horn, who carries her Ghost Memory, uses Agony Beam spells to inflict the same tortures on Darius Grenville (one of her murderers), but only gets through a couple dozen before Darius begs for death and Oliver cuts his head off.
• In Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi, Jin Guangyao survives being poisoned, having his hand chopped off, and being stabbed in the chest before he is dragged into a coffin by a fierce corpse, given a Neck Snap and the coffin is sealed and buried. Nie Huaisang takes his vengeance very seriously.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones:
  • Robb Stark gets peppered with multiple crossbow bolts before being stabbed by Roose Bolton.
  • Yoren is shot with a crossbow bolt in the chest, gets stabbed in the back with a spear, and then it still takes a sword right through the neck to finally kill him.
  • Jon Snow gets stabbed, and stabbed, and stabbed, and stabbed, and stabbed... It doesn't stick thanks to Melisandre's magic, but the rebel faction of the Watch really, really, really wanted him thoroughly dead.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: The main villain in the episode "Warriors", from 1998 (the fifth season), the leader of a new-age supremacist group, has created a prototype muscle man who is not only unbeatable but can withstand everything without so much as flinching or feeling any pain. The group kidnaps a genetic researcher and forces her at gunpoint to share her secrets of "rapid healing" DNA (which she intends to use for good) to perfect his prototype. In the meantime, the man-mountain has beaten Walker and Trivette to pulps, No Selling being shot more than 10 times and Walker's powerful roundhouse kick. In their final fight, Walker is clearly losing against the muscle man, when the researcher shows up after her captors are arrested to finally throw flammable liquid and a flask in the warrior's face, finally allowing Walker an opening to kick the stunned warrior (who is enveloped in a ball of flame) into an oil field and to his doom. The bad guy's ultimate goal was to clone the prototype and create an army capable of overthrowing the world's governments and — in ruling the world — creating a reign of terror unmatched even by such real-life villains as Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler.
• Lost:
  • Mikhail "Patchy" Bakunin, from the third season, is zapped by the sonar fence, only to come back a few episodes later. In the season finale, he is shot in the chest with a harpoon gun, then comes back to life minutes later, only to die while blowing open an underwater window with a grenade.
  • Martin Keamy, the main villain of season four, as well. He is shot in the back four times, stabbed in the back once, and only dies after being stabbed repeatedly in the heart.
  • Juliet is trapped by heavy chains, falls hundreds of feet down a shaft, detonates (or not) a nuclear bomb right next to her... and only dies in the next episode.
• Lorenzo "Happy" Morales from the CSI episode "Ending Happy". The drugged-up ex-boxer passes out on his favorite prostitute's bed and is injected with snake venom by her and an accomplice. His boss's wife is fed shrimp by his boss, in order to trigger Happy's allergy when they hook up, causing his throat to swell. He's then shot through the throat with a crossbow by one of the people who injected him with snake venom, allowing him to breathe again. He figures out what the prostitute did and goes back to her room angry, and she hits him with a crowbar. Then he staggers off to rest on a chair by the brothel's swimming pool and leans over to pick up a cigarette. The chair collapses under his weight and drops him into the pool, wherein he finally drowns. The entire episode basically consists of Your Princess Is in Another Castle! as each suspect is cleared of actually landing the killing blow and ends with Doc Robbins sighing as he lists the various "mitigating factors" in his report.
• In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Really, Really Dead Guy", the "Six-Way Killer" kills the same man six different ways. It was nothing personal. He was trying to distract attention from another murder. Subverted in that the victim was already dead by the second method of execution.
• On Soap, Peter Campbell was killed this way — stabbed, shot, strangled, suffocated and bludgeoned.
• In the Firefly episode "War Stories", the death of Niska's torturer. He gets beaten up by Mal, shot several dozen times by Jayne, Wash, and Zoe, knocked off a railing, bounces very painfully off a steel girder, hits another girder, then gets sliced in half by a giant drill-saw, and then gets dumped into a pit of something very glowy and unhealthy-looking. We're fairly certain he's dead.
• This even happens once in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Graham Chapman, dressed as a Mandarin and speaking with a bizarre Chinese accent, declares himself to be the new English consul in Smolensk; his predecessor "had a heart attack, then fell out of a window onto an exploding bomb and died in a shooting accident."
• Parodied in a sketch in British Comedy show The Two Ronnies. The sketch is a courtroom gameshow in which the defendant is accused of murder. When asked about the particulars of the crimes he responds that the victim was poisoned, strangled, shot 10 times in the back and stabbed fifteen times in the chest and that the conclusion of the police upon finding the body was that "he was dead".
• In the Grand Finale movie of Kamen Rider Decade, it takes a grand total of twelve simultaneous Finishing Moves (ten of which are performed by protagonist Riders in their respective Super Modes) to destroy Doras.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:
  • Cyclopsis the Warzord / Dora Talos in season 1. The Rangers blitz it with their original five Zords, double-team it with the Megazord and Dragonzord to break off its arm blades, bash it with the Dragonzord Battle Mode's staff, and finally form the Ultrazord and use its finisher (a barrage of energy blasts) to destroy it.
  • Dischordia's death in season 3. It takes the finishers of Ninjor, the Shogun Megafalconzord, and the Shogun Ultrazord to kill her. Her counterpart in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger, Yama-Uba, doesn't get off too light either — she's stabbed by Samuraiman (and in fact this can still be seen in the U.S. version when it's supposed to be Ninjor's energy blast hitting her), blasted by Super Muteki Shogun's finisher, and then finally killed by Kakure Daishogun and its finisher.
  • Gekiranger / Jungle Fury had some very complex, multiple-strike finishers consisting of several finishing-class attacks that seemed just overkill on the poor monster. One of them consists of each attack knocking the monster back into the air in order to be hit by the next, over and over, with warmup humiliation before the Megazord arrives for its super punch attack, and more individual Zord finishers after. Mind you, the only one to receive its maximum fury was the strongest Phantom Beast General, who'd proven Nigh Invulnerable all episode. And as there were two episodes to go in the season, he survived even all that. Still, you had to feel sorry for the Monster of the Week types who got to eat at least most of it.
• Akudos Gil, the final boss of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, takes an even worse beating than Doras. The complete rundown:
  • Trapped on his flagship while it explodes around him, including being pinned to the exploding main console and being hit with a Combination Attack by Gokai Red and Silver.
  • Hit with the powers of all 34 previous Super Sentai teams in rapid succession.
  • Attacked by the Gokaigers using past teams' Super Modes, including Silver using another Finishing Move (one that draws upon the power of 15 past heroes, no less). All this really manages to do is destroy his sword.
  • Hit with yet another Combination Attack, this time by all six Gokaiger at once (with Silver still in his Super Mode).
  • Finally, when he's still standing after all this, the team straight-up shoves their BFG into his gut and fires it point-blank while using up all their energy to the point they detransform and are knocked back and injured from the strain, which finally finishes him off but not before he manages to hold on long enough to curse them one last time before he explodes. At this point, their initial worry that Akudos is still alive is completely justified.
• The Body of the Week of the Castle episode "Pandora" was found shot, stabbed, strangled, and with a pencil shoved into the side of his neck, before having been thrown out of a fourth-floor window to the ground below. Quoth Castle, seeing the body: "Gives new meaning to the term, 'overkill.'"
• The finale to the first season of Blackadder, Prince Edmund is strapped to a device that will have "..a spike will go up your nethers... shears will cut off your ears... axes will chop off your hands... the coddling grinder... Then these feathers will tickle you under what's left of your arms." Though he actually survives the ordeal and does not die (immediately) from these wounds.
• In the Sliders episode "The Exodus", Professor Arturo has his brain fluid sucked out, is shot, and then is finally left behind on a planet which subsequently explodes. Apparently, the actor portraying him didn't get along well with the producers.
• Subverted in Torchwood: Miracle Day. A magic spell means no human on Earth can die but can still suffer injuries. A particularly gruesome scene shows the still twitching remains of a suicide bomber. The walking dead all die at once when the spell is lifted.
• The Sopranos has an ambiguous example in the Russian mobster from "Pine Barrens". After seemingly getting his throat crushed, he turns out to still be alive. After seemingly getting shot in the head, he simply disappears into the Pine Barrens. Paulie even compares him to Rasputin, but it's never known what happens to him or if he even dies of his injuries.
• Smallville's Jason Teague is shot, dropped off a cliff, takes a beating in his fight with Jonathan and Martha Kent, and finally dies when a meteor hits him.
• "Been through Canada's Worst Driver" applies any car for this trope.
• The Monster of the Week in the Grimm episode "Red Menace" is a Koschei; a Wesen that can channel energy to heal or harm and is very difficult to kill. This one is poisoned, then stabbed, but only dies when he uses the last of his energy to heal his attacker. It's also noted that Rasputin himself was a Koschei.
• The Governor in The Walking Dead is shot in the arm, gets into a brutal fistfight with Rick, is stabbed through the chest by Michonne, and finally put down by his girlfriend with a bullet through the head. And just in case there was any doubt, the following episode shows his corpse being devoured by zombies.
• Harold Meachum from Iron Fist (2017). He's impaled on rebar by Danny, shot by his own son Ward, falls off of a skyscraper, and is cremated to prevent him from resurrecting.
• Spectreman: Dr. Gori dies by jumping off a cliff...and then exploding. The most plausible explanation is that he carried a grenade with him and set it off.

Music

• The Eagles' "Hotel California" includes the eerie line, "They stabbed him with their steely knives/but they just can't kill the beast," which some rock critics contend is a reference to Satan and, by extension, an implication that Satan can't be stopped or defeated, regardless of what's tried.
• Boney M.'s Disco song "Rasputin" (which has also been covered by Finnish metal band Turisas), mentions his end. Believe it or not, this is one of the more accurate portrayals of his death; while it says he drank poison that failed to work (in real life the chef chickened out on adding the poison), it ends with Rasputin being shot to death and leaves out the drowning myth.
  Ra, Ra, Rasputin
  Lover of the Russian Queen!
  They put some poison into his wine!
  Ra, Ra, Rasputin
  Russia's greatest Love Machine!
  He drank it all and said, "I feel fine!"
  
  Ra, Ra, Rasputin
  Lover of the Russian Queen!
  They didn't quit, they wanted his head!
  Ra, Ra, Rasputin
  Russia's greatest Love Machine!
  And so they shot him 'til he was dead
• In the video for the Type O Negative song "The Profits of Doom", a Rasputinian character played by singer Pete Steele proves remarkably hard to kill, surviving poison, only to be shot at the end of the video.
• Rose Connelly in the Murder Ballad "Down In The Willow Garden". No explanation is given for why the singer found it necessary to poison her wine and then run her through with a sabre. It's not clear whether she was thrown in the river just to hide the body, or if he was hoping she'd drown as well.
• The Celtic folksong "The Sick Note," based on a monologue by Gerard Hoffnung, is about a bricklayer who falls off a fourteen-story building, surviving numerous amusing injuries on the way down.
• The traditional song "John Barleycorn" looks like it's about this at first - poor John Barleycorn is buried alive, left out in a field until midsummer's day, has his legs cut off at the knee, is stabbed in the heart by pitchforks, tied to a cart and rolled round a field, flayed by being hit with sticks, and finally ground between two millstones. However, the last verse reveals it's about the harvesting process, and John, who's now become whiskey, "proved the strongest man at last".
• There's an American folk song called "Grey Goose" (most famously covered by Huddie William "Lead Belly" Ledbetter) about a goose that just won't die:
  Oh, the knife wouldn't cut him
  Oh, the fork wouldn't stick him
  And they put him in the hog pen
  And the hog couldn't eat him
  Oh, he broke the hog's teeth out
  Oh, they take him to the sawmill
  And the saw wouldn't cut him
  Oh, he broke the saw's teeth out
  And the last time I seen him
  He was flying 'cross the ocean
  With a long string of goslings
  And they're all goin' quack-quack
• Buck 65's song "Indestructible Sam" tells the story of a grave-digger who was so good at his job that all of his competition ganged up to put him out of commission. After attempting to blow him up, poison him, drown him, shoot him, and burn his house down (presumably with him in it), Sam eventually lives long enough to dig all of their graves.
• Fred Penner's song "The Cat Came Back" tells the story of Old Mr. Johnson, who had a yellow cat that wouldn't leave his home. The song chronicles his attempts to rid himself of the pesky feline, giving it to people who die in increasingly outlandish ways. But...
  the cat came back
  the very next day
  The cat came back
  We thought he was a gonner
  but the cat came back
  He just wouldn't stay away-y-y-y.

Myths & Religion

• Older Than Feudalism: In Greek Mythology Hercules (or Heracles in Greek) suffered such a fate, likely as there was no real other way to kill somebody like him. He donned a garment contaminated with the poisoned blood of the Lernaean Hydra; for anyone else, it would have proved fatal but instead, Hercules suffered excruciating agony as it tore apart his body. Even as skin peeled from bone, he managed to build himself a funeral pyre by tearing down trees and ordered his companions to set him ablaze. Apparently being burned alive hurt less than the poison.
  
  Just as a general idea of how horrifically painful and potent the blood of the Hydra is: when one of Hercules' poisoned arrows nicked the immortal centaur Chiron, it left him writhing in agony (because the poison couldn't actually kill him) and begging Hercules to end his life. Because he was one of the few good Centaurs, Chiron was then lifted to the stars by Zeus as a constellation (either Sagittarius or Centaurus, depending on whether you're listening to Ovid or not).
• Ajax the Lesser, a "hero" (today we'd probably call him a war criminal) from The Trojan War, died this way too, having his ship destroyed from under him, scrambling onto a rock, and then having that split in two under him by a vengeful god or goddess, causing him to drown. Good riddance. Poor Cassandra...
• In Kalevala, Untamo tries to murder Kullervo, a young boy, without much success. First, Kullervo is put inside a barrel which is thrown into the ocean, but when Untamo returns three days later, he finds Kullervo alive, fishing. Next, Untamo orders the construction of a pyre and attempts to burn Kullervo - the pyre burns for several days without Kullervo getting hurt at all. Untamo attempts to hang Kullervo, but Kullervo survives this as well.
• English folklore states that a wizard must be killed three times before they die for good. Prescribed methods are generally stabbing, impaling, and then drowning. This is invoked with the death of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (stabbed, impaled, drowned), and possibly with Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ( cursed, poisoned, insta-kill spell, fallen off a tower).
• As with wizards, some European folklore has it that vampires must be killed multiple times for it to stick. To start with, you behead the corpse and stake it to the coffin so that it can't rise. If you want to go the extra mile, you can bury it under a crossroads (the idea is that the traffic keeps the ground compacted) or burn it. And just in case that the corpse might still not be done, some possible vampires were buried with their face down, so they would at least go out of their coffin the wrong way.
• In the apocryphal book of 2nd Maccabees, Razis, when he was surrounded by Nicanor's forces, tries to kill himself by falling on his own sword, then failing to die that way, he climbs to the top of the tower and jumps to the ground, hoping to kill himself that way. Still failing to die, he runs to the top of a steep rock, tearing out his insides and throwing them down to the people while praying to the Lord before finally dying.
• The crucifixion of Jesus from The Bible. He was flogged, beaten, received a crown of thorns on his head, and given a heavy cross to carry, which made him fall twice - as other bypassers continue to mock and beat Jesus - on the way to the top of a mountain. There the soldiers nailed Jesus to the cross (when it's usually done by tying the hands and feet), where he was painfully asphyxiated for hours, being at a certain point speared in the side by a soldier. It's shown at its most painful in The Passion of the Christ, where the skin is being visibly ripped by all the beatings.
  • Statues of Jesus as a thin, wispy, frail dude are laughable in retrospect. One of the few people to point this out is Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land who says, being a carpenter^note the Bible says teknon which means he could have been a stonemason too!, Jesus would have been "a hearty man, muscular and healthy."

Podcasts

• The Magnus Archives: The narrator of the episode "First Hunt" finds himself the prey of an Ambiguously Human hunter of the most dangerous game. When he finally manages to get his predator at a momentary disadvantage, he empties two rifles into him, including shots to the head and heart. After all that, the hunter is still clinging to life and starts digging out the bullets with his hands. The narrator doesn't wait around to see whether he dies or not.

Tabletop Games

• In Ars Magica Gruagachan have the power to remove their souls from their bodies and hide them in small objects. Mechanically, this results in them suffering Warping in place of Fatal or Incapacitating Wounds. Certain Infernalists (with access to Incantation and Consumption) have access to a spell that has a similar effect.
• Zapathasura, the antediluvian founder of the Ravnos clan in Vampire: The Masquerade. When White Wolf killed him off as part of ending the Old World of Darkness, his death came about from first fighting a trio of elder vampires for three days and three nights, having a magically boosted nuclear bomb dropped on him and then finally by being exposed to super-focused sunlight beamed directly at him through satellites controlled by the Ancient Conspiracy. And even then it took several hours of direct exposure (most vampires wouldn't last more than a few seconds) to do him in. It should also be noted that he was the weakest of the thirteen antediluvians.
• In the "Operation: Rimfire" Mekton adventure, Lord Dremmond's death scene description is, and I quote: "Tough as nails, he gets one dying speech" (followed by a twenty-seven lines such speech) "before any PC can finish him off". That would be not a Rasputinian Death but a vanilla Final Speech, were not his death in the middle of a frantic close-quarters battle with the whole Rimfire flight crew gang-banging him with all sort of weapons, including lightsabers, in an alien spaceship full of monsters about to be psychically awakened by him — which really gives the PCs no reason at all to cease fire until well after he is Deader than Dead. Which every group of players, routinely, does. After that, he detonates a hard-radiation nuke. And survives. It should be noted that Dremmond's death scene often becomes quite the opposite of what was intended.
• In Dungeons & Dragons, and more generally in games that use a hit point mechanic, high-level characters often survive a series of horrific traumas any one of which should be fatal — anything from being dropped off a 200-foot cliff, to being squashed by a falling block of stone, to being eaten by an enormous monster.
  • Just as one example, going by the rules as written: It's possible for a character to fall from orbit, with no special protective equipment (or any equipment at all, actually), land on the ground, and pick himself up and walk away, bruised and probably not feeling so great, but still completely able-bodied. Assuming minimum damage is rolled, this is technically possible at level 1. Though there -is- an inversion of sorts, especially early on, noted as the "Massive Damage" rule. If you hit a single enemy with one attack for fifty or more hit points of damage, the victim must make a roll to save versus Instant Death.
  • The tarrasque can be slain only by inflicting enough damage to kill it (despite its extreme regeneration and epic DR), then using a Wish or Miracle spell (essentially, invoking a Deus ex Machina) to make it stay dead. Even nuking its corpse doesn't work, because it will revive inside a week without the Wish. And in 3rd ed. it takes getting it down to -30 hit points to kill it in the first place (rather then the -10 it takes to kill most other things).
  • Subjects of holy word and its sister spells dictum, blasphemy, and word of chaos suffer an escalating series of effects based on the difference between the caster level and the subject's hit dice. If the difference is ten or more, the victim is deafened, blinded, paralyzed, and killed instantly. One would have thought the last one would have been enough.
  • The vampire lord requires a variation of this, specifically in disposing of the body so it can't regenerate. You have to behead the creature, cremate the head and body separately, scatter the body's ashes over running water, immerse the head's ashes in holy water, and bury the immersed ashes in holy ground... and a vampire lord can recover from even this, though not without help.
  • A high-level barrier spell called the Prismatic Wall will afflict anyone that tries to move through with up to 120 points of damage (which is likely lethal all by itself), plus permanent insanity and petrification and sent to another world and instant death.
• Invoked in the Dungeons & Dragons setting of Ravenloft: many Darklords are given extremely specific conditions that the party must complete before they can successfully kill them, which can prove rather... annoying. It varies between individuals whether or not they can be "killed" or if they simply turn Nigh Invulnerable until the proper steps are followed.
• Similarly invoked in the Dungeons & Dragons setting of Birthright; one rare Blood power called "Invulnerability" makes it impossible for the possessor to be killed unless certain specific conditions are met. In "Blood Enemies", the sourcebook statting the most well-known Awnsheghlien, the only Invulnerable awnsheg whose method of death is explicitly stated is the Spider, who can only die if he is chopped into bits, those bits are then burned for a day on a fire fed with wood taken from the tree of a dryad, and the resultant ashes are then plowed into the earth with a large amount of salt.
• Warhammer:
  • The backstory for Dogs of War character Borgio the Besieger survived several increasingly over the top attempts on his life, eventually being killed in the bath with a toasting fork.
  • An even more outrageous Rasputinian death was Vlad von Carstein. He survived being chopped up with his own magical sword, being impaled on a dozen lances and being decapitated by a lucky cannon shot. His eventual demise only occurred after the Grand Theogonist of Sigmar threw himself and Vlad off the battlements in the siege of Altdorf, landing on a moat of sharpened stakes. Even then, Vlad only dies because Manfred stole his reincarnation ring. Otherwise, he probably would have just shoved the Grand Theogonist off of him and continued fighting.
• Any GURPS character with Supernatural Durability can theoretically take any amount of punishment before dying. Short of a weapon that vaporizes them in a single hit only one very specific method (e.g. a metal spike through the heart) can ever actually kill them.
• In Hollow Earth Expedition, any character with the Diehard talent automatically stabilizes when they reach negative hitpoints, stays conscious even with negative hitpoints, and increases the number of negative hitpoints they can reach before dying, thus meaning they're much tougher and harder to kill than characters without the talent. The high pain tolerance talent has similar effects, albeit less so, and combining them results in even more awesome effects. Both talents can be taken multiple times.
• Many heroic characters in Warhammer 40,000 can take unbelievable amounts of punishment. Especially characters with the "Eternal Warrior" trait, which makes them immune to the Chunky Salsa Rule.
  • Marneus Calgar and Darnath Lysander each have a whopping four wound points, which, combined with the aforementioned Eternal Warrior rule, means they can each take at least four hits from heavy artillery before going down.
  • Captain Alessio Cortez is the single least killable Space Marine in the Imperium, his feats including things like holding off a six-hour assault in spite of a broken back and cleverly getting an ork's weapon stuck in his ribcage to disarm it and then kill it. Every bone in his body has been broken at least once, which probably explains his attitude towards limb loss.
  I haven't lost an arm, brother. It's over there.
  • Commissar Yarrick has a rule where if he loses his last wound, he has a 2/3 chance of getting up again the next round. As opposed to every other 40K example, he's but a humble guardsman (meaning he's an unmodified Human, except for the artificial arm he ripped off from an ork) pushing into his early 80's/late 70's. He's able to shrug off a hit that would permanently put down Marneus Calgar, the guy with a rule called God of War, and the Avatar of Khaine, the Embodiment of an actual God of War. And all of this is supposedly through sheer determination and nothing else (some canon hints that because he's the only human who's put up enough of a fight to impress Ghazkull, the fact that the orks believe him to be superhumanly tough makes him superhumanly tough).
  • Old One Eye has a similar rule. It's the most powerful in the third edition, where he automatically regenerates one wound per turn (as oppose on a 4+ on a D6) and could stand back up if he was killed. He is drastically toned down for the new release.
  • St. Celestine is supposed to have died dozens of times before finally being nuked. In game terms, she can stand back up within a couple of turns.
  • Many newer characters possess a version of this rule. One of the first outside of Celestine was Chaplain Grimaldus of the Black Templars, although he had to pass a leadership test each turn or his will gave out and he would collapse. Justicar Anval Thawn takes it to the extreme, being able to come back from anything in the game and can continuously test for it even if he fails the first time around. This is very useful as, unlike the other examples, Thawn can claim objectives and so is a bane to the opponent during Objectives games.
  • Possibly the very, very best version of this is the old 3rd edition version of the Fallen Dark Angel Cypher, who has a god looking out for him. When he loses his last wound and fails his armour save, Cypher gets a 4+ invulnerable save... On a 3d6. It will only fail on the roll of three 1s, a 1/216 event. The remaining 215 times he simply vanishes, still alive and kicking, and the other side gets no victory points for killing him. It doesn't matter what you throw onto him; the odds of it actually doing something to Cypher is very low indeed. By the lore, Cypher has survived at least one Exterminatus (killing every last living organism on an entire planet) and vanished tracelessly from a cell in a Black Templar battle barge.
• In Malifaux, this is what many people ascribe to Leviticus, except he turns up later alive. Subverted however because Leviticus really does die every time he claims its Only a Flesh Wound; missed his heart/the body can stand to lose that much blood/intestinal removal isn't fatal. This is because he's somewhat worked out the secret to eternal life, specifically eternal respawning. In game terms, he will die every other turn and reappear at the end of the turn he died. He can be permanently killed but it requires a lot of work to set up.
• In the Pathfinder Adventure Path Reign of Winter, you actually get to fight the man himself. You have to kill him three times in a row before he finally kicks the bucket. Naturally, this will likely involve a lot of stabbing, shooting, poisoning, clawing, burning, freezing, and/or electrocution, etc., depending on your party.
• BattleTech:
  • The Last Stand of Aiden Pryde. A member of Clan Jade Falcon and leader of the Falcon Guard cluster, he stayed in a last stand in the Clans' failed fight with Comstar on the planet Tukayyid. Alone and in a damaged mech, he held off the entire Comguard force as the rest of the Falcon Guard retreated to their dropship. He succeeded in personally killing 12 mechs, three of which he felled after his mech was down to a single small laser and his sensors were no longer working.
  • The Black Thorns mercenaries were killed this way by accident. During the Word of Blake Jihad, one of the writers wanted to do something with them, so they looked up the last planet they'd been deployed on. It turned out to be a planet that since then had been invaded, had a bioweapon that killed hundreds of thousands unleashed on it, been subjected to sustained bombardment from orbiting warships, and then had its entire surface ravaged by nuclear carpet bombing. The person who was the line developer at the time said "Oops. Well, one of those got them."

Theater

• Claudius in Hamlet gets stabbed with a poisoned sword and then forcibly fed poisoned wine. In the Branagh adaptation, a Falling Chandelier of Doom also lands on him.
• Clarence from Richard III is another Shakespearean example: He's stabbed several times before being drowned in a barrel of wine.
• Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman constantly tries to kill himself by intentionally crashing his car and sucking on a gas pipe, but he always survives. He eventually succeeds with one last car crash.

Urban Legends

• There's an urban legend about a man in France who attempted suicide by simultaneously hanging, poisoning, shooting, and burning himself. All on a steep cliff above the sea. The attempt failed, when he shot himself in the head while jumping off, and the shot missed his head and instead ripped through the rope, causing him to fall into the sea and survive, which not only put out the fire but also made him spit out the poison he had swallowed earlier. He was then rescued by a fisherman — but then died of hypothermia. Snopes tracked the first version of the tale to forensic literature of the very late 19th century. Interestingly, in the first versions the man actually survives.

Video Games

• Star Wars: The Old Republic: Lord Draahg. The Sith Warrior has to kick his ass 3 times before they get to Force push him into a pit of metal and fire at Hoth in the Warrior's airlock. He lives. You get to ignore him for the rest of the questline until you're on Corellia, where he tries to kill Darth Vowrawn and keep the Entity imprisoned.
  Draahg: I've been gutted. Bled dry. Jettisoned into space. I survived and grew stronger.
• Luca Blight from Suikoden II. Took two armies; yours and his own conspiring against him; then riddled with arrows (killing his horse), fought three times (by three different combat parties), riddled with arrows, riddled with arrows again, and then fought in a duel. Only then does he die. He is probably the most shining example of #1. His last words, are bragging how many people it took to kill him...and that he STILL killed more!
• In Saints Row 2, the Boss of the Third Street Saints fights Mr. Sunshine, second-in-command of the Sons of Samedi. After beating him, he gets up after being shot. The Boss shoots him again, and Sunshine gets back up again. This results in the Boss yelling "For fuck's sake, just die already!", unloading a full pistol mag into Sunshine, then stealing his machete, cutting off his head with it, and throwing it into a meat grinder.
• From Metal Gear:
  • Liquid Snake crashed a burning helicopter, got shot in the face with a bunch of Stinger missiles, had a giant walking tank explode around him, fell several stories from the top of the wreckage, was riddled with hundreds of bullets from a machine-gun turret, crashed and flipped over his Jeep, and finally died when a genetically tailored disease stopped his heart (either instantly or for several minutes, depending on whether one is talking about the original or the remake). And he still LIVES ON, through this ARM! Except not really, but it's somewhat tantamount to his incredible resilience that nobody questioned it.
  • Let's not forget Vamp, who over the course of his two games starts by surviving getting his brain scrambled and just keeps getting up from even worse things, including being at the controls of a jump jet that gets shot down, drowning (after taking either enough bullets to kill a squadron or enough tranquilizers to knock out an elephant, depending on how you play), another headshot, losing an extended sword/knife battle, and another boss fight in which he can keep getting up after you "kill" him as many times as you have the patience for until you finally take care of the source of his unnatural healing, by injecting him with a syringe that disables his nanomachines long enough for him to finally die in another extended knife duel.
  • Big Boss. Let's go through his history:
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: He had the crap beaten out of him by a professional boxer with superpowers and enough strength to punch through concrete walls, electrically tortured by said boxer, then his eye was shot out, he fell down a waterfall into a river, where he nearly drowned. Then he took on four mentally-unstable black-ops agents with enough illegal weapons and gear to win a small war, then took on the boxer again, then said boxer riding a nuclear tank, and then his own mentor.
    • Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops: 6 years later, he survives being caught within ground zero of the ignition launch sequence of the rocket booster of the ICBMG.
    • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker: Four years after that, Big Boss then managed to survive being electrically tortured at least nine times, three of the shocks even being significantly heightened in frequency.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes: A few months later, a bomb detonates near his helicopter, which causes shrapnel that his student takes the brunt of to shred him and his team, followed by accidentally crashing into the chopper that detonated the bomb. This sends him into a coma and brain-damages his student for 9 years.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Then he survives the black-ops squad sent to kill him along with the boxer's revenant corpse, augmented with one of the psychos' parasites who is continually on fire and frequently exploding.
    • Metal Gear: 12 years later, he faces his son in combat, taking several missiles to the face, before a nuke detonates his own fortress though it turns out this was actually his protégé/Body Double. He survives, rumored to be a quadruple amputee.
    • Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake: 4 years later his son sets his entire body on fire. Which leaves him in yet another coma, except this time he is injected with nanomachines that lock away his consciousness, leaving him a comatose quadriplegic stuck in whatever dream the Patriots forced him to watch. And his will isn't completely shattered by this.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: 15 years later, he shows up again, having survived in a coma, then went through extreme clone surgery to replace about 50% of his body, and was in perfect working order only a few days later. He's just that awesome. Then he finally dies of the FOXDIE virus, but manages to endure a viral-induced heart attack for 15 minutes.
• Zagi in Tales of Vesperia. Granted, Yuri and Estelle don't really do that much more than fend him off the first time he's encountered, but the second time he fights the party, he's thrown off a boat, jumps back on, then is left on when it explodes. Amazingly, he survived to interrupt the finals of a tournament to get at Yuri and show off his new mechanical arm. After overloading the Blastia with magic, his arm basically overloads and explodes. Then he shows up again for another round to destroy Yuri's party at the warship, and literally sprays himself with poison perfume to kill Yuri. He appears to finally die after he gets thrown off of another boat several times after he tries to get Yuri. Amazingly, Zagi survives yet again and makes it into the final dungeon because he's still not done. After the fifth battle with him, Zagi is almost shutting down, but he ultimately dies by falling to his death into a near bottomless pit...after being slashed across the chest by Yuri. The party was probably just as sick of seeing him as the player was.
  • Forcystus, Desian Grand Cardinal of Tales of Symphonia, should qualify too. At the beginning of the game he is caught in a point-blank explosion, tough for anyone to survive. Later in the game, he fights the party and once defeated, falls backwards into a reactor. He promptly shakes it off and meets the heroes again on the way out and is only finally killed after Lloyd stabs him in the chest.
• Mass Effect 2 starts with the Normandy being destroyed by a Collector cruiser. The Normandy gets blown apart while Shepard is still the only person left on board, but being thrown out of the wreckage by a huge explosion is not as bad as the space suits air supply being shredded and the air tubes ripping. However, that's not what killed Shepard, who then started to fall towards the nearby planet to burn up in the atmosphere. And then impacted on the planet's surface. The medical scans shown during the montage of the resurrection process and Miranda's own lab notes reveal that that Shepard's body endured exposure to vacuum, the heat of reentry, exposure to subzero temperatures on the planet surface, as well as an impact that left most of Shep's skeleton shattered. It's no wonder it took them two years and a ludicrous amount of money to get Shepard back in working order.
• Fate/stay night:
  • On the Unlimited Blade Works route, Archer loses most of his mana and gains a nasty arm wound from a duel with Lancer, and then breaks his contract. This normally means he would fade away from mana loss, except he has a class ability that lets him stick around for another three days. That's reasonable. After a day of mana leakage he gets into a fight with Shirou and gets impaled. Then Gilgamesh shows up and he gets impaled about twenty times MORE and a piece of the building collapses on top of him. Everyone assumes at this point he's gone. He shows up during the final battle a day later to rescue Rin and give the killing blow to Gilgamesh. And he still has enough time left to have a conversation with Rin before the Grail being missing removes any last anchors he has to the world.
  • Lancer has this kind of death himself in Unlimited Blade Works, he is ordered by his master Kotomine to kill himself, which he does in spectacular fashion by stabbing himself in the heart with his Noble Phantasm, he then kills Kotomine with the same weapon before being brutalized by Shinji and only resists when Shinji threatens Tohsaka, he finally dies by lighting his funeral pyre and takes a whole castle with him. Since Lancer is actually Cu Chulainn, who in life was so hard to kill that his enemies resorted to Loophole Abuse to get the job done (and he still took ages to die and managed to get the last laugh even after he actually died) Kirei really should have known better.
  • Berserker's Noble Phantasm, essentially 12 1-ups that each have to be removed in a different fashion, more or less makes this trope obligatory for him. It's subverted in two of the routes, but his death in Unlimited Blade Works, charging down at Gilgamesh as the latter kills him over and over with a never-ending Storm of Blades, counts. And after losing all of his lives, he manages to create another life to try to protect Illya.
    • His death in Heaven's Feel is also spectacular. After being consumed by the Shadow and spat out as a blind, crippled version lacking its defensive Noble Phantasm, Shirou obliterates an eighth of its body with eight simultaneous attacks. That still isn't enough to kill Berserker, so he jams his sword through the heart.
  • Gilgamesh's death in Unlimited Blade Works. First, Shirou tears one of his arms off after Gil tries to pull out Ea. It doesn't even slow him down. Then, he's sucked into a BLACK HOLE courtesy of the Grail. He pretty much says "fuck that" and starts pulling himself out with his chain Enkidu, using Shirou as an anchor. THEN, Archer shows up and lobs a knife into Gil's face, going directly into his forehead. STILL doesn't kill him, it just distracts him for long enough to get eaten by the black hole.
  • Shirou experiences one over the course of Heaven's Feel. After losing his left arm and receiving Archer's as a transplant, the strain on his body causes it to start breaking down. His body's attempts to heal by replacing damaged tissue with blades just serves to injure him even further, and use of his magecraft causes parts of his brain to break. By the end of the story his body is barely alive, and in the Normal End his Self-Destructive Charge not only kills his body, it also burns out his soul.
• Resident Evil:
  • Lisa Trevor in Resident Evil is shot multiple times with no effect before voluntarily jumping into a bottomless pit. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles reveals she survived that, and takes multiple rockets to the faces and a fallen chandelier before getting blown up with the rest of the mansion, which she presumably did not survive.
  • Post G-Virus William Birkin in Resident Evil 2 has to be killed multiple times, but keeps coming back in a stronger form until finally being killed for good at the end. The B scenario requires the player to kill him two extra times, then another time in the extended ending, followed by a cutscene in which he dies yet again, presumably for good this time.
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis:
    • Nemesis, who has to be killed at least twice being completely destroyed, and it is possible to kill many more times before that.
    • The remake makes Nemmy even harder to kill by giving him much more monstrous forms to the point his final death comes from Jill shoving the FINGeR down his throat and pulling the trigger.
      Jill: Next time, take the fucking hint!
    • Nikolai to a lesser extent. He's probably more good at narrowly avoiding severe harm than withstanding massive amounts of it, but seeing as he gets into dangerous situations throughout the entire game, probably invokes Why Won't You Die? reactions from the protagonists after his Face–Heel Turn, and when he finally can die it's either via an explosion, Nemesis-impalement, or in the novelizations getting ripped in half...
  • Happens in Resident Evil 5 to Wesker. Rocket blows up in his hand, overdosed on his meds, falls from a high-altitude aircraft, whatever you do to him in the boss fight, immersed in lava, two simultaneous rocket launchers to the face. Probably qualifies as overkill, but, then again, there was no body... ^note Word of God claims the missiles finally did him in. Though one does wonder, seeing as what it took to kill Albert, what exactly it will take to kill off his perfectly immortal "sister" Alex Wesker.
  • Rachel from Revelations qualifies to an extent: she gets eaten by an Ooze, mutates (it's debatable whether or not she's actually dead, seeing as she'll talk to you), gets shot with more bullets than almost any other monster in the series can handle, and then comes back repeatedly in the game (she appears quite a bit in Hell mode) where she will withstand a ton more damage. She's presumably killed when the entire ship explodes.
  • HUNK is of the Nikolai variety: he's known in-universe for being constantly being sent into extraordinarily dangerous situations and returning completely unharmed. His teammates aren't so lucky, resulting in him being given the nickname "Grim Reaper".
  • Simmons in Resident Evil 6 relentlessly goes after Leon and Helena after Carla injects him with enhanced C-Virus via a J'avo. He finally meets his fate after getting impaled on a pillar, but not before surviving five boss fights, getting run over by a train, falling off a skyscraper into a fireball, rockets, helicopter fire, exploding barrels, and multiple electrocutions by lightning.
  • Ustanak, the Spiritual Successor of Nemesis, also counts. Getting crushed by debris, falling from the helicopter, drilled by mining drill machine, crushed by falling electric pole, even getting dunked by lava doesn't stop him from relentlessly chasing Jake and Sherry.
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard:
    • Jack is a great example. First meeting, you simply shoot and stab him while he cheerfully chimes about how ineffective it is and only goes down when he is set on fire by a car which then explodes. Seconds after that, he already gets back up, only to proceed to shoot himself in the head. With your gun. Because why not. Then he returns good as new to stalk you some more, only to duel with chainsaws. It takes three rounds of chainsaw straight to the face for his upper body to explode as his legs try to walk off. And he is still not dead as he returns as a massive mutated beast. Which has to be shot multiple times into it's eyes, then set on fire and shot some more (possible weapons for that range from a small hand pistol to a rocket launcher). The only thing that finally kills him for good is a serum that kills the infection that kept healing him. And even that didn't take, because he comes BACK in the End of Zoe DLC, where he's finally put down for good when he fistfights his brother, who is wielding a Power Fist, gets obliterated by said Power Fist, and exposed to the sun to finally take him down.
    • Almost every boss actually counts. Marguerite takes a lot of punishment and is most likely set on fire multiple times during her fight before finally going down. Mia gets a axe into the neck, multiple gunshots to the face and - taken that you heal Zoe instead of her - survives a wave of Molded only to finally give in to a crowbar through the stomach.
    • Eveline is a subversion. Since you inject her with necrotoxin before the battle, it is a quite short battle where it only takes so many shots before it is already over.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Heavy Weapons Guys who can get shot, stabbed, set on fire, suffer blunt trauma, and take explosive damage before finally getting killed are awarded the appropriately-named "Rasputin" achievement.
  • Posthumous Character Zepheniah Mann died of putrid fever, bilious fever, blackwater fever, green fever, spotted fever, womb fever, superfluous uterus, white plague, marasmus, sweating sickness, deplumatious tumors of the eyelids, pleurisy, membranous croup, scarlet rash, brain itch, stomatitis, blood poisoning, falling sickness, walking sickness, stationary sickness, shingles, jaundiced spine, skull bloat, and scrivener's palsy.
• In Higurashi: When They Cry's Watanagashi-hen, Keiichi gets his head smashed in with a mondo rock, is supposed to get nails hammered into every joint in his hands (probably followed by a Satoko-style crucifixion), does get stabbed outside his house, and what does he finally die from? A heart attack once it's all over.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Holy Paladins. Come on, you know it's true. As of Legion, they're more likely to kill themselves by accident (using Light of the Martyr while at 20% health or less) than they are to die to anything besides an instant death effect. The stupid Legendary shoulder piece just made this truer for all paladins.
  • The same would apply to Protection Paladins... if they ever died. God help you if one in epic gear is holding the flag in WSG.
  • Well played discipline priests, as long as they don't run out of mana.
  • Really, any dedicated healer will be a pain in the arse to kill. Restoration Druids are infamous for their ability to not-die since most of their heals are short cast or no cast heal-over-time spells.
  • After a lengthy quest chain to hunt down and kill the Black Knight, the guy comes back in the Trial of the Champion dungeon as the final boss - and you have to kill him three more times to make him stay down. (His rotting flesh was just getting in the way, and he has no need for bones to best you.)
  • Your average raid boss would have to be hit with Fel flames, Righteous Judgement, any number of plot devices, Runic frost energy, enough disease to kill off an army, copious amounts of arrows and bullets, have it's soul and mind shattered repeatedly, and hammered a variety of swords hammers, axes, daggers (usually featuring poisons) and more, every few seconds for upwards of 5 or more minutes before going down.
  • In the Broken Shore cinematic, Varian Wrynn faces down Gul'dan and an entire demonic army alone. It takes the demons at least five hits, including two impalements, to bring him to his knees, before Gul'dan finally finishes him off by blowing him up with Fel Magic. Given what happened to Vol'jin, it's also likely the weapons were poisoned (not that Varian really had time to notice, the entire thing takes less than 5 minutes).
  • Kel'thuzad, depending on your definition of "dead". Though that's sort of the point, he has a phylactery. He technically only died once though, once he's undead he remains undead.
  • Kael'thas Sunstrider. Not only is he stupidly hard to take down the first time, but he refuses to stay down. Though he becomes increasingly insane each time you fight him.
  • Garrosh Hellscream, much like his father Grommash but even moreso. The number of things this orc survives that should have killed him is a little insane (including messing with the powers of an Old God, and fighting a bronze dragon). Thrall summons a hand made of stone to crush him, in the end.
  • The fact that Varok Saurfang's death was NOT this, is the point: because as a First War veteran his death should logically have been like this, given the number of things he'd already survived that one might think would kill a Badass Normal like him.
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories gives us Zexion who in his final moments gets sliced through, fights a battle, and is sliced through again with the power of light by Riku before being finally betrayed and having the darkness sucked out of him by the Riku Replica via a chokehold.
• Portal:
  • Portal: "Even though you broke my heart and killed me. And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire." And then GLaDOS explodes. And still has an Eye Awaken.
  • GLaDOS plots to do this to Wheatley in Portal 2.
    GLaDOS: Crushing's too good for him... First, he'll spend a year in the incinerator. Year two: Cryogenic refrigeration wing. Then TEN years in the chamber I built where all the robots scream at you. Then I'll kill him.
• Metroid:
  • Ridley gets this treatment in Metroid Prime. After you finally get his health to zero (which requires dozens of super missiles or charged plasma beam shots, or a hundred or so regular missiles) he gets blasted in the chest by laser-shooting Chozo statues and falls over the edge of the Artefact Temple into a huge crater. He comes back in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, where he gets beaten by Samus again and falls into the bottom of a several-hundred-meter-deep pit. He gets better, though, and you have to fight him again later in the game.
  • Ridley is more of a case of Joker Immunity than anything else; he's survived at least 3 potential "deaths", finally dies at the fourth known one, but then gets a clone which survives two potential deaths in one game before the clone is eliminated. They include (in Canonical order):
    • Metroid/Zero Mission - Missiled to death
    • Prime - see above; and he also ends up shot by several eyelasers from the temple's statues, before being knocked over and then exploding.
    • Prime 3 - again, stated above
    • Super - Depending on the player, the first time 'round he's either badly wounded, relatively unhurt, or somewhere in between, but has his ass thoroughly handed to him later on. It should be noted that this is his canon death because his remains were still on Zebes when it blew up, so he couldn't be remade. The Ridley in the next two games is a clone of him.
    • Other M - The clone survives a battle, but has his Life Energy sucked out in a second battle.
    • Fusion - Finally dead (maybe), but still fought in X form
    • And he was planned to be in Metroid Prime: Echoes as well, either possessed by the Ing or clad in his own version of the Dark Suit.
  • Metroid Dread: During his final battle with Samus, Raven Beak takes a ridiculous amount of punishment before expiring. He loses both his wings, Samus jams her fingers into his skull and initiates a Metroid energy drain so powerful that it knocks out the entire ship they're fighting on, and then the ship crashes into the ground and explodes with him still inside. After all that, while exhausted, he's still somehow standing. A moment later he's infected by an X Parasite, painfully mutated into a gigantic abomination and finally destroyed by Samus' Hyper Beam. She then vaporizes the parasite holding his DNA, making sure he'll never come back.
• In Yggdra Union, at the end of chapter 8: You fight Gulcasa and injure him severely. Luciana or Aegina, whoever is still alive, comes running out to cover him. When she goes down, Gulcasa awakens Brongaa and you beat him down again. He still refuses to die quite yet, and heads stubbornly for the altar where he's supposed to complete the Ritual of Soul Unbinding, where you have to pound him to death's door A THIRD TIME (the characters hang amazed lampshades on Gulcasa's sheer determination here) before he finally actually dies. The man is a true Determinator.
• Max gives this treatment to Jack Lupino after beating him at the end of Act One of Max Payne.
  Max: When Lupino finally went down, I wanted to make real sure he'd stay that way. V was a bad monster, turned them into freaking zombie demons from outer space.
• Jon Irenicus from Baldur's Gate II. If you have Minsc, Jan, or both in your party, they'll comment on how tiresome this is becoming. Jan goes as far as to say "it's like a bad play". His last words to Irenicus before the fight begins are "here's to a decent ending" (referring to the "bad play" from his earlier comment). Minsc, on the other hand, comments that "I grow tired of shouting battle cries while fighting this mage. Boo will rip out his eyes once and for all and then he will not come back again!"
• In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, which is set in the near future, we learn that Dracula was finally killed for good in 1999 by Julius Belmont. What did it take to finally end ol' Drac? First, he needed to be challenged and defeated, like in many previous Castlevanias. Then, Julius sealed the holy Vampire Killer whip inside Castlevania, to weaken Dracula's power over the castle (which is the symbol of his power). And finally, Castlevania itself was sealed within an eclipse, to keep Drac's soul from ever reaching it again. It worked, though Drac reincarnated all the same. This time as a good guy, though.
  • Though not mentioned in Aria, to Castlevania: Lament of Innocence showed that Dracula also obtained the Crimson stone, binding a different vampire's soul to it to give him his vampiric powers and control over Death. Julius would, in theory, have to have found and destroyed it as well.
• An old hilariously buggy release of Dwarf Fortress gave these to people. It could take twenty minutes for a squad of wrestlers to take down a giant rat, despite the Ludicrous Gibs and Punched Across the Room mechanics. With the ability to target body parts, this has gone away; a vulnerable foe will quickly suffer a Coup de Grâce by decapitation. However, Bronze Colossi, and certain Forgotten Beasts and Titans made of inorganic materials, are Nigh Invulnerable; the only way to destroy them is to either dismember them completely, hurl them downwards several stories, or douse them in magma until they melts. And in a classic case of Video Game Cruelty Potential, one can cause such deaths by hacking off limbs slowly.
  • This was especially the case with Undead. To start with, already being dead makes them impervious to common sources of death - they feel no pain, have no useful articulations to damage, ignore injuries to their now- useless organs, do not fall unconscious, and are impervious to the effects of morale. Only damage to critical parts, or sources of gib-worthy damage are effective. But the real Fun comes from the highly-detailed nature of the game. Specific body parts can be severed and subsequently reanimated (individual fingers, feathers, hair, liver, teeth, etc.), and the tiny targets can be literally impossible to hit. Sending in a dwarf with a sharp weapon (or using sharp traps) quickly compounds the problem. If your dwarf if skilled enough to avoid being hit and dying during the unending melee, they will instead become exhausted and die.
• John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. When Edgar betrays him near the game's conclusion, he takes fire from about a dozen gunmen for at least fifteen full seconds. And when the smoke clears, he is still standing, and only falls over and bleeds to death moments after the bullets are already in him. Not bad for a guy who earlier nearly died from a single rifle shot in the shoulder.
• Halo: Reach:
  • Noble Six gets shot, beat up, blown up, and can spend most of the game on the edge of death depending on how good the player is; and by the end, Six is responsible for the death of multiple enemy battalions. In cutscenes, (s)he takes it about twenty times worse: (s)he gets tossed out of a spaceship, trapped in a downed aircraft, impaled bodily, and attacked by a plasma turret (in the open, no less), among other things. Given the numerous injuries the player is able to survive both in gameplay and out, it's no small wonder that it takes an entire platoon of high-ranked Elite warriors to kill him (or her)...while (s)he's alone and dying in the desert. Even then, (s)he's impaled twice in the gut and decapitated before (s)he finally stops fighting.
  • Also, given that Emile gets impaled from the rear and then stabs the neck of the alien who did it while he's being held in the air, and can be heard heavily breathing over the radio for several minutes afterwards, he might count as well.
• In the second fight with Dogadon in Donkey Kong 64 (see at the end of this video), it dies pretty damn spectacularly. First it gets punched backwards into the wall, then flies up, has a sort of Technicolor Death with light coming out from the boss at all angles and falls into lava head first, eventually coming up again while on fire, then sinking back in with its hand going down last with smoke coming from it. Possibly a Family-Unfriendly Death. He still reappears in a level introduction cutscene to complain to his master King K. Rool about everything that happened to him so he likely still did not die.
• Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolution gets thrown through a pane of really thick glass, smashes into a heavy computer frame (with glass shards still stuck in him), nearly strangled to death, then shot in twice in the head for good measure. That's just what we see; apparently, after getting shot, the heavily damaged wall behind him fell on top of him due to the fact that the building he was in was also on fire (strangely, this actually saved his life, as it protected him from the flames and the fumes). He survives, but has to become a cyborg.
  • An E-Book you can find in one of the LIMB clinics says that, even after going through all that, Jensen only needed one arm replaced. The other arm, two legs, vital organs, and retractable sunglasses were "requested by employer".
• In Crisis Core, Zack Fair fights off tons of army guys, all armed with guns when he only has a sword; after being shot full of bullets, he still manages to give Cloud his Final Speech.
• Ōkami gives us Shiranui. The start of the game makes you think she died from one of Orochi's attacks, but later it's revealed that she was instead impaled by a... thing... and then took a boulder for someone. Ōkamiden reveals that between these two she was frozen, and after all this it takes an extremely powerful attack from the game's Big Bad to finally finish her off. Gods sure are hard to kill, and even after all this she managed to get reincarnated 100 years later.
• Fallout:
  • Attempted on Joshua Graham (or as he's better known, the Burned Man) in Fallout: New Vegas. He survives (among other things) at least five .308 rounds from NCR snipers on different occasions. Then, having failed Caesar and the Legion at the Battle of Hoover Dam, he's covered in pitch, lit on fire, and thrown into the Grand Canyon. A group of Legion assassins was then sent down after him to make sure he was really dead and finish the job if he wasn't. Not only did they find him still alive, he slaughtered the lot of them without much effort.
    • Using VATS reveals that Graham has a damage threshold of 50, only 15 of which comes from his armor. The best Power Armor in the game only has 28 DT, making Graham harder to kill than a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin or a Deathclaw. His natural toughness also works against him, however, in that he is Immune to Drugs so painkillers don't do anything to relieve the constant agonizing pain from his burns.
  • Even Graham is absolutely nothing compared to Frank Horrigan, the Enclave's walking super weapon from Fallout 2. The only real way for the player to inflict decent damage on him is to repeatedly fry him with the Pulse Rifle, while up to five of your companions also unload their weapons into him. This will usually fail. However, you can also reprogram the seven minigun turrets in the room and convince a squad of four Enclave soldiers armed with the most powerful guns in the game to help you. Meaning Frank's death will almost certainly consist of nineteen targets firing on him simultaneously with the most powerful weapons in the entire game until finally he goes down, likely after being shot thousands of times. Apparently, this isn't enough. So he gets shot more, torn in half at the waist (still being alive at this point), decapitated, and finally nuked, with whatever's left of him sinking to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
• In Haunting Ground, Lorenzo, the game's final boss, is blown up with explosives, put through a rock crusher, thrown into a pit of lava, comes back as a flaming skeleton, before finally disintegrating into dust. Not to mention all of the previous times you could have kicked him, laid traps for him, or sicced the dog on him.
• Ganon(dorf) from The Legend of Zelda usually takes a lot to defeat.
  • In Ocarina of Time, first Link fights him, pelts him with Light Arrows, throws his Energy Blasts back into his face and delivers enough sword-strikes that Ganondorf coughs up blood and collapses. Then his entire tower collapses with him on the roof, leaving nothing but bits of stone debris. He survives that due to the Triforce of Power, and transforms into Ganon. Link fights him, slashes him in the tail many times, and finishes it off by cutting up his face and stabbing deeply into it. And he still doesn't die, instead having to be sealed away in what was once the Sacred Realm.
  • In Wind Waker, to show he's been Killed Off for Real this time, he gets stabbed through the head, Taken for Granite, the tower you fought him on collapses, and the ocean rushes in and buries him under miles of water. We don't actually know for certain which of those steps really did it, either.
  • In Twilight Princess, it takes four phases. First he possesses Zelda, gets beaten out of her, then transforms into Ganon and receives another beating from Link. Midna then uses the Fused Shadows on him, and after predictably surviving that, gets his body filled with light arrows. He falls off his horse (which looked rather painful as well) and gets in a rather awesome sword fight with Link which ends with him getting stabbed through the chest with the Master Sword. Then he STANDS UP, gives his last words, and gets the Triforce of Power taken from him (which had been keeping him alive through all of this). We then see (the dead) Zant break his own neck (for no explained reason), after which Ganondorf eventually dies. He is STILL standing. Not only that, but all of this happens with the wound caused by being impaled, before the game started, by the Sages, who had then sent him to the Twilight Realm. This wound is also the only vulnerable area of his Beast Ganon form.
  • In Breath of the Wild, almost immediately after his Mechanical Abomination form emerges from his cocoon, the Divine Beasts fire their powerful lasers at him. Link then duels against him using all manner of melee weapons, arrows, and the Bequeathed Powers of the Champions. He then reforms into his Dark Beast form on Hyrule Field, where Link rides a horse while shooting Light Arrows at weak points Zelda generates. This all allows Zelda to be freed from within Ganon and deal the finishing blow by destroying him with her sealing magic. And according to the Tears of the Kingdom teaser, even that wasn't enough!
• Danganronpa:
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
    • The mastermind, Junko Enoshima, goes through all 6 executions shown throughout the game in a row^note Shot at with countless baseballs, centrifuged on a motorcycle in an electrically-charged cage, put in a rocket that launches into space before crashing down into Earth, set on fire then hit with a firetruck, hammered in the head with a bulldozer, then finally crushed by a massive block., and is only killed by the final one. What's more, she actually enjoys the experience, up until the last blow, which jams just long enough for her to look up before she's flattened.
    • Earlier, in the fourth chapter of the game, the class trial concerning Sakura Oogami's death is complicated by the fact that although they were bashed over the head with a bottle not once but twice, by two different people, neither of those injuries was the cause of death. She actually committed suicide after both of them had already left.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: In the 5th chapter, Nagito Komaeda goes out badly. The victim is gagged and his limbs are tied to several pillars with rope so that the culprit can use a knife to stab him multiple times in the legs, slice open his left arm, and impale his right hand. The coup de grâce comes with a giant spear to his chest. He was also poisoned with toxic gas right before the end. And even worse, with the exception of the gas, which was accidentally thrown at him by his Unwitting Pawn, he did all that to himself. The look of sheer horror (spoiler warning)◊ on his face shows just how painful his death was.
• Hades in Kid Icarus: Uprising takes a truly staggering amount of punishment before he's dead for good. After having his heart destroyed a few chapter earlier, Hades doesn't even slow down aside from a quick whimper. In the final battle, he gets the wound from his chest shot open even further, gets cleaved in half at his waist, gets his head blown clean off from having his most powerful attack turned back on him, and still seems to be in perfect shape after having regrown all his limbs. It takes the gun from the most powerful weapon ever made filled to the brim with the power of the goddess of light, a Wave-Motion Gun beam that completely obliterates his existence, to finally finish him off. And if the Easter Egg you get for waiting after the credits is any indication, he's still alive in some form, waiting to reform.
• In Neverwinter Nights 2, Shandra Jerro is already suffering from blood loss due to spilling large amounts of it on purpose to free several fiends from their summoning circles to weaken the mage controlling them. The mage catches up with her, impales her with an ice spike, sets her on fire, and blasts her with eldritch magic. She still has enough breath to reveal to the mage that she's his granddaughter before she expires.
• Drakengard 3's intoners are so resilient, they can handle being stabbed by their kryptonite multiple times. Even then, there's a fairly good chance of them being resurrected. This may have to do with the fact that their true combined form is a Grotesquerie Queen, one of which was the leader of the eldritch abominations from Drakengard 1. Five manages to get up after being stabbed repeatedly by a dragon-forged sword, Four doesn't die instantly from the first three charged slashes, Three gets the Wicked Witch of the East treatment from her own summon and survives, Two survives getting blown to bits from a dragon fireball (in Ending B?). One is probably the least resilient of the intoners, but she makes up for it with her eldritch-infused dragon bodyguard, which was mutated by her into a nigh-unkillable beast. Zero herself is literally unable to die without the right conditions, but her resurrection tool eats away at her sanity and risks Armageddon, hence her desire to destroy it.
• Mega Man Zero's Dr. Weil gets one in the Grand Finale of the series. First, Craft shoots him with his own satellite Ragnarok, leveling the city of Neo Arcadia and claiming millions of lives in the process. Then after surviving that, Weil fuses with the Ragnarok Core to fight Zero and gets shot and sliced so much he explodes, comes back and fuses with the heavily damaged station, gets shot and sliced again so much he explodes for a second time, and finally what's left of him burns up in the atmosphere with Ragnarok and Zero. And even that wasn't enough to stop his soul from surviving as an Artifact of Doom formed from Ragnarok's wreckage for several centuries before seemingly meeting his end alongside Master Albert.
• City of Heroes: The final boss of any Task Force, Strike Force, or other group mission, could find themselves set on fire, impaled with blades, pummeled by rocks, doused with radiation, and constricted by vines or tendrils of darkness, among other things. Special mention, however, goes to Siege and Nightstar, the bosses of the Behavioral Adjustment Facility in Praetoria. When defeated, they would get right back on their feet, unless they were downed within ten seconds of each other. They could, quite literally, take an infinite amount of damage, if the players weren't careful.
• In the Five Nights at Freddy's series, William Afton, aka Purple Guy, is one tough bastard. After being a Karma Houdini for many years, prior to Five Nights at Freddy's 3, he was killed by a faulty springlock suit - the very same suit he used to murder children. He's been sealed in the safe room since, for 30 years, the entirety of which spent haunting the suit as Springtrap. By the end of the game, he's caught in an electrical fire, and a hidden image, as well as Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location confirm that he survived that too. Then, after salvaging himself rather heftily in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, he gets lured into a trap by Cassette Man, gets caught in an engineered fire... THEN he dies. Except... maybe not.
• Jubileus, the final boss from Bayonetta has to: 1) be severely beaten by Bayonetta, 2) get her soul punched out by a goddess ten times her size AND 3) to get her soul fried into the Sun in order to be permanently vanquished. And even then she had only one half of her powers at that time. Who knows what it would have taken to kill her if she was at full force...
• Town of Salem has an in-game term for this trope: "Hello, [Insert Name Here] was slaughtered last night", which means that the player was killed by three or more causes. Unlike most example of this trope, it didn't mean someone really wanted them dead, it means several people wanted them dead at the same time. Some people died by 8 different causes in one night...
• Yakuza 0: Awano is the subject of a boss fight with Majima, taking several stabs and slashes alongside the usual armed and unarmed blunt trauma. After that, he Takes The Bullet for Majima from Lao Gui but still remains standing. He takes several more shots following this and is still able to charge his attacker, and only finally dies after getting skewered by Wolverine Claws.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy V: Galuf takes on Exdeath himself in the Guardian Tree to defend the party. He is totally outmatched, but fights on anyways and actually manages to win... at the cost of being so completely and utterly brutalized in the process that his HP is in the negatives by the end of it. Once Exdeath is successfully driven off (after several real-time minutes of combat), Galuf immediately collapses to the ground and dies, having only kept fighting through pure adrenaline and willpower.
  • Final Fantasy IX: Black Waltz 3 is so determined to defeat the party that it takes multiple boss battles, an airship crash, and being run over by a freaking train to finally kill him.
• Destiny 2: Taniks, the scarred, is a franchise-spanning example of this trope.
  • Even before your player character is resurrected, Taniks has already gained a reputation for being impossible to kill. Because of his egregious use of cybernetics, he can largely be considered more machine than Eliksni, making him much harder to kill and much easier to revive. After ambushing Cayde-6's hunter crew and killing two guardians, Cayde-6 kill Taniks in revenge. But apparently being killed isn't enough to kill Taniks, because Cayde-6 has to kill him again later. But even that wasn't enough because soon after, he takes part in Twilight Gap (an Eliksni siege on the last city of humans) where he meets Eramis and later kills another member of Cayde-6's crew.
  • Later on, during the House of Wolves expansion, Taniks is tasked with delving into the Hellmouth to steal dark powers for the house of wolves and Skolas, the aspiring Kell of Kells. In a strike mission, our guardian kills him for what we hope is the final time.
  • Being killed three times just isn't enough, however. During a secret mission in The Taken King expansion, we fight through Tanik's Ketch again and fight him as the ending boss. At this point, there was no doubt that we'd be seeing him again.
  • Sure enough, during the Rise of Iron expansion, Taniks is revived using SIVA (nanobots that can essentially edit matter to whatever instructions they are given) and we have to kill him yet again. This was seemingly the last time, though, as Rise of Iron was the last expansion of Destiny 1 and he was nowhere to be found for the first few years of Destiny 2.
  • During Shadowkeep, we fight Taniks again in the form of a nightmare. As a nightmare, he is able to come back again and again in nightmare hunts and Alter of Sorrow runs, which may be a reference to his seeming inabillity to die. However, this may not be a true example since it isn't really Taniks we're fighting, just a darkness-brought manifestation of him. What comes next, however, is a pretty egregious example.
  • During Beyond Light, the main enemy of the campaign is Eramis and her House of Salvation. As the campaign furthers along and she grows more and more desperate, Eramis instructs one of her high-ranking lackeys, Atraks, to go into the crypt and "retrieve the body." When we do our raid on the deep stone crypt (the home for technology that can transfer humanoid consciousness into mechanized lifeforms known as Exos), we figure out what she meant by that. After clearing the crypt secrurity, we find a newly exo-ified Atraks opening up a container containing none other than Taniks. After we smack Atraks-1 with a sword and launch him out of an airlock, we meet Taniks on an orbiting space station. After disabling its nuclear cores, we slam the station into Europa with Taniks on it, resulting in a collision that we only barely survive because we're basically immortal. Surely that's enough to kill Taniks, right? Nope! When we walk outside of the wreckage of the station, Taniks rises from the debris, his lower half fused with a giant nuclear-powered heavy shank. But finally, after diabling his nuclear cores and sticking some anarchy shots on him & shotgunning him into oblivion, Taniks dies for what is hopefully the final time.
• In the Silent Scope series, Cobra the Implacable Man is headshot by the Player Character during a highway chase, then hijacks a tractor trailer that explodes with him in it, only for him to survive, albeit heavily scarred, to hijack a cargo plane that also explodes after he is defeated, then finally, returns as the Warm-Up Boss of the third game, where he is presumably Killed Off for Real in a tanker ship explosion.
• Cuphead has this happen with Esther Winchester in The Delicious Last Course. After her second phase is beaten, she gets sucked up into the vacuum she's been using and is reduced to a pile of sausages. Beat that phase, and she's put into a can. When that phase is beaten, the battle's finally won, as the sausages are seen as ascending angels. Of course, just like the other bosses that are killed in the DLC, she comes back alive and well in the ending.
• In the backstory of Fallen London, the Masters decided, for reasons not entirely clear, to inflict such a death on one of their number, Mr Candles. They bound him in ropes and chains, stabbed him multiple times, and then fed him to the rulers of the Third City before dropping his remains into a well of pure sorrow to dissolve into nothing. What was left was a pure embodiment of hunger, better known as Mr Eaten.

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE!:
  • The fight between Omni-Man and Homelander ends this way; after being toyed with and having his reputation destroyed by Omni-Man, Homelander tries to kill Nolan with his heat vision while stating that he would go for Nolan's son Mark next, then kill everyone in his neighbourhood for seeing his true colors, and then everyone Nolan knows to wrap things up, only for Nolan to rip open his jaw open, live up to his promise of feeding Homelander his own heart after he killed Debbie at the start by ripping it out before shoving it into his open mouth and finishing by crushing Homelander's head like a grape with his bare hands.
  • For a matchup between slashers known for creative and/or drawn out kills, It only makes sense that Jason Voorhees Vs Michael Myers would end this way; After nearly getting an axe forced into his face by Michael, Jason gets a pep talk from his deceased mother Pamela, causing him to break free, run Michael through the stomach with his machete, shrug off the retaliatory stab in the head by Michael's knife, lodge the prior mentioned axe into Michael's own skull, and pull the knife out of his head to slice Michael's own head off. And just to Make Sure He's Dead, Jason takes the axe with Michael's head still attached and split it in half against a nearby tombstone.
• Fallen Kingdom: A brief example, but the Piglin General has his hand cut off, is impaled with a sword, and then thrown into a fire for good measure.
• Glitchtale Season 2 has a glorious one crossed with Curb-Stomp Battle for its Disc-One Final Boss, Betty Noire; Betty's first attack on Gaster is countered by his Determination hands before she tries to take him out with tendrils from her fingers, only for Gaster to slice them apart with his Integrity saws before pulling her closer with a Patience string and following up with blasts from two Justice hands which Betty managed to block. After Gaster asks if her first attack was all she had, he activates Polychromatism and rips Betty's legs off, while skewering the rest of her with Perseverance needles before crushing her with one of his Duality hands. Gaster followed up the attack by firing his Gaster Blaster from above her, causing her to scream in agony before he fired everything at her, reducing her to a hollow, lifeless shell.
• Red vs. Blue: The Meta survives Tex's landmines, multiple knife wounds, various other explosions, Tex punching him, multiple gunshots from a variety of weapons, slashes from Tucker's energy sword, and four point-blank shotgun blasts from Sarge... before (apparently) dying from being pulled off a cliff by the Warthog's tow cable. Season 13 reveals that, in the end, the sword wounds compromised his armor's life support system, leading the Meta to finally die by way of drowning. He does have advanced body armor, but Wash, in the same armor, still only managed to get through the landmines, punching, and a few gunshots before being seriously out of it.
• The OverSimplified video on the Russian Revolution plays out the myth that inspired the trope name when discussing Rasputin's death, complete with Rasputin flying around like the Anti-Christ after getting shot, and ghosts flying out of his body when he was dumped in the river. Immediately afterwards the narrator says: "He probably didn't really die like that."

Webcomics

• Narbonic: Though a Rasputinian Death did convince her daughter, it wasn't quite enough to get dr. Narbon. (Although it's hinted she has a lot of clones for just that purpose. Like when she "helpfully" supplies her own head in a box to an assassin later to show her employers.)
• Looking for Group:
  • One bit character has a Rasputinian Death in this comic.
  • A later character, Rojave, has Benny in a corner. Cale and Pella both notice this and simultaneously kill him with two throw swords and a bladed ring respectively. Richard then lights his head on fire for the fun of it. Of course, as Benny had previously called the kill, she heals him from the brink of death and then smashes his head with her mace.
• 8-Bit Theater has this:
  Red Mage: I have disposed of the zombie dragon's remains in the ancient ways. His bones I scattered and broke before I buried them. His head was buried upside-down at a crossroads. I added the upside down part as an extra precaution.
  Black Mage: Ideally, this is how we would deal with all of our enemies.
• In Fafnir The Dragon, Edward (yes, that Edward) dies first by consuming the blood of a dragon (you're supposed to bathe in it, drinking it is a major no-no), setting him on fire internally (flames literally erupt from his mouth and ass). He panics and runs, trying to find water, but falls through a skylight, landing in the middle of an amateur chainsaw juggling contest, getting his arms cut off and having a chainsaw go straight into his ass. He gets up and runs, trying to find water, and does, only for it to be a pool of Thor's Holy Water, causing him to burn and dissolve at the same time, until only his head is left, which Vlad the Impaler stabs with a sword. Vlad even states that, despite having imagined a thousand ways he could have killed Edward, this was better than ANY of them. Then Vlad caps it all by pissing on Edward's now fleshless skull.
• Drowtales:
  • Sene'kha Vel'Vloz'ress is stabbed by her sworn enemy, captured by another clan, imprisoned with her arms in chains and legs in solid rock, given to said sworn enemy, beheaded, and set on fire. The Kyorl'solenurn clan does not fool around when making sure nether summoners stay down.
  • Sene'kha's mate, Kess'sen, was horribly difficult to kill. He was set upon by nagas, but fought through them, then survived a manabomb, was stabbed twice, took a blast of fire dead-on, released his seed to be taken over by the demon, and had his head sliced open by Kiel'ndia's chain weapon. Hopefully, the chain weapon did the trick. It's also implied that this was why Sene'kha kept him around.
• Dellyn in Goblins survives being impaled on a rusty sewer pipe during a duel with Thaco. While recovering from that wound, he's tracked down by Forgath and Minmax, but manages to offend them by describing his 'hobbies' in great detail. In the bar brawl that follows, he gets thrown through a window, pummeled, set on fire with lantern oil, smashed over the head with a table, and finally killed when his slave stabs him repeatedly in the neck with a broken sword.
• In Genocide Man Joey shrugs off several sarin-tipped railgun darts (of course Genocide Men are immune to most toxins and the darts are too small to do much damage), so Jacob electrocutes him with a pair of mistuned railguns at point-blank range several times. When that doesn't kill him Jacob drags him to a nearby river and holds his head underwater with his boot until the crocodiles show up. And then the neurotoxins saturating Joey's flesh killed the crocs eating him so what was left got buried under a mound of dead reptiles. The sequence starts here and concludes 15 pages later.
• Colonel Glass of Spinnerette was ultimately killed when, at the end of a long night of combat which included multiple explosions, he was impaled by several dozen shards of glass, shot repeatedly in the face with a shotgun, and then immolated with thermite. It was only the last that killed him; the rest of it was just to keep him immobilized and regenerating long enough for him to be set on fire.
• In True Villains, the Juggernaut vampire Paladin Grey goes out this way: hit with a debilitating Dying Curse from a powerful demon, seared with alchemical fire, impaled with lightning-charged arrows and magic spears, hit with a tornado, beheaded, immolated with The Power of the Sun, and thrown underneath a collapsing temple. Even then, his opponents aren't sure he's dead.
• In One-Punch Man, Lord Boros, the first villain who stands up to more than one punch from Saitama, suffers this. (Keep in mind, a single punch from Saitama turns even huge and immensely powerful creatures hundreds of times Saitama's size into Ludicrous Gibs.) Saitama starts their encounter by punching Boros out of nowhere and sending him flying across a huge throne room. Boros just gets up, powers up, and starts fighting back. Saitama punches him again and rips Boros' arm off. Boros disregards it and keeps fighting, later growing his arm back when the fight pauses momentarily. Later Saitama hits Boros again, and despite the fact that Boros had transformed into a super powerful form with no mouth, he grows a mouth just to spit out blood as a result of the punch. Saitama then hits Boros with some Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs which reduces Boros to a bloody smear and scattered bits of flesh. Somehow Boros manages to pull himself together and makes one last attempt to beat Saitama. Saitama hits Boros with his first "Serious Punch" of the series, the force of which leaves a huge part in the clouds all over the Earth◊. Boros is reduced to a head and about half a torso, but is still alive, (albeit barely) and manages to be a Graceful Loser about the fight before dying.
• Girl Genius: Putting down Andronicus Valois the second time requires, in order, getting blasted multiple times by the Gendarmy, repeatedly electrocuted and buried in rubble by Voltaire, stabbed in the gut with his own sword by Martellus, having an entire building collapse on top of him, getting smacked around by the Jagers, Voltaire melting the weapons that grant him Immortality, Agatha blasting him with a Wave-Motion Gun, and, finally, having his head crushed by Martellus' final blow. To say it took everything the heroes had to put him down is not an exaggeration in the least. In addition, to hear Voltaire describe it, killing him the first time was almost as difficult, and that was back when he was just a normal human with a couple of Spark-made weapons, rather than the One-Man Army Humanoid Abomination the readers see in the present.
  • Before the proper fight even starts, Martellus's Smoke Knights also mention they've stuck Valois with enough poison to "fell a dragon", and that Valois didn't seem to even notice it.
• Unsounded:
  • Duane did not go down easy. His assassins poisoned him, subsequently had several of their members killed in retaliation, then cut him, broke his arm and some other bits, pinned him, cut out his eyes and injected him with some form of the weeping plague which acted as a vector for the spellwork that tied his soul to his corpse.
  • The Lion of Mercy that grabbed Sara and Siya, and was slamming their heads against the wall while his friend tried to/raped Ilya behind them got a pencil stabbed through his mouth—cheek to cheek—by Sara, sliced in his arm and thigh by Sette, went down with Boo stabbing a bunch of holes in his face and eyes then tried to get up and attack the kids again only for Lori to cut his throat.

Web Original

• Though it isn't actually a death, Freeman's Mind invokes this at one point. Gordon complains about all the abuse he's suffered trying to escape, listing all the ways he's been injured up to that point and follows it up by directly claiming "Rasputin wasn't this lucky!"
• Survival of the Fittest:
  • Sidney Crosby, who managed to survive multiple gunshot wounds long enough to prove a vital distraction before biting it for good (after being shot a further few times).
  • Rick Holeman was shot in the chest, stabbed, and then all but hacked to pieces, and STILL had enough strength left to deliver a few last words before he finally died.
• Anderzel in the Season 6 finale of Mindcrack Ultra Hardcore. In order, he is: shot, stabbed, set on fire, attacked by dogs, partially drowned and stabbed again.
• A real humorous one on behalf of The Angry Video Game Nerd, with the Winter Games cartridge as the victim during the review of said game. After reading the back label, which says, "Do not store in extreme temperatures, do not immerse in water, do not clean with benzene, thinner alcohol or other such solvents, do not hit or drop cartridge, do not attempt to disassemble." Not only does The Nerd does all of the above in a montage, but he also burns the cartridge inside his fireplace.
• Maximus Slade from T.O.T. takes forever to kill, in large part due to his Regenerating Health. Even after the protagonists find silver weapons to use against him, he survives getting stabbed multiple times in the chest, stomach, back, neck, and even his eye. In the final chapter, he accidentally swallows a bomb that ends up obliterating his chest and abdomen. And that still didn't kill him; Rachel had to hack off his head with a machete to put him down for good.

Western Animation

• South Park:
  • Kenny McCormick in the first few episodes. "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" had him blasted by aliens, trampled by a herd of cows, and finally, ran over by Officer Barbrady chasing said cows, with only the latter killing him. In "Weight Gain 4000", he is crushed by a teepee, but doesn't die until Mr. Garrison (whom was actually aiming for Kathie Lee Gifford) shoots him, which sends him to slide down a flagpole. "Volcano" shows Kenny crushed by a flaming boulder, but he emerges out of it alive, only for his arm to catch on fire, as the boulder rolls back onto him. Towards the end of the episode, it is shown that Kenny, somehow, survived the whole ordeal, only for him to be shot by a stray bullet from Ned's hunting rifle, which finally kills him.
• Dinobot's death in Beast Wars. He takes on the entire Predacon force (Megatron, Tarantulas, Inferno, Waspinator, Quickstrike, Rampage and Blackarachnea) alone, exhausting all of his energy, defeating all of them, saving mankind and bashing Megatron with a makeshift hammer before dying looking like Swiss cheese. This is after making a noble speech, of course. And the implication is that he didn't die of his wounds directly, but from a complete drain of energy (he used the last bit to destroy an ancient artifact that could predict the future).
• A Robot Chicken sketch features a man trying to shoot a pursuing werewolf. The werewolf tells the man that he can only be killed by a silver bullet. The man's response: Whipping out a chain gun and blasting the werewolf with it long enough to only leave behind a thick red paste which the man shovels into a bucket, pours gasoline over, sets on fire, snorts the ashes like cocaine, shits it all out, and flushes it down the toilet where we see the inner workings of a sewage treatment plant going to work on the remains. Cut to a bunch of kids playing a tabletop RPG...
  Game Master: The book says he's still not dead! It HAS to be a silver bullet!
• The Giant Chicken from Family Guy frequently does this and survives; in one instance his neck snapped, he got impaled on a 10ft tall rusty piece of metal, blasted and essentially cooked by twin space shuttle engines and finally getting caught in the center of an oil rig explosion. And it's implied that he's still alive.
• Most anything that starts about halfway through a Happy Tree Friends short. Cub tends to through this in any episode that's heavily focused on him and he's usually not even very upset about it if someone gives him a snack. Near the beginning of the TV Series episode "And The Kitchen Sink", he loses his lower half to a garbage disposal before, among other things, almost drowning in the sea before Pop finally gets him home safely. He then drowns in the bathtub.
• Clone High did this hilariously in their Tonight, Someone Dies episode, when Ponce de Leon, serial litterer, is Hoisted By His Own Petard: His wrists are bound by beer can holders, his skin is slashed by razor-sharp candy wrappers, a plastic bag flies onto his head, he slips on some garbage, cracks his head on a glass bottle, and finally drowns in a bag full of his own blood.
• Squidward Tentacles from Spongebob Squarepants suffers this at least twice by tumbling off a cliff before exploding.
• On Daria, Kevin is poisoned with cyanide, beaten with a golf club, shot with an arrow, strangled and kicked. Fortunately for him, it is All Just a Dream.
• The Legend of Korra: Amon. He is tossed off a platform, electrocuted, smashed into walls, crushed under debris, kicked through glass, nearly drowned, and finally killed in a boat explosion.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012):
  • Lord Dregg repeatedly appears to be defeated by the Turtles, but it isn't until the Triceratons vent him into space and he freezes does he not return. Until season 5, in which he's trapped in his self-destructing ship.
  • The Super Shredder survives a fall from what appears to be an 80-story building, being crushed in a trash compactor, and worse before he's finally killed for good.
• Underdog plays with this in "A New Villain", where the titular hero is electrocuted unconscious by Electric Eel, bound in chains, and thrown into a lake, yet still manages to recover.
• Although it's not fatal, Vlad Plasmius' defeat in the Danny Phantom episode "Kindred Spirits" is in a similar vein, as he suffers several attacks which would each defeat a lesser villain. First, he is blasted by a double Ghost Ray attack from Danny and Dani. He gets back up and advances on Danielle, intent on revenge... only to get hit with Danny's Ghostly Wail, destroying his lab and throwing the prime clone's tank into him after throwing him into a wall. Again, he gets up and transforms back into ghost form, advancing on the now-depleted and helpless Danny. Cue Danny's friends crashing into him with the Spectre Speeder and putting the Spectre Deflector on him while he's dazed, finally forcing him to transform back and pass out. Also, his Maddie AI adds insult to injury by telling him she preferred the Jack program.
• A Gem in Steven Universe is an alien creature that, alongside being The Needless, is impossible to kill. Literally. And even to reach the closest state of "death", someone has to pulverize the gemstone itself, usually after taking out the physical projection of their body first. Depending on whether or not the gem is a fighter and the type of gem, this part can be more or less easy to brutally difficult. At this point, you can disable a Gem by cracking the gemstone or "kill" a Gem by shattering it, and you can use it for powering technology and weapons, respectively. They'll still maintain full consciousness while this occurs. In the case of shattered Gems, you can undergo the time-consuming task of gluing the pieces back together, though this results in some sort of Frankenstein's Monster with a broken psyche at the end of the process. And then, we learn that even shattered Gems can be properly restored, although this one takes the power of all four Diamonds. One episode plays this indestructible nature for laughs, with Peridot constantly being attacked and crushed in true Wile E. Coyote fashion, while trying to wrangle a Corrupted Gem while Steven is mystified that she hasn't so much as retreated back into her gemstone despite being the weakest on the team.
• In The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XI", when Homer's horoscope says that he'll die, he survives getting an extremely bad paper cut, almost getting crushed by a tree while pulling out of his driveway, half of his car getting crushed by the sign from a Planet Hollywood under demolition, taking a pickaxe to the head from a pickup truck, and getting bit by a snake, only to choke to death on a piece of broccoli.
• The Owl House: In "Watching and Dreaming", after spending the previous episode basically decaying, once Belos is ripped from the Titan's heart he tries to pretend that he's "cured of his curse" to Luz, before the boiling rain hits and melts him into a puddle, with King, Eda, and Raine stomping him to make sure he's gone for good.
• Amphibia: Each individual member of the Core has died once of old age already. In the modern day, it is first defeated in single combat by Sasha who severs its connection to its host, then utterly obliterated by Anne using the full power of the calamity gems.

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You poor, poor fools. I'm still here! Mwahahahahahahaha...

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