Basic Trope: The Big Bad will never get Killed Off for Real.
- Straight: The vicious Emperor Evulz is always defeated by the heroic Bob and his friends, but always returns to start another Evil Plan.
- Exaggerated:
- Evulz spreads death and destruction wherever he goes but all the heroes can do is put him back in his can.
- Evulz returns even after falling into a volcano, which gets blown up.
- Downplayed: Evulz is laughably petty and is ignored because there's a Monster of the Week to take care of.
- Justified:
- Although it is acknowledged that killing Evulz would not necessarily be a bad thing, the heroes are a Lawful Good group and firm believers in the principle Thou Shalt Not Kill, preferring to have faith in the courts to mete out appropriate justice.
- Evulz does everything in his power to make sure he doesn't stay dead, whether it be cloning, altering his own body or simply using mystical forces to later resurrect himself.
- Evulz is immortal. Executing him is not an option, and there's no prison capable of permanently locking him up.
- The Great Gremlinious confines himself to pranks, thefts, vandalism, and the like: he doesn't commit crimes that would get him executed or resist arrest in a way that would get him killed, but he's so good at escaping pursuit and breaking out of prisons that he never gets locked up for long either.
- There is an external force or Greater-Scope Villain that keep bringing Evulz Back from the Dead.
- Bob believes that If He Kills Evulz, He Will Be Just Like Him while Evulz is a Magnificent Bastard who always gets locked up in a Cardboard Prison.
- Inverted:
- Every villain that appears is a one-shot Monster of the Week.
- Alternatively, a person on the hero's side or the hero himself will never get Killed Off for Real.
- Subverted:
- After a season of tormenting the heroes from afar, Evulz is abruptly killed off in the Wham Episode season finale...
- Evulz seems to show up several times after seemingly lethal fates but it turns out he was a Legacy Character.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but it's later revealed to have been a Disney Death fakeout.
- However his mask is the real Evulz - which means he never truly dies.
- Parodied: Bob is beating Evulz to within an inch of his life, but then Evulz tells him that if he is killed, the franchise will end and all of them will lose their source of income.
- Zig Zagged: This being Joker Immunity, it always is.
- Averted: After being captured and escaping twice and just as the trope looks about to take hold, in his third showdown with the heroes Evulz is defeated and killed in a climactic manner, with an appropriate level of emphasis.
- Enforced: "We can't kill Evulz! He's far too interesting a villain, if we killed him our ratings would plummet!"
- Lampshaded:Evulz: "How am I not dead by now?"
- or
Evulz: "It won't matter what you do to me. Arrest me, crucify me, I swear to you I'll be back. Every. Single. Time."- or
Evulz: "As Long as There Is Evil I'll keep coming back!"- or
Bob: "Dude! We’ve killed you, like, 5 times! Stay down!” - Invoked: Evulz strives to become literally too important to his society's function for any of the good guys to kill him without dire consequences.
- Evulz decides to link himself to a Cosmic Keystone that will destroy the world if he dies - ensuring that he won't be killed.
- Exploited: Evulz gains enough Medium Awareness to know that he'll just come back from whatever Bob throws at him or throws him at, so he just tries whatever hairbrained scheme he comes up with, knowing he'll live through it.
- Defied:
- After his fourth defeat, Evulz is carted back to his Cardboard Prison and mocks Bob for his refusal to kill him and pointing out they'll keep doing this forever, at which point Alice shoots him in the back of the head.
- Brought to his breaking point by numerous defeats, Evulz decides that enough is enough and engages in a Last Villain Stand against the heroes.
- Discussed: "You know, killing him would probably prevent a lot of collateral damage. Sometimes I wonder why we let him live."
- Conversed: "You know, it's been years and this guy keeps coming back, after all the stuff that's happened." "I guess the show wouldn't be the same without the bad guy."
- Implied: A one-shot story introduces the hero and Evulz, mentioning that they have fought many times. In the end of the story, Evulz is defeated and seemingly killed but the hero firmly believes he'll return, implying that this sort of thing is typical.
- Deconstructed:
- Emperor Evulz coming back every time he is defeated leads to everything ranging from rage to despair to frustration on the part of those that stopped him the last time. The muggles also question the ability of the heroes to truly put him down.
- Evulz revels in his semi-immortality, until he realises he can't WIN either, and that he's therefore stuck in a stalemate: he will never die, but will never achieve his goals either.
- Reconstructed:
- It is revealed that if Emperor Evulz is killed, a villain far more evil would take his place and everything would get much worse. The heroes are then celebrated for stopping Evulz's plans without killing him.
- Emperor Evulz, as his hamtastic name suggests, was only in it For the Evulz anyway: as far as he's concerned, being locked in a loop of eternal conflict with no finale is his equivalent to heaven, so he's already won.
- Intended Audience Reaction:
- The fact that Evulz' come back after being caught so many times is, in fact, one of the warning signs that he's working for or with somebody with a great deal of political power.
- Alternately, the reason he comes back from so many No-One Could Have Survived That events is eventually revealed to be that he's not actually entirely human.
- Played for Laughs: Evulz is an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who never does any real damage and is treated by the heroes as little more than a nuisance. "Same time next week?"
- Played for Drama: The heroes' inability or unwillingness to kill Evulz results in many deaths and a severe loss of morale.
- Played for Horror: Evulz' constant rampages cause thousands of deaths, trying to arrest him only makes him escalate once he escapes, trying to kill him not only never truly works but only leads to more deaths as measures he put in place for retaliation in case this happens activate and Evulz will get very personal with the killer the moment he comes back to teach everybody else a lesson and it's made constantly clear that, one way or another, he will outlive everybody else in the cast. Mental breakdowns occur as a result, more often sooner than later.
Back to Joker Immunity.
