Basic Trope: A character survives multiple fatal events, usually before they actually die.
- Straight: Bob survives being stabbed, shot at, and objects falling on him before finally dying to a disease.
- Exaggerated: Bob survives intercepting bullets in a war, burning alive, and being nuked before tripping over a rock and dying.
- Downplayed: Bob is stabbed with a poisoned knife, knocked to the ground and shot a couple times before dying of the poison.
- Justified:
- It's the Only Way to Be Sure
- Made of Iron
- Nigh-Invulnerability
- Good Thing You Can Heal
- Bob's killers hate Bob that much.
- It's an RPG Mechanics 'Verse. They have to reduce Bob's Hit Point total to 0.
- Damage doesn't doesn't take effect until after the round has ended.
- Inverted:
- Multiple resurrection attempts fail before one successfully revives Bob.
- Bob is Made of Plasticine and dies after one blow.
- Bob is attacked with his Weaksauce Weakness and dies after one blow.
- Subverted:
- Bob dies due to the injuries from being stabbed.
- Bob recovers from the disease.
- Not Quite Dead
- Double Subverted:
- ...But it took a long time for the injuries to kill him, so his killers do something drastic instead.
- An enraged Alice finally cuts Bob's head off and throws it into a volcano.
- Parodied: Bob is gunned down, stabbed, shoved into a spiked pit, falls off a cliff, is beaten to near death, has his throat slit, electrocuted, disemboweled with his organs getting shoved in his mouth until he chokes, and his still barely living body is lit on fire. Then his body is nuked. Then the planet crashes into the sun. Then the universe explodes. Bob still manages to crawl out of it before he trips and breaks his neck.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob took a long time and a huge effort to be killed, while his boss Don dropped dead after the first gunshot. However, it was a high-caliber sniper rifle aimed precisely at Don's head, as one of Don's clones put up quite a bit of a fight before being put down.
- Averted: Bob dies immediately from the first blow.
- Enforced: The writers want to show how tough Bob is, or how far his killers are willing to go to kill him.
- Lampshaded: "Really? That's what killed him?"
- Invoked: There Is No Kill Like Overkill
- Exploited: Bob is a Super-Soldier and his commander uses him to make the enemy waste their ammo on him so they don't have as much with which to fight the rest.
- Defied: Bob's killers make sure their first attempt kills Bob immediately (usually by Boom, Headshot! from a high-caliber rifle or a machine gun, or Stuff Blowing Up) so they don't have to pull any stunts in more attempts.
- Discussed: "I'm afraid that big guy won't go down so easily..."
- Conversed: "That sequence was rife with Artistic License – Medicine — Bob should have at least died from getting his jugular vein punctured by random debris."
- Implied: When Bob was captured and ordered to be killed, the executioner goes with him at dawn — to return at sunset, dead tired, severely bruised, and covered in blood.
- Played for Laughs: The executioner resorts to ridiculous, over-the-top Black Comedy methods of killing that still don't work.
- Played for Drama: Bob survives everything, but he still feels pain, and the whole experience is therefore a Fate Worse than Death for him.
- Played for Horror: Bob's death is a sequence that lasts several minutes, festooned with grindhouse film-level Gorn, and Bob's pitiful screams of agony are the only soundtrack. Bob's executor performs his function at a glacially slow pace out of sheer sadism. It gets the story an X rating and people are known to up and leave, faint and vomit, or fast-forward the film because they find the sequence intolerable.
The return link to Rasputinian Death is ridiculously immortal. Good luck trying to kill it.
