Basic Trope: An undead creature is killed (or at least injured) when healing magic is used on it.
- Straight: Alice casts a Heal on a zombie, killing it.
- Exaggerated: Alice gives the zombie a drop of a low level potion, and it disintegrates.
- Downplayed: The spell inflicts a considerable amount of pain on the zombie, but is otherwise no worse for wear.
- Healing magic is very effective but rare and expensive. Thus using healing on the undead is Awesome, but Impractical.
- Justified:
- Zombies exist because of dark magic, and Alice's magic is light based. Light and dark magic don't mix well.
- Life, death, and undeath depend on how much life force you have. Living things have positive life force, undead things have negative life force, and dead things have zero life force. Healing spells can kill undead beings by increasing their life force to zero.
- Inverted:
- The heal spell heals the zombies just as it would anyone else. In fact, it turns zombies back into living humans.
- Poison magic heals zombies.
- Dark magic that is used to repair damaged zombie bodies causes grievous harm to still-living targets.
- Excesses of healing can kill living targets.
- Subverted: The zombie seems to fall over dead from the spell, but just gets back up.
- It isn't the effect itself which does the damage but the source. It is the good or neutral divine energy carrying the judgement of the god or goddess which does the destruction. Good gods usually smite as wicked or liberate the victims barring any holy quests. Neutral gods usually returns to their place in the natural cycle without any judgement.
- Double Subverted: Alice then casts Heal II to put it down for good.
- The undead are initially healed by the magic but it also causes them to rapidly take damage over time.
- Parodied: Alice starts treating the zombie's wounds with conventional means like bandages and ointments. The zombie is protesting that she's killing it.
- Zig Zagged:
- Each form of undead is affected differently by heals.
- Most corporeal undead are harmed by healing spells and healed by dark magic. There are a few exceptions. Mummies seem like this but aren't because the process does indeed give eternal life despite becoming decrepit enough to look undead and are healed but are harmed like other living things by dark magic. Plague zombies are are simply restored to life even if they were reanimated as a corpse. Spectral undead are unaffected as beings of pure spirit. Liches are usually the same as other undead but the rare one who masters both life and death magic is healed by both.
- Healing is elemental in nature and affected accordingly. Those very weak against an element will be harmed even by healing. Those immune will not receive any healing and those strong against will receive bonus healing. Furthermore conditions can affect what type of healing is effective or turned actively harmful! Using nature magic on an infection is a horrible idea for instance as it energizes bacteria far more - which is also how it destroys undead.
- Healing magic on undead depends upon the level of power. If it isn't strong enough it results in partial revival of a rotten corpse - which unless enough is restored or prompt treatment given results in the undead briefly becoming alive before dying of septic shock. One strong enough to revive essentially every part of them at once is restored as normal.
- Averted: Heals don't do anything to undead, good or bad.
- Enforced: The developers wanted to give the healing class a chance to do some fighting.
- Lampshaded: "Isn't that supposed to cure people, not kill them?"
- Implied: In a report about casualties inflicted upon zombie hordes healers both inflicted the highest casualties and noted that the zombies did not get back up again.
- Invoked: Alice discovers healing's effects on undead during her studies and decides to keep it in mind just in case.
- Exploited:
- Darklord Blight, while living, pretends to be a lich to trick Alice into using healing magic on him in their climatic battle.
- Claire is a White Mage with a zombification spell, so she zombifies her opponents and then uses a revival spell on them, killing them instantly.
- Defied:
- Alice choses to save her magic for healing her comrades rather than going on the offensive.
- Alice is a Actual Pacifist and won't use her magic to cause any harm.
- Discussed: "You ever see a zombie fall apart when anything normal would have been right as rain?" "What are those bastards made of, I wonder."
- Conversed: "So magic that restores life instead takes life from something that technically doesn't have life at all? Gotta love magic-logic in these stories."
- Deconstructed: Alice tries to use her healing magic to bring a zombified person back to life, thinking that it would cure the zombification, ends up killing it completely instead. She is so horrified by this that she goes into a Heroic BSoD.
- Reconstructed: Bob has to beat the zombie back to death in order for Alice to heal it back to life because a dead zombie is the same as a dead anything else.
Back from the dead to Revive Kills Zombie.
