Basic Trope: Immortality is portrayed as a bad thing which often causes much angst.
- Straight: Alice becomes immortal, and is depressed and angsts about it.
- Exaggerated: Alice becomes immortal, and the depression drives her insane as she suffers through endless amounts of punishment because of it.
- Downplayed:
- Alice becomes immortal and realizes that there may be downsides like seeing her family die, but realizes that it is a gift and only rarely succumbs to angst about it.
- Alice does not become immortal, but merely has her lifespan greatly extended beyond what it would normally be. This still causes her to angst in accordance with this trope.
- Alice is perfectly fine with being immortal, except for the distant but inevitable fate of outliving the entire universe and being alone forever in an empty void.
- Justified:
- Alice's immortality only prevents her from death, not pain and injury, and the large amount of injuries she suffers causes her much trouble.
- Alice runs out of things to do to occupy her time with, and life becomes tedious.
- As an immortal being, Alice will eventually see all of her friends wither away and die. In worst case scenario, even her children if she has any.
- It turns out this setting has an awesome afterlife (or Alice at least believes this to be the case), but now it's impossible for Alice to ever go there since she can't die.
- Age Without Youth.
- Alice will continue existing until the literal heat death of the universe.
- Inverted: Living Forever Is Awesome.
- Subverted: Alice becomes immortal, and initially panics and angsts, but soon gets over it and learns to love her newfound immortality.
- Double Subverted: ...Until tragic things start happening and she starts seeing her immortality as a horrid curse once more.
- Parodied: Alice hates being immortal... but for ridiculously trivial and petty reasons, most of which have nothing to do with immortality at all, rather than the weighty, epic reasons you'd expect. For example, she gets tired of trying to catch up with every decade's latest fashion trends, not because her family and friends keep dying over the ages.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice's opinions on her immortality swing wildly between the sides of the spectrum during different times in the plot.
- Averted: Living Forever is No Big Deal.
- Enforced: The show wants to draw in teenage viewers via adding in angst, and the most convenient possible source happens to be Alice and her immortality.
- Lampshaded: "Being immortal is like everything else on this planet: it also has its drawbacks for the ones with a conscience."
- Invoked:
- Alice becomes immortal, knows bad things will probably happen because of it, and starts her angsting in advance.
- Alice either hasn't lived long enough to have an opinion either way or she thinks Living Forever Is Awesome until a villain forcibly invokes And I Must Scream on her.
- Exploited: Alice is promised death as part of a deal she would never take for any sort of conventional reward.
- Defied: Alice becomes immortal and actively resists angsting over it because she knows it won't help anything.
- Discussed: "Why is it that nobody who becomes immortal likes it? Certainly, it couldn't suck for everyone, right?" "If you have a conscience, at one point it always does."
- Conversed: Alice is scared of death, and mutters about how ungrateful fictional characters are when they become immortal.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice prevents the heat death of the universe by remaining as the only source of power and mass. It isn't comfortable, but at least she was able to preserve a small piece of the universe.
- By the time the heat death kicks in, Alice is godlike enough to press "RESET" on the Universe.
- When immortality technology becomes commercially viable, the crowds believe so firmly in this trope that they hold off developing it for generations, causing myriads of people to needlessly die to old age.
- Reconstructed:
- Although Alice is able to avoid living alone in a void at the end of the universe by preserving it, the eventual boredom still applies.
- One can only reset the universe so many times before it losses its novelty.
- The crowds, in believing in this trope, genuinely hold to these values as good people, causing a Good vs. Good conflict.
- Played For Laughs: Alice becomes immortal, and goes through a series of over-the-top, amusingly painful events, mourning her condition all the way.
- Played For Drama: Alice eventually becomes cold, bitter, and disassociated from humanity as everyone she knows dies, everything she knows changes around her. She begins to view herself as not human and those around her as objects for her amusement.
- Implied: Alice has numerous signs of failed suicides, such as neck bruises from nooses and bullet wounds on her temples.
Back to Who Wants to Live Forever?
