@@TsulaAngenati2292 You really don't need to break the fourth wall to say this. I mean Red's example of immortals is just as cliché. Any immortal who's been around the block could have this opinion when trying to persuade them to side with you. Another uncomfortable saying would be similar: Knowledge is Power and Power Corrupts, this is why Ignorance is Bless and You can't handle the Truth.
@@JohnDoe-sx6iw that’s true, the reason I brought up fourth wall breaking is that I imagined them understanding they were in a story that’s been going on for a while and them pointing out the character arcs and using what they learned from reading their own story to mess with the charactersx
@@TsulaAngenati2292 That's basically if the universe is just an imaginary story made by the god(s) and an atheist is the character that realize that their in a story
Imagine being a new immortal. Like it's 2113 and you reveal your immortality and someone asks what it was like seeing the pyramids being build and you have to respond, "oh no, I was born in 1993. Phones were big back then, but they got small pretty quickly." Or even worse, being an immortal who keeps missing things. "What was it like to watch the pyramids get built?" "Oh, I was in Japan at the time." "Well, what about the Renaissance? That was cool, right?" "Didn't see that either. I fell down a hole in Scotland and everyone assumed I was an enchanted well. It took 400 years to convince someone to help me get out."
When I try and conceive an immortal character, I think to a story my friend told me. He was watching lord of the rings for the first time, and at some point during fellowship a fly was bothering him. He swatted it, but it was ok. By Two Towers,he had swatted at it until it landed in a spider web, and yet the fly managed to fight off the spider and escape. At that point the fly had earned his respect, and he left it alone. And he said that he felt a sort of bond with the fly, as though it was on the journey of watching lord of the rings for the first time with him. He felt a sense of comradery, and respect, for the fly surviving such things. But at the end of the last movie, he found the fly dead. He felt a meaningful connection to something that had lived for such an inconceivably small fraction of his own life. Thats the sort of connection I'd consider an immortal having with the odd human.
@@DarkeLourd Now that's probably me personally, but I would've stopped bothering to look if the fly was gonna escape the web or not waaaaaay before 1 million. :P
One immortal trope Red forgot to mention is "The Immortal Guardian", an immortal whose purpose is to forever guard something forever or until a condition is met.
Does anyone else think there's a contradiction between "if your life is infinite, you'll care less because you lose the urgency to engage with it moment to moment" and "if your relationships are temporary, you you'll care less because temporary things aren't worth worrying about,"? Like, I dont see how you reach both conclusions at the same time unless you go in looking for maximum angst and inhumanity. Kittens are extremely temporary compared to normal humans but we super care about them anyways. DMs pour hours into making one-shot games that will never be played again. I think i prefer the Doctor Who take on immortality, where they throw themselves deeply into relationships because they've been through the grieving process so often that they've come to terms with it and aren't afraid of it anymore. "Sure, Im going to be here thousands of years, but Dave is here _now_. In what other century will I ever get the chance to play Minecraft with Dave?"
Completely agree, and explained very well, thank you for this. I haven't watched a lot of Doctor Who but based on what little I've seen and a lot more that I've heard, he seems like one of the best depictions of Immortality out there. In a similar way, Gandalf has always been my favorite immortalish character, precisely because his long life lead him to find even more appreciation for life and people in general.
Thanks, Sydney, for pointing that out. Your comment should be pinned for its insight. Now, why didn't I think of that? Imagine immortality without such extremes of system down-regulation (SDR) as human beings more commonly experience. I'm not saying "have no SDR at all" but make it less of a potent force on an immortal person so that life doesn't lose its savor. After all, part of insanity (and anhedonia) is the death of brain cells and the breaking of neuro-connections which would otherwise be there.
@@gojifan54gaming15 only a few pets in the family have died and I wasnt really a person then, too young or not even alive when it happened. My cat Zippy and dog Sammy are getting older and I love both dearly to my heart. I don't think I'd last a week after they go.
I have dinner with my 91 year old grandparents every weekend, and they are happy wonderful people. Their friends are dying left and right, and when asked how they deal with it they tell people "If we mourned each of our friends we would never stop." I feel like an immortal could hit that point pretty easily, and it's not necessarily some great feat of compartmentalizing. IDK how unique that is to them tho.
How much of that comes with knowing you'll die though? If you only have to live without someone for 10 years, that's alot less depressing then loving without them for all of time
@@jamieadams2589 Maybe a bit, but probably not much? I feel like people are rather good at getting desensitized to whatever is upsetting to them through repeated exposure if they don't get PTSD or something. It might be heartbreaking the first few times, but by death 50 it's probably like a dog dying, and by death 500 it might be even easier. I know my dogs and cat will die and then I will need to live a long, long time afterwards, but I still cherish them greatly. I will also morn them less than I morned my Mom, partially because I always knew I would massively outlive them and wasn't prepared for my Mom to go early. If you were an immortal and every time you befriended someone or fell in love you started with the knowledge that they will die and you will move on, you might come off as patronizing but probably would be able to handle the death much better.
@@SpellingBeeWiner oh definitely. I just mean I don't think you can have both genuine human connections and not become crushingly mournful after a long time. Like you said, people basically become pets or like bird watching, fun and enjoyable but not really intimate
@@jamieadams2589 I don't know about that. I love the shit out of my cat and dogs, and care far less for my chickens. I think we're totally capable of having deep, meaningful relationships we know are temporary. In some ways I feel like it could almost be easier. An immortal could truly give themselves to someone, knowing that this is a fleeting moment they need to savor with as much intensity as possible. And even if they grieved heavily, they could take a year or two to grieve and it would be inconsequential.
@@SpellingBeeWiner of course you do. I think we love for the temporary and incapable more then anyone else, but the relationship isn't nearly as intimate. If everyone is basically a pet, then you'll love them sure but you'd never connect with them. Hell, in a century or two, you provably couldn't even speak to them since language would move on so much so they'd be even more like a pet
@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563 the loss of immortality bit is in And Another Thing which is sort of non-canon. If you're wondering who he is his name is Bowerick Wowbagger the infinently prolonged and he appears in Life The Universe and Everything the third book in the Hitchhickers trilogy of five. Hope that clears everything up
I know the immortal artist thing is depressing, but I just got the idea of an immortal author who smugly revels in the fact that because they technically will never die, their work will never become public domain no matter how old it is
Because of their long lifespans, they’re likely to be invested in certain ideas for a lot longer as well; their hyperfixations or deep passions are likely long lasting. I imagine if I were an immortal being, I’d be fascinated by the progression of mankind, genealogy, evolution... just sticking around to see what they’re going to do next would be endlessly fascinating. Yeah, maybe writing a bestselling book or becoming President wouldn’t feel as meaningful if soon everyone will forget you or bastardize your words or whatever else, but just being an impartial observer would be so cool.
Also acting as a kind of guardian angel, seeking coomon wellfare instead of individual ones, like helping during protests, going with green peace to save whales, being a source for a newspaper, helping poor people in need, rescuing dogs and cats. Think about the dogs and cats! Simply apreciating life is also fine, seeking ilumination, bathing yourself in sunshine and feeling the droplets of a light rain on your skin in a warm day of summer, and loving the world, that kinda thing.
I personally found the Outsider from Dishonored to be a fascinating example of this - he used to be mortal, and he mostly just watched and, as he put it, “walked through the minds of generations“ - that must honestly be a fascinating position to be in.
Specially in the field of science, you can just keep achieving. If you keep your ear on the ground and keep learning and adapting, you can write a new culturally relevant book once society has changed sufficiently and you've gotten a new idea. Going through the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, the birth of the Internet, these are all very different lives, things only get boring if you don't account for what's new. If I was immortal I'd have had a blast witnessing the birth of the automobile, for example. And as for friendships, maybe you're not able to enjoy growing old with someone, but you can make friends of all ages, you can relate to every generation, and you can attain enough wealth over your lifetime that you never have to worry about not getting to meet someone, you can just invite Einstein to dinner.
Yeah. I'd love to just sit back and watch the world change. I'm always awed just thinking about how different things are now from when I was a kid. Like, I'm watching a video on a screen that fits in my pocket, on a device that is more powerful than the first huge ass desktop PC we owned. When I was a kid this was some fucking sci-fi shit. Getting to watch the development of humanity and technology, getting to go out and explore space an see the universe... Immortality would be awesome. If I were and immortal in a story I'd be one of the characters she'd think was badly written and not well thought out by the author, because I'd be living my best life, lol.
I saw someone on tumblr suggest the idea of immortal characters dedicating their time to really niche and/or time consuming activities, like overseeing the domestication of a species or making trees grow in a way that they're effectively architecture
That gives me the idea of an antagonist immortal who is at odds with the protag because they just want a valuable stone that just makes you rich or something that doesn't help anyone else all by itself. They are pretty chill with the protag and congratulates the protag beats them and possibly gets stuck. Saying "Meh I'll just sleep it off" and never really hates anyone.
I have a trio of immortals who all work for Nasa and are trying to get humanity to space. They all get very frustarted since the government keeps taking their funding for other stuff.
We are immortals for our cats, dogs and specially hamsters, yet we love them anyway. That's why I never really buy the "I'm so different from humans I can't feel anything for them". Come on man, pet the human.
@@user-mh9dx7nz2r I think that love is one of those things that never gets old. I used to rescue animals and because of that experienced loads of loss... Yet I never wanted to stop doing it or thought the pain wasn't worth it. I would assume it would be the same with humans.
@@user-mh9dx7nz2r Eating food you like doesn't get old, neither do being with your loved ones or having pets. You can grow tired of certain things or even certain people you used to love, but loving and enjoying things in general is not something any healthy human will "grow out of with enough time", if only because we're biologicaly wired to find enjoyment in certain experiences. There is no reason to assume it would be different with Immortals. Most likely they would simply forget about their past at some point, rather than loose meaning and hapiness.
I think with truly long lifespans we might get into that stage of no longer caring about the ephemerals, but I always feel that people set that number too low a 200 year old immortal has only lived a tad over two human lifetimes. And whilst there probably are immortals who fall into ennui that quickly (some humans do in less time) declaring that all immortals should be grappling with it rings untrue. The older they get the more I would expect them to grapple with this disconnection sure but at 400 they have barely had enough time to spend two years in each country on earth. On a different note, (and it's probably been done before ) I would like to see more examples of immortals in the super-immortal category trying to keep civilization alive or worriedly searching for a way they *can* die even if they don't want to use it yet as they realize that eventually the sun will die and they'd like to not be alone on a frozen meaningless rock stuck there for eternity
@@Logan_Roman I'd call that more reincarnation (reincarnative?) immortality. Regenerative immortality implies never reaching a point you can call death in the first place.
@@green_pikmin Technically yes, because whenever you die, you don't actually die (which by definition makes it so you can't die). For a "fun" exploration I can only recommend the anime "Re:Zero", where that's basically the main character's super power.
Oblivious Immortal: If your character is over a century old and acts like a high schooler your audience might be a bit thrown. Well, that's an unusual way to call out every D&D player who's played an Elf around me ever, Red.
To be fair, it's very difficult to make a convincing character who got no further than level 1 after centuries then hit level 20 after just a year or two of adventuring.
I've written an immortal character. But she regressed due to her isolation, and her previous mental trauma. Well. She wasn't alone per say, but she wasn't around particularly nice, or good people, and she was more kept there. She doesn't act like a high schooler, but she does have that type of high school girl surprise after meeting new people in over a thousand years, and is extremely protective of those who saved her.
I’m surprised the reincarnated immortal was never brought up, immortals who are immortal through reincarnating keeping memories and all that. I was always found that interesting.
namely, almost every isekai anime. technically they don't become truly immortal but they get reincarnated and are damn hard to kill due to their OP skills.
Reincarnating in the same world, or transported to a different one? The latter is every isekai anime, but the former isn't too common. My favorite example is from the Confinement series by Lord Bung. The main character is a guy in his 20s that can reincarnate by just manifesting next to his corpse. This property makes him the perfect test dummy for throwing at monsters, and there's plenty of slapstick that ensues.
Closest thing to that idea is one i made myself the character in question has turned into a natural calamity within the entire fictional multiverse; always entering a new universe every time they expire, never re-entering them. If you know any anime or material that uses this type of idea, let me know. I've gotten a bit insane playing out the scenarios in my head for a long while now.
I was Thinking of that the whole time!! It's actually interesting how Jack treats the concept of immortality across the movies. Especially since you see him face it's ugliness in every single one of the movies.
Western immortals: "Woe is me! Oh, the curse of immortality! I lack genuine human connections, I lack family, all my friends and loved ones are dead!" Chinese immortals: "Have you considered just being happy" Edit: Guys I can only say "Daoist immortals are free from attachment and suffering" so many times. You're adding nothing if you go on about how losing your loved ones is painful and would ruin immortality. It doesn't affect the immortal bc they are immortal in the first place because they are free from attachment. I'm not able to give you a full education on Laozi, Zhuangzi, Liezi etc in a UA-cam comment section.
@@augustuzmoon3814 Chinese immortals: "I've seen 13 dynasties, strong and beautiful, but transient nonetheless. I would not give up witnessing any one of them in order to die with another"
Imagin an immortal slacker..... "You havn't cut the grass for 500 years!" "No.... I know....." "But it's really high now!" "Yea.... I know..." "So cut it!!!" "No..... Im tired...."
“So, for the first century I’ll go easy on them. Lol them into a false sense of security and then when they think I’m not so bad. Bam! I’ll go full tyrant on them in the second century. After that I’ll disappear for a millennia and make them wonder if I ever existed to begin with. Just to come back and kill them all.” Quote from a Space Dictator seeking Immortality, Lord Freezer
my problem with the whole "being immortal kinda sucks" trope is that it kind of always goes to that point without actually exploring why people would want to be immortal. It's like i'm saying "i want chocolate" and the writer is my mom telling me "if you eat too much chocolate you'll get fat" and i'm like "yes i know but i still want some chocolate right now"
Yeah, honestly, I know it's realistic, but I'm 100% done with the angsty immortal trope, it's over done, it's boring, whoop de doo. I like the immortal creatures of DnD, their plots stretching the lifetimes of whole empires. I'm also sick of "All Gods are Assholes", like, sure they have flaws, but can we hop off their collective dicks, they've done a lot for us yah know?
@@atriumgamesmore4336 I'm not even certain the angsty and depressed immortal trope is actually realistic tbh. It's probably more an offshot of fear of death that led us to create stories with plausible reasons why immortality would suck and death isn't so bad after all.
@@yonatanbeer3475 Less so in the original myths, imo, and more with us placing our modern sensibilities against their behavior. Even then, "all" is a massive exaggeration. Most Norse Gods are pretty alright, and most Olympians (excluding the obvious sexual assaulter and mass murderers) only have 1 or two bad stories about them, which is insane when you consider an immortal lifespan.
_Gilgamesh gets the plant of immortality he almost drowned for stolen by a snake_ *Gilgamesh:* "... _sigh_ Whelp. You can't win them all. It makes for a good learning experience, though." *Back in Uruk:* "Welcome back, my king. How was the sear-" *Gilgamesh:* _"Have every snake in the kingdom killed."_
There is actually an anime called "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" that deals with exactly this. An immortal elf saved the world with a group of heroes, then went on to travel the world. When she comes back, 50 years have passed, and her friends are old and die soon. She realises that she never got to know them properly and has an existential crisis. The anime is about her trying to preserve the memory of her friends.
I just imagine an immortal who got stuck in prison of some ancient civilization for some dumb reason and some archeologists discover the prison cell. Immortal prisoner: finally! Feels like it's been twenty years since you guys have checked on me. Archeologists: try 2000
Try 2000. There is a considerable time between what we call ancient and the rise of serious archealogists. (At least 1000 years, depending who you ask)
In the last book of the W.A.R.P trilogy the big bad is some immortal dude who spend a good while buried in a crypt, and was only let out when some grave robbers tried to get some goodies (but instead got a fun surprise)
I believe there's one more: the Tasked Immortal. This one's a bit strange. They circumvent all of the angst of immortality and lack of motivation by being bound by or taking on an obligation. Usually they're either mentor figures or some sort of leader, either autocratic or shadowy. They can be prone to being brutally pragmatic if the before mentioned morality starts to break down even if their mission is genuinely benevolent. Imagine someone fighting the same threat through all time through every multiverse endlessly. I would imagine they would stop *feeling* heroic and end up just going through the motions (a little thought experiment inspired by Into the Breach). Or when they stop caring for individual humans but still want to better the station of humanity and end up working towards the goal of helping humanity from the perspective of an immortal (these usually show up in brighter, more cheerful stories but a counter example would be The God Emperor of Mankind)
Fate/Stay Night has a nice example on this, albeit it's not an immortal but rather an eternal afterlife. One of the characters is a human of the modern days who lived his life as a real superhero, saving people, destroying supernatural threats without the action of the scary "Powers That Be" of the magical world and even stopping wars. He lived the life he wanted, being an hero and an example. Then he died because humans were still assholes, but he was fine with It, as long as It helped keeping the peace. During his life he made a pact with a supernatural entity, so that rather than having his soul reincarnated he would become part of the Throne of Heroes, where the great figures of History were collected, being able to keep fighting for peace and saving people even after death. There is obviously a catch, and the catch is that he gets deployed in the most hellish landscape of war and destruction, but he isn't there to save, he is there to kill. The entity can't meddle directly with the course of human history, but can influence it ever so slightly that it helps civilizations to stand and humanity to survive, and sends things like this guy to slaughter the remaining threats after shit already hit the fan. And so this guy is endlessly forced to kill over and over, for all eternity. TECHNICALLY he is fine with It, since he is indeed helping survivors, but he obviously develops a huge amount of angst from the absurd amount of people he has to kill and the deaths of innocents he keeps seeing without even being in the same plane of existence as them until they were butchered. Yeah, it sucks. Sucks so much that it's main role in story is trying to undo that immortality to begin with. Obviously, there is also a catch here.
Regular show also had this with Skips; the sole reason he’s immortal is because he needs to beat Clorgbane every 159 years. He also needs to do a very specific ritual on his birthday in order to maintain his immortality, or the time babies take it away. Seems very foolish, as without Skips they can’t beat clorgbane, but what can you do? I remember feeling really sad for Skips in the episode where he explains why he’s immortal, but I cannot help but admire his dedication to his friends in spite of it.
The knight guarding the Holy Grail in The Last Crusade comes to mind. Jesus, he is probably the unluckiest of immortals! Stuck in a cave, no other interactions, and no food. Honestly that would break a lesser man to the point of insanity!
Sounds very Doctor Who-ish. Maybe not exactly as the Doctor is technically mortal but come on, for humans with a lifespan of 100 years top he's immortal.
This is a little bit of Manji from blade of the immortal. I haven't watched the video yet because I don't have time right now, but he's kinda cool with fighting other people who can kill him because his only real motivation is helping Rin and killing bad guys to make up for his past. It's a really manga I'm reading, but also there's a really cool live action movie of it too. Check it out, I don't think it's that big, at least where I am.
Fun fact, if you combine the immature, the walking textbook, the cavelier immortal, and a healthy helping of daddy issues you get one Lucifer Morningstar.
"How are you today miss?" "i'm alright, tried blowing up my head, but it grew back so that's out. Gonna try walking into the frozen hellscape naked later. if it doesn't work it'll at least pass the time."
14:54 Paradox is one of my favorite Immortals if only for how he describes how he became immortal. "I went mad for a time, but after a few millennia, I got bored of that and went sane. Very Sane." Just such a fun way to describe it.
Reminds me of Fujiwara no Mokou from Touhou Project. Basically, she’s lived for like 3000 years and after going through every human emotion in existence (even an undertale genocide run but irl) she kinda just chills, hangs around in the Bamboo Forest of the Lost (which she has memorized the layout of) and fights Kaguya Houraisan to the very temporary death at 9:20 in the evening every day
"Here's a list of the different types of immortality." Sun Wukong: "Ooh, I have that one, and that one, and that one..." I recall a story (which I believe Dungeons&Dragons directly referenced at one point) about a man who freed a genie from a bottle, and the genie granted him a wish as thanks. The man wished for immortality, so the genie turned him into a fish and he promptly suffocated, and thus he lives on forever as a cautionary tale.
I made an semi immortal guy named William who literally played Death, and they now can die an infinite number of times. He isn't really sad because my world has a metric butt ton of other god like people. Also gave a like to get you to 420.
My favorite immortal trope is an ancient being who has somehow missed just about every textbook historical event ever and is consistently and unintentionally behind every single trend by decades or centuries. Their main goal in the story mostly is just trying to be a part of something cool
*Hero is losing the final battle against the strong bad guy* Immortal: GO! I'll distract him, but you need to run! Live another day! Immortal: *Just stands in front of the door for half an hour, blocking the path* Bad guy: WHY ARENT YOU DEAD YET
This trope talk makes me think of the episode of Angel where he and Spike thought that Buffy was hooking up with some haughty jerk called, *The Immortal* *Spoiler Alert* : It turns out it was just a rumor that Andrew started.
A potentially interesting way to get around the "outliving your family" thing is to make said character the patriachal/matriarchal guardian of their family line. Works better if you can make the family more of a clan structure, maybe.
Plot idea: a theatre troupe of immortals who have extremely gorey plays as they don't have to worry about death and just go ham at each other in fight scenes
Imagine the they get so into it sometimes that the villain 'dies' to a random soldier or the hero gets 'killed' in a fight scene really early on, and they end up having to ad-lib the entire play.
But what about memory? It seems that Immortality nearly always comes with the ability to remember everything from your life. What if you just had a normal human memory: you forget your time in Rome apart from a few key bits, you eventually heal from the loss of your loved one, you might not be technically goting to new places but I would happily go to the same amusement park every couple of years even if they don't add anything new. I probably only remember about 10% of my trip to Switzerland, and that was last year. The time I went to Portugal as a child I only remember bits of the ferry to get there. And even that is mostly only kept in my mind by family members talking about it every now and then, if you didn't have people who live as long as you it would be all the more easy to forget.
Yeah I think its weird a lot of immortals are assumed to have the attention span to get jaded. I think ppl would get jaded if they lost a lot of loved ones very rapidly; there just wouldn’t be the time to mourn and figure out feelings. But if it’s spaced out over lifetimes there’s time to heal and recover from the loss; and with each iteration one learns how to mourn and make the best of the time we have with them. I guess it CAN be frustrating if the immortal has been paying attention to the cycles of mistakes humanity makes; but also there would be no one who understands more how human it is to simply forget the lessons you learn.
One of the few that did something like this well was Gilgamesh in the Secrets of the Immortal Nicolas Flammel series. He is one of the first humans, and his immortality has very few limitations. The only real one is the weight of around 11,000 years and no ability to do magic has left him as basically an empty shell of a man. He can't even remember his own name half the time, let alone his sister or anything from his past outside of the occasional moments of surprising clarity. He does keep a journal, written in cuneiform, but as the writting fades, is lost, or worn away he continues to forget.
Yes, biological immortality (enternal youth, avoid swords and bullets) is essentially an upgrade to your immune system and dna repair. Your DNA has caps of junk data at the ends that deteriorate with every cell division and this is the real death by old age, what we call old age death is the immune system / body giving out. I see no reson why this would rewire or upgrade the brain to have perfect or near perfect memory for billions of years. I'm only 21 and have forgotten many things but still have these wierd crystal clear moments (even without context) sprinkled from around 2 or 3 up to the present (super young memories are very fuzzy and low context, like bragging about being 4 to a person my mom was talking to in a driveway and nothing else about that day).
@@jasonreed7522 Imagine if you reached your early thousands, been through wars, famines, plagues and forgot them all....but still remembered bragging about being four years old. XD
This is exactly what happens to a human character in Doctor Who, when she gains biological immortality. She starts to live so long that she begins to forget who she is and her past, so she starts writing her memories down in journals, and eventually fills up a library or her own biographies. It even gets to the point where she doesn't remember her original name, and so she starts to go by the name Me. Really interesting concept
"Child immortal, which is always portrayed as bad and a walking tragedy." Surprised Red didn't mention Claudia from "Interview with the Vampire." Part wish-fulfillment on Anne Rice's part after the untimely death of her daughter, nevertheless, Claudia in-story was turned into a vampire at a young age and the tragedy and terror of it is that her body is forever locked in that form while her mind ages. This causes her to develop intense body dysphoria as her body never matures or reflects her internal age, unable to engage in adult relations, and she's envious and resentful of adult women having the body and form she desires. in addition, as a predator with the appearance of a child, Claudia makes it easy to prey on others by eliciting adult sympathy, which makes creating child vampires a big no-no in the vampire world because they draw too much attention. There's also that scene in the movie where she had an episode of frustration and decided to rebel by cutting her doll-like curly hair down to the scalp, only to scream a second after in horror that her hair grew back in the exact same style as if nothing happened.
On the other hand, The Childlike Empress from The Neverending Story seemed well adjusted... Or was she ultimately allowing the cyclic destruction of her empire so that she could meet a new friend?
@@jakeaurod Well in the Childlike Empress' case, it's implied in the story that she's some kind of 'goddess' in the form of a child, or the universe's equivalent to the Dalai Lama given the cyclical nature to her being. Not actually a child unwillingly given immortality.
@@jakeaurod Yeah, she's /childlike/ not /a child/. She is, by the standard of her species with a total population of herself, an adult. But she's also the central pillar of fantasia, a place of magic and wonder that is built on the dreams of children. (and, if you've read the book....)
I liked the way Arcane handled this with Heimerdinger (who fits in the “not mortal” category as a Yordle and never really had to comprehend the idea of his own mortality, but still otherwise plays with immortal tropes quite a bit.) He’s still worried about his friends’ deaths, but his literal inability to comprehend that 10 years is far too long for most humans to test something (let alone the terminally ill Viktor) ends up frustrating Jayce into kicking him off the Council-and Heimer’s Act 3 arc pretty much consists of learning just how much Zaun has changed for the worse since he last saw it while blissfully letting time pass by, but also just what good people can do with the threat of mortality over their heads.
Professor Paradox had a great quote on immortality: Professor Paradox: "Los Soledad was built entirely on MY ingenious theory - a time tunnel utilizing the properties I discovered in quartz crystals which would allow us access to past and future events." Kevin Levin: "Yeah, well, for a genius, it looks like you blew it." Professor Paradox: "You don't know the half of it. Some tiny miscalculation on my part destabilized the experiment and ripped a hole in the fabric of reality. I was hurled into the event horizon. I must have spent one hundred-thousand years there. I didn't age or need to sleep or eat - just exist." Kevin Levin: "Heh, sounds pretty boring." Professor Paradox: "At first I went mad of course, but after a few millennia I got bored with that, too, and went sane - very sane. I began to learn. I now have total understanding of the space-time continuum, allowing me to travel anywhere and anywhen I want... within reason."
@@green_pikmin I'm part of a plural system of over 20 people, due to shared memories time is retroactively 20 times longer and we got bored of madness.
"Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon" has some strange immortals in it. The Gods are immortal 100% but their time on earth is limited. Their ageless perfect human body will die if it takes too much damage so when a God or goddess is in danger their children are truly afraid for them. But they do know if they 'die' that just means they return to heaven where they cant come back to the human world. so their goals are to have a good time with humans a long as possible. This sometimes causes issues with some mortals avoiding their God'd or Goddes's affection because they are mortal, but their God or Goddess just wants to enjoy the time they have with their favorite mortal. This is an actual scene where a character really hurts a Goddess's feelings because of that.
Dexter Adams yeah, that anime is actually pretty good, I like the manga. I just wish it had a better name, like fuck. I nearly didn’t watch it when I first heard about it cause the name was so cringe. And at that time in my life I watched just about any garbage generic anime so, that says a lot.
@@clawso9014 yeah same, intresting lore, and thd whole show was alright but name makes me a bit dead inside, also its target audiance is definetly weebs
One more type of immortal: The Robot Immortal Someone who's lived so long that it feels like they've experienced everything there is to experience, and reacts to stimuli automatically and out of context. Possibly as a side-effect of having memories well beyond the capacity of their brains. So it's like taking a senile old person's automatic responses, but giving them a healthy body to perform them. In this way, they kinda act like NPCs, robots that are less people and more incredibly dense flowcharts. It's only when something happens to them that is truly new and unexpected that any aspect of sapience is observed. My example for such a character are the demons in SMT games. They come back from death all the time and are intelligent, but the logic that they run on seems so insane and lacking in context except for the moments of quest lucidity where they DO act and talk like people. In some settings, that is the "humanity" that they crave from humans: the ability to NOT be NPCs.
“The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
Episode five of the Sandman show totally changed my perspective on all this. Hobs is such a fresh take on immortality to me, it’s surprising that I haven’t seen many stories like his. It’s a lovely attitude he has to his long life and I like thinking about it
@@MASTERM016 Or life is unpredictable and you can surprise yourself on what "your best moment" even is. Jusy enjoy it, we aren't immortals after all ;)
I am convinced that the narrative of "death is a natural thing and being immortal would suck." is being pushed by vampires who don't want everyone to live forever.
I am very embarrassed to show off my own work this way but your comment made me think of the way one of my protagonists, a sincerely Catholic vampire (yes) thinks about his own immortality at the beginning of the story (translated from my native French) : "If death would one day decide to take him away, it would be by whim, on a bad roll of dice of fate, far away from the peaceful dignity of the cycle to which obeyed every other living thing in this world." Like, the guy can literally only die if he gets lost in the countryside at night and can't manage to get a roof over his head before the next clear dawn. Which is rather silly and sad. Also, yeah, elitist, self-important vampires using propaganda, that definitely adds up.
Eragon has an interesting thing, the elves have extremely long lifespans, an inherent gift for magic, and full knowledge of their “true name” or the embodiment of their self by which someone else can have full control of them. Eragon a human is there to lead and when meeting the forger he asks, “why forge when you can instantly complete it with magic?” The reply, “the endpoint is not my goal, but the journey to get there. If I just used magic to do this my life would be meaningless and without the satisfaction of knowing I did this by my own hand.” She is extreme, but other elves focus on gardens, making houses literally out(inside of) of trees(magically growing trees into the shapes they want), studying magic, or the arts.
@@richardgibson8403 I think the idea is that they're the only ones who have full knowledge of their own true names, so they have full self-knowledge and also can't be manipulated through self-delusion or inadequate understanding of oneself, the way other creatures can...?
I would like to also mention how the Big Bad, King Galbartorix, sought to criminalize the magical language of the elves in order to basically enslave and reign their power since that is the Elves native language. If you can't use your language, what good is it?
A take on Immortality I found interesting was with the character of Me in _Doctor Who._ Me had lived so long that the capacity of her own memory had been reached, so had taken to writing down her memories in books and building a library filled with them for future reference. As _Doctor Who_ was a time travel show, the main characters would encounter her at a couple of different points in history, Me having got there the long way round. Upon being reintroduced to The Doctor's companion, Clara, Me says something along the lines of "I have such fond memories of you, I look forward to reading them" Indicating that although for the time-traveling Clara their initial meeting happened a few weeks ago and was kind of a big deal for her, for Me it was so long ago and had been swamped by all the experiences she had since then, it wasn't even a memory, thus crystallising the disconnect between mortals and immortals.
There's a solo journaling game based on this kind of "immortality-with-limited-memory", called Thousand Year Old Vampire, exploring characters who loses pieces of their identity as the years wear on.
When you mentioned the immortals relating to a family, I had the image of a crazy cat lady - except the crazy cat Lady is immortal, and the cats are humans. Other immortals keep encouraging her to make real friends and connections, but she just keeps trying to optimize the happiness of her pets (showering them with toys, petting, human nip, and new friends.) I would actually be somewhat surprised if someone didn't already make a story of same kind with this same idea.
that's the baseline relationship for the longer lived races in D&D interacting with shorter lived ones, a dwarf isn't so much your friend as a friend of your family, an elf may or may not be able to process the concept that you are a person (this leads to a lot of internal issues for them since it's kiiiinda a big schism point), and fey and the like can get to the point where they have gotten used to not being able to find the right-shaped kind of mortal when they go looking for someone to run an errand for them and just sorta consider learning the relevant language/culture/etc as part of the process of introducing yourself. so an incredibly loyal dwarf is literally the standard when it comes to the ones that actually put up with humans and the like and an elf raising humans/etc as a sort of animal husbandry is by no means out of the question so a "crazy cat lady" situation isn't much of a stretch from there, especially with how often elves just plain don't like other elves. fey/etc picking favorites among mortal species is the standard for the ones you can actually interact with, but you have no idea what percentage and/or demographic of their population that is.
I'd love to see a story about an immortal who basically acts as a secret chronicler for their family lineage, watching them in secret and documenting their progress
Year 632: Dan's grandson persists in being the absolute worst. I narrowly avoided being found out at the family gathering when Katy recognised me from a family portrait with her great-grandfather. Thankfully, her announcement that I am immortal turned out to be a "meme", a new form of joke. Wendy's great-grandchildren are all just as stupid as would be expected. I look forward to seeing Jennifer's "gay" wedding, a concept that delights me.
One gripe I have about people writing immortals is that they're always from the accursed perspective, as if one cannot find joy in life without the impending doom of death. Important milestones in life don't have to be unique in "I did it once", they can also be "I did it once when that war was going on" or based on a routine, or a schedule. Fact is, we can't comprehend how an immortal would feel like living through the ages, but I personally find amalgamating most of them under "oh dear, i desire death, immortality is a curse" quite disappointing, and is one reason I guess why I enjoy vampires, because they relish their immortality instead of cursing it.
This is why one of my favourite immortal characters is the villain from a book series. Almost everyone else his age is depressed and carrying on out of some sense of duty, but he's just living his life, having fun and occasionally getting obssessed in some new thing. Causing chaos for everyone and continuing his search for understanding the natural world (and also spreading fear in hopes that people will learn how to appreciate life from it). He's not even concerned about dying. He just hopes that it's epic.
I’m writing a character that’s exactly like that, except there’s a reason. He’s a kid, sixteen years old. and the only person being immortal. Which means any friend you make and any person you meet are inevitably going to pass away before you. While you, are going to watch them fade away without doing anything about it. Which is why this character, although at first he enjoyed being immortal and even found it fun, now despises it. This made him push other people away and even make a vow with himself that he’s never going to get attached again. Keep in mind he’s a kid, 16 years old, and he still hasn’t felt the long term effect his immortality would have mentally. Yet he still saw other people die, like his friend because of an illness, and even his parents who were part of a cult like Community disappeared. All this whole he’s being hunted down by a secret organization plus a girl from said cult is trying to find a way to kill him because a prophecy said if she doesn’t he may cause a war that destroys the earth. Depending on what story you are trying to tell, yes immortality can be a curse. I mean even without all the horrible circumstances, I’m writing this story based on a feeling I’ve had. A feeling that seeing people that I love around me dying , somehow scares me more than me dying. But yeah idk, atleast for me if I was immortal I’d consider that pure torture if there’s no other immortal people, and even so I’m pretty sure you’ll eventually lose all motivation without the urgency of “Damm one day I’m gonna die so let me make the most of it” sorry for getting too deep ima go now 💀
The thing is... even if you have infinite time to do whatever you want, your goals will just keep changing over time. Especially because this 'I need to stick to this because I only have so many tries at something new if I ever want to be good at it'- alarm clock thing put on us (the 'biological clock', the 'you need a stable job by 25', the 'you need to start doing __ so you can do it long enough to reap its benefits', the 'this person started ___ at a younger age so you'll never get close to their proficiency no matter what you do') fading away would make my life so much better. I would argue that being immortal makes 'living in the moment' easier, not harder, because you don't have to think about the future unless you really want to. No matter how much time you have to cross things from your bucket list, the rate at which new things will appear on it will always be quicker than you can follow. You can take breaks whenever you want. Just study something extremely niche and find out everything there is about it. Who cares if I'm sick of it a thousand years down the line? I'll just start over with something else entirely. And oh, the great milestones of (pop) culture alone.
You can also have an Aziraphael-Crowley situation, where the immortals get really attached to humanity as a whole and are constantly marveling at humans and their inventions/creations/advancements... they get attached to people and places but know that everything passes. Granted, they were never human to begin with, but theoretically you could have a human immortal take the same approach after a few centuries.
Adam from Gene Doucette's immortal series was pretty this. The guy was born during the tail end of the last ice age so he had a strong appreciation for the whole civilization thing in all of its incarnations. The series also made jab at the trope of "immortal knew all the historical figures, and witnessed all the important events" trope. Basically Adam was an alcoholic who never let the truth get in the way of a good tale, and openly admitted to having grey spots in his memory from all the brain cells he killed over the years, so he's not a very reliable narrator. On top of that if you know anything about history you realize that some of the events he claimed to be part of happened at the same time on different ends of the planet.
I dont entirely like that type. Mainly since it tends to over glorify only a couple of facets of reality and have this immortal ignore a huge amount of things that may be wondrous that societies in the fiction may not be aware of, may not focus on, or just not value. Just something that comes across as rather culturally relative?
Red: *talks about death as a deadline that motivates people* Me: And then there's such a thing as time blindness. Forget about the eventual "time to die:" it's harder to process any sort of time beyond "now" and "not now," resulting in such serious problems as perpetual procrastination anyway. Maybe I should write more immortal characters. It seems I have some personal experience, even as a mortal myself....
Yes, you should definitely get around to that one day. You know, once you have some time to spare and wrapped up whatever keeps you busy right now and wasn't it supposed to still be 2020?
Well most people with such mindset usually never get to writing it, so we get a lot of immortal having a mental breakdown kind of story (which is funny since they had forever to get over it).
Ooh same! Imagine the absolute frustration that is being an immortal with untreated ADHD/ADD. Lifetimes of unfinished projects; half learned instruments, skills and languages, knowing that they genuinely do have all the time in the world and yet for all that power, cannot commit to anything because they can always come back to it later. Immortals sinking lifetimes into mindless skinner-box games or spending eternity doom scrolling because they can afford to waste time.
Yes, you may do it tomorrow... but now there are other matters that take precedence! Like have you watched Lord of the Rings, if you have, then watch again and again and again till your life is filled with regret and longing for what could have been. Nice day to you sir or night- I don’t know where you come from so I will just wish you goodness in all of the days spectrums.
The one with the vice who always tries to find that one person to sexually harass every time they reincarnate, turning it into a romance story told in HR departments.
@@sasukeuchiha998 cursed* to find that one person to sexually harass. Also the reincarnating type could be an immortal classification of its own as well.
@@sasukeuchiha998 hey cut the guy some slack, if u had to watch the one you love 100+ times only to be reincarnated to fall in love with u again u might become that weird too. also blame fan service for it
One aspect that I don't think has ever been covered is the issue of memory. I'm in my 50's and I can't remember much of my childhood and nobody seems to have that many memorable events in their old age as it tends to be more of the same. It seems to me that there is a race between boredom and forgetfullness. Do we forget fast enough that we would never get bored enough to want to kill ourselves if we were immortal? I'm thinking yes.
Oh my god thank you, this is the one thing that never, ever gets pointed out in any story I’ve read with immortals. Like dude, how the hell can you remember the blacksmith’s name on a street four blocks from a house you lived in 650 years ago? When i can’t remember my own neighber’s name from two years ago. Also, another thing that bugs me is the, master of 100 different skills, like, sure, you might know a lot of stuff, but there is no way you can speak 23 languages, play 6 instruments, and is the greatest artist in history. One more thing is the whole famous place/person thing. I like to put it like this. “I mean, i did see some guy drawing a cute mouse a few rows ahead of me, all i thought was th character would be cute with a high pitched voice. How the hell would i know that was going to create the happiest place on earth.”
My own, singular thought: Red speaks about immortals as if, alongside losing the ability to age/die, they've lost the ability to develop mentally. This especially when it comes to meeting up with friends you knew a decade ago. Just because you've not aged physically doesn't mean you won't have changed mentally in some form. Unless you're hiding at the bottom of a well for years at a time, your mental state WILL have changed. And even then, the simple experience of isolation with nothing to do will change you. Human minds are constantly shifting, and removing physical age from the equation doesn't change that fact. This also tends to mean, in my head, that immortals will all eventually go insane. And then maybe regain their sanity because insanity was boring. That sort of thing. Another thought concerning the issue in immersing oneself in social circles- why not become a teacher? The students you teach are often times constantly changing, and you almost never have one student for very long. Serving as a teacher is the perfect role for an immortal, because then they are always having to contend with new and different people and personalities, and that's not something that's easy to get apathetic about.
agreed. being a teacher (especially history teacher) would be a perfect role for an immortal Although i the "immortal not maturing despite having time of spare" is another trope too
I guess we all had that one teacher that already taught our parents and seems to have been on this school forever... I think nowadays, with social media and whatnot, it would be nearly impossible for an Immortal to be a part of social life and still fly under the radar.
I would say mentor or advisor. If you have been alive for a few thousand years, I expect you to be able to guess what country/leaders will be the next big deal. I would want to see an immortal seeing Washington start to fight the British, see it as similar to how Rome started, and go and advise and help Washington. Your students live their whole life is like a single class for you.
Red: We’re all gonna die someday every moment counts you don’t want to waste any time because it means you’ll have that much less time to do other things. Me, in the midst of my second and third viewings of many OSP videos: I feel personally attacked
But you enjoyed doing it, investing the time. If you accomplish all sorts of things, but you don't enjoy the process or results, weren't you better off just frittering your time away on something that brings you true happiness, or is at least fun?
The at too many historical events thing reminds me of Buffy. Some vampire claims to have been at the crucifixion and Spike says if every vamp who claimed to have been there had it'd have been like Woodstock
Interesting side note to that: it’s said that if every bit of wood passed off as a piece of “the true cross” was real, Jesus would have been crucified on a cross toughly 1000 feet tall.
I find it funny how Red is usually so optimistic but then in this suggests immortality is almost always a bad thing. Immortals may be fixed, but their memories, experiences and moods can still be fleeting.
If, imortality aside, they are still functionally human, I don't see how living "too long" by itself could make them eternally sad. They wouldn't get bored due to repetition any more than a normal human - as an extremely basic example if you eat your favourite meal every day you will get bored of it within a week, but if you mix it up just a couple dozen others you can enjoy eating that same meal throughout your entire life. Humans hate constant repetitiion, but it doesn't take much to break that. Not every experience has to be unique. As for connections, we're social by nature and I don't think different lifespans have much to do with it. That matters more on an intellectual level, but connections are usually emotional, and can be quite insidious. You don't usually choose to like or dislike people. It's just the natural outcome of interacting with people who make you feel one way or another. Put another way, if this was such a big issue, why do people love their pets, or make friends with the old and terminally ill? They know it's going to hurt. They've probably already been hurt the same way before. But they do it anyway. Meanwhile people seem to agree that deliberatly isolating yourself from connections is one of the worst things you can do for your mental health. Then consider that even within a human lifespan memory is constantly getting blurred and erased. Even if the immortal loses their loved ones, do you really think it's going to sting quite as much after a few decades? Centuries? Millenia? What about "unique" experiences. It won't matter that they've already done something if they don't even remember doing it the first time.
@@sm901ftw The main thing is scale, say instead of a puppy living a tenth your life span, it lives for less then a second. That friend you made is gone in the equivalent of a blink. To you, an entire human lifespan would have as much weight as a single social media post. Sure you can enjoy it, but it won't have the same weight. And the thing is, this will only get worse, as you live longer and longer they take up smaller and smaller fractions of your time. Until eventually the entire span of human history is just a blip. You can enjoy the moments sure, but they too will pass, and in the end you will be completely completely and utterly alone
@@bestaround3323 You don't seem to be considering the fact that an immortal would be living life one day at a time, at exactly the same speed as everyone else. Days may blur in hindsight, but when you're living them, they're just normal days. Maybe when you look back on a love that happened a few centuries ago, you'd see it as short, but when you're in love and living your life with someone, you cherish every minute just as much when you're twelve as when you're ninety, maybe even *more* when you're ninety. Life doesn't go by faster *while* you're living it!
@@CritterKeeper01 i disagree on this, time percepiton allready vary wildly within humans today, depending on how long you've lived and what you've experienced your preception of time might be completly different from someone elses. Time may start to move very quickly for an immortal compared to normal humans. A year may start to feel like a month or a week at some point depending on how long they've lived. Or perhaps it starts moving slower, perhaps everything seem to be going so tedious as if unmoving, who knows, time perception is wild. I say this as someone who's had similar experiences with time, months feel like weeks to me and it feels like i just move at a compeltly different pace than others therefore my experience of the world tend to differ to those around me.
Honestly kind of surprised that Doctor Who wasn't even mentioned. Personally I think that the Doctor is one of the most interesting ideas for a character in all fiction. In terms of his immortality, it's interesting in the sense that his memories and essence can't die while his personality and body can change at any moment, meaning that there is still a level of threat in the story. But of course the Doctor isn't just functionally immortal, he's also time traveller. For him the death of his loved ones isn't even an inevitability, for him it's already happened. And yet he's still an idealist who focuses on doing good for the present. He saves people despite the fact that as soon as he hops back into his TARDIS they're dead to him. The unique condition of the Doctor is why the episode Hide is so interesting to me. The complete disconnect between him and Clara is truly heartbreaking. Doctor Who has had more time than most pieces of media to develop its characters so it's hard for me to effectively analyze the Doctor in a single comment but I wish there were more people talking about it.
And how The Doctor came to the exact opposite conclusion as Red, that the worst thing an immortal could do is hang around with another immortal, as it leads to both of them drifting further and further from being able to care about 'mortals', each reinforcing a sense that nothing really matters at their scale beyond what they want to do. While keeping up relationships with mortals, even as much as it hurts to inevitably lose them, is the only way to keep yourself grounded enough to still care.
This comment was a wild ride because I got so excited about someone else talking about Doctor Who when it needed to be talked about and then thrown for a complete loop when I realized it was the Doctor you were talking about. Several of his key personality points are touched on in the video even though he isn't really mentioned, but what about Me? I've never seen immortality handled the way Me was handled. The fact her memory isn't limitless because no ones is is a wrinkle I've never seen done with immortals and I really want to see her discussed more.
And then the 10th Doctor does something truly heinous and horrifying to Ursula in "Love and Monsters" Ostensibly to save her life, The Doctor transfers her essence into a concrete tile. Now just a face set in concrete, she's doomed to live forever, barely able to interact with the world, waiting centuries for the concrete to finally erode and crumble to dust.
Hans Akkerman That entire episode is...bizarre. Like, “here’s the freelance writer’s episode!” But, she could still convince someone to basically assist her with suicide. Still, her real Horror is how she has NO agency, not that she’s functionally immortal. And she’s only existing for Random Londoner to have a girlfriend, not to preserve her life. ...anyway. I refuse to acknowledge that episode entirely.
I think the phrase “Time heals all wounds” is important to think about here. We naturally tend to diminish negative memories and enhance positive ones, hence nostalgia. So for an immortal the pain of losing a loved one would be diminished and the happiness of the time the immortal spent with that person would be enhanced within their memory. In the long arc of their life I think this would push them towards greater investment in the joys of life. The pain is fleeting but the joy lasts.
Time may heal all wounds, but when it's about to be cut open again, and relived I can see why they'd do batshit insane. Rhea from Three Houses definitely goes through this and then some.
@@ew275x That's the mindset of a certain immortal from the show Invincible. Gets married to a mortal and then later says something like "I do love her, but she's more like a pet to me." Which promptly pisses everyone off.
There’s also the question of memory, with Dr Who doing a character called Me who became immortal (with help from the Doctor) but kept a human memory, meaning she couldn’t remember most of her life and had to keep a massive library of diaries just so that it wasn’t forgotten
Yeah, human memory is barely enough for a human lifetime, let alone multiple. Imagine though, such an immortal would be one of the few humans who can truly experience things as if they were new. Go out and have a life for 1000 years while writing everything down in great detail, and afterwards just spend a hundred years reading through your own records, recalling your own forgotten memories.
@@mbartelsm Actually we have the capacity in our mind for a very large amount of memory. Most of the stuff you forget isn't lost forever it's moved to your subconscious and compartmentalised. You do forget stuff obviously, but the mind retains things you gained from those memories like opinion, personality traits, etc
@@joeblazer3429 I totally agree I recently had the weird experience of re-watching a show I hadn't watched since I was a kid and realized how much of my personality came from the main character
This is an increasing focus in Sanderson's Cosmere works, at least behind the scenes. Most immortals (by whatever method) have to either find a way to offload their memories, or their sanity suffers. It's an interesting take.
The flaw in your thesis is that an immortal would still live their lives at the exact same pace as a mortal would -- one day at a time. Great experiences are still great, loved ones are still with you until one of you dies or changes too much, you lose touch with old friends and meet new ones.Just like everyone else, an immortal loses loved ones and meets new ones. They start a career, get good at it, mentor younger collleagues, and retire from that job -- they just move on to another career after that. People seem to want to believe that immortality has to suck, but there's no reason it should be that different from just living life like everyone else!
Also many experiences can be great in repeat. Eating good food can always lift ones mood, even if you have eaten thousands of times up to this point. Or things like Sunsets and fresh winds don't diminish because you felt them before.
I come down here to see more things that agree with my conclusion because I get angry seeing all this "Death gives us meaning and being alive is scary" bullshit. It's not that complex a thought. I frankly find the idea of not dying to give my life *more* meaning, not less. If I knew I wasn't decaying from here on out in a slow crawl to the fucking dirt, I'd be more inclined to make some fun long term plans. Or yeah, live my life one day at a time. I mean I already spend my days trying to ignore death. If it's as bad as these people are saying, which I strongly believe it isn't, I would just be trading having to ignore continued life. Woohoo. I"ll trade one panic attack for another if it means I can eventually still succeed.
@@jubertalleremierez3783 Eh, I suppose I would rather live indefinitely than live forever. Some sort of escape clause would be nice. But a few thousand years would be nice!
I know that I don't think about the finite time I have left while enjoying myself at things. Or much at all really, apart from general future planning of resources for later in my life. So I can't imagine being confirmed immortal would change my day to day existence significantly at this point.
Another type: Ascended immortals - Immortals who realize they have an eternity to figure out how to enjoy immortality and eventually, after figuring things out, settle into a state where they'll be permanently satisfied. In real life, maybe in the future, posthuman immortality might become a thing.
I think as human we are really close to immortality and i belive we will achive it in the next 200 or so years... Now we only need to freeze ourselfs...
this is basically the mortal-turned-immortal-turned god. Time no longer matters, as it goes by so fast, while at the same time, they enjoy every moment. They may bring some things from the mortal world and turn them immortal. They could help their spouse and loved ones find the same immortality they have, and experience eternal bliss.
@@valletas well technically there is already a method of immortality however you will need to sacrifice a lot of people, and I mean A LOT OF PEOPLE. And also you're not immune to unnatural death and considering all the people that would die to keep you alive, which means at it's only a matter of time until someone kills you. However that means if you do the safety precaution correctly you'll be immortal forever...... ........ that is until the heat death of the universe of course.
I think there is another type of immortal: The Serial Pet Owner. Sort of like the immortal that befriends family lines, but along interests rather than heredity. The oscillate between low motivation "seeking" periods and high motivation "tag along" or "mentoring" periods. Imagine a Merlin who sought out an Arthur every generation because he loved watching leaders develop, or a tutor of music who traveled around looking for music proteges to train to enjoy whatever their magnum opus would be, sort of a serial mentor. Alternately, the immortal may just find some war orphan with a desperate thirst for revenge and teach him some badass mystic kung fu or the ability to control minds and observe what he does it it. Each "hero" they empower or tag along with gives them a unique journey, a specific version of the resolution to an issue they care about as each new pet discovers their own path. To the immortal it would kind of be like a generational serial story, but playing with problems and answers rather than lineage. Sure, the seasons are all a bit similar, but each journey allows them to reconnect with whatever specific aspect of humanity they cherish and observe a variety of answers they can compare and contrast with whatever answer they chose.
I thought of this as a scene in a story (or without a story, because I haven't plotted anything around it) where an immortal is explaining why they can't care about the mortal character, and the mortal calls them on it saying "I have a pet dog, Jed, they are my third dog. I loved Spot, and then he died and I mourned, and then I got Trixie, and I loved her, but she died and I mourned, and then Jed came along. I'm not asking to be best friends forever, but telling me we can't be friends at all because I'm gonna die is rather a dick move."
I've never heard anyone say "I'm not going to get another dog, my last one died of old age and now I can't imagine loving another dog" I imagine it would be the same for immortals
Yeah, to me the idea that you don't want to be immortal because you'll be sad when the people you love die isn't a really compelling reason not to want immortality. You don't stop wanting to have friends when you either move away or they die. Men and women don't all give up on love when their spouses die. You move on. The real fear should be getting used to everyone's deaths. And even then it's not much of a fear when you're used to it.
I still love the quote from Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. “Being immortal isn’t living forever, that’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everyone else dying.”
As compared to being young and having all your older relatives dying? Or being a grandparent and having your kids and grandkids die, perhaps in something like a natural disaster?
@@edisontrent618 Well, yes, that’s kind of the point. In those circumstances, you’d go through tragedy and grief, and it’s horrible. But immortality means that it’s inevitable. It’s not ‘you might live to see some family members die’ it’s ‘everyone you know, every face you see on the streets, every single person who has ever been in your life will be dead, dust and forgotten and you will still have forever to go’. No matter how hard you try, you will be surrounded by death and the only way to escape it would be to cut off all ties, have no connections, and forget everyone anyways. The quote points out that, from the immortal’s perspective, everyone is already on death’s door and withering away, and you’re forced to either experience infinite pain through the ages, or cut the last bit of humanity from yourself.
@@benjaminkingsley-jones7832 If that were true, then you would be arguing for suicide as a valid means to avoid feeling the pain of losing someone close to you or avoid continuing to feel that emotional pain after losing someone, instead of arguing for something like, I don't know, therapy and emotional self control and maturity. And that's before even getting into the False Dichotomy aspect of it. That there is only "happiness because you know you will die" or "infinite tragedy and grief if you know you will live". It completely ignores "moving on" as an option and spits on every person who has ever grieved their spouse and lived on to find love and happiness again as non-existent.
@@edisontrent618 well, as the video above pointed out, it gets increasingly difficult to keep one’s morals intact the longer they remain immortal. Even if no-one is close enough to them for it to effect them, there are still certain phenomena that cause grief. I forget the name, but there’s an effect where, if you know you could’ve helped but didn’t, or if you can’t feel a certain type of pain while others can, it makes you feel bad. (I.e. you hear about someone getting shot in a mugging gone wrong, and are hit with the realisation that, if that were you being mugged, no-one would’ve died) In the end, an immortal will either have to give up their morals and any notion of being good, or deal with personal heartbreak an infinite number of times.
One of the best quotes from Doctor Who I can say relates to this quite well. “Immortality isn’t living forever. It’s everyone you love dying around you.”
Some of the negatives associated with immortality, are projections from those who can only know a mortal perspective, and can only assume what an immortal life must be like. A lot of it is cautionary, to remind the reader that the lust for immortality is folly, that such a life must be cursed or wrong, mainly because desiring it is futile self destructive. We assume immortals will only either get stuck, or degenerate, from what we see as humanity’s flaws. Rarely do we consider that everlasting life could mean everlasting growth of self. For example, humans gain wisdom over time to help them grow emotionally, and better deal with trauma or tragedy. But stories always make immortals grow callous or indifferent to loss, they stop caring about the lives of others. But couldn’t someone with longer emotional growth learn to cherish the finite life of their friends and loved ones, and be able to mourn with minimal trauma. If there is no finish line, the journey is the goal, and thus experiencing as much of the journey as possible is the motivation.
Jack Harkness of Doctor Who and Torchwood fills this niche extremely well. He became an immortal as a young man, so he had a firm grounding in thinking like a mortal, but he lived longer than the universe itself yet continued to love and celebrate while still being so aware of how different he is.
This is probably due to a kind of envy that stems from looking at someone who has what you can never hope to. But since that person doesn't exist, they can take it away in subtle ways and no one bats an eye.
Well said. Much of the discussion around immortality smacks of sour grapes. "I can't be immortal, so clearly immortality is undesirable for... reasons." Like when red implies the "Cavalier immortal" is the result of writers not reckoning with centuries of grief and loss, as opposed the writers acknowledging that grief and loss naturally fade over time. I mean, "An immortal couldn't care for mortals, because they'll inevitably outlive them" has the same logic as "A human could never care for a dog, because humans lifespans are massively longer than dogs. The collective grief from outliving so many pets would leave them jaded or withdrawn." Is this an accurate assessment for human-dog relationships? Or do people generally come to terms with the deaths of people and animals they love after a period of mourning? If they do, why wouldn't an immortal also?
Red did mention that, when surrounded by other immortals, they tend to be more well adjusted. Thing is, a lot of these stories have the immortal be the only one they know that is immortal. They become fundamentally ALONE. As someone made the pet comparison, this would be like there are no other humans around you that you can empathize with, or that can empathize with you. Only pets. Smart pets, but still pets. No lifelong companions, not permanent fixtures, nothing. You are the fixture. Basically, immortality itself doesn’t suck. Immortality alone does. (And of course, immortality with caveats still has those to deal with.)
Some of my favorite immortals in literature are what I like to call "Immortals with a purpose." They devote their eternal life to an ongoing goal, like "defending the world from evil" (it sounds cliché but it works). They often function really well as important supporting characters who help the main character and may even have close ties to the main character.
To be fair, a thousand years was enough for people to go from killing others as revenge for stupidly petty things to not being able to do anything From religion dictating everything about life to it becoming almost meaningless You might still have a very old moral code you never left behind instead of being mean
One thing that i would like to see is an immortal who exists so past their own time that their body becomes unnatural to people. If you go back like 30000 years and see early humans (like Denisovan’s for example) they look strange. So seeing that alienation of an immortal as they become a living fossil would be a cool story
People a few hundred years ago were absolute midgets. I wonder if the human race will keep growing in height or if we've already found a goldilocks point.
@@doanale3344 well a few hundred years ago heights were pretty similar to today it was only during the industrial revolution or in particularly exploited countries that people that people were shorter for most of history humans have been about 178cm tall. I don’t think humans have really hit a goldilocks zone i think we’re too tall but if there were an upper limit people about 190cm to 195cm start getting health problems linked to their height and on average live shorter lives, primarily due to circulation issues
I'm extremely surprised that you didn't bring up Hob Gadling from The Sandman at all. Considering his extremely unique immortality story. Where he has the option to get rid of his immortality every 100 years, but he never does no matter what immortality based emotional state he goes through in that century. The idea of him being kind of positively blase about his immortality, due to the fact that he could give it up at anytime if he wants to. The option is always present for him and him alone. That to me is the ideal form immortality. Never Dying until you choose to die. And in Hob's case, just never really getting around to it.
The fact he chose to keep going even after his son died in a bar fight and endured every kind of hell imaginable really tells you what kind of guy he was.
In a way, super minor spoilter, that's basically the plot of "The Good Place." How network television green-lit a show about ethics and infinity, I'll never know.
I mean, it helps that he has a friend he meets up with every century (at least until the end of Sandman, anyhow)...though he chooses to keep going even when THAT character ends the current incarnation of themselves.
Oh, and there was that whole arc about various immortals and their reactions either to changing times or actually dying...all because Dream and Delirium seek out their long-lost brother. I like what Death said to the caveman guy who'd lived something like 50,000 years. “You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”
@@nehpets216 that would be hellish, I already have trouble telling yesterday apart from the day before, how on earth am I going to tell 1946 apart from 1879
@@femthingevelyn non ADHD people would be depressed remembering those faded times and interactions as pointless since so much repeats and so many losses with the time that had passed. ADHD people have a hard time telling if it was a day or a month ago that you spoke to someone, so you know each interaction was worth the time and effort even if it's hard to tell if this is the grandson or the old friend, time to catch up and be happy with the stories they can tell of what came to pass (whoops it was 5 generations ago, might as well get to know the family and try to make a note to swing by sooner next time)
@@bubblebubble7494 There is an episode of My little pony like this, a character while not immortal is out of time being awoken after 1000years of stasis. After dealing with the plot involving his and 6 friends return, his friends are all able to start new lives in this new time, but he isn't. So he tries to return to his old village, only to find it an archaeological site. And is told off when he tries to go back to living in his house and using his own stuff cause they are now "priceless relics".
I'm trying to slice that into a story I'm working on; the MC isn't exactly immortal, he died and is a spirit but he's got like 1,000 yrs to play with so he decides to travel and look after his family.
I scrolled for this. I'm *at least* 30% existential crisis by volume...... does this mean I'm immortal because if so I'm gonna get some compound interest going right now
The consequences of immortality makes me think of a series called "Ms. Vampire Who Lives in My Neighborhood". The vampire mentions having a friend who turned her family so they wouldn't die and leave her. They didn't mind being immortal. However, her father wished she'd turned him before he'd developed chronic back pains which, with him neither growing older nor younger, will be with him for the rest of eternity. Her mother similarly wishes she'd been turned when she had a few less wrinkles. And her little sister conversely wishes she'd gotten a few more years so she'd at least not spend all eternity flatter than an ironing board. If "immortality" means "forever at the stage and state you're in now", you better be careful just when you make that change.
I think there's another category: The Mature Immortal This is when an immortal has a specific job, or hobby that doesn't wear out with time. Theses immortal are pretty well adjusted and are usually inhumanly good and what ever it is they've dedicated their lives to. These immortals can go through a mid-life crisis if they don't need to guard the magic cup anymore, or something similar. I suppose we could also call this the "Workaholic Immortal." Anyway Red, great video as always.
@@arutka2000 Also any god of a skill. Such as Artemis. This also applies to any immortal who is part of a heavenly bureaucracy. For them the paperwork Literally never ends. (Example: The gold star of Venus)
@@turbowarrior2318 Yea, pretty much all Chinese Gods. Also, because these immortals often do one thing for all eternity, they can be comically clueless on anything that's not part of their department.
The inmortal who was in everything important. Uuugh. "Did you met Davinci? Nope" "Did you met Cleopatra? Nope" "Did you met Jesus? Nope" "Then, where were you?" "Busy, traveling on horseback or horrible carriages for months ir not years. And don't get me started on boats, half of them sunk more than the ones who arrived"
Can you imagine the excitement of every new descovery/invention? "Commercial flights?! Finally!!" "The microwave was the best thing they invented since the aquaduct, for real. I was there both times and I tell you it's makes life so much better"
@@pedroivantaveraferreira3037 Imagine the reclusive inmortal all confused now a days after being absent from society for 50 years and going "you all did what?" where is the soviet union? Who came up with the internet? Wait computers are like this now? Whats whit all this music? Where are the books now?
Imagine being a peasant or something for hundreds of years, finally making it to the present, having an interest in history, then when you bring up something you read people act as if you were personally there but really at the time you were just a simple potato farmer tending your potatoes.
Something red forgot to overlook is that as time goes on, people's lives tend to get longer, possibly providing for them a motivation to work to increase technological development and therefore the lives of their mortal peers, potentially turning them immortal as well
"Existence with nothing to strive for is no existence at all. A life free of debt? You naive fool! DEBT IS YOUR LIFE!" -Yatzhee while talking about Animal crossing Change "Debt" with "death" it's perfect
David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks" has an interesting version of immortality where there are a group of people whose bodies aren't immortal but their souls are. Basically, when they die, 49 days later they "wake up" in the body of a small child, usually a child with an illness who died, and take over living that child's life. It's basically reincarnation without the reset at death.This way, they have mental state of an immortal being, but they are still working on a clock. I think this is a pretty neat version of immortality because it gives the experience of living forever while also still having the idea that time will run out, at least for this life. For example, one being wakes up in the body of a peasant girl with an alcoholic mother and absent father, so she has to get to work using all the knowledge of her previous lives to get to a place of privilege or else spend a life in squalor. Plus, this also eliminates the problem of not connecting with humans because you still are aging the same with everyone around you. Another interesting tidbit is that these beings don't necessarily stay the same gender from life to life, but Mitchell doesn't really do anything with it.
The only problem with that is eventually the Immortals experience the same fatigue of being different people when you aren't. And eventually one of them is going to get tired of the amount of shitty lives they lived and decided to use their beyond age knowledge to just kill their way out of the problem once they have the ability to walk. And then if they play their cards right, they can manipulate events to try and take a specific body or area and set up a system where their new form will become a replacement of their old one directly, no questions asked because they amounted the power they needed to pull it off.
That's still actually kind of terrifying. Imagine your child being taken over a millennia old ghost person, yes they passed away but what's there now is not your child.
The Doctor: People like us, we go on too long. We forget what matters. The last thing we need is each other. We need the mayflies. See, the mayflies, they know more than we do. They know how beautiful and precious life is because it's fleeting. Look how Sam Swift made every last moment count, right to the gallows. Look how glad he is to be alive. I looked into your eyes and I saw my worst fears. Weariness. Emptiness.
An interesting take on the “immature immortal” trope, is having an immortality like in “daughters of Mnemosyne”, where their health status is also frozen in time. If they had a cough when they became immortal, they have it forever. They can regrow any limb when they “reset”, but only if they had it when they became immortal, otherwise they regenerate in full minus the limb. The main character has actually been miopic for hundreds of years, and if she got laser eye surgery, it would be undone the next day. Now, imagine a character who is bipolar and becomes immortal during a manic episode. It would be fun to watch him be all crazy at first and jumping from one thing to the next, but then it becomes sad/tragic when you realize that he literally cannot be any other way. His brain is forcing him to be in a forever manic state due to the nature of his immortality.
IIRC, vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are like that. When a person dies, a vampire, a kind of amorphous demon spirit, takes residence in their undead body, and it absorbs who they were _when they died,_ not the entirety of their character, freezing them in time. If a person died in a manic phase, their mania would imprint on the demon, and the demon would be manic forever. They also lacked the capacity for character development the way humans do it. Without proper biology, their brains aren't changing when they absorb new memories or experiences the way the human brain does. Without the demand to adapt forcing it upon them the only change they experience is the natural and very slow ageing process of vampires, as they slowly grow in power and intelligence over time.
I know you probably used the He out of habit, but the Immortals in that setting are all only Female if I recall correctly. IIRC if a Male gets hit by that effect then... Bad things tend to happen... It has been ages since I saw it though. Might be worth a re-watch
Kilo6Charlie yeah, in the show only women can become immortal, but I was speaking more on the style of immortality in general, not specific to the show. My bad for being too vague 😅
There's also "Hulk: The End", in which Bruce Banner - due to the Hulk - is literally unable to die, and has outlived *everyone* on the planet. It also contains the single most heartbreaking line I've ever heard from the Hulk, in response to Bruce trying to convince him to let them die, saying all their friends would be there. "NO! For years... forever... Hulk has listened to Banner, and Banner's friends, talking about how Hulk ruined Banner's life! Hulk made Banner's life! Banner was nothing before Hulk... nothing! ...Hulk doesn't want friends, because friends will hurt him. Everyone hurts him. Everyone hurts Hulk." And one that surprised me is an imageboard post about an ongoing campaign setting in which an Elven woman continually emerges as the BBEG because... she's trying to bring her human husband back to life. The OP mentioned it was something like *five* campaigns where she turned out to be the primary villain, and driven to the point that she'd wipe out entire languages to protect her magical notes. All to bring her waifu back to lifeu.
I remember hearing about that campaign with the elven woman somewhere. Wasn't it because the DM's party keep being murderhobo's or not taking the game seriously, so to punish them the DM created a BBEG that's completely stupid. Like she wanted to code her notes, but instead of making up a cipher she wrote them in dwarvish and then started genociding dwarves and everybody who spoke dwarvish.
Which makes “Hulk: The End” even more tragic is the last lines of “Hulk feels....cold” even thought Bruce had conspired to kill him he was still the one constant in his life, Hulk FINALLY got what he wanted but now there’s no one not even “puny Banner”.
Tolkien has several interesting takes on the concept: Wizards (Maiar (minor gods/angels in people suits)), elves, and ents. The woodland elves sing and drink and pass the time in fairly endless revelry, mixed with hunting/guarding (enough tension to keep things interesting). The Lothlorien elves exist in a timeless grace, artificially created by Galadriel's ring, so that doesn't completely count. The ents (who, like the Wizards, are Maiar, in this case in tree suits) live at a very slow pace, but also eventually tend to become more tree-like, eventually rooting down and possibly even mostly forgetting they're not a tree. Hence Treebeard's line "Some of those trees were my friends! A Wizard should know better!" A Wizard would know a Maiar in a tree form from a tree, Saruman just didn't care. The Wizards tended to go different ways: Radagast became a hermit who mainly only talks to animals, Gandalf seems closest to elves and essentially befriends bloodlines of other races (Brandobras Took, Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins being the best example), and Saruman just becomes more arrogant and dickish every century until he goes full ent, except instead of turning into a tree, he turns into a complete bell-end.
Yeah! And I mentioned this in my own comment, but I think it's neat how if you follow the thread of an old elf's life, you can really watch them age and become world weary. Tolkien was extremely thoughtful when writing about immortals, and I'm very glad for it, because it's fascinating!!
I always get angry whenever I read "A wizard should know better!". It's backstabbing someone who considers you a friend, has lost everything they cared about and are just waiting for an end.
A really fascinating case of an immortal character is in the Arknights side story "Who Is Real." A major part of the story is an immortal dragon-goddess artist named Dusk who fell in love with a mortal woman. When the mortal woman passed of old age but Dusk remained young, she was hit so hard by the grief that she painted an entire world where a copy of her lover lived among an entire village of false people. Dusk locked herself in the painting so she could be with her lover forever. The plot of the story involves Dusk's sister Nian contracting the protagonists to find Dusk and break her out of her self-imposed isolation, since Nian lived among mortals and saw so much more to enjoy with life and knew she needed to help Dusk return to the world of the living.
There’s a very specific kind of immortal that I really like: the groups of immortals who have been here since the beginning and don’t really view humans as a higher species, a trope most commonly found in stories with angels, demons, gods, and/or fae creatures. There are two subtypes here; 1. The immortals who see humans in the same way that we see bugs: small pests to be crushed if they get too annoying; and 2. The immortals that see humans the way we see pets: temporary and slightly lesser, but endearing and worth protecting. Good examples of these tropes can be found in the Amazon Prime show Good Omens, where the main two protagonists are an angel and a demon, are really close to each other, and both are part of the second subtype, and the antagonists are Heaven and Hell respectively and they both fall into the first category. It’s a fantastic clash of character ideals and honestly, both main characters are hilarious. I highly recommend it!
In the divinity: original sin 2 game, there is an entire race of immortals that predate mortal species and they can't get over how insignificant, primitive, ignorant, stupid, temporary and generally mortal the mortal races are.
He would be so broken if he became a Servant in Fate. Like you thought Heracles was OP with his God Hand? Imagine how bullshit Wu Kong could be with his x4 immortality + Buddha mode.
@@justas423 considering how much media he IS usually protrayed it, as I've never played/watched any of the fate series, it's rather impress if sad that Wukong isn't any of them.
Way of Immortality as taught by Subhuti Name wiped out of the Book of Death Eating Laozi's pills of immortality Eating the Peaches of Immortality Drinking the Wine of Immortality Bathed in the samadhi fires (which makes him impervious to damage rather than immortal, but same old, same old) So that's 6x immortal
"Killing Me / Killing You" is one of my favourite manga involving immortals. It's about a pair of dissimilar immortals living in a broken world (can't really describe it as post-apoc because it doesn't really revolve around the apocalypse, but both the immortals were disfigured/made immortal by it) and journeying together in attempts to find a way to die (not in a "we've lived too long" way, more a "the world sucks now and so does out immortality" way). On their journeys they end up fixing parts of the world partially accidentally, making friends and discoveries.
Immortals: What you call character arcs, I call mood swings.
That’s surprisingly powerful and that sounds like what some charismatic fourth wall breaking immortal villain souls say
If Deadpool lived to be a thousand.
@@TsulaAngenati2292 You really don't need to break the fourth wall to say this. I mean Red's example of immortals is just as cliché. Any immortal who's been around the block could have this opinion when trying to persuade them to side with you. Another uncomfortable saying would be similar: Knowledge is Power and Power Corrupts, this is why Ignorance is Bless and You can't handle the Truth.
@@JohnDoe-sx6iw that’s true, the reason I brought up fourth wall breaking is that I imagined them understanding they were in a story that’s been going on for a while and them pointing out the character arcs and using what they learned from reading their own story to mess with the charactersx
@@TsulaAngenati2292 That's basically if the universe is just an imaginary story made by the god(s) and an atheist is the character that realize that their in a story
Imagine being a new immortal. Like it's 2113 and you reveal your immortality and someone asks what it was like seeing the pyramids being build and you have to respond, "oh no, I was born in 1993. Phones were big back then, but they got small pretty quickly."
Or even worse, being an immortal who keeps missing things. "What was it like to watch the pyramids get built?" "Oh, I was in Japan at the time." "Well, what about the Renaissance? That was cool, right?" "Didn't see that either. I fell down a hole in Scotland and everyone assumed I was an enchanted well. It took 400 years to convince someone to help me get out."
@@brainderp808 ye
Was the renaissance a thing at the time? (chain)
@@ButWhyMe... ye
Was scotland a thing at the time?
@@ckdanny were wells a thing at the time?
When I try and conceive an immortal character, I think to a story my friend told me. He was watching lord of the rings for the first time, and at some point during fellowship a fly was bothering him. He swatted it, but it was ok. By Two Towers,he had swatted at it until it landed in a spider web, and yet the fly managed to fight off the spider and escape. At that point the fly had earned his respect, and he left it alone. And he said that he felt a sort of bond with the fly, as though it was on the journey of watching lord of the rings for the first time with him. He felt a sense of comradery, and respect, for the fly surviving such things. But at the end of the last movie, he found the fly dead. He felt a meaningful connection to something that had lived for such an inconceivably small fraction of his own life. Thats the sort of connection I'd consider an immortal having with the odd human.
That sounds exactly like an immortal story. The immortal remembers an event that happened, and "Oh, yeah. This one guy was there. He was cool."
This is underrated, and now I need to see a whole 4-season show of someone writing immortality like this, with a sprinkle of the 'tired immortal'.
At the risk of being a bummer, if it's the 1394th fly that you see escape a spider's web, would you still feel a connection to it?
@@thomasdjrasta Maybe, if you've seen millions of other flies fail, and seen a few hundred of the other flies that escaped do amazing things.
@@DarkeLourd Now that's probably me personally, but I would've stopped bothering to look if the fly was gonna escape the web or not waaaaaay before 1 million. :P
One immortal trope Red forgot to mention is "The Immortal Guardian", an immortal whose purpose is to forever guard something forever or until a condition is met.
And the “you’ll be reincarnated with all of your memories after each death.” Functionally immortal, but you kinda still age. Robots do this a lot.
Goblin or the nine-tailed fox (k-drama) in a nutshell
I am not sure but thats sounds like green knight in warhammer fantasy
This sounds like the beginning of a bad programming joke.
Literally just Don't Starve's story
"I mean, how many people have pointed out that Peter Pan is really kind of a nightmare?"
The author.
Yes this.
ignore me My favorite horror centric take on Peter Pan was “The Child Thief”; also really good art in the book
@@Dvergenlied oh memories. I bought that book a long time ago but never finished reading, bc it wasnt dark enough for me lol
@@iridescentdemon I didn't know about that one, but "Lost Boy" by Chrustina Henry, also a horror/dark take on Peter Pan, is a great book!
@@iridescentdemon also, pretty sure it would be dark enough for you since it's very bloody and brutal as well
Does anyone else think there's a contradiction between "if your life is infinite, you'll care less because you lose the urgency to engage with it moment to moment" and "if your relationships are temporary, you you'll care less because temporary things aren't worth worrying about,"? Like, I dont see how you reach both conclusions at the same time unless you go in looking for maximum angst and inhumanity. Kittens are extremely temporary compared to normal humans but we super care about them anyways. DMs pour hours into making one-shot games that will never be played again. I think i prefer the Doctor Who take on immortality, where they throw themselves deeply into relationships because they've been through the grieving process so often that they've come to terms with it and aren't afraid of it anymore. "Sure, Im going to be here thousands of years, but Dave is here _now_. In what other century will I ever get the chance to play Minecraft with Dave?"
Completely agree, and explained very well, thank you for this.
I haven't watched a lot of Doctor Who but based on what little I've seen and a lot more that I've heard, he seems like one of the best depictions of Immortality out there.
In a similar way, Gandalf has always been my favorite immortalish character, precisely because his long life lead him to find even more appreciation for life and people in general.
Thanks, Sydney, for pointing that out. Your comment should be pinned for its insight. Now, why didn't I think of that? Imagine immortality without such extremes of system down-regulation (SDR) as human beings more commonly experience. I'm not saying "have no SDR at all" but make it less of a potent force on an immortal person so that life doesn't lose its savor.
After all, part of insanity (and anhedonia) is the death of brain cells and the breaking of neuro-connections which would otherwise be there.
This. This exactly. We really do need more of this mindset when it comes to fictional immortality.
From Avengers: Age of Ultron
Ultron: They're [humanity] doomed
Vision: Yes. But a thing is not beautiful because it lasts.
While this is a good idea I feel like the doctor has an advantage due to his time travel
You get a sample of what it's like to be immortal by owning several pets throughout your life.
Especially if you own rats who are extremely intelligent, have unique personalities and live for about 2 years.
I've had fish, dogs, an iguana, a parakeet, and currently, a rabbit. It's sad when they die, but it's also learning about grief.
@@gojifan54gaming15 only a few pets in the family have died and I wasnt really a person then, too young or not even alive when it happened.
My cat Zippy and dog Sammy are getting older and I love both dearly to my heart. I don't think I'd last a week after they go.
you reminded me about the post where dogs think humans are elves
*Laughs in Omni-man*
I have dinner with my 91 year old grandparents every weekend, and they are happy wonderful people. Their friends are dying left and right, and when asked how they deal with it they tell people "If we mourned each of our friends we would never stop."
I feel like an immortal could hit that point pretty easily, and it's not necessarily some great feat of compartmentalizing. IDK how unique that is to them tho.
How much of that comes with knowing you'll die though? If you only have to live without someone for 10 years, that's alot less depressing then loving without them for all of time
@@jamieadams2589 Maybe a bit, but probably not much? I feel like people are rather good at getting desensitized to whatever is upsetting to them through repeated exposure if they don't get PTSD or something.
It might be heartbreaking the first few times, but by death 50 it's probably like a dog dying, and by death 500 it might be even easier.
I know my dogs and cat will die and then I will need to live a long, long time afterwards, but I still cherish them greatly. I will also morn them less than I morned my Mom, partially because I always knew I would massively outlive them and wasn't prepared for my Mom to go early.
If you were an immortal and every time you befriended someone or fell in love you started with the knowledge that they will die and you will move on, you might come off as patronizing but probably would be able to handle the death much better.
@@SpellingBeeWiner oh definitely. I just mean I don't think you can have both genuine human connections and not become crushingly mournful after a long time. Like you said, people basically become pets or like bird watching, fun and enjoyable but not really intimate
@@jamieadams2589 I don't know about that. I love the shit out of my cat and dogs, and care far less for my chickens.
I think we're totally capable of having deep, meaningful relationships we know are temporary. In some ways I feel like it could almost be easier.
An immortal could truly give themselves to someone, knowing that this is a fleeting moment they need to savor with as much intensity as possible.
And even if they grieved heavily, they could take a year or two to grieve and it would be inconsequential.
@@SpellingBeeWiner of course you do. I think we love for the temporary and incapable more then anyone else, but the relationship isn't nearly as intimate. If everyone is basically a pet, then you'll love them sure but you'd never connect with them. Hell, in a century or two, you provably couldn't even speak to them since language would move on so much so they'd be even more like a pet
There was an immortal character from Douglas Adams who made his goal to insult every being on the universe. Hilarious.
But each one only once, and in Alphabetical order.
@@PhilipTosh no, eventually he did it one planet at a time--He also lost his immortality after getting hit by Thor's hammer.
@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563 the loss of immortality bit is in And Another Thing which is sort of non-canon.
If you're wondering who he is his name is Bowerick Wowbagger the infinently prolonged and he appears in Life The Universe and Everything the third book in the Hitchhickers trilogy of five.
Hope that clears everything up
Did you mean: high schoolers
Ah Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. Hilarious indeed!
I know the immortal artist thing is depressing, but I just got the idea of an immortal author who smugly revels in the fact that because they technically will never die, their work will never become public domain no matter how old it is
Talk about Disney's worst nightmare.
Is that how public domain works?
@@ichimatsu13 AFAIK an author's work becomes public domain 70 years after their death
yeah, but they’d have to fake their death eventually to avoid raising suspicion (unless they live in a world where immortality is known and accepted)
@@esobelisk3110 good point (though I was kinda implying the latter)
Because of their long lifespans, they’re likely to be invested in certain ideas for a lot longer as well; their hyperfixations or deep passions are likely long lasting. I imagine if I were an immortal being, I’d be fascinated by the progression of mankind, genealogy, evolution... just sticking around to see what they’re going to do next would be endlessly fascinating. Yeah, maybe writing a bestselling book or becoming President wouldn’t feel as meaningful if soon everyone will forget you or bastardize your words or whatever else, but just being an impartial observer would be so cool.
Also acting as a kind of guardian angel, seeking coomon wellfare instead of individual ones, like helping during protests, going with green peace to save whales, being a source for a newspaper, helping poor people in need, rescuing dogs and cats. Think about the dogs and cats! Simply apreciating life is also fine, seeking ilumination, bathing yourself in sunshine and feeling the droplets of a light rain on your skin in a warm day of summer, and loving the world, that kinda thing.
Yeah, it opens up opportunities for projects that are simply unachievable on a human timesecale.
I personally found the Outsider from Dishonored to be a fascinating example of this - he used to be mortal, and he mostly just watched and, as he put it, “walked through the minds of generations“ - that must honestly be a fascinating position to be in.
Specially in the field of science, you can just keep achieving. If you keep your ear on the ground and keep learning and adapting, you can write a new culturally relevant book once society has changed sufficiently and you've gotten a new idea. Going through the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, the birth of the Internet, these are all very different lives, things only get boring if you don't account for what's new. If I was immortal I'd have had a blast witnessing the birth of the automobile, for example. And as for friendships, maybe you're not able to enjoy growing old with someone, but you can make friends of all ages, you can relate to every generation, and you can attain enough wealth over your lifetime that you never have to worry about not getting to meet someone, you can just invite Einstein to dinner.
Yeah. I'd love to just sit back and watch the world change. I'm always awed just thinking about how different things are now from when I was a kid. Like, I'm watching a video on a screen that fits in my pocket, on a device that is more powerful than the first huge ass desktop PC we owned. When I was a kid this was some fucking sci-fi shit.
Getting to watch the development of humanity and technology, getting to go out and explore space an see the universe... Immortality would be awesome. If I were and immortal in a story I'd be one of the characters she'd think was badly written and not well thought out by the author, because I'd be living my best life, lol.
I saw someone on tumblr suggest the idea of immortal characters dedicating their time to really niche and/or time consuming activities, like overseeing the domestication of a species or making trees grow in a way that they're effectively architecture
That seems feasible, and productive for an immortal.
@@alkirk6that actually works quite well
That gives me the idea of an antagonist immortal who is at odds with the protag because they just want a valuable stone that just makes you rich or something that doesn't help anyone else all by itself.
They are pretty chill with the protag and congratulates the protag beats them and possibly gets stuck.
Saying "Meh I'll just sleep it off" and never really hates anyone.
@@desadograisedrobot515 that would be interesting
I have a trio of immortals who all work for Nasa and are trying to get humanity to space. They all get very frustarted since the government keeps taking their funding for other stuff.
We are immortals for our cats, dogs and specially hamsters, yet we love them anyway. That's why I never really buy the "I'm so different from humans I can't feel anything for them". Come on man, pet the human.
But after awhile wouldn't it get old?
@@user-mh9dx7nz2r I think that love is one of those things that never gets old. I used to rescue animals and because of that experienced loads of loss... Yet I never wanted to stop doing it or thought the pain wasn't worth it. I would assume it would be the same with humans.
@@user-mh9dx7nz2r Of course not, he's immortal, he can't get old.
@@user-mh9dx7nz2r Eating food you like doesn't get old, neither do being with your loved ones or having pets.
You can grow tired of certain things or even certain people you used to love, but loving and enjoying things in general is not something any healthy human will "grow out of with enough time", if only because we're biologicaly wired to find enjoyment in certain experiences. There is no reason to assume it would be different with Immortals. Most likely they would simply forget about their past at some point, rather than loose meaning and hapiness.
I think with truly long lifespans we might get into that stage of no longer caring about the ephemerals, but I always feel that people set that number too low a 200 year old immortal has only lived a tad over two human lifetimes. And whilst there probably are immortals who fall into ennui that quickly (some humans do in less time) declaring that all immortals should be grappling with it rings untrue. The older they get the more I would expect them to grapple with this disconnection sure but at 400 they have barely had enough time to spend two years in each country on earth. On a different note, (and it's probably been done before ) I would like to see more examples of immortals in the super-immortal category trying to keep civilization alive or worriedly searching for a way they *can* die even if they don't want to use it yet as they realize that eventually the sun will die and they'd like to not be alone on a frozen meaningless rock stuck there for eternity
There is another type of immortality: the "death is still a thing but it is just a small annoyance" type, that is usually for video game protagonist
Regenerative imortality.
DARK SOULS in a nutshell
does "Oops, stuck in a time loop that activates everytime i die"
count as immortality?
@@Logan_Roman I'd call that more reincarnation (reincarnative?) immortality. Regenerative immortality implies never reaching a point you can call death in the first place.
@@green_pikmin Technically yes, because whenever you die, you don't actually die (which by definition makes it so you can't die). For a "fun" exploration I can only recommend the anime "Re:Zero", where that's basically the main character's super power.
Oblivious Immortal: If your character is over a century old and acts like a high schooler your audience might be a bit thrown.
Well, that's an unusual way to call out every D&D player who's played an Elf around me ever, Red.
My first two characters were Elven Rangers, both with pet doggos, who were both basically the same person as me. I do not appreciate this call out.
To be fair, it's very difficult to make a convincing character who got no further than level 1 after centuries then hit level 20 after just a year or two of adventuring.
I've written an immortal character.
But she regressed due to her isolation, and her previous mental trauma. Well. She wasn't alone per say, but she wasn't around particularly nice, or good people, and she was more kept there. She doesn't act like a high schooler, but she does have that type of high school girl surprise after meeting new people in over a thousand years, and is extremely protective of those who saved her.
I do like dnds reasoning for it though.
"what they don't tell you about elfs" on UA-cam is a great video (I think that is the name)
I’ll have you know that my elf dnd character acts like Ron Swanson so take that!
I’m surprised the reincarnated immortal was never brought up, immortals who are immortal through reincarnating keeping memories and all that. I was always found that interesting.
namely, almost every isekai anime. technically they don't become truly immortal but they get reincarnated and are damn hard to kill due to their OP skills.
The Star Touched Queen is a book that I thought did that well
Reincarnating in the same world, or transported to a different one? The latter is every isekai anime, but the former isn't too common. My favorite example is from the Confinement series by Lord Bung. The main character is a guy in his 20s that can reincarnate by just manifesting next to his corpse. This property makes him the perfect test dummy for throwing at monsters, and there's plenty of slapstick that ensues.
Closest thing to that idea is one i made myself
the character in question has turned into a natural calamity within the entire fictional multiverse; always entering a new universe every time they expire, never re-entering them.
If you know any anime or material that uses this type of idea, let me know. I've gotten a bit insane playing out the scenarios in my head for a long while now.
@@opaque3998 hawkman and hawkgirl are also imortals via reincarnation.
“So what now, Jack Sparrow? Are we to be two immortals locked in an epic battle until Judgement Day and the trumpets sound?”
“Or you could surrender.”
I was Thinking of that the whole time!! It's actually interesting how Jack treats the concept of immortality across the movies. Especially since you see him face it's ugliness in every single one of the movies.
Indeed!
@@grimmer-rd1mm that is why i love him so much
"Dormamu, I've come to bargain."
I have another idea.
Western immortals: "Woe is me! Oh, the curse of immortality! I lack genuine human connections, I lack family, all my friends and loved ones are dead!"
Chinese immortals: "Have you considered just being happy"
Edit: Guys I can only say "Daoist immortals are free from attachment and suffering" so many times. You're adding nothing if you go on about how losing your loved ones is painful and would ruin immortality. It doesn't affect the immortal bc they are immortal in the first place because they are free from attachment. I'm not able to give you a full education on Laozi, Zhuangzi, Liezi etc in a UA-cam comment section.
Western immortals:
"What part of all my friends are dead you not understand?"
@@augustuzmoon3814 Chinese immortals: "You have forever, make new friends"
@@S50Sinner
Western immortals:
"Making new friends it's like making a new dynasty it's hard and complicated okay?!"
@@augustuzmoon3814 Chinese immortals: "I've seen 13 dynasties, strong and beautiful, but transient nonetheless. I would not give up witnessing any one of them in order to die with another"
This back-and-forth was pretty great. I enjoyed it.
Imagin an immortal slacker.....
"You havn't cut the grass for 500 years!"
"No.... I know....."
"But it's really high now!"
"Yea.... I know..."
"So cut it!!!"
"No..... Im tired...."
"Look, the grass will be dead during that next winter/hot summer anyway, so why bother?"
@@pianoguy222 yep, thanks, I'll use that.
wow is this cut dialogue from good omens? lol
The immortal who just smokes weed all day and ingests media like it's water.
"Nah man, I'm just chillin.'"
See also: Wizzards with reality changing powers but are too lazy to truly use them.
“So, for the first century I’ll go easy on them. Lol them into a false sense of security and then when they think I’m not so bad. Bam! I’ll go full tyrant on them in the second century. After that I’ll disappear for a millennia and make them wonder if I ever existed to begin with. Just to come back and kill them all.” Quote from a Space Dictator seeking Immortality, Lord Freezer
You know that does sounds fun ngl
You know what. I thought about this line halfway into the video and laughed. Frieza is such an asshole and that's why he's such a good villian
Freezer had his priorities down
Immortality would suck if you were stuck on one spot forever
@@bleugreann1678 thats how dragonballs best villains work imo cell is also a great exsample
my problem with the whole "being immortal kinda sucks" trope is that it kind of always goes to that point without actually exploring why people would want to be immortal.
It's like i'm saying "i want chocolate" and the writer is my mom telling me "if you eat too much chocolate you'll get fat" and i'm like "yes i know but i still want some chocolate right now"
Yeah, honestly, I know it's realistic, but I'm 100% done with the angsty immortal trope, it's over done, it's boring, whoop de doo. I like the immortal creatures of DnD, their plots stretching the lifetimes of whole empires. I'm also sick of "All Gods are Assholes", like, sure they have flaws, but can we hop off their collective dicks, they've done a lot for us yah know?
@@atriumgamesmore4336 I'm not even certain the angsty and depressed immortal trope is actually realistic tbh.
It's probably more an offshot of fear of death that led us to create stories with plausible reasons why immortality would suck and death isn't so bad after all.
@@atriumgamesmore4336 to be fair, the "all gods are assholes" trope kinda started with actual gods.
@@poncho3326 Interesting idea, I've never thought of that
@@yonatanbeer3475 Less so in the original myths, imo, and more with us placing our modern sensibilities against their behavior. Even then, "all" is a massive exaggeration. Most Norse Gods are pretty alright, and most Olympians (excluding the obvious sexual assaulter and mass murderers) only have 1 or two bad stories about them, which is insane when you consider an immortal lifespan.
_Gilgamesh gets the plant of immortality he almost drowned for stolen by a snake_
*Gilgamesh:* "... _sigh_ Whelp. You can't win them all. It makes for a good learning experience, though."
*Back in Uruk:* "Welcome back, my king. How was the sear-"
*Gilgamesh:* _"Have every snake in the kingdom killed."_
Gil: Hmm, some dipshit goddess got my only friend dead huh... Make all the priest do stuff, make sure its bad
Oh fate
Now his snakeskin pants in his casual look in fate zero makes sense
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There is actually an anime called "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" that deals with exactly this. An immortal elf saved the world with a group of heroes, then went on to travel the world. When she comes back, 50 years have passed, and her friends are old and die soon. She realises that she never got to know them properly and has an existential crisis. The anime is about her trying to preserve the memory of her friends.
Ooooooo~ might give it a shot thx
I was just thinking of that
Glad I'm not the only one thinking of Frieren.
"I just want a normal life."
"My friend, you will have as many of those as you wish"
*Bites da dust intensifiles*
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"Because I find giving lower life-forms things they don't comprehend humorous. Also, you won the raffle, lmao."
I just imagine an immortal who got stuck in prison of some ancient civilization for some dumb reason and some archeologists discover the prison cell.
Immortal prisoner: finally! Feels like it's been twenty years since you guys have checked on me.
Archeologists: try 2000
Try 2000. There is a considerable time between what we call ancient and the rise of serious archealogists. (At least 1000 years, depending who you ask)
My brother made a graphic novel that had a character like that, only he was quite mad after all that time
totally using this in a dnd campaign thank you
In the last book of the W.A.R.P trilogy the big bad is some immortal dude who spend a good while buried in a crypt, and was only let out when some grave robbers tried to get some goodies (but instead got a fun surprise)
Immortal Prisoner:............f*%*%
I believe there's one more: the Tasked Immortal. This one's a bit strange. They circumvent all of the angst of immortality and lack of motivation by being bound by or taking on an obligation. Usually they're either mentor figures or some sort of leader, either autocratic or shadowy. They can be prone to being brutally pragmatic if the before mentioned morality starts to break down even if their mission is genuinely benevolent.
Imagine someone fighting the same threat through all time through every multiverse endlessly. I would imagine they would stop *feeling* heroic and end up just going through the motions (a little thought experiment inspired by Into the Breach). Or when they stop caring for individual humans but still want to better the station of humanity and end up working towards the goal of helping humanity from the perspective of an immortal (these usually show up in brighter, more cheerful stories but a counter example would be The God Emperor of Mankind)
Fate/Stay Night has a nice example on this, albeit it's not an immortal but rather an eternal afterlife.
One of the characters is a human of the modern days who lived his life as a real superhero, saving people, destroying supernatural threats without the action of the scary "Powers That Be" of the magical world and even stopping wars. He lived the life he wanted, being an hero and an example. Then he died because humans were still assholes, but he was fine with It, as long as It helped keeping the peace.
During his life he made a pact with a supernatural entity, so that rather than having his soul reincarnated he would become part of the Throne of Heroes, where the great figures of History were collected, being able to keep fighting for peace and saving people even after death. There is obviously a catch, and the catch is that he gets deployed in the most hellish landscape of war and destruction, but he isn't there to save, he is there to kill.
The entity can't meddle directly with the course of human history, but can influence it ever so slightly that it helps civilizations to stand and humanity to survive, and sends things like this guy to slaughter the remaining threats after shit already hit the fan. And so this guy is endlessly forced to kill over and over, for all eternity. TECHNICALLY he is fine with It, since he is indeed helping survivors, but he obviously develops a huge amount of angst from the absurd amount of people he has to kill and the deaths of innocents he keeps seeing without even being in the same plane of existence as them until they were butchered.
Yeah, it sucks. Sucks so much that it's main role in story is trying to undo that immortality to begin with. Obviously, there is also a catch here.
Regular show also had this with Skips; the sole reason he’s immortal is because he needs to beat Clorgbane every 159 years. He also needs to do a very specific ritual on his birthday in order to maintain his immortality, or the time babies take it away. Seems very foolish, as without Skips they can’t beat clorgbane, but what can you do?
I remember feeling really sad for Skips in the episode where he explains why he’s immortal, but I cannot help but admire his dedication to his friends in spite of it.
The knight guarding the Holy Grail in The Last Crusade comes to mind.
Jesus, he is probably the unluckiest of immortals! Stuck in a cave, no other interactions, and no food. Honestly that would break a lesser man to the point of insanity!
Sounds very Doctor Who-ish. Maybe not exactly as the Doctor is technically mortal but come on, for humans with a lifespan of 100 years top he's immortal.
This is a little bit of Manji from blade of the immortal. I haven't watched the video yet because I don't have time right now, but he's kinda cool with fighting other people who can kill him because his only real motivation is helping Rin and killing bad guys to make up for his past. It's a really manga I'm reading, but also there's a really cool live action movie of it too. Check it out, I don't think it's that big, at least where I am.
Fun fact, if you combine the immature, the walking textbook, the cavelier immortal, and a healthy helping of daddy issues you get one Lucifer Morningstar.
that's sooooo.... true.
which one lol
@@lucyandecember2843 From the TV show Lucifer.
Huh
Luci is my daddy
Immortals: Usually portrayed as threatening gods who will probably kill you
Skips: _works for a gumball machine in a park_
Oh my god my childhood just _slapped_ me in the face with nostalgia, holy gravy.
Lol, so true
Ye lol
Ah, the nostalgia
Did you forget that time he KILLED Rigby via arm-wrestle and arm-wrestled death to bring him back, he fits the description perfectly
My favorite kind of immortal is the “betcha can’t” immortal. I.e., someone who goes to see what the absolute limit of their immortality.
For science!
3x3 Eyes Anime.
That fool goes through hell
You can say the monkey king its ok
Just another day for most Citizens of Amber.
"How are you today miss?"
"i'm alright, tried blowing up my head, but it grew back so that's out. Gonna try walking into the frozen hellscape naked later. if it doesn't work it'll at least pass the time."
Queen Elizabeth: *sips tea furiously*
Qi Shi Huangdi: *Laser eyes*
Subjects: All hail queen Elizabeth _the Second_
Queen Elizabeth: *sips tea with even more zeal*
bruh her husband is a zombie
@@WritingNomad-PL Same as her daughter-in-law.
Bruh that woman has outlived God
14:54 Paradox is one of my favorite Immortals if only for how he describes how he became immortal. "I went mad for a time, but after a few millennia, I got bored of that and went sane. Very Sane." Just such a fun way to describe it.
That sounds a lot like a character from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Ben ten is just a good show
@@Oldtowns_is_tiredIt’s a good shows
Reminds me of Fujiwara no Mokou from Touhou Project. Basically, she’s lived for like 3000 years and after going through every human emotion in existence (even an undertale genocide run but irl) she kinda just chills, hangs around in the Bamboo Forest of the Lost (which she has memorized the layout of) and fights Kaguya Houraisan to the very temporary death at 9:20 in the evening every day
"Here's a list of the different types of immortality."
Sun Wukong: "Ooh, I have that one, and that one, and that one..."
I recall a story (which I believe Dungeons&Dragons directly referenced at one point) about a man who freed a genie from a bottle, and the genie granted him a wish as thanks. The man wished for immortality, so the genie turned him into a fish and he promptly suffocated, and thus he lives on forever as a cautionary tale.
Genies are jerks.
@@cybersketcher1130 DMs are jerks too
69 likes.
*NOICE*
I made an semi immortal guy named William who literally played Death, and they now can die an infinite number of times. He isn't really sad because my world has a metric butt ton of other god like people. Also gave a like to get you to 420.
Quite ironic that you have to tell us the tale because no one knows it. Guess the genie fked up... What happens if a genie doesn't fulfill the wish? 🤔
My favorite immortal trope is an ancient being who has somehow missed just about every textbook historical event ever and is consistently and unintentionally behind every single trend by decades or centuries. Their main goal in the story mostly is just trying to be a part of something cool
*Hero is losing the final battle against the strong bad guy*
Immortal: GO! I'll distract him, but you need to run! Live another day!
Immortal: *Just stands in front of the door for half an hour, blocking the path*
Bad guy: WHY ARENT YOU DEAD YET
@@kntyr237 do you want to explain yourself or….
Tank man 1986 should be a good one.
Just in a permanent state of living under a rock
@Henning that would be an awesome story! Definitely making a mental note of this ;)
This trope talk makes me think of the episode of Angel where he and Spike thought that Buffy was hooking up with some haughty jerk called, *The Immortal*
*Spoiler Alert* : It turns out it was just a rumor that Andrew started.
A potentially interesting way to get around the "outliving your family" thing is to make said character the patriachal/matriarchal guardian of their family line. Works better if you can make the family more of a clan structure, maybe.
Plot idea: a theatre troupe of immortals who have extremely gorey plays as they don't have to worry about death and just go ham at each other in fight scenes
I just imagined the "That's my horse" scene in Ed, Edd and Eddy but exponentially more violent
These are some really impressive special effects!
Then go off stage, muttering about the laundry
Imagine the they get so into it sometimes that the villain 'dies' to a random soldier or the hero gets 'killed' in a fight scene really early on, and they end up having to ad-lib the entire play.
I recommend you look up the Clive Barker short story "Sex, Death and Starshine."
But what about memory?
It seems that Immortality nearly always comes with the ability to remember everything from your life. What if you just had a normal human memory: you forget your time in Rome apart from a few key bits, you eventually heal from the loss of your loved one, you might not be technically goting to new places but I would happily go to the same amusement park every couple of years even if they don't add anything new.
I probably only remember about 10% of my trip to Switzerland, and that was last year. The time I went to Portugal as a child I only remember bits of the ferry to get there. And even that is mostly only kept in my mind by family members talking about it every now and then, if you didn't have people who live as long as you it would be all the more easy to forget.
Yeah I think its weird a lot of immortals are assumed to have the attention span to get jaded.
I think ppl would get jaded if they lost a lot of loved ones very rapidly; there just wouldn’t be the time to mourn and figure out feelings.
But if it’s spaced out over lifetimes there’s time to heal and recover from the loss; and with each iteration one learns how to mourn and make the best of the time we have with them.
I guess it CAN be frustrating if the immortal has been paying attention to the cycles of mistakes humanity makes; but also there would be no one who understands more how human it is to simply forget the lessons you learn.
One of the few that did something like this well was Gilgamesh in the Secrets of the Immortal Nicolas Flammel series. He is one of the first humans, and his immortality has very few limitations. The only real one is the weight of around 11,000 years and no ability to do magic has left him as basically an empty shell of a man. He can't even remember his own name half the time, let alone his sister or anything from his past outside of the occasional moments of surprising clarity. He does keep a journal, written in cuneiform, but as the writting fades, is lost, or worn away he continues to forget.
Yes, biological immortality (enternal youth, avoid swords and bullets) is essentially an upgrade to your immune system and dna repair. Your DNA has caps of junk data at the ends that deteriorate with every cell division and this is the real death by old age, what we call old age death is the immune system / body giving out. I see no reson why this would rewire or upgrade the brain to have perfect or near perfect memory for billions of years.
I'm only 21 and have forgotten many things but still have these wierd crystal clear moments (even without context) sprinkled from around 2 or 3 up to the present (super young memories are very fuzzy and low context, like bragging about being 4 to a person my mom was talking to in a driveway and nothing else about that day).
@@jasonreed7522 Imagine if you reached your early thousands, been through wars, famines, plagues and forgot them all....but still remembered bragging about being four years old. XD
This is exactly what happens to a human character in Doctor Who, when she gains biological immortality. She starts to live so long that she begins to forget who she is and her past, so she starts writing her memories down in journals, and eventually fills up a library or her own biographies. It even gets to the point where she doesn't remember her original name, and so she starts to go by the name Me. Really interesting concept
"Child immortal, which is always portrayed as bad and a walking tragedy."
Surprised Red didn't mention Claudia from "Interview with the Vampire." Part wish-fulfillment on Anne Rice's part after the untimely death of her daughter, nevertheless, Claudia in-story was turned into a vampire at a young age and the tragedy and terror of it is that her body is forever locked in that form while her mind ages. This causes her to develop intense body dysphoria as her body never matures or reflects her internal age, unable to engage in adult relations, and she's envious and resentful of adult women having the body and form she desires. in addition, as a predator with the appearance of a child, Claudia makes it easy to prey on others by eliciting adult sympathy, which makes creating child vampires a big no-no in the vampire world because they draw too much attention. There's also that scene in the movie where she had an episode of frustration and decided to rebel by cutting her doll-like curly hair down to the scalp, only to scream a second after in horror that her hair grew back in the exact same style as if nothing happened.
Yup that girl always gave me the creeps
On the other hand, The Childlike Empress from The Neverending Story seemed well adjusted... Or was she ultimately allowing the cyclic destruction of her empire so that she could meet a new friend?
@@jakeaurod Well in the Childlike Empress' case, it's implied in the story that she's some kind of 'goddess' in the form of a child, or the universe's equivalent to the Dalai Lama given the cyclical nature to her being. Not actually a child unwillingly given immortality.
I kept thinking about Claudia and the little girl vampire of the Dark Brotherhood called Babette in Skyrim during that part.
@@jakeaurod Yeah, she's /childlike/ not /a child/. She is, by the standard of her species with a total population of herself, an adult. But she's also the central pillar of fantasia, a place of magic and wonder that is built on the dreams of children. (and, if you've read the book....)
I liked the way Arcane handled this with Heimerdinger (who fits in the “not mortal” category as a Yordle and never really had to comprehend the idea of his own mortality, but still otherwise plays with immortal tropes quite a bit.)
He’s still worried about his friends’ deaths, but his literal inability to comprehend that 10 years is far too long for most humans to test something (let alone the terminally ill Viktor) ends up frustrating Jayce into kicking him off the Council-and Heimer’s Act 3 arc pretty much consists of learning just how much Zaun has changed for the worse since he last saw it while blissfully letting time pass by, but also just what good people can do with the threat of mortality over their heads.
Professor Paradox had a great quote on immortality:
Professor Paradox: "Los Soledad was built entirely on MY ingenious theory - a time tunnel utilizing the properties I discovered in quartz crystals which would allow us access to past and future events."
Kevin Levin: "Yeah, well, for a genius, it looks like you blew it."
Professor Paradox: "You don't know the half of it. Some tiny miscalculation on my part destabilized the experiment and ripped a hole in the fabric of reality. I was hurled into the event horizon. I must have spent one hundred-thousand years there. I didn't age or need to sleep or eat - just exist."
Kevin Levin: "Heh, sounds pretty boring."
Professor Paradox: "At first I went mad of course, but after a few millennia I got bored with that, too, and went sane - very sane. I began to learn. I now have total understanding of the space-time continuum, allowing me to travel anywhere and anywhen I want... within reason."
my man just got bored of madness
@@green_pikmin Professor Paradox is goated
@@green_pikmin I'm part of a plural system of over 20 people, due to shared memories time is retroactively 20 times longer and we got bored of madness.
ben "he doesn't have a time machine. he has a map."
"Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon" has some strange immortals in it.
The Gods are immortal 100% but their time on earth is limited. Their ageless perfect human body will die if it takes too much damage so when a God or goddess is in danger their children are truly afraid for them. But they do know if they 'die' that just means they return to heaven where they cant come back to the human world. so their goals are to have a good time with humans a long as possible. This sometimes causes issues with some mortals avoiding their God'd or Goddes's affection because they are mortal, but their God or Goddess just wants to enjoy the time they have with their favorite mortal. This is an actual scene where a character really hurts a Goddess's feelings because of that.
Dexter Adams yeah, that anime is actually pretty good, I like the manga. I just wish it had a better name, like fuck. I nearly didn’t watch it when I first heard about it cause the name was so cringe. And at that time in my life I watched just about any garbage generic anime so, that says a lot.
Damn you Bell! How dare you make Bestia cry!
@Instrumentality1000 it does have a 3rd season it comes out on October or November I forgot
@@clawso9014 yeah same, intresting lore, and thd whole show was alright but name makes me a bit dead inside, also its target audiance is definetly weebs
i mean, that's basically just Mortality with an afterlife or a Killable immortal
One more type of immortal: The Robot Immortal
Someone who's lived so long that it feels like they've experienced everything there is to experience, and reacts to stimuli automatically and out of context. Possibly as a side-effect of having memories well beyond the capacity of their brains.
So it's like taking a senile old person's automatic responses, but giving them a healthy body to perform them. In this way, they kinda act like NPCs, robots that are less people and more incredibly dense flowcharts. It's only when something happens to them that is truly new and unexpected that any aspect of sapience is observed.
My example for such a character are the demons in SMT games. They come back from death all the time and are intelligent, but the logic that they run on seems so insane and lacking in context except for the moments of quest lucidity where they DO act and talk like people. In some settings, that is the "humanity" that they crave from humans: the ability to NOT be NPCs.
A good example of this is Uncle Ford from Gravity Falls
Artificial immortal
I am so excited for SMTV
Not to be confused with Robotic Immortal, someone who is immortal because they are sustained by or are a machine.
“The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
Episode five of the Sandman show totally changed my perspective on all this. Hobs is such a fresh take on immortality to me, it’s surprising that I haven’t seen many stories like his. It’s a lovely attitude he has to his long life and I like thinking about it
Hob Gadling is my favorite immortal character. His character progression throughout the series.
Absolutely, so refreshing to think we might continually grow, continually change no matter how long we go on.
“Have you ever had the realization that you’re living at a high point?” No. No I have not
I had one while eating dorritos
That just means it is yet to come...
Unless you, like, die before then. Still though.
@@MASTERM016 Or life is unpredictable and you can surprise yourself on what "your best moment" even is.
Jusy enjoy it, we aren't immortals after all ;)
My life has been at a very slow decline for years now, I can't tell if I've hit rock bottom yet or even if I've gone passed it and didn't blink
I actually laughed out loud when she asked that, like bro I’m stuck at rock bottom.
"If you can't conquer sleep, why do you think you can conquer death?"
LMAO that is a good one.
Thousands of years old, and yet the burn is still hot.
Your millions of years old, and you still cannot sleep.
I am convinced that the narrative of "death is a natural thing and being immortal would suck." is being pushed by vampires who don't want everyone to live forever.
I am very embarrassed to show off my own work this way but your comment made me think of the way one of my protagonists, a sincerely Catholic vampire (yes) thinks about his own immortality at the beginning of the story (translated from my native French) : "If death would one day decide to take him away, it would be by whim, on a bad roll of dice of fate, far away from the peaceful dignity of the cycle to which obeyed every other living thing in this world." Like, the guy can literally only die if he gets lost in the countryside at night and can't manage to get a roof over his head before the next clear dawn. Which is rather silly and sad.
Also, yeah, elitist, self-important vampires using propaganda, that definitely adds up.
I'm sorry to do this to ya, but the Dhampir hit squad is rapidly approaching your location. You know too much.
Eragon has an interesting thing, the elves have extremely long lifespans, an inherent gift for magic, and full knowledge of their “true name” or the embodiment of their self by which someone else can have full control of them. Eragon a human is there to lead and when meeting the forger he asks, “why forge when you can instantly complete it with magic?” The reply, “the endpoint is not my goal, but the journey to get there. If I just used magic to do this my life would be meaningless and without the satisfaction of knowing I did this by my own hand.” She is extreme, but other elves focus on gardens, making houses literally out(inside of) of trees(magically growing trees into the shapes they want), studying magic, or the arts.
Yeah.
But, isn’t it like everythinf has a true name, and isn’t that like, the basis for magic? It wasn’t only elves with true names,
@@richardgibson8403 I think the idea is that they're the only ones who have full knowledge of their own true names, so they have full self-knowledge and also can't be manipulated through self-delusion or inadequate understanding of oneself, the way other creatures can...?
I would like to also mention how the Big Bad, King Galbartorix, sought to criminalize the magical language of the elves in order to basically enslave and reign their power since that is the Elves native language. If you can't use your language, what good is it?
Completely forgot I had read this series, thank you for reintroducing such a great book back into my life : )
Might have to reread this, I was trying to remember his cousins name and thought it was Rohan, but that's lotr
A take on Immortality I found interesting was with the character of Me in _Doctor Who._
Me had lived so long that the capacity of her own memory had been reached, so had taken to writing down her memories in books and building a library filled with them for future reference.
As _Doctor Who_ was a time travel show, the main characters would encounter her at a couple of different points in history, Me having got there the long way round. Upon being reintroduced to The Doctor's companion, Clara, Me says something along the lines of "I have such fond memories of you, I look forward to reading them" Indicating that although for the time-traveling Clara their initial meeting happened a few weeks ago and was kind of a big deal for her, for Me it was so long ago and had been swamped by all the experiences she had since then, it wasn't even a memory, thus crystallising the disconnect between mortals and immortals.
There's a solo journaling game based on this kind of "immortality-with-limited-memory", called Thousand Year Old Vampire, exploring characters who loses pieces of their identity as the years wear on.
When you mentioned the immortals relating to a family, I had the image of a crazy cat lady - except the crazy cat Lady is immortal, and the cats are humans. Other immortals keep encouraging her to make real friends and connections, but she just keeps trying to optimize the happiness of her pets (showering them with toys, petting, human nip, and new friends.) I would actually be somewhat surprised if someone didn't already make a story of same kind with this same idea.
The Doctor with his companions.
that's the baseline relationship for the longer lived races in D&D interacting with shorter lived ones, a dwarf isn't so much your friend as a friend of your family, an elf may or may not be able to process the concept that you are a person (this leads to a lot of internal issues for them since it's kiiiinda a big schism point), and fey and the like can get to the point where they have gotten used to not being able to find the right-shaped kind of mortal when they go looking for someone to run an errand for them and just sorta consider learning the relevant language/culture/etc as part of the process of introducing yourself.
so an incredibly loyal dwarf is literally the standard when it comes to the ones that actually put up with humans and the like and an elf raising humans/etc as a sort of animal husbandry is by no means out of the question so a "crazy cat lady" situation isn't much of a stretch from there, especially with how often elves just plain don't like other elves.
fey/etc picking favorites among mortal species is the standard for the ones you can actually interact with, but you have no idea what percentage and/or demographic of their population that is.
@@evernewb2073 My D&D warlock's patron was an archfey that was basically playing a long game of Sims with his family.
A very interesting concept.
*human nip*
I'd love to see a story about an immortal who basically acts as a secret chronicler for their family lineage, watching them in secret and documenting their progress
This is a (relatively small) plot point in Queen of the Dammed. The book.
@@galilea723 that's like my favorite thing in that book. The sheer awe I felt was just incredible
Year 632: Dan's grandson persists in being the absolute worst. I narrowly avoided being found out at the family gathering when Katy recognised me from a family portrait with her great-grandfather. Thankfully, her announcement that I am immortal turned out to be a "meme", a new form of joke. Wendy's great-grandchildren are all just as stupid as would be expected. I look forward to seeing Jennifer's "gay" wedding, a concept that delights me.
an immortal stalker? that's new!
the T in "immortal" is silent
@@hayatobun but it is still there
One gripe I have about people writing immortals is that they're always from the accursed perspective, as if one cannot find joy in life without the impending doom of death. Important milestones in life don't have to be unique in "I did it once", they can also be "I did it once when that war was going on" or based on a routine, or a schedule. Fact is, we can't comprehend how an immortal would feel like living through the ages, but I personally find amalgamating most of them under "oh dear, i desire death, immortality is a curse" quite disappointing, and is one reason I guess why I enjoy vampires, because they relish their immortality instead of cursing it.
I call that the Walter Jameson syndrome, after a character in an old Twilight Zone ep. He was immortal and hated it. Good show, watch it.
This is why one of my favourite immortal characters is the villain from a book series. Almost everyone else his age is depressed and carrying on out of some sense of duty, but he's just living his life, having fun and occasionally getting obssessed in some new thing. Causing chaos for everyone and continuing his search for understanding the natural world (and also spreading fear in hopes that people will learn how to appreciate life from it). He's not even concerned about dying. He just hopes that it's epic.
@@crypticcryptid4702 what book series is that?
@@crypticcryptid4702 , name?
I’m writing a character that’s exactly like that, except there’s a reason. He’s a kid, sixteen years old. and the only person being immortal. Which means any friend you make and any person you meet are inevitably going to pass away before you. While you, are going to watch them fade away without doing anything about it. Which is why this character, although at first he enjoyed being immortal and even found it fun, now despises it. This made him push other people away and even make a vow with himself that he’s never going to get attached again. Keep in mind he’s a kid, 16 years old, and he still hasn’t felt the long term effect his immortality would have mentally. Yet he still saw other people die, like his friend because of an illness, and even his parents who were part of a cult like Community disappeared. All this whole he’s being hunted down by a secret organization plus a girl from said cult is trying to find a way to kill him because a prophecy said if she doesn’t he may cause a war that destroys the earth. Depending on what story you are trying to tell, yes immortality can be a curse.
I mean even without all the horrible circumstances, I’m writing this story based on a feeling I’ve had. A feeling that seeing people that I love around me dying , somehow scares me more than me dying. But yeah idk, atleast for me if I was immortal I’d consider that pure torture if there’s no other immortal people, and even so I’m pretty sure you’ll eventually lose all motivation without the urgency of “Damm one day I’m gonna die so let me make the most of it” sorry for getting too deep ima go now 💀
The thing is... even if you have infinite time to do whatever you want, your goals will just keep changing over time. Especially because this 'I need to stick to this because I only have so many tries at something new if I ever want to be good at it'- alarm clock thing put on us (the 'biological clock', the 'you need a stable job by 25', the 'you need to start doing __ so you can do it long enough to reap its benefits', the 'this person started ___ at a younger age so you'll never get close to their proficiency no matter what you do') fading away would make my life so much better. I would argue that being immortal makes 'living in the moment' easier, not harder, because you don't have to think about the future unless you really want to. No matter how much time you have to cross things from your bucket list, the rate at which new things will appear on it will always be quicker than you can follow. You can take breaks whenever you want. Just study something extremely niche and find out everything there is about it. Who cares if I'm sick of it a thousand years down the line? I'll just start over with something else entirely. And oh, the great milestones of (pop) culture alone.
You can also have an Aziraphael-Crowley situation, where the immortals get really attached to humanity as a whole and are constantly marveling at humans and their inventions/creations/advancements... they get attached to people and places but know that everything passes. Granted, they were never human to begin with, but theoretically you could have a human immortal take the same approach after a few centuries.
I think that's covered under that endgame "Inhuman Immortal," really.
Adam from Gene Doucette's immortal series was pretty this. The guy was born during the tail end of the last ice age so he had a strong appreciation for the whole civilization thing in all of its incarnations.
The series also made jab at the trope of "immortal knew all the historical figures, and witnessed all the important events" trope. Basically Adam was an alcoholic who never let the truth get in the way of a good tale, and openly admitted to having grey spots in his memory from all the brain cells he killed over the years, so he's not a very reliable narrator. On top of that if you know anything about history you realize that some of the events he claimed to be part of happened at the same time on different ends of the planet.
Doctor Who did that first.
Big Hero 6 song intensifies
I dont entirely like that type. Mainly since it tends to over glorify only a couple of facets of reality and have this immortal ignore a huge amount of things that may be wondrous that societies in the fiction may not be aware of, may not focus on, or just not value. Just something that comes across as rather culturally relative?
Red: *talks about death as a deadline that motivates people*
Me: And then there's such a thing as time blindness. Forget about the eventual "time to die:" it's harder to process any sort of time beyond "now" and "not now," resulting in such serious problems as perpetual procrastination anyway. Maybe I should write more immortal characters. It seems I have some personal experience, even as a mortal myself....
Yes, you should definitely get around to that one day.
You know, once you have some time to spare and wrapped up whatever keeps you busy right now and wasn't it supposed to still be 2020?
Well most people with such mindset usually never get to writing it, so we get a lot of immortal having a mental breakdown kind of story (which is funny since they had forever to get over it).
So, basically life during quarantine?
Ooh same! Imagine the absolute frustration that is being an immortal with untreated ADHD/ADD. Lifetimes of unfinished projects; half learned instruments, skills and languages, knowing that they genuinely do have all the time in the world and yet for all that power, cannot commit to anything because they can always come back to it later.
Immortals sinking lifetimes into mindless skinner-box games or spending eternity doom scrolling because they can afford to waste time.
Yes, you may do it tomorrow... but now there are other matters that take precedence! Like have you watched Lord of the Rings, if you have, then watch again and again and again till your life is filled with regret and longing for what could have been. Nice day to you sir or night- I don’t know where you come from so I will just wish you goodness in all of the days spectrums.
Red: Here are the different types of immortals!
Everyone in the comments: There is another.
The one with the vice who always tries to find that one person to sexually harass every time they reincarnate, turning it into a romance story told in HR departments.
@@sasukeuchiha998 Strad?
@@Mailed-Knight I was gonna say every pervy anime protagonist. But no, Melodias if you ever heard of him.
@@sasukeuchiha998 cursed* to find that one person to sexually harass. Also the reincarnating type could be an immortal classification of its own as well.
@@sasukeuchiha998 hey cut the guy some slack, if u had to watch the one you love 100+ times only to be reincarnated to fall in love with u again u might become that weird too. also blame fan service for it
One aspect that I don't think has ever been covered is the issue of memory. I'm in my 50's and I can't remember much of my childhood and nobody seems to have that many memorable events in their old age as it tends to be more of the same. It seems to me that there is a race between boredom and forgetfullness. Do we forget fast enough that we would never get bored enough to want to kill ourselves if we were immortal? I'm thinking yes.
Oh my god thank you, this is the one thing that never, ever gets pointed out in any story I’ve read with immortals. Like dude, how the hell can you remember the blacksmith’s name on a street four blocks from a house you lived in 650 years ago? When i can’t remember my own neighber’s name from two years ago. Also, another thing that bugs me is the, master of 100 different skills, like, sure, you might know a lot of stuff, but there is no way you can speak 23 languages, play 6 instruments, and is the greatest artist in history. One more thing is the whole famous place/person thing. I like to put it like this.
“I mean, i did see some guy drawing a cute mouse a few rows ahead of me, all i thought was th character would be cute with a high pitched voice. How the hell would i know that was going to create the happiest place on earth.”
My own, singular thought: Red speaks about immortals as if, alongside losing the ability to age/die, they've lost the ability to develop mentally. This especially when it comes to meeting up with friends you knew a decade ago. Just because you've not aged physically doesn't mean you won't have changed mentally in some form. Unless you're hiding at the bottom of a well for years at a time, your mental state WILL have changed. And even then, the simple experience of isolation with nothing to do will change you. Human minds are constantly shifting, and removing physical age from the equation doesn't change that fact.
This also tends to mean, in my head, that immortals will all eventually go insane. And then maybe regain their sanity because insanity was boring. That sort of thing.
Another thought concerning the issue in immersing oneself in social circles- why not become a teacher? The students you teach are often times constantly changing, and you almost never have one student for very long. Serving as a teacher is the perfect role for an immortal, because then they are always having to contend with new and different people and personalities, and that's not something that's easy to get apathetic about.
agreed. being a teacher (especially history teacher) would be a perfect role for an immortal
Although i the "immortal not maturing despite having time of spare" is another trope too
I guess we all had that one teacher that already taught our parents and seems to have been on this school forever...
I think nowadays, with social media and whatnot, it would be nearly impossible for an Immortal to be a part of social life and still fly under the radar.
I would say mentor or advisor. If you have been alive for a few thousand years, I expect you to be able to guess what country/leaders will be the next big deal. I would want to see an immortal seeing Washington start to fight the British, see it as similar to how Rome started, and go and advise and help Washington. Your students live their whole life is like a single class for you.
@@calebkirschbaum8158 I've actually got a character that's basically exactly that in the narrative I'm working on currently.
Isn't that Chiron's whole deal?
Red: We’re all gonna die someday every moment counts you don’t want to waste any time because it means you’ll have that much less time to do other things.
Me, in the midst of my second and third viewings of many OSP videos: I feel personally attacked
But you enjoyed doing it, investing the time. If you accomplish all sorts of things, but you don't enjoy the process or results, weren't you better off just frittering your time away on something that brings you true happiness, or is at least fun?
MOMENTO MORI
Haha big mood
Yeah, I was like:
"LOL, that isn't working for me."
The at too many historical events thing reminds me of Buffy. Some vampire claims to have been at the crucifixion and Spike says if every vamp who claimed to have been there had it'd have been like Woodstock
Interesting side note to that: it’s said that if every bit of wood passed off as a piece of “the true cross” was real, Jesus would have been crucified on a cross toughly 1000 feet tall.
@@RamBam3000 Evangelion noises intensify
I find it funny how Red is usually so optimistic but then in this suggests immortality is almost always a bad thing. Immortals may be fixed, but their memories, experiences and moods can still be fleeting.
If, imortality aside, they are still functionally human, I don't see how living "too long" by itself could make them eternally sad. They wouldn't get bored due to repetition any more than a normal human - as an extremely basic example if you eat your favourite meal every day you will get bored of it within a week, but if you mix it up just a couple dozen others you can enjoy eating that same meal throughout your entire life. Humans hate constant repetitiion, but it doesn't take much to break that. Not every experience has to be unique.
As for connections, we're social by nature and I don't think different lifespans have much to do with it. That matters more on an intellectual level, but connections are usually emotional, and can be quite insidious. You don't usually choose to like or dislike people. It's just the natural outcome of interacting with people who make you feel one way or another. Put another way, if this was such a big issue, why do people love their pets, or make friends with the old and terminally ill? They know it's going to hurt. They've probably already been hurt the same way before. But they do it anyway. Meanwhile people seem to agree that deliberatly isolating yourself from connections is one of the worst things you can do for your mental health.
Then consider that even within a human lifespan memory is constantly getting blurred and erased. Even if the immortal loses their loved ones, do you really think it's going to sting quite as much after a few decades? Centuries? Millenia? What about "unique" experiences. It won't matter that they've already done something if they don't even remember doing it the first time.
@@sm901ftw The main thing is scale, say instead of a puppy living a tenth your life span, it lives for less then a second. That friend you made is gone in the equivalent of a blink. To you, an entire human lifespan would have as much weight as a single social media post. Sure you can enjoy it, but it won't have the same weight. And the thing is, this will only get worse, as you live longer and longer they take up smaller and smaller fractions of your time. Until eventually the entire span of human history is just a blip.
You can enjoy the moments sure, but they too will pass, and in the end you will be completely completely and utterly alone
@@bestaround3323 You don't seem to be considering the fact that an immortal would be living life one day at a time, at exactly the same speed as everyone else. Days may blur in hindsight, but when you're living them, they're just normal days. Maybe when you look back on a love that happened a few centuries ago, you'd see it as short, but when you're in love and living your life with someone, you cherish every minute just as much when you're twelve as when you're ninety, maybe even *more* when you're ninety. Life doesn't go by faster *while* you're living it!
@@CritterKeeper01 i disagree on this, time percepiton allready vary wildly within humans today, depending on how long you've lived and what you've experienced your preception of time might be completly different from someone elses.
Time may start to move very quickly for an immortal compared to normal humans. A year may start to feel like a month or a week at some point depending on how long they've lived. Or perhaps it starts moving slower, perhaps everything seem to be going so tedious as if unmoving, who knows, time perception is wild.
I say this as someone who's had similar experiences with time, months feel like weeks to me and it feels like i just move at a compeltly different pace than others therefore my experience of the world tend to differ to those around me.
@@lucyandecember2843 But would time perception change for an immortal who stays physically the same?
Honestly kind of surprised that Doctor Who wasn't even mentioned. Personally I think that the Doctor is one of the most interesting ideas for a character in all fiction. In terms of his immortality, it's interesting in the sense that his memories and essence can't die while his personality and body can change at any moment, meaning that there is still a level of threat in the story. But of course the Doctor isn't just functionally immortal, he's also time traveller. For him the death of his loved ones isn't even an inevitability, for him it's already happened. And yet he's still an idealist who focuses on doing good for the present. He saves people despite the fact that as soon as he hops back into his TARDIS they're dead to him. The unique condition of the Doctor is why the episode Hide is so interesting to me. The complete disconnect between him and Clara is truly heartbreaking. Doctor Who has had more time than most pieces of media to develop its characters so it's hard for me to effectively analyze the Doctor in a single comment but I wish there were more people talking about it.
And how The Doctor came to the exact opposite conclusion as Red, that the worst thing an immortal could do is hang around with another immortal, as it leads to both of them drifting further and further from being able to care about 'mortals', each reinforcing a sense that nothing really matters at their scale beyond what they want to do.
While keeping up relationships with mortals, even as much as it hurts to inevitably lose them, is the only way to keep yourself grounded enough to still care.
This comment was a wild ride because I got so excited about someone else talking about Doctor Who when it needed to be talked about and then thrown for a complete loop when I realized it was the Doctor you were talking about. Several of his key personality points are touched on in the video even though he isn't really mentioned, but what about Me? I've never seen immortality handled the way Me was handled. The fact her memory isn't limitless because no ones is is a wrinkle I've never seen done with immortals and I really want to see her discussed more.
Snipper Joey Honestly, same.
And then the 10th Doctor does something truly heinous and horrifying to Ursula in "Love and Monsters" Ostensibly to save her life, The Doctor transfers her essence into a concrete tile. Now just a face set in concrete, she's doomed to live forever, barely able to interact with the world, waiting centuries for the concrete to finally erode and crumble to dust.
Hans Akkerman
That entire episode is...bizarre. Like, “here’s the freelance writer’s episode!”
But, she could still convince someone to basically assist her with suicide. Still, her real Horror is how she has NO agency, not that she’s functionally immortal. And she’s only existing for Random Londoner to have a girlfriend, not to preserve her life.
...anyway. I refuse to acknowledge that episode entirely.
I think the phrase “Time heals all wounds” is important to think about here. We naturally tend to diminish negative memories and enhance positive ones, hence nostalgia. So for an immortal the pain of losing a loved one would be diminished and the happiness of the time the immortal spent with that person would be enhanced within their memory. In the long arc of their life I think this would push them towards greater investment in the joys of life. The pain is fleeting but the joy lasts.
Time may heal all wounds, but when it's about to be cut open again, and relived I can see why they'd do batshit insane. Rhea from Three Houses definitely goes through this and then some.
@@mrsuperheatran2794 Don't forget hatred, It's fires can be mitigated but never extinguished.
Also I mean most people watch their loved ones and pets die before they die and they mostly seem fine? Would be cool if there was a way to avoid it.
@@ew275x That's the mindset of a certain immortal from the show Invincible. Gets married to a mortal and then later says something like "I do love her, but she's more like a pet to me." Which promptly pisses everyone off.
@@ndstumme It's strongly implied that he was deluding himself when he said that. Still a shitty thing to say.
There’s also the question of memory, with Dr Who doing a character called Me who became immortal (with help from the Doctor) but kept a human memory, meaning she couldn’t remember most of her life and had to keep a massive library of diaries just so that it wasn’t forgotten
Oshildr is her name. She refers to herself as Me because that's easier though.
Yeah, human memory is barely enough for a human lifetime, let alone multiple.
Imagine though, such an immortal would be one of the few humans who can truly experience things as if they were new. Go out and have a life for 1000 years while writing everything down in great detail, and afterwards just spend a hundred years reading through your own records, recalling your own forgotten memories.
@@mbartelsm Actually we have the capacity in our mind for a very large amount of memory. Most of the stuff you forget isn't lost forever it's moved to your subconscious and compartmentalised. You do forget stuff obviously, but the mind retains things you gained from those memories like opinion, personality traits, etc
@@joeblazer3429 I totally agree I recently had the weird experience of re-watching a show I hadn't watched since I was a kid and realized how much of my personality came from the main character
This is an increasing focus in Sanderson's Cosmere works, at least behind the scenes. Most immortals (by whatever method) have to either find a way to offload their memories, or their sanity suffers. It's an interesting take.
The flaw in your thesis is that an immortal would still live their lives at the exact same pace as a mortal would -- one day at a time. Great experiences are still great, loved ones are still with you until one of you dies or changes too much, you lose touch with old friends and meet new ones.Just like everyone else, an immortal loses loved ones and meets new ones. They start a career, get good at it, mentor younger collleagues, and retire from that job -- they just move on to another career after that.
People seem to want to believe that immortality has to suck, but there's no reason it should be that different from just living life like everyone else!
Also many experiences can be great in repeat. Eating good food can always lift ones mood, even if you have eaten thousands of times up to this point. Or things like Sunsets and fresh winds don't diminish because you felt them before.
I come down here to see more things that agree with my conclusion because I get angry seeing all this "Death gives us meaning and being alive is scary" bullshit. It's not that complex a thought. I frankly find the idea of not dying to give my life *more* meaning, not less. If I knew I wasn't decaying from here on out in a slow crawl to the fucking dirt, I'd be more inclined to make some fun long term plans. Or yeah, live my life one day at a time. I mean I already spend my days trying to ignore death. If it's as bad as these people are saying, which I strongly believe it isn't, I would just be trading having to ignore continued life. Woohoo. I"ll trade one panic attack for another if it means I can eventually still succeed.
Right up until the sun explodes, of course.
@@jubertalleremierez3783 Eh, I suppose I would rather live indefinitely than live forever. Some sort of escape clause would be nice. But a few thousand years would be nice!
I know that I don't think about the finite time I have left while enjoying myself at things. Or much at all really, apart from general future planning of resources for later in my life. So I can't imagine being confirmed immortal would change my day to day existence significantly at this point.
Another type: Ascended immortals - Immortals who realize they have an eternity to figure out how to enjoy immortality and eventually, after figuring things out, settle into a state where they'll be permanently satisfied.
In real life, maybe in the future, posthuman immortality might become a thing.
I think as human we are really close to immortality and i belive we will achive it in the next 200 or so years...
Now we only need to freeze ourselfs...
this is basically the mortal-turned-immortal-turned god. Time no longer matters, as it goes by so fast, while at the same time, they enjoy every moment. They may bring some things from the mortal world and turn them immortal. They could help their spouse and loved ones find the same immortality they have, and experience eternal bliss.
i feel like you'd love 17776
The Commonwealth books from Peter F. Hamilton have a bit of that going on.
@@valletas well technically there is already a method of immortality however you will need to sacrifice a lot of people, and I mean A LOT OF PEOPLE. And also you're not immune to unnatural death and considering all the people that would die to keep you alive, which means at it's only a matter of time until someone kills you. However that means if you do the safety precaution correctly you'll be immortal forever......
........ that is until the heat death of the universe of course.
"connecting with others being must be hard as an immortal, they die so quick"
Petstore : *AM I A JOKE TO YOU*
But they die so quick :(
Do you not understand that pets are absolutely not the same as people
@@Firestorm422 also there is a difference between a few people you know dying and losing every person you ever meet over and over for eternity.
@@resentfuldragon Yeah
I think there is another type of immortal: The Serial Pet Owner.
Sort of like the immortal that befriends family lines, but along interests rather than heredity. The oscillate between low motivation "seeking" periods and high motivation "tag along" or "mentoring" periods. Imagine a Merlin who sought out an Arthur every generation because he loved watching leaders develop, or a tutor of music who traveled around looking for music proteges to train to enjoy whatever their magnum opus would be, sort of a serial mentor. Alternately, the immortal may just find some war orphan with a desperate thirst for revenge and teach him some badass mystic kung fu or the ability to control minds and observe what he does it it. Each "hero" they empower or tag along with gives them a unique journey, a specific version of the resolution to an issue they care about as each new pet discovers their own path. To the immortal it would kind of be like a generational serial story, but playing with problems and answers rather than lineage. Sure, the seasons are all a bit similar, but each journey allows them to reconnect with whatever specific aspect of humanity they cherish and observe a variety of answers they can compare and contrast with whatever answer they chose.
Kinda like Doctor Who.
I thought of this as a scene in a story (or without a story, because I haven't plotted anything around it) where an immortal is explaining why they can't care about the mortal character, and the mortal calls them on it saying "I have a pet dog, Jed, they are my third dog. I loved Spot, and then he died and I mourned, and then I got Trixie, and I loved her, but she died and I mourned, and then Jed came along. I'm not asking to be best friends forever, but telling me we can't be friends at all because I'm gonna die is rather a dick move."
I think an interesting example of this (although intentionally kept vague) is the Outsider from the Dishonored series.
@@DeetheFirst I wouldn't really consider my doggie a friend though.
@@einsof6098 hmm many I know concider their dog their best friend ^^
Cavalier immortals be like:
"Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened"
I've never heard anyone say "I'm not going to get another dog, my last one died of old age and now I can't imagine loving another dog"
I imagine it would be the same for immortals
I have heard that. (They don't last long dogless, but people say it.)
Yeah, to me the idea that you don't want to be immortal because you'll be sad when the people you love die isn't a really compelling reason not to want immortality.
You don't stop wanting to have friends when you either move away or they die. Men and women don't all give up on love when their spouses die. You move on.
The real fear should be getting used to everyone's deaths. And even then it's not much of a fear when you're used to it.
@@blksmagma non binary people also move on, but most of us are immortal anyway.
@@stm7810 shhhh the binaries aren't supposed to know that
@@kacbcd Shoot! I mean yeah, we're very much mortal, no genderless gods here!
I still love the quote from Peter Capaldi’s Doctor.
“Being immortal isn’t living forever, that’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everyone else dying.”
As compared to being young and having all your older relatives dying? Or being a grandparent and having your kids and grandkids die, perhaps in something like a natural disaster?
@@edisontrent618 Well, yes, that’s kind of the point. In those circumstances, you’d go through tragedy and grief, and it’s horrible. But immortality means that it’s inevitable. It’s not ‘you might live to see some family members die’ it’s ‘everyone you know, every face you see on the streets, every single person who has ever been in your life will be dead, dust and forgotten and you will still have forever to go’. No matter how hard you try, you will be surrounded by death and the only way to escape it would be to cut off all ties, have no connections, and forget everyone anyways.
The quote points out that, from the immortal’s perspective, everyone is already on death’s door and withering away, and you’re forced to either experience infinite pain through the ages, or cut the last bit of humanity from yourself.
@@benjaminkingsley-jones7832
If that were true, then you would be arguing for suicide as a valid means to avoid feeling the pain of losing someone close to you or avoid continuing to feel that emotional pain after losing someone, instead of arguing for something like, I don't know, therapy and emotional self control and maturity.
And that's before even getting into the False Dichotomy aspect of it. That there is only "happiness because you know you will die" or "infinite tragedy and grief if you know you will live". It completely ignores "moving on" as an option and spits on every person who has ever grieved their spouse and lived on to find love and happiness again as non-existent.
@@edisontrent618 well, as the video above pointed out, it gets increasingly difficult to keep one’s morals intact the longer they remain immortal.
Even if no-one is close enough to them for it to effect them, there are still certain phenomena that cause grief. I forget the name, but there’s an effect where, if you know you could’ve helped but didn’t, or if you can’t feel a certain type of pain while others can, it makes you feel bad. (I.e. you hear about someone getting shot in a mugging gone wrong, and are hit with the realisation that, if that were you being mugged, no-one would’ve died)
In the end, an immortal will either have to give up their morals and any notion of being good, or deal with personal heartbreak an infinite number of times.
"Whoa boy, this ran really long."
- Every immortal, talking about their life.
I wonder if that was intentional...
One of the best quotes from Doctor Who I can say relates to this quite well. “Immortality isn’t living forever. It’s everyone you love dying around you.”
Some of the negatives associated with immortality, are projections from those who can only know a mortal perspective, and can only assume what an immortal life must be like. A lot of it is cautionary, to remind the reader that the lust for immortality is folly, that such a life must be cursed or wrong, mainly because desiring it is futile self destructive. We assume immortals will only either get stuck, or degenerate, from what we see as humanity’s flaws. Rarely do we consider that everlasting life could mean everlasting growth of self.
For example, humans gain wisdom over time to help them grow emotionally, and better deal with trauma or tragedy. But stories always make immortals grow callous or indifferent to loss, they stop caring about the lives of others. But couldn’t someone with longer emotional growth learn to cherish the finite life of their friends and loved ones, and be able to mourn with minimal trauma. If there is no finish line, the journey is the goal, and thus experiencing as much of the journey as possible is the motivation.
Bit of existential stockholm syndrome. We're all stuck with the inevitable prospect of dying and we always have been.
Jack Harkness of Doctor Who and Torchwood fills this niche extremely well. He became an immortal as a young man, so he had a firm grounding in thinking like a mortal, but he lived longer than the universe itself yet continued to love and celebrate while still being so aware of how different he is.
This is probably due to a kind of envy that stems from looking at someone who has what you can never hope to. But since that person doesn't exist, they can take it away in subtle ways and no one bats an eye.
Well said. Much of the discussion around immortality smacks of sour grapes. "I can't be immortal, so clearly immortality is undesirable for... reasons." Like when red implies the "Cavalier immortal" is the result of writers not reckoning with centuries of grief and loss, as opposed the writers acknowledging that grief and loss naturally fade over time.
I mean, "An immortal couldn't care for mortals, because they'll inevitably outlive them" has the same logic as "A human could never care for a dog, because humans lifespans are massively longer than dogs. The collective grief from outliving so many pets would leave them jaded or withdrawn." Is this an accurate assessment for human-dog relationships? Or do people generally come to terms with the deaths of people and animals they love after a period of mourning? If they do, why wouldn't an immortal also?
Red did mention that, when surrounded by other immortals, they tend to be more well adjusted. Thing is, a lot of these stories have the immortal be the only one they know that is immortal. They become fundamentally ALONE. As someone made the pet comparison, this would be like there are no other humans around you that you can empathize with, or that can empathize with you. Only pets. Smart pets, but still pets. No lifelong companions, not permanent fixtures, nothing. You are the fixture.
Basically, immortality itself doesn’t suck. Immortality alone does. (And of course, immortality with caveats still has those to deal with.)
“Immortality is not the same as invincibility” - Iron Lord Saladin, Destiny
"But the ability of controlling reality does mean invincibility."
- Wanda Maximov, maybe
“We’ll be at this all day” Dorian grey vs Mina Harker in league of extraordinary gentlemen
"I didn't fucking say that"
Abraham Lincoln
Thank you so much. A lot of people mix them off
As the Homonculi from Full Metal Alchemist cab attest to...
Some of my favorite immortals in literature are what I like to call "Immortals with a purpose." They devote their eternal life to an ongoing goal, like "defending the world from evil" (it sounds cliché but it works). They often function really well as important supporting characters who help the main character and may even have close ties to the main character.
Try out Rin daughter of mnemosyne anime
Do you mean like Rachel Alucard?
Ah, Joe and Nicky. The best characters from TOG.
Gandalf
@@nurgle333 my favourite Immortal around
Morality:
"Oh Maceline, why you so mean?"
"I'm not mean, I'm just thousand years old and just lost track of my moral code"
To be fair, a thousand years was enough for people to go from killing others as revenge for stupidly petty things to not being able to do anything
From religion dictating everything about life to it becoming almost meaningless
You might still have a very old moral code you never left behind instead of being mean
One thing that i would like to see is an immortal who exists so past their own time that their body becomes unnatural to people. If you go back like 30000 years and see early humans (like Denisovan’s for example) they look strange. So seeing that alienation of an immortal as they become a living fossil would be a cool story
People a few hundred years ago were absolute midgets. I wonder if the human race will keep growing in height or if we've already found a goldilocks point.
@@doanale3344 well a few hundred years ago heights were pretty similar to today it was only during the industrial revolution or in particularly exploited countries that people that people were shorter for most of history humans have been about 178cm tall. I don’t think humans have really hit a goldilocks zone i think we’re too tall but if there were an upper limit people about 190cm to 195cm start getting health problems linked to their height and on average live shorter lives, primarily due to circulation issues
good idea ^^
Face of Bode is a variation of this idea
@@humblehive6502 Great. Now I'm getting anxious about being 193 cm. tall.
I'm extremely surprised that you didn't bring up Hob Gadling from The Sandman at all. Considering his extremely unique immortality story. Where he has the option to get rid of his immortality every 100 years, but he never does no matter what immortality based emotional state he goes through in that century.
The idea of him being kind of positively blase about his immortality, due to the fact that he could give it up at anytime if he wants to. The option is always present for him and him alone.
That to me is the ideal form immortality. Never Dying until you choose to die. And in Hob's case, just never really getting around to it.
The power of choice is liberating, indeed.
The fact he chose to keep going even after his son died in a bar fight and endured every kind of hell imaginable really tells you what kind of guy he was.
In a way, super minor spoilter, that's basically the plot of "The Good Place." How network television green-lit a show about ethics and infinity, I'll never know.
I mean, it helps that he has a friend he meets up with every century (at least until the end of Sandman, anyhow)...though he chooses to keep going even when THAT character ends the current incarnation of themselves.
Oh, and there was that whole arc about various immortals and their reactions either to changing times or actually dying...all because Dream and Delirium seek out their long-lost brother. I like what Death said to the caveman guy who'd lived something like 50,000 years. “You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”
So, ADHD's object permanence issue with memories actually makes being immortal easier.
Neat.
@@bubblebubble7494 I don't use Twitter, so...
@@nehpets216 that would be hellish, I already have trouble telling yesterday apart from the day before, how on earth am I going to tell 1946 apart from 1879
@@femthingevelyn non ADHD people would be depressed remembering those faded times and interactions as pointless since so much repeats and so many losses with the time that had passed. ADHD people have a hard time telling if it was a day or a month ago that you spoke to someone, so you know each interaction was worth the time and effort even if it's hard to tell if this is the grandson or the old friend, time to catch up and be happy with the stories they can tell of what came to pass (whoops it was 5 generations ago, might as well get to know the family and try to make a note to swing by sooner next time)
autisms' occasional memory issue might help an immortals out aswell.
@@bubblebubble7494 There is an episode of My little pony like this, a character while not immortal is out of time being awoken after 1000years of stasis. After dealing with the plot involving his and 6 friends return, his friends are all able to start new lives in this new time, but he isn't. So he tries to return to his old village, only to find it an archaeological site. And is told off when he tries to go back to living in his house and using his own stuff cause they are now "priceless relics".
I really love the whole "immortal befriending a group/family" It's like a super yakuza clan.
I'm trying to slice that into a story I'm working on; the MC isn't exactly immortal, he died and is a spirit but he's got like 1,000 yrs to play with so he decides to travel and look after his family.
"30% existential crisis by volume." How dare you call me out like this Red.
I scrolled for this. I'm *at least* 30% existential crisis by volume...... does this mean I'm immortal because if so I'm gonna get some compound interest going right now
Lucifer is guilty of this
You too, huh?
I feel personally attacked. I’m at lest 40-50% existential crisis. And I’m not even immortal, at lest I hope not.
Nobody:
Queen Elizabeth: *sips immortalitea*
this comment is underrated
Thi S
The likes are at 666... do I want to?
666 LESSS GOOO
God tier comment.
"Censored by Victorians" had me HOWLING
Huh, I don't get this joke. Guess I'll have to start reading Victorian books again. Hey honey, where's mah Victorian age wig? *In the Wash?!?!*
@@whoknows7968 the Victorians were famously prudish and Homophobic. they changed a lot of 'lovers' to 'close friends'
The consequences of immortality makes me think of a series called "Ms. Vampire Who Lives in My Neighborhood". The vampire mentions having a friend who turned her family so they wouldn't die and leave her. They didn't mind being immortal. However, her father wished she'd turned him before he'd developed chronic back pains which, with him neither growing older nor younger, will be with him for the rest of eternity. Her mother similarly wishes she'd been turned when she had a few less wrinkles. And her little sister conversely wishes she'd gotten a few more years so she'd at least not spend all eternity flatter than an ironing board. If "immortality" means "forever at the stage and state you're in now", you better be careful just when you make that change.
I think there's another category: The Mature Immortal
This is when an immortal has a specific job, or hobby that doesn't wear out with time. Theses immortal are pretty well adjusted and are usually inhumanly good and what ever it is they've dedicated their lives to. These immortals can go through a mid-life crisis if they don't need to guard the magic cup anymore, or something similar.
I suppose we could also call this the "Workaholic Immortal."
Anyway Red, great video as always.
You got an example of that?
arutka2000 The grail knight from Indiana Jones?
@@verycoolipromise7150 Crap. Can't believe I forgot about him.....
@@arutka2000 Also any god of a skill. Such as Artemis.
This also applies to any immortal who is part of a heavenly bureaucracy. For them the paperwork Literally never ends.
(Example: The gold star of Venus)
@@turbowarrior2318 Yea, pretty much all Chinese Gods.
Also, because these immortals often do one thing for all eternity, they can be comically clueless on anything that's not part of their department.
Last time I was this early... was a long time ago. Years. Eons, in fact.
The for nations were living in harmony.
Lol
Made me smile
doopdoop dopdop Everything Changed when The Fire Nation Attacked
This is the first "last time I was this early" that was actually funny
The inmortal who was in everything important. Uuugh.
"Did you met Davinci? Nope"
"Did you met Cleopatra? Nope"
"Did you met Jesus? Nope"
"Then, where were you?"
"Busy, traveling on horseback or horrible carriages for months ir not years. And don't get me started on boats, half of them sunk more than the ones who arrived"
Poul Anderson's "the boat of a million years."
Can you imagine the excitement of every new descovery/invention? "Commercial flights?! Finally!!" "The microwave was the best thing they invented since the aquaduct, for real. I was there both times and I tell you it's makes life so much better"
@@pedroivantaveraferreira3037 Imagine the reclusive inmortal all confused now a days after being absent from society for 50 years and going "you all did what?" where is the soviet union? Who came up with the internet? Wait computers are like this now? Whats whit all this music? Where are the books now?
Imagine being a peasant or something for hundreds of years, finally making it to the present, having an interest in history, then when you bring up something you read people act as if you were personally there but really at the time you were just a simple potato farmer tending your potatoes.
Would be a good subversion of the trope if the immortal in question just missed every event that made it to modern history.
Something red forgot to overlook is that as time goes on, people's lives tend to get longer, possibly providing for them a motivation to work to increase technological development and therefore the lives of their mortal peers, potentially turning them immortal as well
"Existence with nothing to strive for is no existence at all. A life free of debt? You naive fool! DEBT IS YOUR LIFE!"
-Yatzhee while talking about Animal crossing
Change "Debt" with "death" it's perfect
which video?
@@finderfinder4290 Animal Crossing New Leaf
Francesco respect that bondrewd profile pic
a suprise to be sure, but a welcome one
The only certainties in life is Death and Taxes.
David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks" has an interesting version of immortality where there are a group of people whose bodies aren't immortal but their souls are. Basically, when they die, 49 days later they "wake up" in the body of a small child, usually a child with an illness who died, and take over living that child's life. It's basically reincarnation without the reset at death.This way, they have mental state of an immortal being, but they are still working on a clock. I think this is a pretty neat version of immortality because it gives the experience of living forever while also still having the idea that time will run out, at least for this life. For example, one being wakes up in the body of a peasant girl with an alcoholic mother and absent father, so she has to get to work using all the knowledge of her previous lives to get to a place of privilege or else spend a life in squalor. Plus, this also eliminates the problem of not connecting with humans because you still are aging the same with everyone around you. Another interesting tidbit is that these beings don't necessarily stay the same gender from life to life, but Mitchell doesn't really do anything with it.
The only problem with that is eventually the Immortals experience the same fatigue of being different people when you aren't. And eventually one of them is going to get tired of the amount of shitty lives they lived and decided to use their beyond age knowledge to just kill their way out of the problem once they have the ability to walk. And then if they play their cards right, they can manipulate events to try and take a specific body or area and set up a system where their new form will become a replacement of their old one directly, no questions asked because they amounted the power they needed to pull it off.
Jáck Fenrír someone make this a book or movie
That's still actually kind of terrifying.
Imagine your child being taken over a millennia old ghost person, yes they passed away but what's there now is not your child.
Also, going through puberty again, and again and again.
@@KaiTenSatsuma SPOILER....
That is actually a major plot point of the book.
Red: I remember when they first invented campfires
So that's how she knows so many mythologies.
And that's how she knows so much about immortal's existential crisis
I thought that joke was clever too.
ASL Princess thank you
The Doctor: People like us, we go on too long. We forget what matters. The last thing we need is each other. We need the mayflies. See, the mayflies, they know more than we do. They know how beautiful and precious life is because it's fleeting. Look how Sam Swift made every last moment count, right to the gallows. Look how glad he is to be alive. I looked into your eyes and I saw my worst fears. Weariness. Emptiness.
An interesting take on the “immature immortal” trope, is having an immortality like in “daughters of Mnemosyne”, where their health status is also frozen in time. If they had a cough when they became immortal, they have it forever. They can regrow any limb when they “reset”, but only if they had it when they became immortal, otherwise they regenerate in full minus the limb. The main character has actually been miopic for hundreds of years, and if she got laser eye surgery, it would be undone the next day.
Now, imagine a character who is bipolar and becomes immortal during a manic episode. It would be fun to watch him be all crazy at first and jumping from one thing to the next, but then it becomes sad/tragic when you realize that he literally cannot be any other way. His brain is forcing him to be in a forever manic state due to the nature of his immortality.
IIRC, vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are like that. When a person dies, a vampire, a kind of amorphous demon spirit, takes residence in their undead body, and it absorbs who they were _when they died,_ not the entirety of their character, freezing them in time. If a person died in a manic phase, their mania would imprint on the demon, and the demon would be manic forever. They also lacked the capacity for character development the way humans do it. Without proper biology, their brains aren't changing when they absorb new memories or experiences the way the human brain does. Without the demand to adapt forcing it upon them the only change they experience is the natural and very slow ageing process of vampires, as they slowly grow in power and intelligence over time.
I know you probably used the He out of habit, but the Immortals in that setting are all only Female if I recall correctly. IIRC if a Male gets hit by that effect then... Bad things tend to happen... It has been ages since I saw it though. Might be worth a re-watch
Hyatt from Excell Saga has a bad habit of dying. Yet she keeps living.
Kilo6Charlie yeah, in the show only women can become immortal, but I was speaking more on the style of immortality in general, not specific to the show. My bad for being too vague 😅
@@alliecat84 yeah, that kind of immortality would potentially royally suck.
There's also "Hulk: The End", in which Bruce Banner - due to the Hulk - is literally unable to die, and has outlived *everyone* on the planet. It also contains the single most heartbreaking line I've ever heard from the Hulk, in response to Bruce trying to convince him to let them die, saying all their friends would be there.
"NO! For years... forever... Hulk has listened to Banner, and Banner's friends, talking about how Hulk ruined Banner's life! Hulk made Banner's life! Banner was nothing before Hulk... nothing! ...Hulk doesn't want friends, because friends will hurt him. Everyone hurts him. Everyone hurts Hulk."
And one that surprised me is an imageboard post about an ongoing campaign setting in which an Elven woman continually emerges as the BBEG because... she's trying to bring her human husband back to life. The OP mentioned it was something like *five* campaigns where she turned out to be the primary villain, and driven to the point that she'd wipe out entire languages to protect her magical notes. All to bring her waifu back to lifeu.
I remember hearing about that campaign with the elven woman somewhere. Wasn't it because the DM's party keep being murderhobo's or not taking the game seriously, so to punish them the DM created a BBEG that's completely stupid. Like she wanted to code her notes, but instead of making up a cipher she wrote them in dwarvish and then started genociding dwarves and everybody who spoke dwarvish.
@@oscarlove4394 Sounds like the best of both worlds
Which makes “Hulk: The End” even more tragic is the last lines of “Hulk feels....cold” even thought Bruce had conspired to kill him he was still the one constant in his life, Hulk FINALLY got what he wanted but now there’s no one not even “puny Banner”.
@@thomasraines1396
Not to mention that the "cold" is delivered in lower-case, which is *never* used for Hulk's speech patterns.
The Frugal Videogamer wow it’s just so sad.
Tolkien has several interesting takes on the concept: Wizards (Maiar (minor gods/angels in people suits)), elves, and ents. The woodland elves sing and drink and pass the time in fairly endless revelry, mixed with hunting/guarding (enough tension to keep things interesting). The Lothlorien elves exist in a timeless grace, artificially created by Galadriel's ring, so that doesn't completely count. The ents (who, like the Wizards, are Maiar, in this case in tree suits) live at a very slow pace, but also eventually tend to become more tree-like, eventually rooting down and possibly even mostly forgetting they're not a tree. Hence Treebeard's line "Some of those trees were my friends! A Wizard should know better!" A Wizard would know a Maiar in a tree form from a tree, Saruman just didn't care. The Wizards tended to go different ways: Radagast became a hermit who mainly only talks to animals, Gandalf seems closest to elves and essentially befriends bloodlines of other races (Brandobras Took, Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins being the best example), and Saruman just becomes more arrogant and dickish every century until he goes full ent, except instead of turning into a tree, he turns into a complete bell-end.
Yeah! And I mentioned this in my own comment, but I think it's neat how if you follow the thread of an old elf's life, you can really watch them age and become world weary. Tolkien was extremely thoughtful when writing about immortals, and I'm very glad for it, because it's fascinating!!
FYI Ents aren't Maiar. They are a race created by the Valar Yavanna.
so he became a bell-ent?
sorry, I will show myself out..
I always get angry whenever I read "A wizard should know better!". It's backstabbing someone who considers you a friend, has lost everything they cared about and are just waiting for an end.
For reference, bellend(UK) translates to douchebag(US).
A really fascinating case of an immortal character is in the Arknights side story "Who Is Real." A major part of the story is an immortal dragon-goddess artist named Dusk who fell in love with a mortal woman. When the mortal woman passed of old age but Dusk remained young, she was hit so hard by the grief that she painted an entire world where a copy of her lover lived among an entire village of false people. Dusk locked herself in the painting so she could be with her lover forever. The plot of the story involves Dusk's sister Nian contracting the protagonists to find Dusk and break her out of her self-imposed isolation, since Nian lived among mortals and saw so much more to enjoy with life and knew she needed to help Dusk return to the world of the living.
Who would be interested in a Trope Talk on “Forbidden Love” or “Dark Prophecies”?
They were kinda covered in "Romantic Subplots" and "Magic" Trope Talks
I'd be interested in a Trope Talk on "War Stories" or "Underworlds"
@@LoneWanderer-by6tv There's a TWA vid on War Stories
xolotltolox Magic isn’t the same as Dark Prophecies
The latter.
There’s a very specific kind of immortal that I really like: the groups of immortals who have been here since the beginning and don’t really view humans as a higher species, a trope most commonly found in stories with angels, demons, gods, and/or fae creatures. There are two subtypes here; 1. The immortals who see humans in the same way that we see bugs: small pests to be crushed if they get too annoying; and 2. The immortals that see humans the way we see pets: temporary and slightly lesser, but endearing and worth protecting. Good examples of these tropes can be found in the Amazon Prime show Good Omens, where the main two protagonists are an angel and a demon, are really close to each other, and both are part of the second subtype, and the antagonists are Heaven and Hell respectively and they both fall into the first category. It’s a fantastic clash of character ideals and honestly, both main characters are hilarious. I highly recommend it!
This is what the Q are all about
Another good example for this type is the pillar men from jojo part 2
In the divinity: original sin 2 game, there is an entire race of immortals that predate mortal species and they can't get over how insignificant, primitive, ignorant, stupid, temporary and generally mortal the mortal races are.
Yes more good omens fans!! Can't wait for season 2 :)
@@ariahazelwood3842 Same!!
Character gains immortality.
The 3x immortal monkey king: that's some rookie numbers.
4x, actually.
What a chad
He would be so broken if he became a Servant in Fate. Like you thought Heracles was OP with his God Hand? Imagine how bullshit Wu Kong could be with his x4 immortality + Buddha mode.
@@justas423 considering how much media he IS usually protrayed it, as I've never played/watched any of the fate series, it's rather impress if sad that Wukong isn't any of them.
Way of Immortality as taught by Subhuti
Name wiped out of the Book of Death
Eating Laozi's pills of immortality
Eating the Peaches of Immortality
Drinking the Wine of Immortality
Bathed in the samadhi fires (which makes him impervious to damage rather than immortal, but same old, same old)
So that's 6x immortal
"Killing Me / Killing You" is one of my favourite manga involving immortals. It's about a pair of dissimilar immortals living in a broken world (can't really describe it as post-apoc because it doesn't really revolve around the apocalypse, but both the immortals were disfigured/made immortal by it) and journeying together in attempts to find a way to die (not in a "we've lived too long" way, more a "the world sucks now and so does out immortality" way). On their journeys they end up fixing parts of the world partially accidentally, making friends and discoveries.