Immortality in Fiction - Negative Effects

Negative Effects

Since immortality is seen as a desire of humanity, themes involving immortality often explore the disadvantages as well as the advantages of such a trait. Sometimes immortality is used as a punishment, or a curse that might be intended to teach a lesson. It is not uncommon to find immortal characters yearning for death. A similar, though somewhat different theme, concerned Elves and Men in Middle-earth. While the immortality of Elves was not explicitly a curse, the mortality of Men was viewed as a gift, albeit one that was not understood by those possessing it. This was chiefly due to the Elves' clear faculty of memory, which could accumulate millennia of sad experiences.

In some parts of popular culture, immortality is not all that it is made out to be, possibly causing insanity and/or significant emotional pain. Much of the time, these things only happen to mortals who gain immortality. Beings born with immortality (such as deities, demigods and races with "limited immortality") are usually quite adjusted to their long lives, though some may feel sorrow at the passing of mortal friends, but they still continue on. Some Immortals (such as certain deities, demigods, and intelligent undead) may also watch over mortal relations (either related to or descended from them), occasionally offering help when needed.

In his short story 'The Immortal', Jorge Luis Borges treats the theme of immortality from an interesting perspective: after centuries and centuries, everything is repetition for the immortal and a feeling of ennui prevails. The immortal, who had turned so after drinking from a certain river, is set to wander the world in search for that same river, so that he can become mortal again.

The Dungeon Master in Zork Grand Inquisitor, a spirit in a lantern during the game, accidentally casts an immortality spell on himself while he still has his body. He soon grows terribly bored, and tries many ways of suicide, with little or comical effects, for example: "Dear Diary, today I tried to kill myself by shoving a sword through my heart. All I got was heartburn."

Another rather comic incident involving an accidental cause of immortality can be found in Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the alien Wowbagger accidentally turned himself immortal. Due to not being a natural immortal, people who he considers to be "a bunch of serene bastards", he doesn't know how to handle his immortality and winds up deciding that he will insult every living being in the universe - in alphabetical order just to kill some time, something he has an awful lot of. In the radio adaptation, his immortality is removed right before the End of the Universe after insulting a deity.

In the manga Blade of the Immortal, Manji is a samurai who has been cursed with immortality. Only after slaying 1000 evil men will the curse be broken so he can finally die. His body cannot age nor can he die from physical wounds. Manji's sword skills are sloppy due to the fact that since he's immortal he doesn't need to know how to fight properly. There is another immortal character in the Naruto series named Hidan, who claims to be the slowest attacking member in his group and is considered stupid by his partner, because he attacks without thought for the consequences. It is possible he did not gain these skills because he did not believe he would need them, being an immortal. This could hardly be further from the truth: Hidan is now a disembodied head buried under a ton of rock, and yet cannot die.

In legend, most famously in Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman, a ship's captain is cursed with immortality after attempting to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in a terrible storm. He is doomed to sail around the Cape forever.

In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, some of the inhabitants of the island of Immortals (near Japan) don't die, but they age and became ill, demented and a nuisance to themselves and those surrounding them. Swift presents immortality as a curse rather than a blessing. The film Zardoz also depicts a dystopian view of immortality, where interest in life has been lost and suicide is impossible.

The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Death Wish" explored in depth the existence of the omnipotent, immortal and omniscient aliens Q. It is learned in that episode that the aliens were originally human-like, and somehow evolved into their current state long ago. With their new-found powers, the Q set out to fully explore, experience and understand the universe. Afterwards, the Q had nothing left to do or say, and now they simply sit out eternity in their realm. As one Q explained, you can only experience the universe so many times before it gets boring, with this Q- a former philosopher- now seeking to commit suicide as it is the only thing he hasn't done.

In the children's novel, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, a family is made physically immortal by drinking water from a magical spring. They are trapped at the same age forever and are invulnerable. They are hated by the ordinary people who knew them and are forced to watch as everything they cherish grows old and dies.

In the film and television series Highlander, once one dies for the first time, if they are an Immortal, they will spend the rest of eternity at that physical age. This poses a problem when one dies as a small child, or as a very old man. The same is true of the Claudia character in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, who became a vampire while still only a child, and the Blade television series.

In the Legacy of Kain series, vampirism was a curse placed upon an ancient race that won the war against the Hylden that granted bloodlust, sterility and immortality, the latter causing their God to abandon them.

In the movie Death Becomes Her, the characters of Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp both become immortal and young after drinking a potion, but this form of immortality has significant drawbacks; most significantly, unlike most forms of immortality, which include rapid healing from injuries, Madeline and Helen simply stop aging from the moment they drink the potion, and subsequently don't stop moving even after their bodies die. In other words, whoever drinks the potion becomes immortal, but can still be killed and the body rises up and essentially becomes a zombie, their bodies continuing to decay despite the fact that they are still fully conscious and self-aware, regardless of the injuries they sustain in the process; in the course of the film Madeline's neck is broken and a large hole is blown in Helen's stomach, with both of them shattering into pieces in the final scene of the film, and yet both continue walking and talking as though nothing had happened. At the conclusion of the film, it is shown that the two are now forced to stay together for all eternity in order to ensure that their bodies remain in at least partially decent condition, working to repair the cosmetic damage they suffer over the years, despite their own long-term enmity for each other.

In the Supernatural third season episode "Time is On My Side", Dean and Sam Winchester face Doctor Benton, a doctor who discovered the secret to eternal life in 1816. However, although his process keeps him alive, he must constantly replace his damaged and worn-out body parts to operate relatively comfortably; taking out his heart will only inconvenience him for a time, but his entire body has noticeable stitches all over from where he has taken organs from other people to add them to his own body. At the conclusion of the episode, the Winchesters bury him in a grave after tying him up so that he will be forced to endure an eternity buried alive.

In the film Hocus Pocus, while three witches seek immortality by sucking the life essence of children, they also curse one of their enemies, a young man named Thackery Binx, to become an immortal black cat to punish him for trying to stop them draining his sister's life-force so that he will be condemned to live forever with the guilt of not saving her. As a result, Binx remains alive as a cat for over three hundred years, capable of surviving even such accidents as getting run over by a bus- the bus killing him only for him to revive a few moments later-, until the witches who cursed him are brought back to life by a curse they cast shortly before their executions, their subsequent deaths when the sun rises ensuring that their curse is lifted.

In general, a theme seen with many variations, is the notion of an essential world weariness akin to extreme exhaustion for which death is the only relief. This is inescapable when immortality is defined as (half) infinite life. Immortality defined as finite but arbitrarily long per the desire to exist does not, as a definition, suffer this limitation. When a person is tired of life, even death is shut off to them, creating an endless torture, as evidenced in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where a character is trapped in an endlessly repeating time loop that causes him to live the same day over and over again even when he tries to kill himself before the end of the cycle.

Several characters/species in the Touhou series are immortal. The most notable are people who drink the Hourai elixir, which renders them completely immune to death and any possibility of death forever. According to some official works, it works not by regeneration, but by instant resurrection due to incapability of dying altogether due to being their own existence that knows no manipulation whatsoever. Other examples include people who become Celestials or Magicians, although they can still presumably be killed through serious injury.

In the Soul series,the character Zasalamel has shown to be immortal due to being able to reincarnate, thus making him immortal. But he is tired of life and he desires a peaceful death. His main goal in Soul Calibur III is to find Soul Edge and Soul Calibur to break the cycle. What happens if 'Tale Of Souls' is completed when playing as him depends on whether the QTE Scene is completed or not; if done correctly, the cycle is broken and he becomes mortal but if the command is not put in, he remains immortal. In his Soul Calibur IV ending, he is still immortal and lives in the modern era.