Immortality Immorality - TV Tropes

"When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it... Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?"

• This is one of the two reasons why the Humanization Ritual exists in the first place in 3×3 Eyes: according to Shiva during the Dream World arc, the immortal Triclops who ages beyond a certain point slowly become more decadent, losing their morals and growing arrogant, distant and apathetic. He told a young Pai that he wanted to undergo the ritual because he felt he was losing his goodness like them. Indeed, the adult Sanzhiyan we see in his arc are often laughing with contempt at the sight of lesser demons being executed and tortured.
• Subverted in Baccano!. While the massacre aboard the Advena Avis suggests the "Immortality is bad" route (they even get immortality through a Deal with the Devil), it eventually becomes clear that eternal life is exactly what it claims to be: life, only (infinitely) longer, while the 'devil' they made a deal with for it is more of an amoral observer than a malevolent force.
• Battle Angel Alita: Last Order has the citizens of the solar system essentially immortal through Applied Phlebotinum — which means that uncontrolled reproduction is a massive crime and children are lucky to be treated as garbage.
• In Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, the reason Dokuro has come to the hero is on account of this. According to her, the hero will in the future create a Lolicon paradise by inventing a device that freezes every girl's growth at 12, allowing girls to live forever as eternal Lolitas; since such immortality is God's domain, the hero must be killed or otherwise stopped.
• Buso Renkin: Becoming a near immortal homunculus generally requires human experimentation that can result in the deaths and forced transformation of many humans. In addition to this, once an individual becomes a homunculus, they suffer from a psychological Horror Hunger that compels them to consume humans even though this isn’t an actual necessity.
• Code Geass plays it a different way. We don't know the actual origin of immortality in the setting, but for C.C. it qualifies in a different way since she had her Code forced upon her by the woman she had come to view as a surrogate mother, who was insane and wanted to be free of the curse of immortality. It's similarly implied later on when C.C. considered foisting it off on Mao, and later Lelouch, but despite her supposed Ice Queen nature, couldn't bring herself to do it. She might have gone through this before the show, but that part of her past was never covered.
  • This is just the tip of the iceberg. Immortality is apparently gained in a somewhat immoral way (if you do it that way), through taking the immortal's "Code". Now, maybe in a good world, it was designed to be in a voluntary way, but Charles proves it can be done through deception, without the victim's knowledge or acceptance - after all, V.V. probably wanted to live longer), so this aches to the Sith Rule of Two. But to have immortality, you need Geass, and to get a Geass, a former Geass-user, now Immoral Immortal himself/herself has to go to the trouble of giving you the Geass, and he/she will give it only to someone capable of using it to satisfy his needed, which may range to Magnificent Bastard qualities needed (like C.C. needed the Geass to evolve in Lelouch, finally being able to take on immortality. This may be further complicated if an immortal doesn't want to die, and makes more than a Geass user. The manga expands on this, stating Geass exists to bring chaos to the world, and thus balance it.
• An episode of Corpse Princess dealt with a doctor who was trying to make people immortal by injecting them with solutions of Shikabane cells in order to save his dying wife. Unfortunately, the quasi-Shikabane ended up dying horribly.
• Variation in Death Note; from the point of view of the Shinigami, it's no big deal to increase their own lifespans by killing humans, but for them to use someone's death to increase the life of a human is "forbidden and unnatural," and results in the Shinigami in question immediately dying and crumbling into dust. This may have something to do with the motivation most shinigami have to break that rule (love). Given that any death might potentially increase someone else's lifespan, this prohibition only applies to a Shinigami intentionally saving someone from their intended death.
• In Dragon Ball, the driving point of many a villain was to collect the eponymous mystic orbs in order to summon the Dragon to grant their wish for immortality. While the immortality itself was not portrayed as evil, the fact that everyone searching for it was a Card-Carrying Villain that killed countless innocent people (even the eradication of entire civilizations) and the heroes never considered it (even former villains lost interest in the idea) does carry the inevitable Fantastic Aesop implications. Additionally, of the two villains that successfully achieved immortality, Garlic Jr. was subsequently shoved into a pocket dimension for eternity and Future Zamasu was erased from existence by Zen'O.
• In The Executioner and Her Way of Life, the villain of the first novel is an old woman who is using large numbers of people as human sacrifices in her pursuit of immortality.
• A variation takes place in the backstory of Fruits Basket. God has all of His animal friends enter an agreement to continuously reincarnate and stay together forever, so they can continue to have banquets and happy times. The cat is the only one to protest this, arguing that it's better to cherish the good memories they made while growing up and making new friends. None of the other animals wanted to hear this though, and as a result the cat was shunned in all of its reincarnated forms. The state of the Sohma family by the time the story takes place shows that the cat was right, and everyone is only able to find peace when the reincarnation cycle is broken for good.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, using a Philosopher's Stone to extend your life is portrayed as immoral. The process of creating the Philosopher's Stone uses up human lives, lots of them.
  • Greed's ultimate goal is immortality, since, as he puts it, "They don't call me Greed for nothing. I want money. I want women, status, and power. I want everything this world's selling and eternity's topping the list!" It's both a means to achieving his other desires and an end in and of itself. While Al points out that Greed seems to already be immortal, Greed himself is aware that he has a finite (though large) number of resurrections available. What he really wants all that time was friends.
  • Hohenheim is granted immortality after he (unknowingly) helps Father sacrifice the entire population of the nation of Xerxes to create Father's body.
  • However, this is averted in the case of Ling and May, who are actively seeking the secrets to immortality, but are still presented as sympathetic characters. This is probably because they're not looking for it so they can use it themselves, but so they can give it to their emperor to help their clans. They've expressed worry that if the emperor knew it was possible to sacrifice everyone in his country to extend his life he would, meaning he is a potential example.
  • In the 2003 anime version, the main method of using the Philosopher's Stone to extend one's lifespan involved stealing other people's bodies. In fact, one of the major recurring themes in both the original series and the 2003 anime are the lengths people are willing to go through to achieve immortality.
• The Stone Masks in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure can turn a human into an immortal vampire if they absorb enough blood/lifeforce. One character in particular (a former good guy even) was so desperate to avoid old age that he betrayed his allies so he could use their blood to activate one of the Masks. However, this immortality does not come with invincibility. Vampires can be killed for good by exposing them to sunlight or using the Ripple to turn the body's biological processes into a manifestation of the sun's energy.
  • The Stone Masks were originally created by a member of a vampiric species known as the Pillar Men who sought complete immortality and immunity to both the sun and the Ripple. His fellow Pillar Men realized he would be a danger to the whole world and tried to stop him, but he and a handful of his disciples eradicated his whole species. The only thing keeping him from perfect immortality was the Super Aja, a gemstone that perfectly concentrates sunlight. In the climax of the story arc where he is the antagonist, he gets the Super Aja and becomes a perfectly evolved life form that cannot die. Not that he doesn't get what's coming to him.
• As expected of a series that puts a lot of emphasis on the succession of the old generation by the new one, all cases of immortality in Naruto employs this trope. Orochimaru uses Grand Theft Me, effectively killing someone every time he steals a new body. Kakuzu stole his opponents' hearts to replace his old, failing ones (though Kakuzu declines to think of it as immortality, being more of an extended lifespan than an indefinite one, and is likely more interested in the power that gives him than the immortality). Hidan's immortality is both very evil and very immortal, effectively being fueled by him killing people, though exactly how it works isn't explained in detail.
  • Sasori also considers transferring his heart into a puppet a form of immortality. While he did not have to kill anyone to do it, it is partly a byproduct of his twisted views on human life (according to him, he can "make" people if he wants companionship by creating human puppets from the bodies of ninja).
• This could be thought of as one of the major themes of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series. It's usually the antagonist of the volume that seeks the eponymous bird so that they can drink her blood and become immortal. The protagonists don't often agree with this, because Who Wants to Live Forever? Though it is worth stating that there are quite a bit of subversions as well, especially since the protagonist of one volume actually succeeds in become immortal.
• Keith White in Project ARMS wants to be an immortal god and is willing to kill everyone in America with a missile to do so. It ultimately is revealed that his plan would never work - the immortal alien lifeform Azrael would never help him destroy the planet because it had spent several billion years alone in space and wanted companionship. The many clones of Huey Graham are also immortal to a degree (their conscious is backed on a computer, and thus can be reuploaded to any body), but all are shown to be emotionless. Their father ultimately decides that it is wrong to keep them that way and destroys their mental backup, shortly before they all die in an explosion.
• Slayers portrays not so much the pursuit of immortality as universally bad, but the verification. Lina points out that the only way to be sure any method of immortality actually works is to test it, and the only way to do that is to apply it to somebody then try to kill them by every means you can think of(Bleeding and asphyxiation don't work? How about poison? disease? Massive blunt trauma? Acid? Organ removal?). Sooner or later, you'll succeed, then it's back to the drawing board(and the next test subject). One entire kingdom fell into ruin after the king offered a massive reward to anyone who could grant him immortality. The resulting testing phases depopulated entire communities. While true immortality is implied to be impossible, two methods of achieving partial immortality do appear in the series: selling your soul to the Mazoku, which is bad; or being cursed with ''Raugnut Rushavna'', which is worse.
• Yo-kai Watch: Shadowside - The Return of the Oni King: The film's Big Bad is a Yo-kai, and thus has lived far longer than any human can dream of. As a result, he harbours a hatred for the human race. During the events of the film, he attempts to kill the cast in a variety of ways to illustrate what he perceives as human fragility.

• The DCU:
  • There was a spate where immortal villain Vandal Savage found his immortality had been shut down. The only way to restore it was to kill and devour one of his genetic descendants. He didn't even think twice about it. In Final Crisis, it's "revealed" that he was the Biblical Cain, cursed to eternal life for murdering his brother.
  • Justice League of America: Professor Ivo, a mad scientist who developed and drank an immortality potion, which unfortunately left him physically twisted, with a thick scaly skin. It got much worse later on when Ivo discovered his immortality process was slowly turning him into an unmoving living statue, which he would be trapped as for all of eternity. He got turned back into a normal human and learned his lesson... for about two months, after which he got spooked of death and downed the serum again.
  • The New '20s reboot of Milestone Comics has the limited series Duo that involves a conspiracy of immortals to suppress advancements in science that would make immortality widespread, due to the fact that an indefinite lifespan inevitably leads to sociopathy. This is informed by personal experience, both in immortals who were too low functioning to allow freedom who got banished by their peers, and the group themselves who freely admit their disregard for mortals but are high functioning enough to forecast that everyone with immortality would selfishly ruin the planet.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Eternals: The Eternals of Earth are a million years old, a hundred beings with Resurrective Immortality. The alien Celestials created them to guard the Earth. However, each time an Eternal resurrects, the process kills a human (or another sentient mortal) to provide the spark of life. Some of the Eternals know this, but don't care. Others reluctantly accept it as the price of their duty. And some, viewing it as utterly immoral, have been subjected to Laser-Guided Amnesia whenever they discover the cost. At least two have called for the destruction of their entire race when they found out about it.
  • The Mighty Thor: In Thor (2007), while Thor had been banished and his half-brother Balder was king of the Asgardians, the Asgardians accepted an invitation to move to Latveria. Once there, Dr. Doom started kidnapping and vivisecting Asgardians. Why? Dr. Doom was making plans for dealing with his impending mortality and wanted to experiment on the Asgardians to gain their longevity.
  • X-Men:
    • In The Dark Phoenix Saga, the entire goal of the Dark Phoenix is to live forever, even at the expense of everyone and everything else. At least, now it is.
    • X-Men Red (2022) discusses this at various points. The mutants of Arakko are not part of the Krakoan Resurrective Immortality system and, as they put it, are "not afraid of a life that ends". This raises questions about the morality of immortal Krakoans, such as Storm or Magneto, acting as their rulers and leading them to war. There's a similar conversation about Professor X's daughter Xandra, a mutant who is also entitled to Krakoan immortality, ruling over the alien Shi'ar.
    • This trope is rather more explicit (and literal) in the case of Selene, who discovered her mutant ability to devour life force well before recorded history.
• The Sacrificers: The Gods of Harlos keep themselves young by harvesting the essence of children chosen as the Sacrificers.
• Star Wars Legends: The comic series Dark Empire gives us an interesting example with (who else?) Palpatine. He has a bunch of clone bodies to put his soul into, coming as close as possible to the Sith dream of immortality, but the clones are shorter-lived every time. To that end, he decides to give Alderaan expatriates a home "in restitution for Tarkin's crimes" and drain their energies, and eventually the entire universe would face this fate. So Luke and a lost tribe of Jedi sabotage the process and Palpatine tries to take possession of Han and Leia's son (this being a desperate last-ditch Plan B when he's down to his last clone, since it would result in being trapped in a helpless child for years), leading to a good old-fashioned father-son team-up wherein Han kills Lord Sidious's body and Anakin (Leia named him. Cute.) kills the soul.

• This was lampshaded by Artax in the Nodwick Highlander parody "A Kind of Tragic" after an attempt at immortality gone south: "I just wanted to live forever. Was that so wrong?"

• This is what caused the fall of the First Ancestral Race in the backstory of Advice and Trust.

  ...having been all but immortal from birth, never knowing vulnerability, far too many of them never developed notions of empathy or restraint, or found them far too late.

• In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Dumbledore believes that seeking to live forever is inherently immoral, and the fear of death is what caused Voldemort to turn evil. Harry disagrees and wants everyone to live forever, but still wouldn't want to achieve it by immoral methods, such as Horcruxes — as he points out, the fact that they're powered by murder sort of contradicts the whole point of universal immortality.

• Ark have this as the motivation of the main villain, Storrian Vizier Baramanda; hijacking the ancient Ark meant for saving the citizens of Alcyeon for his own immortality, and use it to prolong his own life thereby condemning two alien races, the Ceveans and Storrians, into extinction while he lives forever.
• Doraemon: Nobita's the Legend of the Sun King introduces a new villainess, the Evil Sorceress Ledina, who curses the noble queen of Mayana into a Deep Sleep, creates an endless drought upon the kingdom, and intends to hunt down its prince, Tio, to sacrifice the latter for her immortality ritual.
• In Princess Mononoke, the Emperor wants to be immortal through the head of the Spirit of the Forest, which means the death of the spiritual world.
• This idea drives the second half of Renaissance, and the film comes off as a mixture of "It's inherently wrong" and "Even if it was a good idea, letting the resident MegaCorp control it is a recipe for disaster."
• Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island: This happens to be the big dark secret of Simon Lenore and Lena Dupree. Centuries ago, they were the only survivors of a group of settlers attacked by Captain Morgan Moonscar and his pirate army. The two uttered a curse on them by their Cat God, giving them cat creature transformations and destroyed the pirates; however, invoking the Cat God's powers have cursed them as well, and they must drain the life forces of unsuspecting strangers lured by Lena to the island at midnight during a harvest moon, so they can preserve their immortality and stay alive. The zombies encountered by the gang were the various other visitors who lost their life forces, and they were trying to warn them so they wouldn't suffer the same fate they did.
• In Tales from Earthsea, the evil Sorcerer Lord Cobb wants to be immortal through means of Black Magic, which means the death of the world.
• The plot of Tangled revolves around this. When the king's army takes the flower that Gothel had been using to keep herself eternally youthful for centuries and uses it to heal the queen, its power is transferred to Rapunzel's hair, which loses its power when it's cut. Gothel then kidnaps Rapunzel and keeps her in a tower, doing everything she can to ensure that she stays there forever, so that Gothel will always have access to Rapunzel's hair when she needs it to rejuvenate herself.

• In Avatar: The Way of Water, RDA has started hunting Pandora's whale-analogue tulkun for an anti-aging serum in their brains — despite the biologist on their whaling ship acknowledging that tulkun are even more intelligent than humans.
• In Before I Hang, a physician on death row for a mercy killing is allowed to experiment on a cure for aging using a criminals' blood, but secretly tests it on himself. He gets a pardon, but finds out that he's become a Jekyll & Hyde murderer.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the line "We're immortal...We can do whatever we want."
• In Cannibal Girls, the titular women maintain their youth and immortality by eating their victims and drinking their blood.
• Clonus is Immortality Immorality at its best — clones of rich people have their organs harvested to extend the lives of their genetic progenitors.
• A Cure for Wellness: Volmer and his staff are absolutely ruthless in their pursuit of immortality, using their patients as filters for a life-extending elixir in a process that severely dehydrates and ultimately kills them.
• In The Dark Crystal, the new Skeksis emperor seeks to restore his youth by drinking the painfully and fatally extracted essence of other sentient beings. This may or may not be a subversion, as it's unclear if success would also prolong his lifespan: the previous Emperor had just died of old age, but that could've been due to a lack of gelfling victims, not an indication that essence grants youth without long life.
• In Fresh Meat, Heri believes he can achieve immortality through ritual cannibalism, including eating the still beating heart of his son and drinking the blood of his daughter.
• From Beyond the Grave: Evil occultist Sir Michael Sinclair, from "The Door", found the secret of immortality; constructing his own personal room behind an ornate door, Sinclair lures those who come into possession of the door to the room to murder them and take their souls in order to extend his life.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Holy Grail gives immortality to whoever drinks from it; however, the perk comes with two catches: First, you have to stay in the temple to benefit from the holy water; second, you can’t take the grail outside. Immortality serves as more of an imprisonment, since the knight guarding the grail was stuck there in perpetual old age. The fate of the villains clearly suggests immortality is impossible to have. Walter Donovan ends up drinking from one of the decoy grails and rapidly ages to death. Afterward, Elsa Schneider tries to take the grail out of the temple, but triggers a self-destructing mechanism. She finds herself in a Literal Cliffhanger, with the chalice just within arm’s reach. In her greed, she pulls herself from Indiana’s hold to grasp it. Needing just a little more to get it, she stretches too far and the glove pulls off her hand, which sends her falling to her death. Indiana also goes for it but he gives up after his father talks some sense into him.
• The point made by the protagonist Will in In Time, who is against immortality if other people have to die for it. The point is also made by a century-old rich man who is tired of living.
• In Jupiter Ascending, how the Abrasax family — and presumably others out in space — maintain their long lives is pretty horrible. The substance that rejuvenates them is created by harvesting human life forms they seeded millennia ago on other planets.
• The Leech Woman features a woman who retains her youth by using an African pollen... and the brainstem juice of the men she's murdered.
• Point 2 is brought up in The Man from Earth.
• In The Man Who Turned to Stone, a group of 18th-century scientists, led by Dr. Murdock, have remained young after all these centuries by using electricity to suck the life out of young women.
• In Mr. Nobody, society has achieved biological immortality by 2092, and the title character is going to be the last human to die of old age. Pop culture, at least, doesn't come off too well...
• In The Night Strangler, an alchemist has developed an elixir of youth that has to be renewed every 21 years with the blood of a few women.
• In Nothing but the Night, the secret behind the murder of the trustees of the orphanage is that the trustees have been transferring their personalities and knowledge into orphans and then destroying their old bodies to disguise the real cause of death.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Jack Sparrow seeks immortality but is still initially presented as a likable protagonist. Until, that is, he makes a few deals — a bad one with Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, then a really awful one with Beckett in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End — betraying and sacrificing the lives of many others in order to save himself. It takes a little talk with Captain Teague to put Jack back on the other side of the line. In the climax of the latter film, Jack gives up an opportunity for immortality in order to save the life of his friend Will Turner.

    Teague: The trick isn't living forever, Jackie. The trick is living with yourself forever.

  • Blackbeard in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is even more so. His quest for eternal life has more to do with a prophecy that he will die soon. Even then, he's perfectly willing to trade his daughter's life so he can live. ("I'm a bad man.") Averted with the Spanish, though. For most of the movie, it's implied that the Spanish king wants the secret of immortality for himself. In fact, the Spaniards have orders to destroy the Fountain of Youth. Why? Because only God can grant one true immortality in Heaven.
• The Ritual: The cultists in the forest have been regularly sacrificing hikers to a monstrous jötunn known as Moder, in exchange for immortality as her followers. It should be noted this is a case of Age Without Youth; the oldest worshippers have been reduced to shrivelled mummies unable to even move, but still barely clinging to life (the cultists apparently don't have any problem with this).
• In Self/Less, shedding is introduced as a revolutionary way to keep the most important and influential people in the world alive and healthy but is ultimately revealed to come at a pretty horrible cost — the healthy bodies being used used to be living people who were coerced into selling themselves. Not only that, but learning this leaves the client in a very difficult position, as the medication used to keep them anchored to the body is slowly erasing the body's former inhabitant. The ending shows Damien willingly dying so Mark can come back to life as being a result of him becoming a better person.
• The two villains in The Skeleton Key live forever by tricking victims into believing in hoodoo and then stealing their bodies via hoodoo when they are susceptible to it (they are only affected by spells if they believe in them) when their current bodies are too old to sustain them. They got away with it for centuries and get away with it again.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek: Generations, Soran is so determined to get back to the Nexus (a place of eternal bliss) that he willingly destroys several populated star systems to do so.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection takes place on a planet with radiation that makes people living on it eternally young. But the villains are so old they may die before the radiation takes full effect, so they want to collect the radiation and concentrate it, destroying the planet in the process.
• Star Wars:
  • Palpatine's conversations with Anakin in Revenge of the Sith imply that the Sith are this trope, able to resist or even halt death using techniques and knowledge that the Jedi would consider to be abominable. It's most probably a big pack of lies though (considering he's a Manipulative Bastard attempting to convert Anakin to The Dark Side), and while the Star Wars Legends feature numerous Sith that seek immortality at any cost and a few that come close, none are successful. In fact, after Anakin's final turn to the dark side, Palpatine coyly admits that he doesn't actually know the secret to immortality and that he and Anakin will have to discover it together.
  • Palpatine's primary goal is to rule the galaxy for eternity. In The Rise of Skywalker, it's revealed that Palpatine discovered a method of cheating death that involved transferring his spirit into a host body. He survived his death at the end of Return of the Jedi by inhabiting the body of a clone, and seeks Rey as a new vessel.
• The cult in The Thirsty Dead requires the blood of nubile young women as a component of the elixir that provides then with eternal life. The process turns the donors into withered, ugly monsters whom the cult disposes of by feeding them to rats.
• The Unearthly involves a scientist performing tests on human subjects to activate "the seventeenth gland" and achieve immortality. His experiments have a bad habit of turning his victims into semi-catatonic zombies.
• The evil Alchemist from Vidocq needs the blood of virgins to make a special type of glass for his mirror mask. Said mask grants him immortality and eternal youth by storing and slowly draining the souls of people who died staring into his mask. So there's a lot of death involved.
• In The Wolverine, Ichirō Yashida wants to gain immortality by stealing it from someone else. That should be the first clue that he's not a good person. On the other hand, Wolverine's own immorality (or something close to it) isn't presented as anything immoral. But Logan was born that way, rather than gaining it by killing somebody else.

• Arrowverse:
  • The version of the Lazarus Pit in Arrow leaves the user with a permanent (barring other magical effects) compulsion to kill, and that's if you Come Back Right. If you Come Back Wrong, it's as a Soulless Shell that only knows how to kill.
  • The portrayal of Vandal Savage in Legends of Tomorrow needs to kill the current incarnations of Hawkman and Hawkgirl in order to "recharge" his immortality. While he'd love to have Hawkgirl at his side, he has no problem with killing her when she (inevitably) rejects him, and he's already done it over 200 times at the beginning of the show.
• The immortality treatment offered by the title character of the Babylon 5 episode "Deathwalker" requires the death of some in order to make others immortal. Deathwalker hopes to cause the various races to degenerate into civil war as revenge for the destruction of her own people. Ironically, her plans are foiled by the Vorlons, a race that has already reached true immortality, and apparently by less immoral means. (But then again, you never know for sure with those First Ones.)
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), the Cylons couldn't appreciate life prior to their civil war, when the rebellious faction is exiled from the Resurrection Ship, meaning that any deaths would be permanent. Their leader explains it as the possibility of death made each second important, more so than it ever was before.
• Averted with Henry Fitzroy in Blood Ties (2007), who is a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire and does his best not to kill any of his victims. Played straight with Monsignor Javier Mendoza, a high-ranking member of The Spanish Inquisition, who goes to Knight Templar lengths to ensure the destruction of all vampires. He doesn't shy from killing innocents and has kept himself alive all these centuries by draining his vampire victims and using their blood in a life-extension serum. Medusa is a Monster of the Week who also fits the trope. What was done to her all those millennia ago is terrible (being unjustly punished for being raped), but it doesn't justify seducing attractive young men and then turning them to stone when they call her beautiful. Henry's maker/ex-lover Christina is also morally ambiguous.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Ampata in "Inca Mummy Girl" was resurrected and enjoys being a normal girl again, but suffers from a Horror Hunger to keep herself alive.
  • In the episode "Lie to Me," Buffy's childhood friend and crush Billy "Ford" Fordham comes to Sunnydale... and it turns out he's dying from a "nest" of brain tumors. He makes a deal with Spike to hand Buffy over to him, as well as the Vampire Vannabes in the Sunset Club, in exchange for being turned into a vampire and becoming immortal. While Buffy is sympathetic to his plight, she states outright that Ford's motivations and desperation to live do not excuse murder.
• Doctor Who:
  • From the original series, "The Five Doctors" deals with the attempts of a renegade Time Lord to become immortal, the secret involving a chat with Rassilon, the founder of the race. Rassilon does NOT like the idea of Time Lords being immortal; his solution probably inspired what the Tenth Doctor did to the Family of Blood.
  • In "The Brain of Morbius", the Doctor visits an alien race that possesses an immortality drug. The Time Lords have traded with them for ages, but only use the drug to help with failed regenerations; they believe that true immortality would cause cultural stagnation, as it has with the race in question.
  • The Master, once he reaches the end of his regeneration cycle, is perfectly willing to extend his life at the expense of others, whether by using the energy from a black hole's nucleus to restore his emaciated body — which would result in the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords — or, ultimately, hijacking the body of a companion's beloved father.
  • In "School Reunion", Mr. Finch offers eternal life and eternal youth to the Doctor and his companions, even offering to help resurrect the Time Lords. Sarah Jane talks the Doctor out of it, saying "No. The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends."
  • In "The Lazarus Experiment", the Doctor argues against the life-extension researcher who gets turned into the Monster of the Week, though strangely he focuses more on immortality itself than the fact Lazarus had become a monstrous thing that required that he eat people to continue living. He makes a similar argument against Cassandra in "The End of the World", although her monstrous qualities were unrelated to her longevity.
  • In "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", The Family of Blood try to steal the Doctor's immortality to extend their extremely short lifespans, killing a lot of people in the process. Naturally, the Doctor wasn't happy with all the killing and condemned the Family to a A Fate Worse Than Death.
  • Ashildr in "The Woman Who Lived" intended to sacrifice her butler to open a portal, considering it a trifling matter to end his short existence a bit sooner. She changes plans to use Sam Swift because he's already condemned to hang, but her comment to that effect seems to be more a (failed) attempt to mollify the Doctor than an indication that she cares one way or the other. She's an interesting case in that her lack of morals is caused by her immortality (which was forced on her by the Doctor in order to save her life); she has an infinite lifespan but only a human memory, so she forgets everything that she ever comes to care about and ultimately decides to care only for herself.
  • The Time Lords, as well as the Doctor himself, waver back and forth on this. They are said to be "immortal, barring accidents" and can survive even fatal damage at least twelve times, but while individual Time Lords are generally good people the civilisation as a whole is immensely arrogant and indifferent to the rest of the universe, and they have an alarming tendency to produce power mad renegades that use their immortality and knowledge to lord over and cause immense damage to "lesser races" (a category in which many include the Doctor). At the very least, in "The Ultimate Foe" the Doctor states they are "decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core" due to eons of such power, and The End of Time demonstrates to what lengths they are willing to go to preserve their immortality.
  • When Jack Harkness is accidentally given immortality, both the Doctor and the TARDIS immediately run the hell away from him and display some hardcore Fantastic Racism. Jack calls them out on it.
• The mysterious caller in Forever claims he has been around for over 2000 years and, over this time, has lost all compassion for humanity. He sees no problems with killing an innocent person just to get someone to notice him. In contrast, Henry cares a lot, although the caller claims it's because Henry is only 200 years old and hasn't yet become a cynic. Being a doctor probably helps, although Henry is currently working as a coroner. Additionally, unlike the caller, Henry is determined to end his "curse" and die for good, much to the chagrin of his much older adopted son Abe, who himself wouldn't mind a few more youthful decades. Ironically, the one group of people that "Adam" feels compassion for are concentration camp survivors. Why? Because he himself was tortured and experimented on in Auschwitz by Mengele, who was trying to find the source of "Adam"'s Resurrective Immortality.
• The driving force of the rogue watchers, or hunters, in Highlander: The Series.
  • Yes and no. While it does partly stem from the idea that Immortals are somehow "abominations before God/nature" or some such drivel, there's also the very reasonable fear of what would happen if an Immortal actually does win the nebulous "Prize," and what kind of world-ruling power they may actually have. Especially any of the evil guest-star Immortals, Kern, Kanis, Kronos. . .
• In the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode "The Youth Killer", Helen of Troy maintains her life and beauty by draining the lifeforce of attractive young people as a sacrifice to the goddess Hecate. Kolchak defeats her by revealing the glass eye of Helen's latest sacrifice. Displeased with the imperfect sacrifice, Hecate revokes her gifts and Helen is Taken for Granite.
• A number of villains in The Librarians are immortal:
  • The Big Bad of Season 1 is Sir Lancelot Dulaque, who has been alive for over a thousand years.
  • The main villain of Season 2 is Prospero, the very first Fictional, created by the literary genius of William Shakespeare. All Fictionals are immortal, since they're magical beings.
  • The witch Morgan le Fay, who uses magic to maintain her eternal youth, is perfectly willing to get dozens of people killed to save herself.
  • Dorian Gray transfers any negative effects of physical damage, drunkenness, or drugs to others and sees nothing wrong with that. He has achieved that by using modern technology to create a new "painting", a photo mosaic of himself, made up of pictures of his club patrons. All the photos, including the mosaic, are stored in the cloud, meaning there's no easy way of destroying the magic.
  • Averted with Tesla's assistant, who was accidentally made immortal by a failed experiment. While she can't leave the area, as her immortality is maintained by the tech, she is not a villain.
  • The main villain of Season 4 is Nicole Noone, Flynn's first Guardian. A Time Machine explosion threw her 500 years back in time. When Flynn didn't show up to rescue her (he thought she died), Nicole grew bitter, found an immortality potion, and resolved to destroy the Library.
  • Also averted with Jenkins (AKA Sir Galahad), Judson (the first Librarian), and Charlene (Judson's Guardian). Also averted with Flynn and Baird, who are joined to the Library in the Grand Finale, just like Judson and Charlene were, granting them immortality.
• Moonlight: There are thousands upon thousands of vampires across the world (we don't know the number, be we're told that a few hundred live in LA alone). Some are Friendly Neighborhood Vampires (drinking donor blood or from willing humans), while others are of the more murderous variety. It's also revealed that The French Revolution was partly the humans rising up against France's vampire royalty, whose parties typically included murdering humans for their blood.
• The Outpost: The Masters, the group of Physical Gods who are the Big Bad Duumvirate of Season 4 (and the Greater-Scope Villain of the whole series), drain the Life Energy of other beings to sustain themselves. By the time they arrived in the show's universe, they'd already left countless worlds completely devoid of life, having drained them dry without remorse. Upon escaping their imprisonment in the modern day, they get right back into the habit, killing everyone they come across to regain their full strength and intending to keep going once they've done so.
• In Sanctuary (2007), vampires ruled the world millennia ago, until they were overthrown and exterminated. By all accounts, they weren't kind to their subjects. The Five manage to obtain a sample of vampire blood and use it to create a Super Serum. Each of the Five gets different abilities with some of the members (Helen Magnus, Nikola Tesla, and, possibly, Nigel Griffin) becoming The Ageless. While Magnus and Griffin appear to retain their morality, Tesla, who becomes a genuine vampire and gains electrical powers, starts dreaming of the old glory days of "his kind" and becomes obsessed with learning to make more vampires, so they can rule the world again as Philosopher Kings. While he mellows out in later episode, his initial appearance in the show is less than flattering and he even threatens to kill Helen. He also has no qualms about secretly injecting a serum into unsuspecting rich kids that will turn them into vampires over several decades. After losing his immortality, he is determined to get it back and manages to do that by obtaining another sample of vampire blood, except the real vampires don't consider him to be one of them.
• Space: 1999 has a race that can become immortal by extracting and implanting into themselves the brain cells of Maya's shapeshifter species. Needless to say, this kills the "donor".
• In Stargate SG-1, the Goa'uld regeneration sarcophagus, which doesn't grant complete immortality but is damn close, gradually turns its users sociopathic with repeated use. This, combined with the fact that Goa'uld memories are passed on in their DNA to future generations, is the cause of the species' Always Chaotic Evil nature. It's also why the rebel Tok'ra faction (descendants of the only known good Goa'uld, Egeria) refuse to use the sarcophagus, even at the cost of their own extinction. However, even the sarcophagus eventually fails, as it was in Yu's case. Conveniently, he was one of the most benevolent Goa'uld to become senile and close to death. It was not the issue with the host but with the symbiote.
• Supernatural:
  • Subverted in season 3's "Time Is on My Side" with an immortal doctor who needs to replace his organs when they "wear out"; Sam steals his notebook, complete with the formula for how to become immortal. It turns out that its not some dark magic ritual that involves drinking blood from a baby's skull, it's just science — though "weird science". The brothers eventually bury the notebook with the doctor, not wanting to have to prey on others to survive. It seems like they didn't stop to consider the positive implications of that kind of immortality paired with organ cloning technology...
  • And subverted again in the season 5 episode "The Curious Case of Dean Winchester", in which the leads come across a witch who lengthens his life by playing Texas Hold'em with humans. At least 25 years of life is the buy-in: winning means you can regress to your younger self or not age for that amount of time, while losing means you age rapidly or die. There are no tricks involved, as the only ones who play the witch are those who search him out knowing full well what the game entails. Interestingly, the witch never cheats (he's been playing and winning so long, he doesn't feel the need to), tries to dissuade potential players whom he believes don't have a real shot at winning, and on one case, he folds a hand he's certain he'll win and voluntarily ends the game, just to give an aging opponent enough extra years of life for him to see his granddaughter's Bat Mitzvah. He's a pretty nice guy. His companion/lover eventually gets tired of immortality and forces him to play her and win, betting and losing all her years.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "Long Live Walter Jameson", the title character has married dozens of times during the course of more than 2,000 years and abandoned each of his wives as they grew older in order to keep his secret.
  • In "Queen of the Nile", Pamela Morris has managed to stay alive and beautiful for two millennia by draining the Life Energy of young men using a scarab beetle.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Our Selena is Dying", Selena Brockman drains her niece Debra's Life Energy in order to become young again. Her sister Martha previously did the same thing to her own daughter Diane.

• Sentenced's "The Suicider" is about an immortal/undead man who now only finds pleasure in killing other people, feeling reborn every time he kills someone.

• The Adventure Zone: Balance:
  • The Wonderland Twins have massively extended their lifespans by luring people into Wonderland and forcing them to play twisted sacrifice games in the hope of gaining their most desired item, causing the players to be slowly drained of life energy every time they express suffering. It's made very clear that they have never given out a prize at the end, and while it's possible to escape their game, nobody gets out unscathed.
  • The Red Robes are likewise liches who have mysterious reasons for following the Tres Horny Boys around. Subverted. The Red Robe that has been following them around is Barry Bluejeans, trying to help them to solve the mystery.

• Chronicles of Darkness:
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters introduces abmortals, humans who've discovered or fallen prey to strange processes that leave them immortal, unaging, and capable of healing any injury, but usually at a human cost. Sample abmortals feature processes ranging from "must convince someone to jump from the bridge they failed to commit suicide off of once a year" to "never rejects foreign tissue, but often needs a 'full work-up.'" The statted-up sample abmortal is a crooked exorcist who found a way to devour ghosts.
  • Mage: The Awakening:
    • The Tremere Liches are a magical legacy who suspend their aging by devouring souls — at worst, up to one every two weeks. Soul theft is one of the few ways to fall off the Karma Meter irrevocably, to say nothing of the hellish half-life the victims endure.
    • The Timori legacy can suspend their aging by De-Powering other mages, which generally Mind Rapes them into insanity as a side effect.
    • Malevolent spirits called Acamoth can halt a human's aging for a year at a time. The price tends to start at Mind Raping the summoner, but repeat customers tend to get roped into becoming their agents on Earth.
    • The True Soul is a grimoire authored by Tazanteotl, an Atlantean magus who had a unique inability to extend his own life past eighty. The book contains a Legacy that obliterates its members' identity, turning them into a psychic clone of him. The new Tazanteotl loses a point of Wisdom on the basis of him being a self-absorbed Jerkass obsessed with survival at all costs.
  • The sourcebook Inferno has one of the few ways a mortal can become The Ageless indefinitely: Demonic Possession. Hence, it comes with an Enemy Within that's fueled by Vice and literally Made of Evil.
  • One adventure seed in World Of Darkness: Innocents features a woman who maintains eternal life by sucking the youth out of children until they're nothing but ancient, desiccated corpses. She preys on children specifically because they have the most lifespan to drain.
  • In the supplement Immortals, forfeiting one's humanity is the standard price of immortality:
    • Blood Bathers are people who've created Blood Magic rituals to sustain their youth and health. Sure, they can make do with blood packs or animal sacrifice, but that limits the ritual's potential so much compared to Human Sacrifice...
    • Body Thieves and Patchwork People stay alive by preying on other humans through a Grand Theft Me or Organ Theft respectively.
    • The Harvesters become and stay immortal by killing other immortals. Sure, some of them try to Pay Evil unto Evil and only target the above groups, but when the hourglass is running low and the only nearby source is an innocent, do you really think that they're going to cling to their standards and face Mother Death with their head held high?
• C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet: A valid concern for players who reach Span Four: your PC has probably lived several hundred years, adopting numerous identities in multiple timelines, had a bunch of nano-technology implanted, and killed (or Fragged) enemies in service to an ethical code that only other spanners can relate to. At Span Five, you're telepathic, functionally immortal, you can traverse nearly all of human history in a single span and you're much more like the Inheritors than a human being.
• Zig-zagged in Dungeons & Dragons, Depending on the Writer and setting.
  • The ritual to become a Lich is "unspeakably evil," to which some guidebooks add that existence as a lich or other Undead twists the soul towards evil if it wasn't already.
    • A 1^st Edition Dragon Magazine article describes some highly immoral Eye of Newt components for the ritual, like the blood of an elf and the heart of a fellow mage. Of course, a resourceful player might obtain them by Paying Evil Unto Evil to avoid the Moral Event Horizon.
    • Since you Can't Argue with Elves, the Forgotten Realms and Eberron settings feature non-evil lich variants unique to the elven race: the noble Baelnorn and the technically-not-undead Deathless respectively, both highly respected spiritual leaders to their peoples.
    • In most editions, bog-standard Liches get immortality through an evil ritual invoking Orcus, an evil demonic deity of the undead. However, more noble casters with enough effort can find an immortality ritual that forgoes calling upon the demonic forces to become Archliches.
    • Generally, in 4th edition, most epic destinies can involve immortality through different means, almost all of which are good or neutral.
    • 5E Liches eat souls to maintain their forms. Those that do not lose their bodies and revert to demiliches, floating skulls significantly weaker than full liches (unlike in previous editions where demiliches were advanced liches, who also ate souls and were floating heads but retained all spellcasting ability).
  • The Forgotten Realms also features magic that drains the life from others and adds it to your lifespan. Casting the spell is an inherently evil act, though careful users can avoid falling to Evil themselves through their choice of lifestyle and victims.
  • Eberron also shifts undead from Always Chaotic Evil to usually evil. The most well-known vampire of the setting is the guy who ended the last 100 years of war, and he didn't even want immortality originally. Since the setting tends towards at least somewhat realistic politics he earns his Lawful Evil alignment with his ruthless nature, but at least he's working towards relatively good ends.
  • Immortality can also be cosmically illegal: creatures called Marut travel around the Planes, hunting down people who go too far to avoid dying when their time is up.
  • Prior to 3E, Potions of Longevity were a regular part of every D&D game edition. Each potion consumed could add a few decades to someone's lifespan, but had a small chance of causing their deferred age to instantly catch up with them instead. So non-lichly longevity was available, without any moral baggage: it was just a gamble and didn't last long, relatively speaking.
  • In BECMI D&D, the wish spell could knock off 1d10 years of age, without any drawbacks. So once a magic-user hit the right power level, they had it made.
• In Princess: The Hopeful, a Chronicles of Darkness fan supplement, this trope is the reason Queens allow themselves to die and reincarnate on regular basis despite having more than enough magic power to be The Ageless: they know sticking to the same life for too long isn't good for your mental health. The Queen of Tears has been unable to reincarnate for millennia because her power is the only thing preventing her city from falling, and she has devolved into an authoritarian Well-Intentioned Extremist willing to commit any action, no matter how amoral, to protect her people.
• Siren: The Drowning, a Chronicles of Darkness fan supplement, has the Flensers, a society of humans who keep themselves immortal by killing Sirens and eating their flesh. And if that wasn't amoral already, they are willing to pollute entire areas on purpose in order to lure Sirens out.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Clan Tremere started out as human mages. Once their immortality started fading because mankind wasn't buying magic anymore, they poked at vampires with sticks until they gave up their secrets of immortality. Then, in order to compete with other, older vampires, the founder of the clan diablerized the founder of the Salubri, then spread lies about infernalism so the rest of the clan would be destroyed and he'd get off scot free.
• The Dark Eldar from Warhammer 40,000 keep their eternal youth by living in Commoragh and enjoying the suffering of others. Their reason for immortality may seem legit, if a little self-centered (Chaos God(dess) Slaanesh eats their souls when they die), until you remember it's their fault Slaanesh exists in the first place, as (s)he was created by their decadence.
  • Also note that the Dark Eldar could keep Slaanesh's hunger at bay through self-control, as their Craftworld Eldar brethren do, rather than through the suffering of others. A few actually have made the transition.
  • Also, in the Ultramarines novel Nightbringer, some Dark Eldar in search of more reliable immortality end up waking up the incarnation of Death itself.
  • The ultimate goal of any follower of Chaos is to transcend the Materium and become an immortal Daemon Prince, and mortal Chaos Champions can live for thousands of years. Given that the best way to gain favour with the Chaos Gods is indiscriminately conquering and slaughtering everything in one's path, inevitably this trope is involved.
  • In the Warhammer 40000 rpg Dark Heresy, there are alien artifacts known as Halo Devices. These artifacts will give the user immortality, but they will slowly turn into a bloodthirsty creature full of evil appetites. A person can also sell their soul to daemons using dark rites, in exchange for longevity.

• Lazerby of The Pirate's Fate is a slightly unusual example in that he's already long dead by the time he comes up with his plan. Having discovered one of the magic coins and using it to stay bound to this plane, he further finds that all of the coins gathered together will allow for a wish to change the world. He explains his plan as nobody ever needing to die again...by allowing everyone to become a ghost and possess babies the moment they're born. Even when the nightmarish flaws, and the logistics, of this are thought out, he stubbornly insists on it and becomes violent, revealing himself to be a total sociopath who truly does only care about himself and his own survival. (Needless to say, letting him win does not end well.)
• The Narrator and the mortal being he is an echo of, the Creator, in Slay the Princess. The Creator apparently was a witness to the universe’s impending demise and wanted to destroy the concept of death. The plan he came up with involved creating a cosmic being and splitting it into a deity of change, transformation and of course death; and into a deity of stability and stasis. Then he apparently killed himself after trapping both deities in a Construct and left the Narrator, his ghost, in the Construct to have the Long Quiet (the deity of stability and stasis) kill the Princess/Shifting Mound (the deity of change, transformation and death). If the Long Quiet succeeds and leaves the Princess’s body behind in the basement of a cabin, the Long Quiet’s “reward” is to stay in the Construct forever in a stagnant nothingness that the Narrator insists is blissful. This is shown to be a very bad thing, or at least poorly thought out, in the game.

• While mostly averted in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, where Benjamin Franklin and Dr. McNinja are researching a cure for death and the attempt is treated as a positive thing, it turns out to be a case of #1 as Ben was unwittingly receiving "help" from Dracula, and the serum wound up turning Ben into a Headless Horseman. The debate behind this trope is parodied at the end of the arc in this strip.
• The Dragon Doctors had Preston Chang, who turned himself into a parasite known as the Crax so that he could become immortal by infesting everyone. However the Crax eventually determined that his attitude was detrimental to survival and discarded his soul before mutating into benign gut fauna.
• In Drowtales, a human royal coupled sought immortality by bathing in Elf blood Elizabeth-Bathory-style. It's not explicitly stated whether it really worked against aging, but it definitely didn't work against being killed.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Aberrations are humans who have chosen to become monstrous and feed on humanity to extend their lifespans. The process involves giving up any possible empathy for other human beings. Some have traits in common with vampires, and the author has decided that "vampire" is a valid name for them.
  • Immortals themselves (that is to say, a class of magical humanlike creatures who are naturally immortal), have another form of this trope, in that the older they get, the more unhinged and psychotic they become. They also tend to get Stronger with Age, which is not a good combination. The Immortals are aware of this, and consciously decide to "die" every two hundred years or so in order to "reset" their personalities and avoid this fate. They retain some of their memories of past lives, but in the form of pure information, not as actual experiences they can remember. Pandora has been avoiding death for around six hundred years or so, and is very definitely insane by this point. It seems her reason for doing so was she didn't want to lose the love she had for her mortal lover.
• Subverted in Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name when Hanna turns Conrad into a vampire. Immortality's no cakewalk, and it comes at a price, but Hanna is still portrayed as a sympathetic character who was only doing the best thing he could do at the time.
• Discussed in The Order of the Stick when Vaarsuvius, who has the souls of three of the strongest arcane mages in the Lower Planes binded to them, picks a fight with Xykon. The lich doesn't find this very impressive because all the great evil magic-types know they're going to a bad afterlife and there are many options in their world to avoid death altogether.
• Zig-zagged in Kill Six Billion Demons: there are three species that don't die of old age and seem none the worse for it, aside from some overpopulation issues. On the other hand, the seven Demiurges have varied means of extending their lives, "some more corrosive than others"; Mottom restores her youth with fruit that the mutated corpse of her husband, now a twisted fleshy tree, produces when fed the blood of Virgin Sacrifices. Yeesh.
• Angel Eye from Rice Boy was formerly on a Mission from God which granted him immortality as long as he continued seeking The Fulfiller. He quit, but didn't want to give up his immortality, so he began drinking the Black Spirit. As the Overside Encyclopedia explains: "Anyone who drinks it is immortal for as long as he drinks it, but it isn't the same life as before. Extended use is thought to make the drinker increasingly warped and evil."
  • It's worth noting that immortality per se isn't portrayed as evil, as one of the heroes, T-O-E, is on the same Mission From God that Angel Eye abandoned, and is likewise immortal. However, T-O-E does consider himself very foolish for taking the offer in the first place.

• A few of the SCP Foundation's cases feature this, most notably Totenkinder and the population of a remote Russian town, whose immortality is Powered by a Forsaken Child.
• The fan-made Five Nights at Freddy's Villain Song "Unbroken" by Man on the Internet is half William Afton ranting about how much he despises children and half congratulating himself on how "brilliant" he was to find a way to make himself immortal... by murdering children to harvest their Life Energy and infuse it into himself. The chorus is literally a summation of both elements:

  Afton: Cut them down to forge forever // We'll ignite with lifelines severed // In potential lies endless life awoken! Damn them to their final verdict // Give their lives to the deserving // Let their remnants cry // I remain unbroken!

• After Hours pointed out an inherent downside to immortality even with well-respected historical figures - Values Dissonance would inherently come into play, leading them into conflict with shifting norms.
• Mocked by The Nostalgia Chick in her Xanadu review:

  Chick: [as Zeus] That's the thing about immortality, it makes you oblivious and stupid.

• Dracula Flow: Dracula at one point claims to be 12 million years old, and has evidently spent that entire time murdering people, having sex, and consuming obscene amounts of every drug possible.
• Comes up on multiple occasions in Tales From My D&D Campaign.
  • When the Ytarran race began to die of the Hubris, their Warforged servants had to face the fact that without maintainance that only Ytarrans knew how to do, even their artificial bodies would begin to break down and decay. Some were so unwilling to accept this that they learnt to drain the vitality from other Warforged, or to steal other, less-decayed bodies. In contrast to these "Dark Ancients", however, there are also a small number who found ways to sustain their bodies without having to steal bodies or life to do it.
  • One of the party members is a cleric of Ankou, the setting's demigod of death, and his god condems those who seek to prolong their life beyond its proper span. Elves (who are naturally unaging) are exempt from this decree, and when one of the protagonists accidentally becomes immortal due to a blessing from a magical spring, the cleric of Ankou is uncomfortable but concedes that this is less objectionable than most of this setting's ways of attaining immortality (which usually requires becoming some form of undead).

• Marceline from Adventure Time does have a case of this, as it is flat out stated (well, sang) in her introductory episode that the reason she is so Chaotic Neutral is that she's lived so long she's stopped caring.

  Narrator: [singing] Oh Marceline! Why are you so mean?
  Marceline: [singing back] I'm not mean, I'm a thousand years old, and I just lost track of my moral code.

• Ra's al-Ghul from Batman: The Animated Series has this as part of his Utopia Justifies the Means philosophy, and it's shown that the Lazarus Pits that he uses renders the user completely and utterly Ax-Crazy for a brief period of time after using it. In the animated series, he nearly threw his own daughter to certain death (the pits are lethal to healthy humans, and only work on the dying).
  • And then he takes a flying leap over the Moral Event Horizon in Batman Beyond, when it's revealed that after being wounded too badly for even the Pits to heal, he took over Talia's body, overwriting her mind with his. Talia apparently agreed to this out of sheer devotion (or so Ra's says), but that doesn't make it any less despicable. It drives home the point of his own selfishness; if his daughter was THAT devoted, she surely could have been counted on to continue his life's work, so his only reason for taking her body would have to be his own selfish desire to continue living.
  • Batman taunts him at one point that after all this time and delusions of grandeur, Ra's hasn't mastered death at all; he's ruled by the fear of it.
  • Played with in Batman: Under the Red Hood.

    Jason Todd: Oh, you got to talking with Ra's, huh? Does it make it easier for you to think my little dip in his fountain of youth turned me rabid? Or is this just the real me?

• Charles Montgomery Burns displays a similar cowardice on The Simpsons. Coming close to a Heel–Face Turn numerous times, he finally doomed himself after a random act of kindness nearly killed him. He then realized that evil was literally the only thing keeping his frail, 104-year-old body alive, and he vows to never reform his ways in order to keep himself alive forever.
• Count Duckula can conceivably live forever, provided he is not exterminated. If he is, he can be brought back once a century if the resurrection ritual is done properly. In his TV series, it obviously wasn't.

• Some commentators, both religious and secular, argue that to "cure" aging would abolish a key part of the human experience. Perhaps the most notable exponent of this viewpoint is Leon Kass, formerly of the President's Council on Bioethics.
  • While others, like Ray Kurzweil, consider this to be us Stockholming Death. They think the quest to beat death is the most human thing we could possibly do.
• Presumably, if this were applied on a global scale, it would result in massive overpopulation (and thus, this trope is in full effect in Immanual Kant's system of moral philosophy, which says that you should not do something that would be bad if everyone did it). If only a few people were granted immortality, they would likely acquire disproportionate power and control over the course of their lives, and would never be removed from power by death. So, unless there's Population Control, completely effective contraception, and/or cheap, reliable space colonization becomes available, immortality could be very bad for the human race in general.
  • On an even larger scale, one could argue that immortality threatens all life on earth, via a lack of evolution. Eternally young but experienced creatures will almost always outcompete their own offspring. Thus, any immortal species will stop replacing its individuals with those from a newer generation. This stays true as the environment changes, while some of the young creatures will be slightly better adapted to it by chance, this advantage doesn't outweigh the massive gap in experience. This in turn means that those slightly better adapted individuals can't reproduce and produce (once more by chance) even better adapted ones. The gap between the environment the species has evolved in and the one it's currently living in will eventually become too big, and the immortal species goes extinct (barring magical means that let the animals survive literally anywhere). This could take as long as hundreds of millions of years though, in select cases, and it can be subverted altogether if the immortality is incomplete and enough immortal individuals still die from predator attacks or other causes. Still, this is one reason why we have the lifespan we have; evolution selects against populations with too long an average life. Then again not able to die is probably the ultimate adaptation.
  • In much of the developed world, birthrates have been steadily falling in recent years (in some cases below replacement levels) to the point where the average age of the population has gone up substantially. Which could potentially result in an inversion of sorts - developing a cure for aging may be the only practical solution to avoid ending up with more elderly people than society can afford to care for (at least, that wouldn't have nasty consequences much much worse than compromising what some philosophers see as a "key part of the human experience").
  • The one positive benefit of racial immortality is that it makes space exploration by traveling slower than the speed of light an attractive prospect without using Generation Ships. Living forever would work just fine, so long as humanity adopted an extreme expansionist policy.
• For a given definition of immortality, people who commit horrible crimes just to get featured on the news so they can live on in infamy forever would count. Including, not least of which (nor most recently) Herostratus. Notably, even back then, the authorities tried to deny him his goal by trying to Unperson him (they made it a crime to mention his name on pain of death). Unfortunately, their efforts were ultimately in vain. Law enforcement agencies and some media outlets have increasingly become aware of this and are starting to make conscious efforts to avoid it. For example, most outlets pointedly refused to air the name of the man responsible for committing a mass shooting at a church in a small town in Texas in late 2017.
• Elizabeth Báthory supposedly drank and/or bathed in the blood of virgins, thinking it would make her immortal. Obviously it didn't work, as she died anyway.
• Qin Shi Huangdi had a bunch of "wizards" in charge of inventing a potion to make him immortal. While this alone wasn't evil, him burying alive a bunch of the "wizards" when they inevitably failed to produce such a potion sure as hell was.