10 Ways To Become Immortal Power Grid By The Mary Sue StaffNov 1st, 2011, 12:33 pm You are seeing this message because you have javascript disabled. To use our slideshows you need to enable javascript. There's no cross domain hackery or tracking voodoo, it's just some sweet jQuery animations. Please, think of the animations. In the meantime, enjoy the html version below. I guess. If that's your thing. Allow Us To Explain What's to explain? Immortality. You want it. No, don't give me any of that crap about living longer than your loved ones or statistically if you can't die than eventually you're certain to get trapped in a situation where you wish you could. The human race wants to live forever. Some how. This is why we have anti aging cream, children, art, and religion. So far as we know, there's no way to attain immortality of ones consciousness in reality. But in fiction? Why, fiction is full of characters who thumb their noses at gods, laugh in the face of eternity, and play Snakes and Ladders with the Grim Reaper himself. And there are almost as many ways to gain immortality as there are characters who get it, whether it comes after a lifetime of hard study, simply making a wish, gaining a terrible curse, a bloody sacrifice, or sheer bloody luck. There are no runners up for this grid, as we're talking about broad themes rather than individual characters or things, so if you don't see your favorite former-mortal anywhere, just consider them to be lumped in wherever appropriate. If you do have an original method that we haven't covered, please let us know in the comments, for the good of posterity. What you do with eternity is, naturally, up to you. Wish For It Yes, sometimes eternity can be yours just this easily. A dream is a wish your heart makes, so if you're dreaming of outliving your enemies and loved ones alike, sometimes you've just got to want it bad enough. And have your hands on the proper magical implements. For example: Say you've gotten your hands on a genie's lamp. Doesn't really matter how. Obviously, you can't be held responsible for the mistakes of the wisher who came before you, and if that street rat never took advantage of the opportunity afforded by access to phenomenal cosmic powers in such a conveniently small receptacle, well he just should worked harder. You're not going to make his mistakes: you're going to wish yourself into a genie, thus gaining immortality, nigh-invulnerability, and near infinite power, all in exchange for only being let out when somebody wants you to do something for them. This plan has no flaws. Of course, genies are few and far between, so perhaps you'd like a slightly more numerous solution. Slightly, as in there are seven of them. Can I interest you in some Dragon Balls? Get your mind out of the gutter, these magical crystal spheres are the key to summoning the wish-granting dragon Shenron, and are numbered for your convenience! Collect the whole set! Then say the magic words. Then make sure you're the first person in Shenron's presence to scream out a wish: there's no prize for second place, and simply gathering the Dragon Balls is no guarantee. Consume Innocents This is actually quite logical -- if you need to continue living, suck the life out of something else. However, and we must warn you if this is how you've achieved immortality, you're not going to avoid being a murderer. True, some young innocents might be wasting their precious, vital years, and to a creature like your classic vampire, young blood is especially fresh. But there are consequences to consuming the blood of innocents, whether they be human or animal (see: Voldemort feeding on unicorn blood in Harry Potter until he can get his hands on his horcruxes -- ahem, phylacteries) aside from just being a cold-hearted murderer. In the case of vampirism, sometimes the victims also become vampires. And now, you're competing for blood. And that is, more than anything else, inconvenient. But sometimes, you just really need to gain access to some pretty young thing with all that life to spare. Like the Lilim in Stardust, who can't even use magic to regain their lost beauty, or else they'll just become uglier. Instead, they need the heart of Yvaine, the fallen star, so they can buy themselves a few more centuries good looks. This is pretty similar to the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus, a movie about three 17th century witches with a fondness for killing children for their youth who are brought back to life that talks about virginity just a little bit too much for a children's movie. Actually, witches seem to be very into the killing of innocents, and many stories are about a bunch of old hags craving a way to regain their beauty. The mysterious Grail Brotherhood did this intentionally once (when they kidnapped a very powerful infant psychic, hooked it up to a large number of extra cerebral cortexes, put it in a geosynchronous satellite life support system, and based their indistinguishable-from-reality virtual reality network on its greatly enhanced mental processes) and then accidentally started doing it to children all over the world (when that stunted child began to reach out to other children through the internet with its thoughts, putting them all in comas). This is a very good way to be an immortal if you place a great deal of emphasis on your appearance, but not necessarily. Because Voldemort turned into a snake-face, and not one person found that attractive. (Except Bellatrix LeStrange, but she's out of her freaking mind.) But also, don't try this one out if you have a moral objection to murdering innocents. Please/Piss Off a God Certainly, pleasing a god is a good way to get granted immortality: it worked for Ganymede, described in your Child's Illustrated Mythology as a mortal that Zeus liked so much that he brought him to Olympus to be the god-king's cupbearer for all eternity. Once you got a little older, and read the Illiad and the Symposium, you probably looked back on that description with some skepticism. Gandalf, also, was granted a second go at life because he was so indispensable to Eru Iluvatar, creator of the universe, and the three surviving Hobbit ring bearers were also granted the right to sail to the Undying Lands. Which are, uh, Undying and all. But immortality is not always a heavenly gift. Just as often it is a curse, a life lived forever in utter agony, as Prometheus upon his rock, or Sisyphus under his, Jason Blood on his eternal watch over the demon bound within him, and the last surviving humans in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and their computerized torturer, until the immortal longs for release from existence. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman concerns one such character in Urania Blackwell, the Element Girl. Fired from her covert ops job after the superpowers that she volunteered to receive in the line of duty made her unsuited to secret missions, she finds adjusting to civilian life with a body that is no longer made of living tissue impossible and lacks the resources to maintain the life of a superhero. She attempts suicide a number of times, but since her body is no longer technically alive, she's not even sure if she would cease to be conscious were she pulverized, dissipated or diluted. Eventually Urania comes face to face with Death herself, and despite it not strictly being her time to go, the anthropomorphic personification kindly shows her the way to let the ancient god that gave her her powers know that she has grown tired of them, thus shuttling herself out of the mortal world. Schmendrick the Magician, of The Last Unicorn was also unavoidably cursed with near-immortality by his mentor (okay, not a god, but certainly a higher power): he must wander the earth until he learns to control his unfathomably huge magical talent. Probably our favorite curse of immortality happens to a character in the Thursday Next series: as punishment for bookcrime, she cannot die until she reads the ten most boring novels ever written. And she has to figure out which ones they are on her own. Remove a Vital Organ This one seems counter-intuitive, but bear with us. If you can manage to pull it off, there's nothing more definite about immortality than removing one of your vital organs and placing it someplace where nobody is likely to find it. It's sort of like making a phylactery, except instead of place the immaterial part of you in an urn, you're putting a heart in a box. Or in a jar of dirt. But I digress. If you can manage it, there's nothing safer than removing your own heart and placing it in a place somewhat removed from you, unless you remove all of your organs and place them in canopic jars. The only downside of the latter is that you may have to murder a bunch of American archaeologists and adventurers to get them back, but most beings with the wherewithal to remove all of their major organs will find this but a trifling inconvenience. For the safest possible results, it might be a good idea to remove only half your heart, and trade it to a powerful dragon, preferably with a ridiculous Scottish accent, thereby inextricably entwining your life forces. Just beware of knights in shining armor. Alchemy We're using alchemy here as a catch all term for anything that isn't quite science... but, well, it isn't quite magic either, is it? It obviously depends on breaking quite a few of the physical laws of the universe, but it's also a learned skill, a life-long developed talent, a secret formula. In other words: not everybody can do it, and if you'd like to learn how, you better start doing it now. That said, some of the examples in this spot are literally alchemy, as in Enoch Root, or Enoch Red, or Enoch the Red, a frequent secondary character of Neal Stephenson's, who appears in both the WWII and modern day eras of Cryptonomicon, and throughout The Baroque Cycle, a trilogy set in the late 1600's. Enoch, like the fictional Nicolas Flamel of Harry Potter fame, had the use of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, although in Root's case it's not particularly clear whether he actually needs the Elixir to stay alive, or whether he merely uses it to save the lives of other important but minor historical figures. Ra's al Ghul, when he's not reinterpreted as a clever charlatan by movie directors reaching for realism, also uses a form of alchemy to render Lazarus Pits capable of prolonging his life without too many ill effects. And in the special effects, Goldie Hawn, and Meryl Streep (not to mention a disorientingly mousy Bruce Willis) vehicle Death Becomes Her, it's a magical potion that gives the two female leads immortality (but not physical invulnerability). Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention one other way to, after a lifetime of studying with both the living and the dead, can confer a way to cheat death: the way of the Jedi Knight. Clones There are a number of ways to ethically gain eternal life on this list, but clones aren't one of them. In a sense it's simply an offshoot of "Consume Innocents," except in this case you are also creating the innocents that you consume. And whether you do it with a Resurrection Ship, or on a fabled paradise world where you suck the life force of the inhabitants dry in order to bathe the entire place in negative Force energy, it's still going to creep people out. Cloning, of course, is already a viable technological achievement of the modern age, but cloning for immortality demands the further ability to transfer conciousness, possibly including accelerated aging, which, so far as I know, still lies directly in the "science fiction" part of the Venn Diagram. But once you've mastered that, you're in the home stretch, and ready to make like Braniac (who's got a leg up on the whole thing by being a computer in the first place). If you really wanted to be as convoluted as possible, you could make like a member of the Grail Brotherhood and clone a gender-swapped version of yourself, raise her in an environment as close to your mother's as possible, and then impregnate her with your actual clone, just as a backup plan to your regular plan. On the other hand, you could use an army of clones to prolong the lives of your infamously death-prone children without telling them, their own stupidity thus trapping them at the age of sixteen for a few years until you use the army of gooey clone bodies to keep your compound from being invaded. Phylacteries Here's where Susana betrays her biggest pet peeve with J.K. Rowling, and that is that the English language already had a word for Horcrux, and that was phylactery. And now that horcruxes are a thing, everybody knows what they are but not what phylacteries are. And then Susana harrumphs most mightily. Anyway, phylacteries are pretty simple: shove your soul in some sort of physical container through the use of incredibly evil, powerful, and complicated magic, and then go about your daily life as usual. Side effects may include loss of vital signs, flesh, organs; the ability to taste, feel, or smell; and a highly increased capacity for magic and the raising and subsequent control of undead. Side effects may also include a gradual loss of strictly human characteristics like skin tone and texture, eye color, possession of a nose; a gradual loss of any remaining sense of morality; soul instability; and the inability to reach the afterlife. Dorian Gray is the true outlier here: usually someone has to work very hard intentionally to force their soul into an inanimate container, but he got it just by callously allowing a young artist to become obsessed with him while painting his portrait. Lucky fellow, but he might have been better of had the "loss of morality" side effect really taken hold on him. Eventually, in a fit of conscience he rent the painting in two, accidentally committing suicide. Contract With a Higher Power Of course, if you can't find anything to wish on, were never very good at chemistry, and have never been able to decide on just the right urn from Pier 1 to shove your very essence into for safe keeping, you might want to look into skilled negotiation. Because the only thing a god likes more than a friendly wager is a binding agreement in which they come out a clear victor. Take a look at Davey Jones, for example: for the love of a goddess he agreed to ferry the souls of those who died at sea to their final resting place, only to find that she had not remained faithful to him in the intervening years, and the only way he could escape his duties, and his now lonely existence, was if someone murdered him. Then there's Hob Gadling, who owes his several centuries of life to a wager he wasn't even involved in. Death and Dream overheard him bragging that the only reason that people die is because everybody assumes they will, that dying is in essence, "a mug's game." Dream thought it would be amusing to see if the mortal would one day grow to regret an eternal life, and his sister agreed to leave Hob to his own devices for as long as he wanted. Arthas Menethil, prince of World of Warcraft's Lordaeron, made his own bargain with the higher power then known as the Lich King (actually the spirit of a deceased orcish warlock bound into a suit of armor, encased in ice, and positioned atop the Frozen Throne by a very angry and powerful demon; yeah, WoW Lore is complicated like that), by accepting the sword Frostmourne. And lest you think he didn't know what he was getting into, Frostmourne's pedestal read: "Whomsoever takes up this blade shall wield power eternal. Just as the blade rends flesh, so must power scar the spirit." Sword inscriptions: the fine print of the High Fantasy genre. Luck, or an Accident Sometimes, you happen upon a quarter in the street. But in fiction, sometimes you happen upon eternal life. Whether it's a lightning strike that leaves you immune to death, or a Time Vortex takes over another person who then brings you back to life, suddenly gaining immortality can just be a happy accident. Or a greatly traumatic accident. Like death. Yes, indeed, sometimes the best way to tell if you can't die is to die first. One method of death that turned someone immortal was Dr. Manhattan, formerly one Dr. Jonathan Osterman, who found himself trapped in an intrinsic field subtractor, which is exactly what you think it is. When going to get his girlfriend's watch, Jon is trapped inside this crazy machine and disintegrates. But then, his consciousness reforms a new body that can't be destroyed. This is awesome for him, though by the time he became immortal he ceased to have the mortal perspective that would have made him excited about it, but he had to disintegrate first. No easy way out of this one. Similarly, Jack Harkness was shot and killed aboard Satellite 5 while battling the Daleks. But then Rose was kind enough to suck up all the powers of the Time Vortex, become the Bad Wolf, and bring Jack back to life forever. He was not pleased. And in a more organic, natural situation (okay, probably not), Nathan Young, along with his ASBO cohorts, was struck by lightning. While everyone else got fancy new superpowers to play with, Nathan remained powerless -- or so he thought. After being impaled and dying, he woke up in his coffin underground only to find out that he was still alive. But unlike Captain Jack, Nathan is pretty psyched and shoots himself in the head on television for money. Mr. Freeze is an example of the "Fatal Accident" rule, having survived the accident that turned him into Mr. Freeze, after which he wore a cryogenic suit that kept him frozen, but alive, forever in a body that would eventually decay to nothing but a head. Orlando of the Otherland series, which features large on this grid because of the many attempts of its villains to reach immortality of any kind, is, unknowingly to all the main characters, including himself, saved by the stunted child intelligence that controls the virtual reality network the characters are trapped in. If by saved, you mean that his consciousness and memories are copied into computer code and a virtual version of him is created on the network after he dies of medical complications related to progeria, and nobody is really sure if the copy should really be considered to be him. Become a Fan Favorite Here's the capper: the most difficult method of gaining immortality on the whole grid, probably impossible for any real person. And that is to become so inextricable to the plot, or beloved by fans, that the writers would never dare to kill you off, and indeed, will write themselves in tired circles to explain how you got out of that Sarlacc pit. Then, they'll go on to explain for years why it totally makes sense that no one has actually shot you, strangled you, sentenced you to the electric chair, blown you up, or simply let you die falling off that building after you brutally murdered their child, or wife, or partner, or baby; even when your chief opponent knows an absurdly high number of ways to kill a man. Badass fan favorites who must be resurrected from their ignoble pseudo-deaths in order to appear in later installments of the series aside, becoming somebody's lifelong archnemesis is no easy task, even in universes like that of The Venture Bros. where both superherodom and supervillainy is a highly regulated, rule-based career with support groups and job placement programs and everything. This is a round about way of saying that we have no idea how one would go about achieving this method of immortality, and, in fact, we highly discourage you from trying. Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com Filed Under: AladdinBatman (character)Battlestar GalacticaDC ComicsDoctor WhoDragon Ball ZHarry Potter (franchise)Order of the StickOtherlandPirates of the CaribbeanStar Wars (franchise)The Last UnicornThe Lord of the RingsThe MummyThe Picture of Dorian GrayThe Venture Bros.TorchwoodvampiresWatchmenWorld of Warcraft Follow The Mary Sue: Previous PostNext Post Previous PostNext Post
