Since anything is possible in fiction, including bringing people Back from the Dead (even in fiction grounded in Real Life), fans often expect characters not to stay dead, or even assume the character isn't dead at all (as this often is how a character is brought back).
But sometimes, the anticipated resurrection doesn't happen yet; the reaction to this forms this trope.
It's especially common if the character they want back is on the low end of the Sorting Algorithm of Deadness (often in the form of Fix Fics and Fanon Discontinuity), but conversely it can also lead to backlash if the character they don't want back is on the high end (often in the form of Dropped a Bridge on Him in their Fan Fiction, or once they start Running the Asylum). The latter is common in those who complain about resurrection in Superhero Comic Books.
Despite what some think, Back from the Dead isn't always caused by Pandering to the Base or Executive Meddling. Sometimes the writers genuinely intended for a character to come back. On the other hand, characters can stay dead for those very reasons. But of course, there will be Fan Dumb making up their own reasons for either.
This trope is loathed by some but thought of as perfectly normal Wish-Fulfillment by others. Like most tropes, it's all in how it's handled.
Compare Urban Legend of Zelda, Inferred Survival, First Law of Resurrection, Elvis Lives, Unexplained Recovery, No Permanence, No Stakes. See also Viewers in Mourning. When he really is just hiding, it's Faking the Dead. See Uncertain Doom for cases where the ambiguity as to whether someone died is intentional.
Warning: This is part of Death Tropes, so spoilers abound. Don't come crying to us. We repeat: SPOILERS AHOY!
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Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Astroganger: Many fans believe that Ganger didn't truly die at the end, and instead went to his home planet of Katharos after sustaining irrepairable damage. This is because upon rewatching the scene where he's blown up, a flying comet exits the explosion. Unfortunately, Knack Productions can never confirm this because the closest thing Astroganger has to a sequel is Chargeman Ken!.
- Perhaps the biggest example from Bleach is Ulquiorra. Fans saw his body disintegrate, but they still cling to the hope that he'll come back. The fact that his death was so touching and poignant doesn't help matters. Other notable cases include Szayelaporro (he is just that Crazy-Prepared), Starrk (Never Found the Body + capacity for a Soul Jar). and Harribel (negates the bridge drop). Some would be tempted to put Grimmjow on here as well, but he wasn't exactly dead the last time we saw him.
- Fans of Ulquiorra have even more to be worked up about now. Word of God pointed out in an interview how surprised he was by the worldwide response to Ulquiorra's death. He refused to confirm whether that was the last of Ulquiorra.
- Gin Ichimaru is theorized to be alive by some based on his fan-favorite status, the fact that he was still alive when he was last seen (his last words in his head were "great, now I know I can leave things to him," but it's not made clear if he means he can trust Ichigo to take down Aizen after his death or after he's no longer in any condition to fight), and the fact that Orihime showed up just a few chapters after his apparent death. There's also the fact that after the saga is over, Rangiku laments that Gin is gone, but never mentions if he's dead or if Orihime did heal him and he just took off somewhere.
- Recently, Kaname has been added, with some fans suggesting that Mayuri is working on reviving him for...some reason.
- Genryusai Shigekuni Yamamoto. There are numerous theories about how he could have "faked it," including reviving himself as a zombie, being stored in his Zanpakuto somehow, and collaborating with AIZEN, of all people. All of these ignore that, even if he was just hiding, Soul Society really, REALLY needs him, and he's not there. The Kyoka Suigetsu theory sometimes counters this with Aizen is doing it as a practical joke. Yeah. One other thing that often gets cited is the statement that "no body was found," but this is because it was vaporized onscreen.
- Szayelaporro in a separate chapter was shown to be in hell. Ulquiorra and Starrk were confirmed as dead in Unmasked, which is considered pretty definitive. Gin was later confirmed as dead in the Germany Interview.
- But it turns out that Harribel really was Just Hiding - Orihime healed her (and her Fraccion) off-screen, and she's mentioned after the Time Skip. Guess Tite Kubo realised how stupid killing her off so anti-climactically was...
- As of the latest arc, Byakuya Kuchiki can be added to that list. Ever since his apparent death, many people have denied it. Granted the chapter where he apparently died just came out so this might be a little premature, it still counts.
- Nope, Byakuya as of the latest chapter did in fact survive. Though it also has people rolling their eyes at Kubo since it's just another example of him refusing to kill off his dear soul reapers. Kenpachi survived the ordeal too, but his survival is at least somewhat justified due to the guy beating him turning out to be a complete fake of the Big Bad.
- What was so aggravating about Byakuya surviving was that there were multiple points where it was indicated that he had died (i.e. Haschwald saying he'd died, Byakuya giving a farewell speech to a murderous Ichigo and finally his Zanpaktou falling down and breaking with a shot of him having so-called "final thoughts"). It's jarring to see it was just cheap drama.
- On the other hand, all of this is pretty standard for a fake-out death in Bleach. The things we've seen that generally confirm a character's death are the destruction of the body, decapitation, and/or not appearing again for many chapters after being declared dead.
- The NO BREATHES FROM HELL oneshot does bring back Szayelaporro, officially confirming that he's dead and that he's been sent to Hell. At the same time, he confirms that Yamamoto, Unohana and Ukitake also went to Hell after their deaths (specifically after their funerals, which were unknowingly performed for that exact purpose).
- Akai Shuuichi from Case Closed is an interesting example. Immediately after his death, people declared him to be alive, due to the numerous inconsistencies around his death, as well as some notable differences between two shots of the body. Even though that, due to this, there was never much of a doubt in the community that he wasn't dead at all, there are a lot of arguments on who he is - is he Scar Akai, who looks just like his mirror image, but seems to have lost his memory? Or is he, in fact, the scary Subaru Okiya, who displays a lot of non-obvious similarities to Akai? Or is he even someone else? Only time will tell.
- A later Mystery Train arc pretty much settles this dispute; answering who's who as clear as day. Tooru Amuro is confirmed as the real Bourbon, Vermouth and Tooru conspired the creation of Scar Akai to confirm the FBI's reaction to a living Akai and Subaru Okiya is in fact Akai-in-hiding.
- Code Geass:
- Despite seemingly overwhelming evidence, many fans refused to accept the deaths of Euphemia, Jeremiah, Shirley, and Nunnally. Interestingly, Jeremiah and Nunnally actually were Faking the Dead, and show up later in the series.
- Word of God has repeatedly stated that Lelouch is truly dead, they said so in interviews
(e.g. Animage 10 and 11, Continue Vol.42◊, etc), tweets by the director (translation), the official guide book,◊ ..., and Lelouch is listed among the dead in the Death List for R2. C.C. even explicitly says Lelouch is dead in the new epilogue (from 2009). (database with official statements) And yet, some fans refused to believe Word of God that Lelouch is truly dead and clung to the belief that Lelouch survived his Thanatos Gambit in the Grand Finale of the series, either by faking his own death or accidentally absorbing the Big Bad's Complete Immortality in an earlier episode. The series writer stated the ending was made to be a Really Dead Montage for Lelouch, however a possibly deliberately misunderstood interview by the series director saying that "the happy or sad nature of the ending is up to the fans" was misrepresented as a Shrug of God, claiming that it meant that Lelouch's death was up to personal interpretation, while in truth what was really said was that Lelouch's death was free to interpret as a happy or a sad ending, but Lelouch's death itself was never open for interpretation. A Broken Bases inside the fandom ensued and often erroneous Death of the Author arguments were used because the anime's lore itself made it impossible for Lelouch to have the code. 10 years later, a sequel was announced with the real Lelouch being confirmed as the protagonist and the official title of the sequel being "Lelouch of the Resurrection". This made it certain that Lelouch was truly dead, as Word of God always stated, and will be resurrected.
- From Cowboy Bebop, fans of Spike will swear up and down that the character is just hiding, despite having suffered fatal injuries from a personal nemesis, being surrounded by Mooks from the Syndicate (while in the Syndicate Headquarters), collapsing in a pool of his own blood, and the entire series leading up to exactly that climax.
- Notable in that the guy writing the stuff isn't entirely sure if he's dead or alive, either. Some fans have interpreted this as a way of the writer saying it doesn't matter if he lived or died; Spike's story, and by extension the story of Cowboy Bebop, has ended, and whatever happens afterwards, if anything, isn't for us to know.
- Given the nature of the Syndicate in question, Spike would be made its new leader if he survived, since he had just killed the previous leader, Vicious, who in turn had assumed power by killing his own predecessors. Spike would be eligible to take command in this manner because he was previously a member of the Syndicate and despite his own best efforts you never leave the Syndicate.
- It really doesn't help that the entire situation (apart from the fight itself, funnily enough) is completely ambiguous, with Laughing Bull's description of a warrior dying being applicable to either Spike or Vicious, and Spike himself having survived a similar scenario (specifically being, shot, skewered, and jumping off of a four-story building), albeit barely, leaving the entire situation completely valid for either side to make a case.
- Never Found the Body covers a multitude of sins. In the case of the D.Gray-Man fandom and General Cross, this includes disappearing from a room several stories above a lot of sharp rocks, leaving behind the cracked, bloody remains of his Cool Mask, his Empathic Weapon (which is no longer attuned to him), and more blood than a human can lose and survive, all of which was confirmed to be his. That said, there's still one hell of a lot of mystery surrounding his death/disappearance, since, well, they Never Found the Body.
- Danganronpa 3:
- Juzo's got a fair amount of fans claiming this for him. They feel that if he could survive being impaled through the stomach and cutting his own arm off, he could survive the blood loss and just passed out in his last scene. The fact that Kyosuke gets a Downer Ending unless Juzo's alive helps contribute to this.
- There's a fairly large section of the fanbase that does not want Chiaki to be dead, feeling that she deserved a happy ending. Those fans point out that Izuru was right there and could have pulled off a miracle to save her, supported by the fact that it's never shown what became of her body.
- Death Note:
- L; not helped by the fact that this is the point in the story that broke the base on whether the series was still good or not. The live-action adaptations from 2006 actually use one escape theory: When Rem tries to kill L and Watari to save Misa, L actually escapes death — because he'd already written his own name in the Death Note to die at a later date.
- And that's not to mention the deluded fans who are convinced that Light somehow made it. You know, despite having Ryuk write Light's name in his Death Note, just like he said he would in the VERY FIRST EPISODE, which is pretty damned final by the standards of pretty much everyone else.
- A Dog of Flanders (1975): Nello and Patrasche didn't die at the end, and the angels were just a dream because supernatural elements aren't a thing in WMT anime. What's that, WMT confirmed they died? (puts hands over ears) La-la-la-la! I can't hear you! Needless to say, many viewers were torn up about the ending and would prefer to think this instead.
- Dragon Ball Super got a few examples with the Tournament of Power:
- Hit and Tien had fan theories surrounding them about how they weren't really eliminated, via explanations involving Tien's clone technique and Hit's time-skip ability. These theories were widely mocked due to the fact that they didn't really make any sense, given how they were shown on the spectator's stand.
- Android 17's Heroic Sacrifice also got hit with this and was also widely mocked...only for it to turn out that they had indeed survived.
- Fairy Tail:
- For some, Simon has a following for not being truly dead due to the Nobody Can Die nature of this manga, and that because his corpse ends up falling into a dark abyss the last time we see him, someone will make the claim that he never got a proper burial to truly be considered dead. Eventually, though, Simon reappeared as one of the Historias, magically conjured dead people who are turned against those who killed them, something that would only be possible if the character was dead.
- Some fans are speculating that Juvia is not dead, despite the character having performed a Heroic Suicide to save Gray, the man she loved, and then used the last of her strength to give the person a blood transfusion. This may have to do with how, not long before that, Gajeel similarly appeared to die, but turned out to have survived. Turns out they were right.
- Fullmetal Alchemist:
- Maria Ross in Fullmetal Alchemist turned out true in one series, but false in another. The least spoilery way to put it.
- The fandom for Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa has an actual holiday for when Alphons (Heidrich) dies. He gets shot in the back, but we don't see the shot actually hit him. They call it Denial Day, and it's November 8th (or 9th).
- There are a number of fans who don't want to believe that Pride killed his son Selim at the end of the 2003 anime. It's cited that he just strangled him, though a cracking sound can be heard that implies his neck was broken.
- Gundam:
- Lockon Stratos in Mobile Suit Gundam 00. While the way he died made it impossible to recover the body, Word of God has confirmed it — as if the 5-minute montage and monologue sequence wasn't enough. The PS2 game Gundam Meisters made Lockon's Death even more explicit, showing Lockon's faceplate crack off, a scene added to the special edition release to further solidify his death as final.
- Mobile Suit Gundam SEED had someone namely, Mu La Flaga die onscreen, with his helmet visible, drifting through space. Since this didn't set well with the fans, they brought him back as Neo Ronanoke for ''Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny'. This move had its share of detractors, and the SEED remaster erased his helmet from their supposed-death scene.
- The fate of Amuro Ray and Char Aznable at the end of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack has become a somewhat legendary topic of debate among certain fans of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. The intentional lack of a definitive Word of God doesn't help to settle this, and whenever the story appears in a crossover game, such as Another Century's Episode 3, the hero Amuro always survives one way or another. Char's fate is often sealed.
- Guyver fans keep hoping very much that Purgstall will come back from the dead. He was a commonly suggested suspect of Appolyon's identity.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean: Since F.F. is the only one missing from the universe post-reset, many fans did not like the fact they could be Ret-Gone from that universe, and would like to think that another version of them is just not present in the epilogue. The anime adaptation sways a bit on this direction, as unlike the manga, they do get to appear in the last shot alongside everyone else.
- Satoru Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen. Given how beloved he is among the fandom and the anime community at large which contrasts with mangaka Gege Akutami's view of him as a Creator's Pest, the outcome of Chapter 236 - wherein he was bisected by Sukuna's World Slash - was met with massive outcry as the fandom refused to admit he was dead. The fact that his body was recovered shortly after the battle and taken to Ieiri led to many fans hoping he would get resurrected at some point later on. Not even the events of Chapter 263 where Yuta took over his body by way of Kenjaku's Body Surf technique was enough to dissuade the fandom, who still hold to the possibility that Gojo's soul might still be there.
- Alto Saotome, the hero from Macross Frontier, in the movie adaptations. The ending never directly states whether he survived or not, but Ranka tells a comatose Sheryl that she will wake up when Alto comes back. At that very moment, Sheryl's mouth twitched and her earrings glinted. Word of God has stated that this is indeed the case.
- A similar situation applies to Freyja Wion, the heroine from Macross Delta, in its own Finale Movie. In the ending, she pretty much burnt up her lifeforce during the final battle and The Stinger shows Hayate and their daughter reminiscing over her. However, her body is never shown fading away in his arms, which hopeful fans have interpreted to mean that either she managed to survive a bit longer after the movie's conclusion or the door is open for her to be revived in a future installment.
- Though not exactly the most beloved character of the series, fans have hoped that if there's another season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Precia Testarossa should return. She's noted to be one of the cruelest villains ever in the series (on par and maybe surpassing Jail Scaglietti in Season 3), but the final battle against her doesn't have much action, thus fans wanted to at least have her return and be defeated in a more epic battle. And she'd presumably still be a credible threat even after Nanoha has grown up and grown in skill and power, as the SS-ranked Precia officially had more natural power than any other mage of the modern era. Besides, for her Season 1 death, she just fell over a cliff to a never-touched but interesting world and they never really bothered to see if she's dead for good, fueling possible scenarios where she survived and returned with a more insane plan.
- Although, she is Rescued from the Scrappy Heap thanks to later adaptations. The Movie 1st portrays her as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with a more sympathetic backstory, The Gears of Destiny allows her ghost to make peace with her Familiar, and INNOCENTS portrays her as a Doting Parent in an Alternate Universe where she is sane.
- Gai Daigouji from Martian Successor Nadesico; lampshaded with both an Identical Strangernote and a subversion of Back from the Dead.note Naturally, in many Super Robot Wars games he really is.
- Naruto:
- Fans of Jiraiya deny that he died, despite the fact that he was impaled through the chest repeatedly, lost copious amounts of blood, had emotional flashbacks reflecting on his failures and accomplishments in life, transferred his knowledge of the enemy to a frog messenger for Naruto, and sunk to the bottom of a lake while his vision faded to blackness. The fan rationale? It was just one of his shadow clones (even though those would disappear after even one of those things happened).
- Itachi's death was questioned, despite Tobi implicitly stating that his body is lying around somewhere by saying Sasuke could have taken his eyes. Made even worse during the winter break of 2009/2010, when he made a "reappearance" which readers could tell was just genjutsu from a mile away. And then completely finished off when Kabuto used Impure World Resurrection, which only works on the dead, to briefly bring back zombie-Itachi.
- Many fans believed that Obito Uchiha was just hiding, as Tobi of all people. He was.
- One Piece is set in a World of Badass, which means hardly anyone ever dies; as such, any apparent death is generally assumed to be a case of this. Any other fandom would declare them dead. The One Piece fandom insists that no named character has ever died (except for in flashbacks). You can't really blame them, though, because other characters - even fairly minor ones - have come back from worse; after ten years of storyline, the number of named people that are confirmed to have actually died in the main storyline (aside from anime filler characters) barely reaches into double digits.Namely...
- For instance, Miss Monday and Mr. 9 were last seen making a Heroic Sacrifice and getting blown up, and failed to show up in any context for years, but were still assumed to be alive. And sure enough, both are revealed to be alive in Chapter 632's cover story. Not only that, they had a kid together.
- Gin, The Dragon to one of the earlier antagonists who developed a friendly relationship with Sanji and Luffy, seems to be fatally poisoned when he's last seen, but he is never shown dying, leading some to believe that he may have survived (although neither he nor any of Krieg's pirates have been seen since the East Blue saga... until the Egghead arc, where they were among the pirates in Hachinosu watching Vegapunk's broadcast).
- Bellamy from the Jaya arc, seemingly a throwaway villain with too much pride and not enough power. He gets on Luffy's bad side and gets taken out with one punch. At the end of that saga, we see him getting a You Have Failed Me treatment from his boss, Donquixote Doflamingo, an absurdly powerful and influential pirate who can be considered One Piece's rendition of The Joker. Fast forward about five hundred chapters, and we see him alive, well, and significantly more mature, with only a scar to hint at his punishment.
- Gecko Moria of the Seven Warlords of the Sea made the mistake of challenging the Straw Hat Pirates. The last Warlord who made an enemy out of them, Crocodile, had his plans ruined, got beaten to a pulp, and imprisoned in Impel Down. Moria suffered the former two fates. Later, after the War of the Best and his less-than-satisfactory performance, Doflamingo comes after him with a small army of Pacifista, cyborgs akin to The Terminator, the top brass of the World Government having ordered his execution. He escapes, allegedly with his powers, but Doflamingo claims that he was injured too much to survive. Obviously, he was wrong; not much is known about Moria's current status, but what is known is that... He's Just Hiding, somewhere in the New World. It's implied that Absalom used his powers of invisibility to help Moria escape. Come the first interlude during the Wano arc, and Moria goes to Hachinosu to demand Blackbeard he hands Absalom safe and well, only for Absalom having been killed offscreen (his fruit snatched by Shiryu) and Moria himself imprisoned offscreen as of the Egghead arc.
- Another particularly egregious example is Nero, a very minor character who had just enough screentime to get his butt kicked by Franky. He was thrown off a speeding train. Into the ocean. In the middle of one of the biggest, most powerful storms in the world. And he was unconscious at the time. And also horribly wounded. Fans assume he survived. They're probably right.
- The Alabasta arc has two egregious examples of this. First, Igaram is caught in a massive explosion that converts a galleon to scrap-wood, mourned over for the entire arc, and then wanders back in at the end to be supportive. Even worse, Pell carries a bomb with a reported blast radius of five kilometers, which was supposed to kill every living thing in the capital city, high enough into the sky that it doesn't even char the buildings; he's not only caught in the blast, he's actively carrying the thing (and doing nothing to defend himself). After that, he must have fallen the, oh, three miles to the ground. He walks back to the capital on crutches, apparently with no permanent injuries, and in fact wearing the same clothes, which are hardly dirty. In the anime, he walks up to his own tombstone, showing that his friends quite reasonably thought he was dead. And when we see him again one saga later, he's perfectly healthy. Both cases ruin a perfectly good Heroic Sacrifice.
- Bentham, better known as Mr. 2 Bon Kurei, has fallen under this trope twice, both times as a Heroic Sacrifice to help Luffy and his allies escape. The first time, he and his crew face off against a crew of Marines, and his boat is destroyed. Later, a mini-series in the manga shows that he survived…but was incarcerated in Impel Down. The second time, after Luffy's break-in of Impel Down, he alone stays behind to make sure everyone else escapes. This has him facing down a ton of guards and the prison's warden, Magellan, whose Venom-Venom Fruit powers had let him Curb-Stomp just about anyone who challenged him, including Luffy himself. Heck, Magellan had effortlessly sent Luffy to death's door a few chapters prior. But much to the delight of the fandom, it's revealed post-Time Skip, in chapter 666 (make of that what you will), that he somehow survived and is now the "queen" of the secret sanctuary in the prison.
- Sabo. Luffy's brother. Only seen in a flashback involving Luffy and Ace's past, and seen having his raft bombarded at the end of that flashback, with only a tattered hat at sea to indicate his fate. This being a flashback, he was eligible for real-death even under the usual "rules". Many, many fans insisted that he was still alive (and a member of the Revolutionary Army), even after his death was confirmed in a One Piece Databook. And as of Chapter 744, it's finally been confirmed that they were right on both counts. Well, sort of on both counts; he's not just a member of the Revolutionary Army. He's second-in-command of the Revolutionary Army.
- Oda seems to counterbalance this by killing off people by the truckload in flashbacks. From heroic doctors to beloved mothers to whole pirate crews and the entire population of an island, flashbacks are infamous not only for their body counts but for the deceased never ever coming back...except for Brook, that is.
- And Franky, who only survived by rebuilding his body with iron.
- Pokémon Hunter J and her crew from Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl, as they Never Found the Body. Then again, they probably won't, since they all blew up.
- Many fans theorized this was the fate of Shiro after the last episode of Project K. Turns out they were right as the movie went on to show.
- Sentou Yousei Yukikaze has an In-Universe example of this trope: during the evacuation of Faery, Rei Fukai breaks off from the rest of the FAF fleet to lure the JAM toward him & Yukikaze as the fleet is traveling through the hyperspace Passageway to escape back to Earth. When he's at the center of the Passageway, the three Flip Knight drones escorting Rei then detonate their nuclear bombs and collapse the Passageway. Repeat: Rei was at the freaking center of a triple nuclear explosion in a collapsing alien wormhole. Back on Earth though, his commanding officer Jack Booker tells a journalist that he's pretty sure Rei didn't die and is living happily somewhere else in the universe. Considering that the Passageway was created by the JAM, coupled with the fact that we have no clue how it works, this may be possible. Maybe he really did get teleported somewhere else in the universe.
- Tokyo Ghoul: The Filler second-season finale most importantly brings the death of main character Kaneki's best friend Hideyoshi Nagachika (more commonly known as Hide). Although Hide is shown to be bleeding out and dying in Kaneki's arms, the fandom went straight into denial mode, saying "he's just sleeping", referring to how Kaneki covered him with a sheet and bridal carried his body back to the base. Retconned when the third season chose to continue from where the manga ended of from season one, wherein Hide is still alive even at the epilouge
- Haruto from Valvrave the Liberator is getting this for how unrealistic his death was. He just lost all of his memories. There is a 30-second scene of a girl mourning his death and even a memorial around him but poor delivery of all of this made people believe he still lives in a vegetative state.
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Comic Books
- The Atom: Following the death of Ryan Choi in the Titans relaunch, it became a minor meme to draw him, as a black marker stick figure, in totally unrelated books, celebrating his survival and/or swearing to turn the tables on the villains responsible. Endorsed by Gail Simone herself, no less! The resulting backlash surrounding Choi's death was enough to get him brought back in the New 52 reboot.
- Although technically, Ryan never truly debuted as the Atom in the New 52 and instead they introduced newcomer Rhonda Pineda as the Atom. Although it turned out she was the Atom's Evil Counterpart, Atomica, from the Crime Syndicate's universe. It wasn't until Convergence that Ryan, the original Ryan Choi killed by Deathstroke's team and not a new version, was officially brought back from the dead.
- Batman:
- There are a few who found the Face–Heel Turn of Batgirl III (Cassandra Cain) so badly written and conceived that they are torn between a duplicate (the real one still off finding herself) and a mind-seed implanting a new personality outright as alternate explanations. The subsequent editorially mandated damage control mollified things somewhat, though. They did try to explain it, but due to an apparent lack of coordination between writers, the thing that was causing her to act differently and how it was cured were different in two different comic books. It now appears that they've just given up on trying to explain it and have (mostly) moved Cass back to her original characterization.
- This trope is also the reason Neil Gaiman has been so enthusiastic about being offered the chance to write Whatever Happened to The Caped Crusader?, which, like how Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is the "last Superman story" before the retcons of Crisis on Infinite Earths took place, is the "last Batman story" for the retcons of Final Crisis.
- The Big Book of Conspiracies: The comic examines a couple of conspiracy theories claiming that Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, faked his death.
- Blue Beetle: There was a lot of this surrounding the 2004 death of Ted Kord. It helped the situation that Ted had been getting more panel time via flashbacks since his death than he had in the entire decade before it. There was a Red Herring that strongly hinted that Ted was alive, but he then showed up as a Black Lantern in Blackest Night, confirming his demise.
- The Golden Age:
- Bob Daley and Human Bomb both seem to die in the final battle, but their fates are only depicted in quick panels that don't show much of the gory details (after which they are never mentioned again) and some fans feel they may have only been wounded.
- Miss America's death is possible to question, since her powers have let her recover from worse in the main timeline.
- Injustice: Gods Among Us: Huntress didn't get her neck snapped by Wonder Woman! The cracking sound was just the platemail of her suit rubbing together, and the force of the Lasso of Truth jerking her head around just gave her severe whiplash and knocked her out. She was on Kryptonian durability pills at the time, after all. And where's her gravestone, huh?!
- We do find out that the Legion of superheroes have been going around and saving/recruiting people...
- Justice Society of America: The robot Hourman sacrificed himself to rescue Hourman I and II in JSA. Hourman indicated he would try rebuilding him and time-traveler Rip Hunter later said the robot Hourman would be out of commission "for a relative year."
- Kingdom Come: The quick and chaotic nature of the nuclear bombing and brevity of the scene showing there are survivors made it possible to hope that many seemingly dead characters like Red Hood, Human Bomb, Olivia, Batwoman II and Ace, Lightning, Kid Flash, Menagerie, Living Doll, Hawkman, Red Arrow, the Red Tornadoes, Zatara II, Steel, Aleea Strange, Power Woman, Blue Beetle, Stars, Stripes, 666, and Phantom Lady survived offscreen even before many did indeed turn up alive in other works like The Kingdom (DC) and Teen Titans.
- Legion of Super-Heroes: This is the sentiment shared by many fans on the status of Superman's descendant Laurel Kent. After the company edict stating Superman could be the only surviving Kryptonian character following Crisis on Infinite Earths, they had to rewrite Laurel's backstory and "revealed" during the Millennium crossover that she was really an undercover Manhunter android. Since there was no evidence that there was never a real Laurel, fans believe she's still out there. And many years later in Superman/Batman, writer Chris Roberson introduced a new version of Superwoman named Elna Kent in the 31st Century. Not only does she look like Laurel and have a similar costume, but "Elna" was an alias Laurel used in her debut. In fact, the artist's designs revealed she is Laurel Kent, but for whatever reason, they weren't allowed to call her that in the published story.
- Runaways: Played with. Chase and his pet dinosaur, Old Lace, are on the top of a skyscraper when The Punisher pops up and blasts him with an RPG. While the rest of the team is convinced of his death, Molly refuses to accept it.
Molly: Chase probably saw the missile and jumped out of the way and then he... would... fall and then — Old Lace! Old Lace would jump down a dinosaur jump and, and — ...and she would grab the building with her claws and SKREEEECH! Save Chase from falling with her mouth!
- Not much later, Chase returns and says that that is exactly what happened. Molly points out that this was exactly what she said, and asks why the others aren't awesomed by her.
- The Sandman (1989): Neil Gaiman knows this trope, to the point that he said the truly revolutionary aspect of the series is that when someone dies, they are dead. Even if they get some new incarnation, it is distinctly different and pointed out to be so. One character, when offered a chance to be recreated, even delivers an Author Filibuster about the importance of final deaths.
- Silver Surfer: Though not dead, Norin Radd is constantly losing his true love Shalla-bal and regaining her to the point where him losing her has lost all impact. Even her dying in Earth X seems trite and cliched.
- Spider-Man:
- It's become a sort of meme in the comic fandom regarding the Osborns. When Norman Osborn turned out to be responsible for The Clone Saga, he revealed he was just hiding in Europe. Then, when Harry was resurrected post-One More Day, he says that he was also in Europe. To fans, Europe is essentially Osborn-Limbo.
- Despite being a minor member of the supporting cast and a normal human who died from a shotgun blast at close range at the beginning of a story arc titled The Death of Jean DeWolff, fans still refused to believe DeWolff was dead, and came up with all sorts of loopy theories as to why she wasn't.
- Superman:
- In The Death of Superman, it turned out that Superman's body was removed by the Fortress of Solitude robots and kept in regenerative stasis while the four pretenders were gallivanting around Metropolis.
- All-Star Superman features a race of humanoid dinosaurs that are evolved descendants of the dinosaurs of the past who turned out to have gone literally underground instead of getting totally wiped out. Why would the author make such a concept? Because they're too cool to just be extinct, of course!
- The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers: The infamously brutal death scenes were done expressly to avert this; the writers didn’t want people second-guessing the drama and betting the characters would survive, so they made the deaths as horrific and unambiguous as physically possible. They even trolled the readers with this, having Ironfist miraculously survive the final battle only to die of an aneurysm on the very next page.
- Ultimate Spider-Man: Subverted in a story where Richard Parker (Pete's dad) claims that he has been hiding after his reported death. It turns out that he is not really Richard Parker but a clone of Peter that has been aged to a much more mature level and given Fake Memories.
- When it was revealed that Marvel was planning a crossover involving Miles Morales titled Spider-Men, there was rampant speculation that the series would reveal that Ultimate Peter Parker survived his recent death. It then turned out the Peter teaming up with Miles was simply the adult version from the main Marvel Universe. This turned out to be Hilarious in Hindsight as it was then revealed a year later that, yes, Ultimate Peter had survived after all, and he had been in hiding.
- Ultimate X-Men (2001):
- Beast is killed. Turns out he was just hiding underground. This after the architects of the Ultimate Universe promised none of these.
- Gambit was Killed Off for Real but nobody wants to believe it, because he's GAMBIT.
- The Wasp: Janet Van Dyne was supposedly killed in an explosion at the end of Secret Invasion, but Brian Michael Bendis' final Avengers story revealed that she had simply been transported to the Microverse. This caused a bit of Canon Discontinuity, as a prior issue of The Incredible Hercules showed the Wasp was indeed in the afterlife. In any case, she's back and part of the Uncanny Avengers.
- Watchmen: Rorschach wasn't killed by Dr. Manhattan! Jon just teleported him somewhere, the blood was just a decoy to throw off Adrian! Also Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice. Hooded Justice's death is highly ambiguous, though it seems Nelly officially died in a car crash. However, a popular theory that the pair are in truth alive and together may be confirmed by Word of God.
- The strongest evidence supporting the theory that Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis are alive and well is in Chapter 1, page 25, middle-left panel. In the restaurant, two men are holding hands and are the focus of the panel. The main characters, Dan and Laurie, are in the background. This technique is sometimes used elsewhere in the work, for example, page 14 of chapter 10 where the intent is to transfer the reader's attention from the main characters to a new character (in this case, Roy Chess). The men resemble older versions of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis, assuming Justice is the strongman. A final detail is their bow-ties. Their ties have green markings on them, making them resemble domino masks. While the other indicators are rather vague on their own, the addition of the bow-ties seal it for some. And given that Hooded Justice and Metropolis died in ways that leave bodies difficult to identify, were gay lovers, and resemble the drawn men who steal the focus of the panel, it could be true. If you really want to get crazy, Laurie's dialog ("Me and Jon? Oh, yeah yeah, everything's fine. Couldn't be better.") that is present in the panel could be juxtaposed purposely with the men and the relationship of HJ and Nelly. Laurie and Jon's relationship is public, with no privacy, physical intimacy or affection, while HJ and Nelly's was secret and private, and the two men are obviously very intimate with each other. Or it's just a load of crap.
- Word of God, well one of the Gods (the artist) is that it's unintentional, but he likes the idea so why not?
- Wolverine: Sabretooth dying in Wolverine #55? Turns out he was a clone, and the real Sabretooth was in hiding all along. Which doesn't explain how his soul shows up in Hell and is beheaded by a sword that is supposed to render the victim unable to return to the living.
Comic Strips
Fan Works
- Child of the Storm had this as the immediate reaction - on consideration, In-Universe, in general by the readers - when it appeared as if Doctor Strange had died in chapter 29 of the sequel. This turned out to be completely correct, and he strolled in for breakfast in chapter 34.
- To Hell and Back (Arrowverse) offers an In-Universe example. Barry knows that Eobard has to be alive somewhere after being sucked into the portal, but also knows that, wherever he is, it's likely somewhere that is currently beyond their reach.
Film — Animated
- Prince Charming was speculated to have survived the events of Shrek the Third by the window falling on him after the huge realistic prop tower was knocked onto him by Dragon.
- Batman: Bad Blood: It's tempting to question whether Killer Moth and Hellhound might have survived being crushed by falling debris at the abbey, or whether Onyx might have survived the explosion of Talia's vessel after already having a No One Could Survive That! moment.
- Tai Lung's ambiguous fate at the end of Kung Fu Panda has led to many, many a Fix Fic.
- To be fair, the directors' commentary made it clear that the creators never intended to reveal Tai Lung's actual fate. Whether this was a cunning move on their part to prevent it from being obvious he'd appear in a sequel will only be revealed in time. But with the exact words being 'Nobody knows what happened to him, it's just a mystery', they clearly don't mind if some fans believe he's only hiding, and may even be just encouraging it.
- Same for Oogway's disappearance in a puff of petals. Seems to be a natural result in a movie that shows no bodies and never says die.
- It's clear that Oogway's disappearance is a case of Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence; the ambiguity is because there's nothing to tell us whether he can come back.
- The third film clarifies that Oogway is now living peacefully in the Spirit Realm, and could possibly come back if he wanted to. Via Freeze-Frame Bonus, Tai Lung's fate was confirmed as being absorbed by Kai.
- Beauty and the Beast (1991): There are still a great many people (even his voice actor, of all people) who believe that Gaston could still be alive, even after Word of God confirmed (well, mostly confirmed, at least, since his voice actor begs to differ) that he did, in fact, perish.
- Starting with Optimus Prime and Starscream's deaths in The Transformers: The Movie, the weeping of thousands of small children over the former, and their returns in the later stages of the cartoon's third season, it's gotten to the point where nobody's surprised when dead Transformers don't stay that way. Optimus Primal came Back from the Dead three times. Had young fans come to terms with the death of their hero somehow, the world of the Transformers might have been a very different place.
- For an example involving a minor character, there's Brawn. Not only did the G1 cartoon depict him as Nigh-Invulnerable, but his death in the shuttle attack was relatively tame compared to the other Autobots as he was just shot in the shoulder rather than suffering a graphic demise. If that wasn't enough, there is the Season 3 episode "Dark Awakening", a follow-up to the movie wherein the Autobots visit a mausoleum for the casualties of the film, which does not list Brawn but instead Huffer among the interred (which was highly likely to be a scripting error).
- Prime's death in the G1 movie had such a profound effect, it actually caused an aversion in another Hasbro toy-based movie; protests over it caused the creators of G.I. Joe: The Movie to turn Duke's death near the end into a coma. Which is even more ironic when you find out that apparently, the idea to kill off the leader originally came from the guys writing the GI Joe movie. The Hasbro execs liked it so much as a way to clear old stock off of shelves that they suggested the Transformers movie do the same. Then the GI Joe movie got delayed, Optimus Prime died, and the rest is history.
- This is also an in-canon rumor about the single, unnamed SAW Viper who notoriously killed four Joes before being hunted down by Snake Eyes in revenge.
- Sleeping Beauty (1959): After being defeated in her One-Winged Angel form, Maleficent noticeably does not leave behind a corpse—not a dragon corpse, not a fairy corpse. This has caused many fans to speculate that she did indeed survive, and spawned many a Fan Fic.
- The Lion King:
- Thanks to his death occurring in a Gory Discretion Shot, fans of The Lion King (1994) believe the villain Scar to have survived and is in hiding somewhere far, far away from the pride. The fact that he's a Draco in Leather Pants and he makes several cameos in the questionably-canonical animated series doesn't help matters any.
- Scar also had the trope similarly invoked on him in Kingdom Hearts II. Despite him being dead, there were a few hints that Scar, even after his Heartless was defeated, still lived on as a ghost hive and later the Earthshaker, and he might have even created a Nobody of himself as the result of his transforming into a Heartless, going by several heavy implications of what happens to people when they become heartless. Plus, if what is implied to have happened to Master Xehanort/Terranort after Kingdom Hearts II is anything to go by, destroying both his heartless and nobody would most likely bring Scar back to life.
- The same treatment is often given to Zira and less often Nuka and Mufasa. Zira dies by falling into a raging river and being trampled by logs, but it's vague enough that fans say she could have survived.
- The Big Hero 6 fandom has collectively "nope'd" the death of Tadashi Hamada. To be fair, the other victim of the fire turned out to be just fine.
- Discussed in-universe in the manga adaptation where Tadashi was sucked into a portal during a failed attempt to bring Abigail back. It's theorised that he could still be alive in another dimension.
- When discussing writing comics based on The Incredibles, Mark Waid said that Syndrome might have survived the end of the movie but refused to say whether he did or not.
- Elsa and Anna's parents were killed at sea in Frozen (2013). Since it's implied they never retrieved their remains, many theories exist that they survived. Why they have been missing for three years varies, with two popular choices being either they are on a desert island or they have amnesia. The director of both movies, Chris Buck, jokingly said they washed up on an island with their new baby, Tarzan.
Film — Live-Action
- A Wedding (1978): While the other characters assume that Tracy dies in the car crash with Briggs, the viewers might question whether she really was with him. It isn't clear how many people are in the car when it leaves, and Tracy and Briggs only have one conversation earlier in the movie, which doesn't seem to set up a strong enough bond for them to steal a car together to spite the newlyweds.
- Drop Zone: Many fans insist Dark Action Girl Kara may have only been knocked unconscious during her final fight with Jessie.
- Escape Room: Tournament of Champions:
- Some fans are convinced that Rachel and/or Brianna survive the acid rain, especially since Rachel's body has already endured a lot and she falls on top of Brianna and may have shielded her. This is mainly due to the two only being seen from a distance once the acid rain starts pouring harder and Amanda turning up alive after her apparent death.
- Some people think Nate survives being pulled under the quicksand.
- MonsterVerse:
- Somewhat with Ghidorah (specifically with the San/Kevin's decapitated head) at the end of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). The fact that the head's flesh is clearly experiencing decomposition in the film's Stinger didn't stop fans speculating that the head is still biologically alive and could regenerate a whole body from the neck-stump in time. Ultimately, Godzilla vs. Kong revealed that whilst the head decayed to just a skull, the skull retained Ghidorah's consciousness or at least a fragment of it, enabling Ghidorah's remains to hijack Mechagodzilla and turn it into a Robotic Psychopath.
- Following the release of Godzilla vs. Kong, a theory has been gaining traction that Ren Serizawa (or at least his body) isn't really dead at the end of the film. The very last we see of Ren in the film is him getting electrocuted in Ghidorah's skull and then slumping forward, whilst an extra scene in the film's novelization depicts Madison returning to the now-destroyed chamber and finding no trace of Ren's body (albeit after the room has been annihilated by Mechagodzilla's rampage). It's really gotten fans hoping that Ren will return after his electrocution, wearing an eyepatch or possessed by Ghidorah's consciousness.
- Star Wars:
- Inverted by the fandom, who desperately, desperately, wanted Jar Jar Binks to be hiding... on Alderaan. (Or better yet, accidentally shot by a passing Clone Trooper. In slow-mo.)
- The fans who believe Mace Windu survived the electrocution and several hundred story fall in Revenge of the Sith and has been hiding on Coruscant ever since. It doesn't help that official sources seem to intentionally avoid saying the word "death" here. Well, there are characters in SW canon who survived similar situations, namely Darth Krayt and Rahm Kota.
- Then there is Samuel L. Jackson wanting to appear in the new SW films and saying that Windu may not have died...
- Similarly, some think Kit Fisto survived his gut-slash from Palpatine. The claim is based on the fact that the slash didn't appear to be too lethal, just barely hitting his torso.
- The fandom, in general, loved Boba Fett so much, retcons occurred to keep him alive in the Expanded Universe after he was thrown into the Saarlac pit. George Lucas himself says (in the commentary track on the Return of the Jedi DVD) that he regrets killing off Boba Fett, and that he seriously considered adding a scene to the DVD showing him escaping from the pit. According to Lucas, the only reason he didn't add the scene was that it didn't seem necessary when most of the fans already believed he survived anyway. Season 2 of The Mandalorian would confirm that he did survive in the new Disney canon.
- Aayla Secura, a very minor (in the films, anyway) Jedi killed onscreen during the Order 66 sequence, has attracted speculation that she may have survived. This in spite of the fact that the film goes to fairly great lengths to show her being shot In the Back, collapsing, then continuing to be shot for some time. The usual theory is that her squad of Clone Troopers used stun blasts to pretend to comply with Order 66. The Expanded Universe did include the examples of Jedi surviving Order 66 because their clones refused to obey the order, but Aayla wasn't one of them.
- Similarly, Shaak Ti, another minor Jedi, has a habit of surviving not only situations that should have killed her, but also two that actually did. She was filmed dying twice in Revenge of the Sith, at the hands of both General Grievous and Darth Vader, but both scenes were dropped. She was last seen falling into a Sarlacc pit in The Force Unleashed, and we all know No One Could Survive That!...note She was also supposed to die during the first animated Clone Wars series, making it 3 times she's cheated death.
- They've recently been killing off all sorts of characters. There's a whole genre of fanfic dedicated to Anakin (Solo) and Mara getting better. And many believe Luke's going to survive even into Legacy, but for some reason, he has to appear to Cade as a blue ghostie.
- The official Star Wars board had a joke movement saying that the background character San Hill is still alive and well because he is never shown being killed in the movie and his body isn't there after Anakin kills the Separatist council. Word of God by a continuity manager squashed this, though this doesn't explain the appearance of another San Hill (but a human one, not a muun) in the same position in the game Forces of Corruption.
- Knights of the Old Republic fans have this attitude toward Revan. Which definitely isn't helped by the fact that his fate after around a year after the game is set was never revealed. They were right this time around. He's still alive and kicking 300 years later. Well, for certain definitions of "alive."
- In-Universe in Star Wars: Shattered Empire, Captain Duvat believes that the Emperor still lives and anything else is just Rebel propaganda, and repeating it is a punishable act of treason.
- Han Solo's death in The Force Awakens has naturally received quite a bit of this. The fact that Harrison Ford has been announced to be appearing in Episode 8 no doubt fuels quite a bit of this. However, later cast lists released as Episode 8 began filming began casting doubt on this.
- After the announcement of The Force Awakens, a lot of people began to apply this train of thought to Darth Plagueis, first mentioned in Revenge of the Sith, based on Palpatine's comments that his old master was able to conquer death. The EU book Tarkin dropped a couple of details about the enigmatic figure into the canon also helped the theory gain some support. A number of people are convinced that he was somehow Faking the Dead and could be the Big Bad of the Sequel Trilogy as a way of raising the stakes from his apprentice. This theory gained greater credibility when fans found that "Snoke's Theme" from TFA's soundtrack sounded very similar to "Palpatine's Teachings" from ROTS's soundtrack.
- Mark Hamill says that Luke didn't die in The Last Jedi, he teleported to a nudist colony, hence the empty pile of clothing he left behind.
- A fair amount of fans believe that Captain Phasma yet again survived her apparent fiery death.
- Despite being bisected by Kylo Ren, some fans believe that Snoke may have somehow cheated death. The Rise of Skywalker showed they were correct... from a certain point of view.
- Ben Solo's death in The Rise of Skywalker sparked a massive backlash and Wild Mass Guessing as to how he could potentially be brought back, with the Save Ben Solo social media hashtag turning into a full-blown fan campaign.
- Darth Maul, despite being bisected and pushed down a pit in The Phantom Menace, was the subject of speculation for years as to whether he survived or not, mainly due to his Ensemble Dark Horse status in The Phantom Menace. Star Wars: The Clone Wars ended up bringing him back for real, and explores the consequences of his survival.
- After the advance screenings of Serenity, a whole website/blog was established devoted to saving the character of Wash, because some fans found his death too upsetting and felt that it ruined the movie's good vibes. In this case, it wasn't so much a matter of making up fanonical ways that he could still be alive (being impaled through the chest with a giant wooden harpoon being a fairly definitive death) as pressuring the filmmakers to go back and change the movie's final sequence to have Wash survive somehow ("he can just be trapped offscreen during the final battle!"), as though it would have been possible/cost-effective to bring back the entire cast and crew, remake the final thirty minutes of the movie, and have it ready for the movie's September release, which at that point was three months away. Even years later, fans still continue to come up with ideas like Wash being switched for a clone and actually being held in an Alliance prison. The comics make the death harder to reverse, though, in several ways.
- Joss Whedon has said that this is what he fully intended the reaction to be, to an extent; he knew that the fandom would not react favourably to the death and in this way made the connection with the character all the stronger by proving that they were genuinely sad that he was gone.
- Many fans of Star Trek didn't like the way Captain Kirk was killed in Generations. And neither did William Shatner, who co-wrote a series of non-Canon Trek novels set after Generations which resurrected Kirk. Fans call this series the "Shatnerverse", though whether lovingly or derisively depends on the Trekkie.
- And then there's Data. It seems that every single Data fan has fanfic detailing what happens after Nemesis to bring the beloved android back to life. Of course... he is an android in the first place and the movie did hint at Data's possible rebirth through his brother B4, so it's slightly more believable than a lot of other instances of this trope... even if it will never happen in canon (Brent Spiner himself has said he's getting too old for the role).
- This has achieved a sort of quasi-canonicity now, with Data's "resurrection" through B4 being a plot point of a new comic book miniseries which bills itself as "the official prequel to the new Star Trek movie". While comics are not considered canon in Trek, this certainly has some weight as it's written by Kurtzman and Orci, who wrote the screenplay for the new film.
- Star Trek Online consider the event to be canon in the timeline leading up to the game, too.
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch novels also resurrected Data, albeit in a slightly different way to Star Trek Online (his memories are transferred from B4 into a new body, rather than taking control of B4's body).
- Dr McCoy in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
McCoy: He's not dead....not as long as we remember him.- Data is officially resurrected in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, in a new human-like body.
- And then there's Data. It seems that every single Data fan has fanfic detailing what happens after Nemesis to bring the beloved android back to life. Of course... he is an android in the first place and the movie did hint at Data's possible rebirth through his brother B4, so it's slightly more believable than a lot of other instances of this trope... even if it will never happen in canon (Brent Spiner himself has said he's getting too old for the role).
- The Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In Captain America: The First Avenger:
- It was speculated that Red Skull was actually (possibly temporarily) banished to another plane of existence rather than actually killed in the climax. The main supporting evidence was that the method of Red Skull's "disintegration" into a beam of light was very similar to interdimensional travel and portals that were seen in other Marvel Cinematic Universe films like Thor and The Avengers. This was finally confirmed to be true years later, in his brief cameo in Avengers: Infinity War.
- And Bucky Barnes had been rescued from some vague experiments before his apparent death falling from a train, leading to speculation that he'd been made into another super-soldier who could have survived such a fall. Further evidence is that something similar to this had happened to Bucky in the comics. The sequel all but confirmed it from the moment it was subtitled The Winter Soldier - Bucky's post-"resurrection" codename from the comics.
- In The Avengers, it was widely speculated that Phil Coulson survived being stabbed by Loki and Nick Fury lied about him dying to motivate the Avengers. We know that Fury was lying to the team anyway - Maria Hill pointed out that Coulson wasn't actually carrying the bloodstained Tragic Keepsake that Fury showed the team afterward, and while we saw the medics arrive it was Fury that relayed their verdict to everyone else. The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series later provided an answer, but it's complicated: Coulson was dead, for days, before being revived through horrific experimental procedures involving alien body fluids.
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier:
- There are a large number of fans who suspect/hope that Arnim Zola had some secret means of escaping before his home got blown up. After all, he's digitized himself as a computer program now, all it would take to escape would be an Internet connection.
- Like with Coulson (see below) fans are now wishing the same of Sitwell to both still be alive and be a triple agent instead of a traitor. He even has his own hashtag campaign like Coulson did called #ibelieveinsitwell.
- Avengers: Age of Ultron:
- While there is definitive proof that Quicksilver is down for the count, many wondered if the character will stay dead forever, especially when taking the character's shared film rights into account. It's also worth noting that the actor has signed a multi-film contract, so it's not impossible that they're planning to bring him Back from the Dead later down the line (it wouldn't be the first time).
- Ultron. Seriously, if you've got an army of drones and you can hide inside any single one, then why not let two slip away with one acting as a decoy? The fact that the film does not outright show Vision destroying him has only added fuel to this fire.
- Baron Strucker is killed by Ultron barely halfway through the film, but in the comics, the character has a history of surviving seemingly-fatal incidents which could be carried over here. Also, the actor signed a multi-film contract before filming started on this movie just like Aaron Johnson as Quicksilver, so it's not impossible we'll see them again.
- Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame:
- Nobody, nobody, who had any knowledge of the superhero genre believed that the characters snapped out of existence by Thanos wouldn't get resurrected, despite the claims of some people connected with the films that they were absolutely permanently dead, not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story, no do-overs. This rang especially true when the trailer Spider-Man: Far From Home was released a few months before Endgame, showing footage of Nick Fury and Peter Parker alive and well, even though both were dusted in Infinity War.
- On the other hand, fan reactions to the other deaths in the first film got it completely wrong. Loki - who was assumed to be coming back due to his trickster nature and the Dropped a Bridge on Him aspects of his demise - and Gamora - used by Thanos as the necessary sacrifice to get the Soul Stone - were indeed Killed Off for Real, but given Endgame is centered around time travel, this means early versions of the characters were 'spared' and brought back into the fold. In her case, it's one from the start of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) who arrives with Thanos's army in the film's present day. In his case, he escapes with the Tesseract after The Avengers (2012), and a whole show ensues because the Time Variance Authority didn't like seeing such a disruption of history.
- Though the major fan-theory about how Loki faked his death (swapping out his 'corpse' for a random piece of debris) is semi-canonized in his series. A Variant, Classic Loki, did do this, but he ended up Pruned by the TVA because the Sacred Timeline had Loki die for real.
- There are a lot of fans who think that, given Thanos' vision of Gamora, the characters who were sacrificed to obtain the Soul Gem might be in limbo somehow and resurrectable. This is Jossed in Endgame, when Hulk reveals that he tried to bring back Natasha, who also sacrificed herself to retrieve the Soul Stone, when he performed his own Snap, but it proved impossible. Even when it was revealed Natasha's solo film would be sort of a prequel (which indeed, in The Stinger has her "sister" / successor Yelena going to Natasha's grave), set before Infinity War, some fans still have hope she is alive or will be revived.
- Any of number of fans still think it's possible that Tony Stark could be resurrected as early as Spider-Man: Far From Home despite the aftermath of his death explicitly being a driving presence in that movie alone.
- Gamora actually inverted this after Endgame, with many fans believing that she was destroyed with the other time-shifted characters by Tony's snap. This was seemingly confirmed by her non-appearance in the Guardians' scenes in Thor: Love and Thunder. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, however, revealed that she did survive, but simply didn't join the Guardians, joining the Ravagers instead.
- Because of Mysterio's standing as a Master of Illusion and the nature of his Thanatos Gambit at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, many believe it's possible he faked his death (as his comics counterpart frequently did) in the final battle.
- In Captain America: The First Avenger:
- Harvey Dent/Two-Face in The Dark Knight. He wasn't moving after he hit the ground and there was a funeral, but some fans say that they "saw him breathing" after his fall. The fate of the character was addressed in an interview where Aaron Eckhart revealed that Harvey did in fact die and that he had to ask the director if the character was really, truly dead from the fall. This, of course, has led to fans pointing out the possible loophole that while Harvey might be dead, Two-Face might have survived.
- A lot of the speculation was likely also because Heath Ledger's death left a void in what would (presumably) have been the main villain of the next movie, leading some fans to believe that Two-Face's death might be retconned even if it had been intended as final. As it happens, Nolan himself confirmed in an interview that had Heath Ledger not died, half the plot of the third Batman movie would have involved Two Face going on a rampage through Gotham while The Joker stood trial.
- In-universe examples: Two people fake their deaths. Gordon in The Dark Knight, and Batman himself in The Dark Knight Rises.
- After Dr. Gordon's grim (but not conclusive) fate in the original Saw film, fans were rabidly divided as to whether or not the character should, or even could return in a later film. He did, in Saw 3D.
- Adam was also left to an uncertain fate in the first film before being confirmed to be dead in the second, but that hasn't stopped fans from theorizing how he could still possibly be alive.
- Cleon of The Warriors is given this treatment by some of the fanbase. The last time he's seen in the film, he's being beaten up by The Riff's after being accused of killing their leader. He's never seen or mentioned after this. The fact that the novel character he's based on actually survived continues to fuel the theories.
- Rinzler, who is actually a corrupted Tron in TRON: Legacy, especially since it's uncertain as to whether he drowned or not in the cubey-sea.
- A fair amount of the fandom calls this on Flynn and/or Clu as well.
- Confirmed in The Next Day with Master Control Program.
- Scream 3: Jennifer is stabbed twice and thrown through a glass pane in front of Gale and Dewey, but the stab wounds don't look fatal and listening closely, she seems to be screaming after smashing through the glass but before hitting the floor, making it possible that she was just unconscious.
- Kirby is stabbed twice in Scream 4 and left for dead by the film's co-Ghostface Charlie - but as many fans of her character and/or Hayden Panettiere have pointed out (as do director Wes Craven and Panettiere herself on the DVD Commentary), it's never actually confirmed in the film that she kicks it; the last time she's seen she's still alive, and this series generally makes very sure to let us know who's Killed Off for Real and who isn't. Admittedly the film's designated Ghostface Jill includes her in the roll call in the hospital, but she wasn't around when it took place and it's reasonable to presume she only assumed it went according to plan, as everything else had up to then. (Interestingly, a lot of Scream 5 fan fiction brings back Kirby.) Eleven years later, Scream (2022) revealed in a Freeze-Frame Bonus that Kirby had survived and was still alive, and then she returns with a prominent supporting role in Scream VI, where she survives again.
- People unhappy about Irene Adler's bridge dropping in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows have proposed that she's still alive and is being held captive by Moriarty/Moran and that her rescue (and Moran's survival) will drive the plot of the inevitable third movie. And, of course, Holmes himself, for some reason, actually is hiding.
- Friday the 13th Part 2:
- Paul has many people convinced that he survived his final battle with Jason, although in the film itself his fate is unclear.
- Terry being attacked off-screen and not having any serious-looking wounds when Jason lays her body at the shrine for his mother causes some fans to believe that she may just be unconscious.
- G.I. Joe: Retaliation: Any Joe not seen killed on screen during the big massacre who was a character in the original might be presumably still alive, out there somewhere. Candidates include Scarlett, Ripcord, Breaker, and pretty much anyone else still alive at the end of Rise that didn't make it to screen in Retaliation.
- Pacific Rim: Plenty of comics have been made retconning the Kaidanovskys' death.
- There were plans for a sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show where Rocky would have been revealed to be in a coma rather than dead and a blood transfusion would have resurrected Dr. Frank N. Furter but it was rewritten into Shock Treatment where this never happens.
- The DC Extended Universe:
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has an interesting case: According to the Ultimate Edition, the CIA spook disguised as a cameraman was named Jimmy Olsen. Many fans were outraged that they killed off such an important Superman character so flippantly—he didn't even get named in the theatrical cut, and never met his "pal" Clark—with a persistent fan theory/hope that a later movie will reveal that the CIA agent was just using the real Jimmy's identity.
- Also from BvS, Mercy Graves. Sure, she was caught up in an explosion, but her comic version is an Amazon who's gone toe-to-toe with Superman—so what if she seems wimpier here?
- In Suicide Squad, El Diablo is one of the most popular characters and he pulls a Heroic Sacrifice, but we never see his body, so...
- Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Roxy is rather abruptly killed off in the first act. A number of fans pulled this especially because unlike the other dead Kingsmen like Arthur, who are explicitly hit by missiles, the one fired at Roxy hits the bunker under the Kingsman mansion and that causes the structure to collapse. The lack of a direct hit, coupled by them moving offscreen for cover when they notice the missile has led to many thinking it was a fake-out in the same vein as Harry from the first film.
- Mackenna's Gold: While Hesh-Ke is seen taking a pretty long fall off a cliff, she isn't shown hitting the ground, and once the other characters reach the bottom of the canyon, her body isn't there.
- Roadhouse 1989: Some fans think that Morgan and O'Connor are only knocked unconscious and not killed during the climax. It helps that their fights with Dalton are offscreen.
- Sabretooth:
- Lola. She's still screaming while being carried away by the creature, her body is never shown, and a previous victim of the beast was found badly mauled but still alive.
- Leon isn't clawed anywhere near the heart and his body isn't mauled further or drenched with enough blood to indicate he bled out, leaving it possible that he may have just been unconscious when his body is seen.
- Goldeneye: Given the limited amount of time that Xenia Onatopp spends being "squeezed" by her harness during the helicopter crash, some fans wonder if she's only unconscious.
- Austin Powers: The second movie The Spy Who Shagged Me abruptly and nonsensically retcons the first movie’s love interest Vanessa into having been one of Dr. Evil’s Fembots all along in order to write her out of the movie as a Temporary Love Interest, with the only comment about it after she self-destructs being Basil Exposition saying, "Sadly, we knew all along," and then no one ever bringing it up again for Rule of Funny. Fans who were attached to Vanessa in the first film who were dissatisfied with how she was killed off also noticed contradictions in her having been a robot the entire time, namely that she had a mother who was Austin’s partner in the Sixties and time the Fembots were first created in the Nineties. Many of these fans speculate that there was a real human Vanessa, but she got replaced by a Fembot duplicate at some point prior to the second movie (which doesn’t exactly bode well for the real Vanessa anyway, but at least does not completely retcon her entire character). The common point at which she is believed to have been replaced is during the climax of the first movie, in the time between Austin going off on his own to confront Dr. Evil after the other Fembots are destroyed and Alotta Fagina showing up with Vanessa held at gunpoint, with the Vanessa she’s holding hostage actually being the Fembot and the real Vanessa’s whereabouts uncertain.
Live-Action TV
- When Marcus Cole was removed from Babylon 5 in Season 4, he was last seen in a coma, and viewers weren't shown or explicitly told that the plug was pulled. This led many fans to believe he was still in a state of living death and would be revived later. This fanon theory was seemingly confirmed by a shot in the credits of the Distant Finale, and later confirmed in the more-or-less canon short story "Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic", where Marcus is revived several hundred years later and lives happily ever after with a cloned Ivanova.
- Many people were devoted to the relationship of Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and were devastated when Tara died near the end of season 6. There are many websites of Willow and Tara fanfics. In half of these stories, the events of season 6 are changed to keep Tara from dying. In the other half, Tara dies but is somehow brought back from the dead afterwards. After all, Buffy was resurrected by a magic spell at the start of season 6, so why not Tara? Willow tried and failed to use magic to bring back Tara on the TV show, but in fanfiction, the First Law of Resurrection applies.
- There were several areas where Amber Benson might have come back. As the First, but Benson was available. Also, the originally planned finale was to give Buffy one wish, which she would spend the episode trying to figure out how to spend, before ultimately bringing Tara back for Willow. Joss Whedon later stated that, even though neither of those theories panned out, he likes that she stayed dead because it sent the message that Willow could still find love and move on with her life.
- That said, fans still have reason to be annoyed, because he continues to tease the possibility in the comics, and pretty much everyone else that died during Season 6 was revived, often under very contrived justifications. If he wasn't so quick to use resurrection as a plot device, it might be understandable, but nearly the entire main cast has been brought back at least once.
- Spike was killed off in the series finale, but was later resurrected in Angel. The WB's website was advertising Spike joining the cast of Angel the same day that BtVS aired its last episode, if not before. It irritated Joss since it prevented him from doing a shocking intro for anyone who had even looked at the website or read articles pertaining to the show.
- There were several areas where Amber Benson might have come back. As the First, but Benson was available. Also, the originally planned finale was to give Buffy one wish, which she would spend the episode trying to figure out how to spend, before ultimately bringing Tara back for Willow. Joss Whedon later stated that, even though neither of those theories panned out, he likes that she stayed dead because it sent the message that Willow could still find love and move on with her life.
- Burn Notice: Larry apparently got blown up towards the end of the series, but given how the character had already escaped almost certain death several times up to that point, only to always come popping back in, viewers were a bit skeptical that he was truly gone. But the series ended before he could ever come back.
- In-story example - in the tv-movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow, mentally-challenged Bubba is gunned down. His mother later has to tell his young playmate Marylee that he's dead; she laughs and says "He's just being silly...he's playing the Hiding Game!" and she's right.
- The Defenders (2017): The finale creates both in and out-of-universe cases.
- In-Universe: Even days after Midland Circle was demolished to wipe out the Hand, Karen Page fervently believes that Matt must have somehow survived the building crumbling, and sure enough, the episode's last seconds reveal that he did indeed survive and is recovering in a convent, setting up Daredevil (2015) season 3 to adapt the comics' Born Again storyline.
- Out-of-universe: Because Matt survived, many fans have theorized that Elektra may have also survived the collapse as well.
- Doctor Who:
- Fans are known for mourning their favourite Doctors after their regeneration, even though the character isn't technically dead, and cooking up elaborate theories for how Doctors can regenerate back into whatever the fan's preferred version of themselves is. These theories were eventually confirmed in "The Day of the Doctor", in which Tom Baker, who played the very much loved Fourth Doctor, reappears as a curator who "might" be a future Doctor, playing Eccentric Mentor to his young self and assuring him that maybe he'll find himself 'revisiting old favourite faces'. However, it is deliberately left ambiguous.
- Possibly confirmed in Timewyrm: Revelation where it is claimed that when a Doctor regenerates he lives on in the Doctor's mind.
- Confirmed canonically in Power of the Doctor where the Thirteenth Doctor regenerated back into the Tenth Doctor's face (David Tennant). Further explored in the 60th anniversary special The Giggle where the show introduced bigeneration which allowed the Doctor to regenerate into two separate Doctors, the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ten (technically the Fourteenth Doctor but with Ten's face). It's also implied that bigeneration may have happened in the past to other Doctors.
- Inverted after the "Trial of a Time Lord" arc, there are a sizable number of fans who believe that Peri really died at the end of "Mindwarp" and that the Inquisitor's claim that she survived to marry Yrcanos was a lie.
- "Remembrance of the Daleks": John Peel actually wrote a Fix Fic Eighth Doctor Adventures novel which literally claimed the planet Skaro was just hiding.
- The Time Lords were all killed, with the Doctor as the Last of His Kind. Then the Master was revealed to have concealed himself by temporarily becoming human, leading fans to endlessly speculate about who else did this (Romana and the Rani being among the most popular choices). "The End of Time" and then even less ambiguously "The Day of the Doctor" revealed that Gallifrey was actually locked away from the rest of the universe rather than being destroyed, and could potentially be rediscovered. Then the Master burnt it to the ground and killed all the Time Lords for real, as revealed in "Spyfall". That said, the show's complete disregard for standard logic and continuity means that there's no stopping yet another left-field retcon from reversing this bout of Armed with Canon.
- "Journey's End":
- Theories regarding Donna's Time Lord memories/self/whatever and how she can regain them are similarly endless.
- In the commentary producer Julie Gardner expressed her belief that Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister wasn't dead and had escaped through a trap door.
- "Death in Heaven":
- Fans were quick to notice that if Danny had the opportunity to return to the living world two weeks after his Cyberman body was killed, similar means could be used to resurrect any other character killed in the episode. Especially Missy.
- Fans are also adamant that Missy killed a Zygon and not the real Osgood. Ingrid Oliver, Osgood's actress, certainly liked to think her character's just hiding! The following season, it was revealed that either the real Osgood or the double was killed, and the surviving one won't say which is which for purposes of maintaining the human-Zygon peace.
- Missy had been using her disintegrator device to blast people into a cloud of fine red dust left and right. It seems kind of odd that the same device disintegrates her into a cloud of fine blue dust instead, not unlike her teleportation earlier. To this, many point out that the reasoning is flawed because the device itself wasn't used to disintegrate her, with it instead being the Brigadier's Cyberman artillery that did the job. That said, Moffat himself enforced this trope with his comments immediately after the episode aired, noting that he hoped Missy would emulate Anthony Ainley's Master in reappearing without a scratch after getting involved in Deader than Dead situations. She reappeared at the top of Series 9, in fact, and revealed she had used the weapon fired at her to charge a teleport.
- Since Seb isn't actually alive, but an A.I., it's unlikely he would have been "killed" by Missy. This, in turn, provides a small Hope Spot regarding Osgood's survival.
- Clara Oswald's tragic Deader than Dead sacrifice (lifeforce/soul ripped from her body) in Series 9's "Face the Raven" immediately elicited these reactions, partially because there were two episodes left in the season, partially because the cast and crew admitted the fallout from this was key to those episodes (with severely out-of-character behavior on the grieving Doctor's part), and partially because she was set to have at least a final scene in the finale "Hell Bent". In the finale, Clara was extracted from her timeline one heartbeat before her death, and was effectively "put on pause" — she can travel for a very long time before her death, but must eventually return to it, because it's a fixed point in time. And she still can't come back as a companion, because she and the Doctor got too dangerous together.
- In "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", Grace O'Brien, Graham's wife and Ryan's grandmother, dies in a Heroic Sacrifice stopping the antagonist's data coil from toppling the crane that Ryan and Yaz are in. However, her actress Sharon D. Clarke was announced as playing a "returning role" when she was revealed to be involved with Series 11. Thus, there are a few possible options speculated by fans and reviewers: 1) this was misdirection to avoid spoiling the climax; 2) it's technically true as Grace will reappear in flashbacks or a trip back in time, 3) this trope: she will be somehow resurrected and return. Of course, it could also be 4) she's impersonated by some kind of alien entity. It turned out to be (4) in a single episode, but other than that she's just dead.
- Fans are known for mourning their favourite Doctors after their regeneration, even though the character isn't technically dead, and cooking up elaborate theories for how Doctors can regenerate back into whatever the fan's preferred version of themselves is. These theories were eventually confirmed in "The Day of the Doctor", in which Tom Baker, who played the very much loved Fourth Doctor, reappears as a curator who "might" be a future Doctor, playing Eccentric Mentor to his young self and assuring him that maybe he'll find himself 'revisiting old favourite faces'. However, it is deliberately left ambiguous.
- EastEnders has had a few resurrections. Den Watts was just about acceptable, since his body was unrecognisable and he was about to go into hiding when he was apparently killed. Kathy Beale, in a vastly out of character twist, faking her off-screen car cash death and abandoning her sons for an insurance scam was stretching it. It's happened enough that, when a new producer decided to kll of Ronnie and Roxy Mitchell, he made them Deader than Dead: Not only did they drown in a swimming pool, they drowned in full view of CCTV cameras, their bodies were left in the water for hours before being found, and Ronnie was repeatedly shown dead in an open coffin in the weeks that followed. And still fans insist they're just hiding. It doesn't help that Samantha Womack, who played Ronnie, has a tendency to respond to people asking about the theories in interviews by agreeing that they could come back.
- Played with in-canon in Farscape with the apparent killing of Xhalax by Crais in Season 3. To avoid killing Xhalax in front of her daughter Aeryn, Crais takes her off into the swamp and there's a Sound-Only Death. A couple of episodes later, we see an apparent flashback in which Crais makes a private deal with her and spares her life, but then it's comically revealed to be a paranoid Imagine Spot on John's part. Then a few episodes after that, it turns out that Crais really did spare her life.
- Speaking of Crais, a sizable part of the fanbase believes he and Talyn both actually survived their Heroic Sacrifice in season 3, and that they actually did StarBurst away.
- Zhaan gets this as well, with many believing she safely escaped through the wormhole. This was particularly fueled by comments by Stark following Talyn!John's death, in that he heard Zhaan's spirit calling to him on the planet they were visiting.
- You won't find anyone who believes that D'Argo actually died in Peacekeeper Wars. The fact that the similarly left-for-dead Sikozu and Grunchlk did turn up alive in the comic continuation add fuel to that fire.
- An episode of the 1990s revival of Flipper featured a man convinced that his dead son was alive and would return home "soon". He went so far as to buy a present for each birthday his son missed, saving them all for the day the boy would come back. He was rather creepily casual about the whole affair, acting as though the fact that his son has been missing for years was absolutely nothing to be concerned about. Surprisingly for a family-oriented show, the son did not turn out to be alive and the episode ended with the man learning to move on.
- Few if any fans really believed Joe Carroll was killed off in the first season finale of The Following. The first promo for season two pretty much confirmed that he's still alive.
- With the second season opener of Fringe, many people are suspecting/hoping this about Charlie. Some have several reasonable reasons for how it's improbable for the shape-shifter to have killed, body-copied, hid the body and clothes-swapped in the confined time. Wither this remains as a plot hole, red herring or foreshadowing is up in the air. It doesn't help that one of the first series episodes, heavily featuring Charlie, was held back and became part of the second series. Leading to him turning up again with no explanation.
- Game of Thrones:
- Several fans think that about Jon Snow, who was stabbed by the Night Watch in the finale to the fifth season. The fact that his actor is returning, and that a poster for the sixth season shows his face helps the theory out. This turned out to be true, as he was resurrected in the second episode of the sixth season by Melisandre.
- There was also a significant belief that Stannis getting beheaded by Brienne at the end of Season 5 was a fakeout due to the scene cutting the second Brienne swings her sword. This lead to both the writers and the actor confirming no, he's definitely dead.
- Catelyn Stark. In her case, it was initially justified, as she actually was resurrected in the books. However, both her actress and the showrunners have confirmed they have no intention of adapting that storyline into the show, and by the end of season 6, the story has long since passed the point where it would make sense for her to return. Nevertheless, some fans still hold out hope that someday we'll see Lady Stoneheart on Game of Thrones.
- Many fans believe this about Ser Brynden Tully, aka the Blackfish. Though he supposedly died doing a Last Stand against the oncoming Lannister and Frey forces at Riverrun, the lack of an onscreen death and the Blackfish's well-known fighting abilities convinced many that he somehow escaped again. Further fueling this speculation is that in the books, the Riverrun plotline ended with the Blackfish escaping the Lannister forces by jumping in the moat and swimming down the river.
- The series finale has Drogon pick up the stabbed body of Daenerys Targaryen and fly off to parts unknown, later said to have been seen heading towards Volantis. Some fans were quick to posit that he'd take her to Kinvara, a member of a priesthood capable of resurrecting people who lives in Volantis and is a firm supporter of Daenerys.
- In Hannibal all that was found of Abigail Hobbs was her ear, and it was cut off while she was still alive. This led to (usually not very convinced themselves) suggestions that Hannibal let her go. There is also the even more dubious suggestion, only offered as a joke, that Miriam Lass is still alive too and just missing her arm.
- Surprisingly, the one about Miriam Lass turned out to be true. Hannibal cut off her arm and had been keeping her captive since.
- In Naka-Choko, Freddie Lounds is implied to have been killed by Will and offered as meat for Hannibal to cook. However, fans are holding out for her to be alive and hiding as part of Will's Batman Gambit to oust Hannibal.
- There are still people out there claiming that Adam Monroe's death in Heroes was a part of a yet unrevealed plan.
- Richie from Highlander. Not only was he a rather popular character handed the Idiot Ball after being taught for over a season how to survive as an Immortal, he gets killed by Duncan, who was under the influence of a demon at the time and thought he was surrounded by his enemies. Many fans, not just Richie fans, disavow that this episode ever happened, and decided Richie just moved out.
- When Holby City announced Bernie Wolfe had been blown up off screen, it was not well received, especially since she was one half of Super Couple "Berena", and fans insisted she was still alive. Initially, this was reasonable, since they Never Found the Body, but then they found the body, and we saw her ashes...and then, in an almost absurd case of fan pandering, she just turned up with a Handwave about lending her body armour to a colleague (which ignored the fact the armour was found before her body and all the ter ways it would have been identified) and announced she'd been living with Serena in the South of France all along while inexplicably letting her son go mad thinking she was dead and become a serial killer.
- Home and Away has pulled the "faking their death to go into witness protection" twist enough times that when a character dies, there's usually someone suggesting it. The deaths in quick succession of Jack Holden and Belle Taylor were prime candidates, with boards being flooded with Fix Fics where Belle had actually gone into hiding to escape the crooked developers she had tried to expose the previous year, despite having terminal cancer and the audience seeing her husband wake up to find she'd died during the night, and other people insisting Jack's friendly fire death was some sort of set-up.
- When an episode ended with Charlie Buckton's life support being turned up, at least one fan insisted she was going to wake up at the start of the next episode.
- More recently, when rumours began to circulate that Robbo Shaw was going to die, one fan insisted they wouldn't believe he was dead unless we saw him die, saw someone visit his body and saw his funeral. We saw all three, as he was caught in a horror car smash and pronounced dead after a prolonged resuscitation attempt in front of witnesses, and people sill insisted he was just hiding. (Hilariously, the same storyline saw fellow regular Mason Morgan killed off, and even though we didn't see him die, see someone visit the body or see his funeral, there were far fewer calls for him to be just hiding!)
- Archie Kennedy dies a gloriously tragic on-screen death in Horatio Hornblower... but there are so many fics about him surviving that post-Retribution fics usually feature either the label 'LKU', or 'DKU', as in Live Kennedy Universe and Dead Kennedy Universe.
- Jeremiah: While Mysterious Protector Ezekiel is never seen after being shot in the season 1 finale, some fans hope he survived his wounds.
- On Law & Order: Criminal Intent, this is Bobby Goren's in-universe reaction to discovering his nemesis, serial murderess Nicole Wallace, who had expertly pulled a Karma Houdini in every prior appearance, has herself been murdered. This is despite the fact that her heart was cut out from her body and sent to Goren in the mail, and DNA confirmed the organ's identity - Goren is convinced that unless he finds the rest of her, she's enough of a Magnificent Bitch to come back from even this. She stays dead. note
- Law & Order: UK fanfic writers have resurrected another of Jamie Bamber's characters, Matt Devlin, (who by some eerie coincidence also died making a Heroic Sacrifice), penning stories where he recovers from his gunshot wounds (an especially poignant story has him left paralyzed from the waist down) and finally embarks on a relationship with Alesha Phillips. By some equally bizarre happenstance, a story such as this was written a full year before the episode "Deal". Even stranger, another fanfic has provided readers with a literal example of this trope — he lives, but is sent into hiding to recover from his injuries and to protect him from his would-be killers. For their own safety as well, his clueless loved ones are left to grieve for him until he's brought back in order to testify against his assailants and resume his normal life. One of them even combines the two series (possibly lampshading the tendency of Bamber's characters to get killed off) with Highlander, having it turn out that Matt Devlin is, in fact, Archie Kennedy himself and that he survived his injuries and all subsequent ones because he's immortal.
- Lost:
- Even though it wasn't a case of a truly major character, the death of Rousseau on is an example. Even though she was shot, her corpse was later found in a shallow grave, and a guy who talks to dead people heard her voice there were still people online trying to come with survival scenarios.
- Michael and Jin were both on a boat when it exploded. The latter was shown to have survived in this explosion. The former's fate is still up in the air.
- But Jin was on the deck and could've jumped ship. Michael was next to the bomb when it exploded.
- In what may be a subversion, many fans of Lost took the close-shot of Ethan's corpse and the motion of his breathing (which appears to have been a goof) unnoticed by the Losties as a casual foreshadowing that the character would come back. While he featured frequently in flashbacks after the episode of his death, he never made his return in the "present day".
- Another example would be Rose who, in season one, refused to believe her husband had died in the crash. Come season two...
- Frank Lapidus was thought to be just hiding when he went down with the sub. Turns out, he was.
- And then there's the time the Smoke Monster punted Richard into the jungle with no mention of whether he was okay or not until the series finale.
- In the Season 3 finale of The Mentalist, fans speculated that the guy who was killed by Jane in the ending of the episode was not Red John. Jane's actor also hints at this in a pre-season interview explaining the premise of the fourth season.
- NCIS:
- There's quite a bit of "Kate is not dead" fanfic, despite her death being caused by sniping. To the head. There are some crazy theories like some are suggesting a body double. The reason for the body double? So that Kate and Ari can run off and elope.
- There's also a huge amount of "Jenny Shepard is not dead" out there, and the prevailing theory is that she faked her gunfight death to continue her rogue activities unhindered before her disease kills her. Lending credence to this is the fact that the storyline about her dead father (who she thought was alive and in hiding, and could very well have been) didn't have a definitive ending.
- And now there's the same speculation regarding Ziva David, supposedly killed in a bombing at the end of Season 13. It helps that the death happened off-screen, viewers never saw the body, and that TPTB have been vague (apparently intentionally) about whether or not she's truly dead). The episode "She" confirmed Ziva was alive and she returned at the end of Season 16, having gone into hiding to protect her family and hunt down those responsible for the bombing.
- There has been similar speculation about Gibbs' first wife Shannon and their daughter Kelly, though more of the WMG type, suggesting that they were spirited away into hiding to protect them from the drug dealer looking to kill them.
- When Neighbours revealed that Mark Brennan had died in witness protection, an Internet campaign (possibly the work of one person) insisted he was actually alive in witness protection. This turned out to be true but shortly after his return, his alleged One True Love Kate Ramsay was killed. Despite her being shot and pronounced dead on screen, the campaign immediately started insisting that she was now alive in witness protection, citing the lack of blood (which is mainly because it's that sort of show).
- In the first NewsRadio episode after actor Phil Hartman's death, his character Bill McNeal is said to be alive but hiding in an increasingly ridiculous series of stories by his friend Matthew.
- No Ordinary Family: Detective Cho getting a Sound-Only Death in the second episode (although said death is discussed in the next episode) and vague statements the show runners made about not being sure if they were done with the character cause some fans to wonder if she's really dead.
- A large chunk of the Orphan Black fanbase refuse to believe that Helena died in the Season One finale. One Wild Mass Guess entry theorizes that, since Helena and Sarah are identical twins, Helena has the same self-repair gene that Sarah's daughter Kira appears to have. Even an online contest to win Helena's signature parka hasn't dimmed "Clone Club's" belief that she will return at some point.
- In the second series, she was, surprise surprise, alive. Although she also showed signs of superhuman healing, the main explanation was that she's a mirror-image twin of Sarah, with her internal organs on the other side of her body to the usual one.
- Many fans of Our Flag Means Death believe Lucius survived being thrown overboard by Blackbeard in the Season 1 finale. There are several lines of reasoning that support this, from the editing of the scene itself (he's still screaming when it cuts), to an unfired Chekhov's Gun from the first episode (the secret passages within the ship that could easily conceal a stowaway), to the overarching plot of the show (the romance between Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard, which would be pretty badly derailed by Blackbeard murdering Lucius, Stede's closest confidant).
- Ozark: In real life, plenty of people have survived similar gunshot wounds similar to the one Ruth gets in the finale, the bloodstain around the wound is still bleeding when the camera cuts away (dead people stop bleeding), and her shooter is shaken and unfocused. All of this and the character's enormous popularity make it both possible and tempting to hope that she's not dead.
- Power Rangers:
- Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue: Some fans like to hope that Jinxer (and maybe even the Batling Mooks who accompany him in stealing the Omega Megazord) survive the robot's destruction in the finale.
- Power Rangers Ninja Storm: Given how out-of-focus Choobo is when he gets taken out in the finale, many fans believe that he only got knocked down and survived.
- Even Sesame Street has an example of this trope. When Mr. Hooper's death was revealed in a legendary Very Special Episode in 1983, the cause of death was never mentioned (Word of God states the writers chose not to reveal how he died because explaining that he was old and ill could have increased children's fears about death). Several fans have concluded that he faked his death so he could live out his retirement in peace.
- Sherlock:
- Series 2 led to the speculation that Moriarty faked his own death and that he'd return sometime in the future. Andrew Scott stated in an interview that Moriarty wouldn't be returning for series 3. The finale reveals that he was bloody lying, how appropriate. But then it turned out in series 4 that he really was dead and it was a Post-Mortem Comeback.
- Sherlock gets this in-universe in series 3. The audience quickly learns in series 2 that he's not dead, but some of his in-story fans theorize and hope that he's just hiding.
- Professor Maximillian Arturo was shot near the end of Season 3 of Sliders, and his body was apparently obliterated by a pulsar. But, since there was an episode in Season 2 where the Professor fought his double, many fans speculated that the "real" Professor was still alive, and the evil Professor had travelled with the heroes for a year before being killed off. It also seemed possible that Jonathan Rhys-Davies would reappear as another version of the Professor. IIRC, many years post-cancellation Word of God finally stated that it was the evil Professor who slid (and died). Not that it matters now.
- Snowpiercer: Several characters who are seemingly killed turn out to be Not Quite Dead some time later, so this kind of speculation isn't uncommon.
- Some people expect to see LJ's parents, Grey, their prisoners and the others who are left to freeze in season one come back.
- Icy Bob does seemingly die from too much exposure to the cold, but some people wonder if anything could kill him.
- Whether or not Melanie will survive being stranded in the season 2 finale attracts some debate.
- Bojan's fate in the season 2 finale is considered slightly ambiguous by some.
- Mr. Headwood and the Last Australians dying of influenza during the Time Skip between seasons might be taken with a grain of salt.
- Stargate:
- Dr. Beckett's Dropped a Bridge on Him death in Stargate Atlantis spurred outcry from fans. The character returned as a clone, though one with all the original's memories.
- Stargate SG-1:
- Janet, Martouf and Jacob Carter/Selmak are on a super sekrit mission together.
- Daniel Jackson died and was resurrected so many times he wouldn't stay dead even if he was shot in the face at point-blank range with an Asgard beam weapon. Fans don't even bother with this trope when he dies.
- Done in-universe by O'Neill when he refuses to have a funeral for Daniel after one of his many "deaths".
- Stargirl (2020):
- Many fans are convinced that Henry King Jr. either was only wounded after being crushed by a pile of rubble or that his consciousness escaped the death of his physical body due to his telepathy.
- Some fans have wondered whether Joey Zarick might have somehow inherited some of his dad's magical power and unconsciously used it to transfer his soul into the family cat and thus has the potential to be fully resurrected one day.
- Star Trek
- Done by professional authors in the Expanded Universe in The Good That Men Do, a novel that basically explains that the holodeck reconstruction in "These Are The Voyages..." is revisionist history and that Trip faked his death. Since the episode in question is universally reviled by cast and fans alike, the basic premise of the novel in question is basically regarded as Canon (although whether or not it happened when and how the novel says it did is up for debate), and everyone pretends that "These Are The Voyages..." never happened.
- Star Trek: Picard: There are fans who are in denial that Hugh is permanently dead, and they believe he can be resurrected with Borg technology. They use the hashtag #BringBackHugh on Twitter and compose Fix Fics where the character is alive again. The Star Trek Timelines game has also joined in.◊
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Quite a few fans aren't convinced that Hemmer's purported death in "All Those Who Wander" was certain, as earlier scenes in the episode had stressed how comfortable he was in the planet's cold climate, and hence unlike the crew members of the other ship, he could have survived the cold that killed the Gorn offspring parasitising him.
- Supernatural:
- Gabriel's death. The Pepsi commercials don't really reject the argument, nor do the constant rumors that the writers are trying to work out how to bring him back.
- Castiel and Bobby both got this after their respective deaths in season 7. Of course, since Death Is Cheap and Castiel was also a case of Never Found the Body, this was not entirely without merit. Castiel does indeed show up alive and (mostly) well near the end of the season. Bobby returns as a ghost but is still technically dead.
- Super Sentai: Some fans of Choujin Sentai Jetman believed that Black Condor/Gai Yuki merely passed out in the final episode after he was stabbed by a mugger, even though he was officially declared dead by writer Toshiki Inoue in ensuing interviews. In Episode 28 of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, which Inoue specifically wrote, any doubts of Gai Yuki's death was cleared up when his spirit escaped from the afterlife to help the Gokaigers unlock Jetman's greater power.
- This started amongst Torchwood fans when Ianto was killed in Children of Earth.
- True Blood: While the faeries at Hotwings aren't exactly Ensemble Dark Horse material, plenty of fans like to hope that some of Claude's sisters aren't there when Warlow kills everyone present at the club in season 6.
- A version of this happens on Veronica Mars — Logan doesn't believe his mother killed herself; he thinks she faked her death and ran away. Unlike most fans, however, he lives in the "real world", and after his last ounce of hope is stolen, breaks down.
Music
- It's heavily implied that the titular character of "Sandy Fishnets" by Evelyn Evelyn was murdered. This doesn't stop fans from speculating that she either ran away or was kicked out like Evelyn Evelyn were.
Radio
- Pokémon: The Birth of Mewtwo features Jessie's mother, Miyamoto who disappeared in an avalanche looking for Mew. Giovanni says her whereabouts are unknown, as she was said to have made reports after she disappeared. There is absolutely no reason to think she survived. The story says she sincerely loved her daughter, Jessie, so it seems ridiculously out of character for her to simply abandon her. Only Epileptic Trees could explain her still being around. There were some rumors going around that she became Prima/Lorelei of the Elite Four, but with absolutely no basis.
Theatre
- Wicked: Nessarose is not dead! Yes, she dies in both the source material and the musical, but hey, Elphaba and Fiyero got Disney Deaths, so why not her? After all, the way her feet disappeared like that — had to be an illusion...
- The Phantom of the Opera, even though technically, the phantom doesn't die at the end of the play, just simply disappears—this might actually be a literal example of this trope. Sure enough, numerous fic writers have him resurfacing to wreak more havoc in Christine's life.
Video Games
- Borderlands 2 uses this in-universe, in the DLC Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. Tina runs a role-playing game for the four original vault hunters, and she seems to be in complete denial that one of them is dead. When the others finally confront her about this, she admits that she understands the truth, but she doesn't have to like it. The game is her way of providing a better ending. In fact, she kills two birds with one stone, bringing back another character who had died in the main plot so they can save the day at the last minute.
- Call of Duty:
- Captain Price, Gaz, Griggs, and Soap in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare all survived the final battle. They were just gravely wounded. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reveals that Soap not only survived but has been promoted to Captain and will essentially be taking Price's place as the badass squad leader who mentors the player. Whether this was the developers saying "he was just hiding" (not to mention what became of Captain Price) remains to be seen, but so far no one's been complaining.
- Price is also back in Modern Warfare 2, and he and Soap survive the events of the game. Still no word on Gaz or Griggs, but things aren't looking too bright in that category.
- As of MW3, Soap MacTavish is on the "just hiding!" list.
- A common fan interpretation of Chrono Cross to account for the off-screen deaths of Crono, Marle, and Lucca. That the dialogue describing their current status is either implicit ("I'll send you to see Lucca!") or vague ("We no longer exist in this timeline.") does much to aid and abet such theories. Even if we're not told they're dead, are they any more alive after 10 years of nonexistence?
- In Completing the Mission, the Valiant Hero ending ends with Charles Calvin dying at the very end when he pulls out a Heroic Sacrifice by throwing Henry Stickmin into an escape pod, leaving Charles himself to die moments later when the Toppat Orbital Station explodes. The status Charles has left many fans to refuse that he died. Some even pointed out that behind the rubble in the same hall, an escape pod was unselectable and that we see five escape pods flying towards Earth. They say that Charles simply went into the unselectable escape pod off-screen, and him cutting off when the station explodes is his headset losing signal, leaving him as presumed dead.
- A variant from Destiny 2: the Forsaken expansion begins with the death of fan-favorite character Cayde-6. He is very definitely dead: his irreplaceable Ghost is destroyed, he's fatally wounded, he dies in the player character's arms, and is last seen under a shroud on a bier while other characters discuss his death. However, since he was a Ridiculously Human Robot created by Brain Uploading, that just led to discussion about how he could be brought back if his original brain scan could be found. Come Beyond Light, the repository for all such brain scans is found... but it's taken as a given that they won't use it to resurrect Cayde, as this would bring him back without his memories or experiences — Cayde-7 would be a completely new person. Cayde-7's only appearance was in the Chronicon lore book, which was basically in-universe bad fanfiction, and he dies the same page he appears.
- Devil May Cry:
- For over a decade, Vergil's last canonical appearance in the first Devil May Cry saw him outright exploding. Yet, the fandom refused to believe that he was dead even when his signature weapon Yamato was inherited by Nero and the Angelos were created by his body/armor being experimented on in Devil May Cry 4. And then suddenly, this reaction got resolved when Devil May Cry 5 showed Vergil alive and retaking Yamato to heal himself. However, there is no real explanation for how he was still alive to begin with.
- Sparda. The Narrator from the first game stated that he died Excerpt, Arkham in the third game's manga stated that he died, but for some reason, the fans insist that he only "disappeared" (and is likely to return one day), basing it on a misinterpreted line in Devil May Cry 2 or Modeus's musing in the animated series. No one ever bothers to answer the question of just what Sparda might be doing if he did simply just vanish.
- Duncan from Dragon Age: Origins has met with this due to his death not being directly shown onscreen and his body being missing during the Return to Ostagar DLC. Word of God is that he is indeed dead. And even if he didn't die then dialogue with Alister reveals that Duncan was suffering from the horrible nightmares that proceed the Calling, and would have died soon after anyway.
- Fallout 3's much-maligned "Good" ending results in your character's Heroic Sacrifice. It screamed But Thou Must! so hard the walls of the Jefferson Memorial should have exploded. Bethesda wrote the Broken Steel DLC to fix their mistake.
- Aerith from Final Fantasy VII is the princess of the trope. For decades, people would insist that she never truly died after Sephiroth stabbed her and that there was a way to bring her back life. This even becomes a major plot point in Final Fantasy VII Remake where Aerith gets a vision of the original timeline where she's supposed to die. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth quite frankly takes this to parodic levels, as Aerith seemingly is both saved by Cloud and killed by Sephiroth, with Cloud's unreliable vision meaning we don't know what to trust. At the end, Cloud literally sees Aerith off to go in hiding in the Forgotten Capital, though whether she is actually there is very ambiguous.
- Invoked with Rufus Shinra, who is last seen taking an explosion to the face. He turns up later in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, having somehow survived the blast.
- Leo from Final Fantasy VI. There are many, many, MANY rumors that claimed his return was Dummied Out, and others give ridiculous methods to revive him that don't work. You can bring him back through a VERY convoluted Good Bad Bug that requires you to play for at least 8 hours without saving so you can go back before the Point of No Return, but it's clearly not intentional.
- Tidus from Final Fantasy X disintegrates at the end of his game but makes a brief cameo following the credits. One of the main questions from Final Fantasy X-2 is that if Tidus is hiding or doing something. Turns out the answer is completely unrelated but the cameo reveals that Tidus is alive.
- Final Fantasy XIV has this happen quite often:
- Gaius is defeated by the player and the last of him we see is him staggering in the ruins of the facility before he gets hit with an explosion. Because they Never Found the Body, fans insisted that he survived and was in hiding. Several years and two expansions later, Gaius reappears alive and well and has a new agenda that aligns with the Scions's goals in eradicating the Ascians. Alisae does lampshade how it should have been impossible for Gaius to survive.
- Lahabrea, a scheming Ascian, dies at the hand of King Thordon, who became a primal and and uses one of Nidhoggs's eyes to suck Lahabrea's soul into it and then uses the eye like a battery to power himself up. After the player beats Thordon, another Ascian named Elidibus confirms that Lahabrea is dead, thus ending his role in the Heavensward story. Lahabrea's death did not stop fans from insisting that his soul was still in the dragon's eye and that he would return eventually. Later on in the Stormblood expansion, Nidhogg's eyes are used to summon a primal that are fueled by said eyes. When the player beats the primal, the eyes are found lying on the ground by Estinien, who confirms that the aether in the eyes are all but spent and he destroys them just to make sure that no one else can use them ever again. While it likely wasn't the intent from the developers, the destruction of the eyes confirms that if Lahabrea's soul wasn't burned up from fueling two different primals, the physical destruction of the eyes would have finished his remains off.
- Zenos returning after his supposed death in Stormblood left such a big impact on the fan base that when the player finishes him off for good at the edge of the universe in Endwalker, people insisted that he wasn't truly dead and that he would find a way to come back again. While the developers did tease the idea a bit, they eventually stated that Zenos was actually dead and he would not be returning ever again.
- Final Fantasy Tactics has something of an inversion, where despite the ending implying (and Word of God confirming many years later) that Ramza, Alma, and the rest of the party escaped Murond Death City and lived out the rest of their lives in hiding, some fans still insist that they all perished in Altima's death throes and that Ramza and Alma's later appearances were their ghosts or metaphorical survival, rather than literal.
- A fan theory exists in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War that after the first generation was massacred, Ayra still lives and just wanders off to places unknown. Even after being rebuked at the sidequel (Thracia 776), whereas survivors of the massacre were gathered together and turned to stone, which may possibly include her. Fans still don't buy it and merely list her as "just wandering off". "Because she's just too badass to be turned to stone", or so they say...
- There's a similar theory for Gheb. Gheb is rumored to have a double Gleb who took his place when he was killed. Gheb's far too handsome to die.
- Might as well latch onto the fact that in FE 10, it is possible to be "too badass to be turned into stone", and apply that to a totally different universe.
- Agatio and Karst in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. There is some reasoning behind this, as their last scene had them mortally wounded but still alive and swearing to survive long enough to see Mars Lighthouse lit. Whether or not they actually manage to is left ambiguous. However, several other dying characters were healed by the Psynergy that erupted from Mars Lighthouse when it's beacon was lit, so if they were still alive at the time it's possible they could have been healed as well. On the other hand, they're nowhere to be found during the Playable Epilogue, and if they did survive, why didn't they return to Prox? Dummied Out Mind Read text indicates they did die, though whether that can be taken as canon or not is debatable.
- The original Grandia tweaks the trope a bit by giving a female party member an unexpected case of traumatic stress disorder, forcing her to return to her village before the final battle begins.
- In Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, a case of this actually impacted how players handled the game. At the end of episode four, you’re forced to choose between letting Drax perform a Heroic Sacrifice to aid in the team’s escape, or stopping him against his wishes, making the escape more difficult and getting Groot badly injured in the process. It’s obviously meant as a Sadistic Choice, but many players suspected that Drax wouldn’t really die (especially since you don’t actually see him die) or would be revived with the Eternity Forge, so they gladly let him sacrifice himself in one of the most bizarre instances of metagaming ever. Sure enough, the final episode revealed that he survives even if you let him sacrifice himself.
- In Kingdom Hearts, we have the Wild Card Axel, who ultimately performed a Heel–Face Turn because of Roxas, culminating in a Heroic Sacrifice to save Sora and company and open their passageway to The World That Never Was. We later find out that if a Heartless and Nobody are both destroyed, the Somebody that created them comes back to life. And with that, come Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], Axel becomes Lea, and Lea becomes a Sixth Ranger.
- Ansem in the original game: you defeated him as a boss at the end of the original game? Sorry, that wasn't Ansem - the real one really has been hiding. Luckily for the protagonists, the real Ansem is a good guy...to the point that in Kingdom Hearts II, he performs a Heroic Sacrifice to jeopardize the Big Bad's plan.
- Turns out, Ansem the Wise survived that, and, as of Reconnect: Kingdom Hearts, is in the dark realm, memoryless, meeting up with Aqua.
- Although Scar was killed in Kingdom Hearts, the fact that he became a Heartless shortly after his first death and retained his regular form, as well as the heavy implications that an equally strong Nobody would be formed in the process strongly implies that we haven't seen the last of Scar just yet, even after his Groundshaker form was destroyed.
- Ansem in the original game: you defeated him as a boss at the end of the original game? Sorry, that wasn't Ansem - the real one really has been hiding. Luckily for the protagonists, the real Ansem is a good guy...to the point that in Kingdom Hearts II, he performs a Heroic Sacrifice to jeopardize the Big Bad's plan.
- Last Scenario has an in-universe example with Helio. Castor, having just recovered from a Villainous BSoD and learning that Helio died to buy Earp and Flynn time to evacuate Castor, later refuses to find somebody to fill Helio's spot on Omega Team, because he believes Helio is still alive somewhere.
- In Left 4 Dead if one of your teammates is killed, they can be found later in a closet or a room, but in the final sequence, if that's happened, its Killed Off for Real.
- In canon, Bill is dead after he performed a Heroic Sacrifice to save the rest of his team. His body appears in the sequel and fans insist that you can revive Bill with the defibrillator, even though it's physically impossible.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- Since almost every singleZelda game ends with the Ensemble Dark Horse (or Navi) somehow being irreversibly separated from the main characters, naturally fans keep coming up with the weirdest Wild Mass Guessing, about how "Character X will return, because he/she is awesome enough to open the portal sealed by the gods/come Back from the Dead!!" Common targets of this brand of Zelda WMG are Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Linebeck from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (who actually came back, sort of, in form of an Identical Grandson) and, the newest and yet worst offender, Byrne from The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. A group of fans on a Zelda forum created an entire website dedicated to bringing Midna back in a future game — WantMidnaBack.com. Too bad it'll never happen. Not in canon, at least. Read this little tidbit of info: when asked if Midna would return for a future game or not in an interview with Game Informer, Eiji Aonuma stated: "Because of the way Twilight Princess ended, I don't see her making a reappearance, but who knows? If we hear enough voices for her to come back, how can we not?"
- Inverted with the Sages from Ocarina Of Time. A popular theory that floats around the fandom is that they died and are ghosts.
- Joe Barbaro in Mafia II, possibly because it was never shown that he was killed (or the acts of killing him), with his death only being described by Vito in Mafia III. Some also believe that Leo Galante's driver seen near the very end of the game may actually be Joe due to them looking very similar in build and facial structure.
- The initial teaser trailer for Mass Effect 2 indicated that Commander Shepard, the protagonist of the first game, is considered killed in action. The fanbase immediately began coming up with explanations ranging from "Shepard is Faking the Dead to go undercover" to "Shepard has been converted into a geth". Given that it's only a one-minute teaser, of course, it was all a ruse, as Shepard dies at the start of ME2 but just gets brought back to life two years (and four billion credits) later.
- Zero of Mega Man X was originally designed to appear only in the first game, and was killed off at the end. However, fans liked him so much that the developers decided to bring him back — his recovery and resurrection comprise the entire plot of X2, and all subsequent games featured him as a playable character. This would happen countless times over the course of the X series, even stretching to his own Spin-Off series.
- Notable in X5, which was meant to be the last in the series, according to creator Inafune. Alas, X6 was created, in which Zero was literally hiding the entire time up until he returns from the dead.
Zero: I hid myself while I tried to repair myself.- Mega Man Zero 4 ended with Zero's death as he broke up a Colony Drop while re-entering Earth's orbit (although Word of God claims that he's MIA in the Mega Man Zero Official Complete Works). Fans were counting the months for his return. Mega Man ZX has his Expy (who is killed within an hour or so) and you find a biometal that has his properties and attitude, but no, he's really dead.
- Metal Gear fans found Big Boss' death to a cigarette lighter and aerosol can at the end of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was too cheap and anticlimactic a death for the series' greatest Fallen Hero, given his backstory in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (not to mention surviving The Fury's flames from his flamethrower, which was stated to use Rocket Fuel to have the fires burn much longer, and surviving being near ground zero of the ICBMG's launch). They were proven right in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
- Big Boss dies again in MGS4, along with his comrades Eva and Ocelot. However, given these characters massive popularity, fan theories have cropped up by the hundreds claiming that all three are still alive and well and their supposed 'deaths' were just a way of hiding themselves from the various militaries and governments who want to abuse them.
- Solid Snake himself has this trope in an odd way... The ending of MGS4 pretty much outright states Snake will die and very soon. But, he doesn't technically expire within the game itself, leading some to assume that Snake lives on in spite of his body's decline. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance adds to this by having Raiden only talk about Snake in the present tense.
- An in-universe example happens in Peace Walker when it's noted that Paz landed in the ocean in her presumed death, the body was never found, and she had been wearing SCUBA gear at the time of her defeat. So it's quite likely she's still alive, and the trailers for Ground Zeroes confirm she is alive.
- In-universe in The New Order Last Days Of Europe, Sergei Taboritsky is utterly convinced that Alexei Nikolaevich, son of the emperor Nicholas II, is still alive despite having been dead for over fifty years. For him, the only way to allow Alexei to come back and claim the throne is to "purify" Russia by the means of genocide and Crushing the Populace. Once his sanity fully breaks (represented in-game by a clock reaching midnight), Sergei Taboritsky finally realises that Alexei is dead, and dies from shock.
- Robert T. Sturgeon from the NES version of Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos is often assumed to have survived the events of the game despite being severely injured while fighting off the Tribe of Chaos at the end of the game, due to the ambiguity of his final scene.
- Before the release of Persona 3: FES, many fans claimed that the Main Character hadn't died in the end (despite the 100% HP cost from The Great Seal and that he just fell asleep for no apparent reason...) Needless to say, they were all pissed off by "The Answer".
- The lyrics for the song "Memories of You" at the end of the game pretty much confirmed his death before FES was even in development.
- The immediate sequels to the game confirm that MC is indeed dead and that Elizabeth is trying to resurrect him while keeping Erebus' seal intact.
- Persona 5 fans applied this to Goro Akechi as during the plot events of vanilla, he seals himself behind a door in Shido's Palace with his doppelganger in an apparent Heroic Sacrifice as is never brought up again outside of being briefly mentioned by Lavenza and Sae, due to the sound editing and Akechi's popularity amongst the fanbase. Persona 5 Royal confirms that he did survive his "final battle"... only to later reveal Akechi's days are numbered from having been brought Back from the Dead by Takuto due to the protagonist's regret of being unable to save him during the events of Shido's Palace. Given that Akechi (or at the very least someone resembling him) appears in the True Ending cutscene, and some seeming incongruencies in the mechanics of Maruki's power, this trope still applies.
- An extremely similar plot twist could be found in Phantasy Star II, released eight years before Final Fantasy VII. Female lead Nei dies halfway through the game and cannot be revived.
- Except in the Japan-only Updated Re-release.
- Eothas, god of light, redemption, and rebirth, from Pillars of Eternity manifested in human form and, for reasons not immediately clear, went on a violent crusade, ending with his being annihilated by the Godhammer. (The only reason his priests can still cast spells is that priest powers come from faith, not the actual god.) Many, in-universe and out, believed he was Not Quite Dead, due to resurrect, or otherwise not as gone as it would seem... and indeed, his resurrection is the event that will kick off the plot of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.
- Pokémon:
- Inverted with Giovanni. In Heartgold and Soulsilver, there's an event where many fans swear he jumped off a waterfall. When he reappeared in Black 2 and White 2 fans opted for a Bungled Suicide.
- Infamously inverted with Blue's Raticate, who many fans believe Red accidentally killed thanks to a popular theory. The more likely explanation is that it was either put in the PC or released, but many believe it is dead.
- Fans speculated that despite being consumed by James Heller at the end of his boss fight in [PROTOTYPE 2], Alex Mercer is still alive and will most likely return in future installments. This is backup from a memory that Heller read after defeating him where Mercer stated that he is "no longer bound by life and death." Further supporting this is the reveal from the first game that the real Alex Mercer was already dead to begin with, and the "Alex" we follow is actually a manifestation of the Blacklight Virus itself, giving the possibility that, so long as Blacklight exists, so too will "Alex".
- Resident Evil fans have a hard time believing Albert Wesker has truly died after Resident Evil 5. Doubly-so due to his cheap death (lava didn't faze him, rockets didn't faze him, but lava + rockets did the trick?). The series producer would have you believe otherwise, though. And to an extent, Piers Nivans in Resident Evil 6.
- In-universe example in Silent Hill 2, where the protagonist James Sunderland believes this about his dead wife Mary, by virtue of Love Makes You Crazy. The game's goal, ultimately, is for the player to rediscover the truth about her death, and decide whether James faces up to the fact that he killed her, or continues to hide from himself. It's more or less an Invoked Trope for James himself, since Word of God deliberately refuses to name any ending as "canon" and encourages players to decide his fate for themselves. From there, he either could have chosen to succumb to despair and commit suicide, sidestepped the issue and remained in Silent Hill to live out a delusion, learned to forgive himself, leave his old life behind, and start over anew, or the whole thing was masterminded by a supr intelligent shiba inu; none of these is a wrong answer.
- The Sims: Bella Goth could be called Schroedinger's Hottie, being considered dead despite her family tree portrait not being shaded-out, and being able to be summoned up through means both legitimate and illegitimate (such as sending Alexander to college with Mortimer dead). Also, of course, there's the situation with her having a Doppelgänger. The PSP Sims 2 sequel features her (or a version of her), and explains where she's been. (Abducted, and now in hiding, since you asked.)
- Sonic the Hedgehog: There are more than a few fanworks where Maria didn't die in the ARK massacre. She was saved and kept away, preferably either in a manner where she hasn't aged in over 50 years or has been transformed into an anthro teenage hedgehog.
- Sam's daughter in Splinter Cell literally.
- Super Robot Wars:
- Super Robot Wars: Original Generation fans came up with theories about bringing back Axel Almer and Mekibos after OG2, and Lamia Loveless after 2.5. Given Banpresto's proud history of subverting the "Anyone Can Die" mentality, the only surprise in Axel and Lamia's return in OG Gaiden was the how of it. Also, given Mekibos's death and revival as a cyborg in the original timeline, it's only a matter of time before he comes out of hiding, too. Speaking of that kinda hiding, you can't forget how Fiona Gureden got thought to be dead EARLIER in OGs. She got sucked into a dimensional hole, and beforehand still gives out the feel that "I'm gonna die, so don't miss me, Raul...". Then POOF! She comes out from hiding in that dimensional hole in OGG. Damn trailers.
- SRW K gives you a literal 'just hiding' in form of GUN×SWORD's Michael Garret and Fasalina. In the show, they're supposed to be never heard of again after a sudden collapsing ceiling from a destroyed base. In here, after all that happened, if proper actions were taken, they immediately came out from hiding and joins right after.
- In Tekken 7, Heihachi is killed by a devil gene-empowered punch to the chest, and thrown into a lava pit by Kazuya, for good measure. However, due to Heihachi's history of cheating death, some fans have a hard time believing he's gone for good, arguing that he'll probably just be resurrected somehow, much like Kazuya himself after his death Tekken 2.
- Tomb Raider:
- A significant portion of the fandom still believe Alister Fletcher did not die and is somewhere in Avalon, due to his last words being "I'll see you in Avalon". There is plenty of fanfiction involving Lara travelling to Avalon/Helheim to find him - despite the fact that one cannot choose to go to Avalon in death, and people who are there are turned into soulless thralls. Other than this, in a similar way to Archie from Hornblower, fans just choose to write post-Underworld fics and state that Alister didn't die.
- Kurtis Trent from Angel of Darkness gets this as well, however, it is justified in that the game ended on a cliffhanger and the fate of Kurtis was never revealed.
- ULTRAKILL: Even after V2 was splattered to oblivion following its second defeat in the Greed layer, many people in the fandom still theorize it will return in Act III. Adding to the sheer ridiculousness of the thing is that V2's death was explicitly made to be gory as hell to make it abundantly clear that it wasn't coming back this time. When it was pointed out to Hakita in a stream that V2 was still expected to somehow reconstruct itself, his response was succinct:
"Reconstruct WHAT?! THERE'S NOTHING LEFT!!!"
- Many, many people insisted this of Kenny from The Walking Dead (Telltale), after his Heroic Sacrifice to either save Christa or Mercy Kill Ben. In both cases, the player doesn't see him die or get bitten and he quickly runs offscreen, not to be seen again for the rest of the game. Additionally, the endgame statistics only list him as 'lost to the herd', rather than 'dead'. Sure enough, he shows up alive and well in Season 2 with the excuse of having gotten lucky.
- The entry for Watch Dogs: Legion Big Bad Sabine Brandt on the Watch_Dogs wiki lists her as Presumed Dead, notably this is somewhat of a Broken Base, as can be seen on the article's comment section, noting that given how Sabine dies, falling from Blume Tower, she most certainly did die, however some fans insist that because we Never Found the Body she may be alive.
- In The World Ends with You, Sho Minamimoto's body is found during the last day of the Game, just before you enter the final Boss Rush. As he is a fan-favorite, and the standard death for Reapers involves their body disappearing, some believe that he is, in fact, still alive.
- There's even more evidence in the words of Joshua, the Composer, who states he's been well aware of Minamimoto's Starscream status the whole time but keeps him around because he thinks Sho's crazy betrayal plots are amusing. This suggests he left Minamimoto alive on purpose.
- Trailers for NEO: The World Ends with You pretty openly showed him as a party member. Though his high stats seen in preview images imply... something.
- Illidan Stormrage from World of Warcraft is an odd case. Nobody really thinks he wasn't Killed Off for Real at Black Temple, or at least wasn't intended to be when the raid was created. However, Death Is Cheap in the Warcraft universe and many fans were unhappy with Illidan's Motive Decay and subsequent death in the Burning Crusade expansion. Since then, several Epileptic Trees have been made explaining how he could have survived the incident or been resurrected afterward. Several members of Blizzard's staff have even teased the idea of bringing Illidan back in a future patch or expansion. His return was eventually confirmed in the Legion expansion, approximately nine years after his "death" in Black Temple.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Because of the Inferred Holocaust that comes with the City having to be removed from existence along with Aionios for the worlds to separate again, while the game itself (via Melia and Ghondor) implies the people of the City will eventually be born in the future, some fans envision that after the ending, the City residents were evenly allocated across the Xenoblade 1 and 2 worlds, if only to give characters such as Monica, Travis, and even Shania (since Joran is present in the ending) a satisfying conclusion.
- Yomawari: Night Alone gives an In-Universe example with the game's heroine believing that her dog simply ran off and went missing. She's in complete denial, having witnessed and essentially caused her dog's death when he gets hit by a truck trying to chase after a pebble she tossed onto the road.
- In Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen, Sara is killed off in Falcom's official canon, but goes into hiding in the PC Engine version, returning in the non-canonical Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys.
Webcomics
- Brian Clevinger, the creator of 8-Bit Theater, was so annoyed by his audience's refusal to accept the death of Black Belt that he wrote a strip (entitled "Now shut up."), just to permanently close the door on a persistent fan theory on how he could be brought back.
- When Gordon Frohman died in the final episode of Concerned, you could see tons of messages full of grief, rage and hatred on the comic's forum, most of them written without any regard for spelling or, for that matter, the comic's subtitle: "The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman". (Maybe that's because, in their opinion, he was killed off anticlimactically.)
- The reason for this is more that Frohman apparently went from living to dead without taking damage, which can't happen in the game.
- It was so pervasive, that recently, a fan created a comic titled Concerned 2: A Concerned Ripoff-The Continuing Adventures of Gordon Frohman. In the first strip, Frohman was revived by Reloading from the last checkpoint.
- Miko Miyazaki in The Order of the Stick: The fandom is awash in speculation and rumors about Miko, despite her plot arc ending with her being cut in half, her soul being taken to 'her destination' personally by a ghost, and any possibility of her being brought back as an undead abomination shot down in this strip. Before her death, the author had stated that she would remain in the story for most of its run, so while he could have changed his mind, there is at least that.
- This differs from the norm for this trope in that nobody denies Miko is dead (OotS's format makes that impossible, as any character who dies has their eyes turn into a pair of "X"s), but many in the fandom expect her to come back anyway. But then, OotS does take place in a world where death need not be permanent, and where coming Back from the Dead is so routine, the heroes have actually recommended imprisonment over execution for a recurring villain because they figured his eventual resurrection was more likely than his escape from jail.
- As of early 2021, she's stayed dead for 14 real-world years and the comic has entered its final arc, meaning the statement about her being present for most of the story is already confirmed as either a Lying Creator or a Flip-Flop of God. She still could come back, but after this much time it seems highly unlikely.
- In the same vein, Belkar's predicted death has plenty of people wondering if he'll become undead or some kind of sentient construct, despite the Oracle's ramblings and direct statements. So not so much He's Just Hiding, so much as He Will Be Hiding.
- This differs from the norm for this trope in that nobody denies Miko is dead (OotS's format makes that impossible, as any character who dies has their eyes turn into a pair of "X"s), but many in the fandom expect her to come back anyway. But then, OotS does take place in a world where death need not be permanent, and where coming Back from the Dead is so routine, the heroes have actually recommended imprisonment over execution for a recurring villain because they figured his eventual resurrection was more likely than his escape from jail.
- College Roomies from Hell!!!:
- Mike. And he's back... as a zombie.
- Earlier in the comic, Dave was originally intended to die in his first encounter with Satan, but fan outcry meant an Author's Saving Throw in the form of a holy shotgun.
- Fans of Schlock Mercenary spent years insisting that psychobear AI Petey was Just Hiding, to the point when the character came back the strip outright lampshaded it.
- Sluggy Freelance actually managed a kind of cruel subversion of this, even though it's an audience reaction trope. For years, the central cast was protected by Plot Armor, so when it appeared that someone had finally very dramatically died for real, a large proportion of readers insisted that they were just hiding. However, when it was revealed that they were, in fact, alive, and further revealed just what state they were in, some turned around and said it would be better if they were dead, even hoping for that to happen.
- Related to the Real Life section, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has Dracula keeping Bruce Lee, Tupac, the real Michael Jackson, the real Paul McCartney, Elvis, and Hitler in his moon base.
- Everyone thought Sir Reginald Derby had died in a colossal explosion of his landship but in fact, he was seen to be just hiding in the wreckage
- Homestuck. Bro is just faking it, right? Right?
- A whole lot of people seemed to think that Jade's dreamself survived the destruction of Prospit, judging by fans' reactions to said event containing a whole lot of "ifs" in reference to her being dead. This was despite the fact that her dreambot was clearly shown being destroyed, and, you know, having a goddamn moon dropped on her. Thankfully, Andrew showed the corpse shortly after and clearly showed and referred to her as dead, putting an end to this. She came back anyway.
- The Guardians gets hit hardest with this, as the Trolls who've died still are around in their Dream afterlife.
- During a period in the story where several characters died, some fans speculated that the whole thing was an Alternate Timeline and it never really happened. In what may have been a Fandom Nod, there was a scene where Karkat and Terezi were seemingly killed before it was revealed it was an Alternate Timeline. The same thing happened to Spades Slick.
- A Q&A session with Hussie included a question by a fan asking if Spades Slick is okay, after having his entire universe obliterated with him inside it. Hussie responded in his usual style:
Hussie: I am nursing him back to health in my house, like a baby bird that fell from its nest too young.
- There is speculation that Jake's dreamself isn't really dead despite his corpse being shown. The reason being that he died due to the Courtyard Droll being shown stuffing peanuts into his mouth, to which he is fatally allergic to...but the peanuts were described as being "like the kind from circuses". Circus Peanuts are actually peanut-shaped marshmallows with no trace of peanut.
- A whole lot of people seemed to think that Jade's dreamself survived the destruction of Prospit, judging by fans' reactions to said event containing a whole lot of "ifs" in reference to her being dead. This was despite the fact that her dreambot was clearly shown being destroyed, and, you know, having a goddamn moon dropped on her. Thankfully, Andrew showed the corpse shortly after and clearly showed and referred to her as dead, putting an end to this. She came back anyway.
- Fans of Slightly Damned thought this about Sakido so many often that the author went ahead and wrote on her FAQ page that, yes, Sakido is dead for good.
- This is the earlier depiction of a character death in San: Three Kingdoms Comic. Dong Zhuo and Dian Wei go to Hawaii after their novel death, and Lu Bu got sent to Alaska (while wearing a bikini). It looks like latter strips drop this concept, however.
- Sleepless Domain: Given the circumstances surrounding Cassidy's apparent death scene — it comes with very little warning in what had appeared to be the middle of her character arc, and due to the nature of her powers she conveniently doesn't leave behind a body — it's no surprise that fans quickly and fervently latched on to the idea that she might somehow still be alive. It started out as genuine speculation as to whether she was really dead, but it soon passed into ironic Memetic Mutation as it became increasingly clear (to the point that Anemone, the nigh-omniscient Fourth-Wall Observer, eventually had to step in and all but confirmed she was really gone) that she was gone for good... probably.
Web Animation
- The Amazing Digital Circus: Gummigoo in Episode 2 had a lot of buildup and a budding relationship with Pomni, only to have him be snuffed out of existence by Caine by the end of the episode. Many fans did not take this well and even expressed newfound vitriol towards Caine, and many theorize that Gummigoo could somehow return, which in fairness was helped that Ragatha's reassurance suggested it. The fact that he was the only major character from Episode 2 to receive merch alongside the rest of the designated main cast could imply there is hope for him in the future.
- Murder Drones: Following the end of episode 6, fans have been coming up with various explanations for why V, who was last seen surrounded by anti-drone sentinels with no defense against their eye flashes, could still be alive. This isn't especially far-fetched, given what happened to J. Many fans also believe that Doll is still alive, despite Cyn eating her AS core onscreen, mostly through theorizing what exactly happens to cores that Cyn eats. Fans were right on the money with the former, who pulls a Big Damn Heroes in order to save Lizzy, Thad and Khan from J in episode 8, while Doll's case is left ambiguous.
- Helluva Boss:
- Many fans believe that Martha's husband and children managed to avoid the missile the police fired at their house, since Moxxie's phone call would've given them enough time to flee before the cops arrived.
- "Exes and Oohs" has two examples:
- Despite having two confirmations to his death, some fans theorize that Chaz wasn't killed but was merely given A Fate Worse Than Death by Crimson. Helps that he was Killed Offscreen, meaning that he was never actually seen getting killed.
- A smaller section of the fandom insists there is a way Moxxie's mother survived as well, as all the onscreen confirmation we get is her shoe floating on the water. Some even go as far as to theorize the bag Crimson pushes into the water after Moxxie's victim was just all of her stuff he was getting rid of. Perhaps he simply threatened to kill Moxxie to force her away?
- My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale: The episode "Written in the Starscouts" introduces Sunny's mother via flashbacks. The way Sunny and Zipp talk about her make it sound like she died, but they never outright say it, and her mother was last seen leaving Maretime Bay on a quest to find out how to restore magic. This has led people to believe she would've returned if Tell Your Tale hadn't been cancelled.
- Death in Red vs. Blue is rare, but on the few occasions that it's happened, the fanbase tends to react this way. In particular, regarding the deaths of Lopez, Alpha!Church, and the original Tex. The arguments for Lopez and Tex are fairly reasonable (Lopez did mention having backups, and it's never explicitly said the original Tex "died" anyway), but the justification for the original Alpha!Church is a little more contrived, especially because his death has been confirmed by the creators.
- RWBY:
- Volume 3's sudden escalation of darkness in the show contributed to many fans struggling to accept the death of fan-favourite villain, Roman Torchwick; he was Swallowed Whole while ranting at the heroine, by a monster that was immediately destroyed in an explosion. Although the creators admitted that Roman's role was extended beyond the originally intended one-off pilot episode appearance because both the creators and fans loved him so much, they have confirmed several times that he's dead and won't return. That doesn't stop fans theorising how to bring him back.
- The death of fan-favourite protagonist, Pyrrha Nikos, was widely anticipated due to her character inspiration being Achilles. However, her death hit the fandom so hard, the voice actress confirmed that Pyrrha's death had been planned from conception. The many theories about how she could be brought back include downloading her consciousness into a robot as at least one sentient Robot Girl has existed in the show.
- In Volume 6, the creators admitted they tried to avert this trope when Adam died by having him be stabbed twice, plunge off a cliff-edge into a raging waterfall and rapids, and even bouncing off rocks with a Sickening "Crunch!" on the way down. This did not stop fans from trying to figure out ways to bring him back and give him a role in the Atlas Arc, as a result of his past connections to the Schnee Dust Comapany.
- Although the creators have confirmed Summer Rose has been dead for years, her grave does not hold a body as it's heavily implied that her body was never found. Many fans theorise that there is a way to bring her back, especially given certain plot reveals that occurred in Volume 8 connected to Salem's interest in Silver-Eyed Warriors.
Web Original
- The Adventure Zone: people, including the players, kept asking for Barry Blue Jeans to come back - the joke being that he was, in fact, an extremely minor character who only appeared in a couple of episodes before being killed off with all the inhabitants of an entire town in a magical disaster. Griffin kept ranting that he was dead, goddammit - and then brought him back as a lich.
- In Critical Role, this is a common fan reaction to Molly's death. To be fair, he's come back once before...
- "Kate" of KateModern was brutally murdered, her blood smeared over a wall, her dying screams recorded, and her killer - a raving, bloodthirsty psychopath - confessed. None of which has stopped fans from speculating that she might still be alive.
- The show has parodied this a couple of times. On one occasion, a character's insanity manifests itself as the belief that "Kate" faked her death. Another time, a character suggests that William Griffin faked his death (despite the body having been found), prompting another character to comment on how unlikely that would be.
- In Survival of the Fittest, if a character is designated to die, and people like him and refuse to believe that he's going to die, there's a special system designed to save them (albeit at the cost of one of your own characters).
- In v3 many handlers suspected that the characters killed off in the inactive clearing were still around Faking The Dead and plotting against the terrorists. However, this was actually proven to be canonical. In v4, some handlers have speculated that the STAR escape group did not die in a fiery boat explosion as the terrorists claim, but for now, they're treated as dead by most people.
Western Animation
- Avatar: The Last Airbender:
- Zhao often suffered from this. Apparently, getting dragged underwater by the Ocean Spirit he just pissed off doesn't count. But Season 2 of the sequel series reveals that the fans were right. La didn't kill Zhao…because death would be too merciful. So, La gave him a Fate Worse than Death, by imprisoning him in the Fog of Lost Souls.
- Due to the Never Say "Die" nature of the show, it was believed that Jet was merely injured by Long Feng. It took Word of God to convince fans that he was truly dead.
- This was lampshaded in the Ember Island Players episode, when Zuko directly asks if the Jet character on stage just died and Sokka agrees it was really unclear.
- A very popular fan theory states that a small portion of Air Nomads and Airbenders managed to escape the Fire Nation genocide and went into hiding somewhere. This theory was confirmed only by a non-canon card game.
- Addressed in one of the comics, the Fire Nation had put Air Nomad relics into circulation, and set up bases in various mountain chains, until they ultimately found or lured in every last escaped Airbender and killed them. It's not completely clear if this is canon, they may have all just been killed in the initial attack.
- Similar theories exist for the Sky Bison and Flying Lemurs. These were ultimately confirmed true by the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, and they've been repopulating.
- This even applies in-character; when Aang is told that the Air Nomads were wiped out, he is initially insistent that the Fire Nation could never have accessed the Air Temples, and suggests that they've been in hiding for the last hundred years. It's only when he discovers the remains of several Fire Nation soldiers surrounding the skeleton of his closest friend and father figure that Aang accepts that he is the last airbender.
- Beast Wars: Some fans speculate that Dinobot II did, in fact, survive the exploding ship he was trapped in during the series finale and continued to live on Earth alone complete with his memories of being the original Dinobot. The evidence to support this comes from the fact that he had Protoform X's spark in its whole form, which could heal injuries and was already shown to be highly difficult to kill given his transmetal body.
- Big Hero 6: The Series: The highly popular villain Obake died in what was essentially an assisted suicide by way of Collapsing Lair. All we were given was a shot of his chip in the rubble to indicate his legacy could live on if nothing else, but it doesn't stop fans yearning for a genuine reappearance by the man himself. The fact that Trina searched the wreckage of the base and only found the chip, as well as the fact that she tells Hiro that her father is dead, makes it HIGHLY unlikely he will come back.
- DC Animated Universe:
- Batman seems to be the in-universe version of this trope in an episode of Justice League. After Superman is apparently vaporized by a massive energy blast, Batman is the only member of the League that seems openly resistant to the conclusion that Superman's dead. He searches for evidence to disprove it and even forgoes the funeral "because he's not dead." However, it's later shown that he was apparently just in denial, and in a heartwrenching scene, he finally comes to accept it. Of course, it turns out he had it right the first time.
- Terry McGinnis / Batman also invoked the trope twice in Batman Beyond in regards to various villains "deaths," especially towards their treacherous relatives. The first time was in "Ascension". Shortly after Paxton is nominated to succeed his father after Derek Powers tried to sink the submarine with Paxton Powers, Batman, and himself still inside, Batman tells Paxton that he "made a really big enemy" that day, in reference to Derek Powers. Powers bluntly says that his father died. After Batman responds, "Sure he did," and walks away, a news report comes up that has the news crew revealing that they never found Derek Powers' body in the sunken submarine. The second time was in "Inqueling", where Inque's daughter stabs her in the back by giving her a solvent-laced cure to dissolve Inque. Batman then meets up with the daughter, and she mentions that Inque's dead, and Batman merely replies that "[Inque's] been dead before" prior to leaving. The shadows shift and become heavily inked as she draws her knees to her chest and hugs her legs. Inque is seen again in the Fully Absorbed Finale episode of Justice League, but Powers only appears in unrelated comics. No word on what happened to their children.
- Batman allows everybody to assume that he's dead in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Man Who Killed Batman", so he can follow the two-bit gangster who supposedly kills him back to the central boss of a drug ring.
- Clayface's Tragic Villain status and ability to reform his body have many fans arguing that he must have survived being blown apart by firecrackers.
- The fact that Ace's death doesn't cause a massive psychic backlash like Waller had said it would (and her reality warping powers having the potential to heal her aneurysm) can cast a little doubt on Waller's claim that she did die.
- There are those who hope that Reasonable Authority Figure Nardoc was only knocked unconscious and not murdered when Ares starts impersonating him in "Hawk and Dove."
- It's nice to hope that Grodd's mutineers in "Alive" (Shade, Blockbuster, Copperhead, Fastball, Rampage, Goldface, etc.) might have survived. This is made somewhat plausible by Luthor giving the order to jettison them after they're frozen but before his ship is blown up. Additionally, the episode "Epilogue" implies Parasite, who is part of that group, is still alive forty years later).
- Family Guy:
- Evil Stewie appeared to have been killed by Brian, but the other Stewie turns to the screen with glowing yellow eyes, and evil laughter is heard. Perhaps Brian shot the wrong Stewie?
- After "Life of Brian", a lot of people thought this about Brian Griffin after he was fatally run over by a car. He actually did die, but was brought back 2 episodes later via Time Travel.
- Word of God stated that Stewie's former wife Olivia may have survived the events of "Chick Cancer". Confirmed with her appearance in "The Boys in the Band".
Stewie: Well, I'm glad to hear you're still acting. You know, the last time I saw you, you were…
Olivia: Burning in a cardboard house?
Stewie: Yep, burning in a cardboard house, yeah.
- This is what many Generator Rex fans prayed was the case with resident Ensemble Dark Horse Breach. Turned out she was just hiding.
- Many people believe Bill Cipher is still alive at the end of Gravity Falls, with the fact that Stan regained his memory possibly being a sign that the mind-wipe wasn't entirely effective. Additionally, Bill's final words, when played in reverse, are "A-X-O-L-O-T-L MY TIME HAS COME TO BURN, I INVOKE THE ANCIENT POWER THAT I MAY RETURN".
- The Cipher Hunt, a ARG hosted by series creator Alex Hirsch sometime after the series finale, only added fuel to the fire in its congratulatory message. In said message, Stan not only sings "We'll Meet Again" (which Bill himself sang in the series finale), but also appears to slip up by saying "Congratulations on finding my, uh...the mysterious treasure, of the...statue in the forest!", implying that Bill has returned and secretly taken control of Stan.
- The Book of Bill, released almost a decade after the series's conclusion and the ARG, provides an alternate outcome: Bill's soul was indeed saved by the Axolotl (the being whom he invoked in his final words), but as part of their deal Bill was consigned to a extradimensional Self-Inflicted Hell that he will never escape from as he can only leave it if the Axolotl deems him reformed enough, which Bill never will given his inability to admit his own mistakes.
- Hazbin Hotel: Not even a day after the Season 1 finale's release, and many viewers were already doubting the idea Adam was Deader than Dead. Especially after Sir Pentious, who was seemingly also killed that episode, ended up ascending to Heaven as a "Winner", causing many to think Adam might be brought back as a "Sinner", particularly since his body was left behind in Hell without indicating what was done with it, and would offer a potential challenge to Charlie's idea of redeeming Sinners while possibly letting Adam's characterization be fleshed out.
- Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law: Some fans have the theory that Birdman did not die in the last episode, it was the copy made in the previous episode that suddenly disappeared (or alternatively, the copy lived on to take up his life).
- Kim Possible: While Word of God says Warhok and Warmonga do die in the explosion of their ship in the Grand Finale, many fans prefer to think that they survived, or at least that Ensemble Dark Horse Warmonga did.
- The Legend of Korra. Let's face it, there are probably going to be a lot more of these. Starting with Amon, lots of speculation has been that he could somehow have survived his boat exploding in the middle of the ocean & return as the main antagonist, in spite of the fact that this was explicitly done to ensure that he couldn't restart the Equalists. No word on why there doesn't seem to be much speculation about Tarrlok. People also argue over whether or not the Lieutenant died, which is pretty ambiguous at the moment.
- Becomes Hilarious in Hindsight with Varrick's mover idea in Book 4's episode "Remembrances" featuring a zombie Amon that came back from the dead to join a Legion of Doom with the other Big Bad villains of the series. Even Varrick's idea doesn't conclude on what happens to Zombie Amon after the Big Bad legion is defeated.
- From My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Some fans believe that King Sombra, the villain of the season 3 two-part premiere, isn't really dead. This is grounded in the fact that even though his death is actually on-screen, his horn is prominently seen flying away intact, and earlier it was shown that even a small piece of his horn can spread his Corruption. Part of it stems from disappointment in how minimal his characterization and backstory was, and some believe it was intentional to flesh him out later on.
- If it helps, in the IDW comicverse, guess who's a good guy in the Mirror Universe? So we do get a more fleshed-out Sombra, just not this one.
- Luckily, he's featured in an alternate timeline in Season 4 and is resurrected in Season 9... only to be Killed Off for Real, with Grogar refusing to resurrect him again to Make an Example of Him for his legion.
- The Simpsons:
- Spoofed, if not outright ruthlessly mocked, when Homer becomes distraught over the death of "Lord Greystash" in the Harry Potter knockoff Angelica Button and the Dragon King's Trundle Bed and tries to hide it from Lisa. Of course, it might not be mocked either, as Lisa commented after reading the true ending that she actually liked Homer's rendition of the ending better than the actual ending.
- Played straight with Homer's mother, in her second appearance. She flies off a cliff in a prison van and explodes. Homer then tries to find a hidden message from her in the newspapers a la A Beautiful Mind, but he doesn't find any. Although he did find something he thought was a message (I M OK), it just wasn't the lengthy and detailed one she'd really left. She's actually alive. Averted by his Mother's actual death in her next appearance. She later appears in an Inception style dream delving session, where she's confirmed to be really dead, but alive in Homer's memories.
- South Park: Kenny McCormick, of course, died all the time until it was decided that it should be played straight and he would be Killed Off for Real... Until he came back in "Red Sleigh Down" and said he'd just been "hanging out over there" and pointing offscreen. A Cerebus Retcon revealed Kenny has superpowers. Every time he dies, he is literally reborn. Thank his parents for being Cthulhu cultists.
- Despite his death being the catalyst for the events of Star vs. the Forces of Evil's second half, a number of fans believe that Toffee of Septarsis isn't actually dead, and could conceivably return due to his ungodly regeneration. It probably didn't help that he survived his first apparant death at the end of Season 1.
- There's a theory going around that Hekapoo survived the destruction of magic in the Multiverse in the last episode. The argument is that she seemed nonchalant about dying and her remains weren't seen, while the other members of the Magic High Commission were. Possibly, she escaped into another dimension that was unaffected. She'd still be unable to see the other characters as portal dimension travel no longer works. The series does end on a Sequel Hook so make of that what you will.
- Sym-Bionic Titan: Young Lance, at his fathers funeral, states simply that "He's not even in there" (They Never Found the Body), and continues to claim that his father will be back soon, until the Tear Jerker ending when he tells the King his father won't be coming back. Though many fans heavily believe that the leader of G3 is, in fact, Lance's father. Even the episodes he is in highly suggest this.
- Many members of the Transformers: Animated fandom refuse to believe that Blurr is dead, even though it was one of the single most brutal moments in the show. Seeing as his apparent death came mere moments after his CMOA and Transformers have survived being crushed into a metal cube before, this is to be expected. Being incinerated shortly after, however...
- However, Word of God and a rather insightful bit of released storyboard◊ say that this one might not be forever either...
- As of the end of the series, he's still not back. But the above image, plus the fact that existing Transformer sparks can be transferred into the bodies of healthy protoforms, makes hope spring eternal.
- The BotCon 2011 comic book, set in the Animated universe and written by Marty Isenberg and Derrick Wyatt, showed Blurr alive, but still stuck in cube form, as Cliffjumper took him to see the Stunticons' stunt show.
- It doesn't help that Starscream's resurrections by an Allspark fragment opens the door to the possibility of it happening to others.
- However, Word of God and a rather insightful bit of released storyboard
- Early in The Venture Brothers, it's just a matter-of-fact piece of backstory that Jonas Venture, Sr. died some twenty years ago. As the series progresses, however, tiny off-hand allusions start to cast some doubt, if not on the fact of his death, then at least on the circumstances. As of the sixth season, Jonas's demise remains "off-screen" from everyone's point of view, as far as we know, so there is room to wonder. This is played with in "All This and Gargantua-2", when Dr. Mrs. The Monarch breaks into the home of the Sovereign of the Guild of Calamitous Intent and finds that the Sovereign is apparently Jonas, but it's quickly revealed that the shapeshifting Sovereign is just messing with her. Then comes the Season 7 premiere and it turns out Jonas actually is alive—as a disembodied head kept alive by the PROBLEM Light. Then he dies for real two episodes later.
- Many Winx Club fans like to believe that Nabu may still be alive. Since Morgana promised to look after him until he wakes up again, some think that he is just in a coma. The last two episodes still seem to suggest that he really is dead, though... Maybe the writers put that line in just to confuse us. The characters all act as if he's dead and not in a coma... because he actually is dead.
- The first X-Men: The Animated Series episode introduced the character Morph, only to kill him off in the first episode. This was supposedly done to prove to the audience that this show had balls. Apparently, his brief appearance made him popular enough to bring back in the second season, where it was revealed Mr. Sinister resurrected and brainwashed him.
- Wally in Young Justice (2010) thinks this after Artemis and the rest of the team's supposed deaths in 'Failsafe', until it's revealed it was just a training exercise to prep them for failure. Wally's death in the Season 2 Finale had this reaction from fans within hours of the episode airing. The ambiguity: He vanished after the energy of the vortex was drawn into him, leaving the possibility of him being sucked into the Speed Force to dramatically return in a future season.
Real Life
- A disquieting number of people believe that Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, The Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, and Michael Jackson actually faked their own deaths. This is so common for Elvis in particular that it's a trope unto itself.
- The fact that Tupac is somehow still releasing singles, and has put out more material posthumously than during his lifetime, does help their case a bit.
- Of course, as Frankie Boyle pointed out, Michael Jackson might have something of a hard time hiding out after his "death." B.I.G. as well.
- In MJ's case the sheer amount of dedicated impersonators and sound-alikes would probably get people to assume he's just a really good tribute artist if he went out in public.
- And a 30 Rock episode: "Wait till I tell Tupac about this! Oh- um..." (awkward silence) Jack: "I didn't hear anything."
- The notion that Tupac is still alive was spoofed in a Chappelle's Show skit.
- Mostly Harmless has Elvis singing in an out-of-the-way alien bar. For the record, he wasn't abducted by aliens — because he left willingly.
- Hilariously carried on in Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, when some bikers in a bar are playing a trivia game and come across the question of when Elvis died. It turns out the one with the control for the game is Death himself, one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who states that he never laid a finger on him. Of course, he never gets any of the answers associated with deaths wrong. It turns out that Elvis is working in a Burger Lord as a short-order cook.
- Men in Black provided this answer: "Elvis is not dead, he just went home."
- One Weekly World News article claims that the "Elvis" who died was actually his supposedly stillborn twin brother Jesse, who survived his birth but was put in a home due to being severely mentally handicapped. When Jesse died, Elvis took it as a sign that it was time to give up his rock star life and faked his death, having his brother buried under his name.
- And then there is Bubba Ho-Tep, where it was actually an Elvis impersonator who died. Elvis himself lived to a ripe old age.
- A Kit Kat advert from the 1990s showed a figure wearing Elvis' trademark outfit watching a news report about this trope. He eats a Kit Kat and says, in full Elvis accent: "I'm not dead baby, I'm just having a break."
- Even an episode of Boy Meets World showed Elvis as one of Alan Matthews's poker buddies. No one seemed that impressed.
- Elvis is alive and well in The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries. Sort of...
- Elvis is alive and well on Marshall's paper route in Eerie, Indiana.
- Elvis is alive and well as the ruler of a "secret underground rock 'n roll beach kingdom" in The Fairly Oddparents.
- Stephen King once claimed he met Jim Morrison at a random gas station. When asked why he wasn't dead, Morrison replied "Don't believe everything that you read", before driving off. King put the unnerving story in the mouth of one of his characters in The Stand.
- Of course, we might as well mention the most famous Real Life inversion, too: Some people believe that Paul McCartney is dead based on "evidence" in The Beatles' songs and album covers.
- Some people believe McCartney faked his death.
- In a similar way to the inversion with McCartney, there is a conspiracy theory that claims that Avril Lavigne died by suicide in 2003 and was replaced by a double named Melissa. This theory originated from a blog created in 2011 and its creator admitted that the conspiracy theory is not true and that he created the blog to see how many people would believe that theory.
- Another similar case happens with Eminem: some people believe that he died by a drug overdose in 2007 and was replaced by either a double or a clone.
- Mark Twain: "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
- Similar to this are the rumors of Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen. Or being installed onto a spider mech that hungers for Cuban children.
- As many as half the members of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect believe that their long-deceased spiritual leader, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, touted late in his life as the Messiah, is not really dead. Rather, they claim, he has been mystically "concealed" and will return to fulfill his mission. A much smaller number of Lubavitch messianists have claimed that Schneerson was actually an angel in human guise, or even somehow equivalent to God.
- And then there was that other Jewish fellow, two thousand years ago...
- Subverted, since said fellow has been stated explicitly as having died and been brought back to life. However, this trope is often offered as an alternative explanation for his return by those who reject his divinity (e.g. Muslims and Unitarians) or the supernatural in general.
- And the Twelfth Imam of the Twelver subbranch of Shia Islam, who is believed to be in "occultation" until the day of Judgement.
- And then there was that other Jewish fellow, two thousand years ago...
- It turned out that the long-lost author of the classic orphaned 1970s Dungeons & Dragons comic Wormy was just hiding, having dropped comics work altogether and gotten a job as a taxi driver, trying his damnedest to sever any connection to his previous work.
- Some people thought that Amelia Earhart succeeded with her attempted world flight and assumed a different identity afterwards.
- There is a book of short stories in which one featured Amelia as an Orthodox Jewish girl who'd always longed to be a pilot. She eventually achieved her goal, but then realized how much she was missing out on, faked her death, and lived out the rest of her life in Bnei Brak or similar.
- The Autobiography of Santa Claus has it that she faked her death so that she could go to the North Pole and become one of Santa's immortal helpers. So did King Arthur, Attila the Hun, and a few other people, as well as St. Nicolas himself, who basically left a fake body behind him so that people would think he died in his sleep.
- It's worth noting that for a while, people believed Napoleon had actually faked his own death to escape prison. His ultimate fate? A glasses salesman back in France.
- Michel Ney, a French Marshal, was executed after Waterloo as an example to the remaining generals. Some legends have it that he escaped to America, some even say that he had Freemasonic ties and received help from Wellesley, who also was a Freemason.
- The legend that Dmitri, the alleged son of Tsar Ivan the Terrible who somehow escaped death and went into hiding, was responsible for decades of chaos in Russia called the Time of Troubles, as there were multiple pretenders claiming to be him that sought to claim the throne when the Rurikid Dynasty died out. And some anti-Bolshevik Cossack leaders who disappeared after the end of the Russian Civil War, it turned out, really did just go into hiding as they came out after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Their stories did not end well.
- D.B. Cooper, who stole more than $250,000, before leaping off an airplane, with a parachute. The FBI is still uncertain if he's alive, but since part of the money he stole washed ashore, it's generally assumed that he drowned. Apparently, Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks is based on him and is partly this trope.
- Bruce Lee, according to some, faked his death in order to escape his rapidly ballooning fame, retreating into the mountains to meditate and train.
- Mitch Hedberg's death was questioned, due to the fact that his death was ironically announced on April Fool's Day.
- Many Rastafarians believe that Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia didn't die and just returned to Heaven until the right time. Or simply that he isn't dead.
- The Nation of Islam apparently believe that former leader Elijah Muhammad and founder W. Fard Muhammad aren't dead and have instead ascended on a high-tech craft Muggles refer to a UFO. Apparently, in it, they can extend their lives well beyond 100 years...
- There were Nero sightings throughout the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire for about a century after his death, with people believing either that he had somehow survived, or had come back from the Elysian Fields to usher in a new age of imperial greatness.
- And then there were early Christians, who honestly thought Nero was so evil that they expected he was The Antichrist and would return from Hell to bring about the Apocalypse. This can partially be explained by the fact that early Christians read a character in the Book of Revelations as referring to him; his death, therefore, put a crimp in their readings of its prophecies.
- Many, perhaps mostly Nazis, have believed Adolf Hitler to have been alive long after 1945. Whether anyone still believes it is a mystery. If he is alive then he's the oldest man alive and is over 120 years old. We might be safe. All depends on how long a human brain can keep in a jar. Or possibly in a great white shark.
- More serious theories concerned Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann, and the leader of Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, who both disappeared near the end of the war. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal believed that Bormann escaped to South America, while others theorized that he was actually a Soviet agent. In 1998, it was confirmed that Bormann died in 1945. Probably so did Müller, but this is still not confirmed.
- Andy Kaufman talked about faking his death from cancer, but decided against it — not long after that, he was actually diagnosed with cancer. Because so much of his work was based on making people wonder if what he was doing was All Part of the Show or not, a lot of people thought his illness was another elaborate hoax, and some still think he didn't actually die in 1984.
- Conversely, it also wouldn't be out of character for Kaufman to want people to think he had faked his own death when he did actually die. Yes, meaning he'd faked faking his death.
- It didn't help that Kaufman himself stated that if he were to fake his own death, he would return 20 years later. His friends threw a "Welcome Home Andy" party on May 16, 2004, which Andy curiously did not show up to.
- It also didn't help that Tony Clifton (Kaufman's abusive lounge singer character) managed to continue touring after Andy's death. It would probably be more of a puzzler if not for the fact that the entire point of the Clifton character was to present a fictional person as if they were real, and to convince people that it WASN'T simply Andy Kaufman by occasionally having someone else play the role and confront Kaufman on stage, because then there wouldn't be an easy explanation for how a fictional character could survive the death of their actor.
- In short, Kaufman was such a master of the Mind Screw that he's still got people confused decades on, to the point where his death certificate was publicly released to finally put the rumors to rest.
- This trope is one of the most common when dealing with monarchs linked to an old lost cause. From King Arthur sleeping in Avalon till the motherland needs him again to the Grand Duchess Anastasia and other members of the Russian royal family, the examples are countless.
- Billy Mays didn't die; he faked his death because he wanted to start a new life at the North Pole.
- Viktor Tsoi fans also refuse to believe he really is dead, preferring to say he "went out to smoke", and graffitis saying ЦОЙ ЖИВ ("Tsoi is alive") are a common sight. Since Tsoi is hit hard by Hype Aversion on the Internet, this is mocked a lot by Russian netizens.
- Inverted by Russian rapper Alexei "Guf" Dolmatov. Back in 2011, his death was reported by a few publications, with different accounts of how this had happened. Seeing how Guf still releases tracks and tours, this is quite definitely a hoax. Didn't stop "Guf died" from entering meme lexicon at the time.
- In 2012, Guf recorded a track with that title, a pretty tongue-in-cheek reply to his then-fresh memetic fame. It also featured Basta, who was reported to be dead around the same time (not as famous for that though).
- There are people who genuinely insist that John F. Kennedy didn't die. Forget the fact that most theories regarding his death border on the insane, there are mountains of evidence (mostly logical and scientific in nature) that suggest that yes, JFK DID die on November 22, 1963. Not to mention that it would be pretty hard for the president of the United States to run away and live a normal life. Which makes me question why these people don't just latch onto the many theories regarding his death.
- Many adherents of Scientology believe that L. Ron Hubbard didn't die. Instead he "voluntarily left his body" to go travel around the universe. Many of the centers keep a writing desk for him, should he ever return.
- There are so many premature obituaries that The Other Wiki has a long article about them.
- This actually was the case for The Tourettes Guy, who was largely believed to be dead for two whole years, even by the official website's owner. The official website now claims he was in prison the whole time and mentions nothing about the death rumors at all.
- Richey James, depressed, self-harming Manic Street Preachers songwriter, disappeared on 1 February 1995, and his car was found near the Severn Bridge about two weeks later. It was pretty obvious he had killed himself, especially considering his mental health and the fact he never reappeared but was only pronounced dead in November 2008, having been classed as a missing person for the past 13 years. Though considering that he had allegedly bought books on how to disappear, and had withdrawn the maximum possible amounts off of his credit card every day for a week before his car was found, it's not as far-fetched an idea as it first appears...
- It's died out some now, but after Heath Ledger's death in 2008 a lot of people honestly believed it was faked as a publicity stunt for The Dark Knight.
- There are some people who actually believe that Paul Walker did not died in a car crash and faked his death instead.
- As with many other famous people, there are theories about how Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and The Big Bopper are alive. This was parodied in The Venture Brothers where a flashback hints that two members of the Council of 13 of the Guild of Calamitous Intent are actually The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly and the plane crash that "killed" them both was faked.
- Genesis drummer John Mayhew vanished somewhere between Trespass and Nursery Cryme (he played on the former but had been replaced with Phil Collins by the time of the latter), never even collecting most of his royalty cheques for Trespass. For years rumours circulated that he'd died or fallen extremely ill. He turned up in the 90s, alive and reasonably well, having moved first to Scotland then Australia and taken up carpentry; in the mid-2000's he was actively giving interviews and even put in an appearance drumming with a Genesis tribute band, before returning to keeping a low profile. When his brother went looking for him in 2009, he found out he really had died earlier that year, of a heart condition.
- During the WWE's "higher power" storyline there was some speculation that the Higher Power would turn out to be Owen Hart or Brian Pillman, with their "death" being a publicity stunt. Some fans thought that Eddie Guerrero would show up at Survivor Series 2005, which was the week after his death.
- A disturbing number of people (particularly amongst those sympathetic to him) think that Osama bin Laden is still alive and that reports of his death were "propaganda."
- Even larger amount believes that he had been dead for a long time and reports about it were postponed for a better time, politics-wise. Both opinions probably take fuel in same...details in reports. One could say that his corpse has been just hiding, for these people.
- Some people think he and Saddam Hussein are still alive on free vacation on an island with help from the CIA. Seeing as both bodies have been photographed dead, this is rather stupid, but conspiracy theorists never let facts get in the way of a good time.
- Some people think Israeli PM Yitskhak Rabin’s assassination is not quite what the authorities tell them, as some details don’t entirely add up, and a considerable portion of what the Shabak did beforehand is still classified.
- Tenrikyo followers believe their prophet, Nakayama Miki, ‘concealed’ her human form and still lives on. They still bathe her and feed her and read the newspaper to her; how they do it is not known, as it’s performed only by the Shinbashira (hereditary elite Tenrikyo clergy), which is a cause for a serious amount of Squick, or at least Fridge Logic.
- Because of the lack of information about Versailles bassist Jasmine You's death in 2009 (the only information released to the public was that he died of an unspecified illness), there are a few people who believe that he faked his own death for whatever reason—maybe it was a publicity stunt, or he wanted to retire from the music business without being pestered to return, or he secretly identified as a woman and wanted to get a sex change without publicizing it, or he returned to his home planet.
- A rather different example, but this principle applies to Lazarus taxa and living fossils, species of organism presumed to be extinct that pop up much later in the fossil record.
- Many believe that several "extinct" species, like the Thylacine, are still alive in small numbers.
- Then there's the Ivory-billed woodpecker...
- Then there's the Ivory-billed woodpecker
- Many believe that several "extinct" species, like the Thylacine, are still alive in small numbers.
- Some people have had difficulty accepting the proposition that mankind is capable of driving species to extinction. For example, when the passenger pigeon (the most populous bird in the world in the 19th century) was driven to extinction in the early 20th century, some Americans suggested the birds were not really dead, but hiding in Chile.
- The Princes in the Tower. Despite the most popular theory about their disappearance being that Richard III murdered them, there are still ideas that they escaped. Pretenders to the throne tried to capitalise on this, claiming to be them. And now the theory about Richard III murdering them has actually been discredited if not totally disproven. However, the idea that they escaped The Tower of London is still pretty far-fetched: it IS an incredibly well-built fortress extensively remodeled as a prison. The most likely explanation for what happened to them, is that they lived out their lives in the Tower. It's easy to forget that the Tower was actually intended for people to live in, and only the lower portions were ever actually used as a prison. It was never the most comfortable of homes (rather cold and drafty), but it did have all the necessary rooms into which all the necessary furnishings could be placed. Many royals were sentenced to a form of "House Arrest", in the Tower: sometimes for life. Some evidence for this can be found in the palace inventories, although it's hard to use these rather detail-less lists to prove anything (which indeed was the point: written records were deliberately obfuscated to confuse foreign spies). Though the escape theories are not completely impossible, it should also be remembered that the Plantagenets had a fairly distinctive look: for starters they towered over the English of that time period (they were descended from Vikings), had jaws as square as bricks, and what would come to be called the "Gallic nose" (large and protruberant). They could not have hidden anywhere in England, people would have instantly recognized them as Norman and that would be enough. If they escaped and went into hiding, then it was definitely in Normandy. Though even there, the idea of them hiding among the general population is dubious. There was simply too great a chance of them being recognized as Plantagenets: which would be enough for the English authorities to find them and recapture them (not to mention send the entirety of Western Europe into a tizzy).
- Pretty common with famous criminals/outlaws like John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, even John Dillinger. Either they faked their own deaths or, in Dillinger's case, the murder was staged to save authorities the embarrassment of letting them escape.
- A persistent theory about Tsar Alexander I — who talked about giving up the throne and living as an ordinary man at several points in his life — is that his sudden death in the remote town of Taganrog was staged and that he spent the rest of his life as a wandering hermit named Feodor Kuzmitch.
- Edward II's younger brother, the Earl of Kent, attempted to gather a rebellion to rescue him from captivity and put him back on the throne - over two years after his funeral. He got a surprising amount of support, considering, and was beheaded for his trouble. This plays into the theory that Edward escaped and lived out his days as a monk in Italy.
- When his beloved youngest daughter Princess Amelia died in 1810, George III went mad with grief, one of his delusions being that she wasn't dead, but merely went to live in an estate in Hannover. The King however was the only person who believed this delusion, everyone else well... there's a reason he's called "The Mad King" (and The American Revolution is only half of it). Parliament forced him to appoint a regent and retire from all royal duties: hence the name for this time period being The Regency. It should be noted, that this is the time period when Jane Austen's novels are set. The English gentry took full advantage of there being no King to marry into the old aristocracy (or otherwise win titles for themselves often via the military): something that Kings generally took a dim view of, since it undermined their power.
- Maria Feodorovna, the Dowager Empress of Russia, never accepted that her son, Tsar Nicholas II, and his family was killed by the Bolsheviks, believing they were in hiding. There was a persistent faker who went by the assumed name Anna Anderson that pretended to be the youngest daughter Anastasia, until her death in 1984. She never convinced any of Nicholas’s immediate family but some extended relatives bought it. There were some people that tried to claim they were the only son, Alexis, but she also never bought it because he had hemophilia and there’s no way he could have survived the injuries he would have sustained. Every now and again, a Russian-American will pop up claiming to be a descendent of Anastasia, or one of the other Romanovs. A few of the more dubious publications will run with the story, but few people ever really take it seriously and the person usually disappears again pretty quickly. This says more about the general reaction to revelations of royalty among Americans than about their gullibility though. Americans just don't care that much.
- Mexican bandito Joaquin Murrieta was reportedly killed by the California Rangers in 1853, but there were and are stories claiming that they got the wrong man and the real Murrieta lived to a ripe old age.
- Russian rapper Detsl has gone on record saying in an interview that he wanted to fake his death at the age of 35 and go into hiding on a remote island. He died in 2019 at the age of 35, so naturally that interview began circulating on the internet, with a vocal group claiming that everything went according to the plan.
- Many adherents of the infamous QAnon conspiracy theory believe that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in a plane crash and will return one day to expose the truth about an alleged cabal of child traffickers.
- In his memoir Spare, Britain's Prince Harry admits to having convinced himself of this about his mother Princess Diana for a solid decade after her death, believing that she was hiding away from the paparazzi. Not until driving through the tunnel where she'd had her fatal accident could he finally force himself to admit the truth.