How to Cheat Death

How-To Guide

Need to protect a character from dying? It's easy! Just:

1. Make them a main character.
2. Make them more popular than the main character.
   1. Unless the main character is particularly beloved by the writers, in which case make yours slightly less popular to avoid complications.
3. Make them the main character's love interest or best friend (with plenty of Character Development to keep you out of the crisper).
4. Train them in Super Not-Drowning Skills.
5. Refer to them to indicate that they're alive off-screen without appearing on-screen.
6. Give them the superpower of biological invincibility.
7. Send them on a trip longer than their life-span.
8. Give them a Pocket Protector.
9. Put them in an elaborate killing-machine, unsupervised.
10. Put them in the Plot Device Witness Protection Program.
11. Inflict lethal injuries when the plot doesn't call for death.
12. Have rules against upsetting the Balance Between Good and Evil.
13. Ensure that the opposing sides never actually come to blows.
14. Make the other characters perfectly satisfied they're dead.
15. Honorably discharge them from the cast with a possibility they could return.
16. Allow the villain to indulge at having the perfect opportunity to kill them.
17. Rewrite the show to make it safer/ lower the target audience age.
18. Have their true love kiss them.
19. Make them a baby or a dog.
    1. Unless the latter is in a work after the Newbery Medal.
20. Put them through a situation that would surely kill them without showing them dead.
21. Make them a talented or popular villain.
22. Invite their arch rival to their battle with someone else.
23. Comply with censors.
24. Don't let anyone find their body.
25. Wound them during a critical, dramatic, action-packed fight scene.
26. Freeze them.
27. Make them an incredibly cool hero with injuries that should be fatal.
28. Make them too powerful to be killed.
29. Have them get captured by an egotistical villain with a flair for the dramatic.
30. Remind The Hero that If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him.
31. Imprison whoever makes people die.
32. Cast them in a Disney movie. (So long as you don't make them one of the parents of the very young protagonist.)
33. Diagnose them with a fatal illness.
34. Give them artificial respiration.
35. Make The Hero defeat them in a duel, preferably on top of a building.
36. Have them ask any killer to Get It Over With.
37. Take the body to the morgue.
38. Leave behind a decoy and escape.
39. Make it very clear no one could have survived that.
40. Use Time Travel to go back in time and make it look like they died, but really didn't.
41. Literally cheat: Knock over one of His playing pieces, then reset the board while He isn't looking.
42. Have Death take someone more expendable instead.
43. Have them make a few "friends" on the writing staff despite the fanbase wishing to see the character stabbed to death with numerous sharp pointies.
44. Make a new toy for them.
45. Do not give them any stats.
46. But, really, if you ever feel like it, just bring them back from the dead. However you like.
47. Most importantly, make sure no one important in making the show wants you dead for no good reason.
48. And if you can't follow this list, take everyone else down with you.
49. Remember unless it is directly before the credits Never Ever have sex.
50. Simply curse them with immortality.

But really, Who Wants to Live Forever?

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