We Can Rebuild Him

Better, stronger, more badass.

"Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. 'Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.'"

—The Six Million Dollar Man, Opening Narration.

A villain is defeated and suffers a horrific Disney Death. Their body is shattered beyond repair. No One Could Survive That!

But later, he returns! Only this time, he's a cyborg! He's got more power, and he's less human so it's OK to be more brutal on him.

Heroes are occasionally subject to this trope. Unlike villains, this tends to make them question their humanity, and in doing so retain it.

This trope can serve as the Origin Story for both heroes and villains of the cybernetic variety.

Compare with Robot Me and Virtual Ghost. If the cybernetics are obvious and enhance the evilness of a character's appearance, it's a case of Red Right Hand. When the one doing the rebuilding is sadistic enough, it may involve Vader Breath. If the injuries are too extensive or the technology not far enough advanced, may result in Man in the Machine. A nasty variant is when a bad guy takes a Not Quite Dead hero and has him Reforged Into a Minion.

Examples of We Can Rebuild Him include:

Anime and Manga

  • Dragon Ball:
    • Mercenary Tao Pai Pai, in the original series.
    • In DBZ, after his defeat on Namek, Frieza arrives on Earth with a vengeance and a half-roboticized body. Frieza lampshades this fact in the English dub by paraphrasing the page quote.
    • Commander Red in Dragon Ball Online.
  • A rather hilarious one takes place in Dr. Slump when a bear being returned to the wild is shot. Before administering any other help or considering any other options, Senbei declares "I might still be able to make him a cyborg!" He succeeds at this.
  • An interesting take on it is Stroheim from the second part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. He first appears to be a villain, proves to be a Noble Demon, performs a Heroic Sacrifice in an attempt to destroy Santana, then returns later as a cyborg... just in time to pull a Heel Face Turn.
    • And then gets chopped in half by Cars, only to come back AGAIN even more cyborged up in time for the grand finale. Best Nazi character EVER!
  • Jeremiah Gottwald in Code Geass has pulled this one twice now.
    • Technically the second time was just the completed version. He awakened prematurely the first time, and his cybernetic upgrades were not yet finished.
  • Ed before the start of Fullmetal Alchemist. Towards the end of the anime, Col. Archer gets this done to a much more extreme extent.
  • In Inuyasha, Ginkotsu was a cyborg all along, but when he blew up, Renkotsu chopped his head off and mounted it on a tank chassis, along with 50 or so rocket launchers.
  • Franky from One Piece has the particular mention of being the only heroic example of this trope who rebuilt himself while in a critical condition.
    • Bartholomew Kuma was rebuilt as well, but it's not quite certain whether he needed to be. Also, He went further than Franky did, and completely became a machine.
  • The Social Welfare Agency from the anime Gunslinger Girl rebuilds little girls who have suffered tragically and are listed as terminal, using cybernetic technology and psychological conditioning (read: brainwashing) to turn them into assassins. Cybernetics Eat Your Soul is played up for all its tragedy in this series.
  • Career Killer Laura from Mnemosyne is rebuilt with a cybernetic body. It is hinted that the sadistic Big Bad dissected her before doing so.
  • Hero example: Joe Asakura in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
  • Iwata in the Excel Saga manga dies abrubtly of colon cancer and is rebuilt as an android. He does not mind, but everyone else is a little weirded out, especially when he forgets to do human things and casually damages his body.
  • The backstories of two main characters of GaoGaiGar is this. Guy Shishioh had his spaceship crashed with the EI-01, supposedly killing him, but he was brought back to base by Galeon, and was rebuilt as a cyborg to save his life. Meanwhile, his cousin Renais Cardiff Shishioh was captured by a terrorist organization and rebuilt into a cyborg so she obeys their orders (eventually she rebelled).
  • The Major in Hellsing although the original manga never got around explaining how he became one. Fans speculate that the prequel series will show what happened between the time he is assumed to be still made of flesh and the not-so-human plot twist fifty years later.
  • The 2000 anime Sin: The Movie uses this trope, as well. A flashback shows lead character Blade gunned down and fatally injured, only to be save by being rebuilt with cybernetic parts, which end up coming in handy eventually.
  • Jinno in Afro Samurai was originally mortally wounded in a mass battle for the number two headband. He was remade as cyborg by the insane cyborg scientist Dharman. Jinno the cyborg was a superhumanly strong and skilled swordsman, but was defeated and (supposedly) killed twice by Afro. When he was rebuilt a third time, he apparently was so turbo-charged, he could slap Afro around all day long. But Jinno's last act in his tortured unlife was to remember his love for Afro as a sword brother, and defended Afro's life. Dying himself as a man, rather than an evil wartoy.
  • The original A.D. Police OVA series (a Bubblegum Crisis spinoff) had an episode revolve around "The Man Who Bites His Tongue", a police officer who was rebuilt with nothing organic left besides his brain and his tongue - which he began compulsively biting to hold on to his humanity. It doesn't end well, naturally.
  • Tenchi Muyo! GXP: Would-be Knight of Cerebus Tarant Shank goes through several rounds of this after humiliating defeats. It never helps.
  • In the anome/manga Dragon Half, villainous knight Damuramu gets defeated when he accidentally stabs himself in the head with his own sword. In his next appearance - even though he had no other body part injured - he's had everything below his neck replaced with magical bionics by a friendly blacksmith. Except his head. (He even had his flying mount replaced with a robotic version, although this was necessary because the Good Guys ate the original.)
  • This is Kiddy Phenil's back story in Silent Moebius. After being carved up with Razor Floss by a serial killer named Wire, she is rebuilt as a cyborg much stronger than a normal human. An Omake strip even has teammate Lebia trying to convince her to cosplay as RoboCop.
  • Ghost in the Shell is set in a future where this trope is used to remedy all manner of injuries. Apparently replacing damaged organs with real ones is preferable since they require no expensive andtime consuming maintainance (Blessed with Suck), but cybernetics can always be used as a last ditch option.
    • In every version, the Major openly state that the reason she works for the government is because it pays for the very expensive maintenance of her state of the art cybernetic body.
    • The Tachikoma are fully artificial beings who share all their experiences with each other and have a complete backup of these made every day. They get blown up and shot to pieces all the time, but can upload their minds into new bodies any time. Which actually causes them quite some concern, as their inability to experience death prevents them from Becomeing A Real Boy.
  • Possibly the first anime example—Detective Azuma, the eponymous 8 Man.
  • Gintama, being the Post Modern Gag Series that it is, doesn't just do this to one of the characters... it does this to Hideaki Sorachi - Gintama's author! During the Character Popularity Poll Arc,[1] Tae freaks at ranking lower than two "monkeys" (Kondo and Sorachi's Author Avatar), so she breaks the fourth wall to kill Sorachi. Next chapter/episode, he's rebuilt as a cyborg!
  • Kim Jong-Il in The Legend of Koizumi after he fell into the sea and was eaten by sharks.
  • Abullah in Pluto. He thinks he's one of these. In reality, portions of his memory caused a superpowerful robot to think it was him and the human Abullah is dead.
  • This trope was played straight with Raiden of Angel Cop. For some reason his conversion to a cyborg also involves a personality change.
  • Franken Fran rebuilds lots of people, not always for the better, some of whom didn't actually need rebuilding before Fran got her hands on them.
  • Ichiban Ushiro no Dai Maou has Eiko killing her father to become the new Teruya head. She's in for a bit of a surprise when he returns as a cyborg.

Card Games

  • While not actually involving cybernetics, the necromantic Golgari guild of Magic's Ravnica setting is apparently quite casual about reanimating and 'improving' their dead with plant life, as illustrated on cards like Vigor Mortis.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Gagagigo was rebuilt as the cybernetic Giga Gagagigo in order to fight the Invader of Darkness; however, the transformation corrupted him, eventually leading him to become a mindless half-mechanical monstrosity. Another example would be Inpachi, a tree golem which was burned into charcoal and resurrected as the cybernetic Woodborg Inpachi.


Comic Books

  • Oily Duck from the Conservation Corps Funny Animal enviromental Aesop comic book series.
  • Cyborg from the Teen Titans.
  • Deathlok the Demolisher from the Marvel Universe.
  • Batman foe Gearhead.
  • Superman villain Metallo.
  • Doom Patrol member Robotman. In his case, everything but the brain is robotic.
  • Averted by USAgent of the Marvel Universe. He lost an arm and a leg to Nuke, a cybernetically-augmented super soldier, but refuses to get cybernetic replacements, as he doesn't want to look down at his own body and be reminded of Nuke every day. Not that he really needs 'em.
  • Spider-Man villain Silvermane.
  • In All Fall Down, Pronto goes through this, becoming the brainwashed and crazy Modern Prometheus, who nearly kills Siphon.
  • Several characters in Marvel Star Wars. In the very first non-film comic a town proves unwilling to let a man be buried in the graveyard set aside for offworlders because he was a cyborg, so you know there's a lot of Fantastic Racism. A stormtrooper named Valance who was badly injured and had to be made into a cyborg became a bounty hunter who mostly expressed hatred towards droids.
    • Then there's Shira Brie/Lumiya. Originally Luke's wingmate and love interest, he shot her down without knowing who she was while on a mission and later found that she was actually an assassin/agent sent by his father. At the end of that arc she was seen floating in a bacta tank, observed by Vader. Later she resurfaced with three prosthetic limbs and extensive scarring as Lumiya, Dark Lady of the Sith.

Fan Works


Film

  • Bolt, in the TV show within the movie.
  • This is how Chucky of the Child's Play movies always comes back, and indeed it's why he didn't die as a human, at the beginning of his first movie.
  • In Dogma, Rick Wakeman's Metatron utters the words "She can rebuild you, she has the technology", with 'she' being Alanis Morisette's God. The emphasis is on 'she' rather than 'we' (from the original source), highlighting the femininity of the Deity.
    • Previously infertile Bethany is made not only fertile, but also impregnated by the omnipotent being, who does so silently with the laying on of hands. This trope is subverted (because it is a supernatural occurrence not scientific), downplayed (subverted at any rate), exaggerated (improvement), justified (the character is the last scion of Jesus) and parodied at the same time.
  • Wang the Perverted came back as Evil Presence in Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders. Since the same actor portrayed both characters, with no attempt to hide his voice, it's obvious to everyone who watches.
  • The original Godzilla went from this to this when he was rebuilt as Kiryu (The latest version of Mechagodzilla)
  • Inspector Gadget, at least according to The Movie.
  • When Jason is killed in Jason X, there's not enough left of him for the futuristic medical beds to reconstruct as he was, so he is instead reconstructed as a cyborg (much to the heroes' chagrin).
  • Nemesis: The protagonist, Alex.

Narrator: It took them six months to put him back together. Synthetic flesh, bioengineered organs. It always scared him that they might take out his soul... and replace it with some matrix chip.

  • The title character in RoboCop. Ditto for the villain Cain in RoboCop 2 who lost his whole body. Especially monstrous as OCP killed Cain explicitly so they could rebuild him. Another interesting side note is that several other attempted RoboCops committed suicide; the implication is that people need a level of motivation found mostly in psychotics to be able to tolerate a cyborg's existence. It's also implied that Body Horror played a significant part in those suicides. Those failed batches were much less human in appearance than the RoboCop model Murphy was converted into.
  • In the So Bad It's Good sci-fi comedy Space Truckers, the Corrupt Corporate Executive betrays the Mad Scientist by turning his Killer Robot creations against him. Fortunately for him, he's able to rebuild himself, turning himself into a grotesque mish-mash of man and machine, and takes up a new life as a pirate.
  • The most well known example in the whole wide galaxy would be...Darth Vader!
    • Before we knew about him, we saw Luke lose his hand and get a new prosthetic. Like his father before him, he tended to wear a glove on that hand, even though with synthflesh Luke's hand looked entirely organic. He sometimes wears it, sometimes doesn't in the Star Wars Expanded Universe - it's a sign of what's In the Blood.
    • And for another Star Wars example, General Grievous, who is arguably even more heavily reconstructed than Vader, with only the brain, the heart, the lungs and the eyes remaining organic.
      • If you're going just by the original trilogy, Luke only puts on a glove partway through Return of the Jedi when his prosthetic hand is damaged. In the DVD version, you can see the little wires exposed as he examines it before he covers it with the glove.


Literature

  • An interesting example is from Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay, where the Golem Dorfl is destroyed in the final battle against the golem Mesugah. Afterwards, Captain Carrot actually says, in a direct reference to The Six Million Dollar Man, the line: "We can rebuild him. We have the pottery." And they do.
    • Subverted, the character wasn't alive to begin with, or at least had no biological components.
  • Peter David's Psi-Man series had Beutel return with less and less organic parts each time, after getting trashed in the previous appearance's No One Could Survive That moment. We think the finale got him for real...
  • The hero in one Arthur C. Clarke's short story is a man who was, delicately speaking, badly hurt in blimp crash, and was more reconstructed (with cybernetics) than healed. The doctors were nice enough to make him additional 20 centimeters taller, the height to make up for being half-machine.
  • Played for laughs by Edgar Allan Poe in The Man Who Was Used Up.
  • The Tin Man from the Oz books may be the Ur Example.
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe is loaded with characters good and characters evil who end up as cyborgs. There's some Fantastic Racism directed towards those who lose more than a limb. Admiral Krennel literally has a skeletal prosthetic right hand that glows red. Darklighter reveals that Hobbie Klivian has at least an arm and a leg, and Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor shows readers that he also lost his other leg. Ton Phanan lost limbs, half his face, and eventually more and more, and found that cybernetics ate his future.
    • Death Star has a surgeon looking at Darth Vader from a safe distance and thinking that it's pretty obvious that the Dark Lord is largely cybernetic. But it seems that this book is a little divorced from the rest of the EU, since the surgeon seems to think that cybernetics are rare and most people opt to have the missing tissue cloned and grafted on.
    • Supplementary material for Dark Forces reveals that the prototypes for darktroopers - robotic stormtroopers - were aging veteran clone troopers, too old to fight well but very experienced, who had seventy percent or more of their bodies replaced. No one asked them about this beforehand, so while they were effective in the battlefield, a lot of them committed suicide.
      • In Dark Empire, the cloned Palpatine uses Shadow Droids, which are similar except that they're fighters piloted by the brains of incapacitated TIE pilots. And they can use the Force. Sorta.
  • This is the superhero Fatale's origin in Soon I Will Be Invincible.
  • In Freedom (the sequel to Daemon), Loki receives this treatment after being disfigured during torture.
  • In the Quantum Gravity series, Lila Black comes back from Alfheim after a torture session and goes through this in order to survive. In a twist emphasizing the Grey and Gray Morality, she didn't need those to survive until the people in her organization got their hands on her...
  • In Prelude to Dune, Prince Rhombur Vernius of Ix is seriously injured during an assassination attempt on his friend Duke Leto Atreides, losing his entire lower half and much of the upper half. Dr. Wellington Yueh, who has just managed to perfect cybernetic prosthetics on Richese, agrees to "fix" Rhombur with the prosthetics. After the procedure, he is mostly cybernetic than human. Since Rhombur is Ixian, machines are a big part of his life, so being a cyborg for him is not so bad. However, he loses the ability to reproduce and, being the last surviving member of House Vernius, knows his line is ending. His wife suggests impregnating herself with the semen of Rhombur's deceased half-brother on his mother's side, thus providing him with a distaff heir. With his new cybernetic body, Rhombur is very strong and can crush a man's neck with one hand. He does, however, spend years learning how to properly use his new parts.
  • In Max Barry's Machine Man, Dr. Charles Neumann does this to *himself*, going from amputee, to double-amputee, to Man in the Machine, to Brain In a Jar, to full-on Brain Uploading.
  • People in Honorverse generally prefer a regen therapy, but there's a sizable minority for whom it doesn't work, including the main character. These unfortunates have to do with prosthetics, up to and including becoming a Hollywood Cyborg, depending on the extent of damage. Honor, for example, has an artificial eye and an artificial arm (with a built-in gun, no less), and Emily Alexander is basically built into her life support chair.


Live Action TV

  • The Trope Namer is The Six Million Dollar Man, where Steve Austin is rebuilt and given cybernetic implants to become the eponymous hero after a crash.
  • The Bionic Woman, being a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man, follows on with the same concept. As does the 2007 remake, Bionic Woman.
  • Jack Moon in Madan Senki Ryukendo is brought back as Mechanimoon.
  • Michael Wiseman in Now and Again.
  • Inverted in Star Trek: Voyager with Seven of Nine who's turned from a Borg drone into a human with a few Borg components...which miraculously enable her to do everything (and more) that a Borg drone can do.
    • Subverted in Next Generation with Jean-Luc Picard, who was stabbed through the heart as a Starfleet cadet and received an artificial one as a replacement. While this event helped to make him a formidable officer, his newfound strengths came from the psychological impact of his close brush with death, not from his cardiac implant.
  • Repli-Weir, but her body was built from Fran's plans, so it's also a The Nth Doctor situation. You know, before they killed her.
  • In Kamen Rider, most of the 90s-and-before Riders were physically altered in some way to become Riders, though few in response to otherwise-unrecoverable injury or illness. Kamen Rider J was one of those cases, infused with "J Power" after being tossed off a cliff by bad guys. (This is a rare case of the transformation being benign: the rebuilding is usually done by bad guys wanting to use the Riders as a trump card. For some reason, upgrading always comes before brainwashing, and the Rider-to-be always escapes brainwashing. (When will Shocker learn?)
  • Spoofed in That '70s Show. In one of Fez's many Imagine Spots, he contemplates what it will be like to have Hyde, Eric, and Kelso teach him how to get girls..

Hyde: Gentlemen...we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him smarter, handsomer, aloofer.
Eric: Aloofer? Is that even a word?
Hyde: We can make it a word. We have the technology.

  • Spoofed on an episode of Wayne and Shuster - pity the Canadian government had a much smaller budget that six million dollars.

Tabletop Games

  • Dreadnoughts in Warhammer 40,000 is much the same - veteran Space Marines who have been mortally injured in battle, now kept in their heavily-armored chassis. Fortunately, since the darkness of the far future has only war, there's never a shortage of... materials. Also, since they are fanatic warrior monks, they have (slightly) less mental problems than most other people.
    • Dreadnaughts are less 'we can rebuild him', more 'we don't wanna lose him, so we'll keep what's left of him alive and have him pilot a mech'. Augmetics, on the other hand, play this one totally straight. Pretty much all the species of 40K have various versions of this trope - there are even entire Space Marine chapters who do this prophylactically. Except the Tyranids.
      • For the Necrons, it isn't a case of We Can Rebuild Them, but rather They Have Already Been Rebuilt. Because they already have walked this road to the bitter end - being turned into soulless machines. When their robotic bodies take too much damage they are instantly teleported back home for repairs.
    • Worthy of mention are the Iron Hands chapter of Space Marines. Their particular hat is a belief that the machine is strong, the flesh is weak. Ergo, Iron Hands Space Marines actually look forward to serious injuries that necessitate the rebuilding of limbs and the replacement of organs with bionic perfection. Notably, their Techmarines and Chaplains are one and the same, "Iron Fathers", while those interred within Dreadnoughts are revered even more highly that those of other Chapters.
    • Dark Heresy has "Cybernetic Resurrection" Elite Advancement Package. It happens if a character by all rights should be dead, but was deemed useful for the Imperium enough to be worth efforts and expenses on restoration to full functionality. Naturally, the character now owes a big one to the Cult Mechanicus. The lesser version is "Cyber-Rebuild", which is just reanimation and bionic replacements of everything that was destroyed - it's not good for sanity, but otherwise no different from having the same implants added one by one without hurry in a hospital. "Full Resurrection", however, is a whole new cyborg body (usually with meaty parts taken from a servitor or vat-grown) that has some characteristics generated from scratch; it's rare because few Magos are that skilled in the first place, they won't do this simply for money, and those who survive the process at all tend to end up noticeably less mentally stable.
  • Most sci-fi games feature Transhuman cybertech of some stripe, but there's usually some limiting factor as to the degree to which one can be rebuilt. However, Shadowrun goes whole hog with cyberzombies. Apparently, Aztechnology can completely rebuild a person... but he'll live a miserable shell of an existence and likely be dead within a year.
  • Many fantasy games (particularly D&D) have necromancy provide the same effect, with villains and heroes coming back faster, stronger and deader, only the answer to the humanity question is a rather obvious No.
    • A more traditional example might be the Half-Golem template, which has people repaired with magically powered mechanical parts. Eventually they go nuts because Cybernetics Eat Your Soul.


Toys


Video Games

  • The trope picture comes from the 2011 game Deus Ex: Human Revolution where bio-mechanical augmentation is a state of the art but highly controversial science. The guy being rebuilt in the image is protagonist Adam Jensen, chief of security at one of the leading augmentation corporations, who was severely injured in a brutal and highly coordinated attack on the company's headquarters; Adam's employer augments him in order to save his life. It turns out later on that Adam was genetically engineered to be able to accept augments without needing constant dozes of the drug Nueropozyne to prevent implant rejection, and his employer took advantage of this to stuff him with every piece of advanced military hardware they had to make him into a killing machine.[2]
    • On a larger scale, people in the Human Revolution universe are evenly divided between pro and anti augmentation stances, but anyone can choose to get an augmentation. The only limiting factors are money, and the subsequent lifetime use of Neuropozyne to prevent implant rejection syndrome (a build-up of scar tissue that impairs both biologic and mechanical operation). Essentially, with enough cash, anyone can invoke We Can Rebuild Him.
  • Bryan Fury from Tekken
  • Gruntilda in Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge, although instead of being revived as a cyborg, she transfers her soul to a robotic body while she is trapped below a rock.
  • The Starwolf team in Star FOX 64, if you enter Venom the hard way from Area-6, though Wolf avoided this fate.
    • Oddly enough, while the hard ending is canon, Star Wolf returns pretty much unaffected in Assault, although Wolf traded his eyepatch for something more high-tech. It's also perfectly possible to avoid the first encounter with Star Wolf and they still show up like this on Venom.
  • This might be the case for Yoshimitsu from Soul Calibur.
  • Yokuba and Claus in Mother 3.
  • Raiden returns as a cyborg in Metal Gear Solid 4. And he's awesome. It's also one of The Patriots' atrocities: he didn't need rebuilding.
    • Before Raiden, there was... Cyborg Ninja, a.k.a. Gray Fox.
      • And before even the Cyborg Ninja, there was Schneider in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
    • Big Boss in Snake's Revenge. But we don't talk about that.
      • He's a cyborg in official Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake as well, although this fact only comes up at the end (and is explained as being the end result of having been tortured and mutilated prior to becoming your CO in the first game).
  • Driscoll at the end of Front Mission. If you play the Gaiden Game, it turns out he was Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • Ridley in the Metroid series. Many, many times.
    • Twice for Metroid Prime 3.
    • Arguably, Samus herself. In Prime, her power suit gets rebuilt to make use of the game's Applied Phlebotinum. In Fusion, she even gets injected with a Metroid vaccine that alters her body.
      • Her suit had become integrated with her conscious system, making it impossible to remove while she was unconscious without surgery. Samus manages to pull this trope off twice in less than three minutes in Fusion.
    • General Weavil and Mother Brain, too. The Space Pirates are good at this.
  • This actually happens to the Player Character in Armored Core 1 and 2. A little known secret is that if you keep dying, the game "lowers the difficulty" by giving you cyborg upgrades that improve your Humongous Mecha. It even has a funny/morbid little cutscene with the evil AI and a doctor discussing it.
  • Omega Rugal in The King of Fighters 95. He actually wound up destroying himself again with the use of the Orochi power.
  • Wild Dog gets shot to pieces at the end of every game in the Time Crisis series. The first time he returned as a cyborg it was a surprise twist (for a given value of "surprising"), now it's just what he does.
  • Hugo Medio from Super Robot Wars MX has this in his backstory, whereas an attack by a powerful enemy (the Jetzt in OG Gaiden, or the Devil Gundam in MX, the latter uses the zombified version of his old friend Foglia) left him in very grave wounds the only way to save him was to add up cybernetic parts on his body.
  • World of Warcraft has a magic example for Kael'Thas. After his first defeat, he was brought back to life by a demon, apparently by shoving a crystal through his chest.
  • According to the backstory, this is the source of all the Protoss Dragoons in StarCraft. Most notable is Fenix, who you get to control both before and after gets almost killed.
    • Then there are the Immortals of Star Craft 2, Dragoons on steroids. Due to desperation and the loss of the old Dragoon shrines on Aiur, the Protoss had to refit the ones they had with hardened energy shields to squeeze every iota of use out of them. They represent a dying breed who will give everything to buy even a second more for their people. The definition of Badass Determinators.
  • Averted but later subverted in the Mega Man X series. When Zero dies at the end of the first game, the Maverick Hunters try their best in rebuilding him, but Zero's designs are too complicated to duplicate. In the second game, however, he was indeed rebuilt, but by the villains. This situation, however, only happens in the non-canon ending; the true ending has X obtain Zero's parts (which are implied to be created by the villains nonetheless), and the Hunters use them to truly revive Zero.
    • This sort of subversion happens again later, in Mega Man X 6, where Zero reappears once again Back from the Dead, but there's absolutely no idea as to who actually rebuilt him this time.
    • And rebuilt one last time into an even more powerful body by Ciel.
  • Mr. X in Streets of Rage 3.
  • Marathon brings up this trope with its Mark IV Mjolnir combat cyborgs. There is even a strong implication that your character himself is a robocopped dead soldier.
  • In Xenosaga, "Ziggy" is a Ziggurat-8 model cyborg, thus rebuilt after the suicide of policeman Jan Sauer. He isn't too happy about it, until he finds a new purpose.
  • In the original No More Heroes, Travis kills Destroyman by vertically cutting him in half. As one of only many examples as to why the series is Crazy Awesome, he returns in the sequel, with both halves rebuilt into separate cyborgs.
  • In Mass Effect 2, to avoid the Gameplay-Guided Amnesia, the game starts with the Normandy getting shot to pieces and Commander Shepard being hurled into space in a leaking space suit and falling all the way to the surface of the nearby planet. Cerberus retrieved the charred and broken remains and spend two years and billions of credits to bring Shepards body back to life, including most of the memories. Cue Shepard's reply to bewildered onlookers, "I Got Better."
  • Urgot from League of Legends, a battle-scarred warrior who "refused to die". When he finally died, he was rebuilt as a cybernetic crab creature with a grenade launcher arm.
    • Also, Orianna, although instead of rebuilding the actual girl her "father" recreated her as a clockwork automaton.
  • In the Vera Blanc games by indie developer Winter Wolves, the eponymous teenage heroine was saved from a fatal brain tumor with an experimental procedure that not only re-wired her brain to work more efficiently, but gives her the ability to read minds.
  • Amber from Project Eden was turned into a combat Cyborg after a skyway accident, apparently at her request.
  • Peacock from Skullgirls. She was originally a normal girl who was kidnapped by slavers that mutilated her body.[3] She was found after her torture by staff from the shadowy Anti-Skullgirl Lab, who equipped her with a shiny new set of cyborg parts: mechanical arms with three eyes on each, a bear trap for teeth, and a veritable cornucopia of reality-warping instruments of destruction. Unfortunately, the torture drove her mad, and being rebuilt failed to stabilize her mind.
  • The hero in Shatterhand loses his hands against the bad guys, and his new fits allow him to take them on.
  • All the Bonus Bosses in Terraria are improved robotic versions of the older bosses. Which leads one to believe that something had to rebuild them for a reason


Webcomics

  • Xykon's transformation from forcibly de-powered old man to Lich Sorcerer was shown in this fashion, 'Xykon. sorcerer. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the magic. We have the magic to make the world's next undead sorcerer lich. Xykon will be that lich. Deader than he was before. Deader, faster, stronger.' and so on, in the print only Start of Darkness prequel.
  • Done to a raccoon in The Intrepid Girlbot.
  • Frans Rayner from The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.
  • The bunny from Homestuck was quite injured by around twenty-five years of service, until it was patched-up by Rose. And thirteen additional years later rebuild by Jade... as a cyborg!
    • Later, Andrew Hussie does this for Spades Slick after saving him from his dying universe.
  • In one one-page comic from Freefall, Helix is kidnapped, and his kidnappers mail Sam and Florence Helix's body parts, forgetting that Helix, being a robot, can be reassembled. Even Sam says that these guys aren't criminal masterminds.
  • During Hob, happens offscreen to Kimiko, then she gets ripped apart, and rebuilt again. She's had her Artificial Limbs ever since, despite the comic's ambiguous continuity.
  • In Girl Genius one formerly walking AI backup reminds Agatha that since it's a machine, it cannot "die" - move the mind to its original chassis, then repair the mechanical body at leisure, transfer its original mind from where it is stored, and everything will be in order.


Web Original

  • Psychotic assassin Deathlist of the Whateley Universe. He's been rebuilt so many times the only human part of him is his head. Supposedly, his first rebuild was after his parents stuffed him into a trash compactor, decades ago.
  • Red vs. Blue Plays With this trope a bit. In this case, the person turned into a Cyborg (Simmons) isn't actually the one who needed rebuilding; instead, he's rebuilt as a cyborg so his body parts can be used to save Grif after an unfortunate incident with a Warthog and the wall of a base. Why Grif wasn't the one to be made a cyborg is a testament to Sarge's determination to never let common sense get in the way of scientific progress.
    • Though technically, he was already planning to make Simmons a cyborg (so he could fix the warthog), it just happened that it left a bunch of spare organs lying around.


Western Animation

  • Taurus Bulba from Darkwing Duck.
  • Hyena and Jackal from Gargoyles. And Coldstone, but he/they weren't human to start with.
  • Brother Blood from Teen Titans.
    • Arguable, as he intentionally upgraded himself with cyber-parts. Cyborg, however, in both comics and cartoons, fits this trope to a "T" (ouch, sorry)
  • Baxter Stockman in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) lost more and more body parts as the show went on, becoming a more monstrous cyborg with each appearance, until he eventually ends up as a Brain In a Jar.
  • Hexadecimal from ReBoot had this treatment after being blown up when a game cube (No, not THAT one) cut the giant laser she was using in half, but instead of a cyborg she was turned into a BDSM slave. By her brother.
    • Well, technically, it was Herr Doctor that made her like that.
      • Or possibly the brick-footed binome.
  • Zachary Foxx of the Galaxy Rangers is turned into a Hollywood Cyborg with an Arm Cannon after being injured in a space battle.
  • Spoofed in Family Guy in a faux-flashback when Peter remembers the time when he was The Million Dollar Man. Unfortunately, they didn't want to spend a lot of money so they came up with...this.
  • In Men in Black the TV series, Alpha first rebuilt himself with alien body parts, but later used cybernetics.
  • In Bionic Six, Bionic One was able to keep his identity as a cyborg superhero secret from his family until an accident required him to "use the technology," if you will, to prevent them from dying.
  • Cyber-Godzilla in Godzilla: The Series, who is Zilla brought back to life by aliens.
  • The Venture Brothers parodies this with Steve Austin, the original bionic man, running away from the U.S. since it turns out the government wants him to pay for the multi-million dollar surgery, on a government agent's salary.
  • In the second season finale of Archer, the KGB turns Barry into a bionic man to hunt down Archer and Katya. His introduction is a straight-up homage to the oft-quoted The Six Million Dollar Man opening.
  • In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Total Re-Carl", Meatwad declares they can rebuild him after Frylock's Super-Toilet prototype destroyed Carl's body (leaving him a severed head). After several mishaps, Frylock just shoves Carl's head onto a remote-control toy truck and calls it a day.


Real Life

We're getting there. It's inevitable.

  • Some intraocular lens implants used in cataract surgery are reported to give better vision than natural vision at its youth peak.
  • There is a debate over whether prosthetic legs such as those used by sprinter Oscar Pistorius give users an unfair competitive advantage over "able-bodied" (rather makes a mockery of that term...) athletes.
  1. ↑ Yes, Sorachi made an entire arc out of a Character Popularity Poll!
  2. ↑ At first it's implied that he was almost fully augmented due to the rather extreme damage to his body, but an easily missed email at the local LIMB clinic indicates that only Adam's chest and left arm were damaged beyond repair: a neat little clause in his employment contract resulted in Sarif having the legal authority to remove his two perfectly functioning legs and other arms to replace them with augmentations, and cut open his skull for more good times
  3. ↑ Eyes gouged, teeth pulled out, arms torn off
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