This video was sponsored by campfire, you know, I remember when they first invented campfires. Lots of people apparently. Immortality is a very popular very old trope. How old is it? Well appropriately, It's a major part of the oldest surviving work of literature the Epic of Gilgamesh dated to about 1800 BCE. After his best bud Enkidu dies Gilgamesh is overwhelmed by grief and existential terror and starts trying to find a way to... Not do that. he seeks out Uttna Pishtim and his wife the survivors of the Mesopotamian flood myth who were granted immortality by the gods as their reward for saving humanity from extinction. Uttna Pishtim tells Gilgamesh that fearing death And hunting for immortality will just make the life he has miserable obviously Gilgamesh doesn't listen and Uttna Pishtim challenges him to stay awake for a week straight and when he fails he asks, him how he expects to conquer death when he can't even conquer sleep when Gilgamesh leaves Utta Pishtim tells him he can find a plant at the bottom of the ocean that'll restore his youth but after going to all the trouble of tying rocks to His feet to get it It gets stolen by a snake finally recognizing the futility of seeking immortality gilgamesh returns to his city to rule Wisely and justly until he dies of old age So immortality kind of a popular subject and it makes sense mortality is basically the only universal human experience And of course practically speaking, we don't exactly know what to expect from it and that can be scary So while plenty of people posit a pleasant afterlife or a do-over or other? post-mortality exploit many people instead look for ways to avoid it a bucket load of prominent historical figures ranging from herodotus to ponce de leon believed in a fountain of youth the alchemical philosopher's stone was supposed to bring rejuvenation into mortality and many emperors of ancient china sought immortality through various elixirs most of which contained mercury with predictable results It makes sense that to us mere mortals immortality would seem universally appealing or does it we'll get back to that But for now, let's get to immortality and fiction now first off we gotta draw one important distinction There's a difference between a character who becomes immortal and a character who is meant to be immortal Gilgamesh deals with several gods who are all naturally immortal but uphisham and his wife were originally mortals who became immortal there is a difference between immortal because they are not mortal beings and immortal because they won't die like a regular human would Naturally immortal beings like gods spirits demons fairies elves, etc Show up in a lot of fiction and generally fall under the umbrella of non-human immortality. They just don't generally die in practical terms They're figures who are just around and overall They tend to be more like fixtures in a world than real dynamic characters But the real juicy plot stuff happens when humans become immortal or when someone who thought they were human turns out to be immortal So we're mostly gonna focus on that. Now first off not all immortality is created equal There's a bit of a spectrum The lowest tier is eternal youth a basic form of immortality where one just stops aging generally This means you don't need to worry about dying of old age, but you can still be killed This is a pretty common form of immortality as it's glamorous, but not completely busted This is also usually what elves and gods have they stay pretty but you can get rid of them if you need to next up Is magically sustained immortality. This kind of immortality doesn't run all by itself. It needs fuel. Technically speaking This makes it not immortality but mortality with extra steps since garden variety mortality also requires constant maintenance like food and water anyway Magically sustained immortality is usually something like a curse or enchantment Maybe your eternal youth is sustained by a potion or a spell or you stuck your mortality in a duck egg and hit it somewhere or you're a vampire and you'll die if you don't drink blood this one can also make you harder to kill but it usually gives You a glaring weakness that can be exploited common in bad guys But in rare cases it appears in good guys who were cursed with it and are looking for a workaround Higher on the chain is healing factor immortality where your whole deal is that you bounce back from basically anything? These characters usually either don't age or age very slowly as their body auto heals from aging itself and their greatest strength Is that they are incredibly hard to kill how sturdy they are can vary? Some of them basically just don't care if you put holes in them. Some of them can regrow lost limbs Some of them can regenerate from a single cell Sometimes you risk making more of them if you blow them into too many pieces It really varies common among both bad guys and tanky good guys. Now the absolute top tier is perfect immortality This immortality has no weaknesses or caveats you don't age and you can't die This is much rarer than the other types because it's kind of hard for writers to get out of it Sees some use and be careful what you wish for stories, but we'll get to that It's much more common for characters to have almost perfect immortality Which is like perfect immortality with one weakness most commonly that the immortal still needs their head or heart to live Usually pretty much ideal But it sometimes comes with bonus angst and in cases where the negatives fully outweigh the positives we get monkey's paw immortality where you want Immortality and you technically get what you asked for, but it's really not worth it the most common version is immortality without eternal youth which turns into a nightmare very quickly, but sometimes you just get like Congratulations, you've outlived the earth and now you get to suffer through the eternal heat death of the universe, you know stuff like that now while a lot of stories put focus on seeking immortality fewer actually involved getting it and this is because Immortality is kind of hard for writers for several reasons If your villain is immortal that makes them hard to get rid of and if they're too immortal it becomes functionally impossible Without some kind of deus ex machinar firing them into the sun And if your heroes are immortal, then the stakes are somewhat lowered if they don't need to worry about age or death There's fewer things you can threaten them with of course immortality comes with its own set of problems But they go unaddressed surprisingly frequently probably because they require actual thought. Oops. Did I say that out loud cause Here's the thing. Yes dying is scary. And yes Not dying is pretty much universally appealing but since the expectation of mortality is pretty much the only thing every human being has in common Removing it can strip away some things that we think of as fundamental to humanity I'm not going to say that mortality is the only motivation we have because that's straight and not true But it's kind of the finish line. We do what we do with the understanding that we don't have enough time to do everything So the time we have is precious We don't tend to think about it very much but on some level we Know that nothing lasts forever and that knowledge helps motivate us when motivation is otherwise lacking. I haven't spoken to someone in a while And worried it might be a bit awkward to reach out now well The awkwardness feels a lot less important if you think about how you might never speak to each other again if you don't say hi Now want to work on that story or art project, but worried. You're not good enough to do it yet You might genuinely never get the chance to do it if you keep waiting until you're good enough, etc, etc That hard limit on how much time we have is an ever-present reminder to use that time But what happens if you take that away an immortal gets all the time They need to do everything they want and the price they pay is they lose the one thing they shared with everyone else The finish line suddenly, they're running a race without a finish line Are they gonna bother to keep up the same pace stay on the track? Why should they keep running at all? An immortal's life is paced differently than a mortal one and the reasons why are Very structurally fundamental to who they are beyond the whole pacing of life events immortals also struggle with meaningfully connecting with mortals It's very common for immortals to be bummed out about losing their loved ones But the true depths of immortal angst run much deeper than that to feel that loss You have to feel that connection first and how easy is it to connect with someone when functionally speaking you have nothing in common? It's fairly common for immortals to routinely play at a human life making an identity getting a job settling down Even starting a family but within 20 years time will have moved on without them and eagle-eyed observers will notice they don't seem to age And in another few decades when one human lifetime runs, its course the children move out the spouse passes away The grandchildren are in college The workplace has been overhauled that immortal has basically outlived their own life and all they can do is move on Mourn the people they've lost and know that no matter how much they love them They'll never really be able to go through life together An immortal is a fixed point and there's no natural place for a fixed point in a mortal lifetime And that kind of grief can compound over time also I'm, sorry for getting existentially heavy here, but we are discussing the existential ramifications of never dying So I couldn't really find a way to avoid it. Here's a kitten Okay back we go the primary source of immortal angst is that fundamental disconnect between themselves and humanity? This is why many immortals mostly hang out with other immortals Sometimes their whole arc is about seeking out someone else like them. It gives them a community that exists in the same time frame They do but there aren't many immortal characters who can completely avoid mortals and that's where the weirdness starts How strange does it feel to reconnect with someone when you haven't seen each other for years or decades? You've got an idea of who they are based on how you knew them at the time But since you've been gone, they've been through stuff You don't even know about and grown into a completely different person, you know them, but you don't know who they are now And they have the same dynamic with you They remember somebody but you've grown and changed since then and they kind of have to get to know you all over again well How much weirder would it be if they hadn't changed at all? like someone you knew in 4th grade who's still 10 while you're wrapping up a phd What would you have to talk about if you're not the same person to them then? Who are they to you and from their perspective they haven't changed but this person they used to know is suddenly older and more mature And it's like they blinked and suddenly you have nothing in common anymore what happened with an immortal character? This is what dealing with everyone is. Like they're constantly playing catch-up because mortals race through life milestones at a speed The immortal doesn't deal with anymore There's only enough time to do so many things before they hit the finish line But an immortal has no finish line and the time scale mortals used to measure their lives doesn't really work for someone completely disconnected from that This is why some immortals end up befriending families instead of individuals regularly showing up meeting the new generation Commiserating with the older ones getting people confused with their nearly identical great grandparents stuff like that, but there's still a distance there It's an impersonal connection where the mortals involved are largely interchangeable and immortal can't really comfortably immerse themselves in a mortal social circle It's the natural isolation of being surrounded by people completely invested in something You have no stake in coupled with the awareness that you have a very limited time to be with these people It would be like being forced to watch the 93rd episode of a telenovela You've never heard of with your high school graduating class the night before summer vacation This is all the time you have to spend together and they're spending it on something that doesn't matter to you Many immortal characters are at least somewhat disconnected from their environment for this exact reason Even the young ones know they aren't going to age with their peers and probably don't get too invested in their smaller scale Personal antics as a result then once you've lived out a lifetime or two It starts getting harder to get invested in new people And once you've lost a true love it becomes very easy to close yourself off So that doesn't happen again but a human turned immortal is just as susceptible to loneliness as a mortal human is and that kind of Isolation isn't good for them either without a really solid immortal support network and immortal is kind of stuck in a no-win scenario when it comes to human socialization But this isn't the only reason immortals can lose their luster and a lot of their humanity after a few hundred years Have you ever become suddenly aware of the fact that you're currently at a high point that you're living? One of the best moments of your life and you're unlikely to hit this kind of peak again It's a bittersweet realization because even though you're sad that it's a passing thing You still feel the elation of experiencing that beautiful moment and you know, you're better for having lived it for me It was a dinosaur dig, but that's not the point The point is what if you were immortal you wouldn't need to worry about not having enough time But if you knew your life would go on forever would those high points still feel as meaningful or unique? Anything that's impressive because it's once in a lifetime automatically loses its shine in this context You climbed everest got wasted at oktoberfest went over niagara falls in a barrel and put your face on time magazine But do any of those things matter is a bucket list still fulfilling if you have infinite time to fill it Out and suppose you had a dream job a career milestone You can put in the work to accomplish your dreams and build the life You've always wanted but you know in a few decades, you'll have to leave it behind no matter what you build for yourself You won't be able to keep it forever and forever is the only time scale that matters to an immortal And speaking as an artist. There's often a very powerful drive to create art That'll outlast you but what do you do? If you'll outlast both your art and your audience You successfully tell your story and then live long enough to see it bastardized rewritten censored by victorians rendered Unrecognizable by cultural telephone and eventually forgotten you make art in the hopes that you'll make people happy and change lives But no matter how good your art is every life. You touch will still be gone in less than a century The accomplishment loses its luster the high point feels a lot less high. Ok That was pretty heavy have another kitten but with all that in mind. It's pretty clear why many immortals rapidly lose their grip on humanity and their motivation to do Well basically anything but it doesn't happen all at once there are many different kinds of immortal characters and many of them are really just different stages of the immortal life cycle the youngest ones Are the oblivious immortals they're immortal But they haven't been for very long or they've been insulated by largely spending time with other immortals without the whole loved one's aging thing to spark angst and introspection these guys basically still act like regular humans sometimes to a distracting degree if your character is over a century old and Still acts like a high schooler your audience might be a bit thrown Following this variant is the immature immortal an immortal who really doesn't act their age This one is surprisingly common in naturally immortal beings like gods possibly because when your life is consequence free nobody can really stop you from acting like a spoiled child and or a complete menace but it also shows up in human immortals which Usually seems to be the result of either deliberate characterization or poor writing Sometimes it can be hard to tell And then not to be confused with the previous two versions is the immortal child an immortal who became immortal at a very young age This is basically always extremely bad and these characters are typically antagonists either They stay their apparent age mentally as well as physically or they never gain Any more maturity no matter how many centuries they live and how much knowledge they gain these characters are basically walking Tragedies whether or not the story acknowledges this directly. I mean how many people have pointed out? That peter pan is really kind of a nightmare Anyway in a mortal that lives long enough to really get a feel for their own immortality might end up becoming a walking Textbook a character who's used their long life to travel basically everywhere pop into every major historical event and hang out with and or smooch Every major historical figure the walking textbook is a fairly common secondary character since they make a good font of exposition for more mortal less well-traveled protagonists these guys can have frankly unrealistic levels of experience one might start questioning the Practicalities of how exactly this character managed to locate themselves at every major historical event But if an immortal lives long enough among humans and sees enough of them die they're liable to become an angsty immortal These guys are just really bummed out by all the people they've lost and how they can never truly belong and stuff They can also be angsty about other stuff like how people keep getting upset with them for being immortal or if their immortality comes with a caveat of some kind but it's more commonly about losing people and or Being a monster The problem is less that they aren't dying and more that their loved ones are and while they often complain about it They rarely actually do anything about it And if they do decide to do something about it They usually become a lonely immortal and immortal who practices responsible social distancing and avoids getting attached wherever they can but in Order for them to feature in any kind of plot. They usually have to get attached to at least one other character So mostly these stories involve the lonely immortal becoming a little less lonely for, you know a few decades Anyway, if that goes on too long, you're liable to get a tired immortal These immortals have long since exhausted their bucket list and are just tired man They've lived too many lives lost too many loved ones and or witnessed too many atrocities to be really about that stuff anymore Tired immortals also usually only feature in stories where their character arc involves rediscovering the benefits of love Either that or they're looking for a way to die or both cheerful, of course Not every immortal has to dip into angst some of them become cavalier immortals who? Intellectually understand that humans all die eventually but never seem particularly broken up about it Whether they've been overexposed to that sort of thing Or they just don't think about it that much or if the writer doesn't particularly want this fun immortal character to be crushed Under the weight of centuries of grief these characters often hang around mortals without any real issue There's some significant overlap between this and the immature immortal and it can sometimes seem like the writer maybe didn't fully think the implications through But sometimes these guys are just really good at compartmentalizing There are also immortals among friends who compensate for all that isolation and angst by finding one or more other immortals to hang out with These guys are usually pretty well adjusted. Honestly now the typical endpoint for an immortal is the wildly inhuman immortal It's kind of an asymptotic limit for formerly human immortal characters They approach it eventually no matter how long it takes to become noticeable Basically when they live long enough their moral compass kind of wears away the needle's still pointing somewhere But they don't really know where anymore if all human life is ephemeral and fleeting anyway Does human life hold value does human suffering and without the fear of death compassion for others or unfinished personal goals? What's left to motivate them much of what we consider humanity is grounded in our mortality and our connection with others When you remove those factors that humanity begins to lose its color It may take hundreds of years thousands of years hundreds of thousands of years But eventually the immortal will lose those last traces of humanity and settle into something very different not necessarily evil But very morally distinct of course some immortals lose the moral compass very quickly when you basically can't die It's pretty easy to go power mad And that's how you get problem immortals who make trouble like they're angling for a promotion in the troublemaking department whether they're chaotic pleasure seekers long-term master manipulators or just public nuisances These guys are very commonly villains because they basically took a hard turn into power abuse and thus dodge all that inconveniently heroic angsty business by straight up not seeing mortals as people and Sometimes these problem immortals can get slammed with a good old-fashioned existential crisis and become Paranoid immortals who are terrified of death even more now that it's not supposed to be able to get to them This is quite common with magically sustained immortals who? Actively sought out their immortality as now that they have it they are terrified of losing it These guys are popular antagonists in karmic downfall stories Now regardless of the specific type immortals present a unique set of writing pitfalls pros and cons The biggest pro is the unique character trajectory An immortal character can follow all other things being equal and immortal character will live forever eliminating the common motivators of fear of death desire to accomplish this thing before dying and in some cases Even the standard heroic motivation of protect the people and things I care about meaning most standard character motives are kind of off the table But as discussed this can lead to very inhuman characters over time which leads to the biggest con It's not easy for a regular human to properly conceive of what centuries of millennia of life experience will do to a person Many immortal characters end up feeling way, too Normal or flat as a result and your audience might end up being a little jarred by how for instance this immortal centuries old character can have such adolescent motivations another pro is that an immortal character can have an extremely eventful backstory many people roll their eyes at implausibly youthful protagonists who've somehow had Three major badass careers by the tender age of just learned. What a cosign is But your immortal character can have plausibly gotten up to all kinds of shenanigans all over the world Of course The corresponding con is that it's easy to go a bit overboard here looping your character into every major historical event is tempting But unwise another pro is that if your character is immortal you can put them in some very spectacular fights Obviously this doesn't apply so much if they're just the ageless type But if your character is largely unkillable They can go through some pretty ridiculous stuff and that can be good for the drama But on the other hand an unkillable character in a fight is automatically fairly low stakes sure they can die but anything short of that isn't really a threat so you risk a Dramatic confrontation turning into empty spectacle if you just toss two immortals into a blender and crank the dial now while the mortals are very popular characters, there are only a small handful of Immortality-centric plots first and most classic is seeking immortality where a character tries to become immortal Usually they don't succeed and if they do they usually wish they hadn't extremely common in cautionary tales then there's kill the immortal a common folktale format where the villain is somehow immortal but has a weakness usually a very specific one and The heroes must figure out that weakness to get rid of the villain for good There's also I don't want to be immortal anymore when an immortal character gets sick of their lot in Eternal life and tries to find a way to go back to being a regular mortal this is Usually less about them dying and more about them being able to have a nice normal life with someone but in the cases of much Sturdier immortals they might just be looking for something that'll keep them down for good very common with angsty immortals And finally, there's oops all immortals a story format wherein basically, every major character is immortal Usually the same kind of immortal this levels the playing field somewhat and helps reduce the angst factor What exactly the plot is can vary a lot? Maybe the immortals are fighting. Maybe someone's gonna become an immortal Maybe it's an immortal love story, etc. Etc. Lots of variants with this one. Oh boy this ran really long immortal characters can be Really interesting and it always bums me out when people write them like regular humans when by all rights They should probably be about 30 existential crisis by volume So, yeah, and thanks again to campfire for sponsoring this video campfire pro is a writing software designed to help writers organize their story in a much more functional way than my typical approach of scattered post-its and clay tablets It's got a structured plot and story timeline to keep things straight character pages to keep track of everyone's bios character arcs to keep an eye on how those characters grow and Corporate style maps for all your location he needs if you want to focus a little more on the world building campfire has an expansion Available you might like the world building pack which adds support for species language cultures magic systems items religions Philosophies and basically everything you might need to flesh out your world or the backstory of a particularly well traveled and observant Immortal if you want to test it out campfire pro comes with a 10 day free trial and if you like it It's a one time purchase of 49.99 to get it forever The world building pro pack is an optional add-on for another 24.99 with all the fun bells and whistles that entails so if this all sounds interesting check out the link in the description You
