Unkillable

Today, I'll talk about Immortal, or unkillable characters. These are a great incentive and a horrible pitfall all in the same fell swoop. Often, Immortal characters are seen either as a god or as an evil entity, something that should not be tampered with. Have you ever thought about your own characters being immortal? You might be doing it subconsciously.

Dues ex machina- a Latin word that means god from the machine. This is a plot device which is far too often used by writers, with or without their knowledge. Consider lord of the rings. If Gandalf helped destroy the Balrog without any consequences, what would happen to the party? The Balrog was seen as one of the most evil creatures alive in middle-earth at the time. From that point forward, there wouldn't be any reason they couldn't just march into mount doom and destroy the one ring.

Be careful when making your characters immortal in books, you need people to feel fear at the fact they're escaping. If they always get away in the nick of time with cuts and scrapes, if they always escape with a crippled limb, if something always happens to your Protagonist and he always gets out of it the same way, it feels less like a novel and more like a bad action film.
Conversely, immortal characters can help the protagonist in ways that can be useful to the plot. Just make sure the "Grace of god" doesn't get out of hand. This type of usefulness will be covered in the upcoming post, "The Hero's Journey"

Lastly, the immortal character can serve as a great antagonist. If the bad guy isn't striving for it already, the immortal bad guy poses a very interesting question, "How do we kill him?" Interestingly enough, this practice is seen in a lot of story plots for a good reason. In the Eragon Tetralogy (by Christopher Paolini),  Galbatorix is seen as a figure that cannot be stopped. In the Mistborn Triology (By Brandon Sanderson), The main antagonist has lived and ruled for over one-thousand years.

Granted, both series have their own plot twists and dramatic turns, But the evident correlation comes from the immortal aspect of the antagonist. The stronger they are, the more satisfying you feel when they get pulled from the throne, id say.

Special thanks to Christopher Paolini and Brandon Sanderson for helping with those analogies, and also thanks to Writing excuses for giving me the ideas for this post!
Be sure to check out Writing excuses, starring Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, Mary Kowell, and Brandon Sanderson.

Good luck writing!

Writing prompt: Romance! We didn't discuss romance plot much here, but write about an immortal character  and his complications with love (I.E gods cant seduce mortals, their a witch/warlock and cant let that person know, ect. be creative!)