Necromantic

The Necromantic is a character who became a villain (or was marked as one) because they really, really want to bring a loved one Back From the Dead.

Unfortunately, they don't live in a world where people are Only Mostly Dead and Death Is Cheap. Nope, in their world, resurrection is breaking the laws of Man and God, making their goal more of a Tragic Dream than anything else. Thus, they delve into mysteries Man Is Not Meant to Know and things quickly go downhill from there. Often they're willing to make a Deal With the Devil or bargain to free the Sealed Evil in A Can for this. Love Makes You Evil is often involved somewhere down the line.

Rarely do they succeed. If they do, the resurrected subject almost always Comes Back Wrong in some horrific manner or resents being revived.

Often the Replacement Goldfish is either the first step in the process or a fallback. They may become a Living Doll Collector if they keep the resulting monstrosities around as if they were fine.

Compare Mummies At the Dinner Table, A Love to Dismember for when the whole "death" thing isn't that big a deal. If the resurrected keeps his or her mental faculties, it becomes a Resurrected Romance. Closely related to Immortality Immorality, though that one may focus on keeping death from occurring in the first place. Not to be confused with I Love the Dead.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

 * Gendo Ikari of Neon Genesis Evangelion was willing to initiate The End of the World As We Know It twice to get his dead wife back.
 * But couldn't give a rat's ass about his (and her) son.
 * Well, YMMV about that. It is implied that he made Shinji hate him, that he , . His final line in End of Evangelion echoes this:.
 * Horrifying enough, his wife was not technically
 * Pegasus' motivation in Yu-Gi-Oh was to resurrect his dead fiancée/wife through a combination of ancient magic and the 'Solid Vision' holographic technology.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh GX: Professor Cobra made a deal with the Sealed Evil in A Can to resurrect his dead son.
 * Featured heavily in Fullmetal Alchemist. Attempting to bring back a dead person with alchemy is not only strictly forbidden, but is almost guaranteed to go horribly awry, scar your body, kill an innocent, create a monster, etc. etc. etc. People (including the protagonists) try it anyway. Different than the villainous examples as all the people who try this are painted in a sympathetic light.
 * It differs between the manga and first anime versions of the story. In the first anime, ; in the manga (and second anime),.
 * Instead, it's hinted that they which is a little lower in the Scale of Scientific Sins
 * The first anime . By the end, Lust is thoroughly convinced of this while Sloth is scared to death of the possibility;.
 * Featured in Chrono Crusade. Azmaria's foster father adopted her in the hope that he could use her Healing Voice to bring his wife's soul back to a body he reconstructed for her after she died in World War I.
 * Precia Testarossa of the first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha was attempting to resurrect
 * Ironically subverted in Wild Arms 3 where the villain eventually succeeds...but the in the process had become non-human. His resurrected mother runs away from him in horror and dies.
 * A story arc in Slayers NEXT features a wizard making a pact with mazoku in order to resurrect his lover. He succeeds, but she awakens in a zombie-like state begging to be sent back. Needless to say, things do not end well.
 * Lucifer of the Divine Design arc of Get Backers. He kidnapped and brainwashed children, played sick mind games with everyone, and seemed to enjoy doing it, but in the end it was revealed that he really just wanted to bring his daughter back from the dead.
 * Sinner, an antagonist from the first Scrapped Princess light novel, carried around the long-past-decayed corpse of his daughter Lynthia in hopes that he would be able to bring her back to life after she succumbed to a curse. Unfortunately, he's also Ax Crazy, and refuses to believe that she's even dead (until Shannon beats seven shades of hell out of him).
 * Faust VIII, a former villain from Shaman King, was a perfectly ordinary, handsome, cheerful young doctor before the death of his wife in a botched robbery. Now his ultimate goal is to use his necromancy to achieve his goal of reviving his wife's spirit, using corpses (including his wife's and their dog's) as weapons.
 * Although, for a sort of subversion, his goal is not seen as horribly evil as it usually would and it really isn't. It is just his mind and personality that got really crushed with her death, but that has nothing to do with his necromantic powers. The act of resurrecting someone is even called "True Necromancy". The only problem is that on his own, he's not capable of resurrecting her. He eventually  At least in the Manga.
 * In the anime, if I recall properly,
 * They were reunited in the manga too, although
 * In D.Gray-Man, the Millennium Earl gets people who are grieving for the recent death of a loved one to allow him to resurrect the dead person. Although the mourner is not the necromantic per se, the person nevertheless allows the dead loved person to be twisted into a demon-servant just so they can live again.
 * This is the motivation of antagonist Fei Wong Reed in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle and XXX Holic.
 * In Pokémon, the guy who made Mewtwo was a Necromantic. In order for Giovanni to fund his efforts to clone his dead daughter, he had to make him a Super Soldier as well.
 * In Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, the entire plot apparently starts in order for Kinzo to revive his dead mistress... who also happens to be a 1000 year-old Sealed Evil in A Can. Kill'Em All ensues.
 * After Yuki's die in Future Diary, he decides to win the power of God in the survival game and bring them back to life.
 * It should be noted that, unlike most examples,
 * Oh, and
 * Subverted in One Piece with Doctor Hogback. After going through something of a motive rant that looks like he's using this as an excuse for his start of darkness, he reveals he doesn't actually care about Cindry's personality and just liked her pretty face anyway. He prefers her in her new zombie form, completely subservient to his every command.
 * Though not for the same romantic overtones, Mikado of Hayate the Combat Butler was hinted at wanting the Power of the Gods to bring back the daughter he loved.

Comicbooks

 * One of the ultimate goals of comic book Super Villain Dr. Doom, along with the destruction of nemesis Reed Richards and the conquest of Earth, was the resurrection of his beloved mother (or at least, saving her from hell). Ultimately, he was able to do so, but only by forcing his mother to renounce her love for him. No wonder he's always so pissed.
 * Cicada from The Flash was killing people the titular hero had saved to gather enough energy to bring his wife (whom he had murdered, only to feel remorse) back from death.
 * Mr. Freeze's attempts to bring his wife back from the dead succeeded when he put her in a Lazarus Pit...Until she Came Back Wrong with eternal pain, insanity, and fire-manipulation powers. Now, she is Lazera, constantly hating Freeze for bringing her back.
 * When X Men villain Quentin Quire came back to life the first time, the first and only thing he did was dig up the body of his crush, Sophie Cuckoo, and seek out the Phoenix to bring her back as well. She woke up, took one look at him, and immediately dropped dead again out of spite, while her sisters telepathically mocked him.

Film

 * Gillian's insistence on trying to resurrect her accidentally-poisoned boyfriend in the 1998 film Practical Magic is the catalyst for a lot of later trouble for both her and her sister Sally.
 * Of course, this is less about wanting her beloved back and more about trying to avoid a murder charge; Sally accidentally killed him by giving him a dose of belladonna to keep him from trying to kill Gillian.
 * The plot of The Mummy 1999 revolves around the Big Bad trying to resurrect his lover, an ancient Egyptian queen. Interestingly, his own resurrection was a lot easier than hers.
 * For the simple fact that he didn't die and go to the afterlife like her, he was cursed with undeath. Meaning his soul remained in that dried-up piece of jerky that passed for a body, bound to protect the Book of the Dead. Which those foolish Americans stole. Also, he was eaten alive by scarabs. You try to rest in peace with that going on.
 * The trope is touched upon in the 1994 adaptation of Frankenstein. Frankenstein resurrects his dead bride, to horrific effect, as she is a stumbling, barely-aware reanimated corpse.
 * The eponymous Biollante from Godzilla vs. Biollante is an interesting variant on the end result, as the Necromantic character was intentionally trying to resurrect his loved one as a strange creature. By combining his daughter's DNA with that of a rose with psychic abilities and Godzilla, he was hoping to create a plant that contained her spirit and protected it with Godzilla's super-regeneration and near-indestructibility, making the new her virtually impossible to kill. It still ended up not being quite what he intended, though, as the Godzilla DNA made it a giant monster rather than merely Nigh Invulnerable.
 * Star Wars: Anakin Skywalker turns to the The Dark Side so he can learn how to bring his wife back from the dead. Before she's actually dead. And then he kills her because he's evil now.
 * The film of Pet Sematary. See Literature, below.
 * In The Abominable Dr. Phibes, the title character is trying to avenge his wife's death. In Dr. Phibes Rises Again, he's done that, and is now trying to bring her back using Ancient Egyptian magic (with the added bonus of getting eternal life for the pair of them). At the end of the film, he explains to his nemesis why they're not only Not So Different, but Phibes actually holds the moral high ground.
 * The Mad Scientist in The Brain (Head) that Wouldn't Die isn't trying to resurrect his decapitated fiancée (as her head is still living), but he does some pretty villainous things while trying to "secure" her a body, all the while ignoring her piteous demands to be killed. (Of course, said body has to come from a freshly killed victim...)
 * The plot of the Frankenstein retread Frankenhooker.

Literature

 * Elric of Melnibone, in the novels of Michael Moorcock, makes a pact with Arioch, Lord of Chaos, and accepts "control" of the runeblade Stormbringer in order to win back his lover Cymoril, who had been kidnapped and ensorcelled by his cousin and rival Yyrkoon. Ironically enough, the fact that Stormbringer is an evil soul-devouring demon-blade with a mind of its own means that he ends up.
 * In "The Monkeys Paw" (by W. W. Jacobs) a series of Literal Genie moments culminate with the protagonist's child being wished back from the dead after an earlier wish (for a sum of cash) resulted in his death (for which the parents received the exact sum wished for as an insurance payout). The mom is in denial that that their son may Come Back Wrong, but the dad is Genre Savvy enough to use the last wish to put him back in his grave before he even makes it back to the house.
 * An episode of Buffy did same thing essentially, with Dawn trying to bring Joyce back after she died. Buffy gets to Dawn moments too late, the ritual complete, and argues with her to undo the spell before it's too late and someone gets hurt. Their argument reveals how much Buffy was hurting too (she had been putting on a brave face for her sister's sake) and the two end up switching positions on the matter: Buffy is in tears and rushes to the door hopefully when the unseen "Joyce Thing" knocks, but Dawn undoes the spell at the last second and nobody is there when Buffy opens the door.
 * In Stephen King's Pet Sematary, the protagonist tries to bring his cat, then his son, and finally his wife back to life by burying them in the titular cemetery. Some people simply do not learn. The point is that it really works, but the resurrected are changed, and not for the better. Sometimes, dead is better.
 * Dr. Mordenheim, the Frankenstein Expy in the Ravenloft novel of the same name. Despite the fact he lives in a Dungeons and Dragons setting (albeit a Gothic Horror one) where it should be easy to bring his wife back from the dead, he goes the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know route, because he doesn't trust magic.
 * Given that resurrection magic in the Ravenloft novels has a high probability of the intended resurrectee Coming Back Wrong, can you really blame the guy for not trusting it? In addition, before he was brought to Ravenloft, he lived in a world where magic was largely unknown and was replaced by technology.
 * An interesting twist occurs in the Edgar Allen Poe story Ligeia, in which a morose nobleman is pining over the loss of his first wife.
 * In the original Frankenstein book, it's strongly suggested that Victor Frankenstein was doing all his research in the hopes of bringing back his dead mother. Instead, of course, he makes a monster who ends up killing off most of the rest of his family.
 * King Elias from Memory Sorrowand Thorn just wants to be reunited with his dead wife. Problem is, he's Genre Blind enough to hire Evil Sorcerer Pryrates to find a way to do it, and the spirit they end up summoning is not the wife at all, but the Storm King. Pryrates, taking this in stride, makes a Deal With the Devil, and poor Elias is left a massive Unwitting Pawn caught in his own trap for the remainder of the series.
 * The Last Incantation by Clark Ashton Smith plays with this: the ancient necromancer thinks the lover he resurrected was brought back wrong somehow, as she's somehow less beautiful than he remembers, but as it turns out, the spell went off without a hitch. He has just grown too old and twisted to love her the way he did when he was young.
 * There's also The Chain of Aforgomon. Calaspa could have had his beloved's body reanimated or her spirit called back by magic easily enough...but that wasn't good enough, was it? He just had to actually turn back time for an hour to when she was still alive...yeah. That didn't end so well.
 * Okay, bear with me. Can Heterosexual Life Partners count? I'll grant you, Necroplatonic hasn't got the same ring to it. And are you sitting comfortably? But, anyway, in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Interference,
 * In Johannes Cabal: Necromancer,.
 * Hurwood's attempts to bring back his dead wife with voodoo magic kicks off the plot of Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides.

Live-Action TV

 * in The Lost Room wasn't out to destroy the world and didn't think it would actually happen as a result of his plan. Nevertheless, he might have unmade all of reality in his attempt  had not the protagonist intervened.
 * Done repeatedly in (wait for it) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, such as the would-be Dr Frankenstein who rebuilds his dead older brother, only to have him demand a mate.
 * And.
 * Shows up in a season 2 episode of Supernatural by way of an ancient Greek resurrection spell.
 * In the short lived TV show based on The Dresden Files, Bob was once a human wizard. He was cursed with existing as a spirit entity residing in his own skull because he brought back his dead wife.
 * The main character of Pushing Daisies disconnected himself from normal social interaction partly for fear of becoming this trope - he was worried that if someone he loved were to die, he would, in his grief, bring them back at the cost of taking someone else's life, so he largely avoided forming relationships for most of his life.
 * Nevertheless, it's happened more than once- as a child, Ned brought back his mother, and the cost of the father of Chuck, his true love. Years later, when Chuck was murdered, Ned brought her back, knowing, and accepting, someone would die in her place. Then,
 * Inverted in Charmed. There's a dead Necromancer who wants to bring himself back to life to be with the woman he loves.

Mythology

 * This is a fairly common theme in Native American legends, though it is generally the hero doing it. (Still never seems to work out well, though.) Expect An Aesop about how we're supposed to accept death, mourn, then move on.
 * In Egyptian Mythology Isis tries unsuccessfully to bring her husband Osiris back to life, but fails to because his brother Set rips his dead body apart and a fish eats the penis. Isis is by no means a villain though.
 * In the Armenian folktale of Ara the Handsome, Ara is the king of Armenia and the most handsome man in the land. The Queen of Assyria, Semiramis, hears about how handsome he is and asks him to marry her, but he refuses because he already has a wife. Angry, Semiramis declares war on Armenia and orders her soldiers to bring Ara back alive. However, Ara dies in battle. Semiramis attempts to resurrect him by calling upon wolf spirits to lick his wounds and heal him, but the sorcery is unsuccessful.

Tabletop Games

 * Many RPGs have these.
 * Dr. Darius Hellstromme from Deadlands.

Theatre

 * A cast of TSR employees at GenCon 1999 performed a Ravenloft-themed dialogue skit, "One Piece At A Time", that employed this trope. A female Mad Scientist attempted to resurrect her dead fiancee by keeping his disembodied head alive, murdering people, and surgically reassembling him from their salvaged body parts. Being a Ravenloft story, It Got Worse.

Toys

 * The storyline for Transformers: Kiss Players feat--no, wait! Come back! Ahem. In addition to its more {in)famous elements, the Kiss Players storyline features a woman who has this as her motivation--her daughter was killed in an accident involving a Transformer, so she, having apparently watched too much Neon Genesis Evangelion, starts doing all kinds of nasty things in hopes of bringing her back while putting on a show of protecting Earth from horrible monsters.

Videogames

 * The Shadow Hearts series uses this trope in just about every game, thanks to the recurring plot element known as the Emigre Manuscript, a book with instructions for raising the dead.
 * The main plot of the first game, Koudelka, revolved around the game's villain trying to resurrect a loved one. It does not turn out well.
 * Jack in Shadow Hearts was trying to resurrect his mother... and conducted experiments on orphans to work out how. The end result: a vicious monster with her face, which killed him. In many ways his section of the game is a Shout Out to Koudelka.
 * The hero tries this in Shadow Hearts: Covenant, despite being well aware of the above two examples. The best thing you can say about the result is that it doesn't try to kill him at least.
 * In Shadow Hearts: From The New World, the entire plot turns out to have been set in motion by someone attempting this.
 * In the path for the second ending in Drakengard, the character Inuart becomes obsessed with bringing the dead Furiae back to life, vowing that he'll use one of the million Seeds of Resurrection scattered across the land now that the seals holding them back have been broken. Since all throughout the game the Seeds of Resurrection have only been hinted at as being very bad (no one seems to know why), the protagonist attempts to stop him. If Inuart succeeds, it's the end of the world as we know it with a gruesome twist.
 * In Breath of Fire 3, the director of the Plant, Palet, is revealed to have worked with Momo's father Retsol on a method to raise the dead; Retsol wanted to bring back his wife, while Palet wanted to resurrect his mother. Retsol eventually backed out of the project in disgust; Palet continued it, and when the party (Momo included) confronts him, he uses some of what he's found to become a giant mushroom beast. Afterwards, the party finds a tormented creation in the plant's reactor, the results of Palet's attempt to raise his mother from the dead; they shut the machine off and let her rest in peace.
 * Count Bleck from Super Paper Mario almost has this as his motivation. However, even with all his power he can't bring his lover back, so he just decides to do the next best thing: Destroy all worlds. Sadly, he doesn't know until it's far too late that.
 * The of La Pucelle: Tactics involves.
 * This is the protagonist's motivation for slaying the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus. In the process, he
 * Shadow of the Colossus is pretty gray, really. Dormin (the aforementioned ) is really more bitter then actually evil, whereas.
 * Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has two, . becomes possessed by Sealed Evil in A Can when he attempts to use said can to revive his late father, who is revived as a soulless zombie. He promises  that he'll revive his wife if he does a Face Heel Turn. By the time he gets his "wife" back, he's too crazy to notice she's just a reanimated corpse.
 * from Tales of Symphonia spent four thousand years trying to revive
 * At the end of the sequel, Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World, Richter
 * The tradition continued in Tales of the Abyss. Subverted in that this particular Necromantic is a good guy, even if his loyalty to the party can be ambiguous sometimes.
 * Fairly early in Bullet Witch, you discover that the events leading up to the game -- disastrous plague, demonic invasion, etc. -- were caused by such a character attempting to revive their loved one. A bit farther in, you discover that it was his daughter, not a lover. Towards the end...
 * Lezard Valeth of Valkyrie Profile is one of the more demented villains out there even before he discovers that valkyries are only active when the humans serving as their Soul Jar are killed. So he kills a few dozen female humans and elves to make homunculi for Lenneth Valkyrie to be incarnated into (it's never made clear how many, but at least a dozen homunculi are shown, and it's suggested it takes a few of both species to make just one), all so he can woo her. By the end of the game, he gets away with it, too.
 * This comes up a bit differently in the prequel, Valkyrie Profile Silmeria. In this one,  This time, though, the perpetrator gets his comeuppance.
 * This happens in one of the endings to Silent Hill 2 to
 * The antagonist to Silent Hill 4 isn't so much attempting to resurrect a loved one, as.
 * Fable 2's Big Bad, Lord Lucien, begins researching the Spire to bring back his dead wife and daughter, but over the ten-year time skip after the introduction, he becomes much more power-hungry. The game also features a side-quest where a man is tracking down the body parts of Lady Grey (from the last Fable game) in order to resurrect her because he's fallen in love with her.
 * In the Lego Battles game for Nintendo DS, one of the story modes involves playing as an Evil Wizard in control of an army of skeletal mooks... who turns out to be just after the pieces to a magic staff that can resurrect his dead girlfriend. In a partial subversion, he actually manages it at the end, although she Came Back Wrong repeatedly, including coming back as a crab, a robot and an angry pirate.
 * This is the main motivation of, in Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica. Unusually, it's a total success, but the whole experience is taken as proof that Humans Are Bastards.
 * Success? What success?
 * This is the reason why the Dark Presence takes on Barbara Jagger's form in Alan Wake, coupled with a case of Came Back Wrong. Partially subverted as Thomas Zane wasn't evil.
 * Played with in Touhou 7. The goal of Yuyuko Saigyouji is to resurrect the one sealed under Saigyou Ayakashi, believing that it's someone dear to her. . However, the one who enabled Yuyuko to pull her crazy scheme was Yukari, to bring back Yuyuko's memory of her. Neither Yuyuko nor Yukari got away unscathed.
 * Dragon Age II has a Serial Killer with this fixation.
 * Nybbas "Love is eternal" Obderhode.
 * Lady Vayle, the Necromantress of Dragon Fable and Adventure Quest Worlds, was into necromancy to try to bring her brother Back From the Dead..
 * Rue (a heroic example) in Threads of Fate spends his path looking for a legendary artifact which may have the power to bring his dead guardian back to life. In his route,.
 * In the iOs game The Quest, one early-mid quest involves a noblewoman who's determined to propagate her branch of the Donnen family. Thing is, she's also determined to make sure the heir in question is absolutely pure Donnen blood. Her solution? Conjure back the spirit of her dead father for just long enough to impregnate her. No wonder Anton abjured his birthright...
 * Shout Out: VTMB has a quest named Necromantic, but there is nothing romantic about it.
 * Malistaire, the former teacher of the death school, from Wizard 101 plays this to a T. After his wife dies he leaps off the slope. Even when the ghost of his wife begs him to let her go, he believes she's just an illusion. He also takes the nice step of that his way of resurrecting her has the side effect possible side effect of destroying world.

Visual Novels

 * Josef Capek's loved one in Shikkoku no Sharnoth died during a seance and he's trying to bring her back to life with magic.

Western Animation

 * Let's not forget Mr. Freeze from B:TAS (and later the comics, I believe), who turned to crime for funds to cure his sick, cyrogenically frozen wife.
 * And revenge on a Corrupt Corporate Executive for pulling the plug on his first attempt.
 * The archaeologist in Gargoyles who imprisoned Anubis to get his son back. He learned his lesson after that.
 * In Ben 10 Ultimate Alien, Charmcaster tries to do this. It doesn't end well.

Webcomics

 * In Jack, this happened the first part of the arc Two for You, though the male protagonist isn't shown as being especially evil for doing it.
 * In Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden,  fits this role as he
 * Trace's backstory in Two Kinds. he goes insane from the Black Magic required to even try the spell, and begins to slaughter people left, right, and down the middle. He gets so evil that it takes a god to stop him (the beastman god, incidentally. trace going mad was all part of the human god's plan).

Real Life

 * In a bizarre real-life instance of this, Count Carl von Kossel falls in love with Elana Hoyos, a young patient dying of tuberculosis in 1920s Florida. After failing to save her life from the deadly disease, he robs her grave and tries to Frankenstein her back to life, before giving up and settling with loving her corpse.