Joker Immunity/Playing With

Basic Trope: The Big Bad will never get Killed Off for Real.

Straight: The vicious Wolf is always defeated by the heroic Bob and his friends, but always returns to commit more evil deeds.
Exaggerated: Wolf is a complete monster who spreads death and destruction wherever he goes, and the heroes can barely touch him, let alone bring his evil to an end.
Downplayed: The Wolf is laughably petty, and gets ignored because there's a Monster of the Week to take care of.
Justified: Although it is acknowledged that killing Wolf would not necessarily be a bad thing, the heroes are a Lawful Good group and firm believers in the principle Thou Shalt Not Kill, preferring to have faith in the courts to mete out appropriate justice.
- Wolf does everything in his power to make sure he doesn't stay dead, whether it be cloning, altering his own body or simply using mystical forces to later resurrect himself.
- Wolf is immortal.
Inverted: Every villain that appears is a one-shot Monster of the Week.
- Alternatively, a person on the hero's side or the hero himself will never get Killed Off for Real.
Subverted: After a season of tormenting the heroes from afar, Wolf is abruptly killed off in the Wham! Episode season finale...
Double Subverted:...but it's later revealed to have been a Disney Death fakeout.
Parodied: The main character is pounding Wolf within an inch of his life, but then Wolf tells him that if he is killed, the franchise will end and all of them will lose their source of income.
- Alternatively, Wolf is reduced to little more than a smear on a wall, but before the episode ends, he's back to normal with no explanation.
- Or, Wolf was Killed Off for Real, but he has countless identical brothers and cousins (and random casual acquaintances). Each time one of them gets offed, a new one pops up to take on the mantle.
Deconstructed: The hero's inability to defeat Wolf permanently is symbolic of his incompetence and failure, and perhaps even his cowardice and hypocrisy. Due to this, the lives that Wolf takes are the hero's responsibility, since he could stop Wolf but always fails to do so.
Reconstructed: Should the hero kill Wolf he'd lose sight of his own limitations and eventually find that his threshold for using lethal means would keep lowering until he became an even greater menace than Wolf is in the first place. The hero may be a coward, but it's not the villain but himself he's afraid of. Because the authorities can't stop the villain on their own, he's forced to keep fighting forever.
Zig Zagged: This being Joker Immunity, it always is.
Averted: After being captured and escaping twice and just as the trope looks about to take hold, in his third showdown with the heroes Wolf is defeated and killed in a climactic manner, with an appropriate level of emphasis.
Enforced: "We can't kill Wolf! He's far too interesting a villain, if we killed him our ratings would plummet!"
Lampshaded: After his third defeat, Wolf is being carted back to his Cardboard Prison while giving the heroes a Hannibal Lecture mocking their refusal to kill him and pointing out they'll keep doing this forever.
Invoked: Wolf strives to become literally too important to his society's function for any of the good guys to kill him without dire consequences.
Defied: After his fourth defeat, Wolf is being carted back to his Cardboard Prison while giving the heroes a Hannibal Lecture mocking their refusal to kill him and pointing out they'll keep doing this forever, at which point team pragmatist Grit shoots him in the back of the head.
Discussed: "You know, killing him would probably prevent a lot of collateral damage. Sometimes I wonder why we let him live."
Conversed: "Why don't these characters just kill Wolf? He's an irredeemable bastard."
Plotted A Good Waste: The fact that Wolf's come back after being caught so many times is, in fact, one of the warning signs that he's working for or with somebody with a great deal of political power.
- Alternately, the reason he comes back from so many No One Could Have Survived That events is eventually revealed to be that he's not actually entirely human...
Played For Laughs: Wolf is an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who never does any real damage and is treated by the heroes as little more than a nuisance. "Same time next week?"
Played For Drama: Wolf is an Immoral Immortal who grows stronger with every defeat. Bob and his friends are desperately searching for the MacGuffin needed to defeat him; Anyone Can Die but Wolf, who will either die in the Grand Finale... or kill off everyone else before then.

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