Rasputinian Death: Difference between revisions

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* The [[Enemy Without|berserked self-defense program]] of the Book of Darkness in ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]]'' was sliced in half by a [[BFS]], [[Taken for Granite|petrified]], [[An Ice Person|frozen in ice]], blasted to bits by three [[Wave Motion Gun|Wave Motion Guns]]s, jettisoned to space, and [[Deader Than Dead|shot by a weapon that distorts time and space over an area]] before it was finally killed... [[Back From the Dead|temporarily]]. Reinforce had to [[Heroic Sacrifice|delete herself together with its regeneration program]] to keep it dead.

** In one arc, Frank Castle's fighting a mobster's insane muscular lackey. After trading punches (and shivs) with him, Frank tosses him out of a window, where he lands several stories down onto a spiked wrought iron fence, impaling him through the torso. Frank then jumps from the window and lands on the thug. Later, the thug (fence still jutting through him), stumbles towards Frank; who [[Chunky Salsa Rule|blasts him in the face with a shotgun.]] Even then, Frank has to mentally reassure himself that the next steps the guy takes are just reflexive. <br /><br />When Frank later "meets" the lackey's sister, after gunning her down he makes a point of emptying the clip into her, just to make sure.

* Rasputin himself gets another [[Rasputinian Death]] in the 1997 Don Bluth animated musical [[Anastasia]]. After the Reliquary which is [[Soul Jar|the source of his power]] is smashed, it releases an explosion of green energy then a ball of fire comes down from Heaven and smites the screaming Rasputin, melting his flesh. His still living skeleton then disintegrates into dust and blows away on the wind. You know, for kids.

* This is the premise of ''[[Crank]]''. The entire movie's essentially his one-day [[Rasputinian Death]], compressed into about an hour and a half. Even after falling from an airplane, he lives, making [[The Sequel]] possible. And then, he burns alive after recharging himself on a high voltage power line, gets his normal heart back inside him, which stops, and then starts again, ending the credits with him opening his eyes... ''again!''

* The second ''[[Kamen Rider Decade]]'' movie (well, third if you count the ''Den-O'' crossover) gives us Doras, a ''[[Kamen Rider ZO]]'' monster resurrected by the villains, apparently for the simple purpose of finally ''killing'' this guy. He's brought down by {{spoiler|'''TWELVE''' different Kamen Riders, ten of whom were in their [[Super Mode|Super Modes]]s, hitting him with finishers, the last being Complete Form Decade's Rider Kick.}}

* One standard [[Our Vampires Are Different|version of vampire lore]] (dating back at least to ''[[Dracula (novel)|Dracula]]'') says that, to kill a vampire, you need to stake him through the heart ''and'' chop his head off (not to mention filling his mouth with garlic/holy wafers). And sometimes burn the body to ashes and toss said ashes into a fast-flowing river. And in at least one version of the lore, even when all the steps are taken it wasn't really dead. A drop of blood on the ashes would reform it -- stoppedit—stopped only by the fact that the ashes are scattered too widely.

** Pratchett's vampires seem to follow the rules listed above, although to different degrees depending on the vampire. This is because on the [[Discworld]] ''every single vampire cliché is true'', but any single cliché does not necessarily apply to ''any one vampire'', so anyone trying to kill them has to try several different ways to make sure they actually die. Vampires eventually start carrying easily broken vials of blood so they'll smash and bring them back if they're dusted, which for the ones sensitive to light as well is fairly often (especially if they work as photographers). <br /><br />He has serious fun with this in ''[[Discworld/Carpe Jugulum|Carpe Jugulum]]'', where various subtypes of vampire have increasingly silly requirements for true death, starting at the weirdest end of the real life myths and going from there, including mention of a vampire who wouldn't die until ''carrots got hammered in its ears''! The protagonists muse about just how much trial and error it must have taken to get it right.

* In ''The Robber Bride'' by Margaret Atwood, it takes cancer, a heroin overdose, and falling six stories to finally kill Zenia. Even then it's debatable -- Zeniadebatable—Zenia's defining trait is her ability to convince people of things that aren't remotely true, and she'd already faked her own death once by the beginning of the book.

* Lorenzo "Happy" Morales from the ''[[CSI]]'' episode "Ending Happy". To elaborate: a drugged-up ex-boxer is fed seafood to which he is allergic, causing his throat to close up. He's then shot through the throat with a crossbow, allowing him to breathe again. He goes to attack someone, who hits him with a crowbar (hard enough to leave an impression). He's later injected with snake venom, and staggers off to rest on a chair by a swimming pool. The chair collapses under his weight and drops him into the pool, wherein he finally drowns.<br /><br />The entire episode basically consists of [[Your Princess Is in Another Castle]] as each suspect is cleared of actually landing the killing blow and ends with [[Crowning Moment of Funny|Doc Robbins sighing as he lists the various "mitigating factors" in his report]].

* On ''[[Soap]]'', Peter Campbell was killed this way -- stabbedway—stabbed, shot, strangled, suffocated and bludgeoned.

* In the [[Grand Finale]] movie of ''[[Kamen Rider Decade]]'', it takes a grand total of twelve simultaneous [[Finishing Move|Finishing Moves]]s (ten of which are performed by protagonist Riders in their respective [[Super Mode|Super Modes]]s) to destroy [[Kamen Rider ZO|Doras]].

** Attacked by the Gokaigers using past teams' [[Super Mode|Super Modes]]s, including Silver using ''another'' [[Finishing Move]] (one that draws upon the power of 15 past heroes, no less). All this really manages to do is [[Wrecked Weapon|destroy his sword]].

* In the Operation: Rimfire [[Mekton]] adventure, [[The Dragon|Lord Dremmond]]'s death scene description is, and I quote: ''"Tough as nails, he gets one dying speech"'' (followed by a '''twenty-seven''' lines such speech) ''before any PC can finish him off''. That would be not a [[Rasputinian Death]] but a vanilla [[Final Speech]], were not his death in the middle of a frantic close-quarters battle with the whole Rimfire flight crew gang-banging him with all sort of weapons, including lightsabers, in an alien spaceship full of monsters about to be psychically awakened by him -- whichhim—which really gives the PCs no reason at all to cease fire until well after he is [[Deader Than Dead]]. Which every group of players, routinely, does. After that, he detonates a hard-radiation nuke. And [[Brain Uploading|survives]].

** Commmissar Yarrick has a rule where if he loses his last wound, he has a 2/3 chance of getting up again the next round. As opposed to every other 40K example, he's but a humble guardsman (meaning he's an unmodified Human) pushing into his early 80's/late 70's. He's able to shrug off a hit that would permanently put down Marneus Calgar, the guy with a rule called God of War, and the Avatar of Khaine, the Embodiment of an actual God of War. And all of this is supposedly through [[Badass Normal|sheer determination and nothing else. ]]

* Clarence from ''[[Richard III]]'' is another [[Shakespeare|Shakespearean]]an example: He's stabbed several times before being drowned in a barrel of wine.

** Oh, and Big Boss: Had the crap beaten out of him by a professional boxer with super powers and enough strength to punch through concrete walls, electrically tortured by said boxer, then his eye was shot out, he fell down a waterfall into a river, where he nearly drowned, and later took on the boxer again, said boxer riding a nuclear tank, and his own mentor. 6 years later, he survives being caught within ground zero of the ignition launch sequence of the rocket booster of the ICBMG. Four years after that, Big Boss then managed to survive being electrically tortured at least nine times, three of the shocks even being significantly heightened in frequency. 31 years later, he faces his son in combat, taking several missiles to the face, before a nuke detonates his own fortress. He survives, rumoured to be a quadruple amputee, and is burned to death a few year later. MGS4 elaborates his past: he survived in a coma, went through surgery to replace about 50% of his body, and was in perfect working order only a few days later. <br /><br />Then, at the end of the fourth game, he shows up again, perfectly healthy. He's just that awesome. Then he dies of FOXDIE, but manages to endure before expiring in 15 minutes, despite being in pain from a viral-induced heart attack.

** Happens in ''[[Resident Evil 5]]'' to Wesker. Rocket blows up in his hand, overdosed on his meds, falls from a high-altitude aircraft, whatever you do to him in the boss fight, immersed in lava, ''two simultaneous rocket launchers to the face''. Probably qualifies as overkill, but, then again, there was no body... <ref>[[Word of God]] claims the missiles finally did him in. {{spoiler|Though one does wonder, seeing as what it took to kill Albert, what exactly it will take to kill off his perfectly immortal "brother" Alex Wesker}}.</ref>

* On the gameplay side of things, just about any video game character, from Mooks to [[Big Bad|Big Bads]]s to the main characters have deaths like this, considering just how much ammunition/magic/sharp pointy objects you have to pump into them in order to bring them down. [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|Specially if unneeded]].

** One bit character has a [[Rasputinian Death]] is [http://www.lfgcomic.com/page/25 this comic.]

* As said above, Rasputin's real death was the opposite of [[Truth in Television]]. [[History Marches On|His autopsy]], only made public after the end of the Cold War, showed that he was shot four times; one bullet entered his head and killed him instantly. Sadly, Prince Felix Yusupov's wildly implausible lies -- thelies—the cakes and ale, the hypothermia, the roaring up after being shot, all that '''factually inaccurate''' and patently ridiculous nonsense -- hasnonsense—has permeated popular culture so strongly that even on this page editors are falling over themselves to ''explain'' in great detail how Rasputin's death really was Rasputinian. Unfortunately for them, [[For Science!|autopsies don't lie]]: Rasputin ''never'' ate the cakes and ale, he ''never'' roared up after being shot, he ''never'' suffered from hypothermia. His death was quick, clean, and completely unmystical, and the lies told for decades about it were nothing but self-serving hyperbole invented by Yusupov so that he could live in comfort without having to sully his hands with nasty plebian ''work''. (Readers interested in the matter may wish to read Professor Kossorotov's 1916 autopsy as reviewed by Professor Derrick Pounder.) The true story, though, will continue to be ignored because [[Rule of Cool|the fake story is much cooler]].

## The condemned's arms and legs were then harnessed to several horses, which would proceed to pull in opposite directions. The objective here was to literally have his limbs ripped off by the horses, although if it was taking too long--andlong—and it could take hours--thehours—the executioner might help the horses along with an ax.

## Finally, the condemned's torso would be burned at the stake. Note that the last person to receive this punishment ([[wikipedia:Robert-Fran%C3%A7oisFrançois Damiens|Robert-François Damiens]], who had attempted to kill Louis XV in 1757) was still alive when the burning started.