: Re: What makes for a successful resurrection? If you've seen Avengers: Infinity War, you'll recall the line "No resurrections this time" being said in the scene just after the first (arguably second)

@Sent2472441

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In writing a resurrection, you need to balance several conflicting ideas: on the one hand, the death of the character should be a possibility. Otherwise, this death is cheap, meaningless. "He died, so what? He's going to come back." The last thing you want to evoke with a character's death is boredom.

On the other hand, the resurrection should be believable. It should make sense within the rules of your word. It should not be a Deus ex Machina.

And on the third hand (because two are never enough), the resurrection must not devalue the original death. If a character gave up their life for something, but later got their life back, then what have they given up? This was, for example, the main criticism against Star Trek: The Search for Spock: his dramatic death in The Wrath of Khan was devalued by his return.

So how do you balance those elements? I will present here some examples. Those are by no means the only options, but they should give you some ideas regarding what works, and why it does.

You can play off the Jesus angle: a character gives up their life, and then they are resurrected stronger, save the day, and spiritual something. Gandalf is a well-known character who gets this treatment. First, he is, of course, a Maia - an angelic being, thus while we might plausibly believe him dead, it is not impossible within the rules of the world for Gandalf to come back. Gandalf lays down his life fighting the Balrog, and that is a catastrophe - the Fellowship is rudderless, things are going wrong. Then, Behold! Gandalf comes back, it is an eucatastrophe - Gandalf's return is the turning point of the LotR. From then n, there are hardships, but things move towards victory.
Your character might be a skilled trickster or planner - someone for whom it would be plausible to simulate his own death and evade it. Loki is one such example. For such a character, as others point out, it would in fact be less plausible to die than to survive. Nonetheless, the shadow of doubt should be there for the reader, as well as the curiosity of how he evaded death, and when he's going to reappear.
You can create a world where death is cheap. The Order of the Stick, a comics set in a D&D world, works under the premise that characters can be resurrected, multiple times, as per D&D rules. This is used for multiple jokes. But when an MC actually dies, there's a whole plotline of the other characters trying to get the resources to get their friend resurrected, and a parallel plotline of what the MC is doing in the afterlife in the meantime. Because death is understood not to be final, drama must be derived from other sources.

All those examples, attack the aforementioned elements in different ways: if death is understood not to be final, it is not very dramatic, and so drama must come from other places. For your particular case, since you are going to have many resurrections, it is unlikely that the readers would continue to treat death in your novel as something that might stick. You'd have to provide other stakes - something that would stick.

As for a "cheap way out", the story of death and resurrection would have to have more in it than "I need the character out of the way" and "now I need him back". In some way, the whole experience would have to be meaningful. In the aforementioned Order of the Stick example, the one where death is cheapest, the MC is affected by the people he meets in the afterlife, while his team is affected by having to do things without him. The whole thing is thus an important part of the story. For Loki, the multiple death-evasions build up his persona as a trickster-god. Note that he is implied to have "somehow" evaded death, rather than having been dead. And Gandalf, of course, is a Jesus-figure.

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