It's Resurrection Saturday today! What better occasion then than this to talk about the resurrection trope?
Usually, cancelling out a character's death is not a good thing to do in a story. It undermines the weight of the stakes involved and/or the sacrifice or seriousness of the character's death and what it signifies. It's not as powerful to die for the common good if you get to revive later, right? It's more serious if it's permanent.
But as all general rules, this too can be successfully broken.
Sometimes, coming back from the dead is just as important or powerful as having gone through death. The stakes remain as high as before, and the audience is still worried about the safety and well-being and life of the characters, or at least the rest of the characters. 
Nobody thinks Gandalf's return is a cop-out, for example.
The secret in making a resurrection count as a positive in a story is to give it more meaning than ‘the author couldn’t bear to keep this character dead'. The possibility of beating death has to be baked into the worldbuilding in advance in some way.
There are two ways to go about it:
Either coming back from the dead is extremely difficult and rare and reserved for a very special set of circumstances (see Gandalf above) or
Coming back from the dead is the norm, which is known to the characters as well as the audience. Death therefore becomes a temporary hurdle, but its qualities are important enough that every character wants to avoid it. For example, death is permanent unless certain things are done to bring the character back with handicaps for those that bring them back or for the character, or for all the parties involved. This is common in Chinese fantasy (c-dramas) where a dead character can be resurrected but it takes a ton of time (usually from a few hundred years to millennia if the story is about gods), significantly alters the person being resurrected (may cause memory loss, powers loss, prolonged weakness, etc), and requires an incredibly high toll from the person or persons doing the resurrecting.
Therefore dying is not something anyone wants to go through and death still represents significant sacrifice.
And that's where the crux of the matter is: death has to mean significant, important sacrifice. Death has to take something that can't be restored easily (takes a lot of feats to regain) or at all. Death has to alter you enough that you're not exactly the same as before in some way.
Then, and only then, can you come back from the dead without ruining the story.
Have you ever had a character come back from the dead in your stories?
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Back from the Dead
Tantz_Aerine at 2:02AM, April 19, 2025
6 likes!
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EssayBee at 7:02PM, April 21, 2025
Never Dead Ned from A. Lee Martinez's "In the Company of Ogres" was a fun character. Poor guy was a soldier, but not a very good one, so he knew he was gonna die and then come back to life to die another day. (This was played for comic effect and was entertaining.) Then there was Abel from Sandman--forever to be killed by his brother, only to come back to life to be killed again. I suppose it's darkly comic, but the constant terror Abel lives in always seemed pretty nightmarish to me.
Chickfighter at 6:56AM, April 19, 2025
I recently had a dead character reappear in a story, but my solution was slightly unusual. The character did not come back to life as it were, but instead was present to help in the underworld when other characters traveled there. So that character had to stay there at end of story meaning another tough moment in leaving her behind. But generally I'm a dead is dead hardass. I'm the sort who might even complain about Gandalf. LOL All of which is different than having a character appear to have died but really hasn't it and there is no physical proof that they did.
usedbooks at 4:53AM, April 19, 2025
@ozoneocean: I LOVE a time loop story. They can have the most traumatizing events because they know they can rewind. They can set up the most happiest endings, the most horrible ones, or the most bittersweet realizations. And the well-done ones increase the stakes as they approach climax. Like, yeah, they undid death a few times but are now unraveling the fabric of the universe. My favorites are Russian Doll (Netflix), Erased (anime), and Life is Strange (video game -- but not the sequels). Two of them are about serial killers. So, lots of death to talk of. The 999 game series is pretty timeline/death trippy too, but not as linear in story telling.
Ozoneocean at 4:41AM, April 19, 2025
Vampires are a great example of constant resurrection when they're done correctly. Horror films do it really badly with characters like Jason and Freddie because there are no rules, it's just whatever. That is the MOST shit version of resurrections because it's all down to the whim of the writers and nothing else. Groundhog day and other timeloop stories are an awesome way to do it because you know things will reset and they do perfectly.
Ozoneocean at 4:38AM, April 19, 2025
I wish characters could come back from the dead in real life T_T
bravo1102 at 4:34AM, April 19, 2025
Interstellar Battle Girls has resurrection because of the advanced medicine of the culture and to show that "fight to the DEATH!" has lost most of its meaning. Also many of fighters in the ring only go for unconscious that can't be readily discerned from death. Also, too many resuscitation and there is brain damage. This is part of one the prevailing themes which is loss of self and what is this "self"? It's also It's twisting the "fight to the death" trope or even over turning it.
usedbooks at 3:46AM, April 19, 2025
I've had characters fake their deaths or quietly vanish awhile after a scrape with near-death. So it seemed like they were resurrected. But it wasn't a changing my mind situation. It was planned at the start. One character came back with some significant health issues from a head injury, and she had to adopt a new identity and continues to lay low because she's still "dead" to some people. Actually, I have an entire little club of fake dead people run by the fake dead father of a protagonist who still thinks he's dead, so that's kinda a theme in UB. Real death is real death, though. (I have characters dream about dead characters, though. And flashbacks and such.)
InkyMoondrop at 2:26AM, April 19, 2025
Yeah, I killed off the MC of my comic and brought her back later. But that was very much a plot device and basically used to change everyone else around her due to the trauma and grief. I've had a couple of other characters killed off that returned later, but they returned either in flashbacks or in the afterlife, so it wasn't like they got resurrected. I liked this solution: they were still significant parts of the story, even though for most part they were already dead.