#permadeath usually happens bc of something chronic and incurable

[raintailed]

Yeah, the canon cycle doesn't click for me and the idea of it being split timeline stuff makes my brain start to melt (I HAAATE sorting out timeline stuff)

My personal lore has it where creatures (generally higher-order animals? idk) tend to respawn after death like in a video game. Except under certain conditions they Die Forever, and if a creature is too young to be connected to the Cycle they will Always Die Forever.

Perhaps creatures still have the desire to survive because 1. dying is very scary and unpleasant and 2. you never know if it will be your final death. And because all things will eventually permadie, then those things must still reproduce.

And then there's the Great Cycle, where if you permadie eventually your soul is reincarnated, and you don't remember your past incarnation aside from some weird deja vu. (Unless you overdose on karma flowers? Idk) And the Ascensionist philosophy is that this is Inherently Bad, because Life Is Suffering and there is No Escape because even if you permadie you will still wake up again.

With Moon's "you will just wake up again" dialogue with Hunter, I think she wasn't sure of whether Hunter would wake up after respawning or reincarnating. Probably reincarnating, since both iterators and ancients have put an excessive amount of time into researching *when* creatures permadie and Moon is pretty sure Hunter doesn't have much time left as Hunter.

And then death typically being temporary impacts a ton of other stuff, including the societies of ancients, scavs, and slugcats, particularly by making the offense of murder more mild??? It's hard to sort out but it is also interesting to think about

Also I have have a particular pet peeve with some RW headcanons going off the idea that nothing actually dies. It always falls apart for me. The more I think about it the less realistic it feels.

Death wouldn't be a worry at all, reproduction would mean nothing, why would you even bother to survive at all if you could never die?

The natural urges are all urges every creature has because of the pressure to SURVIVE and REPRODUCE.