Drakevarg
Troubadour
Ultimately it's gonna boil down to the author's personal outlook on the world. Personally I think the idea of anyone having "seen it all" requires a pretty shallow understanding of history, or a crippling lack of imagination on the part of the immortal. Life is busy, it only repeats itself if you watch it from a distance and ignore all the details. Someone who has seen empires rise and fall a dozen times didn't stare at them from a hilltop. They were in there, eating the food and talking to the people and watching the plays. Even after a thousand lifetimes, all of those little things would still have an impact on them.
I've watched hundreds of movies in my lifetime, and at least dozens of books. And yeah, I see patterns, but I never got bored of the basic concept of movies just because I assume "well I basically know how they're going to go anyway." And life is FAR more detailed and FAR more emotionally involved than any consumable media is. Even if emotional detachment eventually kicked in (which is something I've never bought, anyone whose never lost a friend and had to make new ones is approximately 14 years old) and the immortal started looking at companions more like pets than equals... I love my cat. I know I'm going to outlive it five times over but I enjoy my time with it and I'd rip the throat out of someone who hurt it.
Life is not boring and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't lived it properly. When I say an immortal person is going to be a lot of different people I don't mean that one century they're going to be Steve and then another century they're going to be Paul, who is nothing like Steve. I equated it earlier to being akin to a goth phase or something similar. One identity might still be recognizable to another, but we're talking glacial shifts over an arbitrarily long lifespan. Little things, like "was into disco for 12 years" or "really really liked pudding" or "went through a period of depression and got all smug and detached because it was easier than making and losing friends."
You pile on these little things over centuries or millenia of time, and those slow, tiny spectrum shifts will produce someone completely unrecognizable. Not because they woke up one morning and decided to change, or because they went through some trauma and reevaluated their life, but out of sheer, slow, Ship of Theseus change. Fashions change, tastes in music and food change, friends come and go, political circumstances change. An immortal who solidified their worldview would speak in a dead language, wear togas because these newfangled "pants" were a stupid gimmick, and refuse to listen to any instrument more modern than the pan flute.
I've watched hundreds of movies in my lifetime, and at least dozens of books. And yeah, I see patterns, but I never got bored of the basic concept of movies just because I assume "well I basically know how they're going to go anyway." And life is FAR more detailed and FAR more emotionally involved than any consumable media is. Even if emotional detachment eventually kicked in (which is something I've never bought, anyone whose never lost a friend and had to make new ones is approximately 14 years old) and the immortal started looking at companions more like pets than equals... I love my cat. I know I'm going to outlive it five times over but I enjoy my time with it and I'd rip the throat out of someone who hurt it.
Life is not boring and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't lived it properly. When I say an immortal person is going to be a lot of different people I don't mean that one century they're going to be Steve and then another century they're going to be Paul, who is nothing like Steve. I equated it earlier to being akin to a goth phase or something similar. One identity might still be recognizable to another, but we're talking glacial shifts over an arbitrarily long lifespan. Little things, like "was into disco for 12 years" or "really really liked pudding" or "went through a period of depression and got all smug and detached because it was easier than making and losing friends."
You pile on these little things over centuries or millenia of time, and those slow, tiny spectrum shifts will produce someone completely unrecognizable. Not because they woke up one morning and decided to change, or because they went through some trauma and reevaluated their life, but out of sheer, slow, Ship of Theseus change. Fashions change, tastes in music and food change, friends come and go, political circumstances change. An immortal who solidified their worldview would speak in a dead language, wear togas because these newfangled "pants" were a stupid gimmick, and refuse to listen to any instrument more modern than the pan flute.