Basic Trope: Villain's bloodless, all-purpose torture device.
- Straight: Malignant Blackthorn zaps Charlie with a laser and inflicts pain.
- Exaggerated: Charlie is willing to divulge all of his secrets after the first second of use, and suffers chronic pains for the rest of his life.
- Downplayed: The agony beam is just an accessory that helps the real torture along.
- Justified:
- The agony beam, through some method, is capable of ensuring that all information given in response to its use is true, making it more reliable than more mundane methods.
- The villain is able to avoid accusations of torture because the agony beam leaves no marks.
- The agony beam has no risk of accidentally killing the victim.
- Inverted:
- Blackthorn instead has a device to relieve pain, which he uses to stop the heroes from torturing him properly on capture.
- Blackthorn has a beam that provides euphoric pleasure upon anybody shot by it. He uses it on the heroes to get them addicted to the beam, then interrogates them with the promise of providing more of that pleasure.
- Nightshade has a device that results in a bloody and gory mess - that is completely painless - as confirmed by Charlie after he regenerated.
- Subverted: Blackthorn caps Charlie, but it does nothing.
- Double Subverted: ...immediately. However, a few moments later...
- Parodied:
- Blackthorn has a Tickle Beam.
- Upon being zapped with the agony beam, Charlie stoically complains that it's rather dehumanizing to be punished with a means of directly giving negative feedback to the underlying stimulus response machine, and asks to be treated with a bit more respect next time. Blackthorn is very annoyed by this.
- Zig Zagged: Blackthorn's agony beam is actually a pleasure beam, Charlie hates pleasure, but it turns out he was faking it.
- Averted: No such device is ever brought up.
- Enforced: "This is a kid's show, so no guns or knives, and no blood. Use some sort of agony beam."
- Lampshaded: "How do you shoot someone with pain, anyway?"
- Invoked: Blackthorn builds an agony beam as a torture tool.
- Exploited: Blackthorn knows that his enemies are hoping that his means of torture will be a bloody affair to win sympathy points from outsiders, so he creates a bloodless torture device to look better by comparison.
- Defied: Blackthorn patiently explains that an agony beam is not possible at this level of technology, which is why he's using old-fashioned regular torture.
- Discussed: "Do not worry, this won't cause you to bleed... I have other means to torture you..."
- Conversed: "You know, the person who is going out of their way to create a bloodless torture device is probably just as if not more screwed up than somebody who just used a chainsaw or something."
- Played For Laughs: Blackthorn hits Charlie with the Agony Beam. He loves it so much he makes a point of stealing it during his rescue for recreational use.
- Deconstructed: The audience is shown a scene of Blackthorn brainstorming new devices. He decides on an agony beam. The scene further explores how such a device would carry out its function. It could assault the target with unbearable guilt or misery, it could cause the target's pain receptors to flare up without any actual injury, etc.
- Reconstructed:
- Blackthorn doesn't reserve the agony beam solely for torture. It's also quite effective at stunning his enemies in the heat of combat.
- The agony beam has a "nocebo effect" so powerful it can trick its target's brain into dying, giving Blackthorn a new murder tool. He finds it most useful for when the target is alone (since they will be in too much pain to fight back) and when leaving behind a clean crime scene is more important than a quick kill.
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