Basic Trope: Giving someone a sedative instantly knocks them out.
- Straight: Alice sticks Bob with a Tranquilizer Dart and he immediately falls asleep.
- Exaggerated: Bob only touches the dart; it doesn't actually pierce his skin and he still falls asleep.
- Downplayed:
- Bob goes down when the dart hits him, but he's not quite unconscious — just really groggy.
- Short skinny Bob goes down with a single dart, large muscular Charlie needs a couple more before going down.
- Justified:
- The sedative is meant for someone/something much larger than Bob.
- Bob's doctor injects him with an unknown substance, but it becomes clear that it was a sedative when Bob falls asleep seconds later.
- Alice is trained in anesthesiology - she knows Bob's correct dosage and how to administer it to him in a way that would knock him out quickly.
- Inverted:
- Alice injects a drug into a sleeping Bob, which wakes him up instantly.
- Bob is injected with a sedative that should realistically knock him out, but it has no effect.
- It takes much longer for the sedative to take effect than it would in real life.
- Subverted: But it turns out Bob was just pretending to be asleep.
- Double Subverted: So Alice shoots him with a few more darts and then he really does fall asleep.
- Parodied:
- Alice gives Bob a relaxing cup of tea and he collapses on the floor, asleep.
- Alice presses a rag to Bob's face, and he immediately collapses unconscious. Only the rag didn't have anything on it.
- A tranquilizer dart whizzes past Bob and he falls asleep.
- Zig Zagged: Alice tries to hit Bob with a tranquilizer dart, but she missed. She tries again with a different dart, and she hits him, but there was no sedative. After she runs out of darts, it turns out that Carol the Wizard was playing a prank on her, and she hits Bob successfully with a dart.
- Averted:
- Bob goes into a loud panic attack when hit by a dart, instead of instantly sleeping...
- Alice hits Bob with a tranquilizer dart, but he doesn’t fall asleep, because there was no sedative attached.
- The dart doesn't affect Bob at all.
- Alice hits Bob with a tranquilizer dart. Bob stumbles around for a minute before collapsing.
- Bob takes about 30 seconds to go down, which is a bit faster than sedatives would normally work, but still not necessarily instantaneous.
- Enforced: There is a plot-related reason as to why Bob needs to be knocked out instantly, or no time or reason to show Bob losing consciousness over several minutes.
- Lampshaded: "Shouldn't these darts take longer to work?"
- Invoked:
- Alice uses a heavier dose of a sedative than someone of Bob's size would need so that he'll go down much quicker.
- The sedative uses magic.
- The sedative uses more advanced fast-acting drugs.
- The sedative is paired with a paralytic; Bob is stunned for a few minutes before going unconscious.
- The sedative was administered by way of a Cartoon Tranquilizer Dart to invoke the Placebo Effect for the first few minutes while the actual sedative gets to work.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: "You want something that knocks someone out in seconds? I'm an apothecary, not a miracle worker."
- Discussed: When Alice and Bob's child is taken by a gorilla at the zoo, Alice suggests the zookeeper shoots the gorilla with a tranquilizer. The zookeeper tells her it will give the gorilla just enough time to tear the child to pieces.
- Conversed: "It's always rather weird when someone's sedated in fiction and they become unconscious in a matter of seconds." "Well, it'd be kind of boring if they just spent a while losing consciousness, don't you think?"
- Deconstructed: The sedative knocks Bob out almost immediately — and then it turns out that the dose is stronger than necessary and it ends up killing him.
- Reconstructed: Bob is hit with a paralytic while they have a respirator on standby, and he's quickly moved to it: more equipment and expertise for a roughly equivalent result.
- Implied: Alice hits Bob with a mysterious dart. A few minutes later, in the next scene, we see Bob sleeping on a couch, but it is unknown if it was a result of Alice’s dart.
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