Playing With / Magic Antidote

Basic Trope: Cures and antidotes work instantly and reverse any damage caused by the illness/poison.

• Straight: Molly was poisoned with Killemall powder, which kills in exactly 48 hours, 47 hours and 55 minutes ago. She's feeble, but when she takes some Etoditna, she quickly regains her strength.
• Exaggerated:
  • She was poisoned 47 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds ago and is suffering from high fever, Tainted Veins, purple skin, torturous pains, extreme weakness to the point of nearly being unconscious, and slightly discoloured nails. Luckily, Hiro arrives Just in Time and drips some Etoditna on her arm. Molly is completely cured in a second, and demonstrates it by single-handedly curb stomping the Big Bad and Cthulhu at the same time. For good measure, it also gives Molly a lifelong immunity to Killemall powder.
  • The Etoditna can revive dead Killemall powder victims (but obviously not anyone that died of something else).
  • The Etoditna is a Magic Antidote to everything.
• Downplayed: Molly was poisoned 42 hours before taking the Etoditna and still has to rest a bit before she recovers fully.
• Justified:
  • The Etoditna has magical properties.
  • Pretty much everything else in Molly's universe has No Ontological Inertia, so why should poisons be different?
  • The Etoditna allows Molly to use her powerful Healing Factor.
  • The antidote, which neutralizes the poison, is mixed with Healing Potion, which reverses the damage that has already been done.
• Inverted:
  • Perfect Poison
  • The Etoditna is really weak, to the point of nearly being completely useless.
• Subverted:
  • It's the end of a Find the Cure! episode. The heroes have found the Etoditna, which they have been told will heal Molly completely. They find her and make her drink it, seemingly Just in Time... but she dies.
  • Molly takes some Etoditna and seems fairly OK, but she leaves the heroes, explaining that she needs to spend some time at hospital because she needs to recover from the damage caused by the poison.
  • After what happened in Straight, it turns out that Molly was faking the poisoning all along.
• Double Subverted:
  • Then she wakes up from her Disney Death ten minutes later, fully healed.
  • However, this turns out to be a lie. Molly is just doing something that she has to hide from her teammates.
  • However, when Lance finds himself in the same situation that Molly feigned, the Etoditna cures him instantly.
• Parodied:
  • Molly takes some Etoditna. It cures her cold immediately.
  • A Show Within a Show features a fictional commercial for the Etoditna, including a long list of dubious side effects and the slogan "It saves your life, or your money back".
  • Forget about having to take it, the Etoditna cures anyone instantly if they just look at it.
  • Molly is suffering from high fever, Tainted Veins, purple skin, torturous pains, extreme weakness to the point of nearly being unconscious, and slightly discoloured nails. She takes some Etoditna. All it ever does is getting rid of the discolouration of her nails almost immediately. Instead of worrying about the other symptoms or her impending death, Molly is overjoyed that her nails look nice again.
• Zig Zagged:
  • Killemall powder is said to have a highly effective antidote, the Etoditna, but it only works before Tainted Veins occur, which is 24 hours after being poisoned. When Tainted Veins occur, the victim is said to be doomed. Alice takes some Etoditna five minutes before the Tainted Veins would have occured and ends up completely fine, but it doesn't matter because it turns out that Alice was immune to Killemall powder in the first place and feigned her other symptoms. When the non-immune Bob takes some Etoditna 23 hours and 55 minutes after being poisoned, he develops Tainted Veins and apparently dies, but returns fully healed later. However, Charles takes the Etoditna almost immediately after being poisoned, and dies anyway because the cure is unreliable.
  • Some poisons have Magic Antidotes, some have more realistic antidotes, and some don't have antidotes at all.
  • Molly takes some Etoditna. It keeps her going for a while after the 48-hour limit, but she dies after defeating the Big Bad. It turns out that she died of the wounds that the Big Bad inflicted on her. Later, it's revealed that the damage caused by the poisoning contributed to Molly's death, and that she would have survived the wounds if it weren't for it.
• Averted:
  • When Molly is poisoned, she's hospitalized. She may or may not return weeks/months later.
  • Nobody seeks any treatment for Molly's poisoning because they know there is none. Molly herself does The Last Dance in her final hours, maybe finally treating her poisoning like a Convenient Terminal Illness.
  • The Etoditna is an antidote to Killemall powder, but isn't unrealistically effective, and is just part of the treatment for the poisoning.
• Enforced:
  • "I don't care if this conclusion isn't realistic. We can't end this Find the Cure! episode with Molly dying. And of course Molly has to be near death when she's saved Just in Time. How else are we going to build dramatic tension?" "That plot's probably fine. Realism isn't the goal of a series like this."
  • The author originally wrote a Find the Cure! story where Molly takes the antidote a few minutes before death, but Surprisingly Realistic Outcome and she dies from her internal injuries anyway. The executives react negatively to this plot^note Maybe they found the "Shaggy Dog" Story ending too depressing. Maybe they found the sudden realism out of place. Maybe they want to keep Molly around because she's well-liked and serves a useful role in the series. Maybe it's just a toy company wanting Molly alive so they can give her more costumes and make more toys of her. and make the author change the ending so that Molly survives.
  • "The Poison status effect would be really annoying if it acted like realistic poison, so letting the antidotes work instantly is an Acceptable Break from Reality. And considering that we're using a fantasy setting with numerous unrealistic damage tropes in play already, it's not like anyone will be calling for realistic poisons anyway."
• Lampshaded:
  Molly: It's really not probable that an antidote can be that effective.
  Hiro: Shut up, Molly, and be glad you're alive.
  • "Wow, this stuff sure works quickly."
• Invoked: A benevolent witch who specializes in healing potions makes the Etoditna.
• Exploited: It can't really be exploited in any meaningful way, unless taking the Magic Antidote and getting cured counts.
• Defied:
  • The villain that poisoned Molly chose a poison with no known antidote.
  • Before poisoning Molly, the villain destroys all the Etoditna he could find.
  • "Killemall" is a cocktail of the nastiest poisons known. Etoditna neutralizes one of them, but the otherwise inert product further reacts with the other poisons, making it all worse.
• Discussed:
  • "I hope this works quickly."
  • Hiro has found the Etoditna and returns to Molly, only to find out that she died less than a minute ago. Hiro is broken because he thinks he could have saved his friend by arriving just one minute earlier, but Lance tries to comfort him by telling him that the poison probably caused irreversible and deadly damage a long time before Hiro came. Hiro doesn't believe him, and they start arguing.
• Conversed: "More unrealistically effective antidotes. Well, I guess this series isn't realistic anyway, so who cares?"
• Implied: Molly gets poisoned. In the end of an episode, Hiro gets a cure for her. The next episode, Molly is fully healed.

• Played For Laughs: The Etoditna is powerful enough to essentially reduce all poisonings to a slap on the wrist, but whenever it's mentioned, it's someone complaining about how awful it tastes.
• Played For Drama:
  • The Etoditna is powerful and rare. For that reason, it's reserved for important people, such as royalty, in case they need it. In addition, some not-that-important rich people use bribery to get their hands on it. Molly isn't considered "valuable" enough to receive the Etoditna, and the heroes face the moral decision of whether they should try to steal it.
  • Two or more people are poisoned, and there's only enough Etoditna for one of them...

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