Basic Trope: An illness progresses unusually fast.
- Straight: Carl, who has a cold, coughs on Alice. After a few minutes, she starts coughing too.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice dies of AIDS less than a day after being infected with HIV.
- Alice sneezes in a crowded room. Seconds later, everyone near her start sneezing...and seconds after that, everyone near them start sneezing, and then everyone near them, etc.
- Alice gets rabies and instantly shows symptoms and starts biting people.
- Downplayed: Alice's cold symptoms begin within 12 hours of infection — shorter than usual, but not that unrealistic.
- Justified:
- Alice is hit by a biological weapon specifically designed to cause symptoms as quickly as possible.
- Alice was in poor health in the first place.
- Inverted:
- Alice never gets sick
- Alice gets septicemic plague (an illness that progresses fast in real life). It takes months for her symptoms to appear, and she lasts a year before it finally kills her.
- Subverted:
- Alice appeared sick, but was faking it.
- While it may appear that Alice has gone rapidly from healthy to frail, this was merely the final stage of an otherwise asymptomatic illness that a layman would misdiagnose as a usually slower progressing illness.
- Double Subverted: However, there is an underlying illness that she wasn't aware of at that time.
- Parodied: Alice gets sick by merely thinking about sickness.
- Zig Zagged: Several characters get sick after being exposed to a virus. It progresses at different speeds for different characters.
- Averted: Alice's illness has a realistic progression.
- Enforced: Alice's actress is sick.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, you got sick so fast."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: The Medic, Bob, knows his patients must be fine—they're either sick or they're not, there's no "in-between period". Therefore, he makes diagnoses easier.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "Did I catch my cold from that guy? If so, I caught it fast!"
- Conversed: "Why do these characters get sick so fast?!"
Back to Instant Illness
