Phlebotinium powered by deeply unethical means in Western Animation.
- Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers has the Psychocrypt. Literally sucks out Life Energy to create Slaverlords through which the Queen can see and hear. In this fashion, she can keep direct control over her armies and her crumbling Empire. The Queen of the Crowns already hunted the Gherkin race to near-extinction in her thirst to create Slaverlords. Then, she discovers humans, who are ideal specimens to create Slaverlords. A good deal of the Rangers' job is to keep the Queen from obtaining more humans for the Crypt. The process, as seen in "New Frontier" & "Psychocrypt" is also horrendously painful.
- Adventure Time:
- In "Power Animal", Finn is kidnapped by gnomes to power a device designed to flip over the Earth's crust.
- "Bonnie and Neddy" introduces Princess Bubblegum's brother Neddy, a reclusive dragon-like monster who hides in a cave under the Candy Kingdom and produces the "candy juice" used by the rest of the kingdom. Though Neddy is hidden away more for his own protection, as he's very nervous and sensitive, and is deeply afraid of everything that isn't his sister. He otherwise seems quite content to stay in the dungeons and feed off sap from the roots of the giant candy tree.
- In Argai: The Prophecy, Queen Dark gains and maintains her immortality by stealing the youth of several maidens throughout time and keeping them in eternal slumber.
- The third episode of Ben 10: Omniverse features a human gang kidnapping Nosedeenians in order to power alien technology.
- In The Fairly OddParents!: Fairy World is powered by belief in fairies. It would be Clap Your Hands If You Believe, if not for one little issue: the only belief that apparently matters is Crocker's. A man who does not remember having fairies, but knows they exist and is completely obsessed with them. Fairy World is thus powered by the spazzes of a forsaken former godkid. To prevent all of Fairy World disintegrating should Crocker die (having magically guaranteed that he'll never get over his issues), several more Crocker-alikes are given his obsession. Although from how it's phrased it's possible that they just started harvesting from people who were already obsessed.
- The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack features a boat powered by angsty children. The children are also used as cannonballs.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the book The Journal of the Two Sisters, it is revealed that the act of raising the sun and the moon every day used to be this. Both the sun and the moon are obviously necessary for life on the planet to survive, but they won't move on their own. Teams of unicorn volunteers would work together to do the job, but their magic would be drained and result in Rapid Aging. When Celestia and Luna found out about this, they proved their power by doing it by themselves (Celestia raised the sun, Luna the moon) with no side effects, and restored the lost magic to all the volunteer unicorns to boot. By the time of the cartoon, most ponies have forgotten that there was ever anything difficult about the process at all since Celestia has been handling both the sun and the moon by herself for a thousand years.
- Ninjago: Dragons Rising: The city of Imperium is a technologically advanced metropolis where everything is powered by magic forcibly drained from dragons. The citizens are fine with this, as they see dragons as mindless beasts.
- Over the Garden Wall: The Beast of the Unknown exists because of a Soul Jar lantern kept lit with oil from the inside of Edelwood trees, which are grown from the souls of lost children who submit to the forest.
- Rick and Morty:
- Shielding the outside of Evil Rick's fortress are hundreds of tortured Morties to prevent the other Ricks from tracking him down. According to "our" Rick this is obscene overkill since you can get the same effect with "five Morties and a jumper cable." ...And That Would Be Wrong.
- In the Season 5 finale, Evil Morty, who was puppeteering Evil Rick during the above example, doubles down on this and uses the blood of all the Mortys on the Citadel as well as their Ricks to power his warp drive and break through the wall Rick put around their section of the multiverse.
- Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends: Vampire crime lord Hanek eventually finds a way to create teleportation devices. The catch is that they are powered by the life-force of banshees, and doing this repeatedly will kill said banshee.
- A more mundane and light-hearted example found in The Simpsons: Homer is forced to turn a gigantic capstan, with a guy with a whip egging him on... in order to operate a rotating display in the break room.Homer: Ow! D'oh! After lunch, can I whip you?
Slave-driver: [cheerfully] Nope.
Homer: Oh, no fair. Ow!
[pan to the plant lunch hall, where Lenny and Carl observe the rotating dessert table]
Lenny: Hmm. Wonder what makes it turn.
Carl: Who cares? - Steven Universe:
- It is implied that many Gem artifacts, including the Desert Glass and the pyramid in "Serious Steven", are powered by Gems. Lapis Lazuli herself powered a magical mirror, though this was meant as an interrogation device which Pearl mistook as some sort of database.
- The Cluster, a planet-busting weapon that Homeworld planted at the center of the Earth, is made up of the forced fusions of millions of Gems who were shattered during the Gem War.
- Starscream's clone technology of Transformers: Animated involves the use of protoforms, which can be described as fetal or pre-natal Cybertronians.
- The Venture Bros.:
- Doctor Venture's family is trapped one by one inside his latest invention, a simulator known as the "joy can" that grants the user's fondest desires. One of its vital components was the heart of an orphan. Doctor Orpheus's disgusted response became the new Trope Namer. Better yet, Doctor Orpheus only asked for ONE of the "unorthodox parts" of the machine, implying the other parts Dr. Venture used were MORE morally questionable.
- Richard Impossible, patriarch of a Fantastic Four expy, averts Reed Richards Is Useless and uses his brother-in-law's pyrokinesis to power his tower. That same brother-in-law can feel his own flames, and Impossible gets called out/congratulated by one of the series' most effective villains for doing the most evil thing he'd ever seen.
- Wakfu:
- Qilby the Traitor stole the heart of the Mechasm Orgonax and used it to create the Eliacube. The literally heartless Mechasm grew up to be figuratively heartless as a result and became hellbent on wiping out organic life (or at the very least, killing every last Eliatrope in the universe).
- Nox was willing to drain the wakfu of entire civilizations and commit wholesale genocide without batting an eye in order to use it to power up the Eliacube and unleash a Reset Button that would allow him to save his long-dead family and erase all the atrocities he committed to get it done.
- In Young Justice Phantoms, the Green Lantern Corps' analysis
of the Kaizer-Thrall, an Apokolyptian weapon confiscated by New Genesis, revealed that it not only possessed sentience but was, in fact, a human child. Miss Martian later established contact with it, learning that the child was Danny Chase, a trafficked metahuman who was handed to Desaad for his living brain to be used in the creation of the weapon.
