A lot of those seem not noteworthy. The ones where the delayed effect causes severe issues for the sedater in-universe could be kept, I guess.
It's one of those tropes that are only noteworthy because it deviates from reality. That makes it so when it is done more realistically it tends to stand out. It's maybe not quite at the Space Is Noisy level of omnipresence but it is close.
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Right. The thing about Instant Sedation is that it is a trope by virtue of the deviation it represents from reality. When sedation works as it would in real life, it's not a trope in the same way. Things Happen Exactly As They Would In Reality is rarely tropable unless the converse is truly omnipresent.
Edited by Fighteer on May 14th 2022 at 1:18:09 PM
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And with those types of tropes it becomes a thing where an example might be "the character drops within seconds, but appears to remain semi conscious even if unable to respond to the attacker." It's not completely straight, not really a subversion, far from an aversion but still slightly more realistic than other uses.
The danger is such a trope becomes any time someone gets tranquilized and the varying amounts of time before it takes effect, but without the unrealistic qualifier of the trope it would be People Sit on Chairs.
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I would consider those examples of Instant Sedation being Downplayed.
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Some of them, but most of them are actual aversions:
- Averted in the novel, where the big Tyrannosaurus rex (yes, there are two Tyrannosaurs) gets shot multiple times with tranqs but it takes her over an hour to feel it. In fact, she nearly eats the kids while everyone's wondering if she was even hit.
Regarding the Jurassic Park example, I would count that as a subversion. What happened was when the T-Rex was first shot, it was assumed that the dart missed because it didn't seem affected by the dart. It was only later that it was realized that the dart had hit it, the tranquilizer was just taking a while to take hold.
Because the trope is centered around realism interfering with storytelling, part of the problem becomes how, exactly, the trope can be played with. It is basically two ideas fused together, that neutralizing someone with some form of sedative is A) reliable and B) quick even though neither is particularly realistic. So is subverting it calculating the dosage needed for the target so they will collapse without any side effects and the patient hero can move along without being caught, or does it mean the target doesn't respond anywhere near fast enough to be practical and they set off an alarm?
Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!
A lot of the examples listed on Instant Sedation are aversions.
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