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The spiciness variant could probably be folded into Lethal Chef or Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce. The caffeine variant: Klatchian Coffee?
My name is Freezer and my anti-drug is porn.
I can't say about the hot sauce, but I kind of suspect it'd work the same; for caffeine, it is what it is. If you take three drinks with 20mg of caffeine each, and pour them into a glass, you don't get the average caffeine, you get the total, 60mg. It's just in a bigger glass / amount of liquid.
Azaram: No, I'm talking about the tendency for authors to make the resulting combination stronger than any of its components, volume-for-volume (i.e., a glass of three 20mg caffeine drinks combined is as energizing as a glass of one 20mg caffeine drink, a glass of another 20mg caffeine drink, and a glass of a third 20mg caffeine drink). Like, a character who's used to chugging Mountain Dew takes a single gulp or chugs a single glass and it has a much stronger effect than a gulp or a glass of Mountain Dew.
Freezer: Looking at the Klatchian Coffee page, it seems that this might be a sister trope to Gargle Blaster (since there is a much less common alcoholic version of this trope that exists under Gargle Blaster, when "a bit of everything at the bar" drinks are treated as more alcoholic than they should be. Like I said, that version seems less common than the caffeine/spiciness versions, and is only a small fraction of gargle blasters in general).
Is this maybe YKTTW-able?
Edited by JET73L
I'd still say Klatchian Coffee fits. The PVP example is listed there, for instance.
Edited by Freezer My name is Freezer and my anti-drug is porn.
Possibly overlaps with Artistic License – Chemistry or Artistic License – Biology or something like that.
Okay, thanks. This needs some more rumination, but I may end up bringing this to YKTTW. I was really hoping it had already been troped, and that I simply couldn't find it, since I was more interested in the principles involved than the examples. Still going to keep an eye on this page in case it does have a page and someone mentions it in a reply.
Is this even a trope on the site? A trope similar to Oven Logic, in which ingredients (generally caffeinated or spicy) are treated as multiplicative instead of additive? For example, someone adds together [6 types of hot sauce/Mountain Dew, Espresso, and Red Bull], intending to make the [spiciest condiment/most energizing drink] possible, and it ends up [melting their tongue/sending them into Caffeine Bullet Time] even though it should only have the average of the [sauces' capsaicin/drinks' caffeine and sugar]?
The caffeine version is most common in New Media (especially works targeted towards gamers; PVP used to feature such a brew at least once a year), but the spiciness version is scattered throughout pretty much every genre I can think of.
Edited by JET73L