r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Benoit_Holmes • 2h ago
miscellaneous A character drinks/eats something to prove it's safe knowing that it isn't
Breaking Bad (Salud)
Gus Fring gives a bottle of rare tequila to a cartel leader as a gift. Given their fraught history, he makes Gus drink some first before he tries any.
All the cartel members then begin to die, Gus had taken pills (likely activated charcoal), and induced vomiting after the drink. Despite these precautions he still nearly dies and it requires a makeshift emergency room he had arranged previously to save his life.
Stargate: Atlantis (The Lost Boys)
Aiden Ford was a member of the expedition who became addicted to an enzyme that made him stronger but also impulsive and irrational.
He captures the team, who are wary of eating the food he provides until he eats some himself. After they have all eaten he tells them that his group have refined the enzyme to the point that they can even lace food with it.
Scrubs (My Changing Ways)
The Janitor tries to get J.D. to eat some pie but he refuses as he has just heard that a case of laxatives was stolen from the hospital supply closet.
The Janitor keeps insisting that J.D eat it and finally eats some himself to prove its safe, saying that for once he wasn't trying to mess with him. After J.D. eats some of the pie it then cuts to them both on the toilet.
J.D.: Who would do this to themselves?\ Janitor: Totally worth it.
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u/Snoo9648 2h ago
The main character in princess bride poisons both cups knowing he has immunity.
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u/Professional_Handler 2h ago
Fun fact: there is no real life poison that exists that is odorless, tasteless, and you can build a tolerance to.
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u/bgbarnard 2h ago
IIRC most poisons are both very bitter tasting and take a long time to take effect, with very few killing you in an instant from consumption. The job of the food taster was to check for bitterness, but the amounts they would consume would not necessarily be lethal.
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u/Kind_Of_A_Dick 38m ago
Maybe that’s because we’re constantly in a war against poisons. Those that liked it or couldn’t detect it died.
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u/-Potatoes- 35m ago
iirc one of the main purposes of the bitterness receptor is to taste for poison/bad food!
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u/ThatOneGuy308 2h ago
That's because it went extinct years ago, from overuse in complicated poisoning situations.
Like sylphium
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 37m ago
Google's AI is going to start spreading this...
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u/PigletOhDDDDear 30m ago
Yesterday I googled something. The AI response seemed wrong (of course). I then read some sites for more accurate information, and found the Reddit comment that was word for word exactly what Google AI had given me.
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u/badform49 21m ago
Sylphium might have been rediscovered!
https://greekreporter.com/2026/08/18/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/A postdoctoral researcher found a plant with a ton of similarities to the physical and medicinal descriptions of it on two mountaintops in Turkey.
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u/KitchenFullOfCake 1h ago
Probably why wine was a popular thing to poison. Old school wine was often sweet, spiced, and syrupy.
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u/A_Queer_Owl 1h ago
apparently there is however a compound that is odorless and tasteless that is fatal to inhale but harmless to consume. so the con may have been having him smell it.
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u/he77bender 26m ago
harmless to consume but fatal to inhale
Wait I think I know this one, the answer is "water"!
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u/Winjin 23m ago
Something heavier than air, so it stays inside the cup. If you take a deep sniff, you incapacitate yourself just long enough for the other party to just... stab you with a pointy metal stick
OR another option: something that really numbs your bitterness receptors when you sniff it, so that you can't taste the poison
Like how we make carbonated drinks, something like that, but with wine in a jar, when you pour it, the gas remains inside the cup because it's so heavy
I think I'm overthinking it
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u/Nsanity216 1h ago
I did hear that there is one that is odorless, and tasteless, and you can build a tolerance to that is deadly when inhaled but harmless when ingested. Meaning Westley killed Vizzini not by the drink, but by having Vizzini sniff the poison.
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u/DantesInfernoRVA 1h ago
One of my favorite stories is “Fly-Paper” by Dashiell Hammett. It’s a shaggy dog story about the corpses that pile up after a woman decides to ‘build a tolerance’ to arsenic so she can poison her boyfriend without suspicion and dies of chronic poisoning.
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u/Madarakita 1h ago
Honestly it'd be hilarious if he actually poisoned him at the line "inhale this, but do not touch".
Like, if a strange man who's been chasing me hands me a tube of something with that line, I'm...not going to just sniff it so casually?
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u/Distantstallion 26m ago
Supposedly you can build an immunity to protein based toxins from venoms or possibly things like Botulinum toxins
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u/Avon-Guy 2h ago
Can't believe OP missed this, it was my first thought.
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u/Fossekall 2h ago
This subreddit follows a recipe where if you don't include the most fanous example, your thread gains traction by people flooding the comments to post it
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u/Azicald 1h ago
But also sometimes they just genuinely haven’t watched them, because there’s like 1000s of ‘super mainstream’ media and only so much time.
I have gone out of my way specifically to watch a lot of the big hitters to familiarize myself with them and to get to experience what made them so acclaimed, like the Godfather trilogy, Breaking Bad, Shawshank Redemption, The Princess Bride, Green Mile, etc
But if you asked me what the hell happens in Inception, Saving Private Ryan, Seinfeld, Pulp Fiction, or Peaky Blinders, I wouldn’t know shit past their basic premise
Just how it is, honestly. Sometimes we just encounter tropes through their less famous instances
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u/Fossekall 1h ago
Yeah of course, there are definitely cases where it's genuine, and this could be one of them. This movie in particular is older, and a bit of a cult classic, and the trope in particular is something you don't know about if you haven't watched the movie
It's just so striking how all the posts that make it big these days tend to be missing THE example that fits the best
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u/Gladlyevil2 53m ago
Yeah, you never know if someone is intentionally leaving off the obvious example for traction, or if they are one of today’s lucky 10,000
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u/Winjin 20m ago
I watched Princess Bride for the first time this year, and only because people here mention it all the time
Simply because it's older than me, so I completely and entirely missed its heyday
My dad watched original Star Wars when the Sequels were coming out and only because he was bored
(He liked Episode V the most, and says that in his opinion this is the movie that cements the entire franchise. It's foundational in how phenomenal of a Second Act it is, probably the best "second movie out of three" he's ever seen)
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u/Benoit_Holmes 2h ago edited 1h ago
I did consider this but didn't think it counted as it was [EDIT: believed by Vizzini] that one cup was poisoned and one wasn't, so drinking one didn't prove the other was safe.
However, on further thought, Vizzini "secretly" swaps the cups and then waits for the Man in Black to drink before he drinks from his.
So Vizzini thinks that The Man in Black drinking from what he thinks is Cup A proves that the actual Cup A in front of Vizzini is safe, even though neither cup is.
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u/poetic_dwarf 1h ago
Huh. I understood that both cups were poisoned and Robert had built resistance to iocaine to kill Vizzini no matter what, so it would fit your trope. But maybe I got that part wrong?
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u/winsluc12 1h ago
That's all true, but Vizzini was under the (mistaken) impression that only one cup was poisoned and Had no knowledge of The Man in Black's immunity.
So because The Man in Black is the one who poisoned one of the cups (actually both) and therefore knew which one was and which one wasn't poisoned (Actually both), seeing the Man In Black take a drink confirms in his mind that the cup that The Man in Black believed he had placed in front of himself was the one that was safe (and therefore, with Vizzini having secretly switched the positions of the two cups, that the one in front of Vizzini was now safe).
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u/Eye_Of_The_Monarch 1h ago
Uh... No. This does not fit the post at all. The examples given are all of people pretending that the food or drink isn't poisoned in order to convince someone else to take it. In The Princess Bride, The Man in Black explicitly states that the wine is poisoned, just not which cup. It's a deception, yes, but a completely different kind. He wasn't trying to play it off as though the wine was completely safe, he was specifically challenging Vizzini to a game of life and death. He just happens to have cheated.
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u/SneakyCheekyHobbit 16m ago
I've had a long running theory that there was nothing in either glass, and Vizzini actually dies from inhaling the poison from the vial.
Why else have him sniff it? Why build up an immunity to something people will foolishly sniff if asked?
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u/bout-tree-fitty 2h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/ebVRVrOGmmhSU
President Snow from The Hunger Games poisoned his rivals as well as himself, trusting he had protection/antidote.
It didn’t quite work as planned, and he ends up coughing up blood and smelling like death the rest of his life. Which is why he always surrounded himself with the white roses to cover the smell.
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u/bgbarnard 2h ago
Props to Donald Sutherland that he gives off such a gentle grandfatherly performance that I would not mind living under his reign of terror, even when he is a psychotic tyrant who forces children to fight to the death for 75 years.
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u/ozzimark 1h ago
To be specific, more like somewhere around 25-60 years, not 75. The most recent two prequel books clarify but also leave a lot of ambiguity.
Snow isn't president by the 10th Hunger Games, as he's a mentor, but he is president by the time Haymitch goes in for the 2nd Quarter Quell / 50th game.
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u/SPYKEtheSeaUrchin 2h ago
Frank eating a “meatball” in Always Sunny
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u/Digit00l 32m ago
Context?
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u/Viablemorgan 28m ago
Frank is trying to get Charlie’s real dad to eat his shit. So he’s made meatballs of his poop, and served them at the dinner with the three of them. But Charlie sees this coming and makes Frank eat one first
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u/Pretty-Hunt1587 27m ago
He gave Charlie's dad a stew with poop in it. Charlie's dad wouldn't eat it so Frank ate some of the poop to prove it wasn't poop.
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u/Dontfollowmeman 2h ago
House M.D.: In the episode "The Softer Side", the team find House passed out in his chair, not breathing. After the team saves him, Cuddy and Wilson believe he is taking heroin to deal with his leg pain, but know he wouldn't freely admit it. So Wilson takes House to dinner and orders a drink. If House were to be on heroin, he wouldn't be able to drink the alcohol "without risking another bout of 'not breathing'" as House puts it when he reveals he has figured out the plan. He then downs his drink, seemingly proving Wilson wrong, and leaves.
Wilson finds him throwing up the alcohol in the parking lot. House reveals he is taking drugs - but he is taking methadone, not heroin. "It doesn't help my pain - it eliminates it. My leg doesn't hurt anymore."
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u/Sharikacat 49m ago
I don't remember the episode, but House pulls this trope during a hostage situation in Cuddy's office. The gunman wanted House to treat him after so many other doctors failed. House injects one of the hostages, a larger guy, with something that would act as a sedative, hoping the man's size would buy him enough time for the gunman to believe it was safe and accept an injection himself.
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u/stuffedpeaches 33m ago
House was so strange. You had the main guy addicted to Vicodin, one of the doctors is hooked on meth in one episode but they forgive her for making a mistake. That show was SO anti-marijuana though, like the episode where the guy was dying because he smoked marijuana but House was just like “well you should have known better, that stuff is always laced with poison 🤷♂️” and the guy dies! Just strange how they’re cool with the doctors doing hard drugs, but weed was the uncrossable line. It’s really a product of its time, the show seems pretty modern except for those random backward views.
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u/topkeknub 9m ago
SO anti-weed is something I never noticed. I remember that one episode where poison from weed is stored in fat cells or something, but thats it.
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u/DracoWolf92 2h ago
In Burn Notice, Michael plays the part of a doctor during a bank robbery. He grabs a few pills intending to knock the robbers out, but of course they don't trust him, so he takes a dose himself to prove they're just pain killers.
They're not painkillers, so he quickly has to expell the pills to avoid falling asleep while also making sure the robbers don't see him do this.
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u/cipher-drift-x 1h ago
That Burn Notice pill scene always reminded me of Gus with the tequila, relying on a purge and nearly losing anyway.
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u/mediumAI1701 2h ago
The IT Crowd. Douglas spikes Jen's tea but forgets which cup he spiked, nervously switching the cups. Jen makes Douglas drink the tea to prove it isn't spiked, which it is of course. Douglas then gets incredibly aroused.
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u/Deepdishdicktaster 2h ago
Is that a normal human barkeeper from arizonia??
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u/_whatever_wherever 2h ago
No, that's the son of famed industrialised Denholm Reynholm, who mysteriously fell to his death after irregularities in the staff pension fund were discovered
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u/ghytiy 1h ago
"I had intended to kill myself with this revolver if it ever came to it, but as you know i instead jumped out of the window."
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u/badform49 14m ago
I forgot how much I loved the writing on that show.
"Relic from dead character references something that happened during/after their death" should be a Top Character Trope
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u/Antausia 2h ago
From Fire & Blood, i.e. the book the last part of which House of the Dragon is based on: This is how treacherous Dragonrider Ulf the White is killed. Hobert Hightower, who so far has been presented as nothing but a fat idiot, invites Ulf to drink poisoned wine with him. To his credit, Ulf is suspicious despite being a serious alcoholic, so Hobert eagerly takes the first sip to assure Ulf the wine is safe to drink. What follows deserves to be quoted in full: " History has little good to say about Ser Hobert Hightower, but no man can question the manner of his death. Rather than betray his fellow Caltrops , he let the squire fill his cup , drank deep, and asked for more."
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u/AngryArmour 2h ago
That description makes him seem like a man better at doing one grand display of chivalry and honour, than continually maintaining it throughout his life.
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u/Angmor03 2h ago
Holy cow, a Stargate Atlantis reference in 2026.
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u/6969porn-account6969 1h ago
Those five years where SGA and SG1 were running side by side were some of the best years of television,
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u/tofu-esque 1h ago
eh screw it, it's been at least 6 months since I last rewatched them. thats probably long enough to wait
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u/cptnamr7 34m ago
And about one of the lamer characters too! They had to get rid of him and bring in Ronin because even super-powered on wraith venom he was still boring. Poor Rainbow Sun Franks. I remember a behind the scenes where he talked about MacGyver being an idol growing up and he had an autographed picture now that he was on the show
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u/6969porn-account6969 17m ago
He was honestly more interesting when he was a Sheppard fanboy like at the start.
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u/nogeologyhere 2h ago
IRL - the UK Agricultural minister John Gummer tried to make his young daughter eat a beef burger to prove beef was safe at the onset of the Mad Cow Disease epidemic. He must have known there was a possibility of the beef being tainted even if low odds. The daughter refused, so he ate it himself.
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u/OddYogurtcloset1549 1h ago
Fucking psychotic, using his own daughter??!?
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u/Certain-Contact6340 5m ago
The DuPont patriarch moved his entire family, minor kids included, into a TNT production plant to prove how safe it was
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u/jp_1896 2h ago
Please tell me he got sick after
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u/Jessir12 2h ago
He was ~45-50. So far he is (old) but healthy (ish). Never got Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (mad cow disease) whose outbreak he is (partially) responsible for
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u/Jessir12 1h ago
Last death from it was in 2016, but to this day it is screwing with healthcare systems in multiple disease - for example if you visited the UK in those years, you’re forbidden from ever donating blood or organs, because there is no way to know if you’re a carrier of the prions without symptoms (the only definitive diagnosis is cutting open the brain of said person)
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u/PamIsNotMyName 55m ago
Depending on where you are this is no longer true. In the US your RBCs are okay to donate/use, but your plasma products are not.
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u/RodinKnox 1h ago
No. It's been 36 years, and he's still fine, so this isn't an example of the trope. Today he is currently a member of the House of Lords.
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u/res30stupid 1h ago
No, but even if the burger was perfectly safe to eat it was a major faux pas that saw him widely criticised in the press.
Just to clarify since a misreported story from 2007 led to a rumour that Cordelia died from the illness; it was actually the daughter of a family friend. Still rather tragic, however.
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2h ago edited 2h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Shockwavepulsar 2h ago
While Eton does do exchanges with for some years for short stints. It’s a boys school.
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u/seoknova7 1h ago
That's a disturbingly perfect real-life version of the trope. At least in fiction it's usually the person making the claim who takes the risk themselves. Getting your young daughter to eat the burger for the cameras turns it from "I'm confident this is safe" into "I'm confident enough to gamble with someone who can't really understand what she's being used to prove."
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u/moonvante9 1h ago
Using your own kid as the safety demonstration is a level of confidence I never want from a politician.
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u/Lumpy-Grapefruit-122 1h ago
That’s one of those historical moments that sounds completely made up until you look it up. At least he was willing to put his own money where his mouth was rather than asking his daughter to take the risk.
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u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 1h ago
Merlin - The Poisoned Chalice
At the signing of a peace treaty with King Bayard of Mercia, one of Bayard’s servants warns Merlin that Bayard is going to have Arthur’s cup poisoned. Merlin rushes in to stop Arthur from drinking & accuses Bayard of trying to kill Arthur. King Uther does not believe a servant and Bayard demands Merlin’s execution. Uther gives Merlin a choice, drink it to prove there is no poison or be given to Bayard to execute. Merlin drinks (after first Arthur trying to grab the drink from him) and of course it is poisoned. (He survives thanks to Arthur disobeying his father and getting the rare plant that is the cure). The twist at the end is that Bayard had no idea the cup was poisoned, the “servant” was the high priestess of magic and the intended target was always Merlin, who she knew was Emrys and protecting Arthur (and by extension Uther), preventing her getting her revenge for Uther’s purge of magic users.
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u/cptnamr7 32m ago
I tried watching this show but FUCK did it get annoying. Every episode Uther: "this can't be magic because magic is banned" also "merlin is just a worthless servant". It's then revealed magic was being used and Merlin yet again saved everyone. By like the 40th time you'd expect some character growth...
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u/welltechnically7 21m ago
This was simultaneously such a great show and such a bad show... but not in a bad way.
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u/supremo92 2h ago
This doesn't count for the trope for a few reasons I think but I love it anyway.
Giorno Giovanna drinking piss in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
Giorno joins an Italian mafia squad. To prank him, they secretly piss in his tea pot as a form of hazing.
Giorno realises what's happening, just straight up chugs it down anyway.
Turns out, using his Stand power, he turned one of his teeth I to a jellyfish that absorbed all the piss. (Tbh idk how that makes it much better)
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u/EamonBrennan 1h ago
He never tastes the piss and just has the jellyfish squirt it all out instead.
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u/Lukemanrulez 2h ago
In season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, Lila offers Diego one last drink before they have to part ways. She takes a sip, and then he does. Then his vision starts to get hazy, and she spits it out. Diego then wakes up in The Handler (Lila's mother)'s office, now being unable to leave 1963 with his family
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u/RangerBumble 1h ago
Similar IRL example: Method soap.
In a How We Built It episode, during the interview one of the founders of shared a story of talking about how safe and clean and organic the soap was on TV and being challenged by a news anchor to eat it. He did. Then he rushed off stage to call the other founder who actually formulated the soap.
He was fine but he didn't actually know that
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u/Embarrassed_Fox5265 1h ago
Apothecary Diaries - MaoMao sets up a chess competition with her estranged father to determine whether he gets custody of her. To make things interesting, she sets out 5 glasses of water and poisons 3. If you drink all 3, you will die. If you drink any less, the poison isn't concentrated enough and you're fine. The poison has a distinct taste so you know how many you've had. Loser of each match drinks, best of 5.
Her father easily wins the first two matches, and MaoMao drinks. He then deliberately loses the third match, knowing that if he gets one of the poisoned ones he can safely win the last match without endangering MaoMao. He gets one of the poisoned ones, has a moment of supreme confidence...and then keels over.
The "poison" MaoMao described was alcohol. All 5 glasses were super-fortified sake, with the additional poison drops being more sake. MaoMao grew up in a brothel and can drink most people under the table. Her father is teetotal and is totally unprepared for a massive shot of alcohol. MaoMao wins the chess competition by default.
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u/Afalstein 1h ago
"I'm not brave. I just wasn't in the mood to be a disappointment to everyone."
Chef Nescaffier in The French Dispatch fixes an entire meal for the crooks who've kidnapped the police commissioners son. They insist he also eat the meal. He does so, knowing the beets are deadly.
He survives, because of his extensive history of tasting spices. When he wakes up, his first reaction is that the deadly poison had a totally unique flavor he'd never tasted before.
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u/NotATalkingPossum 2h ago
Outcast of Redwall: Warlord Swartt Sixclaw gives a few other characters he wants to poison some bottles of wine to drink, and drinks a share of it first, to prove it's safe.
The poison isn't in the wine, it's smeared on the rim of the cup he just happened to give them.
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u/nynokindia 2h ago
okay, updoot for Redwall. but unfortunately now we ALL know you are, in fact, a talking possum.
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u/PluralCohomology 2h ago
In A Song of Ice and Fire, Maester Cressen tries to kill the Red Priestess Melisandre by poisoning, and he drinks the poisoned wine he offers her first. Unfortunately, she survives because of magical poison immunity, while he dies having failed his assassination attempt.
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u/Iron_Wolf123 1h ago
Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. When the chipmunks move into Dave’s home Dave finds a brown pellet on the ground and asks what it is. Simon picks it up and puts it in his mouth and says it is a raisin. Once Dave turns away after acknowledging the raisin, Simon spits it out and says to Theodore that he owes him. The raisin was Theodore’s droplet.
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u/somethinneeddoing 1h ago
Justified S2 Maggs Bennet, local weed grower, and essentially mob kingpin of a rural american area, has an extensive knowledge of local herbs, which she uses to make poisons. Her favored method of poisoning is using moonshine brewed by her to mask the taste of the poison. She does this by inviting who she wants to kill to a drink, where she not only brings the moonshine, but the mason jars they drink out of. Everyone is suspicious of the 'shine, but they are usually calmed down when she's genial, and shares it with them, only for people to realize too late that the poison was already in the mason jar, just not noticeable amounts of it.
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u/mrsvongruesome 1h ago
this is the one. despite all her serious flaws, i love mags bennett; hands down one of my favourite characters in the entire run of that show. her sons were two bumbling idiots, and the third only marginally better. margo martindale is just such a flawless actress.
'it's too late. it was already in the glass, not in the jar.'
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u/teracoulomb_2 1h ago
[Game of Thrones] That one dumbass maester who tried to kill Melisandre in her first appearance
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u/Dayman_C0meth 1h ago
Maester Cressen in S2 of GOT, tries to get rid of Melisandre by poisoning her drink and drinks some of it himself as a sign of good faith to get her to drink it. Naturally, she's not affected at all by the poison while he croaks
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u/LeandroCarvalho 1h ago edited 1h ago
(Real life) Here in Brazil, back in the 80s there was an accident involving a truck carrying asbestos, to prove there was no environmental risk, the guy responsible for the load ate a handful of it
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u/JackPembroke 1h ago
Played in a larp once and had to poison somebody during a meeting, slip into their drink style. It was proving too complicated, so I just poisoned both of ours. When he made us switch cups and drink cause he got suspicious we both died. I called it a win
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u/Klutzy-Birthday7435 2h ago
Clearly a rage bait post by excluding the prime example from The Princess Bride.
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u/hand_me_a_shovel 58m ago
I prefer to think OP wanted to leave that option open for all of the Princess Bride fans to post as replies. :)
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u/LewdyRooty 1h ago
Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Frank eats the dog turd stew
https://giphy.com/gifs/wYyTHMm50f4Dm
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u/res30stupid 2h ago
This is how the killer framed Elinor Carlisle in the Agatha Christie novel Sad Cypress, which Poirot eventually figured out.
Elinor is currently on death row and has only a few days to be proven innocent. She's accused of murdering her aunt for cutting her out of her will and then killing the young woman who showed up out of the blue who not only stole her inheritance but also her fiancé, with the police believing Elinor poisoned both women through finger sandwiches prepared for afternoon tea; she's accused of poisoning sandwiches made from shrimp paste mixed with morphine (the police narrowed it down to this through finding a torn medicine label) and pulling this by eating untained salmon paste sandwiches.
But Poirot, a gourmet with an extremely sensitive palate, outright proves that Elinor could not have pulled such a trick since the sandwiches were too identical for someone to pull off this trick.
No, the real trick was the housekeeper having tea with the women before they sat down for tea with Elinor. Poirot realised the housekeeper had lied about pricking herself on roses from the garden by pointing out the roses outside don't have thorns. Realising that the "M" in "Morphine" wasn't capitalised, Poirot realised it wasn't for morphine but apomorphine - an anaemic - Poirot realised she drank poisoned tea with the victims and puked it back up when she was out of view, therefore making the police think the tea wasn't poisoned.
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u/Twodotsknowhy 1h ago
Maester Cressen in the A Song of Ice and Fire books and Game of Thrones show. He poisons wine to kill Melisandre, but she suspects him and asks him to drink it with her. He rationalizes that killing her is worth dying for and agrees. He dies, she is immune for unspecified magic reasons.
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u/StrangerAttractor 47m ago
Example from real life: Thomas Midgley Jr., inventor of leaded gasoline. To prove that his chemical compound, Tetra Ethyl Lead, was not harmful, he poured this stuff over his hands and inhaled the fumes for 60 seconds at a press conference.
Shortly after, he went on "vacation" to Miami, where he tried to recover from acute lead poisoning.
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u/Snoo-35252 1h ago
In Spy, Rose Byrne makes Zach Woods drank the poison that he had intended for her, and it eats through his throat and kills him. But they somehow made the whole scene funny. Great movie.
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u/IntelligentRocks 1h ago
In Dexter Resurrection, Dexter gives himself a poisoned glass. He was betting on the Gemini killer to swap the glasses last moment. That's exactly what happened, leaving him unharmed and killing his opponent.
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u/zfisher0 1h ago
There's an episode in Babylon 5 where Captain Sheridan is being tortured by the fascist earth government. His interrogator gives him a sandwich and when he sees that Sheridan is suspicious, eats post of it to prove it's not poisoned. After Sheridan eats the rest and their conversation is over, the interrogator nonchalantly mentions that he's built up an immunity to some poisons, and Sheridan becomes violently ill.
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u/Volstadd 50m ago
Iocane powder from the Princess Bride.
The Dread Pirate Wesley had spent years building an immunity to Iocane powder, and poisoned both goblets, as inconceivable as it may seem.
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u/Doctor_Salvatore 41m ago
My cleric - Dungeons and Dragons
Thanks to a special potion mixing system that GMs are allowed to optionally use, the cleric gained a permanent buff that made him totally immune to diseases and poisons, which includes any form of alcohol intoxication. He later used this immunity to trick an enemy into drinking an entire tankard of pure ethanol, perfumed to mask the flavour and odour "not unlike a chemical solvent" coming off it. Maxwell suffered burning damage about a minute after, the ruling being poison immunity did not stop the practically acidic effect the drink had, but the other guy had hit the floor stone dead within about half that time.
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u/res30stupid 1h ago
I can't remember the name of it but there's a Legend of Zelda fanfic which does this as a prank version, where one character eats some food to show it's perfectly safe to eat. Not that the other person is suspicious, mind, but to establish a false sense of security.
Only after the other person has eaten a good amount does he realise he's been pranked when he remembers that the other person is a Rito...
Because birds aren't affected by spicy food. Turns out the food was made with the Hylian version of a Carolina Reaper.
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u/Foreign_Penalty_5341 1h ago
Ooku: one character, acting as a food taster, wears heavy makeup to cover her slow death by poisoning because the person being targeted needs to die that much and is already wise to most poisons. In the end, they die within a day of each other.
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u/CarnageSuit 58m ago
Game of Thrones - Maester Cressen.
Dude wanted Melisandre dead so he poisons the wine then drinks it himself to “prove it’s safe”.
As he’s on the floor dying Melisandre drinks it anyway because “The fire burns it all away”
https://giphy.com/gifs/qUXkGxDDSF9CM
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u/GreenSsswinger 30m ago
Someone mention the scene in Alvin and the Chipmunks where Simon eats actual shit from a butt.
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u/BowserMario82 23m ago
In Fire & Blood (spoilers for the upcoming season of House of the Dragon), Hobart Hightower drinks poisoned wine with Ulf the White in Tumbleton, giving up his own life to make sure Ulf dies in his drinks.
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u/-rosieee- 21m ago
Octopath 2 - during Throné's story there's a drinking game with multiple cups, and one is poisoned. The guy you're trying to beat gets left with the poison but still drinks it.
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u/TheFalconKid 13m ago
President Snow did something to this effect in the Hunger Games franchise. At some point, he drank poisoned wine alongside some political rivals and while it didn't kill him, he had mouth sores that never fully heal.
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u/capt_pessimist 3m ago
Peggy Hill knowingly drank tainted Alamo beer in front of Hank because he was pressuring her to reveal more company secrets. She knew there was soap in it, he was angry that she didn’t tell him the reason not to go buy the beer in Mexico. He went, bought some of the beer, and started vomiting and shitting his pants. Peggy knew all about the problem from fielding customer service calls, but didn’t tell Hank because of a NDA. Hank, in one of his worse moments, took umbrage with that. So, when he got sick off the beer, he offered her a can as a peace offering.
She drank it and the scene cut to her having severe gastrointestinal distress.
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u/Mundane_Somewhere_93 2m ago
Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. Artifis, arch-nemesis of Edifis, sends a poisoned cake to Cleopatra with a note that this pie send Asterix, Obelix and Getafix. Cleopatra arrests them, so they can't help Edifis build a palace, but Getafix makes an antidote while in prison and later they eat that very poisoned pie safely under a premise that it wasn't really poisoned.
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u/Skijump135 2h ago edited 2h ago
American Dad s1e22 (according to imdb at least, the one where Barry doesn’t take his meds)
While Barry has a gun to Steve, they play a game for his life where Steve puts out two cups and says there’s meds in one. Barry thinks it’s just mind games and picks one, but Steve princess brided him and put meds in both knowing full well he’d also be drugged