"She's a robo-cop with a weird robot walk and only one weakness: getting snuck up on by dudes with tasers. [montage of Major being repeatedly tased from behind] You know, for all the gadgets... maybe invest in a rear camera?"
When a normal or not-as-powerful rival needs to take down someone with a superpower, the attacker is commonly going to use a stun gun, typically of the electrically powered variant. Something about the shock to the nervous system renders the victim unable to access his powers long enough for the attacker to get the drop on him. It seems especially useful on vampires.
There's a slight element of Truth in Television to this. Tear gas or pepper-spray rely on the fact they hurt so badly that you can't do anything but curl up in a ball and holler in pain, but people with very high pain-tolerance (either natural or chemically-enhanced) can sometimes at least partly overcome them by sheer force of will. Tasers completely bypass all that by blasting the nerve receptors in your muscles with electrical impulses, bypassing the input from your brain entirely. (Which isn't to say it doesn't really, really hurt as well, mind you.) There's no way to overcome that by Heroic Willpower, or villainous willpower for that matter.
Note: This can be inverted or subverted only if the charge is meant to incapacitate and fails somehow. Simply getting a shock that empowers or has no effect at all doesn't count as a real inversion or subversion.
Contrast Self-Defenseless, where tasers and similar less-lethal weapons fail to work even against people they logically should.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- A minor early antagonist in A Certain Scientific Railgun incapacitates powerful Espers with a stun gun. It's less than effective on Mikoto.
- In Dr. STONE, Senku MacGyvers a taser out of the wires and batteries in one of the cell phones the Kingdom of Science built, using it to take down Hyoga.
- Early in Pokémon the Series, Team Rocket often comes out with Humongous Mecha, robots, etc. that generally prove explosively vulnerable to Pikachu's electricity. Eventually, they get smart and start designing their machines to withstand or even be supercharged by electric attacks.
Comic Books
- The Punisher MAX: A team of special forces soldiers takes out Frank (non-lethally) by continuously hitting him with tasers, even after he stops moving, just to be sure.
- In The Ultimates, Wasp knocks out the Hulk, who's been thrashing her teams and most of Manhattan, by shrinking to wasp size, crawling into the Hulk's ear and electrocuting his brain.
Fan Works
- In Second American Civil War, the DIMMER is specifically designed to incapacitate Dewdrop-enhanced soldiers (and anyone else) by combining a taser-like shock (to neutralize the Dewdrop implants) and a knockout drug.
Films — Live-Action
- Alien (1979). The crew arm themselves with cattleprods while hunting for the Chest Burster, assuming it's still a small creature they can drive into a net and throw out the airlock. On seeing the adult Xenomorph, no-one's crazy enough to find if this trope applies. In Alien: Romulus, one character tries to kill a xenomorph that still gestating by cranking up a cattle prod to maximum and jamming it in the birth sac. Let's just say it doesn't work.
- Ancillary materials to Attack of the Clones reveal that the energy cage in which the Geonosians held Obi-wan exerts a constant low-level electrical charge on the prisoner, which has the side effect of rendering Force users unable to concentrate enough to use their powers.
- Blade (1998): Used on the daywalker by Quinn and his cronies, all of whom Blade has made a hobby of thrashing.
- Averted in Bloodsport (1988) when US embassy officials try to use tasers on Frank Dux, who grabs a bin lid and deflects the shock darts into a couple of nearby police officers.
- Inverted in Crank: High Voltage, in which shocks are the only way the main character can continue to live or perform his fighting feats.
- In Jumper, the Paladins use strings of high voltage wires to prevent Jumpers from using their teleportation power to escape.
- Jurassic Park:
- In the opening of Jurassic Park (1993), Robert Muldoon and other gamekeepers attempt to use cattleprods that resemble short-range Lightning Guns (and are portrayed as such in some of the Video Game Adaptations) to subdue a Velociraptor that managed to break out of confinement and grab one of the staff — it doesn't work before the victim is killed.
- In Jurassic World, a cattle prod is enough to zap a charging Velociraptor.
- Averted in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Cattle prods are effective enough when the dinosaurs are confined in cages; once freed from his cage however, Blue easily takes down a guard waving a cattle prod at him.
- Major Grom: Plague Doctor: After being framed by the Plague Doctor by being placed in his supersuit, Grom is tasered by his partner Dubin, who regrets his actions and turns up later to break Grom out of the holding cell. Grom insists that he hand over the taser first to prove his bona fides.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Thor (2011): The titular character gets tasered by Darcy after being Brought Down to Normal. Not only does the scene get funny points for Irony (the God of Thunder getting tasered), but Thor also calls the taser a puny weapon.
- Thor: Ragnarok has the Grandmaster fitting him with a neurotoxic, taser-like Obedience Disk for added irony, as well as Thor tasing his differently superpowered, villainous brother Loki.
- Averted in The Old Guard 2 when some mooks try to capture Andy by shooting her with a shotgun that fires a kind of taser round, but despite being hit by several rounds she's still able to fight them off.
- In Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, the Brethren use electric sticks to fend off the faceless nurses.
Literature
- A variant in The Laundry Files: zombies are very difficult to bring down with gunfire, being essentially Energy Beings that have taken up residence in a human's nervous system (or the informational echo of a long-deceased human's nervous system, they're not picky). They are, however, susceptible to electrical charges: a cultist wielding a taser manages to banish a preta inhabiting a body this way. (The OCCULUS unit, Britain's elite counter-occult special forces drawn from the SAS Reserves, ups the ante with modified cattle prods hooked up to signal generators instead of delivering white-noise electric shocks.)
- Subverted in The New Jedi Order. During an otherwise successful attempt to capture a Yuuzhan Vong infiltrator on Coruscant, Mara Jade Skywalker hits him with multiple stun shots from her blaster with no effect whatsoever. Medical scans of the prisoner later on reveal that redundancies in the Yuuzhan Vong nervous system render them invulnerable to stun shots.
- Subverted in Storm Front (Dresden Files). While wizards are normally just as vulnerable to mundane weapons as any other human, being one also makes you a Walking Techbane, so when he's threatened with a stun gun by the Big Bad's untrusting wife, Harry is easily able to disable it (although it would easily take him down if she managed to hit him with it).
Live-Action TV
- Alien: Earth. In "Mr. October", Morrow is able to capture a fully grown xenomorph with a few seconds of sustained fire from an electrical beam weapon. Unfortunately this doesn't last long; the xenomorph starts waking up again at a time when Morrow has been temporarily separated from this weapon, so he's unable to stop it breaking free.
- During the third season finale of Angel, Connor uses a taser to subdue Angel and capture him. When Fred finds out about this at the start of next season, she returns the favour.
- The Boys (2019): Justified with Translucent because his Nigh Invulnerable carbon skin conducts electricity well. The Boys knock him out with a power cord and later a cattle prod, then lock him in an electric cage. However, they're then stuck with the problem of finding out what will actually kill him.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Initiative uses taser blasters as a standard issue weapon for its human soldiers to capture non-humans, who would normally prey on even the strongest and most well-trained humans.
- In Heroes, agents with The Company use tasers to subdue super powereds.
- Subverted with a non-plot-relevant prisoner in the opening of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The prisoner is hopped up on PCP and breaks loose from the officers trying to restrain him. Another officer hits him with a taser; he collapses, then gets back up, and is finally subdued by half a dozen officers dogpiling him.
- Person of Interest: Root twice uses a taser to capture Sameen Shaw, a government-trained Professional Killer.
- During one episode of Supernatural, one is used on Kate, a vampire.
Video Games
- All of the boss characters in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which are heavily modified cyborgs,) can be stunned by the stun gun, although they're just held still for a few seconds rather than knocked out, like most mooks.
- In Saints Row: The Third, the only thing to which no one is immune (not even a fully resistant player character) is the humble Stun Gun melee weapon.
Webcomics
- In Chisuji a paranorm with Super-Strength is easily stabbed to death once tased, as his killer gloats that paranorms must focus to use their powersnote and tasers "just screw up that focus".
- In Girl Genius, Agatha takes out one of the incredibly tough Geisterdamen by tossing her tiny Castle Heterodyne dingbot at her so that is can zap her and jumping to make sure she doesn't get zapped herself since they're on a metal floor.
Web Videos
- In a Batman fan movie titled Death of Batman, a battle against a simple criminal starts as a Curb-Stomp Battle from Batman; however, the criminal is a Combat Pragmatist who doesn't hesitate to play dirty, and uses a stun-gun to taser Batman's groin. Although this doesn't immediately incapacitate the dark knight, it's enough to make him let his guard down, allowing the criminal to knee him in that sensitive area.
Western Animation
- In The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Black Widow is able to stun the otherwise unstoppable Hulk with her electric Widow's Sting.
- In the DC Animated Universe, Superman is commonly inconvenienced by being electrocuted. However, since the character is a Flying Brick, the only thing electricity do is stun him — and at best knock him out.
- The Legend of Korra: The Lieutenant, who supports Amon's claim that Benders use their powers to control and frighten non-benders, uses electrified kali sticks to incapacitate said Benders. The same technology is later issued to the Equalist rank-and-file in the form of taser gloves, and proves equally effective against them when Asami acquires one.
