Conspiracy Placement

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated!"
—Phineas and Ferb

Through secrecy and infiltration, the Ancient Conspiracy has grown powerful. They control the government, big business and religion, they routinely pull off complicated plans and never make a mistake. Still their purposes are best served by remaining hidden from public knowledge, always working from the shadows. Now, they begin their latest diabolical scheme - to display their official logo on every street corner... wait, what!?

Conspiracy Placement is the tendency of fictional conspiracies to display hidden clues to their identity where they can be found by the heroes, like Product Placement only coming from an organization that by definition should be trying to avoid exposure. These clues are generally hidden well enough that they will not be spotted by the general public, but you have to wonder what the point is of having such clues at all. Sometimes the story will try to justify the existence of these clues, for example by saying that finding them is a test to gain membership of the group, or a way for conspirators to identify each other, but more often it just seems to be showing off.

This can be considered Truth in Television, for a very loose definition of "Truth". If you look hard enough you can find Illuminati symbols everywhere, or connect anyone you don't like to the number 666. There are those who actually believe that real undiscovered, world-controlling conspiracies do this. They're called nuts.

May overlap with Sigil Spam if the logo placement becomes really excessive.

Examples of Conspiracy Placement include:

Comic Books

  • The Invisibles has a secondary character go on about occult imagery in Speed and Pulp Fiction, taking it as a symbol that there are others out there who are on their side. The others don't take it so seriously.
    • On the other hand, Tom O'Bedlam, an urban shaman and Dane's magical mentor, believes cities are sentient and communicate with inhabitants through secret messages. "You ever see the word 'IXAT' reflected in a puddle late at night? That's one of their names..."

Film

  • The vampires in the Blade movies use vampiric glyphs to mark their territory. The second movie show that they've learned something from Blade cutting them up en masse, as the glyphs are much better hidden, even invisible to the naked eye.
  • Sneakers.
  • The Net had clickable pi links on web pages. Clicking on one pretty much meant you would get hunted down by them. Schmuck Bait at its finest.
    • Though the point of them was that they would open up anything on the web, which meant anything in the world. The bad guys just didn't like it when someone else tried one.

Literature

  • Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code both revolved around hidden messages pointing to Ancient Conspiracies. Partially justified in that some of the clues really were intended as puzzles.
    • Of course, Dan Brown tries to find conspiracies connected to the Holy Grail in completely unrelated things that aren't actually puzzles, but just brief asides that come off as an Author Tract.
  • VFD does this compulsively in A Series of Unfortunate Events.
  • The Illuminatus! Trilogy uses this in multiple places as part of its unholy Mind Screw. For example Landmarking the Hidden Base by hiding the Illuminati headquarters under the UN Headquarters in Manhattan, and sending a insulting message to ex-allies in a rock song.fnord
  • The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon features a secretive underground postal service (which may or may not actually exist) who are apparently more concerned with spray painting their logo on every wall than they actually are with delivering the mail!
  • Parodied with The Areas of My Expertise, where "hobo signs" were really a secret signaling system for the hobo revolution.

Live Action TV

  • Possibly the RNA symbol from Heroes, although to date it has not been explained who is causing that to appear or why.
    • Word of God says that, although it was planned to have this sort of significance, they never got around to plotting it, and it exists now only as a Running Gag.
  • In the first season of the new Doctor Who, the words "Bad Wolf" seemed like this initially until they turned out to be sent back in time by the Time Vortex possessed Rose to guide herself.
  • Torchwood are the epitome of this trope as the most conspicuous secret organization of all time. A now ex-Prime Minister in the Whoniverse's version of Great Britain knows about them, even though she's not supposed to, one of their staff orders pizza under the name "Torchwood" and the Cardiff division as a whole use an SUV with the word Torchwood written on the side, on the roof with bright neon yellow lettering and the initials TW on the front in red neon. Furthermore, at least one conspiracy theorist knows enough about Torchwood to recognize both their car and their staff on sight. As of Torchwood series 2, even a regular pensioner knows who they are. The fact that a Doctor Who episode set in the year 2012 reveals in passing that Torchwood is now a public institution due to its name being used in news broadcasts might constitute Hilarious in Hindsight as it speaks volumes of the organization's inability to keep a secret.
  • And just what is the Blue Sun Corporation up to? Thanks to Firefly being cancelled, we may never find out.

Tabletop Games

  • Pops up in many, The World of Darkness variants:
    • Hunter: The Reckoning and Promethean: The Created both use sigils based roughly on "hobo signs" for subtle communication. For the Prometheans, this makes a bit more sense, as a) their condition requires them to constantly be on the move, and b) they have powers that can make the sigils glow for other Prometheans.
    • Geist: The Sin Eaters has the Twilight Network, a constructed method of communication between Sin-Eaters that relies on web pages, stray radio transmissions, street flyers, and whatever means are available.

Toys

  • Not a conspiracy per se, but a surprising number of Transformers display their faction symbols in their alternate mode, which somewhat defeats the point of being robots in disguise. In the first wave of toys, most instead had "rubsigns", stickers that would reveal the symbol if warmed up by, for example, a human finger pressed on them.
    • The versions from the live action movies could be looked at like this, as the emblem is hidden in a way that suits this trope, hiding them 'in plain sight' as it were. Barricade's police shields are the most obvious one. Prehaps the most hilarious one in the second movie, the cement truck has the Mack truck dog hood ornament, with its head distorted into a Decepticon emblem.
    • Played with in some instances. War for Cybertron Megatron has the gears and panels on his back form the Decepticon logo. It's not immediately obvious. Optimus has his faction on his back too, though his is even less obvious. Also, Vector Prime's head is shaped like the Autobot insignia.

Troping

Video Games

  • Area 51 plays with this one. A hidden document explains that the conspiracy hides these symbols everywhere precisely because anyone who thinks about it for a second will realise how stupid that is and dismiss the conspiracy theorists as raving crackpots.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Patriots use Conspiracy Placement as a type of security measure. Those under them(which includes most of the world's population by MGS4) are implanted with nanomachines that censor any mention of the Patriots' name into "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo".
  • In Anachronox the Dark Servants wore their symbol and put it on all of their ships and such. Even The Mole, Grumpos has the symbol on him, although it is obscured until the final cut scene.
  • In The Conduit, finding the seals of The Trust leads the player to secret caches with One-Hit Kill weapons and arms. Justified in that the seals are Invisible to Normals and can only be seen by the player's ASE.
  • The lambda signs in Half Life 2 and the Episodes, used by the Resistance to identify where they have stashed supplies. The Orange Box version added a Bragging Rights Reward for finding them all.
  • In Assassin's Creed 2, entrances to Templar Lairs are marked by red crosses, but those aren't sufficiently unusual to make them completely obvious. On the other hand, the entrances to Assassin Tombs are marked by wall decorations that look like a skull within a stylized letter A.
  • Cerberus in Mass Effect 2. Their bases, uniforms, equipment and the Normandy SR-2 all have their logo prominently emblazoned despite being considered a terrorist organization by Alliance authority.

Web Comics

Chilus: It makes them feel like they belong.

    • Also, Hereti-Corp displays their logo prominently on all their gear and pizza restaurants, justified in order to lure out Oasis, who is programmed to kill anyone wearing it.
      • Of course, she's only programmed to kill people wearing it because they all tend to wear it. It's more justified because it's the cooperation itself is not secret.

Western Animation

  • American Dad had symbols all over the place for the Peanut Butter Conspiracy episode.
  • Phineas and Ferb: Dr. Doofenshmirtz's evil operation for some reason has its own jingle, sponsored a blimp in a racing event, has its own building with its name printed right on it in the downtown area, and several other buildings all branded with his company name or something like that, like "Doofenshmirtz Abandoned Annex Building-K", which sometimes even have their own jingles.
    • Of course, the good guys are just as bad at this. Take Perry; yes, secrecy is vitally important, and he goes to great lengths to hide his agent status from his family. But then, as Phineas says "he has his own logo?!?"
  • MAD puts either the word MAD or its demonic-cat-face insignia onto EVERYTHING. It's irritating in that Penny's the only one who notices.

Real Life

  • The "Jesus fish" symbol commonly found on cars was originally used by early Christian congregations (we're talking thousands of years ago here.) The Greek word for "fish", "ikthus", happens to form an acronym that translates to "Jesus Christ, God's son, savior." Christianity was persecuted back then, so the churches placed the fish symbol on buildings around town: members of the congregation knew to follow these to the current secret meeting place, while those not in the loop just thought someone was doing fish graffiti.
    • And for identifying each other, dragging a foot through the dust in a curve, then having the other person continue it into a fish.
  • Also in Real Life, organised crime and hate groups have a tradition of "secret handshakes" and codewords, including the Ku Klux Klan tendency to turn K's and C's in words into KL's.
  • But the Crips and the Bloods avoid their respective enemies' names' first two letters when talking, among other more obvious identifiers.
  • According to Urban Legend (aside from the illuminati symbols), gangs use different methods to mark turf an membership from sneakers thrown on telephone wires to air-fresheners in cars. Of course, seeing what the police can make of gang colours, more covert methods are advised.
  • There's a Conspiracy Theory that claims an fake Alien Invasion will happen during the 2012 London Olympics, panicking everyone into a state of emergency and giving up our freedoms so that the New World Order can Take Over the World. The evidence? The logo can be rearranged to spell "ZION", and the mascot-things look like aliens.
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