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Monster Protection Racket: Difference between revisions
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(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.MonsterProtectionRacket 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.MonsterProtectionRacket, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
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Subtrope of [[Engineered Heroics]].
{{examples
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
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* [[Marvel Universe|Hank Pym]] did this with a robot (first) in the ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|The Avengers]]'' comic book when he was on his downhill slide; naturally, the situation got out of hand when he was knocked hors de combat. [[Never Live It Down|No one remembers this because he also hit his wife]].
* El Hombre attempts this in the ''[[Astro City]]'' arc "The Tarnished Angel". As part of his backstory, he hired one of his foes to create a giant robot to go on a rampage that he would then stop and restore his falling fame. The foe double-crossed him and did not include the agreed upon off-switch, forcing other superheroes to come in and stop the menace for real as well as expose El Hombre's scam. (This is almost certainly a homage to the Hank Pym story described above.) {{spoiler|Years later, he adopted a new identity to recruit a supervillain army, whom he later intended to kill in a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] to establish a new superhero identity}}.
* The short-lived ''Sentinel'' miniseries had its protagonist, who had become [[The Kid With the Remote Control]] to one of the titular [[Humongous Mecha]], successfully pulling this on his high school (after teasing a more traditional [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]]). Despite his newfound popularity and a distinct lack of casualties, he still has a [[My God, What Have I Done?]] moment afterwards.
* Used in Jeff Smith's ''[[Bone]]'' series. One of the characters starts stirring up rumors about dragons in the region, and gets an entire town to give him their gold and treasure as "bait" so that he can "trap" a dragon. His actual plan is to get as much gold as he can, then skip town when people get too suspicious. It blows up in his face when an actual dragon the characters met before intentionally jumps into the trap and refuses to escape.
* The fame obsessed [[Booster Gold]] pulls a version of this in ''[[Fifty Two|52]]'', hiring an actor to play a supervillain so he can save the day. He gets busted for it, naturally. {{spoiler|This is actually a subversion as it was part of a [[Batman Gambit]] to get the villain to underestimate him.}}
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