The Psycho Rangers/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: An enemy team whose members are each specifically designed to destroy a particular hero.

  • Straight: The Empire develops a team of Super Soldiers to counter La Résistance's best hero team, both collectively and individually.
  • Exaggerated: The Squad's individual records are dissected and analyzed; down to blood type, mannerisms, and even Astrological Signs. These are then either duplicated or inverted to create the Empire's Resistance Annihilation Team.
  • Downplayed: The Empire's police force, an indirectly-controlled Unwitting Pawn, assembles their best cops into an Anti-Vigilante Squad, in an effort to protect the peace. The AVS consists of the same number of members as La Résistance, and each cop primarily studies up on a different rebel.
  • Justified: The Big Bad's personal philosophy is either "More is Better" or "Evil is my Good".
    • Alternately, La Résistance are defectors from a massive group made up of many teams, with each team featuring a designated member for each job.
  • Inverted: The Federation assembles a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to combat a Legion of Doom. Each misfit is chosen with a particular member of the Legion in mind.
  • Subverted: The Quirky Miniboss Squad merely has the same number of members (likely with the same gender balance and roles) as the heroes' team; yet the QMS was formed independently of the Heroes.
  • Double Subverted: Over the course of their many defeats, each individual member gets a grudge against a particular hero, and no grudge overlaps.
  • Parodied: The "Resistance Anihaliation Team" copies each hero's uniform, down to the buttons, except where there are pastels there are dark colors (and vice versa), square buttons instead of round, etc; and each routinely ask themselves, "What Would (insert rival here) Do?" and do the exact opposite. This may or may not include surrendering to a falling leaf.
    • Sissy Villain: Evil is the new good!
  • Deconstructed: The members of the "Resistance Annihilation Team" are formed from the Anti-virtues opposite of each of the heroes; but those principal Anti-virtues prevent them from functioning as a cohesive unit.
  • Reconstructed: The "Resistance Annihilation Team" trained together to build bonds and strategies for any situation involving any of the heroes, and even some to battle Colonel Makepeace's Squad.
  • Zig Zagged: The Heroes and the Quirky Miniboss Squad were formed independently and initially have no powers/tactics specific to a particular rival. But then, the QMS each get powers specifically to counter a particular hero, who then come up with tactics to counter those powers, which leads the QMS to use those powers against different heroes, who then...
  • Averted: The bad guys never create a specific team to combat The Hero and Friends.
  • Enforced: "We need a line of toys to represent the bad guys and parents won't merely buy every Monster of the Week. We need a line of regulars. With as few deviations from our existing figures as possible."
  • Lampshaded: "What did the Big Bad do to make these guys? Take Samples of our DNA and invert them?"
  • Invoked: "If you can't beat them, make Better yet Evil versions of them! Muh, Ha, Ha, Ha!"
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: When the villain group hears how similar they are to the heroes, they decide to make every effort to be totally different from the heroes and not match up at all.
  • Discussed:

Brian: I've programmed the Training Center to make training doubles of us that are programed to fight us, in case Emperor Evulz tries to create his own team."

Lance: Gee, I hope it doesn't malfunction."

Back to The Psycho Rangers

  1. ↑ Actually Thou Shalt Not Kill, but is "Ape" in practice
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