< The Psycho Rangers
The Psycho Rangers/Playing With
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.
- Each member refines his/her talents in such a way that they each come close to, or even surpass, the respective expert among the heroes, or otherwise exploits an individual weakness.
- 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.
- Each RAT was designed to crush a particular hero, to the exclusion of developing general fighting skills/tactics. As a result, even the Tagalong Kid can beat a RAT 1-on-1.
- 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."
- Conversed: "They dress like the heroes, they pose like the heroes, and their names are 'Evil!Hiro', 'Evil!Lance', 'Evil!Brian', 'Evil!Biggs', and 'Evil!Robin'. It's obvious that they're supposed to be the heores' respective Evil Twins."
- Played For Drama: The RATs were created from the heroes' DNA or recruited from other humans against a team who has Ape Shall Never Kill Ape [1] as part of its moral code, whose previous villains were robots or monsters.
- The existence (or possibility thereof) of souls within the RATs could also be touched on in the clone variant.
- Two of the heroes who have been dancing The Masochism Tango are instantly attracted to the other's respective Evil Twin. Defeating the Psycho Rangers once and for all could have various psychological impacts.
- Best case: The two heroes finally see the positive elements of the Evil Twin in the Genuine Article, resulting in a Relationship Upgrade by way of Doppelganger Replacement Love Interest.
- Worst case: The Fan-Preferred Couple is irrevocably estranged (even from the shippers), with their conflict severely impacting the Nakama.
- Most Likely: It won't impact their relationship one bit.
Back to The Psycho Rangers
- ↑ Actually Thou Shalt Not Kill, but is "Ape" in practice
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