Net... overpowering! Arms... tired... heavy! Can't... move... must... urk...
— Bat Thumb
Want to incapacitate somebody without killing them? Then the most foolproof way of pulling this off is with the Inescapable Net, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a net that, when thrown over someone, causes them to just flail around helplessly, trapped like a bunch of fish, ready to start
Dying Like Animals.
This trope is particularly popular in children's animation, where the intended audience usually just accepts the application of this trope without considering the general silliness of the idea. Suffice to say, this trope is much more difficult to pull off in live action television, in which the participants usually just end up looking silly.
To some extent this is
Truth In Television. Animals surprised by nets usually don't have enough time to figure out a way to get out of it before the hunter is able to incapacitate them permanently. Of course, anything that is substantially stronger, smarter or with more escape time than your typical hunted animal doesn't have this excuse.
Examples:
- Many Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but done most blatantly in Superfriends. These are characters with the ability to vibrate through walls, move entire planets, turn into lightning bolts- but put them under a net and they have no idea what to do. If you're lucky, it'll be a kryptonite net, but that still doesn't explain that no one else can escape.
- Team Rocket's nets in Pokémon. The Pokemon inside their nets will only rarely manage to free themselves, despite them usually being pretty powerful in battle.
- Usually handwaved as being electric/whatever proof nets.
- In The Fairly Odd Parents, fairies are literally incapabable of escaping if trapped in a butterfly net. Not a special, fancy net—an ordinary butterfly net. Talk about Weaksauce Weakness!
- Parodied in Order Of The Stick, where the party gets trapped in a net
on an island with an orc tribe hunting after them. They quickly figure out a way to get out of the net, but Elan warns them that the presence of the net is proof that they were supposed to be caught, and that trying to escape from the net is ultimately futile because the narrative structure is working against them. They're then beat up while still removing the net.
- On The Electric Company, Spider-Man caught criminals this way.
- Justified in One Piece, when the Marines use a net to trap Alvida and Buggy - it's a net specifically designed to counter Devil's Fruit powers, so they're screwed.
- Lampshaded/justified in the Planet Of The Apes book: The protagonist and narrator writes that he was so panicked he did exactly the wrong thing when trying to escape from the net, which led to his capture.
- Even happens in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, when the protagonists are caught (of all things) by the Ewoks.
- Justified in that the trap was sprung a split second after they entered the area and the net had caught them in such a way that they couldn't reach their weapons.
- Spoofed in KungPaoEnterTheFist the hero is trapped in a net that isn't even big enough to cover his head.
