Merchandising the Monster

If it's worth warning, it's worth marketing.

Bruce Wayne: The Joker is a homicidal maniac. An agent of pure chaos. He wants to kill us all just so he can laugh over our graves.

Mark: So, uh, you don't want to Jokerize your fries?

— Batman to a random Bat Burger employee, Batman

They are evil incarnate. They have brought countless devastation, and taken lots of lives. Causing unforgettable pain and trauma to many. Even heroes fear and hate them. And in many cases, they haven't even been stopped yet. Causing untold harm still to this day.

So of course they would make for a perfect kids toy!

A trope that has become especially common in superhero comics. Where a villain that just last week escaped jail, could see their image being used on countless commercial enterprises. Ranging from kid toylines, to fast food franchises. No matter the severity of their crimes.

This can be somewhat excusable. When the heroes of this world have action figures of themselves being sold to kids, it makes sense some of the villains do too. After all, the heroes need someone to fight. And even on the real world, you get toys of generic robbers to fight the generic cops.

And when the villain in question is a relatively harmless white glove thief, there is no real harm done. But when the toy depicts a very specific name and face, and their crimes range from intended manslaughter to genocide? Well. Let's just say that it's strange that the surviving victims don't complain more about seeing all over the general store the person that left them suffering lifelong PTSD.

Keep in mind that this trope encompasses examples where unrelated third parties try to make a business out of it. Not when the villain or evil organization itself, produces the merchandise in an effort of propaganda, or personal monetary gain. Also, not to be confused with Monster Organ Trafficking, which is about profiting from a product a monster creates from their body.

Can overlap with My Little Panzer if the toys are as dangerous as the people they're modeled after. Can also overlap with Angst? What Angst? if the villains are forgiven so quickly that people are willing to make toys based in their likeness. If it's directly pointed out by the characters, it can fall into Misaimed Merchandising. See also Milking the Monster.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• My Hero Academia: While at the mall, the members of Class 1A see a shop selling merchandise of the Hero Killer Stain, whose ideology to end corruption in heroes (by killing any who failed to meet his standards) resonated with many people.

Audio Drama

• Big Finish Doctor Who: The audio Jubilee is set in an alternate timeline, where the UK defeated a Dalek invasion in 1903. A hundred years later, as the English Empire celebrates the jubilee of its victory, Dalek merch is everywhere, in a parody of real world Dalekmania.

Comic Books

• Action Comics (New 52): Played with in the form of "Superdoom", an alternate-universe version of Superman, which was an artificially-created and thought-powered hero designed by the corporation that owned it to be as marketable as possible — which manifested as making it a brutal, violent anti-hero. Even when it went on a murderous, multiversal rampage, Overcorp kept selling its image to make people feel like they were "part of something bigger".
• Batman:
  • After being convinced by several of his Robins to visit a nearby Bat Burger, Bruce Wayne has to control his anger at the idea of seeing the name of the Joker, a known homicidal maniac, being used to publicize a special sauce.
  • Punchline, Joker's replacement sidekick for Harley Quinn, was, before joining up with the Clown Prince himself, a fan of him and once wore a Joker shirt to her college on "Dress Like Your Hero Day".
  • Similar to the above, Jim Gordon, Jr. putting on a (possibly) homemade Joker costume one Halloween was treated as Troubling Unchildlike Behavior, and foreshadowing for the kind of Serial Killer he'd grow into.
• G.I. Joe: Done in an accidental Harsher in Hindsight manner in the IDW Publishing comics, where a character wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the Decepticon emblem. At first, this was merely a Shout-Out to the most famous of Hasbro's properties. However, a Retcon later placed the events of the G.I.Joe comic in the aftermath of Transformers: All Hail Megatron (where the Decepticons launched an invasion that, among other things, resulted in the death of the US President of the time and the massacre of the entire population of Beijing).
• The Spectre: One story had an edgy nightclub in New York called The Killing Joke, with attendees dressed as the Joker, and the actual Joker invited along because they assumed he'd be flattered. After the Spectre stops the Joker from killing everyone in attendence, they say they've learned their lesson. Cut to two guys in green robes heading to a club called The Wrath of God.
• One Spider-Man issue features a truly baffling scene where Mysterio goes to a fan convention for supervillains, complete with people in cosplay. It's akin to going to Comic-Con and seeing people dressed as Joseph Stalin or Ted Bundy. It rather highlights a tendency of writers making gags like this to forget that while the villains are just comic characters in real life, in-universe, they are real criminals responsible for a litany of crimes, some of them quite grisly. For example, one of the villains prominently shown being displayed is Sabretooth, who in-story is an infamously sadistic mercenary and terrorist bordering on outright Serial Killer, a man who kills for money and pleasure, possesses a body count in the hundreds, and is rightly feared as one of the most dangerous criminals in the world. All that being said, there may be an inkling of Truth in Television to this - serial killers can and do at times garner surprising amounts of misguided fans in real life.
• Watchmen: Defied. Issue #10 of the series contains excerpts from Adrian Veidt's communications with the team responsible for creating a toy line based on his former superheroic identity, who propose including figures of the violent vigilante Rorschach and former supervillain Moloch the Mystic (along with Veidt's fellow retired superhero Nite Owl). However, Veidt vetoes their inclusion thanks to ethical concerns, instead proposing creating a fictional army of costumed terrorists.

Comic Strips

• The Doctor Who Magazine strip "Liberation of the Daleks!" is set in the Dalek Dome, a VR theme park where people can experience actual Dalek invasion plans. The Doctor is horrified, and even more so when he learns the simulations are derived from the memories and fantasies of actual Kaled mutants, stored under the park.

Fan Works

• Guys Being Dudes: Cypher and Shadow Lugia are apparently popular enough in their home region of Orre for the resident Hot Topic parody to sell merchandise featuring them.

Films — Live-Action

• Jurassic World: Lowery Cruthers, an InGen employee who works in the Jurassic World control room, proudly shows off his t-shirt displaying the logo of the original Jurassic Park (a shirt that is actual real life merchandise for the 1993 film). Since the old park never opened due to multiple people getting killed by escaped dinosaurs, Claire Dearing thinks that this is insulting to the memory of those who died and demands that Lowery never wear the shirt again.
• King Kong (1933), King Kong (1976), and King Kong (2005): All see characters bringing Kong, who at this point has contributed to the death of uncounted people on his island, back to the US for entertainment purposes.
• Pacific Rim: The Kaiju Hardship had shoes designed after it, advertised along with shoes designed after Romeo Blue, the Jaeger that fought and defeated it. The introduction to the movie also mentions as more Jaegers fought and killed Kaiju, toys were being made out of those Kaijus.
• A borderline example in Rogue One when Jyn's abandoned clonetrooper doll is found by one of the soldiers raiding her home. It makes sense for toys to exist of the heroic clone soldiers who fought for the Republic in the (recently ended in-universe) Clone Wars, but given what happened to said clones at the end of the war courtesy of Order 66, said troopers are now symbols of oppression serving The Empire.
• Thor: Love and Thunder has a brief scene at "Infinity Conez", an ice cream parlor with a logo lampooning Thanos, his Infinity Gauntlet, and how he used it to wipe out half of the universe.
• After the events of the first Tremors film become public knowledge, various Graboid-based merchandise were made. The second film includes arcade video games and informative comic books, though apparently none of the survivors of the first film received any of the profits. In the third film and the TV series, the town of Perfection is slowly being made into a tourist destination for people who want to see Graboids for themselves, including a simulation of a Graboid attack during tour guides and a fully-stocked gift shop.

Literature

• The Zombie Survival Guide: The "Recorded Attacks" section includes the time a lone zombie walked up on the shore of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, tried to bite a child, and was killed by a recent immigrant. Unlike most zombie attacks where the incident was covered up, this one became a local sensation, with merchandise ranging from photographs to children's books for sale.
• Deconstructed in the epilogue of The Relic, where its noted that in the aftermath of everything, there were some very tasteless and tone-deaf attempts to profit off the Museum Beast's rampage, ranging from documentaries to action figures to even a Saturday morning cartoon. Given that the creature in question was a horrifying brain-eating monster with a body count that includes two kids, these attempts fail. Badly.
• "The New Shadow", the aborted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, features a sequence where the younger protagonist Saelon bemusedly remarks on how kids now often pretend to be orcs while playing, in much the way kids in our world play "cops and robbers". Borlas, an aging man who was a child when the War of the Ring happened, is disturbed by this, noting that he's old enough to remember what real orcs were like.
• In Guards! Guards!, C.M.O.T. Dibbler may, like the rest of Ankh-Morpork, hope for a hero to arrive and rid them of the dragon that's destroyed a large part of the city, but that's absolutely no reason not to be selling cuddly dragon toys, because business is business.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: Though it doesn't quite come across in the finished episode, the overall idea of "Snakedance" is that the people of Manussa have turned the celebration around the defeat of the Mara into a cheap, tawdry spectacle (one of the few remnants of the concept is a Punch and Judy show in which a puppet Mara makes a guest appearance). The DVD pop-up notes do indicate that this was much more prominent in the script.
• The Flash (2014) has CC Jitters, a coffee shop comfortable with selling drinks named after Zoom and Cicada. Both were serial killers who terrorized the city; the latter was served when its namesake was at large and actively killing people.
• Hawkeye (2021): The fourth episode shows that Kate's aunt has a "Thanos Was Right" mug in her apartment. Yes, someone thought it was a good idea to make merchandise agreeing with the genocidal madman who destroyed half the universe, and whose alternate counterpart almost destroyed all of it to rebuild in his image. Also doubles as an Ascended Meme.
• Ultra Series: Numerous installments in the franchise portrays the Ultras and their kaiju adversaries as the basis for highly-popular toys in-universe, often portrayed with real-world merchandise for these shows. It helps that the majority of the franchise's installments are a Lighter and Softer take on the Kaiju genre where the No Endor Holocaust rule is applied and most of these monsters are defeated quickly, so they probably aren't too hated in-universe as to not be merchandisable.

Video Games

• Dead Rising: While the zombie outbreak might have been somewhat contained, and using their slaughter as part of a TV show could bring in a lot of audience, the people that lost family members and friends to it don't seem to think the same. Mainly because they don't want to change the channel one day, and see the decaying but still moving corpse of their mother there. And only seconds before her head gets smashed by a giant toy hammer.
• Fate/Grand Order: "Servant Summer Festival!" is about a doujin convention run and attended by Servants. The contents of the event's doujins are also about Servants, including characters who antagonized the main cast in events prior. One such book you can collect is a Buddhist essay featuring Kiara Sessyouin, who was a major villain in her home game and an event.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Long ago, an extradimensional being known as Specimen ID-F86 invaded what is now the New World. It was eventually stopped and contained by the Beast Pack's Precursors, who experimented on it and used it to create interplanetary warp technology. Now, what would be the most appropriate way to deal with the Sealed Evil in a Can that nearly destroyed your planet? Why, turn the research facility containing it into a tourist attraction - complete with cheesy theme park background music and a narrator cheerfully explaining the catastrophe, of course!
• Metroid Fusion has several ending images exclusive to the Japanese release of the game. If you beat the Japanese version on Hard Mode with a 1% item collection rate, you receive a picture◊ depicting a store shelf full of toy packs based on the events of the game. These packs feature two action figures; one is based on protagonist Samus Aran in her Fusion Suit, while the other is of the SA-X, an X Parasite that assimilated Samus's DNA, infected and subsequently stole her Power Suit, and hunted her down with it.
• Pikuniku: A villager outside of the cave you wake up in was selling merchandise of the supposed beast that lives in the cave, and now that everyone knows you aren't actually a scary beast, he lets you know you ruined his business.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando: A strange case where the people marketing the monster created the monster itself, the massive galaxy-spanning corporation aptly-named "MegaCorp" creates a biological experiment called the Protopet to mass-produce and sell to familes as a household companion. Unfortunately, the Protopet is incredibly-dangerous and volatile, causing a widespread catastrophe where people are being devoured by their own pets. It turns out the entire thing was set up by Captain Qwark in disguise, who deliberately marketed the Protopet as a pet to cause the catastrophe so he could stop it and be seen as a hero.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters: Otto Destruct, the emperor of the Technomites, creates an army of evil Ratchet clones as part of his plan to absorb the intelligence of everyone in the galaxy and become the smartest being in the galaxy. After his defeat, the Ratchet clones end up getting sold as toys.
• Warframe:
  • The Cetus' curious merchandise includes toy guns and masks based on the Grineer, those genocidal soldiers who camp out on the neighbouring Plains of Eidolon and who would've stamped out the townspeople long ago if not for the Unum tower's protective powers. There are also replicas of Tenno swords and helmets so kids can play cops and robbers, or rather Tenno and Grineer.
  • Someone is making bobblehead toys of both the Warframes themselves, but also the various foes you face. Up to and including loathsome specimens such as Tyl Regor and Alad V. This inexplicably includes a bobblehead of Erra, the feared leader of the Sentient armies, an action tantamount to seeing the face of Satan and then selling plushies of his visage.

Web Animation

• RWBY: The Creatures of Grimm infest the planet; humanity only survives by living in fortified kingdoms protected by Huntsmen. Grimm evaporate upon death, so don't leave harvestable bodies behind; this has created markets aimed at children and adults alike: Grimm figurines for children, as seen on Ruby's bedroom shelves; expensive statues, as seen in the homes of wealthy elite like the Schnee family; taxidermic mock-ups for people who want hunt trophies on their walls; and so on. Nora once dreams about killing Grimm and selling their pelts as rugs.

Webcomics

• Sleepless Domain has Fright Night which is a version of Halloween close to the Gaelic Pagan roots of the modern holiday, in which the kids disguise themselves as one of the various monsters that infest the city streets at night.

Web Original

• Doctor Who: This trope is lampshaded in this video on the YouTube channel. When a Time Lord child reviews a LEGO toy of the TARDIS, he points out that a Dalek is among the figures included, and that making a toy out of an all-hating monster that nearly destroyed the universe during the Last Great Time War is rather offensive.
• Neopets has had numerous plotlines over the years, and without failure, there will be a ton of items with the villains' likeness, from toys to clothing to novelty food. The resident Barbie Expies, Usuki, will usually be the first to do so, but others will as well, even (and especially) in areas where said villain did the most direct damage. For instance, Lord Kass was so twisted that even the overtly-demonic land of Darigan Citadel considered him a tyrant, but that won't stop the local toy store from selling yo-yos with his face on them. Dr. Frank Sloth was an alien invader who enslaved the entire Grundo race and made it his goal to force Neopians into becoming his personal army of grotesque mutants, but that won't stop the local cafe from selling ice cream in the shape of his head. Etc. They aren't being forced to do this, either; the former is dead, and the latter is sealed in a coin floating somewhere in deep space. Nor is it Gameplay and Story Segregation, as the affected people (especially the Grundos) will be seen using these items.
• Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: A strange creature of immense size was found in the desert of west Texas. Its body and fluids have bizarre properties. So of course Anodyne Deep Earth Mining Inc. started making products from the creature and marketing this Womb Level as a tourist attraction.

Western Animation

• Aaahh!!! Real Monsters: Defied. Krumm is hired by a few humans in Hollywood who think he's just some guy in a costume. Krumm attempts to get around this by using Voluntary Shapeshifting and trying to scare the director of the project into letting him go, proving he's a real monster and not a fake. But when the director finds out, it only makes the director like Krumm even more, thinking of all the merchandising opportunities that a real monster could provide. As a result, Krumm and the other monsters have to just run for it and leave Hollywood behind.
• Batman: The Animated Series: In "Joker's Wild", a businessman unveils a new casino with a Joker-based theme. It turns out that his intention isn't really to exploit the Joker's infamy for profit — it's to provoke the Joker into destroying the casino so he can collect the insurance.
• Batman and Harley Quinn features a Cosplay Café called "Superbabes" staffed by women wearing skimpy versions of costumes for female DC heroes and villains. Nightwing finds Harley Quinn working as a waitress there, cosplaying as herself.
• Frisky Dingo: Attempting this was actually what kicked off the conflict in the series. Xander Crewes finds the toyline based on his Awesome X identity tanking since all his villains keep winding up dead. When he spots Killface, he immediately wants to secure rights to the man's image and market him as the line's new villain. Ironically this might have helped Killface too, who was strapped for cash needed to complete his Annihilatrix.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated features the gang unmasking the Monster of the Week as usual. However, unlike other series, this gains them ire from the local government, who want the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax maintained to increase tourism.
• Transformers: Animated: After being fired from Sumdac Industries, Porter C. Powell starts selling toys of Soundwave, himself a former toy turned into Megatron's robotic liberator that had previously taken control of all the technology in Detroit to wipe out the human race. Surprisingly, it sells like crazy—even Sumdac himself buys one (though it's more to make up for the fact that the original Soundwave, a birthday gift for his daughter, was designed by Megatron when he was tricking him into thinking he was a friend). Unsurprisingly, when the real Soundwave uses these new toys to take control of the Autobots and cause even more havoc, Powell is bankrupted by the massive refunds he gets hit with.
• World of Quest: In one episode, the group comes across a town that lives close to the lair of a creature called the Croca-Doodle-Doo, which they need to combat to activate the Earth Sword. The town, named Crocadoodle Ville, has built a whole economy on selling the Croca-Doodle-Doo as a vicious creature, and is pretty much dependent on it to keep the village from economic ruin.
• Cartoon Network used to hold a number of ads featuring their various characters, either as Animated Actors, or in their downtime. One of the latter involved The Powerpuff Girls' Rogues Gallery attending anger management therapy. Mojo Jojo goes on a rant about how his likeness was merchandised as a keychain, how nobody asked for permission to use it, and how he makes no money off of this.

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