Basic Trope: A group of Badass Normals that specialize in defeating super-powered enemies.
- Straight: The Cape-Busters are a group of mercenaries that help governments neutralize supervillains and rogue superheroes.
- Exaggerated: The Cape-Busters hunt down and kill EVERY SINGLE MUTANT in the world!
- Downplayed:
- There is no specialized organization to fight Capes, but some police officers and soldiers have the training and equipment to try.
- Cape-Buster is a lone gunman with a grudge against every meta-human and the skill and equipment to express it.
- Justified:
- The existence of super-powered individuals could be seen as a threat to non-powered humankind, thus necessitating some sort of forceful countermeasure.
- Standard military and police are vastly under-prepared for super-villains, and a specialist force is required to prevent social collapse.
- All super-humans in-setting inevitably become corrupted and evil, so countering their rise is entirely moral and rational.
- Inverted: A gang of Supers hunt down and murder humans.
- Subverted: The Cape-Busters were not intended at an anti-superhuman unit, instead being given estoric equipment to banish the rise of despotism in their home state.
- Double Subverted: But the main source of despotism is from super-humans, and they believe that all superhumans are either with them or against them...
- Parodied: The Cape-Busters have no special equipment or training, yet are somehow able to defeat a Physical God with ease.
- Alternately, the Cape-Busters are the Chew Toy, unable to win against even the absolute lamest of meta-humans.
- Zig Zagged: The Cape-Busters are a Creature-Hunter Organization rather than one that targets superheros exclusively...but often find themselves in conflict with the latter. It's not due to any jingoism or doctrinal reasons however-it's just that they get paid to do so, and get along with the superhuman community surprising well for mortal enemies.
- Averted: there is no organisation solely dedicated to beating down superhumans.
- Enforced: The writers of the X-Men copycat have decided to write an arc discussing a recent spike in Police Brutality.
- Lampshaded: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely! Imagine a man capable of Mind Raping an entire city with the flick of a wrist! What guarantees that man won't abuse his power for evil?! We, The Cape-Busters, won't allow for that kind of people to exist!"
- Invoked: A superhero founds a cape-buster group as insurance in case he ever goes rouge.
- Implied: On several scenes there are notable wanted posters with pictures of the superhero team members and pretty hefty rewards.
- Exploited: A super-villain founds a deliberately corrupt cape-buster force, both to kill off his rivals and destroy faith in the establishment when their corruption is discovered.
- Defied: Humans are Puny Earthlings, and it Takes One to Kill One. Humans are entirely dependent on their superhuman guardians.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "I pay five hundred dollars a month to try to get a little escapism, and what do the writers do? They write some analogy about the Patriot Act, and then toss my beloved Spidey into that mess!"
- Deconstructed:
- While it can be argued that there needs to be ways to take care of these threats, to the government it's more about removing threats to its power rather than actually protecting people.
- Because they have technology to stop Mutants with very few government oversights they themselves become corrupt.
- The organization mainly is used to prosecute mutants
- Reconstructed:
- While the Cape-Busters serve a corrupt system, they are corrupt because of that system and not because countermeasures against the inevitable super-villain are bad. Placed within a less abusive context, a new unit of cape-busters become the foremost anti-super-villain force on Earth.
- Cape-busters are folded into the greater police force and are subject to even more legislative limits due to their dangerous equipment. While this often means they're drowning in red tape it also means it's much harder for corruption to take root.
- Mutants are invited to join the Cape-Busters, and eventually become valued members of the team, throwing the us-vs-them mentality to the wayside for all but the most diehard bigots.
- Played For Laughs:
- The Cape-Busters are Ghostbusters rip-offs.
- The Cape-Busters, like all other government agencies in comedy fiction, are bogged down by Jurisdiction Friction, extremely small budget, Head-in-the-Sand Management, an incompetent Commander-In-Chief, and enough red tape to sink the Titanic.
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