Lex paid a team of consultants six million dollars and they came up with the name 'Injustice League'.
There are all kinds of antagonists that The Hero and The Team might go up against, though most of them are usually a parallel of the heroes and/or representative of something which the heroes are opposed to – Evil Counterparts, Allegorical Characters of a negative kind, rivals, Evil Doppelgangers, the Satanic Archetype, the Psycho Rangers. And sometimes, when the heroes include or are part of an entire heroic organization, their opponents might be another organization that's similar to themselves, but darker or at least more antagonistic.
An Evil Counterpart Organization is what it says on the tin: an organization which is a foil or an Evil Counterpart of the protagonists' organization – they have similarities to the heroes' organization but are an antagonist. Basically, this trope is to the Foil trope what Mirroring Factions are to the Mirror Character — whereas Mirroring Factions are about conflicting organizations' similarities being emphasized, this trope is about the differences including the moral differences. Note that one of the key traits of the Counterpart Organization is that they can't just be any organization that the heroes oppose. They have to mirror the heroes' organization in some way. Perhaps the two organizations have similar missions and goals, perhaps they work in the same field, or perhaps one organization is deliberately trying to imitate the other.
There are several ways that the Counterpart Organization can be antagonistic whereas the protagonist's organization is not. Maybe the latter is simply good and the former evil. Or maybe the source organization is pretty morally murky themselves, but the rival is worse to the point where they make the first organization A Lighter Shade of Black by default – or the inverse of this might apply in a White-and-Grey Morality story, where the Counterpart Organization is simply grayer than the hero's organization. In Villain Protagonist works, the Good Counterpart Organization is a benevolent and altruistic counterpart to the protagonist, but not as easy for the audience to root for. The Counterpart Organization might show their more antagonistic colors openly, or they might masquerade as more benevolent than they really are.
Organizations that could end up being an Evil (or in some cases Good) Counterpart Organization include Evil, Inc., The Conspiracy and associated subtropes, the Government Agency of Fiction, the Nebulous Evil Organization, The Syndicate, the Anti-Magical Faction, the Brotherhood of Evil, the Corrupt Church, The Empire, the Academy of Evil, the Renegade Splinter Faction, the Evil half of Good Policing, Evil Policing, the Vigilante Militia, or (in Villain Protagonist works) Heroes "R" Us.
The Counterpart Organization might overlap with Privileged Rival if they're more sophisticated or resourceful than the protagonist's organization to keep the main leads as the underdogs. Chevalier vs. Rogue is another possible overlap depending on how the two opposed organizations are presented. See also Team Mercy vs. Team Murder, for when the mirroring organizations are defined exclusively by willingness to kill; often in pursuit of a shared goal.
Compare Evil Counterpart Race (where it's a species instead of an organization) and The Psycho Rangers (where it's a mirror of The Team and each of its members specifically rather than a wider organization). Contrast We ARE Struggling Together (which is infighting within a single organization). Compare and contrast The Horseshoe Effect (which is two ideologically opposed organizations being the same in practice) and the Evil Knockoff (a manufactured, antagonistic imitation of The Hero).
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- My-HiME: There are two rival groups trying to use the power of the HiME for their own ends — District One, a secret but official part of the Japanese Government that was founded by the Obsidian Prince and is run by Nagi; and their rivals, the Searrs Foundation, which is said to be responsible for a number of powerful and secretive business dealings, including picking the President of the United States. The Searrs Foundation are represented in the story by Alyssa Searrs, her robot bodyguard Miyu Greer, and Miyu's creator Joseph Greer. When the Searrs Foundation launches an army at Fuuka Academy to seize the HiME, Nagi freezes time a moment to tell Alyssa and Miyu that he intends to pay them back quite handily for their interference in his plans.
- One Piece: The Fake Straw Hats who appear at the Return to Sabaody arc to try to benefit from the reputation of the real Straw Hats qualify. Their attempt to pass on as the genuine ones is already obviously poor in the eyes of the audience because: 1) These phonies always brag about their stolen reputation to intimidate anyone and get what they want because they have no real skills (they even tried to intimidate the real ones like this!), 2) They aim to recruit other pirates based solely on their bounties because they think of them as an indicator for power, showing they only care for strength, and 3) Most of them never think of themselves as friends or family (as when Fake Luffy simply gives no importance to the loss of his Robin). Anyone who knows the real Straw Hats has a perfect concept of their intense loyalty towards each other, their dedication to their "job" by becoming stronger, the fact that Luffy always handpicked his True Companions if they interest him somehow — or if they look weird and flashy — and not necessarily by strength, and despite thinking of their bounties as achievements, they never rub them to the faces of others to get what they want.
- The Rebirth of Buddha: Sayako Amanokawa, the protagonist, is dragged into a conflict between two religious organizations: the Sounen Group and TSI. The former is led by Tousaku Arai, who claims to be Buddha reborn, but preaches about having a "survival of the fittest" approach to life lures people in with promises of Psychic Powers in exchange for their obedience to him. The latter, which she joins later on after being getting back with her ex-boyfriend Yuuki, is led by Taiyou Sorano, who is the actual reincarnation of Buddha and preaches his "teachings of the mind" to help people purify their minds and save others from demons.
- Rock Is a Lady's Modesty: Bitter Ganache and Bacchus act as early-arc foils to the protagonists' Hard Rock quartet Rock Lady.
- Bitter Ganache represents a band "selling out", sacrificing playing technique and passion for popular accessibility and fame. In the first Battle of the Bands, they're counterpointed to the leads' band (then called Blanc de Noir + α) as the Performer to their Technician, as a poppy J-rock Girl Group singing cheesy crowd-pleasing love songs next to the protagonists' all-instrumental Hard Rock.
- Bacchus is Yayoi Takayanagi's claims and Lilisa's fears made manifest: they're a bunch of rich kids who treat music as a hobby to get a quick hit of clout and attention, with any actual effort substituted with other people's hard work that they buy or charm out of them. They even claim to be aiming for Fuji Rock, like the girls. But their wealth is their primary identity, whereas for Rock Lady, wealth is an obstacle to their genuine passion for making music.
Audio Plays
- Torchwood (BBC Audio): Firestone from "Department X" was designed to be a rival organization for Torchwood, and both are interested in procuring alien artifacts. The major difference is that whereas Torchwood wants to take the artifacts to protect the human population, Firestone wants to use them for personal profit. Firestone is also perfectly willing to go to lengths that Torchwood are less likely to do, such as mind-controlling shop employees and murdering people.
Comic Books
- Marvel Universe: The Cabal, developed after Secret Invasion, is this to The Illuminati. Led by Norman Osborn, the group consists of Doctor Doom, Loki, The Hood, Emma Frost, and Namor who try to secretly manipulate the superhero political atmosphere for their own benefits.
Fan Works
- RWBY Reversed Fates (RWBY): Inverted by Ilia's parents' company, Opal Industries. Like the Schnee Dust Company, it's a family-run major Atlesian corporation, but it was founded in large part to combat the SDC's infamous exploitative business practices including those against Faunus.
- Service with a Smile (RWBY): After Jaune opens his own coffee shop in Vale, he ends up coming into conflict with another coffee shop business called Café Prime, due to them seeing him as a competitor. Whereas Jaune's coffee shop is a warm, cozy, up-and-coming coffee house establishment that serves all kinds of tasteful drinks and where Jaune makes sure each of the staff is treated decently; Café Prime is a soulless, greedy conglomerate chain that serves nothing but the infamously-distasteful Atlas Black coffee, and it resorts to increasingly underhanded methods to put Jaune out of business as the fic goes on.
Film – Live-Action
- Captain America: The First Avenger: The Strategic Science Reserve, or SSR, is a joint Allied military operation intent on creating a Super-Soldier for the Allied Forces, as well as for combatting the threat posed by HYDRA. The latter serves as their Evil Counterpart in the Axis forces — as the Nazi Deep Science Division, HYDRA have also attained their own Super-Soldier in the form of Johann Schmidt, and have more than once attempted to stop the Allied Super-Soldier program via Assassination Attempt. Both the SSR and HYDRA serve as elite units in their respective factions, housing some of the best technology, most brilliant minds, and both perform deep-cover operations behind enemy lines.
- James Bond:
- MI6's most tenacious enemy in the film series is SPECTRE, a group of former spies, criminals, and secret policemen who've pooled their resources to form a dangerous criminal organization led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. They sometimes act as contractors to various governments, usually Britain's enemies, but also undertake plenty of actions on their own, and after their defeat by Bond in the first movie, are shown to develop a grudge against British intelligence in general and him in particular.
- Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace had Quantum... which Spectre retconned as a branch of its namesake organization.
- Though they only appear together in one movie, SPECTRE can also be viewed as an Evil Counterpart Organization to the Union Corse led by Marc-Ange Draco. They're the first and second largest crime syndicates in Europe, respectively. They have a mutually antagonistic relationship at least since SPECTRE managed to entice several of the Union's men to defect, and the Union ultimately supplies most of the firepower to burn down their Piz Gloria operation. They both end up being pivotal to James Bond's life, but in opposite ways - Blofeld is Bond's archnemesis, while Draco, by the end of the movie, is his father-in-law. The Union Corse are treated mostly as Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters and Lovable Rogues, who live a life of crime but still abide by some moral codes, refusing for example to deal in drugs, while SPECTRE is extraordinarily destructive enough to have threatened nuclear or biological warfare multiple times. Finally, they tend to end up on opposite sides geopolitically - Draco used to be in La Résistance and is willing to help the British government again during the movies, while Blofeld spent the war playing both sides and those of his underlings with a past in the government are almost all former Nazis or former Communists.
- MI6's most tenacious enemy in the film series is SPECTRE, a group of former spies, criminals, and secret policemen who've pooled their resources to form a dangerous criminal organization led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. They sometimes act as contractors to various governments, usually Britain's enemies, but also undertake plenty of actions on their own, and after their defeat by Bond in the first movie, are shown to develop a grudge against British intelligence in general and him in particular.
- Jurassic Park: The franchise-central bio-engineering company InGen can be morally iffy at the best of times, but in both the original book and the movie adaptations, they look downright honorable next to the rival company BioSyn. In the first movie, BioSyn, though not mentioned by name, are indirectly responsible for the entire fall of the titular park and all the casualties that occurred because they, through Dodgson, hired Dennis Nedry to steal the park's cloned dinosaur embryos for them so they could make their own. In Jurassic World Dominion, Dodgson and BioSyn are much worse, as they engage in a corporate conspiracy to wipe out the world's entire food supply sans their own genetically-modified crops just so that everyone will be forced to buy from them for food.
- Mission: Impossible Film Series: in the fifth and sixth films, the heroes' Impossible Missions Force, an American intelligence and covert ops agency, has the Syndicate, a global criminal organization made up of former spies of all nationalities, which is explicitly described as "an anti-IMF." The two turn out to be even closer mirrors of each other when it's revealed that the Syndicate was originally created by the British government as a deniable covert army, whose commander Solomon Lane eventually slips off the leash and starts using it for his own goals. The parallels run even deeper if one looks at the rest of the series; not only does the IMF also exist to provide the U.S. government with Plausible Deniability, but it's proven extremely susceptible to corruption in the past, and the main characters themselves have repeatedly gone rogue in the interests of what they believed was the greater good. The difference really does come down to the fact that Ethan and his friends have a strong moral code centered on preserving life that helps keep them and their organization on the straight and narrow, while Lane is The Sociopath, obsessed at first with the violent destruction of the entire world order, and then with revenge on Hunt and the IMF.
- MonsterVerse: The Apex Cybernetics corporation introduced in Godzilla vs. Kong to the franchise-wide Creature-Hunter Organization Monarch. Like Monarch, Apex purports to combat Kaiju threats to humanity, and are a multinational organization worth billions of dollars, using high technology. However, Monarch are a governmental organization who generally recognize that not all Titans are threats and recognize the importance of humanity learning to co-exist with them (particularly Godzilla and Kong); Monarch are genuinely committed to saving and protecting as many human lives as they can; and (depending upon the work) most of Monarch hesitate, sometimes to a fault, to go poking around at things they don't understand. Apex, on the other hand, are a corporate entity who believe that all the Titans should be wiped out or enslaved so that humanity can be the sole dominant species, and they're thoroughly-crooked not-so-well-intentioned extremists: focusing first and foremost on trying to imitate and usurp Godzilla as King of the Monsters, masterminding a corporate conspiracy to deliberately endanger and sacrifice millions of civilians as part of their Engineered Heroics, and they're shown to be extremely arrogant and reckless in their methodology when experimenting with Titan materials (which is ultimately their undoing).
- Star Wars: the Jedi Order and the Sith Order are the two most prominent organizations of Force-users (basically, wizards) in the galaxy far far away. While the Jedi philosophy stresses service, compassion, peace, and selflessness, the Sith stress ambition, power, victory, and greed (to the point that their order eventually had to be limited to two members, a master and an apprentice; their philosophy is so sociopathic and self-centered that if there were any more than that, they'd tear each other to pieces without their enemies having to do anything at all). Their Evil Counterpart status is made even stronger by the fact that they were originally a Renegade Splinter Faction of the Jedi Order, and over the years, tend to replenish their ranks by attracting fallen Jedi (or encouraging them to fall in the first place).
- Whilst they never actually do battle or truly concurrently exist, the Confederacy of Independent Systems serves as a forbearer and dark counterpart to the Rebel Alliance. Both of them are a rebellion (The Seperatists are even referred to as such by Dooku in a deleted scene from Attack of the Clones) fighting against the reigning government (The Galactic Republic and its latter form the Galactic Empire) and are allied with an order of Force users in hiding (The Sith with the Confederacy and the Jedi with the Alliance). They get put into somewhat similar situations, such as how in the middle chapters of their respective trilogies their secret bases are located by their enemies on a desolate "backwoods" planet (The Separatists on Geonosis and the Rebels on Hoth) where they do battle whilst also carrying out a mass evacuation, with one of them being the current Sith/Jedi apprentice (Count Dooku of the Sith and Luke Skywalker of the Jedi) who escapes off by himself to meet with the master on his side who operates from afar (Dooku to Darth Sidious on Coruscant so he could deliver him the Death Star designs and Luke to Yoda on Dagobah so he could continue his Jedi training). In the third chapter, each would fall prey to Palpatine's trickery/deception and at least winding up nearly destroyed when led into what they think is a safe(r) situation (Sidious sending the Seperatist Council to Mustafar on the pretense it would be a safe hideaway and subsequently sends the newly christened Sith apprentice Vader to "take care of them" which leads to them being gathered, cornered and slaughtered as their use was up. Later on he'd fake reports from Bothan spies to the Rebels stating that the Death Star II was not yet fully operational when it actually was and also being supported by the Imperial Fleet as well as his best troops on the ground in order to draw out and destroy the Rebel forces in a cataclysmic battle). The comparison adds interesting food for thought to Padme's line in Revenge of the Sith to Anakin, "Have you ever considered that we may be on the wrong side?". Taking the Expanded Universe into account, both were deliberately created by Palpatine as well in order to further his own agenda (the CIS to create the Clone Wars as an excuse for his "emergency powers" and the Rebellion in order to gather his enemies in one place so they would be more easily crushed).
Literature
- The Cold War spy thrillers by John le Carré have the British intelligence agency MI6 tangle with the minions of Josef Stalin in the Thirteenth Directorate, a Russian No Such Agency tasked with conducting clandestine operations abroad. In the final book, Smiley's People, intelligence man George Smiley is coaxed out of retirement to thwart a "legend operation" orchestrated by George's nemesis Karla.
- The Da Vinci Code: The original Knights Templar were charged with protecting Christianity throughout the Byzantine Empire. However, after the Council of Nicaea decided that Jesus Christ was divine and unmarried, the Knights took to protecting the tomb of Jesus's wife, whom they termed the Holy Grail to obfuscate this fact. The Vatican would be embarrassed to have their doctrine disproven, and the Council of Shadows covertly acts to discover her whereabouts. The Knights' descendants renamed themselves the Priory of Sion, and continue to conceal and venerate the Holy Grail, sustaining a rivalry with the Vatican that has lasted for centuries.
- Its predecessor, Angels & Demons, gave us The Illuminati as another archenemy to the Catholic Church, a secret brotherhood devoted to the pursuit of science in the face of religious oppression. The Catholic Church attempted to stamp it out multiple times throughout history, leading them, in turn, to become devoted to its destruction, which they very nearly achieve in the book. Except it's all a ruse; the "Illuminati" in the book turn out to be a False Flag Operation masterminded by a senior Vatican cleric as an external threat to frighten people back to the Church. There's enough in the book to suggest that the Illuminati were once real, notably the series of clues they've hidden throughout Rome, but their ultimate fate is never revealed.
- Jack Ryan: The relaunch books starring Jack Ryan Jr. have him working not for the CIA, but for "the Campus," an unofficial covert ops agency set up after 9/11, that's connected to the intelligence community but answers to no government authority, and frequently sends out assassins to deal with terrorists or other threats to the U.S. homeland. It's given several mirror counterparts throughout the series:
- "Center," an unofficial black ops group set up by the Chinese government to carry out its orders with some deniability. While largely a group of computer hackers, Center has connections to multiple organized crime groups as well as, as a last resort, Chinese special forces of their own, all of which can be used to carry out violent work in the physical world to protect themselves or promote their interests, as they prove when they attack the Campus headquarters.
- The Iron Syndicate, effectively the Jack Ryan universe's answer to James Bond's SPECTRE. A transnational criminal organization that's powerful enough to manipulate entire governments for its own ends, it was formed after the Cold War by former operatives of the Bulgarian, Czech, and other communist State Sec organs, and has now grown rich and powerful enough to attract former spies and soldiers from a number of Western nations as well.
- Rostock Security Group, a European security company run by a German former government official, an Islamophobic ideologue who's using it to carry out his own private war against what he expansively defines as "terrorism." Ryan even reflects that RSG in many ways runs on exactly the same principle as the Campus, it's just that the Campus only deals with actual terrorists, while RSG effectively considers the entire Muslim world an enemy.
- James Bond: MI6, the British intelligence agency to which James Bond belongs, has SMERSH, the Soviet agency charged with assassination and other violent covert action, which spearheads a number of conspiracies against the West throughout the books that Bond has to counter. Bond, at least, considers it by far the most dangerous of the Soviet agencies, since the fear it engenders makes everybody on their side tow the line, while they, in turn, are shown to consider MI6 the most dangerous and competent of their Western adversaries. Their counterpart relationship is taken far enough that we eventually find that SMERSH, too, answers to a director who's mostly known only by the first letter of his last name, "General G." being their counterpart to the British "M."note
- Jurassic Park: The franchise-central bio-engineering company InGen can be morally iffy at the best of times, but in both the original book and the movie adaptations, they look downright honorable next to the rival company BioSyn. Unlike InGen, BioSyn in the books have an ugly reputation for stealing other companies' products and re-patenting them as their own (which is precisely what they try to do with InGen's dinosaur embryos in the first book, unwittingly triggering the entire disaster which destroys the titular park); and BioSyn's most prominent agent is the unscrupulous and downright sociopathic Dodgson. To give you an idea of just how rotten BioSyn is: in the backstory, Dodgson while under their employ secretly infected Chilean farmers with a modified strain of rabies. And BioSyn higher-ups are in on his schemes, since the book explicitly shows him asking for their permission before bribing Nedry.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The Intra-Scholastic Rivalry between Alvin Godfrey's Campus Watch and Leoncio Echevalria's "old council", both of which are each headed by a small team but represent much larger political factions with more members. Godfrey and his followers actively police the student body, trying to rehabilitate problem students and create safe spaces for weaker students to shine, such as founding a (very queer-coded) support group for students with sex- and gender-linked magical traits (which are discriminated against). Echevalria and his followers are Evil Reactionaries who took a laissez-faire attitude when they were in power, believing in the more traditional mage morality that Might Makes Right. The two groups' key members are also foils of each other: Godfrey and Echevalria are both phenomenally powerful mages of noble birth (but Godfrey was the family failure rather than the good son), Lesedi Ingwe and Khiirgi Albschuch are both outcasts (Lesedi for preferring kickboxing to sword arts, Khiirgi for her perversions of traditional elven magic and hedonistic attitude that got her run out of the home of her birth), and Tim Linton and Gino Beltrami are both phenomenally talented alchemists (Tim being an unsubtle, uncouth Master Poisoner and Gino an obnoxiously-classy liquor distiller and mixologist).
- Skandar Series: Historically, the Island's most powerful factions were the spirit wielders and the "silvers" (the riders bonded with silver, incredibly strong unicorns). Their fierce rivalry prevented the Island from falling into a dictatorshipnote , but a while back, the silvers managed to censor the spirit element and get all its wielders thrown in prison, which is why most silvers in the present-day are tyrannically evil. While the spirit-wielders aren't inherently or universally good, the vast majority of them are and are fighting against the silvers' dictatorship — conversely, most of the silvers are obviously unrepentantly aiming for conquest and killing anyone in their way. The factions' split is even shown in their magic; silvers start with immense raw power, and spirit wielders slowly develop Psychic Powers that reward precision and strategic thinking.
- Venus Prime: The fanatical Free Spirit organization is countered by Salamander, a covert branch of the Council of Worlds dedicated to rooting out Free Spirit operatives from the various government bodies. It's left ambiguous exactly how much better Salamander is, though, as their main objection to the Free Spirit is simply the fact that it's not under the government's control.
Live-Action TV
- The A-Team: Deadly Maneuvers involves an attempt to create one. A group of crime bosses and corrupt businessmen who've each suffered at the hands of the A-Team hire a legendary mercenary to bring them down. He in turn hires several other mercenaries to form his own team in order to be able to go toe-to-toe with his target. In the modern age of serialized television, this kind of villain would probably have lasted an entire season. This being the eighties, however, the "evil A-Team" is defeated and put away in a single episode, having proved themselves decidedly inferior to the real thing.
- Get Smart: The main characters belong to a government agency called CONTROL, while their adversaries belong to a criminal organization known as KAOS. KAOS is bent on world domination and employs all manner of Zany Scheme to that end, with CONTROL sending their agents out to foil them.
- Kamen Rider Zero-One: Both Hiden Intelligence and ZAIA Enterprise are high-end technology firms that have cornered the market in Japan. The Workplace Competition Arc is exclusively about the dynamic between these two companies and how they're foils to one another. Hiden Intelligence is led by Honest Corporate Executive Aruto Hiden and works for both the integration of the Robot Buddy Humagears into Japan's workforce and co-existence between man and machine despite the risk of hijacking by the hostile Metsubojinrai and the Ark — Hiden is also unabashedly heroic as a company, but suffers from organizational in-fighting due to Aruto having little business experience and his immediate colleagues constantly scheming to cut him loose. ZAIA Enterprise on the other hand is a Predatory Business led by Corrupt Corporate Executive Gai Amatsu, who hates Humagears and develops technology specifically to circumvent them as an appliance; being firmly pro-human and intent on eventually entering the arms trade after their attempt to buy Hiden out via the Competition. ZAIA is also much better-organized than Hiden and is adept at turning bad press into praise, yet it's perfectly willing to resort to cheating and cut-throat practice; its CEO secretly responsible for the corruption of the Ark spurring Metsubojinrai into hijacking Humagears in the first place as well as the Raiders interfering with the contest.
- Leverage: Redemption: Leverage, International is a global network of thieves, hackers, con artists, and other outlaws who act Just Like Robin Hood in pursuing the rich and corrupt while trying to make their victims whole again. RIZ Security is a Private Military Contractor that handles security and does other odd jobs for the same people that Leverage, Int. usually targets. The two of them butt heads several times throughout the first season, before finally being defeated in the season finale.
- MacGyver (1985): MacGyver works for the Phoenix Foundation, his archenemy Murdoc for Homicide International Trust. Put simply, the former deals in life while the latter deals in death. The Phoenix Foundation is a think tank and government contractor that promotes any number of socially conscious initiatives, from inner-city youth and anti-drug programs to environmental cleanup to developing new technologies, and while it does often take contracts from the military and intelligence community, always within strict moral boundaries (extracting political dissidents from the Eastern Bloc and China or providing security for visiting dignitaries yes, assassinating people or interfering in elections absolutely no). HIT, by contrast, is a fraternity of killers-for-hire.
- The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The heroes work for U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law Enforcement), an international law enforcement organization that guards world peace and security. Their archenemy throughout the series is THRUSH (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity), which strives for world domination.
- Primeval: New World: Project Magnet is a rare example where the corporation is good and the governmental organization is bad. The team based out of the Cross Photonics company and the governmental Project Magnet are both actively interested in containing Anomalies and neutralizing the creatures that come through as soon as they appear. However, the Cross team recognize the dangers of tampering with the timeline and half the team's members at least have some compassion for the creatures, trying to humanely capture them alive where possible and return them through the Anomalies to their time periods without changing anything. Whereas Project Magnet under Colonel Hall's direction actively try to capture and dissect the creatures for science, and moreso they actively want to experiment with changing the timeline through the Anomalies as much as possible, heedless of the existential cosmic risks to themselves and their world.
- Super Sentai:
- The Gorma Tribe are this to the Dai Tribe the Dairangers are descended from. Both were once part of the ancient Daos Empire before going to war, and both practiced a similar form of Ki Manipulation, the only difference being that the Gorma used it for malicious purposes.
- Juken Sentai Gekiranger: The Rinjuken Akugata are this to the Geki-Juken practitioners, being a Thug Dojo founded by three of the original ten Juken Practitioners based on a corrupted version of the Juken style.
- Torchwood: In "Reset", the titular quasi-governmental team encounter a Predatory Big Pharma called the Pharm. Like Torchwood, the Pharm are actively hunting and capturing alien lifeforms that crop up in Cardiff through the Rift. Unlike Torchwood, who expressly hunt down and then cage or kill the aliens for the public's and/or the whole planet's safety; the Pharm actively experiments on all the aliens they capture to attain new drugs and pharmaceuticals that they can sell, they bribe civilians into taking their experimental alien-derived drugs (which gets several people gruesomely killed), and they employ a hitman to silence people who might blow the whistle on them. Torchwood's leader Captain Jack, who is more or less a human alien himself, is revolted by the Pharm's experimentation on the aliens when comparing it to Torchwood's treatment of them, and he straight-up calls the Pharm's actions a war crime.
- Stargate SG-1: Stargate Command has its long-running bureaucratic nemesis, the NID (National Intelligence Division), or at least the illegal rogue organization operating within their ranks. The SGC's mandate is to retrieve alien technology from other worlds, but also to perform reconnaissance, make contact, and develop alliances in the broader galactic community. The rogue NID, on the other hand, focuses only on retrieving alien technology at all costs and even at the expense of these other factors. While the differences between them are moral, they're also pragmatic; the SGC recognizes that Earth is too much of a backwater by galactic standards to become a major player overnight, and it needs allies to help it and protect it in the meantime, which can't happen if the rogue NID agents have pissed off every major power in the galaxy. The rogue NID, by contrast, claims not to care about this because they believe no outsiders can be trusted with something as important as the Earth's defense, but their real motives turn out to be somewhat less patriotic; they're working for a committee of wealthy and connected businessmen who want access to alien technology so they can get rich selling it, and are too self-absorbed to really care if they're endangering the planet in the process.
- Star Trek:
- The United Federation of Planets has had several over the years.
- The Terran Empire, first introduced in the episode "Mirror, Mirror" of The Original Series, are the Federation's counterpart in the Mirror Universe and are an expansionist empire in which appeals to force are the preferred solution to post problems, constant backstabbing is the norm for career advancement, and Cold-Blooded Torture is the preferred form of punishment.
- The Borg Collective, introduced in The Next Generation, are both a mirror to the Federation and the antithesis to the principles it stands for. While the Federation is an association made up of numerous alien races in which all members are equal and membership is voluntary, the Borg are a mechanistic Hive Mind which forcibly assimilates other lifeforms under the belief that they're uplifting and "perfecting" them. An episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine even has a member of the Maquis compare the Federation to the Borg and argue that the two are alike, only that the Borg are more up front about the fact that they assimilate.
- The Dominion, introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, are another Evil Counterpart to the entire Federation. They're a totalitarian theocracy organized along a Fantastic Caste System that exists primarily to benefit its Changeling rulers, who believe they're bringing order to the rest of the galaxy by conquering everying around them. In short, they're almost exactly what the Federation would be if it were truly a "humans only" club like some of its opponents have claimed.
- Section 31 to Starfleet. Starfleet is the scientific-exploratory-diplomatic division within the Federation that sometimes has to handle also defense and abides to the Federation's ideals and values. Section 31 is a secretive rogue illegal intelligence agency willing to do anything, no matter how inmoral, to protect the Federation.
- In Star Trek: Picard season 1 we meet two Romulan sisterhoods; the Qowat Milat made of benevolent warrior nuns, and the sinister all-female secret society Zhat Vash bent on stoping synthetic life at all costs.
- The United Federation of Planets has had several over the years.
Tabletop Games
- Eclipse Phase: Puts players in the shoes of agents of Firewall, a conspiracy-slash-decentralized self-styled disaster management agency. On occasion, Firewall has to contend with Project Ozma, a mysterious agency that apparently does much the same work, but in the name of Mega Corps, for whichever purposes they may have. Ozma have better toys than Firewall, better funding, better contacts, and — seemingly — are way, way better at keeping their secrets. Or so it seems, at least. Some Firewall members go as far as to believe Ozma is nothing but a boogeyman invented by their higher-ups to make the rank-and-file keep their guards up at all times.
- Mage: The Awakening: Each of the (generally) benevolent Pentacle Orders in Magical Society has a counterpart in the Seers of the Throne, the Ancient Conspiracies who seek to subjugate the world on behalf of the Exarchs.
- The Hegemonic Ministry for the Silver Ladder: while the Ladder wants to help all humanity achieve their full potential in a benevolent meritocracy, the Hegemonic Ministry wants to reduce people to a faceless nation whose only purpose is to serve its rulers.
- The Panopticon for the Guardians of the Veil: while the Veil serve as magical Secret Police to protect mages from internal and external threats, the Panopticon surveils the world to foster paranoia and distrust.
- Paternoster for the Mysterium: while the Mysterium protects and cultivates occult knowledge, Paternoster uses religious dogma to destroy, restrict and censor it.
- The Praetorians for the Adamantine Arrow: while the Arrow engages in conflict to protect others and spur their personal growth, the Praetorians engineer a cycle of violence and warfare to oppress society. The contrast actually bothers the Praetorians, who can't quite convince themselves that the Arrow's ideals are wrong.
The very act of bearing witness to earnest heroism can be painful for a sell-out.
- Mammon for the Free Council: while the Council uses modern tools and technology out of a belief in the inherent value of Sleepers, the Ministry of Mammon uses them to reduce everyone and everything to commodities for sale.
- Pathfinder: The Pathfinder Society is an organization for "good" adventurers, who ostensibly loot dungeons and collect magical stuff for the public benefit. Their evil counterpart is the Aspis Consortium, who do pretty much the same thing but explicitly for their own monetary gain. Needless to say, the Society and the Consortium's agents regularly butt heads over new discoveries, often with lethal outcomes.
- Warhammer 40,000: The various orders of the Imperium have Chaos equivalents, created by Imperial citizens who defected to the Ruinous Powers. The Chaos Space Marines, Dark Mechanicum and even the Questor Traitoris are battling their Imperial counterparts in the Space Marines, the Mechanicum and the Throne Mechanicum.
Video Games
- Carmen Sandiego: The chivalrous thief protagonist and her crew are affiliated with the A.C.M.E. Detective Agency, an international crime-fighting organization. A.C.M.E.'s evil counterpart is V.I.L.E. (Villains' International League of Evil), a Nebulous Evil Organization dedicated to committing Impossible Thefts.
- Liberal Crime Squad: As the Liberal agenda is advancing, the Conservative Crime Squad appears. While the LCS can, according to the choices of the player, use methods either violent or peaceful, the CCS invariably uses brutality, mainly against unarmed civilians.
- Phantom Doctrine: The heroic Cabal organization is up against the sinister Beholder Initiative, which Cabal was founded entirely to stop. Both sides use standard espionage tactics, but Beholder isn't above hiring third-party security goons and bribing local police. They also start with an MK-Ultra facility, which lets them brainwash the player's soldiers and implant them with The Manchurian Candidate-esque Trigger Phrases. Cabal's not much better, as their primary source of income is cash counter-fitting, and they have no qualms about brainwashing Beholder agents right on back once the player gets their own MK-Ultra facility.
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown: You eventually come into conflict with a terrorist organization called EXALT. Like XCOM, they make use of reverse-engineered alien technology, Bio-Augmentation, and international funding. Unlike XCOM, they're Fifth Columnists working to subvert humanity to the aliens' purposes.
Webcomics
- One-Punch Man: After several incidents that damage the public image of the Hero Association, a new group called the Neo Heroes arise and soon establish themselves as a rival to the Hero Association, presenting themselves as the superior protectors by publicly pointing out the various flaws of the Association, all the while recruiting some of their heroes to their side. However, it soon becomes clear that the Neo Heroes are just as corrupt as the worst elements of the Association, if not worse, including having criminal organizations present from the start (which the Association only considered out of desperation), recruiting a millionaire and a cult leader purely for their money and manpower respectively, and later beginning to forcibly convert their heroes into cyborgs with their free will removed. It's telling that McCoy, who jumps ship to the Neo Heroes for his own gain, begins to balk at their actions, specifically when they deliberately withhold their aid from Association heroes in a deadly situation. We soon come to see just how evil their sect is. The onslaught of disasters, ranging from monster outbreaks and automata armies, coupled with the suits enthralling their wearers, are all a part of an elaborate ruse to remake the world with them in charge of it. It is later revealed to Director McCoy that the Engineered Heroics are a key component in a worldshaking scheme to unmake the Hero Association and the regular world as we know it to suborn humanity into a superhumanly augmented society, ruled solely by the top brass of their organization. The Black Bag operatives are going so far as to state how the S-Class, Metal Bat included, will be killed off unceremoniously for the sake of presentation slander against the HA. Before that, they even went so far as to take Bad’s family hostage under the pretense of protection service.
Websites
- The SCP Foundation (Secure, Contain and Protect) can be a very shady bunch with some of the stuff they do when containing, covering up, and trying to understand the anomalous miscellanea they hunt, but compared to the parallel anomaly-hunting organizations they butt heads with, they come across as the sanest and lightest-gray of the bunch. The Global Occult Coalition (reportedly) destroy any anomalies they come across indiscriminately, and the Chaos Insurgency seek to use the anomalous for their own betterment.
Western Animation
- Codename: Kids Next Door: One of the recurring enemies of the titular secret organization of injustice-combating, preteen-defending kids is a rival organization that consists exclusively of teenagers and enjoys bullying pre-teens. Another major rival organization revealed in the post-finale official animatic is the Galactic Kids Next Door, an inter-galactic coalition of kids, similar in ideology to the Earth-based KND, except that they have a literally genocidal if not mundicidal policy to all traces of adulthood in the universe.
- OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: The main characters work at Gar's Bodega, a shop that serves all the heroes of Lakewood Plaza, supplying them with amenities including but not limited to superhero equipment. Most of the villains work for Box More, a company that manufactures robots and other devices for all the world's bad guys.
