Hero Insurance - Television Tropes & Idioms

Leela: Are you crazy? We have to keep our secret identities secret.
Fry: From everybody?
Leela: Especially from everybody!
Fry: Give several reasons why.
Leela: For one, superheroes cause a lot of collateral damage, and we don't wanna get our butts sued.
Fry: Or do we? ...No, I guess not.

Futurama

"It's like they say. The bigger they are, the more catastrophically irreversible the property damage"

Victor Mancha, Runaways, Vol. 2, Issue 20

"Don't let them kid you, fella. We know the real reason the dinosaurs died out. High insurance rates!"

Heroes never get in trouble for demolishing half the city, killing seventeen people and injuring three, or jaywalking, as long as they're being heroic. The necessary explanation seems to be that they've got very, very good insurance, that will take care of everything, including the bribes for the people who want to sue.

At worst, the hero will face a Mc Cloud Speech at the end, but often there's not even that. Morality doesn't come into play, as the (implied) consequences of the hero's actions are all but ignored. This is why even The Cape can get away with gross negligence for the safety of innocent people; it's assumed that somehow, nobody will get (seriously) hurt, and the property damage tab will gladly be picked up by someone else.

It's even more obvious when the hero actually fails to prevent the villain's crimes — this will only add to the sense of urgency the hero faces, instead of making people think that the hero should be taken to task for doing such a poor job.

This is sometimes handwaved with the heroes actually mentioning that they've got insurance that will cover this — and is actually a specific rule featured in the old Comics Code — but it's unclear how any insurance company could do this and still turn a profit.

This is a popular subject in Deconstruction, where destructive heroes are often portrayed as not much better (or even no better) than the villains they're fighting.

However, many countries do have laws in place that prevent someone from being held liable for damage caused while saving someone's life (the most prominent example being bruising or breaking someone's ribs while giving them life saving CPR). In the USA they are known as Good Samaritan laws. Such laws probably wouldn't apply in some of the more extreme cases of heroic destructiveness (such as leveling several buildings in order to stop a bank robber) but is likely an easy enough excuse in situations where the damage caused is minor or where the threat stopped (such as a world destroying bomb) is sufficiently important.

Examples:

Live Action TV

Lampshaded in Charmed. In Billie's first battle with a demon, she hits an empty seat in a movie theater with a fireball, and wonders, "Now help me out here, I'm new at this. Who pays for that?"
Also Lampshaded in Angel: after a Super Window Jump he comments that the demons were now good guys who "own a number of restaurants with pretty expensive windows"
The Power Rangers were bad about this. In the neverending series of the same name, the protagonists often leveled up to a quarter of the city they live in while fighting of some random mooks. Building destruction has been greatly toned down since 9/11, though.

Anime

Averted in Moldiver, where not only does the city have to pick up the tab for repairs after superbattles, it contracts them out to the lowest bidder — who happens to be the Big Bad in his civilian identity, and who is driven to distraction by the escalating levels of damage cutting into his profit margin.
Megas in Megas XLR and the titular robot from The Big O, two Humongous Mecha whose pilots are sometimes guilty of causing just as much, if not more, damage while fighting the Monster Of The Week than the monster could cause all by itself. Megas plays it for laughs since Coop's a loveable buffoon, and the stuff he destroys often has signs that say things like "Conveniently Empty Building" and "We Were Going to Tear This Down Anyway", but it's never really brought up whenever Roger Smith takes out another block or two. But hey, at least he pounded that other robot into the ground, right?
- The manga version of The Big O hangs a lampshade on it: Beck's flunkies, who lack Offscreen Villain Dark Matter, are seen working construction repairing some of the damage afterwards in order to make some quick money.
Lampshaded in Sailor Moon episode 13 when Sailor Mars wants to blast some airplanes being used by the villain and Luna replies that she could never afford to pay for the damage. The joke actually made it through to the English dub.
Despite not quite being the genre for this, He Is My Master subverts this by having the main character's lack of Hero Insurance driving the plot.
Heavily lampshaded in Dai Guard, where the company that owns the titular giant robot is responsible for all collateral damage the robot causes, and numerous insurance-related forms have to be signed before it can be deployed. It's FURTHER lampshaded in one episode where by the time all the paperwork is completed, Dai-Guard has already been deployed and beaten the Monster Of The Week.
Four words: Vash The Humanoid Typhoon. However, it's not without its Lampshade Hangings. Two of the characters are insurance society representatives who stick around to keep an eye on him and fail miserably at keeping him out of trouble, and in the fifth episode of the anime, a character mentions that "Class G Property Damage" contributed to Vash's enormous bounty.
- In the end, the Bernardelli Insurance Company just washes its hands of Vash, and declares any and all damage caused by him "Acts of God."
  - Trigun actually thoroughly averts the trope. The main reason he has a huge bounty on his head is because of the huge property damage that he always leaves in his wake, and at one point someone even tries to kill him because her family died as a result of having the city they lived in destroyed.
Usually averted in Dragon Ball. Particularly in the movies. While battles usually take place in remote areas by default, Goku has often made a point of taking a fight outside of the city to prevent this kind of thing.
Averted in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, when the explosive destruction of the first Anti-Spiral ship causes significant damage to the surrounding city, blame falls on Simon for destroying it. Additionally, subsequent confrontations involve increasingly elegant ways to prevent said damage from occuring (most commonly, the battle just aren't held in cities). It wasn't a problem before that either, as there were no cities and most fights were in giant deserts/wastelands like the old Transformers cartoon, and latter in space.
Averted in the most mean-spirited manner in Bokurano: After learning that their first giant robot battle has killed two thousand people and levelled a mountain, several of the children get notably upset by it and want to break the masquerade and tell people about it.
- Doesn't help matters that one of THEM dies each time the robot is used either. The author really hates people apparently.
Averted in Gao Gai Gar; the villains realize early on the potential of handicapping the heroes by bringing fights to populated areas. The heroes respond by inventing a device to create an pocket dimension (or, rather, a pocket of added space around which 'normal' space bends) in which to fight the villains.
- Partially averted, at least. A few times, they didn't have the opportunity to deploy it, and a lot of damage usually results.
Subverted in New Getter Robo, where a big deal is made of the property damage when a battle moves into the city.
Check the end of the second Project A Ko film. The kind of use (straight, inverted, reversed, folded) would be a spoiler.
In Bleach a copy of the hero's hometown is built in another dimension and switched. In other cases shown being rebuilt.

Comic Books

Spoofed in the late 1980s in Scott McCloud's Destroy!!, which consisted of nothing but one-frame pages depicting a battle between two superhumans which effectively totals the city around them.
Lampshaded by Marvel Comics with their "Damage Control" series — a comic book about the company which cleans up after super battles.
This was one of the many, many problems Marvel fans had with Civil War, in two forms:
- The comic starts off with a superhero-supervillain battle that ends up decimating a small town in Connecticut and killing over 600 people, when the Marvel Universe has previously followed a "no death toll from superhero battle" policy (let us count the number of times New York City has been destroyed with no permanent story changes...).
  - Lampshaded by Squirrel Girl when she tries to talk one of the heroes involved in said tragedy into getting out of his emo funk. She goes into some detail about the other mishaps heroes have made, including a few death tolls. Including a few for Iron Man.
- In the final issue, Captain America, who's leading the anti-registration side against the pro-registration side in a massive battle in the streets of New York City, throws down his shield after cops and paramedics point out the collateral damage the battle is causing. He realizes that superheroes has lost the trust of the public and surrenders.
A Silver Age Superman story has Superman being charged with, and convicted of, incredibly minor crimes that add up over the issue until almost keeping him in jail long enough for his accuser to perpetrate his evil plan. (So minor, in fact, that the badguy might have pulled it off if he'd just taken his time.) Not sure what you'd call this...playing with a subversion?
In the "Guardian Devil" arc for Marvel Comics character Daredevil, DD mentions that New York City (Where most of the action in Marvel takes place) has a billion-a-year insurance policy on damages caused by superheroes.
In the comic book series The Boys, a CIA subdivision is set up to take superheroes to task for the damages they incur. One character's girlfriend was graphically killed in front of him by a speedster throwing another superhuman into her, right after they traded "I love yous" for the first time.
- Of course, The Boys is, depending on who you ask, a deconstruction or just one long bitchfest about superheroes in general. While heroes in other genres might at least make token attempts to minimize property damage or justify it with equal contributions, the superpowered jerkasses of The Boys just don't care and would slaughter a million civilians to apprehend a jaywalker.
The Authority, which takes a rather cynical view of superhero conventions, actually has the Authority helping out before and after supervillain attacks. (This attitude may be helped by Jack Hawksmoor, who is the "king of cities" and so feels it when they're damaged.)
- Also somewhat unique in that the Authority often acknowledges that what they're doing will cause property damage and probably cost civilian lives. The characters justify it with the excuse that the bad guys would have done worse (and considering the threats they usually take on, they're probably right), but the fact that they openly acknowledge the cost of what they do is unique in itself.
This troper remembers an amateur comic in Svenska Serier ("Swedish Comics", a sort-of fanzine published during the 90's in, obviously, Sweden) where villain and a Designated Hero, both musclebound bricks, bust out against each other at a high-class party, tearing the place up in the process. The destruction soon turns to ludicruous levels (the villain pounds the hero into the sky, where he hits an airplane, causing it to crash; the hero crawls out of the wreckage and grabs an occupied train and pounds the villain with, with no thought to the occupants!) until suddenly calling it off and donning their civilain disguises. The manager of the party at the introduction, now the only apparent survivor who is sobbing on his knees in the midst of the destruction, is then approached by two surprisingly muscular suits who inform him that the insurance policy they provide would be excellent should something like this happen again.
Hilariously subverted in #56 of The Avengers in which accountants from the Maria Stark Foundation hold a series of interviews regarding the property damage caused during a mission.
Depending on whether you think it Crosses The Line Twice or not, this trope is either horribly deconstructed or hilariously parodied in the Marvel What If story "The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe". In short, Frank Castle's family is killed in a superhuman battle and he, with the financial support of a group of people who've been similar victims of "collateral damage", goes on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge on the entire superhuman community.

Film

Hollywood action movies have universal Hero Insurance coverage. From Die Hard to True Lies, the hero can use deadly force at the drop of a hat and blow up half the city, as long as they get the real bad guy in the end.
Lampshade Hanging in the James Bond movie GoldenEye:
Q: Need I remind you, 007, that you have a license to kill, not to break traffic laws.
In Lethal Weapon 4, Riggs and Murtaugh are promoted and given desk jobs because the city lost its insurance.
In the second Fantastic Four Film, Sue is seen disputing a report from the cops about how many cars were destroyed on a recent mission.
- The first movie featured the Thing tossing a car at Dr. Doom. We don't hear from the car's owner and he doesn't get called on it.
The setup for the film The Incredibles is, roughly, that superheroes in general were forced to go into hiding specifically to avoid litigation for collateral damage.
The movie Hancock has its protagonist as a Jerkass superhero whose penchant for massive collateral damage gets him a lot of flak from the residents of LA in the beginning of the movie, to the point of nearly getting him an eight-year prison term.
From Demolition Man:
News reporter: How can you justify destroying a $7,000,000 mini-mall to rescue a girl whose ransom is only $25,000?
Girl: Fuck you, lady!
John Spartan: Good answer.
In Back To The Future Part III, Doc and Marty hijack a train at gunpoint to push the DeLorean up to eighty-eight miles per hour, in the process running the train off the edge of a ravine, causing it to explode. Everyone is apparently okay with this to such an extent that they rename the ravine after Marty.

Western Animation

Spoofed in the Robot Chicken premiere. After a battle, Optimus Prime congratulates the Autobots: "Megatron was defeated with only 50 humans killed in the crossfire, a new record!" Everybody cheers.
The Powerpuff Girls don't seem at all concerned about how much collateral damage they cause defeating the monsters that invade Townsville — the monsters alone would probably cause less damage. The citizens of Townsville have apparently gotten used to this... but Citiesville, where the girls temporarily move, is not so understanding:
Citiesville Mayor: At what time did it seem like a good idea to blow up the Citiesville bridge? Do you realize that the bank robbers you captured stole approximately $400? Do you realize you did several million dollars IN PROPERTY DAMAGE TO THAT BRIDGE?!!"
- (It didn't help that said bridge was a local monument.)
- In another episode, when the girls' class has career day, Hanut's father comes in. In a deadpan style, he says that he insures buildings in Townsville from damage... and that he is a veeeeeery busy man.
- And then there is the movie of girls' origins, in which they cause damage to pretty much entire town. For playing tag.
  - Professor Utonium is actually arrested over this, and there is talk of the girls (who quickly become social pariahs) being incarcerated.
- In still another episode, the Professor is horribly worried about the girls' getting injured, and so builds a Humongous Mecha for them to use. They refuse to...until they come up against a bigger monster than even they can handle. They win...but level most of Townsville doing it. (Including all the monuments played up at the beginning of he episode.) The Mayor thanks them, then asks them whose stupid idea the big robot suit was. When they say it was the Professor's, he decides he'll let them off as long as they promise never to use it again. They're only too happy to agree, as the thing was damn finicky to work with.
Underdog had a Catch Phrase for whenever he was confronted with the vast destruction caused during the episode: "I am a hero who never fails./ I cannot be bothered with these details."
Danny Phantom: Danny apparently has no Hero Insurance since he actually feels bad about any collateral damage he causes while capturing ghosts, especially when people he knows (like Valerie) bear the brunt of it. When he accidentally destroys a section of the mall (again), Tucker comments, "I sure hope they're insured." This could be either because, or partly why, Amity Park is an Untrusting Community.
From the same Futurama episode that the page quote is taken from:
Mayor: Thank you, mysterious heroes! The value of the Gemerald you saved is slightly greater than the cost of the damage you caused to this museum: A net gain for our great city!
Subverted in The Tick. Arthur's attempt to break through the Sidekick Glass Ceiling ends with a climactic battle with the Tick, in which a restaurant was partially trashed. The episode ends with the reunited heroes fixing the same restaurant, with the maitre d' profusely thanking them: "When most superheroes have their brawls, they just leave a mess."
The DCAU had its share of this as well: witness this battle between Superman and Darkseid, which is made all the funnier by Supes monologuing about how he usually has to hold back so nobody gets hurt. Gee, I guess all those buildings he punches Darkseid through were conveniently evacuated moments before? Conversely, the fight between Superman and Captain Marvel was conveniently set in an empty city. (No, really. Lex Luthor just built it.) Two Capes tearing up Metropolis over an argument might have stretched the suspension of disbelief just a little too much.
- In the Superman-Darkseid fight, Metropolis actually had been evacuated. You can see people watching the Superman-Darkseid fight, but a lot of people don't leave a city that has been evacuated. Also, given the fact Darkseid had pretty much invaded Earth in full force at this point, well...if they're gonna get killed, might as well enjoy the superhuman slugfest beforehand.
In Superman: Doomsday, Supes throws Doomsday through a building on more than one occasion, and eventually defeats him by taking him to orbit and slamming him into the ground in the middle of Metropolis hard enough to level the entire block (he could've slammed him anywhere, or simply left him in orbit.) In real life, Supes would've racked up a higher death toll than all the villains in the movie put together. And he may well have, as this being a direct-to-DVD release rather than a TV episode, people were being explicitly killed in the show...but he was "dead" at that point, and he did' stop Doomsday, who had wiped out entire worlds'' on his own.
Lampshaded in Transformers Animated. When Optimus Prime crashes into a truck, he apologized and says he heard something called "insurance" will cover that (though he apparently doesn't know of "deductibles", or "rate hikes").
- Also played with a little bit in the live-action movie. In most cartoons, the Transformers trot around human areas with little to no difficulty. The movie shows just how destructive having giant, heavy robots mill about your back yard would be, even if they were trying to be not just careful but stealthy.
- Played with further during one scene showing Optimus Prime running along a busy road; his feet chew giant holes in the tarmac, but he doesn't hit a single car.
- This never came up in the Generation One series because they mostly fought in desert areas and even the city locations didn't have too much collateral damage. But Transformers Animated tries to balance it out considering the Autobot heroes are constantly helping to put the city back together after every battle. (And once took care of the trash during a garbage worker strike.) Robot Chicken had a segment that mocked this trope, however; a quote is on the Moral Dissonance page.
One episode of Darkwing Duck had this factor into public opinion about him, with one member of the public complaining that he stepped on her foot (while pursuing criminals) and a construction worker complaining he somehow knocked a building out from under him. Not bad, for someone without any actual superpowers.
Animaniacs played with this in its Power Rangers spoof 'Super Strong Warner Siblings'. Even activating their Huge Mecha (the water tower) caused quite a bit of damage. Meshed with the Running Gag of the episode, at least ...

Video Games

Aversion: in X Com Apocalypse, you have to pay for any collateral damage you do while cleaning buildings from aliens.
- In the original X-Com, you can, thanks to the miracle of modern agricultural insurance, burn an entire farm to ashes with no repercussions, although you are a UN task force and it's not like anyone in the area is still alive to sue.
Subverted in the video game Mega Man Legends, where any town structures that get damaged or destroyed in battle has to be paid for by the player through donations, regardless of who actually wrecked them. Repairs do not take place until the player starts donating, and buildings don't get fully repaired unless the player has maxed out his donations.
Subverted in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice For All. After Phoenix breaks down the door to the summoning room in the Fey Manor, he later gets a bill for the door, despite breaking it to protect Maya and find out about the gunshot heard in the room.
- Of course, the owner of the door was an accomplice of the murder that was happening, and by entering, Phoenix was interfering with the plans.
  - And of course, if you read some of the tapestries in the school, as well as in the exhibit in the third game, they all discuss methods of making money. The Kurain school of mysticism would gouge anyone for a nickel.
Also subverted in the original Legend Of Zelda, where if you burn down/destroy certain doors, the owners of said doors make you pay them for the damage, this also happens in the Oracle Series of the games.
- In at least one instance, burning through a door has the inhabitant of the house pay you.
I don't remember any actual penalties for impromptu demolitions in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. Of course, with a title like that... Being in a war zone might mitigate this, although there's still penalties for killing civilians off, no matter how annoying or stupid.
- There aren't. Unless you blow up either a keep-it-upright mission objective, or someone's HQ (think the People's Liberation Army will like you much after levelling their main outpost?) ...in the words of the intro, you can level half of North Korea and not be bothered.
Many light-gun games (Area 51 I think was the first for this trend) even encourage you to shoot up the scenery of the location you're trying to save, with rewards including bonus points, powerups, and secret rooms. Apparently glass windows are #3 on the Most Wanted list.
Lan/Netto commits so many felonies during the course of the Mega Man Battle Network series that the Lets Play of it actually harps on the fact.
In Superman Returns, as Superman is invincible, the life bar is that of collateral damage done to Metropolis. Which is a brilliant idea in a shitty game.

Web Comic

The fact that heroes seem to get away with massive property damage gets thoroughly skewered, among other things, in this ''Shortpacked!'' strip.
Parodied in Evil Inc. One of the services the titular company provides is "Battlefield Location and Booking" which seeks out abandoned locations (deserts, islands, other dimensions and the classic Abandoned Warehouse, though the latter is rather hard to book) for villains and heroes to battle to avoid lawsuits from any property damage and casualties. This could also be considered an inversion since, as the name of the company indicates, it's the supervillains who are in charge of this service.

Literature

Averted in the Whateley Universe. An early story features an English class which specifically mentions that insurance and damage laws have evolved to address superhero-supervillain battles. Also, one of the major purposes of the school is to teach enough self-control that the kids are not destroying everything in sight while fighting the villain. And finally, in a novel set over Thanksgiving of first term, the kids find out that a brutal battle years ago in New York City (both superhero and supervillain died, a bridge was destroyed, hundreds of innocent bystanders hurt or killed) has led to the point that everyone at school (hero, villain, or neither) has to have a Mutant Identification card filled out in a meeting with the Mutant Commission Office, or they can't return to the school.
In one of the Man From Uncle novelizations Solo and Kuryakin actually give a woman UNCLE's insurance agencies card, to pay for the hole they cut in her floor.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, after a battle in a cafe, Harry and the others take the time to actually repair the damage (although this was mostly to cover their tracks, as they were on the run at the time).

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