Basic Trope: Businesses using military force.
- Straight: Peace & Love employs a large security force against the headquarters of its rival, Super Race.
- Exaggerated: Peace & Love and Super Race are literal nations engaged in war, with their "security" acting as soldiers in the frontlines.
- Downplayed:
- Peace & Love employs a few assassins to take out an ACME delivery man.
- Peace & Love and Super Race have military forces but they are used only defensively in an unstable region laden with bandits. The two fighting each other means something has gone horribly wrong in target identification - there is no profit in attacking a party anywhere remotely close in power.
- Justified: Peace & Love and Super Race live in a world where businesses submit to the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction, thereby making a standing military force necessary for survival.
- Inverted:
- Militaries are using businesses to fund their war effort.
- War for Fun and Profit, with more emphasis on profit.
- Subverted: Peace & Love is shown to have lots of security people, but it's later on explained that they're only there to keep the peace inside the company.
- Double Subverted: ...but, the employer who gave the explanation was lying and, in places where there are no media to cover the act, several regiments of the security force are employed to conduct military raids on Super Race.
- Parodied: Peace & Love is the country's national military organization.
- Zig Zagged: Despite the large numbers of people in the security force, when the heroes go inside the headquarters of Peace & Love, they see security doing normal security things. Then, a rogue security agent comes in, takes them away, and shows them video footages of security being sent to far-away places to conduct warfare. Yet, a Mole disguised as a security agent interrupts the discussion and says that the video was fake and that Peace & Love's security is not involved in martial activity.
- Enforced: The producers, in light of news about some companies ordering military vehicles to supplant their security, want to make the show relevant by making the main companies inside the show involved in corporate warfare.
- Implied: Peace & Love's security force have lots of body armor and are equipped with automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and an assortment of grenades.
- Lampshaded: "Those were Peace & Love's security?! They just burned down that Super Race branch with innocent people still inside! That's more like a military to me!"
- Invoked: Mr. Double Agent destroys a Super Race store disguised as a Peace & Love store's security guard, causing Super Race to invest heavily into their security force. Peace & Love, closely eyeing Super Race and wanting to stay safe, augments its own security force the same way, preparing both companies for corporate warfare.
- Defied: An official in Peace & Love snitches to the government about Peace & Love beefing up its security force. The government then cracks down on the company and commands it to stop.
- Exploited: An Arms Dealer's company buys products from both Peace & Love and Super Race to give them money which they use to buy weapons from the same company (though both of them don't know they're buying from the weapons company). The weapons company gets a steady source of income this way.
- Discussed: "Companies that have a military of their own should be watched out for, yet I don't know how to look for those kinds of organizations?" "If the guards look like special ops, they're probably it."
- Conversed: "Peace & Love and Super Race fighting each other? With rocket-launcher-toting soldiers?!" "What did you expect when the episode was called 'Corporate Conflict'?"
- Deconstructed:
- Peace & Love and Super Race have been at war for years now. Those in security have trauma from war experiences and those who manage to survive long enough to retire suffer from PTSD. The employees who aren't in security constantly face the ethical decisions of what they're doing throughout the course of the show: Should they invest in this high-tech military company, knowing that, if their respective companies benefits from it, they're just getting weapons that are more efficient in killing people? Should they recommend Peace & Love or Super Race to their friends, knowing that they would end up working for a company that ruthlessly decimates the opposition through guns and explosives rather than through making a good product?
- Not to mention what would happen if they have friends inside the other company; those friends might get assassinated or otherwise killed in order to detach their employees from any semblance of good relations with the "enemy."
- The companies themselves get bad press from the public since they're seen as paramilitary organizations that sell products to get more warfare money, scaring potential customers away from them (especially the ones who are anti-war in the first place). It also kills their arms sales as Realpolitik ensures their customers now see them as potential rivals.
- Militaries are expensive. The CEOs of Peace & Love and Super Race underestimate the cost of maintaining a powerful "Corporate Security Force" and it ends up costing them so much money that they go bankrupt.
- Reconstructed: The companies are headquartered in a country that encourages such fierce competition and warfare. The heroes of the show are employees from both companies as they struggle together in friendship to lobby for a more peaceful business environment and to force the companies to stop the killings.
- Peace & Love and Super Race use robotic soldiers and drones to cut down the cost of infantry.
- Played For Laughs: Peace and Love's warfare methods and reasons are incredibly silly from a "cyberpunk mega-corporation" view, like issuing hardened candy canes during Valentine's Day, all gear being more festooned with advertisement than a NASCAR vehicle, or having all of the soldiers be stock-holders.
- Played For Drama: This is standard for this Trope. More awful, this was Truth in Television once upon a time.
- Played For Horror: Imagine every military atrocity ever done by man. Now imagine it being done for the sake of more brain-dead corporate reasons like facilitating an even market research.
