Sponsored

Any cape that's Sponsored takes funds and resources from outside organizations, a suzerain existence.

Modus operandi

Any sponsored team needs outside benefactors willing to donate resources to meet operating costs.<ref>“You were thinking you might go independent?”

“Which doesn’t pay,” I said. “Not in this environment.”

“How does that work?” Fume Hood asked. “If you’re a crook, it’s easy, you take jobs at the villain bar, or you rob some place, or any number of things. You just… go out on patrol?”

“There are a few other things to do,” I said. “One way is to essentially run a protection racket that isn’t a racket. It’s easy for that to go wrong. There’s a higher level effect, which is easier to pull off when, say, a city has a downtown area and the shop owners gather together to pay a wage to the hero that draws attention and has a positive influence on their area…”

“Things have to be stable before that happens,” Tempera said.

“We’re not there yet,” I said. - Excerpt from Flare 2.2</ref> Operating costs include upkeep for headquarters pay and benefits for the support crew, legal consultants and more.

While there is overlap with Corporate Teams, Sponsored Teams are not employees and can seek outside donors or resources independently; Corporate Teams are wholly owned by their single company and can not break away<ref>I mean, they’re sponsored, not corporate, so they had someone paying the bills and all they had to do was hero. - Excerpt from Polarize 10.12</ref> without, supposedly, forfeiting their cape identity.<ref>He maintains a minor but steadfastly loyal following. In 2010 Snaptrap was approached about a reality television deal. He ultimately rejected the offer when the PRT informed him he would not be able to retain the PRT owned name of Snaptrap. - PRT Files document 12</ref>

The visibility of the team and attendance at their contributors events, promotion of certain brands, licensing of the teams individual or collective image<ref name="Exhibit A"/> interviews and more.

While the term is largely used in the context of Heroes it also applies to Villains<ref name="R1"/> and mercenaries. Consider for example the Deep web Ranking sites, which pay for many of the same things.<ref name="R1">Ranking Sites - (Bambina talks briefly about these) - sites that track hero/villain wins and losses sometimes offer payment to qualifying heroes, host streams or interviews, or do a kind-of-corporate-but-less-strings-attached sponsorship that's often contingent on holding a good position. - Can rogues make a living as a hero? (Wildbow, Reddit.com, 2017-03-06)</ref> It is unknown how common it is to have autonomous, yet long-term hirelings among villains. Arguably, The Undersiders were this under another organization.<ref name=under>“I said we owed you. All yours, no strings attached.”
[...]
I took [the lunch box]. From the weight and the motion of the contents inside it, I immediately had a pretty good idea of what it was. I undid the clasps and opened the box.

“Money,” I breathed, caught off guard by suddenly having so much in my hands. [...] Lisa answered before I had the number totaled up in my head, “Two grand.”

I closed the box and did the clasps. With no idea what to say, I stayed silent.

“You have two choices,” Lisa explained, “You can take that as a gift. A thank you for, intentionally or not, saving our ass from Lung last night. And maybe a bit of incentive to count us among your friends when you’re out in costume and doing dastardly deeds.”
[...]
“And the second option?” I asked.

“You can take this as your first installment in the monthly allowance you’re entitled to as a member of the Undersiders,” Brian spoke up, “As one of us.”
[...]
“Two thousand a month,” I said.

“No,” Brian cut in, “That’s just what the boss pays us, to stick together and to stay active. We make, uh, considerably more than that.” - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.6</ref>

Authorities Response

PRT position

The PRT may well be a Sponsored teams supporters, if they are a hero team. Arguably, a sponsored team could just be a more legal and socially acceptable version of mercenaries<ref>Rogues are, by definition, not heroes or villains. A rogue is someone who doesn't identify with the cops and robbers game, encompassing those who utilize their abilities for business, personal, societal or neutral reasons, and those who strive not to use their abilities at all. To a reasonably strict extent, there is no 'in the field' for rogues.

I say reasonably strict because there's mercenaries like Faultline's crew, but there's pretty much a 'you fuck one goat' attitude toward mercenaries who deign to work with villains... they just get the 'villain' label slapped on them and that's that, mostly. - Can rogues make a living as a hero? (Wildbow, Reddit.com, 2017-03-06)</ref> and would be treated as such, or a parahuman equivalent of a private security firm.

Warden position

Warden-affiliated hero teams seems to dip into this type of relationships, being more autonomous, including financial aspect, but still accepting fund from the Wardens and general public.

Notable Examples

• Dryad Project 3<ref name="Exhibit A">“I haven’t fought alongside them. That’s part of it. The other part is that Recycler and Retouch are from Dryad Project 3. [...] sponsored, not corporate, so they had someone paying the bills and all they had to do was hero. And they were pretty good at that. The sponsors? They started it off on the entire wrong foot. Way too much promotion and way too much money pushed into a team with self-imposed mission of saving the planet.”
  
  “Not a bad mission, considering how we ended up.”
  
  “That’s the issue. It wasn’t saving the planet from Endbringers or other threats. It was saving us from ourselves. Pollution, deforestation, ecology all things that have their validity… on Earth Aleph. People didn’t buy it. And if people aren’t buying, how do the sponsors get the money they invested back? [...] Hired a bunch of bright, genuinely cool heroes, diverse, all good, but few of those heroes cared about the mission before they joined the team, some didn’t care after, and the ones who were really gung-ho got sidelined-”
  [...] “The lack of care from sponsors and the hired-on heroes seemed pretty obvious to most. Then the team got on the wrong side of the Youth Guard, broke or toed the line of just about every damn rule in the book when it came to costumes, school, friendships, throwing kids into violent situations… Two pairs of parents were saying they hadn’t seen their kid in weeks.”
  
  “That was the part I heard about.”
  
  I smiled. “Yeah. And the shitty thing is they had some good heroes. Recycler and Retouch weren’t hip in a way that worked for Dryad Project Three, but they’re strong, they’re pretty capable with potential to place themselves in the public eye, and they’re earnest, which is really important.”
  [...]
  “What happened in the end? Gold Morning?”
  
  I shook my head. “Two members of the other serious or semi-serious members joined a villain eco-terrorist group. The team was barely staying afloat with money from sponsors, after a hundred fines from Youth Guard, court cases, more promotion and marketing, and then a reporter dropped an expose. The sponsor wasn’t a saint in the eco thing, with cover-ups. The heroes were a distraction.”
  
  “Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Anelace said. - Excerpt from Polarize 10.12</ref>
• New Wave<ref name="Exhibit B">I spent most of my childhood watching my mom balance the books, I did the events, the photoshoots, the merchandising as a PRT-acknowledged team. [...] I think I have your PRT trading card from that time period in a binder in my office.” [...] “Which one? I had one that was holographic, which you could swipe through the controller for the video game to have me as a polygon-rendered helper, and the higher quality one that had the bio on the back.” - Excerpt from Flare 2.1</ref> (mainly self-funded)
• Haven
• Goldenrod<ref name=WDH2>History:
  Unicorn is the fourth individual to take the name, receiving permission from the retired Unicorn III. She maintained a successful career on sponsored hero team Goldenrod, receiving multiple sponsorships and catapulting to #23 in the American cape popularity rankings, #6 in an early 2010 Parahumans Online vote for non-PRT capes, leading to her suggestion that she might start her own sponsored team of capes.
  
  In late 2011, Unicorn IV was investigated in relation to a string of disappearances. The investigation prompted others to speak out, raising issues and questions about her behavior, including apparent threats directed at Unicorn III (and Rosenthal’s summary loss of the Unicorn moniker). Within days of renaming herself Monokeros, she was accused of involvement in the kidnapping, torture and murder of nine celebrities aged 8-15 as well as an unknown number of heroines seeking to join her new team, which never existed as more than theory or bait. She killed three capes who attempted her capture, was caught, and was sentenced to the Birdcage. - WD Helena</ref>
  • Potential spin-off headed up by Unicorn IV<ref name=WDH2/> (cancelled)
• The Irregulars (arguably)
• The Suits
• The King's Men
• Ossuary, being direct action activists, are likely to be outside sponsored.
• The Undersiders<ref name=under/> (arguably)
• Bambina<ref name="R1">Bambina is an example of an itinerant: she hits other cities to make a splash, she shows off, and she tries to grab ratings and rankings on top villain lists that she can then leverage into back-alley sponsorship deals and merchandising. Between her episodes, she returns to LA, lives a life of luxury, and gets spends good money on training and counseling in (villain) branding and kicking ass. - Los Angeles Friend-or-Foe (Wildbow, Reddit.com, 2016-08-31)</ref> - Ranking site

References

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