The Mythcreant Podcast 563 – Making The Most of Your Minions
The sad truth is that your villain can’t be everywhere at once, whether they are a scary dark lord or an angsty tortured prince. They need minions to carry out their evil will, but that’s no simple matter. You have to think about how these minions operate, how strong they should be, and most importantly, ways to make sure they don’t get mistaken for those yellow guys. This week’s episode is all about making sure your big bad’s underlings don’t become a laughingstock, but also that they won’t be so strong that it’s impossible for the hero to win.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: You thought we were in charge of this podcast, but actually we’re just the goons you have to get past to reach the mid-level boss. But nobody has gotten past us in 500 episodes, probably because there’s only two of us, which means we’re very tough and intimidating.
Oren: Yeah. If there were more of us, we’d get weaker. So, you know, we have intentionally killed off all the other hosts to gather their powers.
Chris: [laughs] Yeah, and I guess the boss must be really scary since if we can, you know, keep back the heroes for 500 episodes, that must be one tough boss. Making our boss look good.
Oren: Yeah, it’s Podcastia, is who it is. [laughs]
Chris: Ohhh!
Oren: Get past us, you have to face her.
Chris: Oh geez. That is pretty scary. So, this time we’re talking about making the most of your minions.
Oren: When I saw this podcast topic for a second, I thought we were talking about the minions from Despicable Me.
Chris: No.
Oren: I was like, oh no. [laughs]
Chris: You know, this is funny, but I’ve never seen Despicable Me, but I find the minions really annoying.
Oren: Yeah, no, I have never seen any of the movies. I don’t have an opinion on the movies.
Chris: Maybe I would like them better if I actually saw Despicable Me, but I don’t know, they just, maybe they just look irritating.
Oren: It’s because they’re everywhere. It’s, they hit saturation point and now they’re not cool. Now they’re annoying.
Chris: And I’m gonna judge them from my ignorance.
Oren: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s like, okay, it’s like if you had never seen Frozen and you know, suddenly just Frozen was everywhere. You were like, what?
Chris: Or you know, for anybody who has not seen KPop Demon Hunters.
Oren: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
Chris: [laughing] By now you must hate K-pop Demon Hunters. Okay, so why do we have minions? Why minions?
Oren: Because storytellers are lazy and they don’t want to have to fight actual people, so they just send in faceless mooks. There. Podcast over. Done. [laughs]
Chris: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, technically everything we do for a story could be just a sign of laziness. I mean, we could do it without that, it’s just harder, right?
Oren: Yeah. I mean, the real reason is that usually you’re spending most of your character development budget on characters who are good guys, ‘cause that’s who your protagonist is gonna hang out with the most, and that’s who you’re gonna build attachment to.
And there are some individual bad guys that you’re gonna develop, right? Almost every story is gonna have that. But they’re not usually enough to fill out the entire roster of Team Evil, so you need minions. That’s like the core storytelling reason. And then there are a bunch of other logistical reasons that we fill in.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, their primary role is just to save the big bad for later, so the big bad doesn’t have to enter the story too soon. Instead, we can build their mystique and make them real threatening in the background and have the minions kind of provide some level of antagonism in the meantime.
Oren: Yeah, and usually the bad guy is powerful and has, you know, people who will work for them and the ability to command resources, and so at that point, minions make sense.
Chris: So you also need them to just fill out the world, right? It’s like, you can’t have an evil army without soldiers. At some point you’ll need to put some in, but usually for some sections of the story, they are the main antagonists the heroes are dealing with.
I mean, not necessarily. You could have minions that only show up when there’s a big bad around commanding them. That’s possible. But most often you don’t want, you know, a slower escalation of threat. And so usually for the beginning portions of story, we first start with just a minion fight, for instance.
Okay, so then, next question, what makes a good minion? What are we aiming for for our minions?
Oren: I mean, minions follow most of the same rules as any other enemy, which is, the most important one, is that if you want them to be threatening, you can’t be beating them up all the time. That’s just the way it is. Once you start beating up stormtroopers, they aren’t threatening anymore, and technically you could try to make them threatening again, but the amount of work you would have to do to do that is pretty high.
That’s why the most threatening enemies in Andor are not stormtroopers, the stormtroopers in Andor are about as weak as anybody else. It’s the guys who operate more like modern day special forces, like the dudes who go into the hotel towards the end when they’re trying to rescue what’s her face, those guys who wear kind of stormtrooper looking armor, but not the same. Those are the threatening minions.
Chris: [laughs] Those guys, so threatening, shaking in my boots.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: I mean, I might argue that the purpose of the minion is ultimately to lose in place of the big bad, right, but that basically, you know, create an escalator of threats and you can have more than one level of minion to do this, right? You can start with the stormtrooper and then go up to the special forces and then go up to the red guys who are guarding the emperor, whatever they are.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And then Darth Vader. We have a kind of minions that are at different levels getting more and more threatening towards the top. And part of the reason for doing that is because, again, sometimes we just need our heroes to actually win a fight. And when they win, whoever they win against becomes less threatening, is less capable of creating tension. And so at that point, we need to kind of discard them and move up to the next bigger threat in order to just maintain tension in the story.
However, I would definitely say that, you know, it could be bad if that escalator is moving too quickly because if every single minion anywhere on that hierarchy just quickly becomes defeated, after a while, I do think that the audience is like, okay, well that last one wasn’t a big deal. We beat them, so I’m sure this one will be fine too. Whereas if you really want tension, having the minions actually be scary at first, basically try to extend their shelf life a little longer. Also, just again, we just see less easy victories and that also helps with the big bad later.
Oren: Right, and you just need to think about how much are we gonna be fighting these guys?
Because in Star Wars, even though we could do that escalator of threat, we really don’t in most of the movies. It’s just stormtroopers on stormtroopers. And you know, in the initial confrontation, the stormtroopers were pretty scary. And then they just immediately lose that once our heroes actually fight them.
But that’s all we’ve got. So we keep sending in stormtroopers. That’s the thing to think about, right? In [Star Trek:] Deep Space Nine, the Jem’Hadar are like the main minions of the Dominion, which is an interesting sentence.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: And these are the guys that we have to fight for the back half of the show, and the writers either by accident or planned, preserved their threat level by not having us just defeat them a bunch of times.
Like, in the early confrontations between the Jem’Hadar and the main characters, usually the best the main characters can hope for is a draw, and we do have the Jem’Hadar win a fair number of times, and that just keeps them scary in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lost a bunch.
Chris: You had a great post where you were comparing Sauron and—god, what’s his name, Aaron or Arawn? Chronicles of Prydain?
Oren: Oh, it’s Anwyn or something. It’s Welsh. [transcriptor’s note: It’s Arawn.]
Chris: Ohhhh.
Oren: I don’t remember how to pronounce it though.
Chris: But like, the one thing this big bad had going for him was the Cauldron-Born.
Oren: Yeah. They were great.
Chris: Where it’s just a minion that actually is way scarier than any other, because they just can’t die, period, right. There are a form of undead and usually on other undead you might have to do something special to kill them, but these ones just can’t die in any way.
So literally the only thing the heroes could do is run. That’s it. If you see them, you run. And that just made them very scary. And when a few of them mattered, and then when there was a whole army of Cauldron-Born attacking, that was just genuinely frightening. And so they worked really, really well since you couldn’t win against them, right. It just made sure that they never lost and they’re always, you know, threatening.
Oren: Yeah. And it worked out well because once we destroyed them, they all died. It was like, all right, that’s done. We don’t have to deal with those guys anymore.
Chris: [laughing] Yeah, yeah. At that point you need a load-bearing boss that you can defeat and just watch them all die at once.
Oren: It is also worth thinking about if you do want to use the minions to escalate threat, you should be thinking about, “why are my minions weaker than the later guys I’m gonna have my characters fight?” ‘Cause I love Avatar the Last Airbender. But one of the problems it would have if you tried to tell it as a novel for adults is people would ask, okay, why are the soldiers less trained than the elite teenager squads? Why when the nations are serious, do they send in their angstiest 16 year olds?
Chris: [chuckles]
Oren: You know, that’s a question people would ask, and it’s like the same problem if you have your setting in a more realistic or grounded or modern setting. If you’re doing like, a mob story, you’re probably not gonna have it so that, like, all right, I beat up the big mob enforcer, now I’m gonna go fight the mob leader. It’s like, he’s not gonna be any better at fighting than his enforcer dude, right.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: You know, you’re gonna need a different kind of escalation at that point.
Chris: I do think one thing that we’ve seen is that, again, sometimes the storyteller’s goal is just to create a bunch of wish fulfillment and empowerment at the beginning of the story by having the hero wipe the floor with a whole bunch of minions, like, Hey, look how cool he is.
And that does make things really hard. If you have a big badass and all you wanna show is that, see, he’s so badass, he wipes the floor with 50 demons, after that, it is gonna be really hard to make those demons intimidating. I’m thinking about that cartoon we started watching, what is it? Devil May Care?
Oren: Devil May Cry or—no, yeah, Devil May Cry. That’s what it’s called.
Chris: Devil May Cry. That’s it. If you can have the hero, start with, again, if he just fought a bunch of humans instead in a tournament or something, I think that would have saved the demons to be a little more special, that would’ve helped.
But yeah, you can’t really have it both ways there. You gotta choose. And it does definitely reduce excitement if you choose to have a hero that can just wipe the floor with a whole bunch of minions at once.
Oren: No, I need you to see how cool my hero is when I want him to be cool. And now I need you to forget that happened and act scared now that I want him to be in danger.
Chris: Gosh, one of the other things that people do is, okay, so your hero has leveled up to the point where they can defeat a minion. Now let’s add more minions. Well, the problem is that it quickly becomes impossible to choreograph a solution where your hero wins against so many people. This is why in Blue Eye Samurai, we have multiple sequences where the protagonist takes on impossible odds and just wins in contrived ways, right. Or the other thing that can happen is that suddenly all the minions are super weak.
Oren: Yeah. I always recommend using fewer rather than more minions because you can always add more, but it’s really hard to deescalate them. Once you establish that your hero can beat 10 minions, you’re gonna need way more than that to challenge them again. So pace yourself.
Chris: Right. Same with monsters, right? If you have any enemy that appears in numbers, at some point in time too, it gets so ridiculous that you can’t really add more and have it feel like more. We already have a horde of these demons. So you could say the horde is twice the size as before, but nobody’s gonna care because it already feels like the maximum number of demons that I can imagine being in this scene. [laughs]
Oren: It’s like, now we have two times infinity demons!
Chris: [laughs] And it’s like, okay, if you really want that wish fulfillment, you really wanna give, you know, your hero candy, again, balance the concerns how you want to. But for the purposes of having an exciting story, it’s always better to have fewer minions, have stronger minions, have them last longer before your hero can easily defeat them.
Oren: Yeah. Also, just having fewer of them means that you can make them more interesting, right? You can give them a little more personality, you can give them a little bit more description, and that’s harder to do the more of them there are.
Chris: Speaking of personality, I think the other thing that I’ll want to avoid in my minions is just not to have them feel like they are dehumanized people. So basically if they are like, monsters that are just—vampires actually are a good example because vampires do not have, well, I mean it depends on the setting, but usually they are formerly people, right? They’re not really a group that were born that way, and so they turn into monsters.
Or you could have monsters that are just like, a bunch of shadow creatures, don’t seem to have any will or minds of their own, and those are fine. You can make them super vicious, you can make them super evil if you want. Or you can have humans or people who act like people and have their own concerns. They can be bad people, but they’re not gonna be 100% pure evil in every context, usually, in their life.
And also if they think they’re gonna die, they will run away. [laughs] I cannot emphasize this point enough. They think they’re gonna die. Same with animals. I mean, I don’t really like having characters kill animals personally, but you may have a fight with an animal, right? If an animal thinks that it’s outmatched, it will run away, typically.
Oren: You need to think about who these minions are and what is their motivation, and are you showing that in the story? You know, are you showing that they have the kind of unquestioning loyalty that they will fight to the end every time? You could. Again, not to toot DS9’s horn too loud here or anything, but that is one of the things that makes the Jem’Hadar so dangerous is that we establish that they do have that kind of intense loyalty and they will fight to the death no matter what.
But that’s something that we take some time to establish. We don’t just expect you to assume that about every alien species we encounter.
Chris: And you know, we find out they’re basically an engineered species and they’ve also been purposely addicted to a drug to keep them in line. So extra measures are used to force them into this position.
They’re just not like your average soldiers.
Oren: Right. And because Deep Space Nine is a long show, we have time to do a little bit of complication of the Jem’Hadar. We meet some renegade Jem’Hadar who have rebelled for different reasons, which is interesting.
Chris: I would be especially cautious if you’re using—you have a real world and you have people who are basically criminals or even prisoners.
Like, there’s this weird cultural mindset that a person is either a criminal or they’re not. And if they’re a criminal, they’re just a dehumanized person who will just auto-attack. [laughs]
Oren: Yeah, they’re just zombies, you know?
Chris: Who’s just auto-hostile and then will keep attacking until they die. And it’s like, that’s just, that’s not how humans behave.
And people don’t fall into two neat categories of criminal and not criminal, because we’re humans.
Oren: I mean, and that’s the thing. It’s always funny when you watch shows where the writers seem to think that an area with high crime rates operates like a Final Fantasy game, where you go into it and if you take a certain number of steps, a random encounter will show up.
It’s like, look, your characters might get mugged or something, that could happen in the right story. Often they are so huge and badass, that would not happen.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: But even if they are relatively normal people, they’re not just suddenly going to summon crime boys.
Chris: You don’t understand. This is an aggro zone.
Oren: [laughing] Right?
Chris: Soon as you step in, you agro the nearest resident. [laughs]
Oren: Right, and now there’s criminals. [laughs] It’s like that’s just not how it works.
Chris: Again, especially in a prison sequence, okay, because especially in the US we can be extremely cruel to prisoners and these are people who are serving their time. If they’re in prison, they were not sentenced to just execution immediately, so we shouldn’t be beating them up until they die, for instance.
So, you know, treating them like they’re not real people who have real reasons for doing things is just not a good idea.
Oren: It’s so funny in the third Nolan Batman movie when Bane breaks open the jails and a bunch of people come out to join his revolution and it’s like, you could tell that the writers have read enough history to know that’s a thing revolutionary movements do, but not enough to know that the reason that works is that in those contexts, the prisons are full of revolutionaries.
Chris: Right. They’re their own members of their own organization who have previously been captured and put in prison. They’re not just like, you know, the random drug dealers who will join their violent organization.
Oren: It’s like, just imagine you’re in there for like, dealing cocaine, and Bane comes in and he is like, would you like to fight the US government? It’s like, uh, no? [laughs]
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: What? [laughs]
Chris: Oh man. Again, people end up in prison for all sorts of reasons, but at least in the US the majority, I think the biggest or the biggest number, the plurality perhaps, is drug offenses. Those people are not necessarily violent, they weren’t just, fight for any villain that lets them free.
Oren: But even violent criminals aren’t gonna do that, right?
It’s like, the violent criminal who is in there is someone who, I don’t know, beat his wife, right? Is the wife beater suddenly gonna join up with your dark lord? [disgusted/uncertain noise]
Just think about it a little bit, is all I’m asking.
Another thing to think about if you do want to use lots of minions is just to remember that your main characters can be smart and that a smart main character will not fight all of the minions at once out in the open. You have your main characters. If you want them to fight, like 20 guys, have them retreat through narrow areas or use hit and run attacks or things like that so that you don’t have a situation where you have to describe how they’re somehow fighting off attacks from five directions at once. And that just makes the numbers a lot easier to handle.
Chris: And it also just makes your minions look better if your hero has to put in some effort to defeat them instead of being like, Nyah-na-nyah-na, boo boo [laughs], and, you know, which I think, sometimes with like the stormtroopers. Or man, the, the droids in [Star Wars: The] Clone Wars are the goofiest…
Oren: Oh gosh. Pfft.
Chris: They make very bad jokes while they’re being killed and not only does it make them look comical, but also it calls attention to the fact that they’re actually thinking beings and maybe we shouldn’t just be slaughtering them perilously all over the place.
Oren: It’s really weird how the battle droids are weak on purpose. George Lucas has interviews where he talks about how, yeah, they’re pretty useless. The Jedi could just kill thousands of them. And why, George? [laughs] Why did you make them that way? [laughs]
Here’s something you can think about that’s important. We’ve been talking about minions from the perspective of the villain, right? What about when the heroes have minions?
Chris: I mean, that’s not typically what we mean. Are these like pseudo-villain heroes?
Oren: No. Like, what if your hero is the captain of the USS Enterprise?
Chris: So you mean sidekicks?
Oren: I mean, are the Redshirts sidekicks? I don’t know if I would describe them that way.
Chris: I mean, usually we would call them Redshirts in that case.
Oren: [chuckles]
Chris: But I mean, sometimes we do have pseudo-villain heroes that do have what we would literally call a minion. And in Megamind he has little robots, which is useful because on one hand he kind of treats them like they’re his children. But on the other hand, they are robots. They’re not actually, as far as we know, they’re not independently thinking. So if he needs to make them explode, he can do that. And we don’t think less of him.
I mean, I think that is one difference, right, is, if you have a villain and they don’t need to be likable, then they can put their minions into danger. But if you have Mando in The Mandalorian and he literally picks up a droid just to make that droid go through a very deadly situation and he didn’t wanna do it himself, that was a low point, I gotta say.
Oren: Yeah, no, that was bad. That was part of Mando’s weird racism against droids arc. I don’t know who thought that was a good idea.
Chris: I mean, so I think that’s a key difference. Whereas I guess the idea with a Redshirt is that you are trying to establish that the antagonist is dangerous by having people that you can kill off, but you actually don’t want anybody to mourn them.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Which is, I don’t know. I think that’s to be avoided if you can avoid it.
I mean, not that you can’t have minor characters killed off, but I think if you should have somebody that your protagonists know who dies, that should mean something, ’cause a person died.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re going to have characters dying, it probably shouldn’t only be background characters that no one cares about.
Just in general, especially if you’re using it to build up threat or something.
Chris: And you know, again, if you have like a big war, of course, there’s gonna be some people who are in the background dying, but usually at that point you would also have somebody that we care about dying too, instead of having just like, oh yeah, the war was terrible, but you know, don’t worry about it.
Oren: The war was terrible for someone else presumably. My group came through it just fine. [laughs]
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: So this is another thing with minions, is that when you’re thinking about how they work, you don’t just need them to be, you know, rush at the hero with fists punching, right? Again, for the right kind of story, that can work fine, but for a lot of fantasy stories, you’re also gonna want your minions to be a little more interesting than that, right?
You’re gonna want them to have magic powers or cool tech, and that’s a good way to make them stand out. That’s actually what makes certain enemies in Star Wars work better because once they do start introducing steps of minions, they actually get a little more interesting ’cause they can fly or they have armor that actually works.
Stuff like that. That’s a good way to help them stand out.
Chris: Yeah, and of course you can also make some minions that are actually named characters. Which is really useful if you do, again, we don’t typically recommend giving your villain a viewpoint. That causes numerous problems, including demystifying the villain and making them less threatening. And it’s hard not to give information that you don’t wanna give away, et cetera.
But if you do need to share something going on on the villain side, you can potentially give a minion a viewpoint. Or a minion can be a useful way if you want them to tell the hero something. Let’s say the heroes do something nice for a minion, they defeat the minion, but actually then when the minion is about to fall and die, fall off the edge of a cliff or something, the heroes are like, no, actually I don’t want you to die. The minion’s grateful, gives them information, that kind of thing.
Of course, now that I’ve said that, we have to talk about torture—
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: —because there’s so many stories. Look, torture doesn’t work. Okay. That’s the problem, is that when people are being tortured, they just say whatever the torturer wants to hear. So you have no way of knowing if that information is any good, and usually the hero just ends up going on a wild goose chase.
There was actually a pretty good sequence in The 100 where they actually did this, right. There was actually, somebody was threatened and gave bad information, and then it caused a massacre because that show’s dark. [laughs]
Oren: Or if it’s not guaranteed that that’s what’s going to happen, but that happens often enough to make the process unreliable.
Chris: And yes, you could introduce magic to fix this, but you shouldn’t.
Oren: [laughing] Yeah, I wouldn’t.
Chris: Because torture, again, doesn’t work. And creating a scenario—adding magic just to make it work just feels weird because in real life it doesn’t work, right? And so we just shouldn’t be creating stories where heroes use it because it’s cruel and it doesn’t work.
So I know some stories are dark and edgy, but I just feel like we can be dark and edgy in other ways, right. I think we have lots of ways to be dark and edgy if that’s what we want.
Oren: Well, there was just a really cool thread that I read a while back talking about how, okay, if you are trying to do this, if you’re like, “well, torture works in my setting ’cause we have the Zone of Truth spell or whatever.”
It’s like, okay, are you really prepared for the implications of that? ‘Cause people would operate completely differently if that was a thing. If information could be reliably extracted, there would be just completely different methods of sharing information because it’s a huge vulnerability all of a sudden that everyone knows about.
So unless you’re ready to go that route, which most people aren’t, I wouldn’t.
Chris: The other thing that happens sometimes with minions giving information regardless of how it’s done, is that we don’t think the heroes will trust it. So then suddenly we have spontaneous lie detection magic added.
We had a whole episode on lie detection magic. But nobody is ever prepared for the repercussions. And again, detecting a heartbeat is not a reliable way to detect lying.
Oren: This is true.
Chris: So [instead of] just suddenly giving your character lie detection powers, just make the minion convincing or have them give the heroes some collateral or something.
So usually you can either have the minion choose to give information, maybe in exchange you can have the hero convince them, Hey, I know you’re just doing this for money, but if you can help me defeat this boss—maybe they hate their boss. Maybe the villain has forced them to do this. So you can have lots of ways.
You can also have the heroes find clues on the minion.
Oren: Yeah, that’s my favorite way to do it.
Chris: Right, so like, well, we looked on the minion’s phone, we found a note in the Minion’s pocket. We looked at a label on the clothes the minion was wearing, and that can be another way for them to get information out of a minion.
Oren: Right. And if you want it to be a little conflict, then you can find some clues that don’t immediately—like, you don’t find a map, but instead you do the old Sherlock Holmes thing of like, okay, so there’s some red gravel on his feet that’s kind of interesting. And some, oh, and there’s a—he had a candy bar wrapper in his pocket, but this candy bar is only sold in this specific part of the city.
Right? And then you figure it out that way. That will replace the dramatic tension of a torture scene, which is often why authors use those scenes to begin with. All right, well, now that we have our annual don’t do torture message out, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon.
Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.