This video was sponsored by World Anvil! The perfect improvised
weapon to sling at a squad of five to twenty interchangeable faceless goons!
Picture if you will, a familiar scene to those versed in the tropespace. Our mild-mannered
protagonist is walking down a standard-issue dark alleyway when a shape silently emerges from
the shadows. Clad all in black and moving with practiced poise, the formidable figure settles
into a fighting stance honed in a hundred thousand hours of training. Our hero faces the mighty
ninja, a deadly assassin unrivaled in skill. And then six more of them show up, and everyone
breathes a sigh of relief. See, everybody knows that while a single ninja is a deadly threat,
a group of ninjas is cannon fodder, existing only to attack one at a time and be handily dispatched
by our hero with a string of casual kicks and the occasional backhand. This assessment that comes
so naturally to those of us versed in fiction may seem confusing and illogical to a viewer grounded
in reality, who might theoretically assume that if a single ninja is quite dangerous,
then six ninjas should be about six times as dangerous. Why does giving them backup
and strength in numbers make them weaker? This odd phenomenon has been given the
name Conservation of Ninjutsu. It states that each side in a conflict has a set,
constant amount of fighting ability, or Ninjutsu, to split between its participants.
Thus a one-on-one conflict between two ninjas will see a roughly even match, but if one side has one
ninja and the other side has twenty, each enemy ninja will only possess 5% of the fighting ability
they'd display if they were fighting alone. Instead they'll dance around in the background,
shadowboxing or doing flips to keep things interesting while the hero fights their comrades
one at a time. While a lone ninja may be able to tank several hits and will potentially continue
fighting even while stabbed or on fire, ninjas with the misfortune of being in groups can barely
tank a single hit of any strength before flying merrily away and collapsing in a heap. All this
serves to produce some very exciting spectacle, but it can leave the audience scratching
their heads a little. What causes this strange phenomenon? Why does it afflict everything from
ninjas to robots to cops to space-wizards? Why does being outnumbered never, ever mean anything?
Now the primary problem with this trope is that it breaks the story's internal logic and makes
it very difficult for the audience to gauge how much danger our heroes are in at any given time
and what kind of practical threat a fighting force poses. If a single ninja presents a
serious obstacle, the audience should be able to assume that, all other things being equal,
adding more ninjas will only make the obstacle more difficult to overcome. When the opposite
happens without explanation or justification, it erodes the audience's trust in the story.
This is a problem, but it's not an unsolvable problem. There are plenty of stories that
justify this kind of threat-scaling, as improbable as that may seem. But before
we unpack how this trope can work, we need to understand why it happens in the first place.
Now there are several reasons why this trope happens, and we can split them into Doylist
and Watsonian explanations - as in, reasons it occurs because of the writers and reasons it can
be justified as happening in-story. As far as doylist explanations go, the first one is also
the simplest: fight choreography is really hard. Choreographing a fight between two characters is
already complicated and can become arbitrarily complex depending on individual abilities,
the environment they're fighting in and how creative the choreographer and stunt
team are feeling that day. This only becomes more complicated when you add more people.
It's less of a situation of conservation of ninjutsu and more conservation of creativity.
The choreographer only has so much they can work with, and if they have to choreograph a
team of people rather than one fighter, that attention is gonna end up getting split. So
in a one-on-one fight the character might get a lot of focus and show off fancy moves, specific
martial art forms and impressive utilization of the environment, but if you add more people
anything too complicated risks becoming visual noise. Will the audience even notice that the
guy in the background is doing a very impressive flip if there's five more guys in the foreground
also doing flips? All this to say, the process of choreographing a fight is very complicated,
and if it's a fight with one character on one side and a squad of interchangeable mooks on the other,
the solo fighter is gonna get more attention and TLC from the choreographer,
and as a result the mook squad is gonna look less skilled and impressive by comparison.
They also might seem a lot more fragile, because one really easy way to simplify the choreography
is to take characters out of commission, and that means you can thin out the battlefield
just by letting your solo fighter one-shot a couple mooks to get them out of the way.
Now this problem isn't a matter of laziness or anything, as it often applies even when
the choreographers and stuntpeople are genuinely giving it their all.
A lot of big group combat scenes involve some pretty impressive moves from the background
fighters - that just end up completely lost because of all the other stuff happening onscreen.
In fact, in big group combat shots it's common for background fighters to just be, like, shadowboxing
or wiggling to make sure there's action happening onscreen even if it doesn't actually make sense
for them to be doing anything or they're way out of range to actually be hitting anyone or
getting hit themselves. It's more important that the scene overall make visual sense to the viewer
than that every individual character onscreen is being individually impressive. An audience
can only visually process so much at a time, and if a large squad of highly trained warriors
are all doing complicated things at once, the audience has almost no chance of seeing all of it,
or even most of it. All this contributes to the impression that a squad of mooks does a whole lot
of nothing while they wait for the hero to take them out one at a time, because that is by FAR the
easiest way to choreograph that kind of scene, and every bit of added visual complexity will
complicate the viewing experience, potentially to the point of visual incomprehensibility.
This is informed by the second reason this happens - the heroes usually need to win.
Sometimes protagonists end up in situations they have to lose for the plot to happen - maybe they
need to get captured by the bad guys so they can learn their secret plans, or they need to lose
so the bad guys can succeed in doing something evil but much more interesting to watch than
whatever the heroes were planning - but the hero or heroes losing is usually kind of a big moment,
even if it has to happen for the plot to advance. And a writer doesn't usually want to waste that
defeat on a squad of faceless minions. If the hero's gonna lose, it's gonna be to a
major named villain with a unique and interesting skillset so the defeat can inform the hero's arc,
or maybe just make the fight more visually interesting. Some random interchangeable
faceless minion doesn't DESERVE to do something as important as thwarting the hero. So this means if
the hero is facing down a squad of faceless bad guys, it's pretty unlikely the writer is plans
on letting them lose - if they wanted a dramatic defeat they'd bring in someone more interesting.
This isn't universal, but it is a pretty common tell for these kinds of fights. So even though our
hero is outnumbered and potentially facing bad guys that have given them trouble before, in a
very real sense the threat is a total illusion. The faceless goon squad is here to attack the
hero to show the audience and the heroes that the bad guys want the hero stopped, but they're also
here to show that the hero can put up a pretty decent fight and is not about to be stopped,
at least not this time. So the hero will win, even if they get a little banged up in the process.
And all this combines to give the audience the impression that the faceless minions are very
little more than plot space-filler - and in a real sense, they are. They usually exist because
logically they have to exist - an evil emperor needs an army or they're not really an emperor,
an evil boss needs some evil minions to boss around, etcetera. The army of faceless goons
is implied to exist in the setting because the big bad needs manpower to fulfill their narrative
role of subjugating all the hapless background characters, but our heroes are tougher than your
average npc and are above the threat posed by standard-issue evil minions and are really only
at subjugation risk by named villains. The army of minions aren't threats, they're set
dressing. They help establish a power scale and justify the big bad's threat, but that's really
it. Letting a squad of faceless minions beat the hero would be like randomly taking them out of
commission with the flu - an environmental hazard that we understand exists but weren't expecting to
pose our hero a real threat, and it really seems like there were more interesting and compelling
ways to take the hero out of commission than that. So all that to say, conservation of ninjutsu
applies because armies of minions are generally used like background setpieces to establish tone
rather than posing a legitimate threat, while single bad guys with personalities are actual
characters that the writer can use for emotionally impactful interactions without feeling wasteful.
And finally, the last doylist reason this trope applies is that it lets the heroes
show off all their fancy moves. See, if a squad of faceless minions is basically set dressing,
this gives your characters an opportunity to demonstrate their skill by knocking 'em over
in all the fun, exciting ways they can think of. If you heroes only ever fight major bad guys that
pose a serious threat or even outclass them, our heroes are gonna be too busy trying to survive
to show off. This can risk making the heroes' abilities a little tell-don't-show, where they're
allegedly powerful badasses but practically all they do is survive by the skin of their teeth.
If everyone's running around at an elevated power scale and we never get a chance to compare it to,
like, regular people, it's easy to lose sight of what that power means. So sometimes it's
good to throw a passel of faceless goons at your heroes and just let them go to town.
Line 'em up so the hero can knock 'em over however they like. Bonus points if they're robots - and
they so often are - because that means your hero can get extremely brutal without worrying about
any pesky no-killing policies or PG-13 ratings. So these reasons aren't… bad. Which might seem
weird, because this trope isn't great. But it happens as often as it does because it's fed
into by all these completely legitimate writing concerns - fights are difficult to choreograph
and an audience can only keep track of so many players at a time, heroes being defeated is a good
opportunity for character drama that probably shouldn't be squandered on non-characters,
and it's always a good idea to make sure your audience knows what your characters are actually
capable of. This all weaves together to create a large space of scenarios where a large squad
of interchangeable bad guys narratively stands no chance against one protagonist, even if logically
speaking that shouldn't be true at all. But there are ways to make this work,
which brings us to the watsonian reasons this trope can occur. These are the justifications
that exist in-story to explain why these fights end up totally one-sided in the
opposite direction we'd logically expect them to. The simplest explanation is that there's some
trick to beating these bad guys. The first time our hero fights one, they have a lot of trouble
because they haven't worked out the trick yet, but later after they've got the trick down it becomes
pretty trivial to take out even large squads of them. The "trick" can be almost anything - an
elemental weakness, a programming hack, a sound frequency that shorts 'em out, a specific
frequency of light they're visible at, a big glowy weak point to hit that shuts 'em down, whatever.
Once our hero knows what it is, they can use it whenever they want and even take out a whole
passel of bad guys at once. This is probably the best justification for conservation of ninjutsu
because it genuinely explains why the bad guys seem so much weaker after their first appearance
even though they're showing up in big groups - but it has the downside that the bad guys need some
kind of specific exploitable weakness, and that can be tough to justify. Why exactly would the
evil emperor's robot army be vulnerable to AM/FM radio frequencies? Well, because there needs to be
some way to mess 'em up. This does actually give the writer the opportunity to let the bad guys get
upgrades that remove old weaknesses and make the heroes actually struggle fighting them again,
which can be fun and prevents the fights from getting too same-y. In some stories it's not so
much that there's a specific trick to beating the bad guys as it's just that our heroes get
better at it with practice because all the bad guys are pretty interchangeable and don't really
have all that many new tricks up their sleeves. And the less common watsonian explanation is
that these particular bad guys work best alone, and actively struggle to fight in large groups,
making them actually less effective in greater numbers. This is trickier to justify because
it feels a little counterintuitive and makes us question why they'd fight in groups at all, but,
for instance, a bad guy who specializes in stealth or really long-range combat might not be so good
packed in close with ten other guys just like 'em. Like some kind of, say… ninja. Anyway, while this
technically works as an explanation it's a little shaky and unintuitive, so it's not as popular.
There are also scenarios that resemble conservation of ninjutsu but are actually
caused by unrelated factors - for instance, if our heroes undergo significant powerups
and become that much stronger in a fairly short period of time, previously deadly threats become
very rapidly outclassed and can be wiped out by the dozen quite easily. This isn't the same as
the bad guys getting weaker in large numbers - it's correlation, not causation - but it
can feel similarly weird for an audience if the powerup isn't particularly well-handled. There
are also cases where the characters are faced with an army of bad guys and conclude that they
straight-up can't fight them hand-to-hand because, as expected, they'd be destroyed by their superior
numbers, and instead come up with a clever way to solve the army situation without ever having to
personally deck anyone - like hijacking the army's leader, taking the army and pushing it somewhere
else, or allying with another army so the two armies cancel each other out and the important
characters can go back to fighting one-on-one duels like civilized people. This also doesn't
indicate that the army is useless, but it does functionally remove it from factoring into the
plot, which can feel similar to just making them overtly and inexplicably useless in large numbers.
There are also cases where a single bad guy poses the same proportionate threat as a whole squad of
the same bad guy later on, but this is because the heroes have more backup, more firepower and
more training - for instance, the jump from Alien to Aliens involves an escalation from a single
xenomorph to a whole hive of the things, but the protagonists of the first movie are a tiny,
unarmed gang of untrained space-miners and the protagonists of the sequel are a large
heavily-kitted-out crew of highly trained marines - and they still get shredded. This is a case
where conservation of ninjutsu is successfully averted, because each xenomorph in Aliens feels
about as deadly as the lone xenomorph in Alien did. Killing one, while possible, is never easy
or painless, and they've got the heroes on the defensive pretty much the entire movie.
But this is a uniquely effective bit of writing that tries very hard to keep the threat level
consistent in-universe. Conservation of ninjutsu is a problem because it breaks the setting's
internal logic in favor of the spectacle of a huge, bombastic fight scene, but bombastic
doesn't always mean effective. For all the times the heroes of the MCU wrecked shop and kicked ass
through a giant army of interchangeable faceless minions, the hero-vs-mook fight scenes people
remember and talk about most fondly are the bus fight in Shang-Chi and the elevator fight from
Winter Soldier, and both for very similar reasons - they pit a ridiculously skilled fighter against
a squad of bad guys who actually seem like their numbers pose a threat, and the solo fighter has
to actually try to beat them rather than just mowing down a disposable crew of identical bad
guys with one punch each. The bus fight slaps hard, but the elevator fight is probably my top
pick for "fight scenes that avoid conservation of ninjutsu" just because it does so much with
so little - it's barely two minutes, and it's just Captain America versus a half-dozen goons in an
enclosed environment. We know Captain America could beat any of these guys one-on-one, which
is why Hydra stacks the deck against him every way they can. The unfairness of the situation makes it
seem like a genuine struggle, and at every point it's clear what's happening, who's winning and
why. All credit to the choreographers on this one for taking an incredibly simple story beat
and turning it into this - story-wise the script notes could've easily just been "Cap fights the
bad guys and wins," but the fight works because of how it feels and how clearly it communicates the
abilities of both sides. When Cap gets out of the elevator, it's because he's earned it - and then,
rather than attempting to mow down the bigger squad of better-armed goons Hydra throws at him,
he focuses on escaping because he doesn't think he can win - and neither do we. The elevator fight
was enough of a struggle that it convinces us escaping is the way to go. Sure, plot-wise these
guys only exist to confirm that Hydra's trying to take him out but america's ass is far too powerful
to be spanked that easily, but choreography-wise the story sells us on the fight and the victory.
We don't think Cap could just keep shredding these guys like tissue paper, and we don't think Cap
wins just because he's supposed to win - and that is a feeling that these movies overall struggle
with. Eventually I'll run out of tropes I can use Age of Ultron as a good bad example for, but not
today! The first time our heroes fight Ultron it actually seems like a bit of a struggle, which
makes sense - they're not expecting a fight, it's a party, some of 'em aren't kitted out for combat
and each of the Stark drones takes a few good hits to knock out. But even with those setbacks,
it's still over pretty quickly. Then Ultron spends the movie upgrading himself and building a massive
army of extra robot bodies - which go down in one hit. The final climactic battle of the movie
features such hits as "black widow mowing down Ultrons in a truck", "Cap landing on a guy",
"Hawkeye vaguely waving his bow at them" and "gun." These new upgraded Ultrons are objectively
worse than Tony's autonomous drones from the start of the movie. The power of teamwork shouldn't make
a handgun work better. Now to be fair, it's easy to miss this if you're not looking for it with an
explicitly cynical eye - but that's not good, is it? That means this fight scene is visual
noise. Little details like "how exactly are our heroes defeating the killer robots threatening
the world" seems like the kind of thing you wanna highlight, not obscure with big spinning camera
shots and quick-cuts out the wazoo. When Ultron asks the very reasonable question "how can you
possibly hope to stop me" and Tony's only answer is "together", that's a cheeky power-of-friendship
wink and a nudge that does absolutely nothing to explain why and how they completely obliterate
Ultron's entire army in two minutes tops. They don't even use teamwork on any of the
drones - they don't have to, they go down too quickly! There's more teamwork and combo moves in
the first fight! This is textbook conservation of ninjutsu. There's no in-universe explanation given
for why this army of killer robots is an absolute joke compared to the threat the first prototypes
posed. Our heroes win because the story dictates our heroes must win, and everything that gets us
from point A to point B is empty spectacle. This trope is a weird one. It's not a writing
decision, exactly - it's more of a result of environmental pressures that shape
storytelling. In a fictional setting, the power of a character is strongly dependent on their
narrative importance, so of course an army of faceless goons is about as effective at shaping
the narrative as a stiff breeze or a particularly vehement fart. Of course a single ninja is a
deadly threat - ninjas are cool and unusual, so a lone ninja has to be a badass, but once
you get too many ninjas the coolness factor is devalued by inflation. It's an odd duck for sure,
and it seems like the number one way to avoid it is not so much through any trick of the writing,
but through really good fight choreography. Which makes sense, because that is kind of how you
convince an audience that your hero can kick ass. So… yeah!
And thanks again to World Anvil for sponsoring this video!
As you may know, World Anvil is a browser-based writing and worldbuilding software designed to
help writers, game-masters and creators of all stripes keep their worldbuilding organized and
clear while writing and worldbuilding. Along with all the classic features like
custom wikis, family trees, custom calendars and a built-in word processor, World Anvil just rolled
out a new feature called Chronicles that allows creators to connect timelines to maps, giving you
a clean and simple way to visually represent how your story advances through your world. Chronicles
supports multiple timelines and multiple maps, so whether you’re playing with alternate timelines,
multiple disparate plots running in parallel, or just like subdividing your storytelling into nice,
convenient boxes, Chronicles has the tools you need. And of course you can keep the
world private if you prefer, but if you want to show off your world in progress and
start building your audience early, you can make it public and let people follow along!
World Anvil is constantly growing and updating with new features, so if all that sounds useful,
check out the link in the description for more details, and if you’re interested
in an annual membership you can get 40% off with the promo code OVERLYSARCASTIC!