563 – Making The Most of Your Minions
Description
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
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