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!
The title tricked me into thinking it was about how Ninjutsu itself survived to the modern day! instead, it ended up being "one more reason why AoU sucks!"
"But America's ass is far too powerful to be spanked that easily"
Sir Twenty Goodmen: better than any army. Proof? The Trojan Horse.
Putting the hero out of commission by giving them the flu:
How about putting the most powerful warrior in the Universe, that we know of, out of commission by giving him a latent and so-far unknown lethal heart condition that only a medicine from a time-travelling future honorary nephew can cure? Note that this is in a setting where it would be more efficient and less painful for him to commit suicide and then return from the afterlife.
[ chef's kiss ]
I wonder if Red has read Doctor McNinja. Conservation of Ninjutsu happens a lot in that series, to hilarious results.
One important thing with this trope that Red didn't really talk about is the importance of editing. The fight between the Bride and the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill vol. 1 shouldn't work. It's a 1 v 88(?) fight where a majority of the characters are either shadowboxing or just standing around in the background. But the editing is fast-paced enough that you don't really have time to register what's happening behind the main action.
It is enough for the audience to maintain suspension of disbelief. And the focus always returns to the Bride and her physical condition as it changes throughout the fight. The scene tells a specific story: the Bride has to defeat all these ninjas, but the longer she fights, the more blows they land on her.
The fight scene in The Last Jedi does a different thing. It uses longer takes, and puts the focus on the relationship between two specific characters (Rey and Kylo). The scene is once again telling a story. It assumes the audience is paying attention to their teamwork and dynamic, and not counting how many guards are chilling just out of frame. It doesn't hold up when you slow it down, but it doesn't need to. Most people aren't going to scrub through it frame-by-frame.
The fight scenes at the end of Age of Ultron are, by comparison, much more meandering. They focus on far too many characters, and therefore the storytelling is less clear. The editing is fine, but we don't necessarily get much of a sense as to the specific, moment-to-moment dynamics between the characters. It's just visual white-noise to fill out the runtime.
So Ninjustu is conserved! Just by the writer
This is why I'm Team Pirate in that one endless debate.
I had thought this one would be about Ninja, and it kinda was, but not in the way and to the extent I expected. Another excellent trope talk.
What about the rare, reverse conservation of ninjutsu? Clearly displayed when Fezzik fights the Man in Black?