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Goddamned Bats

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The player probably has the same expression as Link when dealing with these things.
"Bats such as the Keese are frequently among the weakest enemies in video games. They make up for this fact by being the most annoying."

Weak enemies that exist primarily to annoy the player character. They probably aren't gonna kill you, but they're certainly going to harass you and slow you down, making it easier for something else to kill you.

Almost every video game has them. These are the enemies that are just a speed bump, even if they are not outright dangerous. They're not difficult to defeat, but because of the frequency with which they appear, they can become a significant hindrance to the player, and they usually don't give you enough of a reward to make fighting them truly worth it, either. Even the explosion made by killing them is paltry compared to other enemies.

They're the goddamn bats, man.

A key trait is that they generally don't pose too large of a threat on their own; they're more annoying than deadly. When an enemy starts posing an actual threat, then it's a case of Demonic Spiders and, in extreme cases, the Boss in Mook Clothing.

Note that this designation applies to any type of non-threatening enemy whose purpose is to stall and harass the player. Goddamned Bats are common in Platformers, where they enjoy disturbing precision jumping.

They don't have to be bats. The best definition of the Goddamned Bats trope is that they are not only common enemies that will swarm you, and they are not only pathetically easy to kill on their own, but they take no skill to defeat, in RPGs they don't provide much (if any) experience or gold when beaten, and are sometimes flat-out annoying. These are often the enemies that will be found in the Level of Tedious Enemies. A famous example of this is Zubat in the Pokemon series which were found in nearly every cave in the first 4 generations and liked to inflict various Status Effects on the player before going down.

Other following factors can contribute to making an enemy a Goddamned Bat:

Occasionally, Goddamned Bats can be a result of the setting; for example, a water level can inadvertently graft Goddamned Bats characteristics onto any enemy if the game has poor movement controls.

Bats in video games tend to have many the aforementioned traits, hence them naming the trope after a phrase from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ("Wait'll you see those goddamned bats, man."); very common in caves and other dark areas yet are individually easy to defeat, their small size and fast movement makes them difficult to hit in real-time games (and turn-based games reflect this by giving them high evade rates), and since they fly the player is usually unable to hit them with melee attacks.

See Goddamned Boss for bosses with these characteristics. Compare The Swarm. For literal bats that God has damned, see Bat Out of Hell.


Examples

    Other Game Genres 
  • F-Zero 99: The Lucky Bumper is a mechanic specifically designed to turn a dead player into an annoyance. The mechanic is that if a player Crashes Out, there is a chance they will respawn as a Lucky Bumper, appearing in front of the pack in a blue car with the camera facing backwards and getting up to 30 seconds to ram into as many other vehicles as possible to earn a bonus point for each vehicle they collide with. The Lucky Bumper drives at a fixed speed, allowing the player to only control its steering and Spin Attack. Due to being able to see every player behind them, Lucky Bumper players have the opportunity to absolutely ruin other players' days by shoving them around the track and disrupting their flow for nominal gain other than cathartic value. An extremely unfortunate player can even wind up dead because of a Lucky Bumper swerving into their path at low health and pushing them into a barrier or other hazard.

    Non-Video Game 
Anime and Manga
  • One Piece has Gecko Moria whose main method of 'attack' is to hide behind a cloud of regenerating shadow bats as hard as bricks and run away when his opponent's not looking. Cue the protagonist spending the entire fight wandering around the forest looking for his enemy.
    • Even earlier in the series, we have the Millions and Billions of Baroque Works during the Alabasta Arc. They're not exactly a threat, as we see the Straw Hats - as well as Tashigi of the Marines - take them out quite easily (at one point, Vivi downs a whole squad of them), but they're definitely a very, very dangerous problem when time in a factor throughout the arc and they're preventing the group from stopping the war.
  • The White Zetsu from Naruto are this in straight-up battle, due to their main skills being infiltration and assassination.
  • In Goblin Slayer, Goblins are the weakest monsters, and mainly appear in quests meant for rookies. With the size and strength (and, apparently, the brain) of a child, they would be no problem for new, inexperienced adventurers at all... if there weren't so damn many of them! Problem is, these beasts multiply like crazy, and being able to kill them with one or two hits doesn't help much if every fallen goblin is replaced by two others. That's why the titular Goblin Slayer seeks to kill every single goblin he can find.
  • Isekai Quartet: During the final round of the Field Day, Vanir and Pandora's Actor uses their magic to create countless of minions, which then form their own quartets to fight against Class 1 & 2.
  • Wonder Egg Priority has the Seeno Evils, small demonic creatures wielding sharp knives. They're no real threat to Ai and her allies, as they die in one hit and can't deal any damage that they won't immediately recover from (until they return to reality, at least). There's a ton of them, and they pose a very real threat to whoever it is Ai is trying to protect, so invariably, swarms of them have to be fought off before they can battle the Wonder Killer.

Comic Books

Fan Works

  • In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, John and George are attacked by a swarm of robotic bats. The narrative even refers to them as "goddamned bats."
  • In Hoenn Wars, Ricky's trainees are really sick of his Diglett sinking them into the ground.
  • Pokemon: The Origin of Species: Humorously lampshaded in-universe when Blue lists off the Pokemon that can be found in Mount Moon.
    Blue: Nothing really competitive, (starts ticking them off on his fingers) Zubat, Geodude, Sandshrew, Zubat, Paras, the rare Clefairy, Zubat, lower down there's Chingling, Absol, Bronzor, Zubat, Makuhita and if you're super lucky, Zubat.
  • In Ranma ½/Sailor Moon crossover "Paragon," the Monsters of the Week are protected by packs of clay troll-like creatures called Ur-Golems. They aren't particularly tough, especially if the main goon's attention is focused somewhere else, but they're irritating to fight your way through.

Films — Live-Action

  • In Wanda Nevada, Wanda climbs down a cliff with a rope around her face to search a cave for gold. An owl flies out of the cave and flaps aggressively in her face, causing her to fall. Beau manages to grab onto the rope before she falls too far and laboriously hauls her back up.

Literature

  • The flocks of birds in both the book and film of The Lord of the Rings. Specifically the crebain, used by Saruman as his eyes and ears to track down the Fellowship in the high mountains. In both portrayals, Aragorn realizes the danger of the flocking crows and has the fellowship stamp out fires and go to cover. (In the film, the crebain detect the fellowship and give Saruman the information he needs to turn the mountain passes against them).

Live-Action TV

  • Piranhas became this in an episode of River Monsters, in which Jeremy constantly caught piranhas, when he wasn't just having his bait stolen.
  • In Community, the hippies act as this when the group plays an important video game created by Pierce's elitist father.
  • In Walking with…, Nigel regards the sea scorpions as a nuisance. They can't swallow him whole or cut him in half, but they can and do bother him, and their pincers are sharp. And painful.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • There's a scene in the Play-by-Post game What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf? in which the protagonist opens the door to the attic...and is swarmed by bats. The other characters, all children, laugh at him for it. The protagonist is understandably miffed since everything up to that point has been trying to kill him.
  • In Spriggs: a Halo 3 Machinima, Lt. Hammer considers the Grey Suits to be this.
    Hammer: They breed you morons like rodents, don't they?
  • The "Fel-dogs" of Tales From My D&D Campaign. They have a bit of DR that nobody's weapons seem to get around, Fast Heal, and most obnoxiously of all, they inflict 1d6 negative energy backlash damage every time you hit them in melee. Not all that hard to kill, but each fight eats a bit of the party's healing resources due to their attacks and backlash damage.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd is the Trope Namer, and he absolutely hates these, and has had many long rants against them in the many Nintendo Hard games he reviews. Bats being the most common offender, but other similar annoyances (like the Medusa heads in Castlevania) get lambasted for all the reasons on this page as well. But with a lot of fucks, shits, and descriptions of fecal matter.

Western Animation

  • A Tom Slick cartoon had Tom in Transylvanian race and he quips "Oh, rats! Bats!" upon beeing attacked by the winged creatures.
  • Scooby-Doo and his teenage buddies are constantly beseiged by bats. In "Decoy For A Dognapper," Shaggy and Velma are flailing away trying to avoid a flock of bats and Shaggy quips that they'd call that dance "the Batusi!"
  • The Danger Mouse episode "Duckula Meets Frankenstoat" has Dr. Frankenstoat having created a machine that will make a flock of bats—a flock of cricket bats with vampire wings.
  • The BX-series Commando Droids from Star Wars: The Clone Wars are a downplayed example. They're certainly threatening to non-Force sensitive combatants like the Clone Troopers, but are a nuisance to Jedi at best.

Alternative Title(s): Goddamn Bats

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