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A Keystone Army is an invasion force / army who's seemingly unstoppable, except for one particular weakness in the form of a well protected but very breakable component. It can be an individual soldier, an object or whatever, but if you trash or tamper with it, the entire army is immediately disabled, saving the day for the other faction. This plot device is handy because it allows for a handful of heroes to win the war without having to depict them fighting off all the enemy forces. Just a daring raid on the enemy's main strong hold and BAM! The entire evil side is defeated. It also allows otherwise unstoppable foes to suddenly stop dead in their tracks.
General forms include having the MacGuffin-weakness be the Hive Queen of an enemy Hive Mind, the sole source of all the enemies' powers, or the lone connection to Another Dimension. Just like a real keystone, once it's destroyed, the rest falls apart. Of course, no one ever considered that someone would aim at their army's one weakness. After all, it would be rather anticlimactic to destroy the Killer Robot's central control but have a backup one come online in another location.
Bee People are likely to be a Key Stone Army if they have a Hive Queen, and as such trashing it is a good way to win the Bug War. Another common Keystone Army simply replaces the insects with Killer Robots or Grey Goo and the Hive Mind with a Master Computer or evil AI, and yet another popular variation has an Evil Sorcerer whose (often Undead, Mind Controlled or Demonic) minions will cease to be a problem due to No Ontological Inertia upon his death/defeat/distraction. Easily Thwarted Alien Invasions often employs such armies.
Despite the name, only occasionally is the vital component a Cosmic Keystone. A Variety of Golden Snitch more commonly known as The Enemy Gate Is Down. See also Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.
Not to be confused with they Keystone Kops.
Examples
Anime
- This could be said of Zero in Code Geass. During the invasion of Tokyo during the Black Rebellion, Zero's vaguely-justified retreat in the middle of the battle proved to be fatal for his troops' morale, and without him there to lead them they quickly fell to Brittanian forces.
Film
- In Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, once Anakin blows up the Trade Federation's control ship, the droid army shuts down.
- This was subverted in the novelization of Attack of the Clones (but cut from the actual movie); the Clone Army blows up the droid control ship, shutting the droids down en-mass, only for them to all power up again seconds later when their new onboard backup systems boot up.
- The earliest Star Wars example is of course the original, with the Death Star's exhaust port. Reused in Return of the Jedi with the Death Star's main reactor.
- In The Lord Of The Rings movies, destroying the One Ring destroys Sauron, causing his armies to flee while Mordor suffers what can only be called a catastrophic geographical failure.
- On a smaller scale, Sauron's human army from Harad are routed when their chieftain is slain by King Theoden.
- The book has no Mordor Implosion, as such this trope is Combined with Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead. Once Sauron's will no longer controlled the orcs, they quit fighting and ran away. However, the Evil Men (Easterlings and Southrons) kept fighting until Aragorn & Co. beat them the old fashioned way.
- The Borg Queen and her Borg in Star Trek: First Contact (at least, those Borg who survived the engine coolant spill)
- And done in "The Best of Both Worlds" when the Enterprise rescues Picard/Locutus, who they use to destroy the Borg Cube...by telling them all to "go to sleep".
- The curse in Pirates Of The Caribbean which rendered the crew of the Black Pearl immortal and unstoppable. Jack and Will break the curse while the crew is in the middle of a climatic battle with Norrington's men, and the second that the pirates realize that their key advantage is lost, they surrender.
- Done in the second Hellboy film, where the demon crown is the keystone.
Literature
- As said above, The Lord Of The Rings.
- The Buggers and their Queen from Ender's Game.
- Somewhat subverted in that the Buggers actually know that this is their weakness and actively hide the Queen among the rest of the ships. It takes a genius tactician like Ender to figure out which one is the Queen ship, and even he can't do it in the middle of combat. On top of that, the Queen usually isn't even with her troops, being capable of instantaneous communication from halfway across the galaxy. As a result, Ender ends up having to wipe out whole fleets at a time.
- It's played straight in the narration of the past Bug Wars, with the justification that the Buggers only saw killing a Hive Queen as killing, which was part of the reason for Humanity's fear and hatred of the species; when they happened upon a human colony, they dismantled our technology to see how it worked - after they "dismantled" the colonists to see how they worked. They didn't understand how much that would piss us off anymore than they could comprehend that we would kill a sentient queen, rather than the nonsentient workers. They've learned.
- In the Starfire series, the alien Bugs (big spider monsters with insane numbers on their side) are all but invulnerable... until they are stopped by a tiny flaw in their evolution: kill enough of them at once and the others feel the pain of their deaths. Kind of like a whole race of Obi Wan Kenobis, all feeling a billion voices crying out in pain only to be silenced. Only these guys all have a fatal stroke when they feel them.
- The Cauldron-Born (an army of undead) from the Prydain Chronicles rampage without end until Taran recovers the Enchanted Sword, Dyrnwyn, and stabs one with it - instantly destroying all of them.
Live Action TV
- The Cybermen in the second season of the new Doctor Who are stopped when the program preventing them from feeling emotions is disabled - upon realizing the nature of the Body Horror they've become, the Cybermen kill themselves en masse.
- The Ood from Planet of the Ood also have a form of hive mind. Destroying would presumably kill all the Oods. The subversion being that the Big Bad tries to destroy it while the Doctor has to save it.
Tabletop RPG
- Warhammer 40000 loves this trope.
- Probably the inspiration for the Zerg example: The Tyranids in Warhammer 40000 have certain breeds called "Synapse Creatures" that connect lower-tier organisms into the Hive Mind. Killing a local Synapse Creature causes the portion of the Hive under its sway to become disoriented until another one can move in to take its place.
- More like without the Synapse Creatures controlling them the Tyranids become dumb, very bloodthirsty, and very very dangerous animals.
- Similarly if the Tau Ethereal is killed other units have to pass a morale check or flee. With their case it's just sheer demoralization though.
- Recent materials suggest Ethereals exert Mind Control over the other Tau castes; the morale check now represents the breaking of that control.
- The Necrons, who have evolved out of game from a ripoff of the Terminator movies into a cult of stargod cultists with a cybernetic Body Horror theme have the "We'll be back" rule. If you can knock down enough of them at one time before their regeneration lets them stand back up the entire army will teleport home. This technically doesn't kill them, but it still counts as a win for the opponent.
- The Necrons are almost a reversal of this example. One would think to target the big things like the Monoliths or the gods they bring along. In reality, the best way to fight them is to exclusively target the common warriors until they teleport away.
- Interestingly, the Human armies generally avert this.
- To cripple a Space Marine company, you'll need to kill the Force Commander, his command squad, the Chaplain and Librarian simultaneously and even then you will be dealing with a 100 fanatical Super Soldiers with a grudge.
- The Imperial Guard has a rigid command structure with field promotions a common occurrence if the upper ranks are killed. Even if the officer core is utterly crippled, the Guard has an alternate command structure: The Commissariat.
- Done literally with the Undead in previous versions of Warhammer, if the general (normally a Necromancer or Vampire) was killed the army would quite literally disintegrate. This was toned down in later editions.
- The spin-off game Warmaster has kill the enemies general as one of the generic win conditions for all armies.
Video Games
- The Zerg in Starcraft are defeated when their Overmind is killed. The Expansion Pack, Brood War, subverts this; without the Overmind to direct their actions, the Swarm launches into a mindless frenzy and slaughters half the Protoss population. Then lots of backstabbing intrigue about control of the Swarm happens.
- A similar effect occurs when a Cerebrate is killed, except the Cerebrates only control specific broods, or sections of the swarm.
- Metal Gear Solid 2 subverts this: Arsenal Gear is designed so that it wouldn't be a keystone if it was ever actually used, because it's almost invincible as long as it has backup. When it doesn't have backup, it's so weak the Big Bad is willing to leave it to the Quirky Miniboss Squad as a way of killing them off.
- In Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, destroying the Quantum Rift of the Seraphim stops their invasion dead in its tracks.
- In both the Supreme Commander game and its expansion, armies will deactivate if their Armored Command Unit is destroyed. In multiplayer mode, losing one's ACU is a condition to lose the game.
- Justified that the ACU contains the only person on the field, and that all the other units are robots under his or her control. sACU's are shown to sometimes be piloted by humans, but only in story missions.
- Justified in a realistic way in the slaughterhouse level of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. The bad guys are mercenaries working for cash, and Sam's boss informs him that once he kills their leader/employer, the remaining bad guys will say "screw this" and all go home (since the guy who writes their checks is now dead).
- The show Burn Notice makes the same remark. Michael points out that if you take out the person handing out paychecks, mooks and mercenaries won't stick around to avenge him.
- Something similar happened in Order of the Stick, when Roy throws Xykon into the portal, he is destroyed. The Goblins in the throne room surrender saying that no one is paying them anymore (though it's more likely that no insanely powerful lich is threatening them anymore). Unfortunately, the goblins
happened tried to surrender to Belkar.
- Recurring theme in the Fire Emblem games. In many missions, killing the enemy commander will immediately end the battle, regardless of how close to death your Lord is and how easily they could be killed next turn. The same also applies to your side: regardless of how badly the enemy is doing, if your main character is killed, it's an automatic Game Over.
- Quite a few RTS will have this as a condition on various campaign levels. The player's goal is to destroy a single unit or structure, and doing so nets a victory, no matter how many enemy units are left on the field.
- The X-Com series loves this trope. In the first game, the entire alien army is run by a giant brain on Mars. In the second game, the leader is hidden underwater. In the third game, you have to seal off the gates to their dimension.
- Occurs twice in the Total War games. First, eliminating the general leading an army causes that army's moral and fighting capacity to decrease, making them much easier to defeat (though it's not an instant win). On the strategic map, removing all the adult male member of a faction's royal family (via Assassination, or by bribing / marrying them into your own faction) causes that faction to lose, no matter how many territory or armies it controls.
- In Sonic Heroes, there are gold enemies that take all nearby 'bots with them when destroyed.
Western Animation
- In the episode "Dark Heart" from Justice League Unlimited, an army of self replicating robots is defeated when the heroes destroy the titular dark heart commanding them.
- From the same series, an alien army is defeated when the Martian Manhunter frees their power source from the corrupted leader controlling it.
- The Joining from The Batman are an army of robot. They are defeated twice by this: the first time by a self destruct code that had been built into the various parts they were made off. The second time they were defeated by a signal to their mothership ordering them to go offline.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go featured in one episode the Vreen, a Horde Of Alien Locusts from the future. Their weakness was the present-day bug they evolved from; when it was found and destroyed, the Vreen disappeared.
- In Left 4 Dead's offline mode, the player(s) lose if the only survivors left are computer-controlled, even though they should be capable of going on with only 3 of them left.
- In Battlefield Vietnam's single-player mode, your AI teammates are so incompetent that they will constantly lose ground if you're not being Rambo on the front lines next to them.
Real Life
- Truth In Television in the form of Stonewall Jackson. The Confederate army was losing badly, and in fact in retreat, to the Union army during the first battle of Bullrun during the American Civil War, until someone said "Look! There's Jackson, standing like a stonewall!" The Union army was then routed.
- Of course, in this case, Jackson happened to be in command of a regiment of infantry who were also standing like a stone wall. Inspiring everyone else's regiments to do the same.
- A noted weakness in armies led by a dictator. When the leader is removed, the army is useless.
- While the battle of the Alamo was an eventual loss, the damage inflicted on the attacking army was so intense because the leaders wore decorative hats, which made them a primary sniper target. One of the reason why the leaders of armies today don't have much to seperate them from their troops.
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