Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"Observe their troops. Thin fabrics. Exposed skin. Feeble weapons. These are toy soldiers. The playthings of children!"
The Cavalry has arrived! Unfortunately, they're all wearing red shirts... and they all graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
Happens all the time in action shows. The hero, who may or may not have any special training or powers, is to be escorted into a "hot zone" by a team of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Space Marines, a SWAT team, whatever, who are heavily-armed and one would assume well trained for the job. Invariably, mere minutes into the mission, they've all been ambushed and killed off by the platoon-load, leaving only the hero alive to finish the job.
Makes one wonder, how did these guys ever pass muster (heck, even survive long enough) for assignment to an elite military or security force if they drop like mayflies in any tactical situation?
This often massive loss of life will rarely be noted by anyone or have any direct effect on the plot, unless the heroes need to emote over how senseless the situation is. These guys are spear carriers in the finest Joseph Campbell tradition.
Provides a convenient demonstration of just how scary the villain is and also explains why the villain gets away all the time.
This is sometimes justified by the idea that the doomed Red Shirts really are experts, but they've never had any training in how to fight beings that can kill them just by looking at them funny. Of course, that doesn't explain how the Hero survives.
As the singular Red Shirt is the "good" counterpart to Evil Minions, the Redshirt Army is the "good" counterpart to the endless hordes of Mooks. The Badass Army is the logical opposite to this; take note how often (as in the example above) Red Shirt Army is, in fact, a subversion of Badass Army via The Worf Effect.
Often precedes Lowered Monster Difficulty.
See Also: A Team Firing, Conservation Of Ninjitsu, Lemming Cops, One Sided Battle
Examples
open/close all folders
- The Federation forces in the original Mobile Suit Gundam had the G Ms, mass-produced mecha whose sole purpose was to die in droves against the latest Zeon special forces mechas of the week. They even had red chestplates.
- The regular UN forces in Macross 7 and later Macross Frontier. (Who were, in both cases, mostly flying outdated Humongous Mecha, and had limited, if any, combat experience; this is even a plot point in Frontier and is used to explain the existence of the Private Military Contractors.)
- Any friendly force in a Humongous Mecha series that isn't equipped with Humongous Mecha. (The AD Police in the Bubble Gum Crisis OVAs count here, despite the fact that they had mecha — the mecha they had were the mass-produced tin-can-death-trap variety.)
- If all the main characters have unique mecha, then any friendly force that does have mecha but only has one or two different models is also a Redshirt Army. For example, the allied armies in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are simply cannon fodder.
- Ditto Paradigm City's Military Police forces in The Big O. The lone ones that don't give up by the finale and actually try to join the fight on Roger's side get vaporized in fairly short order.
- This actually becomes a plot point in season two. The commissioner is shown many times to be struggling with the fact that he and his men are almost completely useless against the giant robot-threats that keep popping up everywhere. Its also indicated that this inferiority complex was the reason he was so hostile toward Big O in season one.
- And the Japanese Strategic Self-Defense Forces in Neon Genesis Evangelion (which are also prone to Five Rounds Rapid); in fact, pretty much all portrayals of the JSDF in anime. On the other hand, they do learn after a while and only use remote control missile barrages, and those are usually just distractions.
- ... or in kaiju movies (e.g. Godzilla) either, for that matter, where any reference to the necessary reality that there are people inside all the tanks and jets being uselessly thrown at the monsters (and by extension, the sanity of continuing to order such futile engagements) is the exception rather than the rule.
- Subverted beautifully in early episodes of Kotetsushin Jeeg, however. The JSDF display competent tactics in their battle against Himika's Claw Phantoms, and although Jeeg spearheads their attacks, he can't do it alone.
- And in Bokurano the JSDF are essential in many of the fights between the Humongous Mecha.
- All of the soldiers stationed in the castle at the beginning of Murder Princess are easily wiped out by a bunch of trolls and a Tyke Bomb mechanical doll.
- Both the soldiers of the Hellsing organisation and their Wild Geese mercenary replacements fall into this, being near-useless against the enemy vampires. To be fair, though, the poor fellows are unpowered humans facing Super Speed-, Super Strength-, Healing Factor-boasting foes.
- To be fair, the Wild Geese make a dang good showing up until they face off against The Dragon, using a combination of heavy machine guns, mines, and the open terrain around the Hellsing manor to fend off the Nazi vampires. It's when they get into close-quarters battles in the hallways that things very swiftly go one-sided.
- The ghouls falls into this category as well since they are little more than vampire-controlled zombies
- The Japanese military and UN forces fill this role in an episode of Magical Project S, where they can't stand up to The Power Of Love fueled housewives.
- They may not wear red, but the generic Combat Mages of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha have a tendency to get mowed down whenever they encounter the current villain's main forces. They're pretty good at keeping Mecha-Mooks at bay though, and they were able to contain the Wolkenritter until their Mysterious Protector appeared.
- In their defense, the main villains of the series are way out of their league. They're essentially cops, and you expect them to be able to take on an insane and insanely powerful mage (albeit with a bit of an Informed Ability), One Man Army magic knights from an Artifact Of Doom and a Mad Scientist and his super-powered cyborg minions and countless attack drones.
- The Magical Teachers and Students in Mahou Sensei Negima during the Mahora Fair arc were woefully unprepared for the fight... so Negi cons the entire student body into making a second Redshirt Army for this fight.
- The Tower Of Druaga anime has the Army of Uruk and some miscellaneous Climber parties perform a bit better than the rest of the examples of this page, but they're still not as good as the heroes. Season 2 introduces the Golden Knights, who are completely worthless against anyone with a modicum of fighting experience.
- The rebel group Katharon of Gundam 00 looks like the AEUG to the A-Laws Titans, except that the AEUG had great mechas and pilots while the Katharon go into battle with mechas that where useless in the previous season that takes place four years ago. Their only purpose is to momentarily distract the A-Laws while Celestial Beings does all the actual fighting. You have to wonder why they even bother if all they do is die.
- Briefly subverted when A-Laws brings out anti-beam smoke. Even the mighty 00 is hampered by its reliance on beam weapons and it falls to Katharon and their obsolete solid guns to pull CB out of a tight spot. Fortunately for them A-Laws relied heavily on beam weapons too.
- Zombies generally have a soft spot for being pretty much redshirts. In the fifth movie of Kara no Kyoukai it gets even worse than that. Simply put? Ryougi Shiki is a human wheat thresher.
- In Bleach the shinigami are completely useless against ANY threat which comes to them and have to be bailed out by the main heroes. Only the Lieutenants and Captains manage to be useful and avoid this, even though they are subject to The Worf Effect at the same time.
- Lampshaded and acknowledged when the captains acknowledge there's maybe ten people in Soul Society who are up to fighting with Aizen, they know it, and they make up the bulk of the Gotei 13's fighting power. Also, Ichigo is apparently twice as strong as they are, which is why they suck compared to him.
- Yu-Gi-Oh, in both the anime and real life. Think about it. All monsters in the game have the highly specific role of acting as a meat shield between you and your opponent's monsters. They can die incredibly easily if you have the right deck. On the other hand, they can be upgraded into a Badass Army with Equip Spell Cards.
- Dragonball Z sees multiple cases of Redshirt armies ripped apart by horrifically powerful aliens and androids. By the time the Buu saga rolls around you'd think they'd have learned that when someone is spotted who flies and uses Ki Attacks its best to just sit back and wait for those other flying folks to take care of the job before sending waves upon waves of men to die.
Comic Books
- Quite often, police officers and security guards are easily thwarted by even the lowest D-list super villain, who usually treats them more as irritating pests than serious threats, although he naturally has a harder time against the hero. Similarly, the Army proves useless when the Earth is invaded by aliens or monsters from another dimension. The exception is, of course, when the trope du jour is The Real Heroes.
- SHIELD form the Marvel Universe is a very good example. Until they got reformatted as HAMMER, which threw a pint and a half of Mook into the mix, along with a dash of Villain With Good Publicity. They are supposed to be the best agents, operatives, commandos and so on in the world. However, agents would be massacred both individually and en masse by both SuperVillains and normal Mooks. In the Ultimate Marvel universe you just wonder how they recruit. Some 30,000 agents and commandos are killed during the first strike of an Alien Invasion, and later get outmatched by superhumans on multiple occasions, usually while pulling guard duty on super-villains. And one time, their HQ was blown up, they were crippled, and then they got hammered by an army of super powered terrorists led by the Liberators.
- DC's Atomic Knights are a step up from the usual. While they do have top-notch training, good teamwork and state of the art equipment (including some of the neatest Powered Armor this troper's ever seen), they're still essentially red shirts.
- The armed forces in any monster movie.
- Although the army in D-War: Dragon Wars did a good job of killing Buraki's forces, the problem was there were too many of them to deal with.
- In fact, individually deadly warriors often become hopelessly inept in large numbers. Consider the phenomenon of ninjas in groups, and the army of mutants in X-Men III: The Last Stand; in the latter, less than a dozen demonstrated any special ability except rushing forward blindly, to the point that the previously completely ineffective human army kicks their butts.
- Of course, it was mentioned that those mutants were the ones with lame powers.
- Plus, the army had power-neutralizing weapons. A flesh wound in the shoulder turns Joe Random Rock Thrower into Joe Blow.
- And for the most part the mutants were all untrained civilians. The most they could do was rush forward blindly and get cut down.
- Tony Stark's escort/bodyguard in Iron Man. (To be fair, however, it is later revealed was a set-up by Tony's turncoat/former friend, whom the villain was actually working for, and were armed with Stark weapons.)
- The soldiers accompanying the scientists in 1988 remake of The Blob are useless. Though their poorer performance compared to the main characters when fighting The Blob might be attributed to the heavy NBC gear they are wearing.
- Very plausible example from The Rock. Commander Anderson's entire SEAL team is killed shortly after entering Alcatraz. Just before this happens, General Hummel rightly points out the dire situation they are in when he says "Your unit is covered from an elevated position, Commander."
- From another angle, if Anderson's platoon had been briefed in elementary infantry tactics — most Red Shirt Armies aren't — they would have a point man go up into that gymnasium and check out possible ambush points. Note: this editor's father had that unfortunate job assignment for several months at the end of World War II. However, the Germans they encountered (Red Shirt Armies in many, many WWII movies) liked to let the American point man walk through the ambush and open up on the multiple targets following him. Therefore, the Red Shirt point man became the Hero, while the platoon became the Red Shirt Army. This was literally true, as attested by the Silver Star and Bronze Star medals I keep among my family mementos.
- Anderson's team tripped a homemade motion sensor. The Marines would presumably have simply waited for the entire team to exit the hole.
- In many crime-related action movies or shows (the Lethal Weapon movies, for example), any uniformed police officers and / or detectives who are not the protagonists are usually little more than easily-disposable cannon fodder. Sometimes it is because they face an opponent against whom they genuinely have no chance against (such as The Terminator); other times, particularly when opposed to a small criminal syndicate, it is because they display incompetence which is nothing short of alarming for members of a modern metropolitan police department.
- An exception to the above is Hot Fuzz, in which the uniformed officer is the Bad Ass Action Heroes and the detectives are the incompetent boobs. Doubly averted when, in the big climactic fight, the detectives prove that they're just as competent as the next man if you load them up and give them riot gear.
- Played straight and averted in the John Woo movie Hard Boiled. In the tea house shootout, anyone other than Tequila and his partner is just another red shirt. The undercover cops and the SWAT team in the big hospital shootout later on, however, do hold their own quite satisfactorily despite losing a good portion of their number and get the hostages out while Tequila and Alan kick serious ass.
- This happened to the army that the dwarves raised to fight Evil Incarnate in Time Bandits.
- The police SWAT teams in both Die Hard and Die Hard 2.
- justifed in both: in the first they were in a APC that was destroyed by a rocket launcher, and in the second, they were ambushed by former Special Forces operators.
- Averted in the latest Rambo movie; the mercenary team sent along with the titular character is actually quite competent and most of it survives the movie.
- In the execrable movie Time Chasers (mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000), the main character is rescued by his past self, who sought aid from the Continental Army... who can't subdue a single Corrupt Corporate Executive with a semi-automatic weapon. Their suckage is lampshaded by the hero's past self commenting "I don't think they've ever seen an Uzi before."
- The direct-to-video release Superman: Doomsday had members of said Redshirt Army lampshading this before they fight Superman's evil clone.
Soldier 1: What are we doing? We can't fight Superman.
Soldier 2: You're right. We can't fight Superman.
Soldier 3: Dead men walkin'.
- The President's Secret Service detail in Air Force One is completely wiped out without so much as wounding a single terrorist. Most likely, the terrorists are equipped with force fields that only the President can pierce.
- Shameless Justifying Edit: the terrorists in question had surprise, confusion, a full arsenal of the plane's cache of weapons, body armor, and were well-trained commandos. The Secret Service had.... pistols. For all that, they put up one hell of a fight and succeeded at their objective to get the President to safety (even if he didn't stay put).
- The Gotham Police Department in The Dark Knight fits under this, if only due to their body count, even though they actually prove to be quite competent — especially at the end of the movie, when the SWAT teams storm the building. The only problem is that "competent" just doesn't cut it with someone as Crazy Prepared as the Joker and Bad Ass as Batman.
- Almost subverted with the faceless police van driver, except it turns out to be Gordon.
- Averted hardcore in Transformers. When the special forces unit calls in the cavalry, the cavalry actually manages to kill or drive off the giant alien robots.
- They're even more effective in the sequel, managing to support a handful of Autobots in holding off a small army of Decepticons.
- Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (2004). The Flying Legion gets strafed by radio-controlled ornithopters, with exploding hangers and airships galore. On returning to the devastated airbase the only concern of the protagonists however is missing colleague Dex. Mind you, we don't really see anyone die, so perhaps the KillerRobots were acting under Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy rules too.
- The Colonial Marines boast extensively of their badass prowess at the start of Aliens, but it only takes a few minutes for most of them to die. Except, of course, for the heroes.
- To be fair, they were ambushed in enemy territory, nearly blind in that the Aliens didn't show up on Infrared and deprived of most of their weapons(except the few who disobeyed orders). That and their platoon leader was one of the first to die, leaving only the inexperienced Officer-in-Command back at the APC.
- The Mobile Infantry of Starship Troopers seemingly exist only to get killed in huge numbers.
- In GIJoeTheRiseOfCobra, the US Army and generic Joe troopers are like this, easily getting slaughtered by
Cobra MARS's elite soldiers and vastly superior technology.
- This also happens later in the movie to Mars's crazy super soldiers as well. The toughness of their armor seems to depend on the scene.
- Face/Off's FBI agents, cops, special forces and security staff are all red shirts whenever they meet the film's main villain, Castor Troy.
- The HBO film When Trumpets Fade is built around this trope.
- Lampshaded by Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket:
Marines die. That's what we're here for.
- The Imperial Stormtroopers in the Star Wars movies (just the movies). And I don't want to hear any justifications like: they were ordered to let them go or some other crap. When you are a "legion of my best troops" armed with heavy weaponry and vehicles you have absolutely no excuse to loose to a bunch of teddy bears with stone age weapons supported by a handful of commandos with small arms, especially when your defeat costs your Emperor his life and your Empire a big ass piece of it's firepower (represented mostly by the second Death Star).
The Ewoks victory is based on the North Vietnamese, REMEMBER THE EWOKS EAT HUMANS.
- You'd think someone told the Navy SEALs in Under Siege that tried to board a hijacked US battleship that said ship has weapons capable of shooting down missiles, so a slow transport chopper might be a bit vurnable.
- In the sequel, the air force gets beaten as well, though that is more due to a They Just Didnt Care case. Stealth bombers tracked via turbulence without any significant equipment and shot down by a Kill Sat designed to cause earthquakes? No army training prepares you for that.
- Lone Wolf's mission in Book 4 at first is to discover the fate of a hundred strong unit of cavalry led by Captain D'Val. Lone Wolf sets off with a force of fifty Rangers; the medieval equivalent of Special Forces. True to the trope, regardless of whatever decisions the player makes, the entire force is either forced to return home, ends up missing, or killed in increasingly unlikely ways (e.g. bandit ambushes, falling through floorboards in a mine, eaten by a giant squid, eaten by a giant worm, eaten by giant cats, falling into a pit trap). Averted with the actual cavalry Lone Wolf was sent to find. During the book's climax battle they live up to their reputation as fine soldiers and rout their numerically superior foe. Lone Wolf's involvement in that battle isn't actually that significant (no One Man Army scenario here).
- If anyone is wondering why the pit trap death is silly, it was located in the middle of a corridor, activated when Lone Wolf unlocks the door at the end. If its purpose was to keep an intruder from opening the door, it's the most poorly designed trap ever.
- In Eric Flint's Belisarius series Rana Sanga comments on the battle described in the Bhagavad Gita, how it is the most famous battle in all of Indian history and how no one remembers even one of the names of the mere mortals who did all the dying.
- The battle in the next-to-the-last Animorphs book involves a Red Shirt Army who survives. The US army launches a military force consisting, essentially, of hundreds of soldiers accompanied by a couple dozen Sixth Rangers. And this military force's goal is a suicide mission worthy of the best of them: To launch an attack, in plain view, against a spaceship that "could blow asteroids out of the sky." Ordinarily, of course, a Sixth Ranger ranks much higher on the Sorting Algorithm Of Mortality than the Red Shirt Army. But in this case, Visser One orders the Sixth Rangers killed first, because he takes them more seriously in both a strategic and a personal sense. And the Animorphs manage to sabotage his ship too late to save the Sixth Rangers, but in time for the ordinary soldiers to survive. When the Red Shirt Army are the survivors, and some kids with superpowers are the casualties, it's a clear example of a plot that thwarts the usual laws of the Sorting Algorithm Of Mortality.
- The Martian army in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan are deliberately constructed to be utterly wiped out on the moment of contact, in order that the course of human society can be changed by making them feel guilty for slaughtering the poor bastards.
- Wonderfully averted in The Dresden Files. The boys in SI know what they're doing.
- Subverted and used in Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Subverted because the military arms its soldiers with the most advanced weaponry around, gives them telepathic links to each other and their guns and trains them to be incredibly effective soldiers. Used because to universe is just that damn dangerous and 75% of them don't last more than 5 years anyway.
- Each of the Ciaphas Cain HERO OF THE IMPERIUM novels will inevitably feature a part where Cain is forced to enter the jaws of hell, usually accompanied only by his sidekick and a Redshirt Army (possibly with a few Mauve Shirts thrown in). The trope is however subverted as often as it's played straight, to the end that you can usually never tell if the book's Redshirt Army will survive or not.
- Partially subverted in the novel God's Demon. The character Sargatanas increases the ranks of his military with an army of souls, which are normally either mounted as artwork or turned into bricks by the demons (and only doing this because the soul Hani offered to form it after restoring the memories of his former life. The subversion comes in the form of this never having been done before (meaning the soul army has a partial element of surprise), as well as the souls using one of their common fates to get behind the enemy army and attack the flanks.
- Played with in Gaunts Ghosts. Occasionally the Tanith First-and-Only is a Redshirt Army, and occasionally they're hyper-competent badasses. It all seems to depend on how prepared their are, and How many of them there are.
Live Action TV
- The term has its origin in Star Trek The Original Series, where the Enterprise's security personnel wore red shirts and were, to say the very least, expendable.
- This was a frontier-mission that was so dangerous, that of 12 starships— each identical, the most powerful class in Earth's fleet— only Kirk's ship and crew even survived. As Kirk put it, "risk, is our business."
- UNIT on Doctor Who has a tendency to fall into this category, although in some of their more recent appearances they've shown the ability to learn from their past mistakes.
- One example is in the episode "The Poison Sky". The Sontaran army uses a field that makes the copper jacketed bullets expand inside guns to jam them. A fair number of UNIT troops are thus slaughtered when their guns fail. UNIT, upon being told this, gets steel jacketed bullets and teaches those arrogant bastards that the human race is not to be fucked with. The Sontarans' claims of "sport" aside, clearly they aren't that used to their prey fighting back.
- The Soldiers in Season Four of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, who took a little under an hour to catch up to the Slayer, and took her 17 seconds to disable the lot of them. This was in training, they lasted less time in actual combat.
- In Jericho, the fictional company Ravenwood (a loose allusion to Blackwater), who is supposed to be full of ex SEALs and other Special Ops guys, gets their ass handed to them by guys with no military experience, including a deaf mute girl with a shotgun.
- In the Babylon 5 Wham Episode, "Severed Dreams", this trope is tweaked with Security Chief Garibaldi arranging sensible defensive tactical positioning for his troops for expected invaders. However, the Narn troopers under his command insist on charging headlong into the fray and the regular guards have no choice but to follow them.
- Every major battle on Lost involves one group of redshirts attacking another group of redshirts with the main characters from both sides escaping unscathed:
- The mercenary attack on the Barracks in the fourth season, where three redshirts (and presumably a fourth who was unaccounted for) are shot by redshirt mercenaries in the jungle. They then proceed to open fire on Sawyer, but their Stormtrooper training prevents them from hitting him.
- Subverted if one subscribes to the theory that Claire was killed when a redshirt mercenary with a rocket launcher blew up her house.
- Subverted again when Ben unleashes the smoke monster on the redshirt mercenaries, but only one dies, even after hearing several minutes of terrified screams.
- At the end of the fourth season, a group of redshirt Others attack the redshirt mercenaries and kill them all...with, you guessed it, the exception of their leader.
- Which is even more ironic when said leader kills one of his own redshirts accidentally by kicking a grenade over to their position.
- In the fifth season, the Others use fire arrows to attack the mass of redshirt survivors in 1954. Again, the main characters escape, but most, if not all, of the redshirt survivors are finally killed, ending four seasons of slaughter.
- The DHARMA Initiative seems to have its own redshirt army. In a subversion of this trope, however, a shootout involving Jack, Kate, and Daniel versus Radzinsky and two DHARMA mooks ends with no casualties, not even the redshirts.
- CTU field teams on 24 will succeed in their mission only if either Jack Bauer, Curtis Manning, or both are present. If they appear to be completing their mission without a main character, that probably means they're about to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb. This rule also applies to any other armed detail mentioned, including the LAPD, Secret Service, and even the freaking Delta Force, all of whom have completely bought the farm at one point or another (for some, repeatedly) while "setting up a perimeter," (a common 24 portent of doom), guarding something or somebody important, or intercepting a fugitive, respectively.
- The Season Seven finale actually subverts audience expectations with the airport security guards when they attempt to rescue Kim Bauer. While most of them are killed, they actually do manage to kill both of her captors, a pair of extremely well-trained agents.
- This troper has also noted the if a soldier or police officer is wearing a helmet, hat, or in some way covering their head, they will most likely not make it back from their mission.
- Any team that accompanies SG-1 through the Stargate. At the same time though...
- Mostly averted in the new Battlestar Galactica, as the handful of Marines left on board the ship are highly-trained and are often shown to perform their missions with great percision. On the other hand, the "robot" Cylons are a completely straight red-shirt army, and die in droves in every battle: their programming is inferior to human improvisation, and it takes a long time for them to adapt. Of course, the Cylons that die are then resurrected, which kind of subverts the trope. And through this trial and error they eventually learn from their mistakes and you end up with "Scar", an ace Cylon pilot. They fail to master "ground" combat for the entire series though.
- In Firefly, the Indipendents army during the Unification War (Mal and Zoe are shown fighting with them in flasbhacks). They obviously lose the war, and they're shown dieing a lot. It's made more interesting by the fact that they actually wear red shirts.
Tabletop Games
- In Paranoia, player characters take on the role of Trouble Shooters, whose job it is to track down trouble in Alpha Complex and shoot it. Given that the PCs are supposed to get in over their heads and die horribly, this means the player characters are the Redshirt Army. They even start as Red-class citizens, which comes with uniforms in the appropriate color...
- Planetary Defense Forces in Warhammer 40000 are almost uniformly treated as speed bumps by any invader, or for Chaos, a ready supply of expendable minions, generally getting wiped out in the first ten minutes or so of any invasion. The Imperial Guard also fulfills this function when the Space Marines are the protagonists.
- Averted in that some PD Fs are as good as their Imperial Guard counterparts. Also justified, as the PD Fs best soldiers and units are usually taken to fill up the ranks of the Imperial Guard. Also, it's basically light infantry vs. the legions of hell.
- Indeed - look at Sergeant Osmar Adeodatus from Damnatus, who was both PDF and badass. Mind you, he was hand-picked by the Inquisition, and he is the only guardsman we see in the film.
- The Imperial Guard tend to subvert this, though, for one very good reason. Sure, the soldiers usually fit the Red Shirt line. But they also have tanks. Lots and lots of tanks.
Video Games
- The Navy SEALs in Metal Gear Solid 2. (To be fair, they were doing pretty well until a super-speed vampire and a woman packing an energy shield and a BFG came along.)
- To be even more fair, it did turn out that the Patriots sent them in so they would fail.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4, Snake is held up by an apparent Mook and obediently drops his gun, then turns to face his attacker. He promptly notices that the safety on the Mook's gun is still on and point his out, calling him a rookie. The rookie instantly corrects Snake, stating that he's a ten-year vet. A noticeably confused Snake immediately disarms the rookie and throws him to the ground, wondering how he managed to make it ten years. Oddly enough, despite his bumbling nature, the guy is not a Red Shirt, confusing Snake even more (he is actually recurring Joke Character Johnny Sasaki).
- Also in Metal Gear Solid 4, gameplay occurs between a PMC and local army. Both sides are guilty of spawning and then running in front of snipers, gun emplacements, and die quickly.
- The Resistance members in the Mega Man Zero games were woefully under-trained and outgunned in every engagement they were in. One wonders how the Resistance was able to hang for so long before Zero came in to save their hides from giant mechs and enemy generals.
- In the third game, the rebuilt Copy X states that he was holding back because resistance leader Ciel is human, and he is (mostly) bound by the first law of robotics. That said, there's probably no excusing the fact that it wasn't just the Resistance fielding an army of redshirts, but also the Neo Arcadian forces. The typical foot soldier of the army, the Pantheon model, has very little purpose in life other than to explode into tiny pieces.
- Mega Man ZX has another group of these, the Guardians. They do much better than the resistance, but when Serpent sends his forces to take out the Guardian airship, it's up to Vent/Aile to bail them out... Then again, all they did was destroy an air-ship and fight off the Psycho For Hire. The Guardians did most of the work defending their own ship, it seems.
- The Hunters in the sequel get special note for averting the trope. In fact, they get a Crowning Moment Of Awesome at the beginning of the game for surviving against the resident Psycho For Hire, and even stole the Biometal out from under his nose.
- This is also common in First Person Shooters. Redshirt Armies can be used as part of the Back Story, explaining why Its Up To You. Other times, the Redshirt Army is made up of NPCs who are pathetically weak, die easily, and can barely shoot, especially when compared with the main character. It's usually difficult to keep these allies alive, and the player is rarely offered any incentive or reward for doing so, beyond, perhaps, personal satisfaction — or a hefty penalty if they die.
- In the original Doom, the protagonist's entire military unit is wiped out before the game starts. (Of course, the protagonist then blasts his way through a demon-filled complex that bested an entire unit of elite soldiers.)
- Both Quake 1 & 2, and the latter stage of Half Life are filled with corpses that look exactly like the player character. If only they knew you were capable of single-handedly wiping out all Mooks and defeating the Big Bad, they could've saved all those lives.
- System Shock 1 & 2 also show the Red Shirt Army as deceased bodies waiting for you to take their loot and diaries to finish the job they couldn't.
- To be honest, player character in System Shock 2 had the advantage of some illegal neural implants and guidance of insane AI considering him her avatar, though the latter eventually meant additional Big Bad to deal with.
- Protagonists from both games also have the advantage of the experience of everyone that died before. For example, most people who died in the early hours didn't know about the cyborg conversion chambers, the CPU core controls on the elevators, and so on.
- Certain games have "plausible" explanations for this, such as Halo, where the protagonist of the game is unique and inherently superior to normal soldiers. Halo also does the "senseless loss of life" nod to the other characters, with another NPC ("Cortana") expressing disappointment and regret if an entire unit of Marines is wiped out.
- In fact, the Marines' AI in Halo is stupid even by "normal soldier" standards. Their artificial stupidity makes them too dumb to live.
- Some of the Pillar of Autumn crew members actually wear red.
- Red Faction's AI wasn't the best, but your allies were especially terrible. Fellow miners would often die 20 seconds after you meet them, and couldn't at all keep up with the regular mook three-on-one even with the same weapon.
- In The Red Faction series, the Red Faction soldiers may as well be called the Red Shirt Faction. In fact, in Red Faction II, Echo, their leader, is made a Red Shirt himself.
- The AI in "Red Faction: Guerrilla" isn't much better. Guerrillas last longer than they did in the first game, eventually get weapons on par with the EDF, and are smart enough to use cover, but are not nearly as efficient as the enemy, who will swarm you with loads of soldiers and gun your ass down before you can even blink.
- In F.E.A.R., the protagonist is supplemented (twice) with Delta Force squads, who are very quickly killed (twice). The first group of three are slain by Alma near the very start of the game, and the second group of two are instantly shot to death by Replica soldiers as the helicopter carrying them to the Armacham building lands. To be fair, though, they are taking on an unkillable, psychotic Reality Warper ghost and an army of hiveminded supersoldiers at least a match for them in training and armed with equivalent or superior weaponry.
- The PS 3 version of FEAR has a bonus mission where you get to play as a team of these guys. It's heavily implied they're able to actually do pretty well against the Replica Super Soldiers, and they just seem like they're made out of fail because the resident Reality Warper Physical God keeps curbstomping them.
- This gets even worse in the first add-on Extraction Point where you have to practically wade though bodies. The end titles state "No Delta Force operatives where harmed in the making of this game."
- Perseus Mandate has Delta troops fighting alongside you, and are actually somewhat competent, though they die in droves anyway.
- Project Origin inverts this: you are one of the Redshirts, as are your teammates, but the rest of your team - who are all unaugmented soldiers - are able to regularly survive battles against ATC mercenaries and Replicas.
- Subverted perhaps in Half-Life and later Opposing Force (Op For); security guards could hold their own at medium range and the marine allies in in Op For could all hold their own in this troper's experience.
- Indeed, in Half Life most individual firefights had the actual Red Shirt Army doing remarkably well against the invading alien forces. It's just too bad that they're trying to kill you, too.
- Less so with Half-Life 2, with the formerly vicious Antlions now willing to smear themselves upon the enemy for a whiff of pheropod, and your resistance allies faring not much better, though medics certainly proved helpful.
- Marathon had the Born on Boards, (Bob, for short) that were the very definition of this trope, existing only to die horribly (by the player or by the Pfhor, it really doesn't matter) while shouting "They're everywhere!" The second game actually gives them pistols; however, they are still more or less useless save for a single prison break operation that amounts to their Crowning Momentof Awesome. Lord knows they deserved it!
- Real Time games, in which the player temporarily controls a unit and micro-manages them, can have this problem as well. Once the player stops controlling a unit, its AI takes over and IQ plummets dramatically. In Warcraft II, the wizard units have deadly artillery style spells, but, under the AI, attack in hand-to-hand combat.
- Though Call Of Duty squadmates can be capable in their own right, they merely exist to hold off the Mooks until you can blaze a trail through them. An interesting aversion are the plot-critical redshirts, who absolutely refuse to take any damage until just after their usefulness runs out.
- Somewhat averted in Quake 4. Sure, a lot of Marines do die over the course of the game, but hey, it's war. At least they're able to hold their own very well in individual firefights, and they actually do manage to win the war while the player character merely spearheads the most essential operations. In fact, in most cases when Marines leave the player character it's because they have orders to hang back and secure a checkpoint, rather than because they were killed off by the enemy.
- Fire Emblem green units, unless they're villagers or other non-fighting units, are suicidal. Come to think of it, most enemy units are suicidal too. Plus, in cut scenes, you frequently get to see the green units getting destroyed by fairly weak enemy units.
- Somewhat averted in the tenth game of the series. Not only are the Green and Yellow units able to stand up against the enemies, some of them are just plain necessary to get by a battle with minimal casualties, not to mention you can give orders to the yellow units, to say, block a path of enemies to serve as meat shield.
- Final Fantasy XII averts this trope by having wandering NP Cs that can help you out in fighting monsters. This troper recalls being helped multiple times by wandering Garif warriors who were picking fights with monsters at random, and also assisted by other adventurers who didn't seem to have anything else to do.
- Also averted in MediEvil, when Sir Dan summons a group of knights to help him battle the Big Bad's minions. The knights Sir Dan summons are actually quite competent fighters, and they need to be-if they die, it's game over.
- Metroid Prime 3 had an encounter between three Space Pirates and three Galactic Federation Marines. Two of the Marines get gunned down, and then the third activates his PED and owns the Space Pirates on his lonesome. He's not the only PED trooper; in the next room you see one wasting a Pirate who's focused on you, and another shoots down a pipe and kills two of them in one go. The GFM troopers remain fairly competent for the remainder of the game as well.
- Until the obligatory escort mission, of course, where they forget that their mission is to survive. Instead they throw themselves suicidally at enemy forces, despite knowing full well their bodyguard (you) could handle all the combat solo.
- Done almost to the point of parody in the obscure Capcom arcade game Tiger Road. In the intro, some Mooks kidnap the villagers, then a single mook stays behind and slaughters the entire city guard. I am dead bleeping serious.
- Mostly averted in the last levels of Star Wars: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. In order to show how much less disciplined the Reborn are compared to real Jedi, real Jedi fight and kill them. They still require Kyle Katarn's/Jaden Korr's help to actually make any progress, though.
- Not averted in X-Wing, Rogue Squadron and other similar flight titles, where allied pilots are about as useless as a sack of hair.
- But rather scarily inverted in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, where the AI pilots, at higher levels, can sometimes leave the player feeling like a fifth wheel. This make sense as the game was designed primarily for multiplayer, so if the a single player didn't have smart wingmen and enemies, he would get flattened or be unable to keep up in multiplayer against more skilled human opponents and allies.
- Played straight in Knights of the Old Republic during the attack on the Star Forge. The Jedi Council sends you an "elite" strike team of Jedi Knights... all of whom get (easily) killed by the various Mooks the place has to offer.
- SeeD in Final Fantasy VIII. Understandable as, even though they're trained to be elite mercenaries contracted by governments, they're still teenagers with very little real combat experience. Fortunately, they're still able to protect their home base from an invasion by the current military superpower, and hold it off long enough for the protagonists to take down the enemy commanders.
- Whenever a bunch of NPC allies appear in a Super Robot Wars game, they will die before the cut scene is over. The non-OG games usually use GMs or other weak Real Robots, but the Original Generation games give this duty to the Gespensts. Ironic thing is, Badass Normal and one-man-army Kai Kitamura pilots one of those Gespensts, and just will not be shot down easily.
- Hilariously subverted in Z's Special Disc scenario. In one route, YOU control the Redshirts (later backed up by the Big O). They have grunt mechs and grunt pilots going against a fairly large group of Mooks. Even without the Big O, they can handle them with decent strategy.
- Oh Dead Space army you fail so completely and it's against one standard necromorph!?
- Subverted in the first mission of Command And Conquer: Renegade. A GDI convoy is ambushed, but with the help of a commando (the player), all the ambushers are killed.
- A mission in Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne has Kael defending a Draenei village from Fel Orcs. The Draenei return the favor by allying with Kael.
- The Hyrulian guards in Legend OF Zelda: Twilight Princess. Despite being heavily armed they are completely outclassed by the shadow beasts (to be fair, the same goes for most of the NP Cs) and most of them are actually shaking with fear during the encounter.
- To be fair, the Twilight beasts don't stay dead unless you kill the last pair of them simultaneously. Unless they knew the trick, they wouldn't have a chance. The fact that Zant himself enter minutes later does not help their odds.
- The BSAA troops in Resident Evil 5 actually do put up a decent fight when onscreen, but offscreen they tend to get surprised and slaughtered by boss monsters - except for those poor bastards in the marshlands, hwo are killed by the Majini. Kind of justified, at least in Alpha Team's case, as they were geared and prepared to arrest a single weapons dealer, and didn't know they were being led into a trap to test Uroboros and the Type 2 and Type 3 Plagas.
- The U.B.C.S. in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis don't put up much of a fight, unless they were named. Somewhat justified, as Umbrella intended for them to fail so that the Supervisors could collect data on how their monsters fared against trained soldiers. The SWAT team from the start also counts.
- Only three of them mattered anyway: Carlos Oliveira for being the Sidekick, Mikhael Viktor for his Heroic Sacrifice, and Nicholai Ginovaef for being a Complete Monster. Everyone else is just a random casualty.
- Hunk aka Mr Death, a gas mask Mook who works for the Umbrella Special Forces unit always lives no matter what he's up against while everyone else on his team dies because "You can't kill Death"
- Who could forget S.T.A.R.S. from the original game? By the time Alpha Team reached the mansion, almost all of Bravo Team was already dead or about to be dead.
- Longbow in City Of Heroes are a paramilitary group who actually wear red, and white. Established by a superhero (the grand daughter of the settings Superman equivalent), their costumes and ethos are styled after four-color superheroes, and they even use similar weapons and powers. They're the most common enemy in City Of Villains, to the annoyance of the player base.
- In the X-COM games, you start out with a team of these. Expect casualties.
- It gets worse. If you ever lose one of your trained and effective soldiers (and it will happen), you get to replace him or her with...Ricky Redshirt. An expected and encouraged use of your forces is as follows: trained soldiers in the back, tanks (don't improve and are always the same stats) in the middle to take any explosive damage, and Ricky Redshirts in the front, to die repeatedly.
- Poorly trained military in Dwarf Fortress.
- In Paradox Interactive games, you can make your own Red Shirt armies—just focus on sheer weight of numbers while ignoring technological advantages or leadership. You can also be on the other end: an advanced, disciplined army will usually kill dozens to hundreds times more soldiers than it will lose.
- In Kane And Lynch, your named team mates (Lynch, Thapa, Rific and Shelly) are suprisingly not a Red Shirt Army. You'll rely on them a lot, and they can take a lot of fire before they go down. However, in the civil war level 'Freedom Fighters', Lynch, Thapa, Rific and Shelly each get their OWN squad of four men to command, which all die pretty much after one shot. (Given that level is Nintendo Hard, this troper can't count the number of times he's heard Lynch say 'We can't afford to lose men at this rate.')
- Pretty much the entire point of Mount And Blade is to raise a Redshirt Army and have them fight the armies of everyone opposed to your kingdom. Or just everyone, if you feel like being a total sociopath.
- Ace Combat regularly has the PC flying alongside allied squadrons, but while they do get the occasional kill in they still are considerably less capable than you are.
- Bravo Team in Doom 3, who gets wiped out before you even find them.
- In 6 Days a Sacrifice, the final game in the Chzo Mythos, Theo has an unending supply of Trilby clones to protect him.
- Valkyria Chronicles has the entire Gallian army. Whenever something needs to be blown up to prove what dire straits we're in, it's the army, and eventually the whole thing gets blown up at Ghirlandaio. No one cares because the army is a bunch of faceless, unsympathetic mooks even to the heroes, and the core group of Squad 7 is more worried that Alicia is capable of an explosion like that than the deaths of some thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people.
- Queen Deirdranna of Jagged Alliance 2 uses an actual Red Shirt Army, who wear red shirts. On high difficulty levels you get to kill hundreds of them. That is, until the Black Shirt elites show up!
Web Comics
- In Goblins, they literally wipe out part of an army by using a shield that triggers random major magic effects whenever it's hit. [1] This tends to subvert the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy in that the redshirts that do hit are probably doomed while those who miss may live, or perhaps the goblin is doing a redshirt-type act, as in the background it hints at the word "redshirt" not "redshirts" — which reminds long timers that the shield is random enough to backfire killing the goblin, upgrading the enemies, summoning weird dangerous stuff, or worse.
- Averted in Order Of The Stick where the Azure City Army gives a damn good accounting of itself. Yes, they lose but they take a lot of Mooks with them and manage a fighting retreat in good order.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Truth In Television examples of profound military ineffectiveness also exist.
- There actually was an official Red Shirt Army. The Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) founded by Ghaffar Khan were known, in the 1920s, as the Surkh Posh, or 'Red Shirts'. They were an entirely pacifist movement, acting upon the principles of civil disobediance. Here is a quote from the founder:
"I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against it. It is the weapon of the Prophet, but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience and righteousness. No power on earth can stand against it."
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
- The vanguard of many Medieval armies was made of peasant levies with zero training, zero armor and light weapons like spears, javelins and slings. They were supposed to bleed each other for a while before being squashed by the heavy cavalry charging from both sides.
|
|
