Training The Peaceful Villagers / Literature

• The Rabbitmen in Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest are so averse to violence that every other tribe of demi-humans considers them absolute cowards. They're not cowards, they just don't like fighting​. (If they were cowards, they would have just surrendered Shea.) When Hajime decides to train them, they take to it with a literal vengeance. Turns out "be very fast, be very quiet" are traits useful to both shy prey animals and assassins.
• Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, concerns the ka-tet defending a village from a raid of bandits. It's a very intentional homage to The Seven Samurai, which becomes a plot point when the fourth wall starts falling away later in the series.
• Fighting Fantasy:
  • Black Vein Prophecy ends with the Amnesiac Hero realizing his true heritage as a prince destined to stop a tyrant, as he leads an army comprising of conscripted villagers and Home Guard units which he had trained alongside his partner, the La Résistance leader Merzei, in order to battle his evil, ruthless brother.
  • This is an option in Knights of Doom. The village of Assart is being menaced by an undead necromancer, and if the reader chose the Battle Tactics skill at the beginning, they can form the villagers into a surprisingly effective improvised fighting force. Doing this allows them to join the player's own forces in battle against Belgaroth's vanguard.
• This is the plot of one of the Animorphs books, where the peaceful villagers and the threatening invaders are both aliens. Also joining the fight are a group of Muggles who are helping to resist the invasion simply because they Jumped at the Call. They're all Trekkies on their yearly camp out.
  • It was also the plot of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles. An Andalite trains the Hork-Bajir to fight against the invading Yeerks. This was necessary because the Hork-Bajir were bark-eaters, and had never had conflict before. They, at first, couldn't even conceive of using their blades to deliberately harm another.
• The Redwall series takes this to ridiculous extremes. The villagers are frequently absurdly outnumbered, pacifists who have never fought a day in their lives, and the villains bother to use actual strategy. (Although to be honest, all but the small handful of leader-types in any given vermin horde tend to be hopelessly inept redshirts in their own right.)
  • Defenders' Advantage—it's commonly accepted that to take a walled city or castle (which Redwall Abbey pretty much is) using medieval weaponry, the attackers need to outnumber the defenders by at least ten to one.
  • Too bad the strategy never seems to extend to using siege weaponry to knock a wall down and rebuild it. The plans are still around, aren't they?
  • To give an actual trope example: in "Mariel of Redwall," a group of sea rats are besieging Redwall Abbey, as they do. The searats have just hit on a strategy to get inside that may actually work — fling balls of burning pitch over the walls to burn them out — when a Long Patrol of three hares from Salamandastron arrive and teach the Redwallers the construction and use of longbows.
  • In the animated adaptation this often turns comical, with one attempt to tunnel into the Abbey repulsed with a vat of hot oatmeal. In the original book, it was boiling water.
• Harry Potter does this with 'Dumbledore's Army' in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
• Subverted in The Sworn Sword. Much time is spent by Dunk, Egg, and Ser Bennis in training the villagers in use of arms for a proposed battle against the Webbers of Coldmoat despite many of them never holding a sword in their life. In a thorough deconstruction of the trope, Dunk decides that these villagers will get butchered since the time window is too short to be trained properly and he decides to resolve the conflict himself before it spills into bloodshed.
• Kel does this with the occupants of her refugee camp in the final book of Protector of the Small, because she doesn't have enough guards to keep them safe.
• Kelsier does this in the first book of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. They then get slaughtered after the army's leader gets hot-blooded and attempts a general uprising instead of the targeted attacks that Kelsier was intending, before the next stage of the plan said army was to be a part of was ready.
• Subverted in The Wheel of Time with the Tuatha'an (an ethnic Expy of the Roma), who follow a pacifistic moral code known as, "The Way of the Leaf". The Tuatha'an refuse to defend themselves even against what are essentially the Hordes of Hell, much to the anguish of Perrin and Aram, a Tuatha'an who becomes "Lost" and learns to fight when his parents are killed by the Trollocs. The Aiel have a mass BSOD when they discover that their ancestors were this.
  • However, played straight when Perrin rallies the people of Two Rivers to defend themselves against first the Trollocs, and then the Children of the Light.
    • Of course, the Two Rivers folk turn out to be pretty skilled already, being some of the best archers in the world and having the blood of Manetheren, which counts for a lot in Randland.
• In Alan Quartermain, when a Masaii warband kidnaps the daughter of a missionary, the Zulu warrior Umslopogaas makes the plan for the parishioners to attack and annihilate the war party.
• In Barbara Hambly's The Ladies of Mandrigyn, the eponymous, and previously very traditional, women secure the services of mercenary captain Sun Wolf to train them in weapons use so that they can free their men from imprisonment in the local mines and help to overthrow a vicious wizard/warlord.
• In the Ciaphas Cain novel Death or Glory, Cain creates a small army by having the PDF troops he had gathered train volunteers among the civilian refugees to supplement their ranks. The popular histories of that war claim that the bulk of the army was made of such volunteers (which was most definitely not true). In Cain's Last Stand, Cain realizes that the understrength PDF on the same world doesn't have the manpower to repulse the incoming Chaos fleet, so he creates militia units across the planet using this trope. Subverted in that he had no illusions about the ability of the militia to repulse the invaders: He was simply hoping that they could pin enemy units down long enough for properly trained soldiers to show up (and as the retired Sister says, if the war was lost they'd be slaughtered anyways by Chaos cultists).
• Vanyel tries to do this in the first book of the [[Last Herald-Mage Trilogy; he realizes almost immediately that he just doesn't have time to train them in new weapons especially when he doesn't really know the fighting style he wants to teach them anyway, and focuses on stratagems involving things they already know how to use, like pitchforks.
• In the second book, Eldest, of the Inheritance Cycle, Roran does something similar in Carvahall.
• In Warrior Cats, the clan cats lead the normally peaceful Tribe of Rushing Water to battle against invaders. And then they teach them both diplomacy.
• In the alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt, a samurai from Chinese-conquered Japan makes his home among a native American tribe. He teaches them the arts of warfare and modern agriculture and industry so that they will be able to withstand the advances of the Chinese colonisers on the West Coast (and the Islamic colonisers on the East Coast). Centuries later, the various native American tribes formed the Hodenosaunee League, which survives as a major world power.
• In The Dresden Files, the ParaNet is organized to protect minor talents from being abused by black wizards or other supernatural threats.
  • It's more successful than anyone expected and becomes necessary for survival after Harry dies.
• The most controversial book of the Sword of Truth has a pacifist MacGuffin people called the Bandakar Empire, that Richard and Co. train to fight.
• George R. R. Martin short stories:
  • "And Seven Times Never Kill Man." The fanatical Steel Angels create a colony on the world of Corlos and begin systematically wiping out the native, simian jaenshi whenever they feel the need to expand their territory. The overweight, amiable, and formerly pacifistic trader Arik neKrol takes it upon himself to organize a jaenshi resistance. The story subverts the trope. Very few of the jaenshi gravitate to his plan, all are half-wild survivors of previous Steel Angel attacks on villages who did not join other existing clans, only one of the group has any kind of discipline, and Arik is killed in their first and only skirmish. But then it's double-subverted because it turns out that the jaenshi didn't really need an armed resistance at all. They apparently concoct a ruse (the how of which is deliberately left vague) using the mysterious pyramids their villages are based around, which plays on the Steel Angel's fanatical religious beliefs. The only thing Arik's resistance ends up accomplishing is killing the one Steel Angel officer that suspected the jaenshi were somehow deceiving them.
  • Subverted in "The Sworn Sword," where Dunk has to rally his master's peasants and train them in preparation for a conflict with the neighboring lord. The peasants are too few and completely incapable of becoming a fighting force in such a short time, forcing Dunk to figure out a better way to handle the conflict.
• In the 10th book of the Ranger's Apprentice series, Horace and Will do this with Kikori peasants, whose greatest combat attribute is their ability to cooperate and coordinate. The results are shockingly effective against the more skilled but highly individualistic samurai, who don't really know how to handle a shield wall.
• The Lord of the Rings - the "Scouring of the Shire", where the pacifistic hobbits, previously subdued by the barrel-scrapings of Saruman's armies, are roused to fight by the return of the four adventurers of the Ring. Becoming an efficient guerilla army, they destroy Saruman's mooks and effectively become their own Rangers, now the original protectors of the Shire have moved to Minas Tirith.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, Karyl and Rob, as the best dinosaur commander in the country and the man who defeated him, respectively, are hired by a Technical Pacifist sect to help them defend themselves against raiders and a marching army out to burn the "heretics".
• The Bulgarian novel Under the Yoke has the rebels train their own people in the villages surrounding the town of Byala Cherkva. In the movie adaptation, the villagers are so inept that when training them to march, the rebels have to replace "left" and "right" with the names of two villages lying in the respective directions.