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It's well known that to actually defeat evil, you have to directly kill the Big Bad -- you can't just hack through enough of his soldiers to leave him relatively harmless. So the army of good will stall the army of evil while the hero and his friends sneak in to kill the Big Bad. This trope can be justified if the Mooks were not loyal to the villain in the first place; they may have been forced to fight against their will, or obeyed out of fear of death or a Fate Worse Than Death. Alternatively, without the unifying figure of the Big Bad, The Empire would rapidly collapse into warlordism.

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  • Decapitated Army
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  • It's well known that to actually defeat evil, you have to directly kill the Big Bad -- you can't just hack through enough of his soldiers to leave him relatively harmless. So the army of good will stall the army of evil while the hero and his friends sneak in to kill the Big Bad. This trope can be justified if the Mooks were not loyal to the villain in the first place; they may have been forced to fight against their will, or obeyed out of fear of death or a Fate Worse Than Death. Alternatively, without the unifying figure of the Big Bad, The Empire would rapidly collapse into warlordism.
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  • It's well known that to actually defeat evil, you have to directly kill the Big Bad -- you can't just hack through enough of his soldiers to leave him relatively harmless. So the army of good will stall the army of evil while the hero and his friends sneak in to kill the Big Bad. This trope can be justified if the Mooks were not loyal to the villain in the first place; they may have been forced to fight against their will, or obeyed out of fear of death or a Fate Worse Than Death. Alternatively, without the unifying figure of the Big Bad, The Empire would rapidly collapse into warlordism. It's notable that this trope only applies if the Big Bad dies. There's no situation where whittling the guy within an inch of his life will even dent his or her organization/get them killed by, say, the Good army that could probably take him, and will only rarely cause the disrespectful Lieutenant of Evil to make his bid for power. Contrast Combat by Champion, where you may actually get an agreement that if you and the Big Bad fight, and he dies, you win. A form of No Ontological Inertia. Compare Golden Snitch for when the objective is an object instead of a person, and Instant Win Condition for when the objective was not considered important until you claimed it. When it applies to the hero, see We Cannot Go on Without You. See Load-Bearing Boss for cases where even the villain's headquarters die with him. When the villain's entire army collapses without him, it's a Keystone Army. When you make a drastic change in the entire world, you've just captured the Cosmic Keystone. Overlaps or leads to And There Was Much Rejoicing. Savvy villains attempting to avoid this effect can attempt an El Cid Ploy. See also Losing the Team Spirit. This trope is not about an army of Headless Horsemen or otherwise undead without heads. Examples of Decapitated Army include:
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