Bumping Off Redshirts

TheIT · Apr 5, 2010

I'm working on a scene in my fantasy novel where my MC and his two bodyguards are ambushed by thieves. My MC needs to survive the attack. The question is whether the bodyguards should.

On classic Star Trek, the landing party always beamed down with a couple of unnamed security guards in red shirts who inevitably got killed to show how dangerous the planet was. Now it's cliche - anyone in a red shirt had a life expectancy of nil.

My MC's bodyguards are almost classic "redshirts". They serve no purpose other than needing to be there because my MC would have guards, I need to incapacitate them so my MC has to fight, and I need to make sure the guards don't witness certain events during the attack. But I've been waffling about whether or not one or both should get killed off. If there's a death, it's going to raise the stakes considerably for my MC because he'll feel at fault, but I'm not sure whether this is the right place in the story.

So I'm looking for opinions. How do you decide whether or not to bump off redshirts?

RJK · Apr 5, 2010

You answered your own question. Killing the red shirts would be cliché. It's easy enough to incapacitate them.

leahzero · Apr 5, 2010

Can you develop their characters at all to make the death not seem as cliché? Maybe one has been working for your MC for a while, and they share little in-jokes or running gags or something.

justAnotherWriter · Apr 5, 2010

The problem is that it's not that easy to incapacitate a human being without a mortal wound. The hollywood and tv BS where you hit someone on the head and you knock them out for a while is just that...BS. If you hit someone on the heard hard enought to knock them out, there is good change you have just killed them.

The human body is both remarkably fragile and remarkably resilient. That means it's hard to damage it enough to stop it, but once you do, that damage can be severe. A common mistake writers make, for instance, is the harmless shoulder wound. Oh you got shot in the shoulder? Hah, no big deal.

Actually it's a very big deal. There is a major artery in the shoulder, as well as a major nerve cluster.

What I suggest in your case is kill one, and critically injure the other so that he is badly hurt but survives. Maybe he should be stabbed in the shoulder.

Danthia · Apr 5, 2010

You can kill them off, but the deaths probably won't have much impact because readers won't care if there's no connection to those characters. But that might not matter to you from a story standpoint. But it could be a good opportunity to show how your protag feels about the bodyguards and how they protected him, sacrificed their lives for him, etc. Their deaths may not matter to the reader or to plot, but it could show an aspect of your protag that could have long lasting effects.

Might be worth taking a minute and thinking outside the box a bit to what else you can show/do/imply by killing or not killing them. There could be a great opportunity there for something fun.

Phaeal · Apr 5, 2010

How much they need to be incapacitated depends on how obvious the thing is that you don't want them to witness. If this thing is fairly subtle, they might well miss it in the fighting. If it's fireworks, it might have to be adios amigos for them.

lachlan · Apr 5, 2010

Also, why does he have guards that aren't very good at being guards? Did he check their resumes?

I'd rather that he gets ambushed somewhere away from the guards (i.e. his own bathroom), rather than have redshirt guards. Death should hurt, if you know what I mean, not just serve a minor plot point.

zpeteman · Apr 5, 2010

Why kill minor characters? Save death for major characters. That way death has real weight.

third person · Apr 5, 2010

Decide? Cause and effect, choice and consequence--these determine what happens. If you have two characters breaking into a place to rob it and one is a psycho killer, there's a chance the psycho killer might kill someone that happens upon them without even thinking. If both the thieves are the type who prefer not to spill a drop of innocent blood then there's no way this will happen . . . unless they get caught by guards and as they make their escape they cause an unfortunate accident in which one or more guards gets killed.

Wash, rinse, repeat . . . cause and effect. Choice and consequence. Start with one event and the story writes itself.

Stunted · Apr 5, 2010

zpeteman said:
Why kill minor characters?

Why not kill minor characters?

James D. Macdonald · Apr 5, 2010

If you don't care about the characters, and the readers don't care about the characters, why exactly are they in your book to start with?

TheIT · Apr 5, 2010

James D. Macdonald said:
If you don't care about the characters, and the readers don't care about the characters, why exactly are they in your book to start with?

I agree with this sentiment, but I'm not sure how it applies. There are different levels of caring. Yes, I care about my characters, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about them. My MCs are driving the story, so they're the ones I care about most. Other characters actively help them along (or hinder them), so they're important. Then there's the rest of the world. Classes of characters like the population of the city, or in the example I first posed, the bodyguards. Some characters are necessary to the environment otherwise the MCs are walking around on a blank page. Sometimes those characters get hurt or killed.

In the example I posed, it makes no sense for my MC not to have bodyguards. He's a young nobleman wandering around a strange city, so his brothers send a couple of soldiers along to protect him. During the ambush, the attackers take them down first so they can get to my MC. The POV character for the scene is not my MC and doesn't know the guards, so she has no personal stake in their fate. My MC does, and I'm hoping the readers care about my MC, so I'm hoping that by extension readers would care about people he cares about, especially when POV switches back to him.

Caitlin Black · Apr 5, 2010

Kill them! Kill them all!

Kaiser-Kun · Apr 5, 2010

I always like it when the bodyguard fights back and is able to do quite some damage before falling. After all, that's what they're trained for.

allenparker · Apr 6, 2010

Have some fun with this. Dress them in red shirts and have them survive. One wounded so that the other is taken up caring for the first.

Then make the MC have to trudge on by himself, making a joke about never hiring another Red Shirt Body guard again.

just my thoughts...

Sage · Apr 6, 2010

I think there's a time and a place for killing off minor characters. Yes, we're not going to care as much, but sometimes we don't need to. If the death is meant to have an impact, we need to, but if it's just, yanno, another death of someone who the MC barely knows, it doesn't matter if we know them either.

lachlan · Apr 6, 2010

You want to show that the place is dangerous, so you have to hurt a bodyguard? So, to show that it's cold outside, you'll have someone get frostbite and/or freeze to death? How about if they just get bundled up, can see their breath, and shiver a lot? I.e. there's lots of ways to show something.

It's dangerous....so the guards are tense. They move differently than they usually do. Noises seem louder, and strangers appear and disappear almost at random. The noble sees bits of blood on the sidewalk, or a beggar with a bandaged foot. The guards stop the noble at random, ask him to wait while they make sure it's safe to proceed through the next doorway.

Jamesaritchie · Apr 6, 2010

Kill them or not. It's your story, and you get to play God. . .or the devil.

Killing red shirts does have a purpose, which is why you see it so often. It's a tried and true way of showing how deadly a situation really is without killing your protagonist. It's up to you to add a creative twist, to write it well, or to find some other way of wring out the cliche aspect, if there really is a cliche outside of Star Trek.

The bodyguard angle looks pretty good, to me. The real question, I think, is if they are just red shirts, why not kill them? Their function is to die, to show how much danger the MC is in. Kill them, and you don't have to worry about them popping up later to complicate things.

Baryonyx · Apr 6, 2010

You could maybe build it up like one of them is going to become a major character, give him a bit of personality, drop in a few subtle hints that he's gonna have a bigger role in the book by hinting that he's going to betray the MC or something or that hinting that he's got feelings for the MC.

Will come as a bigger shock when he gets killed since readers will be expecting him to become relevant

lachlan · Apr 6, 2010

(lachlan SWIPES Zefiris' idea!)

swvaughn · Apr 6, 2010

Seems to me if the purpose of killing the bodyguards is to enhance the MC's conflict, you should definitely kill them.

Yanno, it could be just one bodyguard. You could establish pretty quickly that the MC and the guard know each other, are comfortable with each other, and then off the bodyguard. MC experiences loads of guilt. MC gets a new bodyguard, who he is plainly not comfortable with (and perhaps the bodyguard is not comfortable with him either), and then their developing relationship through the rest of the story can serve as another enriching plot point.

/babbling

In short: kill the redshirt.

Baryonyx · Apr 6, 2010

You could go the complete opposite way and have the MC die, have one of the bodyguards utterly devoted to him and vow to continue on the MCs work whatever it is.

Risky idea that could/probebly does flat out suck but hey...something different at least

TheIT · Apr 6, 2010

Thanks for the replies, everyone! You've given me lots of things to think about.

And the verdict is...

... the bodyguards get to live. At least one of them does.

There are other factors at play in this scene that I haven't mentioned. After the fight, the surviving attackers run off, but my MC doesn't know whether they'll come back. He chooses to stay with the wounded guard(s) to protect them, but he has to convince the POV character to go alone to fetch help from someplace she considers dangerous. She has to decide whether to risk herself to help a stranger (something she's not prone to do).

But I'm still curious about the general issue. When you're writing about life and death conflicts like battles, how do you decide what characters live or die? What sort of questions do you ask yourself when deciding their fates?

kaitie · Apr 6, 2010

I just wanted to say that this thread has the awesomest title ever.

Collectonian · Apr 6, 2010

For the most part, I let the story dictate who lives and who dies.

The characters will usually let me know what happened in that moment.

Bumping Off Redshirts

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