![]() ![]() It also helps to have a superior officer yelling at you to kill. Modern training and drilling techniques have been introduced to overcome the resistance to kill. A pilot can easily fire a torpedo at a battleship and sink it, killing who-knows-how-many soldiers, but the same man may freeze and be unable to bayonet one enemy in close-combat. The closer you get to your enemy, the harder it is to overcome the urge not to kill him. Generals like Carl von Clausewitz were confounded as to why, when a Prussian infantry formation fired a musket volley at a barn, all the shots hit, whereas when the same formation fired at an advancing line of tightly-packed infantry, only one or two enemies dropped. The rest helped wounded comerades, reloaded weapons, cowered in fear, ran around shouting like idiots or fired their weapons over the enemys' heads. Apparently, before the Korean war, only about 15% of soldiers actively tried to shoot their enemies. Dave Grossman showcases the innate human resistance to killing other humans. In his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Just let your protagonist murder him and move on with the plot.īelieve it or not, this diatribe has real-life application. We don't even want to know that his name is Hauptfeldwebel Helmut von Pickelhube. Unless that gas-masked Nazi is going to play a significant role in your plot, we don't want to know about him. Are you still worried about allowing poorly-fleshed characters into your work of fiction? Remember that the way to be a bore is to say everything. By including them as followers of your antagonist, (who should remain fully-fleshed), they significantly enhance his/her fear factor. In short, as a literary device, Faceless Enemies can inspire terror in the human heart. Lastly, when the Faceless Enemy serves a political entity such as an empire or terrorist group, he becomes a symbol of powerful conformity that has obliterated his identity, quietly whispering to the viewer, "This could happen to you, too." Menacing strangers are a powerful human fear, as evidenced by the amount of media attention random murders, child-snatchers and serial killers receive. With the identity hidden, the Faceless Enemy becomes a menacing stranger. The emotions of a Faceless Enemy cannot be read except by body language, making their thoughts a mystery as well. The mask represents mystery and fear of the unknown. But why do audiences find them compelling? I've mentioned that the mask dehumanizes them, but with dehumanization also comes fear. Okay, so that explains why creators select the Faceless Enemy. By putting a mask on your baddies, you are making your story available to millions of bloodthirsty children. Dead Stormtroopers make for PG-ratings in theatres, at worst Teen ratings in video games. When we have our sympathetic reactions to death impaired, it affects censors like the MPAA and the ESRB less. The second major effect is a by-product of the first. It just won't do for viewers to sympathetically exclaim, "Han Solo, you brute! That poor Stormtrooper! Did you think about his family when you blasted him?" This allows heroes to plow through hundreds of faceless foes, letting audiences worry only about the protagonist's peril. Fistly, for audiences, we cease to identify with the enemy. When the face is shrouded, those instincts are deadened. Humans have instinctive reactions to seeing each other's faces. The enemy who has his face hidden is an enemy who has been dehumanized. As a writer I am told over and over to fully-flesh my antagonists, yet fiction is rife with cartoon baddies Wilhelm-screaming and falling off roofs. But why? What is it about Faceless Enemies that we seem to like so much? Why do we like seeing them getting killed? It seems to make no intellectual sense. ![]() The reason for this is that it's just easier to program a certain number of enemies for the player to murder and if they don't have faces, it's less likely that the player will say, "Hey, didn't I kill that guy already?" From the masked-enemies of Borderlands to the shrouded reapers of Infamous to the balaclava-terrorists of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, they are the industry standard. In the world of video games, you will be playing an exeptional game if you AREN'T killing Faceless Enemies. However, we must not forget that the Imperial Stormtrooper was a dream inspired in George Lucas' mind by the Faceless Enemies that Flash Gordon and other cheapo-serial heroes fought in the early days of cinema. For over thirty-five years, the Stormtrooper has been a pop-culture icon. Of course, the most famous Faceless Enemy these days is the Imperial Stormtrooper. ![]()
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