Why do my monster minions all have obvious weak points that instantly kill them?

Question

A malevolent force is lurking the shadows creating monsters to be its army and take over the world. WHY in the world does it put a highlighted weak point on all of them? It makes sense from a writers' and heroes' perspective: each enemy has a gimmick which makes them formidable at first, then suddenly its glowing weak spot gets discovered. Afterward all those enemies become mild inconveniences on the heroes' path.

This principle fails the 25th rule of the Evil Overlord List. Why would a villain on top of giving his minions an Achilles heel, highlight them with a symbol or glowing bit? It severely limits the effectiveness of the monsters, limiting their effectiveness to how well they defend that weak point. On small swarming monsters that would die in one hit anyway it wouldn't make a difference. But on powerful ones that could one-shot heroes it makes them very short lived. You could always drop new monsters, but as soon as their weakness gets discovered their cost to benefit ratio drops.

Is there a reason I am missing? Why would this make sense?

Creative answers are welcome.

Answer 1

What it offers is worth more than it sacrifices

Think of it like this: Why do animals have eyes? The are easily injured, prominently and obviously positioned on the front of our faces for any one to try to gouge out, the eye socket offers easy access directly into the brain via the optic nerve opening into the skull, and on some animals, they literally seem to glow in low light.

Everything about eyes make them a vulnerable spot, yet an animal without eyes is not nearly as awesome as one with eyes. Seeing is a pretty good super power worth trading in a couple of weak points for.

Now let's say you are an evil over-lord. You can make these fleshy golem things that will do whatever you like... only against a well armored knight (or a guy with an assault riffle just depending on your setting), they just aren't that effective... however, you also know how to make power crystals that can enhance your monster's abilities. A fire crystal shoots a blast of flame, an ice crystal shoots a wave of freezing wind, so on and so forth.

But these power crystals all have a few things in common. They are all made from the same delicate material, they radiate light, they need to have a direct line of sight to a target to be able to hit it, and when they are damaged, they explode releasing all the elemental energy you stored up inside of them. Does this mean that your big well armored tank monster can be blown up with a well placed brick to the forehead? Yes... but that chain lightning ability it uses for TPKing entire groups of adventurers is only possible by giving it the power crystal. You can try to give the monster a sort of "eyelid" to keep its crystal safe, but in that moment between opening the lid, and aiming the crystal, you have an opportunity to smash it's gemstone.

Answer 2

You were following another Evil Overlord warning: don’t call up anything you can’t put down. You didn’t want to create any minions you yourself couldn’t easily defeat.

Answer 3

Because the magic process to create these minions require so.

It's pretty much the same as this:

The evil lord has molds to create his minions, but all these molds require a cavity to cast in the magical life force that powers them. Once the process is completed, the magical force "fuses" with the mold to give birth to a minion, but this gap is still there, and the magical life force is so powerfull that, no matter what you cover this cavity with, it still shines as bright as daylight.

Obviously, the minion will be as strong as the material the mold was made with, but a precise deadly blow right into this cavity creates a chain reaction that makes all the life force explode inevitably.

Answer 4

Because he's not the big bad.

The big bad is coming. He's got a nigh unstoppable force of arcane behemoths, who don't bear obvious weak points. But by his nature the creature creator is incapable of teaching other than by showing the humans how to fight the creatures. And while the attacks caused by his creations may be devastating, the looming storm is darker.

Answer 5

Your minions need to remember they are nothing without you!

It is the same reason you make all of your minions wear tiny red shorts! Which everyone does. They need to feel insecure in themselves and dependent on your Overlordly Greatness to keep doing what they are doing. What better what to remind them than a bullseye on their tender bits?

Because if they start feeling like they are all that, they will pull on some asskicking pants over those tiny red shorts and come find you where you sleep.

Answer 6

I know, right? You slave for years on your pet project, eliminating every single flaw, refining and improving your product for maximum effect, then release it into the world to impose your will... and some peon finds that flaw you never noticed, and suddenly your whole plan for dominance falls apart. Worse, you pore through the plans for hours, recreate the flawed parts from scratch, and it still won't go away.

And that's just the programmer's perspective.

Your antagonist probably isn't dealing with Heisenbugs. I think it's more likely that he's facing one of a few issues:

Selective Blindness

He very literally cannot see the problem. For some reason that glowing "kick me" sign just doesn't register in his sensorium. When he reviews his creatures all he sees is a patch of hide, maybe a bit weaker because of the way the creatures' armor fits together, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Perhaps it's analogous to color blindness - maybe more than just analogous. His big green killing machine just happens to have a bunch of red arrows pointing to the weakest point, but he can't tell because they look the same to him. Less directly, the leakage from the creature's core/power source/whatever is on a frequency band his species just doesn't have the ability to perceive, but which is super obvious to other species.

Situational Weakness

The conditions in the lab/foundry where he's creating his monsters are such that the weak points don't actually manifest. The weakness is still there, just not on the surface where it's obvious. Once the creatures go out into the world they encounter conditions that bring the weak point to the surface. He'd actually have to be following the creatures around through different environments to observe the effect.

Enemy Action

Nothing is actually wrong with your creatures, somebody is screwing with you.

Your perfect creatures are being changed without your knowledge once they're sent out. Some active magical effect is forcibly altering the creatures when you send them out. It's an insidious effect that you don't even notice until after it has happened, and whenever you try to defend against it the effect changes to bypass your countermeasures... if you're even aware of it in the first place.

Misapplied Magic

You're working with spells and rituals you uncovered from long-dead civilizations, modified to your specifications, but the magic simply doesn't work the way you think it does. What you don't know - because the snippets of information you've unearthed simply don't mention it - is that the original magic was for creating arena monsters that are designed around the idea that the products would have a target zone to give the competitors a chance. After all, as fun as it is to watch your gladiators spill a little blood, it's really hard to get people to sign up to fight an actually unstoppable behemoth.

Fundamental Rules

Maybe it's not actively working specifically against you, perhaps it's a global phenomenon. Anybody who creates monsters like you do will have the same problem.

Perhaps this is a law of nature created and maintained by the gods after a particularly nasty previous situation that required their direct intervention to prevent the death of all peoples of the world. I can imagine the gods getting together and blaming each other for it, arguing for a bit (possibly loudly) and then one of them proposing they just change the rules to make a repeat impossible.

Or perhaps it's a back door somebody left in the magic system when it was set up in the first place.

What, you think magic just happened? Have you seen how complex that stuff is? How many bits were clearly just bolted on to fix problems? Pull the other one bruv, I've seen enough badly-patched legacy systems to know one when I see one.

Misunderstood Antagonist

I know, he talks a good game, but he keeps pumping out these things that couldn't possibly complete the stated goal of taking over the world. But are these the actions of a true Evil Overlord? Even one that hasn't read the list?

Actually he's a guy who's just trying to make sure that people don't stagnate, or that the world has something to focus on other than petty tribal squabbles. He's seen what happens when there are no common threats to bring the nations together, and maybe he thinks that providing a focus for their aggression is going to be a major improvement over the constant wars over petty things.

On the other hand, perhaps he's trying to prepare the world for a worse evil that he knows is coming. When the stars align just right and a portal to a hellish realm opens, flooding the world with actual demons (who just happen to look a lot like his creatures), it would be much better if people have plenty of experience in how to deal with them.

Either way, he's just trying to save the world by killing half... I mean teaching people how to get along against a major threat.

And he's starting them off on easy mode. The monsters are big and scary, yes, but for now they're fairly easy to take down. When people are used to the idea he'll make them a incrementally tougher. In the "save the world from a future disaster" scenario he'll keep going until the people of the world have adapted to fighting the full strength monsters, hopefully before the real ones get here.

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I started with two ideas, but that got a little out of hand. Again. Hope something in the list works for you.

Answer 7

It's a kill switch.

History is replete with instances of creations turning against their creators. If you don't want to become just another Victor Frankenstein, pursued to the ends of the Earth by what should have been an obedient servant, you need some way to shut things down in a hurry.

Answer 8

Because magical cores work like that.

The magical minions are useful and effective because they have large glowing magical devices you implanted into them, which provide magical energy to boost them beyond mundane biology. You could send units without such points, but humans can kill animals easily.

As such, your minions inevitably have magical cores, which hurt the monsters badly when smashed. The minions are still deadier than normal animals, but the heroes are competent enough to murder them.

Answer 9

You often don't know that a weak point is a weak point until it is proven to be a weak point.

Or you know but your doctrine makes you neglect the glaring weakness.

Why would WWI generals keep flushing soldiers against machine guns and trenches, despite the obvious carnage it was causing over and over? Because they were imbued with the doctrine that a superior fighting spirit was sufficient to win a battle, completely neglecting that a lead bullet would wreak havoc in the body of any soldier, no matter how combative he was.

Answer 10

Because the powers used to create your minions have their own sense of fairness. The dark gods (or whatever) who supply you with the magic of you evil-overlord-ness are perfectly willing to let you make monstrous and powerful abominations to serve your violent whims and whatnot. But it isn't fair for the heroes who oppose you to have no chance of overcoming you.

So the weak points MUST be part of the creatures. In fact, the more powerful the minion, the more obvious and vulnerable the weakness. Or rather, the more obvious and vulnerable you make the weakness, the more otherwise unreasonably powerful you are permitted make the minion. It's an (unfortunate?) clause in the contract.

Answer 11

Developer Oversight

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Your villain is evil, yes. Has grand plans to conquer the world. Knows to strategize in general, yes. But not overly specialized or qualified to build an entire army of minions alone, let alone by their own hands. They employ several minions, either by contract or by force, to do the legwork of designing, testing, and building the monsters. Your villain is simply supervising the entire process after laying out their expectations on what kind of monster to build.

I'm going to quote Doctor Strange (2016) to establish my points:

The Ancient One: The language of the mystic arts is as old as civilization. The sorcerers of antiquity called the use of this language "spells". But if that word offends your modern sensibilities, you can call it a "program". The source code that shapes reality.

Your villain's monsters are built upon these spells. This ancient source code. The villain's minions simply utilize these spells as tools to build the perfect monster ever as required by their employer, analogous to a team of software engineers creating an application.

Given this code's antiquity, lack of proper documentation, incomplete examples on edge cases and corner cases of the spell's uses, etcetera, the villain's minions can stumble upon some undocumented behaviors of certain magic's invocations. Sure, they test the product before finally delivering it to the boss, but there are many reasons why such bugs can escape the testing process

• "It's already nearing the deadline. We have to finish the build by tomorrow." And thus they try to wrap things up in a hurry.

• "The boss won't know anyway. We've been paid. We're done," say the minions. "Once he finds these weaknesses, it'll be too late already for him to track us down."

• "These large weaknesses do not show in our laboratory-conditioned testing chambers."

• "He he he, I've made sure that these weaknesses only show up when the monsters are deployed onto the battlefield!"

• "Meh, I don't know it can do that. I can fix it just before the next battle. Probably. And that's if the boss survives - the protagonist looks like he can defeat him fairly easily."

Answer 12

It's a distraction. Those heroes, always talking to each other and learning things. But the most important thing is to use your enemies strength against them.

Here they go again, rocking up knowing that poking the crystal eye will cause the monster to instantly disappear. Unfortunately for them, what they don't know is they're not killing the monster. It's being sent back to the store for repairs and upgrades.

That's why there are always more monsters the closer you get to the castle, the ones you're "killing" on the way are just showing up again. But this time with new and improved weapons. The overlord's outlay is significantly reduced and density of adversaries is increasing with every kill they make on the way in.

It's not that I have reserves. You're giving me my reserves back!

Answer 13

Because subconsciously he wants to be defeated. He probably had a bad childhood

Answer 14

I'm surprised nobody mentioned vampires here yet. In most settings they're created by a higher power on purpose, and still have a very obvious, relatively easy to procure and instantly deadly weakness: sunlight.

I don't think anyone in-universe ever looked at a vampire and laughed them off as weak or useless however. Except maybe that guy that dies 3mins into the movie.

Since you're asking for reasons for why that is, there's two big ones:

• The power that creates them simply couldn't do any better. Or didn't care to waste even more power on doing it. You can't argue that the results are powerful as they are, so maybe it's just good enough. Think Trollocs or Myrddraal in Wheel of Time, the Dark One doesn't care about the comfort of his army, only about its effectiveness.

• If they were strictly better than regular humans in every way, and with no drawback, there would be no story to tell. They'd simply replace regular humans as part of natural evolution. The fact that there is a story to tell means that there's an imbalance of power that can be exploited to fight against them. Nobody writes stories about Neanderthals, for example.

Answer 15

As a last ditch safety measure

As Both Davislor and Mark mention, there is a trope where you include a safety measure in case your monster turned against you. Neither though have referenced the fact that this was done in real life.

In this case though the 'monsters'¹ were elephants, as discussed here, I've covered it in a spoiler as I find it quite gruesome given the normally nature of most elephants:

More of the elephants were slain by their own drivers than by the enemy. These used to have a carpenter's chisel and a mallet. When the beasts began to grow wild and to dash into their own men, the keeper would place the chisel between the ears, precisely at the joint which connects the neck with the head, and would drive it in with all possible force. That had been found to be the quickest means of death in a brute of such size, when they got beyond the hope of control. And the first man to introduce the practice had been Hasdrubal, a general who was often notable at other times, but pre-eminently in that battle.

Whether you give the monsters of your world a similar nature to elephants or make them mindless and thus their death morally ambiguous is up to you however.

Maybe they're even aware of these weaknesses? Maybe it doesn't even start as a weakness (as with an elephant's spine), similar to Nosajimiki's answer referencing eyes.

But how the evil overlord uses it, that seems obvious, based on your premise and real world examples.

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_{1. Arguably, those who killed the elephants were the real monsters.}

Answer 16

The question title made me think of Gunnerkrigg Court pages 1141 and 1142, so I'll suggest the possibility that the monsters were never designed to fight people who would think to exploit their obvious weak points. I suppose this conflicts with the monsters' being created "to be [an] army and take over the world", but then some other answers seem to as well, including the currently accepted one, so I suppose that's okay.

This could combine with other aforementioned options; for example:

• Kill switches: It might be that the monsters were repurposed into an army of world conquest, with the kill-switches that were included when they originally were created being ignored or (weakly) covered up. Maybe the monsters were originally created by the current overlord for some other purpose; maybe they were originally created by someone else and have fallen into the overlord's control.

• Selective blindness: The overlord took the monsters from someone else, and not having created them personally makes it all the easier to overlook their weak points. Alternatively, the overlord created them eons ago and has forgotten their original purpose and the details of compromises that were made in their design.

• Because magical cores work like that: The overlord took the monsters from someone else and may not know that their power cores are so vulnerable, or the overlord created them eons ago and has forgotten their original purpose and the details of compromises that were made in their design.

In any case, another contributing factor might be that the overlord is feeling time pressure for some reason: maybe there's some deadline by which the world needs to be conquered, or some rival is gaining strength too quickly, so "I need to send these monsters out now, even if they're not perfect! I can't take another twenty years to resolve all the design issues!"

Answer 17

Frameshift: Because the big baddie is not creating monsters in the first place.

He's summoning them from some other plane of existence. The existence of the weakness is exploited by the summoning process, trying to summon a monster without such weaknesses is much harder--perhaps beyond his ability, certainly beyond what he can summon in large numbers.

Answer 18

Everything that you know, even those things that you believe to be uniquely original to your own thoughts are a construction some still call "culture".

At the bottom of that structure seat what Jung (Carl Gustav Jung) called the archetypes. The archetypes are fundamental building blocks upon which we build the rest of our culture. I believe some archetypes prevail over others due to that they work better, namely: they are more successful at the time to make predictions on what the outcome of some event will be.

Some archetypes are common to all humanity, i.e.: "the shaman", "the hero", etc..., some others are unique to each culture, although they will still share some common root with other cultures.

In case of the "monster minion", I can think of: Goliath, Boagrius (giant killed by Achilles), the medieval dragons, etc...

That archetype seems to delve deep inside the roots of civilization and, given that it survived to our days, it must contain some fundamental truth about human nature and nature in general.

A "monster" is in the end just something that deviates from a normal distribution. Normality is not just some human abstraction, it is indeed something very real: the mean of what nature can create and sustain.

A monster, which is usually a mighty figure, may hold some power that exceeds what almost anybody can combat: size, strength, still it is an extreme deviation from what nature can host. Thus, in the end that extra power comes always at a cost, creating some weakness that in the end can always be sought and used against it.

Per instance: some giant will always be slower than a smaller person, some super strong character will put extra strain on its muscle and sinew, some super intelligent guy will lack empathy from other humans, etc...

Answer 19

LISTEN!

Your hero's are supported by creatures that highlight the weaknesses for them, rather than a flaw in the design.