Just You and Me and My Guards/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: The hero bursts in to fight the villain, and when they seem to be headed for a mano-a-mano Duel to the Death, the villain calls for his Evil Minions and a melee erupts ...

  • Straight: The hero faces down the villain and the villain summons his Mooks.
  • Exaggerated: The villain summons a ludicrously vast army of minions, or else multiple large waves thereof.
  • Downplayed: The villain brings in a small squad of guards, and/or uses them sparingly in the battle.
  • Justified: The villain happens have guards around to summon because he is a warlord, mob boss, demonic overlord, etc. in the heart of his stronghold, and thus would have no reason not to call in backup in the event of a fight.
    • Or the villain is insufficiently Badass to stand up to the hero in a fight, and thus needs the minions' help to prevail.
    • It also may simply be that the villain is a Combat Pragmatist and the hero puts Honour Before Reason.
  • Inverted: The hero, not the villain, is the one calling in the underlings.
  • Subverted: The villain summons his guards, but they are utterly useless in the fight.
  • Double Subverted: The villain summons his guards and they promptly prove to be useless, but then they come in critically handy at some crucial point later in the battle.
  • Parodied: The villain brings in his Mooks, but the fight turns into a debacle because of their comically inept attempts to bring down the hero.
  • Zig Zagged: There are underlings around for either side; sometimes they get summoned, sometimes they don't.
  • Averted: The villain would summon his guards, but the hero has prevented their entry into the fight by some means.
    • Averted Hard: The guards cannot be summoned because the hero has already massacred them outright.
  • Deconstructed: ???
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Enforced: The villain originally wouldn't have bothered to summon his guards (or didn't have any), but changes were demanded and implemented which resulted in the guards being called in either to heighten the tension of the battle or to make the hero seem that much more awesome.
  • Lampshaded: Upon facing down the villain, the hero inquires as to whether the villain will be calling in his guards.
  • Invoked: The villain not only calls in his guards, he does so verbally and makes the swerve mid-sentence.
  • Exploited: The hero expects that the villain will bring in hordes of minions when they finally meet to do battle, and so he specializes in weapons and/or training that give him the advantage when he is grossly outnumbered -- or else the hero concocts a plan to trap the minions when they are summoned and either neutralize them or turn them to his side of the battle.
    • Double Exploited: The villain realizes that the hero will be ready for his horde of minions, and so he prepares himself by becoming an expert at one-on-one combat, and uses his Mooks merely to prevent the hero from escaping the fight.
    • Triple Exploited: The hero, realizing that he has specialized in fighting against a group and realizing that the villain has probably prepared to fight him personally as well, prepares a backup plan of his own in order to turn the fight against the villain. This may include the ability to switch gears for better one-on-one combat, or else the use of heroic allies in order to gang up on the villain in the fight.
      • This and any further exponents are incredibly difficult to pull off, since if you get multiple groups of combatants, the situation will generally degrade into a massive free-for-all.
  • Defied: The villain remarks that he could summon his guards if he wanted to, but chooses to fight the hero one-on-one anyways. Unless the villain is sufficiently Badass, this may overlap with Genre Blindness or Suicidal Overconfidence.
  • Discussed: The hero and villain banter back and forth as to whether the villain will call in his guards, and the situations that may arise in either case. May involve head games by one or both parties.
  • Conversed: Multiple characters are watching a movie or show or playing a video game, and one of them calls when the villain is about to summon his Evil Minions -- either through having already seen the sequence or just predicting it out of luck and genre-savviness.
  • Played For Laughs: See Parodied.
  • Played For Drama: The hero has enough left in himself to take down the villain. With the additional guards, though, he's not so certain he can win.

Come, you will face me in Just You and Me and My Guards, man to man... Along with my guards!

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