Protags who do this would normally also spare henchmen who were incapacitated or surrendered, right? Those 7,455 henchmen who died all went down swinging. Accepting the villain’s surrender is only notable because for some reason all of their underlings were fanatics who fought to the death.
Nah. All those henchmen who “fought to the death” are almost never even given a chance to surrender. The excuse is closer to “it was in the heat of battle” but the only reason that excuse doesn’t fly for the villain is plot armor. How many of these movies even have the protag doing stealth kills of guards, coming up behind some poor underling on watch duty and doing the magic neck-snap move or a knife to the throat or a quick pewt-pewt from a “silenced” gun before the guard even knows what hit them. Those guys were probably the most likely to lay down their weapon and say “yeah, go ahead, I’m not paid nearly enough for this shit,” but they don’t matter because they’re underling fodder. We’re never introduced to them as having any motivations or personalities, so they’re just there to provide some action. They are not to be given moral consideration, only the villain is shown with agency, so the audience is only supposed to care about what the “hero” does with the villain. It’s laziness that is widely accepted and goes mostly unquestioned because of what Collatz_problem said, it’s class morality and we’re all used to that because that shit is ingrained.
Protags who do this would normally also spare henchmen who were incapacitated or surrendered, right? Those 7,455 henchmen who died all went down swinging. Accepting the villain’s surrender is only notable because for some reason all of their underlings were fanatics who fought to the death.
Nah. All those henchmen who “fought to the death” are almost never even given a chance to surrender. The excuse is closer to “it was in the heat of battle” but the only reason that excuse doesn’t fly for the villain is plot armor. How many of these movies even have the protag doing stealth kills of guards, coming up behind some poor underling on watch duty and doing the magic neck-snap move or a knife to the throat or a quick pewt-pewt from a “silenced” gun before the guard even knows what hit them. Those guys were probably the most likely to lay down their weapon and say “yeah, go ahead, I’m not paid nearly enough for this shit,” but they don’t matter because they’re underling fodder. We’re never introduced to them as having any motivations or personalities, so they’re just there to provide some action. They are not to be given moral consideration, only the villain is shown with agency, so the audience is only supposed to care about what the “hero” does with the villain. It’s laziness that is widely accepted and goes mostly unquestioned because of what Collatz_problem said, it’s class morality and we’re all used to that because that shit is ingrained.