![]() ![]() 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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