Slave Mooks

"He does not have to earn my loyalty, Captain. He has had it from the moment I was conceived. I am a Jem'Hadar. He is a Vorta. It is the order of things."
"Do you really want to give up your life for the 'order of things'?"

"It's not my life to give up, Captain– and it never was."

—Remata'Klan and Capt. Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Mooks who have been enslaved, and sometimes considered Meat Puppets. If they aren't brainwashed they normally rebel, if only in small numbers (due to fear). Normally played to tug at those tug-proof heartstrings. Nine times out of 10, the brainwashed version won't rebel, and any supporting characters are depressed by their existence. These mooks are normally controlled by the Big Bad or are part of a Hive Mind, and rarely do things willingly. Slaves enthralled by More Than Mind Control are less likely to rebel, even against a perniciously Bad Boss, and may even Hannibal Lecture other characters about their suitability for slavery. If they aren't used depressingly, expect them to be comic relief. They can be pushovers or bosses, but they share the fact that they have about as much free will as a zombie. If they rebel, it will be in small numbers normally. On rare occasions they will be a boss, but rarely The Dragon and never the Big Bad.

Subtrope of Forced Into Evil.

Examples of Slave Mooks include:

Anime & Manga

• Most of Emperor Lelouche's forces in Code Geass.
• In Pokémon Special, we're not exactly sure what is up with the Galatic Mooks, as for some reason do they not only look exactly the same, they have their own weird language and seem to move as one entity. They don't seem to be anything more than mindless dolls.
• Yu Yu Hakusho has Cultivated Humans. They look like a human had sex with a spinach plant and somehow got a zombie baby out of it. Naturally, demons grow these things wholesale as mindless expendable mooks.
• The pre-Extended of Gundam Seed were kept under control by drugs, classified as equipment, and considered even more expendable than the rest of the Earth Forces. The actual Extended in Gundam Seed Destiny are conditioned to be emotionally dependent on their commander Neo and will die without regular treatment that only the Earth Forces can provide.

Comic Books

• In the Batman comics, Poison Ivy often uses spores to create a mind controlled army of mooks. During the Hush storyline, she even uses kryptonite infused spores to turn Superman into a slave mook.
  • In The Long Halloween she makes Bruce Wayne a slave mook.

Fanfic

• Alexia's minions in The Return since they are her Mind Raped and brain washed daughter Succubae.

Film

• The Clones in Star Wars prequels. They're designed to be completely loyal, basically more intelligent meat-droids who obey orders without question. Nonetheless, they're still quite human, forming family bonds and enjoying their lot in life while serving with their Jedi generals. When Order 66 comes out, virtually all of them obeyed. The troopers who disobeyed the order were commandos or delta units, clones specifically designed to be more independent minded due to the more complex missions they're assigned.
  • The insane Selkath in Knights of the Old Republic also count.
• A movie version of this is the Evil Dead deadites, which are possessed (in the first two films).
• Xerxes army in ~300~ is mostly comprised of slaves.
• The original, permanently-hairy Lycans from the Underworld movies were utilized as this trope by medieval-era vampires.

Literature

• The Codex Alera has the Immortals, slaves wearing “Discipline Collars” that give pleasure when obeying orders and pain when disobeying. They've worn those collars their entire lives, making them utterly loyal to their master and more animal than man.
• From Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Lord Shadowspawn's Pawns are human Force-sensitives who have been effectively lobotomized and implanted with telepathic receptors that allow him to control and speak through them remotely. Then it turns out that Shadowspawn (or rather, Shadow's Pawn), is a Pawn himself. The real mastermind is the frail but powerful Cronal.
  • New Jedi Order brings us the Chazrach, reptilian slave soldiers of the Yuuzhan Vong. They're an almost tragic case in that they started out as conquered subjects of the Vong, and over the centuries, underwent progressive genetic "shaping" that eventually rendered them little more than mindless automatons, with no greater instinct beyond fighting for their masters. As Jedi Master Lar Le'ung puts it, "They have no free will, so do not try to reason with them".
• Controllers in Animorphs, since the Yeerks are sentient parasites that take over a host's body, including essentially the entire population of Gedds, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxons (though Taxxons are willing slaves).
• In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and Sam are infiltrated into Mordor, a regiment of orcs turns out to be conscripts.
• Draka janissaries are slave troops used in attrition situations, such as anti-partisan work or trench assaults. They tend to join and fight freely for perks like the right to pillage, and for the limited social mobility it offers individual janissaries within the brutal Drakan hierarchy.
• In Alan Dean Foster's The Damned series, the "allied species" (don't kid yourself) of the telepathic Amplitur have been so heavily brainwashed that they happily throw themselves into battle in order to promote the Amplitur's "purpose", and will never refuse an order... sorry, never refuse a "polite request" (again, don't kid yourself) from an Amplitur. Ever. It never occurs to them to even consider refusing any such orders... sorry again, "polite requests".
• The Winkies in The Wizard of Oz, stated in the original book, though only alluded to in the movie (the "hail to Dorothy, the wicked witch is dead!" scene)

Live-Action TV

• Both the Brainwashed and the normal variety show up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some are mooks of weekly villains and some are the season's Big Bad's. Spike becomes one of the brainwashed types in Season 7 due to the First.
• The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Interestingly, it is shown that the Jem'Hadar fully worship the founders, and rebelling against them is rare. However, they tend to distrust their Vorta overseers and rebelling against them is not as rare. Most Jem'Hadar remain loyal to the Vorta however, because it is the order of things.
• The Borg also fit this to some extent as well, in the brainwashed/Hive Mind sense. They really stepped into it by the time of Star Trek: Voyager, and in the episode "Unimatrix Zero", there's a "Borg Resistance", as it were, that initially operates in an unconscious shared dream world.
• The armies of the Goa'uld are made up exclusively of Slave Mooks of one sort or another. By far the most common variety is the Jaffa, though a Goa'uld near defeat will sometimes use humans instead.

Music

• Invoked Trope in the French national anthem:

What do they want this horde of slaves
Of traitors and conspiratorial kings?
...
Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors,
Bear or hold back your blows!
Spare these sorry victims,
Arming against us with regrets.

• • Unfortunately, it's not in the first verse, so nobody remembers it anymore.

Tabletop Games

• The Iron Ring, a network of slavers from the Mystara setting, reduces some of its victims to a state of berserk insanity, then uses them as expendable human guard-dogs.
  • Illithids in the Forgotten Realms setting, being innately gifted with psionic powers and believing themselves above humanity, enslave all forms of humanoids to do their dirty work and know a small array of grafts and implants they can use to "improve" them, possibly turning them into monstrous mooks with the added side effect of making them more susceptible to illithid psionic powers. However, due to the hefty cost and time investment of applying these implants, such modified slaves aren't likely to be sent as mere cannon fodder.
• The Skaven faction of Warhammer Fantasy Battle uses slaves (of their own species) as expendable troops. So expendable that they have a special rule allowing to shoot at them in melee in hopes to kill their enemies.

Video Games

• In Shadow the Hedgehog, the Robot Shadows count.
• In Fallout 3, Clover could count as this.
  • Also, the Super Mutants.
• Lizard people in the Spider-Man 3 video game.
• Depending on how heavily brainwashed they are, the Covenant in Halo. By the end of the second game, a full-scale civil war has ensued between the Elites and Brutes of the Covenant, with Grunts caught on both sides.
  • Of the Covenant, the Grunts are the most obviously enslaved species. They are at the very bottom of the Covenant Hierarchy, even below the hired mercenaries. They're used for all the menial tasks and militarily are are used en masse due to their apparent large population and high reproductive rate. Killing a Grunt isn't even a crime among the Covenant races.
  • The Flood Combat and Carrier forms. The host bodies don't WANT to be that, but they are forced to by the Infection Form infesting them.
  • Engineers are Actual Pacifist biological supercomputers. So what does the Covenant do? Wire them up with bombs and force them to help the war effort. In ODST, you get an achievement for either not killing any engineers of your own free will as the Rookie, or by killing all of them (a freed engineer, Vergil is actually the MacGuffin of the game). In Reach, their servitude is not explored, and you just shoot them.
  • Bungie's earlier Marathon series had the Pfhor, heading a slaver empire whose thralls include Restraining Bolted S'pht cyborgs, captured AIs, the Drinniol… And you.
• The Stalkers in Half-Life 2. They are a version of the brainwashed type.
  • Like the Flood example above, the headcrab zombies in Half-Life are the same. The most disturbing moments are when you can hear muffled screams for help and prayers to god from the human.
  • But the best example in both games was the Vortigaunts, who were known as “alien slaves” in the first game, and winning the first game freed them, allowing them to join the good guys in the second.
• The Titan Monsters in Batman: Arkham Asylum may be this, but Poison Ivy's minions are this for sure, as they are mind controlled.
• Mass Effect has the Husks, slave mooks created using Reaper technology. They impale the corpses of their humans on 'dragon's teeth', which gradually turn them into mecha-zombies. The second game adds more variants, and the third introduces husks made from other species.
  • In fact, anyone at all that has had extended contact with the Reapers will eventually become indoctrinated by them; this process was the first step in creating the Collectors from Mass Effect 2, who started out as indoctrinated Protheans before being reduced to mindless, sexless, nigh-identical slave mooks by millenia of experimentation.
  • A non-Reaper-related example would be the colonists at Feros under the Thorian's mind control.
  • In Mass Effect 3, Cerberus's mooks are primarily kidnapped human refugees stuffed full with cybernetics. Not surprisingly, they're also all indoctrinated by the Reapers.
  • While the "heretic" geth serve the Reapers willingly, the "true" geth have to be forcibly controlled by Reaper code.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog series has Dr. Robotnik's Mecha-Mooks the Badniks, which are powered by the animals trapped inside them.
• Spider-Man: Web of Shadows has the symbiotes, which Spidey kills without any What the Hell, Hero? speeches.
• Doom has its zombies, slaves to Hell.
• In Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, Yuri's Resource Gathering is handled by the slave miner, a mobile ore refinery which travels to ore fields and has slaves come out and shovel ore into it. When the refinery is destroyed, the miners will defect to your side, but seeing as how they're emaciated, shirtless, and armed only with shovels, they're roughly on par with the Technician unit from the early Command & Conquer games (unless they somehow reach Elite...). Also, any enemy unit that Yuri's faction mind controls will revert back to the original owner once the mind controller is destroyed, with the exception of the Psychic Dominator and the units it nabs.
• In Fire Emblem, this plays a part in most games: At least one unit per game is working for the bad guys against his will, but talking to him with a certain character will convince him to join your side.
  • A more general example is in Path Of Radiance. The Big Bad Ashnard and his Mad Scientist Izuka use Super Serum to warp and control laguz. Though these Feral Laguz are supposedly mindless, they never attack Daein soldiers.
• Metroid Prime's Space Pirate militia work along these lines. One fully-charged shot will kill them, and they're not terribly smart.
• Some instances in World of Warcraft have these. Slave Pens and Steamvaults sping to mind. Both have enslaved Broken commanded by Naga slavemasters. Killing the slavemasters frees the slaves, causing them to stop attacking the players, thank them, and run away.
  • All of the mad Witch Doctor Zalazane's henchmen are actually Darkspear trolls that have been enslaved by his magic. According to the site most of the Darkspear's population is under Zalazane's sway. It is not yet revealed whether it is possible to reverse this.
• Ghost Drones in Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena are basically human prisoners who are captured by Athena Company, cut open, and have cybernetic implants shoved into their organs and brain, the goal being to create an army of mindless combat drones to sell off to the highest bidder. They're not particularly tough (their guns are a bit weaker than a basic assault rifle, and it only takes a couple assault rifle bullets to drop them), but since their weapon is attached to their arm you can't steal it from them after you kill them.) Of course, in the last level they Turned Against Their Masters thanks to some hacking of the ship's computer by Riddick's kid sidekick.
• In Final Fantasy XIII, the l'Cie are only motivated to fulfill their Focus (orders from the boss) by the threat of becoming a Cie'th, a zombie-like monster. On other hand, their reward is to be turned into a crystal statue.
• Many of the genome soldiers and nanomachine-enhanced military personnel in the Metal Gear series.
• Quite a few enemy soldiers in Drakengard are kidnapped, press-ganged unfortunates. This includes the children...
• Most of the hybrids in System Shock 2. Some of them even have enough of a mind left to shout things like "I'm sorry!" and "Kill me!" at you.
• The Dungeons of Heroes of Might and Magic III and V have this: in III, it's the naturally blind Troglodytes, who are implied to hardly ever be allowed to lead, though a large proportion of their Heroes are in fact Troglodytes, including Shakti, one of the best heroes in the game on short maps. In V, the Minotaurs are downgraded to a more clear example of this (in III they were Elite Mooks). Also, the Goblins in V, to a rather absurd extent.

Western Animation

• Ben 10 Alien Force the DN Aliens are parasitic aliens that latch on a hosts turning it into a DN Alien. The Highbreed use them as their standard Mooks and treat them with disdain.
• The Man Hatter used a lot of mind-control technology in Batman: The Animated Series, and tended to use them on civilians and common crooks for this reason; in at least one episode, said Mooks were very angry at him once they snapped out of it, especially after he had called them "gutter trash"...

Real Life

• The most famous examples in Islam are the Caliphate's ghilman (who murdered four Caliphs in a row), Egypt's Mamelukes (who took over the government), and the Turkish Janissaries (well, not slaves, but at first they were kidnapped Christian children; more Tykebombs, then). They weren't mooks, though, their employers certainly wouldn't have put with their disloyalty if they weren't good at what they did.
  • Well, later Ottoman Sultans were fed up by their disloyalty and the fact that they were becoming technologically obsolete. The disbandment of Janissaries took five Sultans because they would revolt and kill the Sultans opposing them.
• Conscripts of any country may or may not be considered and/or consider themselves this.
• Joseph Kony's child soldiers.
• The Red Army regularly kept its numbers up in World War 2 by shanghaiing people along the way and using NKVD troopers to herd them. Kind of like the Greek stereotype of Persian armies. In fact the notorious atrocities done in Prussia-that-was were not done primarily by the Russian vanguard which had high professional standards and did not usually do anything worse then petty looting, but by the shanghaied soldiers between the vanguard and the NKVD.