http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MookChivalry

Nigel Powers, Austin Powers In Goldmember "Oh, put the guns down. Is this the first day on the job or something? Look, this is how it goes: you attack me, one at a time, and I knock you out with a single punch. Okay? Go."

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The life of the mook is a humble one, in which the poor cannon-fodder must look like everyone else, act like everyone else, and get their butt kicked by the hero like everyone else.

But becoming a mook is much harder than it looks. On TV (and in video games), humility is only the first step in a fighting code of mooks's honor, as complex and rigid as that of the medieval knight or the samurai. This is why most mooks fare about as well as a bunch of knights or samurai would when faced with a modern army. The principles of the code are:

Strangely enough, an army of Ninja — despite being dishonorable sneaks — will follow Mook Chivalry as if they were samurai. Due to Conservation of Ninjutsu, a small group of ninja will behave dishonorably, and actually attack from cover, retreat, and so on, but large ninja forces will be made up of Highly Visible Ninja.

There are several reasons for this trope. Beyond giving the hero a fighting chance, one big one is to make fight scenes simpler and easy to follow - a huge rush with large numbers of enemies or a scene where mooks spend all their time carefully exploiting cover is hard to choreograph in a clearly-comprehensible fashion, while it's easy to understand the hero beating up mook after mook in succession. In videogames, this is often the result of technical limitations (when games can't display large numbers of enemies at once, or when AI for using cover properly isn't available) or for the sake of gameplay (when fighting large numbers of enemies at once wouldn't be fun, or when things like open communication or challenges are necessary to help the player understand what's going on). To accomplish this, they typically use a development trick known as "Unit Slotting" where the enemy AI has a limited number of "slots" for enemies to directly attack you, while the rest just stand around or pelt you with ranged attacks. This trick allows the player to be confronted with a large amount of enemies while still having the chance to win, and feel like a total Badass in the process.

See also No Sneak Attacks. If it suddenly comes into play with a pack of enemies who previously were winning because they attacked together, see also Monster Threat Expiration. Contrast Zerg Rush.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Comic Books

In Identity Crisis, the heroes suffer from this while fighting Deathstroke. They all attack him one at a time. Even then, it took a huge amount of handwaving to justify him lasting as long as he did against the group of heroes he was up against. In the end, they gain the upper hand by just deciding to Zerg Rush him.

In the Transformers: Shattered Glass universe, the heroic Slugslinger has an overdeveloped sense of fair play, in contrast to this main universe counterpart, a vainglorious soldier who loves dominating his opponents. In any case, it's a personality quirk that directly lends itself to this kind of thing. For instance, when the bumbling evil Autobot Star Saber dropped his spear, Slugslinger thought it was the least he could do to let him pick it up before continuing the fight.

Sin City averts most of these. Mooks often attack at the same time and in the case of Dwight reloading during Big Fat Kill, are more than willing to blow him up while he's doing it.

Green Lantern: When Hal Jordan got driven insane by Parallax and decided to steal the Central Battery's energy, the Green Lantern Corps members decided to fight him one at a time, each one waiting for him at a different point of the road to Oa. No explanation was given as to why they didn't all tackle the strongest Green Lantern at once.

Subverted by an issue of Iron Man that featured Shellhead being attacked by more than a dozen supervillains at once. One of the main reasons Iron Man won was because the villains got in each other's way and Iron Man was able to turn them against each other.

In Batman: Endgame, the Brainwashed and Crazy Justice League attack Batman one at a time, allowing him to use his Justice Buster suit to take them out one by one, rather than fight him as a team. It's possibly justified since they've been infected with Joker Venom, turning them into raving homicidal maniacs, most likely incapable of working as a team.

Fan Works

Averted in Wizard Runemaster by basically everyone. When an Alliance guild attacks Onyxia's lair, her Elite Mooks come running the moment they hear one of them engaged in a fight. In both Stratholme and Scholomance, the heroes get spotted and have roughly half the forces present in the city/mansion attack them at once. In the latter case, the manor's necromancers stay out of sight and resurrect felled undead minions to further tire the heroes. While dealing with the Scarlet Crusade, the heroes attack one wing of the monastery at a time by first having Harry Potter seal over the entrances. And when fighting them in Stratholme, the Crusaders have a phalanx of paladins use their magic to No-Sell their attacks while casters behind them attack the heroes.

by basically everyone. Averting this is how, in The Rise of Darth Vulcan, Leo gets defeated. He's a dueling machine, sure, but when you're attacked from all directions in both melee and long ranges, it's hard to recover, as shown when Vulcan's mooks gank him good and make it impossible for his armor to reattach before he's downed. Ted openly defies the trope in a "The Reason You Suck" Speech after Leo's beaten

Justified in Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change With The Light when Will O' the Wisp plans to gather a group of Spider-Woman's enemies to get revenge on her. Jack O' Lantern points out that having all the villains attack Spider-Woman at once is probably not a good idea. The villains won't have any experience fighting together and might end up hurting each other more than Spider-Woman. Jack also points out that most of Spider-Woman's enemies won't likely have the patience to train together to function as a unit.

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Lampshaded in the unaired Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot: Buffy: I don't suppose you'd have the good manners to attack me one at a time, would you?"

Vampire: " : I don't suppose you'd have the good manners to attack me one at a time, would you?": " You watch too many movies ." Disappointingly, they then proceed to do exactly that, playing this trope straight. Averted in the Dollhouse episode "Stop Loss", when the three soldiers sent after Victor attack in unison and one strikes while the other two's blows are being blocked. Apparently the only way to overcome this is to bind people's minds together into a single entity .

attack in unison and one strikes while the other two's blows are being blocked. Apparently the only way to overcome this is to . Subverted in Hyperdrive. The Shiny Red Robots of Vortis attack Sandstrom one at a time and she is easily beating them. Henderson comments about this, the robots hear it- and the crew of HMS Camden Lock get captured.

The mooks of Power Rangers take this to an extreme: they actually form a circle around the heroes and attack at rates of one to each hero present at the time (perhaps as consideration to the absent hero). Strangely enough, each mook within a series is identical, so they could really be the same group every time. There's a bizarre instance in Power Rangers RPM. When the military is shooting at the Grinders, the Grinders are ducking behind cars and firing their own weapons... and then the Rangers arrive. The Grinders pop out from behind cover, run in, and fight with the usual grunt tactics, and with the usual results.

Parodied in the Saturday Night Live sketch "The Plucky Ninjas", where action movie ninjas (after one of their many losses at the hands of just one guy) are berated by their leader for, no matter how many time he tells them, always attacking one at a time. Their spirits lifted by his inspirational speech, they proceed to... get their asses handed to them every time anyway.

Lampshaded in an episode of She Spies when the girls were attacked by ninja. One of them notes that ninja are terribly polite combatants, only ever attacking one at a time while the rest just stand back.

Wonder Woman: The thugs, soldiers, and goons regularly followed this. In "The Starships Are Coming", five thugs run up to Wonder Woman so they can be defeated individually. A sixth, armed with a gun, waits patiently for her to wipe the floor with the first crew before firing at her. In "Fausta, the Nazi Wonder Woman", three Nazi goons in a row run up to Wonder Woman individually so she can throw each one of them into the same box. It's such an easy production line of beating thugs up that Fausta openly complains about it. Fausta : So far she shows nothing that I couldn't match

Goons in Xena: Warrior Princess love this. They will stand in a circle, attack one by one, and always go down in a few strikes as if they read the Austin Powers grunt handbook.

Professional Wrestling

Not that P-dog and The Get Along Gang thought of themselves as "mooks", but only the former had any sort of status in Ring of Honor, making at least the other six he brought along this and despite outnumbering Moose seven to one at Supercard Of Honor X they decided to take him on one at a time. This actually had better results than when they all bum rushed him at once, as it forced Moose to consider the women in the group.

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons: In early published adventures, goblins and orcs were famous for attacking in cramped cavern passages where only one goblin could face a hero at once — so one by one, they got killed. This has been dubbed the "Conga Line of Death." Averted in D&D 4 th edition, where many mooks had mechanical advantages to attack en masse and combat usually occured in more open areas. 5 th edition also likes to encourage enemies to gang up on a single target, in open places, but of course it varies based on how merciful your DM is feeling.

An optional cinematic rule for GURPS, called Melee Etiquette, does this. If a PC chooses to fight unarmed or with melee weapons, his opponents always face him one-on-one, one at a time. Unengaged NPCs can dance around the fight uttering shrill cries of encouragement, but wait their turn to attack.

In BattleTech the Clans' zellbrigen code of honor mandates one-on-one combat, up until one side is dishonorable enough to violate the rules and it degenerates into a free-for-all.

Played with in The Riddle of Steel and its successors. Up to three mooks can attack a PC at a time (any more and they'd typically just get in one another's way), and avoiding blows from three enemies at once is appropriately realistic - but the PC can attempt to maneuver so that he only has to face one enemy in a given round at a small cost to combat prowess.

The One Ring: Combatants engage each other one-on-one when possible. They only gang up if one side has more combatants than the other, and even then, a maximum of three enemies can engage a human-sized combatant in close quarters.

Theater

In Peter Pan and Wendy, the stageplay that was the first work to feature Peter Pan, this is played for laughs — Captain Hook sends two very nervous pirates into a cabin one at a time to separately fight the "Doodle-doo" demon (a not-so-disguised Pan) that haunts it.

Video Games

Webcomics

In the world of Irritability, not only do monsters never retreat thanks to monster honor, but it's culturally insensitive to even ask them to no matter how doomed they are.

Subversion: In The Order of the Stick, a Death Knight orders his battalion of hobgoblins to charge to their deaths at an enemy's incredibly well defended wall so that their corpses would form an effective ramp for his horse. It worked !

! Lampshaded in this strip of Penny Arcade.

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life