In my current work, I have my MC going up against an organization, who want the slow destruction of her city (as well as the deaths of all her city leaders). The organization's motive is pretty justified since the MC's city leaders took over the organization's original city, killed it's leaders (which were family members of many members of the organization), and imposed a lot of restrictions and such that changed that city for the worse. Anyway, my great debate is how I should have the MC defeat the villains. By the time the MC reaches them, they've got the MC's city on lockdown, are terrorizing the citizens with a mind-controlled police force, and have already killed one or two of the city leaders. At the very least, MC needs to stop them in order to stop the mind-controlled police and return her city back to some type of normalcy. But I'm really torn between having my MC just kill all of them or finding a way to subdue them (although it'd need to be pretty creative since its about 15 vs 1). Not to mention, I really want to avoid having a villain that's too easy to kill. So now that I've ranted all of that my question to you is: How can I prevent having a too easy villain in this type of scenario? And which method (killing/subduing) would be better?
Does your MC have superpowers? What about the villains? I assume yes since you speak of mind control. Come up with contrasting set of powers, and distribute them equally among your characters. If you don't want your MC to overpower his enemies by sheer force or not by just outsmarting them, you can come up with a clever deus ex machina to help him. Like Tolkien's ever present Eagles, or even something made originally by the villains, like the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz. Or the solar eclipse in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .
Neither party has superpowers. In this world, everything is connected online, and every person is connected online by an implant in their head. The villains spent several years creating a sort of virus to control the city's connection (as well as the connection of all its citizen) allowing for that sort of mind control. The only reason the MC is still standing is her implant was removed shortly before the villains virus took effect.
I would think you problem would be how your hero stays alive, not easy to kill villains. With everyone connected to the net, she would be spotted and located when anyone, not just a villain, sees her.
The obvious way would be for her to hack into the system and interrupt the mind control for long enough for the soldiers to see the error or their ways. Subduing/tricking, in my opinion, always trumps the gung-ho killing approach. Except for in Kill Bill, that was entirely justified and the only way to go
I think that having to sneak past the cops to assassinate the bad guys could be an interesting challenge if handled right. Maybe have the MC need to undo the mind-control on a few allies first, then convince them to create a distraction. Maybe she only gets a few of them with her sniper rifle before the rest run. Maybe killing them isn't enough because then the machine is still running. Maybe she has to capture one alive to find out where the machine is. Maybe she has an attack of conscience and wants to do it non-violently.
