Evil Minions

Table of Contents

Written by Dr Clothilde Levert for the attention of the Dark Lord.

Evil Minions are an essential commodity for all Dark Lords worthy of the name. They are an all-in-one tool that is essential for lair maintenance, efficient running of lab experiments, and general evil operations. Thus, having good minions is imperative for achieving our evil goals.
However, minions vary in quality; competence is often lacking, making them require very detailed instructions, regular feedback, and constant supervision, and results in an atrocious waste of resources. Worse, good minions can become damaged through inadequate care. Both cases lead to at best less efficient evil operations, at worse complete failure.
In order to avoid such unfortunate fate, let us examine best practices for the adoption, care, and disposal of evil minions.

Adoption

New evil minions are both easy and hard to find depending on their desired characteristics:

Grunts selling their loyalty to the highest bidder are everywhere. However, never waste time going for religious individuals, as the simple mind of grunts will be unable to cope with any dissonance between their orders and their religious beliefs.

Educated would-be minions are part of a smaller portion of the civil population and so are harder to find. Yet, they are more likely to question the established morals, more susceptible to twisted whispers, and more likely to consider their talents to be underappreciated. Unfortunately, they are more likely to play with philosophy and ethical considerations and have the potential to cause long terms problems.

What works best is individuals with potential but who have lacked the opportunities to realise it so far. This allows us to both earn their gratitude and to shape their mind as we grow their internal world.

Note: Once a potential evil minion has been spotted, proceed with care. Kidnapping and blackmail are not appropriate approaches likely to lead to long term loyalty. Rather present them with a series of small tasks of increasing difficulties and enticing rewards. Once the minions have been properly ensnare by performing sufficiently evil act, reveal your Dark Lordliness and induct them fully into our movement.

Types of evil minions by AmélieIS

Care

Good care of minions is extremely important to ensure they are loyal and in top form to perform their duties. They require a good salary, a work schedule with adequate rest and paid time off, access to excellent health practitioners, and a retirement fund.
It is also important to provide them with enclosure enrichment by giving them toys and small tasks to do in exchange for bonuses. This also has the benefit of making them feel important!
Minions' qualms and attack of conscience are natural occurrences and should not be dismissed out of hand or they will evolve in more serious cases. Frequent dialogue and reassurance prevent skiving off work, and self-sabotage and instead boost moral.
Failures are unavoidable, as minions would not be minions if they had the talents and skills necessary to be more. failures should be treated as a learning occasions and be associated with a resuming of teaching seminars and mild punishments such as pay deductions and undesirable tasks.

Note: It is important to remember that 1) the dead do not have the possibility of learning from their mistakes, 2) overtime only results in tiredness, weakening of attention, and lack of care, all undesirable characteristics in minions.

Evil minion being congratulated by AmélieIS

Disposal

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, minions can sometimes become defective or can refuse to answer the love we offer them with due loyalty. In such cases, the only solutions is to dispose of them and starts anew with better subjects for our affections. However, we need to consider what method works best for minion disposal.
While a bloody end will undoubtedly intimidate others into behaving, it also has some undesirable effects on witnesses, as shear terror also has been shown to impact with memory formation process and will not allow them to learn from the experience. It also affect moral and is not conductive to a productive work-place atmosphere.
A much better alternative is to allow the defective minions to make a final contribution to our evil operations by having them become part of our experiments, thus solving multiple problems all at once, including ensuring a higher quality of our products thanks to the use of human subjects.

Note: In order to facilitate this procedure, the urgent construction of a cell inside the laboratories is highly desirable, as well as an increase of the budget to include the upkeep of the new test subjects.

Appropriate methods of minion disposal by AmélieIS