Posted: November 19, 2025

Redshirts

In the original Star Trek series, the teams that went down to the alien planet's surface were made up of the Enterprise's most important officers -- Kirk, Spock, McCoy, sometimes Scotty -- and a random, unnamed security guy. Guess which one got turned into a cube or had the salt sucked out of him or was vaporized by a vindictive, godlike alien.

Because these expendable characters were usually wearing the red shirts of the security division, they became known to fans as "redshirts."

A client recently sent me a novel about a small group of people being hunted by a powerful, well-funded conspiracy. Several times over the course of the story, they have to fight their way out of a tough situation with courage and intelligence. Then, in one of the skirmishes about halfway through, a character I'd come to like was killed. I realized later that the character was a redshirt.

So why would you want to include a sacrificial character? After all, you risk disappointing readers when you kill off someone they like, and you've invested the time and energy is bringing your redshirt to life. The redshirt is worth it because when your characters are in physical danger, killing one of them off is an effective way to up the ante for the rest. When you kill off someone readers have gotten to know, they start asking who else you might dispose of?

The writers of the original Star Trek knew this, which is why so many innocent extras paid with their lives. And while the writers, constrained by a 44-minute episode length, didn't have the luxury of developing the redshirts they sacrificed (at least in the original series -- looking at you, Tasha Yar), watching even an unnamed character die made the danger more real.

Redshirts are most effective when their deaths are simply the result of random attacks rather than meeting some other plot need. If your redshirt dies for storytelling purposes, you undermine the danger that the other characters are in. In Lord of the Rings, for instance, Boromir -- the only major character to die early on -- has compromised his integrity so much that he needs to die to achieve redemption. He's not just hit with a random arrow, so his death doesn't increase the threat to the other characters, who don't need to die for character development reasons.

Of course, you can also go too far. Ask anyone who's read the Red Wedding in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Red Wedding is a scene in which three central characters, whom readers have come to root for, are unexpectedly massacred along with dozens of their kinsmen during what they thought was a wedding celebration. And this is only the most extreme example of Martin killing off characters readers have come to love -- the list is fairly extensive.

Martin maintains that he doesn't kill off any more characters than most fantasy novels. The only difference is that he doesn't exempt characters readers have come to know. And to be fair, his impressive body count does generate tension, though it's less "Who might die next" and more "Who's he going to allow to live?" At a certain point, this approach starts to feel like authorial cruelty.

The key to effective redshirt use is to hit the right balance. Life is sometimes random, and people are killed for no apparent reason. In fact, even outside of adventure novels, killing a character can give you a sense of verisimilitude. But ultimately novels only mimic real life up to a point. Killing off too many random characters can give readers a sense that life within your novel is cruel and arbitrary, and I can't help but feel that's not a good thing.

But get the balance right, and you raise your tension and make your story feel more realistic without inducing despair. Your redshirts need not die in vain.