There was an invocation of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few in a series I enjoy, and while, to an extent, I understand the dilemma it created, at the same time, something about its invocation tended to strike me as...not necessarily wrong, but kind of uncomfortable.
I don’t know that I’ve necessarily been able to articulate it well before, and even now, I don’t know that I could articulate it in direct connection to the series without getting nervy and weird. So instead, I’ll try to explain using an example from another piece of media.
In the 1982 science fiction movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock invokes this trope twice. First when he chooses to cede command of the Enterprise to Admiral Kirk, and second, at the end of the movie when he makes the decision to enter the radiated engine room to manually realign the crystals. In the first instance, it was a minor Starfleet protocol which doesn’t necessarily impact much. In the second case, Spock ends up dying of radiation poisoning, but acknowledges that if he hadn’t made that choice, everyone on the Enterprise would have died.
I don’t think the scene would have had anywhere near the same impact if Spock had invoked the needs of the many in order to justify pushing McCoy into the engine room and making him realign the crystals. Or, for that matter, if it had been used to justify pushing any of the unnamed recruits or generic redshirts in there.
There’s an explicitly villainous version of this in X-Men: The Movie, wherein Magneto creates a machine which can turn ordinary people into mutants, which he believes will decrease the stigma towards mutantkind. The only problem with his machine (aside from incompatible genetics which he was ignorant of) is that the machine needs him to act as a channel for it, and this process will kill him. Instead of sacrificing himself, he chooses to force Rogue to copy his powers and puts her in the machine. His justification is that this is for the good of all mutants, and that he cannot do it himself because he needs to be there to lead them. And Logan calls him out on his willingness to sacrifice a kid in place of himself.
The invocation of this trope in the series I had seen was a bit more like the second one, but if you tried to insist that McCoy was wrong for saying he didn’t want to do it. Or if the X-Men movie had tried to insist that Rogue was wrong for not wanting to get in the machine. The trope reads very differently when it is someone casting themselves as a member of the few, or the one, and choosing to make a sacrifice than it does when it is someone casting themselves as a member of the many in order to justify sacrificing someone else.
