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"But it's tough to really care about questions like, 'Why did that happen?' or even 'What's going on?' when you're constantly interrupted by 'Oh my goodness! Giant robots! Wheeee!'"
"So what if the construction of the pyramids didn't really overlap with the existence of the woolly mammoth? Can you honestly say you don't want to see a herd of crazed mammoths stampeding down the ramps of a pyramid in progress?"
The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group.
The Rule Of Cool is another principle that seeks to dispel arguments among fans over implausibility in fiction. It has been cited by animation director Steve Loter (of Kim Possible, Clerks The Animated Series, Tarzan, and American Dragon Jake Long) in response to questions from fans attempting to justify temporary breaches in logical consistency. It is a complement to Bellisario's Maxim and the MST 3 K Mantra.
Of scientific laws that this trope circumvents, the square-cube law is probably the most frequently avoided, with the third law of motion probably a close second.
Note that you only get to invoke the Rule of Cool if the end product is, in fact, cool. Note also that different opinions on what is "cool" create the most arguments over this.
See also Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. Compare Rule Of Funny and Rule Of Fun.
Tropes that exist just because of the Rule Of Cool:
Examples:
Music
- This is the basis of the Lemon Demon song, "The Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny" (which inspired a well-known Flash video
 ), in which Neil Cicierega describes a battle royale started by Godzilla and Batman. As the fight went on, more pop culture icons join in, including Shaquille O'Neal, Abraham Lincoln, Optimus Prime, Jackie Chan, Indiana Jones, the Power Rangers, Chuck Norris, Darth Vader, Superman, Benito Mussolini, and countless others:
The fight raged on for a century,
Many lives were claimed, but eventually
The champion stood, the rest saw their better:
Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater.
- The video for Muse's Knights Of Cydonia features cowboys, androids, birds of prey, seduction, kung fu, rayguns, dirtbikes, execution, Soviet imagery, holographic band members, a unicorn and a half-submerged Statue Of Liberty, and is apparently set in a goldrush town named after the Martian region of Cydonîa. It doesn't make a great deal of sense.
Film
- The canonical definition for this is the utterly preposterous premise of The Matrix, in which robots farm humans for power, using a computer generated reality to placate their minds. This ignores both the first and the second laws of thermodynamics, but who cares? Robots, man!
- Note that the biggest problem most fans have with the second and third movies revolves around this: They just weren't cool enough.
- Also, the whole "humans as a power source" is really a case of Executive Meddling, as the humans were originally scripted to have their nervous systems used to form a giant computer, but was changed as this was somehow seen as too hard to understand.
- For at least this troper, the coolest thing about The Matrix wasn't "Robots, man!" - even though the human-farms were awesome - but the idea (just slightly similar to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) that having found the real nature of the world, the characters weren't bound by the laws of physics and can dodge bullets, bound off buildings and stop time. That was seriously cool.
- In the second Austin Powers movie, Basil Exposition turns to the camera and tells the (young, irritable members of the) audience not to get upset about any contradictions in the Time Travel plot of the story.
- Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, concerning such questions as "Why is Darth Maul here?" and "Why would a security system made of impenetrable force fields go on and off periodically?"
- The revelation in Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones that R2-D2 had the ability to fly was cheered enthusiastically, even though he never showed this ability in the original trilogy, which chronologically occurred after. One possibility is that the flight system just broke down and never got repaired, which would fit with the deliberately greater Used Future quotient of the original trilogy.
- General Grievous would not exist were it not for this trope. An evil alien cyborg general with four arms who hunts Jedi for sport? Hell yes!
- Pretty much anything Quentin Tarantino is involved in, growing more so in proportion to his budget.
- It takes liberal Fridge Logic to see it, but a large proportion of the film version of Stormbreaker is based on this.
- The movie 300. If you're bothered by the fact that Xerxes' army did not, in fact, include cave trolls, ninjas and rhinos, and that Spartans wore armor and had backup, you should recite the MST 3 K Mantra. Either way, the badassery of the movie can be overwhelming to untermensch.
- Snakes On A Plane. Samuel L. Jackson (amongst others) is trapped in an aircraft, and he's particularly incensed about the eponymous reptiles with acted-upon Oedipal complexes. Memetic Mutation was drawn to this movie like flies to stink, and the rest is history.
- The Martial Arts genre wouldn't exist without this trope.
- Everything that happens in the film Shoot'em Up.
- Flynning looks cooler than real fencing. Just ask Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes.
- In the commentary for Serenity, Joss Whedon discusses the scene where the good guys come through the opaque and sensor-killing "ion cloud" followed by an army of Reavers to back them up against the Alliance. Because the cloud kept the Alliance from seeing them coming, it was a perfect cavalry-coming-over-the-hill moment: 'I don't know what an "ion cloud" is, we just made that up. But I would have sold all my knowledge of science to get that scene.' (paraphrased)
- Pretty much all of Hot Fuzz.
- Arguably The Forbidden Kingdom, considering that it had the working title of The J & J Project (the whole point of which was to make the Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan dream fight finally happen on camera; this troper has yet to see that fight being reviewed negatively).
Live Action TV
Animation
- Transformers would probably not exist without this, in just about any incarnation. Several commercials for the 2007 movie were constructed basically of the robots appearing onscreen and onlookers standing around saying "cool."
- Just how did mercurion work in Soukou No Strain? What is it? All we know is it's green. And why was the special ship pink, and what was with the big arm... Well, it looked cool.
- In Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the fight sequences (long enough that you can consider the other scenes "non-fight sequences") consist entirely of "cool", and little to no realism.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, a Humongous Mecha anime where everything the characters or mechs do is subject to Rule Of Cool. Simon and Kamina can actually kill enemies by the sheer awesome they radiate, for God's sake!!! (Note: This is not a joke!)
- This show would not exist without the Rule Of Cool. The fight scenes especially make absolutely no logical sense whatsoever, but it really doesn't matter because they're so awesome. It's like someone's taken the Rule Of Cool and crystallised it into a single mind-blowing gem.
- Much of the Animated Adaptation of Teen Titans is built between the Rule Of Cool and the Rule Of Funny, resulting in quite a bit of varying controversy. Many recurring questions that linger in the fandom are the the identity of Red X, the identity of Slade and the fuel behind his motives, and which of the Robins Robin is. Glen Murakami on the other hand has openly expressed that he couldn't care less about any of these things, so long as the kids liked it and found it cool. In one interview, he uses the word "cool" a good fifteen times to answer just about every other question. Inevitably, the series concluded with more unresolved plotlines than you can count on your hand.
- Lampshaded by Kazuki and actually the motivating reason behind many of Captain Bravo's odd mannerisms in Busou Renkin. "Because it looks cool that way!"
- Mobile Fighter G Gundam relies on this moreso than usual to set itself apart from the rest of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. Among the concepts that walk the infamous thin line between "clever" and "stupid" are a German ninja, a giant robot mummy, and a martial arts master who takes off his sash and uses it to slash an enemy robot in half. The fact that the main character's special technique is called "Shining Finger" is also helped a great deal by this rule.
- Parodied in Invader Zim, where the Virtual Ghost of a Martian justifies their embarking on a ridiculous, pointless project that drove their race into extinction with "Because it's cool."
- One word: Gao Gai Gar. What else can you say about a series where a cyborg combines with an alien robot lion, a bullet train, a drill car, and a stealth fighter to form a Humonguous Robot that uses a Hyperspace Mallet capable of turning whatever it strikes into light particles? And of course, the series features a rather famous Memetic Mutation to explain it all: "With courage, 1% becomes 100%!"
- Near the end of the third season of Re Boot, with the system crashing, "User" characters from every game seen prior to the episode suddenly begin appearing in Mainframe. This is explained by the instability of the system releasing "undeleted RAM" -- but it seems more like a thinly-veiled excuse for a battle royale between the cast and every User at once. Nobody complained.
- Subverted in Metal Fighter Miku. Early in the series, the team's mentor asks the girls to explain the purpose of the robot-like metal suits used in their wrestling league. After one team member gives a detailed explanation of the various computer systems and sensors built into the outfits, he dismisses it all with a simple "Because it looks cool!" In the end, it is revealed that his overarching goal has been to convince everyone to do away with all the pseudo-futuristic glitz and return the sport to the muscle-and-technique competition that wrestling is supposed to be.
- Black Lagoon -- where do we start? A cast consisting entirely of badasses, rounded out by a anti-heroine who is able to backflip seven feet into the air, shoot three people dead mid-jump and has the vision range of a chameleon? A torpedo boat performing a joust against a gunship -- and winning by using a boat-wreck as a ramp and torpedoing it mid-air? A one-eyed seventy year old nun who runs a gun-smuggling 'church of violence' and whose weapon of choice is a golden desert eagle she fires one handed? An invincible terminator maid with a shotgun umbrella?
- Fist Of The North Star, if examined with a critical eye, would collapse under the weight of its Fridge Logic... if not for how it essentially created the Rule Of Cool-based Shonen series. It's hard to complain about the implausbility of the premise when you're trying to retrieve your jaw following the fight scenes.
- Karas is the Sentai series that Power Rangers wishes it could be; it runs on Rule Of Cool. How else can you explain the ludicrously overpowered kick-arse hero who can transform into a jet and a car to combat the rise of blood-drinking Conspicuous CG cyborg demons?
Video Games
- Luminoth Script in Metroid Prime 2. It's a three-dimensional array of lit and unlit nodes, linked by lines, with the shape and which nodes are lit or unlit apparently conveying the message. It's impossible to read or write in two dimensions, needlessly complicated, and likely can't actually convey the amount of information it's shown to... but it looks awesome.
- For that matter, almost any technology in any of the Metroid games exists either to be unnecessarily cool or to be unnecessarily complicated, and often both.
- A good deal of the things Dante from Devil May Cry does. If you don't think that Dante's motorbiking up the vertical walls of the Temen-ni-Gru was cool, your definition might be unnecessarily strict. And that's just one of the most famous. In fact, the core basis of the gameplay is beating shit up and making it look goood. Like rocking on a guitar bearing the soul of a lightning succubus for crowd control.
- Oh yeah, and the bike had flamethrower attachments. (Troper Hivemind! I actually came to this page to add the bike-up-vertical-wall scene...)
- Did we mention that Nero's sword revs like a motorbike? That it revs like a goddamned motorbike?!
- In fact, it's even been theorized that Dante's half-demon background physically forces him to do absolutely everything as awesomely as he possibly can.
- The final battle in Kingdom Hearts 2, where Sora and Riku fight Xemnas, especially the parts when you're floating in space, and you can slice buildings flying at you in half and send them flying back without moving, is so impossible the only explanation is that the laws of physics were breaking. (Though considering what was happening at the end of the game, that's actually not too far-fetched.)
- Painkiller predominantly operates on Rule of Cool. Why is one of the bosses an impossibly enormous zombie/Frankensteins Monster? Why do your weapons include a divine weed whacker with a laser grapple, a shotgun that can fire freezing blasts, a combined rotary cannon and rocket launcher, and a strange weapon that fires shurikens and arcs of electricity? Why can your character turn into a demon, becoming invincible, killing nearly everything in one hit with blasts of inexplicable force, and slowing down time? Because it's cool.
- This is even more true of the Gaiden Game Painkiller: Overdose. Why is your character a wisecracking angel/demon hybrid who makes pop-culture references his backstory couldn't possibly let him know? Why are your first three weapons a disembodied demon head with dangling spine, a redesign of the aforementioned shotgun as a weapon that fires bone shards and petrifying sludge, and a redesign of the aforementioned weed whacker as a magical puzzle cube? Why is one of your stated opponents at the start of the game the Jerkass angel that ordered Daniel around in the original game? Because it's cool.
- Metal Wolf Chaos was probably created with this rule specifically in mind. It's the only logical explanation for why you're playing as the President of the United States battling a coup by the Vice President in a heavily-armed mech.
- Ragnell in the 10th Fire Emblem is said to be indestructible, but in the ending cutscreen it is shown heavily nicked for no other reason than to look cool.
- Super Smash Bros in its entirety is fuled by nothing but Rule Of Cool and Rule Of Fun. There is no other way to justify scenes such as a crossdressing ninja punching a hole through a fighter jet to fight it's anthropomorphic fox pilot or a giant penguin bitchslaping a turtle-dragon.
- Pretty much everything in Red Alert 2.
- And Red Alert 3, too. Armored paratrooper bears, anyone?
Tabletop RP Gs
- This is, in fact, the central rule of the White Wolf tabletop RPG Exalted. Not only do many, many things in the setting exist solely because they're cool, but it's an actual rule -- although it doesn't use that name, it's a mechanical manifestation of it in spirit -- where giving a cool description to accompany an action grants a bonus to perform it.
- The actual Rule of Cool also makes it into Changeling: The Lost by the same company, in the specific context of Dream Combat, and with some caveats appropriate to that.
- Scion, also by the same company, uses the same "stunting" rule as Exalted.
- The open-source game Wushu also thrives on this, giving you dice for every detail that you hammer down for a given action. And everything you describe happens unless the other players veto it.
- Ever wanted to play a wise-cracking time-hopping secret warrior maverick cop with a heart of gold from the future with kung fu powers dual wielding his BFG in one hand and a magitek energy rifle in the other trying to stop evil eunuch sorcerers and cyborg gorillas from replacing the entire history of mankind with their own warped version just by capturing a few places that are heavily tied to the chi of the world? Try Feng Shui. The entire game is pretty much built on every Rule Of Cool trope ever. It makes Exalted look like very Serious Business indeed. Based on a card game called Shadowfist.
- The Eberron campaign setting in Dungeons And Dragons. For one thing, there's a magic train that exists for the sole purpose of players fighting on its roof. Then there's the Lost World continent, the modular magic-powered robots known as the Warforged (who are a PC race!), the dinosaur-riding halflings...
- The small RPG company Atomic Sock Monkey Press has a particular obsession with the Rule of Cool. At least one of their games ("Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot") relies entirely upon the principle behind the Rule to exist. Most games from the company incorporate a rule called "Being Badass," where if the player describes something he does in a particularly cool or effective way, the attempt gets a +2 on the dice roll (and in a game that uses only two six-siders, even +2 is a worthwhile bonus).
- The RPG Fireborn from Fantasy Flight Games was built on this trope, featuring as it does reincarnated dragons. Who fight the forces of darkness in near-future London. With kung fu. As the game progresses, they get flashbacks to when they ruled the ancient world as full-size dragons. Despite straying firmly into I Am Not Making This Up territory, this editor can't help but like it.
- Warhammer 40000. That is all.
Literature
- Beowulf. He is the Rule Of Cool personified. He can hold his breath for several days, rip off the arms of giants, and generally make a nuisance of himself to anyone that isn't awesome enough to hang out with him. The Oldest Ones In The Book and all that.
- On that note, mythological gods and heroes in general, from every culture in the world. That's the whole point of most of them. Hercules, Gilgamesh, the entire cast of The Romance Of Three Kingdoms...all fuelled by Ruleof Cool.
New Media
Misc.
- The vast majority of super-powers fall under this.
- Some wrestling moves (especially the more elaborate finishers) fall into this category; the most obvious one is TNA wrestler Petey Williams' "Canadian Destroyer", a flip piledriver that would break the laws of physics if the opponent weren't helping -- but it looks incredibly awesome, so it doesn't matter too much.
- The legendary Doom comic features the ultimate gut-tearing, demon-shooting, semi-witty-quipping soldier. His cause is just, his faith is strong, and his gun is very, very large.
- This image.◊
- Some of the items sold by such catalogues as Skymall and The Bradford Exchange would never exist were it not for this trope. This editor's personal favorite is the wall-sculpture ''Night Flight''. Depending on your point of view, it's either awesome on top of awesome or actually kind of impressive in terms of sheer ridiculousness.
- This is an explicit rule of design in Magic The Gathering. Pretty much anything can see print if it's cool enough.
- The Rule of Cool most likely explains why people usually portray phoenixes as birds of prey. Granted, herons and ibises (which phoenixes were historically based on) are effective predators in their environments, but they're just not as cool as hawks or eagles.
- [http://wickedpowered.com/d/20070702.html This comic]
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