Follow TV Tropes

Following

Awesomeness Is Volatile

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/MTawesome_3452.png
He'd have worn a Hazmat Suit, but he's too awesome for that.

"God knows what would happen if you spread Branston Pickle onto No More Heroes. Possibly the universe would explode. And it would be awesome."

"Awesome" is a hazardous substance in fiction. Put too much of it together, and dangerous things can happen. Things will blow up, heads can explode/implode, or even the universe could end, all for no other reason than the awesomeness itself caused it.

Probably first created by the Rule of Funny, combined with the fact that explosions are, themselves, awesome (a sort of Transitive Property Of Awesomeness).

A Sub-Trope of Awesomeness Is a Force and Stuff Blowing Up.

Compare Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot (making awesome by a combination of cool things), Nerdgasm, Incendiary Exponent, Reality-Breaking Paradox, Testosterone Poisoning, Big, Bulky Bomb, Readings Blew Up the Scale, Yin-Yang Clash, The Power of Rock, Explosive Overclocking.

Compare/Contrast Suckiness Is Painful.


In-Universe Examples Only:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • Segata Sanshiro does a judo throw on a guy so hard that he explodes. Twice.
  • In a commercial for PS3 motion tracking games, a montage of said games play as a (''real'') operatic duo sings in the background. It all ends when a random houseplant catches on fire, shocking the entire family.
  • The Terry Crews Old Spice commercials tend to include random explosions. Makes sense though, you have a buff black man who uses Old Spice. Can't get much more awesome than that. Of course, they're made by Tim and Eric. On one occasion, Old Spice Guy claimed that if he and his rival Fabio were ever in the same room their combined pizazz would destroy the universe. They did, but thankfully all that happened was a bit of reality rearrangement, some time travel, things went wibbly wobbly, and after a heartfelt speech from Isaiah got past-Fabio to back down, everything went back to normal. *Old Spice jingle whistle*
  • Very heavily used in a commercial for Verizon, wherein Michael Bay spent the entire commercial saying how he doesn't just have things, he has awesome things. And every time he points out an awesome piece of furniture, appliance, or even his POOL, it erupts in a huge fireball. Awesome Barbecue.
  • Nintendo Power will blow up your head, your house, and even the planet itself!

    Anime & Manga 
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
    • Simon and Viral once actually killed an armada of enemies with nothing but the sheer awesome they radiate.
    • It is also canonical that, if Spiral Power is overused, the violation of conservation of mass will create a supermassive black hole and end the universe.
    • Lordgenome also repeatedly sets himself on fire by doing awesome things and generally being Lordgenome.
    • In The Movie version, everybody gets a Tengen Toppa mecha and poses as a team. A galaxy sized volcano spontaneously forms behind them and erupts/explodes (presumably because this is the only way for the universe to contain so much concentrated badass).
  • Getter Robo: The combination sequence of the Getter Emperor is apparently so awesome that it generates energy levels equal to the Big Bang and shakes the universe.
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, the most powerful mages have to have Power Limiters attached to them, even more so if they're in a group together. Otherwise, they'd run the risk of having their sheer combined power potentially warping the fabric of reality, which really happened when Nanoha and Fate fought a Beam-O-War Divine Buster to Thunder Smasher back in Season One over a Jewel Seed.
    • It's also meant to keep unit power levels moderate. Because, let's face it, Hayate is basically a living magical nuke, Nanoha has more firepower than a battleship and Fate can pretty much beat anything she can touch. Those three alone pretty much constitute an army. And then put all three into the same unit.
  • Sengoku Basara. The characters are all so manly and Hot-Blooded that something's bound to spontaneously explode from the sheer overwhelming awesome at least Once an Episode.
  • At one point, the release date for Tiger & Bunny's BTB image song was pushed back two weeks. The "official" reason for the delay was that the awesome combination of elements that comprised it produced an unexpected chemical reaction and blew up the sound studio.
  • Invoked in Excel♡Saga when Nabeshin concludes that anything capable of undoing the "Freaky Friday" Flip in the final episode will have to be highly volatile, so he simply lights a stick of dynamite and holds it out toward those affected. It works.
  • Bleach: A villainous Reality Warper attempts to imagine himself as stronger than Zaraki but instead accidentally tears apart his own body. Although he can imagine meteorites and space vacuum destroying Soul Society, he cannot imagine how any physical body can contain Zaraki's awesome spiritual power.
  • In Kill la Kill, anytime two Three Star Goku Uniform or Kamui users fight, things simply explode. At one point a multi-part explosion was caused simply because Ryuuko and Satsuki were glaring at each other.
  • Parodied in a crossover between Digimon (WonderSwan Series) and Digimon V-Tamer 01 with a Hand Wave that Taichi and Ryo's enemy was a cryokinetic who was weak to hot blooded, allowing them to negate his attempts to freeze Zeromaru and Monodramon through pure passion.
  • When Meliodas and Ban reunite in The Seven Deadly Sins, they get into an impromptu wrestling match that winds up leveling the castle they're in and the top-level spell imprisoning them without actually knowing it's there.
  • In Medaka Box, this is Hinokage's Unknown Hero ability in a nutshell: he's so large, intimidating and awesome that people's minds refuse to see him unless he makes a conscious effort to interact with them. And that was before the series, by the time he appears he's become so awesome that people have trouble remembering him anymore.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • In Gnomeo & Juliet, users of the Terrafirminator are warned in the advert that "In some rare cases, users may explode when viewing the Terrafirminator."
  • The intro dream sequence in Kung Fu Panda has this:
    Po: [narrating] He was so deadly in fact, that his enemies would go blind from over-exposure to pure awesomeness!
  • In this scene from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, Meatwad busts out a guitar solo so face meltingly awesome, and on a two-string toy guitar no less, that he explodes when he finishes.
  • Monsters University: A monster is an awesome scarer if they can scare human adults. Just be sure to get out of there before the screams blow up the door.
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Spongebob's "Goofy Goober Rock" song manages to thwart Plankton's evil scheme with The Power of Rock.
    Plankton: His chops are too righteous! The helmets can't handle this level of Rock and Roll!

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny:
    • JB has a dream sequence in where his singing is so awesome it makes a dude's head explode.
      "I did not mean! To blow your mind! But that shit happens to me... all the time!"
    • A few seconds prior, as he begins his song and turns on his Glass-Shattering Voice, the microphone catches on fire.

    Live-Action TV 
  • It's very often in Super Sentai / Power Rangers team ups for this to occur: Both teams morph, do an Ass Kicking Pose, and then things behind them explode due to how awesome having both teams morph in the same place at the same time is.
  • Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! has a title sequence so awesome that its creators' heads appear to explode into showers of kitten heads. And that's the least concerning thing about the show.
  • In iCarly, it's said the two most powerful warrior classes in a World of Warcraft parody can't fight because the resulting epic battle would be so volatile, it'd destroy the multiverse.

    Pinballs 
  • The playfield and backglass for Flight 2000 features asteroids exploding in space, for no other reason other than because they can.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Adeptus Evangelion your ability to pull off awesome things in your mecha is a stat called Synch ratio, which can change when you get hurt. More=better, at least until you go above 100% at which point it starts to eat your soul alive. Then you pass 200% and essentially attain the power of god. In less than five minutes, you will collapse into Tang. It is sure to be a awesome moment, and a Dying Moment of Awesome.

    Video Games 
  • The Portal of Awesome in Billy vs. SNAKEMAN. If putting two Memetic Badasses together causes that much devastation, imagine what would happen if you did that with seven. If a village's leader is able to open it up, it means the village is about to go down in a blaze of Awesome. Once that happens, everyone in the village gets a bonus, and the leader is allowed to build up an even more awesome village from the ashes. The Wasteland is filled with the fallout of these Awesomizations.
  • Fallen London has spellcasting, but almost the entire cast cannot cast it for this reason. To the amateur magician, The Correspondence may as well be renamed 'fire runes' because reading them has a tendency to set things on fire - except the magic goes even deeper and can burn your corneas, brain, or soul. Usually by exploding. Then there's the Discordance, summarized as 'mysterious amnesia runes' which cause laser-guided anterograde and retrograde amnesia, denial, and an unhealthy tendency to blatantly lie about binary outcomes. Which can also concussively explode.
    • The 'gods' of this setting are master spellcasters, to the point that they can create sentient giant balls of fire made of Correspondence runes. These Logos are meant to blow up your ship and eat anyone in violation of the law.
  • World of Warcraft introduced the Lethal Joke Character "Bard" class as an April Fools joke. The class would wield an axe called "The Facemelter" whose Power Of Rock was sufficient to melt faces.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Memetic Badass Mike Haggar´s Level 3 Hyper, a Spinning Piledriver, explodes on impact with the ground.
  • Rocket League, a game about rocket-powered cars playing soccer, has every goal punctuated with the ball exploding.
  • Used in this hilarious trailer for Strafe, a 90's-stylised first-person shooter with procedurally-generated levels slated for a 2017 release. Poor Trevor.
    Mother: You can't handle the intense gameplay!

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • Mindy suffers an awesomeness-induced coma in this strip of Cinema Bums.
  • Here in Dork Tower:
    "If tvtropes.org had a lovechild with damnyouautocorrect.com, the universe would disappear in a singularity of win, you know..."
  • This is how most Sparks operate in Girl Genius, with Agatha in particular standing out, as evidenced by Vole's report on a local coffee shop in Mechanicsburg.
    Vole: Dere haff been three explosions so far, sir.
    Gil: (Happily) Agatha!
  • Sequential Art: Art creates an image that combines all known fetishes. When Pip looks at it, his head explodes. He's not to complain though.
    Pip: That's some good shit...

    Web Original 
  • SF Debris:
    • It assumes this about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:
      "Ceti Alpha VI just blew up one day. I really have no idea how that just happened. Best guess, Khan took his shirt off, and his genetically enhanced Latin body was just too much for it to take."
    • When reviewing Trials and Tribblelations, Sisko, Spock and Kirk are on the screen at the same time, and Chuck's computer shut down for *ahem* ...personal, reasons...
      "My computer — Ruby — shut down, and I noticed a wet spot under her processor."
  • According to Chuck Norris Facts, if Chuck Norris and Mr. T walk into a room together, that room will explode due to the combined awesomeness being too much to contain. One time, Mr. T once pitied a fool at the exact moment Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked him in the ribs. The result was The '80s.
  • From Badass of the Week, discussing Ellen Ripley, came this line describing how a mecha suit fighting a space monster seemed like something you'd just have to imagine, "the fact that it's an actual scene from a movie makes my head want to implode from the G-force that the "Awesomeness Field" around my computer is generating."
  • As AlternateHistory.com found out:
    "Keira Knightley, along with Natalie Portman may hold the key to the salvation of the Universe itself. If Samuel L. Jackson and Mr. T were to ever team up, they might well keep their beer in the same fridge. Any fridge used by both Jackson and T would be the coolest object known to mankind, so cool that it might slowly bring all atomic motion to a halt. The only way to avert this would be for Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman to make out, thus producing an equivalent level of hotness to counter the sheer coolness of the Jackson/Mr. T fridge."

    Web Videos 
  • The opening title of The Spoony Experiment is a black screen showing the letters: "The following sequence may be the most awesome thing to ever precede a rant on a game or a film. Your head may explode."
  • This one is kind of a Memetic Mutation in Brazil. In a satirical video where resident Memetic Badass Captain Nascimento (from the movie The Elite Squad) was trying to interview Chuck Norris, the two of them started to differ in opinion and it seemed they would break into a fight. Right then both stopped and decided it would be better to call another guest, since the two of them fighting would trigger a chain reaction that would make the universe implode.
  • There is YouTube video of Norio Wakamoto performing a parody of the Giga Drill Break(er). It was bleeped out, and someone in the comments section suggested that it was because, if that combined awesomeness was left unfiltered, it would destroy everything within 15 miles of the speakers.
  • In Chester A. Bum's review of The Expendables, he says that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzeneger being in the same room could have caused the world to explode. He then remarks that, given the movie's love of Stuff Blowing Up, this is exactly what happened.
  • As Allison Pregler is jotting down cool Burt quotes from Tremors 2: Aftershocks, her notebook eventually blows up.

    Western Animation 
  • The Omniscient Council of Vagueness of Metalocalypse believes that the end of the world shall be caused by the Epic Rocking of the main characters' band Dethklok. They seem to be on the ball.
  • In Regular Show, in an attempt to impress Benson by wearing trendy clothing and acting irrelevant, Mordecai and Rigby are brought before an intergalactic court of coolness for becoming so cool that they could potentially create a black hole of coolness that could destroy the universe. They end up being guilty of being too cool after Benson is forced to admit that the two are the coolest people he know, but end up escaping back to Earth with everything back to normal.
  • Grim's guitar solo in the Battle of the Bands episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is so epic that it summons hurricane force winds, causes the entire neighborhood to burst into flames, and cracks the Earth to the point that demons erupt from the bowels of hell.

 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

Note Block Battle

Impressed by their music skills, Green decides to duke it out one last time and turn up the heat by the power of block and roll against his friends.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (5 votes)

Example of:

Main / BattleOfTheBands

Media sources:

Report