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"Now damn it, cookie! Square that rig and approach the rail!!"
The famous "12 steps" scene from the climax of Men Of Honor.
"But I still have one more arm to give to the motherland"
Jewish Russian Army volunteer Joseph Trumpeldor upon being asked to reconsider continuing his service following the amputation of his left arm.
How can you possibly make an undeniably Badass character even more badass? Easy; make him lose an eye, or have her get paralyzed from the waist down, or give them some disease from which there is no cure. And...do NOT use the Reset Button. "What?!", you say. "My character must stay injured/handicapped? Simply, yes.
In Real Life, we know how hard it is to accomplish Bad Ass feats in perfect health and condition, so of course anybody that does it with a handicap instantly earns our respect. Imagine how much more awesome that shoot-out is going to be when the audience finds out The Hero...is blind. Imagine the buzz your character will get when they win the judo competition with just one good leg. If done right, a handicapped character even doing something mundane can become a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
It is important that your character's conquest of their physical challenge make sense; not properly explaining their ability to continue to function, let alone functioning on the badass level, will result in a Wall Banger, or worse, your character might become a kind of Sympathetic Sue.
For sake of story, a restrained dose of Applied Phlebotinum is allowed to explain or aid the character's ability to overcome the handicap. This technological or otherwise un-standard aid cannot completely cure or nullify the effects of the injury, that would kill the point of the character triumphing over the handicap. Thus, the Six Million Dollar Man wouldn't count. On the other hand, if the device that helps the character has drawbacks to using it that constantly reminds the character of their issue, well that's cool - e.g. a blind character gets a robotic eye that gives him X-Ray vision, but it won't work in broad daylight...
Some writers will go for extra points by showing how an injury actually unlocked the character's true potential by causing them to discover some heretofore unrealized skill or ability or learning a new one. A Training Montage might be in order to show how the character learned to overcome the handicap. Considerable overlap with Disability Superpower.
Mental challenges count as well. Old age doesn't as there are several Bad Asses that become even badder with age.
One of the few tropes where you might see it more in Real Life than in any fiction; it's what happens when people don't accept Sorry Billy But You Just Dont Have Legs as an answer.
Of course, it annoys real-life disabled people often enough, too, when they are expected to follow this trope and be "inspirational" instead of just going about their lives, possibly (God forbid) wanting accomodations. Well, at least it isn't vomit-inducing pity.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Killy from Blame! spends a majority of the manga in peak condition, but by the final chapter, had lost a leg and the sight in his right eye. This forces him to replace his leg with a piece of scrap metal, earning him the affectionate nickname "Pirate Killy". This doesn't slow him down in the least.
- Sara from Samurai Champloo, who despite (or possibly because of) being blind, is easily one of the most powerful warriors in the series, easily capable of defeating the already insanely skilled and Bad Ass protagonists in a one on one duel.
- Ryuuto Asamiya, a.k.a. Odin from Kenichi The Mightiest Disciple, is rendered wheelchair-bound after his fight with the titular protagonist, yet is shown to be still capable of an impressive level of combat despite this. Also noteworthy is Takeda Ikki, a boxer whose left arm was unusable in a fight before fighting Kenichi. After the fight, Kenichi's Jujutsu master Akisame is able to repair the damage and give Takeda full use of his arm again.
- Jean Havoc. in Fullmetal Alchemist. Not to mention Corporal Mustang in the first anime's movie.
- And, of course, Izumi Curtis. Missing her entire uterus and a portion of her intestine detracts in no way from the sheer aura of asskicking that woman emanates.
- And then, arguably, there's Ed himself. He's a double amputee with two automail limbs, you know - and both anime and manga are at pains to point out that although they're badass they're still painful, inconvenient, and imperfect - in other words, the show's automail users are not Six Million Dollar Men and still deal with an impairment.
- Other automail-using badasses include Paninya (automail legs with freakin' cannons in them) and lately in the manga, Lan Fan, who not only battles through agonising automail surgery in record time, but has a retractable sword built into her arm.
- Chapter 102 adds another one to the list — Colonel Mustang, now blind after going through the Gate.
- Dragon Shiryu, later Cygnus Hyoga and Kraken Isaac in Saint Seiya. Subverted with Virgo Shaka, who like Kenpachi purposely handicaps himself (in his case, by closing his eyes despite not being blind)
- Rosette Christopher from Chrono Crusade. A generous estimate gives her life expectancy to be no greater than thirty, but god damn if she isn't going to spend those years being as Hot Blooded as possible.
- Berserk: Guts cuts his own arm off, in a desperate attempt to save Casca from being raped by Griffith, but it is later replaced by a metal version (that has a built in cannon).
- Not long after losing he arm he loses his right eye.
- Sora from Air Gear can run as well as many other AT users on the series, if not better. On wheelchairs.
- Early in the series, Red-Haired Shanks of One Piece loses an arm to a sea monster. He goes on to become one of the four most dangerous pirates in the world. Outside of the other three, nobody screws with him.
- It's mentioned that, previous to losing his arm, he'd regularly sparred with the best swordsman in the world, Dracule "Hawkeye" Mihawk, who defeats Zoro literally without trying and nearly kills him.
- The first chapter of One Piece shows Shanks doing a couple of things of things primarily with his left hand (holding booze, eating.) He also wears his sword on the right hip, which would imply that he was left-handed. Word Of God states that losing his left arm hasn't diminished his fighting ability at all. That makes no sense at all, but it's still freaking awesome.
- According to the Other Wiki, left handed people can develop ambidexterity much more easily then right handed people. When you think about it, it isn't all that unbelievable.
- Kaname Tousen of Bleach. Despite being blind, he's Captain of the 9th Division, has incredible spiritual power that acts as a substitute for sight, and even managed to give Blood Knight Kenpachi a hard time. His blindness is also one of the causes for his friendship with Sajin Komamura, as he was unable to see Komamura's face, making him the first person to befriend Komamura instead of treating him like an outcast.
- Kenpachi could arguably qualify as well, he's the only captain who can't use bankai. He can't use his zanpakuto properly, but he still knocks over Nnoitra, the 5th strongest Espada, just by swinging his sword with two hands instead of one.
- Kenpachi definitely qualifies. He hasn't achieved his bankai, nor does he use kido or Flash Steps in combat, but he can still outmatch two captain-level opponents at once without using his full power - even when both opponents have released their bankai.
- Soifon enters the ranking of the handicapped badasses when her arm is affected by Barragan's powers and she forces Omaeda to use his zanpakutou to cut it off.
- Not long afterwards, Hachi's arm is also affected, so he severs it with one of his barriers...and plonks it right into Barragan's stomach, finally killing the Espada.
- Probably one of the reasons why the fandom ate up the concept of Cinque in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. Enemy Little Miss Badass? Nice, but we've seen lots of that in previous seasons. Enemy Little Miss Badass who lost an eye in battle and doesn't let that little problem keep her out of the front lines? Ensemble Darkhorse. Similarities to a certain Metal Gear character has been noted.
- Played with in Basilisk. Hyouma Muroga from the Kouga Manjidani is a mighty swordsman and mentor as well as The Lancer to both his leader Danjou and his nephew/adoptive son Gennosuke - but either due to eyesight problems (original novel) or being Blessed With Suck due to Power Incontinence (anime and manga), he can't use his eyes, linked ot his special powers. He still remains a really powerful fighter and excellent strategist.
- Played straight, though, with Koushirou Chikuma from the Iga Tsubagakure. Ironically, he is the one who defeats and kills Hyouma, since he was already blinded when they fought... and Hyouma's doujutsu powers do NOT work on a blind opponent.
- Also, Gennosuke himself spends about half the story as one, thanks to the Seven Days Ointment that forces his eyes sealed
- Let's not forget Jubei Jimushi, who has no limbs but can still use his extra-long tongue to either handle his pipe or use a small sword. He's the one who kills Tenzen for the first time, after all. Too bad Tenzen's power is coming back from the dead...
- GaReiZero Ayame Jinguuji, with an awesome wheelchair and minigun prosthetic leg.
- Gundam Seed Destiny Andrew Wattfield has a prosthetic leg and aem, and is missing an eye, but doesn't stop him from taking down perfectly healthy Coordinator assassins. Kinda helps his prosthetic hand doubles as a shotgun, though.
- Kinnikuman has Terryman, who took a bullet to the leg for the title character and decides to retire to his ranch in depression, before Kinikkuman manages to get him back in the ring. A few chapters later, however, his false leg is revealed- sending him back into depression as his fans disown him; however, we meet (arguably) another Handicapped Badass- a young kid in a wheelchair, who also uses a false leg and finds inspiration in Terryman. When Terryman's own leg is stolen by Kinkotsuman, the kid grabs onto his hero's leg and holds on, despite being attacked by the evil Choujin. This gives new hope to Terryman, who gets even stronger in future chapters.
- Also of note is Warsman, who has a mechanical body that frequently malfunctions, especially if a fight begins to drag out for too long.
- Monster: Roberto's right arm and hand are crippled after being shot by Tenma. It's strong enough to choke you so hard that your tongue pokes out, but not strong enough to actually kill you. His left, on the other hand...
- Kurogane of TsubasaReservoirChronicle is missing his left arm. He cut it off himself to save somebody because he's just that much of a badass.
- While his primary role in Corsair is that of an extreme woobie, there is still a certain badassness about Canale, perhaps best exemplified by his effortless victory in a duel with another pirate, despite the fact that he's blind.
- Yu Yu Hakusho has King Yomi, who was blinded by an assassin hundreds of years ago sent by his former partner, Yoko Kurama. To counteract this, he grew four extra ears to allow him to "hear" his surroundings. Despite his blindness, he manages to grow in power from A to S Class, take over an entire third of the Makai, curbstomp his cloned son Shura in a fight, and defeat Yusuke during the hero's final fight in the series. The most impressive of all his feats? He manages to force Kurama into an alliance with him, by having one demon threaten to sabotage his parents' honeymoon flight, and having another demon keep track of his stepbrother, all the while flaunting his superior firepower to make sure Kurama doesn't simply try to kill either demon threatening his family or Yomi himself.
Comic Books
- X-Men Professor X's wheelchair doesn't lessen his badassness.
- Barbara Gordon - the first Batgirl - gets shot through the spine and paralyzed. Instead of retiring, she becomes an information broker under the name Oracle, and she can still hold her own in a fight.
- To be precise, she becomes the greatest source of info in the DCU, leader of the Birds of Prey, member of the JLA, the hero who can pick up hundreds of millions from a supervillain's secret account and employ them somewhere else, the one who can break the Internet should she so wish
- And who beats the shit out of Spy-Smasher when the latter threatens to take over her operation.
- Tony Stark. The chest injury he suffers leads to the creation of the arc reactor. Also, in the comics, Stark becomes paralyzed and has to rely on a armor suit powered by his thoughts alone.
- Hawkeye of The Avengers handicapped himself by putting a sonic arrow in his mouth to counter an attack. He used hearing aids after that. Eventually another writer cured him of his deafness altogether, but it deserves the mention for the time he was deaf.
- There's also Rose and Thorn, whose handicap is that she has a split personality. Rose is mild-mannered and sweet. Thorn is a bit of a vamp and very much a Bad Ass.
- New Avenger Echo was born deaf, but makes up for it with photographic reflexes.
- The Condor Knight, from "The 7 Lives of the Sparrowhawk" ("Les 7 Vies de L'épervier" in French) is a hell of a kind. Despite losing an entire arm, an eye and being like, fifty years old, he is certainly the most dangerous swordsman of the entire world. With his handicaps, he has defeated more than 125 people in single combat and be said to have wiped out entire indians tribes and we don't even talk about before his accidents.
- In Dark Knight Returns, Green Arrow turns up missing an arm. He says it hurts when the weather turns cold. Later in the story he hangs upside down from a fire escape to shoot Superman with a kryptonite arrow, pulling the string with his teeth.
- Every Cobra Warrior of Peng Lai in Immortal Iron Fist is handicapped in one way or another, and freaking insanely hardcore. While the only one we've ever directly seen is the gargantuanly obese and unerringly awesome Fat Cobra, we hear of such luminaries as the ancient Old Cobra, One-Armed Cobra, and Blind Cobra.
- Master Wolf from Star Wars Legacy. Wolf lost his right arm in a fight with Darth Nihil and didn't replace it with a prosthetic, instead just training his left arm to use a lightsaber.
Fan Fiction
- Reading all the INCREDIBLE exploits of Rukth 'Kilkar, it's almost easy to forget that he's effortlessly slaughtering hundreds of Brutes with only one eye. Later, his compatriot Zerat 'Omdolo loses his left eye as well, though as Zerat is a sniper instead of a close-combat specialist like Rukth, this is a bigger deal.
- Cassandra Cain in "Settling Accounts". Despite a spinal cord injury that leaves her totally paralyzed from the neck down, she manages to face down her psychotic father alone and defeat him thanks to a spring-loaded, poison-tipped dagger she had someone tape to her paralyzed arm. A subversion of Disabled Means Helpless. Her injury leaves her unable to even feed herself, but she remains anything but helpless.
Film
- Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, who travels from town to town as a common masseur but keeps a sword hidden in his cane just in case. He slashes through hundreds of victims in 26 films and a TV series.
- Blind Fury is an American remake of film 17 of the Zatoichi series. It stars Rutger Hauer as an American soldier who gets blinded by an explosion during the Vietnam War. With the help of some friendly locals (shown via Training Montage) he learns to kick all kinds of ass while blind, then returns to America as a traveling swordsman.
- Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump remains a rough and tumble guy even after getting his feet blown off.
- The quote above comes from the film Men Of Honor in which the real life Carl Brashear, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., not only becomes the Navy's first Black Master Diver; he does it after he loses his leg in an accident at sea. In that climactic scene he has to walk 12 steps in a Diving suit. The badassness takes on new levels when you realize most of us with two legs wouldn't have been able to do it.
- Col. Frank Slade in Scent Of A Woman can drive, tango, and choke people who piss him off... blind.
- John J. Macready, played by Spencer Tracy, who could've been the trope namer. Featured in Bad Day At Black Rock.
- The Terminator reached maximum badassability when he had to rip off his own arm.
- In Star Wars:
- Darth Vader, who manages to be a semi-invincible Big Bad despite missing both hands, one entire arm, and both legs, the entire remainder of his body covered in third-degree burns, and having to wear a life support suit all the time. Episode III implies that, had he not been so injured, his Force abilities would have surpassed even the Emperor's; as it is, he's still strong enough to ultimately defeat him.
- General Grievious uses his cyborg body to outfight several Jedi at the same time. After getting his chest crushed by Count Dooku just before the start of the second film, however, he's more of a genuine handicapped badass and puts up only a moderate fight against Obi-wan.
- Han Solo gets his moment at the beginning of Return Of The Jedi. Shooting a tentacle? Meh. Shooting a tentacle while blind? Awesome.
- The character in the Chop Socky movie who undertakes the titular Iron Fist Treatment kicks ass using Kung Fu with only one arm.
- Lord Blakeney from Master And Commander. One-armed and commanding a ship during an epic sea-battle... and his voice hasn't even broken.
- The eponymous heroes from the kung fu movies One-Armed Swordsman and One-Armed Boxer are all about this trope. In One-Armed Boxer vs. Flying Guillotine, the Master of the Flying Guillotine is a blind man who uses his exceptional hearing. He goes on a killing spree hunting down one-armed men, several of whom are martial artists.
- Ash from the Evil Dead movies becomes a Badass when he cut off his own demon-possessed hand with a chainsaw, then mounts the chainsaw to the stump and uses it to saw off a shotgun for his other hand.
- Used in the 70's Kung Fu flick The Crippled Masters. Lee Ho has no arms, Tang has no legs, together they fight crime.
- John Creasy, played by Denzel Washington in Man On Fire will simply not let a few bullet holes and massive internal bleeding stop him from opening a holy can of whoop-ass on a slew of corrupt Mexican officials who have killed a little girl he was guarding.
- The grandfather in the Spy Kids trilogy. He was played by Ricardo Montalbán, who really was confined to a wheelchair in his latter years.
- In Darkman, Darkman's nemesis Durant has a wooden leg that hides a machinegun.
- In the newest Sherlock Holmes movie, Doctor Watson walks with a cane, that doubles as a deft weapon when he goes into ass-kicking mode.
- During the movie, he's caught in an explosion and his arm winds up in a cast. Only moments later he is shown knuckling up with the bad guys as Holmes and Irene play with some terrorist contraption.
Literature
- Sniper Nessa Borough of Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts series is one of the best snipers in the Tanith regiment, despite being completely deaf. A couple of other characters also retain their badassery after being handicapped, such as "Shoggy" Domor, who is blinded, and Sergeant Varl, who lost an arm - through it got replaced with a bionic augmetic limb that can punch people's heads off.
- Lois Mc Master Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan, whose brittle bones and stunted growth arguably enhance his badassitude.
- His mother implies that if he had grown up normally and been treated like anyone else, he would have been an intelligent and valued military officer. Due to his diabilities and his society's extreme phobia of mutations, he has to work harder to overcome their expectations and ends up overshooting them by miles.
- In Doris Egan's Gate of Ivory, Eln Cormallon, who was born without sorcerous abilities in a family whose business is sorcery, then was left unable to walk as a youngster. He compensated by studying sorcery more deeply and learning more about the theory of it than any of its practitioners have done, to the point of being supremely dangerous when involved in a sorcerer's duel.
- In Mary Gentle's The Golden Witchbreed, Ruric amari is a one-armed warrior in a society where warriors fight with two swords, one in either hand. She is the T'An Commander of the army of the Southland.
- Stephen King's The Dark Tower': Susannah Dean. Her legs were hit by a train as a child, but she still went on to join Roland's ka-tet and be awesome.
- Roland is a lesser example, remaining a badass gunslinger after getting three fingers on his dominant hand chewed off, and later on having to deal with arthritis.
- In Sarah Monette's Doctrine Of Labyrinths series, Mildmay the Fox has near crippling self-esteem issues and one of his legs is literally crippled at the end of the first book, leaving him in near constant pain when he walks and unable to get around without a cane. He still manages to be the biggest Bad Ass in the book and accomplishes a few feats that most able-bodied people would probably have died attempting.
- Bobby Clark in Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak series of detective novels. Epitomises this trope by having no legs yet still being a very Scary Black Man when occasionally necessary.
- In the final showdown of Matthew Stover's Heroes Die, Caine/Hari Michaelson suffers injuries that render him semi-crippled for the rest of his life. This only serves to increase his awesomeness in the sequels, as he now has to pull off all his impossible stunts and insane schemes without the use of his legs. And he does.
- It seems that Captain/Admiral Honor Harrington only gets badder with every major injury and amputation she suffers.
- In the Animorphs book The Ultimate, Jake (the leader, who's been toughening up the last 2-3 years to fight Yeerks) gets flipped by James (a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair). A Crowning Moment Of Awesome for a relatively minor character.
- In The Belgariad, King Cho-Hag of Algaria can barely walk, due to a childhood illness. That doesn't stop him from being able to outride, outfight and outthink anyone or anything that threatens him or his people. As one character notes, when your society is based around horses, not being able to walk stops being such a problem.
- Maedhros from The Silmarillion was a strong elf warrior who was captured by Morgoth and hung by his right hand halfway up a cliff. He was only rescued by having his right hand cut off—and when he'd recovered from his imprisonment, he went on to be a more badass warrior with his left hand than he was with his right, despite being right-handed.
- Beren Erchamion's right hand was bitten off by a giant wolf...after he'd accomplished most, but not all, of the deeds for which he became famous. ("Erchamion" means "one-handed.")
- In The Sword of Truth there is a blind sorceress named Adie. When twenty soldiers came to arrest her, they never had time to flinch. Somewhat subverted, though, when she runs into the Pristinely Ungifted; since she uses her magic to make up for her lack of sight, she can't even detect them unless they make some noise.
- In Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye, little Henry Chinaski meets a kid called Red, who has a prosthetic arm. When some bullies come and start hitting them, Red beats them senseless with his fake arm.
- Captain Ahab, anyone?
- Nobody's mentioned Mad-Eye Moody yet? Over the course of his career as an Auror, he loses an eye and a leg (not to mention a chunk of his nose). He remains a badass, using a wooden leg and a magically-enhanced prosthetic eye.
- Yang Guo in Return Of The Condor Heroes. His right arm got chopped-off, but he still manage to master using a BFS with his remaining left arm and develop a very powerful Ki Attack .
- Bionicle's Vezon, although never actually fighting, manages to remain a main character, not dead, unbelievably unscathed after being captured by the worst torture master in the MU (with the building collapsing), and unmutated by Pit Mutagen. So what makes him better than Badass Normal? He doesn't have powers, and considering how almost every breathing thing in the MU has some power or other, that's pretty crippling. He also doesn't have much of a mind, so the mental handicap comes into play.
Live Action TV
- Ironside
 (Raymond Burr in a wheelchair, 1967-1975)
- Ironside was a piker. Mike Longstreet was blind. And studied martial arts. With Bruce Lee. Bruce Friggin' Lee.
- More famously, Captain Picard. It is revealed in Tapestry that a hot-headed Picard got into a bar fight and got stabbed in the chest, requiring an artificial heart to be put in. It worked reasonably well until he was shot during a riot. It takes on greater significance because the audience learns the fight, as well as Picard losing his original heart, is what ultimately led to him becoming a galaxy-class Bad Ass.
- General Martok of Deep Space Nine is the classic example of a Handicapped Badass. He loses an eye from several successive no-holds-barred fights with Jem'Haddar, then carries on the war and eventually heads the Klingon Empire with only ONE EYE because "I DO NOT WANT AN OCULAR IMPLANT!"
- Mr. Spock was this temporarily when he was accidentally blinded. Oh, and the time he, y'know,..died. He got better though....
- Lt. Commander Geordi LaForge, "a man with unique vision".
- Dr. Gregory House.
- inverted and Played with on Lost. The Bald Of Awesome is revealed to have been paralyzed in the past, then revealed that his paralyzed self was weak and sad, then revealed that he was a sad little creature even before he was paralyzed. then reveled that he was using the Idiot Ball all through the seasons even after he was healed.
- In Breaking Bad, the protagonist's Reign of Badass began with his diagnosis of terminal cancer.
- In the Stargate SG-1 movie Continuum Daniel Jackson loses his leg. Still doesn't stop him from busting caps in the Go'auld.
- Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell shattered his leg in the battle against Anubis. He still has pins holding his leg together. He is also a Colonel Badass.
- Little known fact about Michael Knight. In the pilot, Detective Michael Long is shot in the face by a traitorous bitch. The only thing that saves him is a metal plate in his cranium from a war injury suffered ostensibly in Vietnam. The reconstructive surgery results in him becoming the Knight Rider.
- During the intro to the second season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron suffers damage to her leg that limits her to a slow, unsteady limp. Naturally, while she is limping, Cameron becomes an order of magnitude more terrifying as she hunts the Connors.
- Col. Tigh in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica has his eye plucked out between the second and third seasons, and if anything becomes more badass as a result.
- Doctor Who has Davros, an Omnicidal Maniac who only has one eye and the use of one hand. Despite this, he and his Daleks are two of the most feared monsters in the show. Think Stephen Hawking aged several hundred years.
- The Doctor himself was this for a fraction of a second when he got his hand cut off in the 2nd Christmas special.
- In Firefly, the Alliance's brutal and unethical mental enhancement and training exercises leave River Tam with a case of borderline psychosis. It's unclear if she's a stone cold badass because or in spite of this.
- Her psychosis is considered an acceptable side effect since it doesnt impede her ability to kill people once she has been given the command phrase.
- Jack Bauer has just joined this trope. 24 being the kind of show it is, we have to see if it sticks.
- After Omar breaks his leg jumping from a window in The Wire, he proceeds to kick five kinds of ass all over Baltimore. On one leg.
Mythology
- Norse god Odin has one eye — and sees everything.
- In his case, he traded away the other one, and the recipient can now see everything too.
- Tyr's right hand was bitten off by a wolf (and yes, he's right-handed). He's still the deadliest swordsman in Norse mythology.
- Osiris of the Egyptian pantheon is dead and his penis has been eaten by a crocodile. This doesn't stop him from being one of the strongest gods, or from siring a son.
- And there is the blind Samson, too.
- In Welsh legends about King Arthur (possibly the oldest stratum of the Arthurian legend) Bedwyr, better known as Sir Bedivere, is one-handed, but wields a spear to great effect.
Theatre
- Richard (the one who would become Richard III), in Henry VI part 3. He's got a humpback, a weak arm, and one leg's shorter than the other, but he is frankly amazing in battle, and he matches Young Clifford blow for blow when they duel.
Video Games
- Baiken from Guilty Gear is a Badass one-armed, one-eyed swordswoman.
- Big Boss lost an eye, but never lost a trace of his badassness. He becomes even cooler as an old man.
- His son(s) aren't far behind though Old Snake cheats his old age and disease ridden body with a nano machine enhanced power suit.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4 Raiden seems to have more artificial limbs and organs than real ones, to the point that he runs completely on synthetic white android blood. This does not slow him down at all, but his real Handicapped Badass moment comes, when he has to come to Snakes rescue after having lost both of his arms. Again, with hand-like cyborg feet, this doesn't slow him down at all.
- Xiahou Dun from Dynasty Warriors would also count: after being shot in the eye with an arrow, he plucked it out (arrow and eye) and proceeded to eat his own eyeball in plain view of enemy soldiers. Badass.
- He is actually a real historical figure who did have only one eye, though the story of the loss of his eye was most likely made more dramatic for the novel on which the game is based. Not that he wasn't a total badass.
- To further this trope, Dun, minus one eye, tracked down the poor sod who had fired the arrow and killed him.
- Oro, the one-armed Badass Grandpa from Street Fighter III.
- Pox from the first Destroy All Humans!, and in the sequels after he gets destroyed and gets his consciousness stored in a HoloPox Unit.
- Bentley of Sly Cooper mixes this with Genius Cripple, becoming a better fighter than before after he became wheelchair-bound by building a bunch of stuff onto his wheelchair.
- A slightly less extreme variation, Duster from Mother 3 has a leg injury that gives him a limp when he walks. Oddly enough, he can run, scale walls, and even use kicks as a primary attack through the entire game.
- What? All this time and no Kenny Kawaguchi? For shame. In a wheelchair, he can kick a football farther than most NFL players.
- Date Masamune and Chousokabe Motochika from Sengoku Basara are both missing an eye, but it doesn't stop them kicking copious amounts of ass.
- The Demoman from Team Fortress 2. He's a one-eyed black Scotsman and despite his lack of a functioning liver and depth perception, he still rocks.
- Birdie, the leader of the Turnbull AC's skinhead gang in the video-game adaptation of The Warriors. He's confined to a wheelchair and can only defend himself by using a gun - and his followers are STILL intimidated by him. ("Why don't you use your goddamn good legs of yours and FETCH ME A FUCKING SIX-PACK!")
- Malik from Assassins Creed. He loses an entire arm early on and yet later leads five or six fellow assassins against a small army. Successfully. With him fighting in the front.
Web Animation
- Cortez from The Leet World is the best shooter in the house, despite being near-blind. Instead, he uses his acute hearing to track targets, and was the only housemate able to land a hit when a HAXed-up Ahmad went into Flash Step mode.
Web Comics
- Last Resort has Daisy Archanis with a robotic leg. There's plenty of nifty stuff to do with it... assuming she can keep her balance.
Western Animation
- Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond. He has to walk with a cane. Which doesn't stop him from beating information out of one of the Jokerz with it.
- Hoss Delgado from The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy is missing both an eye and a hand. (The latter is a reference to Ash from the Evil Dead films, see above.)
- Joe Swanson of Family Guy is paralyzed from the waist down, but can still kick some major ass.
- Toph, from Avatar The Last Airbender. She's small and blind and innocent-looking and is perhaps the best Earthbender the world has ever known. After being kidnapped, stuffed in a metal cage, and carted over bumpy dirt roads for a while she decides she's had enough of that shit and bends the metal to escape, a feat previously thought to be impossible.
- Nowhere near as badass as Toph, but still awesome: Minor character Teo has a flying wheelchair. His Gadgeteer Genius father may have built the thing, but only his own kickassery could have allowed him to rival Aang in stunt flying.
- Inverted in a Boondocks episode, in which Granddad gets tripped by a mean old blind and black man. Huey seems convinced that the man must be one of those Samurai, so sensitive ot movement around them that they are somehow superior fighters in battle compared to those with sight. Granddad spends a lot of time getting in shape preparing to get him back; but it turns out he was just a blind man who had gotten lucky, and ends up getting killed by Granddad. Oops.
- Cotton Hill from King Of The Hill. Dude has no shins but is still able to take on a group of able-bodied orderlies. A feat made even more badass by the fact that he was pushing 80.
- Nobody's talking about Garrett Miller yet? He's up to eleven paraplegic badass.
- Armond from Mummies Alive has only one arm but you'd never notice the way he pulls off that Egypt-su. The awesome is slightly diminshed when he gets a mechanical arm to replace the missing limb when he gets his power-up armor.
Jokes
- There is a Joke about Brezhnev who calls an advisor and first asks him who defeated Napoleon in Russia, then, who defeated him in a naval battle, then, who won the Six Days War. In the end he says - "Listen, our Minister of Defence - let's put out one of his eyes."
Real Life
- Former Yankees pitcher Jim Abbott. That man is a true badass.
- Very similarly, Giants pitcher Dave Dravecky.
- Pete Gray. Pitching with one hand? Do-able. Batting with one hand? Playing the outfield with one hand? Not possible. He did it. And it was his good hand he lost as a child.
- Any Paralympian.
- Of special note: Polish Paralympians consistently perform better than regular Olympians.
- Also of special note: Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius (the 'fastest man on no legs', as some have called him), who snagged a bronze medal - in an able-bodied event in Switzerland.
- General Moshe Dayan of the Israeli Defense Forces and his Eyepatch Of Power.
- Another Jew in a Bad Ass trope listing? I'm sensing a pattern here....
- One? You are forgetting Joseph Trumpeldor.
- A wheelchair from a crippling case of polio couldn't stop the inherent awesomeness of President Franklin Roosevelt.
- By all accounts, the qualities of leadership and courage for which he's so renowned were developed as an unexpected side-effect of his condition. For instance, he developed his social conscience thanks to the warm welcome he received from impoverished locals after he set up a rehab clinic for himself in Georgia.
- JFK, too, may have acquired some of those qualities from coping with Addison's disease.
- And having a crippling back injury.
- Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Uber-Evil Bastard Adolf Hitler.
- Emperor Claudius of Rome. As he points out in I Claudius, he survived the treachery of the Roman ruling family with his disabilities (stutter, limp, and rumored to be mentally challenged), when so many others got killed.
- Claudius was most definitely not mentally challenged. The man was one of the most respected Roman politicians of the time, and developed his own form of public speaking to accommodate his disability. In an age where you stood to speak, and held the floor until you sat down...Claudius could silence an entire room from his chair.
- Stephen Hawking. Really. At the time of his ALS diagnosis, he was given 3 years to live. That was 45 years ago. He's held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, the same post held by Isaac Newton, for 30 years, as of his retirement from it this year. In 1985, he contracted pneumonia, and was not expected to survive, but did. He's widely acknowledged as one of the greatest scientific minds of our time (trying to keep up will make Your Head Asplode), and one of the major contributors to lay (non-specialist) knowledge of physics. Talk about your determinator.
- Richard "Rick" Allen, drummer for Def Leppard. He still plays with the band despite having lost his left arm in an accident.
- Tony Iommi, guitarist of Black Sabbath, plays even after losing the tips of two fingers on his fretting hand in a welding accident.
- Similarly, Django Reinhart became famous as a guitar player after losing the use of two fingers on one hand in a fire.
- In fact, Iommi's injury led to him downtuning his guitar in order to allow his self-made prosthetic fingertips to grip the strings better. That's right, his injury was partially behind the creation of heavy metal, something nobody else aside from his bandmates can hold a claim to.
- Beethoven, who composed some of his most beloved works while he was mostly deaf?
- Not to mention he was alleged to have suffered from bipolar disorder and (later in life) a crippling case of lead poisoning that may or may not have led to his death (scholars disagree on that point).
- The late Irish poet Christy Brown (portrayed, with an Oscar-winning performance by Daniel Day Lewis, in the film My Left Foot). Brown had severe cerebral palsy, to the point that the only body part he could control was his left leg and foot. He used that foot to write (holding a pencil with his toes) nine books of poetry, kick footballs, and beat the crap out of rude drunks Brown encountered at his favorite pub.
- Aaron Fotheringham, for both his accomplishment as an athlete and his self-awareness as a role model (already, in his mid-teens).
- Zach Gowen, former WWE wrestler and current indy-circuit regular. He specializes in flips and aerial maneuvers, which is dime-a-dozen in the American indies... except he only has one leg. He really is the proverbial one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, and always represents himself quite well in said contests.
- Also Kerry von Erich, who managed to hide his amputated right foot from the whole WWE rooster while still wrestling.
- Former WWE megastar and current TNA demi god Kurt Angle legitimately won a 1996 Olympic gold medal in wrestling, with a broken freaking neck.
- Sir Douglas Bader. World War 2 fighter ace - despite needing two artificial legs. Was captured by the Germans had made a POW, escaped, was recaptured and sent to Colditz. Ended the war with 22 aerial victories to his name.
- He was such a success because of his handicap, not in spite of. Since he had no legs, his blood stayed in his torso and head, thus allowing him to handle more Gs then other pilots.
- That is an urban legend that has yet to be confirmed, and anyway Bader's badassery stands, since you shouldn't be able to pull any turns of any kind in any kind of plane without legs... Oh, and you missed the part where he escaped from a friggin' prison camp!
- According to one documentary, the only way his German captors could keep him contained was by taking his artificial legs each night.
- Besides, it says enough of his character that this guy was dead set to fly combat aircraft in service to his country despite having no legs to earn my respect. Especially when you consider the fact that self-inflicted injuries to avoid going to war are not unheard of.
- Vice Admiral of the White Horatio Nelson lost most of one arm and the sight in one eye, yet was still a badass naval tactician.
- Nelson used his handicaps to increase his badassitude. At the battle of Copenhagen he chose to ignore a signal to retreat. The order was sent by signal flags; Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye and said, "I really do not see the signal!"
- As noted above, Naval Master Chief Carl Brashear and his "one" good leg.
- Jean-Pierre Hallet, Belgian ethnologist and author of books like Congo Kitabu. While trying to get food for a starving Congo tribe, he got his right hand blown off, his wrist bones and his bracelet were blasted into his face and body, and he was blown out of his canoe into crocodile-infested waters. He then made it to shore, hiked out to his jeep, and drove about a hundred miles through mountain roads to get to a hospital. Top that! And he continued to work in the Belgian Congo for years afterward, winning over a hundred awards, becoming known as the Abe Lincoln of the Congo for his work with pygmy tribes, and even getting a Nobel Peace prize nomination.
- Jessica Cox was born without arms but learned to fly a plane with her feet.
- Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was left with only the use of his left eyelid following a stroke. By having someone repeatedly recite the alphabet to him and blinking when the correct letter was reached, he was able to write an entire book about his experience, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which he had to compose and edit entirely within his head.
- dude, these people are amazing, but it surprises me that no one wrote Terry Fox, the guy was diagnosed with cancer on his leg when he was 18, and being the athlete he was, that was just horrible since his leg had to be amputated. Then he ran across the country (Canada, the second biggest country in the world!) asking every Canadian citizen he saw for one dollar for the cancer foundation. Terry fox RAN, and RAN more than 25 miles a day, being in my opinion the most awesome dude the 1900s, dying at the age of 22, and having raised MILLIONS by asking for one dollar to everyone, he even made his own marathon "the Terry Fox run" to raise money, and then there's the "terry fox foundation", that was a normal dude who lived his short life to the fullest and he's one of the few people I can honestly say I REALLY respect. more at the Other Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Fox
- Don't forget Steve Fonyo, another amputee who decided to retrace Terry's path for his own and made it all the way! to the Pacific Coast.
- Then Rick Hansen, another Canadian and personal friend of Terry, a paraplegic who toured the world in a wheelchair and returned a world famous hero.
- That last one was a real run-on sentence.
- King John I of Bohemia. He lost his eyesight while on Crusade with the Teutonic Knights, but still went to fight for the French in the Hundred Years' War at Crecy. When he learned that the battle was lost and his son was nowhere to be found, he ordered his knights to help him charge forward so he could swing his sword in battle one last time, and made such an impression on the English that when it was all over and he was dead, the Black Prince himself added a part of John's crest to his arms, where it's still a part of the arms of the Prince of Wales to this day.
- A couple years ago on America's Got Talent, there was a crippled guy who had crutches...and he performed one of the most awesome breakdance routines I have ever seen.
- Why isn't Audie Murphy on this list? He had MALARIA through almost ALL of World War 2, and he was STILL able to do everything he did. If you don't know him and you live in the USA, you're not a true American.
- To the everlasting glory of the infantry, shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young. Spindly, geeky, half-blind, half-deaf badass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodger_Wilton_Young
- King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem. Suffered from leprosy, but still managed to give Saladin, who was a badass in his own right, one hell of a ass-whipping. Keep in mind, he did this when he was just 16. You can read more about him here.
- David Draiman, lead singer of the band Disturbed suffered from a deviated septum caused by a number of broken noses early in life, causing him to breathe exclusively through his mouth on stage, and an acid reflux problem damaging his throat and stomach. Despite this, he's been often recognized as one of the better singers in rock music. This has all been surgically corrected in recent years, making Indestructible his first album in which he sings at full ability.
- Kaiser Wilhelm II had a whithered arm
- Max Runham, one armed traceur. Genuinely more skilled than most 2 armed practitioners.
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