Humongous-Headed Hammer

You drop that hammer on your foot, you lose the foot!

"Six and a half feet tall, [Robert Baratheon] towered over lesser men, and when he donned his armor and the great antlered helmet of his House, he became a veritable giant. He'd had a giant's strength too, his weapon of choice a spiked iron warhammer that Ned could scarcely lift."

— Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark, A Game of Thrones Chapter 5: "Eddard"

In medieval warfare, the increasing effectiveness of armor naturally prompted countermeasures, among them the war hammer, which could either crush armor with blunt force or punch through it with a hard spike on the reverse side. In fictional depictions of medieval warfare, though, the heads on war hammers have grown to incredibly large sizes: they're often larger than the wielder's own head or more, sometimes even larger than their entire body. This trope can also apply to maces with gigantic heads, but maces are somewhat less common as a fictional character's preferred weapons than war hammers.

This is very much a case of Artistic License – History. War hammers are a very real weapon, but the heads on real ones were usually much more comparable in size to that of a modern carpenter's hammer. The main distinction was that the haft of a war hammer was usually significantly longer, increasing the striking force by increasing the head's angular momentum, as with Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better.^{The physics:}A larger radius of swing means the head moves faster, and kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity. In contrast, inertia, which resists changes in velocity, is only directly proportional to mass and velocity, and is inversely proportional to angular velocity, so a lighter hammer with a longer haft is easier to swing than a heavy hammer, while being just as damaging.

The use of this trope might simply be Rule of Cool, or the author could be actively trying to show off that the character is incredibly strong. In visual media it might also be an attempt to make the head of the hammer easier to see (a particular concern for video games with sprite or raster animation). Alternatively, huge hammers might be argued to be Weapons of Their Trade: an actual civilian sledgehammer repurposed as a weapon. This last one in fact has some historical basis: while medieval armies were usually not made up of peasant levies who supplied their own equipment, English longbowmen often carried large mauls or sledgehammers as tools for constructing field fortifications, which could be put to use as a weapon of last resort (war bows required a lot of upper-body strength).

This trope sometimes overlaps with Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon, where a big, strong brute carries a big, strong weapon. However, huge warhammers are also associated with The Paladin, which, as noted on Hammer of the Holy, is probably an extension of the (apocryphal) prohibition on Catholic priests carrying edged weapons.

Sister Trope to BFS, for gigantic swords, BFG, for gigantic guns, and Epic Flail, for gigantic flails. Thunder Hammers are usually examples of this trope due to historical depictions of Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. This trope also lends its name to the trope Hammerspace, which is where such weapons are often apparently stored when not in use; similarly the Hyperspace Mallet is where somebody pulls a weapon—usually a hammer—out of nowhere for a slapstick joke. Contrast Hammer Hilt, which is about using the handle, haft, or hilt of a weapon as a bludgeon instead of the business end.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• City Hunter: Kaori, the petite and annoyed deuteragonist, wields a hammer that's as big as her and with a head that dwarfs her torso to punish our Loveable Sex Maniac hero.
• D.Gray-Man: Lavi's hammer can extend and expand enough that he can travel by being carried on the hammer head.
• The Daichis - Earth Defense Family: Introduced in the second episode of the anime, Daichi Dai's Card Item is literally named Hammer Head, a very large item (significantly larger than the user's whole body) that is wielded on their head. He used this item by building up a large amount of speed from his sister's Parasol Hurricane and coordinating directions from his mom's Guide Beam all while he is riding on his flying board, by the time he reaches the trail he smashes the bottom part of the large flying saucer that was above Japan. Afterwards, he pushes the flying saucer up into space.
• Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA: Beatrice Flowerchild wields a Berserker card giving her access to the powers of Thor's son Magni, and with them Mjolnir. Here it's portrayed as looking like a giant version of a traditional Mjolnir pendant, with a head several times the size of her entire person.
• Final Fantasy: Unlimited: Cid has two mechanized hammers that hit his enemies on command, with each hammer head being as big as himself. Somehow, both hammers can fit inside his backpack.
• GaoGaiGar:
  • The eponymous mecha possesses the Goldion Hammer, a hammer with a head as large as the titular Humongous Mecha. In addition to the force created by its sheer mass, the hammer creates an artificial gravity well at the point of impact that reduces all matter it strikes into photons. But this power also meant that GaoGaiGar couldn't wield the hammer without damaging itself, so they built GoldyMarg: a tough robot that is himself built around the Goldion Hammer, and can transform into a massive hand that allows GaoGaiGar to safely wield it.
  • Final introduces a both Downplayed and Exaggerated example in the Goldion Crusher. Downplayed in that the head isn't quite as oversized in comparison normally. Exaggerated in that A: The entire weapon is made from the combination of three battleships, and B: When deployed, the "head" splits apart to form the frame of an energy hammer the size of a small moon.
• Immoral Guild: Hanabata Nohkins wields a huge battle hammer whose head even has a flower design. She unsurprisingly is strong enough to effortlessly wield it.
• Lyrical Nanoha: Vita's magical hammer, Graf Eisen, has a "Gigantform" that causes Graf Eisen to become several times larger than its Glacier Waif wielder. Combined with her incredible strength, Vita boasts that there's nothing she and Graf Eisen can't destroy.
• One Piece: Usopp has occasionally made use of gigantic hammers in his attacks, breaking out a five-ton hammer against Mr. 4, and a ten-ton hammer against Perona. However, Usopp is a physically weak Consummate Liar, so his hammers are fakes. The five-ton one was a pair of frying pans and paper mache on a stick, while the ten-ton one was a balloon. But they still work by frightening his opponents into submission, given that they don't know that the hammers are fakes.
• Pokémon: The Original Series: Early on in the anime, Fiery Redhead Misty would pull out a Hyperspace Mallet with an extremely large head to whack Ash or Brock for their stupidity.
• Record of Ragnarok: Thor's Mjölnir is easily twice its wielder's size but still retains a normal hammer's proportions. Its handle is so huge that there's a smaller handle built into the handle just so Thor's hands can have a firm grasp on it.

Comic Books

• Harley Quinn: One of Harley's signature weapons is a large mallet, like one would commonly see at a "test your strength" game in a carnival. The size is justified because most of the time it is a repurposed carnival mallet and consequently is not made of metal, so it is lighter than its size suggests.
• The Mighty Thor: Thor's hammer Mjolnir is usually depicted as a metal brick that's at least a foot long and half a foot wide with a short handle.
• Scott Pilgrim: Ramona Flowers's primary weapon is a hammer with a head that's at least two feet long and a foot wide. She's only able to carry it around because her bag acts as Hammerspace (no pun intended).

Fan Works

• Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: The next evolution in Pinkie Pie's Fullbring involves this, except she's the hammer being used by Pinkamena. Because her powers operate on Rule of Funny and Rule of Scary, she can change the size of it on a whim.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: Played for laughs in chapter 35. Night Blade and Wind Breaker have been studying weapons in a vault, with each of them in turn grabbing progressively bigger swords and bows (to the point where they were holding ones that were so large they couldn't realistically use them in battle) in a game of one-upmanship... when Vix-Lei the minotaur unwittingly outdoes both of them by walking by while carrying and talking to a hammer with a head as big as her whole body. Both males end up realizing their foolishness and laughing themselves sick as a result.
• Deliberately defied with Sabrina, protagonist of Puella Magi Adfligo Systema. Her magical girl weapon is explicitly a medieval warhammer with a blunt and spiked end, and not a "ludicrous brick on a stick".

Film — Animated

• Batman: Assault on Arkham: Harley Quinn's favourite weapon is a giant mallet whose head is large enough to cover her own head and chest. This trait is shared with most of the character's other depictions at the time, but this time it's actually an important plot point: The hammer's size makes it the perfect hiding place for the Joker's dirty bomb, which Batman spends most of the film trying to locate.

Film — Live-Action

• Almighty Thor, being The Mockbuster to Thor, naturally has the title character swinging a warhammer with a disproportionately massive head as a weapon. After losing his hammer to his evil brother Loki, Thor managed to forge a battleax-warhammer combo whose head is even bigger (and depicted on the poster art).
• Thor: In keeping with its comic book portrayal, Mjolnir's head is a solid brick of uru metal about 10 inches wide and 5 inches thick, on a haft not much longer than Thor's forearm. It is, of course, an explicitly magical weapon wielded by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, so it's easy to wield... unless Odin's spell causes it to deem one unworthy, in which case it immediately becomes even heavier than it ought to be.
• Transformers: Rise of the Beasts: For the final battle Rhinox wields a war hammer that's big enough to send enemies flying or crush them like bugs.
• Warcraft 2016: True to the original videogame, Orgrim Doomhammer wields a huge warhammer that he can effortlessly use to kill other orcs in a single blow.

Literature

• The Devil is a Part-Timer!: Celestia's primary weapon is an oversized mallet that she carries around concealed as a hair broch. Although comical looking, she's capable of breaking bones and crushing skulls when she swings it at her target.
• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman is a retelling of classic Norse myth in contemporary language. Thor's hammer, depicted on the cover, is an iron brick with intricate gold inlay, and Thor uses it to do many a One-Hit Kill, particularly on Frost Giants, aka Jotun, and on one occasion an entire wedding party of ogres.
• Samurai Girls: Kanatsugu Naoe, a normal-sized teenage girl, uses as her weapon of choice a hammer with a barrel-shaped head bigger than her entire torso.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: As a young man, Robert Baratheon was known for favoring a gigantic war hammer as his personal weapon, forged by Donal Noye at the Baratheon castle Storm's End. The hammer is described as having been so heavy that his friend Ned Stark could barely lift it; the younger Robert was simply freakishly strong. He became known as "the Demon of the Trident" after using the hammer to kill Crown Prince Rhaegar in a battlefield duel by crushing his chest right through his breastplate.
• The Stormlight Archive: Justified with Shardhammers, which are made specifically to be used by (and against) noblemen in Powered Armor. It takes two servants to carry one around.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Kiva: When Riki turns into his Dogga Hammer form to be wielded by Kiva, he turns into a hammer whose head is comprised of his entire body, only slightly shrunken down.

Music

• Angus McSix: The band's debut song "Master of The Universe", features one as Take That! to Gloryhammer, the lead singer's former band. Angus casts aside his big hammer in favour of a sword. It still creates a massive explosion when it hits a hillside in the background though, showing its massive nature.
• Gloryhammer: The Titular Gloryhammer is a mighty weapon given many epithets in song. It is both a "laser power goblin crusher" and powered up by the nuclear fusion of a star and in music videos is shown a very long hafted weapon with massive cubic head on the end.

Mythology & Religion

• Norse Mythology: Thor's hammer Mjolnir, usually depicted in the form of a pendant worn by devotees, tends to have a handle only slightly longer than the head and about as wide. Justified in some versions of the legend of its forging, wherein Loki messed with the dwarf that made it so he couldn't finish the handle in time.

Tabletop Games

• The art in Dungeons & Dragons tends to depict war hammers with giant heads and comparatively short handles. Especially when dwarves are involved.
• Magic: The Gathering: Colossus Hammer is an equipment that gives a creature a massive +10/+10 buff, but is so heavy that it prevents the creature from flying. The artwork depicts a dwarf carrying a warhammer with a head alone that's bigger than his entire body.
• Pathfinder: The art in the Core Rulebook for First Edition depicts the warhammer as a big, blocky thing with a head almost as wide as its haft is long, that is nevertheless supposed to be a one-handed weapon. Ultimate Equipment adds the "earth breaker", a two-handed hammer with an even bigger head.
• Warhammer: The game itself is named after the weapon. Specifically, the warhammer Ghal Maraz◊, the setting's primary Legendary Weapon: A symbol of the human god Sigmar, and wielded by the emperors of the empire he left behind. Ghal Maraz is a classic example of the trope, having an impractically large head and a relatively short haft that would make it impossible to use for purpose in real life. This is slightly justified by Ghal Maraz being of dwarf make (dwarfs do not make weapons that cannot also double as a tool) and also a magical weapon whose mere touch is damaging (in-game, Ghal Maraz will automatically wound any target it hits, and it ignores armour).
  • Empire priests of Sigmar wield replicas of Ghal Maraz into battle. Unlike the original, they are not magical weapons, but as they're built to resemble it they're no less impractical in appearance. By contrast, Knights of the White Wolf wield much more realistic-looking warhammers from horseback (warhammers were traditionally used as horseback weapons, as the extra reach from a long haft was doubly advantageous to reach targets from atop a horse).
  • Speaking of dwarfs, dwarf hammerers go into battle wielding large, two-handed mauls intended for rock breaking as their primary weapon. Again, being mauls their heads are impractically large for combat, and the hammerers tend to grip their mauls directly underneath the head and thus reducing the size of the swing arc.
  • In early editions of the game, the titular warhammer was an unnamed hammer wielded by early Series Mascot "Harry the Hammer◊", which downplays the trope. It initially resembled a sledgehammer more than an actual warhammer and had a very modest head size, but in later editions evolved into looking like an Evil Counterpart to Ghal Maraz, complete with impractically sized head.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Thunder hammers are a type of power weapon used by some Imperial combatants: in addition to their enormous size, they will generate energy fields which create a concussive shockwave when they make contact with a target.
    • For the Astartes, Thunder hammers are usually wielded by Space Marines wearing Terminator armor and usually one-handed due to the size and strength of the suit (also used in conjunction with a Storm shield if they are an Assault Terminator). But after Dawn of War showed how awesome a heavy two-handed warhammers were in the hands of a regular-armored Space Marine, Captains were allowed to use them in the tabletop. More often than not the head of a Space Marine's thunder hammer is larger than their own helmet, but a Space Marine's head is a lot smaller relative to their body than that of a baseline human. Although lighter versions such as the Lathe Pattern are also popular with Adeptus Ministorum priests, Zealots, and Inquisitors of the Ordo Malleus.
    • Speaking of Ordo Malleus, they also have the Nemesis Daemon Hammer, which is a force weapon that is built to practically smite and smash powerful daemons with the weapon's humungous hammerhead that's enhanced by the wielder's psychic might. The Nemesis Daemon Greathammer meanwhile is what happens if you scale a Daemon hammer to the size of a Mini-Mecha.
    • For the members of Deathwatch, they have access to the "Heavy Thunder Hammer" a massive two-handed and double-headed hammer that has each head wreath in a disrupter field that smash the midsection of a Carnifex in twain and turn tanks into crumpled wrecks.
  • The Orks take this trope and nail a ton of dakka to it. Their Tankbustas include "specialists" whose weapon of choice is a hammer with the head replaced by a live anti-tank warhead.
    • To continue the Ork's love for over-the-top and downright bizarre weaponry, there's also "the Snazzhammer". A one-of-a-kind weapon that is essentially a Shokk Attack Gun/Tellyport Blasta mounted on the head of an enormous power hammer^note The Shokk Attack Gun and Tellyport Blasta use Warp travel to send their ammunition to the enemy, basically anything that happens to be struck by this hammer will end up being teleported to many places at once.

Video Games

• 30XX: One of Ace's primary weapons is Lara, an energy-based 2-sided giant hammer with a head bigger than Ace is.
• Bloodborne: The Kirkhammer is a trick weapon consisting in a silver longsword that can be inserted into a massive stone slab to form a gigantic hammer.
• Clone Drone in the Danger Zone: The human can gain a hammer as an alternate weapon, and upgrade the size of the hammer to ludicrous amounts. The final upgrade of the hammer makes the hammer's head bigger than their own body and reduce enemies into scrap metal while sending armored and shielded opponents flying, and also cannot be blocked by swords.
• Conqueror's Blade: The game's most popular hero weapon is the Maul, a ridiculously large war hammer which is great at knocking down shields. And the people behind them.
• Dark Souls: One of the bosses in the game, Executioner Smough, wields a massive hammer as his weapon of choice. The player can use Smough's hammer as well by forging a plus ten hammer or great hammer and then ascending it with Smough's soul. Smough's hammer reappears in Dark Souls III, found in Irithyll of the Boreal Valley inside a chest on the second floor of a room with two Silver Knights in it.
• The Elder Scrolls: The warhammer Volendrung, present throughout the series, is an artifact originally made by the Dwemer Rourken clan, though it later became associated with the Daedric Prince Malacath. When it was thrown across Tamriel, it landed in a place that became known as Volenfell, and later Hammerfell. As a weapon, it is often portrayed as a hammer whose blows strike so hard they either weaken or paralyze the target (though it lacks any enchantment in Morrowind). Its exact look varies between games, but it has always had a long, two-handed haft, connected to a gigantic brick of a head that acquired a spike on either striking face in Daggerfall.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Downplayed in most games. While the warhammers aren't ridiculously large, they are still far larger and bulkier than real life warhammers. That said, white mages are capable of wielding hammers in the very first Final Fantasy game. The sprite art makes the hammers appear to have heads as large as their wielders.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • Warriors have access to a handful of war hammers in place of their usual axes. These hammers have heads the size of their wielders' torsos to go hand-in-hand with the superhuman strength granted by mastering one's Inner Beast.
    • The Magic Hammer spell used by blue mages drops an enormous mallet larger than any player character onto the target area, damaging any enemy struck, reducing the enemy's Mind and Intelligence stats, and restoring MP to the caster.
    • Godbert Manderville has the inexplicable ability to make his ordinary goldsmith's hammer grow to enormous proportions, making the haft and the head longer than he is tall. He uses this reach to batter his foes in mid-air before sending them careening down to earth.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Hammers are a recurring weapon in the series (classified as axes in the games' Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors). They have a large head strong enough to break armored units, but its high weight makes it cumbersome against anything else.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses: The Hero's Relic Crusher is a warhammer that like the Hammer is considered an axe for game mechanics purposes. Its gigantic head is implied to be made out of Nabatean body parts.
• For the King: Played for Laughs with The Walloper, a torso-sized two-handed hammer that does massive damage but has terrible speed and accuracy. Judging by the previous owner's remains, they overbalanced and squashed their own head with it.
• God Eater: Alongside the BFGs they wield, God Eaters have a variety of options for oversized melee weapons, including very, very big hammers. In God Eater, they were classified as Buster Blades due to Early-Installment Weirdness, but God Eater 2 introduces a new melee type called the Boost Hammer, which combines the hammer with a jet engine to increase its power when swung. Boost Hammers tend to have a head about half as tall as your character and just as wide.
• Golden Sun: Each character's sprite has a different model for the same given weapon type, so a mace equipped by Isaac or Mia looks approximately realistic for the first two (a fist-sized head with dimples for Mia, a flanged mace for Isaac), and then there's Garet's "spiked iron ball the size of his head" model.
• Harvest Moon: The default hammer that the player starts with is reasonable enough, but upon being upgraded to the Golden Hammer, the head becomes larger than the player. It's Awesome, but Impractical, too, because although it can break large rocks in a single blow, there probably won't be any of those left by the time the player gets the upgrade — and it costs more stamina to use than the regular hammer. The only thing left to hammer in the long run is fence pieces broken by rain, and those only require one hit from the regular hammer, so the extra stamina cost is wasted. You need to get the upgrade for 100% Completion, though.
• Honkai: Star Rail: Qlipoth the aeon of preservation wields a hammer of galactic proportions, with each swing carrying the power of an entire planet slamming down. Each swing is so powerful that the sound echos across the universe, and has even become a standard unit of time to measure eras.
• Kirby:
  • Hammer is a recurring Copy Ability that lets Kirby attack with a wooden hammer whose head is roughly the same size as the protagonist's body. In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, it gets a Super variant called Grand Hammer, which can grow ridiculously large and send massive shockwaves across the screen.
  • King Dedede's signature weapon is a wooden hammer. Though its size varies in each game, it's nearly the size of the king's own head in most depictions. In Revenge of the King, he replaces it with an even larger mechanized hammer.
• League of Legends: Poppy, Keeper of the Hammer, is a yordle who fights using the enormous "Hammer of Orlon", which is about three times her size (the head alone almost as big as her whole body) and would probably dwarf an average-sized human. Poppy believes herself to be a herald meant to deliver the hammer to a legendary Demacian hero and has a comically glaring blind spot to how improbably good she is with using it herself, presumably because she's expecting its "intended" user to be much bigger.
• The Legend of Dragoon features Meru, a very small young woman who twirls her massive two-handed hammer like a baton. The hammer gets even bigger in her Dragoon form.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: After defeating Phantom Ganon, Link gets the Skull Hammer, a two-handed mallet with a head bigger than his own. It's the first weapon capable of dealing any serious damage to the Helmaroc King, who shrugged off a cannonball from a catapult early in the game.
• Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story has Felicia Mitsuki, whose sledgehammer’s head is about the size of her own.
• Minecraft Dungeons: The Great Hammer's head is roughly the size of the player's torso.
• Monster Hunter: The hammer has been a core weapon type since the original game; the shafts of these weapons alone are often as tall as the hunters carrying them, and considering they're used to bash in the skulls of hundreds of varieties of wyverns, fanged beasts, and god-like Elder Dragons, they need to be that big.
• Mortal Kombat: Shao Kahn wields the Wrath Hammer, which is fittingly large and heavy for someone his size, and the head is large enough to either cave in someone's skull or send it off flying like a baseball. One of Shao's intro animations in Mortal Kombat 11 emphasizes this as a bunch of mooks struggle to bring it to the battlefield, only for Shao to yoink the Wrath Hammer with one arm and blasting away said mooks with the force applied in said pull.
• Overwatch has Reinhardt, a modern-day crusader in power armor, wield a jet-powered hammer that's larger than most of the main cast.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Tinkatink is a Fairy/Steel-type Pokémon that starts out with a small metal club that gets bigger as they evolve, until their final stage, Tinkaton, has a huge sledgehammer whose head is twice the size of their body. Tinkaton even sleeps on it!
• Psychonauts 2 has an enemy called the Judge (representing judgement in the human mind) who wields a gavel taller than themselves, with a head large enough to potentially crush player character Raz beneath its head.
• Rainbow Six Siege features the operator Sledge, who as his codename suggests, carries a sledgehammer that can break through walls and destroy certain gadgets that can't be affected by gunfire, such as barbed wire or bulletproof cameras. It can also be used to kill enemies.
• Salt and Sanctuary:
  • Armor Guardians are armed with an absolutely huge bec-de-corbyn called the Obsidian Pillar that hits with an earthquake-like effect that sends your character flying. When you get one, thanks to Conservation of Mass (they're craftable but not dropped), they have a more manageable (but still monstrously heavy) size. It's mentioned in the Flavour Text for the corresponding Iron Rampart shield that Armor Titans have "near-limitless strength."
  • Crypt Guardians are armed with human-sized (as in "as big as a person") versions of the Mountainbreaker warhammer.
  • The Mountainbreaker itself is fully twenty pounds, and is said to have been "carved from a single block of granite." It's the Level VII devotion weapon for the Mountainsmith creed.
• Skylanders:
  • Crusher, the Earth Giant, uses a giant sledgehammer whose head is the size of his own, which he also named Crusher. Crusher (the hammer) is also heavy enough that slamming it on the ground causes fissures to form, and further upgrades make it even bigger, with the second upgrade on the "Rock Grinder" path making it twice as big as his own head.
  • Bowser, in his guest appearance as Hammer Slam Bowser, uses a fire-infused spiked hammer as his primary weapon, and said hammer's head is about the size of his own head. While smashing this down, he's able to create shockwaves, and one upgrade path lets him slam it down hard to create fields of lava that burn enemies.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Amy Rose's Piko-Piko Hammer. Practically every incarnation of Amy has one hammer which is bigger than her entire body and whose head at least twice as big as her head.
• Super Mario Bros.: Throughout the franchise, Mario frequently uses a large wooden mallet that is almost as big as he is.
• Valheim: While mundane maces and hammers stay realistically small, the magical ones have heads bigger than a human's. Especially noticeable with the two-handed clubs: the Stagbreaker looks like a maul surrounded by a cage of deer antlers, while the Iron Sledge and Demolisher have heads the size of an anvil.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge: The Dimension Shellshock DLC adds Red Foot Soldiers who wield hammers larger than they are. Being hit with one will temporarily squash you flat, but the hammers are so heavy that the Foot Soldiers are thrown off balance for a short time after attacking as they struggle to lift their weapon up.
• Warcraft: Huge warhammers are a franchise tradition.
  • Warcraft II: Downplayed with Knights and Paladins, whose warhammers are large enough to be visible on the sprite and still quite a bit larger than historical ones, but not disproportionately so.◊
  • Warcraft III: The Paladin human hero (represented by Arthas Menethil and Uther the Lightbringer in the campaign) carries a two-handed sledgehammer the size of their own torso.
  • World of Warcraft: Warhammers are implemented as a cosmetic variation on maces, may be either one- or two-handed depending on the item, and are uniformly gigantic.
• Warframe: Hammers are a class of melee weapons whose one consistent feature is a head that is larger than an adult person's head. Examples include the Tenno-produced Fragor, the Grineer-produced Jat Kittag and the Corpus-produced Arca Titron.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In the original Dawn of War, Inquisitor Mordecai Toth gives Brother-Captain Gabriel Angelos a Daemonhammer called God-Splitter, whose head is almost as big across as Gabriel's shoulders in his Powered Armor. It becomes his signature weapon throughout the rest of the series.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine: Thunder hammers are available for use. The weapon, whose head is almost as big as Brother-Captain Titus's torso in his Powered Armor, is slow to swing but will stagger opponents on a normal hit, and a couple of direct hits will usually kill just about anything. It's generally considered one of the best melee weapons to use with a jump-pack in multiplayer.
• Wynncraft: Earth-based spears appear as hammers with heads that are the same size as the player's. The third tier appearance for those weapons makes the hammer head even larger to the point where it's barely the same size as the player's body.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Sena's normal weapon of choice is a gigantic hammer with strong but bouncy ends, as well as a round shape. The hammer can even retract its handle and the ends can merge, creating a large, metallic ball that Sena can throw at the opponent. While Sena is best for wielding the hammer, due to the Job System, any of the main characters can wield the hammer as well.

Web Original

• BIGTOP BURGER: Cesare's skull hammer, emerging from a telescoping pole, has a head twice as large as his entire body, and a haft three times as tall. It's heavy enough to send Steve through the ground and into the underworld, its impact causing lightning and a shockwave that blows the surrounding trucks onto their sides.
• Critical Role: Campaign Three: The barbarian Ashton Greymoore wields a two-handed hammer with a glass head that's not much smaller than their torso, custom-made for them by a magical artificer.
• Multiverse Tales:
  • Vasilia Kuznet is a highly-skilled blacksmith, willing to forge suits of armour and weapons for anybody who asks it of her. She is depicted with a hammer with a long handle and a head comparable to a solid stone block, though, in contrast to most characters, she's depicted resting the hammer's head against the ground so she can lean on the handle and put one foot on the head. Vasilia is presumably strong enough to wield the hammer seeing as she's both a blacksmith and a Husky Russkie. In this video, she recalls having been contracted by the very personifications of the four elements, and when she forged armour for the embodiment of the earth... we'll let Vasilia explain in her own words.
    Vasilia: For a weapon, he wanted something big, and when I asked him, "How big?" he said, again, "Big!" So I designed him hammer with the same elements for his armour. And the mallet was nearly as large as his body! I could not even come close to lifting thing myself, but he swung it with one hand like it was child's plaything!
  • Voslo, Vasilia's older brother, is even burlier than his sister, and he has a hammer head built by her to replace his missing right hand. The hammer's size is not that outlandish compared to his sister's, but in one episode, Vasilia mentions that when she gave her brother pieces of a magical armour equivalent to the Smash Ball, the hammer magically grew bigger, along with the arm and armour around it, and Voslo could even turn it into a Shapeshifter Weapon with enough willpower!
  • "Astra and the Secret Knights": Unghu, The Big Guy of the titular Knights, is a Boisterous Bruiser who carries a hammer over his shoulders with a head that easily dwarfs his own head. Unghu can carry the hammer due to the fact that he's a Dragonborn, and therefore is strong enough to carry the hammer when normal humanoids can't.
  • "Kate Kills Claus": The Hammer Twins are two supervillains who work for an evil version of Santa Claus. Frost (based on Frosty The Snowman) uses a hammer with a head that looks like two top hats put together, which enables him to create icicles and pillars of ice to fight with. Cindy Lou (based on Cindy Lou Who) uses a hammer called Nutcracker, which looks for the most part like a cartoonish wooden mallet with an even bigger head than Frost's. Cindy Lou can carry it effortlessly, partially due to the fact that the hammer shrinks to toy size when it leaves her hand, and only grows back to normal size when touched with a bare hand (hers or otherwise) — and Kate is pragmatic enough to use this to kill Claus by getting close enough to stuff the shrunken hammer inside his mouth with her gloved hand, then touching it with her bare hand to make it regrow with... explosive results.

Western Animation

• Ed, Edd n Eddy: On one episode Rolf uses one of these combined with Weaponized Headgear called the Hat of Discipline, and thanks to the Toon Physics of the show he leaves Double D flat as a pancake.
• Steven Universe: Being a fusion of Pearl and Garnet, Sardonyx's weapon is a war hammer, utilizing Pearl's spear as the handle and Garnet's gauntlets as the head, which is more than thrice the size of Sardonyx's own head.
• Transformers:
  • Transformers: Animated: Ultra Magnus wields a huge hammer that also serves as a Staff of Authority named the Magnus Hammer.
  • Transformers: Prime: Ultra Magnus once more wields an Energon hammer as his primary weapon. He later starts using the now de-powered Forge of Solus Prime as his weapon.

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