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Remember kids: Smoke, and you too can be this BadassInsurance Agent: Smoker? Homer: Yes. Marge: You don't smoke. Homer: Shh, I want her to think I'm cool! — The Simpsons
Tim Hartford: [Smoking] is bad for you, but at the same time, teenagers know it's cool, and- Stephen Colbert: I'm glad you said that! Because teenagers do not get that message often enough. Kids! Smoking Is Cool! You heard it from Tim Hartford! It's in a book! — The Colbert Report, Stephen's interview of author Tim Hartford
If you're badass, you smoke.
No, really.
For some reason, smoking is used as a shorthand in fiction to say that someone is a badass. It probably has its roots in Fifties rebel flicks, or '40s Film Noir, or maybe the somewhat deeper idea that someone who cares nothing about their health will willingly expose themselves to pain on a regular basis, maybe the play of smoke on the screen around a character in slow-mo is just that damn cool — but whatever it is, there's no denying that nine times out of ten a fictional smoker is a Badass. No childlike or upbeat characters smoke. The smoker is the Anti Hero, the Badass Normal, or the Deadpan Snarker, whereas the non-smoker is the Genki Girl, The Messiah, the Kid Hero.
And you can forget about the millions of ways cigarettes can kill you or make your life miserable. Fictitious smokers are hardly ever affected by so much as a smoker's cough, let alone shortness of breath, lung cancer, gum disease, or heart disease. No-one else minds, either - the only people who complain are going to be the naggy Side Kick, joykilling bureaucrat or the irritating little brat who tags along outside the lower boundary of the Competence Zone, and it gives the hero a good chance to sarcastically brush them off and show how cool and viciously witty they are.
There may be a pragmatic element to this trope, given the predicted lifespans of most people in Badass professions. The prospect of dying of lung cancer in twenty years loses much of it's sting when there's a real chance of dying of high velocity lead poisoning tomorrow. This is one of the reasons smoking is still popular in high-risk professions, like the military.
While this trope is dying away as smoking becomes less socially acceptable, it's notable enough in older media. Interestingly, shows aimed at younger audiences don't seem allowed to smoke. Since smoking in Japan hardly even raises an eyebrow, this trope is also common in anime and manga.
In older media from before the Surgeon General's report on tobacco use, smoking conveyed maturity, experience, and social acceptability. The Stop Having Fun Guys character in an old movie or TV show will almost always be a non-smoker, as will be the male Neat Freak and Ambiguously Gay and the female Maiden Aunt, Purity Sue, and Straw Feminist. Basically, the non-smoker was thought to be no fun at all, and (unless they're a youngish Purity Sue) socially transgressive in some way. The message was that most non-smokers were weirdos you didn't want to know, which might be part of the reason why people of that generation refused to believe the Surgeon General for so long.
As a side note, much like the Drink Order, the actual forms of tobacco smoked seem to fall into tropes of their own. Cigarettes are smoked by the typical cool badasses. Pipes are smoked by wizened ancient old wizards and martial artists. Cigars, if they're not being smoked by Da Chief or a soldier, are typically the favored form of tobacco for gangsters and Corrupt Corporate Executives.
At one time pipes looked more "intellectual" than cigarettes, so a professor or scientist, even quite a young one, would smoke a pipe, while policemen, soldiers and other men of action smoked cigarettes. Nowadays pipes denote old codgers.
Smoking fetish fiction has its own conventions, subdivided down to brand. Generally speaking, housewives and other prole heroines smoke Virginia Slims or Marlboro Lights. Career women smoke Mores. Black women smoke cheap cigars, such as Gold and Milds (this is Truth In Television); "street smart" white women do the same. (Cigars without holders seldom appear.) Older women smoke unfiltereds, usually Pall Malls or Camels. Teenagers go for menthols, as do black men. The Vamp uses a holder, which is often campily long.
Compare Stealth Cigarette Commercial, Smoking Is Glamorous.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Jean Havoc from Fullmetal Alchemist constantly has a cigarette in his mouth. Serial killer Barry the Chopper even calls him "nicotine dude".
- The entire main cast of Cowboy Bebop, a bunch of bounty hunters, smoke heavily. Well, Ed the Playful Hacker doesn't, because she's a kid. And Ein doesn't, because he's a dog.
- In one episode another young girl is on board their ship, and the smoke bothers her, so Jet unilaterally declares a no-smoking zone until she leaves. Ed must have tougher lungs.
- Black Lagoon tries very hard to be cool, to the point where it's ambiguous whether it's a parody or not - and nearly the entire cast seems to chain-smoke as a result. It's notable in that the most intimate moment shared by the leads is an Indirect Kiss where the heroine chains her cigarette off the hero's.
- Really, smoking is presented as someting that everyone in Roanapur simply does. It's like the sixties, it's just kind of weird not to smoke. That said, the shot at the beginning of the theme song of the cigarette burning down really fast was probably taking it a bit far.
- Also somewhat notable is that while most everybody else smokes cigarettes, Balalaika prefers a good cigar.
- Saki of Genshiken is a Deadpan Snarker example. Notably, after accidentally committing arson, she gives it up from trauma (at least temporarily).
- Saitou Hajime from Rurouni Kenshin most definitely counts.
- Integra from Hellsing smokes cigars, because she's Bad Ass like that.
- Heinckel of the same series smokes cigarettes and an encounter between two where Integral asks her for fire is one the funniest moments in the series.
- Akio from CLANNAD always has a cigarette sticking out of his mouth, though a great shock causes it to fall out on one occasion.
- Also, in episode 16 of ~After Story~, he notably starts to shake one from the pack to light up . . . and then thinks better of it, because his daughter is in labor in the next room.
- Subverted in Ichigo Mashimaro, where Nobue gets berated a lot for smoking by her little sister and the little girl gang she hangs out with.
- A strange kind of subversion is used in Darker Than Black. Contractor November 11 has to smoke every time after using his powers... which wouldn't be so bad if he didn't hate smoking and smokers. It looks pretty weird watching someone freeze some guys in the most Bad Ass manner possible and then cough like a child when smoking a cigarette right afterwards. He also gives a very long rant when we first see him about the evils of secondhand smoke.
- A more straightforward subversion is Private Defective Guy Kurasawa, who smokes because he thinks it looks cool, and is yelled at by his Sassy Secretary because she says it makes him smell even worse than he already did.
- Sanji of One Piece takes up smoking at the tender age of nine in an admitted attempt to seem grown-up and cool. Ten years later, he still has the lung capacity to be the designated rescue-the-captain-from-drowning-underwater guy.
- Smoker the White Hunter of the Marines habitually smokes two cigars at once, but he at least has the excuse of possessing the power to turn into and/or eject smoke, meaning that he can probably absorb cigar smoke with no ill effects. Though perhaps the very fact that his badass power IS smoking, is intended to be a nod to this trope.
- His voice in the French dub, however, makes it clear that smoking is bad for you.
- Ben Beckman, Shanks' first mate on the Red-Haired pirate crew, smokes cigarillos, and at one point early in the series he grinds out his smoke in an attacker's eyeball before bashing him over the head with a rifle, making Ben a badass smoker if I has ever seen one.
- Hina the Black Cage, a badass Marine captain and a friend of the aforementioned Smoker, also smokes. Unlike with Smoker and many other smoking characters, however, no specific attention is ever drawn to her cigarette. It's just there, and sometimes it isn't.
- Crocodile is almost always seen smoking a cigar, he's even seen smoking one after escaping from his cell in Impel Down, after all his possessions were taken away. Makes you wonder were he hid them.
- Don't forget Paulie, who is almost never seen without a cigar, though he does break the cigar-symbolism and just goes for regular badass instead of a gang/corporate one.
- The titular character of the manga The Demon Ororon is a smoker, and has been for at least 113 years. (He's 123.) One of his abilities as an invincible is to make a demon several times larger than himself explode—by touching it with one finger. It is interesting to note that while he is the the king of Hell itself, no other demons are shown to smoke quite as regularly as he does.
- Fee from Planetes is a die-hard smoker and one of the not so minor plot points revolves around her going awesomely apeshit when terrorists start interfering with her smoking habit. Remember kids: smoke and you too can kick terrorist ass. It also makes a point to show how hard it is to smoke when you live in space, and the legths to which the stations engineers had to go to allow it.
- Soubi Agatsuma from Loveless is a sexy badass who smokes. Granted, this is probably to make him seem even more adult compared to his Shotacon cat-boy love interest, Ritsuka. Also, Ritsuka comments more than once that he really dislikes Soubi's smoking habit.
- Yotsuba&!: Yotsuba asks Torako why she smokes. Torako takes a drag from her cigarette, blows the smoke in Yotsuba's face, and replies: " 'Cause I want to." Yotsuba immediately concludes that she's really cool.
- Seishirou Sakurazuka from Tokyo Babylon and X1999 smokes as part of his Bad Ass routine. Subverted later: Subaru Sumeragi also picks it up in imitation, but everybody pesters him about it. Seishirou himself included
- Nicholas D. Wolfwood from Trigun.
- Who in the manga is no older than eighteen and more probably about sixteen, despite his looks.
- Bunji in Gungrave is almost always seen smoking, in both the anime and games.
- Ken Akamatsu seems rather fond of this trope. Between Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima, there's a total of three cool mid-thirty-somethings distinguished by chain-smoking permanent chin stubble, and being at least one main character's role model/love interest because they're so damn badass. The Harem Nanny in Love Hina smokes, as well, although she isn't as much of a badass mentor figure.
- The cast of Lupin III (except Ishikawa, who doesn't smoke) has their favorite brand of smokes in their profiles. One smokes Gitanes, one smokes Pall Mall, and one smokes More. You can figure out who smokes what by their personality.
- Asuma Sarutobi in Naruto is quite famous for his smoking habit. His pupil Shikamaru started smoking as well, after Asuma's death, even though he hated it. Not like he wasn't badass before but to get revenge on Asuma's murderer he took another level in badass finally burying an immortal opponent alive and cut in pieces. Since him turning more reckless and badass for revenge and started smoking because of Asuma it could be a Justified Trope.
- Ban Midou from Get Backers whenever he's doing something calm and collectedly (and most of all, looking like a Bad Ass).
- Kubota in Wild Adapter has a cigarette in his mouth most of the time. Weirdly, it doesn't always seem to be lit. This could be an artifact of the art style.
- In Hidamari Sketch, the heavy smoking of the girls' landlady is generally depicted as something cool, despite her efforts to quit.
- Can't forget Shizuru Kuwabara from Yu Yu Hakusho. She even puts her cigarette out on an apparition's tongue to shut him up.
- Let's admit it: Ginko wouldn't be nearly as cool without the constant drags from his cigarette.
- His smoking is justified, partially, in that the smoke from his cigarettes is used to drive away nearby Mushi and counteract his inherent ability to attract them.
- Matt from Death Note, dunno if Mello too. I mean... they're in the mafia...
- Michiko Malandro from Michiko To Hatchin has the "looking-awesome-with-a-cigarette" shtick down pat.
- In Saiyuki, Gojyo and Sanzo both smoke like chimneys (Sanzo goes from only occasionally being shown with a cigarette early in the manga to his current near-chainsmoker status. Gojyo has consistently chainsmoked). For Sanzo, it's revealed that he got into smoking at the encouragement of a monk who gave his life to protect him when he was a teenager, and helped him come to terms with having to kill to survive. Interestingly, in the Gaiden manga/anime arc, it's revealed that in their past lives as Gods, Sanzo didn't smoke at all, but Team Mom Hakkai was a chainsmoker who would remark fondly on his love of cigarettes.
- In DOGS Bullets And Carnage, Badou Nails is a chainsmoker. It's shown that he's a goofy, clumsy, laid-back, and terminally unlucky but fairly nice guy with something of a cowardly streak when he has his smokes, but if he goes without one for more than a few moments, he becomes an unstoppable killing machine, to the point where his "friend" Haine will intentionally take his cigarettes away from him when he wants him to fight.
- Lucia from Venus Versus Virus smokes, though this is rare in the anime. She's a badass gothic lolita, fifteen year old girl wielding a gun at all times, has one golden glowing eye and has quite the friendship with her best friend. And she smokes! Bonus points!
- Prominent in Baccano!, which is set in 1930s America, so obviously, Everybody Smokes. Ladd Russo, being a part of the Russo Mafia family has a duty to smoke Cigars to up his badassness; Whereas Ronnie Suchiart, a Martillo Family Executive, who smokes back to back, does so not out of mafioso awesomeness, but because he's the devil, or rather, an omniscient demon. But he's actually just an Immortal Alchemist from two thousand years in the past. At one time, Elmer, an immortal with a perpetual smile, smacks ronnie's back in a friendly manner, causing him to accidentally swallow his cigarette and spending the next five minutes coughing his lungs out in a decidedly silly manner while Elmer carries on talking and smiling and promptly walks off before he manages to dislodge the cigarrette.
- Reki in Haibane Renmei is frequently seen smoking a cigarette, representative of her deep wells of angst.
- Retired Badasses Kurosaki Isshin and Ishida Ryuuken in Bleach. Isshin is technically an ex-smoker, but he still smokes a cigarette every year in front of his wife's grave, because she once told him it made him look cool. Aloof Dad and Dr Jerk Ryuuken seems to be something of a chain smoker, to the extent that he carries a portable ashtray with himself and has no qualms about lighting up in his hospital, right under a "No Smoking" sign.
- Then again, it's his hospital, so he can get away with it.
- Tall Dark And Bishoujo Elizabeth Beurling in Strike Witches is the avid smoker of her team. The thing is, her real life inspiration George Beurling was a staunch anti smoker. Yet this girl goes through a cig (or fag in British slang) commonly.
- Lakshad, the genius weapons developer of Code Geass, is never seen without her extremely long pipe in hand.
- Several characters in NANA, but the award for coolest smoker ever goes to Yasu.
- Lyle Dylandy in Gundam 00.
- Doctor Stein from Soul Eater.
- Takes on a less-than cool aspect when it turns out he's trying to avoid cigarettes in an attempt to resist his own insanity. He reasons to Spirit that he if he can't handle one, he won't be able to deal with the other.
- Borgoff Marcus from Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust perpetually has a cigar in his mouth. Which is strange, as he never seemed to actually smoke it.
- Yuuko Ichihara from xxxHoLic loves relaxing with a bottle of sake and her pipe and when Watanuki resolves to take over the store until she returns, he dons her robe and takes up her pipe.
- Kou from Monochrome Factor is one of the [physically] strongest characters of the cast and is usually seen smoking.
- Hijikata from Gintama smokes a lot. The mayonnaise bottle lighter kind of dorkifies it though.
- Yuki Eiri (or Uesegi Yuki) from Gravitation He's pretty much the resident badass in the series (having been known to beat up plenty of people before when they mess with Shuichi) and smokes like a fiend. There was even one scene when he lit an ENTIRE pack of cigarettes at once and smoked the whole thing because he was irritated.
Comic Books
Film
- In Grease, Sexy Sandy smoked, while Plain Jane Sandy couldn't abide cigarettes.
- Zatoichi habitually smoked a pipe.
- James Bond.
- The movie Bond smokes much less than the original. It should be noted that the campiest and suavest Bond, Roger Moore, smoked cigars while the more brooding and badass Timothy Dalton version smoked cigarettes.
- One notable part is Bond's first line in Tomorrow Never Dies: after giving a terrorist a light, he punches him and says "Filthy habit!" However, since the guy was clearly smoking hand-rolled (and probably marijuana), and Bond is seen carrying a lighter in the film, one can speculate that he still doesn't have a problem with tobacco.
- In the Hitman movie, the Interpol agent pursuing 47 smokes cigarettes, because he's hard, but never gets to light them, because he's not a villain.
- Aliens. Sergeant Apone sticks a cigar in his mouth the moment he wakes up from cold sleep (though he never seems to light it). Not to mention Ripley, whose smoking habit saves her life (when trapped in Medical with the facehuggers, she uses her lighter to activate the fire alarm).
- In The Great Race, The Great Leslie smokes a perfectly white pipe. While shaving. Of course, it's a comedy, so it's something of a send-up.
- In xXx, the cool hero does not smoke and criticizes people who do. ("Don't you know those things will kill you?") Naturally, all of the bad guys smoke. This is made wonderfully Anvilicious when Triple-X uses a heat-seeking missile launcher to blow up a sniper who was smoking. Karmic Death, indeed.
- Used as a plot point in Thank You For Smoking; the advertising agency plans to make a film in which the stars smoke, making it look cool.
- Interestingly, no character is ever seen actually smoking on screen throughout Thank You For Smoking itself.
- Used with a raised eyebrow in the movie version of Children Of Men - the protagonist smokes because he's in a dying world and wants, even if only subconsciously, to hasten his own demise.
- The Lady From Shanghai Elsa Bannister takes up smoking to prove her love to Michael O'Hara.
- The Good The Bad And The Ugly: Blondie is smoking as he sees Tuco ride off to try to get the gold for himself, after Blondie has revealed the exact location. In his trademark style, he silently takes the cigar out of his mouth, and uses it to LIGHT A CANNON, which knocks Tuco off the horse. Eastwood smokes cigars in all his various spaghetti westerns as part of his Man With No Name mythos.
- Hilariously, Eastwood reportedly hated the cigars he had to smoke as Blondie.
- Smoking was big in film noir movies. In Sunset Blvd. Norma Desmond smokes expensive cigarettes with a holder that is a strange piece of twisted wire that wraps around her index finger.
- On a related note, Humphrey Bogart in pretty much every film he made. But does the knowledge that the actor died of cancer diminish his smoking cool in any way?
- The 1995 sci-fi film Screamers made smoking a plot point: the drug that helped counter the radiation of the planet was administered via cigarette.
- Reservoir Dogs, including the famous slow-mo intro and Tim Roth's character puffing out neat smoke rings in a flashback scene.
- Subverted in that they're not as Bad Ass as they appear to be.
- Thin Man from Charlie'sAngels smoked his cigarrets with almost poignant refinement. Watch this this
 and I dare you tell me that it isn't absolutely delicious!
- Eastern Promises: Nikolai has some pretty awesome moves with those cigarettes.
- Hilariously defied in Muppets From Space: after coating themselves with invisibility spray, the Muppets sneak past a couple of Area 51 guards, one of whom lights up. Pepe the Prawn cannot abide this, and tells him "Smoking is very bad for you, okay?" The guard, thinking it was his colleague who spoke, smiles and says "Oh. I didn't know you care," is a sweet-natured, borderline homoerotic tone, before putting out his cigarette.
- The Dude smokes three joints over the course of The Big Lebowski. Then again, The Dude is a loser.
- As noted below, Hobbits, Dwarves, humans, as well as Gandalf and Saruman, smoke in The Lord Of The Rings. Apparently, Peter Jackson considered giving Gandalf candy to eat instead of a pipe, but fortunately the idea was dropped; however, Gandalf is shown coughing while smoking in the third film.
Live Action TV
- Spike's introduction in Buffy The Vampire Slayer was of him smoking, in a very bad ass way.
- Although BTVS started off with the convention that "Everyone that smokes is evil or doomed" (N.B. not necessarily dead - even the minor character in "Nightmares" who goes into the basement for a "smoke break" then gets assaulted by the monster, lives), this is well and truly subverted in later seasons. In "Band Candy", Giles and Joyce smoke. Giles gets off scot free, and it would be drawing a long bow to connect Joyce's death two seasons later to this incident. Further, Faith doesn't smoke in Season 3 when she is evil, and does smoke in Season 7 when she's good (and not doomed).
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer even hung a lampshade on this trope when Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain / Unknown Rival Harmony seeks "shelter" from the slayer in Spikes crypt, sparking up a cigarette.
Spike: Taking up smoking, are we Harm?
Harmony: I am a villain, Spike. Hello. (takes one drag, coughs, splutters)
- People do realize the count is now at two Spikes who smoke, right?
- The X-Files had its Cigarette Smoking Man.
- Plus he does it everywhere, whether allowed to or not, even in FBI headquarters.
- One Expanded Universe novel, namely Antibodies by Kevin J Anderson, gave him a nasty cough.
- The actor, however, hadn't smoked since the seventies - after a few episodes on regular cigarettes, he switched to Herbals for the rest of his tenure on the show.
- Hannibal Smith on The A-Team. Other characters did point it every now and then. He also once claimed that he never inhales.
- Almost no cigar smoker does inhale. A cigar is enjoyed for the flavour, the aroma and the feeling, not for the nicotine. Inhaling is a sign that the smoker has no idea what he/she is doing.
- More like "as well as the nicotine", which can be absorbed through the mucuous membranes of the mouth (hence chewing tobacco) as well as through the lungs — or through the skin for that matter (hence the patch).
- As did a recent American ex-President!
- Omar Little on The Wire, who has a tendency to be filmed at least once every season lurking in the shadows of a back alley smoking a cigarette.
- Played with in Katherine Applegate's Making Out series. Nina 'smokes', but never lights her cigarettes. Somehow, she still manages to get through packs at quite a pace.
- Gomez, debonaire and worldly patriarch of The Addams Family smoked cigars since early childhood, apparently at his mother's insistence. Indeed, whenever he takes one, it lights up on its own.
- Or is already lit. You reference the movie—in the original, live-action TV series, Morticia also smoked. She didn't use cigarettes, cigars, or pipes, she just... smoked.
- Gomez and Morticia also occasionally shared a hookah.
- Jayne from Firefly is sometimes seen smoking a cigar.
- Both Starbucks, in both versions of Battlestar Galactica, have been seen smoking cigars; The modern version of Baltar was smoking a cheroot during his introduction, and Doc Cottle is almost never seen without a cigarette on the go. Yet it was Laura Roslin who got cancer; go figure.
- Both of the main characters from The Sweeney, just so you know they're double-hard bastards.
- In Mad Men, Everybody Smokes, and just about every one of them looks damn cool doing it. However, Don Draper definitely takes the cake.
- Columbo.
Literature
- Commander Samuel Vimes from the Discworld novels smokes cigars. This seems to be something he took up to get his mind off drinking, which was his previous vice.
- Occasionally, however, he uses his smoking for practical purposes like ruining an opponent's night-vision. Arguably, this makes his smoking habit even more badass.
- Even if smoking isn't cool, using a dragon as a lighter is (even if it's a small dragon).
- The most intellectual of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, smoked a variety of pipes in his youth but went over to cigarettes as they came into fashion. Philip Marlowe, father of all Badass Longcoat heroes, went the other way, smoking cigarettes in his youth but switching to a pipe as he grew older, more thoughtful and less badass.
- Holmes also indulged in a 7% solution of cocaine. He was also depicted (once) in an opium den, though he was trailing a suspect at the time and not actually indulging.
- Subversion: Nero Wolfe not only did not smoke, he objected to smoking to the extent that he once informed a client who had just paid him a five-figure retainer to go out on the front stoop to smoke. (And this was written in the 1930s, when smoking was socially acceptable.)
- Maybe it's supposed to show how neurotic he is. Or, at least, fastidious and eccentric.
- That and even being near a smoker can harm your palate. Even back in the 30s gourmands tended not to smoke or, for that matter, drink cocktails/spirits.
- Interestingly, Wolfe's sidekick Archie Goodwin also didn't smoke, despite otherwise being a typical hardboiled detective.
- In The Lord of the Rings most of the members of the Fellowship smoke. In Middle-earth, smoking was invented by the Shire-Hobbits, and subsequently adopted by the people of Bree-land, and the Dwarves, and at least some of the Rangers of the North (including Aragorn); no other cultures have adopted it, and most places it is unknown. For the hobbits, it's one of their domestic comforts. Gandalf displays his magical nature by blowing special smoke rings. In the first film, Aragorn is introduced as a bad ass through his smoking, posed in the shadows with the light of the pipe illuminating his eyes. As part of Tolkien's Literary Agent Hypothesis, he felt obliged to include an entire appendix explaining the history of smoking in his artificial pre-Beowulf myth cycle.
- One of the eventually solved mysteries in Atlas Shrugged concerns a brand of cigarettes whose trademark is a dollar sign. (Remember the theme of Atlas Shrugged: $ = capitalism = good.) One character gives a speech on how "fire in a man's hands" makes him feel powerful.
- Everybody on planet Bellevue smokes like chimneys, the rich and aristocratic using long ivory cigarette holders, probably as a tension reliever. On Bellevue the homefront is every bit as stressful as the battlefront.
- Darn near EVERYONE in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy novels smokes. By the looks of it, enough to keep Philip Morris in business by themselves.
- Catherine Li of Chris Moriarty's Spin series. One character even thinks wonders why she hadn't completely covered an explosion crater with them.
- Stephen King, the chain-smoking Harley Davidson rider, has many characters that smoke; some of whom have used cigarettes as improvised weapons.
- Didn't he quit (many years ago) for health reasons?
- Ilia Volyova of Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series. It seems to be a habit for the fun of it, but also because it keeps her going in a twisted environment.
- Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper. A novella about archaeology on Mars from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, has smoking as a plot point.
- Fitz Kreiner from the Doctor Who Expanded Universe smokes "thirty a day". This despite the fact that the Doctor has some sort of Applied Phlebotinum that could almost instantly cure him of his addiction, and almost every other character has lectured him about it at some point or another. Apparently, smoking is just that cool. Also, oddly enough, in one of the novels, Fitz coughs up blood for no possible reason except his smoking. It's never mentioned later on, he never does so again, and he doesn't quit smoking. It's almost like a very minor, low-key Big Lipped Alligator Moment.
- There are at least two species of organism that have colonized every planet in the galaxy in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series: Humans, and tobacco.
Video Games
- Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid was notable in that, back in his Heroic Mime days, the only way you knew he was a badass was because he had a pack of cigarettes in his inventory. In later games they drain his health as they're used, which would make them a subversion - if not for the fact that he smokes one after each boss fight in the first game, which boosts his maximum health and (inexplicably) item capacity. He also gets nagged by his sidekick about it, but with the mild subversion that he seems to get some masochistic pleasure out of the nagging.
- And to see how big is his addiction, at least in the first MGS, Snake got his cigarettes by swallowing the pack and later regurgitating it (since he was not only stripped naked right before the mission started, but also injected with serums that temporarily stopped his stomach acids. This was a side effect of what they were actually supposed to do, but it did mean he could still, you know, smoke the things once he got there).
- Funnily enough, this detail was overlooked in the novelization: Instead Snake simply steals a pack of cheap cigarettes on-site, and spends the rest of the book complaining about their terrible flavour.
- In the prequels, Naked Snake/Big Boss, Solid Snake's clone-father, is shown to be fond of cigars, and carries them around similarly during the game. So it's apparently a genetic trait. He claims to have picked the habit up from his mentor, The Boss.
- By MGS4 it's being used very clearly to show how much of a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold Snake is and how little he cares about living; and, for the first time, he acts like an addict, getting moody when he can't smoke. And yet, by the end of his final mission... he quits smoking. He even says "those things just kill you". He now wants to live as much of his life as he can.
- The kind of cigarettes smoked by Snake at any one point in the timeline pretty much entirely express his character at that point. In Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, he smokes a Bland Name Product version of Lucky Strikes, stereotypical soldier's tobacco. In Metal Gear Solid he smokes a fictional brand (Moslems) designed to leave no taste or smell and almost no second-hand smoke. In Metal Gear Solid 2, they're still smokeless, but change to a real-life brand (Hope). In Metal Gear Solid 4 he smokes another fictional brand (The Boss) of lethal unfiltered hand-rolled cigarettes with 26mg tar each which he stores in a little box and stubs out in a neat portable ashtray, and, symbolically, cigar smoke is shown to make him cough. He smokes with the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger in 2 and 4, and between his third and fourth fingers in 1.
- Just to be super nit-picky, Snake's cigarettes in MGS 4 are actually filtered, take a look at them in the item inventory.
- Let's be fair. There's two Metal Gear games in which he doesn't smoke. One is Snake's Revenge, an initial attempt to make a Western-aimed sequel to Metal Gear for the NES that preceded the other sequels (where Snake was characterized as heave smoker). The other is Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, where he instead starts the game with a 'Fogger', described by the Item box as a 'Device that lights up and emits smoke'.
- Final Fantasy VII's Cid Highwind chain-smokes like a maniac and still spears random monsters on a par with the Super Soldier who runs the team. He even lights a stick of dynamite with his cigarette in one of his Limit Breaks.
- Sergeant Johnson from Halo.
- Sasha Nein from Psychonauts goes as far using his finely tuned psychic abilities to light his ciggarette in his introduction.
- Many characters in Bioshock, in deference to both its Ayn Rand influence and its time period. The main character is smoking on an airplane in the opening sequence, and given the look of the air so is everyone else, totally in-line with 1960. There are cigarettes and cigars everywhere on Rapture, where personal freedom is tantamount to the fact that it's a closed environment with no ready access to fresh air.
- Indeed, you can grab both cigars and cigarettes from the environment and smoke them, for a small boost to your Mana - costing you only an equally-small price in Health.
- Smoking was casually wide-spread in Fallout 3 wasteland settlements, and there didn't seem to be any character consistency behind it. A look through the G.E.C.K. revealed why: almost every NPC who wanders will cross an idle-point where they will run an idle animation for smoking. It's interesting that these were all placed outside, which is why the Vault dwellers and Enclave are never seen smoking, neither are Moira or the Doc, since they never go outside. Some players believe that Jericho smokes more if given cigarettes, but he cycles through the idle anim at random, though not as often as he randomly complains about there not being enough cigarettes around.
- The Spy from Team Fortress 2 carries around a cigarette case [[ that doubles as a disguise kit]], and is often shown smoking in official videos, artwork, etc.
- Due to its film noir roots, almost everyone in Grim Fandango smokes. Brilliantly lampshaded in the manual: "If you are offended by the amount of smoking in the game, remember that everyone who smokes is dead. Think about it."
- Bill from Left 4 Dead is always smoking. When he dies, the cigarette is still in his mouth, but the fire on the end goes out.
- Inverted with Dante of the Devil May Cry series. He's as badass as you can get, but his creator intentionally made him a non-smoker, because he thinks it's cooler.
- Baron Flynt in Borderlands has a doobie. It's medicinal.
- Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil doesn't smoke, even though he is a badass. He has gum, though.
Web Comics
- The One Electronic, in the webcomic Rice Boy, is a trench coat wearing ancient agent of God, who smokes. Never mind that he is a robot, and has no mouth.
- Narbonic completely subverts this - the start of Dave Davenport's long, hard voyage towards being something more than "an awkward nerd" is marked by him dropping the habit of smoking, despite having always been (or not. It's complicated) such a compulsive smoker that if you took the cigarette out of his mouth a new one instantaneously materialized.
- The Pogs from Buck Godot Zap Gun For Hire are probably the least Bad Ass race of science fiction history. They are a race of small lizard-likes who are allied with the humans, doing all the odd jobs we find too mundane or monotonous, but still need to be done by a sentient. Smoking even makes them look Bad Ass. See attached
- Three of the four main cast, and the vast majority of the secondary cast of Cry Havoc smoke, nearly all are battle hardened mercenaries so they tend to prefer cigarettes.
Web Original
Western Animation
Real Life
- In China, Korea and Japan, you aren't considered a man unless you smoke. That includes Kung Fu masters, too.
- Germany is pretty bad about this too, although they're cutting down.
- Winston Churchill was often seen chomping on a massive cigar. He never actually lit it up except for special occasions, but kept it around because he knew it made him look Bad Ass.
- There's a famous picture of Churchill looking extremely grumpy because the photographer just snatched the cigar out of his mouth.
- Frank Zappa, who declared cigarettes to be a food.
- The late comedian Bill Hicks famously invoked this trope on many occasions, and apparently meant it.
- Joe Strummer once said no non-smokers or ex-smokers should be allowed to listen to music made by people who smoke.
- FDR, with that long aristocratic cigarette-holder thing.
- Adolf Galland enjoyed his cigars so much that he had an ashtray installed in his Messerschmitt Bf-109.
- His British counterpart Douglas Bader used to smoke his pipe in the cockpit of his Spitfire.
- General, later President Ulysses S. Grant went everywhere surrounded by a cloud of cigar smoke. Until he died of throat cancer.
- Anthony Bourdain adores[d] his cigarettes, until he had a kid and quit smoking.
- Stalin's pipe became kind of his signature and a subject of some (rather somber, since he's the goddamn Stalin) jokes about him (check the Russian Humor).
- Tom Waits. Find any image of him with a cigarette and he'll look like a true badass.
- Kurt Vonnegut, despite being a writer, had all the badassness you need: Badass Moustache, Badass luck (he lived through the bombing of Dresden, one of the largest bomb raids during WWII) and smoked unfiltered Pall Malls all his adult life. What he said about his smoking habit? "It's a classy way to commit suicide". Irony in that he died of brain injury from the fall in his own apartment. At the age of 84.
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