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"....so if you give a crap feel free to check back in next week to satisfy your insatiable desire to read about grown people punching each other in the mouth or beating each other about the head and neck in a most furious manner."

Badass Of the Week (warning! NSFW due to extreme language!) is a website created by "Amazing Ben Thompson" in 2004, that exists primarily to provide weekly profiles of many and sundry badasses. The various badasses covered range from fictional characters such as Darth Vader, the Punisher, and Kefka to Real Life badasses such as Simo Häyhä, Saladin, and Steve Irwin, to the outright bizarre, such as this huge-ass beetle, Australia, the S&W .500 Magnum, and the AGGRO CRAG (aka the AGGRESSIVE ROCK). The exact criteria for badassery vary, ranging from individual acts of ordinary heroism to face-melting acts of blind bravery and violence. Of course, being a face-crushing, scrotum stomping killing machine isn't required for inclusion, as the Manly Tears-inducing article on Paul Rusesabagina proves.

Part of the humor of the site comes from its surprising historical accuracy used in conjunction with references to various historical figures in vulgar, irreverent language. An example of the former regarding the great Sikh hero Baba Deep Singh:

This crazy-ass bastard is one of the most hardcore freedom fighters to ever live, and a dude so extreme balls-out in his insatiable quest for vengeance that something as inconsequentially-trivial as being fucking decapitated couldn't stop him from crushing his enemies to death with his nutsack.

Another example is the Japanese warrior monk Saito Musashibo Benkei:

Benkei went out to the drawbridge leading towards the castle, clenched his naginata in his fists, and dared the army on the other side to fucking fuck with him. A couple punk-ass bitches thought they wanted a piece of SMB, but Benkei slapped the fail out of them with the blunt end of his bladed axe, knocking their brains out and sending crumpled remains splashing into the moat.

Or Saint Michael the Archangel:

So one day God and everybody are chilling out and this fucking insane-o motherfucking demon busts through the pearly gates ready to kick fucking asses and making the lesser angels (the fat kids and Victoria Secret models) piss themselves.

Holy shit everybody thinks they're totally fucked because look at this motherfucker. He's a fucking huge red monster with gleaming talons and spikes covering one-third of his body and glowing eyes and he looks PISSED. But instead of handing over St. Peter's keys like some kind of two-dollar pussy carjacking victim, God takes one look at this thing and is just like, "Mike, show this fucking douchebag the door". The Archangel Michael calmly nods his head, slowly takes the cigarette out of his mouth and flicks it onto the floor, cracks his knuckles and confidently strides towards Lucifer.

The site also includes a fan mail section and a series of random articles the site's writer decided to throw in, such as why you need to convert to Norse religion, and how to go about this.

Also, Ben recently wrote a book celebrating his love of scrotum crushing badasses, called BADASS: The Book, and is recommended reading for anyone who just can't get enough of of those who Dare to Be Badass!

Also, BADASS: The Book now has BADASS: The Book: the Trailer.

In December of 2012, Ben Thompson started a webcomic with his friend and illustrator Manny Vega titled Badass Con Carne. Read it here.

Due to a server crash, most of the articles are currently unavailable, and Ben is currently working on reuploading them.


This website PUNCHES YOU with examples of:

  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Tiberius Caesar's denunciation of his erstwhile second-in-command Sejanus.
    ... and by the time the senate was done reading Tiberius' e-mail, they all thought Sejanus was sexing all of their wives, killing all of their sons, and stealing all of their money. On top of that, he didn't recycle, only used Styrofoam cups, and drove a crappy, environmentally-unfriendly car that only got like five miles to the gallon.
  • Author Appeal: Badasses!
  • Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • Haast's Eagle, a bird that preyed on moa and the ancestors of the Māori.
  • Author Catch Phrase: Badasses described as going progressively crazier will be described as losing his or her "already-tenuous grip on his/her sanity."
  • Leonardo Da Vinci -This man was able to kill people with a sniper rifle......before they were even invented yet!
  • Buzz Aldrin - If strapping a rocket to your ass and braving deep space isn't an act of sheer balls, then epically jacking some asshole in the face after he calls you a liar and threatens your daughter should count.
  • Neil Armstrong - The first man to set foot on another world.
  • Badass Creed - The Winged Hussars above had this: Kill First, Calculate Later.
  • Aki Ra - Uses little more than a pipe wrench and balls the size of small planets to disarm absurdly lethal anti personnel landmines.
  • Juan Pujol Garcia, who managed to scurry through a civil war serving both sides yet never firing a single bullet for either, and ensured the Normandy landings would be a success without so much as touching a rifle. The only people he ever killed were fictional.
  • BFG The BFG-9000 Trope Namer.
  • Boldly Coming: Commander Shepard
    This is the first thing that pops up when you run a Google Image Search for "space babes", but, honestly, this weird alien space eyeball tentacle-monster also happens to be a good visual representation of Commander Shepherd's military career – drifting around in outer space groping a hot babe with his appendages while random dudes shoot him in the face with rockets at close range without doing any noticeable damage.
  • Butt-Monkey: A 50/50 for Ian Forbes, a man who enlisted in the British Royal Navy for WW2. His military career led him to being subjected to the ship he was on getting destroyed by enemy attacks over and over and finally taken prisoner for three years. That being said, against all odds he survived them all and died 72 years old "of very ordinary causes".

  • The Call Knows Where You Live As it turns out, this is a surprisingly common trope among the real-life badasses profiled.
    • Mochizuki Chiyome founded the kunoichi- an order of female ninjas and spies- to avenge the death of her husband
    • Ivajlo the Cabbage's life as a pig-herder ended in the wake of a raid by the Mongolian Golden Horde- and his life as one of the most formidable military commanders in history began.

  • Canada, Eh?: Defied in Ernest Smith's article in the first paragraph.
    "Canada gets a bad rap these days, with many Americans looking down on them as our pussier, slightly-British neighbors to the North, but anybody who's ever watched footage of the 1970's Philadelphia Flyers teams knows that Canadians can be some seriously hardcore motherfuckers who would just as soon cold-cock you in the chops as slash you between the legs with a goalie stick. These crazy bastards have an underappreciated history of badassery, and nowadays we don't really respect the fact that Canadians can be hard-drinking, hard-fighting, lumber-jacking motherfuckers who destroy all who oppose them in a flurry of bare knuckles, bizarre accents, and the Metric System."
  • Captain Obvious: From the article on Sho'Nuff:
    When he gets super-pissed he starts glowing red and kicking ass. A lot of people can't do that.
  • Catchphrase: "Balls-out" appears often, sometimes multiple times in a single article. Even in the articles about women. Even in the article about the cow, and especially in the article about Buck Shelford, where the author could use the phrase literally.
  • Seal Team Six gets mentioned for their sniping three Somali pirates with synchronized sniper shots.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: Godzilla in ''Badass: Birth of a Legend:
    Another sweet thing is that Godzilla is completely unpredictable, and, as such, represents the Ultimate Duality of Awesome: When he leaves the warm beaches of Monster Island and emerges from the dark waters near the Japanese coastline, you don't know if he's there to smash orphanages or save the universe from a rampaging giant space monster who shoots lasers out of its forehead and spits acid on hot Japanese babes. That's just how he rolls. One minute he's Earth's saviour, the next minute he's grabbing handfuls of cheering humans and grinding them between his massive, pointy teeth.
  • Historical Villain Upgrade:
    • Played for Laughs in the article on Rupert Murdoch, which portrays him as literally a super villain.
    • Enemies of the profilee tend to be described as jackasses, assholes, etc., even if there's no particular reason to think that they were such. Again, Played for Laughs.
  • Hold the Line:
    • The 21 Sikhs, a single unit of twenty-one Sikh soldiers holding a small fortress outpost on the Indian border against a force of invading tribesmen that numbered over twenty thousand. They managed to hold for most of a day, while ounumbered 500:1 until the British could organize a counterattack. While all of them were wiped out, no one doubts the size or sturdiness of their balls, especially as every single one of them volunteered to stay and fight. When word of their actions reached the British Parliament, it received a standing ovation from the entire British government.
  • Justinian II "was a ruthless, merciless motherfucker who crushed all who opposed him, brutally eliminated his enemies, and let nothing stand in the way of his insane, over-the-top, possibly-misguided mission to stomp the lower intestines of anybody ballsy enough to think they could screw with him for any reason."
  • Majorly Awesome: Major Robert Henry Cain landed for Operation Market Garden, and also proved himself Made of Iron for continuing to personally defend against the German counterattack despite being shot by a machine gun (kept firing his PIAT at vehicles anyway), having a PIAT round explode in front of his face (only blinded him for a half-hour) and his eardrums burst from all of the explosions from the fighting (he just stuffed some bandages in his ears). Eventually his force was bereft of PIATs, so he fired a mortar at an airplane from a virtually horizontal angle. By the end of the attack, he was believed to be responsible for knocking out four Tiger I tanks and two self-propelled guns and he, of course, won a Victoria Cross.
  • Minored In Ass Kicking: Thor Heyerdahl
  • Mundane Made Awesome: The grandfather of Harald Wartooth was known as Ivar the Wide-Grasping. The article of Harald is replete with tales of carnage and violence, but Ben theorizing the reason for Ivar's appellation stands out as unique and of a very different nature from the rest of the article...
    "...who I'm pretty sure gets his wide-grasping epithet because he was literally able to grope TWO BOOBS AT THE SAME TIME..."
  • Mugging the Monster: Bishnu Shrestha. This retired Gurkha (which should say everything you need to know about how badass he is) was returning home on a train when forty gangsters boarded it, robbed the people on board, and tried to rape a girl. Bishnu taught them the error of their ways in a storm of blood-spraying violence, killing three men and disabling eight more with just his kukri before the rest ran for the hills.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • T'ai Djin, a Shaolin monk and kung-fu grandmaster who was also a werewolf (well, kinda, at least he looked like one).
  • Léo Major: He singlehandedly took 93 German soldiers defending some sort of Headquarters prisoner, and then took on an entire town alone and drove the entire German presence out over the course of nine hours, liberating an entire town by himself.
  • Captain Johnathan R. Davis: One prospector, two revolvers, one bigass bowie knife, and the most awesome mutton chops ever, versus eleven heavily-armed bandits. Guess who wins.
  • Simo Häyhä So much so that the Soviets actually ordered artillery bombardments just for the express purpose to try and kill him. They failed.
  • Jose M. Lopez The guy who singlehandedly killed over a hundred nazis in one battle, and stared down a Tiger tank. The Germans even resorted to calling artillery down on him. It wasn't enough.
  • Rule of Cool: Articles tend to be based on the coolest accounts of the profilee's life, rather than the most reliable.
  • Shout-Out: Got one in Mass Effect 2 —a character mentions the publication "Badass Weekly".
  • Showy Invincible Hero: Angus MacGyver.
    When Mac gets captured and shackled to the wall of a dank, lightless underground dungeon the question is never “is he going to be able to get out of this?” – it’s, “how is he going to use a coat hanger, some rusty thumbtacks, a Swiss Army knife, some duct tape and a magnifying glass to break free, kick this goon’s ass and disable the time bomb before his girlfriend gets blown up?”
  • Shrouded in Myth:
    • Wolf the Quarrelsome.
      Another thing that totally rocks about Wolf the Quarrelsome is that he only appears in history twice, and both times he's kicking ass.


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