What exactly is a "Badass"?

I can barely stand to read your posts with all the hyperbolic language and caps lock. Your attitude is a perfect example of why Badass is such a vague trope.

edited 6th Jan '15 9:56:41 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

My personal take is that morality has fundamentally nothing to do with badass (though it can, like a man sacricificing his life solely for the good of the people certainly enhances his badassery). A Badass is, to borrow Mermer's words "An impressive, or formidable person".

Take Gregor Clegane. A unrepentant rapist, murderer put entire populations to the sword, he Would Hit a Girl (and rape her beforehand), he Would Hurt a Child (and maybe rape her beforehand as well) and he is a sociopath of the finest degree who'll cleave you in half if you look at him wrong. That's Gregor Clegane. A unrempentant monster devoid of compassion.

And yet he's a seven feet tall war machine who can No-Sell a spear piercing his chest and crush a man's skull with his bare fists. He lifts with one hand a sword most men wouldn't be able to carry with two. He's the perfect soldier, all in all. He's a Badass. But he's also the most loathsome character of the franchise (and this is saying a lot).

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

That's exactly the problem. The trope can be applied to just about anything ever that someone finds to be impressive. Littlest Cancer Patient endures stoically? Badass. Testosterone-poisoned bruiser beats up three dozen mooks? Badass. Video game champion goes on to win a national tournament? Badass.

The trope is uselessly vague.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Barring your first example, the catch is I don't find a problem with it being a very broad trope. It serves a purpose (to note a character that somehow goes above and beyond a normal person in terms of impressive feats) and I wish for that purpose to remain. If you want to be specific, that's why subtropes exist, use them.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

This is why I suggest that we make it exampleless.

This is why I suggest the usage of the term has achieved Omnipresent Trope status.

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If we were to list every single example of Badass, the pages would go on forever. I've never seen a work that made Bad Ass a completely Averted Trope. I don't know a more concrete definition of Omnipresent Tropes.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

That a trope can be averted doesn't make it omnipresent. Most Slice of Life and Coming of Age works don't have a Badass in them, nor do moist romances, but they don't Avert it either, because there's no reason to expect there to be a Badass in it. Remember, a trope is Averted when the conventions of that type of work lead to the expectation that it will be used. Averted doesn't simply mean "didn't get used" — one very clear way to put it is that a fairy tale doesn't avert Space Is Noisy because there's no expectation that Space Is Noisy will even enter into it in the fiirst place. An Omnipresent Trope is one that appears in virtually every genre or type of work; they are relatively few.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I do. Overly broad tropes lend themselves to shoehorning and zero-context examples, plus it becomes a matter of opinion as to whether any particular example applies. By forcing Badass examples into subtropes, you force them to establish concrete criteria, making misuse much less of a problem.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

...Isn't that exactly what I said in the latter half of the post?

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

You said, "If you want to be specific," implying that Badass should be allowed to accumulate non-specific examples. I dispute that. I believe that Badass should be an example-less supertrope.

edited 6th Jan '15 1:13:53 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Fixing Badass was discussed in that general thread and the idea was to do it once all the other tropes were fixed.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That seems fine by me as well.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

I would be fine making the generic badass an exampless supertrope, its the subtropes that really matter for it anyway. My problem is the limiting of the term limits the subtropes themselves.

A "badass" is a character who is brave and awesome. But yes it is defined rather vaguely, and is used (if not overused) a lot.

Yeah, this is my problem as well. If Badass is becoming an exampleless Super-Trope, and will not be allowed on any page, it does not matter one whit if it is fuzzily broad.

The only thing restricting it to combat proficiency does is prevent, say, a sports team in a sports series from being a Badass Crew, which makes no sense.

edited 6th Jan '15 8:55:35 PM by KingZeal

Why would we need to limit it to combat proficiency? I think that is an overly narrow reading of the trope as it exists — or at least as it is used. The problem, as I see it, is that if you widen it too much, it becomes synonymous with "awesome person", which makes it functionally useless as a trope.

So you have a choice: make Badass broad enough to encompass all those concepts, but consequently turn it into an example-less supertrope; or keep it about "awesome combatant" and accept that those other tropes about "awesome at video games", "awesome at politics", and so forth, won't be labeled "Badass".

Frankly, I don't see why you have an attachment to the term such that it has to apply to everything. The concept is so overused that I'm frankly getting bored with it.

edited 6th Jan '15 10:49:27 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I see a distinction between staring down your boss (who can fire you) and staring down a dragon (who can fire you). If that makes sense.

Check out my fanfiction!

Because that isn't what the word means, and how anyone feels about it shouldn't dictate how the wiki defines it. I find the idea of changing a term just because some people don't like it to honest be short-sighted and rather self-serving. And yes, I'm well aware that the admins have elected to change the meanings of words in the past because they've become Loaded Trope Words, and I don't think Badass is quite THAT loaded so much that it needs to be about combat alone.

The word is a value, not a descriptor. The term badass has always been a loose moniker for anything that's reached a level of admiration or accomplishment. Trying to make it a descriptor is like trying to make any trope with "Awesome" in the name a descriptor. Like awesome, it's a value, and whatever the Subtrope is attached to is the descriptor. Unless we're arguing that, like, Badass Boast needs to be a boast strictly about combat and Badass Bureaucrat should not exist.

As I said, if it's going to be a Super-Trope anyway, there is zero point to restricting it to combat

edited 7th Jan '15 12:31:31 AM by KingZeal

I think that a "badass" character isn't necessarily somebody who's great at fighting. They at least have to be someone brave and skilled enough to survive a difficult situation.

That a trope can be averted doesn't make it omnipresent.

But I didn't say it could be averted. I said I've never seen a work that made Bad Ass a completely Averted Trope. To rephrase my statement, I doubt you could find any works that I could not find a fandom who claimed "X is Badass" from that work. That is what makes it Omnipresent.

Slice of Life, Coming of Age, Romance Novel? I've not read or watched a single one that didn't have a Badass. Especially Coming of Age: the entire point is to grow from being a child to an Adult. To become a more awesome version of yourself, who can handle responsibilities and power.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Here's the thing that I have been saying all along: that definition of Badass has suffered massive decay from its original meaning. It's not the first time that a once-precise term has become broadened by its exposure within a large culture — remember our friend Mary Sue?

In these cases, TV Tropes is faced with a choice: accept the definition that's in general usage, which makes the concept far too broad and/or subjective to be a trope, or insist on the original definition and annoy a bunch of people who get really whiny when you tell them, for example, that putting chili sauce on toast or telling your boss off or living past 80 isn't badass.

edited 8th Jan '15 1:00:07 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Except that badass is in the dictionary, and all of the "misuse" is accurate. It can mean anything from tough, aggressive, difficult, or "Excellent; wonderful; rad, slammin" (seriously, Dictionary?).

Mary Sue never had a clear definition.

By that standard, neither did badass, and the dictionary definition is Not A Trope, so here we are...

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

*sigh* I give up.

This is why I didn't argue about this before.

Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.

Seriously?