Characters / Team Fortress 2: Offense

aka: Team Fortress 2 The Scout

Main Character Index
Offense Classes | Defense Classes | Support Classes
Non-Player Characters

These classes are tasked with leading the charge of a fight, whether it be flanking the enemy from the sides or being the first to touch down on an objective. Their kits are designed with DPS in mind, having access to some highly damaging primary weapons and unparalleled movement relative to other classes.

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The Scout

The Scout

Real name: Jeremy

"Ey, is someone keepin' track of my heads batted in? BOINK!'"

Voiced by: Nathan Vetterlein (English), Dani Albiac (Spanish), Alexander Fisenko (Russian), Stefan Günther (German)

"Ya listenin'? Okay. Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother? I hurt people!"

The Scout (real name Jeremy) is an American hailing from South Boston, but somehow has a Bronx accent. A narcissistic braggart with an ego the size of the Soviet Union, Scout is always ready to hype himself up with overly-inflated praises and trash-talk his enemies. Moreover, he's an obvious baseball fan, given his baseball cap, bat, and sports-themed accessories. The Scout is canonically the youngest of eight brothers, son of a single mother, and grew up on the streets trying to pick fights alongside his siblings and thus had to learn to run fast to join the brawls first. He coincidentally looks and sounds almost exactly like Vince Offer, and to some extent even has a similar personality. Everyone, Meet the Scout!

The Scout is an Offense character with emphasis on lightning-fast combat. With a piddling 125HP but a staggering 133% base speed, a Scattergun capable of two shotting any class short of a Heavy, and the ability to Double Jump, he's a fragile but fast and powerful class who relies on agility and speed to outmaneuver his enemies and weave around their attacks, making him the ideal class for flanking and objective-pushing. Moreover, because he counts as two people when on map objectives such as the Payload cart or a Control Point, taking them is often a Scout's job. The Scout's arsenal includes the Scattergun, a lever-action double-barrel shotgun with excellent damage for close-up engagements, but must rely on his pistol to do more than Scratch Damage at ranges beyond shoving the barrel up the enemy's nose. Alternatively, the Scout can use a variety of special consumable (or throwable) drinks in his secondary weapon slot to buff himself. His melee weapon is an aluminum baseball bat.

The Scout was the fourth class to receive new equipment.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • Engineers. While Scouts might be able to dodge most things the enemy throws at them, an Engineer's sentry gun is not one of them. Combined with the Scout's small amount of health, sentries can lock onto and obliterate Scouts in the blink of an eye, even if it's a mini-sentry. Scouts can drink Bonk! Atomic Punch to make themselves briefly immune to a sentry's ammo, but it only lasts for so long before it runs out.
  • Tight corridors and low ceilings make it much more difficult for Scouts to dodge incoming enemy fire, especially blast damage. Thus, classes such as Soldiers and Demomen — who are normally targets Scout has the upper hand against — can much more easily reduce Scouts to sticky clouds of meat.
  • Heavies. Where the other damage classes have slow projectiles which can be dodged, a Heavy's minigun is both hitscan, and has an effective cone of damage, similar to the Scout's own Scattergun. With good tracking skills and a strong position, a Heavy can mow down Scouts by the dozen while laughing at the little baby men. The Scout can however, mitigate the threat of Heavies with his cooldown-based projectiles like the Sandman or by simply ambushing distracted ones and finishing them off before they can spin around and track them.
  • Pyros. Scout has to get in close to do any real damage, and getting in close to a Pyro means being lit on fire. His low health will cost him his life if he gets even the tiniest bit careless, especially if he has no Mad Milk or Bonk! Atomic Punch to potentially save himself with.
• Actually Pretty Funny: In Expiration Date, after he botches yet another attempt to ask out Ms. Pauling, Spy snidely remarks that he's "asking out that dial tone again". Scout immediately tells him to go to hell, but can't help chuckling a little at the joke after Spy leaves.
• The All-American Boy: Viciously parodied. Scout is a born-and-bred Bostonian who loves baseball, his mom, and breaking heads with a variety of blunt objects.
• Animal Motifs: Rabbits, and to a much lesser degree, squirrels. He's fast, superior to most of the classes when it comes to jumping because of his double jump, and he has buck teeth, as well as rabbit-like screaming. The following domination lines support the rabbit motifs:
  Demoman: "You're like a little bunny… scurryin' around, eatin' up yer lettuce and berries!"
  Engineer: "Just a dead little jackrabbit."
  Spy: "Ooh, you were quick as a little bunny, weren't you?"
• Ascended Meme: After the community-made jokes about similarities between Scout and Jerma985, "The Naked and the Dead" reveals that the two men share the same first name.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: Fittingly enough for a baseball enthusiast, the Scout's default outfit just so happens to resemble a typical baseball uniform. It also draws attention to how the Scout succeeds in the same way a batting baseball player does: they both must uphold a strong, aggressive offense by employing their speed and mobility effectively.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: A surprisingly effective strategy for Scouts, just rush at the objective, preferably using the Bonk soda. Works extremely well in Capture The Flag or Payload. The Scout can die and get back into the fight faster thanks to his mobility, and captures things quickly enough that it doesn't have time to reset.
• Attention Whore:
  • Several of Scout's in-game voice lines are desperate cries for attention, especially regarding how effective a mercenary he is.
    "Is-is anyone even payin' attention to me?"
    "LOOK AT ME!"
    "Yo, I oughta' be on a baseball card!"
    "Guys, I'm right here! Of course, we're gonna win!"
  • When the titular Director records him in the "Meet the Director" comic, the Scout blathers on about how great he is until the Director runs out of film. He doesn't realize they've stopped recording until five hours after the fact, and he still has more praises to sing about himself, urging the Director to collect more film and continue their session.
    Scout: ... More of a mentor to the rest of the team, you know? I see how they could be doin' their jobs better? It don't matter how busy I am. I will drop what I'm doin and tell 'em. And why?
    Director: [tired and annoyed] We ran out of film five hours ago—
    Scout: I'll tell ya why. Because I'm a team player. Probably the best team player of the team—
    Director: [more assertively] We ran out of film five hours ago.
    Scout: That's okay, you can go buy some. I got tons more ta say. We'll wait here for ya.
    [Once the Director leaves in a huff, Scout turns his attention to Miss Pauling, who's been taking notes during the recording session. He leans on a fence close to her and flirtatiously eats a sandwich.]
    Scout: Man, what a jackass. So, how you doin' Miss Pauling? Hey, you ever seen me with my shirt off? Cuz it is awesome.
• Ax-Crazy: He's hardly the craziest of the mercs, but he still takes a little too much pride in killing people. In the "Bombinomicon" comic, in lieu of Halloween candy, he offers a trick-or-treater someone's molar — from some poor schmuck he likely batted the brains out of — and proudly explains how he found it.
• The Baby of the Bunch: The youngest out of eight brothers, and probably the youngest member of the team, assuming Pyro is older than him. (Of course, that's assuming Pyro is a human to begin with.)
• Badass Boast: In "Meet the Scout":
  "Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother...I hurt people. I'm a force of nature. If you were from where I'm from, you would be f***ing dead."
• Balance Buff: Not directly onto him, but via the Medic: the Meet Your Match update changed all Mediguns to match the speed of their heal target, whereas in previous versions this trait was unique to the Quick Fix. This turned Scout from one of Medic's worst patients to one of his best; Scout no longer needs to tether himself to the spot if he wants a Medic's heal, Medics can tag Scout to rollout or escape faster, and having a source of constant regeneration and overheal from a Medic that can keep up nullifies Scout's primary weakness in his fragility.
• Bastard Bastard: Or Heroic Bastard, given the Spy's affair with his mom, and the fact the Spy seemed to abandon him when she got pregnant, it's all-but-stated that Scout is an illegitimate child. Naturally, whether or not he's the former trope or the latter depends on if he's on your team or the enemy team, with the bulleted trope falling under the later. By default, he's another one of the Mercs' motley of Blood Knight Anti-Heroes.
• Batter Up!: Being a baseball fan, his default melee weapon is an aluminum bat, and he also has various unlockable bats, which have varying stats. It's even the name of one of the Scout's achievements (Perform 1000 double jumps).
• Big Ego, Hidden Depths: There's more to him than just being narcissistic...
  • Is the brattiest and half-pintiest of the bunch, but loves his ma dearly. Though he doesn't like talking about it, he wants to find out the nature of his Disappeared Dad, and the reveal from Tom Jones^note actually Spy in disguise that he's his father relieves him greatly.
  • Some of the Scout's lines hint that he may be smarter than he lets on: He seems to know about the Hippocratic Oath ("Where's ya precious hippo-crates now?") and has at least heard of H. P. Lovecraft (he calls Merasmus "H. P. Dumb-craft").
  • He seems to be a rather decent artist, with his boredom-fueled scrawls showing he has a rather steady hand, and the art itself isn't too bad.
  • Despite supposedly possessing a 'fourth grade reading level', his actual reading speed seems to be proportionate to his running speed; during the Hard-Work Montage in "Expiration Date", he goes through a large stack of books within 72 hours.
  • Despite his often all-pervading selfishness, he is actually aware of how out of his league Ms. Pauling is, and how while he occasionally does score with a girl, he is absolutely hopeless when it comes to well-educated, classy girls, to the point that he seeks out the help of Spy to win Miss Pauling's heart.
  • One of the "Meet Your Match" lines reveals that he considers his teammates as "Best Friends"; coming out of a narcissist, that really means something.
  "Hey, I'll just say it. Everyone else here is too scared to say it, but I'll just say what everyone's thinkin'! We're all best friends. We are all dear, dear friends! Birthday party at my place this weekend, by the way. Nobody showed up last weekend so I figured, no big whoop, I'll just have it again."
  "Go team, everybody! Six trained killers, am I right? Best of da best! And best friends. We don't say it a lot, or at all, but we're all feelin' it here. In our hearts, you know? The frien-the friendship."
  "That is how a team of best friends wins the game!"
  • He actually had the foresight to try and invest his earnings instead of blowing it all like one might expect. He invested it poorly — the same comic that introduced this quality, "Unhappy Returns," shows that he's been stockpiling not money, but Tom Jones memorabilia to sell when Jones dies — but points for trying.
• Big "OMG!":
  • In "Meet the Sandvich" when the enemy Heavy is charging towards him.
  • When receiving rare items on Mann vs. Machine mode, he will sometimes say this.
• Bizarre Beverage Use: Scout can recover health from the Mad Milk, but not by drinking it. Instead, he throws the bottle at enemies as a projectile (though the impact itself doesn't do damage), covering them in the substance, and whatever damage they take gets returned to Scout as health.
• Blood Knight: He considers using enemies' heads as baseball practice his only purpose in his whole existence.
• Blown Across the Room: The Force-A-Nature, in addition to slapping fat stacks of damage, also applies a lot of knockback to enemies proportionate to distance, which can potentially send them off cliffs or into hazards.
• Body Horror: Has a live bird sealed in his chest after surgery, that was never removed. On rare occasions, when he gets reduced to chunky bits, the bird will fly out unharmed.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Just listen to his lines for about 5 seconds. It's a fair guess that he's meant to sound annoying, being the youngest one of the mercs.
  • Backstory-wise: he's the runt of eight children (referred to as "his mad-dog brothers"). Apparently, he trained up his speed so he could get into fights before his brothers could join in and take away all the fun.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Of all the members of the team, he takes the biggest chunks out of the Fourth Wall. Especially on Competitive Mode:
  "I spec'd these guys earlier. They look ugly. I didn't want to say it, but they do. Their hats are terrible, their faces aren't very good or attractive..."
• Brooklyn Rage: Even though he's from Boston, it certainly counts.
• Buffy Speak: In his domination lines toward Heavy and Sniper:
  Scout: (to Heavy) I am owning you, you fat bald fatty fat… fat-fat!
  Scout: (to Sniper) You'll never hit me! You'll never hit my tiny head! It's so tiny, I've got a fricken'… such a tiny little head!
• But Not Too Foreign: Since Spy is heavily implied to have an affair with his mom, he is half-French on his father's side.
• Cannot Spit It Out: He's got a hell of a crush on Miss Pauling, but just can't work up the guts to ask her out, much to Spy's amusement.
  Spy: Asking out that dial-tone again, I see?
  Scout: Go to hell, Spy.
• Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: While he's got plenty of one-liners for single mothers and whatever girls he comes across, attempting to ask out Miss Pauling leaves him faltering and stammering.
• Casanova Wannabe: Not so much in-game due to a lack of female characters on the battlefield, but in the comics he hits on nigh-on every woman he sees, with varying success.
  • One of the pages for the Halloween 2012 update includes a dating advert that's obviously written by the Scout — the gratuitous amounts of self-praise mean it couldn't have been made by anyone else.
  • In "A Cold Day in Hell", he passes up what's probably one of the few chances he'll get to have sex with a decent woman (Heavy's sister, Zhanna) because he's convinced Miss Pauling will like him if he keeps waiting.
  • A cutaway in the short "Expiration Date" shows he actually can score girls, and has before; however, said girls are implied to also not be very… classy girls.
    Scout: We both got buckets of chicken. You wan' do it?
    Girl: [shrugs] Eh, okay.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: The Scout trained himself to run everywhere and anytime, originally so he could reach fights in time to have some fun before his seven older brothers got there. By the game's scale, he's running at about 17 miles per hour ^note He runs at 400 Hammer Units, each one three-quarters of an inch, per second. This translates to 25 feet per second, or 17.05 MPH. — perpetually. And that's not taking into account his jumping abilities.
• Characterization Marches On: Initially, Scout's interest in Miss Pauling was treated as nothing more than macho posturing by him that was ignored by her out of disgust. This was supported by mentions of other attempts by him to pick up chicks, such as on the description for The Fast Learner. Then "A Cold Day In Hell" hinted that Scout's crush on her might actually be sincere, followed by "Expiration Date" recharacterizing their relationship. The end result was that Scout actually likes her as a person but doesn't know any other way to ask her out other than hitting on her like any random stranger, and Miss Pauling isn't against dating him and merely didn't notice his feeble attempts to ask her out.
• Charge Meter: The Soda Popper has a charge that builds up by dealing damage while wielding the gun. When the meter is full, Scout can activate it and have the ability to quintuple jump for about ten seconds (like Double Jump, but 2.5 times better!).
• The Chew Toy: Tends to get smacked around A LOT in the shorts and comics, especially by his own teammates.
  • In "Expiration Date", the Soldier's first reaction upon learning he can't teleport bread anymore is to choke-slam the Scout against a nearby table. The Scout did nothing to provoke this reaction, other than being in the same room. Hell, Soldier's first appearance in the short is pushing his hand into Scout's face.
  • In the comics, Soldier has strangled Scout not once, but twice in a court of law in both "A Smissmas Story" and "Unhappy Returns". According to "Ring of Fired", Soldier broke BOTH of Scout's arms for an unspecified reason (possibly accidental), sometime after the team was laid off.
  • In the "Gargoyles and Gravel" comic, Soldier's first reaction to learning there will be no pizza is to suggest they all eat Scout. And then he later strangles Scout again.
  • When the mercenaries are set to be executed in Teufort, Scout's the one who came closest to actually being hanged.
  • Also from "Expiration Date," Spy gets in a lot of slaps during his date training with Scout.
  • Most of Scout's screen time in "Jungle Inferno" is spent getting dragged and thrown around by Saxton Hale—about half of that time is spent being used as a human baseball bat.
  • BLU Scout gets in on the action offscreen in "Meet the Sandvich", getting severely beaten to a pulp by Red Heavy.
• The Chosen One: Apparently, God chose Scout to lay with all of the women on Earth. Scout agrees with this, but he's dead just right before this information got to him. So Scout has a Bargain with Heaven to continue the "commitment" until he's truly dead in December 4, 1987. Then again, that could be a posthumous hallucination just like Sniper went through; or alternatively, if it was Heaven, God might have just been playing along with Scout's ego because that's exactly what Scout's version of Heaven would entail.
  • The thing is It likely WAS heaven, because Tom Jones (who was killed much earlier), was there. Considering he'd just seen what he thought was Tom Jones not minutes earlier on Earth, he wouldn't likely have imagined him in heaven, much less getting neck-snapped a second time. While already dead.
• Close-Range Combatant: Scouts only have pistols, the Flying Guillotine, Wrap Assassin and the Sandman for mid-long range harassment, but none are really suited for actual combat. The bulk of their damage will be happening up close, and most fights can end with two blasts from the Scouts primary weapons provided they can aim well.
• Companion Cube:
  • He became very attached to the Haunted Hat during the 2013 Scream Fortress event, even talking to it and treating it like a friend and teammate.
  Just you an' me, scary hat.
  • A few of the "Meet Your Match" lines have him talking to his bat.
• Cool Board: His Boston Boarder taunt makes him spawn a Bonk-themed skateboard. Two cosmetics also have Scout carrying a snowboard and similar Bonk skateboard.
• Cool Helmet: Fitting his baseball and Speed Demon theme, the Scout has the most helmet cosmetics of any class. And they all look cool.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: He's an egotistical, loud-mouthed braggart who also just so happens to be a highly-skilled and dexterous soldier-for-hire that can run at 17 MPH constantly, and kills people with the likes of baseball bats, fish, or a dead man's arm.
• Deadly Dodging: A Scout under the effects of the Bonk! Atomic Punch drink can use his bullet-dodging state to kill Engineers with their own Sentry Guns, and to kill explosive-using classes by forcing them to take self-damage.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Unskilled Scouts can often be seen dropping off like flies, but experienced ones can easily rack up the bodies, capture points, and generally posing a serious menace to the enemy team. His playstyle requires quick reflexes, constant movement, and in-depth knowledge of the map, as well as good aim since he has to keep moving while shooting to stay alive. He is hard to control for many FPS players, due to his ludicrous speed, low health and considerable up-close firepower. On the other hand, truly veteran FPS players (especially those who are used to the classic 'run n' gun' shooters) might get a sense of nostalgia from the quick movement and emphasis on dodging attacks rather than soaking them up.
• Disappeared Dad: In "Blood in the Water", Scout brings up the fact that Heavy's dad is dead, which he has in common.
  Scout: Yeah, mine disappeared.
  Heavy: Yes, your father disappears often.
  • This brief dialogue above is foreshadowing to Spy being confirmed to be Scout's father in the comics. Hence the "disappears often" line.
• Double Jump: One of his special abilities. Certain equipment can improve this skill, giving him a third additional jump (which used to come at the cost of some health), a Recoil Boost, and increased jump height.
  • Soda Popper's Hype meter, when charged by hitting enemies, can grant the Scout a quintuple jump. However, this takes up the same slot as the aforementioned Force-a-Nature and doesn't stack with the Atomizer.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Too many Scouts, or an all-Scout team, makes the team a literal seven-men blitzkrieg that can easily punch a hole through undefended chokepoints in the blink of an eye and overwhelm most enemies, but can quickly come to a screeching halt in the face of Sentry nests, which Scouts usually struggle to overcome, and Sentry Guns, which Scouts aren't equipped or expected to take out by themselves. An effective response to a Scout swarm is to stack some Engineers to cut a chunk of the map away because of this.
• Dumb Blonde: The red shade he's depicted within the comics is very light, and many people consider lighter reds to be shades of blonde, and as mentioned below his in-game models hair could be considered ash blonde.
• Eat My Dust: One of his lines.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: In "Meet the Scout", he kills the enemy Heavy and eats his Sandvich. In-game, he can get an achievement for doing this ("Dodgers 1, Giants 0").
  • Picking up a Sandvich as a Scout will also restore 75 points of health, whereas other classes only get 50 HP back from doing so.
• Easily Impressed: In "Expiration Date", he's impressed by the fact that Ms. Pauling can read.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Seems to be fond of his. "Look at me, ma!"
• Evil Laugh: While every class has an impressive array of sinister laughter, Scout is one of the handful who starts laughing maniacally if he goes on a killing spree in a short amount of time. It's not uncommon to hear good Scouts blow away a group of enemies and hear the Scout laugh his ass off after the second or third kill.
• Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: "Extra! Extra! You're frickin' dead!"
• Fiery Redhead: Some of the comics depict him with red hair, while his in-game model has mousy brown or ash blonde hair. In-game, on the other hand, his hair cosmetics, when painted with the Team Spirit paint can, can make him a proper redhead, as well an inversion of Shy Blue-Haired Girl.
• Flexing Those Non-Biceps: In "Meet the Scout". "Aw man, that's beautiful," he says. Sure thing, Scout. Sure thing. Unless he counts the natural bicep contraction to be a flex.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: One has to wonder where he picked up the word "ragequit". Yes, he actually does tell his domination victims to ragequit.
  • He also recognizes that he's a class, and that all the "battlegrounds" are maps.
  • He uses the term "cap" at least once in any Control Point match.^note Except that he uses it wrong. While "cap" is short for "capture", i.e. the act of claiming a control point, Scout instead refers to the control points themselves as "caps".
  • And he's aware of the existence of critical hits as well, as proven when dominating an enemy Soldier.
  • Painting The Fourth Wall: He pokes the camera in "Meet The Scout", slams into the "camera" (which turns out to be a window) in "Meet The Medic", and knocks the camera over again in "Meet The Pyro". Not a canonical Fourth Wall Break, since those cameras do exist in-universe (as shown here), but still fitting of the Running Gag. Literally.
    • Further, while all the other Meet the Team interviews/sketches seem to take place in actual locations, Scout's interview takes place on the title card of his own video.
• Fragile Speedster: Of the four classes^note Sniper, Spy, and Engineer are the other three with only 125 HP, Scout is the only one made for direct confrontation, but he more than makes up for this with blinding speed and agility. His Scattergun does over 100 damage point-blank in a game where only one class has more than 200 health.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: It's generally hinted that the other mercs, understandably, find him obnoxious to be around. Scout himself reveals that nobody went to his birthday party despite inviting them all a week earlier, and his sincere claims of friendship go completely ignored and Pauling usually sounds a little annoyed when handing out missions to him. The only person who can enjoy being around him is, unfortunately for him, the Soldier, and he's been horribly injured and embarrassed by him many times because of it. On the other hand, Expiration Date shows that Spy, Sniper, Demoman and Pyro were willing to spend their last days alive to help him score a date with Ms. Pauling - presumably because him admitting that Spy is better than him on a loudspeaker is an astronomically rare and humble thing to come out his mouth.
• Glass Cannon: Scout’s primaries are among the most powerful burst damaging weapons in the game, capable of killing a non-overhealed Heavy in 3 shots if all pellets connect. However this comes at the cost of having only 125 HP and being required to get up close to do deal any noteworthy damage.
  • The Crit-A-Cola doubles down on this. When it is active, you deal and (after attacking) take mini-crits. ^note  +35% Damage So while you can kill your foes even faster, most classes can kill you just as quickly.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: He can use the Unarmed Combat, an arm torn off an enemy Spy.
• Had to Be Sharp: He's the youngest of eight brothers, and as a result would often not have time to get any shots in during a fight before it was over. He pushed himself to be faster than his siblings in order for him to be able to actually participate in brawls.
• Handwraps of Awesome: Wears white bandages around his wrists and palms.
• Heroic Bastard: As explained under Bastard Bastard, he's this whenever he's on your team due to the Spy's affair with Scout's mother.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: A not-moving Scout is a dead Scout. Oftentimes, the best course of action (especially against bulkier enemies) is to run in, get several meat-shots on a target, then get out of there before they can take aim on you. Rinse and repeat.
• Hopeless Suitor: For Miss Pauling in "Expiration Date", if one can even consider him a suitor to her at all. Though she seems to turn around to the idea in the end.
• Hot-Blooded: Has a very fiery attitude and is quick to act without thinking beforehand.
• I Fell for Hours: One of his responses for falling into the pit in the Halloween version of Lakeside.
  Scout: (Overly long scream) (Beat) Holy crap, this goes on forever.
• I Have Brothers: Rare male example. He's the youngest of his family's eight children, all sons. Apparently, according to his bio, he got his talent for speed by learning to be the first into the (many) fights his brothers got into so he wouldn't miss out.
• Improbable Weapon User: Quite a few Melee weapons:
  • The Wrap Assassin is a roll of wrapping paper and a Chri—I mean, Smissmas Ornament that causes the target to bleed.
  • The Candy Cane, a large candy cane that causes Scout's victims to drop health packs.
  • The Unarmed Combat, which is actually the Spy's severed arm used as a bludgeon.
  • The Fan O'War, a large Gunbai war fan that deals small amount of damage, but hitting an opponent with it will inflict the Marked For Death debuff, causing all damage they take to be mini-crits.
  • And, to top it off, there's the Holy Mackerel, which has no special effects, but as the item description puts it, "Getting hit by a fish has got to be humiliating." That is, it keeps a hit counter in the killfeed, and if you get killed by it, the killfeed shows a "FISH KILL!" next to who killed you.
• Inherently Funny Words: BONK!
• Ink-Suit Actor: He looks a lot like his voice actor, Nathan Vetterlein◊. And with the official comic stating that the Scout is in his mid-to-late 20's, they were even the same age when Vetterlein first recorded his lines back in 2007!
• In the Back: The Back Scatter. It is specially adapted to ambush and hit-and-run playstyles as the shots deal mini-crits when the Scout shoots an enemy's back.
• Irony: The Scout is one of the better classes for discovering and killing Spies (besides the Pyro), due to his movement speed, and the character himself has a particular dislike of the Spy. Yet Scouts can make terrifyingly effective assassins themselves by showing up out of nowhere, blowing away key targets with their scattergun, and escaping before anyone can retaliate (and all the better if the target is alone). Perhaps not so surprising, considering who his father is...
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In his Meet The Team video, he constantly licks his own shoes and generally acts like a gigantic narcissist. The comics show sometimes he's not the nicest guy even to his own teammates either, like when he rats out Soldier in the Smissmas comic or jeers at Heavy for giving Sasha her own bed. At his best though, he's shown to be surprisingly thoughtful of those around him and has many moments of acting on it.
• Ladykiller in Love: Towards Miss Pauling, as of "A Cold Day In Hell". Though, 'Ladykiller' is a stretch.
• Laser Blade: He has the Batsaber, which resembles the iconic swords from the Star Wars franchise in bat form. It functions the same as the normal bat except enemies killed by it get vaporized.
• Lean and Mean: Like the Spy, he's thin as a stick and loves to mock, tease and trash-talk his enemies, given the chance. He especially plays it up in his Domination lines against the Heavy:
  Scout: Nice hustle, tons-a-fun! Next time, eat a salad.
  Scout: I am owning you, you fat, bald bastard!
  Scout: Hey, lard-fat! Those hard arteries don't stop bullets, do they?!
  Scout: [melee kill] EAT IT, FATTY!
• Leitmotif: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet, a fast-paced piece of music with speedy bongos.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Fan O'War, a promotional item introduced when Total War: Shogun 2 was made available on Steam. Since it's a fan, it has -75% damage penalty, which makes it deal even less damage than the standard Bat (itself already the least-damaging of all primary melee weapons) but marks enemies for death, causing all attacks on the target to be mini-crits. It is somewhat useful if the teamwork is on point but extremely dangerous as the Scout has to go into melee range.
• Life Drain: The Pretty Boy's Pocket Pistol heals 3 health every time he hits an enemy with it. It increases the survivability of the Scout especially when he's forced to play far from his Medic, but its smaller clip size make it less-than-ideal in a heated firefight.
• Lightning Bruiser: In Mann vs. Machine, the Scout gains 20-50 health every time he picks up a pile of money. The limit on how much health this can add is rather absurd; it's not uncommon to see a Scout running around with more health than an overhealed Heavy.
• Like Father, Like Son: Shares some traits with his canonical father, the Spy, including being a good choice for surprising and eliminating key targets and their penchant for biting personal insults when dominating an enemy; Scout even gets a sidegrade Scattergun, the Back Scatter, which deals mini-crits to targets from behind. Both are also shown to have an inflated ego that masks their insecurities and on a more humorous note they're the only 2 mercs who react with borement when they fall into the bottomless pit on Halloween, down to having the same kind of reaction process (screaming followed by snarking that the fall is taking too long).
• Limit Break: Some of the Scout's weapons give the Scout a temporary boost once certain conditions are met. With the Baby Face's Blaster, the Scout's speed goes up to 173% once he deals enough damage. The Soda Popper functions similarly as it grants a temporary mini-crit when the Scout runs enough.
• Loony Fan: Of Tom Jones, at least in the comics. In addition to the usual knickknacks and memorabilia, he has a tattoo of Tom on his chest! He even believes Tom Jones to be his father, when in reality the Spy is.
• The Man They Couldn't Hang: He gets subjected to neck trauma a lot in the comics, almost to the point of a Running Gag. It comes to a head in "Unhappy Returns", where the Scout is the closest captured mercenary to being hanged — his platform had already dropped by the time Ms. Pauling swoops in to save him. He can barely choke out his encouragements for her to keep holding him up.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: He grew up with seven older brothers.
• Motor Mouth: Scout almost never stops talking, even when asked to do so. During his interview in "Meet the Director," Scout talks so much about himself that the titular director runs out of film. five hours before this point in Scout's interview.
• Must Have Caffeine: In an early trailer, his motto simply reads "Too. Much. Caffeine." Plus, two of his unlockable weapons are energy drinks.
• Narcissist: Scout shows lots of arrogance in "Meet the Scout", making himself seem like a bigger deal than he probably is. This trait is very much apparent in-game, where he boasts and shouts about how awesome he is while putting others down.
  "What did we learn? I always win!"
  "You knuckleheads ain't even worth the effort."
  "How's that feel, wimp?"
  "'Ey, is somebody keepin' track of my heads batted in?"
• Never Learned to Read: Depending on the Writer. "The Naked and The Dead" has him struggle to read "sub-machine [gun]" on the side of a weapons crate, but in "Expiration Date", he's shown going through a lot of books incredibly quickly — although it's still debated on whether he's reading or faking it. (In the same video, he also acts impressed by the fact that Ms. Pauling can read, possibly implying that he himself cannot.)
• Nigh-Invulnerable: The Bonk! Atomic Punch renders him utterly invulnerable to damage at the cost of being unable to use any weaponry for the duration and being forced to operate from the third person. However, he is still subject to knockback, meaning that skilled Pyros, Demos, and Soldiers will often juggle inexperienced Scouts into corners before finishing them off.
• No Full Name Given: Only his first name is revealed.
• Not the Intended Use: The Boston Basher is such an enormously high-risk, moderate-reward weapon — a melee weapon that will inflict bleed damage on hit, but will damage Scout himself if it gets nothing — that it's almost never used as an actual offensive tool, especially since like many of Scout's melee weapons, his trademark Scattergun makes them redundant. Despite this, the Boston Basher is extremely common in competitive circles as the self-damage allows friendly Medics to charge up Uber faster, as well as create a mini-Recoil Boost as an extra half-jump to reach unexpected places.
• Nutritional Nightmare: Taken to the point of absurdity, where the cans of Bonk! Atomic Punch and Crit-a-Cola Scout likes to drink are proudly boasted to be radioactive and contains several hundred times the recommended daily sugar intake.
• Oh, Crap!: He utters variations of this when Crit-A-Cola wears off and if he's being hit while trying to chug Bonk! Atomic Punch when his health is in the red.
• Older Than He Looks: Many fans guessed that the Scout was around 16-20. According to the description for the Track Terrorizer jacket, he's at least 23. In "The Naked and The Dead"◊, his father mentions he was conceived twenty-seven years before.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Whenever Scout receives Godlike Loot at the end of a Mann Up tour, he's so gobsmacked at what he's received that he flat-out admits that he's at a loss for words. Considering how much of a Motor Mouth the guy has, that's no small feat.
  • In Meet the Pyro, the RED Scout immediately asserts that he's not going to say anything about their team's Pyro, which is quite unlike a guy who can spend hours talking about just about anything. He's also noticeably tense and not at all like his normal cocky self, and tries to get out of the room within seconds.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Some of his Domination lines toward his opposite-team counterpart show that even the narcissistic Scout looks down on his doppelgänger.
  "I am the Scout here!"
  "Hit the road, Bozo. Let a real Scout get to work!"
  "This map here ain't big enough for the two of us."
• Pastimes Prove Personality: He plays baseball, as reflected by his bat melee weapon and his general theme.
• Pet the Dog: Scout's got more than a few cases where he's been unexpectedly nice.
  • In the 2011 Halloween comic, he kneels down to eye level with one of the kids and gives him a tooth that he beat out of someone with his bat.
  "Hey there, slugger. C'mere. You are gonna love this. You see this bat? Bam! That… is a human molar. From some dummy with a big mouth that used to be fulla teeth. It's all yours, little talkin' France."
  • He's also quick to defend the kids at the mall when Old Nick arrives to kidnap them.
  • Additionally, in "The Naked and the Dead", after he dies and ends up in Fluffy Cloud Heaven, and subsequently finds God upset with the fact that Scout, "His gift to women", was still a virgin, the big man is ostensibly angry enough to cause an Apocalypse How. Scout's answer? A no-hard-feelings "nah, don't do it", followed by a very succinct summary of a "Humans are good" philosophy. It's Played for Laughs, but still a heartwarming little moment.
  God: Of all the ungrateful... ooo, that does it. I am gonna send a plague, or a flood, or... oh, why even be clever? I'm just going to blow up the Earth.
  Scout: (reassuringly puts a hand on his shoulder) Aw, come on, God. Don't destroy humanity. They're good people at heart. Just a buncha dum-dums tryin' their best.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Being the youngest member of the team doesn't stop him from bashing in an enemy merc's head with his Sandman or blowing their brains out with the Scattergun. It helps that he packs some of the most damage up-close.
• Power-Up Magnet: The Auto Innate type in Mann vs Machine, which helps the Scout contribute by collecting credits efficiently, as Scouts don't tend be good on defense.
• Psychotic Smirk: Chill out, Scout…◊
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "I! EAT! YOUR! SANDVICHES! I EAT 'EM UP!"
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers: His Bonk! Atomic Punch energy drink is described this way in his update:
  "Bonk! is fulla radiation, which as we all know is pretty great for givin' people superpowers."
• Ray Gun: The C.A.P.P.E.R is a gun that functions identically to the pistol, but fires lasers instead of bullets.
• Recoiled Across the Room: The Force-A-Nature deals a lot of Knockback to enemies shot, but also to the Scout himself, which can hinder precision, but offers a potential mobility bonus because they can shoot downward to give themselves a semblance of triple jump.
• Required Secondary Powers: Good Scouts can dodge and land their scattergun shots, but great Scouts know maps thoroughly enough to know all the best flank routes, and how fast they can get to places they're needed before they're needed. It's also a good idea to know where all the out-of-the-way Medpack spots are, since Scouts generally operate away from friendly lines.
• Roadrunner PC: As mentioned previously, his speed makes his style of combat reminiscent of early First-Person Shooters where you're faster than anyone else, except with lower health and fewer-yet-stronger enemies.
• The Runt at the End: He's the smallest member of the team, and as the youngest of 8 brothers, he was presumably always the smallest. He's also on the very leftmost end of the character selection screen to emphasize this.
• Sanity Ball: Scout has to act as the Only Sane Man to Soldier and Pyro in "A Cold Day in Hell".
• Satisfied Street Rat: Grew up as the youngest of eight boys, had to learn to run fast to pick fights first, and now serves as a mercenary.
• Savage Spiked Weapons:
  • The Boston Basher, a spiked wooden bat that deals bleeding to enemies, but hits and inflicts bleeding to himself with it if he misses.
  • The Sun-on-a-Stick, a mace with spikes on a glowing orb that crits enemies who are on fire.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: "Wanananana!", "Bonk!", and a bunch after drinking Bonk! Atomic Punch. He also says "Bonk!" in one of his taunts.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: The Scout's primary weapon is a sawed-off shotgun and most of the alternative weapons are also variations on a shotgun. Since Shotguns Are Just Better, the Scout can deal tremendous damage, but only at short range.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: In "Meet The Sandvich" and one of his responses to a ghost. And again in "The Sound of Medicine".
• Self-Deprecation: One of his responses to getting a rare gun drop in Mann vs. Machine mode:
  "For the first time in my life, I'm at a loss for words."
• Short-Range Shotgun: All of the Scout's Scatterguns are only really useful in close range, being able to annihilate certain classes in a single clip, but fall off dramatically in effect in even moderate range. The only exception in terms of primary weapon options is the Shortstop, which fires fewer bullets but has a narrower bullet spread, and is thus more useful in medium range.
• Shout-Out: His name, Jeremy, is based off of ex-TF2 streamer Jerma985, who is also named Jeremy. The comparisons go further though, as Jerma is also fast-talking white man from Boston, and the two are noted to share similar appearances◊.
• Signature Headgear: His default black cap and headset.
• Simple, yet Awesome: His weapon set is comparable to the Engineer's, but while Engineer supplements his weapons by being capable of putting up multiple buildings to set up a defensive hold, Scout has... 33% faster movement and a Double Jump. As it turns out, though, that increase in mobility promotes Scout to be one of the best classes in the game; using it to get to places faster and reach difficult-to-access areas is obvious, but it also improves Scout's survivability by letting him dodge projectiles and escape dangerous situations, in addition to bolstering his offensive prowess by letting him flank and enter close range easily, where his weapons are most effective.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Curses a lot.
• Situational Damage Attack: The Sun-on-a-Stick. It has a -25% damage penalty but does crit damage versus burning players. It synergizes quite well with allied Pyros, but is usually too dangerous to use since it requires the Scout to go into melee range.
• Skill Gate Characters: Or Skill Gate Strategy, in this case. Back capping. It's not too difficult to pull off — just sneak and flank your way to the second capture point on an attack/defend map (Bonk! helps in bypassing the first defensive line), hide until the second point becomes available, and then capture it before the enemy can react or fall back. Easily shut down by an Engineer putting a sentry on the second point in advance, or being called out by attentive enemies while he's bum-rushing past them.
  • In general, a Scout that flails around on his keyboard becomes a distressingly difficult target for beginners, whereas more experienced players, even those in classes the Scout counters such as Pyro and Demoman, can learn to abuse his predictable trajectory after a double jump, his vulnerability to splash damage, and limited range to take him out more reliably.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The Scout's childhood being filled with nosebleeds and broken bones greatly inflated his pride. And it doesn't seem like it'll ever stop growing, thanks to his bombastic, egocentric personality as an adult. None of his coworkers take him seriously beyond his combat prowess, however. As shown throughout the comics, Pauling takes Scout's advances with a grain of salt at best (or straight-up ignoring them at worst), the Soldier is all too willing to drop everything and choke him, the Heavy is perpetually annoyed by his extroversion, and the Spy barely tolerates him for his mother's sake.
• Smarter Than You Look: The Scout seems like an archetypical hooligan idiot from the looks of it. In truth, while he's far from the brains of any operations, he's clearly not stupid. His domination lines with Medic makes apparent he knows of the Hippocratic Oath, and dialogue with Merasmus has him allude to H.P. Lovecraft. Even out-of-universe, much of high-level Scout plays requires a great deal of map knowledge and prediction games to do well, implying that while the Scout is The Ditz, he wouldn't be as good at guerilla warfare as he is if he were even dumber.
• Southies: He's supposed to be from Boston, but sounds like he's from Brooklyn (which is intentional).
• Status Infliction Attack: When equipped with the Sandman bat, the Scout can hit a mildly damaging baseball at enemies as a secondary function. For its first few iterations, the baseball could stun, slow, and disable weaponry for opponents for a brief period, effectively forcing the victim to act as they would when they lose a match. However, if hit from a long enough distance, a Sandman ball could force a victim to stop in place entirely for the duration of the effect. The Jungle Inferno Update changed the Sandman to its present-day state: now, the ball merely slows opponents, with distance only determining how long this single effect lasts.
• Street Smart: The comics and certain Valve-written item descriptions make it clear that the Scout never finished high school and is in general pretty stupid and/or ditzy. He is full of "brilliant ideas" that sometimes turn out to work more out of luck than planning (like using his mercenary money for buying Tom Jones memorabilia). His ego, though, leads him to think he knows everything.
• Stock Shoutout: The Scout's symbol is the winged sandals of Mercury, and even one of Scout's many cosmetic items is called 'Hermes', the god of thieves and a Trickster God.
• Stone Wall: Scout's playstyle, which is built around one-on-one combat and Hit-and-Run Tactics, doesn't gel well against the vast robot hordes of Mann vs. Machine. Thus, it's common for Scouts to eschew offensive upgrades for defensive ones, which ensure he can survive long enough to collect cash and apply debuffs that his teammates can better capitalize on.
• Super Serum: The Crit-a-Cola is a purple soda can which contains an unknown drink that enable the Scout to deal mini-crits. On the other hand, the Scout is marked for death after any attack he deals.
• Support Party Member: In Mann vs Machine, Scout is the designated cash grabber of the team, and is often considered mandatory. He has the unique attribute of gaining health whenever he picks up cash, which helps him stay alive while surrounded by bots that would otherwise evaporate him instantly. Scouts often run Mad Milk, which can be upgraded to slow enemies inflicted with it, and can heal him and his team for alot when they're focusing down a giant, while the Fan O'War drastically increases the damage Scout's team deals to giants when he marks them with it.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Forms a triangle with the Demoman and Engineer. Scouts get shredded by sentry guns the second they're in range, but can exploit the Demoman's lack of hitscan weaponry to close the distance and scattergun him (meanwhile, Demomen are far, far better at dealing with sentries by means of indirect burst damage). Although a lone Engineer without a Sentry nearby is dead meat to a Scout, unless he gets lucky with a melee crit or has mini-sentry available.
  • Forms a secondary triangle with the Heavy and Sniper. The Heavy's superior effective range, powerful hitscan weapon, and massively greater health allow him to bully the Scout at mid-range and kill him if he presses the issue^note Though the Heavy either needs to stay diligent on zoning the Scout out or get help doing that- a good Scout that manages to get close has a significant advantage., but on the other hand, the Sniper's reliance on single precise shots makes hitting a scout closing in on him relatively difficult, and the Scout's ability to get in to point blank range and superior weapon at that distance makes quick work of the Sniper, who of course, counters the Heavy's durability and slow speed with precise headshots from outside the latter's effective range.
• Team Spirit: Ironically for someone as narcissistic as he is, Scouts are vital to team play thanks to their speed and innate passive that lets them capture objectives twice as fast as everyone else. There's rarely anyone better suited to carry the intelligence in CTF, can quickly swarm control points to either capture them faster than other characters or to be the first to stall the enemy's capture long enough for backup to arrive. Mad Milk and the Force-a-Nature also open up new opportunities to support a fight, with the former granting a hefty health-on-damage buff and the latter being reliable for shoving threats out of CQC with its huge knockback.
• Too Slow: Some of his lines, usually after drinking Bonk! and going into enemy gunfire, mock the enemy for being too slow.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • That Bonk! Atomic Punch makes him quite hyperactive.
  • As of "Expiration Date", the Scout has shown to be fond of fried chicken as well, even using a bucket of fried chicken as a taunt.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • The Back Scatter trades out accuracy and a few shots per magazine in exchange for the ability to deal mini-crits to enemies when firing at their back in close range. Sounds like a perfect tool for flanking Scouts... until you realize that Scouts are already exceptionally deadly in close range with other scattergun options, and thus a weapon that forces them into a single optimal means of approaching enemies at the cost of other valuable stats like magazine size can be a full-on handicap for very little tradeoff.
  • The Fan O'War is a melee that turns down the already-puny damage of his standard bat to practically nonexistent (a whopping 9 damage point per hit, 26 on a crit), but allows him to mark an enemy he hits with it for death, causing them to receive mini-crits from all incoming damage sources. While this on paper can lean Scout into a useful support position, his Scatterguns and their ability to near-instantly vaporize many classes in precisely the same intended range makes this power virtually redundant (though it does have a niche use in MvM in amplifying damage against Giant Robots).
• We Need a Distraction:
  • Enemy push too much to handle? Have a Scout start capturing an unguarded point behind them and that'll get someone's attention really quickly.
  • In competitive, the mere presence of a good Scout is a threat to call out because of how much damage they can do to the Medic or Demo, even if they are deliberately feinting.
• With Friends Like These...: With Soldier, who almost always manages to get the Scout in more pain and trouble than if he had gone alone.
  • When the BLU Scout, Soldier and Spy are in the court for blowing up a mall santa training facility, the Scout makes the mistake of getting the Soldier to act as his lawyer. Once Scout decided to shift the blame to Soldier, he instantly broke composure and started strangling Scout right in front of the judge. Later in Unhappy Returns, this occurs again, except Soldier was so jealous that the Scout got an actual lawyer that he murders the lawyer and starts strangling Scout in front of everyone.
  • When helping Scout move out of his home, Soldier somehow managed to shatter both of his arms.
  • When trapped in the Siberian tundra Soldier completely denies the group's attempts to get coats to survive the winter; particularly Scout, who just has his usual t-shirt and later a hot dog costume. Later, when Soldier gets naked and covers himself in honey to wrestle a bear, he implies he's done this before on a double date with Scout once.
  • In Expiration Date, for no reason whatsoever, Soldier chokeslams the Scout and strangles the life out of him when he thought he couldn't teleport bread anymore.
  • Gargoyles & Gravel has Soldier chokeslamming and strangling Scout again when the latter berates him for repeatedly getting them all killed by a deadly Amulet in the titular game... which Soldier somehow interprets to mean he hates America, with predictably violent results. Afterward, Soldier then suggests eating Scout—who's wearing the Deep-Fried Dummy costume—when the person he thinks is the pizza delivery guy turns out to be Merasmus and the Russian Mafia.
    Miss Pauling: [without even looking at the dice roll] The Amulet kills all of you.
    Scout: [furiously yelling] STOP PICKIN' UP THE FRICKIN' AMULET!
    Soldier: We might be pretending we're in Fairy Land, M'lady, but we are still playing in America! You can stop me from getting killed by that Amulet when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
    [Soldier chokeslams Scout against the playing table.]
    Soldier: SAY IT! ADMIT YOU HATE AMERICA!
    Scout: [choking] You are- the worst- at this stupid game-!
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: One of his actual lines in the game, as a negative voice command.
• You Have Researched Breathing: The "Baseball Bill's Sports Shine" is an item that removes Scout's baseball cap and headset, revealing his short haircut underneath.
• Your Days Are Numbered: If God's parting words in "The Naked and the Dead" are to go by as Scout leaves Heaven to go back to the world of the living, Scout's actual death date is December 4th, 1987. Not that he minds hearing that, however:
  Scout: (as cheery as ever) It's a date. Later, guys!
• Verbal Tic: The words "yo" and "frickin'".

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"If you were from where I was from, you'd be f**kin' dead! WHOOOOO!"

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The Soldier

The Soldier

"Real" name: Sergeant-Barrister Mister Jane Doe

"Men, George Washington never lost. Jesus never lost! Patton never lost! If winning's good enough for those war heroes, it's damn well good enough for us!"

Voiced by: Rick May (2007-2020)/Nolan North^note For at least one line in Expiration Date. (English), Vicent Gil (Spanish), Patrick Béthune (French), Alexander Novikov (Russian), Crock Krumbiegel (German)

"If God had wanted you to live, he would not have created me!"

The Soldier is an absolutely insane army man-wannabe who talks like a cross between George C. Scott in Patton and R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, bringing Patriotic Fervor to up and through the roof and hating everything that he considers un-American. He wanted to "do his bit" in World War II, but was rejected from every service in the American military after being found too mentally unstable even for national service; so he self-financed a one-man rampage across Europe with the intention to kill "Nazis" and "Communists", and not stopping until 1949 when someone managed to track him down in Poland and convince him that the war had ended. Meet the Soldier!

The Soldier is an Offense character whose selling point is his versatility. With a considerable amount of health (200HP), 80% base speed alleviated by his ability to Rocket Jump with his powerful rocket launcher (making him the most mobile character in-game when used correctly), and good explosive damage thanks to the aforementioned rocket launcher, the Soldier will find a place in every team and thrives in the thick of battle. The Soldier's rocket launcher allows him to harass at long range and makes him deadly at mid-range. At close range, however, he can rely on a trusty shotgun, which he can then switch with a parachute, several backpacks to buff himself and his team, or boots that can either lessen rocket jump damage or increase his control in the air (with a Goomba Stomp as a bonus). His default melee weapon is a folding shovel, but it can be switched out to deal more damage at low health, increase speed at low health, buff ally movement speed, or inflict critical hits when rocket jumping.

He shared his class update alongside the Demoman, similar to the Sniper versus Spy update. The WAR! comic conclusively revealed that he was never in the Army (his personal Berserk Button), as well as the Soldier's lifestyle; the BLU Soldier lived in a shabby, windowless apartment filled with weapons and weapon magazines, ready to kill any visitor who wasn't a tomato soup salesman or a roast rib deliveryman. The RED Soldier once shared an apartment with Merasmus the Magician, an actual immortal wizard from Scotland, until Merasmus evicted his lodger for being lazy and stealing Merasmus' belongings.

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• Achilles' Heel: While the Soldier doesn’t suffer from this nearly as much as the other classes, he still has some weaknesses.
  • While his rocket launcher is incredibly powerful, much like the Demoman, he can hurt himself with it, and even blow himself up if he isn't careful. He also needs to inflict damage on himself to rocket jump; add fall damage into the mix, and it limits how many times he can rocket jump before either blowing himself up or dying immediately on impact. Fortunately, the Gunboats and Mantreads can reduce self-blast and/or fall damage.
  • Scouts. A good Scout can easily avoid a Soldier's slow-moving rockets and pepper him with the Scattergun while he's stuck reloading. The Soldier can use a shotgun to counteract this, but those aren't nearly as strong as a Scattergun.
  • Pyros. A Pyro's airblast can reflect Soldier's rockets, their primary method of damage, and send it right back at him, which can potentially kill himself or his teammates, especially if said rocket is a random crit. That said, good Soldiers have multiple ways to negate a Pyro's influence, such as shooting the ground with irregular timing to make reflects more difficult, ambushing Pyros via rocket jumping before they can react, or by simply using a shotgun and staying out of Flamethrower range. Most often, it comes down to who strikes first and how.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Soldier has built a functional rocket launcher (the fittingly-named Beggar's Bazooka) and an effective robot disguise out of garbage.
• Adoring the Pests: Through reasons comprehensible only to him, he snuck back into Merasmus' home, hid a refrigerator full of spoiled sour cream in the yard, and attracted several rabid raccoons, prone to chewing on everything in their path. Even though one of them has Soldier's own arm as its meal of choice, he still seems to think it's cute.
  Merasmus: Where did all these raccoons come from?
  Soldier: They sniffed out all the sour cream I hid! They love the stuff. Don't you, Lieutenant Bites? Yeahhh, you do.
  [Soldier holds "Lieutenant Bites" in his arms, scratching his head affectionately. The raccoon growls and digs its teeth into his arm. Several large, bloody gashes are already seeping out from the sleeve of his uniform. Merasmus stares on in shock]
• Amazon Chaser: Zhanna is as tall as he is, just about as buff, and easily as strong as he is, if not stronger. She loves killing things and she throttles with her bare hands. Soldier just adores her.
• American Eagle: He's an extremely patriotic American with an overall eagle motif, as many of his cosmetics are eagle-related and many of his lines reference the bird of prey's status as America's symbol. One cosmetic has a small bald eagle that perches on his shoulder, while another gives him an eagle's head.
• Ammunition Backpack: Has a small backpack filled with rockets.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The description of the Stainless Pot, which Soldier wears on his head as an improvised helmet.
  Protects cranium from bullets and shrapnel. Also heats soup.
• Artistic License – History: If this post about Abraham Lincoln is part of his interior monologue, as opposed to being part of the genuinely weird world history of the TF2-verse ^note  Abraham Lincoln in this universe was not only the original Pyro but also invented stairs so people didn’t need to rocket jump to the next floor after all.
• Ascended Meme: In official Competitive modes, he has lines referencing fan nicknames for the different roles that Soldier plays in 6v6:
  "Which one of us is Pocket?" (A Pocket Soldier is basically a "Bodyguard" for the Medic)
  "Which one of us is Roamer?" (A Roamer Soldier is a Rocket-Jumping soldier who picks specific enemies)
  "Mess with the Pocket, get a rocket!"
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: The Soldier's helmet is slightly too large for his head and covers his eyes. This detail hints at his two biggest traits: his obsession with war and his stupidity, and it's something that many of the Soldier's head cosmetics retain.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • In practice, any strategy heavily relying on the Market Gardener or the Mantreads isn't suited to deal with most situations and is a risky strategy for dealing with medium to large-sized groups. But it's still so satisfying and fun to come blasting out of nowhere and make an enemy go CRUNCH.
  • The Beggar's Bazooka is a very strange rocket launcher that has much to recommend on paper once you figure out how it works: instead of providing a typical magazine's worth of rockets to fire out at your discretion, the Beggar's uniquely requires the player to charge up on rockets before instantly blasting them all out in rapid succession, giving the Soldier much greater burst potential, especially useful for aggressive ambushes. The overload "penalty" caused from loading more than 3 rockets at a time also allows for mid-air explosion jumping, making Soldier's sky-high mobility potential from Rocket Jumping even more ridiculous. However, on top of the inherent weakness of not having a rocket ready to fire on reflex (meaning he's less able to defend himself against aggressors), the Beggar's also comes with random inaccuracy, leaving the fate of its long-range viability to a dice roll. It may not matter so much if you feel like indiscriminately firing at enemy clusters from the sky, but it will hurt much more when dealing with stationary enemy turrets.
• Ax-Crazy: Even compared to the insanity of the other Mercenaries, Soldier's level of brutality and obsession for killing things puts them all — besides maybe the Pyro — to shame. It's heavily implied that his deranged bloodlust was the main reason he got turned down by every branch of the U.S. military.
• Bad "Bad Acting": When he's trying to coax Merasmus out of hiding.
  "Oh hello, Merlin, the famous magician! Noooo, I have not seen Merasmus. What's that? Noooo, I can't think of anyone who'd want an autograph."
  "Oh hello, Gundorf! Where's Blasbo Babbins? Oh there he is! Everyone's here! Labalos, Gimpy, Dumpy, Snoopy... um... Man, I wish Merasmus was around to see this magical turn of events!"
  "Oh look, it's Houdini. What's that Houdini? You looking for a new best friend? Too bad there's no wizards around... get out here, Merasmus!"
  "What's that, Merasmus's favorite actor, Burt Lancaster? You think people who hide are cowards? Wise words, Burt Lancaster. You've convinced all of us-damn it Merasmus, get out here!"
• Badass Bandolier: Including two semi-cosmetic frag grenades. You can only use one of them in a suicidal self-explosion by taunting when you've got the Equalizer or Escape Plan equipped.
• Badass Normal: Despite having been rejected from every branch of the military^*Though it is implied that the reason for his rejection wasn't because he was physically unfit, but because he was deemed bashit bonkers insane. and thus having no formal military training, the Soldier apparently went on a "Nazi killing spree" using entirely self-taught techniques. This quote sums it up:
  "War is hell! My kind of hell!"
  • Though it is heavily implied that most of the people he killed in his "campaign" through Germany and its neighbouring countries were just regular civilians that Soldier mistook for Nazis, so this is somewhat diminished...
• Berserk Button: Do not call him a civilian. Even though it's true, he still goes absolutely apeshit if someone refers to him as that.
• Blasphemous Boast: "If God had wanted you to live, he would not have created me!"
• Boisterous Bruiser: He's ridiculously loud and rowdy at all times, and he'll usually respond to any situation with comically over-the-top violence.
• Bond One-Liner: Many of his killing spree voice notes qualify. "Time to inform YOUR NEXT OF KIN!"
• Boom in the Hand: His taunt kill has him pull out a grenade from is bandolier, raising it into the air, and letting it explode in his hand. This kills him and any nearby enemies.
• Boots of Toughness: The Gunboats are quite impressive as they are military boots reinforced with bolted steel plates. They are also useful since they partially protect the Soldier from his own rocket jumping, allowing for a more dynamic playstyle in exchange for less firepower.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Shotgun, which most Soldiers forgo in favor of the utility or passive buffs that his other, non-weapon secondaries give. Carrying a Shotgun around lets the player easily finish off weakened enemies, allows for a Plan B when an enemy ambushes them while they're out of loaded rockets, and won't Crippling Overspecialize them out of dealing with Scouts and Pyros efficiently.
  • The Pain Train (a melee weapon shared with Demoman) stands out among Soldier's other melee options — most of which have some exciting forms of damage or dynamic utility when pulled out — by being completely passive in nature: in exchange for taking 10% more damage from enemy bullets, Soldier gains an increased capture rate on objectives like payload carts and control points, putting him on par with the Scout. Objective capturing is a common-enough gameplay element to allow this benefit to be useful, and since you'll be mostly relying on your rocket launcher and secondary options anyway, the Pain Train might be worth keeping in your pocket if you feel you can risk taking slightly more damage from shotgun blasts or Heavy's minigun fire.
• Book Dumb: The comics heavily imply that Soldier is too stupid to read, and his grasp on concepts such as history and basic governance are severely lacking as well. Some of this is due to his own inherently deranged mental state, the rest is probably the result of fifteen years of drinking lead-tainted water.
• Bucket Helmet: The Stainless Pot and the Panisher hats are just kitchen pots, while the Crack Pot is a literal cracked garden pot.
• Brainless Beauty: Of the himbo variety- the man is dumb as a post, and when we see him without his helmet in the comics, he's revealed to be pretty handsome despite sporting a fresh black eye. It's no wonder Zhanna fell for him almost immediately.
• Brief Accent Imitation: One of his domination lines for the Sniper has him mimicking his Australian accent. He also imitates the Spy's French laugh when he dominates him.
• Captain Obvious: In "Meet the Spy":
  Administrator: Intruder Alert! RED Spy is in the base!
  BLU Soldier: A RED SPY IS IN THE BASE?!
  Administrator: Protect the Briefcase!
  BLU Soldier: WE NEED TO PROTECT THE BRIEFCASE!
• Carpet of Virility: The cover of "Blood in the Water" shows him wearing a spy catsuit partly zipped open in the front, and he has a pretty hairy chest.'
• Catchphrase Insult: Has a tendency in-game to call people "Maggot" as everything from an insult to a casual form of address, thanks to his Drill Sergeant Nasty antics. The only time it isn't used disparagingly is when he attempts to befriend a rubber prop of a brain eating maggot, whom he apologies to for Insult Friendly Fire.
• Character Catchphrase: "HUTTAH!", which he always shouts before breaking someone's neck. Judging by the Meet The Soldier short in which he utters it while charging a point, it is pronounced "Hutt-ah", with emphasis on the "a".
• Charged Attack:
  • The Cow Mangler's secondary-fire mode charges the laser-like launcher for three seconds before firing a large explosive blast at enemies.
  • Soldier also has the Beggar's Bazooka, which can be loaded with multiple rockets to be unleashed in rapid succession. (More than three will cause an explosion each time, but it can be upgraded to fire considerably more in Mann Vs. Machine).
• Charge Meter: The Soldier's three bugle weapons all charge by dealing damage, and provide bonuses to the Soldier and nearby allies when used. One grants extra damage, another reduces damage taken, and the third heals based on damage done (and gives a speed boost).
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Dominating Spies will have the Soldier taunt them while generally mentioning their French nationality. One calls the Spy a "rifle-dropping coward", another has him say, "Your white flag does not stop American bullets". Think not of how the latter would be a war crime, and remember that the Soldier isn't exactly sane.
  • One of his Achievements is "Geneva Contravention", which literally makes you kill 3 unarmed people. Granted, he's not exactly in the army.
• Chekhov's Gun: His robot Halloween outfit turns out to be useful in fooling Gray Mann's robots, at least until Gray unveiled the robot Engineer.
• Chuunibyou: The Soldiers' profile indicates this trope: where he was rejected from every American Military Branch when he wanted to go and fight the Nazis. So he bought himself a ticket to Europe where he wandered around trying to locate Poland and eventually going on a Killing-Spree and awarding himself Medals of valor that he had designed and gave to himself; only stopping in 1949 when he finally learned that WWII had ended.
• Cigar Chomper: Seen smoking a cigar in the Mann vs. Machine trailer, and he has one as a cosmetic item. Sometimes a cigar is a cigar. And sometimes a cigar is a foul concoction hand-rolled from garbage bins.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Whatever's in Soldier's head would probably not be reciprocated by too many people. For instance, his historical accounts are rather off from what you should know, though other background material in Team Fortress 2 frequently states odd history such as that as well. He also keeps severed heads of his enemies to line up and act Drill Sergeant Nasty to.
  • In "Expiration Date", everything out of his mouth is pure Cloud Cuckooland craziness that gives you some idea of how he would have been used if the series had come to fruition.
    Spy: This... is a bucket. [presents bucket full of "dying wishes"]
    Soldier: Dear God.
    Spy: There's more.
    Soldier: [astonished] No...!
    
    Soldier: You did not read [my dying wish]!
    Spy: [sigh] Does it say you want the buc-?
    Soldier: Yes!
• Colonel Kilgore: His authority is self-imposed (and he's the only one who treats it seriously), but otherwise he fits the trope, what with his obsession with war, killing, explosions, and "military machoism".
• Commissar Cap: Fitting his war theme, one of his hat cosmetics is an M. Bison-like hat called the Team Captain, which he shares with Heavy and Medic.
• Companion Cube:
  • His enemies' severed heads, whom he treats like a squad of fresh conscripts in Meet the Soldier.
  • Also the Larval Lid, a Halloween-restricted hat in the form of a giant botfly maggot (which, according to its texture file, is just a latex costume piece) "growing" from his head. When equipped, it can trigger a special voice line of Soldier conversing with his "brain maggot" buddy.
  • In the Dr. Grordbort's Crash Landing comic, he's shown to have three army men friends who sit with him around a campfire and smoke together; Salty Pete, Iron Eye, and Pepper Pot Pete. The scene is then shown at a different angle, revealing that they're just wooden cutouts with cigars stuck to their mouths.
• Crazy Enough to Work: With the Mann Vs. Machine update, he came up with the idea of creating a decoy facility for the robots to attack. And it worked because the robots were so stupid.
  Soldier: "If there's one thing we can do that these machines cannot, it is this: we can lie. We will lie to them on the beaches! We will lie to them in the beach parking lot! We may even lie to them on non-beach-related property! About the quality of our munitions! About the strength of our will! We will even lie about lying! That is how deep this rabbit hole goes! But the most important lie we will tell is this: Where the Mann Co. facilities are!"
  • He then proceeded to infiltrate the robots' meetings by wearing his terrible robot Halloween costume as a disguise. It worked until Gray Mann got suspicious and built a smarter robot (patterned after the Engineer).
• Crazy Homeless People: According to the comics, the RED Soldier now lives in a box and there's nothing to suggest the BLU Soldier isn't at best a squatter or traveling deviant himself.
  • The Pyromania update gave Soldier a set called the Dumpster Diver, including a helmet lined with tinfoil.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: In the "Unhappy Returns" comic, Jane tracks down Merasmus to Tom Jones' house, murdering the singer in cold blood when he finds out Tom Jones is Merasmus' new roommate. When Merasmus asks why, Jane says:
  "I am fully within my legal rights as your old roommate to kill your stupid new roommate! (...) I was sad, you were happy! So I killed Tom Jones. (...) The heart makes its own rules, Merasmus."
• Crazy-Prepared: Apparently, he always knew a robot attack would happen, and has taken measures to prepare for this. Then again, one of these measures was staring down a toaster for several months to "get inside its mind", so effectiveness is debatable.
• Crazy Survivalist: The WAR! comic shows the BLU Soldier's state of living. His first reaction to hearing a visitor is to attempt to shoot them through the door, then try to lure them close so that he can try to Neck Snap his guest through the custom-built holes in his door, before eventually undoing his myriad of locks and allowing his guest in... just so that he has a clear shot from behind his table. Inside isn't much better, either: tins of canned soup are everywhere, boxes of the stuff litter his desk, it looks like he's done little to clean, he has a massive stack of magazines for "Guns and Haircuts", and the state of his room is generally dilapidated, with little in the way of decorations besides an American flag on his desk and what appears to be a strategic map of Germany.
• Creepy Souvenir: Has a collection of severed heads taken from the BLU team (which he treats like his recruits in his Meet the Team video), and in the comics, his idea of an engagement present to Zhanna is a necklace of severed ears. Happily for Soldier, though, she's just as crazy as he is.
• Crutch Character: Or weapons in this case. The Black Box ^note  One less Rocket in a clip but a percentage of damage is returned as health. and the Liberty Launcher ^note  One extra rocket, faster rockets, and less self damage in exchange for a damage penalty. are very helpful for new players but the one less rocket of the Black Box and the damage penalty of the Liberty Launcher severely hinder the weapon’s combat effectiveness in the hands of skilled players.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: In Expiration Date, his immediate conclusion upon seeing tumors in the bread is that it means they can't teleport bread anymore. Though his logic isn't exactly sound, the conclusion he jumps to is actually exactly right.
• Death from Above: Rocket jumping allows the Soldier to fly to great heights from which he can rain down rockets upon his enemies. The Gunboats greatly reduce the self-damage taken from rocket jumping, allowing Soldiers to perform bombing runs with high frequency, while the Mantreads let him actually land on enemies to damage them. There's an achievement for killing a number of players from above.
  • The Market Gardener lets him deliver this with even more efficiency (through a tight timing window), as it delivers a guaranteed 195-damage crit if he strikes with it while rocket jumping.
  • And now, with the Beggar's Bazooka, Gunboats, and some creativity, he can act as a living airstrike.
  • As of the Love and War update, two new weapons have been added for him; A parachute that allows gliding and a rocket launcher literally called "The Air Strike." The latter allows rapid rocket fire from midair.
• Determinator: No matter how he thinks and acts, the Soldier will NOT give up easily:
  "A winner knows when to fight and when not to fight! Answer: Never! Stop! Fighting!"
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Downplayed. While in most cases, a single-class team will expose themselves to a certain type of weakness (all-Scouts are vulnerable to Sentry Guns, all-Heavies to Spies & Snipers, all-Snipers/Spies just plain won't work), an all-Soldier team can literally blast apart anything short of an Übercharge (or specialized counters, like the Short Circuit) with a salvo of rocket barrage. However good Snipers can shut Soldiers down from outside their effective range and competent Pyros can effectively shut them down entirely by reflecting the rockets back at the enemy team. These are by no means insurmountable for a team of Soldiers however.
• Dirty Communists: His domination responses reveal that this is what he thinks of the enemy Heavy (in contrast to other classes, who make fun of the Heavy for his size).
  • "A Cold Day In Hell" reveals he's not immune to Sensual Slavs, though, as he quickly agrees to have sex with Heavy's younger sister, Zhanna.
  • "Shadow Boxers" implies that he'd have a problem with his own teammates being non-American (particularly the Heavy being Russian and the Medic being German) if he weren't gullible enough to believe them when they say they're also American.
  Soldier: Come on guys! Why would I lie? We're all Americans here!
  Ms. Pauling: Well, not all of us, obviously. I mean, Medic's German and Heavy's from Russ- (Heavy nudges her) Ow! What? Oh.
  Heavy: Ha ha! Germany! Russia! Is big joke! Big American joke on Soldier!
  Soldier: Ha! You got me!
  Heavy: Ohh, America. It is the place I am from. All the time.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Rocket jumping. A lot of people see it as just a typical advantage that Soldiers and Demos have, but when you can blast all the way across the map in five seconds (as showcased in the openings to these tutorials) and even outpace the Scout with enough practice, it becomes clear how useful it really is when it comes to catching key targets and taking objectives. With a Market Gardener, this trope gets elevated, as you need to also learn the correct timing and position to swing, but when it all works out, you can assassinate Medics and Snipers from behind their teammates.
  • The Direct Hit is a conceptually basic but unforgiving-in-practice sidegrade to the default Rocket Launcher: in exchange for greatly reduced explosion size, rockets deal more damage, fly significantly faster, and also deal mini-crits on enemies launched into the air by any hostile means. The reduced explosion size is quite noticeable (splash damage being something you don't quite appreciate until it's gone), meaning you genuinely do have to aim to strike direct hits on enemies to be effective, something that the increased projectile speed may throw you off of, but the increased damage is still nothing to sniff at, and the weapon is especially good at blowing up sentries and other enemy buildings.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Very similar to Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, and the most psychotic member of the team. You could say he's worse than Pyro, since at least Pyro does it because of the goggles.
• Dumb Muscle: Generally portrayed as the least intelligent and lowest-ranking member of the team, but it's implied that it's generally easier on the Team to let him believe whatever won't get the rest of them killed:
  A man whose combat strategies are so complex, so nuanced, that they have never been used on the field of battle, even though Heavy told him they would try them out last week.
• Eagleland: A poster boy for Flavour #2, being a complete idiot, attempting to solve all problems with violence, and hating pretty much everything non-American — while at the same time believing that everything good either is American or ought to be.
• Embarrassing First Name: Mister Jane. That's right, not "Captain Jane" or "Corporal Jane" or even "Private Jane". Just MISTER Jane. It's expanded on a little bit later on, with Soldier's official title/rank being Sergeant-Barrister; but even then, it's not always clear if the "Mister" literally is his name or just a title.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: Invoked to goad his enemies on. The Soldier will declare that Scotland is not a real country, and thus the Scottish Demoman is actually "an Englishman in a dress". At the same time, considering this is Soldier saying this, though, it's entirely possible he actually believes this.
• Establishing Character Moment: Meet the Soldier virtually says everything that needs to be said about him. He's armed with a rocket launcher and a shotgun by default, can rocket-jump, a great frontline class, and is an absolute nutjob.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • When the Administrator offers to kill the RED Demoman in exchange for new weapons in the WAR! comic, Soldier immediately refuses on account of their friendship, even when she plays a fake video of Demo claiming he's a bad friend. He sees through most of it almost immediately, and only ends up going along with the deal when the fake Demo calls him a civilian and triggers his Berserk Button.
  • While Soldier might be a crazed, warmongering maniac who blows up anyone he considers to be his enemy, it's implied that even he is disturbed by some of the ways Pyro kills their enemies, notably when they smash a bear's head in with an axe in "A Cold Day in Hell".
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: Has an army helmet as his default headwear, and it is tilted in a way that hides his eyes.^*Humorously, those familiar with the construction of the WWII American M1 Helmet, after which Soldier's helmet is based, will realize this is a sign that Soldier's helmet is missing its support webbing or the webbing is not properly secured. Engineer even lampshades the trope when dominating a Soldier.
  Engineer: Next time, lift your lid and you might see it comin'.
• File Photo Gag: All three of the Mann brothers use a newspaper clipping of him in lieu of a photo, which is of him having won a nose-picking contest with the Soldier happily holding his trophy shaped like a hand with some snot on the pinky finger.
• Flanderization: When introduced in "Meet the Soldier", the Soldier was portrayed as obsessed with war and dangerous in combat. With the in-universe justification of him getting lead poisoning from drinking the contaminated water in 2Fort, he's shifted from being crazy about war to being crazy in general, but still just as dangerous.
• Fluffy Tamer: Whether it's rabid raccoons, bald eagles, or giant brain-eating maggots, Soldier seems to be genuinely fond of animals. He'd also rather contemplate eating his friends than some ermines in Siberia.
• Friend to All Children: He's tough, but he took three kids trick-or-treating on Halloween, and didn't hesitate to defend the children of Teufort from Old Nick.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: While the Pyro is merely feared by their team, Soldier is actively disliked by his peers for the way his sheer stubbornness, ignorance and uncontrollable bloodlust — often some combination of all three — always seem to cause problems.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Somehow, Soldier went from being rejected by every branch of the U.S. military, having no formal training, and being unable to locate Poland on a map to personally killing over 6000 people during and after World War 2 and becoming one of the nine deadliest mercenaries on Earth.
  • Mann Co always hires the lowest bidder. Soldier once offered to pay to build the Decoy map and — unlike characters like Demoman who lives in a mansion, or Medic, who is always spending money on exotic animal organs — is generally on the cusp of being homeless.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Getting naked and covering himself in honey is apparently his preferred method of close-quarters combat. Despite its seeming impracticality, though? It works.
  Soldier: Don't worry, Scout! I am nude and covered in honey again! LET'S GRAPPLE SOME DAMN BEARS!
• Gender-Blender Name: His name is apparently Mister Jane Doe.
• General Ripper: The Soldier is probably the most dangerously unstable, fanatically violent character in the whole team of lunatics - possibly even including the Pyro.
• Genius Ditz: He may look like an American equivalent of a Nazi fanatic whose logic goes beyond reason, but be reminded that he is still that same guy who beats your face in with a shovel five seconds after a round starts.
  • His bio tells how many people he managed to slaughter by himself despite the fact that World War II already ended.
  • Even tracks down the place where Merasmus lives before Merasmus ever realizes Tom Jones was dead.
  • Somehow made a functioning rocket launcher out of random junk.
  • He is both a lawyer and a priest. Granted, those titles are only recognized in Guam, but still. That said, the one time someone actually came to him for legal advice, he was able to point out a glaring hole in their mutually exclusive claims of victory: both Redmond and Blutarch Mann were dead and ghosts, meaning neither of them really 'won' their petty squabble while the other still manifested on this mortal plane.
• Global Ignorance: One of his domination lines involving Sniper has him mixing up New Zealand and Australia. Granted, Sniper is actually from New Zealand, but Soldier didn't know at the time.
• Gratuitous Spanish: "Hasta la vista! Feliz Navidad! Hasta gaspacho!" ^noteSpanish for "Goodbye! Merry Christmas! Until chilled tomato soup!".
• Hidden Depths:
  • Though he loves war just as much as he despises his enemy, he's completely able to forge a friendship with the other team's Demoman after finding out they both have common ground with Stuff Blowing Up. He wouldn't budge on his friendship with the Demo until the Administrator pushed his one Berserk Button. Even after being pitted against Demo as mortal enemies, he sometimes has some kill-lines on enemy Demomen that aren't biting taunts, but instead show respect to his enemy.
  You were good son, real good. Maybe even the best.
  • After being magically granted a degree in law, although he often flops at being a lawyer when in court when defending himself, he's rather competent in helping to settle civil matters after the ghosts of Redmond and Blutarch Mann approach him to decide which brother "won", but he correctly points out that neither side has passed on yet, so there isn't an actual winner between them.
• Historical Character Confusion: In "Meet the Soldier", he attributes the story of Noah's Ark to Sun Tzu instead.
  Soldier: "Then he [Sun Tzu] used his fight money to buy two of every animal on Earth, and then he herded them onto a boat, and then he beat the crap out of every single one!"
• Hot-Blooded: With this quote as he dominates a Pyro:
  "You cannot burn me. I am already ablaze with passion for war!"
• Hypocritical Humor: A Pyro domination line goes, "Fire is for cooking s'mores, son; get a REAL GUN." This coming from the guy whose primary is a rocket launcher (not technically a gun) and whose secondary default is a shotgun (the same as the Pyro).
• I'm a Humanitarian: He nearly eats the Scout and his own hands while they and the Pyro are stranded and starving in the frozen wastes of Russia.
• Idiot Savant: Soldier's grip on tactics, language, logic, and basic sanity is very suspect and he's never actually been in the military, but he did manage to figure out how to use his weaponry without killing himself or getting killed fighting in World War II (and then probably many more unfortunate random individuals around Europe who were subject to his attacks four years after the war ended) and now survives working as a mercenary fighting against other mercenaries hardened by possibly (marginally) more legitimate means.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: All of the classes are, of course, but his is a particularly poignant case: many of the facts now established for the RED Soldier in the comics (Phony Veteran status, Berserk Button, Battle Cry, Gender-Blender Name) were originally portrayed in the WAR! comic as belonging to the BLU Soldier. This is possible evidence that each team's membership is made of clones.
• Innocently Insensitive: In "Doom-Mates," Merasmus erupts into a spirit form from his corporeal body to rant about the Soldier's antics. Soldier completely tunes out Merasmus' speech to burn his body, treating it as a genuine courtesy for the recently departed. Naturally, this only enrages Merasmus further, leading to the events of the fourth Scream Fortress event.
• Irony: The Soldier has made his disdain towards hippies and long hair (read: anything longer than a buzz cut) clear. There's also a promotional hat in the form of unusual-looking long hair for the Soldier.
• It's All About Me: Capturing points or intelligence noticeably has him stress in his lines that they're his.
• Jack of All Stats: Within the praxis of normal gameplay, the Soldier is a generalist who doesn't fulfill nor exceed in any niche that the other classes don't already, but his versatility warrants his placement on any team. He isn't as fast or instantly lethal as a Sniper with his rifles, nor does he have the controlled, reliable burst damage as a Demoman with his arsenal of explosives, but with good aim, he can still lay down solid splash damage and rack up kills with his rocket launchers that will be impossible for the enemy to ignore. He has relatively slow running speed offset by the incredible mobility potential that comes from Rocket Jumping, and while it's inherently riskier than what the Scout can accomplish by simply running faster than everyone else, players with enough mastery can turn into frightening Lightning Bruisers in their own right. Finally, when it comes to defenses, his above-average health makes him second only to the Heavy, who he can join as a fellow effective front-line fighter, and can serviceably act as a defensive anchor if the team is lacking a proper Heavy.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He is absurdly jingoistic and looks down on people from every country that isn’t America, openly insulting the nationality of non-American classes. Otherwise, he's pretty kind to kids, is capable of befriending enemy mercs, and while his teammates can't stand him, he does show a modicum of care towards them as his comrades.
• Juggling Dangerously: His taunts with non-Shotgun secondaries involve him juggling two grenades from his bandolier and a rocket.
• Katanas Are Just Better: The Soldier can wield the Half-Zatoichi just like the Demoman. It can be useful with its longer melee range and its heal on frag, but the Soldier will suffer from Honor Before Reason as sheathing it causes self-damage unless he's killed someone with it (previously, it couldn't be sheathed at all unless it kills someone).
• Kiai: Screams "HUTTAH!" whenever he snaps someone's neck in the supplemental comics.
• Large Ham: He may potentially be one of the hammiest members of the team, especially in the comics.
• Laughing Mad: He's already loopy, but in "Expiration Date", after accidentally creating a giant bread monster, he descends into maniacal laughter as he gets beaten up.
• Lawful Stupid: In "Expiration Date" he takes an offhand comment that he could hypothetically teleport bread as an instruction to spend three days doing nothing else, with disastrous results.
• Leader Wannabe: The official Soldier is quite convinced that he's in charge, and the team finds it easier to let him think that. Community content often implies a saner Soldier can be the standard "Team leader" figure.
• Leitmotif: Rocket Jump Waltz and The Art of War. In Memoriam of his voice actor, Rick May, a third one was added, Saluting the Fallen.
• Life Drain: With the Black Box, an alternate Primary Weapon, the Soldier can heal up to 20 health when he deals damage with the rockets. However, it has only 3 rockets in its clip, shaving off the Soldier's damage potential.
• Limit Break: The Soldier can trade his traditional shotgun with several backpacks that can activate special effects for the Soldier and his teammates nearby once the Soldier has dealt enough damage. The Buff Banner allows the Soldier and teammates nearby to deal mini-crits, the Battalion's Backup grants 35% resistance to damage, 50% resistance to sentries and immunity to critical hits and mini-crits, finally the Concheror grants speed buff and a heal for damage dealt.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • The Beggar's Bazooka can fire three highly inaccurate missiles at once. Upgrading it in the Mann Vs. Machine mode allows him to exceed the limits of the normal game mode and jam up to eleven rockets into a weapon that by all rights shouldn't be able to hold them, then unleash them all at once.
  • The Air Strike has increased firing speed while rocket jumping, and enjoys an increased clip size with every kill the Soldier scores with it. A full clip of 8 being emptied onto enemy lines demonstrates the trope very accurately.
  • An all-Soldier team subverts Diminishing Returns for Balance thanks to this. A single rocket deals a pitiful 45 at long range? How about 12 of them firing at once? And since buildings are not affected by damage fall-off, not even Sentry nests will last long against that kind of firepower.
• Major Injury Underreaction: In Ring of Fired, he complains to Miss Pauling, "Pyro cut off my hand!" in the same tone of voice a little girl would use to complain about a boy tugging on her pigtail.
• Malaproper: The supplemental comics have him replacing words with other words that sound similar, for instance, 'pepper-pants' when he had meant to say 'pepper pot' and 'salsa' instead of 'salty.' In the game, he seems unable to correctly pronounce anything related to literature, if his constant mangling of the names of characters from The Lord of the Rings and the Bombinomicon is any indication. He always sounds like he's close to what he means to say, but it's patently clear he's just spouting gibberish syllables.
• Mighty Glacier: Downplayed, in that while he’s no Heavy in this fighting style, a Soldier who isn’t rocket jumping or is in a fight where he’s not able to do so is a high health, lumbering and hard hitting class. The bulk of his balancing comes from his Rocket Launcher, which deals some of the most reliable burst damage in the game thanks to its forgiving projectiles without the fire rate of weapons like the Heavys minigun or the high ammo capacity of the Demomans weapons, which means Soldiers fire slow while reloading even slower, meaning he’ll deal great damage and then either have to retreat to cover to reload the entire magazine or painstakingly fire one rocket at a time if he runs dry. The developer commentary summarizes this design philosophy when it comes to balancing his fighting style.
  "(…) His main weaknesses are designed into his primary weapon, the rocket launcher. It has a small clip size, which forces the Soldier to carefully manage his reloads, and it fires relatively slow-moving projectiles, making it ineffectual beyond short range against any opponent who dodges well, like the Scout."
• Mini-Me: The Profane Puppeteer taunt makes him spawn a puppet version of himself for a ventriloquist act.
• Misery Builds Character: As the Soldier says, "Pain is weakness leaving the body!"
• Monster Roommate: RED Soldier's former roommate is an immortal spellcasting wizard! Although if you asked the wizard himself, you’ll find out whatever evil he can do pales in comparison to what it’s like living with Soldier.
• Moral Myopia: To the Soldier, it's only a war crime if the enemy team does it.
• Naked People Are Funny: "Scout, I am nude and covered in honey again! Let's wrestle some damn bears!" A convenient text bubble informs us that the last time he did it was on a double date with Scout.
  • "Old Wounds" has him take off all of his clothes to use a toilet for some reason, especially since the last thing we saw him say was that they were going to use the toilet to clean Zhanna's severed hand.
  • He also gets nude and covered in honey with Zhanna in order to wrestle some robots in "The Naked and the Dead", and it is simultaneously hilarious and badass.
• Neck Snap: Practically his Signature Move in the comics, always accompanied by a yell of "HUTTAH!" During the Scream Fortress 2023 update, a neck snap taunt was officially added for Soldier in the main game.
• Never Learned to Read: It has been confirmed that four of the Mercenaries are illiterate, and while Valve can be vague about who they are, the Soldier is the first confirmed, having been shown attempting to read and apparently failing several times. For this reason, he also thinks Sun Tzu is ultimately why zoological parks are called zoos.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The reason the teams have been fighting otherworldly beings on Halloween for the past two years? This 'genius' decided to tick off an evil wizard both years. Yep, the main reason these characters are fighting for their lives on Halloween is entirely the Soldier's fault.
  Soldier: "Then I told the mighty ghost wizard, 'Ha! I'd like to see you try!'. And that is why he's killing all of us right now!"
  Scout: "I gotta admit, that DOES sorta explain everything."
  • In "Expiration Date", he's also responsible for creating a Bread Monster that nearly kills him, the other members of the RED team, and Miss Pauling. All thanks to doing nothing but teleport bread for 3 days straight. ^note Even though the Engineer said he could teleport as much bread as he wanted.
• No Indoor Voice: Soldier almost always talks in a shout, regardless of who he's talking to or what he's talking about. Fandubs of the comic follow this.
• Noodle Incident:
  • As seen in "A Cold Day in Hell", he has apparently been naked and covered in honey many times before. A footnote reads "See Naked Tales of Valor #1-37, Scout's Worst Double Dates #14."
  • Soldier has also mentioned the act of "holding in your best buddy's guts and screaming at the sky" more than once, generally suggesting that this was his specific last attachment to sanity.
  • After the ghosts of Redmond and Blutarch Mann ask him to settle a civil matter on who "won" between them, Soldier points out they're still at a stalemate since neither has passed on, but mentions that he could've done an exorcism if they were in Guam. It's implied he gained this in a similar vein to his law degree.
• Odd Friendship: Per the comics, the BLU Soldier has this with the RED Demoman. Despite being on opposite teams and coming from vastly different backgrounds, the two have formed a strong bond with one another, having gone to baseball games, hunting, eaten whisky and ribs, and fought the police together among other things.
• Official Couple: As of "A Cold Day In Hell", he's dating Heavy's younger sister Zhanna, not that Heavy is happy about it.
• Older Than They Look: Being an adult during WWII makes Soldier 47 at the youngest during the game, and 51 during the comics, despite easily passing for someone in his 30s.
• One-Liner, Name... One-Liner: When the Tin Soldier set is equipped, upon getting a Revenge Kill, the Soldier may say:
  "Beep boop, son, beep boop."
• One-Man Army: He was (or, at least, claimed to be) one of these from 1945 to 1949. It's officially stated that his killing spree ended four years after the war ended.
  • Also, by his own claim, he spent some time in Guam; knowing him, it was years after the USA had recaptured Guam in 1944.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Exaggerated here, as his Domination quotes show the Soldier doesn't even see his opposite-team counterpart as a real soldier at all.
  Dominated, hippie! Get a job!
  You better hope there's hackey-sack in Hell, hippie!
  You are now a conscientious objector to being dead, hippie!
  What's the matter, hippie? Hair get in your eyes?
  You are a disgrace to the uniform!
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Almost taken literally in that it's his cardboard Halloween costume, which he wore on his successful trips to infiltrate Gray Mann's headquarters.
  • The Mann vs Machine map Decoy is Soldier's doing. It's an abandoned town that, for once in the entirety of Team Fortress 2 maps, does not actually hide anything of importance. Of note within the map is the abundance of hastily-applied white paint, the "Mann Co. Hatch of Great Importance" painted on a bunch of wooden boards, and the "Corn" sign on one of the spawn room buildings, with the last two letters crossed out and "Mann" appended to the front to make "Mann Co".
• Parrot Exposition: In "Meet the Spy". See Captain Obvious above.
• Patriotic Fervor: His pride for America is taken to the extreme for Rule of Funny.
• Perma-Stubble: Always sports a coating of stubble on his lower face.
• Pet the Dog:
  • In this Halloween comic, it's hard to tell how serious the Soldier is about candy — it could just be him on the lam. But he does like kids.
  • In an outtake of "Meet the Medic", the BLU Soldier holds a dying teammate in his arms. Crosses the Line Twice when he gets run over by a train.
  • Like the Scout, he saves the kids of Teufort from being kidnapped.
• Phony Veteran: Contrary to his claims, he has never served in an army, and all those medals he has are self-awarded and self-designed. However, he did acquire a flight to Poland (in 1945!) on his own initiative, though most of the years in Europe were spent killing civilians because he didn't know the war was over. This is his deepest shame, and he guards it intensely; being called out on it is enough to instantly break his loyalty, as shown in the WAR! comic.
• Pitiful Worms: He sure loves to call people maggots and spineless worms.
  "You are a spineless worm! You are a mistake of nature! You are walking vomit!"
• Pity the Kidnapper: He mentions in "A Cold Day In Hell" that he's spent time in POW Camps voluntarily. And they all broke before he did.
• Politically Incorrect Hero (or Politically Incorrect Villain if he's on the enemy team): His domination responses contain a number of offensive slurs against the Scottish, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Australians, and even the Canadians (he calls the Engineer a "cow-herdin' Canadian" in one such response). Despite this, he is still considered an indispensably versatile member of the team with a strong, if somewhat misguided good guy ethic.
• Powerful Pick: The once-dreaded Equalizer is this. It was unusually powerful because it granted damage and speed buffs as the Soldier's health was lower. To balance it, the Equalizer's effect was split into it and another pick named the Escape Plan, which kept the speed buff.
• Present Company Excluded: The Larval Lid hat causes Soldier to say a variety of different voice lines, many of which use this trope due to his fondness for mocking people as maggots.
• Primal Chest-Pound: His taunt with the Direct Hit and the Beggar's Bazooka.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: He does this quite a bit.
  "Stand! On! The! Point! Numbnuts!"
  "I! Am! On! FIRE!!!"
• Puny Parachute: The B.A.S.E. Jumper is a backpack that replaces the secondary weapon of the Soldier. The Soldier can deploy a small parachute midair which slows his fall and allow him to better control the direction of his fall.
• Rage Helm: The variant for Soldier's Thousand Yard Stare hat (which are just big googly eyes on his default helmet) parody this by just giving the eyes Angry Eyebrows.
• Ray Gun: The Cow Mangler 5000 is a semi-futuristic laser variant of Soldier's rocket launcher while the Righteous Bison is a handheld laser pistol.
• Real Men Eat Meat: "Digesting ribs" is one of the items on his (very short) list of activities which are acceptable for a man to do.
• Real Men Have Short Hair: By default, the Soldier has a crew cut beneath his helmet. He also speaks derisively of long hair in many of his voice lines, sometimes vowing to give his opponents haircuts. Ironically, a handful of his cosmetic items gift him a fuller head of hair.
  "Get a haircut, hippie."
  "Get a haircut, trashcans."
  "I am a robot! I am programmed to give you a sensible haircut!"
  "I have returned from the grave to give the living haircuts."
• Religious Bruiser: In "Grave Matters," he claims he is a priest. In Guam.
• The Remnant: According to his official bio, after being rejected from all branches of the military, Soldier flew to Europe on his own and embarked on a 'Nazi killing spree', which ended when he heard news of the war's end. In 1949.
• Riding the Bomb: The Rocket Jockey taunt makes him ride a missile when held down, akin to Dr. Strangelove.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: This is Soldier's basic stereotype.
• Rocket Jump:
  • If it's not the quintessential ability of the Soldier, it's definitely still among the top 3. The basics of rocket jumping are really easy to grasp — jump while shooting a rocket at your feet to launch you upwards at the cost of self-damage — but the amount of technical nuance and exploits you can do to get even more bang for your buck is ridiculous; for starters, you gain more horizontal mobility by strafing side-to-side, not by pressing forward, so high-level players often aim their rockets to hit perpendicular to the direction they wanna go in order to propel and turn themselves into their target destination. The skill ceiling is gigantic, but the closer you get to it, the closer that you can make Soldier into the fastest and most mobile class in the game.
  • The Beggar's Bazooka is a particular rocket launcher with even crazier mobility potential due to the way that it's designed: in addition to having an intense firing speed when loaded up with multiple rockets (making it easier to stack explosions to grant yourself more speed), overloading a chamber with more than three rockets results in a point-blank "misfire" explosion that itself provides the knockback that normal rockets provide, effectively allowing Soldier to rocket jump mid-air without any terrain to bounce off of. This tends to be far less consistent than even usual "advanced" rocket jumping techniques and will result in even more self-damage, but if all the mechanical possibilities are properly strung together along with the Beggar's high burst damage potential, it has some truly bonkers potential in making Soldier the biggest Lightning Bruiser in the game by a wide margin.
• Romantic Spoonfeeding: After sleeping with Heavy's younger sister Zhanna, they can be seen feeding each other at the dinner table as a Funny Background Event.
• Savage Spiked Weapons: The Pain Train, a broken wooden handle with thin bent nails and a railroad spike in it.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Sometimes, especially when he's on a kill streak, he'll say "Kaboom!" or "Pa-pow!". Also, if he has the Tin Soldier costume set on, he goes "Beep beep boop" and occasionally "Robot noises!" while firing a weapon.
  • His first reaction to finding a shipment of space ray guns is to pose dramatically and yell "PEW PEW PEW!"
• Serial Killer: His backstory and some comments here and there paint the picture that Soldiers self-funded trip to Europe and his Nazi killing spree was probably just him roaming the countryside and massacring rural civilians he thought were enemy soldiers. Even after finding out the war was over years after the fact while in the middle of his campaign, and deep into his career as a mercenary decades later, he’s not bothered or probably even completely aware of the scale of his mistake.
  (Post-Match Victory Bragging) One time I killed a man in Germany. After the war! He was asking for directions. I am more proud of this!
• The Scourge of God: "If God had wanted you to live, he would not have created me!"
• Sergeant Rock: He likes to look this way, but his teammates pay little attention, mostly because they all know he's completely insane.
• Serious Business: Almost to the point of being the team "Stop Having Fun" Guy.
• Sexy Shirt Switch: After sleeping with Zhanna, she lends him a frilly pink nightgown, as he doesn't have a spare change of clothes. Of course, him (and the rest of the team) are no stranger to Real Men Wear Pink (see: 2013's 'Magical Mercenary' hat).
• Shovel Strike: While using either the standard shovel or the Market Gardener.
• Signature Headgear: His default war helmet, which covers his eyes.
• Situational Damage Attack: The Reserve Shooter deals mini-crits airborne caused by rocket launcher, explosion or grapple hooks, which makes for an interesting synergy with the Soldier's loadout.
• Skill Gate Characters: While truly mastering Soldier takes months of practice and effort, learning his basics is far from difficult. Soldier's above-average health pool lets him make more mistakes without as much punishment, aiming at the ground with the Rocket launcher gives some leniency to precision shooting, and his flexibility as a class makes him excel in many situations. What makes him a Skill Gate Character is that a new player can do well in a low-level match, but anyone who hasn't learned how to Rocket Jump as mentioned before will get utterly decimated in high-level play, where a successful rocket jump rollout is crucial to the start of the round.
• Sociopathic Soldier: …You really need to ask why he qualifies as this?
• Taking You with Me: The Kamikaze taunt has him say, "C'mere, cupcake!" before using a grenade to blow himself up and take any nearby enemies with him.
• Tank Goodness: Rides in a small tank in his Panzer Pants taunt. Though, while cool, it's useless in combat.
• Taught by Experience: Managed to survive learning to fight after getting to Europe alone while untrained and unaffiliated to the U.S. because they wouldn't accept him due to being a total lunatic/idiot. Granted, he "fought" for four years after World War 2 had ended.
• Team Pet: In the Fourth Annual Halloween Special, he adopts a ton of raccoons. Wild ones that bite him and subsist on rancid sour cream he stole from his former roommate's house, but oh well. A couple of these raccoons are cosmetics for the Soldier. Lieutenant Bites, who bites onto the Soldier's ammo pouch, and Semi-tame Trapper's Hat, a raccoon which clings to his head.
• Testosterone Poisoning: According to the Soldier, true men get haircuts, yell, eat ribs, do pushups, and defend hills. Any person who doesn't do these activities every waking moment is a pansy.
• They Killed Kenny Again: The BLU Soldier is killed in every Meet the Team video, and the two extra videos; the corpse of a BLU Soldier falls off the Red Bread van in Expiration Date, despite the short not focusing around the RED vs BLU conflict, and a Soldier (he's offscreen, so we don't get to see his team affiliation) is brutalized by Heavy in Meet the Sandvich.
• This Cannot Be!: At times, it doesn't take much to astonish him., like in "Expiration Date".
  Spy: This... is a bucket.
  Soldier: Dear God.
  Spy: There's more.
  Soldier: No...!
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Parodied with the cosmetic of the same name; it's a pair of large googly eyes stuck on the Soldier's helmet. The variant gives it angry eyebrows.
• Too Dumb to Fool: In terms of intelligence he's tied for last with Pyro, and yet he is remarkably immune to basic deception; in the supplemental comics, Soldier is able to see through the various Paper Thin Disguises that can fool other people (for instance, once spotting Miss Pauling dressed as a cop, complete with false mustache, when Merasmus was completely taken in by the ruse). He manages to stretch this trope into "Dumb Enough To Fool Everyone Else," as he is also an Idiot Savant in the area of infiltration, having successfully listened in on secret robot meetings at Gray Mann's place (and only found out because Gray Mann built a robot Engineer smart enough notice the idiot in the corner wearing a cardboard costume was not actually a robot) as well as breaking into all manner of secret bases.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Captain Dan's army surplus soup. And ribs. At least, these are BLU Soldier's favorites according to WAR!; it's unclear if this is one of the areas in which the Soldiers differ.
• Undying Loyalty: Soldier may be a psychotic lunatic, dumber than a brick-on-bonemeal sandwich and a war fanatic, but as WAR! shows, he's also incredibly loyal to his friends. The BLU Soldier passionately vows that he would rather die than murder the RED Demoman, especially for something as cheap as new guns; only by hammering on his Berserk Button and making him believe Demoman was mocking him for being a civilian behind his back was the Administrator able to break his loyalty. The RED Soldier is quite up for being tortured endlessly even if only to show his loyalty.
• Unorthodox Reload: He reloads his rocket launchers, weapons that can normally load only one RPG in the tube at a time, by stuffing multiple rockets one after the other into them. Don’t ask how they all fit in there, let alone actually fire one after the other.
• Unreliable Narrator: It should be noted that anything that comes out the Soldier's mouth should be taken with a grain of salt due to his questionable sanity (unless confirmed by other characters). This includes his many offscreen escapades involving wars he fought when he was totally a legitimate enlisted soldier in the armed forces.
• Ventriloquism: A taunt introduced in Scream Fortress 2021 has him doing so by using a puppet Soldier. He's not very good at it since he covers his mouth with his hand while making it talk.
• Voodoo Doll: The Pin Pals are voodoo dolls of a Scout, Demoman, and Sniper, which replace his grenades. He shares this cosmetic with The Pyro.
• War Memorial: He kneels over a gravestone in his Soldier's Requiem taunt. Five years later Valve would put memorial Soldier statues on several maps after the passing of Soldier's voice actor, Rick May, with one being a permanent edition in CP_Granary. (Where "Meet the Soldier" took place.)
• Whip of Dominance: The Disciplinary Action is an officer's riding crop that is more suited to support rather than attack. It has a -25% damage penalty but boosts the Soldier and his teammates' speed on hit.
• With Friends Like These...: With Scout.
• Would Hit a Girl: When the Administrator comes with the proposition of killing his best friend, Soldier threatens to shove his boot so far up her ass, it'll be on the news. Also prepares to threaten the female Apple Store assistant with the same before being interrupted by a pig cooking tool.
• Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: Says this about himself when he has the Larval Lid hat equipped.
• Your Mom: In Mann vs. Machine mode, he may use a variant of a well-known insult and may be a reference to Full Metal Jacket:
  Soldier: The best part of you ran down your motherboard.

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"And from that day forward, any time a bunch of animals are together in one place, it's called a zoo!... unless it's a farm!"

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The Pyro

The Pyro

Real name: Unknown

"I fear no man. But that... thing? It scares me."

— The RED Heavy discussing his team's own Pyro, Meet the Pyro

Voiced by: Dennis Bateman

"Mmmph mmph!"

An enigma even amongst their employers and comrades, the Pyro is a mumbling pyromaniac who is never seen without an asbestos-lined fireproof suit complete with a face-obscuring gas mask muffling their voice. Their race, nationality, and gender are a complete mystery, and from others' perspective, they seem to just want to burn things. But through the Pyro's eyes, they hallucinate the world as a fantastical, idyllic Sugar Bowl known as Pyroland, where the Pyro aims to have fun and bring happiness to everyone. Unfortunately for everyone else — and unbeknownst to the poor Pyro themselves — spreading fun and happiness translates to bringing hell to earth, lighting up people and property alike, splitting skulls with a fire axe and setting the temperature to anywhere upwards 100 degrees. Meet the Pyro!

The Pyro is a close-range class specialized in ambushing enemies, with a respectable 175HP and 100% base speed, giving them the most balanced stats in the game. The Pyro's flamethrower allows them to deal continuous damage in a cone in front of them. Enemies that touch the flames are lit on fire, which constantly eats away at their health until either the fire is put out, or they burn to death. The flamethrower is also capable of emitting a blast of compressed air, which can push and forcibly reposition foes — even when they're Übercharged — extinguish burning teammates for a health boost, clear away Stickybomb traps, and reflect projectiles fired by careless enemies. The Pyro's default secondary is a single-barrelled shotgun; suitable mainly as a backup in case the flamethrower runs out of fuel, or to finish off weakened foes. This can be swapped for one of several flare guns that can set enemies alight from afar, enhancing the pyromania. The Pyro's melee weapon is a fire axe.

In terms of their role on the team, the Pyro is kind of an oddball, as while they are almost exclusively a short-range character they do not necessarily excel at any one role. The cloak-revealing capabilities of the flamethrower (and with certain melee weapons, being able to destroy Sappers) makes them the bane of Spies, but their air blast ability makes them a soft counter to the projectile-based Soldier and Demoman. Their high close-range damage is useful in a flank or ambush, but can be equally effective when charging at the enemy; especially with the help of an Übercharge. A variety of unlockable weapons allow them to specialize in any of these scenarios, becoming a flanker, support, front-line damage, or just a hard Spy counter with relative ease. Ultimately, Pyro is a Support/Offense class suited to fulfilling various secondary roles for their team, and is among the most versatile classes in the game.

The Pyro was the second class to receive new achievements and weapons.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • While a competent Pyro is a terrifying force when you're forced into their range of action, they're one of the worst classes at long range, only having their easily-dodgeable Flare Gun or a Short-Range Shotgun to poke you with. The easiest way to deal with a Pyro is to shoot at them while you run away, and to stay away from tight spaces where they can corner and ambush you.
  • Heavies can completely obliterate Pyros. The Heavy has drastically stronger damage output, nearly twice as much health, a longer effective range and can easily come out victorious in any fair one-on-one encounter as long as the Heavy isn't caught off-guard; and regardless, a Heavy with good reaction times can simply turn around and shred even a full-health Pyro in less than a second. Most Heavies also equip the Sandvich or other lunchbox items, which can help them survive afterburn if their large health pool isn't enough. That being said, using a lunchbox item runs the risk of very loudly alerting the Pyro that the Heavy will be vulnerable for several seconds as they are locked in their eating animation — then needing to spend at least another second revving up their miniguns —and the Flare Gun can work well against Heavies; if the Pyro can aim well and use their mobility to stay out the range of the minigun, they can set the Heavy alight, then take advantage of his large size and slow speed to pepper him with crit-inducing shots from afar and take off big chunks of health on top of the afterburn damage.
  • Then there's the Engineers. Pyro's primary damage source is a very close-range stream of flames, and the large sphere of influence that a Sentry Gun has can deny Pyros from approaching outright. The rockets of a level 3 Sentry can be deflected, but it's not a reliable way to take them out; since by the time the rockets are reflected, the Pyro will typically be dead to the accompanying hail of bullets. An Engineer that's away from his sentry, however, is easy pickings for any class; and the Pyro is no exception.
  • The Sniper acts as the polar opposite of the Pyro, dealing tons of precise damage from a long distance in a comfortable defensive position, compared to the Pyro's forgiving close-range damage that tends to put them in harm's way. A skilled Sniper can completely shut down a Pyro, dishing out deadly headshots from well outside flamethrower range and cutting off entire segments of the map from being crossed. Pyros can counter this by using flanking routes to kill the Sniper or outright avoid them, using long-range flare shots to set the relatively immobile Sniper alight and disrupt his aim — a strategy that can itself be countered with the Darwin's Danger Shield, which makes the Sniper immune to afterburn damage and cuts fire damage in general by 50% — or just taking advantage of a distraction. An observant Sniper can reliably spot and counter these tactics, emphasizing the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors at play.
  • A variety of things can put out burning players, including Medics, dispensers, health packs, several liquid-based weapons, and even friendly Pyros. This makes it relatively easy for players to avoid the extra damage unless the Pyro manages to corner or ambush them.
• Air Guitar: The Pyro's normal melee weapon taunt has them strum their bludgeons like guitars. In the cases of the Neon Annihilator and Third Degree, they have unique accompanying sound effects that play — riffs from a bass guitar or electric guitar, respectively — during their taunts.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Pyro infiltrated the Administrator's bunker faster than Heavy did in "The Showdown" comic this way, sneaking in through the base's air vents as opposed to dealing with all the obstacles — including fences, guard dogs and a squad of Messengers — head-on, like Heavy had to.
• Ambiguously Gay:
  • Their locker in some of the maps features a pink purse, which brought speculation on their sexuality, if not gender.
  • Pyroland's overwhelmingly Sugar Bowl appearance also contributes evidence that Pyro is Camp Gay.
  • The June 22, 2021 update added a tie cosmetic for all classes called the "Manndatory Attire". The "Hobbyist" variant of it for the Pyro sports a rainbow pattern.
• Ambiguously Human: We never get to see for certain what's under that suit. Here are some points for Pyro being a non-human:
  • One of the earliest examples is Pyro's publicity blurb, which questions "if he even is a man"; this can be interpreted as either this, or about what Pyro's gender is.
  • The Apparition's Aspect, a cosmetic which replaces Pyro's head with a ghostly silhouette of itself, shows that Pyro either doesn't need a head, or doesn't even have one one under the gas mask. While other classes have a few cosmetics that throw their humanity into question (most prominently, the "Voodoo-Cursed Souls", which turn them into zombies), the Apparition's Aspect is unique in that — unlike many of those aforementioned cosmetics — it isn't Halloween-restricted, implying that whatever it does lies outside the seasonal magic event of TF2.
  • During the True Meaning comic, a Grocket crashes into Engineer's house, within which a set of five weapons and a note have been left, said note reading: "Greetings, emissary from another dimension! We have heard your plea." While Engineer interprets Pyro's mumbling as a "no, I did not order extra-terrestrial aid", Engie could have been guessing what Pyro was saying.
  • The trailer for the official community-made Invasion update shows the empty crop fields outside the barn where the mercs are hosting a sci-fi movie night. Pyro is conspicuously absent… until they appear right outside the barn's doors, just as the flying saucers start attacking the fields. Combined with the above, this suggests some sort of extra-terrestrial and/or extra-dimensional origin for Pyro.
  • And then, of course, there's the whole deal about Pyroland.
• Ambiguous Gender: Word of God is that there is no answer to whether the Pyro is male or female, so this trope gets played around with a lot. Heck, this very character page has a commented-out disclaimer in regards of what pronouns to use when describing the Pyro.
  • Older versions of TF2 would display random challenges on the title screen for the player, which read "Give him a shot!" referring to the class the challenge was about. If the challenge was issued for the Pyro, the pronoun "him" would sometimes change to "her."
  • In Meet the Pyro, Heavy says 'I fear no man, but that thing… it scares me.' Scout, on the other hand, refers to the Pyro as 'he' (but the caption for the line is "He's not here, is she?").
  • Their storage locker carries a woman's purse, and their Director's Vision taunt flips between masculine and feminine poses.
  • In "Meet The Spy", we see an alerts board (Intruder Alert, Red Spy, In Base). But under the words "Red Pyro" are two alerts, one labelled "Is A Man" and the other labelled "Is A Woman". And elsewhere on the same board, "Is A Robot".
  • Some of domination/revenge kill lines targeted towards the Pyro are misogynistic.
    Engineer: Sorry, ma'am.
    Sniper: Oooh, got ya right in the ovary.
  • In "A Cold Day In Hell", Bears are approaching Scout, Soldier, and Pyro. Soldier claims two things attract bears; honey and menstruating women, before saying "My God, I knew it! Somehow I always knew! PYRO!". As it turns out, Pyro is blocking the entrance to a crashed plane, full of honey.
  • In what is a reference to that, "Old Wounds" reveals that the Classic Pyro is a plump, grandma-like woman (with a large scar on her face) called Beatrice.
  • In Evil Genius 2, where Pyro was added as DLC, the game uses neutral They/Them pronouns.
• And Call Him "George": Pyro would really like to be friends with the little baby-people around… if only Pyro knew how much harm is really being done to them.
• Anti-Structure: Sentries may be a pain in even a really good Pyro's tail, but they still have a few weapons that excel at destroying them. The Homewrecker deals double melee damage against enemy buildings, and the singular blasts of Dragon's Fury deals three times the normal damage on them too^note It deals the same amount of damage as the 300% damage increase to burning targets (approximately 70-90 depending on ramp-up) listed on the weapon's stat list. This is probably because rather than being as advertised, the 70-90 damage is the weapon's default damage level, with its damage on non-burning targets being reduced by 300%, allowing Pyro to puff them out in two or three shots.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: The Pyro's gas mask has large, circular lenses, a quality that most of their head cosmetics try and retain. The lenses resemble the wide, curious eyes of a child, thereby reflecting the Pyro's immaturity. Wide eyes are also associated with being insane, which the Pyro very obviously is.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: A stereotypical new Pyro player will forgo supporting their team defensively, flanking, airblasting, or ambushing in favor of just running straight at enemies and setting them on fire, known derogatorily as "W+M1", for the only two keys needed to do this. It is worth noting that at some point during competent Pyro play, you'll just have a good opportunity to run at opponents and light them all on fire.
  • This is also the encouraged way to use the Dragons Fury and the Phlogistinator, the former gains a massive attack power and fire rate boost so as long as attacks are being followed up on against targets, and punishes the Pyro with pitiful damage and speed if they whiff their attacks or are playing too passively, while the latter ditches airblasts in favor of pure fire damage, encouraging them to build up the weapons meter by always trying to burn something before granting themselves guaranteed critical hits.
  • The Axtinguisher is a weapon built for pure damage against burning opponents, with its latest rework giving the user a hefty speed boost on kills against burning targets for four seconds. While it can be used to make an escape or rush for a medkit after smacking someone with it, it’s just as encouraged to use that speed boost to try and run down more players to get more hits in for even more damage and speed.
• Attack Reflector: Among other uses, properly-timed compression blasts return projectile weapons — rockets, grenades, stickybombs, arrows, jars, flares, and even baseballs and ornaments — to the sender.
• Ax-Crazy: Absolutely. Along with Soldier, Pyro stands out among an already lunatic-filled ensemble as being completely insane to the point where even their own team is frightened of them. Bonus points for their default melee weapon — and several of their unlockables — being an actual axe.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Whenever the others aren't trembling in fear of the maniac, they're treating the Pyro like a strange child. Ms. Pauling in particular talks to them like a kind teacher talking to a preschooler when she's assigning missions to the classes, giving their contract instructions out in really sweet and simple terms.
• Badass Biker: In their Hot Wheeler taunt, Pyro rides a miniature-sized motor tricycle that can shoot flames out of its back. This also forms the basis of the earlier "Sons of Arsonry" cosmetic set; which gives them a spiked leather jacket and helmet, and a motorbike engine-shaped backpack.
• Badass Driver: How the Pyro is depicted in Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, being the driver of the team's kart. Guess the Pyro is the Stig…
  • Give the Pyro's nature, this might overlap with Drives Like Crazy.
• Balance Buff: The Pyro was widely derided by competitive players for being a Skill Gate Character, until they gained the compression blast. This allowed the Pyro to forcefully reposition enemies (into a pit, for example) and reflect nearly every non-bullet projectile in the game; giving the Pyro a huge advantage against Soldiers and Demomen, since the compression blast allowed them to reflect their rockets and grenades back at them, as well as to minesweep the latter's Stickybomb traps.
  • The Pyro's unique traits of inflicting and being immune to afterburn steadily got less relevant by comparison when other classes got Bleed effects, fiery weapons, and many ways to extinguish afterburn. So, the Pyro's flamethrowers now additionally quarter any healing/shielding applied to their target, making the Pyro invaluable in killing someone with a Medic in their pocket.
• Barrier Warrior: The Pyro's compression blast generates a small, short-lived reflective shield in front of the nozzle, which can reflect just about any kind of projectile weapon in the game with good timing.
• Berserk Button: Pyro may see the world as a cutesy Sugar Bowl, but if you diss fire in front of the little firebug, no matter how cute you are, Pyro will go berserk.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Never mind the Innocent Inaccurate rampages, the comics suggest that Pyro is pretty perceptive of the world while they're outside of battle. And exceptionally deadly. It's shown that they are perfectly willing to kill — at least, consciously — whoever or whatever insults fire in front of them.
• Blithe Spirit: At least, that's how they themselves see it…
• Blown Across the Room: Airblast might only push enemies backwards a modest distance, but this also knocks them into the air and limits their mobility for a bit. Besides being able to deflect enemy projectiles and extinguish burning allies, blasting enemies is incredibly useful for a variety of purposes: disrupting enemy capture or control of an objective, juggling them into the air while they burn, saving your team from an incoming Spy or Demoknight, and, of course, sending them into environmental hazards to instantly die like a Bottomless Pit or buzzsaw, or even off a normal ledge to force them into the sightlines of a Sentry or mob of teammates ready to jump them. When nothing else is available, it's also handy for simply shoving enemies out of the way so you're not in an unwinnable fight.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: Often the other most viable playstyle for Pyro besides rushing in for the kill is to act as a bodyguard for other players, acting as a support class that stands by teammates to reflect rockets and grenades away from them, extinguish any flare gun hits from the enemy, be on the lookout for enemy Spies going for a backstab (and also happen to be the one best suited for thwarting them with an airblast to knock them away from potential victims) and especially guarding friendly Engineer nests. Given that Pyros can really struggle in frontline combat when the enemy team is at their best, opting to support those better built to hold the front line can serve as a better use of a life than hopelessly prodding for openings to attack from.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Pyro has a lot of utility apart from the much more fun business of Kill It with Fire, like extinguishing teammates and Spy-checking. A good Pyro guarding an Engineer's buildings can easily detect and kill enemy Spies, shoo away invulnerable enemies, reflect projectiles, and even destroy sappers if equipped with the Homewrecker or Neon Annihilator, making them a nigh-unstoppable combo. However, pairing up with an Engineer tends to mean a lot of waiting around, since you'll usually be far behind the battlefield.
  • The Pyro's default secondary weapon is just a simple shotgun. Most players will instead be using one of the flare guns… but in a Pyro vs Pyro situation, the shotgun will win almost every time, as a shotgun-wielding Pyro can stand safely out of flamethrower or melee range, while their opponent's flare guns barely leaves a scratch.
  • In terms of their flamethrowers, the Degreaser doesn't read like much on paper, trading out valuable afterburn damage and costing more per airblast for... faster weapon-switching speed. Believe it or not, this trait alone is invaluable to Pyro's identity as a combo-centric character, as that fraction of a second in switching between compatible weapons (such as the Axtinguisher or the Flare Gun) may result in combos that more than make up for those drawbacks. The Degreaser/Panic Attack combo in particular grants The Pyro their highest possible DPS output in large part due to both of them having fast weapon-switching speeds, allowing skillful Pyros to practically dual-wield them for close-range blasts of fire and buckshot.
  • The events of the "Ring of Fired" comic lead Pyro to become CEO of Frontier Engineering. They're shockingly effective in this position, making everyone on their team a millionaire in his first quarter alone. However, it's very clear that being a CEO of anything divorced from fire is not who Pyro is; their Pyrovision has turned into a grey, bleak (if still quirky) version of the real world as opposed to the exciting Sugar Bowl it usually is. Once Soldier and Ms. Pauling lure them out with some fire, they immediately jump at the call.
• Catch and Return: The compression blast can deflect almost all projectiles, including Jarate, Mad Milk, baseballs, baubles, explosives, arrows, flares, and eyes. A skilled Pyro can reflect them back so they hit enemies, including the ones who launched them in the first place.
• Characterization Marches On: Pyro's voice lines from release aren't entirely understandable, but based on the context they're used they can be interpreted as phrases that make sense, portraying Pyro as a mostly sane person who's ironically the tamest of a band of killers. Those voice lines have been reused for most of TF2's update history, but besides those, over the years, the Pyro has been steadily turned into a loony Psychopathic Manchild with an affinity for traditionally feminine or "kiddie" things, an obsession with fire, and (in the comics) being someone who rarely utters a word and can be surprisingly friendly — especially towards children and cute pets — but capable of astonishing brutality when pushed. At their most violent, they've even managed to horrify the likes of Scout, Spy and Soldier.
  Soldier: (visibly taken aback, in response to Pyro obliterating a bear's head with an axe) That... that's enough, Pyro. You're launching bone shards everywhere. Some of us are naked, here.
• Character Tics: Flicking a lighter on and off, judging by the waiting room scene in "Meet the Medic". This is a popular stereotype for any pyromaniac… although with the "Meet The Pyro" movie release, who knows what they're seeing?
  • According to the "Ring Of Fired" comic, they see fire as rainbows and bright lights. So maybe they just want everyone to taste the rainbow? Then again, at the same time, they viciously maul a Smokey the Bear Expy who tells them "fire is nobody's friend!", indicating they at least know what fire is.
  • In the background of the main comic series, Pyro can usually be seen playing with a lighter or staring at a burning matchstick until it's time to move. If it isn’t either, starting fires to pass the time will also do.
• Charge Meter: The Phlogistinator has an "Mmmph" meter, which charges whenever the Pyro causes fire damage and can be unleashed to cause triple damage for a few seconds.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: "Meet the Pyro" shows that their view of the world is… odd. Word of God states that they live in a fantasy world known as Pyroland. It does have a darker, more mundane version which is applied whenever they are not gleefully burning things… Which is still pretty weird compared to how others view the world.
• Close-Range Combatant: The Pyro can move fairly quickly, can hit incredibly hard up close and take decent amounts of damage, but generally lacks range. As such, a competent Pyro must always make use of cover.
• Combos: Multiple playstyles revolve around them to compensate for the lack of burst damage in the flamethrowers. Most of the flare-based secondaries deal extra damage to burning opponents (the original Flare Gun deals lethal Critical Hits to them), and the Axtinguisher or Panic Attack can be used to similarly take down a burning opponent. The Degreaser benefits weapon swap strategies further, with its fast holster and deploy times. Thus, a tactic forms in igniting an opponent, then using a different weapon to deal heavy burst damage to them.
• Critical Hit Class: Many of their weapons revolve around a chance to do extra critical hits, such as the Backburner, which deals extra damage when behind an enemy, as well as the Flare Gun and Axtinguisher, both dealing crits to enemies already on fire.
• Cute and Psycho: A worrying combination of enthusiastic childish cheerfulness and rampant wanton arson. Fittingly, many Pyro cosmetics allow you to heavily lean into 'cute' or 'psycho' with some truly sugary and cutesy gear for the former and outright bizarre and horrifying items for the latter.
• Damage Over Time: Pyro's flamethrowers deal damage slowly for a few seconds or until the flames are extinguished.
• Deliberately Monochrome: After RED team disbanded, Pyro somehow managed to run an engineering company as its CEO for a long time, but without any friends or fire to have fun with, their vision has gone dull, depressed and monochrome. Still very, very weird, but much less alive.
• Depending on the Artist: The Pyro's fire axe. In the game proper, their axe is painted red, but the comics give it no paint job at all, looking like ordinary steel. Their gas mask tends to alternate between cartoonishly mending with their facial expression, or remain as a stoic set of lenses depending on the comic or even panel.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Many players overlook the "ambush" aspect of playing a Pyro. But the Backburner, mocked by some, always Crits from behind and can kill in seconds with a steady blast. If you run away from a Backburner and you're not a Scout, you're a dead man. And the Axtinguisher always Crits burning enemies. Setting a foe on fire and then sinking the Axtinguisher into them can kill most enemies in one hit. Plus, with the addition of a speed boost upon a kill with the weapon, experienced players can go on extended killstreaks against an unsuspecting team.
  • Pyros who master the compression blast become Ax-Crazy pyromancers who can reflect projectiles back at opponents (including arrows fired from Sniper bows, but not the syringes fired by Medics^note It can, however, reflect the arrows from the Crusader's Crossbow, and even heal their own teammates through this method.), use opponents' rockets to Rocket Jump themselves up, relocate sticky bombs to inconvenient locations, block the advancement of Über Charged combos and separate Medics from their teammates, and put out fires on teammates. Just see this.
  • Pyros with a good grasp of level design, enemy movements, patience, timing, and sheer insane dedication to bringing Death from Above can literally drop down on someone, set them on fire, and kill most of the other classes in a single swing of the Axtinguisher before they can react. Notably, this allows them to single-handedly kill other Pyros instantly with the Axtinguisher, which is otherwise almost impossible.
  • The Flare Gun does Scratch Damage and a little bit of afterburn normally; however, it does full crits when it hits a burning opponent, meaning a Pyro with good aim and tracking can hit fleeing opponents for a 1-2 punch at a distance, capable of 2-shotting light classes and leaving everyone else save for Heavy critically injured. Of the Pyro's various flare gun options, the Flare Gun doesn't have any special gimmicks to really coast on if the player isn't great with aiming (the Detonator has flare jumping and the Scorch Shot has knockback and massive AoE potential), but has by far the highest burst damage, making it perhaps the most immediately deadly.
  • The Dragon's Fury shoots hitscan projectiles instead of perpetual flames and utilizes a bizarre pressurization mechanic that's shared by its primary fire and the airblast that causes both to come out faster on consecutive hits. Without scoring hits, Pyro's airblast and damage output is actually slower than with their more traditional weapons. This requires the Pyro to properly aim with their weapon, but it's capable of killing enemies at a much faster rate than their other primaries when their aim is true. It also utterly demolishes enemy buildings way faster than any other flamethrower, somewhat alleviating the class's crippling weakness to Sentries if they're close enough to fight back.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: A team with too many Pyros leaves itself vulnerable to just about anything with a range or high ground advantage. While anything within their effective range is going to be turned to ashes, actually achieving that becomes a struggle when the enemy team can start stacking Engineers and Sentries, Heavies and Snipers to out-DPS a horde of Pyros at a distance.
• Disproportionate Retribution: They once cut off one of the Soldier's hands because they were scuffling in the back seat, and mulched a bear's head with an axe because they imagined it insulting fire.
• Dissonant Serenity: In "True Meaning", the Pyro doesn't appear to be too shaken by a rocket that crashed into the Engineer's house, barely missing the two.
  • In "Meet the Pyro", it's shown that during battle, the Pyro sees themselves giving lollipops, bubbles, and happiness to cute baby cherubs, and skipping around happily in a colorful, cartoony town. In reality, however, they're menacingly stalking around a BLU-held wooden town, burning everything to the ground and gruesomely killing everyone they see.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: The Pyro is unique in that unlike other classes that use shotguns, they actually pump its forearm when they first draw it.
• The Dreaded: As shown in "Meet the Pyro", even their own team is terrified of them. The Spy muses on what could fuel such a desire for destruction, the Scout promptly exits the interview room while refusing to divulge any information on them, and the Heavy muses that while he may fear no man, the Pyro is so scary to that he doesn't even consider them to be human.
• Edible Bludgeon: The Pyroland counterpart of the Fire Axe is the Lollichop, a giant team-colored lollipop with a white swirl. The Pyro is seen happily giving one to the Heavy cherub in Meet the Pyro, with the snap-back to reality showing them actually embedding the axe through the Heavy's skull.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": To an even greater extent than the other classes. Even when off duty, the Engineer (Dell Conagher) calls them Pyro.
• Evil Laugh: The majority of their Domination lines amount to sinister chuckles and loud laughter.
• Expressive Mask: Averted in-game, but played straight in the comic where their gas mask deforms with their expressions and the goggles act as Eye Glasses. When they hallucinate a bear as Smoulders the Bear telling them that "Fire is nobody's friend!" the goggles narrow in anger as they grab their fire axe and the background bursts into flames.
• The Faceless: Nobody knows what's under that mask. In the character model, the Pyro's head is the mask. Averted in the concept arts.
• Featureless Protagonist: Nobody has ever seen what the Pyro looks like under that asbestos suit and mask, and the shapelessness of the suit itself doesn't give you much to work with either.
• Fireballs: The Dragon's Fury launches them, and Pyro themselves can throw short-ranged Shakunetsu-style ones with their Hadouken kill taunt.
• Firefighter Arsonist: Several of Pyro's accessories are firefighting attire; their stock melee weapon is a fire axe, the Brigade Helm and Vintage Merryweather are fire helmets, and the Trickster's Turnout Gear a fireman's jacket. At least in "Meet the Pyro", they're seen using said fire axe to break down doors so they can torch people inside, making them a very literal "fireman".
  Vintage Merryweather Description: Pyro wears this in tribute to the many firefighters who have perished trying to quell their flames.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The Pyro's primary weapons are all flamethrowers, which deal fire damage in a cone in front of them, and also deal afterburn damage after they are hit. That makes them a short-range fighter with a Herd-Hitting Attack which can quickly wreck havoc in closed spaces, but can be abused with clueless players (referred to as "W+M1" Pyros) simply charging into the fray hoping to score kills but only getting killed quickly.
• Foot Popping: Pyro does this while hugging Saxton Hale, as seen at the bottom of this page.
• Flare Gun: Apart from shotguns, the Pyro can use flare guns and weapons that act like modified flare guns.
  • The first and aptly named Flare Gun is focused around dealing burst damage to burning targets, with a measly 30 damage flare opening and a 90 damage follow up if the second flare hits, enough to kill most classes in two hits and leave the rest vulnerable to burning to death. When other friendly Pyros are on the team, it goes from a 1-2 combo weapons to a reliable finisher that can snipe enemies with the help of other Pyros torching them for you.
  • The Detonator is a fireworks launcher haphazardly mashed with a flare gun that shoots explosive flares, which sacrifices raw damage in favor of AOE attacks, letting the Pyro burn targets from around corners or entire groups of people with a properly timed explosion, and from a safe distance. Being an explosive weapon, it also lets the Pyro flare jump to spots they normally wouldn't be able to reach, at the cost of some HP.
  • The Scorch Shot is a flare gun that acts similar to the Detonator in that it lacks big bursts of damage in favor of setting multiple people on fire with an explosive flare. Against burning targets, a hit with this flare will deal a disorienting amount of knockback, and the flares will linger for a bit after hitting someone before exploding for a second wave of damage that deal mini-crits, and like the Detonator it allows for flare jumps, albeit ones not as impressive. It can also clear sticky bombs.
  • The Manmelter is a 'flare gun' (RE: Alien death ray) that deals no bonus damage to burning targets, but has an alternate fire mode that extinguishes burning teammates and uses those flames to store crits.
• Friend to All Children: Seen briefly in the second issue of the Team Fortress comics. They like to make children happy, and the children in turn seem very pleased by the Pyro's antics — specifically burning all their textbooks and cancelling school for the next six years.
• Funny Schizophrenia: The "Meet the Pyro" video shows us that they imagine they're playing with cherubs in a Sugar Bowl, and their flamethrower is a Magitek rainbow dispenser built out of a music box, a garden hose, and a cluster of trumpet bells. They see their Flare Gun, in turn, as a bubble wand, and hears the screams of terror and agony as joyful giggling.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Since there is no friendly fire in Team Fortress 2, Pyro players will typically (and are actually expected to) blow flames at their teammates in order to easily spot disguised Spies... Which fits nicely with the fact that, story-wise, the Pyro's teammates are afraid of them trying to burn them alive.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • In-game, Pyros are rewarded for extinguishing their teammates using airblast by healing slightly from it. In the story, firefighting is a thought that Pyro abhors, and they're generally shown to be more interested in preventing flames from going out.
  • In the story, the Pyro sees Pyroland by default, only snapping to reality when the above-mentioned Berserk Button is pushed. In-game, the Pyro sees the real world by default, only seeing Pyroland if they equip one of the relevant items.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Gives the appearance of one, especially with more than one of them on the enemy team. Justified, in that it's more than likely they wear it to prevent suffocating on the fumes from their flamethrowers.
• Gasoline Dousing: The whole shtick of the Gas Passer, a throwable gas tank that can cloud enemies in gasoline, amplifying further fire damage.
• Gasoline Lasts Forever: Strongly inverted with the Gas Passer, whose cloud of gas dissipates after a few seconds.
• Gendered Insult: Owing to the Pyro's Ambiguous Gender, some domination lines directed towards them are rather sexist.
  Soldier: Ha! You fight like a girl.
  Demoman: Go home, lassie. Men are fightin' here.
  Engineer: Sorry, ma'am.
  Sniper: You know what you and Jane Austen have in common? You're both dead women.
  Spy: Good lord! You fight like a woman!
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: The Cremator's Conscience cosmetic are dolls of the Pyro dressed as an angel and devil, visually resembling this trope. Though the description implies neither of them are really helpful.
  'Burn him with fire!'
  'No, burn him with fire, then hit him with an axe!'
• Guest Fighter:
  • Pyro is a playable racer in Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed with the Heavy and Spy.
  • You can also recruit the Pyro from either RED or BLU in the Steam port of Evil Genius 2.
• Homemade Flamethrower: Three of their five non-reskin flame throwers seem to be homemade. For example, the stock flamethrower is made out of a long metal pole, connected by a hose to a propane tank, with said tank being attached to the pole via fastening bands, which is all connected to the team colored trigger, which is a gas pump. Likewise, the Backburner (somehow) upgrades the weapon by simply adding a jagged piece of metal to the barrel, painted to look like a dragon's head.
  • The Degreaser takes this craftsmanship up a notch, being put together from a fire extinguisher to house fuel, a car muffler connected to a stove-top burner for ignition, a metal pipe and a gas pump used as a trigger. All of this put together creates a weapon that would probably fall apart or explode in anyone else's hands when fired.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Flamethrowers pierce through their targets, including Engineer buildings. A Pyro under Übercharge can deal heavy area damage in close quarters, and can inflict a Total Party Kill using the Phlogistinator.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Assuming they're male, Pyro is this with the Engineer as shown in the comics — and with a question mark on 'Heterosexual'. They apparently live together. When a rocket crashed into their house, the Engineer half-joked that they may have just adopted a super-baby. This mirrors their relationship in-game; no Engineer is complete without a Pyro.
• Hidden Depths:
  • The Pyro took charge of an engineering company for a whole quarter and made everybody on the management board millionaires, somehow. Furthermore, while they're perhaps the nuttiest of the mercs, the MacGyvered nature of most of their Flame Throwers suggest they're competent at putting together murder weapons.
  • They're actually pretty good with kids, likely owing in part to their Psychopathic Manchild tendencies; see Friend to All Children above.
  • Similarly, they also adore animals, and not even just conventional ones:
    • Ring of Fired sees them adopting a Dalmatian and bringing the dog in the car to Teufort, despite Dalmatians' typical associations with firefighting a-la bears.
    • In Expiration Date, the final shot shows them chasing around and playing with a loose bread monster like a pet.
    • The Burstchester taunt has them patting the titular alien on the head, pacifying it until it retreats into their body.
• High-Class Glass: A monocle is part of the Pyro's miscellaneous item, the "Whiskered Gentleman".
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Smart Pyro players know when to chase enemies down and when to ambush, set them on fire, then get the hell out of there.
• Idiot Savant: Variously described by the others as a "mutant", a "whack-job", a "mumbling abomination", and a "mental deficient", the Pyro inspirationally makes up for whatever they may lack in social skills by being an expert at inflicting burning agony upon others. A good look at many of their weapons, the Detonator, nearly every flame thrower but especially the Degreaser, Powerjack, Axtinguisher, tips off the fact that their weapons were all homemade and function near-perfectly for looking like cobbled together junk.
• Immune to Fire: A Pyro can still receive contact damage from another Pyro's flamethrower, but under normal circumstances, they are immune to afterburn. However, if a Pyro is soaked in the Gas Passer's gas, anyone can bypass this afterburn immunity; any weapon that hits the Pyro by that point will light them up.
• Improbable Weapon User: Pyro has the largest number of improvised weapons of any class. Most of their weapons have been hand-crafted from things you find lying around a gas station or garage. They have the modified Axtinguisher and the Homewrecker, but the Pyro also uses things like a gardening rake, a car battery attached to a car jack, a giant lollipop, a deep fat fryer, and, giving new meaning to the word "hotmail", a mailbox.
• In a Single Bound: The secondary item, the Thermal Thruster, allows the Pyro to take ridiculously far and horizontal leaps across terrain, somewhat alleviating the mobility issues the class suffers from. It takes some practice to use properly due to it initially having a weird time delay of 1.1 seconds when deploying and holstering it, making it a poor choice as an emergency escape option, not to mention the fact that you're forgoing any capability to deal damage outside of Flamethrower range. Use it in the right situations and understand how it handles, and you gain a fantastic mobility option that lets you flank like never before. The March 28th, 2018 patch reduced its holster-time to 0.8 seconds, making it a bit more viable as an escape option than when it was released.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Everyone knows that the Pyro spreads fiery death and destruction and is feared by all. Everyone, it seems, except the Pyro themselves. Or...so it seems. The "Meet the Pyro" video shows us what the world looks like from Pyro's side of the mask, but several times in the comic seem to imply that Pyro is well aware of what fire is, and has an affinity for it. Their encounter with the Smokey the Bear expy, as documented above, also indicates that Pyro is also capable of truly malicious intent.
• In the Back: Encouraged by the design with the Backburner, a flamethrower that trades the utility of airblasts in exchange for critical hits for flames that strike the enemy's back, leading to an ambush and/or mobility centric playstyle that entails either lying in wait or being constantly on the move to catch enemies distracted.
• Irony:
  • Despite being the class that thrives on lighting people on fire, the Pyro is also one of the best classes to extinguish teammates thanks to the airblast.
  • The Sniper and Engineer are two of the hardest counters against a Pyro. Both classes also benefit the most from having a friendly Pyro supporting them.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: While understandable, Heavy in Meet the Pyro makes it clear that he doesn't even think Pyro is truly human.
  "I fear no man... but that thing... it scares me."
• Jack of All Stats:
  • MvM wise, Pyro is incredibly versatile loadout-wise and can fit pretty much any combat role effectively. Dragon's Fury and Backburner for high damage output, Phlogistinator for tank busting, stock Flame Thrower for airblasting the bomb into a pit, Gas Passer for taking out crowds of robots or medics.
  • Even in general gameplay, the Pyro has perfectly respectable speed, health, and damage output. They're faster than the classes with better DPS and health and are tougher and more damaging than the classes with higher speed.
• Joke Item: The Hot Hand, which is a glove that replaces Pyro's melee weapons and allows them to slap people. The damage is pithy on a class that has better close range options and the primary upside of a speed boost on hit is very situational, but slapping your enemies to death is funny and, like the Scout's Holy Mackrel, the game announces that your enemies are getting slapped to the whole server via the killfeed.
• Jump Jet Pack: The Thermal Thruster, which — after a short charge jump — launches the Pyro in the direction they are looking at when used. The Pyro can jump just before using it to propel themselves fairly higher.
• Kamehame Hadoken: One of the Pyro's taunts, though the actual fireball doesn't reach very far. It is also capable of an instant kill on multiple enemies if you are lucky enough.
• Kill It with Fire: The entire point of the class.
• Knight of Cerebus: Of the "Meet The..." videos. While the shots of Pyroland itself are very much Black Comedy, they're depicted as genuinely terrifying their own teammates with their status as The Dreaded played frighteningly straight, and a lot of emphasis is put on the BLU team showing genuine fear for their lives as Pyro hunts them down in brutal fashion. They could possibly share this spot with the Spy.
• Kryptonite Is Everywhere: Methods for putting out fire have increased in number by the day, making afterburn not even half as menacing as it used to be. To this date, 5 out of 9 classes can equip items that immediately put out a fire on a teammate or render it irrelevant (the Scout's Mad Milk, the Pyro's airblast and Manmelter alt-fire, the Heavy's lunchbox items, the Medic's Mediguns, and the Sniper's Jarate and Sydney Sleeper's scoped shots). On top of that, the Medic has intrinsic health regeneration that almost neutralizes the afterburn, and activating a normal Über Charge extinguishes fire, the Demoman's shields give him great resistance to fire and remove afterburn on charge, and the Spy's Spy-cicle, Dead Ringer, and Conniver's Kunai each allow the player to remove afterburn on certain conditions. Jungle Inferno also nerfed the afterburn itself to only be applied to a player for however long the Pyro engulfed you in flames for, with a cap of 8 seconds instead of 8 seconds no matter what. Safe to say, Spy mains the world over were pretty happy about this change.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Pyroland was a huge surprise… back when it was first revealed in 2012. Nowadays, it's pretty much common knowledge, with the number of items and voice lines in-game referencing the Pyro's childlike attitude scarcely bothering to keep it a secret anymore.
• Leeroy Jenkins: A very simple way to play the Pyro is to charge at the enemy and keep them in range of your flamethrower. This is often the stereotypical "noob" or "W+M1" Pyro, as they lack subtlety and are easily shot down before they get into range, though it still works great at punishing unaware or out of position players.
  • The Phlogistinator even rewards such a playstyle to a degree. Once the Pyro has done enough damage, activating the "MMMPH" will grant 10 seconds of guaranteed critical hits, meaning that blindly charging into a group of enemies after activating it will all but guarantee that at least a few of them will die before the Pyro gets gunned down.
• Leitmotif: In the eyes of both their foes and their friends, Dreams of Cruelty. But in their own mind… Do You Believe In Magic?
• Lethal Joke Character: The Pyro is the stereotypical noob class, and playing them can result in derision from veteran players. Up until they set you on fire, anyway. They've also been heavily nerfed repeatedly, and other classes surpass them in virtually all areas^note The Spy and Scout are better ambushers, the Demoknight is a better melee combatant, the Heavy has better DPS, etc.. Yet see Difficult, but Awesome above for a taste of what a skilled Pyro can do. Additionally, the Pyro is a Spy's worst nightmare, as they can easily cover a large number of players and a wide area with flames with very little effort, easily revealing any Spies caught there.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • Has the highest health/speed balance of all the classes. 100% of baseline speed, with 175 health; only three other classes meet or exceed the Pyro's health level, and they're all slower than Pyro.^note Though the Soldier's rocket jumps actually make him much more mobile, albeit at the cost of some health. Couple with the major damage that Pyro can do with the flamethrower (albeit at short range, hence the speed), and you have this. Pyros, however, have abysmal range, only some of their secondaries give them any range at all, and those have pitiful damage without the use of follow-up attacks or set-ups. The other three classes on par with the Pyro's health have very high damage rates and can easily shred a Pyro in seconds. So despite having a surprisingly large amount of health, it tends to get eaten up pretty quickly.
  • During the Mann-conomy Update, the Pyro gained the Gas Jockey Gear item set, which boosts their speed in lieu of giving them vulnerabilities to hitscan weapons. This makes them teeter on the edge between Lightning Bruiser and Glass Cannon, as Pyros themselves don't stand much of a chance against Heavies in open combat anyways (Heavies having the most damaging and used hitscan weapons). Against Scouts, Engineers, and Spies, the Pyro's survivability is greatly reduced. The set bonus was removed later on, but it still lives on in a way through new attributes given to the melee weapon of the set, the Powerjack, which now gives a 15% speed boost, at the cost of taking 20% more damage, when the Pyro has it drawn.
• Limited Wardrobe: Is never seen without the asbestos suit and gas mask, and their trading card bio implies they wear it constantly. This is taken to extreme levels when attending board meetings of a company they're the CEO of in the very same suit.
• MacGyvering: A running theme with the aesthetic to the Pyro's items. A few of the hats are things that aren't really hats (a toilet plunger, a birdcage, or an old boot). The Degreaser is a flamethrower made with a gas pump, a car muffler, an exhaust pipe, a fire extinguisher, and a stove top burner, while the Powerjack is a car battery tied to an automobile jack.
• The Magazine Rule: At the end of "Meet the Medic", the Pyro is seen reading a magazine called "Man Man"◊, likely a parody of the masculine magazines published in the 50s. The top two headlines read, "Lust-crazed bikini bordellos of the Badlands" and "Chained nudes in the Dustbowl of the damned".
• Magikarp Power: In Mann vs. Machine, Pyros will likely struggle the most out of the frontline units when first starting out and get wiped out easily against the horde, having little to no money for resistances or meaningful damage for such a close-ranged fighter, pushing them back to chucking the more useful Gas Passer with the 'explosion on ignite' upgrade and tank elimination duties, which they suffer no damage penalty for attacking unlike Heavies. With enough money and wise purchasing however, Pyros can get all the damage resistances they need, flamethrower upgrades and health-on-kill purchases to become close to unkillable as they become capable of quickly wiping out groups of robots in seconds with minimal effort. By this point, the only real concern is getting mowed down by giants and especially Giant Heavies, which are usually a team effort to take out anyways.
• Menacing Stroll: In "Meet the Pyro," although from their own point of view, they are happily skipping around.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: The only combat-oriented class whose primary weapon is only usable at close range. They're also the only class with any sort of Attack Reflector and the only class able to reliably deal fire damage.
• Mini-Me: The two identical Pyro plushies with a halo and devil horns called The Cremator's Conscience, which Pyro can wear on their grenade straps. The Engineer also has a Pyro plushie called the "Pocket Pyro".
• Mr. Imagination: Or rather, Mx. Imagination. In any case, if Pyroland and their sheer amount of oddball cosmetics and child-like mannerisms are anything to go by? Then they definitely count.
• Mysterious Past: The only character aside from the Spy — who at least has a certain... history with some people — to have no backstory to speak of.
• Never Learned to Read: Pyro is flat-out incapable of reading because of Pyroland. All in-game signs are translated to unintelligible "mmph"s when using Pyrovision, and during Ring of Fired the newspaper they're "reading" is a blank sheet of paper from their point of view.
• Nice Guy: If they were a bit more aware of the reality of their actions, they'd be the nicest member of the team. Alas, what they think is spreading joy to the world and playing with cherubs is actually burning people to death and driving axes into their skulls.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: They scare the living crap out of everyone on both teams, yet they're completely unaware of this. Taken to literal extremes with an item set based on the attire of a fuel station attendant.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Their Schadenfreude taunt, in stark contrast to the rest of their sinister and proud laughter, is a goofy and higher pitched 'hoo-hoo-hoo!' as they point and laugh.
• Nothing Is Funnier: Valve has gone on record saying that they'll never reveal the Pyro's gender because the mystery will always be funnier than any answer they could give.
• Obliviously Evil: As revealed in "Meet the Pyro". To everyone else, the Pyro is a crazed inhuman thing ready to set the world ablaze. But in the Pyro's mind, they're simply skipping whimsically around a Sugar Bowl world and making everyone happy by handing out candy and blowing pretty bubbles and rainbows for them. That said, they do know what fire is and they do not appreciate anybody telling them that it's bad and are willing to kill a bear over it, it's just that they don't seem to understand that it is bad to set people on fire.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • In A Cold Day in Hell, the Pyro knowingly and actively slaughters a bear with an axe because they imagined it saying fire is bad, contrasting their normal blithe unawareness.
  • The Showdown has Heavy attempt to appeal to Pyro into letting him take the Administrator's favor of getting a new weapon next, by taking her pocket lighter and giving it to them. Despite Pyro's love of fire, they crush the lighter in their hand and snuff out the fire, implying they're aware of the stakes at hand.
• Odd Friendship: With the generally polite, intelligent, soft-spoken Engineer, who is generally the sanest and most down-to-earth of the mercs^note Though he did cut off his own hand to replace it with a robot arm.
  • The game even references this synergy with the relationship of Pyros and Engineers. An Engineer's biggest problems are explosives, Snipers, Spies, and ubercharges. A Pyro's compression blast can hold off ubers and reflect explosives, their flamethrower can spycheck with ease, and, if they equip the Homewrecker, they can remove a Spy's sappers from friendly buildings to save the Engineer's nest if he isn't around to handle the problem. The flare guns (mostly the Scorch Shot) have enough range to prevent Snipers from always having a clear shot, and the afterburn will harass them into retreating for health or equipping the Darwin's Danger Shield just to negate flares. Together, the duo can minimize each others weaknesses with enough coordination.
  • The True Meaning comic, among other things, demonstrates that this friendship is also the case in canon, too, showing that the two either lived together at some point or are on good enough terms to visit each other during the holidays.
• One-Man Army: In "Meet The Pyro", not only does the Pyro singlehandedly take out the entire BLU team, but they also completely destroy the town they were fighting in and burns it to the ground.
• Only Sane by Comparison: Inverted. Although all of the mercenaries are insane with varying degrees of functionality, most of the mercs are equally afraid and judgemental of the Pyro, whose misunderstood psychosis and irrational behavior causes them all to label them as insane, even by their standards.
• Ornamental Weapon: Those napalm grenades are apparently just a style statement. That, or the Pyro just really likes bongo drums.
• Playing with Fire: While their weapons are flamethrowers and flare guns, the Hadouken and the Armageddon taunt have some… interesting implications regarding Pyro actually having pyrokinetic capabilities.
• Proud to Be a Geek: The Pyro's hats would suggest this, coupled with the game's time period (the 60s) being a hotbed of sci-fi B-movies and Silver Age comics.
• Pyromaniac: Well, obviously. In all of the game's history, only two other classes^note Those being the Soldier (with a charged Cow Mangler 5000 shot) and the Sniper (with an ignited Huntsman/Fortified Compound arrow). have been given the ability to deal fire damage as a gimmick. The bulk of weapons that burn people still belong to Pyro.
• Psycho Party Member: The rest of the Team is convinced that the Pyro is their most insane member for their homicidal actions. Turns out they are Right for the Wrong Reasons: Pyro's the craziest of them, but not in a homicidal way.
• Psychopathic Manchild: "Meet The Pyro" is quite definite that this is Pyro's real mental state; but it's Wild Mass Guessing on how they ended up like that.
  • Then there's the scene in "True Meaning" featuring Engineer reading a Christmas story to Pyro, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor and listening closely. Said story describes the "Australian Christmas shootout" between an evil version of Santa and the mafia.
  • Adding Miss Pauling's Rare Contracts in "Gun Mettle" to the mix gives the impression that Valve has settled on Pyro being some crazed combination of a pyromaniac and mercenary — with the mind of a hyperactive 8-year-old — in a fire-retardant suit. The way she chats with Pyro is very reminiscent of a Kindergarten teacher describing letters and colors to a young child.
    Miss Pauling: Hey, buddy! It's Pauling!
    Miss Pauling: Hi, Pyro! I've got something I need you to do, okay buddy?
    Miss Pauling: Hey, Pyro! You want to do a real big favor for Miss Pauling?
• The Quiet One: While just as chatty as everyone else in a fight during the game proper, they tend to scarcely mumble a thing to other characters in the comics, opting to either live in their own little world in the background or follow the conversation with just their head movement.
• Quizzical Tilt: They give a Michael Myers-esque one while incinerating the BLU Sniper at the end of their Meet video, as if they're confused why they're hearing screaming.
• Ray Gun: The Manmelter is a handheld laser pistol for Pyro, while the Phlogistinator resembles this in flamethrower form; to the point where scoring kills with them results in dead enemies messily disintegrating.
• Required Secondary Powers: The fire-retardant boiler suit makes Pyro immune to afterburn — though not the initial fire damage — except when doused with the Gas Passer or targeted with the Dragon's Fury. If it weren’t for that suit and gas mask, they probably would’ve overheated or asphyxiated on the heat and fumes of their own fires long ago.
  • As demonstrated in "Showdown", Pyro — being one of the most meticulous ambush classes without immediate mobility advantages — means they need to be very good at navigating terrain in unexpected ways, such as infiltrating a building with several redundancies for security doors through the unguarded ventilation system.
• Riddle for the Ages: Nearly everything about Pyro is a complete mystery; their gender, their age, their past, their country of origin, what they look like under their mask, and how they became the Ax-Crazy, delusional Pyromaniac they are today. Hell, whether or not they're even a person is sometimes called into question. Dennis Bateman even admitted in 2022 that he doesn't even remember what most of their lines were!
• Rocket Jump: The Detonator and Scorch Shot, having explosive flares, allow this to be done as a secondary feature of their AOE damage, which allow the Pyro to have access to high ground and flank routes normally impossible to reach conveniently. As a trade off, they're not as powerful as the Flare Gun or shotgun and mostly serve as long-range harassment or as an opening moves to a combo.
• Rummage Sale Reject: The Pyro is prone to wearing some of the nuttiest cosmetics in TF2. These include the Frymaster (a miniature fry cooker that replaces the air tank backpack), the birdcage (with the base sawed out and worn over the head, a bird still inside), and the Prancer's Pride (a single reindeer antler tied to the top of Pyro's head with string, like Max the dog).
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Makes air-guitar noises when taunting with a melee weapon. The Third Degree and Neon Annihilator amp it up even more by letting Pyro actually play an electric guitar or bass guitar riff respectively as they do so.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Pyro's secondary weapon is typically a shotgun and other variants, giving them another option at short range. It's also their most effective weapon against other Pyros.
• Signature Headgear: The Pyro is never seen without their gas mask, ever. The head slot cosmetics where they don't have it just replaces their head with something completely different.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Absent from the Mann VS Machine trailer, along with the Sniper and Spy.
• Situational Damage Attack:
  • The Dragon's Fury, which quadruples its damage if its victim is burning and the center of the projectile's hitbox connects.
  • The Neon Annihilator is unique in the game because it deals crit damage to wet players, which is a status that is quite rare and often ignored. That makes the weapon very useful in wet areas like 2fort or Well, but nearly useless in other stages as it then relies on specific items that the Pyro doesn't even have to work. That being said, the Neon Annihilator is the only melee weapon other than the Homewrecker that can destroy sappers (albeit in two hits instead of one).
• Situational Sword: Is prone to using weapons whose effects completely change the way the class is played, but not always for the better depending on the map and battle.
  • The Backburner can't score random crits, but does 100% critical damage from behind, encouraging the user to get crafty and sneak behind the enemy. As a trade off, airblasts cost 50 fuel instead of 20, meaning you only get four uses to extinguish teammates and reflect attacks back before running dry, a big detriment if the enemy is stacking Soldiers and Demomen.
  • The Flare Gun has a pretty tame damage output and a slow projectile speed, but it deals devastating 100% criticals to enemies on fire, and its alternate choices, the Detonator and Scorch Shot, are even weaker, but allow Pyro to flare jump. You need some practice to use them properly at a distance, but potentially lose out on a lot of damage in CQC if you whiff a close range flare shot versus just pulling out a shotgun for an easy 80 damage.
  • Their melee weapons get in on this too and affect the way the player handles fights up close. The Neon Annihilator does less damage than the stock Fire Axe, but deals 100% criticals to enemies who are wet from standing in water or have been hit by Mad Milk/Jarate. The Axtinguisher suffers a 33% reduced damage penalty compared to the stock fire axe, but deals a huge burst of damage depending on much afterburn the target has on them, up to enough damage to one-shot the light classes and leave Medics reeling on good swings.
  • The Degreaser encourages combo-centric playstyles versus just torching players with a stream of fire at the cost of its own damage and airblast cost. Combine the melee and secondary weapons with the Degreaser, mostly popularly the Axtinguisher and Flare Gun, and the Pyro turns into a burst damage dealing menace, albeit one stuck in close range combat.
  • The Phlogistinator removes the ability to airblast at all in favor of gaining a meter that charges up for fire damage dealt to enemies. At full charge, the Pyro can taunt and gain crits to run down enemies with massive damage for a few seconds. The 'situational' part really comes into play in that the most optimal way to charge the Phlogistinator is to pack either the Detonator or Scorch Shot, two weapons that deal measly damage but hit multiple people, and use them until it's time to let loose crits on someone. Given that the Phlog has no airblast and the typical abysmal range that most flame throwers have, it relies on catching enemies off guard, a Medic to keep the Pyro alive, or a hole in the defenses to not get cut down before the Pyro can even get into attack range.
• Skill Gate Characters: Generally speaking, the class can suffer hard against the various counters and chaos the game has to offer thanks to being stuck in close range combat and mid-range harassment. When using the aforementioned W+M1 strategy, a charging Pyro can quickly burn up an unaware or ill prepared opponent if they can't react fast enough, but it's a minor threat to more skilled/lucky players. With all that said, it's still completely possible to play around these counters and lack of range to become a formidable threat to the enemy with enough work and wisdom, but it's a lot of work-arounds versus swapping to another class when the situation becomes too much for a Pyro to deal with.
  • The Pyro is also the most forgiving character, having no need to reload their primary weapon, respectable speed and is a contender for third highest health pool in the game, no self-damage to worry about save for two weapons, and an easy-to-aim weapon. A badly-played Pyro may not be a threat to the grand scheme of the round, but is more dangerous to players than an equally unskilled Soldier, Heavy or Spy that simply runs at you with bad aim.
• Soul-Crushing Desk Job: While they were the CEO of a big engineering company, Pyro brought the company record-breaking gains. They also despised the job, as fire was completely absent from their regular life, rendering everything into boring, grey blobs and boxes. When they saw a burning building during a stakeholders' meeting, Pyro Jumped at the Call.
• Steampunk: The Phlogistinator, which works on archaic chemistry. Basically, it shoots pure phlogiston — the chemical that was thought to react with other things to make fire and released when fuel was exposed to heat, before people figured out that was really oxygen reacting to the fuel when exposed to heat.
• The Spook: Literally nothing is known about the Pyro. They have no name. They have no nationality. They seem to fluctuate between genders, if they even have one at all. Their mask makes every word it says incomprehensible gibberish, so you can hardly ask the Pyro what they are. With every inch of their body covered in a flame-retardant suit, it's impossible to even determine their skin or hair color. A few people out there don't even think the Pyro is human. Only two things are known about the Pyro: They like setting things on fire, and they don't speak.
• Sugar Bowl: How the Pyro views the world, known as "Pyroland"; they think they skip around firing rainbows and lollipops and bubbles at the world, spreading happiness to happy little cherubs and Balloonicorns. In-game, there's an all-class item in the form of special goggles, provided by the same company that also made the Pyro's mask, so every class can see the world as happily as the Pyro.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Just about every W+M1 Pyro will be this, constantly chasing down any enemy they see — including other Pyros — until they're a pile of char.
  • Nearly every Pyro player will be this to Spies in almost any situation. Some of the better ones will even use alternate routes to pursue retreating Spies well past the front line.
• Support Party Member: Despite being listed as an Offense class, the Pyro is more effective in a supportive role. Their flamethrower's short range makes them relatively unsuitable for direct combat, but the sheer utility a Pyro brings can turn the tide of battle, especially on the defensive. In particular, their compression blast can be used to reflect rockets back to the enemy, clear a patch of sticky bombs, reposition enemies, and stop Uber pushes dead in their tracks. Engineers and Snipers especially benefit from having a friendly Pyro guarding or supporting them to cover their primary weaknesses while also providing other support like igniting a Huntsman Sniper's arrows.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Forms a very firm one with Spy and Engineer. A Pyro is the best counter for a Spy, who is the bane of the Engineer, who can easily dispatch the range-challenged Pyro. The Sniper can also fill the Engineer's role here, as the stationary, long-range-focused, and frequently tunnel-vision-afflicted Sniper is easy pickings for a Spy, while the range-challenged and attention-grabbing Pyro is usually at the Sniper's mercy while also being a Spy's worst nightmare.
  • This means that when a Pyro has the patience to stay with an Engineer, the security of the Engineer becomes a lot better. Even if a Spy does manage to backstab the Engineer and sap a building before being burned to death, a Pyro armed with The Homewrecker can dispatch all sappers in one hit. It also helps that the Pyro can neutralize incoming explosives, meaning only enemy Snipers and Heavies pose a threat under ideal circumstances. Though far less common, Pyros who linger around Sniper nests can greatly assist in their survivability as well since most Snipers are even more helpless against close range threats such as Spies, Scouts, and other Pyros.
  • Forms a secondary one with the Demoman and Heavy. The Heavy's greater health and damage shut down the Pyro, while the Pyro's emphasis on staying close, and ability to deflect projectiles grants the Pyro a significant upper hand over the Demoman, whose larger number of explosives and lack of fall-off let him shell the slow, bulky Heavy more effectively.
  • Interestingly, equipping the Dragon's Fury reverses the Pyro's role in some of these match-ups as the weapon's greater damage output and longer range allows a skilled Pyro to fare much better against Scouts and Heavies. In contrast, the cost of losing a consistent stream of fire and drastically slower airblasts makes them much more vulnerable to Soldiers, Demomen, and Spies.
• Taking You with Me: It's common for dead Pyros to score posthumous kills by afterburn. Two achievements are linked with this; one requiring you to posthumously kill a certain number of players, while another one requires you to kill someone in roughly the same second as they killed you.
• Terror Hero: As revealed in "Meet the Pyro", it's unknown who fears the Pyro more: the other team (sans perhaps the opposing Pyro, who isn't shown), or Pyro's own teammates.
• This Looks Like A Job For Aqua Man: The Manmelter is generally the weaker option to choose from the Pyros arsenal of secondaries, having a somewhat redundant ability to extinguish teammates and the weakest damage output of all their secondaries, but said ability to extinguish teammates becomes a lot more attractive when using the Backburner or Phlogistinator, flamethrowers that struggle to or outright cannot extinguish teammates. Moreover, it’s also the perfect response to an enemy Pyro spamming the Scorch Shot, a flare gun with a wide blast radius that can ignite entire groups at once, which can cheaply and quickly be dealt with the Manmelter's extinguishing feature and reward the Pyro with a massive reservoir of crits.
• This Means Warpaint: In one promotional image for the Meet Your Match Update, Pyro paints Angry Eyebrows onto their mask, rather than below their eyes like the Heavy did.
• Through the Eyes of Madness:
  • As revealed in "Meet the Pyro," they constantly see themselves as happily skipping around in a colorful Sugar Bowl giving rainbows and candy to cherubs, while in the real world they're burning down buildings and spewing fire at the BLU team as they scream in agony from their flesh melting.
  • In the comic "Ring of Fired," during their stint as the successful CEO of an engineering company, they are sad and bored because there is no fire, and see everything as shades of grey and brown, while their employees are represented by strange-looking, vaguely humanoid line drawings. Suddenly they see a stream of beautiful rainbows, flowers, and hearts (a huge fire in the building across the street) set by a winged unicorn and a butterfly (how Pyro sees Soldier and Miss Pauling).
• Token Good Teammate: A very dark example. While the rest of the team do their jobs in the name of money, the Pyro seems driven by a genuine desire to do good. Unfortunately, they have a very twisted perception of what "good" entails.
• The Unintelligible: Although the Pyro can and does talk, their dialogue is heavily muffled by the protective gas mask and is, for the most part, incomprehensible. ^note Though the Pyro can be heard saying things such as "Medic!", "Thank you" and "Up you go!" among other things. It's noted that the Pyro's asbestos-lined suit has also contributed to the ravaging of their respiratory system. Pyro seems to at least know Morse code.^note Translated, it reads "Monday", the day the Pyromania Update came out. Oh, and they can whistle.
  Scout: Yo, if ya didn't want me to kill ya, ya shoulda said somethin'!
  Engineer: Gotcha, mumbles.
  Sniper: You are a creepy, mute little bugger, ain't cha?
• Uniqueness Decay: When the game released, the Pyro was the only class capable of dealing damage over time, through afterburn. Then bleeding was introduced and even afterburn was given to more classes. Eventually addressed in the Meet your Match Update, which gave all Flamethrowers the unique ability to interrupt Medic's healing, and reduce the effectiveness of the Vaccinator's Ubercharge by 20%. While other classes may be able to do gradual damage, the Pyro remains undeterred in harassment aftershocks.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Pyros who use the Phlogistinator have access to chargeable crits, as well as periods of temporary invincibility. That said, they're basically forced to W+M1 people to death or poke at people with shotguns and flares with mixed results, because they can't use Airblasts.
• Vader Breath: The Pyro's breathing can be heard menacingly reverberating through their gas mask in "Meet the Pyro", adding nicely to the Darker and Edgier nature of the short.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • The Gas Passer, if you so choose, can be used to extinguish burning teammates. Let that sink in: using gasoline — the very same gasoline you use to ignite enemies — can be used to put out the fires burning your teammates. Oddly enough, it doesn't register anyone as "wet" on hit (meaning you can't combo the Neon Annihilator with it like you would with Mad Milk, Jarate, or actual water).
  • Extinguishing burning teammates with the flamethrower's airblast also qualifies. Because the airblast uses the same ammo as the flamethrower's primary fire, you're essentially blowing out fires with propane.
• Voodoo Doll: The Pin Pals cosmetic are voodooo dolls of a Scout, Demoman, and Sniper, which replace Pyro's grenades. This cosmetic is shared with The Soldier.
• The Wonka: As crazy as the Pyro could be, they somehow became the CEO of a massive engineering company and made their employees millionaires, in only a few months of absence after the team got dismantled. While still wearing that complete asbestos suit and gas mask.
  • It's even implied that this was formerly Engineer's company, and the entire reason it's a success now is because Engineer isn't in charge anymore.
• You Monster!: The Pyro is viewed even by their own teammates as a horrifically cruel sadist. "Meet The Pyro" even shows them viciously slaughtering the BLU team in various brutal ways; such as pinning the Heavy to the ground before putting an axe through his skull, burning the Scout and Sniper point-blank with incendiary weapons, barricading the Medic inside a flammable barn with an axe handle before torching the building^note Which, for additional horror points, was an actual execution method used by the Nazis in several of their World War II massacres, and blasting a hole all the way through the Soldier's chest and out of his back.
  • They apparently aren't even aware that they're torturing and murdering people, as shown by their Pyroland delusions making them think they're bringing them fun and joy. Whether this makes them less or even more messed-up continues to be up for debate.

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"One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that mask. What dreams of chronic, sustained cruelty?"

— The Spy

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