History Series / IntoTheBadlands

* ChildSoldier: Colts start their training as children. Quinn will sometime use colts as scouts and the Widow's Butterflies are mostly teenage girls. Outside of the Badlands, other factions appear to draft children [[MutantDraftBoard with the dark gift]] regardless of how young they are.

* ChildSoldier: Colts start their training as children. Quinn will sometime use colts as scouts and the Widow's Butterflies are mostly teenage girls. Outside of the Badlands, other factions appear to draft children with the dark gift regardless of how young they are.

* ChildSoldier: Colts start their training as children. Quinn will sometime use colts as scouts and the Widow's Butterflies are mostly teenage girls.

* CoolGuns: Well, cool crossbows. Chau's sniper in Leopard Snares Rabbit carries a custom self-loading crossbow which can chamber up to three bolts at once, and has several scope options including night vision. We get several shots of the side-mounted revolving reload mechanism in action as he tries to pin down the Widow's forces.

** In the third season, we meet Nix.

** Everything associated with Quinn tends to be red, from the poppies in his plantations, to his banners and the uniforms of his Clippers. In Season 2, after his return, he and his forces are now clad in black with fur lining on their clothes while his son Ryder, who has taken both he and Jacobee's places in light of their absence, has now taken the red Armadillo and The Fort
** The Widow's forces all wear turquoise and blue, but this is more notable in her female warriors
** Most things associated with Jacobee are blue and green plaid
** Chau and her forces wear pure white
** Baron Hassan and his Clippers are clad in orange and purple
** Baron Broadmore wears turquoise and white
** Baron Rojas wears green-black
** Extended to non-Baron factions. The Totemists get off-white, the Abbotts have saffron and maroon robes, [[spoiler: Lydia as viceroy]] gets dark green, and Black Lotus gets back and red.

** Sexism, on the other hand, seems to be a problem InherentInTheSystem. Despite there being women as Barons and Clippers without much issue, for the most part they're treated like property - and only women are enslaved and forced to work as dolls. Quinn is allowed to take multiple wives without condemnation, and The Widow's husband is implied to have been even worse. The Widow's crusade is for a more egalitarian Badlands, where young girls aren't dragged into dark rooms by their Barons to be used and tossed aside.

** Cogs are essentially serfs/slaves, providing the workforce for their respective baron,
** Makers are engineers and inventors, repurposing ancient technology and building new machines,
** Dolls are people trafficked and sold into prostitution,
** Nomads are roving bandits who prey on anyone they find. Barons only move against them when they become a threat

* AntiHero: Sunny is this, hovering somewhere between a Type III and IV. He may be a brutal Clipper, but he also has certain actions that he won't do if he can help it -- like murdering someone who isn't a threat to his baron or anyone else.

** M.K. may be the monk Xuanzhang, aka Tripitaka, or the name M.K. may be a play on the word Monkey King.

* ArtificialScript: Used along with ConLang for the Azran language that no one outside of the city of Azra is able to read. When we here the Azran language spoken in the third season, it is a constructed language made by applying centuries of sound changes to Mexican Spanish - which nobody in-universe picks up on either.

* ConservationOfNinjutsu: In both Sunny fights of the pilot, the last remaining opponent is the most dangerous.

** Season 2 newcomer Baji is Zhu Bajie, aka Pigsy.

* FirearmsAreRevolutionary: In the final episode, a Clipper finds a working gun. Since the Barons who controlled the Badlands ordered all guns destroyed and banned their manufacture centuries earlier, it's implied this is the next great force that will threaten the Badlands. However, the series was not renewed after this so the full implication of this discovery remain unknown.

* LeftHanging: [[spoiler:At the end of Season 3, Sunny encounters the Master's spirit, who warns him that an evil force more powerful than Pilgrim threatens the Badlands and he must be ready to face it. Meanwhile, a Clipper finds a working gun.]]

* RagnarokProofing: At least 500 years have passed since the fall of civilization, but machines and artifacts from that period are still being salvaged and being put to use, when by rights most of them should have rusted into nothingness by that point.

-->'''Baron Chau:'''I started at the bottom, as a Colt for my father. And believe me, I trained ten times as hard as my sisters. But I ''earned'' my title fairly by being tougher and hungrier than anybody else.

** Season Three ends with [[spoiler: ''almost every named character'' dying in the fight against Pilgrim and his army of dark ones. Most notably, M.K meets a fiery end after nearly fatally stabbing Tilda, and Sunny himself bleeds out after killing Pilgrim. However, this gets averted in the final two minutes as the Master's spirit tells him that his own dark gift is bringing him back to life.]]

* TimeSkip: Six months pass InUniverse between the ending of the first season and the beginning of the second.

* ArmorIsUseless: Despite all of the swords, blades on sticks, and crossbow bolts flying around; none of the fighters wear more than leather armor.

** The first season was filmed in Louisiana, with both antebellum slave-holder plantation houses and French-influenced mansions available as sets. The rest of the production was moved to Ireland, making some of the sets and location filming not match the setting.

* BadassLongcoat: Sunny sports a pretty neat coat, and is by far the best fighter in the series thus far.

** Sexism, on the other hand, seems to be a problem InherentInTheSystem. Despite there being women as Barons and Clippers without much issue, for the most part they're treated like property. Quinn is allowed to take multiple wives without condemnation, and The Widow's husband is implied to have been even worse. The Widow's crusade is for a more egalitarian Badlands, where young girls aren't dragged into dark rooms by their Barons to be used and tossed aside.
** Quinn's Clipper Edgar was openly gay and his fellow Clippers didn't have a problem with it.

** There are also other classes that we haven't yet seen; Lydia, for example, is the daughter of a Preacher.

** Most literally: The men among the Widow's clippers all wear stylish bowler hats.
* GasMaskMooks: Shows up once, during the mutiny episode in the third season. Accompanied by the mutineers tossing tear gas grenades into the Widow's office. Which is strange, since nobody is ever seen using those otherwise. The plot motivation here is for the mutineers to be able to disable the Widow long enough to imprison her (they don't kill her because they need her to sign orders they dictate).

* ImprovisedLockpick: Done multiple times by Bajie, using a rat's leg bone and a bookmark.

* InterestingSituationDuel: The fight choreographers for the series liked to stage fight scenes with characters balanced on top of things - walls, cars, scaffolding, stacked-up furniture, the tops of chimneys.

** In the first season; M.K. is told that Waldo is a former regent and the man who trained Sunny, but since Waldo is in a wheelchair, M.K. still underestimates just how capable a fighter Waldo is. M.K. does not appear to learn his lesson; since in the third season he underestimates Nathaniel for missing one hand despite knowing only that Sunny has beaten him before.

* HandicappedBadass: Waldo, especially when he breaks out the weapons hidden in his wheelchair. Implied to be fairly common in the Badlands, given the injury rates in fights and that Veil provides clippers as well as cogs with prosthetics. Ryder in particular fights pretty well for someone missing part of his foot.

** M.K. is told that Waldo is a former regent and the man who trained Sunny, but since Waldo is in a wheelchair, M.K. still underestimates just how capable a fighter Waldo is.

* NonHeteronormativeSociety: Despite the horrific systemic sexism and the Barons (especially Quinn and apart from the Widow) personally being all straight; there are characters who are out as lesbian, bi, and gay and this generally treated as incidental. For example: When Waldo learns about Tilda's girlfriend, his only concern is that her judgement may be affected by the relationship - just like his warning Sunny about his relationship with Veil.