Playing With / Helmets Are Hardly Heroic

Basic Trope: Who needs a helmet when you got a cool face.

• Straight: Siegfried Helmut prefers not to wear a helmet, not even in battle.
• Exaggerated: Nobody on the good side wears headgear of any kind, for any reason.
• Downplayed:
  • Siegfried wears a helmet just like everyone else, but he never closes his visor.
  • Named characters wear ballistic helmets with transparent faceplates that allow their faces to be seen. Extras wear opaque visors.
• Justified:
  • Siegfried Helmut has hard superhuman toughness, and does not need any armor.
  • Having metal around his head dampens Siegfried's Psychic Powers, so he's crippling himself by wearing a helmet (and he can deflect projectiles away anyways).
  • What's actually protecting Siegfried is a magical force field. Since the field intercepts attacks, armor really is just so much deadweight for him. It also serves a psychological purpose, as enemies who don't know about his magic will (fruitlessly) attack him instead of his Muggle colleagues.
  • Metal is extraordinarily rare in the setting- Siegfried is lucky to have an actual weapon, much less armor.
  • The helmet-less fight scene is an ambush occurring when Siegfried logically wouldn't be wearing a helmet, like when he's sleeping or showering.
  • Siegfried is surveying the battlefield to get a grasp on the situation. Wearing a helmet narrows his eyesight and dampens his hearing, and he needs to make a good judgment on how the battle is going.
• Inverted: Siegfried Helmut wears a full face-covering helmet at all times, even when he is not in battle. He takes off the rest of his armor to sleep, bathe, and what-have-you, but never his helmet.
• Subverted: The book's cover shows Siegfried fighting without a helmet- but when that scene comes in the actual book, he's donned a helmet.
• Double Subverted: But he loses said helmet before the climax.
• Parodied:
  • A random individual asks Siegfried why he doesn't wear a helmet in battle. Siegfried shows them a medical alert bracelet that declares him allergic to helmets.
  • Helmets are cursed- anyone who puts one on for any reason automatically joins the bad guys.
  • Siefrieg's choice of not wearing a helmet is merely preferring to look good over being safe.
• Zig Zagged: Siegfried Helmut wears a helmet into battle on some occasions and doesn't on others, providing a variety of different reasons as to why on each occasion, like one day he wore it because he woke up feeling his head was kinda cold and never bothered to take it off, while some other times he didn't because he was hoping to get a cool scar or he wanted to declare who he was to everyone on the battlefield.
• Averted: Siegfried Helmut always wears full armor, helmet included, whenever he goes into battle.
• Enforced:
  • "We want the audience to be able to tell the hero apart from all the other good guys."
  • "We hired this actor for their acting, and the audience can't see much of that when they're wearing a face-concealing helmet!"
• Lampshaded: "I'm not wearing a helmet to this battle, yes, but we've got far more important things to worry about right now."
• Invoked: Siegfried Helmut notes all the depictions of great heroes in battle he's seen didn't wear helmets, and so decides that he won't either.
• Exploited: Emperor Evulz, knowing Siegfried Helmut's propensity for going into battle bareheaded, sends archers against him, since deflecting arrows is what a helmet does.
• Defied:
  • Siegfried Helmut chooses to always wear a helmet and always keeps the safety of his head first.
    Siegfried Helmut: Screw it, I am wearing a helmet so that my head can't get splattered!
  • Siegfried's commanding officer yells at him to put his damn helmet on.
• Discussed: "Some heroes actually do wear helmets, you know."
• Conversed: Siegfried looks at a painting of a fierce battle that he knows nothing of. Someone else tells him about it and the hero of the battle, chuckling that you can figure out who the hero is by looking at the one individual not wearing a helmet.
• Implied: Siegfried opens a closet that has his sword and all of his armor clearly hanging in it before he goes off to a Great Offscreen War. There is noticeably no helmet within it.
• Deconstructed: Siegfried takes off his helmet in battle for morale purposes, but while it's off, some Genre Savvy enemy tries to Attack Its Weak Point and kills him.
• Reconstructed: Siegfried's death makes him a Propaganda Hero. It's still a better way to die than his Convenient Terminal Illness.
• Played For Laughs: Sigfried Helmut doesn't wear a helmet in battle ... he claims it is because he doesn't need one, but in reality it's because his head is misshapen.
• Played For Drama: Sigfried's mother gives him a helmet when he first begins his fight, but it gets damaged beyond repair in a battle and he can't find a replacement. When the next battle comes an enemy lance strikes him in the head and kills him.

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