World of Badass Narrator

Straight: Every named character has several awesome moments. Exaggerated Everybody, even the cafeteria worker at any given High School, is qualified to be a Memetic Badass. The usual routines involve fending off Eldritch Abominations that reside outside the planet, outwitting the resident Trickster God, and that is before getting through the front door of their job. Even the babies & toddlers and elderly are badass. Only in Florida, or Only in Miami. Downplayed: Everyone gets a Mundane Made Awesome moment. Justified: The world has Social Darwinist standards and has tough living conditions, which forces people to be an Action Survivor at least. This is the method a large majority of societies in order to breed powerful human beings for their success. Badassery is a method of survival in a dangerous Crapsack World. Everyone Is a Super The story takes place at an occupation where badassery is a requirement, such as the military or an MMA tournament. The story takes place in Florida. Or maybe Miami to narrow it down. Inverted: Everyone in a universe is a weakling, incapable of a good fight or a clever gambit. Subverted: Everyone have an awesome moment, except for a pansy Bob. The setting of the story is built up to be a World of Badass... and then the cast is revealed to be one full of harmless talking rabbits. Double Subverted: Until he got Character Development and Took a Level in Badass himself. If guile count as badass, Bob is one. Or you just stop and think about how incredibly badass Bob needs to be to simply survive. The rabbits make no delay in revealing their true awesomeness, making it a World of Badass Adorable. Parodied: Everyone has a moment they believed are awesome, though it is definitely not. Everyone is such a capable fighter that even after years of on-screen war, no one can actually manage to kill anyone else. Battles end when enough people on one side get tired enough to be sick of the fight and leave. Averted: Some characters are badass, some aren't. Enforced: The writer or executive wants the show to have a lot of cool fight scenes to draw in new viewers. Lampshaded: "You, my friend, are a Worthy Opponent just like everyone else I know. You're nothing special." Invoked: The world has adopted Social Darwinist standards just so they can live such a world and will be safe if there any alien invaders. Exploited: Alex Cunningham the lone-wolf wants to hire someone to guard his stuff while he's gone and wants someone tough & trustworthy. Aware of this trope, he chooses random people off the street & makes sure that he can trust them before telling them to guard his stuff. Defied: Bob and his friends (or town, or species) is not particularly badass. But rather than taking steps to rise to the other factions' level of badass, they decide to either isolate themselves or willingly throw themselves at the other factions' feet. Discussed: "Why does everyone have to be so badass? I mean, God could have made at least one of my enemies into a wimp. Good thing I'm not one, though." Conversed: "Why would they make everyone start out as a badass? If you think about it, it'd more impressive for a wimpy character to learn to accomplish such feats and become badass over the course of the story." Implied: A man returns bravely to his hometown to recall his awesome adventures. Everyone's reaction is "Meh, I've seen that many times before." Deconstructed: Bob is afraid he will be out-shined by a lot of people... Klingon Scientists Get No Respect, so the world is stuck in a perpetual dark age of brutality, despotism, and endless war. Reconstructed: ...so he studies super-science and becomes the most colossal Awesome by Analysis Omnidisciplinary Scientist Badass Bookworm IN THE UNIVERSE!!! Everyone is a badass, but there are plenty of Warrior Poets and Badass Bookworms to go around, and even the guy who seeks to end the bloodshed is enough of a badass in his own way to get serious respect. Played For Drama: Sure, everyone may be Badass... But that doesn't mean everybody lives to old age. In fact, because everyone has to fight to survive, the average living age in this world is astonishingly low, which affects all the characters in various ways.

MEDIA EXAMPLES

The post-apocalyptic world of Bastard!! (1988) is filled with badassery at every turn, complete with heavy-metal-themed names. Ben-To: Every single character is Made of Iron, otherwise they'd all be in traction. Filled of crap though it may be, Berserk is this. Four out of five people in this world need to be just a little bit badass at one point in their life in order to survive it, and this includes old people, little kids, and princesses (if only for one moment). If they still don't qualify as true badasses, then they're usually big time action survivors. And even under the most horrific circumstances, people don't just stop being badass: they merely shift from one state of badass-ness to another. For instance, Casca starts out as an Action Girl, then had a brief period of being a Pregnant Badass which horrifically ended with the Eclipse and her going insane as a result of it... only to having glimpses of her former self. Black Butler has a whole lot of badass, for Victorian London. The butler is a Nigh Invulnerable demon, who can kill you with silverware. The Aunt's butler is a chainsaw wielding, red haired psycho, who just happens to be a Grim Reaper. The house servants are an escaped human experimentation test subject with Super-Strength, a ridiculously skilled sniper who can shoot anyone dead from miles away and a badass ex-soldier. The fiancée is a two sword wielding Little Miss Badass who can cut down a horde of zombies. Black Lagoon takes place in the fictional Thai city of Roanapur, a city riddled with corruption, crime and violence, where gunfights happen in a frequent business, and almost every named character can kick all sorts of ass, whether it be with a guns, knives, or your clever wits. This is especially true if you're a woman. Let's just put it this way, in Roanapur, if you have a name, then you are a SURVIVOR. Bleach. Any named character who resides in Soul Society or Hueco Mundo is able to kick your ass. Yes, even the wimpy White Mage, and yes, even the guy who transforms into a pink pumpkin. To say nothing of the human characters, who with the introduction of the Vandenreich number among the strongest characters in the series hands down. In Brave10, the 10 Braves have powerful elemental magic abilities and everyone kicks ass in this series. Only Isanami is an exception, and not quite since she is a God in Human Form. By the sequel, she is able to beat Izumo no Okuni with battle fans. The entire Esper population of Academy City in A Certain Magical Index. And the Magicians are no slouches either. As well as some of the normal ones too! Despite being a Gag Series, Cromartie High School is populated by Badass delinquents like Fireball of Junior 2 and Hospitalizer of Junior 3 among other crazy things like a gorilla and Shinichi Mechazawa. Dorohedoro. You can't be non-badass and survive in a world where Devils go for a walk when they're bored, much less in a city where the yearly Zombie Apocalypse is a fundraising event. It's good that Death is Cheap, otherwise Anyone Can Die would have slaughtered most of the main cast by volume 8. The world of Dragon Ball where everyone is a super-powered martial artist, and even the comic relief Muggle Mr. Satan/Hercule is a Badass Normal who can kick any non-powered human's ass (and a zombie horde....with his bare hand...as an old man who hasn't fought in at least a decade....yeah, that's Dragon Ball for you). Durarara!!: Half of the cast is borderline insane, while the other half is badass in one way or another. No exceptions. And since Durarara!! takes place in the same universe as Baccano!, this makes sense. In Fairy Tail, 10% of the world's population is made up of mages, and there are surprisingly few Squishy Wizards. Miyuverse Alternate Universe in Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA 3rei. How much more badass is it? Even eternal Butt-Monkey Matou Shinji is a legitimately deadly threat! Fullmetal Alchemist is an interesting case, in that the premise doesn't sound like it's trying too hard to be cool, but then you are given Scar, Major Armstrong, Colonel Mustang, the Elric brothers, Izumi Curtis, Riza Hawkeye, and many, many more. You can count the number of non-badasses on one hand, even though it's a series with tons of characters. Hellsing. Sure, not everyone is as badass as Alucard, but that's like saying not everything is as hot as the sun. (Or Alucard.) Kouta Hirano's other work Drifters also qualifies. It's to be expected, when your premise is to take notorious Historical Domain Characters, give 'em an upgrade, and have them fight each other. Hetalia: Axis Powers is a non-Crapsack World example. It is a comedic anime about anthropomorphic personifications of various nations, with some countries, for example the superpowers, being rather childish. America calls himself hero and loves video games, China loves Hello Kitty and Russia considers everyone his friend and loves sunflowers. Still, they're superpowers and we also see America swinging a buffalo over his head as a child, China beating up the entire Axis with a wok and Russia being late to a meeting because he was practising to stop tanks with his body... In the Hetalia Bloodbath 2010, Sealand, who isn't even a real country, beats a mysterious enemy who was trying to kidnap him, showing he is literally Made of Iron. Then there's Italy, who's always quick to raise the white flag when he gets attacked. But as Chibitalia, he once defeated the Turkish Ottoman Empire. While the charakters in Hetalia in general don't spend that much time being badass, it doesn't mean they can't be, if they want to. Hunter × Hunter played this so extremely straight it becomes a Deconstruction. Well, when you have a 10-something hired killer from a Murder, Inc. family… Specifically, the deconstruction is: What happens to the non-badass people? Well, they die left and right, and the police are pretty much useless against the evil Badasses. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. By Stardust Crusaders, it's practically invoked as a law. Stand Users seem to be drawn together by fate. So if you're one, chances are your daily life will generally involve badasses. Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple. Just about everyone except Kenichi to start with, until he undergoes Training from Hell. In Kill la Kill, even the weakest mooks that the main character blows through en masse have Agent-tier Super-Speed, and things only go up from there. In the Lyrical Nanoha series, the world of Mid-Childa is a non-Crapsack World example. Generally, the rule is that if it comes from Mid-Childa and has a name, it will be able to annihilate you. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about five year old girls, ferrets or six inch cute mascots. Or books. This is because a large portion of Mid-Childan population are capable of magic, and damn near anyone with that talent attends a Wizarding School where advanced magical combat replaces your regular PE. All of this under the auspices of the galaxy-spanning Mildly Military Space Police that is so short on hands that they're willing to hire nine year-olds, as long as they can use magic—all the while the memories of a centuries-long Great Offscreen War some 80 years ago are still painfully fresh. So yeah, it may not be a Crapsack World, but only because all the badasses in it at some point decided that there had to be another way. Ironically, Cephiro of Magic Knight Rayearth qualifies as one. Everyone the girls meet is some kind of powerful swordmaster or wizard, even though it was a land of utter peace and harmony not so long ago. Even Lantis, by necessity a Professional Slacker because of the general peace, is seriously formidable. In Mission: Yozakura Family, anyone can be a spy if you look hard enough. That little kid down the street? A Hollywood Hacking specialist. The nice guy running the bubble tea stand? Sells bullets in exchange for blood, eyeballs, or cash. Even the dolphins at an aquarium can be spies. This does not apply to the main setting in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid (which is modern day Japan), but the world Tohru and the other dragons come from definitely qualifies. In episode 2, Tohru and Kanna have an awesome DBZ-like battle with cool explosions, battle aura, and power beams. They call it playing/roughhousing, since they're only at what is considered a human level in their world. My Hero Academia plays with this. In a word where everybody has super powers, not all of them are fitting to big acts of badassery, such as simply attracting small objects. The series though focus on the group of in training super heroes that scored the highest grades on the entrance test, thus focusing on a group with powers such as Super-Strength, control gravity, create fire and ice, create various objects, having engines on their body, creating explosions and so on. Naruto: Almost everyone relevant to the plot displays their badassery in one way or another. Negima! Magister Negi Magi is filled with badass fighters and magicians. The residents of the Magical World can also kick ass. Noir depicts a village in France where everybody, with no exception (children, old women and nuns included), is an assassin trained to mass-murdering or die in attempt. As just are the main characters, Mireille and Kirika and most part of the other characters as well. One Piece. If you don't have a Devil Fruit or do not already have an inhuman degree of strength, you're most likely to be just Made of Iron. That's mostly the reason nobody usually dies in One Piece outside flashbacks, at least until the Marineford War. Being a Deconstructive Parody of the Shōnen genre, One-Punch Man is a world where monsters, aliens, mutants and city-leveling events happen on a daily basis, the only thing getting in their way being every kind of superhero imaginable only just barely being able to stop them. The titular hero Saitama is the most badass of them all, having God-mode level physical power capable of eliminating any threat with a single punch. Pokémon Adventures, a world where humans are more likely to be fighting along side of their Pokémon instead of just hanging back. Every noteworthy character in Ravages of Time is a certified badass, even more so than in the source material and most adaptations. Keep in mind that "noteworthy" here means in excess of a few dozen characters, and the manhua has not even covered a third of the original novel! Rosario + Vampire has this as a running theme in the Youkai World, where there is a pecking order based on how strong you are, and it's a ruthless Social Darwinist. The Seven Deadly Sins. Various characters within the series possess such incredible strength that massive amounts of destruction is quite common. Soul Eater. Pretty much every single character who isn't cannon fodder for the kids' Gotta Catch Them All schooling is badass at some point in time. In YuYu Hakusho, you pretty much have to be this if you even hope of surviving in the Demon World, a place populated with A and S Class Demons. Hiei himself slaughtered over 500 A class demons in order to get himself to an S Class demon. To prevent an all out war between three nations, the Demon World had to set up an Asskicking Leads to Leadership Tournament where the winner would be crowned king of the Demon World.

Really, any major super hero comic universe fits here. Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Image Comics, Valiant Comics, WildStorm, etc. They all have hundreds of super-powered characters and martial artists running around planet Earth alone. That's ignoring the various cosmic beings and powerful aliens outside of Earth. And even side-characters and civilian allies can step up to the plate without being bitten by a radioactive anything. J. Jonah Jameson may be a jerk but he won't back down from Doctor Octopus when his people are in danger. Mary Jane Watson does not make a cooperative damsel in distress (outside the Raime movies.) The X-Men's scientist friend Moira MacTaggert once pulled out a machine gun to battle a monstrosity calling itself Kierrok the Damned. Lois Lane knows kung fu. The list goes on. Special shout-out to those chosen to be Green Lanterns. They have to be badass just to qualify to get the ring in the first place! Asgard, Thor's homeworld, definitely counts. The children are as strong as a Super-Soldier, and the average Asgardian can lift 25 tons. Scott Pilgrim. At first it seems like only a few people can really fight, but it becomes pretty clear that almost every minor character or random background extra could probably throw down with some bizarre fighting style or weapon if sufficiently provoked. Sin City. Even the Comedy Relief bad guys, Shlubb and Klump, can withstand an explosion from close-range. Well, the Yellow Guy is anything but badass. Last Man Standing is filled to the brim with badass characters. The only one who isn't is a Robot Girl, ironically. Jim Valentino's normalman features the planet Levram, where everyone has super powers. Everyone, that is, except the eponymous character normalman. And as the series progresses he gets increasingly badass without ever gaining super powers.

In How to Train Your Dragon, the citizens of Berk have become battle hardened over generations of battling dragons. Hiccup is essentially a black sheep for not being innately badass (at least at first). Zig-Zagging Trope in The Incredibles. The world is indeed full of badass superheroes, but it turns out that ordinary people don't want superheroes around so they make them illegal. Many of the supers also wind up getting picked off one by one by Syndrome's killer robot. The point is repeated a few times: "If everyone is super, no one is." Kung Fu Panda: Almost every named character is some kind of kung fu master and even those that aren't have their moments. The LEGO Movie. Their entire world arguably counts. They've got an elite team of builders who smash mooks in the most awesome way possible and can build anything to kick your ass. Even the citizens count once they've got their creativity back, they can build gigantic mechs to kick robo-ass in the most awesome ways possible. Even the most ridiculously average guy could take out an entire highway of police cars and bikes filled with robots trying to murder him with Motorcycle Fu. The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Mostly downplayed as the Toads aren't particularly shown to be strong in general, but platforming is practically a basic skill needed whenever you're in the Mushroom Kingdom. Toad's tour shows that things like jumping across moving platforms several stories above the ground is something that Toads calmly go through on a daily basis. Just living with them ensured that Peach was able to perform impressive aerobic feats in a dress and high-heels. Mario, as a comparison, is incredibly athletic by human standards yet still struggles with platforming for quite a while.

Cloud Atlas: Not to the extremes of other works, but there are a lot of courageous characters in the story. Everybody pulls off risky schemes to either save their skin or save others. The Expendables. Besides the girl, the entire main cast is pure badass. In the second film, even the girl is badass. John Wick. Pretty much everybody in the setting are hitmen, assassins, bounty hunters, and all kinds of deadly killers from all walks of life who are part of a criminal underworld so vast, they act as their own law enforcement that governs themselves. Even civilians in the setting rarely bat an eye or panic that much when people start killing each other right next to them. Kung Fu Hustle. The wimpiest guys in the film beat up a whole precinct of cops. Mad Max: Fury Road. Justified, in that the strong dominate the weak, and only the stronger can protect the weak. The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. But ESPECIALLY The Avengers. Special notice to the old guy in Stuttgart who stood up to Loki. The Matrix. You have rebels in Badass Longcoats fighting against superpowered Agents who can take over anybody. And Everyone knows Kung Fu fighting. Mission: Impossible – Fallout: Everyone in this movie kicks ass. Not just the obvious Ethan Hunt, Ilsa Faust, and August Walker, but also Luther, Benji, The White Widow, Solomon Lane, and even Director Hunley get a fight scene or two. The only major characters who don't do any fighting are Erica Sloane (who never participates in field ops herself), Julia, and her new husband. The Predator series. Even the women are manly, and Predators has a doctor who seems inoffensive but is someone to fear anyway. The Predator even has a kid who talks down a grizzled military man! In full force in The Raid. From the tenants of the building to the police team that heads inside, every officer and gangster puts up some sort of fight. Even Tama's meth cooks break out some impressive martial arts when the cops run into them. The Raid 2: Berandal continues the trend. The Terminator series, complete with a waitress, a veterinarian and a factory worker becoming Action Girls. X-Men Film Series: A grand majority of the characters in X-Men: First Class have flashy superpowers or kick butt in different ways. Almost inevitable for a film based on Marvel comics. Plenty in X-Men: Days of Future Past; even a Non-Action Guy such as Trask turns out to be badass.