A way with worlds: 22 - The Paradox of the Badass

Oh, we've seen him or her. Deadly cool hard-as-nails, unflappable. Juke boxes start when he hits them right, people back down when they see that fire in her eyes. Focused as a laser, immovable like the core of the world; James Bond, Batman, Shaft, Black Canary. The badasses.

We know them, of course. Now the problem is writing them.

Earlier, I addresses the heroic paradox of the violent hero, and noted a particularly egregious archetype I called the Unlikeable Heroic Badass (UHB) - the borderline sociopath that some authors assume people should love because of their personality problems. The UHB is one of the results of what I call the Paradox of the Badass - namely, writing that kind of focused, tough character can lead to two errors if one isn't careful; godboying and sociopathic characters, sometimes both.

So let's talk about that paradox - and in this case, we are NOT just talking about Shaft. (Feel free to kill me for that joke).

THE TWIN PARADOXES:
What is the Badass? To me, the Badass is the focused character who is precise, knows their goals, firm in their convictions (perhaps to obsession), and hard to stop. The Badass is not necessarily benevolent - but they are driven and often have some level of self-awareness, even if cynical. They usually have reasons for what they do, even if people wouldn't agree with them.

Unfortunately, in poor writing and poor continuities - and human error - two errors tend to emerge in creating badasses:

1. The Godboy. The Badass becomes an unstoppable machine of (fill in the blank, but usually sex, violence, or both). They never fail, screw up, outdo everyone. They also remain wicked cool all the time.
2. The Sociopath. The Badass pretty much does whatever they want (and gets away with it), people love them or fear them but never challenge them. Being a badass, people will someone not question the fact the character, say, just machined gunned an entire small town.

If you've read/seen a good deal of media, you've seen these two "Faux Badass" takes before. You can also see how the "Faux Badasses" can completely warp your continuity - any godboy is a continuity-wrecker from the get-go, and the more subtle Sociopath requires the writer to warp people's reactions to such characters to keep the story going.

So, how do these happen?

THE GODBOY VARIATION:
One of the problems with creating a believable tough, focused character is that people view failure by such characters as a flaw in the character themselves. Because it is perceived that a character cannot be a true Badass/tough person/whatever cannot fail, the characters become and are written in unbelievable manners. Soon said character's toughness becomes defined as "never failing and tougher than anyone else to boot." We all know how unbelievable that can read.

Defining a character by "never fails" will eventually result in utterly ridicules writing as you are forced to contrive and contrive more to preserve the character's image. Eventually of course, the endless contrivance destroys the image of the character, and you end up failing at what you attempted.

To make a believable touch, focused character, I find the following traits work best:

• The character picks their battles (note the element of being focused)
• The character picks their skills and abilities and self development (again being focused)
• The character is realistic about limits and results and keeps them in mind.

THE SOCIOPATH VARIATION:
The second common problem in creating an effective badass is that people assume a focused, driven character must therefore be sociopathic. This involves taking the focus and drive of the character and making it the only part of their character to the exclusion and even detriment of all else. Throw in some of the violence often associated with the badass/tough-and-focused archetype and you easily end up with a character more likely to be in an institution or dead than in a story.