Combat Aestheticist: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

''I love every act of war that can occur upon this earth.''|'''[[Hellsing|The Major]]''' }}

 

 

Goes well with [[Warrior Poet]] and [[Blood Knight]] and may sometimes overlap. The sister trope is [[Showy Invincible Hero]], when heroes care more about being badass rather than elegant.

 

* ''[[Bleach]]'': Rose cares so much about elegence in fighting that he objects when he's helped out of rubble because it ruined his attempt to artistically escape it.

** Played with in the case of Yumichika who abhors ugliness but who defines beautiful combat by the [[Blood Knight]] style of the 11th division. Turns out he's hiding his true combat style because it's not what 11th division allows.

** To be clear Thrawn was talking about his own assassination. So, he even appreciated being on the receiving end of war.

*** Huh? There's nothing Thrawn-like clever about your bodyguard sticking a knife in your chest. Thrawn was referring to the scheme for tricking and effectively enslaving the Noghri!

* Martin van Creveld wrote an entire book on the subject called ''The Culture of War''.

* Vega of ''[[Street Fighter]]'' fame: the only thing he loves more than fighting (in his trademark flamboyant style), in fact, is [[The Fighting Narcissist|himself]].

** There's also an alien race, mentioned in the fluff, that lives by [[Hollywood Tactics]] and measure success and victory in battle by how cool they were able to make the battle look, not if they succeeded at any tactical or strategic goals. This makes them infuriatingly annoying to fight, and unfortunately they have some very flashy technology that will kill you just as dead as any other species' weapons (just in a more flashy way).

* ''[[Vinland Saga]]'' - Askeladd bemoans how no-one these days has any notion of beauty in fighting, everyone just screams and charges wildly. This attitude does not stop him from being a brutally effective fighter.

* Lotton the Wizard from ''[[Black Lagoon]]''. Laughable in this case as all he is actually good at is making an entrance; though to be fair, it is never shown if he is a decent shot because he's yet to get one off.

* Michael Westen in ''[[Burn Notice]]'' fights with a concern for elegance. He is also a [[Combat Pragmatist]].

* ''[[Soul Eater]]'''s Death the Kid has slight elements of this due to his OCD-like obsession with symmetry. It's the reason why his weapon partners are the Thompson sisters; there are two of them, and they transform into identical guns, allowing him to fight with symmetrical weaponry. When one of the sisters is incapacitated, he refuses to use the other on her own for that reason.

* In ''[[Hellsing]]'', many characters would wear this description with pride, but the [[Trope Codifier]] has to be the Big Bad: The Major. His love for war surpasses any loyalty he might have ever had for Nazi ideals, his desire to create it is his sole motivation in life, and he extolls his immortal amore for every facet of conflict with greater poetic fanaticism than the most radical religious zealot. And this is [[Hellsing]]; there is plenty of religious zealotry to go around.

* Miho from [[Sin City]] uses a lot of leaps and slashes, going through various ninja weapons in the process. Considering she's usually fighting random mob [[Mooks]], it seems a little much.

** Londo Mollari is an ''intrigue'' aestheticist. For instance he goes out of his way to {{spoiler|assassinate Emperor Cartagia with a jeweled hyperdermic needle}}. He appears not to be alone about this: Apparently Centauri have as loving a care for their poisons as humans have for swords.

* The [[Devil May Cry]] series is all about killing demons with maximum style. Both Dante and ''the player'' are expected to be Combat Aestheticists.

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Combat Tropes]]