Too Cool to Live/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Someone cool beyond belief who easily overshadows most everyone else, often also a main character.

  • Straight: Garret Redmond is the strongest, fastest, wittiest, most inspirational, most resilient and the most unflinching expert swordsman with inner peace that would make Buddha blush of envy. He wears an extremely cool-looking armor and has a smile that gets women horny and men to faint. He offers Simon Drake, the protagonist, insights and advice that helps the latter immensely on his journey. Unfortunately, because he constantly makes the rest of the cast pale through no real fault of his own, an author, unless he wants the story he wants to tell to drown under the flashy show of Garret's coolness, has no choice but to kill him off.
  • Exaggerated: Take the above and add that he also tends to fight whole legions of soldiers, demons, aliens and dragons. He also often has passionate, steaming hot sex. Sometimes at the same time, during, before or after. He can make speeches that cause anyone who hears it to become ferociously enthusiastic. He can lower taxes just by willing it to happen and can bend the most twisted bureaucracy straight. He can jump so high he can easily cling to a jet flying nearby and get quickly to wherever he wants to go. Sometimes he does all of these at once. He eventually dies in a shower of nuclear missiles.
  • Downplayed: Garret excels in many things, although it's far more subtle and only obvious when you think about it a little.
  • Justified: Garret has done lots of work and applied himself like mad, with lots of great teachers, opportunities and luck along the way.
    • Garret discovered a Divine Cheat Code to Reality and rediscovering it is a story's driving force and thematic element.
    • Garret is literally not human. He's a paragon of many things people admire gained sentience, which is sent down to earth by a diety with his/her/its own motivations.
    • It happens in Simon's head. In this fantasy Garret is a personification of all Simon wishes he was. Garret's death is a sign for Simon to wake up.
  • Inverted: Garcy is so unbelievably lame he makes everyone around him look cool.
    • Garcy is so repulsive in personality he drains energy from everyone else merely by being around them.
    • Garcy is a reminder of everything we don't want to be.
    • Garret becomes Out of Focus, but is still alive, despite having been through enough to have killed off most people, because he's too cool to die.
  • Subverted: ???
  • Double Subverted: ???
  • Parodied: ???
  • Deconstructed: ???
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Garret has many strengths, is interesting enough as a person and doesn't mind not being indulgently cool.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Plotted A Good Waste: ???
  • Played For Laughs: ???
  • Played For Drama: ???

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