This ancient epic has numerous Moment of Awesome as well as a few Awesome Moment of Crowning.
- When Yuddhistira is crowned the king of Indraprastha, nearly all known kings in India show up to his ceremony, including the Kuru elders. This just shows how admired and respected he has already become without even having governed anything yet.
- Krishna as a child, lifts an entire mountain with just one finger to use it to shelter the inhabitants of Gokul from a storm. This is how he earned the nickname Giridhar meaning “holder of the hill”.
- When instructing the young princes in archery, Drona has them look towards a tree to find a toy bird he placed there as a target for them to practice with. While some princes can’t find the bird, others see the bird and other aspects of the tree. Arjuna is the only one who says that he can see the bird and nothing else. While everyone else couldn’t even focus on the target, Arjuna already found it and is focusing on it in exactly the manner that an archer should.
- While acting as the Pandavas' emissary, Krishna admonishes Duryodhana for his arrogance and challenges the Crown Prince to arrest him. When he is stopped, Krishna unveils his divine form to the Kaurava rajya sabha, terrifying them and blinding them with his luminosity.
- Arjuna singlehandedly defeats Bhishma, Dronacharya, Kripacharya, Duryodhana, Dushasana, Karna, and Ashwatthama as well as routing their huge massed army when they invade the kingdom of Mathsya where the Pandavas are living incognito. And he did all this while under a curse of impotence. Lack of testosterone didn’t dull his warrior instinct, aggression, determination or archery skills any.
- Abhimanyu comes so close to outright defeating Bhishma that the latter pleads with Arjuna to reign him in. This was Bheeshma, who had until then been undefeated. Abhimanyu then followed that up by defeating Dronacharya on Day 12 and saving the day.
- Arjuna’s greatest feat of archery isn’t him defeating Karna - it is actually him defeating Jayadratha. Arjuna fires an arrow that somehow not only lops off Jayadratha’s head but also carries it all the way to Jayadratha’s meditating father’s lap. This was done to escape a curse Jayadratha’s father placed on anyone who killed his son - that whosoever touches Jayadratha before his lifeless head falls to the ground shall have his own head explode. Arjuna ensured that Jayadratha’s father was the last one to touch Jayadratha before his head fell - and thereby lose his own head.
- Ghatotkacha shows up and just wipes the floor with the Kaurava army, bringing it close to total obliteration. If Abhimanyu was a Godzilla Threshold who forced the Kauravas to ignore sacrosanct Rules Of Engagement, Ghatotkacha was literally like Godzilla himself - unstoppable even by all the princes ganging up on him. It needed a special weapon Karna was reserving for Arjuna to put him down, and even then he ensures that hundreds are crushed beneath his ginormous falling corpse.
