Awesome / One Hundred Years of Solitude

• José Arcadio saving the Colonel from the firing squad with only one shotgun. Doubles as Heartwarming Moments as well.
  • It gets better because the whole city threatened to revolt if the Colonel was shot. The firing squad was already afraid.
• Úrsula.
  • She beats her own grandson, Arcadio, with a whip because he acted like a tyrant, it got to the point where even the army recoiled and she ruled the city.
  • The moment she goes full Mama Bear for a son that wasn't even hers. General Moncada was sentenced to execution by the Liberal party, led by the Colonel, but in the meantime, he became a fond family friend. What does Ursula do? She protests the execution with all the mothers of the revolution officers in the city. Somewhat negated by the fact that it doesn't work, but still.
  • She decides to visit her son Aureliano in jail before he is executed, but the guards block her way. Her response? "I'm going in in any case, so if you have orders to shoot, start right away." She then pushes one of them aside and enters.
  • She slowly starts to go blind, but her family never noticed it because she managed to know her house by sheer memorizing.
• An Offscreen Moment of Awesome to Melquiades, who died and came back to life because it got too lonely; and then we get to see him saving the whole city from the Insomnia Plague.
• When the conservative forces attack Macondo, Arcadio allows Colonel Gregorio Stevenson to help defend the town, giving him a rifle with twenty cartridges. Stevenson defends the barracks by himself so efficiently, that the attackers believe it to be too well-defended and resort to blowing the place up with cannon fire. And he did it all in women's clothes!
• After Aureliano Segundo grows rich, successful, and fat, he challenges competitors from all around the globe to try to best him in an eating contest. No one can pull it off...until Camila "The Elephant" Sagastume shows up. A Big Beautiful Woman to the extreme (to the point where Aureliano outright declares that she's "the ideal woman"—and the narration agrees), Camila manages to win not by overpowering him, but by being so calm, purehearted, and kind that she can eat nonstop without becoming the least bit fatigued. The contest lasts for three days straight (with a few minor sleep breaks), and Camila never once loses her cool, which ultimately proves to Aureliano's undoing.