Badass Adorable / Literature

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• Alice in the Alice, Girl from the Future series. A cheerful, easy-going, Friend to All Living Things schoolgirl – who has, across space and time, defeated pirates, mafia clans, would-be world conquerors and, at one point, a deadly disease.
• Scelties in Black Jewels are sapient Shetland Sheepdogs with the ability to use magic. Most of the time, they function as Plucky Comic Relief, but Scelties with the right skill set have taken down full-grown combat-trained humans.
• Gwen Lancaster from The Cinder Spires is five feet tall and described as looking like a porcelain doll. In her first appearance she solves the problem of not being allowed to join the army by blowing up part of her parents' house. Then she gets army training and proper hardware...
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Reepicheep: A cute two-and-a-half foot talking mouse with honor, dignity, and the ability to successfully take on an armed opponent twice his size. One of the few characters from Narnia aside from Aslan who shows up in three books; at one point, he even sails over the edge of the world.
  • Lucy: The entire Telmarine army skidded to a stop in mid-retreat, scared stiff of one small adorable girl smiling sweetly at them from across the bridge (their only escape route) while brandishing a dagger. And that's before Aslan stepped up beside her.
    • And in the film version of Dawntreader we finally get to see her in action, rather than just as an informed ability, and we find out why.
• Eros's war half of Cupid Able.
• Diana Tregarde. Barely five feet tall, and compared at one point to a music-box ballerina. She can take you apart with karate, a gun, or magical combat.
• Discworld:
  • Unseen Academicals: Mr. Nutt. The Woobie, Ugly Cute, No Social Skills, uses hilarious Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness ("We must be bursting with machismo!"), starts out as an Extreme Doormat, and could snap a person's neck with his bare hands. He never actually does anything of the sort, and one gets the impression he probably never would, but just threatening it is enough.
  • Tiffany Aching, aged 9, invaded the kingdom of the Elf Queen armed only with a frying pan and a gang of Violent Glaswegian Smurfs in The Wee Free Men.
  • Otto von Chriek from The Truth is this crossed with The Woobie — he's a reformed vampire who prances around in his neat suit and his thick Uberwäld accent, taking photographs and accidentally turning himself into dust every five minutes. But when his friend William gets in trouble, Otto casually beats up a team of muscled goons and scares the living bejeebers out of their boss, all while sporting a longsword in his chest and still maintaining his adorable Funny Foreigner front.
• Melissa from Dreamsnake. Undersized, vulnerable, twelve-year-old abuse survivor? Sure. Quite possibly the bravest character in the book? Yeah; that, too.
• The Dresden Files:
  • The Archive is a prepubescent girl who shows her Badassitude when she's attacked by Red Court vampires while she's moderating a duel. She grabs a piece of anti-life being used and, with sheer force of will, thrusts it into the vamps heads and torsos, vaporizing them. In a later book she's attacked by a dozen fallen angels in an area cut off from magic. Using the little magic she could store in her tiny body she starts taking them down, two at a time, with incredible skill, even while Harry carries her away. She even makes a point of trash talking the angels, although she's not that good at it. She's only captured because the demons take advantage of her low body weight and gas the whole area. She's also very fond of cats and renders official documents in crayon.
  • Mouse is pretty awesomely adorable, too. Sure, he's a dog that's around four foot tall at the shoulder, but he plays the goofy Gentle Giant act up so well you forget about that and just want to snuggle with his big fuzzy self. Then he starts glowing and makes an eldritch horror run away in terror after ripping the back of its foot off. He also garners more respect from a powerful Sidhe noble than his "master" does.
  • The series' original Badass Adorable, Karrin Murphy. Blond, five foot nothing, with a cute little button nose, and she's proven so incredibly badass so very many times that she'd need her own subpage to list all the examples.
  • Toot-toot: A one-foot minor dewdrop fairy who, armed with a nothing but a box-cutter, charges a semi-divine being whose portfolio is pain, suffering and torture, manages to inflict a couple of minor but not insignificant wounds, and lives to tell the tale. "Avaunt, villain!" indeed.
• Rudi Mackenzie of the Emberverse starts his badass career quite early, when, at nine years old, he fights against a picked force trying to kidnap him, and acquits himself nearly as well as do his two adult bodyguards. A handsome and personable boy, he then goes on to charm the daylights out of his captors, including Ice Queen Tiphaine.
• Endling: Tobble is a small, fluffy wobbyk, but he repeatedly tells the others that they don't want to see an angry wobbyk. When he finally gets in a fight, he's easily capable of defeating humans much larger than him.
• Fiene from Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte is adorable and cute...but also able to beat up people with her fists thanks to strengthening magic.
• Charlie McGee, the eponymous Firestarter; a cute, little, blonde-haired girl who even gets called "button" more than once, theoretically capable of cracking the Earth in two when she comes into her full power. Certainly already capable of vaporizing a man with very little effort.
• Sally 'Faye' Vierra of The Grimnoir Chronicles is an adorable, sweet little Okie teenager, a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander, is way too willing to murder anyone whom she thinks deserves it, and is probably the single most powerful wizard on Earth.
• Goosebumps: Most of the protagonists are surprisingly really adorable for their age but after they learn to fight back, they fit this trope to some degree. Special mentions go out to Carly Beth Caldwell from The Haunted Mask, Billy Harlan from Welcome to Camp Nightmare and (to a lesser extent) Greg Banks from the Say Cheese and Die! series.
• Harry Potter:
  • Dobby. He's saved Harry's sorry ass quite a few times, disarmed/attacked several wizards, and says the most awesome line an elf could ever say: "Dobby has no master!!!" He even died like a badass! Hit by a knife thrown by a crazy chick you just dropped a Chandelier on while apparating three other people out of the domain of Voldemort. Though to some, he's not EXACTLY adorable.
  • When Harry himself isn't being a badass, he can be pretty damn precious; notable moments include blushing and slopping his drink down himself when a girl he's crushing on smiles at him, or being remarkably quiet and down to earth for someone so famous. And that's without mentioning how insanely cute Daniel Radcliffe is during the early films◊.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander Luna Lovegood.
  • Ginny and Mrs. Weasley, too.
  • Neville Longbottom is THE badass Adorkable.
• The treecats in David Weber's Honor Harrington series are cute, cuddly, and great with children. They also can read minds and will turn into steel-clawed, near-unstoppable furry buzzsaws of death and destruction when they detect someone planning to harm those they care about. A treecat has only two categories of enemies: those that have been appropriately dealt with, and those that are still alive.
• Camicazi of How to Train Your Dragon is a tiny, cheerful blonde girl with a huge grin and a mane of flyaway hair...who just so happens to be a deadly Viking warrior, Impossible Thief and Master Swordswoman. She's the daughter of the chief of the Bog-Burglar tribe, and takes after her mother.
• Danner Bramblethorn of The Iron Tower is a Hobbit Berserker. Yes, really. In the last battle of the trilogy, he runs at the walls against a horde of goblins ranting about how he's "the King of the Rillrock".
• Lucy and Alexa from The Last Dragon Chronicles. Bonus points for Lucy's Little Miss Badass and Little Miss Snarker and to Alexa's Goo-Goo-Godlike tendencies.
• The Lord of the Rings: Hobbits. For creatures the size of human children, they prove to be surprisingly adept at arse-kicking. Most especially Merry Brandybuck, who helps Éowyn take down the Witch-King.
• The Silmarillion has Huan: a fluffy dog the size of a pony, who duels Sauron...and wins.
• Gazzy and Angel from Maximum Ride. Sure, they're cute and all, being the youngest members of the group, but Gazzy can blow you up with the MANY explosives he keeps somewhere in his clothes while Angel can effectively control your mind
• The Mysterious Benedict Society:
  • Twelve-year-old, pony-tailed Kate Wetherall carries around a bright red bucket full of weapons, crawls through air vents, and can kick a Ten Man's ass any day of the week.
  • To some extent, Constance Contraire also fits this trope. Yes, she's not quite adorable, and certainly doesn't have the cheeriest disposition, but she can kick some serious butt hair-pulling and leg-biting.
• The Disreputable Dog of Old Kingdom series is an adorable (if somewhat snarky) dog who's absolutely devoted to the welfare of her mistress. She's also one of the seven most powerful beings in existence.
• In The Pale King, Leonard Stecyk is an excruciatingly upbeat, kind, and hard-working bully magnet. He's also the only one who rushes in to save his wood shop teacher from dying of shock and blood loss after an accident with a machine. His little apron keeps his clothes from getting drenched in blood, and he makes a perfectly-tied tourniquet on the fly.
• Pippi Longstocking is a cute, quirky eleven-year-old... with incredible super-strength. Given that she lives in an otherwise mostly mundane world, we never really get to see just where the limits to her strength is, but she is perfectly capable of overpowering stampeding bulls, angry tigers and fierce sharks without the slightest difficulty. As in lifting the shark in the air while she's swimming, without difficulty. And she scolds it.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, Rachel and Kirsty are very young and cute, but they defeat Jack Frost every time he causes trouble.
• In the Reboot Book Series, Wren 178 counts as this. She's tiny, blond, and able to beat up five guys holding guns with only her fists.
• Redwall's cute fluffy animal Kid Hero characters. D'awww, fwuffy ickle mousey. Who just happens to be wielding a BFS. Big for a mousey, anyway. From the average human perspective, it'd be about the size of a kitchen knife at best.
• The three Baudelaire siblings from A Series of Unfortunate Events but especially Sunny, who's a baby.
• Spectral Shadows is full of animal characters, both feral and anthro. As such, this trope is inevitable.
• Temeraire:
  • Although unusually for the trope, the badass is the most immediately obvious (he is a dragon, after all), and the adorable comes out in his interactions with the other characters, particularly with Laurence.
  • Lily is also a good example. While she is a twenty-ton acid-spitter, she is also such a complete creampuff you want to snuggle up beside her.
  • There is also a minor horde of Plucky Middies, all of whom have earned their badass stripes, and all of whom are just as endearingly awkward as you expect twelve-year-olds in uniform to be.
• Young Wizards: Praise be to Ponch, the Dog Who Is God! The Wolf of Darkness clashed with the Hound of Starlight, and the Hound threw his old Enemy to the floor of Heaven.
  • Tualha, a black kitten who lives in Ireland. She ultimately gives The Lone Power (read Satan) a Reason You Suck speech in order to get it mad.

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