Characters / Wolfenstein: B.J. Blazkowicz

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Captain William Joseph "B.J." Blazkowicz

Voiced in English by: Matthew Kaminski (Return to Castle Wolfenstein - console versions), Peter Jessop (Wolfenstein 2009), Brian Bloom (The New Order, The Old Blood, The New Colossus, Youngblood), Debi Derryberry (Young B.J., The New Colossus)
Voiced in Japanese by: Joji Nakata (The New Order and The New Colossus), Yui Kondo (Young B.J., The New Colossus)
Voiced in Latin American Spanish by: Gerardo Garcia (The New Colossus, Youngblood)
Voiced in European French by: Patrick Béthune (Wolfenstein 2009, The New Order, The New Blood), Patrick Poivey (The New Colossus, Youngblood)
Voiced in Russian by: Boris Shuvalov (Wolfenstein 2009), Maxim Dakhnenko (The New Colossus, Youngblood), Daniel Bledny (Young B.J., The New Colossus)

The hero of the hour and gaming's #1 Nazi-slayer. B.J.'s exact appearance and personality have varied over the course of the series, but most important details remain consistent.

Born in Texas to an abusive Polish-American father and a loving Jewish mother, B.J. enlisted with the United States military early in World War II and proceeded to spend the next half a decade kicking truly staggering amounts of Nazi ass for the Office of Secret Actions.

Following a traumatic brain injury in one of the final battles of the war, he fell into a coma for 14 years. Awakening to a world conquered by the Nazis, he quickly joined up with the Kreisau Circle to continue the fight.

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A-D

• Abusive Dad: His father, Rip, was a racist, bigoted, sadistic and all-around repulsive prolasped asshole of a human being who only married B.J.'s mother, a Jewish woman, for her business connections. Rip's introduction during a flashback in the New Colossus sees him getting downright furious at a young B.J. for being friends with an African-American girl, knocking his wife out cold for trying to protect their son from his wrath, choking his son almost to unconsciousness, before forcing him to shoot the family dog, Bessie, to teach him to be "strong". When the two reunite years-on, Rip reveals that he sent his wife to an extermination camp. Long story short: the Blazkowicz family tree had a rotten branch that needed hacking.
• Amazon Chaser: What does the sight of Anya, his lover and soon-to-be mother of his children, topless, drenched in blood, and screaming fury as she mows down Nazi soldiers whilst straddling him elicit? An amazed and rather evidently turned on "Wow."
• Ambiguously Jewish: Averted as of The New Colossus - B.J.'s Jewishness was speculated at for most of the Wolfenstein games, but it was finally confirmed after all these years (ethnically Ashkenazi at least. His mother was Jewish, which makes him too by the laws of Judaism. His religious beliefs, if any, remain up in the air, but in The Old Blood he knows what Purim is when Anette talks about it).
• And I Must Scream: According to the cutscenes in Wolfenstein: The New Order, he was pretty conscious while catatonic. His narration notes it wasn't like this the entire time, however, noting things such as seasons passing in what seemed to be the blink of an eye.
• Animal Motif: Wolves. He patiently stalks his prey like a wolf chasing its target and waits for the opportunity to strike Nazis when they are at their most vulnerable. Also, while he gives his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Frau Engel as he brutally kills her with a hatchet, he tells the dying Nazi that she is "among wolves now."
• Arch-Enemy: Adolf Hitler was this in the classic era of Wolfenstein 3D/Spear of Destiny. He was fought and killed at the end of episode 3 of 3D, and even though there were three more episodes and a full game released afterward, those were all prequels and set before the first three episodes of 3D, leaving Hitler as the chronological Final Boss. Starting with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse stepped into the role until The New Order, which was his most prominent role as Big Bad. Frau Engel becomes this in The New Colossus, especially after executing Caroline, and since B.J. killed her lover Bubi, the feeling's mutual. Even if Engel's reign as B.J.'s arch-enemy was fairly short-lived, with him killing her at the end of the game, she certainly made a lasting impression.
• Art Shift: In Wolfenstein, he looks almost nothing like his Return to Castle Wolfenstein incarnation (and, by extension, his classic Wolfenstein 3-D appearance), which is somewhat odd as all the other returning characters appear largely the same (other than a higher polycount and bump-mapping, of course). He seems to be based on the Wolf3D cover art rather than the actual in-game sprite. In The New Order, however, his appearance is directly modeled after his in-game sprite in Wolfenstein 3D, and bears a passing resemblance to John Cena.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Downplayed but present, especially in The New Order. B.J. is an oddly stoic version of this - he's quite intelligent on the whole, but he is rather... temperamental to the point of stupidity in some of what he does, like interrogating someone with a chainsaw or deciding to use his knife on Deathshead because shooting would be too good a death for him. True to form, Deathshead takes advantage of the latter one to (almost) disastrous effect.
• Badass Family:
  • It's been confirmed that William Joseph Blazkowicz II, a.k.a. "Billy Blaze" is his grandson, and Doomguy is his great-grandson (at least in the classic games).
  • In the 2010s reboot series, he ends up with a more immediate version of this trope; his lover, Anya, proves she can be just as badass as B.J. in The New Colossus, whilst their twin daughters go on to be the protagonists of Youngblood.
• Badass in Distress:
  • During The New Colossus, B.J. ends up captured by the Nazis and put on trial, then sentenced to execution.
  • The basic plot of Youngblood, as revealed in its demo trailer, is that B.J's daughters need to rescue him after he goes missing on a mission in Nazi-occupied Paris. Averted in that he's just hiding.
• Badass Normal: No amount of Nazi cyborgs, undead or occult magic can take this guy down. Even the loss of his head ends up being a minor inconvenience in the long run.
• Bad "Bad Acting": At multiple points in New Order, Old Blood, and New Colossus he has to pose as a Nazi or collaborator to infiltrate something or other and he's always really bad at it. He can speak German but his accent is apparently terrible, he's not really familiar with a given cover story and may make some kind of weird joke when cornered, and he refuses to heil. Generally he gets away with it anyway because of Nazi arrogance but he does get caught once in Old Blood.
  • To infiltrate a Venus base, he disguises himself as an actor, auditioning for the role of himself in a propaganda flick. He can't remember a single line, reads what he jotted down in a neutral monotone, those lines are really badly smudged (in his defense, it was pretty poorly written to begin with, and his acting as an actor is pretty good).
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's a perfectly civil, polite and all-round Nice Guy. Who wages a one-man war against the entirety of the Nazi Regime and is winning.
• Berserk Button: Nazis, and bigotry in general, natch. Also hates any insinuation that he or his government was little better than the Nazis in The New Order, but he's more reasonable about that... somewhat.
• The Big Guy: Bordering on Heroic Build in The Old Blood. The unlockable model for Blazkowicz in Nazi uniform notes that they had to get his uniform custom made by a tailor before they could send him off as an infiltrator.
• Bond One-Liner: At the end of Episode 3 in 3D, after killing Hitler.
  B.J.: Sieg heil, huh... Sieg Hell.
  • He occasionally spouts one in The New Order too - in the prison level, you can stab a sleeping guard from under his bunk, and B.J. quips:
    B.J.: Wake up, you're dead!
• Born Unlucky: Raised in an abusive household, using the military as an escape, only for World War 2 to begin, traumatizing him and forcing him into a lifetime of hellish warfare.
• Brain Transplant: After he was publicly decapitated, his head was quickly recovered and preserved long enough to transplant to a Super-Soldier body.
• Byronic Hero: Blazkowicz has shades of these in The New Order. Though charismatic, handsome, and eloquent in his monologues, he's clearly damaged goods by all of the sufferings he's endured throughout the war, whether it'd be all of the horrors committed by the Nazis or the deaths of those under his command. He even fears that once his fight with the Nazis will be over, he may never be fit to live a normal life ever again. The New Colossus makes things worse for him but eventually gives him a new purpose: Anya is pregnant with his twins, and B.J. is gonna make damn sure he'll kill every last Nazi so that his kids won't be born into a living hellhole run by goose-stepping, jackass fascists and spineless greedy Quislings. He also promised himself to be a far better father than his own piss-poor, waste-of-space, sorry-ass excuse of a sperm donor Rip ever was; when confronting his dad, B.J. notes he expects to be dead soon, and he'd still be a better father than Rip was. Unfortunately, despite killing Dethshead, Engel, and Hitler, and liberating America, he and Anya had to raise their daughters with the knowledge that they'd need to fight when needed. While those Nazi jackasses are very much a Vestigial Empire, they still control parts of Europe in the 1980s, and Hitler secretly started a climate-destroying doomsday machine before his death as a Taking You with Me act on the world. Only a literal Reset Button will make things right for B.J. and his family.
• Character Development: He goes from a blank slate in Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, to a cocky badass in Wolfenstein (2009), to a shell-shocked fatalist with a great reserve of kindness in The New Order and in the beginning of The New Colossus, before finding a new will to live and fight after becoming a father-to-be and getting a new Super-Soldier body and becoming a wisecracking Determinator.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: He is incredibly strong, implied to be because of his youth on an American farm, to the point he can carry around the MG46 (a heavy machine gun normally used by the Nazi Super Soldiers — or mounted on turrets) as a personal weapon and dual-wield automatic double-barreled shotguns and assault rifles.
• Children Are Innocent:
  • As a child, B.J. was a good-hearted, accepting child who - despite the prejudices of the time - saw nothing wrong with playing with an African-American girl. Thankfully, this hasn't changed in his adulthood, going by his friendships with Grace, J, and Bombate.
  • He did, however, have one instance of Troubling Unchildlike Behavior when he was gleefully watching a rat drown, thinking that it deserved it. It took Billie, the aforementioned girl, breaking down into tears pleading with him to help for him to knock the bucket over.
• Climax Boss: In Wolfstone 3D, B.J. is this at the end of Episode 3, exactly halfway through the full game.
• Clothes Make the Superman: In The New Colossus, B.J. can acquire three wearable contraptions that he can use to reach areas he otherwise couldn't: The Ram Shackles (allowing him to charge through certain grates and doors, as well as enemies), the Constrictor Harness (allowing him to crawl through really tight spaces), and the Battle Walker (allowing him to basically walk on stilts and reach high places). At a certain point around halfway through, you are allowed to choose one of the three, but can still acquire the two you didn't pick through side-missions. Interestingly, B.J. sort of does become a superman since he's given a new Super Soldier body, but he's not really that much tougher than he was pre-injury, and thus needs to wear the contraptions to step his game up.
• The Comically Serious: Much of the humor in The New Order comes from B.J.'s growling whispers in response to utterly bizarre circumstances, and delivering the strangest lines in the same deadpan tone:
  B.J.: Okay... okay. You put a Nazi on the moon. Fuck you, moon.
• Cyborg: He becomes this in The New Colossus after Frau Engel chops his head off and Set puts it on a new metal body.
• Dark and Troubled Past: As mentioned before, he had a massively abusive and racist father who treated him and his Jewish mother horribly, and was helpless to resist the abuse for much of his childhood. That's to say nothing of the horrors he witnessed through the entire Second World War before the events at Deathshead's Compound. The many evils he has witnessed has made BJ hellbent on making sure that nobody else has to suffer for monsters like Deathshead, the Nazi regime, or his own father.
• Death Seeker: Becomes this in The New Order, as he is forced to face the horrors of the Nazi's impending victory. Culminates in the climax, where he is heavily wounded in Deathshead's compound and gives the order to launch a nuke on his own position. This continues through The New Colossus, as B.J.'s body is slowly failing him from the massive trauma he took at the end of the last game At least until he gets a new super-soldier body to save him from a decapitation.
• Deep South: Sports a thick Texas accent in the New Order timeline. His father Rip has one, too.
• Dented Iron:
  • A major part of his characterization starting in The New Order, as he delivers this line as Fergus gives him CPR.
    B.J.: Death at the gates again. Howling my name. Can't greet you today. I have a war to win.
  • This comes back in the beginning of The New Colossus, when he's bleeding out heavily from his wounds and believes his work is done. After he wakes up and learns that Engel has risen to power, he wheels into the fight with a wheelchair, a catheter, and two busted kidneys, determined not to give up the fight. In gameplay terms, this means that his maximum health has been halved - 50 down from 100. However his use of Caroline's Powered Armour doubles his maximum armour and he later gains a new body that gives him a full 100 health.
    B.J.: Death at the gates again. Howling my name. Come on in, old buddy. Sorry I made you wait.
• Determinator: It seems that any attempt the Nazis make at throwing everything they have at him only make him more determined to wipe them all out. In The New Colossus, he forces his crippled self out of bed and continues fighting in a wheelchair. Hell, not even the loss of his own head stops him for long, thanks to his allies.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • He destroys a demonic creature known as the Angel of Death in Spear of Destiny, and does the same thing to the Devil Incarnate in the Mission Packs...twice.
  • He kills the Eldritch Abomination beneath Wulfburg by literally shooting it in the face repeatedly.
• The Dreaded: In The New Order, Nazi soldiers will occasionally shout "Oh no, here he comes!" in German when they spot him. In The New Colossus the Nazis call him Terror Billy, and he's the most wanted (and feared) individual in the whole Reich. Early on, one conversation between Nazi troops has one of them stating that he had to clean up after one of B.J.'s fights and had nightmares about it afterwards.
• Dual Wielding: In The Old Blood, he puts his massive size and strength to good use by carrying two versions of most of his guns — the only ones he doesn't dual-wield are his Kampfpistole^note a pistol-sized one-shot RPG-launcher, Bombenschusse^note a bolt-action sniper rifle, knife (though he's shown using two of them at once in some Takedown animations), and the MG1946^note a heavy machinegun normally fixed into place or used by Supersoldatens. Also technically his pipe, which alternates between unscrewed format (where he uses it like a club/dagger combination) and screwed format (where he uses it as a shortstaff).
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: In Wolfenstein, Caroline Becker, the leader of the Kreisau Circle, "doesn't completely trust [him] yet" even after completing a number of dangerous missions for them, all of which involve the killing of dozens if not hundreds of Nazis. Dr. Leonid Alexandrov is also dismissive of his accomplishments, though it's justified in his case because he was a mole all along. Averted in The New Order onwards, as he becomes the Kreisau Circle's best agent so much so that they save him from decapitation via Brain Transplant and impresses two other resistance groups enough that they join forces.

E-M

• Eagleland: Even putting aside his Nazi killing, he's an all-American soldier who, in his own words, fights for "freedom, justice, and the American Way" and despises "goddamn Bolshevik traitors." Like Captain America with guns and vulgarity. Though it gets deconstructed with his speaking; BJ rarely speaks German. Not because he can't speak it, but because his American accent is so thick that it would give him away instantly. The one time he gets away with it, it's because he pretends to be a German soldier mocking an American.
• Empowered Badass Normal: After the Kreisau Circle successfully sneaks out his decapitated head and turns him into a reverse-engineered Ubersoldat. That said, his Super-Soldier body isn't all that different from his old one in terms of abilities, which should speak volumes to how badass he normally is.
• Enfante Terrible: He was a nice enough kid, but the fascination he shows over the drowning rat is a disturbing predictor of the brutality he shows the Nazis as an adult.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Not only is B.J's very existence infuriating to the Nazis, it's outright impossible. B.J. and his background fly in the face of the Nazi creed of Aryan superiority — he's an American, born from two Polish immigrants, and is half-Jewish because of his mother. And yet, B.J. is a brick wall of a man, a One-Man Army who can mow down his enemies with little effort, is tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and white. He is, in essence, a superior Jew. In short, the fact he's even alive and walking is antithetical to the garbage the Nazis say about other races, which is one more reason why he's hated. It's also a subtle clue that the Nazi ideology is complete crap when General Engel sits directly across from B.J. at a table during a mission in The New Order. Engel says that she can "just tell" who's an Aryan and who isn't with a Secret Test of Character. If there were any credence to this, Engel would have picked up on B.J. immediately, but she doesn't.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: According to flashbacks in New Colossus, B.J. goes from abused farm boy in Texas who couldn't even fight back to becoming a one man army that leaves Nazis soiling themselves in fear. After acquiring a new super soldier body, he becomes even more feared than before that even hulking Nazi super soldiers became afraid of him.
• Genius Bruiser: The "bruiser" part is self-evident, but B.J. is also well-read and is at least conversational in multiple languages.
  • That said, in The New Order he's not always the best with long-term strategy and suggest his Death Seeker tendencies are getting the better of him. After giving Wyatt/Fergus a Mercy Kill and defeating Deathshead's mech, the general retreats from the roof into a factory. Instead of hitching a ride on the helicopter that's rescuing the prisoners on the ground and letting a nuclear bomb just eradicate the entire fortress as planned, he opts to finish Deathshead personally with his knife. Deathshead anticipates this and nearly pulls off a Taking You with Me with a primed grenade he's holding in his hand. The decisions he made during his inflitration of the moon base are also very dumb. He enters the base with a Nazi disguise and a cover identity, but the first thing he does is to ditch the disguise and shoot anything that moves; he eventually leaves the base by hijacking a shuttle while the pilot was already putting in a distress call.
• Glass Cannon: In 3D, given that on the default difficulty you can be killed by just 3 or 4 straight shots from a pistol at close range. Also, the first part of The New Colossus, where his health is capped at 50.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: In Wolfenstein 3D, his mug in "I Am Death Incarnate" on the Difficulty Select screen displays red eyes to show that he's tough and dangerous to the Nazis.
• Good Is Not Soft: He's definitely The Hero, but his methods are extremely visceral. He'll maim people with axes, slit throats, shoot at point-blank range, and just generally mess up his enemies to hell and back if he wants them dead. If he thinks that he can talk someone down first, B.J. will at least give it a shot. But should they reject the chance, all bets are off.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • Having a piece of shrapnel lodged in his head may put him out of commission, but not for long (sort of). The damage from the shrapnel even allows him to shake off a poison Bubi injects him with!
  • In the first level of The New Colossus, B.J. is crippled, and can no longer walk on his own, using a wheelchair for the first level. He gets better once he gets Caroline's Power Armor after her decapitation. He eventually gets to a point where he can move around without it following his own decapitation.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Somewhat of a subversion. While Blazkowicz is a mildly unhinged mass-murdering Nazi hunter, he shows a lot of compassion and care for Anya as well as other members of the resistance, and is quite gentle with mental patients and an alleyway drunk in Old Blood.
• Heartbroken Badass: Played platonically for all its worth during the hallucination/dream of his mother in The New Colossus. After enduring so much and spending so many years fighting a seemingly insurmountable foe, seeing B.J. break down and confess to his mother that he just wants to stop is a surprising moment of humanity and humility from this One-Man Army. It doesn't help the he'd been told only a few days before that his Abusive Dad sold his Jewish mother out to the Nazis and she died in a concentration camp.
• He's Back!:
  • In The New Order. After spending fourteen years in a loony bin, all it took to bring B.J. back was the kind care of Anya and a Nazi pointing a gun in his face.
  • In The New Colossus, he gets beheaded by Engel, so Set puts it on the body of an experimental super soldier, which snaps him right out of the depression he had since the beginning of the game.
• Heroic BSoD: At the start of The New Colossus he is depressed over how broken his body is and Caroline's death and noticeably more glum than in the previous game. Wyatt even lampshades that B.J. is basically on cruise control waiting to hit a wall. He gets better after having a new body.
• Heroic Build: Growing up as a farm boy made this guy seriously ripped. Notably, around halfway through The New Colossus, his freshly-decapitated head is rescued and grafted onto a bio-engineered Super-Soldier body - and if it weren't for giveaways on the body itself and the neck collar, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. This ordinary guy was so ripped that his physique was identical to that of a Super Soldier.
• Heroic Mime: In Wolf-3D, Spear of Destiny and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. B.J. simply doesn't talk at all. He is Suddenly Voiced for further games in the series, though it takes until The New Order before he starts speaking outside of the occasional cutscene. Even then, in both The New Order and The New Colossus, the only speaking he does is an internal monologue during gameplay, saving the actual talking out loud for cutscenes.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • In The New Colossus, up to the point that the Biopic the Nazis are making in the wake of his death is Based on a Great Big Lie, portraying B.J. as a sociopath, his mother as an enabling Jew, and his father as a put-upon man doing his best but unable to help.
  • A later scene where B.J. auditions for said biopic himself on Venus elaborates further with this line.
    Cue Card: Your bravery is no match for a neanderthal like myself. Besides, I only know how to fight in a dirty manner. Now to kill the innocent children. Germany's future. [Diabolical laugh]
• Hidden Depths:
  • Prevalent in The New Order. Who'd have thought he can play guitar? He also has some rather poignant streams of consciousness about his own existence and his place as a soldier surrounded by death, marking him as something of a Warrior Poet.
  • He also seems to understand Tekla's rapid-fire monologue on the nature of consciousness seconds after being woken up in the middle of the night, and briefly debates her a few minutes later on the subject of free will.
  • He can understand German, of course, even if his accent is terrible, but one cutscene with Bombate toward the end of the Fergus timeline indicates he can understand at least one African language.
  • In TNO, B.J. repeatedly jury-rigs various electrical and electronic systems.
  • Throughout The New Colossus, B.J.'s a lot more reserved and down to earth rather than high-strung about killing Nazis, and readily accepts Sigrun's aid rather than hold bad blood over her being a former Nazi (likely thanks to Klaus and his own childhood abuse). He also is surprisingly tolerant and accepting of all nationalities and races when it comes to the resistance, only angered by individuals he feels let the nation down by draft dodging and anti-nationalist viewpoints - and even then he's over such things as soon as it becomes evident that these individuals will give it their all now.
• Hope Bringer: By The New Colossus he's become one to the pockets of resistance still holding off against the Third Reich.
• Horrifying the Horror: Any Nazis who make the mistake of taunting him or getting in his way end up dying horribly. Even despite all of the torture, mutilation and pain that the Nazis put their victims through, once Terror-Billy shows up, the Nazis become scared out of their minds.
  • In The New Order, a Nazi officer acts rather smug towards B.J, up until B.J. pulls out a chainsaw and moves it closer to the Nazi's neck. Suddenly, the officer is a lot more cooperative.
  • At the end of The New Colossus, B.J. cleaves off Frau Engel's arm and buries his axe in her face. As he descends from the rafters onto the TV studio stage where she is, Engel has a Villainous Breakdown where she screams "You're dead! I severed your head from your shoulders! I killed you!" at him. To be fair, she did indeed sever B.J's head from his shoulders during a public execution, so she probably expected he was gone. But he wasn't. And that just made him even more scary.
• I Am Not My Father: His Berserk Button to place J in Choke Holds up against the wall after the latter insinuate that he or his government was little better than the Nazis in The New Order is seen in a new personal light in The New Colossus where it's shown he had to live under his abusive racist father's thumb during his childhood.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Did not enter the series until the third game, Wolfenstein 3D, after the franchise switched hands from Muse Software to id Software. Before that, the protagonist was a nameless Allied Soldier.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Especially used to highlight his Thousand-Yard Stare in The New Order.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Played with, in that he's not exclusively a cannibal and taking the circumstances he is in, it's more likely out of desperation. If his health is below 10% in Wolfenstein 3D he can actually eat viscera off the floor just to to give himself more health. In Old Blood he can get a a perk called "Vampire" which lets him regain health through stealth takedowns. Whether that actually means he's biting people (some of them zombies!) is unknown.
• Implacable Man: He is an absolute killing machine, able to go One-Man Army on entire armies of Nazis and just never stops from there. The man got his head cut off with a sword during a public execution, and he STILL comes back thanks to a Super-Soldier body, the mad science of Set, and the sheer determination of Anya to save her man.
• Inexplicably Awesome:
  • Easy to think of in The New Order. How can such a gigantic man fit himself into such small spaces? Why's he a One-Man Army? Why's he (almost) Immune to Bullets and Made of Iron? Who knows?
  • In Spear of Destiny, he defeated the Angel of Death and was deemed worthy of wielding the titular spear. Maybe that has something to do with it?
• Irony: B.J. looks for all the world like the Nazi idea of an Aryan... Except he's Jewish on his mother's side and Polish on his father's. It's hilariously ironic.
• Just a Stupid Accent: Excused with the fact that he knows German fluently, but can't work out accents. Averted in The New Order. The Old Blood demonstrates that his use of verbal German is absolutely terrible. Friendly and unfriendly NPCs alike even berate him for it.
• Just One Man: Some Nazis think that just because they're up against one man, they'll be able to take him out. They usually don't last long. This even earns him the nickname "Terror Billy" by the Nazis, and his reputation as an Implacable Man makes him The Dreaded among the Third Reich, as throwing the best they have at BJ doesn't seem to slow him down. Even getting his head cut off with a sword in a public execution still doesn't stop him!
• Knight in Sour Armor: Under the tough, masculine exterior is a broken, traumatized, incredibly tired man who just wants to be able to stop fighting. At times, he's even a Death Seeker because of how much it's all beginning to weigh on him.
• Like Father, Like Son: He'd hate to admit it, but he's very much like his father. Not only do they look alike, B.J has the same predilection for violence, and his hot temper. B.J just had the influence of his mother, and his father as an example of what not to be to shape him into a good person. Oh, and a war where he could exercise those violent urges.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: A truly massive one. Just look at the pictures! If he ever runs out of weapons, he could probably just beat Nazis to death with his chin.
• Lightning Bruiser: In The New Order, B.J. proves to be extremely agile and flexible, despite his considerable physique. He can make some impressively long jumps, fit through tight vents, slide under tiny gaps and generally outmaneuver his opponents and the environment. He also duel-wields everything (including assault rifles and automatic shotguns), and can tank several dozen enemy bullets before dying on Normal difficulty. In fact, with fully upgraded health and max armor he can survive about as many bullets as the prototype supersoldiers from Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
• Living on Borrowed Time: He outright name-drops this in The New Colossus because of the huge number of close calls he's had and because it's literally true, courtesy of Deathshead's Suicide Attack pureeing his insides. Then he gets a literal full-body transplant, and he's back to normal.
• Made of Iron: This is lampshaded a few times, especially in The New Order, to the relief of allies and pure, absolute shock by enemies. As a testament to this there's a sequence where a Nazi ambushes B.J. as he's opening a door, grabbing him and stabbing him repeatedly. By that point in the level even without full health and armor B.J. can survive getting stabbed over two dozen times, while the Nazi goes down in just two stabs to the chest from Terror Billy. It seems that his muscles are so dense that they pull double-duty as natural body armor.
  • It says a lot that on many occasions, B.J.'s preferred method of defeating a Cutscene Boss is to let them stab him until they tire themselves out, then swiftly kill them. Ultimately, it takes a point-blank grenade blast (powerful enough to reduce the other guy in the blast radius to a headless torso) to do any lasting harm to him.
• Manchild: Despite being a veteran Nazi killer and borderline superman in his 40s, he still has immature moments. In The New Order during a mission to clear out a checkpoint, B.J. can find a half-disassembled car; he can sit in it, pretend to drive it (complete with his own engine and horn sound effects) and pretend-hit on a girl. Later on, he gets genuinely jealous of Max's toy blocks, robot, and truck, huffing out "All I had was a pinecone and a box of matches".
• Manly Man: Particularly by The New Order, B.J. is a One-Man Army of Nazi-crushing force with the broad shoulders, chiseled jawline, Icy Blue Eyes, and tree trunk-like arms to match.
• Miles to Go Before I Sleep: Part of his Dented Iron characterization is that he feels like he's just too broken down and tired to keep fighting the Nazis, since the whole damn thing just seems hopeless at times. A few moments of his narration even imply that he wouldn't mind going out now; in fact, he'd welcome it. This doesn't last too long, as the horrors and atrocities of what the Nazis are doing spurs him back into the fray. B.J. figures that if he's going to die, he might as well try and take the Nazi brass with him.
• Momma's Boy: In the most understandable and heartbreaking way, he is devoted to the memory of his mother in The New Colossus. She was one of the few bright spots in his childhood and he remembers her and her teachings in tense moments. He even imagines finding her again and putting his head in her lap for comfort just before his (temporary) execution. And the reveal that his father Rip sold his mother out to the Nazis has BJ snap and just kill Rip right then and there.
• Mr. Fanservice:
  • A tall, square-jawed soldier with a build that could rival an 80's action hero.
  • Played particularly straight in The Old Blood, where the splash screen and first half of the campaign have him shirtless.

N-Z

• Nazi Hunter: The Trope Codifier. As of The New Order, there no shortage of them to hunt down. Even so, BJ has made it is life's mission to destroy the Nazis, saying that "I'll be damned if I'm going to raise [my kids that are on the way] in a world run by these Nazi assholes". The Nazis, in turn, consider him the one man they never want to run into, coining the nickname "Terror Billy" for him.
• Nerves of Steel: He faces down small armies of heavily-armed Nazis on a regular basis without budging an inch. But the the most notable moment is during the moonbase mission, where he finds a scalpel and begins carving along the concentration camp tattoo on his arm, and rips the skin off like an old band-aid. He never once winces in pain. That's some high pain-tolerance.
• Nice Guy: As brutal as B.J. is, he's generally pretty friendly, as long as you not a Nazi, or had any previous alliances with them. And even then, if you defect from them and prove yourself to have no love for them, he'll warm up to you considerably.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: In the MachineGames games, he resembles Brock Lesnar.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: In Wolfenstein, he's always shown with an MP40 in his hands in cutscenes, no matter what weapon the player had equipped when the cutscene was triggered. Furthermore, the MP40 depicted is always unmodified, regardless of any upgrades the player has purchased for it.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: He doesn't let tightly-clothed female guards distract him while he's mowing them down.
• Not So Stoic: In The New Colossus when he imagines himself reuniting with his mother he lets it all out.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: B.J., after finally having had enough of his abusive father, tells him this in an awesome speech before he finally kills him.
  B.J.: Was a time I was scared of you. Was a time I would piss myself having a gun pointed at my head. You know what I feel right now? [Rip cocks the gun. B.J. doesn't even break eye contact] Not a God-damned thing. [B.J. pushes the gun away before Rip fires and punches him in the face]
• Off with His Head!: Is on the receiving end of this by Frau Engel in The New Colossus. Thankfully, Set Roth got him a new body.
• Older Than They Look: In The New Order, spending 14 years in catatonia has not changed him in any way physically, somehow even preserving his considerable muscle mass.
• Omniglot: If The New Order is any indication, thought it's also subverted - he fluently speaks English, can speak and comprehend Polish (though he admits his Polish is not very good), is fluent in German, can read Hebrew, and is evidently able to read French, Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Swedish. That said, as of The Old Blood, he's terrible at speaking German with a convincing accent.
• One-Man Army: He will single-handedly destroy everything in his way, cutting through small armies of Nazi soldiers on his own. Best described by this early radio exchange (in subtitled German) in The New Colossus.
  Frau Engel: [over the radio] (Send in the troops!)
  Commandant Mannheimer: (Ah, General Engel! Please confirm the number of enemy platoons on board the Ausmerzer. What is their current status and weaponry?)
  Engel: (It's one man.)
  Commandant: (...Excuse me, General?)
  Engel: (Are you deaf, Commandant Mannheimer?! It is one man! Terror-Billy, the idiot American!)
  Commandant: (But... I thought we had him in custody, General?)
  Engel: (He got away.)
  Commandant: (Oh... I see, General.) [long beat] (...Hhhhow?)
  Engel: (WHAT DOES IT MATTER? He is a trained killer! I guarantee he has obtained firearms by now. Possibly grenades too, how should I know?)
  Commandant: (Affirmative, General. And how many men does Terror-Billy lead in his raid?)
  Engel: (God in Heaven, are you stupid, man?! He's not leading anybody! He is by himself!)
  Commandant: (But one single man, General... surely our security...)
  Engel: (You ARE the security, you fucking imbecile!)
  [B.J. cuts Mannheimer's legs off and slits his throat]
  Engel: (Commandant? Hello? Commandant Mannheimer? Do you read?! ...Shit!)
• Papa Wolf:
  • On his way to becoming one in The New Colossus. Anya's pregnant with two twin girls, and it becomes B.J's motivation to keep going in spite of how bad things have gotten. B.J. is very much Dented Iron in the game, knowing that he'll be dead soon and that he can barely keep going. But the thing that keeps him going is wanting to make sure Anya and his kids will have a future without the Nazis in them, even though his kids haven't been born yet. While trying to motivate Horton into joining the resistance, part of what B.J. says during his Dare to Be Badass speech is that his kids are his motivation.
    B.J.: You tired? Man, fuck you! [knocks over a chair] I got kids on the way! And I'll be damned if I'm gonna raise them in a world run by these Nazi assholes! So what's it gonna be?
  • In Youngblood, said kids are born and grown up enough to start fighting in the war. When B.J. stumbles across his daughters in a warzone, happy to see them alive, B.J. says "My babies!" and hugs them both. Also, when his daughters go after the Big Bad of Youngblood, B.J. stays behind to give his girls enough time to get to the Final Boss. He makes it out alive, though. After all, this is Terror-Billy. However, a scene between B.J. and his girls reveals that he wants to Set Right What Once Went Wrong after he killed Hitler. While Hitler's death was certainly a prize, it triggered a Thanatos Gambit that set the planet on a course for The End of the World as We Know It. To this end. B.J. intends to use Set Roth's key to go back in time and find a way to stop the Nazis without ending the world. He also mentions a world where his family is safe and happy, which motivated him to fight harder than ever.
• Parental Issues: With his father, who is an unrepentant racist and con artist who terrorized his family for most of BJ's childhood, even forcing BJ to kill his own dog. BJ lived in constant fear of his wrath and was helpless to protect his mother amidst all the abuse, and grew up vowing he'd never be the man his father was. Upon his return to his childhood home in The New Colossus, he confronts his father for the final time and it is shown he is willfully aligned with the Nazis, even selling out BJ's mother to them. As his father holds him at gunpoint, Blazkowicz completely disavows his father for the final time, and he makes him answer for a lifetime of abuse with an axe to the arm behind burying it into the bastard's chest.
• Patricide: A rare heroic example. When B.J. returns to his childhood house and encounters his father Rip for the first time in years, and the latter reveals that he sold his own wife and B.J.'s mother Zofia out to an extermination camp and tries to kill him, B.J. finally bites back and makes the old bastard pay for everything he's done. Naturally, when making their film about Terror-Billy, the Nazis milk this for everything it's worth, portraying Rip as an innocent victim and B.J. as a monster for killing his own father.
• Patriotic Fervor: Downplayed; The New Order establishes him as a bit of a blind patriot toward the U.S., but only because he doesn't like to think that his own country could ever be like his sworn enemies. He gets angry when J compares the Jim Crow South to Nazi Germany, and objects to Boone's Communist resistance when drunk in The New Colossus — not for their criticism of U.S. capitalist society, but more because he believes their messages of pacifism and leftist agitation kept them, and possibly others, from fighting in an increasingly desperate war when soldiers were needed, and instead eroded morale at home. In both instances, he calms down afterward and plays nice.
• Perma-Stubble: One constant face trait of him since Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
• Perpetual Smiler: In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, BJ has a persistent smug smirk on his face that never changes.
• Pipe Pain: In the first chapter of The Old Blood, he picks up a busted pipe that he keeps with him from then on. Slotted together, it doubles as a short staff and spear, being useful in all manner of takedowns and as a makeshift crowbar. He can also unscrew it to use it as a combination of a shiv and a hand club.
• Plot Armor: He manages to escape every capture and survive every execution throughout the series. Special mention goes to his execution in The New Colossus, where he is decapitated. But his head is retrieved by his allies and transplanted into a Super Soldier body, and proceeds to kick the Nazi's ass again.
• Polyglot: He's able to speak German and a little bit of Polish. Some of the documents that can be found are printed in various other languages, such as Chinese, meaning that he can at least translate these. Justified in that, as an OSS agent, being able to speak various languages would be of benefit. As for the Polish part, B.J. is a descendant of Polish immigrants.
• Red Baron: By The New Colossus, those who know him by reputation call him "Terror Billy". He's The Dreaded among the Nazis, seeing him as a One-Man Army that nobody can seemingly stop. Considering he mows through entire battalions and Nazi war machines single-handedly just in normal gameplay, this is not that far from the truth.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In the Game Within a Game parody Wolfstone 3D (in The New Colossus), Hitler's real-face portrait is replaced with a portrait of B.J. holding a gun in a stage victory pose, but with the "I Am Death Incarnate" face and glowing red eyes.
• Scars Are Forever: Towards the beginning of The New Order, pieces of shrapnel hit him in the back of the skull and leave some gashes above his left ear. As Youngblood shows, these scars still haven't faded by the time B.J. is an old man, as he's missing hair over where the scars were made.
• Self-Made Orphan: In The New Colossus, his father Rip had sold out his mother to the Nazis because "this is a white man's world" and Rip wanted a place in it. B.J. undergoes some Tranqul Fury about how he feels "not a goddamn thing" when looking at his father now, knocks away his gun, and slices off Rip's arm with his axe.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran:
  • In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, he's got quite a shocked expression on his face after confronting the undead for the first time and surviving when an Allied plane comes to rescue him. He seems to quickly recover however, and goes back in business right away to infiltrate a German base.
  • His experiences are starting to take their toll on his mind in The New Order. He frequently monologues in his own mind about how this is all taking one hell of a physical toll on him, and how maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he finally kicked the bucket.
  • Comes to a head in The New Colossus, where he flat out breaks down at least once and is running on fumes after all he's been through. Getting a new body and the help of his teammates helps him pull out of this, with spectacular results.
• Shout-Out: He's like a mashup of Captain America and Rambo, wielding Super-Strength that enables him to dual-wield even heavy machine guns. The similarities really stand out if you think of Deathshead as an equivalent to Red Skull. The box art of the Super Nintendo release of Wolfenstein3d even has a rendition of BJ that resembles Rambo. The Thule Medallion that BJ gains in Wolfenstein (2009) also has parallels to The Infinity Stones, gaining powerful reality-warping powers as BJ finds more gemstones for the artifact. BJ also has features of Indiana Jones in his character, battling Nazis and exploring ancient archeological sites for powerful artifacts.
• Shrug of God: Whether or not he is meant to be the aforementioned Allied Soldier from Castle Wolfenstein is a question that has gone back and forth. There's never been a definitive answer.
• Silent Protagonist: Zigzagged.
  • He doesn't talk in Wolfenstein 3D, though he does shout "Yeah!" after completing certain levels.
  • In Return to Castle Wolfenstein he's silent in the PC version; in the console ports, he speaks in some cutscenes.
  • The later games give him an actual voice and personality. However, The New Order and beyond have him mostly give internal monologues during gameplay, while saving his more dramatic and longer speaking parts for the cutscenes.
• Silver Fox:
  • He's 49 years old in The New Order, but looks like he hasn't aged a day.
  • The only signs of his aging in Youngblood is a little grey hair. He is otherwise just as ripped as he was in New Colossus. Possibly due to his new Ubersoldat body.
• Southern-Fried Private: Downplayed - he has a distinct southern accent in The New Order and The Old Blood, but he doesn't really display any of the associated stereotypes beyond a fondness for country music.
• Strong Family Resemblance: He looks a lot like his father, Rip, but is undoubtedly a much better person. At one point he dons a disguise that includes a big bushy mustache, making him look even more like Rip.
• Suddenly Speaking: The console version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein gives him speaking lines, albeit only in cutscenes. Wolfenstein 2009 continues this approach. The New Order and The New Colossus gives him a voice in both cutscenes and gameplay, though most of his dialogue during gameplay consists of internal monologues.
• Super-Soldier: May as well be, what with how unstoppable he is. Finally truly becomes this in The New Colossus when his head is planted on the body of a type of Nazi Super Soldier, complete with mechanical upgrades.
• Survival Mantra: A very mild example, with "Count to four, inhale. Count to four, exhale", which a friend teaches him in Old Blood. He teaches it to Wyatt in turn when he's going through a panic attack, and uses it himself at the end of New Order's prologue when making his Sadistic Choice.
• Terror Hero: The Nazis are scared to death of him, and have every right to be; B.J. is quite content putting the fear of death into his enemies, given how many Nazis he kills and with such efficient brutality. By the time that New Colossus comes around, he's earned the nickname "Terror Billy" from the Reich.
• Tongue-Tied: His first night with Anya on the train had him simply saying "Yes" a few times, obviously at something of a loss for words.
• Tragic Keepsake: Early on in The New Colossus, he takes Caroline's power armor after she's been executed, to help him move around and resume his battle against the Nazis and to honor her sacrifice. Unfortunately, it's dismantled and destroyed by Engel's troops upon his capture.
• Tranquil Fury: B.J. runs on this trope right out of the gates in Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein II. After confronting his father and hearing that he sent his mother to a concentration camp, he calmly expresses his hatred for the man before dismembering his left arm and burying his axe into his heart.
  B.J.: Was a time I was scared of you. Was a time I would piss myself having a gun pointed at my head. You know what I feel right now? Not a God-damned thing.
• Translation Convention: He's fluent in German, as demonstrated in Wolfenstein (2009). Germans speak accented English, peppered with German phrases. In combat, they speak only German. Similarly, readable documents are written in English.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour: In The New Colossus, a flashback shows him finding a rat drowning in a bucket and he laughs at it suffering, not understanding why his friend is freaking out about it. It's only when it stops moving does he start to realise what he did wrong. Considering how his father acted throughout his childhood, it's little surprise that he's so used to cruelty, and makes his capacity for cruelty (such as letting a soldier run on foot in an area about to be blown up by a nuke, or his slower hatchet executions) somewhat tragic with this link to his childhood.
• Warrior Poet: In The New Order. You'd never guess B.J. can be quite eloquent when he wants to. His internal monologues frequently tackle subjects such as how he's running on fumes, the hopelessness of his cause, and how he's going to keep going anyway.
• Would Hit a Girl: In his eyes, a Nazi is a Nazi. Gretel Grosse is accordingly killed by him at the end of Episode 5 in Wolfenstein 3D. Also, his last act in New Colossus is to shove a hatchet through Frau Irene Engel's face.
• You Are Not My Father: Delivers an epic one to his father Rip after finding out the bastard had sold out his own mother to the Nazis, by hacking his arm off and burying his hatchet deep into his chest.
• You Don't Look Like You: His appearance in Wolfenstein (the 2009 game) is the most different from all his other appearances; it seems in Wolfenstein he was based on the cover art of Wolfenstein 3D, whereas all of his other appearances were based on his in-game sprite from Wolfenstein 3D.

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