Rated M for Manly

Well... This is a bit much, isn't it?^note *BIFF!* Wrong!

Mongol General: CONAN! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women.

— Conan the Barbarian (1982)

A work that is heavily dependent on things, situations, or actions that are stereotypically masculine, in order to appeal to a predominantly male audience. Made by men, for men.

Expect to see Perma-Stubble, hot blood, improbably muscled Manly Men, Carpets of Virility, lots of fighting, Stuff Blowing Up, large amounts of Rule of Cool, and if you're lucky, Manly Tears. Most, if not all of the main characters are often grade-A Badasses and sometimes Large Hams. Expect to see somebody shout a phrase WHERE! THEY! EMPHASIZE! EVERY! WORD! which can result in Memetic Mutation. Soundtrack is prone to be fueled by The Power of Rock.

Traditionally, the role of women in such works is often stereotypically feminine, as support characters or Love Interests, sometimes satellite ones, while the men fight and die (often for their sake). A woman may be the Unwitting Instigator of Doom, doing some small and unimportant action early in the movie or in the origin story, which is the Inciting Incident that starts the chain of events that lead to some great disaster, and the real men would have to deal with it (for example, the villain may have turned into a villain in the first place because Love Makes You Crazy). Nevertheless, badass females are far from uncommon, and they may or may not be masculine in their interests. Either way, expect Fanservice. Though keep in mind actual sex or womanizing doesn't necessarily mean "manly", as most playboys tend to have physical (and personality) traits opposite to the ones described above.

These works also tend to glorify war, although there have been many manly works with the opposite viewpoint.

Named after a line in the contrasting segment of the Janus Syndicate parody video Counter-Strike For Kids.

Just because a work falls under this trope doesn't mean that it can't have any feminine appeal or a significantly large female audience. You'll find that many of the examples below have almost as many female fans as they do male fans. This trope simply means that stereotypical masculine behavior is a significant focus of the work at hand. The number of female fans generally depends on how rigidly and/or multi-dimensionally the work fits this trope.

When those in charge think that a foreign video game would sell better with this aesthetic than the one it came with, you get the American side of American Kirby Is Hardcore.

The World of Badass is often the setting for this trope. Compare/Contrast Darker and Edgier. See also Awesomeness Is Volatile. Not directly related to Rated M for Money in any way but the potential for intersection between the two is high. In cases of works where voice acting is involved, Baritone of Strength will often apply with a lot of the male characters.

Compare with Testosterone Poisoning, where the appeal to masculinity is exaggerated to the point of parody (though expect to pass through here before hitting Testosterone Poisoning levels of manly).

Contrast Chick Flick (which is this trope's opposite), Kawaisa and Moe (which are all opposed aesthetics).

Unrelated to Avoid the Dreaded G Rating, though they certainly can overlap.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Segata Sanshiro! Segata Sanshiro, Sega Saturn Shiro!. Among Segata's accomplishments includes catching an ICBM midflight, halting its progress and then jumping off a plate glass window without breaking it.
• An advertisement for a casino shows a man playing roulette with a squirrel next to him placing all his nuts on the table as his bet as the voice over goes "You can cash in now and save for a rainy day or you can be a man and bet it all." The ad is basically blasting men that don't play with risky big bets. Betting with your nuts? Manly. Wagering all your nuts at once? There can be nothing manlier.
• The controversial ads Hardees and Carl's Jr. ran for their X-Men: Days of Future Past burger, which featured Mystique turning into a male in order to eat the sandwich, with the phrase "Man up" uttered by the narrator. That's right, Mystique, the mutant supervillain who has been going toe to toe with the X-Men and Avengers since the 70's, can't handle Carl's Jr.'s new burger unless she's a guy.
• Dr. Pepper's ill advised "It's not for women," campaign for their line of ten calorie sodas. The original idea was to target those men who considered diet sodas to be unmasculine, but the end result was to tell half the audience not to buy their product.
• British chocolate manufacturer Rowntrees marketed the Yorkie Bar — a big, chunky, no-nonsense slab of chocolate — with the slogan Yorkie — Not For Girls!. The adverts featured (for instance) vigilant shopkeepers realising the nervous-looking guy trying to buy a Yorkie bar was a woman in a false moustache, and responded as you might expect for comedy effect. The net result was to amuse one half of the viewing public whilst pissing off and alienating the other.
• Old Spice has two cases.
  • First, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like: portrayed by Isaiah Mustafa, he is a suave gentleman who calmly and eloquently described to women what their man could smell like he was capable of doing if he used Old Spice.
  • He would be followed up by Terry Crews as a Cloud Cuckoolander with a severe case of Testosterone Poisoning.
• Mexican beer Tecate "Somos Bax" ("We are Box") ads featuring Sylvester Stallone. All of them feature men getting angrily reprimanded by Stallone (or some other famous pugilist) for their lack of manliness in their actions, concluding with the line "Te hace falta ver más Bax".
• Gun marketing in general is rich with this, for obvious reasons. Even guns marketed to women have ads promising that packing heat will turn them into Action Girls who can whoop the ass of any rapist. Bushmaster infamously ran a "Man Card" campaign insinuating that owning one of their semi-automatic rifles will make you more manly — which they quickly pulled after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter used that model of rifle to kill 27 people and then himself.
• There is a company making packaged water^note not bottled water: It comes in cans which calls itself "Liquid Death" and uses the tagline "murder your thirst."
• Truck ads. Naturally, marketing for a utility vehicle would emphasize the physical and outdoorsy activities that it makes easier, from work to recreation, but in America, selling pickup trucks has been elevated to an artform. The voiceover will typically be contributed by either Sam Elliott or somebody imitating his gravely cowboy voice, the music will be either a hard rock or country riff, and the truck will be shown in either the scenic vistas of the American West or blue-collar worksites driven by rugged men using it to haul large objects, often with shots of them putting such objects in and out of the bed. The very names of the trucks, from the Chevrolet Silverado and Colorado to the Toyota Tundra to the entire Ram line of trucks, are designed to evoke the rural wilderness. Ford uses the marketing slogan "Built Ford Tough", and Chevrolet once ran an ad for the Silverado mocking the Ford F-150's tailgate step as something that real men would never use — which backfired when Ford's truck marketing manager pointed out that it was free advertising for a genuinely useful feature.

Anime and Manga

• Attack on Titan is considered very manly with all the Titan slaying, military, gore and the characters involved. Especially Levi.
• Baki the Grappler: Pretty much every major character is saddled with an absurd case of muscles (though a lot of them have oddly feminine faces to go with it). In the sequel to the original manga, Baki Gaiden Scarface, an unarmed man wins a deathmatch against a twenty-two-foot shark by shoving an arm through its eyesocket and crushing the brain. It's that kind of story.
• Bastard!! (1988): Naked, buff men fighting in a Heavy Metal Heroic Fantasy setting with naked women in skimpy outfits.
• Berserk: Man with a sword the size of Kilimanjaro hacks his way through the legions of Hell, with more blood per volume than the entire filmography of Quentin Tarantino. And his name is literally Guts. Ironically, one of the themes of the manga is how much of a strain being this sort of person is on your psyche.
• Bleach is a shounen that relies heavily on some of the classic formulae of the genre. It's heavily focused on fighting with character development and revelation occurring through the old-fashioned belief that only through fighting can men truly get to know each other and only when facing death can a man's personality truly be revealed. However, the excessively macho 11th division take the samurai fighting traditions to such excess they're used for both serious storytelling and parody. For example, Ikkaku would rather die than leave his captain's side for another division, but he can also pop his dislocated shoulder back into place with nothing more than a Pec Flex.
• The title character of Captain Harlock is apparently Leiji Matsumoto's attempt to Reconstruct the Japanese ideal of manliness. Thus we have a man who lives under his own flag and ideals, fighting to protect his friends with such effectiveness that by himself, with only his sidearms, he could match an entire town, with such feats as ramming his spaceship into any enemy that tries to bar his route and doesn't realize in time he won't stop and destroying a cyborg by physically overpowering him (and Harlock is apparently a normal human) and then forcing him to drink milk (thus shorting out its circuits).
• A Certain Magical Index: the main character defeats mutants, magic users, and beings of near godlike power by punching them. And he has quite a harem to go with his feats.
• Cells at Work and Friends!: Even though the manga focuses on Killer T's social awkwardness and desire to come down from his tower of testosterone, make no mistake: he really is a badass squad leader who can stop a viral invasion almost single-handedly.
• Chaosic Rune, and its sequel, Chaosic Rune ES. Yes, it's a manga about a card game, but it involves hot-blooded, manly men and well endowed (95% of them, anyway) women fight evil villains in epic battles that include badass dragons, giant motorcycle robots, magical monsters, and more. And along with cards that summon monsters, there's cards that summon weapons such as swords, pistols, and shotguns. Yes, shotguns. It's like if ~Yu-Gi-Oh!~ were written by Bruce Campbell and drawn by Chuck Norris.
• Cowboy Bebop, though lacking in the Hot-Blooded factor, is packed to the brim with references to manly action movies, a soundtrack packed with upbeat jazz and rock music, awesome fight scenes (including non-ironic use of Gun Kata!), and macho plot threads such as a guy trying to find a girl he lost all while battling his pretty-boy arch rival and another guy struggling with his dark past as a cop and still haunted by the girl he loved leaving him. Oh, and did we mention Faye Valentine?
• Cromartie High School is an odd case, deconstructing not only the idea of a World of Badass, but badassery in general, but then thoroughly picking apart the concept of manliness itself, to the point it even inverts this trope in a later episode. And of course, it does it hilariously!
• Parodied in D-Frag!. Kenji Kazama is a delinquent where he and his gang show their manliness by being the toughest guys in school. Then Kenji gets beaten by a group of Gamer Chicks.
• Digimon Data Squad has the main character punching 50-foot monsters to make his partner digivolve, to say nothing of their sheer Hot-Blooded-ness. Surprisingly, Digimon Fusion is heading this way.
• Dragon Ball Z is about men with muscles so large (and in places where muscles aren't really supposed to exist) as to be an impediment to motion in scenarios even remotely grounded in reality fighting one another plus various aliens, monsters, demons, mutants, gods, and robots in increasingly violent and deadly battles (everybody except the Fake Ultimate Hero dies at least once) with increasingly-powerful Supernatural Martial Arts. Warrior ethos and the prides of martial artists play a prominent narrative role. Women feature, but mainly as a means by which to introduce sons into the mix. And breasts. By the time the series ended, the Big Bad could quite literally tear the universe apart by shouting loudly enough, and even the weakest fighters were probably in danger of destroying the planet they were on if they so much as tripped.
• Eyeshield 21 has this in spades, though given that it's about American Football, it's a bit of a given. Especially notable given that it's a post-Millennium Shonen Jump series that mostly manages to avoid Bishōnen Jump Syndrome in an era rife with it. Many of the characters go straight into Testosterone Poisoning territory, considering most of the cast have some pretty impressive muscles and they're only in high school. For example, the 15-year-old who's 6'7, eats nothing but meat, looks like a caveman, and smashed a car head on with his bare hands when he was in grade school.
• Fist of the North Star, renowned for its manliness, stars a Bruce Lee Clone who massacres post-apocalyptic biker gangs by making their heads explode ["You don't even know you're already dead."]. Also features exploding shirts in every episode.
• Gundam:
  • G Gundam: the most manly Gundam series ever, if only you can get past how ridiculous it is; ridiculously awesome, that is.
  This hand of mine glows with an awesome power! Its burning grip tells me to defeat you! Take this — my love, my anger, and all of my sorrow! Shining Finger! GO GO GO!
  Here I go! This hand of mine is BURNING RED! Its loud roar tells me to grasp victory! ERUPTING! BURNING! FINGER!!! AND NOW! HEAT END!
  Erupting Burning Finger! Sekiha! LOVE-LOVE! TENKYOKEN!!!
• GaoGaiGar and its OVA sequel FINAL, in addition to Hot-Blooded, runs on this trope. Shining examples are Geki Hyuuma who still shows off his massive biceps while in the vacuum of space and Goldymarg a robot based on him that is so manly ONE WOULD THINK HE WAS PROGRAMMED IN ALL CAPS. Other examples include Koutaro "Mundane Made Awesome" Taiga, who can make even golf badass, and Guy Shishio, the man who epitomizes hammer attacks a LOT more than Thor. To wit, everyone in this series Exudes Manly Tears, the men, the children, the women, everyone.
• Almost everything by Go Nagai, Getter Robo (which was created by Ken Ishikawa with some input by Nagai) being the most over-the-top, but Mazinger Z is the one that started it all.
• Hajime no Ippo: it's about members of a boxing gym who dedicate their lives to the sport. They're filled with so much fighting spirit that the whole series is translated as that in some countries.
  • Special mention must go to Mamoru Takamura, who truly is a man among men, to the point that it borders on Testosterone Poisoning. The best example of this? He fought a bear and won. Even better, the bear gives him some scars on his chest and shoulders that only serve to make him even more manly and seriously intimidate his opponents.
• Half of the titular Heat Guy J's dialogue is espousing what a man should and should not do.
• Hellsing. Tons of action and vampires and explosions and everything else that a manly show could want, along with several characters who would put the action stars of the 70s and 80s to shame. Alucard, Anderson, and the Captain are just the most obvious male examples, but the show also features Action Girls galore.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It's been described as "the glam version of Fist of the North Star" for a good reason: even though 90% of the characters are well-dressed, sparkly attractive guys, it oozes testosterone, violence, and raw fighting spirit from every page. It's not called manga for nothing. Starting in Part 4, the art style transitions to more realistic proportions instead of the "everybody is a giant and completely ripped" scenario of the first 3 parts...and yet it still somehow remains manly even when the characters' appearances are slender and at times downright effeminate. Who ever said Bishonens can't also be Rated M For Manly?
• Kengan Ashura centers around the titular Kengan tournament, where a bunch of musclebound man beat the shit out of each other in various cool and badass ways. It really says something when some of the low-tier fighters in the series are still people who can smash apart trucks as a warm-up routine.
• Kill la Kill. It's called the Spiritual Successor to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and for good reason: even though the main characters are female, it oozes testosterone, blood and raw fighting spirit from every episode. It doesn't have Kill for nothing. And of course, since the main cast is female, it also has a lot of Fanservice.
• Kinnikuman has muscular superheroes and supervillains duking it out Professional Wrestling style, typically while wearing nothing but a pair of short shorts. It's very title translates to "Muscle Man."
• Kongoh Bancho. The main character crowns the first chapter by carrying a car through a Yakuza base, and can use his hands to carve a wall into a relief so beautiful as to make a grown otaku weep.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes. As a poster once put it "One does not simply walk into Iserlohn, after all. We're talking about Axe-fighting Germans on spaceships, people." Indeed, the show is filled with larger-than-life "galactic heroes". Special mention has to go to Oskar von Reuenthal and Walter von Schenkopp, though.
• Arguably Lupin III. The Lupin III: Part 1 series, Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine movie, and manga could count, being full of Author Appeal for killing and seducing. Lighter and Softer stories share the same style, just with Defeat by Modesty or Bloodless Carnage.
• MD Geist is made of four things: violence, Rule of Cool, Fanservice and Stuff Blowing Up. Plot? Storytelling? What are you talking about?
• No Guns Life: The main character, Juzo, is an amnesiac, chain-smoking Cyborg contractor in a trenchcoat with a soft side and, oh yeah, a gun for a head. Need we go on?
• One Piece:
  • Among the main cast, Zoro is the most prominent example. His daily schedule consists of three things: eating, sleeping, and training. And when a fight is incoming... oooh boy.
  • Amongst the manliest men ever to walk the planet, Edward Newgate A.K.A. Whitebeard A.K.A the World's Strongest Man, is made out of pure manliness. He is about five times as large as a normal man (and is a biological human), is insanely strong and can create earthquakes. He can also take a TON of damage: at the time of his death, he had received 267 sword wounds, 152 gunshot wounds and 46 wounds from cannonballs — and did not have a single scar on his back, because he never, ever ran away from a fight. In addition to all of this, he is probably the purest example of A Father to His Men you will ever find: he call all his crew members and allied pirates "sons", and goes to war against the World Government to save just one of them.
• Even before the Genre Shift from Slice of Life to Fighting Series, Osu! Karate Club is about the strongest mustachioed highschool brawler ever duking it out with nefarious delinquent gangs until the entire male youth of Kansai and Kanto are at his beck and call. There is a constant escalation of violence and themes of dreams, justice, friendship, freedom, forgiveness... and disrespect towards women... A scene where a blood-soaked Takagi lifts a huge wooden ship over his head in a island set ablaze by napalm bombs while singing a children's anime theme song on the top of his goddamn lungs before tossing it into the sea is followed by eleven men willingly sacrificing themselves so the then overloaded vessel can set sail while Takagi solemnly cries for them despite being unconscious at the time.
• Oyaji just exudes pure masculinity, he Is drawn purposefully as manly as possible to goad the reader into seeing how much of a badass father he is, but as the story goes the narrative wants to sell you how much his actual determination and love for his wife and children is that makes Oyaji a real man, not his appearance.
• Psycho-Pass has plenty of blood, fighting, suspense, paranoia and action that may confuse some parents who think anime = animation = for kids.
• Record of Ragnarok is a series where the strongest both above and under the heavens engage in brutal, back-to-back fights to the death. Intense action, compelling backstories and ripped men abound.
• Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin: About convicts surviving in a brutal prison system.
• Ring ni Kakero: Yet another boxing manga with loads of hot blood, as expected of Masami Kurumada.
• Sakigake!! Otokojuku: Delinquents that are all extremely ripped and skilled in some sort of martial art attend a special school with a military-esque faculty determined to turn them into the next great generation of men.
• The second season OVA for the Sengoku Basara anime is built on this trope. Gentlemen, prepare for the Takeda MANSTRAVAGANZA!
• The Seven Deadly Sins: For starters, just about every Holy Knight is completely shredded under their armor and clothing, even the women. The ones who aren't are Buxom as all hell. Then there's the fight scenes, which happen about once an episode, and give the likes of Dragon Ball Z a run for its money in terms of the amount of Fanservice, Calling Your Attacks, and overall awesomeness.
  • Dragon Sin of Wrath Meliodas and Fox Sin of Greed Ban, best bros for life that they are, reunite after ten years and celebrate- by punching each other through several walls, then having an arm wrestling match that collapses both the dungeon that they're in, and the super-powerful magic barrier around it- all without even being aware that they're supposed to be trapped by the enemies outside. Serpent Sin Diane (who is a literal giant) just sits back and grins, noting that they're typical boys and the two have been doing this for as long as she's known them. This happens in Episode 6 of the anime.
  • You thought the rest of this page was as Manly as it could get? Who decided that?
    Season 2 finally introduces The One who stands at the pinnacle of all races, the Lion Sin of Pride, Escanor. He's been hyped up for a season and a half by everyone who knew him, and he actually lives up to the hype. While he looks like a complete dweeb at night thanks to that bow tie and Monopoly Man mustache, during the day he Hulks Out into a Nigh-Invulnerable eight foot mountain of muscle that literally radiates The Power of the Sun and wields a one-handed battleaxe so heavy that strangers mistake it for a two-handed axe. He even manages to make that mustache look manly. The aforementioned boast? He makes it in front of Galand of Truth, a demon who can turn to stone anyone who lies in his presence. Escanor stayed un-petrified... the same couldn't be said for Galand, who runs away terrified. Even Escanor's soul is badass- it completely burns another demon, Melascula, when she tries to devour him. From his introduction to the very end of the series, Escanor never loses a fight and is constantly able to No-Sell his enemies' attacks. It never crosses into Testosterone Poisoning, either, due to everything about Escanor being completely sincere. Oh, and his original Japanese voice is Joseph Joestar, and his English voice is Kamina (or if you prefer, Gohan).
• Space Adventure Cobra. Heck, Buichi Terasawa's works in general (Goku: Midnight Eye, Karasu Tengu Kabuto).
• Sun-Ken Rock: It's about the Korean mafia, and about fighting for your ideals to protect others. The action scenes are intrinsically detailed, full of blood and testosterone, and what means to be a real man. Like one character states:
  "Ken, you're warm like the sun... a strong person as solid as a rock!"
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: It's all about drills. And fighting against authority. And doing the impossible, seeing the invisible, breaking the unbreakable. Breasts feature prominently in the background. And the manliness is so awesome it warps reality. Manliness warping reality is actually the driving force of the plot. As described to an anime club once: "Gurren Lagann is about brotherhood, giant robots, and killing furries with phallic symbols."
• Tomorrow's Joe: A manga in which tough delinquents become decent people through boxing, and they literally stake their lives on the ring.
• Toriko is about finding the most dangerous animals on the planet, beating them to death with your bare hands and then feasting upon their eye-wateringly delicious flesh.
  • Half of the group that fight with Toriko has the ability of Flexing their upper bodies to ridiculous levels. Known as "knocking". This of course includes Toriko himself.
• Trigun: It's not called "Deep space planet future gun action!!" for nothing!
• Vagabond: It's about Miyamoto Musashi. The most badass samurai ever.
• Vinland Saga: It's about vikings. It'll put hair on your chest.

Comic Books

• Diabolik doesn't usually rely on this, but on occasion we can see such a situation. Like when the title character had to kill a giant octopus with a knife to recover a chest full of diamonds (the owner of the treasure had put it in a pool with the octopus specifically to protect it from Diabolik, not expecting him to find out early, and Diabolik didn't have the time to just fill the pool with poison), or the time he was swimming for fun and was attacked by another giant octopus (he killed this one with a knife too in spite of being caught by surprise).
• The Doom comic. It's manliness and a half! It's a 12.0 on a 10.0 scale of manliness!
  • RIP AND TEAR YOUR GUTS!
  • YOU'RE HUGE!
  • THAT MEANS YOU HAVE HUGE GUTS!
  • RIP AND TEAR!
• The Punisher MAX: The weapons and Tarantino-esque violence are the hallmark of this comic. The protagonist Frank Castle is essentially a One-Man Army who obtains his weaponry and resources from the same criminals he kills and/or tortures before dispatching them, and he frequently embarks on adventures where hundreds, dozens of criminals, terrorists, and/or war soldiers are annihilated. He personifies badassery.
• Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Discussed in an exchange between Urzkartaga and Steve Trevor over what a man really wants. Urzkartaga claims that it's all about fighting and conquest, but Steve figures most guys just want a glass of whiskey, a juicy steak and a good woman to curl up with at the end of the day.

Comic Strips

• In The Boondocks, when Robert Freeman and Tom DuBois go to see Brokeback Mountain for the first time, they mistakenly assume it will be a "manly cowboy movie", rather than the gay romance flick it really is.

Fan Works

• A Chrono Cross fanfic The Hunt begins with a badass Bar Brawl. Two burly men threaten Guile, who simply ignores them and pours a bottle of wine into his glass. When the men start to play rough by smacking his back, he counters by throwing the wine in the glass at one of the guys before tossing the empty glass at the other guy, incapacitating them. After that, Guile smashes the wine bottle and threatens one of them by squeezing the spiky ends of the broken bottle into the guy's cheek. When everything is over, the bartender scolds Guile for giving him a heart attack.
• The Night Unfurls: Tough, brutal, unkillable male protagonist resembling typical anti-heroes from the '90s hunts, rips, and tears apart an army of rapists and slavers while leading the charge in a war. Features guns and a variety of cool-looking mix-and-match melee weapons, particularly a large serrated cleaver and a BFS. Gorn galore. Paradoxically, this guy inverts many "manly" stereotypes (e.g. lean physique, Cold Ham, celibacy, etc.) and still remains a stoic, level-headed Cultured Badass resilient to the heaps of trauma he faced in his life. As for the cherry on top, he even sheds Manly Tears in the very first chapter of the story^note during a flashback.
• Poké Wars: Amazing displays of badassery from everyone coupled with almost over-the-top battle scenes.''
• Shakespeare Hemmingway is infamous for writing fics like this, in which the protagonist is an Action Hero who slaughters his way through countless villains and has sex with an equal amount of women. The kicker? The protagonist in question is Garfield. Yes, that Garfield.
• Thirty Hs begins with the line "Dobby relished his groinsaw's roar as he withdrew the flesh-choked blade from the astronaut's ruined skull", features a guitar named Fuckslayer from a dimension where all screamed for naught, the immortal line "Harry, you must rock the fuck out", and it only gets manlier (and stranger) from there.

Films — Animated

• Beowulf (2007). A 7' tall CG Ray Winstone takes on a much taller, hideous Grendel with: No sword, No shield, No armor, no clothes of any kind. And wins. And proceeds to dismember his arm using a massive door from a Viking mead hall.
• Heavy Metal. All but one (the scientist's daughter) of the women characters are naked at one point. World War II pilots are shot and turn into zombies. And it's loaded with violence, constant nudity, and a kick-ass '80s rock soundtrack. What more could fit the bill?

Films — Live-Action

• The 13th Warrior features a band of badass Viking mercenaries battling cannibal Neanderthals in a retelling of Beowulf. It doesn't get much manlier than that.
• 300 is another perfect example, involving heavily muscled and oiled Spartan warriors in tiny briefs kicking copious amounts of Persian ass and roaring out every other sentence.
• Apocalypse Now. Along with Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, this suffers from Do Not Do This Cool Thing syndrome. Most young men want nothing more than to attack a Vietcong village with helicopters and napalm, and then go upriver in a boat, whilst taking drugs, wearing a flak jacket and machine-gunning enemies. Ends up being deconstructed. Three of the crew are killed, the remaining two are probably scarred for life after their journey, the main character is already suffering from PTSD, the villain is a Mighty Whitey who went insane, and that's not even including the hundreds of background characters that we see losing or have lost their fucking minds in the most gruesome parts of the war. And absolutely none of it is portrayed lightly, as we what kind of an effect war really has on ordinary men.
• American Assassin. The main cast consists entirely of attractive, badass, tough-as-nails men, except for one token female member that's suitably easy on the eyes.
• Ben-Hur (1959), mostly thanks to the Chariot Race and Slave Galley scenes. Anything with Charlton Heston, in fact. Whenever his broad shoulders crowd out everything else onscreen, the testosterone factor in the room increases hundredfold!
• The Blues Brothers is about saving an orphanage with the power of awesome music, outrunning the police and later National Guard in a Cool Car, pulling off impossible stunts in a Cool Car, dodging gunfire, ignoring explosions, and running down Nazis (or sending them off bridges to their deaths), all while wearing Badass Suits with Sunglasses at Night.
• Bullitt, with Steve McQueen as a badass cop and basically creating the Chase Scene with an impactful car pursuit.
• Cliffhanger. Let's see, terrorists, gunfights, explosions, and rock climbing? It's a manly movie that flies under the radar.
• Conan the Barbarian (1982) made Arnold (and his muscles) a star. Plenty of violence and muscular men slaughtering their enemies.
• Con Air: Guns, explosions, shirtless scenes, etc.
• Death Race. It's a film about a modern gladiator game where prisoners, all badass racers with nicknames such as "Frankenstein" and "Machine Gun Joe," compete in a race in which the track is littered with all kinds of deadly traps while accompanied by hot babes as navigators. Oh, and the first film's protagonist is Jason Statham, and one of his crew is Ian McShane. The sequels didn't bring them back, but brought Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames for compensation. Can you feel it, dudes?!
• Die Hard is a slightly lighter example than most other "classic" action movies, since it depicts an emotionally vulnerable hero who's really more concerned with saving his marriage than being a badass. Nonetheless, the film has enough moments of male pride (particularly from the villains) to still ultimately fit this trope.
• Enter the Dragon; the film that put Bruce Lee on the map (internationally, at least), it has plenty of wonderful martial arts fights to go around. And Lee spends a good chunk of the latter half shirtless, showing off his amazing physique as he beats up wave after wave of mooks.
• The Expendables series runs on this. It follows a group of Hired Guns sent to South America to depose a powerful dictator, and stars a laundry list of "manly" actors and grizzled action stars, including Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Chuck Norris.
• The Fast and the Furious, which runs on fast cars, manly heroes, and gratuitous shots of hot women.
• Fight Club is a Deconstruction of this trope, presenting the modern man of The '90s as so emasculated by suburban lifestyles of soul-deadening consumerism that they resort to beating each other up in basements to feel alive again. A lot of dudes didn't get the satire.
• Full Metal Jacket. While the movie is a deconstruction of the tribal, primal nature of war and the military with some over-the-top elements that verge on Testosterone Poisoning, there are still plenty of gutsy themes associated with traditional masculinity as well such as hijinks mixed with strength or bravery and vitriolic comradeship.
• Gladiator is the story of a disgraced Roman general with an awesome name who fights as a gladiator with one goal - win over the crowd, get a meeting with the evil Emperor Commodus who ordered the deaths of his wife and son, and kill the bastard in a final showdown at the Colosseum.
• The Godfather, full of intimidating and respectable men, as well as, as discussed by You've Got Mail, philosophy for every male worth his salt to follow ("A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.")
• The Great Escape. Old school war movie, where just seeing the cast (Steve Mc Queen! Charles Bronson! James Coburn!) makes clear it's manly.
• Highlander. An immortal katana-wielding Scottish highlander living in New York in 1986 takes on a deranged broadsword-wielding Russian barbarian to win a millennia-old Deadly Game and also avenge the rape of his beloved wife. Also has Sean Connery as a badass Dashing Hispanic and music by Queen, for double manly.
• Infinite. All the cliches are here: almost no emotional scenes and no development of the main character, a ton of cool cars, a hot blonde girl who kicks ass but doesn't actually have much of a character, a maniacal bad guy in a nice suit, explosions, lots of guns, and ridiculous stunts.
• Indiana Jones has its titular hero traveling the world, getting the girl, and killing Nazis.
• Iron Man: good-looking multi-billionaire super-genius with charisma and swagger keeps himself in shape, shoots terrorists in the face with lasers, kicks all kinds of supervillain ass, and gets all the hot girls, the hot cars, the house, the ultimate Man's Garage downstairs, fucking robots, and the fact he's cool about having been caught masturbating or having sex by Gwyneth Paltrow. Oh, and the fact he gets to wear FLYING ARMOUR. That he built himself in a cave! With a box of scraps!.
• Jack Reacher is just Tom Cruise taking names and kicking ass.
• James Bond is built on a classy manliness, with Bond killing everyone that gets in his way while looking as suave as possible. And he Really Gets Around, of course.
• Jaws gets pretty manly in the third act, as the three heroes head to sea on the Orca to pursue the shark. Plenty of drinking, showing off of scars, and singing drunken tunes when they're not trying to kill the Great White.
• John Wick, which is basically Keanu Reeves going the Death Wish route and slaughtering people left and right.
• Knight and Day: Constant action, check; spy games, check; explosions, check; firefights, check; Cameron Diaz in a bikini...
• Lawrence of Arabia: A movie about Bedouin riding around on Cool Horses and camels in scorching deserts, killing large numbers of Turkish soldiers! That's also about beautiful desert landscapes, British imperialism, one man's war with his own nature, and features barely any battle scenes, instead being rife with sexual tension between men. Not exactly Predator, then.
• The Longest Yard: Football, a prison at Texas, soundtrack composed mostly of hip hop and hard rock, professional wrestlers among the cast and characters scattered across the Noble Male, Roguish Male spectrum. This is a comedy film that manages to be manly without falling into Testosterone Poisoning!
• Gimli in The Lord of the Rings is a gruff, suicidally-brave, Scottish-accented dwarf soldier tremendously proud of his heritage as well as malt beer, red meat off the bone and his axe. Note though this is opposed to the book, where Gimli is a more dignified and complex character; the change was made to make him a Foil to the handsome, refined (but still extremely badass) elf Warrior Prince Legolas.
• Machete, which puts Danny Trejo in the over-the-top 80s action genre.
• Mad Max (especially Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior). The leather-clad hero travels the desert wastelands of Australia in his muscle car, killing gangs and saving citizens. Mad Max: Fury Road brilliantly subverts this by being loudly and unapologetically feminist in a way few movies of any genre can compare, nevermind a post-apocalyptic action film full of sweat, testosterone and motor oil. The film features scores of tough, empowering women ranging from Furiosa to the Wives to the Vuvalini as heroes and explores explicitly feminist themes, challenging objectification of women and toxic masculinity. It may be a manly film, but it is in no way a man's movie.
• Mandy (2018), like The Revenant below, is the rare film where "slow-burning indie art movie" crosses over with this trope. It's Nicolas Cage in the 80s on a quest for vengeance against evil Satanic cultists and a (possibly) demonic biker gang, and killing them in gloriously violent ways with a crossbow, a chainsaw, his bare hands, and a gigantic jagged metal axe, you can't get any manlier than that.
• The Matrix is a downplayed case, specially with the Action Girls and heavy\complicated plot, but certainly provides quite the manly fix with plentiful gunplay and martial arts.
• Most of Michael Bay's movies. Bad Boys (1995), The Rock, Transformers... badasses all-around, explosions, gunplay, jokes, and some pretty women for the quiet scenes.
• The Mission: Impossible Film Series, revolving around Tom Cruise playing a very macho secret agent who survives unbelievable stuff that would kill less manly guys, most of the time out of his own volition.
• The Outlaw Josey Wales:
  [spits] "You gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?"
  • There is a scene where an unnamed Bounty Hunter walks into the saloon and confronts Wales. After a short exchange of words, Wales tells him he can ride away and forget about it, and the man walks out... then moments later walks back in and simply says "I had to come back." Wales, with an almost knowing tone, just replies back "I know" and then the two draw, and Wales wins. So manly.
  • The entire scene with Ten Bears manages to be one of the manliest scenes ever put to film, without any action at all:
    Josey Wales: I came here to die with you. Or live with you. Dyin' ain't so hard for men like you and me, it's livin' that's hard, when all you've ever cared about has been butchered and raped. Governments don't live here, people live here. Governments don't always give a fair word or a fair fight, I've come here to give ya either one, or take either one from ya. [...] I ain't promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another.
    Ten Bears: It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life.
• Predator. Entertainment Weekly once named it the Manliest Movie Ever Made, beginning with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers giving each other a manly handshake, featuring Jesse "The Body" Ventura toting a Gatling gun, and starting the climax with Arnold bare chested, covered in mud and screaming out a battle cry.
  • The more modern Predators does its best to live up to this (hey, they even have Danny Trejo!) and you could say it's definitely the manliest movie of its year. No contest for competing with Arnie and Jesse, though.
  • The Predator also gets really manly, no matter if again the cast doesn't compare to the original and even has big roles for a woman and a child. Blood, explosions, swearing, tasteless dialogue, all a man craves!
• Raging Bull, which might be story and drama heavy but still deals with a pretty manly boxer.
• The Raid, the entire movie is basically people shooting or beating other people.
• Rambo has become a term for exaggerated violence, thanks to its soldier protagonist killing everything in his path. Ironically, the original film First Blood was actually a drama that showed War Is Hell, about a shell-shocked veteran not being allowed to pass through a small American town and who only killed one person in the entire film.
  • Harlan Ellison has a review of the Rambo pictures in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching, speaking about the use of this trope to mitigate America's shame at having "lost" The Vietnam War.
• Raw Deal (1986) features Arnold Schwarzenegger single-handedly taking down the mob.
• The Revenant, which some critics like Gawker and Bob Chipman even call the most macho art film ever made. In the latter's words:
  Bob Chipman: Yes, the story of Leonardo DiCaprio as a frontiersman who crawls out of his own grave to hunt down the men who left him for dead after a brutal bear attack is sub textually about the struggle about the spiritual struggle of man vs nature set against glorious naturalist cinematography and a haunting orchestral score. But specifically, it's about scalping, shooting, tomahawking, head smashing, arrow shooting, dick chopping, hatchet fighting, stick fighting, gun fighting, knife fighting, and bear fighting through harsh wilderness fueled by pure white hot revenge.
• Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. An expy of Kenshiro, who himself is an expy of Bruce Lee, learns kung fu from his uncle by shattering gravestones thrown at him. When he kills the drug dealer who killed his girlfriend, he is imprisoned; whereupon he fixes cut tendons in his arm with his teeth, punches the lower jaw off one of the wardens, punches the arm of the same warden thus causing it to explode, battles and defeats an ogre by throwing it into a meat grinder, and then frees the prisoners by punching a hole through a concrete wall, also causing it to explode. Did we mention he has five bullets embedded in his chest the entire time but is totally unconcerned? This would honestly fall more into the realm of Testosterone Poisoning; if only the film-makers, as far as anyone can tell, weren't dead serious.
• RoboCop, where even the female police officers are tough and prone to beating the crap out of people. It has plenty of nudity, violence, and explosions.
• Rocky is another Stallone franchise dripping with manliness, involving a Boxer. Also spawned one of the manliest songs ever with "Eye of the Tiger".
• RRR (2022). It's a film about two extremely macho revolutionaries taking down colonists with all manner of weaponry and methods, ranging from guns, arrows, and even wild animals. Often while shirtless.
• Rush. Hardly surprising, what with the ultra-light, ultra-fast, ultra-dangerous seventies Formula One cars running around the track as a powerful, character based drama unfolds.
• The Scorpion King: The whole damn movie, from arrows that strike people back at an impossible distance being fired from a bow that only the incredibly manly protagonist can use, to the same incredibly manly protagonist taking an arrow from his back to fire it at the Big Bad. Did we mention when The Rock and Michael Clarke Duncan cross their swords and end up cutting the swords themselves, at the same time?
• Seven Samurai: So manly it makes its own manly trope. It's a bunch of samurai fighting a group of bandits. One of them romances a local girl, one is a Master Swordsman and another has a BFS as a weapon of choice. It may show examples of War Is Hell and display the pitfalls of glory-seeking, but it still has thrilling action.
  • And its Western remake The Magnificent Seven (1960), where the seven gunmen, plus the villainous bandit leader, are badass from start to finish.
  • The 2016 remake as well. Much like its predecessors, the film makes no apologies for what a Testosterone fest it is. A group of grizzled, well trained killers and badasses doing what they do best: Killing bad guys.
• Shoot 'Em Up. Guns, guns, even more guns, Mooks getting massacred by the dozens, Heavy Metal, Monica Bellucci in skimpy clothing... Almost borders on Testosterone Poisoning, really.
• Shooter: The protagonist's final solution is gunning an entire room of bad guys and setting the whole place on fire!
• Sin City, especially Marv. Literally every scene featuring him has him either inflicting/surviving insane amounts of torture and damage or making hilariously deadpan comments, sometimes both at the same time.
• Sisu. This is a movie about a John Wick or Rambo-inspired Retired Badass who singlehandedly takes on an entire platoon of Those Wacky Nazis and kills them in brutal, gruesome, and satisfying ways.
• Spartacus: Gladiators! War!
• Starship Troopers: Space football, rifles that double as shotguns, arachnid aliens that tear people in half, space-marines, explosions, and uncensored co-ed shower scenes. You pay for the whole seat, but you only need the edge!
  "You're some kind of big, fat, smart bug, aren't you?"
  "Do you want to know more?"
  • And much like the earlier war movie examples, this was an anti-war film that still managed to make war look flipping awesome!
• Star Wars:
  • One of the most famous examples in fiction is Darth Vader in the original trilogy and especially in Rogue One, with his deep voice, hulking build, sleek armor, and overwhelming strength and intelligence. Vader's ideal of manliness is a factor behind his success as a villain and as a franchise icon, and he inspired a slew of expies that tend to follow this trope as well, some of which can be found on this very page.
  • And from the prequels, we have Mace Windu, who's played by Samuel L. Jackson and uses a power-focused lightsaber style with a purple lightsaber because Sam Jackson wanted it that way.
• Terminator (The sequels had manly women). As did Aliens, which included smack-talking badass Space Marines packing a shitload of badass weaponry to hunt down badass aliens...hell, even the adorable little girl is badass.
• Thor, at least in the Asgard and Jotunheim scenes. Thor: Ragnarok even more so, although it leavens the hypermasculinity with generous doses of Technicolor Camp, all set to Led Zeppelin. One of the film's big action setpieces is a Thor vs. Hulk gladiatorial match. Even the female lead is a Proud Warrior Race Girl Lad-ette.
• Tombstone, with Russell, Kilmer, Elliot, and so on...each with a mustache and skill with a gun. So much macho it hurts.
• Top Gun: Macho jet fighter pilots jockey for dominance in between sweaty games of volleyball.
• Total Recall (1990), combining Arnold Schwarzenegger with RoboCop (1987) director Paul Verhoeven. Plenty of blood, explosions, and one-liners, and even some badass women.
• Under Siege and its sequel Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Steven Seagal, firefights, explosions, hammy villains, and the former has Erika Eleniak's boobs.
• Venom (2018): Action scenes involving SWAT teams, private security contractors, and a giant beefy, deep voiced alien with no shortage of black comedy one-liners. Outside the action scenes, you have what amounts to two buds talking about how to deal with guy stuff.
• Where Eagles Dare: Clint Eastwood teams up with a Magnificent Bastard British agent and a bona-fide Action Girl to infiltrate a castle full of Nazis, where he kills near all of them with MP40s Guns Akimbo in a way B.J Blazkowicz would be proud and blows a ton of shit up. Classic manly Rule of Cool-powered war film.
• The Wild Bunch, a western featuring a Badass Crew and a huge body count.
• The Wild Geese, in which Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Roger Moore are mercenaries.
• The Wind and the Lion is a fine example of old-school manly. Theodore Roosevelt sends the Marines to Morocco after the Berber sultan Mulai Ahmed Mohammed el Raisuli the Magnificent kidnaps an American woman and her children. "Pedicaris alive, or Raisuli dead!" Plus, you can't go wrong with Sean Connery!
• Without Remorse. There is no blood, swearing, sex or substance abuse to speak of in this R rated actioner. But you have a bona-fide badass Anti-Hero who will violate regulations to assault and torture a Russian delegate out in the open, fire upon Russian police to provide cover for his men, and beat the ever living crap out of several armored guards who have detained him wearing only prison pants; which isn't very common in many PG-13 heroes.
• Wolverine from the X-Men Film Series is a cigar-chomping bearded badass whom the girls love. Pure macho!
• xXx is Vin Diesel as a fan of extreme sports turned spy, and from that description you can count on action, muscles and women.
• Zulu, where the manly Zulus take on the manly British Army in the manliest war movie ever made.
• A lot of John Carpenter's films with Kurt Russell, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing (1982)...
  • They Live! features Rowdy Roddy Piper fighting Keith David for well over 5 minutes, which is likely to cause the TV to sprout biceps and punch the viewer in the face!

Literature

• Any book about bodybuilding or martial arts, will be manly to some degree.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Monsters: Andrew (the narrator)'s mother and aunt in Duffy's Jacket think they need to do manly things (such as camping) with their sons from time to time so the boys don't turn out weird. Andrew's reaction to this is "You can take him camping all you want. It ain't gonna make Duffy normal."
• The Call of the Wild and White Fang: men and canines clawing their way through life in the Arctic.
• The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the rest of The Trojan Cycle. There's an undertone of War Is Hell, but it remains to primarily be about the manly pursuit of men fighting and the gods will it to be so.
• The Hebrew Bible has Samson from the Book of Judges, who kills Philistines by the hundreds, and King David (from the Books of Kings), who does that plus runs a country, keeps a harem of beautiful women, and writes poetry. The Book of Judges also contains Ehud, who spouted a testosterone laced on-liner before offing an enemy king with a concealed weapon.
  "I have a message for you from God." *stab*
• The Icelandic Sagas and Gesta Danorum. Although Njal's Saga is arguably a really effective Deconstruction of Scandinavian masculinity; many of these Viking men react pathetically to affronts to their manly honour and it becomes clear that a lot of the death and destruction in the story could easily have been avoided if they had cooler heads and thicker skin.
• Belisarius Series has so many badass and so much badassery that one can feel the heat from all the manliness warming the covers of the books.
• Conan the Barbarian helped define the Swords-and-Sorcery genre, with it's noble barbarian hero and epic adventures.
• The Destroyer series, featuring Remo Williams and Chuin, Master of Sinanju. In this case, the books approach this rating from the other direction: they're pretty much all parody but the over-the-top machismo is simultaneously downplayed, so that while all the things you'd expect under Testosterone Poisoning are there they're generally treated as the uninteresting parts of the books.
• Ciaphas Cain HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, who was largely inspired by Flashman. He keeps up a Manly-and-badass-yet-humble facade to hide the fact that he'd rather be shuffling papers at a nice safe desk instead of going toe-to-toe with Hive Tyrants and Khorne Beserkers (though the skill with which he fights said monstrosities makes it a really convincing facade).
• The Gor series. Where Men are the Masters. Especially those who are Of the Warriors.
• Many of William Hope Hodgson's stories (including his first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig) feature small groups of men (typically led by a badass) who face off against Eldritch Abominations, sometimes an entire Zerg Rush of them; even in the stories where the heroes lose (or die), they sure don't go down without a fight. Hodgson himself was something of a Real Life badass, which tends to make the manliness seem that much more authentic.
• Jack Reacher, about a former ex-military who the author describes as "an unstoppable force".
• The Lord of the Rings. Let's face it, Middle-Earth is a full-out World of Badass, as made clear in The Silmarillion. We've got guys taking on Balrogs, Dragons, Werewolves and Morgoth himself!
• H. P. Lovecraft's recurring character, Randolph Carter. He may swoon now and then when things get too deliquescent, but he has an impressive array of manly qualities and exploits. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Carter scales mountains, rides Night-Gaunts, allies with the Ghouls, is the cause of several full-scale wars and goes toe-to-toe with Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos — and what's more, outwits him! In "The Silver Key", we learn that he is a veteran of the Legion of Lost Souls and was nearly killed at Neuilly-sur-Seine in the Battle of the Somme. Then in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", he ascends reality, discovers the meaning of life, becomes an alien, then travels millions of light-years back to Earth with nothing but his stash of space-weed to help get him through it.
• The page image comes from Man's Life magazine, one of many "men's adventure" magazines that proliferated from the '40s until the '70s. Known as "the sweats" in the publishing business, these pulp magazines' typical contents involved extremely lurid "true stories" of men going on exotic adventures and fighting bad guys and wild animals, along with sex/seduction advice and photos of various pin-up models. Norman Saunders, a commercial artist who painted the covers of many such magazines, described them as "guys with guns and gals with no pants on" and said that they were mostly purchased by men with feelings of masculine inadequacy, especially the many World War II and Korean War veterans who never saw any combat and envied those who did. They died out in The '70s with the rise of magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler that focused more strictly on naked women (and, in the case of Playboy, selling a more upper-crust, James Bond-style image of masculinity), while the stories moved on to paperback airport novels.
  • As illustrated in these magazines.
  • I WAS THE LUST SLAVE OF THE COBRA GODDESS!
• Moby-Dick. Ahab might be crazy, but he's manly as hell. The book probably qualifies by default, being about an all-male cast hunting giant, deadly sea beasts.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms: If Ancient Greeks have the The Iliad the Chinese have ROTK. Set in the Divided Post-Han Dynasty China filled with one-man armies who can hold a gateway by themselves alone, strategic geniuses bordering on wizardry, and rulers both righteous and ruthless.
• Sandokan novels is when the title character kills a tiger with a knife. Sandokan rushes the tiger from the side and toppled it, started strangling him with the unarmed hand, and then declared himself a tiger too before cutting the tiger's throat). And it wasn't to save his Marianna, but his romantic rival. However, the books don't refrain from showing when it's stupid and the characters could be better served by using their brains. For example, Sandokan declaring he'd kill the tiger with his knife prompted Marianna to try and shoot the tiger first because of just how stupid it is to face a tiger with a knife, and she said so to his face after the beast barely escaped her, while Suyodhana, in spite of being a formidable fighter, refrains from actually getting his hands dirty until he absolutely has to because he's usually better served by having his men jump him twenty at a time or using traps, but the one time he did he gave Tremal Naik such a thrashing that when he kidnapped his daughter the former tiger hunter called in Sandokan while slaughtering Suyodhana's men at every chance he got during the wait.
• The Shahnameh is full of tough warriors battling each other, wild beasts and mythical creatures. Optimized in Rostam, a towering muscular man with a long beard, who wears tiger skin under his armour plates, and the skull of a demon he killed as his helmet, while riding a huge horse and carrying a mace shaped like a bulls head!!!
• Sharpe: the adventures of a British rifleman during the Napoleonic Wars who acts as a One-Man Army. The TV series also qualifies — Sean Bean kicking ass for King and Country.
• Tarzan. A muscular jungle guy, who fights big apes and crocodiles. 100% manly!
• Okonkwo from Things Fall Apart is absolutely obsessed with acting as manly and tough as possible. It ends tragically, as a deconstruction.
• Victoria: An apocalyptic tale of badass ex-military militiamen throwing off the shackles of Big Government and the Fed, crushing leftism and political correctness and setting up a frontier society of well-armed homesteaders and rugged individualism. And fighting dastardly Nazis, Indians, neo-pagans and techno-amazons along the way. one should note, however, that "manliness" is this situation is not the same as goodness. The militiamen crush leftism mainly because they themselves are at the opposite in of the political spectrum and the society they set up could be more accurately described as reactionary and theocratic than true individualism.
• Wereworld is about as manly a young adult fantasy novel can get with Therianthropes ripping each other apart from Chapter 3 onwards.

Live-Action TV

• 24, starring a no-nonsense special agent who isn't unwilling to torture his enemies.
• In a making-of piece for Band of Brothers actor Ron Livingston talks of the cast studying period photos of the characters. The actors were looking at what the soldiers wore, how they held themselves.
  Livingston: They held themselves like goddamn men.
• Spike TV as a whole. It's the result of taking "Rated M for Manly" and building an entire 24 hour a day TV channel around it, not at first, but now they have distilled their lineup. If it's not howling-in-your-face overdone manliness, if it's not about death or booze or babes you'll never get, it doesn't belong on Spike. Its Chick Flick equivalent is Oxygen, and its nerd equivalent is Syfy.
  • Deadliest Warrior. Different warriors from history are pitted against each other in bloody battle, for your entertainment. Samurai vs. Vikings, Spartans vs. Ninjas, Pirates vs. Knights, Shaka Zulu vs. William Wallace...
  • Spike "manned up" Unsolved Mysteries when they took it over, cutting existing segments to fit five into an hour for a "faster, more modern" look and creating "more male-oriented stories." The show's distinctive spine-chilling feel was lost, according to fan discussions.
• Hawaii Five-0 in some ways. There's Steve McGarrett, a reserve Navy SEAL (Lt. Commander) and active Cowboy Cop who will happily open a locked door using a grenade, ride a motorcycle up a staircase, and otherwise behave like a badass. The rest of the team are no slouches either, and most of the significant women on the show are Action Girls. The guys are also pretty much Emotional Bruisers, there is lots of Man Hugging, and it's up to viewer interpretation whether Steve and Danny are Heterosexual Life-Partners or secretly gay for each other.
• The first season of JAG (on NBC) was essentially an Action Series, where the protagonist just happened to be lawyer, marketed and made according to this trope. When the show moved to CBS, it was retooled to include more legal drama and soap opera elements, partially to appeal more to female audiences.
• Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger. Pirates! Giant Robots! Captain Marvelous! What more could you ask for?
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki is about survival of the fittest where it is every Kamen Rider for themselves, and by Kamen Rider standards we see deaths, blood, and Riders pitted against each other among things aimed for men. But, special honor goes to Takeshi Asakura/Kamen Rider Ouja, a homicidal psychopath who is drawn to the mayhem of the Rider Fight and has a pathological urge to kick some ass because he is merely vexed while looking cool at doing so. From endlessly escaping prison to having the distinction of having high body counts in the series, to ultimately combining three Contract Monsters into one Hybrid Monster, you get one of the most evil and manliest villain in the franchise.
  • With Hot Blood, hot girls, and football, there's no other way to describe Kamen Rider Fourze. Doesn't hurt that it's main writer is best known for the aforementioned Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which has its abundance of manliness.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One: Isamu Fuwa/Kamen Rider Vulcan demonstrated that forcibly opening a Progrisekey with brute strength is a proof of manliness.
  • Kamen Rider Saber: Ryo Ogami/Kamen Rider Buster lives and breathes on the trope not just because of his enormous sword that puts him on the same level as Guts or Cloud, he's also both an active swordsman and a devoted father. Also, putting his son in harm's way means asking for a beatdown!
• The Mandalorian checks just about every box. A morally ambiguous protagonist who is both a Bounty Hunter and a Proud Warrior Race Guy? Episodes that mostly consist of him kicking ungodly amounts of ass and getting his ass kicked by a wide variety of giant monsters and fellow seedy underworld denizens? Frequent forging scenes complete with flashbacks to the death of his family? Top it all off with a heavy thematic emphasis on fatherhood? You have a recipe for manliness.
• The Man Show was basically built around this trope. Dirty jokes? Check. Beer? Check. Hot girls in skimpy outfits? Check.
• The BBC show Man Lab is part building cool and useful things, and part building really cool and really stupid things, and occasionally deals with all kinds of other manly skills as well.
• Ninja Warrior (Essentially American Gladiators on crack.) For that matter, American Gladiators itself. The third co-host of the show was Larry Csonka, the manliest man to ever play fullback, and the events that include wrestling, an urban assault course, beating each other with sticks, a game called Powerball that was the deadliest version of Red Rover ever, and finally, The Eliminator.
• Seven Days is this trope, but with Time Travel (and more than a little Eagleland as well).
• Sons of Anarchy: Harleys? Check. Guns? Check. Brotherhood? Check. Good Old Fisticuffs? Check. Violence and Bloodshed? Check. Booze? Check. Willing and available women? Check. Gratuitous occasional nudity? Check.
• The Sopranos — drugs, violence, male bonding, fatherhood, and diatribes about the emasculated state of contemporary Western society abound. Frequently subverts itself, though, by reminding viewers that most of the "manly men" in question are in fact morally bankrupt, pathetic human beings whose inability to express themselves in any way other than aggression makes both them and their families miserable.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand, where even the gays can eviscerate Roman soldiers with ease. It is a show about a Gladiator Revolt after all. "Femininity" is defined as having a slightly lower kill count than the male characters and the male heroes often have their girlfriends (or boyfriend) by their sides as their partner in battle. Despite being a drama, the abundance of lusty women baring it all and almost comically choreographed sex scenes makes it dangerously close to Testosterone Poisoning.
• Stargate SG-1: How Colonel Jack O’Neill has not been mentioned yet is beyond me. Teal'c also deserves to be on this list. Lieutenant Colonel John Shepherd and Ronon Dex of Stargate Atlantis do too.
• Captain James T. Kirk is a charismatic swashbuckling space captain who flies around space where he nails all the hot alien chicks, earns the respect of everyone he encounters (when he's not saving them), tells gods where to shove it, and defeats monsters and super soldiers with a combination of his Cool Starship and Good Old Fisticuffs. All while being one of the most capable naval commanders and Guile Heroes in the setting. Contrast Captain Jean-Luc Picard who, while just as intelligent and pretty badass himself, is primarily an intellectual and diplomat.
• Supernatural is ultimately a show about manly men hunting monsters with guns and machetes and more often than not saving a girl in the process while riding in a sexy classic car, all set to a classic rock soundtrack.
• Ultra Series: The giants of light didn't call themselves Ultramen for nothing, a select few series showcase moments aimed who are asking for adrenaline rush:
  • Ultraseven: Everything about the series itself is brimming with the trope to an extent. The entire Ultra Guard are composed of manly members — Kiriyama, Furuhashi, Soga, and even Dan Moroboshi/Seven himself; last but not the least, we have the highly attractive Action Girl, Anne.
  • Ultraman Leo: While the series is already Darker and Edgier to begin with, boy it does sure have manly moments. What a better way with a returning Ultraseven putting the titular Ultra into a gruesome training regimen early in the series while remaining crippled for the remainder of 39 episodes. Said training eventually paid off. Also, what makes Leo stand out than his predecessors that he's an expert in hand-to-hand combat, preferring to use Diving Kick attacks as a Finishing Move. Later in the series, Dan himself even grows a mustache, and also a beard in Ultraman Mebius. Even Leo himself makes a return in Mebius's 34th episode and his appearance helped Mebius to man up in his fight against Alien Reflect by putting the young Ultra into a similar training routine Dan put him through back in his home series.
  • Ultraman Zero himself. He's Ultraseven's son and is trained by Seven's disciple, Ultraman Leo and has defeated the franchise's equivalent of Satan many times over. Hell, he's able to turn a wimpy Salaryman into a real man after seeing him pulling a Heroic Sacrifice in episode 3 of Ultraman Geed by becoming his host and allow Zero to pull his martial arts skills while he's in control of said host's body.
  • Ultraman Taiga: Ultraman Titas lives and breathes with this trope as he is the Tri-Squad's muscle. Not to mention, he's the Ultraman equivalent of a bodybuilder due to his muscular appearance and the full display of raw power in battle solidified this status.
  • If you wanna see giant robot fights, a Hot-Blooded protagonist who not only pilots a Humongous Mecha but is also a karate expert, a former villain-turned Anti-Hero returning as the captain of an attack team? Then Ultraman Z is a show that stands out as an Ultra Series show for real men that even made Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann proud. The real kicker is that the titular Ultra is a student of Ultraman Zero. Want another kicker? The show's theme song is performed by none other than JAM Project's Masaaki Endoh!
• Walker, Texas Ranger. Let's cut to the chase: it's a television show featuring CHUCK NORRIS. Hell, he sings the intro. Just listening to it is enough to make every woman within 5000 miles pregnant. With triplets. And all of them will have beards.

Music

• AC/DC: They even have a song called Big Balls! Slightly averted in that last case, as Big Balls is more of an extended pun than a celebration of Scott's manhood.
• Aerosmith, which aside from the ballads and gentle songs, are loud guitars, songs about sex or badass themes, and a macho singer who's basically a Transatlantic answer to Mick Jagger.
• Alestorm, Scottish pirate metal, with epic songs about drinking, piracy, revenge, privateering, giant goddamn monster, plundering, and keelhauling landlubbers.
• All That Remains: Nearly all of their songs feature manly imagery such as courage and fiery passion
  • Well, the only MELODIC metalcore band. As they were influenced by beatdown hardcore, classic metallic hardcore bands have a much more macho driven image than most pure metal bands.
  • Nowadays All That Remains has gone soft, and Trivium is seen as taking their role.
• Amon Amarth: Vikings, Valhalla and music videos containing epic battles. Johan's beard and the fact that they can brew mead helps too.
• Clanadonia, a Scottish band whose lineup consists of several frequently-shirtless men in kilts, and who specialise in loud and aggressive pipe and drum music.
• Demon Hunter, a Christian Rock example.
• If the name Gloryhammer isn't manly and epic enough for you then just listen to the lyrics, most of the songs could very well be written by googling 'Things that are epic and manly' taking the first hundred or so results, and then mashing it together as lyrics, Glory? Check, Battles? Check, BF Axes? Check, Lasers? Check, an awesome name? Saving the world by fighting space Unicorns with laser Battleaxes? A thousand times check. And that's just from one song.
• George Thorogood's raison d'être is to give Blues Rock more testosterone. How many times has "Bad to the Bone" been the soundtrack to a TV or movie character doing something badass?
• Guns N' Roses, who couldn't be lumped with the Hair Metal in spite of their looks and Power Ballads, given how they were tough guys singing about rough times, rough places, and not caring about wrecking people on their path.
• High on Fire, if you thought Matt Pike wasn't enough to convince you, the music is sludgy thrash that has the sounds of epic battles within it.
• Iggy Pop, solo and with The Stooges, providing songs with indicative names like "Search and Destroy", "Raw Power", and "Lust for Life". Even a Power Ballad like "Candy" can't take away Iggy's manliness.
• Iron Maiden, a neverending parade of epic metal songs about spooky and violent themes, illustrated with a zombie!
• Jindou, specifically their song Wild Challenger used for the first Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo opening, about how awesome it is to be a macho man.
• Johnny Cash.
  Bono of U2: The most male voice in Christendom. Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.
• Jón Leifs: Hekla has the distinction of being the manliest piece of music ever written: Nineteen percussion players are needed. "Percussion" instruments required are "rocks with a musical quality," steel ship's chains, anvils, sirens, church bells, shotguns and cannons
• Knorkator's Der Ultimative Mann (the ultimate man) tells women why they don't really want Mr Nice Guys.
  "Hot blooded, bold, and handsome. Fast and athletic, determined and courageous. With a body like steel, and eyes like fire. I am what you want: The ultimate man!"
• Manowar: To the point of Testosterone Poisoning. Four buff warriors making music about the glory of war, metal, or Norse Gods. What did you expect from a name like Manowar?
• Megadeth, who always sing about death and destruction, and even homaged two characters listed on this page, The Punisher and Duke Nukem.
• Mötley Crüe: Take away unflattering hair and costumes and "Home Sweet Home", and it's manly metal about sex and drugs.
• A very descriptive song on the trope comes from the film Orgazmo. Listen to it here. It's hilarious, but also a great example of this trope!
• The Rolling Stones: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards just ooze manliness, being sexual, dangerous, and singing about drugs, Satan, and violent subjects.
• Running Wild: Pirates, blazing fast riffs and no weepy ballads.
• Sex Pistols (for those angry young men who love nothing more than to shock and piss off "The Man").
• The Skatt Bros.' "Life at the Outpost", especially the music video. While there's no confirmation either way, it seems as if it has to be parody.
• Slayer: Oh so much. Their songs are about everything from Satan to war to senseless violence and destruction.
• Tenacious D: (from The Other Wiki) "[Jack] Black characterizes Tenacious D's comic nature as an antidote to "the masculinity of rock", adding "There's also something funny about the macho-ness of rock. Like the bands that are the fucking hardest rocking are like, 'We'll fucking kick your ass, dude-with our rock.'" "He asked us, 'Be you angels?' and we said, 'Nay, we are but men! ROCK!'"
• Peter Tosh: Self-proclaimed "The Toughest" and "Steppin' Razor", he's considered the hard man of reggae. He made it his lifetime goal to challenge authority figures and to encourage others to do the same. His marijuana consumption was legendary and he survived many police beatings. Also, he didn't really do love songs — he has a small handful across his whole career. He would also swear frequently, creating his own words like "shitstem".
• Muddy Waters: Most musicians in this list are sissies compared to this blues legend. Muddy sang with a Badass Boast the most virile and lustful songs of all time: "I Can't Be Satisfied", "I Just Want To Make Love To You", "I'm The Hoochie Coochie Man", "Mannish Boy", "I Got My Mojo Working",... all sang with a powerful voice and an electrified blues rock sound that paved the way for Rock & Roll as we know it. If you're still not convinced listen to The Anthology 1947-1972, a double album with the most essential recordings this blues legend made between 1947 and 1972.
• This song Manly Men by Greg Keeler highlights all the activities of manly men among manly manly men are we!

Mythology and Religion

• Ramayana is a lot of things, ranging from morality tales to story True Companions-hood. But ultimately, it's about the quest of a man of strength to get his woman back from a big hulking monster.
• Norse Mythology extols heroism, courage, loyalty, perseverance, sacrifice and more heroism. Contains lots of stories about slaying giants and assorted monsters. Ragnarok is basically one big Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny involving the whole pantheon, and everyone on Earth, except a pair of humans badass enough to survive and rebuild the human race and a few of Thor and Odin's children, ends up dying. Ironically, a ton of goddesses are thought to survive Ragnarok, meaning being feminine gives you a higher chance of surviving The End of the World as We Know It.
• Of all the books in The Bible, the first half of the Book of Judges is filled with the most testosterone (though the second half is more sad). There's Shamgar who killed 600 enemy soldiers with an ox goad, Deborah who hammered a tent pin in a guy's head, Ehud who stabbed a king in the gut after a badass one-liner, and Samson who most of all is freaking Samson!
• Zoroastrianism had a Spin-Off called Mithraism named for Mithras the sun god that got popular in The Roman Empire as a religion for soldiers.
• Aztec Mythology is practically the Macho Masochism religion that sounds like it was designed by metalheads, with its long list of ritual sacrifices ranging from blood-letting self-harm (possibly of your genitals) to human lives. The latter got to enter the Aztec's paradise afterlife.

Pinball

• Just about all of Steve Ritchie's pinball games fall under this. He even said on the promo video for The Getaway: High Speed II: "I don't do cute."
  • High Speed: How else can you describe a game centered on a high-speed police chase in an exotic car with a sexy blonde in the passenger seat?
    • Taken Up to Eleven with The Getaway: High Speed II, which adds a Supercharger, helicopters, and explosions to the mix.
  • F-14 Tomcat features fighter jets, an evil Russian General, his elite squadron, and lots and lots of explosions.
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day, of course, with steel, chrome, and killer robots everywhere.
    • Every inch of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines lives and breathes this trope — the playfield's predominantly red color scheme is broken up by the stainless steel ramps and chrome pipes everywhere, while the red-tinged backglass is only interrupted by the merciless Terminators glaring at you.
  • And then there's No Fear: Dangerous Sports, which is one big Extreme Sports Plot game.
• Hercules, which plays Barbarian Hero tropes to the hilt.
• Atari's Middle Earth has muscular men running around shirtless on a Lost World, battling Tyrannosaurus rex, giant apes, and Kaiju with nothing but Laser Blades and Ray Guns.
• Paragon has shirtless Barbarian Heroes, Distressed Damsels, and Hybrid Monsters trying to kill you everywhere.
• Lethal Weapon 3 qualifies, being full of explosions, car chases, gunfights, and people exploding into Ludicrous Gibs.
• KAZe's Last Gladiators has four tables dealing with warfare, knights, gladiatorial combat, and the Apocalypse, all to the accompaniment of over 80 hard rock theme tunes.
• Mac Attack has a team of commandos equipped with Jet Packs, a rocket-powered tank, and an Attack Base bristling with various large-bore cannons.
• In Operation: Thunder, the player leads a squadron of F-15 Strike Eagles and Stealth Fighters in an aerial assault against the enemy, blowing up large chunks of mountainous terrain along the way.
• Sega Pinball's Starship Troopers features a never-ending Bug War against Big Creepy-Crawlies, where the only option is to Nuke 'em and kill them all.
• Gottlieb's Raven was intended to be this, with a One-Woman Army fighting a horde of Mooks in a southeast Asian jungle. The actual execution left something to be desired.
• Spy Hunter has Agent GK and his Weaponized Car, Cool Plane, and Cool Boat engaging in Vehicular Combat against various enemies, accompanied by his lovely and lethal Distaff Counterpart partner.
• Unburdened from the movie's Indecisive Parody and Hidden Depths, the Last Action Hero pinball game is free to indulge itself in a nonstop barrage of explosions, gunfire, and action.

Tabletop Games

• The rules of Atlantis: The Second Age not only enable players to play their Heroes like this, but also greatly reward them for doing so. Acting cowardly and unheroic actually makes you lose experience, while you get extra experience for fighting with great style. Like slaying an enemy with your bare hands or while being naked. Instead of improving your character's abilities, you gain the ability to use increasingly large numbers of Hero Points to greatly boost any of your die rolls. The number of Hero Points you start with is relatively low, but you can always get more by going on a night of debauchery, cursing the gods, activating a disadvantage, or make expensive sacrifices. To fight the really big and dangerous monsters, you absolutely have to use lots of Hero Points to do things that could only possibly be done by those greatly favored by the gods.
• Exalted: Your predecessors kicked the ass of god-monster creators of the world itself. Now they are returning with an army of death and legions of demons, and it's your job to kick their ass again. The only thing right is what you declare as right yourself, you're beholden to no one, so get your swords/guns/big-badaboom-spells and start racking up the kills.
• In Nomine: Probably best summed up by a quote from its discussion list, in which GM Neel Krishnaswami describes the problem of getting PCs to properly fear the Devil Himself: "IN amplifies this effect, too. Take a standard starting PC. Straight off at bat he (or she) can kick butt, take names, and chew bubblegum — all at the same time. And after they're done icing the bad guys, they can stiffen the spines of the meek, bring hope to those on the brink, and win the hearts of all the cute girls (and cute guys, too) — all because they're *angels*, on a *divine mission from God Himself*. And just for icing on the cake, for pure overkill of cool, he (or she) has got Ray-bans, a flaming sword, and a fast motorcycle. Now, do you seriously expect this PC to freeze up and kiss a$$ just because the Prince of Darkness has shown up?"
• In a gameline that usually emphasises horror, vulnerability and inner conflict, Werewolf: The Apocalypse stands out as being supremely manly. Your character is a huge, shaggy, monstrous Blood Knight fighting in a Forever War against hordes of deformed monsters. The society you are part of is, accordingly, made up of scarred, eternally scowling veterans embarked in a constant battle of dominance where everyone tries to prove themselves a bigger badass than the rest.
  • And to put a hat on a hat, we have the Get of Fenris, which values itself as being the ultimate warrior tribe in an entire species of warriors (well, it's them and the Wendigo, really, but the Wendigo tend to be less boastful and more vengeful). Sworn to the destroyer wolf himself, the Get are hot-blooded beasts who believe that any conflict can be resolved if you just hit it hard enough.
• Traveller: This is a game about Cool Starships, Technology Porn, Settling the Frontier, Intrepid Merchants, Bold Explorers, Badass Armies, Proud Warrior Races and not uncommonly Stuff Blowing Up.
• Warhammer may not be as over-the-top as its erstwhile sci-fi spinoff, but it's no slouch in the manliness department.
  • In normal High Fantasy settings, the elves are somewhat effeminate, the humans resemble real-life humans, and the dwarves are manly. In Warhammer, the elves are manly, the humans are beyond manly, and the dwarves make Chuck Norris look like a milk-drinking wimp.
    • The Warriors of Chaos make them all look like dickless pansies. They're an incredibly muscular, bearded, daemon-worshiping, One-Man Army Viking warrior race who thrive in the most inhospitable areas of the Old World, and who are clad in spiky, skull-studded Conan gear. And their best fighter tend to be eight foot tall Norse demigods clad in really,really intimidating plate armour (with skulls and spikes everywhere), wielding weapons most men struggle to lift and who are able to wrestle Bloodthirsters to the ground.
  • The humans in Warhammer fight many of the same gargantuan demonic monstrosities as the humans of Warhammer 40,000, but instead of artillery and lasers they've got steel breastplates, matchlock muskets, and swords. They still win.
• Warhammer 40,000 is the manliest tabletop game, no, manliest THING in existence. From its fluff to the posing of its models, everything about 40K drips pure, unbridled, unfiltered, grimdark MANLINESS! Yes, that includes the women. Some examples include:
  • A demi-god revives a walking war engine the size of the Empire State Building simply by touching it and saying "BE HEALED, MACHINE SPIRIT!"
  • A crazed, speed-obsessed Ork ramps his kustom bike off a cliff and slams through 12 Void Shields to enter the nuclear core of a walking war engine the size of a building and kills the entire crew while he's still on fire from breaking the shields. The burning skulls of the engine's drivers are now mounted on that Ork's bike.
  • Ordinary men with flak jackets, laser guns, and standard issue balls of steel, battling metal zombies, gigantic all-devouring bug monsters, super-advanced aliens, ancient manipulators who have had thousands of years to perfect their methods of war, hulking psychotic genetically engineered warriors that live only to fight, and mindblowing horrors from beyond space and time...and sometimes managing to win. The fact that they've got some amazing tanks and truly badass leaders helps.
  • Gunnery Sergeant Harker of the Catachan Jungle Fighters, leader of the elite "Harker's Hellraisers". Harker was born on a jungle Death World so insanely dangerous that every settlement is fortified against the native predators (which include amongst other things, scorpions the size of tanks), every plant is toxic, and there is only a 25% chance that you will survive long enough to see your tenth birthday. Every person who comes from this planet is invariably going to be a tough and mean bastard, and Harker is considered the toughest and meanest of all of them. Harker's weapon of choice is a Heavy Bolter, which is an automatic cannon that fires .75 calibre explosive shells and usually requires a team of two men to operate as a fixed emplacement weapon. One time, Harker was attacked by a Tyranid Ravener, a terrifying serpentine monster that can easily rip a man limb from limb, and worse for Harker, the sudden attack knocked his weapon away; undeterred, Harker jumped on the thing's back, wrestled it to the floor and crushed its neck with his biceps.
  • Newborn infant travels through a Negative Space Wedgie unharmed, crash-lands on an icy hellhole and subsequently gets Raised by Wolves. Eventually he beats the most powerful human in existence in a drinking contest and then gets to lead an army of space Vikings across the galaxy. Face it, Leman Russ is the pure distilled essence of manliness.
  • The Orks and Space Wolves are basically entire factions of Manliness. To wit:
    • The Orks were inspired from Highschool Football hooligans while every other faction had it's roots in real-life armies (one of which is the Spartans). They only care about Fighting (shooting and smashing faces), Food and Fast Cars, and their form of promotion is beating the crap out of the boss. They've also managed to fire guns which had no triggers or bullets, made the color red into instant speed potions, and invented space travel using a junk pile.
    • The Space Wolves are all Drunken Boisterous Bruisers. They are the only faction to be considered "good" in the setting, mainly because their leader holds a Daemon Axe, and still managed to intimidate the Inquisition from hurting innocents through brute force. They also ride wolves into battle, wolves the size of cars, and one of their more notable members managed to get laid 12 times within one night. Everyone has a badass beard and prior to the Grey Knight retcon they were the only non-chaos faction to survive in the warp without turning evil.
    • Ah, but what are these two compared to Khorne and his followers? He's a god of war, rage, strength, martial honour, battle and single combat, and is depicted as an impossibly muscular warrior with a horned, wolf's head sitting atop a massive throne of skulls floating in an endless sea of blood and his plane of existence is basically a site of never ending conflict. And his worshipers are giant, axe brandishing, war loving Blood Knights who also tend to be the best melee combatants in the setting.
  • If ever there was a game that was made of pure 100% mansauce, Warhammer would be that game!
  • God himself could not sink this game!
  • A third-person shooter of the universe has been created called Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (starring the Space Marines, obviously). Even before it's release, the manliness of the game was already shown with footage of the Player Character jumping off the air transport he's on effortlessly when it was hit and losing altitude. Not only that but it has, among other things, cutting Orks in half with chainswords, shooting Orks in da face with bolters, shooting Orks tied to missiles who are shooting at you out of the sky, and stomping a downed Ork's skull in with your mighty power armored boot. This game is so manly, your balls will grow balls.
  • The Sisters of Battle. There is an entire army of nuns who go around armed with flamethrowers, chainsaw-swords and guns that fire explosive rounds the size of a human fist, and wear Powered Armor. They're also Large Hams who sing praises to the God-Emperor as they cut their enemies apart. Oh, and they're most assuredly not pretty little girls, either: the standard Sister is fearless, fanatically devoted, tough-as-nails, and their bodies are covered in scars earned from their Training from Hell, and the veterans are even more harsh and grizzled. In short, the women of the Warhammer 40000 universe are manlier than most men in other sci-fi universes.
  • Kharn The Betrayer, so manly that he was resurrected by Khorne for the purpose of spreading more blood and gore. He's not a Berserker, he's The Berserker, plus he effectively demolished TWO SPACE MARINE LEGIONS BY HIMSELF!
• WARMACHINE. Here is a quote:
  This is a game about aggression. This is the game of metal on metal combat. This is fuel injected power hopped up on steroids. This is WARMACHINE — the battle game that kicks so much ass we have to use all capital letters.

  Until the final book of the first edition, Legends, came out with "You have earned your pair".

Video Games

• Asura's Wrath is quickly becoming manliness embodied. The main character has as much raw rage as Kratos, if not more, and takes on demons, gods, demigods, and anything else that gets in his way with pure manliness and rage to keep him going. At one point he fights an enemy that is larger than the planet, gets into a punching contest with the enemy's finger that's so intense that he breaks his arms off, then kills the guy with one final punch. And this is just an early boss fight. The following boss fights are even crazier. The best part? Asura's reaction to being faced with an opponent the size of the planet and tries to crush him with a finger the size of a mountain? Bring It. Oh, and the next few levels, Asura fights enemies with just his feet, head, and rage, since he destroyed his arms taking out the last boss. But Asura doesn't care, that's more than enough. Asura only has five weapons: his fists, feet, head, his rage, and his planet sized cojones. In a bit of irony, the game itself is rated T and C in America and Japan respectively, though it is rated M and Pegi 18 in Australia and Europe.
• The Batman: Arkham Series offers the comic book fan's ultimate power fantasy: being Batman, beating up hordes of goons and using his resources and skills to save Gotham from itself.
• If you're into manly, dig up the old Blizzard Entertainment side-scrolling platformer Blackthorne and its eponymous protagonist, Kyle Blackthorne. His character is designed from top to bottom to be a chiseled rock of manliness with his action hero mode of dress to his choice of weapon to the fact he can Offhand Backhand someone with his shotgun with an unflinching sense of nonchalant and indifferent routine.
• Borderlands contains a truckload of outrageous and overpowered guns that the player is expected to use to atomize a wide variety of zany enemies in a quest for fame, fortune and even more guns.
• Broforce. It's a Contra inspired game where you take control of an assortment of parodies of (mostly) 80's/90's action heroes as you free the world from terrorists, aliens, and the undead in a relentless orgy of explosions, blood, and destruction. Just take a look at the trailer.
• Bulletstorm: if it's not the fact that a simple kick to the face can throw your target 10 yards away and the whole focus of the gameplay is to be as creative as possible with your frags, the main character's dialogue is a constant stream of swears and he even looks a bit like Wolverine. And talks like him. It frequently veers into outright parody.
• Castlevania: The old-school barbarian looking Simon, with the leather and crotch plate. The action figure/toy/collectible model/whatever you want to call it looks even more manly. Also, from Haunted Castle, fighting Dracula again to save his woman.
• Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is all about manly chivalric knights and manly Dirty Communists (who also put the "evil" in medieval") shouting manly battle cries and Badass Boasts at each other at maximum volume and ferocity while fighting manly medieval war. The plot is thin, sure, but do you really need one with a premise like that? Even the main menu theme will put hairs on your chest, guaranteed.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day: Even the money smokes cigars like a badass.
• One promotional tagline used for Crimzon Clover is "0% moe, 120% explosion", a Take That! at the trend of cutesy-character shmups such as Touhou Project.
• Contra: Despite being able to play as female characters (Sheena, Lucia, Tsugu-Min/Brownie, Krystal, Sayuri, Ricci, Sally), this game series demands you to be as manly as hell (Shoot everything that can be shot) to attain victory.
• The EXTREME trailer for Crusader Kings 2: The Old Gods: PAGANS! VIKINGS! BOATS! MAPS! PILLAGE! LOOT! SACRIFICE! BEARD!
• Dante's Inferno. A man's quest for redemption through hell itself to get his wife back, all while sporting a red cross he sewed into his own chest.
• In Darksiders: Wrath of War. You play The Horseman of War as he goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against both gun-wielding Angels and Demons with a BFS named Chaoseater as well as other demonic toys. It's basically Zelda with the sheer testosterone of the God of War games. You open chests by punching them. You open locked doors by stabbing them with knife keys.
• The first two Dead to Rights games fit this category. The Cowboy Cop Anti-Hero Jack Slate is a rugged individual with a Husky sidekick. He is brutal and ruthless in trying to solve mysteries, but shows slivers of vulnerability from time to time, especially in regards with his father. It is a bit hard to see those slivers through all the gallons of blood Jack spills over the course of the games.
• Dead Space: One man, alone, armed only with power tools, takes on a ship full of space zombies. And his most powerful weapon is his almighty boot.
  • In the future, the engineers are more badass than an entire warship full of armed soldiers.
  • In the future, flamethrowers are considered power tools. Possibly because, as weapons, they suck.
  • Dead Space 2 delivers even more Boot-on-Necromorph action.
• Deep Rock Galactic is a video game about a team of foul-mouth, beer-guzzling space Dwarves sent to a dark Death World to mine for rare minerals and mow down entire swarms of giant, monstrous bugs with military-graded weapons. And if that's not manly enough, there's the Abyss Bar where you can order beers for you and your teammates to either get buffs or get stone-drunk on your arses. And if you order the Leaf Lover's Special, you'll be shamed by your dwarven brethren for ordering a tree-hugging elf drink and not being a true, manly dwarf.
• The Devil May Cry series is all about Demon Slaying in stylish-as-hell Rule of Cool fashion. The playable characters' fighting styles also incorporate a lot of martial arts and kung-fu (Dante), Iaijutsu (Vergil), or wrestling (Nero). All of the games' music and songs also use rock and/or Badass Boasts.
• Disgaea 5 is probably the manliest of all the Disgaea games, notably in contrast to the previous game which had only one major male party member, but in this game, the majority of the cast are buff martial artists.
• Doom, although the comic goes a bit nuts with this and turns into Testosterone Poisoning.
  • The mod "Brutal Doom" is about as close as you can get to the line that divides this and Testosterone Poisoning (that is, it's so ridiculously gory and the protagonist can do things like rip monsters to shreds with his bare hands and provoke monsters by swearing and flipping them off that it almost feels like a parody, but it's so badass and Nintendo Hard that it just barely manages to keep a straight face). The fact a large part of its reason for existing is to bring the comic book's vision of Doom to life, particularly with its use of the phrase "rip and tear", contributes significantly to that.
  • Doom (2016): Oh HELL YES! Between the blood, the gore, the Glory Kills and the one-man onslaught against The Legions of Hell, DOOM is all about being a badass. Doom Eternal only increased the magnitude of badassery ^note  The final DLC adds a costume that lets the Slayer rend demons (and kill Satan) while dressed as Conan the Barbarian . RIP AND TEAR!
  • The soundtrack of the game itself is enough to grow hair on your chest. The fact that one of the main instruments is a SYNTHESIZED CHAINSAW hits hard that this isn't some peaceful game.
• Double Dragon, about two burly guys punching everyone who appears in front of them.
• Dragon Valor, a game about slaying dragons. Its intro really says it all.
• Dwarf Fortress adventure mode is so hilariously manly, it often goes to Testosterone Poisoning levels. Did you just lose your four limbs? NO PROBLEM! Go, crawl through the landscape and bite your foes to death! No healing for you, unless you are a werebeast!
  • You can wrestle bears and win. You can then throw these dead bears at other bears to kill more bears, even without limbs. Or even dual wield bear corpses and pummel your enemies with it!
  • Hell, even fortress mode is pretty manly. Mostly your legendary soldiers, who will become (if they don't die) so badass they can go and slaughter Eldritch Abominations on their own or entire goblin sieges, but your blacksmiths are generally pretty manly because they don't even need a hammer to work, they just hammer the metal with their fists.
  • Dwarves can ride a minecart while that minecart is full of lava. How's that for manliness?
  • Even your female dwarves can be very manly. Maternity break? What's that? They can give birth in the middle of an enemy siege and still completely curbstomp the siege!
  • Twelve-Year Favor. It's proof that Nightmare Fuel and Moment of Awesome can become one.
• Dynasty Warriors (aka Romance of the Three Kingdoms the game): Lu Bu, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei best exemplify this trope. Deng Ai, Sun Jian and Xiahou Dun as well. Also it's Japanese counterpart, which has Tadakatsu Honda, Magoichi Saika, Keiji Maeda, Miyamoto Musashi, and Yagyu Munenori who doesn't even have to draw his sword to kick your ass!
• The Elder Scrolls: Arena features a beefy man-among-men blacksmith who forges swords with nothing but his tight pants, Fabio hair and his thick, hardened muscles.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will go down in history as one of great examples of this trope. The game is set in a land of fantasy Vikings, now in the grip of civil war. Around you, a great empire has crumbled, and its remnant struggles against Nazi elves. The world is about to die, devoured by a dragon god whose reptile servants already roam the skies. And you're the legendary Dragonborn, the only one who can stop them. You kill dragons in droves and eat their souls to gain their might, while a barbarian choir chants a song about how awesome you are in DRAGON LANGUAGE. Did we mention that character creation includes an incredible number of options for facial hair?
  • The teaser trailer to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Narrated by Max Von Sydow with a Norse-inspired choir and orchestra in the background. Watch it here.
  • The trailer features a man weathering the full force of a dragon's flames with nothing but a metal shield, then shouting it down before summarily kicking its ass.
  • The live-action trailer is equally badass.
  • Worth pointing out that for Nords, being manly is practically their racial hat. They're big, they're burly, they're hairy (mostly), they love mead and fighting, and they call you a priss if you use magic. Not just the men, the women too.
  • If you are Imperial and wear heavy armour, Nord guards will remark that "you clang like a kitchen and should stay in one". If you're playing as an elf and use elven weapons and armour, you get mocked even more for using fancy moonstone weapons instead of real weapons made from "good old fashioned steel".
• Endless Frontier. The four male protagonists are a cop, a cowboy, and two badass martial artists. The females are a foxgirl, a demon-girl, two Robot Girls, and a pair of busty princesses for good measure. And to top if off, they got a half-dozen armored assault mecha for sidekicks.
• F-Zero; this game not only brings us Captain Falcon, but Samurai Goroh, Black Shadow, Super Arrow, and tons of other muscular masked racecar drivers. In a Japanese game with tons of characters, there is only one Bishōnen in the game (Jack Levin) and even he's manlier then most!
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, in that cheesy, over-the-top 80s sci-fi kind of way. Everything bleeds neon, lessening the impact, but gore is still copious.
• Final Fight. The main trio in the first game consists of a bare-knuckle brawler who punches a dude out of a thirty-story building for kidnapping his girlfriend (Cody), an extremely badass Ninja (Guy), and (last, but MOST CERTAINLY NOT LEAST) a politician (and father of said kidnapped woman) who cleans up crime... by piledriving thugs into the ground and introducing them to the concept of gravity (Haggar). Of course, it exists in the same world as Street Fighter, so go figure. Also, the other Haggar-centric series, Saturday Night Slam Masters. The WWE has nothing on this. Even the lone female is sure to emasculate many, even though she reveals herself to easily fulfill the fanservice quota.
• Full Throttle. Bikers, tattoos, metal, dogs, meat, rednecks, chainsaws, beer, knives, and bunnies.
• Gears of War and its sequels may as well be called "Rated M For Manly: The Game". Big hulking badasses deliver one liners while blowing stuff up and shooting whatever enemies get in their path. They're so tough, they can briefly make their guns stronger by reloading properly. The women within it might not be as large, but their alike activities make many other games' men seem effeminate by comparison.
• God Hand. Everything about God Hand is powered by 100% high-octane, weapons-grade, enriched testosterone, and 50% slapstick comedy. Yes, that is 150% of AWESOME. Therefore, God Hand probably straddles the line between this and Testosterone Poisoning.
• God of War:
  • In just the first 10 minutes of God of War, you get to make Kratos literally tear foes in half, rip the wings off of a harpy, gouge a Hydra head's eyeballs out, and impale another head on the mast of a ship. It only gets better from there...
  • In II, you start off by fighting the Colossus, a giant animated statue using a man that would bring Leonidas to his knees in shame, then just move on from there.
  • In III, you start off by fighting the leviathan, the apocalyptic living embodiment of the sea itself, as it is destroying the Titans who are climbing up Mount Olympus to wage war with the gods. Even more epic than it sounds. And then it's god slaughtering time.
  • The handheld version sets you off against a Cyclops as your first big boss. Well, that's understandable, smaller platforms gonna mean WHAT THE FUCK SOMETHING JUST ATE THE DAMN CYCLOPS!
• Golden Axe, basically a high fantasy beat em up game. There's a female character, but she's hot and dressed in a Chainmail Bikini.
• Grand Theft Auto: There is a mission structure but eschewing that and causing as much mayhem and chaos as you can is actively encouraged by the game itself. Abuse and trolling make you a man, violence torture and drug use make you a man, criminal activity makes you a man. Thing is it works, despite it being a Moral Guardians worst nightmare the series has had one critically acclaimed and best seller after another, with Grand Theft Auto V being the best...worst? example made in 2013 and still considered the biggest and best selling game ever made.
• Guilty Gear is a fighting game chock full of rock/metal music references. The main character is a tough-as-nails, swearing, rebellious, all-American Genius Bruiser Bounty Hunter who hunts down inhuman monsters with a Hot Blade that looks like a mix between a gas lighter and a cricket bat, and listens to Queen and builds awesome weapons in his spare time, and he can transform into a humanoid dragon.
• Gungrave. How about killing alien zombie gangsters with hand cannons on each hand and a BFG hanging from your back, or Katana fighting Tanks with a Blind Badass Longcoat wearing Deadpan Snarker (said katanas have pistols on the handles) or Electrocuting said Zombie alien gangsters with an electric guitar wielded by a Rocking Ghost that looks like a Vash The Stampede expy? and that is not counting the Bosses.
• You can say the whole Halo series represents this trope, especially when Master Chief appears in it; riding a bomb into an enemy warship is just the start of it. There's also this live-action trailer for Halo 3: ODST. Need we say more?
• The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction: You are The Hulk! And nothing can stop you! You can catch a cruise-missile mid-flight, and throw it at a robot the size of a building. You can skateboard on top of a bus, destroying everything in your path. You can crush a car into boxing gloves. You can smash your fists together so hard that everything in a hundred-foot radius of you is sent flying.
• Ketsui. This is CAVE's last game that uses a purely military aesthetic, and on top of that all named characters are male.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It's the first game in the series to be rated Teen (not that that necessarily means, mind you). Link can turn into a wolf, sumo-wrestles a Goron at one point, and uses his own physical strength more than ever before.
• Marathon: It's a 90's FPS where you blow away hordes of monsters almost singlehandedly with an absurd amount of firepower. Furthermore, a common feat done by skilled Marathoners is to run through a level and kill everything WITH YOUR BARE HANDS!
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2: In the words of Miranda Lawson "He's a hero, a bloody icon", obviously referring to Shepard. No better exemplified than when he headbutts a Krogan.
• Mercenaries: A game series about being one man or woman who almost singlehandedly dismantles regimes violently (the airstrikes, high-explosives, and various factions who pay you also helped). Everything Breaks to ensure you will get maximum satisfaction from Stuff Blowing Up.
• Metal Gear stars Solid Snake: A ruggedly handsome, tough-as-nails Anti-Hero stealth operative cloned from the Big Boss, the greatest soldier to have ever lived, with an IQ of 180 and fluency in six languages, a master of combat both unarmed and with weapons ranging from knives and pistols to sniper rifles and explosives, who travels the world to hunt down and destroy nuclear-armed Humongous Mecha to stop them falling into the hands of terrorists and rogue governments. He routinely faces whole armies and all manner of Super Soldiers with almost supernatural abilities, with just his skill and training. You bet your ass this series this manly. Although the characters are extremely manly and cool the series portrays a lot of the usual manliness tropes (like a penchant for committing flashy acts of violence, or not having emotions) as, at best, bad life choices, and at worst symptoms of actual mental disorders obtained through experiencing battlefield trauma. Also, as a Stealth-Based Game, it does not reward you blowing everything up. Usually.
• Metal Slug definitely qualifies. There's so much Stuff Blowing Up and More Dakka!
• Metal Wolf Chaos: President Michael Wilson must reclaim America using his All-American Mini-Mecha "Metal Wolf", a ton of guns, and HIS BURNING LOVE OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE!
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is probably the manliest adaptation of Tolkien's work yet. You, with a big-ass sword and dagger, can run around Mordor at your leisure decapitating Uruks in various brutal fashions, tame and ride ginormous Graugs and Caragors, all while on a quest to free the curse of an undead Wraith bonded to you permanently to avenge the murder of your wife and son, all while being able to cheat death in the face of your toughest enemies..
• Mortal Kombat is a game series that made it name via through excessive, over-the-top violence and Gorn, and every sequel continued to one-up the last in those regards; it's so over-the-top that it's Bloody Hilarious. Most famous about it is its fatalities feature, which allow you to render your opponent unto Ludicrous Gibs. FINISH HIM!!!
• NieR. The epitome of a Papa Wolf, a gruff, intimidating warrior willing to go through anything to save his daughter, in a desolate wasteland he continues to save even after he discovers his daughter cannot be cured. Also the cause for the shedding of many Manly Tears due to its nature. It's also worth noting that the protagonist was requested to be made manlier in the western release to appeal to American gamers.
• NieR: Automata, while certainly not without its sappier moments, has loads of Stuff Blowing Up, Hot-Blooded, hot female-modeled androids that would put any males to shame in combat, flying mechs that take down even bigger mechs, and a story that explores themes such as war, corruption, and prejudice.
• No More Heroes at times. We have Death Metal, covered in tattoos and with decorative bolts in his face. A little before you get to him there's a picture in his mansion of him sittin' with a hot woman. Destroyman, although insane, has a codpiece that fires super lasers. In the sequel, Travis himself gets a great manly moment in the form of one of his Dark Side powers, in which he turns into a friggin' tiger and shreds mooks to pieces. We also get Charlie McDonald, who fights alongside his throes of under-cleavage showing cheerleaders. Letz Shake returns as a robot that looks like a giant penis. Also, Travis's bikes, both of which are called the Schpeltiger.
• Painkiller:
  Painkiller is in the same bucket as Serious Sam and the original DOOMs in that it serves as an antidote to fancy-pants complex modern FPSes. There are no stealth elements, no key hunting, no escort quests, no dorky support characters dribbling in your ear, no mission objectives besides kill everyone. It's just you, some guns, and the entire population of Murdertown between you and where you need to be.
  - Yahtzee, severely Caustic Critic of Zero Punctuation.
• Postal and its sequels all feature a protagonist dressed in a leather trenchcoat, sunglasses and having a deep, manly voice. The manlyness of the games come from the high amounts of gore, hot chicks, Osama Bin Laden and the cool weapons you can use to slaughter your way through everyone, from shovels to a nuclear rocket launcher in the second game's expansion pack. Oh, and you can piss on everyone too.
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within: The Prince is always a badass, but never manlier than here, slicing and dicing people with Le Parkour, while metal music plays in the background.
• [PROTOTYPE]. Alex Mercer kung fu kicks helicopters and tackles tanks, making them explode!
• Pump It Up: This game allows you to choose a male announcer then jam to hip-hop songs about respect and power with names like "The Good Life" and "Like A Man" while looking at animations of overblown anime combat and gangsters. Classical Music is also abundant and features, among other things, cats piloting giant robots.
• Quake: You jump/fly around the world, gib everything in front of you and you die a lot. Imagine that, at infinite.
• Razing Storm features a hardcore metal soundtrack by Five Finger Death Punch and tons of awesome weaponry!
• Red Dead Redemption is the story of former outlaw John Marston, complete with facial scars and beard, taking up his guns once again at the behest of the US government to hunt down his former gangmates and rescue his family, cutting a bloody swathe through the US and Mexico as a One-Man Army. Red Dead Redemption II, the prequel set in the gang's heyday, features tall, handsome and sharp-witted also-One-Man Army Arthur Morgan as he robs banks, gets into shootouts and casually charms practically every woman he meets.
• Robot Unicorn Attack, featuring a chromed robotic unicorn chasing pastel-colored stars and jumping among fairies and dolphins while leaving rainbows in his wake, all set to Erasure's Always, plays with the trope by proudly invoking it as needed for the player to be able to play the game.
  "Is your masculinity threatened? Then you're not man enough to play."
• Ryse: Son of Rome: Play as a badass centurion who can cut foes down foes 300 style.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours. Imagine Tony managed to escape from the finale of the movie alive. He now remembers how he was the baddest mofo around, and it's your goal to make all of Miami and beyond take notice that Tony's back and he's BAD—by literally rebuilding your Reputation (your experience points in this game). Your manliness (which you can build by doing macho things like shooting guys in the nuts and making timely — and profane — taunts) is literally measured in "Balls", which you can then use to go into a brief Unstoppable Rage.
• Serious Sam. And if there's any doubt, the tagline for the third game is "No Cover, All Man"
• Shadow Warrior (2013) is all about leading a foul-mouthed, violent douchebag around to blast apart demonic invaders with an assortment of overpowered firearms, only this time it's Far Eastern Corporate Samurai badassery as opposed to Duke's all-American tough guy schtick.
• Shadowverse: It's not hard to find any card that falls into this category (since many of the male Swordcraft and Dragoncraft followers usually fall into this), but the most exaggerated example is neutral follower Gruff Mountaineer Captain, which can more or less be seen as a parody of this trope.
• Shatterhand, you're a dude in shades and a vest who runs around punching robots to death.
• The Soul Series is about warriors contesting over the titular Evil Weapon, Soul Edge. The game is famous for many things, among those being Fanservice: from a well-endowed ninja, an Evil Brit of a Dominatrix who fights with a Whip Sword to name a few. But one such example who embodies the trope is a Samurai named Heishiro Mitsurugi, who has a pathological urge for fighting stronger opponents, and even has the audacity to pick a fight with a Physical God to prove himself as the strongest.
• Spec Ops: The Line subverts this trope, using it to create an expectation in the player then pull the rug out from under them. At first, heroic, bad-ass-looking manly men from Delta Force go out to do manly things like save American troops in Dubai and shoot brown people in the face. They show no emotion except grim determination and professionalism as they announce, "Tango down!" and kick all kinds of ass. By the end, the characters are war criminals screaming with mad rage and terror. They shout, "I want him FUCKING DEAD!" at targets and howl like animals when hit. Their rugged good looks have been reduced to scarred, broken ghoulishness. Nervous breakdowns, freakouts, and PTSD-induced hallucinations start raining down from the character's shattered minds and morals. War Is Hell and possibly Hell Is War as the game deconstructs this trope — along with most tropes found in a modern war shooter video game. Then the game flatly delivers to the player a "The Reason You Suck" Speech just for wanting to live this kind of fantasy in the first place.
• The 2010 reboot of Splatterhouse features a heavy metal soundtrack and a trash-talking mask while you brutally beat your way through monsters.
• Streets of Rage, where even the hot Action Girl is manly.
• Super Robot Wars itself is nothing to sneeze at in this department. Given the amount of anime series with Hot Blood involved in most installments, it's no wonder that all the manliness rubs off on the most quiet or wimpy characters.
• Any of the Warcraft games, but specifically all installments with Samwise Didier as the main artist. Dear lord, even the elves are gigantic beefcakes you wouldn't find outside of a professional body builder contest. His profile on the Sons of the Storm website containing Blizzard artists' work flat-out says his style of art and favourite things to create are "Over-proportioned, primary colored, bulky armored dudes and monsters."
• StarCraft consists of chain-smoking space confederates fighting aliens with all factions involved dying in droves.
• Diablo features and One-Man Army heroes rendering demons and zombies unto loot pinatas en masse.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order. Built like a brickhouse, dual-wielding machine guns and singlehandedly taking on the entire Third Reich while speaking in a grizzled macho whisper, B.J. Blazkowicz is as manly as they come. The prequel, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, could be summarized as "the very latest in Nazi super-technology is beaten effortlessly by a shirtless Blazkowicz with a lead pipe".
• The Yakuza series is full of this trope. Men pulling their coats off in one swoop revealing tattooed backs and chisled frames ready to duke it out with their fists and whatever happens to be laying nearby. Angry screaming and sickening, bone crunching attack moves are in no short supply and the music just happens to be rocking during the action near constantly. Mix in some Manly Tears every so often and you've got a typical Yakuza game. A good example without any context required.

Visual Novels

• In Extracurricular Activities, the love interests are muscular anthropomorphic men whose physiques are ripped and it's surprising that they're playing tennis with the size of their bodies.

Web Animation

• Lobo (Webseries) features the titular character who embodies a dark and raunchy type of the joke. Lobo likes smoking, drinking and swearing. Almost all of the characters are male.
• Red vs. Blue, which takes the already manly Halo games, puts in a few characters who could give Master Chief a run for his money (on the good guys, Sarge and two women, Tex and Carolina; on the bad guys, O'Malley, The Meta, Felix and Locus) and some stupid comedy tailor fit for dudes.

Webcomics

• Hell Bastard Comix (or HellbastardComix) has a little of everything: demons, violence, pirates, pop culture references, violence, and deep love of alcohol (and also violence).
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things. So manly, it's in the title twice. One of the main ideas of the comics is that real manliness is being a good man on the inside, and that "manly man" and "loud obnoxious jackass" are not the same thing. It also introduces the idea of becoming so manly you enter another plane of existence:
  Commander: If you live yer life right, you reach a state of nirvmana where th' whole universe is in complete recognition of yer masculinity.

Websites

• Badass of the Week, in which every week the tale of a new badass is told; including real-life superspies, legendary warriors who kill monsters, and a guy who disarms live mines by whacking them with a pipewrench. Has its own page on this wiki, as befits its manliness. There are occasional articles about women as well, but those too are more manly than you will ever be.
• The Art of Manliness takes this to an artform, as the name implies.

Web Video

• Epic Meal Time is all about eating food that is gigantic and completely unhealthy, such as a lasagna made out of burgers and pizza, with food items that stretch into the hundreds of thousands of calories. The entire thing is hosted only by men, and their mascot is a silent dude-bro named Muscles Glasses who typically chomps down the things they make with his bare hands. Also, they add bacon strips (and bacon strips, and bacon strips) to every dish, and all the narration is done with emphasis on everything with intense music playing in the background.
• Robbaz: Played for Laughs. Robbaz likes to play up the image of a badass manly viking, but in a tongue-in-cheek way. This is most obvious in his Skyrim videos, where he refuses to fight any other way than with his fists. His idea of "manliness" also happens to include violent Comedic Sociopathy (to characters in games.)
• The "Macho Nachos" episode of You Suck at Cooking parodied this. The host suggests that only real men watch the episode, and gets rid of on-screen captions by punching them. While making the nachos, the host adds moisturizer to his hands, puts on nail polish, and tap dances to his fridge. After the nachos are done, he adds flowers to them.

Western Animation

• Beavis and Butt-Head like rock 'n' roll, heavy metal, gangsta rap, beer, cigarettes, breaking things, fighting, guns, explosions, Toilet Humour, fire, and girls with big boobs so they are pretty much wannabes for this trope. They obviously don't fit the trope, mind you. But they yearn to.
• Biker Mice from Mars, especially the original series, fits the bill. They ride motorcycles...check. Hardened survivors of a genocidal war carried out against their kind...check. Olympic athlete bodies, perpetually shirtless, and with superstrength...check. Hard rock intro...check. Their base is located under a baseball stadium and their diet consists of hot dogs and root beer (with the feeling that if the show wasn't for kids they'd drop the root part)...check. It's even sometimes lampshaded in the show itself. Who knows how many gay male furries this show and Street Sharks spawned in the '90s…
• The Argentinean animated movie called "Boogie The Oily One". It contains every single archetype from any kind of action film (film noir, western, gangster film, etc.), but combines it with lots and lots of Black Comedy.
• Exo Squad: Of all the cartoons in the 90's, this is the only one which has the most gratuitous amounts of Beam Spam, and explosions that can only be matched by Gundam.
• Extreme Dinosaurs has a seriously testosterone laced intro. Hard rock intro coupled with scenes of muscled-up dinosaurs fighting each other pretty much screams this trope.
• Iron Man makes this list once more. This is from the second season of his '90s cartoon, in which the show seriously grew the beard... or mullet, as the case may be. Face-melting guitar solo. Medieval-style blacksmithing — not merely without protective gear, but without a shirt. All the while "I! AM! IRON MAN!" roars in the background.
• Megas XLR. What's more manly, a Cool Car or a Super Robot? Apparently, the answer here is both.
• Metalocalypse: Subverted and played straight. The band deals with less "manly" issues like body image, abandonment issues, and group therapy, but they also make things that aren't really Capital M Manly and make them so, like coffee (which they will make blacker than the blackest black times infinity) or golf (which Nathan will play alone, hatefully, in a rainstorm).
• Primal (2019): The show takes place in a primordial world of dinosaurs and cavemen swarming with Prehistoric Monsters. The protagonist, Spear, is a tough, muscular caveman who hunts for food and gets into brutal and gory fights with predators on a daily basis. However, to balance out the violence, he was also a loving father to his children before their death, and often shows compassion, especially towards his Tyrannosaurus rex friend Fang.
• Rambo: The Force of Freedom, which features a scene where Rambo rides a missile, giving a thumbs up to a passing jet.
• Street Sharks. Seriously, what could be manlier than muscular mutant humanoids with shark heads and razor sharp teeth, and can chomp about anything hard as steel, going around riding motorcycles and bursting through walls every five seconds?!
• Throughout the The Transformers, we've been introduced to many, MANY, manly robots, but the most consist examples are Optimus Prime, and Megatron, the respective leaders of the Autobots, and Decepticons. Then there's Grimlock, leader of the Dinobots, he's a large, aggressive warrior who's weapon of choice is a superheated BFS and he transforms into a robotic fire breathing Tyrannosaurus rex.
• From The Venture Bros.: Brock Samson. He may not kill you with a gun, but he'll kill you with anything else he can get his hands on!! Reaches an apex in "Eeney, Meeney, Miney... Magic" where Brock enters a machine that shows people their deepest desires. He fights off a horde of ninjas with a knife, beats up cowboys wielding flamethrowers and riding T. rexes, whallops polarbears in cars with gatling guns, and has sex with Molotov Cocktease. Another borderline case of ''Testosterone'' Poisoning.

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