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Rule of Cool

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Death playing an electric guitar with a piece of his shattered scythe as the pick. Do you really need to question anything here?
The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness.

Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality as long as the result is wicked sweet or awesome. This applies to the audience in general; there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual. Also known in some circles as a "rad herring", in which something doesn't make sense within the guidelines of the story's reality, but it's too cool not to include it.

The Rule of Cool is another principle that seeks to dispel arguments among fans over implausibility in fiction. It has been cited by animation director Steve Loter (of Kim Possible, Clerks: The Animated Series, Tarzan, and American Dragon: Jake Long) in response to questions from fans attempting to justify temporary breaches in logical consistency. It is a complement to Bellisario's Maxim and the MST3K Mantra.

Of scientific laws that this trope circumvents, the third law of motion is probably the most frequently revoked, with the Square-Cube Law probably a close second. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is third and a mention has to go to the laws of relativity, which prevent us from attaining Faster-Than-Light Travel and going to a distant planet in just a few hours.

Note that you only get to invoke the Rule of Cool if the end product is, in fact, cool. Note also that different opinions on what is "cool" create the most arguments over this. The Rule of Cool is very subjective. Failure to properly use this trope can cause collision damage with walls.

Since it's subjective, it doesn't have to be cool in the sense of "Grim reaper on a mountain playing an electric guitar". The protagonist might not use guns because it's cooler to have them fight vampires with knives and stakes. You might have Missing Parent Syndrome because it would be weird to have parents with you on a road trip across the country. Basically, Rule of Cool works differently for whichever genre you're writing for.

There are no instances of this trope being justified, nor can there be — after all, the entire point is that it's about things that don't make sense but we still gladly accept just because they're cool.

You will need to refer to The Utterly and Completely Definitive Guide to Cool.

A Sub-Trope of Artistic License.

Sister Trope to Rule of Fun!

Compare The Power of Index, Cool of Rule, Rule of Funny, Rule of Scary, Rule of Drama, Rule of Romantic, Rule of Cute, Masculinity Tropes, Garnishing the Story.

Contrast Viewers Are Morons.

Also see:
    Sub-tropes 

Example Subpages:

Series that exist because of this rule:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • Some of the items sold by such catalogues as Skymall and The Bradford Exchange would never exist were it not for this trope. Here are a few examples:
  • There's an Orbitz commercial where a guy is watering his lawn, and a scientist-type from an earlier spot floats down in a hovercraft. Getting out, he strides over to the guy and removes an envelope from his coat.
    Scientist: Hi! You booked a flight and the price went down, so here's an Orbitz Price Assurance check for the difference.
    Guy: Thanks! But why didn't you just mail it?
    Scientist: [looks confused, points backward] We have a hovercraft.
  • The Droid phone commercials are all about the visually impressive Technology Porn. It is relevant? No, but it makes a big statement.
  • This Hahn Super Dry advertisement: "Super goes in, Super Dry comes out."
  • This six minute long ad for the Mercedes A-Class, which features a high-speed chase through a high-tech cyberpunk city with a food truck that only serves people who can catch it. How does it stay open when its entire business model involves running away from customers? Who cares?

    Anime & Manga 
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: The titular demon slayers are trained under varied swordsmanship styles, classified by Elemental Motifs with heavy visual embellishments matching those motifs. These embellishments are purely Stylized for the Viewer, with the author directly confirming that the elements are there just because the attacks look cooler that way.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure basically runs on this trope, since a lot of it's plot elements don't make much sense but were really awesome on the other side. The first part alone is about a man using a mysterious martial art that draws its power from the sun to fight his evil adoptive brother who used a stone mask that, when drenched in blood, grows thorns and actives acunputure points in the brain of its wearer, turning him into a vampire. And that's the starting Story Arc of nine.
  • Naruto:
    • Sasuke can start a fire with his eyes. Instead of just setting fire to the Juubi, he throws it, combining it with Naruto's Rasenshuriken, creating Scorch Release: Halo Hurricane Jet Black Arrow Style Zero (a.k.a. throwing star shaped like a windmill and arrow blacker than liqueur) to set fire to the Juubi.
    • Naruto also has the eight-tailed beast host who goes by the name "Killer Bee". He looks like someone straight out of the Wu-Tang Clan, raps and writes it down in the middle of battle, uses seven swords at once (holding them in such places as his armpit and between his neck and shoulder but not in either of his hands) which he uses by spinning around like a buzz saw, and transforms into a giant bull with octopus tentacles. Despite how weird that sounds, he was able to utterly rip Sasuke a new one. Then he later faked being captured by transforming into a severed tentacle and the actual tentacle into himself. This wasn't discovered until the Akatsuki were busy sealing what they thought was his tailed-beast ("...it's a tentacle"), making Sasuke and the entirety of Akatsuki look like a bunch of idiots. Then it turns out he used the opportunity to his benefit to go on vacation. Oh, and he nearly boom-headshots Kisame with a pencil that'd he'd been using to write lyrics. He also shoots a Bijuu Dama straight down the JUUBI'S THROAT while it's charging its attack.
  • Ninja Slayer: Everything and everyone is so over the top that it has to be seen to be believed. Just think "American '80s and '90s ninja movies" meets Gurren Lagann, and then taken to the next level.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: There is an in-universe reason for all the strange awesomeness but why would you care with such hammy hot blood and Humongous Mecha?
    • Everything the characters or mechs do, and even the laws of physics themselves, are subject to Rule Of Cool. The fight scenes especially make absolutely no logical sense whatsoever, but it really doesn't matter because they're so awesome.
    • Throwing galaxies like ninja stars.
    • Kamina, resident badass draws his trusty katana, and it keeps coming out of the sheath for ten feet, for no reason other than it looks cool while battling someone wielding a meat cleaver. The length of Kamina's sword seems directly proportional to the length of the speech he is making while drawing it.
    • The end of the anime is also a deconstruction of the Rule Of Cool via the Spiral Nemesis, the theoretical end of the universe via an overuse of Spiral Power (which is functionally the Rule Of Cool in Applied Phlebotinum form.) Simply put, being able to bend the laws of physics, probability and reality itself just because it'd be awesome would eventually cause reality itself to come undone. By the end of the anime, Simon resolves to prevent the Spiral Nemesis, starting with abandoning Spiral Power altogether (not even using it to resurrect Nia after her death even though he probably could) to Walk The Earth as his allies go on to use it more responsibly.
    • In the same vein, DOUBLE K, the buddy cop version of the anime, combines how Rule Of Cool driven both types of shows are.
  • Mazinger: Go Nagai explicitly said that this is the reason Mazinger Z (and as a result the Super Robot Genre) is what it is. He DID his research about science and technology, but ultimately he did what he thought seemed cooler.
  • Mazinger Z: Thus, we've got a Made of Indestructium eighteen-meter-tall humanoid war machine and Eldritch Abomination created by a Mad Scientist, piloted from within, powered with Applied Phlebotinum, equipped with Rocket Punches that can be thrown at the enemy, optical weaponry, corrosive gusts of wind and heat blasts capable of melting within seconds a monster made of metal, that can fly, swim and withstand a nuclear blast. It is also capable of being dunked in magma for a short while, and constantly fights robotic gladiators able to shoot lightning bolts and make 3-D mirages in thin air without a screen, flying medieval knights, whales loaded with nukes, three-headed dragons, giant crabs that set off earthquakes, Transforming Mecha that turn into giant landmines, Ninjas, archers, snipers and humanoids that can fly at Mach 6 speed. And that is without getting into some of the first Action Girls in anime, the Home Base equipped with a Beehive Barrier, the zombie cyborg Mooks, the ancient civilizations that built superweapons, one of the Co-Dragons that is a half-tiger cyborg, or the Super Villain Lair that in reality is a humongous Humongous Mecha disguised like an Island Base.
  • Great Mazinger: Great Mazinger has twin swords for Dual Wielding, Armed Legs, shoots lightning bolts, and its Rocket Punch rotates relentlessly to increase the punching strength (combining the trope with This Is a Drill and Spectacular Spinning). The Professor is a The Home Base's upper part can detach off the main building and fly, and the lower part can also detach off and swim through the ocean. The Big Bad is a God-Emperor, ruler of an ancient civilization Beneath the Earth, the Dragon-in-Chief is a giant Caped Mecha with a sword can cleave a mountain in half, and the Robeasts resemble beasts, ancient warriors or evil spirits. And one of their bases is a mobile Island Base that is a blooding volcano can erupt at will.
  • UFO Robo Grendizer: The main character is an alien prince that pilots the mechanical embodiment of his planet's god of war, that is armed with a double-edged scythe that emerges out of its shoulders, and it can be combined with devices allow it bury underground, swim or fly in space. When the main character wants to ride Grendizer, he leaps since a tall hatch and shouts loudly his name, transform his clothes into his Latex Space Suit as airborne.
  • Just how did mercurion work in Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry? What is it? All we know is it's Green. Why was the special ship pink, and what was with the big arm... Well, it looked cool.
  • Cowboy Bebop can be very confusing if taken on surface value, with only five episodes needed to tell the full narrative. Despite this fact, the entire twenty-six episodes remains a standard of great anime for it's smoothness, filmic style, well choreographed action sequences. This is only one element that enabled the show to succeed.
  • Samurai Champloo has little to no narrative and is often too weird or silly to be taken seriously. Fans like the show for its devil may care attitude and breakdancing samurai battles. The Boondocks television series was heavily inspired by Samurai Champloo and is one of the main reasons it was made in the first place.
  • Buso Renkin: Captain Bravo freely admits that his odd mannerisms and Large Ham public persona due to his belief that things are "cooler that way!"
  • Mobile Fighter G Gundam relies on this to set itself apart from the rest of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. Series director Imagawa said that by the second episode, he'd decided not to worry about whether or not anything made sense, just so long as it looked cool.
  • GaoGaiGar:
    • What else can you say about a series where a cyborg combines with an alien robot lion, a bullet train, a drill car, and a stealth fighter to form a Humonguous Robot that uses a space-warping screwdriver and a Hyperspace Mallet capable of turning whatever it strikes into light particles? And of course, the series features a rather famous Memetic Mutation to explain it all: "With courage, 1% becomes 100%!"
    • The Hyper Space Mallet came with several by virtue of being a transforming tank. Then it becomes a transforming triad of spaceships.
    • Mic Sounders' famous Tower Bridge Guitar Riff also qualifies. He literally defeats Percurio alone, by playing rock music on Tower Bridge. By using the bridge as a huge guitar, no less!
    • Soldato-J riding a torpedo through several walls, and hits one of the Primevals, who're about to finish off Guy. Not because he wants to save Guy, but because he wants to defeat the 31 Primevals and Guy himself.
    • Invoked in the preceding series, Brave Police J-Decker, as the reason the Build Tiger combined robot form has a tiger head on the chest.
  • Played with in Metal Fighter Miku. Early in the series, the team's mentor asks the girls to explain the purpose of the robot-like metal suits used in their wrestling league. After one team member gives a detailed explanation of the various computer systems and sensors built into the outfits, he dismisses it all with a simple "Because it looks cool!" In the end, it is revealed that his overarching goal has been to convince everyone to do away with all the pseudo-futuristic glitz and return the sport to the muscle-and-technique competition that wrestling is supposed to be.
  • Black Lagoon:
    • An anti-heroine who is able to backflip seven feet into the air, shoot three people dead mid-jump and has the vision range of a chameleon. She's taken out several speedboats chasing the Lagoon by jumping from each to each and shooting everyone on board, or making them shoot each other... all whilst listening to something that sounds like exercise music on an MP3 player.
    • A torpedo boat performing a joust against a gunship — and winning by using a boat-wreck as a ramp and torpedoing it mid-air!
    • A one-eyed seventy year old nun who runs a gun-smuggling 'church of violence' and whose weapon of choice is a golden Desert Eagle she fires one handed?
    • Roberta is a nigh unstoppable Shout-Out to the Terminator capable of surviving being squished into a shipping container by a multi-tonne muscle car and driving in a way that would make Mrs. Yukari proud... all without anything more than a crack in her Scary Shiny Glasses! Then, she engages Revy in a gunfight that somehow leads to explosions and electric arcs flashing above the shipping containers they're fighting among!
  • In an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the Major one-handedly fires a enormous .50-caliber sniper rifle and reloads the bolt-action by using her knee and the force of the recoil. Why one-handed? Because she's missing her other arm. Even considering the fact that she is a full-on cyborg, the scene borders on absurd but is it jaw-droppingly awesome? Yes, oh yes, oh yes....
  • Fist of the North Star, if examined with a critical eye, would collapse under the weight of its Fridge Logic... if not for how it essentially created the Rule Of Cool-based Shōnen series. It's hard to complain about the implausibility of the premise when you're trying to retrieve your jaw following the fight scenes.
  • Giant Robo. Giant mechas, supernaturally gifted fighters in sharp clothes and all rounded up by a pompous Wagnerian soundtrack.
  • Karas: How else can you explain the ludicrously overpowered kick-arse hero who can transform into a jet and a car to combat the rise of blood-drinking cyborg demons?
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion:
    • Erecting a sprawling civilian metropolis directly atop a military base that is certain to be attacked by aliens wielding doomsday weapons is just Saddamesque enough to be cool.
    • Skyskrapers slide down underground to hang from the roof of the Geofront whenever one of the aforementioned aliens turn up. This ends poorly but seeing them rise back above ground after a fight with that music is a CMOA.
    • The entire reason Hideki Anno decided to go with the name isn't because of religious symbolism, but because he thought the words sounded cool.
  • Dinosaur King. The plot involves cards that become dinosaurs (or dinosaurs that are cards) and an evil gang who wants to use them for world domination. Makes no sense? Watch one of the dinosaur fight scenes. All your complaints will be blown away by the sheer awesomeness of dinosaurs attacking each other with elemental powers.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
    • Jack Rakan based his entire fighting style on this. His moves include summoning a building-sized sword, surfing on a sword, and shattering a magical pocket dimension just by being awesome. It's repeatedly lampshaded by other characters.
      Chamo: This shouldn't be physically possible.
      Jack: It just takes a little spirit.
      [and...]
      Kotomi: He just ignores the laws of magic.
    • The Negi vs. Rakan fight. The ridiculous lengths that it goes to (Negi reveals that he is not left handed five times in a single chapter) would just be overkill if it weren't so freaking awesome.
  • The Prince of Tennis:
    • The Tezuka Zone, wherein Tezuka Kunimitsu doesn't move one step from wherever he is standing, and all balls, no matter how they are hit, are attracted to him.
    • Atobe Keigo's World of Ice, which attacks his opponent's weak spot... and takes the form of flying shards of ice. Yes, this is still about tennis.
    • Synchro is the ultimate doubles technique, during which doubles partners enter a trance-like state and are perfectly in tune with each other... and their eyes become swirling vortexes of color.
    • Tooyama Kintaro's Super Ultra Great Delicious Daisharin Yamaarashi is about as realistic as you would imagine from the name.
  • X/1999: Monou Fuuma destroys Ebisu Garden Plaza with empty soda cans and the power of his own awesomeness.
  • Code Geass:
    • Lelouch constantly uses Rule Of Cool to his advantage. He lampshades it saying that people don't give a damn about reason, but they can't resist miracles. However, this is more a case of Willing Suspension of Disbelief among characters than among the audience.
  • Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto: Essentially the entire premise for the show. Sakamoto frequently performs unlikely, or sometimes, outright impoossible acts.
  • Appleseed the fight scenes in second CGI movie ("Appleseed Ex Machina"), which opens and closes with combat sequences that would make a Cirque du Soleil-trained Green Beret turn flushed with jealousy and admiration.
  • Burst Angel: Jo, an awesome fighter, even if not sociable at all, can pilot a mecha as if it was her own body, do incredible stunts with weapons, and save her Damsel in Distress.
  • Sengoku Basara is set (theoretically) in the Sengoku Period but it features a Mecha Samurai who is twenty feet tall with a drill, Jet Pack and miniature treads on his feet, as well as a horse outfitted with motorcycle handlebars and a tailpipe.
  • FLCL has characters Dual Wielding guitars and a giant hand that is actually a giant spider cowboy robot whose arms are the hand's fingers.
  • Soul Eater's character designs are chock-full of martial arts, scythe-spinning and slicing through things at just about every given opportunity.
  • One Piece:
    • Several characters specifically invoke this trope, such as Luffy gaining power from an afro or Garp bursting through a wall because it's cooler than using the door.
    • One Piece ignores all laws of physics except when realism makes it more awesome, such as its treatment of Harmless Freezing.
  • Getter Robo:
    • Nothing, not even the sideburns, are realistic. No one notices because their heads are exploding from the incredible amount of awesome moments.
      ** In the original Getter Robo, How does the giant robot Texas Mack and its pilot Jack King move a giant UFO away from a city, so that its explosion won't kill everyone? This being a Super Robot show, you'd clearly use a Kamehame Hadoken attack to do the trick, right? Not so for Jack King, who has his giant robot ride a giant robot horse controlled by his dog, and then pulls the UFO with a lasso while shouting: "COME ON, SWEET UFO!"
    • The pilots in New Getter Robo are utterly bananas. By the end of the series they've become so crazy, powerful and, well, badass, the only logical step for the series to go in was for them to fight the four Buddhist Kings. Something they gladly do, with one of them acting completely berserk in the process.
  • Bleach:
    • The beginning of the Arrancar arc has the first 'fighting in mid-air' battles. It has a justification (soul reapers can walk on spirit particles) but it still counts because it's damn cool.
    • A specific example in soul society of bending the rule that meant they couldn't 'fly' in the first place - the Dynamic Entry into the cells where Rukia is held is assisted by a giant winged device that is ONLY useful in the Seireitei. A giant wing comes from nowhere while Ichigo radiates his badass aura, to the surprise of two captains, before discarding it and landing next to Rukia.
  • In Biomega, for its special forces Toha Heavy Industries makes a folding gun that shoots hypersonic projectiles using brain waves. With this thing, Zoichi takes out a handful of intercontinental ballistic missiles within a few minutes of launch.
  • Black Jack: Tezuka does not fail biology but that didn't stop him from making up crazy new stuff for the titular hero to deal with. For example, extracting a parasite from his intestines while under attack by dingoes.
  • Lampshaded in Brave Police J-Decker. Three of the main robots eventually combine to form a bigger robot called Build Tiger — which, appropriately enough, has a large tiger face in its chest. When asked why, the designer states: "Because it looks cool!"
  • My Bride is a Mermaid plays this for laughs. When ever a character wants to appear cool or impressive they Art Shift into a Kenshiro clone complete with Battle Aura.
  • Saint Seiya: It's hard to question the plot when bishonen in cosmic armor and eighties multicolour hair are beating the ever-loving stuffing out of each other for every reason under the sun, and with every attack under the sun too (from Mind Rape to Something about a Rose) whilst running up stairs and visiting Hades in time for tea. It's so much fun you just HAVE to go along with it!
  • Fate/stay night has this to thank for at least one difference from the original visual novel. In the game's Fate storyline (which the anime is primarily based on), one of the main villains of the series, Gilgamesh, approaches Saber and Shiro. After severely wounding Shiro, Saber launches a series of attacks at Gilgamesh, which he shrugs off with his armor, thereby averting Armor Is Useless. In the anime, this is replaced by Gilgamesh summoning swords from his Noble Phantasm, the Gate of Babylon, so that they block the path of Saber's swings, a method much more visually appealing than just having him stand there and take it.
  • In Pokémon Adventures, if something doesn't follow game mechanics, this is why, and no, we don't need humans getting directly involved in our Pokémon battles, up close and personal with the danger, but things sure do get a lot more awesome that way.
  • Final Fantasy: Unlimited: In relation to Kaze and his extremely long Magun summoning sequences. In Real Life it would be impractical but in the show it looks so cool!
  • Highschool of the Dead: Anime school girls with big knockers? Been there, done that. Anime school girls with big knockers... fighting hordes of zombies? SIGN ME UP!
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • There's no reason that turbo duels have to be played on motorcycles in Yu Gi Oh5ds. The format works just as well when played on a table. The anime pays lip service to it being important by stating that the more speed counters you have the faster you can go, but going faster has no tangible effect on the gamestate.
    • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL characters will regularly get sent flying back after taking a sufficiently powerful attack. While this would happen in the previous shows, there's no reason for it to happen here because the monsters aren't actually there. While the previous shows used holograms that actually had a limited capacity to affect the environment around them, duels in ZEXAL are conducted using augmented reality.
    • Maximum Monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS are so gigantic that when Neiru summoned his inside a museum, it actually caused physical damage to the building. Same for the game-winning attack launched by Yuga's own Maximum Monster monster. The damage to the building somehow disappeared along with the holograms at the end of the duel, implying the building being cut in half by a giant energy sword wasn't actually real.
  • Hellsing: Eldritch Abomination vampire serving the descendants of Abraham van Helsing versus a souped up exiled battalion of Ghostapo Nazi vampires who wage war for fun led by an Ax-Crazy SS-Major versus a secret catholic organisation and their crazy Catholic paladin.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist: When Mustang fights Envy he continuously snaps to continue burning him to death. However, he ignites Envy with the first attack, making the snap unneeded due to how his alchemy functions, by changing the explosive gas concentration in the air. The snaps are added purely to make Mustang look cool as he roasts Envy alive.
  • In Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the fight sequences (long enough that you can consider the other scenes "non-fight sequences") consist entirely of "cool", and little to no realism. Just a few examples:
    • During one of the motorcycle fights, Loz leans over, digs his piston-powered gauntlet into the pavement, then swings around on it, with his bike clamped between his legs, to throw the whole bike at the hero with beyond-lethal velocity.
    • The hero is thrown several hundred feet into the air by his friends (one of which is a GHOST) in order to slice a dragon god in half with his sword.
    • Part of the final fight has the hero and the Big Bad swordfighting while jumping and balancing on slabs of a falling building, to a soundtrack of hammering electric guitar with a chanting Latin chorus.
    • Nomura has gone on record by saying he told The Team to ignore the laws of physics and just do what looked coolest.
    • Advent Children is what happens if you take a Final Fantasy game and make every attack a Limit Break. Alternatively, it's an answer to the question, "Just what would it really look like to have level 99 characters who can kill just about anything?" In a game, much of that is covered by numbers increasing, but the movie shows that kind of personal power in practice.
  • Transformers: Cybertron. Half Rule of Cool, half very long commercials for the toyline. 100% awesome.
  • Science Ninja Team Gatchaman: A huge sea/air/spaceplane turning into a giant bird of flame. To take down giant mecha. Hinotori or Firey Phoenix or Firebird mode, it is awesome. And then there was the episode with the Icebird.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • You have a race of space pirates that transform into giant apes or golden haired Gods battling slug people that can regenerate limbs and materialize anything using their antenna, a pink Djinn that can turn anything into candy, an intergalactic, racist realestate speculator and giant humanoid cicada created from stolen DNA because... why not!
    • Zen-o evokes the rule in his tournaments. If it's cool, he's okay with it.
    • Goku, when he wasn't defeating armies on his own armed with only a magic pole and a flying cloud, he was transforming into a giant Ape and destroying anything in his path, using air to one shot his opponents, kicking peoples asses with rock-paper-scissors, using his tail to fly like a helicopter, flying into the air and punching holes through demon aliens with only one arm and using his power pole to sodomize a ninja. And this stuff happened when he was a child.
    • Tao Pai Pai killed a man with his tongue and he did this during his debut in the show. He later taps a pillar and breaks it out, while leaving the building completely intact then throws the pillar and jumps onto it while it's moving. Tao Pai Pai's only comment on that matter is, "Who needs a jet when when we've got a perfectly good pillar."
    • Vegeta turned Saibamen into pulp and made Cui explode like a firework by just pointing at them and did it so casually.
    • Pretty much all of the Ginyu Force, even Guldo, who can stop time by apparently holding his breath. Recoome is a standout example though, having fought Vegeta, Krillin and Gohan back-to-back in a manner that gave the impression of casual invincibility - part praising, part mocking and all around toying with his opponents, hamming it up throughout.
    • Freeza impaled Krillin in the chest with one of his horns on his head and then started to shift his head up and down, further injuring Krillin and causing more blood to leak out of him, used a paintball style Beam Spam on Piccolo, threw a mountain at Goku using his mind and imprisoned Goku in an golden sphere of energy and then toyed around with like a soccer ball and made Krillin implode from the inside out without touching him.
    • Gotenks, not counting the Awesome Ego nonwithstanding, he is able to tear dimensions with his scream, his attacks are summoning explosive ghosts and even turns Super Buu into a ball at one point to be played in a game of catch.
      • Not to mention his ability to turn Super Saiyan 3 with little effort, actually managing it better than the person who showed them the technique. The person in question, Goku in comparison finds the transformation exhausting and it takes everything to draw out its power in an all out battle.
    • Vegito is even more ridiculous, while overpowered on his own, even by the show's standards, he manages to deal humiliating damage to Buu after being turned into a chocolate jawbreaker, noting that normally one can't move or think, let alone speak well enough to taunt Buu some more.
    • Majin Buu as a whole is literally made of Crazy Is Cool and with each new form, the amount of crazy awesomenss he produces skyrockets:
      • Fat Buu turned Dabura, the King of the Demon Realm, into a cookie and then ate him, destroyed a city by breathing at it and turned dozens of humans into clay and used that clay to build his own house.
      • Super Buu goes even further. The first thing he does in his debut is kill a psychopathic gunman by pouring himself down the gunmen's throat until he explodes, while laughing. Then he murdered the entire human race in under a minute without having to move an inch by firing billions of ki blasts into the air. Oh, and he did this out of boredom. To cap off his crazy awesomeness when Piccolo attempts to outsmart Buu by blowing up the entrance to the time chamber, locking him in the pocket dimension. Buu's response is to tear a hole between the dimensions and escape.
      • Kid Buu is completely unrestrained in battle; his fighting involves Beam Spam while using Self-Duplication stretching his limbs to extreme lengths and even taking time to whistle or beat his chest in midst battle. And unlike most villains who are Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy, Kid Buu is too crazy to care about ego and how to attack.
    • Broly, being a massive Breakout Character, who is a Super Saiyan Blood Knight who uses sheer Super-Strength, and not any fancy moves to make the Z Fighters look like amateurs for most of the fight
    • Janemba, who releases all the denizens of Hell at one point, while turning the Afterlife into a jelly bean dimension, creating a clone of Goku to counter the Kamehameha technique, a bunch of clones and control of inter dimensional portals to launch attacks. After going One-Winged Angel, he enhances his dimensional portals to teleportation, beats a Super Saiyan 3 Goku, a feat that the aforementioned Kid Buu couldn't pull off and has a sword that cuts through dimensions from the swipes of the sword
    • Beerus, used King Vegeta's head as a footstool in front of his own son Prince Vegeta while making him treat him to an Eight-Course Banquet, curbstomped Super Saiyan 3 Goku with a single chop on the back of the knock, used chopsticks to defeat Tien and knock Piccolo out with pressure point attacks, defeats Super Gotenks by spanking him, effortlessly defeats Vegeta with a single pressure point attack to the forehead and one shot all the other Z-Fighters including Android 18, Ultimate Gohan and Majin Buu. Oh, and he also needs the sounds of multiple bombs exploding continuously and simultaneously just to wake up.
  • Attack on Titan: 3DMG in reality would encounter much the same problem jetpacks do, not enough fuel. And operating one safely, forget it. Damn if it doesn't look cool though.
  • Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!: Happens In-Universe with the title character, who can shapeshift instantly with just a thought, but deliberately gave herself a full-fledged Transformation Sequence into her combat form entirely because she's a massive Otaku who thinks that sort of stuff looks awesome. This is also the reason her combat form resembles a combination of the Knight Blazer and a Kamen Rider, rather than anything more Lovecraftian.
  • Full Metal Panic!: Sousuke Sagara certainly has innovative methods to solve every situation. For example, when a guy wanted to blackmail Kaname by putting less-than-idolized pictures of her onto the internet, how did Sousuke stopped him? He unleashed a freakin' EMP blast and destroyed every piece of electronics in the school. Or a more radical example: when a Hind was chasing his Humongous Mecha, how did he got rid of it? He threw Kaname high up into the air without warning to free up his mecha's hand, took out the Hind with a knife thrown into the cockpit then safely caught the screaming girl on her way down. As awesome as it was, it put even Sousuke on edge - not because of any danger to her but because she's a Tsundere and he knows how she'll react once she wakes up from fright-induced unconsciousness.
  • Gals! has Tatsuki Kuroi, who makes a habit of doing rather stupid things in an awesome way (and them to work out in the end). The best example is that time the train from Machida (where he lives) to Shibuya (where his girlfriend and protagonist Ran lives) was down and he needed to go to her: instead of waiting for the train to come back on line he borrowed a bike, pedaled for over a hour, and just as Ran said out loud that Tatsuki had once promised he'd fly to her if she ever needed he took off, flew and landed before her, all in more time that it would have taken by waiting for the train and taking that.

    Art 

    Comedy 
  • This was also Denis Leary reacting to his new super-hi-tech stereo system on the Lock and Load album.
    "...and the other stuff where you don't even know what it does but it looks fuckin' great! It's reeeeally shinyyy."

    Comic Books 
  • The reason for the existence of superheroes in general. Superman became Mr. New Powers as the Plot Demands during the forties and fifties because it fulfilled Rule of Cool for the target demographic. This is also the reason why Batman will always have a T. rex and a giant penny in the Batcave even as he shifts between Darker and Edgier and Lighter and Softer. Damn near every superpower or fantastic element needs Rule of Cool to shield it from an onslaught of logic-wielding refrigerators, although a few hits will get through, usually aimed at Superman's disguise or how Spider-Man can stick to surfaces.
  • Blackest Night with its Zombie Lantern Superheroes, Superman suddenly being the general of a 1000+ Kryptonian army, and so on. Silver Age influences have crept into the Modern Age.
  • The premise of Godyssey would not work from a theological perspective but there's no denying that it's really really cool. It is thus; The Greek pantheon appears before Jesus on the cross and demands that he stop mocking divinity by renouncing the low and filthy mortals he serves. Jesus responds by removing himself from the cross and beating the shit out of them all.
  • The Incredible Hulk: The Red Hulk punched a Watcher during one of his "sworn only to watch, never interfere" speeches to the reader. Why? Jeph Loeb.
  • This is the canonical explanation for the name of The Avengers. What are they avenging? Nothing; the Wasp off-handedly suggested the name, and Ant-Man decided that it sounded cool.
  • Hitman (1993): How else do you describe a plot about a professional killer from Gotham City who got superpowers after being bit by an alien parasite having to deal with everything from demons with magic guns to zombified zoo animals?
  • Super Dinosaur: How else can one explain a series about a T-rex who wears battle armors to fight dinosaur mutants armed with BFGs or BFSs?
  • Cadillacs And Dinosaurs is lampshading this from its very title. Caddillacs and Dinousarurs are cool.
  • Revival is a gritty, realistic look at a fantastic situation. Then the Amish ninja assassin and her equally-Amish ninja assassin tween daughter appear to kick ass and take names. Only the flimsiest explanation is offered: she was born Amish, got pregnant, got stabbed by a ninja, got better, then the ninja trained her.
  • Rex the Wonder Dog is made of this. Initially, he was simply an ordinary, non-talking non-magical dog that could fish using a rod and reel, drive cars and boats, had a successful career as a newspaper photographer, and once killed a T. rex using a nuclear bomb. Then it was revealed that he was an decorated war hero from World War II, and a Super-Soldier with a similar origin to Captain America. Then, after all the newspaper photography career and T. rex killing, he drank from the fountain of youth, gaining the ability to speak the language of every thing that lives on planet Earth, as well as eternal youth and unspecified magical powers noted to be among the strongest on Earth.
  • Superman: Lex Luthor, especially in the Silver Age. He once cured cancer just to trick Superman into believing that he'd reformed. Plus, he's a normal human who is the greatest enemy of one of the most powerful superheroes ever created.
  • Transformers Ongoing:
    • Issue 23 gives us Orion Pax (Optimus Prime before he had the Matrix), a tough no-nonsense police captain who, when his subordinates are murdered by senate goons trying to free Whirl (a bullying officer under Prime who himself was jailed for beating on a wrongfully-incarcerated pre-evil Megatron), ends up having to use the corpse of his lieutenant Springarm in motorcycle mode to dispatch of the two goons... one of them by tearing one of his smokestacks off his shoulder and stabbing it in said goon's face. He bought the time to even come up with this plan by grabbing his stacks of Autobot badge awards off the shelf and using them as improvised throwing weapons; why they were given such sharp edges is anyone's guess.
      • And after this, his immediate reaction is to march over to the Senate building, wade through their army of paranoid and heavily armed security guards, just so he can scold the Senate for being a bunch of dicks. His reaction to two goons trying to drag him out is to just get irritated and demand he be allowed to finish asking how the Cybertronian people can get rid of the Senate.
    • Whirl. It's mentioned in More Than Meets The Eye that he punched himself in the fact to prove that he's super invincible. He also has a habit of introducing himself by saying he has "no known weaknesses". When he and Rung were once held hostage by Fortress Maximus, he defuses the situation by straight-up telling Fort Max to shoot him.
    • Hot Rod/Rodimus proves himself no slouch in the first issue he appears in, back in Spotlight: Hot Rod, when he manages to infiltrate the most secure and brutal prison the Decepticons have by surfing on a meteor.
  • Used In-Universe in NextWave, where the S.I.L.E.N.T. terrorism cell and the Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort organization both build superweapons almost entirely based on how cool they are, which annoys the Straight Man characters in the comic like Monica Rambeau who finds the over-the-top nature of their opponents annoying. At one point one of the protagonists (Elsa Bloodstone) comes across a squad of samurai robot soldiers and promptly discards her handguns, realizing that In-Universe there is no way something as mundane as a 'gun' could beat samurai robots. She then dismantles the squad with a shovel.

    Fan Works 
  • The Angry Marines◊, a homebrewed chapter of Warhammer 40 K Space Marines, fought a Greater Daemon of the Chaos God Nurgle to a near standstill, throwing everything they could at it. Then, when that was not enough, they threw what they couldn't: Their Battle Barge, The Litany Of Litany's Litany. That shut the demon up. Just long enough for them to hit it with a second battle barge, The Maximum Fuck. And the Angry Marines may or may not have been rocking out on it while it descended in flames upon the demon's head.
  • Calvin & Hobbes: The Series changes the simple mood of the original strip to a decidedly more action-packed one with a lot of lampshades concerning its use of this trope.
  • The Chrono Cross fanfic Heaven-Smiting Masked Magician is about Black Mage Guile going to outer space without supporting equipment to destroy an incoming meteor that lies beyond the Moon. He gets past the Earth's atmosphere without getting fried up by flying as fast as a rocket (with of course, a massive speed boost by blasting the ground with a Kamehame Hadoken). He then reaches the meteor by using the thrust resulted from blasting the surface of the moon with a Kamehame Hadoken (similar to how he gets past the atmosphere safely). He finally returns to Earth by using the recoil from the energy blast he fires at the meteor, destroying the meteor as well.
  • Ichigo in The First Guardian operates on this. He purposely grows his hair to look like a shonen hero, actually tries to attach speakers to his Shinigami outfit so he can have his theme song (which is "Number One" of course) playing when he fights, constantly talks to his just as crazy Zanpakuto and chooses to do things based on "coolness factor". On the other hand, his crazy way of thinking allows him to enhance his Zanpakuto in various ways (from gathering spirit particles to strengthen it a la Quincy style, shaking the particles already in there to, temporally, turn his blade into fire, and to shape shifting it into different forms) without even showing shikai yet. And, no, his Zanpakuto isn't Zangetsu. And that's only a small sample of the awesome stuff he does.
  • Game Theory deconstructs this trope rather harshly. Nanoha's crazy, reckless plans tend to backfire horribly with serious consequences.
    Aleph: One of the things that Game Theory has as a major theme is that Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs, and that doing something crazy-awesome and insane... is crazy and insane, and doesn't have to work just because it's the hero doing it.
  • HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH freely dispenses with both the Harry Potter canon and narrative logic wherever it can conceive of something ten times more awesome.
  • In the Pokémon fanfic A Mid-Sinnoh Night's Dream, well, the protagonist's partner Pokemon turns into the Gurren Lagann on multiple occasions, a Pint-Sized Powerhouse sends an opponent into the stratosphere, and a Pikachu is heavily implied to run some sort of mafia. Does any of it make sense? What? Just who the hell do you think they are?
  • In the Warhammer 40,000 fanfic P*R*I*M*A*R*C*H*S, Everything the titular Primarchs do: using skyscrapers as swords? Drop kicking the moon on someone? Using the Death Star as a baseball bat? Powered Armor which doubles as a Chain Mail Bikini? Dissing the authors of the work? All of it!
  • Queen of All Oni: This is how Jade picks all her plan names, regardless of the actual content of the plan, leading to some nonsensical names.
  • Most of Sonic X: Dark Chaos runs on this with a generous topping of Darker and Edgier and graphic violence out the wazoo. From battlestations the size of stars to six-necked demonic guitars that can blast warships apart to murderous killer androids to Dragon Ball-esque Chaos powers, it's here. According to Word of God, most of the physics and science run on this too.

    Films — Animation 
  • The entire Alpha and Omega, especially the wolf characters. Unlike most people who believe this is a mistake. A majority of the wolves have Anime Hair and a few have eye colors discommon to actual wolves. This also includes wolf society portrayed on this movie.
  • Fantasia: The battle between the Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex could never have happened, given that the species were separated by 77 million years at the very least. That's not to mention a few anatomy errors of both. But no one's complaining. Wicked music, great animation, incredible synchronization? Sit back and relax.
  • Be Prepared, Scar's song from The Lion King (1994) has the ground lifting up to the moon while Scar and the Hyenas are standing on it to make a menacing tower, in addition to lots of green lighting and smoke coming out of the ground. Why? Because it's COOL!
  • As to be expected, Kung Fu Panda takes Artistic License – Martial Arts and runs with it. The Furious Five fighting Tai Lung on a robe bridge, Tai Lung fighting Shifu with his paws on fire, and Po using tai chi to redirect cannonballs is just the tip of the iceburg.
  • My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks: Yeah, there is absolutely no way DJ Pon-3's transformer car and BASS CANNON could be seriously explained within the context of the movie. Do we care? NO! It's just too awesome.
  • An in-story example appears in Toy Story: Almost no-one (Woody being the exception) calls out Buzz Lightyear on his delusion about being a real space hero as opposed to a toy, because he's just that cool.
  • Toy Story 2 and Finding Dory both contain scenes with characters with no driving experience whatsoever somehow managing to successfully drive vehicles on busy roads to their destination by working together despite being a assortment of living toys in the former, and a fish and a octopus in the latter. The audience is supposed to accept these scenes because of this trope and Rule of Funny, and judging by how successful both films are, it worked, or at least was tolerated by most people despite being completely ridiculous scenes.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Bounty built for the 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty was twice the size of the real ship. Occasionally, replicas of old warships are made slightly larger to accommodate the taller sailors of today, but never to this extent.
  • The 1963 Sword and Sandal epic Jason and the Argonauts features what has been called one of the greatest Final Battle sequences in film history, and certainly the greatest stop-motion fight sequence in film history. Ray Harryhausen's previous film, the 1958 The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, featured a sword fight scene between the hero and an evil sorcerer's animated skeleton; it went down so well that for his next film he decided to up the ante and do three heroes fighting seven skeletons.
  • Six String Samurai. After the Russians nuke everything, Elvis becomes King of the remains of Lost Vegas. A samurai Buddy Holly battles Slash to claim his throne. "Only one man can kill so many Russians. Bring his guitar to me!"
  • Crank: Near the end of the first film after Chase is disarmed, he makes a gun out of his finger and thumb, points it at a guy, goes "Bang" and it kills him. It turns out to be his backup, but for a few seconds everyone watching the movie went "Mind bullets...?! Okay, mind bullets, let's go with that."
  • The Matrix: The premise involves robots imprisoning humans into a computer generated Platonic Cave. However, most of the series involves rebellious philosophers in Badass Longcoats fighting artificially-intelligent Agent programs in corporate attire, all through Martial Arts. In Slow Motion. It also helps that the Wachowski sisters' inspiration for creating the trilogy was Anime.
    • The rooftop scene where Neo first dodges bullets. Trinity puts a gun to the agent’s head, and says “dodge this” before shooting. Which would of course have given the agent time to duck… if it wasn’t so damn cool.
    • The famous lobby scene. There was no reason for them to be there except for a cool shootout.
    • Neo draws his sunglasses before he starts to fight Smith. THAT is the Rule Of Cool in action.
    • This trope is the sole reason the "Burly Brawl" scene in Reloaded exists. It's ten minutes of Neo fighting endless clones of Smith for no real plot-enhancing reason. It just looks cool.
    • When Neo kicks Agent Smith and then instead of taking his foot down, he moves it in air and then put it down. Totally Frigging Cool.
    • The Agents (and later Neo's) ability to dodge bullets is never replicated to dodging much slower punches and kicks. This is due to Rule Of Cool, because if they did the fights would last all of five seconds.
  • GoldenEye: The Chase Scene. Yes, that chase scene.
  • Transformers: There is no other reason for these films to exist or for anyone to watch them except that Giant Transforming Robots are inherently cool. It could be argued that Michael Bay's career rests on taking a premise and making it cool.
  • In the second Austin Powers movie, Basil Exposition turns to the camera and tells the audience not to get upset about any contradictions in the Time Travel plot of the story. Why? Because we have a secret agent using a time machine to go back to the sixities and fight a evil mastermind in his secret volcano lair.
  • The Star Wars franchise has many:
    • The Phantom Menace:
      • It has impenetrable force-fields that turn on at the most dramatically convenient times.
      • Why does Darth Maul use a polearm lightsaber? Why not?
    • Similarly, Kylo Ren's saber from the sequel trilogy. What's even better than a lightsaber? A lightsaber with two other lightsabers shooting out of the handle perpendicular to the blade, making it look like a medieval longsword. Justified in that the design requires plasma to be vented out due to the damaged crystal within, it offers more hand protection than the traditional saber, and that Ren uses the crossguard to injure his opponents while in a Blade Lock.
    • The revelation in Attack of the Clones that R2-D2 had the ability to fly was cheered enthusiastically, even though he never showed this ability in the original trilogy.
    • General Grievous would not exist were it not for this trope. An evil alien cyborg general with four arms who hunts Jedi for sport? Hell yes!
    • Clone Wars: You once see the same weapon on the Millennium Falcon being carried around by a single ARC trooper, and instead of using four arms, Grievous juggles four light-sabers around between his hands and prehensile feet (albeit as an "unwelcome surprise"), making for some of the best fights in Star Wars history.
    • Lightsabers, themselves. They're swords and lasers. They cut through most everything.
    • Basically, all forms of combat featured in Star Wars are glowy sci-fi futuristic space versions of some form of Real Life combat that was (and is) considered to be extremely cool. Lightsaber duels? Swordfighting. Starfighters? Old School Dogfighting. Starship battles? Naval battles. The Clone Wars? Huge armies tearing each other apart. The Force and Force-based Psychic Powers only add more awesome to the mix.
    • The reason why Darth Vader is still in his suit by the time the original trilogy rolls around is obviously because of how cool he looks in his suit.
    • The AT-AT Walkers' practical problems include: high center of gravity, multiple fully-exposed points of failure, extremely poor visibility, severe weakness in that they can be easily tripped up and disabled, offensive weapons which only point forward, no way to defend against an attack from below... the list goes on and on. In a nutshell, these machines would be far less effective in battle than a modern tank but they are undeniably cool.
    • Why is the planet Crait in The Last Jedi a red mineral planet covered with a layer of white salt? Because the visual of geysers of red earth exploding from beneath the white surface looks FREAKIN' AWESOME!
    • In The Rise of Skywalker Poe puts the Millennium Falcon and his gang all at risk through hyperspace skipping (AKA lightspeed skipping) while evading the First Order TIE Fighters. Does it, in a way, go against what Han Solo said about space travel A New Hope? Maybe. But is it epic and intense? Most definitely.
  • Anything Quentin Tarantino is involved in. For instance:
    • The end of Four Rooms, has the most understated rule of cool bet ever. For a $1000 tip, the bellboy wields the ax in a car-or-pinky-finger bet about whether or not one of the guys can start his lucky Zippo lighter 10 times. Chop, snatch and strut out the door.
    • Inglourious Basterds. It's not tactically smart to try guerrilla warfare when you don't have the home advantage, but is it badass? Hell yes and especially when you put Eli Roth in a wifebeater and give him a baseball bat.
  • 300. If you're bothered by the fact that Xerxes' army did not, in fact, include cave trolls, ninjas and rhinos, and that Spartans wore armor and had backup, you should recite the MST3K Mantra. Even in-universe there's an explanation. The story of the 300 is being told by a lone survivor, leading an army of Greeks about to fight the Persians, so of course it runs on Rule Of Cool
  • The Martial Arts genre wouldn't exist without this trope and the Wuxia genre absolutely thrives on it. How else can you explain somebody jumping 30 feet in the air, and then jumping off of their sword in midair to gain more altitude? The Flying Guillotine was made infamous because of these movies. It's a nasty little contraption that consists of a basket with blades and a chain. You throw the basket onto somebody's head, pull the chain, the blades go to work, and it's Off with His Head!!
  • Shoot 'Em Up: There is a shootout while skydiving. This isn't a movie, it's a religious experience.
  • Flynning looks cooler than real fencing. Just ask Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes.
  • In the commentary for Serenity, Joss Whedon discusses the scene where the good guys come through the opaque and sensor-killing "ion cloud" followed by an army of Reavers to back them up against the Alliance. Because my cloud kept the Alliance from seeing them coming, it was a perfect cavalry-coming-over-the-hill moment: 'I don't know what an "ion cloud" is, we just made that up but I would have sold all my knowledge of science to get that scene.' (paraphrased)
  • The Forbidden Kingdom had the working title of The J & J Project. ( The whole point of which was to make the Jet Li vs. JackieChan dream fight ''finally'' happen on camera).
  • The entirety of Doomsday:
    • A detachable bionic eye/camera? Rule of Cool. Foam grenades? Rule of Cool. Glasgow!? Rule of Cool. The entire thing is an exercise in attaching balls to walls.
    • Supposedly the director had a dream about a showdown between a medieval knight and a modern soldier, and decided to write a movie around it.
    • Scottish cannibal ninja stripper punks!
  • Wanted as well as the director's previous films, Night Watch and Day Watch, where things exist for no other reason than because they're cool. Example: Let's drive a car across a building. Why? Why not? You get the feeling that when they were thinking of the concept for this movie, someone said, "What would happen if you took all the cool stunts from The Matrix, and turned them up a notch?"
  • The Back to the Future films rely heavily on this as well as the Rule of Funny.
    • One example, pointed out by Bob Gale on a DVD Commentary, occurs in the third film. Doc and Marty try to get the DeLorean up to eighty-eight miles per hour by pulling it with horses. Gale pointed out that the Doc would know horses don't run that fast and the Doc even points that out in the scene. However, the filmmakers had to do that shot with the DeLorean being ridden across Monument Valley like a covered wagon because it would look cool.
    • The fact that the time machine itself is a DeLorean is Rule Of Cool in itself. What self-respecting geek hasn't fantasized about having a time-traveling DeLorean? This is specifically invoked as one of the reasons Doc chose the DeLorean. He starts to give a practical reason, but is interrupted and doesn't revisit it.
      Doc: The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine, why not do it with some style?
  • TRON. This movie has become a cult movie, heavily enjoyed by geeks and people into computers, even though it's obvious to any such person, or for that matter, anyone above the age of seven, that computer programs are not glowing people running around inside a computer. It's just so much fun that this doesn't matter.
  • This notion was the central focus of Underworld (2003). This is a world where vampires are at constant war with werewolves.
  • Indiana Jones
    • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
      • The jungle swordfight between Mutt and the bad girl. Realistic? Not in the least. Supremely friggin' awesome? Hell yes.
      • The fridgenuking! What if that was the writers saying "Dr. Jones is badass enough that you can't kill him with nukes, or whatever is immediately surrounding him"?
    • The scene in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indy shoots the giant, black-draped swordsman in the Cairo marketplace, was originally to have been a complex whip-and-sword duel. It was cut due to a general ailment among the cast and crew that day.
  • 6 funny examples how Rule Of Cool can mingle with something and get rabies. "...should be pretty cool. Right?"
  • Alfred Hitchcock invoked this trope when he made North By Northwest by answering the question "Why would someone use a crop duster as a murder weapon?" with the understanding that the audience would be too engrossed in watching the next pass to care.
  • James Bond: The gadgets, the Evil Plans, some of the more improbable (and more awesome) fight/chase scenes... all the stuff Agent 007 does is governed by this trope.
  • The climactic fight scene in the movie version of V for Vendetta. It's an overblown Matrix ripoff given that in the comic V just lets Finch shoot him, but still completely awesome. Considering that it was written by the Wachowski sisters, it's not surprising. They made The Matrix too.
  • The Godzilla franchise. Giant robots? Check. Radioactive dinosaurs? Check. Awesome Fight Scenes? Check and double check. Great music? Check! This is the trope namer for Just Here for Godzilla. You better believe it's cool.
  • Roger Ebert says in his review of the Iron Man movie that military weapons tend not to look nearly as cool as Iron Man, but also that "It wouldn't be nearly as much fun to see a fight scene between two refrigerators crossed with the leftovers from a boiler room."
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: You got your pirates, your undead, your curses, your sea monsters, your totally impossible swordfights and Captain Jack Sparrow.
  • The Italian Job (1969). Minis that would normally collapse with that much gold jump across gaps, drive on the roof of a building and then off again.
  • G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra features a Powered Armor Car Chase through Paris, an underwater dog fight, and Snake Eyes. In the "making of" commentary on the DVD, one crew member attributes the mantra (loosely paraphrased) "overdo everything; then make it even bigger" to director Stephen Sommers, and says that they were reminded of this policy daily during the production of the film.
  • Postal the movie. From a notoriously bad director, based on a non-politically correct game, starring unknowns and having a ridiculous plot, all of which is redeemed by a constant onslaught of "how in the hell did they get away with this; this is unbelievably cool".
  • In The Lord of the Rings, due to Tolkien's terminology ("wings of shadow") describing the Balrog, nobody on the production team was quite sure whether the wings were literal or metaphorical. Peter Jackson later admitted they added the wings just because it looked cool.
  • In Jurassic Park, why does the T. rex show up in the nick of time to save Grant, Ellie and the kids from becoming Raptor chow? Because the T. rex is awesome and the animators wanted to show it off some more.
  • Jurassic World:
    • The creation of the Indominus Rex is a deconstruction of this trope. They wanted a bigger, badder, tougher, and smarter dinosaur than T. Rex or Velociraptor...but what they got was a psychotic hybrid hell-bent on destruction, and It Can Think as well!
    • The finale is over the top, and their solution could have easily put them into additional danger (and it's never really explained why it didn't), but at least it was awesome to watch.
  • Avatar.
    • Despite eschewing Space Opera tropes, it's hard to deny that the film is built around the idea of three-meter-tall blue quasi-Algonquian catpeople fighting mecha from space, and it plays fast and loose with the laws of physics and probability to make that happen.
    • Anyone with even the tiniest bit of knowledge in basic botany or zoology would know that Pandora's flora and fauna primarily evolved to look visually impressive to moviegoers. How would a giant species with impenetrable armor plating and no apparent predators not quickly overpopulate? Why the extra legs and bio-luminescence when they serve no function and could even be a liability? Cuz' they look cool, now less thinky, more watchy!
    • It's also the only justification for some of the tactics depicted. Even if the hero knows nothing of his own world's history, common sense should tell him that having lightly armed cavalry charge armour and machine guns is suicide but it's such cool, heroic suicide that he does it anyway.
  • Zombieland. Why would you go to an amusement park and turn all the lights on, turning your location into a gigantic target? Why would you jump out of the car and let it sink into the river, instead of hitting the brakes suddenly? Why would you try to con the first signs of life instead of going with them, then why would you leave? Why would you take a motorcycle or a shovel to fight zombies? Why? Why? Because it's awesome.
  • This song from the film Sivaji: The Boss. As this blog post puts it, "the waycool approach is to ride up, while napping, on a motorcycle that you drive with your feet, dismount by means of wheelie on the front tire, and shoot the bad guys with a machinegun hidden in your guitar. Then the stunningly attractive Bollywood actress will sing and dance with you."
  • This promo poster from Watchmen. True, he could be lighting the cigar purely from the convection of heat, or off the barrel of the flamethrower, but you do NOT want to taste a cigar that's been lit off a kerosene flame.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World : Why do all of Ramona's evil exes meet some requirement of video game boss style, explode into coins when defeated, and everyone naturally is just that good at martial arts? So that when Scott wins the girl, it's really cool.
  • The Fast and the Furious series features this trope in abundance, but it really reaches its apex in the climax to Fast Five. The heroes steal a 10-ton vault by attaching it via steel cables to two souped up Dodge Chargers, then use the cars to tear the vault from the building. They then proceed to drag the vault all over the city in a huge car chase, with the vault careening all over the place and causing massive destruction while still going fast enough to outrun police cars. Anyone with the most basic knowledge of physics knows that this is impossible, but it's so cool that few people complain about it.
  • Pacific Rim:
    • Why Guillermo del Toro helped to make this movie. It's giant mecha vs giant monsters. Therefore, it's cool.
    • The only reason why the tanker didn't buckle under its own weight when used as a melee weapon against a Kaiju or why the Jaeger and the Kaiju don't buckle either.
    • Gypsy Danger's pilots don't use their sword until halfway through the movie. If they had pulled it out right away, they couldn't have used the very cool tanker, and they couldn't have used the sword in midair!
    • Are those flaming chainsaw blade weapons of the Big Bad Jaeger in Pacific Rim: Uprising impractical? You bet they are, but they're wonderful to look at.
  • Dynamite Warrior is a Thai movie about cowboys (well, buffalo traders and buffalo thieves, technically) who either have extraordinary Muay Thai skills, have magical powers, or (in the case of the titular character, the protagonist) fight using primitive rockets. In one scene two characters escape pursuit by using some of the rockets to propel their cart away from the people chasing them.
  • X-Men Film Series
    • X-Men Origins: Wolverine is generally considered at its best when it remembers that it's about Hugh Jackman running around stabbing people in the face.
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past: It's unlikely that a functional interior room like a kitchen at the Pentagon would be designed with a circular shape like, but it makes Quicksilver's Wall Run look cooler, so who cares?
  • Kingsman: The Secret Service: Gazelle's prosthetic legs serve as her weapons of choice. Also features lots of cool gadgets James Bond style like an umbrella that serves as both a shield and a gun or a detonator in the shape of a lighter. Lots and lots of slow motion action, dynamic editing and impossible choreography too.
  • The feats of strength Arnold Schwarzenegger's characters tended to display, outside of fight scenes, cross this trope over with Cutscene Power to the Max. Examples include his casually lugging around trees in Commando and his ripping a bolted-down bed out of the floor, one-handed in The Running Man. About the only time that kind of Strong as They Need to Be factor makes a difference in the actual plot is his freeing himself from the Mind-Wipe Chair in Total Recall (1990).
  • Mad Max: Fury Road:
    • Special mention has to go to the Coma-Doof Warrior. An insane, blind guitarist, wearing his dead mother's face for a mask, rocking out in front of a massive wall of speakers, careening through the desert at high speeds, with a team of drummers bringing up the rear, and the guitar shoots fire. Not only is it awesome, it's also practical; Immortan Joe uses the music for morale and to relay commands to the rest his convoy, like a next-level drummer boy.
    • Another standout element is the Doof Wagon, which is basically a stage on wheels with speakers galore, holding a team of six Taiko drummers in the back and a Warboy, the eponymous Doof Warrior, shredding on a flame-spewing electric guitar on the front. Not only is it completely fucking awesome on its own, it's also practical; Immortan Joe uses the music as a morale booster for his army, as well as a way to relay his orders, akin to Civil War era drummer boys.
  • The Wall: This is a film based on a Pink Floyd album, which is one of their most popular alongside Wish You Were Here (1975) and The Dark Side of the Moon.
    • Special mention goes to how some of the songs were re-done specifically for the movie. Namely, "Another Brick In the Wall, Part III", which rerecorded at a faster pace, and "In the Flesh" (A Darker Reprise of "In the Flesh?"), which was redone with an entire orchestra for the Hammerskin Rally scene.
    • The walking hammers in the animated parts of "Waiting for the Worms".
  • The growing trend of classic movies being screened with the recorded soundtrack replaced by a live orchestra's rendition.
  • Female Agents: Rather than Action Girls, Amazon Brigade or Femme Fatale Spies, female SOE agents were more likely to be used for the Boring, but Practical work of wireless operator (because it didn't look suspicious for a woman to stay at home all day, whereas a man would be out working) or courier (because women were less likely to be searched, or rounded up for forced labour in Germany).
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: Lampshaded. During the final battle against Ultron at Sovokia, Hawkeye (Clint Barton) saves Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) by grabbing her and diving into a building for cover. In an attempt to motivate her, he says:
    "We're fighting an army of robots — and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes sense."
  • The Suicide Squad: Invoked when Bloodsport and Peacemaker begin to one-up the other's attempts at stylish kills.
    Bloodsport: No one likes a show-off!
    Peacemaker: Unless what they're showing off is DOPE as FUCK!
    Bloodsport: [mutters] Fuck! That's true!
  • The 2016 Chinese Epic Movie The Great Wall runs on this trope. You have massive war drums beaten by nunchucks, an all-female warrior corps who fight bloodthirsty monsters with weaponized bungee-jumping, sawblade shields that you can throw, giant blade obstacles, and war balloons!

    Literature 
  • Nightfall (Series): In-Universe example: Prince Vladimir riding techniques and tricks. Tristan finds them unnecessarily pompous.
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Tom Sawyer decides that freeing Jim from the plantation simply by getting the key and letting him out of his cell isn't romantic enough and wants to make an elaborate plan with Rope Ladders, a journal made of leaves, and food poisoned with sleep medicine, just like in the books. The "cool" swashbuckling achieves nothing except getting him shot.
  • Discworld:
    • The page image is from a cover of Soul Music - Death, about to bring down a pick made of his shattered scythe on a magical, sentient guitar that may or may not be the host of an Eldritch Abomination.
    • This is the nature of witchcraft. A witch is simply someone Genre Savvy enough to take advantage of this rule.
    • There exists an order of monks known as the Monks of Cool, who seek ultimate coolness instead of zen enlightenment. An acolyte has achieved this when his master takes him into a room full of all types of clothing and asks, "Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear?" and he responds, "Hey, whatever I select." Cool, but not necessarily up-to-date.
  • Snow Crash. A Mafia-controlled pizza delivery company, chaingun battles with aircraft carriers, ninja skateboard couriers, and intersections being shut down by sniper fire from rival road construction companies are just the beginning. Eventually you get to the part with the supersonic attack dogs and the Badass Biker who has a nuclear torpedo in his motorcycle's sidecar. Then you get to the supersonic motorcycle swordfights....on the internet.
  • Author Christopher Moore lampshades his use of this in the afterword to Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. At one point in the story Jesus goes to China and studies both Buddhism and martial arts at a Shaolinesque temple. Moore admits the temples wouldn't have been around at the time, but then adds this: "But to remain historically accurate, I would have to leave out an important question that I felt needed to addressed, which is, 'What if Jesus had known kung fu?'" Because Josh doesn't believe in using weapons, he and Biff make up their own unarmed martial art called the "Way of the Jew." Or, "Jew Do."
  • Garth Nix' The Keys to the Kingdom is Nix trying to see how much cool magic stuff and mythology he can put into one series. Answer: a lot.
  • In one of the books of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch novels, an interstellar portal (which, mind you, could have led to anywhere in the galaxy) just happens to lead to a Malon garbage scow that had been taken over by a Hirogen hunter. Why? So that Taran'atar, their local Jem'Hadar character, could fight with him, of course!
  • In MEG, Jonas Taylor is swallowed by a 40 ton shark and he cuts through the stomach lining to get into the heart chamber. Then he rips the heart and goes back through the stomach and reach the surface with only a broken escape pod, an air tank, a mask and a 200 million year old tooth. Logical? HELL NO! Awesome? Yeah!
  • While most animal-themed Gladiator Games involve tigers, bears and the like, The Lies of Locke Lamora features gladiator equivalents who stand on platforms over water and fight sharks.
  • His Dark Materials : Iorek Byrnison and the Panserbjorne. No, bears aren't always bad news, especially if they're sentient and armored and blacksmiths.
  • The last book of the X-Wing Series, Starfighters of Adumar, gives us awesomely implausible personal weapons, the blastsword. It exists solely because it's cooler than dueling with normal swords.
    Wes Janson: "So it's like a blaster you have to hit someone with. I've got to have one."
  • Why is Harry Potter's scar shaped like a lightning bolt?
    J. K. Rowling: "To be honest, because it’s a cool shape. I couldn’t have my hero sport a doughnut-shaped scar."
  • George Eliot noted in Silly Novels by Lady Novelists that stories trying to do it via "let's throw it in" method
    ...remind us of the pictures clever children sometimes draw "out of their own head," where you will see a modern villa on the right, two knights in helmets fighting in the foreground, and a tiger grinning in a jungle on the left, the several objects being brought together because the artist thinks each pretty, and perhaps still more because he remembers seeing them in other pictures.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (and its various sequels and imitators) has no real reason to exist except for this rule; zombies are cool and seeing proper ladies slaughter them is even cooler.
  • Scourge of Warrior Cats is a cat who wears a collar with dog teeth sticking out of it. It's uncomfortable, but he wears it because he knew it was awesome.
  • In Wars of the Realm, most Warrior-angel commanders operate out of churches or cathedrals, which are considered safe havens from demon attacks. Not General Brandt. The commander of all angelic forces on planet Earth has his World Headquarters in an old medieval castlenote .
  • The Dresden Files is, by the admission of its author, constructed out of this. When the main character magically blasts werewolves through walls, fights vampires alongside mob bosses, running into the middle of a faerie apocalypse, reanimating a ZOMBIE T. REX and PUNCHING OUT SANTA CLAUS (who is also Odin) you KNOW it's this trope.
  • The Forever War is a hard sci-fi but author Joe Haldeman has no problem in creating a make-believe "stasis field" that makes it impossible for anything to move faster than 26m/s so he can have swordfighting IN SPACE!!
  • This seems to be one of Willy Wonka's guiding principles in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — why make ordinary Impossibly Delicious Food when you can make awesome sweets such as sugar eggs that dissolve in your mouth and leave a little pink sugar baby bird on your tongue? It's not enough that he has a subterranean river of melted chocolate running through his factory — he also loves to travel down it via a boiled-sweet boat that looks like a Viking longship. Many of the inventions mentioned only in passing are absolutely ridiculous-sounding, but also sound like great fun: fizzy lemonade swimming pools, marshmallow pillows, toffee apple trees that can be planted in backyards! Also, the Great Glass Elevator he uses to zip through the factory? It turns out to be equipped for space travel in the sequel.
  • Thursday Next. The hero, Next, can visit inside books. The mechanics of this are explained as, 'If it works, it works'. Which leads to the Chesire Cat manifesting a Kraken to defeat what is essentially a toast-based dictatorship.
  • The Dinosaur Lords is based on one very simple concept: medieval knights riding dinosaurs into battle. How do you tame a dinosaur? Can you tame a dinosaur? If you tamed it, could you ride it? Would it even want to charge into battle? It does not matter — what matters are medieval knights riding dinosaurs into battle.
  • Isaac Asimov's David Starr, Space Ranger: Sanito tables are made out of force fields. Why? Because they're easy to clean. However, the initial force fields worked too well, and they had to be made to purposely glitter so people would see that their plates and cutlery actually rested on something tangible.
  • A Symphony of Eternity: Commodore Horatia TJ Jackson is a Religious Bruiser, Multi-Melee Master and any fleet under her is considered unstoppable once unleashed, and she's a sentient human-sized tarantula.
  • The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • Great Uncle Ebbitt from The Seventh Tower definitely comes under this. Not only is he willing to attempt feats of magic and crazy stunts that even Milla would think twice about and has the competence to pull them off, he actively enjoys them. He doesn't just play the trope but actively enjoys it. It's half lampshaded, half a plot point later on in the book.

    Live-Action TV 

In General:

  • Tokusatsu shows in general.
    • The sole reason that the monsters explode into fireballs upon defeat. It's a flashy way to get rid of a monster without more expensive post-editing effects.
    • Why do the bad guys send monsters one by one?
    • How are Humongous Mecha, let alone Combining Mecha and Transforming Mecha possible?
    • What's with those wacky villain getups and People in Rubber Suits?
    • How the heck does spandex deflect fireballs?
    • How do you summon suits from thin air anyway?
    • Why would you pose dramatically before doing so, and often after?
    • Why doesn't the monster just attack you while you're still posing?
    • How do they do those poses their first time out as if they'd practiced them, in unison in the case of teams transforming together?
    • Why does posing sometimes cause giant explosions in the background?
    • How do fists cause sparks?
    • Not only do monsters explode, but why the hell would you turn away from the monster when you think it's going to explode, since they don't all die with the first use of a Finishing Move?
    • The answer to these questions is another question: would it be as much fun if they didn't?

By Series:

  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
    • Following the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Coulson has taken steps to avert S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Sigil Spam, removing the emblem from the cars and many other obvious places. He couldn't bring himself to remove the giant symbol on the top of the plane, though, because it's just too cool.
    • Coulson has Fitz make him a device that projects an energy shield for the sole reason that they both agreed it would be cool for the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. to have a shield. For bonus points, it's in the shape of Captain America's shield, though with the S.H.I.E.L.D. symbol rather than his star.
  • Águila Roja pretty much lives on the Rule of Cool. For starters, the titular hero is a Gratuitous McNinja in the 17th century Madrid. This means that Absurdly Sharp Blade and Katanas Are Just Better often come into play.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Chuck:
    • The premise of a computer being downloaded into a guy's mind makes no sense whatsoever, and when that computer is upgraded to make him magically learn kung fu, all plausibility goes flying right out the window but Chuck can kick people in face, so who really cares?
    • Sarah's knife-throwing exploits fall firmly into this trope.
    • If Casey is coming to the rescue, why bother with making him take the door when you can have him parachute in through a glass ceiling with a team of Special Ops commandos?
    • The tricked-out Nerd Herder has hidden passenger-side controls, a remote control, a hidden central console, handcuffs that come out of the steering wheel to detain prisoners, and a driver's seat that can be ejected out the door. Why? Because it does, that's why.
    • Within canon, when Morgan can't think of a way to pick the Buy More's new assistant manager, he finally decides to go with a bouncy harness cage match. Not that anything involving Jeff and Lester can be terribly cool, but it's the principle of the thing.
  • Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report uses this trope when he was protecting the identity of a former employee deployed in Afghanistan - "For security reasons I can't show his photo, and for cool reasons I will refer to him as 'Tank Gunbullet'."
  • Nothing in Doctor Who makes any sense at all. Not the centuries-old regenerating Human Alien who travels around time and space in a police box, not the Technobabble they deliver at a hundred kilometres an hour to justify the latest Reverse Polarity, not the perpetually vague or contradicting continuity, definitely not the Timey-Wimey Ball, not the Omnicidal Maniac motorised pepper pots armed with a whisk and a toilet plunger, and absolutely not the screwdriver that gets New Powers as the Plot Demands. There is also, however, not a single person that cares.
    Simmons: What you gonna do, sucker me to death?
    [Dalek promptly suckers him to death]
  • Firefly features this due to the creator's desire to include cool-looking Space Western themes whether they really made sense or not. From the DVD commentary:
    "Nice floating train. Floating trains are cool."
    "And I'll tell you for why, it's because they're floating, and also, trains."
  • In the Grand Finale of Fringe, Walter has developed Abnormal Ammo that will not only kill their typically-Immune to Bullets enemy, but cause the bodies to float in the air due to [insert Techno Babble here]. When Peter asked why they'd need them to float them if it could kill them, Walter says, as if he'd been asked the painfully obvious, "Because it's cool."
  • The Future is Wild BBC miniseries, a followup to the Walking with ___ series, focuses on what life might be like millions of years in the future. It's got elements of evolutionary biology, but most of it is rule of cool all over.
  • Game of Thrones: Why would anyone build a clockwork map of the world? Because it looks really really cool, that's why. The little-cogs-in-a-larger-machine effect satisfies the Rule of Symbolism as well.
  • Happy Days: The Fonz can channel this trope through his fist and into a jukebox to activate it to impress chicks.
  • The Late Show with David Letterman. From the January 5, 1994 show:
    "Top Ten Words That Sound Great When Spoken By James Earl Jones"
  • One of the key selling points of Merlin is the authenticity of the wardrobe and the skill of the costume department at making it so. Then Arthur has a trenchcoat. Why? Because it looks cool.
  • MythBusters:
    • The Team usually follows up a "busted" myth (and plausible and confirmed myths too) with an over-the-top experiment under improbable circumstances just to see how cool it looks like when it explodes. After all, "we've replicated the circumstances of the myth, now let's replicate the results", and "if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing".
    • While testing to see if small amounts of dynamite can clean the inside of cement trucks of solidified cement, they fill one up with FBI-provided high explosives and blow it up to smithereens. Why would this be considered important information in the busting of this myth? The correct answer is: Who cares?
      Jamie: This has got nothing to do with the myth; it's just a big boom.
    • It boggles the mind that they made a cannon entirely out of duct tape. The damned thing worked.
  • The Power Rangers franchise got its success by being practically fueled by this trope, the premise alone involving a small group of teens doing martial arts and making awesome if slightly goofy team poses while wearing motorcycle helmets and fighting giant monsters by piloting transforming giant robots might seem very silly, but if you tell it to any Power Ranger fan, you'll likely get the response "Who cares? it's freaking awesome!"
  • Primeval: It's implausible and silly half the time, but it's about crazy scientists fighting time-traveling DINOSAURS. The development team does their research, but they don't apply it at all and instead take Artistic License – Biology in heedless abandon. One episode even featured a raptor chase through a shopping mall. On motorbikes.
  • The creators of Rome admitted they ignored the date the real Atia died simply because they loved the character and wanted to keep her on. Most fans agreed.
  • Smallville, being a Superman show that ran for ten years, and with one of the producers a fan of the Silver Age madness, sure has its moments.
    • The "Clark time" effect. They love it so much they give Super-Speed to dozens of villains that usually don't have them, because it looks so blasted cool.
    • Lana Lang with the Prometheus armour. It is "armour" that gives not the slightest trace of being worn, and gives kryptonian level speed and strength. Oh, and you need to start some fires... over a water tank... containing the test subject... and there is no energy input... Yes, it makes no sense but it is all forgiven when Lana bursts out of the lab like a phoenix from the flames and does a Bullet Catch.
  • Star Trek: You could fill a hundred encyclopedias with all the technical and narrative inaccuracies; two dimensional space, clear contradictions in the standard operating procedures of Starfleet, glaringly inefficient ship designs, unrealistic scale of space, unrealistic equipment, convoluted timeline of events, the list is infinite. However....when Trek fires on all cylinders warp nacelles, NOBODY gives a damn.
  • In the season four premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise, the Enterprise's targeting sensors are disabled, requiring the ship to get close enough to the target to eyeball it. This serves no plot purpose but the target happened to be a facility in Nazi-occupied New York. The result was the Enterprise flying over New York City, fighting Stukas with plasma cannons.
  • Top Gear: Why race a Bugatti Veyron against an RAF Eurofighter Typhoon? Why attempt to turn a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle? Why do any of the things they do? Because they're cool, dammit!
  • Early seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess really had her pushing the limits of Badass Normal. She could fight one-on-one with a Physical God or solo against armies and win. As a specific example: In one scene, she jumps from a cliff and horizontally spins hundreds of feet onto a passing ship. She could do this because she was Just That Cool. Her blood-quickening theme music sung by the Bulgarian Women's Choir always accompanied such feats. Later seasons had plot-devices and Flashbacks explaining various powers.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: The whole team, really. Marvelous deflects bullets by shooting faster, the team has weaponized their poses successfully , Don has used branches, trapeze ropes, and falling and wins, the team's solution to dealing with a meteor about to crash into earth is to throw one of the mecha into it with another mecha; just about every other episode will have insane, hilarious, and over-the-top badassery.
  • The titular protagonist from Sledge Hammer!; his catchphrase is "Trust me. I know what I'm doing.", and in the beginning of the first episode, he takes out a sniper by blowing up the building under him(after making sure everyone inside had been evacuated, of course).
  • America's Got Talent, of all shows, brings us ArcAttack, who have pioneered the use of Tesla coils as a musical instrument. For real. And it gets better... The founder of the group is one of the group of guys who invented the singing Tesla coil in the first place. And their act is so dangerous and uses so much power that after the audition, they weren't allowed to perform in the theater, and had to have a special stage built for them outside.
  • Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear. In the show's various challenges (convert a vehicle to be amphibious and drive it across a body of water; buy a cheap two-wheel-drive car and cross Botswana), he inevitably goes for more flash, more speed, and more power. As a result, he always seems to achieve magnificent success or equally magnificent Epic Failure.
  • Showa-Era Kamen Rider, being the franchise that gave us such things as Wizard Starfish Hitler, has a fair number of such characters, but special mention must be given to Kamen Rider Stronger. Stronger is THE WARRIOR OF JUSTICE. Where other cyborg riders were unwilling victims rescued at the last moment before brainwashing, Stronger deliberately underwent the procedure and beat the brainwashing through pure force of will, at which point he beat the shit out of his captors. Stronger's Super-Mode is so hardcore that he must exhaust its power when using it, or explode. Stronger can punch a Kaijin so hard that it will not only be reduced to a twinkle in the sky, but will explode shortly thereafter. Stronger once beat the shit out of Heath Ledger's Time-Displaced Ghost, at which point he exploded. Guns are sexually attracted to Stronger, as shown by the opening title sequence.
  • The Owner of the Den-Liner. To specify, he has a habit of eating plates of food while trying to avoid tipping over a small flag in the center...but he a gun that shoots a barrage of these flags as sleeping darts used to knock out an entire room full of people in seconds? Using one of these flags to take down a forcefield? Running along side a time traveling bullet train that's going at full speed? Using a normal everyday bicycle to POWER said time traveling bullet train with his own leg power brings this trope to the next level!
  • Continuing our Kamen Rider tradition is Gentaro Kisaragi. A delinquent who has one mission: make friends with everyone in his new school. His first moment of awesome? Screaming at a fellow student for dumping a girl's love letter to him and then jumping into a cold river to pick it up. Then he has crazy weapons for his arms and legs like a paintbrush, faucet, drill, rocket, etc. Oh and his screams are enough to be heard across the universe and back, not to mention that he has pompadour sense.
  • Mythbusters
    • Among their inventions include: a lead balloonthat actually flew; a fully functional duct tape cannon, two gliders made of concrete, boats made of ice and duct tape, two hovercrafts, four historical weapons, a bridge made of duct tape, and a functioning seesaw that can take 40,000 pounds of force without being damaged.
    • They made a full-sized cement truck vanish in a fraction of a second.
    • They've waterskied behind a cruise ship, dropped a car from 4000 feet. Making a seesaw that can take something like 40000 pounds of force without breaking or even bending and still works as a seesaw.
    • You can't make a sailboat sail by blowing on the sail with a fan that's mounted in the sailboat itself. It's against the laws of physics. They built one. It worked. It sailed. They broke a law of physics. "I reject your reality and substitute my own" is all that needs to be said.

    Music 
  • This is the basis of the Lemon Demon song, "Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" (which inspired a well-known Flash video), in which Neil Cicierega describes a battle royale started by Godzilla and Batman. As the fight went on, more pop culture icons join in, including Shaquille O'Neal, Abraham Lincoln, Optimus Prime, Jackie Chan, Indiana Jones, the Power Rangers, Chuck Norris, Darth Vader, Superman, Benito Mussolini, and countless others:
    The fight raged on for a century,
    Many lives were claimed, but eventually
    The champion stood, the rest saw their better:
    Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater.
  • Muse: Rule of Cool is the reason for Muse's existence. Considering how their stuff is crazy-awesome Genre-Busting with generous heaps of operatic flamboyance, who cares if the concepts don't entirely make sense at times?
    • The video Knights of Cydonia features cowboys, androids, birds of prey, seduction, kung fu, rayguns, dirtbikes, execution, Soviet imagery, holographic band members, a unicorn and a half-submerged Statue Of Liberty, and is set in a goldrush town named after the Martian region of Cydonia. It doesn't make a great deal of sense, but it is still awesome!
    • Another song is about "superstars sucked into the supermassive", with huge riffs and piano's that would make an appropriate soundtrack to Dante's Inferno. Oh, and the live shows are truly awesomely epic, with extended improvised jams and exaggerated theatricality. The Power of Rock, indeed.
  • The video for "Shine on Me" by Chris Dane Owens. It's every fantasy movie imaginable fed through a wood chipper and shaken up, spliced with shots of a Legolas lookalike strumming a guitar.
  • Captain Dan. More specifically, Captain Dan and the Scurvy Crew, a group of rapping pirates with song titles like "Hook it up," and "Keel Haul 'Em."
  • Seasick Steve is a folk singer who used to be a hobo. He plays a three-string guitar.
  • Rush's "2112" is 20 minutes long and the vocals account for less than 10 of them. Does most of the rest of the song have anything to do with the story it tells? For the most part, no, but that's not going to stop it from being awesome.
  • Liquid Tension Experiment; when Dream Theater members gave up any semblance of composition and just dazzled everyone with their unbelievable instrumental prowess.
  • "Godzilla Eats Las Vegas". It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • The album cover of Painkiller by Judas Priest has a silver angel riding a motorcycle with buzzsaw blades for wheels, and a chassis that is a dragon. This shiny angel rides his impossible motorcycle through the air over a bunch of skyscrapers slowly sinking into lava.
  • Ninja Sex Party's song "Dinosaur Laser Fight". It's about dinosaurs having a laser fight in space with sharks and robots because a tyrannosaurus couldn't get a high-five.
  • Bananarama. With fire, a woman dressed as the devil, a woman with huge bat-like wings, a woman in a beret pushing a man from one table to another, the band dancing and singing, and all those different women being worshipped by men, and a woman in a wedding dress coming out of a casket, and with none of these different elements acknowledging each other, the video for "Venus" runs on this.
  • French band Nouvelle Vague made a career out of playing popular tunes from The '80s in a bossa nova style.
  • Former Hollywood Undead member and current solo rapper, Deuce, has a music video for "Let's Get it Crackin" where he spends most of the video dancing with hot girls in typical rap star fashion, but then takes out a gun and nonchalantly shoots them all dead for no apparent reason. Despite the sheer randomness of this, fans still liked the video a lot, possibly for two reasons. First, because the video started out so typical, and then had a never-before-done twist. Secondly, randomness aside, it's still sex and violence. Which is almost always a win.
  • Why is The 1812 Overture, a piece commemorating a Russian victory over French forces, prominently featured in many American Independence Day celebrations? It has cannons in it.
  • Gloryhammer: The plot to Their two albums is as follows: Undead unicorns invade dundee, their leader Zargothrax the Evil Sorcerer is imprisoned in ice, then released by the Chaos Wizards, and the second album ends with Korviliath the Elder God from the 18th Hell Dimension being prevented from being unleashed by the earth being destroyed by a neutron star powering a cyborg exploding.
  • Two words: Lady Gaga. This is the lady who wore a Meat◊ Dress◊. Not only did she wear it, in public, in a totally casual way, but she actually managed to make it look good.
  • P!nk. Especially in concert. She did a world concert tour for her "I'm Not Dead" album, and at every venue sang "Fingers" while doing a 'Cirque de Soleil' act forty feet above an ''unpadded'' stage. With no net if she fell. Even real Cirque de Soleil performers don't perform songs at the same time! (She did something similar at the Grammies, but with her song "Glitter In The Air".) This tour, she's singing a song and simultaneously doing a trapeze act that starts with her being lifted into the air blindfolded.
  • Queen staging an all-female nude bicycle race to promote "Fat Bottomed Girls/Bicycle Race", to say nothing of some of their concert acts and videos (Freddie Mercury swordfighting Connor MacLeod with a microphone stand in the "Princes of the Universe" video, just for example)
  • Miley Cyrus:
    • Her 2009 Wonder World Tour, especially her filmed appearance at London's O2 Arena, can definitely count as this. She entered the stage "breaking free" from a "block of ice" prop, rode moving hotel dollies and airport carts, "rode" a motorcycle across the audience while singing "I Love Rock And Roll", played a piano rising from an elevator for "When I Look At You", flew on a harness in a giant white dress for "Fly On The Wall" (after riding a giant van to the front of the stage), and basically hammed it up in full "rock chick" persona for much of the rest of the show. The projected films, dancers (often scaling walls), laser and light shows, and multiple costume changes added to the theatrics. And she sang live (if understandably breathlessly at times) the whole time. It was one of the hottest tours of that concert season. She (somewhat) scaled down for the Gypsy Heart Tour a few years later.
    • Bangerz Tour brings back the pyro, but appropriately for her change of image and sound is filled with giant dog statues, over the top costumes and masks, a very unconventional dance troupe, and wildly colored rear projection effects. Not to mention Miley's stage presence.
  • Kaizers Orchestra is quite the embodiment of this trope. Think alt-rock and Norwegian folk music stuck in a blender with Blue Man Group-style theatrics on stage and a dark musical mythos involving lunatic asylums, the mafia, and an only semi-defined "resistance" operating in the midst of it all. As for the "awesome" part? Well...her du går, min Costanze.
  • Definitely Maximum the Hormone. Besides their famous themes for Death Note, their hit "Koi No Mega Lover" mixes Death Metal with J-Pop and punk rock into one track. Bizarre and eyebrow-raising? Yeah. Simultaneously insane and epic? Hell yes.
  • This guy from Croatia is a One Man Band! He plays the guitar, the tambourine, the kazoo, the harmonica, a bicycle horn, and a kick drum! Not simultaneously, but it actually sounds like an actual band!
  • Yamantaka Eye. Best known for his work with Boredoms and as the singer for Naked City, Eye is also known for performing under the name Hanatarash. Live performances for these were notorious for their dangerous and destructive nature with antics that include a backhoe and trying to throw a Molotov cocktail on stage.
  • Rammstein. How many other musical artists can you think of that have lit themselves on fire for 3+ minutes once a show every show for three straight tours with solely the protection of a pair of welding goggles, and have been claimed to enjoy it? The drummer Cristoph Schneider was quoted once as saying that the band's motto was "Do your own thing. And overdo it!"
    • When played live, "Mein Teil" sees the lead singer drag the keyboardist out in a boiling pot. And then using a flamethrower on it while the poor guy is still in there.
  • Both members of Angelspit. These are the guys who created a music video about a secret society devoted to cannibalism and vivisection, regularly use synths to fuck songs up beyond belief, built their own instrument and subsequently destroyed it for the purposes of recording the sounds it made while being destroyed, made some awesome music out of a salad bowl and a lampshade, and instead of simply making a video asking for video entries from those who wished to be their new videographer, created a video where ZooG killed the old videographer, asked for video entries, and finished the vid with 'I need a knife, a fork, and an oven built for one. Happy New fucking Year!'

    Mythology and Religion 
  • Mythological gods and heroes in general are full of this. That's half the point of most of them. Hercules, Gilgamesh, the entire cast of Romance of the Three Kingdoms... all fuelled by Rule of Cool. Where else are you going to hear that an Eight-Headed Snake was defeated by Sake of all thingsnote . In fact, most mythological heroes weren't necessarily heroic in the modern sense. A lot of the time, all it took to be a "hero" was strength and daring, not morality.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Some wrestling moves (especially the more elaborate finishers) fall into this category. The effectiveness of every move used in pro wrestling is directly proportionate to how cool it looks.
    • TNA's Petey Williams' "Canadian Destroyer", a flip piledriver that would break the laws of physics if the opponent weren't helping — but it looks incredibly awesome, so it doesn't matter too much.
    • The People's Elbow could finish anyone off, despite being done from a standing position, as well as The Rock bouncing off the ropes twice for no reason.
  • Surely, a wrestling grave-digger zombie biker would be a laughable gimmick, but surely enough, The Undertaker has been alive (undead?) and kicking for about 20 years now, and has become one of the most iconic figures in all of wrestling.
  • Boogeyman smacks himself over the head with a clock, setting off the pyro for his entrances and wrestles with the glass stuck in his head!

    Roleplay 
  • TV Tropes Roll To Dodge: A heavy factor in the gameplay. This is Knighted's main power source, and Dreadnought used it once as well.
    'We're badass enough that a few broken bones won't hinder us'
    — Makuta to to Mu Nu Xi after a particularly nasty fall.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Space 1889, the things requiring most suspension of disbelief are also the coolest; dinosaurs on Venus, Victorians in Space, supertough Martians riding on big scary birds, canals of Mars and flying ships. There are rather detailed and reasonably plausible explanations for these, if you accept slightly different natural laws, though. Perhaps the most blatant example of greater need for suspension of belief for extra cool stuff is two prototype giant steam robots in the adventure Tom Fleet and his Steam Colossus in Challenge 61 — yes, of course they end up having a cool giant robot on giant robot fight, do you even need to ask?
  • Several White Wolf games have a literal Rule of Cool called Stunting.
    • This is the central rule of the Exalted. Not only do many, many things in the setting exist solely because they're cool, but it's an actual rule — although it doesn't use that name, it's a mechanical manifestation of it in spirit — where giving a cool description to accompany an action grants a Stunt bonus to perform it. The more awesome it sounds, the bigger the bonus.
    • Case in point for the Exalted Rule of Cool outside of the Stunt mechanic: chainklaves. Then the Alchemicals had to go and beat it with the gyroscopic chakram: for when Captain America needs to get in on the Chainsaw Good.
    • Stunting also makes it into Changeling: The Lost, in the specific context of Dream Combat, and with some caveats appropriate to that.
    • Scion uses the same "stunting" rule as Exalted.
  • The open-source game Wushu thrives on a stunting rule, giving you dice for every detail that you hammer down for a given action and everything you describe happens unless the other players veto it.
  • The indie Legend System is published by Rule of Cool Games.
  • The Eberron campaign setting in Dungeons & Dragons. For one thing, there's a magic train that exists for the sole purpose of players fighting on its roof. Then there's the Lost World continent, the modular magic-powered robots known as the Warforged (who are a PC race!), the dinosaur-riding halflings...
  • The small RPG company Atomic Sock Monkey Press has a particular obsession with the Rule of Cool. At least one of their games ("Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot") relies entirely upon the principle behind the Rule to exist. Most games from the company incorporate a rule called "Being Badass," where if the player describes something he does in a particularly cool or effective way, the attempt gets a + 2 on the dice roll (and in a game that uses only two six-siders, even + 2 is a worthwhile bonus).
  • The RPG Fireborn from Fantasy Flight Games was built on this trope, featuring as it does reincarnated dragons. Who fight the forces of darkness in near-future London. With kung fu. As the game progresses, they get flashbacks to when they ruled the ancient world as full-size dragons.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Physics is the Rule Of Cool, and it's fueled by abyssal nightmares. The Orks can change the laws of physics through blithering ignorance, while the Ruinous Forces of Chaos have a whole dimension that lets them grow extra bits of everything by way of literal Offscreen Villain Dark Matter.
    • Wazdakka Gutsmek is an Ork who decided his bike's guns weren't big enough. So he mounted fully automatic tank cannons on it.◊ And thats tame by the standards of most Ork Characters...
    • He once took out a Titan by ramping his bike into it, bypassing its force fields (which set him on fire, by the way). He carries the crew's skulls with him and to this day, they're still on fire.
    • Ork flyboys are orks whose obsession with speed is considered insane even by other orks. To quote the deffkopta's inventor, Kog da Flymek, "Wot's faster than a warbuggy, more killy than a warbike, and flies through da air like a bird? I got no bleedin' idea, but I'm gonna find out."
  • In GURPS the Rule of Cool is neatly quantified for Game Masters wishing to run cinematic campaigns: "The "cinematic" campaign is one where realism doesn't rule because if it did, it would constantly get in the way of the story. In a cinematic campaign, swashbuckling heroes can defeat dozens of foes because the story calls for it. Spacecraft whoosh or roar in the silence of space because fast things whoosh and powerful engines roar. Rightness always overrules mere correctness."
  • Shadowrun has been described thusly: "Say your mission was to get a can of coke from a vending machine. Step four can be 'pull out rocket launcher' and nobody will blink."
    • With the proper min/max techniques, it is possible to acquire an ECM-equipped armored stealth helicopter equipped with a long-range armor-piercing missile launcher with 36-hour operational endurance and a secondary heavy machine gun as a basic starting character. Whether your game master will let you, on the other hand...
    • A certain selection of Adept powers boost your character's unarmed combat ability. If you boost your Magic attribute high enough, it is easily possible to create a character who can punch through an armored battle tank without breaking into a sweat.
    • Misuses of the Restricted Gear quality could fill pages. Want a helicopter with a heavy laser cannon? Go ahead. 5 kilometer range remote-guided armor-piercing missile launcher? Sure. Power-armored troll with an assault cannon? It would take two applications of the quality to get military-grade armor and the assault cannon, but yes.
  • Being a mash-up of cyberpunk and Tolkienien urban fantasy, Shadowrun regularly begs for absurd and amazing scenarios. One of the most memorable setting moments involves the Great Dragon Dunkelzahn running for and winning the presidency of the United Canadian and American States, only to shortly be assassinated upon the commencement of his term. Subsequently the creators of the game published Dunkelzahn's Will, a huge document full of Shout Outs, hilarious jokes, and multiple campaigns' worth of intriguing plot hooks.
  • Spirit of the Century, besides having PCs able to pull off basically anything they've ever seen in a movie, fight gorillas on top of a zeppelin, ride dinosaurs, etc., asks the GM to stop and think, before declaring any rule, "What happens if the PCs succeed, and what happens if they fail?" and is expected to come up with a sufficiently interesting answer for both, just to guarantee every roll will have cool enough results either way to be worthwhile. The game also encourages things like taking gangsters and making them zombie gangsters, or making their leader a talking gorilla, etc.
  • Star Wars: Saga Edition has the Second Wind mechanic, Force Points, and Destiny Points, which work as Rules FOR Cool. The Second Wind ability allows a heavily beaten character to pull himself back on his feet and return to the fight for a short duration. The rare Force Points significantly increase the chances for success in critical situations, while the even rarer Destiny Points can almost guarantee success when it is vital for everything he fought for. (Like having only one single shot left before the Death Star blows all your friends up.)
  • This is an explicit rule of design in Magic: The Gathering. Anything can see print if it's cool enough.
  • The independent game Cosmopol only exists because of this rule; Theodore Roosevelt having four terms as president and Buckminster Fuller designing an entire city!
  • Champions and the Hero System invoke this rule repeatedly. The rules emphasize "dramatic realism" but we all know what they mean by that. Combine it with the fact they have strength tables high enough to permit a PC to lift a castle.
  • TORG: Humanoid dinosaurs? Check. Oppressive cyberpunk theocracy? Check. Two-fisted archeologists? Check. Ninjas fighting megacorporations? Check. Ancient astronauts? Check. Lovecraftian horrors in the jungle? Check.
  • "Infinity": you can (with some minor list restrictions) pick any models from a faction you like "because they look cool" and be able to win with them. One faction is made up of the most bad ass French to ever exist, Russians, British and US Special Forces, Scotsmen in Kilts waving broadswords and assault rifles AND werewolves. That is one single faction.
  • What Rocket Age runs on. Players even get Story Points that allow them to pull off the craziest things and alter the plot.
  • Mythender has a very abstract rule system partly so it can focus on this. Whatever cool thing you can think of to do, you can definitely do it, and it will definitely work. In fact, the cooler it is, the more powerful it makes you, so you're encouraged to go nuts. All that power will eventually turn you into an Eldritch Abomination, sure, but you'll look really cool along the way!
  • Basically, any time a player makes an investment in something for their character that is strictly *not* optimal in terms of game mechanics yet appeals to a player's wants/sense of style, they are opting to follow the Rule of Cool (if only in a small way).
Rule of Cool:
  • Exalted. It has two martial arts dealing with flamethrowers and another that uses a chainsaw version of Captain America's shield. The main characters are assumed to go Serial Escalation on a daily basis. The default starting character types, the Solars, have to deal with fate ninjas who don't like them, elemental-powered samurai monks who really don't like them, and extradimensional living cities that absolutely hate them. Oh, and the mechanical spiders that control fate have a soft spot for feats of epic awesomeness, making the really insane stuff more likely to succeed. Given that it has been described as Dungeons & Dragons meets Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, this was frankly inevitable.

    Toys 
  • BIONICLE qualifies with such things as giant-sized, biomechanical tigers that can extend their neck and have caterpillar tracks instead of back legs; robotic heroes surfing on lava or riding on rock slides with buzz saws attached to their feet; humongous insects with powerful blasters implanted onto their bodies; desert bandits riding on dinosaurs; and all kinds of warriors/villains/monsters you can build out of Lego sets with the most bizarre powers you can imagine. Even such mundane things as transportation were cool when the setting called for it. Nowadays, the story tends to focus less on these aspects and more on the actual plot — that is why the introduction of cybernetic dinosaurs with laser targeting-systems was so welcomed.

    Web Animation 
  • Monty Oum lived by this rule, tending to go with what looks cool rather than what looks realistic:
    • Dead Fantasy. The characters of Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy beat the crap out of each other with no regards for little things like the laws of physics.
    • Action in RWBY is built on cool. For instance, the White trailer involves a girl duelling a Giant Mecha with her elementally-powered rapier by jumping off Stepping Stones in the Sky.
    • According to the RWBY creators, the Rule of Cool got a little away from them in the Season Two episode "Breach." The heroines effortlessly defeated dozens of enemies, but the Grimm seemed weak and underpowered, removing much of the dramatic tension. Later seasons made the Grimm much tougher, preventing most one-shot kills but amping up the technical complexity of the fight scenes to compensate.
  • Super Mario Bros. Z: A Sonic the Hedgehog/Super Mario Bros. crossover done with Dragon Ball Z physics. It also features a "Holy Shit!" Quotient that approaches one during some fight sequences that quite frankly have to be seen to be believed
  • Kings of Power: 4 Billion%: There's not much logic behind the animation, but when it looks that cool, does it need any?
  • Flash games New York Shark, Sydney Shark and Miami Shark. It's about sharks eating fishes, humans, boat, baseballs, planes, Spider-Man, etc. and then destroying the Earth with a meteor.

    Web Comics 
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja
    • The inclusion of raptor-riding banditos alone proves the point here, but if that doesn't convince you, there's also Dracula, who happens to have a moon base with a moon laser. He hangs out with Paul McCartney, the real Michael Jackson, and Tupac.
    • See also this strip and the one directly following it. No other webcomic features a ninja MD flying a private jet into a thunderstorm where he will be attacked by missile volleys and pterodactyls birdosauruses, which he will subsequently defeat in a single minute so that he may continue on to the apocalyptic Aztec tennis temple to save the world's greatest tennis champion who must play a game of tennis against the avatar of the Aztec god of destruction in order to save the world from imminent doom. The only reason any of the above makes any sense, at all, is because it is so goddamn cool.
    • King Radical comes from Radical Land, which is even more like this; everything there is based on the Rule Of Cool. Not just almost every plot point like in the normal setting of the comic, but everything else too. Even the Sun wears sunglasses. Given the general nature of the comic, it makes perfect sense when he reveals (in "A Cumberland Ninja in King Radical's Court") that the world of the comic is halfway between Radical Land and a boring universe like ours, influenced by the energies of both, which is why it looks like the world we know with the addition of the occasional ninja doctor or vengeful astronaut ghost or an ogre running a supermarket.
  • Sluggy Freelance uses this mixed with Rule of Funny to make its bizarre and frequently absurd mythology work. As an example, the "Holiday Wars" arc. Bun-bun, a murderous talking rabbit with the stolen powers of Halloween and the Easter Bunny, leads an army of ghouls in battle against a mutated, alien Santa and his own army of black ops elves. Santa and Bun-bun have their final showdown where they fight each other at Super-Speed using the same ability that lets them deliver presents/hide eggs all over the world in a single day. Eventually Bun-bun performs a Coup de Grâce on Santa using a Nerf gun. Take a look for yourself.
  • In Mixed Myth, this is treated as one of the laws of the universe (under the name of Cynmatics). It causes anything that looks awesome to be inherently more powerful, such as how a gold wand with crystals in it is more powerful than a wooden wand. The Genre Savvy characters take advantages of this.
  • This comic brought to you by a man on a shark fighting a Werepire
  • In the Name of the Gun. Jesus is fed up with God's inaction and comes back to Earth circa 1940. He proceeds to kill Nazis with the help of other celebrities, like Ernest Hemingway.
  • Rock Paper Cynic espouses wisdom such as the following: "At some point we must all chose between what is right and what is awesome".
  • In The Order of the Stick, Rule of Cool is regularly invoked by the local bard, Elan. He deliberately pushes a self destruct button so he can jump away from the explosion 'like a Vin Diesel movie'.
  • Cyanide and Happiness states that all good webcomics needs pirates because pirates are cool.
  • In Snowflakes, Wray's logic and knowledge of history, and even her grip on reality, are often come into question. But who cares if Erik the Red never piloted the Enterprise, or whether there are wraiths? It's awesome.
  • In Mob Ties, there is a clan of time traveling yakuza monkeys.
  • Invoked by the protagonist of Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger in-comic here.
    Plotya Foreshadow: But why did you fire a salvo of photon torpedoes to detonate it? A remote self-destruct command would have done the job...
    Quentyn Quinn: Well yeah, but this way looked cooler.
  • Axe Cop: The t-rex with Cool Shades has chainguns for arms and can breathe fire and can turn into a dragon with rocket wings. Seen here.
  • The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The premise is "wouldn't it be a lot cooler if Charles Babbage had completed his Difference Engine, then gone on Steampunk adventures with Ada Lovelace?" (He's an engineer, she's a mathematician, they fight crime! And street music!)
  • Homestuck:
    • In the (hugely spoilerific!) [S] Dirk: Synchronise, why does Dirk do a handplant while he's flying around on a rocket board? Because it's goddamn cool. Why does he ride through space on a rocket-powered skateboard, high-five an alien while in motion, carry around a robot just so he can fist-bump it later, and save all of his friends lives by kissing them and decapitating himself? Because it's goddamn cool.
    • Bro. Like Dave, he has a katana, but prefers to kick Dave's ass with a different weapon: Li'l Cal. How? By utilizing so much Flash Stepping that it looks like Li'l Cal is alive and doing the fighting for him. When he's doing this, you can barely see him on-screen as a blur. And when said ass-kicking is over, he flies away on a rocket-skateboard. In a series that runs off the sheer absurdity of the characters and situations, it really says something when this guy is the craziest and coolest of them all.
    • Post-flipout, Gamzee Makara picks up the Crazy Is Cool slack. His Strife Specibus is Jokerkind. What kind of weapon does Jokerkind consist of? WHATEVER THE MOTHERFUCK HE WANTS. Including the WARHAMMER OF ZILLYHOO. When he isn't brutally murdering people, he's Flash Stepping around, tricking people into gathering in one place so he can kill them more easily later, swapping items while people are holding them, generally scaring the shit out of Karkat, and, apparently, kissing Tavros's severed head. Then there's the MOTHERFUCKIN JURY.
  • Dragon Ball Multiverse: Broly was found unconscious and transformed (powered-up) at the same time, which does not happen in DBZ. The authors stated they did that for the coolness, and the readers didn't approve.
  • Deep Dive Daredevils: It's a Diesel Punk webcomic about a Cool Boat, with a Cyborg captain, two characters wearing an Eyepatch of Power (only because it's cool), a Were-whale, Dracula (who wants to Take Over the World) and a volcano about to blow its' top. Yeah, it's cool.
  • In the nondescript space future of Manly Guys Doing Manly Things wars are literally FOUGHT on the Rule of Cool: the point of it is to get the public to think you have the coolest army. Case in point: Commander Badass wants to punch his superior officer. Any other army: that'd get him immediately punished, probably demoted, and lucky not to get kicked out. In an army running on this trope: they decide it could be 'mad bitching' and set ground rules to give the Commander one free no-strings-attached sucker punch on the Admiral (preferably in public). However, the concept is also deconstructed and averted: sometimes Rule of Cool isn't the best option: red jackets may look cool, but make the wearer a big target. And the military has no problem emotionally manipulating their soldiers to make them be 'more like Batman', which is what actually led to the case in point. (And by the way, no, the Commander hasn't punched the Admiral yet. It's not about punching him, it's about him knowing he's getting punched.)
    • On a smaller scale, Angel's survival derby is decided by who has the raddest team/base. They technically didn't say who won the most recent one, but considering the Commander made a Dynamic Entry on a megalodon wearing a sweater (the megalodon, not the Commander), it's reasonable to guess his team did.
  • An In-Universe example in I'm the Grim Reaper. It's Satan's justification for the physical changes he makes to Scarlet, which includes giving her a pair of horns, fangs, black and red hair, and even a tail. She, on the other hand, is less than thrilled.
  • Invoked in this Nerf NOW!! strip (which is literally named after this trope), in which Morgan points out all the flaws mecha have and how tanks are superior in every way. Jane's counterarguement? "Can a tank suplex a kaiju?"
    Morgan:...can't argue with that.
  • Sydney of Grrl Power is a hyperactive comic store owner with a taste for corrosively-hot curries, a vocabulary that can and does make sailors blush, and, in her first fight scene, threw a guy by his tongue. Confusion Fu is her speciality. And in terms of actual powers, the only people on her team who outshine her are Maxima and Dabbler, the two most powerful supers on Earth. It severely worries both the latter when Sydney's powers level up after an early battle.
  • Kiel'ndia of Drow Tales has definitely crossed over to this. She's always been a little out there (she treated the readers as her imaginary friends). After the timeskip, she's weaponized us. The readers are now manifest as a swirling cloud of black demons that apparently only she can see, and she uses us to fight other characters and capture demons.
  • In El Goonish Shive, Adrian Raven comments on the subtitle of the "Sister II" arc questioning if "awakenings" is even a word but Catalina claims no one cares because it sounds cool.

    Web Original 
  • Chuck Norris Facts is all about this; Chuck Norris can do X because it would be cool.
  • Parodied in the Onion News Network video Supreme Court: Death Penalty Is 'Totally Badass'. See also this article from The Onion, in which the Rule Of Cool is applied to federal government.
  • 4chan, particularly in /m/, the section devoted to Humongous Mecha, often generally has any argument about... well, just about anything, really, solved by using this as the defining factor.
  • The Terran Confederacy in Ralts Bloodthorne's web serial First Contact applies this rule to their history. As one character puts it: "Yeah, it may be bullshit, but it's cool, so I choose to believe it." This is mostly because a lot of their history was lost in various conflicts, so they had to make things up to fill in the gaps - and if you have to make something up, you might as well make it cool.

    Web Videos 
  • In The Nostalgia Chick class on how to spot evil, Nella says that black leather coats are bad, unless you're a post-apocalyptic Anti-Hero. Then it's cool.
  • Matthew Mercer talks about how to use this trope in an episode of his series about Game Master tips on the Geek & Sundry web channel. His main point is that you should allow the players to try interesting things, but also be careful to not do it too often, since that can mess up the structure and cohesiveness of the game.
  • The Unlucky Tug discusses this at the end of "EVERY Thomas Movie Ranked"; he says that he doesn't mind if the climax is slightly unrealistic as long as it's exciting and wraps up the story.

    Western Animation 
  • Dino-Riders is about people from the future riding into battle on dinosaurs with Frickin' Laser Beams attached to their heads!
  • The Legend of Vox Machina: Their team motto being "they fuck shit up". Vox Machina has prevailed through performing acts of feat. Vox Machina suggests that Scanlan use his magic hand to get them airborne. Scanlan protests that they're all too heavy... and then he realizes that the music he needs should be heavy, and he starts playing a heavy metal electric guitar solo on his lute.
  • Transformers:
    • Several commercials for the 2007 movie were constructed of the robots appearing onscreen and onlookers standing around saying "cool."
    • Animated takes it to new extremes. For starters, Optimus Prime has a rocket-powered axe.
    • Prowl is an alien ninja robot. Who turns into a motorcycle. Why would giant alien robots have ninjas, you ask? Stupid question.
    • Optimus Prime and Soundwave getting into a rock-off?
  • Much of Teen Titans (2003) is built between the Rule of Cool and the Rule of Funny, resulting in varying controversy. Many recurring questions that linger in the fandom are the identity of Red X, the identity of Slade and the fuel behind his motives, and which of the Robins Robin is. Glen Murakami on the other hand has openly expressed that he couldn't care less about any of these things, so long as the kids liked it and found it cool. In one interview, he uses the word "cool" a good fifteen times to answer just about every other question. Inevitably, the series concluded with more unresolved plotlines than you can count on your hand. Invoked In-Universe with the HIVE Five's name.
    Kid Flash: If you're called the HIVE Five, why are there six of you?
    See-more: Because... it sounds cool?
  • Parodied in Invader Zim, where the Virtual Ghost of a Martian justifies their embarking on a pointless project that drove their race into extinction with "Because it's cool." He proved himself right, too. They turned their entire planet into one giant moveable spaceship. That's pretty dang cool!
  • Rambo: The Force of Freedom: Demonstrates the caveat listed in the description: You can only use the rule of cool when the result is, in fact, cool. Highlights of this show include Rambo wrestling a panther under water, driving a motorcycle on top of a train, and jumping out of a burning aircraft with a rocket launcher and somehow managing to turn around and blow up several missiles headed straight for his ally's helicopter with it. It's just cringe-worthy how ridiculous it all is, the flawed animation and complete insanity of the idea of basing a cartoon for children on an ultra-violent action hero making it impossible to take seriously.
  • The creators of The Batman, the Continuity Reboot to Batman: The Animated Series, were looking for a way to set their series apart from the rest. So, they made a spin-off movie entitled, The Batman... versus Dracula. Batman. Versus. Dracula. The bat-imagery crossover lets it make a twisted kind of sense. The movie lives up to the concept. Yes, Batman finds a cure for vampirism at the end, and all the citizens of Gotham who were vamps go back to normal. The Penguin becomes The Renfield. Oh, and as if it wasn't cool enough already, The Joker is turned into a vampire for a while. VAMPIRE. JOKER.
  • In George Shrinks, Becky asks George why his ghost catching machine requires bells and horns. His answer: "they're cool!"
  • In one episode Kim Possible jumped off a plane without a parachute. Even while she was falling towards her doom, she didn't panic and just by sheer luck was she saved by a blimp. While asked why Kim would do such a deadly stunt, the director answered that it was cool.
  • ReBoot:
    • Enzo's birthday party. During the festivities, Megabyte crashes the party, and brings out... a guitar? With a dial turned to 11? Megabyte begins jamming. Then Bob steps up to face him, seemingly angry at him for crashing the party. Then he commands his keytool to turn into a guitar and thus begins a rocking guitar duel, between the Hero and the Big Bad! The whole thing ends with Megabyte giving Enzo his guitar, "I've always wanted to do that" and then leaving. Sure, it could've been a trap, or just about anything, but those thoughts never crossed ANYONE'S mind because it was just that freaking AWESOME.
    • Near the end of the third season of with the system crashing, "User" characters from every game seen prior to the episode suddenly begin appearing in Mainframe. This is explained by the instability of the system releasing "undeleted RAM" — but it seems more like a thinly-veiled excuse for a battle royale between the cast and every User at once. Nobody complained.
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold was inspired by the glorious lunacy of Silver Age DC Comics so of course it focuses on coolness above all else.
    Aquaman: Outrageous!
  • Megas XLR A badass opening theme song, a giant robot with a car for a head that's piloted with a video game system. Coop can pull off amazing and special moves because he played video games all his life. It can all be summed up by these two lines, from the episode where Coop enters Megas into a car show:
    Coop: Man, there's some tough competition this year.
    Jamie: Competition? Dude, you have a giant robot from the future, with a car for a head.
  • Tried, but failed, in the Mister T animated series. note  While a few moments (most notably spinning an alligator over his head) managed it, the punctuating thuds of anvils landing got in the way.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender
    • Sokka has a space sword. A sword made from meterorite. Suddenly being The Team Normal became a much cooler position.
    • The giant drill — that could have been done so many other less cool ways.
    • From Season 2, we are introduced to Varrick, a fun-loving corporate executive. A mad inventor who invented film for fun, whose girlfriend (?) is his smoking hot leading lady, and who, when he gets in a pinch, hides in a Platypus-Bear to remain undetected! Oh, his yacht? It's also a giant speedboat and carries a biplane ("What sort of ship wouldn't have a plane?") but no runway. Not only that, he owns one of the very first Battleships ("I wanted one so I got it!"). When he's later arrested for attempting to kidnap President Raiko, he reveals he has already built himself a custom cell in the prison which his company made since he always thought he'd end up there someday, and finally when his cell is busted open during Unalaq's attack on Republic City, he immediately puts on goggles and Zhu Li, his Hyper-Competent Sidekick, jumps onto his back, attaches herself to him and they both fall out of the cell, then glide away on a glider he had just in case!
      Varrick: Zhu Li...do the thing!
      Zhu Li: [attaches a box to her back, runs over and jumps on Varrick's back and both jump out of the cell and glide away]
  • SWAT Kats: How did they build a serviceable jet fighter from parts in a salvage yard? One better than the official military's jets? After building a secret hangar? Many of their Special Missiles violate logic and physics. Their jet crash into the water with stalled engines and they get the engines restarted underwater and fly away. Who cares? It's RADICAL and plays to an awesome electric guitar soundtrack.
  • Samurai Jack has this as a guiding principle when writing the setting. It was all but outright stated in a featurette that Rule of Cool dictated the writing sessions for Tartakovsky and his creative team. They would sit down and ask: What cool thing can we invoke this episode that we saw on TV when we were kids? Why are there robotic Celtic demons, cowboys riding jet-powered horsebots, robotic Viking warriors, boisterous Highlanders with machine-guns for legs, Spartan warriors with rocket spears, immortal monks and magical portals? Because awesome.
  • The Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "The Mandalore Plot" featured a villain with a lightsaber and not just any lightsaber but one with a black blade shaped like a katana. Word of God said that this was a case of Executive Meddling on Lucas's part, who didn't allow the kortosis vibrosword to be used against a lightsaber..... which was planned to be used for this trope's sake in the first place.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door: The stuff that happens on a typical episode would be laughable anywhere else, but the fans overlook that little detail because it has 10-year-old secret agents with homemade weapons and vehicles.
  • In The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, the climax consists of SpongeBob, seemingly doomed because of Plankton's Evil Plan, singing about the Goofy Goober using a visor and microphone from nowhere to distract Plankton, and when Plankton finally instructs his minions to attack SpongeBob, the microphone and visor are gone just as easily as they appeared and SpongeBob now has a wizard costume with a peanut pattern as well as a Goofy Goober guitar which he uses to play a solo which involves lasers fired from the guitar destroying Plankton's mind-controlling helmets. Despite the blatant, out-of-nowhere Deus ex Machina, this sequence is too cool to question.
  • Motorcity: nukes, tornado stunts, tanks, and car chases that basically says "SCREW YOU" to physics. Think a more child-friendly FLCL, except with cars instead of guitars.
  • Ben 10 and its sequels:
    • A wrist-mounted device that shapeshifts the wearer into ten (or more) forms with varied superpowers? Having it means meeting alien heroes, beating down bad guys, and being able to do your chores in a hurry? Oh heck yeah.
    • Ben's alien form Rath takes the cake. Basically, he's a tiger standing on two legs who looks like he took trash talk lessons from Randy Savage or Hulk Hogan, and fights like them. He cemented his "cool" status by jumping down into the stomach of an intergalactic overlord to save the prince of a planet he had to tend for and threatened that he'd knit a sweater out of his organs if it happened again because "EATING BABIES IS NOT! COOL!" Not to mention that he is super strong, very angry and all around BADASS.
  • Ready Jet Go!: Two (later three) kids get to tag along with Human Aliens on space adventures to learn about science. Unrealistic? Yes. Totally awesome and way more fun than simply looking up information on the internet? Also yes. This even gets lampshaded in "Potatoes on Mars".
  • OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: As implied by the title, this is a setting where anyone can become a superhero (or supervillain), simply by fighting or doing enough deeds to level up like in a RPG game. Heroics are also commonplace enough that finishing off a Killer Robot by falling out of the sky with a shoulder tackle is treated no differently than a daily routine.
  • Lampshaded in the Rick and Morty episode "The Old Man and the Seat" with the leader of The Monogatrons, an obvious Emperor Palpatine pastiche with long tubes apparently surgically implanted into his back. The ending shows they're literally just stuck to him and they serve no purpose other than being a cool accessory:
    Leader's Wife: How much water are you sucking through these stupid fucking tubes on your back?! [pulls them off]
    Leader: THESE TUBES ARE COOL! And I want a divorce!

 
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"SOLVED!!!"

Parodied, then played straight. The ending of "Fixin' it With Soos: Cuckoo Clock" has Soos creating an overly elaborate ending for the episode, mainly consisting of a montage of various things blowing up (using the same live-action explosion effect for each explosion), before ending with a a shot of Soos standing dramatically at the edge of a clifftop and shouting "SOLVED!" into the heavens. To cap it all off, the scene cuts back to Soos' office where the episode officially ends with Soos' computer struggling to render the video project, before ultimately exploding.

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Everything Explodes Ending

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Hulk Punch

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Alternative Title(s): Refuge In Cool

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"SOLVED!!!"

Parodied, then played straight. The ending of "Fixin' it With Soos: Cuckoo Clock" has Soos creating an overly elaborate ending for the episode, mainly consisting of a montage of various things blowing up (using the same live-action explosion effect for each explosion), before ending with a a shot of Soos standing dramatically at the edge of a clifftop and shouting "SOLVED!" into the heavens. To cap it all off, the scene cuts back to Soos' office where the episode officially ends with Soos' computer struggling to render the video project, before ultimately exploding.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (5 votes)

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Main / EverythingExplodesEnding

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"SOLVED!!!"

Shooting throug...

Hulk Punch

Cat on a bike

A pole for your...

Juggle counter

Cool walk