4 Lame Characters Who Are Secretly Badass
It’s a sad fact that bad characters happen to good franchises. And we don’t mean characters like Joffrey that we hate because we’re supposed to hate them. We’re talking about characters we were supposed to enjoy and instead make us cringe and go get another drink before the good characters come back on screen. But sometimes, just sometimes these terrible characters aren’t as bad as we think. For example, did you know …
4. The Heart Ring Kid Is Keeping the Entire Planet Alive
How you think of him:
Ma-Ti, the Heart Ring Kid, is well known as the worst member of the Captain Planet team. He didn’t control an element, was useless in a fight and spent most of the time telling people to be nice, getting kidnapped or pointing at things.
How he’s secretly badass:
He Can Brainwash People (And Might be Keeping the Whole Planet Alive)
It turns out Ma-Ti was actually more powerful than all of the Planeteers combined, including Captain Planet.
Captain Planet was called to stop “eco-terrorists” who were trying to destroy the planet, usually by destroying their equipment and getting them arrested. He didn’t teach them lessons or change their attitudes about polluting though, he was more like a tie-dyed Batman who just had them locked up and waited for them to try again, but Ma-Ti’s heart ring could actually make people not evil anymore and stop them for good. It turns out the power of heart is actually the power to make someone a better person against their will. Check out this clip where a jerk says no to giving Ma-Ti some change in an apocalyptic future.
He Heart Rings the guy which is basically robbing him because even if he was a jerk, that was his money and he had decided not to give it away but Ma-Ti compelled him with the power of heart, and boom, free money. Wheeler even comments in the same clip that “with your power you could move people to care for the whole planet”. Whoa. There’s no explanation of why he doesn’t do that all the time, that’s some crazy shit.
Some intrepid Captain Planet theorists even say that Ma-Ti is the only thing keeping Captain Planet from killing the entire planet. Think about it, without Heart, Captain Planet would just be the Earth personified, emotionlessly destroying the things that are killing the Earth. And what’s killing the Earth the most – humans. And what’s stopping Captain Planet from turning us all into fertilizer – the Heart Ring Kid.
3. Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks Fight Hitler and Human Trafficking
How you think of them:
Rich bald, business guy and sassy red headed orphan who get into hijinx, usually through song.
How they’re secretly badass:
They Fight Crime all Over the World. Seriously.
And they’ve been doing it for decades. The Annie comic strip was officially cancelled in 2010 but in the last strip produced of this family friendly tale Annie was left kidnapped somewhere in Guatemala by a self proclaimed “butcher” after discovering a human trafficking ring and Daddy Warbucks was investigating the deaths of several men surrounding her kidnapping. And this was a normal storyline for them.
[Tomorrow, tomorrow, we’ll kill ya, tomorrow …]
But this badassery isn’t something that was just added to modern Annie strips. All the way back in the 1940’s Daddy Warbucks was fighting Hitler along with the rest of the world, but he found an even more badass way than just joining the US army, he used his millions to build an army of mercenaries that he appointed himself general of.
[And after Hitler’s taken care of, my mercenaries and I are going to take over a small island nation, just for fun.]
Hmm, Annie’s not coming off as entirely badass though is she, getting kidnapped and sitting around not fighting Hitler? We can’t have that. Here, have a strip from 1938 where Annie hacks a giant hound to death with an axe.
[It’s a hard knock life.]
2. Aquaman Can Mind Control Everyone
How you think of him:
It’s no secret that people think Aquaman sucks. His powers are breathing underwater and talking to fish. How is this useful on land? It’s not. We’ve all heard it. Even Big Bang Theory has discussed it so we know literally every terrible joke about Aquaman has been made.
How he’s secretly a badass:
He can Control Monsters and Minds. Everyone’s Minds.
Forgetting that Aquaman has always had super strength on land, most people think he “talks to fish” when he actually commands all life in the ocean to do his bidding. All life on 70% of the planet, think about that. The scariest things on Earth live in the ocean, sharks, Godzilla, Cthulhu, the Green Ranger’s Dragon Zord, and Aquaman can control them all, along with the whole army of Atlantis that he’s the king of.
[How controlling sea life can be badass.]
But wait, humans evolved from the sea didn’t we? We sure did and he can mind control all of us too. In fact, he can pretty much control all living things on the planet, including other members of the Justice League when he’s mad at them.
[Members like Steel who he mind-controlled into obscurity.]
Oh, you don’t even have to have evolved from our oceans for him to be able to turn you into his own personal puppet by the way, he’s taken over Superman’s body on occasion as well.
Just a few things to keep in mind the next time you want to risk making an Aquaman joke or throwing your plastic bottles into the ocean.
1. Jubilee Could Destroy the Planet
How you think of her:
Usually getting kidnapped by sentinels or even regular humans, or trying to help in a fight and just getting in the way. Seriously, her codename could have just been Plot Device or Wolverine Bait for all the times the X-Men had to go rescue her.
Fashion Disaster also would have been acceptable.
How she’s secretly badass:
She’s actually an Omega Level Mutant (or at least Emma Frost thinks she is).
Jubilee’s powers are usually described as “creates fireworks” which is fun at parties and next to useless in a fight against giant robots and guys with super strength. Except Jubilee doesn’t make fireworks, she actually detonates matter at sub-atomic levels, which means she potentially has the power of a fusion bomb and might be one of the most powerful mutants on the planet. The reason she usually just makes fireworks is because her real power scares her ever since she blew up the Mandarin’s mansion, pretty much by accident, a few months after she joined the team.
[That was incredible. I must never be useful like this again.]
But she’s fully capable of blowing up pretty much anything and killing a lot of people, like in the below panel where Emma Frost goes into her mind to push Jubilee to use her powers to blow up an entire alien invasion force by herself.
[The darkest day in X-Men history, the day Jubilee saved them all.]
Of course, none of this changes the fact that she looks like a crossing-guard dressed for multiple weather scenarios.
Have we changed your mind about any of these characters or are they still the worst? Know anyone we missed? Tell us about it in the comments.
I like this article.
Dazzler.
Marvel’s cheesy 80’s pop-rock ripoff, right?
Dazzler has the mutant ability to transduce sonic vibrations, which reach her body into various types of light.
Let that sink in for a second.
Quick science lesson. What we refer to as ‘sound’ are sonic vibrations traveling through matter. ‘Light’ is electric and magnetic waves oscillating perpendicular to the direction it’s traveling.
Stay with me now.
Audible sound (sound you can hear), generally has frequencies between 20 and 20,000 Hz (Hertz)
Visible Light has frequencies between 400000000000000 and 800000000000000 Hz. Hertz (Hz) is oscillations per second.
Quite a difference, eh? But how does it apply?
Dazzler essentially has the ability to speed up oscillations exponentially.
So what?
Everything in the universe oscillates. EVERYTHING. The examples i’ve given here are only audible and visible oscillations. Dazzler has access and control over non-auditory and non-visible forms as well.
Remember this? E=mc^2 Let’s rearrange it: m=E / c^2
Sound is a form of energy. If she can speed up the oscillations to ‘ c ‘ (speed of light), why not c^2?
That’s right folks. That cheesy 80’s pop-rock girl can create matter from sound (theoretically).
That is beyond omega-level. That fringes on DIETY.
Isn’t Dazzler originally from the 1970s? I believe she started out as a Disco singer. I know I’ve seen scans of her in very 1970s era outfits on retro blogs wondering why she was with the guy she was with.
Don’t forget Jubilee is now a vampire as well. So she’s not only a mutant, but an undead mutant with incredible strength and immortality.
Jubilee lost, and as far as I know never regained her powers, during M Day. So, know she’s just a vampire. No more super explosion powers.
She lost her powers when Scarlet Witch said “No More Mutants” she’s only a vampire now.
Cypher.
Has the ability to communicate with everything that has a language.
Including the city of San Fransisco, where he listened to the “pulse of the city” to find a terrorist who had a bomb, and was able to stop him from blowing up the city.
Also, during Second Coming, when the Nimrods from the future were wrecking everybody and everything, Cypher was sent into the future with X-Force on basically a suicide mission. He gets absorbed by one of the Mastermolds, which allows him to access its programing, and thus overwrite it. This deactivates all the Nimrods invading Utopia, pretty much saving the day.
you are absolutely right sir, i apologize.
Amazingly, she was also supposed to have a tie-in album, and some singer somewhere was going to pretend to be her.
The late 70s had to be a very strange time to be alive.
Dont Forget Jubilee also turned vampire in recent years, so figure all those powers into her badassery.
I realized Ma ti was more powerful than he looked when I saw Will (The one with the power of Heart) on the cartoon W.I.T.C.H. They portrayed that power a LOT better on that show and made it quite clear that should actually create sentience, communicate telepathically, read minds, and lead the team. Besides the same apparent powers as Ma Ti and I realized then that Ma Ti was likely that powerful too.
Way to paint Jubilee as so terrible despite the point of the list. How about you name “all the times” she had to be rescued? How about you not act like her 90’s outfit is any worse than the other cheesy uniforms of almost all comic characters ever. Most only think Jubilee is lame because of shallow writing from a kid’s cartoon. If you’ve followed her history it’s clear she’s far from lame or useless. What you’ve done here is go out of your way to make it look like you’re giving props to her when you’re just shitting all over her, though.