6 Badass Normal Humans (you don’t want to piss off)

The Buffyverse is filled to the brim with supernatural ass-kickers, from Slayers to Vampires to Demons to Witches. However, there are also a solid amount of humans with no demons or magics but are still quite able when it comes to holding their own in a fight. And they don’t even have to turn green for you to know that you wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.

Following are the characters who don’t need flashy lights or superspeed to demand respect from an opponent.

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6. Lindsey McDonald (Angel, Seasons 1 and 2)

Lindsay smashing Angel's face with a sledgehammer, after running him down with a truck.

Lindsey is not your typical evil-lawyer (aka laywer), since once in a while (twice), he gets a heart and sees that Wolfram & Hart, evil incarnate on earth, may not be all they’re cracked up to be. He’s never a good character, just an evil one who has his limits. He does most of his scheming for the top spot in his company from behind a desk or the safety of evil security guards, but there are a few instances, mostly when it matters to him personally, that he doesn’t mind getting his hands (later just “hand”, and then later “hands” again) dirty. Namely, when it comes to Angel.

Yes, Lindsey has some negative feelings toward Angel as the man cut his hand off. It made for a really cool scene, but Lindsey didn’t appreciate it so he continued working with W&H to bring down Angel as painfully as possible. Then he fell for human Darla, and being evil didn’t notice that she was different when she became vampire Darla once again. Darla gets laid and discarded by Angel, something she probably deserves, but Lindsey is still blind to her disinterest in him and proceeds to introduce his sledgehammer to Angel’s face. After running Angel down with a car. Because Angel is a vampire and can take it, it actually makes for a pretty funny scene.

Of course, Lindsey comes back in season 5 all super-mojod up, but before he went on his roadtrip of evil, he showed that he was one lawyer you didn’t want to piss off.

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5. Justine Cooper (Angel Season 3)

Justine giving Wesley a Sweeney Todd-esque shave.

Justine wishes more than anything she could be Buffy. Not the fashionable sense of dress, but all those extra powers in order to fight vampires…yah, she’d have loved some of that. Justine, having had her twin sister killed by vampires, was a character on a permanent vengeance kick. Doing her best to slay vampires by night and drink herself into a coma during the day, she probably wasn’t the most fun character to have around at a dinner party. She is, however, probably the only normal female who could be counted on to kick a little demon ass.

Good old Holtz used that drive to up her vengeance-seeking and focus it to his cause of destroying Angel, which she did rather willingly because she really had nothing better to do. In her moment of ultimate wickedness, she tricks Wesley into thinking Holtz beat her up (probably by ramming her own face into a brick wall), and the double-crosses him. She manages to do that by crossing a knife across his jugular. Bitch.

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4. Rupert Giles (aka Ripper)

He could kick your ass

The first example of the Watcher’s Council churning out closeted rebels, this tweed-clad librarian was nicknamed “Ripper” back in his day. The true meaning of the name is never actually explored, but one assumes it had something to do with his being a delinquent and experimenting with dark magic in order to stick it to his father for putting him in the Watcher’s training school. Ripper used to hang with an anarchist posse, including current chaos-worshipper Ethan Rayne, until one day..oops, they killed someone. Funny how that happens sometimes. Anyway, his friend’s death either clicked something on or off in him, because next thing he knew he was enrolled in the Watchers Academy again, and out popped the stuffy but caring Giles we know and love.

But wait, there’s more. “Ripper” had a tendency to surface now and again, when needed. Small instances include his beating the shit out of Ethan Rayne during “Halloween” (before we knew all that lovely backstory, so it was quite shocking at the time), and his actual reverting to Ripper during the episode “Band Candy.” A more significant moment in Giles’ awesomeness occurs after Jenny Calendar’s death, and he proceeds to beat Angelus in the face with a flaming baseball bat. It almost gets him killed, but its still pretty cool to watch.

The ultimate moment of Giles’ badassness, of which noone else on the show is ever made aware, is when he suffocates a broken Ben in order to make sure Glory never re-emerges. Giles kills an innocent guy, with his bare hands. If you haven’t been paying attention to the show, you might forget that people killing people is a big deal. Especially innocent people. Therefore, Giles flaunts the ability to shed the dusty librarian look and make you think twice about crossing him or his loved ones.

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3. Charles Gunn

"You expectin' me to be jumped by a couple of purse-snatchin' demons?"

Often referred to as the “muscle” of Angel Investigations, Gunn didn’t take no guff from nobody. Well, not while he was on the street anyway; he suspiciously became more refined as time passed and he lived in a cushy hotel with a bunch of white people. I’m not saying anything either way on this subject; I imagine it’s a touchy one. Just know the guy found out he liked ballet and never went back.

Despite his last name, you’d often see this guy wielding a stake or a cool axe of some kind. He’s probably the only human good guy in either series where you could feel confident he could take on a gang of vampires solo and come out of it without a scratch (except for that scratch in the last episode which turns out to be a mortal wound). The man could do some serious damage to demons if he wanted to. And he wanted to.

So why isn’t he the top of this list? Well, though incredibly capable in a fight as well as strategically knowledgeable, Gunn didn’t quite reach that level of crazy vengeance the top two people on this list lived on. Yes, the death of alot of his gang members and the vamping of his sister did affect him deeply, but it just made him more focussed on his cause, and he retained sanity pretty much the whole way through, killing only vamps. Unless you sent his girlfriend to a hell dimension for 5 years; then he’ll snap your neck. But really, he was even sane during that, only killing the dude to make sure Fred wouldn’t have to carry the burden of murder on her conscious. What a guy.

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2. Daniel Holtz (Angel Season 3)

Holtz making an Angel-kabob.

As vengeance without emotion goes, Holtz is king. Back in the day (1700’s), when he was chasing Darla and Angelus around Europe, he managed to be such a threat that he was able to chase Darla and Angelus around Europe. Meaning that he was so fearful that he was able to make two of the most feared vampires tuck their tails and run. Damn.

Angelus and Darla got him back for all that running, though, by raping and killing his wife, killing his children and vamping Holtz youngest daughter. Did Holtz let that get in the way of what he knew he had to do? Nope; he threw his vampire daughter into the sunlight with not a moment’s hesitation. Daaaaamn.

He retained his need for vengeance long after the pain of his family’s massacre subsided, making a deal with a demon to be transported to now-ish in order to make his foe’s lives hell. Only when he gets here, he meets a vampire with a soul seeking redemption and a vampire with a baby. Does he quit on his mission? Hells no, he just ups his game by switching to a sneakier strategy. If anything, the fact that Angel can truly suffer emotionally makes him giddy (I’m guessing; like I said, dude barely ever cracks a smile or sheds a tear). After attempts at destroying Angel physically, he realizes emotional murder is the way to go by kidnapping Angel’s son and instilling in Connor a hate towards Angel so powerful it later drives him insane. Oh, yah, and he sets up Angel by making Justine kill him in a way that looks like a vampire attack. That’s right; he takes his vengeance so far that he kills himself just to make his enemy look bad. Sweet merciful Zeus.

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1. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce

Can you believe this guy used to be comic relief?

Looks like the Watcher’s Council turned out another one.

The thing that makes Mr. Wyndam-Pryce the ultimate in badassery in the Buffyverse, besides the trendy “y”’s in his two last names, is his complete transformation throughout the series. Sure, he didn’t have the constant vengeance campaign last nearly as long as Mr. Holtz, but in the short time he had he really made the violent craziness count. Also, he switched to contacts.

Unlike the shady youth that Giles covered up, Wesley was every bit as pompous, wimpy and nerdy as he appeared when he first showed up in Buffy Season 3. He was a foil for Giles, and when he showed up as a main character later on Angel, he had gained a very marginal amount of cool points (from 0 to 1) by being a bumbling “rogue demon hunter.” Slowly, over time, he became more and more capable in the field, once getting shot to protect Gunn, but preferably stuck to the books and bickered comically with Cordelia.
All that changed when he read the wrong book. “The Father Will Kill the Son” is pretty much the prophecy that sends Wesley spiraling into being the darkest and most depressing character on the show (next to Angel, of course). Dude kidnaps a baby from a guy who he knows will kill him ten ways to Sunday if he ever finds him, but he does it because he knows it’s right. And then he gets double-crossed, but survives something he never should have. Justine may have slit a guy in the neck, but that was Wesley’s neck, and he hung on all night with blood pouring from his jugular without giving into death. And then was rewarded with a pillow smothering while on life support by the vampire with a “soul,” from which he nearly died.

Cast out by his friends (which is fair but sad because he made a very difficult, if wrong, choice), WWP went on to fight the good fight on his own. While still recovering from his neck injury and the pain of the rejection from Fred, he managed to take on a great number of demons and vampires on his own (we’re told, we don’t really get to see). He of course turns to the drinking, but who could foresee the tumultuous relationship with the unapologetically evil (and foxy) Lilah Morgan? Both keeping their relationships secret from their respective sides in the good vs. evil battle, Wesley is in Buffy territory the way he uses Lilah for sex. She’s not Fred, but she’ll do; he can’t really feel sorry for her, because, well, she’s evil and she’s doing pretty much the same thing to him. Don’t forget the cool toys Wesley plays around with. The difference between him then and his earliest incarnation is most evident in the episode “Spin the Bottle” (go check it out).

The season goes on, and the anger between him and Angel soon fades, mostly because Wesley rescues Angel by keeping Justine trapped in a closet like a dog. That’s fairly dark, but more or less his last badass move…

Until Illyria. Wesley went dark after baby Connor was kidnapped; he went INSANE after Fred died. Seriously, everything had been running nicely, mostly because Angel had erased his memories of all that nasty stuff from before. But after 2.5 years of loving her from a distance, she finally decides she wants to go steady. The following week, she succumbs to a horrible disease that melts her organs and burns up her soul. Fred died because of Illyria, and Knox, and Gunn to a certain extent; and Wesley doles out rage like there’s no tomorrow. Mostly because for him, there really isn’t. When Fred dies, his soul dies, and he becomes grief incarnate. For a violent person like him, the grief manifests itself unsurprisingly as violence; he stabs Gunn, shoots Knox (so rudely after Angel said they wouldn’t), and basically does his best to enforce himself, a lowly human, as an equal to a demon that once ruled the world and has a hard time letting that go.

The Wesley that dies on this show is as an irreversibly broken man who goes out in style; macheted through the gut by an incredibly powerful demon. A long cry from the guy in “Graduation Day” who lasted all of 10 seconds before a minor injury took him out of the fight. Wow.