Badass: Beyond the ass

After seeing some rather amazing special effects, I had a question dawn on me. What makes certain things badass? And more importantly, why do we love the badass?

I began my hypothesizing by thinking of other animals that view things as "badass". I began remembering a video I saw on gorillas. I remember that the video said that one male is born in each group that has a patch of white hair on it's back. This makes the gorilla the alpha male. This patch of white is apparently extremely badass to these gorillas, as most males fear the silverback.
I soon came to the conclusion that my first thoughts were going no where in my search for the nature of the badass. So I tried harder. I then came to the idea that maybe it wasn't the white hairs on the back of the silverback that makes it badass, but it is the power that the fir represents. The alpha male is the leader, is this where the badassness begins?
I thought back to all the things that I idolized for their badassness as a child. I came up with three, the first is Starscream from Transformers, the second was Darth Vader (i'm a nerd), and the third was Godzilla. Two out of the these three had extreme power, Starscream just has the coolest name ever. Vader had the force and the storm troopers to give him power, and Godzilla had lazer vision. Those two are equally badass, yet I still didn't know if it was the power they held that made them badass, or the way they used them.
I began to dwell further into this badass theory and, I realized that badassness itself is badass, and badassness is not powerful in itself. I thought about whether there even is a true reason for badassness. I couldn't think of a characteristic that is shared by all the baddass things, and this is when I realized that badass should stay a mystery. Just like a joke, when deconstructed, badass becomes ordinary.