George R.R. Martin
By Sean Tuohy
He's portly. He wears glasses. The man can wear the hell out of a vest. He plays Dungeons & Dragons in his free time.
George R.R. Martin is nobody's geek grandpa. He's a complete and utter badass.
Who else creates vivid fantasy worlds that he quickly filled with characters that you fall in love with and then kills them off in the most bloody gruesome way he can think of.
Martin is responsible for this:
Was that not the most brutal death imaginable for someone named Ned?
Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series was already popular, but the critically acclaimed HBO series brought the novels and their author to a higher level in the zeitgeist.
So you might expect someone that's killing off beloved characters the same way you brush your teeth in the morning to be covered in tattoos, causing Twitter outrage on a daily basis, and driving a Harley at 100 mph without a helmet (Not that any of our other Badass Writers of the Week fit that description or anything...). However, Martin is still the down to earth nerd he started out as.
You know what else makes him a badass? He doesn't give a White Walker about whether or not he lives long enough to finish his novels. He's writing this series as much for him as he is for his readers and is doing it at his own pace. Check out Martin's reaction to an interviewer when he's asked about whether he's worried about dying before he finishes or not:
He's not just giving humanity the finger; he's flipping off the Grim Reaper. We feel pretty confident that Martin is going to live long enough to end A Song of Fire and Ice with a comet smacking into Westeros and incinerating every single last character.
In that spirit, let's joyously watch some people get brutally murdered and appreciate the true badass genius of George R.R. Martin.