Small Girl, Big Gun

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She may look cute in her school uniform, but she's packing enough firepower to overthrow a Central American dictatorship. And she'll probably use it, too, before the half hour is up, no matter how minor the situation — because she's just that Trigger-Happy.

How does she carry all those guns, anyway? Maybe it's related to the phenomenon of the Hyperspace Mallet.

Sometimes pops up with the Little Miss Badass, BFG. Don't worry about the Missing Backblast when she uses it though, it's all Rule of Cool.

Compare with Cute Bruiser, Pintsized Powerhouse, The Napoleon, Girl with Psycho Weapon, the Girls with Guns genre (when the girls aren't necessarily small and the guns aren't necessarily big), Glacier Waif (the melee version), and Black Magician Girl (the fantasy version).

Basic Trope: Cute girl with ridiculous firepower.

Straight: Linda is a smaller than average and good looking Friendly Sniper armed with a large rifle. Exaggerated: Linda is a teenage girl who fights armed with a gun that's big and scary enough to make Arnie brown his trousers, and spits out massive amounts of bullets, lasers and/or missiles when the trigger is pulled. Downplayed: Linda is a cheerful young waitress who always carries a large handgun that takes up most of the room in her purse for self-defence. Linda is of average height or slightly shorter, and is often seen at the shooting range with a four-foot-long tricked-out Sniper Rifle. Justified: Linda lives in a dangerous part of town, and feels safer if she's obviously armed. Linda is a cyborg whose body has been engineered to handle the force of such hefty firepower. Linda has Super-Strength because A Wizard Did It, Psychic Powers, or similar, and is an Action Girl, so using the heaviest weapon she could wield seemed a logical idea. And since the world she lives in has invented guns, using a BFG supposed to be vehicle mounted makes more sense than using a BFS Inverted: Linda, a huge, tattooed butch biker, has a Little Useless Gun so tiny that it's barely visible past her huge hand. Gender-Inverted: Alex, the scrawny boy, uses a big rifle that might compensate for something. Subverted: Linda admits to a friend that the gun's just for show, and she doesn't own any ammo. Linda is a smaller than average girl who uses an Assault Rifle. Lina wants to use a large gun, but given that the recoil will blow off her arms without her actually being able to hit anything, she's forced to use a more appropriate smaller gun. Double Subverted: Linda claims she has no ammo for the huge gun, but was lying to put her friend at ease. Linda admits to a friend that the big gun's just for show... then pulls out a second piece and says that this one is not. Linda ignores the orders of her superiors and uses a big gun anyway, consequences be damned or non existent. Linda has been seen using a rocket launcher. Parodied: Linda has a zillion guns, but can never decide which one goes with her shoes. Ichigo, eight years old, has a ludicrously huge gun. It's pink and glittery. She calls it Mister Sparkles. "I like fireworks, and Mister Sparkles does too!" Linda is a miniature human who wields a full-sized gun better than any full-sized human. Zig-Zagged: ...But this makes it too heavy for her to lift it al all. So she mounts it on wheels and uses it as a cannon, but ends up being injured when she can't maneuverer with it fast enough. Averted: Linda has a pistol. Enforced: Guys think girls with guns are hot, so, how about we give 'em "bigger boomsticks"? Lampshaded: "You might not want to take that thing with you on your date, Linda. Poor guy's probably nervous enough as it is." Invoked: Tired of being written off as "the cute one", Linda deliberately buys a huge gun so she'll seem more dangerous. Exploited: Her small frame but ability to use a large gun without any problems, even ones that beefy trained soldiers would encounter, get her conscripted into an elite military force to mow down swarms of enemies that have a hard time hitting said smaller frame. Defied: "That one looks a little... cumbersome. Got anything smaller?" Discussed: "It's only loaded with one round of ammo, since I end up on my butt after the first shot anyway." Conversed: Linda sure likes boasting about her gun, and that she "Likes 'em big". Deconstructed: Because of the size disparity, Linda can hardly hold the gun properly, let alone fight the recoil, and thus she's horribly inaccurate, putting bystanders in danger. Deconstructing the inversion, Linda gets mocked for having a wee gun as her main weapon, and it's also very tiny and finnicky to use. Reconstructed: ...So she gets a gun with a built-in bipod, further increasing its size. Said wee gun is a derringer or a machine pistol of any kind, which is just as lethal with a nice bonus of being a Hidden Weapon that she can draw without anyone noticing and kill people by stealth. Played for Laughs: Linda is armed all the time, even while waiting tables. This leads to some awkward situations. (On the other hand, people never, ever forget to tip her.) She also is able to shoot the gun accurately without the recoil ever being present. Played for Drama: Something bad happened to Linda recently, and she's taken up arms to protect herself. She's also growing increasingly temperamental and distrusting. Her friends are all worried, but they're too scared of what might happen if they upset her to talk about it.

MEDIA EXAMPLES Black★Rock Shooter's Rock Cannon is as long as she is tall. In the last episode, its muzzle grows into as wide as she is tall. The Gretel personality from Black Lagoon can fire a Browning Automatic Rifle (with a teddy bear or doll keychain attached to the barrel) from the hip despite only being about twelve years old. There is some real-life precedent for this. Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde infamy) is reputed as having fired a BAR from the hip, and she was quite small at 4'11" and 90 pounds. The BAR was noted for having fairly low recoil, as it was heavy (around 20 pounds loaded) and had a recoil-reducing mechanism in the buttstock. Bleach: The extremely shy Ururu Tsumugiya wields a bazooka that resembles a giant lit cigarette as a weapon. The weapon is bigger than she is. Soifon's Bankai is a giant missile launcher that's attached to her arm. It's so big she can barely move when carrying it, and needs to tie herself down with a heavy iron sash to stop the recoil blowing her away. While the Sisters of A Certain Magical Index usually use the FN F200], when we are introduced to them one of them is trying to shoot Accelerator with a massive Barrett M82 sniper rifle. Kaori in City Hunter, except that she carries a ton of them yet even with this great arsenal can't even hit a single baddie. This can be extended to Xiang Ying in AngelHeart as she inherits Kaori's Heart and the first thing she does is to blow up a castle. She can later be seen with all sorts of automatic weapons as she is a former assassin. In the second season of Code Geass: V.V is a Small Boy with a Big Gun, which he uses to murder his sister-in-law. Also, the gun is not that big, but V.V is so tiny and it fires so rapidly that it looks quite bigger than it really is. Anya is a sixteen-year-old girl and the youngest person to ever be accepted into the Knights of the Round (the Britannian Empire's twelve most elite soldiers) and whereas most Knights of the Round pilot swift, agile custom mechas, Anya's Knightmare Frame is really slow but has countless guns, including one BFG that probably makes up a third of the frame's weight, and impenetrable shielding. Toward the end of the series, Nunnally gains control of the Damocles, which is basically a mile-long gun that fire nukes. Jessica Cleiborn in D_CIDE TRAUMEREI The Animation is small enough to get mistaken for an elementary schoolernote , and uses a massive rotary machine gun. She also wields a Desert Eagle in one episode, which other characters assume to be a model gun at first and are quite surprised to find out it's real. In Darker than Black: Gemini of the Meteor Suou wields an anti-material sniper rifle that is significantly longer than she is tall. And she summons it out of her chest in a magical girl transformation sequence. Which is a real-life WWII-era anti-tank rifle. That said, how she can even lift something that's two metres long and weighs twenty kilos, let alone fire the thing from the hip... Defied in Desert Punk. Kosuna starts bugging Kanta and their weapon shop owner to give her a bigger gun. After the owner has her dig a lot with an oversize shovel, she tries out a moderately-sized rifle. Even though she's a pretty good shot with it, she realizes it weighs too much for her to carry it and extra ammo around easily and the recoil is so strong it actually hurts her shoulder. Her and the owner then conclude that you need to know your own limitations and guns are just tools which become pointless if you are unable to use them, so she settles on a more powerful but appropriately-sized 9mm automatic weapon (which is made a point that if she's doing her job right she wouldn't even need since she's suppose to be staying out of sight). Lilymon from Digimon Adventure is one of smallest Ultimate digimon ever, but she can use her Flower Cannon attack. The twins Luki and Noki from Dogs: Bullets & Carnage are about twelve years old and ridiculously cute. They also have cybernetic arms that pack massive guns and blades that can and will reduce you to a smear of red paste. Comes up from time to time in Eat-Man given the way the setting is saturated with BFGs. Cisqua in Elemental Gelade. One scene in episode 5 of FLCL has Amarao's female sidekick Kitsurubami trying to take out Canti the robot with an anti-tank rifle. Mao of Full Metal Panic!. She might rarely be seen fighting outside of an M9 but when she does... Mao: Let's try this party favorite! [lifts a rocket launcher] Gunslinger Girl; unsurprisingly, given the name (although any of the glamour or comedy typical of the image is subverted about as hard as it possible to get). The first DVD volume is even titled "Ragazzine Piccole, Armi Grandi" — literally "small girls, big guns" in (bad) Italian. Most of the time the girls will use sub-machine guns or smaller caliber pistols, but thanks to their cybernetic enhancements they can handle much larger weapons if needed. Rico has fired a belt-fed MG3 machine gun from the hip, Henrietta uses a Walther WA2000 sniper rifle, Triela's default long arm is a Winchester 1897 trench shotgun with sword bayonet, and Gattonero uses an AW-50 anti-material rifle in the Final Battle. Rally Vincent from Gunsmith Cats usually goes for quality/precision over raw power/rate-of-fire, but she will pull out the occasional BFG when needed. Fledgling Vampire Seras Victoria from Hellsing is frequently shown waving around her 30mm artillery rifle which is longer than she is tall. Later in the manga, she starts shooting down zeppelins using a pair of 72mm automatic versions of those rifles. Yes, Small Girl, More Dakka! And Akimbo! Near the end of the manga, she picks up an 88mm artillery cannon and fires it off the shoulder into the Major's face. To a lesser extent, Rip van Winkle, who wields a very large (albeit not excessively so) musket. One or two of these appear in the anime Izetta: The Last Witch to the point where they are big enough that the titular witch can use them as a broom (one was even custom made for her with handlebars), sometimes with Archduchess Fine on the back as a passenger. There is even one chase scene between a gun ridden by Izetta and Fine and a squadron of 4 German fighter planes. You can see the gun they flew [[ http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Izetta:_The_Last_Witch here]]. Palus Abel from King of Braves GaoGaiGar FINAL has multiple large energy cannons attached to her chest that conveniently only appear when she spreads her cloak. Jennifer Grey of Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple strives for a little more realism than other examples on this list. Only a little, though, because at one point she's still dual-wielding Hand Cannons, with a BFG left over in reserve. Seen here. Himeko of Kurohime wields the legendary pistol Senryuu (Tornado Dragon), a huge pistol capable of firing magical bullets. Additionally, it shoots regular bullets with enough power to wreck a small carriage. Ten years earlier, she wielded a ridiculously long rifle that was capable of summoning dragons without any ambient magic power. Nanoha from Lyrical Nanoha; her "Magic Wand" is capable of firing off energy blasts that can (and do) take out Humongous Mecha. Canon material says that she is 129 cm (roughly 4'4") tall and weights 24 kg (roughly 52 pounds). In the movie she levels a city with a single Starlight Breaker. Dieci and Wendi have large guns as part of their Inherent Equipment, the former being a BFG that can fire devastating explosive projectiles, and the latter being a surfboard-like gun that she can use to fly through the air, fire energy bolts and block attacks. In one part of the manga, Nanoha is shown testing out a gun that appears to be around her size. Arnage wields multiple Gatlings and missile launchers. In My Bride is a Mermaid, Maki's Water Cannon is only the size of a conch-shell but the proportions work out. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Despite her pacifistic philosophy, Nausicaa gets a brief Girls with Guns moment with a large-caliber machine gun. Mana from Negima! Magister Negi Magi. Half subverted: the guns are air-powered replicas (most of them, as the biggest is confirmed as an actual anti-materiel rifle), but they use ridiculously effective magical ammunition. And she's not small at all (she's 180 cm tall, and possesses the Most Common Superpower). At the end of the Kyoto Arc, Chachamaru uses a gun that's at least as long as she is tall. And the magical world, Sayo gets in on this, too. Shio from Nobunagun. Like most of the other characters in the series, she is the reincarnation of a famous historical figure (Nobunaga Oda in this case), and can summon a weapon with ties to their past life. Shio's weapon is the titular "Nobunagun", which primarily takes the form of a gatling cannon, among other things. Kirika from Noir prefers a smaller pistol, but can fire off a machine gun with the best of them. ...also, she does overthrow a typical Central American dictatorship. ...A few, actually. Eboshi in Princess Mononoke believes that women should not be excluded from warfare and has her gunsmiths design a rifle for women. It is fired more like a rocket launcher than a musket and her personal prototype seems to be the most powerful weapon in the whole film. B-ko Daitokuji from Project A-Ko. Essentially Lex Luthor as a sexy high school girl, complete with battle suit. Mami Tomoe from Puella Magi Madoka Magica has her Tiro Finale. A massive matchlock of variable size and form. Homura Akemi's not to be forgotten. A 14 years old girl who fires machine guns and rocket launchers with ease. Stolen from army bases thanks to her time-stopping power. By the end of the series, she stole and fired cruise missiles. (Granted, she wasn't holding them in her hands, but still.) In at least one episode of the anime version of Ranma ½note , Kodachi —a petite 16-year-old gymnast— can be seen wielding a World War II Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, which she hefts around effortlessly, despite it nearly being as long as she is tall. Tanya of The Saga of Tanya the Evil, only ten years old, typically goes into battle with a rifle that's almost as long as she is tall. Downplayed, though, in that it's the standard issue for the Imperial Army, and was designed with an adult soldier in mind. Chise in Saikano has a huge Gatling Gun for an Arm, (as seen here◊) that she uses to instantly destroy B-1 Lancers in the First Episode. And her arsenal gets BIGGER◊. They don't call her the ultimate weapon for nothing. At one point in SoltyRei, Bratty Half-Pint Kasha fires a massive bazooka and gets sent flying backwards by the recoil. Everyone in the titular Strike Witches regiment. In fact, sometimes it's Small Girl Big Guns. Sinon from Sword Art Online is so small in size that her avatar is described as "doll-like". However, she's the greatest gunner in Gun Gale Online and uses the Hecate II, which is longer than she is tall. In the first anime episode of Alicization, when the cast converts their avatars to GGO, resident Token Mini-Moe Silica is seen firing a turreted M2 Browning mounted on top of a Type 73 Light Truck. Chris Yukine from Symphogear is a Tsundere who has her moments of awkwardness when interacting with her fellow protagonists, but she's equipped with a Power Armor that employs a vast arsenal (read: miniguns, missiles, submachine guns, etc.) capable of wiping out an army of aliens by herself. When tapping into her Super Mode during the first season's finale, she can exaggerate the trope by unleashing a cruiser's payload of missiles. Typically her arsenal is just a pair of crossbows with homing capability or quad three-barreled gatling-style guns to dole out More Dakka (the latter lost homing capability for raw brute force). The gatling itself is longer than her arms. Yoko Littner and her sniper rifle (which is bigger than she is) in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Ritsuko Inoue from Those Who Hunt Elves, with her sniper rifle, battle tank, and other deadly gear — and her immaculate schoolgirl's uniform — is the ultimate archetype. One of the Trigger Happies from trash. is Dodo Eidai, a tiny girl wielding the huge Solothurn antitank rifle.