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In this case, it also stands for Big Furious Grizzly.
"My cause is just... my will is strong... and my gun is very, very large."
Doomguy, Doom

BFG: a piece of personal artillery used by an individual and chiefly defined by, well, its incredible bigness.

A BFG might have a mounting or bipod, but the main use in-story is for our warrior to sling it around as a personal weapon. With gritted teeth. While standing knee-deep in a pile of spent brass, shouting "Get Some!"

The BFG is a visual metaphor for power and therefore has a lot of uses as a trope. If The Hero, particularly the Action Hero, gets hold of one, it's likely because the writers intend to escalate the action, most likely with a Storming the Castle scene where he takes on a whole army. Upon seeing someone carrying a BFG, a Deadpan Snarker is likely to imply that they're Compensating for Something.

The Big Guy is likely to wield one of these as his weapon of choice.

A BFG chiefly differs from a Hand Cannon in that the Hand Cannon is large for a pistol, while the BFG is large for ... well, it's just plain large. A BFG, possibly after Sucking-In Lines, may cause people to be Blown Across the Room from the mere recoil of firing it.

See also: Beam Spam, Splash Damage, Macross Missile Massacre, Sphere of Destruction, Wave-Motion Gun, Lightning Gun, Freeze Ray, Death Ray, Removable Turret Gun, Disintegrator Ray, and Recursive Ammo. A BFG will almost certainly yield Stuff Blowing Up, and will likely possess additional dakka. A Swiss-Army Gun tends to also be a BFG, as does a Bigger Stick. Might cause the user to be Trigger-Happy. When in the possession of a little girl it probably overlaps with Small Girl, Big Gun. If its grips are placed along the top of the barrel and at the back of the weapon, you have a Chainsaw-Grip BFG. BFGs will may sometimes overlap with Gatling Good, though more often than not it's a single-barreled (or non-rotary multi-barreled) cannon. If the weapon was designed as a sidearm (perhaps not even a Hand Cannon) by a larger race then that's a variant of Giant's Knife; Human's Greatsword.

A Sub-Trope of Impossibly Cool Weapon. See also Big, Bulky Bomb, BFS, Epic Flail, Great Bow, and Humongous-Headed Hammer. Often the final gun acquired in an arsenal of Standard FPS Guns.

Not to be confused with Roald Dahl's book and character The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), Impact Wrestling's show Bound for Glory, Big Friendly Dog, the starship battle game Battlefleet Gothic, "Bang!" Flag Gun, or another type of gun. Or with The Notorious B.I.G., for that matter.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • There's also the experimental laser rifle Kaneda gets a hold of in AKIRA when it's shown that Tetsuo can halt ordinary bullets in midair.
  • Bakugan Battle Brawlers has recently unveiled Battle Gear, which contains several things that qualify as BFG's, but the current granddaddy of them all is Zukanator. (Yes, the little guy on the lower right is and in a figurative sense one was The Dragon.) Practically big enough to be a Wave-Motion Gun, it turns your Bakugan into a living Kill Sat. However, it fits the BFG category because it is carried by the hero and can't blow a spaceship in two. It can blow a pretty sizable hole clean through one, though.
  • Guts' Arm Cannon in Berserk, which is exactly what it sounds like — a small-sized gunpowder cannon built as a replacement for his left arm, which he typically unloads on demons at point-blank range.
  • Most characters in Black Lagoon favor Hand Cannons, but during the "Baile de la Muerte" arc, Roberta, who in this arc is in full-on Ax-Crazy mode, starts sniping at the Grey Wolf unit with a Barrett M82 anti-materiel rifle, a .50 caliber beast of a weapon that is normally used on a bipod in a prone position. When some FARC soldiers show up behind her, she swings it around and blasts them one-handed.
  • Black★Rock Shooter wields the Rock Cannon, which is possibly longer than she is tall, and definitely as heavy. And it can get much, much bigger...
    • As of the anime, BRS isn't the only one with one of these. Chariot's, um... chariot has a BFG built in that shoots giant explosive macarons, no less. There's also Strength/Yuu's Ogre Arms, which have blasters in the fingers and can become a pair of Gatling guns. However, the most ridiculous has to be Insane Black Rock Shooter's Insane Cannon Lance. It's at least twice as large as the Rock Cannon, doubles as a BFS, and the amount of shots it can dish out is just plain unfair, even by this show's standards even if the bullet spread is pretty severe. And then there is the utter behemoth of a cannon Mato pulls as a finishing move against Insane Black Rock Shooter in a Combined Energy Attack. The muzzle alone is wider than IBRS is tall.
    • From the game, we have White Rock Shooter, who, in addition to having a Rock Cannon nearly identical to BRS's, has the Grateful Sun Ray, which is comparable in size to a tank, and fires a slow-moving, self-dividing ball of energy that hurts. A lot.
    • The above examples don't even account for all the as-of-yet unused characters. There's Black★Matagi's gunblade, Underworld Vulcan's rotary cannon, Maid Gunner's sniper rifle, Demon Cannon User's, well, cannon... geez, huke really likes small girls with big guns...
  • Bleach:
    • 2nd Division's Captain, Soifon, an expert in assassinations and melee combat, truly dislikes her Bankai. Why? Because it's a freakin' missile launcher. And it makes an insanely giant boom. Fans call it The Banzooka. Or, in reference to her stinger-like two-hit kill Shikai (which Soifon likes very much), the "Stinger Missile".
    • The Zanpakutou of Hanataro Yamada, Hisagomaru, can, in materialized form, release a Death Ray from the BFG concealed in his chest. This requires the absorbing of a certain amount of pain energy from some poor victim nearby. While in Zanpakutou form, this attack would likely be considered a Wave Motion Sword.
  • Brave Police J-Decker: Gunmax and his motorbike have the capacity to transform into the Max Cannon, which then attaches itself to J-Decker/Fire J-Decker right hip to fire a massive energy beam to obliterate the target. Shadowmaru in his Brave Cannon mode also counts as a bigger example, needing to be carried by all the other members of the team together.
  • In at least one occasion on the classic cyberpunk anime Bubblegum Crisis, (entirely human) police officer Leon McNichol makes use of a massive anti-mecha gun that appears to be some sort of miniaturized cannon. Again seen in the episode "Red Eyes" when Linna is equipped with a prototype motoslave connected to a huge cannon capable of not only reaching but vaporizing a Kill Sat in orbit. And somewhat humorously presented in Revenge Road where the ADP has to deal with a rampaging super-car that seems to have taken on a digital mind of its own. Their response is to drag out a decommissioned tank so as to have a gun capable of stopping it.
  • Cells at Work: Baby!: Immunoglobulin G (IgG), an antibody the baby obtains from the mother, is portrayed as a massive mounted artillery that effortlessly tears through an entire group of dangerous S. aureus bacteria. It's so big, it looks more like a vehicle than a weapon at first.
  • A lot of them in City Hunter: Ryo uses a Colt Python .357 Magnum; Kaori uses her brother's own Colt Python, but also makes use of Gatling gun, bazooka, grenades and giant hammers; Umibozu has a S&W Model 29 (the original .44 Magnum revolver), even if he usually fires a machine gun or a bazooka; Miki, being Umibozu's partner, has a tendency to draw the less ridiculously big guns in his closet, who are still quite big for anyone else's standards...
  • In the second season of Darker than Black, Suou can manifest a PTRD 14.5mm anti-tank rifle with her contractor ability. We see its effects on the human body in one episode. It is not pretty.
  • D.Gray-Man: Allen Walker's anti-Akuma weapon can go into this form, first seen at the "Ghost of Martel" arc.
  • Several Digimon embody this trope, most notably Beelzemon, in both his blast mode and Xros Wars incarnation.
  • Bolt Crank's affectation for comedically over-sized armaments of all shapes and sizes amounts to half the appeal of Eat-Man.
  • Fairy Tail:
  • Final Fantasy: Unlimited has Kaze wielding the Magun, which through the use of Soil Charges can summon giant monsters for just about any occasion, including a monster that is literally a God.
  • In Gaiking: Legend of Daiku Maryu, the Serpent Buster aircraft can combine with the titular Humongous Mecha, attaching to its arm and turning into a cannon, to form Buster Gaiking.
  • Many of GaoGaiGar's predecessors in the Brave Series had their ultimate forms come equipped with BFGs (while the former went down a different route). Two of the most famous (and most appropriately named) are Fire J-Decker's Max Cannon Mode and Great Might Gaine's Perfect Cannon.
  • A number of weapons from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex qualify.
    • Saito uses a sniper rifle, Batou uses a Minigun, Ishikawa uses a bazooka filled with Anti-Tank Adhesive Countermeasure ammo, Borma uses a bazooka, and Motoko herself uses a .50 caliber anti-tank rifle... with only one arm. Of course, considering that they are all enhanced with prosthetics to various extents, it makes some sense that they can wield these weapons. Togusa, the only non-cyborg, just uses a Mateba autorevolver. In the original movie, Batou also uses a man-portable HEAT SPIW (High-Explosive Anti-Tank Special-Purpose Individual Weapon), which he affectionately calls "your standard-issue Big Gun".
    • In one issue of the manga, Togusa (in that version a cyborg like the rest of them) uses a 50-cal anti-tank rifle.
  • In the Gundam franchise, numerous Mobile Suits can be seen carrying weapons like these. Many of them were designed to shoot down battleships, but their power is more than enough to pulverize a Mobile Suit with ease. Among them:
    • The titular Mobile Suit Gundam redefined the balance of power by demonstrating the first MS portable Beam weapon, allowing it to punch through any armor the forces of Zeon could muster and essentially turning it into a One-Man Army
    • By the time of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, the Gundam's been mass produced as the Gundam Ground Type, but its Beam weapons have been reduced to the new standard of weaponry. To compensate, G-Type Gundams now include a backpack that carries a 180mm cannon for heavy armor engagements.
    • Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam had its three main MS, the Zeta, the Mk-II and the Hyaku Shiki, each have one. The Hyaku Shiki had the Mega Bazooka Launcher, which was more or less a mobile weapon platform that required a secondary power source to charge it up. The Zeta had the Hyper Mega Launcher, which was based off of the Mega Bazooka Launcher. The Mk-II had the Long Rifle when combined into the Super Gundam.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Wing had the Buster Rifle and Twin Buster Rifle of the Wing and Wing Zero Gundams, powerful enough to destroy colonies if need be.
    • After War Gundam X gives us the Satellite Cannon, the main weapon of the Gundam X. These suckers were designed to take out colonies and are devastating weapons beyond them. The Double X gets two of them and when the titular Gundam X is upgraded to the X Divider, it exchanges the Satellite Cannon for the Beam Harmonica, a shield/thruster pack armed with 18 beam cannons.
    • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, we have the Strike Gundam's "Agni" Impulse Cannon as part of the Launcher Striker Pack, which unleashes a massing burst of energy when fired.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn the titular unicorn uses the "Beam Magnum", which is a Wave-Motion Gun with a five round magazine. It's so overpowered it consumes an entire "conventional" beam magazine per shot, and its magazines are in turn multiple beam cannon magazines nailed together.
    • Mobile Fighter G Gundam features Gentle Chapman, whose Royal Gundam includes an enormous rifle that he used to win three Gundam Fights in a row, upsetting the balance of power and bringing the world to the brink of war before Master Asia defeated him in the 13th Gundam Fight.
    • ∀ Gundam features three on the titular Gundam, two in its abdomen that can generate a literal Wave-Motion Gun of energy in front of it, and its obligatory hand-held rifle which was intended to destroy Battleships
    • All of the protagonist Gundams in Mobile Suit Gundam AGE feature an obligatory one that gets progressive bigger as the chapters continue, however all are eventually supplanted by the AGE-3's Blustia Cannon, an attachment for the Sig Maxiss Rifle that makes it even bigger.
  • The Buster Launcher of Heavy Metal L-Gaim.
  • In Hellsing, Seras Victoria, a recently-turned vampire, uses a 30mm cannon that weighs 120 pounds unloaded. Her strength enables her to wield it like a mundane personal rifle, much to the shock of the human troops. And this is one of the smaller guns in the series. She later upgraded to an even bigger cannon. It had two 30mm auto cannons, could fire grenades, and had the ability to take down armored vehicles at four kilometersnote . She DUAL-WIELDS a pair of these when facing down Zorin's zeppelin, and uses them to bring it down.
    • It reaches its peak when in the manga and OVA's climax she pulls out and fires an Eighty-Eight note  in order to blow through the reinforced glass shield protecting the Major, which not even the other aforementioned BFGs could pierce through.
    • Her sire Alucard wields a pair of Hand Cannons.
  • The weapon of choice for the Capital Police in Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is a hand-held version of the MG-42 heavy machine gun from WWII. In real life, this weapon weighed well over 11 kg and was only accurate with a tripod, and was normally used by a team of two to four men. However, in the movie, they take steps to make the use of a man-portable one seem more realistic, such as an added foregrip and a shoulder-mounted compartment that holds the ammo-belt. The weight-balance problem was more than likely evened out by the heavy armor they wore. Plus, they always seemed to use them at ranges of only 10-15 feet from the target, and at such a close range, accuracy problems for a heavy machine gun become essentially non-existent, since the spray fire is going to kill everything.
  • Hitomi Landsknecht from ICE wields one, with a gorgeous Steampunk design.
  • Sakuya of Koi Koi 7 can call forth any gun at any time, and has a preference for BFGs.
  • The Law of Ueki: Any one-star or above Celestial being, most notably Robert and Ueki has a weapon called Kurogane, which turns their arm into a giant, 6-foot cannon that completely overshadows the user in size.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Natsuki Kruger in My-Otome is a proud wielder of a BFG from Hammerspace (literal, in-story Hammerspace, accessed via Applied Phlebotinum). It is at least 1.5 times as long as she is tall, if not longer.
  • Miyu from the My-Otome manga has a tri-barrelled triple gatling that is almost certainly a Xenosaga Shout-Out. Unfortunately, the enemies she attempts to use it on have Deflector Shields...
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
    • Chachamaru at one point wields a gun as long as she is tall. It's powerful enough to temporarily contain an uber-powerful demon.
    • Mana LOVES the BFG: she does Guns Akimbo with Desert Eagles, and when she was hired to prevent love confessions in a determinated area she did it by shooting her targets with a tranquillizer-loaded, 14 kg anti-materiel rifle (laying down with a tripod though, like one would expect). At one point, she even uses an anti-tank machine gun to fight demons. She has mentioned at least once that some of her guns are airsoft replicas.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion has the Positron Sniper Rifle, a prototype firearm that is slightly longer than the EVAs are tall and that uses the entire power grid of Japan as its power source.
  • In Night Wizard, Emotionless Girl Akari usually wields a BFG, but during one of the final episodes, she briefly upgrades to a RIDICULOUSLY oversized ANTI-FLEET weapon. It's so big, she needs another wizard to handle the reloading. Rather than firing from the hip as is her general style, she finds it necessary to carry it on her shoulder... and it's the size of an interstate bus.
  • Takeo from Noblesse uses a gun that is as tall as him, and he's one of the tallest characters in the series!
  • In Nobunagun, the main character Shio uses a giant minigun that fires ammo bigger than her torso.
  • Several people in One Piece are armed with oversized guns or even cannon. For example, Tilestone, Zanbei, and Absalom. Also slightly parodied with one Marine officer who wielded a really huge portable bazooka.
  • Hiromi in Patlabor has a tendency to end up packing an enormous anti-labor rifle in the movies; in the first, it's shown being fired at a police patrol car, throwing it about fifty feet into the air trailing debris. The one he uses in the second movie forces him backwards with every shot even though he's braced and using a bipod, and is powered enough to go straight through the head of a Extor.
  • At one point in Pokémon Adventures, Lt. Surge has a bazooka. What makes it awesome is its ammo...which are Voltorb and Electrode. Seriously.
  • Though not actually that big, Lady Eboshi's gun in Princess Mononoke is the prototype of a BFG especially designed to be used by women. It's a shoulder-fired matchlock musket that fires shot well over an inch in diameter and has a really big muzzle flash. With it Eboshi mortally wounds two very powerful forest spirits and decapitates The Great Forest Spirit with a single shot.
    Eboshi: Now watch closely, everyone. I'm going to show you how to kill a god.
  • Mami Tomoe from Puella Magi Madoka Magica wields conjured matchlock rifles as her weapon of choice, and her Tiro Finale gun is huge. Exaggerated in Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, where she uses a railway gun which upgrades her Tiro Finale into a Fantastic Nuke.
  • In Rebuild World, Akira is allowed to purchase an anti-materiel rifle and the corresponding CWH ammo for dealing with heavily-armored monsters following his promotion to Rank 17. The sniper rifle is as large as he is while deployed and using the CWH ammunition blasts a hole through the heads of what is essentially an alligator tank after his normal piercing rounds failed to leave lasting damage. Not only that, but the bullet keeps going and does significant damage to the building behind it.
    • The Ragnarok, which is a super powerful missile launcher multiple characters dream of getting, that’s used for the far east front lines where Kaiju are common. The launcher is as big as a person, but Sara thinks she could wield it due to her nanomachine-based Super-Strength.
    • The Old Soldier Kurosawa uses a Morph Weapon whose different forms are huge guns that would look better on a tank than carried by a person. Like a sniper-rifle that looks like a tank cannon, or a huge machinegun.
    • Akira gets modifications for his A421 Grenade Launcher to turn it into a missile emplacement on his large second Cool Bike, and it wouldn’t look out of place mounted on a tank. It gets fired remotely, being aimed with a Laser Sight on Akira's rifle.
  • In The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, the Victory Kizuna Buster is a massive cannon as large as Red is. It runs on the power of the bonds of the wielders and can only be used at full power when its users put aside their differences and work toward a single goal, generating a laser that causes a huge explosion on impact. But if the users are bickering, the beam will split in half, missing the target completely.
  • Scryed: George Tatsunami's Alter, Big Magnum, is, as its name would suggest, a Big Fucking Revolver that shoots Big Fucking Bullets.
  • Sgt. Frog: Garuru's sniper rifle is at least 5 times larger than himself.
  • In Soul Eater, Death the Kid wields two of these when using Death Cannon, which are somehow merged with his arms. They're usually normal-looking pistols.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Yoko's enormous coilgun-sniper rifle. The gun is about as long as she is tall (mainly because of the barrel, which is fairly ridiculous on its own, the rest of the gun itself is actually fairly reasonably-sized considering its purpose, that, and it's a railgun that can accept any ammunition that can fit into the barrel, even arrows), and is capable of taking down Humongous Mecha, occasionally in one shot. Exaggerated in the final episode where Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the mecha that jumps on galaxies like stepping stones gets one of its own. Sized appropriately of course.
  • In Transformers Victory, Deathsaurus has the Living-Metal-Destroying Cannon.
  • Trigun thrives on this trope. Wolfwood wields the Cross Punisher, which actually contains a machine gun, a missile launcher, and (in the anime) between six and eight normal-sized guns. Knowing that Wolfwood's Punisher is slightly taller than him and that Wolfwood is about 1.85m, the weapon must weigh at the very least 100 kilos, which makes it a more than honourable BFG (and Wolfie one honourable badass). Millie Thompson carries a stun gun that looks like a portable Gatling gun, can fire projectiles with enough force to knock over a truck, and fits neatly inside her overcoat without a bulge. Chapel the Evergreen (Wolfwood's mentor in the anime) carries a Punisher that can split down its length to form a pair of machine guns. Caine the Longshot, another Gung-Ho Gun in the anime, has a sniper rifle with a barrel that is several yards long. He shoots at Vash and Wolfwood from far outside of town until Vash uses his Improbable Aiming Skills to blow the rifle to pieces. And then, the most BFGing BFG of all BFGs: Vash and Knives' angel arms. When fired at low power, they blast away whole cities. When fired at full power, they carve giant craters in the moon.
  • The Carbon-Freeze cannon and Gekko's Moonclub, which doubles as a Bazooka, in Yaiba.
  • Yozakura Quartet: Kotoha's Acht.

    Comic Books 
  • During the Dark Age, it was remarkably common for a hero's superpower to simply be "uses a big gun." This was particularly true of Rob Liefeld and those inspired by him. This is especially true the way he drew Cable; see the image for item #23 in this hilarious article:
    "I think Cable should be holding a BIG gun on this cover."
    "Well yeah, he usually is."
    "Pffffft, no, I mean a REALLY big gun."
    • The X-Men Red (2022) series lampshades this a little when Cable resorts to using his biggest gun - the Omega-One Pulse Rifle. It's supported on a load-bearing harness (and, based on the art, may also have anti-gravity support or something similar). The barrel is a similar diameter to Cable's torso.
  • Played for Laughs and a little Deconstructed in Alan Ford: the killer for hire "Bazooka" Joe is an average scrawny man who uses a large bazooka as his weapon of choice when it comes to assassination. It's incredibly deadly, but since he insists on training daily to not lose his edge he ends up spending all the money he gains in ammo.
  • All-New Ultimates: One of the watchdogs had one for using against the reinforcement cops, but work just as well against superheroes.
  • Blue Beetle: The third Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes) has a scarab that specializes in these. We never get to see him use most of them because they're all lethal and for Jaime, killing's a big no-no. But seriously. One has theological implications. Just think about that.
  • Daredevil: In Born Again, drugged-up Super-Soldier Nuke wields a freaking beast of a firearm affectionately called Betsy after his beloved childhood babysitter. Betsy is titanic in size and power and even sports a kill counter so Nuke's handlers can monitor his results.
  • Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith introduces the lightsaber rifle, a powerful laser cannon that uses lightsabers as fuel. Extremely Awesome, but Impractical, because while it produces a massive beam with the Absurd Cutting Power of a lightsaber, it can only get off about five shots before destroying the saber entirely and those things aren't easy to come by.
  • In The Death of Superman, we were introduced to the "Toastmasters", powerful military-grade weapons being sold on the black market and being used by the gangs in Metropolis to "take back" the city after Superman was gone. It's also a massive Old Shame to its creator John Henry Irons, as he never wanted them out in the first place and their appearance in Metropolis is what convinces him to fight back.
  • In Doom, the Space Marine calls the BFG 9000 "the Holy Grail of Firepower" — it's found on top of a plinth like a relic.
  • In Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl, Batgirl has a gun which looks like a miniature rocket launcher.
  • Empowered has ThugBoy's 50-cal Sniper Rifle, although it gets destroyed during a fight. And the B.F.Gunnaz who are named after this trope.
  • In the first arc of Wildstorm's Gen¹³, the newly gen-active Fairchild picks up a massive laser/rifle type weapon she obtained from one of the fallen I/O ops to brandish in her fight to save her new comrades....though it seemed to be more of just a chance to see a hot spandex-wearing redhead brandish a gun considering she was now about 6'5 and superhumanly strong regardless.
  • In Kingdom, Gene gets his hands on one when he falls in with the Wild Bunch. In his own words:
    Gene likes the new kill-toy.
  • In Gold Digger, Brianna is very fond of this trope.
    "Don't worry, it's got a stun setting!
    "A fifty-millimeter Gatling cannon with a STUN setting?!"
    "Uh... Yeah."
  • Howard the Duck uses a gun actually named the BFG when going zombie-hunting across the multiverse.
  • The Incredible Hulk:
    • In The Incredible Hulk (1968) #390, a soldier in a battle mans a high-tech cannon about ten feet long. When a blast knocks the weapon off its legs, pinning the soldier beneath, the Hulk (the really smart version) picks up the cannon, wields it in one hand, and to the enemy says "...let us reason together"
    • Hulk himself succumbed to this trope during the Dark Age, when he spent a story arc running around with a huge energy cannon in each hand. Thankfully, that story tends to be ignored these days.
  • Nextwave: The main guns on the H.A.T.E. Aeromarine:
    Monica Rambeau: Those are some big f%43ing guns!
  • Spider-Man: In the Revenge of the Sinister Six storyline, the Sinister Six run around with massive weapons after stealing them from HYDRA. Spidey attempts to match them with backpack-mounted web cannons, but after that disastrous usage, he dumps it.
  • Played for laughs in the Sturmtruppen: the Lieutenant's attempt to make a new, powerful rifle for the army ends up in the same rifle as before, but now howitzer-sized, and gets him fired.
  • In Superman: At Earth's End, Superman uses a comically oversized gun (it's twice his size!) to kill twin clones of Hitler.
  • In the Transmetropolitan series, Yelena Rossini briefly picks up one of these at a gun shop. She is acutely disappointed when she is not allowed to take it home and asks whether it's because of her sex, but it turns out that the weapon is "designed for people with two backup spines."
  • Wolverine: Sabretooth's short-lived partner Birdy was quite fond of guns which her tiny frame would normally find impossible to lift.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): As Julianna Sazia's muscle bound cybernetic thugs were rather emblematic of the Dark Age of Comics during which they were created, those who didn't have a hand replaced by a gun tended to carry a gun at least as big as one of their legs.

    Fan Works 
  • Fate of the Clans: Black Barrel Replica is a black-and-red sniper gun around 4 meters long.
  • The Darned Nearly Recoilless Rifle from Under The Bridge is probably one of the smallest BFGs. It only uses comparatively tiny .22 rimfire cartridges of which it can only hold one. The reason why it does qualify as a BFG is that it's designed by a mouse to be used by rodents, and at that scale, .22 rimfire is the equivalent of a 155mm howitzer. The sole cartridge is inserted into the barrel from behind; it's actually designed to be operated by multiple rodents, one of whom loads it. And although the recoil is dramatically reduced by ejecting the empty casing backwards, it is still strong enough to knock over a single gunmouse.
  • The Gunslinger Hero: Flintlock:
    • A gun formerly owned by Izumi, later gifted to Pony, known as "Sweet Business". It is an assault rifle with a gatling barrel firing system.
    • Another gun from Destiny that Izumi owns, Gjallarhorn, is named after the horn that announces the coming of Ragnarok. A rocket launcher that fires a missile that, when it makes contact with a target, explodes into several cluster tracking missiles that hit anything that is leftover.
  • Here Comes The New Boss: In the Hostile Takeover spinoff, Taylor retrieves her signature minigun, Caroline, from the PRT. Vista privately calls it the biggest gun she's ever seen.
    It looked like Butcher had welded a couple of rifles together, and then added a grenade launcher.
  • Renegade: GDI weapons in general. Quothe a scene where a quarian Marine acquires a specific weapon:
    "Then Kal’Reegar came around the corner opposite the Scrin, having gained half his bodyweight in gun."
    • Note that said gun is a four-barreled railgun so heavy that he needs to have a power-assist frame to even carry it, and also help him brace from the recoil of using it. It's also the only weapon that manages to down a Scrin Corrupter, which had previously withstood the guns of an entire GDI squad, including over a dozen grenades, and kept healing itself.
  • Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover, has two that stand out. First is a Gatling gun made out of Widow sniper rifles. It only has three barrels, but it shreds virtually anything and has a special super-sized heatsink to keep up a high rate of fire. The other is essentially portable artillery useable by a character due to having a mechanical arm. Even then, he has to brace in a stationary position in order to fire it.
  • In Avengers: Infinite Wars, when the Avengers join the Clone Wars, War Machine is naturally a particular example of this; most notable, he possesses six powerful anti-tank missiles, one of which blew up (although didn't kill) the nearly-unstoppable Durge, and another of which destroyed a Separatist ship once fired into its power core.
  • Bait and Switch (STO): When Eleya and her team are gearing up for an away mission, Captain Kanril Eleya turns around to see her first officer Tess Phohl hefting a gun almost as big as she is.
    Eleya: Tess, what the phekk is that?
    Tess: (matter-of-factly) Phased polaron minigun.
    Eleya: Don't remember requisitioning that. (Tess tells where she got it.) You really think we’ll need that SAW?note 
    Birail Riyannis: Says the woman carrying a grenade launcher.
  • Star Mares, a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Star Wars crossover, has party pony Maple Leaf and her 'party cannon,' a refitted concussion rifle capable of rapid deployment of balloons and confetti at up to 30 lengths.
  • In Wonderful (Mazinja), when Miss Militia performed "Unite Gun", all her team members merged and formed a huuuuge gun. It was bigger than a person and it shot human bullets.
  • Ranma's preferred ranged weapon in A Horse for the Force is a heavy blaster cannon that was originally mounted on a speeder (before he ripped it off).
  • Reisen's sniper rifle in FREAKIN GENSOKYO, described as "almost as big as she is".
  • Principal Celestia Hunts the Undead: The rocket launcher Sunset brings during the attack on CHS.
  • RWBY: Epic of Remnant: Ruby Rose helps EMIYA Alter build an anti-tank rifle that's 6 feet 10 inches long, modeled after the Type 97 Automatic Cannon. It's single shot, but it fires Noble Phantasms.
  • For the Glory of Irk: Gaz wields a huge laser gun in Chapter 59, which is actually called a BFG.
  • Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami sees this apply to the “police guns” that are wielded in a couple chapters. In chapter 17, Matsuda mans “a big police gun” on it’s highest setting, which causes it to fire out entire police cars. During the final battle, Soichiro, being the “chef”, reveals he has an even more powerful police gun, which fires out tanks, battleships, and trains.
  • Becoming a True Invader has Original Character Daj's Giant Fraction Blaster, which is a huge cannon of a Ray Gun.
  • Vow of the King: Kanae's spirit weapon is functionally a portable cannon which Uryu compares to an artillery gun.
  • Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse has Dyna, who uses her Spider Tank-shaped life-support armor to carry either of two huge guns; a multi-barreled automatic rifle and a giant rifle that hits like a ship-mounted cannon.
  • Top of the Line (Editor-Bug): MiMi's upgraded form in The Rematch is built around an enormous blaster contained within her body.
  • Invader Zim: A Bad Thing Never Ends: In Chapter 18, Zim's team sets up a giant cannon capable of turning anything into amoeba goo, which they plan to use on Aldrich when he makes his Election Day speech. Thanks to interference by Tak and Lex, they never get a chance to do so, though Bob does use it against Lex's DIRs, turning the tide of battle against him before the cannon breaks down.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • One of the most plausible instances of this trope appears in the sci-fi film Aliens.
    • In order to save colony survivor Newt, Ellen Ripley straps an automatic pulse rifle/grenade launcher combo to a flamethrower with duct tape, along with a belt of extra grenades, making her a one-woman army. In the extra material on the DVD, Sigourney Weaver actually carried the weapon around the set while shooting scenes, although it was ridiculously heavy, and had to be taken off at regular intervals.
    • An even better example are the Smart Guns carried by Vasquez and Drake (which even had matching sets of Nose Art: "Adios" and "Bitch"). The gunner wears a load-bearing harness with the gun mounted on a power-assisted arm, allowing them to easily sling the heavy weapon around like it weighed nothing. Think of it as a just the gun from a set of Powered Armor.
  • In the western Appaloosa, Viggo Mortensen's character carries a mammoth 8-gauge shotgun around with him at all times. The gun weighed 11 lbs and was 50 inches long. In the behind-the-scenes footage, the filmmakers described it as a punt gun, mounted to the sides of river barges and fired into large flocks of birds. In reality, 8-gauge shotguns would be considered too small to be a punt gun.
  • The Avengers:
  • The Annihilator 2000 in Beverly Hills Cop III, which is not only a highly powerful machine gun/grenade launcher combo, but includes such additional features as — and none of these are exaggerations — night-vision goggles, microprocessor, a cell phone, digital AM/FM radio, CD player, and microwave oven.
  • Near the end of Black Hawk Down some militia show up with an SPG-9 recoilless rifle, which they menace some US soldiers with; a group duly take control of it, use it and then disable it.
  • Den of Thieves: When Merriman is stuck in the traffic jam and sees the deputies advancing on him from behind, he pulls out a SAW from the back of the truck and sets it up on the bonnet. The deputies are taking completely by surprise when he fires through his own vehicle to attack them, killing one of them in the first volley of shots.
  • Dirty Harry had Harry sniping at the Scorpio killer with a Winchester Model 70 chambered in .458 Winchester Magnum.
  • Nearly all the Prawn weapons in District 9 count as BFGs. One of their weapons is a Lightning Gun that kills people by making them explode. Another one can blow people through walls, yet another one is a machine gun which can blow your head off. The most impressive one, though, is seen in the intro. It fires a grenade, which explodes in a big, black mushroom cloud that's surrounded by lightning bolts. All of these guns can be carried by a man. Koobus' men employ the man-made Mechem NTW-20 (a South-African anti-tank rifle), which is capable of taking down the Prawns' mini-mech.
  • In Dobermann, Nat the Gypsy uses a FN Minimi Paratrooper with an M203 Grenade Launcher (which is squad automatic weapon, or SAW, for those playing along at home) to blast her way into the bank.
  • As the poster makes clear, the real star of The Dogs of War is a giant 18 round grenade launcher; the supporting cast includes some guy named Christopher Walken. It really exists, though it fires non-lethal gas shells rather than grenades.
  • The Doom movie, where it's lampshaded by being called the "Bio-Force Gun." Of course, when The Rock's character gazes in awe at it before acquiring it, he says to himself, "Big... Fucking... Gun..."
  • Ma-Ma from Dredd tries to take out Dredd and Anderson using a trio of .50 calibre Gatling guns. They rip through most of the level Dredd is on, killing almost everybody, but he manages to escape by blasting out a damaged exterior wall with a Hi-Ex round. Needless to say, given that this is Judge Dredd we're talking about, all this succeeds in doing is pissing him off.
  • General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove kept an M1919A4 machine gun in his golf bag!
  • Ditto for most of the weapons in Elysium. Neill Blomkamp seems to love this trope.
    • One of the weapons for the Civil Cooperation Bureau, who supplies the weaponry for the Elysium Defense Forces, is known as the Cousar Crowe Rifle. It's classified as an anti-material rifle, weights 40kg, and fires a .22 non-explosive round at extremely high-velocity. In order to utilize it, the operator has to wear an Exosuit, for not only recoil management reasons, but to provide the damn thing with additional power.
    • Then we have its upgraded version, the Sky Sweeper, which gives the rifle the ability to serve as a man-portable air defense system and adds 15kg to the base rifle. It uses a smart surface-to-air grenade round with megaton+ explosive yields with a 400,000 km range — enough to hit Earth while standing on the moon.
    • Then there's the ChemRail, which is a man-portable railgun system. It doesn't get nerfed by the movie, and gives the middle finger to concealment, cover, the laws of physics, and the (presumably reinforced for security reasons) walls of the armory before disintegrating a Mook.
    • Importantly, the ChemRail is a very real concept design. It very much does exactly what it is shown doing. At 50+% of the speed of light, things like Concealment, Cover, Steel walls, and the Coriolis Effect (which would make most firearms on Elysium fire in peculiar arcs, like a nosedive into the firer's foot) simply cease to apply. Think .30 caliber nailgun with Electromagnetic assist.
    • Kruger uses man-portable quad AA missile launcher, whose missiles are capable of intercepting (from behind, no less) spaceships traveling at 1.7 times escape velocity. The missile itself is going about 45 times escape velocity, or 518 kilometers per second
  • In Eraser, Arnold (who else?) wields two railguns which can see through walls and fire bullets at near-lightspeed; he mostly fires them from the hip like machine guns. An enemy Cold Sniper also uses one for most of the movie.
  • The Zorg ZF-1 in The Fifth Element is a rather large "pod weapon system" with a laundry list of handy functions including target-seeking bullets, a flamethrower, an ice cube system fire extinguisher, a net, spikes, and a rocket launcher. Just don't forget to ask about the little red button.
  • Four Rooms: "The Wrong Man" segment... someone with a large caliber handgun receives a phone call from another room in the hotel.
    Sigfried: "No needles here, kid. Just a big fucking gun."
  • In G.I. Joe: Retaliation Roadblock is seen firing an 84 pound M2 .50cal machinegun, from the hip.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Rocket gets one of these off a security drone during the prison break. "Big" here is relative because he's a raccoon, but the gun is still bigger than him and he probably shouldn't be able to lift it. Naturally, he's a little too satisfied with the upgrade.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Gamora manages to not only jury-rig an entire spaceship cannon that's bigger than her during a fight, but walk around with it sitting on her shoulder as she fires it at full-auto straight into another damaged Ravager craft.
  • In Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Hansel's Gun and several other toys.
  • In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Hellboy uses a weapon called the "Big Baby." It looks like a cross between a revolver-style grenade launcher and a lever-action shotgun, and it takes six rounds the size of artillery shells. Each of these has a baby bottle drawn on the side and the message "SUCK ON THIS" engraved around the primer cap in its base.
    Hellboy: You woke up "the baby!"
  • The Hitman film of the game series has this when Udre Belicoff goes Guns Akimbo with two RPDs.
  • In the 1997 film, The Jackal, Bruce Willis's character (The Jackal, who else?), has a custom-built BFG that he has to keep in the back of a car, controlling it remotely via a laptop. To test it, he blows off Jack Black's hand with a single shot.
  • Judge Dredd: For part of the second half of the film, Dredd ends up using Fargo's really huge shotgun.
  • In Jumanji, Van Pelt emerges armed with a huge lever-action elephant gun powerful enough to decimate a police cruiser all by itself. When he finds he can't get any more ammo at the local gun store he is faced with a waiting period and forms to fill out for a replacement weapon. Undeterred, he offers a handful of gold coins to the owner and gets a super-advanced silenced semi-automatic shotgun even bigger than the elephant gun seconds later.
  • Subverted in Jurassic Park III. The mercenaries Kirby hires to provide security are shown testing an Iron Horn 20mm anti-material rifle with a magazine holding ten high-explosive incendiary rounds, just one of which is powerful enough to blow a light airplane in half. When the Spinosaurus attacks however we hear it get fired a few times, then Gilligan Cut to a bleeding mercenary tearing ass through the jungle, having abandoned his heavy rifle in favor of running like hell.
  • Early on in Kindergarten Cop, Arnold Schwarzenegger wields a shotgun of unearthly power, able to blow (among other things) an entire sofa clean in half.
  • From The Living Daylights: After Bond empties his PPK's magazine at the Big Bad, who was hiding behind facial body armor, the bad guy says "You've had your eight! Now have my EIGHTY!" Shortly afterwards, he proceeds to unload his assault rifle's magazine on full-auto in Bond's general direction.
  • In Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, John takes a Bren machine-gun to hold up the pot-growers. The gun is so loud that Dog threatens to kill him if he fires it again. Ultimately, Gloria grabs the gun and unloads the thing on Dog's crew. In slow-motion, the shells hitting the ground sound like oil drums.
  • The Lone Ranger: Red's ivory leg gun.
  • Played completely straight in The Matrix: Mouse, the wimpiest member of the team, similarly attempts to go Guns Akimbo with two drum-fed fully automatic shotguns. Sadly his attempt to provide More Dakka does not result in any deaths at all except his own. Although the film has "lots of guns", they're mostly the type that can be concealed under a Badass Longcoat. Except for when Neo fires on the Agents holding Morpheus with a helicopter-mounted Minigun. (How Neo avoided cutting Morpheus to shreds when one of the Agents was standing behind him was not mentioned.)
  • First subverted, and later used straight, in Men in Black, when Agent J (Will Smith) asks for a really powerful gun, and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) gives him the Noisy Cricket — a tiny, fragile-looking gun which turns out to be incredibly powerful and has enough recoil to knock J across the room. Towards the end, however, they both get some really big guns. In the Animated Series, J eventually acquires a suppressor for the Noisy Cricket that reduces the recoil to where he can fire it without bowling himself over each time. This is also indicative of Agent J's status as perpetual rookie. The official supplemental information indicates the weapon has adjustable power settings that Agent J never found out about in the animated series. In the second film, J decides to have a little payback by giving K the gun while the latter is amnesic. Unlike J, K handles the weapon better than J does.
    • The supplemental information also makes clear that new agents are intentionally given the Noisy Cricket on its maximum setting to teach them about not seeing things as they once did.
  • Never Grow Old: Preparing for his showdown with Dutch, Patrick walks into the general store and asks for a gun that will kill the maximum number of people with a single shot. He walks out of there with a blunderbuss.
  • Predator: The M134 Minigun carried by Jesse "The Body" Ventura's character in the movie, lovingly nicknamed "Old Painless." Ventura commented the weapon was like trying to fire a chainsaw.
  • Predators also gets a minigun, which Stans actually calls a "big fucking gun" when he was ranting about how everyone else (except for Edwin) has guns while he only has a shiv.
  • Bandied about with wanton abandon in Raising Arizona, by the evil biker Leonard Smalls and an assorted rogue's gallery of convenience-store clerks.
  • Rambo is big on this one. The fourth movie has a fifty-cal Browning M2 machine gun, typically used as an anti-aircraft weapon, used against infantry. Due to the movie's very Ludicrous Gibs nature, the results are pretty much what you'd expect — heads blow up like overripe melons, torsos are split in the middle, limbs are torn off, and blood rains everywherenote . The big gun allows the good guys to win the fight — Rambo uses it to kill more baddies than the whole rebel army does with ordinary small arms.
  • Guy Ritchie likes to turn BFGs against their owners:
    • In Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, one of Dog's bandits brings a Bren light machine gun to hold up the pot growers. The gun is so loud that Dog threatens to kill him if he fires it again. Ultimately a girl grabs the gun and unloads the thing on Dog's crew. In slow-motion, the shells hitting the ground sound like oil drums.
    • In Snatch., Vinnie brings a giant semi-auto shotgun to hold up a bookie. Sol remarks, "It's a fucking anti-aircraft gun!" Vinnie uses it to blow a hole in the wall and force the girl at the counter to lower the protective shield, but she ultimately snatches it and fires on the thieves before making her exit.
  • In RoboCop (1987) the bad guys get hold of some "Cobra assault cannons"note  in order to take down the otherwise bulletproof cyborg hero. One of them test-fires one of the guns, blows up a car with one shot, and declares "I like it!"
  • At the end of Scarface (1983), Tony Montana famously pulls out an M16A1 fitted with an M203. A common misunderstanding is that this gun was his "little friend;" actually, he was talking about the 40mm grenade he was firing. There was nothing little about the weapon.
  • At the climax of The Spirit, both Mortgenstern and The Octopus wield huge guns.
  • Split Second (1992): "We need to get bigger guns. BIG Fucking GUNS!" These were the "Combat Shotguns" they checked out from the police armory- in actuality a pair of miniguns that used shotgun shells instead of bullets.
  • In Star Trek: First Contact, Worf takes a REALLY BIG gun, shouts "Assimilate this!", and blasts a group of Borg into oblivion.
  • In Star Trek Into Darkness John Harrison wields a huge Gatling phaser in one hand against the Klingons, with a normal-sized phaser rifle in the other. Not only does he take out two birds of prey with it, but he also uses it as a melee weapon. Justified: He's really Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically enhanced human with a greatly upgraded physique and hand-eye coordination.
  • In Suicide Squad (2016), Johnny Frost uses a helicopter-mounted Minigun to keep the Suicide Squad pinned down during the Joker's Gunship Rescue of Harley Quinn.
  • In Superman Returns, one of the early Mooks that Superman faces is a bank robber with a tripod-mounted gatling cannon with which he holds off the cops most spectacularly. Needless to say, his attempts to use it on Superman result in hilarity.
  • The Terminator smiles over the same minigun in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with the grip arrangement the only thing altered; John Connor notes, "Oh, yeah. It's definitely you." On set, Schwarzenegger was the only person who could physically carry the minigun by himself, and the studio actually had to dial back the minigun's blistering fire rate or else the recoil would have physically pushed Schwarzenegger back if he tried to fire it for more than a short burst.
  • Transformers (2007):
    • Ironhide has two very large cannons attached to both of his forearms that's about twice the size of his normal arms.
    • Megatron forms an enormous Fusion Cannon by slamming his hands together.
  • Tremors movies:
    • In Tremors, the "Elephant Gun" used in the Rec Room. In reality, an 8 gauge side-by-side shotgun. Probably fired roughly a 2-ounce slug of hardened lead, if it was loaded for elephant. (Why wouldn't it be? You never know when you will face a war elephant.)
    • In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, there's the Grizzly Big Boar, a single-shot .50 caliber rifle. Unfortunately, it was a bit too big.
    • Tremors 4: The Legend Begins goes that extra mile, featuring an 8-foot 4-inch, 94-pound punt gun with a two-inch ("A" Gauge) barrel: a Real Life giant boat-mounted shotgun, once used for the commercial hunting of whole flocks of ducks. It was actually a prop built for the film using a triple-loaded 12-gauge inside to produce a muzzle flash; the barrel's inside was sprayed with WD40 prior to shooting to add more smoke. This is because apparently there are very few functional punt guns left in America today.
  • In Valdez is Coming, Valdez uses a Sharps buffalo rifle—the largest caliber longarm available in the Wild West—to wreak havoc on Tanner's hired guns as they are riding across the valley floor; killing five men. Lampshaded in the dialogue when El Segundo catches up with him:
    El Segundo: [referring to Valdez's earlier marksmanship against his men] You know something, Bob Valdez, you hit one, I think, 700-800 yards.
    Bob Valdez: [with certitude] Closer to a thousand.
    El Segundo: What was it? Sharps?
    Bob Valdez: [nods] My own load.
    El Segundo: You ever hunt buffalo?
    Bob Valdez: Apache.
  • In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bishop wields one which he charges with his powers. On closer inspection, it appears to be connected to his circulatory system.

    Literature 
  • Ian M. Banks novel Against a Dark Background, has as a MacGuffin called the "Lazy Gun". Among other peculiarities is the fact that it weighs three times as much when it's upside down as when it's right side up. Its effect on its targets tends to be... humorous, such as materialising a free-falling ship's anchor directly overhead, or a spear, piece of tsunami, small nuke, or asteroid. When researchers attempted to disassemble one, its self-destruction took out a fifth of the city and killed half a million people. And when a user tried firing one at the Sun, it killed him instead.
  • Blood Meridian: When the freebooters' camp is ambushed, the attackers rush into Judge Holden's tent to find him naked and holding a Howitzer cannon. He levels the cannon and casually lights the fuse with his cigar.
  • The later Dale Brown books give users of the Tin Man Powered Armor — and later still the CIDs — the ability to wield railguns.
  • From Osprey Adventures, Mark Latham's Bug Hunts offers a curiously downplayed example. The background is based on Starship Troopers and Aliens, yet the standard gun is actually smaller than what we had up to the mid-1980s (it's a lightweight carbine that uses 4.7mm caseless rounds, it's only able to take down giant bugs because it uses high-energy plasma shells and carries a lot of ammo). Even the smartgun analogue is downplayed, the SI-66X Heavy Auto-carbine is 6.6mm and greatly truncated with a lightweight casing. It's rather telling, that one heavy weapon is the Combi-carbine which is just the standard gun with either a flamer or a shotgun built in. The book plays it straight with the KT-E4 Man-portable Railgun and SI-242 "Devastator" Emplaced Rotary Cannon, which is a 4-barrelled Gatling gun that shoots 12mm plasma rounds.
  • Ferik Jurgen, aide of Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM) normally carries a melta, a squad support anti-tank weapon, as his personal weapon. And frequently uses it against unarmored infantry.
  • Cradle Series: Launchers are a Magitek weapon that puts a Striker technique inside an object, basically making it a simple magical gun. They're not particularly popular, but Fisher Gesha discovers ways to have different techniques resonate and enhance each other, creating weapons capable of damaging enemies far above their power level. And of course, all the extra magic and bindings need a lot of space, resulting in massive magical cannons bigger than the person using them.
  • Crescent City: The Godslayer Rifle, which Jesiba Roga keeps disassembled and mounted on the wall of her office.
  • Neal Stephenson features a Vickers machine gun in the World War II timeline of Cryptonomicon, which is less futuristic than Reason (see Snow Crash, below) because of the lower-tech setting, but noteworthy because of the (characteristic) pages-long description of its badassery. Well, that and the fact that it's a real gun that, while not quite as stupendously deadly as the book makes it out to be, is still a terrifying thing to have aimed in your direction.note 
  • In Daemon, nothing less than a 50-cal rifle will damage the Immune to Bullets Razorbacks or first AutoM8.
  • ''Damsels of Distress": Clementine utilizes a huge machine gun known as the Dragon's Breath that was designed to be used by infantrymen with the air of a tripod. Being a centaur, Clementine constructed an apparatus to secure the gun on back of the equine part of her body. Having four legs helps to brace herself and absorb the recoil.
  • In Destroyermen: Distant Thunders, Silva MacGyvers a "super lizard gun" he affectionately nicknames the "Doom Whomper" out of a salvaged anti-aircraft gun from HIJMS Amagi. It's a flintlock rifle that shoots a quarter-pound slug, which he built to hunt the allosaur variant that is Borneo's top predator in the book series' alternate Earth. The recoil from it is enough to knock him over the first and only time he fires it from any posture other than prone. While hunting, he makes a game of seeing how many "rhino-pigs" he can kill with one shot.
  • Discworld:
    • Largely free of firearms as the Disc is, the trope still shows up in the form of the massive 900 kg ballista siege weapon carried by Sergeant Detritus (an enormous troll made of rock) as a crossbow, "The Piecemaker." It is called this because the iron stone-piercing spear it used to fire was replaced with a bundle of arrows, which was presumably supposed to allow it to operate as an area weapon but unintentionally results in the arrows disintegrating into an expanding cone of burning wood fragments when fired, making it more like a (very inaccurate) shotgun that totally erases whatever it's fired at (or near) be it walls, doors, or presumably people.

      When the Piecemaker is first used, it uses a ballista bolt. The results were so horrifying (And probably expensive) that they just tied a bunch of bolts together instead. The results were even more horrifying. The scene in Night Watch where it is fired - as a warning shot! - at an assassin is perhaps the most hilarious (and most destructive) scene in all of Discworld. Yes, this even includes the exploding cabbages.

      In fact, when Vimes mentions seeing it tested, apparently the target vanished so did the two targets on either side and a flock of seagulls who happened to be in the wrong place, i.e. right above Detritus. It's also noted that the only safe place to be when it's fired is directly behind it, and even then you're taking a pretty big risk. It's the only weapon that can blow open both the front and the back doors simultaneously.

      In The Fifth Elephant, its destructive power was so terrifying that Vimes actually threatened an inanimate secret trapdoor into opening just by pointing it in roughly the general direction he thought it was in. Later, when Detritus used it to open the front door of an enemy castle, Vimes labelled it as a national emergency rather than a weapon. Several paragraphs later:
      Vimes: Detritus, you can't fire that off in here! This is an enclosed building!
      Detritus: Only till I pull dis trigger, sir.
    • The Gonne in Men at Arms is one of the more powerful devices in the Discworld setting (it actually wounded the aforementioned Sergeant Detritus), and is usually depicted as huge-bore semi-automatic rifle using a horizontal rack of six chambers.
    • A Real Life BFG was briefly alluded to in Pyramids. The "puntbow" used by Pteppic's ibis-poacher tutor is a low-tech equivalent of the massive boat-mounted shotguns once used by commercial hunters to shoot entire flocks of waterfowl.
    • Leonard of Quirm's rocket launcher in Jingo. It may just be a metal tube with a firework stuck in it, but it certainly impresses the weapon-loving Nobby Nobbs.
      He had the special gleam in his eye that a small man gets when he's laid his hands on a big, big weapon.
  • Adam Anders of Domina has a 6-gauge "Saint George" (as in the dragon slayer) shotgun as one of his main weapons. Although that's pretty small compared to everything else on this page, that's basically the biggest shotguns get in real life.
  • The Doom novels make use of the trope, little surprise given it's an adaptation of the Trope Namer. Fly has no idea what kind of gun it is and calls it "the big freaking gun".
  • Guns in The Dresden Files tend to be pretty reasonable in size; in fact, Murphy prominently carries a P90, a weapon specifically designed to be small and portable (to fit with her tiny hands). However, in the short story "The Warrior", a former military sniper uses a Barret M82A2 rifle, possibly one of the largest caliber sniper rifles available (.50BMG, which is only legal for civilian use through a technicality related to how caliber is measured). It's so powerful that it blows through two layers of Harry's magical defenses, and is only stopped by a third layer and Divine Intervention.
  • Duumvirate is loaded with BFGs. Fusion-powered microwave lasers, atomic slugs, and there's a subplot involving "room eraser" spread weapons.
  • The Emperor's Gift: Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr's wields a custom Mk.Vb Godwyn pattern boltgun, a weapon designed for the more than 8-feet tall Space Marines that is out of proportion, even for a tall woman such as the Inquisitor.
  • The Executioner
    • Mack Bolan uses elephant guns as sniper rifles — first a Marlin .444 lever-action, then the Weatherby Mark V in .460 Magnum calibre. This leads to several Your Head Asplode moments.
    • In "Blood Circle", Bolan is up against Igor Baibakov, a seven-foot psychopathic ex-Spetsnaz terrorist who uses a Barrett Light Fifty as his weapon of choice. Not only does he use this .50 BMG monster in its primary role as a sniper weapon, but he's so big and powerful that he can use the thing at close range like an assault rifle, which is more justified by his impressive size and strength and the Rule of Scary than anything else.
  • In J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham, the title character has a blunderbuss. JRRT quotes the Oxford English Dictionary that it has been displaced in all 'civilized' countries, but that as Farmer Giles' country hadn't been civilized yet, it was the only gun around, and rare at that.
  • In Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club build the Columbiad cannon, a massive cannon located in a 270 meter deep hole in Tampa, Florida used to launch people in a 3 meter wide bullet to the Moon.
  • In The Gate of Bones, a Warhammer 40,000 novel set during the Indomitus Crusade, we get a very large example. Princess Jessivayne of House Kamidar is the pilot of Incendor, a Questoris Knight which is a medium-sized giant mech. Its ranged weapon is a Conflaguration Cannon. This flamethrower is only mounted on a Dominus Knight which is a significantly bigger mech type. The only reason Incendor can use the Conflaguration Cannon is because, as a recognition gift to the princess becoming a pilot, Adeptus Mechanicus techno-magi installed an ancient relic Plasma Reactor and then heavily reinforced the Knight's chassis to handle the weight.
  • In the Gatling novels, Gatling totes a Light Maxim Gun that has been modified to allow him to fire it from the hip.
  • In The General Series, the Skinners' preferred personal weapons are always mentioned with emphasis on their size: two meters long, firing 15mm slugs, and capable of downing a sauroid or removing your head at a thousand meters.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not very specific about its size, but the Kill-O-Zap gun is definitely not a gun to be trifled with.
    The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.
  • A more realistic depiction appears in Harry Turtledove's Hitler's War. A Czech expat fighting for the French scavenges an anti-tank rifle and spends the rest of the book wrecking light armor and blowing people in half.
  • In Stephen Hunt's Steampunk Kingdom of Jackals series, various Steammen use large steam-powered cannons in battle. One character, an outcast former Steamman Knight in Secrets of the Fire Sea, uses his BFG to hunt dinosaur-like monsters.
  • Alan Dean Foster has used this trope at least twice: in his Mad Amos short stories, the titular character's weapon of choice is a large caliber LeMat, a Civil War era revolver with a built-in short-barrel shotgun, and in the Humanx Commonwealth novel The End of the Matter, Skua September uses a "Mark Twenty" blaster, designed to be vehicle- or tripod-mounted, as a hand weapon.
  • In Malevil, Vilmain has a bazooka. Hardly the most massive weapon on this page, it is by the far the heaviest weapon in post-World War III rural France, were the only other weapons are hunting rifles and shotguns. While not powerful enough to really damage the protagonist's castle, feet-thick stone being greater than a few inches of steel, it's more than enough to destroy the gates and kill the defenders behind their fortifications.
  • Monster Hunter International features Abomination, a fully automatic shotgun with attached grenade launcher, which gets a more detailed description than most of the human (or otherwise) characters.
  • In Neal Asher's The Owner trilogy, it's after 2149 AD and the world is living in a neo-communist cyberpunk nightmare. The Committee usually outfits its troops with ion tasers and firearms that aren't too different from what we have today. But if they have to fight something that needs something heavier - they get carousel missile launchers (bazookas with a large Tommy Gun-style magazine) and 10-bores. The carousel missile launchers are man-portable, but 10-bores are heavy machine guns so big that they require 3 men to properly set up.
  • In Phule's Company, one of the sluglike Sinthians tries to shoot a full-auto shotgun... but since said trooper is half the body mass of a human and riding a Hover Board at the time, the resulting blast sends him into a rapid spin— fortunately Phule had the foresight to disable the "full auto" feature beforehand, so no further shots are fired and the surrounding soldiers remain unpunctured.
  • John Ringo is in love with this trope, with nearly every story of his involving infantry/marines.
    • The Prince Roger series, co-written with David Weber, features a lot of BFGs, but the giant four-armed Mardukans really take the cake. They can "off-hand" wield cannons meant to serve Humans as crewed support weapons and capable of blowing large concrete buildings and stone walls to dust. When some madman decides to equip a squad of them with a species-appropriate version of Powered Armor, the standard-issue weapon that goes with it is more typically the main gun of a tank.

      Taken to the extreme by Erkum Pol, The Big Guy even by the standard of the nine-feet-tall-on-average Mardukans. He likes BFGs and can carry the aforementioned tank gun without Powered Armor. On the other hand (one of them, anyway), his aiming skills aren't even up to Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy standards. When he takes the tank gun along on a hostage rescue mission (supposedly just for intimidation purposes*), Played for Laughs (for "laughs" read "an entire city block being set on fire").
    • The M-300 grav rifles from the Legacy of the Aldenata qualify. They use gravity drivers to fling antimatter-loaded pellets (or, later, when supplies are low, regular uranium pellets) around at just below the speed of light.
    • In the Into the Looking Glass series, the initial invasion by the aliens later called the Dreen were countered in part by a bunch of Florida rednecks with a rather diverse collection of weapons, including a rifle used for hunting big game that fires the .577 Tyrannosaur round. Later books in the series include Space Marines who regularly carry around some pretty serious armament, in their Powered Armor, including one who dual wields two cut-down .50 caliber sniper rifles.
  • In Roadwork, Dawes buys two heavy-caliber weapons early in the story, a .44 Magnum pistol and a .460 Weatherby rifle. The rifle (described by its seller as "a freaking anti-tank gun") has enough recoil to make his shoulder ache when he test-fires it, and both weapons do quite a number on the police cars that arrive on the morning of his eviction.
  • Zigzagged in late 2010s, cyberpunk series SINless by K.C. Alexander — the first book Necrotech, the main character Riko laments her missing gun, the Mantis Industries Valiant 14 an assault rifle that uses 12mm rounds. Only 50 of these were made as a collaboration between Mantis (who never made weapons before) and rival TaberTek. These guns outclassed anything in their respective category, but never made it to large scale protection as TaberTek went bankrupt in a corporation war. Riko further upgraded it with laser sight and a heat baffler. While the Valiant 14 had the rate of fire and stopping power of a heavy machine gun, it's easily compact enough to fit in a carrying harness, making the gun about the size of a carbine instead of something much bigger.
  • Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash features "Reason," a Gatling gun firing depleted-uranium slivers at incredibly high velocities. It's a little hard to move around because its nuclear power supply, utilizing radiothermal isotopes, uses an outboard heat-disperser that drops into the ocean. "See, I told you they'd listen to Reason."
  • Happens in the Star Wars novel Wraith Squadron, as part of a ludicrously complex plan to capture one of Zsinj's corvettes: Gamorrean (think the guys guarding Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, but smarter) pilot Piggy uses an X-wing laser cannon as a personal weapon. It blows clean through a floor/ceiling (and the officer above it) with one shot. Wedge even points out how implausible the weapon ought to be.
    Wedge: "A laser cannon is nine meters long, Five."
    Kell: "Not the essential components and housing, sir. Strip out all the computerized aiming and synchronization equipment, the diagnostics, the flashback suppressor, I think we could chop it down to a meter and a half, two meters."
  • Starworld by Harry Harrison. One of the Israeli commandos is firing a handheld .50 calibre recoilless machine gun during the attack on Spaceconcert.
  • Desmond Bagley's thriller The Tightrope Men features a punt gun: an extremely large shotgun generally 4 gauge and bigger, which were mounted to the sides of river barges and used to fire into large flocks of waterfowl to harvest many birds with a single discharge. One of the protagonists recognises it for what it is, and they actually use it in the appropriate way, blasting a mook with birdshot. One character remarks, "What weapon did you have on that punt? A bloody flamethrower?"
  • In John Barnes' Timeline War series, The Alliance issues its soldiers the SHAKK. It's only rifle sized... But the ammo is self propelled over a six-mile range, seeks its target so aggressively it can even be fired from behind full cover using a remote camera, delivers enough kinetic energy with each round to liquify a human being, and comes in a 6000 round magazine that can be emptied in a few seconds on full-auto. Exploits include shooting down barely-visible planes and ripping modern-era tanks to scrap. The weapon can also manufacture more rounds from random trash. At least in spirit, it is one very, very, very B.F.G.
  • Piling up plasma cannons and other big guns in Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons, Cheradinine Zakalwe says he'll need "FYT" weapons for a mission. His Culture handler says she doesn't recognise the term; it stands for "Fuck You Too".
  • Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch: Hitch carries a double-barrelled 8 gauge he kept from his days riding shotgun with Wells Fargo. Many people remark on its size, including the observation that its barrel looks large enough to drive a train through.note 
    “Christ. Pellets must look like billiard balls.”
  • Harry Turtledove's The War That Came Early features Czech sniper Vaclav Jezek and his 13mm French antitank rifle. No longer useful against the heavier German tanks, Vaclav converts his antitank weapon into a sniper rifle, and uses it to pick off Germans, and later Nationalist Spanish officers from more than two kilometers away. He becomes effective enough with it that multiple German snipers are dispatched to get "the SOB with the elephant gun."

    Live-Action TV 
  • A flash-forward in the Babylon 5 episode "Babylon Squared" showed Garibaldi using what appeared to be a Gatling-style variation on a PPG.
  • Although the Cylon Centurions in Battlestar Galactica (2003) have built-in automatic weapons, Cylon boarding parties can be seen hand-carrying heavy machine guns in "Razor" and "Daybreak".
  • When Mike in the Better Call Saul episode "Gloves Off" is looking for a sniper rifle from an arms dealer, the first one that is offered to him is a .50 cal anti-material rifle that Mike describes as "a hernia with a scope on it".
  • Despite Booth denying her gun permits as a Running Gag, Brennan on Bones showed up in one episode with what she said was the largest commercial handgun available, a Smith & Wesson 500. It’s sometimes called a “hand cannon”. She says she got it at the mall.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • In the episode "Innocence", the gang has to defeat an enemy called the Judge who "no weapon forged" could kill. However, that declaration was made before Christ, and humanity has much bigger weapons now. Buffy decimates him with an AT-4 rocket launcher.
    • Adam's right arm can turn into a Gatling gun and a bazooka.
  • Chuck has an excellent example of this trope in action during the first episode of the third season, when Casey gets to use his minigun. Gunship battles, explosions, and gunfights with terrorists ensue.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Though he doesn't actually fire it, Adric uses a cannon that's not only taller than him but is meant to be mounted on a spaceship to scare slave traders away from the Doctor and Romana in "Warriors' Gate". Yes. You read that right. Adric.
    • In "Dragonfire", Kane's men gear up with some in preparation for the "ANT hunt".
    • "Remembrance of the Daleks":
      • The Special Weapons Dalek was basically a self-propelled BFG that first blew down a large metal gate before taking out an entire rival Dalek squad. And they say its gun is fifty times more powerful than the normal Dalek gun. There's a reason the other Daleks called it "the Abomination".
      • Ace's rocket launcher. There's a reason why she's considered to be the first badass to join the Doctor's crew.
    • Jack Harkness, of both Doctor Who and Torchwood, has always been fond of them. He used a modified defabricator the size of a minigun in Doctor Who's "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways" and "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End". He also constructs an equally beefy weapon in the Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed".
    • "The Girl in the Fireplace": The fire extinguishers on the spaceship look more like BFGs than their intended purpose, to the point that Mickey initially assumes they're "ice guns". They are also powerful enough to temporarily halt the clockwork droids, and the Doctor uses one for that purpose twice.
    • "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday": The Preachers turn up packing enormous guns designed to kill Cybermen. The Doctor modifies some of them so they'll be semi-effective against Daleks, as well.
    • BFGs are the weapon of choice against Daleks in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End". The one Rose carries looks like it weighs half as much as she does, and Mickey and Jackie wield equally impressive versions.
  • Where would this article be without Jayne of Firefly, who never left Serenity without enough firepower to take out a ship? Hey! She has a name, you know. Vera also probably qualifies on a metafictional level. Out of universe, Vera was created by modifying a Saiga-12 combat shotgun (already close to a BFG) and, based on a good look at the magazine, loaded with slugs rather than shells.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Kamen Rider Ryuki: Kamen Rider Zolda (Kitaoka Shuuichi) wields a gun twice as long as he is tall and two pretty big guns mounted on his shoulders, too. And that's nothing compared to his Macross Missile Massacre Finishing Move...
    • Kamen Rider 555: Kamen Rider Faiz's Faiz Blaster. That thing was HUGE. Sad its gun form was rarely used.
      • Faiz's Final Form Ride in Kamen Rider Decade is the Faiz Blaster. Of course, this time it's human-sized due to being the transformation of a person. Dunno if this makes it bigger or smaller than the original, though.
    • Then there's Kamen Rider Kabuto's Perfect Zecter which was both a BFG and a BFS.
  • Miami Vice: Tubbs carries various shortened shotguns as his standard sidearm, commonly an Ithaca 37 Stakeout or a sawed-off double barrel.
  • In The Prisoner (1967) spy spoof episode "The Girl Who Was Death", the title character Sonia, having failed to kill Number 6 with various elaborate death traps, finally decides on the direct approach, escalating from a machine gun to hand grenades and mortars before finally drawing a bazooka on him.
  • Red Dwarf: The Bazookoid. In keeping with the mining ship setting, the Bazookoid is described as a mining laser cannon for blasting apart rocks, so it could count as an Improvised Weapon. The Boys from the Dwarf use Bazookoids most of the time when they confront dangerous enemies, seemingly choosing them over more typical guns that are also shown to be available.
  • Sharpe: Harper carries a Nock Volley Gun.
  • Sons of Guns: The Red Jacket crew converts a tripod-mounted Browning M1919 into a shoulder-fired weapon. It's still quite hefty.
  • Stargate:
    • Stargate SG-1:
      • The Jaffa staff weapons are pretty big on their own, but at one point Teal'c wields a dismounted anti-ship version taken from a Death Glider. And one-shots an Al'kesh with it. In the windshield.
      • In "Allegiance" O'Neill used a huge machine gun.note 
    • In Stargate: Continuum, Vala has to be dissuaded from bringing this (the X-699) to Ba'al's extraction ceremony.
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Night Terrors" has the memorable scene in which just about everyone in Ten Forward is panicking and fighting because paranoid delusions are causing them to think they're being left to wait to die and finally Guinan has enough. She pulls out one of these and fires at the ceiling.
    Guinan: It's a little souvenir I picked up on Magus III. That was setting number one. Anyone want to see setting number two?
  • One episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is based around the crew's attempts to catch a murderer armed with a special sniper rifle with a transporter attached to the barrel, so the shooter can fire from almost anywhere and transport the bullet to hit the target.
  • In one episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the crew is taken to the Q continuum where they fight in the Q Civil War. The weapons look like American Civil War era guns (due to A Form You Are Comfortable With, the Continuum looks like a Civil War setting to Janeway.) but in normal space they cause supernovas.
  • Super Sentai, and by extension Power Rangers, loves this trope. In some seasons, the Rangers combine their individual weapons into a BFG, while others use the "Team Bazooka", a separate weapon to which each Ranger contributes a power cell or ammunition.
  • The Young Ones: "Vyvyan, where did you get that Howitzer?!" "Found it!"

    Music 

    Pinball 
  • Doom (Zen Studios) features the Trope Namer, which can instantly wipe out any demon leaders that stand in your way as you complete missions.
  • Williams Electronics' Big Guns is based on this trope, with two gigantic cannons on the playfield that fire pinballs through the air and into facing habitrail rails.
  • The Rocket-Propelled Grenade launcher from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, represented in-game by the player-controlled ball launcher in the backbox.

    Podcasts 

    Roleplay 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Battletech has a number of weapons designed for use in heavy 'mechs and vehicles, which become this when carried by lighter 'mechs. The crowning example is the UM-R60L Urbanmech variant: At 30 tons of weight, half of it is taken up by a massive 14-ton Autocannon/20, a gigantic short-range gun intended for assault 'mechs, and a ton of ammunition. Coming straight behind the UM-R60L is the 35-ton BZK-F3 Hollander, which carries a massive 15-ton Gauss Rifle built into its torso. The Hollander is prone to Death by Falling Over simply due to the massive recoil on its weapon.
    • There are two weapons vying for the title of "biggest gun put on a combat unit," these being the Long Tom Cannon and the Improved Heavy Gauss Rifle. Both weapons weigh 20 tons apiece (making them mass the same as an entire scout 'Mech before ammo is added) and are so enormous that they barely fit on most 'Mechs. Thanks to their size, cost, and other limiting factors (including the Gauss Rifle's alarming tendency to explode catastrophically when even slightly damaged), they are hard to use except on the largest of mechs, but the devastating power they provide makes them worth it.
  • As below in Real Life, Call of Cthulhu has the Elephant Gun. It's used a lot, I hear.
  • In Dust ordinary infantry soldiers can carry heavy machineguns or magazine-fed semi-automatic bazookas.
  • Eclipse Phase has the plasma rifle. It's big, bulky, and needs to cool off for one round every other shot when in vacuum. But it deals 3d12+20 damage per shot with an option to double it. More than a thermobaric grenade or mini-missile.
  • Exalted has some of the larger First Age alchemical fire weapons, which were designed to level the field between humans and warstriders. The bigger one in Wonders of the Lost Age is basically a fire bazooka.
    • In the Shards of the Exalted Dream supplement, the Modern Exalted alternate setting has the three-dot Godcannon artifact, which is a bipod rifle with a four-foot barrel and a divinely powered firing chamber the size of a man's torso. What's most awesome is that despite being two-handed it only requires Strength 2 to use, so a character with a strength of 6 or higher (such as a Solar with Increasing Strength Exercise, an Alchemical with Fourth Strength Augmentation, or a Lunar in Deadly Beastman Transformation) can dual-wield them. Other overgrown firearms include the shellcaster and its friend, the warstorm shellcaster.
  • Fabula Ultima: Calamity, the strongest rare firearm in the core rulebook, is strongly implied to be a magical bazooka. It can hit two targets with every attack and is tied with a few other weapons for having the second-highest damage value of any weapon in the book.
  • Feng Shui has a few of these:
    • The Helix Ripper, one of the signature arcanowave weapons, which is able to rip apart flesh at the cellular level and passing through inorganic matter without losing coherency, with wounds caused by the thing not being able to be healed normally. The thing weighs close to 20 kg (that's 44-45 pounds) when not plugged into an AI/O port, but when it's plugged in, it weighs a more manageable 6 kg (13 pounds).
    • The Buro Hellharrower. This thing is so damned large that it takes a Strength of 11 (either a Big Bruiser, a high-Body Supernatural Creature or somebody with a Robot Arm or other cybernetic or arcanowave enhancement) to be able to use the thing without a vehicle mount, and for this reason, it's primarily issued to abominations, the cyber-demonic Super Soldiers that the Buro fields against its most dangerous foes.
    • The Minigun, Flame Thrower and Missile Launcher hardware schticks, all of which do not have a concealment rating — they're so effin' huge that trying to hide them is all but impossible, especially given the fact that they're usually mounted on an equally bulky cybernetic body.
  • Games Workshop games:
    • Warhammer 40,000:
      • Many of the heavy weapons are BFGs. It is worth noting that normal humans have to mount them on mobile platforms and use them in teams of two — it's only the superhuman Space Marines who can use them like traditional BFGs, and even then most of them have to stay still and brace themselves before firing. Of course, there are some Badass Normal humans who can lift said weapons by themselves, and those are realistically seen as abnormal.
      • Also of note within the Space Marines are Terminators, who use rather heavy armor that permits them to fire normally vehicle-mounted weapons with unhindered accuracy with one hand while moving.
      • When wielded by normal humans even the regular weaponry used by a Space Marine is quite massive. This is taken to another level with the Primaris Space Marines; a Primaris Marine is significantly larger than a regular Space Marine, and their Bolt Rifles are even larger in a Primaris Marine's hand than a Bolter is in a regular Space Marine's, which shows hold large the Bolt Rifle is.
      • The chunkiest BFG may go to the Deathwatch Space Marines with their unique Infernus Heavy Bolter. The Heavy Bolter is already an Astartes heavy weapon that'll slow down the majority of Space Marines. Take that gun and tack on the even larger Heavy Flamer and you have possibly the thickest infantry weapon in the game - one capable of blowing up its enemies' innards or melting them into slag.
      • The Ork Kaptin Badrukk has a particularly awesome example - it was taken from an Ogryn (basically an Ogre IN SPACE!) and is loaded with highly unstable plasma cylinders. Standing near it is a death sentence. Though this is less due to its firepower, and more because it's hotter than Chernobyl. (Badrukk himself wears lead under his kaptin's uniform, making him marginally less likely to die.)
      • The Orks also have Shokk Attack Guns, massive contraptions - bigger than the meks that fire them - which teleport a small Gretchin (basically a Goblin IN SPACE!) through hell into an enemy's insides. Yes, really.
      • Ork Flash Gitz and Lootaz embody this, having massively customized guns almost as large as they are that are equal parts Dakka, killy, and flash all turned up to 11.
      • The Eldar get around the normal problems with this by tacking anti-gravity devices onto their guns, allowing Dark Reapers and Eldar Corsairs to carry some pretty large missile launchers.
      • Maugan Ra, due to his station as a Phoenix Lord, takes the cake among the Eldar by mounting a massive scythe blade on the end of his shuriken cannon, making it a huge gun that he can wield like a polearm. It earns him some ire from Eldar players as, due to the weapon, he's put to better use when he's slicing people in half with it instead of actually shooting with it (which means he does not mesh well with his own troops, namely the Dark Reapers).
      • The Tau pulse rifle is a Plasma Cannon as long as a human is tall and has firepower greater than the Imperial bolter. It is wielded as standard equipment by Fire Warriors, the basic troop choice for the Tau. The rail rifle, wielded by Pathfinders, is even larger and more powerful.
      • For the record, because of all the superhumans and armoured foes encountered, almost every gun in 40K is built big. The most common autogun is the Agripinaa pattern from a forge world near Cadia; this standard mid-grade weapon is 8.25mm and weighs 6.2 kg. In comparison, an M-16 is 5.56mm and weighs 2.89 kg.
    • In Necromunda heavy weapons, such as the heavy stubber or the 'Krumper' rivet cannon are large and unwieldy weapons with massive firepower. Highly expensive, and often difficult to use, the use of heavy weapons are limited to only the most trusted or technically minded members of a gang such as Heaviesnote  and Championsnote .
    • The Leadbelcher Guns used by the Ogres of Warhammer and the Ogors of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar are basically cannons stuffed with rocks, broken weapons, and other detritus that their wielders are able to use as easily as other races use handguns and crossbows.
    • The eponymous hero of Chainsaw Warrior can choose from guns and heavy weapons for his shooting choice. Among the heavy weapon is the Reaper which is a massive autocannon that can tear through even the Meat Machine with ease. Against anything less, it's almost a guaranteed kill. In the sequel game for iOS and Android, the Reaper has been changed into a high-calibre Gatling gun, it's specs have been changed so it's got good armor-piercing ability and the ability to several enemies at once. The drawback is that it's so big, it penalizes you in melee combat. There's also the new Xm 600 sniper rifle which just misses the cut at being a heavy weapon, it's a very big anti-material sniper rifle that's very good armor-piercing and it's very accurate. Unfortunately, each bullet is so big, that it can only hold 4 at once.
  • The Grav Railgun from GURPS Ultra-Tech can be carried by people in a good suit of Powered Armor and fires with enough force to punch straight through a tank from five miles away... with more accuracy than a sniper rifle... twenty times a second... completely without recoil.
  • Hc Svnt Dracones has "large" weapons, such as heavy machine guns, that require herculean strength (or the 'taur morphism) to use without a tripod, and then there's LAN (Lift Assist Required) weapons, which you're simply not going to be able to use without Powered Armor or two consecutive Muscular Enhancements. Most notably the V-801 Mag Lance (depicted here with Omni-Frame lift assist), which costs more than a small spaceship and does 1,000 damage with each shot, and the shell keeps going until it's done that much.
  • The Proteus expansion set to the now mostly forgotten Netrunner trading card game paid homage to the concept with the 'Big Frackin' Gun' icebreaker card — a powerful 'gun' for the Runner player to use in cyberspace to blow away the Corps's virtual sentries, cheap to install but with a hefty activation cost per 'shot'.
  • The guns in Apophis Consortium's Obisidian: Age of Judgement are all typically big in order to deal with demons and cyborg freaks, with weapons being designated from Levels 1 — 4 (Level 1 street legal, Level 2 "standard" assault rifle, Level 3 ridiculously over-sized assault rifles or small vehicular weapons, Level 4 anti-vehicle weapons). Of special note are the unique weapons of the Wasteland Military Federation — the Faustian Sniper Weapon System which is a 300lb sniper rifle that fires hyper-velocity armor-piercing sabot rounds, the Spectre 20mm Vulcan Gun Drone which is a automated turret with two 20 vulcan cannons capable of gunning down mountain-sized demons, the Exciter Launcher which fires a thermo-nuclear warhead and the Conflagration Cannon which fires a super-heated magnesium round to disintegrate most enemies it hits.
  • Paranoia has a couple of 'em:
    • Cone rifles, basically bazookas. Ammo ranges from solid slug to high explosive to hallucinogenic gas to tacnuke (information on the blast radius is not available at your security clearance) and is always clearly labeled.
    • Plasma generators, only slightly below tacnukes in sheer destructive capacity. They also malfunction even more often than your regular gear, and some of those malfunctions would cause the entire thing to explode; naturally, it being Paranoia, you couldn't tell which malfunction was which, and neither could the rest of the party. And you had to strap the thing on to use it; taking it off suddenly (say, to get away from the now-it's-a-bomb strapped to your back) was not easy. Fixing it wasn't easy, either; you have to make one repair roll just to turn off the alarm, another to stop it from exploding, and a third to actually get it to fire again (good luck with that). Oh, and as usual, you have to pay a fine if you let it get damaged.
  • The double hackbut and the culverin in Pathfinder are the two heaviest firearms available, and the highest damaging ones, in the classic and scatter category respectively. Both need a stand to be used correctly or the user suffers a -4 penalty to attack rolls and is knocked prone by the recoil, any waist-high obstacle is enough for the culverin, the double hackbut comes with its wheeled carriage.
    • The nation of Numeria, which is covered in scattered debris from a spaceship crash, provides even more impressive examples, from rail guns to enormous lasers, but the two that stand out are the vortex gun and the gravity cannon. Both deal tremendous amounts of force damage in a wide area: the vortex gun in a hundred-foot long cone and the gravity cannon in a huge explosion. The gravity cannon is in fact so overpowered that it’s the only nonmagical handheld weapon to be considered an artifact.
  • Rifts has a number of heavy weapons, from railguns to missile launchers, with a perennial favorite being Plasma Cannons. One of the most infamous is the "Boom Gun", the railgun used by the Glitter Boy Powered Armor, which is so powerful the armor has to anchor itself to the ground before firing. A different style of Glitter Boy has a gun that can only be used by it because, without its unique stabilization system, any other mecha or vehicle would eventually shake itself apart with the recoil. Another weapon of note is the ATL-1 laser cannon, which is so powerful it drains an entire energy charge for a single shot. In Russia, the troops of the warlords there are so enamored with BFGs that they actually designed and used a servo-harness to allow normal humans to carry them around. Consequently, roughly half the guns in the Warlords of Russia World Book weigh around a hundred pounds or more.
  • In Rocket Age Elephant guns and Venusian trade muskets both count, but the prize goes to the Thunder Lizard gun, a RAY weapon essentially designed to put down a T-Rex.
  • Sentinels of the Multiverse and its sequel, notably Bunker's Omni-Cannon; it acts as a Charged Attack in the original card game, capable of dealing huge amounts of damage by placing cards under it each turn, then discarding them all for a massive blow. In Sentinel Tactics, Omni-Cannon is not a BFG, it is THE BFG, being arguably the hardest power in the game to activate, but using 10 dice for its base damage, compared to the maximum of six that any other attack had in the original set. In both cases, the cannon is almost as big as the rest of his suit is.
  • Shadowrun.
    • Drool at the Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle. Then weep at its prohibitive availability rating.
    • And then there's the rest of his family, the assault cannon class. All of them would be considered anti-materiel weapons in Real Life. It's just that there are so many tough targets in Shadowrun (like trolls, drones, cyborgs, dragons, etc.) that you need this kind of firepower at the higher levels.
    • Then again, some sniper rifles can do as much (or even more) damage if they are equipped with EX-explosive ammo (which is cheaper than assault cannon rounds), and have a higher rate of fire and a longer range, which puts them squarely in this class.
    • There are also a few Frickin' Laser Beams here and there. A model in one sourcebook has an availability rating of "Good Luck With That".
      • To contrast, an assault cannon ammunition belt has a concealment rating of "Yeah, Right".
  • In Sla Industries, your Operatives are actually encouraged not to use guns, because melee is more attractive for viewers on TV. But if they do need to use a gun, they can buy anything up to a 17mm sniper cannon for personal use. And then there are guns mounted on the walls to keep out undesirables, these are 66mm tri-barreled Gatling guns that'll vaporize its targets.
  • Traveller has the PGMP (Plasma Gun, Man-Portable) and the even more OTT FGMP (Fusion Gun, Man-Portable) for when there's No Kill like Overkill. Some models can only be used if you're wearing Powered Armour.
  • In Mayfair Games' Underground, you play a Super-Soldier as drawn by Peter Chung brainwashed into thinking their a superhero a la Marshal Law. As such you can carry some very big guns, with the biggest being a 75mm cannon. In this game, the 30mm Urban Nightmare is just a larger than normal pistol.
  • YuGiOh has one in the form of Buster Rancher. So huge it requires a power generator the size of the wielder. How he’s still holding it up on his shoulder is anyone’s guess.
  • Tales from the Floating Vagabond: Guns in the top of the size scale qualify, being called the "Don't Point That At My Planet" scale.

    Theme Parks 
  • In Fast & Furious: Supercharged at Universal Studios, Hobbs happily displays his huge gun to an FBI agent.
    Dom: Cop, I suggest you clear out of here, otherwise we can't guarantee your safety.
    Agent Novak: Guarantee my safety? I'm the one holding the gun!
    Hobbs: (comes walking in with a massive gun) Yeah, but mine's a whole lot bigger than yours.

    Toys 
  • Super Soaker's CPS and Monster lines were the toy water gun version of this trope with its biggest one, The monster XL, being about the size of a minigun, had two barrels and came with a mounding stand. Though what it lacked in the power department compared to some of the smaller CPS guns, it made up for in size, twin-barreledness, staying power, ability to take abuse and raw intimidation power The CPS 2000 was not quite as large but packed a big punch, generally estimated to output a liter every second and require repumping every second. The smallestCPS The 1000 was quite large as well.
  • NERF:
    • The Centurion, an almost 41" long blaster that fires Mega Darts, styled as an Anti Material Rifle.
    • The Mastodon, a revolving automatic blaster that fires Mega Dart, styled as a .50cal Machine Gun.
    • The Magnus is an enormous Hand Cannon that owes some comparison to a Desert Eagle.
    • The Vulcan is a fully automatic tripod-mounted belt-fed blaster that looks like an HK MG-4, firing the smaller Elite Darts. It is, no joke, an LMG. Its smaller brother, the Stampede, is an automatic magazine-fed blaster, closer in spirit to the uncommonly seen Stoner 63 with the LMG configuration.
    • Also using the smaller bullet type are the Longshot and Longstrike sniper rifles, which are almost as massive as the Centurion.
    • The Rival Prometheus MXVIII-20K is one of the largest and highest-capacity blasters made in 2018 by Hasbro, sporting a massive 200-round ball ammo hopper that uses a gumball machine agitator to feed the rounds into a powerful set of flywheels. It is even bulkier than the Vulcan and requires you to install a pair of stabilizing 'feet' underneath it so it can sit stable on a tabletop.
  • Kotobukiya's various model kit toylines, in particular their Modeling Support Goods accessories, have featured a lot of these over the years. The first notable example was the Free Style Bazooka, a rocket launcher accessory longer than the leg of the Frame Arms unit wielding it. The Bazooka was used as the initial signature weapon of the first Frame Arms Girls, Gourai, to evoke the Small Girl, Big Gun aesthetic. During the anime, she upgraded to the Revolving Buster Cannon, a much bigger gun than the Bazooka: it's longer than the wielder is tall. Various other M.S.G kits like Grave Arms or Selector Rifle also qualify for the trope. Koto's other toyline Megami Device would eventually introduce Bullet Knights Launcher, who wields a cannon dwarfing anything else on the list.
  • The Busou Shinki Arnval MKI has the single biggest one-piece Shinki weapon, a massive, massive beam rifle that dwarfed every single other Shinki cannon in existence, and was not topped until Bullet Knight Launcher hit the market. Even her direct descendant, Arnval MKII, has a beam rifle that is nowhere near that original weapon's size.
  • Funtastic's (Poundland's house toy manufacturer, and therefore super-duper cheap to the point that none of the characters have names) S.W.A.T. line of toys has riot cops with absolutely massive, over-designed weaponry. The tamest is a shotgun as long as its gunner is tall.
  • Every single Marvel Legends figure of Cable follows tradition of giving Cable a massive gun. The most blatant has to be the original ToyBiz figure, whose massive gun can also be flipped upside-down to use as a hover-bike.

    Web Animation 
  • Dreamscape: Nik carries around a large, futuristic, light-blue rifle.
  • In the Helluva Boss episode “Truth Seekers”, Blitzo takes out a huge RPG labeled “My Dick” that fires an equally large rocket called the “Pussy Destroyer”.
  • Murder Drones protagonist Uzi's Establishing Character Moment consists of showing a self-made "sick-as-hell railgun" and shouting at her classmates because they (supposedly) don't believe her. The following events of the pilot episode show that it's in fact a powerful weapon as it can destroy the dreaded Disassembly Drones who are invincible to everything her fellow Worker Drones can make. The only withdrawals are that the weapon takes half an hour to recharge, and that it's ultimately destructible as anything.
  • A bit more common than the BFS in RWBY:
    • Main character Ruby wields Crescent Rose, a sniper rifle/scythe combo whose blade alone is taller than the average human. The recoil is enough to launch her backwards several yards, which she exploits to get around the battlefield faster and add a little extra power to her strikes. Even when in basic rifle form, it's still immense almost as big as she is.
    • Coco Adel is a svelte fashionista whose weapon of choice is a gigantic minigun which shreds whole hordes of Grimm and folds up into her handbag for convenience's sake.
    • Junior wields a combination bat and bazooka that's as big as he is. For clarification, Junior is six feet, eleven inches tall. It gets smashed by Yang, though.
    • Ironwood wields Due Process, a pair of revolvers that fire explosive bullets and Gravity Dust bullets respectively. They can also be combined with a silver cannon into a form very reminiscent of the BFG from the Doom series, which Ironwood notably uses to vaporize Jacques Schnee.

    Webcomics 
  • Afterlife Blues, by the same authors, features a railgun that at full power is only usable with Powered Armor (unless you're a full cyborg).
  • Axe Cop has Wexter, a tyrannosaurus rex with BFGs for arms.
  • Girl Genius:
  • Kore the dwarf paladin from Goblins wields a pair of eight-shaft repeating crossbows. They are quite devastating.
  • In MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck, there is a BFG called Ahab's Crosshairs wielded by the pirate Orphaner Dualscar, and later his descendant/ancestor (it's complicated) Eridan Ampora.
    • Jade Harley gains Iron Man's Proton Cannon from Marvel vs. Capcom by combining a rifle, her Iron Lass suit, and a proton accelerator.
    • Grandpa Harley has the Blunderbuss, which makes a dramatic entry of sorts before releasing fire along with a big BLAM on its target.
  • Joyce Brown's shoulder-fired Hammerspace cannon in It's Walky!, which is even called a BFG and is over a foot wide at the muzzle. Somewhat justified by her superhuman strength. It still has some serious recoil though. At least once she's told to get a smaller, more practical weapon.
  • Parodied in MegaTokyo with a BFWii control. Also in MegaTokyo is an actual big gun, the Sony P4216A Killtrunk.
  • In this A Miracle of Science comic: "And if I say no?" "Gun." "You make a convincing argument."
  • In The Munchkin Man, "Ted" (which isn't actually his name) has this thing.
  • Captain Martello, from Mushroom Go, carries a Bullet Bill cannon. Yes, carries it.
  • Frequently shows up in Narbonic (usually in the hands of Mell, the evil intern). One reader posts comments keeping up with "Big Freakin' (tm) Gun Count".
  • Schlock from Schlock Mercenary uses a BH-209 Plasma Weapon complete with Ommmmminous hummmmmmm and intimidating barrel glow. It does have a setting to shoot a small, saner beam, but since this is Sergeant Schlock we're talking about, it might as well be stuck on "Set entire room on fire and evaporate target."note  He also gives us a new euphemism for these: "Wristbreaker." He's fortunately exempt from actual wrist breaking by way of being a Blob Monster, however.
    • Hinted at in several Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
      • 25. If the damage you do is covered by a manufacturer's warranty, you didn't do enough damage.
      • 34. If you’re leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun.
      • 37. There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload.'
    • Schlock loses his BFG, and is offered a new model which is much more powerful and doesn't need to warm up. On the downside, it is smaller, and doesn't make an ominous hum, so Schlock manages to find another of the old model. To be fair, Schlock uses both the size and the ominous hum as much for intimidation as he uses the gun for blasting things. Although he does like blasting things.
    • He briefly replaces his lost plasma cannon with a pair of sawn-off 'multicannons', which are normally a shoulder-fired multi-purpose weapons platform. He fits them with autoloaders and hoses entire rooms with anti-tank shells. They prove to be so ludicrously dangerous that Schlock decides to keep them even after getting a new plasma cannon.
  • Subverted in Sequential Art: Pip "borrows" a few really, really big guns from the denizens living in their basement — only to discover that they have a range of about four centimeters. He even lampshades it.
    Pip: Quit looking at me like that! I just grabbed the biggest, most-lethal looking guns I saw! Admit it! They don't look like short, short range weapons, do they?!
  • An unsuccessful medieval version in Sluggy Freelance, chapter "Anima": While the two are in a medieval-style alternative dimension, Torg asks Riff to make him a hand crossbow. He gets one that's so big that eventually they just admit it's a ballista and mount it on a cart.
  • Plasma cannons in S.S.D.D. are illegal because they have a tendency to blow up their owners and anyone around them, but that doesn't stop Tessa from owning one (guess how sane she is).
  • In tinyraygun, the Geckoid species' culture and industry pretty much revolve around producing and owning these. Of course, all that industrialization resulted in oxygen masks becoming their second-largest industry...
  • One of Ren's Attack Animals from Tower of God has big damn energy cannon with a firing end and a very point end as well as a petal shield.
  • Tuesday Titans: Plenty on display, but the Autocarriers stand out due to the sheer number of Titan-killing, city-leveling guns they come equipped with. A single barrage is enough to send Excel running for cover.
  • The Way of the Metagamer gives us the aptly-named Rod of Za-Boom.
  • The Whiteboard:
    • Paintball guns! Most would be illegal in the sport, especially the railgun and rocket-launcher.
    • This beauty, from the real 2005 April Fools' Day strip, is almost as long as the vixen wielding it is tall, but still being carried around like it's just a scaled-up rifle. note 

    Web Original 
  • The aptly-named Bad News from Critical Role. Since this is a D&D campaign, it's unclear exactly how big Bad News is, but the kickback is powerful enough that it nearly knocks Percy off his feet whenever he uses it. He has to wield it two-handed, and it has been known to reduce enemy heads to Pink Mist.
  • Darwin's Soldiers features two notable ones. Gustave Chiumbo, a massive Nile crocodile, wields a double-barreled 4-gauge shotgun. Clyco's prototype weapon from the second RP counts too.
  • FPSRussia is devoted entirely to BFG's.
  • Tech Infantry features a wide variety of plasma and other weaponry designed to be carried by heavy-weapons troopers in Powered Armor. It greatly helps that many of those soldiers inside the armor are Werewolves.
  • Big Fucking Steam Punk Guns!
  • Linkara shows off his third favorite weapon in the Silent Hill Dying Inside review: a minigun he wears on his hand. It shows up in his Doom review and 90's Kid picks it up in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers review. HE also has another BFG he got off Cable that was used in the above mentioned Power Rangers review.
  • This video is titled 'Huge Guns'. Frankly, it's a bit of an understatement.
  • The XM78 in Noka. An anti-materiel rifle designed to annihilate armor-plated targets such as tanks, most likely stolen by the heroes, and for what purpose? Noka has no skills with firearms so they let him use it on a panda. Yeah. It's that kind of story.
  • Lenny and Shinko's Disney-See as shown in the I, SHINKO short, Mickey's Christmas Carol review, and in the Questions and Answers video, Lenny has a large steampunk blunderbuss, that seems to have quite a kickback when being fired.
  • In The Salvation War, artillery, machine guns, and missiles serve to mow down Hell's forces like so much tall grass, but the calibers used by your average infantry struggle. It would be in bad taste for mankind try and weaponize holy water (Yahweh allowed Satan onto earth in the first place), so the armed forces of the world phase out assault rifles and bring back battle rifles, which work a bit better - but not better enough. By the time Hell falls and Yahweh decides to directly intervene against humanity, .50 BMG is standard caliber in the U.S. Armed Forces.
    • Demons who defect are given modified 30mm RARDEN autocannons as assault rifles, since they're just that tall.
  • Subeta's Cyborg Soldier costume set includes the admittedly rather unimaginatively named Cyborg Soldier BFG. It's almost as long as one's avatar when held.

    Western Animation 
  • Almost subverted, but not quite, in the CGI-animated Action Man (2000), when Coach gives Alex Mann a device called the BSU 10000. Alex thinks that this stands for something more sophisticated than the bazooka-like gun that it looks like at first glance, but Coach fires the gun at a pile of scrap metal (blowing it sky-high) and reveals that it really stands for "Blow Stuff Up". (Possibly a G-rated version of "Blow Shit Up", considering the show's audience.)
  • C.O.P.S. (1988) features Mace, who carries a laser bazooka, and uses it in the Title Sequence to slice a hole in a reinforced concrete walkway. Also features Buttons McBoomBoom, a Cyborg gangster who, along with having the greatest name in all of fiction, keeps a pair of BFGs in his chest.
  • Generator Rex: One of Rex's forms produces a ridiculously large gun, known as the Slam Cannon. It's about three times as large as its teenage wielder, and on one occasion used bowling balls for bullets - and they were small compared to its usual mass-of-rubble rounds.
  • Roadblock (and his Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Heavy Duty) from G.I. Joe. Roadblock's gun is identified in the original comics as carrying an M2 Browning machine gun, a gun that is usually operated by a squad or vehicle-mounted, and weighs up to 120 lbs.
    • Sometimes it's depicted as more like the smaller (but still large and normally crew-served) M1919 Browning machine gun. Especially the action figure of him, since it wouldn't be able to stand up while carrying a properly-scaled M2.
  • Parodied with X the Eliminator's death ray in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law: it's big, but it's also attached to just as big a console that's horrifically unwieldy and hard to get around, which, coupled with the fact that it's still run on 60's technology, makes it impractical as a weapon, though that doesn't stop X from trying. (And no, it doesn't even qualify for Awesome, but Impractical, that's how impractical it is.)
  • While not completely fitting with this trope (it's more of a Wave-Motion Gun), the Justice League watchtower has a large laser that is quite literally called the Binary Fusion Generator. This was not unintended by the writers.
  • Miraculous Ladybug: Played for Laughs in the episode "Malediktator," when Ladybug's Lucky Charm summons an actual weapon for the first time—a massive gun bigger than she is. Both Ladybug and Queen Bee are gobsmacked, but it turns out all she needed was the laser pointer.
  • Capri Chilton from Motorcity has one.
  • On My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Pinkie Pie shows off her Party Cannon, which can blast decorations all over a room in one shot to instantly set up a party—or blow changelings to Kingdom Come. She never leaves home without it and has hauled it from Ponyville to Canterlot and the Crystal Empire.
  • Dot's gun in ReBoot's season 2 finale "Web World Wars." It's bigger than she is.
    Dot: What do you think? Does it make me look too butch'?
    Mouse: Hmm, nah.... listen, while I'm working on the codes with Megabyte, well, you'll watch my back won't'cha?
    Dot: What do you think this is for? <Cocks gun>
  • The unofficial ReBoot Episode Zero (a compilation of every cutscene from the PlayStation videogame) plays this a bit more straight. After Hexadecimal reveals that Dot is trapped inside one of her mirrors, Bob goes berserk. He brutally kicks Megabyte's ascii, then stares right at the mirror-slash-vidwindow above the Tor looking into Hex's lair. His next line, with progressive camera zoom-in on each letter: "Glitch: B.F.G.!". His already big gun turns into the poster child of More Dakka, then he points it straight up at the mirror, says his catchphrase ("Stay Frosty."), and blasts the crap out of it. (Watch the epic scene here, starting at 3:14.) Also lampshaded by Bob, his first request for glitch to form a BFG was actually a big, freaking guitar.
  • Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons have a duel where they come up with bigger and bigger guns; eventually Itchy has the good sense to actually shoot instead of getting yet another larger gun from hammerspace(his gun is already the size of planet Earth), and sends scratchy flying into the sun — improbable targeting skills at work, too!
  • Star Wars animated series have a few examples:
  • The King in Sym-Bionic Titan, while fighting with the army on the front lines and already shooting a BFG, runs out of bullets and pulls out an even bigger one.
  • Thunder Cats 2011
    • The Dragon Grune has a huge kanabo Morph Weapon that transforms into an equally huge Lightning Gun.
    • Mercenary slaver the Conquedor has a huge machine gun that fires adhesive goo and an absurdly long laser rifle he likes to use when tormenting Cute Machine villagers the Ro-Bear Berbils.
    • Played for Laughs in "Between Brothers" when young Wilykat invokes it by appropriating an enemy's BFG. He staggers under its weight, attempting to aim it at a Walking Tank while enemy troops sneak up behind him. Its recoil is so tremendous he sails backward into them, knocking them out, while his errant shot manages to hit the tank's feet.
  • A lot of Transformers have these.
    • The Requiem Blaster from Armada, which changes hands a couple of times over the course of the series. Three Mini-cons transform into a rifle capable of blasting a hole through the guts of any 'bot with zero resistance.
    • In Robots In Disguise, Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Hightower, Mega-Octane, and Rollbar had weapons which would qualify as BFGs. Optimus' was shoulder-mounted, though, and Mega-Octane had both a handheld one and a back-mounted pair of cannons.
    • The guns in this series can get pretty gargantuan. Guns can combine into bigger guns for the likes of Ruination, and any part of a robot's vehicle mode not used in their main body can turn into an arsenal. In G1, everyone asked where Optimus Prime's trailer went. In RID, there's no question: it turns into a buttload of extra guns and missile racks (or it can combine with Optimus for his Super Mode). Ditto Ultra Magnus (car carrier) and Evil Counterpart Scourge (gas tanker.)
    • Bumblebee was seen with a gun (more like a Big Fucking Cannon) that was twice as long as he was tall in Dreamwave's "War Within" issue 5, while one of IDW's "Infiltration" issue 4 cover homages that with a really large caliber gun.
    • Both Generation 1 and Animated Swindle have a giant gun that can mount on top of their vehicle mode.
    • Megatron's fusion cannon from Generation One (and Megatron himself in at least one scene). Once he was upgraded to Galvatron, it became even more powerful - in a couple of the post-Movie episodes, it was used to destroy planets.
    • Cliffjumper is famous for pulling guns larger than he is. Its appearances have also been exhaustively documented, and because it's TFWiki.net, they also pepper the page with synonyms for "big f'ing gun."
    • This may be Megatron's Best F'G moment he's ever had. It's also just plain awesome.
    • The Animated Megatron also has a fusion cannon which is almost identical (if not a little bit bigger!) than the original and even uses the same sound effect (Although slightly modified to sound like a weapon firing). Most impressively, he uses it while Dual Wielding. Is it any wonder that this guy is considered to be a badass?
    • Meanwhile the Armada version of Megatron had a waist-mounted cannon which is so powerful it blows him backwards along the ground. Of course, most of the other Armada characters have similarly ludicrously powered weapons when they power up with Mini-Cons — Starscream's first test of his Null-Laser cannons leaves a huge crater.
    • The Logical Conclusion to this trope, the Ark, a BFG made from 4 absolutely huge spaceships being stuck together with the power of creation here it is. For comparison, the guy holding it is Primus who transforms into a PLANET.
    • Rampage's "Hellbelcher" from Beast Wars.
    • And the ones on the base in this exchange:
      Megatron: (walking up to the Maximal Base, when half a dozen turrets come from out of nowhere) Ah! I come in peace!!
      Rhinox, through megaphone: (turrets fold away. twice as many turrets, three times as big unfold and point at Megatron) You'll leave in pieces.
  • As with The Avengers example above, Coulson Dual Wields a pair of BFGs that double as rocket launchers in the Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) episode "Run Pig Run".
  • In the Samurai Jack episode "Robo-Samurai vs. Mondo-Bot", not only does Mondo-Bot sprout literally scores of autocannon from its arms and chest, but each gun is so huge that the ejected spent casings are big enough to crush automobiles.

    Real Life 
  • The High Impulse Weapon System developed by Lacroix Defense & Security was an attempt to create a shoulder-fired 76mm mortar. It operated at the very limit of what can be considered man-wieldable, if not beyond. A video can be seen Here.
    • Truth in Television: in 1943, when the war turned and Japanese equipment started to be captured in significant quantities, an error in translation led to one item being called "the knee mortar". This was a light one-man mortar of perhaps 37mm bore. Its integral baseplate was curved, allowing the weapon to be braced against any suitable rock or fallen tree bole while it was aimed and steadied by hand, Unfortunately, an error in translating the Japanese designation along with the baseplate having just the right amount of curve to sit securely against one's thigh as if by design led British and Australian troops to confidently suppose it was braced against the knee or thigh of the soldier operating the weapon. Allied field hospitals were, for a time, faced with a steady trickle of men whose kneecaps and femurs had been shattered by recoil energies, when seeking to use captured Japanese weapons against their former owners. Revised instructions and warnings were sent out as a matter of urgency. The "knee mortar" in Allied service eventually proved to be a handy and potent short-range weapon in jungle fighting.
  • At the start of WW2, most of the principal combatants were issued with anti-tank rifles. Given armour thicknesses in tanks of the era, it was not unreasonable to issue very large single-shot or limited magazine rifles, using armour-piercing bullets that could penetrate up to an inch (25mm) of tank armour. But the weapons themselves were large cumbersome monsters which were generally hated by men detailed to use them, with good reason. Britain's Boyes Anti-Tank rifle was 5 feet 2 inches long (1,575mm), weighed 35 pounds (16kg), and fired a massive 0.55" (13.9mm) round. A man tasked with carrying a weapon four times the weight of the standard SMLE rifle and twice as long then had to brace against the massive recoil energy generated on firing. The Soviet PTRS-41 was even larger: 83 inches (2,100mm) long and 46 pounds (20.3kg), but larger still was the Finnish Lahti L-39 20mm rifle (nicknamed the Elephant Gun; 87 inches/2,200mm long and 109 pounds/49.5kg), capable of defeating almost all Soviet armor.note  Germany's version was unique. The bullet incorporated a small charge of tear gas: the thinking was that when the bullet penetrated the tank, the gas would add an extra degree of unpleasantness to the recipients in an enclosed space. note  Most anti-tank rifles were phased out by 1943 due to advancements in tank armor; the Russians, however, continued to use theirs as "shock and awe" sniper weapons. Against human targets.
    • Anti-materiel rifles are also considered BFGs. Keep in mind the name means it's supposed to be used against enemy equipment, meaning most things weaker than tanks can be put out of commission with a shot from these. A good sniper can incapacitate light vehicles and even grounded airplanes with one of these things, and they're generally overkill against human targets. It's come full circle with Serbu, a firearms company, naming their heavy sniper the BFG-50.
  • The KS-23 is a Russian shotgun made from recycled 23mm AA gun barrels (equivalent to 4 gauge!). Nowadays they are issued to the OMON special police unit & available for local civilians.
  • The "Fat Mac" .950 JDJ is more or less a man-portable cannon. It is .95 caliber and is the size of a large child, which is to say that the rifles weigh between 85-120 pounds, depending on the customizations on them (every one was custom made). The cartridges weigh half a pound apiece. The muzzle flash alone could kill you. The recoil can also kill you- if the rifle mounts a scope that isn't sufficiently cushioned, it's capable of smashing in the bones around your eye. It is somehow classed as a hunting rifle. What the commissioner could possibly be hunting with the thing is unknown but presumably, they're after the devil. If you don't want to click the link, imagine the page image as a bolt-action rifle instead of a wave-motion gun.
    • It should be noted that the .950 JDJ is purely a novelty gun, only fireable from a bench rest and utterly unsuited to actually being carried or used in the field, unlike various 20mm rifles which were designed to be practical combat weapons. For example, it has forty pounds of deadweight added to the stock just for recoil management.
  • The GM6 Lynx is a semi-automatic rifle firing the .50 BMG round... and can be used from the shoulder, thanks to its recoil compensation mechanism.
  • The Hawk MM-1 is a man-portable 40mm grenade launcher that can fire 30 rounds a minute, and loads a 12-round drum magazine. It can load, among other rounds, HEDP (causes a big blast and can penetrate 51 millimeters of steel), thermobaric, HE (32 grams of Composition B), and canister (20 1-gram steel balls) grenades. It's the gun Arnold Schwarzenegger uses in Terminator 2!
  • The Neopup PAW-20 is an oddly-shaped direct-fire grenade launcher that fires what are essentially cut-down cartridges for a 20mm aircraft cannon.
  • When U.S. Army soldiers were first equipped with the M79 40mm grenade launcher in the Vietnam War, they discovered a need for a short-range self-defense option in an emergency. So the M576 40mm grenade was developed, essentially a 40mm shotgun shell.
  • Arguably the Kord 12.7mm Heavy Machine gun serves as the best example of this when held with a bandolier over the shoulder; this gun was developed during a time Russia barely had any machine guns for use after the Soviet Union dissolved and to solve that problem alone. The Kord 12.7 heavily takes inspiration from the NSV Machine gun which was only mounted unlike it's future counterpart.
  • Anzio Ironworks has created a 20mm sniper rifle which uses the exact same ammunition as the M61 Vulcan rotary autocannon. It dwarfs a Barrett .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle.
  • Black powder weapons:
    • In early modern Europe, handguns were generally divided into "arquebuses" and "muskets", with the latter firing shots about twice as large as the former and this requiring forked stands to use properly. This distinction largely disappeared among most countries by the early-mid 17th century as they standardized a sort of "half-musket", but the Spanish continued to use it throughout the Thirty Years and Franco-Spanish wars.
    • The Asian powers tended towards smaller guns than the European ones. A big exception was the Vietnamese, who became notorious for using full-sized musket equivalents and later bigger. In the 17th century the Trinh army was reportedly using six-foot long matchlock muskets firing 124 gram shots; for reference, the standard for "half-muskets" in Europe at the time was around 40 grams. They had to use swivels and three-legged stands to keep them stable.


Alternative Title(s): Big Freaking Gun, Big Fancy Gun, Big Fucking Gun

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Supreme Cannon

The Supreme Cannon is one of Omnimon's weapons, a cannon capable of mass devastation.

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Main / BFG

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