"There is just something sexy about a woman with a blaster, too bad my wife doesn't agree to that."
Girls with Guns describes a sub-genre of
action media that focuses on strong female leads being awesome with firearms. May or may not involve
Heroic Bloodshed. It was developed somewhere in the Hong Kong film industry and has since made itself a genre that is often used in anime. Usually involves gun fights, stunts and martial arts.
Small Girl, Big Gun is a subtrope—
Girls with Guns aren't necessarily small, and their guns aren't necessarily big. Yeah-heh.
Compare
Superhero Packing Heat. See also
The Other Wiki's page
on the subject
.
Note that this page describes a genre, not a character trope. Individual examples of
Girls with Guns go on
The Gunslinger.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bee Train and Koichi Mashimo in particular deserve a special recognition for popularizing the genre with their trilogy:note Mashimo was also the director of the Dirty Pair Movie Project EDEN.
- Gunslinger Girl (though you should have known that from the title)
- The title of the intro theme to the image album is "Ragazza Col Fucile". the trope name (singular), in Italian
- More precisely, "girl with a rifle".
- The series could almost count as a Deconstruction of the genre, with the girls becoming badass Child Soldiers though extreme mental conditioning and cyberization, drastically shortening their lifespan to the point that none of them will live to see 18. There's a good amount of good old-fashioned ass-kicking, but the series is mostly about playing the premise for all the tragedy it's worth.
- Dirty Pair (probably kicked off the genre, at least within anime)
- Gunsmith Cats
- Kite (and Kite Liberator, too)
- Najica Blitz Tactics
- Burst Angel
- Grenadier
- Shirow Masamune obviously has a fetish for Girls with Guns: though the boys get to play as well, the main characters in his books are usually female, and spend much of their time toting, and being awesome with, guns. (Or in one case, tanks). Some of his works:
- Canaan
- Mezzo Forte and Mezzo DSA
- Early Reins: Die Hard on a train, in The Wild West, with six girls with guns as the heroes.
- Black Lagoon has Revy (trope picture), Roberta, Balalaika, and the entire church of violence. Practically every fighter that survives for more than a episode is a woman. Fetish, anyone?
- Upotte is about girls who ARE guns.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica has two gun users in it's roster : Mami (magical flintlock rifles) and Homura (modern day weaponry).
- Girls Und Panzer has girls playing with very big guns...on tanks!
Comic Books
Film
Literature
Live Action TV
- Revolution: Charlotte "Charlie" Matheson started out as an archer with a bow and arrow. By episode 10, she has dropped that weapon in favour of guns.
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The title character is a girl who's harder than nuclear nails. A female cyborg often acts as her partner.
Tabletop Games
Western Animation
