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[Jayne walks menacingly towards Mal with a large gun.]
Jayne: Six men came to kill me one time. And the best of 'em carried this. It's a Callahan full-bore auto-lock. Customized trigger, double cartridge thorough gauge. It is my very favorite gun.
[He holds the gun out to Mal.]
Mal: [exclaims in Chinese] You offering me a trade?
Jayne: A trade? Hell, it's theft. This is the best gun made by man. It has extreme sentimental value. It's miles more worthy 'n what you got!
Mal: What I got? She has a name.
Mal: Well, my days of not takin' ya seriously are certainly comin' to a middle.
Some people just like weapons. A lot.
One way to show they have a favorite weapon is to give it an affectionate girly name. Expect them to act slightly too keen about the weapon, like knowing even its most obscure facts and statistics, with possibilities of stroking and licking. Frequently they speak to the weapon directly, often apparently expecting or thinking they hear a response. Expect them to be armed with it at a moment's notice, even if they were asleep a moment ago.
Anyone who does this either has a sentimental attachment to said weapon (pure or otherwise), is a veteran from some war, is generally insane (though you wouldn't say it to their face), or is some combination of the three. In any case, someone who gives a name to their gun or knife is usually someone to watch out for and generally not one to mess with.
In Real Life though, another reason could be that the owner is just very, very, lonely. Or, you know, a member of one of the several real world militaries that encourage this in trainees so they might actually bother to maintain the weapon.
Note that this only really applies to common weapons, especially guns. Empathic Weapons and Evil Weapons are a different issue, and vehicles like ships and planes nearly always have a name. Also, back when all weapons were handmade works of art, nearly all of them had names, so this trope is Older Than Dirt. Indeed, the word gun is derived from the name of a crossbow, Lady Gunilda. Therefore, every gun in existence is already named after a woman.
Related to this is I Call Him Mister Happy, where men name... another weapon of theirs. Seriously speaking, Companion Cube is what you get when you evoke this trope to the point where it might as well be an actual character, and Spaceship Girl is what you get when you invoke this trope literally.
Compare Named Weapons and Stock Weapon Names. See also They Call Him Sword wich occurs when somebody gets nickname after a weapon.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Just about any Super Robot, technically. You can't very well yell out the name of your attack if it doesn't have a name, now can you?
- Maya from the various incarnations of Burn Up does this with her entire arsenal.
- Aya of Weiss Kreuz eventually reveals that his katana is named Shion, after his former teacher. Weiss being the sort of series that it is, Aya is eventually obliged to kill his weapon's namesake.
- Kino of Kinos Journey names her guns. "The Woodsman", "The Cannon", and "The Flute."
- Chang Wufei is particularly notable, in that he gave his Mobile Suit an additional, personal name after his dead fiancée besides its official one.
- Guts in Berserk has his sword, the Dragon Slayer. This wouldn't count except that there are no dragons in the Berserk universe (unless you count Grunbeld in Apostle form); the sword was merely designed so that it could slay one if there were. Recent chapters showed a dragon sitting on a castle tower, so the Dragon Slayer might eventually come to earn its name.
- In Slayers Try, Filia has a mace named "Mace-sama".
- The bat that can do anything, Excalibolg~
- In Dominion Tank Police, Leona names her Mini-tank Bonaparte.
- Hellsing has a particular obsession with naming weapons, to the point where the manga has dream sequences featuring some of them. Alucard's pistols are named Casull (which fires explosive tipped .454 Casull rounds) and Jackal (which fires 13mm blessed silver bullets with explosive mercury tips), Seras' "rifle" is called Harkonnen. Said "rifle" is a breech-loaded 30mm anti-tank weapon. The Harkonnen II is the upgraded version, which features *TWO* fully automatic, drum-fed 30mm anti-tank weapons. It should be noted that in aforementioned dream sequences, Seras' Harkonnen is represented by Baron Harkonnenn
- Casull is just it`s name in the signature series anime. In the manga and OVA it`s name is actually Joshua for who knows why.
- Genkaku from Deadman Wonderland calls his double machine gun electric guitar "Flying V" very affectionately. It receives better treatment than pretty much all other humans he interacts with.
- Another good anime example of this trope is found in Patlabor. In the Patlabor anime, Police Officer Noa Izumi affectionately names her giant police robot 'Alphonse' for some unspecified reason. Her fellow police officers are quite dismayed by her naming choice and her loving devotion to her mecha. It's what she's named all her childhood pets. Labor Alphonse is Alphonse III, with the first two being her cat and dog.
- In Kenichi The Mightiest Disciple, Kenichi's father has a shotgun he calls "Sebastian".
- Not to mention Hunting Rifle Maximilian and the Double-Barreled Rotwoski.
- It's only a ''metaphorical" axe, but Yui's dearly beloved instrument is "Gitah". Often written with a tilde to express the love. This affliction seems to be spreading to her bandmates.
- In the manga Double Arts, the resident Blood Knight Sui had a hoola hoop made of solid iron that she uses in battle. She calls it Avis.
- In Gundam 00, Graham Akre (AKA Mister Bushido) named the beam katana wielded by his mobile suit Masurao "Howard" and "Daryl" in honor of his former wingmen.
- Played straight and subverted in Bleach. Though it's more like the weapons have names of their own, and their bearers ought to know their names as to extract all the killing potential of them (the subversion comes with Kenpachi Zaraki who doesn't even need to care).
Comicbooks
- Marv from Sin City has a .45 by the name of Gladys, which he named after one of the nuns from his school days. According to Marv, the gun has almost lived up to its name.
- Buck Godot calls his pistol "Junior". So do Smith and Wesson, a pair of entirely sentient AI zap guns belonging to a Space Pirate who goes by the name "the Pistol Packin' Polaris Packrat". It's probably the gun's actual name, although it isn't an AI and therefore doesn't talk (or if it is, it doesn't have much to say. Well, other than ZOWNT). A distinctly imposing rifle with "Senior" inscribed on its side is also shown to be in his possession, although if there's ever been a situation where Junior wasn't sufficient, we haven't seen it yet.
- The Dragunov sniper rifle of Natalya Zamyatin from Y: The Last Man is named Rodya, after her husband killed in the plague.
- Nuke, the drug-fueled Super Soldier from Daredevil, had a BFG he called "Betsy", which had a kill counter.
- In one of the Cable & Deadpool comics, Deadpool is in Rumekistan shooting people and his gun says "Deadpool's Gun" on it, with the little Deadpool emblem. So...well, he didn't really name it, but he did label it. (Also, in one of the issues Cable has a BFG named after Liefeld, as an in-joke on the way Liefeld used to draw ridiculously giant guns.)
- Captain America's shield seems to be named Shield in Steve's head. He loves that shield. He also once referred to it as "she", but when a rescued scientist asked about its name, Cap retorted, "Do you have a name for your right arm?" Naturally, the shield was lost at the end of the issue and later destroyed. It got better.
- In the Spacehack back-up strip that ran in Knights Of The Dinner Table, the security officer had a BFG he called "Suzy".
Film
- Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket, in one memorable scene, forces his recruits to give girls' names to their rifles.
- The first indication we get of Pvt. Pyle's decaying mental state is when we see him cleaning his gun delicately and whispering to it like a lover.
- In Aliens, Drake the smartgunner seems to have named his weapon "My Bitch". He kisses it at one point.
- Predator's 'Old Painless.'
- In John Carpenter's Vampires: Los Muertos, starring Jon Bon Jovi(!) the scary black guy calls his gun "Miss P".
- "Bruce? Matilda!"
- Since non-weapon examples have made it onto this page, we might as well mention Rosebud. What do you mean rosebud isn't a weapon?
- Hackers. Joey gives the name "Lucy" to his computer, which the character would consider a weapon.
- Hellboy's weapon of choice is a huge gun, which shoots bullets containing Holy water, Garlic or silver. He calls it The Good Samaritan. In Hellboy 2, Hellboy's new weapon is the 'Big Baby,' which is a large shotgun with six barrels. "Aww, you woke up the Baby!"
- Trigger from Disney's Robin Hood carries a crossbow with a faulty safety called Betsy.
- The Dirty Harry movie Sudden Impact contains this exchange between Harry Calahan and a would-be armed robber:
Harry: "Well, we're not just gonna let you walk out of here."
Crook: "Who's 'we', sucka?"
Harry: [brandishing his .44 Magnum revolver] "Smith and Wesson... and me."
- The sheriff of the town of Deliverance in Blood Rayne II: Deliverance calls his double-barrel shotgun "Sadie". The first time he mentioned the name, This Troper assumed he was talking about his wife. Imagine the confusion that ensued from realizing he was talking about his gun.
- In the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, two of the cannons on the HMS Surprise have names scribed on their side, "Jumping Billy" and "Sudden Death".
- Tony's "Little Friend"
Literature
Live Action TV
Music
- It is actually somewhat common practice for musicians (especially guitarists) to name their instruments.
- Devo Spice apparently named his Atari
"Heather".
- BB King's famous guitar, Lucille. According to King, early in his career, a fight broke out in the club he was playing at. This fight quickly got out of hand, and somehow a fire started. Naturally, everyone immediately ran out, but King had left his guitar behind in his haste. Realizing that he couldn't afford to replace it, he reentered the burning club and retrieved his instrument. When he learned that the fight had started over a woman named Lucille, King decided to name all of his guitars in the future "Lucille", "to remind myself never to be that stupid again." King also famously refuses to ship Lucille in a plane's cargo hold; he buys two seat tickets. One for him and one for Lucille.
- This is likely why a number of examples on this page (such as The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air above) use Lucille for their named weapons as well.
- Green Day leader Billie Joe Armstrong's "Blue" - his first guitar which he still plays today.
- Bo Diddley's guitar, the Twang Machine.
- Willie Nelson's guitar, Trigger.
- Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitars. The most famous is First wife also known as #1. Others include Lenny for example, after then his wife who gave it to him.
- Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page played a black Les Paul custom known as "Black Beauty" (until it was stolen). Since then, his number one guitar has been a Les Paul sunburst known simply as "Number One".
- Black Beauty is actually what the model was called, not his name for it. He named his other Les Paul "Number Two". This had more to do with him having an easier time to separete them, since they were setup differently. Similar thing with the numbers put on Pete Townshend's Les Pauls in the 70's.
- Eric Clapton's guitar, Blackie. He also has a Brownie (which he used with Derek & The Dominoes).
- Mason Williams's guitar (which he named a song after, too), $13 Stella.
- Vadim Pruzhanov, of DragonForce, plays a keytar named "Batman".
- Brian May's guitar, Red Special. It is actually quite unique
.
- Neil Young's primary guitar, Old Black. He has another guitar named Hank, since it used to belong to Hank Williams.
- Billy Gibbon's Pearly Gates. Miss Pearly Gates.
- As can be seen above, a lot of axes.
- The Sisters of Mercy always call their current drum machine "Doktor Avalanche". The Doktor has been swapped out a few times for newer models over the last three decades.
- Many famous string instruments, especially any built by a member of the famous Stradivari family, have unique names. The Other Wiki lists some
.
- New York rapper Qadir has released a single, featured in Grand Theft Auto IV, called "Nickname", which is, you guessed it, about having a nickname for your guns.
"I got a nickname for all my guns: a Desert Eagle that I call Big Pun, a two-shot that I call Tupac... my TEC-9 I'm-a call T-Pain, my .38 snub I'm-a call Lil Wayne..."
- Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead calls his Rickenbacker bass "Rickenbastard".
- Eddie Van Halen's striped guitar, Frankenstrat. A Fan Nickname in the guitar community for guitars that are made of pieces of different guitars is to call them Frankensteins.
- Shirley Manson owns an orange Fender Stratocaster named 'Rita'
- Raymond Scott named most of the instruments he built: "Karloff", "Bandito the Bongo Bandit," etc. Of course, he needed names like that so his employees would know which one he was talking about, since telling them to go switch on "the one with all the knobs on the top and the buttons—no, to the left—down—right" would get in the way at ol Manhattan Research Inc.
- Though not name per se, Woody Guthrie was famed for having "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" on the body of his guitar.
Professional Wrestling
- Mick Foley calls his favourite baseball-bat-wrapped-in-barbed-wire "Barbie".
- Ron Bass carried a bullwhip that he called "Miss Betsy." He also had a pair of spurs with which he once attacked Brutus Beefcake, and which, on at least one occasion, he referred to as "Brett" and "Bart."
- T. L. Hopper, the wrestling plumber, carried a plunger named "Bessie."
Tabletop Games
- In the Iron Kingdoms setting, Orsus "The Butcher of Khardov" Zoktavir calls his axe "Lola". As long as we're talking IK, there's also Ashlynn's Nemesis, Croe's Hiss, Gorten's Forge Father, Seige's Ground Pounder, Vlad's Skirmisher & Ruin, Magnus' Foecleaver, Bart's Red Tide & Ace, Fiona's Viper, and Brocker's Thrasher, and that only covers the some of the mercenaries and a few faction combatants. Naming your weapon is pretty common in the Iron Kingdoms.
- Mr. Welch, of (Increasingly Large Number) Things Mr. Welch Can No Longer Do In An RPG
fame, is forbidden from this, even if suggested by the game, per rule number 1359.
- In the Iron Heroes setting, the Weaponmaster class is required to name his weapon at 11th level. Doing so causes his reputation to precede him.
Theatre
- In the musical Sweeney Todd, Mr. Todd doesn't ever mention names for his razors... but he does have an entire song, "My Friends," where he directly addresses them as his friends, and apparently expects them to answer him.
Videogames
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Thirty/Thirty (the robot/cyborg horse from Bravestarr) had a gun called Sarah Jane. He himself is named for a bullet.
- In Walt Disney's Robin Hood, one of the guards—tellingly named Trigger—has a powerful crossbow called Betsy.
- The Simpsons parodied Full Metal Jacket in the episode "Dead Putting Society" wherein Homer forces Bart to call his golf putter "Charlene". "Pull, Dutchess! PULL!!!"
- In Open Season, Shaw calls his shotgun "Lorraine". It even has its name engraved on it.
- Big-game hunter Mr. Marlin, a one-shot character from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), called his custom laser rifle "Betsy". Eventually, it blew up, killing him.
- The unfortunately named Lugnutz of Transformers: Cybertron, according to his official bio, calls his rifle "Dutch".
- In Gargoyles, recurring character Vinnie Grigori's pie-cannon is named Mr. Carter, Mr. C for short.
- Avatar The Last Airbender example: Sokka's Boomerang. Space Sword might also count. Hey, nobody said Sokka was good at naming things...
- I think "Sparky-Sparky-BOOM Man" Agrees with that statement.
- Although Matrix didn't give his weapon a proper name, based on dialogue, it's clear that at least he and AndrAIa consider 'Gun' to be the name of his gun.
Web Original
- Non-weapon example: In Survival Of The Fittest, Cody Jenson names the motorcycle he finds "Loretta", and apparently falls in love with it as the game goes on.
- An NPC in Neoquest II, a game within the game of Neopets, has a sword named Vera. His cowboy-like speech patterns (which he shares with no other character in the game) and the fact that there are several self-proclaimed Browncoats on the Neopets staff suggest that this is a direct Shout Out.
- Marzipan's acoustic guitar, Carol.
- Chaz Villette in Shadow Unit has a sourdough starter named Elmer. Not anymore, he doesn't.
- A video by You Tuber Blunty3000 features a ninja who has named his sword "Suzette".
- From Red vs. Blue, we have the Blue Team's Tank named "Sheila"
- Happens in Protectors Of The Plot Continuum.
- Agent Foxglove has two daggers named Pointy and Stabby and a sabre named Choppy - she's aware it's not a chopping weapon, but in her words, "'Slicey' doesn't sound right and I think we can just forget about 'Slashy'."
- In the Official Fanfiction University of Redwall, one of the boys named his motorbike and was very unhappy when the vermin staff members stole and vandalised it. In the words of the heroine, "It takes a guy who's either very secure in his own masculinity or very bad at connecting brain to mouth to publicly admit he calls his motorbike 'Cynthia'."
- In Im A Marvel And Im ADC, Deadpool's guitar is called Lucille (a Shout Out to BB King). In its latest appearance, Rorschach shoots it.
Real Life
(Personal examples of naming things should be directed to troper tales.)
- One of the first Apple P Cs was called the 'Apple Lisa' presumably named after Steve's daughter 'Lisa Jobs'. The acronym 'Local Integrated Software Architecture' was invented after it had been named Lisa.
- The BM-13 Katyusha
fires a Macross Missile Massacre, and yet the name "Katyusha" is the Russian equivalent of "Katie"; later models were luckier and were named BM-21 Grad ("hail"), BM-27 Uragan ("hurricane") and BM-30 Smerch ("tornado").
- Richard Hammond of Top Gear was mocked by his co-hosts when he referred to the car he was driving as "Oliver." (Oliver wound up becoming Hammond's Companion Cube.)
- According to legend, Davy Crockett named his gun Betsy, which is most likely brought this trope to public consciousness, and thus makes it Older Than Radio.
- Most Norse warriors of the Viking era had a tendency to name their weapons, in imitation of their Migration Era ancestral heroes (and of course, their myths, or perhaps their myths imitated their history), making this Older Than Feudalism. Examples crop up by the hundreds in the sagas, which are all part real history, part heroic legendry (the proportion varies from pure history to mostly fiction). Just one confirmably historical example would be Grasida ("Greyside"), which began as a sword, was broken and then reforged into a spear that went on to serve Gisli, son of Sur, for the rest of his life.
- The tradition didn't die with the Vikings, either. Medieval romances, in an exaggaration of real life, were full of named swords like Roland's Durandal and its sisters, Joyeuse (belonging to Charlemagne) and Courtain (AKA Cortana, wielded by Ogier the Dane). In fact, it seems people have kept up the practice, quite unbroken, right up until modern times (see the bit about Marines naming their guns); for example, one source from the 18th Century features a sword named Skiver the Pullet...
- The "Big Bertha" howitzers used by Germany during World War One.
- The British muskets of the Revolutionary War were called Brown Bess, although Bess is a corruption of buss (gun) as in blunderbuss.
- Another variant: It's not uncommon for players of Collectible Card Games to name their decks, particularly if it is a particular archetype. On the other hand, oblique or nonsense names allow you to refer to something and not give away too much about it to opponents who haven't seen it play yet.
- Naming electronics, computers in particular, seems to be a general geek thing. Of course, most modern OSes specifically support computer naming for good networking/management purposes, but many geeks take it further by using a personal naming scheme that's standard across all their stuff.
- Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo had a pattern of naming the succession of servers for the webcomic after girls from Kanon, and his laptops after Haibane Renmei. This is taken to an extreme end in a few of the omake, depicting the comic server as a female persocom just sitting in the colocation center, who gets kidnapped.
- Jeff Darlington
provides a really good example.
- There's a 15th century cannon at Edinburgh Castle called Mons Meg. (Mons being where it was built, and Meg being short for Margaret.) The barrel is almost big enough to crawl into.
- Feudal Japan; The works of master swordsmiths were named for the smith, often with a name for the individual sword as well. The works of the legendary swordsmith Masamune include the Honjo Masamune, a symbol of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
- Warplanes were and are often painted with pet names and naked women, almost enough to cross into true Companion Cube territory. Although still somewhat prevalent, it began to die out during the Korean War when an Air Force general's wife became indignant.
- All incoming trainees are instructed to name all their weapons in the US Army's basic training. Although this may be meant to encourage total and generally unnecessarily complete knowledge of how these weapons work rather than because said knowledge exists to begin with.
- In NASCAR, race teams and drivers would give names to their multiple cars. Jeff Gordon, for example, gave his racecars names starting with the letter B, including Boomer, Backdraft, Boo, Beavis, and Butthead.
- "Figurative uses of animal names in Latin and their application to military devices; a study in semantics
". Yes, it's a work about pet (or mount) names Roman guys gave to things like heavy catapults. This trend even made it to English (ram).
- As a matter of fact, the word "gun" is derived from an Old Norse woman's name, "Gunhilda" (which ironically means "battle-maiden"). Most old cannons would be named after a woman, and Gunhilda was the most popular name at the time.
- When they were first issued their FAMAS rifles, French troops during the 70's and 80's nicknamed it "Le Clarion" which translates as 'the bugle', due to its odd shape.
- The M-79 grenade launcher was nicknamed by US troops the "Blooper gun" or just "blooper" due to the sound it made when fired.
- William Fredrick "Buffalo Bill" Cody named his favorite rifle "Lucrezia Borgia".
- David "Davy" Crockett is known to have used three different long-guns throughout his life. He named them all Betsy.
- Plus where do you think the M-388 Davy Crockett tactical nuclear recoilless rifle got it's name from?
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