When someone's weapon is either made useless literally, or in comparison to the superior firepower from the adversaries, this trope makes your blade, firearm, or other weapon in hand go unusually limp like a fish held out of water, signifying that your weapon isn't much better than wielding an actual fish in the dilemma the wielder is in.
It's one thing to try and point your gun at the living One-Man Army your superiors have sent you to kill, only for them to respond by pulling out their BFG. It only gets worse when your gun itself goes limp from sheer terror, being unable to function properly so you couldn't even shoot first if you wanted to. It looks like your firearm knows that it's just as screwed as you are.
A blatant example of Artistic License (especially Guns Do Not Work That Way for guns going limp) that is mainly Played for Laughs due to the hilarity of such weaponry defying usual physics to "express" how inept it is.
Compare to Empathic Weapon, where even "non-empathic" weapons in unpleasant situations like these act like they can feel terrified or inadequate. Compare Flexing Those Non-Biceps, when the limping subject is body parts instead of held weapons. Not to be confused with Phallic Weapon, which covers a similar concept where the weapon going limp is tied to a certain "emotional state" of the wielder, which makes this trope contrast with Something Else Also Rises by comparison. But they can overlap to show both literal and figurative "impotency" for weapons, especially when the weapon wielder on the receiving end of this trope feels outclassed by his enemy's "Schwartz".
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Panty has the superpower to transform underwear into guns. In "High School Nudical", her panties get stolen by the Monster of the Week during the Lingerie Run, so she steals the underwear of all the teenage boys. Nearly all of them turn into tiny guns, except Brief's, which turns into a massive pump-action shotgun. It is strong enough to defeat the Ghost but goes limp and floppy after a single shot.
Panty: Man, turns soft and useless so quick, just like its owner!
Comic Books
- Happened with one-shot Doom Patrol villain The Codpiece. Codpiece took Compensating for Something to a laughable degree with groin-based weaponry he used to commit robberies and general mayhem. Coagula faced him down and touched his groin gun, engaging her melting powers. This (and a humiliated wannabe supervillain) ensued.
Film — Animation
- An American Tail: Fievel Goes West: When Tiger, Wylie Burp, and Fievel return to Green River to rescue the mice population from being killed on a disguised mousetrap, they, of course, encounter resistance. After Tiger proves his prowess with a slingshot, he faces off with one of Cat R. Waul's Cactus Cat gang members, who produces a slingshot with six elastic bands. Somehow, Tiger's slingshot turns cartoonishly rubber and goes limp at the very sight of it, with Tiger himself giving a scared-out-of-his-wits sheepish grin.
Film — Live-Action
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action: "Secretly evil" Elmer Fudd pursues Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck through a series of paintings in the Louvre. The chase begins in Georges Seurat's A Sunday on la Grande Jatte, moves to Edvard Munch's The Scream, and continues to Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory. There, the characters find themselves seeming to melt as they run. Elmer levels his shotgun at the fleeing duo and warns "Stop or I'll fire!" accompanied by rebus illustrations. Elmer's gun also begins to sag in keeping with the medium, so he props up the barrels with a crutch from The Burning Giraffe. Pulling the trigger, Elmer discharges two bullets that vomit from the muzzle, then fall to the ground after a foot of travel.
- The Raven (1963): Dr. Bedlo (Peter Lorre), a rather mediocre wizard, attempts to attack the villainous Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), using a wand along with his incantations (considered inferior to the gesture magic that Scarabus and Dr. Craven (Vincent Price) have mastered). Scarabus smugly blows on the wand, which goes completely limp.
Dr. Bedlo: (reproachfully) Oh, you dirty old man!
- Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, a Star Wars parody, has the Darth Vader expy's Laser Sword (one ironically coloured blue) drooping after his weapon ran out of battery in the climax. Cue the Vader expy checking his weapon's battery compartment.
"What the hell? I thought these are long-lasting batteries!"
Music
- David Guetta: The music video of Lovers On The Sun is a homage to The Western, and when it comes to the climactic gunfight, the bad guys' weapons all melt away simultaneously when their opponent pulls out a miniature sun.
Video Games
- Cursed Halo: One of the many cursed weapons featured in this Game Mod of Halo: Combat Evolved is the Flaccid Sniper Rifle, with a drooping barrel and "impotent" x1 magnification scope. In-game, it has a massive reticle and is so inaccurate that it's practically a miracle if you hit anything with it. Apparently this happens to one in every four snipers.
- Enter the Gungeon: The JK-47 gun's barrel droops loosely when you first pick it up and every time you re-equip it. This is to signify that it's an objectively worse knockoff of the much stronger AK-47.
- Subverted by the Neopets item Sword Of Lameness
. While its design with the blade drooping over looks pathetic, it's actually a very expensive Infinity +1 Sword and one of the only weapons that can heal you or freeze your opponent multiple times. The implication is that its name refers to it striking your opponents lame, not the quality of the sword itself.
- In The Saboteur, the target of one mission given by Dr. Kwong is a massive cannon Those Wacky Nazis installed in the dome of the Panthéon, supposedly as a phallic symbol of their dominance. When sabotaged, this cannon is left hanging in a suggestive manner.
- Worms:
- In the first game, one of the intro cutscenes features a worm attempting to sneak up on the enemy worm with gun in hand, only to blow his cover, causing his gun to do this, before the enemy worm melts him with a flamethrower.
- In a Worms 2 cutscene, the cutscene includes a Worm pointing a gun at an enemy Worm wielding a sword, only for the latter to pull out a shotgun that leads to the former Worm's gun to droop in response.
Web Animation
- Heavy Weapons, a short Team Fortress 2 animation by Eltorro64Rus, features two deformed Heavies revving their miniguns at each other. A third Heavy appears to rev his own Tomislav minigun, though it doesn't make any notable revving sound, so the other Heavies do not appear to be impressed. To match the newfound embarrassment the third Heavy feels, his minigun's barrel droops in shame with him.
- One of Karma Charger's joke weapon demonstration videos for Team Fortress 2 shows off the Flopassador, a custom weapon that's just an Ambassador with the front barrel flopped down, rendering it unable to fire. It's a useless weapon, but the background music that normally plays for when absurdly powerful weapons are shown off plays.
- Karma did this a couple of times. He later showed similarly droopy minigun, done in protest of Valve's failure to release a new update.
Web Comics
- Nerd & Jock: In Episode 205, Jock is prepared to surprise his friend Nerd in a water gun battle with a water minigun, but then Nerd shows up in a giant water gun mecha, causing both him and his gun to do an Eye Pop, followed by the minigun barrels going limp.
Western Animation
- Blitz Wolf: In this Tex Avery cartoon, anti-aircraft gun of pigs deflated after use and raise up after pig gave it B1 vitamins.
- Bonkers: At one point, Bonkers and a gangster end up in an Escalating Punchline contest of who outguns who, and Bonkers' missile battery ends up doing this in response to the gangster's battleship.
- Darkwing Duck: In one episode, Darkwing fights An Ice Person named Isis "Icy" Vanderchill, who hates the cold. When she coats St. Canard in gold to heat things up, leading to Darkwing's gas gun drooping from the sheer heat.
- The Fairly Oddparents: Tends to happen Once per Episode (at least) when Timmy asks Cosmo and Wanda to poof away the latest problem and some obscure loophole in Da Rules forbids it, leaving their wands limp. Complete with pbbt noise.
"Oh great, the wand-not-working pbbbt noise!"
- Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: In "Blue Harvest", Obi-Wan is played by Herbert the old pedophile. His light saber droops when he activates it. And it straightens out when he sees Luke Skywalker (played by Chris).
- In the Mickey Mouse cartoon "Shanghaied", Mickey fights Peg Leg Pete with a mounted swordfish. After successfully wielding it for a few moments, the fish goes limp and useless.
- Noveltoons: A non-weapon example with a similar execution, a Tommy Tortoise and Moe Hare short, Sleuth But Sure, has a prison alarm droop after the prisoner it was signalling about managed to get away.
- Justified in the Private Snafu short, "Fighting Tools", that details the importance of weapon maintenance. Snafu is shown employing a Vicker's Machine Gun against a German soldier, but since Snafu didn't hook up the cooling jacket's water supply, the barrel goes floppy as the weapon liquifies into a puddle, not unlike melting ice cream.
- Looney Tunes:
- "The Timid Toreador":, Porky Pig finds himself being chased by a bull, and tries to fend off the bovine with a bullfighter's sword. Faced with the bull, the blade immediately goes limp.
- The Stupor Salesman: In this short, the crook Slug McSlug points his gun at the stomach of Daffy Duck due to the latter being an annoying salesman to him, but Daffy takes out shoe shiner polish to apply it to the gun, causing the gun go limp like a shoe in response.
- Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: In Lucky Ducky, the hunter Junior attempts to shoot at a duck inside a log, but then the duck pulls out a scary mask that frightens the gun, causing it to shrink, go limp, and waste its shot on the ground.
- Tom and Jerry: In "Jerry and Jumbo", Tom chase Jerry and Jumbo, a baby elephant disguised as a big mouse, with a shotgun. After the baby's mother decided to help disguised as a mouse too, Tom's shotgun wilts before Tom runs away Laughing Mad.
- Xiaolin Showdown: In the Cowboy Episode "Treasure of the Blind Swordsman", Omi is disappointed to find his Wudai Weapon has the appearance of a tiny stick, causing it to drop in shame after being insulted.
