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Small Girl, Big Gun

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"Everybody says
Don't go messing with a girl with guns
They don't need you
They couldn't love you
They couldn't be any fun."
Tommy Shaw, "Girls With Guns"

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

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

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

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


Examples

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

    Comic Books 
  • Bazooka Jules: As part of her superpowers Jules can summon any weapon or gadget she wants. There doesn't seem to be a limit as some of the guns she summons are bigger and wider than she is. Thanks her enhanced strength, she can hold them with ease.
  • Body Bags: Panda Delgado. Mostly only in covers and pin-ups, in the actual book she usually has a Glock.
  • Some pre-launch publicity art for the ElfQuest series Jink showed the title character sporting a very big gun, combined with a male-on-female Leg Cling.
  • Gold Digger: Brianna Diggers might not be small, but she uses guns and Powered Armor that are far larger than her with ease and, later on, tends to power them with magic.
    • And may have a serious Elektra Complex. On a rescue mission, everyone just stares at the giant sniper rifle shaped like a penis. At first Brianna thinks that her gun represents her desire to be penetrated deep... until she realizes that SHE ATTACHED IT TO HER CROTCH ARMOR. Happy to see you indeed.
      Brianna: WHY DIDN'T I SEE THIS DURING THE DESIGNS?!
  • Justice Society of America: Stargirl and the Cosmic Rod, which is about a head taller than she is (since it was made for Jack Knight) and a very potent weapon and sky surfboard.
  • Little Victory: An early 'test' for Victory Girl was Boomstick. She might not be smaller than normal, and what she wields is not a traditional 'gun', but the huge symbiote cannon that is her right arm does seem to count.
  • Tank Girl: Tank Girl, in both comics and film, has a love affair with this trope. To emphasize the phallic, she's often shown standing waist up from the tank's hatch, with the barrel of her Big Gun aimed forth from where her pelvis would be.
  • Transmetropolitan: When a semi-paranoid Spider tells Channon and Yelena to get guns to defend themselves, streetwise Channon takes them to a gun dealer, and patiently explains to a somewhat condescending proprietor, in technical terms, exactly what is needed. Contrasted with her is the diminutive Yelena, who finds a bazooka-like gun and asks if she can have it. (The proprietor declines, and insists it's not because she's a girl, but because it was designed for people with two backup spines.)
  • X-Men: Sabretooth's partner Birdy.

    Fan Works 
  • In the Discworld fanfic of A.A. Pessimal, there is Rivka ben-Divorah (who on our world might get a job offer from Mossad) a girl barely five feet tall but who, a trained Assassin, is good with weaponry of all shapes and sizes. Quite often, the bigger and the more potent, the better. Among other things, in Gap Year Adventures, she shares half the credit for sinking a warship with what amounts to a makeshift torpedo.note 
  • Reisen in FREAKIN GENSOKYO, who carries a sniper rifle almost as big as she is.
  • The Gunslinger Hero: Flintlock:
    • Despite Sweet Business being moderately sized for someone taller, Pony being vertically challenged causes her to fall into this category.
  • Going Merry in This Bites! ends up making her signature weapon a gatling gun that's over twice her size while only being a small preteen girl.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Private Vasquez from Aliens, is played by a 5'3 actress and wields a 40-pound machine gun. "Let's rock!!"
  • Ma-Ma in Dredd mostly plays with blades, but when she uses a gun it's a really big one.
  • Phoebe Spengler with a Proton Pack in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Most of the bulk is in the backpack and it's roughly half the size of her.
  • In the movie Jackie Brown, the characters are seen watching a video of bikini-clad women firing off massive assault rifles. Such things actually exist.
  • Nikita carries a Desert Eagle. Lampshaded in radio adverts for the film, where Antoine de Caunes said, more or less, "If you like movies about pretty girls in teeny tiny dresses carrying big guns..."
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: Elizabeth Swann normally prefers swords, but dips into this trope as part of her new Action Girl status in the beginning of this movie. They make her take out all her weapons, including one large handgun. It's never made clear where she kept it. Or is it?
  • In Predators, one of the character is a Special Forces sniper played by Alice Braga. The actress went on the record as saying that she had to train a lot just to be able to carry the gun around.
  • Art3mis from Ready Player One wields the very same M41A pulse rifle as Private Vasquez mentioned above despite being a petite and not particularly tall girl. Justified though, given that Art3mis is an avatar in an enormous Virtual Reality game where fun-infringing stuff like weapon weight is a non-issue.
  • Smokin' Aces gave the smallest girl in the cast (Sharice Watters) the largest weapon, a Barrett M82A1 fifty caliber sniper rifle that shoots straight through walls.
  • While Morgenstern, from The Spirit film, looks like an ordinary rookie cop at first, later she pulls out a massive Hand Cannon of a gun.
    Commissioner Dolan: Is every goddamn woman in this goddamn hell hole out of her goddamn mind?
    Morgenstern: No, sir. We're just equipped.
  • Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys, played by 5'2" (1.57 m) tall Emilia Clarke, wields a lot of assault rifles, sniper rifles, pistols, shotguns, grenade launchers, etc....
  • Mattie in both True Grit adaptations. Unfortunately, she has trouble firing it due to her size and inexperience.
    Rooster Cogburn: Why, by God, girl, that's a Colt's Dragoon! You're no bigger than a corn nubbin, what're you doing with all this pistol?
    Mattie: It belonged to my father, he carried it bravely in the war, and I intend to kill Tom Chaney with it if the law fails to do so.
    Rooster: Well, this'll sure get the job done if you can find a fence post to rest it on while you take aim.
  • Little Rock, played by Abigail Breslin, from Zombieland can use a quite impressive arsenal for a 12-year-old.

    Literature 
  • Shiro Miaowara of The Adventures of Samurai Cat is male, but fits the trope otherwise; he's a tiny little boy, and packs ridiculously huge guns. At one point he totes around a giant vulcan Avenger cannon and says he's able to swing it about thanks to possessing the strength of madness.
  • Saya Sasamiya from The Asterisk War wields a variety of custom-made guns and cannons as her weapons. Some of them are noticeably larger/longer than her diminutive self.
  • In the Belisarius Series, Antonina's Hand Cannon is large enough in relation to her that every time she uses it, the recoil is described as spinning her around or knocking her on her ass.
  • Notably averted with Lt. Karrin Murphy of The Dresden Files. She's a 5-foot, petite, blond, where the shit did she pull a gun and a badge from looker cop. She carries appropriately fun-sized guns. Dresden ribs her for it repeatedly. One of her guns (a highly illegal P90) fits in a box of chocolates. That she got from Kincaid. To remember Hawaii. It should be noted that she's perfectly capable of, and certified to, handle much larger guns (and actually has used weapons like shotguns and assault rifles in-series). She simply tends to use the smaller ones because they're easier to hide on her person.
    • Played straight with every female White Court Vampire.
  • Zack of the Hells Bells series of Urban Fantasy novels is an example of Small Girl Big Staff, her channelling focus being an iron pole described as longer than she is tall, with which she wipes the floor with vampires, wizards and demons alike. As if that weren't enough, her normal firearm is a .455 Webley revolver, and in the climax of Dead Silver she ends up behind the barrel of a minigun.
  • Sandokan: Marianna is stated to be of very short stature, and in the Italian tv movies she has manned a CANNON.
  • Hope Adams from Women of the Otherworld has the superpower of sensing chaos, but no combat abilities. She's also quite petite. Since her chaos detector invariably draws her into danger, she makes a point of carrying at least one gun with her, and she regularly practices with it.

    Live Action TV 
  • Any number of police/thriller shows where a petite female character wearing body-hugging clothes suddenly pulls a full-frame service automatic from under her jacket. Caitlin Todd (Sasha Alexander) often did this in the first two seasons of NCIS, and Rita Lance (Mitzi Kapture) of Silk Stalkings did it in nearly every episode. Avoided in the serial-killer thriller Copycat where very petite Holly Hunter carries a compact SIG-Sauer 232 in a realistic manner.
  • Dr. Brennan of Bones carries what appears to be a stainless .45 revolver for a few episodes, prompting nervous commentary from Agent Booth. In a moment of unusual realism, it get subverted in a later episode: in the midst of a desperate firefight, Bones offers Booth her gun, admitting "mine is too big for me." It's a Smith & Wesson .500, the largest-caliber production handgun out there. It's used for metal silhouette target shooting, moose hunting, and shooting bad guys through heavy steel doors.
  • It's not her weapon of choice, but Buffy once takes out a particularly powerful demon with a rocket launcher almost half as big as her body.
  • Despite being a size 0, Fiona from Burn Notice always has a huge shotgun or assault rifle nearby.
  • Very tiny general Beckmann uses a rocket launcher in an episode of Chuck.
  • Doctor Who:
  • In an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, Chris has an Imagine Spot of his family manically holding weapons, with each descending family member getting a bigger weapon, leading up to Tanya holding a bazooka.
  • Sakura (BoukenPink) does this in one episode of GoGo Sentai Boukenger. When her male teammates get kidnapped, she draws on her Japanese Self-Defense Force experience instead of her Ranger powers, and rescues them by walking into plain sight of the army of Mooks and firing two machine guns nonstop. No explanation is given as to how her shoulders aren't instantly dislocated, but that was probably done on purpose.
  • Kamen Rider Den-O: Hana may be a young girl due to time travel weirdness, but her weapon of choice is a bazooka. No weapon is more fitting for a girl who can singlehandedly beat the tar out of a kaijin twice her size.
  • Kari Byron from Mythbusters once held the reins of a M-134 Minigun, for the "cutting a tree down with gunfire" myth. And it was awesome.
    • Happened again with the 'shooting around corners' myth, although it was more the device it was in that was huge than the gun itself. The gun itself is actually just a handgun.
      Kari: Mama like.
    • When testing if you could bullet-proof a vehicle with phone books, Kari got to play with a .50 cal sniper rifle, and succeeded in disabling the engine of the vehicle with it.
      Kari: Science gets more fun when I get a bigger gun.
    • Also in the James Bond Propane Tank myth, where the boys had a handgun and a small-caliber rifle, she brought in a shotgun!
    • In fact, just about any time all the members of the build team are shooting something, she's the one with the biggest gun. This probably isn't accidental.
    • In the "Scary-go-round" myth, Kari fires a .50 cal rifle, as well as poses with it.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Captain Janeway brandishes a large compression phaser rifle whenever it's time to get Sigourney Weaver on the Monster of the Week's butt. See "Macrocosm," "Dark Frontier," and many more.
  • Elsewhere in the Whoniverse, Gwen Cooper wields one magnificently in the first episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day.
  • Although not always small, and rarely qualifying as "girl", the few times the folks in True Blood wield guns they are hardly proportionate; somewhat justified in that the wielders are either superhuman (vampires, werewolves, etc.) or are FIGHTING the superhuman. Or both. Pam takes the cake when she tries (unsuccessfully) to take out the witches' protective shield-spell with a rocket launcher.
  • Judith Grimes from The Walking Dead is about 10 years old and she carries her father's 6" Colt Python after his disappearance.

    Music 
  • "Gunpowder & Lead" by Miranda Lambert – played literally. The song is about a tiny woman who suffers horrendous physical abuse by her much larger, stronger boyfriend. The boyfriend is sent to prison as a result and now has been released. The girl learns that he is out and is coming home ... but she plans to be waiting with a surprise of her own and to show her boyfriend (in a deadly way) "what little girls are made of."
    His fist is big, but my gun's bigger
    He'll find out when I pull the trigger...

    Tabletop Games 
  • The character of "Suzie Jones" in Vampire: The Masquerade. Embraced at the age of 16, Suzie was your archetypal gun-bunny munchkin Brujah. Used the Obfuscate discipline to wear all her firearms in plain sight, and just keep people from noticing. Highlights of her career involved firing an anti-tank missile launcher down a crowded tunnel (it was full of demons), using her fangs to literally hang off the shoulder of a much larger vampire elder in melee while using her sole functioning arm to stuff an unpinned white phosphorous grenade into the elder's back pocket, and going through an entire 500-round belt of minigun ammo while in a synagogue. (In her defense, she was aiming at a Setite Methuselah that had already flattened the rest of the party, and her only hope of survival was More Dakka.)
  • Warhammer 40,000: the Sisters of Battle is an army of normal women in "7-foot-tall-Space Marine"-grade power armor with a preference for "7-foot-tall-Space Marine" weapons. Particularly the ones that Melt and Burn things.
  • Small female figures wielding absurdly large weapons are disturbingly common in miniature gaming, especially from freelance ranges which are not officially attached to a ruleset. Often there is no thought given to holsters or extra ammo. One case in particular was Abuela Ortega from Malifaux, whose first edition appearance was of a little old lady with an immense shotgun or blunderbuss, which she just wouldn't swap for a more practical weapon. Its immense recoil was represented by having the miniature move backwards across the tabletop.

    Theatre 
  • Taz from Starship arguably has the biggest gun in the group despite being the shortest person in the cast.

    Video Games 
  • BlazBlue: Noel Vermillion uses a pair of Hand Cannons each the length of her arms. Her Distortion Drives summon even bigger guns for More Dakka.
  • Bookworm Momo carrying that big cannon around with her in Breath of Fire III. As is the draw of the series, she can use it for things outside of battle as well.
  • B. B. Hood from Darkstalkers, who carries machine guns, land mines, flame throwers, grenades, a rocket launcher and occasionally, a pair of heavily armed mercenaries under her red riding hood cloak.
  • Devil May Cry:
    • Lady hefts around the Kalina Ann, a full-fledged bayonet-equipped rocket launcher that happens to be larger than she is tall.
    • Before Lady's debut, the Devil May Cry 2 prequel novel featured a devil hunter named Beryl who used a gun resembling an anti-tank rifle. Between her choice of weapon, Badass Normal status, scars and origin story involving a father who abused demonic powers, she was pretty much a prototype of the above mentioned Lady.
  • Rozalin from Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories. While, technically speaking, she can be equipped with anything from a sword to a staff like anyone else, she unarguably is best with ballistics and her first special attack involves whipping a chaingun bigger than she is out of Hammerspace and riddling enemies with tons of bullets.
  • The Tinkerer class in Dragon Nest.
  • Sunny, support class from Evolve has an enormous gun as her primary weapon. As an extra touch, she wears an exo-suit with a mechanical arm attached to help support the gun's weight.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: Oerba Dia Vanille's Eidolon, Hecatoncheir, can transform into a walking war platform with really big guns.
    • Also, when she's first seen, she takes a gun from Snow to defend the group of Purgees with. Bonus points for childishly aiming it at Snow and saying "Bang! Bang!" in a six year old's voice.
      • There is also a cutscene in Chapter Nine where she steals a soldier's rifle and unleashes her fury on a Vespid Soldier in order to escape with Sazh.
    • During the first chapter, Snow recruits Hope's mother Nora to fight against the soldiers. She ends her brief appearance using a rocket launcher to take down an airship, citing "Moms are tough". What happens next though...
    • The first chapter also features Lebreau as a Guest-Star Party Member. While Gadot (another guest) carries a normal military rifle, hers is much larger.
  • Girls' Frontline has some instances where a petite Doll happens to be paired with a large gun, such as Desert Eagle, M200 or M99, who guns are as tall as they are for the latter two. On the bad guys size, Destroyer and Judge take the cake with both childish frames and dual waist-mounted grenade launchers the size of their torsos.
  • Any female character from the God Eater series fits this description, as the weapon they all wield, the God Arc, is several times their size by standard.
  • Try handing Miranda or one of the female Marines one of the bigger weapons in Halo. You'll suddenly realize that they were initially scaled for 7 foot cyborgs or 8 foot aliens.
  • A build possibility in Hellgate: London; a tiny markswoman can dual-wield massive gatling rocket-launchers.
  • Iji is more like "Big Girl, Bigger Gun": If you unlock the detailed enemy stats, you learn that she's 6'3" (taller than most men!), but the Nanogun she wields is designed for Tasen Elites who run an average of nine feet tall. She complains at the beginning that she can barely lift it, and the recoil from the MPFB Devastator (essentially a triple-nuclear-rocket launcher) knocks her off her feet if she hasn't maxed out her Strength stat.
  • In Intrusion 2, the boss Maku is an average size but very thin woman who wields a positively massive laser cannon.
  • Jak and Daxter: Tess designs BFGs for Jak that are at least as big as she is. And if she continues her gun-designing career after her transformation into an ottsel... The cutscene commentary in Jak 3 explains that, in one scene, they actually had to scale down one of Jak's guns just so that it wouldn't look ridiculous when she held it.
  • Pops up a few times in League of Legends.
    • Tristana of course. She carries around a rocket launcher taller than she is, and can even use it to Rocket Jump.
    • Jinx is is short and skinny as a rail, but still hauls around a sizable minigun and rocket launcher.
    • Prior to being imprisoned in Thresh's lantern, Senna used what is basically a magic handgun. After being released, she now wields a magical cannon from the Mist that is even bigger than she is.
  • Playing Rochelle and picking up an M60 in Left 4 Dead 2 could count as this, seeing as the M60 is almost at tall as she is.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has twelve year old Wrench Wench Tita Russel, who borrows an "archaic" gatling gun from her Gadgeteer Genius grandfather to use as her Limit Break. It sends her flying backwards when she fires it, and like her regular attacks, has an Area of Effect. This fits with Tita's stats making her a Glass Cannon.
  • Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen has the outfit War in Winter, whose jacket cut makes her look short while carrying an anti-materiel rifle as long as she is tall.
  • In Makai Kingdom, just about anyone can wield a minigun, bazooka, or giant arm cannon though only a few classes are proficient. With class changes, an Archer can use those just fine. Etna specializes in miniguns as a special character, while Castile can use bazookas.
  • Playing a female Shepard, who in canon is only 5'3" and possibly the tiniest combatant on the Normandy, in Mass Effect 2 and using the Cain probably counts. The weapon itself isn't THAT big, but it makes a ridiculously big explosion. Likewise, any combat-class FemShep who picks one of the advanced weapons. The Widow looks like a telegraph pole, and the Claymore and Revenant are just huge.
    • And Mass Effect 3 allows you to give Tali a Claymore.
    • As well as carry a Widow, Revenant, Claymore, Cain (in some missions), and pistol and submachine gun at the same time as female Shepard.
      • The "Reinstated" trailer for female Shepard shows her packing this combo sans the Claymore and submachine gun. Her "Take Earth Back" trailer also shows her wielding a Mattock, and a Widow can be seen on her back before the fighting starts.
    • Ashley Williams in Mass Effect 3, who can carry a Revenant light machine gun and a Widow sniper rifle at the same time. Or an N7 Typhoon machine gun, which is even bigger, heavier and more powerful than the Revenant.
  • Femme Fatale Mona Sax from the Max Payne games is rather slender and petite, yet her signature weapon is a Desert Eagle, the largest handgun available in the games. This is especially evident in her Mexican Standoffs against Max, who usually sticks to more modest but more efficient (dual) Berettas.
  • Meryl from Metal Gear Solid wields a Desert Eagle chambered in .50 Action Express — a gun that is well known for being impractically huge, no matter who carries it. And, in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, she gets a custom long barrel model alongside the standard-sized one (sometimes literally).
  • Fio is the smallest of the four main playable characters in the Metal Slug series, but not only is just as capable of rocking every uber-powered gun in the game as the other characters, but in later games becomes the heavy weapons specialist who starts every life with a Heavy Machine Gun.
  • In art for the Nazi Zombies level "Call of the Dead", Sarah Michelle Gellar rocks a minigun.
  • Speed Buster from No More Heroes used a 50-foot laser cannon as her weapon of choice.
  • Aya, the small-framed heroine of the Parasite Eve series gets her hands on some really big guns. In the first game she gets a rocket launcher that is as long as she is tall. The sequel ups the ante by allowing her to wield a giant portable railcannon that takes time to charge, and sends her back a few feet whenever she fires it.
  • Phantasy Star Online has the human and CAST female Ranger classes, RAmarl and RAcaseal respectively. Phantasy Star Universe also has a Ranger class and its offshoots that are open to females of any race. While not always being the case, they can be made as small as a young girl. And with the same customization systems, one could also make a Gender Flipped example of this trope. Same in Phantasy Star Zero - and the cannons of that game compensate for every penis on the server.
  • Saki Omokane from Quiz Nanairo Dreams.
  • Rebecca Chambers from Resident Evil 0 becomes this when equipped with a shotgun. It's not that the gun is big as much as she's really, really tiny, but the result is still pretty hilarious.
    • Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis isn't as tiny, but her bonus Rocket Launcher is only slightly smaller than her.
  • Carmelita Fox in Sly Cooper wields a shock pistol that kicks so hard she can hardly hold onto the thing when she fires it. The bolts of electricity it fires can destroy inanimate objects in one shot and kill even hulking flashlight guards in 2 shots.
  • TimeSplitters 2 lets you dual wield a fair number of weapons. Picking any of the smaller characters and using twin homing RPGs can lead to a few laughs in multiplayer. Unfortunately, the full potential is prevented by scaling.
  • Twisted Metal has this with vehicles instead of guns. In Black and the 2012 reboot, the big rig Darkside, one of the largest vehicles in the series and one whose special attack is a high-speed ram, is driven by Dollface, portrayed as a childlike young woman in Black and a psychopathic supermodel in the 2012 game. In the third game, the monster truck Hammerhead is also driven by an old lady named Granny Dread.
  • Any female Lancer from Valkyria Chronicles, whose weapons are longer than they are tall. Applies to Aisha as well, as she's only 12-years old and wields the Shocktroopers' standard assault rifle.
  • Carol from Wild ARMs 5. Teeny-tiny girl, huge honking rocket launcher.
    • Maya Schrodinger from Wild ARMs 3, not quite tiny but certainly petit, has a hidden minigun as part of her arsenal. Hidden...well...see for yourself. (Skip to 5:33)
  • Xenosaga has a couple. KOS-MOS isn't exactly small, but she dual-wields triple miniguns in a few attacks; Shion plays it straighter, with her arm-mounted MWS.

    Visual Novels 
  • Makina throughout the Grisaia Series, she learned to snipe from Yuuji, but thanks to her small physique, she is always dwarfed by the huge sniper rifles she uses.
  • Ciel from Tsukihime, a curry loving Meganekko by day and... this by night. Plus she's a bit of a nut. Though her "Seventh Holy Scripture" is not so much a gun as it is a pile-bunker with a unicorn's horn for anti-vampire purposes... but it's close enough. Normally, the magical weapon is a spear or sword, but she personally and specifically redesigned it to be an enormous jack-hammer. She's just that hardcore.

    Webcomics 
  • Homestuck: Jade Harley is an adorable thirteen-year-old Genki Girl... who happens to very adept at the use of hunting rifles as long as she is tall. When she gains access to Item Crafting, the guns get even bigger.
    • It must be noted that this is partially due to Rule of Perception, as "player characters" in Homestuck are usually represented by Palette Swapped sprites that look to be about two feet tall. When drawn in a more realistic style, Jade appears to be about the same size of her initial guns. Her Item Crafting-derived guns are still huge, though.
  • Joyce's Hammerspace BFG in It's Walky!. She has an unusual reason why she picked the gun.
    Joyce: Lots of room for stickers!
  • An unnamed girl from the Terrible Interviewees Montage at the start of Keychain of Creation has a very large Essence Cannon. The interviewers are less than impressed, especially when she drops it and it shoots one of the interviewees behind her.
  • Panda Xpress had its origins in a sketch of the (five year old) protagonist Dahlia with a machine gun. The gun was replaced with a cyborg panda before the launch of the series.

    Web Original 
  • Mae Winchester of YouTube channel C&Rsenal is not a large woman. In this video, she shoots a German anti tank rifle that is about as long as she is tall.
  • RWBY
    • Ruby is one of the smallest girls in the cast but carries one of the biggest weapons, a huge combination of a Sinister Scythe and a sniper rifle (She calls it "Crescent Rose" and it's her baby).It folds into a rectangle that's almost as wide as her back, which is where she carries it. When fully extended, it's one-and-a-half times longer than she is tall and fully customised. When she's not actively swinging it or using its Recoil Boost to augment her already insane Super-Speed, Ruby has to keep the blade anchored to the ground when firing.
    • Coco is a svelte fashionista who gets irritated when her favourite shopping locations get destroyed by monsters. She expresses her irritation at this by whipping out her extremely fashionable satchel, which unfolds into a huge mini-gun that's at least as large as she is. Her ammo is artfully woven into her clothing designs as fashion accessories that become extremely handy during a fight.
  • Bunker, of the Whateley Universe. Petite (mutant) girl, usually armed with bazookas, full-sized machines guns, you name it. She likes the big guns. Hive might qualify too, given that she wields a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle.

    Western Animation 

    Real Life 


Alternative Title(s): Huge Gun Tiny Girl

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