Basic Trope: Weapons fire things other than bullets.
- Straight: Bob's gun fires frying pans
- Exaggerated: Bob's gun fires just about anything, including pianos, trucks, and killer whales.
- Downplayed: Bob's gun shoots paper clips.
- Justified:
- Bob hates bullets and would prefer to use just about anything else.
- Alternatively, real bullets are not available, and Bob must make do with what he has.
- Bob is quirky or insane.
- Bob is trying to invoke Lethal Joke Item. Sure, no guard will take a man pointing a gun that looks like it was found in a box of cereal seriously, but when the gun shoots paperclips at supersonic speeds...
- Inverted: Bullets are used for anything but shooting.
- Subverted:
- Bob calls his weapon the "Squirrel Gun". It's just a handgun with a squirrel painted on the side.
- Bob's gun breaks or even explodes as a result of Abnormal Ammo
- Double Subverted:
- He's loaded it with peanuts
- The resulting explosion takes out the enemy.
- Parodied: Alice owns an ammo store that sells anything but bullets.
- Zig Zagged: Bob's gun is the above-mentioned "Squirrel Gun", but it fires peanuts. Yet those peanuts are actually disguised bullets. Only Alice replaced the disguised bullets with real peanuts. But it turns out that those are mystical peanuts that are as lethal as real bullets.
- Averted: Bob's gun fires bullets.
- Enforced: "This is a family film, so we can't have anybody getting shot. Let's replace the bullets with something ridiculous."
- Lampshaded: "I've got candles and I'm not afraid to use them."
- Invoked: Bob prefers non-lethal projectiles.
- Exploited: A burglar picks Bob's house because he knows that Bob doesn't use bullets.
- Defied: Bob brings plenty of bullets.
- Discussed: "Next time, stock up on real bullets."
- Conversed: "They really shouldn't be shooting bowling balls at each other."
- Deconstructed: There's a reason why most guns use standard sorts of ammunition. The abnormal ammo just doesn't get results and is a bitch to load and fire, as well as requiring a specialized and possibly unwieldy weapon. While Bob's trying to remove a mangled frying pan from his weirdly-shaped rifle after a misfire, someone puts a perfectly normal bullet in his head.
Back to
Abnormal Ammo
