Basic Trope: A badass little girl.
- Straight: Alice, a preteen girl, is an excellent fighter.
- Exaggerated: Alice, a pre-schooler, singlehanded defeats an army of Mooks.
- Downplayed: Alice, an early teenager, is good in a fight, but only compared to other girls her age. Next to Alicia, a full-grown badass, Alice is nothing special.
- Justified:
- Alice is actually a superpowered android/cyborg.
- Alice has been training since she could walk.
- Inverted:
- Alice is a grown woman who is a lackluster fighter in an occupation that expects her to be a skilled fighter.
- Never Mess with Granny
- Gender Inverted: Alex, a preteen boy, is an excellent fighter.
- Subverted:
- Alice walks into a room with a BFG. When she fires it, the recoil knocks it into her head and she starts crying.
- It is revealed that Alice is neither a child nor a teenager. She's actually a 28-year-old little person.
- Double Subverted: But that was just a ploy to get her enemies to let their guard down. She kills them all.
- Parodied: A team of trained soldiers raids a compound and run into a normal little girl. One of them cries "It's a little girl!" and they all run screaming.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is a little girl but looks like she can be a deadly combatant because she's holding a shotgun and being a little girl doesn't stop a shot gun from being deadly, BUT the shotgun is too heavy for her and she can't even fire it without being knocked over from the recoil, BUT Alice is using Obfuscating Stupidity to draw her enemies in and lower their guard for her "true" art of Twin Pistol Dancing, which she uses to decimate her enemies, BUT sooner or later she runs out of bullets and is once again, just a little girl, BUT Alice is always prepared and has knives, BUT she is a little girl and has serious reach issues, BUT she more than makes up for it in sheer aggression, after all, she is a badass, BUT...
- Averted:
- Alice's father tries to train her to be a LMB, but she just doesn't cut it.
- No preteen fighters exist in the setting.
- Enforced: An executive says, "Look at how popular Joss Whedon's shows are. We need a superpowered teenage girl, too!"
- Lampshaded:
- Alice joins a group of soldiers in a fight. One soldier says to another "If they let a little girl in here, you just know she can do something awesome."
- "Does her mother know she's playing with butterfly knives?"
- Invoked: Alice, a normal preteen girl, pretends to be a LMB to scare off enemies.
- Exploited: Alice hunts Pedos for the reward money to buy herself a Pony!
- Defied: "I will NOT turn my daughter into some kind of Super-Soldier!"
- Discussed: "Why does the super soldier program focus on little girls so much?" "Because the Applied Phlebotinum of the program is compatible to little girls only, newbie."
- Conversed: "Why do writers find super-powered little girls so appealing?" "Isn't that obvious? There is a certain market to appeal to."
- Implied: An assassin is seen entering a kids bedroom, the next scene he's seen being treated for paedophobia.
- Deconstructed:
- Like Real Life Child Soldiers, the LMB ends up being mentally ill.
- Depite her training, and no matter what her mindset, Alice is still physically a little girl, and as such is at a severe disadvantage in combat; most of her enemies are adults and thus inevitably bigger and stronger.
- In a universe where technology isn't advanced, where combatants use bows and swords to fight, Alice's small size means she has less attack range than others, which proves to be severely crippling.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice was trained to be a LMB because she lives in a Crapsack World where certain badass skills are necessary to survive.
- Alice is at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat, but size and strength aren't really much of an advantage in a gunfight, and Alice is a smaller target.
- Played For Laughs: The Brute attacks Alice, only to be put on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle. Alice is about a quarter of his size.
- Played For Drama:
- This type of violence is NOT something a child should be exposed to, let alone participating in. Deep-seated psychological problems ensue, with a side of behavioral issues.
- Played completely realistically, this is Troubling Unchildlike Behavior and serves to show how much of a Crapsack World the show's setting is.
Back to Little Miss Badass... And do NOT try to take away the teddy bear if you value your clavicle.
