A pocketful of saudade.
Support. Not sure about the proposed name, though.
The words above are to be read as if they are narrated by Morgan Freeman.
I see the Awesomeness.
AXTE INCAL AXTUCE MUN
To me, Ballistic Guns sounds like a firearm version of No "Arc" in "Archery" (which is, purely incidentally, one of my favourite trope titles ever).
Hi
I kinda like Throwing Your Guns Never Works, too.
I don't think they're necessarily distinct enough to a hard split. There's a huge amount of overlap. The point of the trope is that once a gun runs out of ammo, it's expended its usefulness and is now just a useless piece of metal. Both variations seem like they're the same in that respect, and it seems like that's the core part of the definition.
Rhymes with "Protracted."
Teutonic Tomboy T-Girl
Isn't "throwaway gun" also sometimes used as a name for a gun that a Dirty Cop would carry around for the sole purpose of planting on a suspect (e.g., after shooting him) to retroactively make him "armed"?
Jet-a-Reeno!
Zzzzzzzzzz
I don't know about that, but it was a term that saw a lot of use in the seventies for the Saturday Night Special — a small, cheap handgun that a criminal would use for committing a crime, then get rid of.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Teutonic Tomboy T-Girl
I very well could be wrong - might be confusing this with some other term for the "planted" gun.
Jet-a-Reeno!
Role Model
Just because there's this thread, didn't we have a different image for this? A guy with a couple dozen guns in his coat? That seemed better than this.
The sad, REAL American dichotomy
New member. Joined specifically to comment on this page.
I do think there should be a "Throwing The Useless Weapon" trope. This doesn't just apply to guns. Sword break? Throw the hilt. Out of arrows? Throw the bow. Taser run out of juice? Throw the sucker.
I'm also surprised that no one has mentioned the episode of Aeon Flux where throwing a gun actually kills someone.
I see the Awesomeness.
Good idea. You should probably YKTTW it.
Fight smart, not fair.
Has anyone taken up ^this suggestion? If so, we could just move/copy the relevant examples to that trope.
Throw-Away Guns describes two things - people throwing their guns away when they're out of ammo, and people throwing their empty guns at the enemy out of desperation.
I'd suggest making the latter a subtrope, possibly called Throwing Your Gun Never Works (a play on Throwing Your Sword Always Works). It's a lot rarer, and reflects a very different behaviour to Throw-Away Guns. That trope is "meh, I have other guns" or "I'm too badass to waste time reloading", while TYGNW is "oh shit, I'm out of options, what can I possibly do to hurt this guy" and is often Played for Laughs.
edited 30th May '11 7:07:42 AM by johnnye