Misused: BFG

So a long time back, BFG was restricted to oversized guns carried by humans by admin fiat. Since then, though, it's continued to be the subject of considerable misuse as a blanket term for any disproportionately large gun, whether it be a fixed emplacement, a tank cannon, or a weapon carried by a Humongous Mecha in the same way that a human might carry a 'proper' BFG.

To be honest, this seems like a glaring example of a missing supertrope. Comically oversized guns crop all over the place as expressions of power, and we're restricted to troping only a small segment of them. There's three tropes we have:

• BFG, for people carrying guns that are far too big for them.
• Wave-Motion Gun, for immensely oversized energy weapons with the power of a WMD. Can be any size, so long as they're disproportionately big for what they're mounted on, and/or are capable of sufficiently impressive destruction (so a merely large beam gun won't count, but a large beam gun used to wipe out armies, cities, or even entire planets will).
• Hand Cannon, for immensely oversized pistols. Like the Wave-Motion Gun, they just have to be big, not just too big for their human wielder.

There's a really obvious gap there. Comically oversized guns? Better be hand-carried, or we can't talk about them unless they're pistol-shaped. A planet-destroying railgun the size of a small country? Sorry, Wave-Motion Gun is for energy weapons only.

It would seem to me that it would make far more sense to make BFG our oversized gun supertrope, with tropes like Hand Cannon and Wave-Motion Gun dealing with specific, common varieties. We could maybe then add a few more tropes for particular kinds of big or ridiculously destructive guns - perhaps we could expand or make a supertrope for Punch-Packing Pistol so we've got somewhere to put tiny, unassuming guns with ludicrous destructive power like the Gravitational Beam Emitter in BLAME or the Noisy Cricket in Men In Black - but we'd have a nice, flexible parent for those weapons that don't quite fit into such categories, like a tank with a gun twice as big as its chassis, or a Humongous Mecha carrying around a naval cannon that dwarfs even it.

What do you folks think?

Opening

Honestly BFG probably should be a supertrope or index to all big ass guns tropes, from huge hand cannons and Rifles taller than they are◊ to planets and colonies turned into giant weapons [1] and so on. oh and this◊[2]

Also Disproportionately Big Hitter in general too like the noisy cricket and Nanoha's Starlight Breaker

edited 2nd Dec '16 7:26:09 PM by Memers

BFG could probably do with a clearer name if it's about more than just really big guns.

I think a trope / supertrope about Really Big Guns with that name is just fine actually.

What really got me thinking about this was the Gundam franchise, where the various eighteen-metre-tall Humongous Mecha are frequently equipped with weapons that are disproportionately huge even by their standards, but aren't destructive or energy-based enough to qualify for Wave-Motion Gun status. Examples include the GN-X's sniper-pattern beam rifle, the Gundam Barbatos's 300mm smoothbore cannon◊, and the Zeta Gundam's hyper beam launcher◊ (or even its regular beam rifle◊). They're very prominent, obvious parts of these war machines' appearances, so it seems weird not to be able to trope them.

I also wonder, on a related note, whether we want a subtrope for disproportionately large bazookas, RPGs, grenade launchers, and so on. Most of our 'big gun' tropes are implicitly for either conventional firearms or laser guns shaped like conventional firearms, which seems like it leaves another obvious absence.

I think the reason "BFG" is an acronym is because it stands for "Big Fuckin' Gun", but I've also seen it as "Big Freakin' Gun". The latter seems fine.

Disproportionately Large Guns? (That may cover very large cannons on vehicles too)

I think BFG should be made into a supertrope about disproportionately large guns.

Given the expansion of the acronym, BFG would indeed be logical supertrope for f-ing big guns in general.

Sound like we have a consensus for making this a supertrope?

I don't have anything against it, so... okay I guess?

Fair enough. What's the procedure now?

Usually you get to modify the description, and then clean up the misuses. But for the former I suggest you put the modified description into a sandbox page first.

Fair enough. Problem is, I've got a shedload of RL work at them moment. Anyone else feeling like lending a hand?

I could do it

Rough draft of the supertrope posted at Sandbox.BFG

I don't see much difference other than the sandbox being a shorter form of the actual trope page.

So you're saying the sandbox definition is restricted to oversized guns carried by humans?

edited 7th Apr '17 11:37:20 AM by crazysamaritan

Uh... the opening of BFG reads "A BFG is a piece of personal artillery used by an individual and chiefly defined by its, well, its incredible bigness."

It's the first time I've read the "personal artillery" part. When was that edited? I remember it was "A BFG is chiefly defined by, well, its incredible bigness." like in the sandbox.

Changing it to be proportional to the whatever would work, which would include mechs and such.

The important thing is the work itself needs to treat it as too large in some way, Bigger Is Better or too big to the point its cumbersome.

In May of 2013, Chaotic Brain changed the definition from starting with the sentence "A BFG is a piece of personal artillery used by an individual and chiefly defined by its, well, its incredible bigness. " to leading with a rambling paragraph about what else the acronym could stand for. Fast Eddie edited it shortly after to restore the original version.

So it's been defined as "personal artillery" a far back as the edit history goes. I have not checked the wayback machine for older versions yet.