Basic Trope: Big freaking guns, because Bigger Is Better.
- Straight: A gun proves to be ridiculously useful because it is big.
- Exaggerated:
- The gun that Sergeant Gunnery F. Young uses is meant to be vehicle mounted, or more specifically, a gun so large that the friggin' vehicle it's supposed to be mounted upon is an accessory: A handheld GAU-8 Avenger.
- Guns smaller than a shotgun don't exist. And they are all fired like pistols.
- A gun that is bigger than an entire continent.
- Downplayed: Handheld Miniguns are standard equipment for nameless Red Shirts. But, being red shirts, they are not very useful in actually accomplishing anything aside Bullet Hell, though they succeed in looking much cooler than most red shirts.
- Justified: The story features a foe that's impervious to anything short of More Dakka, necessitating the proliferation of ridiculously huge guns.
- Inverted:
- A small gun that is ridiculously powerful.note
- Commander Contrarian insists that his absurdly tiny pistol is just "compact" and can still work just fine. It does not.
- Subverted:
- The hero grabs a big gun to take on an army and gets killed since he can barely move while holding it.
- It looks like a gun, and its huge... but it's really some high tech science device.
- Double Subverted:
- A big gun, that is assumed to be useless, actually turns out to be ridiculously powerful.
- Until it has the function to be a gun.
- Parodied:
- Two characters pull out bigger and bigger guns on each other past the point of all meaning (ending with the two pointing ballistic missiles at each other).
- One of the characters wields a 100:1 scale pistol like an ordinary pistol.
- A literal example.note
- Zig Zagged: BFGs are brought into service but shortly thereafter decommissioned due to their impracticality. Then a foe shows up that can't be harmed by anything short of a BFG. Improvements in BFG technology result in smaller weapons that are just as effective. Those same improvements are then scaled up again...
- Averted: All characters use normal sized guns
- Enforced:
- For a video game with low resolution, the guns need to be big enough for the players to see.
- Rule of Cool
- Lampshaded: "We're going to need bigger guns."
- Invoked: A character decides to use a certain gun because it's so big.
- Exploited: A character deliberately uses the "BFG" because it'll give him the firepower he needs
- Defied: A character refuses to use any gun he can't reasonably hold in one hand.
- Discussed: "This gun is huge! What are you fighting, tanks?"
- Conversed: "Check it out what happens if you shoot the guards with the grenade launcher!"
- Deconstructed: A military organization seeks to improve its fighting ability by creating bigger guns. The guns turn out to be too heavy for their soldiers to carry, or aim effectively, so the project is mothballed.
- Reconstructed:
- A military organization seeks to improve its fighting ability by creating bigger guns. The guns turn out to be too heavy for their soldiers to carry, or aim effectively, so the project is mothballed. Then the weapons are brought back into service and improved when an enemy shows up that shrugs off everything else...
- Or, a military organization seeks to improve its fighting ability by creating bigger guns. The guns turn out to be too heavy for their soldiers to carry, so they build Mechs to carry them.
- A military organisation seeks to improve its fighting ability by creating bigger guns. The guns turn out to be too heavy for their soldiers to carry, or aim effectively. Cue the Super Soldiers.
- When the Kaiju come out of the woodwork and begin tearing the cities to shreds, the military decides that it does not matters how stupid it looks to field the guns, they are the only things that can hurt the beasts, so they will be fielded anyway.
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