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Playing With / Small Girl, Big Gun

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Basic Trope: Cute girl with ridiculous firepower.

  • Straight: Linda is a smaller than average and good looking Friendly Sniper armed with a large rifle.
  • Exaggerated: Linda is a teenage girl who fights armed with a gun that's big and scary enough to make Arnie brown his trousers, and spits out massive amounts of bullets, lasers and/or missiles when the trigger is pulled.
  • Downplayed:
  • Justified:
    • Linda lives in a dangerous part of town, and feels safer if she's obviously armed.
    • Linda is a cyborg whose body has been engineered to handle the force of such hefty firepower.
    • Linda has Super-Strength because A Wizard Did It, Psychic Powers, or similar, and is an Action Girl, so using the heaviest weapon she could wield seemed a logical idea. And since the world she lives in has invented guns, using a BFG supposed to be vehicle mounted makes more sense than using a BFS
  • Inverted: Linda, a huge, tattooed butch biker, has a Little Useless Gun so tiny that it's barely visible past her huge hand.
  • Gender-Inverted: Alex, the scrawny boy, uses a big rifle that might compensate for something.
  • Subverted:
    • Linda admits to a friend that the gun's just for show, and she doesn't own any ammo.
    • Linda is a smaller than average girl who uses an Assault Rifle.
    • Lina wants to use a large gun, but given that the recoil will blow off her arms without her actually being able to hit anything, she's forced to use a more appropriate smaller gun.
  • Double Subverted:
    • Linda claims she has no ammo for the huge gun, but was lying to put her friend at ease.
    • Linda admits to a friend that the big gun's just for show... then pulls out a second piece and says that this one is not.
    • Linda ignores the orders of her superiors and uses a big gun anyway, consequences be damned or non existent.
    • Linda has been seen using a rocket launcher.
  • Parodied:
  • Zig-Zagged: ...But this makes it too heavy for her to lift it al all. So she mounts it on wheels and uses it as a cannon, but ends up being injured when she can't maneuverer with it fast enough.
  • Averted: Linda has a pistol.
  • Enforced: Guys think girls with guns are hot, so, how about we give 'em "bigger boomsticks"?
  • Lampshaded: "You might not want to take that thing with you on your date, Linda. Poor guy's probably nervous enough as it is."
  • Invoked: Tired of being written off as "the cute one", Linda deliberately buys a huge gun so she'll seem more dangerous.
  • Exploited: Her small frame but ability to use a large gun without any problems, even ones that beefy trained soldiers would encounter, get her conscripted into an elite military force to mow down swarms of enemies that have a hard time hitting said smaller frame.
  • Defied: "That one looks a little... cumbersome. Got anything smaller?"
  • Discussed: "It's only loaded with one round of ammo, since I end up on my butt after the first shot anyway."
  • Conversed: Linda sure likes boasting about her gun, and that she "Likes 'em big".
  • Deconstructed:
    • Because of the size disparity, Linda can hardly hold the gun properly, let alone fight the recoil, and thus she's horribly inaccurate, putting bystanders in danger.
    • Deconstructing the inversion, Linda gets mocked for having a wee gun as her main weapon, and it's also very tiny and finnicky to use.
  • Reconstructed:
    • ...So she gets a gun with a built-in bipod, further increasing its size.
    • Said wee gun is a derringer or a machine pistol of any kind, which is just as lethal with a nice bonus of being a Hidden Weapon that she can draw without anyone noticing and kill people by stealth.
  • Played for Laughs: Linda is armed all the time, even while waiting tables. This leads to some awkward situations. (On the other hand, people never, ever forget to tip her.) She also is able to shoot the gun accurately without the recoil ever being present.
  • Played for Drama: Something bad happened to Linda recently, and she's taken up arms to protect herself. She's also growing increasingly temperamental and distrusting. Her friends are all worried, but they're too scared of what might happen if they upset her to talk about it.

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