Girls with Guns



""There is just something sexy about a woman with a blaster, too bad my wife doesn't agree to that.""

- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Action Girl meets The Gunslinger.

Girls with Guns describes a sub-genre of action media that focuses on strong female leads being awesome with firearms. May or may not involve Heroic Bloodshed. It was developed somewhere in the Hong Kong film industry and has since made itself a genre that is often used in anime. Usually involves gun fights, stunts and martial arts.

Small Girl, Big Gun is a subtrope--Girls with Guns aren't necessarily small, and their guns aren't necessarily big. Yeah-heh.

Compare Superhero Packing Heat. See also The Other Wiki's page on the subject.

Note that this page describes a genre, not a character trope. Individual examples of Girls with Guns go on The Gunslinger.

Anime & Manga

 * Bee Train and Koichi Mashimo in particular deserve a special recognition for popularizing the genre with their trilogy:
 * Noir
 * Madlax
 * El Cazador de la Bruja
 * Gunslinger Girl (though you should have known that from the title)
 * The title of the intro theme to the image album is "Ragazza Col Fucile". the trope name (singular), in Italian
 * More precisely, "girl with a rifle".
 * Dirty Pair (probably kicked off the genre, at least within anime)
 * Gunsmith Cats
 * A Kite (and Kite Liberator, too)
 * Najica Blitz Tactics
 * Burst Angel
 * Grenadier
 * Shirow Masamune obviously has a fetish for Girls with Guns: though the boys get to play as well, the main characters in his books are usually female, and spend much of their time toting, and being awesome with, guns. (Or in one case, tanks). Some of his works:
 * Ghost in the Shell
 * Appleseed
 * Dominion Tank Police
 * Canaan
 * Mezzo Forte and Mezzo DSA
 * Early Reins: Die Hard on a train, in The Wild West, with six girls with guns as the heroes.
 * Black Lagoon has Revy (trope picture), Roberta, Balalaika, and the entire church of violence. Practically every fighter that survives for more than a episode is a woman. Fetish, anyone?
 * Upotte!! is about girls who ARE guns.

Film

 * Hong Kong action cinema has many examples of the genre in question.
 * So Close
 * Andy Sedaris films are known for girls with big guns and other big things.
 * D.E.B.S.
 * Gun Crazy
 * Sucker Punch (among being many other things)
 * Assault Girls
 * Angels Revenge
 * The Quick and the Dead has the Lady, who is commonly remarked upon as she's the only woman in the gunfighting tournament.
 * Colombiana

Literature

 * The short story anthology A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters (also features monsters)

Live Action TV

 * Sons of Guns: Steph as well as the customers for her 'white gun' line.
 * American Guns: The pink M1911 for a customer, all the women in the class in the episode. Renee and Paige.
 * The title character of The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a girl who's harder than nuclear nails. A female cyborg often acts as her partner.

Music

 * The likely Trope Namer can be found in Tommy Shaw's 1984 song "Girls with Guns", which is about Exactly What It Says on the Tin and why you shouldn't get involved with one.

Tabletop Games

 * Macho Women with Guns
 * Warhammer 40,000 has got an entire army of them, in the form of the Adeptas Sororitas. Fans occasionally refer to them as "Nuns with Guns".

Web Original

 * In the Whateley Universe, Hive, aka Whateley Academy Security officer Samantha Everheart, who is capable of wielding anything including her own Barrett .50 caliber. Also, devisers Flashbang and Tinkertrain, whose new inventions tend not to be all that safe.
 * One of Cracked.com's 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "every sexy girl is a ruthless killer."

Western Animation

 * Aeon Flux