Guns Are Worthless/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Guns aren't much good in this work.

  • Straight: The monster shrugs off handguns and rifles but dies when a mage fireballs it.
  • Exaggerated: The monster shrugs off tank rounds and anti-tank missiles but can be clobbered to death by maces.
  • Justified:
    • The monster is Immune to Bullets.
    • The monster has some defence against mundane weapons and explicitly can only be defeated by magic.
    • The work is set in early/pre-Renaissance period where guns really aren't much good.
  • Inverted: Monster with ridiculously strong Anti-Magic that also resists any number of melee weapons gets gunned down by a squad of riflemen without much fuss.
  • Subverted: A few shots with a standard gun don't do the trick... but More Dakka and/or BFGs do.
  • Double Subverted: The monster regenerates afterwards.
  • Parodied: The monster laughs off a nuke but crumbles into dust when it gets pummeled by twigs and pebbles.
  • Deconstructed: ???
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: The monster dies to guns as easily as to melee or magic.
  • Enforced: Muggles Do It Better is a Pet Peeve Trope for the author, but he doesn't want to hand an Idiot Ball to the conventional military either. Therefore, he has to come up with reasons why they can't just gun the monsters down.
  • Lampshaded: "Our guns aren't doing anything! Where's the damn mage?!"
  • Invoked: ???
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: "Why do guns never work against monsters in these films?"
  • Played For Laughs: ???
  • Played For Drama: The appearance of monsters that shrug off guns sends the conventional military into chaos and the story explores how the world reacts to the emergence of both them and those who can successfully fight the monsters.

Back to Guns Are Worthless, and don't worry about getting shot!

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