Unusual Weapon Mounting

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
... not what most people mean by "Crotchrocket".

Might I sugest agin, a skul-gun for my head. Yesterday in Batery Park, some scum we all know pushes smack for NSF gets jumpy and draws. I take 2 .22's, 1 in flesh, 1 in augs, befor I can get out that dam asalt gun. If I could kil just by thought, it would be beter. Is it my job to be a human target-practis backstop?

—Gunther Hermann's spelling error filled email, Deus Ex

Sometimes simply holding a weapon just isn't cool enough. Some characters just have to have weapons in the most unexpected places, like on their shoulder, on their head, or even inside a limb. Maybe they just have so much dakka that they can't fit any more weapons in conventional places. Or maybe they're just weird.

Subtropes include the Arm Cannon, Leg Cannon, Shoulder Cannon, Weaponized Headgear and Chest Blaster. Compare Natural Weapons for when they're already part of the wielder.

Not to be confused with Headcanon.

Examples of Unusual Weapon Mounting include:

Anime and Manga

  • Hyakkimaru from Dororo has a cannon that fires upwards out of his lower leg
  • One cyborg in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex had a heavy machinegun in her elbow.
  • Nearly every given Gundam will have a small pair of vulcan cannons mounted in its head as a backup weapon. At least one from G Gundam (the Tequila/Spike Gundam) has about ten.
    • Gundam Heavyarms had Gatlings and missile launchers almost everywhere BUT the crotch.
    • The Freedom Gundam from Gundam Seed has two hip-mounted cannons, and two stored in its wings (the latter of which are sadly replaced by a Chest Blaster in its upgrade).
      • You forget that Strike Freedom's two wings turned into eight flying instruments of More Dakka; giving it two Beam rifles, two hip-mounted railguns, a chest cannon, and eight remote-controlled beam launchers. Oh yeah, don't forget the sowrds mounted on the hip-mounted railguns and the Vulcans in its head.
      • Also from Gundam Seed were the ever-popular Mouth Cannons, which spat freaking huge particle beams.
    • Look. Gundam and all its incarnations are basically just trying to one up each other and see who can get the most Dakka on their suits. You have Mecha with Vulcan's in their feet, Guns for fingers, or hidden in their palms, often times has some mounted on their wrists or forearm (Including swords/whips/etc), on the chest/collar/abdomen/hip/and yes...crotch. The back of the mech is literally the catch-all location to put any shiny gadget or huge gun you can think of, wings are especially popular. If that weren't enough, most mechs also carry some more guns/swords concealed inside the giant shield they're carrying (If the shield itself is not a weapon in its own right) or inside the mech itself! Added to that, sometimes they even carry Attack Drone(s)
    • There's also the chin/nose mounted machinegun of the Anf (literally, nose in Arabic) from Mobile Suit Gundam 00.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, minor character Paninya has a one-shot gun in one of her legs. The barrel comes out of her kneecap.
  • Astro Boy has machine guns in his butt. That's not just a crass joke tacked onto the 2009 CGI movie; it dates back to the original manga.
  • Albert Heinrich, a.k.a. Cyborg 004 from Cyborg 009. Amongst the many weapons hidden in his body are missiles he can launch from his knees.
  • Stroheim from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has a machine gun in his stomach.
  • Ray from Gun X Sword has a gun in the heel of his boot. However, he doesn't try to shoot people with it; he fires it by stomping into the ground, which summons his mecha Volcain.
  • Boomers in Bubblegum Crisis usually have a powerful laser lens assembly in their mouths. Many also have Chest Blasters, and at least one model of Superboomer had laser lenses pretty much all over its body.
  • Tanaka-san from Mahou Sensei Negima has a clothes-destroying laser in his mouth. But he's a robot (T-ANK-Alpha3, "Tanaka-san").
  • Full Metal Panic!'s third season opener had the bad guys using Arm Slaves whose standard-issue automatic rifle is supplemented by a crotch chaingun turret...
  • The crotch gun appears in Super Dimension Fortress Macross: for some unexplained reason, the titular ship fires a spaceship-sized one in the battle against Bodolza.
  • The Hannibal military labors from Patlabor have a 20mm rotary crotch cannon as their main armament.

Comic Books

Fan Works

Film

  • Austin Powers is the orignating example for Machine Gun Jumblies.
  • One character in From Dusk till Dawn has a gun mounted on his... belt.
    • Those kinds of things actually exist. One was made for a Nazi officer's uniform. It was a small caliber affair with only two barrels, one shot each.
    • Here it is, came in .22 or .32 and held four rounds.
    • The crotch gun also showed up in Desperado, though it didn't get used.
  • Planet Terror, one of the two movies making up Grindhouse, has Cherry Darling replacing her right leg with an M-16 assault rifle after it gets eaten by a zombie. She later replaces that with a minigun.
  • Leonard in Leonard Part 6 has underarm rockets. These are not the most ridiculous of his weapons.

Literature

  • The Diamond Age has skull guns. Guess where they're fired from.
  • In Sergey Lukyanenko's Stars Are Cold Toys duology, the rat-like Alari have short and weak front appendages. As such, they go into battle with back-mounted guns. Then again, their role in the Conclave is that of space fighters, not ground combatants.
  • The Cobra warriors in Timothy Zahn's Cobra novels are armed with antipersonnel lasers in their little fingers (which double as arcthrowers and are eventually upgraded to also function as a stun weapon) and also have an anti-armour laser in their leg. It fires through the heel. They have to go through a fair amount of special training to use it effectively.

Live-Action TV

Tabletop Games

  • The Humongous Mecha of the BattleTech universe commonly mount missile launchers and other weapons on their shoulders. Head-mounted guns are rare, due to the majority of head space being taken up by the cockpit.
    • The Mackie, the very first Battlemech, has a cannon on its crotch
    • The Atlas has an Autocanon/20 mounted on the hip, and a 6 shot short range missile launcher mounted on the leg.
  • In Warhammer 40,000 shoulder-mounted and forearm-mounted weapons are occasionally seen. Commissar Yarrick has a laser weapon in his bionic eye.
    • Let's not forget the Titans, bipedal war machines standing between 30 and several hundred feet tall, which tend to put weapons everywhere they can fit. The Ork version, Gargants, do that too, and also put weapons where they don't fit, like on top of OTHER weapons.
    • Eldar Striking Scorions have "mandiblasters" on the sides of their helmets.
    • Tau Broadside Battlesuits, which can fire either their arm-mounted missile pods or their shoulder-mounted railguns... Or vice-versa on the mounting, if you get creative with a hobby knife.
  • Munchkin has in one expansion the Shooty Hat, which is a hat with a miniature cannon on it.
  • Shadowrun has cyberhands or cyberarms that contain guns of different sorts. The game also featured cyberguns that can be mounted in the mouth or the eye. Though not strictly a weapon in and of itself, a targeting laser could also be mounted in the eye. There were also cybernetic weapon and equipment mounts that could be attached to your shoulder or back. Monofiliment whip users sometimes stored the weapon in their cyberarm and used the last joint on their artificial finger as the tip weight, not unlike Johnny Mnemonic
    • Cyberpunk 2020 had the same gear / addons.
  • From the Girl Genius spin-off card game, General Cannonhat and his Amazing Cannon Hat, complete with Cool but Inefficient earplugs.

Toys

  • Machine Robo: Mugen-Bine. It's a continuation of the line known in the US as Go-Bots, except now, instead of transforming, the toys separate into their composite pieces—animal parts, drills, gun turrets, jet wings—to be combined as desired. It can get pretty ridiculous...

Video Games

  • No More Heroes' Destroyman has a crotch-mounted laser, earpiece lasers, and of course, "machine gun jumblies"
  • Near the end of the third Disgaea Mao threatens to convert Sapphire to fire missiles out of her boobs.
  • Bayonetta has guns in her stiletto heels, and she can mount other weapons there as well.
  • Mechwarrior 2 allowed you to customize and choose where to locate the weapons and equipment for your mech. Although the arms and left/right torso had the most space for this, nothing stopped you from putting guns on your mech's legs, head, or center torso. More canonically, many mechs have shoulder mounts or other unusual configurations.
    • Putting guns in the legs was actually recommended, on the grounds of them being more armored and less likely to draw fire from the AI.
  • Gunther Hermann of Deus Ex wants a "skul-gun".
  • The Huckebein family of mecha in Super Robot Wars, being Gundam Expies, also have the same head guns.
  • CannonCrotch. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • One type of enemy in God Hand is a Fat Bastard with a cannon on his back who has to prone to fire it.
  • Redneck Rampage had weapon you could pick up from alien strippers. Both a physical weapon, with the machine guns from the 'nipples', and a psychological weapon, a skinny male redneck wearing a purple chrome bra...

Web Comics

  • Schlock Mercenary shows various helmet-, shoulder- and gauntlet- mounted weapons on heavier types of Power Armor. Kevyn in modified "runt supersoldier" form thanks to sentient nanobot swarm had a handgun implanted in between the lobes of his brain, wired to his brain for sight and controls.

Western Animation

  • In the Transformers franchise, pretty much every single plausible (and a few impractical) location on a Transformer's body has contained a weapon.
  • Also, Megas XLR has tons of guns everywhere, so there should be at least few in unusual locations.
  • The Scotsman in Samurai Jack has one leg replaced by a machine gun. He's pretty nifty with it and never loses his balance when shooting.
  • As was stated in the theme song, Secret Squirrel had a cannon built into his hat.
  • Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot: Big guy has arms that swing up and reveal a large number of weapons that stick out of his elbows/armpits.


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