Ask John: Who’s Got the Big Guns?

Question:
Are there any anime characters with ridiculously overlarge guns? There have been characters like Cloud, Gatts, and Sagara Sanosuke who wield swords that are bigger than they are, but I can’t think of a character who carries a gun that fires 90mm bullets. The closest I can think of is Merowlink from the Armor Hunter Merrowlink OVA series – he carries an anti-tank rifle, which is long but not ridiculously large. Do you know of any?

Answer:

I think it’s ironic that both anime fans and casual observers may instinctively associate anime characters with big guns, yet in actuality characters that regularly carry and use impossibly large firearms are quite infrequent. It’s a representation of the stylistic impact of anime – its tendency to encourage imagination – that makes observers unconsciously exaggerate and stereotype what they’ve seen. There are certainly countless anime characters that wield guns, including many that use large guns. But there aren’t actually an awful lot of characters associated with absurdly large artillery.

Because it’s an artistic drama, viewers may forget that “the boy” in the 1985 film Angel’s Egg carries a very large gun in the shape of a cross. Years later, Trigun’s Nicholas D. Wolfwood also appeared with a massive machine gun shaped like a crucifix. Gintama’s Sougo Okita is often seen with a bazooka. Fatman in the Spriggan motion picture employs a 250 pound M61 Vulcan machine gun – not realistically a personnel sized weapon. Sarukichi from the animated video game Dancing Blade carries a small cannon, but he may not count as Dancing Blade isn’t always recognized as a conventional anime. Kaneda in the Akira movie picks up a sizeable laser rifle. Eatman’s Bolt Crank occasionally reconstituted and used especially large guns, but he never routinely carried them around. Ghost in the Shell TV’s Ishikawa and Saito should be considered also, although they only use their large firearms briefly. Similarly, Gene Starwind employed a personal rocket launcher in Outlaw Star episode 15.

Girls shouldn’t be excluded. Diechi Nakajima of Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS carries and uses her “Enormous Cannon.” Milly Thompson’s “stun gun” in Trigun is unusually large. The “Black Rock Shooter” is rarely without her exceptionally large firearm. Urusei Yatsura’s Benten frequently appears with her bazooka. Hellsing’s Seras Victoria typically equips with the 30mm “Harkonnen Cannon,” upgrading to a pair of 72mm “Harkonnen Cannon II” guns in the sixth OVA. Xenosaga’s sexy robot girl KOSMOS briefly uses artillery sized gatling guns. Gurren Lagann’s sniper, Yoko, employs a rifle that taller than she is, but her gun may not conform to the requested requirements because it’s not especially bulky. Similarly, Suo Pavlichenko in Darker Than Black ~Ryusei no Gemini~ regularly uses a 14.5mm PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle that’s not especially bulky, but is particularly long. Kitsurubami in FLCL OVA 5 briefly wields a Barrett M82 .50 caliber sniper rifle.