Talk:Girls with guns

Kite and Mezzo Forte
For the animes, wouldn't kite (anime) and Mezzo Forte be important works to the girls with guns genre as well? - 69.244.100.206 (talk) 03:43, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Sure, then please add them. Chris (クリス • フィッチ) (talk) 03:52, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Charlie's Angels
For the television section, shouldn't the original TV version of Charlie's Angels be included? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.199.212.7 (talk) 11:12, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Needs to be reworked
Honestly, this is just a silly neologism. "Girls with guns" does not constitute a genre so much as a stock character, like the damsel in distress. I mean you really just can't have a genre where the only real criteria is that the protagonist has a gun and a vagina. --Remurmur (talk) 10:42, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Don't get out much, do you? A quick Google search yields 10 million hits. Anything constructive to say?--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 14:18, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Very few of those hits have anything to do with a genre. They're literally referring to females with firearms. Pburka (talk) 15:57, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Looking at a few of lists found through such a search and this page I think that the problem is a blurring of the of the lines between trope, genre (a collection of tropes), and fetish. Some of the movies that are referenced as "Girls with Guns" tales are set in pre-firearm time periods, and some have a protagonist armed with nothing but a yo-yo!.

The History section could be more concise, could give the origin of the term, not just examples of what would define the genre(s), and could use some organization by country. I seem to remember hearing the term in the eighties in reference to HK films and later in the nineties for anime. The HK movies were usually buddy movies with two or more female cops, equally good with a gun or with kung fu. The 60s to 80s films listed seem to be mostly Pinky violence, so I added a link to the Pink film page. A far as anime goes there was no genre per se that I can think of, just that some guys just liked stories whose main characters tended to blow things away that we call "girls with guns". These tales were usually sci-fi like "The Dirty Pair" or "Bubble Gum Crisis". If I can find references to back these statements up I will help edit the page, but some of the material is not easily available. — Preceding unsigned comment added by LindenWatterson (talk • contribs) 03:07, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Once again, TVTropers forget it's Wikipedia and not TV Tropes. Don't get me wrong, the content here is interesting, but the way it's written is far from Wikipedia style and much closer to TV Tropes. Personally, I really don't mind - but with all the deletionism zealots out there, unless you can rally up 50 people to counter-vote and veto the deletion, you're gonna get your article removed (without any warning) sooner or later. You've been warned. --88.177.158.231 (talk) 14:19, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Like others, my first thought was "Huh? Why is this on Wikipedia instead of TV Tropes?" I think there are three problems with the subject of the article:

First, while Genre can technically include anything we can describe, such as "films about blue-eyed girls who own Glock 19 pistols and have names beginning with 'E, most people are going to scoff at a silly, made-up-on-the-spot "genre", thinking of this more as a partial description of the subject matter rather than a "true 'genre. However, a quick Google search reveals that this is, in fact, a genre recognized by a lot of people, although most sources I'm finding explicitly call it a sub-genre and mention that it's not very mainstream.

Second, this "genre" seems far too generic to mean anything useful. The Nikita movie falls into the action, thriller, and spy genres, as well as being a French film. It can also fall into the film noir and drama genres. The more recent Nikita TV show additionally contains many elements of the detective fiction (as well as the super-genre of crime fiction) and romance genres. All of these are far more meaningful in describing the content than "some kind of action-ish movie in a modern-ish era where the lead character is female".

Third, the use of this genre to describe something seems somewhere between stupid and sexist. Take any of the Nikita variants, replace the main character with a man, and suddenly it will be described using nuanced genre descriptions, such as those I listed above. But with a female lead, it's reduced to 'Girls with Guns' or femme fatale and nothing else seems to matter. While Wikipedia isn't responsible for society's use of terminology, I can certainly see this article as seemingly endorsing this type of sexist nomenclature.

I don't know that any of these points are a valid reason to get rid of the page, but maybe it would help to address these issues. Where did the genre come from? Why would anyone care about this genre? Is this genre relevant or notable enough to be on Wikipedia?

On a separate note, but possibly helpful to making the article seem less TV Tropes and more Wikipedia, is that the only source I've found that really delves into the genre doesn't really agree with this article at all. This blog post suggests that the Girls with Guns genre is much more specific than suggested here. It says the genre is about Chinese movies "featuring international casts, exotic locations, lots of Uzis, a jackhammer pace, at least one fight on a construction site, some of the most synth-tastic scores of the Eighties, and many, many questionable hairstyles". It goes on to talk about how this genre doesn't just have female leads, but "the men’s roles were limited to treacherous pimps, lazy boyfriends, unsupportive husbands, or silky boy-toys, and the focus was on sisterhood served with a side of hot lead." Furthermore, "when they weren’t talking about sisterhood, Girls with Guns movies chronicled the war between the sexes. Women were passed over for promotion, not given serious cases, sold into prostitution, threatened with rape, obliged to go undercover as hookers, and called “bitch” with metronomic regularity." Finally, the blog post makes it clear that "as sleazy as they sound, Girls with Guns movies are never about sex.... Real Girls with Guns movies don’t have an ounce of prurient interest in them: the heroines are chaste, love scenes happen offscreen, romance consists of little more than flirtatious glances, and the heroines are usually bundled up in ankle-length skirts, high-waisted mom jeans, long jackets, and loose T-shirts."

With that definition of the genre, many of the examples used in the article disappear. Though honestly, anything that claims Yes, Madam and Alien: Isolation are in remotely the same genre seems pretty suspect. The only real similarity is they both feature a female protagonist and both protagonists pick up a gun at some point. You are encouraged to not bother with guns in AI, and can mostly complete the game without fighting at all. Guns certainly aren't the focus of the game. This definition also helps solidify the genre into something meaningful: it's a group of movies with similar themes created around the same time in the same part of the world. 199.127.114.114 (talk) 07:40, 23 December 2018 (UTC)


 * That's because as is often the case with wikipedia, someone has started an article on a specific subject (In this case the particular cycle of Hong Kong action movies in the late 80s) and a bunch of people unfamiliar with the topic have just seen the title and started stuffing in weakly related topics such as any video game with a female protagonist with a gun. In my opinion the video game section should be eliminated entirely.


 * It's a bit like having an article on Horror movies and them someone saying "well, the stuff in Schindler's List is pretty horrific, shouldn't that be in here?"


 * Maybe one of those disambiguation links would help, directing the "I just wanna add my favourite game/book/TV show to the list" types elsewhere.12:56, 21 March 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Verlaine76 (talk • contribs)

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Delete Mange/Anime and Video games section
The video game section is just another useless wikipedia list and not relevant to the topic of the 80s/90s Hong Kong cycle of films.

The Manga/Anime section is a disaster with links to totally unsuitable sources such as news groups, blogs and comment threads. In many cases it never discusses "girls with guns" as a genre, or in the context of any lineage with the films and genre mentioned in the lede, but just use "girls with guns" as a quick descriptor for the content, because the film feature a girl or girls who use guns.Verlaine76 (talk) 13:04, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Girls in action with and without guns
I'm not sure why "girls with guns" is specifically a thing especially in contexts such as that videos for ("Police Assassins" OR "yes madam") 1985 show the female protagonists similarly fighting without guns. "girls with guns" seems to me comparatively limited and I'm not convinced that it conveys an appropriate action film subgenre.

I googled action film sub genres and, even here, there's only limited reference to a percieved "grrrl power" subgenre from a less notable source. I'm not sure how much is made of the distinction between action movies with male or female protagonists and the extent to which this is used in classification and I suspect that editors may be pushing possibly good faith edits in a "girls with guns" direction.

The current content of subgenres at List of genres doesn't reflect the range of subgenres presented elsewhere and I think that this page should either be deleted or be either merged with Girl power or moved to something like Grrrl Power (subgenre). Alternatively the page could develop into a history of women with guns in the media. If the topic of girls with guns is wanted then that goes back at least to 1976 with TV's Charlie's Angels and to various blaxploitation movies stretching even further back in time.

Ripley, the strongest female character from films from 79, was, at one stage, girl with a flame thrower. Beatrice Kiddo was regularly girl with a katana. These are the giants of female action with both of whom weren't dependent on guns. GregKaye 09:22, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Image
In July 2022, a user who has now been blocked indefinitely from editing Wikipedia added a cosplay image of Lara Croft to the article, only giving the edit summary "+photo"; see here. I've recently removed this image on the grounds it's a cosplay image. It's not an actual image of a 'Girls with guns' film, which is the subject of this article. I therefore think it has extremely limited relevance. , an account which now has three edits, reverted this removal (and also confusingly deleted 7 of the articles 10 references at the same time without explanation). So I'm starting a discussion about this issue to see what experienced editors have to say on the matter. Damien Linnane (talk) 01:53, 14 July 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree. The Lara Croft cosplay image does not improve the page. Tomb Raider isn't discussed in this article, and I'm not even sure it's a good example of the genre (it's a video game film). Using cosplay photos might be a clever way to avoid copyright concerns, though. pburka (talk) 02:03, 14 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for you comment. Speaking of video-games, there's a consensus at WikiProject Video Games that cosplay images should only be used if the article itself talks about cosplay in relation to the subject. Cosplay images shouldn't be added in just because they exist, no matter how accurate the depiction of the original character is. See the archived discussion here. I think that's pretty sound advice which should apply to all articles. Damien Linnane (talk) 03:45, 14 July 2023 (UTC)