Upotte!!

Quite interesting title layout.

A Slice of Life show following the lives of Funco and her friends Eru, Ichiroku, and Shigu. At Seishou Academy, the four girls aim to do their best and shoot for their goals. Literally. With live ammo.

...Yeah. The students at Seishou Academy are all Anthropomorphic Personifications of various military firearms, and the show features Slice of Life antics alongside information about the weapons depicted.

The franchise consist of the manga (Regular and the Nano spin-off) with the ONA (Original Net Adaptation) so far. Is being simulcast on Crunchyroll. The animated series is licensed in North America by Sentai Filmworks.

This series has these tropes in bullet point:

• Adaptation Distillation: The anime has scenes from the mangas Upotte!! and Upotte!! Nano.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The anime shows a battle between Ichiroku against Aug and T91 during the jungle wargame arc.
    • An episode shows everyone in Seisho Academy preparing for their annual school fair.
• Amusing Injuries: After Eru gets hit in the head by Genkoku, she has a large lump on her head. Several scenes later it's still there while Ichiroku's bump has long since faded. It then drastically shrinks after she sits out in the sun for a while.
  • Pretty much anytime Genkoku gets hurt, helped by the fact that he usually brings it on himself.
• Anime Accent Absence: Subverted by Thompson-sensei, who speaks with an American accent, but otherwise played straight by everyone else.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Most of the characters in the school are guns. "Sensei" is the one exception.
• Artistic License Gun Safety: Proper firearms safety is stressed, and all characters keep their fingers outside the trigger guard when not shooting.
  • In the live-fire exercise in "Go for it! Pass it!" (also in the manga), the girls were shooting at balloons above each others' heads. Had they been human, this would have been ridiculously dangerous.
  • Common safety rules are posted in the hallways at regular intervals. The obedience level... is about what you'd expect from middle school students.
• Beach Episode: Episode 9. Plenty of Fan Service as well.
• Bland-Name Product: A little boy shoots a 3BS in episode 1.
• Blood Knight/Trigger Happy: While several of the high school girls seem to display this trope, the middle school girls can sometimes seem a bit too eager for combat, particularly Sako.
• Bloodless Carnage: Slighty averted for after Sako slams Eru in the mud, she is later seen with a nosebleed.
• Boom! Headshot!: Sako does one as a cheap shot to Sig at the finals of the Jungle warfare tournament. Of course being a gun, all it does is knock Sig over on her face for a moment, mess up her hair and get her really pissed off.
• Breather Episode: Episode 7, which spends time with the girls during the Christmas/New Years holiday.
• Censor Steam: Quite a bit of it during episode 9 while the girls are in the bathhouse.
• Chekhov's Skill: G3's full auto sniping technique, which Sig later uses against SAKO. Also Eru uses it to keep her magazine in place in episode 10.
• Close-Call Haircut: Sig gets one from Sako, and later returns the favor. Ichiroku/M16 does it as well towards Sako.
  • FNC gets one as well in episode 9, although it doesn't impact her hair the same it does to Sig.
• Cold War: Much of the series' premise, especially the rivalry between Akagane and Seishou, is grounded in it. The series also promotes some really weird Western cliches of the time, like Easterners not helping their wounded (which is said by Nanayon of all people).
• Color Failure: Happens to Sensei when he realizes the lady talking to him in episode 9 is Fujiko-sensei without her eyepatch and with her hair down.
• Cool Guns: In human form.
• Conspicuous CG: The empty 5.56 NATO bullet casings fired from Ichiroku's M16A4 during the shootout with Ichiyon.
• Cosplay Cafe: The girls run a maid one in episode 8's School Festival episode.
• Dangerously Genre Savvy: When the girl guns from the "East" show up in episode 9, they mention not killing the girls outright, since "Western" guns tend to help out their wounded, unlike them.
• Did Not Do the Research: With a bit of Fridge Brilliance. In the anime version of Fal's duel with Funco (episode 2, "Go for it! Pass it!"), she fires a quick burst in full-auto. The British L1A1 FAL variant she uses was built to be semiauto only (other FALs had full auto functionality, which was removed from Commonwealth L1A1s). However, converting an L1A1 to fire from semi to full auto has been done before in the Vietnam War when Australian SAS soldiers did these to their issued L1A1s.
  • 14's official profile states that the M14 was made by FN Herstal, which is not true since Springfield Armory was the one whose design became the M14.
  • Sako and Galil's eyecatch in "Sing! Compete!" shows the caliber for the former as 5.56x39. Such a cartridge does not exist; the intent might have been for 5.56x45, which the weapon was available in for a short time, but the other stats on her side of the eyecatch are for the 7.62x39mm variant as used by the Finnish military.
• Disproportionate Retribution: "Sensei" gets shot at by Funco when he talks about her thong/skeleton stock in the first episode.
  • It should be noted that the first time he called her "girl with the thong".
    • MP had the same thing, except she asked TMP on her underwear if she had them on.
• Excited Show Title!: It is written with two exclamation points.
• Fantastic Arousal: Funco gets this way at the thought of being in the hands of a skilled marksman.
• Feuding Families: Being guns from different countries, there are some who have bad histories with each other.
  • One example is the American guns (M16 and M14) with the AKs (In this case, the Galil and Rk95 as their internals are based on the AK rifles) ever since the Vietnam War. 16 faces the AK faction from Red Steel High later on, which fuels her rivalry with them.
  • In the manga, there's also the rivalry between the Uzi sisters and MP5 sisters on the best SMG. This has some historical truth to it as a lot of security forces worldwide, including America and Germany, were armed with the Uzi during the Cold War until the MP5 took over as the world's main submachine gun.
  • And in one omake, MP7-tan and P90-tan face off, reflecting the competition between both PDW types.
• Foreshadowing: In episode one, L is laid up in the school infirmary with what the school nurse diagnoses as a bent firing pin. Then, in Episode 3, mention is made of L's various woes when shooting. This culminates in Episode 4, when she breaks her firing pin.
• Four-Girl Ensemble: FNC, 16, L, and Sig.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Episode 5. After Funko takes Galil out, Sako is seen playing...with herself, fantasizing over the former. Seconds later, she pulls her hand out and we get to see some... liquid stuff.
• Girls with Guns: Up to Eleven. The girls are the guns.
• Going Commando: Funco wonders if Ichihachi does not wear any underwear.
  • MP asks TMP on this, which she met with some response.
• Gun Accessories: Ichiroku goes to a small arms store to check on getting a red dot sight for the Seisho Academy jungle war games.
  • Later, during preparation for the school fair, she tries to buy an AN/PSQ-20 night vision sight.
• Gun Porn: It is a series about gun girls. (Does not mean porn of the gun girls. Though it comes close.)
• Hair Decorations: Ichiroku has the most obvious one, with a circular orange slice. Sig also has some purple hair clips, and in episode 7, they vaguely resemble cat ears.
• Hammerspace: Where the girls can draw their rifles from at any time.
• Human Shield: Ichiroku uses the teacher as one in episode 7 during a snowball fight.
• Humiliation Conga: The narrator relating the L85's troubled history, with L confirming that all her bad press is true. And then to cap it off, "Taps" is played. As in the bugle music at military funerals.
  • And then if this wasn't enough, she breaks her firing pin in Episode 4, after repeatedly put down and referred to as a dud.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The episode titles all consist of two verbs in the -tte (って) ending form.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: 14 firing her M14 on full auto. According to 16, the spread is about 10 meters.
• Incredibly Lame Pun Pungeon Master: 14 much to her sister, 16's annoyance. Funco does this too in a few instances and this also annoys 16.
• Info Dump: Done on a regular basis to give background information as to why the girls act a certain way, or the relevance of a current event, such as Ichiroku's rivalry with Sako.
• Instant Bandages: FNC has some in episode 1 when Genkoku accidentally ricochets some cork bullets on her face at a festival stand.
• I Work Alone: M16/Ichiroku plays this trope during the tournament in episodes 4-6, due to being teamed up with Eru, who misses the flight to the jungle. Until the finals, she actually manages to hold her own while soloing.
• Just for Pun: There's a reason why all the AK-type weapons of Red Steel High have cat ears. The original full pronunciation of the school from its kanji 紅鋼高 (Akaganekou) contains a pun (AK ga neko, or AK is a cat).
• Kansai Regional Accent: 16 speaks in Osaka-ben to emphasize that she's loud, boisterous, and fun-loving. Sako speaks in Kyoto-ben while Galil speaks in an Umpaku dialect, spoken in central San'in region, namely Tottori and Shimane prefectures.
• Karma Houdini: While Sako loses in the tournament in episode 6, she's never punished for taking that cheap shot at Sig, nor her excessive abuse towards FNC.
• Knights Of Cerebus: SAKO in episode 5 and the the AK group that attacks the girls during the school trip in episode 9, it's even stated in the latter case that if Ichihachi had been struck at a slightly different angle she would have died.
• Made of Iron: Almost literally: since the girls themselves are guns, they're made of metal, which means that they can take bullet hits better than a flesh and blood human could.
• Male Gaze: Quite evident in the closing credits.
• Malevolent Masked Men: Some girls show up in episode 9 wearing masks, and then they start shooting up the secondary girls later in the episode.
• Mismatched Eyes: Fujiko-sensei hides a mismatched eye under her eyepatch.
• More Dakka: Ichiyon switches to this in her duel with Ichiroku... and doesn't hit her at all.
  • Most assault rifles can fire on full auto, but the M16A4 is limited to 3-round burst because full auto uses ammo too fast.
• Motor Mouth: M10-chan, who proceeds to fire off an entire panel of text in about 10 seconds, causing FNC and Sig to wince in pain...until she runs out of ammo.
• Not So Different: After spending 2 episodes putting down L, 16 realises she's not so different after all, when she remembers the M16's troubled performance in Vietnam.
• Power Copying: Sig learns G3's secret technique after observing it in their sniper duel.
• Sacred First Kiss: Funco loses hers to Sako at the end of the Jungle Wargames arc. Funco's really upset as she was waiting until she had been registered.
• School Festival: Episode 8 has one.
• Schoolgirl Lesbians: Sig seems to have a crush on Funco, Aug is pretty explicit about it even if Funco doesn't seem to notice.
  • SAKO takes Funco's Sacred First Kiss after watching her take down Galil in the Jungle Wargames arc.
• Shout-Out: Jatimatic's appearance is based on Cobra's Marion Cobretti.
  • Sig could make a good Goemon based on her Iai technique. "Once again, I have shot a worthless object."
• Shown Their Work: Mostly the firearms used in the franchise.
  • G3 & Sig's sniper duel correctly shows basic sniper and counter-sniper tactics.
  • The show does explain how the British military were eventually armed with the L85A2. Alongside the problems they encountered such as the frequent jamming, their issued magazines falling from the rifle and parts breaking down before the L85 has been modified to the A1 and A2 standards.
  • The evolution of the M16 series with the differences between the various M16 rifles. Also shown with Ichiroku constantly taking baths and cleaning herself excessively, as the M-16 tends to jam when not maintained properly.
  • The hand signals used by the assault rifle teams in the jungle wargame story.
  • T91 and AUG demonstrate bounding overwatch in their battle against 16.
  • Aspects of urban warfare were shown during the gunfights between the Seisho students against the AK faction, including suppressive fire to provide cover and crouching to avoid being an easy target by using the corner.
• Significant Anagram/Sdrawkcab Name: Upotte!! (うぽって!!) is the reverse of "Teppou" (てっぽう) which means "gun".
  • Yes, that means this show is called Nug!!
    • Or Snug!!, since Japanese is not particular about plurals.
• Skinship Grope: In episode 3 Ichiroku forcibly helps Funco with her "maintanence".
  • And in episode 9, she does it to Eru.
• Stunned Silence: Ichiroku and Ichiyon after the former managed to successfully bat away a chestnut into the latter's balloon.
• Too Dumb to Live: "Sensei" for some strange reason brings up Funco's thong/skeleton stock. The result: he was hospitalized even longer. He does it again by accident in episode 7, although FNC at the end of the episode pouts (after getting suspended again) and says that she didn't hit him; rather he fell out of the window in his apartment on his own.
• Tournament Arc: The jungle wargame arc.
• Transfer Student Uniforms: G3 and her MP5 sisters wear the uniforms of their old school.
• Urban Warfare: The Red Steel High-based AK faction engaged all of the Seisho assault rifle girls, fighting throughout Atami with urban warfare tactics (sans military support and all). Ms. Fujiko and the battle rifle girls join in the fight, assisting the latter with a super friendly Galil. The AK faction receives help from 2 other AK derivatives, the Bizon SMG, and the Saiga-12 self-loading shotgun.
• Ventriloquism: Sig does it in episode 9, which surprises everyone.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Ichiroku/M16 constantly bashes Eru's performance and frequent breakdowns, which causes the latter to attempt skipping the jungle wargames tournament.
• Who Is This Guy Again?: When Sensei sees Fujiko-sensei (the high school teacher) without her eyepatch and hair tied back, he's utterly confused as who she is at first.
• Widget Series: Anime viewers who like moe will be put off by the guns, and gun fans will most likely be put off by the moe. Only those who can appreciate - or tolerate - both genres will be able to watch this show.
• William Telling: A variation of this occurs in episode 9. Sig annoys HK by calling her Chuusuri-chan, and Chuusuri shoots the cover on the book Sig was reading on the beach named Wilhelm Tell, which featured an arrow piercing an apple on the cover. After getting it shot, Sig holds the book up, and points out that its a library book, and Chuusuri gets a scolding from one of the teachers.