Combat Stilettos - TV Tropes Combat Stilettos You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share Stylish, comfy and excellent for a night of Crime Fighting and a Date, Dinner and Coffee later. Blood Removal sold separately. "I'll punish you in high heels!" Thanks to Sex Sells and Rule of Sexy , Action Girls will often wear high heels to complement the rest of their Stripperiffic outfits . In comics this is often Depending on the Artist : artist A will use it in moderation, artist B will draw practical shoes, but artist C will insist on drawing high heels on all female characters regardless of reason, situation, or even if it's her usual style. While this can be part of Most Writers Are Male trend, this tend to appear equal often with Female Writers as well, for various reasons . note Just for reference, any heel less than three inches is excluded from this trope.

There is a fierce debate over the use of this trope, ranging from a realistic point (they are very hard to balance, tiring to walk and can damage the feet and spine by prolonged use in real life), if it's a misogynystic tool in a male dominated medium just to make the heroines more appealing, or that they are only another trope in fantasy and comics, no more unrealistic than any other, but regardless some women become very good at keeping their balance in heels. Not to be confused with a combat stiletto , nor shoes being directly used as weapons . See Rule of Sexy , Impossibly Cool Clothes and These Tropes Are Made for Walking . Compare Kick Chick and With My Hands Tied , as this trope may sometimes be used together with the said two. Examples open/close all folders Anime & Manga Birdy in Birdy the Mighty , though it appears to be justified in that they function as rocket boosters. For a male example, Sebastian from Black Butler wears stilettos when in demon form. In Brave10 , Ana usually fights in heels, as do many of the villains, male and female. One opponent takes this to its logical extreme and just wears giant blades underneath his feet.

Bubblegum Crisis : Supplemental material reveals that the Knight Sabres are actually on tiptoe while wearing their hardsuits , because their armored boots are like a ballet slipper with a heel. The tech manual also states the heel is filled with a shock absorbing gel, which cushions the impact of harder landings. Devil Hunter Yohko : Yohko's devil hunter attire includes a red pair of high-heeled pumps. Not only does she fight in them, she's even shown capable of sprinting through forests and across rugged terrain, without any signs of difficulty, as though she were in track shoes! Quite a few feminine Digimon that look more humanoid in their higher levels have them, such as Angewomon and Sakuyamon . Many of them possess some form of flight, though, so movement is a non-issue. Due to author Mamoru Nagano's ever-present fascination with genderqueers, a great many of the Mortar Headds from The Five Star Stories have stiletto-esque heel-struts built into their legs. Actually becomes a plot point in one story arc, when two characters use their mech's collapsible heel-struts to slip out of an opponent's gripping attack.

Agent Ginrei from Giant Robo wears a pair of white ones. Hunter ï¿½ Hunter : Hisoka has no problem arena fighting with high heels on. Likewise, the butler Canary, who is also a Badass in a Nice Suit , has absolutely no trouble kicking ass in high heels. Literally with Hato in Jojos Bizarre Adventure Part 8 . Her Stand gives her the power to stretch the heels of her shoes into deadly spikes. Kill la Kill : As part of the over-the-top nature of the series, both Ryuko Matoi and Satsuki Kiryuin don high-heels, with Satsuki wearing them in both her normal school uniform and by both girls in their powered Kamui forms. Satsuki's heels are often prominently shown hitting the ground (with a distinctive CL-ACK! sound) whenever she makes a Dynamic Entry . Likewise (both for fighting and entrances) with Satsuki's mother, Ragyo.

Satsuki is so well-known for this trait that she has recently ascended to the Trope Pantheon as Goddess of Combat Stilettos (and Holy Backlight ) Despite its lack of apparent gender, Milia/Miriya from Macross / Robotech has heels on her VF-1 (To be fair, all VF-1s do, in fact). In Mobile Fighter G Gundam , the Nobel Gundam has these as well - to be expected, as it's basically a Giant Robot Sailor Senshi. A Humongous Mecha version of this trope appears in the YAMS-132 Rozen Zulu from Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn . The eponymous Unicorn Gundam's "Destroy Mode"(as well as that of the Banshee) might also count owing to the changed configuration of its feet resulting in somewhat less dramatic but still clear high heels. The predecessor of Unicorn's Re-ZEL, the Z-II, has a set of humongous high heels. However, as it was meant to be a space-only Mobile Suit, it's pretty much cosmetic.

Another example occurs in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans : The ASW-G-08 Gundam Barbatos , which originally had fairly standard feet, gains a pair of truly gigantic high heels when it is converted for ground combat on Earth. Tsunade from Naruto wears high heeled sandals that can somehow survive a heel drop which can shatter rocks. One Piece : Boa Hancock sees nothing wrong with kicking people in the face with her high heels in the middle of a warzone. Gold Lion Shiki carries this trope to an absurd extreme in Movie 10, as he's replaced both his feet with his swords. See? ◊ Although she doesn't fight physically, Nami still counts, as she wears high-heeled sandals most of the time. Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt : The Anarchy sisters wear high-heeled sandals in their angel outfits, which they don in more serious fights. Some mechs in Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure have feet designed along these lines. The Earth Defense Force units all have them, but the Rara Army tends to use non-humanoid designs. The later seasons of Pretty Cure (more notably Fresh and Heartcatch ) have their heroines wear high heels while transformed.

Homura's Magical Girl outfit in Puella Magi Madoka Magica has these, though in her case it mostly makes sense : she fights with bombs and guns, enjoys doing the Unflinching Walk , and her Time Stands Still ability means that she doesn't really need to run or do other things made difficult by wearing heels...in theory. In reality, there's a few implausible scenes, like the beginning of episode 9, where she runs in heels on an Alien Geometry set of floating train tracks and doesn't even stumble. Pirotess, the female dark elf from Record of Lodoss War wears a pair of white thigh-high boots with heels. Sailor Moon : Most of the Sailor Senshi have heels on their shoes: Mars, who wears red stilettos, even mentions it in the above pre-battle speech in the manga . Though the creator of Sailor Moon is a straight woman. She really likes drawing shoes. Interestingly, Sailor Venus has a tendency to kick her enemies' throats with her heels: she apparently realized what she could do by weaponizing them. The fact she has possibly the shortest heels of the group just means she has less trouble performing a Flash Step before the kick.

Shaina in Saint Seiya fights in high heels. Including a scene where she dodges Shun's Nebula Chain, jumps and runs on it, an then hits Shun. However in the Manga version she wears more reasonable shoes as a part of her armor Extremely common in Sekirei , though it is worth noting that several Power Types wear either sensible heels or flats. Senki Zesshou Symphogear plays with it on two characters: Hibiki's first real fight after having learned martial arts from Genjuro starts with her tripping on her Symphogear's heels, which she promptly breaks off so she can fight properly. Tsubasa , on the other hand, plays it straight, and, on top of fighting with Armed Legs , can even combine her heel with a stories-tall BFS to perform a kick on hapless Mooks . Tauburn, Takuto's mech from Star Driver has these. Yes, the giant robot has high heels. In Tokyo Ghoul , female Ghoul Investigators typically dress like an office lady and this means wearing pumps even while working in the field. The Auction Arc of the sequel features Akira Mado fighting in a pair of heels.

But taking it to the next level is Nutcracker , a Ghoul dominatrix that is seen running along walls and performing brutal stomps in a pair of boots with stiletto heels. Comics Barbara Gordon, the second Batgirl . Lampshaded in Batgirl #45 , when her successor Cassandra Cain puts on Barbara's old costume. Cassandra, who usually uses Waif-Fu , keeps tripping and stumbling thanks to the heels. The Batgirl: Year One miniseries joins the long line of lampshades on this trope by having Barbara's heel snap off during her initial fight with Killer Moth. There it makes perfect sense , since at this point she is not a crime-fighter, and was actually going to a costume party where high-heels fit in just fine. Once she decides to go pro, she cannibalizes some hiking boots to give her costume some better soles. When the new Batwoman was revealed in 52 she was drawn with a number of impractical costume decisions, including high-heels.

When she was transferred to the lead in Detective Comics the artists made a deliberate decision to have her costume be more practical and, amongst the changes, removed her heels (she also cut her hair and replaced it with a wig, since Batman points out that any mook can grab her hair and end the fight).note Funny how he seems to have no problem with capes and cowls... This was eventually given an in-story explanation: her father was the original designer of the costume. Kate: Pop...are those heels? Jake: They were the only boots I could find in red. It's a good color, doesn't pop during night ops. Hawkgirl used to, now she wears flat-soled boots. Green Lantern villain Star Sapphire. Less of an issue for her since she mostly flies. Mary Marvel , when she turned evil during Final Crisis . Black Canary is infamous for fighting in high-heeled shoes, and there is a widespread and heated conflict in the fandom between those who insist it is stupid and should be fixed, an acceptable aspect of fantasy, and a few who claim it is actually reasonable . At least one letter writer to a Black Canary comic claims she was capable of delivering high-kicks while cosplaying as Canary, without harming herself. We...

wouldn't recommend trying . In JLA: Year One, The Flash once asked Black Canary about her high heels and if they are not impractical for fighting crime. Her reaction ◊ was to grab the wings of his mask and turn his mask 90° around, blinding him . Emma Frost , and every other female in the Hellfire Club. Elsa Bloodstone of Nextwave wears thigh high stilettos. Silk Spectre I and II in Watchmen . Empowered : Maid Man is a rare male example. He gets away with it because he is the Goddamn Maid Man. Nearly all the female supers play this straight. Sistah Spooky's 6-inch platform heels are impressive - she can fly though. Emp herself can't wear shoes in costume... But the imitation costume she wears as part of a group of licenced superhero impersonators (in which she plays herself) has them. She's still wondering why . Incandescence wears 5-inch heels as a signature part of her outfit. It's often lampshaded that she can run, jump, and fight in them. Though it's mentioned that she has a background in dance. Some dancers do have extraordinary balance in high heels.

Animal Superheroes example: Alley-Kat-Abra from Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! The girls from Runaways usually dress pretty sensibly ( none of them have traditional super hero costumes ), but not always. One issue showed Nico going into battle wearing stilettos and Karolina fighting alongside her in flip-flops, which seems even more impractical. To be fair, they weren't attacking somebody, somebody attacked them when they weren't expecting it. For Gotham City Sirens , Catwoman has added heels to her formerly sensible costume. The aptly-named human villain Stiletto from the Transformers Animated comic series is a former kickboxer whose boot heels actually incorporate laser scalpels . Wonder Woman used to have this trope done straight, but Post-Crisis onward usually has her wearing sensible flat soled boots. Envy Adams of the Scott Pilgrim series wears platform heeled boots in her fight with Ramona. Female Judges in Judge Dredd stories may have them, Depending on the Artist (especially if that artist is Brian Bolland). Sin City has an assassin named Blue Eyes who once threw a stiletto into a man's eye socket and killed him. But who throws a shoe? Honestly! Lady Mechanika .

Not true stilettos, but the heroine does do all of her action scenes in Victorian-era high-heeled boots. Fables . Cinderella wears high heels most of the time, even when flats would make more sense. (Fables are Forever.) But she also shows how she can kick tail anyway, and weaponize them as needed. Subverted with Dorothy, as she's wearing special high heels. note The Silver Shoes. Yes, that Dorothy. Victorion from IDW's run of The Transformers is an enormous Combiner . As the only Combiner made entirely of female Transformers, she naturally has high heeled feet to set her apart from all the male Combiners. She may have fewer balance issues than most, considering that she's also a Gravity Master . Fan Works In the fanfiction Fine Feathers Damian Wayne is in a situation where he must crossdress. He muses on how high heels would make more effective weapons than footwear, and demands Barbara Gordon teach him how to fight in them. In Dreaming the American Dream , a crossover between the Marvel Universe and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander (who was gender swapped ...

don't ask) lampshades this when he notices that heroines wear high heels while running and fighting. At first when he got offered some he thought they were joking ...they weren't . Eri's Game has the titular character's case. Plus the scene where she beats up Reaper Beat with it. Subverted (and possibly lampshaded) in My Little Mages: The Nightmare's Return , where at one point Rarity bemoans the fact that she chose to wear heels that day, as it's hard to run and fight in them. Frozen Moonlight has these pop up as, during their first date Aoshi and Misao get attacked. She uses them more appropriately, taking them off and using them as an Improvised Weapon . Effective ones too. In Off The Line , Rainstorm's shoes are these. They are literally so sharp that he accidentally killed a woman when he stepped on her. As the Fanservice Joke Race , high heels actually improve the balance and support of the Viera Race. Rainstorm slices a bounty hunter's throat open when he swipe-kicked him in his heels. Friendship Is Magical Girls : Pinkie, Rarity, Fluttershy, and Sunset all fight in them.

Fluttershy lampshades how hard it is to do so, but Rarity trains her in how to do so effectively. Sailor Moon: Legends of Lightstorm: Jason notes that the footwear on the Sailor Scouts' Combat Modes is not ideal for mobility (According to him, the people of the Silver Millennium Moon Kingdom valued aesthetics over performance). However, he trains them to compensate for this. Notably, he trains Sailor Mars so well that she is able to rocket-run at superhigh speeds without ill effect. At one point, Lita notes that her own footwear is not as mobility-oriented as she would like, and wonders just how much the people of the Silver Millennium Moon Kingdom really valued aesthetics. Films — Animated Jiko Bou of Princess Mononoke uses Tengu-style wooden Geta sandals with only one tall "teeth" instead of the usual two. He's a covert operative sent by the Emperor, so he has the balance needed to walk, run and jump wearing them. This leads to a bit of Fridge Logic and Hypocritical Humor in The Incredibles , where Edna Mode berates capes for being impractical but still designs (and makes) high-heeled costumes for the heroines.

Cinderella in Shrek the Third , as expected. She sharpens the heels and use them as throwing weapons. Films — Live-Action Catwoman in the live-action adaptations. In the comics she usually wears more reasonable shoes. Noticeably jarring when in the Batman Returns mall her heels keep appearing and disappearing when she starts doing back flips and such. As portrayed by Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises , it is played straight. ◊ Which is odd considering how much Christopher Nolan likes to go on about how plausible the Batsuit is. (It's a little hard to see because they appear to be made of metal and blend in with the concrete.) The heels are actual, serrated blades, and one poster ◊ shows Catwoman symbolically stepping on and breaking a Batarang with said heels. Given the plausibility attributed to the Batsuit, one has to wonder how she actually made those shoes . Lampshaded the first time said bladed heels actually show up: Stryver: [holding a pistol on Selina] Nice outfit. Those heels make it hard to walk? Selina Kyle: I don't know.

[stomps on Stryver's foot, stabbing him in the instep, causing him to drop his weapon] Do they? Another Batman villainess who gets those in film is Harley Quinn for Suicide Squad . Margot Robbie highlighted how the stilettos are Awesome, but Impractical : So, that's when the powers that be stepped in and voted on a pair of heels. Once I knew that it had to be a pair of heels, I wanted the most badass-looking ones. And when I saw the Adidas ones I was like, "They are sick." And it all happened quite quickly. Before I knew it, I was like, "OK. So, that's the costume." And I walked around in them for a day. That was the worst idea. Ever. Cherry Darling in Grindhouse , at least on the leg that hasn't been replaced with an assault rifle. Justified because she's a stripper go-go dancer who never actually makes it home from her shift. Elvira in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark subverts the old trope about female victims running from slasher-movie villains tripping and falling (and then being killed) due to high heels...

by throwing her stiletto heels as weapons. This scene from Jackie Chan 's Armor of God , which also demonstrates some of the problems with high heels in combat situations. On the other hand it gave some extra punch to their multiple Groin Attack . In the Watchmen movie shows the impracticality of this, when Silk Spectre's boots slip out from under her, as she's trying to fight off the Comedian's rape attempt. On the other hand, her daughter seems to have no problem fighting in them during the prison breakout scene. Although in an interesting real-life subversion, if you pause the movie during various points in Silk Spectre II's prison fight scene, you can see that the actress is in fact wearing flat-soled boots as she walks. She's only in the high heels whenever she doesn't have to do anything action-oriented, or when she has to plant a heeled foot on a mook's chest. While filming Tromeo and Juliet , actress Tiffany Shepis accidentally punctured co-star Stephen Blackehart's lower lip with her spiked heel. In the live-action movie of Barb Wire , Pamela Anderson does a great deal of fighting in stilettos.

On a plus-point she uses dynamite and guns a lot more than hand-to-hand combat, but they are still impractical. The villain of Single White Female murders the protagonist's boyfriend with a stiletto shoe. Averted in the 2010 film Red when Victoria slips off her dress high heels and trades them for a pair of sensible flat boots before the big operation. Cynthia Rothrock. Fighting in tall stiletto heels. On glass table-tops. On a CARGO NET stretched over a two-story tall stack of boxes. Then she moved to Australia and her films got a little calmer. Played with in a scene from The Blonde Fury where she's having difficulty fighting a male opponent due in part to wearing high heels and a long skirt ( appropriately dealt with mid-fight ). However, she actually discovers the heels can be to her advantage, after she (purely by chance) stabs him with one, and kicks him repeatedly with the other after the first shoe comes off. Van Helsing : Kate Beckinsale complained about the difficulty she had running about in high heels while filming action sequences.

In Ticked Off Trannys With Knives , one of the "girls" manages to gouge her attacker's eye out by stabbing it with the heel of her shoe. While Renate Richter wears high-heeled boots in the second half of Iron Sky , she's not much of an Action Girl (she's just a schoolteacher, after all, with no combat training whatsoever). However, she does use her heels as impromptu weapons during her fight with the Big Bad Klaus Adler, stabbing him in the forehead. Averted in Mission: Impossible ï¿½ Ghost Protocol . The female IMF member hears on the radio that the female assassin who killed her colleague has escaped the trap set up for her, tears off her high-heeled shoes and races out of the room to inflict a major asskicking. Early in Sharknado 2: The Second One , we see Kelly Ripa showing off her new heels on Live! with Kelly and Michael. During the climax, Kelly ends up using the heels to kill a shark that flew onto the set. There's a scene in the Steven Seagal movie Belly of the Beast where our hero fights a ladyboy , and she doesn't even bother to take off her shoes, using them as weapons.

In a mostly averted and justified example, Jurassic World has Claire wearing high heels through all that terrible day. Including being chased by a Tyrannosaurus she's attracting to combat. Bryce Dallas Howard reported it wasn't easy to accomplish , but "itï¿½s way better than running barefoot in a jungle, Iï¿½ll tell you that." X-Men: Apocalypse : Psylocke's thigh-high boots come with high heels, and Storm wears wedge heels with her Horseman and X-Man attire. In The Cobbler , Max defends himself and accidentally kills a baddie with the heel of a stiletto. In Power Rangers (2017) , the Pink and Yellow rangers are given wedge heels, despite being marital arts fighters. Literature Discworld Going Postal . Adora Belle Dearheart wears high heels and notes that in pounds per square inch, it's "like being stepped on by a very pointy elephant" and that she can "kick like a mule". Combined with the fact she's not really an Action Girl (of the combat related type at least) and on a date at the time of first reference, it makes her footwear less impractical.

She's also only ever described as kicking while sitting down. To make it simple, she stomps her heel down on the feet of annoying men, which thanks to her high and thin heels, has near armor-piercing qualities. It doesn't work on Trolls, though. Lampshaded in Witches Abroad . Magrat ends up wearing the high-heeled 'glass' slippers. She slips, loses a slipper, and screams, "How the hell is anybody supposed to walk in these?!" Then she pulls off the other one and runs for it. Cat Crawford, the heroine of the Night Huntress books, has been known to use a pair of solid silver stiletto heels to sneak stakes into vampire gatherings. A similar tactic was used by Cathy Barrett to discourage a groper in a Nightside pub. Parodied in A Series of Unfortunate Events , in which the Fashion-Victim Villain Esme Squalor uses actual stilettos on her high heels to attempt to kill the Baudelaires. Naturally, Snicket did a Lampshade Hanging about how impractical and violent the shoes were, and indeed she had huge problems with running, constantly getting her shoes stuck.

The Action Heroine's Handbook has a chapter on 'How to Win a High-Speed chase in high heels and a bustier'. Subverted in Medallion . Villainess Kespa has a pair of heels she made from sap to wear around her fortress, but their purpose is solely to scare her servants and announce her arrival (her floors are made of stone and the shoes make noise). It's stated she has a pair of practical boots for when she goes out to do battle. In The Dresden Files , Lara sprints several blocks in impractical shoes. Harry lampshades this, and it's one of the facts that hammers home that she's not a muggle. Several pages later, she hammers the heel through a badass zombie's head. She's a vampire, she later dropped from a helicopter in similar shoes. Running through a parking lot isn't even that impressive. Subverted in the Kate Daniels series when Kate slips off her stilettos in preparation for a fight. If I kicked him, the heel would slide into him like a knife - but I'd have a hell of a time getting free.

In the book You Know You're Ghetto If..., one of the jokes was "...if you can outrun a police officer while wearing high heels." In one of the Fearless novels, Gaia gets attacked by a bunch of thugs while dressed up for dinner with her dad. She reflects that one advantage to fighting in evening wear is that high heels can be used as a weapon. In her case, it makes sense that she would be able to fight in heels, as she's been extensively trained from childhood in every kind of martial art with a name. Even though she hates wearing heels, walking and fighting in them probably isn't much of a problem for her. Isabelle Lightwood from The Mortal Instruments , wears heels constantly and fights in them when she needs to. She has even been known to use them as weapons, slashing and impaling targets with her kicks. 1930s pulp heroine Domino Lady fought crime in an evening gown and high-heeled shoes. It never seemed to impede her ability to kick ass. Live Action TV Fiona on Burn Notice always dresses as if she is going to a cocktail party, and still manages to kick serious ass about 98% of the time.

Though when she is planning to get into trouble she generally wears more practical footwear. "I'm wearing my door-kicking Jimmy Choos..." ("Besieged", Series 5 Episode 7) Sydney Bristow in Alias wore heels for many of her disguises while on assignment. Sometimes the outfits were Stripperiffic, sometimes they were conservative. But unless she was running laps around the track, she was in heels. Scully on The X-Files . OK, so she's only 5'2", but the footgear issue was lampshaded in the episode "Hollywood A.D.", when the actress playing Scully asks her how it's possible to run in heels that high (which Scully does have to do on the job). What makes it better is that she actually demonstrates , and can be seen running back and forth in the background while Mulder has a conversation with the actor playing him. Once, she turned her heels into a self-defense weapon by kicking someone in the face while wearing them . "Taffy" on Dollhouse . It's probably a joke when she says it's important to wear comfortable shoes. Laura Holt on Remington Steele .

In the episode "Steele in the Chips," a guest star played by Geena Davis asks how Laura can run in high heels, to which she replies, "Practice." The mysterious super-heroine Stiletto (Lois) in Smallville wears stilettos, although she regrets this since she can barely walk in them, never mind fight crime. On one of the few occasions Ziva wears heels on NCIS she ends up in a big fight. The actress goes on (and on) about this in the DVD commentary. She Spies . Lampshaded/Inverted in Cybill ; Maryann briefly tries wearing flats, but can't keep her balance. Ditto on The Nanny . Fran has to go out on a ledge to keep her date from trying to jump (it makes sense in context.) The maitre d' suggests she take off her heels, to which she responds, "Are you nuts, that would screw up my balance completely." Referenced in an episode of Gilmore Girls . Girl: So girls go on adventures too? Lorelai: And they go in heels.

Nikki (as Jessica ) of Heroes fame pulls this off spectacularly : after effortlessly throwing three burly security guards to the ground, she places her stiletto heel against the temple of the one that's still conscious to get information out of him, threatening to stomp down and stab his brains if he doesn't talk. For reasons forever unknown to God and Man most of the Doctor's companions on Doctor Who elect to explore strange new worlds in three or four inch heels. Subverted with Rose, Donna, and Amy. Most of time all three are seen wearing sneakers. Donna explains it as follows: "Seriously, there is a ridiculous amount of running involved." Leela wore calf length moccasins, but judicious application of the pause button reveals that they were made with a wedge heel - because Louise Jameson is 5'6", and Tom Baker is 6'3" . Sarah in Chuck always wears heels, and she seems to get in fights fairly frequently. Casey mentions stabbing someone with a stiletto while investigating a fashion show sometime before the series began. This is a Stealth Pun as "stiletto" can refer to a shoe or a knife and it's unclear which one Casey meant.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine : Kira Nery wears (chunky) heels with her uniform. This is, however, almost entirely because Nana Visitor , when stood next to her statuesque co-stars like Terry Farrell, looks almost ridiculously short. Star Trek: Voyager Jeri Ryan actually insisted on this for Seven of Nine's costume. Something about the catsuit seemed to require them, apparently. Which doesn't make much sense for a practical Borg. Then again, the Borg never seem to run or engage in hand-to-hand combat, so it may work. Referred to in the MythBusters "Superhero Special". A build team filler segment involved how fast one could change into a superhero costume in a phone booth. After Kari won the competition, she commented that she needed the head start if she was going to chase down a villain while wearing high-heeled boots. Averted In one of those weird Xena: Warrior Princess episodes that take place in modern times. Xena found herself reincarnated as a mousy secretary in a 1940's Indiana Jones spoof. When Ares is reawakened, she kicks off her shoes and proceeds to kick his ass.

Brittany from Glee does an amazing dance with Mike at Sectionals in heels. This is Truth in Television . Dancers - particularly ballroom and belly dancers - train bloody hard to do extremely complex and sometimes dangerous steps specifically in heels, and not necessarily sensible heels either. It's as much a skill as dancing en pointe in ballet, and is made somewhat easier by the fact that most dance forms require you to keep your weight over the balls of your feet rather than the heels. In an early episode of Quantum Leap , Sam Beckett "leaps" into a small-town coroner/mortician in the early 1960's, and has to solve the murder of a young woman. He discovers that the woman was killed by a jealous friend who took the victim's own spike-heeled shoe and hit her, driving the heel into her brain, in a manner very like the Robert De Niro film mentioned above. All of the girls in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon have heels on their footwear. The series featured a lot more high kicks and flips than the anime did, so it's noticeable when you can see the Senshi wearing flat-soled boots during the fight scenes.

The most noticeable flub was during Act 0: Birth of Sailor V! during which Sailor V's normal shoes are replaced by white sneakers for a few shots. Miss Parker of The Pretender likes her high heels. Detective Kate Beckett of Castle constantly wears 4 inch stiletto heels, despite the fact that her job requires a good deal of walking and running. The fact that this is impractical, and the fact that she pulls it off unrealistically well, is lampshaded constantly by other characters in the series. In "Nikki Heat", Natalie Rhodes postulates that she wears them because she needs the psychological edge that the height gives her against the men in her profession. Beckett agrees, but says she also just likes it. Subverted with Sophie on Leverage . She's a grifter and therefore almost always wearing high heels, but kicks them off if the con goes awry and she needs to leg it, like "The Second David Job" and "The Reunion Job". Also in "The Reunion Job" both her and the female gun for hire kick their heels off before fighting each other. Played straight with Eliot's counterpart in "The Two Live-Crew Job", however.

It's occasionally played straight with Parker who despite normally wearing flat boots and other practical clothing can easily backflip through laser grids in stillettos and cocktail dresses when she doesn't have time to change. Played literally on Empire when Cookie and Lucious team up to search for a kidnapped Hakeem. They shake down a guy for information; Lucious knocks him to the ground and Cookie puts her heel to his throat. The Widow in the second episode Into the Badlands ("Fist Like A Bullet") kills several men while wearing heels even higher than Kate Beckett's, with backflips and martial arts moves equal to any of the men, finally finishing off one guy with one of her heels. Lucy Liu is 5'3 while Jonny Lee Miller is 5'10. When they play Joan and Sherlock in Elementary , Joan's Unlimited Wardrobe contains a lot of Combat Stilettos to combat the height difference . She's not a hands-on Action Girl but is a Badass Bookworm , an ex-surgeon, and a skilled detective. Professional Wrestling Sherri Martel used her knee highs as bludgeons.

Later, Heel Elizabeth (no pun intended) worked interference for Ric Flair by lobbing shoes like guided missiles, landing 9,999 damage with each shot. Brandon Stroud : WCW ï¿½s deadliest foreign object, the LADIESï¿½ SHOE. If youï¿½re a regular reader of the column youï¿½ll know that Miss Elizabeth basically wears nuclear warheads on her feet, and if you remove one of them and hit somebody in the face with it that person will die. Hulk Hogan got jabbed in the face by a shoe once and it not only busted him open , it almost blinded him and he had to wrestle in a flesh-colored eyepatch. Yinling, the Erotic Terrorist of HUSTLE , would wrestle in high heels. Subverted by Cherry Bomb in CZW , who would get in the ring with baby face Greg Excellent wearing High Heels but then take them off and beat his face bloody with them. Tabletop Games GURPS has two perks relating to this, "High-Heeled Heroine" and "High-Heeled Hurt".

One allows you to run and do acrobatics in heels, the other makes it possible to use them like the other kind of stiletto. The tongue-in-cheek Macho Women with Guns game is all over this. "Run in high heels" is a skill. Armor Piercing is a +1/2 advantage in Champions to which the disadvantages Only When Kicking and Obvious, Inaccessible Focus: Stiletto Heeled Boots could be applied to make them quite affordable. In later editions (5th plus) one may simply purchase the Armor Piercing on a hypothetical Hand Attack equal to the character's best kick. Some of the artwork in Warhammer 40,000 depict Sisters of Battle with the effect of these modelled onto their power armour. Virtually all the female models in Infinity have heels of some kind on their feet. Toys The action figure for comics lead Michiko Noguchi (a human Weyland-Yutani employee adopted into a Predator clan) features ridiculous combat stilettos in Predator-armor fashion. Video Games The Demon Hunter from Diablo III .

City of Heroes : For females, most footwear options have stiletto heels to them, where in a male character the same clothing choice would be flat. Yes, one of the female heroine's natural abilities seems to be kicking ass in six-to-eight inch heels. The other is the Most Common Superpower . This was actually cut down in its close relation Champions Online . There are now far more flat and moderate heel options and even the high heels are mostly thicker character heels (a dancing heel). The eponymous heroine of Bayonetta , as well as Jeanne . In both cases, the heels have been replaced with guns , with which she performs Gun Fu . In Bayonetta 2 , the same as ever applies to Bayonetta and Jeanne, as well as Bayonetta's mother, Rosa and, in a Rare Male Example , the Masked Lumen. The last may seem odd, but it's fitting given that he's a Mirror Boss who uses light-themed versions of Bayonetta's attacks. Bloodrayne . Similar to Bayonetta, the heels are actual stilettos . Averted in Tomb Raider: Legend .

The bad guys attack while Lara is at a fancy dinner party, and she takes off her heels and fights barefoot. In the early Mortal Kombat games, the women wore flat shoes due to being digitized live actors. Once gaming reached the 3D era though, Midway started adding progressively more Fanservice with each game. It got particularly bad in Mortal Kombat 9, where Sonya—an Army commando who dressed sensibly in most games, was wearing heels. Skarlett invokes this trope by stabbing her opponent in the eye with her heel. A welcome change in Mortal Kombat X is making the ladies more sensibly dressed: less Stripperiffic outfits and no stilettos. While D'Vorah does wear heels, they're not outlandishly high and more like character heels. Tanya also noticeably wears a pair of high-heeled boots, and they are shown off in both her fatalities. Ivy Valentine from SoulCalibur . Though she does actually make use of them by stamping on opponents while they're lying down and twisting her foot around. Ouch. Lei-Fang from Dead or Alive . Her down attack is stomping on the opponent with them.

If the opponent is male and is in front of her it hits him in the groin. This is also the footwear of choice for Christie and Helena Douglas . Tekken : The Williams sisters do this every so often; both can grind the heel on a downed opponent. The other girls appear to prefer flat-soled boots, sneakers, slippers, or nothing. Lili, who was introduced in Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection, wears white high-heeled boots with her most common outfit and generally defies physics with her She-Fu fighting style. Averted in Skies of Arcadia with Fina , who is a very slow character and fights with magic or by letting her Mon do the fighting. Played straight with Fragile Speedster Aika, but her heels are not as big as Fina's. Final Fantasy series: Every Viera ever. They have digitigrade feet, so their heels are off the ground with or without the shoes. Exception: in the artwork of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and A2, which take place in the same universe as XII, Viera have rather reasonable heels and some even walk flat like the Assassin. Due to the...

unusual art design for Final Fantasy XII , it was long believed that Larsa Ferrinas Solidor's thigh-high boots were what have been described as "cherry red high-heeled Sunday pumps." The contrast of the red and green on his boots actually makes it appear as if he's wearing high-heels, and red ones at that. Another male example with Luso in Final Fantasy Tactics A2 , as he has heels in his official artwork. His Cat Girl Adelle sports these as well. The Tactics Advance series in general has several instances of this, most notoriously, the hume Black Mage. Final Fantasy X : Lulu has been speculated to wear heels beneath her dress due to the sound her feet make on hard surfaces in the game. The official figurine solves this mystery — yes she has feet, yes she is wearing high heels. Final Fantasy XI 's Kam'lanaut fits this trope to a T. By day, he wears garish wine-colored robes and gladiator sandals, but by night, he becomes a sorcerous Paladin wearing what are easily 6-inch stiletto-heeled sabatons. It doesn't help that he has Rapunzel hair that drags on the floor.

Another male example is The Emperor in Dissidia: Final Fantasy . It's been part of his design before that if you look at the Amano art, but they were actually emphasized in one cutscene. Rydia from Final Fantasy IV also wears high heeled boots, but only as an adult. As a child, she prefers sandals or low-heeled boots, Depending on the Artist . Rather surprisingly averted in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII , given how Stripperiffic some of Lightning's outfits are. Most of Lightning's garbs give her boots with low or medium heels. In Kingdom Hearts it's kind of easy to miss, but Larxene and Xion, the only female members of Organization XIII, wear heeled boots, which the former practically uses it during her Kick the Dog moment. When Xion turns into Sora at the end she wears sneakers like Roxas. Played with in Portal . Your character has prosthetic knees (boots in the sequel) which allow her to fall indefinitely without dying. However, they make her feet contort in the same way that heels do. Ada Wong in Resident Evil 4 wears high heels to go along with her evening gown.

The opening cutscene of Resident Evil 5 introduces us to Jill Valentine, who wears high-heeled boots through the entire game. Sheva's BSAA outfit wears some boots with semi-reasonable heels and she does plenty of high kicks and flips . All of her alternate costumes also include high heels. Jill's BSAA outfit actually has some sensible boots. Excella Gionne wears high heels in her default costume and actually uses them on knocked down Majini during The Mercenaries Reunion minigame. Helena from Resident Evil 6 always wears high heels, even when she changes her outfit before going to China to deal with Simmons.. The first offense can be partially justified since she didn't fully expect to be involved in a zombie outbreak, but she's still a Secret Service agent. Claire also wears heels in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 , and so does Alex Wesker a.k.a the Overseer to go along with her elegant sense of fashion. Alex notably loses them after her mutation. Moira has a sensible choice of footwear, though. Cindy from the Outbreak games also wears heels.

Made all the more peculiar in the fact that she's a waitress, who normally wear comfortable shoes due to all the walking involved in that job. Holly Summers from No More Heroes . It may be necessary for her to wear the heels... well, heel, as otherwise her real and prosthetic legs would be unbalanced. Shinobu in the sequel also sports a pair. As does Bad Girl Most of the females in the Devil May Cry series, including Trish/Gloria and Lucia. In Dirge of Cerberus , Rosso clicks around in stiletto, thigh-high boots. To say nothing about her butt-cape. Evelynn in League of Legends sports a pair of noticeable heels in game, and even kicks enemies sometimes with her physical attacks. She even points out the difficulty of walking in them. Evelynn: It takes a lot of effort to move like this in heels. Ashe wears high-heeled boots in her Amethyst skin. The splash art for her Freljord skin has them, but she has normal boots in-game. All of Miss Fortune's skins (save for one) wear high-heels in battle.

An amusing example of this trope is her passive ability Strut, which increases her running speed the longer she is out of combat. The icon for this ability is her heels. Most of Vayne's skins have them, as well. Zyra has them, despite not actually wearing clothing. Even female champions that don't have heels in their default skin tend to have them in some of their other skins. Many custom outfits for The Sims have gratuitous heels, even with swimwear. Female elementalist and mesmer boots in Guild Wars are typically high-heeled. Other professions have more sensible footwear. Several years have passed, and players still wonder how come Lady of War Chizuru Kagura from The King of Fighters can fight while wearing stilettos. Shania from Shadow Hearts : From the New World wears high-heeled sandals and not much else... Mai Hem in Perfect Dark Zero wears heels, along with a stripperiffic dress. Hel, the main antagonist of Viking: Battle for Asgard . Ninja Gaiden ; even more so in Sigma 2. Ninjas in heels, anyone? In Saints Row: The Third (and IV , by extension), you can wear 5 inch platforms without having difficulty moving.

But then again, this is the game which allows you to juggle pedestrians 50 feet in the air using explosive ammo. Realism isn't particularly high on it's list of priorities. The same applies to Shaundi as part of her sexyfied revamp. Also available in Saints Row II , for the fashion-conscious boss. Including some graphics issues when it tries to force the Boss to stand flatfooted despite her office pumps. Shiki's boots in The World Ends with You are heeled, but not ridiculously so. The most amusing example of this trope, though, comes in the form of the footwear equipment that, given a high enough Bravery stat, anyone can wear . Of these, the best would have to be the Enamel Pumps — their stats in terms of defense aren't impressive, but the wearer keeps their balance when hit by enemy attacks that would otherwise knock them around. Oh, irony. Dragon Quest IX does something similar. There are several high heel pieces of equipment that female characters can wear and they actually increase evasion rate. The high heels don't look any different than other footwear, though, even though equipment actually shows up on your character in this game.

One of the main party members in Anachronox is a combat assassin who wears stilettos and uses lots of throwing knives. Her name? Stiletto Anyway. Averted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots when Naomi ditches her heels to run quicker. But played straight with Raiden in the same game and in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance , whose cyborg body is equipped with rubberized heels that allow him to grip knives and swords with his feet. In the Fire Emblem series, a sizable portion of the female cast of any given game will be wearing high heels. While this can be at least somewhat excusable for some characters (mounted units for whom the heels serve a somewhat more practical purpose, mages who aren't expected to fight in melee combat, healers who aren't really capable of fighting at all, etc.) a fairly large number of these characters are melee fighters, a couple of them even being thieves or myrmidons, the most agile classes in any given game! This doesn't apply to every game in the series, though, and to what extent it applies to any particular game varies greatly. The first Rival Schools has school nurse Kyoko fighting in high heels.

In Project Justice, she's joined by Tiffany , whose heels are on boots that are somehow part of a cheerleading outfit. Yurika also has heels on those giant red platforms of hers that are as thick as they are high, while Zaki 's metal boots are of the lower-and-thick, more practical kind. In Knights in the Nightmare , both Maria and Meria's suits of full-body armor just so happen to have stiletto heels. Gaap from Umineko: When They Cry . She actually uses them as weapons, though, since when she's not dropping enemies into pits, she's kicking holes in them. Gaap actually *curb stomps* George with her heels in arc 4, leaving a nice clean hole in his forehead. Rose from the Street Fighter Alpha series keeps wearing those sexy red heels in fights. While she is more of a psychic, she still can brawl with the rest of them. Soccer Spirits : Several characters wear heels. Playing soccer. Sharr: "I'll punish you with my heels!" Sonic Rush Series : Blaze the Cat is almost always shown wearing high heels, yet she can run nearly as fast as Sonic himself. And then there's Rouge the Bat ...

Miranda and Samara from Mass Effect 2 . Rather jarring after the practical footwear all the female party members used in the first game . Samara takes this trope literally and breaks someone's neck with her heels. Tela Vasir from the DLC "Lair of The Shadow Broker". The original version of the armor model she wears (it's the hidden "extra heavy armor" from Mass Effect ) didn't have these, but apparently Bioware modified it just for her. Bioware listened to complaints about the high heels. In the second appearance pack, Miranda's alternate outfit replaces them with proper boots, as well as plate armor. And then proceeded to forget about the complaints in time for Mass Effect 3 , when they rolled out EDI's new body as the replacement Ms. Fanservice for Miranda (though, as a robot, it's not as if EDI needs to worry about hurting her muscles or back) Bonne Jenet of Mark of the Wolves wears these. In her most powerful attack, she grabs the enemy... then yanks off a shoe and repeatedly hits them with it. Sakuya Izayoi, the Perfect and Elegant Maid of the Touhou franchise.

Especially noticeable in the fighting games, where she uses those high heels to kick and stomp on her opponents. Ange Serena of Tales of Innocence wears high heels to go along with her large white dress. Which is really quite odd, given that she's a speedy melee character who jumps and moves around a lot with her combos. Super Smash Bros. : All the regal fighters have used them at least once: Princess Peach, Princess Zelda (who lost the pumps for some uggs after Brawl) and Rosalina (which are not such a bother for her as she mainly floats around the battlefield). Zero Suit Samus gets a pair of them in Wii U/3DS, but instead of just cosmetic, they also double as Rocket Boots . Judith of Tales of Vesperia equips these in her secondary weapon slot. Millenia from Grandia II takes this to utter extremes.

Not only does she always fight in her high-heel boots (to be fair, with her stats, she is less of a melee fighter, and more of a Squishy Wizard and the archer), but she also has a Limit Break attack called "Heel Crush", wherein she walks up to an enemy, uses a platform of Hard Light to lift herself just above their head, then stomps it viciously for massive damage. Did we mention she is a full-time Fetish Fuel Station Attendant ? Samus, in Metroid: Other M has what are best described as combat wedges, on her Zero Suit . Persona : Many of the eponymous Personae come toting heels, or, as seen in the first and second games, digitigrade feet. A large slew of Kaneko Kazuma's Persona designs feature both. Persona 3 has Mitsuru Kirijo, being the local badass Ojou , wearing some very sexy heeled boots into battle, and kicks her opponent during her Critical Attack. She once again fights in heels in Persona 4: Arena . In Persona 4 , Kick Chick Chie Satonaka usually wears sensible boots and greaves as her weapons.

However, her strongest weapons look like frilly pink high-heeled boots. Margaret, the Velvet Room assistant, will also fight you, toting a pair of beautiful blue high heels, but she floats during battle, so it doesn't really apply. Persona 5 : Arsene, the Protagonist's main Guardian Entity , has knives for stilts, which reach way past its shoes' soles. They're not just for show either: he uses them in his physical attack animations. A couple of Castlevania examples: In Castlevania: Judgment , Carmilla has literal combat stilettos, as her guard break attack actually involves her leaping into the air and stomping on her opponent. Also, while they aren't pointy stilettos, Alucard wears high-heeled boots. While unequipped, you can press down and attack while falling and he'll do a kick. Sarah Kerrigan 's infestation somehow resulted in her growing a pair of bone stiletto heels out of her feet. [PROTOTYPE] exudes this trope when you put on the disguise of one particular civilian female wearing high heels, especially while executing attacks with your feet/legs.

Parasite Eve starts with Aya dressed for a night at the opera (and, in New Game+ , likely a rifle hidden in that gown), including some cute platform sandals. Then things hit the fan(s). Every female race except the Amani in Tera Online , with Castanics being the most notable. In Brave Soul there are High-Heels that improve the atack power of the wearer, despite none of the characters ever using kicks. in Armored Core For Answer, the Lahire model legs by Omer have high heels, as do the Alicia reverse joint legs made by Rayleonard. not that it matters much, as both of those leg designs specialize in NEX Ts that fly a lot. Super Mario Maker features a new variation of the Goomba's Shoe called the Goomba's Stiletto. It defeats spiked enemies instead of just harmlessly bouncing off of them, applying a Super Mushroom to it gives it a Ground Pound function, and if you put wings on it, the fluttering sound that plays when double-jumping will be replaced with a Noblewoman's Laugh . One of the "Thing" stickers in Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a giant stiletto that crushes enemies repeatedly with its heel.

Fallout: New Vegas (and Fallout 3 too) had a few outfits with a perfectly suitable heel for a housewife at home, or a lady at an office, or to match a slinky black evening gown. Shame that you're wearing them in various barren wastelands, swamps, deserts, rubble-strewn ruins, and vaults ... with grated floors. They're back, albeit slightly lower, in Fallout 4 . A Rare Male Example occurs with Mettaton EX in Undertale . Grand Theft Auto V has Online mode where a female character can wear these. No word yet if it means you're giving enemies three extra inches to target you, or if Hitbox Dissonance makes up for the height differential. In fact, this is the historical origin of high heels . They became a fashion item for men as an imitation of the military equestrian item, then got adopted into women's fashion, then were phased out of men's wear as the fashions changed, and remained a mostly feminine item (see Rule of Sexy ), except in the functional uses described here. It's also easier to keep your feet in place on motorcycle footpegs if there's some heel to your footwear.

Hence, motorcycle boots (like cowboy boots) for both men and women generally have heels somewhere between 1 and 2 inches tall. Again, like cowboy boots, they are rarely stilettos although some womens' designs are both higher and skinnier. This is one reason it's generally accepted that picking a fight with a Drag Queen is a huge mistake, especially since drag queens tend to be tall and can put even more force behind a stiletto. Apparently, female North Korean soldiers wear 4-inch high platform heels while they conduct patrols on the Chinese border along the Yalu River. While not combat-related, a good pair of stripper shoes (i.e. high-heeled, but with a platform under the ball of the foot to reduce the height differential) actually qualify as sports equipment for Samba dancers, particularly those who participate in Carnival-type parades, where they will be dancing non-stop for hours. Antonia Eklund, who moved from Britain to Brazil to tSrain as a Samba dancer, discusses it (among other things) in an article here .

Question: What word refers either to a sharp knife or a high heel?
Answer: Stiletto