Manga / Black Lagoon

She smokes cigarettes and guns!

"Rock, if you think about it, other than this, what do we really value in life? God? Love? Don't make me laugh. When I was a brat, crawling around in that shithole city, it seemed God and Love were always sold out when I went looking. Before I knew better, I clung to God and prayed to Him every single night — yeah, I believed in God right up until that night the cops beat the hell out of me for no reason at all. All they saw when they looked at me was another little ghetto rat. With no power and no God, what's left for a poor little Chinese bitch to rely on? It's money, of course, and guns. Fuckin' A. With these two things, the world's a great place."

— Revy

After barely graduating from a Japanese community college and landing a job as an underpaid salaryman in the shipping and handling department of Asahi Industries, Rokuro Okajima seems destined to live a life of abused mediocrity as a small cog in a large corporate machine. But fate has other plans for him.

Rokuro's life changes forever when the company asks him to deliver a data diskette to a customer in the South China Sea — his ship comes under attack by pirates with a torpedo boat, who nab the disc and bring him with them as a hostage for ransom. Twenty-four hours later — after a series of events that include being nearly shot by his captors, surviving a bar shootout, being chased by a gunship helicopter, and being declared legally dead by his own company — Rokuro (now rechristened with the nickname "Rock") joins up with the pirates, a gang of Americans who run a small boat courier service known as the Lagoon Delivery Company.

Rock's compatriots in the Lagoon crew include:

• Dutch, an imposing African-American veteran of The Vietnam War^† (or possibly not) who serves as the head of Lagoon Company and the captain of the Black Lagoon.
• Revy, a sociopathic, nihilistic, Chinese-American thug who works as the Lagoon Company's primary muscle. Her nickname, "Two Hands", comes from her unique style of shooting.
• Benny, a Floridian communications expert and hacker who ran into trouble with the FBI and the Mafia back home; he acts as the Lagoon Company's technical expert and the boat's radar/radio operator.

The crew makes their living out of the fictional Thai city of Roanapur by "acquiring" goods (legal or otherwise) and delivering them, no questions asked, on behalf of the various criminal elements who effectively run the city — and at times, the crew has to "persuade" the owners to hand over the goods...

Black Lagoon is a seinen action manga series created by Rei Hiroe and published since 2002 by Shogakukan (with an English localization by Viz Media). The series delves into the underbelly of international crime like a Tarantino-esque crime story in Southeast Asia, while also ruminating on existentialism, a man's place in the world, and the thin line between civilization and savagery.

The manga was adapted for anime by Madhouse in 2006, and was licensed by Geneon and dubbed into English by The Ocean Group. In total it consists of two twelve-episode seasons covering the manga series through the "Fujiyama Gangster Paradise" arc, and an OVA of the subsequent arc titled Roberta's Blood Trail.

This series has also become notorious for going on hiatus, to the extent that it is regularly compared to Berserk and Hunter × Hunter in terms of how frequently the updates start and stop. There was an almost-three-year hiatus from June 2010 to March 2013 before the series started releasing new chapters. As of February 2014, there were no new releases except for May 2014 when Volume 10 of the manga was released in Japan (American release date April 2015)... which not-so-coincidentally covered up to all the then-released chapters. Chapter 88 finally dropped in May 2017, more than three years after the previous chapter. The manga then went on hiatus again in August 2018 after Chapter 101 was released... which was just enough material to compile Volume 11 together. Publication resumed in September 2019 with Chapter 102, though Hiroe confirmed in an interview reprinted in volume 12 that the series would conclude in the forseeable future.

Sawyer is in a manga spinoff illustrated by Tatsuhiko Iida known as Sawyer the Cleaner - Dismemberment! Gore Gore Girl, while Eda is in Eda -Initial Stage- by Hajime Yamamura.

Not to be confused with Creature from the Black Lagoon.

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Trope Lagoon:

Tropes # to C

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: The vehicles, which can get pretty obvious at times, but is especially noticeable during the chase scenes.
• Abuse Discretion Shot:
  • The abuse endured by Hansel and Gretel, including having to star in child porn and snuff movies, isn't exactly described but reactions by various characters show it to have been pretty bad.
  • Similarly, there's only a few plans of Revy being abused by her father or raped by NYPD cops, and they don't directly show the abuse itself.
• A-Team Firing:
  • When two main characters are fighting. The most egregious example is Revy vs. Roberta.
  • Mister Chang stands in place without being hit while enough bullets are fired at him to completely destroy his car.
• Action Girl: Fabiola is a knight in a maid uniform. The other female warriors are considerably darker about their action.
• Actor Allusion: In the English dub of Roberta's Blood Trail, Roberta yells "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" at the hallucination of the Japanese worker whom she killed years ago. Her voice actress also voiced another character who regularly says that quote.
• Adaptation Distillation: The "Roberta's Blood Trail" OVA.
  • On the one hand, it had the tough task of adapting a manga story arc ("El Baile De La Muerte") that some say went on for too long and suffered from poor pacing. For reference, the OVA lasts about as long as the Japan arc from the second season (the equivalent of six episodes), but had to adapt twice as many chapters. The OVA compressed the narrative and streamlined the fight scenes to make them more exciting.
  • On the other hand, it also cut through important information and changed the order of scenes for dramatic emphasis. Also, the OVA removed some scenes that explained things like Chang and Balalaika's conversation about Grey Fox at the dock, and how Chang asked Balalaika to avoid attacking them, but only provide cover so they can escape Roanapur – she was indecisive at that point, which was not present in the OVA, but only in pictures through Rock's flashbacks. Also, the short conversation between Caxton and Dutch about Vietnam, and Caxton's subsequent warning to Benny and Rock that Dutch is lying about his past, is gone.
• Adaptation Expansion: The anime version removed characterization and changed mood-setting moments to the story compared to the more psychological and action-oriented manga version. On the other hand, the anime added a lot more action scenes to the "Rasta Blasta" arc which introduced Roberta (for instance, the physics-defying car chase between her and Lagoon Company isn't present in the manga). The opening chapter of the series is extended across two episodes.
• Affably Evil: Most of the main and supporting cast have rather pleasant and upbeat personalities to go with all the nasty things they do for a living, though only sometimes when opposed to one another. A big example comes in "Moonlit Hunting Grounds."
  Alfred: Honesty is wonderful. Hypocrisy rots this world. I sincerely wish your kind will one day be wiped off the face of this planet.
  Dutch: Thank you kindly. And I sincerely wish that you rot in hell.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Hansel and Gretel are mourned by Rock as tragic victims despite being batshit crazy and violent.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us/The Siege: The "Greenback Jane" arc.
  Dutch: Somebody set my dock on fire! MOTHERFUCKER!!
• Anachronism Stew: Mild version. The series takes place in the early 1990s, but the computers they use are pretty darn 2000s-esque, and the Gray Foxes use EOTech sights (first introduced in the mid to late 1990s). A few weapons in Hotel Moscow's small arms arsenal are actually made in the late 1990s to the mid 2000s.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: Balalaika states that she'll destroy people who cross her by targeting their friends, family and even their pet dog in the first episode of season 2.
• Anger Born of Worry:
  • At the end of the "Goat, Jihad, and Rock and Roll" arc, Revy, having managed to save Rock from kidnappers with a mixture of her characteristic ultraviolence and uncharacteristic guile, rips strips off him for being stupid enough to be kidnapped. Then they go off together.
  • In the Japan arc, after Rock gets into a confrontation with Balalaika that nearly leads to a gunfight between Balalaika, Boris, and Revy, Revy tears into Rock in a fury.
    "Over here, I'm your gun! I could keep you alive through Tarawa or the Alamo! But I can't save someone who's that anxious to die! If you weren't you, I'd have shot you myself for being so stupid!"
• Animated Actors: The setting of the author's Winter 2012 Comiket doujinshi. Benny is a Nice Character, Mean Actor, everyone else are in Mean Character, Nice Actor group, both of the twins are girls, and Revy is wearing a dominatrix suit.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Averted: In the "Greenback Jane" arc, the only hired gun to walk away from the warehouse siege under his own power was the one who thought to wear a bulletproof vest.
  • Later used completely straight in the "Baile de la Muerte" arc. Most if not all of the Black Ops unit are wearing ballistic vests, most likely with trauma plates. Not one of them manages to stop the black powder sabot flechette rounds fired from a musket by Roberta.
• Art Evolution:
  • At the start of the manga, Balalaika looks in her 20s, Revy has short hair and definitely looks Asian. Revy's hair gets longer and longer through the first arc (which takes place over a day or two) and slowly becomes less Asian-looking. Balalaika shows up in the second arc looking about 10 years older. The designs don't change much after that though.
  • Also, while not as a drastic change as the above, Roberta's hair grows at an incredibly fast speed, from chest height to waist height in her introductory arc.
  • Garcia's hit puberty in "El Baile de la Muerte", but is obviously a tad older when in the boat with the Gray Foxes. Compare when he tried to kill Caxton earlier.
• Artistic License – Cars: The series explicitly states that Roanapur is in Thailand. However, every car shown in the series has the steering wheel on the left side and traffic in and around the city drives on the right (like in the USA and China). In reality, Thailand's road rule is the opposite: traffic there drives on the left and most cars have their steering wheels on the right (like in the UK and Japan). It would make a lot more sense if Roanapur was in neighbouring Cambodia.
• Artistic License – History:
  • In the Hansel & Gretel arc, Balalaika's Number Two Boris recalls serving alongside Romanian troops in Afghanistan during the 1979-89 Soviet-Afghan War. Romania, though part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, did not support the Soviet occupation nor did they provide troops: in fact they, alongside North Korea, condemned the invasion.
  • Some of Hotel Moscow's small arms, like the MP-443 Grach, were only developed in the early 2000s. The series is set in the mid-late-90's.
• Artistic License – Ships: Cool Boat though the Lagoon might be, there's only three 80-foot Elco PT boats known to still exist. The rest were scrapped following the end of World War II. And as badass as that stunt to take down the helicopter was, due to the design of the Elco, actually attempting that in real life would have torn the propellers and rudders clean off and left the crew stranded if not taking on water.
• Asian Speekee Engrish: Largely averted, however Shenua speaks in heavily-accented and broken English, leading to Revy^note who is herself Chinese-American, making for some Hypocritical Humor here dubbing her "Chinglish."
• Authority Equals Asskicking:
  • Balalaika and Mr. Chang are the heads of their groups, and among the most lethal people in the series, and Dutch is shown to kick much ass in his own time.
  • Averted, in that Roberta and Ginji are even deadlier than just about anyone else in the series… and have jobs as a maid and a manservant street vendor respectively. Also averted in the case of the bosses of Colombian Cartel and Sicilian Mafia, who end up as mere Mooks compared to the protagonists or major villains, though they don't have very much authority to begin with.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Janet's forgeries are deemed this by her employers, something which Revy and Eda agree with. Janet's team were able to produce very high quality forgeries but her perfectionism made the project exceed its deadline and go way over budget.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Hansel and Gretel, as well as Revy herself when the "Whitman Fever" takes hold in the Nazi arc. Roberta, during the course of the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc.
  • It should be noted that Hansel is literally axe-crazy. He kills people with a battle axe almost as big as he is.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Revy and Chang blasting a way out of the Lagoon Company's office past Ibraha's goons.
  • Revy and Eda do this at least once.
• Badass Army:
  • Balalaika's Vysotniki. Justified as they are all former Russian Special Forces. Through all the story arc's they've been in, we've seen a total of two fatalities. Two. And boy did Hansel suffer for killing them.
  • There's Caxton's Gray Fox Unit. In addition to their military careers before the events of "El Baile de la Muerte", they've survived a few dozen hired mercenaries (albeit mook-level ones), contact with elite FARC soldiers, Revy and Shenhua (who they disarmed rather easily), as well as close contact and a gunfight with Roberta. Thrice. Especially considering they were funnelled into several situations that should have killed them. Eda warns Chang that if he pursues them into the jungle, he and his men are as good as dead. Their established badassery only shows further how dangerous Roberta is when she kills several of them. And even then, they're under orders not to kill her by that point.
    • In the anime adaptation, the battle is less one-sided, as Gray Fox cripple Roberta for life as she tries killing them. By the time Garcia manages to put his plan into action, it's ambiguous whether he's saving Gray Fox from Roberta, or Roberta from Gray Fox.
    • Balalaika even goes as far as to call the Vysotniki Gray Fox's dark reflection.
• Badass Boast:
  • Subverted. Wacky Nazi Fritz/Blitz Stanford boasts about his .454 Luger... giving Revy enough time to calmly reload and shoot him.
    Stanford: Are you afraid?! There's no way you're not! Now witness the awesome power of—
    *BANG*
    Revy: Shut the fuck up.
  • Eda's retort to Chang in chapter 56:
    "And another thing, smack talk has no effect on those stronger than you. You and your men have the power to bring men and whole companies to your heels, but we have the power to bring entire nations to our heels, if not to ruin."
• Badass Crew: Black Lagoon crew itself. For some people's definition of "crew", Balalaika's Vysotniki.
• Badass Longcoat:
  • Subverted with Lotton the Wizard. While he does carry a Cool Gun (a Mauser C96), Cool Shades and wears a Badass Longcoat, his first appearance in an action scene ended with him being shot off of a rooftop before he could finish his In the Name of the Moon speech (the Longcoat did work in that it hid his bulletproof vest, though, so at least he was able to walk away from it...). It hasn't really gotten any better for him since.
  • Meanwhile, played straight with Balalaika, Mr. Chang, and Ginji.
• Badass Pacifist: Rock, who is able to argue with some of the most psychotically violent characters on the show, and not get killed. Sometimes he even wins, and all without ever picking up any weapon more lethal than (once) a chair.
  • In episode 2 he comes up with the idea of launching a boat into the air and firing a torpedo at an attack helicopter. More importantly, it works.
    • He negotiates his way through Sister Yolanda while Revy and Eda are pointing guns at each other, without looking up from his tea. He's an intelligent badass.
    • Late in the series, while Roanapur is going to hell in a hand basket, Dutch and Benny are relaxing inside the Lagoon office. At one point, they comment about the craziness going on outside their front door and each one agrees that it would be much worse if Rock actually learned how to shoot a gun.
    • He's also the only character (aside from Roberta) to cross Balalaika and live to talk about it.
    • How about actually snatching Revy's gun from in front of his face before she can pull the trigger? In truth, she hesitated and may have only pulled the trigger because the gun jerked in her hand, but it still takes balls of titanium to attempt it with Revy's gun in your face to begin with.
• Bad Guy Bar: The Yellow Flag, exploded on a seemingly weekly basis. The bartender has armored the bar to survive inevitable shootouts.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy:
  • During Balalaika's retelling of Hansel and Gretel's past, this trope is in effect at one point. Black Lagoon being the kind of show that it is, this scene may or may not be a example of this trope at all, but the alternative would be much, much worse.
  • Averted in the manga; Roberta's nipples are clearly visible when she is in the shower mourning the loss of her master. As are Revy's later on. Same in the OVA.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Eda's bushwhacking of Jane, although it has elements of Gambit Roulette.
  Revy: It's like you gathered together all the "ifs" in the world for this lame-ass plan.
  Eda: Hey, this has worked four of the last seven times I tried it!
  • Jane pulls one on Feng. She hires her knowing that she is a PLA agent sent to spy on her, and tricks her into hacking a corporation while she and her hacker partners observe. Not only do they manage to steal Feng's hacking methods, but they also get more than enough proof of the PLA hack that they can sell it to the corporation for a nice profit.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: The only aversion is the result of Revy and Roberta's fist fight, as the blood and bruises distort their faces for a few scenes near the fight's conclusion.
• Berserk Button: Questioning Revy's cynicism - depending on the length of inquiry - will end with a cocked pistol to your head, shooting at the Rip-Off Church will incur the wrath of their working sisters upon you, doing anything even remotely threatening or inhibiting to Garcia demands your murder at Roberta's hands.
• Between My Legs:
  • Done at one point with Revy framing a very unlucky guy about to get what's coming to him in what's probably a For Your Eyes Only reference. Well, judge for yourself◊.
  • Also used when Gretel tries to show her gratitude to Rock for being the first person who was ever nice to her and crying for her... by dropping her panties and sexually proposing to him, thinking that is the only way an adult could ever appreciate her in return. Needless to say Rock is less than pleased.
• Bilingual Bonus: In Episode 6 (in the dub), Alfred the old Nazi who hired the Black Lagoon company calls Dutch a "Schwarzen"^note which was grammatically wrong in this sentence; correct would've been "Schwarzer", which offends the latter. Anybody who knows German can tell you that it means "black man" in a derogatory sense in that context.
  • In the original manga and Japanese audio track of the anime, Alfred calls Dutch "Jungle Bunny-kun".
  • In the German dub, Alfred calls Dutch first "nigger" and then "Schwarzer" (just like in the English dub, but grammatically correct).
• Black-and-Gray Morality: The Lagoon Company is not really "evil" per se, they're just Hired Guns who often do morally questionable things for money. Just about the worst thing they've done so far was to unintentionally help kidnap a child (Garcia) and plan to sell him off for money. With few extraordinary exceptions, most characters in the series don't try to be particularly nasty, but the trades they're involved in are unquestionably immoral.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: When Jane tries explaining her counterfeiting techniques to Yolanda, Eda, and Revy. It's obvious none of them seem to understand what she's saying, nor do they seem to care too much, and finally Revy and Eda shut her up. Jane then gives them a real hundred dollar bill and a fake one, and asks them to spot the fake. Revy chooses one, and Jane tells her that she'd be going to jail shortly afterwards for using a counterfeit bill.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The Lagoon Company's beer of choice is "Heireken", complete with green-and-white cans. Odd, since they explicitly mention other name brands, such as Bacardi rum and Beretta pistols.
  • Don't forget the use of American Spirit cigarettes. Benny acts as if they're low-grade cigs, however.
  • Cars on the other hand, surprisingly do not get this treatment.
  • It also features an obviously embarrassed Revy, Balalaika, and Roberta in cosplay clothes at an anime convention, and a parody of Yuri.
  • A doujin reimagined the cast as Animated Actors of a ten-season, live-action TV show shot in the Phillipines with Revy's "actress" as a Hong Kong starlet Playing Against Type who likes kids, Rock's as a bespectacled third-gen Japanese-American TV drama actor who learned the language for the role, Dutch as a photogenic Captain Ersatz for Taye Diggs, Benny as another Playing Against Type actor... this time, a bad boy sort constantly getting into trouble and showing up too often in tabloids, Balalaika as a Russian-American who arrives early for the burn scar makeup, Chang as a soft-spoken Hong Kong star, the Vampire Twins Hansel and Gretel being a pair of twin girls who are all grown up from their appearance in Season 3 and an overall massive case of Mean Character, Nice Actor.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: The head nun of the Rip-Off Church sports a golden pistol. Not any gold-plated pistol, a gold-plated Desert Eagle. The Captain of the Neo-Nazis himself had a gold-plated long-barreled Luger (for all the good that did him). Revy and Mr. Chang both have custom engraving on their guns; Revy's "Sword Cutlass" Beretta 92Fs are further customized as well.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: Parodied in the Greenback Jane arc. In Heroic Bloodshed movies, the church is usually there to be a cool and somber shootout spot, and not so much for its ability to sport gunslinging nuns who blow the ever-loving crap out of the invaders. Like this.
• Blown Across the Room: And oddly enough, also lampshaded in a 'that's not how things work' way. Once.
• Book Ends: "The Wired Red Card" arc begins and ends with Rock and Benny having a conversation about all they went through over a game of darts.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Made particularly obvious when Gretel unloads a seemingly endless wave of bullets from her BAR without reloading once. The number of shell casings easily exceeds the magazine's capacity by degrees of magnitude.
  • Inversely played for drama: The more Revy has to reload, the more serious the scene is.
• Bowdlerize:
  • The "Goat, Jihad, & Rock n' Roll" arc was heavily edited for the anime. The manga explicitly named the Islamic terrorists as being part of Hezbollah, but the anime used a fictional name for their group. In addition, the manga's drawings of the terrorists had them wearing keffiyehs, including Ibraha, but the anime changed it to ski masks and left Ibraha bare-headed. Coincidentally, these episodes originally aired in the summer of 2006. A few weeks later, Israel and Hezbollah went to war. Again.
  • When Leigharch serves as Rock and Revy's get away driver at one point, in the anime he his high off his ass on marijuana. In the manga, he was using cocaine. Given his state of mind and actions following the pick up, the latter drug makes much more sense but was presumably too "hard" a drug to make it into a network tv show.
  • When the anime aired on Toonami, edits had to be made for language and some of the more gory scenes but even with said edits, Black Lagoon was still pushing the limits of what Toonami could air at the time.
• Braids of Action: Roberta, FARC terrorist turned maid-cum-bodyguard who is very well armed, has braids.
• Bring My Brown Pants: When Balalaika describes how she discovered the identities of the killers in the Hansel & Gretel arc by having her soldiers bring her the city's main porn distributor, she mentions that "the back seat of that cab will never be the same."
• Broken Bird:
  • Revy is a particularly dark and violent version. Balalaika as well. Sawyer too.
  • And then there's Roberta, who was broken, reassembled, and broken a second time. The results aren't pretty.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • The Lagoon Company's Elco PT boat. Keep in mind most of these were destroyed after WWII as well.
  • A practically literal example occurs with both Fabiola and Roberta, who borrow a few select pieces from the Lovelace family's private collection whenever they go to the city.
• Break the Cutie: Balalaika. For proof, see these◊ two◊ pictures of her before and after the war. Not to mention Hansel and Gretel. Oh God, were they ever broken. Yukio gets her mind snapped due to the pressure of being forced to lead a Yakuza clan as well as getting kidnapped, beaten up, and molested. Garcia, who has it broken several times during the El Baile de la Muerte arc.
• Breather Episode: Technically breather arc. The series can get fairly oppressive at times with its depiction of both violence and life on the fringes. The "Greenback Jane" arc however is almost entirely played for laughs, largely featuring a cadre of freaks and dumbasses chasing after an unlikable counterfeiter with the Lagoon crew smack dab in the middle of the nonsense thanks to Eda's scheming.
• Bringing Running Shoes to a Car Chase: Roberta overtakes the Lagoon Crew's vehicle at a dead run and leaping right on the rear with a trench knife. There's a reason she's often compared to the Terminator.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Most of the Roanapur gangster community, in one way or another. For example, Sawyer. A Cute Mute goth who specializes in corpse disposal and uses a chainsaw in combat. She's rather sociable when able to communicate with others, but becomes downright catatonic when she can't.
  "…Goddammit. I can't tell if these people are stupid or professionals." —Dutch, after finding the Lagoon's bridge destroyed by the Ninja left behind by the pirates being led by a gangster and druggie.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Bao. His bar has been shot up at least fifteen times, nearly destroyed six times, and utterly demolished once as of "El Baile de la Muerte".
  • Lotton is another example, but given his crazy preparedness, that might point at something else.
• The Cartel: One of the four main power factions in Roanapur is the Colombians. They're the second weakest group, interested mainly in trafficking heroin, but their actions back home resulted in Roberta coming to pay them a visit…
• Carnival of Killers: In the "Greenback Jane" arc, we have an obese Mormon pyromaniac who is always smiling, a chainsaw-wielding "cleaner" goth lady with an artificial voicebox, a flamboyant gunslinger calling himself "Lotton the Wizard," a cowboy, and a Chinese knife fighter hired to hunt down and kill the eponymous Jane. In fact, one of the episodes that features them is titled "The Roanapur Freakshow Circus".
  • Revy and Shenhua having a friendly chat while trying to kill each other.
  • Revy's tendency to sing along to her Walkman while getting in shootouts early in the manga.
• Caught Monologuing: A hulking neo-Nazi named Blitz Stanford manages to get the drop on Revy while she's out of ammo... only to waste time bragging about how awesome his gun is, giving her an opportunity to reload and shut him up for good.
• Cerebus Callback: Leigharch is introduced in the al-Shabaab arc as Shenhua's partner: a Getaway Driver who uses enough drugs to embarrass Ozzy Osbourne and consequently has constant absurd hallucinations. Unfortunately, when Shenhua reappears flying solo in a later story, we learn that Leigharch overdosed offscreen and is now permanently institutionalized.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Season One definitely had some dark themes, but Season Two was really dark. And then "Roberta's Blood Trail" happened.
• Character Development: Takes a while but it happens.
  • Revy: Straw Nihilist —> Defrosting Ice Queen. It's a race to see if she becomes an honest-to-God human being before Roanapur completely destroys Rock. Revy's starting to realize this. If her behavior toward Fabiola at the end of El Baile de la Muerte is any indication, she is not happy.
  • Rock: Naïve Newcomer —> Action Survivor —> And now seems to be on track to becoming a Magnificent Bastard.
  • Roberta: Call to Agriculture —> Ax-Crazy She Who Fights Monsters. Roberta would've been content to stay with the Lovelaces as their maid for the rest of time, but when her master was killed in "El Baile de la Muerte", she sets off down an ultimately self-destructive path of vengeance.
• Charles Atlas Superpower:
  • The series is set in 1990's Thailand, but with characters like Sawyer (who can deflect bullets with a chainsaw), Shenhua (who takes out military vehicles with knives), and especially Roberta (who has enough muscle strength to bite through metal, and just generally seems invulnerable) this trope comes up a lot.
  • Shenhua, whose favorite weapons are twin kukris. On chains. That she is able to throw and whirl with impressive accuracy. Kukris are not throwing weapons — they're closer to a axe/machete hybrid.
• Chekhov's Gun: The pistol Balalaika used to slay Boss Kousa and then threw into the ornamental pool is clearly shown to have a fingerprint on it, presumably Rock's from when she handed it to him. Its true meaning is to show that Rock can never return to his home country, because now he is a prime suspect in the murder of a Yakuza boss.
• Child Soldiers: It is mentioned that Balalaika and at least some of her men fought them in Afghanistan.
• The Chessmaster:
  • Balalaika usually plays this by crushing the enemy with superior tactics.
  • Rock becomes one in "El Baile de la Muerte", yet he is defeated (sort of) by Eda and the CIA.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • The English dub, as evident by Black Lagoon: The Fucking Short Version, which counted 259 fucks over the span of 24 episodes (and missed a few more) – that's nearly eleven fucks per episode, or one every two minutes. The original Japanese is not lacking in English profanity, either.
  • And since this dub uses The Ocean Group, a studio and voice actor pool known for dubbing many anime and Western children's cartoons, hearing these voice actors dropping F-bombs all over the place is pretty surreal. Case in point: Revy's voice actress plays one of the sisters in Johnny Test for crying out loud!
  • The funny bit? Pay attention: Revy is a minimum of half of the "fucks" spoken. Everyone else Cluster-Bombs. She Carpet-Bombs.
  • The Toonami broadcast tries to get away with as much as it can in terms of language, but ultimately still censors out any instances of the F-bomb, effectively turning the show into a Cluster Bleep-Bomb.
• Compressed Adaptation: The anime version of the "Goat, Jihad, & Rock n' Roll" arc cuts out a Chase Scene between the Black Lagoon and boats under the control of Abu Sayyaf that ends with Rock and Revy sinking a hijacked freighter that had been used to box them in (in a similarly MacGyvered way to the helicopter-torpedoing thing from the pilot).
• Cool Boat:
  • The Lagoon, a WWII-vintage PT boat, retrofitted with metal armor plates and having had its deck guns removed.
  • The Lagoon operates as a courier, so having the guns on deck probably doesn't bode well when dealing with authorities (those they can't bribe anyway). They can probably pass the torpedo tubes as either ship weight, empty, or just too big to detach.
• Cool Car: Lagoon Company's main mode of transportation on land is a sexy and rare 1968 Plymouth Road Runner, and later a 1965 Pontiac GTO.
• Cool Shades:
  • Dutch, Mr. Chang, and Eda all wear glasses and all of them are cunning badasses. At certain angles, Eda's shades bear a striking resemblance to Kamina's.
  • Lotton wears them and is still pretty cool, just not as cool as anyone else in the cast.
• Corrupt Church: The Rip-Off Church; it's uncertain if it is a real church, a Catholic-flavored gun cartel, or something more complicated. Volume 7 of the manga shows that the Rip-Off Church is involved with information brokering as well as gun-running, with Eda working as a Deep Cover Agent for the CIA. The head nun, Sister Yolanda, appears to have an Intelligence background herself, as her offhand comment naming Eda's boss indicates.
• Corrupting Pornography: "Hansel and Gretel" are a pair of twins who were sold to child pornographers by their orphanage when its funding dried up after the fall of communism in their native Romania. They were shunted into snuff films and made to brutally murder other children, and grew to enjoy it probably as much as a survival tactic as anything else, then were trained to fight on top of it. In the series proper, they're brought to Roanapur by The Mafia in an attempt to start a Proxy War with Hotel Moscow.
• Covers Always Lie: See those cute kids on the fourth dvd cover?◊ They're not as harmless as they look.
• Crapsack World: Boy is it ever! To give an example: during the Hansel and Gretel arc, Balalaika, having received the vital clue that the mysterious psychos attacking her organization are twin children who speak Romanian, calls in the main pornographic distributor in Roanapur asking him to supply her with every child porno and/or child snuff film featuring Romanian twins. She promptly gets over 250 videos.
• Crazy-Prepared: While performing her BDSM show at Goof Fest, Revy kept a pistol on her sub partner's back just in case she needed to use it. She did.
• Creepy Twins: Hansel and Gretel were put in the Trope Pantheon (the family one) because of their commitment to the idea of making their twinness as creepy as possible. The gender switching, the torture, the death worshipping blood lust, what one of them thinks is "thanking" Rock etc.
• Creepy Children Singing: "My mother has killed me. My father is eating me. My brothers and sisters sit under the table, picking up my bones! They'll bury them under the cold—". It appears to be a slightly changed version of a song from Grimms' fairy tale "The Juniper Tree".
• Cross Counter: Revy and Roberta's fistfight ends with one.
• Crossover: With Jormungand, funnily enough. Not surprisingly, Koko wraps herself around Revy's leg before getting her to buy a crap-ton of extra stuff on top of the Lagoon Company's weapons order. ^note American MRE rations, a Gary action-figure, an exercise set, and a lot of high-class makeup.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • After holding off droves of pissed-off gunmen and FARC troops, Gray Fox are summarily slaughtered by Roberta because they're under orders to bring her back alive.
  • They put up a much better fight in the anime, by operating under a looser definition of "alive". Roberta killed about half of them, but doing so left her crippled for life. Her right leg and left arm needed to be amputated, she only had three fingers left on her remaining hand, and her right eye had been shot out. She'd taken so many game-breaking injuries that she would never fight again.

Tropes D To L

• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: Subverted. Although The Lagoon Company and Balalaika's Hotel Moscow branch initially appear to be playing this straight, the series makes it very obvious that these are not happy people. Balalaika and her men were more or less forced into a life of crime after they were screwed over by their own government.
• Dark Action Girl: Just about every female warrior on this show counts because they're all criminals of some flavor or another.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Half of the damned cast, though Hansel and Gretel take the cake. All in all, some horrible thing or another from their past led most of the cast to Roanapur in the first place.
  • Averted, and Discussed often concerning Rock. He lived a fairly normal and privileged life in Tokyo, if a bit boring and routine. His defection was more caused by dissatisfaction with the mundane and subservient life of a Salary Man.
• Deadpan Snarker: Dutch with his infamous "Amen, hellaluha and peanutbutter". Many other characters also have such lines
• Death Glare: Much is made of the "Mad Dog" eyes of Roberta. Most other badass characters in the series have this as well, combined with a Slasher Smile.
  • When Revy tumbles that he's Not My Driver, Takenaka keeps up his usual Affably Evil demeanor, but a close-up shows the cold stare hiding behind his tinted glasses.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Balalaika and Chang, sort of. More like "Shooting Each Other In The Guts Means Grudging Respect With A Hint Of Sexual Tension".
• Did They or Didn't They?: After the Yakuza arc, Eda asks in no uncertain terms if Revy "did it" with Rock while both of them in Japan. Revy's reaction? A sullen, mumbled "I don't wanna talk about it..." This answer could be read a few different ways.
• Dirty Communists: Roberta used to be one until she grew disillusioned with the revolution. Her former organization, the FARC, are one of the factions after her in the "El Baile" arc, being led by a Cuban commando.
• Dirty Cop: The entire Roanapur police force. They're paid off by enough factions to the point where few crimes around the city actually go investigated. Mr. Chang was likely one too, before he became a full Triad member.
• Discriminate and Switch: Maybe? Greenback Jane takes to calling Feng Yifei (a Chinese hacker) things like "Miss Fu Manchu" and "Miss Peking Duck", but this might only be because she was spying for the PRC.
• Doesn't Like Guns:
  • Rock. Everyone else, on the other hand...
  • Also, Shenhua. She prefers knives.
  • And Sawyer. She likes chainsaw.
  • Let's not forget Claude "Torch" Weaver unless count a flamethrower as a gun.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Revy's follow-up to the page quote, including a threat that she'll shoot Rock if he ever tries to bring it up again.
• Downer Ending:
  • The Hansel and Gretel Arc. It's not entirely their fault that they're psychopathic murderers but it's explicitly stated that all they will do – all they can do – is kill people, so they both are killed. The same can be said about the final Yakuza arc. Lampshaded by Benny: "Stories like this don't have happy endings."
  • The Fujiyama Gangster Paradise arc ends with Rock failing in his attempt to save Yukio, nearly getting Revy killed, and the other Yakuza clans beyond the Washimine clan being annihilated by Hotel Moscow as part of Balalaika's entry to the Japanese criminal market.
• Dressed Like a Dominatrix: After accepting Rowan's offer to be a dominatrix for his BDSM show, Revy spends the entirety of Chapter 101 dressed as one. This helps distinguish the real Revy from the imposter disguised as Revy.
• Dress Hits Floor: Gretel does this. It's intended to be disturbing. We also aren't sure of her gender.
• Drinking Game: One right here.
• Driving Question: In the L'homme sombre arc, it's whether Dutch is tied to the Le Cinq Doigts agents in their quest to hunt for black African men in relation to the aftermath of post-World War II Burkina Faso.
• Drugs Are Bad:
  • Leigharch is implied to have become irreversibly fucked-up after snorting too much coke in the manga. In the anime, his drug of choice is marijuana rather than cocaine (though the fact that he apparently hallucinates under its influence implies there's something more than weed in those joints of his).
  • In the case of Roberta in the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc, she becomes addicted to Ritalin, which may play some part in her apparent psychosis. Then she starts ODing on the pills, which do jack to stop her from hallucinating and it's probably the main reason she does start hallucinating. She's taking them in large part so she can continue without sleeping, and that does a real number on your mental state real quick. See here.
• Dual Wielding: Revy and Chang both carry two guns.
• Eagleland: The series utilizes both variations, but plays heavily into The Boorish.
  • America's less than savory history is referenced a lot. The CIA has a major heroin operation out of Roanapur and a vested interest in keeping the place a chaotic hellhole. The USA backs a few right wing organizations and even deploys the NSA to destabilize various South American socialist movements (the series depicting their attack on the Fifth Republic Movement) in order to keep the wealthy in power. The CIA representative based in Roanapur Eda is ruthless and greedy but by all accounts not a corrupt agent, simply one exhibiting the typical behaviors of the agency.
  • Shane Caxton and the Grey Fox unit are some of the only members of The Brave variant of this trope. They're professional, heroic, effective, and have a sense of loyalty and comradery to each other. Caxton himself goes out of his way to rescue civilians and minimize the damage his people cause. The contrast is best shown in flashback where his unit try and rape a young Vietnamese woman after massacring her village; Caxton protects her and fights them off but is the only one to do so.
  • The Neveral Cartel provide an example of The Boorish that's not connected to the government. Elvis and Russel are idiots plain and simple. They barge into Roanapur throw their weight around expecting to bring everyone to heel and consistently have the situation blow up in their face. Elvis's stupidity in dealing with their contracted tech people leaves the gang at a tremendous monetary loss and his attempts to start a gang war in Roanapur end with him getting killed.
• Earn Your Title:
  • Revy is known as "Two-Hands" for her style of fighting.
  • Roberta is known as the "Bloodhound of Florencia" because once she has a target there is no stopping her and presumably also was earned for what she does when she catches her target.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Balalaika's enforcers are former Russian Special Forces called Visotoniki (who fought with her in Afghanistan), and the name is, surprisingly, not just for show.
  • FARC deploys its Sumasas fighters in the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc. And they're led by a Cuban Formación de Misiones Especial Naval (Naval Special Mission Formation) commando dispatched from Havana.
• Establishing Character Moment: Major Caxton gets an excellent one in the first episode of Roberta's Blood Trail, where he takes on his entire unit in Vietnam to stop them from raping a little girl, and wins.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Both Lagoon Company and Balalaika take a dim view on their more sadistic, cowardly, or just plain petty enemies.
  • Balalaika and Chang are disgusted over the child porn/snuff business that spawned Hansel and Gretel, with Chang pointing out what a shitty world it is for that kind of thing to exist.
  • Some of Verrochio's men are disgusted when they see Hansel and Gretel mutilate the dead body of a Hotel Moscow soldier.
  • Dutch calls out Elroy (who arranges getaways and fake papers) for killing a client, saying that he just threw away decades of trust and no one would hire him now. Though in Elroy's case it was One Last Job as he wanted to get out of the business and look after his sick son.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Not to mention a few boats, although various high explosives and incendiary rounds were applied to them.
• Everybody Smokes: Especially Revy. If she's not drinking, she's got a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Or both. The fact that even the relatively wimpy Rock smokes is pretty much a dead give away of the author's opinion on smoking. Also justified in that it takes place in the early 1990s, when smoking was far more common and accepted than it became in the following decades.
• Everyone Can See It: Rock and Revy. Eda constantly brings him up with Revy, and the one day Rock wasn't with her Bao asked if the "lovebirds" had had a fight. It should be noted that while neither Rock nor Revy have confirmed that they have feelings for one another, neither have explicitly denied it, either.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • (For sliding values of "Good" and "Evil") When Balailaka is dealing with Hansel, he seems genuinely unable to understand her response to his actions.
  • Gretel's response to Rock's attempt to redeem her is confusion.
  • Rock himself frequently fascinates, bewilders, or annoys his criminal contemporaries because he sees things from moral angles they can't even conceptualize.
• Evil Gloating: Parodied with Fritz/Blitz Stanford. When he gets the drop on Revy, instead of simply shooting her he makes a ridiculously grandiose and over the top speech about how superior he is and how he wields "this terrible gun". Revy promptly shuts him "the fuck up" with a bullet.
• Evil Versus Evil: You're either a mafia leader, an apathetic criminal, an asshole, or a complete psychopath, or Rock, and even he's steadily becoming more and more evil.
• Eye Scream: A random mook has a coat hanger hanging out from his eye after running into Roberta during the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc.
  • "Lock 'n' Load Revolution" features a hapless Bulgarian who decides to sell guns in the middle of Mr. Chang's territory as a side hustle to delivering documents to the Islamic Front. By the time Chang's thugs force him to give up the goods, the Bulgarian is minus an eye—and one of them is shown crushing something suspiciously round and white inside a garlic press.
  • In Roberta's Blood Trail (as opposed to "El Baile de la Muerte"), Roberta's left eye is shot out.
• Faking the Dead: Garcia shoots Lt. Shane at the end of the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc, who falls down from the shot. He then tells Roberta he's going to shoot her as well, and that if she has faith in him, she'll survive. Then it turns out that he was firing blanks, and what he was really after was to "kill" her sins, so that she wouldn't be tormented by them any longer.
• A Father to His Men:
  • Balalaika is a gender-inverted version being an Apron Matron of sorts to her soldiers. She takes threats against them very seriously and they follow her orders quickly and without question.
  • The commanding officer (the Major) of the US Special Forces team is fully willing to sacrifice himself if it means that the rest of his team will survive.
  • Dutch often falls into this trope, doing a lot of things for the members of his crew, such as when he rushed back to help Revy, Rock and Eda to help Jane escape.
• Fictional Counterpart: "Extra Order", the mercenary outfit from the first two episodes, is based on South African private military contractor Executive Outcomes. Aside from having the same initials, both EOs wore green fatigues and fielded Russian-made Hind helicopters. That said, Executive Outcomes doesn't seem to have been as kill-crazy as its onscreen counterpart, who are introduced massacring a bar full of criminals and prostitutes.
• Fictional Painting: The crew is hired to retrieve a fictional Nazi War Propaganda painting that went down with a U-boat after the fall of the Third Reich off the coast of Thailand. Of course, Neo-Nazis are also after it.
• Finger in the Mail: Balalaika has a yakuza boss who betrayed her killed and (offscreen) cut into pieces. She then sends a box containing some of the pieces back to his organization as a reminder that she's not to be trifled with.
• Fingore: In the last OVA episode of Roberta's Blood Trail, Roberta gets blasted with a Claymore mine, as well as getting shot by a sniper. After she takes cover behind some trees, two of her fingers are severely damaged and are just barely hanging on her hand. So she simply flicks her hand to remove them, and enters melee with a few of the remaining spec ops soldiers, simply because she can't fire her gun anymore. Note that this does not happen in "El Baile de la Muerte", the original manga version of the same story. There, Roberta gets away with barely a scratch.
• Five-Token Band: The four main characters are from different ethnicities; Rock is Japanese, Revy is Chinese American, Dutch is African American, and Benny is Jewish American.
• Flipping the Bird:
  • Rock has one of the most epic in animation history – "You got FUCKED!"
  • Revy to Eda after their confrontation.
  • Dutch does a subtle one, nudging the bridge of his sunglasses with his middle finger while Mr. Chin is running his mouth.
• Foe Romance Subtext: For rival crime lords who have attempted to murder one another at least once, Mr. Chang and Ms. Balalaika sure do behave rather flirtatiously towards each other. One scene from the manga has both of them explicitly state that the times they'd tried to kill one another are the most valued experiences that either of them posses, and one of the Slice of Life AU omakes depict them as a married couple (with Hansel and Gretel being their children).
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: You can actually see the Hawaiian shirt that Revy bought for Rock hanging on the back wall of his room in Omake #4 here.
• Freudian Excuse: Hansel and Gretel are nutcases because of their childhood. They were porn and snuff film starlets.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Early on, Revy blames the way she is now on her rough childhood. During her argument with Rock, he gets fed up with this attitude and accuses her of wallowing in self-pity, which puts a serious crack in her shell.
• Friendly Enemy:
  • On the rare occasions that anyone in Lagoon antagonizes Balalaika, she's usually rather nonchalant about it. Usually.
  • Takenaka embodies this trope.
  • During the "Greenback Jane" arc, Revy and Shenhua seem to accept that they're against one another in a fight to the death. They even have a bit of small talk in between shooting.
    • Before that, they continued to threaten each other with death all the while when they went to save Rock after he got kidnapped. They even fought over who got to take on the enemy first (with rock/paper/scissors).
• From Camouflage to Criminal: Hotel Moscow is a Mafiya group formed from ex-Spetnatz, and their training and loyalty to their commanding officer make them perhaps the most feared criminal organization in Roanapur.
• Game-Breaking Injury: Roberta in the anime (though not the manga). It doesn't matter how superhuman she was, she had clear limits and was up against one of the best special forces in the world. Thus, she's lost one eye, one arm, two fingers on her remaining hand, and is missing a leg.
• Gang of Hats: While most of the criminal organizations are organized along ethnic/national lines, the Church of Violence is a group of nuns who are Roanapur's top gunrunners. They aren't actually nuns at all!
• Gangsta Style: Dutch does this once with a shotgun in episode 6. However, some shotguns from the 70's and 80's were less likely to jam when reloaded sideways since the cartridge could leave the gun more easily. This does not justify actually firing it sideways, but then again it's a shotgun...
• Gasoline Dousing: Implicitly done to Mr. Chin with bombs and a jerrycan (not shown being set up on screen but later the results were) by the Russian Mafia for trying to kill the Lagoon Company. It's triggered by an explosion set off by Balalaika, the leader of the gang.
• Geeky Turn-On: The one thing to cause a positive reaction from Jane? Benny's hacking skills.
• Girls with Guns: Nearly all of the major female characters have picked up a gun at some point, and for the ones who haven't, it's only because they're too busy playing with knives and/or chainsaws, or are just schoolgirls.
• The Glasses Come Off: Averted by Roberta during her fistfight with Revy. Predictably, by the end the lenses have been completely shattered.
• Good Feels Good: Invoked by Rock when Balalaika has him at gunpoint. He explains that just because he does good things, he isn't looking down on her, it's just a hobby like any other.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars:
  • For a given value of 'good'. Balalaika sports a nasty burn on the side of her face. Call her "Fry Face" at your peril.
  • Sawyer has a nasty scar on her throat from where it was apparently cut, explaining why she needs the voice synthesizer. Hiroe's Black Lagoon swimsuit special reveals that she also has multiple scars on her wrists.
• Gorn: In the Roberta's Blood Trail OVAs, you get to see what happens when a chainsaw meets a human chest among other things.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Used throughout Revy's rampage on the Nazi's boat in episode 6.
• Gratuitous English:
  • And Russian, and Spanish, and German (even the racist insult of Alfred the old Nazi coot turns out grammatically wrong in the English dub) ... But especially the English. Not Thai, surprisingly (written script, anyway). In the English dub, Gratuitous Japanese turns up in the 'translation' scene during the last arc. The Yakuza uses his Japanese seiyuu for the scene, while Rock gets Brad Swaile trying to speak Japanese.
  • Just what is a "Mass import of ammunition and economic reality"? A reference to Roanapur's ammunition consumption being out of proportion to its economic activity. It does sort of make sense.
  • The opening song is sung completely in English, although heavily accented and badly slurred in parts. Oddly enough, the same singer did the main theme for RideBack; also completely in English, but this time it's completely unintelligible.
• Grin of Audacity: In contrast to the bloodthirsty Slasher Smiles exhibited by most of the cast, Rock prefers these, first showing one in the first episode when Revy challenged him, a Japanese Salaryman, to a drinking duel. It most often comes out when Rock has a crazy plan in mind.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • Revy and Mr. Chang. Possibly Lotton as well, if he'd ever last long enough to actually shoot.
  • Roberta and Fabiola have been known to dual-wield firearms on occasion too — it's not really their signature fighting style, though.
  • Lampshaded in the Viz edition: the liner notes in the back make sure to note that while the 'gun-kata' style used by Revy looks awesome, using it makes aiming all but impossible, not to mention reloading.
  • Oddly enough, while both Revy and Chang are veritable destroyers of worlds with their style of dual-wielding, it's also noted that becoming as good as they are was incredibly hard and just as rare. Even similarly powerful pistol-users like Eda or the Texan mercenary only use a single gun. And Lotton's Mausers are fully automatic, which leads one to assume that his doubling up is meant for, beyond looking cool, increasing his spray.
• Gun Porn: It's a very gun-laden series, and Rei Hiroe is very good at rendering the main characters' primary instruments of destruction.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Regardless of how tragic the villain's fate is and how much you sympathize with them, this does not mean that they can be returned to the bright side and make a good person out of themselves just because you do enough good for them.
• Hand Cannon: Seventy-year old nun with a gold-plated Desert Eagle. She fires it one-handed.
• Hand Signals: Anime episode 10 "The Unstoppable Chambermaid". Revy and Roberta are in a Mexican Standoff, each with a gun to the other's head. Balalaika raises one hand in the air to signal to two of her snipers to shoot the guns out of their hands.
• Harmful to Minors:
  • Hansel and Gretel have quite possibly the most fucked-up and tragic Back Story you could hope to find in the series or any series.
  • And look what happened with Garcia when he found his head maid doing... that. She engages in a rather animalistic seduction of a FARC leader before shooting him with a gun hidden in her belt buckle and beating his head to a pulp with her bare fists just offscreen, while shouting about how she was doing everything for Garcia.
    • He's further in shock in the manga, displaying Tranquil Fury and wishing for people to go to Hell, especially the Black Ops commander.
• Heroic Bloodshed: Playing most cynical subtropes straight and demolishing the idealistic ones.
• He Will Not Cry, so I Cry for Him: Rock, one from just of handful of genuinely good people (and the only one optimistic enough to believe in redemption) in the Crapsack World of Black Lagoon, listens with sadness and horror rather than disgust at the coldly delivered Breaking Speech of Gretel, a little girl so traumatized by rape and torture with her twin brother Hansel back in Romania that murder has become the sole source of joy for them. He holds her in a tight embrace and weeps, begging her to accept the possibility that there is hope, and still a possibility of a new and happy life for a little girl like her. This act of sincere kindness, so alien to Gretel, was enough to move even a mass murderer like her to blush like a real little girl for the briefest of moments... Cue one of the few Squicky Tear Jerkers in existence with how she tried to "thank" him: It's implied that she is offering her body to him, since she can't understand that someone would do something good for her without asking from compensation.
• Hidden Badass: The Texan mercenary from the Greenback Jane arc. He's the butt of many a joke (given his unfamiliarity with the pecking order of Roanapur), and relentlessly mocked by the more 'experienced' mercenaries. Then he gets into a gunfight with Eda...alone. He matches her shot-for-shot for quite some time, and with a revolver, no less. It's probably no coincidence that Eda's male counterpart in one of the extras looks eerily like him, albeit in a priest's smock.
• High School AU: The subject of this omake.
• How Much More Can He Take?: Revy and Roberta settle their grudge by beating the living crap out of each other for apparently hours, and neither has a clear advantage the whole time. Near the end, they even rhetorically ask why the other hasn't gone down yet.
• Humans Are Bastards: Due to the nature of this show, humans can be pretty sadistic bastards, such as what happened to Hansel and Gretel. That said, not everyone is a jack ass all the time, such as Hotel Moscow often pulling strings to help out the Lagoon company in a pinch.
• Hypocritical Humor: "It's dangerous to [answer the phone] while driving, so let's do it at the hotel," Benny says. He says this while driving a car and receiving fellatio from Jane at the same time.
• I Call It "Vera": Revy's twin custom Beretta 92FS, the "Praiyachat Sword Cutlass Special".
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Roberta does this to some US soldiers in the El Baile de la Muerte arc, via shooting them with flechette with an old musket. The blast was powerful enough to penetrate their bulletproof vests.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: It seems that every enemy or otherwise non-primary characters (and even primary characters if they get in a fight with each other) seem to have come from this academy.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: Gangsta Style, Guns Akimbo, Throwing Kukris, Chainsaw bullet block, using pistol guards to twist apart said chainsaw...
• Indirect Kiss: The "cigarette kiss" between Revy and Rock right after their heated confrontation.
• Informed Ability: Hotel Moscow is former company Vozdushno-desantnye voyska or Soviet para-trooper. We will never see their jump because this series is combination of land-based, mostly urban and jungle, and sea-based and their enemy mostly gangsters.
• Intertwined Fingers: Done by Hansel and Gretel in the end credits after both of them are dead. It's for a Together in Death thing.
• Intoxication Ensues: At one point Revy gives Rock a cigarette (really a joint) to calm him down.
  Rock: What a strange taste this cig has. What brand is this?
• I Know You're Watching Me: The third of the Bounty Hunter brothers hunting Li Xinlin decides to make his move, after Rock and Revy has dealt with his two other brothers. This particular brother is a Cold Sniper, so he waits in ambush at the top of a building, deciding to target Rock first, as he has by this point identified him as the brains of the group. But as the sniper lines up his shot, he notices through the scope that Rock is actually looking straight at him, with a completely calm expression on his face, and even does a Finger Gun gesture towards him. Rock had in fact long since anticipated that the third brother would try something at that point, and had arranged for Eda to be on the very same roof top, armed with a baseball bat. The sniper barely gets a second to realize that something is wrong, before Eda brings said baseball bat down upon the back of his skull, knocking him off the roof.
• Jerkass: Chaka, Verrochio, and Chin, assholes even by the show's standards. They all die gruesomely at some point during their introductory arcs. Their deaths aren't just gruesome, they're fairly amusing as well as well deserved.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When Greenback Jane gives her story about her boss being pissed with her because she failed to deliver the promised counterfeits despite being $20,000 over budget and two months past her deadline, everyone listening agrees it's her fault. She was hired to do a job and failed to deliver.
• Job Mindset Inertia: Rock was originally an office worker by trade, but after being stranded in Roanapur by his bosses and joining the title crew of mercenaries and pirates as The Face, he couldn't give up his professional habits. The first episode of the anime, for instance, ends with him calling on the Black Lagoon's newest victim in a very polite, business-like manner to please surrender and hand over all of their valuables.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Ginji, who slices bullets and gun barrels with ease.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • Revy is especially fond of doing this. The musclebound Neo-Nazi was arguably the best – she not only shot him down mid-sentence, she lazily reloads her gun and THEN kills him. Later during the Greenback Jane arc, she tries to do the same to Lotton, who is saved only by his bulletproof vest.
  • The latter case is not so much a matter of "trying" as "Lotton introducing himself while standing on a rooftop silhouetted against the moon". She shot him out of reflex.
• Kneel Before Zod: Balalaika does this to one of the Creepy Twins near the end of the Vampire Twins arc. With a sniper. Demonstrating once again why you never want to piss her or the Russians off. The scene is even better in the dub:
  I said '''KNEEL'''!
• Kosher Nostra: When Rock discusses the various factions vying for control of Roanapur, he namedrops the Kosher Nostra alongside the Triads and Mafia. Though of all the factions they've never received major focus.
• Kukris Are Kool: Shenhua's weapon of choice. For throwing.
• Lactose over Liquor:
  • When she first appears in town, Roberta orders milk at the Yellow Flag, presumably having given up alcohol after becoming a maid for the Lovelace family. The next time she shows up, she demands a bottle of tequila.
  • At the start of the Jane Greenback arc, when the Carnival of Killers is being assembled in the local tavern, everyone notices two of them (Lotton The Wizard and Claude "Torch" Weaver) have glasses of milk instead of beer like everyone else does. Lotton states he doesn't like the smell of beer, and Claude says drinking alcohol is against his religion.
• The Lad-ette: Eda and Revy are heavy drinkers who tend to swear like sailors. Revy's also shown to be quite a slob with empty beer cans strewn about her room.
• Leave Behind a Pistol: Played with at the end of the Neo-Nazi arc. Revy gives the Neo-Nazi commander a gun, and tells him do to what he wants with it. She then makes a bet with Dutch, and says "black", but he says it's not really much of a bet and places "black" as well. The commander at first points the gun to his head, as if to utilize this trope, but then tries to shoot Dutch instead. Turns out she gave him an empty pistol, and the bet was who was going to get shot first, with "black" being Dutch. They both then finish him off.
• Leave No Survivors: The E.O. captain. "There's nothing I hate more than survivors".
• Lets Fight Like Ladies: Downplayed. Revy and Roberta agree to settle their score with a fistfight, but the only rules are no weapons or time limit.
• Likes Older Women: Garcia concerning Roberta (as of the end of "El Baile de la Muerte").
• Lipstick-and-Load Montage: Dragon Lady Shenhua is shown putting on lipstick during her introduction scene, while she and Leigharch prepare to rescue Revy.
• Little Miss Badass:
  • Fabiola Iglesias is basically, a younger, flatter, nicer, and cuter version of Roberta.
  • Gretel also counts due to the small age and big gun but the fact that she/he/whatever it is may not be a girl makes it hard to determine.
• Little Useless Gun: Subverted. While Fritz Stanford is bragging about the enormous handgun he plans to use to kill Revy, a custom-built gold-plated Luger chambered for .454 Casull, she's loading her regular handgun, a custom-built 9mm Beretta, and shoots him before he can finish speaking. Before she finishes him off, she tells him that "if you can hit your target, pretty much any gun will do the trick."
  • Later on, Balalaika is negotiating with some Yakuza and demands they let her examine the bodyguard's gun. Then she insists he also hand over his backup gun and she begins to mock him for having such a little weapon. However, she then opens fire and kills the two men, stating that perhaps it wasn't so useless after all.
• Look Behind You: Roberta pulls the "your shoe's untied" version on Revy while they square up to fistfight each other. Revy looks down briefly after some initial skepticism, and Roberta uppercuts her.
• Lust Makes You Dumb: In Roberta's Blood Trail, after the FARC commander manages to defeat her, rather than restraining and/or shooting her immediately, he decides to try having sex with her, allowing Roberta to shoot him with a hidden gun in her belt buckle before beating his head to a pulp

Tropes M to R

• Made of Iron: Most of the recurring characters ignore or survive attacks that would cripple or kill any real person. And then there's Roberta, who is in a category of her own.
• The Mafia: The Verocchio family. Of the four main powers in Roanapur, they are the weakest. Their attempt to rectify this resulted in Hansel and Gretel coming to town. Balalaika barely had to life a finger to destroy the Verocchios after that.
• The Mafiya: Balalaika's branch of Hotel Moscow. May or may not be the strongest of the four powers in Roanapur – physically they definitely are, but Chang's Triads seem to wield more influence.
• Magical Girl AU: There is an OVA that turned Revy into a magical girl called "Radical Girl Revy-chan".
• Master of Disguise: The final member of the Um Quartet is revealed to be this. We find this out after she's already disguised as Revy. In fact, she is never seen outside of her Revy disguise.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Not surprising since this is basically a thinly-veiled action movie parody that plays many tropes of the genre dead straight. However, it's notable that there aren't that many more women in the antagonists than there are in the mooks, and fewer still actually die. Female characters will threaten and battle each other violently but, so far, none of them have ever killed another woman on-screen.
• Menacing Stroll: Seen in the Final Battle between Revy and Ginji. Yakuza enforcer Ginji walks upright and straight-shouldered, as befitting someone who uses their height and reputation to intimidate people. The diminutive Revy is slack-eyed and hunched over, creating an appearance of weakness but conserving her strength for the eruption of violence to come.
• Mexican Standoff: Between Revy and Dutch during the Nazi arc following the "Whitman Fever" incident, and between Revy and Roberta in episode 10. Again in the Yakuza arc, between Revy, Balalaika, Boris, and Rock (though Rock wasn't armed).
• Mob War: The Yakuza arc. Roanapur's criminal hierarchy has already evolved beyond this stage, but this doesn't stop attempts to upset the status quo via surrogates.
• Mook Horror Show: Revy vs. the Neo-Nazis in the "Moonlight Hunting Grounds" episode. Revy walks through their compound killing all of them while they panic.
• Mooks: You better start praying if you aren't a main character. If you're really lucky you might come out of it as lucky as Bao.
• Moe: Invoked with Hansel and Gretel, who deliberately use this to fool their enemies.
• More Dakka: The Rip-Off Church responds to a stray shot denting their door by bringing out an M-60.
• My Kung Fu Is Stronger: Quoted by Benny during the Greenback Jane arc but with "hacking skills" instead of "kung fu".
• Musicalis Interruptus: Gretel's song is interrupted by gangsters walking in on a not so pretty sight.
• Naïve Newcomer: Always a source of entertainment in Roanapur. It's hard to decide which is funnier—the ones shooting at the Church of Violence and then hiring Roanapur's Freak Show for only a grand each, or the ones trying to pit Hotel Moscow and the Triad against each other.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Many. Revy Two Hand, Manslayer Ginji, Ronny the Jaws, the Bloodhound of Florencia...
• Near-Miss Groin Attack: Lotton avoids a significant Groin Attack by Roberta by wearing a metal codpiece beforehand. However, said codpiece was dented after the attack.
• Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters: The Washimine group run festivals instead of drug smugglers or women selling. They are alone here.
• Never a Self-Made Woman:
  • Averted with most of the females. No female character ever mentions a relationship to a man to justify their success, line of work or skills. Their positions in the story were hard-earned and based on their own abilities. Fabiola and Roberta were taken in by a wealthy widower, but Roberta averts the trope as the reason why she had to turn to said widower for help was because she already had a reputation as a stone-cold killer and all-around badass who needed some help evading her enemies. Fabiola learned how to fight thanks to growing up in the slums of Venezuela and Roberta was the one who trained her on how to handle a gun. The one example that probably plays this straight is Yukio, and that did not end well at all.
  • Balalaika was implied to have been trained to shoot by her father (in preparation for the 1984 Olympics) but her actions in Afghanistan were what really made her the woman she is.
• The '90s: The time the story is set in. The OVA gives us the exact month of October 1995 as when Diego Lovelace was assassinated, and the rest of the OVA takes place at least two months later.
• Ninja: In the light novels, one of the Lagoon's clients dresses and acts like the stereotypical ninja, and nobody wants to talk to the perceived loony. Yes, he is indeed a ninja.
• Nipple and Dimed: The manga shows Revy's bare breasts a couple times: once when she's changing from her wetsuit into her usual clothes before attacking the Nazis' ship, another time when she has a Shower Scene in her apartment during "El Baile de la Muerte". This is cut from the anime, although the anime keeps the nipples on the strippers in "Calm Down, Two Men".
• Non-Action Guy: Rock and Benny are justified examples. They were not hired by Dutch to fight. He has Revy for that. Rock is the negotiator and Benny is the hacker.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Leigharch makes these when on coke (manga) or pot (anime). To whit:
  • (When Revy kicks him in the head to get him moving) "I forgot! We have to go to Liverpool! Jimi Hendrix is calling for me! To defeat the Klingon-alien!"
  • (When the car gets shot up) "Barbarella is holding an anti-war sign in the nude!"
  • "Playmates! There are exactly one hundred playmates! Starting from the nineties! It's attack of the Playmate Army!"
  • "WHAT? My application to the Black Panthers was denied AGAIN?!"
• Noodle Incident: Benny managed to piss of the FBI and the Mafia at the same time.
• No One Could Survive That!: Roberta curtseys and drops almost a dozen grenades inside the Yellow Flag bar blowing the establishment sky-high with the blast consuming numerous gangsters who'd thought they'd gotten clear. Rock almost immediately believes that Roberta got out ok even though she was at ground zero of the explosion, and of course he's right. Interestingly enough all of the people at ground zero got out relatively ok: Bao was fine, if crushed at the loss of his bar, and even Abrego (whom the explosion was mean to kill) was banged up but alive.
• No Swastikas: The Neo-Nazi group that the cast fights against for two whole episodes is using the old SA logo, possibly a reference to Neo-Nazi groups evading the Swastika ban by using other symbols in real life. Their employer wears an SS wing, and in flashbacks to the event that launched the arc — the last trip of a German submarine after the war — some swastika flags are seen.
• No Sympathy: After she tells her story, everyone agrees that Greenback Jane's problems are her fault. Despite her talk about needing to do things exactly perfectly, Jane still went both over budget and past her given deadline.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy:
  • Rock doesn't even seem to notice Revy's stripperiffic outfit. She doesn't seem to care all that much about how much of her he sees either, since he had to wake her up when she had no pants on at one point.
  • Averted in the OVA. When Revy gets out of the shower, she's got nothing but a towel to (barely) cover her chest and a pair of panties. Rock can be seen rapidly and deliberately blinking his eyes in the background.
• Not Hyperbole: Benny notes that violent jokes in Roanapur are often more than jokes. A minute or so later, Revy says "You're a rocket man, baby!" to a guy before igniting his flamethrower tank.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The nigh-unfilmable horrors of Hansel and Gretel's backstory are thankfully left to the audience's imagination.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Played with by Gray Fox and the Vysotniki:
    Balalaika: Though our allegiance and the places we've fought differ... My unit has seen the same things as yours, and fought the same battles. But tell me, Major... How... How did we end up... so different from you?
  • Also, Balalaika reveals that although her discharge was medical, and on-request, she was unofficially dishonored because she saved a child from a refugee camp, mirroring Caxton stopping his superior officer in 'Nam from leading the unit to rape a young village girl.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain:
  • Eda, though she hasn't even revealed exactly how far this goes. As example, during Greenback Jane arc, the usually happy-go-lucky Eda getting serious for once when one American gangster identified her as CIA agent, and shut his mouth for his trouble. And guess who provides our Termi-Maid with Foxes' information? She really hates NSA, that's for sure.
  • She's also one of the only people to make Chang lose his cool, so much so that he smashes the phone they were speaking on. After all, she did basically call him an insect compared to the might of the United States.
  • And she told Roberta to "shut the fuck up and listen", after physically restraining her arm.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Roberta. Who would believe that the clumsy housemaid who just burned dinner is actually the "Bloodhound of Florencia"?
• Official Couple: Hansel/Gretel and Benny/Jane.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Definitely the last thing that went through the zealous mercenary pilot's head. Followed by a torpedo milliseconds later.
  • A common expression worn by anyone unlucky enough to stand in the way of one of the badasses in Roanapur. And there's a lot of them.
  • The entire city of Roanapur does this when they hear Roberta is coming back. Badder, angrier and crazier than ever.
  • From the light novels, to the fine crew of the Black Lagoon: You know that tanker you just helped your client assault team get aboard? Yeah, it's owned by the Triad. Mr. Chang's on board.
  • Lotton has one after he examines his steel codpiece following an encounter with Roberta and finds it crumpled like a tin can, giving him a rather chilling hint of how close he got to losing the prospect of fathering children.
• Omake: The manga regularly features these; most of them are varieties of Bizarro Episodes, like:
  • Fountain of Youth: Fun fact: Balalaika's Dragon Boris used to be a scrawny Bishōnen before he joined the Russian Army. Who's gonna think that a cute 9-year-old girl who always listens to mommy and daddy can grow up into the ruthless leader of a group composed entirely of ex-Soviet paratroopers.?
    • Yolanda used to quite the looker.
  • Gender Flip: Rock-chan as an Office Lady; Revy's surprisingly unchanged - at first.
    • Hansel and Gretel are likewise flipped... not that you can tell the difference any more easily... and that it is not JUST the Omake in which they Gender Flip.
    • Balalaika as a male is a surprisingly good fit.
    • And Benny is a flat chested Meganekko with Girlish Pigtails.
    • Eda looks an awful lot like the Texan mercenary, had he taken holy orders before mercenary work.
  • High School AU: Balalaika as the most badass homeroom teacher ever. Roberta, Uncanny Valley Girl. (And Benny's a Trolling Hikikomori.)
  • Magical Girls: Magical Maid Roberta-chan and Ragical Girl Revy-chan.
    "Tokarev, Makarov, Kalashnikov, Heckler and Koch... Kill 'Em All!!"
  • Manzai: Yukio and her kohai try to get into the manzai business... but no one in her yakuza gang gets this "slapstick" thing, or if there's any such thing as moderation. Knuckle dusters get involved.
  • Maternally Challenged: Balalaika trying to raise Hansel and Gretel, who enjoy everyday childhood activities like constructing pipe bombs and skinning cats. Featuring Dutch as a school principal, Garcia as a highly unfortunate babysitter, and Mr. Chang as the father.
  • Summer ghost stories omake, everyone trying to scare each other. The winner is... Rock. The loser... Balalaika, who demands that Boris escort her for bathroom breaks in the middle of the night.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Revy fistfights Roberta shortly after being shot in the arm with no apparent issues, and even gets the upper hand on her midway through.
• Outlaw Town: Roanapur is populated entirely by criminals.
• Out of Focus: Dutch and Benny during the last arc of Season 2 in the anime. They only get a few brief scenes while the focus is on Rock, Revy, and Balalaika during their trip in Japan. They also don’t get much action in the second half of the Goat, Jihad, Rock ‘n’ Roll arc either.
• Out of the Inferno: Roberta. It's Lampshaded by Rock as part of the T-1000 jokes. He expects it to happen.
• Outside/Inside Slur: Shenhua calls the Chinese-American Revy a "twinkie", a term frequently used to imply that an (East or Southeast) Asian person is "white on the inside".
• Pair the Smart Ones: Benny and Greenback Jane are a computer nerd and a counterfeit nerd, respectively. Computer code is their foreplay.
• Papa Wolf:
  • Ginji. Lay one finger on Yukio and he will deliver a horrible Karmic Death to you.
  • Also, Rock. Harm or threaten a child that Rock is trying to protect, and you'll see quickly why he's a member of the Black Lagoon crew.
• Parasol of Pain: Roberta's umbrella is made of Kevlar and has a built in shotgun. And that's just one of her many pain-inducing items.
• Parrying Bullets:
  • Ginji is fast enough to cut bullets in half with his sword, making him a more than equal match for any normal gunman. Revy, naturally, sees this as a challenge.
  • There's also Sawyer the Cleaner, who can deflect bullets with her chainsaw. Her deflections are more like Improbably Lucky Fencing Powers compared to Ginji's. In the same episode, an apparent mook also deflected bullets shot by freaking Revy and Eda at point-blank range with his chaingun.
• Perma-Stubble: Benny must not shave because he always has a couple hairs around. No razor maybe?
• Pet the Dog:
  • Revy showing a group of kids what gunplay's really about — using their popguns. We even get a Luminescent Blush after she sees Rock was watching!
  • Later on, she and Rock meet the same kids, and Revy blasts the same set up of cans she did the first time...with her Cutlass.
• Pink Mist: during Roberta's Blood Trail, Roberta shoots several FARC troops with an anti-material rifle. It vaporizes their entire torsos.
• A Pirate 400 Years Too Late: In the novel Shaitan Baidi, one of the people the Lagoon is transporting is a woman who is, or believes herself to be, a direct descendant of the infamous Captain Morgan...and dresses the part.
• Pirates: The Lagoon Company, as well as several of their opposition, are criminals that plunder on the sea. The end of the second episode shows them hijacking a cruise ship.
• Police Are Useless:
  • The Roanapur police are totally corrupt and incompetent to the point that they can't stop crime at all, and so turn a blind eye to everything while taking bribes.
  • The Japanese police aren't exactly useless but they're pretty ineffective at dealing with the sudden rash of explosions and massacres that occur during the Tokyo arc.
• P.O.V. Boy, Poster Girl: Rock's perspective is used for the series but Revvy is the one on all the promotional art.
• Precision F-Strike: Despite the company he keeps, when Rock swears at you, you know he is very angry!
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Revy is very fond of these such as "Say hello to the fuehrer" for me just before offing a neo-nazi.
• Pretty Boy: Lotton the Wizard, to an extent. He basically exists just to look cool and talk fancy. Revy even asks him if he's a man whore.
• Pretty Little Headshots:
  • Used AND averted. Gretel had a (most likely large) head wound conveniently covered by his/her wig. Ginji had a significantly larger response when shot by Revy at the end of Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise.
  • In the anime, Ginji takes the bullet in the throat rather than the forehead.
• Psycho for Hire: Quite a lot of people; Hansel and Gretel are the most overtly so. Most of the city of Roanapur. Look no further than "Greenback Jane". And that started as just $1000 a head.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Everyone in this city, at one point or another, has tried to kill each other, if for no other reason than they either had conflicting interests at the time or they were employed by a party who wanted the other dead. Hardly anyone takes this personally, and it is not uncommon to watch most of the same parties who tried to kill each other hang out together later.
• Punished for Sympathy: In the "Baile de la Muerte" arc Balalaika, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, reveals that although her discharge was officially medical and on request, she was unofficially dishonored because she saved a child from a refugee camp, mirroring Caxton stopping his superior officer in 'Nam from leading the unit to rape a young village girl.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Rock ultimately wins his little bet with Chang in "Roberta's Blood Trail." His entire plan goes off and the maid is defeated in a manner that ensures that both she and Garcia will live, meaning he saved their lives as he intended. However, in doing so, he's also ensured that there will be no further American involvement in Roanapur, which means the change he had been hoping to see in the city will never come to be. The status quo was preserved and the city will continue to be the Wretched Hive it's always been. Rock is left more disillusioned than ever, and Chang got what he wanted anyway.
• Quick Draw: Chaka challenges Revy to a quick draw contest, with them drawing when the soda can he's holding hits the floor. Revy has such contempt for him she charges at Chaka and knocks him down with a kick to the face. She then leads him to Ginji, who challenges Chaka to his own quick draw contest, with Ginji only armed with a samurai sword. Ginji wins!
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: The bounty hunters in the "Greenback Jane" arc are a colorful crew of minor characters working for the Arc Villain.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • Several groups have popped up (mostly out of convenience), but Lagoon traders is easily the most prominent with the nigh unflappable Bald of Authority, a laid-back hacker in a Hawaiian shirt, gunslinger gal prone to Whitman Fever, and a Japanese salaryman. Still, they work.
  • The most absurd group yet showed up in the first light novel: a heroin-drained sniper, a Morgan-wannabe pirate and her entourage, an insufferable "gangsta", and a Ninja. Yes, he's a ninja. No, none of the Lagoon company are happy to have them aboard.
• Rape as Backstory: Episode 5 of "El Baile De La Muerte" shows a flashback of a corrupt cop beating and then raping a young Revy.
• Rape Discretion Shot: The OVA has a flashback of Revy's Prison Rape, which shows everything but the actual act.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Lots of people give them in this series, especially Revy and Balalaika, but one that's of special note is Eda explaining to Mr. Chang why the Triad is nothing but street trash compared to the might of the United States, which is probably the first time in the entire series that anything made him lose his cool.
  • Rock gives Revy some harsh criticism in episode 7. She nearly killed him for it, were it not for the fact that he finally showed some backbone, refusing to back down, and pointing out that she's the reason that he feels like he's making something of himself for a change (after having lived his life sucking up to his bosses prior to joining the Lagoon company). She does change her attitude slightly towards him afterwards however.
• Reflective Eyes: Gretel's eyes reflect the beautiful blue sky above her after she is shot in the head
• Refuge in Audacity: In the final episode of season two, Balalaika arrives at the home of an influential Yakuza leader where she shoots him with his own gun and massacres his staff. She then proceeds to bluff her way past a police barricade by impersonating an ambassador, casually walk to her fancy limousine and drive away, all before anyone has had a chance to figure out what just happened.
• Retired Monster: A retired SS officer by the name Alfred turns out to be the one behind the plot where both Lagoon Company and some neo-Nazis were going after the same treasure. Setting them up to fight each other was his way of testing the neo-Nazis. Since they all died, they don't get a passing grade. He also had fond, first hand memories of plotting with other members of the Nazi elite ^note given the context, it is unlikely his mention of the 'Wansee' means the Wansee Conference that was a turning point in implementing The Holocaust: The last attendee died roughly a decade before Black Lagoon is set (and the only one named 'Alfred' did so in 1945) and the meeting did not involve paintings or hiding away Third Reich money. However, the Wannsee palace was used for various meetings by the Nazi elite all until the fall of Berlin and is an unabashed racist.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Ibraha and the ex-JRA member from "Lock And Load Revolution."
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Dutch uses one of these. So does Chaka, which Revy takes as another sign that he's a poser and a show-off. Also, one of Florida gangsters uses one with surprising competence, and probably could have survived... if he had shut his big mouth regarding Eda's identity.
• Riddled and Rattled: Discussed while Revy is hanging out with a group of children who are playing Cops and Robbers. Revy watches them dramatically feign death while recoiling from the toy bullets they're shooting each other with. She points out that this isn't how it works in real life, as you're more likely to simply collapse after being shot.
  Revy: You got it all wrong. The only place you see people die like that is in movies. In reality, you just suddenly lose all your strength. Do you understand? It's like everything below your knees disappears then you lose balance and go down headfirst. I'll show you what I mean. [points at a kid] You there. [falls over after being hit by the toy bullet]
  Boy: Lady, if that's what it's like to die, it kinda sucks.
  Revy: Hehehe. I'm sorry, but that's just how it's like to die. In real life, dying never looks that cool.
• Right Through His Pants: Roberta and the FARC commander in the OVA version of "Roberta's Blood Trail." They're indicated to be having sex, but neither of them actually have so much as their flies unzipped.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The Lovelace family maids are prone to these. Revy could also have been said to indulge in them in Japan and on the Nazi vessel, except that her anger wasn't directed at the people she was killing.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Strongly romanticist from art style and shot composition to character motivations to the heavy Rule of Cool in action scenes. Balalaika's rationalist ideology and fighting style, Enlightenment, make her that much more intimidating as a result.
• Rule of Cool:
  • Season 3 might be a "Quentin Tarantino Presents" feature.
  • Lotton is a complicated case. He tries to live by this trope and fulfills everything needed aesthetically, but his only mentionable talent seems to be not dying. Then again, he spends a lot of time posing dramatically in the middle of gunfights full of ultra-violent psychos so "not dying" is still pretty cool.
  • To put it simply, Revy's fighting style of Guns Akimbo while doing all sorts of acrobatic moves would not work in real life for multiple reasons, from poor aim resulting in many misses to recoil limiting movement, but it just works in the series because of this trope.
• Running Gag: The Yellow Flag being destroyed whenever a fight starts there.
• Ruthless Foreign Gangsters: Hotel Moscow plays this straight in the Yakuza arc when they make a landing on Japan. Usually, though, the trope is subverted, as Roanapur is too much a Wretched Hive for any one gang to control, and both the Italian mafia, the Colombian cartels and the Florida mafia finds that out the hard way — the latter being the prime examples as their group is treated as Naive Newcomers by the hardened resident gangster community.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: A relatively rare case of these sort of pirates being the protagonists. The eponymous Black Lagoon company hijack ships, smuggle merchandise and loot for profit. Revy even calls her guns "cutlasses".

Tropes S to Y

• Sanity Has Advantages: Mostly played straight but occasionally averted. Hansel is led into a trap that Balailaka notes no one who was sane and not blinded by bloodlust would have fallen for. Sawyer collapses into catatonic depression when her audiovox is lost (though she gets better). Revy becomes way more focused and dangerous when she dissociates, but will kill everything in sight with no regard for the consequences, and got held at gunpoint by Dutch when he caught her getting ready to murder an entire roomful of noncombatants against orders and would have been killed if he hadn't been able to bring her back to lucidity. On the other side, Roberta, in her second appearance is blinded by anger, and pain, but remains a devastatingly effective combatant, with complicated strategies and maneuvers other distressed characters have lacked. In fact, Roberta becomes ''far'' more powerful when she is angry.
• Scary Shiny Glasses:
  • Roberta, as well as Dutch during episode 3. Both of them are dangerous people about to inflict pain on someone else.
  • Inverted with Eda, who's at her most intense and intimidating when the glasses stop hiding her eyes.
• Scary Teeth: Any time a character starts giving into bloodlust, their teeth become sharper and more pronounced, including enlargement of the canines into outright fangs.
• Scenery Porn: The anime is full of gorgeous scenes of the South Pacific, and for all that it's a corrupt shithole, Roanapur is certainly a lavishly detailed corrupt shithole.
• Scheherezade Gambit: Balalaika puts a gun to Rock's head and tells him the way to increase your chances of surviving such a situation like the one Rock is in is to entertain the person with the gun and give them a good reason not to kill you.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The ending credits sequence concludes with Revy whipping out a shotgun and pointing it at the camera.
• Second-Face Smoke: In the Yakuza arc, Revy does this to Chaka in response to his talk about having a gunfight with her.
• See You in Hell:
  • Yukio's last words in the manga are for Rock to inform Balalika of this.
  • Also Balalika's words to Tsugio Bandou before she kills him.
    "I'm only interested in how much I can dance in the pit of hell when it's all over. See you there some day." (Neck Snap)
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Eda and Revy get into a discussion over what sidearm Jesus would carry through the Valley of Death. Revy suggests a Jericho 941FBL (he'd want an Israeli-made gun, right?) while Eda prefers her Glock.
• Seppuku: The Japanese officer in the German sub does this with the sword he brought once he's told that they will run out of oxygen in a short time. In a later arc, Yukio does the same thing, or more technically jigai, the female version.
• Settle It Without Weapons: How Revy and Roberta settle their score the first time they meet; put away their guns and punch each other black and blue.
• Ship Tease:
  • Remember that odd cigarette lighting scene at the end of Episode 7 that was a hell of a lot like a kiss?
  • Chapter 76: Garcia/Roberta at the conclusion of "El Baile de la Muerte" includes a kiss.
  • Somebody on the OVA's animation team seems to be a fan of Garcia/Fabiola...
• Shoot the Dangerous Minion: Kind of twisted example. A Magnificent Bastard Nazi Aristocrat tires of the incompetence of his Neo-Nazi followers, so he sends them on an assignment which leads to their coming in conflict with the protagonists. After the Neo-Nazis are all killed by the protagonists, the leader congratulates Dutch and tells him You Are a Credit to Your Race. He wasn't necessarily planning on their deaths, but more as a test, which if they didn't succeed, they weren't worth keeping alive.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the more obscure ones was Sawyer the Cleaner's rendition of Leatherface's rage dance from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
  • A less obscure one would be towards the end of Season 1 Episode 12 where it's mentioned that Revy's still wanted in New York's 27th precinct.
  • One of Revy's gunfights in the 2nd season looks an awful lot like a Grammaton Cleric in action, considerably more than usual.
  • Roberta the unstoppable maid in anime episodes 8-10.
    • The whole Roberta sequence is a huge and lampshaded shout-out to the Terminator films.
    • Roberta and Revy run towards each other shooting their pistols and end up on the ground with their guns pointed at each other's heads in a Mexican Standoff, just like Neo and Agent Smith in their subway battle in The Matrix.
  • The U.S. Army unit in "El Baile" is called the Gray Fox unit. Which is the name of a real life ISA unit that helped track down Pablo Escobar.
  • Madame Flora, the mistress/pimp who runs the whorehouse upstairs in the Yellow Flag, is based off Divine.
  • The flashback scenes to the German submarine in episode 4 are rife with references to Das Boot. The submarine even ends up stranded on the sea bottom like the U-96, although it, unlike the U-96, doesn't manage to escape.
  • The Vampire Twins arc has a few The Shining references, one of which was exclusively manga, in which Gretel sings a song from The Shining (in the anime she has a song written for her).
  • From the first light novel: "Never speak of the turtles!!" (It Makes (just a bit more) Sense In Context)
  • The omake where Balalaika raises Hansel and Gretel as her kids is titled The Melancholy of Balalaika in Japanese.
  • In Chapter 55, Fabiola and Revy have to talk to a heroin/speed addict who's convinced they're Martian death squad scouts. Fabiola gets him to calm down by telling him she's a "good alien" from the Cylon Empire.
  • The end of the second season could be one to Cowboy Bebop.
    Revy: Bang.
  • At the end of the "Greenback Jane" arc, Eda remarks "God's in His heaven and all's well in the world."^note  This is also a paraphrasing of the final verse in the Book of Revelation.
  • Hansel and Gretel can apparently do picture-perfect impersonations of each other, right down to their voices. Apparently they've decided to take after a certain blonde serial killer. Their names are also of German origin. Monster takes place in Germany (as well as the Czech Republic).
• Shown Their Work:
  • In the OVA version of the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc, Roberta's Blood Trail, the first Ninoy Aquino International Airport complex is properly depicted as the main terminal of the Philippines in 1995.^note  As of 2015, it's being relegated to a few international airline companies since most of them are being moved to the NAIA-3 terminal complex.
  • In most media, translators and the person they're translating for talk to one another by exchanging "They Saids/Tell Thems." However the correct etiquette for a translator involes the speakers being translated addressing one another, while the translator is never addressed directly. We see this in the Tokyo arc, where Rock is acting as Balalaika's translator while dealing with the Yakuza factions: Balalaika speaks directly to the Yakuza heads, with Rock staying out of the way. Whenever Balalaika addresses Rock and instructs him to tell her counterpart something, she's intentionally being rude.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!:
  • This entire franchise seems to be an Author Tract of "It's pointless to even try to be a decent human being in the real world. Fight, Fuck, Kill, Don't Care About Anybody and Be Content."
  • Alternatively, the story can be about how wallowing in nihilism and cynicism makes you a pathetic wreck of a human being. As Revy so aptly puts it, Roanapur is the city of the walking dead; nobody there is happy or content, they just exist and let their nihilism control them. Fabiola's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Revy summarized this; after having enough of Revy's cynicism and nihilism, she ripped into her about how the whole world is not Roanapur and she needed to stop using her own past trauma as an excuse for her many selfish and psychopathic acts and lust for violence. While Rock and Revy shouted her down, neither of them said anything to address the actual substance of the speech.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: Revy and Eda towards each other. At times they seem to be at each others throats; yet at others they're both working and/or drinking together.
• Skewed Priorities: After pulling off the chopper-torpedoing stunt Dutch's first concern is about his shades remaining intact. Well actually just second after his head not being torn off.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: The second half of episode 7 is a drawn-out Slap Slap Indirect Kiss for Rock and Revy.
• Slasher Smile:
  • Revy and Hansel/Gretel are fond of these, as well as Roberta during her Ax-Crazy phase.
  • Balalaika has a truly frightening one that mainly sees use during the Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc.
  • This is actually one of two signs that a person is an incredible badass, with the other being a Death Glare. If one has the glare, but no smile, chances are they're holding back.
  • As of "El Baile De La Muerte", Rock's Grins of Audacity are beginning to cross over into this territory, and are enough to even unnerve Revy.
  • In the Red Card arc, Sheng gives one when she's telling Rock how exciting it is that all that's left is to decide how she dies. Rock gives one back when he agrees with her.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
  • Far, far on the cynical end. Except for Rock. But that appears to be changing, much to Revy's dismay (at times).
  • Revy herself seemed to be picking up some of Rock's idealism... And she and Fabiola had one last talk at the end of "El Baile de la Muerte".
• Small Girl, Big Gun:
  • Gretel with her BAR (which is drawn much larger than it is in real life).
  • Fabiola and her China Lake grenade launcher.
• Smoking Is Cool: The entire show could be considered one giant cigarette commercial.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The Grey Fox Unit in the Roberta's Blood trail OVA. It crosses into Adaptational Badass a bit as well; even though the Grey Foxes were badass in the Manga, they take the level much higher when they use vicious and extremely effective tactics on Roberta (an example is hitting her with an M18 Claymore Anti-Personnel Mine at point blank range) to even the fight.
• Spell My Name With An S: Revy had a few problems with this in fan translations, being called Levi instead until her first name was revealed as Rebecca.
• Spotting the Thread: In Chapter 101, when talking to "Revy", Rock notices that Revy isn't doing her BDSM show, wearing her normal clothes that she had previously been looking for, and was looking for Feng even though she should already know where she is. All of this makes Rock realize the Revy he was talking to was actually an assassin disguised as Revy who was after Feng.
• Stab the Scorpion: First, after a heated argument, it looked, as if Revy and Dutch are gonna shoot each other (including to them both), but they shot the Nazis standing behind the other one instead.
• Start of Darkness: Episode 21, "Little Soldier Girls", which details Balalaika's transformation from idealistic little girl to disillusioned war veteran to the nihilistic Magnificent Bitch we see in the series.
• Stealth Parody: The whole series is this for the action movie genre. Most of the characters outside of our "heroes" are Captain Ersatz of notable action characters/movies. Hansel and Gretel are Gunslinger Girl (with bits of Monster due to the amazing crossdressing abilities reminiscent of Johan Liebert, and Hellsing due to them being from Romania, Dracula's homeland — and being called the "Vampire Twins") dialed to 13, Greenback Jane looks and acts (down to the above-noted pantyshots) like she came over from Gunsmith Cats. "Babe" is Chow Yun-fat, etc. An amusing note to make is that most of the focus characters and factions are essentially classic 80's and 90's villain archetypes from action movies of the era, such as post-Soviet Russian crime lords, triads, mercenaries, and a veritable cornucopia of gimmicky minions.
• Steel Eardrums: By now, Revy should have had her eardrums blown out multiple times and suffered permanent hearing loss. Ditto Rock, since Revy fired her gun right next to his left ear.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: The Chinese-American Revy really doesn't like how the Taiwanese Shenhua talks in stereotypical "Chinglish", and even calls her that as a mocking nickname.
• Story Arc: For the most part, Black Lagoon contains nothing but self-supporting arcs describing the crew's current job. They will reference past events, but they rarely influence each other. The biggest exception is Rock's failure to save Yukio, which deeply shakes his worldview, and directly informs his actions in the succeeding arcs. Additionally, that Garcia and Fabiola didn't thank him (and in fact, Fabiola shot him. It was a blank, but still, blanks can still hurt) for doing whatever he had to in order to save Roberta, has him even more depressed when "Wired Red Wild Card" begins.
• Stumbled Into the Plot: Rokuro Okajima aka Rock is forced to go on the run and eventually, live in Roanapur and join Lagoon Company since his boss in Asahi Industries decided to have him written off despite being told to handle sensitive data to be given to a VIP in Southeast Asia in case of He Knows Too Much.
• Stupid Evil:
  • Hansel and his confrontation with Balalaika. He sees her sitting at a fountain, alone, and it doesn't even occur to him that she might have a sniper team watching him from a rooftop. This is lampshaded when she acknowledges that there was absolutely no way that anyone who wasn't completely insane and mindlessly bloodthirsty would fall for such a painfully obvious trap.
  • This kicks off the Greenback Jane arc. The funder of the counterfeiting operation decides to kill a "useless" member to motivate everyone else. The "useless" person he killed was the only one who knew all the passwords and security protocols for the servers. This renders all the servers locked off and no one can access the data now.
• Suckiness Is Painful: During the "Wired Red Wild Card" arc, Revy is forced to sit in a cell next to a redneck who likes singing country tunes. His singing is apparently so terrible that Revy is tearfully begging Rock to get her out.
  Revy: If you put his singing on a disc and throw it into an entrenchment, it'd kill anyone!
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: What happens when a Charles Atlas Superpower human goes up against an extremely well trained special forces? In the anime at least, She. Gets. Wrecked. Also what happens when untrained and undisciplined Cartels go up against the same special forces? They get introduced to the Curb-Stomp Battle, with none of them landing any shots on their more skilled and disciplined opponents.
• Surreal Theme Tune:
  • The theme song contains Gratuitous English that puts such gems as "YOU WA SHOCK!" to shame. It still sounds rather threatening, however, being almost an Image Song of Revy. There isn't a single word of Japanese in there.
  • The World of Midnight in relation to the Twins. Deeply beautiful, haunting lyrics, and disturbingly fitting for two of the most fucked-up characters in the entire series.
  • "World Of Midnight" can also be heard playing in the background of some of the young Balalaika flashbacks.
  • After some episodes the beautiful instrumental ending theme becomes really haunting.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Rock gets into this quite a bit, since he's an All-Loving Hero in a human city that could fairly be called "a hell".
• Talking Is a Free Action: Repeatedly mocked; trying to deliver a Pre Ass Kicking One Liner or In the Name of the Moon speech with Revy around is a sure-fire way to get shot mid-sentence. For example, when Revy runs into a neo-Nazi soldier who takes time to brag about how awesome his gun is, Revy takes her time reloading her own pistols, then shoots the Nazi in mid-sentence, asks him if he was trying to sell the gun to her, and tells him to shut the fuck up.
• Talk to the Fist: Revy's response to blowhards who shoot off their mouths is often to shoot them mid-sentence.
• Tea Is Classy: Parodied in the "Boys and Girls" omake, where a gender flipped Garcia, who is a lot more posh than her original male counterpart, is shown to be calmly sipping tea from an elaborate teacup while sporting Regal Ringlets and wearing a fancy frilly dress—acting all posh and dignified while, in the background, Rock is screaming over the insanity of this Gender Bender Alternate Universe "he's" found "himself" in.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Revy laughs when Garcia says the Lovelace family maid will show up to rescue him. You'd think this trope would be reason enough for her to keep her mouth shut.
  • Poor old Bao has his in spades, too. Virtually every time he said something along the lines of "As long as my bar doesn't get shot up, I don't care about it", you could bet that either in the current episode or arc the Yellow Flag would end up in ruins.
• Tension-Cutting Laughter: Balalaika's Evil Laugh (possibly insane laugh) does this for the three-way Mexican Standoff in "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise". Balalaika had just been saying that when you have a gun to your head you'd better come up with a reason why you shouldn't die, or find a way to humor the person doing so. Fortunately Rock achieves the latter.
• Terrorists Without a Cause: Masahiro Takenaka. Having long since outgrown all ideals about perpetuating a worldwide communist revolution through his actions, he now considers his acts of terror to be his purpose in themself.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Gretel states she feels a little bad about killing a couple of orphans so they could be used as decoys.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Revy invokes this trope in episode 3 when she plays a heavy rock song on her CD Player and proceeds to destroy 5 PT boats that were attacking the Black Lagoon. She does it single-handedly, using only a grenade launcher and a sub-machine gun and she manages to blow up the last one when they try desperately to escape with their lives. The same song ("Peach Headz Addiction") also plays when Revy lapses into Whitman Fever in the Nazi arc.
• Those Wacky Nazis: The American neo-Nazis from episodes 4-6 are incompetent buffoons who are effortlessly slaughtered by Dutch and Revy. By contrast, the German submarine crew in the World War II flashbacks is portrayed as more affable and humane, mostly because they are just ordinary soldiers instead of actual party members. The one exception is an SS officer, who is a fanatical Jerkass.
• Throw-Away Guns: In a gunfight on the Cool Boat, Revy throws a gun at a mook when it runs out of ammo. Eda lampshades this by asking if Revy is made of money. Both the mook and the gun probably end up in the ocean.
• Together in Death:
  • Hansel and Gretel, as shown in the ending of episode 15. Ditto Yukio and Ginji.
  • Garcia claims this at the end of "El Baile De La Muerte" (Translated from Spanish: "The Dance of Death"), the Major, and Roberta. Although it is more psychological death.
• Token Good Teammate: Rock for the Lagoon company because he was a non-criminal civilian; Lotton the Wizard for the Carnival of Killers and later Sawyer and Shenhua's team because of his chivalry.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • This one sees heavy use throughout the series. There's the crew of a pair of gunboats that don't think to stagger their positions before shooting at a target between them. An oversized and loudmouthed Neo-Nazi captain goes on and on about how astounding his personal sidearm is, and Revy finally tires of it and shoots him. A Chinese mafioso sets a trap for the Lagoon crew, who were currently Balalaika's favorite workers, and then brags all around town about how clever he was.
  • Some cases are very annoying, usually among mooks. For example, while Roberta is standing in the middle of the Yellow Flag pointing her gun at the Lagoon Crew, a random thug of the Colombian Cartel hops out of cover BEHIND her, takes aim at her, and then, instead of just giving her a headshot, completely wrecks any advantage of surprise he had by yelling "We're not done with you yet, you fucking bitch!" and then not shooting, but charging towards her. Cue the guy getting Blown Across the Room via Offhand Backhand.
  • Chaka. At the same time you're seething with loathing for him, you're also shaking your head in disbelief at just how incredibly dumb he is. Revy and Genji are more than happy to point this out to him. His superiors in the yakuza also count, for being dumb enough to keep him around despite his obvious lack of loyalty, intelligence, or self control.
  • Subverted with Lotton the Wizard. When he goes face to face with Revy and company, he starts off on a spiel about how their doom has come and he will bring them down... and Revy interrupts him with a bullet. However, he was the only person out of the band of mercenaries that thought to wear Kevlar, so he actually survives the ordeal.
  • Guy Russell. For all of his bluster, he was actually pretty competent and wound up being the last member of the Carnival of Killers who boarded the Lagoon Company's boat to survive. He even had the foresight to stay out of sight and sneak off to the engine room to smash it up and hopefully strand them out in the water. Eda caught him in the act, but didn't seem particularly eager to kill him even as she held him at gunpoint. Then he started rambling about how he thought he had met her before in the US. Eda began repeatedly demanding that he shut up while still holding him at gunpoint. Had he just stopped talking and backed off, he probably could have gotten out of the whole ordeal alive. Instead, he ignored Eda's warnings, kept rambling, and figured out that she was a CIA operative while at gunpoint, and was shot dead by Eda for his trouble.
• Took a Level in Badass: Rock, definitely. Garcia, by the end of El Baile de la Muerte. And in one of the Omakes. we see that Sgt. Boris of the Vysotniki used to be a scrawny, girlish-looking boy...until he joined the Soviet Army.
• Tragic Dropout: The Mafia Princess Yukio Washimine was forced to drop out of high school to take over her late father's Yakuza group. Needless to say, she wants nothing to do with her father's business and just wants a normal school life, but the family honor compels her to take control of the gang.
• Traitor Shot: An extremely subtle one in the conclusion of the "Freakshow Circus" arc. A minor mob boss, out of his element in the pirate city of Roanapur, is spazzing out that he needs the mob in Florida to send him more men after he got all his own men killed by Lagoon Company and other Roanapur denizens. The local expert on Roanapur keeps trying to tell him that things just don't work the same here and that it's not their turf, but the minor boss won't listen to reason. The advisor leaves the room, sighs, and as he leans we see a concealed gun in his coat. Another character strongly implies later that the advisor is probably just going to shoot the minor boss to clean up the mess rather than let him create a bigger one.
• Tranquil Fury: Several characters seem to exhibit this trope from time to time.
  • Balalaika seems eerily calm when Hansel approaches her in the park. Even though she's extremely pissed at him for killing her men, she never loses her cool even after she has the upper hand.
  • Revy can sometimes seem strangely calm when shooting. The dead look in her face makes it creepier.
  • Roberta shows this trope when she's facing off against a group of mafia men trying to kill her. And even when she's chasing the Lagoon company, she never seems to change her facial expression. She only averts this trope when she first scared Garcia after exhibiting her Blood Knight side, and when fist fighting with Revy.
• Translation Convention:
  • English is the universal language used when most of the characters communicate, although the mafia and yakuza gangs presumably speak their native languages internally. For easiness' sake this trope is in effect, with the exception of scenes where people who don't speak each others' languages appear.
  • Which gets kind of weird in the Japanese audio, because characters who have been heard in Japanese are revealed to have been speaking in English all along, and thus have to speak Gratuitous English when in-universe Japanese characters are around.
  • Gets even weirder in the English dub: When Revy gets pissed at a street vendor and starts yelling at him, he yells right back at her, but in the Japanese audio he clearly didn't understand her and was snapping at Revy to speak Japanese. Also, since Ginji magically speaks English now, his dialogues with Revy are rewritten so that they actually understand each other instead of talking past one another in the original Japanese.
    • A shortcoming of the English dub is that in the "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise" arc, Laptev and Balalaika's lines in Russian (present only in the Japanese audio) are omitted and simply replaced with the English equivalent.
• Trespassing to Talk: Chang at the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc when he waits for the arrival of the Lagoon crew and Fabiola alongside Garcia. This led to a tense standoff before Chang grappled with Fabiola to disarm her.
• The Triads and the Tongs: Mr. Chang and his Sun Yee On syndicate. Probably the most influential of Roanapur's four major powers, but not the strongest (that'd be Hotel Moscow).
• Trigger-Happy: Revy. A lot of other characters too, but mostly Revy. Dutch has to tell her off for killing Innocent Bystanders.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Hansel and Gretel are incestuous mass murders, and they're the youngest criminals seen.
• True Companions: The Lagoon Company and Hotel Moscow, both to themselves and each other. The reason why the Hotel Moscow unit under Balalaika act the way they do is because they used to be a unit of the Soviet Army, and so therefore their bond is that of soldiers. However, Balalaika's relationship to the Lagoon Company, a band of mercenaries that are not always on the same side as her, but who she is quite friendly to, is a good example of true companionship.
• Tsundere: Revy qualifies as a terrifyingly psychotic Type A. When she's being angry and confrontational she's bad enough, but when she lapses into Whitman Fever during the Nazi arc, she's even worse. She has even tried to shoot Rock on two different occasions during the first season, with her "dere-dere" side surfacing during the "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise" arc from the second season (though there was that time she saved Rock at the end of the first season, something she swore she would never do). Other dere-dere moments include: inviting Rock to join the Lagoon Company at the end of Episode Two, the infamous "Cigarette Kiss" in Episode Seven, threatening to kill Gretel if she ever fucks with Rock again (Hey, we did mention that Revy was psychotic?), and trying to stop Rock from watching Yukio's suicide. She also smiles several times at Rock during the Yakuza Arc. Justified in that she had such a violent, messed-up life that she simply doesn't know how to act normally around people she likes.
• 12-Episode Anime: The first two seasons.
• Two Shots from Behind the Bar: The owner of the Yellowflag keeps a shotgun behind the bar handy for inevitable shootouts. It doesn't hurt that the bar itself is fully armored to withstand shots.
  Revy: it's only a fuckin' Taurus
• Understatement: "Rock, could you take over babysitting? As you can see, not a lot of maternal instinct there." Dutch, in response to Revy opening fire on an unarmed child hostage.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Revy and Rock.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Eda explains an extremely dubious plan for extorting Greenback Jane, involving Jane barely escaping with her life from a hotel room while chased by a Carnival of Killers. Revy is just about to drive off in disgust when Jane turns up right on cue. Unfortunately everything after that goes to hell, because if Eda has explained the plan earlier, Revy and Rock could have told her their getaway boat was out of the harbor.
• Unstoppable Rage: Roberta, in "El Baile de la Muerte", tears a bloody path of revenge because of the death of her employer.
• Villainous Crossdresser: Hansel and Gretel are very good at swapping genders, and more disturbingly personalities, to the point that there is literally no way to tell what their true genders are. All we really know is that the "Gretel" carries the Browning Machine Gun and Hansel carries the Axe.
• Villainous Incest: Hansel and Gretel are evil and murderous twins who kiss on screen.
• Villain Protagonist: The Lagoon Crew murder and transport contraband for whomever is willing to pay for such services, including the transportation and willing abandonment of a child deemed as cargo. Dutch and Revy, captain and second-in-command, respectively, have deliberately removed and actively discourage any inclination towards justice amongst the crew. With Hotel Moscow as prominent customers, the local police force over-worked and eagerly-bribed, the local church working well within and beneath the sight of the black market and the city's arms race, and an entire city comprised of mercenaries and pirates, they simply work to the best of their abilities.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Revy behaves like this on Rock's behalf as they get better acquainted, though she isn't is girlfriend.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Revy and Eda go from pointing guns at each other to drinking together.
• War Is Hell: The Roberta's Blood Trail OVA dips heavily into this motif, showing how utterly self-destructive Roberta's "war" is and how messed up Roberta, Caxton and Balalaika are from their respective wars and the treatment they engendered after returning 'home' (Roberta was a FARC guerilla, Caxton fought in Vietnam and Balalaika in Afghanistan). To drive the motif home the OVA uses the tune to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"/"Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" as an ending melody, both songs about veterans come home from their war. The latter one of the two turns out to be Foreshadowing to Roberta's fate.
• Warrior Poet: Revy and Balalaika occasionally fall into this. The former gives lectures on nihlism and the latter on warrior life.
• Watching Troy Burn: The Greenback Jane arc, when the Lagoon's dock and offices are destroyed during a firefight.
• We Have Forgotten the Phlebotinum: The manga version of the Abu Sayyaf arc has the militants pursue the Black Lagoon at sea and try to head them off with a hijacked freighter. Rock suggests they torpedo it like they did the helicopter in the first chapter, but Dutch says he sold off the torpedoes since then because it's not like they're expecting to fight a naval war (which isn't unreasonable: the unguided WWII-era torpedoes they had would be next to useless against the similarly sized boats they're more commonly up against and getting rid of them saves some weight). Rock and Revy MacGyver a makeshift torpedo to sink the freighter out of a harpoon gun and several blocks of Semtex.
• Western Terrorists: FARC from Colombia.
• What Have I Done: Roberta, after she blasts GARCIA, of all people, in a fit of murderous rage in an instinctive trigger-pull near the end of "El Baile de la Muerte".
• What the Hell, Hero?: Fabiola to Revy after the latter summarily executes a wounded FARC fighter who they told that they would take to the hospital if he gave them information.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist:
  • Rock insists on saving people and getting paid. In the epilogue of "El Baile de la Muerte", Rock laments that he may have acted like a crook, even if his goal was to save everyone. Then again, what caused Fabiola to call him out on it was his belief that survival and being "saved" went hand in hand.
  • The Neo-Nazi crew from the U-boat arc, who seemed to have very little comprehension of how the world really worked.
• World of Action Girls: Black Lagoon is the poster for this trope. While Mr. Chang and Dutch certainly are no slouches, compared to Revy, Balalaika, Roberta, Eda, Fabiola, Sawyer, Shenhua, and others, they might as well just toss their guns up and kick back.
• World of Badass: If you live in Roanapur and you have a name, you are a survivor. Even if your name is Lotton.
• World of Buxom: Revy, with an E-cup, is considered to have a medium bust based on The Official Breast Comparision Chart.
• Worst Aid: After the final fight of the Tokyo story arc, Revy's leg is impaled all the way through by Ginji's sword. Rock, coming to her aid, proceeds to rip the blade out; que massive blood gushing and screaming. He's lucky Revy didn't bleed to death right then and there!
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?:
  • Hansel does this with Balalaika, describing in detail how one of her comrades refused to give up and kept calling out to her and how interestingly he died. She makes him kneel by blowing out his leg.
  • Chaka tries this on Ginji with Yukio, but he knows Chaka would never kill his valuable hostage, so isn't impressed by the blatant lie.
• Wretched Hive: Roanapur is truly home to "scum and villainy". Everyone here is a junkie, a smuggler, a thief, a murderer or all of the above.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Several "outsiders" who visit Roanapur would be pretty clever anywhere else, but don't seem to understand the rules of the city.
  • There's Hansel and Gretel, who think they can murder just any Russian gangsters and run without consequence from Balalaika.
  • Elvis thinks he can just stomp into Roanapur and start throwing his weight around, and utterly refuses to learn that he's a nobody in a city full of professional criminals, and manages to piss off some of the absolute last people in the city who you would want to piss off.
  • Gus Russell thinks assembling a group of assassins is enough to stop the notoriously tough One Woman Army Revy.
  • There's Janet Bhai, who's a pretty smart girl to latch onto the Lagoon Company for protection, but she first trusts the words of a stranger (one of the easiest ways to die) and then gets too comfortable with Lagoon and toys with Revy about Rock (an even easier ways to die, if you're not Eda).
  • Lotton the Wizard would be perfectly genre savy if he weren't in this show. With his dramatic theatrics, long flowing white hair, and "wizard" epithet, he seems to come straight out of a shonen manga. Like a shonen hero, he thinks he can deliver a speech (with catchphrases) to his enemies in the middle of a battle, and he gets a bullet in the gut from Revy for his troubles (luckily, he wore a vest).
  • Fritz Stanford also acts like something between a shonen and action movie villain with his long-winded speech about his ludicrously powerful and flashy custom Hand Cannon, and spends so much time boasting and threatening Revy that he fails to notice her reloading her guns, and is eventually shot by her after she gets sick of listening to him.
• Xanatos Gambit:
  • Rock during the "El Baile de la Muerte" arc. Perhaps due to his failure in the Yakuza arc, where he failed to save Yukio, Rock formulates a plan that would save some people while still getting paid for it, and possibly as a "screw you" to Chang after the latter called him to say he failed his mission. The results were mixed. Although he saved Garcia and Roberta, and the Americans captured a drug cartel lord, it's still largely business as usual in Roanapur.
  • The entire neo-nazis arc turns out to be a gambit orchestrated by an old exile from Nazi Germany who wanted the painting back and used getting it as a pretext to test the neo-nazis' skill and commitment. The Lagoon Company become his instrument when he hires them for the same job through a shell company. If the neo-nazis succeed then they are worthy of his continued patronage, but if they don't, then they are not.
  • It's implied that Kageyama set up the entire chain of events that resulted in Rock joining Black Lagoon. First, he sent Rock out to transport the disk, and then hired Hotel Moscow to steal the disk from him. Then, when Kageyama's superiors panic at the theft of the disk, he steps up and offers to hire mercenaries to retrieve it, knowing that he wins either way. Either the mercenaries succeed and retrieve the disk for the company, or they fail and Kageyama simply takes the disk back from Hotel Moscow. Regardless, it's a win-win for Kageyama, and he moves up the corporate ladder.
• Yakuza: A war between two rival yakuza groups makes up the final arc of the second series.
• Yandere: Played for Laughs in the Manzai omake, wherein Yukio takes a slap from her kohai very seriously. Then prepares to punch her lights out as part of some friendly slapstick.
• You Have Failed Me: What sets off the Greenback Jane arc. The boss of the counterfeiting ring decides to do this to motivate everyone else. The problem is he killed the only person who could access the servers that had the patterns, wrecking the entire operation.
• You Monster!: Greenback Jane is running away from gangsters, while Sister Eda is driving next to her in a car.
  Sister Eda: Do you want us to save you? Think hard. If you don't want to hand over the plates, I guess we don't have a choice. You'd better run to a mosque next time. What do you think? [snip]
  Greenback Jane: 30,000 dollars!
  Sister Eda: Rock, it's almost my bedtime. I'm going back to the church.
  Greenback Jane: You monster! 100,000!

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