So, it doesn’t take very much anime and manga to realize that your average Perfectly Ordinary Japanese Schoolgirl is, honestly, a force to be reckoned with.  As a class, they live one dimensional portal or talking cat away from being forced to take up arms, put on some high heels, and start fighting demons, overthrowing kingdoms, defending the universe from aliens or just generally kicking arse.

They’re the world’s equivalent of special forces, with frilly skirts.

Silent Hill 3, then, represents the western world’s best response, despite being a Japanese game.

Heather Mason is 100% not Japanese.  You could not get a less Japanese person.  And, while technically maybe a little old to be called a schoolgirl – she’s 17 – she could maybe still be a senior in high school so I’m going to say that she counts.

Within minutes of starting Silent Hill 3, Heather finds a pistol – and not a girly pistol, a Beretta 92FS, made popular throughout the world by Mel Gibson’s characters in the Lethal Weapon movies – and uses it to put six bullets into a nearby monster.  Over the next few hours, ignoring the whole bouncing back-and-forth-between-hell-dimensions thing, she puts together an arsenal of the aforementioned pistol, a shotgun, a submachine gun that looks rather like an Uzi but which IMFDB assures me is a Mac 10, a katana, a 2-handed mace thingy, a switchblade, and – for good measure – a three-foot length of steel pipe, all of which she uses to brutal effect as she slaughters her way through hordes of bizarre flesh-eating monsters on her way to kill a god.  And she doesn’t even need to put on high heels in the process.

There is a skirt.  It’s not frilly, though.

Now, her dad DID have some inkling that Heather MIGHT have some rough times in life, so it’s possible that he, you know, took her to the range a couple of times as a kid or something.

But, still, as the toughest ever fictional representation of a Perfectly Ordinary American Schoolgirl, I think we should take some pride in being able to call her our own.