Bayonetta is the titular witch of PlatinumGames' third-person action series that launched in 2009, set in the fictional European city of Vigrid where she fights angels and demons with a handgun strapped to each of her four limbs4. She summons giant Infernal Demons out of her ankle-length black hair, which doubles as her clothing and unravels off her body whenever she casts her strongest attacks1.

The look combines glasses, a beehive hairdo, and a bodysuit woven from that hair, all built around director Hideki Kamiya's brief for a modern witch with four guns1. Character designer Mari Shimazaki stretched the character's limbs beyond typical female game-character proportions so she'd read as an action lead, and gave the whole cast a shared "fashionable" aesthetic with intentionally subdued ornamentation2. Kamiya built the game as a second stylish action title after his work on Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta drops references to that earlier work throughout its runtime.

Bayonetta gets used online as a shorthand for a specific kind of over-the-top, hyper-stylized action heroine, and often shows up in gaming discussions about character design, difficulty curves in the character-action genre, and PlatinumGames' back catalog. Urban Dictionary entries treat the name as a compliment for someone who dresses sharply, carries themselves with confidence, and gets what they want5. Fan communities also use the character in cosplay, fanart, and pinup-style illustration, with the beehive-plus-glasses silhouette being the easiest visual shorthand.