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There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day if we had him back with us. — Mark Twain, on James Fenimore Cooper's character Natty Bumppo
If a hero picks up a sword, he will instantly gain Implausible Fencing Powers... and, similarly, if he picks up a gun, bow, crossbow, throwing-knife, shuriken, or other long-range weapon, he'll instead gain Improbable Aiming Skills.
Basically, it's the natural flip-side to the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy — while villainous Mooks are terrible at aiming, heroes are inversely superb at it. This enables such feats as Blasting It Out Of Their Hands or the Offhand Backshot, the firearm-based answer to the Offhand Backhand, and is in no way dependent on the factual accuracy of the weapons in question... a frequent user of this trope is The Western, where the heroes are often using guns that were, in real life, notoriously inaccurate at anything other than point-blank range — for feats that would make a modern-day Sniper with a top-tuned high-tech rifle turn green with envy.
Is sometimes parodied by implying that the shooter meant to do something entirely different and messed up in a spectacularly lucky way.
The Achilles Heel to someone with this ability is someone who can Dodge The Bullet. They tend to have little problem with Human Shield situations.
Almost always used by The Gunslinger (or, in fantasy settings, any archer character). Contrast with A Team Firing, More Dakka (which emphasizes quantity over quality), Shoot The Rope and the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has Hol Horse, whose Stand basically grants him Improbable Aiming Skills as he can control where the bullet goes after he's fired it.
- Even further along the timeline is Guido Mista, who's Sex Pistols Stand kicks the bullets he fires out of a gun. Subverted in the sense that if he doesn't feed them first they won't work and also will sometimes beat each other up.
- Mana Tatsumiya in Mahou Sensei Negima could ricochet her bullets and hit her targets with a sniper rifle, even when she couldn't see the target and was firing impact-fused bullets which should have detonated instead of bouncing. Similarly Gandolfini, one of the mage-teachers, was capable of intercepting an incoming bullet and hitting it head-on with one of his own.
- The king of Improbable Marksmanship, however, is probably Vash the Stampede from Trigun. Capable of putting a bullet down the barrel of a sniper's BFG from a kilometer or so away. Earlier in the series, he attends a quick-draw contest, and is able to ensure that every hit is non-lethal by flicking pebbles at the bullets in-flight and altering their course.
- Vash aims, mind you, with a gun that has its sights off. Incredible. Oh, and apparently either the writer forgot or Wolfwood is supernaturally good to be able to adapt to that when he briefly used Vash's gun and Vash remarks how good of a shot Wolfwood is.
- That's not even counting the time he managed to defeat a foe by shooting off the straps of his battle armor all so fast nobody noticed AND without the gunfire making a sound. It was more than enough to destroy this editor's willing suspension of disbelief into 1000 tiny shards, then set those shards on fire.
- I think you're referring to the battle with E.G. Mine? The firing of the spikes (and then the breaking windows, to speak of 'shards') were pretty loud. Not to mention that the battle was so short that it really made no difference whether or not E.G. Mine would've heard the gun or not.
- Nicholas D. Wolfwood from the same series was also quite good, but he naturally pales against Vash.
- This editor believes that Vash lost the title to Rushuna Tendo, the main character of Grenadier. Also a peace-loving, gun toting blond in a red jacket, she at one point stopped a massive barrage of bullets by firing a single bullet, that caused a chain reaction where each bullet deflected the next bullet down the line until the final bullet destroying the machine gun firing said bullets (To be fair, the gun in question was firing them in a very tight spiral (kind of like an inverted gatling gun), but it's impressive nonetheless).
- This editor would also like to point out the final battle in the series, in which Rushuna faces off against her Evil Counterpart: 80% of the bullets they fired would hit each other exactly between them. In one case, rapid-fired while jumping away from each other.
- The improbably aiming with these two starts well before a shot is even fired: to load their guns, they literally thrust their chests in the direction that allows the bullets stored in their cleavage to leap right into the loading chambers.
- Train of Black Cat pulls many stunts similar to Vash, including shooting down both barrels of a Dual Wielding opponent and shooting other people's bullets out of the air (after a few seconds talking about how their shots would be ineffective anyway). Maybe most improbable is when he shoots a can off a stump, then shoots it five more times while in the air, aiming at the same spot where he shot it the first time. He only hits three, gets annoyed, and is later spotted next to a pile of similar cans having wasted a lot of bullets. One can only assume he got it right at some point.
- Because he was transformed into a child at the time (and therefore couldn't handle the recoil of his gun), it's implied that he always gets it right in normal circumstances, and was frustrated by his inability to do so.
- The vampire leads of Hellsing are extremely good (though not infallible) shots due to a sort of "third eye" superpower they have. Even more impressive is the manga's Rip van Winkle, whose magical rifle fires bullets that change course mid-flight to such a degree that they can hit multiple targets and blow up helicopters.
- The fully human Integra Hellsing (in the first TV series at least). She is shown as capable of shooting the exact same spot on a target repeatedly (creating a single hole in it) and rapidly shooting the shape of a cross into the face of a vampire (take into account the gun's recoil and the fact that the vampire would stagger back after each shot).
- Amazing shooting skills are a key characteristic of the female assassins in the anime Noir. Among other things, one of the characters—on two separate occasions—is capable of shooting the blade off a knife being swung at her partner. She does this with a handgun at up to fifty feet away.
- Then again, Kirika was also raised from earliest childhood to be the perfect assassin, so it's reasonable to assume that her training included lots and lots and LOTS of firearms practice.
- This editor is appalled that no mention of Gunsmith Cats has been made. The entire series revolves around high-octane gunning and driving around the streets of Chicago — and the main character's trademarked ability to shoot her opponents' trigger finger off at a generous distance. (Hence her nickname, "Thumb-Snap Rally".) She's also hit an oncoming RPG dead-center to detonate it before it reached her; and when asked at gunpoint to disarm, she let her clip fall on her foot, whereupon she kicked it back into place and shot her assailant (who was understandably dumbstruck at the maneuver).
- Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh!, who on more than one occasion knocks something out of someone's hand with a piece of cardboard.
- Before him, there was the Agent S5, who used poker cards as projectiles.
- Usopp from One Piece is such a good shot with just about anything that he often surprises even himself. Not only that, his weapon of choice is a slingshot, and he can still out-snipe riflemen.
- There are two other characters in the series, who, at least at the time of their introduction, actually outclassed Usopp in Improbable Aiming Skills. These are Yasopp, Usopp's father, who has claimed to be able to hit an ant between its eyes. The other is Van Auger, who has demonstrated lethal accuracy from so far away the main characters can't even see the island he's shooting from, yet. It is unclear whether or not Usopp has surpassed either yet, though it seems almost inevitable that he ultimately will.
- This troper remembers it as Yasopp claimed to shoot off an ant's leg from a few km away.
- Though it would also be wise to remember Yasopp is related to Usopp, so if it sounds like an over-exaggeration, it probably is one. But then again, he IS in Shank's crew...
- Riza Hawkeye from Fullmetal Alchemist. Her idea of disciplining a puppy is to empty a pistol's magazine around it, without even grazing the puppy. Not to mention that she can face even the most menacing monster calmly, only to lose it when she thought her beloved boss was dead.
- Akane from Ranma ½ usually prefers to use her fists, feet, or the random blunt object (mallets, bamboo swords, the nearby smokestack...) but when she picks up bow and arrow, she's deadly.
- Ranma also exhibits some aiming skills, as he was once able to flick a stub-sized pencil from across the classroom, while jumping, and stick it point-first into the hole of the fifty-yen coin in his teacher's hand. He was also able to jam a polearm weapon perfectly into the key-like slot on a statue, while falling from several hundred feet in the air.
- In Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Kai, Kasai manages to snipe out all four tires of a van (think of the angles!) in under 7 seconds from a great distance. This apparently requires no resighting, reloading, or any movement on the part of the shooter.
- There are modern rifles that redirect the recoil of the rifle into a mechanism that loads the next bullet in the magazine, though, which would solve the first two problems.
- If this troper remembers correctly, Kasai was using a Dragunov SVD, which was a SEMI-AUTOMATIC, designated marksman rifle.
- In Rose of Versailles, Oscar is a legend with a sword, so when someone challenges her to a pistol duel, everyone thinks that she's ***ed. However, one Ret Con later, she's also been practicing with guns her whole life. Who knew?
- Kurz Weber of Full Metal Panic! is apparently one of the most naturally talented marksmen in the world, and generally handles sniping duties for his unit. This includes, at one point, making a shot from the back of a moving truck that goes straight into a Humongous Mecha's machinegun, disabling the weapon — using an ordinary sniper rifle.
- Compared to Kurz, Sōsuke's marksmanship is merely normal, but he still nails a watermelon from something like fifty paces, blindfolded, during a game of crack-the-watermelon in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu.
- Well, he was using a pump-gauge shotgun. The lack of collateral damage was rather amazing, though, this being Sōsuke and all.
- He's a real military guy, not some idiot gun-nut wannabe. What would you expect?
- The Major from Ghost in the Shell once shot a fleeing perp in the ankle, as he was landing from a jump, at what could have been no less than a hundred meters. Justified somewhat with the Major being a full cyborg capable of acting with literally mechanical precision and has targeting software capable of calculating all aspects of the shot.
- More justified in season 2, where they establish that she actually uses a specialized program loaded into her cybernetics just for shooting at specific ranges.
- Specifically, she has a program capable of shooting down sniper rifle bullets with a P90 at close range.
- In the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG episode "Poker Face", the Major and Saito face off. It becomes a game of I Know You Know I Know when Saito is viewing the skills of The Major and realizes she does not have the software for midrange sniping skills. He attempts to shoot her before she can download the software. The Major had been fooling Saito into thinking that she couldn't shoot down his bullets midflight the whole time and shoots him in the eye. Maybe.
- Vice of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who managed to snipe the head of a Combat Cyborg who was attacking an ally, with said ally being in the way of his line of sight, through a building window, from a moving helicopter that couldn't be seen from said building. And he did this while said cyborg had previously been playing possum, so he only had a split second to react and perform the shot.
- Subverted in a flashback by the same character. A gunman is holding a little girl hostage. He takes the shot and hits her in the EYE!!! She gets better due the ammo using Magical Damage, but it still caused a lot of guilt for him.
- Near the beginning of A's, Nanoha, while training, uses a guided magical bullet to hit a juice can 100 times in midair, and is slightly disappointed when the can doesn't fall into the trash bin after the final strike.
- Golgo 13 beats all of the above. In the movie The Professional, he killed a man by aiming through the skyscraper between them. Not enough for you? The pinnacle of improbable aim comes from the chapter "Hollywood Cinderella", where he aimed at a target by watching them on TV. He could probably shoot you from another continent given the right gun.
- Gundam 00's Lockon Stratos is recruited for the PMC Celestial Being because of his ability to, with the aid of his Dynames Gundam, shoot a satellite out of orbit from the ground.
The ships supercomputer was handling the actual calculations behind the shot, and the mobile suit's support robot took care of physically, aligning the shot. His only job was to pull the trigger. Notice, that his aim was significantly impaired once their faction had been cut off from the main computer.
- Impaired my butt, during the siege on the Ptolemaios, the Gundam was not calibrated and he ignored Haro's request to tune the gun and instead programmed it to manually target or else he would have been inactive for a good 10 minutes. That and he also has skill with a real life sniper rifle.
- In Samurai Deeper Kyo, Basara, who is a member of the Junishinsho, is able to fire countless arrows at incredible speed, and almost never miss, even when he is aiming at such tiny points like eyes or in peoples' mouths. And as if that weren't badass enough, his specialty is firing his arrows in the air so that they will come down around him at the exact moment his enemies close in for the attack. It's implied that Basara is such a strategic genius that he can predict when his enemy will close in, but it seems more like a supernatural ability than anything else.
- In the manga Gun Blaze West, "Target" Kevin is a sharpshooter... with a double-barrelled sawed-off shotgun. Yeah. He's also got a twelve barrelled number for special occasions, but still seems to think of himself as an ace marksman even though it would take more effort not to hit something with that monster.
- Parodied in Ninin Ga Shinobuden, where a squad of Ninja pin all of Miyabi's rogue summoning scrolls to the wall with shuriken. Then they all start expressing their surprise, as none of them had ever used a shuriken before.
- Almost everyone in Angel Heart and City Hunter is crack shooter, but the most egregorious example is Umibozu, who retain his aiming skill even after got blinded. Really.
- Let's not forget Jigen from Lupin III.
- While training, Itachi of Naruto leaps into the air and, while upside-down, hits eight targets with his kunai, and strikes two of them in midair in such a way to divert their course to hit two targets behind a rock, while still getting those two to their targets. In an early episode, Zabuza throws some shuriken at Naruto, but Haku, who is standing between the two and off to the side, out of the way of the shuriken's flight path, throws needles at them and knocks them out of the air.
- Madlax, who can kill anyone not protected by Plot Armor with a single shot regardless or whether or not she's running, jumping, or hanging upside down. Half the time she doesn't even aim.
- Taken up to major proportions in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has Yoko in the Final Episode when she snipes the Anti-Spiral's Homeworld. Note that although it seemed like an easy hit, take into account that the fight had the Grand Zamboa and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann moving faster than the speed of light. And Yoko STILL manages to hit her target even through a hail of laser fire while her target was moving at the speed of light. It's a CMoA for Yoko cause is just shows that she has some SERIOUS Sniper skills.
Comics
- While all The Minutemen from One Hundred Bullets wield handguns with deadly accuracy; Minuteman Willie Tymes never misses. His fellow agents gave him a nickname "My first shot is my last."
- Lucky Luke is the quintessential Wild West example. He can shoot off the firing pin of a derringer tinier than a pinky — and do so faster than his shadow. There are other occasions of improbable aiming in the comics — in one instance, two Dalton brothers shoot two bullets at each other that collide with each other half-way between them.
- Note that Lucky Luke is a parody of Western heroes, so his speed and aim are meant to be impossibly amazing, just like the bad guys are meant to be improbably stupid.
- Inverted by Bullseye from the Marvel Universe — the simple fact that he's got aim roughly on par with your average good-guy takes him from "villain" to "supervillain".
- Not just with guns either. He displays god-like accuracy with anything he picks up.
- He's not even limited to accuracy. He has such an uncanny sense of ballistics and trajectory that he can aim in the opposite direction of his target and still score a direct hit. If he can shoot, throw or spit something, he can kill you with it.
- And not just with accuracy, but physics-defying force. No matter how perfect your aim is, it's highly improbable that someone can hurl many everyday objects hard enough to do any damage. If he had telekinesis, sure...
- This was demonstrated to an absurd degree in his very first appearance: he threw a paper airplane through a closed window from several blocks away. And that was just to deliver a threatening message. He later killed the recipient of the threat by hitting his jugular with a ballpoint pen casually thrown across a room.
- He also killed a lady with a toothpick from 100 yards.
- And to top that all off: he's not even a mutant.
- From both The DCU and Marvel comics, self-trained superhero archers Green Arrow and Hawkeye, and their families of characters, can ricochet arrows off walls and into targets. And that's not even getting into "boxing glove arrows", "bomb arrows", "net arrows" or "cat arrows" (don't ask). They have, at times, been depicted as so implausibly good, some people theorize that they actually have psychokinesis and are simply using it to show off by making it look like they're the world's greatest archers. The fact that the artists and writers of their titles usually don't do very much research into how archers actually even hold their bows drives it home for a lot of people.
- In The Dark Knight Returns, Green Arrow has lost an arm and still manages to be a crackshot.
- Green Arrow once lost both arms (he got better) and still managed to pull off a shot by bracing the bow with his feet and pulling the arrow back with his teeth.
- Although, it must be remembered that the footbow does exist, and, indeed, the longest arrow flight world record was set in 1979 with a footbow — 2009 yards and a bit. It is even possible to hit targets with some reliability with one.
- In Marvel's Ultimate universe, Hawkeye is an expert marksman who chooses to use a bow because of the challenge. He was shown to be deadly with anything he could throw, even killing a room full of armed guards while strapped down to a chair by flicking his fingernails. (He did mention at some point that it was not only practise, but that his vision was artificially enhanced.)
- In the Sin City story Hell and Back, a sniper has a rifle with telescopic sights mounted on a tripod. He misses, the good guy, Wallace, returns fire, across a street, into a darkened building with a short-barreled revolver. His bullet goes down the telescopic sight and through the snipers eye into his brain.
- Both Sin City and The Badger have featured a character throwing an object with such accuracy that it plugs the barrel of an enemy's gun. What wouldn't a darts player give to be able to throw like that?
- Given that there are plenty of darts players who can repeatedly hit three triple 20s in a row, and given that Miho was considerably closer to Jackie Boy than the oche is to the board, this may not be that unlikely.
- Daredevil has also done the plugging-a-gun (and surely Bullseye too, though I can't think of any specific examples). Frank Miller really likes these feats, doesn't he?
- Allan Quartermain gained access to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen mostly by virtue of his Improbable Aiming Skills. At least he's got the good grace to use a rifle.
- The Saint of Killers from Preacher has magical (they were made from the sword of the Angel of Death) revolvers that cannot miss, never run out of bullets, never jam, never inflict anything less than a fatal wound, and can be drawn faster than the eye can see. Given that he's also completely invulnerable, getting on his bad side (or, for that matter, getting close to him) is not recommended. In the final issue he kills God with his guns
- Lightly used in Usagi Yojimbo: at a carnival, samurai Usagi cannot hit a target while Rich Bitch turned Defrosting Ice Queen Kiku gets a bull's eye on her first try. She explains that she "just aimed everywhere except the target."
- Deadshot, a gun-wielding assassin and sometime Heroic Sociopath from the DCU, has a long-standing reputation for never missing his shot (unless he happens to be aiming at Batman). In a recent miniseries, he took out six targets scattered around a room while blindfolded.
- Earlier in the same series, he failed to shoot a target in the bullseye while blindfolded...because Captain Boomerang Jr. had hit all his bullets in mid-air, using bent paperclips. (Admittedly using superspeed, but still.) In the Outsiders, while in a prison riot, Captain Boomerang Jr. had grabbed and throw something, bouncing it off the walls, to hit and knock out a fellow prisoner.
- Superman, in one comic, pretends to be a villain named the Golden Dart, kidnaps Lois Lane, and throws darts at her. His Improbable Aiming Skills allow him to keep himself from hitting Lois, instead missing her by "scant inches".
- To be fair, it's SUPERMAN... he could just put the darts there while we blink...
- Kid Twist, a particularly slimy individual from Joss Whedon's run on Runaways, has this as a power: once he sets eyes on a target, he never misses. This includes casually firing his gun behind him, and having the bullet turn corners.
- In an early issue of Cable & Deadpool, while Wade (Deadpool) is casually conversing with Nate (Cable) about how he no longer feels the urge to kill, he rolls a pebble around between his fingers. When Nate's not looking, he lets it fly and nails a dragonfly so that the pebble knocks the body dead-center, leaving the wings on either side. (Really.)
- Straight Arrow Strongbow of ElfQuest never misses, to the point that when he does it's an obvious sign that he's in a bad way psychologically. And shortly after recovering from that, he gets the ability to hit a target without evening seeing it, though he's assumed to owe that to magical help.
- Since Cyclops of the X-Men is using Eye Beams, you'd expect him to have very little trouble hitting whatever he can see. That doesn't explain his ability to pull off such shots as precision-stunning Professor X after ricocheting the beam around three corners or destroying six fast-moving targets, at least two of them behind him, with a single shot.
- Actually it's been officially stated that Cyclops's mutant ability includes an intuitive knowledge of how to ricochet his own optic blasts.
- Kris de Valnor from Thorgal is reputed as a deadly archer and proves it many times through the series. However, Thorgal himself can top her feats when pressed. In one instance he won a Duel To The Death by firing two arrows at once. One of them hit the villain while the other collided with his crossbow bolt in mid-air.
- Arrowette of Young Justice, who is probably not a member of the Green Arrow Clan, was once shown having a conversation with her mother (the first Arrowette) while playing darts. The camera pans back to show a line of darts driven into each other point to tail, Robin Hood style, from the first, dead center on the target. The ladies decide they really need to find a different game to compete with.
- In a Donald Duck classic, one of the nephews manages to deflect Donald's golf ball into a hole-in-one by rapidly firing several shots at it. With a toy airgun. Which he just happened to have with him. To the golf course.
- Wolverine has demonstrated this by first throwing a dart, and hitting a perfect bullseye, turning away from the dartboard and sitting down at a table, throwing his remaining two darts behind his shoulder, where they both managed to hit the bullseye as well. When challenged to get 3 bullseyes again, he stood up and stacked the darts on each other. He has also thrown a katana with his left hand (he's right handed) at an attacking stuka plane, hit the pilot in his side, causing him to crash and burn. He has said that he can put six shots through a quarter, and still have change left for a gum machine.
- And, of course, there's Captain America's ability in throwing his shield to hit multiple targets by means of ricocheting, and still come back to his grasp.
- Though, in early issues of the Avengers, the "coming back" part was explained by little magnets on the shield and on his gloves!
- This was later retconned into simply being the product of lots and lots of practice; when John Walker was brought in to replace him as Captain America, it took weeks of training with the Taskmaster for him to even be able to throw it reliably; he never figured out how to get it to ricochet and hit multiple targets or come back to him after being thrown.
- In the Great Ten, Celestial Archer is capable of freaking ridiculous with this. He can shoot out the sun and hit a target on the other side of the world.
Fan Works
- In the notorious badfic Sailor Moon: American Kitsune, Davey Crockett manages to shoot and completely destroy a throne on the moon. From the Earth. With a sawed-off shotgun. And without hurting the person sitting in it. Don't think about it too hard, or your head will explode.
- In Light And Dark The Adventures Of Dark Yagami, Dark buys a sniper rifle with which to assassinate Near, and aims at him from the top of the "Eyfal Tower." The implication is that he could have killed Near with a single bullet and didn't need to buy a box ... if Near hadn't used a Nerf gun to shoot out Dark's bullets and scope. Later, in what might be due to a typographical error, Dark manages to kill 1000000 (one million) Stormtroopers with 100000 (one hundred thousand) bullets, which requires killing on average, ten people with a single bullet, and only misses once.
- And then there's Haloid. The Spartan soldier in that video is simply put, an insane marksman with just about ANYTHING. Ricochets from sniper fire hitting moving targets and ricoheting off of OTHER moving targets, insane levels of accuracy with rapid-fire weapons at a full run, THREE TON VEHICLES, SHOTGUN FU. Seriously. It's like watching every action movie hero's specialty with a weapon crammed into a can of complete fuckwin.
- Tiberium Wars has a deliberate Take That directed at the official novelization, where a character gets a headshot on a target a hundred meters away with a pistol....except unlike in the official book, the one making this headshot is Colonel Nick "Havoc" Parker.
Films
Literature
Live Action TV
- Jack Bauer... because he's Jack Bauer.
- Shooting the gun out of Bad Guy's hand was a routine shot in the kiddie TV Westerns of the 1950s. The title character in Annie Oakley never shot anyone in any other way. It made her even nicer as a heroine.
- In the Red Dwarf episode "White Hole" Lister displays Improbable Aiming Skills when it comes to driving a planet into a white hole by stimulating a solar flare. While this sounds like a mindbogglingly complex procedure, it's basically the same as playing pool. Apparently. (He was even able to make it a trick shot!)
- Note that the actor who played him, Craig Charles, also has them, as he actually did make the pool shot.
- Improbable Aiming Skills are spoofed when the crew enters a Western VR environment in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse". Both the Cat (as The Riviera Kid, gunfighter) and Lister (as Brett Riverboat, knife-thrower) were able to do things that were clearly completely impossible... until the special skills were erased from the databank.
- In Lost, Locke is scarily accurate with throwing knives, in one early episode planting a knife in a chair right next to Sawyer's head, from a good 15 feet away, just to make a point.
- Jack is also a good enough shot to shoot a rope, despite having no discernible experience with weapons.
- The Others are also excellent shots, the anti-stormtroopers.
- The mercenaries on the freighter in season 4 know their jobs (and guns) well, as shown in "The Shape of Things to Come" when they fire three instant death shots in a row. Then again, when the group turns their collective attention from extras to Sawyer immediately afterward, they start to fail.
- Parodied/Subverted in the first episode of Buffy season 3. While trying to take down a vampire without the Slayer's help, Oz, Willow and Xander get beaten and the vampire starts running away. Oz stands dramatically with stake in hand, the music swells and he throws the stake only to have it clatter harmlessly off a nearby gravestone. He sighs and says "That never really works."
- In The Man From UNCLE episode "The Never Never Affair", Napoleon Solo demonstrates extremely Improbable Aiming Skills when, bound to a chair, forced to hold a pistol with his hands tied behind his back pointing the pistol behind him, and while having to look into a mirror to see his target, he nonetheless warns a THRUSH agent that any attempt to detonate an explosive booby trap in the face of other U.N.C.L.E. agents arriving at the scene would result in Solo shooting the THRUSH agent. The THRUSH baddie pooh poohs Solo's threat, and makes for the detonator, only to be shot by Solo. Solo then hangs a lampshade on it by looking surprised and muttering, "Well how about that!" when he sees the THRUSH agent go down.
- In Brimstone, Detective Ezekiel Stone has no problem shooting out the eyes of the escaped souls.
- Justified in that in Brimstone, a soul escaped from hell gains supernatural powers related to the individual's history and/or mental condition. As a former cop, it's entirely conceivable that superhuman shooting accuracy is Stone's power (though this is never stated outright, as the series didn't last long enough to make a point of it.)
- Firefly runs rampant with this. A lot of shots are pulled from the hip, but nonetheless hit targets quite precisely; Zoe even manages to shoot a man's gun out of his hands from a good fifty meters off in "Safe," and Mal's quick-draw shots are almost legendary.
- Also, River killing three of Niska's men with one shot each, while her eyes are closed, and the bad guys are hiding behind cover...Jayne's disbelief is understandable. So is his line, "She killed them with math, what else could it be?", heavy on the sarcasm.
- In all fairness, River is psychic and she could probably pinpoint their location by their thoughts
- Early in Serenity, Jayne gets hit with a harpoon fired by Reavers, and Mal shoots the rope to free him. But it takes him three tries.
- The Lone Ranger used this to avoid ever having to kill an opponent.
- Arguably, the Fourth Doctor displays this in "State Of Decay". He learns the only way to kill the Great Vampire is with a "mighty bolt of steel". He doesn't have one of these laying around the TARDIS, but does have access to a dart-shaped shuttlecraft that has barely enough fuel to lift off. He programs it to take off, go as high as it can, then flip nose-down with the final drops of fuel. Gravity sends the shuttle dead-center into the Great Vampire's heart. OK, so it was still coming out of torpor at the time, but still....
- The Comic Strip Presents spoofed this in Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. A detective from the gun-toting cop shows of The Seventies shoots at a Nineties-era suspect at a hundred yards and misses, because reality has now taken over the genre.
Tabletop Games
- Zen Archery and Zen Marksmanship in GURPS divide range penalties by 3 when used successfully. The Precision Aiming technique is meant to be a more realistic version, taking much longer to do and requiring special equipment for a more modest gain.
Video Games
- Dante from the Devil May Cry series is a pretty damn good shot even in the game proper, but only demonstrates truly ridiculous levels of skill in the cutscenes, such as as the intro of Devil May Cry 3, where he — among other things — kills several Mooks with a single bullet by sending a bunch of billiard-balls into the air, and then shooting one of them in such a way that it starts a chain-reaction, sending the balls flying in all directions like gigantic, colorful buckshot. This is due to the fact that he's a human/demon hybrid using magical, demonic handguns.
- In Devil May Cry 4, Dante puts a round through the Mad Scientist Agnus' papers. When Agnus picks one up to examine the damage, Dante puts another round through the exact same hole to kill him.
- In the same game, in the boss encounters with Dante, he rarely uses his guns, unless of course Nero tries to shoot him, at which point Dante will begin to shoot the bullets out of the air.
- Also in the same game, Dante manages to pull off "stacking" five bullets on the end of the handle of his sword (a la Robin Hood, just with bullets), stuck inside the Big Bad, each landing perfectly behind the other, with the final one thrusting it into its core.
- Partially subverted in Deus Ex. Weapons in which you are untrained or only slightly trained have very bad aim. Although the player can start off with very good aim in one type of weapon or decent aim in several, they'll still have a few really inaccurate crappy ones for most of the game until enough skill points are gathered to push them to Advanced or Master training level.
- Revolver Ocelot from Metal Gear Solid is another rare villainous example. Though wielding a revolver (and never, ever using his other hand to steady it), he's got unerring accuracy, on-par with even Sniper Wolf. He can even richochet bullets off of walls. When Cyborg Ninja cuts off his right hand, he just starts shooting with his left instead, without any perceptible drop in accuracy.
- This may be accounted for by the fact that Revolver Ocelot the son of a psychic. However, that doesn't explain how, in a New Game Plus file, Snake can pull off the same stunts, shooting around walls and even aiming behind enemies and hitting them in the back.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 subverts this; the future Big Boss, then known as Naked Snake, gave Ocelot the idea of using a revolver as his weapon of choice, after noticing that with his previous gun (a Makarov PM handgun), he twisted his elbow to absorb the recoil, which actually worsened his aim with it.
- Later in the same game, Ocelot adds a stock to the revolver to steady his aim for a long-range shot. And misses.
- In MGS3, the first time we see Ocelot, he displays Xanatos Roulette Aiming Skills, managing to fire a bullet that ricochets multiple times before killing a Mook. When Snake later gets one of the revolvers, the bullets still ricochet, so he could concievably do the same if the player was good enough.
- Also subverted in The Twin Snakes, where, during the torture scene, Ocelot is spinning his gun on his left hand and drops it by accident — lending a bit of credibility that his left hand isn't quite as accurate as his right. He later goes on to shoot the PAL key out of Snake's hand near the end of the game.
- Ironically, in Twin Snakes, the legendary sniper villain character Sniper Wolf also subverts this trope by submitting to certain real-world sniping necessities of behavior: her accuracy suffers unless she's lying down, she takes an elevated position and plans ahead to hold that superior position throughout her battles. The irony comes from nearly every other villain in the game embodying a trope in order to make themselves unique, while Wolf's more conventional sniping ability is soundly trumped by Solid Snake's employment of two tropes multiplied together. In the cutscene in which Wolf is defeated (following a player-controlled sniper-fight boss battle in an outdoor snowfield in Alaska, against an enemy wearing all white, in the midst of a blizzard), Snake is suddenly disarmed by Wolf shooting the PSG-1 sniper rifle from his grip and taking a bead on his forehead. She is undone, however, when Snake suddenly performs a perfect backflip, lands with his heel against the rifle's stock to propel it into the air, executes a full 360 turn to grab it, aims, and fires the killing shot straight into Wolf's lungs from more than a hundred yards distant. In Wolf's defense, she does recover from surprise in time to return fire simultaneously, but without the power of being the primary focus of the cutscene, her shot harmlessly misses. The combined power of Improbable Aiming Skills and Cutscene Power To The Max has a resonance, it seems, rendering the protagonist briefly perfect.
- Altaïr, the main character of Assassins Creed, also displays an unbelieveable level of accuracy with his throwing-knives. His knives always hit, even on a moving target that changes direction unexpectedly, and ALWAYS kills instantly, without even giving the victim a chance to cry out. Well, unless it's one of your 'Targets', in which case they just basically ignore the throwing-knives for no apparent reason.
- Gordon Freeman in Half Life. He's not shown to be supernaturally accurate, at least compared to other First Person Shooter heroes. However, unlike almost all other FPS heroes (who at least have some form of military background), he's a theoretical physicist who's never picked up a gun in his life prior to the events of the game. This makes incredibly impressive his ability to rapidly learn to use an assault rifle well enough to fight off both an alien invasion and a battalion of highly trained special forces soldiers.
- Well, except for the firing range in the hazard course which is apparently mandatory for all employees... Though, it's never clear how often they're required to run it.
- Lampshaded in the sequel, in which Breen, through his "Breencast" system, berates his mook army for being completely unable to impede Gordon's progress: "This is not some agent provocateur or highly trained assassin we are discussing. Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist...The man you have consistently failed to slow, let alone capture, is by all standards simply that—an ordinary man."
- The Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3 takes this trope to ridiculous extremes, being able to shoot a switchblade out of someone's hand and follow it up with a perfect headhsot. From fifty metres away. With a sightless (I shit you not) hunting rifle. He can still miss with a shotgun at point-blank range, oddly enough.
- And that headshot doesn't even appear to be a true headshot. Instead the target is decapitated with a Clean Cut, the seemingly undamaged head lying next to the corpse. This is particularly hilarious when considering that the ammo used by Sniper rifles and the 'Infinity plus one rifle', Lincoln's Repeater (.308 and .44 Magnum, respectively) would have caused a lot of Pink Mist to spurt from the headless body. Compare a point blank hit with a shotgun which blows the enemy into many bloody chunks.
- The sniper rifles and repeater are nice, but they just don't provide the satisfaction that decapitating someone with a BB gun does.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance makes use of arc trajectory algorithms for Archers/Hunters/Snipers/Assasins with bows and line-of-sight algorithms for Gunners to see if a projectile would be obstructed by an obstacle or the terrain itself due to tiles with varying heights to make it seem more realistic... but this all goes out the window when you order your bowmen/gunslingers to use specials, which ignore those algorithms and just check to see if the target is within weapon range. This leads to cases where you can have an archer shoot at something that's pretty much 2 tiles away and 10 storeys above, or have a gunner SHOOT THROUGH A MOUNTAIN FACE AT POINT BLANK RANGE and hit the target on the other side, 7 panels away.
- It's amusing to think that a bullet backed up by Ultima Charge would behave this way.
- Compared to other AI allies throughout the series, Captain MacMillan from Call Of Duty 4 is a deadshot. Within a second of killing your first mook (as Lieutenant Price), his partner is killed by MacMillan, regardless of who you choose. Despite his skills, he's only there to supervise your preemptive assassination attempt on The Man Behind The Man. During the hectic escape from the operation, you're hard pressed for cover and ammo while MacMillan patiently urges you on, and turns his side of the field into a graveyard.
- At the start of a round of War Rock on Conturas (a very large map), this troper's rifle went off accidentally. Several seconds later, it was announced that I had killed an enemy soldier with a headshot. Evidently, my stray bullet arced into the enemy airfield and into the skull of an enemy soldier as he was running towards a plane. It was a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for me.
- This troper's brother performed a similar feat on Call of Duty: World at War. He was on Airfield with a sniper rifle, got spooked by an enemy and let off a shot without aiming. The enemy got killed by a teammate but he was intrigued by the two head-shot kills. Upon inquiry, the two are on the other side of the map.
- This troper was very bad with Counter Strike (rarely gets any kills). In one match (dune), this troper was hit by a flash-bang and just spray fire into the room. 5 head shot kills, with a SMG.
- Sometimes a common occurence in FPSes, especially if The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard, but played straight in Timesplitters, as the Phlebitonium for much of the game, and in fact the concept itself, is plain and simply Rule Of Cool. Of special note is that the computer tends to be completely suck with normal shotguns at long ranges, but does quite a few headshots with the BLUNDERBUSS. Speculation has it that this is due to a couple of the set patterns of blunderbuss firing arcs, and the height at which the computer naturally aims. If you require evidence, use all zombie characters, while playing one yourself, and take note of the amount of headless people running around in some all blundie games.
- Also see: any oldschool 2d sprite FPS, where so long as you can see the creature in the distance, if he has a bullet-type attack which deals instantaneous damage, he can hit you very easily, even if he's a few pixels high. Averted with the Spider Mastermind in Doom due to the chaingun's naturally random 'spray'.
- The assault rifle in Left 4 Dead has laser-like accuracy that gives it essentially infinite range. This can be a bit annoying when playing as the infected on versus, as Survivors will be able to spray bullets at you from halfway across the map and still get a headshot.
- Arcade Light-Gun shooters take this to a ridiculous extreme, for both you and your opponents. Not while using their guns, though, oh no. This trope is only invoked when your enemies throw something at you. Whenever anything is thrown at you, from a knife to a 55-gallon drum, it will hit you with 100% accuracy. Yes, for some reason a thrown baseball is more likely to kill you than an assault rifle in these sorts of games. For your part, however, you're quick enough on the draw to shoot whatever's coming at you out of the air with a single shot.
Here are a few highlights of the genre:
- Area51: You can shoot grenades, oil drums, and RP Gs out of the air with one shot from a pistol.
- Target: Terror: You can shoot groups of dynamite (complete with timer) out of the air with a single pistol shot. Apparently they must have set said timers for 4 seconds, as they will explode the instant they hit you. Not only that, but one of the bonus levels involves you doing this while terrorists throw a non-stop string of dynamite bombs attached to frozen turkeys at you!
- The House of the Dead: Zombies will throw axes at you. This in itself is amazing, but they will always hit unless you shoot them out of the air with a single shot. Always. Even when the zombie throwing it is fifty feet away, TEN FEET BELOW YOU, AND DECAPITATED!
Web Comics
Web Original
- A Survival of the Fittest example is Trish McCarroll. Using an AK (notorious for recoil) that she'd never fired before (or any guns for that matter), she managed to hit Sloan Henriksen four times in the heart in a single burst of fire. It's put down to luck, but still, for somebody who has never used a gun it was an incredible feat. Amusingly, given that SOTF is a play by post game, it was actually Sloan's handler that caused the Improbable Aiming Skills. (by mentioning which places the characters was hit in the death post)
Western Animation
- The Yuyan Archers from Avatar the Last Airbender can literally shoot the wings off a fly (or at least pin it to a tree from a hundred paces away — without killing it), or at least that's what Zhao said. Though this was most likely hyperbole, they are able to pin Aang to a log by his shirt and nail someone hiding behind a human shield in the head.
- The ARC Troopers from Star Wars Clone Wars possess impressive powers of accuracy, almost every shot blasts a droid's head off and a single trooper takes out a Trade Federation armored tank in less than 5 seconds by running up the side of it, blasting the top off, shooting several shots from the inside of the machine and running like hell.
- Averted in Code Lyoko, where Odd and Yumi miss quite frequently, especially when the shot would be difficult in real life (i.e. shooting at a moving target). Then again, since often the enemies simply dodge, and Odd's arrows are often shown moving as fast as a real arrow, this might be a case of The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard. Played relatively straight with Aelita (after she gains her Energy Field in season 3), who only misses when she's distressed.
- Played with in South Park: Butters hits his target every time, without looking — but only in the guy's crotch.
- In King of the Hill, Bobby has very few talents but at a carnival after picking up a bb gun at a shooting gallery finds out he's an excellent shot, later when taken to a shooting range he shoots off his rounds pretty quickly and Hank is disappointed that he didn't listen to him only to discover all of his shots hit the target dead center.
- Used in MASK episode The Golden Goddess to a ridiculous degree. Alex Sector (never previously known for his aiming skills) disables an elephant with laser cannons without harming it. He fires the cannons the elephant's feet such that the elephant steps/falls into the blast craters... which are the size of its feet. Alex accomplishes this feat:
¤From above and behind
¤While parachuting from a plane in a semi truck
¤With the giant laser cannons mounted distally on the truck
¤Hitting beneath all four feet on both sides of the elephant, without hitting the elephant
¤Missing only one set of three paired shots
¤With the "camera" noticeably rocking to convey how unsteady a platform he's shooting from
¤This just after commenting "... if I can just keep this blasted truck steady enough."
Real Life
- Real World Examples: A number of competition and professional shooters, over a number of decades, have performed incredible feats of gunplay. These include going from a standing rest position to drawing and firing an killing headshot in 0.26 timed seconds — and being even faster than that, being able to throw a handful of eight clay pigeons behind them and promptly shoot all of them in the air with a shotgun, setting up two targets and using a sword in between and in front of them to cut the bullet and strike both targets accurately, being able to fire sixty rounds from ten revolvers and put every shot into a four inch circle in 17 seconds—picking up and putting down each revolver in succession, firing eight rounds from a revolver in 1.00 timed seconds (480rpm—matching a machinegun's rate of fire!) with all rounds hitting the target, and many, many more. It should also be pointed out that these shooters practice daily, going through tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition per year, and are the absolute top masters of their respective field at an Olympic level of skill. Look up folks like Bill Munden, Ed Cantrell, Elmer Keith, Jerry Miculek, or Rob Leatham for starts...or, for that matter, Annie Oakley.
- The Discovery Channel series Time Warp aired an episode titled "Sharpshooter", which featured (among others) super-slow motion photography of a professional rifle shot shooting at and hitting an ordinary playing card edge on! Granted, it took him a couple shots before he hit the card, but the feat seems to be at least in the running for being a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- Ed McGivern
 was the living embodiment of this trope. In addition to five shots at five yards into a silver dollar in 45/100ths of a second (with a stock DA revolver), he could shoot six hand-thrown clays, centerpunch washers, fire revolvers akimbo at separate targets with equal effectiveness, and score hits at 600 yards (again, with a stock revolver). In one chapter of his book, he says (paraphrased), "anyone can do this. I pulled it off by standing in a field in Montana and burning up 30,000 rounds to master this one trick (shooting aerial targets)."
- Getting away from handguns and shotguns, three notable sniper shots: the legendary Carlos Hathcock, 2,286 meters, the current record set by Rob Furlong, 2,430 meters. The difficulty of these long ranges is pointed out by the facts like Furlong's shot, at a moving target, took 4 seconds to go from the gun and had a bullet drop of about 146 feet. Beating even that was Royal Marine Matt Hughes. Although his shot at an Iraqi sentry was a relatively short 860 meters, the gale-force crosswind meant his bullet curved 56 feet sideways.
- Simo Häyhä. Of particular note is that Häyhä did all of his work without a scope. Yeah. The greatest sniper in history used only iron sights. He may not have matched other snipers in sheer range, but you have got to respect a sniper so skilled he hunted with only a pair of very fine-tuned bits of metal telling him where his shots were going to go.
- Rifleman Thomas Plunket. In 1809, using a black powder rifle over an open sight, he shot a French general dead at a range of 500 meters. Then he shot the first man to come to the general's aid, just to prove it wasn't a lucky shot.
- Billy Dixon. He and a group of Bison hunters were defending the settlement of Adobe Walls from Comanches. Dixon, armed with a Sharps rifle, knocked a Comanche off his horse at a surveyed range of 1,538 yards.
- Military snipers in general. US Army snipers average one confirmed kill for every 1.78 bullets fired. Add in the probable kills, and the accuracy goes up to one kill for every 1.32 bullets fired.
- Not that shooting guns out of people's hands can be done, but it's just too awesome but impractical to use.
- An old man, who's name escapes this troper, has actually imitated Robin Hood's arrow splitting shot almost to a tee, the only difference being that the arrow that was being targeted was pushed through the bull's-eye instead of split in twain. WAS IT MENTIONED THAT THE GUY IS ELDERLY?
- This happens all the time in competitive archery. It's considered good form to pay for someone's arrow if you hit it end on (known as "Robin Hooding", of course).
- This troper's brother was in competitive archery. Another term for it is "telescoping". Since modern arrow are mostly either carbon fiber or aluminum tubes, a "Robin Hood" shot will make the second arrow "telescope" into the first.
- During an eight hour battle between US Marines and Taliban fighters, a Marine marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn't miss any shots, despite the enemies' rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.
- The memoir Sniper One tells of the exploits of a UK sniper platoon in Al-Amarah, one of the most dangerous, and least-known, battlefield cities in the Iraq War. They have a number of feats such as these. Expecially when they get their hands, briefly, on a .50 calibre anti-tank rifle.
- The Beanshooter Man. That is all.
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