Why does the Annoying Arrows trope exist?
It can perhaps be inferred that the primary root cause of this tropes’ presence in modern times is most likely a case of Reality Is Unrealistic, Aluminum Christmas Trees, and/or Pop-Cultural Osmosis. The very concept of firearms as a whole has existed for hundreds of years, although the types of guns that some people today are modern weapons that have been heavily improved upon across various generations; with firearms having become far more accessible and adopted as primary weapons for various groups of individuals, a contemporary person therefore is generally aware of what a gun is capable of, even if they have never personally fired one or have ever even seen one for themselves. Since bows and arrows aren’t as commonly used as weapons as of late, most people's only source of familiarity with them can tend to stem from a variety of sources like movies and video games, which often tend to downplay the true lethality of arrows for considerations such as plot convenience or gameplay balance. Guns and bullets are frequently used in modern combat, whether as great in scope as a war or as minor as a gang skirmish, due to being relatively easy to use, easy to carry, difficult to evade, and capable of wounding and killing at a distance; bows and arrows are generally not, as in spite of being just as capable of killing at long range as guns, even the lightest and most compact bow that is still accessible and capable of fulfilling its function is liable to be generally too large to be comfortably carried around like a knife or a handgun could be, which prevents civilians and street criminals from using them, and bows and arrows are outclassed in destructive power by other "bulky" weapons such as bazookas and rifles, so modern militaries and crime syndicates don't bother with bows and arrows, either.
The average person, even if they have not been shot [with a bullet] themselves or knows somebody who has, knows through exposure to the news that bullets can travel at supersonic speeds due to being propelled by small explosionsnote ; a bullet fired from a gun has enough force to smash right through a person, bones and all, and if it still has enough momentum left (and has not ruptured inside the target due to being a hollow-point bullet), pass out the other side and potentially smack into something else. Bows and arrows do not have this sort of power. Even with peak human strength behind the bow firing them, arrows, unlike bullets, tend to travel at subsonic speeds, which, in the minds of an unfamiliar audience, produces insufficient force to pierce armor or penetrate or break bone. Arrows, due to their greater length and lower flight speeds compared to bullets, as well as their need for some sort of fletching to stabilize their flight at said speeds, generally don't come out the other end of whatever they strike, be it a tree, a designated archery target, or a person; if the target is soft enough for them to penetrate at all without bouncing off (and, again, most people assume that arrows can't penetrate the plate armor that was common during the Middle Agesnote ), they virtually always lodge in the target with the head stuck inside and enough of the shaft sticking out to be grabbed and pulled out. Also, modern bows and arrows are made for sport, not warfare; they are primarily designed to be used for archery competitions. This means that the arrows are generally made to be just hard and sharp enough to partially penetrate and lodge into the targets used for said competitions, while also being as unlikely to kill or severely injure a person who happens to be accidentally shot as the manufacturers can manage to make them.
In short, the combination of unfamiliarity with arrows and these commonly-known points of comparisons between bows and arrows and guns and bullets tends to result in bows and arrows being underestimated by modern audiences.
