Basic Trope: The characters, no matter how much firepower or ammunition they have, are incapable of hitting targets.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are hired guns attempting to shoot out Steve, the Big Bad of the episode, but can't seem to shoot him with their carbines.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob and Alice have with them, an army of trained soldiers dual-wielding chainguns, as well as 15,000 tanks and jet fighters, as well as laser-firing satellites. All of them are fired at the same time, but when the smoke clears, it is revealed that the army has hit everywhere except for where Steve is standing.
- Nobody cares that they are under heavy fire, because nobody ever gets shot in this world.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob occasionally hit Steve, but usually miss.
- Targets with cover essentially need it entirely destroyed by gunfire to be hit.
- Justified:
- Bob and Alice's guns are highly inaccurate, even with a scope. Alternately, Steve may move fast enough so that Alice and Bob can't aim quick enough to fire.
- Alice and Bob were given orders that Thou Shalt Not Kill.
- Alice and Bob are untrained and rely on More Dakka alone to take their targets down.
- High-stress environments do wonders in reducing one's marksmanship.
- Bod and Alice were toying with him.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob have Improbable Aiming Skills.
- Steve is a top-notch graduate from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, and yet he never hits Alice or Bob.
- Alice and Bob repeatedly try to miss their targets on purpose, but they instead manage to shoot them fatally every time.
- Subverted:
- It looks like Alice and Bob are missing their targets, but they're actually aiming to cause a fire, avalanche or other disaster that will be far more deadly to Steve.
- Alice appears to be missing but she is actually providing suppressive fire while Bob flanks around - their goal was to capture Steve in the first place.
- Double Subverted: It turns out they missed the target they were actually aiming for, as well.
- Parodied: Alice manages to miss every shot when pointing a gun at her own head and firing full auto.
- Zig Zagged: Bob and Alice's skills with guns vary.
- Averted: Alice and Bob are competent with guns.
- Enforced: The show's producers go The A-Team route; being aware that youths are among the watchers of it, the producers decide to have Alice and Bob purposefully miss Steve, setting up for a bigger clash later on in the episode.
- Lampshaded: "We never seem to hit our targets with these guns, do we Alice?"
- Invoked: The man who hired Alice and Bob is The Mole, and gave them guns with dodgy sights and hair-triggers.
- Exploited: Steve knows how terrible Alice and Bob are at marksmanship, and uses the opportunity to line up his own shot.
- Defied:
- Rather than firing full auto and relying on Bottomless Magazines, Alice and Bob find cover, pick specific targets and aim carefully.
- After a few misfired shots, Bob and Alice both attach scopes onto their carbines, allowing them to fire with more precision.
- Discussed: "Yes! We shot Steve! And to think, everyone thought we'd just keep missing."
- Conversed: "You ever notice how the good guys on television rarely hit their targets? Maybe guns aren't for them..."
- Deconstructed:
- Hitting everywhere but Steve results in severe collateral damage.
- The shooting takes place in a very crowded area, and many civilians are wounded or killed as a result of their disgraceful marksmanship.
- Reconstructed: ...Which leads them to travel to a school about firearms, using their poor marksmanship skills usefully, allowing them to show students the dangers of bad accuracy, though their own accuracy is still pretty bad.
- Played For Laughs:
- Alice and Bob's sheer inaccuracy with the weapons results in them losing their titles.
- Everything but Steve is shot, and he walks by the ravaged landscape completely unharmed.
- Played For Drama: Everybody's accuracy is bad; many bystanders end up severely wounded and large objects are destroyed.
Go back to A-Team Firing? Ha! You couldn't hit this link at point blank *BANG*
