Basic Trope: Arrows are treated as simply an annoyance, instead of causing potentially life-threatening injuries like they would in real life.
- Straight: Steve gets hit by an arrow. He barely flinches, quickly and easily pulls it out, and continues fighting.
- Exaggerated: Steve is hit by a barrage of arrows from a group of enemy archers. He pulls each one out, and doesn't even seem to be bleeding.
- Downplayed:
- Steve is shown to be wounded and in pain from being hit by arrows, but needs only peremptory first aid before he's fixed up as good as new..
- Arrow injuries incapacitate by default or against a badass slow them down enough to give them a chance to lose. Improbable Aiming Skills or giving a Sedgwick Speech are the only things that make them directly lethal.
- Steve makes a Last Stand against a group of archers, and only goes down after being pincushioned.
- Justified:
- Steve is wearing heavy armor, which the arrows are unable to penetrate.
- Steve is being hit by arrows from weak bows, some of which fail to break the skin.
- Steve isn't entirely human; he's an android, demon, alien, or some other type of entity that can shrug off such attacks with ease.
- Steve has a powerful Healing Factor, so any arrow that isn't immediately lethal will only slow him down.
- The arrows are weak and tiny, being somewhere in between an actual arrow and a mere dart.
- Inverted:
- Steve is seemingly unfazed by sword wounds, but when he gets hit by an arrow he collapses at once.
- Steve is immune to all weapons the enemy uses, except arrows. The Big Bad knows this, and takes advantage of it.
- Subverted:
- The arrow hits Steve, and he seems only slightly bothered by it, but then the pain kicks in and he collapses.
- The arrows wounds give way to nasty infections.
- Steve then takes a sword to the head without blinking. It's not only the arrows that are useless against him.
- Double Subverted:
- ...After he collapses, though, one of Steve's comrades removes the arrow, and Steve quickly leaps up and resumes fighting.
- The infection is cured by rubbing some herbs on the infected area.
- Parodied:
- Steve charges towards the enemy archers with his sword and ends up nearly covered in arrows. He complains about how it's going to take forever to pull them all out of his skin, what a waste of time.
- After noticing that his arrows have no effect, the frustrated archer tries to beat Steve to death with his bow.
- Zig Zagged: Steve's character gets hit in the chest with an arrow, and just pulls it out. His comrade gets hit in the shoulder with a nearly identical arrow and collapses at once, except that was actually from shock because he wasn't expecting that, but oh wait now he's bleeding badly from his arrow wound... Nope, Just a Flesh Wound, don't worry.
- Averted: Arrows are treated as deadly, or at least extremely painful.
- Enforced:
- "There are tons of enemy archers! If the arrows did wound people severely, the battle would be one-sided, and we need the battle to take up the whole episode!"
- It's a fighting game. The archer has an innate advantage by having longer range, so they needed to balance it out.
- Lampshaded: "Oh dear, an arrow wound. These never even hurt."
- Invoked: The archers are there to seem weak and thus distract the enemy into moving in for the kill. They use small, dull arrowheads to avoid doing too much damage and seeming like a threat.
- Exploited: Arrow volleys are used like rubber bullets to injure and demoralize mobs without killing them.
- Defied: The archers make sure that their arrowheads are especially sharp, and tip them with a highly potent toxin so that they'll do damage even if quickly pulled out.
- Discussed: "No, we shouldn't send in the archers! Nobody ever dies of arrow wounds here anyway, they just pull them out. It's pointless."
- Conversed: "Oh, come on. That arrow wound totally should've at least pierced Steve's lung! Why are the arrows always made so pathetic in these shows?"
- Deconstructed: It turns out that the enemy's arrows are nearly painless because they were tipped with a poison that numbs the area of the injury and causes the wounds to often swell closed and bleed only a minimal amount. Shortly after the battle, however, people start dying.
- Reconstructed: ...until an antidote is discovered, and when administered, people can charge into battle treating arrows as simply annoying again.
Shoot back to Annoying Arrows (not that they'll do anything to you, though)
