Basic Trope: Mooks have terrible aim, especially when aiming at heroes.
- Straight: The Mooks can't hit the hero even when he's standing out in the open, shooting down their comrades.
- Exaggerated:
- Mooks can't even hit a single trooper among an army of characters fighting on the heroes' side.
- A mook fires upon the hero at point-blank range, and misses outright.
- The mook’s shot flat out passes right through the hero.
- Downplayed: The heroes do get shot by mooks. The shots are never fatal, but may come dangerously close.
- Justified:
- Any mook with good aim is swiftly promoted.
- The villain secretly doesn't want the heroes dead, and orders their troops to deliberately miss.
- The Big Bad conscripts peace-loving peasants to work as his foot soldiers, and they struggle with the world of battle. They miss all the time because they have never seen a gun until they were drafted.
- There's a substantial difference between firing a gun on a range and firing a gun in battle, and the stress of combat causes accuracy to suffer.
- The standard issue guns are poorly made, inaccurate pieces of garbage.
- The mooks are really rooting for the hero, and don't want to hit him.
- Their targets are somebody or something they are very reluctant to shoot. Thus they have shaking hands and tense grips.
- They're laying down suppressing fire while a sniper moves into position.
- The targets are protected by some sort of supernatural power, and any gun will miss them even if shot point blank.
- Inverted:
- Even the lowliest mook in the Big Bad's organization has Improbable Aiming Skills.
- Good guys' accuracy is nonexistent when firing at bad guys.
- A mook kills the hero with what was intended to be a warning shot.
- Subverted: It later turns out that the mooks were deliberately shooting to miss.
- Double Subverted: It really matters... and they miss again. The above was a bluff.
- Parodied:
- Whenever the mooks start shooting at the heroes, the bullets go wild, in all directions. They are shown breaking windows, shooting out lights, and generally wreaking havoc in comical ways.
- The Mooks manage to miss even when they have the barrel of the gun pressed against the hero's head.
- The mooks are sent to an actual academy where they are taught how to shoot badly.
- The goons use a barn for target practice. They don't even come close to hitting it, proving they literally can't hit the side of a barn.
- An entire army of mooks is unable to hit any of the heroes, even if they use heavy firepower , not just guns.
- The mooks manage to have their bullets fire perpendicular to the gun barrel somehow.
- Zig Zagged: Some days a mook can't hit a barn, other days he's a near sniper. Depends on the conditions of the firefight.
- Averted:
- The mooks are actually trained marksmen. The heroes need good bulletproof vests to get past them.
- The mooks use melee weapons.
- Enforced: The hero never gets hit by the mooks because it wouldn't be family friendly to show any blood.
- Lampshaded: "Who taught you to use a gun?"
- Invoked:
- Exploited: The hero just walks past the mooks completely unprotected, trusting the bad aim of the enemy to protect her/him. It works.
- Defied: The mooks' trainer says "Just because you are lowly foot soldiers does not give you the excuse to misfire like a little old lady!"
- Discussed: "Don't worry about the foot soldiers. They're the worst shots in the multiverse."
- Conversed: "Why doesn't the bad guy ever teach his goons to aim correctly?"
- Deconstructed:
- The mooks are such terrible shots that the Big Bad is always shooting them for letting the hero get past them.
- Friendly Fire is a serious issue, as the mooks have a tendency to shoot each other or their own critical devices by accident.
- Reconstructed:
- This behavior breeds a deep resentment within the mooks, and leads them to realize that the hero was right all along. Thus, they begin missing on purpose, en masse, because their boss can't just shoot them all.
- The Big Bad does go out of his way to teach his mooks to aim correctly, or at the very least does the smart thing and comissions Auto Aim devices to fix their shots for them instead of blowing his stack at every failed shot made.
The bad guys couldn't hit the broad side of the main page if they had all day.
