Twang! "Hello."

""You either have really good aim or really bad aim.""

- Jack, Lost

It's the middle ages. A group of bandits have tied up a fair maiden and there's no telling what they're about to do as they cackle evilly. Until an arrow zooms over head and embeds itself in a tree with a *twang*. The Cavalry has arrived.

A group of characters are hiding from a Serial Killer. They try to figure out their next move. They're scared but one poor soul says things can't get any worse. Uh-oh. A knife zooms by and hits that character in the chest. Enter the psychopathic Knife Nut.

A band of samurai are walking through the woods when a shuriken flies past them and hits a tree. Oh no! NINJAS! THOUSANDS ONE OF THEM!!!

You get the point (pun not intended). Who needs a battle cry when a clean, well-timed (in regards to dialogue) launch of an arrow, throwing knife, or any other throwing implement into a nearby wall, tree, or person is a far more loud, efficient and stylish way of announcing your presence to your enemies? Sure, a sneak attack would be far more practical, but that's not nearly as cool. Let's also forget the fact that the character just wasted ammo, and that in the middle ages, arrows, especially the quality ones demanded by experienced archers, were somewhat expensive as well (unless of course the arrow buried itself into one of the enemy characters in which case it was quite the efficient move).

See Blasting It Out of Their Hands for a subtrope which helpfully disarms the opponent, and Knife Outline if it pins their shirt to the wall. Compare Click. "Hello.", the gun version of this trope.

Advertising

 * From a recent Priceline Negotiator ad: a group of martial artists were sitting at a desk looking for a good vacation deal online and William Shatner entered the scene by throwing a shuriken at their desk, with the martial artists doing that obligatory look-up that accompanies this trope.
 * An Australian ad for Nicorette gum has a green clad ninja using a shuriken to knock a cigarette out of a smoker's hand and pin it to the wall (through his Employee of the Month photo).

Anime & Manga
""[If you want to get my attention] just ask! Just say, 'Hey, Yugi, could you stay a little longer?' Don't lob a freakin' harpoon at me! Seriously, that's, like, the rudest thing ever!""
 * Ikki from Saint Seiya does this all the time with the "feathers" from his armor.
 * Notable in that he often hits people with these razor-sharp feathers, mostly because they were in the middle of attacking his younger brother.
 * Mako from Yu-Gi-Oh! Parodied in Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series:


 * Tuxedo Kamen/Mask in Sailor Moon would always make his entrance by throwing a rose in the midst of a battle or conversation.
 * This troper recalls seeing him do this to some kind of living rolling boulder monster. Rose thrown, guitar chord, begins his rant... and is interrupted when the monster rolls over the rose and keeps rolling. The look on his face was priceless.
 * Osaka does this with a pinwheel of all things in one Azumanga Daioh episode.
 * Guy from Naruto usually makes his Dynamic Entry by throwing a kunai (before the kick to the face. Ouch.)
 * Naruto himself does this at one point, when Orochimaru (the current Big Bad) is about to attack one of his teammates, only to stop short as a hail of knives come down right where he was about to step slither.
 * Another example is right when Kisame
 * Condor Joe from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman also uses feather-shaped projectile weapons in this way.

Comics

 * Green Arrow's normal method of announcing his presence to evildoers.
 * Hawkeye takes this up a notch. It doesn't matter if he actually hits the guy because his arrows explode
 * Batman has his Batarangs, although he's just as likely to use the "Hey You!" Haymaker. Really, any comics character who uses throwing weapons has probably done this at some point.

Fan Works

 * In With Strings Attached, Eric o' the Green and his men greet the four and the Hunter this way in the Forest of Screams, which has the unintentional effect of triggering Ringo's “escape clause” teleport and sending him over a hundred miles away, which is mighty inconvenient.

Films
"Chief: Ah, we see you have Boom-boom sticks... Bye bye *all scarper*"
 * Used in most Robin Hood movies, most notably in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood where several cackling Normans are on the receiving end of a twang hello in the form of Robin's black arrow.
 * Used by the Pig Natives in Muppet Treasure Island with spears, in a failed Big Damn Heroes move.

Literature

 * Arya Stark of A Song of Ice and Fire is introduced this way to The Archer of the Brotherhood Without Banners—a Robin Hood-homaging merry band of anarcho-communist guerrilla fighters.
 * Theon Greyjoy also did this to save Bran from bandits, and was very annoyed about getting yelled at for it, because the guy might have been wearing armor, or lived long enough to kill Bran.
 * Jiriki's first lines in The Dragonbone Chair are accompanied by him shooting an arrow into a tree in front of the hero. Unusual because the hero had just saved his life and the arrow was actually a sacred artifact used to signify a life debt, and also because it occurred during his exit
 * Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Taishi Ci decides to Twang Hello at a bunch of uppity officials standing atop of the gate of a city he was helping to besiege, and unlike most examples, impales the man's hand with the shot. (Which was called, by the way.)
 * In The Witcher novels it is mentioned that the Dryads used to warn humans who wondered into their domain this way. The problem was that a panicking peasant (especially children) was just as likely to run deeper into the forest as he was to run away. Geralt notes that they recently mostly abandoned this in favor of a simple sneak attack.

Live Action TV

 * Robin Hood loves to do this. Common in many Robin Hood series, including Robin of Sherwood such as the pre-credit sequence of "The Power of Albion".
 * Locke from Lost spoke for the first time after throwing a knife into an airplane seat while the group of Losties were talking about how they were going to get food. Locke's response after his Twang! "Hello." was "We hunt." Jack's quote at the top of the page was his response to that.
 * This was not the first time Locke had spoken, but it was the moment that he Took a Level in Badass.
 * Black Canary gets the drop on Chloe by throwing a knife at her desk in Smallville.
 * Like his comic book incarnation, Green Arrow does this a lot, as well.
 * Almost subverted in Red Dwarf: from a GELF, an arrow twanging into a tree (and not into you) is really considered a very warm greeting.

Video Games

 * In Mega Man X Zero introduces himself by firing a buster shot from off-screen, blowing the arm off Vile's ride armor.

Web Comics

 * An 8-Bit Theater strip has Black Mage being pinned to a tree by an off-screen Ranger (just because he was arguing that "shooting several arrows precisely at once" was impossible).

Western Animation

 * Opens Big Damn Heroes moment in the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Boiling Rock".

Web Original

 * In Survival of the Fittest, the duel between Jacob Starr and David Jackson starts with Jacob throwing his knife at David, only for it to miss and hit the tree David was standing in front of.