Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy/Playing With

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Basic Trope: The Mooks have terrible aim, especially when aiming at heroes.

  • Exaggerated: Mooks can't even hit an army of characters on the side of 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 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.
  • Inverted: Even the lowliest mook in the Big Bad's organization has Improbable Aiming Skills.
  • Subverted: It later turns out that the mooks were deliberately shooting to miss.
  • Double Subverted: ???
  • 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.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: The mooks are actually trained marksmen. The heroes need good bulletproof vests to get past them.
  • 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.
  • 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, bacause their boss can't just shoot them all.

The bad guys couldn't hit the broad side of the main trope if they had all day.

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