3288: Archery Feat
| Archery Feat |
 Title text: Update: I would not have embarked on this powerscaling venture if I'd known how thoroughly Mark Twain was going to roast me. |
Explanation[edit]
It is a common trope in fiction, especially historical or fantasy genres, for protagonists to be skilled archers. Sometimes this is demonstrated by incredible feat of archery, which may be merely difficult or nearly impossible.
Here, Randall posits a new protagonist that he has created, and decides to create a super-feat of archery by combining three famous feats from fiction. This feat will evidently involve firing an arrow through twelve axes, through an apple on someone's head, and then splitting an arrow that has already split another arrow.
- Shooting an arrow through twelve axes: This feat is from the Odyssey, in which the ability is unique to Odysseus, and so distinctive that he uses it to prove his identity. The 2026 film adaptation of The Odyssey was released in the month before this strip and may have inspired this instance of the concept. Interpretations of the original arrangement vary. The axe heads are popularly known to be in a straight line, with one end of each axe buried in a trench to keep them upright. (How this comic, as with other common portrayals, have depicted the scenario.) Alternate configurations have been suggested, however.
- Shooting an apple off a person's head: In the story of William Tell and other Germanic tales before it, the protagonist is forced to shoot an apple off his own son's head as punishment for disrespecting a bailiff or other ruler. While placing fewer restrictions on the path, angle, or force of the arrow, this feat required the target to be at a considerable distance, with a significant chance of hurting the son if the arrow flew low. Depending on the version, the son and possibly the archer may be executed if the arrow misses the apple. The challenge is thus especially stressful, and relies on the steadiness and cooperation of the person balancing the apple. To match the feat, Randall's protagonist should be under similar pressure. It is unclear whether the planned plot involves an assassination or rebellion against the tyrant administering the challenge, as many of the original stories do.
- Splitting an arrow already on the target: This is a popular trick in stories involving archery competitions, most famously in the legend of Robin Hood. Randall's protagonist apparently intends to split an arrow which has already split the original arrow. There are three ways that this situation could arise without rearranging the equipment.
- Most impressively, the protagonist fired both previous arrows (performing the super-feat three times in a row).
- The protagonist fired the first arrow and a competitor fired the second.
- Two competitors each fired one of the previous arrows (least likely because it suggests two competitors with skill approaching the protagonist's, and because success at splitting the second arrow is not much more impressive than splitting the first).
The longbow Cueball is using to perform the feat may also be a reference to Bard the Bowman killing the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, though various other fictional characters also possess a longbow.
The title text refers to power scaling (a trope in various fandoms where the characters' power levels are compared with each other based on what feats they can perform), as well as Mark Twain's highly satirical essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. The comic puns on alternative mathematical senses of 'power' and 'scaling', which suggests that each new element of the challenge multiplies the difficulty of completing it. Twain roasts contemporary author Cooper for having three marksmen shoot bullets though the same bullet hole in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea.
Transcript[edit]
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This is one of 34 incomplete transcripts: |
- [Cueball aims a drawn bow-and-arrow through a line of 12 axes, over a seated Hairy-like boy with an apple on his head, and at a target where an arrow in the bullseye has been split by another, later-arriving arrow.]
- [Caption below the panel:]
- I want to prove that my new protagonist is a better shot than all those other protagonists.
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- Title + Link / Store
xkcd store i back?
XKCD STORE IS BACKKKKKKKKKKK!!!1!!!1!!11!! although he should add an "RTFM" bumper sticker to prove we use linux
- xkcd Store! RadiantRainwing (talk) 02:06, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
- XKCD STORE WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!11!1!!11!!1!11!1!!!1!!1!1!1!1!11!!1!!!11!!!1!1!!1!1!1!!!!1!!!--DollarStoreBa'alConverse 14:04, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
- im honestly sad he didnt use any of these as designs for merch. GreyFox (talk) 13:39, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
- There is one for the formal logic bumper sticker. 130.76.187.47 16:06, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
- He went crazy, why is every comic title a link to the store?? Also is there a page for it (The store) 14231423 (talk) 04:41, 23 August 2026 (UTC)
Was just thinking if we should add the fact that the store is back to the explanation. Speaking of that, Cueball must be really strong other than accurate to be able to shoot for such a long distance without introducing some sort of tilt upward, which is pretty impossible because of how the axes limit the movement of the arrow XD HenryM (talk) 04:43, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
The title of the comic, "Archery Feat", links to the store. Is this the first time that the title linked to something? Is it a coding accident, or is it on purpose? 158.173.67.81 13:41, 23 August 2026 (UTC)
- i feel like its a coding mistake; there is actually a button next to the top row of browsing buttons that links to the store. maybe Randall misplaced a <a> tag? GreyFox (talk) 16:59, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
- I do not know html well enough but i did see this for the title, is this a misplaced<a > tag <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/s/7d94e0.css" title="Default"/> <title>xkcd: Highway Signs</title> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/s/919f27.ico" type="image/x-icon"/> <link rel="icon" href="/s/919f27.ico" type="image/x-icon"/> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 1.0" href="/atom.xml"/> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="/rss.xml"/> 98.227.252.198 22:05, 25 August 2026 (UTC)
Most comics have links to the store in their titles, but not all. In particular, the Guest Week comics don't have it. Should that be documented somewhere? 74.83.153.42 12:43, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Note: the traditional legend of William Tell has him shoot a crossbow. 78.212.78.203 21:31, 21 August 2026 (UTC)
Twain on Pathfinder: three bullets fired toward a nail in succession "Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquito's eye. Be ready to clench!'" ("Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses") Many scathing remarks on various topics but this one is pertinent. (glc) 2600:4040:A03B:DB00:EDB5:E2BB:1BD0:C02C 00:27, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
I thought the joke was that Cueball already shot two arrows, and they passed through the apple without damaging it. And he is now preparing to shoot a third. 47.147.61.212 01:51, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
The reference is to Twain's 1895 essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, one of the most famous hatchet jobs in American literary criticism.
Cooper's hero Natty Bumppo (Deerslayer/Hawkeye/Pathfinder) is a legendarily good shot, and Cooper keeps escalating his feats to prove it. The scene Twain tears apart most thoroughly is the shooting match in The Pathfinder: one contestant hits a nail head at a hundred yards, the next puts his bullet into the previous bullet hole, and then Pathfinder tops them all by putting his bullet through the same hole again — and Cooper describes the targets being examined afterward as if this were plausible. Twain goes through it with mock-forensic precision: how a bullet could be found inside a hole already filled by two other bullets, what the target would actually look like, why nobody in the crowd could have seen anything at that distance, and so on. His general verdict is that Cooper's marksmen are "miracles" and that Cooper had no idea what he was writing about. 2a02:8108:2c07:c700:3156:4ec7:d3b4:6661 (talk) 02:15, 22 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- On my first rifle shooting practice at military service, I shot 2 bullets out of 3 on the same spot on a 200 metre distant target. I thought one of the shotS was off-target, but the instructor noticed a slightly larger hole which he said was due to the second bullet. A feat I of course never repeated! 194.119.24.137 13:13, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
There are some weird interactions with conditional probability and path constraints here. For instance, in the classic William Tell situation, you worry about the victim losing an eye or otherwise being shot in the head. But here, assuming the axes are lined up to make shooting the apple possible, it's going to be more difficult to shoot through the arrows and then miss the apple, so the risk of shooting the victim in the eye is less than it classically would be. Maybe you could miss the axes and still shoot the victim in the ear or the chest? There are some further corner-cases for this analysis with the arrow-shooting-arrow geometry, too. JohnHawkinson (talk) 08:26, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
Is it worth mentioning that the attempt to prove greater mastery by combining multiple feats of precision is flawed? The multiple restrictions don't accumulate additively. If you place an apple on someone's head, and position a target's bullseye behind the apple, then any shot which hits the bullseye will necessarily pierce the apple. So the apple-on-head doesn't make the shot any more impressive (other than by raising the stakes, which, as someone pointed out above, the axes actually negate). This is what I believe the main joke to be -- he's only shown his protagonist to be as good a shot as Odysseus, and whoever set up the targets so that the feat is possible in the first place might be even more impressive. -- 76.22.93.146 16:12, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
I've gotta ask: what kind of axe even has a hole in its head for an arrow to go through? Modern utilitarian axes don't, and although I've seen older decorative axes with fancy curved designs, they all had a full "filled" head. Curious if anyone can elaborate on this. Ralfoide (talk) 17:57, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
- There is no such axe. A hole in the head defeats the purpose of the grind on the axe, namely to withstand being driven into wood or human skulls without breaking. It's a misunderstanding of the challenge posed in the Odyssey. Axe heads already have a hole, for the handle. Famously, there was a film production company whose intro video showed this same mistake. The goal was to shoot an arrow through five axe heads (through the hole for the handle, an extremely precise shot to make), a feat accomplished only by Odysseus. 2600:1702:69ef:8030:1d83:2a2f:a6ff:7ebb (talk) 19:26, 22 August 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- That's the vanity card for TSG Entertainment, and possibly others. 158.173.67.116 20:52, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
Here is a fourth: Karna, tragic villain? antihero? from Mahabharata. When Arjuna already had shot off all targets (Karna came late to the competition) he split the thin target-holders with his arrows to show off. 10:46, 22 August 2026 (UTC)
I wonder if the axes had two holes in them if the target would show an interference pattern. 174.134.128.173 00:59, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
- What about shooting while shield-surfing over the heads of enemy orcs, Legolas-style in the LOTR movies? 194.119.24.137 13:25, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
- I wonder if the shape of the axes* references a common diagram of cosmic inflation since Big Bang: https://assets.science.nasa.gov/dynamicimage/assets/science/missions/wmap/060915_CMB_Timeline600.jpg and therefore brings up issues of causation in the order of the arrows? *~plural(axis) 174.141.207.193 17:17, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
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