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You Always Hear the Bullet

124 statements
23 feature instances
15 referencing feature instances

You Always Hear the Bullet	type	FeatureClass
You Always Hear the Bullet	label	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet	page	YouAlwaysHearTheBullet
You Always Hear the Bullet	comment	"If you hear the shot, you're still alive." Bang! Hit! Fall to ground! This trope describes the standard order of sound effects whenever someone gets hit by a bullet: gunshot sound, then exploding squib to simulate the hit. In real life, because most bullets travel faster than the speed of sound, the order is actually the bullet hitting, then the sound of the gunshot catching up. Note that this only applies when one is standing at a distance and someone is shooting at you; Anyone standing next to the shooter will not experience a significant enough lag between the events to notice much of a difference, unless the bullet travels a very long distance (light being much faster than sound or a bullet). This trope is so common, it may be considered an Omnipresent Trope. Indeed, most of the examples below are notable as aversions of this trope rather than indications of the countless times this appears in media as the standard effect for simulated gunfire. Related is the sound effects of a silenced weapon. While in real life, the explosion of the bullet is muted, you will still hear the mechanical noises of the gun itself. In TV land, these guns are completely and utterly silent. Instant Thunder is this concept applied to thunder strikes. See also The Coconut Effect. NOTE: As of March 9, 2010, this page almost only lists aversions of this trope, ranking it a dead horse.
You Always Hear the Bullet	fetched	2024-03-17T03:16:57Z
You Always Hear the Bullet	parsed	2024-03-17T03:16:57Z
You Always Hear the Bullet	processingComment	Dropped link to DependingOnTheWriter: Not an Item - FEATURE
You Always Hear the Bullet	processingComment	Dropped link to HollywoodSilencer: Not an Item - FEATURE
You Always Hear the Bullet	isPartOf	DBTropes
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_1a1a594f	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_1a1a594f	comment	Also averted in Battlefield 2. Tested with an M95 .50cal AMR from about 400m away. The bullet impacted half a second before the shot was heard. The bullet's initial speed was set to about 850m/s.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_2baa7b2e	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_2baa7b2e	comment	Averted in The Killing Joke. The shot that paralyzes Barbara Gordon has no sound effect. It is never heard (although that's an artifact of the Signature Style of Alan Moore, which does away with onomatopoeia).
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_310b3174	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_310b3174	comment	Averted in the tactical first-person shooter game Operation Flashpoint and its sequels in the Arma series (including Arma 2's famous DayZ mod), in which sound travel time is simulated, so it's entirely possible to be killed by a bullet before the report of the rifle that fired it reaches you. All other sounds follow the same rules, so if a huge explosion takes place a few kilometers away from, the sound reaches you several seconds later.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_3f2718c2	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_3f2718c2	comment	Averted in the first Brothers in Arms game when a soldier is shot in the head by a sniper while the squad is resting at the top of a church. The soldier's head simply blows open and he falls from the roof, with the distant sound of a gunshot following shortly after.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_41b0198a	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_41b0198a	comment	Quite deliberately averted in The Dresden Files. Kincaid once stated that if he wanted to kill Dresden, he'd use a supersonic round from a sniper rifle to do it, so that Dresden would die before he heard the bullet and realized he needed to ready a death curse. At the end of Changes, Dresden is shot and killed by a supersonic sniper bullet.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_550ba95a	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_550ba95a	comment	Speaking of the Barrett, this is also averted in one portion of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - at one point halfway through, you are treated to a flashback to Call of Duty 4, specifically the mission where the player as Captain Price shot at Zakhaev from a mile away, with the player now viewing from someone who was within the target area. If you pay attention to the hotel, you can see the muzzle flash from Price's rifle a full three seconds before Zakhaev's arm flies off, followed about half a second later by the actual firing sound.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_6f3fcfe8	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_6f3fcfe8	comment	Averted in a first-series episode of Life, when a hostage taker in a bank is shot by a police marksman: you hear the shattering of a glass window first, followed by a reverberating distant report. SFX carry this event, since you never see the window or the sniper; the only cue that the shot's coming is a voice over the radio saying "I'm in position".
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Life (2007)	hasFeature	You Always Hear the Bullet / int_6f3fcfe8
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_733ac336	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_733ac336	comment	The flavor text for Unreal Tournament III's Sniper Rifle averts this, mentioning that the NEG Marines say "any shot you hear is nothing to be worried about." It's played straight in-game, however: the bullets are hitscan, the sound is instantaneous, and the rounds are all tracers, so you know where the sniper shot from too.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_761813a6	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_761813a6	comment	Leave it to the ultra-realistic Band of Brothers to avert another gunfire trope. Winters gets winged in the leg by a random shot that has no sound effect associated with it.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_793274f3	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_793274f3	comment	Followed faithfully in Cuanta Vida, a Team Fortress 2 fancomic, to such a degree that even bladed weapons have a visible sound effect whenever employed. The only exception is the one story turnpoint shot. Probably justified, as they're in an environment slightly modified from the "2fort" map, so the maximum engagement range is a couple of hundred metres.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_79ef1bd2	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_79ef1bd2	comment	Averted in Quigley Down Under. At one point you see three mooks drop dead, and then you hear the gunshot. Quigley had watched for hours, waiting until three guys stood in a row, so he could pull it off.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_7b02d715	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_7b02d715	comment	In PokÃ© Wars: Dawn of a New Era, Dawn kills three Fearow with long range shots. It is explicitly stated that the sonic booms came after the fatal shots.
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PokÃ© Wars (Fanfic)	hasFeature	You Always Hear the Bullet / int_7b02d715
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_7d1c83da	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_7d1c83da	comment	Also averted in Better Call Saul when we see shootings from a distance. In the season 2 finale, "Klick," when Mike is watching the Twins kill the truck driver through his sniper scope, there's a long delay between the shot and Mike hearing the bullet. Also seen in the season 4 finale "Winner" when Mike kills Werner, where there's a delay between the muzzle flash of Mike's gun and the gunshot sound. And in season 5's "Bag Man," when Mike is using his sniper rifle to pick off the cartel hitmen trying to steal Lalo's bail money from Jimmy, there's a delay between the shots hitting their targets and the echo of the shot.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_8d814070	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_8d814070	comment	A noted early episode of MAS*H called "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" has an old friend of Hawkeye writing a book from the soldier's perspective, which he will call "You Never Hear the Bullet." When he later is shot and the bullet turns out not an Instant Death one, he tells Hawkeye with some irony, "I heard the bullet," and then dies, leaving Hawkeye shattered. This episode is noteworthy as being the first in the series to examine the serious consequences of war (and in a much less heavy-handed way than would be commonplace in later years).
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_8d81bb26	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_8d81bb26	comment	Averted on NCIS, when Caitlin Todd is sniped through the head at the end of Season 2—the bullet punches through her a half-second before Gibbs and Tony hear the gunshot.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_90c73dda	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_90c73dda	comment	Averted in an early Animorphs book: Jake hears two shots during a fight in a Yeerk-held hospital - but doesn't hear the one that hits him.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_b5a087d7	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_b5a087d7	comment	Averted in, of all things, Robot Chicken. Poor, poor Fumbles...
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_b5bb9184	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_b5bb9184	comment	Averted in the 1972 Clint Eastwood film Joe Kidd: when Kidd and a band of Mexican revolutionaries come under fire at extreme range by a sniper using a scoped buffalo rifle the sequence is shown in proper order (muzzle smoke - bullet sound - gunshot) reflecting the relative speeds (light, bullet, sound) involved.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_c0589b98	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_c0589b98	comment	Outrider's standard victory taunt in Call of Duty: Black Ops III mentions this - "One shot, one kill. Won't even hear it coming." The Call of Duty series otherwise plays this straight, however, where there is no sound traveling. If you're far away enough from someone that you can't hear their shots exactly when they're fired, you're not going to hear the bullets until the killcam shows you your death from their perspective (and that's assuming you're also not far enough that their bullets won't disappear mid-flight, although unless they're using a shotgun that's generally rare in most maps).
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_c73f511c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_c73f511c	comment	Nicely averted in an early episode of Boardwalk Empire, in which Richard Harrow snipes one of Jimmy's enemies while dining. The first indication of the shot is the sound of the bullet shattering a water pitcher. Everybody in the restaurant looks around in confusion for a beat before we see the victim with a hole in his face, and then the hole in the window, and Harrow a block away.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_f0c816fb	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_f0c816fb	comment	Averted in Breaking Bad in "Bug" when Gaff carries out a sniper attack on Gus Fring's men to send a message to Gus for the cartel. He first snipes one guy in the head, the man falling dead before the gunshot sound reaches Gus's men. Throughout the rest of the scene, there's a delay between the bullets landing and the gunshot.
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_f22e6bb4	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_f22e6bb4	comment	Also, despite this trope's name, hearing the bullet traveling through the air and hearing the report of the gun that fired it are two different things. In reality you do hear bullets "whiz by" when they pass nearby, even if the sound of the actual gunshot hasn't reached you yet. As two characters said in Black Hawk Down:
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You Always Hear the Bullet / int_f6eed39	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
You Always Hear the Bullet / int_f6eed39	comment	Averted in the final episode of The Sopranos. One interpretation of the ending is that Tony Soprano was killed in reprisal for killing another mob boss previously, and the screen immediately cuts to black because he died. The clue is in a conversation Tony and Bobby have earlier that season, where Bobby explains that bullets travel so fast that if it's a headshot, your brain can't even register the sound of the gun having been fired before you're dead. A few episodes later, Silvio is in a very similar situation where he survives a public whacking only because he wasn't the intended target, just a diversion. He goes deaf in the moment and it takes his brain a split second to recognize where the sound came from.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

You Always Hear the Bullet	processingCategory2	Dead Horse Trope
You Always Hear the Bullet	processingCategory2	Guns and Gunplay Tropes
You Always Hear the Bullet	processingCategory2	Guns Do Not Work That Way
Fury (2014) / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
Joe Kidd / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
The Front Line / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
The Tomorrow Series / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
PokeWars	seeAlso	You Always Hear the Bullet
Life (2007) / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
The Sopranos / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
Final Combat (Video Game) / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (Video Game) / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
Clonk / Videogame / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet
Cuanta Vida (Webcomic) / int_635963c	type	You Always Hear the Bullet

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