#❛ ᴇᴀɢʟᴇ ᴛᴡᴏ ➟ C. CLINT BARTON

[nothuntress]

⤜ H E A D C A N O N S ⟶                           Kate & Archery

I made a small comment about this on the Lars Anderson post a couple days back, but it really does deserve it’s own thing:

The type of archery Lars masters is the very same that would be absolutely crucial for a heroing archer to know and master. Their mobility, speed, and efficiency more than doubles when compared to the traditional style of archery.

( A short summary of Lars’s video: a right handed archer should have their arrow on the right side of the bow, not the left. They should be able to carry multiple arrows in their draw hand and fire them in rapid order. A master should be able to catch an arrow midair and fire in the same motion. The true ‘master’ shot is not splitting an arrow on a bullseye, but splitting an arrow in the air. )

This is the type of archery Clint Barton would have grown up with. His only mentors were Trickshot and Swordsman. In the circus, I imagine, if Clint deviated from the ‘traditional’ style, but remained an impressive shot, no one would have said otherwise. And while he had these two mentoring him, Clint largely taught himself. So he shot in ways that felt natural, in ways that made it seem easier. He wasn’t being corrected for this. He was hitting his marks. He had his own flair. That was that. That was what made him the Amazing Hawkeye and later one of Earth’s Mightiest.

Kate Bishop, however, learned archery under a lot of instruction. She says in YA1 that she learned to shoot at music camp. You know how camp counselors are. They hover, they correct, her form was exactly what they taught her it should be. When she started to take her archery more seriously all year round, it was still at a range under another instructor’s guidance. Probably, a very expensive instructor who had hopes of grooming her for Olympic status thanks to Daddy Bishop, but an instructor none the less. She was expected to hold a specific stance, to fire at a specific distance a specific target. By time she joins the Young Avengers she’s a fantastic shot, but she’s not quite Hawkeye.

Kate has to do as Lars does: she has to forget everything she knows and relearn it all. ‘

Kate’s great with the on the wire shots, with shooting a specific target, but it takes some learning to be able to be really efficient in a battle where everything is moving, where she’s moving, where her stance isn’t what matters as much as her practical accuracy. She learns with the traditional method that she can’t fire fast enough, she can’t draw fast enough, sometimes her quiver is nothing more than a pain in her ass. She has to learn archery’s natural, lost art.

How’d she figure it out? Similar to Lars, actually. But rather than looking through the history books, she pulls up videos of Clint Barton. She starts to notice how he notches the arrow, how he carries the arrows, and suddenly it makes sense.

When she meets Clint Barton as Ronin, she’s still trying to make this work. She still defaults to the method she was trained in, but she’s working on it. And when he officially signs off on her as Hawkeye she goes into overtime to learn what he knows, to prove to both of them she deserves the name.

By now, this style is second nature to her. It’s her style. She has to make herself think about firing in the ‘traditional’ manner these days.