| abstract | - In battles you will often see arrows that are on fire (especially at night). These arrows are used to set enemies on fire. This can also happen to ballista arrows, catapult rocks, and various other projectiles. Even if there is no sane reason for them to be on fire. Fire is just cool. Though arrows can still get even cooler, especially if shot en masse in a Rain of Arrows. In real life, flaming arrows were seen on medieval battlefields, though to get them to burn reliably one had to wrap them in flammable material and light them first, making them heavier and reducing their range. Also, wrapping a cloth around the pointy bit of your arrow might affect its ability to, you know, kill people; wrapping the cloth behind the arrowhead, as was mostly done in real life, would allow it to penetrate a target. Lighted arrows in real life were used to
* Frighten enemies, see many hundreds of flames coming at you was/is terrifying. Tracers accomplish the same today.
* Adjusting the shot, flaming arrows can easily tell the shooters where most of the arrows are going and they can adjust their shots accordingly
* Set flammable material on fire. There is therefore nothing mockable about them being used en masse to attack wooden buildings or to try to panic a civilian population, but the trope gets taken to extremes when they are always used in night battles even in situations where the lighting-things-on-fire factor would be a non-factor, such as when attacking a stone castle (except when the attacking army is in a position to shoot over the walls and there are wooden buildings on the inside--which there usually are--in which case it's justified). Flaming arrows also give the advantage of letting you see where your arrow lands during the night, so you can correct your shot. They are also very useful as signals in a society with that level of technology. Molotov Cocktails are arguably the modern counterpart. Examples of Arrows on Fire include:
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