School bullies giving a new meaning to having a bad hair day.
"If life were to suddenly get fair, I doubt it would happen in high school."
— Will Stronghold, Sky High (2005)
It seems fictionland is inhabited by the worst bullies in existence, always ready to mock you and steal your lunch money, no matter what happened to you, you will always be different from All of the Other Reindeer. Not even the Littlest Cancer Patient gets a break. Especially not the Littlest Cancer Patient.
The victim is almost always the protagonist; at least fictionland doesn't think bullies are good protagonist material. In Teen Drama, the Alpha Bitch and the Jerk Jock represent this trope. One way to defuse the abuse is for the kid to make their aggressors realize what they're feeling. This only works if the mean kids are good but misguided though, if they aren't, then a beatdown is in order.
If the target of abuse could easily rip them apart if said target wanted and the kids know it, then they're Bullying a Dragon (not to mention Too Dumb to Live). And even if the target of abuse is not superpowered at the time, just wait until the Bully Magnet who Used to Be a Sweet Kid undergoes a Start of Darkness, possibly as a result of the cruelty of other kids, and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, often at a point when the bullies themselves have forgotten the whole thing.
A favorite for films with grown protagonists is to reveal this as part of their Backstory via Flash Backs.
See also Teens Are Monsters, Big Brother Bully, and Humans Are Bastards. Contrast Children Are Innocent. The Royal Brat is a a consequence of this trope mixing with a child with vast social status and power. The Psychopathic Manchild is an adult having a childlike cruelty to them. Adults Are Useless for when the majority, if not all, the bullying occurs all the time because the adults ignore it, are oblivious or, in a few extreme instances, actively encourage it out of a sadistic desire to see the victim suffer. Cruel kids are usually the main cause of the Badly Battered Babysitter and Dreaded Kids' Party Entertainer Job, and are also part of why Middle School Is Miserable.
When this trope is encouraged, or made light of by a work's narrative, see Cereal Vice Reward.
For a child who is outright evil towards adults too, see Enfant Terrible.
Sometimes, this leads to Would Hurt a Child. But all too often the bullying has catastrophic consequences.
Might potentially lead to pedophobia
if one should ever encounter these types of younglings.
Example subpages:
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Advertising
- Many '90s kid-aimed commercials glorified this trope, with kids joyfully behaving in ways that even most real-life kids would find repulsive:
- A good example is the Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats commercials of the mid-'90s, which not only exemplified Kids Versus Adults but often had cartoonishly sassy children doing things almost no decently-raised kid would even want to do in real life, such as squirting (reasonably nice) old ladies with garden hoses.
- Kids in cereal commercials are especially cruel to mascots, with the most notorious examples being Lucky the Leprechaun and the Trix Rabbit, who will never get to keep or have their respective cereals thanks to them. The kids in the Cocoa Puffs commercials did the opposite, tempting Sonny the Cuckoo Bird with the cereal until he lost his self control and went "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs".
Comic Books
- The Beauty: Ezerae states that kids can be assholes, while showing a picture of her getting beaten up on the playground as a kid (and as a boy).
- Cletus Kassidy started out in this trope and got worse from there. To wit, he killed his dog, his family and apparently burnt down the orphanage he was sent to before he became a teen.
- Doom Patrol: The children who bullied Dorothy Spinner when she was younger were invariably shown to be despicably hateful little monsters. For instance, Grant Morrison's run on Volume 2 established that one of the bullies was a boy named Bernard Muller who even went as far as tormenting Dorothy by hanging a cat (no context is given on whether the cat is Dorothy's pet or merely a stray she befriended), while Rachel Pollack's run on the same volume revealed that the children who were already picking on Dorothy for having a face like an ape found another reason to make fun of her when she started menstruating.
- Little Archie, as described in this article, frequently came off as a misogynistic, fat-shaming little brat, mainly due to Values Dissonance.
- Monica's Gang: Just try to find any issue of the comics from before the 2010's that were devoid of name-calling, squabbles, bossing around, disagreements and physical note aggression between the child protagonists. It makes Peanuts look like the Get-Along Gang in comparison. Even after it turned Lighter and Softer, it's pretty much impossible to have these kids to be nice to each other for longer than one comic.
- Robin: Damian Wayne is currently the youngest member of the Batfamily and one of its least pleasant members with his superiority complex and Anti-Hero tendencies. Snobbish, self-entitled, and manipulative, he constantly rubs others the wrong way and it took a while for him to get over his "killing is okay" mindset instilled in him by his mother, Talia al Ghul. Nevertheless, he still has his moments, such as the time he dropped the younger and naive Jonathan Kent off an eighty story building just to distract Lex Luthor with full knowledge that he was unable to fly.
- In Runaways (2015), all the horrors of the Doom Institute were orchestrated by Valeria von Doom, God-Emperor Doom's brilliant but sadistic four-year-old daughter.
- On the same note, the first villain of Super Sons is a boy calling himself Kid Amazo. After he and the rest of his family gained superpowers through the Amazo Virus, they fell into in-fighting that ended with Kid Amazo murdering his entire family out of the scorn he believed they had for him.
- This plays into a notable event in Rorschach's past in Watchmen. Rorschach was the son of a prostitute who often beat him. One day, when he was ten years old and sent out to get some milk, two fifteen-year-old boys accosted him and kept up the taunt of "whoreson" and demanded to be hooked up with Rorschach's mother. Rorschach, at age ten, partially blinded one boy with the boy's own cigarette, and swarmed the other one. Rorschach was taken into custody, and then put in state school when his home life was discovered.
- The X-Men in every incarnation displays this trope. X-Men being what they are, this is liable to fall under Bullying a Dragon.
- Young Avengers: Wiccan's backstory is this mixed with Beware the Quiet Ones; when a bully was beating him up for intervening, he accidentally electrocuted the boy, discovering his powers for the first time.
- Irredeemable. As a child the Plutonian was forced to put up with bullying because any retaliation could have killed the kids bullying him. After his Face–Heel Turn, he uses that to justify his willingness to murder children.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- Calvin himself can be pretty cruel when he's not the victim; he can be quite the bully towards Susie, and he absolutely Would Hit a Girl with snowballs and water balloons, or by making threats of knocking her teeth out.
- In the Tenth Anniversary Collection, Watterson muses a bit on the character of Moe, who was written as a bully from a child's perspective, which is to say that being a jerk is Moe's only purpose. Moe is, in fact, the only recurring character in the entire strip not intended to be treated with any sympathy whatsoever.
- After Moe shoves him face-down in the dirt, Calvin proceeds to express his contempt for his own age group:
- The way Charlie Brown is treated in Peanuts's World of Jerkass, most of the kids could count for this (except Linus and Marcie most of the time). Lampshaded especially hard in this strip. It's as though Schulz himself hates children.
- In Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis recounts that when one of Charles Schulz's mistresses said "I do not want to be the woman who ruined the innocence of the Peanuts characters", Schulz replied "You're so naive to think they're innocent. Children are not innocent at all. Children are cruel." However, the woman gave this rueful response: "Children aren't cruel. They're learning from us."
Films — Animation
They even have Nightmare Faces. Oh, God!
- An American Tail has a group of mean, cynical orphans near the end who briefly convince Fievel to give up looking for his family, though they could be seen as Jerkass Woobies who were embittered after failing to find their families.
- Cats Don't Dance: Child star Darla Dimple is a savage, prejudiced, hot-headed, self-absorbed, sociopathic prima donna who has let her celebrity status go straight to her head and has an iron-fisted dominance over every other cast and crew member on the film set.
- The white-wooled lambs in Charlotte's Web 2: Wilbur's Great Adventure are incredibly mean to literal Black Sheep Cardigan. Not only do they call him names, mock him for being friends with Wilbur, and push him around, they pretty much outright kick him out of the flock for the terrible sin of having black wool.
- The president's daughter in Free Birds: after successfully kidnapping Reggie, she deliberately mistreats him.
- Fantastic Planet: It turns out that the woman in the opening scene is being tormented by Draag children. Tiwa's friends like to pit their Oms against each other in gladiatorial combat. Even Tiwa, who is said to "love" Terr in the narration, is just as often seen playing mean pranks on him as treating him well. While adults are shown killing Oms, they only do it because they regard Oms as pests, not because they get sadistic pleasure in tormenting them.
- The LEGO Batman Movie: As Richard Grayson is introducing himself to Bruce Wayne, he mentions how the other kids at the orphanage nickname him “Dick”. Wayne replies, “Children can be cruel.”
- Megamind: At the beginning of the movie, it's shown that Megamind was bullied relentlessly by his peers in school, particularly by the child who would grow up to be Metroman. In one scene during a game of dodgeball, Metroboy chooses a girl with a broken leg and lazy eye over young Megamind to be on their team, leaving Megamind the sole target. Even the teacher picked on him.
- Toy Story:
- Toy Story 1: Sid, Andy's next door neighbor, decapitates his sister's dolls and crudely fixes them onto anything he finds. He also enjoys burning holes into toys and strapping them to rockets. Thankfully averted with Andy, who cares very much for his toys, even when he's a teenager, as shown in the third film.
- Toy Story 3: The daycare children, although excused in that they're too young to understand that some toys aren't designed for rough play.
- Toy Story 5: Kara, Chelsea and Heidi, three girls from Bonnie's dance group who Lilypad tries to win as friends for Bonnie, turn out to actually be a Gang of Bullies who constantly mock Bonnie for playing with non-technology toys. During their sleepover they play hide and seek but "forget" to search for Bonnie.
- Wreck-It Ralph: The Sugar Rush characters are meant to be around age ten. They aggressively bully Vanellope, who is referred to as "The Glitch" due to her being a glitch, to the point where they break her car in order to get her out of a race. However, it's only because King Candy tampered with Vanellope's coding system that they act this way. When they regain their memory, they are a lot sweeter to her, though it may partially just be fear as she is royalty and could reprimand them.
- Zootopia (2016): When they were young, both of the protagonists, Judy and Nick, were victims of two separate violent bullying incidents from bigoted peers where their dreams were ridiculed because of their species. Judy was told she would never be more than a "stupid carrot-farming dumb bunny" and Nick was told that a fox would never be trusted without a muzzle. While the two of them reacted in completely different ways, it was the main factor in shaping their adult world-views and the trauma still affects them even 15-20 years later.
Films — Live-Action
- 8 Ball Clown: The two kids of the movie earn 8-Ball's wrath by constantly prank calling him and leaving him nasty messages about how he's a loser and an asshole, and even by farting into the phone.
- Those kids from 50 First Dates would laugh at a man having a fantasy dream.
- In the movie An American Girl Chrissa Stands Strong, three girls constantly bully Chrissa and her friend Gwen. They throw away Chrissa's clothes, give Gwen a deliberately bad haircut, and even cause Chrissa's brother to become seriously injured.
- Scott Hoager and Gary Fulcher from the Disney film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia, whose screentime consists almost entirely of picking on protagonist Jess Aarons. Scott especially takes on a more antagonistic role like teasing Jess after his only friend Leslie's death.
Scott: "Looks like you're the fastest kid in class now, huh, Jess?"
(suddenly noticed Jess standing up and turning around)
Scott: "Uhh, it's a joke, dude!" (Cue Scott getting well-deserved punch to the face) - Big Fat Liar: Marty shows up at a kid's birthday party dressed like a Non-Ironic Clown. The guests have no reaction to his greeting. But then the birthday boy's father recognizes him, instructs his son to "show him your nutcracker," and... they all go raging wild!
- Billy Club (2013): In Flashbacks, we see that when Billy struck out in the 1981 and lost a Little League game for his team, they all basically turned on him. They ripped the sleeves off his shirt, gagged him, put him in a dunking booth, and took turns trying to dunk him. It was Alison who threw the ball that put him in the water, at which point the kids started shaking the booth. Also, his hands were tied up, so he couldn't swim to the surface, so he basically started drowning. He was floating face-down on the surface by the time someone showed up to get rid of the other kids and save his life (partly because the door to the booth was jammed shut. Losing a game is one thing, but basically drowning the one who cost you the victory!?
- Blitz (2024): George stands out as a biracial boy in the London of 1940 during the Blitz. He receives racist bullying from many other children due to this. He finally stands up for himself by telling off two boys who teased him on the train. This causes said boys to behave better after that. One white girl on the train also takes his side, and the runaways who he meets are also friendly.
- In A Boy Called Po, the titular autistic child is severely bullied at school, which teachers refuse to do anything about even after he comes home with a black eye.
- The Butterfly Effect: Look at the nerd! He has no arms and no legs! Ha ha ha!
- It's played with, given how the bully can be a better or worse person depending on how the events are dealt with.
- Carrie (1976): A textbook example not just of Kids are Cruel, but of just what happens when you bully the character with telekinetic powers.
- In Castle of Sand, young Hideo is a beggar along with his leprous father. In one village the local children jump on Hideo and beat him, then throw stones at Hideo and his father as they limp out of town.
- A Christmas Story: In addition to the bullying Ralphie personally experiences, there's the aftermath of the infamous Tongue on the Flagpole scene where the teacher tries the guilt trip the class for daring that kid, since she didn't know which one was responsible. But Ralphie notes that it didn't work because they were only concerned about getting caught.
- Daredevil: Even after Matt is blinded, the kids still pick on him. Although to be fair, before Matt agrees to fight them, they turn away, presumably to leave. They may have physically hurt him when he could see, but it seems like they weren't about to cross that line anymore.
- The protagonists in Drillbit Taylor are constantly menaced by two bullies, one of whom is completely psychopathic. Not only do they perform the normal bully tactics, but at one point the bullies chase the protagonists with a car, apparently in an attempt to murder them for trying to report their behavior. What makes this even worse is that most of this is done in plain sight of the rest of the kids in school and they do absolutely nothing about it, at least until the protagonists finally grow some backbone and kick some bully ass.
- Force 10 from Navarone: There's a young boy in the Chetnik camp who always laughs at captured enemy soldiers being taken away to be tortured by the Germans.
- The flashbacks in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare showed that it was, among other things, being relentlessly bullied by other children that drove Freddy Krueger to become a killer. Pretty horribly, the kids were shown teasing him about how he was conceived when his mother was raped by mental patients ("Son of a hundred maniacs! Son of a hundred maniacs!")
- Also revealed to be part of the inspiration for Jason Voorhees' rampages in Freddy vs. Jason. You'd think Freddy would have a little sympathy. Oh, wait, that's right, it's Freddy Krueger.
- In A Girl Named Sooner, the girls doing jump rope tease Sooner. Later, Sooner and the kids throw things at Bird to try to get him to fly.
- The 1993 movie The Good Son. Although, Macaulay Culkin's character is more than just cruel...
- The Gillymuck: Three of the four little girls are mean little brats. They scare one of their own and call her a wuss, causing her to leave the tent in tears that night and run into The Gillymuck.
- Hellboy (2004): Look at the freak, let's throw rocks at her! She doesn't talk, she's a freaky Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette, weird fires keep starting arou — (Earth-Shattering Kaboom!)
- Hostel: There is a roving gang of children that mug people for money and candy, and are very comfortable with violence.
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000): When the Grinch was a child, Augustus and most of his classmates mocked him for his looks, which led to his Start of Darkness.
- I Not Stupid Too has a scene where the eight-year-old protagonist, Jerry, fell asleep during recess in drama class after rehearsing for a stage play, and a girl around his age was napping next to him. Jerry's "friends" and fellow classmates from performing arts then worked together by moving the sleeping Jerry next to the girl and when he wakes up, pranks Jerry into thinking he impregnated his classmate and mocking him repeatedly by shouting lines like "You're going to be a father!" And Jerry somehow falls for it!
- Henry Bowers From It (1990). Not only is he cruel. He's a psychopathic racist, sexist and an all-around asshole etc. While he was bad enough as a kid, he eventually grows up into an even worse adult who tries to murder the protagonists before finally getting his comeuppance.
- The entire The Karate Kid series including the fourth one is filled with bullies that are mean to the point of over top idiocy; sometimes it's influenced by an adult who enforces this behavior. In the remake not only are they cruel but also racist.
- Kids and Bully, both Larry Clark films, feature absolutely horrible yet strangely realistic depictions of kid cruelty.
- In Kung Fu Hustle, in a flashback to his childhood, the Anti-Hero protagonist attempted to protect a mute girl from a group of bullies who were ganging up on her. They then proceed to turn around and beat him up instead, and afterwards, they even pee on him. This is when the protagonist says he decided to turn to a life of crime.
- In La Ferme des Sept Péchés, François' flashback shows him being bullied by boys from the village who throw stones at him until Paul-Louis Courier intervenes.
- Let the Right One In: The three bullies can get pretty mean. Oskar, his victim, is clearly getting a little creepy. Then comes the big brother whose cruelty scares even the bullies, and of course, finally Eli.
- Little Sweetheart: Thelma torments adults and her friends increasingly as the movie progresses. Even her friend, Elizabeth, becomes cruel for a while, but ends up redeeming herself. It almost equals death, instead becoming life in the last few seconds.
- In Mandy (1952), almost all the titular deaf girl's interactions with normal kids are unpleasant. In one scene, a boy takes her ball and won't give it back until she says "please." When she can't, he and his friend play piggie in the middle, taunting her with the ball, until she attacks him and pulls his hair.
- In Mario (1984), Mario is first shown being taunted and shoved around by other kids.
- Masters of the Universe (2026): After Adam ends up on Earth as a child, he starts going to a local school. A teacher chews him out in front of the class because he was supposed to write an essay about his favorite historical figure, but he wrote it about Ram Man, who nobody on Earth knows about. Adam says that Ram Man is historical, and the rest of the class laughs at him.
- Jack Jr. from Meet the Fockers.
- The Monster Squad. Even the kids we like are vicious little creeps at times.
- Eric has shades of this in Mystery Team.
- Real Genius features a group of college students selected for early advancement due to their intelligence. Naturally, they tend to come from backgrounds where they were bullied for this. Mitch, the main protagonist, describes to his roommate Chris how he was once stuffed into a mailbox by the Jerk Jocks at his old school.
- Remember Me (2010): Caroline, Tyler's little sister, is frequently a victim of bullying, but she says she can handle it... until towards the end of the film, where one of the bullies invites her to a birthday party. The sister is nervous to go but assumes the girls just want to be friends now...and then later we see her tearfully begging her father over the phone to pick her up, her pigtails chopped off. Apparently the girls ganged up on her out of sight of the parents, held her down and cut her hair off, and then told the parents she did it to herself — and, as her father reluctantly admits, it was off school grounds, so nothing can be done about it. The girls still mock her for her attempt at a decent hairdo the next week (she was too traumatized to leave her room) at school, in front of the teacher. Luckily, even if the teacher did nothing, the girl's older brother and father certainly did. In fact, when said brother was sent to jail for doing something about it, the father bailed him out and then told him that he threatened all the girls' fathers if they didn't transfer them to other schools right away.
- In RoboCop 2 not only is one of the villains of the film a child, but every kid who appears in the film is either a violent criminal (one scene involves a group of little leaguers mugging a man and beating him to death with their bats) or a foul-mouthed little brat who drops F-bombs generously.
- Used on a couple of occasions in Schindler's List, such as the little girl screaming "Goodbye, Jews!" as they're being rounded up, and the boy who grins and makes a throat-slitting gesture at the cattle cars heading towards the extermination camp.
- Smosh: The Movie: The gang of kids at the Game Bang antagonize Ian and Anthony for no reason, with their leader taking a dump on Anthony's car.
- In Star Trek (2009), we discover that even Vulcan kids display this tendency towards Half-Human Hybrid Spock. Being Vulcans, they're quite stoic and formal about it (Spock: "Have you prepared more insults for me today?" — Vulcan boy: "Affirmative."). They cross the line once they discuss Spock's mother: a beatdown from Spock ensues.
- This was actually established the TOS episode "Journey to Babel".
- Parodied in Step Brothers, where elementary schoolchildren attack Dale and Brennan and force them to eat dog shit. Dale and Brennan are at least 40 years old. Thankfully, the two get their revenge at the end.
Dale: You know in that one scene in The Wizard of Oz when the flying monkeys pull apart the scarecrow? That's what it was like.
- The main plot of the WWE production That's What I Am, where a kid gets paired with an intelligent student who gets made fun of due to his tall, wiry frame, red hair and big ears. The kid gets to learn his qualities and experiences the prejudice he faces.
- At the end of Tomboy, the protagonist's friends force her to take off her shorts and force a female friend to check her pants, so that they can see if she's really a girl. There have been cases of kids actually doing this to transgender or gender-variant kids too.
- Unbreakable: "They called me Mister Glass."
- When Evil Calls: Many of the students are shown being treated horribly by others, which often prompts their wishes for change.
- The Wild Child: In the village where Victor is originally kept after his capture, local kids hit Victor, and he hits them back. At the institute for the deaf-mute, the other students are initially friendly, but soon they start harassing him and mimicking his odd behavior.
- The Woman in Black: Angel of Death includes a scene where a young, traumatized child is locked in a haunted nursery during a game of hide-and-seek. Things only go downhill for him after that.
Manhua
- My Beloved Mother is set in a universe where robots are integrated into daily lives, with orphans being Raised by Robots issued by the government. But due to prejudice and Fantastic Racism, children with robot parents are often picked on by their peers for being outcasts; a child who lose his family and subjected to having a robot mother even bullied until he runs away from home two months later. There's also the protagonist Sinbell who tries hiding the fact that he's one such orphan, only for his robot mother to accidentally reveal herself at his school, which quickly leads to the entire class severing ties with him!
Manhwa
- In Redrum 327 Hyeri. At just 8 years old, Hyeri and the other kids locked Gahui up in an abandoned safe in the middle of a forest, where Gahui ended up being trapped for six days while it rained, nearly drowning and half-frozen as a result.
Music
- The video for Mass Destruction by Faithless has kids engaging in fist fights.
- Gym Class Heroes' third album is called As Cruel as School Children, with the implication that school children are inherently cruel.
- The song "Face in the Hall" is about homophobic bullying that escalates and ends up killing the victim.
- Lene Marlin's first single "Sitting Down Here" is about this; the other kids are pretending to be her friend and apparently think she hasn't noticed that they talk about her behind her back, while the main character plots revenge for these slights.
- Nightwish has "Eva", a song about a girl who is practically suicidal because of bullying.
- Dolly Parton's song "Coat of Many Colors" recounts a story from her childhood. She grew up poor, and her only coat was one made of multicolored rags that her mother had sewn together. Dolly absolutely loved the coat, and wore it to school...only for more well-off children to begin laughing and making fun of her.
- All BUT Taylor Swift's character in the video for "Mean" are bullied by other kids.
- Tony Tammaro: in "Alla fiera della casa", one of the children (all brothers) spits in the face of another one and a third one hits the second one's face with a stone with enough force to draw blood. All Played for Laughs. Also all the commotion started due to another one of the twelve brothers crushing a pack of popcorns of yet another brother for no reason other than being a dick.
- The Who's Tommy features Cousin Kevin. John Entwistle wrote the song based on a bully he dealt with as a child until they were teenagers, when John realized he had grown bigger than the bully and punched him out.
- While Mark Wills' Don't Laugh At Me is about cruelty in different settings, the first verse covers examples of kid/teen cruelty very nicely.
Radio
- Nebulous:
Nebulous: At school... they called me "Nobulous"Rory: Ha ha ha ha... er... Ahem hem, er, kids can be so cruel.
- Adventures in Odyssey: Liz Horton was a rather nice girl, but you wouldn't know this from her first appearances. In two episodes, the first she repeatedly teases a girl about how ugly her clothes are, ((even informing her that she was talking about her)), and in the other episode she is so mean at times, you just want to reach through the speakers and punch the ever living tar out of her.
Stand-Up Comedy
- Donald Glover discusses this in one of his stand-up routines, describing children as "tiny Hitlers". He says that walked by two kids fighting over a basketball, and the fight ended with one of them saying, "And that's why your mom's in a fucking wheelchair!". Donald was so shocked he dropped the food he was carrying, and wonders how someone can say that without exploding.
- John Mulaney, in one of his specials, says "thirteen year olds are the worst people in the world" because of their ability to be accurately cruel in making fun of people.
Tabletop Games
- Hilariously invoked in an article in Wargamer's Illustrated about an Alamo game demo at a wargaming convention. Put in charge of some Mexican troops storming the makeshift fortress, a preteen let the referee know that he would like to storm the church. Upon being told that the only people in the church were women and children, the boy stated that he wanted to storm the church anyway. The referee joked about the kid's sociopathy in the article.
Visual Novels
- Katawa Shoujo: One of the reasons Hanako has such a withdrawn personality is that she was bullied at school after having half of her body scarred by the fire that killed her family. The worst part? Her bullies used to be her best friends. No wonder she has such a difficult time letting people close.
Web Animation
- Catbug from Bravest Warriors is naive and child-like. As a result, he doesn't quite understand right and wrong. Due to this, episodes have dealt with him being both a kleptomaniac and a murderer.
- The New Miami City Hackers were a group of kids who teased Danny relentlessly as a kid, inventing a remote that made him throw up on command.
- In the DEATH BATTLE! episode featuring Lucy vs. Carnage, even poor Boomstick can't help but feel bad about Lucy's mistreatment and justify her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- Homestar Runner:
- Strong Bad was abusive to his little brother Strong Sad, going as far as drilling a hole in his stomach for a belly button. He and Strong Mad still pummel Strong Bad "every hour on the hour".
- One Strong Bad Email has Strong Bad introducing Edga Jr., a filter for long emails. The splash screen has an angry kid with the caption "Indent and Die!"
- Another one purports to teach children the value of hygiene, that being that one case of lice or "accident" at school will cause you to be mercilessly bullied by everyone in your grade.
- SNARLED
- "Whispers that Bite" wouldn't have happened if the kids at Chris's school didn't have a tendency to whisper bad things about her, especially Ryan.
- The children in "Frozen Fury", and how! The children who live on Daphna and Amira block love to torment the two sisters. They throw snowballs packed with rocks at them, empty the girls' backpacks, and among them, Keith steals the sisters' lunches.
- Story Booth is known for having stories revolving around this. They sometimes reach Bully Brutality levels.
- Sid from There's a Man in the Woods, who tells a rumor that causes a teacher to be fired, just because he doesn't want to share the honeysuckle with the other kids.
Webcomics
- Jan from Gifts of Wandering Ice was known to be very cruel to his little sister. Also, at the age of 16 he killed her mentor and, when asked for the reason for this at the trial, said that "it was fun".
- Rigel from DNA The Webcomic bullies the other X's younger than him very cruelly. In Segment: Tooth, Rigel mocks Orion's Speech Impediment and throws him into mud puddle and tells him to eat the mud, and then begins drowning Orion in the mud when Orion insults him, which shocks even Leon, who was helping Rigel with his bullying. In Segment: Mud, the first thing he does upon meeting Lukas is boss him around for breaking the rules and then ruins Lukas's drawing, making him cry. but this time it turns out he was Bullying a Dragon.
- El Goonish Shive:
- Tedd has been made fun of since he was small for being androgynous; his AU counterpart went nuts from the strain. Justin has been teased since early high school for being gay. Susan has always been considered a weird feminist, but she got really reamed for a few days after showing up at school in the boys' uniform.
- Elliot feared he may have enjoyed fighting bullies too much in his past. He thinks it might turn him into something of a bully's bully.
- In Gunnerkrigg Court, it seems that prior to Antimony's arrival, the entire Queslett North class made a point of ostracizing Kat Donlan, simply because she got good grades and had teachers for parents. Part of this newfound respect for Kat may be simple fear of Annie. Its shown that despite the class having respect for her, they're kind of freaked out by her Emotionless Girl status at the same time. Ironically, this makes Kat the sociable one and Annie the quiet one, as the class tend to ask Kat to pass messages along to Annie. Kat, naturally, calls them on this.
- In Girl Genius, the children aboard Castle Wulfenbach are noted by Tarvek in this comic as tormenting and picking on each other all the time. Lineage, as he comments, was a favored excuse, with them taking any chance to "one up" each other and thusly claim a reason to bully their "lessers" around.
- This might be Unreliable Narrator, as Tarvek is not unbiased on the subject. Though they're old enough to mostly not be "kids" any more, only one of the Castle students (Princess Zulenna) goes out of her way to be cruel to Agatha when she's living with them, despite everyone at the time thinking Agatha is a commoner nobody.
- As Sleipnir noted, by this time active Sparks among them became more confident in their power, however much they have. And, ahem, found other things to do with their free time.
- As Sleipnir noted
- This might be Unreliable Narrator, as Tarvek is not unbiased on the subject. Though they're old enough to mostly not be "kids" any more, only one of the Castle students (Princess Zulenna) goes out of her way to be cruel to Agatha when she's living with them, despite everyone at the time thinking Agatha is a commoner nobody.
- I Love Yoo: The bullying Shin-Ae was subjected to as a child is certainly not played for laughs. Another example is when Shin-Ae is at the mall and sees a girl bullying a younger girl at a mall for seemingly no reason.
- Little Lapses: Holly's "friends" from early on in the school year locked her in a shed for getting scared while playing a game.
- In What Birds Know, this trope forms a major part of the backstories of the three girls during flashbacks.
- New Transfer Student Danny from The Boy in Pink Earmuffs gets called homophobic slurs by the local boys for being Camp Gay and ignorant of "boy stuff".
Web Videos
- In the lonelygirl15 episode "Poor Pluto", it is revealed that Bree was bullied by the other kids at school because she liked to ask questions about stars. However, in the following episode, "I Want to Take Bree to a Party", Daniel claims that
it was just teasing and that Bree takes things really seriouslythey were a bunch of mindless jerks who didn't give a crap about her feelings. Seriously, spreading rumors about her having an affair with her teacher? - The Nostalgia Critic got bullied for most of his childhood, and while we mostly just hear about it, in Christmas with the Kranks we get to see depressing flashbacks of it.