Aquaman has a scene where bullies slam the boy hero against a tank, so the writers have an excuse for him to create shark-on-tank collisions that will probably cost this poor aquarium millions of dollars.
We’ve all seen it countless times: the good-looking and talented protagonist goes to school, only to be physically assaulted by villainous children. These bullies don’t like the protagonist because they’re new to the school, or their parent is dead, or they’re different in some invisible and undefinable way. So, they slam the main character against the nearest wall and grab their lunch money. Good thing the protagonist has some magic or a giant robot friend, because otherwise they’d get beaten up every day.
From the recent Aquaman film to the classic The NeverEnding Story, it feels like every movie or TV show with a school-age protagonist pulls out this cliché. Screenwriters seem to think it’s their “get sympathy free” card. Throw in some bullies, and with little time and even less thought, their protagonist becomes an underdog. The cliché is less common in novels, probably because the greater length allows for more nuance.
The problem with this pattern isn’t that bullying is the subject matter; it’s how cheap these depictions of bullying are.
What’s Wrong With These Scenes
Like any cliché, bullying scenes are disappointingly unoriginal. But more than that, bullying is a serious issue. Treating it so thoughtlessly is not helping the real kids who are getting hurt.
It Spreads an Inaccurate Picture of Bullying
The bullies shown in these stories are more physically violent than any kids that ever bullied me, or indeed, any kids I have seen in my life. This is not to say that bullies in real life never use physical violence, particularly against kids that face extreme marginalization in their communities, but that’s not how most bullying manifests. Most bullying is harassment, much of it designed to humiliate the victims and destroy their feelings of self-worth. Bullies don’t have to physically hurt their targets; with enough emotional damage, the victims will hurt themselves.
Screenwriters probably don’t want to use harassment because too many people don’t understand how harmful it is,* and it’s not easy to demonstrate that harm in five minutes. So instead they pull out something they know their audience will react to. But doing this only makes people think that real bullying is physical rather than psychological. As a result, bullies who engage in harassment are allowed to continue, which is probably why it’s their favorite tactic.
Exaggerating bullying isn’t productive either. All kids need to be taught not to wield emotionally abusive language or violate other people’s boundaries. When we spread the idea that bullies are kids waiting to grow a twirly mustache, what parent will be willing to admit their kid is a bully and teach that kid better?
It Perpetuates the Idea That “Kids Will Be Kids”
If an adult protagonist left work every day only to be mugged by the same people, what would we expect to happen? Let’s see, how about… calling the police? In a story where it’s important for this adult to face the muggers on their own, there would at least be a little dialogue or some thoughts explaining why the protagonist won’t report what’s happening to the authorities.
But in most of these cheap depictions, no one even mentions that some adult at the school could intervene. Bullying is just what kids do, and any kid who’s targeted has to face the perpetrator on their own. Or worse, a kid who reports their victimization to a teacher is a “tattletale.” This is convenient for storytellers, because having an adult save the day would reduce conflict and take agency away from the youthful protagonist.
Convenient for us or not, this isn’t okay. In real life, schools absolutely have the responsibility to ensure a safe environment for every student on their property. Intervention and discipline from school officials can stop bullying. But too often schools don’t stop it, either because they don’t think they have to or because students and parents don’t realize that’s something they should demand. This assumption leads to countless kids getting bullied when it could easily have been prevented.
It Exploits Vulnerable Kids to Benefit Privileged Kids
The reasons that most movies and TV shows give for why bullies target their protagonists are patently absurd. Kids aren’t picked on just because one of their parents died, and they certainly wouldn’t be picked on for having superpowers. The reality is that bullies are not interested in targeting kids they think can fight back; they choose victims with the least amount of power and social support. Most often, that means their targets are unattractive, lack social skills, are part of a marginalized group, or all of the above.
Update 2/11/19
But the average studio is unwilling to give protagonists any traits that would actually make them a target. Every protagonist has to be attractive, sociable, able-bodied, neurotypical, straight, cis, and white. Most movie stars more closely resemble a typical bully than a bully’s victim, and the continued over-representation of this narrow group of people only perpetuates the same imbalance of power that allows bullying to flourish.
Instead of giving protagonists some diversity, too many storytellers are appropriating the experiences of marginalized kids to use in stories about privileged kids. If they don’t do it by depicting a super privileged kid being bullied for no reason, they’ll do it by making a sidekick the bully’s target instead. This way the attractive protagonist can prove themself to be an exemplary human being by protecting such a lowly person from the bullies. This latter trend of using a less fortunate side character is just as exploitative.
Ways to Avoid This in Our Stories
As many written works show, there’s a plethora of more thoughtful and original ways to create conflict in a school setting.
Create School Conflict Without Bullying
In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles has just left his old public school for an expensive private school he earned a scholarship to attend. He doesn’t want to go. Scenes in the movie show him walking by his former classmates as they head to class without him, demonstrating how well he gets along with them. When he arrives at his new school, his dad embarrasses him the way parents do, the other students don’t understand the culture he comes from, and after losing his way, he’s reprimanded by a teacher for being late.
As a new middle-class black student in a school of upper-class white kids, bullying is actually realistic in this situation. But rather than subjecting viewers to the harsh reality of something they might have to deal with in real life, the movie focuses on Miles’s internal journey. Viewers understand that when it looks like everyone is watching and laughing at Miles, it’s just a reflection of how he feels out of place. When Miles learns how to be who he wants to be and also succeed at his new school, it’s more satisfying than if he had just learned to spiderweb some bully to the ceiling.
School is naturally full of conflict. Kids are often under pressure to get good grades and are forced to participate in activities they’re terrible at – in front of lots of other people. They are made to work on a team with other kids who may be complete assholes, and even students who don’t intend to be rebellious may clash with teachers.
Sure, most schools aren’t arenas where kids battle to the death. And in most stories, it’s a mistake to try to make them one.* Keep normal school conflicts focused on meaningful interpersonal interactions and the protagonist’s character arc. Let your magic or robots bring on the excitement.
Depict Realistic Power Dynamics
In the Harry Potter series, Draco is a bully, but he isn’t usually Harry’s bully. He’s Harry’s rival. Draco doesn’t choose to pick on Harry because he can get away with it; Harry embarrasses him at the start of their first year. Once that happens, Draco’s pride is at stake. Draco has a powerful family and lots of social support he can use as a weapon against Harry, but Harry is famous and talented. While Rowling often manufacturers reasons for Harry’s classmates to be angry with him, she doesn’t pretend that he would be picked on at Hogwarts for being who he is. Because he wouldn’t.
The kids we know are regular targets of bullying at Hogwarts – Neville and Luna – really would be bullied. Neither of them have many friends. Neville is talentless and afraid of everything. Luna constantly states wild theories as though they are facts. Harry is nice to them, but they aren’t in the story just to be damsels for Harry to rescue.
Rowling does describe how Harry is bullied before he attends Hogwarts, and it’s surprisingly realistic. He’s scrawny, and he’s made to wear really old, baggy clothes. His primary bully is his cousin, who’s been taught to be cruel to Harry at home. Back then, Harry couldn’t control his magic well enough to fight back.
The Harry Potter books are by no means perfect in their depiction of bullying; Rowling treats really abusive behavior like it’s just unkindness and lets the school off the hook for keeping kids safe. However, the books do show that it doesn’t take much added effort to break out of this tiresome cliché. The main characters don’t have to be outcasts to be sympathetic, and they don’t have to be bullied to have an enemy in the schoolyard.
Show Bullying for What It Is
This is a taller order. To do justice to real-world bullying, it’s important to not only show what it really looks like but also to demonstrate to audiences that it is harmful. In a cultural climate where too many people dismiss bullying as just a normal part of life, it will take time and care to teach them otherwise. If it’s not important enough to your plot to fully address the issues you’ll raise by depicting bullying, it’s better to leave it out. Otherwise, you risk normalizing the behavior instead of challenging it.
For an example of what real bullying looks like, I’d like to point to a few scenes in Spider-Man: Homecoming. In the movie, Peter Parker’s best friend tells some classmates that Peter knows the famous Spider-Man, hoping to help him make a good impression. A bully in class instantly seizes on this perceived foible. Assuming it’s a lie, he makes fun of Peter loudly in class and, later, over a microphone when he’s DJing at a party. His loud, public comments are designed to humiliate and socially isolate Peter. He also chooses to focus on something real he thinks Peter will be embarrassed about, making it more likely that Peter will internalize the abuse.
Of course, in the context of the movie, it doesn’t actually hit so hard. Peter is actually Spider-Man, and as an attractive white boy with a Stark internship, he’s unlikely to be bullied. Depicting bullying correctly would mean focusing on a character who would actually be targeted in real life. It means communicating to the audience how the protagonist dreads going to class, how they lose confidence, and how everyone else watches and does nothing. Then the story must have constructive messages about how this abusive behavior can and should be stopped in real life.
It’s not a light topic, and it would be best handled by someone with personal experience being bullied who wants to do the issue justice.
As fantasy and scifi geeks, there’s one more thing we should keep in mind. People aren’t bullied for being geeks anymore. Today our interests are cool, or at least mainstream. So let’s not pretend our protagonists would be picked on because they like Narnia or Star Wars. Our depictions matter, and we can do better.
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Ok, gonna defend Aquaman :-) :
1. Arthur actually is a minority, he’s a PoC. Also, in that short scene he comes across as socially incompetent, fixated on the fish instead of interacting with the other children. Even if you don’t buy this argument, though…
2. it’s such a short scene, so I thought the movie makers were more interested in showing his fish-telepathy-powers emerging in a highly dramatic way, rather than making him into a bullied underdog. I mean, this is the only scene we get of other kids being mean to him. We quickly move on to him being an adult, and he seems pretty popular then. (Among humans, that is, not counting racist Atlanteans).
STILL, I totally see the overall point of the article. :-)
Wow, my bullies must have consumed too much cliched media, because it was a daily experience of getting punched in the gut, choked, tripped and shoved into walls for me.
I’m sad to hear that.
I experienced less physically violent bullying myself (even though the bully was a boy – the more social bullying is usually more attributed to girls). It lasted until two of my teachers got wind of it and gave the whole class hell for what they let happen – both teachers were strict and highly respected, so their words really counted for something.
lmfao That first one happened to me a lot at my camping trip in junior high
One issue with this that comes to mind in both the Harry Potter and I am assuming Aquaman(I haven’t seen it) examples are that the character has magic of some sort but no one believes this to be true because of the masquerade. So they are the subject of bullying because they appear to be a “freak” out of context in that their magic cannot possible be real.
Yet another reason why plots involving the masquerade are problematic.
In case of Harry Potter, though, the bullying by his cousin happens mostly before he learns he has magic (and there are mentions of accidental magic he used before). Since Harry is abused by all of his aunt’s family (mostly because Petunia hated her sister for being magical), Dudley has been brought up to hate his cousin – it’s not a surprise from that background that he bullies Harry (especially since it’s clear Harry’s uncle, too, is a bully at heart). He’s never punished for it, neither by his parents nor, which would have been more likely in this case, any of the teachers at the regular school he and Harry went through.
The bullying by Draco happens at school, but has nothing to do with being a freak – since here we’re talking about two wizards in training. It really comes from Draco’s idea of having been humiliated at the beginning of their time in school – after all, after denying Draco’s friendship, Harry’s best friends are a poor wizard whose family is too muggle-friendly for a pureblood and a muggle-born girl.
Yeah Aquaman has this really weird masquerade premise about there being huge powerful underwater civilizations that humanity doesn’t know about. I think the plot was pretty clichéd, but I still enjoyed the movie SO MUCH because of the spectacle and the awesome underwater environments and creatures.
But yeah, the quick bullying scene indicates that the other kids think Arthur is weird with his fish interest. Then it’s fast forward to when he’s an adult, most of the world knows about his existence although he’s a bit of a mystery, but some locals know who he is. They make this jokey scene where a bunch of tough guys come up to him in a bar and it looks like they’re gonna try to oppress him for being a mage, but actually they’re fans and want to take selfies and drink with him.
Everything you say about bullying is pretty much on the mark, though I went through a lot of physical violence as well at emotional.
What is missing is the community. Bullying isn’t really about two kids. Or two kids and a few of the bully’s entourage. When we frame bullying as an interaction between individuals without any context we make it all but impossible to really deal with the the issue.
Communities create the circumstances to allow bullying. They push the one on the margin further away, not so much out of cruelty, but as you say, school is already a hotbed of angst, and deliberately working to include those on the margins is adding extra to the burden.
Bullies are either close to the top of the social ladder, and use bullying as a way to maintain their position, or they are also on the margins and try to move up through bullying. These are often both victims and bullies at the same time.
The other thing you don’t cover is that bullying doesn’t stop after school. Many bosses are effective bullies. They get things done by grinding down and humiliating their employees. There are bullies in choirs and orchestras, in bowling leagues. Pretty much anywhere where social status is an issue – so anywhere aside from Crusoe’s desert island.
I agree with you on all accounts.
We Germans refer to bullying in a work environment (which often has to do with power play of some sort – either between the boss and their employees or between employees vying for better jobs) as mobbing, though.
We also refer to bullying in school as mobbing and it’s just as much a power play there as it would be at work, maybe with slightly less secure social roles.
Its great that you mention the community aspect. Bullying, in most cases, is a show – the bully does what he does in front of other kids, to score “kudos points” or “brownie points”. The bully is out to impress his/her friends and gain social status, at the expense of lowering the social status of the bullied.
This usually works. Speaking from my own experience (in a working-class all-white school between ages 7 and 15) – for kids at that age, social standing is a zerosum. To gain some, you need to take it away from somebody. The ability to dish out suffering on others is a highly praised skill in school. Most teachers at that time (early 90s) also accepted this.
This is exactly why the same kids, as you said, “are often both victims and bullies at the same time”. Kids gain and lose respect, acceptance and love through violence. It is a real problem that adults see this and accept it among kids, all the while they accept none of that amongst themselves.
Anyone interested in a depiction of bullying that doesn’t do any of this should go read the first chapter of Worm. Warning: every trigger warning ever.
In all fairness, the bullying in Worm isn’t terribly realistic either.
The bullies are implausibly violent and there is no way they could have gotten away with the locker incident.
To Worm’s credit, the story manages to make it seem believable. The more implausible stuff happens off-screen and the whole setting is just so dark that it makes sense for the schools to be more unpleasant than in real life. Still, this isn’t a strategy most stories can follow.
The general consensus that I’ve seen is that everyone with the authority to investigate the Locker Incident was corrupt. (Or Contessa/Simurgh/Coil)
Yeah, Contessa and the Simurgh are the go-to handwavium for any plot hole.
The corrupt authority explanation is probably the best one we have and it’s backed up one of the author’s Reddit comments. It wouldn’t explain why the media didn’t run the school into the ground though.
That’s, I think, where the overall tone and setting of Worm help.
If an innocent schoolgirl got shoved in a locker full biohazards by her classmates and almost died, that’d be global news in real life. In a setting where super-serial killers and kaijus regularly wipe out whole settlements, where cities are ruled by superpowered gangs and where gang-members even show up in schools, it’s a bit more believable for people to ignore this. Desensitization to horror and all.
But like I said, this isn’t a strategy most stories can or should follow. Normally, covering up implausibly grimdark story elements with more implausible grimdark just makes everything worse.
(Puh, that was a long post. I hope I wrote it in a way so that even people who haven’t read this obscure piece of web fiction can follow me. That’s why I kept names to a minimum.)
Hey Chris,
Its a great article, thank you for writing it. I strongly agree with the overwhelming majority of what you wrote.
There are three points I would like to talk about more though:
1. Privilege amongst kids.
We should be careful how we use that term, as privilige amongst adults is something very different than what counts as privilige amongst kids.
In my class the most bullied girl was the one that was the most pretty (arguably, she was the prettiest girl in the whole school). The girls bullied her mercilessly, inlcuding braking her arm at one point. She likewise received quite a bit of rough horseplay from guys as well.
Sure, she was neither the most nice nor the most smart of the girls. But that was not why she was picked on (there were many far less nice and more dumb girls than her). Her beauty was the primary factor in the bullying and arguably the main reason why other girls picked on her more violently than on anyone else. We all knew about this, it wasn’t a secret.
2. Violence and harrassment in bullying.
You have stated that “most bullying is harassment” – maybe today it is, or it was like that in your area. From my own school experience, I’d say violence was 60% or more of all bullying. Violence was almost always followed up with harassment, but “harassment without violence” was pretty much non-existant. All cases of bullying included some form of violence. It wasn’t always simple beatings. Often it was throwing kids out on the wrong bus stop, or holding them and preventing them from getting out at the correct bus stop. Another example was kids being caught and held down so they wouldn’t be able to go to the cafeteria and eat during lunch (this also prevented the bully from eating, which is why bullies stole or brought their own lunch).
But all in all, the physical over-powering of the victim (often by 3 or more bullies ganging up on him/her) was a necessary component.
Also we can argue about the severity of the impact of harrasment and violence. Personally, I’d gladly take 8 years of insults, alienation and “passive harassment” over 1 year of violence. In my experience, violence is clearly the most destructive form of bullying.
3. Social background.
Bullying, from my experience is strongly tied to working-class culture. At least here.
To clarify: I went to an all-white school in an European country where over 99.5% of the population is white and 98% or so is of the same ethnicity and language. The school was overwhelmingly blue-collar and most kids were poor. Coming from the lower ends of the middle class (my mom was blue collar, my dad a white-collar scientist), I was one of the richer kids here.
Bullying was constant and ubiquituous, teachers did nothing at all about it and brushed away parent’s concerns. I was buillied, but I’ve also participated in bullying (mostly out of fear of ending up on the receiving end if I failed to join the majority in the bullying or stand up for the bullied kid) – something I’m not proud of at all.
The head bullies and propagators of the bullying culture were all from the working class and they used violence expertly. They explicitly targeted some kids because they thought he/she was “too weird”, “used big words” or otherwise felt he/she is not coming from the same background. I tried very hard not to let people know my background.
That is not to say that the bullies didn’t bully other working-class kids as well, but being from a different class was a reason enough in itself to get you bullied. Likewise being an atheist or from a non-christian religion would automatically send a lot of violence your way.
Later I graduated to a high school that was overwhelmingly for rich and upper-middle-class kids, where I was the poorest kid in class. There was no bullying in said high schoool. None at all – zero. Those kids who came from blue-collar schools all had previous experiences with bullying, but none of us felt the need to continue it in this new upper class school.
I think it was at that point that I realized that bullying in my country does have a working-class core component that one can’t ignore. I talked with people from other countries here like Romania and Estonia and they had the same experiences: bullying was absent from upper-class schools.
Questions of class are divisive, controversial and difficult, especially in a nation as uniform as mine. But we should not shy away from difficult questions if we want to find the solutions.
To 1: It speaks for itself that the girl got most bullying from other girls for being pretty. Prettiness doesn’t make you popular with other girls in their teens – unless you learn to play society early and ruthless position yourself on top. And once the girls started, the boys went along with it.
To 2: If bullying is not directed at you, you will mostly see the violence, not the harrassment, because harrassment is very subtle in some cases. I was bullied and 95% of it was harrassment. It might have a social component (I went to the Gymnasium, the highest form of secondary school in Germany, where the huge majority came from a well-off to wealthy background), but saying ‘just because I don’t see much harrassment, there is none’ is not a good thing.
To 3: Bullying in upper-class environment might tend more towards harrassing – which in some ways makes it worse, because violence leaves visible proof, harrassment doesn’t. As already mentioned, I was bullied in school and I went to a more upper-class school myself.
Well, in primary school (roughly age 7 to 15) bullying was certainly directed at me very often and the majority of it had a component of violence. That doesn’t mean that violence was not followed up by harassment, destruction of property or alienation. But violence was the most socially-damaging one and it was, at least to me, the hardest to withstand.
With insults etc, you can always talk back. With a sharp tongue and a quick mind, you can even turn the tables and end with the bully walking away losing standing, being insulted in wittier and more funny way than he tried to insult you.
With physical violence you don’t get the chance to do so. If 3 guys are holding you down and the fourth is beating you up, you are absolutely helpless and can’t do anything (even if you are strong and fit).
If you have your food stolen and you are physically prevented from going to the cafeteria, you simply have nothing else but to go hungry and it spoils the whole day.
I’d say the helplessness is the worst part, at least it was for me. Its worse than losing social “brownie points” or knowing that the adults don’t care.
As for “visibility”, the bullies in my school knew a lot of ways to cause you a lot of physical pain that left no visible marks. I imagine they were probably using techniques that their parents used on them when dishing out corporal punishment.
Plus it didn’t matter much, as the teachers didn’t care. The worst beatings were dished out on your way from school or on your way to school, so teachers could a;ways say: “It did not happen on our watch”.
I agree that if bullying happens in upper-class schools, its less likely to be violence. Also girls would use violence less (whic does not mean not using it at all).
I have very similar experience. Ex-USSR country, 90th, bulling in school on, let’s say, social basis. Move to another, more elite school solved all bulling issues.
But I should say that I experienced bulling whereas my 1 year younger brother did not have such problems. I do suspect that root cause was in teacher attitude (we had one main teacher responsible for class). In my case it was clearly her attitude that initiate bulling.
“In my class the most bullied girl was the one that was the most pretty (arguably, she was the prettiest girl in the whole school).”
Doesn’t surprise me at all.
I was bullied in primary school, and I have a more or less conventionally pretty type face. In my case, the boys started it, and the girls at most made some snide comments.
Why was I bullied? I was the weird kid and didn’t get along well with the girl, so had no friends to protect me. End of story. Being pretty didn’t help me any.
Other girls were picked on for having large breasts. In adults, you would have called it sexual harrassment, but to me as a kid, it looked like bullying. In that case, for all I can remember, ONLY by the boys. For girls and women, beauty is not a privilege, not really. It is a double-edged sword at best.
Sadly, my experience with upper class schools doesn’t match yours. While I am not entirely sure all students were upper class, I went to a pretty nice private school, and there was bullying, too.
(Though I have to say, the most privileged students – there were some with a nobility title – were not usually involved in the bullying. While the one I know was underprivileged enough to skip school to work instead – she wasn’t poor, but I guess she didn’t get as much pocket money as she would have wanted)
A deep seated lack of self esteem might be a factor in becoming a bully. I have certainly met some very annoying people as adult where I am almost entirely certain that they are acting like they are the best thing since sliced bread because they are extremely insecure deep down.
Not that that’s an excuse. There’s plenty people with low self esteem who manage to not be assholes.
I think you’re right about bullies having low self-esteem. The bullies I encountered in my life usually were often over-acting – making themselves look perfect, but you could tell that it was an act. From that point of view, targeting a pretty girl (if the bully is a girl, too), makes even more sense – they make themselves seem better by bringing the other girl down. And, no, that’s not an excuse for bullying.
This actually continues into adulthood, where bullies in companies often are people who think they should have a raise or a promotion and target those who ‘compete’ with them for it and have more chances to get it.
I liked how Zootopia handled bullying. At first, Gideon is portrayed as a typical bully. But there’s two layers to his interactions with Judy. First, he reinforces her internal bigotry towards foxes. Second, when he turns up again when they’re older, he’s doing well and apologizes for how he treated her when they were younger. It doesn’t have the catharsis most examples would have, but it has more nuance.
I think the movie Wonder did a good job of depicting bullying in its direct and indirect manifestations.
I first read Judy Blume’s book Blubber when was fairly young, and didn’t understand it. Now I look back on it with absolute horror.
I had in mind a story of a girl who was mercilessly bullied in school, not only by her classmates but also by the teacher as well. The girl is the daughter of immigrants, has a learning disability, spoke funny (mixing English words with her Parents’ native language), doesn’t adhere to customs in America (for example, her parents don’t celebrate Halloween because its unknown in their country), was caught doing something embarrassing, and is shown to be too sensitive.
Even after she graduated school, the bullies still harass and tease her because they have nothing better to do, even as they have their own lives and went different paths (one bully is a vain, self-centered and snappish youtube makeup guru, another is a racist, xenophobic conspiracy theorist). The grown bullies are unrepentant and remorseless, short-sighted jerks.
The premise of the story is a Halloween story, liberally mixed with a Willy Wonka type punishment, but with Fairies and their Otherworldly Plane (of the wild and chaotic kind). Each bully gets their just dessert, while the Protagonist leaves and survives, finally relieved and finding confidence, and darkly enjoying her tormentors’ punishments.
That’s certainly a story that would necessitate sensitivity readers, I imagine. You’re reaching into touchy territory for many people.
About the vain makeup YouTuber, well, it just strikes me as similar to a couple of problematic clichés, i.e. “natural beauty is TRUE beauty” and “caring about your appearance means you’re shallow.” The prior one came to mind since the makeup aspect of that character seems tied to the vain and self-centered part of them, and it’s easy to extrapolate that the character’s makeup use is a signifier of their vainness as a person, etc. The latter is pretty self-explanatory. These both feed into the double standard of being pretty without trying to look pretty or acknowledging self-prettiness – that is, “you don’t know you’re beautiful, that’s what makes you beautiful” (or, as I’ve referred to it, Not Beautiful Yet Beautiful Syndrome). Which … urk.
Just be aware.
Most of it is semi-autobiographical; it happened to me in school, a young boy, American born son of Greek Immigrant parents, lived a mostly sheltered life, switched schools due to a learning disability, the new school was horrid with the classmates taunting and harassing jerks all because of my learning disability and funny pronunciation of words (I spoke mostly Greek in my house), didn’t celebrate all American Holidays, like Halloween or Valentine’s Day (they are mostly unknown in Greece), didn’t eat meat on Wednesdays or Fridays, etc. also I wore a pin button that had spiritual meaning (it had a picture of my patron saint), the kids and teacher thought it was some ‘luck charm’ and tore from me. The teacher herself was a two-faced monster who mocked and teased me. The other teacher (I had two teachers in one classroom) was a clueless idiot. Overall, the teachers at that school were irresponsible and lazy jerks, I tried to tell one teacher to make the bullies stop harassing me, and all they said were “just ignore them”, as if it weren’t serious. I got into trouble at school for fighting back, until a couple years later, the teacher was fired and the bullies went to different classes.
So the story was mostly based on my school life.
Thank you for the warning of making the bully character into a cliche vain girl. I’ll find a different way to make her vain without being about makeup, but she’ll still be a youtube celebrity, if that is okay.
The rest of the Bully characters in story all have different vices as they grew up (despite still harassing the main protagonist).
Sonia was the vain youtuber I was talking about, but she was also highly germophobic (which would extend to hating animals and insects), snobbish, petty, and inconsiderate.
Danielle is the typical spoiled brat, entitled, demanding, envious, and prone to tantrums.
Charles is the handsome academic athlete, but a condescending and bossy perfectionist, somewhat narcissistic, and insufferable intellect.
Kyle is a ‘nice guy’ who is truly a bitter, hypocritical, stalkerish, and frustrated Incel.
Matt is the racist conspiracy theorist, a white trash and lazy, loutish pervert, peeping tom, and internet troll.
Alex is a glutton who is marked by his total lack of charity, sharing, empathy, and politeness. He berates homeless people, bullies his own little siblings, and can be something of a coward.
Richard is the school bad boy, but very unsympathetic, cocky, aggressive, and controlling of his girlfriends.
Linda is a Preacher’s daughter, but very sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, conformist, and saccharine.
It’s important to understand why people are the way they are–as far as I know, no one wakes up one day and decides ‘I’m going to be racist’ or whatever. Not only do upbringings and the attitudes of parents [who were influenced by their parents, and back and back and back in a huge messy cycle] influence people, but also their experiences and what they were taught or not taught, and their overall views and beliefs are directly connected to all of the above. In many case, people literally don’t know any better, because no one intervened on their behalf, or taught them about boundaries.
One of my bully characters is a racist, among other things like sexist, xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, conspiracy theorist, reactionary, and nationalist. All thanks to due to his grandpa, who is a biker and was an ex-hippie who became conservative with age he made money, and also finding a group on the internet (like Breitbart or TheBlaze).
He’s genuine in his beliefs, which makes him a genuine jerk. He really thinks about himself in relation to race and nationality, interpreting everything as political, and thinks people are either with him or against him. He’s also disheartened to hear about any minority’s problems, as he thinks they’re either lying or weak (and thus deserving of their problems). He’s also paranoid of a Muslim/Jewish/European invasion on America.
He’s exaggerated, yes, but the bullies in my story are exaggerated in their own ways.
Sounds like a pretty serious strawman.
How so?
My own experience with being bullied was in an upper-middle-class suburb which my parents, from lower-middle-class stock but highly successful at their jobs, could afford to move to in order to take advantage of their highly-regarded school system. I was targeted with verbal bullying — in part for being weird on several levels (including social awkwardness, which is twice the “sin” when you’re female, aka the “social” gender) and in part because when I was younger, I reacted very strongly to it (screaming, crying, etc.). It was purely boys targeting me, a girl not shallow enough to fit in with the other girls (while I realize it’s harsh to put it that way, I can’t think of a nicer way to put it that’s still accurate). As my time at this school wore on, more and more boys participated in it until at its peak it was maybe a third of the male portion of my class, though it felt closer to two-thirds at the time. There turned out to be at least one boy who was peer-pressured into being part of the bully herd.
Ultimately, though, what was most damaging wasn’t the bullying itself, even as pervasive as it was; it was how the adults in my life, especially the teachers, reacted to it.
To begin with, none of them would call it “bullying” at all — it was called “teasing”, because it wasn’t physical. Of course, at first, this led to the horrifyingly wrongheaded canard of, “If they’re teasing you, that must mean they like you! :D ” This is why I had to learn the word “malicious” in second grade to qualify it.
Second, my teachers found me every bit as weird as the bullies did. At one point, they even mistook a game of let’s pretend that didn’t involve saying “let’s pretend” every other sentence and *did* involve briefly going marginally out of bounds for me being on drugs. …At age seven. That I actually had a half-developed sense of suspension of disbelief at the time that I didn’t know how to properly express didn’t help either.
Third, my teachers found my telling on the “teasers” constantly to be incredibly burdensome. Why couldn’t I stop monopolizing their precious time and making their jobs harder? Count me as another person who got harassed for years by teachers insisting that I “just ignore them”. Worse still, that I *couldn’t* “just ignore them” was one reason why they treated me as some kind of mentally ill person who needed to be “helped” with lots of coercive “therapy”.
There is more and worse I could say about my bullying experience, but suffice it to say that you probably couldn’t easily make up a climax to a realistically-presented verbal bullying issue that I’d find implausible.
Incidentally, if you need an excuse for a child character not to trust the adults in their life to help when, say, demons start subtly invading their town? You have my permission to rip off my experience.
This is very similar to my experience, as well. Although I wasn’t bullied by teachers, they did seem to consider my constant reports of constant bullying to be a nuisance that they would rather not have to deal with. I should “just ignore them”.
I can easily imagine a severely bullied child character not trusting adults to help them, whether it’s with bullying or with demons invading the town. Even now, as an adult, if I discovered there were demons invading the town, I wouldn’t trust authority figures to take it seriously.
*gets on soapbox*
Everyone go read the Neverending story as a book!
*gets off soapbox*
As someone who was bullied as a kid, I think you made some great points.
One of the things I would like to add is that often, bullying can come from someone close to you—I was bullied by the people I called my best friends. This is never shown in the media. It’s always someone the MC barely knows, just someone the MC happened to annoy for whatever reason. Additionally, I think you made an excellent point with the fact that a lot of damage comes from the victim destroying their own self-confidence (something I’m still working to undo) and media never reflects that.
For me, the bullying mostly took the form of verbal/mental abuse, with the occasional punching. One of the things that can also happen is that, especially for me, the victim ends up feeling like they can’t trust anyone because nobody seemed to notice the problem, even when it was right in their face.
My point is that bullying isn’t a problem that’s fixed as soon as the victim gets moved somewhere else. It can leave long-term scars and I agree that the media needs to do a better job portraying that.