Inferiority Superiority Complex / Literature

• The Tiffany Aching subseries of Discworld has Annagramma Hawkin as its resident Alpha Bitch. She is described, among other things, as "vain as a canary in a room full of mirrors", having a "huge lack of interest in anyone other than herself", and treating everyone "as if they were slightly deaf and a bit stupid". Despite her efforts, sometimes her façade falls and the clever, capable, but absolutely terrified girl beneath it can be seen, and after Tiffany forces the truth about her impoverished heritage out, she slowly becomes a better person.
  "Inside there was this worried, frantic little face watching the world like a bunny watching a fox, and screaming at it in the hope that it would go away and not hurt her."
• Felix Harrowgate from Doctrine of Labyrinths, having been abused as a child in pretty much every way possible, is a very damaged and unstable person who veers chaotically between self-worship and self-loathing. He can be a shameless Attention Whore and really is extraordinarily vain when it comes to his looks, intellect, and magical prowess, but he's also practically addicted to self-sabotage and doesn't really believe he deserves to be happy or loved. Throughout the series he repeatedly does awful things to the people he cares about, is too proud to apologize but inwardly berates himself for being a "monster", then seeks out some kind of horrible karmic punishment to cope with the guilt, usually while trying to maintain his arrogant and uncaring facade. What a mess.
• In Fatherland, a nation-wide example of this trope presents itself. Xavier March goes on a bus tour of the "Nazis-won" 1964 Berlin with his son. When pointing out the grandiose landmarks all around them, the tour guide constantly boasts about how everything is bigger and better than comparable monuments in other cities. Far from being impressed, however, March merely identifies this as a symptom of how deep-down insecure and inferior Nazi Germany as a culture and people actually feels:
  Higher, bigger, longer, wider, more expensive... even in victory, Germany has a parvenu's inferiority complex. Nothing stands on its own. Everything has to be compared with what the foreigners have...
• In the Irvine Welsh novel Filth, Bruce is a boastful, misanthropic bigot who appears to look down on everyone around him. Turns out, he's severely self-hating, traumatised, and mentally unwell.
• Gods of Jade and Shadow: Martín the secondary antagonist likes being a scion of the wealthiest and most powerful family in his home village; avoids situations, like school, where he'd have to apply his mediocre abilities; and abused Casiopea for years out of fear and resentment that their grandfather respects her more than him. He has a crushing Jerkass Realization when he's forced to confront the fact that she's in no way his inferior.
• In The Great Gatsby, Tom for all his bluster is painfully aware that he has nothing to offer Daisy but his money. The only time he appears truly worried about something is when it seems that Daisy might leave him for Gatsby.
• Harry Potter:
  • Hermione's know-it-all attitude. In J. K. Rowling's own words, "underneath Hermione's swottiness, there is a lot of insecurity and a great fear of failure". Hermione's fear of failure is so great that her boggart when she was a student was Professor McGonagall telling her she failed all of her classes.
  • Hermione's insecurity being masked by her know-it-all attitude makes her a fascinating comparison to her close friend and later husband, Ron Weasley, who is pretty open with his insecurity due to being the youngest son (his brothers have already done a lot and his younger sister was the girl his mother always wanted) while being in the shadow of his best friend and thus tends to get a big head whenever he accomplishes something.
  • According to Rowling herself, the person she based Gilderoy Lockhart on may have had this (she's not sure because she "never dug that deep"), so it's possible it could be an explanation for Lockhart's behavior as well. For his part, Kenneth Branagh (who played Lockhart) rejects this theory: "I wish I could tell you that it's because he's very insecure. In fact, he's not. He's just a narcissist." Once more of his backstory is revealed, it turns out to be a downplayed example. Lockhart does have a genuinely over-inflated opinion of himself, but he's also aware of his ineptitude and has spent most of his career using the skills he does have to disguise his shortcomings and turn himself into a celebrity. He could actually have been a talented wizard had he put in the effort, but his ego is so big that he refuses to acknowledge this.
  • This is implied to be partially the reason for The Masquerade as a whole. Wizards (especially the British ones) act like The Fair Folk and treat muggles with Condescending Compassion at best, looking at them like children or zoo animals. However, despite the past witch hunts being laughable failures, it's still suggested at times that despite their lack of magical powers, Muggles as a whole are actually more of a threat to the wizarding world than vice-versa because of Muggles' sheer numbers and technological advancements wizards don't even attempt to understand. Dumbledore was the Big Good, and even he was put off enough by them to try subjugating them when he was younger. Just look at how the Dursleys treated Harry, and imagine that on a planetary scale.
• Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy:
  • "The Mayors": Prince Regent Wienis of Anacreon has been troubling the fledgling Foundation. Mayor Hardin voices the opinion that Wienis' warmongering and bombastics are signs of an inferiority complex, as that often happens among younger members of royalty.
    "Probably an over-compensated inferiority complex. Younger sons of royalty get that way, you know." — Salvor Hardin
  • "The Mule": The Mule is a mutant with powerful psychic abilities... but they also come with a hefty dose of physical inferiority, leading to an aggressive personality angry at the society which used to scorn him as a child and capable of repaying it. This leads to him becoming a Galactic Conquerer and Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • "Search by the Mule": The First Speaker of the Second Foundation calls it their second mistake with respect to the Mule. They had easily deduced his Psychic Powers when he conquered Kalgan but neglected to realize his ugliness and inability to procreate made him resent the rest of the galaxy. After he realized what he could do with Emotion Control powers, he began conquering worlds so he could prove that he was better than everyone who ever picked on him. Even after taking control of both the Empire and the First Foundation, he keeps his palace empty of servants, so that nobody can see him and laugh at his appearance.
    "We didn't foresee that you were not merely a mutant, but a sterile mutant and the added psychic distortion due to your inferiority complex passed us by. We allowed only for a megalomania - not for an intensely psychopathic paranoia as well." — First Speaker
• In the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, future Herald-Mage Vanyel starts off as The Unfavorite of his father (who sees him as an Inadequate Inheritor) and the cosseted darling of his mother (who is florid, romantic, and craves attention). This leaves him with a fragile ego and deep insecurities which he masks with arrogance. After a particularly excessive moment, another character wisely observes that Van holds his nose so high because everyone else is trying to push it into the dirt.
• The titular character of "Iswaran" from Malgudi Days had this. Having failed his college entrance exams nine years in a row, he eventually lost all respect from his village and even his family. He fooled himself into thinking he didn't care by dressing in grand clothes, boasting and putting on airs of confidence, but in reality, he loathed himself for his failures and yearned to graduate. The reason he groomed himself which such care was because he assumed people considered even washing himself to be far above him.
  "He felt that they remarked among themselves that washing, combing his hair and putting on a well-ironed suit were luxuries too far above his state. He was a failure and had no right to such luxuries. He was treated as sort of a thick-skinned idiot. But he did not care. He answered their attitude by behaving like a desperado. He swung his arms, strode up and down, bragged and shouted, and went to a cinema. But all this was only a mask. Under it was a creature hopelessly seared by failure, desperately hoping and praying for success."
• Mother of Learning: Taiven is apparently loud, proud, confident and driven. When Zorian begins to surpass her, though, the cracks start to show, until she has a breakdown, sobbing into his shoulder about how after all her hard work she feels like she's not really achieved anything, and him being better than her at everything despite being younger is the icing on the cake.
• In Judy Blume's Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Sheila Tubman has an inferiority complex about her various fears and the fact that she cannot do certain things (such as swimming and working a yo-yo) that other kids her age can do. It causes her to act boastful, which makes even her friends feel uncomfortable around her—and she even acts mean to her neighbor and classmate, Peter Hatcher (the protagonist of Judy Blume's other Fudge books).
• An interpretation of Zeus's behavior in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. He quarrels with Poseidon over who their mother Rhea likes better, is paranoid that Poseidon is constantly plotting against him, demands respect when no one respects him, closes off Olympus due to wounded pride, and tries to blame others for his mistakes. His massive ego and demanding people respect and obey him come across as at least partially trying to cover up his own mistakes and knowledge he is a failure that no one likes, especially when one compares his treatment of others, and how others, in turn, react to him, with his fellow Kings Ra and Odin in their own series having a lot fewer people in those series who snark or debase their kings (at least when Ra isn't senile, then many of the Egyptians Gods will snark at him.)
• The titular hero of the Prince Roger series embodies this trope at the start. His parents separated before his birth under...tricky circumstances, and his mother was aloof during his childhood because he looks (and behaves) too much like his father. But as Roger knows nothing about this he takes it as a purely personal rejection, and it doesn't help that the whole empire compares him unfavorably to his ridiculously accomplished half-siblings. He grows up into a stroppy, arrogant playboy largely to piss his mother off, but also to cover up how generally lousy he feels about himself. It's no coincidence that he only starts to outgrow his Spoiled Brat tendencies once others start viewing him as worthy and useful and he gains some actual self-esteem.
• Jane Rizzoli of the Rizzoli & Isles books suffers from this. In the first two books, in particular, it's implied that a lot of her tough and abrasive behavior stems from insecurity after years of being The Unfavorite, in her family (thanks to being the only daughter), on the workforce, where she's the only female detective — even though the very reason she even became a cop was that she felt it was some way that she would finally earn respect, and in life in general because of her plain and average looks, resulting in her striving to excel at everything else in order to compensate.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Pick any younger-generation Lannister. Blame it on growing up with Tywin Lannister as the head of the clan — it might just be that the only thing worse for you than being one of the kids who was judged to be a disappointment from very young (say, Tyrion and Lancel) is being one of the kids who was born full of enormous potential that he will never see you as living up to, no matter what you do (Cersei, Jaime, and to some extent Joffrey). And, then there's poor Joy Hill's situation; she gets shunted to the side of almost everything because she's his brother's acknowledged bastard... and acknowledging low-tier by-blows is simply beneath Lannisters — and, despite being kin, you're not a Lannister, Miss Hill. Until using her as a backhanded marriage trinket comes along as a possibility, that is: yay, suddenly remembered when nobody else in the extended family wants in on that marriage (or when that whole thing just got misinterpreted)! How to mess 'em up, House Lannister.
  • What the Lannister kids can do, Theon Greyjoy can do too — and for much, the same Daddy Issues-based reason. But, he's also much, much smugger and with rather fewer grounds for the superiority bit: the Greyjoy name doesn't hold as much weight.
  • This attitude seems to be pretty widespread among the Ironborn; only a few major characters, like Asha Greyjoy and Rodrik Harlaw, see the contradiction between being "born conquerors," superior by birth to the green-landers, etc., etc., and getting their teeth kicked in so often by the mainland kingdoms.
  • But, if you want the most inferiority-driven superiority for the least amount of ability and oodles of posturing Small Name, Big Ego to go with... pick a Frey. Almost any Frey will do.
  • Shortly after joining the watch Jon Snow gets accosted by four other recruits but ends up delivering them a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with relative ease. This earns him a dressing down for Donal Noye who calls him out on his superiority complex to other recruits being the cause of the tension. While Jon at first tries to refute this, Donal hammers it home even further by pointing out that for all of Jon's complex about being a great lord's bastard child, he still grew up with a far more privileged upbringing than the smallfolk who make up the majority of the Watch recruits, and continuing to act the way he does will only alienate them more.
  • Ramsay Bolton will always hate having been merely born a Snow. Killing his half-brother was probably one way to try to prove to Daddy how Bolton he could be. As well as overdoing it a bit with the family hobbies.
• The deal with Bradley Chalkers of There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom. Bradley begins as the blueprint Barbaric Bully, responding to a kid's first interaction with him with "Give me a dollar or I'll spit on you.". Few see his struggles: he's a Kiddie Kid with learning disabilities that have held him back a grade, classified as a failure by everyone but his mother. Figuring that if he's a failure, it won't sting as much if he hates the people who branded him one, he gains confidence and a sense of superiority by becoming their worst expectations: an aggressive, lying, friendless wretch who will break anything given to him. The story is about Bradley's relationship with his new school counselor, Carla, who helps Bradley break out of his cage of self-image and flourish as a person.
  He understood it when the other kids were mean to him. It didn't bother him. He simply hated them. As long as he hated them, it didn't matter what they thought of him.
• Starflight from Wings of Fire thinks of himself as being inherently superior due to being a NightWing (dragons that can tell the future and read minds), but he doesn't have any powers yet. Internally, however, he berates himself for not being as brave or daring as his friends and thinks that he's a failure. He wants to believe that the NightWings are good and noble and awe-inspiring, but just like Clay and Glory, he's let down by what they really are.