Kick The Dog / Literature

Kick the Dog in Literature.

---

• In The 13 Clocks, the wicked Duke imprisoned children in the tower for sleeping in his camellias. We've already learnt, in his introductory description, that he limps because he spent so much of his youth kicking puppies and kittens that one leg outgrew the other.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo is implied to have destroyed ships with civilians and military crew before, but the act of following with the Nautilus the horrible death of all the unnamed ship's crew on purpose, without losing any detail, is when Nemo reveals his true villainy. Captain Nemo also Kicks the Cachalots in a terrible massacre:
  The sea was covered with mutilated bodies. A formidable explosion could not have divided and torn this fleshy mass with more violence. We were floating amid gigantic bodies, bluish on the back and white underneath, covered with enormous protuberances. Some terrified cachalots were flying towards the horizon. The waves were dyed red for several miles, and the Nautilus floated in a sea of blood...
• Agnes Grey: Reverend Hatfield kicks Nancy's cat and Agnes's dog; he's actually a vain, selfish Hypocrite better at scaring people than bringing them to the Lord. His curate Mr. Weston is kind to both animals and rescues them at some point; he's Agnes's proverbial Prince Charming. The significance of this contrast between the two does not escape the heroine's notice.
• The Surgeon in the Ahriman Trilogy is a horrifying example. He doesn't seem to really hate animals, he just sees them as raw materials.
• In The Algebraist by Iain Banks, the Archimandrite Luseferous primarily stays off-stage kicking the dog repeatedly, acting as a horrible encroaching threat we know is ready and able to bring if not thwarted... yet never meeting the protagonists or directly interacting with the main plot. In one scene he uses the undying severed head of an enemy as a punch-ball.
• American Gods contains a scene in which Wednesday taunts and shortchanges a random waitress. Shadow, feeling sympathetic, makes sure she gets the correct amount. Any sympathy for the girl is lost moments later, when Wednesday reveals the girl's many horrible little deeds — among them, when she was little, locking a kitten in a closet for days, listening to it mew, and then burying it outside, for no reason other than that she wanted to bury something.
• In American Psycho, insane serial killer Patrick Bateman kills a dog (along with his owner), and casually mentions tormenting a puppy to death. When at the zoo, he throws coins to the seals, just because he saw a table asking people not to do so.
• Animorphs:
  • In one book, the Animorphs set out to put a stop to the workings of a certain Villain with Good Publicity. Their plan resembles an Engineered Public Confession, only instead of confessing to anything, the villain was set up to have a Kick the Dog moment on live television.
  • Visser Three in the first book as well. Killing Elfangor wasn't enough, he had to eat him alive.
  • Once Rachel casts off the façade of normalcy and becomes a full-on Sociopathic Soldier in the last books she gets her share of these. Executing a fleeing Yeerk soldier in cold blood, almost punching Cassie, threatening to kill Ax, and almost committing vehicular homicide on the mild-mannered Captain Olston are just a few that come to mind.
• In Atlanta Nights, Bruce's mother is at one point casually described as setting Bruce's dog on fire.
• Mrs. Bagg-Meanly from The Belfry Witches, written by Kate Saunders, is a very evil woman. Let's just count a few of the things she did:
  • She was first introduced when the vicar, Mr. Snelling, mentions that she threw the curate, Mr. Babbercorn, down the stairs, and indicates that this has happened more than once.
  • She keeps all of the food in their house locked up, eating most of it herself and only giving the vicar and curate, who unfortunately live with her, a measly sample every day. (It should also be mentioned that her treatment of Mr. Babbercorn is considerably worse than her treatment of Mr. Snelling.)
  • She takes the best bedroom, giving Mr. Snelling a much less favourable one and making Mr. Babbercorn sleep in the attic.
  • She assaults a police officer (and gets away with it).
  • She faints on top of Mr. Babbercorn and then gets angry with him for having the audacity of being underneath her.
  • She bullies everyone in town, effectively frightening them into submission.
  • She then stoops even lower when she poisons Mr. Babbercorn with the intention of murdering him and getting away with it. Luckily, he survives, thanks to the witches, but it's still an indication that she crossed the line if she hadn't already done so. In fact, Kate Saunders even states that Mrs. Bagg-Meanly is possibly even worse that Mrs. Abercrombie, who is actually the main villain for the entire trilogy.
  • The last time we hear anything about her after she's driven out of Tranter's End and forced to live with her sister in Antarctica, she's been arrested for eating penguins!
• The Belgariad:
  • In the prequels, Zedar does get a fair range of dog kicking moments, including offering immortality to a queen for the murder of the King of Riva and his family, before letting her down as the whole army of three countries-and-a-half comes to avenge him.
  • The series also contains an example of a literal dog-kicking, although it is only distantly heard by the characters as an abruptly silenced barking followed by a yelp. When the heroes hear this, one of them says that kicking a dog to make it be quiet is horrible and he would like to go in and see how that person liked it.
    "I don't have much use for a man who kicks his own dog."
  • It's also revealed that Taur Urgas' favoured son and crown prince, as a child, amused himself by dropping live puppies in boiling water.
• Black Sunday (Thomas Harris): As if Harris believed the reader needed further convincing this far in of just how nuts the pilot is, we get a scene in which he brings a kitten to his wife as a gift, then gruesomely kills it via kitchen garbage disposal when they quarrel.
• In A Brother's Price, Keifer Porter has committed a lot of unmotivated nastiness in the backstory. Among other things, he told his wives' little cousin that eating too many cookies would make his "you know what" fall off. And no, he was not talking about teeth. He also beat up and raped one of his child-wives because she criticised him, which may or may not qualify, depending on whether one counts the fact that Trini might have been discouraged from opposing him a second time as net gain. His only redeeming action, if one may call it that, was demanding that Ren be sent out of the opera house because her crying at a sad scene in the opera annoyed him. Would also be dog-kicking, if not for the fact that the building exploded minutes later, and Ren survived because she was outside. Most probably that was not his intention, though.
• A literal example in Caliphate. When Fatima and Zainub come across an injured puppy on one of their patrols, the sadistic pair decide to kick it between each other like a ball until Fatima gleefully crushes its skull beneath the heel of her steel-toed boot.
• You can tell that someone in the Chalet School series is a true dogkicker when they do something to hurt Joey's Morality Pet, the Robin. For example, Betty Wynne-Davies takes a snarky comment from Fiona McDonald very badly in The Highland Twins at the Chalet School and resolves to get back at her by selling the school out to the Nazis. As the twins are living with Joey at the time, and the Robin is Joey's ward, anything that hurts the McDonald sisters will hurt her and Daisy Venables too. Betty knows this, but doesn't care.
• Chaos Walking: It practically becomes a running theme that any villain in The Knife of Never Letting Go will hurt the main character's pet dog. First, one man cuts half of his tail off while trying to kill his master, another kicks him in the face so hard that it injures his eye and breaks some of his teeth, and ultimately the Big Bad kills him by snapping his neck.
• Children of the Last Days:
  • In Eclipse of the Sun, Maurice coerces Fr. Andrei into looking at pornography — by threatening to drag a real woman in and rape her if he refuses. In the same book, Maurice gives Fr. Andrei the Sadistic Choice of publicly denouncing his religion or watching three depraved men rape 8-year-old orphan Arrow into insanity.
  • In Count Smokrev's back-story in Father Elijah, as a child, his playmate rejected a sexual advance. In response, Smokrev killed the boy's pet rabbit, right in front of him.
• Much of the first chapter of A Christmas Carol is dedicated to establishing Ebenezer Scrooge as a cruel and bitter old miser, but one of his worst early moments is when he tells a solicitor for the poor, who has just told him that the poor can't go to prison or a workhouse and that many would rather die than go there, "If they would rather die, then they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." Needless to say, it's one of the things that gets thrown back in his face during his encounters with the Spirits.
• In Chung Kuo, deVore blows up the dog with explosives in an infamous scene. Apparently this is just to make it clear that even though he is one of the rebels, he is to be seen as a villain.
• A Clockwork Orange: Among their other amusements, Alex and his droogs like to run over animals with the cars they steal.
• Codex Alera wastes no time in letting us know that High Lord Kalarus is a bit of a dick. He uses his first scene to threaten Isana, make sexist comments, and smack and verbally abuse the innocent and cute slave courtesan Serai. He also sent assassins against Isana and tried to kill Tavi and Max for making his son Brencis (who was himself introduced torturing the most harmless-looking Academs he could find) look weak. And he hits Brencis too for losing to them. This makes for a lovely lead-up to his bounding leap over the Moral Event Horizon revealed in the third book.
• Conqueror: Eeluk in Wolf of the Plains declares himself the new khan of the wolves and exiles Temujin's family, taking their ger, ponies, and all their possessions to force them to die on the steppes, then kills the clan bard for the crime of protesting this was evil. Just to make things worse, he does this during Yesugei's funeral.
• The Coral Island: When pirates arrive on the castaways' island, one of them swings Peterkin's cat around by the tail before tossing it into the lagoon. Jack says, "You see what we may expect. The man who will wantonly kill a poor brute for sport will think little of murdering a fellow-creature."
• Elizabeth Bathory in Count and Countess will casually kill anyone who stands in the way of her attaining power, even her own family members.
• The arrogant landowner Mr. Hazell kicks the old doctor's dog in Danny, the Champion of the World, simply because he's in the way, so the doctor selects an extra-blunt needle for the man's injection.
• Little Willie Connolly in J.R. Lowell's 1972 thriller Daughter Of Darkness is a Deliberately Cute Child and a super-intelligent Child Prodigy, and secretly a practicing witch. She asks her parents for a kitten, but her mother buys a Maltese◊ puppy instead. Unfortunately, Willie's expertise doesn't extend to the fact that she could easily have made the little dog her Familiar (a dog like that would have clinched the Cuteness Factor besides averting All Witches Have Cats). Using a combination of animal psychology and a cursed charm, Willie cold-bloodedly arranges to have her puppy run into heavy traffic in midtown Manhattan. The next day she has her kitten.
• In Dave Barry Slept Here, Spiro Agnew, while no reporters are paying attention, decides to retire from being Vice President to take up clubbing baby seals.
• In David Copperfield, James Steerforth gets two very noticeable Kick the Dog moments. First, when as a 14-years-old he insults Mr. Mell for trying to do his work and helps Mr. Creakle get him fired. Years later, he seduces David's childhood friend Emily when she's about to get married to her stepbrother Cam and they run away. And later we find out that he abuses her during the time they're together.
• The Dead Zone has a horrifically literal example — the first sign we have that Stillson is evil under his affable exterior is when, after making sure the owners of a particularly annoying dog aren't home, he sprays ammonia in its face and kicks it to death.
• Deerskin: When the evil king is about to rape his daughter, Lissar's loyal sighthound Ash jumps to the princess's defense. The king flings the dog against the wall hard enough to knock her unconscious.
• Deryni: In The King's Deryni, when Bishop Oliver deNore sees young Alaric Morgan has been touching his horse (the boy calmed the animal for a short journey by sea), he orders the animal slaughtered and summons a butcher to see the deed done on the spot. The bishop arrogantly points out the horse is his property, suggests he's motivated by a desire to feed the poor, and refuses all offers to purchase the horse. While deNore nurtures a particular grudge against Alaric due to the role the boy's mother played in the conviction and execution of his brother, he is also well-known for persecuting Deryni generally. His promotion to Archbishop of Valoret is looked upon with dread by Alaric and others.
• Anthony Horowitz may possibly have been making fun of this trope in one of his Diamond Brothers stories. A man who ran a charity for children was run over and crushed flat by a steamroller. Nick and Tim Diamond, in the course of their investigation into this matter, go to question the man who was driving the steamroller at the time, who has been treated extensively for shock and has only recently recovered enough to speak. Against the advice of the doctor at the hospital where he is being kept for treatment, though, Tim proceeds to slip in all sorts of remarks that traumatize the driver all over again—including "Would you like a Coke with crushed ice?" "It's time we got to the crunch" and "Can we run over a couple things." This culminates in the driver jumping out of a closed window and running away screaming. This has no significance to the plot whatsoever; so either it was a kick the dog moment for Tim, or we were just getting to see, yet again, how idiotic he really is.
• Different Seasons: In Apt Pupil, Todd Bowden squashes an injured blue jay with his bike tire... and proceeds to go back and forth over its corpse for no reason whatsoever.
• Falk of The Dinosaur Lords cements his status as a villain by trying to rape Melodía while drunk. Worse even — he later doesn't fret about the fact that he tried to rape a teenage girl, but that this makes the next parts of his plan problematic.
• Discworld:
  • In Small Gods, High Exquisitor Vorbis harpoons a porpoise — or rather, he forces a ship's captain to do the harpooning. The captain knows better than to say no to the Exquisitor when challenged to prove he harbors no heretical superstitions, e.g., that the souls of sailors are reincarnated as porpoises. Also, earlier in the book, Vorbis turns a tortoise on its back and props it with pebbles to ensure that it cannot right itself. The tortoise is a protagonist, but Vorbis doesn't know this at the time; he just wants to see how a tortoise dies.
  • In Hogfather, Mr. Teatime kills a dog by nailing it to the ceiling. This isn't even because he was trying to be cruel; he simply didn't want it to bark while he was working. Which just shows that he's evil and crazy.
  • In Witches Abroad, Lilith de Tempscire Lily Weatherwax, Granny Weatherwax's sister turns some drunk coach drivers into beetles and crushes them. This might qualify as crossing the Moral Event Horizon, given that the dog had probably been kicked fairly severely by this point. The scary part is, she thinks she's the good one.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, after the Magpyrs lose their cool, they kill Igor's patchwork dog Scraps and abduct Queen Magrat and her infant daughter.
  • When Captain Quirke first appears in Men at Arms, he does a series of actions which are all fairly unpleasant, culminating with kicking Gaspode the Wonder Dog. This might possibly be lampshading...
  • In Snuff, the general attitude towards the goblin race counts as this for many characters who are otherwise perfectly nice people. One of the clearest indications that an apparent thug is actually a Jerk with a Heart of Gold is that he does show some sympathy for them.
  • In Making Money, Amesbury the chef doesn't like Cosmo Lavish because he once kicked Mr. Fusspot, his stepmother's funny-looking little dog who Amesbury is in charge of feeding. Of course, you kind of knew Cosmo Lavish was a horrible person even before Amesbury says that, but it lets Moist know that Amesbury is trustworthy and won't let people hurt the dog.
  • In Night Watch Discworld, after Lord Snapcase succeeds Lord Winder as patrician, he agrees to a general amnesty for the rebels, as it will make the transition to his rule go more smoothly. However, despite this he orders John Keel assassinated, since even though they are not enemies he finds Keel's competence as a leader intimidating, and doesn't want him to become a threat at a later date. The civic leaders present, who are the ones who masterminded Winder's death, find this disgusting — even the assassin.
  • From I Shall Wear Midnight:
    Tiffany: [to the Cunning Man] But you convinced a man to kill his canary, and somehow I think that was the worst crime of them all.^note When the worst criminals in Ankh-Morpork are sentenced to life in prison they will spend in solitary cell because they are too dangerous to be allowed to mingle with the prison population, they are given a canary to keep them company. They feed it and take care of it. A villain of the book is a malevolent spirit which can take other people's bodies and completely overwrite their personality. He took over a mind of an unrepentant murderer, gave him super strength so he can break the door and run away. And killed the canary on the way out, just because.
• Several instances with Eric in Divergent — putting Christina in the chasm for 5 minutes, preparing to throw knives at Al's head and trying to shoot a mindless, defenceless Four to sate his jealousy come to mind.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • The Time Trips novella The Death Pit cuts from a passage about a noble old lady who dearly loves octopuses and surrounds herself with beautiful glass statuettes of them, straight to David Agnew's Establishing Character Moment:
    David Agnew was a man who purposely ate octopus whenever he could. He was currently sitting in the Fetch Hotel’s Sweet Spot Bar and wishing he was, instead, lolling by the pool at his Greek island villa, tucking into some fresh octopus legs and shooting geckos with his air pistol. These were the kind of things he enjoyed.
  • In the Short Trips & Sidesteps story "A Town Called Eternity", the Master shrinks a velociraptor to six inches tall (in self-defence) but then keeps it around to kick it, the story noting "Its suffering made him happy".
• The Duel of Sorcery Trilogy: In Moongather, the Noris uses Serroi (then about ten) as a conduit by which to suck the life force out of various animals and transform them into demons. The doomed menagerie includes a litter of puppies.
• Habitual dog-kicking is the primary familial characteristic of the Harkonnens in Dune. National Lampoon's Doon, a parody of that novel, has their expies strangling kittens for amusement; it barely rates as parodic.
• Dust Devils: The vampire gang love to go out their way to hurt people, with some of their worst deeds being murdering Cody's horse just to spite him and burning an old kindly woman alive for no reason.
• The protagonist of Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf doesn't like playing with Angelica, the Prince's young daughter. Seeing that she dotes on a kitten, he sneaks into her room while she's sleeping and decapitates it.
• A semi-literal example in Each Little Universe: Big Bad Orion doesn't seem to care too much that her dog might have been harmed or killed, which one supporting character thinks makes her a monster (more so, apparently, than any of the other things she's done, including but not limited to murder).
• Done in Eclipse (2007) by the Volturi to the newborn vampire Bree Tanner. Despite her being able to control herself, surrendering, and not knowing the laws of vampires, the Volturi kill her even after the Cullens had volunteered to take her in.
• General Ryde in Engines of Creation kills one of his own men by crushing his skull with his boot for being so stupid as to get injured.
• The Famous Five: Edgar shows himself to be a nasty piece of work in Five Run Away Together, when he sings nasty things about George, who is very upset about her mother suddenly going into hospital. Even the pompous Julian is then determined to teach him a lesson.
  Edgar: Georgie-Porgie, pudding and pie; sat herself down and had a good cry; Georgie-Porgie...
• In Robert Harris's Fatherland, when we first meet the Gestapo, one officer's first act is to shoot a dog in the face. Yeah, they're evil.
• Jack Hyde, the nominal villain from Fifty Shades Freed, makes his last on-page appearance a Kick the Dog moment—he kicks a pregnant woman in the ribs.
• In Forbidden Sea, Lord Durran's current horse master is Master Wickliff, a cruel, incompetent trainer who beats horses.
• Walter Jon Williams' The Fourth Wall is narrated by Sean Makin, a down on his luck d-list Former Child Star whose friends are mostly other child stars — one of whom had a literal Kick the Dog moment that Sean witnessed. He has no illusions about such moments:
  Kicking a dog is worse than cheating on half a dozen spouses, worse than committing a dozen hit-and-runs. Worse than invading a foreign country.
• In the first of the Frank Merriwell books, Frank Merriwell's School Days, Barton Hughes kicks a dog in the second sentence of the book to establish that he's no good. Frank demonstrates his own good character by protesting. Bart follows up by pushing a crippled boy (the dog's owner) to the ground for being in the way.
• In The Girl Who Could Fly, when Sally Sue tells Piper what her mother says about Piper, Piper retorts that her mother kicks dogs, she saw her doing it once. This frightens off Sally Sue, because she's never seen Piper and wants to know how she knows.
• Goblins in Goblin Slayer hand these moments out like candy. Of particularly nasty note is what they do to the all-female party that attacked the Elven Fortress from Chapter 4 after overtaking them: first they burn the wizard at the stake, then they tie up the ranger and kill her with her own arrows, and then stuff her entrails into the mouth of the monk who tried to bite out her own tongue in order to kill herself. And as for the Knight who led the party? Not only do they make her watch all of this horrificness, but they then spend three days and three nights raping her and doing all kinds of other unspeakable things before she finally dies, just before throwing her horrifically mangled body into the river for the villagers to find. And they did all of this because they were feeling vindictive about them killing a number of their own in their bid to rescue a village girl that they had taken.
• In The Goldfish Boy, Matthew sees Mr. Charles dump a bucket of water on Nigel the cat, then try to kick Nigel. Matthew hates Nigel, who he sees as infested with germs, but he's still horrified by the cruelty.
• In The Green Mile, Percy Wetmore gets two — first stomping Mr. Jingles, Eduard Delacroix's pet mouse, which was done just to be a sadistic asshole, and his deliberate sabotage of Del's execution (resulting in a truly Cruel and Unusual Death for Del) in revenge for Del laughing at Percy pissing himself in fear because of Wharton, with Percy capping it off with a cruel taunt to Del on the chair about how "there is no Mouseville" directly before said execution instead of simply letting him die happy.
• Hannibal. Mason Verger is much worse than Lecter himself, and this is established in quite an early scene in which he calls an adopted orphan into his private room and not only brings up all the insecurities the child would already have, but then tells him that his beloved pet cat is going to be taken away and suffer a terrifying death, and that the boy should feed her rat poison to save her. This incident is mentioned later, when it turns out that the boy is in hospital after taking the rat poison himself. Mason calmly orders the family to be paid off, with the sort of tone that suggests this sort of thing is not unusual for him. This incident is not tied in any way to his revenge on Lecter, and serves no purpose beyond making you wish the bastard suffers a truly hideous death. Much to the pleasure of the readers, he does.
• Harry Potter:
  • Rita Skeeter does this so much in the first book she appears in (Goblet of Fire) that she is probably one of the most hated characters in the series. She embellishes a story about how Harry feels about being in the Triwizard Tournament (it's established from the start that she puts words in peoples' mouths and has nothing nice to say about anyone but herself) and once called Albus. Freaking. Dumbledore. an "obsolete dingbat". She also wrote a scathing article about Hermione being a gold digger because Hermione had the guts to criticize her, then wrote an article about Harry apparently going crazy or just being an Attention Whore due to his scar hurting more and more lately. She also revealed Hagrid's half-giant heritage to all of the UK, using people like the Malfoys as quote sources. She gets hers at the end, though, with Hermione holding the information that she's an unregistered Animagus (being unregistered is illegal and violators are subject to a few years in Azkaban) over her head, making her quit the Daily Prophet and stop writing nasty stories. In book 5 she actually does some good, though, getting the truth out about Voldemort through The Quibbler since the Prophet can't be trusted due to the Umbridge-controlled Ministry attempting to discredit Harry and Dumbledore at every turn.
  • Also, any time Snape is mean to Neville. Sure, Snape is also unreasonably cruel to Harry, Ron, and Hermione in and out of class, but they seem better equipped to handle it than Neville does. One stand out example is in the third book where he uses Trevor, Neville's pet as a guinea pig for Neville's potion which he expects will be deadly for the frog. When it turns out that the potion worked fine thanks to some subtle help by Hermione, he gets so angry that he takes some points from Gryffindor for presumed cheating despite the fact that he didn't have any concrete proof, technically speaking, that Neville cheated.
  • Umbridge seems to love to do this, like forcing Harry to carve the words I must not tell lies into his flesh and falsely accuse Muggles of "stealing" magic.
  • In Order of the Phoenix, thanks to Umbridge's influence, the Slytherins try kicking as many dogs as possible. Things include Malfoy insulting Molly Weasley and the late Lily Potter after his Quidditch team lost, Malfoy and his gang laughing at Harry after getting attacked by a bowtruckle just to see his reaction, and creating the song Weasley Is Our King.
  • Mrs. Weasley telling Sirius that he was a poor godfather because he was in prison for twelve years. She was motivated out of concern for Harry, and they do make up at Christmas, but seriously: not cool, Mrs. Weasley.
  • In Order of the Phoenix Bellatrix Lestrange taunts Neville by saying that she's had the pleasure of meeting his parents, whom she tortured to insanity. She then follows by taunting Harry about Sirius' death up until he tries the Cruciatus Curse on her.
  • Averted, however, by Lord Voldemort of all people, in on specific case in the seventh book. While on his way to the Potters' in a flashback, he sees a small child, contemplates murdering it, and then just walks on by.
• Note the fate of perhaps the one and only half decent character, Mr. Fish, in Hell's Children by Andrew Boland, at the hands of the protagonists. And then there's Acheri’s childhood, which is not work safe, by a long shot.
• Perhaps the easiest way to figure out who the villain is in the Honor Harrington books is to see who has the most misogynistic internal monologue, with frequent use of phrases such as "that bitch" or "putting her in her place". Though this only applies to domestic villains, and not all of them. Increasingly in the later books, the use of "cargo" or similar for manpower slaves serves much the same function.
• Hurog:
  • Lampshaded and subverted with Garranon. When he expresses his intent to force seemingly dumb Gentle Giant Ward into an asylum for insane (or unwanted) nobles, Ward's uncle asks whether he also "tortures puppies". Garranon says that yes, in order to protect his brother, he would do so. Not really dog-kicking, as he has a reason for what he's doing — he wants to get a slave back whom his younger brother bought from a person who didn't actually own her. Or so he believes.
  • The trope is played straight with his younger brother Landislaw, who does attack Ward for no good reason.
  • There's also Ward's father, who is not only abusive towards his wife and children, but also mistreats his horse. That's how we know that we don't have to be sorry when he dies, by being thrown by said horse.
• The Icewind Dale Trilogy: In The Crystal Shard, Akar Kessel comes close to doing this, except it's a cat and he tries to kill it with a magic spell (for practice) instead of kicking it. Animal lovers have nothing to worry about, since at that time he's pretty hopeless when it comes to spellcasting.
• In Cold Blood: At one point Dick deliberately runs over a stray dog with his car. His comment to Perry is "Boy! We sure splattered him!"
• In Death: Some of the murderers, being Ax-Crazy, Smug Snake, or some combination thereof, have engaged in this. This just makes their comeuppance all the more worthwhile.
• In It, Henry Bowers kills the dog of Mike Hanlon, a kid he hates for being black, by feeding him a steak he has rubbed ground glass into.
• Jack Reacher: In One Shot, Reacher is helping investigate a shooting spree. A police officer mentions that after arresting the suspect, they sent the dog to the pound and it was put to sleep. Reacher says, "That's cold... the damn dog didn't do anything wrong." Reacher is a giant of a man who kills several people with his bare hands in the series.
• James Bond:
  • In Moonraker (the novel, not the movie), an otherwise tense car chase between Bond and Hugo Drax is interrupted by a third car, whose driver taunts Bond as he passes him. Bond laughs it off, but as the third car tries to pass Drax, Drax drives it off the road.
  • Goldfinger: The title character asks Bond if he likes cats before feeding the animal in question to his henchman.
• The original novel of Jaws has a subplot involving the town mayor being in hock to the Mafia over a real estate deal. After Chief Brody orders the beaches closed following another shark attack, one of the Mob mooks tries to intimidate him by twisting his pet cat's neck right in front of one of Brody's kids.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell:
  • One of our first glimpses of Mr. Drawlight is a flashback to when he threw someone else's cat out a third-story window because he feared it would shed on his clothing.
  • Also, Mr. Norrell himself, when he mentions that he doesn't care whether Lady Pole lives or dies, only what her husband thinks of him.
• In Journey to the River Sea, Miss Minton explains that she doesn't have an umbrella, as she broke it on the back of some naughty boy. Asked what the boy did to deserve it, she says that the boy tried to push a puppy through a wire mesh fence. The protagonist immediately ask if he was okay — the dog, that is; she doesn't care for the wellbeing of the boy after being told that. (The puppy survived, but lost an eye.)
• Edith Wharton's story "Kerfol" tells of a man who suspected his wife of infidelity because she'd given her little dog's collar (a present from him) to a friend. He proceeds to kill the dog, and to kill any dogs she adopts or even shows the slightest kindness to. She begs her friend to take her away, or help her some way, as she fears for her own life. When hubby is found dead later, the friend is put on trial for murder, and the wife testifies that on that night she'd heard barking and howling she would recognize anywhere.
• When Thrope's house burns down in the Knight and Rogue Series Michael suggests that someone may have set it on fire as revenge for Thrope kicking their dog. He does try to hurt a dog and a young boy in his first appearance, but it has nothing to do with why he was targeted.
• The miller in Krabat mistreats the boys. Not all the time, but if he does, he gets mean.
• Laughing Jack: Or kill the dog and stuff it with candy. Laughing Jack hangs the corpse of Fido, the family's dog, from the kitchen's light fixture, for seemingly no other reason than just to horrify James' mother even more, since the candy in the dog's open stomach matches the candy that was given to her son earlier.
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:
  • Between Lucy first discovering Narnia and Edmund discovering it himself, he mockingly asks her if she's found any other countries in other wardrobes in the house.
  • After Edmund and Lucy return from Narnia, Lucy tells him to tell Peter and Susan about it, hoping he will back up her story. Instead, he decides to let her down and she runs off in tears. After she rushes out, Edmund goes on to insult her behind her back, saying, "There she goes again. What's the matter with her? That's the worst of young kids, they always—" before Peter tells him to shut up. The narration even says Edmund chose to do it because it was the meanest and most spiteful thing he could think of to do.
  • The Witch turning the merry party to stone, when she learns that Father Christmas gave them their banquet. This moment is significant, because Edmund sees the evil he has sided with, and for the first time in the story, feels sorry for someone besides himself.
  • The Witch and her minions do this to Aslan before the Witch kills him by tying him up, shaving his mane off, and muzzling him.
  • The BBC version has a metaphorical version. Edmund throws some nasty taunts at a dog that had been turned to stone by the White Witch, but he immediately regrets it when his conscience reprimands him for it.
    "What a stupid thing to do. It would serve you right if it came to life and bit your head off."
• The Lord of the Rings has Saruman consistently abusing Wormtongue, until finally, it all backfires magnificently.
• In Lost Voices, the mermaid Anais tortures larvae ^note girls transformed into mermaids as infants or toddlers, who will never grow older and are usually left to be eaten by orcas, since protecting them is too much trouble by holding them out of the water or sometimes even throwing them onto a beach until their tails dry out, resulting in a slow, incredibly painful death. No one cares much about larvae, but Luce is still horrified by the cruelty, and by the other mermaids' acceptance of it.
• In Somerset Maugham's novel The Magician the villainous wizard Oliver Haddo (modeled on Aleister Crowley, who wrote a review of the book when it came out) kicks the heroine's dog and immediately gets a thrashing from her fiancé — which begins a deadly feud between them.
• In the Malazan Book of the Fallen, the Crippled God's penchant for making lopsided deals and preference of 'broken' individuals means that his followers don't have the best of time in his service. The worst example being the teen-aged Rhulad Sengar, who gets to experience hundreds of deaths to become a stronger champion.
• Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park finally opens her suitor Edmund's eyes to her true character when she stealthily wishes in a letter to the heroine for Edmund's ill older brother to die, which would make Edmund, as the next heir of his father's wealth and title, rich enough for her to consider marrying. Now if only more readers could come to the same conclusion...
• Marcelo in the Real World: While Wendell Holmes is trying to persuade Marcelo to help him get Jasmine onto his boat so he can rape her, he lures a pigeon over towards his foot with a potato chip. Then he kicks the pigeon hard. It's the first time Marcelo has ever seen anyone hurt an animal.
• The Marvellous Land of Snergs: When Joe and Sylvia see Golithos for the second time, he is gnawing on the bones of the cow he used to get milk from. Then they know the ogre has given up on becoming a non-violent vegetarian.
• Marian from MARZENA just love kicking the dog. If she's not beating up or flaying MLK, she'll be playing mind games with poor Shrinking Violet Lauren, spoofing her holo contact lenses with graphical glitches and asking her to do things against her better judgment. Then there's Livia and her Secret Test of Character where she sends Zoé to kill Lauren, and they fake Zoé's death just as a psychological test to see Lauren's reaction.
• Matilda: What Matilda's parents do to her regularly, especially her father, when he tears up Matilda's library book, simply because he envies the pleasure she gets from reading. The strong-willed Matilda refuses to cry as many other children would, and takes her revenge in increasingly cunning ways.
• Evil Sorcerer Pryrates in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn crushes the head of a puppy under his foot. He does it not even because the dog annoyed him, but because he knew it would shock the hero (who he didn't see as anyone special at that time). And this is just his Establishing Character Moment — he gets worse.
• In Mermaid Moon, Baroness Thyrla coughs a fire-breathing lizard out of her mouth to demonstrate her magic. A few minutes later, she kills it with her shoe.
• In The Mermaid of Black Conch, Thomas Clayson is one of the fishermen who capture the mermaid Aycayia. After David rescues Aycayia, Thomas goes to Arcadia's house to report the mermaid's "theft." Arcadia's son Reggie's two dogs run to greet Thomas. He kicks one of them.
• Mermaids of Eriana Kwai: In Ice Crypt, Dani learns that her students have been feeding a stray dog. She shoots the dog to teach her students not to be soft.
• In The Midwich Cuckoos, the "Cuckoos" kill a dog and a bull that respectively bit and chased one of their number.
• The Thénardiers in Les Misérables do this in just about every scene they're in. Javert also gets one when he frightens Fantine to death (albeit unintentionally) by telling her the mayor is a convict. Notably, this is one of the only moments where Valjean briefly loses his cool.
• In The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly, the police officer who takes Kieran from his mother stops to kick a pig that was following him down the road.
• Modern Faerie Tales: Lolli in Valiant kicks her cat under a train when she gets sick of its mewing.
• Morris and Chastain Investigations: In Black Magic Woman, Walter Grobius, upon hearing that his evil plan was completely thwarted, in anger, requests that a servant buy him a dog so he can kick it to death.
• My Dark Vanessa: When the sexually abusive teacher Strane visits Vanessa at her house, her dog Babe jumps up on him. Vanessa tells him to say "no," but instead he shoves Babe so hard that she falls on her back.
• A children's book titled No Biting tells the reader on each page what they must not do and what they can do instead. One page instructs the young reader that they must never kick a dog. They may, however, kick a ball.
• Nory Ryans Song: Cunningham takes away Sean and his brother's currach (boat) as payment for rent and has it chained up on the pier to waste away, depriving them of the only thing they can use to catch fish during a famine.
• The titular Nova from The Nova Chronicles hates animals and never misses a opportunity to crush a creature beneath her thick metal boots.
  • In book 1, during a raid on a home, Nova boots the homeowner's puppy across the room. After failing to gather any intelligence, She steps on and crushes the injured puppy's skull on her way out.
  • In another scene, after landing on a planet, as she exits from her pod, she jumps directly onto a small alien creature. Rather than be disgusted at her boots being covered with alien blood, she laughs at her first kill on a new planet.
• This trope goes back to Victorian times, where in Oliver Twist Dickens had one of the two main villains (Bill Sikes) repeatedly kick his dog on numerous occasions. The dog even went down with Sikes when he accidentally killed himself.
  • In the Roman Polanski film adaption, the dog lives, though Bill attempts to drown it because it was mentioned on his wanted poster.
  • In the musical adaptation Oliver!, Bill tries to kill it, but it not only runs away, it leads the chase right to him.
• Lady Gray, an early antagonist in Only Villains Do That kills several orphans simply because she hopes it will stop the protagonist from thinking straight.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Luke, the true Lightning Thief, really didn't need to frame Percy for stealing Zeus's bolt and Hades' helm. Percy wasn't even aware he was a demigod at the time.
  • In The Titan's Curse (overlapping with Kick the Morality Pet), Luke kidnaps his childhood friend Annabeth to use as a hostage and bait. Both Percy and even Thalia were rightly appalled by this.
• Överenskommelser quickly shows us how creepy the villains are. Even if we disregard what they do to the two protagonists from this trope, as we can see those deeds as important to the overall plot, we also get to see two of the villains (Edvard and Rosenschiöld) repeatedly abuse women while having sex with them. We also have the moment when Rosenschiöld cuts off Beatrice's hair after raping and battering her, a pointless act of evil that he only does to further humiliate her.
• Najma Hussein from RS Perry's Over The Edge provides a literal example. Najma is a ruthless assassin who takes a little too much delight in killing. When one of her targets manages to escape, she takes her frustrations out on her victim's dog. Brutally stomping it to death with her steel toed boots.
• The midpoint of The Player of Games sees main character Jernau Gurgeh unmotivated and on the edge of a Heroic BSoD due to the culture clash he's experiencing: to the Azadians, Azad is the epitome of Serious Business, involving life-and-death stakes, while to Gurgeh it's nothing more than an interesting game. Since Gurgeh quitting the Azad tournament is not in accordance with Special Circumstances' plans, his Handler takes him on a quick tour of the city that amounts to a kick the dog moment for the entire Empire of Azad. The result is exactly what SC wanted.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, this happens every time Jack Frost kidnaps or tries to harm an animal. In the movie, he gives a speech about his snowman army saying that they're mindless soldiers who can be indefinitely replaced. He also fires his goblins despite the fact that they were useful to him.
• Committed almost literally in The Red Vixen Adventures when Space Pirate Bloody Margo kicks Lady Sallivera, a fox-like alien, when she's already bound to a chair.
• Tybalt from The Reynard Cycle does this so often that it's one of his defining traits. In Defender of the Crown he is even described as stalking off, "Looking no doubt for a dog to kick."
• Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games starts off with a man taking revenge on his adulterous wife by tossing her cute little puppy out the window.
• The Saga of Tuck's Principal Nickerson has no qualms about assigning detention to students who skip class to commit suicide. Just so you know how badly he deserves the Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Sandokan: In The Tigers of Mompracem Lord Guillonk was willing to kill Marianna, his niece, before letting her marry Sandokan, and would have done so if Yanez didn't headbutt him into submission when he tried.
• Something Different About Dad: How to Live With Your Asperger's Parent: Mark literally does this to Jason and Louise's pet dog Buster in Chapter 4 during his (Mark's) meltdown. Mark's ranting while going off his rocker in Chapter 4 in general, to be more precise.
  Everyone was really, really happy about the baby... but not Dad.
  He started shouting and shouting. He shouted at Louise, saying really mean things — that the baby would cry and ruin our holiday, just like Barney had ruined last year's holiday. He said that Louise was stupid for having another baby, when she couldn't manage the ones she had already...
  Mum was really upset. She tried to get Dad to calm down, but he wouldn't listen. He kept shouting. He just got more and more angry. It was horrible.
  He started shouting at Lily and Barney... And he kicked Buster...
  Jason told Dad he was right out of order and pushed Dad. Then Dad pushed him back. Grandpa Fred told Jason to just calm down and Jason told him to keep out of it.
  Buster was howling, Lily and Barney were screaming, and Louise started to cry...
  And then Dad just... lost it. He started shouting and shouting and didn't stop. I've never, ever heard him shout so much. I was really frightened. He told everyone to Get Out! of his house.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • As if there weren't enough evidence that Joffrey Baratheon is a psychopath, other characters relate an incident where he cuts open a pregnant cat. While his very young age at the time, and the circumstances around the incident, might suggest that he might not have fully understood what he was doing, the sadistic streak that becomes so obvious later undermines any sympathetic interpretation.
  • Not long after becoming king, Joffrey passes judgment on several court cases, and only seems interested in the ones from which he can derive sadistic pleasure. He has a thief's hands cut off, has two knights duel to the death to resolve their land dispute, has a traitor's wife sent to the dungeon when she asks for her husband's head so she can bury it, and makes a minstrel who made an insulting song about Robert choose between keeping his hands or his tongue.
  • There's also Viserys Targaryen, who actually has a dog kicking moment in every scene he appears in in A Game of Thrones.
  • There's also Gregor Clegane raping the daughter of an innkeeper and murdering the innkeeper's son for no reason.
  • Cersei Lannister is less "Kick the Dog" and more "Execute the Direwolf". Not the direwolf that actually did anything, just the one who happened to be convenient at the time.
  • Catelyn Stark has a kick the dog moment when Jon Snow comes to visit a comatose Bran following his fall from a tower, and Catelyn says to Jon, "It should have been you."
  • Sansa Stark has some dog-kicking in relation to her sister, because even though Arya normally gives as good as she gets when it comes to The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry, there are times when Arya is genuinely trying to apologise or comfort Sansa, only to get it thrown in her face for no other reason than bitchy spitefulness. There is also the fact that after Ned is executed and her world falls apart, Sansa barely even remembers Arya's existence, let alone trying to think of a way to help.
  • Tywin Lannister, who is usually the epitome of Pragmatic Villainy, has several pointlessly cruel moments with Tyrion.
  • Invoked metaphorically by Varys after Tyrion says he should kill him even though he's come to break Tyrion out of jail the night before his execution:
  The faithful dog is kicked, and no matter how the spider weaves, he is never loved.
  • Ruthless killing and casual violence is par for the course in this series, so you know that Ramsay and Roose Bolton are exceptionally bad because of their habit of flaying people.
  • Euron Greyjoy raped his brother Victarion's wife, raped his youngest brother Aeron, murdered his brother Balon, and now seeks to kill Victarion and take over the kingdom.
  • Victarion Greyjoy frees a ship of sex slaves only to make them his own sex slaves, and murders several people for no real reason throughout the course of ONE chapter.
  • Ramsay Snow spends most of his time torturing Theon Greyjoy, both physically and psychologically, to the point he is but an empty shell of who he was. He also enjoys hunting women by siccing his dogs on them.
• Pulp villains often indulged in dog-kicking. One of The Spider's villains actually gave a puppy the plague and then hit it with a stick for good measure.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Dark Apprentice has a fairly obvious kick the dog moment when Admiral Daala orders her commanders to level an unarmed colony on Dantooine. This despite Daala stating that the planet "is too remote for an effective demonstration." The obviousness of this trope is made evident when she subsequently observes that she wouldn't "have another opportunity to catch the New Republic so unprepared." So why waste the opportunity on a ridiculous, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-target? To show just how cold, evil, and tactically inept she is.
  • In the same trilogy, Moruth Doole is shown to have a slave harem where he essentially rapes female Rybets, and then uses the offspring as slave laborers in his mining operation. If that doesn't make him evil enough for a Karmic Death, then he is also guilty of having the offspring murdered when they get large enough to challenge him.
  • In the X-Wing Series, Flirry Vorru was an Imperial Moff who got sent to Kessel for massive corruption; typically he's urbane and civilized, but when he "disciplines" an unlikeable lesser criminal who had recently been gut-shot, the Rebels he's working with make a note on how quickly his mood changes.
    Vorru's right hand struck fast and slapped Thyne on the belly. The younger man howled, then, as he doubled over, Vorru grabbed him by the neck and slammed his forehead into the table. Thyne, glassy-eyed, rebounded and Vorru flung him from his chair. "For some people, discipline is a lesson. For others it is a lifetime."
  • Kirtan Loor also does this, as when Corran had finally caught Bossk, the bounty hunter responsible for murdering his father, he had Bossk released under the pretext of "collateral damage", and it's outright stated to the reader that he did this purely out of spite.
  • Dark Force Rising: Grand Admiral Thrawn asks the Noghri maitrakh if she needs a reminder of what it means to defy The Empire. When she says no, Thrawn gives her one anyway by launching an Orbital Bombardment on Honoghr.
  • Galaxy of Fear: Captain Thrawn is generally not as evil-seeming as any of the other Imperials in the series, more of a Noble Demon than most of them. But when he and the Arrandas are fleeing The Swarm and he gets up the ramp to a ship first, he keys it to start closing. They pick up the pace and get on board on time, then demand to know why he did that, and he says it was a tactical decision and he hadn't wanted the swarm on board. Of course, it could be argued that he knew they'd go faster if they saw the ramp closing...
  • In "Nightlily: The Lovers' Tale", Feltipern Trevagg is introduced in the process of driving an impoverished widow and her children out of their house. Makes it all the more satisfying when his blood stains the hotel bedsheets aqua through his own mistake on an unrelated pursuit.
• Pierre Brossard, the Villain Protagonist in The Statement by Brian Moore, kicks the dog he bought his ex-wife years before in order to force his way back into her affections. By that time though he's already established as a sociopathic Manipulative Bastard.
• In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the very first time Hyde is described, he is seen by the narrator walking down a street and running into and trampling a girl without so much as breaking stride. Fits the trope even more appropriately because for Hyde, there was no real hostile intent behind the action: she just happened to be in his way while he was walking.
• In The Stranger, Mr. Meursault's neighbor, old man Salamano, is known for habitually beating and cursing his equally old dog. Later on, however, this leads to Even Evil Has Loved Ones. After the old man loses his dog while at the fair, he shares his fear with Meursault that he may never see it again. Soon after saying goodnight and closing the door to his apartment, Meursault hears through a wall Salamano weeping.
• Terror from Survivor Dogs literally beat up a smaller dog who tries speaking with him. Even Lucky wonders what kind of alpha mauls their own packmates.
• Squire Hardman in "Sweet Ermengarde" kicks an "unquestionably innocent" cat while twirling his moustache. The story is a send-up of hack romance stories, so Squire Hardman is pretty much every Obviously Evil villain cliché.
• The Things They Carried: Soon after Curt Lemon's sudden death, Rat Kiley found a baby water buffalo, stroked its nose, and offered some C rations. After the animal showed disinterest, Rat mutilates the baby water buffalo with various shots over the body. The barely alive buffalo was dumped into the abandoned village well.
• Trail of Lightning: Longarm is a corrupt cop with a chip on his shoulder, but because he's human Maggie isn't willing to get in a fight with him. That changes when he beats and tries to execute a civilian.
• In Twelve Days, two goons break into the Dorseys' condo to kidnap Nicki. Pax the Great Dane attacks one of them, who tases him. Later, as the goons are carrying Nicki out, one of them tases Pax again, even though he's still helpless on the floor. Pax gets his revenge the next day by ripping the goon's throat out.
• In Valley Of The Dry Bones, a dystopian novel set in 2016 America, we know that society is really going downhill when the book casually mentions parties where the entertainment includes torture-and-snuff child porn. This takes place several pages after comments by law enforcement about the curious recent increase in missing children.
• The Virus: Olivia Cromwell was leading a small team of soldiers into Barnaby's secret lab in order to find his research on the cure. Upon entering the lab, she immediately steps on and crushes a small lab animal because it "got in [her] way."
• Vorkosigan Saga: In A Civil Campaign, we have all-around winner Lord Richars, who drowns his 12-year-old cousin Donna's puppy after she fights off his rape attempt. Many years later, when she has a sex-change operation (going from Donna to Dono) and challenges his claim to her/his late brother's title, he tries to have Dono castrated, in the back of a van, without anesthetic.
• Cree Bega of The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara specialises in Kick The Woobie. He forces Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil to watch while The Morgawr devours the minds of a ship's crew, and later, during their final battle, smugly informs Ahren of his crush's torture and suicide, then taunts him for being unable to save her. There is no reason for Cree Bega to do any of this, it doesn't serve to advance the Morgawr's plans or his own; no, he just likes to hurt people.
  "She took ssso long to die little Elvesss. So long it seemed that it would take forever. Would you like to know what we did to her, when The Morgawr gave her to ussss?"
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In order to ensure that we don't sympathise too much with Alaric from the Grey Knights novels, who is otherwise a "pure white" hero, he spouts stolid Knight Templar dogmatisms from time to time, such as threatening a techpriest with death for admiring some advanced technology unavailable to the Imperium.
  • In Ravenor Rogue, Carl Thonius kills an innocent man by phasing him through a window to be torn apart by a blizzard, while also compelling an oblivious Maud Plyton to put a gun to her own head. He does both things simply to test the limits of his daemonic abilities, and to see what he can get away with while Ravenor is watching.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Clear Sky does a couple of these in the Dawn of the Clans book Thunder Rising. He bullies Jagged Peak while he's suffering from self-esteem problems, embarrasses one of his cats to make Thunder look good, beats up Nightheart's brother when he was already defeated, sends Frost out to die even though he can still hunt, and throws his own son into the path of an attacking fox.
  • There's one cat who the Omen of the Stars book The Last Hope really wants you to know is an evil bastard, and it's not Brokenstar or Tigerstar. It's not even Shredtail. It's Hawkfrost. Sure, Brokenstar murdered Beetlewhisker, but Hawkfrost made it personal when he kicked the corpse and smugly mocked Beetlewhisker. Then, he goes on to nearly kill fan-favourite Ivypool, and actually succeeds in killing Hollyleaf, another fan-favourite (admittedly without Ivypool's absurd levels of popularity). Then, he spends the rest of his screentime rubbing it in to Ivypool and Brambleclaw that he killed Hollyleaf. He really has his death coming.
  • This is a rather unpleasant habit of Darktail's in A Vision of Shadows:
    • In The Apprentice's Quest, he murders the half-starved and virtually harmless Mistfeather and leaves his body to rot.
    • In Thunder and Shadow, he half-blinds Rain after the latter surrenders to him when Darktail defeats him in single combat.
    • In Shattered Sky, after he and his army defeat RiverClan, Darktail takes their wounded prisoner and forces them to leave their dead to rot in the open. It's worth noting that taking the wounded prisoner was more of a Can't Kill You, Still Need You thing, but was done with obvious pleasure, and leaving the dead to rot was pointlessly cruel. Also, while holding the wounded warriors prisoner, Darktail tortures them into swearing an oath of loyalty to him by starving them and allowing their wounds to fester. When Reedwhisker, the cat who resists the longest, finally gives in, Darktail needlessly humiliates him by forcing him to the oath again, louder. And even after the prisoners give in, Darktail continues to starve them anyway, making it abundantly clear that he is treating them the way he is purely for his own amusement.
• Wasp (1957): Sagramatholou's first on-page action is to beat up an old man and kick him while he's down. This grants him Asshole Victim status once he dies by Mowry's hand.
• In The Waste Lands, Gasher not only kidnaps Jake and takes him on a journey during which he threatens and beats him so much it's virtually all one long Kick the Dog moment, but he starts the journey by instructing him to throw Oy, his newfound pet Billy-Bumbler, off a suspension bridge, and then he takes a kick at Oy as he runs away. Needless to say, he gets his Karmic Death, as it's Oy who leads Roland to the lair of Gasher and his buddies.
• In White as Snow, Arpazia rejects her 8-year-old daughter Coira's declaration of love.
• The Witch of Knightcharm:
  • The evil witch Lily Rutherford does this when she stops during a race to execute a fallen competitor named Luban. While Luban was herself an evil mage, she'd been defeated and trapped by the protagonist, amd she was no longer any threat to anyone. But Lily still chose to slaughter her anyways, and why? Because Luban had dared to challenge Lily in the first place, which offended Lily so much that she decided murder was the most appropriate reaction.
  • Lily also does this later in the race when she tries to kill Janet Yawkly, a pacifist witch who was also no threat to anyone and was also so far behind that there was no chance of her catching up and beating Lily. This time, the protagonist Emily is able to save Yawkly, and she's so enraged by the attack that she then overtakes and beats down Lily as well.
• The title witches of The Witches are singularly nasty, what with their scheme to turn little children into mice, but when one of them expresses her reservation about getting rid of all of them, the Grand High Witch disposes of her in nightmarish fashion for daring to say that she is wrong, incinerating her alive with magic.
• Worm features tons of this, mostly coming from the Slaughterhouse Nine. A limited list is as follows:
  • Mannequin and Burnscar getting revenge on Skitter by attacking her territory and brutally killing dozens of civilians, with Mannequin making a point to murder parents in front of their kids.
  • Attacking Parian's territory and killing nearly everyone there, including Parian's family, before mutilating the survivors to look like them so that they can serve as decoys to draw the fire of local Neo-Nazis. To top it off, one of the Nine members the victims were altered to look like was the Siberian, who literally cannot be harmed by anything, so the motivation was sadism as much as tactics.
  • Attacking a hospital and starting with the nursery. It also bears mentioning that the hospital was in a rural area and served multiple counties, so it was both very crowded and too far for anyone but the police to intervene, and it's implied that the Nine picked this target specifically to ensure that the chances of escape or rescue were virtually zero.
  • Attacking a ski resort and gruesomely killing nearly three hundred of its residents before kidnapping 999 more and stashing them away, promising to kill them if anyone but Theo tries to stop them.
  • Bonesaw kidnapping Blasto, using him to clone the Nine, and then forcing him to sing a children's song for four solid months before he drops dead from a stress-induced stroke.
• Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has Heathcliff actually hang his future wife Isabella's puppy, right in front of her. Then he tells her he'd like to destroy anything and everything she loves. She marries him anyway.

---