Kids Are Cruel / Other Media

Calvin demonstrates a fine example of being both a victim and an instigator.

The cruelty of children as depicted in other forms of media.

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Advertising

• Many '90s kid-aimed commercials glorified this trope, with kids joyfully behaving in ways that even most real-life kids would find repulsive:
  • A good example is the Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats commercials of the mid-'90s, which not only exemplified Kids Versus Adults but often had cartoonishly sassy children doing things almost no decently-raised kid would even want to do in real life, such as squirting (reasonably nice) old ladies with garden hoses.
  • Kids in cereal commercials are especially cruel to mascots, with the most notorious examples being Lucky the Leprechaun and the Trix Rabbit, who will never get to keep or have their respective cereals thanks to them. The kids in the Cocoa Puffs commercials did the opposite, tempting Sonny the Cuckoo Bird with the cereal until he lost his self control and went "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs".

Manhua

• My Beloved Mother is set in a universe where robots are integrated into daily lives, with orphans being Raised by Robots issued by the government. But due to prejudice and Fantastic Racism, children with robot parents are often picked on by their peers for being outcasts; a child who lose his family and subjected to having a robot mother even bullied until he runs away from home two months later. There's also the protagonist Sinbell who tries hiding the fact that he's one such orphan, only for his robot mother to accidentally reveal herself at his school, which quickly leads to the entire class severing ties with him!

Manhwa

• In Redrum 327 Hyeri. At just 8 years old, Hyeri and the other kids locked Gahui up in an abandoned safe in the middle of a forest, where Gahui ended up being trapped for six days while it rained, nearly drowning and half-frozen as a result.

Music

• Gym Class Heroes' third album is called As Cruel as School Children. There are also several songs on that album, as well as their other albums, that are about this trope. For example, "Face in the Hall" is about homophobic bullying that escalates and ends up killing the victim.
• The Who's Tommy features Cousin Kevin. John Entwistle wrote the song based on a bully he dealt with as a child until they were teenagers, when John realized he had grown bigger than the bully and punched him out.
• The whole point of John Peel favorites Furious Pig's "I Don't Like Your Face."
• The video for Mass Destruction by Faithless has kids engaging in fist fights.
• While Mark Wills' Don't Laugh At Me is about cruelty in different settings, the first verse covers examples of kid/teen cruelty very nicely.
• All BUT Taylor Swift's character in the video for "Mean" are bullied by other kids.
• Dolly Parton's song "Coat of Many Colors" recounts a story from her childhood. She grew up poor, and her only coat was one made of multicolored rags that her mother had sewn together. Dolly absolutely loved the coat, and wore it to school...only for more well-off children to begin laughing and making fun of her.
• Nightwish has "Eva", a song about a girl who is practically suicidal because of bullying.
• Lene Marlin's first single "Sitting Down Here" is about this; the other kids are pretending to be her friend and apparently think she hasn't noticed that they talk about her behind her back, while the main character plots revenge for these slights.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • Calvin himself can be pretty cruel when he's not the victim; he can be quite the bully towards Susie, and he absolutely Would Hit a Girl with snowballs and water balloons, or by making threats of knocking her teeth out.
  • In the Tenth Anniversary Collection, Watterson muses a bit on the character of Moe, who was written as a bully from a child's perspective, which is to say that being a jerk is Moe's only purpose. Moe is, in fact, the only recurring character in the entire strip not intended to be treated with any sympathy whatsoever.
  • After Moe shoves him face-down in the dirt, Calvin proceeds to express his contempt for his own age group:
    Calvin: People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
• The way Charlie Brown is treated in Peanuts's World of Jerkass, most of the kids could count for this (except Linus and Marcie most of the time). Lampshaded especially hard in this strip. It's as though Schulz himself hates children.
  • In Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis recounts that when one of Charles Schulz's mistresses said "I do not want to be the woman who ruined the innocence of the Peanuts characters", Schulz replied "You're so naive to think they're innocent. Children are not innocent at all. Children are cruel." However, the woman gave this rueful response: "Children aren't cruel. They're learning from us."

Radio

• Nebulous:
  Nebulous: At school... they called me "Nobulous"
  Rory: Ha ha ha ha... er... Ahem hem, er, kids can be so cruel.
• Adventures in Odyssey: Liz Horton was a rather nice girl, but you wouldn't know this from her first appearances. In two episodes, the first she repeatedly teases a girl about how ugly her clothes are, ((even informing her that she was talking about her)), and in the other episode she is so mean at times, you just want to reach through the speakers and punch the ever living tar out of her.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Donald Glover discusses this in one of his stand-up routines, describing children as "tiny Hitlers". He says that walked by two kids fighting over a basketball, and the fight ended with one of them saying, "And that's why your mom's in a fucking wheelchair!". Donald was so shocked he dropped the food he was carrying, and wonders how someone can say that without exploding.
• John Mulaney, in one of his specials, says "thirteen year olds are the worst people in the world" because of their ability to be accurately cruel in making fun of people.

Tabletop Games

• Hilariously invoked in an article in Wargamer's Illustrated about an Alamo game demo at a wargaming convention. Put in charge of some Mexican troops storming the makeshift fortress, a preteen let the referee know that he would like to storm the church. Upon being told that the only people in the church were women and children, the boy stated that he wanted to storm the church anyway. The referee joked about the kid's sociopathy in the article.

Visual Novels

• Katawa Shoujo: One of the reasons Hanako has such a withdrawn personality is that she was bullied at school after having half of her body scarred by the fire that killed her family. The worst part? Her bullies used to be her best friends. No wonder she has such a difficult time letting people close.

Webcomics

• Jan from Gifts of Wandering Ice was known to be very cruel to his little sister. Also, at the age of 16 he killed her mentor and, when asked for the reason for this at the trial, said that "it was fun".
• Rigel from DNA bullies the other X's younger than him very cruelly. In Segment: Tooth, Rigel mocks Orion's Speech Impediment and throws him into mud puddle and tells him to eat the mud, and then begins drowning Orion in the mud when Orion insults him, which shocks even Leon, who was helping Rigel with his bullying. In Segment: Mud, the first thing he does upon meeting Lukas is boss him around for breaking the rules and then ruins Lukas's drawing, making him cry. but this time it turns out he was Bullying a Dragon.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Tedd has been made fun of since he was small for being androgynous; his AU counterpart went nuts from the strain. Justin has been teased since early high school for being gay. Susan has always been considered a weird feminist, but she got really reamed for a few days after showing up at school in the boys' uniform.
  • Elliot feared he may have enjoyed fighting bullies too much in his past. He thinks it might turn him into something of a bully's bully.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court, it seems that prior to Antimony's arrival, the entire Queslett North class made a point of ostracizing Kat Donlan, simply because she got good grades and had teachers for parents. Part of this newfound respect for Kat may be simple fear of Annie. Its shown that despite the class having respect for her, they're kind of freaked out by her Emotionless Girl status at the same time. Ironically, this makes Kat the sociable one and Annie the quiet one, as the class tend to ask Kat to pass messages along to Annie. Kat, naturally, calls them on this.
• In Girl Genius, the children aboard Castle Wulfenbach are noted by Tarvek in this comic as tormenting and picking on each other all the time. Lineage, as he comments, was a favored excuse, with them taking any chance to "one up" each other and thusly claim a reason to bully their "lessers" around.
  • This might be Unreliable Narrator, as Tarvek is not unbiased on the subject. Though they're old enough to mostly not be "kids" any more, only one of the Castle students (Princess Zulenna) goes out of her way to be cruel to Agatha when she's living with them, despite everyone at the time thinking Agatha is a commoner nobody.
    • As Sleipnir noted, by this time active Sparks among them became more confident in their power, however much they have. And, ahem, found other things to do with their free time.
• I Love Yoo: The bullying Shin-Ae was subjected to as a child is certainly not played for laughs. Another example is when Shin-Ae is at the mall and sees a girl bullying a younger girl at a mall for seemingly no reason.
• Little Lapses: Holly's "friends" from early on in the school year locked her in a shed for getting scared while playing a game.
• In What Birds Know, this trope forms a major part of the backstories of the three girls during flashbacks.
• New Transfer Student Danny from The Boy in Pink Earmuffs gets called homophobic slurs by the local boys for being Camp Gay and ignorant of "boy stuff".

Web Original

• Cobra Kai: Played painfully straight by Kyler and Yasmine. They have no issues with bullying others For the Evulz (at least until The Dog Bites Back).
  • Season 3 (when The Bus Came Back for both of them) sees her all but moving on from this trope, while he continues to play it absolutely straight. Best demonstrated in how each of them deals with Demetri (Give Geeks a Chance versus Kick Them While They Are Down).
• Catbug from Bravest Warriors is naive and child-like. As a result, he doesn't quite understand right and wrong. Due to this, episodes have dealt with him being both a kleptomaniac and a murderer.
  • The New Miami City Hackers were a group of kids who teased Danny relentlessly as a kid, inventing a remote that made him throw up on command.
• In the lonelygirl15 episode "Poor Pluto", it is revealed that Bree was bullied by the other kids at school because she liked to ask questions about stars. However, in the following episode, "I Want to Take Bree to a Party", Daniel claims that it was just teasing and that Bree takes things really seriously they were a bunch of mindless jerks who didn't give a crap about her feelings. Seriously, spreading rumors about her having an affair with her teacher?
• Sid from There's a Man in the Woods, who tells a rumor that causes a teacher to be fired, just because he doesn't want to share the honeysuckle with the other kids.
• The Nostalgia Critic got bullied for most of his childhood, and while we mostly just hear about it, in Christmas with the Kranks we get to see depressing flashbacks of it.
• Story Booth is known for having stories revolving around this. They sometimes reach Bully Brutality levels.
• Homestar Runner:
  • Strong Bad was abusive to his little brother Strong Sad, going as far as drilling a hole in his stomach for a belly button. He and Strong Mad still pummel Strong Bad "every hour on the hour".
  • One Strong Bad Email has Strong Bad introducing Edga Jr., a filter for long emails. The splash screen has an angry kid with the caption "Indent and Die!"
  • Another one purports to teach children the value of hygiene, that being that one case of lice or "accident" at school will cause you to be mercilessly bullied by everyone in your grade.
• In the DEATH BATTLE! episode featuring Lucy vs. Carnage, even poor Boomstick can't help but feel bad about Lucy's mistreatment and justify her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

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