Bully Brutality

Bully, or aspiring serial killer?

Often in media, The Bully is portrayed as a typical Jerkass whose biggest threat to their victim is a wedgie or fist in the face. Aside from that, they are mostly harmless in the grand scheme of things. Bully Brutality takes the typical bully up to eleven by having him do things that could actually seriously hurt or even kill their victim, though the bully may or may not actually want to commit murder. Of course, knowingly using violence that can result in serious injury or death isn't any better than premeditated murder. Where the typical bully just wants to give their victim a black eye, the brutal bully wants to beat them to a bloody pulp, if not even worse. The fact that the bully is capable of inflicting such harm is usually lampshaded by the characters. It becomes clear that these bullies have no limits. It also becomes clear that because of that, they have crossed all lines, which makes it a great example of crossing the Moral Event Horizon.

Like Bullied into Depression, this trope has emerged in recent years as a reaction to the common depiction in media of bullying and the abusers who commit it as being harmless. Unfortunately, this trope is Truth in Television; some Real Life bulles have been known to brutally beat, maim, disable, or even kill their victims. Conversely, some victims have ended up snapping and violently assaulting or murdering their abusers, though this happens much less frequently than the former scenario. That being said, No Real Life Examples, Please!

Do not confuse this with cases where bullying has led to the victim committing suicide; that's just a specific case of Driven to Suicide. This trope is where the bullying itself has reached levels where the bully has committed manslaughter, or come close to it by landing the victim in hospital or leaving them permanently disabled.

Related to Kids Are Cruel and Teens Are Monsters. Compare No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, a common weapon in the bully's arsenal for this trope. Contrast with School Bullying Is Harmless.

See also Barbaric Bully, for more unrealistic and stereotypical portrayals of brutal bullies.

noreallife

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Accel World: Araya initially just resorts to bullying Haruyuki, extorting him into giving him lunch. After Kuroyukihime gets him expelled, he jumps right into brutal territory by trying to run Haru and Kuroyukihime over with his car.
• In the fifth episode of Battery, a group of boys sneak up on Takumi after school, pull his shirt up, and start whipping him with a belt. One of them pulls out scissors and threatens to "give him a haircut", but he's stopped by his friends because the scars would be easy to see.
• Blue Exorcist: The Starter Villain, Reiji Shiratori, invokes this. He is shown killing pigeons with a crossbow and threatens Rin with a warning shot for getting involved. As retaliation for beating him up, Reiji tries to brand Rin with a metal rod that he doused in fire, which leads to him getting possessed by Astaroth.
• In Elfen Lied, Lucy/Kaede's Precious Puppy is killed with a vase by Tomoo and his friends, the orphanage kids who bully her on a regular basis. They just wanted to see how she would react. She snaps out and kills them with her Vectors.
• Fruits Basket: Saki Hanajima was a victim of this in the past. She nearly killed a male bully with her Psychic Powers after he force fed her a live newt, and later, several girls went so far as to burn her with a match just to see if she'd react and use her waves on them.
• Ayana's bullies in Fukushuu Kyoushutsu have repeatedly raped her, and even thrown her under a car... and expressed disappointment when she survived. The car was what made her snap and decide to psychologically or physically destroy her classmates for being bullies or not trying to help her.
• In one episode of Hell Girl's fourth season, a student is regularly tied up and savagely beaten by a gang of five bullies, the episode protagonist's cousin and older sister among them. The older sister is sent to Hell by the bullying victim while the protagonist does the same to his cousin for other reasons. After that, the protagonist and the bullying victim decide that since they've sold their souls and are damned to Hell, they may as well go for broke. The episode ends with them about to gruesomely murder a third bully and the implication that the other two are next.
• Holyland has multiple examples:
  • Back in junior high, Yuu was regularly beaten and robbed until he stopped coming to school, tried killing himself, and, after backing out at the last moment, started training himself in basic boxing so that when (not if, when) the bullies came back after him he'd be able to fight back. And sure enough, not only is he attacked by delinquents from other schools in high school just because he looks harmless (resulting in him getting famous as the "Thug Hunter of Shimokita" after he puts down the third), but one of his junior high tormentors tries to rob him once again.
  • When in high school, Masaki was attacked by his sempai in the boxing club and their friends for being so much better than them that he won a spot in the interhigh tournament while still the first year, suffering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown until he begged them to stop when they threatened to break his hands with a brick. The trauma from that experience and him hunting them down one by one in revenge would be the starting point of his rise to the king of the streets.
• Iris Zero: Toru is viciously bullied by other students for being an Iris Zero, that is, somebody without a special eye-related power. Because of this, he develops his "low exposure" policy to avoid standing out as much as possible. It's really brought home later in the series where another character gets angry and starts kicking him repeatedly. A girl asks him why he didn't fight back, and he calmly stands up, dusts himself off, and says that it's better to just get it over with.
• Juujika no Rokunin:
  • The 5 main antagonists pick this trope and run with it. When the bullies were only 12 years old, they started to pick on their classmate, Uruma, with the explicit goal of nudging him into commiting suicide. And when Uruma changed schools to avoid them, despite being forgiving to the point of not name-checking the bullies to school authorities, the ringleader Kyou Shigoku proceeds to cause a car crash that kills Uruma's parents and beats Uruma's younger brother into a coma. The rest of his underlings were all on board with this plan and found it HILARIOUS to rub it in Uruma’s face.
  • When Uruma comes back some years later to get revenge, you would expect that at least one of these guys would show remorse for their actions or grow into normal-ish individuals. Nope. They all grew up to be delusional criminals and sociopaths that hurt other people for no other reason than to watch the world burn. As a result, no one feels sorry for them when Uruma kills them in his quest for revenge.
• Manami from Life (2002) and her Girl Posse can be very violent. It gets to the point where one character throws herself off the school balcony to avoid their wrath. Early on, they attempt to shove a handful of needles down Ayumu's throat in a reference to taking the Japanese Pinky Swear rhyme seriously. Manami outright attempts to get Ayumu and Miki murdered outside of school.
• The Kindaichi Case Files has Kindaichi visit a cram school where a bullied student had committed suicide years before. Later, it is revealed that the boy didn't kill himself, but was killed by his bullies, who put a noose around his neck for fun, and caused the boy to die when he lost his footing and got hung for real. The murders that happened while Kindaichi was around was an act of revenge against those bullies.
• The protagonist's bullies in Magical Girl Site are a violent Girl Posse who give her swirlies and try to get an upperclassman to rape her. After Aya escapes and accidentally kills one of them, her friend tries to get revenge by leaving Aya with a scarred face.
• Maria no Danzai has Kiritaka blackmailed into jumping off a cliff, or else his bullies will upload a falsified sex video of his mother on the internet. It doesn't end well for him. Most of the bullies balk at the fact that Kiritaka got himself killed, but only because they don't want to get arrested and try to flee the scene. However, the ringleader, Okaya, only laments that "he let him win and escape". Then, to cover their tracks, the bullies leave behind a suicide note that matches Kiritaka's handwriting, use a fake Twitter account impersonating him to post several messages hinting at suicide, and overall make it look like he was Driven to Suicide due to Abusive Parents. His mother, Mari, does not take it well, both before and after learning the truth.
• My Hero Academia establishes from the get-go that Katsuki Bakugo has bullied Izuku Midoriya (The Hero) for ten years straight because Izuku is a "quirkless" individual in a world where Everyone Is a Super and this somehow makes Bakugo loathe Midoriya's existence with a passion (what's worse yet, it turns out that he's Midoriya's Evil Former Friend). This means that for ten years straight, Midoriya has been insulted, treated like a sub-human (by what is implied to be everyone in class) and has had Bakugo's Quirk (the ability to sweat nitroglycerine and set it off at will) going off in his face on a constant basis. In the very first chapter Bakugo tells Midoriya that he should just kill himself and hope he reincarnates into someone with powers. Because of Values Dissonance, a (very) Vocal Minority in the manga's Western fanbase considers him to have gone way past the Moral Event Horizon and hates him, and even the author has gone on record in calling that scene a case of Early-Installment Weirdness (especially because Bakugo's character arc revolves around learning to be less of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold... mostly because he puts a rather incredible emphasis on the "jerk" part).
• In Naruto, a flashback during the Land of Waves arc reveals that Tazuna's grandson Inari was bullied by the local children. Their leader Akane stole his dog, threw said dog into a river, shoved him in after him knowing he couldn't swim (bear in mind Inari was about five at the time), and threatened to throw one of his own "friends" in after Inari when said friend balked at the sheer cruelty.
• In Nijigahara Holograph, the bullying of Takahama by his classmates, particularly Kohta, gets more harsh after Arié is dropped down the well, culminating in Kohta pulling a knife on him. However, he's knocked out by one of the other bullies before he can actually use the knife on Takahama.
• In Private Actress, Shiho Kobayakawa is hired by a rich couple whose daughter, Fuyuka, was almost surely murdered by her bullies after months of being their target. The grieving parents want Shiho to investigate Fuyuka's Boarding School and confirm this. Shiho eventually finds out that yes, Fuyuka was killed... but the exact reason was that she walked in on the bullies murdering someone else, and they turned their attacks towards her...
• Shadow Star has 12-year old Aki Honda, who forces her victim to eat worms, beats up her friend for being late, and then rapes her favorite bullying victim with a test tube.
• Rinne from ViVid Strike! is targeted by three bullies after she turns down their offer to join the school's fighting club, eventually resulting in them destroying a prized family heirloom and beating her into unconsciousness on the day her grandfather died. She ends up beating all three of them into the hospital afterwards.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Many one-off antagonists during the Shadow Games Arc are guilty of this.
  • Ushio, who beats Jonouchi and Honda to a bloody pulp with hopes that Yugi will pay him to be his bodyguard. When Yugi refuses, Ushio beats him up instead. When Yami challenges him to a shadow game that involves knife play, Ushio tries to cheat by attempting to stab him.
  • A TV producer has his assistant Fujita disguise himself as a student and beat up Yugi to fabricate a bullying news story.
  • Sozoji, who forces Yugi and Hanasaki to sell tickets to his concert. Because he has an infamously terrible singing voice, nobody will buy tickets, so Yugi offers to take Hanasaki's off his hands, which leads to the latter getting brutally beat by Sozoji.
  • Hirutani, who forces Jonouchi to rejoin his gang. When Yami confronts him, his gang members threaten him with Tasers.

Comic Books

• Played with in the first issue of Muties — Jared murders longtime bully Dunk and gets away with it because Dunk turns out to be a mutant, and thus everyone is willing to believe that he posed a threat to Jared.
• In the original volume of Omega the Unknown, a nerdy student is beaten so badly by bullies that he must be rushed into the hospital for surgery. When he returns, a bully kicks him hard enough to rupture his stitches and he dies.
• In Robin, a pair of bullies at Tim's high school beat a kid to death.
• There's a story arc in The Sandman (1989) where at a Boarding School of Horrors, dozens of students return from the dead — including a trio of bullies who attended the school back before the First World War (for reference, this story takes place during the Gulf War). It turns out that these bullies killed one of their fellow students decades earlier as part of a Satanic ritual (and this unfortunate lad is also back from the dead). Displeased with the way that the ritual failed to gain them any special attention from Satan, and generally unhappy about being back at their old school, they decide to resume being bullies and inflict their tortures on one of the few live students left at the school. The poor kid ends up dying from the wounds they inflict upon him after several agonizing days without medical care.
• Spider-Man: The "Coming of the Thousand" arc features the titular villain, a Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up of Spider-Man's named Carl King, now a hive-minded Spider Swarm seeking to Kill and Replace Peter as Spidey. During his Evil Gloating, King nonchalantly recalls doing such things to Peter as forcing him to eat dog crap, dangling him off the Williamsburg Bridge, and holding a knife to his crotch purely because he messed up his math paper.
• Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra: Trey started as a mere bully, but things escalated so much that he tried to commit murder.

Fan Works

• In AAML: Diamond and Pearl Version, Ash and Paul's Full Battle at Lake Acuity has Paul maim both Charizard and Sceptile during the fight (Charizard gets a dented skull and a broken horn thanks to Electabuzz, and Magmortar chars Sceptile black and burns off half his tail with a point-blank range Flamethrower), and also hurt Ash's baby Riolu just for his own amusement. His brother Reggie is visibly distraught by his little brother's heartless actions, and everyone else is pissed, especially Misty.
• The climax of the Lucky Star fanfic The Day Everything Changed involves school bully Sakura Takahashi, using a metal pipe and a pocket knife and hopped up on two of the world's most potent steroids, brutally beating poor Kagami half to death over irrational jealousy. She possibly could have killed her (despite earlier telling herself that she wouldn't) if Konata had not intervened.
• In Mudsnake, several Gryffindor kids decide to get back at Slytherin by targeting a student. They sneak up on Hermione, stun her, beat her up, lock her in a seldom-visited broom closet, and then charm the door so no one can hear her scream. Snape deems it a near murder attempt because, if not for Ron's guilt making him tell what happened, Hermione could have been stuck in there for days. Dumbledore lets the perpetrators off easy by just giving them detention.
• Being Scarlet Lady encourages Chloé to take her bullying to whole new levels.
  • While she mostly avoids getting physically violent as a civilian, she happily tries to upset her victims to the point that they risk akumatization by Hawkmoth — after all, that gives her free reign to show off as Scarlet Lady! And she can then taunt and torment them for being akumatized afterwards, just to rub more salt in the wounds!
  • She also drags Sabrina around more, and at one point chucks a tablet at her head just for being the bearer of bad news.
  • Chloé is more than happy to attack civilians as Scarlet Lady as well. Case in point: Lila Rossi, whom she gleefully ties up and sends spinning into a fountain with her yo-yo. But perhaps the biggest illustration of how far she's willing to go is during "The Gamer", when she actively tries to help the akuma kill Marinette. All because she's jealous of how Mari was spending time with Adrien.

Films — Animation

• In the Walking with Dinosaurs film, Scowler beats up his brother Patchi in a fight and leaves him to die in a ditch.

Films — Live-Action

• Biff Tannen from the first Back to the Future engages in this by using his car to try and run a skateboarding Marty into a manure truck.
• Better Days: Wei Lai the Alpha Bitch and her Gang of Bullies push Chen Nian down stairs. Then they get particularly savage after Chen Nian reports them for bullying, at one point trying to assault her with a cage filled with rats (she escapes), then later cornering her and kicking and slapping her, ripping her clothes to shreds, and hacking off her hair.
• Nacho from the 2009 Spanish film Bullying is a particularly depraved example. He starts by forcing Jordi to drink alcohol and wet himself on camera, and then moves on to fracturing Jordi's dog's leg. Finally, he moves on to trying to rape and murder Jordi.
• In Drillbit Taylor, the titular character is hired by the protagonists to protect them from two bullies who are actively trying to kill them.
• Discussed in The Garbage Pail Kids Movie; Dodger gets bullied physically by Juice and his gang. When asked why he hasn't reported it to the police, Dodger explains that the last one who snitched on Juice got "poured" into the West Side highway.
• In The Goonies, a high school bully drives up next to Brandon, who is riding a little girl's bike (long story), grabs his hand, and attempts to drag him along before sending him over a cliff. Somehow he survives.
• Henry Bowers, the lead bully in It (1990), pulls a knife on one of the child protagonists, and later on, he and his posse chase the protagonists into the sewer (while they're confronting IT) in order to kill them all. This is pretty much standard for Stephen King.
• In The Karate Kid franchise pretty much runs on this trope. Aside from the multiple severe beatings bullies inflict, we have the following:
  • In ‘’The Karate Kid’’, Johnny and his goons not only beat up Daniel but at one point, run him over with motorbikes. He could have easily died or gotten seriously injured.
  • In ‘’The Karate Kid Part II’’, Chozen outright threatens to murder Daniel and tries to make good on his threat at the end.
  • ‘’The Karate Kid Part III’’ sees Mike Barnes and his goons repeatedly break into Daniel’s business and his dojo. They also threaten to leave him at the bottom of a cliff with high tide coming.
  • ‘’ The Next Karate Kid’’ has a different protagonist: a female highschool student who is confronted by what is essentially bullied by hall monitors who have an unhealthy obsession with her, complete with unfortunate implications. Oh, and they blow up her boyfriend’s car.
  • The continuation series Cobra Kai follows up by making the first students of the resurrected titular Thug Dojo victims of modern methods such as cyber-bullying that become (by the end of the first season) brutal bullies themselves of the old-school "beat the living shit out of your target" kind.
• In both Let the Right One In and its American remake, Let Me In, the protagonist is constantly being victimized by a trio of bullies, culminating in their attempt to drown him in a pool.
• My Bodyguard: The film's main bully assaults the main character so much that he hires a fellow classmate as as his bodyguard, prompting the original bully to get his own Psycho for Hire, a grown-ass adult who pummels the bodyguard and wrecks his motorcycle before a whole crowd of onlookers. Later, the main kid and his bodyguard rematch the villains in another brutal, public fistfight that you would expect would draw the attention of the local police's gang taskforce.
• Some students from My Name is Khan eventually torture Sameer with a soccer ball just because his stepfather is a Muslim. They end up accidentally killing Sameer.
• In the movie Pay It Forward, one of the bullies stabs a kid with a switchblade and he actually dies. However, unlike most cases, here the bully is genuinely shocked and remorseful at what he did.
• The Breyer Brothers from SHAZAM! (2019) are introduced by intentionally running over Freddy with their car and continuing to pummel him. They even make fun of him for not having a mom — which Billy immediately responds to since he understands how it feels and comes right to Freddy's defense. They have also given Freddy a suitcase wedgie and are shown spitting loogie on an infant.
• Three O'Clock High: The main character runs afoul of the new kid in school, Buddy, who turns out to have a Berserk Button about being touched and tells him he's going to beat the shit out of him after class. The kid spends the rest of the day trying to find some way to save his neck, including buying the services of a Bully Hunter. Buddy kicks the ass of the Bully Hunter, beats up an school security guard, and pummels the main character within an inch of his life before the kid turns the tables on him. Somehow, Buddy shows up for school the next day instead of getting thrown in jail and tried as an adult for multiple counts of battery and at least one of property destruction (sabotaging the main character's car so he wouldn't run away and leaving a note stuck to the steering wheel with a switchblade).
• This is parodied in The Toxic Avenger. Bozo and his gang bully Melvin and throw him into a vat of chemicals, leading to him becoming the titular character. Before they do it, they admit that they're also serial killers. They also run over a boy on his bike For the Evulz and back into him when they see that he survived.
• In Young Adult, Mavis befriends Matt, a nerd who was so severely bullied in high school that he's now permanently disabled.

Literature

• In the first book of The Blasted Lands Series, Andover Lashk has his hands smashed to a pulp by a city guard who wrongly accuses him of flirting with a girl the guard wanted for himself. He later gets new magical hands and uses them to horribly maim the guard and his accomplice.
• In The Body, the four protagonists all receive beatings from Ace and his gang; one gets a broken nose and fingers and another one has a badly broken arm.
• Nut from Bravelands usually just mocks and jeers at Thorn, Mud, and Fearless. However, during Thorn and Mud's second Feat, he nearly gets them murdered by crocodiles when he throws rocks at the crocs.
• Chris Hargensen of Carrie fame. Aside from tormenting Carrie over her first period and pouring pigs' blood over her head as a prank, it's noted that she's committed such horrible things as stuffing firecrackers in someone's shoes and nearly blowing her toes off just because the girl had a harelip, among other mistreatments of "misfit" pupils. The principal of the school even flat-out tells Chris's father that, with all of the things she's done, they could easily have her thrown in prison.
• In Rumer Godden's The Diddakoi, the eponymous girl is bullied repeatedly by the other girls at her school, which comes to a head when they physically assault her and leave her with a broken neck. Thankfully, she survives, but had her guardian not been there, it would have been fatal.
• Inverted in Ender's Game. A bully attacks Ender, who responds by beating him to a bloody pulp, actually (if unintentionally) killing him. He gets away with it because the military recognizes it as a sign of his potential for measured brutality.
• Harry Potter:
  • Tom Riddle commanded the Basilisk to target muggle-borns at Hogwarts petrifying many and eventually killing one. Dumbledore implied that Riddle and his gang were also the cause of several other shady incidents during their time as students.
  • Some of Snape's Hogwarts friends were said to use dark magic on other students.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Vincent Crabbe, one of Draco Malfoy's two minions, attempts to actually kill the protagonist and his friend Hermione. He dies of his own attempt, consumed by the Fiendfyre he summoned, which he doesn't even begin to know how to control.
  • Sirius Black tricked Snape into going into a room with an out of control werewolf and he might have died if james Potter hadn't intervened.
• In It, Henry Bowers is shown as perfectly willing to do such things as carve his name into Ben Hanscom's belly (only managing the "H" before Ben gets away), poison Mike Hanlon's pet dog, break Eddie Kaspbrak's arm, nearly drown Bill Denbrough in a dunk tank, and white-wash Stan Uris's face in snow until he draws blood. The other members of his gang are depicted as actually being horrified that he would go so far. Needless to say, it's easy for It to use him as The Scapegoat for Its killing spree.
• The bullies in Let the Right One In are pretty vicious. At one point, a bully's older brother gets into the fray and literally attempts to drown the main character. Yeesh.
• As The Mental State takes place mostly in prison, this trope is inevitable. Most of the violence is targeted at Charlie on account of the reason why he was arrested in the first place. Zack is pretty much the only inmate who actually attempts to understand and stand up for him. Upon his release, Zack even makes his successor promise to keep protecting him during his absence.
• The short story "Sometimes They Come Back" from Night Shift has the protagonist reminiscing about a gang of greaser teens that kept bullying him until it escalated to attempted murder (of him — they also killed his brother, who was twelve), and then died in an accident... and these greasers are the titular "they", who resurrect through unknown means for no reason other than to keep on tormenting the protagonist in order to finish the job.
• Inverted in Ben Elton's book Past Mortem. A bunch of school bullies are killed by a serial killer, years after the bullying took place, usually in an Ironic Death. While the serial killer takes his revenge too far, however, several of the various misdeeds perpetrated by the bullies in the past touch on this trope.
• In Powers, Hoby's torment of protagonist Gavir comes to a head when he and his pack hold Gavir upside-down in a well. Not only is he nearly drowned, he's badly bruised and battered, and their owners finally send Hoby away.
• In The Saga of Tuck, the protagonist is beaten almost to the point of death at one point. More than one chapter focuses on his dubious chances of survival.
• In The Soldier Son series, there is a tradition of hazing new recruits at the military academy. The sons of the new nobles were subjected to far worse hazing than the old nobility, to the point that several of them were discharged for health reasons afterwards.
• In the short story "The Swan" from Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the bullies who torment Ernie go as far as to tie him to railway tracks and later shoot him in the leg with a rifle.
• The Witch of Knightcharm:
  • Lily Rutherford's gang of witches does this at their evil Wizarding School. They are ruthlessly cruel go so far as to curse and almost murder the protagonist Emily simply for competing against them and for previously having attended a 'good' magic school whose alumni historically opposed evil witches like Lily and co.
  • Julia Medina was also shaping up to be this, trying to cast necromancy curses on a weaker student just to show her dominance, but she didn't last long enough to do much bullying.
• In Worm, Taylor gets her superpowers when her tormentors trap her in a locker filled with rotting used tampons; aside from ending up in the psych ward for a week, she could have gotten any number of bloodborne pathogens from the mess. At another point, she kisses a boy one of the bullies, Sophia, was looking at. Sophia retaliates by attacking Taylor in a bookstore, nearly tearing her ear off in the process.

Live-Action TV

• In 13 Reasons Why, calling Bryce Walker and Monty bullies is a gross understatement, since they are both guilty of rape, with the former raping Hannah, culminating in her suicide, and the latter being responsible for the incredibly controversial scene of Tyler's assault via broomstick.
• In The Americans, Tuan, a teenage spy from Vietnam, arranges for the shy and awkward Pasha's life to be made hell as part of a plan by Phillip and Elizabeth to recruit Pasha's mother, who has a job teaching Russian to government employees.
• Inverted in a CSI episode actually called "Bully For You" — the bully, Barry Schickel, is the Asshole Victim there. It turns out that the murderer is the school counselor. Long story short, she decided to go Knight Templar and try to prevent a future Columbine rip-off.
• Freaks and Geeks uses this with a bully who lands a kid in the hospital by using peanuts, which the kid is allergic to.
• An episode of The George Lopez Show has Carmen play a prank on Max by photographing him with a teddy bear while he's sleeping. It goes horribly wrong when Max ends up getting stitches in the back of his head from the bullying that ensues.
• On Graceland, Carlito Solano is an overgrown bully of the Psychopathic Manchild variety. In his first appearance, he shoots one of his own bodyguards in order to test an antique pistol, and the poor bastard only survives because Johnny intervenes and prevents him from bleeding out. In another, he nearly chokes his own sister to death.
• In Grange Hill, "Booga" Benson was expelled after the beating he gave Tucker landed Tucker in the hospital.
• Halt and Catch Fire:
  • Joe's initial explanation for his scars was that he was chased off of a roof by bullies. However, Cameron later figures out that this is a lie.
  • In the second season, a closeted programmer at Mutiny is brutally attacked by homophobes who lured him out on the pretense of a date.
• Little House on the Prairie: "The Bully Boys" is the most notable of several episodes where bullies try to intimidate their way through Walnut Grove and Hero Township, and the trope kicks in when Charles tries to beat up one of the brothers for attempting to rape Caroline, only for the other to sneak attack Charles and break his ribs. In the end, the town is able to stand up to the bullies (as a group) and they are escorted out of town, told never to return.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • One episode has a kid with a Disappeared Dad want to join the local gang of bullies and die accidentally, though it looks like a suicide (he was supposed to stay on a chair in a noose and slipped off), causing his mother to die soon after. Years later, one of the murderers thinks that he's going to die and confesses to the priest... who happened to be the kid's father.
  • In another episode, a child is left for dead by the bullies and is found amnesiac by a couple who's recently lost their child. They end up keeping him in their basement for years (not out of abuse, but so that he won't be taken away from them).
• In the season finale of Necessary Roughness, T.K.'s career is effectively ended when Coach Wizinski enlists some of his former teammates to utterly wreck his shoulder to "punish" him for defecting from the Hawks.
• Stranger Things: Troy at first starts off as a simple bully, going no worse than giving Mike a small cut on his chin. However, he makes an incredibly disrespectful comment about Will during his memorial service, which leads to Eleven making him wet his pants. As retaliation, he threatens to stab Dustin if Mike doesn't jump off a cliff. Notably, Troy's friend, who was an accomplice to previous instances of bullying, thinks Troy is going too far.
• Walker, Texas Ranger has an inversion in one episode, where one particular kid is picked on by almost all of the other students for being smaller than they are, for wearing ratty clothing, for being "stinky", and for his Hispanic accent, among other reasons. Eventually, the boy makes it to the roof of the school and intends to jump to his death, but Walker arrives on the scene and proceeds to try and talk him out of it; the boy appears to change his mind, only to accidentally slip and fall to his death anyway. Walker immediately starts an anti-bullying campaign, not just at the school, but in the entire community, in the wake of the boy's untimely death.

Video Games

• Bully largely consists of typical schoolyard bullying and fistfights (already violent on its own), up until one of the Greaser bosses comes at you with a massive iron sledgehammer.
• Hideki, a Jerkass student, from Hearts Like Clockwork initially settles for taunts and insults then (after losing in a kendo match) decides to attack Rin with a real katana out of spite, fully intent on wounding/killing her simply because she humiliated him in a match.
• Buggs from Kindergarten (2017) is generally just a standard Barbaric Bully, but he'll outright beat the protagonist to death if you refuse to give him half your money at the start of the school day or if you provoke him by bringing up his Disappeared Dad (though Ms. Applegate can put a stop to the latter).
• Halfway through Lost Judgment, Yagami and company secure a vital piece of evidence into their case, which turns out to be a video of a bullying incident recorded in secret by one of the key players in said case, Jin Kuwana. In the video, they see a gang of bullies harassing their target, with the leader punching and dropkicking the poor victim before stripping him of his clothes, causing the boy to soil himself to further mockery from the bullies. As they watch, Sugiura comments that the kids in the video are the absolute worst he's seen.
• In Mystery Case Files: Shadow Lake, a tough-looking girl follows the boy who found an artifact up to the school's bell tower and tries to bully him into handing it over. In the struggle, he's knocked over the railing and falls to his death.
• In Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers, Big starts off as just a bully who steals Tiny's treasured underpants. However, said pair of underpants turn out to be a magical artifact that slowly turns Big into an Omnicidal Maniac, and by the end of the game, he's so hell-bent on outright killing Tiny that he's hurling whole brick walls at him.
• It's implied that the Bullies in Yandere Simulator broke a student's arm prior to the game's beginning.

Visual Novels

• In Yume Miru Kusuri, Aeka Shiraki is being continuously harshly bullied — even having tasers used on her in class — to the point of breaking, and everyone turns a blind eye. The bad end of her arc is past that point and has her jump off the school roof in a suicide attempt. Good end? That one has her and the supportive-of-her protagonist quit the crapsack school after she snaps and retaliates at the bullies, near-strangling the instigator to death among other things.

Web Animation

• Story Booth:
  • In "I Was Homeless", Tony got brutally pummeled by his two older sisters throughout most of his life. It got so bad that he had to move away to escape their wrath.
  • In "Finally Accepted for Being Albino", Lulu got shoved into the pool by an Alpha Bitch and nearly drowned to death. The Alpha Bitch was laughing as this was happening.
  • In "So What If I Love Anime", Kodi got pelted with rocks by her classmates for her anime obsession.

Web Comics

• Bastard: Jin's classmate Beau Park beats him so severely after Jin steals his wallet that the artificial valves in his heart stop working, and he nearly dies. Fortunately, new transfer student Kyun Yoon happens upon the scene and calls an ambulance, which kickstarts the whole plot.
• The bullying of Lidusis from Black Haze crosses from Stock Shoujo Bullying Tactics to this when bully Manon and a group of upperclassmen take him and strap him to a target with his hands tied behind his back while ordering his classmates to throw stones at him, promising a perfect score to anyone who can hit "the decoration" (i.e. him). Thankfully, he only gets hit once (though in the head, when one of the bullies demonstrates how it should be done) before Rood shows up and rescues him (while utterly demolishing the upperclassmen in the process). However, had Rood not shown up (or had he been unable to do anything, which was what Manon was counting on), Lidusis could have very easily been stoned to death by his classmates.
• In DNA, Rigel begins drowning Orion in a mud puddle after Orion refuses to eat mud and insults Rigel in retaliation. When this happens, even Rigel's fellow bully Leon recognizes that Rigel is going too far.
• In Forest Hill, Kaleb has to go to the hospital and even has a Near-Death Experience as a result of Benni performing a suplex on him, which gives him serious head trauma, enough that he starts to have seizures afterwards.

Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Shake constantly acts as such with Meatwad, doing such crazed actions as stuffing Meatwad's pets in the microwave and trying to dupe him into using a beehive as a replacement brain.
• Archer: When Archer was 13, he was brutally bullied by Ivy and Whitney, two of the students at the Boarding School of Horrors he was attending at the time. It's not played for laughs at all; their bullying culminated in Archer ending up in the hospital with pneumonia after being beaten bloody and nearly drowned in a toilet, and the episode shows that Archer is still traumatized by it as an adult.
• In the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends pilot, Mac's Big Brother Bully Terrence tries to kill him and Bloo with an extreme-o-saur.
• The Mask: Ched Bozak, Stanley's high school bully, bullied him relentlessly and ended up getting expelled after nailing a bunch of wood to Stanley's head and passing him off as a doorstop for shop class. What really drives this into brutality territory, however, is when Ched returns as an adult and gets his hands on one half of the Mask (it had been broken in half by Walter at the start of the episode), allowing him to transform half his body into his own Mask persona, who is even worse than him, and actually tries to kill Stanley and The Mask with a circular saw. Even Ched thinks that this is going too far and ends up in a physical struggle with his own inner demon.
• Played terrifyingly straight in the Recess episode "Gus' Last Stand". In it, Gus is being repeatedly victimized by a Barbaric Bully named Gelman. Not only do Gus's attempts to evade him not really work, but in the climax, Gus himself is subject to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown that nearly kills him. It takes nearly the entire school to force Gelman to back down. Tellingly, this episode was considered so violent that ABC's Media Watchdogs almost did not allow it to be aired.
• As is revealed in the Regular Show episode "Skips' Story", Klorgbane the Destroyer was an excessive bully in high school whose bullying often went under the radar of Headmaster Bennett. Klorgbane crosses the Moral Event Horizon, however, when he causes the death of Desdemona, the love of Skips' life and reason for his constant skipping and name.
• In one episode of Robotboy, Donnie attempts to throw Tommy in a woodchipper.
• The Simpsons:
  • Played for Laughs in the episode where Lisa gets a crush on bully Nelson, and makes Milhouse pass him a note on her behalf, which says "Guess who likes you?" Nelson takes a look at Milhouse, who's waggling his eyebrows suggestively. Cut to Milhouse being taken away in an ambulance.
  • The episode "Bart the General" portrays Bart's escalating problems with Nelson's bullying, to the point where he has a nightmare of being killed by Nelson and Nelson arriving to his funeral to beat up on the cadaver some more.
  • In "When Flanders Failed", Bart gets beat up by the usual group of bullies and winds up hanging by his underwear on a basketball hoop. According to the writers, when the scene came back from overseas, Bart looked bloodied and half-dead. The writers forced the animators to make Bart's pummeling less graphic, thus downplaying this trope.
  • In "Bye Bye Nerdie", Lisa meets a new girl named Francine, who proceeds to bully her, making the episode one of the few times Lisa gets the "constant No-Holds-Barred Beatdown" kind of bullying throughout the show.. It's revealed that Francine bullies her and any other nerds due to their pheromone, which Lisa would dub "poindextrose"; Francine can otherwise be nice to Lisa if either her nose is covered or Lisa has her pheromone be covered by a different scent.
  • Subverted in "The Haw-Hawed Couple" when Bart becomes friends with Nelson but is only in it for the protection from other bullies. Ultimately it fizzles and Nelson begins actively and frighteningly hunting Bart. When he finally gets him cornered and all alone, Nelson gives him a stern, composed, and even heartfelt speech about how Bart is a bad friend and how hurt Nelson is that their friendship meant so little to him and ultimately saves him from drowning, but only because they're field-trip buddies.
• South Park:
  • When Trent Boyett get released from prison, he brutally torments both Butters and the sixth graders to the point of hospitalization.
    Doctor: (about Butters) He received a massive snuggie, his underwear pulled up so high it nearly killed him. He also received two Indian sunburns on his forearms, a charlie horse on the thigh, and a second-degree titty twister. And from the damage to his head area, it appears he was also given a swirly, a colossal one. It also looks like he received a noogie, and, a Polish bike ride.
  • Eric Cartman has beaten up multiple students in school, at one point dismembering a student Saw-style just for calling him chubby. It's only due to the ineptitude of the staff that he has never been expelled or arrested for his actions.
• Sym-Bionic Titan: In a Whole Episode Flashback to Lance's time in a military academy, he spends the whole time being physically and verbally harassed by another student named Baron. After Lance beats Baron at a war game, he and his cronies attack Lance with live rifles and grenades. When Lance jumps into a Humongous Mecha to scare them off, Baron does the same, starting a fight that trashes much of the academy, and which Lance is arrested for along with Baron.

---