Whenever human beings divide into subgroups, those subgroups have a tendency to have a competitive rivalry against one another, even when ensconced in the same institution.
This could be represented by Jurisdiction Friction in works involving law enforcement, or competition between various branches of the military and intelligence organizations in thrillers and war movies.
But in the classroom? Even groups of students can form rivalries within their school.
More often than not this will involve the denizens of the Wacky Homeroom. The teachers may or may not be involved in this, but if they are, count on them to be the ones spurring it on.
This does not necessarily have to be subdivided between classrooms, either. Various school clubs can get involved, as can an Absurdly Powerful Student Council.
This may also involve interpersonal conflict between individual members of the competing organizations or classrooms.
It needn't be a hostile rivalry, with good-natured ribbing between the two (or more) factions being possible. However, when hostility is involved, count on it getting ugly very fast.
Compare and contrast Absurdly Divided School, which tends to be an overarching thematic part of a work as a whole, whereas Intra-Scholastic Rivalries are either episodic or, if present through the work, are more of a background element than an overarching theme. Harry Potter is an example of Absurdly Divided School, as the Houses each student is divided into are treated as severe ideological differences, and such examples belong on that page. Contrast School Rivalry, where the rivalry is with another institution altogether.
If the two (or more) factions competing or fighting each other are still able to socialize outside of the activity in question, it can overlap with Friendly Rivalry.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Azumanga Daioh: Class 3 (Yukari's class) and Class 5 (Nyamo's class) have a longstanding rivalry that typically gets played out during the yearly Sport's Fest. This is largely fueled by the animosity between Yukari and Nyamo, who could best be described as frenemies. The only member of Class 5 that we get to know by name is Kagura, and she ends up in Yukari's class the very next year to serve as a ringer in this very rivalry.
- Bloom Into You: During the sports fest there is a clear rivalry between the Student Council (mostly fueled by Touko), and the head of the Basketball team, Serizawa. This results in Touko really pushing her underlings to work hard on preparing for a relay race. Both of her Love Interests, Yuu and Sayaka agree that she's become a real slave driver. It doesn't help her mood when they lose in the scheduled event.
- Doki Doki School Hours: The students in Mika's class have a spirited debate about whether their summer or winter uniforms were better. When Mika-Sensei falls and hits her head, she has an entire Dream Sequence where she imagines this taken to an extreme, where nearly a hundred years later the two factions have become nations at war. When she recovers from the blow to the head and regains consciousness, she urges her students not to fight over such trivial matters.
- Freezing: West Genetics (and other Pandora training centers) is divided along grade lines; the later-year students are literally lower-years' military superiors. The Adults Are Useless, so this turns into a Drill Sergeant Nasty scenario where the upperclassmen are free to brutally bully the younger students virtually without consequences. The entire first Story Arc consists of our second-year protagonist Satellizer El Bridget getting into an escalating one-woman war with the third-year students until the Student Council President finally directly orders the third-years to stand down after a transfer student, Rana Linchen, gets dragged into it. The rivalry between the upper and lower forms quiets down after this arc as the upperclassmen are forced to work with Satella more regularly and come to respect her.
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu: The clubs at Jindai High are hurting for spaces to work in. This culminates in a competition where one club agrees to surrender their classroom to whichever club can draw in the most girls with various flirting techniques.
- Lady!!: At Saint Patrick's Academy, the student that brings the most honour to the school is awarded the Order of the Lady's Crest. As a result, certain students form cliques dedicated to bagging it, with Mary Waverly desperate to sabotage Lynn so she can get it for herself.
- My-HiME: The selling point of Fuuka Academy is governance for the students by the students. This results in an extremely notable Absurdly Powerful Student Council. Ostensibly the Executive Committee, which deals out punishments for infractions of the rules, is supposed to be subservient to the Student Council as a sub-group. But due to the head of the Executive Committee, Haruka, wanting to prove herself as capable and skilled as Student Council President Shizuru Fujino, they are often at loggerheads. This usually gets "resolved" by Shizuru gleefully tricking Haruka into volunteering for an even bigger workload.
- In My Hero Academia, Class 1-B has a one-sided rivalry with Class 1-A. Due to the 1-A being at the center of a number of high-profile villain attacks, 1-A gets a disproportionate amount of attention in the media compared to 1-B. This has led 1-B, whose education has been far less bumpy, to gain a competitive streak as they try to prove that they're just as capable as 1-A. This rivalry becomes intense enough that even 1-B's homeroom teacher Vlad King gets unusually biased and hammy during a mock battle exercise.
- School Rumble:
- There is a heated rivalry between Class 2-C and Class 2-D, spurred on by many personal rivalries, such as the three exchange students from 2-D, Harry, Togo, and Lara having personal rivalries with Harima, Hanai, and Karen respectively. At one point, Harima and Hanai lose the entirety of their class to 2-D in a mahjong match. It should be noted that for the most part, these are Friendly Rivalries, as Harima and Togo actually join a basketball team together, and it is not uncommon to see Lara and Karen shopping together or having lunch with each other.
- When a nascent girls' basketball team forms at the school, several of the male characters, and Tenma, come together to form the rival "Outlaws" team and challenge them to a match.
- Class 2-C has a division between those who want to put on a play for the upcoming culture fest and those who want to do a cafe. This initially has a game of pool hockey form to see which side can win (at the start of Season 1). By the time Season 2 rolls around, the friction over doing a play or a cafe has reached a point where the two sides actually conduct a war game at night to decide the victor (strangely played for both drama and comedy at the same time), but still ends in a draw. A P.E. teacher who is disciplining the class for the late-night shenanigans tells them they should just do both, which ends up being the solution.
Fan Works
- My Immortal: The Goths and the Preps have a rivalry, with Ebony and her friends constantly demeaning them under their breaths. Not much is known about them, except their leader Hillary is supposedly an Alpha Bitch. Headmaster Dumblydore also proclaims himself a goth, but Ebony can clearly see he's a poser.
Literature
- The Discworld Assassins Guild divides its students into multiple houses, each named after a venomous animal. The houses compete against each other in various sports and also in activities such as "lofting", where each house builds a structure somewhere on the Guild roof, and a prize goes to the best one. It is considered totally acceptable for the houses to sabotage each others' loftings, with some senior Assassins believing the low-grade war that results is worth a year of theory.
- Haruhi Suzumiya: There is a great deal of antipathy between the Computer Club and the SOS Brigade, particularly since Haruhi essentially stole a computer from them by falsely accusing the Computer Club President of molesting Mikuru (with staged pictures to boot). Later the Computer Club tries to retrieve their computer by challenging the SOS Brigade to a computer game. The Computer Club is cheating, and when Kyon learns this, he gives Yuki full permission to backhack them and turn the tables on them.
- Sporting rivalry between the various school houses is a standard facet of boarding-school life in all of P. G. Wodehouse's early school stories. It comes to the fore in The Head of Kay's, where the protagonist is transferred to the unruly Kay's House as replacement head boy. One of the ways he makes his mark is to turn its performance around in the inter-house sports competitions.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades has two major overlapping intramural rivalries at Kimberly Magic Academy, though people aren't likely to fit cleanly into one faction or the other and often move freely between them.
- Clashes between pro- and anti-demihuman rights students form a significant part of the A-plot of volume 1. It's only been a few years since The Magocracy gave citizenship to four demihuman races, and Katie Aalto among others advocates to expand this to other demonstrably intelligent demihumans, trolls in particular, and are opposed by a faction of students hoping to reverse this trend. Guy notably disagrees with Katie about the relative merits of trolls but still backs Katie up along with Oliver and Nanao when she's targeted by bullies, landing the three of them in detention for brawling with the bullies in a classroom. Additionally, the Starter Villain turns out to be from the pro-rights faction.
- The incumbents on the student council are a group called the Campus Watch, led by Alvin Godfrey, a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who gained popularity by actively policing the student body and protecting freshmen from the depredations of rogue upperclassmen such as Cyrus Rivermoore and Ophelia Salvadori. They are opposed by supporters of the former student council, led by Leoncio Echevalria, an aristocrat with traditional-for-mages Social Darwinist views. A significant plot in volumes 6-10 deals with the fact that several senior Watch members including Godfrey are about to Graduate from the Story, turning the election for Student Council President (who gets to freely appoint the rest of the council) into a Proxy War between Godfrey and Echevalria. The Sword Roses take Godfrey's side and some of their class rivals join Echevalria, albeit reluctantly: Joseph Albright only backs the old council because his family would raise hell with him if he didn't, Richard Andrews withdraws his support over their attempts to cheat during the Tournament Arc, and Tullio Rossi openly hates Echevalria and only works with the old council because his teammates Andrews and Albright are. Meanwhile, Echevalria's younger sister Felicia is a friend of Teresa Carste and Dean Travers, who are admirers of the Sword Roses.
Live-Action TV
- Glee:
- New Directions is often pitted against the Cheerios and the football jocks for school funds and notoriety. While a number of students are members of more than one group, their loyalties to each group are often pitted against each other.
- In Season 3, Sugar Motta's father started the all-female Troubletones choir at McKinley after the tone-deaf Sugar was rejected from New Directions. Mercedes, Santana, and Brittany later defected to the Troubletones since they were tired of Rachel hogging all the solos. While the choir directors tried to make peace between the groups, Santana in particular decides to wage war in "Mash Off", leading to Finn accidentally outing her and Santana slapping him in return. The club essentially merged with New Directions again after they placed second behind New Directions at Sectionals, though Mr. Schuster promised them they could perform a solo number at Regionals and Nationals.
- House of Anubis: In the third season, we get introduced to the houses besides Anubis, with Isis House specifically taking a decent focus as characters reference it quite a bit while Willow lives there for much of the season. All of this serves as a buildup for the school sports tournament, where each house is competing in a game of dodgeball. Anubis sees Isis as their biggest rival due to how athletic the people of Isis are. This is not helped by Eddie's old rival, Ben, staying in the house and even stopping by to intimidate the Anubis residents. The only one who really takes this rivalry seriously is Eddie, however; the other Anubis students are irritated with his obsession with winning, and Ben soon proves to be a Graceful Loser who values fair competition.
Video Games
- Bloodborne: Much of the (human-level) conflict is rooted in the rivalries of various scholarly institutions researching humanity's Ascension To A Higher Plane Of Existence. The first, and most momentous, rivalry took place at the Byrgenwerth College, between Provost Willem's group and a splinter faction of his students led by Laurence: the former sought to ascend through Insight into the eldritch truths, while the latter believed ascension would come through imbibing the Old Blood of Eldritch Abominations. Laurence's group eventually left Byrgenwerth and founded the Healing Church.
- Bully has the rivalry between all 5 factions of Bullworth High, those being the Nerds, Bullies, Preppies, Greasers, and Jocks. This feud is one of the main traits (and obstacles) the game offers to Jimmy in his journey.
Visual Novels
- SHUFFLE!: There are three separate Pervert Alliances at the school, one for Kaede, one for Nerine, and one for Lisianthus. Each group is dedicated to two things; protecting the "purity" of their girl of choice, and the utter demise of Rin Tsuchimi. Unless, that is, Rin seems to favor one girl over the others. For example, if Rin seems to be spending all his time with Nerine, then the groups supporting Kaede and Lisianthus will suddenly come to Rin's rescue against Nerine's "fan club".
