Revenge via Storytelling

"I don't like these stories with morals."

"Enough! Here is the truest tale of all! There was an all mighty, all powerful wizard, and there was a pathetic little samurai. And the wizard destroyed him! THE END!"

— Aku telling his last story to children, Samurai Jack

Sometimes characters just really hate each other. Whether it's because of a long-term rivalry, a bitter breakup, or just a falling out, they're at each other's throats. So, when one of these characters is given the opportunity to tell a story, they'll often use this chance to get their fictional revenge, inserting their enemy into the story and then doing bad things to them.

Often, this starts at the portrayal itself. The character is often written to be as unlikable and pathetic as possible, with their flaws exaggerated or falsified. Then, once the plot progresses, something will happen - if they aren't killed off, they're humiliated in some way, and sometimes they're both killed and humiliated.

This is almost never subtle. It's usually a very thinly-veiled attempt to hurt someone else, without regards for actual proper writing and character-design. In some cases the story is entirely designed around this concept, making it as obvious and spite-driven as can be, even if there's technically more plot than just "my rival gets eaten by a bear". The reaction of the humiliated character will also be a big factor, as they usually catch on and protest their portrayal - especially if they're written as an awful parody of themselves. Sometimes, they may not even be aware that there's an issue until they find the story, and occasionally they retaliate with a story of their own. It doesn't necessarily need to be a written story, either; a common variant is for this to occur in a drawn comic instead.

This is usually Played for Laughs; the characterization will be cartoonish and the vengeance taken to comedic extremes, often with the character getting horrifically killed off or treated like an outright villain. However, serious examples do exist, and usually paint the storyteller in a more negative light- if not as an outright bully, as someone taking things too far. If the story is shared publicly, such as on a stage, it's more likely for them to be seen as the antagonist rather than the person they're writing about. Private stories usually get a pass for being personal wish fulfillment and Power Fantasy, lending themselves to a more comedic take.

Sister trope to Her Codename Was Mary Sue, and can appear alongside it. Compare "Rashomon"-Style, which usually involves characters casting others in a negative light in their own version of events. It can also overlap with Propaganda Piece, as those are often written with the intent to make someone look bad.

This is Truth in Television, as the existence of Write Who You Hate, Revenge Fic and Take That! can attest. The Roman à Clef novel is often used by imaginatively vindictive authors to "get even" with people they have a beef against, by writing them in as unappealing or unflatteringly described characters. Muse Abuse is when people incorporate real life people into their art in ways that offend everyone around them and cause them social damage.

In-Universe Examples Only, please! This is about fictional characters having fictional beef, not real people venting through fiction. For Real Life examples, check Write Who You Hate.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• In an issue of Squirrel Girl, Squirrel Girl and her friends make comics. However, Kraven creates a story insulting Spider-Man and praising himself, prompting Spider-Man to title his story ''Hey Kraven Squirrel Girl Showed Me Your Comic, So What The Heck".

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • In one strip, Calvin writes an illustrated poem about a kid named "Barney" who locked his father in the basement after his father made him eat his peas; Calvin's father is not pleased with the depiction. In a different comic, the dad would tell Calvin a story about a boy who got locked in the basement for not going to bed on time.
  • Another had Calvin once again asking his dad to read his favorite story: "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie", Calvin's dad refused because he read the story many times and told Calvin he knows how it ends. Calvin cries until his dad gives in, however he improvises the story with a dark ending that keeps Calvin and Hobbes awake all night.
    Calvin: Wow, the story was different that time.
    Hobbes: Do you think the townsfolk will ever find Hamster Huey's head?
  • In yet another strip, Calvin tries to extort his father by threatening to make him the subject of a strip called "Dopey Dad." He gets sent to his room, but he draws it anyway.
• Foxtrot:
  • One arc has Paige write herself as a Princess Classic encountering a tiny troll that looks like her brother Jason, which she leaves to get eaten by boars. Jason's complaint isn't that she cast him as the villain but that the work sucks overall. In another arc, she writes a horror story that culminates in Jason being decapitated by axe-wielding ghosts.
  • Jason frequently writes Paige into his Slug-Man comics as the villainous Paige-o-tron, who always gets defeated (but returns to face the hero another day).
  • Jason also drew a week's worth of standalone strips attacking Paige. She countered by drawing a week's worth that attacked him, mostly recycling the same gags.
  • After deciding that he wanted to become Gary Larson's successor for The Far Side, Jason drew a week's worth of Far Side strips, all of which also attacked Paige (also lampshading The Far Side's obsession with cows).
  • And there are plenty more where these came from. In general, any time Jason ever works on any sort of creative work for any reason, an avatar of Paige will be a villain, victim, and/or monster.
  • In the How the Grinch Stole Christmas! parody, Jason actually changes things up a bit: Paige is portrayed in a basically positive manner, and Andy is made into the villain. The idea seems to be that Jason was too upset and preoccupied over the terrible presents Andy got everyone to bother with Paige, his usual target of choice.

Fanfic

• In the Sherlock Holmes fanfic 221B , Watson, trying to write, finds his efforts disrupted by Holmes shooting the surroundings with cork-tipped blow darts in an effort to assuage his boredom. The doctor decides that he's going to portray the client who gave Holmes the blow gun as a complete idiot when he writes the account.
• Zigzagged in The Loud House fanfiction The Sad Little Girl. Lucy writes a story about a girl named Abigail who seems like a self-insert, but it could just be because Lucy likes that kind of character due to her personality. Abigail in the story gets bullied by three girls, then she finds a spell book and gets revenge on them in gruesome ways: she turns the first one's blood into molasses, the second one's intestines into snakes, and the third one's bones into glass. Lisa finds the story, reads it, and suspects that Lucy may be being bullied in real life and writing the story as catharsis, but it's left up in the air as to whether that's the case.
• In Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail, Chloe Cerise has creative writing as a main hobby, especially pertaining to horror and especially involving the classmates who bully her and the people she believes would never understand or support her real non-Pokémon interests. For instance, in the case of her Childhood Friend Goh, she writes a story about a boy who is chasing after a wish-granting creature who can morph into different items who ends up (accidentally) killing his best friend and then cursed to forever chase after the creature. It's a parallel to her feelings about Goh leaving her behind to chase after Mew and signals the start of how she never wants to see or hear from him again. She later makes it clear that she doesn't actually want the people who bullied and/ or neglected her to actually experience the horrors in her writings, but this hobby is slowly turned against her as the whole of Vermillion City and her family implode under the ramifications of her disappearance.
• Deconstructed in Cinders and Ashes: the Chronicles of Kamen Rider Dante, as Hoshi realizes he had rewrote his fanfic to have his main character (who he based off himself) attack caricatures of people who bullied his friend to suicide. What made him quit writing was realizing he was using the newest chapter of his fanfic to vent out his anger on someone who revealed that he was the final straw to said suicide.
• In the Shining and Sweet chapter "Sleeping Fabulous", Disco Kid bases the Wicked Fairy off of a girl named Ashley who bullied him as a child.
• Played for Laughs in Dia's Fairy Tales between the Third Years. In the second chapter, after Mari drags her into telling a fairy tale staring the other third years and the second years, Dia tells a version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" with Mari as Golden Mari but portrayed as breaking several laws for her antics that get her arrested at the end. In the fourth chapter, Mari and Kanan team up to tell their own version of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" with Dia as the rude and trouble-prone Princess Diamond White that gets involved with the Seven Deadly Sins. It does get Zigzagged at the end with Princess Diamond brought safely back home by Prince Kanan, who joins her in a three-way with Diamond's shiny stepmother, which Mari and Kanan decide to reenact with Dia in real life.

Film — Live-Action

• A variant occurs In After the Dark. Professor Eric Zimit makes his whole class run through several social experiments, in which they pretend to be people stranded in a very dire situation (survivors in a bunker while nuclear war happens outside, for example) and they must choose who to cull to live longer. As he constantly derails the simulations to make the students' characters suffer brutal and humiliating deaths from consequences they didn't thought about, it becomes increasingly apparent to Petra (Zimit's top student, and former girlfriend) that Zimit is only making them roleplay to get even by constantly killing the characters played by Petra's new boyfriend James.
• In A Knight's Tale, a humiliated Chaucer threatens to eviscerate his two creditors in fiction. And he does exactly that: Simon the Summoner and Peter the Pardoner are two characters in The Canterbury Tales, which the film is adapted from a story from.
  Chaucer: Be gone, I'm done with you. Except to exact my revenge.
  Peter: What on Earth could you possibly do to us?
  Chaucer: I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every last pimple, every last character flaw. I was naked for a day. You will be naked for eternity.
• In Labyrinth, Sarah is irritated about once again babysitting her little half-brother Toby, and can't get him to stop crying. So she starts telling him a story to try to calm him down - about a beautiful teenage girl whose Wicked Stepmother treated her like a slave and always made her take care of the awful selfish baby. This, of course, results in Sarah accidentally invoking the magic phrase which leads to the goblins abducting Toby.

Literature

• Played With in Bimbos of the Death Sun, regarding getting revenge on a fictional character. A famous writer is found murdered and the heroes, in passing, eventually discover that the writer was completely and utterly fed up with his greatest character, an Expy of Conan the Barbarian, but he kept making the books because it made him rich and famous. to the point that in order to vent his hatred, he always added a (non-canon) epilogue to his stories in which the character died an incredibly brutal and humiliating death and that would be the end of the series, forevermore, which his editor always made sure to remove before going to print. This ends up becoming more important than the heroes expected it to be when it turns out that the killer is a Loony Fan of the character, who snuck into the writer's hotel room, found the unedited finished manuscript of the series' latest book, and decided to "protect" the character when he read the epilogue.
• Captain Underpants: In Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy - Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets, George and Harold get fed-up with Melvin's constant tattling. So they create a Captain Underpants comic featuring Melvin as the villain: a tattletale kid who becomes the mayor and jails everyone for incredibly minor violations. After the jails get full, Melvin creates a hybrid giant robot suit/prison and imprisons people. Captain Underpants saves the day and defeats Melvin, sending him to his own jail while freeing the others. Melvin himself gets angry after reading the comic and swears to get revenge on them both.
• In a Dirty Bertie book, Angela writes a story about marrying Bertie, on whom she has a Puppy Love crush. Bertie, who doesn't like Angela, angrily rewrites the story to have her marry his Nerdy Bully rival Nick instead. He adds in a jab at Nick by having him fall into a cowpat at the end.
• Judge Dee: In "The Willow Pattern", Ma Joong is told to look through a crack in a wall by a puppeteer named Yuan and sees a naked and bound woman being whipped to death by a man. Furiously, he tries to go for help, but then Yuan shows him it was just done with cutouts. We later learn that this was based on Yuan's own life story (his wife was abducted, raped and whipped to death by a degenerate aristocrat) and this was the only form of revenge he had. The murder is avenged by the end, but the judge tells him off for poisoning his and his daughters' lives by endlessly retelling the story.
• Magpie Murders: Taken to extremes:
  • Alan Conway hated his only famous creation, the Hercule Poirot expy Atticus Pünd, so he took great pleasure in revealing in his final book that the name is an anagram for "A stupid cunt", therefore taking revenge on his millions of fans and his editors.
  • In every Atticus Pünd mystery, he also included versions of people from his real life. In Moonflower Murders, his ex-wife Melissa is transformed into a murdered actress, and Cecily's husband Adrian is transformed into an unpleasant sleaze. But that's not even the worst of his revenge.
• The Nero Wolfe novel The League of Frightened Men revolves around a bitter and twisted novelist who, after receiving a crippling injury during a college hazing incident that went wrong, has subsequently written a series of grotesque novels in which thinly-veiled versions of his friends meet with horrific fates, which leads him to become Suspect No. 1 when said friends start dropping dead in real life. It turns out that he's too cowardly to actually get revenge in reality and can only get revenge using this trope, but was very much enjoying playing mind games with his friends by pretending that he was responsible; only one of the deaths was an actual murder, and it was committed by someone else. When Wolfe exposes this, the novelist promises to write a book in which a version of him meets a nasty end in revenge.
• Sherlock Holmes: In "The Three Gables", a Mrs. Maberley is being harassed into leaving her home and everything in it. Holmes figures out they're actually after her recently-deceased son's luggage, which contains a manuscript in which an innocent young man is entrapped by a cruel woman. Obviously the story is the author's own with the names changed (Holmes notes that at the climax, the narrator switches to "my" rather than "his"), which he wrote as revenge for getting dumped by Rich Bitch Isadora Klein. Holmes agrees not to press charges against her or cause a scandal (Klein is about to get married to a nobleman almost two decades younger), but in exchange for a large sum which he gives to Mrs. Maberley so she can travel around the world.
• The Silkworm: Quine promised that he would write a novel in celebration of his loved ones, such as his mistress Katherine and their surrogate daughter Pippa. However, the novel itself is a violent revenge fantasy, lashing out at all his co-workers, his wife Leonora, and his onetime friend Michael Fancourt. His editor Liz is depicted as a violent rapist, for instance, and the others are subterranean monsters. But double subverted. That isn't Quine's book, which depicts Katherine and Pippa positively. Liz wrote a parody of it and hid the real book before killing Quine in revenge for blackmailing her. So the story is a double revenge: against Quine himself and against other literary figures.
• Subverted in Gray Cardinal's The Tale of Marian's Wedding, in which the Sheriff of Nottingham, in the course of arranging his marriage to the Lady Marian, commissions a ballad designed to lure Marian's protector Robin Hood into a trap. Robin and his men naturally spring the trap, but discover that Marian and the Sheriff are genuinely in love, while the Sheriff in turn learns that Robin and Marian are not lovers at all, but rather half-siblings. Alan-a-Dale, who has foreseen both twists, rewrites the ballad to allow for a (secret) happy ending.

Live-Action TV

• Black Mirror: In "USS Callister", This is part of Robert Daly's revenge on his co-workers. He uses their DNA to create online avatars of them that he tortures, but he also forces them to act out mini-plots that involve them, especially his hated CEO, being made to look like fools and/or enemies that repeatedly praise him.
• Castle: In "Ghosts", True Crime writer Lee Wax was contracted to write a tell-all book for former ecoterrorist Cynthia Dern, presumed dead in a botched bombing, but figured out she was lying and leaked the fact Dern was still alive in hopes of getting her arrested so she could break her contract and write that story instead. This indirectly got Dern killed.^note Dern's associate, who had been thought dead in the bombing, resurfaced courtesy of Wax's leak and wanted to tell the real story, Dern attempted to murder her, and was killed in self-defense. Castle criticizes Wax and yanks her press pass to the precinct, and tells her she's going in one of his books. Correspondingly, the Nikki Heat novel Heat Wave includes a wannabe true crime writer named Bree Flax whom Castle's Author Avatar Jameson Rook considers an annoying hanger-on.
• Community:
  • "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps" has the study group telling horror stories to each other. Many of the stories have jabs directed towards other members of the group. Britta's story portrays Jeff as a Fetishized Abuser. Annie's story outright calls Britta (her romantic rival) a slut. Pierce believes Troy's story about a Mad Scientist who kidnaps two fighter pilots is about him, and in response he tells a story where heavily stereotyped versions of Troy and Abed try to rob him and get handily defeated. Shirley's story has the rest of the gang getting left behind during the end of days in retaliation for them making fun of her Christian beliefs.
  • In the stinger of the episode "Paradigms of Human Memory", the Dean has written a comic story where, after the group makes fun of his costumes (again), he kills each member in a graphic and unpleasant way.
• Frasier: In the episode "The Show Where Diane Comes Back", Frasier Crane discovers that his ex-fiancee Diane has written a play named Rhapsody and Requiem with one of the characters, "Mary Anne", as Diane's Parody Sue Author Avatar and all other characters being Expies of the "Cheers" cast that go out of their way to sing Mary Anne's praises and kiss her ass when in Real Life they had one reason or another to loathe her. Frasier in particular is very upset about the fact that she rewrites the time she dumped Frasier at the altar as entirely his fault and "Franklin" easily forgives "Mary Anne" when she asks him to (the actor playing "Franklin" even wonders how dumb the play's plot gets at this point in one scene. Frasier, who is in the same room, goes to town):
  Frasier: What you are feeling is that this woman has reached into your chest, plucked out your heart, and thrown it to her hellhounds for a chew toy! And it's not the last time either! Because that's what this woman is! She is the Devil! There's no use running away from her, because no matter how far you go, no matter how many years you let pass, you will never be completely out of reach of those bony fingers! So drink hearty, Franklin, and laugh! Because you have made a pact with Beelzebub! And her name is Mary Anne!
• House of Anubis: Played for Drama. As a result of being cheated on, Mara makes it a personal goal of hers to ruin Jerome's life. She writes a school play designed around humiliating him. His character is portrayed as a huge, manipulative loser with no redeeming qualities, and he gets his heart broken at the end- with the ultimate plan being having Joy dump him on stage in front of everyone. Jerome realizes the character is based on him and takes it in stride, but is crushed when he learns about the full plan and breaks up with Joy before she can break up with him.
• In How I Met Your Mother, Tony holds major resentment over main character Ted Mosby for dating Tony's baby mama Stella. This is extreme enough that Tony eventually creates a fictionalized version of their Love Triangle as an in-universe Romantic Comedy where the Romantic False Lead is a Jerkass named Jed Mosley.
• Mad About You: In "My Boyfriend's Back!", Jamie learns that Alan, an ex-boyfriend of hers, has drawn Queen Tallon, the villainess of his new comicbook, with her face and some of the plot is based on incidents of their relationship. Worse, some fans of the comic recognize her and when she protests to Alan, he just gives everybody a "See?" look, as if her complaints proof his right, making her feel worse. Paul comforts her later, saying he doesn't think she is evil and HE likes her.
• Magpie Murders: In the TV adaptation, Conway is even more bitter and unlikeable in his revenge. He manipulates Susan's sister Katie into telling him Susan's sad backstory (that her mother committed suicide by drowning and she blamed her father, from who she was almost permanently estranged), and put an (admittedly heavily disguised) version of it in his final novel, turning Susan's father into murder victim Magnus Pye, just to upset Susan and get revenge on her for the crime of...editing his books.
• Modern Family: Played with when Manny writes a play based off of his family life and asks Gloria, Claire, Hayley, and Alex to act it out. Each of them plays an exaggerated version of themselves. Claire's character is a bitter, cold alcoholic; Alex is a bookish spinster; and Hayley's character is so stupid she picks a fight with a parrot (apparently something that really happened). The women take offense to Manny's characterizations of them and believe he was trying this. However, Manny insists that isn't the case and claims the characters are amalgamations of real women he knew.
• My Name Is Earl: One episode had the main characters getting into creative writing. Catalina's story portrays Joy (her rival in real life) as trying and failing to sabotage Catalina's romance with a wealthy man.
• The Office (US): When Michael makes his homemade movie, Threat Level Midnight, his grudge against Toby is reflected in the final film. Toby plays one of Goldenface's hostages, who gets brutally killed, by being shot in the head. The film exaggerates his death, by showing the head of Toby's character explode on replay. Michael reveals that the scene was the most expensive in the film, but justifies the cost by saying it was "integral to the story". Moments later, Michael Scarn unnecessarily reveals that the hostage was a wanted "Animal Rapist".
• The Suite Life on Deck: Once Cody and Bailey have their messy breakup in Paris, both are left crushed and angry. Cody assumes Bailey was cheating on him with a mime, while he struggled to prepare an anniversary dinner. So, to get payback, he wrote a play based on the breakup and wrote Bailey's character as a cruel, unfaithful idiot who ultimately falls off the Eiffel Tower and dies. Bailey sees the scene and runs off in tears, surprised that Cody hated her that much.
• That '70s Show: In "Donna's Story", Donna writes a short story for the school paper revolving around a woman trapped in an abusive relationship with a possessive man who is a thinly veiled stand-in for Eric, whom she had broken up with at the end of the previous season. Eric retaliates with a short story of his own in which he portrays Donna as a big-footed, vindictive witch who denies him sex. At the end, it turns out that the school paper only published part of Donna's full story; while the story ends with Donna's character leaving Eric's, she still admits to having a soft spot for him. Donna tells Eric that she didn't write the story to bash Eric but was simply using it as an outlet for her complicated feelings over their break up.

Music

• On the Tom Waits album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, there's "Children's Story", in which he tells a REALLY depressing story about a child in an uncaring universe, then says "Well, there's your story. Night-night!", making you think he was getting revenge on a child he was forced to tell a bedtime story to.

Video Games

• Dragon Age II: Invoked by the Flavor Text of Varric's special ability "Unauthorized Biographer", which is unlocked by maxing out his Rivalry score. Varric is the Character Narrator of the whole game, so if you do that, the world will primarily learn about Hawke from someone whom you've gone out of your way to antagonize^note which is the only way to unlock that particular ability - Varric is the easiest companion in the game to befriend, apart from Hawke's sister, and conversely is the most difficult with whom to get into a rivalry.
  One of these days, Varric will tell your story. Whether you like it or not.
• The Beginner's Guide plays it for drama. Coda's games, starting from Lecture, start being less about Coda's artistic vision and more about attacking Davey Wreden for tampering with his games, showing them to others without his permission, and ruining their friendship.
  • Lecture stars a Know-Nothing Know-It-All professor who insists he has the key to achieving perfection but just comes off as a pretentious snob who is revealed to have an Inferiority Superiority Complex. Much like Davey himself.
  • Theatre has you perform a play about how to be social for an unpleasable Prima Donna Director who berates you no matter what you do, like how Davey tried to force Coda to be social in an attempt to "help" him.
  • Mobius and Whisper have the protagonist admit that they no longer like making games and consider it painful and draining as a thinly-veiled message to Davey.
  • The Machine represents Davey Wreden through the protagonist, who is heavily implied to be a Villain Protagonist that forces the titular Machine, Coda, to make games, exhausting them to the point of breakdown, and then shows them to the light that it hates, like how Davey shows Coda's games to others without permission.
  • Finally, The Tower drops all pretenses because Davey cannot take the hint and flat-out tells him he ruined their friendship, and to never contact him again.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: In the Halloween toon "Doomy Tales of the Macabre", Strong Sad writes a story about each of the main cast suffering a horrible fate (except Coach Z because his life is already a horrible fate). At the beginning of the toon, he admits that he's doing this out of spite toward them for not inviting him to their Halloween party.

Webcomics

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: One strip has Don Quixote as a Spanish dragonslayer (the last one was hiding in a windmill). Unfortunately, he's a jerk to his biographer Sancho, whose book turns him into the windmill-attacking loon we all know.

Western Animation

• Arthur: In "Draw!", Francine insults Fern and later refuses to apologize for it, causing Fern to retaliate by drawing a comic of Francine as an arrogant cow named Frank. The other students, who were also sick of Francine's teasing and arrogance, also draw mean comics of Francine. Arthur's one has her, as a Blob Monster, get Eaten Alive by a hungry boy who he clearly based off Buster.
• Played for Laughs in Scared Shrekless. During his round of the scary story, Donkey immediately kills Puss off, as part of their longstanding rivalry. Puss protests his death, arguing that he wouldn't die in the way Donkey claimed. The segment proceeds like that, with Donkey trying to kill Puss and Puss changing the story. At the end, it's Donkey who gets killed off.
• Family Guy: In one episode, Brian finds out Stewie wrote a book where he is portrayed as an idiot. He gets angry and by the end of the episode writes his own book where Stewie is the idiot.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Look Before You Sleep", Rarity and Applejack end up stuck at Twilight Sparkle's house due to a big storm, and right after the two had had a big argument. Since Spike is taking a trip to Canterlot for "official business", Twilight tries to turn the event into an impromptu slumber party, but the other two ponies keep butting heads all night. When they get to "scary stories" on Twilight's checklist of slumber party activities, Applejack offers to tell "the terrifying tale of the prissy ghost, who drove everypony crazy with her unnecessary neatness," and Rarity shoots back by offering to tell "the horrifying story of the messy, inconsiderate ghost, who irritated everypony within a hundred miles!"
• Regular Show: In "Terror Tales of the Park II", the gang once again tell scary stories while driving to a Halloween party. A mishap after the second story causes their van to crash and have to get a lift by the tow truck driver. Angered at Mordecai and Rigby for unintentionally causing the situation, Benson tells the third story and make the duo come off as bumbling idiots who end up getting themselves killed trying to stop the spider monster of the story. Offended, Rigby tries to tell his own story but causes a scuffle that once more cause their car to crash and end up killing them. Luckily it's Negative Continuity, so it doesn't stick.
  Rigby: Once upon a time, Benson was so dumb!
• Samurai Jack: After witnessing children praise Jack and shunning him, Aku attempts to gain their praise by telling them fairy tales portraying him as a hero. When they ask for stories about Jack, he responds by telling them tales that portray Jack as the villain. However, none of the fairy tales he uses please the kids. He soon gets fed up and tells a rushed tale to them about him killing Jack before leaving.
• The Simpsons: In "Itchy and Scratchy and Marge", Marge is protesting The Itchy & Scratchy Show for being too violent. One of the animators see her protesting outside the studio and begins sketching her. The next episode shows a squirrel caricatured as Marge telling Itchy and Scratchy to stop hitting each other; she gets her head knocked off her body with a bat.
• South Park: During the climax of "Woodland Critter Christmas," the plot is revealed to be a story Cartman is telling. This explains why the story's version of Kyle, who has a long-established beef with Cartman, willingly absorbs the Antichrist into his body in order to take over the world for the Jews. Kyle calls Cartman out on just using the story to once again mock Kyle for being Jewish. Everybody at the end of the story is allowed a happy ending except for Kyle, who dies of AIDS.
  Kyle: Goddammit, Cartman!