Basic Trope: The most attractive people in a show's cast are extremely bitchy (or outright evil) and make the lives of the uglier people a living hell.
- Straight: Kimberly, the high school's star cheerleader, beauty queen, Miss America candidate, and most popular girl, is extremely mean to the school's nerds for no apparent reason.
- Exaggerated: Kim is a Psycho Knife Nut ready to slit a nerd's throat at the slightest provocation, as well as the World's Most Beautiful Woman.
- Downplayed:
- Kim is marginally more attractive than the others, and she might shove someone a time or two.
- Kim is known as beautiful in-universe, while she is a kind of snob, she still has some good side.
- Kim isn't that much mean and evil, but she is rather an Innocently Insensitive Brainless Beauty who occasionally says some bigotry things without knowing any meanings behind these words
- Justified:
- Pretty people can get away with things, and the lack of consequences warps their worldview accordingly.
- Kim had a bad childhood, and her good looks brought her a lot of trouble in the past, so she had to appear as a bitch.
- Kimberly is a complete narcissist who cares a lot more about her looks than other people.
- Inverted:
- Kimberly, the high school's star cheerleader, beauty queen, Miss America candidate, and most popular girl, is a Nice Girl to everybody, even the nerds.
- Kayla, the Sour Prude unpopular girl, is extremely mean to the Class Princess.
- Kayla is a sympathetic and likeable person in spite of her meekness and homeliness.
- Subverted:
- Kim was previously friends with the fanclub, but then one of the more extremist members tried to run over her with his car once she became popular, invoking It's Popular, Now It Sucks! in the process, even though she did nothing to provoke this guy. À la Stephenie Meyer and Jimbo Wales, the fanclub's leader stays completely silent on the issue and even seems to encourage this rabid fan. So, Kim does evil things to save her life.
- Everyone thinks that Kim is an evil bitch, but the hero Bob discovers that she's simply lacking in social skills such that people keep misinterpreting her behavior as being out of malice rather than concealed awkwardness.
- Double Subverted:
- ... But then the fanclub smartens up, reports the extremist guy to the police, and Kim is STILL a bitch to them.
- ... However, it transpires that Kim has been pretending to be socially awkward, just to make her haters look bad and gloat about it in secret.
- Parodied: Kim joins the cheerleading squad only to see how much damage she can cause to the reputations of "lesser" people.
- Kim is an evil queen of an alien species. By human standards, she's as hideous on the outside as she is on the inside...but her whole species looks like that, and in fact, she's considered quite attractive by their standards, albeit they still consider her a terror.
- Zig Zagged: Kim is on her period.
- Averted: Both the Star Trek club and the cheerleading squad have a healthy mix of good and evil people, regardless of their looks.
- Enforced: The author was bullied by a beautiful Alpha Bitch and isn't over it.
- Lampshaded:Star Trek Fanclub guy: Why do you pick on us so much!?!
Kim: Because you're ugly and I'm beautiful. It's my prerogative. - Invoked:
- "Those Star Trek guys are, like, SO pissing me off. I'll go totally harass them!"
- The author wants to defy Double Standards associated with good looks. For example, bullies (especially if they're male) are typically portrayed as ugly, or at the very least conventionally unattractive, so the author may want to make a point that a bully is a bully regardless of whether or not they're good looking.
- Exploited: Kim gets away with skipping school by fluttering her eyelashes at the principal.
- Defied: Kim decides since she is beautiful on the outside, she must be a nice person too, essentially invoking Beauty Equals Goodness.
- Discussed: "I can't believe that Asian girl makes fun of us even though she might be One of Us."
- Conversed: "Who's gonna pick on poor ol' Betty Suarez today?"
- Deconstructed:
- Kim is so convinced her beauty can allow her to get away with anything that she eventually Crosses the Line Twice and ends up bullying the wrong person who eventually snaps and murders her and no one shows up to her funeral except her direct family and her clique of hangers-on who only do so out of social norms, not out of actual friendship.
- Beauty always loses to old age and Kim, now an older woman who lost her looks, get viciously brutalized by a group of younger, more beautiful girls who get away with it, just like she once did back when she was a young woman.
- This starts Persecution Flip of the traditional Attractiveness Discrimination, now all Mr. and Ms Fanservices are viewed as "horribly ugly people", while all Gonks are warmly worshipped as truly beautiful, and nice people.
- Reconstructed:
- Kim and the aforementioned Star Trek fanclub make a truce and, even though they don't really become friends, they eventually come to non-aggression policy.
- When the Gonks become new beauty standards, this also gives their power that goes to their head as well, and they have officially grown as bad as what they were treated before.
- Played For Laughs: All of the beautiful characters have to walk around wearing shirts or labels that say "WARNING: BAD PERSON" on them.
- Played For Drama:
- Kim's Attractiveness Discrimination actions make the nerds and Hollywood Homely people to hate themselves and even begins to contemplate suicide due to it.
- Due to this belief, all of the attractive people are raped so frequently by the uglier people, but are ignored or not taken seriously, or even being treated as redemption from their (possibly informed) personalities.
- Implied: Kim is an unseen character who people always talk about how attractive she is, but everyone frighteningly tries to avoid any kinds of interaction with her.
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