Basic Trope: A boarding school is horrible to students.
- Straight: Stonemarsh's School for Boys has Sadist Teachers, bullying students, and uncomfortable housing.
- Exaggerated:
- Stonemarsh's School for Boys has teachers so sadistic even their pet students live in fear of doing something wrong, brutal bullies, housing worse than prisons, and food that can give you stomach flu.
- Stonemarsh's School for boys was built in Hell and is so bad every kid sent there comes out as a career criminal or a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic if they come out at all.
- Stonemarsh's School for Boys is a tough Military School whose purpose is to educate boys to become soldiers — and it pulls no punches for its goal. Every single teacher is a Drill Sergeant Nasty, the curriculum and other activities are focused on combat, hazing is condoned if not endorsed as a discipline tool, and every once in a while someone leaves the campus in a body bag with no one batting an eye.
- Downplayed: Stonemarsh's School for Boys is a solemn place, with a few Stern Teachers and one bully.
- Justified: Stonemarsh's School for Boys is actually a borstal.
- Inverted: Stonemarsh's School for Boys has Cool Teachers, student camaraderie, and nice housing.
- Subverted: The viewer sees the inside of Stonemarsh's School for Boys. The students are crouched at their desks, looking nervous, and the teacher stands one of the students in front of the class with a "dunce" cap as punishment...but it turns out the boy was a bully who the teacher had caught messing with another student.
- Double Subverted: But he was punished not for bullying, but for being dumb enough to get caught.
- Zigzagged: Stonemarsh is a hellhole, but its alumni get excellent grades and fare extremely well in the academia.
- Parodied: Stonemarsh's curriculum involves things like "fighting bullies" and "surviving cold benches".
- Averted: Stonemarsh's School for Boys isn't particularly pleasant or unpleasant.
- Enforced: The author had a bad experience with boarding school and wrote it into the story.
- Lampshaded:Bob: Boarding school? Uh oh.
- Invoked: The head of Stonemarsh hates kids and explicitly makes the school as unpleasant as possible.
- Exploited: Groups that need kids recruit from boarding schools, knowing the kids will want to escape.
- Implied: Bob is usually writes detached and detailed history of any number of locations and its people to keep them alive in some way. He refuses to say anything about Stonemarsh.
- Deconstructed: The alumni are shown to be deeply traumatized by their experiences. A veteran of the Somme is shown having more flashbacks from his boarding school days than the Great War!
- Stonemarsh is so horrible the government shuts it down and sends the students to a comparatively nicer school.
- Defied: Bob is about to be sent to Stonemarsh School for Boys, but he instead wants to go Summerdale School, known as to be a much more pleasant place.
- Discussed: "Bob, you need to man up! We are going to send you to Stonemarsh School for Boys to make a man out of you!"
- Conversed: "You know, I've never seen a boarding school in fiction that looked nice."
- Backfired: Bob, the alumnus of Stonermarsh School for Boys, becomes a politician and strives to shut the place down because of the widespread abuse there.
Pipe down in there! By three bells, you'd better be back to Boarding School of Horrors!
