Basic Trope: A character who is quick to give bullies their comeuppance.
- Straight: Alice beats up Carol and/or shames her into backing down when she sees Carol picking on Bob.
- Exaggerated:
- Downplayed:
- Alice uses Passive-Aggressive Kombat, Politeness Judo, and Stealth Insults out on bullies for fun or to mess with their heads.
- Alice only beats up or picks on bullies when she's had a bad day.
- While she doesn't care about others being bullied, Alice doesn't let anyone bully her.
- Justified:
- Alice views herself as a force of good that must stop the evils of bullying in any way she can.
- Alternately, Alice was bullied like hell in the past, and refuses to let it happen to others if she can help it.
- Or, Alice used to be a bully herself, and now seeks to atone for her past misdeeds.
- Bob is Alice's friend. Of course she'll stand up for him.
- Alice considers bullies as useless piece of trash in general and sees it fair that they experience how their victims feel.
- Inverted:
- Alice tirelessly tracks down known philanthropists and gives them a beatdown.
- Alice has genuine affection for bullies in a way that goes beyond just kissing their butts.
- Subverted: Bob thanks Alice profusely and she reacts in shock, revealing that she had no idea that Bob was even there, let alone being bullied, and showing that she's beaten Carol bloody for no reason.
- Double Subverted: It's slowly but surely revealed, however, that Alice has done this multiple times. She attacks various bullies, using her icy, jerkass behaviour and status as a 'psycho' to prevent retaliation against the victims. It isn't their fault, after all, it's just Alice being a lunatic.
- Parodied:
- Alice steals the lunch money of bullies even when they're not going after anyone.
- Alice keeps an anti-bully flamethrower in case of bully attack (break glass) in her locker. Bullying rates are low at her school.
- Alice turns into a schoolyard version of The Cowl, ambushing bullies from the shadows and using extravagant terror tactics to deal with them, like the classic High-Altitude Interrogation.
Dave: Please, let me down! Let me down! I'll never threaten another nerd, I swear to God!
Alice: SWEAR TO ME! (She says just before dropping Dave, while he screams in terror... And catching him back with her Grappling-Hook Pistol before he crashes into the ground, but in a morbidly comedic twist when she pulls him back up again he's revealed to have died from having a heart attack from falling) - Zig-Zagged: Alice bullies Carol into giving up on bullying Bob. And when Carol is gone, Alice goes on to bully Bob. But it turns out that she only does it because she saw Bob bullying Sally earlier that day. She then goes on to lock Lester in his locker just for giggles.
- Averted: Alice takes no action against Carol.
- Enforced: "We need to show the audience that Alice is good, but tough. Let's show her defending Bob against some bully."
- Lampshaded: "You don't even know Bob, do you just go out of your way to find bullies to beat up?"
- Invoked: Carol wanted Alice to attack her so she could get away with maiming her in revenge for something.
- Exploited:
- The bullies use Alice's willingness to fight as a way of getting her suspended.
- A Death Seeker, knowing how dangerous Alice is, proceeds to bully the Littlest Cancer Patient in order to commit Suicide by Cop.
- Defied: Alice acknowledges that beating Carol to a pulp, while deeply satisfying, wouldn't solve the underlying cause of her maliciousness and works to give Bob the self-confidence to stand up to Carol without using violence.
- Discussed: Alice suggests to her friends that she go after Carol, but decides it's too dangerous.
- Conversed: "I wish there was someone in my school who went around beating up the bullies."
- Deconstructed:
- 1) Alice is only doing this for the respect; she doesn't really care about the people she is defending.
- 2) Alice realizes that by fighting violence with violence, she's just making the bullies feel more victimized and misanthropic, making them more likely to lash out.
- 3) The work shows Alice as essentially picking on people she feels are weaker than her and whose activities offend her sensibilities.
- 4) Alice is a severely mentally disturbed girl who harms bullies far worse than they would ever dream of doing to their victims.
- 5) Alice is actually targeting the wrong people every time. Carol was bad, sure, but she's practically slim pickings in comparison to Flash Young.
- 6) Alice becomes a bully herself in a case of He Who Fights Monsters.
- 7) The fact that Alice uses violence to stop bullies does more harm than good for her reputation. People don't see her as a heroine or savior, but instead as a hypocrite. Not only that, but the bullies she was attacking are now able to get away with their actions by Playing the Victim Card through pointing out Alice's actions.
- 8) Alice forgets that Carol has friends backing her up, and as soon they learn about Carol's situation they all gang up on Alice after school, ultimately turning her into their new bullying target.
- 9) Alice decides that Carol is too evil to be allowed to go free, and escalates to a horrific level of cruelty to ensure that Carol doesn't get any ideas of bullying ever again. It works too well, as the sheer depth of her torture to ensure that Carol never considers bullying is so extreme that Carol is a broken shell of her former self, utterly paralyzed with terror, begging for forgiveness from everyone she ever tormented while inflicting immense self-harm, and being on the constant edge of suicide because of how terrified she is of Alice. Everyone is utterly horrified, as even if Carol was a genuinely awful person, no one deserved to be tormented to that extreme. Alice is too hateful of the former bully to care, feeling that bullies like Carol needed to be broken in order to teach a lesson, because people like them in her eyes will never change willingly.
- Reconstructed:
- 1) Alice admits that she only does it to vent her violent tendencies, but rationalises that as long as she's only hurting people who would otherwise go on to hurt innocent people, she's doing more good than bad.
- 2) Alice is a Warrior Therapist. She uses The Power of Friendship in a "Break Them by Talking" lecture while preventing the bully from harming their victim or herself and eventually they see reason. In other words: Defeat Means Friendship.
- 3) Alice is a Martial Pacifist, who prefers to talk things over with bullies, but if things take a turn for the worst, she's willing to fight back.
- 5) There may be the occasional bully who is too smart or stupid for Alice to defeat, but the other 99.999% of the bullies in her district are so pants-wettingly scared of what kind of physical and mental brutality she can unleash on them at any given moment that she doesn't sees any reason to stop using her tactics.
- 7) Alice, however, does not cares about looking good to the regular students. She knows that, against certain extremely insidious kinds of bullies, the only thing that can keep them at bay is dark knights. Not dogs, or even wolves, but Tyrannosaurus. She will even make use of her bad reputation to turn herself into The Dreaded to the bully community.
- 8)
- Alice makes clear that she can't take on a dozen bullies ganging up on her at once, but she can still take one or two of them down with her, and they are going down hard. Carol's friends don't feel like risking getting hurt and tell Carol that she's on her own.
- Alternatively, Alice is capable of taking ALL of them on. No matter how hard they try, they'd get beaten up simultaneously because Alice may or may not have to deal with disproportionate fights in her enemies' sides before.
- 9) But when Flash friggin' Young comes a knockin', everyone believes that Alice's method of brutal torture would probably do the deal. She may even need more than what she did to Carol; Flash had gone through even worse than what Alice could ever dream of!
- Alternately, Alice could be seen as the villain now and people forgive and forget Carol's behavior and legendary bully-hunter Dean decides to teach Alice a lesson by doing the same things to Alice she did to Carol, but makes clear this is his first and only time doing such a thing. Carol, in gratitude, recovers but genuinely wants to stop bullying and Alice (who is made of sterner stuff and can handle being taught a lesson in such a way without being fully broken) from then on takes far more reasonable measures against bullies.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice starts dressing like a superhero, dropping from rooftops to save kids from bullies.
- Bullies are shown to be scared pantless by a sight of Alice then run away screaming like little girls.
- Played for Drama:
- Alice goes to Knight Templar extremes by taking over the school and creating rules that can get a student who does even the slightest amount of bullying expelled. Eventually the students realize Alice is being a dictator and giving them a much harder time than the bullies did. The students, with the help of the former bullies, overthrow Alice.
- Alice doesn't realize that Carol wasn't actually just bullying Bob, she's standing up to him since her friend Sally was bullied horribly by Bob. Carol still gets her ass beat. Not in that way.
- Alice brings a gun to school in order to kill the bullies in a Columbine-inspired shooting.
- Played for Horror: The school bullies take lunch money, do swirlies, and give lame names — strictly "old-school" tactics. Alice is a Serial Killer with a love for Saw-style "ironic death" tactics, and it's pretty obvious that once she finally brings her school's bullies to heel with her terror, she will not stop there.
- Implied: The audience has seen Carol bullying Bob. New character Alice comes to the school and hears about how awful Carol is. Alice and Carol go offscreen together for a moment, and the next time they appear, Carol is much more subdued while Alice looks satisfied.
Bully back to Bully Hunter. And don't you dare go bullying others; I got my eye on you!
