Basic Trope: A character gets pantsed by someone.
- Straight:
- Bob pulls down Alice's pants, showing her underwear.
- Bob pulls down Alice's pants and underwear.
- Exaggerated: Alice's shirt and underwear is somehow pulled down along with her pants, leaving her fully naked.
- Downplayed: Bob tugs down on Alice's pants, but not to her knees or ankles, and she pulls it up quickly.
- Justified:
- Bob is a bully.
- Alice is a bully who like pantsing others herself.
- Subverted: A character appears to be a bully looks like they’re about to pants someone, but then just tells them that their belt isn’t buckled well.
- Double Subverted: And then immediately pantses the person.
- Inverted: Bob helps Alice put her pants back up after an Comedic Underwear Exposure.
- Parodied: Alice spends the rest of the series naked after her pantsing.
- Averted: There is a bully character who physically bullies others but he never pantsed anyone.
- Defied: The bully insists he’s not some kind of cliché and refuses to pants anyone.
- Zig-Zagged: The bully pantses a victim in the first episode, but doesn’t do it again for the entire season. But then, he realizes it’s been a while since he last did so and tries to pants as many people as possible at least Once an Episode. But then, he realizes that he’s just pantsing people on not doing anything else to them so he swears off pantsing anyone. But then, he undergoes Character Rerailment and makes sure to pants at least one person Once a Season, but he normally bullies people in other ways. But then, he goes through Character Development and stops being a bully. But as school graduation nears, he realizes that he won’t get a chance to bully again, so he snaps back to his bullying ways and pantses people. But he has acquired enough enemies that they make sure to pants him at graduation. But after graduation, he at first gives up, but then realizes he can get away with pantsing some people in certain circumstances. But they only see it as a good-natured prank, so he stops doing that because he doesn’t know how to be a Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up. But then, years later, he pantses everyone at his high school reunion, including the students and teachers, and is immediately arrested for sexual assault.
- Enforced: "Bob is supposed to be a bully. Have him pants some people so it’s not an informed attribute."
- Lampshaded: "Does it seem strange to you that Bob’s main method of bullying is pantsing?"
- Discussed: "Have you noticed that in media bullies always seem to pants people?"
- Conversed: "And I though getting pantsed was something that only happened in movies?"
- Invoked: Bob gets an If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten! threat from the other bullies in the form of being asked to pants someone.
- Exploited: "The bully always pantses the geek whenever he sees one, so let’s send a geek to him as a distraction so we can get past the gymnasium without him seeing us."
- Played for Laughs: The bully pantsing his victims consistently leads to comedic underwear exposure of their goofy print underwear and uncool undies with the different ways of showing this becoming a running gag and it being in no way seen as harmful by the narrative.
- Played for Drama: The constant pantsing of the victim becomes a ritualistic humiliation which costs him all his friends and love interests resulting in him becoming a social outcast and after graduating school struggling to recover from feelings of inferiority created by this history.
- Played for Horror:
- The victim is pantsed showing his teeny weenie making him a subject of constant mockery including by his nominal friends so he kills himself.
- The victim is actually not a human but an extraterrestrial life form with bizarre alien biology and sees itself as exposed by the episode and kills everyone within a fifty mile radius to maintain the masquerade.
- The victim is raped after being pantsed.
- Implied: “I have a bully at school, what should I do?” Always carry spare pants.
- Unparodied: It starts off Played for Laughs but then there’s a Cerebus Retcon.
- Untwisted: The loser protagonist whose worst fear is getting pantsed is told that the new bully is “not the kind of bully” who pantses people foreshadowing that the character will get pantsed and the bully later gets behind the protagonist’s trousers seemingly about to pants him but then gives him a wedgie instead because of exact words. And then another bully pantses the protagonist.
- Deconstructed:
- The bully is expelled from school for pantsing people
- The schoolyard bully all grown up is arrested for sexual assault after pantsing someone.
- The pantsing victim is exposed as having a teeny weenie, is dumped by his girlfriend who decides he’s a loser and is abandoned by his friends for being “a loser” with a teeny weenie or viciously mocked by them so they can use him as a straw loser resulting in him going to parents and teachers only to find out that adults are useless, endures the Pants-Pulling Prank routinely after the fact and responds to the constant humiliation by committing suicide
- The pantsing victim is originally ignored because he’s a Butt-Monkey and endures it until graduation but after the fact develops serious psychological issues because of it.
- The pantsing victim has enough and retaliates with a school shooting.
- The pantsing victim, who is smarter than he looks, decides to use his intellect to become a supervillain and take over the world and make everyone else suffer so that he will never again have to be powerless.
- Reconstructed:
- The Loser Protagonist nearly attempts suicide but then realizes that a great many people aside from him are bullied in the same way without so doing and resolves to become an Iron Butt Monkey
- The suicide shakes the school but then it’s discovered that he wrote his suicide note just in case years before his first pantsing and responded to being transferred to the new school by writing in his diary that he planned to kill himself at one point and it turns out there were several prior attempts and it actually had little to nothing to do with the pantsing.
- The pantsing victim comes to commit a school shooting but is immediately pantsed before he can shoot and being pantsed is his weaksauce weakness that stops him from being able to go through with it.
- The pantsing victim grows up, goes to therapy, gets the issue off his chest and gets better and decides in retrospect it wasn’t the end of the world
- The pantsing victim originally resents his former bullies but then takes a philosophy class on Utilitarianism and becomes convinced that if there were more people who were happy laughing at his expense than people who were hurt by it (the only one being him) then it was the correct thing to do and should be accepted.
- The pantsing victim turned supervillain is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who takes over the world and transforms into a universally beloved utopia because it turns out the extremist was right.
- The supervillain claims being pants is his Freudian Excuse but he was actually evil all along well before that.
- The supervillain is defeated by another pantsing villain who didn’t turn evil because of his trauma but became a hero instead.
- Pantsing is eliminated but it’s only replaced by other worse more vicious forms or bully brutality.
- Decon-Recon Switch: A work originally shows the realistic negative consequences of the Pants-Pulling Prank and after having done so begins to make the case in favour of it notwithstanding the deconstruction.
