YMMV / Cyberbu//y (2011)

• Accidental Aesop: The way that Taylor handles the cyberbullying in this film could very well be used as an example of how not to handle online trolls.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Were Samantha's actions the result of a genuine desire to protect her best friend that ultimately went too far, or jealousy because she was in love with the guy playing Taylor's love interest? Alternatively, is she a self-hating closeted lesbian who uses the internet to fantasize about dating her best friend and acting on her hatred of jocks?
• Broken Base: The base is divided between a dedicated Fandom, who are glad the film raises awareness of bullying while occasionally featuring great acting, and an equally active community of detractors who criticize it due to it featuring a combination of possible Artistic License – Law, New Media Are Evil and loads of Narm.
• Cliché Storm: Hits all the cliches prevalent in this genre.
• Designated Hero:
  • Taylor. She has a few moments where she's rude towards her best friends, and when Caleb, a gay boy in her class, tries to sympathize with her about the cyber-bullying and tells her that people post homophobic slurs on his page a lot. Taylor's response? "Yeah, but you really are gay. What they're saying about me isn't true."
  • Samantha, whose cyberbullying tactic is much more realistic and harmful than Lindsay's over-the-top method and much more reminiscent of the prank that prompted the news story around which the movie is based. But Sam gets a free pass because she was "trying to help."
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The whole Big Brother Is Watching aspect to the problem's solution, which, aside from being extremely expensive and time-consuming, would also infringe on various privacy laws.
• Fridge Brilliance: The "I can't get the cap off" scene is justifiable, as she's in an acute emotional state and presumably not thinking correctly. It's how it's presented that helped turn it into a meme.
• Glurge: The film's ending has such a strong Big Brother Is Watching aspect that it goes beyond unrealistic and ends up not being as inspiring as intended.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The controversy regarding SOPA and other cybersecurity bills manage to make the ending even more unpleasing, as it shows just what would happen if a Big Brother Is Watching bill were to happen in real life.
• Les Yay: Sam states near the end that she created the fake Internet guy profile and used it to flirt with Taylor in order to "protect her from a guy". Sounds a bit like Clingy Jealous Girl behavior...
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Too gay to lift". Making things worse, this is a mondegreen; the actual line is "too gay to live", but the actor's bad enunciation makes it sound like "lift".
  • ur nasty and a bitch^note This is Taylor's very well-thought-out response to a mean comment from Lindsay.
  • Ur a Liar Lindsay ^note One of the scenes in the trailer was a melodramatic close up of a computer screen with the words "Ur a liar lindsay"(sic). A large number of Photoshopped versions of the screen appeared that replaced the character and text with other◊ famous◊ characters◊.
  • "I can't get the cap off!" ^note When Taylor is caught in the middle of a suicide attempt, she's found struggling to open a bottle of prescription pills that she intends to overdose on, shouting this line while doing so. The scene quickly became popular to parody, especially after being highlighted in YourMovieSucks.org's review of the film, thanks to the implausibility of an able-bodied high school girl struggling with a safety cap, something meant to deter toddlers.
• Narm: The whole movie in its entirety. Seriously, this thing rivals High School Musical in this department.
  • The scene where Taylor hits her breaking point and tries to fatally overdose on pills is obviously meant to be sad. Instead, many ended up laughing at the scene since her suicide attempt is thwarted less by her being caught in the act, and more because she couldn't open the childproof cap before being caught. Taylor expressing this verbally ("I CAN'T GET THE CAP OFF!") right as Samantha barges in only makes it funnier as it comes off like she thinks telling Samantha about her frustrations will make her help her commit suicide with obvious results.
  • This exchange.
    Senator Evans: I don't want to try to legislate the Internet... Well, they do have delete buttons on computers.
    Kris Hillridge: I thought that too, until I almost lost my daughter.
  • The stylization of the title on the DVD cover, especially for those familiar with what two slashes and a B means.
  • ur nasty and a bitch.
  • Lindsay's video that makes Taylor break down. She dresses up in a mask of Taylor's own face, pads out her belly, and tries hitting on a guy wearing a paper bag on his head. It can make one wonder why such a video drove Taylor over the edge, especially since this sort of childish, obsessive behavior would probably lead to the bully getting relentlessly mocked in real life.
• Narm Charm: During the 2000s and 2010s, "Breathe Me" by Sia was pretty overused as the go-to song for sad scenes in movies, and as a result, has gained a reputation over time for being a forced, unintentionally funny meme song - its unironic appearance in this movie does nothing to buck that trend or dispel that reputation. With that much being said, "Breathe Me" does prove to be a good choice for Taylor's attempted suicide scene. The way the verses build on top of each other while Sam realizes the true extent of Taylor's despair, and Taylor psychs herself up to take the plunge builds up genuine suspense about whether the former will be able to stop the latter from going through with what she has planned in time.
• One-Scene Wonder: Lindsay's father appears in one scene, but he is played as over-the-top nasty as his daughter.
• So Bad, It's Good: With how quickly the plot/conflict escalates, the writing, acting, editing, and musical swells being as forced as a Full House episode, and the rising action leading to the funniest scene in the entire movie where Taylor tries to overdose on pills, but "can't get the cap off", it's one of the most unintentionally funny movies you'll ever see. It makes for excellent riffing material on movie nights.
• Tear Jerker: As narm-y as the execution is, watching a girl being viciously bullied to the point where she's Driven to Suicide, can still be pretty upsetting, and of course it happens in Real Life, where some children succeed. The quote "I CAN'T GET THE CAP OFF!" might be funny at first, but it's there for more than one reason. Look it long enough and it becomes heartbreaking and even horrifying.
• Unintentional Period Piece: It's extremely apparent in hindsight that this movie was made in 2011 (though it can be blamed more on the rapid evolution of computers and technology than any failure of the film itself.)
  • Most of the cyberbullying takes place on one specific desktop website populated exclusively by teenagers, and their parents and teachers are completely clueless about both the harassment and social media in general. Nowadays, most teens communicate using apps on their phones rather than desktop-exclusive websites, and the vast majority of adults have at least some level of familiarity with social media, even if they aren't using the same networks as their kids. Facebook, which seems to have provided the inspiration for Cliquesters, has fallen out of favor with teenagers; it's still regularly in the news for negative reasons, but most of its scandals have to do with things like political disinformation and illegal data harvesting, not high school Alpha Bitch cruelty.
  • The protagonists' proposed solution to the cyberbullying issue is a law that would surveil every computer in the state and make bullying of all kinds completely illegal. Today, many people would be too concerned about government censorship and mass surveillance to even consider supporting that kind of law. It certainly wouldn't be seen as the unambiguously good and righteous thing the film portrays it as.
  • When Caleb is bullied for being gay, Taylor's response is "at least what they're saying about you is true." With today's greater awareness of LGBTQ+ issues, most people would (hopefully) understand the true harm of outing Caleb to his classmates and bullying him over his sexuality.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Taylor is a self-absorbed high school girl who spends all her time chasing attention from two boys she's interested in online, brushes off a gay classmate's moment of empathy because he's never been called a "slut" despite being bullied for his homosexuality, and ignores her well-meaning mother's advice to get off of Cliquesters, which is shown to be a cliquey and toxic environment. To make matters worse, she never blocks her bullies, deletes their comments, or sets her profile to private, all of which would have made her situation a lot better. Instead, she continues to engage with them for nearly the entire movie, fanning the flames repeatedly until the harassment begins to consume her life. Some find it quite hard to care when she's driven to greater emotional distress over the course of the film.
  • Samantha pretended to be a boy called James online in order to get close to Taylor, then used her fake profile to spread rumors that Taylor slept around and gave James an STD. Later on, she says that she did it to "protect [Taylor] from a guy," which makes her sound at best like a Clingy Jealous Girl and, depending on how you interpret her character, possibly like a Stalker with a Crush. Despite this, she's Easily Forgiven, and she and Taylor rekindle their friendship by the end. A lot of viewers thought Samantha got off far too light, in part because using a false identity to harass a classmate is a much more common and realistic means of bullying than the wildly over-the-top stunts Lindsey pulls, and in part because a similar incident actually did drive a girl to suicide in real life.
  • All of the main characters and their parents at the end, mostly due to the Big Brother Is Watching aspect of their proposed solution to cyberbullying. Their goal is to monitor every computer in the state and make even minor trolling punishable by law, which comes across as ridiculously-over-the-top and dystopian. Blocking the bullies, setting profiles to private, reporting abusive comments, ignoring flame-bait, and simply not using the toxic website that's causing all the problems are all much more practical and realistic solutions, but the protagonists act like those options don't even exist. It's hard to sympathize with them when they act like government-sanctioned, privacy-invading cyberstalking is more reasonable than hitting the block button and moving on.
• The Woobie: The film tries to present Taylor Hillridge herself as one with all the crap she is put through.
  • The movie also paints Sam as one but it really doesn’t work.
  • Caleb, a gay teen of color, goes through bullying just as bad as (if not worse than) Taylor’s, and unlike her, he’s a nice person through the movie.
  • The other teens at Taylor's support group.

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