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You Are What You Hate / Live-Action TV

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You Are What You Hate in Live-Action TV series.


  • Jocelyn Jee Esien's sketch show featured the character of Fiona, a black woman who dislikes black people and fears they will "out" her to her white co-workers, who (she believes) do not know that she's really black.
  • In the second episode of 30 Rock:
    Liz: Toofer's just afraid of black people.
    Tracy: Which one is Toofer?
    Liz: The black guy.
  • In The 100 episode "Resurrection", Clarke, normally an All-Loving Hero, becomes obsessed with killing the Mountain Men in revenge for their missile attack on a village, despite Clarke herself being partly responsible for the resulting carnage, since she knew the missile was coming but chose not to warn anyone. It's implied that she's focusing her hatred on the Mountain Men as part of a coping mechanism, so she won't have to face how much she hates herself for what she let happen.
  • The Black Mirror episode "The Waldo Moment" sees a British comedian run his cartoon bear character Waldo as a by-election candidate as a protest vote against corrupt and clueless politicians; as far he is concerned, politicians are all just made-up characters with nothing to say, and so is he but at least he admits it. He ends up becoming the figurehead of a global movement which sees the old democratic institutions torn down and replaced by a new internet-based direct democracy, where the darkest impulses of human nature and mob rule are made into law.
  • The Borgias: This is used to explain Rodrigo Borgia's treatment of his elder son Cesare, whom he spurns and ignores in favour of his bratty younger son Juan. While Cesare is certainly no saint, he is clearly the more dutiful and intelligent of the two, and Rodrigo's hostile attitude towards him sometimes seemed illogical, but he finally breaks down and admits that he sees too much of himself in Cesare, and therefore finds him far more difficult to love than his other children.
  • The image on the main page is from Chappelle's Show, which contains an extremely literal example; in the sketch "Clayton Bigsby, White Supremacist", about a Blind Black Guy who grew up not knowing that he's black and became a prominent white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader. His friends make sure that their fellow Klansmen never see him in public out of his robes, and don't tell him that he's black because they are afraid that if he ever found out, he'd kill himself just so there'd be one less black person in the world, and he's too important to the Klan for them to lose. This fear turns out to be unfounded, as when he does find out, he simply becomes a Boomerang Bigot and resumes business as usual.
    Closing Narration: In the past few weeks, Clayton Bigsby has finally accepted that he is a black man. And just three days ago, he filed for divorce from his wife. When asked why, after nineteen years of marriage, he replied, "Because she's a nigger lover."
  • In The Colbert Report, the eponymous Stephen Colbert (the character, obviously) considers gays and their agenda to be one of the biggest threats to America, and is so deeply closeted a diagram of his brain had a large area labeled "Repressed Homosexual Urges".
  • The Killer Of The Week on an episode of Cold Case turned out to be a Jewish (or at least half-Jewish) member of a neo-Nazi group. The den mother of the group manipulated him into murder by telling him it would "purify" him.
  • In the July 28, 2010 episode of The Daily Show, Jason Jones interviewed Scott Lively, who argued that the Nazis persecuted gays to hide their sexuality:
    Scott Lively: The Nazis did persecute homosexuals to distract public attention away from their homosexuality.
    Jones: So that which you hate the most... you secretly are.
    (Beat)
    Lively: I am not gay.
    Jones: I didn't say you were.
  • Hazel on Degrassi: The Next Generation is rude to the Muslim girl on Culture Day and secretly pretends to be Jamaican, until the Muslim girl's exhibit is vandalized (context: this was only a few months after 9/11) and Hazel comes clean about her Somali heritage.
  • Doctor Who:
  • In the first season finale of First Kill, Juliette transforms Theo into a vampire to save his life, an action that nobody approves of. As Cal states, she turned him into the thing he hates the most because his mother was killed by a vampire in front of him, which Theo swore revenge over along with his father..
  • Fresh Off the Boat had an episode set during the 1996 election where Jessica proudly supported an anti-illegal immigration proposition. When Mexican immigrants protest her campaign, she calls INS on them. The INS agents discover one of the protesters is an illegal immigrant, but so is Jessica.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The two Lannisters who hate each other the most (Tywin and Tyrion) also have the most in common, down to their names.
    • It is not so much as in the books, but at the end of the day Cersei is a philanderer, a drunkard and an incompetent ruler, not unlike her hated late hubby (albeit in a different style and more malicious compared to his apathy).
  • Dave Karofsky on Glee is highly homophobic and bullies Kurt, and it's revealed in the second season that he's actually gay.
  • Extremely southern Blanchenote  from The Golden Girls discovers when attempting to join "The Daughters of the South" (an expy for "Daughters of the Confederacy") that not only is her great-grandmother a Yankee from Buffalo NY, but was nee Feldman.
  • In one episode of Grimm, Nick suspected there was another Grimm killing wesen in Portland. It turned out to be another wesen who was in denial about what he was and was trying to kill all wesen. When he's forced to confront his true form, he starts saying to Nick "You should kill me!"
  • On Heroes, Angela vaguely hints that Danko, a member of the Cape Busters, might be a super himself. Whether this is true is left ambiguous, but he never shows any powers.
  • House:
    • Dr. House constantly expresses contempt for clueless patients who think they know better than their doctors. When he had his leg infarction, his doctors tried to convince him to amputate it, but he refused. He ended up with a crippled leg, with constant pain that resulted in a painkiller addiction.
    • Kutner acts pretty hostile towards a group of high school bullies. His co-workers immediately assume he was bullied in high school (as Taub theorizes, being an Indian-American and having had his parents murdered in front of him most likely didn't help his popularity). However, at the end of the episode, we see Kutner visiting a former classmate and apologizing to him about bullying him. A rare positive example?
  • Played for Laughs in How I Met Your Mother, when after years of enduring his taunts surrounding her Canadian heritage, Robin finds out that Barney is one-quarter Canadian.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "Like Angels Put in Hell by God", Lestat de Lioncourt complains that "[Claudia is] an affected, self-absorbed, nasty little creature who's fooled herself into thinking she's smarter than she is," which is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Later, when Claudia purposefully leaves their chess game without finishing, Lestat launches into an angry rant, calling her "Spoiled, selfish, thankless. Heedless, disagreeable, obnoxious, repellent, unkind, spoiled to the core!" All of these adjectives could easily be used to describe Lestat himself.
  • Played for Laughs in a Key & Peele sketch involving a Literal-Minded school bully. After hurling a homophobic insult, the bully immediately confesses that he only said it because he's beginning to realize that he himself might be gay, and thus wants to seem like he hates homosexuals so that nobody will suspect him.
  • Law & Order:
    • A member of a high school clique of white supremacists touts himself as being of "pure white Christian blood", but Rey Curtis, who is himself Hispanic, smugly informs him that no matter what he says, him being of Spanish heritage means that he's Latino and therefore one of the very people that such groups denounce.
    • An intellectually disabled man confesses to the murders of two nurses because they abused drugs - even though he himself is a recovering addict, and the victims were treating him at a methadone clinic. He is also deeply in denial about his disability, and makes many offensive remarks about people with intellectual disabilities.
  • ADA Sonya Paxton of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit shows an intense hatred of a suspect who committed his crimes while he was drunk, ranting numerous times about how being drunk is no excuse. Then she shows up to trial late and noticeably drunk...
    • Also, in the episode "Damaged", the antagonist Missy's Rape as Backstory involved her biological father raping her and "renting her out" to his friends. The Reveal of the episode is her doing the same to her sister Rebecca (actually, worse — she didn't just offer up Rebecca, she pushed her boyfriend into doing it when he was reluctant).
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: As much as Galadriel hates Sauron, she has many things in common with him, she has same desires to rule and control, disregard for the orcs's lives, and very susceptible to being blinded by her own ambition. No wonder she almost killed Adar in anger for suggesting she is the mirror image of Sauron.
  • Mrs. America: The STOP ERA movement is made up of women who oppose women's liberation and think women should Stay in the Kitchen. They frequently state that they're proud to be homemakers and disdainfully say they don't want to be "working girls." Except, as Bella points out, in order to promote their cause, they have to organize protests and rallies, spend hours making phone calls and writing letters to politicians, balance budgets, write and give speeches, deal with the media, and, in the cases of the movement's leaders, keep everyone else on-track.
    Bella: Congratulations. You're working girls.
  • The Muppet Show:
    • It's probably not "hate", but in the Dizzy Gillespie episode Scooter says that Kermit doesn't allow puppets in the studio. (This rule wasn't always in effect; Edgar Bergen was a previous guest, and they had no objections then, given how all of them took part in the "Consider Yourself" musical number.)
    • In the Mummenschanz episode, Waldorf compares the guest stars to puppets, and Statler says he's always hated puppets. Waldorf responds "You're a traitor to your class!"
  • Murdoch Mysteries:
    • The Season 2 finale has a mild example. A visiting Mountie starts upstaging Murdoch in the areas where he usually excels which leads Murdoch to declare "I don't know how anyone could put up with it." As Murdoch walks off his superior says to a third character "Yet somehow I manage." Of course it also later turns out that Murdoch and the Mountie are half-brothers.
    • In the episode "Bloodlines" the killer is a Niagra police officer. Appearing to be one of the most racist of a whole station house of Bigots With Badges, he turns out to have killed the victim for having evidence his grandmother was black. Confronted with this, he still insists "I'm not black" with total disgust, appearing to be more ashamed of this possibility than of the murder.
  • Helena from Orphan Black is a clone, but initially hates her sisters, believing herself to be the original from whom her sisters were cloned.
  • Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation is very disdainful of people from Eagleton, a nearby affluent town. She later discovers she was born there.
    • The fifth season introduces Marcia Langman's husband, Marshall. Like her, he's a right-wing Christian fundamentalist horrified by the slightest hint of sexual deviation. He's also very obviously Camp Gay.
  • One of the Saturday Night Live "Bill Brasky" sketches tells us these (comparatively mild) facts about the legendary salesman:
    "He hated Mexicans!"
    "And he was half-Mexican!"
    "And he hated irony!"
  • Seinfeld: Jerry once dated a woman whose mannerisms and interests were basically identical with his own, to the point that he at first thought she was "the one". In the end, though, he broke up because she was too like him.
    Jerry: I can't be with someone like me... I hate myself!
  • Supernatural
    • Bloody Mary kills people who have a secret where they're even vaguely culpable in somebody's death, if such a person looks into a mirror after she's been summoned. This leads to one of the most ironic or meta cases of Hoist by Her Own Petard imaginable when she sees herself in a mirror and gets sent to Hell by herself for killing people.
    • In Episode 7x01, Castiel kills a homophobic preacher who Cas reveals is secretly gay himself.
    • Gordon Walker hated all supernatural creatures and thought that they should all be killed. After his Karmic Transformation into a vampire, he agrees to let his partner kill him, but not before using his enhanced abilities to try and kill Sam Winchester, who gained psychic powers after ingesting demon blood.
  • In The Thick of It, Ollie Reeder eventually usurps his hated, bullying "mentor" Malcolm Tucker and takes his job.
  • The Twilight Zone (2002) episode "Cradle of Darkness" ends with The Reveal that Hitler was actually a member of one of the "Untermensch" races he hated so much. The original baby Adolf was killed by his time-traveling nanny, but the other nanny grabbed the nearest available baby (that of a homeless Roma) and passed him off to Alois Hitler as his son. He bought it.
  • The Wheel of Time (2021): Egwene learns Renna and the other sul'dam, who cruelly control the damane (enslaved channelers) are themselves (weak) channelers. Renna is horrified to be told this, as sul'dam have been taught that damane are akin to animals, urging Egwene on as she's getting strangled by Egwene's weave.

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