Bully Hunter / Literature

Bully Hunters in Literature.

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• The town of Grantsville on a grand scale in 1632 when they declare war on anyone who commits mayhem in their neighborhood.
• In Michael C. Bailey's Action Figures — Issue One: Secret Origins, Stuart. Even, eventually, on behalf of the boy who had accidentally killed his younger brother.
• Alex Rider has a few examples in his limited downtime at school. One being tracking down a pair of drug dealers and using a crane to dump their lab-boat in a police station car park.
• Tobias gets into this somewhat after becoming trapped as a hawk in Animorphs, mostly because he had been repeatedly bullied as a human. He sees a couple of bullies harassing Erek King before getting to know Erek, and was about to dive bomb them when something else happened instead.
• At the start of Dinoverse Janine Farehouse has taken on a role with shades of this. Her bullies are cruel gossipers and saboteurs, rarely lowering themselves to assault. Ever since her best friend betrayed her for popularity Janine has developed a piercing stare that intimidates her peers. They can't hurt her anymore. Whenever she shows up, they change topics and forget what they were discussing before.
• Vlad Taltos of the Dragaera novels was bullied as a young boy by bigger kids from House Orca. Said bigger kids didn't have much foresight, as being an Easterner, Vlad grew into an adolescent much faster than them, and took great satisfaction in picking fights with similar Orca youths so he could beat the crap out of them.
• Harry Dresden fights for the muggles who refuse to believe in the magic he fights with/against for this reason. We don't learn how core it is to his pyromaniac-wizard persona until Ghost Stories, where we finally see his fight with He Who Walks Behind.
  • He's so well known for this, both in combat and in making fun of said monsters, that he jokes that if he didn't make fun of a particular Eldritch Abomination, they might be offended.
• In The Eyes of Kid Midas, when Kevin gains Reality Warper powers, he uses them to get revenge on the bullies who picked on him.
• In Harry Potter, Ginny is this for Luna and to a lesser extent, the rest of the D.A. Even before her first year began she defended Harry against Malfoy.
  • Fred and George Weasley are also this. They tricked Dudley into eating one of their Ton-Tongue Toffees because Dudley bullied Harry.
• In Honor Among Enemies, a major subplot (essentially unrelated to Honor's doings) features a lowly enlisted man on his first crew being harassed and assaulted by some bad-apple coworkers. He got some serious self-defense training and eventually winds up seeking out and ending the ringleader after the thug tries to murder his best friend.
• Annie in Twister on Tuesday of The Magic Treehouse when her brother is being picked on.
• In The Marvellous Land of Snergs, Miss Gribblestone bludgeons Joe's abusive father.
• An example of a child standing up to a Sadist Teacher is Roald Dahl's Matilda. When you intend to make the lives of a helpless class of young children a living hell, be aware of the possibility that one of your victims may have latent magical powers.
• In the novel The Night Gardener, Kip hates seeing other people bullied, due to his own experience of being bullied for his bad leg most of his life. When he sees Alastair picking on his sister, he gets into a fight with him — despite the fact that Alastair is the son of the house and Kip is only the hired help.
• The plot of Past Mortem by Ben Elton is based around a detective hunting a serial killer whose victims are all bullies; initially former school bullies whom the killer finds via Friends Reunited, but then teen bullies whose victims had contacted a charity helpline.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The titular character big time. His opening scene has him almost punching the resident bully, and only resisting because he'll be expelled if he gets into another fight with her. In the mortal world, he frequently makes friends with the kids who get picked on and makes it his personal mission to protect them — even if it means he's bullied as well. In the supernatural world, he stands up to abusive gods and magical creatures.
• Kel in Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet. She's eventually able to persuade her peers to join her, and the victory is not that they are able to beat up the bullying pages, but that her group of people who believe it's not acceptable for older pages to torment and hurt younger ones is big enough that the bullies just stop.
• Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot has Mark Petrie.
• Secret Santa (2007): When Charlie and Noelle were in elementary school, he stood up to a boy who hit her for using the monkey bars because she was a girl. This caused Noelle to fall madly in love with Charlie, even though she Cannot Spit It Out and he only dates older girls.
• This is the premise behind Neal Shusterman's The Shadow Club.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, it seems that Lyanna Stark was one, beating the living shit out of three squires who were bullying crannogman Howland Reed. And if she later posed as the Knight of the Laughing Tree, as the popular theory goes, the revenge went even further to chastising those squires' lords. It must run in the family, as several of her nieces and nephews share this trait:
  • Jon Snow is particularly eager to show up some of the nastier recruits like Rast during his training at The Wall. And even goes on to menace everyone who bullies Sam Tarly.
  • Carries through with his little sister — and incidentally favorite sibling — Arya, who just about cuts down Joffrey when he is bullying a butcher's boy, threatens to gut Hot Pie when he's being an ass, and is prepared to execute captive rapists when they threaten her. She later goes from bully hunter to full-on executioner, carrying around a list of people she wants to kill, who are all in some way...you got it, bullies.
• Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdasasdottir's Nordic Noir thriller Absolution revolves around the murders of several teenagers, where the only common link is that they were the ringleaders of bullying groups who made life miserable for other kids. It soon becomes apparent that this is the motive for their murders.
• The Stainless Steel Rat was bullied in school, so he bribed the PE teacher into giving him martial-arts lessons. He became hugely popular among the wimps for his ability to send entire gangs of bullies fleeing in fear.
• Vince from Super Powereds. Camille is strongly influenced by his coming to the rescue when she is beaten up by bullies, and she later decided that she had to make it through hero certification because she knew his heroic behavior was going to get him hurt and she would need to be there to heal him.
• The Tribe: The Titular Tribe are made up of this, coming to Spencer's aid in "Homeroom Headhunters" whenever Riley Callahan is about to do something cruel and humiliating to him.
• Armando "Commando" Rivera is one of these in The Twinkie Squad by Gordon Korman. He's actually quite nice, but unfortunately, he comes across to authority figures as a thug who starts fights for the heck of it.
• Whateley Universe: Appropriately for a school with both aspiring superheroes and aspiring supervillains, there are some students who go out of their way to throw their weight around, which leads in turn to several becoming 'bully busters'. Several of these are students who are themselves targets of discrimination of one sort or another, often due to Gross Structural Dystrophy changes or weak powers. Among the most important of these in the Gen 1 stories are Razorback, Jimmy T., Eldritch, and Aquerna, with Aegis trying to be this but endlessly messing up.
  • One notable case is Aries, who went from being bullied, to being a bully buster, to getting twisted around by Freya into being a bully himself.
  • This is aside from instances where bullies have underestimated their target's powers or resourcefulness, or even just bullying someone they should have known outclassed them.

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