Bullying A Dragon / Western Animation

YOU JUST MADE A FATAL MISTAKE, MR CANDY-ASS! I HOPE YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT!

— Coach Buzzcut, after being slapped by the much weaker Mr. Candy.

From time to time, cartoon characters can make a terrible mistake Bullying a Dragon!

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• Invoked and almost a literal case in one episode of Adventures of the Gummi Bears when Tummi accidentally sinks Duke Igthorn's ship while trying to figure out how to work the Gummarine, which Igthorn and Toadwart think is a real sea serpent.
  Igthorn: (To the Gummarine) You sank my ship, you slithering sludgeball, you serpentine sneak, you!
  Toadwart: (Cautiously) Maybe not swell idea to get it mad!
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Bobert is a robot with super strength, the ability to shape shift, and can shoot lasers and nukes at people. "The Robot" shows that the other kids love to mock him. This is justified by the fact that they all think he doesn't have feelings and therefore can't get mad at them.
  • In "The Sock," Gumball and Darwin become brutally honest after Mr. Small tells them that honesty is the best policy. They promptly use this as an excuse to insult Tina Rex, a Tyrannosaurus multiple times their size. It does not end well. After that, they get called into Principal Brown's office and insult him and Miss Simian to their faces for being unprofessional, which predictably enrages them.
• In American Dad! Stan does something very very similar to The Simpsons example below. After searching for the perfect Christmas tree, he falls off a cliff and dies, with his family waiting in the car. Yet his car keys are in his pocket, and they are in the middle of nowhere freezing to death. Stan after losing a trial to determine whether he should be brought back to life, steals a gun that can kill Angels, bursts into God's office. And (despite being a devout Christian himself) threatens to kill God if he doesn't bring him back to life and save his family. God doesn't punish Stan (aside from a sharp telling off) as he is touched that Stan cares about his family that much to do something so idiotic and blasphemous. It might actually have been deliberately invoked by God, as the episode was an Aesop about getting it through Stan's head how destructive his insistence that he's always right about everything is. When God points out to Stan that he's in the afterlife, holding a gun to God's head to get his way, Stan finally accepts his judgement...and God immediately returns everything to the way it was.
• Arcane: Marcus goes to the Last Drop to arrest the four kids of the bartender Vander, who he explicitly knows once was a formidable fighter and is the defacto head of the underground of Zaun. He enters said bar full of people he considers thugs and criminals with only two other Enforcers as backup. Marcus is damn lucky his men don't find the kids he was looking for and manages to avoid a beating of a lifetime from everyone at the bar despite being a belligerent dick to everyone only because Vander is trying to keep the peace.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Pops up occasionally in Avatar: The Last Airbender. When most of the cast are powerful Kung Fu Wizards, it's only a matter of time. If there's a Central Theme of this universe, it might as well be, Don't mess with a fully realized Avatar, you're just gonna get your butt kicked all the way to Ba Sing Se.
    • Aang is a kid, so it's understandable that people might not think much of him. A much less justifiable example occurs between Avatar Roku and Fire Lord Sozin. Roku has finished his Avatar training, meaning he is straight-up the most powerful bender on the planet (even without accessing the Avatar State). Sozin asked Roku to join him in "spreading the superior Fire Nation culture" across the world (Read: Conquer the world). When Roku basically says "Not on my watch", Sozin attacks him. Needless to say, a hilariously one-sided beatdown ensued, leaving Sozin minus a palace. ^note Sozin and Roku were very close friends and Sozin was absolutely sure that uniting the nations under his rule will benefit everybody. Still, there must have been a better way to do this rather than ignoring the avatar until he shows up at the front door and attacking him the second he disagrees with you.
    • Seen in flashback in "Avatar Day", with a warlord trying to bully Avatar Kyoshi into surrender. When Kyoshi flexes her muscles (breaking off her village's peninsula from the mainland, forming Kyoshi Island), the warlord dies because he was too busy bellowing in rage to notice he was now standing on an unstable cliff. (His actual army retreated the moment Kyoshi went into action).
    • Related to the above examples, a notable (non-flashback) invocation of this trope comes up in the first episode of the second season, "The Avatar State." An Earth Kingdom General tries to help Aang reach the eponymous Super Mode, and when everything he tries ends in failure, he resorts to threatening Katara. It ends about as well as you'd expect it to, and the fort where it happens gets smashed to pieces.
  • The Legend of Korra:
    • In a Season 1 flashback, Yakone bloodbends Aang. Aang goes into the Avatar state, chases Yakone down in about thirty seconds, puts him in a rock prison with earthbending, and then takes away his bending.
    • The Earth Queen tries this on Korra, treating her like a random servant and then refusing to give Korra any information on the airbenders that Korra was searching for, despite having agreed to do so. (It turns out the Queen was forcibly conscripting said airbenders into a secret army). While the Avatar State itself is never used on her, harassing and manipulating a Hot-Blooded Physical God works as well for the Queen as this trope does for anyone else in the franchise, as she quickly finds herself with no airbenders and having made enemies of both the Avatar and her Badass Crew. She also does this to the season's Big Bad and his group of friends, continuing with her bravado and tirades even after witnessing them completely trounce her Secret Police/personal guards. She soon learns that unlike the heroes, he has no qualms about killing...
    • Also in Season 3, the Red Lotus's plan is to invoke this trope — specifically, to force Korra into the Avatar State in self-defense, then kill her to end the reincarnation cycle. It's a testament to their ability that they almost make it work, as even they seem surprised at the raw power Korra unleashes when activating the Avatar State on instinct and not deliberately.
    • During their fight early in Season 4, during a duel, Kuvira (who had the upper hand at that point) taunts Korra into shifting into the Avatar State. Once Korra does, she wipes the floor with Kuvira until her Enemy Within rears its head and drives her back to normal.
• Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force does this on a regular basis. Being both extremely stupid and an obnoxious jerk, Shake generally spends his days harassing the people around him even when they're powerful enough to make him pay for it. It rarely turns out well for him, though since the show runs on Negative Continuity, his many humiliations, injuries, and deaths rarely carry over into the next episode. Depending on the Writer, he can be smart enough to grovel, but only after having something horrible happen to him - and there are times where he's continue making an ass out of himself right up to the end.
• The page quote is thanks to Mr. Candy from Beavis and Butt-Head. Keep in mind this guy was an even match for Mr. Van Driessen, and this time around he takes a swing at Mr. Buzzcut. Cue army snare drums and the beating of Mr. Candy's life.
• In the Ben 10: Ultimate Alien episode "Nor Iron Bars a Cage", a prisoner named Trukk tries to push around Ultimate Kevin, completely ignoring the fact that Kevin is A) bigger than Trukk, and B) breaking rocks with his bare hands. Lucky for him, Kevin was not really interested; otherwise Trukk would have ended up killed rather than just getting beaten up.
  • Amusingly enough, this isn't the first time Kevin is on the receiving end of this trope. His Freudian Excuse in the Original Series was all about him getting bullied and called a freak for having the ability to absorb energy and shoot electric blasts. You read right: some kids apparently believed it was a good idea to insult and harass a Psycho Electro Creepy Child.
  • Amusingly averted by The Men in Black at the beginning of The Windening Gyre:
    MIB: Standard operating procedure is to show up unannounced, then demand you come with us. But we know we're dealing with Ben Tennyson, so we're asking. Would you please come with us?
  • Then there's Will Harangue, who is Ben's J. Jonah Jameson, who devotes his life calling Ben a menace, even though if that were true then Ben would have gone alien and turned him to paste ages ago.
  • Then in Ben 10: Omniverse, Doctor Psychobos, despite calling himself "the greatest mind in the entire universe", apparently thinks it's a good idea to act bossy around Khyber the Huntsman and try to Mind Rape him when he acts reluctant. This doesn't end well for him.
    Khyber: Never. Do. That. Again!
• The Brak Show: Once per Episode, Zorak would take the opportunity (and occasionally invented them) to insult, belittle and bully Thundercleese. The literal war machine Thundercleese. At best Zorak ended up Punched Across the Room. Usually, Thundercleese would open fire, leaving Zorak a pair of flaming shins. Good thing for Zorak the show ran on Negative Continuity.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: The eco-villains, most of whom are ordinary humans, think it's a good idea to keep offending two superbeings with the entire power of nature by hurting their planet and threatening their kids. Admittedly, this is semi-justified by the fact that Cap and Gaia are harmed by the same pollutants that the villains regularly make during their schemes of the week. However, they're still banking on the fact that Gaia and her superhero are too nice to drown them with a hurricane, drop a mountain on their heads from twenty feet up, or just sit on their hands while the eco-villains get killed by their own backfiring schemes.
• Castlevania (2017):
  • Dracula tells the people of Wallachia they have a year to make their peace after they burn his wife at the stake. They respond by celebrating the anniversary of her death. He tells the people of nearby Targoviste to flee before he annihilates them, and they ignore him. He makes good on his threat alright.
  • In Season 3, people keep thinking antagonizing Isaac with a small army of demons at his back is a good idea. It keeps ending very, very predictably.
• Eustace in Courage the Cowardly Dog does this to almost every monster and supernatural being. He would often taunt them gleefully and fails to realize exactly how much more powerful they are than him. Unsurprisingly, it usually doesn't end well for him.
• Cyber Six:
  • Right after Lucas has seen a Fixed Idea, a near nine-foot-tall Frankenstein's monster-like man, tear through his wall, he figures he can take it in a fight. Being a boxer and strong by human standards he gets a couple of decent hits in, but Fixed Ideas are Unskilled, but Strong and he's just not strong enough to even stagger them. All in all, it's probably his least finest moment in the entire series as the only reason he doesn't get the complete man-shit kicked out of him is because Cyber Six saves him.
  • Though admittedly he's desperate to save his sister^note he's being blackmailed into capturing her, the private investigator Yashimoto tries to capture Cyber Six with nothing more than a grappling hook staff thing. Keep in mind this is after he's watched her leap building to building. The only thing that saves him from the beating of his life is that Cyber Six takes a third option and teams up with him to save the hostages.
• Humans literally do this in The Dragon Prince, humans were looking for excuses to slaughter dragons, elves, unicorns and other wildlife because they believe is the only way they will survive the harsh conditions that Xadia put them through, although is humans' own fault because they betrayed the unicorns that helped them thrive and exploited many species for dark magic.
  • Viren wanted to kill Avizandum because he killed Sarai, although Avizandum did it to defend his people from humans and is Viren's fault for putting himself in danger, so she died saving him, and Avizandum was willing to spare Harrow and Viren, but they killed him anyways.
  • Viren also wanted to kill Zym because of assuming he is a weapon of mass destruction that will only feel hatred for humans, despite he literally didn't do anything at all for being an egg at the time Viren wanted to kill him, but also because of his greed for power.
  • Viren also wanted to kill Zubeia just for greed and spite.
  • Soren started a fight against Pyrrah believing humans are stronger, Corvus warned Soren she would fight back but he ignored the warning, then Claudia used an enchanted bolt to bring Pyrrah down, then they wanted to maim her to use her for dark magic, fortunately Callum saved her before they do, and she broken Soren's bones, in the hospital Soren reflected is his fault Pyrrah attacked.
  • Claudia was about to kill a dragon that was chasing her for being a wanted criminal, in her mind all dragons are beast that deserve to die for bullying humans, fortunately Terry begged to stop and spare it.
  • The drakewood elves enslave dragons to use them as mounts and they had an imprisoned dragon to eat their enemies, they also tried to tame Zym, apparently not knowing he is the Xadian prince, they are lucky Zubeia wasn't there when doing that or else she'd eat them.
• Ling Ling from Drawn Together gets abused by the rest of the housemates in some episodes...completely forgetting that the little Asian rat is perfectly capable of ripping them apart easily if he wants to in order to have sex with their skulls. Xander learns this the hard way in one episode.
• DuckTales (1987):
  • "A DuckTales Valentine": Given that the episode's conflict involves Scrooge ending up with something that belongs to an Olympian, it's a given that much of the cast found themselves getting into fights with extremely powerful beings.
    • Scrooge refuses to return Aphroducky's arrows, pushes her out of his office and shuts the door. He doesn't change his mind about giving the arrows back even after Aphroducky has blasted the door in with her magic. Aphroducky easily overpowers him.
    • Webby sticks Aphroducky with one of the arrows to make her stop messing with Scrooge. Later, she and the boys attempt to replicate it to undo the spell (and succeed at the end).
    • Launchpad shoots Vulcan (who at the moment towers into the sky and has been flinging destructive blasts of magic) in the face with a missile when he arrives at McDuck mansion to kill Scrooge for planning to marry Aphroducky. Thankfully, Vulcan only grabs and throws his plane away, resulting in Launchpad crashing but ending up unharmed.
  • DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp: Scrooge insults and tries to attack Merlock, a sorcerer who can shapeshift into a griffin and was ruthless even to sink Atlantis.
• Played for Laughs in the DuckTales (2017) episode "Jaw$!" where Webby and Lena are having a slumber party and the triplets try to start a pillow fight. They quickly acknowledge that this was a bad idea.
  Huey: Why did we pick a fight with Webby?
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • Ed is unbelievably strong. We're talking strong enough to casually lift a house and drop it on someone's head. Yet he allows himself to get bullied by almost everyone. Sadly, he's just too stupid to realize he could probably kick Kevin's ass. In the movie he does kick the ass of Eddy's much feared older brother though. His strength can be seen in the episode where he was in a bad mood. He inspired genuine fear in his little sister Sarah, he brought his strength to bear against the same people who usually have no trouble antagonizing him, and in lieu of drumming his fingers impatiently against the tree stump he was sitting on, he dug tracks into it with his fingernails. Hell, even the skies darkened over him. It didn't help that Eddy thinks that Ed was in a bad mood for no reason at all and badgered him to get over it and be happy again. Good thing he went back to his usual, goofy, lovable self by the end of the episode (he was in a bad mood because he had a pebble in his shoe).
  • "A Case of Ed" has Eddy (with Ed just following what Eddy is doing) take advantage of Kevin's grounding to mercilessly annoy him, which culminates in them sealing his entire house up with bricks. Sure enough, towards the end, Kevin "gets out early for good behavior" and gives them a well-earned thrashing (with some help from Double D, who was also the butt of one of their pranks).
  • Eddy in general does this a lot to any character more powerful physically than him, mostly to Kevin and Sarah, completely ignoring the many beatings he, along with his friends, had suffered from the two, especially the latter, who Eddy even taunted gleefully in one episode, ending with predictable results.
• Played with in Ever After High. A lot of people covertly rebel against destiny (or want to), but none of them have the courage to do it openly...until Raven, a budding Evil Sorceress who regularly scorches flowers into ash and polymorphs people by accident, proclaims in front of a crowd of hundreds that destiny can go fuck itself. Traditionalist characters like Apple and Milton make vaguely insulting attempts to persuade Raven otherwise, but these fail because 1), Raven is already despised by almost everyone, their opinions make no difference, and B), how do you punish someone who can turn you into a chicken?
• Family Guy:
  • Peter visits Australia and during a walk, he comes up to a sleeping crocodile. He starts poking the crocodile with a stick, yelling, "Wake up, sleepyhead!" Subverted when after a few pokes, a koala flies out of nowhere and latches on to Peter's face.
  • "Dial Meg for Murder", aka The Dog Bites Back.
  • Whenever other kids pick on Enfant Terrible Stewie, which doesn't usually end well for them. Somewhat understandable since most of them are toddlers, and don't have the best judgement even if they know about Stewie's intelligence.
• Demona from Gargoyles thinks it a wise idea to bully and manhandle Puck (yes, the trickster spirit) into granting her wishes. While he is fairly easygoing about this for most of the episode (though he toils endlessly with her), once Demona finally managed to push his Berserk Button, he thinks up an extremely nasty bit of karmic punishment that won't do Demona's state of mind any favors.^note She wanted him to give her the ability to stay flesh and blood during the day. He does, but now instead of turning into inert stone, she turns human. Painfully.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • Nergal Junior is constantly bullied in school. Even though everyone knows he's a borderline-Eldritch Abomination shapeshifter with electric tentacles.
  • The show could practically be titled Taunting the Reaper. The entire premise requires that The Grim Reaper never snap under constant torment and do away with the kids. Justified by the fact that Billy has an IQ in the negatives and Mandy is scarier than Grim is.
  • Mandy herself has no supernatural powers but is malicious enough to terrify most creatures who do. This doesn't prevent her from being the favourite target of Alpha Bitch Mindy.
• Gumby:
  • A literal example occurs in the episode "The Elephant and the Dragon". Both creatures work for a storybook king (the Elephant as manual labor, the Dragon as a castle guard), but the Elephant keeps picking arguments with the Dragon. This pisses off the Dragon, who torches people's houses with his breath. To stop their arguing, Gumby uses a back-hoe to do the Elephant's job just as efficiently and without arguing with the Dragon (and without torched houses). The Elephant takes the hint and apologizes for causing so much trouble. As for what they were fighting about, the Elephant keeps asserting that dragons are mythological, and therefore shouldn't exist. The Dragon torches houses to prove that he's real.
  • In an episode that has Gumby, Goo, and Prickle in The Big City, a mugger (with an attack dog) tries to rob the trio in an elevator after Gumby buys a new guitar. Prickle stands up to the thief and threatens to incinerate his pooch if the mugger doesn't call it off. The mugger doesn't. Cue Prickle breathing a huge plume of fire. The murderous mutt is reduced to a whimpering puppy, and the mugger runs away after the elevator reaches the ground floor!
• Like in the original movie, Adonis from Hercules: The Animated Series doesn't realize the danger in bullying someone who can throw a mountain at you and break the surroundings by accident. It finally catches up to him when he antagonizes Gaia, who nearly kills him before he manages to appease her.
• Hey Arnold!:
  • Several episodes deal with people (usually Sid and Stinky), teasing either Harold or Big Patty, either of which can and will beat the crap out of them in retaliation.
  • "Stoop Kid" has the episode's titular character finally growing the toughness to leave his stoop. Harold, who was not aware of this event, casually mocks the Stoop Kid for staying on his stoop... which promptly leads to the Stoop Kid jumping off of his stoop. Harold freaks out and gets chased by the Stoop Kid.
    Stoop Kid: "COME HERE, FAT BOY! I'M GONNA ROLL YOU DOWNTOWN!"
• This happens to Lucius on Jimmy Two-Shoes. As a child, he was bullied by his teacher, despite knowing full well that he was the future ruler of Miseryville and that he'd have the resources to fight back one day. Even nowadays the weavils and the Rodeo Clowns love to pick fights with him despite having an entire army at his beck and call. Even Heloise is guilty of this at times, though in her case it's because he's so reliant on her help to govern Miseryville that he can't really punish her.
• Kaeloo:
  • Kaeloo has the power of Hulking Out when angered, sometimes involuntarily. Despite this, Pretty, Mr. Cat and Stumpy annoy her all the time. Mr. Cat has a reason for this, but the others don't.
  • In Episode 213, Kaeloo mistakenly assumes that Mr. Cat has pulled a full-on Heel–Face Turn and starts telling everyone, unaware that Mr. Cat is in fact stuck in a Heel–Face Revolving Door. Having heard the rumor, a pair of sheep walk up to Mr. Cat and start trying to bully him for "going soft", only for Mr. Cat to beat them unconscious in a matter of seconds.
  • In Episode 214, Mr. Cat flicks one of Lavanade's ghosts on the forehead, which ends about as well as you'd expect.
• Kim Possible:
  • Bonnie Rockwaller's constant petty harassment of Kim — despite knowing full well that if Kim decided she'd had enough, her only choices would be "run" or "catch a beating" (and in fact breaks down crying the one time Kim seems to be about to do just that). A cut scene in So the Drama have Ron and Kim discuss this. Kim actually looks like she's considering it for a moment, but ultimately decides against it as beating on Bonnie would be a mark on her permanent record.
  • And A Sitch in Time has Drakken, Monkey Fist, and Killigan go back in time to keep Kim from becoming a crimefighter. When they bully Ron while the duo were in kindergarten, Kim trounces them. Later, Drakken wants another crack at it.
  • One of the dumbest examples, from "Graduation": Ron, who has just become the Mystical Monkey Master, throws Warhok across the landscape and manifests enough power to bring down a bunch of tripods, making the idiocy of messing with him clear. Warhok and Warmonga still try to attack him.
  • The villains aren't immune to this, either:
    • Señor Senior Sr. has had this happen to him twice. "Animal Attraction" had him losing his billionaires' club membership after its president, Phillippe Bullion, learned about his ongoing rivalry with Kim, where he would at least expect him not to show up there anymore. Then in "Triple S", he was swindled by Vinnie Wheeler, a Con Man posing as a financial advisor, and lost his fortune and private island. Neither Bullion nor Wheeler thought they would face any retaliation from the Seniors for their respective deeds, but they would realize too late that antagonizing a father-and-son duo known to be international supervillains would be a terrible mistake, with the former nearly losing his hand to frostbite and being crushed by an icy stalactite (along with Kim and Ron) after they constructed a giant cryogenic device to freeze over his club, and the latter offering $2 billion for Senior Sr.'s capture after he took it upon himself to steal back the family fortune from him. The situation with Wheeler resulted in Senior Jr. using the reward money to buy back their island, then he'd break his father out of prison after the fact yet, Wheeler narrowly avoids legal ramifications for his crimes.
• Looney Tunes:
  • In "Night of the Living Duck", Daffy Duck dreams he's a lounge singer performing for an audience of classic movie monsters. He makes the mistake of trying to roast Schmodzilla ("Schmodzilla is just like any unemployed actor, except when he 'pounds the pavement', it registers a ten on the Richter scale!") and nearly gets eaten for his troubles.
  • In the Daffy and Porky Pig cartoon, "My Little Duckaroo", Daffy (as The Masked Avenger) repeatedly sees clear evidence that Nasty Canasta is far stronger and tougher than Daffy is, yet he still challenges Canasta to a fistfight. After Canasta bursts his shirt clear off merely by flexing his muscles, Daffy still persists in accusing Canasta of being too chicken to fight, albeit with a look on his face which says, "oh heck, I'm going to die."
  • Tex Avery's "A Day at the Zoo" from 1939 has a recurring gag with Egghead (Elmer Fudd's prototype) teasing a lion despite constant scolding from the narrator who warns him that this will end bad for him. The short ends with the lion sleeping peacefully, leading the narrator to conclude that the boy finally went home, but it turns out that the lion actually ate him alive.
    Egghead: [a la Lou Costello] I'm a ba-a-ad boy!
• One episode of The Looney Tunes Show features Gossamer getting bullied by his classmates. Though wishy-washy at that point in the episode, Gossamer is nevertheless an eight-foot tall hulking monster that could easily play basketball with his entire class (with them being the ball!)
• The Moville Mysteries episode "The Novelty Kid" centers around Norman, a greedy jerk who thinks he can swindle the Ace Novelty company just as easily like his schoolmates, only for said company to turn him into one of their products after he refuses their final notice.
• In My Life as a Teenage Robot, the Krust cousins take every opportunity to torment and belittle XJ-9 socially, attempting to guarantee that Jenny never, ever becomes anything close to popular. XJ-9, a.k.a. Jenny, is a cheerful, sweet-natured girl who also happens to be a walking, talking, sapient weapons system capable of destroying entire alien battle fleets single-handed. In one episode, with the aid of a more aggressive friend, Jenny finally shows them exactly what she can do to make their lives miserable. Even after she drives them into a breakdown, they don't learn from the experience.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: In "Woe is Me", mess Woebegone finds himself in started when he and two other kids decided to have fun by bullying a known witch and antagonizing her for no reason. This endeavor, unsurprisingly, turned out very badly for them — most so Woebegone, who ended up with a bad-luck curse on his head.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
    • Happens with an actual dragon in "Dragonshy". A napping dragon is causing problems for everypony by blowing smoke into the town with its snoring. Rainbow Dash's oh so brilliant strategy to make the dragon leave is to yell at it to get lost, then kick it in the face. It takes her less than a second to realize that this was a really bad idea. It is then defied by Fluttershy who yells at him for his Disproportionate Retribution (the kick annoyed him at best) and that he could have handled it without trying to kill them all. That said, though, they WERE her friends to the point that hurting them would anger her a lot, making Fluttershy a "dragon" herself (though to be fair, nobody was in the right mind at the time to realize that).
    • In "Ponyville Confidential", everypony gets targeted by the Cutie Mark Crusaders' made-up hit pieces, even Princess Celestia; the pony who could inflict divine retribution at the slightest provocation — and most ponies think she absolutely would.
    • In "Make New Friends but Keep Discord", ponies at the Grand Galloping Gala decide to heckle Discord when he gets up on stage and gives a crappy stand-up routine. Considering he basically has unlimited powers, a Hair-Trigger Temper, was once equatable to Satan for the evil stuff he pulled, and already having a bad night, this goes about as well as you would expect. Spike and Big Macintosh pull a similar stunt in a later episode, but Discord's retaliation of warping them into their imaginary Lawyer-Friendly Cameo version of Dungeons & Dragons ends up being a case of Cursed with Awesome instead.
    • The Great and Powerful Trixie has an habit of picking up trouble with ponies and beings who are clearly stronger than her. For starters, she still considers Twilight (a powerful alicorn princess by the series' end) a worthy rival, even after she freed her from the corrupting influence of the Alicorn Amulet, and constantly tries her best to upstage her. This is best demonstrated in the Season 6 episode "No Second Prances", where she makes friends with Twilight's pupil Starlight Glimmer with the intent of turning her away from her mentor just so Trixie could finally beat Twilight at something. Even after Trixie does become a genuine friend for Starlight, she still enjoys annoying Twi whenever she has a change. And in the Season 6 finale, she has no qualms insulting Discord, a Mad God with near-omnipotent powers and quite a temper, and even calls him out often for how annoying he is.
    • In "All Bottled Up", the main conflict comes from Trixie's rather careless behavior as Starlight tries to teach her magic lessons. While she's been redeemed, this is Starlight Glimmer we're talking about, an unicorn with a power comparable to that of Twilight Sparkle before her ascension to alicornhood and who used her magic to enslave an entire pony village and force her own ideology upon them to rule over them unopposed until the Mane Six showed up. To be fair, this time Trix was being mostly Innocently Insensitive rather than acting out of true malice.
    • In multiple episodes, Ponyville as a whole decides to gravely mistreat some or all of the Mane Six^note Fluttershy in "Putting Your Hoof Down", Twilight and her family in "Once Upon a Zeppelin", and all six in "Fame and Misfortune". The same group of close-knit friends who have personal ties with the ruler of the nation and have taken down five god-tier world ending villains, and consist of a powerful Earth Pony, an incredibly fast Wonderbolt, a pony who can stare others into submission, a Fighting Clown with Deadpool levels of Medium Awareness, a unicorn who once bitched an entire pack of Diamond Dogs into letting her go, and an Alicorn who is one of the most powerful ponies to ever exist, even before her ascension, while two of their closest friends consist of a dragon who saved the Crystal Empire twice and another unicorn who mastered several advanced spells including Cutie Mark removal and time travel. Let's just say the citizens of Ponyville are VERY lucky the Mane Six are Technical Pacifists because you could probably make an entire TV Tropes page listing all the ways these ponies (and dragon) could retaliate and get away with it scot-free.
    • In Season 8, Chancellor Neighsay is shown to be racist towards all non-ponies, even those that are allies to Equestria, due to believing they are "threats" to their way of life. He openly insults the ambassadors to other countries simply because they aren't ponies and their young students attending Twilight's School of Friendship, which consist of creatures such as griffons, dragons, yaks, changelings, and hippogriffs. After he insults them one too many times the angry leaders nearly get physical with him before Celestia manages to calm them all down and Twilight shows that Neighsay does not speak for the rest of them. This attitude of Neighsay's also extends to anyone who associates with non-ponies, with his later appearances have him showing complete disrespect for Twilight Sparkle, a princess of Equestria and alicorn, who has authority far greater than what his position gives him, due to teaching friendship to non-ponies, believing that she is putting Equestria in danger because of it. This attitude comes back to bite him in the season finale when he finds himself being saved by the young non-pony students he had disrespected for so long, and they end up being the ones to save Equestria thanks to the lessons they learned at the School of Friendship.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • In the episode "Telephonies" involves the Gangreen Gang making Prank Calls to the girls by pretending to be the Mayor and claiming Mojo Jojo, Fuzzy Lumpkins and Him were committing crimes. While the "Dragon" in this case could be defined as the girls themselves, the Gang found out, to their regret, that the three villains were even bigger Dragons who did not like to be bullied.
  • In the reboot, the girls end up bullied when they transfer to an elementary school when the older children mock them for being young. This is despite the fact the girls regularly save the city and have superpowers.
• Oscar Proud from The Proud Family seems to take glee in tormenting animals (and people) proven to be much more powerful than he is. Special mention goes to the time in a flashback when Oscar (as a kid, no less) torments an elephant in a zoo with his friends. When Oscar meets up with the elephant as an adult, it goes as well as you'd expect (due to elephants never forgetting).
• Played for Laughs in the Rick and Morty episode "The Jerrick Trap", where the Villain of the Week is a relatively-small time alien mob boss. After one of his mooks mistakenly kidnaps Morty he immediately panics and starts trying to placate him, Rick, and Jerry who the latter did a "Freaky Friday" Flip with. After Rick & Jerry insult him he lets his pride override his common sense and tries to (in Rick's words) "kill God". As he's bleeding out, he admits that he was a fool while Rick & Jerry express Sympathy for the Devil and respect his attempt to assert control over his life.
• Samurai Jack: No matter how many robot hordes and Eldritch Abominations he defeats by himself or how much his reputation spreads, bounty hunters always target Jack with hopes of gaining the astronomically large price that Aku has put on his head. Aku himself seems to be the only exception; he's smart enough never to challenge Jack in a straight-up fight, except on one occasion in which the Samurai agreed to refrain from using his sword if Aku refrained from using his powers, and when the going gets tough, he always gets going.
  • It becomes even clearer in Season 5; Aku realized that he had no chance of beating Jack as long as he carried his magic sword, so instead he destroyed all of the portals back to the past, intending to let the progression of time itself destroy him. Unfortunately for Aku, the portal he created that sent Jack to the future in the first place granted the samurai immortality. In "XCVI", the Scotsman puts it best, telling Aku to his face that he's washed up and living in fear that Jack will one day come to defeat him. Aku promptly vaporizes him, but thanks to some Celtic magic he comes back as a ghost.
• The Evil Horde from She-Ra: Princess of Power will often attempt this with the normally easy-going Sorrowful the Dragon. Then they expand their bullying to his friends only to watch him crush a tank with his fist and decide better of it.
• The Simpsons:
  • Parodied in "The Bart Wants What It Wants" with one of Ranier Wolfcastle's films which involves him going undercover as a nerd at a high school. Ranier Wolfcastle is a huge, musclebound actor, but he's dressed as a nerd so obviously some bullies try to pick on him. They even lampshade it by saying "Well, well, a big, musclebound nerd! Just more of you to pick on." It ends with Wolfcastle throwing one of the bullies through the chest of the other.
  • Another hilarious example in "Bart vs. Australia", when the Simpson family travels to Australia where Bart is to apologize for his prank calls. Homer notices the guard at the gate and mistakes him for a British Royal Guard, making funny faces at him for a few seconds until the guard punches him hard in the face. "No sir! US Marine Corps, sir!" Later he starts jumping back and forth across the USA-Australia line in front of the embassy:
    Homer: Look at me, I'm in Australia! Now I'm in America! *hops back and forth* Australia! America! Australia! America!
    * Marine punches him hard as he lands on the US side*
    Marine: Here in America we don't tolerate that kind of crap, sir!
  • "Bye Bye Nerdie" has an unwilling version by Nelson. After Lisa learns that nerd sweat causes bullies to beat them up, she tests it by swabbing some on Drederick Tatum. Nelson is thus compelled to bully Tatum, all while begging him not to retaliate.
    Drederick Tatum: (rolling up sleeves) I'm afraid you've left me little recourse.
  • In "Thank God It's Doomsday", Homer tries this on God himself when he is raptured but his family isn't. When God refuses to send Homer back for them, Homer delivers this warning to the Almighty's face:
    Homer: You've just made a powerful enemy! (runs around knocking things over and otherwise vandalizing Heaven)
  • "The Springfield Connection" has Snake scam Homer with a rigged game of 3-Card Monte and then flee when called on it. Marge chases him for a few blocks and corners him, and then realizes it was probably a bad idea to chase the much larger muscular criminal when he turns and brandishes a switchblade on her. Thankfully Marge gets a good burst of adrenaline at just the right time and lays him out with a trashcan lid.
  • "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" has Barney constantly bugging Joe Frazier while he's in Moe's. Joe is a champion boxer. After an evening of this, Joe finally reaches breaking point and they step outside. They're not even out the door a second before Barney's blood and teeth start flying.
  • In "The Cartridge Family", a soccer riot arises and Homer wants to do some rioting, but makes the mistake of picking on one of Groundskeeper Willie's Scottish soccer hooligan friends.
    Marge: Homer, we've got to get out of here!
    Homer: Oh, but I wanted to do some rioting.
    (shoves one of the Scottish hooligans)
    Scottish Hooligan: Jobbers cobknots, ya mucker!
    Homer: (runs away) All done!
• South Park:
  • Cartman gets his humancentiPad taken away and he starts cursing God. Cue Cartman getting struck by lightning and him sobbing in the hospital.
  • Another example comes after Stan and Kyle have watched Cartman take some rather extreme revenge. They decide it would be a good idea if they never pissed Eric Cartman off again. Cartman is not superpowered though, just sociopathic.
• Two-Legs Joe of Spliced is a Reality Warper who can destroy entire towns when he gets mad. Doesn't stop Peri and Entree from deliberately bugging him to no end.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the episode Big Sister Sam, Squidward repeatedly insults Patrick's older sister Sam, even though she is 1) much bigger than him, 2) EXTREMELY short-tempered, and 3) super strong. Naturally, pain ensues for Squidward.
  • Despite being tough herself, even Sandy fell under this trope once in "Sandy, SpongeBob, & The Worm." This was combined with Break the Haughty. Despite the Bikini Bottomites and SpongeBob's constant warnings about how big and monstrous the Alaskan Bull Worm was, Sandy refuses to take them seriously. This bites her in the butt when she finds out that the "worm" she was fighting was actually it's tongue. Sandy then realized that she was seriously outclassed and runs for her life, getting a relentless I Warned You from SpongeBob.
  • In "Jellyfish Jam", SpongeBob warns Squidward that the jellyfish don't like his music. Squidward, who by this point is too furious to listen to reason, decides to antagonize them further by blaring his awful clarinet-playing through loudspeakers. This does not end well for him.
• On Squidbillies, what is Early Cuyler's response to being declared a protected species? Get drunk and pick a fight with a jaguar.
  Early: More like a faguar!
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • In the Season 4 episode "Deception", Obi-Wan Kenobi has to be disguised as a criminal named Rako Hardeen with the intent of extracting information regarding a plot to kidnap Chancellor Palpatine. Undercover as Hardeen, Obi-Wan is taken to the Republic Judiciary Central Detention Center. During lunchtime, a Karkarodon inmate approaches the table Obi-Wan is eating his dinner at and begins taunting "Hardeen" (despite the fact that Hardeen has quite a reputation among the criminal underworld) and even drinks his beverage. Kenobi retaliates by abruptly planting his fork into the offending alien's hand and threatening to eat him, scaring the beejezus out of the inmate who runs away cowardly shortly afterwards.
  • In the episode "Eminence", Bo-Katan has the brilliant idea of insulting Darth Maul, comparing him to a Jedi and calling him weak. He promptly chokes her with the Force, only letting her live as an example.
• When Peridot from Steven Universe insults Yellow Diamond the first time, it was through a video call, leading to Peridot getting the final word in before hanging up. When she decides to do it again in person, Yellow Diamond poofs her without breaking a sweat.
• On one episode of the animated series of Street Fighter, as Guile and Blanka are in Iraq, some of the people there call the latter (a big green creature with electrical powers and anger issues) a monster and throw rocks at him.
• In the Testament: The Bible in Animation "Creation and the Flood" Satan tries to overthrow God. It goes about as well as you'd expect since He's, ya know, God.
• In ThunderCats (2011) a rare justified example, when young Catfolk protagonist Lion-O pulls a Go Through Me in defense of some stockaded Lizard prisoners, the Powder Keg Crowd of townspeople harassing them rapidly whip out the Torches and Pitchforks calling for a Vigilante Execution of the Lizards. The mob leader's response to Lion-O's protests is to call him "Lizard Lover" and threaten to put him in the stocks. Though Lion-O is a formidable Bare-Fisted Monk and Thundera's crown prince, soon joined by his brother Prince Tygra, their authority does absolutely nothing to prevent the brawl that breaks out, because Lion-O has a longstanding reputation as a Cloud Cuckoolander and Category Traitor in his culture of Fantastic Racists.
• The Transformers:
  • In one episode Blitzwing, having managed to temporarily overthrown Megatron, thought it was a good idea to make a bargain with the Constructicons (the group of Decepticon with the ability to combine into one giant powerful robot) and then go back on his word by telling them to get lost. Unsurprisingly, they answer by forming Devastator and kicking his ass.
  • Starscream does this on a regular basis, insulting, defying and making absolutely zero shrewdness about his plans to overthrow Megatron right to his face. At least one point, Megatron finally lost his temper with Starscream's impudence and gave him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, even ripping out some of his hardware afterwards so he'd stop whining.
• Transformers: Prime provides an almost literal example with Starscream's initial treatment of Predaking. The Decepticon repeatedly insults and strikes the beast, despite the creature being much bigger and stronger than he is. This all stops when the Predacon demonstrates the ability to speak and transform... If only because Predaking's first words make it very clear where the two of them stand.

  Predaking: Strike me again, and I will bury that rod in your spark.

  • He still hasn't learned his lesson, as he repeats the same with the slightly smaller Skylynx and Darksteel. Again a literal example, since they too are Cybertronian dragons. By the end of Predacons Rising, Skylynx and Darksteel are allied with the aforementioned Predaking, and we don't actually get to see what state they leave Starscream in. ^note Eventually, he turns up alive
    Predaking: I am not here to seize thrones, Starscream, but to settle scores.
  • Earlier in the series he attempts something similar to an insecticon, after it finds an energon crystal Starscream immediately demands it to give the crystal to him, despite the fact the insecticon is several times his size and has massive claws and teeth, it ignores him at first but attacks when he keeps bothering it and he's only saved when Airchnid calls the insecticon back.
• In TRON: Uprising, Beck has a tendency to talk back and do this to the Black Guards, whilst in his civilian persona. Thankfully for Beck, his friends usually intervene before things turn bad.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • An early episode combines this with Mugging the Monster. A random bar owner constantly insults Brock's hairdo, and while he likely did not know that Brock is a secret agent who normally murders people who show him disrespect and has a license to kill (which he likes to use with gusto but had expired at that point), Brock was still twice the man's size (in muscle) and had biceps bigger than the man's head. Combined with his perpetual angry scowl, you'd think he'd know better than to insult the guy who looks like he could bench press an armoured vehicle and is looking for any excuse to blow off steam. And of course the first thing Brock does after his License to Kill is renewed? Show it to the guy, who insulted him again on the way in. The next time we see the bartender, he's sporting a fancy new eyepatch.
  • Downplayed in the same episode when Brock is training to requalify and Hank gets a little too into playing Drill Sergeant Nasty to "motivate" him. Despite being the kid's bodyguard, Brock easily shuts him up by reminding Hank of the obvious:
    Hank: "You're NOTHING! You're WEAK! Why do you even WANT to be a secret agent, boy?! You think you're good enough?!"
    Brock: "Hank. Seriously; when I get my license back, I'm allowed to kill you."
    Hank: *gulps* "Sorry, Brock."
  • An example of this is why The Guild came up with their arching ranking system. Back in the days of Jonas Venture, a pathetic villain named Turnbuckle walked onto the Venture compound, snatched Rusty, and challenged Team Venture to a fight. A gigantic super-scientist adventurer, an ex-RAF soldier with a cane sword, and a Trigger-Happy lunatic on "Go Juice". Turnbuckle got his ass kicked, and then his brains blown out. So the Guild introduced their ranking system to keep it from happening again.
  • As part of his training to be a true supervillain, Augustus St. Cloud decides to harass Rose Whalen, elderly mother of his arch-nemesis Billy Quizboy. Unfortunately, Col. Gentleman was there and despite being elderly is still large and strong enough to casually lift him by his cuffs. Furthermore, Rose is a retired crimefighter who upon learning that he's her son's nemesis decides to deal with him herself. The next scene, St. Cloud is badly bruised.
• Percedal from Wakfu has a bad habit of doing this. The worst example of this was when he taunted Rushu, the king of the demonic Shushus and one of the most powerful and omnicidal beings in the setting. Fortunately Rubilax invokes the Rush right before Rushu is about to incinerate Percedal for his impudence.
• Wander over Yonder: In "The Black Cube", the titular Black Cube of Darkness is a soul-sucking piece of Sinister Geometry who is The Dreaded on his home planet...even when he tries to do good. In particular, there is a trio of street kids who seem to have a death wish as they spend the whole day with nothing better to do than to taunt him and make his life even worse than it is. This escalates when one of the kids ends up falling in the water, and even when the Black Cube tries to save him, he refuses the Cube's help! It all accumulates when the Black Cube, after saving the kid by temporarily stealing his soul so he would stop resisting, faces an angry mob. The Black Cube goes through a Freak Out and ends up stealing Wander's soul in the process. Sylvia calls out the mob for how they've been treating the Black Cube, which makes them realize how terrible they all have been. At this point, the Black Cube's life starts changing for the better and cements his Heel–Face Turn by joining the rebels in the finale against Lord Dominator.
• X-Men '97: In "Lifedeath - Part 2", Professor Xavier pulls the minds of members of the Shi'ar Empire in the midst of a coup into the Astral Realm to teach them a lesson on the weaknesses of imperialism and the inherently harmful acts of the Empire's conquests. When Deathbird proclaims the Empire was built on the conquest of their perceived lessers, Xavier casually chides her for speaking out of turn and puts her back behind a desk in his psychic classroom, her taunts silenced by an apple in her mouth.

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