Butt Monkey / The DCU

The DCU

Comic Books

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • While Killer Moth had a ridiculously bright costume when he first appeared, he was treated as a threat, an Evil Counterpart to Batman. Then, they made the mistake of having him be the first foe for the newest addition to the Bat-Family, Batgirl, the end result was turning him from a threat to a laughingstock instantly. No one took him seriously anymore. During Underworld Unleashed, they tried to save his character by turning him into the monstrous Charaxes and he was still ignored even when he managed to ambush Tim in Robin (1993), only to be killed by Superboy-Prime in Infinite Crisis.
  • Kite Man is the butt of many jokes because of his ridiculous-looking gimmick. Even in the late 2010's when Kite Man got a boost in popularity and a catch phrase ("Kite Man. Hell yeah") he still was derided.
  • Normally, being part of Batman's rogue gallery grants you Joker Immunity, but not for Professor Milo, who has the dubious distinction of having been Killed Off for Real not once, but twice in truly gruesome deaths in two different animated series:
    • In the Justice League Unlimited episode "The Doomsday Sanction", Professor Milo is killed after awakening Doomsday. He thought he could convince Doomsday to kill Amanda Waller, whom he wanted revenge on, but he was gravely mistaken.
    • In the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Gorillas in Our Midst!" The Spectre converts him into cheese and lets some of Milo's mutant rats feed on him.
    • If we consider that in the novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Milo is secluded in Arkham while he insists he is perfectly sane, that makes him the Butt-Monkey of the Batman villains.
• Wally West is kind of the go-to Butt Monkey for The Flash writers. However bad any other speedster has it, they can always look at Wally and thank their lucky stars they're not him.
• The poor Jimmy Olsen when was a constant target of Superdickery.
• The Jokester, a heroic doppleganger of The Joker from Earth-3. The entire multiverse really has it in for this guy, which makes sense, if the Joker is a terrifying villain who never suffers any consequences, his exact opposite would be a Failure Hero who constantly takes it in the teeth. A brief synopsis of his life story:
  • He was a friendless, bullied loser throughout his childhood;
  • When he grew up, he found love with Evelyn Dent, the future Three-Face, who abruptly left him while pregnant with their daughter;
  • He became a successful standup comedian by mocking Owlman, only for Owlman to murder his manager/Only Friend and disfigure his face;
  • He then became a vigilante hero and reunited with his daughter and Evelyn, only to learn that she had remarried and had left him because she had developed Multiple Personality Disorder and two out of her three personalities hated him;
  • He began to build a relationship with his daughter and even managed to woo Evelyn's other personalities, only for the Crime Syndicate to attack their hideout, leaving Jokester as seemingly the sole survivor;
  • Deciding he had no reason to stay on Earth-3, he joined up with Donna Troy, Kyle Rayner and Jason Todd, stepping through an inter-dimensional portal just in time for Evelyn, who was alive and racing to get to him, to tearfully watch him disappear;
  • On his first dimension hop he was unceremoniously shot in the back, and died on a world that was not his own, far away from anyone who ever loved him, unmourned and never spoken of again, having achieved nothing.
• Garryn Bek from L.E.G.I.O.N. is almost always the most picked on member of the cast. Nobody in the whole galaxy takes as much punishment and humiliation as Garryn Bek, at least for the first forty issues or so.
• Supergirl in Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade is convinced that her new homeworld hates her. Her schoolmates mock her, her teachers are sadistic jerks, and her powers malfunction at the most inopportune times.
  Supergirl: This planets hates me.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Virginia True is one of the Holliday Girls, but unlike the others never really gets a chance to shine while fighting bad guys. She gets knocked out and nearly drowns during an underwater fight, kidnapped and replaced by an agent of the Saturnian Empire without her friends even discovering the deception and then knocked out of the fight during her escape.

Films

Films

• Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo: Beast Boy, he's constantly punched and beaten. Most of it comes from Raven, from beginning to end.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• Tommy Merlyn on Arrow. The poor guy was just a lightning rod for bad luck and every time something good happened, something horrible was waiting around the corner to beat him down again. Before the series started, he saw his mother murdered and was neglected by his father, who simply abandoned him for two years. As an adult, he loses his best friend for five years, loses his fortune after his father cuts him off and then tries to make him close down a clinic that his mother cared about, he finds out Oliver and his father are both murderers, his relationship with Laurel falls apart because he can't keep Oliver's secret and she still has feelings for him and he gets beaten up and nearly murdered by Huntress. And then he dies saving Laurel by being impaled and crushed by concrete.
• Smallville's version of Jimmy Oslen becomes something of a snowballing butt monkey, especially once Lex the Woobie left the show after Season 7.
  • Apart from getting his share of the standard amount of grievous physical trauma experienced by most characters on the show, Jimmy's buttmonkeyness was evident early on by his being generally treated like dirt as the designated love interest for Chloe Sullivan, but ballooned in Season Eight, where his not-unfounded jealousy over Clark is the least of his problems, what with getting constantly and very obviously lied to by everyone and most especially by his fiancée. His joy at discovering that Clark is the Red-Blue Blurr is crushed through an elaborate deception by his closest friends, and his boss refuses to take him seriously. Things ratchet up several notches when his wedding gets literally crashed by Doomsday who just about eviscerates him. After being thus benched for a good chunk of the season (in which his wife oddly does not seem to spend much time visiting him in hospital), he becomes addicted to painkillers, discovers that Davis Bloom is a serial killer and when he tries to warn his friends nobody believes him, not even his wife. He gets repeatedly beaten, tortured and tied up, keeps getting lied to over and over again by Chloe, is dismissed as a crazy junkie by all his friends, even witnesses that Chloe apparently has romantic feelings for the guy he discovered is a killer, precipitating the total collapse of his marriage (which doesn't even rate more than a handwaved mention of their divorce). To top it all off, gets gratuitously murdered in the finale by the same guy he tried to warn everyone about. To add insult to injury, his funeral scene reveals that he wasn't even the "real" Jimmy Olsen from the comics that he had hitherto been presented as being, but rather a "Henry James Olson", evidently an older brother to the canonical "James Bartholomew Olsen".
    • Apparently it really sucks to be Jimmy Olsen, even when you're actually not.
  • Lana Lang is supposed to be The Woobie, but really comes off more like this. Of course, given many fans' opinions of her, this also makes her The Chew Toy.
• Wonder Woman (1975): Harold Farnum spends most of his time being an annoyance that is only barely tolerated due to his father being a Senator. His one contribution was, while trapped in a locked cell, to make an arc pencil that would possibly free them in a few hundred years. Wonder Woman breaks the door open to save the audience from watching him grow old and die before escaping.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Whoever wants to be the Mayor of a Wretched Hive like Gotham is asking for it: Mayor Hill even once was framed up by the Clock King to be a Butt-Monkey in revenge for an Advice Backfire.
  • Harley Quinn was a relatively rare female example before she Took a Level in Badass.
  • Harvey Bullock is an out-of-universe example. He's given token respect by the characters, but part of the fun for the audience of seeing any episode with Bullock in it is waiting for him to stuff junk food in his face or say or do something stupid. Kudos to Gotham for doing its part to salvage this much-maligned character.
  • Sid the Squid is a manchild and self-admitted idiot and the events of his only episode "The Man Who Killed Batman" sees him become a target for many of Gotham's other criminals after he seemingly kills Batman by accident. Yet, A closer look at his character reveals that he also an inversion as despite going to prison after the still-alive Batman saves him from Rupert Throne, Bats himself points out that Sid might actually have a good reputation in prison after what's happened and Sid concludes that going to prison was Worth It after he's greeted to cheers from his fellow inmates as the guy who almost killed Batman and made idiots of the Joker and Throne.
• The Batman: The Penguin seems to be the Butt Monkey of almost every episode he's ever made an appearance in, no matter how short it was. Heck, he was the movie's Butt Monkey! Though oddly enough, he wasn't one in "Team Penguin", simply because Killer Moth was.
• Bane of all people is this in Harley Quinn (2019), being an Adaptational Wimp (in terms of spirit) who gets pushed around by all the other villains despite the fact that he could easily break any one of them in half.
  • Kite Man to a lesser extent. Just like the other iterations of the character he's seen as a joke by pretty much every supervillain and is an Extreme Doormat who rarely stands up for himself, but he doesn't let it get to him much. However Poison Ivy, the only person who ever respected him, winds up cheating on him with Harley and ultimately leaves him for her.
• Justice League: The Flash tends to be seen as a clown and buffoon whose interest in the ladies far exceeds his ability to impress them. However, it's mitigated by the fact that when push comes to shove his teammates really do trust and respect him.
• Teen Titans (2003): Beast Boy. Poor guy even suffers in the Downer Ending. No wonder he's embarrassed that his first name is the same as that of a certain well-known cat. But he's much better off than Poor Doctor Light...
• Teen Titans Go!: Robin is generally disrespected by the other Titans and is mocked, injured, or ignored at least Once per Episode. But then again, Robin's a total jerk and control freak to his teammates who won't hesitate to whack them with his staff or foist laundry duties on Raven when it's his turn. Robin gets this doubly in crossover episodes where the rest of his team will faun over the guest stars and Robin is ignored by them.

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