Butt Monkey / Web Original

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• Achievement Hunter tends to do this to poor Kerry, especially in Let's Play Grand Theft Auto V. They put Kerry through a major hazing ritual (which had him doing a bunch of events while being mugged by the rest of the team) and when they moved him over to the Xbox One version of the game, they created a very ugly avatar for him.
  • Gavin Free is so bad at fails his page on the Rooster Teeth Wiki has a tab specifically for them. He's died in just about every possible way in Minecraft, usually at the most inopportune moments, he's been targeted by far more muggers than Kerry, and his list of fails is so long Geoff complained of being forced to team with him in a Destiny raid despite Gavin having the highest Light level of the party.
  • Matt Bragg also gets put through a lot, largely in part for his insanely hard custom gameplay maps and for his self-admittedly schlubby lifestyle. During several of the group's TTT videos, either Matt or Gavin will usually be the first killed off unless the traitors realize that they're Jesters and avoid trying to kill them to keep them from winning. As a prank to cement his moving into the main talent room, the group replaced his desk with a comically tiny shelf and a camping stool and then his real desk became their favorite target to chuck moonballs at. In more recent Minecraft videos, every time Matt finds and tames an animal, Ryan will be on a quest to kill said pets, culminating in Matt sneaking the horse and his mini-clone in a tiny pocket dimension away from Ryan. In return, Ryan killed the server.
  • Joe Lee, as one of the newest members of the group, gets ripped on by Michael and Alfredo, largely for being worse than Alfredo for being clueless in games that are not FPS shooters. While he does seem to quickly adapt and his aiming skills are equally, if not better, than Alfredo's, he still remains a punching bag for Michael. In fact, for the 2022 Extra Life, he takes Gavin's place in the highly anticipated segment of get pummeled by stuff with Michael, due to Gavin being out of the country on a prior commitment.
• Angel Hare: Francis. He's a Nervous Wreck who in the show is always involved in some disaster or crisis of faith, in the letters segments he seems to be all too aware of the strange things about the show but unable to explain (perhaps for fear of Gabby's anger), and even in the soundtrack video he's trapped in a hot air balloon trying to get Gabby to help (though to be fair to Gabby, she has headphones on and her eyes are closed so she probably doesn't notice his predicament). In the VCR copy of the show, he doesn't come to life when Gabby does and continues to follow the script oblivious to Gabby's deviations from it. In a previously missing episode of the in-universe show - the Easter special - he finally deviates from the script by painting ominous symbols on his Easter eggs, clearly trying to communicate misgivings about the whole arrangement - but even then, he fails.
• Brandon Farris makes himself this as part of his main channel. His intention is to humor his followers by either humiliating himself or causing accidents from trying and failing various life hack videos, many of which have the potential to backfire if done wrong. His friend Cameron is also likely to get this treatment in the course of trying some of the items Brandon has bought or competing with him in challenges.
• The Courier from Courier's Mind: Rise of New Vegas falls victim to Gunshots, broken limbs, laser burns and Cazador stings in his travels... all in the first two days of his journey.
• Anni from Coyle Command has to pay to work for Coyle Commander, and gets regularly abused by him. He doesn't seem to notice.
• Dan O'Brien is definitely this in Cracked's After Hours series of videos.
• While playing River City Ransom in GACKT Game Center, Takumi is always in the way of GACKT's fist's of fury
• The Cartoon Show has Tom, played by Doug Walker. The poor man has a rocket fall on him in every iteration of the theme song, and that's meant to "make his imagination grow".
• In Darwin's Soldiers, Shelton gets beat up a lot.
• The Yellow Guy is often the most criticized and bullied of the three main characters in Don't Hug Me I'm Scared.
  • The Yellow Guy gets all of his suggestions in the first episode slammed or ruined, including his clown picture and his favorite colour.
  • In the sequel, Tony beeps loudly at him until his ears bleed - something that does not happen to his friends because they cover their ears.
  • This continues in the third video, but not to the same extremes. Yellow Guy gets told that he can't love what he wants and must get married to a wife, against his will.
  • Yet again, Yellow Guy is the butt of the joke. In the fourth video he is interrupted by Duck Guy and smacked in the face twice by Colin.
  • Takes a disturbing turn in #5, when the Food Band tricks him into eating his only remaining friend.
  • It gets even worse with #6 which starts has him being dragged into a song about dreams against his will then he endures the horrors of the teachers both old and new getting swapped repeatedly when Red Guy messes with the big machine's controls and all he can do is cry and beg for it to stop.
• In The Derp Crew's gaming sessions, John Page has a bad tendency to make really bad plays and moves that compromise the others, especially in Shell Shock, and frequently takes abuse from most of the others, especially Chilled Chaos.
• Joe and Mimi for Sora in Digimon Resumido.
• From Door Monster's videos about Civilization, Enrico Dandolo, the leader of Venice. In the game, Venice is never allowed to have more than one city, but is given a lot of options to earn lots of gold. In the videos, he's treated as Upper-Class Twit, who's attempts at Screw the Rules, I Have Money! get laughed out of the room by the other leaders. Even aside from all the mockery, "denouncing Venice" is a major religion in the setting (a nod to the ability to found your own religion, and the tendency of the AI to denounce players), the other civilizations unanimously vote to embargo city states to cut him off from his only strength, and when Ghandi gets access to nuclear weapons, his first target is Venice's single city.
• Dream SMP:
  • Callahan gets killed quite often when he's online.
  • Jack's lack of luck or skill to back up his claims of grandiose leads to him being extremely easy to pick on and kill. No one really seems to take him seriously either. Additionally, in the early days of the SMP, due to his house's close proximity to L'Manburg and its Podium, strange activity often frequents Jack's house whether or not he's around, to his frustration.
    Jack: (in response to Niki being imprisoned for the first time by the Schlatt administration) Why, whenever something's going on, it's always on my balcony?
  • For some reason, bad things always seem to happen to Connor when he gets involved in "Big Lore", whether it be getting tortured for information or tricked into debt to Las Nevadas. He also gets imprisoned in Pandora's Vault for using a stolen military ID he found at the L'Manburg wreckage.
  • Foolish applies as well. Being a former God of Death isn't a deterrent on the SMP, considering how often he's harassed by cat maids, pushed into going along with unfair workloads by others, and becoming a trolling victim to Callahan of all people (who, as mentioned above, is a bit of a Butt-Monkey himself).
  • It's not uncommon for Fundy to be treated poorly and jokes to be made at his expense, from his appearance to his personality to him being an orphan (note that the last one only applies throughout Season 2 and in the first part of Season 3 due to his father's death and eventual revival). It was often Played for Laughs... until Fundy finally explodes from frustration.
    Fundy: (bitter laugh) This is– They're toying with me! They're toying with me. They're actually– Everyone is toying with me, they ARE ALWAYS TOYING WITH ME!! EVERYONE IS!! I'M ALWAYS BEING PLAYED WITH! WHY?? Why does it always have to be me? Every single time...
• Echo Chamber:
• Pretty much everything Zack says earns an eye roll from Dana and Tom.
  • Tom; for example, Mr. Administrator gets pissed off at him for something Dana said.
• In Farce of the Three Kingdoms, everybody (except his boyfriend Sun Quan) is a jerk to Lu Su. This frequently includes his supposed friends. As one of the very few genuinely decent people around, Lu Su just puts up with it.
• Slamdunkwizard in Final Fantasy Relay leaked Fire Tomes on the Warship, kept running into Lamia Queens in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, and decided the race single-handedly.
• The Irate Gamer is a frequent victim of this trope in The Frollo Show, where he screws things up on a constant basis (likely to fulfill the Take That! nature to his show). After becoming bros with Best Hercules — a villain that's more incompetent than him — they become the laughingstock of all the villains in the show.
  • The Downfall Hitler (of Hitler Rants fame) also gets this treatment whenever the Irate Gamer or Best Hercules aren't around. Such abuse to him includes being covered with shit, sliced to pieces, and forced to wear a Sailor Moon costume in front of a crowd (causing him to die of humiliation).
• Gaia Online's Gino Gambino. He got his start as the cute, woobie son of the original Big Bad of Gaia Online, but has since grown into a scrawny, effeminate, accident-prone, deadpan Butt Monkey.
• Hero House has Nightwing, who just cannot seem to catch a break.
• Anthony Mennella (of Culter 35) gets this treatment A LOT.
• Adolf Hitler in Hitler Rants is this very much. In many videos, he receives bad news regarding one of the subjects he is interested in causing him to burst out in one of his eponymous rants. And if he is not ranting about anything, he has to deal with the cartoonish antics of his worst enemy Hermann Fegelein, among them are exploding muffins, teleporting Hitler's bunker to random locations and turning Hitler into a toilet. If Hitler tries to strike back against Fegelein, it always results in a catastrophe.
• Emperor's caretaker in If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device. For starters, he has no name, and his nickname is Little Kitten. The Emperor calls him a moron half of the time, he got dumped by his first and only love and his fellow Custodians keep on mocking him, even though he's their Captain-General. Oh, and nobody knew who he actually is until Fyodor invaded the palace.
  • Might be subverted slightly, as Magnus notices that the Emperor trusts Kitten more than he ever trusted any of his own children. It's also notable that the Emperor keeps on insulting everyone, so Kitten is no exception.
• I Hate Everything has Aqua Man and Kite-Man constantly taking verbal or physical abuse from him.
• LoadingReadyRun (or, more specifically, commodoreHUSTLE) has Matt, who has a ton of bad stuff happen to him. He breaks his iPhone on the road though it gets fixed very quickly, his Xbox 360 suffers a Red Ring of Death (his ninth or tenth one yet) and is later turned into a NES Box, which is basically a NES that looks like an Xbox 360, loses a bet to Graham that allows Graham to kick him in the balls at some point in the future, gets tricked out of cookies by Paul, travels all the way to Seattle to replace his Xbox and breaks it within five minutes after returning home (before receiving the Groin Attack from Graham), gets his idea of putting LRR videos on Youtube quickly shot down, kisses James in a dream, and lastly gets his gamer score deleted, right before the end credits. And that's just season one. Of course, the fact that he's a Deadpan Snarker, Anti-Hero, and is usually at odds with the entirety of the crew (in-universe, of course) doesn't get him much sympathy from the viewers.
• Mahu: In "Second Chance" the Kingdom of Yadra are this as an intergalactic nation. They lose half their territory, homeworld and billions of their people to Hive Mind of always-starving drones, most of these lost territories are later captured by the Galactic Commonwealth, one of their closest rivals. Since living there is far safer, many of the citizens not devoured in the previous war leave to join this Commonwealth and become citizens. A war ensues, where the Kingdom joins the Yaanari, a race of xenophobic slavers they hate only slightly less than the Commonwealth...only to be later betrayed by these "allies", lose nearly all of their remaining worlds and have a civil war only a couple of years afterwards.
• Matthew Santoro:
  • Nerdy Eugene. Matt constantly abuses him and criticizes him for being a nerd, which is Played for Laughs.
  • Hugo. Matt abuses him for being crazy, which is Played for Laughs.
• Dr. Poque from Mega64 can never get his way. The worst time was when he gets into a bet to get a girlfriend with stolen money of his being used. He eventually gets one but she's taken away by one of his roommates (who's a puppet), gets made fun of by her and when it appears he won her back she's hit and killed by a car.
• Mewtwo of Melee's End is mindless abused and demeaned by his boss and coworkers, even when he's not around, despite probably being the most competent villain.
• The YouTube Like button is this on MrBallen's channel. As a Running Gag, he changes the typical verbiage of "hitting" or "smashing" the button that is used by many other creators into comically abusive scenarios that act as if the button is an actual person being mistreated. Such antics can range from harmlessly pranking the button all the way up to brutally murdering it with guided bombs.
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter has dealt with this archetype so many times that he's given it the name Megward the Wizard, based three of the worst, most frequent examples (Squidward, Meg Griffin, and Kyle).
• In Noob, if a gag involves someone getting hurt or humiliated among the protagonists, the someone will be Omega Zell 90% of the time.
• Origins SMP:
  • Niki has it the hardest out of everyone. Not only can she not go into any of the communal areas without major adjustments, due to her inability to breathe air as a Merling, the others go out of their way to annoy her by throwing trash in her pond and tapping on the glass of her tank in the Pub(e).
  • During Sneeg's first day on the server, he was killed repeatedly by Tubbo and Ranboo, just because they thought it was fun to punt him. Later, Wilbur offered him a place to stay underneath his house and gave him full permission to sneak around inside... under the sole condition that if Wilbur ever caught him, he could beat Sneeg to death with a bucket. Keep in mind that Wilbur, as a character that can walk through walls, is the only one who can actually follow Sneeg into his secret tunnels (which are otherwise too small for anyone else to fit into).
  • James gets made fun of for his inability to mine stone (as one of his origin's limitations), and gets pranked by Wilbur on one occasion.
  • Not nearly as much as some other members, but when someone starts poking fun at someone else's origin powers, expect Tommy to be brought up, likely as an example of poor origin design, as his origin, the Avian, has only minor abilities that are made practically useless by the fact that other origins have the same or even better abilities with significantly fewer drawbacks.
• Party Crashers:
  • All four members of the group have ended up as this at least once in Mario Party. Sophist and Vernias are the most obvious examples, as it seems like nearly game they play has it out for them, such as having abismal rolls and constantly getting screwed over in Chance Time. And while Nick and Brent don't get tormented nearly as frequently, they do suffer especially on Mario Party's Peach's Birthday Cake and Mario Party 2's Mystery Land respectively.
  • Vernias tends to be the main target for insults from the group, with the others often making jokes at his expense. The fact that his go-to character in Super Mario Bros. Spin-Off titles is Birdo certainly doesn't help, as the others absolutely despise her presence. Even when he's not playing with the Party Crashers, he still gets regularly mocked when playing with Sidequest Party or KirbyKid, HarryBook, and Dukerino (the group he typically plays multiplayer Kirby games with).
  • Nick tends to get hit with this whenever the fellas play Mario Kart due to being less skilled and experienced than the others. This is best exemplified by their Mario Kart: Double Dash!! video, where he not only frequently places last amongst the group, but at one point he unintentionally clips through the ground on Yoshi Circuit, after which he respawns right in front of the finish line and doesn't move on to the next lap after crossing it.
  • Brent tends to end up as this in Magic the Noah's Dungeons & Dragons-like videos as a result of constant low rolls and monsters constantly aiming straight for him due to his role as the team's tank.
• PhantomStrider directly refers to this trope and This Very Wiki in his "Worst Classic SpongeBob Episodes" video.
• PlayStation Access has at least two:
  • Dave is scared of horror, but the cast makes him play horror games anyway.
  • Their puppet Delsin got abuse from Rob for years until he quite to go on a revenge quest.
• Plonqmas: Happens to Plonq in all these stories to varying degrees. His Christmases never go well.
• Jay treats Alexander as his personal verbal toilet on Pretty Dudes, though he's pretty rotten to everyone except Zario.
• Random Assault: Mitch, without question. Sometimes Drew.
• In most RedLetterMedia productions, particularly Best of the Worst, Rich Evans is given the worst, most humiliating treatment — he suffers numerous medical emergencies (a circular blade slices off his finger, Mike stomps on his diabetes medicine, and the ShowBiz Pizza Bear gnaws his throat out), gets physically assaulted or mocked by their celebrity guests (Len Kabasinski punches him, Max Landis wishes he stayed in hell, Macaulay Culkin is his little spoon), his line flubs are often left in the videos by the editors (either Mike or Jay) while bloopers from the other commentators are ignored, and he usually is the one who has to introduce/describe the weirdest/worst videos they watched that night.
• In SBI Rust, Ranboo is often used as a punching bag for the other characters' entertainment.
• SEC Shorts: Every SEC team is bound to receive this treatment upon having a poor performance or embarrassing incident happen to them. Teams that are in the basement of the conference (like Vanderbilt and Arkansas) and teams that have had a hard fall from grace (like Tennessee) tend to receive the worst of this.
  • Although if one of the top teams loses, expect SEC Shorts to immediately make a skit at their expense (especially Alabama).
  • Non-SEC teams almost always get this treatment if they are portrayed in a video, particularly Notre Dame. If an SEC team loses to a nonconference opponent, expect a lot of jokes to be made at the SEC school's expense with only a mention at most of the other team.
  • The University of Texas is also a massive source of humor, especially following the news in July 2021 that they would be coming to the SEC along with the University of Oklahoma. In "Texas wants out of the SEC", the title school tries to shred their application to join the SEC after being blown out by Arkansas, who was thought to be one of the weakest SEC schools.
• A whole episode of Plumbing the Death Star is dedicated to "Why is Hawkeye in the Avengers?", and he's frequently brought up as the worst of the Avengers. They make a point of killing him off in their What If? "Would the Avengers be Better off Without the Hulk?", they characterize him as an emotionally-fragile whiner in "Which Avengers Would Make the Best Friend?"
  "Chances are you think you're better than Hawkeye thinks he is."
• In the The Six Cats Parade, Jessica (the Siamese cat) is frequently beaten by her brothers and even by her mother, Torresminha.
• Throughout Sky Williams' series, Jesse is usually treated as the butt of mean-but-friendly jokes. It came to a head in "Jesse's Master Plan" where he was treated so poorly that Sky's fans complained enough that the next video had Jesse as the all-star. In "Jesse's Game," he was made leader for a day as a direct result of the complaints.
• Slimecicle Cinematic Universe: Bizly gets treated like dirt by his fellow gods in "The HARDEST Minecraft Difficulty" once they learn that he made chickens hostile and rapidly-multiplying. His throne is taken away from Molympus, leaving him with only a stair step or a minecart to sit in, and anytime he says anything he gets berated by Slime and has potions and tridents pelted at him by the others.
• In Smash King, A lot of the minor characters are this, notably Toon Link, Captain Falcon until his Heroic Sacrifice, etc. Subverted with characters like Wario, Dedede, Ike, and Meta Knight, as while they also get crapped on a fair bit, they can show that they can be serious and step up if they have to.
• Smogon
  • The editors have gone out of there way to give Luvdisc an analysis for each generation it has appeared in, just to point out how little use it has. The Generation VI analysis can't even give any battle strategies and instead advises how it can be used to declare love to your opponent.
    "Luvdisc is great if you're playing with Battle Timeout, because its mere presence should cause your opponent to laugh at it for so long that you win the match."
  • Downplayed with Magikarp, the trope namer for Magikarp Power and a nearly defenseless Pokemon, who only has an entry for Generation V because, as the entry sees, any jokes about using Magikarp are tired. Magikarp is described as being Nerfed because, with the new unpopularity of Death Or Glory Attacks, he lost his role as a sacrifice.
• SMPLive has many of these.
  • The server supposedly has an anti-bullying rule... But it's frequently said to specifically not apply to Joko, who very often ends up the butt of people's jokes, particularly being The Chew Toy for cscoop, who constantly gets donations to kill him for the audience's amusement.
  • Connor gets subjected to the never-ending "eat pant Conar" meme, to the point it was banned in his Twitch chat.
  • Jawsh is another frequent bullying target due to his tendency to Rage Quit.
• The poor girl in the short film ''Socket'', an exhausted electric person desperately looking for a place to literally charge her batteries.
• SolidarityGaming is a near-constant victim of this throughout many of his roleplay SMP series.
  • Empires SMP: In Season 1, the poor man has his valuables stolen, his land exploded, and his villagers pranked constantly. In Season 2, he's constantly belittled and called a toy. While he does have a track record of antagonizing half the server population in both seasons, it's hard not to feel sorry for him.
  • In the Life SMP, he has an unfortunate track record of always being the first to be Killed Off for Real in each season, even when others actively try to stop him from going out first as of Season 4 (Limited Life); his content creator counterpart swears it's not even intentional by this point. He finally manages to break this off in Season 5 (Secret Life), but there's no guarantee that this luck is going to stick just yet.
  • In the New Life SMP, his original Bad Guy Origin did little to combat the images evoked by his giant pink house, culminating in a repeated pattern of toy boxes being built for him with every new Origin change. Note that New Life started just after Empires Season 2 ended, hence the continuation of the toy joke.
• In The Sonic Amigos, Tails and Silver are subject to abuse from everyone in the cast.
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: Luigi, Toad, and Tari are the ones who get abused the most.
  • Admiral Greg from side series Guards N' Retards also qualifies.
• SuperMarioLogan:
  • Mario is most definitely this, as he had to put up with inconsiderate roommates like Shrek and Black Yoshi, as well as their antics, had people make fun of the lack of hair on his head, and even had his ex-girlfriend, Princess Peach, break up with him. His Butt Monkey status wore off in "Mario's New Girlfriend!", wherein he started dating Princess Rosalina, but grew strong again starting with "Mario the Babysitter!", wherein Jeffy, a handicapped child, is dropped off at his house.
  • Chef Pee Pee is definitely this as well, with Bowser and Junior bothering him all the time, and the plot destined to make him as miserable as possible. One notable example would be falling into a coma after Bowser tries riding him like a Yoshi in Part 3 of the Mario and Bowser's Stupid and Crazy Adventure story arc.
  • In the earlier episodes, Toad was constantly treated as garbage by the characters. This was nullified starting from "Toad is Cool".
  • Bowser Junior has a small status of Butt Monkiness, which escalated starting from "Bowser Junior Goes to Military School!", where he gets constantly traumatized from doing various pushups, pushing heavy rocks, passing logs, climbing ropes and walls, getting hot sauce in his eyes, scrubbing a dirty toilet with a toothbrush, watching Big Hero 6, eating dirt and watching his Thomas & Friends toy being burnt before eventually getting broken both physically and mentally.
• Top Down Perspective: For a while after they got bored of the game, the hosts loved dumping on the way the characters in Tomodachi Life act, mocking some of their phrases incessantly (especially "I've been working on my funny face!").
• On Channel Awesome, Melvin was this to extremes before he got killed off and among the living, Nella and the Critic probably are the ones who get abused most often. While Critic deserves it, Nella doesn't.
  • The Nostalgia Chick is fast getting there herself with her self-destructive, completely unrequited obsession with Todd in the Shadows.
  • Also, Ma-Ti, by virtue of What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?.
  • In To Boldly Flee, JesuOtaku!Edward has an invention! She will test it on... Paw Paw!
• In Thew's Awesome Transformers Reviews, if Thew wants to show you the review subject swinging its melee weapon or firing its missiles, nine times out of ten the target will be a Captain Planet figure.
• In The Time... Guys, everyone, even his teachers, hates and/or ignores Timmy.
• Ghost from True Capitalist is definitely this. He gets trolled on his own radio show!
• Vaguely Recalling JoJo, Polnareff is the Butt Monkey of the Joestar group, mostly because of his Running Gag where he gets punched in the face.
• Almost every character in the dark-comedy short story Vatsy and Bruno falls under this description. Vatsy is an insane, unscrupulous journalist who can't understand why his laughably poor articles aren't making it big-time. Bruno, his stoic bodyguard, gets pretty badly thrashed in a fight against a bounty-hunter pastiche known only as trenchcoat. Most badly, the character referred to as Chinbeard gets hunted like an animal, mutated into a freakish abomination, and then put down like a dog by Bruno because it's more convenient than finding a way to turn him back.
• Phase, in the Whateley Universe. Turned into a mutant, when he was one of the people who couldn't manifest as a mutant. Thrown out of his family and impoverished, tortured by a mad scientist, had to go live in a basement, his body turned into a weird inter-sexed mess so he looks mostly female, in his first superpowered scrap had his clothes burned off in public and got kicked in the family jewels, and then got chewed out by the police for stopping a cop-killer supervillain, is roundly hated by most of Whateley Academy because of his last name and his intersexed status and has been physically attacked maybe two dozen times for these reasons, usually gets injured the most in any Team Kimba battle, in their first trip to Boston he got dumped in the sewer, you name it.
• In Youtube series Why Would You Eat That?, in which disgusting or odd foods are featured and fed to co-workers, the presenters typically take a special kind of sadistic delight in subjecting poor Georgia to their food of the week. It doesn't help that she reacts very negatively each time they approach, which has both goaded them on and made her a favourite among fans.

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