Fiendish Fraternity

"Fuck Phi Rho Kappa!"

Richard: Van isn't exactly Delta Iota Kappa material.
Van: Richard, you never told me that you were a DIK. Not that you had to...

— Van Wilder

If media has taught us anything, it's that young men are perverted, messy, and often dumb, especially in comparison to women. Put all of them together in a house and you have a recipe for a Wretched Hive and a No Woman's Land.

One of the worst examples in fiction is the fraternity. Fictional fraternities will be hotbeds of sexual assault, bullying, and Hookers and Blow. Both men and women can (and often will) be victims. This goes double if the fraternity is somehow associated with sports, at which point Jerk Jocks will be all but unavoidable. Hazings in these environments will often be fatal. If the work is set in Central Europe, you can also expect a lot of irresponsible swordplay and obsession with social class getting thrown into the mix.

Despite the gendering of this trope, the Distaff Counterpart is the Sinister Sorority Sisters. The two forms of cruelty will usually manifest very differently because Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication.

Wacky Fratboy Hijinx will be the comedy equivalent, though occasionally they can exist side-by-side, especially in cases of Black Comedy and/or a Double Standard. The Frat Bro is the singular equivalent, though they can nearly always be expected to co-exist.

Though frequent scandals have shown this to be Truth in Television, no real-life examples, please!

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Examples:

Comic Books

• The Boys: During Hughie's infiltration of the G-Men (a parody of the Xavier institute), he finds that the adult students act much like party-obssessed fratbros with a lot of focus on Power Perversion Potential. Then the whole "molested as kids by the director, molest the new kids" part comes up.

Film — Live-Action

• Animal House: While the members of Delta House are all pretty friendly, the members of rival Omega House are all a bunch of elitist jerkasses. And even Delta House is also an example of this kind of fraternity because of their unruliness so Dean Wormer is at least partially justified to kick them out, but 1) they are the protagonists so they are more sympathetic and 2) the Dean takes it too far when he finally expels them and arranges so they will be drafted and hopefully die in Vietnam.
• Black Christmas (2019): The DKO fraternity is revealed to be killing the sorority sisters while having raped multiple girls (specifically protagonist Riley) over campus. They did this with the assistance of sorority sister Helena, although it ultimately turns out that DKO was brainwashed by the bust of founder Calvin Hawthorne and evil professor Dr Gelson, though it's left ambiguous how culpable they are.
• Emergency (2022): Discussed. When the guys find the underage Emma passed out in their shared house, their first instinct is to do the simplest thing and move her outside so that she can get help. As they live close to several frats, they agree that they can't leave Emma unconscious there due to the risk of Date Rape.
• Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island: At least believed by the killer, Jack's father, the Dean, who was forced to give him up twenty years ago and wishes to protect his young closeted son from the fraternity's corruption and excess.
• Frat Star: The fraternity is portrayed as racist, sexist, and homophobic, and the hazings are humiliating at best and involve some extremely dubiously consensual hookups at worst. Nick is totally corrupted by his (brief) time with them.
• Haze: Nick Forrest decides to join the Psi Theta Epsilon fraternity, despite the death of a pledge a few years ago. He gets more than he bargained for, with him and his fellow pledges being forced into increasingly brutal hazings and criminal acts, until Hell Week, where they are locked in a room and tasked with killing the frat's pet dog.
• Mystery Men: One of the local crime syndicates are called the Frat Boys (lead by Michael Bay of all people). While they're not particularly bright or as visually intimidating as some of the other gangs, the Big Bad recognizes them as equally dangerous.
• Neighbors (2014): Played With. The Radners, a married couple with an infant, become annoyed at the fraternity that moves in next door because they don't keep their noise down. However, the guys at Delta Psi Beta seem to be uncouth party boys at worst: most of the gruesomeness they get up to (e.g. dumping their trash on the Radners' lawn, a fight that injures a passing professor) is at least partially the result of their escalating feud with the Radners, who are notably surprised when Teddy shows kindness during the hazing ceremony.
• Night of the Creeps: Every fraternity member is portrayed as a Jerk Jock, especially Brad. Even Chris, the apparent hero, is ultimately responsible for the alien invasion because he was trying to steal a corpse to get into the fraternity.
• PCU: Technically subverted in that fraternities have been outlawed and now operate in secret. However, every single "fraternity"-like organization is impossibly cliquey, and Tom can't stop himself from pissing them off somehow. The Pit is the Token Good Teammate, and Balls And Shaft are the Token Evil Teammate who are outwardly villainous.
• Pledge: This film takes it to the extreme, as instead of it being just hazing, the fraternity that the protagonists try to join straight up tortures them. The fraternity itself is doing this to prove their worth to a mysterious Cult who ultimately end up inducting the sole remaining main character after the fraternity falls apart by the end.
• Promising Young Woman: Cassie sets out to avenge her friend who was raped in a frathouse while their college turned a blind eye, driving said friend to suicide. Cassie approaches the dean about this, then says she intercepted the dean's daughter and left her in a frat house at the mercy of the tenants. The dean is appropriately horrified.
• Revenge of the Nerds: The whole plot occurs because the Alpha Betas, the university's Jerk Jock fraternity, accidentally burn down their house in a drunken prank and then use their pull with the university's management (read: the football team's coach bullies the principal into allowing it) to take over the freshman dormitory, kicking everybody out in the most brutal manner possible (one of the things we see them do in that sequence is toss some poor freshman out a window five stories high, probably severely injuring the young man, and nobody bats an eye). During the rest of the series, their actions are portrayed as more dangerous to life and limb than the Tri-Lambdas' pranks, such as stranding the latter on an island in the second film, and are bigger scum in their treatment of women.
• Scream:
  • Scream 2: Though Derek is a thoroughly nice fratboy, the frat themselves are inadvertently responsible for his death. Fellow frat member Mickey, who's also Ghostface, tips them off that Derek gave his letters to Sidney, so they kidnap Derek and tie him up in the theater. This allows Mickey to use the situation to persuade Sidney that Derek is actually Ghostface, causing his death and emotionally torturing her.
  • Scream VI: The frat party only appears for two minutes, but a guy is about to sexually assault the extremely drunk Tara before Chad intervenes, punching the fratbro to stop him.
• The Skulls centers around the machinations and corruption of a Writing Around Trademarks-version of Yale University's Skull and Bones fraternity. The main character is initially won over by the fraternity's willingness to set him up with money, a Cool Car and an acceptance letter to the law school of his choice before he as even applied, but is rapidly turned against the group when murder and blackmail enter the equation.
• Van Wilder: Van's rival is a Big Man on Campus, Richard, in Coolidge College's fraternity Delta Iota Kappa, and is shown brutally hazing new pledges while being a spiteful, petty asshole.

Literature

• In Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, a novel set In a World… where humans can randomly come back as decomposing-but-sapient zombies upon death, fratboys are The Dreaded. Other people insult zombies and throw things at them...fratboys will just destroy them for fun.
• The Impairment: Beta Alpha Omega are bullies that are regularly compared to dogs and apparently don't pray to any "normal" god or gods.
• In Heinrich Mann’s satirical novel Man Of Straw (German title "Der Untertan"; literally "The Subject"), the cowardly protagonist Diederich joins a fencing fraternity and, with the help of his fraternity brothers, bullies his fellow students to goad them into a duel so he can earn his Dueling Scar and get ahead in Imperial German society.
• In his autobiography The World Of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig mentions his encounters with several flavours of Austrian fraternity students during his university days. He recounts being not at all smitten with what he describes as their bellicose, macho-masochistic and ultranationalisic manners (or lack thereof).

Live-Action TV

• American Horror Story:
  • In American Horror Story: 1984: Ray accidentally kills a fraternity pledge. Or, at least, he thinks he does. When he stages the death to look like a car accident, it turns out the pledge was alive...and then Ray killed him like that. Ray is also Secretly Selfish and self-involved.
  • In American Horror Story: Coven, Madison is gang-raped by fraternity brothers while at a Wild Teen Party and kills them all by flipping their frat bus. The frat's Token Good Teammate is Kyle, who tries to stop the assault, but it's also implied that he has a better understanding of abuse due to being sexually abused by his mother.
• Being Erica: When Erica manages to prevent Leo's death and he goes to university, he joins a frat. They're all bullies who torment him, pushing him into a deep depression, and he's also sodomized during his initiation, a crime for which none of them shows any remorse, sending him over the Despair Event Horizon. Even worse, Leo's rapist shows no regret about it when Erica confronts him.
• Boomtown (2002): In the episode "Brotherhood", a fraternity believes that a pledge died due to excessive binge drinking, and they conceal the body in a wall to cover up their actions. Then it turns out that he wasn't dead, but simply unconscious, and instead was suffocated inside the wall.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "Reptile Boy" the members of a college fraternity are drugging the drinks of female high school students who attend their parties, then sacrificing them to a giant snake demon in exchange for wealth and power. A rather more literally "fiendish" fraternity than most examples of the trope.
• Cold Case: In "The Promise", the fraternity is shown holding "pig parties" — i.e. inviting plus-sized female students over to be relentlessly tormented and forced into humiliating rituals and games, often sexually assaulting them. When Laurie attempts to retaliate by photographing the horrors, fratbro Manny locks her in a room after the frat is set on fire. Manny shows no remorse and still refers to her as a "pig".
• Criminal Minds: In "What Happens in Mecklinburg," three fraternity brothers (two of whom are also Jerk Jocks) brutally rape a student named Lauryn-Ann at a frat party; they later force her to drink excessive amounts of vodka so that even if she reports the rape, no one will believe her. Though Lauryn-Ann is able to name her attackers, she soon goes into a coma from alcohol poisoning and eventually dies, leading her older sister Sheila to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the frat brothers.
• CSI: In "Pledging Mr. Johnson," the frat leader makes things increasingly difficult for a specific pledge he doesn't like so he'll come in last in their point-standings and not get in. He first makes him sit in a large vat of ice wearing only his boxers, while handing out cold beer to everyone else. But, after the guy makes a surprise comeback in points, the leader makes him do a private trust exercise — swallowing a chunk of raw liver on a string and trusting him to pull it back out. When the string breaks and the guy chokes to death, the leader and another member stage the death as a suicide by hanging.
• CSI: NY: "Some Buried Bones": Some privileged male students form a secret fraternity called Kings and Shadows, thinking their rich fathers can get them out of any trouble they get into. One of their practices is to give a ritualistic beating to anyone who wants to quit. They're found out when a guy dies after such a beating. That turns out not to be his cause of death, though.
• Euphoria: McKay is ritually humiliated by his frat brothers after they see Cassie at a party, holding him down and jeering at him.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Dennis's unnamed former Fraternity from "The Gang Reignites The Rivalry" are some of the few individuals in the entire show who can actually rival the Gang in terms of loathsomeness and depravity, being presented as a bunch of obnoxious arrogant bullies who regularly engage in sadistic rituals (such as tying a pledge to a chair and repeatedly zapping him in the groin with a stun gun) and hold anyone not in the fraternity in utter contempt (though past members are also mocked for not meeting their current extreme standards). Dennis likewise implies he might have been even worse back when he was a member, with apparently flat-out sexually assaulting pledges (and seemingly viewing it as harmless pranking).
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Tau Omega Fraternity appears multiple times, usually complicit in a horrible act of violence:
  • While the sorority is arguably worse in that they masterminded the rapes, it's two frat brothers who actually assault them in "Consent."
  • In "Brotherhood", the fraternity are all abusive snakes, with both Rob Sweeney and Tyler Henry being sadists who physically abused the pledges, and ultimately violently raped, the freshman Will Caray during his Initiation Ceremony, driving him to kill Tyler and to attempt suicide.
  • In "Friending Emily", a pair of underage sisters snuck into a frat party. One was kidnapped by a serial rapist posing as a member (in what's implied to be not the first time), and the other had sex with an older man — who was unaware of her age but was still committing statutory rape.
  • In "Girl Dishonored", the fraternity is revealed to have many, many rape victims who are systematically disbelieved and mistreated by the university.
  • Played with in "Devastating Story" where the fraternity is painted as this for apparently harboring several rapists after a gang rape at a party. It turns out that the story was exaggerated — only one boy raped Heather, and Heather was manipulated into exaggerating her story to incriminate the whole frat. Not coincidentally, this is the only episode in the entire series to feature a fraternity that wasn't Tau Omega.
  • In "The Long Arm Of The Witness", Judge Gallagher is portrayed as both a habitual rapist while at university (a fact that his fraternity covered up) and then on in his adult life, as well as elitist, classist, racist, and homophobic.
  • In "Promising Young Gentlemen", the Hudson University frat is so vile that they literally have a song about how raping women and violent misogyny is part of their club's creed.
• Tales from the Crypt: In the episode "House of Horror", Wes is the pledge master of his fraternity who delights in hazing the wannabe pledges. Among other things, he makes them scrub the floor of the fraternity wearing only socks and underwear that has "kick me" written on it. He later makes a pledge kiss his foot after having stepped in dog shit. Finally he makes them all spend a night in a Haunted House. Since this is Tales From The Crypt this does not end well. The all-women's fraternity Delta Omega Alpha (DOA) is much worse, though: it's a fraternity completely composed by cannibals.
• The Münster Tatort features a cold case in which members of a local Burschenschaft (right-wing fencing fraternity) are found to have hosted (and subsequently covered up) a Duel to the Death.
• A Teacher: The plot revolves around high school senior Eric being drawn into an affair with his teacher. She's arrested shortly before graduation, which gives Eric a reputation going into college. The plot then shows how fraternities are counterproductive to recovery as Eric's housemates constantly bring up the affair to the point where they no longer see Eric as a person. Eric finally snaps when they spring a lapdancer on him for their own amusement.
• Veronica Mars: The Hearst College fraternity in Season 3 accommodates dumbass misogynist Dick Casablancas and Jerk Jock Chip Diller, who are remarkably indifferent to the existence of a serial rapist attacking Hearst women. However, zigzagged in that the perpetrator is not actually a fratbro.

Music

• In their Music Video Moritat vom Kriegsminister Theodor Graf Baillet de Latour, Austrian cabaret duo Christoph & Lollo recount, in graphic detail, the murder of Count Latour, the Austrian Minister for War, at the hands of a mob during the Revolutions of 1848, where fraternity students feature prominently.

Web Original

• Dropout: "The Problem With Frats" features Phi Rho Kappa, which is facing being shut down by the dean. The misdemeanors and felonies one member boasts about the frat committing include raping passed-out women, wearing blackface whilst engaging in racist chants, letting freshmen die via alcohol poisoning, and many more.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In "The Life and Times of Stan Smith", Steve expresses regret for missing out on the school college fair, so Klaus takes him to Arizona State University to give him a sample of the college life. Steven is immediately hazed into the Beta Gamma Zeta fraternity (Beta Jizz for short) with Klaus' overseeing. The next week of Steve's life has him tortured and subjected to inhumane conditions, to the point of Steve giving up and becoming completely subservient to the hazing rituals.
• Batman: The Animated Series: In the episode "The Terrible Trio", three thieves are causing trouble in Gotham (stealing, starting riots, breaking Robin's arm, putting an old man in the hospital, etc). The thieves in question are three rich young men who were all fraternity brothers, and have been committing crimes because "they were bored". Along with the criminal activity, they're rude to the people who work for them, condescending towards anyone who makes less money than they do, and even tease Bruce Wayne for actually being nice to his employees. Batman figures out their identities because they were still wearing their fraternity rings while they committed crimes.
• Inside Job: When attending a meeting of the Lizard People, Brett bumps into two of his old buddies from Delta Sigma Phi, who reveal themselves to be part of the Lizard conspiracy as well, something that Brett wasn't privy to in college because he never rose to the requisite rank in the fraternity. The frat's Secret Handshake includes miming slipping two roofies into the drink of the other person.
• Kevin Spencer: Anastasia is tricked into going to a frat party so that she can be entered into an "ugly date" competition. It's portrayed as a Pay Evil unto Evil moment when she then drives a bus into the frat house.

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