Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
I'd kill kittens and puppies and bunnies
I'd maim toddlers and teens and then more
Just who...had the nerve...to put a puppy and baby seal in my path!!
He always seemed the kind of man who enjoyed kicking stray dogs.
Kicking the Dog is the fodder of anything resembling a modern-day Morality Play. A character performs an act so casual and immoral that you know that they are scum , incompatible with the moral rules of the series that they're in. This is the audience's cue that it's "okay" for the character to meet their end, whether they actually get their just deserts or not. While not all villains kick the dog, dog kicking is a sure sign that the writers want the audience to be wary of this character, even if he is nominally one of the good guys.
The key to this trope is that not only is the act evil, it's also pretty pointless to the actual plot. It establishes the character's morality, which is a useful endeavor, but the actual act itself is rarely important. It is the fact that it had no other point than to be evil, thus putting them on the bad side of the Rule Of Empathy.
It doesn't have to be a literal dog-kicking. It's any act or statement that shows the character's meanness or out-and-out evil, such as a boss demanding an employee come to work during Christmas when the employee's kid is in the hospital, or stealing from a blind beggar's coin dish, or a vicious No Holds Barred Beatdown on the hero or one of his Nakama or Protectorate. A Politically Incorrect Villain can kick the dog by showing gratuitous racism/sexism/homophobia/speciesism.
If an animal is used, however, a dog is usually the pet of choice, partly out of connotations of blind loyalty, partly from tradition. Arguably, however, substituting a cat can be even more shocking. After all, even bad guys like cats. So, the argument goes, if someone goes out of his way to harm one, they must really be a bastard.
Dog-kickings can be verbal as well, when a line of dialogue is used to shock the audience with its sheer repugnance. If it's uttered in the presence of the hero in an action series, he'll echo the audience's thoughts and tell the villain " You're Insane!"
This trope is common in horror-based Monster Of The Week shows, often to set up the Asshole Victim for the Twilight Zone Twist. Anthologies are especially prone to this, as they have to set up their villains really quickly, since they only have one episode to tell their story. This can be played up by having the very same kick of cruelty be the cause of their downfall. At the very least, it is designed to let you know who is going to lose at the end. The opposite of Karma Houdini.
In cartoons, someone who does this can be legally harassed by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, The Warner Brothers and their Sister Dot, etc. The Screwy Squirrel, however, doesn't need one of these.
One possible origin of the trope name comes from Westerns, where three bandits would ride into the town, one would shoot the Sheriff, one would shoot the Deputy, and one, just to prove he is also evil, would Kick The Dog.
If a character's Kick The Dog moment is excessively horrible, cruel, or otherwise despicable enough to make an audience lose all sympathy for him, then he's crossed the Moral Event Horizon, if he's not on the other side of it already. If the Dog in question is someone the character cares about and discovers Being Evil Sucks, then they've Kicked The Wrong Dog and might be in time to avoid a Face Heel Turn. If the dog belonged to a minion, expect it to help cause a Mook Face Turn because Even Evil Has Loved Ones.
A more benign, and more comedic, form of this shows the immorality of the villain by having them cheat at Solitaire.
Compare with Cant Get Away With Nuthin, And Your Little Dog Too, Kick Them While They Are Down, The Dog Bites Back. See " If Youre So Evil Eat This Kitten" for when bad guys do a Kick The Dog test to make sure undercover heroes are really evil.
Contrast Pet The Dog.
Not to be confused with Shoot The Dog. (That's what you do when Old Yeller gets rabies.)
See Kick The Son Of A Bitch for when it's less of a dog and more of a, well, you know.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Souther in Fist Of The North Star is this trope. He kidnaps children, forcing them to work on his massive pyramid, and poisons a supply of bread knowing that it will be stolen from him, just to serve as a warning. On top of this he kills the nicest guy in the series in an unimaginably cruel way.
- Kaioh, on the other hand, takes this trope rather literally. In a flashback we see him decide to start being evil and then, as his first evil act... you guessed it. Oddly enough this is meant to be a serious scene. Of course he also plays this trope very straight in a variety of other ways...
- In another literal example A soldier of God's army kicks Lynn's puppy.
- Young Jagi attempts to stomp a puppy in Yuria den.
- Kaiser in Yu-Gi-Oh GX, following his Freak Out, originally just came off as an unfeeling, disrespectful jerk who liked dressing in black; if anything, his new bad-boy persona only increased his popularity in the eyes of the fangirls... until he nearly killed his little brother in a duel.
- To drive the point home, Jack Atlus of Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds kidnapped a mutual friend, tied him up and put him in a rowboat placed in the sea during a violent storm in order to force Yuusei to choose between his SDD card or their friend's life.
- And then there is Divine. That utter bastard...
- In the manga version of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Kaworu Nagisa kills a kitten, going along with the Japanese switch of Petting The Dog with a cat. He justifies this by saying that, since neither he nor Shinji would care for the kitten, which was orphaned, it would die a slow, painful death through starvation if he didn't intervene. Still, seeing someone squeeze the life out of a poor, innocent kitten is... disturbing, to say the least. Tokyo-3 may not have a Humane Society, and all the people there are probably preoccupied with more important things, but he still gained the Fan Nickname "Evil Manga Kaworu" for this.
- Cat-haters seem to love it though.
- In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Nanami Kiryuu is established early on as a deceptive and manipulative bully. She's insanely jealous of her brother Touga's time, and that she idolizes him to an almost sexual degree. But she only really becomes freaky when shown in a flashback: She's six or so, and her brother gets a cute little kitten and pays more attention to it than he does to her, even while he's talking to her. Nanami puts the thing in a box and pushes it over a waterfall (into a water treatment center?). She does run away crying, so you could say she's not as cold as some. But then she says something like, "I'm sorry, I had to do it!" Brrrr.
- Interestingly enough, it was Nanami who gave Touga the kitten in the first place. To her credit though, the imagery heavily implies that she didn't understand the impact of her deed until the last moment and her final words were a futile attempt to justify the whole episode to herself.
- In Zero No Tsukaima Louise, despite being the heroine, regularly kicks the dog. Only for "kicks" substitute "beats with a riding crop" and for "dog" substitute "Saito" who she treats as her dog (despite being her love interest). In the novels it does at least once genuinely cross over into Dude Not Funny, to the extent where it almost makes Louise look like a sociopath.
- In Elfen Lied, Lucy lived in an orphanage when she was younger, where the other children often harassed her because of her cute little horns and emotionless nature. Soon after she started caring for a puppy, the others forced her to watch as they quite literally kicked the dog and beat it to death with a vase, just to try and get her to show something. They got more than they bargained for: Lucy snapped and left no witnesses.
- Played with near the very beginning of the series, when Mayu is first introduced. After leaving the house, Lucy stares for a while at Mayu's dog, which tied to a post near the front gate. It seems like she actually killed the dog for real... but the only thing she did was cut its rope. Which, given that it was quite obviously terrified of her, might actually count as a Pet The Dog instead.
- The scenes manage to be even more shocking when you take into account the fact that both of these dogs are drawn as little more than small puppies.
- The anime series Nightwalker includes a villain who feeds on dogs.
- Long before he became a vampire, Dio Brando, Big Bad of Jojos Bizarre Adventure, introduced himself to Jonathan Joestar by kicking his dog Danny in the head. Then later, he sets the dog in the incinerator and tricks the butler into to burning the dog to death. What an asshole.
- And then in Part 3, Vanilla Ice literally kicks the dog (Iggy) to reinforce his utter admiration of and loyalty to Dio. Iggy had used his stand to create a sand-based image of Dio, and Vanilla Ice was enraged at being forced to destroy the image when it attacked him.
- Happens with cats in the manga of Sailor Moon, when Luna, Artemis and Diana are wounded by Sailor Tin Nyanko and turn into ordinary, non-talking cats. (This Troper teared up a little at the sight of the three cats hopelessly meowing in Usagi's arms.) To make matters worse, one of Galaxia's minions, Sailor Lethe, kills them in the next chapter.
- And kills them by tearing their bodies apart, no less. It happened to the other Senshi, but there was something incredibly creepy and upsetting about seeing it happen to cats.
- A Pokemon episode titled "Here's Looking At You, Elekid" features Jessie of Team Rocket forcing James to sell his Victreebel for a special Weepinbell. When the new Weepinbell evolves, she gets rid of it as well.
- Paul tops her as being the biggest Jerkass in the show by releasing Pokemon that lost fights. In his first appearance, he captured three Starly and kept the one that knew Aerial Ace...and later, despite the fact that it won against's Ash's Starly, released that one as well (in the same episode, no less)!
- Whenever Wakamatsu Madoka, the heroine's bitchy rival in Full Moon O Sagashite, looks like she might be getting too sympathetic, she is shown being cruel to her adorable pet pig, thereby cementing her reputation of bitchiness.
- We are first introduced to Teresa of the Faint Smile in Claymore when she casually splatters bystanders flicking the blood from her sword after killing a Yoma, then hints that failure to give the payment for her services to the correct traveller will result in more attacks and no help. In the next town she literally kicks a young girl the local Yoma kept for 'entertainment' halfway across a street in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade her from following. It was only after the kid's persistence and an encounter with bandits pushes her into Morality Pet status that we learn her name (Clare) and realize this is the Backstory of the previous chapters' protagonist.
- The climax of the Rurouni Kenshin movie has the Japanese army surrounding a small force of rebels, stopped while Kenshin goes in to try talking them (and their leader) down. Kenshin succeeds, only for the real villain, an officer in the army, to have soldiers open fire on the surrendering rebels anyway, killing several, including the leader (who had acknowledged that he'd been wrong). True to the spirit of the trope, Kenshin (a Technical Pacifist) snaps, goes Battousai, and very nearly kills the officer.
- Amusingly, Digimon Adventure 02 uses this trope very literally: with Ken, while still the Kaiser. He also kicks his Digimon, Wormmon, on numerous occasions.
- Done again near the end, where one of the Dark Seed kids kicks a kitten. Likely a direct parallel of Ken's dog kicking. Both occasions of punting are cut from the dub.
- Fate Testarossa introduces herself to Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha by roughing up an enormous kitten for a Jewel Seed. She (Fate) gets better.
- Mai-Otome viewers get an early glimpse of Tomoe's not-so-niceness when she slaps around her so-called friend Miya and almost makes her cry when they botch a prank involving the sale and eventual damage of Arika's Garderobe uniform, and then tries to save face by coercing Miya into Taking The Heat for the whole thing. She then took it a step further and tried to kill Arika with Miya's GEM. And that's just for starters...
- Hiten, a Monster Of The Week from Inuyasha, comes home with a woman, and when his brother Manten tells him that he failed to collect some jewel shards he discovered, flies into a rage and kills her for no apparent reason. Very gruesomely, too: in the manga he punches a hole through her head, and in the anime, he uses a blast of lightning to fry her to a charred husk.
- The very hateable Smug Snake Jonathan Glenn does that in Brain Powerd when he destroys Nelly's house with his brand-new Baronz. He had no reason to do that, he just wanted to show off his power and make Yuu suffer.
- And let's not forget a scene a few episodes before, where Jonathan basically tells Yuu (paraphrased): "I have slept with your sister, and after that with your dear mom as well. They care about me more than they care about you! Hahahaaa!". Yeah, Johnny Boy is a jerk.
- Despite being a hero (well, Anti Hero), Lelouch from Code Geass gets a definite Kick The Dog moment when he orders the slaughter of anyone connected with the Geass as part of a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge for his close friend Shirley's murder. Since a Geass user killed her, his anger is somewhat justified, but taking it out on civilians and children is the point where it crosses into this or the other trope.
- It should be noted that Lelouch is prone to Kick The Dog after a tragedy such as the death of Euphemia, or the suspected death of Nunnally.
- This troper consider's Lelouch's Imprisoning almlost the entire freakin' cast the biggest Kick The Dog moment in the entire series.
- It would have been, if his intention hadn't been to have them rescued by Zero (Suzaku) and for him to die in the end.
- Still a Kick The Dog though, and simply the last in the long line of dog kicking moments that Lelouch racks up during the last arc.
- Given the nature of his plan, the dog kicking moments and their effect on his reputation were intentional.
- In this instance, it is an Invoked Trope.
- And you have to remember that the children that he's talking about are far more dangerous than the civilians. Far more dangerous. Not that that really justifies it, but just saying...
- Which ties into another Kick The Dog circmustance, since the "dangeorus" kids are actually victims of Tyke Bomb oriented training courtesy of the scientists of the Geass orders. Who knows what these Geass-using children went through so they ended up like THAT....
- The Pretty Cure villains are pros at this.
- In Episode 11 of Futari Wa Pretty Cure, after assuming his monstrous form to fight Nagisa/Cure Black and Honoka/Cure White, Gekidrago becomes so frustrated that he willingly attacks Ryota, Nagisa's little brother, just for having wandered near the scene of the battle. Terrible mistake. An enraged Cure Black declares This Is Unforgivable and attacks Gekidrago with a vengeance... and, as one might imagine, the dumb oaf does not live to see the end of the episode.
- Femme Fatale Poisonny's tactics almost always involve some dog kicking, mainly using mind control over a group of bystanders and using them as meat shields. The brainwashing of two of Nagisa and Honoka's schoolmates in Episode 14 comes to mind.
- In Splash Star, the very first thing Karehan (the first member of Dark Fall's Quirky Miniboss Squad) does is beat up Flappy and Choppy to force them to give up information about the Source of the Sun.
- It seems that villains, in that series, are at their worst when they're about to be killed by the heroines. In Episode 13 of Splash Star, Moerumba destroys a glass sculptor's work in front of Saki and Mai just to prove his point that might makes right. And that was his last episode, barring his resurrection later in the series.
- Shitataare, while a somewhat humorous villainess, seemed to try her best to get under Saki and Mai's skin by repeatedly reminding them of how Michiru and Kaoru were trapped in the darkness and forever lost. Pretty much the only villain who refrained from punting the pup in that season, other than Michiru and Kaoru themselves, was Kintolesky, because of his obsession with fighting fair.
- And let's not even go into what Gooyan did...
- Jerkass road racer Shingo from Initial D. We first witness him tapping the bumper of Iketani's car (which had just come back from being repaired after a horrible crash), and later when confronted, says that it's Iketani's own fault for being too slow. He continues his Kick The Dog moments by challenging Takumi to a match in which both drivers' non-shifting hands are taped to the steering wheel, breaks up a date between Itsuki and his blind date by crashing Itsuki's car, and during the race that he challenged Takumi to, attempts to crash Takumi's car in an attempt to end the match in a draw (since Shingo couldn't catch up anymore), and this is where his rampage ends: He misses Takumi and crashes into the guardrail instead. But this turns into a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming when Iketani and Itsuki come across Shingo and offer to take him to the hospital instead of getting mad at him.
- In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Marie's entire family including her dog are gunned down by the Neo Atlantian soldiers just because they're that mean.
- Shizuru's attack on a near-defenseless Yukino (which resulted in Haruka's death) in Mai-HiME punctuated her Face Heel Turn.
- In Saint Seiya, Aquarius Camus is quite a Knight Templar, and we get to see that clearly when he uses his power to singlehandedly sink a frozen ship... which was the sort-of tomb of Natasha, the mother of Camus's disciple Hyoga. To be fair, Hyoga did need to outgrow his Oedipus complex, but daaaaaamn.
- In Yakitate Japan, we see just how rotten Tsukino's stepsister Yukino is in a flashback, where Yukino throws the ashes of Tsukino's late mother onto a tree while laughing like a maniac. A very jarring moment for a comedy about bread-making, especially since it's all but forgotten after that scene.
- One Piece has a literal version of this. Before we even get a look at her face, the very first thing "Pirate Empress" Boa Hancock does is kick a kitten◊ that simply happened to be in her path.
- Hancock is absolutely smitten with this trope. In the very next chapter she destroys a clay statue of her that the tribe's children worked on, claiming that it ruined the aesthetics, before proceeding to toss the tribe's elder through a window, and if that wasn't enough, in the next chapter she petrifies three of Luffy's newfound allies when they try to reason with her. Luckily for the side of good, that just happens to be one of Luffy's Berserk Buttons...
- To be fair to her, at least half of this is a Jerkass Facade, and other half that isn't, she has a pretty good Freudian Excuse for it.
- She's at it again, a few chapters later she comes across a puppy and a baby seal... guess what happens. What makes this particularly notable is this is after her Heel Face Turn, although technically, almost none of the Kuja even suspect she went through a Heel Face Turn and oddly, almost none of them were aware she was cruel to them in the first place.
- Is This Troper the only way who thinks this is a big hint Boa hasn't really changed? I mean, Oda might be making a point with TWO darling baby animals...
- This Troper is convinced it's just Hancock maintaining her Jerkass Facade masquerade.
- It seems more likely that Oda-sensei is playing it for humor, given that there's no real reason for a baby seal or a puppy to be on Amazon Lilly and that they're the archetypal cute animals.
- A few episodes earlier, that baby seal was actually seen in the crowd watching Luffy's botched execution. It seemed very happy.
- Earlier in One Piece, there was an even more literal version of this when minor villain Mohji the Lion Tamer kicked an Angry Guard Dog in his path. He then proceeded to cross the Moral Event Horizon by taking the only thing the dog cared about (a pet shop once owned by his deceased master) and burned it to the ground right in front of him.
- Also subverted quite cleverly at the start of the Loguetown arc. When we first meet new villain Smoker, he is walking down the street looking generally sinister. A little girl running around with an ice cream cone accidentally bumps into him and ruins his marine uniform by getting chocolate all over his pants. Smoker gives the girl an intense, hard look....and then sweetly apologizes for bumping into her. He even gives her money to buy a new cone. Especially effective since up to this point, all the villains in One Piece had been irredeemable bastards; Smoker is the first antagonist with real moral complexity to him.
- We all know how the titular character from Suzumiya Haruhi loves to mistreat, molest and abuse the closest thing to a female friend she has, Mikuru. Naturally, this is Played For Laughs, but in the 2nd novel, there is a definite scene that crosses the line: During the filming of the Brigade's movie "The Adventures Of Mikuru Asahina", Haruhi (with the help of Genki Girl Tsuruya) first puts tequila into Mikuru's drink, so she would act more realistic for the kissing scene. The next thing she does is to punch Mikuru on the head simply because she still wore her colored contact lens. She then continues to punch her several times because the "contact lens is supposed to fly out when your head gets smacked." After Kyon understandably yells at her that Mikuru is not her toy, she seriously replies "Well I've decided, Mikuru-chan is my toy!". This actually makes Kyon explode, trying to punch her, but he is stopped by Koizumi. After Haruhi realizes what Kyon was about to do, she still doesn't get it, confronting him even more. This also shows just what a Jerkass she can be... though soon she starts to get better.
- This is slightly softened in the anime adaptation, where Haruhi does declare the same thing... but when Kyon is about to hit her for making Mikuru cry and Itsuki stops him, she stares away and looks remorseful. And not to mention Kyon, thanks to Itsuki, realizes that it's not in him to be physically violent.
- In Gundam 00 the Federation military unit A-Laws is established as pretty mean when they arrest an innocent Saji Crossroad for hanging out with a suspected rebel, who they both shoot and beat up for trying to run away. Saji gets sent to what appears a penal colony created solely to make the inmates' lives a living hell, and then the A-Laws test their brand spanking new killbots by letting them run amok in the colony.
- And then they get a Kill Sat... The first time it is used, a refugee camp gets destroyed. It gets worse from there...
- The oft-cited "Nena attacks a wedding out of frustration/boredom" incident also counts, since her character was established one episode earlier as a playful yet mentally unstable child soldier (her older brothers are much less on the "playful" side... especially Michael). Your Mileage May Vary as most of the people see it as a Moral Event Horizon, especially after she ditched her chance of redemption and in her moment of betraying Wang, she also killed her brother Hong Long for no reason (even if it's for self-defense, Nena would've shot him even if he didn't snap back), who is at least still more sympathetic than Wang
- In one episode of Fushigi Yuugi, while talking with underlings, Nakago takes a canary out of its cage and crushes it in his hands, just for the heck of it.
- Now And Then Here And There plays this literally. Except it's a cat.
- And it's not kicked, it has its neck snapped when Hamdo has a tantrum.
- In the end credits for "Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~", main character (and assassin) Zwei is depicted repeatedly shooting a target's sad-eyed dog after he's killed her. One assumes we're meant to take this to mean that he's edgy and dangerous in his brainwashed and confused assassin persona.
- In Eyeshield 21, pretty much anything that Agon does. Highlights include: taking Kurita's spot at Shinryuuji just to spite Hiruma, perving on, accosting and nearly assaulting Mamori, nearly taking Sena's eye out at the tournament drawing, beating up the sympathetic Zokugaku Chameleons, intentionally dislocating the rather puppy-like Mizumachi's shoulder in a scrimmage, pretty much all the nasty things he says to his less talented but much nicer twin brother, oh, and attempting to break the knees of a child in a wheelchair.
- Lord Laertes Montague does this regularly, but the worst (aside of the massacre) is him forcing his ally Titus into a duel and killing him. In front of Titus's son, Mercutio..
- Shortly after his introduction, Daranimaru Goryo of the Goryo group in Muhyo hears that an old woman is unable to pay for an exorcism, and then allows her to be possessed again, suggesting that her relatives could pay for it after hearing about her going insane.
- In Blade Of The Immortal, Shira not only kicks the dog, but kills the dog Rin had befriended the previous night and tricks her into eating it. Of course, we already know Shira is beyond Moral Event Horizon and accelerating.
- The World Is Mine introduces its Villain Protagonists by showing Wild Child Mon casually toss the girl he was having sex with out of their moving car onto the freeway. Mon's
bitch partner Toshiya's slide into complete monstrosity happens when he tortures and kills an elderly couple.
- In his early appearances, Mayuri Kurotsuchi from Bleach was clearly designed to be loathed by the audience due to the near constant abuse he levelled towards his Daughter and Lieutenant, Nemu Kurotsuchi.
- There's also the part where he tries to kill Ikkaku when he refuses to answer his questions, before Kenpachi stops him.
- Gin Ichimaru is introduced by slicing off Jidanbo's arm (only making a gash in it in the anime) and suggesting that he should have died defending the gate. And then there's his falsely offering to help save Rukia and all his friends before her execution just to raise and dash her hopes.
- Byakuya does some pretty assholish things in the Soul Society arc, such as refusing to allow Renji to be treated when he's defeated, attempting to overkill Ganjyu simply for being a Shiba, and openly insulting the more merciful Captains such as Ukitake. In fact, some believe that if it wasn't for his Freudian Excuse, he would've crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
- In the latest chapter, Tousen, who after his Resurrection, was able to see for the first time in his life, started laughing like a maniac, commenting on all the things he could see, before turning towards a silent Komamura and remarked that he looked far uglier than he thought. In fact, this may well cross over to Moral Event Horizon.
- Miss Minchin in Shokojo Sera literally does this, except that it's Kick The Cat, and the cat gets its revenge fairly soon. Ironically, she soon undergoes a probable Heel Face Turn, and is seen holding the same cat in her arms an episode later.
- Deathsaurus in Transformers Victory leaves the Dinoforce to die on Atlantis after he gets enough energy to reactivate his evil fortress of doom. Tragically, they keep on stealing energy while under the impression that he's going to return.
- Grewcica in the Gunnm OVA kills the dog that Gally picked-up.
- In Kinnikuman, Mixer Taitei does an almost literal example (but ratchets up the brutality) by needlessly killing a helpless puppy with his blender blades, thoroughly establishing him as one of the most monstrous heels Kinnikuman would ever face. In Nisei, you also have Dialbolik/Tel Tel Boy killing famous wrestlers just to get an audience's attention.
- In the fourth arc's witches' tea party in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, Lambda and Bern cracking up at Ange's fate was one of the big shots across the bow to keep an eye on those two.
- Xellos does this every once in while in Slayers, just to remind folks that despite his generally cheerful facade, he IS a Monster and will gladly kill anybody his boss orders him to, Lina included.
Comic Books
- In Alan Moore's Miracleman, the newly revived Kid Miracleman initially spares the one person that had offered kindness to his mortal alter-ego Johnny Bates, only to return moments later to viciously take the woman's head apart with a single blow, claiming that his earlier act of mercy would've been seen as a sign that the villain had "gotten soft".
- Cobra Commander did it in a panel of the GI Joe comic. The shot was so popular it was eventually redone as a pin-up some years later (the pin-up version can be seen at the top of this page).
- Megatron one-ups it by ordering the dog shot to death.
- Whereas Wilder kicked the dog himself and killed it because it annoyed him.
- In ElfQuest, the Wolfriders bond with wolves, and the Gliders with giant birds. Just before the two groups meet, Strongbow spots one of the giant birds and shoots it down for a meal. It becomes an inter-tribal incident that sticks half the tribe in slavery and Strongbow in psychic torture for a couple weeks, before the tribes' leaders meet to discuss it. One of the proposed solutions is to kill Strongbow's bond-wolf: "My mount was slain while testing its wings! Why should the killer's mount live?" One of the Wolfriders protests that they cannot order the execution of the wolf — "You might as well command us to kill our own children!" This is a little bit remarkable in that the death was caused by the good guys out of ignorance and not malice.
- In a much later issue, the animal-tamer elf Teir berated Ember for being willing to kill an animal who trusted her. "Would you kill the wolf who shared your fire if you needed some new furs?"
- In issue 4 of Infinite Crisis, Superboy-Prime cemented his status by kicking Krypto the Superdog. You don't tug on Superman's cape, and you certainly don't kick his dog.
- In the Sandman issue about the serial killers convention, one of the convention attendees tells another that he got his start by cutting off the heads off of kittens.
- Notably, the said guy was the most sympathetic person in the convention. He clearly understood he was sick, but lacked courage to turn himself in. It's implied that he was looking for peer support for just that.
- Also in Sandman, Desire does a unique kick the dog moment that doubles as a demonstration of what a Magnificent Bastard he/she is: Desire tells a random party-goer how she can win and cruelly break another woman's heart. Apparently, he/she can figure such things out just by looking at people.
- Not that Jody from Preacher needed any further proof of his unredeemable bastardry, but in a feat fitting for the trope, he went beyond kicking Jesse Custer's pet dog Duke when it made the mistake of humping his leg: he nailed it by the head on a fence.
- Ironically, in their final fight, Jesse would nail Jody in the head with a piece of the fence. In both terms. The fact Jody no-sells it gives one last demonstration of how inhuman he is.
- In a story from the 1940's newspaper comic strip of Batman, a giant thug is shown caring for a kitten. After attacking Batman and Robin when they show up (and hence causing the his boss undue suspicion) the thug's boss breaks the kitten's neck as punishment. While the crime boss ultimately ends up drowning in a swamp while his thug stands by, the revenge is soured by the crime boss being able to shoot the thug to death before he's pulled under. The whole thing made this troper wish that the daily strip featured The Punisher instead.
- Nothing demonstrates one's evil properties quite like attempting to destroy an entire city of orphans.
- Colonel Boris/Jorgen is generally considered Tintin's most unpopular villain. Why? He kicks Snowy down the rocket chute in Explorers on the Moon, breaking the poor thing's leg. To quote the Captain: "Monster! Vivisectionist!"
- Doomsday has several, including crushing a small bird and beating up a little boy and his cat. To be entirely fair, though, it's not like he can help it, as he was raised to see anything and everything as a threat that must be destroyed.
- The first appearance of the DCU villains the Reach (evil super-advanced alien race, enemies of the third Blue Beetle) has the Reach negotiator stress how they're there to 'save the earth' and that the Reach 'come in peace'. The very next page introduces the Reach Negotiator's adorable minions... and he crushes one of their heads with his bare hand. Just so the audience wouldn't believe the whole 'we come in peace' thing.
- Various villains Kick The Dog throughout Kingdom Come, but Vandal Savage snapping the neck of a secretary for putting the wrong amount of sugar in his coffee kinda takes the cake.
- In King of Klondike, the eight chapter of The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck, Soapy Slick kidnaps Scrooge, steals his plot of land and reads his mail. When a letter from home reveals that Scrooge's mother had died, the villain mocks the young duck for it and tells his cronies to kill him. No wonder Scrooge went berserk and trashed the entire steamboat they were on.
- In Watchmen, a gang commits a horrid action when they break into aged retired hero Hollis Mason's (AKA: Nite-Owl I) house and beat the shit out of him. Then the leader SMASHES HIS HEAD IN WITH A TROPHY MASON WON. Even the other members were horrified by that. Why did they do this? Because Nite Owl II broke Anti Hero Rorsarch out of jail. Mason had absolutely nothing to do with the action. That's right. A guy beat a harmless old man to death for worthless revenge. This editor wanted him to die as horribly as possible. Luckily, you can see his corpse in the opening of Chapter 12.
- Also, they kill his dog.
- In the case of Adrian Veidt, it's more like "Kick the Cat": he leaves his own pet lynx, Bubastis, to be vaporized during his attempt to get rid of Dr. Manhattan at Karnak. It doesn't even work. Poor kitty.
- Averted since Rorschach kills the dogs of the guy that killed the little girl and feed it to them. So in this case it was a good thing.
- In the fourth volume of Empowered, we see the mastermind who turned the 'Capies' award ceremony into a deathtrap discovered by the titular superheroine. Upon the relevation of his identity, he gives a Motive Rant that seems tailor made to win sympathy from any reader who has bothered following the title (not to mention the No Respect Girl before him). Then he attempts to use the lives of Emp's lover and her best friend to extort sexual favors out of her. Empowered is not pleased, and her suit is rather more intact than it appears.
- In Final Crisis Aftermath: Run #1, the Human Flame—the archetypical small time thug who had Martian Manhunter killed—returns to his family's home, embraces his wife, and tells her how much he had missed her and their daughter. This is all a pretext to steal his car, with the daughter's bike still attached, while the wife is tied to a kitchen chair. Note that the Flame had already crossed a Moral Event Horizon by leading a shootout through a Brand X Chuck E. Cheese. But just when it looked like writer Matt Sturges was humanizing him as at least a loving family man, whammo!
- Don't forget that earlier, Flame wakes up in a hospital, and his first action is to forcefully punch the young attending nurse, knocking her out. He then knocks a traction patient out of his bed while running away, rationalizing both actions by saying "they probably deserved it."
- Norman Osborn is master of this. The list of his dog kicking moments he's done to Spider-Man alone is very long, and contains thing like having sex with Peter's girlfriend, making her pregnant and killing her after she gave birth to his children; making those children believe that Peter's their father who abandoned them; killing Peter's unborn child and stealing its body; kidnapping Peter's aunt and replacing her with an actress, and revealing it after that actress died. All this so Peter could suffer. Oh, and he started the infamous Clone Saga too!
- In Dark Reign he adds some new ones like: shooting two kids because one of them's wearing a Spider-Man mask, impregnating his son's ex-girlfriend (he must really enjoy stealing younger guys' girls) and making his son believe it's his baby, so Norman could manipulate him and kill him in the near future for the biggest benefits (HIS OWN SON!). There's also the possibility that the guy he's using as a guinea pig in his laboratory is his other son, Gabriel Stacy.
- When no-one was looking, Lex Luthor stole forty cakes. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible.
- In Superpatriot a Nazi kicks one while in a good mood. This troper considered it as possible replacement for the current image. You can see it here◊
- In BPRD 1946, cute little girl (and head of the Soviet counterpart to the BPRD) Varvara shows her true colors when she brutally murders Audo, a disfigured and mentally unwell little boy.
- Hey, maybe Iron Man has a point. Maybe the registration isn't a bad thing. Maybe it's all for the greater good and the corrupt politicians won't manipulate the heroes once they're under their collective thumbs. OMG DID THEY JUST CLONE A GOD AND MAKE HIM KILL GOLIATH!!!?
- On the other hand, dog-kicking is contagious when it comes to Pro-Registration heroes. All right, Ms. Marvel, you know that Spider Woman II/Arachne is a traitor to the Pro-Registration side, you are to bring her down... but seriously, separating her with her dearest treasure (her grade-school daughter Rachel) is just... low. Maybe you've gone apologizing, but your friendship has been strained and if anyone's at fault it's you, Carol.
- Just so you know Col. Stryker is evil before you even meet him, his legions kill two unarmed six-year-olds and leave their corpses in a playground for other small impressionable children to see. Then once we do meet him, turns out he murdered his wife and child, his most loyal henchperson, and Shadowcat who at the time was a cute teenage girl.
- Black Tom Cassidy killing squidboy. Although, that was a CMOA for squidboy, I don't think a nigh immortal tree-god should have been that intimidated.
- Junior from Secret Six: "Kill him. Leave body for his family to find. Also believe he had a dog. Kill dog."
Fan Fic
- In the long-running yet unfinished Daria fanfic series 'The Look-Alike Series', most fans feel that the Mary Sue (some say God Mode Sue or even Black Hole Sue) character of Lynn Cullen reached her Kick The Dog moment when she threatened her when she wore a .45 pistol to school and threatened Quinn with it.
Film
- Averted in The Fellowship of the Ring when the dog got smart, stopped barking, and backed into its hobbit hole so it wouldn't die. But then the Ringwraiths decide to chop off a hobbit watchman's head off and drop a door on the gatekeeper. Oh, and they try to kill off all the hobbits while they're in bed. Just in case you didn't realize that the creepy cloaked strangers aren't the embodiment of pure evil yet.
- In The Two Towers Saruman decides Wormtongue is now useless. Kicking promptly commences.
- In The Return Of The King they don't so much kick the dog as much as throw the heads of the dog's friends at him.
- In Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Rear Window, just when it looks like Lars Thorwald didn't actually kill his wife, another neighbor's dog gets killed. Three guesses as to who strangled the unfortunate canine? Oddly enough, Thorwald was seen petting the dog and gently shooing it away in an earlier scene.
- Evil, but not gratuitous - the dog had discovered the corpse of Thorwald's wife in the garden.
- Another Alfred Hitchcock's example: in Strangers On A Train, Magnificent Bastard Bruno Anthony uses his cigarette to casually puncture a little boy's balloon. Just for the pleasure of being a total dick.
- There's a likely homage in Wes Craven's original Last House On The Left, wherein we see David Hess as Krug do the exact same before his band of socially and sexually deviant weirdos get down to the more serious business at hand.
- A dumb racist in Terminator Salvation self-righteously screams at a frightened Chinese woman to "Speak English!!" on the prisoner transport. He deservingly dies for his arrogance later, shot to bloody little pieces by a T600.
- In the 2007 Transformers film, Megatron gets to Kick The Human: while he and Prime recover from a fall during their climactic battle, Megatron casually flicks a fleeing passerby in disgust. It's made somewhat funny that this passerby was in fact the director, Michael Bay.
- Villains in B action movies routinely do unspeakable things like this to family, friends, and property of the hero to set him on the path to violent revenge. One of the most flagrant abuses of the trope was in the Chuck Norris film Lone Wolf McQuade. The villain (David Carradine) goes through all the usual atrocities, including killing or maiming the hero's entire family, until — with the most dramatic music of the movie welling up — he kills McQuade's border collie and leaves him lying in the dirt. At that point, Norris's wooden features almost show real emotion as he sets his jaw and goes forth seeking vengeance.
- Equilibrium has a scene where the minions of the government of Libria kill a bunch of dogs. Off-camera, but still, it demonstrates very well the extent to which the establishment will go to "protect" humanity from their own emotions. Of course, in their belief that suppressing emotion was necessary, they probably thought it a Shoot The Dog, but it's for us audiences to decide, not them.
- The villain of Pans Labyrinth kills a couple of hunters that he suspects are rebels, one by beating his face to a bloody pulp. It's very cringe-worthy, and basically has nothing to do with the plot beyond marking him as a huge bastard.
- What's worse, they may not even have been rebels. He finds the rabbits they were hunting in their pack after he shoots them, and then tells his subordinate not to wake him for such trivial matters. He may have killed them to teach his men a lesson.
- He also orders that the rabbits be cooked for him, if not in the movie then in a deleted scene. Which pushes him that much closer to (or further over from) the Moral Event Horizon.
- Pretty much everything the Captain does in that movie is either kicking the dog or raping it.
- The Jet Li movie Kiss of the Dragon has a scene where the main bad guy forcibly injects the female lead, a woman he had tricked into prostitution, with her "fix" of heroin and sends her back to work on the street after she begs him to let her daughter go so that she can get out of the business. Apart from the earlier nasty things he did (such as framing Li for killing the diplomat), this scene marks him as a huge bastard worthy of the very nasty death that Li gave him.
- In Scarface, Sosa's evil is made clear by his lack of qualms about the children that will be caught in a hit's collateral damage.
- For the first 45 minutes of The Princess Bride, it appears that Prince Humperdinck, if somewhat a hunting-loving milquetoast that Buttercup doesn't love, is more aloof and uncaring than out-and-out evil...until he tortures Westley to death (well, mostly) on Count Rugen's crazy sucking machine, and lies to Buttercup to make her think Westley abandoned her.
- The book is much more to the point on the subject - the first time we see Humperdinck, he's in his Zoo of Death, where he keeps wild animals for the express purpose of killing them when he's bored.
- And who can forget the destruction of Alderaan by The Empire's Death Star in the original Star Wars? This one's heinous enough to be Moral Event Horizon material, considering that it was an entire planet and that Tarkin did it as a You Said You Would Let Them Go on Leia, who he had moments before given a Sadistic Choice.
- In episode VI Jabba feeds a defiant slave dancer to his pet rancor. While it does set up for Luke's battle with the beast later on it has little point other then to show how cruel he is.
- In Ernest Goes to Jail, Ernest's Evil Twin throws Ernest's small dog into the garbage can to stop it from barking. The dog was physically uninjured, but it apparently had no way of getting out before the real Ernest came along and rescued it, a day or so later.
- Done by a corrupt cop in American Gangster- he shoots the dog.
- This happens in many, many Bollywood films, such as the Captain beating his servant in Lagaan.
- In One Crazy Summer, Aquila Beckersted gloats over his victory over the protagonists and punctuates his villainy by literally kicking a little girl's dog and putting it in an animal hospital.
- In Batman Begins, just to make good and sure that the audience is set against Detective Flass, a corrupt cop, he cheats a street vendor out of his money before Batman interrogates him.
- Oddly enough, Batman himself inadvertently invoked this not once, but 4 times in The Dark Knight. The Bat, who won't kill, casually throws one of the Chechen's dogs over the railing in a parking structure, and then at his confrontation with the Joker, knocks three dogs down a stairwell. From the top.
- The Kick the Dog description says that instances of this trope are gratuitous and unnecessary. Batman throwing trained attack dogs off a roof or stairwell in the middle of a fight doesn't seem to qualify.
- Early in Dog Soldiers, Captain Ryan, a Special Forces commander, ironically fulfils this trope by literally shooting a dog. Not that kind of Shoot The Dog, just killing it for no real reason.
- Later on in the movie, he attempts to shoot another dog to get it to stop barking, but he is thwarted when another character vomits on his head.
- Don't forget Glenn Close's character from Fatal Attraction killing and cooking the pet rabbit of the protagonist's daughter.
- In the 1970s Blaxploitation film Shaft, the title character grabs one of the Big Bad's Mooks and uses him as a human shield to try and escape. The villain shoots and kills his own henchman. He lets Shaft live only because he has to report back to his employer Bumpy that the Big Bad hasn't killed Bumpy's daughter, that he has taken hostage.
- Snakes On A Plane has a businessman who grabs another passenger's pet chihuahua and throws it to the snakes in an attempt to buy himself some time. Everyone in the audience likely cheers when, a few seconds later, a snake eats him.
- The audience in this troper's cinema cheered a few seconds earlier when they finally killed that goddamn dog. The thing was more sickening than Mr. Muggles.
- That's funny, cause the exact opposite happened to This Troper. I recall, when he was immediately killed by a snake a few seconds later, the theater cheered and clapped (one woman next to me leaned over to her boyfriend and said "God don't like ugly"). I guess more dog lovers in Detroit?
- Chihuahuas tend to turn this trope into Kick The Son Of A Bitch when they're the object of it, because they're The Scrappy of their entire species; even the most compassionate can be tempted to give them a punt. So instead of exposing what a bastard the kicker it, audiences are gratified to see someone else doing the kicking.
- The Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: "Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings... and call off Christmas!"
- This troper found this rant (and others like it) to be the most entertaining part of the character.
- American Psycho had a very literal example. When the dog of the homeless man Patrick Bateman has just shot to death starts barking, Bateman coolly stomps it to death, shutting it up. Later, he is at an ATM when a kitten starts rubbing against his leg. He picks it up, the scene playing like an unlikely Pet The Dog (or kitty) moment... until the ATM screen reads "FEED ME A STRAY CAT," and Bateman (almost) obliges.
- The book has Patrick being cruel to many more animals— and then there's that unfilmable scene with the starved rat, a Habitrail tube, and one of his female victims...
- Back To The Future Part II: There's a scene in 1955 where Biff gets a hold of a bunch of kids' balls and while listening to them plead to have it back mocks them and then throws it onto a second story balcony. Not that it wasn't already obvious Biff was a jerk, but it was over the top.
- In the movie U-571, the captain of the Nazi U-boat orders his men to slaughter survivors from an Allied cargo ship over his crew's protests.
- In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in order to make the Ax Crazy protagonist sympathetic, they had to show his nemesis, Judge Turpin, sentencing an eight-year-old to death.
- This is actually a stand-in for a considerably less endearing moment in the stage version. While spying on Johanna through a hole in the wall, the judge rants to himself about how beautiful she's grown in the years he's cared for her. He gets so worked up (and naked...) in the process that he has to self-flagellate to restrain himself from raping her, while praying for his arousal to go away. It doesn't work, and indeed, the whipping actually drives him to climax. And then he throws his bathrobe back on and rushes into Johanna's room to inform her that they're getting married. Naturally, he's singing the entire time.
- This troper believes the scene was meant to draw parallels with Signore Pirelli's rather cruel treatment of his ward Toby, especially when he is soundly bested by Sweeney at the shaving contest in the marketplace. The scene in question shows that Judge Turpin is even worse than Pirelli — and it immediately follows the scene where Pirelli becomes Sweeney's very first victim.
- Judge Turpin is a dog-kicking machine in general throughout the musical. Besides the above sentencing of that kid to death and lusting rather creepily after Johanna, there's his transportation of Benjamin Barker, the man who would become Sweeney Todd, for life because he lusted after Benjamins wife, theres his cruel treatment of Anthony and Johanna in general, which culminates in having Johanna thrown into a madhouse for defying his plan to marry her, and even a Moral Event Horizon moment with the "Poor Thing" scene, which has him raping Lucy at a masked ball that he has Beadle Bamford take her to soon after having her husband transported.
- The Beadles a bastard as well. In addition to his role in the "Poor Thing" scene, in the movie, he savagely whips Anthony after Turpin throws him out of his mansion for "gandering" at Johanna. In the stage version, the Beadles even crueler — he snaps the neck of the poor little bird that was Anthonys gift to Johanna before threatening him with the same if he ever sets foot on their street again.
- The Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie had a number of examples of this, such as terrorizing Vicki Vale, disposing of his last girlfriend Alicia offscreen so he could be with her, and gassing a museum and a parade full of innocent people (though the last one was foiled by the Batman), but the worst was probably cold-bloodedly executing his unquestioningly loyal Battle Butler Bob after asking him for his gun following said foiling.
- In Advent Children, Kadaj kicked the dog when he convinced Rufus he needed to tell the truth by tossing Tseng and Elena's bloodstained ID cards at his feet. It would have been a much more gruesome moment if... well...
- In the new Hulk film, Blonsky arrives at Bruce's apartment with his tranquilizer gun only to find he's already run for it; he shoots Bruce's dog instead (complete with comedy yelp noise).
- In the screening this troper attended, many of the audience reacted in distress to the moment, some remarking aloud that a tranq dart intended to knock out a human (in fact, a human who could become the Hulk!) probably hurt the dog. Nobody found it funny, but it did cement the latent super-villain as the vilest of characters.
- In The Monster Squad, Dracula all but cements the fact that he is an utter bastard right near the end of the movie when he confronts Phoebe, a little girl who is five years old and has the amulet that he wants to destroy so that the creatures of the night can rule the world, with these words: "Give me the amulet, you bitch!" If calling a five-year-old a bitch isn't Kicking The Dog, this troper doesn't know what is.
- The actor playing Dracula actually refused to do the scene in more than one take.
- And the actress playing Phoebe was genuinely terrified when she saw his "evil" contact lenses.
- Agents Johnson and Johnson in the first Die Hard have an exchange in which they determine that their plan to stop the terrorists (which was actually a vital part of Hans Gruber's Xanatos Gambit) could end up with 25% of the hostages dead, but they dismiss it as being an acceptable casualty. Presumably this is to obliterate any sympathy one might have for the fact that they get blown up by Gruber five minutes later.
- As far as Kane Hodder was concerned, kicking dogs is too evil even for Jason Voorhees: "Jason can pull people's limbs off and beat them to death with their own arms, things like that, but he's not gonna be kicking any dog. You know, you gotta draw the line somewhere."
- Michael Myers from the Halloween series apparently doesn't share the same sentiment, having killed at least two pet dogs over the course of his many rampages.
- And eating one of them, apparently. "He got hungry..."
- Early in the first Terminator, the titular character had to run over some children's toys to establish that he is evil. Never mind that he'd already killed (at least) two people in exceptionally ruthless fashion.
- Let's also count the moment in T2, where the T-1000 actually kills John's dog.
- Invoked in Spider-Man 3: the actor playing the Sandman asked the director if he could be shown punching a police dog while fleeing from the cops, so it would be clear that he wasn't an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. (It was only a puppet, but it gets the point across well enough.)
- Used almost to the point of gratuity in No Country For Old Men; Chigurh arbitrarily murders random innocents several times, based solely on whim and the outcome of a coin toss. He even takes a potshot at a pigeon he passes while crossing a bridge. Ironically (the irony being that he's the most terrifyingly competent and relentless assassin in film history), he misses. Utterly lampshaded early on by Deputy Wendell, who, upon surveying the scene of the drug dealers' massacre in the desert, remarks: "Aw, they even shot the dog." As if the pile of dead bodies and truckload of heroin weren't big enough clues that these are bad people.
- Juno from The Descent gets a few of these, such as revealing she purposely led the group into the wrong cave without telling anyone where they were going, or leaving her friend who she accidently stabbed to die slowly and painfully. This was before she becomes a fairly heroic uber-Bad Ass.
- Hunter "Raoul Duke" Thompson has one of these in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas when he suggests selling Lucy into prostitution. Although it's really hard to tell whether or not he was serious.
- The one-eyed "bible salesman" in O Brother Where Art Thou? beats two of the protagonist senseless with a branch to steal whatever it was that they were keeping in that shoe box they were guarding so closely. When he finds out it's a frog (which they thought was a cursed friend), he squeezes the thing dead on his palm, and violently throws it against a tree, making one of the heroes cry. He later gets what's coming for him when a burning cross drops on him.
- In The Invasion, it's not clear what would be so bad about the new world order that's taking shape, until it's made clear that anyone not affected by the change would be executed, rather than simply kept out of positions of influence and allowed to live out their lives
- Not actually an example, but we have to mention that it literally happens in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, after the title character accidentally throws a burrito at a Badass Biker. In retribution, the biker destroys something that Ron Burgundy loves: his puppy Baxter. Baxter returns at the end, wet but unharmed.
- More specifically, he punts the dog off an overpass.
- "THE MAN PUNTED BAXTERRRR!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH AAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!"
- The 1950s version of Show Boat whittles Pete's role down to one of these scenes, taking a slave's necklace on the grounds that she probably stole it, then actually performing his role and mucking things up before being fired.
- In the 2008 film adaptation of The Spirit, the Octopus (the Spirit's nemesis) dons a Nazi uniform and gleefully melts a white fluffy kitten, seemingly just for kicks.
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom demonstrates The Dip by melting a tiny, adorable shoe toon in it.
- In Superman II, a boy in a small town taken over by the Phantom Zone criminals makes a break for it on horseback for help. Seeing this disobedience, General Zod almost casually signals Non to stop him, which is done by taking a police car flasher light and throwing it hard and accurately enough to apparently kill both kid and horse with one blow. When a woman wails he was just a boy, Ursa purrs sadistically, "And he will never become a man." When this troper saw this is at the age of nine, all he think was "Oh, just wait till Superman gets you!"
- Let's not forget "evil" Superman in Superman III, in which he straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa and blows out the Olympic Torch, out of boredom. Or is that just Superdickery?
- In the Super Mario Bros movie, Koopa kicks his pet dinosaur Yoshi.
- In Birth - when her fiancιe beats up (ish) the kid. Though this isn't just a pointless act, I think it still sets up the fiancιe for a fall.
- In the Toho film King Kong Escapes, the villain Doctor Who shoots the old man on Kong's island when he comes to take the ape, just responding to his warnings not to take the ape with "Yes. Kong's mine now." before killing him.
- In the classic John Ford western The Searchers, John Wayne is frequently compared to the antagonist- a Comanche chief named Scar- but is differentiated in that while Wayne pets the dog before Indians raid his family's home early in the film, when we later see Scar at his camp before the cavalry raids them, Scar throws a rock off screen at a yapping dog, and we hear a pathetic whimper a second later.
- In The Meteor Man, the Big Bad doesn't kick the dog, he throws a dumpster on the dog! The dog got better.
- The Mask of Zorro does this with resident baddie Captain Harrison Love. For the first fourth or so of the picture, Captain Love seems less like an evil villain and more like a lawman who is only an antagonist because the hero of the movie is an outlaw. Well, we can't have that sort of thing in our summer blockbusters. In order to avoid actually having to deal with moral complexity, we're treated to an Anvilicious scene where Zorro is conversing with the Captain and he randomly takes Zorro's brother's head out of his desk drawer, where it had been "marinating" in something presumably alcoholic, and Captain Love nonchalantly drinks a cupful of it. Drawn straight from the jar. To drive the point home, he tells our hero that he keeps the heads of everyone he kills, because he just loves killing people so very much.
- If you weren't convinced yet that Jane is a little off her rocker in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? by the time Blanche's pet bird goes missing, you'll be quite assured to know Jane's mental status when she kills the bird and puts it on a dinner plate to horrify her disabled sister.
- This trope is kind of spoofed in Blazing Saddles when baddie Mongo punches a horse.
- James Bond examples:
- Occurs in Live And Let Die when Kananga slaps Solitaire in the face after she sleeps with Bond.
- In The Wizard Of Oz it was clear from the first second the Wicked Witch of the West appeared that she was ... well, wicked, particularly when she threatened Dorothy's poor dog in the Trope Namer for And Your Little Dog Too. However, for most of the movie she's more of a Designated Villain, since all she wants is to get her sister's shoes back. When she really gets solidified as evil comes at one of three points:
- When she orders one of her Mooks to drown Toto anyway, even after Dorothy agreed to do whatever the Witch said, a Kick The Dog moment that involved an actual dog. Or ...
- When she locks Dorothy in the room with the evil hourglass (the one that would kill her once it ran out) and the crystal ball, makes Aunt Em appear in it, and then sadistically mocks her once she's completely broken down. Or ...
- When she finally has Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion cornered. As she prepares to attack, she gloats, "The last to go will see the first three go before her." Even the most generous Alternate Character Interpretation can't make that anything but pure sadism.
- In The Butterfly Effect, the Evan's enemy Tommy burns his dog alive after seeing Evan kiss Kayleigh, Tommy's sister when they're 13 years old. It's an even more impacting scene than when Tommy's violence is first established by beating a boy in the movie theater with the metal queue pole, and then smiling at Evan as security drags him out.
- The Young Victoria: After violently manhandling Princess Victoria, Sir John Conroy actually kicks her dog, Dash, as she storms from the room.
- 3 Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain, where male lead villain Lothar shows that he's a big unsympathetic jerk. First, on his way back to central control, he steals a kid's ice-cream, with the kid crying after that. Later on, fifteen-year-old Rocky, the oldest of the heroes tries to save his girlfriend from becoming roller-coaster roadkill. With a sword, Lothar engages into battle with the unarmed Rocky, to the point that they climb up the roller coaster tracks.
- "Give him another month to think about it."
- X-Men: Last Stand - While the director took pains to make Ian Mc Clellan's Magneto a complex Anti Villain with sympathetic goals, his slow slide toward the Moral Event Horizon is punctuated with increasingly cruel kick-the-dog moments. In particular is the scene in which Mystique is hit with a "cure dart" and turns suddenly into a beautiful, stricken, and supremely vulnerable human woman. Without a trace of emotion, Magneto informs her that she is no longer "one of us" and leaves her lying naked on the floor. Even his (new) head mook looks at him with a "WTF? That's cold" look. The cherry on top (of the dog turd) is his comment as he walks away: "Such a shame. She was so beautiful."
- Not to mention the fact that she had just saved him.
- He also gets major dog-kicking points in the scene where his forces fight against the goverment. He uses Chess Metaphors, telling his protege, Pyro for them to wait until the pawns (his other followers) exhaust themselves. In this moment, like the above scene, Magneto violates is own standards of decency, since if nothing else, he supposedly cares about mutants.
- At the beginning of Sky Blue, Locke orders a decaying rig to be jettisoned. When one of the Diggers protests that they need time to evacuate, Locke shoots him and threatens to kill the other if he doesn't comply, thus resulting in the deaths of numerous other Diggers. He also kicks several more dogs hard at the end, but telling would be spoileriffic.
- Subverted in Local Hero due to Values Dissonance. After Mac has adopted a rabbit he accidentally hit with his car and takes it to the village, the villagers cook and eat it. They turn out to be good people anyway.
- Used in a very interesting way in the film Cold Turkey. A town is trying to give up smoking for 30 days, so we know they aren't really "bad" people, just highly frustrated. That said, someway into the movie, a man literally kicks a dog and it hilariously goes flying.
- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune when he pulls the heart plug from one of his slaves and then does something too gruesome to describe here.
- In Nacho Libre, the wrestler who had originally won the battle royal for the opportunity to fight Ramses, Silencio, is fighting against a child beggar over a loaf of bread.
- Near the end of Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, Lucius Malfoy literally kicks the
dog Dobby.
- In the musical film version of Little Shop Of Horrors, Audrey II, after a blatantly evil phone call, reaches into the change slot of a pay phone to see of there are any coins. And Thats Terrible.
- Done literally in the Charlie Chaplin silent short Sunnyside when the villain kicks a dog belonging to a young boy. The antagonist repeatedly kicks Charlie himself in the rear throughout the entire film as well.
- Early on in Metropolis, Joh Fredersen fires one of his overworked assistants for failing to report an accident at the Moloch Machine, effectively dooming him to working in the deplorable conditions underground.
- Done literally in the film Hitler: the Rise of Evil to make absolutely certain that the viewer would understand that Hitler is not to be liked at all.
- The protagonist in Drag Me to Hell sacrifices her kitten in an attempt at placating the demon set upon her by a Gypsy Curse. It doesn't work when all is said and done.
- Inglourious Basterds: Zoller, the subject of Goebbels' propaganda film, is portrayed through most of the movie as a kind, generous, patriotic, somewhat lovesick suitor. The guy is even a film buff. And in one of his last scenes, he shudders at watching Goebbels' glorification of his bloody war heroism. In his last scene, he takes joy in accidentally hurting Shoshanna after she turned him down one more time, barks commands and threats at her and generally gives off a rape vibe. This is the scene that makes it OK to kill him.
- In Disney's Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, when the Queen is on her way out to poison Snow White, she passes a skeleton reaching for a jug of water just outside his dungeon cell. "Thirsty?" she mocks; "then have a drink!" and throws the jug at the skull, destroying it.
- In Return To Oz, the Nome King enjoys a long sequence of kick the dog moments as he becomes steadily more human: to begin with, he reveals that his supposedly innocent contest is actually a death trap for Dorothy's friends, and forces Dorothy and the others to keep playing by threatening to incinerate them; then he sends the childlike Jack Pumpkinhead to participate, clearly enjoying Jack's terror; finally, he reveals that he now owns the Ruby Slippers and mockingly congratulates Dorothy for letting them fall into his hands.
- In the (remarkably boring) 2000 horror thriller The Calling, one of the signs that the sweet US girl's cut little son is evil incarnate is that he kicks away his dog. In case that other hints like not missing his mom one bit, trying to psychically murder a little girl for hogging the swing and impaling a guinea pig didn't work.
- In the Shooter, the protagonist sniper reveals that he would have just hid in the wilderness if only the bad guys hadn't [[beserkerbutton Shot his dog]] first.
- Played ridiculously straight in Point Break, when Johnny Utah is thrown a Rottweiler, and immediately punts it off a second-story balcony.
- In the French film Forbidden Games (Jeux Interdits) it's not enough that the Nazis kill Paulette's parents. They have to kill her dog, too!
- The 2009 Japanese film Goemon probably has one of the most evil examples of this thus far. Saizo tries to assassinate the (mostly corrupt) ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi. Naturally, he fails, and is captured. After Goemon breaks him out, Hideyoshi and his men attack Saizo's home, kill his wife, and abduct his baby son. Being told that his son's life will be spared if he turns himself in, he gladly allows himself to be boiled alive in a giant vat of oil, in front of the entire city. Hideyoshi kicks him into the oil, and this is where the moment comes: when Hideyoshi throws his baby son into the vat 10 seconds later, alive. Literally every other character, be it good, evil, or in between, were disgusted by this act at best. At best.
- In Secret Window, one of the first ways in which the protagonist's stalker demonstrates his overall high level of dangerous creepiness is by killing the protagonist's dog...by stabbing him with a screwdriver. Of course, it turns out it was actually the protagonist himself who did all that, but the point stands.
- In Charlie Wilson's War, the title character tells his assistant about his first foray into politics: When he was a kid, he had a dog that always dug up a neighbor's flowerbeds. The neighbor solved the problem by feeding it dog food with broken glass mixed in. The neighbor was running for city council, so Charlie (after burning up his flowerbeds) went to the poor black neighborhoods in town, where most of the people had never bothered voting in a local election, told them that this candidate had purposely killed his dog, and offered them a ride to the polls. It was enough to lose him the election.
- In the Troma film "The Toxic Avenger", the antagonists take dog-kicking to the extreme with their hobby of running people over in their car for fun and taking pictures of the gore that ensues. The most gruesome/hilarious example is provided in the scene where the main characters run over a small child riding his bicycle after taunting him and, upon realizing he is not fully dead, reverse the car over his head. Furthermore, the attractive females of the crew of villains seem to get sexually aroused by the carnage, so...you know. All pretty much standard fare for a Troma film.
- Surprisingly enough averted in the eight Friday The13th, where Jason Voorhees was originally scripted to kick a dog to death, but Kane Hodder explicitly said that such an act would be beneath Jason. You heard me correctly; a psychopathic, machete-wielding, hockeymask-wearing murderer, who had slaughtered upwards to fifty people before this movie, and nearly twenty more during this one, wouldn't Kick The Dog.
- In Time Bandits Evil himself shows us how it is done.
Literature
- In the original book version of The Dead Zone, the first sign we have that Stillson is evil under his affable exterior is when, after making sure the owners of a particularly annoying dog aren't home, he teargasses it and kicks it to death.
- Another Stephen King example: in Dark Tower: The Waste Lands Gasher not only kidnaps Jake and takes him on a journey during which he threatens and beats him so much it's virtually all one long Kick The Dog moment, but he starts the journey by instructing him to throw Oy, his newfound pet Billy-Bumbler, off a suspension bridge, and then he literally takes a kick at Oy as he runs away. Needless to say, he gets his Karmic Death as it's Oy that leads Roland to the lair of Gasher and his buddies.
- And another: in The Green Mile, Percy gets two — when he stomps Mr. Jingles, and Delacroix's execution.
- In the Discworld novel Small Gods, High Exquisitor Vorbis harpoons a porpoise. Not only does he intend this as a slight against what he regards as a harmless superstition, but if there was any doubt of his evil, it is gone.
- It's worse than that — he forces the ship's captain to do the harpooning. The captain knows better than to say no to the Exquisitor when challenged to prove he harbors no heretical superstitions, e.g., that the souls of sailors are reincarnated as porpoises.
- Earlier in the book, Vorbis turns a tortoise on its back and props it with pebbles to ensure that it cannot right itself. The tortoise is a protagonist, but Vorbis doesn't know this at the time; he just wants to see how a tortoise dies.
- And later, when considering if Vorbis might have made a better Chosen One than Brutha, Om comes to the chilling realisation that if Vorbis had known the tortoise was the god to whom he had supposedly dedicated his life, he'd probably have done it anyway.
- In Hogfather, Mr. Teatime kills a dog by nailing it to the ceiling. This isn't even because he was trying to be cruel; he simply didn't want it to bark while he was working. Which just shows that he's evil and crazy.
- In Witches Abroad,
Lilith de Tempscire Lily Weatherwax, Granny Weatherwax's sister turning some drunk coach drivers into beetles and crushing them. Might qualify as crossing the Moral Event Horizon, given the dog had probably been kicked fairly severely by this point. The scary part is, she thinks she's the good one.
- In Carpe Jugulum, after the Magpyrs lose their cool, they kill Igor's patchwork dog Scraps and abduct Queen Magrat and her infant daughter.
- In one book, the Animorphs set out to put a stop to the workings of a certain Villain With Good Publicity. Their plan resembles an Engineered Public Confession, only instead of confessing to anything, the villain was set up to have a Kick The Dog moment on live television.
- In A Song Of Ice And Fire, as if there weren't enough evidence that Joffrey Baratheon is a psychopath, other characters relate an incident where he cuts open a pregnant cat.
- There's also Viserys Targaryen, who actually has a dog kicking moment in every scene he appears in in A Game of Thrones.
- In The Algebraist by Iain M Banks, the Archimandrite Luseferous primarily stays off-stage kicking the dog repeatedly, acting as a horrible encroaching threat we know is ready and able to bring if not thwarted...yet never meeting the protagonists or directly interacting with the main plot. In one scene he uses the undying severed head of an enemy as a punch-ball.
- Maybe the cultural standard is a little different, or perhaps it's at least partly for shock value, but this editor has read a number of horror shorts (most by Takahashi Rumiko) in which the villain's first evil act is killing a dog. Sometimes eviscerating it.
- A girl and her pregnant dog go too close to an evil place, and end up having to spend the night there (I think she got knocked out); the evil goes into the dog, destroys it and the babies, and emerges in the form of a horrible fleshless sort of puppy that the hero later has to defeat.
- A boy in high school finds out that the girl he was betrothed to as a child is coming to see him. He scoffs at the custom, since he has a girlfriend and all. His fiancιe takes it a little more seriously. She can control little shapeless monsters who eat things, and has already murdered at least two people and a dog (it barked at her, so she poisoned it to feed her new pets). Then, to frighten her fiancι's girlfriend into staying away, she kills the girlfriend's dog.
- There's a series (this editor forget which) in which... demons? vampire spirits?... take over bodies shortly after death. One little boy dies and gets possessed this way, and his mother can't bring herself to destroy him, so she hides him. Brings him animals to kill and eat. However, despite the numerous pets who go missing and the eviscerated corpses that show up all over the place, the fact that he's killing animals and not people works against Kick The Dog, seeing as (a) the boy lives, (b) he's victim more than villain, and (c) the killing of pets was literally the lesser of two evils.
- Let's not forget that pet standards differ by culture. Whatever is the pet norm is the one thing you would never even consider eating. For Americans, it's dogs and cats. For those in India, it's cows. We have no problem eating beef, and we joke about how Asians might serve dogs and cats in restaurants (There's a Cat in the Kettle at the Peking Moon). And, of course, some people eat horseflesh... and right now there's some little kid out there realizing that their breakfast sausage was made from Wilbur.
- And Finns eat reindeer. Goodbye, Rudolph! We hardly knew you!
- Standards also change with the times, notably before spaying and neutering became the norm. In Emily of New Moon, Emily is on vacation when she receives a letter saying her cat has had kittens. She matter-of-factly hopes she'll get to see them before they're drowned; her relatives only spare one. On the other hand, there are actual Kick The Dog moments in the book, when we learn that Teddy's pathologically jealous mother has drowned and poisoned various cats because she thought he loved them more than her.
- Since Zedar in the Belgariad didn't kick the dog (he only betrayed his loving God and his brothers, set off all the tragedy in the entire book and tried to destroy the world), apparently a lot of fans thought Belgarath might have been hitting the metaphorical pup himself when he decided to stick the other man in rock for all eternity. Which just goes to show, really.
- If you read the books more carefully, you'll see that Zedar absolutely had to do a lot of the various things he did. If he hadn't then the entire sequence of events that led up to the reunification of the two purposes would never have happened and/or the Dark Prophecy would have triumphed. Add to that the idea that in reality everyone was merely a pawn of either or both of the prophecies and incapable of independent actions it's not hard to see why he retains some sympathy.
- In the prequels however, he does get a fair range of dog molestation moments, including offering immortality to a queen for the murder of the King of Riva and his family, before letting her down as the whole army of three countries-and-a-half comes to avenge him.
- Indeed, the main question is why Belgarath feels guilty about it, even though Zedar set someone on fire without feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.
- The series also contains an example of a literal dog-kicking, although it is only distantly heard by the characters as an abruptly silenced barking followed by a yelp. It's also revealed that Taur Urgas' favoured son and crown prince was a Complete Monster who, as a child, amused himself by dropping live puppies in boiling water.
- Not to mention that when the heros hear the above dog kicking in town one of them says that kicking a dog to make it be quiet is horrible and he would like to go in and see how that person liked it.
- This trope goes back to Victorian times, where in Oliver Twist Dickens had one of the two main villains (Bill Sikes) repeatedly kick his dog on numerous occasions. The dog even went down with Sikes when he accidentally killed himself.
- In the Roman Polanski film adaption, the dog lives, though Bill attempted to drown it because it was mentioned on his wanted poster.
- In the musical adaptation Oliver!, Bill tries to kill it, but it not only runs away, it leads the chase right to him.
- In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, one of our first glimpses of Mr. Drawlight is a flashback to when he threw someone else's cat out a third-story window because he feared it would shed on his clothing.
- Amazingly, Thomas Harris' most horrific (to this editor) scene does not occur in any of the Hannibal Lecter books, but in Black Sunday. As if Harris believed the reader needed further convincing this far in of just how nuts the pilot was, we get a scene in which the pilot brings a kitten to his wife as a gift, then gruesomely kills it via kitchen garbage disposal when they quarrel.
- Pulp villains often indulged in this. One of The Spider's villains actually gave a puppy the plague and then hit it with a stick for good measure.
- In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry finds a letter from his mother that indicates that the Potters had a cat when Harry was a baby. Harry briefly wonders if the cat died when Voldemort destroyed the house. An example of kicking the cat when no dog (other than Sirius?) is handy.
- In the same novel, Voldemort is seen forcing Draco to torture people instead of doing it himself, just to watch him suffer, and almost killing an innocent muggle child, just because.
- You would think Snape's decision to mock a fourteen-year-old girl's awkward appearance, completely humiliating her in front of all her classmates and causing her to run off in tears, would be enough to establish he's a complete jerk. But no, he's still Draco In Leather Pants.
- only because said fourteen year old girl hexed him in the previous book.
- Snape, however, gets enough Kick The Dog moments to everyone, especially students that you can't really justify his position as a Jerk.
- It was this reader's feeling that the novel Children of Men has its Villain With Good Publicity do several such moments within the last chapter, (with the implication that he's done more like them) simply to avoid any Moral Dissonance for the heroes, or risk them not having an adequate excuse to get him out of there when they'll try and build a better world.
- This is the characterization of the Harkonnens in Dune.
- The arrogant landowner Mr. Hazell kicks the old doctor's dog in Danny the Champion of the World, simply because he's in the way. So the doctor selects an extra-blunt needle for the man's injection.
- Evil Sorcerer Pryrates in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series does this literally: he crushes the head of a puppy under his foot. He does it not even because the dog annoyed him, but because he knew it would shock the hero (who he didn't see as anyone special at that time). And this is just his Establishing Character Moment—he gets worse.
- The easiest way to figure out who the villain is in the Honor Harrington books is to see who has the most misogynistic internal monologue, with frequent use of phrases such as "that bitch" or "putting her in her place."
- Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has Heathcliff actually hang his future wife Isabella's puppy.
- Right in front of her. Then he tells her he'd like to destroy anything and everything she loves. She marries him anyway.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe book "Dark Apprentice" has a fairly obvious kick the dog moment when Admiral Daala orders her commanders to level an unarmed colony on Dantooine. This despite Daala stating that the planet "is too remote for an effective demonstration." The obviousness of this trope is made evident when she subsequently observes that she wouldn't "have another opportunity to catch the New Republic so unprepared." So why waste the opportunity on a ridiculous, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-target? To show just how cold, evil, and tactically inept she is, of course.
- In the same trilogy, Moruth Doole is shown to have a slave harem where he essentially rapes female Rybets, and then uses the offspring as slave laborers in his mining operation. If that doesn't make him evil enough for a Karmic Death, then he is also guilty of having the offspring murdered when they get large enough to challenge him.
- In the X Wing Series, Flirry Vorru gets a moment that is simultaneously this and Kick The Son Of A Bitch. He was an Imperial Moff who got sent to Kessel for massive corruption; typically he's urbane and civilized, but when he "disciplines" an unlikeable lesser criminal who had recently been gut-shot, the Rebels he's working with make a note on how quickly his mood changes.
Vorru's right hand struck fast and slapped Thyne on the belly. The younger man howled, then, as he doubled over, Vorru grabbed him by the neck and slammed his forehead into the table. Thyne, glassy-eyed, rebounded and Vorru flung him from his chair. "For some people, discipline is a lesson. For others it is a lifetime."
- In Dark Force Rising Garnd Admiral Thrawn abuses Mara Jade's trust pretty ruthlessly, following her to Talon Karrde's hideout and kidnappping him off to the Chimaera for... questioning. What's worse is he does it in a fashion that makes all of Mara's erstwhile smuggler friends believe that she had been working for Thrawn the entire time. This incident is what convinces Mara to begin her Heel Face Turn.
- In James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, the wicked Duke imprisoned children in the tower for sleeping in his camellias.
- Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games starts off with a man taking revenge on his adulterous wife by tossing her cute little puppy out the window.
- In China Mieville's Perdido Street Station it comes up three times this troper can remember.
- First, a character explains a remaking in which a woman, tired of her baby's crying, ends up shaking it. She ends up having the baby's arms attached to her face. Knowing Remakings, they probably worked.
- That particular Remade woman reappears in Iron Council. The arms DID work. And ew.
- Later in the book, we find that Lynn's head legs (she's a Khepri, with a head that is essentially a giant scarab beetle) have been ripped off one by one when some gangsters think that Isaac stole their drug making moth.
- The worst though was Isaac, the protagonist. He ends up crushing a terminally ill man in a press, knowing that if he pulls his punches at all, the moths can't be killed. It was necessary, but still, overkill for a hero!
- In the Dresden Files book Turn Coat, Lara Raith casually feeds a couple of crippled henchmen to her wounded sisters and herself. This may have been to remind the readers that while the White Court vampires were not as openly malevolent as the other courts, they were still predators.
- Eeluk in Wolf of the Plains declares himself the new khan of the wolves and exiles Temujin's family, taking their ger, ponies, and all their possessions to force them to die on the steppes, then kills the clan bard for the crime of protesting this was evil. Just to make things worse, he does this during Yesugei's funeral.
- In the novel American Psycho, insane serial killer Patrick Bateman kills a dog (along with his owner), and casually mentions tormenting a puppy to death. When at the zoo, he throws coins to the seals, just because he saw a table asking people not to do so.
- In One Shot, by Lee Child, Jack Reacher is helping investigate a shooting spree. A police officer mentions that after arresting the suspect, they sent the dog to the pound and it was put to sleep. Reacher says, "That's cold... the damn dog didn't do anything wrong." Bear in mind that Reacher is a giant of a man who kills several people with his bare hands in the series.
- The midpoint of The Player Of Games sees main character Jernau Gurgeh unmotivated and on the edge of a Heroic BSOD due to the culture clash he's experiencing: to the Azadians, Azad is the epitome of Serious Business, involving life-and-death stakes, while to Gurgeh it's nothing more than an interesting game. Since Gurgeh quitting the Azad tournament is not in accordance with Special Circumstances' plans, his Handler takes him on a quick tour of the city that amounts to a kick the dog moment for the entire Empire of Azad. The result is exactly what SC wanted.
- In The Curious Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the very first time Hyde is described, he is seen by the narrator walking down a street and running into and trampling a girl without so much as breaking stride. Fits the trope even more appropriately because for Hyde, there was no real hostile intent behind the action: she just happened to be in his way while he was walking.
- In The Knife of Never Letting Go it practically becomes a running theme that any villain in the book will hurt the main character's pet dog. First one man cuts half of his tail off while trying to kill his master, another kicks him in the face so hard that it injures his eye and breaks some of his teeth, and ultimately the Big Bad kills him by snapping his neck.
- In order to ensure that we don't sympathise too much with Alaric from the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novels, who is otherwise pretty much a "pure white" hero, he spouts stolid Knight Templar dogmatisms from time to time, such as threatening a techpriest with death for admiring some advanced technology unavailable to the Imperium.
- John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos kill a dog and a bull that respectively bit and chased one of their number.
- American Gods contains a scene in which Wednesday taunts and shortchanges a random waitress. Shadow, feeling sympathetic, makes sure she gets the correct amount. Any sympathy for the girl is lost moments later, when Wednesday reveals the girl's many horrible little deeds — among them, when she was little, locking a kitten in a closet for days, listening to it mew, and then burying it outside, for no reason other than that she wanted to bury something.
- Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park finally opens her suitor Edmund's eyes to her true character when she stealthily wishes in a letter to the heroine for Edmund's ill older brother to die, which would make Edmund, as the next heir of his father's wealth and title, rich enough for her to consider marrying. Now if only more readers could come to the same conclusion...
Live Action TV
- In the SNL skit "Natalie Portman Rap", Natalie says: "I'll kill your fuckin dog for fun so don't push me!"
- As above, horror anthologies are particularly prone to this. Tales From The Crypt, Monsters, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and so on all did it from time to time.
- MacGyver was romanced by a female assassin. How were we told that she wasn't going to be charmed by his goodness and turn good? She killed a dog.
- Likewise, the charming suitor of a friend of the family on Seventh Heaven was revealed to be a wife beater after he threatened to kill a dog.
- In the pilot of the teen drama Hidden Palms, Cliff is revealed as being unhinged when he is shown kicking a pug.
- In the miniseries which launched the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Caprica Six's villainy is announced when she kills a baby seconds into her first onscreen appearance. However, in a move typical of the series' tendency to favour moral complexity over black and white morality, on her reintroduction during the second season, Caprica develops into a much more layered and sympathetic character. Despite her having not only kicked the dog but committed genocide. On the third hand, it was often theorized that Caprica had killed the baby out of either dispassionate curiosity, or even a strange desire to save the baby from its inevitable death in a nuclear holocaust.
- To this troper it seemed like a pure accident. She was fascinated how such a frail neck could support the big head, and in the process of feeling its durability, she found out that it wasn't quite as strong as she thought.
- In the DVD commentary, it was revealed that the scene was a strong candidate for being cut in editing—however, the actress, Tricia Helfer, had such a strong expression of ambiguous guilt and grief walking away from the site of the killing that it was kept.
- A lot of fans thought that Tom Zarek ordering the execution of the entire Quorum of Twelve during The Mutiny fit this trope, even though his ruthless action makes sense in a coup where you have to seize power first and worry about how it looks afterwards. The problem was while Zarek had been accused of any number of nefarious deeds, most famously blowing up a government building, the audience had never actually seen him commit an atrocity until that point.
- On Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Giles' books contain an anecdote about Angelus nailing a puppy to the wall. Buffy finds such a story shocking enough that she refuses to let Giles tell her any details, saying, "I don't have a puppy. So skip it!"
- Also, it was on Valentine's Day.
- Angel, Drusilla, and Spike then spend several episodes announcing that they are feeding on puppies and babies For The Evulz. Mostly Offstage Villainy, but Drusilla did carry around a puppy for the express purpose of feeding on it later.
- Later, after much Badass Decay, a defanged Spike keeps his hand in the evil game by dealing black market kittens to demons.
- In another episode (or the same one, possibly) Buffy witnesses a poker game among demons, where they use kittens instead of money. At this point, Buffy has become so jaded that she just remarks, "Why don't they just gamble with money and buy the kittens themselves?" She then gets a hold of herself and liberates the kittens.
- In Season Three, the Mayor is Affably Evil (he likes the Boy Scouts, thinks children are the future, and gives his best girl a flower print dress because she should feel pretty). It's easy to like the guy. When he sees his girl in a coma, he gets upset and the audience connects with him even more. Then he tries to smother an unconscious Buffy. Not cool.
- In one episode of Hustle, the crew are conning a woman seeking vengeance on her ex-husband. One of the reasons they take his side is that she killed his dog.
- Agent Dobson's hitting of an already-unconscious Shepherd Book in the Firefly pilot was a very intentional Kick The Dog moment (and is lampshaded as such in the commentary track), designed to make Mal gunning him down without a second thought as he heads back on board later go down easier with the audience.
- Soon fortified when he threatened to shoot Kaylee in the throat, after already almost killing her once by accident.
- Not to mention that he spends the entire scene before Mal takes him down pointing a gun at the head of a traumatized, terrified River, who's on the verge of tears the whole time. And Jayne indicates that Dobson knew what the Alliance had done to River, and was still intending to bring her back to the Academy so they could keep experimenting on her. So yeah, Dobson. Good luck on getting those sympathy points, man.
- To be fair he might not have known: "I know what you did for your sister, that doesn't make you a killer." While that was likely a by the book attempt at manipulation, could anyone really be confident if he knew? On the other hand he did earlier call River a "precious commodity" (which may not have been very bright either under the circumstances).
- Dobson was not just mean, he was incompetent at his job and he broke under pressure far less then the main characters (who were not professional agents except for Book in his Mysterious Past) ever had to face. Which qualifies him as a Dirty Coward.
- Jubal Early from "Objects in Space" very quickly goes from witty Bad Ass Bounty Hunter to unpleasant bastard right around the time he ties up and threatens to rape Kaylee.
- At least Early was doing this for functional reasons. I thought Jayne's constant insulting and harrasing a disturbed person in front of her and her big brother for no particular reason was rather despicable. But I never liked Jayne and indeed his point was really to be hyperbolically repulsive.
- In an episode of Hercules The Legendary Journeys, Hercules goes to the underworld where he briefly unites with his wife and children who were murdered by Hera. The family dog is there too. As Kevin Sorbo says in the commentary "You can tell she's evil. She killed my dog too!"
- The minor character of Devo Damars from the 1991 Beverly Hills, 90210 episode "Ashes To Ashes". (Quote from Television Without Pity Mondos Extra by reviewer Cleophus Wayne: Next is the slightly sad spectacle of Devo wearing a loud dress shirt and holding flowers, yogurt, and a bag of tamales while shooing away a small dog that continues to nip at his ankles. It's quite the empowering scenario for any young black man, I must say. Two of Beverly Hills' finest slowly pull up in their patrol car. "Don't you like animals?" they ask.) Which is apparently enough to get him labeled a troublemaker by the cops, because it ends up with him getting arrested for walking around without a car (gasp!) and not knowing his girlfriend's home address.
- Played for laughs in the pilot episode of New Tricks; DS Sandra Pullman — a central protagonist of the series, and a decent if uptight police officer — is forced to shoot a vicious dog that is attacking her during a raid on a triad gang's headquarters. Although the shooting was reasonable and justified given that it was attacking her, the resulting public outcry over the incident completely derails her career and makes her a laughing stock, resulting in her 'promotion' to the head of the UCOS team. To make matters worse, the incident also kick-started a chain reaction which led to some poor kidnap victim jumping out of a window blindfolded in the process... which everyone ignores, because they're too busy being outraged about the dog.
- If it wasn't any clear after just the first few minutes of Damages, Patricia "Patty" Hewes soon solidifies her reputation as a magnificent bitch by orchestrating this trope as part of a Xanatos Gambit.
- In 24, Drazen uses a hostage to get Jack to back down, and then shoots the hostage, either just for the fun of it or to have one less person to keep up with.
- In the fourth season of the HBO series The Wire, Marlo Stanfield brazenly walks into a convenience store and steals several small items in full view of a security guard. The guard follows him outside and asks why he would do something so foolish, leading Marlo to deliver one of his most memorable lines ("You think it's one way...but it's the other way"). He then has the guard (who took the job to support his family) murdered for questioning Marlo's actions. Later on in the fifth season, he gains the trust of "Proposition" Joe Stewart, a long-time player in the Baltimore drug trade, and supposedly makes arrangements to get him out of the country to lay low. Joe shows Marlo around his house, commenting on the history of the city. Then, Marlo reveals that he never was going to get him out of the States, and that Joe's nephew sold him out. He then has his enforcer, Chris, execute Joe while he stands watching the entire act.
- The writers behind Mad Men seem to be engaged in a perpetual puppy punting contest. In Season One alone, the charming and unnervingly likable Don Draper brutally humiliates Sterling by sabotaging his meeting with the Nixon campaign in spectacular fashion. This, of course, only comes off as a prank compared to when Don drives his loving younger brother to suicide by forcing him to accept a bribe to stay out of Draper's life. And all of this is utterly blown out of the water by Joan's absolutely brutal subversion of the Romantic Two Girl Friendship. Not only does she brush off her roommate's heart-wrenching confession with "you've had a hard day," she proceeds to bang a guy right in front of her. Now that's pretty much worth a field goal right there.
- A notable moment involving a literal dog has the seemingly alcoholic Duck Phillips abandoning his dog to get his drink on in peace. Chauncey, we hardly knew ya.
- Betty from Ugly Betty literally kicks a puppy in a daydream she has when she's imagining she's Wilhelmina, the shows resident dog kicker.
- Done literally in this commercial. The dog did deserve it though.
- Farscape. In "That Old Black Magic" Crais receives a direct order from Peacekeeper High Command to end his pursuit of John Crichton and return to base. His second-in-command Lt. Teeg destroys the message and assures him that no one else knows about it. Crais repays this loyalty by breaking her neck to ensure that no one ever will.
- In Malcolm In The Middle, Reese has a phenomenally evil moment in "Evacuation" - he barters his way up from having the only plastic cups in the makeshift shelter to, among others, taking a man's watch in exchange for five blankets; giving an old, disabled man a blanket in exchange for his scooter and, eventually, having two diabetics bidding against one another for insulin. INSULIN.
- Played fairly literally in the season finale of True Blood, where Drew Marshall the real name of Rene, who's committed all the murders of the women kicks Sam, who's in his dog form.
- Heroes: In season 3, Big Bad Arthur Petrelli, a Smug Snake for the ages, is basically the Anthropomorphic Personification of dog kicking. Without any other characterization to get in the way, he can truly embody it on this plane. Let's take a look:
- Psychically paralyzes his wife.
- Kills off the most consistently entertaining character.
- Gives his son a hug just to steal his god-like powers
- Keeps threatening to re-cripple Daphne.
- Throws Hiro off a roof.
- Decapitates someone who was being helpful (this didn't sting too much because the other dude didn't have much characterization, it happened off-screen, and he didn't use his bare hands - I guess it would have been too interesting to show him with blood all over his suit).
- Tells a warlord to kill his other son (who he tried to kill in the past, too).
- Maintains only one tone of voice throughout...and unfortunately, it's not that of a Large Ham
- Several characters on Lost have fulfilled this trope:
- Benjamin Linus has several dog-kicking moments in season 3, in order to build him up as an unsympathetic villain before revealing he is a more complex character. This is best epitimized when Ben shakes a bunny with a pacemaker to death, but later reveals the bunny never had one to begin with.
- Martin Keamy takes Ben's "daughter" Alex hostage in order to coax him out and into imprisonment. Ben tries to call his bluff by saying she means nothing to him. Keamy then emotionlessly shoots her in the head and walks off.
- Phil, an annoying Mauve Shirt DHARMA Initiative security person, is present while Radzinsky and Horace Goodspeed interrogate Sawyer as to the whereabouts of Kate. When Sawyer won't talk, Phil says he knows a solution, promptly punching Sawyer's girlfriend Juliet in the face. Executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse confirmed this scene was meant to be a kick the dog moment for Phil, and combined with Sawyer's promise to kill Phil for his action, all but confirms Phil will meet an untimely demise.
- At the end of the Legend Of The Seeker episode "Fever," Darken Rahl has a kill the cat moment, a cat he had been cuddling just a second before, after getting a piece of particularly bad news. Bad Darken Rahl!
- In the Star Trek The Next Generation "Datalore", Lore, after changing clothes with Data and leaving him unconscious, then kicks him in the head, showing the viewers just how much a bad guy Data's Evil Twin was.
- In the Doctor Who episode "Utopia", the newly awakened Master immediately demonstrates his competence as a villain by shutting his enemies out of the control centre and setting the Futurekind on them. However, his Kick The Dog moment comes when his longtime loyal assistant Chantho threatens to stop him with a gun. He turns on her with an exposed electric cable with the chilling remark, "Oh ... now I can say I was provoked."
- And, amazingly, the episode "The Waters of Mars" dares to do this to the much-beloved Tenth Doctor himself. The Doctor's declaration of himself as the "Time Lord victorious" who can choose who deserves to live or die is a conscious effort to prepare viewers for the fact that the Doctor's approaching regeneration is neccesary and timely. The Doctor is even called on it by the very woman he is saving, and her subsequent suicide pulls him up sharply (although the episode ends on an ambiguous note, so we're not sure if he accepted or ignored this revelation).
- For a literal Kick the Dog moment, see "Meglos", where the mercenary kicks K9. According to the commentary, the actor, who was best known for playing hammy villains, added this business himself because he figured the fans would be expecting it,
- The PM in Torchwood: "Children of Earth" kicks the dog twice. In Day Four, just after everyone in Thames House has died, he turns to Lois Habiba, who is partly and wholly unwillingly responsible for this and asks: "Happy now ?" And then, in Day Five, he expresses relief when learning that at least he will be able to blame the Americans for everything that went wrong.
- Connor Temple of Primeval thought he'd got a stroke of good fortune when he met hot geek Caroline Steel...that is of course until she stuck the team mascot, an adorable lizard by the name of Rex, in the refrigerator attempting to freeze him to death and exposing herself to everyone (except naive Connor) as a stone-cold bitch.
- After veering back and forth for three seasons of Arrested Development, George and Lucille Bluth cement themselves as unlikable people after learning that a woman Michael is on the verge of marrying is both mentally retarded and incredibly wealthy; they opt to conceal these facts from Michael and speed the wedding along, in the hopes that they can exploit her in order to restore their own fortune. This is only topped in the Series Finale when Lucille reveals that they only adopted Lindsey as a gesture of spite towards Stan Sitwell. She freely admits that they never actully wanted Lindsey, and kept her adoption a secret (raising her as Michael's twin) to preserve their own image. This fact puts Lucille's psychological abuse of Lindsey in a much darker light.
- Played for laughs in "The Body Politic," an episode of the Dawn French anthology series Murder Most Horrid. French's character literally kicks several dogs while disposing of a body.
- In one episode of Merlin, Arthur went to go get a flower to cure Merlin against his father's orders. As soon as he came back, his own father imprisoned him for disobeying orders. Arthur didn't care if he stayed in prison for days or weeks, as long as the flower got to Merlin. He even begged his father to at least deliver the flower. Uther simply crushed the flower in front of Arthur, told him to get another servant and dropped the flower just out of Arthur's reach.
- Quite a few villains do this in Star Trek The Original Series. In the episode that Khan first appeared, he blackmailed the crew to join him by forcing them to watch Kirk being suffocated in the decompression chamber.
- In the same episode, one of Khan's henchmen slapped Uhura when she defiantly glared at him and would have done it again on two other occasions if someone hadn't interrupted him.
- "Turnabout Intruder". Dr Janice Lester, while in Kirk's body, hit Kirk, who was in her weakened body at the time, when Kirk had the misfortune of entering a room with her in it while trying to warn Spock and Mc Coy about her.
- In "The Empath", the Vians tortured Kirk and Mc Coy to provoke a reaction out of the sweet empath Gem, just to see if her species was worth being saved.
- In "Plato's Stepchildren", the Platonians entertained themselves by using their psychic powers to force Kirk and Spock into some humilating situations. In one instance, they had Kirk lying helplessly on the ground, with Spock's feet about to step on his face. Later on, they would bring in Uhura and Chapel and force them to kiss Kirk and Spock. They even made Kirk and Spock hit them.
Professional Wrestling
- Triple H from WWE Monday Night Raw joked about this trope saying, "I'm gonna beat Batista like a bag of puppies."
- Trips is quite good at forcing Heel Face Turns doing this, especially if it looks like he'd become a good guy himself. However, Genre Savvy Batista didn't suffer the same fate as Randy Orton (and a year later, Ric Flair) did.
- Authority figures in Professional Wrestling often Kick The Dog by placing commentators, referees, valets, and other non-wrestlers into wrestling matches with particularly brutal heels (villains), who then proceed to demolish the hapless non-wrestler with glee. This is a sort of double-dog-kick, as it serves as a kick-the-dog moment for both the authority figure and the wrestler who does his dirty work.
- An example of a wrestler bullying a commentator was used to kick off The Undertaker's most recent Face Heel Turn in late 2001, when The Undertaker forced Jim Ross to join Vince McMahon's Kiss My Ass club.
- Taker's first Heel Face Turn was brought about by then partner Jake "the Snake" Roberts trying to take a steel chair to Miss Elizabeth, the wife and manager of "Macho Man" Randy Savage, with whom he had a serious feud.
- More literal, when Chris Jericho needed to make a Face Heel Turn before his WrestleMania match against HHH, he was given the responsibility of watching over HHH's dog. His negligence of the dog led to its Off Camera Death.
- Another method for this involves a tag team or stable splitting with one member pulling a Face Heel Turn and absolutely brutalizing his partner for whatever petty reason the new villain has been stewing over. Examples include Edge and Christian, Shawn Michaels and Marty Jenetty, the Hardys (at least twice), Jericho and the WWE team during Survivor Series 2001, Rey Mysterio/Eddie Guerrero (again, at least twice), Rey Mysterio/Chavo Guerrero, Rey Mysterio/Spike Dudley...
- Let's not even go into how many of these Rey's gotten. Big Show slamming him into the turnbuckle while in a stretcher, Eddie Guerrero's brutal Face Heel Turn...really sucks to be the smallest fish in a tank full of piranhas, especially when the Cruiserwight Title's been dropped.
- Randy Orton from 2006 onwards. Talk about a Generation Xerox...and he takes it one step further by having a punt as his other Finishing Move.
- Matt Hardy turned on his brother Jeff by knocking him in the head and costing him his first-ever WWE Championship against their mortal enemy, Edge. Jeff refused to fight him. Matt verbally assaulted and berated Jeff for two weeks and beat up a mutual friend mercilessly. Jeff refused to fight him. Matt called Jeff out and backhanded him to the ground. Jeff refused to fight him. Matt cost Jeff a chance to be in the Money In The Bank Ladder Match at Wrestlemania 25. Jeff STILL refused to fight him. Then Matt came out, carrying the burnt collar of Jeff's dead dog, and admitted he was the one who had killed Jeff's dog (and burnt his house and tried to kill him several times, but it was mostly about the dog here). At this point, Jeff finally snaps and proceeds to open the proverbial can of whoopass.
- What the hell? He never admitted to trying to KILL Jeff Hardy or having burned his house down.
- He didn't flat out say it, but the implication was so heavy that you couldn't really take it to mean anything else. At any rate, his mention of the dog was still what finally pushed Jeff over the edge.
Tabletop Games
- This scene in the continuing examples in Bliss Stage:
- Surprisingly rare in Warhammer 40000. Kick The Dog barely begins to describe the treatment of choice for civilians, cute fluffy critters, and even entire planets. Even Moral Event Horizon barely begins to cover it.
- In Magic The Gathering's Weatherlight saga, Greven il-Vec threw Vhati il-Dal overboard. The set's designers admitted that they created Vhati just so Greven could kill him and show how evil he was.
Theatre
- Stephen Sondheim's Assassins: Sarah Jane Moore shoots her dog for barking, then stuffs the dead dog in her purse — but it's played for laughs.
- As far as marking her as a credible threat goes, Sarah Jane's real Kick The Dog moment is when she turns her gun on her infant son, because he wanted an ice-cream. Thankfully, she doesn't pull the trigger.
Video Games
- In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, during a briefing in the "Cold Alliance" episode, Bentley remarks that he saw bad guy General Tsao "kick a puppy, twice!" Taken less literally, Tsao also shows himself to be a misogynist when Sly confronts him about his plans to marry the Panda King's daughter in a Shotgun Wedding.
Sly: She doesn't want to marry you!
Tsao: She's a woman, she doesn't know up from down.
- Ironically enough, the Panda King got a moment of his own in the first game when he caused a village to be destroyed by an avalanche when testing out his fireworks.
- Borderlands: You're told to get an important macguffin from a bandit leader named Krom. You know nothing about him except for that. Problem is, he's the first major villain that doesn't wear a mask, so players might think he has some secret, sympathetic past. What's the very first thing he does when you see him? Shoot a cowering Claptrap in the face and push it off a cliff. He. Must. Die.
- A possible Lampshade Hanging of this trope occurs when Patricia Tannis tells the protagonist that their next target, Baron Flynt, stole the last Eridian Artifact and punched her dog.
- Soul Nomad And The World Eaters Just... Soul Nomad. If anyone would like to try and list all the stuff that goes on even WITHOUT counting Demon Path BE THIS ONE'S GUEST!
- At one point you meet Hawthorne, an influential merchant; his daughter, Tricia, is an archer who joins your party. But then you find out that Tricia is the most recent of about half a dozen "daughters" Hawthorne bought from a child slavery ring, the others all having "disappeared" sometime before their 17th birthdays. Of course, it does make you feel a little better about Hawthorne being killed in front of you. This plotline only gets worse in the spoiler-blocked thing mentioned above.
- The Thurists (cultists who worship a World Eater) infect towns with a deadly plague because their "god" tells them to. But the real Kick The Dog moment comes where Kanan reveals that 10 years ago she killed young Danette's parents. Then he laughs about it.
- Levin, whom you originally believe is your ally, attacks Layna, reveals that he's a World Eater and reveals that he killed his sister Euphoria. Then, to add insult to injury, he resurrects Euphoria just long enough to rub in the fact that she was a soulless puppet and Endorph was a chump for falling for her. On top of the shaming and asskicking Gig and company dish out before this insult, he wins the grand prize from Endorph afterward — one Psycho Burgundy to put him to final rest.
- Gamma and Joules' entire Hannibal Lecture, which is followed by their attempt to devour Feinne purely for power.
- Tales Of Symphonia has several; all of the Desian Grand Cardials get at least one involving doing some manner of nasty stuff to an Innocent Bystander, and Mithos gets a particularly anvilicious one when he's revealed as a villain by nearly killing one of his former nakama and kicking him while he lies defenceless on the floor while laughing evilly.
- This game also features a literal version of this trope as Colette kicks a dog after having lost her humanity at the Tower of Salvation. This is not done to portray her as a Heel, but to underscore the fact that her personality as gone, as she is the game's dog lover.
- In Snatcher, a pair of the titular Ridiculously Human Robots attempt to search Katrina's house for a list of Snatcher-run hospitals hidden there. When they fail to find it, they slaughter her dog, Alice, gut it violently, and throw it through Katrina's window, entrails hanging out. In the original Japanese, uncensored version, it's still twitching.
- In Jak II, the Krimzon Guard — a fascist organization led by Baron Praxis — that holds Haven City in the grip of oppression at least seems to have a redeeming trait in that they keep it safe from the monstrous Metal Heads. Then, partway through the game, you find out that they've been bribing the Metal Heads to make ineffectual attacks for them to thwart — rather than staying quiet until they can stage an effective assault — in order to justify their brutal rule as necessary in face of this danger. Because, y'know, just being fascists who tortured the main character for two years didn't make them bad enough.
- And in the first cutscene after Jak escapes prison, you get this little gem.
Krimzon Guard: By order of his eminence, the Grand Protector of Haven City, Baron Praxis, everyone in this section is hereby under arrest for suspicion of harboring underground fugitives. Surrender and die!
Daxter: Ahh, excuse me sir, don't you mean surrender OR die?
Kor: Not in this city!
- The World Ends With You. Oh, where to begin...
- Megumi Kitanji has one the instant he introduces himself to the players, saying that Neku's entry fee is now Shiki, so instead of restoring her to life like the Reaper's Game promises, he instead sends her to a state of limbo, on pain of death if Neku loses. That in itself was a jerk move, but he later blantantly abuses the rules he's supposed to uphold when he says that now every single player is now Neku's entry fee, so he puts all thier lives on the line, when Neku needs them to even play the Game without getting killed. Is it any wonder he's listed in TWEWY's own entry as a Jerk Ass?
- It's stated in the Secret Reports later that Kitaniji is actually a step below the guy who actually has the power to revive the fallen who win the Game, and was using Shiki's instatement as Neku's entry fee to cover that up. The jerkery still holds about using every other Player as Neku's entry fee for the final week. He's just very fortunate Beat was the only Reaper who didn't have intentions of leaving his ass out to dry.
- Let's not forget Mitsuki Konishi, resident passive-aggressive Baroness. In her chapter, she crushes Beat's cute pet Noise into a pin just minutes before we found out said pet Noise was Rhyme after being Blessed With Suck so that Beat could resurrect her in human form...All with a grin on her face.
- In Final Fantasy VIII, Seifer actually goes and kicks a mongrel the first time he's in the party.
- In Fire Emblem 7, The Vamp Sonia sends her daughter Nino and teenage contract-killer Jaffar to kill the Prince of Bern for Lord Negal. She also gives Jaffar an order to kill Nino, then justifies it Hannibal Lecture style by saying that the Prince's killer must be killed to avoid panic in Bern. Nino and Jaffar don't go through with it, and actually defect to your side after a Quirky Miniboss Squad member runs her mouth about Sonia's plan in front of Nino.
- Even worse was the fact that she just promised Nino that she would hug her, just once, if she finished the mission. Worse still, she kills her foster father and reveals that she killed her entire family of mages when she was a baby, by using her as a human shield. Making her a combination of Adolf Hitler and Lord Voldemort.
- And from the same game, just in case you didn't know that Prince Zephiel's father Desmond was one huge bastard, they show him ordering a baby fox to be killed. A baby fox! A baby fox Zephiel had given to his baby sister Guinevere! And Guinevere was Daddy's favorite!
- This editor was actually thrilled to learn that Zephiel grew up to kill his father, after Daddy tried to kill him again. Does that make me a bad person?
- What made it awesome is how Zephiel killed him. Basically he faked his own death and when his father came up to his coffin during his "funeral" Zephiel jumped out and stabbed him. Awesome.
- In the John Woo game Stranglehold, Big Bad Mr. James Wong is shown early on to be an utter bastard when he reveals during his meeting with Tequila that he intimidated his own daughter Billie into breaking up with the Cowboy Cop on pain of death eighteen years ago while she was still pregnant with their daughter Teko — and ordering a No Holds Barred Beatdown on Tequila on top of it. Eighteen years later, after charging Tequila with the task of rescuing her and Teko from the Zakarovs and the Golden Kane, Wong decides to stick the knife in by ordering Tequila's own partner Jerry to betray Tequila by murdering Billie after Tequila took out Damon Zakarov and trying to kill him as well, both to protect his syndicate (Damon had threatened to force Billie to reveal everyone on the payroll of her father's syndicate in order to keep Damon from killing Teko) and to deny Tequila the woman he loved forever in true rat bastard fashion.
- Most of the later assassins in No More Heroes enjoy kicking the nearest canine. Since the viewpoint character isn't exactly a friend to all living things, this is probably there to justify the bad guy's eventual gory deaths.
- Number 2, Bad Girl, states that she feels no remorse about killing anyone while slaughtering clones for fun, Number 3, Speed Buster, kills a major trainer in a rather messy manner, and Number 7, Destroy Man, cheats so consistently it's remarkable.
- As a twist, a good bunch do not kick the dog, however. In comparison...
- In Assassin's Creed, every single Templar that you're assigned to kill gets at least one Kick The Dog moment (breaking a test-subject's legs, pushing somebody into a pile of burning books, murdering a priest out of paranoia, etc.) before you kill him.
- Except, of course, for the slave trader. Because do you really need any other reason to kill a slave trader?
- Apparently horrible storage conditions for the slaves, as mentioned on this very wiki. "Even Altair seems vaguely appalled."
- Oh, sweet Jesus, I get to be the one who mentions this! In Overlord, you have a tower, which, naturally, is your base of operations, housing an armory, a forge, even a private chamber for your mistress. It also features a jester, (a brown in a jester's outfit, kinda like a toned-down Monster Clown,) who will laud your various accomplishments, and whom you can kick in the head. It serves no purpose, has no effect on your corruption meter, and if you do it enough, the jester will cower in fear of your mighty boot, and later comment on how mean you are to jesters. But you are supposed to be an Evil Overlord, and the fact is, the game lets you do some pretty, ughh, heroic deeds. So you need to kick the jester, to prove to yourself that you're still evil.
- In Destroy All Humans 2, Crypto panders to the Black Ninjas by saying that the Furon god Arkvoodle (Or "Darkvoodle," as the ninjas put it) is so evil that he eats kittens for breakfast, and that he's hungry now and wonders if they have any kittens. The Black Ninjas are unimpressed, saying that they eat babies for breakfast.
- In The Bard's Tale, if you decided to adopt the cute puppy that the Bard will show some actual affection for — a Druid stops the group to allow their Griffith to stomp on the dog, breaking the poor thing's spine as it gave a pained cry. A literal Kick The Dog and Player Punch in one swoop. Cue this troper giving the boss as much painful looking action as she can.
- Call Of Duty 4 makes it a point to ensure the player won't feel any sympathy for either Khaled al-Asad's revolutionaries or Imran Zakhaev's Ultranationalists. Al-Asad's troops do such pleasant things as mass-executing civilians in broad daylight, publicly executing President Yasir al-Fulani on national television, and detonating a nuclear bomb inside his own city. Zakhaev's Ultranationalists routinely murder civilians, bomb civilian villages indiscriminately, and conduct another mass execution in a village for no apparent reason except to be complete bastards.
- The Ultranationalists murder the civilians because they don't want to take the chance that the civilians will rebel and damage their long-range bombardment equipment. They bombard other villages and targets to try and defeat Loyalist forces. And they perform the second mass execution so that they can use the village to hide Al-Asad without fear of being discovered. Sure, they're all evil reasons, but they're not indiscriminate. Firing the nuclear missiles at the US, now THAT is a Kick The Dog moment.
- WELCOME TO REALITY!
- Have we forgotten that three Call of Duty games feature Dogs as enemies, making players often stab dogs on sight? While these are all justified in that they would maul you if you don't, I know of one case in Modern Warfare 2 in which many players, myself included, shot a dog that was on the other side of a chain-link fence that was no threat to the player, which at least made this troper feel like a bad-guy more than the infamous Airport massacre scene did.
- The announcers in Gradius Gaiden will give you words of encouragement if you run out of lives early on, but later on, they rub your defeat in your face with more disparaging comments:
"Poor boy..."
"Get outta here, forget about it!"
"Hahahahaha!"
- The first thing a minor villain does during his introduction in Fable 2 is kick the player's dog.
- That bit-part bandit is nothing compared to Reaver's puppy-punting spree. Upon his introduction, he kills a sculptor and an artist trying to capture his likeness, sends you off to get your soul drained by {Cosmic Horror ancient demons} so he can stay eternally youthful, kills a character you've known since childhood, and then informs you cheerfully he's just betrayed you to the very person who...dammit, Lucien needs a new section.
- The stories around Lord Lucien in your childhood depict him as a noble, if somewhat eccentric man. In fact, he even offers to adopt you and your sister, both homeless orphans... unless he gets exactly the result he does get from a simple test which reveals that the two of you have the blood of heroes, at which point he shoots your helpless, unarmed sister in the head, and then shoots you in the chest, sending you out a window in a tall tower. You get better. After this point, he becomes a fairly standard Big Bad, but at the end of the storyline he reveals that again, to try to cut off the heroic bloodline, he's personally murdered your spouse and any children you have, and then literally kills your dog when it takes a bullet to save your life.
- Sometimes when a villager sees your dog, he/she will taunt your dog and then kicks the dog in the face.
- In Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2, Archibald Grims (a recurring enemy character for the first part of the game) merely comes off as a minor Jerkass. It's not until you've fought him a few times that you find out that he actually is a sociopath — his solution to digging up a rumored lost-technology giant robot is to bomb the area, blasting away the sand covering the robot as well as the pesky civilians who were digging it up the hard way. A subordinate even tries to reason with him, and Archibald seems to consider for a moment.
"I see. Yuuki, are you trying to say you don't like unnecessary bloodshed?"
"Not in this situation, Sir."
"What a shame. But I do. Especially from non-combatants!" (Cue maniacal laughter and screamy civilians)
- World Of Warcraft: Choose a Blood Elf in The Burning Crusade, and you're required to kick many dogs (or cats, as it may be.) Play a death knight in Wrath of the Lich King, all you do under the Lich King's control is kick dogs — oh, and kill your best friend.
- Also in the opening cinematic a Blood Elf cuddles with a small magical creature, only to destroy it so she can absorb its mana.
- At the Argent Torunament a woman takes the confessions of champions from both factions. An undead champion informs her that he punched a penguin in the face just so he could see her expression when he revealed it.
- Jade Empire lets you indulge in a little dog-kicking, if you're evil enough. When your karma meter hits rock bottom, the cute little dogs running around in the background become targetable - interacting with them lets you kick them, making them explode, and drops a health power-up.
- Bio Shock does this indirectly in an event that could also be considered a Moral Event Horizon. Dr. Suchong forces the protagonist, Jack, who was a genetically conditioned child in Rapture to snap his new puppy's neck. Jack is mentally conditioned to obey him, even though the child protests profusely. This just demonstrates how much of a huge dick Dr. Suchong was.
- Then there's the fact that he was so abusive with a little girl. I know he was irritated, but he had no excuse for doing what he did. He even said "shit" right in front of her! Shouldn't he know you're not supossed to use foul language when you are nearby the little ones? [[Spoiler:At least that resulted in him getting mauled by the Big Daddy. You can even see a huge drill in his belly when you find his corpse.]]
- In the Japanese dub of Mega Man Legends (Dubbed Rockman Dash in Japan), when you reach a scene where you have to get the dog Paprika away from Tron, players have the option of just merely kicking the dog, causing him to scamper away. Sadly, this is not present in the english dub.
- In Planescape: Torment, you get to experience flashbacks to previous incarnations of your character, the Nameless One. One is dubbed the "Practical" Incarnation. Pretty much everything he does is dog-kicking and Moral Event Horizon-crossing. And yet, it's implied that something your original self, the Good Incarnation, did before he repented was so far beyond the Moral Event Horizon that the Practical Incarnation is a near saint in comparison.
- It's the first thing you see the "protagonist" of Postal 2 do after he gets out of his trailer on Monday morning. And then it gets better. It's just that kind of game.
- Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies has a cutscene where the Erusean invaders set up an anti-air gun post on top of a hospital in the narrator's hometown. It also reinforces Yellow 13's Anti Villain status by having him be disgusted by this.
- SaintsRow 2. Boss, the character you play, does a lot of this.
- She doesn't kick an actual dog, but give one to her, and Larxene would probably kick it. She does this trope enough, you'd think it was her job.
- Mafiaesque Team Rocket was the lightest villain group in the games, bar none. Whacking a few Mons, running a casino and the Viridian Gym as legitimate business ventures, intermeddling with the Lake of Rage, and hijacking the Goldenrod Radio Tower were pretty big for their day, but compared to more recent organizations they're small fries.
- Much hyped in the continuity is Team Galactic, who slid right up the Sliding Scale Of Villain Effectiveness by bombing the Great Marsh, extracting the gems from the three nymphs, and using the gems to shackle Dialga and/or Palkia in an attempt to rewrite reality. Unfortunately for them, the Mooks are plain dumb, the Great Marsh explosion was pure shock value, and the lion's share of bad intentions come from emotionally stunted Cyrus, who believes that living spirit is an imperfection that needs to be scrubbed away. If it weren't for him, even the Rockets would have someone to laugh at.
- Archie and Maxie must play canine soccer when their groups aren't at each other's throats. Sure, they take their cause a bit too seriously, but what drives them dangerously close to the Moral Event Horizon is their operation at Mt. Chimney. Whatever they planned to do to the global climate does not excuse them from nearly driving Lavaridge City to ruin - the eruption that Team Magma was aiming for would have burned it all away and left multitudes of both humans and Pokemon homeless for years to come, while the death of Mt. Chimney would have financially devastated the city, with the demise of its hot springs as part of the backlash. (Keep in mind this was before Team Galactic was even a concept) In the manga, Archie becomes a professional Poochyena kicker by actually killing Mt Chimney via his Elite Mooks, one of which he sends off to die for doing his job right later on, and proves to Maxie prior to the Emerald arc that he is indeed Eviler Than Thou after they partly recovered from being used by the Red and Blue Orbs. Still, neither of them hold a candle to...
- Cipher makes Poochyena kicking, if not molestation, its modus operandi. In the events of Colosseum, they were literally running all of Orre from the shadows of the criminal underworld, with even its most affable Admin, Miror B., holding the mayor of Pyrite Town around his pinky while distributing Shadow Pokemon shipped from the Under to people at the Pyrite Colosseum. Dakim was the enforcer who put everyone else in line, Venus was the pretty face that kept the people of the Under out of Cipher's affairs with her gaudy entertainment programming, and Ein corrupted the stolen Pokemon that Team Snagem and other criminal organizations paid Cipher as tribute for use as weapons. The place was hell on earth in a near-literal form until Wes waged his two-man war, and five years later during the events of XD, changes in personnel aside, Cipher's at it again, and the loss of support from Team Snagem is merely a setback to their greater operations. Say what you will, but any organization with nigh-Complete Monsters comprising the entirety of its cabinet is a Complete Monster itself, bar none - and given the sheer assets Cipher possessed during XD, the possibility of a third coming is very real.
Webcomics
- A hilarious literal example, from the webcomic Van Von Hunter.
- As soon as the villain, Frans Rayner, of the D.A.R.E To Resist Ninja Drugs and Ninja Violence story arc is introduced, he gets into this trope. It could be seen as his Moral Event Horizon... but they are just mooks who failed him because of Dan McNinja's Incendiary Exponent.
- This is parodied in an 8-bit Theater strip.
- At the end of a Penny And Aggie storyline, Charisma rants to her illegitimate son's face that he exists to ruin her life, after a series of events he had no control over, in front of her boyfriend. Needless to say, he leaves her soon after.
- In Sluggy Freelance Aylee's evil clone gets one of these after she goes through her corporate executive transformation. She attacks the gang's Halloween party and leaves all the guests unconscious outside and taunts Riff with the knowledge that she can kill him and everyone he knows so easily.
- New Knight Templar Xaphrael kicks the dog within his first half dozen strips in Misfile when he nearly chokes resident Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Cassiel in this strip (for doing her best to get Rumsiel in trouble).
- Mileage varies apparently, this Troper views Cassiel as not sympathetic in the slightest, and that Cassiel really should've taken the hint after Vashiel gave the same exact threat quite some time ago. Not to mention, in that case, reporting what Rumsiel did may well have had serious repercussions.
- In Awkward Zombie, the Author Avatar does this literally.
- Kubota from Order Of The Stick has kicked several puppies. He not only orders his men to kill a pregnant woman (which doesn't work that well, but still...), he seals the deal by poisoning and killing his assistant Therkla, just so he can make an effective escape. This last act might even put Kubota into even worse territory.
- Vaarsuvius threatening Elan with death when Elan says that he will not cover up for Vaarsuvius killing Kubota. In addition to suggesting that Elan had an affair with Therkla behind Haley's back. Note that Elan is hir team-mate.
- Vaarsuvius's first act after making a Deal With The Devil in the comic could also count as one...as well as a Moral Event Horizon. Killing the dragon in revenge was one thing. Reanimating her so you can use her to kill the dragon's entire family...that was seriously over the line.
- Seriously? No one's mentioned Xykon yet? He kicks the dog in almost every strip he's in.
- Belkar constantly complains about not getting to kick any dogs. Although, he does eventually cross the line with his teammates when he kills the oracle. Of course, the oracle, being... an oracle, expected this and used it to pull off a magnificent example of a Xanatos Gambit.
- Very literal instance in General Protection Fault, in one of Trudy's earliest appearances, complete with giggle. This turns out to be one of her nicer traits as the strip progresses.
- Questionable Content. Sven. Not funny, Jeph. Not funny.
- Minions At Work. Well, I don't feel really good about who we stole the candy from but you have to admit... it was easy.
- Misty Snow from Shadowgirls. She was racist at the age of 5, and when she grew up, she became a teenage Queen of Jerkass. Her biggest feat in kicking a dog? She made Lin betray her best friend Becka for popularity, and led her in a trap, but instead of embarrassing her in public, like Lin thought it would end, Becka almost gets raped by three guys. And Misty was meanwhile playing with Lin's guilt, and thinking about it made Fate Worse Than Death even worse.
- And if you think Misty's bad, just wait until she becomes Possessed By Mother Hydra, who surpasses her in kicking a dog like hell. And she has this promo art.
- Several times in Slightly Damned:
- First, we have the as-yet unnamed hooded archer, whose first action in the story is to kill Sakido.
- Shortly afterwards, we're introduced to Lazuli and Talos, two demons who got their kicks out of tormenting Kieri.
- And shortly after that, we learn Kieri's bunny form was a curse from a rabbit spirit (go figure), who did it to her for the lulz.
- And then there's Denevol, who despite being an Angel, has done nothing but kick dogs (and bunnies) since he appeared.
- For the first part of RPG World Galgarion comes across as a comical somewhat harmless villain. But as Cerebus Syndrome set in, Galgy got several suprisingly evil moments, including his attack on the Mubble village, the slaughter of a turncoat henchman's family and finally murdering Reka. Some or all of these might count as crossing the Moral Event Horizon as well.
- The Chosen of Battles in Keychain Of Creation. When she first shows up, her moral status is indeterminate: sure, she's trying to sequester the group's precious artifact, but it had just been stolen by the villains for world-ending purposes. Then, after one of the team gets it back, the Chosen of Battles looks like she's ready to throw down on the group — until Marena points out that that would be illegal. Fortunately, the conundrum of whether we're supposed to sympathize with the Chosen of Battles or not is solved in the very very next strip, as she immediately chooses to try and steal the artifact and bait the rest of the group into attacking her first (so she can "defend" herself) by attempting to behead Secret, on the legal technicality that even though she is a defector from team evil and working for the protagonists, she's still an Abyssal Exalted. Going straight for the Woobie's neck just to get around a bureaucratic roadblock in your path is what we call "a signal".
- This strip of LICD has a literal example.
- Khrima from Adventurers, he kicks cute things.
Web Animation
Web Original
- In the fanfic Kingdom Hearts: The Short and Honest version (found in the fanfic recs/ page) Clayton from Deep Jungle mentions "punting a few puppies off a cliff".
- In the animation Ninjai the bigbad for no real reason what-so-ever attacks the hero's little bird friend. The bird get's his own back though.
- TheSagaOfTuck's Principal Nickerson has no qualms about assigning detention to students who skip class to commit suicide. Just so you know how badly he deserves the Roaring Rampage Of Revenge.
- Survival Of The Fittest character JJ Sturn: This thread. (NSFW
- To summarize: He has sex for one last time with his girlfriend (Rosa Fiametta), then breaks up with her while insulting her. She slaps him, and then he decides to beat the crap out of her while continuing to insult her. He's The Atoner for a reason.
- In the video The Unspeakable Deeds of Bill 42, it's not enough for the character representing the bill to fine people for meeting to air their grievances. He has to up the evil quotient by deliberately knocking over a woman's crutches.
- At Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, the head of the Alphas, Don Sebastiano, is the master of this. As an example, he tells Hekate how he can handle a deviser, and demonstrates by destroying a different deviser's invention in such a way that nearby girls think the deviser was attacking them. Best part? Said deviser is known around campus to be mentally ill. What a classy guy.
- In a recent episode of Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series, Marik mentions that he once kicked a puppy. "And it was very cute".
Western Animation
Truth In Television
- As mentioned in Pet The Dog, Adolf Hitler had a pet dog whom he was very fond of. By the end of the war, he killed it so the Soviets wouldn't get it. Though the writing team of Real Life were probably a little paranoid if they thought that at that point anyone needed reassurance that Hitler was evil.
- So Shoot The Dog then. Both literally and metaphorically.
- To be fair... if the Soviets ever found out it was Hitler's dog... High Octane Nightmare Fuel would ensue. I imagine dog gore would cover every inch of whatever camp it would be brought into. These WERE the same people who had their country raped, pillaged, and obliterated by the Nazis, and after the war was over, they pretty much returned the favor, complete with mass raping German women. Considering Hitler's dog is not human...
- This Troper was told that he did it in order to test if his cyanide capsules worked. He had resently decided that Himmler, the guy who gave them to him, was working against him.
- This
- As well as this.
- And again...
- All-around excellent guy David Motari was booted out of the Marines for pulling a real-life Kick The Dog stunt while on a stint in Iraq. Needless to say, he is not well-liked. By anyone.
- Michael Vick, who did far more than just kick his dogs.
- Here's another case.
- While technically involving a shoot the dog moment, the court case of People v. Green (445 Mich. 894, 519 N.W.2d 853 Mich.,1994) is fairly close to this. It involved a man who said he killed his neighbor after his neighbor "had killed Green's dog a few weeks before, and allegedly said it was bad enough living around nigger, much less dogs.
|
|
