"Middle school is hell. Maybe war is a little bit more of a hell than middle school, but not by much. You can always get discharged from the military. If you're at a lousy job, you have the option of quitting. But you don't have a choice in going to middle school; you're sent to that prison five days a week, seven hours a day whether you can stand it or not. And when everyone around you is constantly belittling you and telling you you're worthless, repeatedly, every single day...you eventually start to believe it. Middle school messed me up pretty badly."
The unholy middle step between elementary and high school.
Middle school, or Junior High as it's been called historically, is often shown in fiction as a rotten, nasty place where the innocence of childhood gives way to the awkwardness of adolescence. Bullying is a virtual inevitability, the teachers may be apathetic if not outright hostile, and homework gets piled on like pancakes. The school in question may or may not be a Sucky School, but even if it isn't, don't expect the other kids to be any better.
Sadly, this is Truth in Television for a lot of people. Just ask anyone about their experiences in middle school, and chances are they'll treat it as a bad memory - assuming they haven't blocked it out. Part of the reason why is because middle school years (around the ages of 11-14) are generally the ages in which people begin to undergo puberty, which is frequently considered an awkward/difficult time for many young people. That said, No Real Life Examples, Please!
See also Kids Are Cruel and Teens Are Monsters. Contrast High School Rocks and Summer School Sucks.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- My Hero Academia: While Midoriya's childhood wasn't exactly all sunshine and rainbows on account of being Quirklesss in a world where 80% of the populace have superpowers, by middle school just vocalizing his desire to become a hero in class gets every other kid and the teacher to laugh in his face and mock him for it. By contrast, his general opinion of U.A. is that High School Rocks, despite the immense challenges he has to go through such as his struggles to control his new Quirk, One For All.
Comic Books
- Stuck in the Middle is an anthology of 17 short comics about the crappiness of middle school life, with the main themes including bullies, loss of friends, and oblivious or unhelpful adults.
- Downplayed in Berrybrook Middle School. Berrybrook isn't exactly a picnic for most of the students, mainly due to the usual difficulty of academics and immeasurable drama instigated by each other, but for the most part, it's far from the worst one in media.
- The Sunny Series: Swing It, Sunny has Sunny start middle school, which she doesn't like one bit — there's math tests, boring teachers, the Gym Class Rope Climb, and terrible cafeteria food. When asked if she's learned anything by her Gramps, she remembers seeing the track and field images from past years which include her older brother Dale, who has fallen out of grace with her due to his substance abuse. She later finds attending the Spring Fling awkward in Sunny Rolls the Dice.
Fan Works
- In Those Lacking Spines, in the High School AU world, Xaldin, Vexen, and Lexaeus already get a good number of complaints and potshots at high school in general, but their real vitriol for the world comes out when it turns out that the high school they're prowling around in search of their missing colleagues' ...you know is actually a 7th-12th school, with Vexen in particular ranting about how Even's life in high school was full of bullies, cheaters, thieves, and sports teams taking all of the academic funding.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: When Anastasia and Drizella got to middle school, they were severely bullied for being unattractive.
Films — Animated
- Turning Red: Inverted. Mei enjoys school, enjoys learning, and enjoys getting good grades. Her friends are there, and going to school means she's out from under her mother's control for at least a few hours. After she begins transforming, school also means the panda hustle, having fun and earning money toward the 4*Town concert tickets.
Films — Live-Action
- Welcome to the Dollhouse: Dawn Wiener is an awkward 12-year-old girl that is the epitome of "uncool" and suffers for it. Many students, and a teacher as well, takes sadistic pleasure in bullying Dawn and all while the other adults that should be looking out for her often turn a blind eye to the problems she's facing in school.
Literature
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid pulls no punches in its portrayal of middle school as a nightmare where pubescent awkwardness reigns and everyone is a dick. Protagonist Greg Heffley (who's hardly immune himself) even says as much in the first book, noting that the mix of pubescent and prepubescent students is a natural recipe for disaster.
Greg: Let me just say for the record that I think middle school is the dumbest idea ever invented. You got kids like me who haven't hit their growth spurt yet mixed with those gorillas who need to shave twice a day.
(illustration of a large, thuggish boy hitting two much smaller boys with his backpack and saying, "Outta my way, runts!")- Diary of a Wimpy Kid is essentially the Trope Codifier of this trope - so much that during the end of the 2000s and especially during The New '10s, loads of books about the middle school experience (Especially negative) came out - though it is important to note that Tropes Are Tools - Many of them are considered to be actually good by the target audience (of middle-grade readers) but also sometimes gain a Periphery Demographic of high schoolers, younger readers, and adults.
- How I Survived Middle School: The title itself should be a dead giveaway of this. The first book starts with heroine Jenny McAfee being forced to deal with her best friend, Addie Wilson, abandoning her to join the Alpha Bitch clique called the Pops, and the rest of the series is about her various ups and downs in navigating the drama and everyday stresses of middle school (usually caused by Addie and the other said Pops) with her friends.
- Middle School: Rafe doesn't like Middle school. So he and his friend Leo decided to break some rules for fun. It is literally subtitled "The worst years of my life" after all.
- It eventually escalates to Rafe getting expelled. He gets transferred to a private arts school. He thrives there, but the school is later closed for budget reasons and he’s forced to return. Neither Rafe or the school are happy about it.
- His sister Georgia later attends and she has a hard time between being “Rafe’s Sister” and running afoul of a Girl Posse.
- Dear Dumb Diary: Similar to Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dear Dumb Diary portrays middle school problems in a humorous way that is written in a diary format, but from the mind of seventh-grader Jamie Kelly.
- Smile has quite a bit of its arc in Middle School, detailing all sorts of drama such as Raina getting a sixth grader crushing on her and all the awkward feelings this entails. Along with her recurring dental issues and all the hygiene that she had to deal with. While Raina cuts out her toxic friends in High School, much of the bullying truly starts here. The spinoffs Sisters and Guts are also entirely in Middle School.
- The books All's Faire in Middle School by Victoria Jaimeson depicts a girl who is entering Middle school from Homeschooling - which suffice to say does not paint a good picture of what Middle School is like. Roller Girl by the same author also mentions it, but the girls never physically go to Middle school (As it is set during Summer), although there are sections where it is discussed.
- Wonder (2012) opens with main character August "Auggie" Pullman entering the fifth grade. Auggie, whose Treacher Collins Syndrome has given him facial deformities, has been home-schooled all his life, but his parents decide that he needs to start socializing with other children, especially because they cannot keep him sheltered forever (it's all but stated that they home-schooled him to prevent him from being bullied). The Pullmans choose fifth grade to start Auggie at a private school, reasoning that since it's the beginning of middle school for all of the children, he'll have a slightly easier time integrating with the other kids. It doesn't go according to plan, as Auggie faces horrible bullying, although he does eventually make friends.
Live-Action TV
- This trope is the raison d'etre for Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. As the Opening Narration states, bullies abound, the teachers are nuts, and the lunch is disgusting. Hence why Ned Bigby starts the titular guide.
- Lizzie McGuire: A majority of the series deals with the often hilarious, but painfully awkward realities of being in middle school as Lizzie and her friends Miranda and Gordo struggle to fit in.
- Played for drama in the Cold Case episode "Sleepover", in which a toxic environment of bullying and domestic abuse at a sleepover leads to one poor girl being accidentally killed in the woods by her former friend in a misguided attempt to regain status with the class Alpha Bitch. As the culprit laments, at the time, she didn't realize that middle school would end eventually and the opinions of her classmates wouldn't matter anymore.
Web Original
- The Platypus Comix article "Kellogg Middle School: The Happiest Place on Earth
" sees author Peter Paltridge recount his time in middle school, and the title quickly proves to be a sarcastic. He notes that middle school in general is a hellish time in general for a lot of kids, and that this wasn't helped by the sordid state of Kellogg itself; he specifically recounts an incident in 1991 where a female student was kidnapped right in the middle of class.
- In the webcomic Alcatraz High, we especially see this in Mike’s case, but it’s implied that every character is at least somewhat traumatized by Middle School. We get to see this firsthand in the short “Gatekeeping Poser”, when the metalhead Jesse has a flashback to being beaten up and thrown in a trash can on the first day of 6th grade in Middle School for approaching a group of metalhead 8th graders while dressed like Kurt Cobain and admitting to liking the Goo Goo Dolls. Mt. Diablo Middle School proudly advertised itself as a “trauma factory” on the marquee in front of the school.
Western Animation
- Ed, Edd n Eddy had already established a cynical outlook on the pubescent experience from the beginning, so naturally that continued in Season Five when the action moved to middle school with the In-Universe end of summer. Not only are the kids no nicer in the school halls than out, but the teachers almost always look the other way — if they're not punishing the wrong kids for the wrong infractions, usually Eddy.
- Zig-zagged in The Loud House: "Middle Men" reveals that Lynn's experience in middle school was terrible due to relentless bullies, and in "Schooled!", when Lincoln and his friends move up to middle school, they fear being bullied, with one of Lincoln's new teachers being a Stern Teacher. Despite this, Lincoln and his friends actually don't have that hard of a time in middle school.
- Zig-zagged in As Told by Ginger. The marketing very much played into this trope. Several episodes play this straight in which the characters have a very hostile time in middle school dealing with issues such as Slut-Shaming and predatory behaviour by other girls. This is slightly subverted in that Ms. Zorski turned out to be a very good teacher to Ginger and even the principal can be a Reasonable Authority Figure, showing that not all people had a bad time in middle school, though it can definitely be a scary place.
- Zig-zagged in the Disney seasons of Doug. While it became very much Denser and Wackier during the Disney run and the middle school itself is fairly neutral-positive (compared to other examples of this trope), several episodes actually do try to touch upon darker themes than in the Nickelodeon run. Such as drug addiction, grief, The Talk, or eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
- The Proud Family and The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder are set in middle school. It delivers some very cynical aesops about the real world through the eyes of middle school girls.
