Trainee from Hell

"But you need an adviser
A satyr, but wiser
A good merchandiser
And - oh!
There goes my ulcer."

— Hercules' Trainer Phil, Hercules

Training in fiction is often exhausting and can be dangerous for the student. However, they may not be the only one: This is about cases where the training becomes hard for the mentor.

The reasons for this can vary. Sometimes, the mentor underestimated his or her student. Sometimes, they overestimated themselves, especially if they're not as young as they used to be. Sometimes, the training is simply in a subject that is not to be taken lightly, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous by nature (magic often falls into that category). It doesn't help that a lot of fantasy mentors appear to know very little about safety when it comes to their exercises.

Students who make life hard for their mentors tend to come in two major categories:

1. The nice but overpowered student: This is often the case when the student has superpowers, and, especially, when the mentor underestimates what it means that his student has these powers. Superpowers themselves may not even be unusual for the setting, the student just may be a lot stronger than the mentor anticipated. Or far too eager to try out something dangerous. Or maybe, the mentor just really forgot he's not as young as he used to be and should consider some safety measures before the training starts. Either way, this version is not unlikely to end with the student saving the mentor from a danger that resulted from their own training exercise.
2. The malicious student: This is the one who actively tries to make his mentor miserable. There may be a number of reasons for that. Maybe he's insulted the mentor initially beat him. Maybe, he holds a grudge against him for some other reasons. He may be working for the enemy. But he may also have valid reasons, if the mentor committed a severe mistake or else riled up the student against him. He may even be right. In not-so-rare cases, this interlopes with a malicious mentor and there are mutual attempts of the two to harm each other. It can overlap with Klingon Promotions and commonly occurs in settings where they are frequent.

Students of category 1 rarely truly kill their mentor, and their training may or may not be effective, but the mentor will certainly be relieved when it is over. With malicious students on the other hand, things are unlikely to improve even when the training is finished.

Of course, there can be mixed forms. The student may dislike the mentor but still underestimate his or her capability to seriously harm him. The student may consciously try to defeat the mentor to prove him- or herself, but just as part of the training, without any personal grudge behind it. Training can be difficult for both student and mentor because of the subject. Whenever a story empathizes that training is challenging or even dangerous to the mentor because of the student's actions, intentional or not, then this is this trope.

Compare and contrast to Training from Hell, which focuses on training being hard for the student. This is the inverted trope, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Assassination Classroom: All the students Class 3-E qualify as this, since they are all tasked with killing their nigh-unkillable teacher Koro-sensei. Special mention goes to Karma, who states in his first appearance that he's always wanted to kill a teacher and ends up being the first person to successfully wound Koro-sensei.
• Dragon Ball: Son Goku of all people is this. Not because of his being overpowered and Does Not Know His Own Strength a lot of the time. But his growth rate and mastery is so unbelievably high, his trainers need to keep devising harder and more difficult regimes for him almost constantly. In the case of Master Roshi this was such a problem that he had to don a Paper-Thin Disguise at the World Martial Arts Tournament and defeat Goku so he wouldn't go through life believing he was already at the peak and neglect his potential.
• Full Metal Panic!: Sōsuke Sagara is an example of the "super-powered" type and a bizarre example at that: he is a veteran soldier undercover in a high school and his life has been essentially a constant Training from Hell. When the P.E. teacher hates his guts and yells at him like a drill sergeant and makes him do things that other students would consider torture and humiliation, Sōsuke thinks the teacher is being kind and does his best to fulfill the orders — usually by setting up booby traps and unleashing violence of the type normally seen in war zones. When the teacher ends up in the hospital courtesy of becoming collateral damage to Sōsuke's mayhem, Sōsuke goes as far as to wish him good health so he can come back to yell at Sōsuke some more.

Comic Books

• Asterix:
  • In Asterix the Legionary, the Roman instructors have a very hard time getting Obelix to go through their training as he just uses his Super-Strength to slap the enemy away. His javelin throws go through the training dummy, when the recruits are made to march while carrying heavy bags of rocks Obelix just picks them all up, and generally the entire squad becomes Mildly Military after the Camp Cook is... persuaded... to start making good food.
  • Asterix the Gladiator has the gladiator trainer Insalubrius announce that he gives up and is going back to his father's lace factory after the Gauls' Super-Strength and lackadaisical attitude towards violence proves too much for him. Caius Fatuous finds them playing parlor games with the other gladiators, which ends up repeated in the games while Caesar is watching.

Fan Works

• Harry Potter: In The Order of the Phoenix by Ruskbyte, Ginny after having her magical power increased accidentally blows her Defense Against the Dark Arts professor clear across the classroom during a practical lesson. He takes it in stride, but stops asking her to demonstrate anything in front of the class from then on.

Films — Animation

• Hercules: While the main character Hercules gets his training montage, every single clip puts quite a lot of effort into showing that his trainer Phil suffered considerably more through the whole affair than Hercules himself. This isn't because of any malice on Herc's part. He's enthusiastic and friendly...and also rather klutzy and unskilled in controlling his Super-Strength.
• Ratatouille presents a variant: Linguini cannot cook, so Rémy is supposed to teach him. But Rémy is a rat and can't speak the human language, so they have to find another way to make it work. It turns out he can control Linguini by pulling at his hair, but the film makes it clear that cooking that way is a learning experience for both of them.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Wars:
  • The Sith invoke this with their Rule of Two: Since the rules of their order dictate that there can only ever be two Sith and that the apprentice has to kill the master or to be killed by him at one point, Sith apprentices and their mentors are generally enemies and seek to harm each other.
  • It also often applies with the Jedi Order both in the current and the Star Wars Legends continuities where the Jedi trainees make life difficult for their masters.
    Obi-Wan: Why do I get the feeling you're going to be the death of me?
• Full Metal Jacket: Leonard Lawrence becomes this to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. The Sergeant did not consider the dangers of teaching a mentally unstable person how to shoot a gun. Lawrence kills first Hartman and then himself.

Literature

• Dale Brown's "J C" Powell. When Powell was in flight school, instructors assigned to fly with him frequently exclaimed "Jesus Christ!", usually followed with "help me!" or "save me!". They were terrified not because Powell was a bad pilot, but because he was insanely good at it.
• In A Wizard of Earthsea, the Masters at Roke College come to see Ged as a dangerous student after he accidentally unleashes the Shadow, only allowing him to complete his studies at the college because they decide that it's safer for everyone if he is confined there until he's learned enough magic to protect himself from the Shadow that waits for him outside the college's walls.
• Myth Inc In Action: Protagonists Guido and Nunzio are vastly overqualified for basic training when they enlist in order to infiltrate the army. The Drill Sergeant Nasty they're assigned to can't figure out a way to actually challenge either of them, and his attempts to make them look bad keep backfiring because yes, they can do that seemingly impossible task. This ends with the Sergeant trying to have an "unarmed" combat demonstration with Guido while wielding a sword (which he definitely isn't planning to harm Guido with). Guido promptly sucker-punches him and knocks him unconscious.
• The History Monks in Thief of Time see Lobsang Ludd as this, because he's unfocused, prone to answering back, and worst of all innately good at this stuff, so there's not even anything they can punish him for. They describe him as "smart", a word which they use to mean a student who can't be taught because they think they know it already, and consider worse than a stupid student. They eventually hand him off to Trickster Mentor Lu-Tze, in the hope that at least one of them will break as a result.

Live-Action TV

• The Rookie: Downplayed but present in season five. John Nolan's initial excitement at finally becoming a training officer is quickly shaken when he discovers his new rookie Celina Juarez is a reckless, overreactive superstitious young woman whose first instinct is to run into situations half-cocked simply off her intuitions. As Nolan quickly learns, it's he who will receive the brunt of the blame for Celina's screw-ups, and it will reflect poorly on him if she doesn't shape up.

Tabletop Games

• In the backstory of HeroQuest: At the beginning of the quest book, Mentor tells of how his young apprentice wizard Morcar became power-hungry and eager to learn very powerful magic, breaking into Mentor's study to read his books, and finally battling with him. Morcar becomes the "evil wizard" player in the game, and the other players must enter his strongholds, and defeat his monsters and spells.

Web Videos

• CalebCity: How the main character "develops" in 90% of shows. has the protagonist reach their instructor's level in less than 10 minutes. The instructor in question then tests the protagonist by ordering them to get one hit in with a Killing Intent. He gets hit hard enough to be knocked out before he has the chance to brace himself.

Western Animation

• American Dragon: Jake Long: Professor Rotwood is hit by this, quite literally, in the episode Ski Trip, when one of his students throws a boy at him. While he‘s already hurt from that time when the students ran over him while he tried to distribute ski passes. That having said, his attitude of continuing to supervise the trip with several broken bones instead of admitting he‘s hurt and should go to the hospital leads to quite a lot more accidents for him.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • The episode "Feast" provides a dramatic example: The student Wang Fu resented having to train to become a member of the Order of the Guardians, which recruited him against his will as a child and forced him to watch over magical jewels, the Miraculous. Wang Fu used one that reacted to people's emotions — and turns emotions into beings. His resentment against them and the order created a monster that destroyed the entire order and tried to destroy all Miraculous.
  • A less severe case is played for laughs in the episode "Riposte": The fenching teacher Mr D'Agencourt infects the students with his enthusiasm to watch the duel between Adrien and Kagami. Unfortunately for him, they don't pay attention to him anymore — first, he gets run over by his students, then hit by something flying down the stairs due to Adrien and Kagami's very acrobatic dueling style.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Fluttershy's younger brother Zephyr Breeze spends the majority of his screentime staunchly refusing to put any effort at all in the internship opportunities his sister presents him with, to the point where he tried to have local wildlife dye fabric in his stead. This behavior actually stems from his paralyzing fear of failure, which sabotaged his chances at graduating from mane styling school. He does get better, though.
• The Simpsons: To the faculty of Springfield Elementary, it's Bart Simpson, hands down. He refuses to learn anything, destroys school property, destroys teachers' property, and has directly caused Skinner to be fired more than once. He's even known in-universe to teachers across America as "The Devil In Blue Shorts".
• South Park: Eric Cartman becomes this in the episode "Dikinbaus Hotdogs" where he does everything in his power to avoid actually doing work when he wants a job at the ice cream place Butters works at.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Spongebob has failed Mrs. Puff's Boating School dozens and dozens of times, every time putting the poor driver instructor to hell over the fact that he can't take the driver's test without crashing and/or injuring her.
  • Patrick Star could be the poster child for this in episodes such as "Big Pink Loser" where he is not capable of performing even the most menial task correctly.
  • Spongebob's cousin Stanley is even worse. He is incapable of performing even a basic task without ruining everything around him.

Real Life

• Sports teachers and trainers can face situations like that. This job can be very physically demanding, and, for professional athletes who take on the job, but can no longer perform at the level they used to due to age or injury, very frustrating.
• A lot of accounts of Air Force service, both fictional and real-life, deal with the experience of learning to fly in the first place. Authors such as Derek Robinson emphasize how little fun or relaxing it was for the flying instructor, especially on flimsy and unreliable WW1 biplanes. Robinson details how the instructor might be a time-served combat pilot rotated back from France to pass his skills on to a new generation — who then discovers his very life is at the mercy of some clueless dunce with no idea, who has been put in a position where there's every chance he'll kill both of us. Before the advent of dual-control trainers, this was a very real and present fear. Robinson relates that some training instructors begged to be sent back to front-line combat as they felt they stood a better chance against the Germans, who were consciously trying to kill them.
• Student Drivers:
  • Driving schools require the instructors to constantly pay attention to their students, especially the beginners among them. Else, they could seriously harm or kill people by accident, including themselves and the instructor.
  • The parent teaching their child how to drive does not get the passenger-side brake pedal that driving school cars have, sometimes leading to the child accidentally wrecking the family car.

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