High School Cliches You're Sick Of!

If you don't mean literally, the latter is quite plausible.

For example, last year, there was this younger guy that probably had either ADHD or Aspergers who kept spotting me in the hallway and said to me "hey, buddy", even though we never met. Fortunately, he seemed to have forgotten about me.

But if you mean literally running into that person, causing both to tumble down...yeah. That would require unlucky timer and major clumsiness.

edited 18th Feb '12 7:00:40 PM by chihuahua0

It's also one of the sports that really emphasizes size and having the large bulky players that writers see as best fitting their "idiot meathead" perception. I think a lot of the Jerk Jock thing still being common in media is that a lot of writers are nerds themselves and still have some repressed resentment against highschool athletes from when they went through HS in the 80s-90s.

I don't know about that - one of the things this thread has established is that most nerds really don't need that kind of vindication/wish fulfillment in the first place.

That always bothered me, I know in my school that the jocks are nothing like that. There was even a guy who looked like a nerd but is actually in the varsity wrestling team and I know a football player who is an anime fan. They are nothing like that in fiction, it makes you wonder if those writers have had bad experiences with jerk jocks?

Or in the end, you can blame it on laziness and people copying off of copiers.

And on the flip side there's "writers" like the "writer" of Dominic Deegan who pretty much runs off of nerd wish fulfillment and anti-jock revenge fantasies, and I've seen a lot of other nerds like him too, despite being out of high school for 5+ years. There's plenty of people smart enough to not think like that, but it's still common enough for that mindset to contribute to the trend among a lot of writers.

I remember when I was at school, nerds would complain about jocks all the time, but I seldom saw a jock antagonise a nerd directly.

In any case, I'm pretty sure it was only the nerds who called them jocks.

This was also not the case in my experience; these people were mostly pretty cool and some of them were even quite popular. I don't think it does to generalise or extrapolate too much from personal encounters, since that's how stereotypes form.

I've heard far more complaints from nerd groups about jocks than I ever saw any actual bullying from athletes. None of it really affected me too much though anyway since I kind of moved between groups a lot. I was a really quiet introverted guy that played saxophone for the concert band, was on the chess and quiz bowl teams, and hung out after school watching anime or reading comics with people, but was also a two-way player on the football team, and never really got shit from anyone in any of those groups for being in any others, aside from a couple of people on the chess team trying to claim I was a "dumb jock."

@Bobby G: Well, that's how they were like to me and I figured that was as good an example as any for a subversion of the Jerk with a Heart of Gold trope.

It was actually about half and half. Some of them were fairly decent and just wanted to be left alone.