Bullying A Dragon / Video Games

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• In Ace Attorney: Justice for All, the final culprit, Matt Engarde, attempts to blackmail Shelly de Killer, a professional assassin, using a video tape containing footage of them committing a murder. This turns out horribly, as de Killer makes Engarde his next target once Phoenix Wright informs the assassin of the attempted blackmail. Regardless of what you chose when the Judge asks what veredict should Matt face, he will interrupt and start yelling that he's guilty as he continually scratches his face, out of the utter fear the prospect of facing the fury of Shelly de Killer.
• Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia has an evil company of mercenaries that actively abuse and denigrate their magic-wielding partners. This is doubly stupid, since there's the obvious "oops I fireballed your face" factor, plus being mean to them severely limits the power of the abilities they can use to help you.
  • Sure enough, at least one boss is defeated when he asks his abused partner to attack you, after literally enslaving her. She smiles, says 'No'... and uses her charged special on him.
  • This trope also turns out to be one of the major reasons for all the problems in the game and the reason the Big Bad is the Big Bad. Poor Mir.
• Done in Arc the Lad: when they find a more-or-less 5-year-old child who's already able to kill soldiers by summoning flames, Seiyras scientists decide to turn him into a guinea pig: the adult version of said kid, last survivor of a genocide, tortured during his childhood, eventually teams up with the world's most wanted terrorist and is instrumental in destroying the Ancient Conspiracy for which the scientists worked.
• Assassin's Creed: Many games have examples of random people deciding "hey, let's antagonise that person carrying enough weapons to kill a small army" and getting exactly what's coming to them. Which is usually a knife to the face. The Templars are particularly bad in this respect, if they encounter an Assassin, they usually seem to make it their goal to piss them off.
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: Duccio (pronounced exactly how it sounds) runs into Ezio Auditore, who three decades ago beat the living daylights out of him for cheating on Ezio's sister. Despite Ezio being covered in weapons, this asshole thinks it's a good idea to harass him. Ezio beats the living daylights out of him again.
  • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: The "Legacy of the First Blade" DLC is caused by this one. The Order of the Ancients learn there's a Tainted One running around Greece, and decide this will not stand, so they do everything in their power to get the Eagle Bearer's attention, even after said Eagle Bearer has settled down to a small village to raise a family. They still think it's a good idea to go after them, kill their spouse and abduct their baby. End result? The Order's entire Greek branch is eradicated in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• In the beginning of Baten Kaitos Origins, some low-ranking Dark Servicemen start taunting Sagi after he's overheard musing over the morality of the assignment. They apparently forgot that Sagi is both a spiriter and a talented swordsman. For extra points, two of the servicemen start another fight with him ten minutes later — while Guillo is backing him up.
• In Beyond: Two Souls, during a chapter in which Jodie attends a birthday party, the partygoers end up ganging up on Jodie and locking her in a cupboard despite knowing about her "ghost powers". After she escapes with the help of Aiden, she's given the opportunity to either leave or to have Aiden wreak havoc on the douchebags.
• BlazBlue:
  • The bullies in the story Heart to Heart do this twice over in the same scene. At one point whilst bullying Makoto, Noel tries to intervene, only to be pulled aside by the aforementioned Makoto (solely because she didn't want someone else suffering for her sake), and one of the bullies gets herself injured. Said bully tries to pass the blame for the injury to Makoto, yells at Noel (an adopted child of a once-noble family) when she tries to defend Makoto, then talks back to Tsubaki (a child of nobility — a Duodecim child, to boot) when she tries to adjudicate the affair. Tsubaki takes the opportunity to turn the bullies' arguments against them, going to far as to state that her actions at that point were in line with Duodecim expectations with intent to lead by example. The bullies proceed to silently walk out afterwards, having nothing left to say in their defense. In the next scene, Jin reviews Makoto's entrance tests and makes it clear that the bullies would have been utterly screwed had Makoto chose to physically retaliate.
  • Jin treats Noel like trash throughout the entire series, including calling her 'Obstacle' to her face and asking why she isn't dead yet. He continues to do this even after she acquires the power of the strongest Murakumo Unit and the Reality Warping Eye of the Azure. Noel, being heavily riddled with self-doubt by this point, lets him do it with no backlash.
• The Book of Unwritten Tales has a scene where you literally bully a dragon, in order to help her get angry so she can spit fire and reforge your sword.
• In Bully, other students will constantly attempt to fight Jimmy even though, if the player is doing it right, this consistently results in them lying on the ground moaning. Even the wimpy nerds will, at times, pick fights with you.
• A literal example in Breath of Fire IV. The Empire keeps messing with both Ryu and Fou-Lu even though they are quite aware of what they are. Needless to say, neither ends well.
• In Call of Duty: Black Ops II, a gang of Panamanian kids decided it's a good idea to vandalize a USMC Humvee, parked on a yard, with an insulting message for the Marines to leave. They get away with it because Mason Jr. told his compatriot to stand down, as they're not worth their time.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: Sure, Celia, go ahead and piss off the emotionally volatile teenage boy with the capacity to become The Antichrist and then encourage him to kill you out of revenge. It's not like he'll go through with it... right?
• City of Heroes: The thoughts running through every single street gangster's alleged mind must be: "I live in a city where people wielding earth-shattering powers run around dressed in bright-colored spandex. I'm bored and I have a baseball bat. Let's attack the very next person we see dressed like that!" Most of the time, heroes of a high enough level to mop the floor with a spawn of villains won't get enough XP from it for them to bother, but if the villains went around hitting first...
• Daughter for Dessert:
  • When the protagonist confirms that Mortelli is hiding something from him, the protagonist poisons him and breaks into his office.
  • The protagonist and Lainie defrauded Lainie's family lawyer to get $250,000 from her bank account.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Adam Jensen is a former SWAT officer and The Dragon for one of the world's leading biotech corporations. He is a skilled marksman, stealth operative, close-quarter combatant, and all-around badass. This is all before he's given custom, military-grade augmentations that make him look even more dangerous, even with his Badass Longcoat covering most of them. This is clearly not a man you want to trifle with, regardless of your opinions of him, his employer, or his augmentations. Everybody does it anyway. It's left to the player to decide how Jensen responds.
• Devil Survivor franchise:
  • After a few days of lockdown in Devil Survivor, mobsters start to hunt down devil tamers. This either ends with killing a tamer who was trying to save them or a pissed tamer countering with summoned demons.
  • In a rare non-willing example, in Devil Survivor 2, to destroy Alioth's Giant Flyer warship, Kama is recruited to shoot an arrow into Shiva's eye, as he did in a certain myth, so Shiva uses his spear Pasupata to strike Alioth. Problem is, Kama remembers very well what Shiva did to him the last time he pulled that trick, and has to be forced into doing it again. When the time comes, he's also tricked into believing that he'd be protected by JP's. Instead, it turns out only his memory would be protected, and he's promptly elevated into the air against his will to the correct angle so Pasupata's attack destroys both him and Alioth.
• Hilariously subverted in Diablo III, where a random citizen in Caldeum tries to rob the Barbarian. The Barbarian's reaction is to ask him to get a closer look, then think again about what he is doing. The would-be robber awkwardly backs off, saying he was just kidding.
• In Double Homework, Dennis uses many kinds of manipulation to get his way. However, when he blackmails Dr. Mosely/Zeta, it gets him killed.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • "And people actually voluntarily attack you? Are they just stupid?" — remark of Sergeant Kylon to the Warden^note Who is, by all accounts, the high-fantasy equivalent to a super soldier who by this point may have achieved such feats as defeating a pack of ancient werewolves in a cursed Elven forest, journeyed to the deepest pits of the Deep Roads into the middle of a Darkspawn stronghold, and fought their way to the top of a mage tower overrun with demons and abominations after a side quest.
    • Also lampshaded when you first meet Flemeth during your initiation into the Grey Wardens. One of the Mauve Shirts in your party accuses Flemeth of being a witch, and the other one says "If she is a witch, do you want to make her mad?"
    • Flemeth in regards to this trope is doubly amusing when you find out she often turns into a dragon.
    • There's also a rather sad example in Lothering, where a band of refugees attack you out of desperation to collect the bounty Loghain has placed on your head. If you point out to them just how suicidal it is to attack a Warden, they agree, but say that between the advancing Darkspawn and their own starvation, they're pretty much dead men and women walking anyways; if they fail to kill the Warden, they're at least spared the nasty fates of either starving to death or whatever twisted plans the Darkspawn have for them, but if they somehow succeed, then the bounty will be more than enough for them to survive another day.
    • If you tell a couple of bandits that you are the Warden Commander in Awakening, some of them immediately realize that it's better to leave. Follow that up with an Intimidate option and one of them actually jumps off of a cliff, and likely to their death, just to avoid having to fight you.
    • Arl Howe is probably the king of this trope, as well as Do Not Taunt Cthulhu. If you took the Human Noble origin, he brags to you about how he butchered your family, right before giving you the perfect excuse to slaughter him like a pig by attacking you.
  • In Dragon Age II:
    • Chantry zealots such as Petrice go out of their way to escalate hostilities against the hundreds of elite Qunari warriors who were shipwrecked in Kirkwall. The Qunari have done nothing against Kirkwall for years despite the Arishok's growing disgust with the Wretched Hive of a city, since they are busy looking for their sacred relic. They aren't even actively looking for converts to the Qun — people are joining them of their own free will. Near the end of Act II, when Petrice murders Seamus Dumas after he joined the Qun, the Arishok warns Hawke that the provocations that the Qunari suffered have finally worked and later launches a full invasion of the city. Petrice, meanwhile, gets introduced to a spear-sized Qunari arrow for her troubles.
    • Likewise, we routinely see Templars or Slavers threatening mages who don't have good control over their powers (or cause them to become desperate enough), so the only way out they see is to allow demons to possess them and become Abominations.
    • Despite being well-known as the Champion of Kirkwall by Act III, the amount of people who try to murder the person who defeated the Arishok in single-combat is particularly baffling, especially if Hawke is a Mage. Zevran Arainai lampshaded to Hawke that he doesn't even understand why people insist in trying to kill both Hawke and the Warden (which he firsthand witnessed personally when they foiled his assassination attempt against them).
    • Several post-non-scripted-battle quips from your comrades fairly well lampshade this, usually different iterations of "When will they learn? Messing with us is suicide."
    • If the mutually-exclusive quests "Secret Rendezvous" and "The Conspirators" are any indication, people are still trying to bully the dragon that it's the Warden. In the latter, the quest-giver even lampshaded that the "truly stellar idea" of trying to kill the Warden is so stupid by mentioning some of the foes they killed (i.e. the Archdemon, Loghain, the Mother, and many more) to earn their position.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition: The Hand of Korth is an Avvar warrior who somehow got it into his head that trying to kill the Inquisitor for bragging rights is a good idea. This being the Inquisitor who has, by this point, at least managed to survive the Temple of Sacred Ashes exploding on them, escaped the Fade, killed a horde of demons, and has an N.G.O. Superpower at their beck and call, including multiple powerful companions that they always travel with, and depending on when exactly you do the quest might have foiled an assassination attempt on Empress Celene of Orlais, beaten up a few Tevinter Magisters, killed an Envy Demon, resolved the mage/templar war, beat armies of Red Templars/Venatori for standing in your way, fought Corypheus on even footing, and if you did the Jaws of Hakkon DLC, even killed an Avvar god (little-g; other cultures would consider it an exceptionally powerful spirit). Oh, and you're the only one able to close the Rifts currently threatening to destroy the world, and everyone knows this. After you kill him, not even his own father blames you, as he recognizes that his son really had that one coming.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Throughout the series, it doesn't matter if you're a world-saving, god-slaying hero fully equipped with legendary weapons and armor created by the gods themselves... that bandit in fur armor with an iron dagger will still attack you.
  • Morrowind:
    • One particularly humorous example occurs with a highwayman not far from the starting town. He's meant to be a low-level encounter, but if you don't find him until late in the game, he'll still attempt to rob you. He's wearing only a few pieces of armor and wielding a weak blade while attempting to rob a god-slayer.
    • Blades Spymaster and initial main quest Quest Giver Caius Cosades has a bit of a reputation in Balmora. If you ask around the South Wall Cornerclub, you'll learn that people who make the mistake of underestimating Caius tend to… disappear.
  • Oblivion: Even if you're the Champion of Cyrodiil, the Divine Crusader, and the new Sheogorath, highwaymen still attempt to mug you for a measly 100 gold. (Ironically, even if Level Scaling has them in armor worth 100 times that...) Goes double if you're a vampire, because their "Your money or your life!" script gets overridden by the Oh, Crap! realization.
  • Skyrim:
    • Despite equipment, magic, or other abilities, Bandits, Witches, and other humanoid enemies will still charge at you head-on, despite you being the only one who can stop the dragons that are currently bringing about The End of the World as We Know It.
    • Summarized rather well by a popular screenshot◊ of a group of bandits with the caption "Hey, you know that guy who just killed a dragon and ate its soul? Let's mug him."
    • A Darwin Award is reserved for the idiot who thought that infiltrating the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary for purposes of journalism was a good idea. Still, the fact that he apparently understood the danger going in puts this example here rather than Too Dumb to Live.
    • Special mention goes to Rochelle the Red, who decides to kidnap your spouse and hold him/her to ransom in the Hearthfire DLC — this being the Dragonborn, the one destined to essentially kill the Tamriellic Beast of the Apocalypse. And your spouse could be anything from a werewolf to an experienced adventurer to a Winterhold mage. By the way, paying the ransom isn't an option.
    • Amusingly, it's Dragons themselves who are the worst repeat-offenders when it comes to taking on the Dragonborn. Their Suicidal Overconfidence is justified, however, as it is an inherent part of their nature to try to dominate and conquer others, and refusing a challenge or running from a fight will at best make a dragon a laughingstock and more likely cause the others to turn on them, which is why they desert Alduin after he runs away from you. Of course, the Dragonborn's ability to permanently kill them by absorbing their souls hasn't particularly engendered any goodwill or reason why they wouldn't want to see them dead.
    • A random road encounter is a group of Vigilants of Stendarr. While generally benevolent in that they work to exterminate supernatural threats such as vampires, werewolves, and Daedra worshipers, they don't really discriminate between the Daedric Princes, some of whom are mostly benevolent toward mortals. If you are in possession of any Daedric artifacts, regardless of the Prince they are associated with, the Vigilants will demand that you turn the item over under threat of violence. They will attempt this even if the player character is an endgame Dragonborn who has singlehandedly fought, defied, and/or allied with multiple Daedric Princes, Divines, and Alduin himself.
    • Subverted by the Stormcloaks. Ulfric knows full well that the Empire has vastly more men and resources than an independent Skyrim nevermind his fledgling rebellion, so he makes careful political manoeuvres to ensure he does not needlessly provoke the Empire into crushing them with their full might, knowing also that the Empire can only divert so many resources away from the southern border and that the Empire would rather lose Skyrim to the Stormcloaks than present any semblance of an opportunity to the Dominion.
    • Several NPCs will send the Dragonborn to perform a task they themselves know they cannot complete...then try to backstab and kill the person who was strong enough to do the exact thing they couldn't.
• In EVE Online, the NPCs do this quite a bit. To make matters worse, the respawn system in Eve is canon, and the NPCs know that. So even though they are facing an essentially unkillable foe, they will still taunt and threaten players. It also doesn't matter if you show up in a Vindicator or a strategic cruiser, they will still call you a noob and attack you.
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Crown and Fool are a pair of sadistic Monster Clown on loan to the team, but barely loyal to it. Their participation isn't for the sake of saving the world, but for the chance to enact as much violence as they want. So when the team needs to hide aboard a cruise ship and dress in fancy suits and dresses, Platinum takes pleasure in cleaning them up and forcing them to dress nicely and subjects them to endless teasing. A few episodes later, and Crown and Fool have broken through their Power Limiter and the memory of Platinum's bullying is still fresh in their mind, and they must be fought alongside that episode's enemies.
• In The Fairly OddParents: Breakin' da Rules, Timmy does this to Vicky in the opening cutscene for the "Time Warped" level. He later remarks that perhaps he shouldn't taunt Vicky while she has wish powers. This being Timmy, he does the same thing in the "A Dog's Life" level.
• Fallout
  • Fallout 3:
    • You can be a walking tank packing a plasma rifle and someone will try to take you down with a bat. This is particularly unforgivable, as the local radio announcer is constantly updating the entire wasteland with information on how badass you are.
    • This trope can also be applied to you. When Liberty Prime is repaired and attacking the Enclave, you "can" attack him, though doing so is a surefire way to get killed because he NEVER dies no matter what you shoot him with and he can kill you in one hit with his Eye Beams. In other words, DON'T DO IT.
    • Ironically, this happens to Liberty Prime itself in the Broken Steel expansion. After continually pushing on the Enclave after the assault on the purifier in Fallout 3, the Enclave pushes back. Hard.
    • One Apocalyptic Log you can find in The Pitt expansion for Fallout 3 is the journal entry of a steelyard manager describing how his workers rioted due to being forced to leave after being replaced by new worker robots. Robots based on the Securitron pattern. When the robots showed up, the rioting humans tried to attack the heavily armored, laser-blaster-wielding, steel-claw-equipped, notoriously violent and unstable robots. The result is… too horrific to mention.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • If you have bad standing with Caesar's Legion, you will attract assassin squads. Said four-man squad (who admittedly tend to be well-equipped for the task) will run up to you and proclaim that Caesar has ordained your death for your crimes against the Legion, before attacking. Said crimes can include killing Vulpes Inculta, singlehandedly wiping out Cottonwood Cove, Nelson, or the Fort, not to mention killing the previous assassin squads.
    • It's even worse if you've already gotten hold of a Chainsaw, and especially the upgradable GRA version. Chainsaw weapons ignore whatever damage resistance you get from armor. The Legionnaires already know this, as many of their assassination squads carry small chainsaws just for that reason. The Chainsaw is a massive beast of a machine that's nearly as big as the Courier wielding it, and a Courier with minimal skillpoints in Melee can still rip through a squad of Legionnaires with it in seconds using VATS.
    • In a very amusing example, if you're a female Courier, a low-ranked Legion soldier armed with nothing more than a knife will go on a tirade of insults against women. To your face. While you may very well be in hyper-advanced Enclave power armour and wielding a plasma rifle.
    • The NCR isn't much better, however. Not only do they also send Rangers after you, if, at the ending, you decide to pull a fast one on them, General Oliver will state that were he in your shoes, he'd have you hung. While he's surrounded by securitrons armed to the teeth who will do anything you say.
    • But really, the palm goes to the Freeside Thugs. We're armed with pool cues, razors, and maybe a baseball bat and clad in basic clothes. Let's pick a fight with the guy/gal with a weapon that can One-Hit Kill us, a decent armor, who is escorted by a floating robot with a laser on it/a cybernetic dog and a Cold Sniper from the best outfit in the wasteland, identified by his beret/A gal with a Power Fist/a guy with a plasma pistol and a chainsaw knife/a ghoul with a revolver/a drunk gal with a shotgun/a super mutant. That will end well…
  • Fallout 4:
    • As usual, Raiders will attempt to attack you despite you wearing power armour and wielding a plasma weapon which can one-shot them, and them having body armour and firearms cobbled together out of rusty scrap. Justified by the fact that they use psychoactive drugs to make them more aggressive and to let them ignore pain, plus many of them are Ax-Crazy anyway.
    • The Gunners really made a big mistake attacking the Atom Cats, a gang of Greaser Delinquents who mod suits of power armour as a hobby. When the mercenaries attack their garage, the gang will suit up and cream them even if the player doesn't do much to intervene.
    • Summed up in a simple video here. A Railroad operative talks some smack to the player as they're leaving. Cue a quick save and…
• Two of the Masters in Fate/stay night have a real problem with this in how they treat their Servants. Servants are extremely powerful supernatural beings who by and large appear capable of killing a human being with their bare hands before the human has a chance to realize what happened, and that's without considering their other powers. Masters do have their Command Seals to give Servants an order they can't disobey, but they only get three and a clever Servant can get around them.
  • The first is Shinji, who only evades being killed because it would upset Sakura, Rider's real master; otherwise Rider would have killed him before the story even began for the abuse he puts her and Sakura through. The second, Caster's unnamed original Master, is not so lucky and is in fact dead quite a while before the story starts. Caster's Master was jealous of how much better a magus she was, so he put a power limiter on her and then abused her. She got tired of it and tricked him into using up his Command Seals, then brutally murdered him.
  • Shinji has an even worse case of this in the Unlimited Blade Works route with Gilgamesh, the most powerful Servant. Gilgamesh pretends to be Shinji's Servant, and Shinji decides to be every bit as rude and insulting to Gilgamesh as he was to Rider. Gilgamesh, despite his massive ego, doesn't seem to care since Shinji was just an Unwitting Pawn in for a rude awakening when he realized he was being used. It turns out Gilgamesh had Shinji as a plan B for his Evil Plan and subjected him to And I Must Scream.
  • The Expanded Universe of Tsukihime has this happening with ORT. One of the Dead Apostle Ancestors (the most powerful vampires on Earth) found ORT asleep underneath South America, and decided to try to kill it before it could wake up. ORT is an Ultimate One. The Ancestor was dead in seconds, and ORT barely stirred. The other Ancestors are then smart enough to leave ORT alone.
  • As revealed in Fate/Grand Order, a similar story apparently happened in the Fate timelines, except it was the Mages' Association that discovered ORT and tried to kill it in its sleep. They sent in a crack team of the most powerful combat Mages that existed at the time... only one of them came back out, and he barely lasted long enough to tell everyone "Under no circumstances should anyone even think about challenging ORT. It will be thousands of years before anything on Earth is strong enough to have a chance at killing it". Then his entire body turned to crystal and shattered. Again, ORT didn't even wake up during this encounter.
• Final Fantasy XIV: In "The Parting Glass", Teledji Adeledji makes the mistake of taunting Raubahn over the apparent death by poisoning of Sultana Nanamo, to whom Raubahn was very close. This leads to Raubahn flying into an Unstoppable Rage and cleaving Teledji clean in half.
  • Final Fantasy XVI: After her battle with Clive, the infamous summoner Benedikta is magically crippled and hobbling through the woods. Three bandits decide to ambush her convoy, murder her men, and taunt her about how they're going to rape her and sell her into slavery. This drives her completely insane and she manages to break through the debuff to unleash her summon, razing the land and the bandits with it.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, a group of slavers decides to attack a runaway Manakete — a Shapeshifting humanoid (bonus points given that Manaketes' transformed form is a literal dragon) that they had previously enslaved. It goes about as well for them as you'd expect.
  • A literal example of this is the cause of much of the warring that takes place in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light. Humanity mistreated the Manakete race (Dragons who took on human form to escape a plague of mental and physical degeneration), despite the fact that they earlier spared them from annihilation by battling against the rogue Earth Dragon tribe, who went berserk due to their refusal to become Manaketes. Eventually, one of them (who, ironically, is the one Earth Dragon who didn't go berserk) gets sick of it, and rallies his like-minded brethren together to put the humans in their place.
• First Encounter Assault Recon: When she was five years old, Alma Wade was found to have extraordinary psychic abilities, and they were growing more powerful. So her father had her put in a lab where she could be studied and others protected from her. However, he and others involved in the project decided to step it up by sealing her away forever and inducing a permanent coma, because she was proving dangerous to them. Then they artificially impregnated the now-teenage girl, twice, in an effort to make viable telesthetic offspring that could be used for their company's purposes. She woke up during both births, and screamed to let her keep her babies. Then they deem her still too dangerous, despite the coma, and shut off life support and leave her there forever. She doesn't die. And when Alma escapes years later, she is apocalyptically pissed off, and oceans of blood follow. The people involved in the project get the worst of it, including her father.
• While this might have been excused in the first game, General Serpentine goes all-in on this trope against Milla in Freedom Planet 2 - threats of violence are to be expected, but threats of exposing her true nature to her friends are mixed in along with a heaping dose of dehumanization. Keep in mind he has a good idea of what she's capable of based on the events of the first game (much of which may be from Brevon's briefings). But what really locks in this trope is that Serpentine knows that Milla was a result of a supersoldier breeding program that Brevon was running on the side who just so happened to wind up on Avalice long ago. Even if you rule out his bloodlust and fanatical loyalty getting in the way, exactly why Brevon would want to make someone like her never seems to cross his mind. Needless to say, once Milla works up the nerve to stand her ground against him, he pays dearly.
• Timmy's father in Giants: Citizen Kabuto has no fear of ordering the Meccaryns Baz and Tel around, or even threatening to set his dogs on them even they even think of backtalking him. This despite the fact that the Meccs are twice his height, clad in Power Armor, bristling with heavy artillery, and have already slaughtered dozens of Sea Reapers, the warlike people who have conquered his race, and made it look easy. Fortunately for him they have relatively high morals for a bunch of Cockney alien mercenaries, so they refrain from blowing off his head.
• Hermes in God of War III. By this point, Kratos has slaughtered several gods on his own, including in this game, and Hermes is running across the landscape, taunting Kratos. When Kratos inevitably catches up, the best Hermes can do is put up a Wimp Fight. It never seems to occur to Hermes not to taunt a warrior who had slain several of his brethren with relative ease. Of course, by this point Kratos had already resolved to kill all the Olympians (even if they didn't get in his way, Zeus was a Load-Bearing Boss for Olympus so they'd die if he did), so it's not like laying off the taunts would've saved his life; at most, it'd reduce the intensity of the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• God of War Ragnarök: Heimdall wears this trope with pride. He bullies pretty much everyone he meets (save Odin, whom he genuinely respects) because he knows that a) he can dodge any attack they throw at him and b) Odin won't let them kill him. This extends to Atreus even after Odin tells him that he's treating Atreus as a guest; Heimdall only backs down when Thor (the Aesir most willing and able to go through with his threats) threatens to kill him if he doesn't back down. When he fights Kratos, he keeps taunting him even after Kratos has proven fully capable of hitting him (though he does get very rattled and his banter becomes more hysterical), and repeatedly threatens Atreus's life in front of Kratos, even after Kratos beat the hel out of him and tried to spare him. Needless to say, Kratos didn't offer him two last chances.
• Halo 3: ODST
  • The audio logs simultaneously play this straight and lampshades it. A man in a car is honking his horn while people run in panic in the streets. A very large man who was giving away kebabs to refugees approaches and leans on the man's car, telling him to calm down and have a kebab. When the man keeps honking, the butcher tells the man "My friend, I am an eight hundred pound man with a large cleaver, who kills animals every day and chops them into small pieces. Do you really want us to be enemies? Or would you rather have a nice kebab?"
    In the next log, the idiot still hasn't taken a hint, prompting the butcher to smash his cleaver through the car hood. "Oh! a thousand pardons. But it was either that or smash your windshield, pull you out, and make you into kebabs." After making his point, the butcher finishes the conversation with a polite "...please, stop honking your horn. It frightens the children."
  • There's also a straight example involving the player themselves in the level "Data Hive". If you've collected 29 audio logs and continued to follow your cop buddy after he tells you not to, you'll find out that he's a Dirty Cop on Kinsler's payroll. He then tells you that you know too much and have to die. Thing is, you're a member of the best non-Spartan unit in the entire UNSC, wearing the best armor an unaugmented human can wear, and that cop just saw you cut through a small army of Covenant. No points for guessing who wins this fight.
• In Hitman (2016), coming across the facial-reconstruction-in-progress patient Jason Portman in the Hokkaido Level will make him say the following to 47:
  Shut up Helmu-, Hey, you're not Helmut Kruegur. Hey, bad form dude, you stole my idea! Look, maybe there's someone else you can emulate, err… I dunno, Jordan Cross, he's hot, right?
  …
  Wooow, this is super embarrassing. At least we don't attend the same social circles, right? Shut up, we don't, right?
  I… I've got connections! I can make you disappear for good!
• In Hypnospace Outlaw, Control Freak Gill runs his theoretically collaborative website, the Sovereign Alliance of Imagination, with a passive-aggressive iron fist of "citations". Eventually, he picks a fight with Re3koning, one of the most competent and mean-spirited hackers on Hypnospace. This results in Re3koning turning the Sovereign Alliance's lovingly-drawn map into a World of Chaos.
• In inFAMOUS and inFAMOUS 2:
  • This is the reaction of the bad guys in general, especially as the storyline goes on, falls under this. Despite being one of the most powerful Conduits in existence, capable of fighting small armies and giant monsters to at least a draw, and most likely rapidly taking over the city, random Mooks will still show up en masse and try to off Cole.
  • Averted in the first game by Zeke. He's been taking advantage of Cole's powers since they appeared and so is fully aware of what he can do and even states that he doesn't want to "do anything that might piss (him) off!" after a news broadcast paints him as a terrorist and turns everyone else in the city against him. Unfortunately, his savvy fails him later on and gets him into very serious trouble.
• Aurelion Sol of League of Legends is a ludicrously powerful being. A celestial, star making dragon who makes the humans around him look like ants in a size comparison. The residents of Mount Targon thought that meant it was a good idea to slap a mind controlling crown on him, and make him do their monster killing for centuries. The crown is also starting to lose its effect. Suffice to say, Sol plans to wreak hell untold on Targon and the world when he's fully free.
• The Legend of Spyro:
  • Cynder gets a lot of grief from Sparx due to being the Big Bad of the first game (though she was Brainwashed and Crazy at the time) who made a Heel–Face Turn. This is despite the fact she's far larger than him and is nearly as powerful, if not as powerful, as Spyro himself. Several other characters also do this while referring to her by her old nickname "the Terror of the Skies". Sure, she's not a gigantic monster anymore, but she's still tough enough she could beat the tar out of them without a second thought if she wanted to.
  • The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: Sniff insults Spyro for most of the Sky Pirate arc. Justified at first because he has the powerful Skabb to back him up. After Spyro kills Skabb, Sniff doesn't get the hint and just keeps talking, so Sparx socks him in the eye and knocks him out cold.
• In Spyro: Year of the Dragon, Moneybags Took a Level in Jerkass compared to the prequel, openly belittling Spyro and lording over the prisoners he was tasked to guard, to the point that he pretends that they show him gratitude for freeing them - even though he was the one keeping them imprisoned in the first place. Predictably, this results in several beatdowns.
• No matter the game, random street thugs seem bent on picking a fight with Kiryu Kazuma of the Like a Dragon series. An incredibly menacing, damn near impossible to kill former Yakuza captain known as "The Dragon of Dojima". It ends predictably badly for them every time.
  • It's even worse for those punks that decide to go after Taiga "18 Counts" Saejima, an escaped death row inmate with 18 counts of murder on his rap sheet (he didn't actually do it, but that's another story) that makes Kiryu look like a twig.
• Lufia: The Legend Returns puts this around Gades, a god of destruction, who is regularly mocked by an Idiot Hero and his Deadpan Snarker partner, resulting in two full-strength beatings. Mayor Fugo threatens Gades once and gets his new mansion destroyed almost instantly.
• Mario Party 2: An AI-controlled Donkey Kong will repeatedly go for the Bowser Bomb in item games, because he apparently believes he can take on Bowser himself. But unless he has the most stars at the end of the game, he cannot. Expect him to lose coins as a result (Bowser takes his own turn on the board at the end of the turn in which the Bowser Bomb is won, with a triple dice block; he bankrupts any player he runs into on his turn).
• Commander Shepard in Mass Effect is an N7 Special Forces Alliance marine, which ranks them among the most elite military officers in the galaxy. At the start of the first game, they've already earned a measure of fame for having confronted and beaten impossible odds in their previous service history. Even characters that don't know Shepard's history will still take note of their armored hardsuit and weapons loadout indicating that they mean business. Yet Shepard still has to contend with non-military grunts, criminals, and civilians trying to pick fight with Shepard or bring them down with petty threats and insults. How Shepard responds will depend on if you're going Paragon or Renegade on that playthrough.
  • Wrex says it best: "Anyone who attacks us is either stupid, or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business — killing the former is a favor to the universe."
  • If you choose the "Earthborn" origin in Mass Effect (you were born on Earth, orphaned, and grew up on the streets), you eventually run into a former member of a gang you used to be a member of. Commander Shepard is both the commanding officer of a Systems Alliance black ops ship, and a Spectre, essentially given carte blanche by the Citadel Council to do whatever they want. Your "friend" tries to blackmail you, because apparently he thinks revealing that you were a former gang member would ruin you. You can choose to point out that you're legally authorized to execute him where he stands... or you can just shoot him.
  • Quite possibly the best example of this in the series is Warden Kuril, who attempts to knowingly imprison Shepard, the most badass person in the galaxy, and hold him/her for ransom or sell him/her on the black market as a slave. It doesn't end well for him. Especially stupid, since you belligerently refuse to surrender your weapons on entering the prison, even threatening Kurill, and he (still fully intent on capturing you, remember) lets you keep your weapons. Even more stupid if you're playing a class that wouldn't have been significantly less dangerous without weapons. What exactly was his plan for imprisoning a Shepard that could throw him across the room with a mean look?
  • In the Mass Effect Redemption comic, some shuttle pilots try to get additional "docking fees" from Liara T'Soni. Liara, as it turns out, is a powerful asari biotic who works with Commander Shepard. Even if she didn't, all asari are biotics to varying degrees of strength. And they don't even need implants to use their powers. Those pilots should've known better.
  • After a confrontation with Shepard on Thessia, biotic ninja Kai Leng decides to taunt the man/woman who has killed multiple Reapers via email, mocking Thessia's destruction, and taunting Shepard about any former crewmembers of his/hers that he's killed.
  • To the mad scientists and corrupt corporate executives of the galaxy: if a group of heavily armed people led by a Spectre comes up and tries to arrest you, pulling a weapon is not exactly the brightest idea. This happens three times in the first game alone.
  • During Grunt's loyalty mission in the second game, Gatatog Uvenk decides to pick a fight with Grunt, Shepard, and their squadmate… immediately after they have survived a fight on foot with a thresher maw (a hundred-foot-tall monster that spits acid and can crush buildings with a swipe of a tentacle). Especially stupid if, rather than simply surviving the fight, Shepard and co. actually kill the maw outright. Even his fellow krogan think he's an idiot for trying that: his followers afterward are pissed off that he's dead… pissed off at Uvenk, that is, for having picked a fight he couldn't win and making them look bad by proxy.
  • From Mass Effect 1, there's Kaira Stirling, a biotic security guard on Noveria, who takes an instant dislike to Shepard the minute they step foot in the port, and figures it's a good idea to antagonise them even after they learn Shepard is a Spectre. Eventually, it can culminate in Stirling confronting Shepard after they've already mown down some other dirty cops, and trying to kill them. Doesn't matter if Shepard's party can include at least three other biotics, one of whom is a krogan battlemaster, she's hell-bent on avenging her fellow dirty cops.
• Mass Effect: Andromeda doesn't have quite as many examples as the trilogy, but there are a lot of raiders on Kadara and Elaaden who think it's perfectly sensible to take pot-shots at the Pathfinder and their crew for the loot. A lot of criminals on Kadara, at least the more civilized parts, just restrict themselves to being rude to Ryder…
  • The villains of Nakmor Drack's arc are amazingly stupid, given they're trying to mess with the krogan. Krogan who were perfectly content minding their own business. But these idiots decide to hassle them and try to kill them out of sheer, petty Fantastic Racism. Note that even the primary bad guys of the game stay away from the krogan colony.
  • After Drack's Loyalty Mission, it's possible to be part of a Bar Brawl, instigated when several humans try to pick a fight with the krogan because… he already beat up some of their friends for picking a fight with him. Drack beats them up too.
• At the start of the second act of Max Payne, Max wakes up in a basement, tied to a chair, with a baseball bat-wielding thug named Frankie Niagara standing next to him. After Frankie introduces himself, Max asks if he's called Niagara because he cries a lot. Frankie then proceeds to beat Max with the bat, and while he was going to do so anyway, Max lampshades how bad an idea it was in his situation.
  He had a baseball bat, and I was tied to a chair. Pissing him off was the smart thing to do.
• Max Payne 3: When the bad guys initially (try to) kidnap Max's principal, they could be excused for not knowing how much of a badass he was. When they attack his principal's office to kill him, specifically because he's killed so many of them, you start to wonder why on earth they're Too Dumb to Live enough to be so bent on provoking him.
• Happens in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance as two villains use Raiden's past and some underhanded tactics to try to mock his reasons for fighting. Technically, they succeed. But Raiden was known as Jack the Ripper and their mocking convinced him to take up that persona again. They end up finding out just how bad an idea that was the hard way.
  • Senator Armstrong is the Big Bad of the story, but he's just a murderous and hawkish civilian who is served by a private army of cyborgs and super-soldiers that Raiden cuts through like butter. Despite this, he is not remotely intimidated by Raiden — even after he destroys the latest Metal Gear with Armstrong piloting it — and even decides to fight Raiden head on! In a hard subversion, and to the total surprise of both Raiden and the player, Armstrong is totally justified in his confidence — he is, and always has been, a superhuman thanks to being infused with nanomachines, and can completely mop the floor with Raiden in a hand-to-hand fight.
• Mechwarrior Online has the MechWarrior Academy, a simulated tutorial environment meant to teach new players how to control and master their piloting skills. Overseeing their progress is an NPC named Captain Adams, seen piloting an AS7-S(L) Atlas, one of the toughest variants of one of the toughest assault 'mechs in the game. Take a shot at him. Your shots do nothing to him. As the simulation's admin, of course he has his 'mech in God Mode. He makes nothing of it and lets that shot slide. Shoot him again. He gives you a stern warning to rethink your plan to pick a fight with him. Shoot him a third time. He opens fire and blasts your Battlemech into pieces within seconds. Or, if you tried to be cute and snipe at him from where his 'mech can't reach yours, he uses his admin powers to lock your throttle at zero and force your 'mech to self-destruct one piece at a time.
  Captain Adams: "I don't believe we've been properly introduced. My name is Julias H. Adams. I am in charge of this Academy. I am God in here. (BOOM!) That's you losing an arm—and the weapons attached to it. (BOOM!) That's you losing a leg. Only one to go! (BOOM!) Did you think we'd do nothing?!"
• Mega Man 8: One of Tengu Man’s pre-battle taunts is “It’s just a kid; don’t make me laugh.” Note that he says this to Mega Man, who is not only the second oldest (after Blues) and most experienced Robot Master, but has ripped through Wily’s forces at least seven times before. Also counts as Suicidal Overconfidence to the max, as Tengu Man is often the first boss players go after, due to having the lightest armor and easy-to-read tactics.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri):
    • The original game instroduces the Jaggi picking fights with large monsters, both in-game and in cutscenes. Most of the time, they quickly learn the hard way that they're Too Dumb to Live.
    • In 3 Ultimate, Kayamba is introduced in a cutscene where he tosses his boomerang at the weighted tail of a Duramboros, a very large monster. Upon waking up, the Duramboros turns around to see what disturbed its slumber, and then Kayamba runs for his life.
  • In all games, anytime you take a Wyvern Egg from its nest is this (in a very literal case) and Tempting Fate at the same time. If you're on a quest to do so, you'd better know what you're doing, because Rathalos and Rathian are extremely overprotective parents; the second you pick up that egg, they'll know, and they'll drop whatever they're doing at the moment to come kick your ass. It becomes even worse of a matter if they're both on the map.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer:
  • Araman chasing you down after the battle on the Fugue Plane. Sure! Singlehandedly attacking a party of four probably-30th-level characters is a wonderful idea! And this is after you killed him once already.
  • At the beginning of the original campaign, Amie Fern ends up killed after she fires off a magic missile spell at a Githyanki mage who's giving her master Tarmas a hard time. A Githyanki with a clearly visible shield spell up^note shield is a complete No-Sell against magic missile, which is otherwise an Unblockable Always Accurate Attack. The Githyanki basically rolls his eyes, then one-shots her.
  • Midway through the first campaign the party is confronted by a lower level adventuring party trying to kill you for the reward and your magic items. Spelling out to them exactly what they're doing will cause half of them to come to their senses and run; the others are so overconfident that they attack anyway and are instantly slaughtered.
• In No Greater Glory, it is possible to try this with France or Great Britain when playing as the Union. Doing it is just as bad an idea as it sounds, and results in quickly losing the game.
• The beginning of Overlord II has kids tossing snowballs and taunting the Witch-boy, a Creepy Child who blasts lightning with his hands and gains control of vicious little Minions early on. It Gets Worse later on when after being tossed out of Nordberg by the village for The Empire, frozen in a block of ice, and later raised by an Evil Chancellor, he returns as a full-fledged Evil Overlord ready to either enslave or slaughter Nordberg.
• In Pathfinder: Kingmaker if Landers Lebeda is made regent he will eventually try to usurp the player character, and makes the spectacularly poor decision to personally lead his troops in the assassination attempt. He does this even though as an advisor he knows his regent has spent the last few years personally defending the barony against a constant series of threats ranging from armies of trolls to a disease that turns people into giant monsters to an ancient undead sorcerer, while he's done little but lounge around the capitol. Unsurprisingly he does not survive the encounter.
• Unlike in later games, Persona-users in Persona 2 can summon their Personas in the real world. Personas tend to show up without being called when the user is in danger. The backstory indicates that Tatsuya and Jun both summoned their Personas on people attempting to bully them, which made the former popular against his will and got the latter kicked out of school because everyone thinks they were the ones fighting back. In-game, we see people purposely provoking Eikichi, who has more control over his Persona and is very willing to summon it on anyone stupid enough to try this.
• Phantom Brave: The People of Ivoire think main character Marona is "The Possessed One" who can kill them all by summoning armies of the undead. So they hire her to solve their problems, insult her, then cheat her out of payment. They do get better.
• Due to Dude, Where's My Respect? similar to other games, in Pokémon people with 10 level Magikarp will still try to battle you after you are a Champion (i.e. the best trainer in a region) and single-handedly saved the world from disaster. May be justified as the whole point of this game is to get stronger by defeating more experienced trainers. This elevates to Do Not Taunt Cthulhu when you obtain legendary Pokemon. Then you have commoners armed with bugs and squirrels picking fights with a kid who controls demigods that manipulate the fabric of space and time and can usher destruction of the entire world on a whim.
• In Portal 2, GLaDOS refuses to turn the insults off even when kicked out of her body and facing a nigh-omnipotent Wheatley, repeatedly calling him a moron and claiming the player did all the work during their escape plan. This gets her (and the player, by proxy) punched down a bottomless pit.
• Red Dead Redemption:
  • During the first mission with Landon Ricketts, John Marston is greeted by a trio of Mexican thugs who are hassling him for being an American interfering in the affairs of Mexico. John says that he has no problem with them personally and he is just here in Mexico on official business; he then asks them politely to leave him alone and they can all go home to their families. The trio then continues to harass John and even steals his hat. John, having had enough of their tomfoolery, promptly shoots all 3 of them casually and takes his hat back. John by now has killed hundreds of bandits that decided to get in his way, so those 3 didn't have any clue who they were messing with. Landon Ricketts lampshades the killings of those 3 idiots and tells John that he becomes like a peasant when he kills peasants and that he isn't exactly endearing himself to the people of Mexico by casually killing men like that. A dragon killing casually when it doesn't need to is just showing off.
  • Also happens in the prequel, Red Dead Redemption II, when the Braithwaites kidnap John's son Jack. This makes Dutch round up the gang to attack Braithwaite Manor, raining all hell on the family.
• Resident Evil: In the remakes for Gamecube and onward, they introduced a new character, Lisa Trevor. A once-innocent little girl that Umbrella mutated into a hulking monster with barely any humanity left, and practically immortal. Wesker was one of the heads of this experiment. In Wesker's second scenario in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Wesker, having just revived, is fleeing the about-to-explode Arkay Mansion, when he runs into Lisa. What does he do to the massive monstrous (nearly) immortal beast that wants to tear apart the man who ruined her life? He gloats about all the horrible things he did to her. Though possibly justified in that he had turned himself into a super-being just minutes earlier and assumed he himself was immortal.
• River City Girls involves Misako and Kyoko beating up every gang leader they come across, in their search for their allegedly missing boyfriends and series protagonists Kunio and Riki. This eventually culminates with them deciding to confront the yakuza boss Sabuko (who had nothing to do with their disappearance). Flash forward to the events of River City Girls 2, in which Sabuko reports her humiliation to her imprisoned father Sabu. His response is to break out of jail, have his adopted son Ken take over River City High, then seize the rest of the city. Nice job, girls.
• Samurai Western introduces the badass samurai protagonist Gojiro confronted by three outlaws, who obviously never met a samurai in their life and tries taunting Gojiro for being a stranger in town, besides making un of the samurai's "overgrown butterknife". Gojiro promptly paints the town red with their blood and intestines via katana.
• The endgame of Saints Row 2 begins when Ultor tries to assassinate the Boss, who has just spent the entire game proving what a Memetic Badass he/she is by almost single-handedly annihilating the three rival gangs that previously controlled Stillwater and essentially taking over the city. (Granted, Ultor's own plans for Stillwater couldn't have worked with the Boss alive and uncooperative, but they don't even try to buy him/her off before sending in the mercs.)
  • This gets a lampshade hung by Richie when you're protecting him in the airport Drug Trafficking activity. One of the taunts he can throw at the enemies attacking you is "You really think you can kill the leader of the Saints"?
  • Saints Row: The Third continues this. The game opens with the Syndicate attempting to buy off the Boss, Shaundi, and Gat. After a roaring escape out the back of the plane and a dive through the plane when they try to ram you with it, Phillipe thinks the best thing to do is taunt The Boss with the death of a certain companion. It ends with the Boss taking over all of Steelport.
  • From the same game, one of the Survival Challenges has The Boss get called out by a(n obviously drunk) generic biker gang to "prove how tough he/she is" by facing them all. The bikers are all poorly armed and lack the Specialists and Brutes the Syndicate gangs have, yet despite getting slaughtered by the dozen, they never take the hint that maybe they bit off more than they could chew.
  • And still from the same game, after blaming the Saints for an act of terrorism commited by The Syndicate, you can find people with signs protesting for the gang to leave Steelport. Including in front of the Saint's Loft itself. When the gang is led by someone who goes by the moniker "The Butcher of Stillwater", you really shouldn't be trying to provoke them…
  • Saints Row IV has an alien general who thinks the best way to deal with The Boss escaping is to blow up Earth. As the narrator notes, had he not blown up Earth, The Boss would not have returned to kick his ass up and down the ship.
• The Secret World features quite a bit of this when it comes to the Orochi Group's test subjects; time and again, the company research teams have dealings with powerful supernatural captives and end up doing their level best to piss them off for no good reason. Needless to say, this frequently results in a great many casualties when the inevitable break-outs occur.
  • Emma Smith, another test subject, is frequently abused and mistreated by her Orochi foster-mother Julia, despite knowing full well just how powerful her ward really is. For the most part, Emma takes the dehumanizing remarks and the harsh restrictions without complaint. Then, in the intro to "Breached," Julia makes the mistake of grabbing her violently enough to hurt her — and Emma instinctively retaliates with a blast of energy that sends Julia flying across the room.
  • Jung was subjected to this as well — ironically not by Orochi, but by the Fear Nothing Foundation. Following the Tokyo Incident, the FNF sent a henchmen to capture him, and the man in question didn't seem all that intimidated by word of Jung's powers; indeed, he actually sneered over how small and alone the "little freak" was. Jung responded by very politely telling the man to forget how to breathe.
  • The end of Issue #11 changes the equation when you end up bullying a dragon in the form of the Orochi Group. Having invaded their tower headquarters and made it as far the penthouse, you're warned by Samuel Chandra that continuing on with your attempts to kill his wife will result in disastrous consequences for both you and your faction of choice. Naturally, you ignore him — despite the fact that he's the CEO of a multinational company with the political power to sway elections all over the world and surveillance systems integrated into every single product they sell. He retaliates by having the security footage of your break-in leaked to the media, successfully framing you as one of the terrorists behind the Tokyo bombing — and the only way to escape the repercussions is to have your face surgically altered, or risk assassination attempts by angry secret worlders.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In her childhood, Blaze the Cat was bullied for her pyrokinetic powers.
  • Goes double for anybody stupid enough to intentionally piss off Shadow.
  • Heck, Sonic himself counts as this. As one of the most powerful beings in his world, with only a handful of others that can even match him, Sonic treats saving the world as an exciting adventure at best and like a day job at worst and is surprisingly difficult to genuinely anger. Erazor Djinn manages to do just that by pressing every single Berserk Button he has at once and calling him a disgusting rat along the way. The No-Holds-Barred Beatdown he gets from Darkspine Sonic and Cold-Blooded Torture afterwards leaves him pleading for even a shred of mercy. He gets none.
  • In Sonic Superstars, Fang the Hunter constantly yells at Trip whenever their traps malfunction (which they do often; then again, trying to capture the likes of Sonic is best left to the professionals). Hell, the entire reason she even works with him in the first place is because he broke her spear and threatened her into doing so, as shown in the Fang's Big Break webcomic. But where this really kicks in is in the main cast's version of Golden Capital Act 2, where his Marvelous Queen got thrashed enough to spill the Chaos Emeralds, and he kicks her when she tries to pick them up. "These are the same Emeralds that turn the already dangerous Sonic into a one-hedgehog robot apocalypse, but surely that helmeted ditz has no idea how to use them, right?" Turns out, she knows how they work, transforming into her super form. As a parallel to Milla, she uses her newfound power to wreck him, the Marvelous Queen, and the giant mech in the background he tries to operate in a single moment of righteous fury, completing her Heel–Face Turn. Bonus points for Trip's Golden Super Mode being a literal dragon.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has this in spades. If you watched all the Jedi/Sith cinematics back to back, it would make a good drinking game counting all the times somebody tells you that, "You're not the first Sith/Jedi they've taken down." One of the most egregious, however, comes from a small-time wannabe crime boss in the Inquisitor storyline who tries to bully you into working for him after you've single-handedly devastated an entire syndicate that even the Hutts were afraid of.
  • The main problem with these people is that they aren't the player character. When you're playing a non-Force-sensitive class, you encounter Force users who use the same thought process in deciding you're an easy takedown. Naturally, you show them the error of the assumption.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has a few examples. Depending on how you progress with the story after learning the protagonists true identity, its possible some people know who you are, some do not, but all of them enjoy taunting or threatening you and your dialog choices expand to fit the story up to that point. It never ends well for the mooks and even trained Sith are in deep trouble.
• Blanka's intro in Street Fighter IV shows him, an eight-foot-tall, muscular ogre with electric powers, being taunted by the people of his hometown. Great plan, folks.
• While a lot of NPCs in Streets of Rogue can make very questionable decisions regarding your character special mention has to go to the mobsters who will calmly walk up and try to mug you, thus giving you more than enough opportunity to decide how you want to wipe the floor with them. They can do this even if they literally just watched your character level an entire city block and slaughter all of its occupants in under a minute.
• In Tales of Rebirth, Hilda, a "Half" (Half-Huma[n] half-Gajuma), was always despised when she was a kid (and still is). Which wouldn't make much difference, except that Halfs, despite having a weaker body, have much stronger and harder-to-control magic than both Humas and Gajumas. (Un)fortunately, she never fought back.
• In Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, you can be a complete Jerkass to the people you talk to. Doing this to Bouchard, a notorious gangster, will have him shoot Lara dead.
• This tends to go both ways in any given Touhou Project game; early bosses tend to be barely capable of fighting, but insist on attacking well-known badasses anyway, while the last few bosses are you taking on beings that could probably one-shot you if they decided they didn't want to follow the spellcard rules.
• Early on in Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Optimus has been captured by the Decepticons and brought before Megatron only for Metroplex, who had just gotten back online after being seemingly knocked out, to tear open the roof above them. The unfazed Megatron immediately starts firing on Metroplex and orders his troops to do the same. Metroplex then proceeds to punch Megatron to the ground not once but four times, and the Decepticon leader would have actually stayed dead were it not for Soundwave using Dark Energon to resurrect him.
• Numerous citizens in Ultima IX try to bully and pick fights with the Avatar, a heavily armed demigod and messiah of Britannia's religion who's trying to save the world. Despite the Avatar visibly carrying magical weapons and armor, some NPCs will even attempt to fight unarmed, often for petty reasons. The most notable example is a child that starts combat with the Avatar for not giving him money.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a Nosferatu Player Character's Looks Like Orlok appearance sends Muggles running in terror (to say nothing of their Super-Strength and other supernatural powers). Not so for the retired hit man Ji Wen Ja, who calls them over with a brusque "Hey, ugly!" to hire them for an assassination and makes fun of them if they take offense.
  "What you do, break my other hip? Oh look! Is Mistah Senior Citizen Boxing Champ!"
• In Warcraft III: The Frozen Trone, Grand Marshal Garithos strikes an unholy alliance with the Forsaken in order to drive the Undead Scourge out of what remains of Lordaeron. When they succeed, he proceeds to tell the leaders of the Forsaken to piss off and get out of his city. Said leaders are an undead elf who used to be a ranger-general and a former member of the Burning Legion. Naturally, Sylvanas just tells Varimathras to get rid of the bastard, which he gladly obliges.
  • This same Grand Marshal also thought it would be a good idea to direct racist slurs at a several hundred year old elf Prince, who is also an extremely powerful fire mage wielding a legendary weapon. The only reason his sorry hide does not get burnt to a crisp is because Prince Kael'thas needed assistance from the Alliance at the time given how his people had become a Dying Race in the aftermath of the Scourge invasion, but he eventually finds new benefactors in Illidan and the naga. Ultimately, Garithos' abuse pushes the blood elves to join The Horde, the Alliance's perennial enemies. It comes back to bite the Alliance in the behind years later, when Magister Sunreaver modifies a magical artifact to be used as a bomb against an Alliance city. The Alliance are just lucky that there are relatively few elves left and they mature slowly.
• Watch_Dogs 2 features this a lot, many missions are triggered by the antagonists taunting or harassing DedSec, becomes more pronounced as the game progresses, even without prior street cred everyone who angers DedSec suffers humiliation at the hands of the group, so people should really learn. Special mention goes to the Bratva and Tezcas, who wind up in a total war with DedSec after Marcus' kidnapping and near murder and Horatio's murder respectively.
• In The Witcher, the eponymous Witchers have to take a lot of verbal abuse from normal people. None of them stops to ponder whether it's smart to mock someone who you'll need when you're once again troubled by some undead menace (a common occurrence in this world), and who can break the finest human fighters in half with his superhuman mutant reflexes and Healing Factor.
  • Geralt hangs a lampshade on it to some would-be robbers in chapter two.
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has Frau Engel (an elderly, ordinary Nazi officer with little to no real combat experience) taunting the hero B.J. (basically a One-Man Army who leaves even hardened Nazis soiling themselves in fear) repeatedly over the course of the game, not realizing that he has been killing Nazis and Eldritch Abominations that were a bigger threat than her (B.J.'s most recent kill was Deathshead, possibly one of the last competent villains in the Wolfenstein games). Engel only got away with it because B.J. was crippled at the time and couldn’t fight back. Towards the end of the game, B.J. acquires a super soldier body after she arrogantly beheaded him and upon seeing him again, goes into a panic and tries to kill him in a futile attempt with a small golden gun, only for B.J. to sever her arm with a hatchet and plant said hatchet right into the screaming Nazi's face.
  • Also, an earlier, but plot-relevant example: B.J's abusive, bigoted father, Rip, points a loaded shotgun in B.J's face, knowing full well of what B.J is capable of and what he has done in the past and tries to kill him while bragging that he sent his Jewish mother to a Nazi death camp. B.J calmly tells his father off and kills the abusive old man effortlessly.
• In Yggdra Union, Gulcasa was born the first pure-blooded descendant of the dragon Brongaa in hundreds of years. This made him a savior to his people, and gave him the right to the throne. The previous Emperor did not like this, and under his orders, Gulcasa was treated as a harbinger of disaster and abused throughout his childhood. Too bad for the Emperor of that time that Gulcasa is literally the descendant of a demonic dragon. At least the coup d'etat was over really fast. There was much rejoicing.
• The player actually can bully a dragon in Zork II. Although truthfully, it's not so much "bully" as "disturb its nap, then annoy it with your puny sword until it incinerates or eats you."

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