Academic Alpha Bitch

"A" for Alpha.

Weiss: I was thinking we could be on the team together.
Pyrrha: Well, that sounds grand!
Weiss: Great! [turns around with smirk and clasping hands, monologuing to self] This will be perfect! The smartest girl in class combined with the strongest girl in class! Together we will be unstoppable! I can see it now! We'll be popular! We'll be celebrities! We'll get perfect grades! Nothing could come between us now!

— RWBY, "The First Step"

Similar to the Class Representative in her concern for anything school-related, and like the Alpha Bitch in how ambitious she is, this character is aggressive in her academic superiority. She will act like she's in charge and decide who gets to do what. She's no shy Bookworm. This can be a male character, but for some reason, probably because both Men Are Uncultured and Higher Education Is for Women, you can expect a female character in the role.

They'll be found in a show that has a private school or a large cast as the one who will fight to be the best but is somehow still popular. The natural Student Council President but not necessarily the only one. Unlike a regular Alpha Bitch, she is rarely glamorous and much more likely to be a friend sooner or later, like the Lovable Alpha Bitch. She can often be the Beta Bitch.

The academic subtrope of The Perfectionist and Alpha Bitch. Compare to Insufferable Genius and Nerdy Bully. Compare also with Go-Getter Girl. These types of characters may subscribe to Academia Elitism.

The polar opposite is the Kindhearted Simpleton. Also contrast Gentleman and a Scholar.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Death Note: Light Yagami is a male example, especially after he found the notebook. He is one of the best students in the country, is very popular among his peers and teachers, and is very success-oriented. He is also a Control Freak with a god complex and a Hair-Trigger Temper.
• Erina Nakiri of Food Wars! starts off as this. She's exceptionally beautiful, intelligent, the heiress of a very important family in the culinary world, and has the talent to back it all up. However, she is feared by most budding chefs in the country for her insanely high standard of cooking and her willingness to use her influence to crush those who fail to meet her standards, such as closing down a school club for its lack of achievements, then taking their kitchen for her own personal use despite already having plenty. She eventually mellows out though, becoming more of a Lovable Alpha Bitch.
• Highschool of the Dead: Prior to the outbreak, Saya was the smartest girl at Fujimi Highschool — and it shows. Her nigh-encyclopaedic intellect and analytical ability have enabled her to quickly and accurately assess a situation on repeat occasions, which has saved Takashi and the others several times. But (in the anime) it's also made her almost unbearable at times, between lauding her intellectual superiority and being a major Tsundere.
• In His and Her Circumstances, main character Yukino Miyazawa starts as this. She aspires to be the #1 in her class and is not pleased when Arima steals her top spot, along with the admiration she feels should be hers. Later, however, Yukino becomes a Broken Ace: when she relaxes and then she and Arima start dating, she realizes that she was so focused on being the best student in her year that she hasn't made any real friends and can barely interact with other people.
• Kaguya from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War fits this trope to a T early on in the series, looking down on all those that she views as her intellectual inferiors. It remains a subtle part of her character even after her defrosting, as seen by her actions when she appoints himself as Ishigami's Romantic Wingman (have him obsessively study to impress Tsubame with his grades and encourage Tsubame to cruelly turn down any other potential boyfriends).
• Kaze no Shōjo Emily: Rhoda prides herself in being Ms. Brownell's favourite student, and when her new teacher Mr. Carpenter starts giving the other students more attention, she tries to steal it back, to no avail. This exacerbates her hatred for Emily furthermore.
• Student Council President Kiryuin Satsuki in Kill la Kill takes this trope to the logical extreme; she runs the school like a Social Darwinist totalitarian autocracy.
• Lady!! loves this trope:
  • Mary Waverly is an elite tennis player as well as one of the wealthier pupils at the school. She views everyone else as her enemy in the race to get the Lady's Crestm and especially hates Lynn because she blames her for her mother's engagement to Lynn's father failing. Though, by the end of the series, she's publicly disgraced for sabotaging Vivian by cutting the reins of her horse. Even her own grandfather, Victor Reynolds, is disgusted at her for this.
  • Vivian Spencer is St. Patrick's School Idol, and many people believe that she will win the Lady's Crest. She's haughty, smug and is often followed around by adoring fangirls. She is always rude to Lynn whenever they interact, but soften ups later and eventually becomes her friend. She also gifts Lynn her horse.
• Little Witch Academia has Diana Cavendish. She is the top student of Luna Nova and an incredibly intelligent and powerful witch from an old and prestigious family and is capable of solving problems that even the teachers couldn't. However, she is also an incredibly haughty, cold, and stuck-up Jerkass who tends to berate and look down on others for not living up to her standards of a witch (Akko being her most frequent target), on top of frequently putting herself on a pedestal and thinking she knows best due to her background. That said, she is a Lovable Alpha Bitch who does have a noble side to her and does genuinely cares about her peers, including Akko, even if her snobbish attitude hides it. She would later become much nicer in the TV series (especially in the later episodes thanks to Character Development), even if she remains a bit stuffy and reserved towards Akko.
• Magical Doremi has an elementary school version in Reika Tamaki. She's a very pretty, very Book Smart, and very arrogant girl who is the Class Representative of Doremi, Hazuki, and Aiko's class, and always rubs on everyone's faces how charming, cute, smart, and powerful she is.
• B-ko (Biko) Daitokuji from Project A-Ko, although a bit downplayed because her rivalry with Sitcom Archnemesis A-ko tends to be more physical than intellectual. She has all the hallmarks of a standard Alpha Bitch (beautiful, rich, bratty, self-centered, head of the local Girl Posse she uses as flunkies) but doubles down by also being a top student with a genius-level intellect (she builds giant robots and advanced powersuits in her spare time, usually to take down A-ko).
• Sailor Moon: Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury, of all people, once showed tendencies of this in the Exam Battles specials; upon discovering that a mysterious boy named Mercurius had her same scores in all tests, she started going mad and trying to understand how it was possible, and when she accidentally mistook an hostile Genius Loci for him she gleefully attacked the enemy, content of having an excuse. Minako Aino/Sailor Venus promptly declared she'll stop studying for fear of being murdered by her.

Comic Books

• Emma Frost: Matilda Brant, Emma's main academic rival at the Snow Valley School for Girls. She is outraged when Emma gets a higher score than her in the midterm exam and is convinced she cheated. She's actually right even if she doesn't know how Emma did it.
• Park, the top student to enter the Cadet program in Mech Cadet Yu. She insults Yu for admiring the ceremony because he's "hired help" as a member of the cleaning staff and is confident he will never be a Cadet.

Comic Strips

• Big Nate gives us Gina, one of Nate's archrivals. She's the smartest girl and even beats out Nate's best friend Francis for smartest kid in some parts. She's also a notorious rule-follower and Teacher's Pet, partially why she and Nate clash so often. Nate's friends though think of it as a love-hate relationship.

Fan Works

• Miraculous: The Phoenix Rises gives us Kiku Yoshikuro, head of the student council and all-around Go-Getter Girl. Her Hidden Depths reveal her to be someone resentful of the heavy expectations placed on her.
• Returning shows that Ravenclaw is plagued with them, and Rose comes close to becoming one.
• Rick and Morty New Drama Adventures: Courtney is shown to be the best academic in school, and she knows it. She takes her classes very seriously, but, as can be seen in Chapter 7 "Summertime", Courtney is very ambitious and takes it upon herself to solve her friend's problems by suggesting to Bridgette that Rick be institutionalized or arrested to "protect the poor children".
• Unlike the rest of her popular friends, Trixie Tang in Silent Wish takes her academics very seriously. She's also bratty, though a lot of it is to hide her Hidden Heart of Gold.
• The Simpsons: Team L.A.S.H.: Simon Skinner-Chalmers is a male example. As the product of an Office Romance between a principal and his superintendent, he's been raised to think that his education is the single most important thing in his life. As a result, he's a Control Freak of a hall monitor who's constantly snitching on his classmates, sucks up to faculty members, and is Obsessed with Perfect Attendance to the point where he refuses to take sick days.

Films — Animation

• Johnny Worthington from Monsters University is an unusual male example. He's the president of Roar Omega Roar, the most elite fraternity on campus, but he isn't a stereotypical Fratbro as RΩR pride themselves on being the best scarers, which is a challenging academic program. He threatens Sully's place in the frat if he can't keep his grades up and eventually kicks him out when he's dropped from the scaring program.
• Mr. Peabody & Sherman: Penny, although later she becomes a Lovable Alpha Bitch. After Sherman shows her up in class, she picks a fight with the "dog" in the lunchroom. In the insurance photos, she's practically on the verge of Crocodile Tears.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Played with. While Sunset Shimmer is a genius, having been a former student of Princess Celestia who underwent a Face–Heel Turn and sought to use her powers for evil, she behaves more like a traditional Alpha Bitch in the first movie. Her love of and thirst for knowledge isn't prominent until the third movie in the spin-off series, by which point she has already undergone a Heel–Face Turn.

Films — Live-Action

• 2-Headed Shark Attack: Downplayed with Lyndsey, who may not act superior but takes her high grades seriously and is quick to complain about anyone distracting her from her work.
• Candy Jar: If you believe Lona's mom, Bennett's mother fell into this when she was young. If not, she was probably more of a Teen Genius like her son.
• Overachieving high school student Tracy Flick is running unopposed for Student Council President in Election.
• Fear Street Part One: 1994: Kate, who is both the valedictorian and a cheerleader, and is selling drugs to make enough money to leave Shadyside. Played with however in that she's the protagonist's best friend, and even happily hooks up with her nerdy younger brother (and being best friends with an out lesbian in 1994 makes her quite progressive for her day).
• Taylor McKessie of High School Musical is the president of the science club at East High and a member of the school's national decathlon team. She wants gifted Gabriella to join the team to beat their rivals in West High and gets involved to sabotage Gabriella's growing relationship with Troy to get rid of any distractions. She does grow out of this when she realizes what a Jerkass move she pulled and becomes nicer.
• John Tucker Must Die: Carrie is a classic case, excels in school and is intimidating to other students. She is also a perfectionist, an Extracurricular Enthusiast, and a School Newspaper News Hound. Apparently she also speaks several languages and is writing a children's book.
• When Elle gets to Harvard Law in Legally Blonde she faces Vivian Kensington, a horrible preppy girl who tries to make her look bad in front of the professor. Vivian is a threat to Elle because she's a smart, serious, law student. Later, however, Vivian and Elle start interacting more and become sort-of Fire-Forged Friends.
• Real Genius: Kent is a Rare Male Example - good enough to be a student teaching assistant (he teaches Dr. Hathaway's lower curriculum courses), but aggressive in his academic superiority and ruthless to anyone he perceives as a threat to this primacy.
  Kent: You'll rue the day.
  Chris: "Rue the day?" Who talks like that?
• School of Rock: Summer is a mild example. She is obsessed with getting more gold stars than anyone else but just tries to get as many as possible for herself and never tries to sabotage anyone else.
• Harriet Bentley in Wild Child is a very good example, being the "head girl" of the school and making Poppy's life miserable. She ends up being expelled when accidentally confessing that she was the one responsible for a fire for which Poppy was blamed.

Literature

• American Girls: Samantha: Edith is the smartest girl in Samantha's class, and thus acts superior to her classmates.
• Winifred from Ballet Shoes is this from a performing perspective. She's the best all-round student the academy has and is used to getting all the lead roles because of it. As such, she is not happy when she suddenly starts having to compete with the slightly more charismatic (and definitely more beautiful) Pauline Fossil. In the 2007 film, when Pauline gets cast as Alice, Winifred throws a tantrum and screams that the casting has "nothing whatsoever to do with talent!" In the original novel, though, Winifred makes the Fossil girls feel uncomfortable because she isn't jealous or bitter; she works harder than them and has a tougher home life due to poverty and illness in the family.
• In Bunny, Alpha Bitch Eleanor has fantastic grades and is loved by the school community.
• Classroom of the Elite: Suzune is an exceptional student and she knows it, but her brother indicates that she's been assigned to Class-D because she can't work with others. She does try an intervention with the three dumbest students, but because she's constantly insulting them, they walk out, and she immediately decides to let them fail out of the school and stop dragging on Class-D as a whole.
• Ghosts of Fear Street: Emily from How to Be a Vampire is always talking down to her little brother Andrew (the protagonist) about how much smarter and more sophisticated she is for reading more advanced books than he does. Even when she agrees to help cure his vampirism, she makes it clear that is only helping him because she thinks having a vampire brother would be embarrassing.
• Hermione Granger is this at first in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. She spends most of her first scenes bragging about all the spells she's read up on in advance, and showing off in class. She undergoes Character Development and becomes friends with Harry and Ron pretty soon, however. According to Word of God, there was a character planned to fill this role in the fourth book: a Weasley cousin called Mafalda who would get sorted into Slytherin and become Hermione's academic rival. She was dropped due to her age-limiting story potential; as there would be a three-year difference between the girls, they would share no classes and have few opportunities to interact.
• Hating Alison Ashley: Erica, the main character, is this. Probably the only smart student in her ill-famed school, she is an ambitious and extremely arrogant girl who believes herself superior to all her stupid classmates. When a rich and intelligent girl named Alison is placed in her class, Erica starts hating and antagonizing her because she is jealous of how Alison outshines her academically (not just because she's rich) and is loved by all the teachers.
• In Lets Get Lost, Isabel is not only the meanest girl at her school, she's also the cleverest, which she says isn't because she's a natural genius or anything, she just put in a lot of work to be top of the pecking order.
• Malory Towers by Enid Blyton has Alicia Johns, whose status as this trope is both confirmed and undermined when she collapses during an exam and is found to have come down with measles. She confesses that her head has been 'woolly' for days and that she finally understands (and sympathizes with) how difficult it is for the non-genius girls in her form.
• In My Weird School, Andrea Young is the smartest in the class but is also the meanest and bossiest. She is the leader of a Girl Posse, with her friend Emily as the Beta Bitch.
• In One Hundred Years Ahead, Mila Rutkevich has shades of it from the beginning, and her unpleasantness skyrockets when Alice starts to outshine her in classes.
• On the Edge of Eureka: Cressida was a complete jerk before her Character Development, but she still got really good grades.
• The Scholomance: The Wizarding School valedictorian Liesel Mueller is a positive example by way of Good is Not Nice — pragmatism, long-term planning, and willingness to bully people into line are very useful skills when organizing a group to survive mortal dangers. Even when she drops the friendly facade and explains to people's faces how she's manipulating them, they tend to concede that she's doing a great job of it.
• In Speak, the Marthas are a group of girls led by an Alpha Bitch trio, Meg, Emily, and Siobhan, who spend their time doing community service projects but are very exclusive as to who they allow to join, look down on unpopular students and are harsh towards their junior members. It's hinted that the newer members are the ones doing most of the actual work—when it's time to decorate the ballroom for the senior prom, Meg, Emily, and Siobhan delegate all the work to their juniors so they can get their nails painted and teeth whitened.
• Ethel Hallow of The Worst Witch. The narration describes her as "one of those lucky people for whom everything always goes right". She excels at all her classes but continuously rubs it in everyone's face. The TV series emphasises this by giving her only one friend in Drucilla.

Live-Action TV

• 13 Reasons Why has two particularly unlikable examples:
  • Marcus Cole. He vies for school valedictorian, mentions his grades, Ivy League aspirations, or student body presidency in practically every scene he's in. He wants everyone to think he's The Ace (even if he's a jerk who treats girls horribly), thinks the world will end if he doesn't get to Harvard, and is willing to resort to very underhanded and cruel actions to protect his reputation, even framing people for serious crimes.
  • Courtney Crimsen. She's focused on academics, is popular, and organizes many events in school. On the exterior, she seems to be a sweet Go-Getter Girl but, like Marcus, is actually a selfish Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who willingly harms others to protect her reputation. She even pulls some typical Alpha Bitch moves like starting rumors and excluding people. Season 2 sees her undergoing a Heel–Face Turn.
• A.P. Bio: Sarika, the Indian-American go-getter, sits at the front of the class and is consistently the most resistant student to Jack's staunch refusal to teach biology. Even her own mother believes that she needs to calm down and enjoy herself a little.
• Boy Meets World: Topanga counted up her A's for the year, and insisted that her final assignment get an A, even though it wasn't for the grade, just to ensure that she was valedictorian over Minkus.
• Laura in Season Two of The Bridge (2011), who throws a tantrum because her teacher gave her a lower score than she wanted and begins blackmailing said teacher. Said teacher is also her lover.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer reveals that the stereotypical Alpha Bitch Cordelia Chase scores well on standardised tests as a gag. She also did well enough academically to get into top schools.
  "What? I can't have layers?"
• Cold Case: In "Forensics", One-Shot Character Alyssa is a preppy, confident, skillful, and very arrogant debater who angrily, but not seriously, threatens a teammate's life once he costs them a round. Deconstructed with the reveal that she's a C-student who views a successful debating career as her only hope of getting a good scholarship.
• Community: Annie Kim, an intensely competitive student who develops a rivalry with Annie Edison. Also, hotshot debater Jeremy Simmons ("Debating 109") and high school achievers Mark, Kelly, and Scott ("The Art of Discourse") in Season 1.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation:
  • Season one has Ashley Kerwin who is popular and is glad for her unchallenged status as Student Council President.
  • Seasons 5 has Liberty Van Zandt who becomes Student Council President and then fights to be valedictorian.
  • Holly J. Sinclair becomes Student Council President in season nine so she can do things her way.
  • The "mean girl" from the original series Degrassi Junior High, Kathleen, is one of the smartest and most obnoxious students. Among other things, she drives a science fair judge crazy by reciting every stack of facts she knows, never giving her partner a chance to talk, and is shocked when that doesn't earn her first prize. She also serves as a foil to Caitlin (the other overachieving Go-Getter Girl) who can't stand Kathleen's Jerkass attitude.
• In Derry Girls, Jenny Joyce is a brown noser who gets top marks and frequently rubs her wealth in the other characters' faces. She's also quite prone to snitching.
  Sister Michael: Jenny, you'll go far in life [Beat] but you will not be well liked.
• Drake & Josh: Mindy, an intelligent and boastful girl in the boys' class at school who is always trying to top her rival Josh. She eventually gets better from this, after she gets with Josh.
• ER. Among Kerry Weaver's many flaws was the way she'd lord it over others how much smarter than them she supposedly was, along with always striving to outdo them.
• Freaks and Geeks: Shelley Weaver, Lindsay's mathlete rival, complete with prim and proper attitude and patronizing comments.
• Gilmore Girls: The first time that Rory meets Paris Geller at Chilton Academy, Paris tells her how she's going to be editor of the school paper and valedictorian, ending with, "You'll never catch up. You'll never beat me. This school is my domain and the Franklin is my domain. And don't you ever forget that." Rory does catch up, edging Paris out for valedictorian, and though Paris' personality retains its intensity, they become close friends.
• Glee: Quinn is a competitive, bitchy, and popular cheerleader who maintains a 4.0 GPA and gets early acceptance to Yale. She later becomes a Defrosting Ice Queen.
• Gossip Girl: Blair is a rich, popular, and ruthless overachiever who wants to destroy her rivals in both popularity and academics.
• Head of the Class: Alan Pinkard is none too pleased that others in the high IQ class do as well as he does, even better sometimes. And he was really pissed that 11-year-old Janice was in his high school - and more pissed that she left early to go to Harvard, which is where he wants to go. He and Darlene were neck-and-neck when it came time to declare a class valedictorian, but the school's powers that be decided to make another girl, TJ, valedictorian instead because of the challenges she'd had to overcome.
• In Insatiable, Magnolia Barnard is portrayed as a stereotypical popular girl (at least at first) as well as a straight-A student.
• Kenan & Kel has Janet, a smug brainy girl. is frequently at odds with the titular protagonists. One episode has her giving a brown-nosing book report that lasts for the entire class.
• Mr. Iglesias has Whitney Carson, an honors student who looks down on the underprivileged kids in Mr. Iglesias’s class. She’s rich, too, and uses her money to get perks to get ahead of her classmates in tests and grades.
• Davina in My Family and Me. She was a straight-A student back in high school and a dean's list student in college.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide:
  • Evelyn takes being the top student at Polk disturbingly seriously, to the extent that she'll physically injure you to get ahead.
  • Male example in Lance Widget, a nerdy bully who never hesitates to insult the people he tutors.
• Never Have I Ever: Dev and Ben are fiercely competitive and their rivalry brings out the worst in each other.
• The O.C.: Taylor Townsend is introduced as a competitive, power-grabbing overachiever who quickly assumes the Student Social Chair position after Marissa is expelled. With her early behavior especially towards Summer, she was a combination of Manipulative Bitch and Go-Getter Girl (she gets better later on when the Manipulative Bitch part is toned down).
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Libby is usually just the typical Alpha Bitch cheerleader. However, there's an episode where Sabrina uses her magic to turn Libby into a nerd because she believed that it would teach her a lesson in humility and kindness. This ends up backfiring when Libby takes over the Science Club and starts bullying her old friends in the cheerleading squad. Libby also averts the ditziness usually associated with being the Alpha Bitch and does occasionally mock Sabrina when she gets better grades than her. One episode where Sabrina is forced to find out more about Libby has her discovering that she works harder to improve her math homework.
  Quizmaster: You didn't know Libby was bad at math?
  Sabrina: No, what surprises me is that she cares that she's bad at math.
• Deconstructed in Sassy Go Go with Kwon Soo Ah. She is shown to be abrasive and manipulative, and is even willing to frame Kim Yeol for stealing the midterms. However, she is shown to be heavily under the influence of her mother and clearly regrets most of her harsh actions.
• Strange Days At Blake Holsey High: Corrine Baxter has a very strong competitive streak.
• Teenage Bounty Hunters: April is more an alpha bitch than Sterling but both are fiercely devoted to their studies.
• Teen Wolf: Lydia is introduced as the typical snobby Alpha Bitch who is dating the Jerk Jock but is also a Teen Genius who excels at academics and she knows it.
• Wishbone: Sam's rival Amanda spends most of the episode "Sniffing the Gauntlet" gloating over how her team is going to win the class spelling bee.
• The Worst Witch: The 1998 series adds an original character, Deirdre Swoop from the rival Pentangles Academy. She's the prize student and helps the school win numerous competitions, which she doesn't fail to rub everyone else's noses in. Fortunately, she mellows out by the time she appears in the spin-off Weirdsister College - and becomes a teacher at Cackle's later in her life.

Professional Wrestling

• Scott Steiner comes from a highly educated university, so when he comes out here in front of all you white trash, he has to dumb himself down!
• Not only is The Lovely Lacey better looking than you without the aid of silicone, not only is she the best wrestler in all time and space, but her family could afford to send her to a better college than yours, so she's also smarter than you! The exception was Ring of Honor, where she was a part of the rich kid raver druggie group Special K, and part of her Heel–Face Turn implied finishing her college degree.
• Christopher Nowinsky was initially a Jerk Jock, but when he earned a WWE contract and started appearing on their television programs, his graduation from Harvard became his most important trait, and he became this trope instead.
• The Two Time, Two Time All American American Jack Swagger is not only an All American twice over, but is both an athletic and academic All American. And he's a tall, natural blond. This makes him better than you in every conceivable way.
• Ryback, of all people, became this after his Face–Heel Turn, proclaiming that John Cena fans knew nothing about nutrition or education, and that killing John Cena was the only way to save them from their path of self-destruction. After his inevitable loss to Cena however, Ryback degenerated into a generic bully, then turned face.
• Niya Barela became this after completing her doctorate, claiming not only greater knowledge and higher intelligence than her peers but also boasting and attempting to prove she spoke with a "higher linguistic acumen" than they did. Or in the case of her fellow educated Puerto Rican La Rosa Negra, better education and fluency in English.
• Daniel "The Progressive Liberal" Richards loves to trace the problems of whatever area he happens to be wrestling in to the lack of higher education among its adult residents and urge them to push their children to pursue what they neglected. His degrees are also what apparently allow him to win so many matches.

Theater

• Ocean O'Connell-Rosenberg of Ride the Cyclone. Before her untimely death due to roller coaster derailment, she was choir president for nearly four years, student council president for two, and had gotten straight "A"'s since she was in kindergarten. She founded an improv group to help her best friend Constance Blackwood gain confidence with public speaking... except every "improv" came with a patronizingly moralistic script, and she would attack Constance's already fragile self-esteem for deviating from their rehearsed material. In life, Ocean's ambition drove her to measure her self-worth by her achievements, and she held all her "friends" in the choir to her impossibly high standards. In death she was even worse, gleefully telling the other choir members who perished in the same roller coaster accident that the only tragedy of their collective death was her own wasted potential.

Video Games

• In Genshin Impact, the Sumeru Akademiya is filled with and run by overgrown examples of this trope, with many researchers' overinflated view of their own wisdom leading them to hold less "intellectual" subjects (such as dreams and the arts) in contempt. These scholars frequently make it clear that they look down on those less educated than themselves, even arguing that laypeople don't have the right to argue with Akademiya scholars due to the education gap between them. Aside from a few exceptions like Alhaitham, this mentality only gets worse the higher up you go in the Akademiya, with Grand Sage Azar being easily the worst of the lot. In practice, it's made clear that the Akademiya's version of "wisdom" has led to mass Creative Sterility and creates a plethora of Know-Nothing Know-It-Alls.
• The head of the popular clique in Our Darker Purpose, Regan, a master of both social manipulation and dark magics. (Although only the latter is actually seen.)
• Subverted by Makoto Nijima from Persona 5, who isn't one but is mistakenly believed to be (which includes the Protagonist and his companion Ann Takamaki). For example, the Protagonist can hear some girls gossiping about how she knew what Kamoshida was doing but hid it because she's only pretending to care about the student body. (The truth is that she was furious and blamed herself for him being unpunished for so long, but felt she didn't have the power to do anything, as the series also subverts Absurdly Powerful Student Council.)
• Kameo from True Love Junai Monogatari is a Rare Male Example, always bragging about his academic accomplishments. He's also a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander at times, though.

Web Animation

• ATTACK on MIKA: Callaco was the top student in her class, which drove her to bully Koki for surpassing her. Later on in the student reunion, Koki finds out her looks deteriorated.
• ETU - Animated Stories: Bree has the highest grade in her class. She bullied Jacob for his low grades. After she tried to destroy his reputation, Bree was not asked by anyone to the prom, so she was forced to take along Jacob. But when Jacob takes a babysitting job with a teenage daughter and a younger son, it is revealed that Bree is the teenager, and she broke up with him.
• Weiss Schnee from RWBY, who is one of the protagonists. She is also a Lovable Alpha Bitch.

Webcomics

• In Anecdote of Error, Shimei shows off her knowledge every chance she gets, in order to stick it to Atshi whose grades are terrible even on non-magical subjects. She is personally offended that Atshi attended their school despite having no magical ability and being a housekeeper on top of that.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Cindy Vortex is a popular, athletic, and intelligent girl, but she has a mean streak quite big and does not like Jimmy for having usurped her position as smartest kid.
• Braceface: Nina Harper is the most popular girl in her grade at her and Sharon Spitz's school, but completely averts Popular Is Dumb in that she's a straight-A student, being particularly gifted in the subjects of math and science. Given how intimidating Nina can be (even some of her teachers appear to be scared of her!), no one would dare to call her "nerdy"!
• Charity in Exchange Student Zero. While she somewhat grows out of this in the Made-for-TV Movie, she reprises this role in the TV series, tenfold. Then again, the show deliberately deviates from the events that happened in the TV movie so her Character Development is apparently nonexistent.
• Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil: Kendall Perkins, straight A student and class president, tends to be bossy and dismissive towards other people.
• The Owl House has Amity Blight, a young witch-in-training who seems deliberately patterned off of Diana Cavendish of Little Witch Academia fame in everything from her attitude toward those she sees as inferiors to the moments where her Hidden Heart of Gold comes through.
• Pepper Ann: PA's rival Alice Kane — an arrogant overachiever who always wins the science fair and rubs her accomplishments in PA's face.
• The Simpsons:
  • Lisa Simpson prides herself on her intelligence and always coming top of the class with straight 'A's. One episode has her world collapsing when she gets her very first B; another deals with an even brighter girl joining her class and Lisa's utter jealousy of her, and another when she skipped a grade and was no longer the big fish in a small pond. As the series went on, she also developed a rivalry with fellow smart student Martin Prince to the point that in the episode "Dial 'N' for Nerder", when Martin is apparently killed by a prank of Bart gone wrong, she instantly assumes that said rivalry will be seen by the police as motive enough to commit murder.
  • Marge's ex-boyfriend Artie Ziff was a male example. In high school, he was a stereotypical overachieving nerd, yet was also popular enough to get elected homecoming king and verbally bullied less intelligent students like Homer. The love triangle between him, Homer, and Marge was basically the classic story of the pretty girl dating the Jerk Jock while secretly having feelings for the sweet-natured geek, but with the jock and geek switching places.
• Static Shock: Madelyne Spaulding, a stuck-up "Little Miss Perfect" type who tried running for class president but failed to gain enough supporters to get on the ballot. Her latent abilities as a Bang Baby then manifested, which allowed her to control people like puppets, or "brain puppets", and be able to read minds. She couldn't control Static's mind because of his electrical abilities, but she was able to enter his mind and learn his secret identity. Madelyne then used her powers to try and take over Dakota so she would definitely become student council president.
• Total Drama has Courtney, a stuck-up perfectionist overachiever whose motto is "If you can't come in first don't come in at all." She gets worse as the series goes on.

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