I Shall Taunt You

Goblin diplomacy

"If your enemy is of a choleric temper, seek to anger him."

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

A character deliberately insults and goads another as a calculated ploy. Possible motivations include:

• Infuriating the target so that he quits thinking straight, picks up the Idiot Ball with both hands, and charges headlong into a trap.
• A Secret Test of Character to see if the target can keep his cool under pressure. After all, If You Taunt Him, You Will Be Just Like Him.
• Prodding a dispirited ally to make him quit sulking and get back into action.
• For an opponent who's already about to die to the hero's attacks, this might be played for drama by having them reveal something particularly shocking or pertinent to where the story's headed next through their taunting.
• Driving someone who is already behaving irrationally to go too far and thereby realize that he needs to stop and calm down.
• Snapping the target out of a debilitating mental state such as amnesia or Mind Control.

Sometimes even Cthulhu can be annoyed beyond thinking straight... but you'd better have a really good plan.

In competitive Video Games this frequently takes the form of a move or "attack" which does no damage and leaves your character defenseless against retaliation while he engages in some mocking or playful behavior such as an Ass Kicking Pose, Dancing or a Finger Wag. Bring It!

Sometimes this is inverted as an "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight. See also Defiant to the End, Teach Him Anger, The Computer Shall Taunt You.

Compare to a Batman Gambit, of which this trope is a verbal form. Compare also Trash Talk which occurs during a competition and is more for general intimidation than calculated insults, You Fight Like a Cow which may couple this trope with a duel, Practical Taunt when the benefits are based on a gameplay system which may use this trope as justification, Unsportsmanlike Gloating which occurs after winning the fight, Volleying Insults where two characters may attempt to repeatedly use this trope on each other, Fisticuff-Provoking Comment where a particularly insulting or offensive remark results in physical violence, and Insulted Awake where the intent of the taunt is to snap the target out of a mental stupor. Bring It is when there is no subtle ploy, and the character is openly defying another one to fight.

Beware of using this on someone Too Dumb to Fool, as they may misinterpret your taunt as an Insult Backfire and react the opposite of how you want them to. Either that, or they'll simply ignore your taunt and keep doing whatever it was they were doing before you taunted them. When this trope goes bad and backfires on the taunter, see Offing the Mouth.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Nestle's Quik commercial from 1968 had an opposing baseball catcher taunting Washington Senator slugger Frank Howard who is seen drinking a glass of Quik in the Orioles dugout:
  Catcher: [condescendingly] Why, Frank! You're drinking Nestle's Quik like all the good boys do. It's so rich and chocolatey, isn't it Franky-Wanky? [as Howard comes to the plate] Hey guys! Here comes the Nestle's Quik Boy! [to Howard] Please don't hit the ball too hard, Nestle's Quik Boy! [pitcher winds and delivers; Howard sends it over the centerfield wall and is rounding the bases. As he takes home plate] Hey, Frank. How long have you been drinking Nestle's Quik?
  Frank Howard: [chucking catcher's cheek] Ever since I was about your size.

Anime & Manga

• Armed Girl's Machiavellism: Fudo Nomura fights Satori Tamaba and is having a very difficult time because a) she is naked which is distracting him, and b) she seems emotionless so it is hard to read her moves. He turns the tables by stripping naked himself and taunting her by calling her a monster. She both gets distracted by his nudity and angry about his comments and attacks him in a rage, allowing him to read her moves and defeat her easily.
• Bastard!! (1988): Gara kidnaps Dark Schneider's love interest Tia Noto Yoko. When Dark Schneider arrives, Gara wants to goad him into a fight and defeat him at his full power, so he lies and says that he raped Yoko and took her virginity. An outraged Yoko tries to explain that he's lying (Gara had stripped Yoko naked with a clothes eating slime creature and was planning to rape her, but Dark Schneider arrived before he could), but Dark Schneider believes him and attacks him in a rage.
• Bleach:
  • Aizen uses this against the Vizards and remaining captains in Karakura, Shinji warns everyone to stay calm, but Hiyori falls for it and gets either cut into two from behind (manga) or Impaled with Extreme Prejudice (anime) by Gin.
  • This beauty from Aizen:
    Hitsugaya: I'll kill you.
    Aizen: Don't use such overly strong words. They'll make you look weak.
  • It was used by Bambietta from the Vandenreich against Komamura. In the words of another trope: "'Doggie dog' Komamura isn't happy about being insulted yet again."
• Used several times in Chrono Crusade, particularly since Chrono has a bad temper when provoked. Aion uses it successfully against him in at least one battle. Remington uses it against Chrono in a later battle to teach Chrono to "control his rage". Rosette also uses it against Rizelle in the anime version, taunting her about her unrequited love for Aion.
• Lelouch as Zero calling Jeremiah "Orange Boy" in reference to his disgrace during Season 1 of Code Geass.
• Cross Ange: During their fight in Episode 24, Tusk brags to Embryo about how he slept with Ange, a woman Embryo had been lusting after for most of the series. This causes Embryo to go completely berserk and forget about his chessmaster tactics.
• In Death Note, this is L's preferred tactic of dealing with Kira: pile on the perceived pressure and the subtle mockery until Kira makes a mistake. Most obviously, during the famous "Lind L Tailor" broadcast he openly calls Kira evil. Light takes the bait and kills the guy in the broadcast, thus revealing not only that he does in fact have a supernatural killing power, but also where he was (since the broadcast was only being aired in the Kanto region of Japan).
• In Dragon Ball:
  • In the original series, Mr. Popo taunts Goku about being weak to make him careless and predictable. Since this is before Goku learned emotional control, he falls right for it.
  • In Z, Vegeta is the victim of this, a lot. As fond as he is of trash-talking, he can be easily manipulated and goaded into holding the Idiot Ball.
  • Done by Krillin to Frieza. First, he cutd off the latter's tail, sticks his tongue out at him, and then pats his butt. This is all to lure Frieza away from Gohan so Dende can heal him.
  • Vegetto, the fusion of Goku and Vegeta, is even worse than Vegeta by himself. Since he's so Game-breakingly-powerful that Buu isn't capable of even scratching him, he doesn't even put any effort into fighting Buu; just humiliating him. It turns out though, that he was goading Buu into attempting to absorbing him so he could free all the other fighters Buu had consumed.
  • During their match at the end of the Buu saga, Goku angered Uub into attacking him by insulting his parents and using racist pejoratives, since Uub was otherwise too scared and meek to fight back. After the fight, Goku apologizes for the insults.
  • In Super, Vegeta angrily taunts Cabba during their match, eventually declaring that if Cabba was an example of what Universe 6 Saiyans were like, he'd go to their home planet and slaughter them all. Cabba hits a Rage Breaking Point and suddenly transforms into a Super Saiyan, which is exactly what Vegeta was trying to get to happen. After the fight Vegeta is much more cordial with him, making it clear his earlier threat was empty.
• In Drifters, Shimazu Toyohisa is spectacularly gifted at pounding every single one of his enemies' Berserk Buttons. He turned away from Joan d'Arc, smashed apart a Breaking Lecture from the Count of Saint Germi, and his mere presence turned Hijikata Toshizo into a frothing berserker.
• Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel: In the third film, Spring Song, when Saber Alter and Rider fight, Saber gets confused why Shirou is just standing there instead of jumping in like a Leeroy Jenkins like back when they were partners. Rider taunts her about how she is a better partner than Saber because Shirou trusts her more. The comments slowly get under Saber's skin, and while her combat performance doesn't suffer too badly, she does leave herself open for them to kill her.
• In Food Wars! Soma angers one of the Elite Ten, a second-year named Eizan, who is basically the cooking equivalent of a crime lord. He tries to set Soma up for humiliation during the following tournament, but not only does he fail, Soma doesn't even realize he was being targeted. Later, he tries again when the directorship of the school changes hands and tries to crush Soma's spirits. First, he tries to shut down Soma's dorm and make it clear that while Soma can try to challenge him, the contest will be so heavily rigged that the judges won't even taste the food. Soma challenges him anyway. He tries more intimidation tactics to make Soma despair, including sending his thugs to evacuate the Polaris dorm and begin the destruction immediately, but Soma keeps on going as though he doesn't notice. Frustrated at his inability to make Soma submit, he finally attempts to actually beat him in cooking. Unfortunately for him, he hadn't actually prepared for the match at all and promptly loses despite being the better cook. Afterward, Soma makes it pretty clear that he actually was worried but knew the only way to win was to keep pissing off his opponent until he sabotaged himself. Eizan is a control freak, so just kicking Soma out wasn't enough to recover his pride, and Soma exploited this vulnerability.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Roy Mustang did something like this to Edward Elric (using his Berserk Button) when they fought, and Ed has resorted to hiding among the crowd watching the fight. Mustang makes a small reference to Ed's height within Ed's earshot, which makes Ed go berserk and expose his position. He used that "Art of War" quote above.
  • Envy uses this a lot, usually while taking the form of someone near and dear to his victim. This tactic backfires spectacularly when he tries it against Mustang. It does make him furious... but not in a way that makes him sloppy, but in a way that makes him murderous. Mustang then turns it right on his head by taunting Envy as he continues to incinerate the homunculus over and over. Considering Envy doesn't take insults well, it proves a very formidable tactic.
  • Edward does this during his fight with Lan Fan. He presses her Berserk Button (insulting her master Ling) to make her attack more recklessly.
• In Full Metal Panic!, one of Gates's hobbies is trash-talking to the twins Xia Yu Lan and Fan, both of them being not very expressive. Much to his satisfaction, Gates finally hits a nerve when he grabs the younger of the twins (deceased) and does some kind of sick drama/puppet show game just to break the elder sister, It goes perfectly for him since when Fan loses her cool she lowered her guard and Gates ends her with few blows.
• Reilan in Haou Airen uses this as a part of her Thanatos Gambit, taunting and insulting Hakuron until he snaps and shoots her dead.
• Inuyasha: Mouryoumaru tries this. Upon realising that the calm, rational one is Sesshoumaru and that Inuyasha's easily goaded, he begins targeting Inuyasha by insulting Kagura's death, dismissing her sacrifice for Kohaku's life and mocking her desire for freedom as Inuyasha, Kagome, Miroku and Sango become angrier and angrier. Unfortunately for Mouryoumaru, his plan backfires when, to everyone's complete shock, the person who explodes into an Unstoppable Rage isn't Inuyasha but Sesshoumaru, who becomes so upset that he breaks his sword Tokijin and puts his own life in danger. Everything degenerates into chaos at that point.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • A common strategy for Joseph Joestar. In his fight with Blood Knight Wham, he actually gets Wham to not kill him by taunting him that he'd be strong enough to beat Wham if given one month.
  • Backfires on Rohan Kishibe when he attempts it against Josuke Higashikata. Josuke needs to keep his eyes closed to avoid the effects of Rohan's Stand, Heaven's Door. Rohan tries to enrage Josuke by pressing Josuke's Berserk Button of insulting his hair. While this does succeed in getting Josuke to open his eyes, it also succeeds at sending Josuke into a literal blind rage, so he still doesn't see the trigger that Rohan needed him to. As a result, Heaven's Door can't activate and Rohan gets an even harder beatdown than he would have otherwise for his trouble.
• Jessie Mavia in Kinnikuman is a master at move reversals and counters, but possesses no original techniques of his own. He's Hoist by His Own Petard when Kinnikuman goads him into going on the offensive.
• In episode 4 of Log Horizon, Shiroe purposely mispronounced Demikas' name twice ("demi-glace" and "delicious") to enrage him and get him separated from his main party. He continues doing this when he meets Demikas again in the second season, but in that case he was just being a Troll: there was no strategy behind it.
• In Magical Circle Guru-Guru, the heroes meet a monster called Unvel that blocks the door they need to pass. A nearby diary warns that attacking Unvel will only make it bigger and heavier until it's impossible to move at all. Naturally, Unvel constantly taunts those in front of him specifically to provoke this.
• Quattro from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS did this twice. The first time, she had Lutecia relay a message to Vita about her greatest failure right as Deici was about to blow up a helicopter with Vice, Shamal, and Vivio on board. The second time she used a hologram to try and stroke Vivio's cheek in front of Nanoha. The second time did not work out for her.
• Mahoraba has the Secret Test of Character variety where Tamami brings Shiratori to Tamami's all-girl high school and then goes around telling everyone that Shiratori is a pervert, which gets him chased by half the campus, then has him haul a heavy load home for her. None of her slander or demands fazes him and he passes the test.
• The Misfit of Demon King Academy: When Anos's mother Izabella is attacked by Emilia in an attempt to steal Anos's sword, the Anos Fan Union stand in her attacker's way, but are overwhelmed. Because the attack is motivated by hatred towards the hybrid Anos defeating Royals, the girls begin singing the cheer song they made for Anos. This enrages their assailant enough to start attacking them one by one, ignoring Izabella. This move buys enough time for Anos to arrive, heal them, and put an end to Emilia's attack. The act earns Anos's respect such that he swears to remember their names for the rest of their lives.
• Used tactically in My Hero Academia:
  • Hitoshi Shinso needs to make someone verbally respond to him for his Brainwashing Quirk to work. He's very good at this, as he manages to make Midoriya fall for it by calling Ojiro an "idiot monkey" and mocking him for quitting the Tournament because he didn't feel he'd earned it - even though Ojiro had specifically warned Midoriya not to talk to Shinso just before their match started.
  • Armored All Might uses it against All For One as well in the Final Battle. He knows AFO can’t think as clearly if he’s doing Trash Talk.
• Naruto:
  • Sakura uses this during her fight with Ino in the Chuunin exams. Ino was holding back at the start of it whereas Sakura wants to fight for real, so she starts taunting her rival by hitting her two Berserk Buttons (being called "pig" and having someone claim ownership of Sasuke) deliberately.
  • This is actually a fairly common ploy in Naruto. When used against plenty of the characters, especially Naruto himself, it works quite well, and the taunted character ends up losing his/her judgment and getting beaten. The problem comes when someone tries this with Sasuke. Insulting his clan or hurting his friends definitely presses his Berserk Button, but instead of losing his judgment, it's his morals that tend to go out the window. People who taunt Sasuke have a tendency to end up beaten to a pulp, if not dead.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Shirabe attempted this against Kotaro. It appeared to work, but he was actually faking. Those who remembered that he Wouldn't Hit a Girl could have seen it coming.
  • Then, after the tournament, Negi meets someone who's really good at taunting him. Kurt Godel, his father's ex-companion. Who manages to provoke Negi into releasing a Superpowered Evil Side. Holy...
  • In Negima?!, Kotaro himself, in his introductory chapter, successfully taunts Negi into fighting him seriously, by trash-talking his father.
  • Kotaru pisses Negi off a second time after they all crash into the Magical World, by jabbing at his inability to protect everyone. Considering how protective Negi is, he doesn't take it well. In this case, he was doing it because Negi needed to burn off the excess magical energy that was left by Konoka's healing spell.
• One Piece:
  • Luffy invokes this within the first ten episodes: he presses Buggy the Clown's Berserk Button ("BIG NOSE!") to goad him into shooting him with his ultra-destructive cannonball. Luffy then uses his powers to bounce it back, blowing them up instead…but it doesn't cause them too much harm.
  • Zoro also has no problem trash-talking his opponents. Even when he's got a sword in his mouth.
  • A lighter example: Most of the schemes that Sanji plots during the Alabasta Arc revolve around pissing Crocodile off enough. It's both fabulous AND hilarious!
  • Admiral Akainu stops Ace from escaping by insulting Ace's adoptive father, Whitebeard, by calling him a loser of a dead era who could never match Roger, a man that Ace hated. This works horrifyingly well.
  • Trafalgar Law is rather fond of this trope, and uses it as a strong part of his fighting against Doflamingo and Trebol. And it is very effective.
• Princess Kraehe (and later Mytho) in Princess Tutu use this against Fakir throughout much of the series to damage his confidence bit by bit.
• In addition to the taunting-like moves in the video games (see that section), there are characters that are known to taunt others in Pokémon: The Series. The most frequent taunter is Ash's Treecko/Grovyle/Sceptile in the Advanced Generation era. In his earliest appearance, AG007, he smacked his rear at Team Rocket's Cacnea, angering it into shooting his Pin Missile at the Team Rocket balloon and sending them blasting off. He also did "Nanny Nanny Boo-Boo" in his Pokémon Speak at Meowth in the Pikachu short Gotta Dance!
• Ranma ½:
  • Used by Ranma in conjunction with the Hiryu Shoten Ha technique, since the technique doesn't work against a calm opponent. When faced with an opponent who deliberately remains calm in order to foil the technique Ranma resorted to alternate methods, such as showing photos of himself dressed in lingerie to a lecherous foe, or manipulating the existing heat and cold in the vicinity (with or without magical tools.)
  • Pantyhose Taro is, however, the undisputed master at this. He will taunt his opponent throughout the entire match, flaunting his superiority over them (or their anxiety over him turning into his monstrous form) until they're raving mad at him and make a fatal mistake. Then he moves in for the kill. In the manga, while Pantyhose Taro is good, Ranma is better. Because Ranma is such a Manipulative Bastard, this is one of his techniques in fighting. Makes sense, since he insults people on a regular basis.
  • When Ranma found himself unable to counter Ryouga's brand new Lion's Roar Bullet (Shishihokodan), Genma took him aside to teach him the fearsome, terrible Cry of the Mad Dog. Step one: back away and out of range. Step two: cup your hands around your mouth. Step three: At the top of your voice, shout, "Idiot! Fool! Moron!"
  • Of course, as the Shishihokodan is powered by DEPRESSION and negative feelings, taunting Ryoga is not really recommended...
• Rurouni Kenshin: Yatsume Mumyoi hates being called a freak or having his clan insulted. Saito Hajime deliberately goads him this way, making him so angry he can barely think straight and allowing Saito to defeat him easily.
• In the final battle of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online, when LLENN and Pitouhui are one on one, LLENN gets Pito to open herself up to attack by mocking Sword Art Online. Pito, who's carrying a lot of baggage over SAO, charges recklessly and gets knifed multiple times by LLENN for her mistake.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, episode 2, after Kamina misses the two enemy Gunmen with the "Perfect Combustion Of Burning Souls Cannonball Attack", the enemies taunt him mercilessly. It doesn't serve them any good though, since Lagann just turns around inside a mountain-side.
• Tenjho Tenge: For some reason, Inue thought it was a really good idea to pour a cup of tea on Mitsuomi's head while repeatedly dissing and berating him. End result? She had her face smashed in, lost most of her teeth, and got tossed out of a window.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Seto Kaiba loves trash-talking his opponents to get under their skin.
  • In his duel against PaniK, Yami Yugi taunts him by declaring a countdown to victory and even telegraphs his cards. PaniK falls for his ruse and walks right into the traps he lays down.
  • Subverted in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX in that Judai's opponents generally go out of their way to insult and harass him after one-upping him. However, he doesn't take dueling quite as seriously as his opponents and is basically having a great time, which in turn unnerves them back. Much more prevalent in the dub.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Yusei is dueling Placido and about to perform an Accel Synchro Summon. Placido taunts him about how Yusei's father's research contributed to the Zero Reverse incident that caused a lot of destruction and claimed a lot of lives. Yusei tries to block it out, but becomes really shaken up, and since an Accel Synchro Summon requires a Clear Mind to perform, it fails.
• YuYu Hakusho: Kaito uses his powers to forbid violence, resulting in everyone being surrounded by invisible forcefields. Yanagisawa goads Kuwabara by calling him weak, causing him to lose his temper and throw a punch, only to hurt his hand on the forcefield.

Comic Books

• Batgirl:
  • In her first confrontation with The Joker, Barbara Gordon stops him from finishing off a wounded Batman by laughing at him, thus stalling him until the police arrive.
  • Later, Cassandra Cain pulls a similar trick by walking away from the Joker in the middle of a fight and saying, "Bored. You're boring." (It helped that she knew of Barbara's earlier gambit.)
• Subverted in Captain Britain and MI13. John the Skrull is a cheeky, chirpy character who keeps up a constant stream of Witty Banter and taunts even when the situation seems hopeless. He'd be a Deadpan Snarker if he was, y'know, deadpan. The Skrull invaders eventually get fed up and decide to just shoot him.
• When Boo is taken hostage in Copperhead, he taunts Brex into physically attacking him to get an opening to make an escape attempt.
• Deadpool does the same thing, only his jokes tend to be cruder and is more a result of his insanity than a tactical move.
  Domino: I always forget (or just block out to spare myself the agony) what Wilson's most lethal weapon is... his mouth! He'll talk nonsense until you surrender or commit suicide.
• Fantastic Four: Reed Richards snaps his wife Sue out of the Hatemonger's Emotion Bomb mind control by hurling condescending and misogynistic taunts in order to enrage her as much as possible (the mind control could only be broken by powerful emotions that stemmed from a different source.) Of course, some fans who never actually read the story and only saw that semi-infamous panel of him bitchslapping her while yelling "Shut up!" got the wrong idea...
• Nightwing does this so much that it's more or less part of his fighting style.
• Savage Dragon also regularly taunts his opponents. The most classic example would be his fights with Powerhouse - a deadly supervillain who has a face that looks like a chicken. There about five jokes per panel.
• In Secret Wars (1984), after Molecule Man drops a mountain on the heroes, Reed Richards taunts and insults the Hulk, who is pushing himself to the limit holding up the mountain, so that anger will give him the extra strength to hang on.
• Spider-Man:
  • Spider-Man is the well-known wisecracking grandmaster of taunts and the embodiment of this trope itself, with various other Spider-Heroes being the same to varying degrees. It serves the dual purpose of keeping his spirits up and annoying the crap out of his enemies.
    Some villain: Blast it! You talk so much, you've got me confused!
    Spider-Man: How about that? I've got a super-power I didn't even know about: My Spider-Speech!
  • Naturally, when Spidey and Deadpool fought, taunts played an even bigger part than physical attacks. Spider-Man effectively won the fight by rendering Deadpool speechless with the taunt "Kids don't wear Deadpool Underoos!"
  • Spider-Man 2099: Paid tribute to early in. Spider-Man is being chased by a very persistent (and very talkative) cyborg bounty hunter, and he wonders to himself "Lord! I wonder if I get on people's nerves this much when I mouth off as Miguel?" A deliberate inversion, as writer Peter David deliberately created Spider-Man 2099 as an opposite of Peter Parker — Parker is shy in person and talkative in costume, which the 2099 version inverts.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man has Spidey confront Wilson Fisk, who demands to know who he's working for (assuming him to be in the employ of some criminal underworld rival). Instead, Spidey says he's had a lot of things he's wanted to say... and it's nothing but a series of fat jokes at Kingpin's expense. This torques off Kingpin to no end and causes him to lash out physically, but Spidey being who he is, he just dodges around the room while reading off his notecards. This is a valid tactic as Ultimate Kingpin is a mountainous slab of a man, but is actually pure muscle instead of fat, to the point that even Ultimate Spidey doesn't get much mileage out of hitting him.
• Superman:
  • In the beginning of Red Daughter of Krypton, Lobo pushes Supergirl's buttons over and again in order to make her so irrationally angry that she can't fight effectively. He succeeds in driving her utterly mad... and then he finds out it was a spectacularly bad idea.
  • Superman Reborn: When Mr. Oz realizes someone's missing, Doomsday, Prophecy and Tim Drake are all in their cells laughing at him.
    Tim Drake: Someone got out! You hear me?! Someone got out!
  • In The Phantom Zone, Supergirl enjoys taunting and mocking Faora before engaging with her and defeating her decisively.
    Faora Hu-Ul: This planet... shall fall... before my might...!
    Supergirl: You think so, Faora— with those looks and no personality?
    Faora Hu-Ul: Supergirl!! Then this attack upon my beauty was your doing! I shall scratch your eyes out for this, you—
    Supergirl: Save the threats for another night, Sweetcheeks.
• X-Men: In the Proteus saga, Cyclops notes Wolverine is suffering psychologically from the villain's reality-warping attacks. Fearing Wolverine might become permanently gun-shy, Cyclops taunts him into attacking him. After a brief fight (where Cyclops manages to skillfully avoid Wolverine's attacks) that is interrupted by Phoenix, Cyclops reveals his reasons for provocation, which have successfully broken Wolverine out of his funk.

Fan Works

• In Asuka Quest, Asuka manages to get the drop on Lorenz Kihl as Demi-Adam with a long, colorful, and creative rant about how he is a horrible being who should never have been born. Notably, this occurred after her opponent insulted her vocabulary.
• In The Beacon Civil War, Jaune does this to Weiss with terrible love poetry. It Makes Sense in Context; Jaune is known for being an Abhorrent Admirer to Weiss, and he knows she hates his displays of affection.
• Cripps the Pink from A Brief History of Equestria took the Unicorn title of "Lady" to mock the Unicorns with the fact that she was an Earth pony with Unicorn heritage.
• A Force of Four: While fighting Wonder Woman, villainess Badra gloats that she'll go after her mother and daughter next. One second after charging into a reckless rage, Wonder Woman realizes she fell for it.
  Wonder Woman wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Expect no help from your patron. I've dealt with all his lackeys before, and beaten them. As I beat you."
  "Then deal with me a second time," said Badra. "If I get done with you soon enough, perhaps he'll let me help the boys deal with your daughter. And your mother."
  A second after she had done it, Diana realized she'd been goaded too well. She should have harnessed her fury, and tried a move with more finesse.
  Instead, she just charged, with a war-cry on her lips and a face twisted in hate. Badra managed a sidestep, no easy feat considering Diana's velocity, and swung a knee into her abdomen.
• In Fragmentation, ComStar suffers from this as a feint to distract them away from Executive Outcomes' activities in the Free Worlds League. A group of heavily armed pirates (in actuality an EO Taskforce disguising themselves) captures several ComStar HPG centers, something none of the Successor States would even dare risk, and their leader, a man clad in black with a bandana covering his face demands the 'return of Princess Buttercup'.
• In The Galactic Knightmare, Magalor invokes this on Marx by asking the armless beast for a high five. This causes Marx to charge at him, letting him dodge and sending Marx crashing into Yamikage.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, Supergirl's evil duplicate sees through Kara's attempts to lure her into a literal death dimension, so Supergirl baits her further by calling her a pathetic weak copy and revealing the Legion of Super-Heroes killed her lover Mordru.
  Kara stopped at the warp-gate and looked behind her. Satan Girl had stopped as well, less than a mile behind her. To her credit, she wasn't stupid. She knew that Supergirl was leading her on. And, having Kara's memories, she knew where she was headed.
  <That is the anti-matter universe,> sent Satan Girl.
  <Oh, very good,> mocked Kara, smiling like a teacher tutoring her most backward pupil. <Now, if you'll just join me here, I can finish you right off.>
  The villainess didn't budge. <It'll blow us both to bits if we touch any substance there without force-shields or matter-conversion,> she sent. <I can just wait you out. You'll come back, or you'll be atomized. Either way, I win.>
  <Oh, will you?>, asked Kara. <I thought for certain that you wanted to tear me apart with your own hands. Except it hasn't been that easy, has it? Maybe you're just not up to it, after all... since you're just a pretty pathetic copy of me.>
  Satan Girl's expression of hatred, which was about the only one she owned, intensified. <YOU...> she began, and that was all she could get out.
  <Just one more thing, darling,> sent Kara. <I didn't want to have to tell you this, but we killed Mordru. He's dead. Hope you didn't get attached to him too much.>
  At that, Supergirl knew she had succeeded.
• Here Comes The New Boss: One of the uses for Bearskin's rage aura is preventing enemies from running, if you can handle them furiously attacking you instead. (Which the Butcher usually can.) Taylor uses it to stop Hookwolf from escaping and revealing her to Kaiser.
• Kara of Rokyn: A common tactic used by Kara during her wrestling stint, albeit sometimes it backfires.
  When she faced Kara, Jasmine was all business. "I'm gonna knock you outta your panties, babe," she snarled as they circled.
  "Glad somebody reminded you to wear yours," retorted Kara. That got to Jas. They closed and started pulling hair.
• In the case of the four in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, "I shall make myself an easy target so you will attack me, I will defeat you, and I will take all your stuff."
• This is how Korosensei saves Supergirl from her Face–Heel Turn caused by her red kryptonite infection in this story based from season 1, episode 16 of the latter series.
  Supergirl: WILL... YOU... SHUT... UP... ALREADY?!
  Korosensei: Why? Am I bothering you by talking to you? Am I distracting you somehow? Make you lose focus? Messing up your concentration? Getting on your nerves, perhaps? I think you might just feel upstaged that I might beat you.
• The Mountain and the Wolf: The Wolf's main tactic is to insult his enemies and destroy them in melee combat when they charge in blind rage, ranging from the Mountain to Petyr Baelish and even the Night King. Unfortunately, he has the same effect on his allies (without appearing to consciously try to do so), who restrain themselves from punching him with some difficulty, and even his most sincere compliments end up causing Your Approval Fills Me with Shame.
• Inverted in New Look Series: Joe's New Look an unwillingly crossdressed Joe accidentally flashes his panties at Big John, who isn't amused and takes it as a provocation. It's all a mistake; surely the last thing Joe intended was to appear in the field of battle wearing his girlfriend's clothes.
• In The Night Unfurls, this is done to Morgan by Kyril in Chapter 8, remastered version, who grabs Grace in the forearm and pulls her in close to him. As Morgan intends to claim ownership of Grace beforehand, this predictably attracts his attention because the two seem close. Kyril would then have an excuse to get rid of Morgan, which is what happens in Bar Brawl Cock Fights anyways.
• In Nightmares Are Tragic, Princess Luna taunts the Nightshadow with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, claiming to pity it. This enrages the demon to the point that it devotes all of its attention to attempting a Mind Rape of Luna – and loses sight of the fact that the Element Bearers are summoning the Rainbow of Harmony against it, which is exactly what Luna intended.
• In Warhammer 40,000/A Song of Ice and Fire crossover The Phoenician of Blood and Fire, one of Balerion's favorite pastimes is sending insulting letters to Robert Baratheon. As a result, Robert hates him as much as he hates the Targaryens, if not more.
• Son of the Sannin: Neji tries to do this to Sasuke when they face each other in the Chunin Exam preliminaries by bringing up the Uchiha Insurrection. This proves to be a very bad idea, as an enraged Sasuke beats him so badly that he nearly has to be hospitalized. The only good thing to come out of it was that it marked the start of his relationship with Karin.
• Sword Art Online Abridged: Strategically used by Kirito, right as Kayaba is about to leave, to get him to agree to a duel to the death for the fate of the players instead of simply stranding them again; by then, Kayaba's too pissed off about the repeated taunting to figure he's being had and decides skewering Kirito would be "therapeutic" enough to be worth it.
• The Ultimate Evil: During their first duel, Valmont mocks Jackie about Captain Black whom he injured with the Dragon Talisman. Jackie's resulting anger makes him attack Valmont recklessly, and the crime lord gains the upper hand. A while later, Jackie returns the favor when he reaches Valmont who's escaping on a barge with the gold stolen from Fort Knox. Jackie mocks Valmont while tossing the gold overboard, making Valmont blast a hole onto the barge and sink it.
• In crossover fanfiction The Vampire of Steel, Supergirl baits Zol-Am into a personal duel by stating he's frightened to fight her.
• Vow of the King: When Ganju challenges Ichigo to a fight, Ichigo lies that he banged Ganju's sister Kukaku, in order to make him angry and sloppy.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  • Joey steals Bandit Keith's "In America!" catchphrase. Keith goes berserk.
  • Also from The Abridged Series, Yami taunting Kaiba by making fun of his voice and motives.
    Yami: Hey everyone, look at me! I'm Seto Kaiba! I have a dragon fetish and I sound like Brock from Pokemon! Screw the rules, I'm in love with Nurse Joy!
    Kaiba: That's it, Mutou, you're f**king dead.

Films — Animation

• In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Batman (Terry McGinnis) delivers an epic Boring Insult to the Joker. He successfully drives the clown over the edge by laughing at him and calling his attempts to make the original Batman laugh silly. After all, the only thing worse for a comedian than a Tough Room is The Heckler. For all his snark about others' failings, being trash-talked at is the one thing the Joker won't tolerate. It is a brilliant Ironic Echo to Joker's own taunting of the original Batman after finding out his identity, mocking him for being "a little boy in a play suit crying for mommy and daddy," with the insult being thrown right back at his face. The Smug Snake Monster Clown façade crumbles and only the monster remains from that point on.
• In Igor, Dr. Schadenfreude does this to Eva to goad her into hitting him, which will activate her dormant evil bone and turn her into an unstoppable monster.
• In Megamind, the titular character deliberately uses Titan's short temper to get punched across a square towards the hidden weapon that can turn him back to normal.
• Over the Hedge: RJ taunts Vincent by eating a Spuddie at the climax to trick him into lunging over the hedge and into the range of the Depelter Turbo.
• In Turning Red, in the climax, Mei tries to distract her transformed and out-of-control mother Ming by dirty dancing in front of her while the rest of their family tries to prepare and perform the ritual that will banish the panda spirit and return Ming to normal. It works, perhaps a little too well.

Films — Live-Action

• The titular game in BASEketball basically involves trying to psych someone out to prevent them from making a basketball shot.
• In Blazing Saddles, this is how Bart and the Waco Kid lure two KKK members into a trap: "Hey, Where da White Women At?"
• Spoofed in Duck Soup. Groucho insults the Ambassador Trentino, in order to provoke Trentino into hitting him, so that he can have the Trentino deported; the insults backfire (no, not that way), and Groucho ends up slapping the ambassador. On multiple occasions. Leading to a declaration of war.
• During the climax of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Tommy lures Jason into his trap by taunting him, saving his Love Interest in the process.
• Happy Gilmore: Shooter hires a heckler who taunts Gilmore for many holes. After Gilmore is thoroughly riled up, he ends up venting on Bob Barker, who cleans his clock effortlessly.
• Hustle (2022): The antagonist basketball player Kermit Wilts repeatedly taunts Bo Cruz to infuriate him and throw him off his game. A big part of Bo's training is about learning to shrug off the insults.
• Scream VI: When faced with the killers and learning how their motives are tied to avenging Richie Kirsch, the killer from Scream (2022), Sam begins to taunt the ringleader by insulting Richie, calling him pathetic and noting how his girlfriend did most of the killing. This provokes one of the Ghostfaces into attacking in a rage, which breaks the standoff they were in and gives Sam's group a chance to fight back.
• Marlowe: The mob sends their enforcer, Winslow Wong, against the private eye Phillip Marlowe. Knowing he doesn't stand a chance against Wong in a straight fight, Marlowe runs away while insulting Wong over and over, making Wong angrier and angrier. Eventually, the chase leads to a skyscraper's balcony. Marlowe calls Wong gay, which enrages him so much that he attempts a flying kick. Marlowe dodges it, causing Wong to go over the edge and fall to his death.
• In the movie version of M*A*S*H, after Frank and Hot Lips have sex, Hawkeye relentlessly asked Frank questions about the experience to taunt him. It works, as Frank attacks Hawkeye and is later taken away in a straitjacket.
• Towards the end of Men in Black, Jay figures out the best way to get "Edgar"'s attention is by stomping on cockroaches.
  Jay: [feigning ignorance] Oh, I'm sorry, was that your auntie? Then that must be your uncle over there! (stomps on another roach) Well, well. Big, bad Bug got a bit of a soft spot, huh? What I can't understand is, why you gotta come down here bringing all this ruckus! Snatching up galaxies and everything. My attitude is: don't (stomp) start nothing, won't (stomp) be nothing!
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail :
  • The trope namer is French soldier, although he doesn't seem to have much motive other than to amuse himself at the expense of the silly kuhniggits.
    French Soldier: Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
  • It is referenced while fighting the killer rabbit, when Sir Galahad suggests taunting it, saying it may become so cross it will make a mistake.
• John Banning in The Mummy (1959) tricks Mehemet Bay to sic the mummy Kharis on him (and consequently, into his trap) by visiting him under a friendly neighbour guise (revealing that he survived the original attempt at his life), acting snooty and being dismissive about the Karnak religion, which Bay is a follower of.
• In No Name on the Bullet, no one has ever convicted John Gant of murder, because he always goads his targets into drawing first.
• The film version of Red Dragon.
• Subverted in Red Eye, as calling Jackson Rippner by "Jack" doesn't particularly bother him. He just finds it mildly annoying.
• In Serenity, Mal attempts to goad The Operative, to which he replies "You can't make me angry." Later on in the film, during the chase sequence, The Operative shoots Mal In the Back, to which Mal replies "You shot me in the back! I haven't made you angry, have I?"
• The Star Trek films:
  • In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk ensures that Khan will follow him into the Mutara Nebula (which will negate many of Khan's current tactical advantages) by making it a dare and stomping on Khan's sense of superiority ("I'm laughing at the superior intellect.")
  • Also used in Star Trek: First Contact. After the Borg have taken over most of the Enterprise, Picard stubbornly refuses to activate the self-destruct sequence and evacuate the ship. In one of Patrick Stewart's finer moments in acting, Lily proceeds to taunt Picard until Picard loses it and delivers a furious tirade against the Borg, which in turn makes him realize his hatred of the Borg is affecting his judgment.
  • Used by a much younger alternate-universe Kirk in Star Trek (2009) as a way of getting Spock to prove himself unfit to command the Enterprise. It was slightly more successful than intended - Spock came very, very close to throttling Kirk.
• Dark side characters in the Star Wars universe are often seen taunting their opponents. In the Expanded Universe, this becomes an explicit technique of lightsaber fighting called "Dun Möch." Palpatine apparently failed his lessons.
  • Obi-Wan does it to Ventress constantly in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars pilot movie.
  • Sounds like any Jedi could've just countered with "How appropriate, You Fight Like a Cow."
• Will Smith as Deadshot appears to be doing this to El Diablo in the second trailer to Suicide Squad (2016). After seeing just what El Diablo can do, he immediately apologizes for fear of being on the wrong end of those powers, which is Played for Laughs.
  Deadshot: I was just tryin' to get you there. No hard feelings, right? We good?
• Thor:
  • After Thor provokes war with the Frost Giants, Loki negotiates a way out. As they leave, a very large Frost Giant says to Thor, "Run back home, little princess". It's immediately lampshaded by Loki, who knows exactly what's coming: "Damn".
  • Later in the same movie, the new, more humble Thor hesitates to attack Loki...until Loki threatens Jane Foster.
• Total Recall (2012): Lori taunts Melina about how she had slept with Melina's boyfriend Hauser. As a result, Melina breaks cover to shoot at her, and almost gets herself killed.
• The electric ghost Sammi Curr in Trick or Treat is defeated when Eddie taunts him to materialize the police car he is driving, which soon falls into the biggest collection of his weakness: the sea.
• In True Romance Dennis Hopper taunts Christopher Walken with some demographic facts about Sicilians which this particular Sicilian doesn't really care for. The result is that Walken and his mooks stop torturing him and go straight to killing him, which plays out as a victory.
• In Mystery Men, Mr. Furious falls into an existential funk just before the climactic battle. Since his powers are (supposedly) fueled by his rage, his teammates start belittling him in an attempt to get him into a fighting spirit. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
• No Name on the Bullet: John Gant has never been convicted of murder because he always goads his victims into drawing first.
• SHAZAM! (2019): Having learned that Sivana is vulnerable when separated from all seven Deadly Sins, Shazam taunts Envy (the only one currently bound to Sivana) out to fight and maneuvers it into taking a blast of transformation lightning. He then easily defeats his now-depowered foe.
• This Is the End: Franco spews some taunts at McBride and his followers as he's being ascended to heaven. Naturally, this gets both him disposed from the Rapture and eaten alive.
  Franco: Go to hell, McBride! Fuck you! Ha, ha! Suck my dick!

Literature

• All Hands! has a version, with the commander of the Starcougar cursing out a pirate captain, in the hopes that the pirate would focus on him, not the merchant he was protecting. And to distract and anger him as well, though that goes without saying.
• In the Final Confrontation of Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, Artemis and Holly have to stop Opal Koboi from diverting a subterranean probe surrounded by tons of molten metal onto Haven, which will simultaneously kill almost half of The People and reveal the remaining ones to humanity. Artemis' brilliant plan involves a mostly-reformed thief with a bottomless stomach and Opal's weakness for truffles. Of course, this is just a distraction.
• While this happens several times in the Belisarius Series, the most notable example has to be the taunting of Venandakatra the Vile by Shakuntala, his former prisoner and planned rape victim. She openly marches into a city that Venandakatra is supposedly besieging, marries her True Love Rao in a public and very popular ceremony, and then performs an extremely sensuous dance on a platform erected on the city walls specifically positioned to be visible from Venandakatra's headquarters.
• Mundo Cani uses this tactic to battle Wyrm in The Book of the Dun Cow, insulting him and goading him into looking his seemingly outmatched opponent in the eye. This allows Mundo Cani to blind him, trapping them both underground.
• Codex Alera: In Captain's Fury, Tavi, dueling a considerably more skilled opponent, is able to defeat her by working out her mental weakpoint and talking her into a berserk rage. It turns out this runs in the family, as his aunt Isana pulls off a similar feat in Princeps' Fury.
• Council Wars has Dionys McCanoc's pitiful attempts at taunting Edmund Talbot, and almost two pages of Edmund Talbot showing him how it's done, spurring McCanoc into a rage that allows Talbot to demolish his foe.
• In The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, Roland Deschain gives a large "The Reason You Suck" Speech and all manners of taunts to Blaine The Mono, for acting like a spoiled child. Note that he and his companions are currently riding said mono, who threatens to derail them in response. Roland still doesn't care.
• A Dearth of Choice: Tam uses a Taunt skill to draw Biyaban's attention to himself instead of his more vulnerable teammates. It doesn't help; Biyaban kills both him and them, sparing only the one who didn't want the fight.
  Biyaban: My instincts already scream to me, crying out for me to slaughter you where you stand, human. You think I need more reason to kill you? So be it.
• Discworld:
  • Subverted by Jonathan Teatime. It's pronounced "teh-ah-tim-eh", and he's a bit sick of people getting it wrong, but it won't drive him mad.^*He's already insane, but it won't make him lose his cool, either.
    Teatime: Please don't try to distract me.
  • In Going Postal where Moist von Lipwig sets out to make Reacher Gilt as angry as he possibly can because angry people make mistakes. Although he doesn't directly insult him so much as pull a Bavarian Fire Drill.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe: The Doctor does this a lot, but in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Camera Obscura, he goes all out in one scene, mostly just to get back at Sabbath for making his life very, very difficult. He does all kinds of intentionally romantic things (well, Sabbath did steal his heart), hides a whoopee cushion in his sofa, flops on his desk like a cat while Sabbath is looking at something, folds his papers up into penguins, sings to him, etc. Do not piss off the Doctor, or he'll teach you how it's done.
• Dora Wilk Series:
  • The eponymous witch's main tactic against people who'd rather see her dead. She can't attack them (officially they're on the same side), but she can subtly taunt them until they make an ass of themselves. Additionally, in the Doraverse, the art of beating someone with words is valued higher than the art of beating someone with magic, so other characters use it sporadically.
  • In the fourth book, All Stays In The Family, this gets exaggerated. To taunt her opponent and make her Paranoia Gambit possible, Dora breaks into Albin's house and leaves him a Sickeningly Sweet illusion. Twice.
• In Dragon Bones, Oreg tells Ward that he tried to taunt one of his owners into killing him. Didn't work, the man was clever enough to have someone else whip Oreg, knowing that Oreg is immortal and can only be killed by the one who wears the ring he's bound to.
• S.M. Stirling's Draka novel Marching Through Georgia. (Not that Georgia, the one in SW Asia.) The Draka blocking force has been defeated. The Nazi units can bypass them and break through to take the pass and save the day for Germany. The leader of the Draka radios the German commander and taunts him into neglecting his duty and trying to wipe out the Draka.
  "Do you have any messages for your wives and daughters? We'll be seeing them before you do."
• This is basically the default state of being for Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files. Must come from being a self-proclaimed Spider-Man fanboy. He basically mouths off to every super powerful godlike being he interacts with.
  • Harry is goaded into depowering one of the Swords of the Cross. It wasn't in the end. Nicodemus later tries the same thing on him, so he plays along for a while. In the same book, Harry is goaded into revealing himself, forcing the Archive to reveal herself, which was the ploy all along.
  • Harry pulls this on Fix in a ruthless fashion. After the fact, Fix is impressed and bemused.
  • When Harry is meeting Donar Vadderung aka Father Odin, Harry looks at his two receptionists each with guns trained on him, and despite being told to not say anything, taunts the two women. He justifies it because he has mouthed off to so many powerhouses, it would be against his nature to not do it now.
  • In Blood Rites, he inverts this trope when he addresses Ebenezar McCoy as "sir" in the presence of Lieutenant Murphy. Murphy is utterly floored and treats Ebenezar very respectfully after that.
• Ender's Game:
  • Used by Ender when he goads a bully into fighting him one-on-one (rather than 12-on-1).
  • Inverted in a way right after that, when one of Ender's friends bursts into the scene and tries to reason with the bully that Ender really is humanity's last, best hope. Ender groans to himself, fully aware that such a comment will only enrage his enemy further (he hates Ender especially for the fact that Ender matters and he ultimately doesn't), but not in a way that will make him mess up, just completely homicidal.
• Fate/strange Fake: During their first fight, True Archer/Alcides mocks False Archer/Gilgamesh and calls him weak, but Gilgamesh keeps his cool and keeps fighting normally. Later, False Archer comments he was trying to goad Gilgamesh into losing his temper and making a mistake. He considers Gilgamesh a Worthy Opponent because he didn't fall for it.
• In Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein, Star goads a fairly stupid but very strong giant (he's immune to swords and guns don't work there) in order to get him wound up so he can't think straight and "warm him up" for Oscar to kill. He thanks her for getting the unkillable guy angry at him.
• The Golden Hamster Saga: In Freddy in Peril, the Mad Scientist Professor Fleischkopf and his henchman Brewster try to use a vicious, cat-hating dog named Rex to track down the protagonists. Sir William the cat leads Rex away from Freddy, Enrico, and Caruso by yelling "Rexy is a cat lover!" Enraged, Rex yanks his leash out of Brewster's hand and runs after Sir William, who leads him on a lengthy chase before giving him the slip and reuniting with the others.
• Go to Sleep (A Jeff the Killer Rewrite): The centre man of the opposing team in Jeff's ice hockey game taunts the other team to throw off their concentration. He chirps them so often as if his coach told him to. One last insult at Jeff results in him retaliating and fighting him, getting Jeff suspended from the game.
• Draco Malfoy goads the trio throughout the Harry Potter series, although his goals are usually nothing loftier than getting them in detention.
• In the Honor Harrington series, this has almost become standard operating procedure for characters in the Talbott Quadrant when dealing with antagonists from the Solarian League. Vice Admiral Michelle Henke specifically outlines it as part of her strategy for dealing with Solarian admiral Sandra Crandall, even though it conflicts with another goal to try and stall for time. Other tactics used by her subordinates include opening communications in uniform instead of protective skinsuit (sending the message that the Sollies are no threat to them whatsoever) or using their faster-than-light communication to invoke Oh, Crap! moments.
• John Rain: When Dox is held prisoner in The Killer Ascendant, he keeps his morale up by taunting the one member of the professional team of mercenaries holding him who is easier to provoke, but Dox also does it in the hope of creating an opportunity to escape, knowing that the man would have to get him alone to get payback. It very nearly backfires when his escape attempt fails and the man decides to castrate Dox on the spot, only for John Rain to pull a Big Damn Heroes.
• Journey to Chaos: Eric prevents Dengel from noticing the trap he is setting by exploiting the ancient mage's ego. For instance, "the great sage is dead, because he wet his bed!"
• After seeing his friend most likely fall to his death, Fisk has to listen to the villain of book three in the Knight and Rogue Series make fun of his morals for agreeing to work with them (not knowing Fisk only agreed for a chance at getting revenge).
• In The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn does this to Sauron by using the Palantír of Orthanc to show him Andúril (Narsil reforged), hoping to provoke Sauron into mobilizing his forces before they were fully ready. It worked.
• The Mallorean:
  • A nasty variant of this was used, where a pair of Tolnedrans are arguing in the street. One remains completely calm, while the other becomes more and more enraged over the former's haranguing. However, instead of the former goading the latter into a fight, the latter dies of a stress-triggered poison both Tolnedrans had consumed, the former knowing that he could keep his emotions under control.
  • Mandorallen compares another knight's beard to the fur on a mutt's ass and asks if the knight's father was a goat. The rival is so enraged he is unable to reply, so Mandorallen throws his gauntlet in the knight's face.
• James Bond pulls this on Hugo Drax in Moonraker while tied up, causing Drax to forget and leave a torture instrument in the room, which Bond then uses to free himself and the Girl of the Week.
• The third book of Magic 2.0, An Unwelcome Quest, has Martin do this to Todd, in an effort to distract and stall him as long as possible while Brit attempts to disable Todd's defenses.
• Musashi does this a lot before duels. The way he sees it, the fight itself begins before the swords are drawn. He was famous for it in Real Life.
• Part of the initial exam for joining the CDF in John Scalzi's Old Man's War is a specifically calculated taunting, in order to record some brain information about extreme emotion.
• In C. S. Lewis's Prince Caspian, Glozelle and Sopesian goaded Miraz into accepting the challenge of single combat (expecting that he would lose and if not, they would kill him themselves) by subtly insulting his courage and his fighting ability. In The Movie, Edmund does this while presenting the challenge ("So what you're saying is, you're bravely declining a challenge from a boy half your age."): Sopesian might be doing this as well, but since the Narnia films have likely hit Alternate Continuity status relative to the books, there's a chance he's sincere. (Glozelle effectively says "Go for it!" in the film.)
• Used a lot in Romance of the Three Kingdoms to varying amounts of success. One of the more famous examples has Zhuge Liang, wanting to bring his rival, Sima Yi, out of his defensive position, sends him a dress and women's make up with a note saying "If you are unable to fulfill your duties as a man, dress in this outfit and act like a woman instead." This example is notable in that it is the rare instance where Zhuge Liang failed. Sima Yi was actually deeply insulted, but had enough self-control to pretend it didn't matter. Instead he just laughed and put on the outfit anyway, along with sending Zhuge Liang a thank-you note to rub it in.
• In The Silmarillion Fingolfin rides to the gates of Angband to defy Morgoth himself, and challenges him to single combat. Morgoth would have just had his Balrogs, wolves, and Orcs Zerg Rush him, but Fingolfin called him craven. Morgoth realized he would have to face him or lose standing in his subordinate's eyes, so he accepted the challenge. Not that it made much difference, as Morgoth wins anyway.
• In Stephen King's Skeleton Crew, in the story "The Wedding Gig", the gangster "The Greek" sends a frail little man to insult Mike Scollay and Scollay's sister Maureen at her wedding. Even though he's likely aware he's being baited into a trap, Scollay responds with rage and storms outside, where he's gunned down.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • X-Wing Series: Wes Janson, incorrigible jokester that he is, does this on occasion. Most notably is in Starfighters of Adumar, where he successfully goads his opponent in a sword duel into making an attack Janson can dodge - which opens him up for Janson to knock away the sword and beat the living daylights out of him bare-handed.
  • The Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droids in New Jedi Order, who are programmed to yell "We are the machines! We are greater than the Yuuzhan Vong!" in their language. This is such heresy to the Vong that they have a tendency to charge at the droids in a blind rage, which, of course, goes poorly for them.
  • Grand Admiral Pellaeon uses this against the Vong, repeatedly taunting their fleet commander, Vorrik.
    Pellaeon: Maybe I'm missing something, Vorrik, but I'm not seeing any evidence of this great plan of yours. We're destroying your yammosks; we've killed your spies; we're taking back those you thought were captives. You don't have the muscle to take this planet, let alone the others. Your threats are as empty as your boasts are shallow.
    Vorrik: You will eat those words when-
    Pellaeon: Empty.
    Vorrik: -we turn your abominations into slag and-
    Pellaeon: Empty.
    Vorrik: -grind every trace of you into the dust from which you were born!
    Pellaeon: Empty, Vorrik! [...] You may win the occasional battle against us, Vorrik, but the Empire will always strike back. That I promise you. (speaking over Vorrik's ranting) You tell Shimrra from me that if he wants to get the job done, then he's going to have to send a bigger fleet - and a more competent commander to oversee it. (the Yuuzhan Vong fleet shortly withdraws)
  • Taunting enemies during lightsaber combat is a technique of its own, called Dun Moch. It is often used by darksiders trying to rouse anger in an opposing Jedi.
  • The Jedi use an inverted version, appealing to any remaining shreds of goodness in their foes in an attempt to redeem them and avoid fighting. It sometimes works.
• The Stormlight Archive: Parshendi get really angry if someone touches or moves their dead. In The Way of Kings (2010), Kaladin exploits this when he dresses up in armor covered in Parshendi hide and bone. This cause the entire Parshendi army to focus fire on him, ignoring the unarmored bridgemen and allowing them to place their bridges in relative safety. On multiple occasions after this, the Parshendi ignore Alethi soldiers who are right among them cutting them down to try and put an arrow in Kaladin.
• In The Tamuli, Ulath does this when faced with a small army of trolls to provoke them into attacking on the protagonists' terms.
• The Traveler's Gate: Alin faces two Endross Travelers who try to mock and insult him into dropping his shield and fighting them "fair." Alin is perfectly aware of what they're doing, and therefore embarrassed that it almost works anyway.
• Warrior Cats: In Leopardstar's Honor, Redtail does this, repeatedly inching his paw across the border until Leopardfur attacks.
• Corm tries this on Maris during the Tournament Arc in Windhaven. It doesn't work; he's too far behind.
• In The Witchlands, when Leopold finds Vaness aboard her ruined ship after her run-in with Merik, he spends his visit aboard taunting her, likely to preserve his image of an Upper-Class Twit.

Live-Action TV

• Angelus does this to the Beast in the Angel episode "Salvage". Indeed, whenever he's unleashed, his favourite games are always headgames.
• This is the main tactic used on the "Bad Girls Club". One girl will taunt another, usually putting her face within inches of the other's, goading the other into throwing the first punch. The rules of the show say whoever throws the first punch may be voted off.
• In Black Books, Bernard does this to a gang of violent skinheads for the very simple reason that he wants to be beaten up and thus have a legal excuse to delay completing his tax return. His taunts provoke only bewilderment until he picks on their football fandom.
  Bernard: Which one of you bitches wants to dance? Hey, you know when you're doing your usual threesome thing you do on a weekend, and the moonlight's bouncing off your heads and your arses and everything, does that not get a bit confusing? Right. This is you, okay? [He prances about] Tra-la-la! Millwall! That's the one! Do you know this chant? Er, 'Millwall, Millwall, you're all really dreadful, and your girlfriends are unfulfilled and alienated...'
• Booth attempts this in Bones to try and incriminate her father (using a false identity).
  Max Keenan: You're just trying to make me angry so that I'll hit you. Twenty-five years ago, that would've worked.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Buffy does this to the Mayor in the "Graduation Day". She goaded him in giant snake mode to a roomful of explosives, escaped and hit the detonator.
  • In the season two finale, Angelus does this to Buffy. It doesn't work like he hoped.
    Angelus: No weapons, no friends. No hope. Take all that away, and what's left?
    Buffy: -catches his sword with her bare hands when he lunges at her- Me.
  • Buffy does this when captured by Faith in "Enemies". Ostensibly this is so Faith will kill Buffy instead of torturing her to death. Turns out Buffy is a Play-Along Prisoner and wants to get Faith to reveal the Mayor's plans during her Evil Gloating.
• In an episode of Chuck, Chuck aggravates Casey to get him riled up enough to defeat his sensei.
• Serial killer Nate Haskell had a habit of doing this to Ray Langston on CSI. He knew Ray was fighting becoming He Who Fights Monsters and wanted to get him angry. After Haskell kidnaps Ray’s ex-wife, Ray finds where he’s holding her, and Haskell keeps taunting Ray even after Ray cuffs him. It leads to Ray giving in to his anger and shoving Haskell over a stairway railing to his death.
• Dexter taunts a killer by using his real name — it's unclear whether he is trying to affect his judgement or just piss him off. Either way, it doesn't work. "You think calling me that is an insult? I take it as a compliment. It reminds me how far I've come."
• Doctor Who: In "Remembrance of the Daleks", the Seventh Doctor goads Davros into using the Hand of Omega, thereby destroying Skaro (or maybe not). He was presumably going to use it anyway, but it gave the Doctor a chance to imply Davros was using the Daleks to compensate for being impotent.
  • In "The Vampires of Venice", Rory tries insulting Francesco to get him away from Amy but nothing works, that is until he insults Francesco's mother.
• The same thing popped up yet again in an episode of ER. Dr. Kovac wanted to keep an abusive husband away from his wife (the patient), but she refused to identify him as her attacker. In order to have him certified as a "danger to others", Kovac went into detail about his wife's injuries, explaining the kind of force necessary to cause them and what a big tough guy the man must be until the man snapped and punched him in the face. Kovac admitted the tactic probably wouldn't work for very long because he so obviously baited the man.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Oznak zo Pahl, the champion of Meereen, taunts Daenerys' army by haranguing them and pissing at them. To damage the morale of the defenders, she permits Daario to engage him.
  • Oberyn's "You killed my sister" rant during his duel is used this way, though it is also useful for creating a spectacle since Oberyn wants the world to know.
  • To get the Mercy Kill he desires, The Hound resorts to pressing his companion's Berserk Button to get a revenge-kill. Arya doesn't fall for it and leaves him to die.
• A frequent tactic of immortals in Highlander: The Series during sword fights. Usually it’s the evil ones and it usually just makes Duncan more determined to win.
• An episode of Law & Order used essentially the same tactic, provoking a suspect that had beaten the system (by having the single source of DNA thrown out of the case) into assaulting one of the victims' brother by biting him, in order to get a DNA sample from the blood when the suspect hurt his hand.
• A version seen in the Life episode "Everything... All the Time"— though it's likely popped up in lots of other Police Procedurals— is when the protagonist, in need of an excuse to hold someone for questioning, provokes them into attacking, then arrests them for assault.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • In the episode "This Side Of Paradise", Kirk deliberately insults Spock in order to anger him enough to throw off the influence of mind-controlling spores.
  • He also taunts Rojan, in the episode "By Any Other Name", saying that his woman (Kelindra) favours Kirk over him. This is done to heighten Rojan's reactions and force him to acknowledge that trying to travel to the Andromeda galaxy in an emotion-filled human body was a mistake.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "Family", Jean-Luc Picard is successfully taunted by his estranged elder brother, Robert. Robert has complex reasons for disliking Jean-Luc, including envy and a clash of values, but when his constant needling finally provokes a fistfight, he reveals that he partly did it for Jean-Luc's own good: He needed the catharsis since he was freshly dealing with the trauma of having been assimilated by the Borg.
  • In "Samaritan Snare", Picard recounts that the reason he has an artificial heart is because he was taunted into a bar fight just after he graduated the academy. Much later, "Tapestry" explored the incident further, with Q apparently giving him the chance to do it over in the midst of a near-death experience. The crucial difference is that while the original young Picard allowed the taunting of the Nausicaans to start a melee, the mature Picard chose to keep his friends and himself out of danger. Q then forwards him to the "present-day" following from that choice, where Picard has been unnotable and never been promoted past lieutenant. Picard takes the point.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • We have Colonel Jack "Of COURSE I dare mock you" O'Neill.
  • Eventually rubs off on Daniel Jackson. Vala can be good at this too, as can Mitchell. None of them can quite reach Jack's level, though.
• In the episode "Folsom Prison Blues" (S02, Ep19) of Supernatural, Agent Henriksen tries this when interrogating Dean.
• In Survivor: Gabon, one contestant attempted a two-part strategy of doing this and then getting the Hidden Immunity Idol off an ally to blindside everyone else. It worked right up until he learned it was a fake idol - after playing it.

Music

• The Texas A&M University fight song, "The Aggie War Hymn", deliberately calls out rival University of Texas. So this trope zig-zags during sporting events where it's played, considering at any moment, it could be a close game, or either school could be completely smoking the other.
• The Scottish folksong "Baron O' Brackley" features this. The baron is raided by a rival clan, but refuses to fight on the logical grounds that he's horribly outnumbered. His wife insults his manhood, and he goes out to face them. Just as planned.
• P.D.Q. Bach: "Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments" has a brass section, rather than properly echo a woodwind section, do everything it can to screw with their concert-mates, like playing completely different riffs, ignoring cues, and musically calling out "Nanny Nanny Boo-Boo". The woodwinds finally respond to the brass's dragging out their lines by pulling guns on them, which gets the brass to cooperate... until they get in one last insult by refusing to play their last note. The woodwinds good-naturedly finish it for them.

Myths & Religion

• Older Than Dirt example from The Bible; Elijah approaches the priests of Baal and challenges them to a contest. Each will build an altar to their respective god and ask him to call down fire to consume the offering; whoever gets an answer is worshiping the true god. Elijah lets the priests of Baal go first, and they spend a good chunk of the afternoon calling out to Baal to no effect. As evening draws near, Elijah starts to mock Baal's seeming inattentiveness; perhaps Baal is busy, or off on a journey, or taking a dump, and thus can't hear his priests. Once the priests gives up, Elijah takes his turn and gets God's answer after a simple prayer

Professional Wrestling

• After seeing Colt Cabana talk his way into a match with World Champion Jay Lethal at Supercard Of Honor X, Silas Young decided to try and get War Machine to put their Tag Team tiles on the line by questioning Raymond Rowe's manhood.
• Hijo del Dos Caras turned his match around with Cuervo in WWC by grabbing a Puerto Rican flag, rubbing his butt on it, and then threatening to break its pole over his knee. His antics later lead to a flag match against Ray Gonzales.
• One time in 2005, Chris Masters was guarding Edge and Lita. John "Bradshaw" Layfield appears in the parking lot and mocks Masters on the TitanTron, calling him names like "orangutan" and "monkey". Enraged, Masters runs out to the parking lot to confront him. JBL says he fell for it, then in the ring, Rey Mysterio Jr. sneaks in and attacks Edge and Lita.

Sports

• A common tactic in various sports when one player attempts to provoke another one into doing something stupid. There tends to be a fine line, because the taunting itself can get penalized if it's too blatant or caught. A famous example of the above tactic gone somewhat wrong was made during the final match of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Italian player Marco Materazzi taunted his French counterpart, Zinedine Zidane, by insulting Zidane's sister. While it did work (Zidane got a red card), the reason it worked was that Zidane gave Materazzi a headbutt to the chest.
• Also on sports, whenever the audience has a reason to insult the opposing team they will chant to unsettle them. Even more to gloat once things are headed towards a victory (the Standard Snippet is "Na na, na na na naaa, hey hey hey, GOODBYE."). In hockey, the home crowd also likes to chant the visiting goaltender's name once he concedes a goal (or especially if he gives in many).

Tabletop Games

• Standard tactics in Before I Kill You, Mister Spy... (formerly James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game, formerly Before I Kill You, Mister Bond...) — the spy cards are worth more points if you can pull off a successful taunt before the kill.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Kender in Dragonlance are infamous — among other qualities — for the ability to get any creature able to understand them riled up.
  • The Taunt spell could enrage opponents and cause them to attack you in melee combat (which was useful if they were more effective at ranged combat).
  • Weaponized by the bard spell Vicious Mockery, which causes psychic damage to the target of the insult. If done right, a high-level bard could kill a dragon by insulting it to death.
• Unlike Chess, you're allowed to do this in Game of the Generals.
• GURPS has the "Rapier Wit" Advantage which allows a character's witty remarks to leave an opponent mentally stunned. Critical failures, however, push the opponent over the line from "exasperated and wide open" to "infuriated and dangerous."
• Magic: The Gathering features this as an effect on some cards (as seen in the page image), and there is even a keyworded ability, "Goad", that forces a specific creature to attack (another player than the one who goaded it, if possible) when its turn comes. Due to the way combat works in Magic, a creature that's forced to attack will give the target the freedom to block it with any of their available creature or creatures they have on the board — and kill it if the defender has better stats, making the implementation an example of the Blinded by Rage variant of the trope. As such, Goad is a somewhat unconventional way to get rid of enemy creatures that are useless in battle but have strong passive or activated abilities, which the opponent would never send into combat otherwise.
  Mklthd had always hated crowds ... and they had always hated him.
  — Flavor text for Jeering Homunculus
• In Munchkin, there's a card named "Divine Intervention", which lets all Clerics gain a level. That level can be the one that makes them win the game. If that happens, any cleric who reached Level 10 this way get to taunt the other players mercilessly. And the rules even encourage taunting them if you win this way, because it's just unlikely to ever actually happen.
• Mutants & Masterminds has the Taunt feat, which lets you do this. Not that there's anything stopping you from mouthing off, but this lets you use it in combat a la Spider-Man. And it's only one character point.
• Savage Worlds has a Taunt skill that can be used in combat to put an opponent at a disadvantage (Intimidation can be used similarly). In Deadlands this has a special significance in duels, as each gunslinger tries to goad the other (by either taunting or intimidation) into reaching for their gun first, which not only gives them a penalty to their shooting roll but also puts them on the wrong side of the law.
• This is a somewhat easily missed but perfectly valid use of the Intimidation skill in Spirit of the Century; there's even a related "Infuriate" stunt for it that gives an explicit bonus to attempts to rile people up rather than simply frighten them. Presumably, to eliminate this potential point of confusion, the later Fate Core System rules rename the skill to Provoke and explicitly define it as the skill of eliciting negative emotional responses in general — be those fear, anger, shame, or whatever — and getting one's way by basically being a jerk to people.
• As stated in the Films folder, Sith characters from Star Wars tend to taunt a lot (except Darth Maul, who doesn't talk much). In the old Hasbro-licensed tabletop fighting game "Epic Duels Game", a few attack or special cards are named after banter lines from the movies. Dooku's most powerful attack cards are simply called "taunting", and they indeed deal a high amount of direct damage. Christopher Lee's tongue must be just that sharp.
• Weaponized by Wulfrik the Wanderer in Warhammer Fantasy. "Cursed" by the gods with immortality and a gift of tongues, now he has to wander the world fighting the strongest champions the enemy has to offer, and does so by hurling the crudest insults he can think of at them, and Chaos magic not only translates it into their tongue but makes them take the insult so badly they can't refuse the challenge. And since Wulfrik is a nine-foot-tall Horny Viking straight from the best Heavy Metal album cover, said taunts get very crude indeed, such as this one, delivered to a dwarf king:
  Wulfrik the Wanderer: Face me if you dare, stunted whelp, or do you lack even an Elven maid's courage? I thought the Sons of Grungni were great warriors, but perhaps you are no true Dwarf. Indeed, maybe you are instead some breed of bearded goblin, though in truth, I have seen a finer beard on a Troll's back-side."

Video Games

• This is how tanks work in any MMO with any kind of hate/threat system. The tank "taunts" the enemy to make it attack the offender rather than to judge the situation correctly and go for the squishy wizard, the healer or in some cases, a weakened or vulnerable tank.

---

• The Age of Empires series uses prerecorded soundtracks explicitly called taunts slaved to individual numeric values. This allows players to spam certain numbers in rapid succession, (eq. 11, which causes a highly annoying 'laugh' to play).
• Some games have pre-recorded taunts for use in-game, such as Age of Empires II ("All hail! King of the losers!", "Nice town. I'll take it.", "My granny can scrap better than that!").
• Swashbucklers in Age of Wonders 2 can taunt enemy units, forcing them to attack the Swashbuckler (or ideally, waste their turn trying to reach him), collecting attacks of opportunity from units they must pass by. Heroes can get the skill as well. In Shadow Magic Bomber (Goblins), Glutton (Orcs) and Leprechaun (Halflings) got this ability as well.
• The Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator gives this ability to the Communications Officer. Sending a taunt to an enemy ship is a good way to bait them over the minefield you've just placed, although it doesn't always work.
• Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood has this as a combat mechanic. It goads one enemy into attacking Ezio early; this will end badly for the enemy because of Ezio's devastating counter-moves. Also it's amusing, at least if you can understand the insults. The more obscene ones are said in Italian.
• One way to free Minsc at the beginning of Baldur's Gate II is to cruelly mock him. He goes berserk and breaks free of the cage. Fortunately for the player character, Minsc immediately realizes that this was why you taunted him.
• In Battle Arena Toshinden, the French knight Duke does this instead of using a "down attack", a tactic he considers dishonorable. Doing this during battle lowers his opponent's Overdrive meter.
• Bayonetta from the Bayonetta series is always taunting her enemies in cut-scenes, although a Taunt Button is available during normal gameplay as well, causing an enemy to go berserk and start attacking faster and more aggressively, which is actually great for building up combos. There's also an accessory called the Gaze of Despair, which is basically like equipping a permanent taunt, as its very existence is described as an affront to the Angels of Paradiso.
• Hazama / Terumi Yuuki employs this as a survival tactic in BlazBlue, but not in the typical, enrage-opponent-so-s/he-commits-mistakes kinda way... Or, well, not ONLY in that kinda way... Because people's hatred of Hazama sustains his existence in the world, being the biggest dick possible is a way for him to ensure his continued existence. He also gets off on making people miserable.
• Borderlands 2 has Salvador learn a skill which flips the bird with both hands at his enemies, taunts them, all while regenerating all of his health, and drawing all of the enemy aggro as a result. The skill name? Come At Me Bro! Said skill also causes Salvador to fire off some deliciously lampshading one-liners.
  OVER HERE, MORONS!
  TAAAAANNNKKKIIIING!
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, Anonymous learns a skill called Taunt at level 35, which draws enemy fire to him, (and away from his teammates), for several turns.
• Kid in Chrono Cross insults some guards until they open the cage she's stuck in, at which point the party kills them. Poor guys.
• In Chrono Trigger, Marle has a spell called 'Provoke', which taunts the opponent in the hopes of making them attack her. It doesn't always work..
• In City of Heroes, the signature move of the Tank (though Brutes and Scrappers could take it) is Taunt, which is this trope played straight: pissing off the enemy so that they attack you instead of your teammates. Apparently, the taunt is so effective, aliens, monsters and robots will drop whatever they're doing just to kill you. One of the Invention Origin enhancements you can make is even called "The Perfect Zinger," not that you ever have any idea what you're even saying... The best part of "Perfect Zinger" is that you can mock a foe so thoroughly that they die from the resultant psychic damage.
• The final boss of The Day The Noobs Took Over Roblox 3 is this. He literally installed monitors around his Big Fancy Castle just to taunt you.
• In Devil May Cry titles, the various player characters can taunt to regain Devil Trigger orbs and raise their style rating for extra Red Orbs.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Molag Bal, the Daedric Prince of Domination and Corruption, utilizes this. Almost every sentence out of his mouth is a taunt to remind a person how insignificant they are compared to him. He is the Lord of Domination, after all, rather justifying it.
  • In Morrowind, this is a game mechanic in conversations. The player can choose to Taunt an NPC, which lowers their disposition and may cause them to attack, and is based on the player's Speehcraft skill. If they do, you are within your legal right to kill them in self-defense with no penalty to you.
• Eternal Card Game features a full communication wheel in lieu of text-based communication. This includes a Threaten emote, which is usually a taunt for the enemy.
• The "Provoke" move in Final Fantasy X that anyone can learn forces the enemy to attack only the caster. the animations are different for each character, like slapping your ass (Rikku) to pointing at the enemy then to yourself (Wakka).
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn have the Provoke skill, which makes enemies more likely to attack that person. It's already attached to Shinon and Skrimir, and you can also earn one and put it on a character with strong defense.
• In Full Throttle when Ben is tied and being torn by motorbikes he can threaten to call his torturer names. Actually, an aversion, since Ben only needs to say the nickname Malcolm Corley gave her to prove they only had a friendly chat with Malcolm Corley and he didn't kill him.
• Throughout the entire Galaxy Angel trilogy, Tact Mayers makes a habit of doing some disparaging comments to the enemy commanders whenever he communicates with them, in order to psych them out. By the time Galaxy Angel II rolls around, this tactic is acknowledged by Verel when they face one another.
• Mooks from Gang Wars simply love taunting your character. Whenever you got knocked off your feet or you're out of range, they'll let out a "huh-huh-huh-huh" from a distance with their arms on their waists as they laugh at you.
• If you taunt your enemies in God Hand it infuriates them (increasing their attack power) but it also increases your Tension, allowing you to use your God Hand more frequently. It's also very useful in drawing out targets to fight one-on-one, rather than getting bum-rushed by multiple demons at once. However, it simultaneously increases your Level, which makes your opponents even tougher (but the reward for beating them gets better as well).
• The Hot-Blooded Matsu from .hack//GU is fond of doing this. He belongs to the Moon Tree guild which forbids him to make the first strike in PKing, so he taunts people, trying to make them strike first, before he retaliates, citing self-defence.
• Halo 3: Sgt. Johnson tries this against a Brute that's holding him prisoner in order to activate the Halo Array, continuously insulting the Brute. (If Johnson dies, they can't activate the Halos, since only a human can do so.) Unfortunately, the Prophet of Truth realizes what Johnson's up to, and tells the Brute to calm himself.
• In Hearthstone, this is a specific ability for minions, but they usually don't taunt the other player. Evil heckler on the other hand lives and breathes this trope, as all of his voice lines demean the opponent.
  Play: Your mother was a murloc!
  Play alt.: You smell like a leper gnome!
  Attack: Boo!
  Attack alt.: You suck!
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle, taunting an opponent when they are knocked to the ground will force the camera to zoom in on the taunter as their victim's super meter is reduced. Two characters also have counter-taunts: Joseph's entail him employing his famous trick of telling his opponents what they will say next before they say it, reducing their meter and buffing his attack power; while Josuke's has his opponents taunt him, or rather, his hair, granting him immunity to flinching and buffed attack power at the cost of forcing him to continuously march towards his opponent.
• In Kingdom Hearts, whenever Larxene isn't kicking the dog, she's doing this.
• League of Legends:
  • Each and every character in can do this, obviously existing for the purpose of mocking the enemy you just squashed. The taunts in question vary from Rumble's "Come on, I'm not even holding the controls!" to Skarner's "I am ANCIENT. You are nothing but an INSECT to me!" and pretty much everything in between.
  • It gets better. Taunt is an actual status that some champions can inflict. What it does is make the ones who were inflicted with it automatically - and uncontrollably — autoattack the one who inflicted the status.
  • Of the champions that can inflict Taunt, Rammus is designed around it. His Q allows him to rush in and stun at melee range, his W boosts his defenses for a short time and causes him to return autoattack damage, and his E, Frenzying Taunt, 'reduces' your opponent's defense slightly while inflicting Taunt for up to 3 seconds (one wonders how he manages it when he hardly speaks). His ultimate deals AoE damage in a radius around him, likely a melee range, which is sort of a soft Taunt in teamfights due to the massive damage it can inflict in a small area over time. Rammus is a tank whose passive gives him some extra attack damage from his armor, so have fun trying to kill him before he kills you.
  • Tryndamere is a special case. While he doesn't inflict Taunt, his Mocking Shout can slow enemies who have their backs turned to him, letting him catch up to you more easily.
  • In addition to the built-in taunt mechanics, players winning a tournament game often improvise their owns taunt behaviors by intentionally doing non-optimal or harmful things in front of their opponents, like having their heroes "dance around" or deliberately waste powerful and flashy abilities or items.
  • Teemo (and, to a lesser extent champions like Twitch and Soraka) is memetically considered to have this going all the time. His 'Global Taunt' hidden passive/psychological warfare tactic baits enemies into becoming Leeroy Jenkins in an attempt to kill him, leaving them open to his mushroom traps and ambushes, or getting them to leave some important objective unguarded.
• Both Left 4 Dead games have a "Laugh" vocalization can spam and are routinely used in VS mode when the zombie players failed to kill them, causing the Survivor players to keep spamming the Laughter as the points are tallied up. The sequel also adds a literal "Taunt" vocalization for the Survivors, the "vocalize" command itself was shortly blocked from the developer console however.
• Little Nightmares II: Some of the Bullies will take a moment to taunt Mono if he is nearby. This allows you to get the drop on them, as they're too preoccupied with taunting you than attacking.
• In Lost Odyssey, while you are selecting your actions, Jansen will tap his staff twice on the ground, hunch over, and make what seems to be 'come on' motions with his other hand. Cooke will put her hands on the side of her head and waggle her fingers in the 'na na na na boo boo' motion, while blowing a raspberry.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance has a Taunt debuff as an early option for one character. It's Deadpool's. And they tend to be a bit... surreal.
• While everyone in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 can taunt, Deadpool's is the only one that can hurt. Literally. His appear in little yellow speech bubbles that deal a small amount of damage if the opponent gets hit.
• Mass Effect 2:
  • Harbinger from loves to do this. A full list can be found here.
    • YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, SHEPARD.
    • THIS HURTS YOU.
  • IF I MUST TEAR YOU APART SHEPARD, I WILL.
  • A fantastic one is given by Liara to the Shadow Broker in the eponymous DLC, and the best part is very little of it was out-and-out insulting. Said Broker smugly claims that he can see everything about her, while she knows nothing about him. Liara proceeds to demonstrate her savvy as an information broker, outlining everything about the Shadow Broker: race, background, how he came to be the Shadow Broker and topping it off by calling him a "pet" of the original Broker. It works very well.
• Max Payne employs this in the first game after storming an illegal arms shipment organized by mob boss Punchinello at the behest of Vladimir Lem — Payne's doing it for the revenge factor. After securing the shipment, Max takes a call from Punchinello meant for the captain and lets him know he's there and needles him in order to piss him off.
  Max: [narrating] Pissing Punchinello off was a dangerous game. But when people get mad, they make mistakes. I should know. That's where I wanted Punchinello, mad enough to trip over his own feet, preferably into a grave.
• Many of the Medal of Honor PC games featured prerecorded soundtracks as well. Most of them were operational, such as stating they'd seen an enemy in multiplayer. But a specific subset of commands is labeled 'taunts'. However, there are so many options that they're divided into menus, which kind of makes them a little too hard to use in fast pace FPS combat.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid: Psycho Mantis will taunt the player by looking announcing the other games he played in his playstaion.
  • For Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, in the Jetstream Sam DLC, Sam can taunt his enemies. It makes them hit harder, but it also makes them weaker to your attacks. A skilled player can use this to destroy Armstrong at the end of the DLC!
• In Monday Night Combat, finishing a taunt gives you $5, finishing a taunt soon after a kill gives you $50, and getting damaged while taunting gives you extra juice.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The infamous taunts of Shao Kahn. In the second game, he would taunt you mercilessly and in Trilogy, when you could finally play as him, he actually had these as special moves. Given his general difficulty, Shao Kahn's inability to fight straight-up and dispense with taunting is his only weakness.
    • "PATHETIC!"
    • "IS THAT YOUR BEST?"
    • "IT'S OFFICIAL: YOU SUCK!"
  • Arguably, Johnny Cage and his daughter Cassie use bad puns, movie references, and other insults to keep their opponents distracted and off guard. Johnny does it, arguably, so that opponents keep underestimating him. Cassie does it because...well, she takes after dad.
• The gremlin enemies from Monster Hunter (PC) loves doing this. Every now and then during gameplay, if the player is a fair distance away from the gremlin or they're in another part of the maze and unable to fight back, the gremlin mooks will taunt the player with a "nyardy-nyar-nyar". Any levels containing gremlins will have the player hearing their "nyar-nyar" a lot.
• Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 include the "Taunt" skill as an option for characters. In the first game it is almost useless as it is only an ineffective combat power, but in the second it turns into a conversation skill as well. The Taunt options during your trial in the second chapter of the main campaign are really silly, especially when you succeed on your Taunt check and Ambassador Claven looses her cool.
• In The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge, Jack's attack repertoire involves a Taunt (where he cracks his weapon like a whip and yells "Come on!"). This infuriates nearby enemies into 'Oogie Mode' where they become stronger and gain Halloween-style Tron Lines, but drop better items and exp. It's actually required to reach many of the level goals.
• In No One Lives Forever, the player finds themselves incarcerated and has to provoke Magnus Armstrong into a fight. He'll agree to let the player go if they win, otherwise it's a Nonstandard Game Over.
• The Mooks of Outlaws will constantly yell: "Don't be a fool Marshal!", "Where are you Marshal?" or "Yer' outnumbered!"
  StephenPlays: SHUT UP! I'll be dropping you like flies!
  • The bosses also have have some unique taunts:
    "Bloody" Mary Nash: After I kill you, I'm gonna smoke your cigars!
    Chief Two Feathers: You are a dead man walking. I don't need to see you or hear you to know exactly where you are!
    "Spittin'" Jack Sanchez: Here chicky, chicky...! *makes chicken sounds and laughs*
• In Planescape: Torment this is Morte's special combat ability - to hurl insults, curses and taunts so enemies will drop whatever they're doing to assault him, and only him, in melee. This works especially well on the Squishy Wizard, because they'll be so infuriated they'll forget to cast spells. On anyone else it's mostly just funny.
• Pokémon:
  • Three moves: "Taunt", which locks the opponent into only using attack moves; "Torment" (the original Japanese name translates to "Impugn"), which impels the victim to never use the same move twice in a row; and "Swagger", which raises the target's Attack by two stages and also induces Confusion.
  • In Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal, one rocket grunt says to you, "I WILL BE RUDE TO YOU IF YOU DISTURB OUR WORK."
• Don Flamenco from Punch-Out!! does this constantly to goad you into attacking, giving him the opportunity to counter-attack. He does it so often that you tend to attack him just to shut him up.
  ¡Venga, venga!
• In Renowned Explorers one type of standard attack is Enrage which in addition to dealing damage to the target's Spirit makes them so angry that they neglect thier defenses, lowering thier armor and making them more vulnerable to Agressive attacks. If a target loses the last of their Spirit to an Engrage attack they become so angry that they stop fighting and just stand on the side of the battlefield yelling at you.
  • Some characters also have special Enrage attacks that force the targets to attack them for a turn or two allowing them to pull aggro away from other party members.
• Resonance of Fate is rife with taunting and banter, and often trade quips with each other and the enemy mid-battle. Particularly with boss battles; the enemy-if humanoid/with the ability to speak- and your three protagonists will taunt each other equally. This is especially true with Hero Actions, as you're not encouraged to just stand and shoot. The funny part is the protagonists do not just taunt the 'bad guys'. They are not above throwing zingers at each other, particularly-but not exclusively- if you accidentally catch someone in friendly fire (all too easy to do), screw up a Hero Action, or otherwise blow it.
• Any Resident Evil game with Albert Wesker, but especially Resident Evil 5.
• Saints Row: The Third offers you dozens of these in character customization. Using them against a Cop or rival Gang Member tends to get you shot.
• In Scarface: The World Is Yours, you can taunt enemies to gain Balls for building towards Tony's Blind Rage.
• The 7th Guest has Stauf taunt the player while in the middle of puzzles using cheesy one-liners ("I'm dying to see what you'll try next!") or just in general being a creepy Jerkass.
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant: Yuri Hyuga tends to taunt enemies in cut scenes, particularly Lenny, mocking the guy's intelligence until Lenny in anger tells them exactly what they wanted to know.
• In Star Control 2, this is required to ally with a certain character. When you encounter him, he mistakes you for an Ur-Quan and starts lobbing insults at you. The correct tactic is to respond in kind, and then flee from the ensuing battle so you don't kill him. After a few rounds of this, he realizes your behavior isn't very Ur-Quan-like and becomes more open to a civil conversation.
• Star Wars again: Star Wars: The Old Republic takes it almost to the point of parody. Many Sith that you fight will taunt and threaten you and tell you over and over how screwed you are to have crossed paths with them, even as their own health rapidly dwindles away to nothing.
• Street Fighter:
  • Many games feature a taunt button that does nothing aside from performing a minor action that leaves you open to counter-attack. Bar none, the best taunting character is Dan Hibiki. In some games, each character is only allowed to taunt once per round... except for Dan, who never suffers this restriction. In some games, performing a taunt will help to fill up your opponent's super meter... but Dan has a legendary Taunt that lets him spend his own entire super meter on one overly long taunt. In some games, Dan can even taunt while in the air.
  • In addition, some professional tournament players have an improvised version, where they try to win each bout by Cherry Tapping or with a specific Difficult, but Awesome move or one that is considered a bad or weak move normally. In extreme cases, a super-confident player may intentionally throw a round he could've won easily because he can't set up the specific move he wants to use as the finisher, such as a Charged Attack he couldn't build up to that round.
• Mr. X in the Streets of Rage series will laugh at you during your fight with him if you get knocked down. In the remake, this is the same case but once Mr. X's life bar is down to 1 life or less, he stops taunting you and becomes more aggressive.
• All five Super Smash Bros. games have taunts.
  • Smash 64 and the Brawl mod Project M have taunt canceling, which is a technique that cancels the animation of a taunt, but doesn't cancel the sound, is often used for humorous results.
  • Melee has taunt canceling to a lesser extent; only Dr. Mario and Young Link can regularly taunt cancel (due to their momentum properties), and the other characters can only taunt cancel using the cloud on Yoshi's Story.
  • Taunt-cancelling becomes something of an Ascended Glitch in 4 with Bayonetta, whose taunt can be canceled by pressing any other button. Not only does this prevent novice players from leaving themselves open if they accidentally hit the taunt button (since her taunts are the longest in the game), but it also essentially gives her taunts the same function they had in her original games, as described above.
  • Super Smash Bros Ultimate rework some taunts to be shorter, which can result in oddities such as Pikachu's side taunt's audio being cut short abruptly, or Mario losing his trademark shrinking and growing taunt that he had since the first game to a more generic thumbs up.
• In Tales of the Abyss, Taunting fills up your overlimit gauge faster.
• In Tales of Legendia, Norma has a spell called "Taunt" that basically lowers enemy-attack power.
• Justified in Team Fortress 2 because a large part of the game revolves around dominating your opponent and nothing is more satisfying than taunting over a nemesis' corpse. Certain weapon taunts also have the ability to inflict massive amounts of damage or outright destroy players careless enough to stand still.
  • Plus the fact that some classes have voice taunts that auto-fire after a domination (or a revenge PAST a domination) that get downright personal, in-universe. "May I borrow your earpiece? *mocking voice* This is Scout! Rainbows make me cry!"
• Unreal Tournament games have prerecorded taunts for bots and players alike. The bots spout one after every kill, and you have the option of the game doing so for you as well.
• In the PS2 Beat 'em Up Urban Reign you can use a taunt to draw a dazed opponent towards you and extend the length of their dizzy state. Or just do it for fun.
• Vega Strike communication lines can improve or worsen Relationship Values with the ship (or other unit) to whom they are addressed. An observation that the opponent learned to fly by Correspondence Course isn't taken very well.
• Wing Commander has this as a basic tactic: taunting Kilrathi fighters has a chance of making them drop whatever they're doing to attack you (instead of whatever you're escorting).
• World of Warcraft:
  • Warriors do this to keep enemies focusing on them and ignoring their squishier, more dangerous allies. While all tanks do this, with skills like Taunt and Mocking Blow warriors seem to be the only ones who do it by annoying the enemy into trying to squash them. (The in-universe mechanic isn't well defined, but it can be inferred that paladins magically force people to attack them or intimidate them with holy fire, death knights actually command the foe to attack them , and druids have "RAAARGH I'm a BEAR!")
  • The new Monk class "Provokes" the target (or multiple targets.) Their taunt is so clever it increases the target's movement speed when charging at them.
• In X-Men Legends, Toad's Taunt, Rogue's Bedazzle, and Deadpool's Wisecrack lowers the enemies stats while luring the baddies towards the hero who used the power.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • This could be said to be something that Apollo Justice adds to the series. While Phoenix provokes his foes into a Villainous Breakdown by finding the flaws in their story; Apollo can use his special power to identify his foes' weakness like this.
  • And throughout the whole Ace Attorney series, any time the villain of the day seems to have the upper hand, they will mercilessly taunt the player character, thinking they have them completely beat. The character then either goes into a panic since they're backed into a corner, or they go silent or taunt right back when they see a flaw from the bad guy they can exploit.
  • This trope is also Prosecutor Simon Blackquill's primary method of controlling the courtroom in Dual Destinies. He also used it while searching for the Phantom during his time in jail. 'Just try to retrieve your identity, you bloody butcher!'
  • The more comedic version that runs the same circles as the trope namer is the petty and childish "No, You"-type fights between the prosecution and defence in the first half of the last case.
• In Double Homework, Dennis tries to make the protagonist lose face by taunting him in the hopes that he’ll do or say something he regrets.
• Tohsaka in Fate/stay night irritates Caster into not noticing that she and Shirou have circled her and Kuzuki to make for more favorable fights. Kuzuki notices but doesn't do anything about it.

Web Animation

• In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, Tzeentch utilizes cheap insults and clever word-twisting to win Magnus over to his side, using sorcerer's own pride and hatred of Emperor's other children, especially Leman Russ.
• Madness Combat: Hank pulls a subtle one, impressively so considering the series has no spoken dialogue. When he first encounters a Soldat, bio-mechanical cyborgs, he dramatically points to his own eye to make fun of them for their own lack thereof. Naturally, they open fire on him.
• Imperial Fist VS Iron Warrior is a Warhammer 40,000 fan-animation, showing a verbal altercation between an Imperial Fists Space Marine and an Iron Warriors Chaos Marine. Instead of a heated exchange between two mortal enemies however, it's more like an argument between playground bullies.
• RWBY:
  • Neo, being mute, uses cheeky gestures and facial expressions to taunt her opponents. Even her fighting style utilizes this, as she tends to block and evade to frustrate her opponents' attempts to hit her, all with a smirk on her face.
  • During the Vytal Festival Tournament, Weiss and Yang are set up against two members of Team FNKI from Atlas. Neon Katt, a cat faunus dressed like she just got back from a rave/roller derby, spends much of the fight calling Yang overweight to throw off her accuracy. If only she spent as much time and effort actually trying to defeat Yang properly... or watch where she was going.
  • When Cordovin discovers the woman piloting the stolen airship is Maria in "Stealing from the Elderly", she threatens her Sitcom Arch-Nemesis. Maria not only defies her but starts munching cashews over the comm-link to provoke Cordovin into using her giant mech-unit. Maria smuggling cashews onto a flight once in the past is how their feud began.
    Maria: You hear that Cordo? [loudly crunching on cashews with the radio to her mouth] That's the sound of me not caring! [maniacal laughter]
  • As things start going south in Atlas, the titular team faces against the kingdom's elites Ace-Ops, led (at that point) by Harriet Bree, who can either overpower or outspeed any of RWBY girls individually, so Ruby triggers her competitive nature by proclaiming her team to be the best in Atlas. Ruby then spends most of the fight using her own speed/teleportation ability to evade an infuriated Ace-Op, while her teammates take out Hare's one by one before eventually coming to their leader's aid.

Webcomics

• Angel Moxie double subverts this. The girls manage to get Tsutsumu furious during their battle, but he realizes he's losing his control and takes a moment to calm himself down. Then it turns out that was their plan - he was vulnerable while he was collecting himself
• Erfworld:
  • Parson deliberately offends Ansom's (excuse me, Prince Ansom's) traditionalist sensibilities by dismissing the concept of royalty as "obsolete," and then provokes him further by declaring that Stanley's attunement to the Arkenhammer makes him Ansom's "superior".
  • He also has his troops sing a filthy song about the Jetstonians carefully crafted from the most obscene things he can get past Erfworld's built-in "boop" filter.
• Edith of Godslave mocks Turner when he tries to attack her in the same manner yet again, calling him a one-trick pony. Unfortunately for her, he promptly changes his tactic.
• In Girl Genius during the fight agaisnt the revenant Andronicus Valois the Jagers start taunting him to keep him distracted while other characters prepare attacks that might actually be able to stop him.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court, Jones starts badmouthing Antimony's father, in order to make Annie angry so Jones can better "assess her character". This doesn't work very well — at most, it makes Antimony marginally irritable and (rightly) suspicious of her intentions. Annie reacts more viciously when such things are said in context where they make sense, however.
• In Moon Crest 24, Aleck taunts Drake. It pretty much gets as close to a "Come at me bro!" without saying it verbatim.
• Vaarsuvius (or V) from The Order of the Stick has a long history with this trope.
  • Vaarsuvius does this to outsmart Nale. Elan's Evil Twin Nale briefly took Elan's place in the party, until Elan catches back up to them and V walks in on the two fighting. Nale tries to use the Kill Us Both trick to get out the Spot the Impostor situation, which frustrates Elan into proclaiming what a Dead Horse Trope that particular trick is. V agrees, and pretty much says that such a dumb trick is exactly the sort of thing Nale would do. Nale (who is guilty of both being a Smug Snake and having a serious Small Name, Big Ego problem) immediately blows his cover by trying to defend his plan, which earns him a magical bolt of lightning in the face from V.
  • Later V falls victim to it when another customer in a magic shop intentionally provokes them. It turns out to merely be an elaborate ploy to have V identify themself so that the other "customer" can serve V with divorce papers.
  • Later still, during a period where V is working to overcome the Fatal Flaw or Pride, V averts this by refusing to give in to anger when Zz'dtri tries to taunt V by saying how V couldn't win their fight without help. For about a panel V is furious and clearly considers abandoning the tactics that had all but handed V the victory, but then reconsiders and ignores Z's little verbal jab.
• Hwaryun from Tower of God taunts a Costume Copycat impersonator of Viole by calling him a stinking pig until he tries to bash her brains out. Tries.
• Weak Hero:
  • Teddy gains his advantage in battle by taunting his opponents beforehand, riling them up and shaking them mentally so that he can more effectively take them down. Unfortunately for him, he's not prepared for it when Gray turns the tables and taunts him before their showdown.
  • After Wolf expresses his intention to quit the Union, Donald taunts him into a fight by calling him a dog and then effortlessly beats him down, putting him back in his place.
  • Eunchan's introduction has him mocking two bullies he finds out in the street, all for the purpose of making them lower their guard so he can get in some quick hits and scare them off.

Web Originals

• Atop the Fourth Wall's Linkara pulls this on Lord Vyce in order to get him to come and fight him again.
• In the Black Jack Justice episode "No Justice", Jack is being questioned by mobster Chick Mason and his flunkies Monk and Hak. Jack spends as much time as possible insulting Dumb Muscle Hak to provoke him. He's initially thwarted because Mason can keep him under control. Then Jack insults his mother and sends him into a blind rage, during which he ignores his boss to attack Jack. It is at that point Jack reveals he slipped out of his handcuffs ten minutes ago and proceeds to beat down Hak, Mason, and Monk in quick succession.
• In Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] Abridged, Archer tries to indicate that he wants Lancer to hit him with his most powerful attack as part of a plan. When Lancer fails to pick up the hint, he switches to goading Lancer into getting angry enough to use said attack anyway by disparaging his pride as a hero, trying to embarrass him with Baby Talk, and, because Lancer is Irish, insulting potatoes.
• Jayuzumi uses his soundboards for this purpose on a fairly frequent basis. How good-natured the insults are tends to vary.
• Happens on two separate occasions in Survival of the Fittest with the same characters: Tyson Neills and Bobby Jacks. The first time around, Tyson taunts Bobby in an attempt to provoke a fight with Troy McCann (to raise his 'street credit'). The second time is on the island itself, in an attempt to make him lose his cool and do something stupid. It backfires, Bobby does lose his temper, but in the midst of his rage kills Tyson.
• Little One of Tales From My D&D Campaign takes this approach to all his interactions the evil Kua-Toa. From getting Angel to write insults in Kuar on his shield to decorating that same shield with teeth taken from dead K Ts to dropping a fishing line in the water he suspects to be occupied by KT warriors, he goes to great lengths to make sure the K Ts are as pissed off with him as possible. Perhaps the best is when, after slaughtering a KT patrol, he cuts the heads off, stakes the bodies upside-down, then sticks the head back on top of the whole affair (i.e., the K Ts have their heads up their behinds.)
• Done by some of the mouthier heroes in the Whateley Universe. Chaka has pulled this successfully both times superpowered ninjas slipped into Whateley Academy. She got the leader annoyed enough to make a major mistake. Both times. Phase pulled it off against an unbeatable, unkillable demon who had just crushed her like a bug. Literally. She managed to stall it long enough for help to show up, banishing the demon and keeping her from a Fate Worse than Death.

Western Animation

• Aladdin does this plenty of times in Aladdin: The Series, especially to Abbis Mal.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • In "The Deserter", when facing Zhao, who is a very powerful firebender but has a lousy temper and poor self-control, Aang repeatedly insults his bending and combat skills until Zhao loses control and starts sending out wild blasts that set his entire fleet on fire.
  • In "The Day of Black Sun, Part 2", Azula wastes the heroes' time during the eclipse by mocking Sokka about Suki.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Robin does this all the time.
  • Extremely rare example from the original Batman himself: In "Mad Love", he taunts the Joker by saying that Harley had come closer to killing him than he (the Joker) ever had. Then Batman grins and calls him "Puddin'", Harley's pet-name for the Joker. He also pulls this stunt on Harley Quinn. After she tells him her plan of killing him so the Joker will love her, he actually breaks into laughter (delivered in the most haunting, chilling chuckle by Kevin Conroy), telling her the Joker only cares about himself and mockingly informing her that he's played the same mind games on her with countless other people — she's just the only one to fall for it.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002): In "Sky War", Skeletor eats Ambrosia and becomes even stronger that He-Man. He-Man starts insulting him by calling him ugly and other things. Enraged, Skeletor gives him a savage beating. He-Man endures it and explains he tricked Skeletor into overexerting himself so the Ambrosia would wear off faster.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In "Bullies", Valmont gets his hands on the dragon talisman, which provides the power of combustion, which he uses to rob Fort Knox. Jackie follows him, and remembering his own struggles with his Berserk Button (Captain Black's injuries by Valmont) throughout the episode, decides to press Valmont's Berserk Button by tossing gold overboard, while sarcastically asking things like "How much is this gold worth? A new Ferrari?" Valmont loses it, fires at Jackie in a rage, and proceeds to sink his own raft.
• Justice League:
  • "Only a Dream" has another Batman example, where he relentlessly mocks and taunts Dr. Destiny as he closes in, disrupting Destiny's focus and making it harder to bring his full psychic power to bear.
  • "Wake the Dead" sees Aquaman act like a Politically Incorrect Hero to goad Shayera out of her funk to no avail.
• The Karate Kid: In the episode "My Brother's Keeper", Kala insults his guard to make him come back so that Kala can steal his spear to cut himself loose.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "A Canterlot Wedding - Part 2", the villain traps Twilight Sparkle in a cave and taunts her until Twilight is attacking with magic. Not only does the magic ricochet all over the place, but Twilight attacks the pony that the villain has been masquerading as. However, this ends up backfiring, as Twilight breaks open an exit and is able to free both herself and the other pony.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Makes Zen to Me", Mojo Jojo unsuccessfully tries to taunt Buttercup during her meditation session.
  Mojo: You cannot defeat me. Green is not your color. You look fat in that dress.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The episode "Texas" has SpongeBob and Patrick insult deliberately insult Sandy's titular home so she can chase them to the surprise party they have planned for her. Unfortunately, it worked too well, and Sandy's out for their blood.
• Star Wars Rebels:
  • In "Droids in Distress", Zeb has the upper hand in his bo-rifle duel with Agent Kallus, until Kallus claims he personally ordered the use of disruptors during the massacre of the population of Zeb's homeworld, causing Zeb to get really angry and fight sloppier, leading to Kallus coming very close to killing him. "The Honorable Ones" confirms that Kallus was lying to demoralize Zeb: while he was involved in the Lasat genocide, he didn't make the call for the use of disruptors and didn't expect such a massacre.
  • In "Trials of the Darksaber" Kanan — playing the Warrior Therapist — does this to Sabine during their practice duel, to get her to spill the hang-ups that are preventing her from giving her all to the training.
  • In "Zero Hour", Kallus does this to Governor Pryce while she's in the middle of a Villainous Breakdown, causing her to order him Thrown Out the Airlock — which is exactly what he wanted, as it gives him the perfect opportunity to escape the Chimaera and join up with the rebels.
• Steven Universe: In "Earthlings Part 2", Peridot laughs at Jasper during her fight with Smoky Quartz whenever she gets beaten up or humiliated in some way. This makes Jasper madder and madder and causes her to make more mistakes during the fight. She eventually gets so mad, she fuses with a corrupted gem to get a power boost. She's still easily defeated, and only managed to infected herself with corruption in the process.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): While he doesn't often use it against his enemies, Michelangelo, in true sibling fashion, knows that taunting is a hugely effective weapon against Raphael, and will always use it when fighting him. This tactic backfires horribly once when Mikey makes Raphael so angry that he nearly caves his head in with a blunt instrument. Naturally, Raph is horrified at his action and spends the episode learning An Aesop about self-control.
• When Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Starfire have evil Doppelgangers of themselves made in Teen Titans (2003), the Doppelgangers start taunting the heroes they were based on. Beast Boy's Doppelganger managed to get him to cry Berserker Tears.
• In Transformers: Animated, Prowl has Bumblebee use his greatest weapon against Blitzwing to force him into his angry personality, whose corresponding vehicle mode is ground-based instead of flight-capable, and make him crash mid-flight:
  Bumblebee: What, my stingers? My turbo-speed?
  Prowl: Your obnoxious personality.

Real Life

• During World War I, Italy's (in)famous Warrior Poet Gabriele D'Annunzio did it twice:
  • First, the Bakar Mockery: he led a trio of MAS (basically, motorboats with a pair of torpedoes strapped on the sides) into the most guarded harbor of the Austro-Hungarian empire, fired torpedoes at the moored ships (ineffectively, as the Austro-Hungarian admiralty had placed torpedo nets in case the Italians managed to elude the surveillance) and left numerous bottles with mocking messages in them in an attempt to lure the fleet to give chase... And get in an ambush. On the short term it failed, apparently, because the Austro-Hungarians were too shocked by what had just happened to come out, but on the long term the Austro-Hungarians lost their flagship when they replied with a large-scale raid and the ship ran in the crews of the MAS that had supported D'Annunzio;
  • Second, and most famous, the Flight Over Vienna. The Austro-Hungarians had recently launched a bombing raid on Milan as a warning. D'Annunzio led a squadron over Vienna (believed to be outside the range of contemporary bombers. Except the Italians had something with more then enough range) and dropped leaflets, some with a horrible poem written by D'Annunzio himself (horrible enough it was too difficult to translate into German) and most with a message that can be summed with "You bombed Milan believing yourself invulnerable. You're not, be grateful we're too civilized to bomb Vienna to rubble and you should surrender before we change our minds". Austro-Hungarian morale plummeted after that, especially because the whole squadron got away with it.
• Al-Qaeda wants their enemies (which are far bigger than they are) to be stretched thin, unable to focus, and spend their funding like there is no tomorrow. To this end, they are making attacks that basically amount to mere taunts in its scale of damage. Considering the length of The War on Terror and the sorry economic state of said enemies, it seems to have been Crazy Enough to Work.
  "[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses [...]"

  — 2004 Osama bin Laden video
• In Iraq, during the early months of the invasion and occupation, coalition troops routinely lured insurgents out of cover and into reckless, bullet-spraying charges by insulting their manhood. As they were charging headlong into a few DOZEN machine guns when they did this, it routinely went badly for the insurgents.
• In schools around the world, this is how bullies work - many zero-tolerance policies either punish both people involved or give a greater punishment to the person who throws the first punch. So they want you to throw the first punch so you get in more trouble than they do.
• The page quote comes from Sun Tzu. The future founder of the Han Dynasty, Liu Bang, took this to heart, using it a lot in battles against his famously irritable rival Xiang Yu.
  • When Xiang Yu captured Liu Bang's father and (from across a ravine) threatened to boil him alive, Liu's response was "Send me a cup of the soup!"
  • That same taunt was part of an exchange that led Xiang Yu to shooting an arrow at Liu Bang, which struck him in the chest. His response was to shout "Ow, my foot!" Probably a subversion, since having their leader struck in the chest would easily demoralize the army in question, and Liu Bang couldn't afford to have that.
• This is the core of the American Atheists billboard campaigns. Come up with something controversial, put it on a billboard, release a press statement, wait for Bill O'Reilley and the Catholic League to get infuriated and say something equally press-worthy.
• This is the only tactic of trolls.
• This is very common in Poker, to the point where it has acquired the name putting someone "on tilt." It's actually risky to the insulter because it can be a clue as to what you want the person to do (or, even worse, provoke a fight).
• The use of skirmishers in traditional (i.e. formation-based) warfare followed this trope: Skirmishers would range in front of an army in a scattered formation and pelt enemy melee infantry formations with javelins, arrows, sling stones, and other light missiles. This would cause undisciplined enemies to break formation and charge the skirmishers, who would feign retreat back to their own lines where friendly infantry could deal with the enemies who broke formation.

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Now, go away, or I Shall Taunt You a second time!

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