RevengeSVP

There's a big ol' party and everyone's invited ... but not, it seems, that guy or gal. They may be an insufferable Jerkass, a villain, or some other type that thinks they're popular but no one likes, usually because of their vindictive nature and volatile Hair-Trigger Temper. And wouldn't you know it, after finding out they've been snubbed they go and prove their reputation right by concocting a revenge plot against the party-goers, host, or a loved one of theirs.

This trope is especially common for Wicked Witches, Vain Sorceresses, and Jerkass Goddesses, who will curse the object of the party or throw in an Apple of Discord and watch the revelers tear into each other.

Mortals are no less vindictive or limited in their means. A popular method is to throw their own party and invite the one who snubbed them (coercion may be required to get them to RSVP though) and then reveal it's an elaborate Death Trap, spiking the punch, or otherwise humiliating everyone present. A classic is having them all implicated in their own "murder", all while having the guests kill each other off. Can overlap with Prom Wrecker, if the event in question is a school dance.

Subtrope of Uninvited to the Party.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Shows up in the Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics' version of Sleeping Beauty. Here though, it is 13 witches who reside in the kingdom and the King is actually willing to avert this trope by inviting them. The problem is, the witches must be served on solid gold plates, and he only has a dozen on hand, so naturally the most powerful witch gets snubbed. One does wonder why he couldn't just find another plate before then and save himself some trouble.
• Subverted in the third Urusei Yatsura movie. A witch curses Lum because she apparently wasn't invited to the baby shower. Turns out she was invited; a postal screwup prevented the invitation from reaching her, and she cancelled the curse upon learning of the circumstances in which the invitation had failed to reach its destination.

Comic Books

• Batman: Various villains have made it a point to invite The Joker to any team ups, as he could see it as an insult if not and will enact violent revenge.
  • A villainous example shows up in Infinite Crisis. The Joker approaches the Royal Flush Gang and demands to know why he was excluded from the newest Secret Society Of Super-Villains and subsequently kills them when they explain that "Everyone knows the Joker's wild." The Joker responds "That's not funny." In the last issue of the series, he ambushes and gruesomely kills the Big Bad in Gotham City, while Lex Luthor watches and explains, "You didn't let the Joker play."
  • While he doesn't like the Joker, Lex Luthor has made a point at times to invite him along to various legions of doom specifically to avoid this trope. The Joker may be a pain in the ass to work with, but better that than have him pissed off that he wasn't invited along.
  • Similar example, slightly less gruesome, is Joker's role in Justice. Brainiac doesn't invite him into his Legion of Doom because he can't compute how a psychotic clown could be of use to his scheme to Take Over the World, and the Joker answers by escaping from Arkham Asylum, infiltrating Brainiac's compound, and blowing a significant chunk of it to smithereens during the final battle, which just adds insult to injury considering that the Legion is suffering a Humiliation Conga at the hands of the Justice League at the very same time.
• Black Panther: In the lead-up to the wedding between Black Panther and Storm, Black Panther's rival the Man-Ape planned to crash their wedding as a prelude to invading Wakanda since he wasn't invited. The next time he is seen, he is morosely drinking Scotch at the wedding reception's open bar. Turns out he was on the wedding's invitation list.
• Fables: Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, learns that revenge is the reason for her curse, which has the unfortunate factor of kicking back in whenever she pricks her finger. Then she has a chance to discuss it with the casting fairy.
• Fantastic Four: In The Thing's short-lived series, actress Carlotta LaRosa is hosting a party she's invited our Everlovin' Blue-Eyed titular character to, and calls up contemporary Milan Ramada to tell her she's not invited. Milan's payback is to get Psycho for Hire Arcade to trap the party in his Amusement Park of Doom.

Fan Works

• Subverted in Somnus Ultima; Ardyn was nursing thoughts of revenge long before the christening, and decides to attack during the event just to be extra spiteful.
• In Total Drama Legacy, because Scarlett attempted to blow up the island with everyone still on it, her son Nero deliberately wasn't invited to be on Total Drama Legacy. However, he shows up anyway.
• In The Weaver Option, Wolfgang Bach was one of the most genuinely talented students at the Naval academy but was passed over for an officer's commission due to his commoner background. As revenge, he snuck into an admirality party to cause some chaos. Notable events include him tossing a drink in the face of an admiral's son, bedding the twin daughters of a Lord Admiral, and fleeing the hotel where he did said bedding a step ahead of a company of the Lord Admiral's soldiers.

Films — Animation

• Disney's Sleeping Beauty: Maleficent wasn't invited, and Merryweather makes it clear she wasn't wanted.

Films — Live Action

• Maleficent, the live-action adaptation of Disney's previous take on Sleeping Beauty, averts this. While she crashes the party, Maleficent's motivations for targeting Stefan's daughter go way beyond not being invited to the christening. She does pay mocking lip service to the trope.
• In The Parent Trap (1961), Susan and her cronies mess up Sharon and her cronies' tent with honey, twine, and feathers while they are asleep. This is right before tent inspection, so this causes Sharon's tent to fail inspection and as a result, the girls are banned from the camp dance that night. Sharon gets revenge on Susan by hiding under the outside balcony of the building where the dance is held, and when Susan comes out to the balcony to chat with a boy and leans against the edge of the balcony, Sharon takes a pair of scissors and cuts out a large portion of Susan's skirt. When Susan goes back into the dance, pandemonium ensues.

Literature

• Animorphs: Prior to the start of the series, the kids were invited to a pool party. Marco put a few chocolate bars in the pool and told everyone they were... well guess. In the present, Marco is the only one not invited when the same girl hosts another pool party. In revenge, he and Ax attend the party as mice.
• The "Sleeping Beauty" example gets deconstructed a bit in the Discworld spinoff Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, where Nanny advises anyone organizing a christening to make a point of inviting any "touchier" witches they know, and just give them a table to themselves so they don't upset anyone. "Play your cards right and you could be ahead by an extra good wish. She may be a bit whiffy on the nose, but it's better than waking up a hundred years later and finding trees growing through the floor."
  • Sound advice, considering that she saw firsthand the results of such a curse in Witches Abroad.
  • Apparently foreshadowed in Carpe Jugulum when Granny keeps checking for her invite to the christening of Magrat's daughter —but Granny's better than that. She is hurt enough that she needs a few days to herself, though. It turns out the invitation was deliberately diverted. Not only was Granny invited, she was named Godmother and the girl was named after her.
• There's another evil sorceress example in The Dragon Hoard by Tanith Lee.
• The "Sleeping Beauty" example is also subverted in the first book of Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Princess Alinora has had most of the well-known fairy-tale princess calamities either fail to happen to her or not happen the way they're supposed to.
  Alinora: It started when the wicked fairy came to my christening.
  Cimorene: She put a curse on you?
  Alinora: No. She ate cake and ice cream until she nearly burst and danced with my Uncle Arthur until two in the morning and had a wonderful time. So she went home without cursing me, and Aunt Ermintrude says that that's where the whole problem started.
  Cimorene: Lots of princesses don't have christening curses.
  Alinora: Not if a wicked fairy comes to the christening.
• In Goblin Moon, the Duchess's grudge against an innocent girl dates back to her christening ceremony. No, she wasn't deliberately or accidentally denied an invitation; she was invited but arrived so very late that the girl's mother had to reluctantly select a substitute godmother instead.
• The fairy tale The Hind in the Wood justifies the "wicked" fairy's outrage: the Fairy of the Fountain was the first fairy to befriend the Queen, and in fact introduced the Queen to the fairy who allowed the Queen to conceive a daughter in the first place. But by the time the little Princess was born, the Queen had neglected the Fairy of the Fountain and forgets to invite her. No wonder she's upset...
• In the Rainbow Magic series, this happens a lot with Jack Frost. Very often, he crashes a party that he wasn't invited to.
• the secret lives of Princesses:
  • Sleeping Beauty was cursed because her parents forgot to invite a distant cousin who worked as a fairy.
  • Miss Hap's clumsiness was a curse brought on by her parents' limiting the catering costs by limiting the number of party guests.
• "Sleeping Beauty". The circumstances for the evil fairy not being invited vary, from a simple clerical error to (as in the Disney version) outright not wanting her there. (Though in "Sun, Moon, and Talia", an older variant, it was just a prophecy, not a curse.)
• In the first book of the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, the good fairies, figuring this is going to happen, arrange for the wicked sorceress to get a date the moment she walked in the door. This confuses her to the point where by the time she finds herself obliged to provide the Traditional (fairy tale tropes are a literal force of nature in this series) curse, the only thing she can think of is that on her sixteenth birthday, the princess will have a spectacularly bad hair day. In the fifth book, it's mentioned that a Genre Savvy king who had enough troubles on his plate found a different solution: his daughter's christening was held in a quiet, private ceremony. Since nobody outside the immediate household was invited, nobody could take offense at not getting an invitation.

Live-Action TV

• Happened to Drew and Mimi on The Drew Carey Show. A new co-worker invites every single person at Winfred Louder to a huge party he's hosting, except Drew and Mimi. So the two team up to crash the party and ruin everyone's fun. Except it turns out Drew was invited. The guy throwing the party had planted invitations in every pocket in Drew's suit while doing an embarrassing magic trick in the office. Drew just never checked his pockets and thought he was being made fun of. When Mimi asks where her invitation was hidden, though, she finds out she really wasn't invited. Nobody likes her because she's mean.
• Happened in one episode of Kenan & Kel, where Kenan decides to set up a booby-trapped birthday present for Marc after he didn't get invited to his birthday party, even though he didn't want the invitation in the first place. It was revealed that Kenan was originally going to be invited, but in an effort to avoid Marc, he told Sharla to lie about something in order to get out of the party. Sharla told Marc that he was going to have a surgery on his ear, and thus is unable to attend.

Music

• In the Starbomb song "Crasher-Vania", Simon Belmont is upset that he was not invited to Dracula's party, so he crashes it and slaughters all of Drac's monster pals.

Myths & Religion

• In Hindu legend, the Jerkass Daksha holds a big sacrificial party but doesn't invite his son-in-law, Shiva, because he doesn't approve of Shiva being a dirty dreadlocked pot-smoking naked hippie. Daksha's daughter, Sati, becomes enraged and ruins his sacrifice by immolating herself in the sacrificial fire. Depending on which version you read, this might also involve Sati turning into Kali and going on a kickass rampage together with Shiva and their demon armies.
• In spite of not being a villain, Ilya Muromets once burned all of the church steeples in Kiev because he was not invited to one of Prince Vladimir's parties.
• From the Finnish epic of Kalevala: When the Maid of the Northland gets married, the hero Lemminkäinen, who had wooed the same girl before without success, is the only one in all of Finland who is not invited. Resenting the shame done to him, he gatecrashes the wedding feast, where he ignores the hostility of the host and behaves rudely to the guests until he is challenged to a swordfight duel by the bride's father. Then he lops off the head of the latter before the duel even really gets started and dashes off, eventually escaping to safety.
• Cunningly averted in a Swedish folktale. A farmer was on good terms with a troll living nearby. When he got his first kid he understood that the troll wanted to be the kid's godfather, but the farmer thought that was going a bit too far - but he didn't want to make the troll angry. So he goes to invite the troll directly. The troll gets happy - but then the farmer starts bragging about who is coming to the christening... namely a whole cadre of famous saints, making the church-fearing troll nervous. When he finally adds that the old pagan troll-foe Thor would provide the music, the troll has had enough and doesn't want to come anymore, but to get out of it with his honour intact he gives a huge christening gift to the kids, trolls being proverbially rich in Swedish folklore.
• Talmud: A parable tells of a first-century Jewish man who has a friend named Kamtza and an enemy with the similar name of Bar Kamtza. He throws a banquet and tells his servant to invite Kamtza, but the servant invites Bar Kamtza by mistake. When the latter shows up for the banquet, the host, in front of all the other guests, orders him to leave. Bar Kamtza, wishing to save face, offers to pay first for his own meal, then for half the cost of the banquet, and finally for the full cost, to no avail. He leaves the banquet so humiliated, and angered at the failure of the rabbinic sages present to stand up for him, that he engineers an elaborate plan to convince the Roman authorities that the Jews are planning to rebel. As a result, says the Talmud, the Second Temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled.
• In The Trojan Cycle of Greek Mythology, Eris the goddess of strife was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. In revenge, she crashed the party and threw the Apple of Discord into the event to cause the other goddesses present to start fighting over it. It would eventually get resolved by Paris, a mortal prince of Troy, choosing Aphrodite as the fairest of them and being rewarded with the hand of the World's Most Beautiful Woman, Helen of Sparta. The Greeks were not happy with how Paris chose to claim her, and thus began the Trojan War. That makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.

Newspaper Comics

• A Running Gag early in Peanuts was that the Girl Posse of Patty and Violet would announce to Charlie Brown that they were having a party and not inviting him. His most successful response to the taunt involved threatening a highly improbable version of this:
  Charlie Brown: If you don't let me come, I'll get in a jet fighter, and fly it over your house, and strafe it! Then I'll come back with a bomber squadron, and we'll bomb your party to pieces!
  Patty and Violet: (nervous) Okay...you're invited.

Pro Wrestling

• Mercedes Martinez sought revenge on Daffney Unger for not inviting her to Nikki Roxx's birthday party by knocking them over and dumping Roxx's cake on them. Daffney had invited the entire SHINE roster but Martinez missed the memo.

Theatre

• In The Golden Apple, Mother Hare suddenly arrives at the church social with a burst of thunder and lightning, to the consternation of Lovey Mars, Mrs. Juniper, and Miss Minerva. After insulting the three ladies for not having invited her, she presents them with the titular Apple of Discord.

Video Games

• Inverted in Always Sometimes Monsters. The plot kicks off when the protagonist is invited to attend their love interest's wedding. Said invitation is sent by the protagonist's former best friend, who does so purely out of spite. If the protagonist manages to make it to the wedding venue on time, they can attempt to win their love interest back.
• In the Barbie as Rapunzel game (which takes place after the movie) Gothel puts a curse on the castle because she wasn't invited to a masked ball, even though it would be impossible for her to go even if she were invited. She then helpfully explains how to break the curse.
• In Hearthstone, the adventure One Night In Karazhan is kicked off by the demonic Prince Malchezaar angrily storming into Archmage Medivh's eponymous tower due to not being invited. Medivh then mentions that the last time he invited the demon prince, the latter inflicted some serious property damage and thus the archmage is wary about giving another invite.
• Mario Party 7: Bowser embarks on this, because he's really mad Toadsworth didn't invite him on a luxurious cruise like the rest of the cast. This is also the reason for the Bowser Time mechanic, where the Koopa king shows up every 5 turns to ruin their vacation with deeds ranging from messing with the boards themselves or forcing the players to pose and pay for funny, board-relevant group photos he snaps.
• This is the central premise of the game Naughty Bear.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • This happens in the Halloween short "Doomy Tales of the Macabre. Although Strong Sad didn't really have much room to complain, since the last time he was invited to someone's party, he depressed everyone to the point that they outright banned him from coming to future parties.
  • The Strong Bad Email "labor day" has this happen by accident; Strong Bad decides to take the day off from answering emails and instead hangs around by the Stick insulting everyone who walks by. It turned out they were all heading to Homestar's Labor Day barbecue, which he didn't know about because he wasn't checking his email.
• Pucca held a party and Ring Ring wanted revenge for not being invited. She just missed the invitation.

Web Videos

• One of the questions sent to Ask That Guy with the Glasses asks how to handle the fact that the asker's friends held a party and didn't invite him. Surprisingly, That Guy gives an honest answer that the best way to solve this problem is to talk to the friends and try and mend the misunderstanding between them as understanding is the only way that people will grow.
  That Guy With The Glasses: Nah, I'm just kidding! Castrate them.
• In Monster Factory, the Final Pam was apparently not invited to a barbecue that her neighbor was hosting. So she made a helicopter crash land into his yard.
  Pam: Next time you invite Pam!

Western Animation

• In the Adventure Time episode "Princess Potluck", the Ice King tries sabotaging a nearby potluck being held by Princess Bubblegum. Turns out the Ice King really was invited but overlooked the invitation letter.
• The Charmkins kicks off when Dragonweed and his cronies are miserable over not being invited to the festival, and they decide to kidnap Lady Slipper as a result.
• In Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a bull terrorizes a town over not getting invited to a festival.
• Done in an early episode of El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera.
  Zoe Aves: How dare she not invite me to that party I would not be caught dead at!
• In the episode "Debutante Ball" of Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats, Cleo is not invited to the high society ball thrown by her childhood friend Muffy DuParr. The reason she's not invited is her lack of pedigree, even though Muffy holds a debt of honor due to Cleo looking out for her during their childhoods. Cleo's rarely as angry as she is over this and what with the Catillac Cats being Anti-Heroes, they crash the party and ruin it. They didn't mean to go quite as far as they did, but they're not sorry for it either.
• Legends of Chamberlain Heights: The episode "Party Over Here, F*ck You Over There" has Grover throwing a party at his house where everyone from school is invited. Everyone except Randy and his friends, who were going to be the ones throwing the party and try to ruin it with an exploding beer keg, only for the guests to decide to continue the party while naked. This prompts Randy to try and beat up Grover until Montrel and Shea arrive to knock him out instead.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Discord gets angry and jealous when he learns Fluttershy invited someone else as her plus one to the Grand Galloping Gala instead of him. Fluttershy only did so because she assumed he had his own invitation and didn't need hers, but it doesn't make him feel better. When it turns out he was invited (the mailpony just got lost in Discord's chaotic home dimension), he brings the Smooze as his own plus one in order to both make Fluttershy jealous and wreak havoc on the Gala.
• Rocko's Modern Life: In the Christmas Episode, Ed Bighead is bitter about not getting an invitation to Rocko's Christmas party, so he starts an ugly rumor about the Christmas elves that have moved in across the street in order to discourage people from going. It turns out Ed's invitation got lost in the mail after all.
• T.U.F.F. Puppy: Half of the Chameleon's motivation for repeatedly trying to get T.U.F.F. and D.O.O.M. to destroy each other in "Share-A-Lair". He obviously wants T.U.F.F. destroyed for repeatedly foiling him, but why does he want to have fellow villains D.O.O.M. destroyed? They never invite him to their ice cream socials.
• Walter Lantz's version of Sleeping Beauty had the evil fairy missing the invitation. Upon learning she had indeed been invited, she decided to set things right.

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