Stock Shoujo Bullying Tactics

In manga, especially works intended for the shoujo demographic, bullies tend to read from the same playbook. They tend to be more relational bullying or anonymous intimidation than the physical bullying more common in shonen works. These tactics are most common in shoujo manga, but not limited to them; josei, seinen, and even some shonen works are also full of this, and Western works that treat bullying may use some similar patterns as well. Unfortunately, this is Truth in Television, because a lot of these tactics tend to be used by real-life bullies (albeit in a usually more realistic manner), which isn't surprising since a lot of fictional bullies are based on real-life bullies that the author/creator had to face as a kid.

Common tactics:

• Hiding someone's desk or school shoes. (Yeah, you have to wonder where the hell they can hide a desk without making a mess.)
• Being ignored by the entire class, sometimes with the phrase 'there's a bug in here'. Often enforced by a clique of popular girls who'll do the same to anyone who doesn't toe the line.
• Being cornered and yelled at by a group after school.
• Embarrassing photos, graffiti, or both posted in a public place.
• Stealing and/or throwing away someone's personal items.
• Spreading rumors about inappropriate sexual behavior, especially in the case of girls.
• Insidious Rumor Mill
• Force Feeding, generally bugs.
• Sending loads and loads of harassing e-mails/text messages (or letters in the shoe lockers).
• Defacing desks or shoe lockers or filling them up with garbage
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit
• Placing a flower vase on a desk (signifying a funeral)^note In Japanese schools, it's common to put a flower vase on the desk of a student who died as show of respect. Doing this while the student is still alive sends the message that they should be dead.

Tactics that are usually lampshaded instead of played straight:

• Tacks in shoes, usually in a piece involving performance art.
• Ripping up a girl's clothing.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Amakusa 1637, before befriending Natsuki, Eri was often cornered and verbally abused by other girls.
• In Arisa Shiori gets trash dumped on her desk, which is referred to as "the garbage," and Tsubasa is beaten, harassed, and threatened for daring to go against the King. The King himself also engages in such tactics to appease his subjects.
• In Assassination Classroom, this is why Sakura, an elementary school student, chose to go back to kindergarten: the bullying (which included stuffing her desk full of garbage) got to her in a way she wasn't keen on showing up to school anymore, and she intentionally underperformed (in kindergarten, it bears repeating) to avoid going back. It took positive reinforcement from Nagisa to give her the courage to return.
• Marika Aoki from Bokura no Hentai suffered bullying for several years. She has no friends throughout elementary, save for her friend she's known since preschool, and suffered from homophobic name-calling. By middle school, the bullying had ended though. When she starts going to school as a girl she isn't bullied, though some kids do talk about her behind her back.
• In Bad Company, the other delinquents cover Ryuji's desk in obscene graffiti. It doesn't end well for them.
• BECK: Koyuki is subjected to a school-wide Silent Treatment enforced by Hyodo. Saku is the only one to stand by him throughout, and his talent for music ends up winning everyone over.
• Bleach shows that Ichigo Kurosaki and two of his True Companions, Orihime Inoue and Yasutora "Chad" Sado, were victims of bullying:
  • Ichigo was both shunned and cornered/beaten up in the past because his uncommon reddish hair made him look like a delinquent and either scared his school peers or "drove" bullies and delinquents to fight him.
  • Chad went through exactly the same deal due to his size, his own Face of a Thug matters and being half-Mexican. In fact, he met Ichigo when he stepped in Chad's defense.
  • A junior high-aged Orihime once was cornered by a group of girls who hated her uncommon hair color (light brown in the manga, red in the anime), then was given a Traumatic Haircut. She was physically abused too, as the flashbacks also include Orihime coming home while wearing bandages. This lasted until Tatsuki Arisawa decided enough was enough and ran the bullies off.
• Boys over Flowers:
  • Tsukushi is subjected to graffiti on the wall saying that she's had 'two abortions' and photos of her and a boy in a compromising position.
  • Not only that, but the F4 group (Tsukasa, Akira, Rui, and Soujirou) holds so much power that they can singlehandedly drive the whole school to pull this against one or more students for things as small as just spilling water on them. Tsukushi is actually the first student in the whole Eitoku Gakuen who refuses to take this shit: she first stood up for her then Only Friend Makiko, and then kicked Tsukasa in the face. Which made him fall for her.
• In Bunny Drop, some third-year students corner Rin and get on her case for walking down the wrong corridor.
• The Boarding School arc of Candy♡Candy has more than one example:
  • Candy is bullied not just by Alpha Bitch Eliza and her Girl Posse, but by Neil and his buddies, and occasionally others take part in it. I.e., when Candy arrives at Saint Paul Academy she doesn't know about the dress code rules (wearing a black uniform on Sundays instead of the standard white one) and is cruelly mocked by everyone and especially the aforementioned group when she shows up in the normal white uniform. (Not helped by the very strict nuns refusing to let her change clothes). Eliza spreads Malicious Slander about Candy among the students (which causes some friction with her roommate Patricia at first), and later Neil and his friends trick her into going to the woods and then corner her, verbally harassing her until Terry shows up to set things straight.
  • Later, Candy's friend Annie Brighton is also shunned and verbally abused not just because she is Candy's ally, but because she's an adopted child like her.
  • When Candy is in nursing school, her fellow nurses subject her to the silent treatment when they believe she's just a rich girl who's becoming a nurse for fun. Luckily, it gets cleared up later and they come to see her as being a serious and excellent nurse.
• Case Closed sometimes alludes to school bullying:
  • A filler episode is all about this. The case's Asshole Victim is a student who drove a boy to suicide several years ago due to his bullying and, despite initially repenting, later returned to his bully ways. When the suicidal kid's dad found out, he asked the guy to house sit for him... but secretly trained his pet dog John (a very intelligent German Shepherd) to attack the bully under very specific circumstances... and fatally push him down the stairs of his home.
  • Also, another filler episode has a girl named Maho Izumi as a former victim of this, almost ending up as a Hikikomori due to trauma.
  • An OAV shows that Ran Mouri used to be bullied by her elementary school peers after her parents' separation - in fact, a boy openly mocks her because of it. Sonoko, however, verbally lashes the bully and later Shinichi manipulates the odds to force the kid to apologize further.
  • The Whole Episode Flashback from manga chapters 921-924 shows a massive invocation of the trope. 4-years-old Ran was also bullied in her daycare, and first Sonoko and later a newly-arrived Shinichi stood up for her... but it turns out it was a part of the plan from her daycare teacher and his wife, who wanted to kidnap Ran and raise her as a Replacement Goldfish for their lost daughter. A part of this plan relayed on him tricking the kids into thinking Ran was the "teacher's pet" so they would bully her, then making Ran's parents Eri and Kogoro believe Ran was the actual bully, so she'd come to trust only the teacher and thus becoming easier to "raise" once they abducted her. It would've worked, if not for Shinichi realising some of the teacher's odd behavior patterns and mentioning them to his father...
  • A filler case is about Sonoko's friend Eimi Chikada and her classmates, who have been subjected to bullying by some mysterious enemy. The tactics include Eimi's pigtails being forcibly cut, a girl name Megumi drinking juice that has been tampered with, another girl named Chie having toy spiders put in her stuff, etc. Conan, Ran and Sonoko find out that the culprit is Eimi, who is doing it out of revenge after her crush Yuuto subjected her to a cruel Prank Date; she intends to conclude it by killing herself and making it look like Yuuto killed her. They manage to reach for Eimi before she concludes her plan and stop her.
  • The trope also takes place in the backstory of the "Naniwa Swordsman" case. The members of an Osakan university's kendo team pulled hazing (bullying tactics as a part of an "initiation rite") on the freshmen who wanted to get in, but one of the newbies died. The one who accidentally killed the poor kid threatened the team to publicly release the information and discredit everyone if they sought to kick him out, so one of his classmates decided to kill him because he refused to have his public image in the kendo team ruined.
• Chainsaw Man: After Asa accidentally kills Bucky the Chicken Devil, a couple of her classmates harass her by shoving her shoe locker with raw chicken. Asa's friend Yuko ends up murdering most of them for it.
• Inverted in Cheeky Angel when an antagonist arranges to have stock bullying tactics like stealing school shoes applied to herself and every other girl in their class except the protagonist to make her the odd girl out and the prime suspect.
• Dear Brother:
  • Nanako Misonoo is subjected to several of these tactics when she becomes a candidate to join the high-class group known as the Sorority. When she's reading out loud in class, the local Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse start whining about not hearing her and almost the whole class joins in until the Class Representative Kaoru gets pissed at them. A bunch of second-year girls corner her and slap her verbally and physically after class, specifically saying it's because of the Sorority deals. Her P.E. gear is stolen (and in the anime, her friend Tomoko refuses to lend her hers as she mistakenly thinks Nanako has deserted her). The aforementioned Alpha Bitch issues a petition to have her kicked out of the Sorority under the false accusation that her mother is a Gold Digger who seduced Nanako's stepfather and kicked out his legal wife and son (They actually met after Professor Misonoo got divorced.) This more or less stops around the second half of the series, when the action actually starts kicking in.
  • By association, Nanako's friend Mariko Shinobu also gets bullied by the same Alpha Bitch. She reveals Mariko's Dark and Troubled Past to the whole class (claiming that several girls already knew) and, in the anime, ends up provoking her into hitting her in public. And when Mariko's parents actually split up and Aya brings it up very cruelly, it goes From Bad to Worse.
• In Descendants of Darkness, a boy named Hijiri Minase is verbally harassed by a jealous classmate since he's a mix of Teen Genius and Elegant Classical Musician. When a Deal with the Devil sealed within a cornea that Hijiri received a whole ago through a transplant starts taking its toll (It Makes Sense in Context), Hijiri starts developing a Superpowered Evil Side and begins to retaliate...
• Himeko in Destiny of the Shrine Maiden is cornered by Chikane's fangirls but since hurting Himeko in any way is Chikane's Berserk Button, it doesn't end well for them. After Chikane rapes Himeko as a part of her Face–Heel Turn/Jerk Ass Facade, the girls again start bullying Himeko since Chikane isn't there, but this time Makoto defends her.
• Detective School Q uses these in the Boarding School case: A School Idol is believed to have gone missing, and there's evidence that she was bullied into almost insanity by the Student Council President through the internet. Her internet boyfriend, also a student of the school, kidnapped and killed the Student Council President and attacked a potential Spanner Inthe Works, all in the name of revenge... In reality, however, the School Idol had run away from home after her parents disapproved of her and her boyfriend, and the girl who was bullied by the council president and doubled as the internet girlfriend was a local Shrinking Violet who had a crush on the Sympathetic Murderer.
• In A Devil and Her Love Song, Maria has her uniform ripped up and used as a flag, and balloons of ink put into her school shoes by her teacher.
• Lampshaded in Eensy Weensy Monster, while thinking of ways to bully Nanoha, the girls of the class think of ripping her party dress or putting a tack in her shoe 'like in a manga'.
• Fruits Basket deals with bullying at least thrice:
  • Kisa Sohma is the victim of a version of the ignore tactic. First everyone in her class ignores her, and then whenever she says something everyone starts to giggle. This turns her into an Elective Mute.
  • Tohru Honda and Saki Hanajima were also subjected to bullying in their earlier years. Tohru's playmates publicly humiliated her via playing a game and bending the rules so she would end up alone and unable to join in, while Saki was beaten and later force-fed a bug by a boy and she almost killed him with her powers by accident.
  • The Prince Yuki fanclub try to keep bullying Tohru out of jealousy for how friendly she is with Yuki (among other things, they fix the voting for a school play to make Tohru be the evil stepsister in Cinderella and shove Tohru when they see her talking to Yuki), but aren't able to do anything really bad because of the continued presence of Hanajima and Uotani.
• In Gakuen Hetalia, New Transfer Student Seychelles is laughed at by the rest of her class when she introduces herself to them. One of her classmates is even taken to the infirmary due to laughing too much. Not to mention she's pushed around by Student Council President England and his Number Two France. She doesn't let that get to her.
• Gakuen Ouji has a lot of this. Rise gets water poured all over her, her desk and notebook vandalized and a cockroach placed in her flip-phone, just to name a few.
• Once in Gals! a minor character found herself at the receiving end of being ignored and yelled at, being her homeroom teacher's Scape Goat for their defeat in a sporting event against Ran's class. Thankfully, this ends once the teacher's true colours are exposed and he's fired.
• In the shoujo manga Gatcha Gacha, Hiroyuki's fangirls write graffiti about Yuri being a slut on the walls, but Hiroyuki comes every day before school to remove it.
• Komari in Gokujou Drops is similarly cornered by Yukio's fangirls, who strip her nearly naked, and Komari hides in embarrassment until Yukio finds her.
• Hell Girl has several episodes involving bullies and bullying, with the victim invariably being driven to pull the red string to send their tormentor to Hell.
  • The very first episode involves school council member Mayumi Hashimoto being tormented by Aya Kuroda, who not only steals the 100,000 yen in donation money that was entrusted to her, but then frames her for the theft, forces her into Compensated Dating to get the money back, and then blackmails her with photos of her in the grip of an older man, which she threatens to release to the school if she doesn't continue to pay her and her Girl Posse — and then Aya decides to release the photos anyway For the Evulz, getting poor Mayumi in trouble with the administration and driving her to pull the red string.
  • The first episode of Futakomori features another bullied schoolgirl by the name of Maki Onda, who has to deal with an unknown party vandalizing her books and even her shoes with "Die", "Kill yourself", "Stinker", and other mean-spirited things; sewing the sleeves of her jacket together, and even putting caterpillars into her pencil box without her knowledge. She soon finds out that her teacher, Ms. Kamishiro, is the one doing this to her when her classmate Nakase shows her the caterpillars and the mannequin used in one of her worse pranks involving locking Maki in a running shower room with her clothes on. Kamishiro's worst comes when she burns Maki with hydrochloric acid and tries to coerce her into doing "experiments" with her in some kind of perverted "science club" that she's been running on her own for a while, which drives Maki to pull the red string and send her to Hell.
• In His and Her Circumstances, after she stops trying to be a model student, Yukino Miyazawa has the entire class stop speaking to her. They're led by Maho Izawa, the local Alpha Bitch. Who later is subjected to the same treatment. Things get better after a while, though.
• Kasane: Kasane is a girl that looks like a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl. She used to get beat up and harassed by girls in elementary for having a popular, attractive actress for a mother. Her classmates would write on her umbrella that she should kill herself and she was ostracized by the other kids. In the series proper, classmates write insults on her desk.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple:
  • Kenichi Shirahama enters the Ryozanpaku dojo half to be able to defeat the master and date his cute granddaughter, half to become stronger and face the bullies that pick on him.
  • The aforementioned granddaughter, Miu Furunji, transferred to Kenichi's school after having been bullied at her former one because the local girls were jealous of her physical beauty. This is why she wears glasses and braids her hair outside of the dojo.
• Kimi ni Todoke begins with Sawako being shunned by her class — but not due to bullying, but because everyone believes she's cursed. Later on she faces more traditional bullying from a group of girls who think she's too close to Kazehaya. This is subverted when she actually starts dating Kazehaya; her friends Ayane and Chizuru do things like check her shoes for tacks out of concern that she'll start facing bullying from jealous girls, but nothing actually happens.
• Mohiro Kitoh:
  • In Bokurano, Mako "Nakama" Nakarai is often cornered, verbally lashed at and/or ignored for being the daughter of an ex-prostitute. The anime has a scene where she's thrown school implements while cleaning up the classroom, and when she turns to confront the bullies they refuse to acknowledge her presence.
  • In Shadow Star, Hiroko Kaizuka is beaten up, force-fed bugs and ultimately raped with a test tube by her bullies Aki Honda and her Girl Posse. When Hiroko gains a "mon" right after the rape episode, she murders the bullies, with Aki herself getting the absolute worst of it, and only leaves one girl alive -- and the surviving girl still ends up mutilated.
• Kodocha:
  • At the start of the story, Akito Hayama and his friends are the bullies and at some point, they almost drown Sana's friend Mami when she accidentally presses Akito's biggest Berserk Button. Sana Kurata decides to call Akito out on his shit, which causes Akito to fixate on her.
  • Later, Sana gets bullied more than once by other people, especially Naozumi's fangirls. At least once she's cornered and has her clothes slashed, which reveals her Modesty Shorts.
• Volume 5 of March Comes in Like a Lion displays cases of stolen and hidden possession, public graffiti on desks and chalkboards, and class ostracization.
• Metamorphosis: Saki tries Compensated Dating, and is later blackmailed by some of her male classmates into having sex with them when this is discovered. At one point after this, she discovers that her desk has been defaced, with "Gross", "Pervert", "Whore", "Die", and other harsh words and phrases scrawled all over it.
• Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: Discussed and invoked in chapter 67, as Nozaki stages various attempts to "bully" Mikoshiba and Sakura for a bullying subplot in his manga. These tactics include pestering upperclassmen, leaving fake love letters, leaving tacks in Sakura's shoes (except Nozaki worries that she'll get hurt, so he leaves candy instead), having a friend betray them, and stealing clothes. This manga being what it is, though, all the attempts backfire.
• At one point in Nijigahara Holograph, Amahiko gets the "vase of flowers on your desk" treatment. Having already been ostracized by his classmates, he goes into a rage and trashes the classroom.
• Ouran High School Host Club:
  • In the first chapter of the manga, Haruhi is targeted by a Tamaki fangirl named Ayanokouji, who tosses her bag into a fountain. When Ayanokouji tries to fake Haruhi attacking her, she is soon found out, doused with cold water in public AND permanently banned from the Host Club itself.
  • In another chapter, the Benibara club members suggest that there will be a 'maidens behind the gym' meeting if Haruhi messes the play up.
• Happens a lot to poor Momo in Peach Girl. In fact, this trope makes up a lot of the drama in the show.
• Kind of a theme in both the backstory and the early episodes of The Prince of Tennis:
  • Masashi Arai and his group of friends take the Senpai-Kohai dynamics to the extreme and often verbally bully Ryoma and the other first years.
  • A first year Tezuka once was beaten up for refusing to take a senior's bullying. For worse, the sempai hit him on the elbow with his racket - which is the source of his Game-Breaking Injury
  • In the OAVs we learn that Kawamura used to be verbally and psychologically bullied by the sempais due to being Unskilled, but Strong.
  • The worst case, however, happens in the backstory of Kippei Tachibana and the whole Fudomine team, who were physically abused by the sempais and by their coach. They fight back (with Tachibana attacking the Sadist Teacher) and are suspended from tennis tournaments for a year; they use that time to train, then come back to the circuit when the manga starts.
  • Also, in the anime a teenager Hannah Essenheimer had her tennis clothes torn off by her rivals right before a tournament, forcing her to forfeit and making her stop playing.
• Chapters 13 and 14 of Private Actress have the main character Shiho infiltrating an Elaborate University High's middle school section to learn the truth about Fuyuka Sakuragi, a girl who was subjected to this (i.e. her sketchbook was ripped and stepped on, she made only short calls home because she was being watched, etc.) before she died in odd circumstances. Poor Fuyuka's parents believe that she was murdered by her bullies via being thrown down a flight of stairs by them, and since the police couldn't get any clues confirming their suspicions, they hired Shiho to pose as a student for some weeks/months to get info. Here is where Shiho meets her Foil and Shadow Archetype, Kana Juumonji/Satoka Ryoudo, who is the local Alpha Bitch and responsible for several deaths, not just poor Fuyuka's.
• Ito from Punch Line was bullied in school. One day a teacher drove her home from school and a girl who liked him saw them together. Being a popular girl, she got others to start alienating Ito. The classmates began to ruin her outdoor shoes, scribble in her books, steal her clothes during PE, and throw her things in the trash. This led to her dropping out.
• Ramen Fighter Miki exaggerates this trope through Megumi, who is a Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Instead of hiding The Rival Miki's shoes, she blows up her bicycle tires, instead of posting embarrassing photos, she publishes the true facts about Miki (that she is The Slacker, The Bully and spreads Malicious Slander) in public places, and she sends menacing letters to Miki and leaves Miki’s card at the scene of a crime. Oh, and she leaves hot dog skewers instead of tacks in Miki's shoes.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena:
  • Anthy is a frequent target for bullying, especially due to her "passive" nature. She's frequently yelled at behind the school, which can even devolve into her being slapped around as she won't defend herself but this is because she's the Rose Bride of the Duels, which doesn't really allow her to fight back aside from using words. During a "Freaky Friday" Flip episode between Utena and Anthy, Utena-in-Anthy's body finds herself on the receiving end of this abuse... and shocks the bullies by actually hitting back. Nanami in particular is obsessed with bullying Anthy, as her brother Touga is obsessed over her due to her importance in dueling. Nanami, extremely possessive of her brother and unaware of the duels (back then), once fakes being Anthy's friend to get close enough to her to learn that she gets extremely frightened of people and especially huge crowds and arranges for her to attend a dance in a special dress... then abandons her in the crowd and arranges for her to be covered in water, which causes the dress to dissolve around her. This backfires however as Utena immediately rushes to Anthy's aid and makes her a new dress out of a tablecloth, causing everyone to be further in awe of Anthy. Nanami's bullying becomes more and more incompetent after that - in one particularly funny moment, she gets a snail to put into Anthy's pencil box...only to open it up and find that Anthy already keeps snails there.
  • In "Troublesome Insects", Nanami turns her jealous wrath toward her Beta Bitch Keiko for daring to share an umbrella with Touga. She bans her from all extracurricular activities and has the remaining members of her Girl Posse deliberately snub and ignore her, which drives Keiko to become a Black Rose Duelist.
• Sabagebu!: Momoka suffers from these tactics in the first episode. The girls' idol Miou turns up to stop the bullying and make them apologise. Momoka tells them there is no need to apologise, and then bullies them back tenfold.
• The first Sailor Moon anime has quite a bit of this:
  • Usagi once finds a tack in her shoe... She put it there herself for the drama of it all.
  • Ami used to be a victim of the "silencing" tactic by other students since they believed that she was arrogant due to her intelligence — in reality, she was too shy to approach them. She was also totally ostracized and badmouthed by others in one episode of R when she was framed for cheating in tests by the Monster of the Week, but once this is cleared up the other kids set it aside.
  • In the R movie, it's revealed that Ami wasn't the only victim. Minako used to be looked down and shunned by classmates who found her too weird and childish ^note ("Ooooh, Aino-san's playing pretend! She surely thinks she's Sailor V!"), while Makoto and Rei were feared and isolated because of either bad reputation as a bully who picked fights with others (Mako) or Psychic Powers that creeped people out (Rei).
  • In S, Hotaru is subjected to the ignoring tactic too since her schoolmates are in fear of both her seizures and her odd healing powers.
  • There's the memorable scene in which Eudial finds slugs (which she hates) in both her slippers and her locker courtesy of Mimete. This has fatal consequences when Mimete not only puts more slugs in Eudial's car, but she also tampers with the brakes — Eudial is too panicked by the slugs to drive well and ends up fatally crashing.
• In Sakuran, the other maids hide Tomeki's kimono and she gets scolded for this.
• Discussed in The Secret Notes Of Lady Kanako: Kanako notes that the 'girl culture' way of getting ahead is putting tacks in shoes rather than working hard at ballet.
• Towards the end of Serial Experiments Lain Lain's teacher and classmates hide her desk and pretend she doesn't exist. but her life has become so surreal at that point it's not clear if this is happening in the real world.
• In the anime version of Shaman King, Lilly (the Meganekko from Sharona's group) was subjected to this by her classmates once her powers as a shaman were revealed. A flashback has Lilly breaking down in tears when she finds insulting messages written in the classroom's blackboard.
• A Silent Voice is about the bullying that a deaf girl named Shouko is a victim of. They make a montage of Shouya bullying her. He mocks the way she reads out loud in class, and with the help of Ueno, throws her hearing aid away, drenches her in water, and rips the hearing aids from her ears causing her ears to bleed.
• In Skip Beat!, Kyoko has dealt with the entire list, from having her desk hidden to being ignored by her entire class due to her connection with Shou. She notes that that sort of tactic is so common that she couldn't even use it for reference for her role as a bully.
• Discussed several times in Slam Dunk:
  • When Sakuragi spots Haruko in the corridor of the third-year students (she was delivering her older brother his forgotten lunchbox), she tells him she's very nervous and fears that she'll be thrown out. Sakuragi blushes and admits that he's kinda scared too. (Despite being a very feared ex-delinquent as well). They both run away when they're spotted by the seniors.
  • Rukawa's trio of rabid fangirls bully both Sakuragi and Haruko. The first is booed and verbally lashed at during training, the second is badmouthed and pushed to the ground once by the leader of the group.
  • Happened in Uozumi's backstory, and it was so severe that it almost drove him to leave basketball as a whole.
  • The most serious case, however, is Mitsui and his friends hounding and bullying Sakuragi's teammate Miyagi. At some point, they corner him outside the school and a brutal fight ensues, sending both of them to the hospital. It turns out Mitsui used to be a basketball star like Miyagi, and having suffered an almost Career-Ending Injury he fell into delinquency and bullied Miyagi out of envy because he had the place in the basketball team that should've been his. When this is revealed, Mitsui sees the coach of the team and has a tearful Heel–Face Turn, earning a Last-Second Chance and becoming Miyagi's friend.
• Even though it's a shonen anime, the Girl Posse in Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry just loves applying stock shoujo bullying tactics to the protagonist, usually by tearing up her uniform while she takes a shower.
• Keiko Suenobu:
  • Life (2002) has many examples of this trope. Hiding the desk? How about we throw it out the window. Tacks in shoes? Nah, let's make her eat them. Embarrassing photos? Of the main character being raped.
  • Limit (2009) has this as backstory, with Morishige being ignored and mocked by the entire class.
• In Suicide Club, after a girl confronts Saya about naked photos of her that the girl found in her boyfriend's possession, she makes dozens of copies of the photos and posts them on bulletin boards in the school with notes saying that Saya is selling such photos. She's eventually found dead, and is later revealed to have been murdered by Saya.
• Tokyo Babylon has a girl named Hashimoto, who is totally ignored by her classmates when they're not treating her like shit. She first appears when the class is organizing a trip; she sits alone, and when the teacher asks the other students if someone will join her, nobody wants to.
• Tuxedo Gin has a rather... unusual version played out when a penguin named Linda falls for boxer-turned-penguin Ginji. Besides trying to trick him into a Baby Trap, upon finding out that Ginji is still in love with his human girlfriend, Minako, she resorts to sneakily doing things like leaving tacks in Minako's shoes.
• In ViVid Strike!, Rinne gets subjected to this by three of her schoolmates, simply because she refuses to join their club. This includes destroying her shoes and school supplies, and ultimately culminates in stealing her grandfather's precious tie pin and dropping it in the toilet, then beating her up so that she falls unconscious. Since the latter, combined with the bullies breaking her phone, resulting in Rinne being unable to go to her grandfather's side during his final moments, she performs a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on her tormentors.
• Wandering Son:
  • This happens to the closeted transgender girl Nitori, mostly in the elementary chapters. She's teased by boys for being too feminine, a boy makes a rumor she's dating her best friend, and at one point some boys try to check what genitals she has. She does mostly fine until she comes to school in a girl's uniform in mid-middle school and gets ostracised.
  • Cool Big Sis Yuki was also victim of this when she was a middle schooler. One incident that involved boys forcing her to dress up in the girls uniform stunned her so much she dropped out of school and became a Hikikomori.
• Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches: Urara Shiraishi is subjected to bullying from Rin Sasaki and her Girl Posse by having her lunch shaken up and her books and locker defaced with abusive graffiti among other things. But while Urara is usually an Extreme Doormat, the bullies' actions are first seen when it's actually Delinquent Ryu Yamada in Urara's body — and he decides to take some violent steps to put an end to it.
• In YuYu Hakusho, being bullied pushes Kiyoshi "Seaman" Mitarai into becoming a member of Sensui's group. There's a flashback in which he's seen being beaten up and mocked by his classmates.
• Zekkyou Gakkyuu shows several of these tactics whenever bullying becomes part of the chapter's plot. School shoes being scribbled on or hidden, garbage being dumped into or on top of the desk, and writing/scratching hateful messages onto the desk, are some of the most common ones used. It also uses the more violent ones, where the bullies beat up their victims and even manage to drive some of them to (almost) committing suicide. Narrator Yomi's background involved such severe bullying that she chose to kill herself along with her bullies.

Fan Works

• The RWBY AU fic "Red Thorn" had Ruby subjected to this by some of her classmates when she's first adopted and raised by the Mibu, due to their society's isolationalist nature and general distrust for outsiders. It culminates in one of them pulling the flower vase stunt, but since Ruby was still learning the culture, she's moreso confused by everyone else's shocked and offended reactions to what she believed was a kind apology gift.
• In one Saki fanfic, in which the eponymous character transfers to Ryuumonbuchi, she gets a flower on her desk. The subtext flies over Saki's head, but her friend Koromo immediately gets it and becomes upset.

Films — Live-Action

• The bread and butter of the 4th grade mean girl posse in An American Girl Chrissa Stands Strong - chief bully Tara starts out poking Chrissa with pencils and ordering her minion Sonali to steal all of Chrissa's Valentines, but she escalates to throwing away Chrissa's clothes after swim practice, spreading rumors that Chrissa has a contagious skin condition, and tricking Chrissa's brother into nearly drowning.
• In The Boy Who Could Fly, both Milly's Eric and little brother Louis are victims of this. The first is mostly ignored by the high school kids, and the second is cornered by bullies.

Literature

• Another:
  • A girl named Mei Misaki is so completely ignored by her classmates that the New Transfer Student Kouichi Sakakibara isn't even sure she isn't a ghost. Turns out that this is a countermeasure against a fatal curse that affects the class, and by talking to her, Kouichi unknowingly unleashes supernatural death upon the other students. Though it later turns out that the curse had already been unleashed.
  • In the original novel, Kouichi himself was bullied in his former school in Tokyo because he shared his name with "Seitou Sakakibara", an infamous teenage killer.
• Durarara!!:
  • Mairu Orihara has a number of strange habits, including wearing a non-standard sailor fuku, never shutting up and loudly reading porn at her desk. As her brother predicts, she is immediately targeted and her desk is covered in nasty messages, but unfortunately for them, Izaya is also correct in that his sisters won't take it sitting down. Mairu quickly hunts down the bullies, threatens to force feed one tacs to get her to point out the leader. Mairu then takes her to the washroom, and it's unknown what happens inside, but Mairu comes out, alone, with her bra and uses it to clean up her desk.
  • Kururi Orihara, like her sister, is targeted by bullies for being weird, namely her almost never speaking and wearing a skimpy gym uniform constantly. She soon finds her desk vandalized but appears to have no reaction to it. Aoba goes to confront the perpetrators and harasses them, only for one of the girls' bags to catch on fire and the girl gets in trouble for having fire-starting supplies on her. Aoba then meets with Kururi and Mairu and realizes Kururi set the bag on fire.
  • A classmate of Akane Awakusu is bullied by having her desk vandalized and stuffed with trash. Akane then goes to confront the bullies and orders them to stop, with them complying. Akane initially believes it's because they realized it was wrong, only to find out her classmates had been planning to subject her to the same treatment, but decided not to because they learned she was the heir to a yakuza family.
• In Haganai, Sena Kashiwazaki's Rich Bitch attitude comes from being subjected to this. She's smart, good looking, athletic, well-stacked, popular with the boys and the daughter of the school principal/owner... which causes other girls to develop jealousy and therefore isolate her, as well as spread rumors about her to make her look bad and probably make themselves feel better. Kodaka points this out in the first episode when she introduces herself formally.
• Harry Potter:
  • The bullying that Luna Lovegood faced sounds a LOT like this. She specifically says that her Ravenclaw classmates used to hide her stuff and force her to look for it, and also gave her Embarrassing Nicknames (like "Loony Lovegood"). Apparently, Ginny Weasley was her Only Friend for years until she joined Harry's group of friends.
  • Myrtle Warren aka "Moaning Myrtle" was bullied for her looks by her fellow Ravenclaw, and once she hid in the girls' bathroom to hide from an Alpha Bitch. Then the Chamber of Secrets was opened, a Basilisk was released near the bathrooms, and Myrtle had the terrible luck of looking at it...
  • Severus Snape was on both ends of this, as he was bullied by then-Jerk Jock James Potter and his friends but also was a member of a school gang that terrorized other students.
• I Had That Same Dream Again: Nanoka's classmates start ignoring her after she tries to stand up for Kiryu, although this doesn't bother her as much as Kiryu's apparent spinelessness in the face of his being bullied does.
• Played for comedy in I'm In Love With the Villainess, where Claire tries to use these on Rei, to no success. It turns out Rei thinks Claire's petty antagonism is adorable and keeps interpreting every action as merely being signs that Claire is playing hard-to-get.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!:
  • After the death of Mary's mother, Mary has been subjected to bullying from her elder half-sisters, which included hiding or breaking her things, as well as verbal abuse up to and including comparing her to a Red-Headed Stepchild.
  • Atsuko was subjected to heavy bullying in elementary school, because her classmates saw her as a weirdo. At a minimum, she was ignored, made fun of, and her things got hidden.
• In Please Bully Me, Miss Villainess!, Elsa Dorothy, the protagonist of the otome game in which the series is set, is subject to bullying from her classmates, from carving hateful graffiti into her desk to putting a spike on her chair. The game's villainess and the story's protagonist, Yvonne Smollett, is often forced to bully Elsa when a "Villainess system" assigns her tasks and threatens her with punishments.
• In Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being, Naoko is so thoroughly and completely ignored by classmates that the bullies trick the school into assuming she's dead and holding a funeral service.
• In Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note, Aya as Class Representative was plainly ignored when she makes an announcement. Sunahara saved her by asking the class to keep quiet and invited her to start again. Of course, this caused a bit of Because You Were Nice to Me.

Live-Action TV

• Boys Before Flowers features lots of school bullying. So much that, in this particular continuity, Jan Di (Tsukushi) gets the chance to enroll in the Shinhwa school after she stopped a student who was a target from this from killing himself. And of course, she's at the receiving end as well.
• Inverted in Carrusel. Maria Joaquina is given the "cold shoulder" by her classmates and as a consequence, she has a sobbing meltdown while talking to Miss Ximena... but this is because the other children got fed up with Maria Joaquina's Spoiled Brat behavior and deciding to not take it anymore, which became quite the Break the Haughty phase for her. Once the deal's cleared up and Maria Joaquina apologizes for her arrogance, the kids take her back into the group.
• Oshin:
  • Little Oshin is subjected to this when she tries to go to school in Yamagata since she's a farm girl who also has to take care of her boss's baby. She gives up going there, and later she learns to read and write thanks to a man named Shunsaku whom she has an Inter Generational Friendship with.
  • Oshin's son Nozomi is heavily bullied at school when it's revealed that he's adopted.
• In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, at some point Usagi is a victim of the "silencing" tactic thanks to the Brainwashed and Crazy Ami.

Video Games

• Persona 5: team members Anne and Futaba both reveal to Joker that they were bullied in the past, Anne for being half-foreign, Futaba because her classmates found her perfect memory and intelligence intimidating. In both cases, this happened well before Joker met either of them and it's long over, but coming to grips with it is part of their personal arcs.
• This is just one of the many weapons in Ayano "Yandere-chan" Aishi's arsenal in Yandere Simulator. If you spread rumors and lower the reputation of a student too much, they'll be bullied by a clique of five popular girls led by Musume Ronshaku. The girls will write hate messages on the student's desk, and after class, Musume will harass the student by clapping chalk erasers against their head while the others point and laugh. If you lower someone's reputation all the way this way, it is possible to drive them to kill themselves, possibly one of the most evil ways to eliminate a rival for Senpai.
  • YandereDev's description of Mission Mode implies that Musume also does the 'destroy clothing variant'. When explaining why students would call in a hitman to begin with and why they might put restrictions on the mission, he uses as an example 'Musume Ronshaku bullies a student by cutting up their swimsuit with scissors. The student calls in a hit on her, requiring the assassin to wear a school swimsuit and kill her with scissors'.
  • Spreading rumors about inappropriate sexual activity is part of dealing with the test rival Kokona since she really is engaging in iffy activities like Compensated Dating and selling used panties ( Because her father is in debt to a loan shark, and she needs money fast to make the payments), and you can use this to make the rumors you spread more believable.

Visual Novels

• Amnesia: Memories subjects the heroine to these through Ikki's fanclub members.
  • Spade World has the heroine get harassing phone calls, though she quickly blocks the numbers and tries to ignore them.
  • Diamond World has them, too, but the heroine's phone broke recently and she doesn't get any. There's also messages sent to her laptop from anonymous senders, insulting her and telling her to 'break up' with someone. Her contact information was also posted online, claiming that she's very open to sexual things, and getting lots of messages from strange men asking for such favors.
• Several students in Danganronpa are shown to be victims of bullying, according to their Free Time Events:
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Chihiro Fujisaki is actually a boy who dresses up as a girl because he was bullied for being unmanly. Touko Fukawa was not only abused by her parents but bullied by her fellow students (including at least one Prank Date). Her reaction to a gift she doesn't like is to claim she once got a fake love letter with a razor blade hidden in the envelope.
  • In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Mikan Tsumiki was a victim of the "ignoring" and "physical violence" tactics, which messed her up so badly that not only is she a Nervous Wreck at the present time, but she says that she'd let people do things like drawing on her and stamping their cigarette butts on her because it meant they would pay attention to her.
  • In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, during the Talent Development Plan, Hiyoko contemplates putting tacks into Sayaka's shoes, not liking her due to the latter being an Idol Singer. Sayaka reveals that she overheard Hiyoko, and is magnanimous enough to not take it personally.
• In The Prince of Tennis Dating Sim Gakuensai no Oujisama, the player character will be bullied if she's a Hyoutei student and gets "too close" to Keigo Atobe. She'll first receive anonymous notes and e-mails, then will be cornered and physically/verbally abused by the jealous Atobe fangirls. And if Atobe is actually the chosen boyfriend, one of their scenes will involve him hiding her from the bullies.
• Higurashi: When They Cry shows that Keiichi Maehara was isolated by other students and had his seat vandalized in his former school for his brilliant grades, which caused him to snap and start shooting people with model-guns. When this goes From Bad to Worse and a little girl gets seriously wounded in the eye, his family moves to a certain place named Hinamizawa...
• In Love, Election & Chocolate, Isara is cornered by bullies and has her underwear violently stolen by them, so she has to spend the rest of the day without panties.
• School bullying is a constant theme in the School Days franchise:
  • The player can play Makoto Itou as the kindest Nice Guy or the biggest Jerkass, but there will be one constant character trait: his absolute HATRED of school bullying.
  • Kotonoha is often cornered and verbally bullied by Alpha Bitch Otome Katou and her Girl Posse, plus Setsuna Kiyoura harasses her because she wants her out of the way of Sekai and Makoto. In one route, Sekai's friends spread rumors about Kotonoha's supposed sluttiness and Otome's Girl Posse first knock down a lunch box that she made for Makoto with lots of effort, and later corner her to beat her up. If Makoto doesn't stand up for Kotonoha during the last part, this will lead her to totally snap and murder Sekai.
  • Cross Days reveals that Roka Kitsuregawa is also bullied by Otome. In this case, it's because Roka's mother was The Mistress to Otome's womanizer father, and the badly-damaged Otome takes out her frustration at such a situation on poor Roka.
  • It's all but stated that Setsuna's affection for Makoto come from him protecting her from students who bullied her for being younger-looking than them.
• In Tokimeki Memorial, when a player commits the mistake of having the Player Character focus only on the chosen Love Interest and ignore all the other potential lovers, they will get so jealous that they'll become all too willing to use the infamous "bombs", aka using the "rumors tactics" towards the PC. If the player doesn't take measures to defuse those bombs, they will explode, heavily damaging relationships with all the characters the PC knows. It's very hard to recover from a gone-off bomb with regular characters, and an essential Game Over with Nintendo Hard characters such as Shiori Fujisaki or Kei Hazuki.
• Aeka Shiraki from Yume Miru Kusuri (A Drug That Makes You Dream), as the mildly strange-looking girl who inadvertently ran afoul of popular girl Kyoka Nanjou, suffers from essentially all of these tactics except rumors over the course of the game (in addition to worse things), culminating in either the events of her route or her unsuccessful attempted suicide. Kouhei himself also becomes a target of theft and attacks after Aeka's bullies find out that they're dating.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!: Yuzuriha finds her desk being vandalized by Akane, who is a bully to her. She decides teach Akane a lesson by swapping her desk with Akane's to make Akane look like she was one who got bullied. Their teacher Hiiragi is concerned by this as he used to be bullied when he was a kid and considers bullies to be rotten-hearted people. Since Hiiragi is Akane's favorite teacher, she stops bullying Yuzuriha.
• MoniRobo: Ai and her posse bullied Sayuu by hiding her belongings and saying horrible things to her. The zenith of her bullying was when Ai locked Sayuu in the emergency food storage closet for the entire tournament day and had the coach replaced with her dad. The day after, they poured dirty water over her and forced her to clean it up.
• Revenge Films:
  • The girls at our school started bullying our friend…: the school's popular girls bullied Ali for getting Bob's attention, as one of them, Clair, had a crush on him. They badmouthed her behind her back, hid her belongings, and tried all sorts of things to discredit her. However, when Ali stopped going to school as a result, Bob went on a rampage against Clair's posse for the bullying they meted out on Ali.
  • The girls that bullied me is backed by the school, but my sister brings justice to them: The OP was bullied by her upperclassmen A and B for excelling at tennis. Both girls damaged her equipment and filled her bags with dirt or milk. When she objected, they assaulted her with her own damaged racket. When the OP's older sister went with her to face the bullies, the headmaster, coach, and principal dismissed the bullying by claiming she did this to herself.

Webcomics

• Lidusis from Black Haze is isolated by his classmates and called "Monster" to his face and behind his back, all because of Chevel's illusion magic showing the students images of a young Lidusis murdering Ibriel, Chevel's little sister. Lidusis doesn't fight back because he thinks he deserves it, though it's still unclear as to what actually happened. Eventually, the bullying escalates, though not before Rood steps in to intervene.
• Dreaming Freedom: Juhyeon isolates Jeongmin from her classmates by spreading rumors, making nasty comments about her, and spreading her private Tweets around the class.
• Red String is an American webcomic written in the style of shoujo manga. Being set in a high school, a number of these cliches are used.
  • Reika is a frequent target of rumors and shaming due to lies spread about her supposed promiscuity and later because she attracts the romantic attention of two boys who are popular with the rest of the school. It's later revealed that Sayuri, a girl jealous of her, deliberately kept spreading the rumors to elevate her own popularity...
  • ...this backfires after Sayuri's attempts to ruin the reputation of two more girls are proven false, leading Sayuri to be the target of the same type of bullying she once perpetuated. One strip featured bugs left in her shoe.
• In Sunstone, this kind of bullying figured into Alan's backstory in college. Wrongly accused of being gay, people harassed him for this, but things escalated when his sketchbook of BDSM artwork was discovered, stolen, photocopied, and then posted around the campus, getting him in trouble. Worse still, it was one of Ally's social circles at the time that kept the gossip about Alan circulating. This contributed to Alan's cynicism about mainstream's society's views about his subculture, and up until he met Ally, he was completely closed off from everyone because, as Ally explains, "when people pull that kind of shit on you, it ruins any benefit of a doubt you might otherwise give strangers."

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • Lisa Simpson has been a victim of this, most notably in the episode "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson" where she's the only girl at a military school. When she's struggling with a machine gun that won't go off and asks for help, two of her classmates pull the old "did you hear something?" bit and leave her to suffer.
  • Lisa herself has either been or almost been the perpetrator too. This is especially seen in "Lisa's Rival": when the super smart girl Alison joined the class, Lisa went crazy with jealousy and decided to sabotage Alison's diorama for class to make her look bad.

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