Basic Trope: A drill sergeant who is torturous to his recruits.
- Straight: Bob is the drill segreant of Troper Company. He's rude, abrasive, and yells at his recruits.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is a nightmare of a man who only communicates by screaming, has driven more than one of his recruits to insanity, and is basically the most hated man in the military.
- Bob greets every recruit with a series of profane reflections on their ancestry, their courage, their physical prowess, and the chastity of their female relations while they are still at the recruiting office. He regularly phones the mothers of the recruits just to insult them for giving birth to and raising the contemptable creatures he is training. When he is in a good mood he "only" orders a twenty mile a day forced march naked in the arctic and walking over glass shards barefoot. The last miserable, no-good recruit to arrive at the barracks at the days' end is tortured to death for his wussiness. And deservedly so.
- Bob literally treats everyone like one of his recruits. When addressing his commanding officer he still yells the same way he would at a raw recruit. Even while off duty and addressing people with no military position, he insists on shouting, spouting insults, and demanding people give him push-ups.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is a Jerkass, but otherwise not terrible by any means.
- Bob pushes his recruits hard, but his attitude is mostly civil.
- Justified: Bob's goal is to toughen up his recruits and/or weed out the weak ones — it's not his job to be nice or friendly; after all, their enemies won't have any mercy for them in a real battlefield, so those who want to make it need to be prepared for it well ahead of time.
- Inverted:
- Bob is a sweet, jolly, fun-loving hippie who gives everyone lollipops and sings happy songs about unicorns and choo-choo trains.
- Bob is a nightmarish recruit who is rude, abrasive, and yells at his spineless drill instructor.
- Subverted:
- Bob is an absolute nightmare of a drill sergeant...until you get out of basic, in which case he's pretty much the friendliest guy alive.
- Bob is rude, abrasive, yells at his recruits...and is beloved by them, being A Father to His Men.
- Bob enjoys a reputation as a nasty sergeant, but it turns out to be unwarranted.
- Bob has a reputation as a nightmare... until one of his recruits breaks and threatens to leave, in which case he supports them and helps them work through the training, helping them succeed rather than let them fail.
- Double Subverted:
- He's friendly after basic if he liked you. Otherwise he's still a Jerkass.
- To an outsider, Bob's men seem to think of him as a father, but if you knew the guys you'd really know they're terrified of him.
- He's actually From Bad to Worse.
- Parodied:
- The Drill Sergeant mentality and attitude are transplanted wholecloth into another environment, like a hospital or office.
- The Drill Sergeant is a horrible tyrant. Until one of the recruits phones home. Then the mothers and grandmothers of the recruits come out to the base and yell at the drill sergeant and terrify him.
- Even Animals Hate Him.
- The recruits arrive at base. As they come in to see their trainer, all of the veterans mock them for their fate. The recruits imagine in their minds what a horrible Drill Sergeant Nasty has been chosen for them. Then their worst fears are surpassed. For he isn't a sergeant at all. He is a lawyer.
- Zig Zagged: Some of the recruits think of Bob as a father, others fear him.
- Averted:
- The drill sergeant is no worse then any other trainer would be.
- Bob is the Drill Sergeant Rock of his company — tough, uncompromising but fair to those under his command.
- Even if it may be Training from Hell, the man in charge is not a devil — he rewards and explains as needed, and when he pushes his students he is not a colossal asshole about it.
- Enforced:
- Bob is starring in a public-service announcement about the psychological risks of military training.
- Good luck trying to find a writer who thinks "Boot Camp" and doesn't thinks of adding their own Gunnery Sergeant Hartman either as a Homage, Deconstruction or Parody.
- Lampshaded: "You've been assigned to Troper Company. Looks like your sergeant is Bob Editor. Heh-heh...have fun, New Meat."
- Invoked: Bob's CO gives him the laziest and most unmotivated recruits knowing it will set Bob off.
- Exploited: Bob is placed in charge of a Penal Battalion; after all, penal battalions are supposed to be unpleasant.
- Defied: Bob is eventually told not to do this because it's counterproductive in this specific example.
- Discussed: "This is expected when someone like me joins the military... being delivered colorful insults by those Drill Sergeants."
- Conversed: "A training scene? OK, better insert Drill Sergeant Nasty here."
- Deconstructed:
- Bob drives his recruits into being brainwashed sociopaths, which could also result in his personal downfall.
- Bob's relentless cruelty pushes one recruit to break and eventually murder him in Revenge.
- Bob's jerkass attitude causes the more polite officers to be scoffed at or not taken seriously, as Bob has his recruits on his side through fear.
- The organization sees a significant nosedive in recuitment figures and an equally excessive increase in trainee resignations because there is no way in heaven, hell, or any realm in between that anybody will want to work with Bob.
- There are recruits who mess around with Bob because of his nightmarish attitude and his boss encourages the recruits because the boss knows that eventually Bob’s going to break them if he keeps up with this.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob is a Sink or Swim Mentor for the recruits' Training from Hell, but either has access to therapists or is one himself when he detects break-down signs.
- Bob is deliberately trying to make himself as abrasive as possible while constantly reminding the recruits that regular officers are way fairer than him — so that the recruits hate him, and respect other officers for being perfectly reasonable in comparison.
- Drill Sergeants are held to professional standards of ethics. The goal is to train good soldiers, not kill or maim them or turn them into sociopaths.
- Bob is still just one instructor amongst many. And even he creates hard soldiers, who survive combat and return home and, even if they curse his name, will also praise said results as they reminisce about him. It's all a matter of knowing what to cut out and emphasize in advertisement.
- Turns out that Troper Company is the company for the headstrong, wanna-be John Winger / Carey Mahoney-type idiots who won't learn how to be proper soldiers unless you break them first (and no, there are times when kicking them out is not an option, either) and Bob is the drill instructor for that Company because he is the only man hard-ass enough to being them to heel. Bob is the proper tool for the job and said gadflies… the faster they keep being pains in the ass for everybody else in Bob’s beloved Corps, the faster they will stop being in a hell of their own making (the hell they may walk into once they leave Bob's command is a different thing, though. At least they will face it with discipline).
- For a given value of "reconstructed": Bob is the drill instructor for the black-ops Sociopathic Soldier squads. To only way to bring someone like them to heel is to be a hell of a lot worse.
- Played For Laughs:
- The actions Bob does turn his entire army into The Chew Toy.
- Bob's drills inevitably devolve into shouting matches of him demanding that his recruits Dare to Be Badass, and the recruits yelling back at the top of their lungs until Bob is satisfied with their attitude. Thanks to Bob working up his recruits that way before training, they routinely beat the assignments with unstoppable ferocity.
- Played For Drama: Drill Sergeant Bob is such a colossal asshole that he is single-handedly responsible by the army's steady influx of Sociopathic Soldiers.
- Played For Horror: Drill Sergeant Bob is a sociopath that summarily executes any trainees that fail his "tests" and has terrorized all of his higher-ups into submission.
- On the flipside, Drill Sergeant Bob's training regimen goes so far the recruits kill him in Revenge for all the cruelty he's visited on them.
- The government behind the military just doesn't give a shit about war crimes and actively wants its soldiers to be brutal in order to further the country's genocidal policies. Drill instructors violently abuse and torture recruits in order to break them into cruel brutes who will take out their anger on enemy soldiers and civilians.
- Implied: The rumors about Drill Sergeant Bob can get pretty extreme, and those who were trained by him talk about the experience with a Thousand-Yard Stare.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob is so abrasive, insulting, and loud that the trainees can't stand him and often fantasize about him suffering a horrible death. Then one of them twists their ankle during training and Bob is the first person at the trainee's side, examining the injury and determining how severe it is. Bob sends the trainee to the infirmary to get his ankle taken care of, then turns around and bellows to the rest of them that his job is to make them soldiers and a cripple is of no use to anyone on a battlefield, and how if any of them get so much as a blister they are to fucking tell him about it. He keeps this attitude up for the rest of boot camp until they graduate, whereupon he turns into a friendly bloke who's downright proud of everyone who made it through. Turns out that his nasty demeanor was (mostly) an act intended to toughen up the recruits so that they'd be able to endure and operate in the conditions one will experience during a war, which is exactly what drill sergeants are supposed to do.
Listen up, maggot! You make me sick. Go back to the main page and give me 20!
