Bully (video game)/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Derby Harrington and Bif Taylor are regularly considered to be a homosexual couple. While it's easy to see why Derby/Bif is a popular slash pairing (Bodyguard Crush), it doesn't explain why this caught on with the Bully fanbase at large.
    • This was born from a random line that Dan Wilson, one of the Jocks, says. "Word is Bif and Derby are made for each other." or something very similar to that.
  • Gary Smith: just a jerk, or Jerkass Woobie?
    • Jerkass interpretation: just a smug narcissistic jackass who isn't as smart as he thinks he is, who's primary motivation is that he loves manipulating people.
    • Jerkass Woobie interpretation: he hints that he has a horrible homelife, a host of medical problems for which he has to take pills that make him feel horrible, a personality and attitude that prevents him from having friends.
• Anticlimax Boss: Read Breather Boss below.
• Awesome Music: Almost the entire score is an Ear Worm and everything is beautifully composed, taking in a wide variety of styles which fit moods and places very well.
  • "Vendetta Preps".
  • "Beach Rumble" (which also plays throughout the final mission and into the boss fight).
  • Don't forget "The Big Game".
• Breather Boss: The final boss fight against Gary on the school roof. Despite truly epic final battle music, he's actually not a lot tougher than the standard enemy Mooks you've been beating up throughout the game, and may even be weaker, considering he spends most of the fight blocking your punches with his face. Makes sense if you think about it. After all, what sort of fighting experience did Gary have, especially when compared to the punch-happy Jimmy? The difficulty of that fight is largely based on chance, depending on how good you are at dodging Gary's attacks before you can get to him, or pure luck, seeing as how you can't dodge his thrown bricks. If your luck doesn't hold out, you might go into the actual fight with your health almost gone.
• Complaining About Games You Don't Play: As stated above, when the game was first announced, every Moral Guardian protested, saying the game was about a bully who beats up students. Some went as far as to say that it was going to be a Columbine simulator, simply because it was being developed by the same company (Rockstar Games) that developed the Grand Theft Auto series. When details of the game was released, it turned out to be the complete opposite. After the game came out, the same people then switched their protest due to the fact that there's an option to kiss some boys, crying that it was some kind of gay agenda. This is ironic considering this is optional on the player's part.
  • The first part was most likely intentional on Rockstar's part, as they have a history of deliberately stirring up controversy in order to get tons of free publicity for their games.
• Critical Research Failure: The Post-Script, which omits the actual sentences served once appeales were filed.
• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Not as bad as some of Rockstar's other examples, but technically speaking, our protagonist is a bully. And he's in a school full of bullies.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Gary Smith.
  • The Greasers (excluding Lola) in general get this. It probably has something to do with the Greasers being the only clique that isn't inherently unsympathetic and the aforementioned All Girls Want Bad Boys.
  • Parker Ogilvie also gets it, mainly because he's basically a repressed nice guy by nature. Fanfic, however, forgets about the "repressed" part a lot, as well as the not understanding why he can't buy friends and love thing.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Some of the minor characters have big followings among the fan community.
• Fanon: With only slight amounts of time for characters to develop, a number of characterizations in fanfic have stuck and been repeated in other stories. A couple popular ones...
  • Trent Northwick is a serial molester of new girls, and he has horrible tobacco mouth from smoking.
  • Derby Harrington is a foppish ponce who can easily be taken out with a right hook by any Author Avatar Mary Sue, and needs Bif to do everything for him. This is especially ironic considering that during Complete Mayhem, he's probably the toughest of the four faction leaders to take down.
  • The Greasers, and especially Johnny Vincent, are essentially nice guys.
• Game Breaker:
  • It's debatable but perhaps the unlocked go-kart is too awesome for the game world. It is faster than all the cars and will comfortably leave any police or prefects in their dust.
  • Additionally, you can use mopeds for the bike races. Jimmy on a moped + everyone else on mountain bikes = nerfed races.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • If Beatrice did something about her hair, braces, posture and cold sores, she's probably be quite pretty. Sadly...
  • Angie.
• Idiot Plot:
  • Jimmy could have ended this in Chapter 2 if he just went to hunt down Gary down. At least during Chapter 1, Gary was giving Jimmy a good reason to trust him until the end.
  • Not to mention, early on, you have to take pictures of a cheerleader in a risque pose. Later on, when they're plastered around town, you have to spray them with paint. Apparently, Jimmy didn't think of just tearing them down, which wouldn't have gotten the police and adults coming after him.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Any of the main characters, any of the bisexual boys. But especially Gord Vendome.
• Magnificent Bastard: This is clearly what the game designers were gunning for with Gary. Fans of the character see him as this, and most fanfiction portrays him as one of these.
• Non Sequitur Scene:
  • What happens when you find all the transistors for The Hobo. He gets sucked into the sky by a tractor beam while a maniacal laugh echoes.
  • Also destroying all the gnomes for Brandi in the Scholarship Edition.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: As with Rockstar's other games, the Moral Guardians and their protests and attempts to ban the games only ensured that it sold well.
• Porting Disaster: The "Scholarship Edition" for the PC. "PRESS <MOUSEWHEEL UP> AND <MOUSEWHEEL DOWN> TOGETHER!"
  • The Wii version of Scholarship Edition is arguably the best version of the game overall, but has one annoyance in that there's no way to do hard swings with weapons. While not a huge problem, it makes a few missions far tougher than they should be.
  • In the 360 version, the music minigame becomes a Luck-Based Mission because of a bug in registering both bumpers at the same time. Moreover, the release version of the game suffered some pretty nasty glitches and performance problems, which weren't fixed for some time afterwards.
  • The music minigame isn't perfect in the PC version either. While the above example about the mousewheel IS fixable by changing the inputs, music class REQUIRES you to use left alt and right alt, sometimes at the same time, inability of some (most?) keyboards to register that input be damned.
• Retroactive Recognition: Michael Pitt and Bijou Phillips.
• Ron the Death Eater: Gary fangirls semi-frequently demonize Jimmy, either to make Gary the good guy or just to get him out of the way of the Gary/Petey slash. And Lola's pretty nasty and immoral, but she's not the force of pure evil that Johnny fangirls turn her into to justify Johnny/Peanut and Johnny/Mary Sue fanfics.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The game has its own version of the Gold Saucer, the amusement park, but there's also a ton of races, collecting, and other side stuff to keep you away from the main story for a while.
• Squick:
  • Everything involving Edna the cafeteria lady. If she's not trying to date rape old men, she's intentionally hacking phlegm into the food.
  • Mr. Burton asking Jimmy to fetch used panties from the girls dorm.
  • There is the mission where Burton gets tumbled around in a portable toilet and is smothered in feces.
  • You can also make out with one of the old women in town.
• Straw Man Has a Point: There are a series of missions where you defend an alcoholic teacher (Mr. Galloway) from getting fired by another teacher (Mr. Hattrick). Granted, Galloway is pretty much the most popular and well liked teacher in the school, and Hattrick is a Rich Bastard. But when Hattrick calls Galloway out on drinking in front of students, he's... kinda right about that actually. Of course, it's stated that years of bullying from Hattrick drove Galloway to the liquor in the first place. Of course, the game is from Jimmy's perspective, and Hattrick is just another bully: if you're getting savaged by teachers, then of course the drunk is preferable to the vicious jerk.
• Villain Sue: Everything goes perfect for Gary Smith right up til his downfall, regardless of how many IQ points the supporting cast has to drop to make it go perfectly for him.
• The Woobie: Pedro. His bullying has been so traumatic that he can't stop wetting his sheets.