Cyberbully

werobbanks: (answering ostricholympia44's A Normal Guy's Reaction to Cyberbully by taking Refuge in Audacity, a deserved tongue-lashing, or plain cyberbullying) : Normal people suck !

Cyberbully is a 2011 Made for TV Movie starring Emily Osment. It is a Ripped from the Headlines story about a girl who is bullied online after offending a classmate. Aside from the aforementioned Emily Osment, it's earned minor internet fame. The base is divided between a dedicated Fandom, which is very glad that the movie deals with bullying and raises awareness while occasionally featuring great acting, and an equally active community of dectractors who criticize it due to it featuring a combination of possible Critical Research Failure, New Media Are Evil and what is seen by an important part of the base as glorious, glorious Narm.

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This film contains examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny : Some of the jokes between the three friends. On another side of this, Kay Panabaker is pretty good at acting, and Hannah Montanna haters never thought Lily Colins would be this credible in a tragic part.
• Alpha Bitch: Lindsay.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Eric, to Taylor.
  • Probably a Deconstruction, as he goes from annoying to irresponsible to the point it might endanger his sister's well-being... because she refused to lend him her computer.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The solution to cyberbullying is apparently to monitor every single computer and make trolling illegal.
  • As mentioned in Critical Research Failure, it would not only be extremely expensive and time consuming, it would also be infringing on various privacy laws as well. So it's pretty probable that they wouldn't even bother with it.
  • Mitigated by the fact the politician says he will try to pass a legislation making verbal harassment on the internet illegal. Which basically means that reporting insults made somewhere on the internet to the police office like the mother tries to would be constructive. It would just cause prosecussion for repeated, willingly insulting comments about a minor, given they are reported, and their existence is proved, and the case would most probably be brushed away by the judge as a stupid feud between teenage girls unless one of them's sexual orientation or her ethnic origin are invoked.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Lindsay's bitchiness to Taylor is retaliation for a comment Taylor made in Health Class that Lindsay assumed was directed at her. It wasn't.
• Driven to Suicide: Taylor tries to kill herself by overdosing on aspirin, but can't get the childproof cap off.
• Epic Fail: You would think that overdosing on pills would be relatively easy. Just open the bottle and OH WAIT.
  • A meta-example, but the fact that they took something like cyberbullying and turned it into something completely silly is quite a feat.
• Freudian Trio : Cheyenne as Id, Taylor as Ego and Samantha as Superego
• Hypocrite: Played Straight with Lindsay, who lashes out because of the anger caused by a misdirected comment from Taylor, but then bullies her and all the people who have nothing to do with this story, but of whom she can easily make fun, despite the fact that, for some of them, they had common enemies and she had no reason to hate them, but she goes along remorslessly because that's the trend, nicely proving both how self-centered and shallow she is.
  • A part of the base thinks Taylor is this towards Lindsay, in a way : she views Lindsay as a complete bitch for saying nasty things about her (which she is, but that isn't the point), but she never really stops to consider the possibility that Lindsay may have been just as hurt by her comment in Health Class for the first half of the movie (and then, if she does, she does it off-screen, or it is implied during the comfort group scene), whether it was directed at her or not. Taylor, however, is just Innocently Insensitive at the beginning, and she grows out of this, while Lindsay remains a Manipulative Bitch with no concern whatsoever for hurting people, and while Taylor keeps wondering what she did to be so hated, Lindsay immediately goes on to bully another person, proving that it was never her reason for bulying people.
• If You Taunt Him You Will Be Just Like Him: Arguably a secondary message of the film. Discussed during the support group.
• Jerkass: The Alpha Bitch and her father are rather laughable examples due to their portrayal.
  • Although it is realistic in that they never get a real comeuppance and Taylor's speech involves five people and a ten-second long applauding before Lindsay tells them to go and regains her status, still being followed by her friends, and getting some gossip as there probably were before exchanged about her. Also, it is revealed that they may have a Freudian Excuse, and the father reacts as most parents would, except for the way he says what he says. Plus take Evil + Teenage Girl + Popularity + Internet, and you've got Lindsay in Real Life.
• Intended Audience Reaction : Did you find some of the people in the support group scrappy-like ? Yes, granted, they were harmless, but very annoying kids, and either reacted by almost wangsting, seemed to despise the bully way too much, or sounded like Purity Sues. They really came off as annoying and managed to offend you with their self-righteous looks, as they shook your normal-sized self-esteem by making you feel guilty for some trolling/otherwise uncondemnable act you did, and they would never indulge in. You might even have posted comments about how unbearable you found these characters. Why did Lindsay mocked Taylor, already ?
• Life Imitates Art : Emily Osment, who plays Taylor Hillridge, was bullied on her twitter account. The story went a different road because she is a teenage popstar, and has better repartee than her character (who already wasn't stupid). Just read this : [1].
• Lifetime Movie of the Week: It's an ABC Family movie, but it fits the formula.
• Moral Dissonance: The apparent happy ending is to monitor every computer at all times so that even good-natured ribbing of others is considered illegal. Does this remind you of anything?
  • Not to mention that they ignore the Unfortunate Implications
  • Again, debatable because the extent of measures the senator indulges in is not really as huge. See Esoteric Happy Ending, and you might wonder if the moral dissonance is not about not doing enough.
• New Media Are Evil: Probably the reason why there's so much Critical Research Failure.
• One-Scene Wonder: Lindsay's father appears in one scene, but he is played as over-the-top nasty as his daughter.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Follows the trope down to the letter.
• Single Girl Seeks Most Popular Guy: Taylor wants to date a football player.
• Teens Are Monsters: Tries to do this with the bullies, that they will blindly and savagely switch targets in the blink of an eye (shown as the gossip and lies stop featuring Taylor and start featuring Sam, after they find out what the latter had done).
• Teens Are Short: All the main characters are about One Head Shorter than the adults.
• Too Dumb to Live: Among other things, Taylor is too dumb to open a childproof cap without struggling. Making this a strange case of Too Dumb To Die.
• Totally Radical: The teenagers in the movie use a lot of slang that teens in real life stopped using LONG before the movie was made. Among these slang terms used are "bling" and "the clap".
  • At the end, when the word is getting around via texts that Taylor and her friends told Lindsay off, one of the responses that can be seen is "That's fab!"
• TV Teen: So much.