How to Write a Good Fanfic

10.3 - Bullying/Cyber Bullying

Since I tackled Internet Safety in 10.2 – Internet Safety (A Rare Subject) I figured 10.3 should be about the subject of bullying which in turn includes bullying.

The topic is a much more popular topic than internet safety. Currently there are around 37.9k stories which use the #bullying tag. There are 25.9k stories which use the #bully tag. However, only 963 stories use the #cyberbullying tag and 342 use the #cyberbully tag. That's still more than internet safety.

Here are the main issues I see crop up.

The writer doesn't understand what bullying is.

There are unfortunately some people who think anybody who hurts their feelings is a bully, so you have stories where the person we're supposed to sympathize with regarding their plight is in reality complaining about things such as...

Well, let's take Bloom from the original Winx Club. She's a nasty piece of work who gets upset because the girl who is supposedly her bully and is in the 4Kids version offers to send her a postcard from her vacation because Bloom is upset she can't go on a vacation like her friends, which led me to believe the bully was really a friend Bloom was jealous of because her family can afford to send her on a special vacation.

The bullied is actually the bully.

Again, I'm going to turn to the original Bloom as an example. She was the real bully and every time she came home she was constantly making her rival I suppose you can call her feel bad, but the other girl was forced into situations where she would misbehave because she was hurt by what Bloom did to her and was tired of Bloom getting away with it, yet was always the one in the wrong. And yeah, sometimes she was, but more often those were pushed.

There is no reason behind why the person is bullied.

A few people take this statement as me trying to blame the victim of bullying. However, as someone who falls into the statistic of being bullied the reason I was bullied didn't come out of nowhere.

In fact, sometimes bullying is the response to being bullied. Sometimes a person has a disorder which prevents them from realizing their behavior is wrong. Other times the person is jealous of something the person they are bullying has, such as friends, looks, or some other kind of status. Other times the bully hates themselves and takes this out on others. Sometimes the bullied will bully their bully back, but sometimes the bullied will go and bullied others.

This doesn't make it right, but when the reason isn't given, I tend to doubt the situation. Are they really being bullied, or are they perhaps the bully.

Shipping the bully with the person they victimized.

I'm not saying it isn't possible to make this kind of relationship work, but both characters need to grow. The bully needs to become a person who no longer bullies, but the other person must grow into a person willing to forgive their bully. Added to this, it also depends on the severity of the bullying. Most of the time, the story just ends up pretending the bullying never existed – which is dangerous when that is part of what shaped who the victim came to be – or the writer is writing an abusive relationship as if it were a healthy one.