The Chew Toy



"I think the writer hates me..."

- Shinji Ikari, Evangelion Abridged

An odd sort of polar opposite to The Woobie, The Chew Toy is a character the audience loves specifically because his or her misery amuses them so. The Chew Toy is roughed up or messed with on a constant basis... and is always, always used for comic effect and treated with a light touch, generally glossing over the meaner undertones of the idea.

Whatever the reason is, these characters just can't catch a break. Did they do something wrong in a previous life? This life? Or are they just Innocent Bystanders who look as if they'd blow up in a more amusing manner than anyone else in the crowd? Who knows. Either way, the powers that be tend to inflict punishment on them for seemingly no reason, generally but not always of the slapstick physical variety.

Every. Single. Episode.

That's gotta hurt.

Unlike Woobification, Chew Toys are generally designated as such in the series proper, and often have a tendency to bemoan their fate. If they're lucky, the writers will Throw the Dog A Bone a time or two. If they're unlucky, they'll Yank the Dog's Chain. It can sometimes be a delicate balance. Throw too often and the character can be Flanderized into The Eeyore; Yank too much and the audience may no longer find it funny.

If a female Chew Toy is regularly used for physical comedy she probably is also a case of Slapstick Knows No Gender.

Compare with the Butt Monkey (a character who is mistreated regardless of audience opinion), and The Eeyore (whose depression is usually in excess of their actual mistreatment), and the Iron Butt Monkey (who seems to suffer injury and accidents more frequently than anyone should, but is capable of taking it). Contrast with The Woobie, whose suffering inspires sympathy and a desire to make things better for them instead of amusement. The polar opposite is Karma Houdini, where characters do horrible things while karma (and occasionally the other characters) sits back, watches, and eats popcorn.

If the entire cast is made up of Chew Toys of some kind or another, then you're probably watching a Sadist Show.

Anime and Manga

 * Sakura (a boy, mind you), the main character of Bludgeoning Angel Dokurochan, is a particularly good example. He gets killed and revived several times per episodes in the most brutally over-the-top ways possible.
 * At least he isn't the only one to suffer: The angel Sabato, who's introduced in the second episode, has to suffer a lot of misery and hardships after she fails to kill Sakura.
 * Mikuru from Haruhi Suzumiya eventually ends up being God's [[media:haruhi2.jpg|literal chew toy]]... and God is a mix of Genki Girl with Jerkass (and in the beginning, much more the latter than the former). In the opening, she cries as Haruhi forces her to be a cheerleader. She can go either way in The Woobie Vs. The Chew Toy debate, depending on how sadistic the viewer is feeling at any given time, or how serious Haruhi's abuse of the moment is.
 * The computer club president is a much straighter example of this trope.
 * Kon from Bleach. He is the right size for it and constantly fails to be cool. He's is literally a chew toy (or a doll), anyway.
 * Junjou Romantica: Takahashi Misaki, who is the love (and jealousy) interest for an entire clan.
 * The titular Hayate the Combat Butler. He can take it. He trains.
 * Jaken, Sesshomaru's impish retainer, on Inuyasha is forever being abused by his "Master". (Drowned, stepped on, headbonked, etc. Although he's actually fairly good at defending himself from others who mean him harm.) Myoga, the titular character's flea-demon advisor, fulfills this trope as well (for Inuyasha), but once in a while, Shippo may get thrown (literally!) into the role.
 * Sesshomaru's abuse of Jaken in his early appearances was threatening to kill him; it was other characters that beat up Jaken. But as Sesshomaru become less of a villain and started to care about Jaken after a fashion, his abuse of Jaken started to descend into slapstick beatings and verbal abuse.
 * Keitaro in Love Hina. He moved in to the place of his childhood, only to find it to be turned into a girls-only pension. When he is accepted as a legitimate resident (it's a long story) he is then forced to work like a slave for roommates who constantly beat him up for his bad luck, when they're not doing it for fun. It gets better, but for some reason, none of the girls ever get any retribution except one.
 * In Xxx Holic, one Watanuki Kimihiro never seems to get a break. He's antagonized by monsters normal people can't see, degraded and belittled by his employer, constantly having to be rescued by his "rival" and to top it all off, he never gets the girl.
 * It's later either Justified Trope or made worse, depending on perspective, when it is revealed that he is literally , and he knows it. Those invisible horrors stalking him? They're only doing it due to his supernatural nature combined with .
 * Lancer from Fate/stay night may have been a credible threat in the original work, but subsequent sequels and fan works often portray him as largely useless, particularly whenever Archer is around. In the recent Carnival Phantasm series, he's killed off more or less Once Per Episode, and his 'guest appearance' on the (fake) preview for Arcueid's magical girl show has his silhouette dramatically show up... before instantly being hit by a car. Assassin has been entirely replaced with a cardboard cutout.
 * Mesousa from Pani Poni Dash. Not an episode goes by without the universe inflicting some form of misfortune on him, from being attacked by malevolent soda cans to being stranded in space to being used as a literal chew toy. Appropriately enough, his name means "weeping rabbit".
 * Normad, a Deadpan Snarker AI stuck inside an immobile plush toy in Galaxy Angel, is generally abused and mistreated by every single member of the cast (usually due to his snarking pushing somebody's Berserk Button), including Vanilla, whom he worships despite the fact that she drags him around on the ground by his tail, uses him as a shield whenever needed, and has resorted to eating him whenever she's on the verge of starvation.
 * As a Continuity Nod, Mimolette, a bizarre floating cat-head thing from Galaxy Angel Rune gets much the same treatment, despite being generally nice and helpful to the girls. Nearly every single episode ends with a freeze-frame of whatever horrible suffering was piled upon him, following the Post Episode Trailer.
 * Kiyone from the Tenchi Universe branch of Tenchi Muyo endures constant humiliation due to being partnered with Mihoshi, who is the personification of ditz.
 * Mic Sounders The 13th in the first half of Gao Gai Gar lasts, on average, about five seconds in any real battle until he gets swatted away like a fly. In the second half though, the universe makes it up to him by giving Mike a System Change transformation powered by The Power of Rock, and the most potent Weapon of Mass Destruction in the series.
 * In Axis Powers Hetalia, Lithuania seems to exist to be tortured by his best friend Poland, his crush Belarus, and his boss Russia. This can be applied to any of the Baltic States, with little Latvia being the most obviously traumatized. Oh, and let's not forget Ukraine, Russia and Belarus's sister and the only sane nation-tan in the family.
 * This is sadly Truth in Television, as Eastern Europe's history is full of Chew Toy situations. Usually, only Poland gets any recognition.
 * Metallis in Magicians Academy. Not an episode goes by where some misfortune befalls him. All of his magic was drained by Suzuka's first in-show appearance, he was tied up by Synclavia and was the one who released the Hard Gay angel onto the school. After Metallis finds love, the role of Chew Toy shifts to George.
 * Yuuki Rito of To Love Ru invariably ends up in so many Accidental Pervert and Not What It Looks Like moments that get him horribly beaten up by girls, episode after episode (or chapter after chapter if you read the manga). Comes with the territory of having a Magical an Alien Girlfriend.
 * Mutsumune, Mina's Unknown Rival in Getsumen to Heiki Mina, is subject to Amusing Injuries every episode, usually as a result of her hubris putting her in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 * In Excel Saga, Excel normally tries to hold down a job while completing a mission for her beloved Il Palazzo, but her hyperactivity and stupidity means she always fails at both, and destroys wherever she is working.
 * One Piece's Sanji just cannot win. It's not just his constant failing attempts to woo women, either. There's also his dreams of mermaids being destroyed by Kokoro; his attempts at earning a bounty bearing fruit in the form of a poster with a God-awful composite sketch; his childhood dream of becoming Invisible demolished because Absalom beat him to the punch in a way he couldn't even envy; and finally meeting a man who hated him because his face was near-identical to that God-awful composite sketch. Ending up in an island of transvestites, where he was forced to briefly go native and wound up stuck there so long that he briefly experienced life threatening nosebleeds around real women.
 * Spandam: You hate him from the start of the story, being physically weak and feeling strong only because he has strong people working under him, he ruined Franky's childhood by killing his mentor, and he doesn't seem to believe lowly pirates, scum of the sea can possibly be superhuman enough to defeat CP9, and is under the misconception that Luffy only killed 5 of his guards, with no idea that Enies Lobby has actually been invaded by pirates, and then of course, he is punched and crushed with an elephant by Franky (It Makes Sense in Context) then is slapped repeatedly by Robin, while later having his spine broken by her. And after watching the whole "Enies Lobby" Arc, you'll love to watch it, along with his other mishaps during the arc.
 * Hol Horse from part 3 of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure. In his first appearance he was quite a threat, as he kills Avdol, but is forced to run away when his backup is beaten as he's too much of a coward to fight by himself. The next time we see him he's forced into an Enemy Mine situation thanks to his previous actions, but once again gets away, this time with the heroes' car. The last time we see him he's teamed up with Boingo, trying to take advantage of the latter's powers of prediction. He screws up and winds up shooting himself in the face with his own gun.
 * After being disgraced by Edward of Fullmetal Alchemist, Yoki spends the rest of the manga being on the receiving end of constant humiliation, from being beaten up by refugees, practically being Scar's slave and being a useless hostage because no one cares what happens to him. It actually gets to the point that everyone (including the reader and Yoki himself) is surprised when he saves everyone from a really nasty Big Bad with some well-timed Car Fu.
 * In the first anime, it all comes to a head when.
 * Arguably, Ranma of Ranma One Half. He gets a fair amount of Throw the Dog A Bone moments, but examining his past makes one wonder just how much his family must have pissed God off to warrant the stuff he goes through. Some of it is his fault, some of it is Genma's, but a lot of it is just implausibly bad luck.
 * Takeru in Rokushin Gattai God Mars is a terrific example. The head Bad Guy sends him to Earth as an infant such that, once grown up, he will destroy the planet. But things go wrong - relatively speaking - and Takeru, now grown up, decides against the plan. Whereupon the Bad Guy sends out assassin after assassin to kill him and, in just about every episode, he's beaten, burned, frozen, zapped, electrocuted, asphyxiated to within a centimeter of his life, at which point the title robot arrives to save him. In the second half of the 64 episode series, he's even stuck with a psionic device which drains part of his life force if he attempts to use his powers. It doesn't get much worse than that. Oh and, he knows that, if he does die, the super-bomb in his guardian robot will blow up the planet.
 * Originally, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni's chew toy was Satoko. However, by the fourth arc, she's rescued from the bin, and gained a large fan base. She's now just The Woobie. She can go between being a chew toy and a woobie depending on the mood of the show at the time.
 * In Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, Rosa gets the worst of this. And frankly, dying horribly is probably an improvement over what she goes through in some of the other arcs, especially EP4, when  Unlike Satoko, she's still not The Woobie, given her relationship with her daughter.
 * Katsuya Jounouchi/Joey Wheeler of Yu-Gi-Oh almost constantly gets this treatment from Seto Kaiba.
 * Yoshii of Baka to Test To Shoukanjuu gets beat up, starved, given detention, and generally mistreated constantly. And it's hilarious!
 * Shimon of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Gurren Gakuenhen has all of the qualities of The Chew Toy: his prayers for a normal life get answered with Kamina doing a flying kick through his bedroom window (and this is the most normal entrance into Shimon's room Kamina will ever perform), accidentally gets involved with a girl who regularly draws him into bizarre situations, gets chased by sharks for most of the Beach Episode, gets blown up by landmines repeatedly, and much much more. The entire universe seems to exist to make try to hurt Shimon. The only things that separate him from an ordinary Chew Toy is that he is the main character of the story, and the fact that he manages to take a speech about his constant misfortunes and transform it into a Badass Boast and has an Awesome Moment before the end of the series.
 * Yukinari of Girls Bravo. Though some fans differ on whether or not it falls into Dude, Not Funny at times considering how Kirie, who is supposed to be his best friend, beats him up to a brutal degree constantly.
 * Kelly from Transformers Robots in Disguise is a female version of this trope. She's not clumsy or incompetent, just incredibly unlucky. No matter how remote her vacations or how many cars she buys, they will always be ruined by the Transformers on a regular basis. To add insult to injury, it's seldom as a result of collateral damage and instead of incredible misfortune.
 * Episode 1: Fired out of her SUV via Ejector Seat. Episode 2: Car eaten by robotic shark, etc...
 * Sky-Byte was a villainous example, with his tendency towards panicking, and getting blown up. In one episode Megatron mistakes him for an Autobot and blows him up twice.
 * Noboru from Great Teacher Onizuka is abused, embarrassed, and driven to suicide by Anko.
 * The World God Only Knows has Keima.
 * Gai of Saint Beast is a bit of a failure as an inventor, a thief, and a prankster, and frequently gets ribbed over his "boorish" attitude. This is all part of his charm.

Comic Books
"Things seem to go really bad around me [...] It's like my life is being done by some awful, awful cartoon guy. Everything seems like one big, stupid, mean bitter cartoonist's joke!!"
 * More or less every single Big Bad Wolf comic, as well as all Lil Bad Wolf or Three Little Pigs where he plays a part, have him getting the shit beaten out of him by B'rer Bear, Practical Pig, his own son, and pretty much the rest of the universe, no matter whether he's doing something bad or not (granted, he usually is).
 * In Bone, the Stupid, Stupid Rat-Creatures are regularly punished for their henching (or one's love of quiche). Their leader, Kingdok,
 * The title character from Brit. Sure, he's invulnerable, but he gets knocked around constantly. Then it even happens to in the last issue (12).
 * Det. Soap in The Punisher.
 * Calamity James in The Beano. The entire point of the comic strip is that the universe has it in for him, and the humour comes from the never ending stream of horrible luck he goes through.
 * Razguts/Raznuts in the Warhammer 40000 comic Deff Skwadron walks the fine line between this and Butt Monkey. Let's put it this way: only two members of the Skwadron lose a plane Once Per Episode. Killboy loses a plane every mission because his flying strategy is based largely on Ramming Always Works. Raz loses a plane every mission because in the event the enemy doesn't shoot him down, his allies shoot him down (and usually make unkind references to turning back to machine-gun him), and when neither of those happen, he crashes.
 * He also usually ends up bailing out into something nasty, like a Shark Pool or an enemy army. However, he somehow keeps surviving.
 * "Kill me." - Jhonen Vasquez's Fillerbunny.
 * Squee also qualifies as this.


 * Ed from Box Office Poison starts off this way.
 * Gail Simone has made it a habit of treating Cheshire like this in both her run on Birds of Prey and her Secret Six stories. This seems to coincide with Simone's belief that Cheshire is a Complete Monster character, and that her inevitable beat down is Laser-Guided Karma for her despicable actions.
 * In the Robots in Disguise comics in the IDW continuity; Zetca and Dirge have become this. Zetca (A former Autobot) gets beaten almost to death by two Decepticons after getting into an argument, and then beaten up by another, and almost framed for murder. Dirge (A Decepticon) finds himself bored with the war and makes friends with an Autobot. That Autobot is killed by explosions from the planet (which wasn't his fault), and he's almost killed by the Autobot's superior because he survived. Later, he gets a job at a garbage plant, then witnesses a murder, gets mind controlled, and beaten up. When the autobot Prowl breaks the mind control by killing the bot controlling him, he tries to kill Dirge because he witnessed another murder.

Film

 * Ed Rooney, the school director in Ferris Buellers Day Off (1986), unless you find him a Designated Villain.
 * Jeanne, the sister of the protagonist, also comes across as this to modern teens as well (the ones who do actually understand the rules, anyway).
 * C-3PO from Star Wars: "It seems we are made to suffer."
 * Gedevan (the Fiddler) in Soviet cult classic Kin-dza-dza!, to the extent that "Nobody needs the Fiddler!" becomes sort of a catch phrase. All this despite, (or maybe because of), his being one of the only decent people in the whole movie.
 * Red from Pineapple Express. He takes a number of seemingly mortal wounds and appears to die at least three times, only to wake up or reappear a little later, even more grievously injured than before.
 * Ash from the Evil Dead series. In spite of his action hero transformation in the third film, he spends most of the series screaming and getting pummeled by deadites.
 * Andy, the kid from Freddy Got Fingered. In every scene he is in, he gets horrifically injured- either from Gord's antics or the hand of fate.

Literature

 * Pawel Frossengellet from Felsic Current is quite a bad-ass yet seems to be the target of repeated undeserved physical assaults. From serious incidents to minor ones (pratfalling when Fullian Fishk steals his sword, which Frossengellet was leaning on at the time).
 * Any and every Franz Kafka protagonist.
 * Rincewind, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Other characters have pointed out how lucky he is to have survived everything he's been through (unknown to anyone, he's a favourite pawn of the Goddess of Luck). He, understandably, thinks it would have been luckier not to have been through it.
 * Also from the Discworld novels, the Bursar. Accidents are constantly happening to him; if someone throws away something, you can bet that it's going to hit the Bursar. He does not, however, mind (or even notice) since he is on a steady diet of strong hallucinogens.
 * Dawlish the Auror from the Harry Potter books. He tries to arrest several characters and is beaten every single time: Dumbledore, Hagrid, Ted Tonks, Neville's grandmother...
 * It spans in the fandom: at least one fanwriter mentions Dawlish only to have him defeated, usually in a humiliating way (once he even had him beaten by Dudley Dursley with a single punch, leading to Dudley declaring him a Squishy Wizard).
 * Ron Weasley tends toward this as well, especially in the earlier books in the series. Being the youngest boy in a large, money-strapped family, he's frequently saddled with hideous hand-me-down clothes, broken wands (the latter causing him to start barfing slugs during an attempt to defend Hermione), and other hilariously embarrassing misfortunes. The trope is subverted as the series becomes increasingly darker, with Ron's inferiority complex becoming a source of major despair and resentment, eventually leading to his Darkest Hour in book seven.
 * He also has a Self-Sacrifice Scheme in the first book, Nasty broken leg in the third, what ever the hell happens to him in Book 5...
 * Marvin, from The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy.
 * Agrajag, who is repeatedly reincarnated into the universe, and then always killed by Arthur Dent in some way. By accident.
 * Beginning with A Malady of Magicks and apparently never quite ending, the universe picks upon Wuntvor of the Western Kingdoms. It starts with his wizardly master becoming allergic to magic. Wuntvor doesn't get a moment's respite after that. Love, luck, demons, and the Monster's Union all wittingly or unwittingly make life difficult for Wunt.
 * By the end of the series, we've discovered that it's worse than that. Wuntvor is actually the current incarnation of the Eternal Apprentice. This means he has had and will always have this sort of luck, and he will never be truly competent at any profession, for all of eternity. On the other hand, he's maybe one of the greatest non-Shonen embodiments of The Power of Friendship around.
 * The dwarf Bombur in The Hobbit. The poor fellow is constantly the first one on the menu by the enemies that capture them throughout the book, and often enough he's made to go last when put into pairs because of his weight. Not to mention he is the only one that falls into the Enchanted River...
 * Joe Buckley is included in almost every Baen Books book expressly so that he can be killed badly. In Mission of Honor there is the SLNS Joseph Buckley, latest in a line of ships named after a scientist who came to a spectacularly bad end, and almost all of which have themselves been destroyed or vanished. The one that actually appears in story fares no better.
 * Stephanie Plum can't go a single book without being this. If she's not having a car blown up or landing in a pile of garbage, she's getting dyed blue.

Live Action TV
"Howard: Have you got my script?"
 * Fat-Blue/Mr. Johnson in Sesame Street. Can't Grover ever get his order right? Even when Grover isn't around, he has bad luck with other restaurants.
 * Father Larry Duff in Father Ted suffers horribly on every appearance, usually as the result of the title character phoning him at an awkward moment; among other catastrophes he gets buried in an avalanche, mauled by his pet Rottweilers and trampled by a herd of stampeding donkeys.
 * Al Bundy on Married With Children is a perfect example of this trope. Berated by his neighbors, stuck in a dead-end minimum-wage job, and badgered by his freeloading wife for sex every night...it's no wonder he constantly wants God to take him out. Whether viewers identify with Al Bundy because of their similarly dysfunctional home lives and miserable jobs, or simply because they love to see him suffer, much of the show's humor is derived from Al's misery as the Chew Toy. One of the show's producers even told an anecdote about a fan letter they received from a viewer who had a crappy home life and a shit job, but who was always cheered up by the fact that, no matter how bad his week had been, Al Bundy's week was just a little bit worse. That letter made the producers so happy that they framed it and hung it up on the studio wall.
 * Mikhail from Lost. His Eyepatch of Power seems to be the only thing that keeps him alive. Something bad happens to him in every episode in which he appears. He is, in order, beaten up, shoved into a sonic fence and apparently killed, beaten up again, beaten up again, and finally gets speared (and comes back five minutes later) and blown up in his final appearance. Even then, it took Word of God to assure fans that he was really dead.
 * John "Don't tell me what I can't do!" Locke was the man was conned out of a kidney by his father whom he had never previously met and made it obvious that he wanted nothing more to do with John, thrown out an eight story window by said father and paralyzed from the waist down, rejected when proposing to the woman he loved, and when his paralysis is cured when arriving on the island thanks the island's miraculous healing powers and he begins to find a purpose in life, he is sent off the island and killed.
 * Meredith from The Office. She is usually the one to absorb all of the physical damage, from having a bat trapped against her head by Dwight, being hit by a car by Michael, resulting in a broken pelvis, being hit in the face with a football by Pam and setting her hair on fire during an office party. Poor Meredith just can't seem to catch a break.
 * Ted from Scrubs. Usually by Dr Kelso, but frequently by just about everyone else. To the extend that he constantly thinks about either killing Kelso or himself, and almost succeeds in the latter in one episode. It's played for tragic comedy, mostly.
 * More comedy than tragic, though; on the one occasion he managed to jump, an enterprising custodial staff's scam was exposed by the fact that it saved Ted's life. And then the Janitor got mad at Ted for ruining his cushy gig.
 * Howard Steel in The Worst Week of My Life.
 * Bad things happen to Firefly's Jayne Cobb. But then again, being a borderline Token Evil Teammate, he probably deserves it.
 * Blair Sandburg from The Sentinel couldn't get through an episode without being captured, drugged, tied up, shot, held hostage or drowned by the criminal of the week. He even died from said drowning, though this Cliff Hanger was solved in the next season.
 * With a heartbreakingly long list of characters lining up to tell him how worthless he is, Dean Winchester from Supernatural is walking an incredibly thin line between this and woobiedom. This was made especially clear by the episode where they have to go back to their old house; The first half went to great lengths to tell us how much it's upsetting him but then, suddenly, it switches to Extras-like comedy and Missouri seems to have it out for him, smacking him down every five minutes.
 * If you disliked that then you must have hated Hunted; He's at his lowest point (up until All Hell Breaks Loose) but he's been reduced to begging Sam not to be mad at him (which, again, happens in All Hell Breaks Loose) gets treated like an Extreme Doormat by a disturbingly John-like Sam and only loses his fight with Gordon (who he actually won against easily in Bloodlust) because they needed him to be tied up and used as bait quicker.
 * Antonio on Wings in the later seasons. Although he was a reasonably contented homeowner during his few seasons, he was to become dirt poor, have his mental health collapse, lose his one true love, and be attacked by a pack of wild dogs.
 * Karen Ball from Green Wing gets her hair stuck in a copy machine, is ostracized after she gets Slytherin in an online "sorting hat," and is not noticed, for days, to have fallen out of an open window. However, once she falls out the window, she returns in the series-closing special as a much more aggressive person
 * The Interrodroid from The Middleman gets its head ripped off every episode it's in. Sometimes more than once. They started out with the Interrodroid 3000 and now they're up to the 7000 (although that was already destroyed).
 * In Life On Mars, a regular's getting demoted? Not Sam, Gene, Annie, or Chris: Ray! Somebody's getting blown up? Ray! Somebody's going to be intolerantly racist? Ray!
 * Then again, Ray arguably brings a lot of his own misfortune on himself rather than the universe just being cruel; he was demoted, for example, because he irresponsibly caused the death of a suspect in custody then tried to cover it up, and being racist isn't exactly something you can blame on the universe. Chris, on the other hand, is the guy Ray uses as a punching bag, and the guy everyone else uses to do the unpleasant menial work.
 * Olive in On the Buses spends the entire series being mocked for being a saddo by her family.
 * The horrors visited upon Jason Stackhouse in True Blood take full advantage of HBO's allowance of various forms of naughtiness. Of course, he usually deserves it.
 * Pretty much every single character that Blackadder interacts with fits this bill, unless he/she is higher status than him. Baldrick is the shining example, though, seeing as he's in every single series.
 * Ryotaro Nogami, the protagonist of Kamen Rider Den-O, is described by one of Those Two Guys as having Guinness-level bad luck; in fact, the first time we ever see him, he's stuck up a tree because a sign randomly fell down in front of his bike and acted as a ramp, sending him flying - and that's just a mild example. However, he manages to be both The Chew Toy and The Woobie, as his antics tend to inspire chuckles followed by statements of pity; probably a combination of his Dogged Nice Guy personality and being played by a rather handsome actor. In one episode he tells a stunned onlooker that he doesn't give up because he knows things can only get better from here.
 * A later movie shows that his grandson Kotaro (also the inheritor of the Den-O powers and job as pseudo-Time Police) is just as unlucky; however, his Battle Butler Teddy actively shields him from the misfortunes. When forced to work alone for a while, Kotaro immediately starts experiencing the kinds of disasters that afflict his grandfather.
 * Dr. Smith from Lost in Space is another Chew Toy that many people believe deserves everything he gets.
 * As do the Divine Predecessors of Lexx.
 * Neil from The Young Ones flits between this and The Eeyore, though some may see fit to make him into The Woobie. Stuck with all the drudge work, and mistreated at least once every episode, Neil's lot is not a happy one. He's also the show's resident Butt Monkey.
 * Alan on Two and A Half Men. Although every once in awhile, they make sure you know that he brings it on himself. Every time he gets a slight advantage, he lets it go to his head and starts acting like the biggest jerk on the show. And that's saying something.
 * If something bad is going to happen on The Mighty Boosh -- whether it be mildly unpleasant or a living nightmare of pain and degradation -- smart money says it will happen to Howard Moon, even if it should logically happen to someone else. Howard's bad luck is one of the best running gags on the show and was Lampshaded in the third series, when, to Howard's utter disbelief, something bad happened to Vince for a change:

"I am usually such a klutz, you know. I am always getting stuff dumped on me like guacamole or pies, but with this car I managed to stay perfectly clean! Looks like my luck is changing. Oh, the dipsticks a little bit out..."
 * Tony DiNozzo of NCIS is tormented for your amusement throughout the series. It's played for laughs (and as just comeuppance) even when it crosses over into sadism (and the punishment far exceeds the crime).
 * McGee also gets this treatment, though he, in contrast, rarely does anything to deserve the punishment. Enjoy being tased, Probie!
 * It never happens to Gibbs or Ziva. They are just too cool. (And too hot.) Not that they avoid drama, though.
 * Fredward Benson from I Carly. Constantly rejected romantically by his best friend, his mother is insane, is constantly beaten up and insulted by his other best friend, can never win something without losing something else. This is played for laughs in all but one episode. And because that resolution was private, he still would have had to deal with the consequences anyway.
 * On The Jersey, Nick's older sister Hilary is the victim of most slapstick gags which usually leaves her wet or messy. She has even Lampshades the number of times she has been Covered in Gunge with this Tempting Fate statement:


 * Alex Krycek in The X-Files basically exists so people can beat him up. Granted, he's not a particularly nice man, but the dude spends every episode getting bitched.
 * It almost winds up a running gag.
 * Mason of Dead Like Me. He is ridiculed by his colleagues, shot at, run over and hurt in various other ways, he once had a stash of drugs dissolve in his anal tract, and he died from drilling a hole into his own head.
 * Beaker of The Muppet Show was brought in as a lab assistant for Dr Bunsen Honeydew to test his inventions on. They invariably went wrong. Over time he began to be used in more skits outside of Muppet Labs, which usually also involved him getting hurt somehow, even if he was the only one taking part in the skit. He seems to be one of the more popular Muppets, however, judging by how frequently he is used (and tormented) in the YouTube videos that The Muppets Studio are currently producing.
 * Victor Meldrew from One Foot in The Grave.
 * And Patrick, often a secondary victim of the weirdness affecting the Meldrews, including having his genitals attacked by a live crab, having a naked suicidal man hanging outside his office window whilst entertaining important clients and having his house flooded with a hosepipe. And Mrs. Warboys - in "The Return of the Speckled Band" Mrs. Warboys, already suffering from drawn-out food poisoning, ends up in hospital. Margaret, trying to cheer her up, brings her a video of Alien, having no idea of its content but knowing that Mrs. Warboys likes sci-fi "like Mork and Mindy", leaving her unable to leave the bathroom for two and a half hours. In a second attempt to cheer her up, Margaret unknowingly boils developing alligator eggs and delivers them to her for breakfast. In fact, about the only non-Chew Toys in it seem to be Pippa and Mr. Swainey.
 * Bertie Wooster of Jeeves and Wooster. Always up to do a favor for a friend/cousin/aunt, which always manages to backfire on him, and not the friend/cousin/aunt. Includes both emotional and physical humiliation: the number of episodes ending with or involving him getting whacked over the head seem too numerous to count.
 * Rebecca Howe from Cheers has to go here. Over the course of the series, she has her heart broken multiple times, loses her job more than once, accidentally burns down the bar, her boyfriend cheats on her and steals her money, and she ends up such an emotional wreck that in the last episode she marries a man she just met solely because she's desperate to be loved (and in an episode of Frasier, it's casually revealed that the guy became a millionaire and dumped her). Throughout, and with very few exceptions, the rest of the characters seem utterly indifferent to her misfortunes, and they're almost always played for laughs.
 * Ted from the US Queer As Folk.
 * Although just about all the characters in Mongrels get used like this (apart from Kali) it's really poor Nelson who suffers the most, perhaps because he is the only character who actually cares about others. It makes him an easier target.
 * The Colbert Report: Poor Jay the intern. He can't catch a break.
 * Speaking of interns, Matt from The Soup.
 * Josh Lyman of The West Wing alternated between this and The Woobie, depending on the cause and nature of the misfortunes he suffered. Anything stemming from the fact that he's a Genius Ditz who Can't Get Away With Nuthin' always invokes this trope, but the universe would sometimes pummel him to the point where it became diabolical (or even tear jerking), instead of funny. This was quite painfully deconstructed in season two, when his status as the chew toy combined the fact that he usually bounces back with perfect poise from every hilarious tragedy he suffers is implied to be the main reason why.
 * However, he didn't stay this trope: eventually, he managed to become the campaign manager for the next Democratic presidential candidate, got a delightful Relationship Upgrade with the woman who had been in love with him for years, and after winning the campaign, was appointed the president's chief of staff.
 * Lazy Town's Robbie Rotten. One of the show's main jokes is that something bad will always happen to him just before the credits roll. Always.
 * Nathan from Misfits has been beaten up, maimed, humiliated,  more often than the rest of the main cast put together. He occasionally strays into woobie territory when something really bad happens to him, but more often than not his horrendous misfortune is played solely for laughs - perhaps partly because said misfortunes can usually be traced directly back to some act of blatant stupidity and/or jerkassery on his part.
 * The lovable play-doh man Mr. Bill of the Saturday Night Live sketch show, "The Mr. Bill Show." A parody of Tastes Like Diabetes children's shows, every sketch ends with Mr. Bill being dismembered, blown up, set on fire, electrocuted, or squashed.
 * Matt from Operation Repo.
 * Bill, in the "Adventures with Bill" segments on The Red Green Show, seems to exist entirely for the sake of being the victim of physical comedy.
 * Nelson Van Alden on Boardwalk Empire. Nothing ever goes his way, and any time he tries to fix anything he just makes it worse. All of this is played for comedy (admittedly, sometimes it is very dark comedy). That the character is a complete Jerkass and the very epitome of The Comically Serious just adds to the hilarity.
 * Santana Lopez on Glee.

Newspaper Comics
""Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask: 'Why me?' And a voice answers: 'Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.'""
 * Peanuts: Charlie Brown is the absolute king of this trope. For fifty years the entire universe tried new and creative ways to mess with him.

"Jon: You wouldn't believe what happened to me! I went out to get the paper, and my robe got caught on a passing street sweeper. I swept five neighborhoods with my FACE before I could get the driver's attention. It took three fire companies and a crowbar to get me loose. I'm lucky to be alive....What happened to my muffin?
 * Jon Arbuckle of Garfield is practically the adult Charlie Brown.

Garfield: I ate it, vac-boy. Where's the paper?"


 * The title character of Australian comic Snake. The plots of typical strips include: Snake tells a bad joke and gets smashed under his own rock; Snake fails to get anywhere with Lady Snake and gets smashed under his own rock; Snake is randomly abused by tourists and gets smashed under his own rock; Snake gets a package airmail that smashes him into a pulp, but for a change isn't smashed under his own rock; and the list goes on.

Radio

 * Bluebottle of The Goon Show, perhaps the ultimate canonical Chew Toy. "You rotten swine! You have deaded me again! Look, my beautiful nut is all singed!"

Tabletop Games

 * The Necrons of Warhammer 40000 have been going through a phase of Chew Toy status, amusing and pleasing some players to no end.
 * The Sisters of Battle are like this to Games Workshop. In almost every piece of fluff they appear in they get killed and mutilated in horrendous and increasing pointless ways. While martyrdom is a theme of the Sisters, it has become overdone.
 * The goblins in Magic the Gathering. Regardless of whatever world, goblins are always on the short end of the stick. In a twist they can actually be used to devastating effect in the game.
 * Squee in particular deserves an honorable mention. He was stuck in a cycle of dying horribly, and then mysteriously coming back to life, just so he could die horribly again. Hell, the usefulness of his in-game card revolved around the fact that it could be discarded/sacrificed/chewed-on over and over, turn after turn.
 * Brave/foolish/insane players can do this to their own characters with the right disadvantage in many game systems:
 * GURPS has Unluckiness, and then Cursed for those who really want to get it.
 * Humorously, one available in some older rulebooks is Jinxed, which turns everyone but the afflicted character into one while in their presence. For obvious reasons, it has been removed now.

Toys
"Lewa: Oh. It's going to be this kind of day."
 * Lewa from Bionicle tends to be either this or The Woobie, depending on the situation. While he has some genuinely disturbing things happen to him, his upbeat attitude and tendency to crack jokes about his predicaments make his misadventures funny rather than depressing. For example, his reaction to having his body stolen, being turned into an Eldritch Abomination (he got better), being Thrown Out the Airlock, ending up in a strange jungle full of cyborg dinosaurs that shoot laser beams, and then being captured by savages in the space of what seems like only 24 hours:

Video Games
"Jayden: I seem to spend most of this case getting the shit beaten out of me..."
 * Edwin of Baldurs Gate fame is perhaps the unluckiest bastard in the universe, yet his stubborn determination, raging superiority complex, and complete lack of any redeeming traits in the face of utter failure makes him a favourite character of many.
 * Touhou fandom being what it is, many characters get this at different times. Hong Meiling (who's always suffering Sakuya's stabbity wrath for sleeping on the job and allowing Marisa into the Scarlet Devil Mansion to steal Patchy's books), Reisen Udongein Inaba (who's always getting punished by Eirin for Tewi's pranks, in addition to the sadistic attentions of Kaguya and others), and Mystia Lorelei (who has to deal with Yuyuko and other youkai always trying to eat her) probably get the worst of it, though.. Borderline canon in Reisen's case, too.
 * Rise of the Triad, you will accept you are one if you play on easy. Oh yeah.
 * In the third game of the Disgaea series, Almaz is the chew toy. He gets his title stolen, will slowly turn into a demon, is shot by his Love Interest when she takes him for an enemy, nearly dies from poison, and other things.
 * He's so much of a chew toy that he gets an entire song about how unfortunate he is in the former of the two mentioned endings.
 * There's Vyers in the first game and Axel in the second as well. In fact, many characters in Disgaea have moments of this. Then there's the Prinnies, who are an entire race of Butt Monkey Chew Toys. They'd be sympathetic if they weren't mostly lazy reincarnated criminals, a fact which makes the fact they are LIVING GRENADES utterly hilarious.
 * Don´t forget Etna in the second half of the second game. Come on, she looses all her amazing levels, becoming a lv1 wimp that can't even beat Laharl (the first one she wish to kill in her list). And, the worst of all, her own prinnies mock her and go away. Do you know anything more humiliating to Etna?
 * In Knights of the Old Republic HK-47 seems to get smashed up, shut down and locked into a warehouse, zapped with ion beams, or be disassembled and have his parts shipped to opposite corners of the galaxy quite frequently.
 * Sandbag from Super Smash Bros. Sandbag is a semi-sentient, well... sandbag, whose sole purpose is to be beat up upon (Its description as a trophy even states this). In Melee and Brawl, there exists a "Homerun Contest", where the player would beat up Sandbag, then see how far they could hit it with a Home-Run Bat smash, which is one of the hardest hits in either game. Furthermore, Sandbag, when it appears as an item in Brawl, will drop a bottomless supply of items when beat up upon. Sandbag also spawns in the Brawl online waiting room for the player to attack.
 * Sandbag doesn't actually mind being beaten up, though. It oddly enjoys it. He's something of a masochist.
 * The village of Mile in Phantasy Star IV. The crops have all withered and died, the ranch owner can't seem to catch a break, and the village is steadily being covered with sand due to the encroaching quicksand field nearby. It doesn't help that they're located right across the sands from Zio's Fort. In the endgame
 * In Live a Live, the Watanabe father-and-son pair lose its father or both in every single chapter. And how easy it can be seen depends wildly between chapters, from the Mecha chapter featuring a little boy named Watanabe wondering where his father is, to the Wrestling chapter just about requiring you to use a cheat code to allow you to trigger the scene.
 * Malygos and the rest of the Blue Dragonflight in Warcraft. Without fail, everything Malygos has tried to do in the last ten thousand years or so has turned into a catastrophic event for his flight and sometimes for the world as a whole. Small surprise he ended up going a little insane... and when he recovered and tried to stop the madness mortals have unleashed with magic, the other dragonflights ally to fight, and ultimately kill, him.
 * He did, mind, decide he was going to do that by killing every last magic-using mortal. Leaving aside the minor genocide aspect, this does have the small objection of guaranteeing the mortals of Azeroth become too weak to defend against the Burning Crusade. Oh, and there's also the part where one of his other plans is going to blow up the planet. He really didn't get much less insane at all.
 * The Elven Race of the Disciples series gets well and truly hammered throughout their history. They were the first victims of the Legions of the Damned in the backstory, and fled into the Mountain Clan's territory to escape the onslaught. The Dwarves, thinking the Elves were invading, attacked them right back. The Elves' patron God, Gallean, went to the Dwarve's god, Wotan, and demanded some repayment for the mistake. Wotan killed him for his troubles and threw his heart into the sun. It Got Worse because from there, when Mortis, Gallean's wife, eventually got around to sending an Undead army on their lands as part of her plan to resurrect Gallean, in which they lost their Queen, and then they suffered the double-wammy of their High Prophet and another Queen falling to two different invasions of the Legions of the Damned, as part of their scheme to free their own god, part of which involved the Elve's lands getting turned extra-crispy, and meanwhile the newly revived Gallean went insane and went away for a while when he rejected Mortis. It was so bad that Strategy First gave them an expansion pack all for themselves, during which they decided to get revenge on the human Empire of all people, the only people who never wronged them, at least not in a way that's not All There in the Manual.
 * Punch Out regular Glass Joe, with his 1-99 record and feeble attacks, as well as being something of a fan favourite is a perfect example. It has an even worse one, 1-99 that means somebody out there actually lost to Glass freakin' Joe. Word of God for the Wii version says it was Von Kaiser, who decided he could beat Joe with his mustache and got his face in the way of Joe's fist, ruining his career forever.
 * Super Punch-Out for the SNES gives us Joe's student, Gabby Jay. Also 1-99, with Glass Joe being his only win.
 * Winston Payne in the Ace Attorney games. In every single appearance, he is always the first prosecutor the player faces and is usually the easiest one to win against due to flaws in his logic and reasoning and he is quick to make excuses or give sloppy explanations when he is losing his case. Payne gets treated so badly from the story writers that in the 3rd game,, and in the 4th game, the story in the first case shifts away from Payne and onto Phoenix Wright and Kristoph Gavin, causing Payne to say in the end "What about me!? Don't I get to prosecute anyone!?"
 * Roxix, The Rival to The Hero Vayne in Mana Khemia Alchemists of Al Revis. Some of the extremely funny moments in the game are at the cost of his dignity, courtesy of his Familiar who admits to humiliating Roxis as a hobby.
 * The Black Baron of Mad World has the honor of introducing the newest Death Trap in each Bloodbath Challenge... and the misfortune of being used to demonstrate each and every one, courtesy of a tall woman in a spiked bustier.
 * Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series has a habit of taking lots and lots of physical abuse. For example, the second game opens with him shot and in a wrecked train hanging over the edge of a cliff.
 * The ship captain in the God of War series.
 * Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter. His father died fighting Sagat, constantly abused in the animated series, and can never catch a break. However, his cockiness and goofy attitude has led him to become one of the most popular characters in the game.
 * In The Sims 3 you can design your own Chew Toy by assigning a Sim either the Unlucky or the Loser trait. (Bonus points for assigning both) The Sim will forever be surrounded by bad juju but will be literally unable to die by anything except old age.
 * Norman Jayden from Heavy Rain. Every chapter he's in involves withdrawals and attacks, both physical and verbal.


 * Brad Vickers, helicopter pilot for S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team in Resident Evil. He's basically shown to be a Dirty Coward in the first game, abandoning his teammates to the horrific mansion, only returning at the very end. In RE2, he returns in the form of a zombie who the player has to kill if they want to acquire the key to the locker where Claire or Leon can change their outfits, and even worse, RE3 shows how he was zombified -- by being killed by the Nemesis.
 * Nuts in the Edutainment Game Kids on Site.

Web Animation

 * Strong Sad from Homestar Runner is continually put upon by the other characters, who seem to find something repugnant in his odd physical build and unceasing pessimism.
 * Although you can occasionally predict how things will swing in a given situation, all the characters are Chew Toys now and again, based mostly on the Rule of Funny; the abuse goes to whoever it's funniest to abuse for this cartoon.

Web Comics

 * Brian Clevinger, author of Eight Bit Theater, has claimed that in his comic, the universe exists to hurt Black Mage. Of course, being among the most evil characters in the comic (so evil, in fact, that the symbolic representation of his sins was himself, nothing else being up to the task), he deserves it.
 * Onion Kid, who loses his parents, multiple sets of foster parents, and an orphanage in unconnected atrocities committed by Black Mage.
 * Ansem Retort: Riku, Riku, RIKU. He's been cut in half too many times to count, is pretty much held together only by duct tape, is blamed for anything and everything, and the only reason he has a girlfriend is that she likes boys who don't have the balls to defend themselves.
 * An unusual example is Laura from Collar 6, who was actually a CONSENTING chew toy.
 * The Cyantian Chronicles: Khaelis and Marcus, during Campus Safari. Although Marcus does do more to deserve it. Darrik gets gnawed on a little in Akaelae.
 * In a way, the title character of Dominic Deegan, who often gets hurt for comedic effect, such as when he's punched in the groin by a dwarf who then comments on how the seer didn't see it coming, or when he breaks down in a most humiliating fashion because he lost his candy, and so on. He also often gets hurt for narmtastic dramatic effects.
 * In Girl Genius, troubles heap mainly on the head of Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. Or his Nice Hat. Wulfenbach-senior was also chewed long and hard.
 * Lyle Phipps of Great
 * Robot S13 from Gunnerkrigg Court, at least for the first 14 chapters. He begins the story in a box, shut off, disassembled, and missing an arm, and from there it just gets worse: That said, his luck seems to have turned around, ever since Antimony rescued him and Kat started building him a new body.
 * Paz. So far she only once (when teaching Kat to push her vision and not give up) was the focus of a strip without some misfortune befalling her. She's the first victim of Mort's new-and-improved scaring skills; her hopes to see cows are rather cruelly shot down; then she gets kidnapped. Then her Love Interest has a crush . She takes it all rather stoically, however.
 * And how could one forget the hilarious Boxbots? Tom Siddell seems to have an unnatural hatred for these poor robots, in that their appearance is always accompanied by frustration, or even facepalming, on the part of the people around them. Even the cast list hates them!
 * Conrad Achenleck from Hanna Is Not a Boys Name seems to live to be tortured. He is maimed, killed, reborn as a vampire, battered and humiliated time and time again. And we love every minute of it.
 * The titular character of Nodwick: How many horrible deaths does a man henchman have to suffer to get a little respect around here?
 * Another example: In The Order of the Stick, a pair of Flumphs (jellyfish-like monsters from first edition Dungeons and Dragons, widely ridiculed among players everywhere due to their uselessness) fill this role. Due to their levitation abilities and soft bodies, their purpose in life seems to be to provide the main characters with safe landings.
 * In this strip, a character falls to their death; in the next strip, there's a panel of the Flumphs, with one saying "Say, isn't there somewhere we were supposed to be?" (Warning! Major Spoilers!)
 * Another chew toy is the Paladin O-Chul, who suffers abuse after abuse at the end of the bad guys. First paralyzed by Xykon, then catapulted through the air by a Giant Explosion, captured and used as a doll by the child-like Monster in the Darkness, and it only gets worse afterwards.
 * Jeremy from Platinum Grit is this almost all the time, with suffering and embarrassment being the two defining features of his friendship with Nils. And most readers wouldn't want it any other way.
 * Kharisma Valleti and Mike Dowden in Something Positive; while both have been shown in a more sympathetic light lately (especially Kharisma, after she was both disfigured and wrongly jailed for murder), they both pretty much deserve what they've been getting. Mike even realizes this, and lampshades that he's paying off a pretty hefty karmic debt. (His last few appearances suggest he has fallen off the reformed-jerkass wagon, though.)
 * The title character of Crushed, The Doomed Kitty is under a curse that causes her to be painfully killed, humiliated, and left naked... over and over again.
 * Clover spends the first half of Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic being kicked around by three-fourths of the cast and ignored by the remainder. She doesn't even have clothes for most of that time. Her fate takes a remarkable upturn after a while, but she's still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
 * in The Zombie Hunters, James, a trainee in a team of Post-Zombie Apocalypse Disaster Scavengers, is very much the Chew Toy, portrayed as comically "freezing up" at the sight of a few Crawlers, a zombie class that doesn't pose much of a threat. He's enough of a klutz that he even ends up falling into a Creepy Basement. And after that, which makes him The Woobie in the offing.
 * Rick in Basic Instructions seems to be the universe's scratching post, insulted by even his best friends. And quite often the butt of the comic's jokes.
 * In The Kingfisher, Darren seems to only serve the purpose of being humiliated for the audience's amusement. He may be working his way up to Bumbling Sidekick.
 * Charles' girlfriend from Cyanide and Happiness exists only to be insulted and cuckolded by her boyfriend. She always ends the strip with the same frown on her face.

Web Original

 * Krillin (pictured above), from Dragon Ball Abridged goes through some physical/verbal abuse that is actually lampshaded by the Krillin Owned Count
 * Vegeta applies as well.
 * Snape from Potter Puppet Pals. If you need proof, look no further than this diary entry: "Today, the orange one accidentally drank one of my more expensive elixirs. He promptly vomited a glittering rainbow of foul waste, and the classroom erupted with applause, triggering my migraine. I aborted the class and was left to clean the boy's sick. Halfway through, Argus Filch showed up and bragged about his many affairs with Hogsmeade barmaids. Then he told me I smelled of broccoli and left without wishing me a happy birthday. Later, I noticed my bottle of sangria was gone. I settled for a cup of coffee, scalding my writing hand in the process and spilling it on my pants. I walked to the hospital wing, covering the wet spot with a book. Madame Pomfrey laughed and made me wait while she treated a student's runny nose. After an hour it became apparent that she had forgotten about me, so I returned to my room and found that I had locked myself out. I called for Filch, who turned up covered in lipstick and clearly having finished the sangria. He broke open my door, laughed at me, punched me in the shoulder too hard, and left me alone. I thought of my father."
 * "I cried."
 * American President George W. Bush in a series of The Onion News In Brief starting just over a week after the election of Barack Obama.
 * The Nostalgia Critic, overlapping with Jerkass Woobie. He's not based on Daffy Duck for nothing, y'know.
 * Survival of the Fittest: Considering the setting, it's almost impressive that any one person could stand out above the rest as an example, but the world really just seems to exist entirely to make Jimmy Brennan miserable.
 * Chase of the College Humor series "Troopers" seems to be shaping up as a Kenny-style Chew Toy, having already died more than once.
 * Evan Guido from Shiny Objects Videos is a minor example, though mostly he's just on the receiving end of Matt's tormenting.
 * Ghost is a special example, in that it's the audience that makes him suffer, through embarrassing splices, Stupid Statement Dance Mixes, and generally Trolling him.

Western Animation
"Sokka: The Universe just loves proving me wrong doesn't it?
 * Who gets stuck with all the bad luck? No one, but Donald Duck.
 * His Looney Tunes counterpart, Daffy Duck, also. Especially in stories co-starring Bugs Bunny. Maybe it's got something to do with being a duck?
 * The earlier, more Screwy Squirrel-like Daffy was less of a Chew Toy; it seems that Chuck Jones' recasting Daffy as a foil to Bugs' Heroic Trickster spurred the move.
 * Plucky Duck of Tiny Toon Adventures, as the Spiritual Successor to Daffy, is also a victim to this, especially around Buster and Babs Bunny, whenever he gets crushed by an Anvil, shot out of a cannon, crushed by an Anvil, beaten up over treasure, crushed by an Anvil, flatten by a monster, lose the money he made in a boxing match, and lose an award to another monster. Did I mention he gets crushed by an Anvil?
 * Wile E. Coyote, in Road Runner cartoons. The sheer unfairness of the clever, inventive Coyote always losing to an idiot bird capable of exactly one act in the most bizarre of ways makes it physically painful to watch. According to Chuck Jones, the "rules" of Road Runner cartoons are actually built to keep this theme lighthearted -- the major one being that the Coyote could give up at any time but doesn't, making it partly his own fault.
 * Chuck Jones seemed to have a perverse fondness for Chew Toys: his version of Daffy, Wile E Coyote, Claude Cat, the nameless and hapless guy in One Froggy Evening...
 * Sylvester the Cat is usually one of these.
 * Tom from Tom and Jerry is much the same way, and in an even more agonizing fashion: A large number of episodes have Tom chasing Jerry strictly so that Jerry will not mess up the house he's living in, thus resulting in not only Tom not getting dinner, but being beaten with whatever is handy by his owner. He never, ever succeeds. No matter how much one might come to the conclusion that that *** mouse deserves a beating.
 * Actually, Tom did win a few times. Those victories may be outnumbered by Jerry's victories, but they did occur. They occur particularly when Jerry initiates the fight with Tom - which is rare.
 * Kenny from South Park. Later was supposed to be replaced by Butters, but most audiences did not enjoy watching Butters suffer, so Kenny was brought back.
 * Kenny's Chew Toy status was subverted once, in a Christmas special. At the end of the episode, all the characters gather in front of the screen and the words "The End" appear above them, at which point Kenny shouts, "WOO HOO!" in utter joy.
 * He was thrown a bone again in the rainforest episode where he was struck down by lightning, but then immediately revived by his new girlfriend using CPR.
 * Recent seasons in particular have toned down Kenny's Chew Toy status and shifting it more toward Kyle. Why Kyle specifically? Apparently to milk sympathy.
 * The Transformers mythos has Waspinator, who was crushed, blown up or shredded in nearly every episode of Beast Wars. In multi-part episodes, Waspinator is often blown apart just as he's finished putting himself back together. In the final episode, he got his reward, left alone by the other Transformers and being worshiped by a tribe in a tropical paradise; naturally, this was reversed when the sequel series started up. Waspinator is referred to as the "chew-toy of fate" or other such nicknames often amongst fans, and thus this entry is partly in his honor. Of note: He was slated to be Killed Off for Real in the second season, but his popularity with the fans spared his life... or prolonged his suffering, depending on how you look at it. The funny thing about the quote in the Quotes page is that it comes from one of the few episodes where he didn't blow up.
 * He was originally chosen for this kind of role because the story editors didn't like how he talked and felt it took up too much time. Since they had to have him appear regularly, they decided the best course of action was to have him make these appearances in pieces. When they want a Predacon to be seen in a mirrored alien pod and shredded by Rhinox? Waspinator. Someone needs to get his shiny metal ass fragged by a flying island? Waspinator (OK, and Terrorsaur, but mainly Waspinator).
 * Though Waspinator is most remembered for this, in the first season Terrorsaur and Scorponok seem to be blown up just as much as he did. Then at the beginning of the second season they died in the same accident that was originally supposed to kill him, leaving him to take the abuse for all three of them.
 * Transformers Animated has Sari's Tutor Bot, who's smashed in most of his appearances, and who Sari seems to dislike. For example he was crushed under some dinosaur models that would later become the Dinobots, then the few functioning parts that were being repaired were incinerated by the same Dinobots. When Bulkhead's body was stolen, they gave him Tutor Bot's and presumably decapitated him off screen. Of course Tutor Bot is a regular robot, and thus, unlike Waspinator, doesn't feel any pain. Incidentally, he got his revenge of sorts when he was upgraded by a villain to fire powerful lasers. They also have their version of Waspinator (known simply as "Wasp"), but is more of a Cosmic Plaything as the extent of his misfortune is much more serious.
 * Another character that happens to be this is Jerkass Sentinel Prime. It seems everytime Sentinel tries to enforce his order onto others, something bad seems to happen to him. From getting crushed by a building, to falling off a highway, to even losing his head to The Headmaster. Maybe if he was a little nicer, he wouldn't be in this rut. Oh well, that's Reverse Karma for ya.
 * The original series has Cosmos, who, in almost every appearance he makes, manages to crash and/or have something even more horrible happen to him -- such as getting eaten alive by metallic weeds or spending an entire episode paralyzed and worshipped by primitives. One of the few times he doesn't crash made it seem like Optimus Prime was tempting fate by sending Cosmos out three times on a dangerous mission against his will. Poor, poor Cosmos.
 * Cosmos seemed to be infectious, too, often anyone around him will suffer a similar fate. Even the awesome and magnificent Sky Lynx wasn't immune.
 * Teen Titans Trouble in Tokyo: Beast Boy all the way.
 * In the Ice Age movies, Scrat.
 * Jay Sherman of The Critic has had his fair share of troubles.
 * Both Milhouse Van Houten and his father Kirk in The Simpsons are frequently used as chew toys.
 * Good old Gil was used as a chew toy in every episode he appeared in.
 * Hans Moleman, who seems to have very narrowly escaped death (or not) several times by now.
 * The incredibly minor, infrequently recurring character Invader Skooge from Invader Zim is absolutely nothing but a chew toy. In his few appearances, he was assigned to the planet of the slaughtering rat people; shot out of an orbital cannon; and in an episode designed to showcase Zim being a Jerkass, he was pushed into a canyon, attacked by the Meat-Thirsty Hogulus, landed on by a drill sergeant and wedged in his rear, then used as a weapon to bludgeon the aforementioned Hogulus.
 * Most of the characters on Invader Zim can be thought of as chew toys, especially Zim himself. That's what happens when you live in a Crapsack World.
 * Meg from Family Guy, in order to compensate for her lack in popularity, is often abused and injured to the point of being a Butt Monkey. There are those Family Guy fans who love Meg, and there are those fans who love to see Meg suffer.
 * Mort and Neil Goldman never catch a break.
 * Brian suffers this in later seasons to the point he becomes the second "Meg" (which was even lampshaded at one point). Has no luck with woman due to bad luck, his own insecurities, or bad dating advice (thank you Stewie). An attempt to get someone to like him ends in a "The Reason You Suck" Speech (by the most hypocritical person on the show no less). Never finished college costing him a posh job. His book bombs horribly and the people who'll celebrate it are "special" kind of readers, and any projects he tries to go for always ends in ruin. Granted some of these actions are well deserved due to either being cocky or following along with someone he likes who go against his beliefs. But half the time, the writers just seem to make him the designated victim for no reason solely to get some cruel laughs.
 * Every character in Drawn Together falls under this category at one point or another.
 * Xandir especially is Captain Hero's favorite Chew Toy.
 * Pete, from Goof Troop, falls into this category most of the time. Even when he's not being a Jerkass he still falls victim to painful accidents or embarrassing situations about every five minutes, usually caused by Goofy.
 * Iago is this throughout the entire franchise of Disney's Aladdin. He truly was the writers' designated Butt Monkey (their mantra was "When in doubt, hurt the bird"), but what keeps him from being a Designated Monkey is that he often brings it on himself from being a greedy manipulative Jerkass, albeit one with a heart of gold at times since his Heel Face Turn.
 * The N.I.G.E.L. unit in Godzilla the Series, destroyed at least once an episode, to its creator's dismay.
 * Adding the amusement is that it's usually Godzilla that does it.
 * Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender is a prime example. He's been smashed, splashed, slammed, tripped, bonked, nearly killed by his own master (this may not have been as bad as he thought), slapped, kicked, punched, jumped & tied-up (by his future girlfriend, no less), squished, gotten drunk/high on cactus juice, thwacked, and buried alive, just to begin the list, and all for our sadistic amusement. And that's only the show proper -- the shorts involve Sokka being mangled in ways that would make Wile E. Coyote cringe. Though one may expect him to be The Woobie, and to a minor degree he is in some circles, the fact that he's shown to be able to take more physical damage than just about any other character in the series, combined with his cocky attitude and general c'est-la-vi demeanor, make for more hilarity than tragedy.
 * He even lampshades it in the season 3 opening episode:

Toph: You make it too easy!"

"Narrator And so everyone in Acme Falls got his or her wish... [safe drops on Mime] except for the Mime that is.
 * Ironically, this turned out to be a subversion.
 * In fact, there was a full episode where Sokka gets stuck in a hole in the ground, unable to move... while the baby moose-lion (Foofoo Cuddlypoops, Aang. Aang, Foofoo Cuddlypoops) that he was hunting sticks around to keep him company, including sleeping on his head.
 * Any time the Cabbage Merchant shows up, you know something horrible is about to happen to a wagon full of cabbages.
 * XR from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was literally - inside the Canon - created to be destroyed. Usually by exploding. In fact, other characters have a tendency to think the 'X' stands for 'eXpendable'.
 * In Animaniacs, Buttons from the Buttons and Mindy shorts gets thoroughly abused trying to keep his charge from getting killed, and then gets yelled at by Mindy's mom for some minor infraction at the end.
 * The Mime. Because Everyone Hates Mimes:

Yakko: I don't know about him, but that sure was my wish."

""Hooray! I'm expendable!""
 * Scratchensniff is also one.
 * Futurama: "Don't forget, you still have Zoidberg! YOU ALL STILL HAVE ZOIDBERG!"
 * The title characters of Beavis and Butthead, although their idiocy makes a lot of their troubles self-inflicted.
 * Mr. Bump and Little Miss Calamity from The Mr. Men Show. Since it's a sketch comedy show, almost all the characters experience this from time to time, but these two have their characters entirely built around being the chew toy.
 * Calling Cat-22, a series of 90-second shorts dealing with the eponymous secret agent being sent undercover to figure out the many and various weird and disgusting habits of dogs. No matter how much he tries to avoid danger, or even the assignments themselves, every event surrounding his missions seems to end in his getting injured somehow. The last short - about burying bones, oddly enough - does indeed throw him a bone at the end.
 * Batman Beyond has a recurring character, a soft-spoken, hapless bald businessman, who never seems to show up but to find himself somehow inconvenienced or terrorized by whatever threat has reared its head that day.
 * Misery from Ruby Gloom. Name notwithstanding, she somehow takes it all in stride.
 * H.E.L.P.E.R. from The Venture Brothers.
 * Plankton, Patchy, Squidward, Mrs. Puff, and Gary from SpongeBob SquarePants.
 * Spongebob himself is one when he's not causing it in other people. The biggest example is in "Party Pooper Pants" where he gets locked out of his house, gets banged the front door by Patrick, gets his fingers broken by Larry's act of closing the bathroom window, sent back to outside by everyone's bunny hop, gets accused and arrested by two police officers, and lastly, realizes that he didn't use the spare key.
 * Eugene from Hey Arnold.
 * Happy Tree Friends. EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER. Except Splendid, because  and Buddhist Monkey, who never dies.
 * Binky on The Fairly Odd Parents. And Timmy.
 * And Chester, and Crocker, and sometimes Cosmo.
 * Mort on The Penguins of Madagascar - a bit of a Zoidberg-esque example, as he happily accepts the role of The Chew Toy since it means he gets noticed.

""I hate my life""
 * Henry on Ka Blam, though other fans view him as The Woobie.
 * Same goes with Meltman from the Action League NOW! sketches.
 * Prometheus of Prometheus and Bob.
 * The Boolie brothers in Race Rabbit.
 * Fondue (And, at times, Sniz).
 * Po from Kung Fu Panda. An interesting case because he's the lead character. Partially justified in that he lives in a place which is not at all designed for his size, but there are times when it's pure Rule of Funny.
 * Gorillaz's 2D. He got run over twice in a single year, by the same person. And that was only the start of his problem.
 * Owen of Total Drama Island has fallen of a cliff (several times), impaled his foot on a rake, been stung by swarms of hornets multiple times in the same episode, had some contrived coincidence cause one bad thing happening to him make something even worse happen two seconds later more times than I can count, and in general has had ridiculously bad luck, even more so than the rest of the cast.
 * Trent gets the raw end of the deal as well. He's been shoved out of a plane, without a parachute, knocked unconscious by Owen throwing a crate of oranges at him, and eaten a blowfish prepared by Lindsay, who took, but never passed, biology, gotten stuck in quicksand, and not to mention
 * One of the times he fell off a cliff had him alternately hit his head and his groin off of very improbable objects on the way down.
 * That was all during Island, though. In Action, it was Harold and Justin who suffered physically while Owen became a Creator's Pet. In World Tour, it seems to be Tyler's turn, shared with Blainley. Blainey is even called this once!
 * Timon in Timon and Pumbaa. Pumbaa in their "Stand By Me" video.
 * Pretty much the main cast of King Arthurs Disasters. Hey, it's called King Arthur's DISASTERS for a reason, you know.
 * Jimmy in Ed, Edd n Eddy fits this to a T.
 * The Eds themselves, when they don't deserve it.
 * In Phineas and Ferb, both Candace and Doofenshmirtz frequently find themselves under this trope.
 * Archer may qualify as a Sadist Show, but Cyril Figgis and Trinette stand out even in that beleaguered cast as characters who get dumped on by the entire universe. There's also the random ISIS employee who is constantly getting hit by Archer's stray gunfire offscreen, screaming. After a few episodes, Archer finally takes notice and learns the guy's name.
 * Steve Smith from American Dad. The guy's been attacked by bees, beaten up by cheerleaders and jocks with baseball bats, pantsed and given a swirlie at the prom, and had a beautiful woman willing to have sex with him killed, twice.
 * Francine also seems to be getting this treatment more frequently as the show goes on, starting with "Flirting With Disaster" where she.
 * Klaus, because everybody forgets he exists. He's something of The Artifact.
 * Dan's Car and Chris from Dan Vs.
 * Fuzzy Snuggums from Spliced seems to exist solely for the sake of getting beaten up by scenery and/or the other characters.
 * Nothing ever seems to go right for Mr. Ed Bighead on Rocko's Modern Life. But, he usually deserves it for his Jerkass behavior. But even when he's NOT being a jerkass, like in the golf episode, he'll still get blamed for something that wasn't his fault and get horribly injured by it.


 * Hack and Slash of Re Boot, who were smashed in neary every episode they appeared in. It's only done for drama in the third season, but afterwards its right back to laughs with these guys. You could say they were Mainframe Entertainment's prototypes for Waspinator.
 * Eustace Bagge from Courage the Cowardly Dog. In spades.
 * Ren from The Ren and Stimpy Show. Stimpy is more of a Butt Monkey because of the abuse he gets from Ren.

Real Life

 * You know someone who always winds up being used as The Chew Toy. They always wind up being singled out for abuse, always gets the short-end of the stick, is always scapegoated, and they just make fun of them.
 * This Guy lives in Hello Kitty Hell. It's tragic for him, but hilarious for us.
 * This guy is being haunted by Pachelbel's Canon in D. (It Makes Sense in Context.)
 * In the sports world, the Chicago Cubs baseball club (no world series championships in over 100 years) and the Cleveland Browns football club (famous for coming close but never quite reaching the Super Bowl) are favorite chew toys of their respective leagues.
 * Just to add insult to injury, the Cleveland Browns did win a Super Bowl. After they moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens.
 * We shouldn't forget the Los Angeles Clippers basketball club. Not only are they consistently one of the worst teams in the league, they share a city and a court with one of the most successful franchises in NBA history, the Lakers.
 * Nor the Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL, a favorite chew toy especially for fans of the six other Canadian teams. This may have more to do with the excessive (and we mean excessive) media coverage the team gets more than anything.
 * The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were this for a long time. They had a brief period of respectability in the late 1970s-early 1980s, but their public image was cemented by their 26-game losing streak at the beginning of the franchise. The significance of that losing streak is somewhat exaggerated, as "highlight films" and "worst team ever" shows love to portray the 1976 team as a bunch of bumbling losers who somehow accidentally wound up on a football field, led by a wisecracking but beleaguered coach. In reality, they were a competitive team who were unable to establish a consistent offense due to an insane rash of injuries, and many of the blooper-reel style highlights are heavily padded by preseason footage of players who were never actually part of the team. Even coach McKay's most famous wisecrack about the team, his response that "I'm in favor of it" when asked about his offense's execution, appears to be an urban legend, never uttered by McKay. When a number of factors including the 1982 players' strike and the rise of the USFL fractured the team in 1983, they went back to the basement, and spent most of their first 20 seasons as one of the NFL's worst teams. They finished in last or next-to-last place over a half-dozen times during that span, in a 28-team league.
 * German Intelligence services in World War II. Honestly everybody seems to have pulled one over on them.
 * Not by the Italians, during the war. Then the Brits revealed they had broke Enigma, and the Italians, the butt monkeys of the war, found that some of the blame for their defeats belonged to the German intelligence, who revealed the Italian deployments every single time they warned them to avoid friendly fire from the Luftwaffe...
 * In his career as keyboardist for Rammstein, Christian "Flake" Lorenz has: played a suicide bomber, played a suicide jumper, electrocuted, played a hermaphrodite, abandoned at his spot, cooked, sodomized and made to walk on a treadmill. Though this is a case of mileage varying, some still see him as The Woobie.
 * The entire nation of Poland. The rest of Europe just loves invading them, especially the Germans and Russians.
 * This trope applies to pretty much the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia (Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Baltic States and Hungary). Poland just happens to be the largest and thus most mentioned.
 * Especially since they lost so many of their national leaders, including their president and his wife, in that terrible plane crash in 2010. My God, that definitely turned Poland into Europe's woobie.
 * This also helps explain the humble charms of the first Polish pope in history, Pope John Paul II.
 * Vichy France in World War II. When ever they were geopolitically inconvenient to one side or the other the first instinct of both sides seems to have been to stomp on them.
 * Oddly enough to modern eyes, much of Germany. Germany was once so disunited that it mainly served as a convenient place for the armies of Great Powers to kill each other and mutually bully the local peasants.
 * English football club Portsmouth FC, currently in £119 million debt, bottom of the table, forced to sell their best players to stay afloat, lost 9 points for going into administration, sealing their relegation into the Championship, all offers of new owners have fallen through, with the only Hope Spot being them reaching the finals of the FA Cup. To add salt to the wound, back in 2008, they were competing in the top half of the table and won the FA Cup along with winning a spot in the Uefa Cup.
 * And now they've been beaten 1-0 in the FA Cup Final.
 * The national soccer-football team of Scotland, ESPECIALLY concerning the World Cup.
 * The entire Gulf Coast region around Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. First they had Hurrican Katrina, then Hurricane Rita that same year, and now the BP oil spill. Could they get any more slammed?
 * Well, another "Bloop" was recorded in the Gulf back in 2010...
 * Mary, Queen of Scots as you can read here on The Other Wiki, every single thing she touched turned to disaster. The poor woman just could not catch a break. Even her execution was a farce; when the headsman held up her decapitated head he gripped it by the hair. Except she wore a wig, and it peeled off from her skull leaving the headsman holding the wig while her head bounced away on the ground.
 * The country of Somalia. Decades of Communist dictatorship, then decades of civil war, foreign ships overfishing their territorial waters and using those same waters as dumping grounds for toxic sludge, forced to become pirates to survive, which provokes further retaliation from the rest of the world, mass starvation and now a cholera epidemic.