A character's property is defaced by a slur, insult, or warning written in bold letters, usually in red or black, with the intent of terrorizing the recipient. Cars, desks, lockers, and doors tend to be the common locations. Generally, it's anonymous and it's done to illustrate the views of the community against this one person rather than point to a single source of bullying.
It tends to show up mostly in media about teenagers, scorned women, loansharks, or media that deals with civil rights and/or racial tensions.
Compare Rushmore Refacement and Face Doodling.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- After Suzaku joins Ashford Academy in Code Geass, he's faced with discrimination because he's Japanese in an otherwise all-Britannian school. This includes one of his shirts being spray-painted with "GO BACK TO YOUR GHETTO". Thankfully, it stops when he saves Lelouch's life in the same episode and Lelouch publicly declares him his friend.
- During the first episode of the second season of Hell Girl, one of the many torments faced by the Victim of the Week was her books being defaced with ugly words.
- All Might statues get vandalized during My Hero Academia‘s final arc as the public trust in heroes is shaken. In the one we see, someone keeps writing “I AM NOT HERE” and someone else keeps removing it every day.
Comic Books
- In Avengers: The Initiative, The Gauntlet ends up getting beaten into a coma and having the New Warriors symbol spray-painted onto his body after repeatedly taunting several of the team's former members.
- During Fear Itself, the community of Bleachville, which was long rife with racial tensions between its majority-white population and a neighboring reservation, experienced a rash of vandalism warning that the "Red Nation will rise again". The vandalism was later revealed to have been carried out by a bunch of white racists hoping to start a riot to wipe out the reservation's inhabitants.
- In Watchmen, Silhouette and her lesbian partner are murdered, and the derogatory slur LESBIAN WHORES is painted on the wall.
- "Mutie" is a common graffiti epithet in the X-Men books, primarily used against mutants.
- In Ziggy Pig - Silly Seal Comics, One of Ziggy's ways to try and get Silly killed is to deface statues of Doctor Doom with insults and then sign Silly's name to them.
Fan Works
- In the Emergency! fic Reclamation,
John Gage has this happen as he recovers from being held captive for 18 months and tortured. A firefighter who lost his friend to John's captor keeps scrawling homophobic slurs on John's vehicle and house, his thoughts being that John stayed with the guy so long and survived because he was gay and some kind of pervert. (He wasn't.)
Films — Animation
- In The Lorax, Aloysius O'Hare gets back at Ted for defying his order not to go back outside Thneedville (and possibly bringing back trees) by painting over Audrey's tree mural with gray paint and writing "Courtesy of O'Hare, Inc." where it once was.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: After an incident where April O'Neil was giving the school announcements and threw up on camera, everyone started making fun of her and someone wrote "Puke Girl" and "April O'Puke" on her locker. After April becomes a hero in the climax by going on the news during Superfly's rampage and explaining to the panicked citizens that the Turtles and their mutant friends are actually trying to save the city, the insults on her locker disappear and someone writes "April O'Hero" instead.
Films — Live-Action
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: The statue of Superman is defaced with the phrase "FALSE GOD" spray-painted on it.
- Bottoms: The janitor is used to painting over PJ's and Josie's lockers, which are regularly painted with insults. At the nadir of their popularity, the janitor doesn't even bother.
- Carrie (1976): Carrie is the school outcast and Bully Magnet because of her social awkwardness and her mother's crazy religious beliefs. While Miss Collins admonishes the girls in the gym for collectively ganging up on Carrie, a custodian is in the process of removing graffiti painted in red letters on the exit doors that reads "Carrie White Eats Shit!", accompanied by a crude caricature.
- In the 2013 version, a boy is seen writing the same words in white spray paint across a row of lockers.
- Chak De! India: Kabir is accused of deliberately throwing the final of the World Cup to Pakistan due to a photo of him shaking hands with the Pakistani captain (at least partially coupled with the fact that he is Muslim); it gets even worse when he attacks a journalist who accuses him of it. This leads to him being vilified by the press and subsequently the public, culminating in him seeing his ancestral house being defaced with the word "ग़द्दार" (traitor), causing him and his elderly mother to leave. In the ending, after he has coached the women's national team to victory in the World Cup, Kabir and his mother return to his ancestral home, where they see a young boy scratch out the word from the wall.
- Played With in some fashion in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Charles Jefferson, Ridgemont High's star football player, finds his car destroyed and defaced with racial slurs allegedly perpetrated by people from a rival school. But it was actually his brother and Spicoli, who had taken it for a joyride and wrecked it. They painted the slurs to cover up their culpability.
- Played straight later in the movie, when Linda spray paints "prick" on Mike Damone's car and writes "little prick" on his locker for going back on his promise to drive Stacy to the abortion clinic when he can't pay for his half of the cost, despite being the one to impregnate her in the first place.
- Ghostbusters (1984): At the beginning of the film, the Ghostbusters’ first office at the university has a defaced door with the words "VENKMAN BURN IN HELL" smeared on it in red paint.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002): Messages written in blood randomly appear inside Hogwarts that read "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware" and "Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever". Coupled with the fact that several Muggle-born students have been mysteriously petrified, this understandably sends the school into a panic. The perpetrator was Ginny Weasley, acting under Voldemort's influence. She's as much a victim as the others, though.
- Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist: Rayford Steele sees a pig's head wearing a crown of thorns posted upon the cross of an abandoned church, no doubt done by vandals as an insult to God and Jesus Christ.
- Life Is Beautiful: The protagonist finds his shop vandalized with "JEWISH STORE" written on it, both to taunt him and to make him a target of other anti-Semites.
- Master: Jasmine, the only black student in her dorm at a very old university, finds the word "LEAVE" carved in the door of her dorm room, complete with a noose hanging from the doorknob. The door is repainted and partially fixed but the words remain visible.
- Mitchell: Greta, angry at Mitchell for standing her up, writes the word "BASTARD" ("JERK" in the censored version) on his car windshield with lipstick.
Tom Servo: (as Cummings) Word on the street is you're a jerk.
- The Real Exorcist: A shot of Tomoka's desk shows written insults and phrases like "Die", "Ugly", and "Idiot". When she went to check her exam sheet, not only it was punctured with pencil, but it had "You're dumb, die" written in the back.
- Robot Jox: when the main character retires from Humongous Mecha fighting (after being traumatised when his mecha's thrown into a crowd full of spectators) his poster's defaced with Mustache Vandalism and graffiti calling him a coward.
- Saved!: Hillary Faye spray paints their Evangelical school with anti-Christian bigotry and plants the cans in her enemies' lockers in order to get them expelled.
- School Ties: David enters his dorm room and discovers a large white banner pinned to the wall with a swastika and "GO HOME JEW" painted on it in red letters.
- Wicked: While racism against talking animals is running rampant in Oz, Shiz University’s goat teacher, Doctor Dillamond, is very unhappy on the first day of the new school year when he finds that somebody wrote "ANIMALS SHOULD BE SEEN, NOT HEARD" on his chalkboard.
- Wyatt Earp: The shooting script contained a scene of Chinatown residents painting over racist messages reading "Chinks Go Back to China" and "John Chinaman Must Go!" It was not included in the finished film.
Literature
- Oliver Button Is a Sissy: Oliver is bullied by the other boys at his school for taking tap-dancing lessons, who steal his tap shoes and write "Oliver Button Is A Sissy" on the wall. Oliver competes in the school talent show; he does not win, and when he sadly returns to the school next day, he sees that someone has crossed out the word "Sissy" and replaced it with "Star!"
- The first book of Protector of the Small has Kel walk into her room at the palace to see that her belongings have been mauled and a disparaging message against girl pages has been painted on the wall.
- The Revenge Playbook: After Ana is raped at a party, she is accused of being a cheater and her reputation tanks because her rapist already had a girlfriend. Her missing panties are taped to her locker door and the words "lying whore bitch" are scribbled under it.
- In Rick, Jeff tells Rick to cover for him as he vandalizes the Rainbow Spectrum's posters for Cabaret Night. Rick is reluctant to report him to the principal out of fear of severing their friendship, even though he knows he's a queerphobic Jerkass, and Melissa tells Rick that Kelly suspects that he's a queerphobe despite joining Spectrum, just because he hangs out with someone who doesn't support LGBT+ people. Rick then realizes that staying with Jeff is making him feel bad for himself and his new friends at Spectrum, so he stands up to Jeff when he tries burning another poster and reports him to the principal with Ronnie's help.
Live-Action TV
- In one episode of Adam-12, Malloy goes back to college part-time to finish his Bachelor's. After he's involved in arrests of students partaking in a sit-in at the university, his car is vandalized with the word "pig" spray-painted on it.
- Alan Partridge finds someone has written COOK PISS PARTRIDGE on his car in spray paint. He tries to correct it himself to COOK PASS BABTRIDGE, but the vandals get the last laugh by spray-painting TWAT on it.
- All in the Family: The Bunker house gets a swastika spray-painted on the front door, but it isn't intended for them. They live at 704 Hauser, and a Jewish activist lives at 740 Hauser. The activist comes over & explains the situation, and then gets blown up with a Car Bomb right outside the Bunker house.
- One episode of Aquarius has Shafe coming home to find that his house has been vandalized after someone found out that he's married to a black woman.
- On Arrested Development, episode "Afternoon Delight", the banana stand is hoisted out of the bay with graffiti painted on it. It reads "I'll get you Bluth. Hello." with a few letters missing. It's very subtly implied that Annyong did it.
- In the Barney Miller episode "The Vandal", the squad comes back to find their office destroyed and with "MILLER IS A DIRTY M...(all we see is the "M", but the word continues) spraypainted down the access hall. While fingers quickly point to a disgruntled Officer Levitt, it turns out that the perp was a man whom Miller had cited for littering back in 1961, starting a Humiliation Conga that lasted for years.
- The Big Bang Theory: In "The Staircase Implementation", a flashback episode to when Leonard first moved in as Sheldon Cooper's roommate, after meeting Sheldon’s previous roommate on the stairs (who advises him to run away as fast and as far as he can), he eventually discovers that his intended room inside the flat has graffiti sprayed on the wall in large, blood-red letters: DIE, SHELDON, DIE.
- The Brittas Empire: In "UXB", Laura is first seen scrubbing away an insulting message left on one of the exterior doors of the centre reading "DIE BRITTAS YOU FU—".
Laura: We think it was the WI Crafts Group. They had a bit of a lecture yesterday on hanging their coats on proper hooks.
- CSI: In the episode "Bully For You", the Victim of the Week is Barry, a high school bully found shot dead inside the boys' bathroom. Moments before his death, he had sprayed the word "STICK" in orange paint on the locker of a small wiry classmate named Dennis, whom Barry had relentlessly tormented. This initially makes Dennis a suspect but he is eventually cleared.
- A Different World: Dwayne and Ron go to a football game at a rival college, and Ron makes a bet with a group of white students. Ron wins and openly boasts about it, which escalates into him and the white students getting into a racially-charged argument. One of the students begins to spray paint a racial slur on his car but only gets as far as "Ni" when Dwayne shows up and a brawl occurs. The incident sends both parties to a holding cell where they work out their differences. However, when they get out, they discover someone else has finished the word.
- In the Family Matters episode "Fight the Good Fight", Laura finds her locker open with a racist sticky-note attached to it. She then closes the door to find the N-word sprayed onto it (the latter message is usually cut from reruns).
- In an episode of The George Lopez Show, Carmen's ex-boyfriend spreads rumors of her being sexually promiscuous, leading alpha-bitch Piper to spray "CARMEN HO-PEZ" on the Lopezes' gliding doors.
Benny: Hey, thank God our last name isn't "Tucker".
- Mentioned on Halt and Catch Fire, when Lev is hospitalized after a homophobic assault, Joe reveals to Cameron that the word "FAG" was written on his locker in permanent marker when he was in junior high school.
- In the very first episode of Hannibal, when the sole survivor of a killing spree returns to the place of the crime — her own house — she finds that somebody sprayed 'CANNIBALS' all over the garage.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: In "Mean", the victim of the week is Emily, a high school bully whose favorite target was an overweight girl named Agnes. Emily's friends — also active participants in harassing Agnes — are later arrested for Emily's murder caused by a rift over a boyfriend, and it's believed that Agnes would finally be at peace with her tormentors jailed and ultimately convicted. However, at the conclusion Stabler receives a call about a shooting at the high school the girls all attended. At the crime scene are the words "AGNES THE PIG SQUEALED" painted across a row of lockers and accentuated by a fetal pig hung on display. Another girl had wrongly believed that Agnes was responsible for the fates of Emily's friends-turned-murderers and had stepped up in their place to start bullying her. This causes Agnes to finally snap and shoot her dead out of the hopeless realization that the bullying was never going to stop.
- The Mentalist: In the episode "Ruby Slippers", the (male, gay) Victim of the Week's locker at work was covered in girly stickers, courtesy of another employee who is a bit of a homophobe.
- Mork & Mindy: In the episode "The Night They Raided Mind-ski's", Mindy outs herself as being of Polish descent to a KKK-esque group her politician cousin is trying not to alienate. When she and Mork return home one night, they find her apartment trashed and a hanged dummy wearing a sign reading "Go Home Polack". Mindy's concern for her safety prompts Mork to vandalize their headquarters.
- One episode of Scrubs has the Almighty Janitor defacing JD's car with a message asking him not to drop his gum on the floor...in chewing gum.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "A Man Alone", an angry mob accuses Odo of murder. Odo finds that his office has been vandalized, and the word "SHIFTER" inscribed on the wall.
- Summer Heights High:
- There is an episode where Jonah and his friends deface the lockers of the year 7 boys who annoy them. This leads to Jonah being suspended for a few days. Whilst Jonah is suspended, the year 7 boys retaliate by vandalising Jonah and his friends' lockers with racist language (Jonah and his friends are Polynesian). Later in the final episode, Jonah is shown to have defaced the bag of the boy from year 7 who annoys him, the office door of the English teacher he hates and many of the teachers' cars with his dicktation tag (a drawing of a penis with the word "tation" after it).
- Later in Jonah's spinoff Jonah From Tonga, Jonah vandalises his uncle's truck by writing "homo" with an arrow pointing to driver's window, which leads to the uncle saying that he felt like killing Jonah because of that. In a later episode, Jonah welds Graydon's locker shut (Jonah hates Graydon) and writes his new "pussycat" tag on it (a drawing of a vagina with the word cat after it).
- Tyrant (2014): Bassam, the estranged son of a Middle Eastern dictator, remembers that when he was studying at an American college he came back to his dorm room one time to find that his room had been trashed and the walls defaced with graffiti saying stuff like "MASS MURDERER" and "GENOCIDE".
Pro Wrestling
- WWE had a storyline in the '90s where the Malcolm Xerox stable The Nation of Domination returned to their dressing room after a match to find it ransacked and racial slurs spraypainted all over the walls. The Nation believed that The Hart Foundation were to blame, but, as it turned out, it was actually D-Generation X trying to frame the Harts and thus turn the Nation against them.
Video Games
- Grand Theft Auto V: Trevor leaves several of these around Debra's apartment while he stays there:
- Debra's blackboard note is rewritten as "Debra is a bitch".
- The "Live, Love, Laugh" writing on the wall is crossed out and replaced with "EAT, SHIT, DIE".
- Letter blocks that have "L-O-V-E" written on them have "H-A-T-E" scribbled over them.
- Half-Life 1: In "On a Rail", the HECU leaves behind "threatening" graffiti for Gordon, such as "YORE DEAD FREEMAN".
- Hotline Miami: Jacket finds his car heavily broken and vandalized after the flatline chapter.
- Lies of P: After defeating the Corrupted Parade Master, P returns to Hotel Krat to find it utterly wrecked due to an attack by Stalkers led by the Black Rabbit Brotherhood, who kidnapped Gepetto in the process. Furthermore, a banner with the word "HYPOCRITE" painted on it is hung in the main lobby.
- In No Umbrellas Allowed, reporting too many customers will have them vandalizing your store with insults the next day. You can even see the window breaking a split second before you leave at the end of the day. You can pay the janitor to clean the graffiti the next day.
- If you successfully lower a girl's reputation enough in Yandere Simulator, her desk will be defaced with horrible insults and calls for her to kill herself.
Web Animation
- The fourth episode of There she is!! has Doki and Nabi experiencing this along with Broken Window Warnings as the city turns against them for bucking the "one species relationship" rule.
Web Comics
- Dean & Nala + Vinny: The trio have been camping under bridges while traveling through Finland. Armed with a can of paint, Nala writes on a bridge wall, "DEAN may have worn a KILT!" Vinny is unimpressed.
Western Animation
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Pick An Ed", Eddy goes undercover after he, and later his alter-egos, are insulted with graffiti on the school walls, calling him a No-Neck Chump.
- In an episode of Family Guy, Peter goes to war with Quahog's Amish community, who sprays "YE SUCK" on the front of his house.
- The School Ties example above is parodied in a flashback in which Brian, who attended Brown University, found a banner reading "GO HOME, DOG!" in his room.
- In the Gravity Falls episode "Society of the Blind Eye", a couple of teenage boys, Nate and Lee, deface Old Man McGucket's shack with "McSuckit". McGucket catches them and angrily chases them away, but then he sadly says "McSuckit. They got me good.".
- Referenced in the Kid 'N Play Band Toon, when the protagonists accidentally do this to the back wall of a synagogue (and the insult is only such in context) resulting in a Double Aesop about vandalism and religious tolerance.
- The Proud Family: In the Very Special Episode "Culture Shock", Penny, her family, and their new neighbors arrive home from the restaurant after celebrating the end of Ramadan and find the words "GO BACK TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY!" written on their garage door resulting in a lesson about post-9/11 Islamophobia.
- The Simpsons:
- Bart’s alter-ego, El Barto, has been defacing the school walls with “Principal Skinner is a weiner” tags since the earliest episodes.
- In "The Parent Rap", Homer and Marge put a banner on Judge Harm's houseboat. Homer comments that there's only one way to describe a "nasty super witch" like her, and we can see that the banner reads "BI—" but, once the whole thing is up, it turns out that it says "BIG MEANIE".
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Sailor Mouth", SpongeBob learns an unknown swear word after seeing graffiti someone wrote on the dumpster behind the Krusty Krab, calling Mr. Krabs the swear word.
