CW: Majorly depressing shit, suicide.
There was this one episode of a show called Shigofumi that I watched recently. This one guy blogs on a forum about a guy in his class getting bullied and laughs about it with all the other posters. Then he realizes that the guy being bullied is one of the posters too. The victim recognizes him and asks him to help at school, but the guy just tells him that he can't do anything, and the victim eventually kills himself out of sheer despair.
Then they reveal that the bullies saw the victim talking to the original guy for like five seconds, and decided that since he was the victim's 'friend', he ought to be next in line for bullying. The guy being bullied is handsome, popular, gets good grades and largely well-liked, but nobody wants to piss the bully clique off, so they ostracize him. He starts blogging on the same forum, and realizes that no one on the Internet or in real life cares. Someone's gotta be the scapegoat, and no one wants to take his place.
The episode basically wraps up with the bullies making the original guy walk around on the edge of a roof, which has a high chance of getting him killed. He realizes that there's no way to run, no way to back out, because they'll be hounding him for every second of the rest of his school life. If he complies, they'll keep coming up with new ways to torture him. If he gets used to it, they'll escalate the punishments to get a reaction. The guy realizes that there's no way out, snaps, and stabs one of the bullies with a screwdriver. They put him in juvie and the implication is that his life is ruined, because Japan ostracizes the heck out of anyone with a minor criminal record, so a murderer would never be able to get a job or achieve anything resembling a stable, ordinary life. But even though he's got no future, his actions are presented as justified, because there was no hope for him anyway, so at least he got some catharsis. He realized that relying on logic or negotiation or authority figures wouldn't do anything, because nobody wanted to get involved with him and would just turn a blind eye. He's already seen what happened to the former victim, and decides to kill instead of being killed. Basically, he becomes an animal, because there was no place for him in an apathetic society.
It really drove in how absolutely hellish bullying can be, particularly in Japan, where it seems like ritualised abuse. There's no perfect solution, no ray of hope, no saviors- just a choice between two different kinds of hell. It was pretty bleak, but I honestly couldn't call it unrealistic, because I've seen people in similar situations and read stories about how they just... broke. Bullying is a problem that's pretty hard to solve, seeing as it stems from immature kids channeling the worst parts of human nature, but that's exactly why people need to take every possible effort to keep an eye out and combat it.
