When I originally read about how much trouble it caused him, I was shocked at how bad the abuse was. I had seen the video and thought it was in more or less go

When I originally read about how much trouble it caused him, I was shocked at how bad the abuse was. I had seen the video and thought it was in more or less good fun -- it was cute. I, however, was an adult looking at this thing in a completely different social context than the kid in the video. Perhaps you, too, forget, or were never exposed to, the type of mob mentality that runs rampant through school-age kids forced into a structured institutional environment for 10+ hours a day. Random people on the internet got a laugh out of it. His schoolmates, on the other hand, used it as a source of cruel torment. Laughing it off generally does no good with school kids, unless you are already extremely popular. And if something like your weight makes you stand out, it's 1000x worse. There is almost certainly no better way he could have handled the situation - he was lucky that changing schools was enough to (apparently) stem the flow. It was a serious situation that was way out of control, not a matter of a few of your buddies giving your a hard time for doing something stupid.