Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: Difference between revisions

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* ''[[Sailor Moon]]'': At least, it seems this way at first.

* ''[[Tokyo Mew Mew]]'' seemed to pick 5 random girls who were just in the wrong place and wrong time. They just happened to have DNA that was compatible with the chosen animals.

 

 

* ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'': Though in this case, the X-Men ''did'' receive combat training prior to their first mission. It bears mentioning that the team's youngest member was only 13. Justified in that mutant powers manifest at puberty, and Xavier started a school for "gifted youngsters" to train them in their potentially uncontrollable and deadly mutations. But he also [[Professor X Likes Watching Teenagers Sweat|liked watching them sweat.]]

** In ''[[Ultimate X-Men]]'', the team barely has time to be assembled and forced into tight leather pants before being sent to rescue a young mutant from 50-foot killer robots.

 

 

* In ''[[Animorphs]]'', five teenagers are picked by an alien to save the world from an alien invasion. To its credit, the series ''[[Deconstructed Trope|does]]'' deal with the absurdity of five teenagers being the world's only hope, and in the end they're all shown to have some fairly deep psychological trauma.

** Initially explained that said alien didn't have much choice, since he was about to die and the kids happened to be there, but {{spoiler|it is later revealed that a [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien]] [[Energy Being]] (read: stand in for [[God]]) hand-picked more than half of the kids for [[Luke, I Am Your Father|various]] [[Reset Button|reasons]]; since it is involved in an absurdly complex universe-spanning game with an evil [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien]], the earth's defenders being teenagers might have been a restriction as part of one of the in-game deals}}.

 

 

* ''[[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]]'': the [[Trope Namer]]. In the pilot, mentor Zordon asked for "five overbearing and over-emotional humans" in the area, and helper robot Alpha said, complete with facepalm, "Oh no, not that! Not... teenagers!" to which Zordon responded, "that's correct Alpha," to which Alpha sighs, "I was afraid of that." Only one of the group didn't have any martial arts training and they were fairly decent shots on the very rare occasion when they actually used their blasters. The reasoning behind this, stated in the first episode was that as teenagers they would be the generation to inherit the planet, and thusly should be the ones who protect that inheritance.

** The ''[[Power Rangers]]'' series continues this (though usually to a lesser extent; most of the later seasons had the characters be past high school), stopping occasionally for mentors that actively seek out professionals- from nonmilitary professions. When we do get something that's technically military, at most one of them has any concept of military tactics, procedure, or discipline. And in several years, the ''leader'' was most likely to be a straight example: someone with no experience given the role for no discernible reason. In fact, ''[[Power Rangers]]'' is the [[Trope Namer|Namer]] for ''that'' trope: [[Rookie Red Ranger]].

 

 

* Many ''[[City of Heroes]]'' players make their in-game avatars as teenagers.

* Ditto ''[[Champions Online]]'' players.

* ''[[EarthBound]]'''s four main characters are teens (and possibly even younger in the Japanese version), though they were chosen by a prophecy. Unlike many examples, though, the trope is [[Deconstructed Trope|deconstructed]] a bit, since what the characters have to go through at the end of the game is meant to signify a loss of innocence.

 

* In ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'' Susan and Nanase got their magic potential [http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2010-05-24 unlocked this way], when two immortals recruited them to fight a dangerous vampire-like being called an Aberration they'd had a run in with. This encounter led to Susan getting some [http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2010-05-31 psychological scars] due to being forced to {{spoiler|kill someone who used to be human}} at the age of 15. [http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2010-07-14 It later turns out] the Immortals in question had no need to do so as they could have called on several other sources, the fact that they asked teens to do so was a source of great disgust to Jerry, a separate Immortal.

 

 

* ''[[Sailor Nothing]]'' also [[Deconstruction|deals with the absurdity]] of choosing teenaged girls to save the world. Who would come up with such a ridiculous idea? A villain who actually wants the good guys to lose?

 

 

* ''[[Captain Planet and the Planeteers]]'' had Gaia recruiting five teenagers with no previous experience fighting evil. On the good side, they were able to summon a superhero when things got too tough. The Planeteers were the generation that was going to grow up to inherit a polluted planet, like the intended audience, so it made sense for Gaia to teach people of that generation to take care of it.

* [[Double Subversion]] with the ''[[Storm Hawks]]'', as when they tried to register the first time, they were turned down for being too young (with the exception of Stork). Eventually, they are recognized by the Sky Council as Sky Knights.