Teens Are Monsters: Difference between revisions

Ironically, the much milder version of this trope occurs with shows aimed toward ''younger'' children, who find teenagers cryptic, pushy, and intimidating for other reasons.

 

 

Of course, this can be, on an individual basis, [[Truth in Television]]; there are monster teens in [[Real Life]] in the same fashion that we can find some [[Kids Are Cruel|mean kids]] and cruel adults. The mere fact of being a teenager doesn´t make people automatically good or evil; it ''does'', however, make any given person more susceptible to reckless or selfish behavior than they otherwise would be as an adult, for biological reasons. This makes it [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|all the more commendable and impressive]] when a teen acts maturely, responsibly, or selflessly in situations where it would be difficult or unexpected for an average adult to act that way. '''Still, no personal examples, please.'''

 

== Anime & Manga ==

** Mohiro Kitoh's manga titles tend to take a very dark view of ''everything.''

*** To the degree that, when Kitoh announced his next work would be [http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-07-28/bokurano-kitoh-to-launch-noririn-cycling-manga a sports series about a high school girl doing mountain bike riding], the internet immediately turned to constructing scenarios about how the bike would be used to destroy the world.

** ''Akira'' manages to both play this trope straight and deconstruct it. Whilst Kaneda and his gang are portrayed as teenagers that have little regard to the law, they are also shown as having a sense of honor (though it is small), particularly with Kaneda's feelings toward the death of a friend (in both the anime and the manga). By the end of the series, they actually {{spoiler|manage to revitalize Japanese nationalism}}.

* The teenagers in ''[[Battle Royale]]'' are ''forced'' to become monsters and kill each other. Some take quite easily to this new role, others never do.

** Prior to Duel Monsters taking the priority of the series, Yugi went through a whole series of teenage monsters every chapter in the manga, Seto Kaiba being among them.

* [[Lampshaded]] in ''[[Digimon Adventure]]'' by Gotsumon and Pumpkinmon, despite the fact that teenagers are usually minor characters:

{{quote| '''Gostumon''': ''Woah! I think you knocked over a monster!''<br />

* All the contestants in the tournament in ''[[The Law of Ueki]]'' are supposed to be junior high students. Yet, they do not mind using their powers to [[Take Over the World]], and hell, apparently don't have any qualms about killing their opponents, for God's sake.

* [[Strongest Legend Kurosawa]] uses this '''a lot''', and at one point even compares them to animals.

 

 

== Comicbooks ==

* In the graphic novel ''[[Black Hole]]'', teenagers are being afflicted with a mysterious STD that causes them to mutate randomly, occasionally turning them into literal monsters: barely human creatures that live in the woods. At least some of them seem to have become significantly mentally deranged because of this, turning them into more traditional monster teens.

* The [[X-Men]] and other [[Marvel Comics|Marvel]] [[Mutants]] literally exemplify this trope. Most mutant powers seem to manifest around puberty, and turn their recipients into freaks or outcasts of some sort.

* Elizabeth of ''[http://tinyurl.com/38mg7t2 Gemini Storm]'' was recently revealed to be one of these, spending her teen years in juvenile hall and mental hospitals until government funding ran out from the quarantine and the institutes closed down.

* Mark Collins in ''[[Twisted]]''.

* The first ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' movie used disaffected youths to form a thieves' guild.

* Also ''[[Welcome to The Dollhouse]].''

* The classic horror film ''I Was a Teenage Werewolf'' took this quite literally.

* A big part of ''[[Brick]]''.

* Similarly, the film ''Kidulthood'', being centered around the troubled youth of urban London, feeds off of this trope - even a fair few of the protagonists are [[Jerkass|pricks]] to some extent, while the main antagonist is a towering [[Jerk Jock]] who batters his girlfriend and shows no visible regret at leading a bullying campaign against a girl at school which ultimately [[Driven to Suicide|drove her to suicide]]. Combine this with the film's other underlying theme of [[Adults Are Useless]], and you get a pretty bleak movie.

* The first two ''Pumpkinhead'' movies pretty much define this trope, with Blood Wings pretty much having you want the titular monster to pretty much slaughter every teen we meet in the movie.

* The feral [[British English|chavs]] terrorizing the [[Council Estate]] in ''[[Harry Brown]]''.

* The Pioneers in ''[[Scarecrow]]'' who traumatize Lena and her grandfather, driving them to madness and out of town.

* [[The Fifties]] was rife with films with this at it's core with titles like "18 And Anxious". [[Rebel Without a Cause]] came in and set it straight.

* Jodee Blanco's memoir of recovering from intense bullying, ''Please Stop Laughing at Me'', turns both this and [[Kids Are Cruel]] [[Up to Eleven]]. A group of kids Jodee was friends with in a new town fall out with her after she refused to play a prank on a disabled teacher. They then come back to her over the summer, invite her to play baseball, then [[Complete Monster|knock her out with a fastball, moon her, and call her a variety of names]]. Not only that, her crush wrote {{spoiler|"You're going to have to fuck yourself bitch"}} in her yearbook, gets beaten up by the entire football team, and is made fun of when word gets out that {{spoiler|one breast is smaller than the other}}, and [[It Gets Worse|that's not even the half of it]].

* ''[[Speak]]'' has Melinda's classmates. Heather jumping ship on her. Those kids at the pep rally. {{spoiler|And Andy Evans who raped her}}.

** "Horrorshow" means "very good" there.

* Figures rather prominently in ''many'' novels by [[Stephen King]] - one almost suspects King believes [[Teens Are Monsters]] himself. Among other examples, we have:

** Faith, until her redemption

* Connor in ''[[Angel]]'' is a perfect example. The bad guys hardly have to break a sweat to manipulate the kid into doing really nasty stuff. Fortunately, he returns in Season 5 as a ''much'' saner person, due to {{spoiler|having [[Fake Memories|memories]] of a normal loving family instead of a childhood in a hell dimension.}}

* Kevin the Teenager in the ''[[Harry Enfield and Chums]]'' sketches. ("That is SO UNFAIR! I HATE YOU!") However this is more along the realistic lines of making him an unbearable, moody, whining brat who hates everything his parents do or say and is entirely controlled by hormones and current trends.

** In the earlier ''Harry Enfield's Television Programme'', Kevin (also called "Little Brother") was a hyperactive and relentlessly cheerful preteen. The first episode of ''...And Chums'' showed his thirteenth birthday triggering a hideous [[Transformation Sequence]], similar to [[The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde|Doctor Jekyll]], in front of his horrified parents.

** Though he was 'born' within the run of the show, Q's son of Voyager was always depicted as a teen whenever he made an appearance.

** In contrast, Naomi Wildman follows the same path of being born during the show's run, but was depicted as a child when she interacted with the crew.

* ''The Sontaran Strategem'', an episode of ''[[Doctor Who]]'', features a genius teenager as an antagonist whose motivations can be boiled down to being a teenager. However, he came around in the end, sort of.

** Also, he had gathered a large number of other genius teenagers to him who, on hearing his real plan, were appalled and immediately abandoned him. It implied that his plans were less about his age and more that he was somewhat unstable anyway.

* Several ''[[Lifetime Movie of the Week|Life Time Movies]]'' portray any teenager who's not a [[Naive Everygirl]] or a squeaky clean Mama's boy as evil, rotten assholes or bitches who try to corrupt the good kids.

* Early on in ''[[Andromeda]]'', the ship docked at a station run by a tribal society of teenagers (everyone died young due to radiation poisoning, so the oldest survivor was sixteen). When the teens gained access to star-destroying bombs, they immediately went out and blew up inhabited solar systems with them.

** Of course, he also said it was probably the mother's fault, which usually is in more real cases of bullying or teenager rebelty.

* Though not all, a lot of the [[Monster of the Week|meteor freaks of the week,]] people who usually go crazy and start killing people on ''[[Smallville]]'', are teenagers. Part of that is likely due to the high school/college setting of the first five seasons, but it holds true in later seasons as well.

** Initially an [[Enfante Terrible]], Lx-15/Alexander Luthor plunges headlong into this trope, after he ages to the point where he's in his mid-teens. He attempts to assassinate Martha Kent, Clark, and Earth-2 Lionel, burns down Luthor Mansion, and even attacks Tess, his [[Parental Substitute]]. Thank god that memory loss, and a [[Heel Face Turn]] set in.

* Totally subverted by the [[Power Rangers]], where just about every teenager the audience sees ends up being unbelievably wholesome and respectable. Even the bullies and teenage-jerks usually turn out to be decent people when push comes to shove, although once every few seasons, a teenage character plays the trope straight.

** Lampshaded in the pilot episode; the original team is assembled when Zordon looks for "immature, overbearing humans" to fight evil. This was rephrased as "teenagers with attitude" in the opening credit sequence.

* Subverted somewhat in ''[[Teachers]]'', in which the titular teachers, most of whom loathe their jobs, believe this about the teenagers they teach - but their actual interactions witht hen show that the teachers are more at fault than the teens. However, background events in any given hallway or yard scene do tend to show students casually setting each other on fire or hanging each other out of windows as the teachers walk by obliviously...

* Accepted as a truth universally acknowledged in ''[[Glee]]'', where it ends up being true at one point or another not just of the general school population but of ''almost every single one of the teenage protagonists too''. So far Mike Chang is about the only one who's escaped it. The trope is taken to its furthest extreme in 2X01, in which [[Mary Sue|Rachel]] is so jealous of [[Always Someone Better|an exchange student's]] superior singing voice that she sends her to a crack house instead of an audition. It is, however, also deconstructed somewhat with the implication that what lets teens be monsters is adults not doing the job of teaching them better: WMHS has an anti-bullying policy that is not enforced, but Dalton Academy for Boys features an ''enforced'' anti-bullying policy and Teens are emphatically Not Monsters there.

* Parodied in ''[[Father Ted]]'' with the teenaged Father [[Meaningful Name|Damian]], [[Evil Counterpart]] to [[Man Child]] [[Cloudcuckoolander|Dougal]]. He exhibits [[Obviously Evil|all the typical traits]] (and rebels against the older priests whom he sees as his parents) and his theft of an old whistle sends the [[Eccentric Townsfolk|inhabitants]] of Craggy Island into a downward spiral of paranoia.

 

 

* [[Whateley Universe|Whateley Academy]] has what might seem to be more than its fair share of students who fit this trope. Possibly [[Justified Trope|justified]], though, in that it's presented as pretty much the only school for teenage ''mutants'' in the entire US (if not much of the world, given the number of foreign students showing up) -- there just aren't that many other places for the offspring of infamous supervillains, the badly traumatized, and the just plain assholes among them to ''go'', so Whateley quite naturally becomes the place where one almost by default encounters all of them at once.

* A lot of [[Protectors of the Plot Continuum]] are in their teens, and committing acts of extreme violence is all part and parcel of the job.

 

 

== Western Animation ==

** Although they also betray the adults as well, possibly in reference to the fact that teenagers are also more rebellious against adults than kids are (or just to show that they are indeed bastards).

** Many characters in the show enter an "outgrowing" phase shortly before their 13th birthday and become the rebellious bastard stereotype we know and love when the finally hit the big 13.

*** {{spoiler|Though not all of them are affected by this. Some teens (and even a few adults) are hired as black-ops double agents for the KND.}}

** Katie's issue was [[Getting Crap Past the Radar|implied]] to be a much more [[No Periods, Period|specific teen problem]].

* Two episodes of ''[[Powerpuff Girls]]'' featured the Smith family, one member of which was their angry teen son Bud. The first episode, Bud's entire appearance consisted of him yelling something typically teenagerish at his father, such as "I hate you!" and "No one understands me!" The second episode, which features the entire family as villains, provides every member of the family with a motivation for why they hate the Powerpuff Girls - and Bud's is "I hate everything!"

** She's consistently painted as a evil babysitter, but it only brings up her ''age'' when [[Rule of Funny]] applies. More than likely that she has always been and will always be evil. Her age is a side-effect of being a babysitter.

** In one episode she's member of a whole club of evil teen girl babysitters. [[Negative Continuity|But it's not likely they'll be brought up again.]]

** Probably the next most prominent example is [[Well-Intentioned Extremist|Jet]], who attempts to ''kick an old man in the head'' and flood a whole village of innocents in his intense rage towards the Fire Nation. He's the leader of an entire gang of teenagers willing to commit murder and other dark crimes for no other motivation than revenge, and even gets called a monster in-universe by [[Team Mom|Katara.]] He's changed his approach by the next time we see him, insisting that nobody else will get hurt when he tries to expose two firebenders disguised as Earth Kingdom refugees, but is forced to learn that {{spoiler|[[Redemption Equals Death]]}} when his plan backfires on him.

* The vast majority of villains on ''[[Static Shock]]'' are superpowered teenagers.

** [[Subverted Trope|As are the heroes.]]

* One episode of ''[[King of the Hill]]'' has a gang of teenage paintball delinquents making Hank and his buddies' life a living hell (to the point of doing drive-by shootings with the paintball rifles) just because he took a stand for Bobby earlier. The trope's even mentioned when they get Bill to pull a [[Wounded Gazelle Gambit]] so Hank and Dale could pick off two of them:

{{quote| '''Hank:''' You were right, Bill. Teenagers ''are'' cruel. They'll pick on the slowest, heaviest... Well, the important thing is, you were right, Bill!}}