Teens Are Monsters/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Teenagers are portrayed as rebellious, angsty, or evil.

  • Straight: Alice, the 16 year old girl, becomes a Jerkass who rebels against authority, gets drunk at parties, and picks on her little siblings.
  • Exaggerated: On top of all that, Alice joins a gang, robs stores, mugs old ladies, kicks several small puppies, and listens to gangsta rap and heavy metal music.
  • Up to Eleven: All Teens Are Complete Monsters
  • Justified: Alice is a teenager, trying to transistion into being an adult while still being treated like a kid. She rebels against authority to give herself a sense of power and breaks the rules to prove that she can make her own decisions.
    • Teenagers have raging hormones but their prefrontal cortex is yet to develop
    • Adolescence provides an opportunity to let out one's psychologically repressed and latent behaviours (for instance, sexuality)
  • Inverted: Alice is a good teenager, always listens to her parents, volunteers at the homeless shelter during the weekend, and helps anyone in need.
  • Subverted: Alice dresses like a rebel and is always listening to rap and heavy metal music on her headphones, but she does all her chores, takes good care of her little siblings, and is overall a good person.
  • Double Subverted: ...While her parents are around. When they're gone, she goes to wild parties, vandalizes street signs, and sets old buildings on fire.
  • Parodied: All teenagers are evil overlords trying to Take Over the World.
    • Or the the teens are literal monsters, once a child reaches the age of 13 they become a bloodthirsty demon until the reach their mid twenties, when they become somewhat apathetic adults
  • Deconstructed: Alice is a terrible teenager, never listening to authority, breaking several laws, and never going to any of her classes. She alienates herself from her family and her friends and all of her teachers have given up on her a long time ago. Her behavior causes her parents to kick her out of the house. Without a home or friends to rely on, and without any skills or qualifications to get a decent job, she resorts to a life of crime. She is thrown in prison, where she dies alone.
  • Reconstructed: Alice discovers that growing up is hard. She's tired of being treated as a kid, so she rebels, which causes her to be treated even more as a kid. Alice eventually learns that growing up means getting along with others, but does not necessarily mean blindly following authority all the time. As a result, she becomes a rebel who learns when it's right to listen to authority and when not to, but is always considerate of other people and will help them out whenever they are in need, even if that means going against authority.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice looks like a rebel, but she listens to her parents and volunteers at her church. But at night, she gets drunk and vandalizes public property. But she feels bad for this the next day and turns herself in and agrees to repair the damage she's done.
  • Averted: Alice is neither portrayed as overly nice or naughty. She just tries to get by without attracting too much attention to herself.
  • Enforced: "We know that teenagers are hard to deal with. Let's create a character that reflects this."
  • Lampshaded: "I'm a teenager! I'm supposed to be a bitch and this is what I will be, BECAUSE I FUCKING CAN!"
  • Invoked: Alice acts like a bratty teenager to get what she wants.
  • Defied: Alice tries her best to be a good daughter for her parents, a good sister for her siblings, and a good student for her teachers.
  • Discussed: "She's going through her teen years. We're trying our best to survive."
  • Conversed: "Teenagers are so horrible in this show."

Back to Teens Are Monsters