Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
Ordinary High School Student
|
Arcueid: Wow, ordinary high school students sure are something! — Tsukihime
The most common protagonist of an action show targeted at teenagers. Usually it's discovered they are anything but ordinary — they're reincarnated princesses, or alien princes, or the only ones who can pilot the Humongous Mecha. Or they've been training in an obscure martial art since they could walk. Or they're God. Or they've got something that makes the opposite sex flock to them, and possibly the odd member of their own, whether they want the attention or not.
Then again, there are the true average joes who have something unusual happen to them, and then nothing in their lives is ever the same again.
Usually they start off as unremarkable or even outcasts, but by the time they come into their own, their Secret Legacy and gifts, whatever they are, have manifested and helped them make a place for themselves in the world (which often involves taking a level in badass).
Look for the kid in the fully open button shirt over a T-shirt, jeans and Converse sneakers — think Ferris Bueller or Ned Bigby.
Usually, their powers are revealed as part of the central premise. Compare I Am Who, in which their hidden powers are so immense and important that their revelation is the biggest twist in the story. Contrast Arthur Dent, Innocent Bystander, and The Everyman, who are genuinely ordinary.
See Farm Boy for their rural counterpart.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Comics
- Peter Parker, which was revolutionary at the time. A sidekick-aged protagonist?!
- Inverted in Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, however, in which Mary Jane — the protagonist — actually is an ordinary high school student.
- Doug Ramsey was a kid from suburban New York who was good at languages, and didn't know any different until he was informed by an acquaintance from the odd boarding school nearby that he was in fact a mutant with powers of... comprehending languages... and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to come establish communications with a potentially hostile alien.
- The Runaways were all normal teenagers... who in the course of a night watched their parents kill a young woman, discovered superpowers/super gadgets/a telepathic dinosaur, fought off their parents, and ended up becoming runaways living in an underground mansion.
- Jaime Reyes, the current Blue Beetle in The DCU. One day he's just hanging out with his friends, the next he gets bonded to an alien symbiote, helps Batman save infinite universes, and goes missing for a year, yet he still manages to come off as more of a normal kid than 90% of other teenage superheroes in comics.
- Give it time, they'll kill his parents off too.
- Mineko from Helios Eclipse.
Films
- The film and book of Stephen King's Carrie, and the film sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2.
- Sam Witwicky was just an Ordinary High School Student until he bought his first car. Turns out it was an alien robot. Who knew? His special quality is just being the great-grandkid of the man who found Megatron. Sari Sumdac from Transformers Animated actually asks the Allspark why it chose her. It had an answer too, albeit a vague and ambiguous one.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer — not the show, the movie which preceded it. Unlike in the show, Buffy is completely unaware of her destiny as the Slayer until her Watcher shows up.
Literature
- Arguably inverted in Harry Potter, as everyone knows that he's special from the start — except him.
- Battle Royale
- Subverted in Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series, in which the protagonist essentially becomes the heir to the the House (the so-called "epicentre of creation", the denizens of which give our universe about the same casual interest as a rather exciting zoo) simply because he almost died on the right day.
- That's right kids. This kid essentially becomes God by nearly dying.
- Bella Swan in Twilight. Until she falls in love with a vampire.
- In the lovely juvenile novel Wings by Bill Britain, the main character is an Ordinary High School Student who inexplicably develops a huge pair of fully functional bat-like wings.
- Mia from The Princess Diaries is an Ordinary High School Student who turns out to be a Princess of a minor European Principality. Unfortunately, it is not the case that Everythings Better With Princesses.
- Jerry Renault, unexpected instigator of The Chocolate War.
- The Animorphs. Ordinary middle/high school kids whose lives are changed forever when they decide to take a shortcut through a construction site.
Live Action TV
- Claire Bennet of Heroes.
- The title character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Most of her allies, too.
- True of the allies, not so much Buffy herself; she knows at the start of the series that she's the Slayer. The film on which the series was based more accurately fit the trope.
- Nickelodeon's The Troop plays this straight and hard with Jake.
- Joan Of Arcadia.
Manga & Anime
Video Games
- Soma Cruz from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. The game specifically says he is a high school student on a foreign exchange trip to Japan.
- Kazama Jin from Tekken started out somewhat ordinary, but things haven't been exactly going well since. Ling Xiaoyu is a milder example. The Tekken 5 ending for Kazama Asuka suggests she might be more than just a brawler, too.
- Kasugano Sakura seems like a typical schoolgirl enamored with a rough famous fighter. Aside from the fact that instead of trying to date him, she prefers mirroring his moves as best she can. Including martial-arts fireballs.
- Ethan Kairos in Time Hollow is completely ordinary. He just happens to be the latest in the line of his family to receive the power to adjust history via a special pen.
- Hell, the English manual quotes this trope exactly, describing him as an "ordinary high school student".
- Fei from Xenogears plays almost every part of this troupe. Yeah, he knew martial arts but he thought it was just "normal" martial arts. Besides knowing martial arts that can destroy God and giant robots, he's also the only one that can pilot a special gears, which turns out to be the super ultra special titular one. He is also secretly one of the most powerful beings in the game's universe, whom "God" gave his power to.
- And while he is utterly oblivious to all or this at the beginning, he also has several split personalities. One of which has shut himself off from the world, and another which is an utter sociopath who makes full use of his godly power.
- Many (though not all) recent Shin Megami Tensei games feature Ordinary High School Students as protagonists. Of course, something usually happens to make them considerably less ordinary, such as finding a computer that can summon demons, learning to call forth entities from the inside of their mind, being forced to share their body with a Devil Summoner, or being turned into a demon after witnessing the end of the world.
- Lan Hikari and Geo Stelar, but the latter fits better the description. None of them are high-schoolers, but close enough.
Web Comics
- Mike Cosley from Bardsworth
.
- Kanzaki Kei from Circumstances of the Revenant Braves
, more so than any other character.
- Sarah from El Goonish Shive is the only member of her group of friends who isn't a shapeshifter, witch, mad scientist, or martial artist of some kind.
- Give her time. At some point the demonic duck will be the most ordinary character in the strip.
- Elliott probably fits the trope better, though. For most of the first story arc, he does indeed seem to be an ordinary student with a weird friend, but it's progressively revealed that he's far more unusual than that.
- Ash and Emily from Misfile until Rumisiel got stoned while in charge of the Celestial Files. Wackyness Ensued.
- Divided Sky, like so many other tropes, lampshades it.
- Uma from Everyday Heroes. To everyone else, she's perfectly normal
.
Web Original
- Yuri Mikagami in the round-robin story Dark Heart High
. A bit of a subversion as its revealed in the very first scene that her father is a retired Evil Overlord. (A non human one at that!)
- As far as Survival of the Fittest goes, it would be easier to list exceptions, since just about everyone in the entire cast is an Ordinary High School Student. For example, Johnathan Michaels of V2 was a world champion boxer and Renee Valenti of V3 a burgeoning movie star.
- Nick Reilly, Bill Wilson, Tony Chandler... A lot of the kids who become mutants and then go to Superhero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe.
- Eliot in El Goonish Shive is probably the only ordinary one who could qualify. Even after he gets a alternate gender clone and we find out he has chi-blast style kung fu skill, he's remarkable ordinary. Anyone standing next to Tedd would have to be just to keep the universe in balance.
Western Animation
- Danny Phantom
- Ben10: Ben was an Ordinary Elementary School Student, but was the star of the (apparently hugely popular for high school JV) soccer team at the end of the Time Skip.
- Code Lyoko: Every member of the group is an Ordinary Student, though Jérémie is the only one who can use the Supercomputer, Aelita is the only member who can deactivate towers, and the other three are her protectors.
- Aelita's status is a lot more complicated; she didn't start out ordinary in any sense.
- Oddly enough, William is an actual Ordinary Student until Season 3. Debate has been going on for quite some time on several fan forums as to whether he's still a Warrior or an Ordinary Student in the series finale.
|
|