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Wake Up Go To School Save The World
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Oz: Guys, take a moment to deal with this. We survived... Xander: Yeah. That was one harsh battle. Oz: Not the battle. High school. — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Graduation, part 2"
"All these amazing powers you possess, and yet you still can't get school canceled." — Paco, Blue Beetle
When a show has a preteen or teen hero(ine), the message is usually as follows...
Beating up the Big Bad and saving the universe from certain doom time and again? Easy.
Dealing with social pressures and crushes? Hard.
It's basically one giant Aesop, and can succumb to all the pratfalls and drawbacks that those things entail. Played right, it can be an effective way to communicate to the audience. Played wrong, and it can be disastrous.
Juvenile version of the Part Time Hero. Usually a Triple Shifter. The mental and social counterpart to Mundangerous.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
- Red Garden deconstructs this, where the pressures of fighting monsters in the middle of the night cause problems for the main characters' social lives.
- Though Digimon Adventure avoided this one, Digimon Adventure 02 waltzed right into it. A team of 11-year-old students who go to school during the day and face off against monsters and the evil emperor of another world in their spare time? Textbook.
- It has one interesting subversion: said evil emperor is another eleven-year old student.
- But since he's evil he's allowed to ignore the aesop and go full-time villain when it hits the fan.
- This happens to Nagisa in Iczer One, but only after being nothing short of abducted by the eponymous protagonist to man the battle robot with her.
- The premise of Yu-Gi-Oh GX can be summarized as "Wake up, go to school, practice saving the world." By playing a children's card game. Which quickly turns much uglier than is typical.
- In Yu Yu Hakusho, Yusuke flat out states that "school sucks" and that "this job" (basically, saving the world), is the only thing he's ever been good at. Probably justified in that Yusuke is extremely Book Dumb.
- The Pretty Sammy series is based around this.
- Sailor Moon. Maybe it's because Usagi/Serena totally sucks at/hates school.
- Half-subverted in the S season, where we see very little of the senshi at school, but nearly every episode starts with them studying for their exams (until they are inevitably distracted, either by the monster of the week or by some more mundane crisis).
- Fully Subverted in Sailor Moon Super S. They're all on summer break. During the Manga they've shifted to High School during this arc but it was pushed back an arc for the anime. The timeing pretty much ends up the same by the end though.
- All but one of the Idiot Rangers in Mahou Sensei Negima are powerful fighters on Negi's team. Kaede and Ku Fei in particular were strong fighters even before the start of the series, yet their first major obstacle in the series was to receive adequate scores on their final exams.
- Full Metal Panic practically runs on this. Most of Sōsuke's issues involve being able to explain distressingly common situations and failing in epic fashion. In one episode, Kaname visits while Testarossa is in the shower and Sōsuke tries to explain why Kaname can't come in. Cue Testarossa sticking her head out asking if she can borrow clothes. He will generally sweat bullets in these situations — and yet, when he appears to be totally screwed in a military situation, he will either find a way out of it or somehow stay calm.
- This is probably because, in those situations, he can't shoot anyone...
- Subverted by Death Note. Or possibly played straight. It depends on your moral stance on Light's actions; he definitely believes he's playing it straight as he interweaves his increasingly meaningless social life with his genocide.
- Shinichi, the hero of Parasyte. Somewhat deconstructed towards the end. Though he just barely manages to graduate, he flunks all his college entrance exams and is doomed to a life of poverty, and thus his future with Love Interest Satomi is far from certain.
- Code Geass has something similar to this, but it's more like Wake Up, Go To School, Take Over The World.
- Maybe played straight—all depending on your interpretation of certain characters. There's Lelouch, who seems to fight for freedom but also has more selfish motives (revenge for his mother's death, serious daddy issues), Kallen, who actually does believe she's saving the world (okay, Japan), and Suzaku, who's trying to end war and keep from going insane. In R2, Gino wants to save the world and have fun in the process, Anya—well, nobody's really sure what Anya wants.
Comics
- The Amazing Spider-Man invented this trope. Thank you, Nohamotyo.
- Deconstructed in Scott McCloud's Zot! The problems in Zot's world are on the surface bigger, but since it is ultimately a fantasy world the much smaller problems in Jenny's world are real problems and therefore more serious. The Deconstruction comes in the exploration of why high school life seems more serious than fighting super-villains.
- Ostensibly, the Teen Titans — but the comics tend to ignore the characters' lives outside of superheroics to the point that Titans Tower occasionally seems like a weird super-teen commune.
- Similarly, the X-Men mansion is technically supposed to be a "School For The Gifted" but only a couple of writers (among them Grant Morrison) really paid anything more than lip-service to the concept.
Films
- This is basically the entire premise of Sky High.
Literature
- Harry Potter got dangerously close from Goblet of Fire onwards, but Deathly Hallows abandoned many of the school based sub-plots to focus on the final confrontation with Voldemort.
- Diane Duane's Young Wizards.
- The Alex Rider series deals with the potential real-world ramifications of just how much school one would have to miss to save the world. Not to mention what might happen to the school itself once the Big Bad knows exactly which school the teen- or Kid Hero goes to.
- Animorphs made some use of this, but partially subverted it, as the characters soon find that fighting a guerrilla war against an alien conspiracy/invasion is physically and emotionally taxing, and their grades start to suffer. They lose all their friends not in the know, and stay in school just to keep up the pretense. Next to the enslavement of humanity, school seems kind of meaningless.
- It also helped that they gained advanced ancient androids as allies who could take their place in school for long absences thanks to their advanced hologram technology.
- Near the end of the series the war has escalated significantly, pressuring the kids to devote their entire lives to fighting. Jake notes that none of them get to school consistently anymore, to the point where Jake can't even recall what they're studying in class. They go on missions pretty much full-time, almost every day, and they rarely get more than a couple hours of sleep either.
- The Demon Headmaster series of books. That crazy headmaster is always trying to take over the world (although he's not always a headmaster), and apparently this small group of children are the only ones who can ever spot it. But they still have to go to school and be home for tea.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians is "Wake up, Go To
School Camp Half-Blood, Save the World from Greek Mythology".
Live Action TV
- Four words: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That high school was infinitely worse than, or at best merely even with, fiends from hell was one of the show's basic concepts.
- Of course, this particular high school was built on a Hellmouth's centre, so the line between school evil and demonic evil is blurred.
- There's also the series finale. Right before the final battle, Buffy, Xander, and Willow start making plans for the day after, which involves shopping. Wake up, save the world, go shopping.
- In an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, after John helped destroying a batch of coltan, a metal used to build terminators, he comes back home to do his homework for school.
- Of course, he's since dropped out.
- In Ace Lightning, Mark Hollander, a thirteen-year-old boy, unintentionally gets himself elected as the superheroes sidekick: this pretty much costs him his social life, including two girlfriends.
- Disney's Aaron Stone.
- Chuck Bartowski's spy work is often impacted by the equally complex, thought not as dangerous, life he leads as a Buy More employee.
- Early episodes of Power Rangers take this formula to a T. More often than not, the Monster Of The Week they were facing would correlate to whatever problem they were dealing with in real life.
- MI High
Tabletop Games
- Mage: The Ascension mentioned this when describing how the Game Master could use character backgrounds to make the game more interesting. Fighting the Ancient Conspiracy of wizard-scientists trying to eradicate magic from the world, the bunch of Evil Sorcerers trying to destroy everything that has ever existed, the mad mages whose very existence warps reality, and the odd elder horror from beyond the stars gets a lot harder when your mom is going to kill you for staying out past curfew.
- This troper has seen it as a common way of running games of Changeling The Dreaming, which is all about balancing your fae and mortal sides. "I'm sorry, boss, I've gotta take work off tomorrow, I'm saving the Seelie Princess from Fomorian cultists — er, I mean 'I'm really sick'."
Video Games
- Persona 3 bases both its storyline and gameplay around this concept, requiring you to balance fighting demons with day-to-day activities to succeed. It also subverts it, to an extent — the characters frequently admit that they find fighting Shadows much more difficult than dealing with school.
- Persona 4 does much the same thing, though in this case it's Wake Up, Go To School, Catch a Serial Killer.
- Both Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force play this one straight by having the main protagonist be a fifth/sixth-grader who also happens to either own or be the most powerful being on the internet. Throw in a villain of the week or fifty and you're set to go.
- In Star Force's case, it takes a lot of work from Echo Ridge's local Class Representative/#1 Mega Man fangirl to get the hero to "GO TO SCHOOL" (emphasis hers).
Web Comics
- Touched on in Gunnerkrigg Court: Emotionless Girl Antimony has no problem talking with ghosts or judo-flipping the class bully, but she has difficulty making normal conversation with her classmates. She's gotten better since opening up to her friend, Kat.
- Several of El Goonish Shive's characters have struggled with issues such as coming to terms with their sexual orientations and standing up against unfair school policy. Meanwhile, there are interdimensional conflicts going on that directly relate to the central cast, but those only come up in conversation as direct responses to the events happening, and even then they don't last very long.
- Used in Angel Moxie, and some teachers are more than meets the eye.
Web Original
- Deconstructed in Sailor Nothing, where fighting the forces of mad, sadistic evil turn out to be much worse than dealing with The Libby after all.
- LessThanThree Comics' Brat Pack are an example of this trope, being made up of high school students, who also save the world on a regular basis.
- Pretty much standard for the superpowered kids of Team Kimba at the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe. They even have specific scenes or story lines focused on classwork: Tennyo has trouble with math; Chaka is struggling with English; Shroud doesn't get some of the aspects of physics that her body apparently violates; Phase is bored stiff in her Intro to Superpowers class because the professor is so tedious....
Western Animation
- Popularized within relatively recent American cartoons by Kim Possible. Even before the series rolled out, TV previews summarized the premise of the series as a girl who finds saving a hijacked space station far easier than asking a cute boy out, a problem she faces in the very first episode to be broadcast ("Crush"). Highlighted within the series itself in The Movie, when Kim responds to Drakken's taunting about her social drama with, "You're right, Drakken. Boys? Dating? It's hard. But this? Is easy!" At which point she slugs him.
- The Life and Times of Juniper Lee, while about the supernatural rather than espionage, goes out of its way to imitate KP's style, right down to the Extraordinarily Empowered Girl lead and the bare midriff.
- And since American Dragon Jake Long was made to duel with Juniper, it does the same thing, though thankfully he keeps his midriff covered.
- Jake Long started airing first, and so did Danny Phantom. Several people complained Juniper Lee was just a case of Follow The Leader.
- Which ISN'T the case, the show went into production just a Jake Long was finishing theirs. It was just bad timing.
- Danny Phantom
- The Powerpuff Girls: "Saving the world... before bedtime."
- W.I.T.C.H. actually used this phrase during early (pre-Animated Adaptation) US promotions for the chapter books.
- Code Lyoko. Of course, Time Travel helps with the missed classes and tests on occasion.
- My Life as a Teenage Robot
- X-Men: Evolution
- Gormiti: The Lords of Nature Return
- Monster Buster Club
- Parodied, mocked, and almost even averted in Invader Zim. The eponymous character may be an evil green alien attempting to bring about the annihilation of the human race, but of course he spends plenty of time pretending to be an elementary student ("It's a... skin condition). Almost, because the good guy, Dib, a classmate of Zim, spends much of his screentime either ostracized in school, dealing with his cruel little sister, and... trying to save expose/save the world to/from supernatural threats.
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