Why are teenagers portrayed as monsters in fiction?

You I was reading A.V. Club once and there a was one comment about how teenagers are portrayed in the show, they comment on how they don't really behave like the teenagers in the 90s. Still, I wonder why are teenagers portrayed as monsters, morons and sociopaths in fiction? It isn't as though that adults weren't teens once and adolescence is a time when your hormones takeover. I know not everyone has the same experience with being a teenager but why do teens get portrayed as monsters in fiction?

Narrow your question. You seem to be implying that all or most teens are portrayed that way, and that's provably false, given the number of YA/coming-of-age stories that feature teenagers as protagonists.

As for when they are...it's simple. Raise your hand if you've met, or you were, someone who was a froward, stubborn, immature adolescent dickhead.

That simple.

I am sorry about that.

I guess it is a little broad but why are some teenagers in some 90s shows portrayed as strange in fiction?

Because the majority of teenagers are to some degree self-absorbed, rebellious, confused about their place in the world (which interacts badly with the other stuff), hormonal, poor at controlling their impulses, and yet getting big enough and smart enough to interact effectually with the world around them even on a large scale.

Hell, it's physiological; the parts of your brain that cope with consequences and rationality are changing to their adult forms at the same time as the majority of your adult hormones kick in for the first time. It's a biological recipe for disaster. The wonder is that most of us make it through.

edited 28th Apr '15 12:03:04 PM by Night

Mostly, it's because fiction, in most cases, requires conflicts of some sort to pull the "plot" along. And no matter how much people want to deny it, most of us had to deal with teenagers, or at least were witness to the behaviour of those, that were at least somewhat unpleasant; that makes teenagers an easy target if you want to have a conflict of some sort.

But there are unpleasant teenagers. And there are some teenagers who are even more pleasant. And rarely, you can find teenagers who are genuine monsters; sure, there are adults and children like that too, but the kids "will grow out of it" so it's not noticed that much, and the adults generally either learn how to hide it (hiding yourself is something most adults do, to a certain degree) or are clearly degenerates anyway so you stay away from them. So it's simply an exaggeration, in terms of both frequency and scale, of something that actually did happen, is happening, and likely will continue to happen.

Also, what Night had said.

edited 28th Apr '15 12:08:28 PM by Kazeto

What kind of fiction have you been reading??? Percy Jackson the troubled teen with a heart of gold is a million miles from the sort of monster that Alex in A Clockwork Orange is!

edited 11th Oct '15 5:06:00 AM by Faemonic

Because they are monsters, obviously! What with the sleeping all day, eating everything in sight (while complaining about still being hungry, no less!), and constant text messaging, we should take a page from A Modest Proposal and eat them!

Well, the most recent book featuring an adolescent protagonist was Blood Meridian, but the unnamed "kid" is a fairly unrepresentative sample of adolescence.

But, that's my point exactly: there are a broad swathe of teenage characters in fiction. Only a minority of them are the antisocial dicks that OP asks about. I'm fairly sure everyone either knows/knew/is/was some teen or another who was unbearable to be around and had a tendency to make others suffer, so the bullying jock/Regina Berry-wannabe is an enduring fixture—which is a partial answer to OP's question—but hardly representative of most teenaged characters in fiction.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at twelve years old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

You barbarian!

Everyone knows that teenagers should be sautéed in a light white wine...

There are a number of teenage protagonists in fiction that come across as responsible and laudable. My son is quite a fan of such books - Chris Ryan's books especially.

edited 28th Apr '15 9:46:19 PM by Wolf1066

So there are responsible teenage protagonists? Where do shows like Battle Royale and Buffy come in?

As members of a sample size not large enough to be representative of the genre.

You know what a sampling error is in statistics, yes? When you look at a sample that's not large enough to be representative of what you're studying? For instance, by observing people walking down a fashionable street in a city and thus concluding that everyone in the city is fabulously wealthy, because the people walking down that street were wealthy?

That's the issue, as people in this thread have been pointing out. You've been cherry-picking data to support your hypothesis and you haven't even tried to falsify it by searching for counterexamples. There is no shortage of them. (In fact, there's a possible counter-hypothesis to be made that the majority of teenagers in media are shown in a favorable light, because they tend to show up in YA works, which in turn feature them as protagonists; one word for you: Bildungsroman. The existence of works featuring teenagers in a primarily negative light does not falsify that hypothesis; but if there are more examples of such works, it would.)

Besides, not only is your sample too small to draw sweeping conclusions from, it's contrary to your hypothesis. The protagonists in the spotlight in Buffy aren't uniformly monsters. There are teenaged antagonists and protagonists, as there are in just about any work featuring teenagers, and there are recognizably good people as well as bad.

Very much this

Because if you don't have bad ones as well as the good, you get rid of a large chunk of conflict - on which interesting narrative is based.

A few books portraying some teenagers as baddies doesn't equate to teenagers being universally painted as monsters in fiction.

I am baffled that anyone thought Willow was a less than perfect role model until sometime in season four or five.

...hell, the only Buffy characters who're teenage and an indisputably poor role model and recurs are probably Xander and Faith. And Xander can be questioned the later one gets.

edited 29th Apr '15 2:23:55 PM by Night

Well Teens Are Monsters is a trope so it's not unheard of. And a lot of the counter-examples you mentioned are YA (and painting teens as awful in YA would alienate their target demographic). So I think there is something to be discussed here, and it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

I guess really haven't looking for for anything. I just wanted to ask around but I will look up the coming-of-age story.

Because kids and teenagers can be pretty damned awful to each other. Bullying is still a major problem that many schools still have problems dealing with.

Thanks for that input. Still, I wonder if Age can play into this. It seems as though some older people tend to hate teens and young people in general.

Some older people hate everyone around them and are more bitter than a 99% chocolate bar.

It's just easier to show that towards someone who can't just beat you up, tie you up, drive you to someplace in the middle of nowhere, and leave you there for you to reflect on how annoying you are; however unlikely that is to happen even with those who could do it.

Whenever someone hates a whole group of people when that group in based on something arbitrary like age, just for belonging to that group, it means that the problem is with the hater and not with the group.

The reason why I do it personally?

Well one, I like writing young protagonists. It allows for more character growth,and it creates more drama due to obvious vulnerabilities. Because I also like the idea of the hero and villain having a very personal relationship, I like to make them the same age. This is why teenagers are a good age. They're young, certainly. But not SO young that you can't conceive them as a legitimate threat.

As for an actual reason besides "hatred of youth" and "teen stereotypes", teenagers have a great capacity for evil because they're in the in-between the stupidity of childhood (carrying some of the simplistic mentality and often black-and-white views, lack of thought and selfish reasoning) combined with the strenght of adulthood (limited cleverness, physical strength, independentness, burning desire and hatred) with a few attributes of its own (hedonism, lack of care for society).

Basically teens combine the worst traits of childhood with the worst traits of adulthood into one bad maelstrom of unpleasnantness.

Of course, when teens are portrayed positively, the portrayal often flips around, having teens contain the qualities of childhood (imagination, youth, idealism, kindness) with the qualities of adulthood (independence, competence, passion and positive ambition) with a few qualities of its own (malleable spirit, freedom of spirit, chance to make mistakes).

That makes some sense, I knew there was a reason for all that old people and adults hating children thing.

I trying to create a story in where both The Hero and The Big Bad are teenagers.

The Big Bad is a Fallen Hero who fall hard. For the end of the story he has 19 years psysically and 21 years of experience. The Hero has 19 years in the both senses.

The evil teen (I need a name for him. I just called him Makoto becuase psycically look like the protagonist of Persona3 ) was often a Nice Guy but after a Trauma Conga Line he become more agressive, and more a Control Freak. And giva a reaaalllly nice Rage Against the Heavens.

In the end he is: -A rapist (mind control his "dear girlfriend" into a a dependant Moe girl who has sex with him when he want. And after he delete that memories if he want, also he tried to rape the main heroine. Is more like the scene between Gym Ghingham and Kihel Helm)

-A genocide Flat-Earth Atheist who tried to kill or "teach" all religious people in the world. Killing the 40% of mankind in Six Months.

-Lie a entire city filled with people loyal to him to get dragged into "The Darkness" and become them into Demons (Who are deformed people with superpower and weird instints but with his human memories...mostly).

-A Brutal Blood Knight with a obsesion of show who he is "manlier" than the heroes.

Pretty bad guy, right?.

By the way, the title is a typo.

Aye, it's fixed now.