Deconstructing children with superpowers and monsters and effects on society

My project is to deconstruct the idea: What would happen if a group of kids suddenly manifested superpowers and gained supernatural monsters with them fighting aliens who want to destroy Earth?

I feel it could a make a dark deconstruction and turn the Saturday morning cartoon idea into a violent horror show involving aliens and Complete Monster Eldritch Abomination villains and sociopathic kid heroes.

Look up on child psychology. It should teach you enough.

How, I'm not even in child psychology.

You don't need a degree or anything, hell, just look up on basic things like emotional and cognitive development in children, child laborers/soldiers and toll on their minds, children's relationship in with adults, how children views and functions within a given society, etc.

Okay, I know that child soldiers have a negative effect on their minds, so any suggestions?

One thing I can think about is that adults of your story will try their best to avert Adults Are Useless. Generally child soldiers are frowned upon in most countries, so it's pretty likely that adults will attempt to find a way to put the kids as far away from the frontlines as possible as long as they can still use the monsters.

As for impact on children fighting, I guess this seems like a fairly in-depth look at the case. It's fifty pages long, though.

Neon Genesis Evangelion would seem to be pretty much what you're trying to achieve here. Might want to take a look at it if you haven't already.

Yes, but I'm not interested in Neon Genesis Evangelion. What I want to do is to see the effects.

"The effects" is that the children may potentially become emotional wrecks. How it happens varies because wrecks aren't always the same, and what you get in NGE is a few of the possible ways for it to happen.

In the end, it boils down to psychology. Children are emotionally vulnerable and not yet ready to tackle the world around them with all the grime and dirt that it has without potentially damaging themselves and changing in some way, sometimes that being not a good change. And any "bad" thing in their lives can trigger such a thing; heck, even growing up in a family devoid of one of the parents can. Compared to that, a dangerous duty with toil and pain and misery and no reward ... yeah, it is going to change them. If you want to know how exactly, take a look at the possible ... hmm, let's say difficulties, of children from dysfunctional families; adult child syndrome is one of the possible outcomes of exposing a kid to something like this, and if it's something as bad as what would happen in your example then you could have actual kids with this thing.

It's kind of like that, but I want to see the effects on society and the damage they would make. The dangers of their superpowers and the monsters. The aliens that want to invade and destroy Earth. Not to mention the government response if it happens.

Then do plan it out, bit by bit. There are a lot of governments on this world with a lot of different ways of running things, and no two authors have the exact same ideas for development of ... basically anything, really, so whatever the threats and the powers and the personalities of the affected kids would be would vary greatly form person to person. So the only way for you to get this without being given it all on a platter is to simply take what you have already—and believe me when I say that for as long as you are willing to read you do have enough—and work on it.

If you need help with a specific thing, then ask, sure. But your attitude right now very much seems to be "I have this idea, write it for me, people", which ... well, it won't do, not here at the very least.

edited 16th Jul '16 7:31:15 PM by Kazeto

I suppose part of the premise would have countries try to fight back the supernatural monsters with mundane means, only to realize it's a lost cause and they have to recruit the superpowered children? I also suppose only the children (no adults) obtained superpowers?

Yes, kind of like that. Any more suggestions? Because I'm busy right now.

Devil Survivor is a pretty terrific deconstruction of what happens when you give people access to Mons,though admittedly,its not specific to kids.

Like others pointed out,child psychology would get you really far,but for actual suggestions I'd throw my 2 cents here (even though I'm no specialist,I did look it up in place);

• Kids tend to be a lot less controlled in their emotions and selfishness than grown men.You could rather easily invoke Kids Are Cruel and have them either bully each other or kill any authority they dislike, for petty reasons.
  • Similarly an savvy adult could easily exploit the children's newfound sense of self-importance

• There's also the Wish-Fulfillment that is very prevalent in kids (kids dont always learn early to be "realistic") so maybe power get through their head pretty fast.They could be going for outlandish dreams (To Be a Master in a realistic Crapsack World for instance) completely oblivious of how bad things actually are currently.

hope that gets you a lead?

edited 2nd Sep '16 8:35:16 PM by FujinKeima

Thanks!

Here is my other ideas for the superpowers part.

• Kids and teens are often have no experience with strange powers, so they would accidentally cause chaos when they try to use their powers.
• They would be targeted by the government due to their superpowers.

Any suggestions for the alien invasion part?

The way you handle the alien invasion basically depends on how dark you want the series to be.

If not very dark then they are probably going to simply be attacks of whatever-themed aliens that happen often enough to tire out the defenders but not often enough to overwhelm them ... for whatever reason.

Now, if it's supposed to be dark instead, then in addition to the regular Monster of the Week stuff you'll have attacks by alien Mook squads, often with the mooks behaving in a human-like–enough way that at least some of the defenders wouldn't be able to go against them and some others would go and would then break in one way or another. Then you would have attacks playing on the primal parts of ourselves; fear and then terror are the most basic and very usable ones here (they could terrorise most of the defenders at the place of the battle in order to make them escape and leave one or two who are trapped and who will not get out alive because of it). Depending on how similar to humans the aliens are they could also go for assassinations.

The aliens are energy beings that require possessing living things to make corporeal form. How dark the story would be: try thinking Humans who want to defend their own independence vs Aliens who want use man as a shell to stave off their extinction of their species.

A mix of Black-and-White Morality and Grey-and-Grey Morality in the war between humans and aliens.

edited 3rd Sep '16 3:54:48 AM by Huthman