History Literature / TheDarkestMinds

* AbusiveParents: Jude's father, and Cole and Liam's biological father.

* SpiritualSuccessor: To Creator/DavidCronenberg's ''Film/{{Scanners}}''.
##The agony of PowerIncontinence has escalated into all-out HowDoIShotWeb because because none of the adults ''want'' the kids to know how to use their powers, to the point of ''torturing'' them if they make any attempts and ''killing'' those they can't torture into submission.
##TheGenerationGap has been updated; where Scanners examined the conflict between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, here the boomers are presented with their successors, the [[NeurodiversityIsSupernatural mentally atypical]] millennials. Neither side understands what the other needs or wants, and the conflict between Dr. Ruth and his children has been escalated to full-blown KidsVersusAdults genocidal warfare that has turned the US into a failed state.
##[[spoiler:Even the origins of the powers are related: where the Scanners were created by a treatment for morning sickness, the psis were created by water tampering. That's an escalation as well; the war generation thought that they could use technology to solve all their problems without bothering to understand either the technology ''or'' the problem, and the Boomers believed they could solve a problem that ''hadn't even occurred yet'']].
##It's actually a pretty good adaptation of Cronenberg's original "Telepathy 2000" project, where there was supposed to be entire populations of Scanners and an ongoing struggle between them and normals.

* ''The Darkest Legacy'' -- an upcoming novel set in the same universe with Zu as the main character.

* PyrrhicVillainy: The government. President Gray's ''ridiculously'' stupid policies have turned America into a failed state.

* HarsherInHindsight: Alexandra Bracken has gone on record to say she rewrote several parts of The Darkest Legacy in order to avoid unintentionally reflecting the events of the 2016 election.

##It's actually a pretty good adaptation of Cronenberg's original "[[Trope2000 Telepathy 2000]]" project, where there was supposed to be entire populations of Scanners and an ongoing struggle between them and normals.

** Ruby's full name is '''R'''uby '''E'''lizabeth '''D'''aly, and the two other named Oranges in the series, Martin[[note]]comes from the Roman god Mars[[/note]] and [[spoiler: Clancy[[note]]comes from a word meaning 'red warrior'[[/note]]]], both have names relating to the colour red. [[http://alexandrabracken.tumblr.com/post/140993792872/on-multiple-occasions-you-said-that-all-the-orange This was intentional]], as their abilities should've been considered the most dangerous and classified as such.

* SuperpowerRussianRoulette: Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration(IAAN) is a particularly nasty one. It expresses at puberty, and is 98% lethal, but the remaining 2% develop psi abilities. On top of that, the abilities are not equal; The majority are super-intelligent Greens, and most of the remainder are telekinetic Blues or electrokinetic Yellows. The rarest are the telepathic Oranges and pyrokinetic Reds - especially since the government couldn't figure out a way to control Oranges, so they killed them ''all'' and buried them in mass graves. [[spoiler:Turns out it's also a BizarreBabyBoom: a decade earlier, the government added to the existing cocktail of water treatments a chemical they called "Agent Ambrosia", meant to counteract and nullify a number of poisons, bacteria, and drugs. However, despite extensive testing, it turned out to have a teratogenic effect that only expressed at puberty, whereupon kids either develop psi or die]].

** In more disputed territory, Clancy's father approved scientific experiments on Clancy which his mother had some involvement in. Clancy perceives his mother's attempts to "cure" him as a continuation of this abuse.