The developmental process of transgression... and putting ourself at odds — strongly! — with our parents or with the culture for no other reason than the experience of being at odds. It's not even because as teenagers we're championing a high ideal, but basically just flipping off authority structures in a way that we might regret or find humorous later in life. But there is an experience of standing against that is valuable in ego development, regardless of the particular gesture... There is a more clear sense of being an individual and having the power to disagree, the power to chart a new course. Even if it's not a great course — but it's a new course!
— Jungian analyst Joseph Lee, This Jungian Life podcast, episode "Sin and Transgression"
The rebellious teenager archetype is a classic teenage stereotype that has been around since the dawn of time and has gone through many different manifestations depending on the culture, time period, or medium.
Since adolescence is the stage between childhood and adulthood, there are a lot of growing pains associated with it. Many teenage characters are just trying to find themselves in the world, which often leads to them acting out and/or being insubordinate to their parents, teachers, and other adult figures. Despite this, they are often shown to still be good kids at heart and some grow out of the rebellious stage in their character development arcs. This isn't the reality for every teenage rebel though. Some will swing too far left and become hardened Delinquents, social outcasts, or just straight-up criminals.
One common form of this trope is to have an otherwise mild-mannered teenager, who isn't actually rebellious in nature, act out or disobey their parents for an episode to set up An Aesop of the day. The act of rebellion doesn't have to be anything heinous — it can be something small like dyeing their hair, getting piercings or a tattoo, or just generally doing something they were explicitly told not to by their guardians.
In some works, the teen learns that it's best to listen to authority figures, and while it's okay to let loose every now and then, one must not act recklessly. In other works, it is the parents/adults who learn that it's fine to ease up on the reins a little and let their kids have fun and express themselves. Oftentimes, it is revealed that the authority figures themselves were once Former Teen Rebels.
In a lot of works, this type of teenage character is part of niche subcultures such as Goth or Punk.
The trope overlaps a bit with Delinquents. The key difference with the latter is that while all teenage delinquents are an example of the teenage rebel trope in one way or another, many rebellious teens don't end up as delinquents or have the antisocial nature or criminality associated with that trope.
See also Troubled, but Cute, Bratty Teenage Daughter, All Girls Want Bad Boys, and Dating What Daddy Hates for other teenage stereotypes/archetypes that are associated with this trope. Also related to Cool People Rebel Against Authority and Rebellious Spirit.
Rebel teens are also often paired with Helicopter Parents and My Beloved Smother.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: In Chapter 44, Hahari tries to pass off Kurumi constantly rebuffing her as a rebellious phase, even though A.) it's already been established that Kurumi is being irritated by a craving for a French kiss, and B.) Kurumi's disgust with Hahari has been present for as long as they've known each other.
Fan Works
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: In "Ambush", Jared's conclusions on the mysterious "registers as evil" Mercury, strangely appearing in the Light Is Good surfacer lands, as summarized by Cathy:
Cathy nodded, examining the information from all angles. "So you think she's some kind of sheltered princess from the Underworld, out on a bout of teenage rebellion?""More or less."
- Elementals of Harmony: Assemble a Conniption involves Ditzy dealing with her daughter who is facing unicorn puberty, which makes them really hostile to their parents due to underlying megalomania, in combination with regular pony puberty. Summarized by Dinky's father:
Puberty's rough on a pony. There's a need for independence, an itch to go out and do something with your special talent...
- Every child should rebel against their parents at one point or another.
- Past Sins: Glimpses 2: "Day": Helia's rebelliousness started early, when, as a child, she didn't want to hide her unique and scary appearance, with her Flaming Hair, and it escalated when she got what's implied to be a Toxic Friend Influence.
Things only escalated as the years went on and the pair of them became teenagers. Helia was running around with friends who liked to get in trouble and goof off. Her grades were slipping as she turned not studying into an act of rebellion against Twilight.
- Tantabus Mark II: How The Tantabus Parses Sleep: "The Battle of the Bell": After procrastinating at her job and using eating as stress relief despite subsisting on ambient magic, and having other ways of dealing with stress, Moondog defines those actions as her teen rebellion, as she says to her mother:
"Oh, nooooo." Moondog shook her head. "I mean, right when you need me the most, I bug out to binge on food I don't even need? No, I totally deserved that, and- You know what? I haven't really been a teen. Consider that my rebellious phase."
Film — Animated
- Aladdin: 16-year-old Princess Jasmine hates the entire idea of being forced to marry someone she doesn't love, so she runs away from the palace in search of a way to avoid the forced marriage.
- Turning Red: This appears in two different (but related) ways.
- 13-year-old Meilin Lee wakes up one morning to find that her family's ancient Hereditary Curse has manifested in her, giving her the ability to turn into a giant, anthropomorphic red panda whenever her emotions run high. It's expected that she, like her mother, grandmother, and aunties before her, will repress the red panda as much as possible and then permanently banish it at the first opportunity, thus ending the transformations. During the ritual to banish the panda, Mei breaks with all family tradition by deciding to keep her panda spirit.
- Mei has always been her mother Ming's "perfect little Mei-Mei", doing everything she possibly can to live up to her mother's extremely high expectations. When Ming refuses to let Mei go to a concert starring her favorite boy band, 4*Town, Mei decides there's no point in trying to meet her mother's standards if she's never going to get anything in return. So she and her circle of friends devise a plan to attend the concert anyway — a plan which involves exploiting the power of her red panda transformation (which is also against her mother's demands).
Film — Live-Action
- The Breakfast Club is pretty much the quintessential teenage rebellion movie of the '80s and has spawned copycats and parodies over the years. The film centers on five characters from different cliques who are forced to interact with each other after getting sent to detention. Bender (who is an outright delinquent) and Allison (a social outcast) are the only ones to have a prior history of rebellious behavior before the group was hit with detention. Later on, it becomes apparent that all of them share the same feeling of not fitting in their home/school environments in one way or another.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once: During one of the flashback montages showing Evelyn and Joy's complex mother-daughter relationship, one brief sequence shows Joy dressed in punk/goth attire talking back to her mother. Given Joy's age in the present (an aimless 20-something), this shows her during a rebellious teenage phase versus her present apathetic stage of life.
- Parodied at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, where the reincarnated Groot has a growth spurt and immediately behaves like a sullen, slovenly teenager.
- Rebel Without a Cause is possibly the Trope Codifier, as it was a major influence on media depictions of the teenager, which was a novel concept in the 1950s. The characters, particularly the main character played by James Dean, feel aimless and lost, rebelling against their parents and society at large through direct conflict with authority figures as well as activities like underage drinking, games of chicken, and squatting in abandoned houses. Unlike many contemporaneous examples, the teen characters were actually portrayed sympathetically, and the film inspired many subsequent teen movies, though they generally eschewed its dark tone and existentialist themes.
Literature
- Disasters And World Prunification: A character is literally named Rebellious Teenage Daughter because the world is made to host B-Movie plots so everyone is just named for their roles.
- In the novel Speak, Melinda's parents think that her newfound attitude problems are a result of her no longer having respect for them and wanting to "jerk them around" for fun, when actually her closed-off, nonchalant nature stems from a trauma that she's struggling to cope with.
- In Tora Dora, Taiga the delinquent girl is willing to hit anyone who's in her way, and some of her insecurities and pent-up frustrations are not helped by her parents' constant fighting in the past. However, as time goes on, she mellows out.
- The plot of Nora Roberts's The Witness is kicked off by sixteen-year-old Elizabeth rebelling against her extremely controlling mother by refusing to go to the summer program her mother got her into, cutting and dyeing her hair, buying revealing clothing, and making fake IDs which she and a new friend use to get into a club run by The Mafiya.
Live Action TV
- In Black Snow (2022), Kalana Baker has been acting out against her absent mother and strict grandparents by repeatedly vandalizing a statue that commemorates Ashford's founder, scrawling the word "colonizer" all over it with paint.
- CSI: NY: "2,918 Miles" centers around a 16-year-old girl who runs away from her home in NYC all the way to San Francisco with her 19-year-old boyfriend because she'd been fighting with her parents over them wanting her to clean her room and do her homework. Plus, they'd refused to buy her a new phone after she'd lost hers. The couple fake the girl's death hoping her parents won't come looking for her, then the guy introduces her to drugs and abandons her in a crack house where Mac, Jo, and the FBI agent with whom they were working eventually find her.
- Frasier: In one episode, Niles realizes he never had a rebellious phase as a teenager. Feeling he missed out, he decides to eat a pot-laced brownie. Unfortunately, his dad eats it before he has the chance.
- Smallville: Jonathan and Martha believe that Clark is just going through a normal phase of rebellion, made more troublesome by the fact that he's, well, Clark. In actuality, he's been exposed to Red Kryptonite, which strips away his inhibitions and unleashes his most base impulses.
- The Twilight Zone (2002): "Evergreen" is about a Stepford Suburbia where teen rebels are brought by their families. Jenna has Nonconformist Dyed Hair and has been arrested twice for possession, which is not uncommon in Evergreen. Her parents insist on bringing her to Evergreen to "straighten her out", drugging her to remove her tattoos, removing her piercings, and trying to get her to go straight. She rebels after finding out that something is very wrong with Evergreen, which ultimately ends with her being voted out of the community and being turned into fertilizer.
- Victorious: It's implied Beck is going through a rebellious phase. He lives in a trailer in his family's driveway. When asked why, he states that his dad told him that he would abide by his rules when he lived in his house. So, Beck got his own house.
Music
- Various music videos of My Chemical Romance are all about this teenage rebellion, no matter whether it's applied in a High School setting or a Cyberpunk one. Songs like "I'm not OK (I Promise)", "Na Na Na" and "Teenagers" made setting of teenagers making riots and taking control of all in the videos.
Video Games
- Purple Moon: Junior high kid Sharla has bleached Delinquent Hair, a leather jacket and she's become known for causing trouble, along with cutting class. But she only pretends to smoke cigarettes, and the cause of such rebellious actions is implied to be because her father walked out on her and refused to take her to a father-daughter function.
Visual Novels
- Discussed and Played for Laughs in Gyakuten Kenji 2. In Case 3, Prosecutor Edgeworth is investigating a poisoning incident at the scene where his father, defense attorney Gregory Edgeworth, investigated his last case. One of the witnesses from the aforementioned case notices the late defense attorney's son sporting a prosecutor's badge and assumes he's going through a rebellious phase, flabbergasting the 26-year-old prosecutor.
Webcomics
- In the first arc of The Order of the Stick, this is played for laughs with some goblin teenagers who are rebelling against their evil parents by aiding the heroes.
