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They won't be laughing at me anymore...

"They say, 'All teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed'"
My Chemical Romance, "Teenagers"

In their striving to try to be taken seriously, teenagers are susceptible, gullible, and downright dangerous to anyone who wants to manipulate them. They are the best targets for demons, vampires, or The Virus. Sometimes they're just delinquents with no respect, sometimes they are only a hair's breadth of sanity away from shooting up the place and they'll stay that way as long as you don't treat them like a kid.

Much of this trope is fueled by a distrust of teenagers by the adult population. Also, many parents of young children dread the day that their innocent little angels grow into back-talking, angst-ridden, hormone addled teenagers, which can sometimes even happen earlier than expected. However, television producers are often worried about offending the very lucrative 13-to-17-year-old market, so usually the heroes are also teens, or at least there will be a very prominent "good" one.

Ironically, the much milder version of this trope occurs with shows aimed toward younger children who find teenagers cryptic, pushy, and intimidating for other reasons.

Some cases of Royal Brats and Military Brats can be attributed to this trope. This trope often has the teenage monsters in question have been previously sweet kids. If teen monsters run society, it's a Teenage Wasteland. See also Big Brother Bully, Kids Are Cruel, Humans Are Bastards, and Middle School Is Miserable.

Some teens act this way because they don't know any better. Some others however do, know they will get away with it because they won't get caught, and might have For the Evulz as their main motivation. Others may have been taught to act this way by their parents or are even dealing with their own huge troubles at home. Whatever the reasoning, the results are basically the same.

Of course, this can be — on an individual basis — Truth in Television (ask any high school or middle school teacher/student), there's some neurological evidence of this, as the human brain doesn't fully develop and mature until around the age of 25, so the parts that handle things like empathy and self-consciousness may very well be underdeveloped in a teenager; there are monster teens in Real Life in the same fashion that we can find some mean kids and cruel adults. The mere fact of being a teenager doesn't make people automatically good or evil; it, contrary to popular belief, does not make any given person susceptible to reckless and selfish behavior. There are just as many, if not more, selfless, sweet teenagers as there are selfish, impulsive adults, and age does not necessarily correlate to behavior.

Compare and contrast Troubled Teen, a usually more sympathetic portrayal though one can develop to a monster. Also contrast Recruit Teenagers with Attitude for cases in which the call to heroism specifically targets teenagers.


Example subpages:

Other examples:

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    Anime & Manga 

  • AKIRA manages to both play this trope straight and deconstruct it. Here, teenagers form biker gangs, engage in vandalism, and engage in downright brutal brawls with each other, such as Tetsuo drive-by clotheslining a rival biker's brains out with a hammer. Whilst Kaneda and his gang are portrayed as teenagers that have little regard to the law, they are also shown as having a sense of honor (though it is small), particularly with Kaneda's feelings toward the death of a friend (in both the anime and the manga). By the end of the series, they actually manage to revitalize Japanese nationalism.
  • Miki from Aishiteruze Baby went to an extremely competitive school and saw a teacher beating up a fellow student for getting a low grade; the teacher left off with "Tell everyone you fell." The teacher never notices her, but Miki talks with her peers about it, none of whom are willing to tattle. One day, though, some of her classmates pull out an Exacto-knife, hold Miki down, and go all-out on her, saying that they wondered what it was like to hurt someone else for once. It starts with the teacher and how he treats them, but he has no part in what the students do — he neither goads them into hurting anyone or suggests they do and has no knowledge it's going on; it's all their own decision.
  • Carris Nautilus of After War Gundam X is a 15-year old boy who is willing to use increasingly extreme measures to bring the world under control. He eventually wises up. Shagia and Olba Frost, on the other hand, a pair of 19-year old Ace Pilots do not, and their Wangst over how unfair life is treating them nearly triggers an utterly devastating war.
  • Arisa: Arisa (actually her twin sister Tsubasa in disguise) has been ostracized, drugged underwater, beaten, and pushed off a cliff, among other attacks by her classmates, because she's trying to find the "King" who has an almost hypnotic hold on her sister's class. Tsubasa/Arisa's friend who previously lost faith in the King was ostracized and Driven to Suicide and is now paralyzed (it appears to be psychosomatic), but after finding out about Tsubasa being Arisa, she beat Tsubasa's aunt unconscious.
  • Explored in Attack on Titan, thanks to the series' focus on Child Soldiers and how sometimes Humans Are Bastards. While most adults commit horrible acts fully aware of what they are doing, many of the 104th Trainee Corps express callous attitudes or commit cruel actions because of their inexperience or emotional immaturity:
    • Eren is downright terrifying, thanks to his Unstoppable Rage and his past as an Enfant Terrible, often leading him to make decisions that have negative consequences on him and others.
    • Mikasa is obsessively attached to Eren and she has become suicidally reckless when he is in danger. She has flat out stated before that she will hurt and even kill anyone, whether Titan or human, that stops her from getting to him and only cares about Eren and to a lesser extent, Armin.
    • Jean is callous when his hometown of Trost was being attacked, complaining he was one day away from joining the Military Brigade and leaving the whole mess behind. His attitude changes after the battle.
    • Before enlisting, Sasha hated the refugees from Wall Maria for the famine her village suffered through, along with their being forced to give up hunting in favor of farming, and believed outsiders shouldn't be helped. Her father challenged her to enlist and change her selfish attitude.
    • Krista was willing to get herself and Daz killed, all for the sake of dying heroically. Ymir calls her out on this.
    • Reiner, Bertolt, and Annie might be incredibly tragic, but they're still responsible for the events that killed off 20% of those living behind the walls. While they are the product of growing up as second-class citizens in a militaristic nation, and parents who pressured them to take on the mission for various reasons, all three are incredibly ruthless when it comes to accomplishing their mission. Reiner claims they didn't know anything when they began their mission, and all three definitely feel remorse over their actions.....but their youth, relative inexperience as spies, and unstable emotions combined with their power makes them an absolute nightmare.
    • Ymir is incredibly callous and calculating, thinking only of herself and the girl she loves, Krista. She's unapologetic in weighing the lives of the people around her against her personal goals and leaves everyone around her uncertain of her true motives or goals. She admits to being a horrible person, willing to risk Krista's future just to see her one last time and emotionally manipulates her. Unlike her peers, she's painfully aware of just how much of a screwed up person she is and keenly aware of how messed up everyone else is as well.
  • The teenagers in Battle Royale are forced to become monsters and kill each other. Some take quite easily to this new role, others never do.
  • In Claymore you see several female Awakened Beings, which have the outward appearance of young girls. All right, man-eating monsters look like female teenagers. The most famous examples are Priscilla, Riful, and the female Awakened Being in the area of Gonahl. And all three of them had a single-digit rank as warriornesses.
  • Death Note:
    • Light Yagami. He starts committing genocide on the criminally convicted at the tender age of 17.
    • Mello, too. He runs away when he's almost 15 years old, and when we see him again at 19 he's running the mafia with an iron fist.
  • Lampshaded in Digimon Adventure by Gotsumon and Pumpkinmon, despite the fact that teenagers are usually minor characters. Made better by the fact that the Digimon are, well, monsters in the literal sense.
    Gostumon: Woah! I think you knocked over a monster!
    Pumpkinmon: Even worse! I think I knocked over a teenager!
  • Future Diary has the classmates of Ai who arrange a group rape for her because they do not like her. Her friend Marco comes too late to protect her, but he can kill the boy who raped her.
    • Tsubaki, the Order's High Priest, also qualifies for this. She is cruel and evil and commands her followers to gang rape Yuno to get to Yukiteru. However, she was also a victim of sexual abuse.
    • And above all, Yuno also counts. She is a 14-year-old, nice looking girl. But this is just a façade. In fact, she is a psychopathic serial killer who has developed an obsession to an innocent boy, killing everyone she believes she stands in the way of her and Yukiteru.
  • Great Teacher Onizuka: The lead character is the homeroom teacher of a class full of bullies, blackmailers, manipulators, and scheming sadists that hate all adults and believe that it is their mission turn every teacher they are given crazy, depressed or suicidal. However, every delinquent is given a Freudian Excuse and a Backstory explaining their behaviour and how they became "damaged goods". Also, the series isn't much more sympathetic in its treatment of the "nice kids" or "respectable adults", treating Humans Are Flawed as a basic condition with the apparently normal people simply using coping mechanisms which just don't stand out as much... for the moment.
  • Highschool of the Dead is so prone to this, not even the good guys are immune. Takashi Komuro, Saeko Busujima, Kohta Hirano, and Red Shirt Misuzu Ichijou are just a few examples.
  • In Higurashi: When They Cry there is a group of six friends, each of whom becomes a murderer in an Arc (even Mion, as of Higurashi Gou). In the village, there is a dangerous local pathogen that makes people insane, paranoid and aggressive. Rika states that they're all genuinely sweet kids, however the Hate Plague causes them to become brutal:
    • In one arc New Transfer Student Keiichi, a boy believes that his village murders two people each year, and he is the next to be in line, believes Mion and Rena to be out to kill him. He ends up killing them eventually. Mion and Rena were actually innocent. Keiichi was delusional and simply believed everyone was out to kill him.
    • In two different arcs, Shion develops a violent conscience (later revealed to be the same Hate Plague that also turned Keiichi and Rena into murderers, they can even "talk" to it and use reason to force it out of their minds) that drives her to become paranoid and aggressive. She kills several of her friends and some family members, in revenge for her crush Satoshi whom she has been made to believe was killed by them, thanks in no small part to the whole village also thinking that the local "curse" got to him. None of the people involved were related in Satoshi's disappearance, they all assumed someone in the village did due to the curse, hence why Mion and Kimiyoshi told Shion he's most likely dead. In the final arc it's shown that Satoshi wasn't even dead, just in a coma inside the Big Bad's lab.
    • In one arc, Keiichi notices that his friend Satoko is being abused by her uncle, and kills him shortly thereafter. His friends notice this, and try to give him a false alibi. Keiichi doesn't figure out that they're trying to save-face and thinks they're hiding something from him. Satoko, a preteen, is actually the one who attempts to kill Keiichi in the end after mistaking him for murdering Rika. Keiichi survives but ends up with a God complex after believing he caused the entire village to die. One of the console arcs (Tsukiotoshi-hen) has a similar premise except Keiichi, Rena, and Shion all decide to kill Teppei together. It ends even worse.
    • Then there is another arc in which Rena perceives that her father is being blackmailed by his new girlfriend, whereupon she kills her and her lover Teppei. This is only the beginning because she believes she is being persecuted by a mysterious organization which Mion belongs, resulting in her taking all the students of her school as hostages and was seconds away from blowing them all up with a homemade bomb. Keiichi convinces Rena to back down through The Power of Friendship. She is taken by the police out of town, which causes her to become the Sole Survivor of the entire village after a "gas leak" occurs, although her survival is only shown in the anime.
    • Shion, who has become Satoko's loving surrogate big sister, says she wants to kill Satoko's abusive uncle in one arc. Keiichi points out that deep down she doesn't actually want to do this and instead just wants everything to go back to normal without anyone having to become a murderer, not to mention that "losing Shion would make Satoko sad". This snaps Shion out of her emotional outburst and she ends up working with Keiichi to save Satoko legally. Incidentally, Keiichi admits in the visual novel that he also was planning to kill Teppei at first but Shion made him drop that idea since it gave him a flashback of a previous arc where that very same thing happened.
  • This trope is used to its full potential in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood. In the very first chapter, right after meeting the noble and courageous main character, a 12-year old rich boy named Jonathan Joestar, a blonde teen by the name of Dio Brando shows up and reveals that he is moving into his mansion and they will be brothers from then onwards. Little did poor JoJo know, Dio was a homicidal megalomaniac who believed his goal was to rule over the entire human race, and his first step towards becoming the king of the world was to torment Jonathan for all his life until he eventually got a hold of his inheritance. From Dio's POV, his ways of tormenting Jonathan includes (but is not limited to) physically abusing him, spreading false rumors about him so every kid in town hates him, humiliating him in a public boxing match (by playing dirty) burning his dog Danny alive, and murdering Jonathan's father, who was his own adoptive father, to quickly get his hands on the money. But there is more: even after all of that happened, Jonathan manages to defeat Dio more than once, but thanks to his vampire powers, he was able to kill Jonathan and steal his body, which he would use to further torment and try to eliminate his descendants. And even after his death at the hands of those descendants, he kept disturbing the world's order via some wicked ideas of 'attaining Heaven' he had imprinted on his closest friend, who proceeded to reset the entire universe. Talk about a resentful dude.
  • All the contestants in the tournament in The Law of Ueki are supposed to be junior high students. Yet, many of them do not mind using their powers to Take Over the World, and apparently don't have any qualms about killing their opponents.
  • Life (2002) has a plot that revolves around high school bullying. It begins when Ayumu's best friend ruins their friendship because Ayumu got into a school but not her. This leads Ayumu to start cutting. Ayumu befriends a popular girl named Manami, however, after believing she's cheating with her boyfriend (who is a Jerkass who sexually harasses Ayumu), she goes into extreme Alpha Bitch mode. It turns out Manami is a huge bully with an equally mean Girl Posse. Manami does everything from trying to feed Ayumu needles, trying to murder her, and making another girl so scared she jumps from the school balcony. Ayumu isn't the only one who suffered throughout the series though. Her crush was severely bullied in middle school and has cigarette burns all over his arms from the bullies.
  • Prevalent in some of the works of Hiroya Oku:
    • In Gantz there's Nishi, a sadistic murderer at the age of fourteen that don't hesitated to kill anyone, be it human or alien. He eventually murders his whole classroom, minus one girl because she was nice to him. Later we're introduced to Izumi, a high schooler that appears to be The Ace on the outside, but is even more cold and ruthless than Nishi, to the point he is willing to go on a spree killing and murder dozens of innocents in order to return to Gantz's games, the only thing he truly enjoyed in life.
    • Inuyashiki features the main antagonist Hiro, a high schooler with a bizarre sense of morality that becomes a serial killer after being reconstructed by aliens as a cyborg along with Ichiro Inuyashiki, the protagonist, a middle aged man that uses his new cyborg form to become a superhero. Before Hiro, Inuyashiki also dealt with a gang of teenagers that beat up homeless people with baseball bats for fun.
  • Maria no Danzai. Poor Kiritaka is ruthlessly tortured by a Gang of Bullies led by Nozomu Okaya. Why he was made their punching bag is because he saved a classmate for their cruel “game” of betting how long the kid would last getting strangled until he beg. And all of them are only 2nd year middle schoolers! On his 14th birthday, he’s brutally kicked with a target taped on his torso and forced-feed cockroaches mix into his bento. In the middle of the night, the bullies text him a video and demand they all meet up somewhere. What was the video in question? An heavily edited porno of his “mother” with another man! The bullies have the gall to brag how “fuckable” his mom looks in the fake porn. When Kiritaka lets out a Big "SHUT UP!", they just laugh it off, making Okaya demand Kiritaka be the one to post the fake porno of his own mother online! When told no, Okaya gives Kiritaka a Sadistic Choice, either jump off a cliff, or else the video gets posted online, with only 3 seconds to think it over. None of the bullies even have a shred of concern that he can easily die from this, brushing it off as a few broken bones. Kiritaka survived the fall, but not the truck. Most of the bullies seem horrified by this… only because they didn’t want to get arrested, while Okaya only feels disappointed that Kiritaka’s death means that he “won” and will never get to torture him again! All of this was because Okaya hated the look on Kiritaka’s eyes!
    • Little did they know, they messed with the wrong Mama Bear. Kiritaka’s mother eventually finds her son’s diary and flash drive showcasing all the bullying he’s been put through, from ordering him to write suicidal notes for a thousand times unless he’ll be Forced to Watch a rabbit get killed by the bullies, forced to strip down, and many other beatings. Now abandoning her old life, Maria Akeboshi plans for two years to get revenge on the bullies by being their School Nurse in their high school, and they’re all still same sociopathic bullies.
    • Tsubasa Kowase loved to beat up Kiritaka black and blue, nearly drown him, and/or record all the torture his friends would put on Kiritaka. Two years later, he gives the same treatment he gave Kiritaka to other young girls, but only targets them because he believes they’re too weak to fight back. Kowase even makes money is by selling panty shots of random girls at his school to third parties. He's not above selling panty shots of elementary schoolgirls either. When his phone gets hacked and exposed all of his evil deeds, he accuses his frequent victim, Yashima, and threatens to expose her shoplifting and sex videos while he’s beating her up and nearly drowns her.
    • Kumiru Shikimi frequently hooks up with older, lonely singles while portraying herself as a sensitive, caring girl... before revealing that she's actually underage and extorting massive sums of money out of her vulnerable targets in exchange for keeping the fact that they were about to sleep with a minor under wraps (and having her helper beat the stuffings out of them just to hammer it in). She also isolated Kiritaka from his peers by making it look like he stole her gym clothes, which everyone was too scared or too apathetic to contest (and is heavily implied to have done similar things to other students she didn't like), leaving him with no friends throughout middle school. After Maria uses her own tactics against her and makes it look like she's trying to frame up Kinugawa, Shikimi reacts by throwing a tantrum and Skipping School, before sending her helper and his goons to beat up Maria for telling her that she would end up alone with that kind of attitude.
  • Metamorphosis: With the exception of our protagonist Saki Yoshida, the teenagers in this world is portrayed as heartless bastards that contribute to her downfall:
    • The female ones subtly imply that in order to keep her newfound popularity, she needs to buy various expensive goods, and suggests her into a Compensated Dating. But then, some of the same teenagers took pictures of her date and Blackmailed her to reveal this (which will risk her being expelled) with sexual favors. When this happens, the female friends that suggested the dating in the first place start getting jealous that Saki gets all the boys' attention. Then they bully her and get the same boys do the same thing, which causes her to run off and after a few complications later, drop out of the school on her own accord.
    • And finally, at the end of the manga, the same classmates encounter Saki, who has been through many traumatic experience, is broke, homeless, pregnant, addicted to drugs, but still trying her best to earn honest money, even if she's not using a more wholesome method. Not recognizing her due to her new Gyaru Girl look is one thing, but then they decided to, for no apparent reason than the sudden kick to do evil, assault and violate Saki while kicking her pregnant belly hoping to murder the unborn baby. Then they rob her hard-earned money, and leaves Saki completely miserable and eventually Driven to Suicide and Dying Alone, while they pass the whole incident as "Doing a public service of removing unwanted filths".
  • Mikado no Shihō: You realize that Rinshō is this once his older brother Emperor Sōun "Shiki" is revealed to only be 17 years old.
  • Glemmy Toto of Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ is a 17-year-old Ace Pilot and The Starscream to Big Bad Haman Khan who gets up to some truly nasty stuff over the course of the first Neo-Zeon War, eventually forming his own faction. Whether he's a Smug Snake or a Magnificent Bastard is a matter of some debate amongst the fandom, but the fact that he's a serious problem, despite his youth, is not.
    • Gyunei Guss Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack is not initially this, but after meeting Quess Paraya he quickly degenerates into this state, forgetting all about his original goal of keeping Char in check and becoming obsessing with proving his worth to Quess at any cost. Quess herself might also count, though at 13 she's just a little too young to be considered a teenager.
    • Shinn Asuka of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny is hardly evil, but as a young, impressionable, and emotionally damaged teenager he easily falls victim to Chairman Durandal's toying with his emotions, and is used as the Chairman's attack dog for much of the show.
  • Sailor Moon: Rei Hino is a downplayed example; she is usually quite unpleasant and irritable, but she also has a softer side. In the DiC dub, however, this is played straight, as Raye is portrayed as even more abrasive, especially in her interactions with Serena.
  • School Days anime involves a number of teenagers doing false "dating practice" with sex, betraying, harassing, blackmailing, cheating, avoiding responsibilities, raping, and murdering.
  • Shadow Star might as well be Mohiro Kitoh's best example on his manga usually taking very dark views of teens and tweens. The main setting is that strange creatures called "dragonets" partner up with certain children, most of whom have issues with the way the adult world works, conferring upon them considerable power. Unlike other Mon-themed manga where that power would be used to protect Earth from alien or supernatural threats, many of the children become the threat themselves, turning their dragonets on each other and the adult world with horrific results. Also, as Hiro-chan's arc shows, those without dragonets have the potential to be monstrous as well.
  • Strongest Legend Kurosawa uses this a lot, and at one point even compares them to animals.
  • Tweeny Witches: Lennon is most important and one of the few named teenage characters in the franchise. He is introduced attacking Arusu, the preteen heroine of the franchise, and the other witches on the Ludens.
  • While not necessarily teenagers, most antagonists in Yu-Gi-Oh! were in their early twenties or earlier when they started out and were at that age once the feces hit the fan. There was Pegasus at age 22 when we first saw him, there was Malik/Marik who was a mere 16 when we saw him (and who had started down the path of evil before entering puberty), and Dartz who started at only age 21, and kept himself that way for who knows how long, and Yami no Bakura, who probably wasn't more than 20 in the original timeline. To say nothing of all the other minor antagonists over the course of the story that were never older than 25, teenagers must get a horrible reputation in their world.
    • Prior to Duel Monsters taking the priority of the series, Yugi went through a whole series of teenage monsters every chapter in the manga, Seto Kaiba being among them.
    • This didn't stop at the first series either. In GX, the majority of antagonists of the day were fellow teen schoolmates, the chief antagonists of season 2 were all early 20s or younger, and season 3's subplots and season 4's plot were all ultimately instigated by youngsters.
    • Avoided in the third series Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, mostly. While Aki is only 16, and goes on to terrorize Neo Domino as the Black Rose Witch and gets called a monster until her Heel–Face Turn, that is, all of the Dark Signers are adults.
  • The characters in Zekkyou Gakkyuu are schoolchildren... who, more often than not are willing to resort to murder to save their own hide or to get rid of a rival. Bullying also happens with great regularity and can get outright vicious.

    Comedy 
  • John Mulaney says in his New in Town special that he considers middle schoolers the worst people in the world and goes out of his way to avoid them.

    Comic Books 
  • In the graphic novel Black Hole, teenagers are being afflicted with a mysterious STD that causes them to mutate randomly, occasionally turning them into literal monsters: barely human creatures that live in the woods. At least some of them seem to have become significantly mentally deranged because of this, turning them into more traditional monster teens.
  • This was America's prevailing attitude towards Young Justice in The DCU, causing them to eventually become America's most wanted super-group, despite the fact that they were actually pretty heroic and set a good example for others like them.
  • The X-Men and other Marvel mutants. Most mutant powers seem to manifest around puberty, and turn their recipients into freaks or outcasts of some sort. Rule of Symbolism much? One incarnation of the Hellfire Club are all teens at just about 12.
    • Also from Marvel, there's the Bastards Of Evil, the illegitimate teenage children of famous supervillains, who have set out to take over the world but mostly seems to cause chaos for the hell of it. Warhead, the son of Radioactive Man, blows himself up at Ground Zero, killing thousands and irradiating the whole area. It turns out that it's actually a case of Kids Are Cruel, the members of the team are kidnapping victims who have been genetically engineered with powers and brainwashed by their leader Superior, who's much younger, and the only real Bastard of Evil, being the son of The Leader.
  • Robin: Several of Tim's high school classmates are murdered by other classmates, and while most teens in the series are nice enough if flawed individuals those he faces off against as Robin are generally quite monstrous in their actions.
  • Several of the teenage antagonists in the Shazam! franchise, especially the ones who tend to focus that antagonism on Freddy such as Sivana Jr. and the Breyer brothers. (Usually) averted hard by the Shazamily themselves — even Superman thinks he was a holy terror in his teens compared to them.
  • Superboy Prime from Infinite Crisis, in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths he was one of the heroes, a well mannered young boy who admired Superman and wanted to be as good of a hero as him, in the sequel series he’s now in his mid teens, eventually he is corrupted by Alexander Luthor and starts committing villainous acts, while his first couple kills are an accident, he grows increasingly unstable and violent as the story progresses to the point where he goes on a killing spree across the various universes, it takes the combined forces of Superman and various Green Lanterns to defeat and restrain him.

    Comic Strips 
  • The police procedural action strip Dick Tracy has a few teenage villains.
    • Jimmy White is an angsty seventeen-year-old who robs banks as well as his father, attempts assassinations, and acts as a cohort to major 30s villain Ben Spaldoni, who in turn worked for the Big Bad of the decade, Big Boy Caprice. He later explodes in an oil tank trying to kill another person. For a young kid that's pretty twisted.
    • Flattop Jones, Jr. committed at least two murders and led Tracy on a manhunt while trying to kill the aforementioned protagonist as well before getting killed. Considering this kid is the son of Flattop Jones, a mass murderer, hitman, and child killer, this is not unexpected of him. It's implied to be hereditary as despite being raised by his law-abiding aunt, Flattop Jr still turned out rotten.
    • Flattop Jr's accomplice, Joe Period, also guilty of several murders. When his mother visits him in prison, he basically just tells her to fuck off. Joe Period and Flattop Jr were created to explore the topic of teenage criminals, which was becoming a major concern in the 1950s.

    Fan Works 
  • Adventures in the Human Realm: Luz’s three classmates, Diana, Debbie, and Danelle, thought of her as a weirdo, even after three months when she was supposedly at camp. When the three of them see that Luz made friends with a group of teenagers, they mock both Luz and her friends, saying Luz turns those kids into weirdos like her despite Willow trying to be polite to them.
  • An unusually serious and dark CATverse story, The Pæan of the Bells, gives us a flashback to The Scarecrow's incredibly shitty childhood. A group of teenagers enjoyed hunting him down daily, beating the crap out of him, verbally abusing him, and more, purely For the Evulz. He was terrified that he might just be killed sooner or later, and the kicker? They weren't doing this to somebody their own age or anywhere near their own size; Jonathan was still a little boy. Not surprising that he grew up to be a villain.
  • "Anarchy for All" of the Dusk to Dawn Batman series portrays Anarky this way. Dillon "Lonnie" Machin appears at first to be a dorky fourteen-year-old Teen Genius inspired by his idol Batman to expose corruption in Gotham's society with his hacking skills. Unfortunately, constant neglect and emotional abuse from his Workaholic father Grant, plus having Hugo Strange for a therapist, reveals a dark side in the boy: He's a Loony Fan who wants Batman to be his father figure in place of Grant, has a creepy crush on Batgirl, trades his hacktivist modus operandi for blowing up buildings, and slowly poisoned his mother for being an Alcoholic Parent before becoming Strange's pawn.
  • Cool Cat and the Beauty of War and Destruction: At The Hamburgular's school, he was bullied so badly that he decided to commit a school shooting in retaliation. After he commits suicide, all the students cry and mourn him because they realize that if they had treated him better, he wouldn't have done what he did.
  • In the Discworld fics of A.A. Pessimal, the Assassins' Guild School is viewed by the cynical as an institution where people deliberately send their potentially monstrous offspring for up to seven years just to get them out of the way. Especially with the children of Assassin parents, the School is informally considered a place where potential social problems can be harnessed, socialised and turned into the right sort of largely socialised adults.
  • The Megamind fanfic Heroes makes it clear just how cruel and uncaring some teenagers can be compared to others. In some places, the cruelty is shockingly realistic.
  • During the section set in 1996, Redaction of the Golden Witch focuses on a group of Witch Hunters. The three younger members are all twenty-somethings, and much of the conflict revolves around the significantly older Narrator getting frustrated with the trio's apparent Lack of Empathy. Each of the three is so wrapped up in what they enjoy most about the Witch Hunt fandom that they don't seem to care about the fact the Rokkenjima Incident was real, with real victims whose memory they're insulting.
  • Pokémon Reset Bloodlines features Belladonna Tyrian and her group of minions/lovers. They're introduced in Chapter 22 plotting to cause a blackout in Gringy City by sabotaging the local power plant and kill someone. Their motivations are fully fleshed in Chapter 23, which reveals their Dark And Troubled Pasts.
  • Riding a Sunset: Subverted with Charlie, Memo, Chip, and Tripp, as they are all fairly decent people. Tina Lark and her friends, however, are still nasty even after getting a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Charlie and after Tripp dumped Tina.
  • Doki Doki Literature Club!:
    • In The Bike, Yuri has several moments where she is more unhinged than her canon version. There's MC eats breakfast with his 'mother', where Yuri confesses to murdering his whole family after breaking into his home. Or she's also seen holding Sayori captive in "Sayori is missing." Or she's there to brandish knives.
      • Monika also has her moments. In "Monika checks on Sayori," Monika witnesses Sayori's suicide, and takes a morbid interest in it.
    • Autistic Communist:
      • After not eating for three days, Natsuki murders MC and eats him before killing her abusive father and deciding to leave his corpse to rot.
  • Deconstructed with Steven, who fits the loosest definition of a teenager (he's 10-11 years old during the game), in Pokémon Strangled Red. He uses Missingno to bring back his deceased Charizard, and it controls him so that he kills his own brother with his bare hands.
  • Rosario Vampire Brightest Darkness Act III: While they actually are monsters in the literal sense, the bulk of the Yokai Academy student body fit the bill throughout most of the act. Disbelieving that Tsukune and his friends actually did fight Fairy Tale and believing them to just be fakers claiming as such for attention, they take virtually every possible opportunity to harass, bully, and mistreat them, climaxing in Kano blackmailing the girls into letting him take dirty pictures of them and nearly raping them outright; it reaches a point where Felucia asks the others in earnest why they should bother saving such assholes from Kuyou's upcoming attack. That being said, when the students witness the gang fighting off Kuyou, as well as a subsequent assault on the academy by Fairy Tale, they suffer a Jerkass Realization and help fight Fairy Tale off.
  • In Danny Phantom fanfic ResurrectedMemories: The A-Listers as per cannon are a group of snobby popular kids who bully others they deem beneath them but it's stated that the popular kids from Ember's backstory are even worse.
  • While they haven't been seen yet, Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail shows off how monstrous Grace and Simon, both 18, are. They essentially crippled a young child and buried him within the confines of his own car — and his father was unaware of this for eight years — and the one person who tried standing up to them and the Apex's cruelty got hit with a sledgehammer to the face, kicked in the ribs and tattooed with the Apex's symbol on their wrist. And that's not bringing up other atrocities that they did like stabbing a kind rabbit in the head under the excuse of "saving" someone or dropping a girl to her death without a care.
  • Since At The Food Court is a Take That! against the work of Cori Falls, who liked Gary Oak and made him the buddy of her Sued up Team Rocket, Gary (who is 14 at the time of Cori's work) is made into a juvenile delinquent, whose friendship with Team Rocket is actually the sign of his delinquency, he is exactly as brutish as that implies, and he straight-up lied about his grandfather being okay with it, because in no way would his grandfather be okay with it. What takes the cake is how he bullies Tracy and gets him fired by wrecking his own grandfather's equipment and making Tracy the fall guy, entirely because Tracy has a thyroid condition and as such is an easy target. To make it even worse, he threatens Tracy with physical violence at the hands of his friends, who are of course career criminals who gave Ash irreversible brain damage. He doesn't get any better after growing up, either.

    Films — Animated 
  • The unused Frozen song "We Know Better" has implications of this. It's from an early script where Elsa is a Tragic Villain. Growing up Anna was popular with locals while Elsa was feared for her powers. One portion has a teenage Elsa and Anna out with some of Anna's friends. Elsa says the kids are jerks but Anna tells her to relax and be friendly. One boy calls Elsa a "freak" — something that's happened before — and Elsa gets mad and attacks him:
    Anna: Try to be friendly, just smile and say "hi". Don't be defensive look them in the eye.
    Elsa: Those kids are jerks.
    Anna: I know it's hard but your temper makes it worse. They don't understand... your gift.
    Elsa: Yeah, they think that it's a curse.
    Elsa: They want me to stay mild and meek. I'm s'posed to turn the other cheek. But if one more kid calls me a...
    Elsa: Wait for it—
    Boy: Freak!
    Anna: [spoken] Elsa, what did you do? I'm so sorry!
    Anna: [whisper to Elsa] You should know better.
  • The Emperor's New Groove: Kuzco is a 17-year-old Incan king, and while he isn't completely evil, throughout much of the film — until his Heel Realization — he treats the villagers in his kingdom like shit-even having an ''elderly man thrown out of a window for the crime of "throwing off his groove". His idea for an 18th birthday gift is to bulldoze a village to the ground and build a theme park — themed around himself, of course.
  • Big Bad Ercole from Luca is a 16 year old who is utterly monstrous.
  • Sid Phillips from Toy Story is a teenage boy who is apparently not just a Big Brother Bully to his younger sister Hannah, but also regularly tortures toys for fun.

    Films — Live-Action 

  • The '50s was rife with films with this at its core with titles like "18 And Anxious". Rebel Without a Cause came in and set it straight.
  • A number of driver's education films, especially the 1950s but as late as the early 1980s(!), were rife with this. Usually, these were teenaged boys who were hot-rodders and depicted as rebellious and reckless drivers. Prime examples were The Last Date and And Then There Were Four, but as late as 1980's The Last Prom showed teenaged boys as inheritently reckless drivers who scoffed at traffic laws.
  • Subverted by the kids in Attack the Block, who are first shown mugging a woman but become heroic after they team up with her after aliens attack.
  • Bad Apples: The killers in this movie are a pair of teenage girls whos idea of Halloween fun involves torturing and killing people and vandalizing their homes.
  • Bandslam: The nickname 'Dewey' that Will gets mocked for - and an entire auditorium of teens chant at him comes from the fact that his father killed a child while drunk (DWI - driving while intoxicated - Dewey).
  • Battle Royale takes this to an extreme. After children in Japan start refusing to go to school, the government starts kidnapping entire classes of teenagers, putting them on an island, give them guns and other weapons, and tells them to all go kill each other, last one alive gets out free. Many of the teens, instead of fighting against the government, see this as an opportunity to wreak havoc and start mercilessly killing off their classmates. Not to forget that even before the games began, we saw them do cruel things like lock the female protagonist Noriko inside a bathroom (with insulting graffiti on the walls) and stab a teacher in the buttocks.
  • Berkshire County: When a YouTube video of Kylie giving Marcus a blowjob at a Halloween Party is posted, all the other students at the school don't hesitate to bully and Slut-shame her. She ultimately leaves the school in tears and cries in the shower at home.
  • The Boy (2015) has an example in the form of the teens who stay at the hotel one night. When Ted who is all of nine years old is found spying on one of the drunken female teenagers, the rest of them throw him outside, beat him and soak him in liquor. It serves as Ted's Despair Event Horizon.
  • Most of Larry Clark's films; Bully, Ken Park, Kids and The Smell of Us practically all run on this trope, often in a nihilistic and sensationalist exploitative manner. Ken Park features a teen stabbing his grandparents and getting an erection from it.
  • From Bumblebee, we have Alpha Bitch Tina and her Girl Posse who love to bully poor Charlie for kicks. Tina actually has a sick Kick the Dog moment by mocking Charlie's dead father. You can clearly see that Charlie is emotionally damaged due to the constant torment. Fortunately, Tina gets what she deserves when Bumblebee destroys her car.
  • Central Intelligence has Jerk Jock Trevor and his gang throwing a naked Bob Stone into the gymnasium, where he gets publicly humiliated. 20 years later, Trevor hasn't changed one bit, though the rest of his classmates had clearly matured since then.
  • A Cinderella Story: Shelby and her Girl Posse constantly torment Sam for being a "Diner Girl". They reach their low point during the pep-rally when they harass her into tears. They're still shown to be mocking her as she's crying in the hallway.
  • The Class (2007) is a brutal and realistic look at the effects of teen bullying. And how a whole class of students can gang up on an individual.
  • Cocaine Bear: The Duchamps are a trio of teen delinquents who, after finding one of the bags of cocaine, get high and amuse themselves by attacking hikers with knives.
  • Any movie based on Columbine, including Zero Day and Elephant (2003). In the Estonian film Klass, the shooters are constantly and horrifically tortured psychologically and physically by their classmates.
  • Drillbit Taylor features two high school bullies named Filkins and Ronnie who constantly terrorize the three main characters and even try to run him over with their car at one point. Fortunately, at the end, Filkins gets arrested and Ronnie pulls a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Eden Lake uses this as its central premise, with a gang of teens in the British countryside that intimidate and terrorize a tourist couple during their visit.
  • Gremlins is often interpreted as a satire of teenagers. The titular creatures (Gremlins) are green scaly creatures who were once Mogwai (meant to symbolize sweet, innocent children), but when they eat after midnight they transform into nightmarish monsters that drink, party and pervertedly chase human girls at best while terrorizing people even killing them at worst.
  • The feral chavs terrorizing the Council Estate in Harry Brown.
  • Holidays: The crux of Valentine's Day. Maxine is cruelly, constantly bullied and teased by other students, with their leader Heidi even mocking her dad's suicide.
  • The film Kidulthood, being centered around the troubled youth of urban London, feeds off of this trope — even a fair few of the protagonists are pricks to some extent, while the main antagonist is a towering Jerk Jock who batters his girlfriend and shows no visible regret at leading a bullying campaign against a girl at school which ultimately drove her to suicide. Combine this with the film's other underlying theme of Adults Are Useless, and you get a pretty bleak movie.
  • The Last Exorcism's Caleb is rather creepy and antagonistic and is actually a member of a demon-worshipping cult. His younger sister Nell, who's possessed and going to give birth to the demon, might be in on it too.
  • The Lie: Whether it was Britney's idea or Kayla's idea to pretend the latter pushed the former to her death just to cover up an escapade with a boyfriend either didn't think of what that would do to their parents or did not care.
  • In Madea's Family Reunion, the teens and young adults at the titular reunion are called out on their bad behavior, which included gambling, dressing inappropriately, and gyrating on each other.
  • Monos: The film centers on a group of child and teenage guerrilla soldiers whose youth and lack of supervision lead them to making reckless and often violent decisions. They ultimately break away from their guerrilla organization and essentially become bandits.
  • Murder by Numbers (2002), what with its vague inspiration from the Leopold and Loeb case.
  • From Mystery Science Theater 3000: Kitten with a Whip, I Accuse My Parents, The Sinister Urge, The Violent Years, What About Juvenile Delinquency? (short) and Teen-Age Strangler strangles teens, but is actually an adult
  • Never Been Kissed: Even though the film is mostly a comedy, the teenagers there are shown to be quite jerks; they stole Josie's car on her first day at the school and then watched on in delight while she tried to find it (and it was told to her that that wasn't the first time they did it), refused to sell a girl a prom ticket because she wasn't popular enough, tried to pour dog food on said girl at the prom and the boy that Josie was into (the student, not the teacher) deduced that she was a loser based on her bedroom. Oddly enough, in spite of this behavior towards her, she eventually was able to be accepted by the students and gleefully hung out with them.
  • Odd Girl Out: Another Lifetime Movie. In this one, the protagonist is bullied both inside and outside of school to the point where she cuts off her own hair (after the other teens say her hair is too frizzy) and overdoses on sleeping pills. Even after her attempted suicide, the kids would not ease up on her. They posted a video of her being wheeled into an ambulance on a hate page that was dedicated to her and called her a "pathetic druggie".
  • In Preservation, the three silent Malevolent Masked Men stalking the trio through the woods turn out to be teenage boys.
  • The first two Pumpkinhead movies, with Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings having you want the titular monster to slaughter every teen we meet in the movie.
  • Kimmy and her group of teenage purgers in The Purge: Election Year full stop. Namely, Kimmy uses the excuse of not being able to shoplift a candy bar to burn down a store and murder everyone inside. And Kimmy brags about murdering her parents on top of it. They are all killed without mercy, thankfully.
  • The events of the 2008 film Red are kicked off by three teenagers mugging an old man, then shooting his dog For the Evulz.
  • Riot Girls: The Titans are brutal teenage thugs committing murder and very obviously willing to rape too. Even those on the "good" side are pretty ruthless to survive, like Jack and Scratch.
  • The Pioneers in Scarecrow (1983) who traumatize Lena and her grandfather, driving them to madness and out of town.
  • SHAZAM! (2019): The Breyer Brothers are often shown to be mercilessly abusing Freddy; their Establishing Character Moment has them deliberately running him over with their car. They even make fun of him for not having a mom — which grabs the attention of Billy since he understands how that feels.
  • Shut In: Stephen was increasingly troubled but he becomes this by the end, faking being paralyzed, drugging his stepmother and trying to kill Tom.
  • In Stoker, nearly all of India's male classmates are sneering, relentless bullies, who sexually harass her on what is implied to be a daily basis. Whip Taylor appears to be an exception, not participating in the bullying and seeming to harbor a small crush on India, at least until he tries to rape her. India herself is marginally better, being sarcastic and passive-aggressive, but mostly polite and elegant. But she becomes a murderer at the end, so that's there.
  • The Strange Thing About the Johnsons has Isaiah sexually abusing his father since he was a teenager, to the point where his father dies after trying to escape the abuse.
  • In Summer Camp Nightmare, a 1980s adaptation of The Butterfly Revolution, counselors-in-training Franklin Reilly, John Mason, and Stanley Runk (a.k.a. Runk the Punk) are the main architects of the takeover of Camp North Pines, locking up all the adult camp counselors and its strict camp director Mr. Warren. At first things start off as fun, but then the three teenagers prove to be monsters as Stanley is involved in the murder of Mr. Warren, John is involved in the rape of the Camp South Pines girl Debbie Stewart, and Franklin becomes Drunk with Power as he uses the broken rope bridge test to dispose of those who break his increasingly insane rules.
  • Tales of Halloween: In "The Wicked and the Weak", Alice and her gang of bullies torture and murder people For the Evulz. However, a flashback shows that they were like this even when they were children.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) used disaffected youths to form a thieves' guild.
  • Another Lifetime Movie called Terror in the Family centers around a teenage girl (played by a young Hilary Swank) acting violently towards her family. She even goes as far as breaking her father's hand. We learn throughout the film that she's mostly doing this to impress her rebellious boyfriend, who is ten times worse than her as he once punched a teacher.
  • Thirteen (2003): With all the drug usage, underage drinking, underage sex (and numerous other illegal acts) that goes on in this movie well... let's just say this film is a parent's worst nightmare on what will happen when their sweet little angels become teenagers.
  • Tragedy Girls is a Black Comedy horror movie that stars Sadie Cunningham and McKayla Hooper, who are quite possibly two of the evilest teenagers to ever grace the silver screen. They run a true-crime blog together, and in order to boost their fame, go on a killing spree and report on their own crimes. They murder, torture, manipulate, lie, and steal for the sake of getting attention for their blog, all without a hint of remorse.
  • Unfriended is a horror film about a Skype chat haunted by the vengeful spirit of Laura Barns, a high school Alpha Bitch who was humiliated at a party and committed suicide out of shame. She starts killing the teens off one by one as they refuse her demands to know who filmed the humiliating video and even try to all shift the blame on each other. It turns out that all of them made anonymous Google accounts to mock her after her death, Jess desecrated her grave, Val told her to kill herself when she came around and asked for help, and Laura's best friend Blaire (the Final Girl) is revealed to be the one who filmed the video and released it onto the internet. More than one critic reported the sheer amoral cruelty of all the teenage characters was more horrific than the premise of an evil spirit who killed you through the internet.
  • Japanese film The Warped Ones. Akari and Masaru are thieves and rapists. Their partner and Masaru's lover Yuki is a hardened prostitute. They delight in tormenting Fumiko, the woman Akari raped, and her spineless boyfriend Kashiwagi.
  • The Whale: Ellie exemplifies this trope. She has severe behavioral issues, including cyberbullying, drug use, and blackmailing. She was even suspended from school for her behavior; her grades have suffered as a result.
  • What's Eating Gilbert Grape: Ellen is vain, self-absorbed, and ungrateful toward her elder siblings, particularly Gilbert. She never helps out around the house and is too impatient and immature to take care of Arnie; the one time she's required to look after him, she ends up knocking him to the ground and jerking him around by the hair.
  • Downplayed in Where the Wild Things Are: Claire's friends don't wreck Max's snow fort out of malice but out of playing too hard for the smaller kid. They even look genuinely upset when they realize what they've done, but are much too self-conscious to apologize.
  • In Mabul, 13-year-old Yoni's tormentors not only smash a window and threaten to beat Yoni up but also send Tomer out to sea alone in a rowboat, almost killing him.

    Literature 
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Heffley is not only lazy and irresponsible, but also extremely rude to his family, especially Greg.
  • The Dinner: Rick and Michel attack a helpless homeless woman for no other reason than she smelled awful and she was in their way. Michel also murders his cousin Beau in cold blood because Beau had tried to blackmail them.
  • Go to Sleep (A Jeff the Killer Rewrite): Out of the Terrible Trio of teenage bullies, Randy is the most twisted of all. Keith and Troy do help Randy beat up Jeff, but they get even more reluctant the more sadistic Randy gets towards Jeff. Keith and Troy later work to grow out of their dangerous lifestyles and Randy is left alone as an adult.
  • Stacey de Lacey from Oliver and the Seawigs looks to be around his teenage years, and wants to help the Thurlstone win the seawig contest and become ruler of the living islands so he can have them under his command, and use them to get back at everyone who was mean to him. It probably doesn't help that he seemed to bring the bullying upon himself by being a pretty nasty kid himself. Plus, he has absolutely no qualms about trapping Oliver's parents inside the Thurlstone's new earrings.
  • Jodee Blanco's memoir of recovering from intense bullying, Please Stop Laughing at Me, turns both this and Kids Are Cruel up a notch. A group of kids Jodee was friends with in a new town fall out with her after she refused to play a prank on a disabled teacher. They then come back to her over the summer, invite her to play baseball, then knock her out with a fastball, moon her, and call her a variety of names. Not only that, her crush wrote "You're going to have to fuck yourself bitch" in her yearbook, gets beaten up by the entire football team, and is made fun of when word gets out that one breast is smaller than the other, and that's not even the half of it.
  • Speak has Melinda's classmates. Heather jumping ship on her. Those kids at the pep rally. And Andy Evans who raped her.
  • Figures rather prominently in many novels by Stephen King — one almost suspects King believes Teens Are Monsters himself. (Well, he did teach high school for several years.) Among other examples, we have:
    • Todd Bowden from Apt Pupil, the second novella from Different Seasons. Todd learns that his elderly next-door neighbor is a Nazi fugitive, but doesn't turn him in because he wants to learn the "gooey stuff" about the Holocaust. As his Odd Friendship with the Nazi continues, Todd graduates from dreaming about raping concentration camp inmates to becoming a hobo-mauling serial killer. Finally, Todd kills his guidance counselor and snipes motorists on an expressway.
    • Buddy Repperton in Christine. Arnie Cunningham doesn't qualify quite so much due to the whole Demonic Possession thing.
    • The Children of the Corn from Night Shift, along with Creepy Children.
    • Junior Rennie and his posse in Under the Dome. Three of them rape a girl while the only female member of the posse cheers them on, and Junior repeatedly has sex with the bodies of two girls he murdered and stuffed in a pantry.
    • The teenagers who kill Alice in Cell.
    • The Kid in The Stand gives the appearance of this, but is in his mid-twenties to thirties.
    • Henry Bowers and his friends Victor and Belch in IT, as well as Patrick Hockstetter, whose actions even disturb Henry.
    • The girls in the locker room in Carrie, particularly Chris, who comes up with the whole ill-advised pig-blood thing.
  • Ann M. Martin, best known as the creator of The Baby-Sitters Club, published a young adult novel titled Slam Book in 1987, which eerily seemed to presage the same bullying issues that would be associated with online social networks two decades later. In this case, Anna, the protagonist, falls out with her BFF, Alpha Bitch Paige, over a boy, and concocts a scheme to humiliate Paige by forging slam book entries supposedly written by Paige to Cheryl, the school outcast. Anna, not even taking Cheryl's feelings into account, doesn't realize it's gone too far until Cheryl commits suicide by slitting her wrists.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire:
    • Joffrey Baratheon is only 13 years old, yet is regarded by many as the single most depraved character in the series (at least until the below-mentioned Ramsay came along).
    • Gregor Clegane was barely in his teens when he burned his little brother Sandor's face after Sandor played with some of Gregor's discarded toys that Gregor didn't even want anymore. Gregor only got worse as an adult.
    • Sixteen year old Ramsay Snow also qualifies, given how his main hobbies are flaying and hunting women for sport, and to a lesser extent nineteen-year-old Theon Greyjoy also counts, although he does bad things less because he's evil and more because he's a stupid kid that gets in way over his head. Of course, that all changes when the two meet...
  • In John Saul's House of Reckoning, the main character is crippled from a car accident and the school (and the town) whispers behind her back and alienates her, then accuses her of worshiping the devil. Because she has a limp. Saul actually has several novels with outcast teenagers being victimized by their monstrous peers. The Unwanted, Black Creek Crossing and Punish The Sinners are a few examples. Then there's Teri, the glamorous teenage serial killer in Second Child.
  • In Andrew Vachss's Burke books the protagonist often passes by disaffected teens who may be violent, though they're rarely the focus.
  • Brought up in Discworld, but in typical Pratchett fashion, quickly subverted soon after. The Ankh Morpork teen street gangs are mentioned to be ruthless and deadly... but find themselves helpless to resist Captain Carrot's good-natured effort to organize them all into a Cub Scout equivalent, camping trips and chanting all included.
  • Gone, by Michael Grant. Partially justified in that the series uses an Only Fatal to Adults situation and every main character is 14 or 15 years old. On the other hand, there are a lot more villains than heroes, and the "good" characters have issues.
  • In The Butterfly Revolution, John Mason rapes one of the female campers, Blackridge tortures Divordich, and Stanley kills Mr. Warren.
  • Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter, and his Slytherin cronies.
    • The young Tom Riddle is an exaggerated example, who murdered his father and grandparents, framing his uncle. Opened the Chamber of Secrets, killed a girl and then blamed it all on Hagrid.
    • For that matter, James Potter and Sirius Black were examples of this trope regarding Snape, at least during fifth year.
      • Severus wasn't their only victim. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince revealed that the Marauders got detentions for several acts of bullying and general mischief. One incident involved being one of them being apprehended and using an illegal hex on some one-note student. There's also Sirius trying to lure Severus to Werewolf Remus during a full moon with full knowledge of what Remus could have done to him.
    • Snape might be an inversion because, while he didn't even seem to be mean, he had a very dark mind, with his fascination with the Dark Arts and the creation of some violent spells. This is likely what his classmates' perception of him was. However, he did hang out with a group of other Slytherins who eventually became Death Eaters which probably didn't help this perception. Though we never learn much about this gang's activities, they probably fall under this trope.
    • And Dudley before the Dementors.
  • This is essentially the point of Knights of the Forty Islands, in which a bunch of teenagers are kidnapped by aliens and put on small islands connected by narrow bridges, where they're given anger-activated swords and told that anyone who conquers all 40 islands gets to go home (The Cake Is a Lie, as all "kidnapped" kids are copies). The protagonists decide to make an alliance with the neighboring islands in order to peacefully or forcefully bring all islands under one rule. While it works for a short while, teenage hormones soon take over, and the alliance falls apart, as many of them just want to have power and sex (two of the betrayers are murdered in cold blood by the protagonist after they rape a girl).
  • Others: Deformed private investigator Nick "Dis" Dismas, walking home via the beach, passes a gang of variably drunk and stoned teenage girls. With a barrage of vicious verbal abuse, they overpower him; kick him to a pulp, and steal his cash.
  • Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick takes this to the extreme. In this Zombie Apocalypse, an electromagnetic pulse has made most teenagers become Technically Living Zombies and killed most adults, thus making the only survivors younger children or elderly people, who both have no problem mistrusting teenagers.
  • Some of the teens in The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth are unnecessarily cruel. The leader of Danielle's hate club actually wishes that Danielle dies from the anesthesia when she goes to get dermatological surgery.
  • Lord of the Flies pretty much breathes this trope. Let's just say that William Golding had no faith in the ability of human beings to solve problems without resorting to violence, and showed it through the preteen and teenage characters in the book.
  • The Scream: The Screamers, rabid fans of metal band The Scream. One chapter ends with a list of the violent acts perpetrated by the fans, all aged 13-17. The characters also discuss Khmer Rouge and one character points out that many of the people involved were around age 14.
  • Little House on the Prairie has the oldest boys at Almanzo's school. Because of the time period and the rural environment, it's a mixed grade school. The older boys are sixteen and seventeen-year-olds who are rarely at school, and usually spend class talking when they are. They steal from the younger students and force the boys to fight for fun. The previous year they ended up beating a teacher so hard he died of his injuries. The new teacher gets them to behave by whipping them.
  • In the Seeker Bears book Great Bear Lake, a group of older polar bear cubs appear. They steal from weaker bears by ganging up on them, goof around when they're not supposed to, mock the Spirits, disrespect their elders, and try to fight on a day of peace. At one point they even kidnap a black bear cub so that can chase the black bears out of their territory and steal their food.
  • Marty Pants has Salvadore Ack, whom Marty likes to call "Peach Fuzz" because of the mustache he has. Salvadore is a teenage bully who likes picking on Marty every chance he gets.
  • Forbidden: Kit, who, in his sister's words, is "your standard screwed-up teenager." Part of it has to do with his older brother being forced to act as a parent to him, rather than the Big Brother Mentor relationship they could have had. He does begin to improve starting in the last third or so of the book.
  • In R.S. Belcher's King of the Road, there's Dickie Dennis and his gang of thugs. In contrast to the "secret club" kids who are in their tweens and act even younger, Dickie Dennis and his gang are in their late teens. You know they're bad news when they once put one of the kids in the hospital and in book, one of them tries to rape or at least molest Nevada, the sole girl in the "secret club" and another steals her beloved harmonica. Dickie Dennis and company get their Moral Event Horizon when they join a cult of killer clowns and murder and kidnap people from a kindly group of nomads. No one sheds a tear when heroic "clown" Emmett Wally from the Brotherhood of the Wheel, comes and kills most of the gang while trying to save the kids from them.
  • Point Horror has many of the killers turn out to be a friend or relative of the teenaged protagonist.
    • The Invitation focuses on a party where the resident Alpha Bitch invites five losers to her annual party for the mere purpose of turning them into props for her party game. Her friends call out her idea as 'too weird' but go along with it. Things only get worse when an uninvited guest shows up and starts offing the five protagonists due to misguided revenge.
    • Unleashed also uses this trope. Protagonists Stu and Jane from Scissorman psychologically torment their little stepbrother and rope their friend in to help. Then there are all the teens (and kids) who go off the rails in Darker. Although that turns out to be a result of Brainwashed and Crazy.
  • The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea: Noboru and his friends, who are all young teenagers, kill a kitten to prove that they are not constrained by the taboo of murder and later decide to kill Ryuji as well.

    Live-Action TV 

In General:

By Series:

  • 7 Yüz: Mete in "Büyük Günahlar". For months on end, teenage Mete tormented not only Aytaç, but also his family, who never did him any wrong. His troubling behavior indicates a lack of empathy and regard for consequences, far beyond the "little bit of fun" he claims he was having. Aytaç's daughter Nihal calls him out for failing to recognize the cruelty of his actions and persisting once damage had been done.
    Nihal: If you had any intention to stop, you would have stopped before.
  • 13 Reasons Why. While all the teenagers in the show have issues and/or Fatal Flaws, some of them stand out for being total Hate Sinks such as Bryce Walker, his comrades, and Monty De La Cruz.
  • Early on in Andromeda, the ship docked at a station run by a tribal society of teenagers (everyone died young due to radiation poisoning, so the oldest survivor was sixteen). When the teens gained access to star-destroying bombs, they immediately went out and blew up inhabited solar systems with them.
  • Connor in Angel is a perfect example. The bad guys hardly have to break a sweat to manipulate the kid into doing really nasty stuff. Fortunately, he returns in Season 5 as a much saner person, due to having memories of a normal loving family instead of a childhood in a hell dimension.
  • At least two episodes of The Blacklist have played with this:
    • In "Ivan", the Skeleton Key was stolen not by the titular hacker, but by a 17-year-old boy who was stalking the daughter of one of the Key's makers.
    • In "Arioch Cain", Elizabeth Keen is targeted for assassination. The backer of this assassination? An angry teenage girl who believed that Keen was responsible for the terrorist attack that killed her mother.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
    • Jesse, Theresa Klusmeyer, and Harmony got turned into vampires.
    • "The Pack": Hyena-possessed bullies. Lampshaded heavily here:
      Giles: Xander's taken to teasing the less fortunate?
      Buffy: Uh-huh.
      Giles: And, there's been a noticeable change in both clothing and demeanor?
      Buffy: Yes.
      Giles: And, well, otherwise all his spare time is spent lounging about with imbeciles.
      Buffy: It's bad, isn't it.
      Giles: It's devastating. He's turned into a sixteen-year-old boy. Of course, you'll have to kill him.
    • Marc the Demon from "The Puppet Show".
    • The Inca Mummy from "Inca Mummy Girl".
    • The Swim Team from "Go Fish".
    • Pete Clarner "Beauty and the Beasts".
    • Vamp Willow and Vamp Xander from "The Wish".
    • Faith, until her redemption.
  • Cold Case is a huge fan of this trope: plenty of the killers were teenagers at the time of their respective murders, but some episodes particularly stand out:
    • "Shuffle, Ball Change" had a Big Brother Bully jealous of his younger brother's talent for dancing and the eventual approval of their hard-nosed widowed father and ultimately breaks his foot with the crutch he had been using all episode long due to a debilitating football injury then beating him to death with it.
    • "Stand Up and Holler" featured two supposed best friends trying to be In with the In Crowd as cheerleaders for the football team. While the latter group are rapists, the former is ran by an Alpha Bitch who poisons the one friend who dared try to go against her by leaving the squad and telling what the jocks did while the pathetic wannabe "friend" leaves her to die.
    • "That Woman" shows that it doesn't even have to be the "popular" group that is consisting of jerks: the school's "religious" group routinely breaks the rules of the group by engaging in activities like premarital sex and exploring their sexuality while also Slut-Shaming their newest member. They ultimately lured her into the woods fearing she would spill their secrets and participated in collectively stoning her to death.
  • The high school students attending campus for a program to earn college credits in Community episode "The Art of Discourse" won't stop mercilessly hounding the cast for going to a community college, when they'll be one day going to universities. Strangely exaggerated; many fans felt they were too cruel to be funny.
  • On one episode of Criminal Minds there is the statement "All teenagers behave like sociopaths sometimes; that's why you can't diagnose them until they're 18." In the episode "All that Remains", a teenage girl starts to believe that her mother loved her younger sister more than her. She then murders her mother and then murders her sister a year later, and blames it all on her father, who happens to be an alcoholic and suffering from multiple personalities. JJ soon figures this out and the teenage girl points a gun at her. When Reid and Morgan come to arrest her, she tries to get out of it by claiming that she's suffering from post-traumatic stress, but they don't buy it.
  • Doctor Who: "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky" features a genius teenager as an antagonist whose motivations can be boiled down to being a teenager. However, he came around in the end, sort of. Also, he had gathered a large number of other genius teenagers to him who, on hearing his real plan, were appalled and immediately abandoned him. It implied that his plans were less about his age and more that he was somewhat unstable anyway.
  • Elementary:
    • The episode "Child Predator" has Adam Kemper, the so-called victim of kidnapper Samuel Abbot. He actually abused his kidnapper and forced him to kidnap and kill children, then pretends to be a guilt-ridden victim of Stockholm Syndrome to get an immunity deal for his crimes. Thankfully Sherlock pulls a Rules Lawyer and get him convicted.
    • Episode "One Way To Get Off" has Sean Figueroa, the illegitimate son of Serial Killer Wade Crewes, who's father convinced him to commit murders to make himself look innocent. He killed two couples, and a bystander who happened to be present.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Like his book counterpart, Joffrey Baratheon is a standout example. From ordering the massacre of his father Robert's bastards (nearly all of whom were children), to forcing one prostitute to sexually torture another for his own pleasure, to his emotional and physical abuse of Sansa Stark throughout the second season. Of course, given the Crapsack World of Westeros, other infamous contenders show up.
    • Theon Greyjoy and Ramsay Bolton, nee Snow, although a little older, are no slouches in that department either, although Theon gets his comeuppance and then some.
  • Accepted as a truth universally acknowledged in Glee, where it ends up being true at one point or another not just of the general school population but of almost every single one of the teenage protagonists too. So far Mike Chang is about the only one who's escaped it. The trope is taken to its furthest extreme in 2X01, in which Rachel is so jealous of an exchange student's superior singing voice that she sends her to a crack house instead of an audition. It is, however, also deconstructed somewhat with the implication that what lets teens be monsters is adults not doing the job of teaching them better: WMHS has an anti-bullying policy that is not enforced, but Dalton Academy for Boys features an enforced anti-bullying policy and Teens are emphatically Not Monsters there.
  • In The Glory Moon Dong-eun, when in high school, endured severe bullying from a gang led by Park Yeon-Jin, including being burned repeatedly by a curling iron, sexual harassment, and they at one point even broke into her home. Moon eventually drops out of school due to the group.
  • On Grimm, teen werefolk tend to be this, even more than adults. Like the violinist were-rat, the sweet little were-badger (or -wolverine; some sort of mustelid), or the hybrid were-tortoise/were-lion.
  • Kevin the Teenager in the Harry Enfield and Chums sketches. ("That is SO UNFAIR! I HATE YOU!") However, this is more along the realistic (if exaggerated) lines of making him an unbearable, moody, whining brat who hates everything his parents do or say and is entirely controlled by hormones and current trends. In the earlier Harry Enfield's Television Programme, Kevin (also called "Little Brother") was a hyperactive and relentlessly cheerful preteen. The first episode of ...And Chums showed his thirteenth birthday triggering a hideous Transformation Sequence, similar to Doctor Jekyll, in front of his horrified parents.
  • Homicide: Life on the Street:
    • The perp in "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" is a teenage gang leader who had accidentally beaten another teenager to death during a gang initiation ritual. The leader actually regrets killing the kid and admits he had honestly thought of the ritual as a gesture of affection.
    • In "Last of the Watermen", Pembleton and Felton investigate the murder of an elderly woman whose tongue had been cut out and shoved back in her mouth. The prime suspect turns out to be the woman's grandson; when they track him down and question him, he casually confesses that he had killed her for no real reason.
    • In "The True Test", Bayliss and Lewis suspect wealthy teenager McPhee Broadman (Elijah Wood) murdered another boy. They eventually uncover Broadman had been abusing younger boys to make them his willing slaves, and murdered the victim because he refused to murder Broadman's loving mother for him.
  • The House episode "The Jerk"'s patient of the week was a teen Jerkass that bullied his mother, insulted everyone he met just for the lulz, and was just a general all-around brat (after getting tired of all the tests, when asked for a urine sample, he pissed on the floor). his mother even used the "he used to such a sweet kid till he became a teen" line. House only had his "Eureka!" Moment discovery of the kid's illness by realizing that the kid's utter jerkassery was NOT a symptom, he was just a teen A-Hole. He also said it was probably the mother's fault, which usually is in more real cases of bullying or teenage rebellion.
  • Judge Judy is a staunch believer in this trope, often saying, "When teenagers' mouths are moving, they're lying." To be fair, though, most of the teenagers that appear on the show don't really do much to dissuade her of this opinion. One memorable case involved a teen girl who was accused of setting up her ex-best friend to be assaulted by a gang of bullies but protested her innocence through the whole case. The judge, of course, saw through her act.
    • Judge Hatchett, a courtroom show that ran from 2000 to 2008, is somewhat of an inversion. Judge Glenda Hatchett tried many cases involving out-of-control teens and tried to get them on the right road through unique interventions, with varying levels of success. Contrary to Judy, Hatchett was an advocate for kids, often saying, "If we want our children to do right, we have to do right by them."
    • Judge Judy even pointed out the difference between herself and Judge Hatchett in one of her own cases, when one teenager who felt Judge Judy was being too mean to him said he should have brought his case before Judge Hatchett.
      Judge Judy: I mean, you wanna go over and see Judge Hatchett, be my guest. Judge Hatchett is a great gal, a very good friend of mine. She likes to help people. I don't.
  • Justified:
    • Gangster, Serial Killer and Serial Rapist Robert Quarles committed his first murder at fourteen, executing his sexually abusive, drug-addict father on orders from mobster Theo Tonin. As an adult he seems to view this as the point at which his life effectively ended, turning him into the monstrosity he is now.
    • Harlan County marijuana dealer Dickie Bennett, is an interesting example, being a man in his forties who is effectively trapped in his teenage years. A bully even in high school, Dickie suffered a crippling leg injury when one of his victims hit back, leaving him emotionally arrested at the age of fifteen.
    • Subverted by Loretta McCready and Kendal Crowe. The former's a Bennett family protégé turned drug dealer, slowly building her own criminal enterprise. The latter's from a long line of smugglers, thieves, and conmen. Both, however, have well-developed moral compasses and are better people than ninety percent of Harlan's criminals.
  • The Late Show with David Letterman amplifies this trope to its comic extreme in its Dwight the Troubled Teen skits. At the slightest provocation, Dwight loudly proclaims his hatred for his family and storms off.
  • The Law & Order franchise is fond of this one — if there's a teenager in the episode, this trope trumps even Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize if you're trying to guess the perp at home. Especially if it's a teenage girl. Bonus evil points to a girl in SVU who raped her little sister, convinced her boyfriend to rape her too, gave her an STD, got her boyfriend to kill the sister and another boy to kill him.
    • One episode of SVU had a heartbreaking subversion. A teenage boy kills his younger brother with a gun, but it's only because his mother convinced him they were facing a Fate Worse than Death and that killing his brother was the only way to save him. When he realizes this was a lie, he's horrified.
      • SVU in general subverts this nearly as often as they play it straight, since a number of the victims are teenagers abused by adults.
    • Also deconstructed on occasion in the various series. A teenager will appear to be this and potentially even do something horrible, but it turns out that they're being manipulated or brainwashed by an adult.
  • The Middleman plays with this trope. In one episode, it appears that a teenage girl is a Stalker with a Crush who's been following her favorite boy band group, opening vortexes in physical space and is about to end the world. Turns out, the girl was a General from another planet, sent here to stop the boy band, who were actually alien terrorists in disguise.
  • Subverted by the Power Rangers, where every teenager the audience sees ends up being unbelievably wholesome and respectable. Even the bullies and teenage-jerks usually turn out to be decent people when push comes to shove, although once every few seasons, a teenage character plays the trope straight.
    • Tommy's brainwashing as the Green Ranger notwithstanding, the few times we see this trope played straight are when one or more of the main characters is cast as a villain or as a brainwashed/corrupted character for most of the storyline, usually ending with a Heel–Face Turn about halfway through the season. Astronema/Karone (in Space), Mara, Kapri, and The Thunder Rangers (Ninja Storm), and Trent (Dino Thunder) are notable examples of this.
    • Lampshaded in the pilot episode; the original team is assembled when Zordon looks for "immature, overbearing humans" to fight evil. This was rephrased as "teenagers with attitude" in the opening credit sequence.
    • Played straight with Power Rangers in Space's "A Ranger among Thieves". Andros befriends a trio of thieves and the lead one Chuck is the only one of them who is presented as irredeemable. He gets arrested at the end.
    • To be fair, Power Rangers rarely shows any evil human, regardless of age.
  • SCTV did "Nice Kids From Hell", a parody of 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, where a group of clean-cut, polite teens terrorize a middle-aged couple with their pleasant, helpful behavior.
  • Though not all, a lot of the meteor freaks of the week, people who usually go crazy and start killing people on Smallville, are teenagers. Part of that is likely due to the high school/college setting of the first five seasons, but it holds true in later seasons as well. Initially an Enfant Terrible, Lx-15/Alexander Luthor plunges headlong into this trope after he ages to the point where he's in his mid-teens. He attempts to assassinate Martha Kent, Clark, and Earth-2 Lionel, burns down Luthor Mansion and attacks his Parental Substitute Tess. Thank god that memory loss, and a Heel–Face Turn set in.
  • The Sea Beyond: Some of the characters fit this, since it's a show set in a juvenile prison.
    • All the inmates are under 18 years old, and many of them belong to youth gangs, so they are ruthless and perfectly capable of murder, especially the ones who are raised this way by their families, such as Ciro and his gang.
    • Even the ones who are not part of criminal families can fall to this. Viola is the biggest example, since she's just cruel to everyone For the Evulz.
    • At first sight, Sasà is just a rich, shy, and very young teenager who is easily bullied by the other inmates. Then it's revealed that he is in prison because he raped his girlfriend. At first he claims his innocence, but then he confesses the truth.
  • On Spartacus: Blood and Sand there are a couple.
    • In the first season, Numerius seems like a nice enough kid who worships Spartacus the way one would a famous athlete. He later forces Spartacus to kill his own best friend as part of an entertainment.
    • In War of the Damned, Tiberius makes Julius Caesar look like a Nice Guy in comparison! In his case, it is shown that his father is trying to raise him to be a ruthless asshole and simply did too good of a job of it.
  • Any episode of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) that featured anyone younger than 20 years old adheres strongly to this trope. In no fewer than three episodes (Charlie X, Miri, And The Children Shall Lead) unsupervised youngsters nearly destroy the Enterprise and/or kill the principal characters.
    • Trelane, the teenage omnipotent being who'll hunt you down if you ruin his fun.
    • Though he was 'born' within the run of the show, Q's son on Voyager was depicted as a teen when he made an appearance. He was also quite fond of making it absolutely clear that A God Am I to anyone who crossed his path.
    • In contrast, Naomi Wildman follows the same path of being born during the show's run but was depicted as a child when she interacted with the crew.
    • Averted with characters the writers actually liked. Wesley (TNG) and Icheb (VOY) were stock Teen Genius characters who were generally well-meaning and sociable. Although Wesley was widely seen as The Scrappy by a segment of the fandom (and the Enterprise crew half the time), this had more to do with him bordering on being a Creator's Pet (and, less overtly, an Author Avatar).
  • Subverted somewhat in Teachers (2001), in which the titular teachers, most of whom loathe their jobs, believe this about the teenagers they teach — but their actual interactions with them show that the teachers are more at fault than the teens. However, background events in any given hallway or yard scene do tend to show students casually setting each other on fire or hanging each other out of windows as the teachers walk by obliviously...
  • Teen Wolf; literally; that's the whole premise. (Weird, uncontrollable physical changes; mood swings; powerful, destructive, violent urges and thoughts you don't understand and can barely control. Is it adolescence or lycanthropy?)
    • Matt Daehler in Season 2 is revealed to be bonded with the Kanima and consciously used the shapeshifter to murder innocent people whom he believes wronged him or just because they were in his way and even killed people direcvtly himself.
    • Gabe in Season 6B who joins the lynch-mob-esque band of hunters and cruelly menaces supernaturals who go to school with him, killing an innocent werecoyote and shoots up a house injuring several people including normal non-supernaturals .
  • Todd and the Book of Pure Evil: Crowley High may be a Weirdness Magnet because of the wishes granted by the Jackass Genie Artifact of Doom mentioned in the title, but the book can't really be blamed for the students' tendency to kill the wishmakers… and only a couple wishmakers can be said to have had it coming.
  • The students on Veronica Mars are perfectly awful to each other all the time.
  • A frequent scenario on What Would You Do?. Actors depict teens in various bullying configurations—boys on boys, girls on girls, the victim targeted because they're gay, albino, or even red-headed—in public places, and we see how the adults nearby react (one thing we learn: adults are more likely to intervene when the teens wear black or otherwise look sort of gangsta). Another one had a big teenage boy not only mouth off to his mother at a drugstore but do so in a way that strongly suggested he had physically abused her.
  • The first couple of seasons of Without a Trace seemed to be dedicated to the idea that teens were vicious amoral beasts who lived to victimize each other. Coincidentally(?), CSI went through a similar phase about that same time.

    Music 
  • My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade features the song Teenagers, which starts off about how adults view teenagers, and then how, with the way school life has changed in recent years, why it's understandable they think this way. The end message seems to be that it's a vicious cycle.
  • "Becky" by Be Your Own Pet. The protagonist of the song murders a girl as revenge for high school bullying. Apparently slightly based off Jemina Pearl's high school experiences. Without the murder.

    Myths & Religion 
  • The Bible:
    • In the Book of Genesis, Ishmael, at fourteen years old, did nothing but pick on his younger half-brother Isaac. When Isaac's mother Sarah saw this, she was furious, and she saw to it that Ishmael and his mother Hagar were sent away from Abraham's household. Ishmael later went on to become the forefather of the Arabs and, eventually, the Muslims. Though, considering that Ishmael was the son of the slave-woman Hagar (who was effectively acting as surrogate mother since Sarah was infertile) and Sarah's idea of sending them away involved having them abandoned in the desert to die of dehydration, it is debatable who was the real monster.
    • Later on, the prophet Elisha encounters a gang of obnoxious delinquents, who must have been in their teens at youngest, who insult him by saying "Go on up, you bald head." Or more colloquially, "Drop dead, you old fool!" Elisha won't take this lying down, and God allows two she-bears to maul forty-two of those cruel teens. Bullying a Dragon, indeed.

    Podcasts 
  • Amusingly subverted in Wooden Overcoats. Madeline speaks of the "local hoodlums", a trio of teenagers who terrorize the village by... occasionally tagging walls with graffiti (which itself is really closer to street art), and then going to loiter at the local bus stop! Antigone bumps into them in "The Cliffhanger," and it's quickly revealed that they're actually perfectly nice, intelligent kids, who are very friendly to Antigone, despite the fact that she's the local weirdo.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • A recurring theme in Hailey Hatred's live journal, where she documents teenagers doing horrible and or stupid things throughout her travels, usually while reminding herself she wasn't far removed from being one herself.
  • Team Bad's tag team title run of UCW-Zero was basically this trope, though somewhat played for laughs when the bias referees would berate management for putting them in matches with older, stronger baby faces or Exoticos like the Fella Twins.

    Roleplay 
  • In Survival of the Fittest, some of the high-schoolers thrown into the game prove to be capable of horrifying acts of brutality, though many of the more violent ones are already insane, and a few are thrown onto the island from insane asylums and the like specifically to spice up the game. Even with that in mind though, the kids almost seem worse than the terrorists who abduct them.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Monsterhearts runs on this both on the metaphorical and literal sense. The game uses Rule of Drama to ensure the character's lives are kept messy and unboring, and this often results in many teenage characters and NPCs getting into verbal, physical and emotional fights. The fact that most of them are also actual monsters only heightens the drama.
  • Bleak World has the Androids, who are cyborg teenagers brought back to life from the razor's edge of life and death by a corrupt corporation.

    Theatre 
  • Salome, and how! For a start, she takes advantage of Narraboth's infatuation with her by driving him to suicide. Then, she herself becomes infatuated with John the Baptist (here, called Jochanaan), and when he, John, refuses Salome's advances, she does a striptease before her stepdad, Herod Antipas, and requests John's head in return. Finally, after John the Baptist is beheaded, she kisses the head before the horrified Herod! And all this by the age of sixteen!

    Video Games 
  • Notwithstanding the other teenage characters in Double Homework, Dennis fits the bill. He’s motivated by sex and misogyny (they are closely intertwined with him), his interactions with his peers go beyond bullying or creepy to outright criminal, and he wrecks an experiment that was designed precisely to help teens get more sex. Dr. Mosely/Zeta lampshades this last part; Dennis is the first person ever to derail one of the Zeta experiments.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic. The cadets at the Sith Academy are in their early 20s at best and indulge in things like beating up passers-by and playing cruel tricks on the "hopefuls", like telling them to stand until they drop of exhaustion or starvation. Carth's teenaged son is a fabulously short-tempered brat who will try to skewer his own dad on a lightsaber if you choose the wrong dialogue option. Subverted in that Kel Algwinn isn't a bad guy, just unaware of other options, and that Mission Vao is higher on the Karma Meter than the party's Jedi because of her optimistic, trusting nature.
  • Bully gives you the chance to play as a pubescent terror. Student looks at you the wrong way? You can shove him to the ground. Nerd bumps into you in the hallway? You can knee him in the balls. Preppy student mocks your clothing? You can shove him through a glass window, beat him with a cricket bat, and repeatedly stomp on his head while he lays moaning on the floor. Downplayed at times when the main character can be played as a compassionate teen and actively protect vulnerable students. And in the actual story, he usually only messes with people who have done something to deserve it.
  • In Beyond: Two Souls, a group of teens lock Jodie in a closet because she got a girl a book for her birthday. If you pick revenge, it doesn't end well for them.
  • In the semi-canon manga and game The King of Fighters: Kyo, it's all but stated that Leopold Goenitz was already aware of his role as member of the Orochi clan when in his teens, and that he still was a teenager when he killed Maki Kagura, then a 10-years-old girl.
  • In Ninja Pizza Girl, the enemies that you face are other teenagers who are employed by MegaCo Pizza. If you encounter them, they will throw things at you, push you down, verbally assault you, and laugh at you.
  • In the Danganronpa games, "Complete Monster" doesn't begin to describe how monstrous Junko Enoshima is. On that sinister note, she's quite possibly the most evil teen in any Visual Novel series.
    • In the final class trial of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, the thought-dead Junko is unmasked as the game's Big Bad. Orchestrating the Tragedy and the Killing School Life because she felt that bored of everything, she's an Ax-Crazy Hope Crusher who only seeks to satisfy her sadomasochistic desire for despair... no matter who must die or what must be destroyed.
    • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair reveals Junko as having been the founder and leader of a cultish terrorist organization called Ultimate Despair. They were obsessively devoted to doing and saying whatever they could to spread despair in her name. If that wasn't enough, Junko effectively made herself into an Artitical Intelligence program called Alter Ego Junko prior to her suicide in Trigger Happy Havoc. From there, she masterminds the Killing School Trip so that she can ultimately Take Over the World and trap three of her former classmates in the Neo World Program out of vengeful spite.
    • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls shows how Junko not only manipulated the Warriors of Hope into nursing their murderous hatred against adults, but also instructed Monaca Towa (their leader) to mass produce the Monokuma robots that she went on to use during the Tragedy. Additionally, Towa City's kid-adult war was caused by Alter Ego Junko meddling through Kurokuma and Shirokuma. Her true goals were to have the Future Foundation take an interest in the city and ensure Izuru Kamukura was going to upload her into the Neo World Program. All of that scheming causes the events of Goodbye Despair.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 4 shows what happens when you combine this trope with a Big Brother Bully and an animatronic. In case you're wondering, it's the Bite of '83. All because the protagonist's brother and his friends wanted to pull up a prank on the child, and... Though they all stop laughing once the Bite happens, and at the end of Night 6 the brother apologises, implying that though they were major Jerkasses, they never wanted that to happen.
  • The post-apocalyptic United States depicted in Fallout is home to some terribly shitty people, but one of the absolute worst ones to ever appear is Myron from 2, the greedy, lecherous and callous teenage "pharmacist" who developed the drug Jet for the Mordino crime family. Jet is one of the most addictive and dangerous drugs around, it killed hundreds of slaves in the preliminary tests, and it's unlikely there will ever be a cure for Jet addiction — which is convenient for when his employers want to enslave entire towns by getting people addicted to it. Myron's completely proud of his creation and will casually tell you all about it over a cool beer. He doesn't care about the widespread suffering he causes, he only cares about continuing to produce Jet so he can be rewarded with cash and whores. Not to mention if you're playing as a female character with low Intelligence and high Charisma, he'll offer you a spiked drink. Even decades after Myron's canon death (being stabbed in a bar by a crazed Jet addict), Jet has been distributed across the post-war United States and ruined countless lives.
    • The Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3 is nineteen, so choosing to be evil will make them this trope.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar's Legion is an army of mass murdering, raping marauders that's heavily implied to consist in large part of teenagers. If you go to the Legion fort, you can find boys training to be full-on legionaries, with the implication that they're going to be entering combat soon (which, considering even the industrialized NCR lets people sign up for active-duty at 16, isn't implausible at all). If you talk to the NCR general Chief Hanlon, he says that any legionary who survives 10 years is considered an exceptional veteran, as most die long before then ("life expectancy isn't long in the Legion; you live ten years in Caesar's army, you're a force to be reckoned with").
  • As they were originally envisioned, the cast of the Pico series of games were around 16-18 years old. Said cast consists of a pyromaniac who burned down all of Des Moines, Iowa on a whim; a promiscuous suidical girl who eventually gets morphed into a Death Seeker; a whole group of loser goth-punks who shoot up their school because they felt osctracized and hated American education; alien robots designed to look and act like teenage Gangbangers; and the titular character, whose morals change depending on the game and can choose to gun down anyone surrendering or innocent with zero reprecussions. Fan flashes made after Tom Fulp's original output can make them saner or much, much worse.
  • Wick starts off with the player blindfolded being led into a haunted forest by their teenage friends. In the normal ending of the game, the police were called and yet they insist on playing Wick again and inflicting that psychological torture on someone else. In the secret ending, they don't seem at all to care that one the player apparently went missing after the events of last year.
  • The Church of Chernabolg in The Shrouded Isle considers just being a teenager to be a minor sin.
  • Most of the characters in Yandere Simulator are high school students, and can do some pretty horrific things. It's averted with most of the students, who are generally nice kids, but some play it dead straight.
    • Ayano Aishi can be one. Her ultimate alignment is up to the player and a Pacifist Run is possible, but there are a lot more ways to horribly ruin the lives of innocent girls who just happened to fall in love with the wrong person. Murder, getting them expelled, Cold-Blooded Torture, sabotaging their relationships, bullying them to suicide, and more are all on the table for Ayano.
    • The Bully clique (Musume Ronshaku, Hana Daidaiyama, Kashiko Murasaki, Kokoro Momoiro, and Hoshiko Mizudori) all play this trope to the hilt. They're the ones who bully the student with the lowest reputation, and school bullying is not harmless here — it can drive your rivals to stop coming to school in fear, or be Driven to Suicide. And while most students would be adverse to gossip after a suicide to prevent it from happening again, the bullies would just convince themselves it wasn't their fault, and keep on bullying.

    Web Animation 
  • Puffin Forest: In this video about a Pokémon tabletop game he played in, Ben played a character he described as an average high-school girl named Trixie Starbright, who turned out to be a massive Bitch in Sheep's Clothing capable of controlling legendary Pokémon through intimidation and who would resort to Self-Harm for a Wounded Gazelle Gambit in order to avoid getting into trouble while also spreading rumors about her rival, all just so that she could be the most popular girl in school.
    GM: Ummm, Ben? I don't think you're playing an... average high-school girl like you'd said.
    Ben: You.... didn't go to the same high school that I went to, did you?
  • Where Was My Hero...? has much of its Villain Protagonist Miles Prower's onscreen villainy happen while he's around 16-18 years old.

    Webcomics 
  • DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything: This webtoon shows the length other students are willing to go to obtain the Dice, which range from bullying to killing each other. One splinter group of students even ends up luring their classmates into their service with promises of Dice, only if they take loyalty oaths and serve them as virtual slaves, then not giving what they've promised.
  • Dreaming Freedom: Practically every classmate in Jeongmin's class plays social mind games with each other and manipulates/uses other peers without batting an eye. To an extent, this applies to Jeongmin and Siyun themselves once they start enacting their revenge.

  • This is the entire premise in Get Schooled. Teen bullies milk the law forbidding corporal punishments on students for all its worth and brutally pick on their defenseless classmates. Not even the teachers are immune to the bullying, with several delinquents going as far as to frame teachers for abuse just because said teachers dared to put their foot down. This finally culminated in a teacher getting beaten to death by one of their own students for reasons still unknown. This is also what led to the creation of the Teacher's Rights Protection Agency (TRPA). Individual examples include-
    • Junhyeok Ryu: He’s runs his school with an iron fist on account of being the son of a congressman. He drove one classmate into becoming an outcast, ruining his family, drove him into taking his own life, just because the kid stood up to him when he tried to bully and frame a teacher! When TRPA exposes his father’s corruption, this leads him into becoming the school’s new outcast. He gets so fed up, he decides to burn the school to the ground as payback. Good thing Hwajin stops him.
    • Yeri Han: An Alpha Bitch in an all-girls high school, she frames a male teacher for molesting her, leading the teacher to Death by Despair. It’s because of this event that made all of her school teachers live in fear. When Yeri suspects one teacher of reporting her to TRPA, she decides to break into her home and try to cut her!
    • Jiwoong Min: He firmly believes the law is on his side, since he’s 14 years old, thus can’t be prosecuted with serious charges. To that end, he brutally picks on his defenseless classmates, commits robbery, and tries to kill Hwajin.
    • The Kang sisters: Sooyeon and Jayeon are the star players of their basketball team, and horrifically bully their rookie teammate, Eunha Park, hoping she will leave the team.
    • Hong Seong-Hak: An high school bully, who’s forced to give a written apology to his victim and promises leave him alone. Except he’s lying through his teeth and continues to be a bully, to the point of driving his victim into cutting his own wrists!
    • Jung-Hyuk Lee: He’s the branch manager of the G.Y gang, which runs as an illegal gambling circle targeting teens into debt and robbing from adults. Also a major Ax-Crazy punk who loves getting bloody in street fights. He even gives the okay to waterboard gamblers indebted to the G.Y gang and carves into one boy’s hand the gang’s symbols with a pen.
    • As for the teen who just so happened to murder his own teacher and the reason TRPA got put into the picture? It’s even more messed up. Senior high schooler Gyucheol Cho wanted to leave school because it was a hot day and the school staff refused to turn on the air conditioning, but his home room teacher, Gayoon Choi tried to stop him. The result? Gyucheol beats her to death! He’s since been incarcerated not just for killing Gayoon, but he’s also imprisonsed for assault, robbery, gang rape, and involvement with illegal gangs. Even as he’s stuck in juvie, Gyucheol is revealed to be the leader of the G.Y gang. And he uses Gayoon as a mascot! The season 1 finale reveals that for whatever reason, Gyucheol been trying to track down Gayoon’s fiancé, and laughs hysterically when he finds out it’s Hwajin, who he had previously bragged over how he killed Gayoon while Hwajin posed as a counselor.

  • This Goblin Hollow strip subverts it in Ralph Hayes, Jr.'s favorite way.
  • Homestuck:

    Web Original 
  • Whateley Universe: Whateley Academy has what might seem to be more than its fair share of students who fit this trope. Possibly justified, though, in that it's presented as the only school for teenage mutants in the US (if not much of the world, given the number of foreign students showing up) — there just aren't that many other places for the offspring of infamous supervillains, the badly traumatized, and the just plain assholes among them to go, so Whateley quite naturally becomes the place where one almost by default encounters all of them at once.
    • This is exacerbated by the fact that Exemplars - those whose power makes them into their idealized selves, usually with improved health and vigor, heightened mental capabilities, Super-Strength, and a Heroic Build - all experience heightened emotions as well (on top of being Hormone Addled Teenagers), making them temperamental and prone to monomania. Since about a sixth of all mutants have some degree of the Exemplar trait, this makes it a major headache for the school administration.
  • The Innocent. Not just teens, but also younger children.
  • A lot of Protectors of the Plot Continuum are in their teens, and committing acts of extreme violence is all part and parcel of the job.
  • The Bullies that plague the main character of Worm are bad enough that they drive her to near-suicidal recklessness and induced a complete mental breakdown that was traumatic enough to trigger her powers. A later point is made of how despite this, none of her classmates got involved other than to join in. At no point do they show even a hint of remorse or even a reason for victimizing her constantly.
  • In the titular boarding school of Addergoole, older students Keep younger students — this is slavery aided by mind control. Since the administration puts few limits on what the Keeper can do to their kept, beyond a one-year-max duration, this in many cases leads to abuse, which over the years becomes worse, when former abused Kept continue the tradition how they have been taught.

    Web Videos 
  • Empires SMP Season 1: Implied. The official musical adaptation has Xornoth mention having gone to "Demon High School", implying he was corrupted to serve the resident God of Evil around the age range of a highschooler (or the Elven equivalent of it).
  • The Nostalgia Chick was a Bratty Teenage Daughter when she was younger, and got bullied so much in school that she tried to take the "fur and limo" type of revenge at her Class Reunion.
  • Any memory that The Nostalgia Critic seems to have of high school involves some sort of bullying, and in Christmas with the Kranks we actually get to see some of it. In his Doug's First Movie review, he loses his temper at teen girls thinking the monster dressed up as female is cute when in reality they cause so many body issues in each other.
  • Slimecicle Cinematic Universe: Tommy, or "Patient Zero" as he's known in the credits, in "We Spent 100 Days in a Hardcore Minecraft Apocalypse". First, he worked with a Mad Scientist, brought the zombie virus back into their world after travelling to another world, and thus kind of helped start this whole zombie apocalypse in the first place. Then, he sabotages Charlie's base and leads zombies into it. Though he practically begs to be locked up for doing so, he escapes, and returns on Day 95 and threatens Charlie that Day 100 would be the day the horde would be fully unleashed on him... and he does exactly that on Night 99 by summoning the Final Blood Moon with powered-up zombies (that he taught to do mathematics and speed-bridge), and when that fails, he tries to kill Charlie himself with his spear. It took Charlie sending both of them to the world where the zombies originated from, where Tommy didn't have invulnerability, to take him down.
  • Tales From the SMP: During the episode "The Pit", Jackie is a gladiator who is presumably a teenagernote , but once got arrested for being in a knife fight, is able to win the trial by combat to become Emperor/King Porkius' general, and executes most of his opponents and Karl on Porkius' orders (though he expresses some regret about the latter).


 
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Alternative Title(s): Teenagers Are Evil

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Miyagi Saves Daniel

Mr. Miyagi saves Daniel from being viciously beaten by Johnny and his friends.

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