- Basic: A child is destined to be a detective from birth.
- Straight: Since Leslie was old enough to walk, her parents have been training her in the detective ways, and she grows up to be a detective herself.
- Justified: Leslie's parents, Martin and Nina, are detectives themselves and in a secret society. One of the society's rules is that any child of an agent must join the agency.
- Inverted: Leslie became a detective when she was 9 years old, and she spent most of her life training Martin and Nina to be detectives too.
- Subverted: Martin and Nina say multiple times throughout Season 1 that if they ever have a baby, they'll train the baby to be a detective, and they give birth to Leslie in the last episode, so the audience assumes she'll join her parents in being a detective. We see her again at age six in season 2, and she doesn't even know her parents are detectives.
- Double Subverted:
- They start training her when she's 7.
- Leslie doesn't disclose to the POV character that she is a detective- her first lesson was to never tell anyone that she was being trained.
- Parodied: At age five, Leslie solves cases for people in her class such as "Who stuck the booger on the desk" "Who called me fat" and "Who drank the last chocolate milk".
- Deconstructed: When Leslie is fourteen, she decides she doesn't want to be a detective at all but an artist- after all, it's unreasonable to expect a child to want to do something because their parents told them to.
- Reconstructed: Leslie is forbidden to do anything non-sleuthing-related so she doesn't discover any new interests that she may want to pursue.
- Averted:
- Leslie gets a normal childhood despite being the daughter of detectives.
- Leslie is the daughter of normal people and she still becomes a detective.
- Enforced: "Let's see, we need a good reason for Leslie to be much tougher and better at sleuthing than any of the other kids at the detective school so she isn't a
Mary Sue. I know! She's been training since she was a baby!" - Implied: Detective Leslie shows Oliver a picture of her at age 4 reading a book on how to be a detective.
- Played for Drama: Leslie laments on how she never got to have a real life.
- Exaggerated: Since Leslie came out of the womb, her parents have been teaching her to be a detective.
- Downplayed: Martin and Nina start teaching Leslie how to be a detective when she is 12.
- Lampshaded: "Leslie was born to be a detective. She's been training since she was four."
- Invoked: Penelope tells Martin and Nina to train Leslie from a young age, knowing this will make her even tougher and better at her job for when Penelope hires her to work at her evil organization.
- Defied: Penelope kidnaps and raises Leslie so she doesn't have to grow up as a detective.
- Discussed: "Come on. This isn't a movie, Leslie has not been training since she was a kid."
Now, young one, go back to Born Detective- and make sure to practice your deductive reasoning for your first day of kindergarten!
