Western Animation / Teen Titans (2003)

aka: Teen Titans

From their tower, they can see it all...^note Left to right: Raven, Beast Boy, Cyborg, Robin, and Starfire.

"When there's trouble, you know who to call."

— Robin^note and Puffy AmiYumi in the theme song

Based on the classic DC comic (mostly the 1980s incarnation by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, but with a lot of differences), with a generous dose of anime influence thrown in, Teen Titans (2003–2006) features the adventures of five young superheroes:

Robin, the gruff, straight-laced leader; Starfire, an alien from the planet Tamaran who behaves like an Action Girl Funny Foreigner; Cyborg, the second-in-command Techno Wizard who can also hold his own in a fight with his body's built-in weaponry; Raven, The Quiet One, a moody sorceress with a few secrets of her own; and Beast Boy, the shape-shifting Plucky Comic Relief.

While their adventures are primarily episodic, each season includes an arc follows the most famous arcs of the comic book with some fidelity. Furthermore, in the last season, its arc not only introduces the majority of the classic characters from the comic but also the members and enemies of the allied superhero team, The Doom Patrol. Deathstroke appeared as the series' main antagonist, though he used his civilian name of "Slade" due to the executives thinking "Deathstroke" was inappropriate (which became redundant come the Young Justice adaptation). Other comic book villains such as Trigon, the Fearsome Five, and Mad Mod appeared, as did a number of original villains created for the show, such as Red X and Control Freak.

It has a Made-for-TV Movie titled Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo, and its own comics series, Teen Titans Go! (not be to confused with the TV series Teen Titans Go!).

It was originally pitched as a Young Justice series, and the two are very similar in tone. Oddly enough, when Young Justice itself got a series, many noted it to be closer in tone to the original Teen Titans comics.

All five seasons of the show are available on DVD, Blu-ray and iTunes. The show has also returned in the form of chibi-fied shorts for Cartoon Network's DC Nation block in 2012, called, appropriately enough, New Teen Titans. Thanks to the success of these shorts, a new Super-Deformed, Denser and Wackier series titled Teen Titans Go! premiered as a part of the DC Nation block in 2013, with all of the original cast back as their respective characters. While successful at introducing the Titans to a new generation, response to it among older, long-time fans of the characters has been... mixed.

Tara Strong, the voice of Raven, tweeted that there is a chance this show could receive another season if Teen Titans Go! To the Movies was successful. However, the film’s moderate performance at the box office left this promise in doubt, with the Direct to Video movie Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans so far being the only project involving the original series.

All episodes can be watched for free (with ads) on Cartoon Network's website, provided you sign in with a cable provider. The TV episodes are available on the HBO Max streaming service with a subscription.

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Teen Titans provides examples of:

A-F

• Academy of Evil: The H.I.V.E. Academy is a school for budding supervillains, and both its administration and its students are recurring antagonists. The Titans destroy the physical location in the third season, but its agents continue to operate independently afterwards.

• Actor Allusion:
  • In his first appearance, Mad Mod (voiced by Malcolm McDowell) claims that "nothing teaches discipline and respect like a brain-erasing trance." Well, the line from the movie is "brain-erasing drugs," but it is a kids' show. He even uses The Ludovico Technique.
  • The quote "You're just jealous 'cause I sound like a rock star" is a nod to Greg Cipes' actual career as a reggae-ska rock singer. On top of that, Cipes has lived on a vegan diet since age 8, and actually is a professional surfer, so he fits with Beast Boy's lingo.
  • The hero of the Star Wars Shout-Out in "Episode 257-494" is voiced by James Arnold Taylor, a.k.a. Obi-Wan Kenobi.^note Though at the time Teen Titans was airing, only Star Wars: Clone Wars was aired, as Star Wars: The Clone Wars came a few years later.
  • Kid Flash is voiced by Michael Rosenbaum, who voiced the adult Flash.
  • Lightning is voiced by Quinton Flynn, whose Star-Making Role was also as a man codenamed "Lightning".
  • Mother Mae-Eye is voiced by Billie Hayes, who is best known for playing another twistedly maternal wicked witch.

• Adaptation Distillation: The roster only consists of Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Raven, and Beast Boy for this reason — to avoid having too much to work with. In the comics, even during the Wolfman-Perez era the show took inspiration from, there were always different members that go in and out, and never has the roster consisted of just those five. Here, it's simplified by making them the stars, while many of the other members were made into recurring/minor characters. The final season, which saw the Titans expand to include many other young heroes, is actually a pretty good representation of how many other characters have been members in the comics.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Killer Moth. In the comics, he's the most ineffectual of the Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains, with a completely ridiculous, ill-fitting costume that looks like it was put together by a colorblind man. Here, he has an army of genetically modified bugs at his command, has a cool half-man, half moth hybrid look, and takes out the Teen Titans like they're nothing. Despite this, he's still the series' Butt-Monkey when it's revealed that his teenage daughter, Kitten is the one who runs the show. However, he is by far the coolest incarnation of Killer Moth.
  • This series just succeeded in creating the most badass Robin incarnation in the history of DC Universe. Instead of being the comic relief sidekick to Batman, he's the leader of the Teen Titans, and a martial arts master. Having been trained by Batman his whole life really toughened him up, and that's what this series is getting at. He's so badass in fact, that there have been multiple instances of him putting up a better fight than his superpowered teammates.
  • Dr. Light was nothing but a perverted weakling who couldn't even beat a bunch of kids in the comics. In this show, he takes the Teen Titans with ease. He is without a doubt one of the least threatening villains, but he's powerful.
  • Kid Flash also counts. In most incarnations, the writers have to work around his Story-Breaker Power of Super Speed. Here, they take it and use it to his full extent, and he spends most of the episode running circles around the Hive Five. The only way they manage to bring him down is by tiring him out, and that takes a long time.
  • Here, Aqualad is a water-bending Atlantean cop who was lusted after by Raven and Starfire (for one episode, at least), can summon nearby aquatic wildlife when in his element (up to and including whales), and has an understated amount of Super Strength (he's torn his way through the Titan Tower's front door, ripped off robot arms, and toppled pillars underwater). Not too bad considering he was written out of the original Teen Titans comic book because the writer thought he was useless.
  • Raven as well. In the comics, she can simply teleport, heal other people, and sense other's feelings (nothing actually useful during a fight). Here, she uses telekinesis, can fly, knows sorcery, etc.
  • Madame Rouge. In the comics, after a short tenure as a recurring villain, she winds up Killed Off for Real and a source of guilt for Beast Boy. Here, her powers (stretching, Human Shifting) are greatly upgraded, making her an unholy fusion of Reed Richards and the T-1000. Nothing hurts her, except heat, and she just has to take a second to shapeshift into an undamaged form. The episode with Hot Spot alone being hunted by her makes her almost Nightmare Fuel, an implacable threat that can come from anywhere, look like anyone, and can't be held back for long even when your power is her Kryptonite Factor, and when she returns to battle Kid Flash, she's every bit as badass. He runs circles around the HIVE Five and looks so good doing it... then she shows up and it's a whole 'nother story, able to shift fast enough to actually stretch out to grab Kid Flash when he's looking like a yellowy blur and then proceed to lay down a beatdown.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Terra is a runaway with zero control over her powers, rather than being the Manipulative Bastard who was willingly working with Slade in the comics. While she does become friends with the Titans, she leaves when she thinks Beast Boy told them of her powers. Afterwards, Slade takes advantage of her and she becomes The Mole. And while she does betray the team, she is shown having some regrets and later performs a Heroic Sacrifice. Also, her romance with Beast Boy is shown to be genuine and not fake.

• Aesop Amnesia: Most of Cyborg's episodes revolve around him accepting, again and again, that he's human, though from different perspectives (not being robotic enough, not being human enough, etc.).
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: In "Calling All Titans," Jericho reaches down and pats an exhausted Beast Boy on the head after he climbs all the way to the top of the mountain to give Jericho a communicator.
• Affectionate Parody: "Employee of the Month" appears to be a nod towards Invader Zim, with some FLCL thrown in too.
• Age Without Youth: General Immortus of the Brotherhood of Evil. He is so old that he looks like a ghoul.
• Agony Beam: Doctor Light uses one of these on Robin in Season 5. It's powered by the Aurora Borealis.
• Aliens Speaking English: Tamaraneans have the ability to absorb other people's language through mouth-to-mouth contact (ahem). As a result of kissing Robin, Starfire's English is fine, though she slips up from time to time and doesn't always "get" wordplay or innuendo. She also speaks very formally, rarely using contractions. Why the Tamaraneans who stayed on Tamaran and presumably never met an English speaker can speak English is never explained, though.

• All There in the Manual:
  • While never stated in the series proper, the tie-in comic, Teen Titans Go!, reveals that the city that the Titans lives in is "Jump City."

• All Your Powers Combined:
  • The Master of Games set up a tournament for young heroes so he could capture the losers in a crystal which enabled him to use their powers as his own. His plan worked until Robin the champion tricked him into fighting and freed the heroes trapped in the crystal.
  • Raven beats Trigon in "Nevermore" by combining all the aspects of her personality.
• Aloof Ally: Red X, joins the Teen Titans sometimes in saving the day, and is a Worthy Opponent to Robin, as well as he calls him "kid" in a good natured way. However, he is a thief, and therefore is not to be part of the group.
• Alphabet Architecture: The iconic Titans Tower, a big old T.
• Ambition Is Evil: Jinx's motivations for villainy stem mostly from her desire to "be somebody". Hey, she was born with "bad luck" powers, so she might as well be a bad person so she can do something great (but terrible) with her life. However, there's also an inverted example of this; Jinx is far more ambitious than her lazy slacker teammates, so eventually part of the reason she turns good is so that she can work with competent people like Kid Flash instead of teammates who have no ambitions besides petty theft.
• Amusing Alien: Starfire's odd Tamaranean customs and fish-out-of-waterness is a main source of funny. Examples include drinking mustard as if it were soda and misinterpreting Earth slang (responding to "You diggin' the scene?" with "I... did not know we were supposed to bring shovels!")
• And a Diet Coke: Cyborg makes a large order at Mega Meaty Meat and ends it with this. After Beast Boy tells him they sell no soda, Cyborg asks for a cup of meat juice.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Malchior, who was imprisoned in a book for a thousand years.
  • While Terra was trapped in stone, it is heavily implied that she was alive the whole time.
  • The Brain also counts since he's well... a Brain in a Jar.
  • Plasmus can qualify as well since he must be kept asleep or turn into a horrific version of Muk.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: Raven invokes this trope by name when the Titans take on Johnny Rancid's Robot Dog Rex.
• Animesque: The show's style can be summed up as "Anime meets Bruce Timm".
• Anti-Hero:
  • Robin. He may be the leader of a team of superheroes, but he even admits to himself that he is too dogged in his pursuit of villains, and is not above lying to his friends if it helps his plan.
  • Raven. Dark, mysterious, aloof and the least social of the group, her Dark and Troubled Past has her very jaded, and distant from basically everyone, and if you want to stay in one piece, don't you dare go into her room. However, she is on the good side like everyone else on the team, and gladly helps out her friends.

• Apocalypse Maiden: Raven is prophesied to become one when her father, Trigon, eventually uses her as a portal to come to Earth and destroy it.
• Are We There Yet?: Raven to Cyborg, in the T-Car she isn't particularly impressed about.
• Arm Cannon: Cyborg's sonic cannons, one built into each arm.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • Shows up in "Forces of Nature." When Thunder begins to question the morality of what he and Lightning are doing, his brother repeatedly assures him that they're "just having fun." Later, when Slade has tricked them into unleashing a monster, Thunder wants to help the Titans, only for Lightning to start fighting him. Lightning has him pinned on the ground and is ready to kill him when Thunder asks him: "Tell me, brother...are we still having fun?"
  • Beast Boy started it by giving one to Thunder earlier in the episode: before this, Thunder also thought they were "just having fun" by wrecking cars on a bridge. Beast Boy points to all the innocent bystanders that they're terrorizing in the process and asks, "Do they look like they're having fun!?"
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Killer Moth threatens to destroy the City unless the following three demands are met:
  "The city will declare me ruler, the Teen Titans will surrender and Robin... will take this lovely young lady to her junior prom."
• Art Evolution: Most notable are the chibis, which became more refined as the episodes went on.
• Art Shift:
  • Larry turns the city into a crayon drawing in "Fractured".
  • The viral core in "Crash" is rendered in pixel art.
  • Mad Mod turns the city into a black-and-white collage in "Revolution".
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Often going hand-in-hand with Artistic License – Martial Arts, as Robin should not hit as hard as Cyborg or Starfire but he often does.
  • Cyborg's sonic cannon operates largely on the premise that the audience doesn't know how sonic waves work and treats it as a heavy-duty laser blaster.
  • Robin once decided that the T-Sub, which is designed explicitly to maximize internal pressure to keep the ocean out, would be perfectly suitable transportation for outer space, which has absolutely no pressure to speak of to keep the hull from rupturing like a T-Sub-shaped bomb.
• Ash Face: In the episode "Only Human", Raven gets charred from head to toe when Cyborg blows her up in a little scene after trying to cheer him up.
• Ass Kicks You: One of Pantha's wrestling moves, employed against Cyborg in "Calling All Titans".
• Astral Checkerboard Decor: When the Titans first encounter Mad Mod he is in control of a strange world with a checkerboard pattern. It's later revealed to be all smoke and mirrors.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: The H.I.V.E. and "Gamma Formation!"

• Bad Future: In "How Long is Forever", Starfire accidentally gets sent to one where Cyborg has to stay plugged in at Titans Tower since his batteries are dead, Beast Boy is a fat, bald circus performer after failing miserably as a solo hero, and Raven appears to have gone insane from loneliness. But Robin/Nightwing is relatively fine. He's become just like Batman, a loner with nobody to talk to. Thankfully, Starfire returning to her own time seems to fix it.
• Bad Powers, Bad People:
  • Jinx. This is subverted with Jinx's Heel–Face Turn in one of the final episodes. If anything it seems that she became bad specifically because she thought she had to follow this.
  • Raven, having demonic powers, defies this, even during season 4 by blasting her demonic dad.
• Badass Boast: A couple of examples, but a special mention goes to Slade at the end of "Haunted".
  Robin: "Slade...stop..."
  Slade: "No, Robin. I won't stop. Not now, not ever. I am the thing that keeps you up at night; the evil that haunts every dark corner of your mind... I will never rest, and neither will you."
• Badass Normal: Robin. Notable in that though he's the only member of his team without superpowers, he's also the only one who can take on every member of his own team at the same time. Because like Batman, he had special equipment made to take down each of his teammates. That is why Red X is so hard for the Titans to deal with.
• Badly Battered Babysitter: Raven is at one point tasked with protecting 3 annoying young children who might have superpowers. It goes about as well as you'd think until her kids are threatened.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine:
  • Starfire wears a midriff-baring outfit and is generally gentler and more cheerful than the brooding goth girl Raven or the three boys on the team. When Terra joins the team, she also starts wearing a black crop top.
  • In the Titans East team, their leader and only female member Bumblebee wears a yellow-and-black striped, midriff-baring top, whereas the male members all cover their midriffs.

• Batman Gambit: Robin pulls these several times through out the series, but this is unsurprising considering that the Trope Namer trained him.

• Beam-O-War: Happens fairly often in the series, especially involving Starfire, Raven, or Cyborg with a villain capable of energy attacks. Some examples include:
  • Starfire and Thunder/Lightning in "Forces of Nature".
  • Raven with Trigon in "Nevermore".
• Because Destiny Says So: Raven's reason for allowing her father Trigon to invade Earth and destroy it.
• Berserk Button:
  • If you hurt Raven's friends, you're screwed.
    • "No one should ever go into my room."
  • Robin does not like being compared to Slade. At all (most noticeable in the Apprentice episodes, he manages to get over it but it's still a sensitive issue for him). However, this is partially true, since he's as obsessive as Slade. Deep down Robin does realize this, but doesn't want it to be pointed out. This may be why he's so obsessive with Slade, as he made him something he doesn't want to be and always many steps ahead of Robin.
  • There's also "The Beast Within" that's all about Beast Boy's Berserk Button taking physical form (it's a long story) and hunting down a jerk that put Raven in a coma. Surprisingly, the romantic overtones were completely unintentional.
    • Beast Boy is also extremely protective of his friends in general. Slade once pushed this button and ended up getting the living crap beat out of him. Beast Boy may be the team clown, but once he's set off, even the series Big Bad is little match for him.
    • Don't talk to him about Terra's betrayal.
  • Starfire cannot stand being the victim of a prank:
    Starfire: On my planet, we have a name for people who do such terrible things, you are a... a.. (head expands) CLORBAG Varblenilk!!!
  • Don't harm her friends
  • Don't flirt with Robin.
  • Get between Starfire and Robin at your own risk.
  • Slade hates it when someone makes him lose his cool, outdoes him, or when his apprentices betray him.

• Beware the Nice Ones: Starfire is generally the kindest and most naive of the main characters, but if you hurt her or her friends, or if you just happen to be a villain, she'll really kick your butt. Also helps for her that she is a member of a race whose powers are fuelled by emotions.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Raven is, most of the time, very reserved. Unless she's pissed off, which tends to happen whenever her friends are messed with. And when that happens...
• Beware the Silly Ones:
  • Beast Boy usually plays the role of the plucky comic relief with shades of the butt monkey, but in "Titans Together", he proves himself an incredibly capable leader and powerful fighter. When he meets Terra again after nearly being killed by her and seeing how she's trashed the city, he has no qualms about fighting her even when they were basically an official couple.
  • In a way, Control Freak also is one. He is an avid television and movie junkie. As Raven called him, "a couch potato with a souped-up remote." At the same time, he can make inanimate objects come to life with said remote, make a larger one that has "high-end equipment to break half the laws of physics", uses said remote to escape into the World of TV, use his television knowledge to Take A Level In Badass and learn how to counter both the Teen Titans and Titans East. Is he a large creepy fanboyish villain? Yes. Is he dangerous? Definitely.
    • Making specific counters against Titans even makes sense for him. He's a Genre Savvy comic book nerd... in a comic book world.
• Big Bad:
  • Slade in seasons 1 and 2 (with Terra as his right-hand girl in season 2).
  • Brother Blood in Season 3.
  • Trigon for Season 4 (with Slade as his right-hand man).
  • The Brain in Season 5. (Not that Brain, amusing as that would have been.)
• Big Eater: Cyborg and Terra, and Starfire when among her native people. Cyborg also had an Extreme Omnivore episode in "Crash" when a computer virus caused him to hallucinate that everything around him was delicious food.
  Starfire: New friend, please enjoy my home-made ''glorrkh!''
  Robin, Raven, Beast Boy, Cyborg: No!!
  Terra (devouring it): It tastes like sushi mixed with ice cream. Got any more?
  Starfire: I shall go cultivate the fungus!
• Big Entrance: "Birthmark" starts off with Dr. Light fighting the Titans. At first he seems to be holding his own, until Raven makes her entrance. She mimics the last time the two of them encountered each other, with scaling up her size a fair bit, Glowing Eyes of Doom, and tentacles made of shadow.
  Raven: Remember me?
  Dr. Light: (Goes Blue with Shock, turns, and raises hands) I'd like to go to jail now, please.
  • The Fridge Horror kicks into high gear when you remember Identity Crisis, which DC implied is the reason Dr. Light went from fighting the Justice League to fighting the Teen Titans. He's fighting the Titans in this canon, and Raven's Mook Horror Show probably gave him subconscious flashbacks to the first time his mind was invaded.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti:
  • Beast Boy can turn into one. Of course, in a universe with aliens, half-demons, and cyborgs, maybe Bigfoots and Yetis aren't the greatest Willing Suspension of Disbelief we're expected to accept.
  • For a more simplistic reason, Bigfoots could be an official species in this universe, rather than an elusive Cryptid that is traditionally considered a myth.
• Big Sister Bully: Blackfire to Starfire.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • For those who understand Spanish. At least you know what the bloody hell Más Y Menos are talking about.^note No English subtitles are provided. Their catchphrase, "Más y Menos, sí podemos!' literally means "Plus and Minus, yes we can!" Not only is it a straightforward Spanish rhyme, but it is also a pun on the saying "más o menos" ("more or less.") They've also shouted at least one curse word in Spanish! The Latin American Spanish dub had to modify this, naturally, and the Season 3 DVD release substituted in a different line as well.
  • In one of the fights between Robin and a robot version of Slade, large billboards behind them states "Read the comics" in Chinese.
  • The Movie has a Japanese bonus. People who don't know Japanese have never been on the Internet wouldn't catch the joke when a cute girl calls Beast Boy a geek (otaku) and he thought she called him cute, for example. The Cat Girl keeps talking to him during their fight also, which just frustrates him because he has no idea what she ever says.
    • Also in one scene, one of the signs spells out "Robin" in Katakana.
  • If you know Japanese, you'd see the reason why the Japanese version of the theme song's used for silly episodes. And for those who don't, the English translation of the song is revealed in the movie. The song's lyrics are very random for a superhero cartoon theme song.
• Bit Part Bad Guys: Mumbo, Control Freak, and Dr. Light started out like this before moving up to better things. Same can't be said for that poor giant scorpion Terra crushed during her Batman Cold Open.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "Things Change" ends with Beast Boy coming to terms that Terra is better off not remembering him, the Titans, or her powers but Terra enjoys her new life.
  • "Troq" ends with Val-Yor and the Titans left in bad terms with the former still racist and declaring that Earthlings are just as bad as Tamaraneans. However, the Locrix are destroyed and the Titans learned a lesson that while some people may never change their views, there will be others like the Titans who don't judge on appearances.
• Black Dude Dies First: Averted. In "Fear Itself" When Raven accidentally brings a horror movie to life in the Tower, Beast Boy gets Genre Savvy and, along with stopping the inevitable Let's Split Up, Gang!, says that as the Plucky Comic Relief, he's the one who's going to go first. And he did. In fact, Cyborg was the last to get taken.
• Blaming the Victim: Slade justifies his manipulation and control of Terra this way.
  Slade: She wanted control, and that's what I gave her; my control, her body.
• Bland-Name Product: The GameStation.
• Blush Sticker: Jinx has them.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Cyborg pulls one when talking to Más y Menos for the first time. What he said translates to "Hello! My friends I am name The Cyborgo!"

• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: The Movie apparently wants to do this with Beast Boy and Raven (because Japan), but fails to understand pacing, which left a lot of fans with the impression that Raven was mean-spiritedly picking on Beast Boy.
• Book Dumb: Beast Boy, who in one episode practically admitted to learning history from the back of a cereal box.
  Beast Boy: Now I know how George Washington felt when Napoleon beat him at Pearl Harbor.
• Brain Freeze:
  Beast Boy: Hey, check it out! (flash-freezes The Brain) Brain freeze! *Everyone else groans*
• Brainwashed:
  • Happens to all the Titans (main, East, and a few reserves) at least once. Beast Boy seems to get it a lot after the team's first run-in with Mad Mod. In "Revolution," also featuring Mad Mod, the entire population of Jump City.
  • This was Brother Blood's greatest power, and the fact that it didn't work on Cyborg was the reason for his obsession with the boy.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: "Larry" counts. While he is just Batmite, or Robinmite rather, his fifth dimensional tricks break the fourth wall just fine. He's from beyond it, after all.
• Breather Episode: Usually before a rather dark Season Finale. If the episode's theme is sung in Japanese, that's also a clue to it being one.
• Brick Joke: In the Season 1 episode "Nevermore", Dr. Light causes Raven to lose control to her dark side, growing in height and using shadow tentacles to drag him under her cloak. By the time he's uncovered, he's pale and shaking, muttering about the darkness. In the Season 4 episode "Birthmark", the Titans fight Dr. Light again. Raven appears with the same height and shadow tentacles. Dr. Light immediately goes pale and says meekly, "I'd like to go to jail now, please."
• Bridal Carry: Cyborg carries Raven like this in "The End - Part 1".

• Broken Aesop:
  • The episode "Troq", is an Anvilicious message about racism. Sadly, it's somewhat undermined because the episode involves them committing genocide against a robotic race, on the word of a known racist. Sure they almost caused some severe Collateral Damage, but you could make an argument that they're trying to protect their species at all costs. With the way Val-Yor acts and regards Tamaraneans, we can't even be sure the Locrixes are eradicating organic life, or if Val-Yor is in fact the aggressor, and the Titans were charmed and didn't find out the whole story.
    • The episode also breaks in the opposite direction, because it insists the Tamaraneans in particular are victims of mindless bigotry from other planets' cultures. The problem with this understanding is that the Tamaraneans are a Noble Savage Proud Warrior Race comprised of Flying Bricks that are immune to the freezing cold vacuum of space; their bellicose tendencies are so ingrained that a later episode "Go!" indicates that the closest word Tamaraneans have to "Nice" is actually translated "Weak". So the Tamaraneans are an astonishingly powerful Proud Warrior Race... that everybody else picks on for absolutely no reason, because they're all just jerks.
    • If you turn your head and squint, it makes more sense. Tamaran, as established in Go!, lost a war to the Gordanians. On top of this, they seemingly readily agreed to marrying off Starfire to Glgrdsklechhh when faced with another war, implying that while individually powerful warriors, they're not all that good at this whole "War" thing, giving them mostly a reputation as wild, dangerous thugs.
  • Lampshaded at the end of "Episode 257-494":
  Robin: Well, I guess this whole experience proves it really is bad to watch too much TV.
  Starfire: But truthfully, we only prevailed because Beast Boy watches too much the television.
  Raven: So there really isn't a lesson here.
• Buffy Speak: In "Aftershock, Part 2", Cyborg describes Ternion (Cinderblock, Plasmus, and Overload merged into one monster) as "a giant Franken-thingy".
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Beast Boy. Poor guy even suffers in the Downer Ending. No wonder he's embarrassed that his first name is the same as that of a certain well-known cat.
  • Poor Doctor Light, especially when Raven's around...
• Broken Pedestal: Val-Yor towards the Titans after they discover what a racist Jerkass he turned out to be.
• Canon Foreigner: A lot, including most villains of the week and minor characters.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • Más y Menos, Billy Numerous, and Cinderblock have appeared in the comics.
  • The series' version of Gizmo was also adapted into the comics, as the son of the Dwarfish original.
• Cain and Abel:
  • Starfire and Blackfire, who still look like a parallel of Queens Elizabeth and Mary Tudor, even though Glen Murakami admits that they watered down the much more intense rivalry of the original comics into a more kid-friendly, "I Dream of Jeannie/Bewitched kind of way." If you're even slightly familiar with the comics, you'll know what he's talking about.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Raven did this to her demonic dad in the season 4 finale. While blasting him to oblivion, too.
  Raven: Fathers are kind! Fathers protect you! Fathers raise you! I was protected by the monks of Azarath. I was raised by my friends! They are my family. This is my home. And you are not welcome here!
• Calling Your Attacks: Cyborg and Beast Boy (and Robin, when it happened) had a habit of nicknaming their teamup moves. In "The Quest", Robin has someone else call his attacks for him.
• Calvinball: Stankball and later variant Extreme Stankball.
• Captain Obvious: About every time the alarm goes off, one of them says "trouble". Really? Who would have guessed?
• Captive Date: Killer Moth threatens the city with destruction unless Robin takes Killer Moth's Bratty Teenage Daughter, Kitten, to the prom. Robin complies, much to his chagrin.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Several. Few villains even got origin stories, so most seemed to just be causing havoc for the fun of it.
• Cardboard Prison: Usually they do not even bother mentioning an escape. Recurring villains who where caught and jailed simply reappear in later episodes, regardless of how ineffectual or silly they are.
• Cat Fight:
  • Starfire and Kitten in "Date with Destiny", started by Kitten just because Starfire points out things don't revolve all around Kitten.
  • Raven and Terra's fight in "Aftershock" could be called this. Although this fight is generally taken more seriously than Starfire and Kitten's. Partly because of Terra's preceding Face–Heel Turn and betrayal, and partly because both girls go all out; punching, kicking, choke-holding, and even attempting to drown each other while covered in mud.
• Cat Girl:
  • Kitten. Not in literal sense, but her name and mannerisms says it all. And the odd thing is, her dad is a moth man. And her boyfriend has a giant spider for a head.
  • Starfire is turned into a tiger in the episode "Bunny Raven", but she can speak and still wears her clothes.
  • And a literal cat girl in the movie made of magic ink.
  • Cheshire herself gets a cameo in season 5 fighting Speedy.
• Catapult Nightmare: Robin wakes up from one in "Apprentice Part 1".
• Catchphrase: Each character has one.
  • Robin: "Titans! GO!"
  • Starfire: "Glorious!"
  • Cyborg: "Booyah!"
  • Raven: "AZARATH METRION ZINTHOS!"
  • Beast Boy: "Dude!"
  • Más y Menos: "MÁS Y MENOS SI PODEMOS!"
• Central Theme: The central theme of the whole show is The Power of Friendship. Several of the season arcs are centered around the theme that you may be Not So Different from a villain, be it by blood, abilities, or personality, but you can always choose to be a better person. The Terra arc also has the central theme of taking responsibility for one's actions, and the Raven arc says yes, you can Screw Destiny.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: Especially in later seasons (season 1 was fairly tonally constant), bouncing back and forth from lighthearted action-comedy, to utter random goofiness, to some surprisingly intense darkness. Honestly, when you've got an episode centered around sentient omnicidal cow abducting space tofu that comes shortly after an episode where the local Woobie gets tortured by being shown a vision of the apocalypse at her hands in a scene strongly choreographed to suggest rape, your show is officially schizophrenic. Sometimes the show's mood shifted within the individual episode.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Though the show as a whole was more of a rollercoaster, the individual arcs tend to show this one strongly (except the season four arc, which apart from a brief cold open with Dr. Light, is pretty bleak throughout). The Terra arc in particular is a great example, with plot progression that basically goes: Yay, the Titans have a new friend! Okay, she clearly has trust issues and suffers Power Incontinence when she uses too much power, but hey, none of the team are perfect. Aww, she and Beast Boy are clearly crushing on each other, too. Wait, she works for Slade!? And thanks to her, he knows everybody's weaknesses? And now they're taking over the city together? And wow, Slade's a Bad Boss. But Terra makes a Heroic Sacrifice and saves the day, and she's apparently frozen in stone forever. Bittersweet Ending, much?
• Character Focus: Results in a surprising degree of Character Development, given the mostly-episodic nature of the series.
• Character Overlap: Kitten's father is Killer Moth, a long time nemesis of Batman.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Robin, of course, as he's the apprentice/sidekick of Batman.
• Chaste Toons: Averted by Blackfire in The New Teen Titans, who got married to Glgrdsklechhh some time after "Betrothed" and had babies with him.
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Occurs in the episode "Don't Touch That Dial"; when Beast Boy and Control Freak crash into a French cooking show, the chef immediately produces a white flag and leaves the set.
• The Chew Toy: Beast Boy has pointy ears and green skin like an Orc or a Goblin, eats tofu, is a (Not very good) jokester, and is the official Plucky Comic Relief of the entire series.
• Chronically Crashed Car: Cyborg's car gets destroyed in pretty much every episode it makes an appearance in.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • Inverted. Recently-deceased villain Slade has returned to beat the living crap out of Robin... or so Robin thinks. Turns out, he'd been exposed to a drug that makes him see Slade, and his body to react as if struck. He is able to disbelieve in his opponent just in time to save himself from the killing blow.
  • A strange and perhaps confused example in the episode "Bunny Raven", where Raven, a magic-user, asserts that Mumbo's magic will disperse if she disbelieves it. Mumbo counters that magic doesn't work that way, and seems to be right.
• Clingy Costume: Terra's final costume was an armored suit that Slade had fused with her nervous system. With Clothing Damage, it's clear that she wears bandages where the suit's parts don't go — an aversion of Stripperiffic, which without the bandages is what the suit would be.
• Clothing Damage:
  • In "Birthmark", Slade rips off over 85% of Raven's outfit while mind raping her... or perhaps the other kind. Watch closely, her top is being held on by thin shoulder straps. There's absolutely no back.
  • Terra's outfit in "Aftershock Part 2"; see above.
  • Robin's outfit got quite a bit torn up in "Haunted" when he was fighting with what he thought was Slade.
  • Beast Boy's suit near the end of "The Beast Within" gets pretty ripped up... Which raises a lot of questions about how it got ripped up, or where it goes when he changes...*
• Color-Coded Characters: Each of the characters who had some form of energy manipulation powers had a distinct color associated with them, observable when they used their powers and also when their eyes glowed. The major ones:
  • Black with white edges for Raven (red edges for her Superpowered Evil Side and pure white for her "White Raven" form).
    • In the episode "Nevermore", the various parts of her psyche wear different colored robes to match that aspect. Pink is a happy Genki Girl who thinks Beast Boy's jokes are Actually Pretty Funny, gray is a timid Nervous Wreck who Apologises a Lot and green is a brave, Hot-Blooded Boisterous Bruiser. Brief glimpses at two other sides of her, yellow and orange, apparently represent her intelligence (complete with a pair of glasses) and her rudeness (upon arriving, orange burps).
  • Green for Starfire.
  • Bright Blue for Cyborg and his T-car.
  • Yellow for Terra.
  • Bright red for Brother Blood.
  • Fiery red-orange for Trigon (and Slade when empowered by Trigon).
  • Dark purple for Blackfire.
  • Red for Red X.
  • Pale pinkish-purple for Jinx.
• Collapsing Lair: Slade gets this twice in the first two season finales, Brother Blood gets it twice in the third, and the movie starts off with an attack on Titans Tower.
• Combat Tentacles: The Centauri police-robots in "Sister".
• Comic-Book Adaptation: Teen Titans Go! is a Recursive Adaptation, in that the show was derived from a Comic Book in the first place.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames:
  • "Deathstroke the Terminator" is simply Slade here. See Never Say "Die" below. However, the French dub of the series, which can even be heard on the DVD if the language is selected, actually calls the character "Deathstroke". ("Terminator" is still never uttered.)
  • Interestingly, despite being her codename in the original comics, here Raven is her codename.
  • Elasti-Girl inverted this with Beast Boy, calling him by his real name once—"Garfield." No one else does this, even after this event when Raven says she will get a lot of mileage out of it.
  • Starfire is a downplayed example. While her real name is unknown (the comics has it as "Kori'andr", but it's also turned into "Kori Anders" again in the comics), she says that it translates to "Star Fire," so they're sort of calling her by her real name... a little...
• Composite Character: Robin is Dick Grayson and has his acrobatic origins, relationship with Starfire and status as Teen Titans leader, Jason Todd's temper and prone to lowering himself to criminal level when he has to, and Tim Drake's Bo Staff skills and Batman-like tendencies.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: If the Titans are facing a single villain for the episode, they'll most likely be taken down easily. A lone Titan tends to have to be capable of quite a lot (i.e. Robin taking down Cinderblock).
• Continuity Nod:
  • Dr. Light's instant surrender when he came face to face with Raven, as he recalled the Mook Horror Show she'd subjected him to before. Guess he was still scared of the dark...
  • Another is in "Can I Keep Him" where one of the "foods" Starfire offers to Silkie is mustard, which she was drinking in "The Sum of His Parts".
  • In "Go!", the bus Cyborg catches from Starfire looks very much like the one he stopped in "Final Exam".
  • In "The End" Part II", Starfire mentions that she's used Raven's powers once before (in "Switched" when she and Raven switched bodies).
• Convection, Schmonvection: In "The End", Badass Normals Robin and Slade run around on rocks floating in lava. Later, Cyborg's face is held about a few inches above a lava lake and he's totally fine. Even if his mechanical parts are very heat resistant, the human parts should burn.
• Cranium Chase: During an episode, Starfire's head and body are separated when Larry messes with reality. She then has to chase it down.

• Crazy Cultural Comparison: Starfire has a few strange Tamaranean customs, such as The Pudding of Sadness and The Poem of Gratitude. Also, Zorka berries which cause mutations in certain organisms, like say Silkies.
• Create Your Own Villain: Really Beast Boy is the one who sent Terra over the edge with his rejection of her. This is forgivable, however, seeing as how she had just betrayed him and his dearest friends to their worst enemy after they took her in twice and welcomed her into their group with almost no qualms whatsoever (Raven being the one voice of dissent, which quickly stopped as she came to trust Terra as well)...and for some reason, she still expected him to be OK with that. The only one to blame in that situation was Terra herself. Beast Boy's biggest mistake was letting his emotions affect how he spoke to Terra and letting her leave with Slade rather than taking her back to the tower as a prisoner.
• Cuffs Off, Rub Wrists:
  • Cyborg, of all people, does this, in the second part of "Titans East".
  • Starfire as well, after Robin picks the lock on her cuffs in "Go!"... despite the fact that she's wearing metal plating under the cuffs.
• Culturally Sensitive Adaptation: In The Judas Contract, Terra is The Mole for Slade and is in a sexual relationship with him even though he's much older than her. When Slade decides not to go through with his plan to kill the Titans, Terra turns on him and ends up dying when she loses control of her powers and the story treats her as more evil than Slade even though the latter is the one who came up with the idea to kill the Titans in the first place and pursues a sexual relationship with a girl young enough to be his daughter. In the animated series, Terra is depicted as a young, scared girl who is manipulated by the older Slade. While Terra's crimes are not glossed over, she isn't depicted as the more evil of the two between her and Slade. Also, Slade and Terra are not in a sexual relationship.
• Curbstomp Battle: Oh. So. Often. Any given Slade vs. Robin fight will be like this.
• Custom Uniform of Sexy: Pick a girl, any girl.
• Cyber Cyclops: Slade and the H.I.V.E. use large one-eyed robots against the Titans.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Season 4 episode "Overdrive". Especially if you decide to delete parts of it yourself...
• Dance Battler: Jinx will sometimes look like she's dancing or doing some complex gymnastics while dodging attacks in battle.
• Dangerous Interrogative: In "Troq", Robin does this when Cyborg tells him that Val-Yor had been calling Starfire "Troq" because it's an anti-Tamaranian slur.
  Robin: What?
  Cyborg: (whispering) And that's what he's been calling her this whole time.
  Robin: Starfire, why didn't you say something? (slams his fist into his palm) He will apologize! I'm gonna make him!
• Dark Action Girl: Jinx fits this to a T (heh heh heh). She's also the leader of the H.I.V.E. Five, all male, and the only one with ambition. Her Heel–Face Turn was partly triggered by high ranking villains initially dismissing her as useless. She has yet to do real heroics, her motivations seem to be simple revenge (and a crush on Kid Flash). Of course, the phrase "Dark Action Girl" really brings Raven to mind... though she's more an example of another trope.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Many thought Raven will make a great villain because of her very dark past. She isn't. In the case of Jinx, she is a villain at first, but her relationship with Kid Flash convinced her to do a Heel–Face Turn.
  • You are dark, and darkness is often misunderstood. —Malchior
• Dark Magical Girl:
  • Raven is a lonely girl with father-angst that develops a close friendship with a sunny and perky girl. Even their powers are foils; Starfire uses her powers through fully embracing her emotions while Raven has to suppress her to keep them under control.
  AZARATH METRION ZINTHOS!
  • Applies to Jinx as well. Including the Heel–Face Turn due to The Power of Love.
• Dark Reprise: Terra's early appearances are accompanied by a lighthearted and beautiful Leitmotif. Her appearance in the two-part episode "Aftershock" has her accompanied by a more sinister version of it.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Season 4: Trigon's plot is to force Raven to fulfill her destiny as the antichrist and destroy the world. "Birthmark" alone has a scene where Slade brands Raven in a scene that is uncomfortably creepy. This after the series was sometimes accused of being too kiddie.
  • "Haunted", definitely. It's basically Robin having a PTSD-fueled mental breakdown the whole time, and the final scene sounds as much like rape as "Birthmark" does.
  • In general, Slade's episodes tended to be darker then was typical for the show.
• Darkest Hour: At least two occasions had things seem very bleak. One was in "Aftershock", when Terra was manipulated to siding with Slade and nearly destroyed the city. The other occasion would be in "The End", when Trigon's arrival nearly destroyed the entire world.
• Dating Catwoman:
  • Happened between Kid Flash and Jinx. As a result, Jinx became one of the good guys.
  • Another Jinx example. While Cyborg is undercover at the H.I.V.E., it's revealed that they went to a dance together. It is also heavily implied they had some kind of relationship during this time.
• A Day in the Limelight/Hostile Show Takeover: "We're the H.I.V.E. Five. This is our show now!"
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Raven.
  • Red X.
  • Cyborg has several moments, too.
  Robin: I have to find out if she's a threat.
  Cyborg: More like find out if she'll give him another kiss...
• Death of a Child: Terra's fate in "Aftershock", although further revelations about it later down the line (such as implications that she was still alive and aware, along with her presumed return at the end of Season 5) make this largely zig-zagged.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: The Very Special Episode "Troq" deconstructs the Noble Bigot with Val-Yor. He is genuinely heroic, badass, and friendly with the Titans, except he's horribly racist to Starfire, something the other Titans demand he apologize for once they find out. One would think Starfire saving him and the day would turn him around, it turns out racism is not that easily overcome. All it did was make him think Starfire was "one of the good ones", causing the Titans to lose any remaining respect for him. Val-Yor showed that no amount of nobleness would make bigotry acceptable.
• Decoy Getaway: Slade, to Robin's continually escalating frustration.
• Defanged Horrors:
  • When Raven pulled Dr. Light into some sort of dark vortex within her cloak, and when he came out he was curled up in the fetal position muttering, "S-so dark. Make it stop. Please make it stop."
  • The episode "Haunted" also ranks up there as one of the creepiest pieces of Western Animation targeted towards kids. They took Slade, a villain who's already creepy in his own right, and left the audience constantly unsure whether he was Back from the Dead and torturing Robin, or whether Robin had gone insane and was mutilating himself. The truth is somewhere in between.
• Defeat by Modesty: In "Mother Mae Eye", See-More, while fighting Starfire, reveals that he has "see-through" vision and then gazes intently at Starfire, which prompts her to cover herself up while blushing. This allows her to be an easy target for See-More's next attack.
• Defiant to the End: Standard for each of the Titans to be Defiant to the End, which makes Robin begging for Slade to stop in "Haunted" more disturbing.
• Denser and Wackier: The DC Nation shorts and the revival series Teen Titans Go! do away with the dark elements of the series and are played completely for comedy.
• Deranged Animation: Bits of it in (nearly) every episode.
• Despair Event Horizon: Almost the entirety of "The End."
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • Cyborg sang his own variation on the tune in the Cold Open to "Titans East, Part 1". ("When there's trouble you know what to dooooooooooooooo! CALL CYBORG! He can shoot a rocket from his shooooooooooooe! 'CAUSE HE'S CYBORG! Doo-da-doo-da, somethin' like that! Nananana, BIG FLUFFY CAT! That's right!") See it here and laugh.
  • The ringtone of the Titans' communicators is the melody of the theme song.
  • In "Homecoming, Part 1", when Beast Boy is pretending to advertise a "tuborkel" (combined tuba and snorkel, for when you want to play your tuba in the bathtub), the first notes he plays are the opening bars of the theme melody.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Leads to your friend being infected with a computer virus. Which leads him to hallucinate that everything's food and giving him a ferocious appetite. Which leads to him almost crashing every computer system on the planet...
• Disgusting Vegetarian Food: There is a Running Gag involving Beast Boy's unappealing vegetarian food. He's the only one who'll eat soy or tofu.
• Disney Dog Fight: Between Killer Moth and Starfire. The "Dog" in question can't make up his mind so he explodes.
• Distracted by the Luxury. When Blackfire gives her sister a "Centauri moon diamond" necklace.
• The Ditz: Starfire, though she's just naive and unfamiliar with her new environment as opposed to being legitimately stupid. She's demonstrated her intelligence on more than one occasion. She knows exactly how many moles there are in a kilogram of oxygen and has explained mathematically (off-screen anyway) how it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light.
• Do-Anything Robot: Gizmo's tiny mechanical backpack holds a freaking car in it. Cyborg might qualify as well.
• The Dog Bites Back: Terra in "Aftershock". Slade flunks #48 on the Evil Overlord List.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The episode "The Beast Within" seems to resemble a PSA about steroid abuse, especially in the scenes with Beast Boy going into an animalistic rage in the gym. However, it has nothing to do with steroids whatsoever.
  • "Troq" has this brief discussion about Val-Yor's racism against Starfire's kind:
  Starfire: You know what it is like to be judged simply by the way you look?
  Cyborg: Of course I do. I'm part robot.
• Don't Think, Feel: In "Switched", Starfire teaches Raven how to fly.
  Raven!Starfire: Okay. How do you fly this thing?
  Starfire!Raven: You must feel flight.
  Raven!Starfire: What.
  Starfire!Raven: When you feel the unbridled joy of flight, you will fly.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Raven is constantly hitting Beast Boy whenever he acts like a fool and it’s Played for Laughs.
• Dramatic Drop: Terra drops the T-communicator when Robin announces her big secret: that she can't control her powers. She thinks Beast Boy lied to her and told, but Robin once worked for the world's greatest detective and figured it all out on his own, unaware it was a secret.
• Driving Up a Wall: The T-Car pulls this in a clear homage to Lupin the Third.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Beast Boy, in the whole series and The Movie Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo.
• Dysfunction Junction: Each Titan has a dark past.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Silkie had a few blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos before "Can I Keep Him?"
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Some of the Season 1 episodes have some rather strange-looking animation.
• Eating the Enemy:
  • The villainous Rubber Woman, Madam Rouge, is sent by The Brain to get a Titans communicator and ends up targeting Hot Spot. Eventually Hot Spot destroys the communicator to keep it out of her hands. Fed up, Rouge decides to end Hot Spot by reeling him in and absorbing him into her body. Too bad for her, he's able to burn right out of her body. It's a basically a more literal case of Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth.
  • In the first episode, the Titans are tussling with Plasmus, a Muck Monster, without Cyborg. Eventually, Plasmus gets blown into multiple pieces, which regenerate into several smaller beasts that attack the Titans individually. While Robin gets away and is saved by Cyborg, the other titans getting consumed off-screen. But they in turn are saved by Robin and Cyborg's combination attack.
• Either/Or Title: "Bunny Raven, or How to Make a Titananimal Disappear". Also "Don't Touch that Dial, Or Episode 257-494".

• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Starfire is a little better at English than most online translators. But not by much. "Kick The Butt!"
• Emotionless Girl: Invoked by Raven, who has emotions, but is forced to keep them in check by the nature of her powers. "Fear Itself" provides a pretty good example of what happens when her emotions become too much for her to handle.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Season 4's three-part finale.
• Enemy Mine: Slade teaming up with the Titans in "The End Part 3".
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: The series, itself not known for abusing this trope, does a spoof in "S04E01".
• Everyone Can See It: Robin and Starfire. Everyone including their teammates, their enemies, and random nerds on the Internet (in-show).
• Every Pizza Is Pepperoni: The Titans' Trademark Favorite Food, pizza, is always shown as pepperoni pizza. There's even one episode where a pizza is referred to as cheese but clearly has pepperoni on it.
• Everytown, America: Jump City, California and Steel City, New York. The latter is especially ironic for those aware that "The Steel City" is a nickname for Pittsburgh, PA.
• Evil Brit: Mad Mod. He is British, and he is evil.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:As confirmed by Word of God, this is a trait Slade has. His inability to comprehend Robin's loyalty towards his team and the lengths he would go to keep his friends safe and his not considering any residual loyalties Terra had towards the Titans led to his defeat twice.

• Evil Costume Switch:
  • Robin in "Apprentice", though he did not do a Face–Heel Turn like his teammates thought he did.
  • Terra in "Aftershock", who wears nothing but a breastplate and underwear, with the rest of her body covered in bandages.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Blackfire. And later, Red X served as sort of a "morally ambiguous" counterpart to Robin. Jinx was designed to be a sort of evil counterpart to Raven, both magic users with a "dark" color theme.
  • Slade acts like a sort of evil counterpart to Batman (as he was intended to be in the original comics, complete with Wintergreen, his own anti-Alfred). So it's no wonder he and Robin are so similar, since Robin takes after his mentor.
• Evil Learns of Outside Context: When the Teen Titans appear to help the Doom Patrol face off against the Brotherhood of Evil, this makes the Brotherhood's leader (the Brain) aware of the Titans, as well as other Kid Heroes, whom he now sees as threats equal to that of the Doom Patrol.
• Evil Makeover: Cyborg's car gets one when Overload hijacks it.
• Evil Minions: Various catspaws of Slade's.
• Evil Takes a Nap: Plasmus is only in his monstrous form while awake. To keep him contained, he's kept sedated and constantly asleep.
• Expanded Universe: The tie-in comic, Teen Titans Go!
• Experienced Protagonist: The entire team is this after the first episode, being recognized by civilians and villains alike. However, Robin and Beast Boy stick out as having the most experience of the team, a fact made noticeable in the chronologically first episode.
• Exposed to the Elements: Starfire in the episode "Kole" is in the arctic wearing her usual midriff-baring Mini Dress Of Power costume, while everyone else around her is dressed in thick winter attire. Handwaved due to the fact she's an alien.
• Exposition Cut: Probably not the only example of this in the series, but used in the episode "The Beast Within" after the team found Raven in the maw of a feral Beast Boy.
  Starfire: Rest. You are safe. He can no longer harm you.
  Raven: He didn't hurt me, he saved me.
  Starfire: From what? (cue scene transition)
• Expository Theme Tune: Not in the traditional sense, but whether the opening credits are the English or the Japanese version of the theme song will let you know if it's a serious or silly episode, respectively.
• Expressive Mask:
  • Robin's mask basically emotes as if it were his eyes, and he never takes it off (except once in the movie, and then he was wearing sunglasses).
  • Slade's mask also counts, even if there's only one eye.
  • Red X actually counts, too; in "Revved Up", his reaction to landing on the bus only to discover Raven and Starfire in it is nothing short of hilarious.
• Expy: Professor Chang bears a striking resemblance to Hannibal Chew, of Blade Runner: From his distinctive clothing and facial appearance, right down to the frigid environment in which he works. Chang's voice actor? None other than James Hong, who also played the role of Chew..
• Extradimensional Shortcut: Herald uses his horn to open portals into another dimension that can serve as a shortcut for just him or for the whole team.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • A number of characters show this.
  • Starfire is probably one of the most prominent examples. As an alien, she is happy to eat and prepare many Tamaranean delicacies, which disgust the rest of the crew, and has several strange eating habits when it comes to Earth food (such as consuming mustard as a beverage).
    Starfire: I suggest a large pizza with pickles, bananas, and mint frosting.
  • Thanks to a virus, Cyborg goes on a rampage through the town and eats several normally inedible objects in "Crash", such as a stop sign and a little girl's teddy bear.
  • In "Final Exam", after Jinx, Gizmo, and Mammoth take over Titans Tower, Mammoth is shown consuming the blue, moldy food in the Tower's Fridge.
• Eye Lights Out: When Cyborg is severely damaged, his glowing eye fades, along with the blue lights on his arm and leg circuits.
• Face Palm Of Doom: "Pantha's Claw".
• The Faceless: Slade. Even when his mask gets knocked off in "The End" and his undead face is just a skull. Though at that point in the show, he had been reanimated by Trigon, but not resurrected. Apparently, this means he can't regrow his skin.
  • The episode "Forces Of Nature" has Slade disguised as an old man, though this functions as a bit of a Mythology Gag, as his disguise is somewhat similar to his original comics appearance.
  • Red X fits this as well, considering we only ever see his mask.
  • And, to a lesser extent, Robin, due to the fact that his eyes are never shown, but this would fit better into The Eyeless trope.
• Fade Around the Eyes: Mumbo does this at the end of "Master of Your Fate", but with his mouth instead of his eyes. Unusually, while most examples of this trope featuring the mouth only use the teeth, this example shows his entire mouth.
• Fake First Kiss: When she first came to Earth, the first thing that Starfire did was kiss Robin because her species can learn any language by touching mouths with a speaker. The two don't share a proper romantic kiss until the Grand Finale.
• False Innocence Trick: Raven befriends a heroic wizard in a book by the name of Malchior. He tells her stories of how an evil dragon trapped him there. He teaches her powerful magic and things seem awesome, until she sets Malchior free, only to find out "Malchior" is the name of the evil dragon, not the wizard.
• False Camera Effects: The later episodes and TV movie played with false Jitter Cam and Whip Pan effects.
• Family of Choice: The Titans support each other in all the good ways of a family, but they're also a family in all the worst ways with all the conflicts. Their family-like relationships are used to look deeper into each of the character's back stories and character flaws.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: Every now and then, the show features some pretty brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdowns played completely seriously. There's never any blood, but it can get surprisingly disturbing with how far it goes; Robin "vs" Slade in the episode "Haunted" comes to mind. Speaking of Slade, his first death was rather horrific, as he's melted alive in magma (off-screen of course, but still).
  • Brother Blood dismembers all of Cyborg's limbs mid-combat and rips open a hole in his chest in episode 39, and if it weren't for the fact that his body parts are electronic, it would obviously be a very graphic display of violence.
• Fanservice: It has a good amount for a kids show...
  • Starfire and Raven provide this trope well. At one point in a season 2 episode, Starfire's breasts visibly and blatantly bounce while accompanied by a spring sound effect.
  • Some males, especially Aqualad fulfill this. So much so in Aqualad's case that he causes Starfire and even Raven to go gaga and ogle him through heart-shaped eyes at least once.
• Fantastic Racism: Val Yor. Now we know that "Troq" is the intergalactic equivalent of the N-word, used to describe Tamaraneans. Lampshaded by Cyborg:
  Starfire: You know how it feels to be judged just because of how you look?
  Cyborg: Of course I do... I'm part robot.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Superpowers, magic, mutants, robots, aliens, time/interdimensional travel, you name it.
• Fastball Special: Multiple variants. Of particular note is the "Beast Boy Blitz", where Beast Boy turns into an armadillo and rolls into a ball so that Cyborg can throw him. And then turns into a rhino mid-flight.
• Female Gaze:
  • The camera does tend to focus on Robin's butt an awful lot…
  • And Aqualad. All. The. Time.
  • Beast Boy too, to a certain extent.
• Femme Fatale: Blackfire.
• Ferris Wheel Date Moment: Twice. Robin and Starfire have one in the episode "Sisters", and Beast Boy and Terra have one in "Betrayal".
• Feud Episode: Robin and Cyborg have an early episode like this.
• The '50s: The Fifties Fifties version, in a Show Within a Show which Beast Boy lands in for a short while before an eight-foot robot smashes into the suburban paradise home like some demented manifestation of Chandler's Law.
• Final Solution: Our heroes go on a trip with Val-Yor and commit genocide on a race of allegedly hostile robots.
• Finger Poke of Doom: The Came Back Strong version of Slade does this to Cyborg.
• Finishing Move:
  • The Sonic Boom, which was unfortunately only used once until "Titan's Together".
  • A number of other one-off named Finishing Moves exist, like the "T-Rex Takedown".
  • Many of these involve Cyborg and Beast Boy pulling off numerous variations of a Fastball Special.
• Fish out of Water: Starfire — due to being an easy bit and the series' hinge on humour, her adaption was pretty back and forth but never complete.
• Fish People: Triton and Aqualad's friend, Tramm.
• Flanderization:
  • The H.I.V.E. kids were initially a competent villain team and the collective Evil Counterparts of the Titans, sliding into infighting and immaturity only when not "working". Later seasons flanderized them into being all incompetents (except for Jinx) who only won because they got lucky.
  • Their boss, Brother Blood, was in his first appearance a cool-headed, charismatic leader who only overacted when playing to an audience; later appearances made him a straight Large Ham.
  • Notably, the Titans themselves and Big Bad Slade inverted this trope; in the first few appearances they were defined by one or two traits (i.e. Robin was serious, Raven was a goth, Beast Boy was an immature jokester, Slade was a Card-Carrying Villain, etc.), but later appearances added a lot more depth to all of them.
• Flat "What": Connected to the Fantastic Racism example above, and definitely not Played for Laughs.
• Fluffy the Terrible:
  • Silkie, the Ugly Cute mutant moth larva. Who still retains the potential to metamorphose again.
  • The ravens in Raven's mind... when we first meet them, anyway...
• Flying Brick: Starfire, plus energy blasts and Bizarre Alien Biology.
• Flying Firepower: Starfire most of the time.
• For the Evulz: In the first season, Slade's apparent goal is to destroy the city for no reason at all. Subverted in the season finale; the destruction of the city turned out to be a diversion and his true goal was to blackmail Robin into becoming his apprentice.
• Forced to Watch: Robin has been subject to this at least twice, and Raven once.
• Forced Transformation: All of the Titans in "Bunny Raven... or ...How to Make A Titananimal Disappear", especially Raven who becomes a cute widdle bunny rabbit.
• Forgot About His Powers:
  • Raven has a very diverse set of magical powers that she mainly uses to throw things at people. There's also Cyborg's seldom used detachable limbs and grappling hook hand. Not to mention he can turn his hands into almost any tool he can think of.
  • In the episode "Kole", the entire Titans team ends up falling through a huge hole into a prehistoric world. Despite Beast Boy being able to turn into flying animals, Cyborg's above mentioned grapple hook and Robin owning every swinging rope gadget imaginable. Starfire and Raven on the other hand somehow completely forget they can fly.
  • Starfire's forgetfulness is particularly bad. One minute she's lifting tons over her head and flying faster than light, and the next she's struggling against badass normals. Justified because her powers are affected by her emotional state.
  • Speaking of Beast Boy, he can turn into every type of animal there is (from one-cell amebas to prehistoric dinosaurs) quick as a blink, yet most of the time he just uses one form to smash or ram into things, and often gets knocked out or looks stumped when his chosen form doesn't work. The biggest offender is during "Winner Take All," when the bottom of a cage hanging in a portal dimension he's fighting in breaks under him and he forgets he can fly, losing the match. (Averted during a few tense episodes with Slade and Terra in Season 2, showing that when Beast Boy puts his mind to it he can fight with scary efficiency.)
  • Also, in the episode "Calling All Titans," Beast Boy is assigned to deliver a communicator to Jericho, who is located at the top of a mountain. Rather than transform into a bird or other flying creature, he tries to climb the mountain as a goat.
• Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Literally every single character.
• Fountain of Youth: In the episode, "How Long is Forever?" after a battle where his time suit is dmaged, Warp is reduced to infancy.
  • In the Season 4 finale, Trigon uses Raven as a portal to enter Earth's dimension. While this initially appeared to destroy Raven, Robin later found her, now a child with no powers, and (allegedly) no memories.
• Five Temperament Ensemble: Robin = Choleric, Starfire = Phlegmatic, Raven = Melancholic, Beast Boy = Sanguine, Cyborg = Leukine.
• The Freakshow: Beast Boy's ultimate destination in "How Long Is Forever?".
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: "Switched".
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Has episodes that pair in some way each of the Titans with another member, with the exception of Beast Boy and Robin. Before Season 4, Robin and Raven also never had any episodes focusing on them, making their supposed close friendship that drove the emotional core of the season feel like an Informed Attribute.
• Funny Foreigners: The Spanish-speaking Más Y Menos. Starfire as well.
• Future Badass: In the Bad Future of "How Long Is Forever?", Robin is the only Titan to get more badass.
  Robin: So... "Nightwing" huh?
• Future Loser: Beast Boy being the most prominent, but Cyborg and Raven's futures also kinda suck.

G-L

• Gag Series: Often, depending on the episode.
• Generic Doomsday Villain:
  • The Puppet King from early into Season 1 is one. It is not explained how he came to be or why he wanted to control the Teen Titans' bodies as his personal army and destroy their souls. He basically just seems to be carrying out this plan for the sake of it so that the episode could have an antagonist, and he had no real personality aside from "creepy, high-and-mighty bad guy."
  • Most of the more mindless secondary villains (Cinderblock, Plasmus, Overload, the Chrysalis Eater, Cardiac and the like) in the show seemed to be wreaking havoc just 'cuz. It doesn't help that the show had a general aversion to origin stories.
• Genius Ditz: Starfire may come off as ditzy, but she knows a lot of things, like the secret to travelling faster than the speed of light and knowing the exact number of atoms in a kilogram of oxygen.

• Genre-Busting: It's a superhero action cartoon whose animation is often more inspired by Tex Avery or the weirder side of anime than anything in American Comic Books, yet often has very dark, dramatic storylines and, on a few occasions, will have an episode focus almost entirely on character interactions, with the obligatory supervillain battle relegated to a minor B-plot.
• Gilligan Cut: In "Fear Itself", when no one looks impressed with the horror movie Beast Boy is touting until they start it.

• Glitch Episode: Cyborg gets a virus in him when Beast Boy pirates a game on his recharger, and makes him have intense cravings for... literally everything in sight thanks making him think its all food, and it's up to Beast Boy to shrink down and get in him and solve it before it's too late.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Starfire vs. Blackfire.
• Glove Snap: Cyborg does this once.
  Beast Boy (about Robin): Right. Check him for batteries.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom:
  • Starfire and Blackfire get these when using their powers.
  • Raven also does this whenever she's using magic. Her demon form has it basically all the time, as does her father, Trigon.
  • Terra also has this at times when using her geokinesis, though it is inconsistent
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Happens to Raven in the Bad Future episode "How Long is Forever". She gets better, though.
• God Guise: In one episode, Raven crash-lands on a planet inhabited by tiny aliens, and is worshiped as a God simply for being more than three inches tall.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Clearly, Blackfire did not have the best interests of her people in mind when she took over the planet. Fortunately, in their culture, a monarch's rule can be taken away from her via Trial by Combat, which is exactly what Starfire did.
• Good Costume Switch:
  • Although a Dark Is Not Evil example, Raven has had a dark cloak to white cloak switch at least three separate times in the series, accompanied by a Big Damn Heroes moment. Never lasts long, though.
  • Starfire also switched from an outfit not unlike her sister's in "Go" to her current uniform when she learns to be "nice".
• Goomba Stomp / Goomba Springboard: Robin uses this several times against mooks.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!:
  • Gizmo. His harmless swear words are so creative they actually sound dirty.
  • Starfire too, in fact she's probably the Titan with the foulest mouth. She's just polite enough to limit herself to Tamaranean swears.
• Goth:
  • Raven, the ultimate gothic superheroine. However, although the early episodes portray Raven as straight-up goth, her personality begins fluctuating later and she is revealed to be more calculating, introverted and antisocial than generically goth.
  • Argent, introduced in the third-to-last episode.
  • Jinx fills the goth villainess role.
• Goth Girls Know Magic: Raven and Jinx are gothy and the most notable magic users in the series.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Trouble in Tokyo is full of this one. The biggest standout is Brushogun; while his name is a portmanteau of "brush" and "shogun", his name would be "Bra Shogun" in their language.
• Great Gazoo: Larry the Titan, from "Fractured", an explicit parody of Batman Gazoo Bat-Mite.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Batman. It's acknowledged that he exists and that he is the source of Robin's resources and gadgets, but he's only indirectly an influence on the Titans.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Starfire during "Date with Destiny". The kicker? She really has green eyes. Bright, glowing green eyes.
• Green Eyes Take Warning: Starfire, especially once she attains the use of eye beams.
• Grenade Tag: Robin.
• Grievous Harm with a Body:
  • Kole.
  • Pantha gets a few of these scenes, only the body she's doing grievous harm with isn't usually a willing participant.
• Harmless Villain: Doctor Light.
• Half-Arc Season: Every season, sans the fifth, followed this format; of thirteen episodes, roughly half told a story arc specific to that season while the rest were standalone.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Raven is half-demon. A case could be made for Cyborg as a half-robot.
• Heel–Face Turn: Jinx. goes through one near the end of the series.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • The Titans rescuing the lost Doom Patrol members in "Homecoming".
  • Raven and Cyborg escaping Mad Mod's traps in his debut.
• Heroes Unlimited: Season 5.
• Heroes Want Redheads: Starfire is a common target for boys, in the show and in Real Life.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In "Aftershock Part 2": Terra.
  • In "Snowblind: Red Star. A supercharged supersoldier from Russia, he willingly locked himself up in an old power plant for years to keep from hurting other people due to his body discharging radiation every few hours and at the end of the episode has Starfire take him into the stratosphere when he goes supernova due to an overload from battle. He returns in the second-to-last episode with no particular explanation.
  • Robin nearly pulls one of these in the Season 1 finale by blasting himself with the same deadly nanites that were killing the rest of the Titans, gambling on Slade being more willing to let them all live than to let Robin die. He was right, too.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Raven is her worst enemy by far. Even her dad, who was the ultimate personification of evil pales in comparison (he was beaten easily after Raven resolved part of her inner conflict). In fact, her stoic personality is her way of controlling her dark side.
• Hostile Show Takeover: The theme song of the episode Lightspeed is interrupted by the H.I.V.E. Five, who claim that the show is theirs now. The Teen Titans don't appear anywhere in the episode, except for Kid Flash. The Teen Titans are back by the next episode though.
• Hot-Blooded: Robin and Cyborg.
• Hot-Blooded Sideburns: Control Freak has a long pair of them.
• Hotter and Sexier: Notably averted and a source of some criticism from those hoping for a more direct adaptation of the comic book. The character designs for the Titans were made more awkward and teen-like than their comic book counterparts. Although this can be said for virtually all the characters, Starfire is the obvious poster child for this particular aversion.
• How About a Smile?: When Killer Moth's daughter, Kitten, forces Robin to take her to prom in exchange for Killer Moth not releasing his mutant moths, she tries to force him to look like he's enjoying himself.
  Kitty: And would it kill you to smile?
  (Robin forces a painful-looking rictus)
  Robin: Maybe.
• Human Outside, Alien Inside: Pops up for Starfire from time to time, such things as her allergy to metallic-chromium and strange recipes. Also when she attempts to "bathe" her pet, Silkie, by licking it like a mother cat. With a two-foot-long tongue.^note Source material indicates that her and other Tamaraneans are derived from cats/feline, justifying the licking Silkie part. Apparently, she also has nine stomachs. And let's not get started on her transformation....
• Human Resources: "Employee of the Month".
• Humorless Aliens: Starfire has some trouble understanding why, exactly, Beast Boy's jokes are supposed to be funny. When exposed to "Why are ducks so funny? Because they're always quacking jokes!", she said something like, "Oh, I get it! It is humorous because ducks lack the large brains necessary for the telling of jokes!"
• I'm Standing Right Here: "And I thought Raven was grumpy."
• I Regret Nothing: Terra in "Aftershock".
  Terra: My name is Terra. I have done horrible things. And I have absolutely no regrets.
• I Shall Taunt You: One of Gizmo's usual battle strategies. It rarely actually works, though.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Cyborg, Raven, and Terra. Notable in that Terra's subsequent retirement was permanent, and implied as being for the better.
• I Was Just Passing Through: Completely averted by Red X. In "X", Red X tracks Robin down to Professor Chang's lair Just in Time to snatch Robin out of mid-air before Robin can fall into Chang's disintegrator cannon. When Robin comments on this, Red X doesn't try to claim that he acted for his own reasons.
  (after Red X saves Robin's life)
  Robin: I thought you didn't like to play the hero.
  Red X: Doesn't mean I don't know how.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Slade uses this threat to make Robin his apprentice. It works... for a short period of time.
• Idiosyncratic Cultural Gesture: When Starfire first escaped the Gordanian ship, she kissed Robin on the lips. Confusing possible romantic gesture to Robin, telepathic transfer of linguistic patterns for Starfire. She does the same thing to a random Japanese boy in "Trouble in Tokyo" to learn Japanese, making Robin further confused and a bit jealous.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Robin gets hit with a big one in Season 5.
  • Seriously, Terra, trusting Slade was never going to end well.
• If It Swims, It Flies: The T-Sub quickly became the T-Ship capable of deep space travel. Lampshaded in that Cyborg was quite adamant about it being built for deep-sea, not deep-space.
• Imagination-Based Superpower:
  • Beast Boy can turn into any animal he's ever seen. Including alien creatures.
  • Raven's powers, even more so in Go! where they start allowing her to make objects out of energy.
  • Argent's powers seem to work this way as well.
  • Melvin has this power. Raven was surprised and impressed once she learned that Melvin indeed had this.
• In Name Only: Aside from the fact that the series had adapted many of the plot lines that originated from the comics (although with only some fidelity towards the events that have occurred in the comics), Teen Titans has virtually nothing in common with the original 1980s comic book series mainly through the many differences between the heroes and villains in the comics and their cartoon incarnations and the fact that the origins, the physical appearances, and (occasionally) the powers of the characters in the animated series are profoundly different than that of the original comic book series that the series was adapted from which, despite its title, depicted the Titans as being in their 20s (at one point the comic series even dropped the Teen from the title as it had become apparent they weren't anymore). However, this series was an example of Tropes Are Not Bad through the fact that it served the role as the introduction to the Teen Titans for many younger watchers (or those who just don't read comics).
• In the Blood: Raven's demonic heritage and power, which she resists.

• Ingesting Knowledge:
  • In one episode, a mage teaches Raven an ability to absorb (not literally) many books at the same time, as it's faster than reading them.
  • Starfire learning languages through lip contact might be considered this.
• Injured Limb Episode: In "Fractured", Robin breaks his arm and a reality-warping, interdimensional fanboy tries to heal it.
• Innocent Aliens: Starfire. Innocent, but a far cry from helpless.
• Innocently Insensitive: Cyborg in "Troq" when he calls Starfire "Troqqy" not knowing it's offensive.
• Invisible Parents: All of the characters really, but lets focus on the main ones.
  • Starfire's parents are probably dead, since her older sister was the one ruling once she returned to Tamaran. It's never mentioned if they actually are though, or how long it's been. In fact, they're never mentioned. Starfire was raised by a Tamaranean nanny so she might not have known her parents well.
  • We meet Raven's dad, and see her mom in one episode. Her mom seems to be okay with her teenage daughter leaving home and doing her own things on Earth. Does she even know she defeated her father and is still alive?
  • We know Robin's parents are dead, due to him being the apprentice of Batman, but why did he leave Batman to begin with? It's never shown in this version.
  • Cyborg's parents are never mentioned or seen, ever. Do they exist? No one knows.
  • Beast Boy's parents are never mentioned or seen either. We only know that it seems the Doom Patrol raised him, and even after those episodes, they're never seen or mentioned again either.
• Ironic Birthday/Dangerous 16th Birthday: If you don't know Raven that well, don't even try to plan a birthday party for her.
• Ironic Echo:
  • In "Aftershock"
    Beast Boy: It's your life Terra, your choice, it's never too late to change.
  • The show's finale
    Terra: Things change, Beast Boy. The girl you want me to be is just a memory.... you're the Teen Titan. That's who you are. That's not me. I'm not a hero. I'm not out to save the world. I'm just a girl with a geometry test next period and I haven't studied.
• Irritation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Inverted, though for a moment, everyone who was imitating Robin was afraid it might hold. Robin actually was flattered. It's a good thing the True Master taught him not to take himself so freaking seriously.
  Robin: You know, Robins, the mask makes me feel cool, too.
• It Amused Me: This is Red X's reason for stealing the suit in the first place, and then using it to commit theft. He's not really a "villain" so much as he finds crime more entertaining than heroics — although he's not adverse to heroics when he feels like it, as he does have a streak of actual decency that tends to kick in if people are going to die or someone's done him a favour.
  Robin: Why did you steal the suit? What are you planning to do?
  Red X: Whatever I want. Not everybody likes to play the big villain, kid.
• It Came from the Fridge: "Final Exam". Later played with, as Mammoth has absolutely no problem scarfing the entire fridge.
• Jobber: Dr. Light ends most of his appearances in short order as the unfortunate target of Raven's Superpowered Evil Side. After getting one episode where he actually was a threat in Season 5, the Grand Finale ended with his attempted bank robbery being responded to by the entire extended Titans team.
• Just a Machine: Cyborg sometimes feels like this.
• Keet: Beast Boy, of course.
• Kid Hero: All of them!
• Kid Hero All Grown-Up: A darker, more pessimistic variation comes from the episode "How Long Is Forever?". Starfire pursues a time-traveling villain 20 years into the future, where she finds that, shortly after she disappeared, the other Teen Titans disbanded and went their separate ways. In this future, Cyborg is stuck hooked up to Titans Tower's power supply, Beast Boy is balding, overweight and has a miserable job as a one-man zoo, Raven is in a mental asylum, and Robin has taken on a new identity, Nightwing. Near the end of the episode, however, all the Titans band together again to defeat the villain, and Starfire returns back to her time.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • If Slade or Trigon is in an episode, it's pretty much a guarantee it won't be humorous (except for the first few episodes featuring Slade, but even then he wasn't played for laughs, though he also wasn't as creepy as he'd become later on). Also, Terra. You wouldn't think it at first but once all her deep emotional issues and comatose conscience come to light, you get the impression she's not there for fun and games... especially later on when she tries and succeeds in killing each of the Titans. Apparently anyway.
  • The Brotherhood of Evil in Season 5, particularly The Brain. Whenever they were at work, the situation would be intense and leave little room for humor.
  • The Puppet King, villain of the episode "Switched", was extremely creepy and tried to destroy the Teen Titans' souls while keeping their bodies as his slaves.
  • Probably the first example in the show aside from Slade was Fixit in episode 5, "The Sum Of His Parts". All scenes with him had a dark tone and filled with Nightmare Fuel in direct contrast with the zany scenes with Mumbo in the same episode.
• Large Ham:
  • Brother Blood, before Aquaman comes to mind. Both voiced by John DiMaggio, no less.
  • Trident also deserves a mention here:
  Trident: I AM PERFECTION! I! AM! TRIDENT!
• Last Episode, New Character: Several of the Honorary Titans (Argent, Jericho, Pantha, Herald, Kilowatt and Bushido) didn't have any role whatsoever in the animated series until the Calling All Titans and Titans Together finale that wrapped up the Brotherhood of Evil arc in the final season. Out of all of the characters, only three of them manage to evade capture/defeat and team up with Beast Boy and Mas to save the rest of the Titans, while the rest of them are flash frozen and only play smaller roles in the final battle.
• Last-Minute Hookup:
  • Robin and Starfire are ship teased throughout the whole series. They finally kiss in the last few minutes of Trouble in Tokyo.
    Cyborg: (Approvingly) Well, it's about time!
  • Also Kid Flash and Jinx.
• Last Resort Takeout: The pilot had the Titans get into an argument over what they should have for dinner, interspersed with Starfire discovering that whatever leftovers they had have now evolved into a higher life-form. Finally Robin suggests, "Maybe we should just go out for pizza." Cut to the pizzeria, and now they're arguing about toppings.
• Laughably Evil: A few villains, with Control Freak being one of the most apparent.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In the Trapped in TV Land episode "Don't Touch That Dial", Cyborg recognizes the episode of the show they're in as being episode 1 of the fourth season. Feel free to guess what episode and season "Don't Touch That Dial" is.
  • The same episode (also known as "Episode 257-494", its production number) also has Robin grabbing the camera, declaring that watching television while Control Freak was inside will liquefy your brain. For added comedic value, the show they were interrupting during the scene featured a doctor who had discovered the secret to world peace and was going to share it with the viewers.
  • It also has a mugshot of Control Freak on a news bulletin, with him holding up a number: 257-325—the production number of "Fear Itself", Control Freak's first appearance.
  • And to really nail down the ways this episode mutilates the fourth wall, it even goes after the in-show version of it - at the very end of the episode, Cyborg and the red-clad woman from the soap-opera scene are hugging.
• Leeroy Jenkins: The Doom Patrol partially due to Mento's Good Is Dumb and Knight Templar tendencies. Robot Man manages to be a particularly egregious example on his own though, getting taken down over two episodes than any of the Titans over the entire course of the series. Even lampshaded by Raven: "You sure he has a brain in there?" Suffice it to say, he'd be a lot worse if he wasn't literally Made of Iron.
• Left the Background Music On: In the episode where Mad Mod tries to put all the Titans in detention, a song is played during their attempted escape. Right before the "exit" is discovered, Robin turns a switch on a bust of Mad Mod, ending the song. For reference, the song is K2G, by Puffy AmiYumi.
• Leotard of Power: Raven, though averted with Starfire (whose costume in the comics defines Stripperiffic).
• Lethal Chef: Raven's pancakes — burned like charcoal on the outside, still runny on the inside. Starfire may be a perfectly competent cook by Tamaranean standards but... well, it's called pudding of sadness and is produced by someone who treats mustard as a beverage...
  Starfire: Wonderful!! I shall go cultivate the fungus!
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Beast Boy has these moments quite a bit.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: Between Raven and Dr. Light. To date, Raven — a demon's daughter who dresses in dark colors and uses dark-themed magic — is one of the few things that the light-based supervillain is terrified of. Having been dragged into her dark dimension once before, he would rather surrender and be jailed than having to face her again.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Starfire is the light, Raven is the dark. While neither are particularly tomboyish, Starfire is a perky princess with a bright color palette, Raven is a stoic Lady of Black Magic with a darker color palette.
• Lighter and Softer: The '80s comic had a much darker tone than you might expect. Brother Blood was a cult leader with a penchant for Blood Magic, Terra was Deathstroke's lover and The Mole completely of her own free will, Raven was explicitly stated to have concieved when her mother was raped by Trigon and was often seen reeling with pain from using her abilities, Starfire was stated to have been a slave (with Sex Slave heavily implied) and Blackfire's interactions with her reek of predatory Villainous Incest, Cyborg's I Just Want to Be Normal-moments were played with all the seriousness you'd expect from a Real Life paraplegic and Gar's search for his parents was an all-consuming obsession that frequently led him to dump the team to track even the flimsiest lead (which caused all the friction one might expect).
• Limited Wardrobe:
  • The team even sleeps in their costumes. Justified since plenty of crimes take place at night and their home is a giant letter on an island next to the city.
  • This is repeatedly demonstrated for every character (except Cyborg, who doesn't wear clothes).
    • Robin's closet is revealed to contain only multiple sets of his costume, complete with gadgets for each one. When the other members of the team decide to try them on, Hilarity Ensues.
    • Starfire is shown carrying dozens of copies of her uniform out of her room when she goes to get married.
• Literal Ass-Kissing: Beast Boy does this to himself in "Wavelength."
• Little "No": Raven, in "Birthmark."
• Loafing in Full Costume: Pretty much everyone wears their superhero / supervillain gear around the clock, secret identities not being a big concern of this show.
• Locked Out of the Loop: In Season 4. Raven knows full well why Slade has returned, who he's working for, and what his new mark means, but doesn't want her friends to find out that she's destined to destroy the world and so withholds the information as long as she can. Slade throws a wrench in it by feeding Robin information and then deliberately baiting the team to a location that happens to hold all the answers.
• Loners Are Freaks: Raven.
• Loss of Identity: Cyborg's greatest fear.
• Lost the TV Remote: "Final Exam".
• Lotus Position: Raven is frequently seen meditating, mostly to keep her emotions in check, and usually adopts the lotus position to do so.
• Love at First Punch: Robin can be argued to have this for Starfire.
• Love Can Make You Gonk: Starfire has been known to do this when coming across something too cute for words.

M-R

• Macabre Moth Motif: Killer Moth.
• Made of Iron:
  • Everybody. Repeatedly blown through walls, or fall from great heights. Especially notable when it comes to Badass Normal Robin.
  • He shouldn't have been able to survive any of his fights with Slade.
  • Even mentioned by Cyborg at one point during "Haunted":
  Raven: His heart rate is off the charts.
  Cyborg: Blood pressure, neurokinetics - most people can't survive that kind of stress!
• Magicians Are Wizards: The Amazing Mumbo.
• Magic Is Feminine: Raven and Jinx are both female and the Token Wizards of their respective teams. Jinx is particularly notable for being the only female member of her team.
• Magic Kiss: Starfire learns languages this way; see Aliens Speaking English above.
• Magic Skirt:
  • Starfire has a really short skirt that magically sticks to her somehow.
  • Elasti-Girl of the Doom Patrol does as well, despite being 30 feet high.
  • Jinx's Minidress of Power may count as well.
• Male Gaze: The camera seems to suffer from this, but it's subtle enough you don't notice unless you look.
• Malfunction Malady:
  • Starfire is allergic to metallic chromium. It causes her to sneeze starbolts. Explosively.
  • Don't forget Beast Boy's cold-caused sneeze trigger transformations.
• Mama Bear: Raven, of all people. It just goes to show, you never can tell. "Nobody messes with my kids!"
• The Man in the Mirror Talks Back: In the episode "Only Human" Cyborg loses to the robot villain Atlas, who keeps his friends as trophies. Cyborg (the robot side) gets a pep talk from his reflection (his human side) to go back and save his friends.
  Reflection: So that's it man, you just going to give up?
  Cyborg: What else can I do? I gave everything I had. 100%.
  Reflection: Give more. Your friends are in trouble. You have to go back, you have to win.
  Cyborg: I can't win. Atlas is stronger, Atlas is faster, he's just a better robot.
  Reflection: But you aren't all robot! Half of you is human, and that's the half that can beat him!
  Cyborg: Time to take it up a notch.
• Marked Change: Raven.
• Marshmallow Heaven: In "Forces of Nature", Starfire hugs Beast Boy, as a cat, after forgiving him for the motor oil balloon prank. If you look carefully, Beast Boy is rubbing his face on her boobs. Hey, he's a teenage boy, what did you expect?
  • The Abridged Series subtitled this with "im on ur girlfriend rubbin on ur boobs!"
  • Puss-In-Boots Eyes: "You know you can't resist the face..."
  • Happens to none other than Raven. After getting back into their bodies at the end of "Switched", Starfire hugs Raven and for split second, we can see her head at a questionable place.
• Masked Luchador: Pantha, a rare female example.
• May–December Romance: Between Raven (teen) and Malchior (easily a few centuries, if not millenia).
• Me's a Crowd: Billy Numerous.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Terra. Guess what her powers are.
  • In a similar vein, Cyborg's cover identity when he infiltrates the H.I.V.E. Academy: Stone. This is more of a nod towards Cyborg's real name Victor Stone. The fake power more likely came about because of the name, not the other way around.
• Metaphorgotten: "Run run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me... catch you, uh... I'm Billy Numerous!"
• Midair Collision: There are a bunch of missiles heading toward a bridge so Speedy starts jumping on each of them to change the course so they crash into each other.
• Military Mashup Machine: Submarine + rockets = spacesub!
• Mind-Control Eyes:
  • The Teen Titans have pink-tinted eyes in the episode "Mother Mae-Eye", when they are under the titular character's spell.
  • Brother Blood's victims have glowing red eyes when he's directly controlling their actions, but normal ones when they're just being influenced.
  • Beast Boy, along with the citizens of Jump City, have the stereotypical spirals when under Mad Mod's hypnosis.
• Mind Rape:
  • Slade's attack on Raven.
  • Raven's first battle with Dr. Light.
  • Cyborg almost suffers this at the hands of Fixit.
  • Robin in the episode "Haunted" suffers one big Mind Rape.
• Mirror Match:
  • Happens most commonly with Robin. All are Badass Normals who conceal their eyes/face and use martial arts/gadgets to compensate their lack of powers. To list there is Red X, and Speedy.
    • The only exception is Slade, who actually is an enhanced metahuman, he is also the most prominent example for being Robin's Shadow Archetype and greatest foe.
  • Cyborg gets one in his fight against Atlas, and multiple in the form of several robotic duplicates. He also has a minor one in Thunder. Both are blue, super strong, and use sonic weaponry that manifest as blue energy beams. Their opening attacks were even a 1-1 mirror and sent each other flying back.
  • Starfire gets one in the form of her older sister: Blackfire.
  • Beast Boy gets one when both he and Adonis become werewolf like creatures and battle.
• Missing Mom: Arella. Someone had to give Raven her looks.
• The Mole:
  • Terra.
  • Robin, when he is recruited as Slade's apprentice in exchange for his friends' lives.
• Mirror Character:
  • The basis of Slade's We Can Rule Together crusade towards Robin. The team even calls Robin out on it a few times, after he does something dickish.
  • Demonstrated terrifyingly effectively in the Season 4 finale, when Slade and Robin fight off an army of Trigon's lava monsters, using the exact same moves. As Robin points out though, there is one major fundamental difference between them:
    Robin: "He doesn't have any friends."
• Mistaken for Imprisonment: In the episode "Snowblind", Starfire, after nearly freezing to death in a snowstorm, wakes up in a room where a window separates her from Red Star. She immediately demands to be let out before Red Star explains he's the one being imprisoned and that Starfire is free to leave.
• Monochrome Past: In "Snowblind", Red Star's flashback as he explains how he got his powers is all in grayscale.
• Monster of the Week: The Titans have a couple of villains who qualify (many whom the Brotherhood of Evil recruits). Some villains were lucky to have two appearances.
• Mood Whiplash: The show basically had three kinds of episodes: dark and serious ones with occasional comedy, largely serious plotlines but with plenty of wacky hijinks on the side, and completely insane goofy ones. Apart from the multiparters, which were pretty much all the first type, all bets were off as to what the next episode would be like, and it wasn't at all uncommon for something serious to be followed up immediately by something bizarre (or vice-versa).
  • "Fractured" goes from Larry's Cartoony Crayon World to Rancid's Gothtastic Reality.
    • Raven (in regard to the latter): "Cool! I-I mean, oops."
  • "The Sum of His Parts" goes back and forth between two storylines. The main one features Cyborg being held prisoner by Fixit, who wants to remove his human parts and turn him into a full robot, and almost having his memories erased in a scene that could rival "Birthmark" for Mind Rape factor. The subplot features the rest of the Titans in their efforts to catch Mumbo, who they think is responsible for Cyborg's disappearance, in a chase scene over-the-top with silliness and visual gags.
  • "Birthmark" starts out with the Titans battling Dr. Light. They joke about his incompetence, and go out for doughnuts, all except for Raven. And then, in a remote location, Slade bursts out of the ground after two seasons of being dead. It gets worse.
• Mooks: Various villains and villainous factions have these, H.I.V.E. soldiers and Trigon's Fire Demons are prime examples.
  • Mecha-Mooks: Slade's minions, the robot commandos. Also, Mad Mod's Robot Army.
• More Dakka: Cyborg when Slade's army starts marching to Titans Tower ("The End (Part 1)"). Arm cannons? Try two giant arm cannons, MMM-grade missile launchers in the chest and shoulders, a giant cannon on his shoulder, and draining the Tower's power to feed it all. Of course, Slade is left standing, his army rises out of the ground, and Cyborg is completely drained afterwards.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The monster from "Wicked Scary" ("Fear Itself").

• Most Common Superpower: Raven is... very well... "developed", compared to the other female characters. Starfire is a very (emphasis on very) close second, with poor Terra as dead last. This is funny, considering how curvaceous Starfire is in the comics (more so than Raven).
• The Movie: Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo.
• Mr. Fanservice: Some of the males were this, especially Aqualad and Nightwing.
• Ms. Fanservice: Starfire and Raven seem to be nearly neck-and-neck here.
• Mud Wrestling: The infamous fight between Raven and Terra. It's well-known for (mostly) averting the usual fanservice and is instead packed with brutal attacks, cruel taunts, and a seeming death by drowning.
• Mugged for Disguise: In "Revved Up" Starfire and Raven can't fly, so they mug a couple of Z-list supervillains and steal their costumes so they can get on the bus full of supervillains and continue following the race.
• Mugging the Monster: The hunters in "Snowblind", who initially laugh when Red Star says that he doesn't want to hurt anyone.
• The Multiverse: Teen Titans Go! Vs Teen Titans has this incarnation of the Titans meet their counterparts from the 2013 show Teen Titans Go!, which exists in a seperate universe, and has them encounter other versions of the Teen Titans such as their counterparts from the Tiny Titans comics, The New Teen Titans comics which the show was based on and the DC Animated Movie Universe.
• Mushroom Samba:
  • A very unfunny version. In the episode "Haunted", Robin accidentally inhales an unnamed hallucinogen from an old mask of Slade's. Unlike most examples, however, this Mushroom Samba leads to one of the darkest episode of the series. Robin hallucinates that Slade is everywhere and goes on a rampage trying to stop him, even going so far as physically hurting Starfire, his love interest, and threatening to "take down" his team if they try restraining him. The drug manifests every blow on his body as though he really is battling someone, and so before he realizes that bright light disperses the visions, he's nearly beaten to death by himself.
  • Cyborg gets his turn in "Crash", when Beast Boy accidentally gives him a computer virus. He runs around crazily and eats everything in sight, while having strange food-related hallucinations.
• Must Make Her Laugh: Beast Boy tries to make Raven laugh throughout the series, after seeing her laugh in the prequel episode, succeeding twice, once in the Journey to the Center of the Mind and again when a cold has caused him to randomly transform.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: When Cyborg is unveiling the T-Car:
  Cyborg: "Ladies and gentlemen...and whatever Beast Boy is."
• My God, What Have I Done?: Beast Boy in "The Beast Within" when chemicals causes him to become complete feral. He kidnapped Raven and knocked her into catatonia.
• Mystical White Hair:
  • Malchior actually Rorek is a pretty boy with piercing blue eyes and long white hair constantly fluttering in the wind of battle.
  • The Chrysalis Eater first approaches Starfire as a wise woman in a white dress with pink eyes, white skin, and white hair.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In one episode, Red X, an alter ego Robin used, returns, and it's definitely not Robin. On BB's board-o'-theories, a careful viewer can notice "Jason Todd" and Nightwing. And "Long Lost Brother".
  • Larry's real name: "Nosyarg Kcid" in "Fractured".^note Dick Grayson spelled backwards.
  • Beast Boy being referred to as a "changeling" in "Winner Take All".^note Changeling is name Beast Boy used upon joining the Titans in the comics.
  • When Cyborg infiltrates H.I.V.E., he uses the alias "Stone"; in the comics, his civilian identity is Victor Stone.
    • In the same episode, Beast Boy shuts up Robot!Cyborg by turning into a starfish and clamping over his face, in a manner very reminiscent of classic DC villain Starro the Conqueror.
  • A lot of the lines from Terra's episodes are slightly changed from The Judas Contract, such as Terra referring to Raven as a "witch" (she referred to her as that a lot in the comics). Terra being turned to stone and the monologue is also very reminiscent of Terra's burial statue and the monologue during her death.
  • Beast Boy's infinite movie and TV show knowledge is possibly a reference to the fact that he was, at one point, a television actor in the comics.
  • In "Mother Mae-Eye", the titular villain character combs Robin's hair in the style that the original Dick Grayson version of the character wore (y'know, the one without pants), which he eventually shakes out. His hair also slips into this for a few seconds in "Date With Destiny". He's very quick to shake it out.
  • When Beast Boy dresses up in Robin's costume, he jumps through a screen held by Starfire that proclaims him "The Sensational Character Find of 1965". This is an homage to the title page of Robin's first ever appearance in Detective Comics, and the date of Beast Boy's first appearance (Robin himself was "The Sensational Character Find of 1940").
  • In the "The End, Part 1", Beast Boy finds a penny, with the date of 1964 which he then gives to Raven for "good luck". The Teen Titans debuted in The Brave and the Bold #54 (July 1964).
  • Right before Robin and Starfire have their big damn kiss in the movie, she tells him to "Stop talking". It's rather minor, but Starfire said variations of this frequently to Dick Grayson in the comics.
  • In "Prophecy", Slade mentions that he's actually enjoying working for someone else, (in this case Trigon) a reference to his role as a mercenary in the comics.
  • In "For Real", Control Freak fanboys over the main cast, and the taglines he gives them—"Teen Wonder", "Mistress of Magic", "Shapeshifter Supreme", "Half-Man Half-Robot", and "Alien Powerhouse"—are all directly lifted from the introductory captions◊ of the original Wolfman/Pérez New Teen Titans comics.
  • In "Date With Destiny", Starfire gets into a Cat Fight with Kitten, half of the villainous duo of the episode with her father Killer Moth. Aside from Kitten being named what she is, this—and the cat sound effects that are used for humor during their fight—are especially fitting with Starfire since, in the original comics, it was explained that her species, the Tamaranians, are basically superpowered alien humans who evolved from cats.
    • This is further emphasized in "Bunny Raven… or… How to Make a Titanimal Disappear" where Mumbo Jumbo turns her into a cat.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: During the Titans' first meeting with H.I.V.E., after the other four Titans are eliminated from the fight, Robin simply motions for them to Bring It and then all three attack at once and send him plummeting into the sewers.
• Never Say "Die": Played completely straight, even the reason why Slade went by his civilian name rather than his codename in the comics: Deathstroke. The most egregious example would have to be in the season 2 finale where just about every variation of death and kill is used but the actual words: Destroy, annihilate, exterminate, eliminate, etc.
• Never Split the Party:
  • As explained by Beast Boy.
    Beast Boy: When you split up, the monster hunts you down one at a time, starting with the good-looking funny relief guy -- ME!
  • He doesn't die, but he's the first to go down.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Raven. There are possible justifications for it, such as just using new spells or perhaps being afraid to go all out due to her demon nature.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Terra could have been persuaded from Slade's influence earlier if it wasn't for the fact that Beast Boy pushes her off the edge when he declines her friendship at the very end of "Betrayal". He proceeds to blame himself for it in "Aftershock"—even though he'd been under the considerable emotional duress of realizing his friends were in mortal danger because of Terra's betrayal.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Thanks to Terra going ridiculously overboard in trying to destroy the Titans and the city, and generally prove herself a villain, the Titans manage to put aside any past feelings toward her and kick her butt easily the next time she confronts them by herself. And then Slade does some fixing of his own when he decides to be an asshole to Terra and take physical control of her through her supersuit, which is a big factor in Terra's final Heel–Face Turn.
• No Cure for Evil: Averted by Raven of the Teen Titans. She is a half demon and uses dark/shadow magic, but one of her magic abilities is to heal people.
• No Ending: The last episode, verging on Mind Screw territory.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • Pretty much the entirety of "Haunted".
  • Each of the Titans are capable of giving a good one when they really cut loose. Usually that requires either Heroic Resolve or a Berserk Button to be pushed, however.
• No One Could Survive That!: Slade ending up in a lava pit. We even see his mask swallowed by the lava. Toasty. Ironically for a superhero show, Slade genuinely didn't survive. When he returns, it's due to a demonic overlord resurrecting him but even then, Slade is still not truly alive.
• No-Sell:
  • Occurs semi-regularly, but a notable example is in "Wavelength" when Cyborg hits Brother Blood with a (small) missile and there isn't even any Clothing Damage when the smoke clears.
  • But that's nothing compared to "The End: Part One": While trying to stop Slade and his army of fire demons from entering the Tower and taking Raven, Cyborg plugs into the Tower's power supply and unleashes a pair of gigantic shoulder cannons whose payload is implied to be somewhere in the vicinity of a suitcase nuke. When the dust clears, Slade just cracks his neck back into place while the fire demons promptly regenerate.
• Not Just a Tournament: In "Winner Take All", a number of teen superbeings are teleported to an unknown location, where the Master of Games invites them to take part in a Tournament of Heroes that will determine which of them is the greatest young hero on Earth. What the competitors don't know is that when they lose, they're trapped within the Master's jewel so he can use their powers.
• Not So Above It All: Raven dressing up as Robin in "The Quest" after Starfire, Beast Boy, and Cyborg urge her to do so.
  Raven: You know, Robins, I've gotta admit, the mask makes me feel (Luminescent Blush) ...cool.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Bobby, the giant teddy bear that Melvin created. "Created" as in Melvin's power is to make things she imagines real.
• Not This One, That One: In "Betrothed", Starfire returned to her home planet for her Arranged Marriage. When her sister announced Starfire's husband-to-be, a beautiful Tamaranean boy showed up and Starfire was actually looking forward the idea of being his wife. The boy then revealed a hideous-looking alien as the actual husband-to-be, much to Starfire's horror.
• The Notable Numeral: The H.I.V.E. Five.
• Nothing Personal: Said by Jinx right before attacking her ex-teammates.
• Occidental Otaku:
  • Beast Boy. Not only he knows his sci-fi knowledge, he's a manga worshipper. Curiously, despite being one, BB doesn't actually seem to know what it means.
  • And Control Freak. Can't forget him.
  • Starfire technically counts in the Titans in Tokyo movie where she quickly mastered playing a combination Guitar Hero/DDR/Whack-a-Mole arcade game, where she gets the attention and praise of everybody in the arcade.
• Office Sports: Stankball, using a ball made from unwashed socks.
• Official Couple: Robin and Starfire, Kid Flash and Jinx. For a while, Beast Boy and Terra.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Slade is fond of this.
• Oh, Crap!: Quite a few moments.
  • Cyborg in the TV Land episode when he reassures the team that the Jones Lake Monster is just a guy in a costume since they're in TV, then realizes that it WASN'T a costume.
  • Robin, Starfire, and Raven in "Crash" whenever Cyborg mistakes them for food.
  • Cyborg in "Bunny Raven"
  Cyborg: (his sonic cannon is turned into a flag toy) " 'Bang!?' Oh dang!"
• One Cast Member per Cover: Every season released on DVD featured one of the five team members.
• One Extra Member: The Hive Five end up having six members. Lampshaded by Kid Flash.
• One, Two, Three, Four, Go!: The theme song is the Trope Namer.

• Painful Adhesive Removal: Red X defeats Raven by sealing her mouth shut with an adhesive tape, thus preventing her from speaking Magical Incantations. When the Titans reconvene at their base, Cyborg forcefully rips the tape off of Raven's face, and although she only lets out an emotionless "Ow", her inner self is seen squirming in pain.

• Pardon My Klingon: Starfire occasionally spouts odd Tamaranean curse words and insults.
• Parent Service: This show happened to appeal to older fanboys.
• Parody Commercial: In "Don't Touch That Dial", with Rattling Off Legal.
• Peek-a-Bangs: Terra, which symbolizes when she's working for Slade.
• Pick on Someone Your Own Size: Fairly common due to the fact that they're kid heroes. Sometimes their villains actually are old people (Mad Mod being a prime example).
  • Slade has an obsession with Robin based on both spite and admiration. At first, he wanted to blackmail Robin into becoming his apprentice. After that fails, Slade seems to just want Robin dead, but still seems fascinated at the same time.
  • After Cyborg infiltrates HIVE, Brother Blood sees him as his archnemesis. Unlike Slade, Blood just straight up hates the kid and covets his power because Cyborg is the only one Blood could never mind control. It had a bit of irony in that Cyborg was one of the larger characters in the series while Blood was rather wiry.
• Pietŕ Plagiarism: Raven holding an injured Robin in "Birthmark". Added irony for being caused by Trigon and that they are in a church. He returns the favour a bit later once Slade is done with her.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Beast Boy! He even names himself as it in "Fear Itself".
• Poor Communication Kills:
  Robin: Do NOT separate! I repeat! DO NOT SEPARATE!
  Robin, as heard on the ship's communication: (static) separate! I repeat! (static) SEPARATE!
  Starfire: As you wish. (The ship separates. Cue the Titans being stranded on an alien planet.)
  • The scene just before also counts, as Starfire thinks Robin doesn't see her as a friend at all after his She Is Not My Girlfriend moment.
• Post-Kiss Catatonia:
  • The Movie's random Japanese boy from whom Starfire Mega Mans the language.
  • Also Robin, after Starfire first kisses him and then pushes him to the ground when he first meets her in "Go".
• Power Crystal: Raven's red forehead crystal.
• The Power of Friendship:
  • In the fourth season, Raven, after becoming her father's portal to Earth and being transformed into a powerless, younger version of herself, is able to regain all of her powers by drawing on The Power of Friendship and cause a complete Snap Back of the global destruction Trigon caused.
  • With the Robin/Slade dynamic, Robin's friendship with the rest of the team, by Robin's own words, serves the same purpose that Batman's code against killing does: it's the brake preventing him from crossing the line and becoming what he fights.
  • Usually the aesop of the show involves this trope.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Given Terra's past as a mercenary and having a relationship with Slade, despite being only fifteen, it's little wonder they made the changes they made to her.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Several.
  Starfire: I am sorry to disappoint you... but I am stronger than I look.
  Cyborg: NO ONE'S GETTIN' IN HERE!
  Beast Boy: I'm not a man... I'm an animal!
  Raven: This time, when I break you … stay broken.
  Robin: Lady, you are not my mother.
• Pretty in Mink: Raven's winter outfit is basically her uniform with fur trim.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Terra betraying the Titans by working for Slade as a spy is treated as a terrible act, and she is repeatedly called a traitor, but when Cyborg goes undercover at the Hive Academy and betrays them, it's treated as a good thing. Same deal with Jinx betraying the Hive Five by joining the heroes. The later case is more notable because she didn't even offer her old teammates a Last-Second Chance to join her in her Heel–Face Turn. In addition, she helps Kid Flash capture and cryofreeze her former friends as they are trying to escape during the final fight rather than simply allowing them to flee.

• Pupating Peril: In the episode "Transformation." Starfire starts to exhibit all sorts of ugly deformations as a result of Tamaranean puberty that she tries to hide with bulky clothes. Eventually, she's unable to hide them anymore and flies off in fear that her teammates will think she's ugly. She ends up getting captured by a spider alien that feeds on Tamaraneans that go through this process, just as Starfire ends up immobilized in a cocoon. The other Titans show up to save her, with Robin reassuring Starfire that no matter how monstrous she might end up looking after the metamorphosis, she'll still be their friend. It ends up being moot, because Starfire looks just the same after emerging — the only difference being that she now has extra powers.
• Pull a Rabbit out of My Hat: Mumbo. Even better, the rabbit in question is Raven. It's complicated. Cyborg sums it up — somewhat.
  Cyborg: So Let Me Get This Straight...: We're [Robin, Starfire, Beast Boy and Cyborg] inside Mumbo's Hat and Raven's inside Mumbo's Hat INSIDE Mumbo's Hat?!"
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "YOU! RUINED! MY! DRESS!"
• Puppet Permutation: The Puppet King cast a spell to put the Titans' souls into puppet facsimiles. The boys are all captured this way, leaving Raven and Starfire to save them.
• Race Lift: A possible case for Jinx. In the comics, she was Indian (and bald); on the show she's chalk-pale, but most likely Caucasian. However, the comics Jinx had a completely different set of powers concerned with elemental control. There was another Jinx with luck-based powers, but that one was male, in a spandex bodysuit which covered the head.
• Rain Aura: The episode "Haunted" subtly gives away a secret early on when Robin has this but Slade does not...
• Rape as Drama:
  • Seriously. Sort of. Many of Slade's lines had pedophilliac undertones as it was, but "Haunted" has him giving a speech that almost completely sounds like rape dialogue.
    Slade: No, Robin. I won't stop. Not now, not ever. I am the thing that keeps you up at night. The evil that haunts every dark corner of your mind. I will not rest, and neither will you... I'm very real. Could you have gotten all of those bruises from someone who wasn't there?
  • It's even worse in "Birthmark". Slade rips off a considerable portion of Raven's outfit. He then grabs her by the arms. While she moans in agony. Holy crap.
    Slade: You have no other choice!
    Raven: No!
    Slade: Yes. Look at it. Drink it in.
• The Real Remington Steele: A mysterious new criminal named Red X appears and seeks to partner with the Titans' enemy Slade. He turns out to be an alias of Robin, used in a ploy to investigate and/or capture Slade. In later episodes, the Red X costume is stolen by an unknown thief, essentially identical to the persona being portrayed by Robin. It's never revealed who stole the Red X suit, although Word of God is that he was not any previously-introduced character.
• Reality Has no Subtitles: Guatemalan siblings Más y Menos only speak Spanish and are not given subtitles. While this makes for some hilarious moments when interacting with their Spanish-illiterate team mates, they become comedy gold if you can actually understand them.
• Reality Warper:
  • Mad Mod turned the sky into a huge Union Jack... somehow. To say nothing of all the other unexplained weirdness that happens whenever he shows up. Though Mad Mod is probably more a Master of Illusion than a Reality Warper.
  • Trigon is a serious example, turning all of humanity to stone, reducing every building in the city (and world) to rubble, turning the oceans from water to magma, and covering the sky with smoke...in the space of about a minute.

• Rebus Bubble:
  • Raven + Larry = NUCLEAR EXPLOSION!
  • Ham and eggs, does not equal Beast Boy.
  • Ice Cream + Sushi = the flavor of Starfire's glorrkh dish, according to Terra.
• Redemption Equals Death: Terra, though she does return... Sorta.

• Remembered I Could Fly:
  • Seemingly played straight when Beast Boy wants a moped and Robin reminds him he doesn't need one, because he can fly. Then averted when Beast Boy says he already knew that, but complains that his arms get tired.
  • Justified in one chase scene where it's shown that of all the fliers in the group, he's the slowest and weakest. While the others all have modes of transportation (Robin has his motorcycle or being carried by Starfire, Raven can fly, and Cyborg has the T-Car), his animal forms rely on his stamina.... which depending on which animal form he picks, can vary wildly. It even goes into Shown Their Work territory when he does become a cheetah... but quickly runs out of steam, just like in real life.

• Revolting Rescue: "Wavelength", when the T Sub is destroyed on the way to fight Brother Blood, Beast Boy turns into a whale and swallows everyone to carry them the rest of the way. The rest of the team is grossed out, especially when they have to repeat it to escape at the end of the episode.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • Who is Red X?
  • What was in Robin's briefcase?
  • Who "won" the Tournament of Heroines?
  • Where are the adult heroes?
  • What was the deal with Terra in the series finale?
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • The Shalas from the episode "Stranded".
  • Beast Boy, probably in unlimited ways◊
  • It's Raven! As a BUNNY!◊
    Starfire: Awww! You look so cute!
    Bunny!Raven: (Death Glare)
  • Silkie too considering he is a large mutated larva that Starfire keeps as a pet.
• Right Behind Me: After Robin left for further training, Raven eventually joins the other Titans in dressing up as Robin.
  Raven: I have to admit, the mask makes me feel...cool. (blushes)
  Robin: The mask makes me feel cool too.
• Rise of Zitboy: Starfire, in the episode "Transformation".
• Rocket Boots: Slade's ninja-minions have these. Cyborg does too, but he rarely uses them.
• Rousing Speech: Most memorable is Beast Boy's speech in the Season 5 finale.
  Beast Boy: Look, this may not be the perfect team, but it's all we've got. We're the Teen Titans now! If we work together, we can accomplish anything.
• Running Gag:
  • Starfire's bad English and being unaccustomed to Earth culture.
  • Robin is short and wears a lot of hair gel.
  • Cyborg's car being destroyed or damaged.
  • Silkie becomes one in most of the episodes after "Can I Keep Him".

S-Z

• Sassy Black Woman: Bumblebee is immune to mind control because "There ain't a man alive that can tell me what to do".

• Screaming Warrior:
  • Everyone gets a turn, often when making their first move in any given battle.
  • Robin. Every time he moves.
• Screw Destiny:
  • Raven's ongoing fight against a prophecy that she will aid her demon father in destroying the world. Which she loses, but then turns it around.
  • Starfire had one of these moments at the end of "How Long Is Forever?"
• Script Wank: Lampshaded! After defeating Control Freak, Robin states that the lesson this week was to not watch too much TV... until he's reminded that they only won because Beast Boy watches too much TV, thereby deliberately smashing the Aesop into tiny little pieces.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • Trigon in season four, where his daughter Raven becomes his portal into the world, allowing him to turn every creature in the biosphere into stone and cover the planet in lava.
  • The dragon Malchior in an earlier episode qualifies, sealed in one of Raven's spellbooks.
• Second-Person Attack: Frequent. Cyborg does it in the title sequence.
• Secret Pet Plot: One episode reveals Beast Boy had secretly kept one of Killer Moth's grubs as a pet and named it Silky, with Starfire finding out. At first disapproving, Starfire quickly grows to be more attached to Silky than Beast Boy and promises to keep Silky hidden from the other titans, failing due to feeding Silky Tamaranean food that causes it to grow to monstrous size.'
• Self-Deprecation: Robin's "This Show Will Rot Your Brain" rant in "Don't Touch That Dial" could be taken as against the cartoon itself!
• Series Fauxnale: Season 4's three-part finale, "The End."

• Shaped Like What It Sells: The balcony of the pizzeria is shaped like a slice of pizza when seen from above. The floor is the cheese and the tables are the pepperoni.
• Shapeshifter Showdown: Beast Boy vs. Genetically-modified Adonis.
• Shared Universe: Downplayed with the DCAU. The show was written with its own continuity, and DC had a number of embargoes on what characters and superhero "families" could be leads in a show in separate continuity at any given time (which is why Wonder Girl and Kid Flash aren't part of the main lineup—Wonder Woman and Flash were leads on Justice League). The restrictions did loosen slightly near the end; while it's still not in continuity, there are little nods like Kid Flash's appearance in Season 5 with DCAU Wally West's voice actor. Justice League Unlimited answers by having the Teen Titans-original Kid Flash costume in the Flash museum, and even went so far as to have a brief Guest Star appearance by Speedy with the same voice actor and costume from Teen Titans.
• She Cleans Up Nicely:
  • Starfire is staggering in an evening dress and Opera Gloves.
  • Robin looks very nice in a tuxedo.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Said by Robin and then gleefully deconstructed in "Stranded", as it leads to Starfire being so upset at Robin's mixed signals that she is unable to use her powers (which are driven in part by emotional clarity). He first chalks it up to her not understanding what a girlfriend is, but she demonstrates that she understands perfectly.
  • They had ridden a Ferris Wheel together as he shared cotton candy with her and they watched fireworks (1x02); she also called him "my boy" while fighting Fang in "Date With Destiny" (2x06), which was promptly followed by a slow dance after the two were declared King and Queen of Prom. Robin also has several Save the Princess moments in "Betrothed" (3x03), including scaling the side of a massive castle to get to Star, and the two are otherwise frequently seen hanging out together and saving each other bridal-style. "Stranded" is in Season 4. No wonder Starfire considered them to be in some sort of relationship.
  • Subverted in "Date with Destiny", when Robin yells at Cyborg that Kitten is not his girlfriend—Robin truly did not like Kitten in any way, shape, or form.
• Ship Tease:
  • TONS of it between Robin and Starfire before they "officially" got together in The Movie.
  • Some instances for Beast Boy and Raven. Notably, the ending of "Spellbound" and most of "The Beast Within".

• Shonen Hair: Robin, probably to invoke an "anime" look more than anything.
• Shoo the Dog: Starfire with Silkie.
• Shout-Out: So many, they've been moved to their own page.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The exchange between Slade and Robin in "Masks".
• "Shut Up" Kiss: How Starfire "learned" her English. Also somewhat a subtle Smooch of Victory as she kisses Robin after he frees her from her restraints. Also Starfire to Robin in the movie.
• Sibling Rivalry: Starfire and Blackfire. Oh. So. Much.
• Side Effects Include...: In the Trapped in TV Land episode. The product is Zinthos, from the makers of Azarath and Metrion, and it gives you what you need, exactly when you need it.
• Sidekick Glass Ceiling:
  • Though not a sidekick, Beast Boy.
  • Also denied — Comicdom's best-known sidekick leads the team.
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: Terra
• 65-Episode Cartoon: More of a subversion, though. The series was expected to end with 52 episodes. Season 5 was just as much a surprise to production as it was to fans.
• Slasher Smile:
  • Raven when her demonic side first surfaced during the Dr. Light fight in "Nevermore".
  • Terra also cracked a few of these during "Aftershock Part 1".
  • Brother Blood gave a lot of these too, particularly notably in "Titans East Part 2" as he's tearing Cyborg limb from limb.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Even though this series will tackle some darker and serious issues from time to time, Teen Titans is definitely more on the idealistic end.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: The whole show dances a jig up and down this. Take, for example, season three, where you've got an episode that's basically one of the most brutal, drawn out mind rapes ever put to Western Animation, very close in production order to an absurd story about Cyborg accidentally downloading a virus and trying to eat every inanimate object in sight.
• Smart People Play Chess: Raven and Cyborg, the two smartest Titans, play chess with each other in one episode; the Brain and Monsieur Mallah also appear fond of the game. Cyborg even puts "Chess with Raven" into his daily Schedule.
• Smelly Skunk: Beast Boy uses this as an attack once, unlike most examples in this trope there isn't an actual gas cloud shown, but there is a fart sound effect.
• Something Person: Beast Boy, Aqualad, Gill Girl in the tie-in comics.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: With the H.I.V.E. demonstration in the very first episode.
• Sour Supporter: Their name should cue you but the Doom Patrol is a superhero team with a very different approach than the Teen Titans. For them, their mission takes the utmost priority since the knowledge of what would happen were their archenemies, the Brotherhood of Evil, to succeed understandably makes them very cynical. This contrasts with the Teen Titans's attitude — as teenagers, they have a less depressing view of life and have fun when not superheroing. Additionally, they also value teamwork and friendship more than the mission.
• Spider Limbs:
  • Gizmo
  • One-shot villain Fang, who has a spider for a head!
• Spinoff Babies: A similar case to X-Men: Evolution: the original comic book began with a team of teenagers, but most of the team members in the TV series first appeared as adults.
• Squishy Wizard: Raven is not nearly as squishy as she could be, seeing as she has at least some martial arts moves, but she's still the most vulnerable to direct physical attack of anyone on the team, and if her spellcasting is interrupted the effect will usually fizzle (or worse, go haywire).
• Sssssnake Talk: The snake guardian in The Quest.
• Stalker Shot: In Season 5 "Kole", after taking down Dr. Light, Robin gives Kole and Gnarrk a communicator and tells them to call them if they're ever in danger. Kole tells them they probably won't need it because they're going back to where they belong and no one's going to bother them there, until the camera cuts to The Brotherhood of Evil at their base listening to them the entire time through their communicator and they were able to pinpoint their location.
• Status Quo Is God: Every single episode that was not a part of the story arc (Like Robin becoming Slade's apprentice, the whole Terra storyline, Cyborg with Brother Blood, Raven with the prophecy of ending the world, and all of Season 5, which focused on the Brotherhood of Evil and a lot of characters we have never heard of before unless we read the original comics). Even with Terra, after the Titans were convinced to let her become a member of the Titans, she only made a split-second appearance in the next episode. The episode after that had to do with her though but of course the events of that episode restore status quo of the team. Most episodes will always end where it began, but there are a few exceptions.
• Stealth Pun:
  Robin: Cardiac, you're under arrest!
  • At the end of the theme song, to go along with the anime influences and the fact that Ami Yumi are the singers of the theme song, at the end the count to 5, but instead of saying "five," they say "go" at the end. This flies over the heads of those who don't know Japanese where "five" translates to "go" in their native language.
• Step into the Blinding Fight: For Robin in an episode he went on a quest and one of the trials was to fight a blind snake in his own element, a dark cave with zero light. He eventually has to learn to try and stop seeing his enemy and start hearing and feeling where the master is.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: Slade's name is a pretty interesting case. His comic-book name, Deathstroke the Terminator is rejected by the bigwigs at Cartoon Network because saying death is a big no-no and the fact that "Terminator" is still copyright from Governor Arnie. As a result, the producers picked his actual name, Slade Wilson. And the weirdest thing is that it works. Deathstroke sounds like a hitman's name, which works in the original comics because he's a mercenary.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors:
  • Beast Boy still wears the outfit of his old group. He ditches the mask after Cyborg calls it goofy, but that's about it.
  • Supposedly Robin is still wearing the uniform from his "old job".
• Stolen Good, Returned Better: The Hive takes over the Titans' (filthy) Tower. By the time the Titans retake it, the Hive have cleaned it up and alphabetized their CDs. The Titans are appalled, since now they can't find anything and they were saving that blue mold. But they did find the remote!
• Story Arc: Each Season had one.
  • The first season focused on the Teen Titans figuring out who Slade is and thwarting his schemes, eventually learning that he wanted to bring Robin over to the dark side.
  • The second season revolved around Terra, her acceptance as a member of the Titans, and her eventual betrayal of the team to Slade.
  • The third season's main story arc dealt with Cyborg coming to terms with himself and Brother Blood's schemes as the season's Arc Villain.
  • The fourth season was about Raven's father Trigon forming an allegiance with Slade and conspiring to get Raven to fulfill the prophecy of Trigon's arrival into our dimension and bring about The End of the World as We Know It.
  • The fifth and final season had a lot of focus on Beast Boy learning to be more mature and accepting that things change as well as the Brotherhood of Evil's plan to take out the Teen Titans.
• Strong as They Need to Be: The show is fairly notorious for this. Raven, Beast Boy, and Starfire are very powerful titans but will be subjected to The Worf Effect if the situation calls for it.
• Stylish Protection Gear: The team has protection outfits that still look good. In the episode "Snowblind", and others where it's cold, Raven wears a cape◊ and fur-trimmed tights◊. Robin and Beast Boy◊ also swap out for a more winterized version of their usual outfits, albeit more subtly. As for Cyborg, "stylish" depends on what you think of him looking like an angry Michelin Man. Notably, Starfire averts this with the justification that her kind is far more tolerant to extreme cold.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Raven — although occasionally someone manages to push Raven over into using the more aggressive Tsundere tactics.

• Super Hero: Hmm…
• Super Hero Origin: Oddly, not featured until the fourth-to-last episode of the series.
• Super Strength: Cyborg. Starfire beats him in this department, though.
• Superpower Lottery:
  • Raven, Brother Blood, and Slade while working for Trigon all seem to develop five or six new abilities in every alternate scene. Their typical powers are also pretty damn out-there. It's probably a sign when quite a few of Raven's episodes ("Switched", "Fear Itself", "Bunny Raven", "The End") feature her losing her powers in some way. And of course, her teleport-through-shadows power is only remembered when it suits the plot; if the Teen Titans need to be impeded in escaping a situation, the teleportation ability won't even come up.
  • Jinx's powers seem to let her do anything as long as its considered "bad luck" for the target, anything. This can be as simple as causing small explosions or electronic mishaps, to telekinetically dismantling the chair they are sitting on, to causing the ground itself to break apart so water mains can just so happen to burst out right into the person's face. Her powers definitely made her stand out among her comrades, who were just a Super Strong Guy and a Techno Wizard.
• Surprise Creepy: "Fear Itself". It starts off very light-hearted with Control Freak, one of the goofiest, least threatening villains the series has...and then becomes a horror story about Raven not admitting her fear, causing monsters to run amok the Tower.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Starfire saving Val-Yor didn't end his racism. Instead, he tells her that she is one of the "good ones", a compliment that neither Starfire nor the other Titans took well.
  • Despite having a Story-Breaker Power and being easily capable of handling the entirety of the H.I.V.E. Five at once with no real trouble, Kid Flash does not have unlimited energy and will get tired eventually. Madame Rouge deals with him by repeatedly hunting him down until he's too exhausted to fight back or run away, and it takes a Heel–Face Turn from Jinx to save him.
  • The series finale. The Brotherhood of Evil has been beaten, and the Titans have returned home. However, things are not neat and tidy. There's a new villain around, and Terra's seemingly back. The episode ends without either plotline having been resolved. In addition, they've been gone for a long time and many things have changed around town in their absence.
  • In "For Real", Aqualad uses his hydrokinesis to make water shoot out of the Titans' kitchen sink. When the episode cuts back from the commercial break, he's shown with a wrench fixing the pipes.
  • In "Kole", when the titans come across some hungry velociraptors and have Beast Boy communicate with them, however, his Animorphism allows him to turn into animals and talk with them, but not to actually control them, nor does it grant him any social affinity with them, all this gets them is confirmation that yes, they do want to eat them.
  • Robin and Terra's fight in "Aftershock, Part 1" on both ends. On Robin's end, he's a Badass Normal going up against a girl with superpowers. On Terra's end, she attempts to fight Robin (who was trained for several years by Batman compared to Terra's minimal time with Slade) in hand-to-hand many times instead of simply using her powers. This ends up making the fight seem much closer.
• Surrounded by Idiots: In the episode "Lightspeed", Jinx remarks "I don't know why I hang around with you nitwits." By the end of the episode, she's done hanging around with those nitwits.
• Swarm of Rats: Occurs as Starfire's "demise" in the episode "Fear Itself".

• Swiss-Army Appendage: Cyborg's arms (and possibly most of his body) qualifies.
• Swiss-Army Hero: Beast Boy. Well, he can be whatever (Animal) you need him to be.
• Swiss-Army Weapon:
  • Robin with his discs and Speedy with his arrows. See-More's eye can change into many different kinds of weapons or tools, from a heat laser to bludgeoning projectiles, to x-ray vision and even a blimp... unclear if See-more is more of a case of a weapon or a body part though.
  • Cyborg's arm can cycle through sonic cannon, blowtorch, and pretty much an entire toolbox.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: In "The End pt.II", Starfire, Beast Boy and Cyborg cannot beat their respective clones. So they switch and face each other's clones instead.Needless to say, they win.
• Taken for Granite: Terra in "Aftershock Part 2" and the entire world in "The End".
• Taking the Bullet: How Terra takes out Starfire-with a boulder aimed at Robin.
• Talking to Themself: Billy Numerous has a habit of holding conversations with his clones.
• Tamer and Chaster: In Teen Titans, everything was dialed back due to being a kids cartoon. Starfire in particular went from being an incredibly curvy Ms. Fanservice to being a lot less so, and currently even provides the page image for Adaptational Modesty.
• The Team:
  • The original team consists of Robin, Cyborg, Beast Boy, Raven, and Starfire. While their team consists of five members, they each develop in such a way that they aren't consistently in one role, except for Robin and Starfire that is.
    • Robin is The Leader, though being a teen himself, he is headstrong. He's led the team into and out of trouble and is a constant inspiration for the team to get through fights and to deal with their problems.
    • Cyborg, depending on which part of the series, is The Lancer, but also The Big Guy who's a Gadgeteer Genius to boot. More specifically, he's a personality Foil to Robin, but he's more of a Best Friend rather than a rival. He's the Number Two on the team. Moreover, while Robin fights mostly through melee attacks and is more of a martial artist, Cyborg usually attacks with his ranged weaponry and is more of a street fighter. His robot body gives him more physical strength and access to a variety of weapons, too. All of this puts him as both The Lancer and The Big Guy at times.
    • Beast Boy's primary role in the team is the Plucky Comic Relief, but he's got a trickster personality as well. He can transform into small or practical creatures for infiltration purposes as well as giant or strong creatures for fighting purposes. As such, he's also the Pint-Sized Powerhouse of the team.
    • Raven is, at times, The Lancer and, at other times, The Smart Guy. When Robin gets too hot-headed, she can act as a calming influence on him, though she also has this effect on other teammates when life becomes too stressful for them. She contrasts with each of her teammates in different ways, whether that's the magic-oriented thinking, or her serious demeanor, or her maturity — contrasting Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Starfire respectively. When it comes to anything magic-related, she fills the role of The Smart Guy.
    • Starfire is The Heart as well as The Big Guy. When she travels to a Bad Future, she learns that she is the team's reason for staying together through thick and thin, and throughout the series, she's the team member most concerned with friendship and staying connected. She's also a Girly Bruiser, with Super Strength that outmatches even Cyborg's, the ability to shoot powerful energy blasts, and endurance to the elements (including withstanding radiation and the conditions of deep space). She is also capable of achieving supersonic speeds, an ability that is more directly addressed in the show's comedic counterpart, as she has both entered and escaped Earth's atmosphere under her own power twice and evidently is versed in "the secret to traveling faster than light", per "Final Exam".
  • Titans East consists of five members, but two of them act as The Dividual. Bumblebee acts as The Leader, whereas Speedy is The Lancer. The former is more cooperative and collaborative whereas the latter likes to tease his teammates and is short tempered. Aqualad acts more in the role of The Smart Guy, being a super genius and is a tactics-oriented fighter. Meanwhile, Mas y Menos are The Dividual and are the strongest fighters on the team and reliant on brute force and momentum, making them collectively The Big Guy.

• Team Title
• The Teaser: Nearly every episode features a scene before the opening theme.
• Techno Babble: Usually Cyborg, but even Robin gets some moments. Also Beast Boy's 'knowledge' when it comes to all things sci-fi.
• Techno Wizard: Cyborg and Gizmo.
• Terrible Trio: The HIVE kids. Jinx is the leader, with Gizmo and Mammoth working with her. They're pretty dangerous on their own if they put their minds to it, but generally need a higher-up to scare them into that level of competence — Slade in their first appearance and Brother Blood later. Ultimately they strike out on their own, but without The Man Behind the Man they become joke villains. And then Jinx finally gets fed up with that and does a Heel–Face Turn.
• Theme Tune: "When there's trouble you know who to call, TEEN TITANS! From their tower they can see it all...!"
  • The tune was also used as a cue. If Puffy AmiYumi sing in Japanese, you're getting one of the wacky, goofy episodes. If they sing in English, it's a more serious episode. The only exception to this rule was the first Raven-centric episode, "Nevermore".
    • And if Larry sings it, it's What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs?.
  • In the Movie, not only is a translated to Japanese and back to English version sung by Beast Boy during a Karaoke scene, but also in the credits of said Movie, each of the five main characters sing (or in Raven's case, deadpans in a way that you KNOW she must be trying to look away from everyone) at least two lines.
• There Are No Therapists: One wonders how society is okay with a group of teenagers with no parental figures involving themselves in horrific violence every day without any support, except from each other. Also, each Titan has an extremely dark past which quite obviously still affects them and even interferes with their work sometimes, yet they don't try to seek help in any way, and in the case of most of them, simply try to bottle it all up.
• Thinking Up Portals: Herald helps Beast Boy and the other surviving Titans in "Titans Together". He can open up a portals with his trumpet, which he then carries them in a Pocket Dimension while he innocently slips by the Brain's perimeters. He's so harmless looking that the villains just think he's a random person walking through the area. During the ensuing battle, he also randomly helps others out by opening portals for others to jump through or redirect attacks.
• Throat Light: Raven in "Spellbound".
• Time-Traveling Jerkass: Warp, the Villain of the Week in the episode "How Long Is Forever?" is a time-travelling thief from the future who says that the items he steals were recorded lost by history, so all he's doing is enforcing a Stable Time Loop. Of course, when Starfire pursues him to the future, he's perfectly okay fighting her, and tries to break her spirit, gloating that he's going to leave her in the Bad Future that he's created.
• Token Minority: The Teen Titans avert this. We have Robin the white guy, Cyborg the black guy, Starfire the orange alien, Raven the gray demonic hybrid, and green Beast Boy. Considering that they have a habit of meeting minority villains and allies, this show averts this trope pretty well.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Dr. Light, of all people, takes one in "Kole", by virtue of having a better plan than usual, and having very loose limits on what can be done with "light-based" powers. He loses the level with his inevitable defeat by episode's end, however.
  • Control Freak takes a level in TV badass (not that it makes him any less dorky in the script) in "Don't Touch That Dial", and tops it off with "I Know Karate".
• Totally Radical: Beast Boy, Cyborg, and especially Gizmo were the worst offenders.
• Town Girls: Starfire is the sweet, naive, girly one (femme), Raven is the level-headed bookworm (neither), and Terra is the tomboyish new girl (butch).
• Traitor Shot: Guess.
• Transforming Conforming: Beast Boy can transform into any animal, but he is bound by the rules of whatever form he takes. The most inconvenient and noticeable being that he can't speak in animal form. And while he can fly if he becomes a bird, he does tire from the exertion of flapping his wings.
• Trapped in TV Land: Season 4, episode 1. Positively Troperiffic.
• Trapped in Villainy: In the first season finale, Slade forces Robin to become his apprentice and turn on his comrades, or else they will die.
• Trekkie: Beast Boy. It was actually helpful in the TV Land episode to defeat Control Freak.
• Trojan Prisoner: Season 5, "Titans Together" - easy to pull off with Jericho's ability.
• True Companions: The team. Raven even says they are her family.
• TV Never Lies
• 20% More Awesome: Subverted in the episode "Only Human." Since Cyborg is, well, a cyborg, the machine part of him can measure how much effort he's actually putting in.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Robin and Red X. Although, another person did adopt the Red X persona in a later episode.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Trigon and Arella, Raven's parents. He's a huge red demon with multiple eyes; while Arella is a beautiful young woman. Kitten and her boyfriend Fang fit also. She's a pretty blonde, with a nasty attitude to boot; while Fang is a human/spider mutant, but he only wants to develop his relationship more with Kitten.
• The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Raven to Trigon and Kitten to Killer Moth. They're both powerful evil monstrous beings (Trigon being a large red demon and Killer Moth being an actual large moth), while their daughters are both pretty.
• Unexplained Recovery: The show uses this a few times to varying degrees. The most blatant example is the second season finale, "Aftershock", where Terra hunts down and seemingly kills all five Titans. Her methods range from No One Could Survive That! deaths to smashing Robin with a boulder at point-blank range, at which point it immediately cuts to her kicking his crest across the floor to Slade, implying that yes, there was even a body, and she pulled it off. And then they all show up underground looking little the worse for wear and ready for round two.
  • Along with Terra herself. Maybe. Possibly.
  • Matched (if not topped) by the fifth season premiere, where the Doom Patrol falls one by one as they fight their way to the Brain's lair, except not really.
  • Red Star shows up among the numerous allies who come to the Titan's aid in the penultimate episode, even though he died by turning into a supernova in his introductory episode.
• Unflinching Walk: Robin has a "cool guys don't look at explosions" moment, even though there's no explosion and he crouches instead of walks.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Val Yor to Starfire, then to the rest of the Titans when they stood beside her.
• Universal Remote Control: Control Freak is a supervillain in possession of a reality warping remote. He can use said remote to make inanimate objects come to life, or to beam himself into TV land.
• Unorthodox Sheathing: Robin pulls out two Birdarangs at several points in the show's run and makes a sword out of them.
• The Unreveal:
  • Robin's attache case in "All Revved Up".
  • Also, whether the schoolgirl was really Terra in the series finale, and if so, how she lost her memory...or if she really did lose it at all. This is explored somewhat more in an issue of Teen Titans Go!
  • Also, anytime Slade's mask gets knocked off something happens to make sure we don't see his face (in Apprentice II he managed to cover it with his hand before more than a silhouette could be seen, and in The End II his face was just an undead skull).
  • In "Final Exam", we only hear the final sentence of Robin and Starfire's conversation as they enter the living room:
    Starfire: ...and that is the secret to traveling faster than light!
  • Raven's backstory gets one is "Switched" when she and Starfire have to know about each other's powers.
    Raven: I was born in a place called Azarath...
  • In "Haunted", it's revealed that the chemical reagent in Slade's mask that caused Robin's hallucinations didn't activate itself; someone had to have triggered it from outside the tower. We never find out who is behind this.
  • In Trouble in Tokyo, when Robin needs to ditch his superhero persona because he was framed for a crime, you think you will finally see his eyes, but nope, now he's got big 'ol shades. Actually, we DO get to see his eyes for a second, when Robin and Star's moment gets interrupted by the rest of the team. Of course, they're only specks because the animation goes haywire, but still.
  • Red X's identity and how he knew about the suit in the first place. One of the New Teen Titans shorts lampshades the Wild Mass Guessing on the subject of his identity, and the majority consensus as well. That, Red X is Jason Todd.
• Unusual Dysphemism: Starfire is full of these.
  Starfire: (putting a flower on Robin's lapel) I believe on such occasions, it is customary to wear a dead plant?
• Unusual Euphemism: Gizmo works in these like other people work in oils or clay. What the hairball?!
• Vague Age: It goes with the series lack of showing anything of the heroes personal lives.
• Values Dissonance: In-universe example. In "Betrothed", Robin is appalled by the idea of Starfire having an arranged marriage, but Raven responds by asking if the Titans have any right to question Tamaranean culture. The issue's rendered moot anyway, since it turns out Starfire was lied to and she didn't have to marry anyone at all. Besides, Robin was complaining for other reasons.
• Variable Terminal Velocity
• Variations on a Theme Song
  • Teen Titans had its theme song sung in Japanese at least once per season. Usually, hearing the Japanese cover meant that the episode would be of a more comedic nature.
  • There was also a one-time rendition of the song by an alternate-reality Robin (aka "Larry"), also in Japanese.
• [Verb] This!:
  Slade: All he needs is a little motivation.
  Robin: Motivate THIS!
  
  Chrysalis Eater:Since you have stolen my meal, I shall devour you instead!
  Starfire: Devour THIS!
• Very Special Episode: "Troq" (racism), "Overdrive" (addiction) and "The Beast Within" (Steroid abuse).
• Villainesses Want Heroes:
  • Kitten demands that Robin take her to the prom, or she'll unleash mutant insects on the city. Robin is not happy. Neither is Starfire.
  • Blackfire also flirts heavily with Robin in her debut appearance; however, this seems to be more about making Starfire angry than an indication of real interest on her part, as she doesn't even interact with Robin at all when she shows up again.
• Villainous Face Hold: In Season 2, Terra tries to quit working for Slade. Unfortunately the armour suit she's wearing is integrated into her nervous system, and as she tried to leave Slade uses the suit to drag her back to him and electrocute her. He grabs her jaw and holds her face still while he brags about how she can never leave him.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Slade and Robin, Brother Blood and Cyborg, Slade and Terra.
• Villain Teleportation: Red X
• Villainous Rescue: Slade in Part 3 of "The End".
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: The show always got darker whenever Trigon showed up, and the same could almost always be said of Slade.
• Visible to Believers: In one episode, Raven guards three super powered children all the while telling the oldest one her imaginary friend isn't real but at the end of the episode he's what saved all their lives.
• Voices Are Mental: In "Switched", when Raven and Starfire switch bodies, they still have their original voices.
  • "Fractured" featured some Mind Screwy variant where Beast Boy, Raven and Cyborg briefly spoke in Raven, Cyborg and Starfire's voices, respectively, after snatching the other party's mouths off their faces.
• Volumetric Mouth: Expect to see this in arguments.
• Waif-Fu: Starfire may be cute and beautiful, but she packs super-strength. She even beat Cyborg in terms of sheer strength, showing she was capable of lifting at least FOUR TIMES the weight Cyborg was struggling with, and with ONE ARM. "I am sorry to disappoint, but I am stronger than I look."
• Was It Really Worth It?: In the Robin vs. Speedy fight during the episode "Winner Take All," Robin wins, but Speedy asks this before being teleported away. An odd example, as both Robin and Speedy had both explicitly expressed that they'd do anything to win, and it isn't clear what would have changed their minds — Robin does break Speedy's bow, but neither seems to mind, and it's inexplicably fixed by the end of the episode.
• Wasn't That Fun?: One episode has Raven forced to take three little kids who are potential superheroes to a safe place to stop them from being kidnapped by the Brotherhood of Evil. At one point, she and the kids are trying to escape from Monsieur Mallah by riding in a cable-car, and the wire snaps. They go plummeting down the mountain in the car, which eventually crashes, but the kids land harmlessly in the snow. The two who can talk both promptly sit up and scream, "Again! Again!" Raven's reply? "NO AGAIN."
• Wave-Motion Gun: In "The End: Part 1". As a last resort, Cyborg hooks himself up to the Tower's electricity supply and proceeds to arm a truckload of hidden equipment. This culminates in double blasts from two massive sonic cannons, spiriting several hundred fire demons back to Hell. Probably bumped up the episode's JustForFun.Holy Shit Quotient considerably.
  • In "Go" it turns out that the Gordanians also have this on their ship.
  Robin: (to Starfire) You fight me, you kiss me, but you never stop to mention they have a giant particle weapon!?
• Weak Boss, Strong Underlings: Subverted with the Teen Titans. On paper, Robin, The Leader and a Badass Normal, is this compared to his True Companions. His team includes one magic user, a shapeshifter, a cyborg, and a superpowered alien. In reality, however, Robin can go toe to toe with any of them thanks to his superior fighting skills — he might not be as strong or capable of shooting beams but his martial arts training means he can outmaneuver them.
• Weak-Willed:
  • Beast Boy, a real hazard whenever Mad Mod rolls around.
  • Also Terra until Beast Boy tells her that she doesn't have to let Slade control her.
  • Averted with Bumblebee and Cyborg against Brother Blood; old guy never stood a chance.
• Weld the Lock: Starfire does this in the third episode.
• Wham Episode:
  • For good writing, "Aftershock".
  • For something more epic, "The End".
  • Also, "Apprentice" in season 1 shocked people with how dark it was, back when the show was new and hadn't established itself yet as a serious show.
  • "Things Change", the Grand Finale, due to Terra's unexpected return after 3 seasons of being presumed truly gone and rarely mentioned (twice in between her demise and the finale) and her apparent amnesia which nobody expected to happen
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • At the end of the Trapped in TV Land episode Cyborg has brought a soap opera star back to reality with him. What happens to her is never explained. Then again, how she got there is never explained, either...
  • In Season 5, what happened to the Doom Patrol in the finale? Their leader was shown to be obsessed with taking down the Brain, you'd think they'd know when the Brain made a move as big as capturing the Titans en masse and they'd do something about it.
  • Pay close attention to Slade's butler in the pilot, for he is never seen again. (He does make a brief appearance in the comic as a victim of Ravager, but his relationship to Slade is never elaborated on.)
    • He does exist and have a backstory in the main comics, though- his name is Wintergreen, and he's a relatively minor character. He appeared with the rest of the villains in "Titans Together".
  • Wonder Girl appears on the Wheel in "Titans Together", but never appears in the episode. Due to contract problems, Wonder Woman and her supporting cast weren't allowed to appear in shows she wasn't a main character of at the time. No Wonder Woman, no Wonder Girl. This doesn't apply to comics, and they somehow sorted this problem out by the time Young Justice came around.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Whether or not you think the episode "Troq" is a Broken Aesop hinges on whether you consider robots to be sentient creatures.
• "What's Inside?" Plot: "Revved Up" - what is in Robin's secret briefcase?!
• When She Smiles: Raven. Occasionally, this is a sign that something's horribly, horribly wrong... Or something truly wonderful has happened.
• White Void Room: Raven's chamber in "How Long Is Forever?"

• Will They or Won't They?: Robin and Starfire.
• Win Her a Prize: Beast Boy won a prize for Raven in "Sisters". She was less than thrilled and discarded the prize at the first opportunity five seconds later. It wasn't romantic in nature...no really, it wasn't!
  Raven: A giant chicken. I must be the luckiest girl in the world.
• Wipe That Smile Off Your Face: Parodied in "Fractured". After Larry breaks his magic finger, weird stuff happens. One of which is that Beast Boy loses his mouth.
• Wise Serpent: In "The Quest", Robin goes on a journey to get training from somebody known as the True Master. For one of the trials, he finds himself having to fight the Guardian of the Cave, a blind snake who teaches him to master his senses by forcing him to fight in pitch darkness.
  Guardian of the Cave: You only see what is right in front of you. If you want to find me, you must go beyond what you see. You cannot trust your eyes. You cannot trust your ears. I could be anywhere.
• Witch with a Capital "B": After Terra betrays the team, Raven, who initially didn't trust her but ultimately befriended her, calls her a witch in a spiteful, bitter tone.
• Wolverine Claws: Cheshire from Season 5's finale sports these.
• Word Salad Lyrics: The Japanese theme song. It's not a translation of the theme song, to put it simply.
  Today we'll uphold traffic laws! TEEN TITANS!
  We'll eat anything without preference! TEEN TITANS!
  Earthquakes, thunder, fire, Dad
  Language Arts, Arithmetics, Science, Social Studies
  We're not afraid of anything
  TEEN TITANS! GO!
• World-Healing Wave: At the end of Season 4.
• World Limited to the Plot: With a couple episodes being exceptions, used with full force until Season 5. A good example of this is that despite Robin, Aqualad, Speedy, and Kid Flash being characters, we never even hear the hero names of their adult counterparts mentioned. We also never hear Robin's real name, though it's implied a couple of times to be Dick Grayson.
• Wrench Wench: Raven, of all people, though its easy to miss. Terra has this aesthetic, but isn't.
• X Called; They Want Their Y Back: In "Revved Up", Ding Dong Daddy taunts Cyborg with "The junkyard called! They want their scrapheap back!".
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: Kyd Wykkyd seems to have a serious aversion to the letter I.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Terra's now an official Teen Titan, made friends with her teammates and even had a little romance with Beast Boy. You thought she's going to be a permanent character, right? WRONG. As it turns out, after the debut appearance, she seeks Slade's help, and even give out vital information to him into order for Slade to send his robot minions to attack Titans Tower. For once, we should have actually believed Raven's instincts.
• You Are Already Dead: Robin does the Diagonal Cut version on an animated cardboard samurai monster in "Fear Itself".
• You Didn't Ask: The True Master when Robin asks why she didn't say who she really was.
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Raven is easily the most powerful Titan, but makes it clear that she has to avoid strong emotions or risk losing control of her powers. She proves this by administering a couple good Curb Stomp Battles through the series (see Dr. Light in "Nevermore" and Slade in "Prophecy") when sufficiently angered. Typically this terrifies the crap out of everybody, including herself.
  • A Continuity Nod in the beginning of "Birthmark" illustrates just how scary Raven was from "Nevermore". Just watch Dr. Light's reaction to seeing Raven for ostensibly only the second time. She must be pretty scary....
    • Or, as mentioned above, he's having emotional flashbacks to an event he cannot remember.
  • Beast Boy, of all people, is the runner-up in sheer scariness. In "Betrayal", he gets serious and nearly kills Slade while protecting Terra, relenting only after Slade Mind Screws them both. Then there's "The Beast Within," where mystery chemicals and fits of anger turn him into a ridiculously fast and powerful man-beast, showing what can happen when he stops being the Plucky Comic Relief and how much damage he's really capable of doing. In season four's finale, he even manages this transformation willingly. In "Things Change", he beats the living daylights out of Slade for suggesting that Terra wants to forget her past. Of course, it turns out to be Actually a Doombot, but considering the damage taken by Slade...
  • Starfire is another example, as seen in the episode "Go!". After escaping her captors and fleeing to Earth, she goes on a berserker rampage, nearly destroying the entire city (didn't help there was a language barrier with herself and everyone else at the time). The other four Titans were barely able to stop her, and that was when she STILL had on her ridiculously heavy handcuffs meant to keep her subdued. Just imagine how much damage she could have done if they weren't on. Starfire only stopped when Robin offered to get the cuffs off.
  • All of the Titans have this to some degree, if they get the right Berserk Button pushed.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: "Haunted", when Robin is haunted by hallucinations of Slade, Raven enters his mind and tries to calm him down by showing there is no one there - only for the hallucination to strike again and leaving Raven with a sore jaw.. And "Fear Itself", though in this case, it's just Raven's mind for everyone.
• Zerg Rush: About the only thing Billy Numerous can do. There's also Slade's attack with an army of fire-demons in the fourth season finale.

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"Titans, go!"

— Robin