Examples for the film go here, and examples for the series go here.
- Bizarro Episode: "Spy Trap", one of the new stories in Secret Weapon, is a deeply surreal story about psychotropic drugs that is structured unlike anything else in the series.
- Broken Base: A sizeable portion of the fanbase thought Alex going into space at the climax of Ark Angel was too fantastic to be credible. Horowitz himself admitted a few years after its publication that he was worried it might not be believable, but decided to go with it because the alternative Earth-based denouements were too boring, straightforward or had plotting issues.
- Complete Monster:
- Stormbreaker: Herod Sayle is a multimillionaire who holds a petty grudge against England and the Prime Minister. After being bullied incessantly as a child and teenager by English schoolchildren, Sayle planned to strike back by creating a smallpox outbreak that would kill hundreds of thousands of children. Using his new Stormbreaker computers, Sayle hid small vials of smallpox into the devices so that they would be released once children turned on the computers. When Alex Rider's uncle, Ian, found out about this, Sayle had him murdered. Later on, after Sayle discovers Alex was working undercover for MI6, Sayle instructed one of his lackeys to torture Alex to death with knives. Once Sayle's plans are foiled by Alex, Sayle kidnaps Alex and almost shoots him to death, all while promising that he'll resurface in the future to strike back at England again.
- Skeleton Key: Conrad is a freelance terrorist and General Alexei Sarov's most trusted lackey. A former bomber who blew up his school and later committed terrorist acts across the globe, Conrad began to work for Sarov shortly after he was injured in an accident. After Sarov comes up with a plan to take over Russia by setting off a nuclear bomb and dismantling most of Europe, Conrad wastes no time helping Sarov get the materials he needs, killing anyone who interferes with their plans. Once Sarov kidnaps Alex Rider, Conrad tries to have him killed on numerous occasions, despite Sarov's demands to keep the boy alive. While Sarov wanted to bring Russia to a more stable country with him as its leader, Conrad only helped Sarov for the sake of getting rich, not caring that millions would perish in the process.
- Scorpia: Julia Rothman is an executive board member of Scorpia. Under orders from a client to spoil the special relationship between America and Britain, Rothman infects every schoolchild in London with nanites containing cyanide, planning to make claims that she knows can't be satisfied and make a less extreme demand to America with the same consequence knowing that they will meet them after that. To demonstrate the weapon and show that she is not bluffing, Rothman kills a completely separate group of football players without giving them a chance to be saved. She also manipulates Alex into joining Scorpia by getting him to think his father worked for them and was killed by MI6 when it was the other way around. Rothman is also an awful boss who will frequently murder her own men for failure and kills a colleague via venomous scorpions when he objects to her plan. When confronted by Alex, Rothman shrugs off the thousands of deaths that will occur, all for the sake of money.
- Scorpia Rising: Abdul-Aziz Al-Razim, better known as just Razim, is another agent of Scorpia, and is affiliated with them purely to slake his sadistic curiosities. A cold, unfeeling sociopath since his history of violence in his youth, Razim sold out his own parents and sister to Saddam Hussein before joining Scorpia. Come his involvement in Operation Horseman, Razim plans to blackmail Britain into handing over the Elgin Marbles, or else defame the country by revealing the contents of the Horseman file, ultimately to assassinate the Prime Minister of England and throw the country into a war. Fascinated by pain, Razim routinely tortures countless innocents to death in perverse "experiments", in an attempt to create a measurement for pain, initially claiming it for the sake of science but likely simply to amuse himself more than anything. When Razim captures Alex, Razim forces him to watch his mentor and guardian Jack Starbright blown up—in truth handing her off to the Grimaldi twins but keeping the emotional stab to Alex all the same, while casually adding the boy's emotional pain was so great, he may have to create a second measurement. From there on, Razim tries to have the US Secretary of State assassinated, framing Alex so that he'll be shot dead. Lacking the scale of previous antagonists but trumping all of them in sheer, frightening sadism, Razim makes his mark even in the dark world of Alex Rider as Alex's most personal foe.
- Crazy Is Cool: Smithers. In Scorpia Rising, we're treated to this passage:There was an explosion inside the house. Then another. Alex heard the screams of some of the men and wondered what exactly had blown up. The sofas? The toilet? With Smithers it could be anything.
- Die for Our Ship: A softer version that usually doesn't involve actually killing her, but the general trend of fandom hatred of Sabina Pleasure, Alex's primary love interest (though she ceases to be a love interest towards the latter books in the series.) The most common pairings appear to be Alex/Fox, Alex/Wolf, and Alex/Yassen.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- All four members of K Unit are very popular with fans. Wolf and Fox especially, thanks to their reappearances in Point Blanc and Snakehead respectively.
- Smithers, for being a Crazy Is Cool Gadgeteer Genius who consistently supports Alex throughout the books.
- Yassen Gregorovich, due to his being a Draco in Leather Pants with Hidden Depths.
- Fanon Discontinuity:
- Some fans choose to discount Ark Angel and anything after it in the series, instead believing that Alex died at the end of Scorpia.
- More recently, some fans discount everything that came after Scorpia Rising. It helps that the author originally planned for the series to end there.
- Faux Symbolism:
- HEROD Sayle wants to kill all schoolchildren in Britain! (Although Word of God states it's meant to be a pun on "Harrods sale".)
- Damian Cray, hm?
- Julius Grief, his looks identical to Alex's looks in every way, appeared first in Point Blanc, but this trope applied better in Scorpia Rising as his insane and murderous personality was shown more. Later, when Alex killed Julius, psychologists described it as Alex killing part of himself. As Mrs. Jones and Blunt put it, the part that they created and never should have been born.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Poisoned nanoparticles in vaccines activated by tehahertz (basically 5G) beams... Almost an Unbuilt Trope of the modern conspiracy theories, considering what happened when 5G was unveiled in real life.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: The recurrent Shout Outs to James Bond—mostly comparing Alex to a young 007—became this in 2015, when Random House announced that Anthony Horowitz would be contributing a novel to the actual Bond series, titled Trigger Mortis. Becomes even funnier when Horowitz becomes the first person since Raymond Benson to publish more than one Bond story, Forever And A Day in 2018.
- The Villains of Point Blanc seem oddly similar to the main (human) staff of Superjail!: a Mengele-esque leader, a Brawn Hilda and a gambling addicted assistant.
- Iron Woobie/Stoic Woobie:
- Alex has had a horrible life, but he hardly ever complains. He's remarkably composed even after Jack is killed in Scorpia Rising, save for his brief Heroic BSoD, though after that he is said to be much more cold and isolated, as you would expect.
- Yassen, poor Yassen, his real name was Yasha. First his family is killed and village of Estrov is destroyed. Then he is introduced to the criminal underground of Moscow, after that he sent to work as a slave for four hellish years. He then becomes the cold assassin he was in Stormbreaker.
- Jerkass Woobie: General Sarov. The man is messed up in the head, but he's lost his son and watched his country go to ruin, at least from his point of view- the everybody eating at McDonald's and wearing Levi jeans thing might not be so bad per se, but he points out millions of people have AIDS, nothing to eat and live in perpetual poverty. Rather than receiving the Cruel and Unusual Death that typically befalls a Big Bad in the Alex Rider series, he commits suicide when Alex tells him he'd rather be dead than have a father like him; his final words are "Goodbye, Alex". In the graphic novel adaptation, he is visibly distressed by Alex's rejection and sheds a tear as he puts the gun to his head.
- Magnificent Bastard:
- "Yassen Gregorovich", real name Yasha, is a ruthless and efficient SCORPIA-affiliated assassin. After escaping the destruction of his home village, he uses his wits to survive before being rescued by a SCORPIA assassin. During his training, he develops a friendship with an undercover John Rider, who encourages him to leave the organization. After finding out that Rider is an MI6 agent, he decides to remain with SCORPIA, his first target being the man responsible for the destruction of his hometown. In the present day, despite his willingness to work alongside villains such as Herod Sayle and Damian Cray, he proves to have a moral code, as he refuses to directly kill children. He shows a particular soft spot towards John's son Alex, telling him that he shouldn't be a spy and that he should be living like a normal 14-year-old.
- "Point Blanc": The Gentleman is an assassin-for-hire, named such because of his tendency to gift flowers to the families of his victims. In the first chapter of "Point Blanc", he successfully kills billionaire Michael J. Roscoe by hacking into his office building's mainframe, moving his elevator up a floor, and replacing it with a hologram, causing him to "accidentally" fall to his death. By the time Roscoe's body is found, the Gentleman has long since disappeared, making him the rare Alex Rider villain to get away with his crimes.
- "Skeleton Key": General Alexei Sarov was an esteemed commander in the Russian army, who has become disillusioned with the end of the Cold War and the suffering of his people. Introduced as he coolly outwits and kills two mercenaries who try to blackmail him, Sarov plans to overthrow the corrupt Russian president and lead his country to become the dominant power in the world. Inviting the president to dinner, Sarov has him drugged and steals his plane, planning to trigger the explosion of a hazardous site of nuclear submarines, then release a doctored video to make the president appear indifferent to the crisis, which will spark an uprising and drive the president from power. Sarov handles every situation with a charming, sardonic wit, maintaining a genuine respect for Alex Rider for his sense of duty, and even handles his defeat with composure, calmly bidding Alex good-bye before shooting himself.
- Moral Event Horizon:
- Alan Blunt. Some of his actions are questionable to begin with, but in the ninth book, Scorpia Rising, he springs head-first over the line by arranging a school shooting in order to coerce Alex into taking his next mission. Said shooting hospitalizes Alex's best friend and Secret-Keeper Tom. It doesn't help that what he does leads Alex into a trap set by Zeljan Kurst.
- Yu planning to have Alex painfully tortured by forcing him to donate his organs to black market clients.
- Razim crosses the line when he kills (or appears to kill) Jack Starbright and forces Alex to watch. This might perhaps be the moment where Julius crosses the line too, as he's the one pulling the trigger on Razim's orders and gleefully rubbing it in.
- Narm:
- "When you bought me here, you made me play a game. It was a horrible, vicious thing to do." Why thank you, Captain Obvious.note
- From Stormbreaker, Herod Sayle's repeated references to his old school nickname, "Herod Smell", especially during his Motive Rant. Realistic? Probably. Unintentionally funny? Definitely.
- In Point Blank, the villain's plot is called Project Gemini. There was a famous Real Life space program called Project Gemini back in the 1960s. So, this novel has unintentionally humourous lines like these:
"We cannot allow you to leave, you know too much about Project Gemini.""I've discovered your whole operation. I know all about Project Gemini!"note - Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page.
- Paranoia Fuel: The ease with which MI6... deal with Bulman halfway through Crocodile Tears. They erased all of his financial and personal records, then made new records appear as though he was an escaped Broadmoor inmate named Jeremy Harwood who had killed Bulman. They did all that in a matter of hours. They executed his fate overnight as he slept.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Yassen's feelings about killing Ian, the brother of his mentor, are never really explored.
- Yassen Gregorovich's character in general. He is a fan favorite with a complicated history with the Riders (and Ash, the man responsible for killing John And Helen Rider) and yet he was killed off after a few short scenes (only one of which was face-to-face with Alex) in Stormbreaker and some longer ones in Eagle Strike, though he had his character's backstory told in Russian Roulette, which further deepened fan appreciation for the character. His death resulted in missed opportunities to explore aforementioned history with Alex and his family, Scorpia the organization, and Alex navigating the intelligence world with a competent person with the potential (and possibly will) to be on Alex's side, if not the side of the "good guys". Horowitz likely did not expect that the series would go on for as long as it did; tellingly, Yassen is Spared by the Adaptation in the TV series.
- Unexpected Character: Sir Graham Adair from Scorpia has an unexpected (albeit offscreen) Big Damn Heroes moment in Nightshade.
- Unintentional Period Piece:
- In Skeleton Key (2002), the Big Bad is an embittered former Soviet colonel who wants to return The New Russia to its former glory by orchestrating a coup d'état against the Russian government. In hindsight, the book was pretty clearly written early in Vladimir Putin's reign, before his reputation as a global powerhouse really became established. The President of Russia is a blatant No Celebrities Were Harmed parody of Boris Yeltsin, and Russia itself is portrayed as a chaotic post-Soviet Republic that just wants to embrace democracy and move past its old rivalries with the West. That portrayal became pretty outdated by the end of the decade, after Putin's aggressive policies actually did return Russia to superpower status, his increasingly authoritarian leadership caused most Western pop culture to portray Russia's government as a dictatorship, and the country's antagonism with the West went back to square one after Putin was accused of (among other things) conspiring to influence the 2016 United States Presidential Election.
- In a more minor example, in the fourth book, Eagle Strike, the only thing that gives Alex reason to suspect that the Big Bad is international celebrity Damian Cray is that he finds Cray's personal phone number on a hired assassin's unsecured mobile phone. Indeed, due to the Comic-Book Time nature of the series' timeline, in Scorpia Rising (published 8 years later in 2011, but set less than a year after Eagle Strike), a smartphone that can't be unlocked because it needs a passcode is a minor plot point.
- In Point Blanc, one of the characters is called Fiona Friend - a Punny Name referencing one of the Lifelines in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. When the book was released in 2001, Millionaire was a ratings juggernaut which ITV's schedules were frequently built around, and it was so well-known it was unlikely a reader wouldn't get the joke. By the time the Alex Rider books were coming to the end of their original run in 2011, Millionaire was limping to the end of its original run and was well out of the public eye.
- The Un-Twist: In Ark Angel, the fact that Nikolei Drevin is the real Big Bad and not Force Three is made incredibly obviousnote . Alex even lampshades it; when Drevin is about to "reveal" this fact, Alex tells him to not bother.
- Values Dissonance: Alex, on the whole, is a very well-adjusted child, but the narration has suggested that he seems to view clones as "freaks" and "creatures".
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: So you think this is a fun for young teens novel series? Not quite; the titular character is just a fourteen year old boy manipulated to work for MI6, he then endures many horrific things over a single year. This series can be considered the Neon Genesis Evangelion of Spy Fiction.
- The Woobie:
- Alex. Within a year, he's lost his uncle, gone through horrific situations that no child - and indeed, no human being - should ever go through, only escaping by luck. Then he loses his housekeeper, the only adult left in his life who he really loved and trusted. And this doesn't even take into account the psychological damage that he suffers from the horrors he's encountered on his missions.
- Yassen Gregorovich's backstory in Russian Roulette gives off this vibe.
