Basic Trope: Children are portrayed as cruel, callous bullies.
- Straight: Alice is a 7-year-old and bullies the other kids.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is a 3-year-old who picks on kids of all ages.
- Alice is the Big Bad Enfant Terrible who plots the deaths of children and adults around the world.
- Alice is a neonate who dreams about becoming a Multiversal Conqueror.
- Alice is a zygote possessed by an ancient Eldritch Abomination who's desperately trying to escape her.
- All children are Always Chaotic Evil.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is a 12-year-old who bullies the younger kids.
- Teens Are Monsters
- Justified:
- Alice has parents who abuse her every single day.
- Alice is a psychopath.
- Alice is too young to feel empathy.
- Inverted:
- Children Are Innocent.
- Alternatively, Alice is a 37-year-old Child Hater who only thinks that Kids Are Cruel.
- Subverted:
- Alice may seem to act like a bully to other children but suddenly acts nice.
- Alice seems like a bully at first, but it's because she has anger issues that she doesn't know how to deal with. She gets help from a therapist and her behavior improves.
- Alice seems like a bully at first, but it turns out that a demon is possessing her and making her act that way. The demon eventually leaves her body or is exorcised and she turns out to be a nice person.
- Double Subverted:
- Only because she's hiding her true personalities and using them for her own selfish purposes.
- Only because she wants the therapist to get off her case. As soon as her parents stop taking her to the therapist, she reverts back to her old behavior.
- The real Alice is just as bad as the demon that was possessing her, if not worse.
- Parodied: Alice is essentially a super-villain with her own secret lair and plans for world domination.
- Zig Zagged: Alice switches from mean to nice depending on a certain mood she's in.
- Averted: Alice is neither cruel nor kind.
- Enforced:
- The writer has a distaste for children and plans on portraying children as monsters.
- The writer is writing a story with a cast full of children, and they want to make a point about how children can be cruel sometimes. So the writer adds a child to the cast whose role is to be The Bully and bully the child protagonist.
- Lampshaded: "Your mother should have aborted you, Alice."
- Invoked:
- Alice's parents teach her how to be mean to other children to make her feel special.
- The Corrupter turns Alice into a cruel kid.
- Exploited: Bob is a classmate of Alice who sees that Alice keeps the other kids under her heel with constant bullying, so he tries to get on her good side to also control the other kids to an extent.
- Defied:
- "No, children are not mean, let alone total sociopaths, so we're going to have something not even Alice would cross."
- Children are taught empathy so they understand why it's wrong to hurt others, and instead learn to be kind to eachother.
- Alice is punished for her misbehavior and grown-ups try to make her understand why bullying is bad.
- Alice goes to therapy sessions to deal with her bullying tendencies.
- Discussed: "Just because Alice is a child and doesn't know any better doesn't mean her actions are excusable."
- Conversed: "Do you think the author created Alice as a representation of how he feels about real-life children?"
- Deconstructed: Sally the Social Worker cannot understand why Alice still chooses to be cruel despite having no Freudian Excuse: she lives a somewhat comfortable life, no one bullies her, and has a loving supporting family. Because of this, Sally begins to question if all children are like Alice.
- Reconstructed: Sally acknowledges that there are some children like Alice who are a lost cause, but the majority of kids aren't all like that, and children mostly do cruel things because something in their lives made them that way. (Still not an excuse since they still chose to be that way.)
- Played For Laughs: Alice wishes to rule the world while delivering an Evil Laugh.
- Played For Drama: Alice's parents disowns her because of her heartlessness, and whether or not Alice cares, she now has to fend for herself alone with most of the world wanting her dead.
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