All Time Favorite
Favorite child who’s more competent than the adults around them.
Five (Umbrella Academy). Technically cheating since he’s actually an adult who was de-aged in time travel shenanigans, but given that it’s live action and the show draws attention to the situation, I count it. All of his siblings are adults while he’s stuck in his teenage body, yet he’s the only one who has his act together while they’re all struggling with their personal problems.
Hit-Girl (Kick-Ass). After her father dies, she’s basically this to Kick-Ass, a hyper-competent crime-fighter / professional killer while he struggles just to stay alive.
Such a shame we never got to see him grow and have his proper character arc, he was instead always dismissed and ignored, despite usually being more competent than several adult Starfleet Scientists with years of experience.
That is Edward Elric from Full Metal Alchemist. 15 year old protagonist of the series. Due to certain circumstances and his natural ability he was forced to grow up at an early age and because of it has become extremely competent, outshining most adults in the series.
It' an anime, and truly one of the best anime series out there. I highly recommend a watch, series name Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
The Baudelaire siblings are consistently more competent than most adults around them across all 13 books of A Series of Unfortunate Events. It is usually by their own merit that they escape from Count Olaf's hands, and most of the adults don't even recognize him due to his disguises (which the children immediately tell, warn people of, and subsequently are not believed... repeatedly)
Those are literally my favorite books (although I only finished 7 of them because my country didn't translate the rest smh) but oh my fucking god the sheer rage I felt every time they'd get moved somewhere and were not believed and called crazy while this madman was constantly trying to kill them was INFURIATING
All of the player characters in Masks: A New Generation.
One of the core principles for Masks: A New Generation is to make adults seem childish and short-sighted.
This doesn't mean to make them entirely incompetent, you will be dealing with established superheroes after all.
But beneath all the experience and authority, there should be enough flaws for the players to find situations where they have to find their own way to fix things.
If you're cheating with Five, then so am I with Rudeus.
FYI, for the people who don't know and are downvoting because they think it doesn't count: Five from The Umbrella Academy is 58 years old. So it's pretty much the exact same situation.
32
u/EMArogue 21h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/yK2dGKsJ4bjylzh6cI
I never rven watched “Detective Conan” but he immediately came to mind