These days, it seems that when you turn on the TV or pick up a book to catch up with your stories, you find yourself meeting the same cliché teenage characters over and over again. No matter where you look, in a family sitcom, in the latest young adult novel or on the big screen, whenever there is a teenage character, that adolescent almost always falls into one of the small variety of archetypes authors choose to portray their underage characters. From jocks to nerds, freaks to geeks, preps to punks, high school settings in film and literature have proven to be the breeding ground for some of the most tired, used up clichés in literature and pop culture.
“The first things that I think of when I think of high school are the jocks and the nerds,” said Senior Lindsey Martinez. Possibly one of the most cliché teenage characters of all time is the Jock, who oftentimes has a quirk or oddity that sets him apart from the rest of the team. The Jock or Athlete is usually portrayed as ravishingly handsome, the apple of every girl’s eye and the coolest of the cool. One notorious jock who is well known to the current student body is Character Troy Bolton from High School Musical. Troy is the package deal: handsome, cool, smart and he can sing (character quirk alert) and definitely a pinnacle for the cliché high school jock.

From esentially the top of the character food chain, we move all the way down to the bottom, where lies the nerd, the goofy character who wears pocket protectors, collects action figures on the sly and is chock-full of random and unnecessary trivia. Just to name a few notoriously known nerds, Characters Carlton Banks (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and Steve Urkel (Family Matters) fit the textbook description of a nerd.
Nerds and jocks constitute only half of the story in the antiquely gender-divided world of cliche characters. Junior Margaret Soriano said, “There’s always that one group of girls that are the mean girls. They tend to look down on the protagonist of the story and make fun of that person.” A perfect example of the ubiquitous, malicious teens portrayed in films, TV shows and books comes from the film Mean Girls. If the title isn’t enough to stress how pedestrian the trope is, then flip through any young adult novel set in a high school. See what I mean?
Now, no high school story is complete without, you know what’s coming here, the popular love interest. The popular girl, usually a cheerleader, or the super cool popular guy that every girl wants to “get with,” is way out of the league of the main character. The popular girl is constantly portrayed as pampered, stuck up and too-good-for-the-likes-of-you, yet somehow at the end of every story, she’s somehow fallen for the protagonist, even though he isn’t popular or cool. On the other hand, popular guys are often portrayed as having “another side” and being “different” from the rest of the cool kids. But not too different… because.then he wouldn’t be “cool” (think 16 Candles — he does have a Porsche).
It’s kind of funny how many authors/screenwriters tend to group teenagers, even though there are so many of us with so many dynamic characteristic possibilities, into such a small selection of categories. Sure, we see these cliché characters every day in the real world, but sometimes all the audience is looking forward to is something interesting and original. The teenager is commonly portrayed in a way that really is formulaic. As much as that seems a bummer, at the end of the day, the audience does still eat that stuff up.  So can we blame them?