Updated September 3, 2020 6.1K votes 1.5K voters 561.6K views
Over 1.5K Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of Fictional Children Who Will Be The Most Messed Up Adults
Voting Rules
Vote up the fictional characters who seem like they're going to struggle.
Today we pit nature against nurture as we look at fictional children who are going to make for some messed up adults. Does it come from parenting? Is it something already built into their DNA? Or does it have to do more with the environment they’re brought up in? Some of these characters have to avenge their families, some are required to be leaders before their time, and some are raised in truly awful worlds. Look at the precious ragamuffins below, and vote up the kids you feel certain are going to have a tough time as adults.
Plain and simple, Mathilda will never know a normal life. Even if her family wasn’t slain, it didn’t look like it was a happy life to be brought up in. She wouldn’t be a contract killer, but she would have been unhappy and would have carried on the dysfunction to her children - and that’s only if she didn’t run away before it became too much.
Mathilda’s life is pretty laid out for her in Leon. She’ll live a lonely life with nothing really to live for. There will just be the job and the money that comes after.
John Connor is a living paradox. His mother is a mental institution patient and his father is not born yet to travel into the past to impregnate his mother - good luck explaining that to a therapist. Also you've got the fact that his destiny to be the leader of the human resistance against robots has been erased. Good luck finding the same level of excitement and meaning when working in a cubical. Sarah Connor is his rock, but she’s also very unstable, even if she is justified in what she fears. She wouldn’t be able to shake all her mental strife off once the events of T2 ended, and she broke out of the mental institution. She’d always have to be on the run or if she got caught she’d be recommitted because there’s no way to prove their story of the robot apocalypse.
Kevin McCallister has got to be rife with mental demons. He’s got to have some serious abandonment issues, and a great resentment for his family who would forget him and abandon him on Christmas... TWICE. Not to mention facing off against two career criminals in a home invasion has got to be traumatizing for anyone at any age.
Walter Jr., AKA Flynn, is going to be a messed up adult because he never got a good sense of closure with his father. Their last face-to-face meeting was tense, to say the least. Also, Heisenberg is famous, so Walt Jr. will have trouble outrunning his legend.
Poor Arya Stark. Her short life is already marred by great tragedy and in the world of Game of Thrones we know it’s not the last of it. Arya’s life is committed to one mission and one mission only: revenge. Arya’s going to have to live a solitary and repressed life. She can never love anyone because everyone she’s ever loved ends up dead.
Even after Arya pulls off her life's great mission, what happens next? Maybe she becomes a heartless blade for hire like Sandor “The Hound” Clegane. There are few people to stay “good” in the lands of Westeros and Essos, and they usually end badly. Arya’s could become a powerful cutthroat who in the wrong hands could really sway who gets in power and who stays in power - a real wild card.
“Spoiled Rotten” aptly fits one Angelica Pickles. She was never taught boundaries, was never told “no,” and things always went her way or she would throw a fit. We all know people like this and they usually mean a world of hurt for people who were taught to think about others. Angelica is a product of her environment. She’s got the go-go work mom who never really gave her full attention and a spineless father who let Angelica walk all over him. In some ways she paid for this by not having friends her own age, putting all her affection into a banged up Cynthia doll.
It's easy to imagine Angelica would take more after her mother, climbing up the corporate ladder and becoming a Bill Lumbergh type boss for her office. She would have no problem making you work the weekends or laying you off just before the holidays.
