Supernatural Teens

Adolescence already feels like a supernatural event, the body changing without permission, emotions powerful enough to level a town, the certainty that no adult could possibly understand. The supernatural-teen genre just makes the metaphor literal. The new power that terrifies and thrills, the monster only you can see, the secret that isolates you from everyone: these are simply what being a teenager feels like, given fangs and a spellbook. That is why the genre endures, and why it speaks so fiercely to the people living it.

From a small town with a Hellmouth under the high school to a coming-of-age with claws, the real subject is always the same terrifying transformation: growing up.

The monster is always the metaphor

The genre's secret is that the supernatural is never really the point. Buffy made the horrors of high school into actual demons, Ginger Snaps turned puberty into a werewolf bite, and Carrie made adolescent rage apocalyptic. The fangs are a way to say the thing that is too big and too embarrassing to say plainly.

Games found a tender register here, letting you live the small, defining choices of a strange adolescence yourself, where the superpower is often just the agony of deciding who to be.

And it is the engine of an entire publishing wing, the paranormal-YA shelf where vampire academies and shadow-hunters and small towns full of old magic gave a generation of readers their first taste of the genre.