Alex Rider/YMMV

• Complete Monster: Just about every Big Bad, except arguable Sarov and Damian.
  • The only difference between Sarov and the other villains is his sentimental attachment to Alex because Alex reminds him of his dead son. This doesn't change the fact that Sarov still wants to kill millions of people and ostracize an entire nation from the rest of the world.
  • Special mention goes to Dr. Grief, a white supremacist who plans to dissect Alex. Alive, and without anesthetic. It was even lampshaded in the narration; Alex could not let Grief pull a Karma Houdini because he was a "freak" and a "monster" who didn't deserve to survive.
  • The final villain, Razim, takes this to horrific new levels. He's described as a pure sociopath whose greatest hobby is torturing people so that he can measure their. pain, ostensibly for creating a measurable scale for it in the future. Most of his experiments involve surgical instruments, in the same vein as Dr. Grief. When Alex is captured, Razim measures his emotional pain by killing Jack while Alex watches.
• Counterpart Comparison: Joe Byrne arguably does more for Alex than Alan Blunt ever does, especially after "Scorpia Rising".
• Crazy Awesome: Smithers. In Scorpia Rising, we're treated to this passage:

There was an explosion inside the house. Then another. Alex heard the screams of some of the men and wondered what exactly had blown up. The sofas? The toilet? With Smithers it could be anything.

• Die for Our Ship: Fangirls will make up any reason to hate Sabina. The most common pairings appear to be Alex/Fox, Alex/Wolf, and Alex/Yassen. Sabina-bashing appears occasionally in fics for any pairing, however.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • All four members of K Unit are very popular with fans. Wolf and Fox especially, thanks to their reappearances in Point Blanc and Snakehead respectively.
  • Smithers, for being a Crazy Awesome Gadgeteer Genius who consistently supports Alex throughout the books.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans choose to discount Ark Angel and anything after it in the series, instead believing that Alex died at the end of Scorpia.
• Ho Yay: It seems that the author enjoys going into detail about the male characters' musculature.
  • Especially prevalent in Ark Angel, when the soccer player is examining himself... and spends a good deal of time complimenting his body.
• Iron Woobie / Stoic Woobie: Alex has had a horrible life, but he hardly ever complains. He's remarkably composed even after Jack is killed in Scorpia Rising, save for his brief Heroic BSOD, though after that he is said to be much more cold and isolated, as you would expect.
• Moral Event Horizon: Alan Blunt arranging a school shooting to force Alex to work with him again in Scorpia Rising.
• Nightmare Fuel: For what was supposedly a kid's book series, it packed a lot of this.
  • Scorpia Rising takes this Up to Eleven. A shootout in a public museum with kids cowering and screaming as they scramble for cover in the first chapter. Then we meet Razim and his experiments...
• Paranoia Fuel: The ease with which MI 6... deal with Bulman halfway through Crocodile Tears
  • To elaborate, they erased all of his financial and personal records, then made new records appear as though he was an escaped Broadmoor inmate named Jeremy Harwood who had killed Bulman. Hell, they did all that in a matter of hours. Basically they executed his fate overnight as he slept.
• Technology Marches On: Combined with Comic Book Time, with the world incorporating new technology and referencing events that occurred throughout real history.....all without the author bothering to advance the story universe more than a year. The titular Stormbreaker computer isn't that impressive by modern standards and is rather quickly eclipsed by the iPhones that somehow appear just a year later.
• Unfortunate Implications: Herod Sayle is a Lebanese (Egyptian in the US version) villain (and a damn evil one), Alex is a white British protagonist. Could be subverted in that Herod was British, just not native.
• The Untwist: In Ark Angel, the fact that Nikolei Drevin is the real Big Bad and not Force Three is made incredibly obvious. Alex even lampshades it; when Drevin is about to "reveal" this fact, Alex basically tells him to not bother.
• Values Dissonance: Alex, on the whole, is a very well-adjusted child, but the narration has suggested that he seems to view clones as "freaks" and "creatures".
• What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Although the Alex Rider books have been written for kids, they have a large amount of violence, horror, some swearing, and even one use of the word "balls". Adults have also found a good read in them. And the Alex Rider movie, Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, got a PG-13 rating.
• The Woobie: Alex, and how. Within a year, he's lost his uncle, gone through horrific situations that no child - and indeed, no human being - should ever go through, only escaping by luck. Then he loses his housekeeper, the only adult left in his life who he really loved and trusted. And this doesn't even take into account the psychological damage that he suffers from the horrors he's encountered on his missions.