Psychopathic Manchild/Playing With

Basic Trope: An adult villain has the personality traits of a child.

• Straight: Psycho for Hire Kent is an avid fan of cartoons and is tends to resort to childish insults.
• Exaggerated: Big Bad Kent plays with his toys, hires a woman to act as his "mom", and generally acts as though he's a ten-year old despite being around fifty.
• Downplayed: Kent plays with toys and acts like a child in private, but in public he tries to act his age.
• Justified: Kent had a very, very unhappy childhood-it's what lead him to become an assassin, and he hasn't had a chance to really grow up.
• Inverted: Kent is a kid, but is both a villain and acts with a taste for high culture, art, and generally adult pursuits (no, not those).
  • Creepy Child
• Subverted: The heroes find a well-used action figure in Kent's base and a television turned to a cartoon... because he has a young son, and those are his.
• Double Subverted: His son is also creeped out by his dad, on the basis he correctly suspects he's more mature.
• Parodied: Kent shows up to the council meeting sucking on a pacifier and wearing nothing but a diaper, a bonnet, and bandoliers. Nobody else comments on it.
• Zig Zagged: Kent acts like a adult sometimes, and like a child at other times, depending on his mood.
• Averted: Kent acts his age.
• Enforced: ???
• Lampshaded: "...Is it just me, or does Kent seem like a disturbed preteen wearing an adult suit?"
• Deconstructed: Kent's immaturity is a psychological shield-he's knows fully well that what he does is wrong, and takes no pleasure in it. Over time, his emotional growth regressed to a state of Ambiguous Innocence, allowing him to avoid the moral implications of what her does. When he was forced to confront the fallout, his mind broke, and he convinced himself he was "playing" with his targets, with a side of Black and White Insanity (a child's view on morality).
• Reconstructed: This doesn't help in the slightest, as he now views himself through that lens, and he eventually collapses into a suicidal depression, which the heroes help him out of. He preforms a Heel Face Turn and becomes a much happier person thanks to effectively "re"-maturing.
• Defied: Kent considers childish behaviour immature and unfitting for someone of his age, and is careful to act like an adult at all times.
• Discussed: ???
• Conversed: ???

---

Please don't wake up Kent from his nap-time while you go back to the main article. He gets... grouchy if you wake him up...