Find your tribe in a Sea of Creativity
the peak of "wouldn't it be awesome to be a child soldier? JUST KIDDING! it would be incredibly fucked up. anyway here's the main character getting eaten by wolves" is the alex rider series, which takes the wish fulfilment premise of being a teenage spy and then makes it explicitly clear from day one that alex is being blackmailed into acting as a spy for adults who have neither love nor even basic care for him and will let his life fall apart the moment he says no. coincidentally it's due to this career that alex is both an orphan and without a guardian in the first place; spying led directly to both his parents' and uncle's deaths. alex is repeatedly traumatised and nearly killed in increasingly horrifying manners, and it becomes clear that the only way for him to protect himself is to keep throwing himself in danger; he hates this and is completely aware that the only person he trusts could be ripped away from him at any moment and that his social life and academic standing is being ripped to shreds the longer he continues living his double life. the kicker is that he was raised in, perhaps intentionally moulded for, this lifestyle and the longer he continues it the harder he finds it to leave; he's essentially addicted to life-and-death situations and almost doesn't want to keep coming back to it. he turns to the other side only to turn that his bosses' enemies are just as bad as they are; at the age of just thirteen he finds himself completely alone in the world. and it slaps both as a thriller series and a deconstruction of the horrific violence both literal and structural that undergirds alex's life and job and the ethics of using a literal child to do your bidding as the lines between work and home life blur beyond recognition