Sometimes, age can be the deciding factor on whether a scenario is "pathetic but funny," "kind of sad," "upsetting" or "gut wrenching."
Broadly speaking, viewers have more sympathy for young characters. We expect children to have an emotional response to everything, and so we expect them to experience the emotion more acutely. "
Staying true to yourself" is more important to young characters than "
maintain your dignity at all times", so it's acceptable - even appropriate - for children to burst out into tears in situations where adults would get a funny look for
doing the same.
The audience may feel mildly betrayed when a young character suffers a tremendous tragedy. Children are
supposed to have an idealistic outlook on life; their parents should be there to protect them,
they don't have to worry about money or jobs and their daily trials and tribulations should be minor. Of course, it doesn't feel like "no big deal" when you
are a child, and many children could tell you that this
blissful interpretation of childhood does not match up with their reality. In general, though, kids aren't expected to have too many worries. So when kids get whacked over the head with the
Reality Stick, in the form of
divorce, bereavement or illness, it seems like a betrayal of the child's inherent trust in the world. Adults, on the other hand, are supposed to know that it's a
Crapsack World out there and not be too surprised when life goes to hell in a handbasket.
An adult that suffers the same problems isn't "meant" to be as badly affected, especially if those problems relate back to their parents and siblings. If a child's parents divorce, it's a tragedy and all but the most
Jerkass characters will be sympathetic and allow them to vent their feelings. If a twenty-five-year old receives news that his parents are divorcing and makes his feelings on the matter known, his various friends and family will tell him to "grow up" and probably throw in "your parents don't have to answer to you any more; they've got their own lives to live." Because the effects are less immediate since the adult probably doesn't live with their parents (and those who do are often
Acceptable Targets), they lose their "right" to be upset.
In extreme cases, this can be the difference between comedy and tragedy. A grown up
Un Favourite is usually a pathetic loser who blames all his problems on his childhood; a young unfavourite is a tragic
woobie.
However, in other cases, a situation will be seen as devastating to an adult when they're shrugged off as a minor issue for children/teens. A thirteen year old who's heartbroken after breaking up with her first boyfriend will get a talk with her mum in which she's told that it's part of growing up, and she'll get over it - she's too young for boys anyway. A twenty-something woman who breaks up with
her love interest will have her friends rallying around to support her (and often a parent who'd just
love to introduce her to a more "appropriate" partner).
The clincher is often material security. Children (usually) live with their parents and siblings, so divorce,
Parental Favoritism, moving house and the death of a parent have a major impact on their lives - these issues affect their living conditions, and, moreover, they don't really get a say in what happens to them. If Dad decides they're moving to a different country so that he can chase a promotion, the kids' interests are usually glossed over.
Conversely, issues affecting employment, dignity, independence and romance hit adult characters harder than kids. A teenage loses his
Burger Fool job and it's no big issue - he's still got his parents to support him. A man with kids loses
his job though... that's a problem, since he's the one that's doing the supporting. Children are also portrayed as being able to "bounce back" from attacks on their self-esteem, such as bullying or social embarrassment, while these can have a long-reaching effect on adults. Psychoanalysis might rather disagree on that point, of course.
The most glaring difference turns up in instances involving grief. An adult who loses a parent gets less time to grieve than a child who loses a parent. The adult will be given one episode to cope with their loss, after which the parent is almost forgotten by the plot; the child will never really get over it, and the deceased parent will be frequently mentioned. An adult who loses a child, though, will probably be defined by that loss; outliving your own offspring seems unnatural and grossly unfair.
Contrast with
Demographic Depth.
Often
Truth In Television. Keep in mind, also, that this trope is
extremely culturally subjective, and affected by
Values Dissonance.
Examples:
Advertising
- Exemplified in a recent series of television ads for a pet containment system, in which adults bemoan the loss of their runaway pets. This editor, a pet owner himself, would think that the loss of a pet would be heart-wrenching regardless of age; but he was surprisingly unmoved by these ads, genuine though they seem.
- It's hard to empathize with somebody you've known for less than ten seconds.
Anime and Manga
- In Pet Shop Of Horrors, the death of Ms. Orcot has a bigger impact on her second son, Chris, who she died giving birth to, than her oldest son, Leon, who was eighteen when she died. Chris mentions his mother often, while Leon only really talks about her once or twice (although, arguably, a scene where an unconscious Leon dreams of speaking to his mother suggests he wasn't so much "unaffected" as "doesn't like to talk about it"). The manga makes some justification of this though; Chris feels the guilt of having "killed" his mom, while the fact that he never really knew her makes her an almost mythical figure in his mind. Leon, however, has his own, genuine memories of his mother, giving him an advantage over Chris.
- To be fair, Chris apparently wasn't really hung up on guilt until his cousin accused him of killing his mom. Sure, she was upset and didn't really mean it, but the realization had shocked Chris to the point he simply stopped speaking.
- Mostly because up until that point, he had considered his cousins as siblings and likely hadn't deeply questioned the lack of his own biological parents (how old is he, again?) Also the fact that death is a harder to understand concept the younger you are. (This troper remembers her little brother's reaction to the death of the family cat, at the age of four - three months later, he was still asking if she'd come back yet, unable to get the idea that she had run away permanently.)
- In Princess Tutu, the death of Fakir's parents when he was just a child affects him so much that a large bit of his personality seems to have been shaped by the event particularly since he appears to be the cause of their deaths. Parental Abandonment also plays a key role in another character's development.
- The pain of characters losing someone close to them is a key theme in Chrono Crusade, particularly in the manga. For Satella, Rosette and Azmaria, the pain comes from lost parents and siblings. For the much-older Chrono? His lost loved one is his friend and possible love interest, Mary Magdalene. Of course, this may be subverted with Aion, who is also mourning his mother and twin brother in a way.
- Negi Springfield of Mahou Sensei Negima is an odd case. He's ten years old and witness his entire remaining family in the village he grew up in turned to stone at age four, now frequently ending up in life-threatening siuations, including being run through with a sharpened rock spear and had his left arm sliced off (he has it reattatched with magic medicine). Despite it all, he shrugs off everything that happens as a way of overcoming weakness and still likes to remeain happy with his Nakama. The rest of the cast tell him he should act more like a kid and stop putting himself in such dangerous situations. He acknowledges his friend Anya as being stronger in this regard than him, given her fiery personality.
Comics
- Batman is totally defined by his single great childhood trauma. It's what drives him for the rest of his life. He never had to worry about security, because his parents were billionaires who left him everything, but he was ten, and his only remaining parental guidance came from someone who was as much servant as authority figure.
- Also, unlike most modern rich characters' parents, who tend to be distant in order to grant as much sympathy as possible to the character in question (or at least excuse the fact that they're a raging Jerkass), young Bruce Wayne's parents appeared to be very involved in his upbringing-for one thing, they were shot on the way home from a family outing.
Literature
- Compare J.D. to Harry Potter, who is defined by the loss of his parents despite having no real memory of them prior to ''The Philosopher's Stone."
- More like he lost his parents and the family he was sent to just sucked. Also, every parental figure he got later died before his eyes.
- Except for the Weasleys, who eventually became his parents-in-law.
- Something of a subversion in The Lord of the Rings, where Faramir's position as The Un Favourite is presented as a legitimate source of angst.
- Then, he's still under his father's authority, who is coping with his grief by ladling work onto Faramir. All the work that both of them used to do, which is noticable enough to be commented on in the streets. Plus, of course, he's lost a beloved brother, and his father's actual disfavor (as opposed to being the less favored) is new.
- Subverted at the conceptual level by The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, who ages in reverse.
Live Action Television
- In various Red Dwarf flashbacks, we see a young Arnold Judas Rimmer, The Un Favourite of his family, who is bullied by his brothers and classmates, alternately abused and ignored by his parents and who is schooled in a pretty draconian environment. We first meet Rimmer as an adult however, when all these factors have already taken their toll on his personality, resulting in a military-obsessed neurotic with an authority complex but very little actual ability. Rimmer is viewed by many fans as the funniest and most complex of all the Red Dwarf cast, but if the audience had first met him as a youngster, he would have been tragic rather than comic.
- Dog training show At The End Of My Leash featured a daughter unable to control her Great Dane pet. According to the dog trainer, this was due to a lack of confidence and low self-esteem. When all the surveillance footage showed was the daughter's mother screaming at her, berating her and ordering her out of the house, most viewers could take a guess as to just why the girl had low self esteem. The trainer "cured" her by...screaming at her, insulting her and accusing her of invading her parents' privacy. Why? Well, she was thirty, and had just moved back in with her mother and stepfather — thus, an acceptable target. Apparently, living with your parents is a far more serious offence than treating your adult offspring like dirt, since the dog trainer never even mentioned the mother's attitude. Needless to say, if the daughter had been fifteen years younger, any child behaviour expert would have been having a heart attack and accusing the parent of psychological abuse.
- Inverted in Sports Night. Jeremy learns that his father has been having an affair for decades and his parents are divorcing, and tries to be stoic while the rest of the cast is supportive and wants him to let it out. Jeremy ends up throwing himself into a work project, projecting his feelings into it until he hits the breaking point.
- Aaron Sorkin must have had this happen to him—he spins out the exact same scenario with Sam in The West Wing.
- Supernatural's Sam and Dean have never really got over the loss of both their parents. Although this could be because they feel like it's their fault. After all, Mary only died because the demon was gunning for a six month old Sam and John died (and stayed in hell for a whole season) in a deal to save a comatose Dean's life.
- The characters in Friends regularly meet and break up with people, often in the space of one episode. Every time one character says, "It didn't work out" or something, the others let out a big sad "Ohhhhhhhh" and physically rush to comfort him/her.
- Subverted in an episode of NCIS, where it's touched upon that bullying and other things children are supposed to get over fairly quickly can, in fact, have lasting effects. McGee is interrogating a high school kid of a pretty clear bully stereotype. He notes that the two boys who led him to this particular young man seemed pretty afraid of him, and tells him that while he'll forget them quick as anything, those two will remember him for the rest of their lives. He goes on to have a disarmingly personable conversation about what fun it is to pick on those little geeks, especially when they cry or soil themselves. Then, just as the kid is starting to think this interrogation will be smooth, silky cake, McGee gets right up in his face and tells the kid what fun he'll have, because he used to be one of those little geeks, but guess who's in the position of power now?
- This is sort of subverted in Full House, where the missing mother is hardly mentioned, and whenever it is Bob Saget's character is often more effected by the loss than the kids.
Theater
- Played with in Hamlet: Shakespeare waits until the last act to tell you that Hamlet is actually 30, making his previously understandable angst seem a little more odd; in the beginning he comes off as more of an adolescent. Of course, there's an alternate interpretation for the line that gives his age, making him 16 instead. And then there's the theory that Shakespeare only threw in that line in the first place because the actor playing Hamlet was older. So that leaves us... somewhere ambiguous.
Web Original
- One of the reasons Survival Of The Fittest can be so heartwrenching is that it covers situations that no teenager should ever have to experience. (The murder of close friends, occasionally rape, etc).
Western Animation
- In the sequels to The Land Before Time, Littlefoot seems to have come to terms with his mother's death, put it behind him and has been able to maintain a happy, healthy lifestyle. Either that or he's in denial.
- Of course this is probably the result of the writers being uneasy at bringing this concept up in an ongoing series aimed at children.
- And Littlefoot does have his awesome grandparents around to raise him. That'd help.
- And, y'know, he's a dinosaur. Before they ended up in the Great Valley nasty deaths must have been pretty common - Sharptooths have to eat something.
- When Advent Children was released, many saw Cloud as an example of Age Inappropriate Angst.
- That's kind of a vague example... But, you know, Cloud ain't exactly the most mature guy on The Planet, because being in a a nearly perpetual coma between the ages of 16-20 sort of hinders ones maturation.
- Also, it was apparently mentioned somewhere that one of the side-effects of the Geostigma is that it causes angst, so there you go.
