Not Growing Up Sucks

aka: Under Grown Up

Sorry, Baby Doll, but you're stuck on this side of the mirror.

"I never should have done this to Ringley; he'd have been better off dying in his youth than spending eternity in it. It's had a damaging effect on him. He could be with my wife, but instead he is here, living out a cursed existence, dreaming of sunlight and an uninterrupted life."

— Ringley's dad, The Last Halloween

Some (well, many) kids think Growing Up Sucks. Then there's this. It turns out Immortality Begins at Twenty is only true for a lucky few, because due to some form of Phlebotinum, this character is an adult but has the physical body of a child or early teenager. If still organic and biologically alive (that is, not a robot or Undead Child), they will never be mature enough to have a sex life. Even if they're mentally mature enough to give consent, most adults will still perceive them as children and steer clear. Thankfully, this doesn't come up often. Interestingly, their intellect will very likely keep growing throughout their lifetime, but their emotional maturity may or may not undergo a similar growth. They may still have their childlike optimism, or they may well develop a more mature mindset or even go beyond it. (And, either way, they may still have to go to school.) In any case, expect this thwarted love life to cause them a great deal of frustration if not outright Angst.

Oh, and in live-action television, there's one more thing to worry about. The actor who plays such a character is likely going to keep aging, so don't be surprised if the character is killed off before the actor begins puberty.

Common causes for not being able to grow up include but are not limited to: Being a robot, virtual copy, magically animated puppet, a god being cursed, an Undead Child, or various real-life medical conditions, usually hormonal^note In particularly disturbing examples, this may be a result of prepubescent castration. or genetic disorders that prohibit body growth and/or puberty.

May or may not overlap with Who Wants to Live Forever? and I Hate You, Vampire Dad. Sub-Trope of Blessed with Suck. Not to be confused with Not Allowed to Grow Up, which is about characters being forced to remain the same age via Executive Meddling, not any in-story reason. A subtrope of Never Grew Up.

Contrast Elderly Immortal and Born as an Adult.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Arata: The Legend, Kugura deals with this issue upon accepting his Hayagami. He's permanently stuck in a childlike form, though he can use his Hayagami to transform into a more adult form for a short period of time.
• Astro Boy: Astro is a Replacement Goldfish permanently frozen at the age his human counterpart Toby died, which was nine-ish or so. Though, in most of the incarnations, Become a Real Boy (and the negative aspects of this trope) is at most brief and sometimes skipped over, because Humans Are Flawed, who wants to be one?
• Czeslaw Meyer from Baccano! became immortal when he was a preteen, and such will remain that age eternally, although that's not as big a trauma for him as being a Guinea Pig. Sylvie, on the other hand, saw this coming, and waited to become immortal until she aged to her mid-20's (though that was mainly to disguise herself from a certain other immortal).
• Excel in Black God appears to be no older than 13, but acts much older, and tells Keita appearances are deceiving when he mentions she's younger than him. It's mostly left unexplained until the end where her becoming a contractee is shown, and it is mentioned that that was at least 100 years ago. She also mentions that she hates it when people don't take her seriously because of her apparent age.
• In Black Blood Brothers, there is a possible aversion; the younger brother is childlike and innocent, and still loves sweets and toys (and doing silly things, like wall graffiti).
• Thanks to being what amounts to a collection of organs put into a childlike artificial body, Pinoko from Black Jack is stuck looking like a three-year-old. (Technically, she's eighteen... or one, depending on how you count it). She doesn't gripe about it too often, but it comes up now and then (one story shows she has a fun house mirror in her room so that she reflects as an adult). Her ectoskeleton (which keeps her almost entirely artificial body from collapsing) prevents her from growing, a fact that often upsets her, especially because having the appearance of a 6-year-old girl prevents her from living out her romantic feelings for the protagonist the way she would like to.
• In Bleach, Shinigami age very slowly compared to humans. Toshiro Hitsugaya resents the fact he'll be stuck in the body of a child for several years, as he hates being short and treated like a child.
• Chidori Kuruma from Ceres, Celestial Legend. She is a teenager but has the height, looks and personality of a child until she transforms into her tennyo form, making her look older.
• V.V. from Code Geass is a perfect example. It seems that the immortality in the Code Geass world works by keeping your body unchanged, so if you get it when you're ten, you'll be ten forever.
• Wynn in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Sympathy for the Devil". Caught in the explosion that destroyed the moon as a child and unable to age, over the decades he became cold and ruthless.
• Cyborg 009 has this affecting the protagonists, especially Ivan Whisky (Cyborg 001), a baby who has not aged since his father turned him into a psychically powered cyborg.
  • The 009 Re:Cyborg movie from 2012 had series protagonist Joe(Cyborg 009) begin with Identity Amnesia — because with the Cyborg team separated and him frozen in a teenager's body, it was decided that he should have his memories wiped every three years to allow him to enjoy a normal life.
• Dance in the Vampire Bund, humans turned vampires don't grow any older than they are. The queen was born as such and would have aged to adulthood had she not decided that being stuck in a constantly childlike state sucked less than being made to bear the child of the people who killed her mother.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers:
  • Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus appears to be a child, and according to one of the CD dramas, he can't grow up because he's only been recognized as a country by Turkey.
  • This may also be in play with the micronation kids as well, as Sealand, Wy, Kugelmugel and Ladonia appear to be children and haven't been recognized by the world, while the physically oldest member, the adult Seborga, was once an independent nation before being absorbed by Italy. Notably, England once has a dream in which Sealand gets recognized as a country, and grows to become an adult.
  • Holy Roman Empire is an Adorably Precocious Child, and he's unable to grow up due to the constant strife and in-fighting between the Germanic states. He seems to have only reached the preteen stage before he was possibly Killed Off for Real...or became Germany.
• Konata and Yutaka of Lucky Star, paternal cousins, were frozen in their early teen bodies. While Yutaka complains it makes it difficult to find a boyfriend, Otaku Surrogate Konata pragmatially assures herself that many of her fellow otaku would have no problem with it.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha gives us Vita, starting in A's. She looks like a young girl no older than Nanoha, despite being an ancient Belkan knight formerly tied to the Book of Darkness. Though it doesn't often come up in the main series, supplementary materials indicate she isn't happy about it. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS' supplementaries suggest this may eventually change. Or maybe not.
• In the Mermaid's Scar story of the Mermaid Saga, Masato has been an immortal child for 800 years, and he quite resents it. The only way he can get by without arousing suspicion is by tricking kindly women into loving him, then feeding them Mermaid Flesh so they become his eternal caretakers. If the Mermaid Flesh turns them into Lost Souls instead, or the current caretaker kills herself just to escape him, well, too bad. Time to look for another kindhearted girl.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Evangeline A. K. McDowell was transformed into a vampire when she was around ten years old and hasn't aged a day since. However, she can use illusion magic to alter her appearance to look adult.
  • It has been stated in chapter 342 that Negi is now the same as Evangeline and will likely be stuck at a young age forever, with the possibility of growing and aging for only a few years more. By the end of the series, it seems Negi is now permanently stuck with the body of a mid-to-late teenager. That or he still looks like a kid and is using age pills to look older.
• The driving force behind the plot of Petite Princess Yucie, the anime result of combining the settings, characters and story elements of several of the Princess Maker games. Here, an artifact called the Eternal Tiara exists, capable of granting any wish, and several girls of about ten years coincidentally end up trying to prove themselves true princesses (and thus able to use it without getting killed) in order to be worthy of using it. The twist comes when it becomes clear that all of the girls are about 15, and none too pleased about having stopped growing at ten. The reason? A cosmic ploy to give the winner something to wish for when their friends are sacrificed to power the tiara, since it tends to destroy the world its currently in if it isn't used regularly.
• Pokémon Journeys: The Series gives us Chloe's Eevee, who literally can't evolve even if she touches an evolution stone (a contrast to Pikachu, who chose not to evolve). As a result she tries to imitate her evolved forms and other Pokemon, to the point she has Copycat in her moveset.
• Presents stars a girl named Kurumi, who after falling asleep at the table on her birthday one night, without receiving presents from her classmates or parents, found herself suddenly far away from home, and unable to age past 10. Now she's an old woman in a child's body, who searches for her missing birthday present.
• In an odd case Hinako Ninomiya from Ranma ½ (manga, but not anime) isn't able to stay grown up. Due to a cure for an illness when she really was a child she periodically reverts back to a preteen state until she absorbs enough ki to temporarily age up again. This makes it rather difficult to be taken seriously as a teacher, or woo a potential suitor, since she spends most of her time looking and acting like a five-year-old.
• According to Rebuild of Evangelion, Eva pilots are immune to aging. Asuka describes this as the "Curse of Eva". (The original series didn't take place over a long enough period of time to see whether this was the case then as well.) This is especially true for Mari as 3.0+1.0 revealed she's actually around the same age as Yui and Gendo.
• For the first 900 years of her life, manga Chibiusa of Sailor Moon is magically kept at the physical age of five until her powers kick in. This is stated to be unnatural even considering the extremely long lifespans of the citizens of Crystal Tokyo (such as her twentysomething-looking parents), because of how early it kicked in, but is never fully explained. The first anime, unsurprisingly, avoids the weird subplot entirely.
• A bit of a supernatural case in Spirited Away where Yubaba's coddling and spoiling of her son Buu made him physically and mentally a child.
• Ohno Kei from Take On Me provides a mundane example. She is 26 years old, but looks half her age and thus has trouble finding fellows her age that are willing to date her and she is willing to touch.
• Angela from Tetragrammaton Labyrinth is several hundred years old but perpetually stuck in the body of a 12-year-old girl. She angst about her immortality all over the place but also shows a bit of jealousy toward more developed women.
• Tokyo Ghoul contains a particularly ghastly example in the form of Juuzou Suzuya, whose ghoul foster mother (along with various other tortures) castrated him with a hammer so he wouldn't hit puberty and stop looking young and pretty.
• In Tweeny Witches, Sheila and Eva were made ageless as punishment for letting Arusu release all the captive sprites back into the wild. Arusu didn't understand how this was a punishment until they explained that since they can't reach adulthood, they can never reach their full magical potential. Not to mention, since they're stuck as kids, they will never be able to experience adult things like getting married.
• In UQ Holder!, Touta is perfectly comfortable with his immortality until he learns that this trope applies, and as a result he won't complete puberty and gain a deep, manly voice (kind of important when you want to be a singer in the vein of Louis Armstrong).

Comic Books

• In a departure from the source material (see Literature below), Pinocchio in Fables had to deal with this. The Blue Fairy was, due to her fairy mentality, a Literal Genie when he asked to become a real boy. He got to be a real boy, but he was stuck as one, forever.
• Lenore from Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl. A 10 years old girl, dead for 100 years.
• Marvel Comics' Agamemnon is immortal but never physically aged beyond 16. There was some Wild Mass Guessing at the time that at one point in the past he was Bucky.
  • Also in Marvel Comics, there's the Eternal Sprite. He was so frustrated at seeing his fellow Eternals do adult things and always being considered a child for a million years, that he masterminded the lobotomized resurrection of all of his peers in order to have access to the power of the Sleeping Celestial and become a human boy just for the chance to grow up. It worked. He got caught. He was killed. We cried.
• The modern-age Superboy was afflicted with this; a disease that affected only clones was killing him, and the only way Cadmus's scientists could stop it was to halt his aging at 16 years old. After they cured the disease, they couldn't find the aging genome to turn it back on until some time later, during the Young Justice Crisis Crossover "Sins of Youth," when the spell that aged the rest of his teammates to adults started tearing him apart at the genetic level. Cadmus reactivated Superboy's aging, only to have him lose all his powers when the aging spell was lifted. Superboy just could not catch a break back in the day.
• In the DC Comics story Superman & Batman: Generations, Superman's great granddaughters become this due to an accident. After a century like this, one of them falls in love and decides to give up her powers so she can grow up. She gets them back eventually and then falls under Immortality Begins at Twenty like with normal Kryptonians.
• One album of the Belgium comic book series Urbanus featured a sorceress who was cursed by her master/mentor to remain a child forever because she abused her powers to turn her brother into a crow. She desperately wants to break the curse because she mentally did mature and now wants a steady relationship, but because of her body still being that of a child she can't get one.
• In Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run, a sect of the Cult of the Unwritten Book are kids who are given surgery to attain eternal youth. The surgeries are quite painful and mutilates the kids severely, and then they start to realize that staying young isn't as great as they thought. So they become the Little Sisters of Our Lady of the Razor, and walk around brandishing knives.
• Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005):
  • Seven Soldiers: Bulleteer explores the concept of eternal youth in the superhero community through Alix Harrower (Bulleteer) discovering that her husband had an obsession with a website called "Eternal Superteens" which is essentially a website for eternally young superheroines performing pornographic super-feats. He was having an online affair with a woman named Sally Sonic, a 75-year-old British woman trapped in a teenage body, who has been broken beyond repair from decades of being used and abused when all she wanted to do was be a hero.
  • Given a different twist with Ed Stargard in Seven Soldiers: Manhattan Guardian, formerly part of the kid gang the Newsboys of Nowhere Street under the name Baby Brain. When we see him in the present, it turns out that he didn't grow up, but he did grow old. He looks like an old man with the proportions of a baby, and is hooked up to machines to support him against the frailties of both.
• One issue of 30 Days of Night had a vampire infant that would never be able to grow up.
• The main character Gertrude from I Hate Fairyland is taken to Fairyland at the age of eight and becomes trapped there for twenty-seven years. Now at the age of thirty-five, Gert still looks eight. That and being trapped in a Sugar Bowl for most of her life have turned Gert into a mildly psychotic killing machine.
  • Issue #6 of the spinoff anthology comic examines the difficulties this caused with her love life, as despite being thirty-something years old she struggled to find a man who wasn't creeped out by her childish physical appearance... until she met a vampire likewise stuck in a prepubescent body. The relationship still fell apart and she ended up murdering him, but for unrelated reasons.
• In Runaways, Abby received a magical cupcake back when she was thirteen that halted her aging. Being afraid of puberty, she took it with barely a second thought. Over half a century later, with her parents now getting too old to keep taking care of her and most of her old friends having long since outgrown her, she is seriously regretting her decision. It later turned out she had both an antidote to the cupcake and a second cupcake in case she wanted to go back to being eternally young. Abby tried to guilt trip Molly Hayes into eating the other cupcake so she'd have a companion forever, but it was accidentally eaten by Julie Powers of the Power Pack. The Runaways managed to find the antidote and gave it to Julie even as Abby begged them not to. As it gets pointed out, Abby had literal decades to age normally and she chose not to while Julie never agreed to becoming a 13 year old again. After selfishly expecting to enjoy all the perks of being young, Abby's now going to experience the downside.
• In Black Hammer, Gail is a superhero who reverts to a child when she transforms. One day, she gets permanently stuck in her superhero form. She hates it because she's actually in her 60s, but she's forced to be a primary schooler again.

Fan Works

• It's ambiguous in Gunslinger Girl but fanon has the eponymous girls stuck at the same age as when they were first turned into cyborgs. Given that the cyborg girls often have a Precocious Crush on their handler, never growing old enough so that he might comfortably return those feelings is one of the few aspects of being a cyborg that annoy them. It's not easy from The Handler's side either; Jose warns another handler that some of the cyborgs can be pretty manipulative, pointing out that his cyborg Henrietta might be an eleven-year-old girl, but she's had years of experience in being that age.
• Detians in Undocumented Features can sometimes, if their immortality is activated by traumatic injury, be frozen in their current ages. This is called Edgerton's Syndrome, after the guy who took high-speed pictures of fast-moving objects, freezing the images forever in time.
• Most people agree that the teenage years suck. Now, imagine if you became undead while a teenager, and were more or less stuck that way forever. This is what happened to Adrius, a Forsaken teenager encountered in Travels Through Azeroth and Outland.
• Bit of Fridge Horror used in a few Hetalia: Axis Powers fics. Nations only age when their countries develop; the Italy brothers were stuck as prepubescents for two hundred years when under the thumb of Austria and Spain. In the 21st century, Sealand is personified by a twelve-year-old boy. He is eternally optimistic about his future, hoping to grow up and become a great empire, but since he has an official population of four people and his "land" is an old World War II fort, this is unlikely. His human name is Peter, which may or may not be a Shout-Out to Peter Pan; either way it's been used as such in fanfic, since he'll presumably be twelve forever.
• Happens to Sherlock via Applied Phlebotinum in SailorChibi's fic, A Slight Miscalculation. His mother did it so she could Raise Him Right This Time. He gets better, but not before getting kidnapped and realizing that his Mother will keep him a child until his mind breaks and nothing of his own mind and personality is left. Brr.
• In Harry Potter and the Elder Sect Harry gives Voldemort a new body but fixes things so it will be perpetually fourteen.
• Peewit in the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf series is actually a 42-year-old man stuck inside the body of a 12-year-old boy. It is implied to be a curse that was eventually lifted, though, for at the time of Empath's wedding, he starts growing up.
• The Powerpuff Girls in The Utonium Trials are artificial humans stunted as five-year-olds. This only gets more annoying as time goes on, but they all have their ways to cope with it. Blossom is especially hit by this because she hates being treated like a child when she's more intellectually advanced than most adults (and even her father).
• Evershade: Dr. Emilly is stuck at the appearance of a 10-year-old girl, and hates how she gets treated like a child even though she is mentally a 27-year-old.
• While it's generally glossed over, several loopers in The Infinite Loops who were children in their baseline and still have child appearances in spite of being millions of years old have complained about issues with being forever stuck as children, such as not being taken seriously by adults, relationships being treated as just something cute (several children loopers are seriously dating and a few are married), and not being allowed to do adult only things like drinking.
• Zigzagged with Dipper/Alcor in the Transcendence AU. When manifesting in the physical realm, he can alter his body to appear as any age he desires (and throughout his twin Mabel's life, he deliberately aged himself to match her), but it's all an illusion - his original body was destroyed in the event that turned him into the demon-human hybrid he now is, and since then his soul was essentially stuck as that of a just-shy-of-thirteen-year-old boy. Depending on his state of mind over the millennia that follow, this off-and-on causes him a fair amount of angst.
• In the Human in Equestria genre of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction, it is a popular trope for the protagonist to be a male adult human that turns into a young filly after being isekai'd into the show.

Films — Live-Action

• In the opening of Daybreakers in a world where nearly everyone on earth has been an ageless bloodsucker for about a decade, a girl vampire leaves a suicide note and sits outside to be killed by the dawn. Her note describes how she can't take eternal puberty anymore. Supplementary material shows that said girl was actually Patient Zero for the worlds' Vampirism, so it could be seen as her hating how she had inadvertently messed up the world.
• The child vampire Homer in Near Dark is considerably pissed off by his condition.
• The boy in The Tin Drum stays a three-year-old until he's well into his twenties. He does this out of his own free will, although changes his mind later when he makes this realization.
• Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit smokes humongous cigars, and has "a fifty-year lust and a three-year-old dinky" concerning his nurse. That's not his only problem, as seen in the comics.
• Let the Right One In is a film about a 12-year-old boy's friendship with a vampire who was turned at about the same age.
• Claudia in Interview with the Vampire felt the pain most keenly.
  Louis: You see the old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old. And you will never die.
  Claudia: And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never, ever grow up. Tell me how it came to be that I am this... thing.
• The entire plot of Orphan hinges on this. It's revealed that the titular orphan is actually an adult woman with a medical condition. She hates being stuck looking like a kid.
• Eternals: Like in the comics, Sprite is stuck looking like a kid despite being the same age as the other Eternals. In particular, she's grown to resent humans and Sersi, her fellow Eternal, for being able to grow up, fall in love, and live full lives like she cannot. She's even forced to live a more nomadic lifestyle than the others, as a thirteen-year-old not aging after several years is going to draw attention much sooner than with the others. These factors, in conjunction with her unrequited feelings for Ikaris, inspire her to join him in his Face–Heel Turn, and her Motive Rant has undertones of wanting to Put Them All Out of My Misery. After Tiamut is stopped, Sprite accepts Sersi's offer to turn her into a normal human.

Literature

• Short story: "Child of All Ages" by P. J. Plauger. Though Melissa had actually come to an acceptance of her eternal childhood. Her real problem was that her friends weren't immortal, and if she befriended children, they inevitably wanted to grow up and thus lost their immortality.
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.: In Tastes Like Chicken, Alvina becoming a vampire at the age of ten is portrayed as sad and serious. She'll spend the rest of her potentially eternal life going through puberty without being able to get older and have kids one day. Also, she'll never have a chance to try out for cheerleading.
• Josie in Lois Duncan's Locked In Time has to live forever as a preteen.
• Ditto in The Supernaturalist, who is a 30-year-old genius with a six-year-old's body.
• In Tuck Everlasting, Winnie is harshly warned not to drink from the fountain of immortality until she grows older. However, the villain threatens to force her to drink from it so that he can use her as a demonstration for whatever business plans he can concoct.
• Claudia from The Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire.
  Louis: You see the old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old. And you will never die.
  Claudia: And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never, ever grow up. Tell me how it came to be that I am this...thing.
• Ben from Castaways of the Flying Dutchman is stuck at about fourteen: just old enough to fall in love, but still young enough that if he stays in one place too long, it will become obvious very quickly that he's not aging.
• Discworld:
  • Ysabell in Mort. Because real time doesn't exist in Death's Domain, she was sixteen for thirty-five years. She says the first year was bad enough.
  • The teenage vampires in Carpe Jugulum. Vlad tells Agnes early on that family isn't usually a vampire thing, and the reasons for this become apparent when his sister Lacrimossa starts rebelling against the idea that she's going to be treated as a minor by their parents forever.
• The Empirium Trilogy: When Ludivine reveals herself to be an angel who's just borrowing a body, it's noted that her perpetual existence as a teenager is an awful thing, and one that will get harder and harder to explain to that body's family as the years go by.
• The Little Vampire: Rüdiger (Rudolph) and his siblings Anna and Lumpi. Lumpi became a vampire while in puberty and will never grow out of this difficult phase. Rüdiger and Anna still seem to be children at heart, despite the fact that they have been vampires for at least 150 years.
• Seria Mau in M. John Harrison's novel Light. Her physical age is around 30, but her mental age is still around 13; the age when she was voluntarily imprisoned as a K-ship. She is shown to have tantrums and not have the understanding one would expect of a sane, unbroken adult; her body is also unable to grow past the age she was when she merged with her ship.
• Oskar Matzerath, protagonist & narrator of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.
• Vampires Nikolaos, Bartolome, & Valentina in the Anita Blake series. Nikolaos may have been turned as an adult by the standards of her (thousand-plus older) time; at least, she doesn't display any of the mental traits or treatment from others which define this trope. (The other two do... very thoroughly, on all counts).
• The novel Vamped is set after virtually the entire population of the world has been turned into vampires. Many who were turned as a child have essentially gone insane from the change, or because they have an adult's mind trapped in a child's body. They are known as "Screamers" because of this.
• In the short story Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison, the titular Jeffty is a boy who never grows past the age of five, either mentally or physically, while the narrator character, who was his childhood friend, reaches adulthood normally. Treated as a unique medical disorder by most people, Jeffty's actual condition is a a lot stranger, and only his parents and the narrator have any sense of what's really happening.
• Peter Pan: Peter sometimes, ever-so-briefly, laments that he can never have a family or know love because he can't grow up, as seen at the end of the story after he drops Wendy and the Lost Boys off at Wendy's home and watches them through the window. At the end of the book, Wendy learns that Peter has no concept of death, and has forgotten that Tinker Bell ever existed. He also routinely forgets about her for long stretches. While Pan doesn't necessarily think Not Growing Up Sucks, it's clear that the author does.
• In the Honor Harrington universe, most of the characters have Prolong. It slows down aging and almost halts physical development when the person appears to be in their early—very early—twenties. While this means that someone chronologically 90 is physically 30, it has the unfortunate side effect of extending puberty through your early twenties. Most midshipmen and midshipwomen fresh from the academy look like they're 13, even though they're at least ten years older.
• In chapter 25 of The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio's desire to Become a Real Boy comes from a desire to grow up.
• The novel Postmortal plays with this. The premise is that a scientist has found a cure for aging, and whoever takes the cure will remain the same age until they die, which may not be for hundreds of years. No one is supposed to take the cure before age twenty-six, but one mother gave her eight-month-old daughter the cure, ensuring she would never learn to walk or talk. Another example comes from a 42-year-old former supermodel who was bribed to get the cure at age eighteen, and feels compelled to act like a teenager: get drunk, play dumb, and party, even though she regrets not having the chance to experience maturity.
• The titular character of the Mediochre Q Seth Series is unable to mature past the age of fifteen due to an accident involving dragon's blood.
• In The Mortal Instruments, Simon is dismayed at being sixteen forever, saying that it's one thing to be frozen at twenty-five but looking how he is he is never going to grow into his features. Or get a drink. And there's the fact that he's going to far outlive his friends.
• Molly Harper's Nice Girls series has a mild example: Ophelia looks perpetually fourteen, which isn't so bad, but vampires are usually turned as adults, specifically because of this trope. Hence, having a love life is a problem when she looks like jailbait. Eventually, a cute teenage boy she has a crush on gets turned, so they don't get funny looks when people see them together.
• The alien Tendu of The Color of Distance have a version of this. Once they've undergone enough metamorphosis to be intelligent, speak, and have allu, they can halt the degradations of age and potentially live forever. They can remain in that first intelligent stage for hundreds of years until deliberately boosted into full adulthood, taking responsibility for things. The life stage just before sentience, which has them working as semi-intelligent servants to older Tendu, physically can't speak, is considered a beast of burden, and lives for about thirty years before age weakens them and they die. For every mature Tendu there are countless subadults never given the triggers to change, and dying of old age as "children".
• Ukiah Oregon's half-alien nature means that past about the age of twelve, he only ages when injured. In the tribe he was born to as "Magic Boy" he lived for two hundred years like this, shielded from anything worse than minor bruises and cuts that would only advance him a few days and so unaware of the effect injuries would have. He resented and was afraid of this, and even as he settled into an odd position of being passed from generation to generation, caring for and playing with each new child, he thought of himself as a stunted freak and dreaded when each growing child started to outgrow him and become interested in a world he couldn't know.
• Manifestation can physically de-age mutants in the Whateley Universe, although so far most of the cases shown have been induced. Exemplar and Regeneration mutations often include some slowing of the aging process, and for Faerie mutants aging stops entirely; while in most cases Immortality Begins at Twenty, there are some exceptions who stopped aging in their teens.
  • Headmistress Carson - the former Miss Champion, now Lady Astarte - has been aging at about 1/3 normal rate since she manifested, in the 1940s. She spend nearly twenty years looking like she was a teenager, which was not a pleasant thing for her.
  • Both Timeless and Generator are fourteen, but appear to be about ten. In Jade's case, she acts like it much of the time, too, though that appears to be in part Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • Eldritch physically is a healthy 18-year-old golem, but mentally is a shell-shocked 31-year-old ex-Marine with fragmented memories spanning millenia.
  • Hive isn't a mutant, but was rebuilt by an alien nano-hive using Sam's 21-year-old daughter as a template. This shaved twenty-six years off her apparent age, but she's still a cranky forty-something Boomer inside, somewhere.
  • Ribbon's manifestation was triggered by a serum his daughter devised, resulting in a 50-year-old grandfather and auto mechanic living in the body of a 10-year-old body. Alyss believes that The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body is also coming into play because she hasn't felt anything along the lines of sexual attraction yet. It's not known how long it will be before she begins puberty, if ever.
• In Another World with My Smartphone: Leen, as a fairy, is already over 600 years old, but is forever stuck in the body of a pubescent girl. Until she met Touya, she had pretty much resigned herself to never get married because she was mistaken for a child or only attracted the attention of pedophiles.
• In The Twisted Thing, Mike Hammer discovers the mastermind behind the murder of a scientist is his own son, a fourteen-year-old child genius. During his Motive Rant he tells Mike that, thanks to his father's experiments he's mentally aged to an adult, and when he finally reaches adulthood he'll be an old man trapped in a young body.

Live-Action TV

• Being Human's third season had an episode with a forty-year-old vampire who was still stuck as a teenager. He had been taken care of by his family, but when they died of old age he was left alone to fend for himself. Complicated by him still being mentally 14 as well as physically.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer briefly featured a child vampire known as The Anointed One. Joss Whedon later said that they'd originally planned to have him be a major villain in Season 2, but ended up killing him off early on because the actor was growing up faster than they'd figured on. Also, whilst Anya did age after losing her vengeance demon powers, her frustration was not being able to order a drink as she still looked like a teenager.
• A Monster of the Week in the final season of Forever Knight was Lucien LaCroix's step-daughter Divia, circa eight years old when she was turned (and who in turn sired LaCroix into vampirehood). In life, LaCroix was Roman general Lucius from Pompeii; Divia turned LaCroix the day Mt. Vesuvius erupted. She was a "child" for over 1900 years.
• A minor character in Helix was Mademoiselle Durant. As one of the first generation of Illaria Immortals, she's around 500 years old, but is physically a ten-year-old girl. Much like Claudia from Interview with the Vampire, she is mentally an adult woman, with mature, adult desires that her physical appearance deny her from acting upon. She can only frequent bars and nightclubs run by people in the know, since a ten-year-old girl sampling fine wines and other recreational substances would be highly inappropriate in another situation. And flirting with a handsome movie star just gets her an amused smile and a pat on the head.
  "While there is much joy in being young and rich, there is much sadness in being young and rich forever."
• In Highlander there was the child immortal, Kenny. He would never age, and as such had difficulty creating new identities for himself, getting work, would never be able to date. He had severe physical disadvantages compared to other immortals as well. He allowed his frustration over all of this to send him over quite a few Moral Event Horizons. He learned to convince powerful immortals to 'adopt' him, and then slayed them when they were vulnerable, such as being asleep. In one case, due to the interference of an immortal's mortal wife, he slew her. The widower then hunted down the child immortal, until he met Duncan MacLeod, the child's current protector. Duncan managed to create mental justifications for the child until he found out that the innocent that had been slain was mortal, and thus not a valid target for the mutual immortal hunt. Kenny seems to justify himself with the idea that any immortal who would take in a child immortal like him would eventually turn on and betray him, so he's just preempting the supposed betrayal with his own, but Duncan refutes that belief during the climax of the episode.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lestat warned Louis that turning someone as young as Claudia would be a bad idea. He was right. At the end of "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding", Claudia writes in her diary with alarming instability about being stuck in a "flat-chested, hairless-crotched 14-year-old baby doll body" as her mind matures into that of an adult. This precedes her beginning to Self-Harm by sticking her arm in sunlight. In Claudia's eyes, the problem is very specific: her immature body severely limits her romantic prospects. The only people attracted to her are young teenaged boys, the same age she was when she was turned, and ephebophiles. Louis sees the problem more broadly, the central issue being that she's permanently "locked in the emotional storm of puberty."
• Truth in Television example: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit did an episode about a young woman, chronologically an adult, whose rare medical condition would keep her looking little more than half the age of her peers. Her consensual relationship with an adult man caused a lot of Squick, more so in that he's implied to be a pedophile who only likes her because she looks prepubescent. Her parents, naturally, want him busted for rape because they still think of her as a child.
  • The episode was pretty balanced about it though. Some members of the team were uncomfortable, but others were okay with it. Huang, a forensic psychiatrist, felt that it was good for the girl, as males her own age refused to date her due to her appearance, and that many older men have fantasies of schoolgirls or cheerleaders while women often try to physically appear underage.
• Let the Right One In: Eleanor is a vampire girl who's stuck permanently as twelve, physically anyway. She isn't happy at this, still having to blend in by appearing like a tween even though mentally she's more mature.
• There was a Monster of the Week on Moonlight who was a vamp stuck in puberty for 200 years.
  • Even better, he's been channeling his rage into killing prostitutes.
• My Babysitter's a Vampire introduced a member of the Vampire Council who resembles a young girl in the second season.
• SCTV has a humorous aversion featuring Martin Short as the former child actor of the in-universe long-running comedy series Oh, That Rusty! and the increasingly ridiculous steps he takes over the years, such as casting overly tall basketball players as adults, just so he can remain being seen as the kid hero of his series.
• The title character of the So Weird episode "Rebecca", an old friend of the protagonist Fiona's mother bumps into her again and finds that Rebecca looks exactly the same as they did 30 years or so ago as teenagers. Though Rebecca isn't immortal, she just ages very slowly, growing one year older every century, so she's got the body of a teenager but has been alive for more than 1500-1600 years. As a result, she's suffered from a lot of We Are as Mayflies and Mayfly–December Friendship.
• True Blood:
  • Jessica Hamby, recently turned into a vampire, who now lives with her "maker" Bill Compton instead of her uptight Christian family. Now she has the freedom to do almost anything she wants, including getting a human boyfriend; but to her dismay she has to discover that after sex her hymen grows back. Every time. Seriously.
  • There is also Godric, Eric's maker, who is over 2000 years old, but looks like roughly 16. It's not really clear if his apparent age has any disadvantages for him, although Eric did complain at first (he felt that "Death" should look more impressive).
  • One of the Council members of the Authority seemed to be somewhere around eleven or twelve, but was implied to have been that way for a very long time (just being on the Council to begin with, for starters). He also proved that just because a vampire has the body of a child, it doesn't mean they have the intellect, ambition or "appetites" of one. Or the vocabulary.
• The Vampire Diaries has Anna, a girl who looks about 15, but is actually much older than the Salvatore brothers. At least Stefan might count, too, being eternally stuck at 17.
  • Caroline is recently stuck at 17 and Elena at 18

Music

• Hatsune Miku suffers this in this song, where she is an adult with the body of a young girl, and is afraid her boyfriend will be mistaken for a pedophile.

Tabletop Games

• In the Old World of Darkness, children of ghouls or 15th generation vampires age at 1/4 the normal rate, and that includes gestation of around 2-3 years. Partially averted since they will reach puberty eventually.
  • Vampires with the "Child" flaw get to spend eternity stuck at whatever age they were in life (and the flaw's description sets the upper limit at around ten). This saddles them with both physical penalties (because children tend to be short and have little muscle mass) and social ones (because to human adults they're just another brat and other vampires can't see past their physical age). Not too many child vampires make it very far in unlife.
• In Wearing the Cape RPG's Barlow's Guide to Superhumans Sourcebook, Iri Pegason, an ultra class telekinetic with a hallucinogenic drug induced breakthrough guided by choldhood fantasy, is forever frozen at the age of sixteen, and has been a homeless perpetual teenage stoner for ten years or so.

Video Games

• Aion has a Daeva in Sanctum explain that she became a Daeva at a very young age, and so still looks very young (the player has the option of making a childlike character as well). This could be a subversion, as she doesn't seem troubled by it at all, but it provides some Fridge thinking on the subject.
• Dislyte: Q was once angsty over his youthful appearance brought upon by his Esper Transformation as it made him believe that he's a freak. However, upon joining the Esper Union and seeing that there are other 'freaks' like him, Q became relieved to be somewhere he belongs and thus implied that he accepted his appearance.
• Babette from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a 300+-year-old vampire who was turned when she was a child. She puts the Cheerful Child facade to good use on her assassination missions for the Dark Brotherhood, but she's pretty straightforward about not really being kid anymore. As she puts it, she's no more a child than the protagonist is. She looks and sounds exactly like other little girls in the game (except for the telltale red eyes and fangs) but comes across as one of the most mature and level-headed members of the Brotherhood (which admittedly isn't that much of an accomplishment since they are a cult of death-worshippers). Babette doesn't really seem to mind her condition — most vampires in the series are evil/sociopathic and don't really care about little things like "love", so no "never being able to grow up and marry someone" angst for Babette.
• Nyx the dark mage of Fire Emblem Fates has the appearance of a young girl and many characters mistake her as one, but she is far Older Than She Looks, due to a curse she accidentally inflicted upon herself in her youth preventing her from aging physically. She's very insecure and bitter about her young looks in the present day, believing that she could can never enter into a serious romantic relationship because men would be averse to them. She travels the world seeking an artifact called the Mirror of Truth, which is said to reflect a person's true appearance, in the hopes that it will show her adult body, though she doesn't expect that it'll lift her curse.
• Golden Sun:
  • In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Lemurians live for hundreds of years, but there's just nothing to do as the island is isolated from outside contact. The children there are pretty much bored to tears.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Set thirty years after TLA's epilogue in which Alchemy returns to the world, it's revealed the original eight people (and Kraden) have been aging far slower than normal, with the result that Isaac and co. are in their forties but barely look five years older than their own teenage children (and are pretty much only distinguishable via facial hair). And while that's already bad enough for them, poor Kraden was an old man in the first games, now he's still an old man who doesn't really benefit from the Older Than They Look trope. What effect this had on Piers (a Lemurian who didn't want to give his age but was probably older than the rest of the party combined), is unknown.
• Implied in Ib. Mary is actually a painting, and while it's not known when exactly she was created, she doesn't look a day older than when she was painted. At one point she wonders aloud why adults are so tall and declares she wants to grow up soon, and if you talk to her in a bonus area in the update of the game, she rattles off a list of jobs she wants to have when she grows up.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a race of forest-dwellers called the Kokiri, who are born directly from the Deku Tree somehow... Only one of them seems to care about the fact that they can't grow up, but their physical deficiencies are a big deal when monsters move into the forest. This trope is more seen by Link (and the player,) because it comes as a surprise to him when the Kokiri children he was raised with haven't aged a day after seven years.
• Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII - The world is affected by a time paradox that prevents anyone from aging, including the children. Everyone is hundreds of years old. A side-quest centering around a former child actress (she's still a "child", but quit acting) reveals that she had fallen in love with an adult man, but he could not accept that she would always be a child and his rejection broke her heart.
• Porky in Mother 3 - and is also a Time Abyss. However, he is a special case. While he aged physically - by the time you encounter him he's a decrepit old man on life support - mentally he's still the selfish spoiled brat he was in EarthBound (1994).
• Alice from Nightfall Mysteries: Asylum Conspiracy is a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who's never physically aged past ten or eleven for some unexplained medical reason. Her brother is a normal adult.
• Annie from Skullgirls cannot age (or swear) thanks to her mother, who used the Skull Heart to wish that her daughter would be a child forever.
• In Tales of Symphonia, Presea Combatir was subjected to an experiment when she was a child, giving her immense physical strength but severely suppressing her emotions and stopping her from aging. After regaining her emotions and learning of just what she has been made to do all these years, she has a breakdown. It's revealed that she's actually 28 years old chronologically, yet still looks no older than 12. In the epilogue, she says that she's growing normally again.
• In Tomodachi Life, if there are no more child-age Miis of one gender, but there are adults of the opposite gender present on your island, the child Miis will repeatedly ask time and time again "I wish I was all grown up..." expecting you to use the Age-O-Matic on them to satisfy their request (which is redundant as you can simply edit their age via the Mii editor, which allows you to not only define the exact date a Mii would be, but also skip the otherwise unskippable cutscene of the Mii doing "adult things"). What triggers this request from a child Mii is the following: Since the game's ultimate goal is for Miis to fall in love, get married, and have children, the child Miis are essentially asking for the Age-O-Matic for the intent of going after and eventually confessing their love to one of the adult Miis the gender opposite of theirs. What makes this a problem is it does not exclude Miis that are married, meaning if all the adults of the gender opposite the one that wants to be made grown-up are already hitched, there is no reason to use the Age-O-Matic at all, unless the player makes more Miis that they can flock over to.

Visual Novels

• In Aoi Shiro, we have the oni Kohaku who got frozen in age as a young teenage girl. Kohaku resents this mostly because being stuck in the body of young teenage girl makes her a worse fighter. Aoi Shiro also has Yasuhime and Nami stuck in young girls' bodies although they don't angst about it during the game.
• Ilya from Fate/stay night is about twenty. While not on business, she appears to be quite a Cheerful Child, but there's a ruthless, realistic side hidden under the Cheerful Child facade, one that will break through nearly anything to accomplish what she wants. It's not really surprising, since she is Kiritsugu's daughter. She doesn't mind looking so young, and her eventual early death from Clone Degeneration is something that she accepts with only mild feelings of melancholy.
• Rika from Higurashi: When They Cry is physically 9-12 but is implied to several hundred years old mentally. She has been forced to relive the same few years (which has since been decreased to barely a month), be brutally murdered, and relive them again in a "Groundhog Day" Loop. Each time she must pretend to be a "normal" child and watch her friends undergo Sanity Slippage and kill each other (often including herself). As a result of this all, she's become a jaded Lady Drunk despite her young physical age. She breaks free of the loop eventually and will likely age alongside her friends.
• The middle child among the Kuonji sisters in They Are My Noble Masters physically looks like a child younger than the youngest sister but she's already an adult.

Webcomics

• One of the main themes in Homestuck: frequently characters deal with issues of maturity, and there are a plethora of versions of them that are permanently stuck as teenagers. It should also be noted that the main antagonist is completely unable to emotionally mature — the being responsible for the destruction of multiple universes and obliteration of ghosts has the mindset of roughly a twelve-year-old human.
  • Additionally, one need only look at the beta trolls (Kankri's group). They have, with the sole exception of Meenah, been dead for several thousand, or perhaps million, years. As a result, they are stuck in severe mental ruts.
• Robert from the webcomic Eros Inc. isn't human, but he looks and talks like a human baby (gun obsession notwithstanding).
• Avatar from Far Out There deals with this as part of her indestructibility (among other inconveniences).
• In the Jack arc "Megan's Run," Susan Lancaster and Megan Fairchild are not only not able to die, get sick, or remain injured, but neither will grow old or mature any more than their current state.
• Forever Boy from Sidekick Girl. He was a forty-something who stopped aging around age 12. It eventually drove him insane.
• A slight variation: Chibi Sue of Ghastly's Ghastly Comic is the only Super-Deformed person in her hometown, and perpetually looks like a child to the normal human populace, despite being thirty-six. Thanks to this, she's still a virgin because she's creeped out by the idea of paedophiles using her as a substitute (one could argue it's preferable to the alternatives, but the poor woman's allowed her squicks). Cybersex doesn't work either, as she has no fingers and can't type properly.
• Completely averted by Vampire Cheerleaders. They're all actually rather happy to have eternally youthful forms, and even seem to be able to head through Vegas casinos and other seemingly adult situations without hindrance, though some tactical vampiric hypnotism probably helps there; their biggest source of angst is that they have to keep switching schools every couple of years to avoid suspicion and always have to deal with new groups of inexperienced cheerleaders.
• In the The Order of the Stick prequel Start of Darkness, Redcloak's brother Right-Eye believes that the ageless immortality the Crimson Mantle bestows upon Redcloak has frozen him not only physically but mentally as well. Even decades later, Redcloak is still the same angry teenager who first put on the Mantle. Redcloak doesn't agree but Word of God has confirmed that it's true.
• Inverted (without much reduction in suckitude) in Tales of the Questor. Why do all Elves look young? Because an Elf long ago made an ill-worded wish that Elves never grow old. They die at twenty.
• Revealed to be happening in Unsounded. Sette still idolizes her father, but her father's affections for his daughter faded as he saw that she would never mature, physically or mentally. It is not entirely clear that there are strict limits on her mental maturation, however. Her savvy as a rogue is clearly far beyond that of the average seven-year-old daughter of a crime boss.
• The Last Halloween provides the page quote. Ringley was a young boy in the Middle Ages who came down with the plague. His father had previously become a vampire, and so decided to turn him against his wife's wishes. Ringley survived up to the present day with the body and mind of a child.
• Hex of Charby the Vampirate implies his recreation of Mye's Bunny form may have been partially due to this, and unquestionably partially because he is sick of being mistaken for a child by one actual child in particular.
• A Tale of Two Rulers, a Legend of Zelda comic: The Undead Child Skull Kid is usually pretty chipper, but once breaks down in tears over the fact that he'll never be able to grow up or have children, while his only friend keeps Reincarnating and forgetting him. Rinku hatches a plan to wish him back to life with the Triforce.

Web Original

• Paul Twister was 19 when he got pulled from the modern world into the fantasy world he's been trapped in ever since. Ten years later, he's still 19, physically, and rather resentful about it. This is technically closer to Immortality Begins at Twenty in terms of physical age, but Paul's attitude towards it is purely this trope, mostly because he's too young for many people to take seriously, (not that he doesn't take advantage of that at times,) and because his teen-level hormones are hard to keep under control sometimes.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • The titular character in "Baby-Doll" is a former actress with a very rare genetic condition that severely stunted her growth (but not her mental development), who made a career out of playing a toddler on a popular sitcom. She couldn't find work after leaving the show, due to no one being able to take her seriously, leading her to become a villain and later kidnap all her old fellow cast members.
  • The later episode "Love Is a Croc" shows Baby Doll out of prison and doing relatively well working as a hotel receptionist (her face and hair show mild signs of maturity, though that may or may not be diegetic due to the show undergoing a broad shift in art style). Unfortunately, she still feels like an outcast due to people still not respecting her condition or her desire for peace — especially after getting harassed by a drunk who tries to get her to "do something funny" — leading her to an unlikely partnership with fellow societal outcast Killer Croc, resulting in her falling back into her criminal ways.
• Ben 10: Omniverse: Being trapped in the timeless Dimension 12 has permanently halted Billy Billions' aging process, trapping him in his 11-year-old body. He tries to exact revenge on Ben by using a De-Aging ray to turn him into a child forever.
• The Centsables: The character Bouncing Baby Boy looks much like an infant, but is, in reality, a Mad Scientist of indeterminate age specializing in gadgets driven to villainy after "growing up" un-adopted in an orphanage. He got better.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: According to EdwardKay, Heloise will "always be fourteen-ish." He, however, refuses to say exactly why.
• Mordred in Justice League, as a result of a spell his mother put on him to keep him as a child. This is bad enough, but infinitely preferable to ending up with eternal life without eternal youth after he breaks that spell in "Kid Stuff".
• Steven Universe: In "Steven's Birthday", Steven, a half-human/immortal Gem hybrid, suspects he hasn't physically aged for over six years. He starts worrying that he'll never grow up, and thus will still be a kid when his friend and potential love interest Connie is an adult. Steven tries to use Voluntary Shapeshifting to fake growing up, but overexerting his powers ends up turning him into a baby for a while. After accepting that his friends and family will still love him no matter what age he is, Steven ages back to "normal" and finds evidence that he really is growing up somewhat. By the time of Steven Universe: The Movie, Steven shows signs of aging normally.
• Tutenstein features the Undead Child version. Since boy-king Tutankhensetamun died at the age of ten, his reign was cut short and he never had the chance to do great deeds and make a name for himself as pharaoh. Once he's resurrected as a mummy, he tries to make up for lost time, and hijinks ensue (as well as Fridge Horror, since Tut gets several chances to escape the trope and grow up, but always ruins them through childish mistakes).
• Yugo from Wakfu still looks like a kid in the Special episodes that take place years after the series proper. He's not exactly thrilled about this since all of his friends have grown up normally. This is taken to a whole new level in season 3, when this disparity starts to bother him when facing the possibility of dating Amalia. When they were both very young (at the start of the show, Yugo was 12 and Amalia was 13), there was nothing wrong, but now in their 20s, Yugo feels like she'd be ridiculed for dating someone who is still in the body of a kid and saddened by the fact that he will live long enough to see her grow old and die, possibly before his body even starts to look like her current age. This is despite the fact she wants to be with him still. In Season 4, later on, Yugo is forcefully grown into an adult after being temporarely used as a wakfu farm; after the battle against the Necros is over Yugo completely drops all of the previous insecuirities he had in pursuing a relationship with Amalia, they marry right away at the end of the Season.
• In Wakko's Wish, King Salazar is contemplating what he will wish for, leading him to ponder eternal youth, to which Dot gives us this zinger:
  "So you'd be 16 forever. You'd have zits, no car, and no one would ever date you."
• After the five-year Time Skip in Young Justice (2010), Superboy still looks the same. One of the side effects of the cloning process that created him is that he will never age externally. Superboy clarifies that he's not immortal since he still ages internally: his lifespan is no different than that of an ordinary human but when he's 80 he'll still look like he did the day he came out of his tube.

Real Life

• Turner Syndrome and Kallmann syndrome are among a number of genetic disorders that can result in the appearance of extreme youth.
• Eunuchs were men and boys castrated for various functions. For example, they were historically valued as courtiers because they couldn't threaten succession by founding upstart dynasties or knocking up the ladies of the Royal Harem. If castrated before puberty—as was the case with Italian castrato singers^note This trend started with the Catholic Church, who didn't want women in their choirs but still wanted singers whose voices fell in a typically feminine range. Baroque opera was where castrati reached the height of their popularity as celebrities, though.—they retained a boyish voice and appearance even into adulthood. On the other hand, they also zigzagged this trope by growing taller than average (since testosterone tells the limb bones when to stop growing) and developing wrinkles and osteoporosis more rapidly as they aged (meaning they went from resembling prepubescent boys to resembling postmenopausal women). Not to mention that a eunuch's life didn't always suck as much as one might think: they often wielded considerable political influence behind the scenes, hence their popularity in media as Evil Chancellor characters.
• Brooke Greenberg had the body and mind of a toddler right up to her death in 2013 at the age of 20.
• Bart de Graaff was a well-known Dutch television presenter who suffered a growth disorder which caused him to look and sound 12 for most of his life.
• Due to a growth hormone deficiency, Andy Milonakis has retained the appearance of a teenager despite being born in 1976.
• Speaking of growth hormone deficiency, John Franklin is a similar example. For example, at the age of twenty-five, he played fifteen-year-old^note twelve at the time of the backstory cult leader Isaac Chroner in Children of the Corn (1984).
• Gary Coleman suffered from this. In his case, however, his issues were caused by drugs used to treat his kidney disease, which stunted his growth.
• Nicky Freeman has a condition in which despite being in his forties, he has the body of a ten-year-old, though his condition has left him blind and mute. He and Brooke Greenberg are labeled as "Benjamin Button Children".
• Jazz singer Jimmy Scott, born with the aforementioned Kallmann syndrome, defied this trope by making his ethereal childlike voice into a Disability Superpower. (Twin Peaks fans will remember his appearance in the finale of the show's original run.) Other singers who managed to work similar conditions pretty well—effectively becoming modern cruelty-free castrati—include Paulo Abel do Nascimento (who appeared in the 1988 movie of Dangerous Liaisons as an eighteenth-century castrato), Radu Marian, and Javier Medina.
• Dick Beals was another actor who voiced children throughout his life due to hormonal issues that prevented him from maturing.
• Likewise with Walter Tetley (the voice of Sherman on Rocky and Bullwinkle), who either had a condition akin to Kallmann syndrome, or—if costar Bill Scott wasn't just joking—was castrated at his mother's behest so he could keep taking child roles. Unlike Beals, who stood only four and a half feet (137 cm) tall his whole life, Tetley eventually reached a more typical—if still below average—height of 5'5" (165 cm) after medical treatment.
• Hervé Villechaize's dwarfism is believed to have had endocrinological causes, as it not only stunted his growth^note And notably, his body was proportioned like that of a typical adult except smaller—unlike other conditions that affect not only size but also proportions, as with achondroplasia, the most common cause of dwarfism. but left him with a childlike appearance and voice. Villechaize had a rather miserable life, culminating in his 1993 suicide. Deep Roy's condition is similar to what Villechaize is believed to have had, though Roy seems less unhappy about it.

---