Basic Trope: A young character (usually female) with a fondness for older men.
- Straight: Alice is in love with Bob, who is more than a decade older than her.
- Exaggerated: Alice is a teenager and Bob is 90. Bonus points if Alice is under 18.
- Downplayed: Alice tends to go after men who are about five to ten years older than her, but no older.
- Justified:
- Alice likes older, more mature men because she actively seeks commitment and responsibility in a relationship or is in Junior High, where the boys her age are going through awkward adolescence (braces, pimples, etc.)
- Alice is interested in roleplay such as teacher/student and father/daughter.
- Inverted:
- Likes Older Women
- Mrs. Robinson
- Bob is an old or at least middle-aged man who prefers younger women.
- Subverted:
- Bob is Younger Than He Looks and is roughly Alice's age.
- "Bob" is secretly a member of a species that ages slower than humans, and both Alice and Bob are, in terms of maturity, teenagers. Whether consciously or not, Alice has picked up on that.
- It's not the men, it's their well aged wallets.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob lied about his age and really is that much older than Alice.
- "Bob" still has experienced a time where Alice was not even born yet, and that experience (if not necessarily maturity) that only older people have is what attracts her to him.
- Parodied: Alice swoons over literally any man who's older than her in any way, ranging from a man only a few days older to elderly men at a nursing home.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice is attracted to both boys/men of comparable age (or younger), and to older men.
- Averted:
- Alice only dates men who are about the same age she is and does not find significantly older men attractive.
- Alice isn't interested.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "You do realize Bob is old enough to be your father, right?"
- Invoked: Alice puts an ad in the Personals section or uses a dating website specifically to find men older than she is.
- Exploited: Bob takes advantage of the younger Alice's attraction to him to groom and manipulate her.
- Defied: Alice will not date men significantly older than her, no matter how good-looking they may be.
- Discussed: "How come you like older men so much, Alice?"
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Alice consistently goes after men well above her age.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice isn't taken seriously as a viable romantic partner by Bob because of their age gap and he treats her like a kid, which frustrates Alice and ends her attraction to him.
- Eighteen year old Alice falls in love with what she's seen of a twenty year old Bob from twelve years before, but not so much the current version of him.
- Reconstructed: Alice forms a platonic Intergenerational Friendship with Bob and it naturally grows into romance over time.
You can go back to Likes Older Men if you want, but isn't he a bit... you know, old for you?
