Unclear: Absurdly Youthful Mother

Incorrect. No one else has suggested images that you like. That's not the same thing. Seriously, calm down.

Cable and Cyclops?◊

edited 17th May '11 8:19:29 PM by shimaspawn

I like that one.

Much more clarity there.

That one works, and strictly speaking, the viewer doesn't have to know that Cable is actually his adult self from a future time period.

And it's still an example even then.

I like Cable. Crop the left panel out and we have an image.

However, I agree with Setsuna that this trope is confusing. Right now, it describes 3 tropes, for what I see: 'A parent who is too young to be a parent', A parent who looks too young to be a parent and 'A parent who is just too young to be a parent because external weirdness (time travel, imortality, etc)'. All of these are completely different and have completely different implication. The first and the thrid, for exaple, are more likely to be a plot point, while the second is more likely to be just aesthetics.

Should we take it to Trope Repair Shop?

edited 18th May '11 12:27:55 AM by Heatth

I don't know if merely looking too young specifically because of the result of Only Six Faces is a trope, more like an unintentional side effect.

However, Child Parent or Abnormally Young Parent seems to be a trope in its own right, yes.

I think we can recategorise these internal subtropes. TRS it.

Even most Only Six Faces authors can make a old person. Sometimes it is just adding one line on each side of the check, but rarely I've seem one author who could make that much differentiation.

Furthermore, the reason is irrelevant as is if the author did on purpose. Even if accidental, it is noticeable and it effects who the viewers see the character. It is a trope.

edited 18th May '11 12:53:01 AM by Heatth

Also getting really tired of people citing Only Six Faces whenever anything involving anime art is brought up.

Agreed, I'd actually say there's a fourth, which is something of a subset of the first and second. The first is basically "Teenager with an infant", the second is "Young looking adult woman with a teenager" (or whatever age, the point is that the parent is an adult), a subset of these would be a woman who was a teenager with a child, but is now an adult.

Its the difference between a 40 year old with a 16 year old child and a 32 year old with a 16 year old child.

Anyway, if you want to go ahead and make the TRS thread feel free, if not I'll do it later today after I sleep for a bit.

Looking through the page, I can understand why they're all lumped together, and the reason is, that In-Universe, it's often very hard to figure out if it's someone who had a kid young, or if they just look young. Ages frequently aren't given and a lot of it is just fan speculation. The page itself is soft split as best as it can be by reason, but there's a whole category of "We really aren't sure so if you split it, we'd have no place to put these."

As for Anime and Only Six Faces, well, the one you brought up only seems to have two, one for men, and one for women. The women's faces are creepily identical. If you want it to stop being brought up, start picking examples from shows that avert it and have a more distinct looking cast.

That is reasonable. I tend to lump, so perhaps if some varieties are distinct, I support making Internal Subtropes instead of mere soft categorisation.

A lot of the page is best guess at categorization and speculation. That sort of thing is best done on one large soft-split page rather than trying to break this up be reason when the reasons aren't always clear. We'd have a lot of duplication if we didn't, and about eight really short pages if we tried to divide it all by strict reason.

edited 18th May '11 7:09:16 AM by shimaspawn

The Cyclops one is good.

I said it once and I'll say it again: in all of those anime examples, everyone looks roughly the same age and it's impossible for people unfamiliar with the source to know who the mother and/or kid is.

At any rate, Cyclops is definitely an example.

Move this to a TRS thread?

Shall we put the second frame of the Cable image up?

edited 18th May '11 10:05:50 AM by shimaspawn

I like the example at the top of the page. Just the right panel is needed.

Also, I agree that we probably could just add the different categories to the page itself rather than splitting it, but that's a matter for TRS, which would probably be a good idea. There are definitely a few distinct categories that this tropes includes, predominantly "actually young parent" vs. "parent who looks young".

The different categories are already on the page and they're already soft split. You want to start a TRS thread to do nothing? Not all the examples are clear which one of those categories they fall into. Even the classified ones are iffy at times. There's currently a lot of natter on the page simply because the examples don't fit well into distinct categories.

edited 18th May '11 10:17:30 AM by shimaspawn

Cropped and uploaded:

Caption: "Hahaha, no, seriously, who is this?"

Anyway, no plans for TRS? I can't really gauge whether any of the categories are big enough to be an internal subtrope, which would be the only strong reason to revamp.

We have this three points which are mentioned in the page

1 a mother gave birth when she was unusually young

2 some magic/technology changes the age difference

3 a mother looks younger than she is (intentionally or not)

This three point are not just three facettes of one trope they are three individual tropes. The effect on a story , the intention of the creater and the reaction of the audience is different for each of this points.

That's the theory. The practice is that the examples don't know which they are and a large number of them appear to be combos with natter that indicates they don't fall neatly into any one category. Especially with the overlap between 2&3.

edited 18th May '11 11:17:44 AM by shimaspawn

The purpose of the TRS thread would be to determine whether we want to keep the page soft split like it is, or spin off the categories into their own tropes, and to define the categories better. I favor keeping it as is, but some posters seem to like the idea of keeping the things separate to avoid confusion. And yeah, the examples need some cleaning up.

edited 18th May '11 11:20:18 AM by JapaneseTeeth

For the first and the third only, you mean. Magic and time travel is usually really blatant in the story. Anyway, we can set the first variety (mother who give birth yearly) as for when this effect the story or it is explicitly mentioned.

The Cyclops image doesn't show the trope at all. There is a young guy, and a reasonably old older guy who could be his father. Everything else is relying on context.

Hence the bubble speech.

Anyway, I am writing a thread in the Trope Repair Shop right now for this discussion.