Examples seem inapt, also a lot of overlap with InvisibleParents.: There Are No Adults

The examples in There Are No Adults seem to miss the mark most of the time, even citing movies where the plot is that the parents are kidnapped and the kids have to rescue them, which is not this trope.

Also, I'm having a hard time seeing how this is different from Invisible Parents — even the trope descriptions seem to be nearly identical. Can these be merged and what constitutes and example cleared up?

Um, "adults" is not the same as "parents", so these seem like different tropes to me. I admit the descriptions might benefit from some enhancement, and the examples could probably use some cleanup (I didn't look, but it wouldn't surprise me).

An open question might be: are these sibling tropes or is Invisible Parents a subtrope of There Are No Adults. I don't yet have an opinion on this (but I suspect my answer would be sibling).

Well, if you look at the examples, there is a LOT of duplication. I'd say Invisible Parents is just There Are No Adults But More Specific.

Invisible Parents is a more specific version, yes, but a very, very common variation.

Like, K On is Invisible Parents, but not There Are No Adults

The description of There Are No Adults explicitly allows cases where there are plot-related shenanigans to remove all the adults from the picture. So those examples, as the description currently stands, are correct.

Like what has been said already, Invisible Parents is a very common, very specific subtrope of There Are No Adults. Yu-Gi-Oh, for example, has Invisible Parents in spades—you can count on one hand all the characters that have had their parents shown on screen. But the series also has lots of prominent adult characters, such as Pegasus, Dartz, Zigfreid, Bandit Keith, Yugi's Grandpa, etc.

There's a couple bad examples on the page that are really just Invisible Parents (there are plenty of adults in Scooby Doo. Just not parents). But overall the trope seems okay. How long has Invisible Parents been around, anyway? It seemed like the bad examples could have been Round Peg Square Trope -ing from before Invisible Parents existed.

I see the Invisible Parents entry on K-On is of the X Just X variety, and having never seen the show, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's a setting thing. Like Saved By The Bell, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, or Head Of The Class we rarely (or never) see the parents but we do see the teachers, but that's because the setting is school, so the parent's presence is not germane to the telling of the story.

So it seems Invisible Parents has less to do with There Are No Adults and more to do Conservation of Detail.

When There Are No Adults (biggest and clearest example I can think of is Peanuts), there is a conscious decision made to overtly avoid showing adults at all, so as not to ruin the effect of a child's world.

I think some select episodes of The Little Rascals would count, too.

Also exacerbating the situation is that there is Teenage Wasteland, which has in its own description a disclaimer noting not to confuse it with There Are No Adults, although overlap is likely to occur. If the plot is such that something Only Fatal to Adults occurred, and the kids have to deal with it, that seems like a case of Teenage Wasteland.

edited 8th Jul '11 8:00:42 PM by ArtemisStrong

Okay, so I've returned to reviewing Invisible Parents, There Are No Adults, Conservation of Detail, and There Are No Indexes, and am convinced that there's a sort of hierarchy of tropes here that would benefit the wiki of it were implemented.

The "There Are No" tropes are, in effect, related to Conservation of Detail in most cases. When there are no cops, parents, toilets, etc., and it's not dealt with in the story, it's simply not important enough to include OR it simply would ruin the story if the detail were included or its absence explained.

Now, here's the sticky thing: Invisible Parents certainly meets this criteria (the parents aren't important, so the creators don't have the story spend time with them), but some of the most glaring examples of There Are No Adults (Lord Of The Flies comes to mind) go explicitly out of there way to eliminate the presence of adults in order to tell a story of a world of children—the absence is the point, not an omission of detail.

And again, I think the similarity of the Invisible Parents and There Are No Adults tropes (though I think really one is just a narrower variation of the other masquerading as a unique thing) justifies at least cleaning up the ambiguity and fixing examples that appear on both.

And if I'm way off here, please tell me.