Clean up, retool, or cut?: Child Mage

So, the laconic of Child Mage appears to be "the main magic user in the game or story happens to be the youngest person in the group". That's the second sentence of the description, and it's what's being used as the laconic for the "playing with" entry.

The examples, however, seem to be taking the title literally: children who use magic, full stop. That's not a trope unless there's a commonality in the way the child mages are used or characterized in their respective works, right?

I'm not sure this was ever really well defined. Harry Potter was listed as the first example in the original YkTTW proposal, and he seems like a wobbly fit at best.

edited 19th Aug '11 4:43:45 PM by Bailey

Hm, agree that there's a problem. Not sure how to fix it.

Works really do put magic in the hands of Children a lot.

The Harry Potter type or the Token Loli Mage along the lines of Little Miss Badass with a Huge Mallet (That would be related to Small Girl, Big Gun).

I would say split with Child Mage as a supertrope to Token Child Mage.

edited 19th Aug '11 11:38:41 PM by Raso

I agree that works do put magic in the hands of children a lot... but is that a trope or a consequence of the fact that fiction just generally puts magic in the hands of people of all ages on a regular basis?

Basically, while kids often are magic users, so far I don't see a trend beyond the statistically inevitable. I wouldn't say most magic users are kids and I wouldn't say most kids in relevant genres are magic users. Also, I don't see a lot of commonalities to kid mages when they do appear except for things that come from being kids or from being mages... the parts are not greater than the whole the way they are in the case of most valid tropes.

The way the trope is phrased isn't incredibly promising either: "the main magic user happens to be...". A trope is a device used for a reason, not something where X just happens to be Y.

edited 20th Aug '11 12:14:21 AM by Bailey

The trope title is Child Mage, and I think most people are just taking that literally. I'm interested in the description tying child mages into the Children Are Special idea. The descriptions seem to be cataloguing examples along those lines; that is,

• kids can do magic and adults can't.
• kids can do magic that adults can't.
• kids and adults can do magic but some kids can do advanced stuff very young, like a Child Prodigy.

Should the entry be split between the first two examples and the last one?

Two and three sound awfully close to me and it may not be the best way to have worded it. My thinking is influenced by Young Wizards, where the younger the wizard the more raw power they have; as they age their strength becomes subtlety, wisdom and experience. One of the characters in the series is an unusually young wizard with both awesome power and nerd smarts and pulls off stunts no one else could do, like giving birth to a species of sentient alien computer wizards and calculating, then powering, a timeslide to the very early eon of the universe to obtain star metal to reforge an ancient weapon. (A book later she hits the age for her power level to seriously drop off so she's closer to the level of the teenage main characters and has a hard time adapting).

I think all three types would be good split on the page and a separate section that fit into more than one category or fit it in a different way. I do agree that there needs to be something special about them.

yeah there are murky ones like that. In Nanoha apt mages are always strongest when they are a kid and will lose power as they get older unless they keep up their training.

edited 20th Sep '11 5:42:15 PM by Raso