Does Not Illustrate: Age Inappropriate Dress

I disagree with the Jeannie costume for a few reasons; First, again, it's not age-appropriate clothing, it's body-appropriate. Second — she really doesn't look "too old", and third, but important, it's the costume that is iconically hers, and she was wearing it for a special occasion related to the show that made it famous, and the definition specifcally says "not for costumes or dressing-up"

edited 30th Oct '13 6:36:43 AM by Madrugada

Cliff Notes - she's enough of a subversion/aversion to override the illustrative factor?

edited 30th Oct '13 6:37:03 AM by Willbyr

Yeah, that.

Yeah, I don't think that it works either. Unfortunately, the only blatantly obvious examples I can think of a the moment wouldn't really be appropriate.

Let's try the extreme end of the opposite spectrum. Would something like this◊ be appropriate?

edited 30th Oct '13 9:50:58 AM by theAdeptRogue

You know what, that seems actually good.

Since when was it inappropriate for children to wear swimsuits?

Huh? Never seen a swimsuit that looks like that.

For starters, it you look at the url of the link it is clear that this is a picture of swimwear.

Frilly swimsuits are nothing unusual, and I've seen plenty of girls in that age group wear swimsuits that include skirt-like frills around the bottom part. If anything, that is done to make the bathing suits more age appropriate by being cute/girly (and therefore supposedly more appealing to children) and more modest (by covering up that part of the body more) than regular bikini bottoms.

It isn't anything that would cause anyone to blink an eye at your average beach or pool, though I'm hesitant to do a Google search right now for more examples because I don't want my employer's IT people to ask why I'm doing image searches for little girls in swimsuits.

A large part of the problem with any proposal is that there is not a single universal cultural standard for what is age appropriate, and for such standards as there are, they mostly depend on context that the pictures are lacking.

A little girl can wear an outfit like that to the beach and no one will care. She can't wear it to school. But then again, a teacher can't show up wearing a bathing suit in classroom either. It really isn't an age thing.

EDIT PS: Upon further reflection, I think this trope needs TRS before we worry about an image.

"This is more a character either not realizing how they look dressed like that, or they might even be trying to pretend they are a different age (either as a disguise, or as a denial about one's age)."

That part makes it sound like this is a in-universe thing only when it plot-relevant that someone is dressing in a particular manner, but what we get in the example section is mostly a list of underage characters allegedly dressing in a Stripperific manner, which is all kinds of creepy.

edited 30th Oct '13 12:04:01 PM by Catbert

I still think the top right panel of the comic in post 10 is the best idea so far.

It's got a clearly young girl in a Chainmail Bikini, but the art style is simplistic enough that it's not horribly skeevy and it's not drawn for fanservice. Plus, you have a character around her who's much older and blatantly lampshading that it's uncomfortable.

I like that image better than others suggested because it is clearly an plot-relevant in-universe response used for comedic effect, rather than "Look at this picture of a little girl that I personally think is inappropriate!"

Exactly. It's not a "I think it's appropriate," it's lampshaded in universe.

I'll try to look at 10 later, hopefully the site will work for me.

Really? still not working. How about now◊

HA! That whole thing's great...there's several different ways we could spin that, provided the text works at wiki size.

Good one. Do we use the whole page or just select panels?

True enough. The whole page, at 300 px width, is still 313 kb in size, and shrinking it down to reach 200 kb will make the images indiscernible

edited 30th Oct '13 7:15:07 PM by theAdeptRogue

Sections; we couldn't use the entire page without permission, and trying to shrink it to wiki size would make all the text illegible.

Here's the second panel; I think it works well enough on its own.

edited 30th Oct '13 8:05:40 PM by Willbyr

I think that panel alone works fine, we can have a caption that links to Really 700 Years Old somehow.

The third and last panels, combined, would be a good parody pic for Legal Jailbait; we'd just have to convince Eddie since that's a "no pic" page.

43 is actually quite good. That's where my vote goes now.

Same here

How about a little bit more of the comic?

I think including the panel after the one previously suggested in 43 helps flesh things out a bit without going to the extreme of including the entire comic. My personal preference would also be to include the context providing full body shot to the left, but if people think that makes the text too small to read, I've provided examples of it with and without that.

Or if people still prefer just the one panel as in 43, I'd offer my second example to re-crop it from, as I did some clean-up work on the panel border where there was some color bleeding from where it intersected her cape from the full body shot.

edited 31st Oct '13 6:53:13 AM by Yotsuyasan

Adding the panel to the left makes the text illegible.

Adding the third isn't as legible, but it doesn't add anything as far as this trope is concerned... in fact, it confuses the issue by bringing up the Legal Jailbait aspects.

Less is definitely more in this case.

edited 31st Oct '13 6:49:26 AM by Larkmarn

Bingo; I can read the text in the first version but it's small enough to give a lot of people problems. Also, see my previous post in that latter regard.

edited 31st Oct '13 6:50:59 AM by Willbyr