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Fountain of Youth - Should it be split into two tropes?

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Lizuka8002 Since: Jul, 2015
#1: Apr 19th 2024 at 11:22:15 PM

The focus of the Fountain of Youth page has kind of always seemed rather off to me. Despite the prevalence of the Fountain of Youth myth itself and the wide variety of ways stories have played with that or similar concepts not directly using the name, the trope actually deals with characters being age regressed which, while certainly warranting its own dedicated trope, feels rather counter-intuitive to what you would expect out of the name of the trope, and there does not seem to really be a separate dedicated trope for the Fountain of Youth itself as a storytelling device to neatly fall into.

I also kind of wonder if both Baby Morph Episode and Elixir of Life should be overhauled in connection with this same issue. The former is just a slightly more specific sub-category of the same concept that the Fountain of Youth trope already covers, without really a clear enough distinction between the two tropes to really warrant it being considered a separate thing.

For the latter, it does somewhat more line up with the idea I'm describing the lack of except the trope as written heavily emphasizes the need to ingest the substance. Though that still even if changed wouldn't really cover the storytelling convention itself, only one of the more frequent storytelling uses for it, so I don't think Elixir of Life is as much of a redundancy.

MorganWick (Elder Troper)
#2: Apr 20th 2024 at 2:16:49 AM

Page dates back to at least 2007. My recollection is that it was created at the same time as its inverse, which was, at the time, named Thirteen Going On Thirty explicitly as a reference to the movie of that name, and has since been renamed Overnight Age-Up. So this might be a "failure to meet modern-day trope naming standards" double whammy.

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