History Main / ProportionalAging

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Invincible}}'', Omniman reveals that Viltrumites have very long lifespans as a result of aging very slowly. This extends to his son, Invincible, as despite technically being half-human/half-viltrumite, Omniman explains that [[DominantSpeciesGenes Viltrumite blood is dominant]] meaning that Invincible is almost pure Viltrumite because of how genetically similar humans are to Viltrumites

* ''Franchise/MassEffect'': The salarians, opposite the long-lived asari, live for only forty years on average and accordingly mature faster. Mordin, who is considered geriatric at thirty-eight, mentions that his nephew is a tenured professor at sixteen.

** Different universe, same concept. In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'', the [[{{Animorphism}} Laguz]] lives a lot longer than the [[HumansByAnyOtherName Beorc]], as the Beast laguz can live at least around 200 while Black Dragons can live around 1000 years. [[AllThereInTheManual The artbook]] gives a straight estimate for some laguz, with Lethe comparable around 18 while Dheginsea being around 50, despite being one of the oldest laguz in Tellius. Branded are also long-living and their appearance may not be indicative to their age. Micaiah still look like a young girl despite her closest friend, Sothe, growing up quite noticeably and Stefan (also a Branded) once point out that Amy (Largo's and Calill's adopted daughter) is Branded and still look like a little girl. [[AmbiguousSituation However]], dialogue between Stefan and Soren in ''Path of Radiance'' implies that the Branded instead experience ImmortalityBeginsAtTwenty by aging at the Beorc rate until they turn [[DangerousSixteenthBirthday sixteen]] and it slows to match their Laguz ancestry.

* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1'':
** The High-Entia are a {{winged|Humanoid}} [[OurElvesAreDifferent elf-like]] race with a lifespan going into at least the 400s. Their physical ages are proportionate to their chronological ones. High Entia children have ages in the 30s-60s while young adulthood seems to be around the mid-late 100s and old age being the high 300s.
** The [[spoiler:Machina]] are another example, having lifespans going well into the thousands and seemingly aging proportionate to them. However, [[spoiler: being as they're machines/cyborgs it's unknown if they actually ''age'' as biological beings would.]]

* In ''VideoGame/SwordOfTheStars,'' Liir reach maturity at the age of fifty and live for centuries, possibly millennia [[spoiler: if they escape gravity's influence on the SquareCubeLaw.]]
* ''VideoGame/BlazBlue'': Celica has a special kind of soul that, along with bestowing her the ability of HealingHands, lets her age more slowly and live for longer. Despite looking like someone in her mid-teens, she's actually a young adult. Her older self just looks like a woman in her 30s despite living for around a century.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Disgaea}}'' series most demons and angels seem to age about a 100 times slower than humans. So, the protagonists of the [[VideoGame/DisgaeaHourOfDarkness first game]], Laharl, Etna and Flonne, are 1313, 1470 and 1509 years old respectively, but look and act like young teenagers.
* ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'':
** Downplayed and played with concerning the [[FishPeople Zora]] in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild''. They live to be a bit over 200, and the Zora princess Mipha notes at one point that Link, a Hylian presumably around the same age as her (17), looked grown up faster than her (he's OneHeadTaller than her despite adult Zora being OneHeadTaller than the average Hylian). There's also Finley, a Zora girl who appears to be a short child but complains about not yet reaching that final growth spurt and also speaks in a very formal and adult diction, indicating that she's in her mid-teens at the youngest; she eventually hooks up with a Hylian guy who appears to be in his 20s at the oldest, and her mother doesn't see anything wrong with this. This is in contrast to Zora princess Ruto from ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'', who seems to grow up at the same rate as Link.
** The ''Champions' Ballad'' DLC confirms that Sidon, Mipha's younger brother, was born during Mipha's lifetime, despite her having been dead for a century in the present. Since Sidon is a child in his flashback with her, and a not-particularly-old-looking adult in the present, the implication is it took him most of the century to fully mature.
* Dragons in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' are magical in nature and can become TheAgeless, but it takes a great deal of time for them to mature to such a point. Dragon whelplings are physically and mentally children for hundreds of years.

* Implied with the Agori and Glatorian of ''Toys/{{Bionicle}}'', where in order for someone to be even remotely ''percieved'' as elderly, they apparently need to be well over 100,000 years old. Gresh is younger and acts a lot like a teenager, but even he is hinted in the story to be "only" a few dozen millenia old.

** {{Space Marine}}s age very, very slowly, since the process that turns them into superhumans begins around adolescence and takes years to complete. For example, [[http://spacemarine.wikia.com/wiki/Leandros these]] [[http://spacemarine.wikia.com/wiki/Titus three]][[http://spacemarine.wikia.com/wiki/Sidonus Astartes]][[note]]Note the two service studs in his temple. Each is given for a full century spent on the battlefield.[[/note]] are 75, 175 and 250 years old respectively. However, it's usually harder to tell, since liberal use of BaldOfAwesome hides the age difference.

* ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' Manaketes and other long lived races tend to age, physically and mentally at a slower rate then humans or their [[HumansByAnyOtherName equivalent]].

->'''The Mandalorian''': Wait. The target is a child? They said ''fifty years old''.\\
'''IG-11''': Species age differently.

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

** D&D [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame Dwarves]] for instance reach (physical) adulthood at 40 years old, are considered middle aged at 125 and can expect to live for more than three centuries baring violence. A D&D Elf is not considered an adult until he hits ''110'', meaning an ancient human, a Dwarf who is in the prime of his life and an Elf in the equivalent of her late teens might all have been born in the same year.

[[folder:Webcomics]]

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

[[folder:Film -- Animated]]
* In ''WesternAnimation/FantasticMrFox'', the concept of fox-years implies that foxes age six times as fast as humans. Ash is two years or twelve fox-years old, and is about as mature as a twelve-year-old child, while Mr. Fox is seven years old (which would be forty-two fox-years), and has a midlife crisis.

[[folder:Film — Live-Action]]
* [[CloneArmy Clone troopers]] in ''Franchise/StarWars'' are modified to age at twice the rate of regular humans, allowing them to become combat ready in half the time. However, it comes with the drawback of halving their lifespans; which is why they've mostly been phased out in favor of regular human recruits by the time of the Original Trilogy. As of ''Film/ANewHope'' the youngest clones are chronologically 19 years old; which means they're pushing 40 biologically.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''

** Aarakocra have it even worse, being considered mature by 3 and rarely living longer than 30.

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* The Petalars in ''WesternAnimation/ThunderCats2011'' age from childhood to death by old age in a single day. From their perspective, [[TimeDissonance it feels like a long life]].

[[folder:Other]]
* The traditional illustrations of Baby New Year, who is a baby on January 1st and ages into an old man by December 31st, when he dies to be replaced by a new Baby New Year.
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%% In ''VideoGame/{{Disgaea}}'' Demons and Angels seem to age 10 times slower than humans

Note that in real life, humans and some other great apes have proportionally long adolescences compared to the majority of species, most animals grow to maturity as fast as physically possible and then live a maximum lifespan roughly proportional to their likelihood of being eaten. I.e. bats mature in one year and live up to 20 because they fly, deer mature in 18 months and live about ten years, blue whales mature about as fast as humans and may live for centuries. That being said, it has been observed that the trope is generally TruthInTelevision, though the reality is that it's more of a case of correlating both maturation rate and maximum lifespan with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory reproductive quantity vs. quality]] rather than with each other; that is, the fewer the number of offpsring produced at a time, the slower they mature and the longer their lifespan, whereas [[ExplosiveBreeder rapid breeders]] tend to have both faster maturation rates and shorter lifespans. This means that the common belief of one human year being equivalent to seven dog years is not quite accurate. Outliers exist, of course, making the trope more of a helpful guideline than an absolute rule.

* In ''WesternAnimation/Invincible'' Omniman reveals that Viltrumites have very long lifespans as a result of aging very slowly. This extends to his son, Invincible, as despite technically being half-human/half-viltrumite, Omniman explains that [[DominantSpeciesGenes Viltrumite blood is dominant]] meaning that Invincible is almost pure Viltrumite because of how genetically similar humans are to Viltrumites

->'''The Mandalorian:''' Wait. The target is a child? They said ''fifty years old''.\\
'''IG-11:''' Species age differently.

* ''Film/{{Hellboy|2004}}'': The eponymous character is said to age at one third the rate of a human being and thus has the physical prowess of someone at age twenty when he is sixty years old at the present time of the film.
* In the ''Franchise/{{Predator}}'' series, the Predators, or yautja, can live for centuries or millennia. For example, [[Film/Predator2 Predator 2’s]] City Hunter is an adolescent by yautja standards, little more than a excitable, glory-hungry teenager.

* In the ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' series, Prolong has essentially tripled the human lifespan. The treatments must be done in early youth, and as the name implies prolongs ''every'' stage of human development. As a result, characters are OlderThanTheyLook, with individuals in their twenties looking as potentially young as late preteens. The WeAreAsMayflies overlap comes when interacting with planets or individuals who were too old to receive the prolong treatments when they became available. There's also one instance of a MayflyDecemberRomance detailed in the Talbott Quandrant books.

* Ian [=McDonald's=] ''River of Gods'' and related short stories/novellas feature genetically engineered 'Brahmins' who live twice as long but age at half the rate, at least physically. They actually develop faster mentally, fast enough that spending two years as a helpless infant is a source of considerable frustration and misery.

** According to Tenth in "Time Crash", the reason First appeared to be a grumpy old man (especially in his earliest stories) wasn't because that incarnation ''was'' an old man, but because psychologically speaking, he was still at the point in life where someone wants to show how very grown-up they are, and the later, "younger" incarnations grew out of it.
* ''Series/TheMandalorian'': In the [[Recap/TheMandalorianS1E1Chapter1 first episode]], the Mando discovers that his 50-year-old bounty target is [[spoiler:a baby from the same extremely long-lived species as Yoda, who died at the age of 900.]]

** D&D Dwarves for instance reach (physical) adulthood at 40 years old, are considered middle aged at 125 and can expect to live for more than three centuries baring violence. A D&D Elf is not considered an adult until he hits ''110'', meaning an ancient human, a Dwarf who is in the prime of his life and an Elf in the equivalent of her late teens might all have been born in the same year.
** Depending on the source, elves are often actually physically mature around the same time humans are (most of ''Literature/TheLegendOfDrizzt'' takes place when the title character is in his thirties or forties), but they're not regarded as adults by ''other elves'' until they've passed their first century. Some sources has it as a combination of social attitude (elves having a more modern attitude to when people are adults) and maturing at an increasingly proportional rate the more they mature (so elven babies stop being babies not long after human babies, while elven adolescence can last for decades).
** Played with in regards with Dragons. Dragons live for well over 1000 years, being considered wyrmlings for the first five years of their lives, and adults at around 100. Beyond that, however, all similarity to human ageing ceases. Dragons grow in power their entire lives, and the closest thing they have to getting feeble from old age is that diminishing returns set in at around 1200.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'':

* Windermerans in ''Anime/MacrossDelta'' are a subspecies of humanity created by the [[{{Precursors}} Protoculture]] to have incredible physical abilities [[CastFromLifespan at the cost of a radically shortened lifespan]]. The average Windermeran lives for barely 30-35 years. It's played with in that [[DeliberateValuesDissonance it mainly concerns their]] ''[[DeliberateValuesDissonance social]]'' [[DeliberateValuesDissonance age]], rather than biological. Frejya, for example, is fourteen, and looks it, but is considered an old maid and enters the story to escape an ArrangedMarriage with a potential suitor who, she believes, she is BetterAsFriends with. Helman is already an old man by their standards at 33, with confirmed grandchildren, but he doesn't ''look'' any older than that.

* Winston, ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'s'' resident [[UpliftedAnimal uplifted]] gorilla is 29 years old but comes across as middle aged. Real life gorillas live about 50 years.

* In ''Webcomic/PublicHumiliation'' pookas mature in about a year, their lifespan is never given specific numbers but it was short enough for Boo to break up with her longer-lived boyfriend for fear of leaving him when he still had his life ahead of him. [[spoiler: However, it's discovered that [[DivineParentage semigods]] like Lan's progeny, including Boo, have the proportional equivalent to ImmortalityBeginsAtTwenty, and they can pass that longevity onto their mates.]]
* In Webcomic/TwoKinds Keidrans can live up to their mid-twenties and are adults around age 8 or 9 (about a third of their lifespan).

* In ''WesternAnimation/FantasticMrFox'', the concept of fox-years implies that foxes age six times as fast as humans. Ash is two years or twelve fox-years old, and is about as mature as a twelve-year-old child, while Mr. Fox is seven years old (which would be forty-two fox-years), and has a midlife crisis.

* ''VideoGame/{{Xenoblade}}'':
** The High-Entia are a [[WingedHumanoid winged]] [[OurElvesAreDifferent elf-like]] race with a lifespan going into at least the 400s. Their physical ages are proportionate to their chronological ones. High Entia children have ages in the 30s-60s while young adulthood seems to be around the mid-late 100s and old age being the high 300s.
** The [[spoiler: Machina]] are another example, having lifespans going well into the thousands and seemingly aging proportionate to them. However, [[spoiler: being as they're machines/cyborgs it's unknown if they actually ''age'' as biological beings would.]]

* Windermerans in ''Anime/MacrossDelta'' are a subspecies of humanity created by the [[ThePrecursors Protoculture]] to have incredible physical abilities [[CastFromLifespan at the cost of a radically shortened lifespan]]. The average Windermeran lives for barely 30-35 years. It's played with in that [[DeliberateValuesDissonance it mainly concerns their]] ''[[DeliberateValuesDissonance social]]'' [[DeliberateValuesDissonance age]], rather than biological. Frejya, for example, is fourteen, and looks it, but is considered an old maid and enters the story to escape an ArrangedMarriage with a potential suitor who, she believes, she is BetterAsFriends with. Helman is already an old man by their standards at 33, with confirmed grandchildren, but he doesn't ''look'' any older than that.

** The ''Champion's Ballad'' DLC confirms that Sidon, Mipha's younger brother, was born during Mipha's lifetime, despite her having been dead for a century in the present. Since Sidon is a child in his flashback with her, and a not-particularly-old-looking adult in the present, the implication is it took him most of the century to fully mature.

This trope will often overlap with WeAreAsMayflies and may result in [[MayflyDecemberRomance Mayfly-December Romances]]. Compare ImmortalImmaturity, when a character who is immortal acts immature and childish in contrast to their age; AgeWithoutYouth, when a character has an extended or infinite lifespan but still grows old; and NotGrowingUpSucks, when a character is stuck in the childhood/adolescence stage and suffers in the process.

* Kitov of ''Webcomic/CryptsAndCantrips'' is fifty nine, but appears to be a young adult.

** Aarakocra have it even worse, being considered mature by 3 and really living longer than 30.

** According to Tenth in "Time Crash", the reason First appeared to be a grumpy old man (especially in his earliest stories) wasn't because that incarnation ''was'' an old man, but because psychologically speaking, he was still at the point in life where someone wants to show how very grown-up they are.

* Very common in ''Literature/{{Elcenia}}''. Dragons, elves, and part-elves (both TrueBreedingHybrid Barashin halfbloods and UnevenHybrid Elcenian insert-fraction-here-elves) are LongLived and have correspondingly long childhoods. Children of different species and different ages, but the same state of development, are described as having the same "equivalency".

Note that in real life, humans and some other great apes have proportionally long adolescences compared to the majority of species, most animals grow to maturity as fast as physically possible and then live a maximum lifespan roughly proportional to their likelihood of being eaten. I.e. bats mature in one year and live up to 20 because they fly, deer mature in 18 months and live about ten years, blue whales mature about as fast as humans and may live for centuries. That being said, it has been observed that the trope is generally TruthInTelevision, though the reality is that it's more of a case of correlating both maturation rate and maximum lifespan with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory reproductive quantity vs. quality]] rather than with each other; that is, the fewer the number of offpsring produced at a time, the slower they mature and the longer their lifespan, whereas [[ExplosiveBreeder rapid breeders]] tend to have both faster maturation rates and shorter lifespans. Outliers exist, of course, making the trope more of a helpful guideline than an absolute rule.

** Different universe, same concept. In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'', the [[{{Animorphism}} Laguz]] lives a lot longer than the [[HumansByAnyOtherName Beorc]], as the Beast laguz can live at least around 200 while Black Dragons can live around 1000 years. [[AllThereInTheManual The artbook]] gives a straight estimate for some laguz, with Lethe comparable around 18 while Dheginsea being around 50, despite being one of the oldest laguz in Tellius. Branded are also long-living and their appearance may not be indicative to their age. Micaiah still look like a young girl despite her closest friend, Sothe, growing up quite noticeably and Stefan (also a Branded) once point out that Amy (Largo's and Calill's adopted daughter) is Branded and still look like a little girl.