History Main / ShortTeensTallAdults

* In ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'', the teenage heroes are significantly shorter than the adults Vector the Crocodile and Vanilla the Rabbit. For example, Blaze the Cat is 14 years old and stands at 95cm. Sonic himself is 15 years old with a height of 100cm (Shadow and Silver are the same height as him). Vanilla the Rabbit is 130cm, and the 20-year-old Vector the Crocodile stands at 180cm.

* Usually averted in ''ComicStrip/FoxTrot'', as 16-year-old Peter and 14-year-old Paige are usually depicted as the same height as their parents and other adults, but in one storyline, Paige invites all of her friends to Peter's Halloween party. Her friends are all ''ridiculously'' short and -- as Peter keeps reminding us -- high school freshmen, meaning they're all about 14 years old.

* Up until the mid-[[TheFifties 1950s]], especially during the Victorian era where [[ArtisticLicenseChildLaborLaws child labor]] was still an issue, it was commonplace to still be prepubescent all the way into your teens, as puberty historically started much later than it does today -- in the 19th century it was 15 for girls and 16 for boys, essentially delaying height acceleration in teens.

* Averted in ''Manga/MyHeroAcademia'', while there are short characters like Midoriya or Mineta (and Midoryia is only a little shorter than than most other boys), everyone has plausible heights for their age, and some teenagers are pretty tall, more than some adults themselves. It helps that they're pretty athletic and have great physiques due to lots of training.

* ''Fanfic/AbraxasHrodvitnon'': In this ''Franchise/{{Godzilla}}'' Franchise/MonsterVerse fanfiction, [[spoiler:Thor's son]] was notably shorter than his father when he died.

* Franchise/MonsterVerse: [[Characters/MonsterVerseMadisonRussell Madison Russell]], who's supposed to be 12 years old in ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'' and 17 years old in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', looks shorter than all the adults around her in both appearances[[note]]The films were shot back-to-back, and the actress Millie Bobby Brown would have been 13-15 during shooting[[/note]].

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheDeep'', Fonatine is 15 years old and 149 cm (4’10”) tall. Her mother is 170 cm (5’7”) tall.

* Averted on ''Series/TheConners'', where both of Darlene and David's children end up taller than them, though it helps that both Sara Gilbert and Johnny Galecki are below-average height. Emma Kenney (Harris), cast at age 18 when she had already reached her adult height, is 5'7" next to Gilbert's 5'3" and Galecki's 5'5". Ames [=McNamara=] (Mark), cast at age 10, had already hit a growth spurt before filming began but then just never stopped growing, and by age 14 is already approaching the same height as his tallest castmates, Creator/JohnGoodman and Jay R. Ferguson (and therefore towers over his onscreen mother).
* ''Series/HouseOfTheDragon'': Rhaenyra, who's 15, is a short girl. In "[[Recap/HouseOfTheDragonS1E2TheRoguePrince The Rogue Prince]]" she uses a stepstool and the camera lingers on it to remind us of this.

Part of this can be the visual effect of a show shot from a child's or teen's perspective. The adults tower over our protagonists in terms of authority, and the best way to demonstrate that is make them physically much taller (or the child physically much shorter) than they actually are or conceivably would be. This is especially true in animated shows, which can often have the [[PintSizedKid child reach no higher than the parents' waist despite almost nearing adolescence]]. "Short=Younger" can even apply ''among'' the young cast. It's not unheard of for a "big" brother's actor to actually be younger than his "little" sister's actress, but because he's OneHeadTaller, he's written as older. Again, it's a visual clue to the power dynamic.

* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'':
** Teen starlet Music/SelenaGomez was portrayed as barely taller than Cartman and tiny compared with the adults when she 'appeared' on the show, apparently solely due to this trope (in real life Gomez is 5'6 which is actually noticeably ''taller'' than the average American adult woman).

* WesternAnimation/TheFlaminThongs: Narelle is 14, but could pass for being the same age as her 12-year-old brother due to being only slightly taller than him.

** ''WesternAnimation/AmericanDad'': Both used and subverted. Steve and Hayley are both towered over by their parents. Same goes for Steve's friends and Hayley's boyfriend/husband Jeff. Other teens depicted in the show are typically depicted as having realistic proportions. For example, Hayley's friends Zooey, Kristen and Danuta are all a few inches taller than her and most Pearl Bailey High School outside of Steve and his friends are at or near the heights of the adults. Steve is only 14 so an argument could be made that he is just a late bloomer (the episode "Roots" more or less confirms him as a late bloomer and most episodes that take place in the future show that Steve as an adult is at least as tall as Francine, who is pretty tall for a woman). Hayley, however, is 19 and should be long done with puberty. If the [[https://clzmovies.r.sizr.io/core/covers/lg/1b/1b_d__0_AmericanDadSeason6.jpg cover]] of Volume 6 is anything to go by, Hayley is just barely five feet tall and Steve is about four-and-a-half feet tall.

Part of this can be the visual effect of a show shot from a child's or teen's perspective. The adults tower over our protagonists in terms of authority, and the best way to demonstrate that is make them physically much taller (or the child physically much shorter) than they actually are or conceivably would be. This is especially true in animated shows, which can often have the [[PintSizedKid child reach no higher than the parents' waist despite almost nearing adolescence]]. Again, it's a visual clue as to the power dynamic.

''Note: What constitutes as the minimum age for adult depends on how they are portrayed in the work; usually 18-19 year olds count as adults. However, a "15-year-old character being shorter than a 19-year old character" is just as valid an example for this trope as an "18-year-old character being shorter than a 25-year-old character".''

** Rapunzel in ''WesternAnimation/{{Tangled}}'' -– supposed to be 18, and still shorter than all the adults. Flynn Rider is in his early 20s and is visibly a full foot taller; evidently Rapunzel's height has little to do with her age and more just that she's ''very'' short.
** Anna in ''WesternAnimation/{{Frozen|2013}}'' –- aged 18 and with one exception she's the shortest person in the main part of the film. Her sister, Elsa, is 21 and appears to be of average height. Subverted in ''WesternAnimation/FrozenII'', where Anna's still the shortest despite being in her early 20s.
** In ''WesternAnimation/BigHero6'', Hiro Hamada is stated to be around 5′0″ –- pretty short for a 14-year-old, and further emphasized by the fact that everyone else in the movie is an adult and ''incredibly'' tall (except for [=GoGo=] and maybe Aunt Cass). It's stated in ''The Art of Big Hero 6'' that for the first bit of the movie, everything is shot above Hiro's eye level so that we are looking down on him. However, after [[spoiler:Tadashi's death]], the "camera" moves down so that we are seeing everything from Hiro's point of view. His short height is occasionally acknowledged in ''WesternAnimation/BigHero6TheSeries''; in particular, when he tries to question Liv Amara at the symposium in "Something Fluffy", he has to move the microphone down. After the moderator Bluff Dunder repeatedly jokes about his height, he angrily replies he just hasn't hit his growth spurt yet.

** ''Anime/MahoGirlPrecure'': Lilia still needs to bend down for 13 year old Riko to even reach her chin.

* Can be TruthInTelevision easily enough; sometimes genetics can be tricky, and reasonably tall people can have short kids. Generally of course the shortness doesn't ''end'' at their teenage years and they remain short into adulthood (IE, why so many twenty-something actors are able to pull off DawsonCasting so well).

* Mostly averted in ''Manga/{{Haikyuu}}'' where some of the high-school-aged volleyball players are quite tall, the tallest of them, Hyakuzawa measuring over 2 meters at age 16. In the time skip, however, some players grow quite a bit which mostly makes a difference for characters like Hinata who used to be rather short at the start of canon.

* Mostly averted in ''Manga/{{Haikyuu}}'' where some of the high-school-aged volleyball players are quite tall, the tallest of them, Hyakuzawa measuring over 2 meters at age 16. In the time skip, however, some players grow quite a bit taller which mostly makes a difference for characters like Hinata who used to be rather short as a teenager.

* A justified example is [[ComicBook/Batgirl2000 Cassandra Cain]], who was alone and starving between the ages of six and seventeen, so that even at eighteen she is noticeably short, despite her parents being rather tall at 5′8″ and 6′2″. Ironically, Cass is [[OlderThanTheyLook older than she looks]] as she hasn't been a teenager since about a year after she was introduced and is meant to be about the same age as Jason Todd, but due to her short size, [[ContinuitySnarl some writers who aren't well versed in her character write her as being a teenager]], and some fans have assumed she's such.
* Poor [[ComicBook/{{Shazam}} Billy Batson]] is 16 years old, and despite the fact that he's supposed to grow into his "Marvel" form at some point, he still looks like a short, skinny kid. Then again the burdens of being an orphan may be a contributing factor.
* ''ComicBook/SpiderGwen'': [[PlayingWithATrope Played with]], as Gwen Stacy is 19 during the first volume (due to a time skip, she's 20 in the second volume), but is shown to be ''exceptionally'' short. Her exact height is only given as 'approximately' 5′5″, but its repeatedly shown to be much shorter than that (a crossover with the above-mentioned ''All-New Wolverine'' depicts the two at the same height, implying Gwen is ''5′1″''), especially when standing next to others billed at that height. Her father George is a full foot taller and pretty much all of her (primarily adult) villains tower over her, not unlike ''Ultimate Spider-Man''. It seems to be something specific to ''this'' Gwen, as when she meets the Gwen Stacy of Earth-616 (AKA, the main Marvel Universe) when lost in time and space [[spoiler:which indirectly leads to splintering the timeline to create the AU Earth-617]], its said the two are the same age at this point, but 616!Gwen is a couple inches taller. Averting/inverting this somewhat, ComicBook/MilesMorales is about a year and half younger than Gwen, but is currently billed at 5'8. Typically he's depicted as ''much'' shorter than this when around adults, playing it straight, but when him and Gwen meet he's typically drawn a good few inches taller, despite the age gap. This makes ''some'' sense as Miles ''is'' at the point he'd be reaching his full height, and boys are typically taller than girls, but it does amusingly subvert the trend of height being used to determine youth.
* Despite having been portrayed as adults for decades, most of the founding ''ComicBook/TeenTitans'' members (Dick Grayson/ComicBook/{{Nightwing}}, [[ComicBook/WonderGirl Donna Troy]], and Garth/Aqualad/Tempest) will all be a little shorter than their mentors. [[Franchise/TheFlash Wally West and Barry Allen]] are both 6 feet tall, and prior to the ComicBook/New52, Wally was actually an inch taller than Barry. And Roy Harper/Arsenal/Red Arrow is an inch taller than [[ComicBook/GreenArrow Oliver Queen]]. Despite this, you'll rarely see an artist draw either Wally or Roy as taller than their mentors, and sometimes Wally will outright be dwarfed by Barry despite this billing.
* In ''ComicBook/UltimateSpiderMan'', Peter Parker is shown to be about the same height as Aunt May, though most other people tower over him. Even his girlfriends Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson are shown to be somewhat taller than him. Hilariously addressed when someone tells Flash Thompson that he thinks Peter Parker may be Spider-Man; Flash dismisses the idea out of hand because "Spider-Man is like, 6 feet tall!"

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