Basic Trope: Someone looks older than they are.
- Straight: Alice looks like she's twenty, but is actually thirteen years old.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice looks like she's eighty, but is actually five.
- Really Was Born Yesterday
- Downplayed: Alice looks like she's forty, but is actually around thirty-five.
- Justified:
- Alice looks old due to years of substance abuse.
- Alice has worked at a horrifically demanding job for twenty-two hours a day, seven days a week, every week since she was ten. Thus, at twenty-five, Alice looks like she is in her tenth decade.
- Alice was subject to years of Cold-Blooded Torture.
- Alice suffers from Rapid Aging.
- Alice is an Artificial Human.
- Alice is an alien with Bizarre Alien Biology.
- Alice hit puberty early, and she hasn't looked her age since she was fourteen.
- Alice belongs to a species that grows up and matures much faster than humans.
- Alice has progeria.
- Alice is a clone from adult's gene.
- Inverted: Older Than They Look
- Subverted:
- Alice was lying about her age or was wearing a disguise.
- Alice starts looking younger when she get older.
- Double Subverted:
- She still looks 20 years older than she actually is.
- Her youthful look isn't that last long, after that, she returns to the previous form.
- Parodied:
- Difference between actual age and apparent age is overstated for the sake of absurdism.
- Bob mistakenly calls Alice "an eighty-year-old." An offended Alice quickly retorts, "I'm seventy-nine."
- Zig-Zagged: Alice looks like she is eighty, but she is actually five. Then she is frozen in time for 1,000 years. In that time humans are replaced by a species whose appearance ages oppositely to humans, thus they look old when they are young and vice versa (or evolution does this to humans). They accuse this character of looking young.
- Averted: All characters look their age.
- Enforced: Alice is being played by an actor who's older than she is.
- Lampshaded:
- Alice meets a character who says, "Hmmm ... you look quite old, but I know better. You're probably, like ... five, aren't you? Man why do I keep meeting people like that?"
- "Will you act your age? ...The age you look like, not the age you actually are, I mean!"
- Invoked:
- A Mad Scientist makes Alice look like she was 20 years old.
- Alice dresses and wears makeup in the certain way to make herself look older.
- Exploited: Alice manages to buy alcohol and get her driver's license at a young age.
- Defied: Alice gets Magic Plastic Surgery to look her own age.
- Discussed: "You know, some people could easily fool others into accidentally getting onto the FBI watchlist."
- Conversed: "How old is Alice really?" "I don't know. This show won't tell me."
- Implied: Alice doesn't exactly act her (apparent) age.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is informed that her ID says she's only sixteen years old. She nods.
- Played for Drama: Bob, a 20 year old is in love with Alice and thinks she’s 20 just like him because of her looks. When he finds out she was actually thirteen years old, he is now labeled as a pedophile by everyone and is arrested.
- Deconstructed: Alice's appearance leads people to expect her to act more mature and less emotional. She isn't allowed to do fun childish things like her friend do because it makes her looks like a Womanchild. As a result, she can't find a friend of her age due to her look and her unwilling hobbies, causing her identity crisis.
- Reconstructed: Though people may make assumptions about Alice because of her mature appearance, she doesn't care about it. Instead, she still engages in everything like her friend do and uses her appearance to boost her popularity amongst kids of her age who wish they were older than they currently are.
Back to Younger Than They Look.
