Adult Child vs Manchild

• Adult Child
• Manchild

Can someone explain the difference between these two?

Glancing at the articles, I think Adult Child is about an adult who primarily interacts with a cast of children and is generally treated like one of them. Actually behaving like a child is not a necessary part—they can be the most mature member of the cast.

Manchild is an adult who behaves with the intellectual and emotional maturity of a child. Interacting with children is not a necessary part.

So they'd be sister tropes.

My take:

An Adult Child acts immature because they're used to dealing with people of a similar level of maturity; deep down they're still adults (we swear).

A Manchild really is that immature, through and through, no matter who they're dealing with.

I salute your concision.

edited 30th Oct '10 7:07:17 PM by sgrunt

I think both Meta4 and sgrunt's definitions are compatible: an Adult Child acts childlike, a Manchild is developmentally childlike.

Or: a Manchild acts childlike because he is mentally childlike, and an Adult Child acts childlike for some other reason... so the former is a subtrope of the latter? Dunno, they are pretty similar.

edited 30th Oct '10 7:37:53 PM by rodneyAnonymous

This distinction is not clear enough in the text of Adult Child and as a result people are treating the tropes as interchangeable — there is some overlap in the examples along these lines.

Specifically "interacting with, and behaving almost identically to, characters who are noticeably younger" is a bit vauge — many Manchild characters will interact with kids even if they aren't in the Adult Child subtrope: characters of all types sometimes interact with kids.

edited 30th Oct '10 7:27:25 PM by Camacan

I just made an effort to rework the opening line - does that make it clearer?

A little. But I doubt it will stop people adding Manchild examples. I find it quite counter-intuitive at heart: which adult characters deal primarily with children? Full time parents? Primary school teachers? These people are often know for their maturity not immaturity: they have to behave like adults because they deal with kids all the time. Am I missing something?

No wonder people skip over that bit and just read it as the supertrope. Should we just merge the examples in to Manchild and axe this one? (Many examples will already be there, from what I can see.)

edited 30th Oct '10 8:57:34 PM by Camacan

The correct solution would be to prune the examples and (further?) rework the opening text, then - there is an adequate distinction here which just needs to be clearly articulated.