This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
from YKTTW...
Tzintzuntzan: Okay, I know I've seen this. Ever notice that in most shows, there's a magic age where you become innocent and naive below it? If a story is mostly about adults, a sixteen-year-old will be "just a kid" and the adults will need to shelter the poor kid from harm. If a story is mostly about teenagers, the teens will be competent, and will regard a twelve-year-old (especially a girl) as such a delicate little flower who should be protected from harm. In a story about twelve-year-olds, the cast is competent and able to face danger, but a five-year-old should be protected, and so on. See, for instance, Molly in Runaways, Shinobu in Love Hina, Angela in Degrassi The Next Generation, the kindergartners in South Park...of course, the trope is usually subverted these days by having the "innocent" kid blurt out a sarcastic line, revealing they know more than the older people think. I'd call the subversion Kids Say The Darndest Things, but what's the straight trope called? (Just a Kid has been taken.) The Innocence Line? The Point Of Innocence? I'm not sure whether it goes on the trope list or the law and formula list.
Looney Toons: Innocence Relativity? And I'd say Laws and Formulas if you express it as a pseudo-formula, along the lines of: "For any child under 18, if child's age < (main cast's average age - 5), then that child will be treated as a clueless innocent to be protected from the harsh truths of the world."
Ununnilium: I first noticed this in Digimon, where the main cast is 10 and the "kid" is 8 - he's drawn much smaller and more childishly than the rest. The amount isn't stuck at 5 years, either.
Looney Toons: Some percentage of main cast age, then? <shrug> Not having noticed the trope myself, I can't really offer a reasonable suggestion. I still think a pseudoformula of some sort is the way to go, though.
Tzintzuntzan: I love the idea of doing it as a formula, although I agree with Ununnilium that the gap varies by show. Maybe say that the gap is usually average age minus two, but that if there are more than x characters two years younger than average age (probably three), the gap will be greater.
Robert: It's not the number of young characters that matters but the plot importance — a dozen eight-year olds who routinely get kidnapped won't lower the age of innocence but a single seven-year old will, if she's a shape-shifting half-demon who helps the teenage heroes fight evil witches.
For a pseudo-formula, use some unmeasurable parameters, e.g age x plot importance < (average age - 1 standard deviation) x character's humanity.
There should also be a page, and formula, for the converse, the age at which characters succumb to Adults Are Useless and similar tropes. If all the main characters are ten, five years olds will normally count as innocents, and teenagers will be as useless as adults. On the young side, a Creepy Child will be an exception to innocence; on the older side, adult secret keepers and mentors will be partial exceptions to Adults Are Useless
Rbloom: Buffy fans HATE this one. You see helpless, widdle Dawnie (15) couldn't help with the monster killing and the "adult" Scoobies (about 20) had to always save and protect her. However they (the characters and writers) forget that all the Scoobs were YOUNGER than Dawn when the show first started and were taking down badass villains left and right.
Tzintzuntzan: In response to Robert's point, I think the number of young kids does affect the age at which they become innocent. The more eight-year-olds there are, the less likely the writers will bother to make them individual characters (and thus, the more likely their age is to be lower than the innocence point, or whatever we're calling it).
I think Robert's absolutely right about the need for a trope about when older people become beyond the pale (I remember being surprised when I first saw the way teens fit in on Codename Kids Next Door). But I'm not sure if there's a good formula for it — isn't it often the case that if a teenager's parents are useless, the grandparents are smart and with-it? (Look at Juniper Lee, or Hay Lin's family on WITCH).
Oh, and about the superpowered kids issue. Do powers have any effect on the magic age of innocence? I can definitely think of super-powered kids on teams that still insist on treating the kid as an innocent to be protected.
Morgan Wick: I'm going to take a lumper-to-the-extreme tack on this and suggest The Competence Zone: characters must be at just the right age to be competent and main-character worthy. Fortunately, they usually are. Too young, and they're innocent and naive; too old, and they're oblivious and jaded. The size of the zone depends on a number of factors, but perhaps expanding the definition makes it easier to tease out the formula.
Ununnilium: I like The Competence Zone.
Tzintzuntzan: Does this mean we dissolve Adults Are Useless and fold its content up into The Competence Zone? It sounds good, although the one problem is that the zone isn't necessarily a solid block of ages (like the fact that if a character's grandparents are within the zone, the character's parents usually aren't).
Janitor: I stubbed it. There is clearly material for the concept. I'd say Adults Are Useless is somehow governed by Competence Zone issues, and the main thing about the Competence Zone is its variability based on factors. That is, there is an age range that is competent. The boundaries of the range are set according to the intended audience demographic.
Gus: Probably needs some reference to Vague Age, as well.
Robert: And a note of the standard exceptions. Mentors, and sometimes grandparents, can be competent, but they're special cases. Other people the same age aren't. Exceptions on the young side are rarer, more so the younger the main characters, and there'll be some reason they don't qualify as innocent — the Creepy Child, Half-Human Hybrids, kids with superpowers — and even then it'll depend on where the shows falls on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. The Messiah would try to keep their little sister completely safe, even if she could disembowel a werewolf with her bare hands; a realist hero would be rather more pragmatic.
Kendra Kirai: Reading the first part of the discussion only, I have to say...Shinobu did need to be protected. The other examples I can tell are actually rather mature and competent for their age. And as for the Digimon kids, I was under the impression that TK and Kari (Takato? and Hikari) were six or seven compared to the other kids ten. They got aged-up with everyone else in the dubs by a couple years.
Ununnilium: Adults Are Useless is a subtrope, but it should keep its own entry, IMHO.
Gus: just giving this a <bounce>, so Tzintzuntzan can find it next time cycling past.
Tzintzuntzan: I'm going to pull the trigger. I haven't seen all the TV examples we've mentioned, so I'll just write up the ones I know.
Gus: Banged it right out of the park, Tzintzuntzan. Sweet!
Ununnilium: Niiiiiiiice.
Tzintzuntzan: Thanks, I try. Something that just occured to me, from Grev's example of My So Called Life — that show may actually be a subversion (or at least exception) to the Competence Zone in both directions. Danielle is too young for the group, but she's actually the sanest and most self-aware kid on the show. The parents are clueless, but they're totally different from the caricatures you get of most adults on a Teen Drama, and they actually save the day sometimes (Degrassi parents are much worse).
Ununnilium: I gotta disagree on Discworld. If you look at the Watch, they're all adults of different ages, and they age throughout the series; we get to see Vimes go right through middle age. Similarly, while Rincewind has sort of a Vague Age, he's been around for a while.
Robert: Likewise. I've removed the example. Tiffany is in her early teens, Granny Weatherwax in her seventies, but both are pretty competent. The spread of ages is too wide to justify a competence zone.
Looney Toons: Am I the only one amused that both this entry and its discussion page get a "John McCain in 2008 Exploratory Committee" ad from the ad server?
Ununnilium: Oh, yeah. Everybody knows Google has evolved a sense of humor.
osh: Bits of this article seems repetitious. Anyone wanna cut down TL;DR to a managable but still clear size?
Semiapies: At the risk of being fannish (here? no!), I don't buy the Ultimate Spider-Man example. For one thing, Peter tends to get bailed out a lot by adults - including the scarily competent Nick Fury and the rest of SHIELD. For another, in his interactions with Daredevil, he (to the point of strangeness) actually tends to act like the stupid kid that Daredevil angrily dismisses him as. For one more (that may or may not count, as she's not in his "peer group" of superheroes and such), the USM version of Aunt May is a perfectly competent, even socially formidable, middle-aged woman.
I'd like to hear a little more justification of that one; otherwise, I think it needs removing.
Ununnilium: I agree, actually. While there are plenty of incompetent adults, there are plenty of competent ones, too.
Tzintzuntzan: Okay. Long explanation:
The story seems to have a constant theme of "adults have ruined everything, and I'm too young to know how to handle it, but I gotta cause they'll just make it worse." The most blatant example is the 'all these angry people" rant that Peter gives to Nightmare. But there are plenty of others, like the Venom arc (look how the older generation ruined a cure for cancer, especially the video of Peter's dad explaining how he was betrayed).
The competent adults reinforce this theme — while they're competent, it's shown that adult competence goes with being either evil or a hardened sociopath. Peter is clueless around Daredevil, but Daredevil is an arrogant prick who never explains anything and then wonders why Peter is still clueless. Nick Fury is competent, but he's utterly selfish ("at age eighteen, I own you." "Next time we meet, take away his powers.")His bailing out Peter is often cynical and useless ("we can't shoot Norman until he's hurt someone"). He's trigger-happy and brutal, ruining things Peter could have just solved (anything having to do with Harry Osborn). And it's implied that half the messes Fury saves Peter from are Fury's fault (his own Super Serum experiments, not even knowing about Hammer's lab...)
Semiapies: You make very good points, don't get me wrong. But I don't think the issues of moral weakness, amorality, lack of foresight, etc. really have to do as much with the trope as presented, which focuses more on "being useful". I think USM would fit the trope if Fury and other figures were just completely incapable and resorting to Peter to save the day.
Outsyder0486: Where do we list exceptions? I'm thinking of Naruto, where ninja run the gamut from kids (the Genin pre-timeskip) to teenagers (the Rookie Nine post-timeskip), young adults (most of the senseis), middle-aged (some of the older Jonin), and even the older people (Sandaime, the three Sannin), and all of them are competent in some respect.
Andyroid: And as discussed above, there's Discworld, which has had heroes ranging in age from pre-teen to old age.
Cassius335: I'm not sure Digimon02 is a Competance Zone issue. It's more lack of time (due to school and such, plus the loss of the upper half of their power base (Partly due to Control Spires blocking normal Digivolution (until Ken's Freak Out) and partly due to giving up their crest traits). The 02's were just better equipped and/or more readily available. Even then, the older kids got in on things if they had chance (the Christmas ep, for example)
Dave Empey: Rbloom above is mistaken about Dawn's age vs the other character's age. Buffy was 15 when the show began, and Dawn was 14 when she was introduced.
Dave Empey: I have removed the comment about Buffy the Vampire Slayer because it is incorrect.
Looney Toons: Natter nukage:
- I agree with Ritsuko but Misato... how exactly is she impressive? Jet Alone is the only time she demonstrated much competence.
- She successfully commands a defense against the tenth angel in Gendo Ikari's absence. She also personally investigated the secrets NERV kept locked up, i.e. Lilith. She doesn't have to jump around in a funny suit to be competent.
- I agree with Ritsuko but Misato... how exactly is she impressive? Jet Alone is the only time she demonstrated much competence.
Gedca: Narnia is a possible example of this, but I can't think of a good way to put it.
