Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies

From sitting on his mother's shoulder to the other way around.

When a very large creature such as a Kaiju first appears in fiction, it's usually alone, and menacing for its sheer size even if it's not ferocious. If it acquires offspring, or is shown in flashback as an infant, the image of baby creatures invariably differs: unable to loom like an adult, the juvenile's depiction will become cute and cuddly (if it's friendly) or fast-moving and in-your-face (if it still wants to eat you). Either way, this transition from towering bulk to close contact is facilitated by making the subadult creature much, much smaller than its parent or adult self. Small enough, in fact, to interact easily with and/or appeal to human characters, in ways that the mature version can't.

While this makes sense in terms of drama, it can also lead to situations where the offspring are so tiny, it seems a bit bizarre to we humans to think that baby and adult versions are the same species. This is mostly a case of human/mammal chauvinism — many, many invertebrates and fishes in Real Life are tiny or even microscopic as hatchlings — but the feeling of incongruity persists.

Truth in Television when it comes to dinosaurs, as even the largest of the long-necked herbivores were no bigger than puppies upon hatching (though they did grow very quickly). The square-cube law is to blame since bigger eggs need thicker shells to support themselves but can't be too thick otherwise it prevents respiration for the growing embryo or is too difficult to break when it's time to finally hatch.

This is a very common trait for dragons, and often used to incorporate the Shoulder-Sized Dragon trope in stories about much larger dragons. Additionally, stories where a carp grows into a dragon will also incorporate this element by having a modest-sized fish mature into an immense serpent. May be combined with Cub Cues Protective Parent.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A credit card ad depicts a family buying things for an extremely large Newfoundland dog. In a scene of their very first dog-related purchase (the dog itself), the young Newfie puppy is barely the size of a cat. The man realizes that his new dog is going to be trouble when he sees the dog's huge mother.

Anime & Manga

• Doraemon
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Dinosaur has Nobita unexpectedly becoming the owner of the titular dinosaur, Piisuke (a futubasaurus that hatches from a fossilized egg restored by the Time Cloth). As a baby Piisuke can fit in a plastic beach bucket and shows up in a few scenes as a Head Pet on Nobita, but as it grows it becomes large enough for Nobita, Doraemon and all their friends to ride on. Naturally Doraemon has to use the Shrink Light for Piisuke to fit in a container for the gang to deliver back to Japan.
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan has Nobita using Doraemon's Life Creation Set to create any new "pets" he wants, so he mixes the set's DNA around and creates a Pegasus, a Gryphon and an Oriental Dragon. In their default forms, the trio are small enough to fit inside Nobita's clothing, but as adults (in a few weeks!) they can be rode on as steeds.
  • A non-pet variant in Doraemon: Nobita and the Winged Braves with the gang's new andromorphic bird friend Gusuke, who's the same age as Nobita and roughly a head shorter. His father Icarus on the other hand is a giant who can fit his son in his palm.
  • Doraemon: Nobita's New Dinosaur has Nobita becoming the owner of a pair of dinosaur twins, both of them hatching out of a single egg and can be carried by Nobita on each hand. When growing up (reaching the dinosaur equivalent of adolscence within the span of a month) they're at least thrice larger than Nobita.
• Naruto: The Inuzuka Clan fight with and ride trained dogs the size of horses. This includes Kiba's dog Akamaru, who looked like a regular puppy that rests on his master's head before the Time Skip.
• Toriko: Shown to be the case with Battle Wolves and probably others. Newborn Battle Wolves are the size of an adult gray wolf. Adult Battle Wolves can be 50 meters.
• The☆Ultraman has a pair of mating kaiju, Tough Gillan, Tough Gillas, which are the size of buildings and can devour entire forests. Their babies, a pair of infant monsters called Tough Gillaco, on the other hand are smaller than humans.

Arts

• Mother's Child◊ by Boris Vallejo (used as illustration for the trope Monster Is a Mommy).

Comic Books

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: One comic has Donald Duck's nephews find a large egg, slightly larger than a man (duck?). A creature is born from it that is slightly shorter than the egg. At the end of the comic, we see the mother, who is larger than Earth.
• Old Master Q: One strip has Master Q feeding a tiny little "fish" in a fishbowl. The next panel has the "fish" being kept in a bathtub and being fed actual fish. Master Q is later seen running home with more food only to see a whale burst out of his house.

Films — Animation

• Abominable: Everest, a young yeti, is about as big as a female Asian elephant. When he's reunited with his parents, the full-grown yetis tower over him like five- or six-story buildings.
• Astro Kid: Flash, the alien creature that Willy befriends, is barely the size of a housecat when young. Willy can easily pick him up and carry him. Once an adult, he is at least four times bigger than Willy and the boy can ride on his back.

• How to Train Your Dragon: True of dragons, as revealed in Gift of the Night Fury when hatchlings of several varieties are seen alongside their parents.
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: The baby tyrannosaurs are around Sid's size, but the mother is taller than Manny.
• The Land Before Time: The baby dinosaurs are rather small compared to the fully grown ones.
• The Sea Beast: Blue, the baby monster that Maisie adopts as a pet, is about the size of a small dog. While we don't see the adult version of his species, we can assume they are enormous if they're anything like the other sea beasts in the movie. However, we do get to see this trope in action with the Warmblers, the orange walrus-like beasts on Red's island — the babies are all roughly the size of Maisie, but the mother is several hundred times their size and goes just under the treetops.
• Strange World: Splat is a larva of a much larger purple creature.

Films — Live-Action

• Cloverfield: The monster, according to Word of God, is in fact only a baby. It's not "tiny" by any means, being a huge, ten-storey high Kaiju... until The Cloverfield Paradox, in which the film closes with the reveal of the adult Clover... which is easily hundreds of times bigger than the baby, and with its head rising above the cloud layer is about several kilometers tall!
• Gamera the Brave: The new Gamera Toto is the size of a normal baby turtle when he first hatches. After a week, he's about as big as a house and he's still growing. By the end of the film, he's a full-grown Gamera capable of defeating the film's antagonist.
• Godzilla:
  • The baby form of Godzilla Junior from the Heisei era as introduced in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II. The scientists were able to move its egg between the rooms of their lab and fit the hatched Junior into the elevator, who at this point is about five feet tall. The infant's size difference with Godzilla himself is made clear near the end when they are seen together. By the time of Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, he's around 30 metres tall, about as high as his father's waist, while he grows slightly taller to 40 metres following the explosion of Birth Island in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, but this is still less than half Godzilla's size.
  • Godzilla (1998): Zilla is the size of a skyscraper, but its horde of offspring are only about twice the size of humans, about the size of the raptors of Jurassic Park, allowing them to pursue the main characters indoors.
  • Godzilla (2014): The female MUTO is as tall as a building, but she lays eggs the size of small cars, which relatively speaking are incredibly tiny.
• Gorgo: Played with. Gorgo is a true ankle biter compared to his mother, about a tenth her size. That said, Gorgo is still twice as tall as an elephant.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park: The baby Tyrannosaurus is small enough to be carried by one person, as opposed to its much bigger and angrier dad.
• The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia: The baby rock biter is fairly tiny compared to the adult rock biters.
• Pacific Rim: The adult kaiju are the size of mountains, whereas the fetal kaiju that emerges from its dead mother's carcass is the size of a bus, hence better-suited to harry an individual human target through the rubble-strewn city streets. (It's uncertain if this trope would have still applied if it had grown to full term and been born.)
• Sharktopus: The adult sharktopi have van-sized bodies and tentacles several yards long, whereas the hatchling from the second film is small enough for the heroine to lift it between two fingers.
• Tremors: Graboids are gigantic Sand Worm monsters large enough to swallow cattle, flip over trucks and destroy buildings menacing the main characters. The fourth film (a prequel set inn the 1840s) reveals the monsters' origins. It turns out that the first generation Graboids are born from eggs the size of melons. One of the juvenile Graboids even gets killed via impalement on a pick.
• The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep: The Loch Ness Monster is small enough to swim in a bathtub as a baby, but the size of a bus when fully grown.

Literature

• Birthright (2017): A dragon in its late juvenile years stands at about four feet, while the oldest dragon seen is large enough to be mistaken for part of a room. Said dragon is also still an adolescent, meaning they very likely come bigger.
• Clifford the Big Red Dog: Clifford is born tiny, but he grows to the size of a house in compliance with his owner Emily Elizabeth's concerned wish for her undersized pet. In the spin-off Clifford's Puppy Days, his pre-wish life as a hamster-sized runt is depicted.
• The Dresden Files: As a puppy, Harry's dog Mouse is small enough to fit in his coat pocket. Fully grown, it's a struggle to squeeze the pooch into Harry's Volkswagen.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: The baby dragon Norbert is no bigger than a football, but in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire we see that adult dragons can get massive.
• Inheritance Cycle: Dragons are very large — in fact, they never stop growing, and as they age they reach and exceed the size of buildings and eventually grow as big as small hills. Their babies are born from eggs small enough to be carried around with one hand.
• The Light Fantastic: The baby troll is about the size of a watermelon. Played with in that his parents aren't that much bigger than humans, but "Old Granddad" is large enough to qualify as a Monster-Shaped Mountain!
• Robert Sheckley: In one short story, a starship comes across a planet full of human-scale animals and plants. In the end, it turns out that the planet is a playground for some kind of alien children. The children are probably human-sized or near so, but the parents seem to cast mountain-sized shadows and use a mile-high metal column as a key to wind up the entire planet.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Direwolves and dragons.
  • Direwolf puppies are the same size as ordinary puppies, while the adults are as big as ponies.
  • Dragon hatchlings are small enough to curl up on a teenage girl's shoulder, while the biggest known adult dragon, Balerion the Black Dread, could devour mammoths in a single bite and covered entire towns in his shadow when he flew overhead.
• So I'm a Spider, So What?: Newborn Taratects are the size of a pig while the Taratect Queens that spawn them are bigger than dragons.

Live-Action TV

• Dino Dan: Mother dinosaurs often appear with their very young offspring. Their size differences can be quite extreme, as when Dan carries a T. rex hatchling in the top of his backpack, then sends it to join its mother, whose toes are bigger than it.
• Doctor Who: Word of God is that adult Adipose are twice the height of a human. The baby Adipose in "Partners in Crime" weigh exactly one pound and fit in a human hand.
• Game of Thrones: Daenerys' dragons, when newly hatched, are kitten-sized babies that Dany can cradle in her arms or perch on her shoulder. Come Season 8, which is only a bit more than six years in in-universe time, and the largest of her dragons, Drogon, is now the size of a jumbo jet, and is ridden by Dany as a mount. In House of the Dragon, some centuries-old dragons have reached a truly gigantic size such as Balerion, Vhagar and Vermithor (Drogon is still young compared to them). The youngest seen, Vermax, is merely the size of a human when first seen.
• Galavant: Understandably, nobody believes that Richard's lizard Tad Cooper is the dragon he insists it is. The end of the series vindicates him.
• Ultra Series occasionally shows the life cycle of different kaiju. How, at infancy, those monsters are surprisingly diminutive compared to their gargantuan adult forms.
  • Return of Ultraman: Kupukupu starts off as a baby which can fit in a cage which an adult man can carry. But thanks to its Adaptive Ability, it quickly grows into the city-destroying monster, Kingstron.
  • Ultraman Taro: The Kemjila larvae resemble ordinary worms, which feasts on watermelons and can be swatted by humans. But exposing it to fire will cause its rapid growth into the Kemjila adult, a building-sized monster. From the same series there's the kangaroo-like kaiju Chinpe whose baby is the size of a human child, but the mother is some 50 meters tall.
  • Ultraman 80: The catfish-like monster, Angoras, is several times larger than Ultraman Eighty, while its baby is the size of a regular fish. In fact, the reason behind the mother's rampage is because the baby was accidentally fished from a pond and kept in a child's aquarium, and the mother's fury was finally appeased when the boy who accidentally fished the baby released it back into the lake.
  • Two different snail-like monsters, Taraban from Ultraman Tiga and Arandos from Ultraman Cosmos, have babies the size of train carriages (although the former can enlarge at will if needed), while the mothers are either the same size as the Ultras or even larger.
  • Ultraman Mebius: The insectoid monster Insectas (creative name, we know) has larva small enough to fit in a person's ear, while the adults are some 45 meters tall. The larva can grow to adult-size within a short period of time if it receives enough nutrients.
  • Although the kaiju, Pandon and Black King (both the size of buildings) had appeared in earlier series like Ultraseven and Return of Ultraman, in the later show Ultraman Taiga their infant forms are revealed in two separate episodes, where it turns out they're hatched from eggs that can fit in a human's palm.
  • On the subject of Ultraseven, the classic Ultraseven kaiju Eleking stands some 55 meters tall, but appearances made by its tadpole form in various series are always depicted as being small enough to be comfortably carried about in the arms of a human of the Alien Pitt that usually command it.
  • Ultraman Z: Exaggerated and taken to the extreme with the recurring monster Kelbeam. As it turns out, the skyscraper-sized Kelbeams from the past series are actually infants, and in the show we finally saw the Monster Progenitor simply called the Mother Kelbeam — a planet-sized version of the previous Kelbeams.

Mythology & Folklore

• "The Lambton Worm": The infant creature that John pulls out of the river is only a tiny, wriggling worm, small enough that John can carry about his rod with it dangling from the line. As an adult, the Worm is large enough to wrap itself ten times around a local hill.
• Some forms of Eastern European folklore claim that zmei dragons begin life as common snakes, such as grass snakes or adders, that mature into huge, fearsome serpents if they live for a sufficient amount of time.
• Some variants of Chinese folklore state that a common carp that lives for a sufficiently long time or jumps over a waterfall will become a dragon, creatures that are usually depicted as quite large.
• Japanese art and myth usually depict tatsu dragons are sizable beings, ranging from slightly above human size to colossal depending on the specific art piece. Some folklore traditions describe everyday seahorses as being infant dragons.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In a vintage supplement about giants, a "hulking barbarian" who volunteers to join the adventuring party turns out to be a young cloud giant playing at being a human warrior. Cloud giant adults average 18' tall, so if human-like growth patterns were assumed, a juvenile 6' tall ought to be their equivalent of a toddler too young to execute such a deception. This does work by the rules, which state that a juvenile giant is two sizes smaller than an adult (in this case, a Huge adult being Medium), and one big enough to pass as a very large human could be pushing Large, making this the equivalent of about a 10-year-old human. (Who would still struggle at this sort of deception, even without taking their blue-white skin and hair into account.)
  • Some of the smaller variants of dragons are born at roughly the size of cats (4 feet long, half of which is tail, 1 foot wide, 1 foot tall, 8 foot wingspan, and 5 pounds) and grow to the size of large whales (85 feet long, 38 feet of which is tail, 10 feet wide, 16 feet tall, 80 foot wingspan, and 80 tons). The larger variants get even bigger, at 120 feet long and 640 tons, but since they are born the size of small bears it isn't quite as dramatic.
• Only War: The Drakons of Cuyavale can reach or exceed 250-metre wingspans as adults. When newly-hatched, they're only about a metre long.

Video Games

• Borderlands and Borderlands 2: The skags, specifically Dukino's Mom. The skeletons littered around Pandora, like in Three Horn Valley and Tundra Express, are so massive that bandits live in them.
• Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice: Mao is about the size of a normal teenager. His dad, the Overlord, is so freaking huge that even his fingers are several times Mao's size. However, Mao's ultimate skill Vasa Aergun reveals that Mao himself actually has a quite gigantic One-Winged Angel form.
• Drunk on Nectar allows you to play through an insect's life cycle. As one would expect with invertebrates, you start off incredibly tiny compared to how you turn out.
• Extinction have you battling the Ravenii, orc-like monstrosities the size of buildings that you can perform a Colossus Climb upon, and their juvenile offspring, Jackals which are only slightly larger than humans.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy XIII: The baby Chocobos are about as large as a real-life baby chicken. Adult Chocobos are about eight feet tall, and can carry humans on their backs without even slowing down significantly. This is not generally true of the rest of the Final Fantasy series, though; other games have baby Chobocos (sometimes called Chicobos) that, while smaller than the adults, don't seem disproportionately small.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Elezen youth are quite small, and even in their late teens hover around the 5 foot (or 1.5 meter) mark, with sixteen-year-old Alphinaud and Alisaie still being quite diminutive. Elezen adults, however, are incredibly tall—a six-foot (2m) elezen man would be on the short end of things, and can easily reach a full seven feet. According to dialogue from Urianger, the great growth spurt kicks in at around age twenty.
• Jusant: The protagonist's companion is an adorable, hand-sized blue creature. The adults of its kind are building-sized◊ Space Whales big enough for the protagonist to Colossus Climb.
• Katamari Damacy: The King of All Cosmos is so much bigger than the Prince. In the game, the King is bigger than the sun and the prince is about the size of a teacup.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land has an inversion. Fecto Forgo is the larval form of Fecto Elfilis, an alien who tried to conquer the planet in the distant past and returned to its current state because of a lab accident. But putting the two side by side, Forgo is roughly two or three times Elfilis's size.
• Metroid: Other M: Samus occasionally encounters a small furry creature with chicken legs. The tiny but greedy little monster quickly disgusts and disturbs her with its eating habits. Samus had good reason to be unnerved by the creature — it's actually the larval stage of whatever species her Arch-Enemy Ridley is and is in fact a clone of Ridley itself. And thanks to Genetic Memory, it hates her just as much as the original did.
• Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps: Adult owls such as Kuro and Shriek are kaiju-sized, while their hatchlings are around the size of real-world owls.
• Pokémon: Pokémon tend to be very small in their basic and baby forms, then get enormous with each evolution.
• Subnautica: Many of the largest hatchable animals emerge from their eggs no bigger than peepers, making even the likes of crabsquids or cryptosuchus look cute.

Webcomics

• Dark Wings: The great dragon Strake is monumentally huge, but his young son Arra is around the size of a puppy and years later when he's older he's as big as a draft horse yet still tiny compared to his father. The vast difference in size is actually remarked upon by the wyvern team sent to kidnap Arra.
• Earthsong: The giant character is the size a human girl of her age would be. It is stated in the comic that had she the opportunity to reach puberty, however, she would be roughly 10 feet tall.
• In Solo Farming in the Tower, Sejun is nearly devoured by a Kaiju-sized red bear his first day. Many months later, A tiny bear cub only about the size of the Farmer Rabbits falls into his farm, which the Manager warns him is that giant bear's cub. After he feeds the cub(which makes it grow nearly three times its original size) and helps it get out of his pit, the cub returns with his mother, who offers to protect the farm in exchange for providing food to help her child grow big and strong.
• Yamara: In an early strip, the adventurers come across a tiny two-legged creature and start arguing about what sort of monster it might be. In the last panel, a gigantic foot of the same type appears behind them, and Yamara looks up very high while fearfully suggesting that the tiny creature might be somebody's baby.

Web Original

• Hamster's Paradise:
  • The mammoth-like rakatusks are the largest land hamsters of the Glaciocene Era, rivalling prehistoric Earth's Paraceratherium at five meters at the shoulder and weighing over 20 tons. However, due to constraints of the mammalian placenta, their young are born proportionately very small, making them vulnerable to predators and making their parents extremely protective.
  • Inverted with the wingles (flying lizard-like creatures the size of insects), who are so small that the females can only carry a single, proportionately massive infant about a quarter of her weight. The pregnancy takes so much out of her that she immediately needs to leave in order to find food once she gives birth and leaves the father as the sole caretaker.
• Looming Gaia: Newborn cecaelia are small gelatinous blobs that could fit in a palm, while adult cecaelia are about seven feet long on average.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The sabre-toothed moose lion starts life as a Yorkie-sized cub and grows into a hefty 10' predator.
• Danger Mouse: Invoked example: one episode has Baron Greenback get hold of a formula that made giant chickens. The eggs they laid, however, are normal size, and his plan was to distribute them to the world's doorsteps, so that when they hatch...
• The Dragon Prince: Adult dragons are gigantic — common dragons are the size of respectable houses, and the titanic archdragons are much larger still. By contrast, dragon eggs can fit in backpacks and newborn dragons are the size of smallish dogs.
• Godzilla: The Series follows where the 1998 film left off, where the newly hatched Zilla, Jr. is just a bit bigger than adopted parent Nick, and eventually grows to match the skyscraper size of his biological parent.
• The Godzilla Power Hour: Godzooky is roughly human-sized — but he's less than half the size of his uncle Godzilla's head.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Mandu is a mutant piglet roughly the size of a housecat or a small dog, but later on we see some Mega-Mute pigs that look like elephant-sized versions of Mandu with tusks. After the timeskip in the finale Mandu has grown to her full size and is confirmed to be the same species.
• Played with in the Looney Tunes short, "Goo Goo Goliath"; a drunken Delivery Stork delivers a giant baby to a human couple and a human baby to a giant couple. As a result, both parties struggle to care for their respective babies. This is particularly noticable with the adult giant taking care of the human baby, who uses a Jeweler's Eye Loupe to change his diapers.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: This seems to be the case for dragons, generally.
  • Spike the baby dragon is small enough to live with and interact easily with the ponies, and even ride on Twilight's back. When we're shown a full-sized dragon, a grown pony walks along his nose and is significantly smaller than his eyeball. Appears to take the "immortal, grow forever" path for dragons as the adult dragon described is indicated to be several centuries old. The "teenage" dragons from a later episode are much larger than Spike and the ponies, but still tiny compared to the many adult dragons in the episode, who come in a great range of sizes.
  • In "Gauntlet of Fire", we see Dragon Lord Torch, their leader and the biggest dragon seen yet, almost as tall as a mountain. (In fact, he's one of the biggest creatures seen in the show up to this point.) Torch has a daughter named Ember who is barely bigger than Spike, and about as tall as one of Torch's knuckles.
  • "Sweet and Smoky" confirms what we already knew from the flashback of Spike hatching: newborn dragons are about the same size as baby ponies (Fluttershy can grab and carry three of them between her forelegs). Compared to the size of adult dragons, the ratio is colossal.
• The Owl House: The reveal that King is a Titan shows that this is the case for Titans. King is about the size of a housecat, while his deceased father is as big as Vermont, his decaying body forming the island archipelago the entire story takes place on.
• Popeye: Dinky the dog from his self-titled segments starts off as a small puppy bought at a pet store, but became so big (about the size of a car) that his two female owners sing that he isn't a "Dinky doggie" anymore.
• Pound Puppies (1980s): Teensy from "Little Big Dog" was a tiny puppy small enough to be mistaken for a mouse. By the end of the episode which takes place several months later, he was so huge that he dwarfed his future owner.
• Primal (2019): Amal is the size of a normal human child, but her father Kamau is a towering giant over nine feet tall: the same of which applies to the rest of their tribe. This also applies to Fang, a T. rex, and her far tinier babies.
• Space Ghost: In one episode, while Space Ghost is busy fighting a huge monster called a Star-beast in space, his sidekicks discover and befriend a strange creature no bigger than the team pet called a Star-fly. It's only too late that they remember that Star-flies are the larval form of Star-beasts. Fortunately, the new Star-beast still remembers the team pet whom it had befriended earlier and departs peacefully.
• Star Wars Resistance: In "Bibo", the titular creature is small enough to be comfortably carried in Neeku's arms. His mother is large enough to be capable of destroying the entire Colossus platform.
• The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: The alien Org in "Visitors from Outer Space" is around Hamburglar, Tika and Franklin's height, but his parents are outright giants.
• Wakfu: Adamaï, Yugo's twin dragon brother, is about a head shorter than the Kid Hero. Grougaloragran, an adult dragon, is massive like any other western-style dragon. When he reincarnates, he's about the size of a dog.
• Wander over Yonder:
  • "The Egg": Played straight — the mother of a relatively small bug, that's about Wander and Sylvia's size, is a gargantuan behemoth.
  • "The Toddler": Inverted — the parents of a baby larger than Wander and Sylvia are two tiny bugs.

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